by Uglow, Jenny
that when he was charged with making himself popular (as endeed he is, for many of the discontented Parliament…did attend at the Council-chamber when he was examined), he should answer that whoever was committed to prison by my Lord Chancellor or my Lord Arlington could not want being popular.9
Pepys may have been right that it was Buckingham’s popularity which had most angered Charles in the spring. At that point Charles had not yet fallen out with Clarendon, and he rushed to show the Chancellor the depositions, including the letters to the duke from an astrologer, which, he said, ‘gave him the style of prince, and mentioned what great things his stars promised to him, and that he was the darling of the people, who had set their hearts and affections and all their hopes upon his highness, with many other foolish and fustian expressions’.10 This dangerous ambition was now forgotten, or at least overlooked. When Barbara Castlemaine pleaded for her cousin in July, Charles was not quite ready, and she ‘so far solicited for him’, wrote Pepys, ‘that the King and she are quite fallen out; he comes not to her nor hath for some three or four days, and parted with very foul words, the King calling her a whore, and a jade that meddled with things she had nothing to do withal’.11 But shortly afterwards, Barbara arranged a meeting between Charles and Buckingham at her apartments. The duke was allowed to kiss the king’s hand and return to court. After a quickly staged rapprochement with Arlington he was ready to do battle with Clarendon again.
In the same month Clarendon’s wife Frances fell ill. She died on 9 August, ‘so sudden, unexpected and irreparable a loss, that he had not courage to support’.12 She was buried in Westminster Abbey a week later, and Charles visited Clarendon to offer his sympathy and support. But there was hardly time for private grief. Before another fortnight had passed Clarendon’s son-in-law the Duke of York came to see him, looking troubled. Charles, said James, was concerned at reports that when parliament met the Commons were planning to start proceedings towards impeaching the Chancellor, ‘who was grown very odious to them’. Once proceedings began, Charles would no longer be able to divert them or protect him. The only course, the king believed, was for Clarendon to surrender his seals of office, and go.13 Or, as an anonymous poet put it pithily in the voice of Charles,
I will have my Chancellor bear all the sway,
Yet if Men should clamor I’ll pack him away.14
As soon as the news leaked that Clarendon had been asked to resign, his family and supporters rallied round. His daughter Anne, Duchess of York, appealed to Charles in tears and his son Cornbury openly blamed Arlington. On 25 August, Charles sent Albemarle to talk to him, and persuade him to give up the seals. Again, Clarendon refused. The next day, around ten o’clock Clarendon went to his room at Whitehall. He had not been there long before the king and Duke came in, by themselves. At once Clarendon went on the offensive. What fault had he committed that Charles should be so severe? Even in Clarendon’s own third-person telling one can almost hear Charles’s indrawn breath, and exasperation. In reply, the king said that he ‘must always acknowledge’, wrote Clarendon, ‘that he had always served him honest and faithfully, and that he did believe that never king had a better servant, and that he had taken this resolution for his good and preservation’. James, Charles asserted, agreed. James demurred, huffed, and contradicted, but Charles talked on. If impeachment began, he insisted, Clarendon would no more be able to defend himself against parliament than his father’s minister Strafford had been all those years ago, whereas if he went now, Charles could at least guarantee his safety. The mention of Strafford, who had been impeached and executed after Charles I signed his death warrant in tears, was a clear warning.
Charles and Clarendon talked for two hours, during which the Chancellor argued strongly that giving in to demands for his dismissal would irrevocably weaken the position of the crown in parliament. Then, fatally, he began to lecture Charles about Barbara Castlemaine, ‘and in the warmth of this relation he found a seasonable opportunity to mention the lady with some reflections and cautions, which he might more advisedly have declined’.15 Charles rose without speaking and left the room. Even James was taken aback. In an oft-described scene, like a climax in Shakespeare, Clarendon walked out into the Privy Garden, where a crowd of courtiers had gathered and, ‘the lady, the Lord Arlington, and Mr May, looked together out of her open window with great gaiety and triumph, which all people observed’.16 It was obvious from the King’s demeanour and from Clarendon’s expression that he would now be dismissed. Barbara, so Pepys heard, leapt from bed and ran into the aviary in her smock, ‘and stood herself joying at the old man’s going away’. Four days later, on 30 August, Charles sent Orlando Bridgeman to collect the Great Seal.
A few days after the dismissal of his Lord Chancellor, Charles had a long meeting with Buckingham. ‘My lord of Buckingham has made but few visits to court since he came out of his trouble,’ wrote Henry Savile, ‘but was yesterday two hours alone with the King in his closet.’17 By the end of September, Buckingham was restored to the Privy Council and to his position close to Charles, as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. He also patched up his quarrels with Barbara, who was eager for an ally in her fight against the Chancellor.
Buckingham, Clarendon’s deadliest opponent, now had the ear of the king, the Lords and the Commons. He was there, in the House of Lords, when parliament met again on 10 October. Almost before proceedings began, his allies, including William Coventry, suggested that both houses should thank the king for removing the Chancellor. Charles assured them that Clarendon would never be employed on official business again. He clearly wanted him to stand down and go to the country. But Clarendon stayed and fought his corner, using all his old legal training. His defiance began to infuriate Charles, already pressured by the Commons’ attack on the handling of the war. On 20 October 1667, bowing to the Commons’ will, he agreed to Clarendon’s impeachment. By early November, Buckingham and Bristol – who had suddenly reappeared to gloat over his old enemy after three years lying low and out of favour – had drawn up seventeen articles of impeachment. These ranged from collecting bribes in relation to the Irish land settlement and the Canary patent, to the sale of Dunkirk, the division of the fleet before the Four Days Battle, and the plan for a standing army. Crucially, he was even accused of divulging secret information to the French, and this highly dubious charge, based only on a casual remark of the Austrian ambassador, Lisola, was tantamount to treason.
One by one, the MPs spoke, with mounting bitterness. In the notes on the debate, one can feel their resentment of Clarendon as a man who had held the reins of power too tight, for too long, infuriating MPs by his apparent contempt for them. Charles offered no support, and in November Clarendon wrote him an impassioned letter, declaring that he was so broken under the signs of his displeasure, that he did not know what to do or to wish for. He was innocent in every respect, he pleaded, including involvement in the marriage of Frances Stuart and Richmond, where he was as free of guilt as an unborn child. He asked the King’s pardon for any ‘saucy or overbold expressions’ he might have used, and begged him, appealing to the memory of his father Charles I, to ‘put a stop to this severe persecution against me’.18 Charles, Clarendon later recorded in neutral tones, was in his cabinet when the letter was brought to him. As soon as he read it he burned it in the flame of a candle standing on the table, and said ‘that there was somewhat in it that he did not understand, but that he wondered that the chancellor did not withdraw himself’.
Clarendon still refused to flee, sure of his innocence and determined to beat his foes. It was now becoming too late to retreat to his country house, where he could easily be arrested. At this point Charles sent another old friend to see him, the gentle Bishop Morley, accompanied by the Bishop of Hereford, who brought assurances of safe passage if he would leave the country. He replied that he was too ill to travel fast, and that he must have a safe pass from the king to save him from arrest while still in England. Buckingham’s ally Edward Seymour had alr
eady taken the indictment to the House of Lords, asking them to order Clarendon’s committal. The Duke of York was absent from the Lords, recovering from a mild bout of smallpox, but Ashley, Sheldon and most of the bishops spoke on Clarendon’s behalf, while Bristol, Albemarle, Arlington and Ossory, the son of his old friend Ormond, all spoke against him. On 20 November Buckingham protested vehemently against the Lords’ reluctance to try the Chancellor on a general charge of treason, a charge which, if he were found guilty, brought the penalty of death. When they refused to impeach him, dismissing Lisola’s remark about his dealings with the French, Clarendon was triumphant.
Opposed by his own House of Lords, Charles smarted with rage. Word spread that he would soon dismiss parliament and arrange for Clarendon to be tried by twenty-four of his peers, in a special court, chaired by Buckingham. Such a court would almost inevitably sentence him to death. The French ambassador offered him refuge (a promise that would later prove problematic), and the Duke of York persuaded Morley to visit him again and tell him that he must leave at once.
Morley saw Clarendon on the morning of 30 November. Later that day, Evelyn found him ‘at his new built Palace sitting in his Gowt wheel charyre’ gazing at the gates and the fields to the north, where ‘he looked & spake very disconsolately’.19 Evelyn took his leave, and next morning heard that he was gone. A friend had arranged for a custom cutter to wait for him down the Thames at Erith, and when darkness fell Clarendon clambered into his coach, accompanied by two servants. His two sons rode with him. An hour later they said their farewells and the boat cast off, only to be becalmed as the wind slackened and carried briefly back upstream by the tide. At last, the cutter sailed down the Thames, past the marshes of Kent and Essex, into the King’s Channel and then south, to France. Three days later Clarendon was in Calais. After many months of illness and adventures, he settled in Montpellier, where he lived until his death in December 1674. He occupied his time in writing his Life, a continuation of the History of the Great Rebellion that he had written during his first long exile. He never relinquished his hopes of returning home.
33 The Triple Alliance
Nay, he could sail a yacht both light and large,
Knew how to trim a boat and steer a barge;
Could say his compass, to the nation’s joy,
And swear as well as any cabin-boy.
But not one lesson of the ruling art
Could this dull blockhead ever get by heart.
BUCKINGHAM, ‘The Cabin-boy’
DESPITE BUCKINGHAM’S SCORN in this verse, full of the bile of later battles, Charles had in fact learnt the rudiments of the ruling art. He wanted to steer his ship of state alone, and Clarendon’s fall allowed him to go ahead with changes he had been pondering for some time. He wanted to loosen the control of the Privy Council, which he had sometimes found as irksome as that of the House of Commons. He also wanted to handle his own money, freeing the Privy Purse from the rule of the Exchequer. In late August 1667, when he demanded the chancellor’s seals from Clarendon, he had a team at the ready. He was determined that no one councillor would dominate as Clarendon had done, almost as if he took note of Marvell’s accusation that his advisers were cutting him off from the nation:
Bold and accurs’d are they that all this while
Have strove to isle our Monarch from his isle,
And to improve themselves, on false pretence
About the common Prince have rais’d a fence.1
His decision to gamble on being more open, and to display his majesty in public rather than letting his people judge him through salacious rumours, showed in small but significant things. He began to dine in public again in the state apartments, a practice that had been abandoned in the economies of 1663. In early August, after noting a trivial chat with the king about swimming, a delighted Evelyn wrote, ‘Now did his Majestie againe dine in the Presence in antient State, with Musique and all the Court ceremonies which had been interrupted since the late warr.’2
In politics, his decision to take a personal, public lead meant that courtiers and officials felt even less secure. In particular Charles set about juggling carefully between the men of the moment, Arlington and Buckingham. These two were seen as the leaders of a new inner group of five. The others were Ashley, Clifford, and Lauderdale, now firmly ensconced in Edinburgh. But despite the neat shorthand of their initials – Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale – there was no coherent ‘Cabal’. They were not natural allies. Arlington and Buckingham could not stand each other, Lauderdale was preoccupied with Scotland, Clifford was a near-Catholic, while Buckingham sympathised with the dissenters, and so did Ashley, who also retained much of his earlier republican loyalties. This was not a team that would form a policy based on shared principles. Instead their approach was pragmatic, reacting to events more than guiding them. If Charles himself had a long-term aim, it was carefully concealed.
In late 1667, as recriminations about the war echoed through Westminster, Charles’s main concern was to put the humiliations of the Medway attack and the Breda treaty behind him. It was as if he narrowed his eyes and looked at Europe as a chequerboard spread out before him and worked out the odds, placing groups of counters in different combinations and seeing what advantages they might bring. He needed a pause to work out his next direction.
The increasing power of France at sea, and Louis’s bold sweep across the Spanish Netherlands on land, made Charles seek conciliation with the French as soon as possible. This tack was favoured by Buckingham, who was keen to join the French in a booty-taking war against Spain. Arlington, by contrast, had been pro-Spanish and anti-French since his time in Madrid in the 1650s, so his instinct was to forge a Dutch treaty first. This inclination was bolstered by his surprise marriage in April 1666, in the middle of the war, to Isabella van Beverweerd, daughter of Lodewyck van Nassau, head of the Dutch embassy to Britain at the Restoration. At a quiet wedding at Arlington’s country house, Moor Park, the bride was given away by Ormond’s son Ossory, who had married Isabella’s sister Aemilia in the last days of exile. Isabella brought important connections, not only with Ossory and Ormond: her father was an illegitimate son of Prince Maurice of Orange and she was thus cousin to William of Orange. She also brought a dowry of a hundred thousand guilders to add to Arlington’s income from fees and from the Post Office, of which he became head in December 1666. On a personal level, she was a skilful hostess, as serious and discreet as her husband. Their only child, the adored ‘Tata’, was born in 1667. At the Restoration Arlington had come back from Madrid with virtually nothing, but he was now a man of substance, owning Euston Hall in Suffolk (handy for Newmarket), and Goring House, at the end of St James’s Park, on the site of the later Buckingham Palace. He could not yet rival Buckingham, but with Isabella he made Goring House a centre for London’s polite society. He was a power in the land and, he hoped, in Europe.
At the end of November 1667, in uneasy partnership, Arlington and Buckingham met the French ambassador, Henri de Massue, marquis de Ruvigny.3 They offered to recognise Louis’s conquests in the Spanish Netherlands in return for an alliance against the Dutch, and British control of the ports of Ostend and Niuewpoort. Arlington was on crutches, limping from an accident when his coach was overturned, and as they left and he struggled ahead, so that he would not hold up their coach, Ruvigny grabbed Buckingham and urged him to persuade Charles to a French deal.4
The omens looked promising but although he wanted the treaty, Louis, secure in his conquest, rejected Charles’s particular demands. Without a quiver, Charles immediately did a swift volte-face and discreetly approached the Dutch. Although they had so recently been England’s enemies, this line was more likely to be popular at home, where outrage at French ‘perfidy’ was loud. The first move had come, rather surprisingly, from Holland, when Johann de Witt hinted that the Dutch were alarmed at French aggression in Flanders: an alliance with England might, perhaps, be possible, its aim being to stop the war betwe
en France and Spain in the Low Countries. The twists and turns continued. Three days after Buckingham and Arlington talked with Ruvigny the Privy Council sent Sir William Temple, a man of immense energy and commitment, to make approaches to de Witt. He carried with him the minutes of the meeting with the French ambassador, subtly edited by Arlington to show how the French were manoeuvring against their supposed Dutch allies. ‘You shall plainly tell Monsieur de Witte’, Arlington told him, that the Privy Council would like to know if England and Holland could form a league to protect the Spanish Netherlands, ‘and if the interests of both Nations shall require it, even against France itselfe’.5 Temple was also specifically instructed to say that although Charles still felt ‘all possible kindness for his nephew, the Prince of Orange’, this should not interfere with ‘the great interest betwixt the nations, which must ever be superior to that particular one’.6 At the cost of family loyalty, one major cause of friction was therefore shelved.
Arlington was still slightly concerned that de Witt might be using the threat of an English alliance to force concessions from the French. He therefore worked hard to ensure that British merchants’ fears about a Dutch monopoly were recognised, demanding that the Dutch should not block access to independent trading districts by building forts, or make exclusive contracts with local peoples. Not all the demands were met, but nonetheless, in early January, Temple and de Witt worked out a deal with lightning speed, and Charles signed the agreement on 13 January. In London, ‘with the sincerity of a great actor throwing himself into a new role’, Charles charmed the Dutch ambassador with his zeal for the new alliance.7 Glibly, he justified his actions to Minette: ‘finding my propositions to France receave so cold an answere, which was in effect as good as a refusal, I thought I had no other way but this to secure my selfe’.8