King Charles II

by Fraser, Antonia

  As usual with illnesses which may prove fatal, people behaved both well and badly. Burnet afterwards tried to create scandal by suggesting that Louise took care of Charles throughout as ‘a wife of a husband’. In fact, the reverse was true. The ladies of the Court reacted entirely according to type. Louise, the ready weeper, swooned and had to be carried out for air. Nelly ‘roared to a disturbance and was led out and lay roaring behind the door’.28

  The Queen was overcome with pure grief and had to be carried back to her apartments in a state of collapse, or, as the poet more picturesquely put it,

  Which was nearest the Grave could scarce be seen

  The dying Monarch, or the living Queen….

  But Princess Anne, who was pregnant again, was not allowed into her uncle’s chamber because he looked so dreadful, with his eyeballs rolled back, that it was feared a miscarriage might ensue.29

  Louise, once she recovered her energies, showed that practical streak in her nature of which she was never long devoid. According to Lady Mason’s story, she sent her boxes of goods packing to the French Ambassador’s house, where they would be safely stowed if things looked ugly. It was a wise precaution for a Catholic foreigner who had once been in danger of being arraigned as a common prostitute (and who, furthermore, had a lot of worldly goods to lose). Less appealing is the second half of the story that has Louise drawing off two great diamond rings from the King’s fingers. Interrupted by the Duke of York, she is supposed to have blushed. At which James begged her courteously to proceed: ‘No, Madam, they are as safe in your hands as mine. I will not take them till I see how they go.’

  But the rings, according to Lady Mason’s account, vanished from view for ever.30 It is however unlikely that this ghoulish incident ever took place (although one can believe that Duchess Louise packed her bags) for sheer lack of opportunity.

  In truth, one of the main features of the death-bed of King Charles II was its total lack of privacy. When a rather more serious matter was at stake than the future of a couple of rings – the future of the King’s immortal soul – it would prove extraordinarily difficult to secure a moment’s relief from the throng surrounding him. Just as the number of medicines proliferated, so did the interested observers. When the room came to be cleared on Thursday, it contained seventy-five assorted lords and Privy Councillors, surgeons and servants. By this time the company also included no fewer than five bishops.

  Thomas Ken, the King’s former chaplain, now Bishop of Bath and Wells, was the first of these to arrive. He appeared on the Wednesday morning, when the King was thought to be rallying. He was present on the Wednesday afternoon, when the King suffered another major convulsion and the hopes aroused by each small recovery were finally dashed. From the first, ‘little Ken’, as the King had familiarly termed him in the past, made his presence felt; the man who had refused Nelly her place at Winchester was not likely to flinch now from his duty. Ken had last administered Communion to the King at Christmas. He now pressed the King to receive it again. Charles however steadfastly declined to do so, giving two contradictory reasons: first, there was no particular hurry, and secondly, he was too feeble to receive it. He was silent too when Ken asked him to declare himself a member of the Church of England, either because his voice was weak or because some deeper emotion was already stirring within his failing body.

  Towards the evening of Wednesday the King’s condition worsened. He broke out in a cold sweat. He also suffered from intermittent bouts of fever. That night six of the chorus of physicians watched by his bed as well as Lord Chesterfield, Lord Keeper Guilford and two others deputed by the Privy Council. The bulletin issued on Thursday morning was sanguine: the Privy Council ‘conceive His Majesty to be in a condition of safety, and that he will in a few days be freed from his distemper’. But this of course referred to the apparent progress of Wednesday. The church bells began to ring, bonfires were readied, when the dramatic news began to leak out that the King was sinking. Silence stole over the city as vigils of continuous prayer in the royal chapels replaced the joyful cacophony of the bells.

  Exactly what was wrong with the King? At four o’clock on Thursday afternoon, in the language of the doctors, there was ‘some exacerbation or paroxysmal increase’. In other words, the convulsions were mounting. Great bouts of fever were shaking his body. Ironically enough, the same doctors who were so busy at the cure were still very much in the dark as to what they were curing. Their energies were great; but then so was their ignorance. Guilford angrily pointed out that, when finally taxed on the nature of the King’s illness, they behaved in the Spanish way over difficult cases: ‘Hazer il bove, that is stared and said nothing.’

  After the King’s death the official verdict was apoplexy. It would be translated today more familiarly as a stroke. Apoplexy was a portmanteau word, much used in the seventeenth century and not necessarily narrowly defined: Lord Chesterfield called it ‘a sort of apoplexy’. It is easy to believe that the King, like many middle-aged men, was suffering from high blood-pressure, followed by a stroke, brain damage and finally cardiac arrest. However, that verdict presents certain difficulties.

  If the King had a stroke, then it is remarkable that he was never paralysed – paralysis down one side would have been expected. He also recovered his speech totally, while he never lost his reason. This point is not a purely academic one: for if the King had had a stroke, it could be argued that he was incapable of making a positive decision in favour of the Catholic faith. Yet it is clear from the account of Father Huddleston and others that his mind was quite clear, if his body was weak. The intermittent fevers or ‘fits of ague’ to which the doctors bear witness are equally puzzling if the King had had a stroke.

  We may discount the usual titillating rumours of poison which surrounded the death-bed of Charles II, as with most other notable characters in the seventeenth century, including his grandfather and Oliver Cromwell. Monmouth, predictably, later accused the Duke of York of poisoning his brother. Other popular scapegoats were the servants of the Duchess of Portsmouth (presumably because they were Catholics and foreigners). One rumour had the King being killed by inhaling poisoned snuff. James Welwood, ardently advancing this view in the memoirs written later at the command of Queen Mary, had to admit, as a physician himself, that there were no outward signs of poisoning. But he sidestepped this neatly, in a manner worthy of twentieth-century spy fiction: ‘It must be acknowledged that there are poisons … of so subtle a nature that they leave no concluding marks upon the bodies of those they kill.’31

  The fact that Peruvian bark of cinchona (the so-called Jesuit’s powder) was now once again, as in 1679, used to treat the King’s fever excited another suggestion in the nineteenth century. The Principal of the Calcutta Medical College formed the opinion that the King died of malaria, from his habit of feeding the ducks in St James’s Park.fn2 But the malaria P. (plasmodium) vivax, from which a great many people suffered in Europe in the seventeenth century, was not a lethal disease and should not be confused with the malaria P. falciparum, which swept away so many Europeans in India in the nineteenth.32 One is glad to acquit the ducks and St James’s Park.

  Another enterprising theory has been recently advanced that the King poisoned himself slowly through his constant experiments, trying a process for the fixing of mercury; gradually he developed erethisma. Uraemia attendant on kidney failure is one of the common sequents of mercury poisoning. Thus the massive blood-letting caused a temporary recovery by removing the circulating toxins from the King’s system: the nephritic damage was however irreparable. It is a tempting thesis, but further exploration is needed, since it is outlined in a very short article, in which the medical and historical evidence cited is far from exhaustive. As the authors themselves conclude, ‘Further work will no doubt be necessary….’fn3 For example, the King’s increased irritability as time went on is given as one proof of mercury poisoning: but that could be attributed to a number of causes, including quite simply advancing years.


  At the present time the theory of Raymond Crawfurd, elaborately set out in 1909, still seems the most plausible: the King was suffering from chronic granular kidney disease (a form of Bright’s disease) with uraemic convulsions. During the winter he had been plagued by gout. The fatal use of cantharides, to promote blistering on the first night of his illness, must have done much to rob the King’s kidneys of their vestige of functional activity. The autopsy fitted exactly with what would now be expected of ‘gouty kidney’ coupled with uraemia. It would nevertheless not be fair to describe King Charles, as Macaulay did, as the victim of his doctors. The physicians did substantially increase his sufferings, while failing to alleviate the cause. But they did not kill him. The disease would have done so in any case.

  In the end however most medical historical investigation, however fascinating, has a double disadvantage. First, there is never a body, let alone a patient, and the bones of Charles II have never, rightly, been troubled. Secondly, the medical language of the time, on which reliance has to be placed, is not precise by our standards. There can be no certainties. King Charles II was ageing and had endured some recent severe attacks of illness. Perhaps in the end the best verdict on the King’s death was given in a poem by Abraham Cowley, addressed to his leading doctor, Sir Charles Scarburgh:

  Let Nature and Art do what they please,

  When all is done, Life’s an Incurable Disease.

  The men of science proving useless, the men of God were given their turn. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of London, Durham and Ely were now ranked round the King’s bed, joining Bishop Ken. The King however paid no attention to these princes of the Church, perhaps because their nebulous and rather unattractive voices did not reach him. Ken, who had a voice ‘like to a nightingale for the sweetness of it’, fared better. He read the Prayers for the Sick out of the Book of Common Prayer.

  In the meantime, a dangerous and different drama was being played out behind the scenes. It is not clear who made the original suggestion that the King should receive a Catholic priest. One obvious candidate was the Queen. As early as Monday Catharine had said to the Catholic Duchess of York: ‘Sister, I beg you to tell the Duke that he, who knows as well as I do the King’s convictions about the Catholic religion, should do what he can to take advantage of any opportunity that offers.’ Mary Beatrice went to her husband. The Duke of York replied, ‘I know, and I am thinking of nothing else.’ But he took no action.33

  The Duke’s cautious attitude illustrates the extreme delicacy of the situation. The fact was that the King could well recover (and indeed subsequently did so, albeit temporarily). Then, although the Queen referred to the King’s ‘convictions’ about the Catholic religion, a sentiment echoed by Louise, who described him as a Catholic ‘at the bottom of his heart’, neither lady pretended that these convictions had as yet been given public expression. Indeed, the nervousness of the King’s intimate circle is yet another argument against the proposition that the King was already an established Catholic. It has been postulated throughout this book that the King never at any point underwent an official conversion – neither in his youth in exile, nor in 1669, nor in 1684 when he was rumoured at the French Court to have become a Catholic, nor at any other date. This whole death-bed episode, attested by so many witnesses, makes little sense if such a conversion had already taken place.

  All the Catholics surrounding the King – all in their way branded by their religion – were well aware of the care with which he himself had avoided suffering similar damage. Catharine was in a particularly difficult position: a woman who had valued discretion throughout her time in England, she well knew that she was closely watched. The King had not asked for a Catholic priest. Catholicism was a proscribed religion; not only were its priests under heavy sentence, but many of them had recently been executed. Were his family now to involve Charles in something desperate and ruinous, for which a convalescent King would castigate them?fn4

  Nevertheless, the question remained: given that the King intended to live as a ‘public’ Protestant, did he intend to die as a private one? The fateful move to introduce a Catholic priest was only made when the King was clearly dying, and then in fear and trembling. Catharine was not involved: her approach to Mary Beatrice on Monday, passing the responsibility to the Duke of York, was as far as she dared go.

  The two people who did finally broach the matter were both in their different ways more reckless. Louise Duchess of Portsmouth received a visit from Barrillon in her apartments. He found her in the midst of her general grief, extremely agitated on the subject of the King’s religion. She bewailed the fact that he was surrounded by Protestant bishops since, in her precisely limited observation, ‘at the bottom of his heart the King is a Catholic’. Was there any possibility of a priest being produced? She herself could no longer enter his room ‘with any decency’ since the Queen was nearly always present. Barrillon, with his usual freedom of movement, could go to the Duke of York. The Queen being absent – she was being ‘blooded’ herself to alleviate her distressed condition – Barrillon delivered Louise’s message.

  A Capuchin monk, Padre Mansueti, one of the chaplains to the Duchess of York who came over to England with her, was also prompted to go to the Duke of York with the same message. He had been entertaining a Benedictine monk, Dom Gibbon, at dinner, when the news came that the King was sinking; Gibbon spurred on Mansueti to act.fn5

  To Barrillon, James was said to have responded immediately with a characteristic declaration: ‘I would rather risk everything than not do my duty on this occasion.’ He told Barrillon he was aware that there was no time to lose. To Mansueti he was said to have been equally accommodating. It may be questioned whether these pleas were necessary: whether James the straightforward believer would really have let his brother die as a Protestant. The answer seems to be that it was not until he knew his brother to be dying that he dared countermand his known policy, and then only when encouraged by Barrillon and, on another level, one of his priestly entourage. So close and secret had Charles kept his inner soul.

  The introduction of a Catholic priest into the royal chamber remained a challenging task. For one thing, there were the Protestant bishops, innocent vultures unaware of the embarrassment their presence was causing: how could they be politely ejected? Even if that were accomplished, the problem of discovering a Catholic priest at short notice and smuggling him into Whitehall was even more horrendous in the fierce light of publicity which shone down upon the whole palace.

  First of all, the King’s consent still had to be gained. Only the Duke of York had the opportunity to do so. As discreetly as possible he bent down and whispered in his brother’s ear. The King answered. From time to time James had to repeat his words, so low did he speak. The King himself was barely audible, except to those closest to him, who included Barrillon. But the King’s basic answer remained the same: ‘Yes, with all my heart.’

  The King had agreed.

  On Barrillon now devolved the duty of actually finding a priest. All parties concerned agreed that time was short. But there was an absurd complication. Those priests most readily available were the Queen’s chaplains; for they were in a room divided from the King’s only by the entrance to the Privy Stairs, used by Chiffinch and others to conduct visitors discreetly to him. The Queen’s priests were not in on the secret – there seems to have been a general, if unacknowledged, conspiracy to keep the Queen’s household clear of it for her own sake as well as the King’s. That was less serious than the fact that they only spoke Portuguese, a language the King had never mastered.

  The chaplains of the Duchess of York, on the other hand, spoke Italian, a language in which he was comparatively fluent. But these priests were both well known and extremely unpopular: they would be immediately recognized for what they were if they attempted to enter the King’s chamber, with fatal results. And the Duke of York’s apartments lay on the wrong side of the King’s: entry from one to the other could be vett
ed by the watchful.

  It was the Portuguese Count of Castelmelhor who pointed out the language barrier of the Queen’s household. Barrillon and James between them therefore decided to tackle the house of the Venetian Resident, where they would find an Italian priest. Before they set off, Castelmelhor did look into the Queen’s room. And there, by a merciful dispensation, he discovered Father Huddleston.

  It had been a long road from Worcester for both parties. Mary Beatrice afterwards described Father Huddleston to the nuns at Chaillot as ‘un homme très simple’. She even regretted that a more suitable ‘subject’ could not have been found ‘to help this great Prince make a good death’. She had presumably managed to avoid taking in (language barrier again) her brother-in-law’s tales of escape and derring-do, which involved the good priest. Otherwise she must surely have realized that no more appropriate missionary could have been discovered.

  Besides, if Father Huddleston had preserved a certain simplicity in the quarter of a century which had passed since Worcester, it was appropriate holy simplicity rather than something more rustic. Rewarded by the gratitude of the King after the Restoration, he had formed part of the household of two Queens, Henrietta Maria and Catharine; he was thus hardly a stranger to Court circles.

  Disguised in a wig and a cassock, Father Huddleston was led from the Queen’s suite of rooms to a closet just off the King’s chamber which had a private communicating door. Here he waited. There was a further problem. Father Huddleston had not been bearing the Blessed Sacrament with him on his visit to the Queen’s rooms (although he did have a viaticum of holy oil). So one of the Portuguese priests, Father Bento de Lemoz, had to be despatched outside the palace on the vital mission to secure a Host. In the meantime, the Duke of York cleared the King’s room in soldierly fashion by simply announcing in a loud voice, ‘Gentlemen, the King wishes everybody to retire except the Earls of Bath and Feversham.’ The former, a fervent Royalist, was the Groom of the Stole; the latter, a Frenchman naturalized English, the Queen’s chamberlain. But both gentlemen were Protestants, which helped to pacify the Bishops. Their continued attendance, which was contrary to the King’s own wishes, was also due to James’ concern that his dying brother’s conversion should be seen to be voluntary; he did not want to be the sole witness to such a momentous event. When the room was ready, Chiffinch, who had brought so many clandestine night visitors to his master in the past, brought in one more, a man of God.