by Uglow, Jenny
Dover was a small port, where the chalk cliffs fell ‘horribly into the sea’, or so visitors thought. Fishing boats went out every day, and the fires along the beach were not bonfires of welcome, but local people burning seaweed to get ashes for their fields. The followers of both courts were billeted through the town, in small houses in the winding streets. It was a place full of emotion for the king and his sister.
The main business was indeed the secret treaty. Minette’s final contribution to this was to cajole Charles into agreeing to support the French in war with the Dutch whenever Louis was ready, and not insist on them waiting until he had made his dangerous declaration of faith. She won the support of Clifford and Arlington for this move, helped, in Arlington’s case, by her persuading Charles to agree to the betrothal of Arlington’s three-year-old daughter ‘Tata’ to Henry Fitzroy, his second son by Barbara.4 On 22 May, Arlington, Clifford, Arundell and Belling signed the treaty for England, ready for Minette to carry it back to be ratified in France.5
The treaty seemed a coup for Charles, but better was to come. Buckingham and most members of the Privy Council had no idea of the signing of the agreement. At Dover, keen to keep Buckingham as a friend, Minette was always completely charming towards him, and his enthusiasm for a French alliance increased still more. He was backed in this by Lauderdale and by Ashley, who had harboured considerable doubts about any rapprochement with France, until he realised that concessions on trade could only be won from the Dutch by force. Two months later, in July, Buckingham proposed that when he visited Paris he should suggest a secret alliance to Louis. With some amusement, Charles, James and Arlington agreed at once. Buckingham set off, taking with him as a ‘proposal’ the exact terms of the Treaty of Dover, but without the conversion clause. Charles had no great hopes of this hoax, but back Buckingham came, triumphantly bearing a draft treaty.
With a serious face, Charles promptly renegotiated the terms to his advantage, much to Louis’s irritation. The money secretly designated for Charles’s declaration of faith was now written in as a general ‘subsidy’, which would be paid whether there was a war or not, and at Ashley’s and Lauderdale’s insistence two more islands at the mouth of the Scheldt and Rhine were added to English claims if the war was won.6 With a flourish, Buckingham and the other members of the Cabal – Clifford, Arlington, Ashley and Lauderdale – signed the ‘Secret Treaty of London’ on 21 December 1670. The bluff had worked. If any news leaked out about a secret treaty – as it eventually did – this would be the one that was discovered. The Dover pact that lay behind it was not known until its terms were published in the History of England by the Catholic historian John Lingard in 1826. Details were still coming to light in Clifford’s papers in the 1930s.7
Louis had followed Minette to Dunkirk, where he stayed three days, inspecting the fortifications, as if he could influence events by beaming his will across the channel. Messengers sailed back and forth, and to her surprise and delight, Louis gave Minette permission to stay an extra ten or twelve days, in defiance of Monsieur’s wishes. The treaty signed, she and Charles enjoyed themselves. Charles had ordered the leading officers of the court to attend him to entertain Minette, a newsletter reported, ‘and the Duke’s Company and the King’s private music are ordered thither for her “divertissement”’.8 Since Monsieur had adamantly refused to let her go to London – although several of her entourage went up to see the sights – the royal party rode over the downs to Canterbury. It was May, and the tall hedges were once again white with hawthorn. Kent’s labourers were the best paid in England, and between Dover and Canterbury, in the deep valleys that cut into the downs, lay orchards and hop gardens, and pastures full of sheep. As they came down the hill towards the gates the bells pealed from the city’s sixteen churches. The small cathedral city was a busy, prosperous place, its timbered houses crammed within encircling walls, its gardens watered by branches of the Stour, ‘the sweetest river’, as Cosimo of Tuscany had called it the year before. At its heart was the cathedral, beautifully restored since Charles had held his first Privy Council there, encircled by the houses of the close like a jewel in a box.
In Canterbury Charles and Minette attended a great banquet in the hall of St Augustine’s Abbey. During her stay in England, they also watched a comedy performed by the company of the Duke’s Theatre, and a ballet. The English court were on holiday, and some even took the chance to go over to Calais ‘to satisfy their curiosities and see a glimpse of that country’.9 On Whitsunday, the king and all the Garter knights, in their full robes and regalia, attended Dover parish church. Only the Duke of York was missing as he had dashed to London to help the Lord Mayor, since there was fear of trouble from the ‘fanatics’. Charles himself sent firm instructions to the Lord Mayor and the Earl of Craven, as Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex and Southwark, to contain all trouble.10 But the day passed without uproar in London, and the court celebrated without anxiety on 29 May, Charles’s fortieth birthday and the tenth anniversary of his arrival in London. Though pale and thin, Minette was radiant, her happiness giving her energy. She went to all the feasts and balls and enchanted all who met her. The cold May rain stopped, and they sailed out into the Channel in the royal yachts, with three men-of-war standing by.11
Before she left, Charles gave Minette money for her expenses and two thousand crowns to build a chapel to their mother’s memory at Chaillot. In return, so the legend goes, she opened her mother’s jewel box and asked him to choose the jewel he liked best. Jokingly, he said that there was only one he would really like, the young woman standing nearby, her Breton maid of honour, Louise de Kéroualle. Minette, who was responsible to Louise’s parents, firmly refused. But Charles did not have to wait long. When Buckingham went to France in July he was charged with bringing Louise back with him. They set out together, but for some reason, never explained, he left her behind at the port, for which she never forgave him: Arlington instead arranged her voyage. With her round face and curls (Charles called her ‘Fubbs’, for her chubby cheeks), Louise brought a new vitality to court, instead of worldly languor. Since Nell was regarded as Buckingham’s protégé, Arlington was particularly glad to see Louise installed. Colbert de Croissy breathlessly reported his views:
For although his Majesty is not disposed to communicate his affairs to women, nevertheless as they can on occasion injure those whom they hate, and in that way ruin many affairs, it was much better for all good servants of the King that he was attracted to her, whose humor is not mischievous, and who is a lady, rather than to comediennes and the like, on whom no honest man could rely, by whose means the duke of Buckingham was always trying to entice the King, in order to draw him away from all his Court and monopolize him.12
Louise must learn to manage Charles well, Colbert added, ‘not to speak to him of affairs, and not to show any aversion to those who are near him, and, in short, to let him find only pleasure and joy in her company’. She became Charles’s mistress in late 1671, and gave birth to their only son nine months later – the new Duke of Richmond, last of the acknowledged royal bastards. ‘She studied to please and observe him in every thing,’ wrote Burnet, ‘so that he passed away the rest of his life in a great fondness for her.’13
No one really wants to know the future, Charles warned Minette, joking about her interest in astrology. He had no patience with prophets; ‘I give little credit to such kind of cattle and the lesse you do it the better, for if they could tell any thing tis inconvenient to know ones fortune before hand whether good or bad.’14 Despite his Catholic protestations he may, like Rochester, have agreed with Hobbes: ‘The present only has a being in nature. Things past have a being in the memory, only. But things to come have no being at all, the future being but a fiction of the mind, applying the sequels of actions past to the actions that are present.’15 Hobbes had also declared that experience of things past could endow a man with foresight. But in May 1670, with the future, at least in Charles’s mind, settled by the Treaty of Dover, the pre
sent was all that counted.
40 Sailing
Not caring to observe the wind,
Or the new sea explore,
Snatched from myself, how far behind
Already I behold the shore!
EDMUND WALLER, ‘Of Loving at First Sight’
ON 3 JUNE, carrying the treaty, and accompanied by her court, Minette sailed for France. The treaty was ratified on 4 June, and twelve days later she celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday. Towards the end of the month she wrote her only known letter in English, her spelling as vivid as a spoken voice. The note was to Clifford, asking him to remind Charles of the promise he had made about the marriage of Arlington’s little daughter:
When I have write to the King from Calais I praid him to tel milord Arlington an you what he had promised for mi bothe. His ansers was that hi gave me againe his word, that hee would performe the thing, but that hi did not think it fit to exequte it now…
This is the ferste letter I have ever write in inglis. You will eselay see it bi the stile and tograf [autograph] prai see in the same time that I expose mi self to be thought a foulle in looking to make you know how much I am your frind.1
By this time Minette had left Paris to stay at St Cloud, where she could sit in the shade and stroll in the gardens by moonlight, listening to the fountains and talking to her friends. On the afternoon of 29 June, complaining of a pain in her side, she drank a glass of iced water, flavoured with chicory. Immediately she cried out in agony, fearing she was poisoned. For the next few hours she was in terrible pain. People rushed to her side, including Ralph Montagu, and Louis himself, bringing with him the queen and his rival mistresses, both of whom had been Minette’s maids of honour. Ralph Montagu arrived just after she made her last confession.2 After sending last messages to Charles, and asking Montagu to retrieve her very private letters to her brother, Henriette-Anne, ‘Madame’, duchesse d’Orléans, died at three in the morning on 30 June 1670. According to Montagu, her last thoughts were with her brother. ‘I have loved him better than life itself,’ she whispered, ‘and now my only regret in dying is to be leaving him.’3
The royal doctors pronounced the cause of death as ‘cholera morbus’, and the accepted view now is that she probably died of peritonitis as a result of a burst duodenal ulcer. But rumours that Minette had been poisoned by allies of the chevalier de Lorraine circulated fast. An hour after she died Montagu wrote to Arlington to tell him the news, adding ‘God send the King, our master, patience and constancy to bear so great an affliction. Madame declared she had no reluctancy to die, but out of the grief she thought it would be to the King, her brother.’4 Sir Thomas Armstrong, who had also been present at her death, travelled without stopping to bring the news to Charles. Shouting in pain and rage, ‘Monsieur is a villain’, Charles turned and shut himself in his bedroom. Convinced that his sister had been poisoned, he refused to see Colbert de Croissy, or Louis’s official envoy. (Rochester, who was back at Whitehall, told his wife that the King was enduring ‘the highest affliction imaginable’, before thanking her for some cheeses and signing off cheerily ‘tarara’.5)
Charles emerged after five days. He sent Buckingham to Paris for Minette’s state funeral, carrying with him, to Charles’s bitter amusement, the fake ‘secret treaty’.
The Treaty of Dover that Minette had helped Charles to achieve was the biggest gamble of his reign. It paid off, in the sense that the money from Louis paid over the years relieved the pressure of being totally reliant on parliament. But the sum was less important than the security of having Louis on his side in case of crisis. It was not uncommon for monarchs to receive subsidies from foreign rulers – indeed Richard Cromwell had asked for a large sum from Mazarin in 1658. As to his religious promise, if he had really meant to pronounce his Catholicism and reinstall the faith, now would have been the moment to act, backed by Louis’s arms and money. But Charles knew that one virtue of his restoration was that it had taken place without bloodshed, and without help from foreign armies. He was no man of stubborn principle, like his father and his brother James. Furthermore, he had cleverly agreed only to his own conversion, not that of his country. As far as this was concerned, he said tactfully to Minette that he was not yet satisfied with the Catholic truth. When the papal nuncio visited in November, there was no word of conversion.6
It was the secrecy of the treaty that was so significant. For a king who had intended to be so open and accessible, this was an admission that he must now rule in a different way. His assertion at the Restoration that he wanted to rule with his parliament was implicitly denied, and his actions were the forerunner of many later deals, when heads or cabinets of allegedly democratic states commit their nation to action without the knowledge or full agreement of parliament and people. To modern eyes, the treachery may lie less in ‘the design about R’, which so shocked his contemporaries, than in Charles’s committing his country to fight a pointless war in which thousands of lives might be lost.
The people who gathered on the Dover shore in May 1660, and the crowds that greeted him in London or petitioned him from all his three nations, had expected their lives to change. And so they had, not always for the best. The euphoria of regime change did not last long. Many royalists won back their lands, but others did not, and those that had were often crippled by loans and mortgages. Trade survived, even flourished, and the rising ‘middling class’ were buying newly fashionable walnut furniture, paintings and books, but the poor did not benefit and the prisons were full of debtors. The people welcomed him as a prince of peace and plenty, only to experience a decade of war, plague and fire. They had sought stable government and lower taxes, but the factions still fought and the taxes were higher than ever. And there was one great gulf that Charles could not bridge. At the restoration the traditionalist Anglicans had hoped for a strong, united, state church to which all must conform, while those who held other views, from the presbyterians within the Commonwealth church to the Catholics and the sects outside it, had hoped only to be allowed to worship in peace. No group had achieved what they desired, and after the struggles of the 1660s those whose tender consciences Charles had vowed to respect now found themselves outside the law.
The events of 1670 drew a line in the sand, which marked the end of all the experiments of that first decade. Defeated in his attempts at comprehension the year before and unable to get funds from parliament, Charles had turned his back on the would-be reformists, and embraced the old Anglican, royalist faction. When he signed the Treaty of Dover, his future track was set. From now on, although the surface charm remained, he became increasingly wary and withdrawn, his thinking even harder to fathom, his course with regard to parliament and the public ever more duplicitous. In the parliamentary session from October 1670 to the following April, the Commons granted yet another huge sum, supposedly to boost the navy in the face of France’s increasing strength, but actually to fight the Dutch.
For Charles, his family came first, even more than his nation. His loyalty to his brother James – the only one of his siblings still alive – would bedevil the rest of his reign. If one takes a whirlwind view forward, dashing through time like the comets that swooped over England in the mid-1660s, this becomes all too clear.
James had decided to become a Catholic in 1668. A month before Minette landed at Dover, he told Colbert de Croissy that his wife Anne (who had practised confession since she was twelve) planned to convert and that both were keen for the secret treaty to be signed so that they could declare their faith.7 Anne was received into the Catholic Church this winter. At Charles’s request, James kept her conversion secret.
Alarm flared in 1672, when Charles issued his second Declaration of Indulgence to fend off opposition among powerful dissenters in the country and the city to the coming war with the Dutch. This not only allowed dissenters to open meeting houses but freed Catholics to worship in their homes. It was supported by Buckingham and by Ashley, who was made Earl of Shaftesbury and Lord Chancellor. At th
e outbreak of war, Charles was seeking support on all sides, but despite Louis’s promises, funds were desperately short, so much so that Charles agreed to Clifford’s drastic suggestion of a Stop of the Exchequer, which meant that government loans were no longer to be repaid. ‘The Robbery at the Exchequer’, satirists called it, pointing to yet another arbitrary action by the crown. Small lenders were ruined and the bankers who had lent a fortune to the crown, including Backwell, Robert Vyner and Francis Child, lost many thousands.
The war opened with French successes, although neither the English nor the Dutch fleets could claim victory at sea. In Holland, an Orangist coup, in which the de Witt brothers were removed from power and murdered by the mob, made William of Orange stadtholder at last. When William rejected peace terms – thus making a mockery of any claim from Charles that the war had been fought to aid his cause – rumours circulated that Britain had only been dragged into war at France’s behest. As before, anti-French and anti-Catholic feeling grew strong. Under this pressure, Charles switched tack once again, withdrawing the Declaration of Indulgence and agreeing to the passing of the Test Acts by which all public office-holders must deny Catholic doctrines.