by Uglow, Jenny
Some merchants were horrified at the threat of war, as a grave disruption. But there was no doubt that they feared the Dutch were gaining a monopoly of international trade, and that such a monopoly also implied a wider ‘dominion’ over the seas. Since 1662 the East India Company had submitted petition after petition couched in these terms, claiming, for example that the Dutch were aiming ‘to perfect at once their long-designed work of ruining the whole trade of the English in India and dispossessing the Portuguese of the little that still remains in their hands’.16 They also suspected them of planning to capture the Levant trade, and the navy provided convoys in the Mediterranean to protect shipping there. The Royal Africa Company in particular was adamant the Dutch must be stopped. On 21 April, Sir Thomas Clifford, now head of the Council for Trade, told the Commons that the Dutch were ‘the greatest single obstruction to foreign trade’. The Commons agreed, passing a resolution to assist the king ‘against all opposition whatsoever’.17 From this point on, the war party – led by the Duke of York and Albemarle – urged full-scale conflict. Clarendon advised against it and so did William Coventry, both of them arguing cogently that trade was better served by peace and greater mercantile efficiency.
Everywhere the Dutch were roundly abused. A Dutchman, it was said, ‘is a lusty, Fat, Two-legged Cheese Worm. A creature that is so addicted to eating Butter, Drinking Fat Drink and Sliding [skating] that all the world knows him for a Slippery Fellow.’18 And because the Dutch themselves proudly proclaimed that they were ‘masters’ of the seas, of the Indies, of Africa – many British commentators saw their ambitions as imperial and global. Day by day the mood swung towards war.
News from West Africa travelled slowly. For weeks the ships tacked their way up the African coast, past the Straits of Gibraltar and the cliffs of Portugal, and across the Bay of Biscay. In the spring of 1664, the Privy Council finally heard that Holmes had captured the island of Goree off Cape Verde, one of the chief Dutch bases, and a string of other stations further south along the Gold Coast. To capitalise on this, Charles agreed to send the British warships south to Guinea under Rupert’s command.
In May Charles showed off his warships, letting them parade in formation in the Channel, and two months later he took Catherine to see the fleet sail out of Chatham and down the Medway (‘taking off his wig and pourpoint to be more at his ease, by reason of the extreme heat of the sun’ and catching a bad, feverish cold as a result).19 As he told Minette, he was still sure, or still hoping, that the Dutch would cave in. It was, however, increasingly difficult to calm the British public. ‘Sir George Downing is come out of Holland,’ he wrote in June, ‘and I shall now be very busy upon that matter’:
the States keep a great braging and noise, but I believe, when it comes to it, they will look twise before they leap. I never saw so great an appetite to a warre as is, in both thise towne and country, espetially in the parlament-men, who, I am confident, would pawne their estates to maintaine a warre, but all this shall not governe me, for I will looke merely at what is just and best for the honour and good of England, and will be very steady in what I resolve.20
If war did come he would be ready with good ships and men, and leave the rest to God.
Three weeks later he told her that he was providing a man-of-war to accompany eight East India vessels, stressing that this was only for fear of Dutch attacks. The Dutch ambassador had arrived, he said, and was begging him not to let the ships sail, lest hostilities might be sparked by the ‘indiscretion of some of the captaines…You may guesse, by such a simple proposition, whether these people are not affraide!’21 To cap his show of strength he agreed that his forces should remove the ‘nuisance’ of New Amsterdam, the Dutch stronghold nestling in the heart of British colonies on America’s eastern seaboard. In mid-May four vessels sailed from Portsmouth, commanded by Captain John Nicholls, arriving off New England in late July. Soon the British men-of-war appeared at the mouth of the Hudson river, having come, Nicholls told Governor Stuyvesant, to support the English title to the lands. The Dutch colony had no defences, and on 27 August Stuyvesant surrendered. New Amsterdam was handed without bloodshed to the English crown, having been granted in advance by a confident Charles to his brother James, Duke of York. As news trickled home, bells were rung in triumph. But Charles was very careful, in his correspondence with Minette, to convey to Louis – who was obliged by his treaty with Holland to act only if the Dutch were the victims, and not the initiators, of aggression – that this was simply a justified recapture of British property. ‘’Tis a place of great importance to trade, and a very good towne,’ he wrote. ‘It did belong to England heretofore, but the Duch by degrees drove our people out of it, and built a very good towne, but we have gott the better of it, and ‘’tis now called New Yorke’.22
Sending his letters to Minette through safe messengers, Charles tried to find a formula for a treaty of ‘strict friendship’ that might keep France out of the war. Meanwhile, despite the threat of conflict, trade went on. Ships sailed up the Thames to the Pool of London from the West Indies and the East, and from India itself. Some brought priceless gifts for Charles, including jewels in a purse of purple satin: a huge yellow diamond, a fine ruby, a blue-and-white sapphire, and a great pearl which he gave to Catherine.23
But the tension was rising. One of the Privy Council’s fears was that the English republicans who had fled to Holland would use this as an opportunity to foment another uprising: they did in fact form an English regiment to fight with the Dutch. To find out about such plots, and about Dutch plans and naval manoeuvres, Henry Bennet set up a network of spies.24 The system was profoundly inefficient, not only because the post was routinely opened and the coded letters were all too easy to decipher, but because many informers worked as double agents. William Scott, the son of the regicide Thomas Scott, former head of Cromwell’s intelligence services, who had been executed in 1660, was now living in Flanders. He routinely fed Downing misleading information and as soon as the English agents were in place, Scott betrayed them to the Dutch.
In late summer, however – although this was not something the spies picked up – it seemed as if the Dutch were willing to enter talks. Through Downing, de Witt put forward a highly secret proposal, agreeing to many of the long-standing English demands.25 Yet the Privy Council remained silent. Were they waiting for yet more concessions, or could it be, as some suspected, that they really wanted war after all?
In October the pretext came. Despite Holmes’s successes, since early summer the Royal African Company had been complaining of ‘insolent protests and threats from the Dutch’ off the African coast.26 The ships for Rupert’s new expedition were almost ready to sail but the Dutch had pre-empted them. In October news reached the Privy Council that the admiral Michael de Ruyter had already sailed south with part of the Dutch Mediterranean fleet to West Africa. Charles at once ordered all naval vessels to join Rupert at Portsmouth, and appointed commissioners to supervise treatment of the wounded, and prisoners of war.
Waiting for action, the Duke of York was bored. Longing to deploy his fleet he spent all day and most of the night down at the wharves, seeing his ships armed and stores taken on board. Charles, too, visited the dockyards and boarded the ships, often dragging Catherine and her sea-sick ladies with him. In the November rain and hail he talked to the captains and watched the great new ships being launched. Swept up by such enthusiasm and by the simple longing for a fight, courtiers and aristocrats like the Dukes of Richmond, Buckingham and Norfolk volunteered to serve on board ship, even if they could not tell one end of a hawser from another.
A small Dutch warship, drawn by Hollar
Both Charles and James were passionate about the navy, and knowledgeable about ships. The British navy had a range of warships, arranged in order of importance from the great first-rates, which could carry as many as a hundred guns, to the small sixth-rates.27 The big three-masted first-rates, which were only brought out in wartime, were heavy, deep-hulled, powerfu
l beasts, beautifully ornamented and carrying acres of sail. They needed enormous crews of up to eight hundred men, under the command of the captain and his lieutenants and the non-commissioned officers, and they also had to carry their own surgeons and doctors, cooks and carpenters, trumpeters and gun-smiths, and often a troop of soldiers, forerunners of the marines.
Discipline was harsh, space below decks was horribly cramped, sanitation non-existent. The crew survived the long periods of waiting largely through being permanently drunk – beer and spirits was one area the navy was liberal in. They were led by officers out for glory, often rash and violent, jealous of each other’s victories and endlessly quarrelling among themselves. To add to the feuds, there was a clear division between the ‘tarpaulins’ – the commanders who had risen from the ranks during the Commonwealth, like Monck, Sandwich and Lawson – and the ‘Cavaliers’, who included veterans from Prince Rupert’s civil-war fleet, like Holmes and Thomas Allin, and men whose command came through the patronage of the King or Duke.
This was the fleet now assembling. On 18 December, the Privy Council ordered attacks on Dutch shipping wherever possible. The next day, with only eight ships under his command, Allin attacked the Dutch Smyrna convoy coming out of the Straits of Gibraltar, thirty merchantmen and three men-of-war. He took three ships, bringing his prizes and his prisoners slowly back to port. At a meeting at Worcester House, Clarendon and Southampton, who were known to be against the war, finally admitted its reality, telling the company there was no longer time to debate if it should be ‘war or no war: it was come upon us, and we were now only to contrive the best way of carrying it on with success; which could only be done by raising a great present sum of money’.28 At the opening of the parliamentary session Charles appealed to the Commons in his speech, for a minimum of £800,000 upon which a back-bench MP, Sir Robert Paston, coached by Clarendon, that it should be no less than £2,500,000.29 The silent house ‘sat in amazement’, until the motion was seconded, with all the court placemen carefully staying silent until the Speaker proposed the vote.30 This massive grant, to be raised over three years, was the largest ever won by a monarch. But even this was too little, said the Navy Board, since there was so much pay in arrears and so many ships to be repaired before any real fitting out could be done.
Some MPs were suspicious that the funds were merely for court indulgences. Others, who had been urging war for some time, saw corruption in the Privy Council as the reason why it had not yet begun. Clarendon was currently building a huge house on land granted to him in Piccadilly, employing the best craftsmen and using the most expensive materials. Almost as soon as the scaffolding went up people had called it ‘Dunkirk House’, implying he had been bribed by the French. Now they called it ‘Holland House’, shouting that the bribes came from the Dutch. To get the money from parliament Charles had to promise that once he had the grant, he would not simply make a quick peace with the Dutch, and then spend it on himself.
The winter of 1664–5 was grim. In Paris, the Dutch ambassador Van Benningen proved alarmingly persuasive at keeping Louis to his word, and at blaming the English for all the hostilities, despite the good efforts of Charles Berkeley, sent as Charles’s personal envoy. People seeking omens looked anxiously at the sky as a new comet flared across Europe. Out at sea, Sandwich charted its progress for several weeks in his log, seeing it as a broom sweeping the constellations, as if a creature of myth was interfering with his navigation: ‘After sunset I saw the Blazing Star again in the Whale’s Mouth…and observed his distance from Aldebaran…The stream of his light like a brush besome stretched out towards Orion’s head.’31 But Charles – unlike most of his subjects – chose to decide that the comet was a portent for good, and his court still celebrated the festivals of the New Year in their old style. And at Candlemas, 2 February 1665, there was a fine masque of ten dancers, ‘surprizing his Majestie’.32
However relaxed he seemed, war was on his mind. In his letters, he teased Minette about her latest pregnancy, wishing her an easy labour: ‘A boy will recompense two grunts more, and so good night, for feare I fall into naturale philosophy, before I think of it.’33 The weather was so icy that he could hardly hold his pen, yet he wrote longer and longer letters, fearing that Van Benningen had used ‘all possible artes and trickes’ to make him seem the aggressor, and threatening that if no agreement with France was offered, he would look elsewhere, to Spain.34 Meanwhile, backed by an eager parliament, he sent Sandwich, with eighteen ships, to hunt down the Dutch fleet in the North Sea.
In late February, disconcerting news arrived – the talk at the Exchange was all of de Ruyter’s exploits and of the British being ‘beaten to dirt at Guiny’.35 Charles reassured the Commons that he had asked Downing ‘to demand speedy justice and reparation’. He did not doubt, he said, that the States General, as good allies, would agree to his demands.36 By now this rang hollow, but he still hoped that the Dutch would back down, and that if they did not, at least Louis would not feel bound to help them. Both hopes would prove false. The Dutch stood firm, while Louis called Charles’s bluff about seeking a Spanish treaty, and blocked his attempts to find allies elsewhere. English envoys criss-crossed Europe seeking alliances. On their way back from Russia, the Earl of Carlisle and Marvell called in vain at the courts of Sweden and Denmark. No help at all was forthcoming, not from France or Scandinavia, Spain or Portugal. Britain was on its own. On 4 March 1665, Charles declared war on Holland.
23 The Itch of Honour
I looked and saw within the book of Fate,
Where many days did lour,
When lo one happy hour
Leaped up, and smiled to save thy sinking state;
A day shall come when in thy power
Thy cruel foes shall be;
Then shall thy land be free,
And thou in peace shall reign:
But take, O take that opportunity,
Which once refused will never come again.
DRYDEN, Song from The Indian Emperour
THE NEWS THAT BRITAIN was at war with the Dutch was announced by heralds sent to the Exchange in London and to the major cities in the provinces. When she heard of it Minette wrote to her brother, clearly passing on a message from Louis. She wrote calmly that as it would ‘not be desireable’ for the French King to enter the war on the side of the Dutch, perhaps now was the time for Charles to come to a separate agreement that would keep the French neutral:
I beg of you to consider if some secret treaty could not be arranged, by which you could make sure of this, by giving a pledge that you would help in the business he will soon have in Flanders…Think this over well, I beg you, but never let anyone know that I was the first to mention it to you.1
Soon Louis sent two extra ambassadors to join Cominges, in what became known as ‘la célèbre ambassade’. As they drove from Dover to London, the new ambassadors reported, many people asked what their mission was, and ‘being informed that we meant to secure peace between England and Holland, they without hesitation answered: “If they come for nothing else, they might as well go back”’.2 One of the envoys was a lawyer, Honoré Courtin, a shrewd choice since Charles took to this short, rather absurd figure with his ironic smile, easy manner and clever mind. The other was the sixty-four-year-old Henri de Bourbon, duc de Verneuil, illegitimate brother of Henrietta Maria, and thus uncle to both kings, ‘an handsome old man & a greate hunter’ as Evelyn described him.3 He had brought his dogs and two dozen horses with him. In all his months here the hunt seemed of far more importance than the war.
The old concept of honour that the duc de Verneuil represented, however lazily, underpinned Charles’s attitude to the war as much as his mercantile interests. The two were strangely, dangerously, intertwined. And the conflicts between old and new values were often argued out in that mirror of the times, the theatre. Early the previous year, at the King’s Theatre, Dryden and Howard had written and produced The Indian Queen. The play was set in Mexico and Peru, with a fiction
al ‘restoration’ plot, in which Montezuma, a noble savage who has to learn the restraints of so-called civilisation, is restored to the Mexican throne. The production was lavish and the play set a new style of heroic drama, dealing with the clashes of passion and duty, desire and honour. This was a self-consciously aristocratic mode, a resurrection of lost ideals of chivalry and the sun-like glory that surrounds a king, a glory that was fast disappearing from Charles himself. At one point, the fearsome queen Zempolla asks if honour itself is merely indulgent self-display:
Honour is but an itch in youthful blood
Of doing acts extravagantly good.
In the spring of 1665, Charles saw the King’s Company perform the sequel, The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico. Here – using the same sets and costumes for economy’s sake – Dryden brought Europe face to face with the exotic New World, through the arrival of Pizarro and the supremely honourable Cortez. The idea of conquest itself was double-edged since Cortez is ‘vanquished’ by passion for Montezuma’s daughter, Cydaria, while Montezuma is also enfeebled by love – a double warning to a womanising king. Cortez was played by Charles Hart and Cydaria (very badly) by the fourteen-year-old Nell Gwyn, in her first recorded role. The two stars, as everyone knew, were lovers. Love and war, distant as they seemed, echoed each other in fervour and despair.
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
In the real war, the young blades, and the not so young, were eager to prove their code of honour in the heat of battle. Their vaunted heroism would later inspire furious satire, and just as Marvell demolished the posturing of the war leaders, so Dryden’s pretensions to grand heroic tragedy would be punctured by Buckingham and Rochester. This spring the words ‘love’ and ‘honour’ were also bandied about in the latest court scandal, starring Rochester himself. He was now eighteen and in need of a rich wife and for some time he had been pursuing the heiress Elizabeth Mallet without luck, although Charles himself urged her to accept him. In late May Rochester decided to abduct Elizabeth, and hired armed men to grab her on her way home from supper with Frances Stuart and bundle her into a coach. She was soon found, but Charles, enraged, sent Rochester to the Tower. A month later he sent the King a vehement petition, declaring,