by Uglow, Jenny
For the king, at odds with his parliament and anxious about the war and his empty treasury, there was no real breathing space. From time to time in this chilly spring of 1667 his habitual cool seemed to crack. He was unsure how to play his hand. This was seen in his abrupt attack on Buckingham in February over the business of the horoscope. And in the same month, Charles also suffered from a crisis in his affair with Frances Stuart. She was now eighteen. He offered to make her a duchess, promised her lands and swore he would banish Barbara, but still she refused him. She was in a difficult position, since her reputation was tarnished simply by his public attention, and this spring she told one courtier that she felt that she could no longer stay at court ‘without prostituting herself to the King, whom she had so long kept off, though he had liberty more than any other had, or he ought to have, as to dalliance’.22 She had come to such a pass, she said, ‘as to resolve to have married any gentleman of 1500l a year that would have had her in honour’.
The man Frances found was another Charles Stuart, the third Duke of Richmond. Still in his twenties, he had been married twice, drank, gambled and was hopeless with money. His marriage to his second wife, Margaret, was furiously acrimonious and within weeks of her death in late 1666, like a man set free, he was courting Frances. Charles already disliked Richmond for his work in Middleton’s now disgraced administration in Scotland. He was also irritated by a duel in 1665, for which Richmond was imprisoned in the Tower. It was alleged, although it says little for Richmond’s reasoning powers, that he first became friendly with Frances because he wanted to get back into Charles’s favour. By early February, when Pepys saw her wearing her hair in a new fashion, ‘done up with puffes’, they were meeting secretly. Later that month, after a tip-off, allegedly from Barbara Castlemaine, Charles entered Frances’s room to find her in bed, with Richmond seated at her pillow.23
Richmond fled, and after an angry exchange with the King, Frances appealed tearfully to the queen, explaining that she and Richmond wanted to marry. Sensible and tactful, Catherine persuaded Charles to accept the marriage. But since Richmond was a relative, he required the King’s permission to marry, and Charles stalled obstinately.24 Despairing of an end to this obstruction, on a stormy night at the end of March Frances crossed London Bridge to meet the duke at the Bear at the Bridge-Foot. They eloped and were married at his estate in Kent. Scrupulously, but insultingly, she left behind the jewels Charles had given her, including a pearl necklace worth over £1,000. On 3 April the couple returned to London, to stay at the lodgings of Frances’s mother, in Somerset House, hoping for forgiveness from court. None came.25 The personal and political were always linked. Wry jokes were made when people saw the new medal for the Peace of Breda, for which Frances had sat as the model for Britannia, encircled by the motto Favente Deo, ‘By God’s Favour’.
The Peace of Breda medal 1667. The front of the medal showed a portrait of Charles II, with the image of Britannia on the reverse, modelled from Frances Stuart, so accurately that both Pepys and Evelyn thought one could recognise her at first glance.
Charles found that other small humiliations hit home. In mid-April he arrived at a Privy Council meeting to find no paper laid out for him on the table. The man responsible explained that he could provide it no longer: he was not well off, had already spent four or five hundred pounds of his own, and had not been paid since the king was restored. After being snubbed by a servant, Charles was then attacked in his own theatre. He had shrugged off uncomfortable plays written by friends before, including Orrery’s Mustapha in 1665, with its evil counsellor, threatened succession and infatuated king. Ned Howard’s The Change of Crownes, which Charles watched with Catherine on 25 April, should have been standard fare, containing a double plot in which two usurpers, a brother and sister, repent and marry the legitimate rulers. Unfortunately, in the sub-plot, Charles’s favourite comedian John Lacy acted ‘the Country Gentleman come up to Court, who doth abuse the Court with all the imaginable wit and plainness, about selling of places and doing everything for money’.26 As if the script was not provocative enough, Lacy added his own impromptu gags. Icy with rage, Charles had the actor confined to the porter’s lodge, the theatre closed and the playbill torn down. The play was withdrawn and in the ensuing rows Lacy hit Howard with his cane, shouting that the playwright was ‘more a fool than a poet’. The hierarchies of court and theatre were well and truly ruffled.
Observers thought Charles was behaving wildly. A week after his outburst over the play, on 22 April, the eve of St George’s Day, there was a sumptuous banquet for the Garter knights. This was followed next day by a service, when the knights processed in solemn order, a ceremony mounted with extra show to impress the Swedish ambassador. Four days later Charles and his crew put their Garter robes back on, fooled around the court all day and even rode with them on into the park, ‘which is a most scandalous thing’, thought Pepys, ‘so as all gravity might be said to be lost among us’.27
The frivolous, rushing, material world that dismayed the men of faith was returning. Yet ten days before the Garter feast, a work of eloquent gravity, in all senses, appeared in the bookshops. Paradise Lost passed the censor with hardly a whisper of protest. It was published by Samuel Simmons, the nephew of Milton’s old friend and publisher, next door to the Golden Lion at Aldersgate, where the poet had lived during the early days of the Civil War. (Milton was paid £5 when he signed the contract, and another £5 when the first print run of thirteen hundred copies was sold.) Like the note of a great organ, heard faintly at first, his epic slowly found its readers. His former colleague Marvell wrote a sober, moving tribute and before Milton’s death in 1674, Dryden approached him for permission to turn his poem into an opera for the stage, an impossible project. Charles took note. Around this time, according to Betty Milton, her husband ‘was applied to by message from the King, and invited to write for the Court, but his answer was, that such behaviour would be very inconsistent with his former conduct, for he had never yet employed his pen against his conscience’.28
In his earlier prose Milton had written with eloquent power of the virtues of the republic, the right to freedom of speech, the need for easier divorce. In his epic he turned to battles in Heaven and joys in Eden, to the Fall, and the promise of redemption from a corrupt world. But if the Good Old Cause and the rule of the saints were behind him, they were not forgotten. His poem was a cry to the nation to defy tyranny and to reject corruption and luxury. Moreover the fallen world that the Archangel Michael shows to Adam and Eve could appear a direct criticism of Charles II’s court:
The brazen Throat of war had ceast to roar,
All now was turn’d to jollitie and game,
To luxurie and riot, feast and dance,
Marrying or prostituting, as befell,
Rape or Adulterie, wher passing fair
Allurd them; then from Cups to civil Broiles.
Driven from Eden by their own sin, banished by the angel’s flaming sword, Milton’s fallen couple enter a world where the future is all uncertain. But they still have the power to choose their way ‘with Providence their guide’.
Charles rejected the guidance of Providence, and thought he could make his own luck. But this proved hard. It seemed a dark hour, yet in this space of winter and spring, between the Fire and the warmer days when the fleets might set out again and threaten war, a powerful sense of life revived flowed through his capital. Its clashing voices were full of energy, from Wren’s grand plans to Margaret Cavendish’s ambitious imaginings, from the experiments of the Royal Society to the sonorous, severe yet lyrical visions of Milton. These too, like the tributaries that flowed into the Thames, mixing their streams and blending at last with the sea, were part of the currents and counter-currents of Charles’s first decade.
31 The Dutch in the Medway
There our sick ships unrigg’d in summer lay
Like molting fowl, a weak and easy prey,
For whose strong bulk earth scarce could ti
mber find,
The ocean water, or the heavens wind –
Those oaken giants of the ancient race,
That rul’d all seas and did our Channel grace.
MARVELL, Last Instructions to a Painter
THE DUTCH WERE QUICK to see the Fire of London as God’s judgement for English sins, including ‘Holmes’s bonfire’ which had consumed their merchant ships in the Vlie Roads. They too were badly battered by the war. In September 1666 Aphra Behn wrote, ‘Things are in so universal a disorder, that if God give our fleet good success at sea we shall see strange things.’1 But when Charles tried to negotiate a peace, the States General held out for terms that would take English possessions back to before the war.
This had its bright side, as Louis held the view that the obsinacy of the Dutch freed him from his agreement with them. In secret he began to approach Charles about terms for peace. Despite this, French privateers continued to attack traffic in the Channel, damaging British customs and excise duties. In February 1667 the Navy Board gave the Duke of York a forthright account of their plight. They could place no contracts for supplies since they had only been able to pay £1,315 out of the £150,000 due to suppliers. They owed the sailors £930,000, of which they had paid £140,000.2 They needed half a million pounds immediately, or there would be no fleet at all. In this situation Charles could take only the minimum action. He sent squadrons out to the West Indies to retake Surinam, which had been lost to the Dutch, and to Antigua and Montserrat, which had been seized by the French. Privately, he ordered James, as High Admiral, to mothball the warships and use smaller boats to police the coast, to keep privateers away and harass enemy ships. He was probably advised by Sir George Carteret, the treasurer for the navy, but this was his own decision, made outside the Privy Council, which still – like most of the public – expected the fleet to set sail. Instead of building and repairing, Charles and James concentrated on fortifying the coastal towns and ports, building new defences at Harwich and Portsmouth. Charles himself drew up plans to fortify Sheerness, on the Isle of Sheppey, guarding the mouth of the river Medway, where most of the fleet was laid up in Chatham dockyards. He also went down to talk to the engineers.
It was a gamble, but Charles argued that this policy was the only way he could play the poor cards left in his hand. There was no way he could repair the whole fleet. Even if all the new grant was collected, the money was already committed to pay existing bills. After that, the treasury was bankrupt. The run of play, and of luck, had gone against him and all he could do now was sue for peace. And of course, if peace was in the offing, he would have no need for a new battle fleet anyway.3 Yet he might still have been able to raise funds if he had appealed to the City, and his decision would later be seen as an inexplicable lapse of judgement.
When he dismissed parliament in February Charles said, ‘I must tell you, that if any good Overtures be made for an Honourable Peace, I will not reject them.’4 In fact talks had already begun. Louis’s attack on the Spanish Netherlands would be helped by English neutrality, and he had hinted to St Albans, Henrietta Maria’s burly, card-playing chief adviser and close companion, that he would make peace if Charles promised not to enter into any alliances contrary to French interests (in other words with Spain) for at least a year. In return France would restore the English possessions seized in the West Indies, and broker a good peace deal with the Dutch. In February, encouraged by Clarendon, Charles secretly signed these terms, which were formally agreed in early April.
Charles made no public statement for fear of deterring his anti-French parliament from raising money. But news of the ‘underhand’ treaty leaked out, reaching the Dutch. This was awkward, as in Holland Arlington was negotiating with de Witt on opposite lines, offering to help protect the Spanish Netherlands against the French, in return for the island of Pulo Run and compensation for English losses. In his approaches to de Witt, Arlington suggested that their peace talks be held in the Hague. This offer to meet on their enemies’ home ground was partly a symbolic gesture, implying that England really did want peace, contrary to the propaganda of the States General. But the Hague was also a good place for the supporters of the House of Orange to make their presence felt, and for that very reason, de Witt turned the suggestion down. Eventually, after much to-ing and fro-ing, it was settled that they would meet at Breda. The English delegates, Denzil Holles and Henry Coventry (William Coventry’s brother), set off in late April, arrived on 4 May and began their talks ten days later. Charles was optimistic and instructed his ambassadors to press hard for the terms he wanted. The Dutch, however, had other plans. That winter, de Witt had already persuaded the States General to grant money for preparing an even stronger fleet, but when agents reported this to London it was seen simply as a move to strengthen the Dutch at the conference table: ‘Som will have it best to make peace with the sword in the hand.’5
De Witt certainly had sword in hand, and was determined to show his strength, both to avenge the Vlie raid and to force concessions from the English delegates. The Dutch commander Van Ghent sailed over to Scotland and on 1 May led a squadron into the Firth of Forth, hovering opposite Leith harbour, alarming the local people. But this was only a warning: the real target was the Thames. Among the prisoners of war in Holland de Witt had found two English pilots who knew the tricky shores and shoals of the Thames estuary, and had recruited English sailors from among the exiled republicans. An English dissident, the mysterious Thomas Dolman, mustered a large force of troops and marines. On 4 June these troops joined the Dutch fleet and set sail. De Witt’s brother Cornelis sailed with them, on board Admiral de Ruyter’s flagship.
So confident was Charles that the Dutch wanted peace that he and his councillors largely ignored reports about the movements of their fleet. They were worried enough, however, for Arlington to warn the Lords Lieutenant of coastal counties to keep their militia on the alert. As for the Medway, the government were relying on Charles’s detailed orders for fortifying Sheerness. The only action they took was to place a heavy chain across the river, protecting the warships laid up at Chatham. They had no doubt that these defences would hold.
On 1 June Charles was at Greenwich, watching tests of new cast-iron grenades. By then Van Ghent had sailed down from Scotland to meet de Ruyter, and on Friday 7 June watchmen spotted a large Dutch fleet off the North Foreland. Over the next three days, although hampered by slackening winds, the Dutch moved slowly towards their target. First Van Ghent led his squadron along the Thames estuary’s north coast, landing briefly on Canvey Island, burning barns and killing sheep for his ships’ stores. The threat was clear, and desperate actions were taken, all too late. The Duke of York ordered an alarm sent to all the dockyards, frantic work took place in Plymouth and Portsmouth, militia were sent to the Isle of Wight and a Scottish regiment was despatched to Margate, to fend off any invasion. Charles hastily borrowed £10,000 from the City to pay for new defences along the Thames, and ordered Albemarle to take charge in Chatham. Then he sent Rupert to Woolwich to supervise defences, and commanded Coventry to organise fireships. The naval officials scurried down to Deptford, wrote Pepys, ‘and pitched upon ships and set men to work but Lord! to see how backwardly things move at this pinch’.6 The Dutch prizes, and the merchantmen that lay at anchor at Chatham, were moved further up the river and guard-ships were placed in the creeks to defend the chain. But when the first guns were heard Albemarle was still at Gravesend, ‘with a great many idle lords and gentlemen, with their pistols and fooleries’.
On Tuesday 11 June, riding the incoming tide, the Dutch surged up the Medway. The much-vaunted Sheerness defences had never been finished and the Dutch took the fort easily, capturing its guns and valuable stores and landing eight hundred men. English troops arrived too late and were confused about their orders – many spent their time looting the houses that terrified occupants had abandoned. The precious fireships, so rapidly assembled, were sunk to blockade the narrow channels. It was no use. Next morning Van
Ghent’s ships passed Sheerness and marshalled at the mouth of the Medway. Albemarle arrived to find the local workmen in a panic. There was hardly any ammunition, either at Chatham or at Upnor Castle on the opposite bank, and every small boat had been taken to carry away the goods of frightened householders. The Dutch hacked their way slowly through the ships that had been sunk to defend the chain, destroying and setting fire to the guard-ships. The following morning, 13 June, with their canvas taut against the wind, they sailed on upriver, exchanging shots with the guards at Upnor Castle and with Sir Edward Spragge’s battery on the southern shore. Then they broke through the chain as if it was a rope of straw, and burst into the sheltered reach of Chatham where the big warships were moored. Rounding the river bend they took the grounded Sancta Maria and went on to capture their supreme prize, the flagship the Royal Charles. When Cornelis de Witt wrote his report to the States General, he headed his letter ‘In the Royal Charles…about two in the afternoon, lying in the River of Chatham’.7
Standing on the shore, Albemarle watched the ships burn. The General was, as Clarendon said, ‘of a constitution and temper so void of fear, that there could appear no sign of distraction in him: yet it was plain enough that he knew not what orders to give’.8 When the Dutch broke the chain Albemarle even thought of taking a ship out himself, with a group of volunteers, but was soon persuaded that he would merely be leading them to their deaths. All that he and Commissioner Pett could do was to send out longboats to help the sailors who were trapped. He knew that the main body of the fleet under de Ruyter still lay off the coast, and might be back the next day.
Sure enough, on the next morning’s tide the Dutch returned, sailing with astounding bravery under the batteries of guns that Albemarle had now organised. This time they sent fireships into the Chatham docks, blasting three more ships of glorious names, the Royal James, the Royal Oak and Loyal London. All on board fled, except for the Scottish soldier Archibald Douglas, who stayed alone on the Royal Oak until it went down in flames – the one act of heroism of the whole episode. ‘Fixt on his Shipp, he fought the horrid day’, wrote Marvell, ‘And wondred much at those who ran away.’9 Everyone was running away, although after abandoning a sketchy attack on the Chatham dockyard itself, the Dutch left the river, deciding that the sunken ships that Albemarle had put in their way made any further sally too risky. Displaying a bravado and skill that made all on land marvel they steered the Royal Charles downriver through the shallow waters, braving difficult tides and contrary winds. Their triumph was complete.