by Uglow, Jenny
It was clever of Charles, alert to the quick spread of gossip and shrewd in his understanding of Hyde’s nature, to appeal to him in the role of counsellor, jerking him back to responsibility, forcing him to think of action.
Charles stood by him again when five of James’s friends, in a misguided display of loyalty, claimed to have had sex with Anne. They included Ormond’s second son Richard, Earl of Arran; Harry Jermyn, nephew of Henrietta Maria’s chamberlain and rumoured lover, the Earl of St Albans; Richard Talbot, another of James’s Irish friends, later Earl of Tyrconnell; Charles Berkeley; and young Harry Killigrew. All of them loathed Hyde for different reasons. Their stories were scurrilous and clearly invented, although they have been repeated by court gossips ever since. Arran claimed Anne had pretended to be sick and lured him to a side chamber at the end of the gallery while his sister and Harry Jermyn were playing nine-pins; Talbot said she had made an appointment with him in the Chancellor’s own study ‘and, not paying so much attention to what was upon the table as what they were engaged in, they had spilled a bottle full of ink upon a despatch of four pages, and that the King’s monkey, which was blamed for this accident, had been a long time in disgrace’. Killigrew topped it all by describing them making love in a water closet overhanging the river, with three or four swans as witnesses.14 The suggestion was that since Anne had so many lovers she had no proof that James had fathered her child: she had tricked him into an ‘unlawful’ marriage which could now be declared invalid.15 The cruel stories were a heightened form of the malicious jokes the court loved. Charles was brisk, amused, and realistic: he had given his permission and since he was sure that the marriage was legal, it must stand. There was no question of it being annulled by an act of parliament, as parliament must never interfere with the succession. James must drink as he had brewed. (When he heard, Sandwich was more brutal, quoting his father’s saying, ‘He that doth get a woman with child and marries her afterward it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head.’16)
Charles showed greater calm than the rest of his family. Mary was indignant, and Henrietta Maria was outraged. With amazing aplomb Anne herself sailed through it all. In time she proved clever, witty and energetic and made herself a striking presence at court. As the courtier and writer Anthony Hamilton remembered, she had ‘a majestic air, a pretty good shape, not much beauty, a great deal of wit’ and an ability to pick out intelligent, promising figures at court. Furthermore, ‘an air of grandeur in all her actions made her be considered as if born to support her rank which placed her so near the throne.’17 James did not give up his womanising – in October, only a few weeks after his marriage, Pepys saw him talking ‘very wantonly’ to Barbara Palmer through the hangings which curtained off the royal pews in the Chapel Royal – but eight years later he would remark that ‘in all things but his codpiece’, the duke was ‘led by the nose by his wife’.18
Barely a fortnight after Anne’s son was born, on 2 November, Henrietta Maria arrived at Whitehall with her younger daughter Minette. The old queen came partly as the unofficial representative of Cardinal Mazarin, sent to smooth relations between the two countries, but she still had hopes of suppressing this marriage. Furious with James, she refused to recognise Anne as her daughter-in-law, to see their baby son, or to grant Hyde an audience.
Then came the next blow. While the quarrels about James and Anne raged, Charles’s sister Mary, the Princess of Orange, fell ill. Her fever turned out, once again, to be smallpox. Charles sent his mother and Minette away from Whitehall to St James’s Palace to escape infection but he himself stayed behind, visiting Mary constantly, regardless of risk. She died on Christmas Eve, aged twenty-nine, asking Charles to be the guardian to her son. This was not to be, but Charles kept William’s picture in his bedchamber for the rest of his life.
Christmas was marked by grief for the deaths of Henry and Mary, and by lasting embarrassment at the awkwardness of James’s marriage. Henrietta Maria’s chilliness almost created a diplomatic incident, prevented only by Mazarin’s firm messages and Charles’s threat to stop the income from her English estates. Finally she and Hyde met – with deep reluctance on both sides – and on New Year’s Day 1661, when Charles attended the baby’s christening in Worcester House, she deigned to receive her daughter-in-law ‘with much respect and love’.19 In a further defiance of gossip, and to ward off questions in the House of Commons, Charles created Hyde Earl of Clarendon – having offered him the higher honour of a dukedom, which Hyde wisely refused for fear of provoking more jealousy.
Having lost this battle, Henrietta Maria decided to return to France. To the British public she was an ominous reminder of past wars, a foreign, Catholic beauty, heir to the Bourbons and Medicis, now shrunken and plain. Ever since her husband’s execution she had dressed in black, offset by white lace, and she looked much older than her forty-nine years. Her slight, elegant daughter, however, won the people’s hearts by her charm and tact. Like Charles, Minette had a natural graciousness, an instinctive, easy attentiveness to those around her. Although she was, in almost every respect, a French princess, Charles liked to remind her of her English heritage as an ‘Exeter woman’. She had been born there in 1644, amid the flurry of war, and had been smuggled out of England at the age of two by her governess, Lady Dalkeith, who had walked a hundred miles to Dover, carrying the baby. In Paris she joined her mother, who brought her up as a Catholic.
Charles had known Minette when she was a small girl in Paris, but there was a gap of several years before he met her again in late 1659, on his way back to Brussels from Fuentarrabia. She was then fifteen, chestnut-haired, petite, coquettish. In the ten days they spent together, they became extremely close, with the intensity that sometimes defines the relationships of long-separated siblings, a sense of recognition, almost as if they shared a part of the same self. From then on, they wrote to each other more openly than to anyone else, and Charles showed all the protective affection of an elder brother, giving her presents and fighting her corner in the intense quarrels of the French court. In 1660 Minette became engaged to Louis XIV’s brother, the temperamental, bisexual Philippe, duc d’Orléans, and the marriage was due to take place on her return from England. As Louis’s brother the duke was given the courtesy title ‘Monsieur’; after her marriage Minette would be ‘Madame’.
In January 1661, she and Henrietta Maria sailed from Portsmouth, making a calm, slow start with ‘little wind, very smooth water’. But Minette then fell ill and her ship returned to port. The great fear was that this was yet another onslaught of smallpox, but it turned out to be measles. Although that was serious enough in those times, after a few days she and her mother set sail again. This time their crossing was untroubled. ‘The Princess was weak,’ wrote Sir John Lawson in his journal when they arrived in France, ‘yet had been very cheery all the way in her passage over.’20
Yet despite the relief of Minette’s recovery, the New Year was darkened for Charles. The glitter of his return had dulled. Although he was still sure that the major political problems could be resolved, and was caught up in the passionate throes of his own affair with Barbara, everywhere, even in his family and his household, he felt the threat of trouble and death.
7 Blood and Banners
You are now to enquire of blood, of Royal blood, of sacred blood, blood like that of the saints…this blood cries for vengeance and it will never be appeased without a bloody sacrifice.
ORLANDO BRIDGEMAN’s instruction to the jury at the trial of the regicides
THE DEATHS IN CHARLES’S OWN FAMILY coincided with the violent ends of some of the men who had condemned his father. Charles had not wanted a bloody revenge. As soon as he landed, he tried to cajole his parliament into passing an Act of Oblivion and Indemnity as quickly as possible. This would offer a general pardon for those who had opposed the crown, with the exception of the regicides, the men who had signed his father’s death warrant. Fifteen of these were safely in the American colonies,
or lying low in Switzerland and Holland. But nineteen had surrendered immediately after the Declaration of Breda, having read the Declaration to mean they would be pardoned if they gave themselves up within a fortnight. Now they faced trial for treason. While they waited in prison their fellows were rounded up and arrested.
The reactions differed greatly. Colonel Thomas Harrison awaited his arrest with calm, accepting that death would bring him face to face with God. By contrast, Edmund Ludlow, who had hidden in the alleys of London all summer, turned himself in and arranged bail, but when he realised he faced execution, he escaped and fled, eventually slipping away to exile in Geneva. The arrested men were brought to London, paraded through the streets in irons and then held in the Tower. Their families stayed in the capital all summer, begging to see them and pleading their cause.
Many men connected with Cromwell’s administration went into hiding. Among them was John Milton. In June parliament had ordered his arrest, and in August a royal proclamation called for two of his books to be burnt, the Defence of the English People against Salmasius and the Eikonoklastes. On the 30th of that month the public hangman flung these on the fire at the Old Bailey. Many influential intermediaries begged for clemency for the poet, including his old colleague Andrew Marvell, as well as the Secretary of State William Morice, Arthur Annesley, the Calvinist Earl of Anglesey, and Lady Ranelagh, sister to the Earl of Orrery and to Robert Boyle. In November, when Milton thought himself safe, he was imprisoned for a month, but released on payment of a fine of £150. But he wrote on despite his blindness and his political despair, working on Paradise Lost, his ‘heavenly muse’ still singing,
…with mortal voice unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude.1
The two poets who had marched beside him behind Cromwell’s bier took different courses under the new regime. Marvell became a dutiful, hard-working MP for Hull, an envoy to Russia, and later one of the government’s most stinging critics, while Dryden turned into a court propagandist. Right at the start he tried to undo his blunder of writing ‘Heroic Stanzas’ to Cromwell by publishing his euphoric poem Astraea Redux. This welcomed the returning Charles as a second Augustus, celebrating a new Golden Age after the rule of the ‘Rabble’ in such reverent tones that a shocked Samuel Johnson found it positively sacrilegious:
How shall I speak of that triumphant Day
When you renewed th’ expiring Pomp of May?…
That star that at your birth shone out so bright
It stained the duller sun’s meridian light,
Did once again its potent fires renew,
Guiding our eyes to find and worship you.2
In Astraea Redux Dryden showed a belief in a guiding Providence, and a respect for monarchy that he would retain all his life. But he also noted the human frailty of the king, trusting – in slightly warning tones – that he had learned from his exile:
Inured to suffer ere he came to raigne
No rash procedure will his actions stain.
Dryden’s swerve was far from unusual and his shift in allegiance illustrates very clearly how the mixed traditions of the Interregnum and Restoration could blend together. Short and squat (his friends called him ‘Squab’) with a piercing intellect and self-assured manner, Dryden was the eldest of fourteen children from a land-owning puritan family in Northamptonshire. His cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering, was one of the judges at the trial of Charles I (although he did not sign the death warrant) and he later became Cromwell’s Lord Chamberlain. As a counter to this, Dryden absorbed the classics at Westminster under the brilliant, firmly royalist headmaster John Busby. The clashes continued.3 After Trinity College, Cambridge, he worked for the Commonwealth civil service, yet one of his closest friends was Sir Robert Howard, a son of the Earl of Berkshire. After the Restoration they shared a house, and in 1663 Dryden would marry Howard’s sister Elizabeth. Setting his mind on court favour, Dryden would write a ‘Panegyrick’ on the Coronation, and New Year verses to Hyde, who helped to wring a dowry for Elizabeth from the king, late in payment but still an important court link.
Dryden’s cousin Gilbert Pickering was one of the men excepted from pardon in the Act of Oblivion, although he escaped execution. But while Cromwellians shuddered, the royalist-packed Commons and Lords attacked the Act as a sign of weakness on the part of the crown. The net of exceptions should be spread wider, they argued. All who had dealt with public money must be brought to account and all who held public office should take oaths of allegiance and supremacy. As they fought against the too-lenient act, MPs constantly tried to add names to the list of exceptions. The debates were loud and heated and in addition, the two houses disagreed: more than once a man pardoned by the Commons was rejected by the Lords and vice versa. And even when a man’s name was removed from the dread list, the Commons could still decide if he should keep his lands or lose everything.
Charles’s speeches to the Lords and Commons became increasingly impatient, stressing the need for the speedy passing of the act as an essential foundation to domestic security. He begged his supporters to put aside personal grudges and animosities. Once or twice, through Clarendon, he intervened specifically in rows between the two houses. He promised, for eample, that the republican general John Lambert and the politician Sir Henry Vane, both sentenced to death by the Lords, should be reprieved, as the Commons wished, because they had not been present at his father’s trial. Vane, however, conducted such a brilliant defence that Charles allegedly thought it was too dangerous to let him live: he was eventually executed on Tower Hill in June 1662. Lambert’s fate was almost worse, incarcerated for a quarter of a century in island gaols, until his sanity collapsed.
Charles’s speeches were doubtless drafted by Clarendon, but they reflected his own desire. He knew he could leave it to parliament to obtain a bloody revenge, leaving his own hands relatively clean. But he disliked bloodshed and politically, in purely pragmatic terms, he was wary of creating martyrs. Mercy and indulgence, he insisted, would make his opponents ‘good subjects to me, and good friends and neighbours to you and we have then all our end, and you shall find this the securest expedient to prevent future mischief’.4 It took three months to get the Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion through. When it was passed, on 29 August 1660, the Speaker of the House presented the list of exceptions with this warning: ‘We deal not with men, but monsters, guilty of blood, precious blood, royal blood, never to be remembered without tears.’5
In October the first defendants appeared at the Old Bailey. The procedure at their trials was fair, but the odds were stacked. The judges and prosecutors had already met in secret sessions, allegedly to decide on procedure but actually to prepare the indictments so that they could not be questioned by the defence: the accused were not charged with murdering the king but with ‘compassing and imagining’ his death.6 The jury were vetted for their loyalty and the judges were royal appointments. Among them was the newly ennobled Earl of Sandwich, sitting in silence as men who had been his fellow soldiers in the field were brought into the court, to face almost certain death.
Within a week several of those on trial were convicted, and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered: the sleds carrying the condemned men to Tyburn passed near to Milton’s house in Holborn. The first to die was Colonel Harrison, trusting in the God who had protected him so often in battle: ‘By God I have leapt over a wall, by God I have run through a troop, and by God I will go through this death and he will make it easy for me.’7 As he came to the scaffold the crowd booed and jeered, ‘Where is your Good Old Cause now?’ Harrison replied calmly: ‘Here in my bosom, and I shall seal it with my blood.’ The spectacle did not end with Harrison’s hanging. Cut down semi-conscious, he lay on the scaffold, and the executioner ripped out his bowels with hot tongs, cut out his heart and displayed
it to the crowd before he threw it into a bucket. Then he hacked Harrison’s head off and showed this too to the mob. Finally his body was quartered with a cleaver, and the parts carried off to be displayed on the gatehouses of the city.
Each of the eight men executed over the next few days received the same treatment. Royalists exulted. ‘I saw not their execution,’ wrote the sober scholar John Evelyn, ‘but met their quarters, mangld & cutt & reaking as they were brought from the Gallows in baskets on the hurdle: o miraculous Providence of God.’8 But after a fortnight of such scenes, many in the crowd around the scaffold were expressing admiration for the brave speeches of the condemned rather than cheering for the king, and the sober citizens of London were retching at the stench of their burning bowels. This was enough.
The execution of the regicides, October 1660
The remaining regicides were held in prison over the winter, still officially under sentence of death. Others would soon join them. In December the Marquess of Argyll appeared suddenly in Whitehall, gaunt and ruined. Charles refused to see him. He was taken to the Tower and in the spring of 1661 he was sent to Edinburgh to face trial and although it was hard to prove his involvement in the regicide, or to justify the accusation that his activities in the 1650s amounted to treason, Argyll was found guilty, and beheaded in May 1661. His head was placed on the same spike on which he had impaled the skull of Montrose.
Over the next two years Clarendon’s men hunted down others, pursuing them across Europe and America, either dragging them back to trial or employing men to murder them abroad. Charles, however, was against such dirty tricks. Clarendon told Sir George Downing, the ex-Cromwellian now hounding his old colleagues in Holland, that he did not think the king would ever give instructions to have the regicides assassinated, such a measure being against his dignity as a king and a gentleman.