by Uglow, Jenny
There were also posts for musicians, artists and the ‘sculptor to his majesty’. Charles I had been a passionate art collector, sending emissaries around Europe and making great acquisitions, like the collection of the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua, a host of Raphaels, Titians, Caravaggios and Mantegnas at one swoop. After his execution, a series of sales had scattered these treasures but Charles II was determined to regain what he could. The process began before he set foot in Dover. On 9 May 1660, the day after the proclamation of the Restoration, the House of Lords set up a committee to collect information as to where the king’s goods, jewels and pictures might be, and to advise on getting them back. The Commons was granted special powers of seizure, and an order was published that anyone possessing such goods should hand them to the Commons, on pain of forfeiture. By the time Charles arrived in Whitehall the walls were no longer bare.
The remaining empty niches and faded patches where large canvases had hung were partly filled by the works he brought with him from Europe. He had bought some paintings of his own while he was in exile but these were trebled by the ‘Dutch Gift’, organised by the Anglophile connoisseur Constantijn Huygens at the Restoration. Together with a rich bed of state, this was a present from the Dutch Republic, anxious to atone for earlier rudeness. The works of art, largely acquired from the collection of the Reynst brothers in Amsterdam, included twelve antique sculptures, twenty-four Italian paintings – one of them a superb Titian – and several modern Dutch scenes. When the collection arrived it was exhibited in the Banqueting House and when Charles paid a formal visit to view it, he was clearly delighted.
Charles needed someone he could trust to take charge of the staggering trove of pictures and he turned, without hesitation, to Thomas Chiffinch. Old enough to be his father, Chiffinch had been attached to his service since Charles was fourteen, and had taken his young family abroad during the exile. On his return, he was made Keeper of the King’s Jewels, while his wife became laundress and seamstress to the king. Charles and Chiffinch puzzled hard, consulting John Evelyn, as to exactly where all these priceless works of art should be placed to provide a suitably awe-inspiring and magnificent display, to impress foreign princes. Chiffinch was well rewarded, and by 1663 shared the post of receiver-general of all the plantations in Africa and America.
But the hunting for the lost artworks still went on. Emanuel de Critz, the former Serjeant-Painter, reckoned he had spent £900 in rescuing from Parliament ‘the incomparable statue of the late King by Bernino and £300 more to buy in statues, pictures etc now in his majesty’s possession’.16 As ‘Master of Our Great Wardrobe’, Sandwich was responsible for collecting the goods when Charles issued a proclamation to try and recover royal property. This claimed that:
during the manifold Disorders of the late time – much Plate, Jewels, household-stuff, Cabinets, Statues, Inscriptions, pictures, Drawings, Sculptures, Rugs, Stones, ancient Coyns, Medals, books, Manuscripts, Pieces of Art and the goods and chattels which did belong unto our late dear father, our Mother the Queen or to Our Self have been purloined and embezilled, dispersed, detained and conceald.17
In his ‘Princely Clemency and care to prevent suits and prosecutions’, the notice declared, the king was now placing a public advertisement: if the goods were restored no prosecutions would follow. Slowly, piece by piece, throughout Whitehall, he was restoring his kingly state.
9 Courtiers and Envoys
But if in Court so just a man there be
(In Court a just man, yet unknown to me)
Who does his needful flattery direct,
Not to oppress and ruin, but protect…
Who does his arts and policies apply
To raise his country, not his family…
If such there be, yet grant me this at least:
Man differs more from man, than man from beast.
ROCHESTER, ‘A Satyr against Reason and Mankind’
CHARLES HAD AN IDEAL of the courtier, but it was one from which he often slipped. The model of the perfect courtier had been set early in his life by the Marquess of Newcastle, who was, in Clarendon’s words:
A very fine gentleman, active and full of courage, and most accomplished in those qualities of horsemanship, dancing and fencing, which accompany good breeding; in which his delight was. Besides that, he was amorous in poetry and music, to which he indulged the greatest part of his time; and nothing could have tempted him out of those paths of pleasure which he enjoyed in a full and ample fortune, but honour, and ambition to serve the king.1
Charles absorbed some of Newcastle’s advice, like the virtue of a calm indifference to study and to religion, both of which, his tutor felt, could preoccupy a nobleman to the detriment of his exercise of power. Equally, he admired Ormond’s wit and easy elegance, and, like him, he believed in making life look effortless. But he had another model, his cousin Louis XIV, now free of the control of his mother and Mazarin and firmly installed on his throne. Like Charles, Louis loved his pleasures yet remained always elegant and polite with ‘a flood of wavy hair around his beautiful face’.2
Although Charles never aspired to the numbing protocol of the French court, there was a visible hierarchy at Whitehall, despite the more informal mood. In cold winter evenings in the large drawing room, the king and the inner circle of nobles stood around the fire, while lesser courtiers, talking among themselves, had to hover in chillier corners. Yet Charles had the gift of making everyone feel important. He took careful note of the minor, yet useful presences around the court, beckoning them forward, letting their relatives come and view the curiosities, including a fabled ‘unicorn’s horn’, talking easily about every subject under the sun. In January 1662, for example, he called in John Evelyn to pass the time while Samuel Cooper was sketching his profile for the new milled coinage, which would come into circulation in March the following year. Evelyn held the candle, since Cooper preferred sketching at night ‘& by candlelight for the better finding out the shadows; during which his Majestie was pleasd to discourse with me about severall things relating to Painting & Graving &c.’3
Samuel Cooper’s profile sketch of Charles II, for the new milled coinage
Yet however easy he made life look, Charles ordered his court according to his own wishes. At the heart of court life was the royal Bedchamber, and at the heart of court circles were the twelve Gentlemen of the Bedchamber appointed by the king. In manipulating court politics Charles granted and withdrew this position of honour with a certain steeliness, a quick way of indicating who was in and out of favour. The department of the Bedchamber had been invented by James I as a kind of personal cabinet, a forum to discuss policy away from the Privy Council. The Gentlemen were peers, often holding other high offices, and most of Charles’s appointees were his intimate friends and old supporters. The Gentlemen were responsible for the private rooms, where the king paced and argued and made his own political choices, free of his council. To be part of this group, so close to the king, was to warm yourself at his fire – a position that gave much influence, and patronage. The Gentleman on duty spent the night in the Bedchamber with the king, sleeping on a trestle bed put up every evening, a closeness that allowed him to ask favours – a commission for a poor relation, a boon for a friend – and gave Charles a space to discuss life freely. At their head, as ‘First Gentleman and Groom of the Stool’, Charles placed Sir John Grenville, who had been with him since he was a boy and whose closeness to Monck had done so much to bring about his smooth restoration. But Grenville also held important positions in his native West Country – he was Lord Steward of the Duchy of Cornwall and Governor of Plymouth – and was often absent. The real ‘First Gentleman’ was Charles himself.
The next level of courtiers were the twelve Grooms of the Bedchamber, men like Ned Progers, who provided the king’s linen and attended him constantly in his rooms and at meals, and undertook delicate and sensitive commissions. Almost all the Grooms had been with Charles in exile, some even sharing his humiliations in
Scotland. Below them came the six Pages, who really ran the royal apartments, taking care of the clocks and pictures, building the fires, making sure the rooms were clean and running innumerable secret errands. The intimacy was extraordinary. At the very end of Charles’s life, Thomas Bruce, Lord Ailesbury, remembered him retiring to bed, and how ‘according to his usual custom, he went to ease himself, and he stayed long generally, he being there free of company, and loved to discourse, nobody having entrance but the lord and groom of the bedchamber in waiting’.4 In this most private space, ‘he laughed and was most merry and diverting: I holding the candle and the groom of the bedchamber, Mr Henry Killigrew, who always had some amusing buffoonery in his head, held the paper.’
The frontispiece to The Courtier’s Calling, 1675, showing the deference due to the King
This was a public life to an extreme degree. As Charles moved through the days, his existence seemed encrusted, as if he were wearing a heavy robe, with layer upon layer of tasks, row upon row of people. But among the flocking crowds that scuttled down the galleries of Whitehall, some characters stood out. As well as the quartet of grandees – Clarendon, Ormond, Nicholas and Southampton, who pursed their lips disapprovingly at the antics of the young – there were a few older courtiers in their late forties, like Tom Killigrew, now officially the Master of the Revels, and the volatile George Digby, Earl of Bristol.
Bristol’s father had been Charles I’s ambassador to the Spanish court. He had grown up there, becoming fluent in the language, until his father was recalled when he was twelve. In the political upheavals before the Civil War, as MP for Dorset, he had challenged royal misgovernment, but had shifted sides to oppose the attainder and execution of Strafford, the king’s minister and friend. From then on he became one of the monarch’s most passionate defenders and outspoken advisers, often not with the best results. Despite his recklessness, Charles II valued Bristol’s loyalty in the past, and his knowledge of Spanish in the present. In exile he had been one of the inner circle, although he lost all his offices when he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1658 – an ill-timed piece of opportunism aimed at winning him more influence in Spain. At the Restoration he was restored to his old lands and titles, and as Earl of Bristol, he became a striking figure at court. Talented and extravagant (he bought Henrietta Maria’s former palace at Wimbledon in 1661), he was full of tempestuously self-destructive schemes, famous for his flamboyant entertainments and heavy gambling.
Although they did not always take him seriously, Bristol stood out amid the younger courtiers. Both Charles and James had their own confidants, particularly James, who had a separate court of his own, like a grand French duke. Among their closest friends were Ormond’s two sons, the twenty-six-year-old Thomas, Earl of Ossory, and Richard, Earl of Arran, now twenty-one. They were among the leaders of the several Irish families at court. One of the richest courtiers, Charles’s Groom of the Bedchamber Daniel O’Neill, came from a proud native family from County Down, but most of the Irish, like the Ormonds, the Hamiltons and the Talbots (five brothers who were constant thorns in Charles’s side), belonged to Anglo-Norman or English families who had owned lands in Ireland since the fourteenth century or before. James Hamilton, another Groom of the Bedchamber, was the eldest of nine children of Irish Catholic aristocrats, although he himself became a protestant. His mother was Ormond’s sister, and the Hamiltons, like the Ormonds, had joined the exiled court and were granted lands at the Restoration. James’s brother George became an officer of the Horse Guards, and their younger brother Anthony later poured a mass of carefully collected court gossip into the quasi-fictional Memoirs of his brother-in-law, the comte de Gramont. (The Memoirs give him another ‘m’, as ‘Grammont’.) Hamilton also wrote acclaimed French fairy tales, and indeed the French class the ‘memoirs’ as one of the popular romans prétendus historiques of the time.5
In contrast to the Irish, very few Scottish peers, with the exception of Sir Robert Moray, made the English court their base. They preferred to look after their interests in Scotland, coming south only when they had business. The bulk of courtiers, unsurprisingly, came from the English nobility, headed by the old ducal families: Grafton, St Albans, Newcastle, Richmond, Beaufort, Devonshire, Norfolk. But the lesser gentry were represented here too. One man who won the hearts of both the royal brothers was the Somerset-born Sir Charles Berkeley. In exile he had been a cavalry officer under the command of James, whose influence won him a knighthood, the post of lieutenant-governor of Portsmouth, and the receipts from mooring fees on the Thames below London Bridge. All this made him rich enough to buy a house beside the Whitehall bowling green.6 Now he commanded James’s regiment of guards and was one of his closest friends. In 1661 he was elected MP for New Romney, one of several court placemen in the Cavalier Parliament.
Charles came to love Berkeley. Not especially clever, witty or handsome, he was a good listener and a perfect confidant, who would happily dash between the king and Barbara. He had no pomposity, and the more Charles showered honours on him, the more easy-going he seemed; ‘and so sincere in all his proceedings’, records Gramont’s Memoirs drily, ‘that he would never have been taken for a courtier’.7 Swimming through court intrigues as if everything was easy, in 1664 he married one of the prettiest and nicest of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, the dark-haired Mary Bagot. Berkeley’s sincerity had added charm since it was hard, sometimes, for Charles to distinguish between true friendship and self-interest. He found it difficult to deny requests, showering favourites with honours, posts and gifts. This had been a weakness, in Clarendon’s view, from the early days of exile, when it was understandable for a boy of great ‘sweetness of disposition’, floundering in insecurities, to think he could buy love and lasting loyalty: ‘If I did not hope he would outgrow that infirmity it would break my heart.’8
Already there were cliques. One formed around the Duke of York, another around the charismatic Duke of Buckingham, with his pale, long face and elegant, fluttering hands. ‘When he came into the presence chamber,’ remembered Dean Lockier, ‘’twas impossible for you not to follow him with your eye as he went along – he moved so gracefully.’9 Buckingham, like Charles, was a natural actor, yet unlike Charles, he had found no role. He was restless and volatile. During that first summer he was busily pushing through his petition for the return of his estates. In exile he had gradually sold off the treasures from his father’s York House – books, statues and paintings including nineteen Titians, seventeen Tintorettos, two Giorgiones, thirteen Veroneses, three Leonardos, thirteen Rubenses and three Raphaels. Now his fortune had returned. His lands in Yorkshire, his rivers and forests, mines and rents, and new, lucrative posts brought him a fabulous income of £20,000 a year. But all of this was swallowed up in mortgages and loans, taken out at exorbitant rates. All the time, his debts were spiralling.
Charles was still suspicious of Buckingham after his switches of allegiance in the 1650s. He kept him out of the Privy Council and did not admit him as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber until August 1661. But however doubtfully he eyed him, their shared history bound them, and Buckingham made him laugh. Buckingham’s wit was a political tool. His party piece was his mimickry of Clarendon, when he hung a pair of bellows from his belt to imitate the Great Seal and limped goutily across the room, thrusting out his belly, pursing his lips and grimacing at the company as he bemoaned the antics of the dissolute young. A friend followed, slinging the fire-tongs over his shoulder like a mace. The act was ludicrous, but uncomfortably close, an act of demolition through ridicule. Buckingham could mimic anyone: no one was safe, even the king.
Charles was always eager for entertainment. He was notably indulgent, for example, to the young ‘men of mirth’ as Clarendon called them, several still in their teens, like Charles Sedley, Charles Sackville (Lord Buckhurst), Henry Savile and Tom Killigrew’s son Harry. In 1661 Ormond reported gloomily that ‘the king spent most of his time with confident young men, who abhorred all discourse that was serious, an
d, in the liberty they assumed in drollery and raillery, preserved no reverence towards God or man, but laughed at all sober men, and even at religion itself’.10 This group, with Buckingham and, later, Rochester (who was only thirteen in 1660), would soon form the core of the libertine wits, challenging decorum and questioning the nature of rule, and self-rule.
The court was swept by crazes, for yachting, for dancing, for new forms of music. One of the first things Charles wanted to do was to re-establish a full body of musicians and singers to provide songs and dances and fine music for the Chapel Royal. Before he even arrived, when Henry Lawes and the English composers were writing celebratory compositions, six French musicians turned up, explaining that they had been commissioned to write the ‘festive music’.11 In November 1660, Sandwich reported an evening at Whitehall when John Singleton, a member of the royal orchestra, was royally snubbed: ‘after supper, a play – where the King did put great affront upon Singleton’s Musique, he bidding them stop and bade the French Musique play, which my lord says doth much out-do all ours’.12
Charles admired the violins of the string band of Louis XIV, and he liked strong melodies and dance forms like the new gavotte, minuet and bourrée, ‘something he could tap his feet to’.13 One of the Italians at court was a gifted guitarist. With his fingers flying over the strings, he made it look so easy that a delighted Charles sent guitar lessons to Minette in Paris. But as Anthony Hamilton noted caustically, ‘The truth is, nothing was so difficult as to play like this foreigner’:
The king’s relish for his compositions had brought the instrument so much into vogue, that every person played upon it, well or ill; and you were as sure to see a guitar on a lady’s toilet as rouge or patches. The Duke of York played upon it tolerably well, and the earl of Arran like Francisco himself. This Francisco had composed a saraband, which either charmed or infatuated every person; for the whole guitarery at court were trying at it; and God knows what an universal strumming there was.14