King Charles II

by Fraser, Antonia

  Charles II cried out with pleasure at the sight of Huddleston. The various accounts of the conversion scene vary in detail, but the King’s general reaction to Huddleston was clear: ‘You that saved my body are now come to save my soul.’ He was certainly well aware of the providential element in the presence so close at hand of ‘this good father, whom, I see, O good Lord, that Thou hast created for my good’.

  Father Huddleston put a series of questions to the King. Did he wish to die in the Faith and the Communion of the Holy Roman Catholic Church? Did he wish to make a full confession of all his sins? To all these questions, Charles answered firmly, in a low but distinct voice. His resolution was clear. Then he made his general confession. Amongst the things for which he declared himself ‘most heartily sorry’ was the fact that ‘he had deferr’d his Reconciliation so long’– these words on the lips of a dying man, reported by Father Huddleston without contradiction, being yet another proof, if proof were needed, that the King was not already a secret Catholic.fn6 The King’s confession ended in an act of contrition: ‘Into Thy Hands, Sweet Jesus, I commend my soul. Mercy, Sweet Jesus, Mercy.’ The priest gave him absolution.

  Huddleston’s last question concerned the Blessed Sacrament: ‘Will you receive it?’

  The King replied, ‘If I were worthy of it, Amen.’

  But since the Host had not yet arrived, Father Huddleston asked the King’s leave to anoint him with the holy oil, in the Sacrament of Extreme Unction. To which the King agreed ‘with all my heart’. When the Portuguese priest returned with the Host – probably from the chapel at Somerset House – Huddleston went to the side door and received it. The King, with a touching flash of the old spirit, tried to rise. As he struggled, he said, ‘At least let me meet my heavenly Lord in a better posture than in my bed.’ Father Huddleston calmed him: Almighty God, who saw into his heart, would accept his good intention.

  So the King received the Catholic Communion and afterwards Huddleston sat quietly by him, reading the Catholic prayers for the dying in a low voice. It was by Charles’ own request that Huddleston recited once again the Act of Contrition, ending ‘Mercy, Sweet Jesus, Mercy.’ Then the priest put a crucifix into the King’s hands, saying that it only remained to him to meditate on the death and passion of ‘Our dear Saviour Jesus Christ’. Father Huddleston recited more prayers as the King held the crucifix: ‘Beseech Him with all humility, that His most precious Blood may not be shed in vain for you … and when it shall please Him to take you out of this transitory world, to grant you a joyful resurrection, and an eternal crown of glory in the next.’

  Then Father Huddleston left as he had come, through the secret door. The whole momentous episode had lasted three-quarters of an hour.

  The King’s progress out of the transitory world, although sure, was slow. The stubborn way his body clung to life even gave hope to those Catholics in the know that his conversion might have wrought a miraculous cure. The King himself summed it up with his ineffable politeness: he told the gentlemen surrounding his bed that he was sorry to trouble them by taking so long a-dying, and he asked their pardon.36fn7

  Throughout the long night of Thursday, 5 February, Charles remained conscious. The physicians, allowed back into the torture-chamber, set to work with their remedies again with even greater energy. At one point the King referred to his continuing ordeal. He told his attendants, ‘I have suffered very much and more than any of you can imagine.’ Once, listening to those innumerable palace clocks striking, he asked the time. They told him and he said, ‘My business will shortly be done.’ But his stoicism continued to excite the admiration of all those about him. It was an exemplary death-bed, as might have been expected of one who had learnt early to confront the unknown with courage and hope.

  There were a series of farewells. Catharine came. Charles greeted her lovingly. But her distress, both at the King’s tenderness and at his suffering, was too great. Tears overcame her. She was carried back to her own apartments, half-fainting. She sent back a message to her husband to beg his pardon if she had ever offended him.

  ‘Alas! poor woman,’ said the King. ‘She beg my pardon! I beg hers with all my heart.’

  To James too, linked to him by every shared memory of boyhood and now at last by Faith, the King showed much tenderness. James, kneeling, could not hold back his own tears. Charles begged his pardon too, for the hardships which he had inflicted upon him from time to time. At some point in the long midnight hours he handed him the keys of his cabinet and begged God to give him a prosperous reign. The Duchess of York remained openly weeping at her husband’s side.

  The King also spoke of his children. He recommended his little family most touchingly to his brother, naming each one meticulously. When he stumbled on the name Burford – as Nelly’s handsome, spirited boy was still known, despite his new dukedom of St Albans – the King put the boy ‘into his [James’] hand’. He asked James to take particular care of Burford’s education, ‘for he will be spoiled else’.

  But the King did not name Monmouth. And James, repeating the list back to him, did not mention the forbidden name either.

  The ladies, those other members of his extended family circle, were not forgotten. In a phrase sometimes supposed to be apocryphal but in fact attested by three sources, the King adjured the Duke of York ‘to be well to Portsmouth’ and ‘not let poor Nelly starve’ – even in his last hours the vital social distinction between the two ladies was preserved.38

  One by one his children came and knelt down by the King’s bed and received his blessing. At which the throng of people once more surrounding the royal bed, and crowding into the chamber, cried out that the King was their common father. So all present in fact knelt down for his blessing. It was of course an Anglican blessing. But when Bishop Ken repeatedly urged the King to take the Sacrament, Charles declined it. He would only say that he had thought of his approaching end, and hoped that he had made his peace with God. Ken was unaware what this characteristically courteous evasion meant.

  At six o’clock in the morning the King asked for the curtains to be drawn back. He wanted, he said, to watch the dawn for the last time. He was still conscious enough to ask that the eight-day clock in his room should be wound up, because it was the appointed day. An hour later he became breathless and struggled to sit up. Once again the doctors bled him, taking twelve ounces, and gave him heart tonics. At half-past eight his speech began to fail once more. This time it did not return. By ten o’clock he was in a coma.

  The rising sun over the Thames was probably the last sight he took in. It was an appropriate one for this man who had so loved the early morning on its misty waters.

  King Charles II died at noon. It was now high water on the river and the time of the full moon. The day was Friday, 6 February 1685, and he was in his fifty-fifth year.

  1 These and various other sources for the King’s death-bed are considered and collated in Raymond Crawfurd, The Last Days of Charles II, 1909. But Crawfurd’s list of sources is not exhaustive: amongst others an interesting account by Anne Margaret, wife of Sir Richard Mason, second Clerk Comptroller of the Household, printed in Household Words, 9 (1854), as by ‘a wife of a person about the Court at Whitehall’, is omitted by Crawfurd.

  2 See Norman Chevers, M.D., An Enquiry into the Circumstances of the Death of King Charles the Second of England, Calcutta 1861 (not mentioned in Crawfurd).

  3 See M. L. Wolbarsht, Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, and D. S. Sax, Psychiatric Institute, University Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland: ‘Charles II, A Royal Martyr’, in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, vol. 16, no. 2, November 1961. As they themselves point out in an Appendix to the article, Pascal’s death ‘was almost certainly not due’ to mercury poisoning; as for Faraday’s death, ‘it would be difficult to say mercury was the specific cause. …’ Yet both Pascal and Faraday’s experiments far outstripped those of Charles II.

  4 There is of course the mysterious matter o
f the two papers ‘containing about a quarter of a sheet on both sides’ shown by James, then King, to Pepys about six months after his brother’s death. These papers gave arguments in support of the Church of Rome. But it is not clear if they were in Charles II’s own handwriting, annotated by him, or merely copies certified by James. Nor is it clear if these arguments were supposed to be Charles II’s own composition or the arguments of others proposed by him. Most of the evidence concerning these papers is second if not third hand. (Pepys never wrote about the matter himself but reported it to Evelyn. Burnet heard about it from Thomas Tenison, but his account differs from that of Evelyn. Halifax would say no more than that the King ‘might do it’.)34 All one can reliably conclude is that Charles II continued to show an interest in the tenets of Catholicism.

  5 See A True Relation of the late King’s Death, by P. M. Dated early march 1685. Printed in full in J. G. Muddiman, ‘The Death of Charles II’, The Month, 1932. (Not mentioned in Crawfurd, cited above.)

  6 Barrillon was told by the Duke of York afterwards that Father Huddleston ‘made the King formally promise to declare himself openly a Catholic if he recovered his health’. But Father Huddleston does not mention this in his own detailed account.35

  7 A saying given its unforgettable expression in Macaulay’s History of England: ‘He had been, he said, a most unconscionable time dying; but he hoped they would excuse it.’37 But the word ‘unconscionable’ is not in the original source.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  His Royal Ashes

  ‘Let his royal ashes then lie soft upon him, and cover him from harsh and unkind censures.’

  Halifax, Character of King Charles II

  After the death of King Charles II the ordinary people walked about ‘like ghosts’. Roger North wrote that ‘almost every living soul cried before and at his Decease, as for the loss of the best Friend in the World’.1 Others felt that they had lost a father, that feeling spontaneously expressed at the King’s death-bed when all present, not only his children, had knelt for his paternal blessing.

  The universal application was given its first expression when the King’s body lay in state in the Painted Chamber at Whitehall for several days. As was the custom of the time, his wax effigy, standing upright over the catafalque, dominated the scene. It was dressed in robes of crimson velvet trimmed with ermine, and surmounted with an imperial crown of tin gilt, all specially ordered for the occasion by the Lord Chamberlain. Such effigies, taken from the death-mask, often have a haunted look: the lines on the face of Charles II are deep, the face is slightly twisted, the expression very sad. Still to be seen exhibited in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, it commemorates the cruel sufferings of his death-bed.

  Queen Catharine, as befitted a devout woman who had once been a Portuguese Infanta, understood how to conduct her official position as widow with stately grief. She received the Ambassadors and other great persons who came to offer their condolences on a vast black bed of mourning. Her whole chamber, from the ceiling to the floor, was hung with black, and lit by innumerable tapers. The callers came thronging and their sympathy was not purely formal: no-one doubted the sincerity of the Queen’s own passion for the King, and besides, she had won universal respect.

  One does however detect a firm, even righteous hand, in the way the funeral and other mourning arrangements kept the mistresses at last in their place. The royal concubines were allowed to wear black themselves in their official capacity as ladies-in-waiting, but could not put their households into mourning, a privilege reserved for royal persons. There were other nice distinctions preserved, such as that between the cambric doled out to the Queen’s entourage, while the rest made do with mere muslin. It was not for nothing that the Lord Chamberlain commanded from the Treasury yards of black and white satin for eight escutcheons showing the royal arms of England and Portugal.2

  The funeral itself took place on the night of 14 February. The King’s body was enclosed in a lead coffin – that ‘house of lead’ which had been prophesied – bearing a solid silver plate with an inscription which began: ‘Depositum Augustissimi et Serenissimi Principis Caroli Secundi….’ In its last line, ‘Regnique sui tricesimo septimo’ (‘in the thirty-seventh year of his reign’), the inscription dated the King’s accession once again from his father’s execution.

  Then the body of Charles II was laid to rest in a vault beneath the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey. There it remains to this day.fn1 Many of the King’s natural children were later buried near him: Charles Earl of Plymouth had already been placed there in his early grave.

  Careful provision was made for discreet display – banners of black taffeta with strings and tassels of black silk – and appropriate sad sound – black-coated trumpeters, kettle-drummers, and a fife. Despite this care, despite the fact that the body was carried under a velvet canopy from the Painted Chamber to Westminster Abbey in a procession headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Norroy, King of Arms, and attended by James II, Mary of Modena, various other royalties, nobles and their servants, the rumour has arisen that, in the words of John Evelyn, ‘the King was very obscurely buried’.4

  This has sometimes been ascribed to the religious embarrassment caused by the King’s last-minute conversion. The new monarch, it is suggested, did not wish his brother’s body to be buried according to the Anglican rite and did not dare employ the Catholic one. This is also the explanation sometimes given for the fact that James himself stayed away from the burial. The truth is rather less dramatic. Royal interments at the time were traditionally held privately at night, as for example that of the Duke of Gloucester in 1660 and of Prince Rupert in 1682. It was according to custom that the nearest relative stayed away, the role of Chief Mourner devolving upon an officially designated person: in the case of Charles II it fell upon the stalwart shoulders of his nephew-in-law, Prince George of Denmark. He was ‘supported’ by the Dukes of Somerset and Beaufort, and ‘assisted’ by sixteen earls – hardly a meagre representation.5

  An exception was the state funeral of Cromwell, the Lord Protector, in 1658. Like a coronation, this august ceremony had its own rhythm: it took place three months after his death (both impressing and disgusting Evelyn). The actual burial might even be separate from the State ceremony: Cromwell’s corpse was secretly interred about a fortnight before this took place, because the embalming had failed. Such a magnificent piece of pageantry was mounted with the explicit intention of demonstrating the strength of the regime – in the case of the Cromwellian Protectorate, to bolster its prestige abroad against a young man then known as Charles Stuart. The money spent was crippling: not much less than £50,000.6

  Where the late King Charles II was concerned, no such demonstration was felt to be necessary. A staid succession was, surely, to be followed by a steady reign. Above all, there was the question of paying for such pageantry: the monies voted by Parliament for the late King all came to an end with his death, while Charles himself had left large debts. James II, faced with a financial crisis and the daunting prospect of a Parliament to solve it, was in no mood for unnecessarily lavish expenditure. The shade of Charles II, no stranger to State penury and its ramifications, would certainly have agreed.

  The outbreak of verse on the King’s death (including an ode by the Quaker Penn, a tribute to the King’s tolerant spirit, and Otway’s long poem on Windsor Castle, a tribute to his artistic enthusiasm) showed a genuine spirit of lamentation.

  Sad was the morn, the Sadder Week began…

  was Aphra Behn’s contribution. Two other slightly bathetic starts were as follows:

  No more, he’s gone, with Angel’s wings he fled…

  and:

  O God! Some pity, and I am turned to stone…

  All however stressed the state of serenity in which King Charles left his realm. One, by Edmund Arwaker, will serve for many:

  The best of Christians as the best of Kings:

  By him such Blessings to his Realms were given;


  He seemed created for his People’s good…7

  So, in a mellow atmosphere of regret the King was buried. It seemed that the peace which he so much desired for his country had fallen upon it, even as he himself was laid to peace in his grave.

  It was not to be. Only a few months later those characters dismissed from the stage by the final curtain of one play, found themselves engaged in quite a different drama. There was to be no happy ending to the reign of King James II.

  Monmouth died at the executioner’s axe after his foolish and bloody rebellion, only a few months after his father’s death. Three years later James himself was fighting off the political onslaught of William of Orange and his own daughter Mary; the birth of the long-dreaded Catholic Prince to Mary Beatrice in June 1688 had brought disaster in its wake. By 1689 Titus Oates, savagely whipped after trial for perjury in May 1685, was being received by William, now King of England: Oates remained a weather-vane for the direction of the English political wind. As a counter-poise it is good to relate that Father Huddleston lived on to the ripe old age of ninety – protected in the household of Queen Catharine at Somerset House.

  Another mercurial figure, whose story had been even more closely entwined with that of Charles II, did not survive to see the new Protestant reign. Buckingham had divided himself from the opposition in the King’s last years, unable to remain in accord with Shaftesbury, and had thus been received back into Charles’ favour. On the accession of James, he retired to his great Yorkshire estates, which his friend Etherege complained was like the hero leaving the play at the beginning of the fourth act. But Buckingham’s health was failing, through prolonged dissipation, as it was generally thought. He died two years after his master and childhood friend; but it was somehow characteristic of the man that his burial at least – like that of Charles himself in the Henry VII chapel at Westminster Abbey – was a most splendid affair. As for the younger politicians, Sunderland, Rochester, Godolphin and the like, for the most part they stepped willingly onto the new stage to act out all the intricate if not heroic dramas of politics in the ages of William and Mary, and Anne.