by Uglow, Jenny
There was panic in London. It was rumoured that the Dutch had landed and the drums were sounded to raise the Trained Bands. People sent their families into the country with all their valuable goods, plate and reserves of cash. There were reports of English sailors going over to the Dutch and in Wapping the seamen’s wives cried, ‘This comes of your not paying our husbands.’10 When a fire broke out at Deptford, the town was in uproar, believing the Dutch were already there. Arlington’s secretary, Joseph Williamson, received alarmed letters from across the country. James Bentham, for one, wrote from East Anglia, ‘The beacons are on fire, and some say that Harwich, Colchester and Dover are burned, and the King gone out of town or out of the world.’11 Anxious letters from Devon, Hull and Chester voiced the same refrain, ‘All conclude that there was treachery in the business, and hope the contrivers will receive the reward due to those who betray King and country.’
A panoramic view, looking upriver to Chatham and Rochester, and bringing together the events of all three days. In the centre, the masts of sunken ships mark the point where the chain was strung across the river, and in the foreground the Royal Charles is being towed away.
In the wake of this humiliation, on 25 June Charles summoned parliament to meet in late July, breaking into its summer recess. During the Medway alarm he had ordered an army to be raised, twelve regiments under the command of old Commonwealth generals, including Marsden and Fairfax. The troops were ready within three weeks. He wrote to the East India Company pleading for contributions to pay the navy and begged the nobility and gentry to support the new land forces. But instead of appeasing critics, this move roused fears of an old bogey, a standing army under royal control. When parliament assembled, member after member demanded that the troops be dismissed, in a sequence of angry speeches.
On 21 July, the Treaty of Breda was signed. As soon the news was confirmed four days later, Charles briskly dismissed the MPs, asserting the crisis was over. They had met for only four days, and many had just unpacked their bags after their journey from the country. ‘The parliament’, wrote Clarendon, putting it mildly, ‘that had been so unseasonably called together from their business and recreations, in a season of the year that they most desired to be vacant, were not pleased to be so soon dismissed.’12 To win them over, Charles ordered the new army to be disbanded within a month, while to soothe the MPs’ anti-Catholic fears, Catholics were purged from civil and military offices by being compelled to take the Oath of Allegiance and Supremacy. They were also banned from court, and British subjects were forbidden to attend mass in any ambassadors’ chapels.13
The Treaty of Breda itself was curiously anti-climactic. Both countries kept their conquests, England forfeiting its claim to Pulo Run and losing the West African forts except Fort James and Cape Coast Castle, but gaining New York and New Jersey. Until the treaty was finally ratified on 24 August, the Dutch kept up the pressure, cruising coolly off the English coast. People were relieved that trade was now free to flourish, but everywhere there was a feeling of let-down, a sense that England had submitted weakly, and dishonourably. The revelation that the French had known of the planned raid on the Medway added to the feeling that Louis had been playing with English interests all along, lulling Charles with false promises.14
When people heard that on the day of the Medway attack, Charles had not stayed with his troops but had come back to London and spent the evening playing at trivial party games after dinner with Barbara Castlemaine, the Duke of Monmouth and others, they were quick to compare him to Nero. And after the treaty was signed Pepys noted that the merchants at the Exchange did not seem glad, ‘but rather the worse, they looking upon it as a peace made only to preserve the king for a time in his lust and ease’.15 It was widely believed, he added, that ‘the king and court were never in the world so bad as they are now for gaming, swearing, whoring and drinking, and the most abominable vices that ever were in the world – so that all must come to naught’. All through the summer, he filled his diary with reported conversations linking the licence of the courts to the national disasters. Even the royal chaplain Dr Creighton, he noted, preached a sermon against adultery, ‘over and over instancing how for that single sin in David, the whole nation was undone’, and then moving swiftly to the lack of ammunition at Chatham.16
Gossip about the court rippled through the bitter post-mortem on the war. In particular a deluge of satire was prompted by two long, pro-government narrative poems. The first was Edmund Waller’s Instructions to a Painter, for the Drawing of the Posture and Progress of his Majesties Forces at Sea, under the Command of his Highness Royal which celebrated the Duke of York’s naval victories in 1665. Waller’s imitation of a Venetian poem, in which the poet had celebrated a naval victory over the Turks by instructing a painter how to depict the battle, immediately provoked parodies, offering acid revisions of the heroic accounts. These included The Second and Third Advice to a Painter, circulated in manuscript in 1666.
In answer to these attacks, Dryden published his Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, which he had been composing since 1665 and which tried to counter the ‘Advice’ poems and prodigy-ridden Annus Mirabilis pamphlets by painting the battles and the Fire in epic terms. Just as Dryden had described Charles as a potential Augustus in 1660, now he portrayed him as Aeneas, concerned for his people and the fate of his country. He even took on the assertion that the disasters were a judgement on the King and his court, giving Charles a dramatic prayer during the Fire, in which he asks to be made a sacrifice for the ills of his people.
Or if my heedless Youth has stept astray,
Too soon forgetful of thy gracious hand
On me alone thy just displeasure lay,
But take thy judgments from this mourning Land.
We all have sinn’d, and thou hast laid us low,
As humble Earth from whence at first we came:
Like flying shades before the clowds we show
And shrink like Parchment in consuming flame.17
Annus Mirabilis was a fine poem, rich in effects and feeling, but in 1667 such rhetoric merely roused scorn. The hollow laughter grew louder after the publication of Marvell’s devastating Last Instructions to a Painter in the same year, adding to its sharp picture of the idiocies of the war a blow-by-blow account of the stupidity of factions in parliament.
Andrew Marvell
Instead of lauding their courage, the satires showed the government and its naval and military leaders – with the exception of Albemarle and the brave Captain Douglas – mired in cowardice, chaos, negligence and greed. The printing was actively aided by Marvell and by his patron, the puritan Lord Wharton, and when the ‘Advice’ poems were published in a single volume, the unlicensed printers were rounded up (including Elizabeth Calvert).18 But the poems could not be written off as the work of sectarian conspirators. Most dissenters had been stoutly loyal during the war. The satires were a trenchant critique of government incompetence, mirroring the despair of the whole nation. Furthermore, they showed the first stirrings of a publicly voiced opposition, a new dynamic that would in time replace court intrigue as the nation’s political driving force, leading, through the Whigs, to the party politics that have defined public life ever since.
After the plague and the Fire, who would take the blame for the Medway disaster? The naval commissioners Sir William Coventry and Peter Pett, who was in charge of Chatham dockyard, and Sir Edward Spragge, nominally in command of the ships in the Medway (and doubly under suspicion as an ‘Irish papist’), were all abused for incompetence. There were even mutterings about the doubtful loyalty of the Chatham dock-workers. On 17 June Pett was arrested and taken to the Tower, to be interrogated by a committee of the Privy Council. Coventry’s nephew George Savile, by now Earl of Halifax, wrote to his brother Henry, ‘He is most undoubtedly to be sacrificed; all that are the greater lay the fault upon him in hopes that he is to bear all the blame; the town has no mind to be so satisfied.’19 He was right on both points. The go
vernment certainly hoped that the sacrifice of Pett would calm the public rage. The day after Pett’s arrest, Arlington wrote to Ormond, ‘if he deserve hanging, as most thinke he does, and have it, much of the staine will be wip’d off the Government which lyes heavily upon it’.20
That autumn in parliament, a committee of inquiry was appointed into the miscarriages of the war, looking at mishaps as far back as 1664–5. Henry Brouncker, for example, was questioned about taking false orders to Sir John Harman to lower sails and thus let the Dutch get away after the Battle of Lowestoft. The following April, Brouncker was dismissed from the Commons in disgrace.21 Sir William Penn was threatened with impeachment for his part in sharing and selling the cargoes of the East Indiamen that Sandwich had captured. Raising more recent matters, William Coventry, an eloquent speaker who, with his brother Henry, had practically been Leader of the House during the last two years, tried to blame Albemarle for the Medway disaster, but was firmly rebuffed by the General’s supporters.
Pett, however, was the first victim. When he appeared before the Commons committee he made a miserable impression and Albemarle’s statement, accusing him of negligence down to the smallest detail – in not providing sufficient tools and boats, and using deal planks instead of oak boards, so that the shots whistled through them – was devastating.22 The final charge, that he had not taken the Royal Charles further upriver as ordered, sealed his fate. ‘It is believed he will prove a very great criminal,’ wrote Sir John Milward, who was following each day’s debate with furrowed brow, ‘but very much friended by the old gang.’23 Despite his powerful friends, Pett was the handy scapegoat, a point that Marvell hammered home in Last Instructions to a Painter in angry, echoing rhyme.
After this loss, to relish discontent,
Someone must be accused by Punishment.
All our miscarriages on Pett must fall:
His name alone seems fit to answer all…
Who all our Seamen cheated of their debt?
And all our Prizes, who did swallow? Pett.
Who did advise no Navy out to set?
And who the Forts left unrepaired? Pett.24
Articles of impeachment were drawn up, but when parliament was dismissed in November the matter was dropped. The following February Pett was formally dismissed as commissioner of the navy; he retired into obscurity, dying four years later, never clearing his name. But Arlington’s hope that Pett’s disgrace might shield other government figures proved vain. The public rage was not so easily slaked. And in their mind the chief culprit, among all those deemed responsible, was the Lord Chancellor, Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon.
32 The Blows Fall on Clarendon
Pride, lust, ambition, and the people’s hate,
The kingdom’s broker, ruin of the state,
Dunkirk’s sad loss, divider of the fleet,
Tangier’s compounder for a barren sheet,
This shrub of gentry, married to the Crown
(His daughter to the heir), is tumbl’d down.
ANON., ‘The Downfall of the Chancellor’1
CLARENDON’S PALATIAL HOUSE in Piccadilly, said to have been paid for with bribes from the sale of Dunkirk and built with the stones put aside to mend St Paul’s, was still rising, a visible symbol of his overweening power. Charles had been loyal to Clarendon through earlier efforts to unseat him, like Bristol’s attempt at impeachment in 1663. But he had now become irritated. In a haunting passage in Last Instructions, Marvell deftly implied the ruthless calculation and knowledge of his courtiers that lay beneath Charles’s mask. In his dreams the king is accosted by a pale and beautiful Britannia (a figure he eyes lustfully, of course, until he sees she is a phantom) and then by the ghost of his grandfather Henry IV and his father Charles I, with the ‘purple thread about his neck’. Dawn breaks.
The wondrous night the pensive King resolves,
And rising straight on Hyde’s disgrace resolves.
At his first step he Castlemaine does find,
Bennet, and Coventry, as ’twere designed;
And they, not knowing, the same thing propose
Which his hid mind did in its depths enclose.2
Charles could let this designing crew do the work, without any effort on his part. Clarendon had become a problem. He was increasingly pompous in defending tradition and blocking measures advocated by new ministers like Arlington and Coventry. Worse, he had lost his old skill at manipulating parliament. In the winter of 1666 he had failed to win the Commons round over the Irish Cattle Bill, and had enraged them by his stubbornness over the Canary Patent. He was so dominant in the council chamber, Downing reported, that the king ‘doth call the Chancellor that insolent man and says that he would not let him speak himself in council’.3
At the start of 1667, Clarendon was ill and tired. After the Fire he had moved from Worcester House, where his lease was almost up, to stay with his son Laurence’s parents-in-law, the Burlingtons, at Berkshire House, opposite St James’s Palace. They were kind and considerate, but as winter drew in he felt out of place, dreading the gout that always came with the cold. It arrived as he expected and while he was laid up, from January to March, forces mobilised against him. Clarendon was fifty-six, but seemed older than his years, tetchy and overbearing, his natural impatience inflamed by stress and pain. And although Charles’s affection for him endured, he had become tired of his lectures and of hearing courtiers joke, ‘There goes your schoolmaster!’ As Thomas Carte put it, ‘The king was weary of a minister, of whom from his earliest youth he had learned to stand in awe, and who still seemed to keep up an authority over him by the remonstrances which he made to him on all occasions and with little ceremony.’4 This impatience is still heard in a story remembered many years later. Charles, it related, seeing a man in the pillory, asked what his crime was. It was libelling Lord Clarendon, he was told. ‘Odds fish! crys the King, why did not the Fool go on libelling of mee, he must now certainly suffer for libelling this great man.’5
The last straw was the idea that Clarendon had interfered in his relationship with Frances Stuart. Charles knew that Clarendon wanted to prevent an affair and he became suspicious when he bumped into Clarendon’s son, Cornbury, who was taking Frances a message from the queen, on the very night that he discovered Frances and Richmond together. Cornbury, wrote Burnet, ‘met the king in the door coming out full of fury’, and Charles ‘spoke to him as one in a rage, that forgot all decency, and for some time would not hear Lord Cornbury speak in his own defence’.6 His opponents whispered that Clarendon had forwarded the Richmond marriage because he feared that Charles might divorce Catherine and marry Frances; their children would then block his own grandchildren’s route to the throne.
The idea that involvement in the Richmond marriage was to blame for Clarendon’s downfall is far-fetched. But it may well be that Charles’s resentment blocked any remaining impulse to protect his chancellor from the coming storm. Clarendon was undoubtedly shaken by the king’s anger, and during the summer, more blows followed. In May his two young grandsons died, James, Duke of Cambridge, and Charles, Duke of Kendal, aged three and one. His old friend Southampton died in the same month and to his distress, instead of appointing a new Lord Treasurer, Charles made the bold decision to put the Treasury in commission. There were six commissioners: Ashley, Clifford and Coventry (all of whom Clarendon loathed), as well as Albemarle, Sir John Duncombe and Downing, as treasury secretary. Together they scrutinised the creaking workings of the old system and put in place fundamental reforms. The old order was passing. Clarendon poured out his anxieties in long letters to Ormond, as if he feared that he too would desert him. Writing of Southampton’s death, he lamented, ‘I have lost a frende, a fast and unshaken frende, and whether my only frende or not, you only know.’7 Would Ormond, the last of the old crowd, stand by him ‘against all temptacions and assaults’?
After the attack on the Medway in June, Clarendon found himself the prime target of popular fury. The trees in front of his Picca
dilly house were lopped down, his windows were broken, and a gibbet was painted on his gate. His enemies were gathering. Buckingham had been in hiding since the order for his arrest for commissioning the horoscope in February. But his battles in the last parliament had made him a hero to many, and after the Medway disaster he was sure that the government would not risk more public anger by pressing charges against him. He now came out of hiding and gave himself up. On 28 June he asked Robert Howard to take a letter to Charles, begging forgiveness. Clarendon insisted on a formal surrender, but when he was taken to the Tower, Buckingham staged a triumphal rather than penitential progress. He stopped on the way to dine at the Sun Inn in Bishopsgate with powerful supporters – Lords Rivers, Buckhurst, Vaughan and the Duke of Monmouth. Here ‘he showed himself to a numerous body of spectators with great ceremony from the balcony, openly threatening his accusers, and that Parliament should execute vengeance on his enemies’.8
Clarendon House
Such public theatre was a blatant assertion of Buckingham’s power. In July he was released from the Tower, partly as a sop to his supporters in parliament, who were smarting at their abrupt summons and dismissal after the Breda treaty. In a brief Privy Council hearing, the horoscope charges were dismissed almost as a formality. Buckingham was so confident that he felt able to toss off a careless jibe without fear. ‘It is said,’ wrote Pepys,