With sudden decision Monk acted. He secured the strong places throughout Scotland, disarmed his Anabaptist officers, and on January 1st, 1660, in the bitter cold of a northern winter, crossed the border into England.
Anxiously, all Europe watched and waited. What did he mean to do? The exiles’ disappointments had been so many and so bitter throughout these iong years of hope deferred, they feared that he would only prove another Cromwell. Then with beating hearts they learned that the veteran Fairfax had left his bed to join him, and all Yorkshire risen at his call.
Slowly but steadily Monk’s columns wound their way over snow-covered hill and dale, and as they advanced all resistance melted away before them. Yet on the long march southward, he would say no word as to his intentions, and when at last they came over Hampstead hills to London, he was still ominously silent.
A decision by the Aldermen to pay no taxes until a ‘Free Parliament’ should be called, gave the ‘Rump’ an opportunty to test Monk’s loyalty to themselves. They ordered him to occupy the City. Amidst a tense, watchful silence, he obeyed. Then he assembled his officers, spoke to them of their duty as he saw it, and declared for a ‘Free Parliament’. Instantly London and the country were seized with a delirium of joy—yet Monk continued stubbornly silent regarding the Royalists abroad.
On March 16th, the ‘Long’ Parliament brought its existence to an end by the votes of its excluded members, and at last Monk signified his willingness to receive Sir John Grenville, the Royal emissary. On the 30th Grenville reached Brussels and delivered Monk’s message, urging the King to leave the territory of a state with whom England was still at war. Before the Spaniards had time to stop him, Charles galloped across the Dutch frontier and entered Breda.
Here he signed the famous Declaration, agreeing to. A General Amnesty—Security of Tenure for property gained during the late troublous times—Liberty of Conscience—and Arrears of pay for the Army, all as a Free Parliament should determine. With it he sent letters for both Houses and a commission for Monk as Captain General of his Forces.
In April, Lambert escaped from the Tower, but was defeated at Daventry. On the 25th the new Parliament met, and three days later Grenville laid the King’s letter before them. They listened to it bareheaded and in siience, then William Morrice moved that the Constitution of England had ever lain—in King—Lords—and Commons. His motion was carried without a dissentient vote. Unanimously the Houses asked that the King should return at once to rule them—then the floodgates of joy were opened, and the House broke up in a pandemonium of wild, tumultuous loyalty.
They knew, as England knew, that the King alone was capable of restoring the good old times, when men were free and money plentiful. They had suffered the tyranny of democracy too long, and the whole nation was shaken with a great, glad happiness at the tidings of his return.
The exiles still hardly dared to believe it true, until a deputation from the States General arrived, inviting the King to the Hague, and offering the almost unbelievable sum of £30,000 for his expenses. When they reached the Hague they were hardly left time to wonder. By every boat and every road, Loyalists came pouring into the town. From Antwerp, Brussels, Havre, Caen, Paris, Cologne, Rouen, crowding about the Royal lodgings, their faces lit with happiness. Old enemies arrived from England, protesting that they had ever been the King’s best friends. The Citizens of London who had howled for the blood of the martyred King sent smiling representatives with £10,000 in gold. Charles had to take his brothers to handle it, because none of them had ever seen so much before.
On May 15th, the Fleet arrived, under Sir Edward Montagu. With him he brought a poor relation, young Samuel Pepys, who on the first day of that year had begun to keep the secret diary which has added so greatly to our knowledge of the period. Healths were drunk, cannon fired and joy bells rung, as on the 22nd Charles went aboard the flagship Naseby, now rechristened Charles. Anchor was weighed with fifty thousand cheering people on the shore, and the 25th found him at Dover welcomed by the deafening huzzas of fifty thousand more.
The King kissed Monk, who was there to receive him on the beach, calling him ‘father’ and ‘preserver of the crown’, then accepting a gilded Bible from the Mayor, declaring it to be ‘the thing he loved above all others in the world’. Wild with excitement, half the population of Kent ran cheering and shouting beside his coach to Canterbury, and so, amidst similar scenes of unparalleled enthusiasm, he made his way towards the capital.
On the 29th day of May he entered London, and never was there such a home-coming in the life of any man before or since. The people wept for very joy to see him, their own ‘Black Boy’, tall, slim, bareheaded, smiling— bowing to either side as he rode through their midst, half deafened by the unceasing plaudits of the multitude. The fountains ran wine, the church bells pealed, the cannon thundered, while thousands upon thousands stood packed In the narrow streets to see him pass. Hoarse with cheering, drunk with joy, wildly elated by the thought that in his person Merrie England was come back once more.
Tired but still smiling, he reached the old Palace of Whitehall, which the homely Mrs. Monk had made ready against his coming. Night drew on, and in every village throughout England the crowds danced round the blazing bonfires delirious with joy. In London the crowd surged hundreds deep about the Palace, yet still the King would not deny the crush that pressed to kiss his hand.
So on his thirtieth birthday he was restored to sovereignty, yet he was of a wisdom far beyond his years, for nearly half his life he had lived abroad in poverty. He knew Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans, Dutch, the English, Scots and Irish too—princes, peasants, merchants, soldiers, clergy, spies, for he had met and spoken with them all. He knew them for what they were worth and judged them in accordance, remembered their splendid loyalties but forgot not their betrayals. And thus, too sweet natured to bear rancour for past ills, but armed with the bitter knowledge gained during fourteen years in the hard school of adversity, at long last ‘The King came into his own again’.
Four
The Heady Wine of Great Inheritance
To appreciate the life of Charles in the years immediately succeeding the Restoration, it is necessary to visualize the age and circumstances of the people who formed his court.
One must banish the memory of those portraits by Lely and Kneller, delineating the heavy-jowled, middle- aged men, and the ripe over-fleshed beauties of a later period; cast aside the weighty periwigs and look beneath the stiff ornate garments of brocade and satin. Then with a clearer eye one can gather some understanding of the hot-blooded, tumultuous youth that thronged the tapestried galleries and gilded chambers of Whitehall.
It was essentially, and above all things, the Court of Youth. The King himself was just 30, and his brother James, Duke of York, who as his heir was the next most important person in the Kingdom, was 27.
The gorgeous, scatterbrained Duke of Buckingham was 32, and those Earls who were the constant companions of the King, Ossary, Falmouth, Dorset, Arran, and Sunderland. 26, 24, 22, 21 and 20 respectively. While Rochester, who more than any, in his triple capacity of great noble, drunken debauch^, and man of letters, epitomizes the courtier of the period, was only 17 when he became a leading figure at the Court.
In addition to these gay young lords who held position near the King by right of birth, Charles delighted to have about him that brilliant band of rapscallions who contributed so much to the wit and literature of the age— Dryden, Etheridge, Jermyn, Montagu, Sedley, and Wycherley, whose ages at the Restoration were 29, 26, 24, 24, 21, and 20—all, therefore, in the first vigour of their youth.
The women, too, were of an even more tender age— most of them being no more than slips of girls in the first flush of their beauty, when they entered upon that riot of intrigue, without which it is doubtful if their names would have come down to posterity.
To the natural exuberance of youth must be added the heady wine of great inheritance. It was not possible for Charles to restore ev
ery cavalier to his estates—to have done so would have caused immediate revolution—but large numbers did regain their patrimony, and to those who participated in his exile or assisted in his escape after Worcester he scattered with a lavish hand all the benefits which he was able. Lordships of the Bed Chamber, Groomships, and Governances, all of which carried considerable emoluments. The needy band who a few years before had been hard put to it to secure a crust at the King’s impoverished table, or in foreign universities had anxiously awaited the questionable arrival of remittances from England, now found the pockets of their new silk breeches bursting with golden guineas.
Above all, the war was over, and these people who from their early youth had known danger, hardship, un- certanty and distress, had at last come home, freed from the clutches of foreign landladies, welcomed and restored, safe once more to ride the broad acres without fear of death, imprisonment or fine—and all in the glory of an English summer.
In our own day we have known the reaction that followed upon those years of horror, when every ablebodied man received the Armistice as a reprieve from certain death or mutilation. We know that as a result of the strain which the nation had undergone, there was an epidemic of free love, and a sudden uprush of talent among the younger generation. In the pyjama and bottle parties, the night clubs, and the doings of the ‘bright young people’ of the early 1920s we see reflected the licence of the Restoration, and in the writings of Huxley, Coward, Joyce, Sassoon, Lawrence, to name but a few, a repetition of the flame that lit the 1660s. The King himself was young, generous, elegant, and witty, it was therefore but to be expected that the hectic gaiety natural to the circumstances of his contemporaries should centre about his person.
During the months that followed the Restoration every highway throughout the length and breadth of England was gay with cavalcades. Clumsy windowless coaches bumped and jolted over the miles of grassy ruts, Churchmen upon docile mules, and ladies riding pillion, laughing horsemen galloping upon the springy turf—one and all wending their way through shady forest or over rolling down towards the magic centre of Whitehall—to see the King, to kiss his hand; and if he was, from sheer lack of funds and posts, unable to grant every favour that they asked, at least he ordered that none, however humble, should be turned away, and pledged his credit, that he might recognize their loyalty by invitations to a long series of splendid entertainments.
By the end of October the Queen Mother was back in England, and with her, to conquer every heart, came Minette. Buckingham fell desperately in love with her, and to pleasure this dear sister there was nothing in the world to which Charles would not agree. A fresh round of gaieties was initiated in her honour, and the King, fretting at the ties of state which kept him from her when she went to Tunbridge Wells, slips a pressing note to the faithful Hyde, now Earl of Clarendon, ‘I would willingly make a visit to my sister—when can I find the time?’ ‘I suppose,’ replies the ponderous minister, ‘your Majesty will go with a light train.’ ‘I intend to take nothing but my night bag,’ cries the King. ‘But surely,’ protests Clarendon, ‘you will not travel without forty or fifty horse.’ ‘I count that part of my night bag,’ laughs the impatient Charles.
No sooner had the festivities attendant on the triumphant homecoming died down, than the Coronation was ordered for the following spring. It was celebrated in April with a blaze of Royal Pageantry and accompanied by a renewed burst of gaiety in which the whole Kingdom once again participated.
Then a marriage was arranged. Little Catherine of Braganza arrived at Portsmouth in May of 1662, bringing as her dowry half a million pounds, Tangier, and Bombay—and in her train some very unprepossessing Maids of Honour, some very dirty monks and—a curiously oriental attendant for a woman—a barber skilled in the art of depilation!
Catherine was a dowdy little person, her legs too short, her body too long, but her face was redeemed by a pair of large, soft, dark eyes. She had been brought up with the greatest strictness, and all knowledge of the world kept from her; she suffered, therefore, in proportion to her ignorance when she became aware of the custom of the age, by which all crowned heads married from policy, and kept a series of mistresses for their amusement.
That she loved the tall, dark King to the end of his days is a testimony to his unfailing kindness and thought for her—but being human, more he could not give. After a little she resigned herself to his infidelities, comforted herself with innumerable dishes of tea, and learned to alternate her pious devotions with participation in the gaieties of the Court—gaining by the latter the approbation of her husband, and much genuine pleasure for herself.
Of those ladies who caused the Queen so many jealous, unhappy tears during her first months in England, Barbara Villiers was the most prominent. As Mrs. Palmer she had already become intimate with Charles at the Hague, and Palmer, upon the Restoration, was created Earl of Castlemaine; yet he quarrelled with the King, not, as might be supposed, about his wife, but on religious questions, and, being an ardent Catholic, took himself off to act as Chamberlain to the Pope, Barbara thereon becoming the open and undisputed Queen of Whitehall.
A dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty of imperious temperament, she remained Charles’ mistress for the best part of twelve years, and a powerful entity at Court until his death. That she was very lovely there can be no doubt, and Pepys was one of the many who paid tribute to her attractions by unruly prickings of the flesh whenever he saw her at the theatre or about the Court, yet it is difficult to understand the secret of her lasting fascination for the King. No single writer on the period has a good word to say in her defence. She was consistently unfaithful to Charles, yet shrewishly jealous of his infidelities to her, avaricious to a degree and possessing the temper of a virago. The latter characteristic alone one would have thought sufficient speedily to sicken the indolent, peace- loving monarch, yet by some mysterious means she kept her place and a certain hold on his affections. If one may use the expression ‘bed-worthy’, Barbara, in common with all really great courtesans, seems to have possessed that attribute in a very high degree, and Charles may have forgiven her much on this account. Good-natured people are also more than usually liable to allow their affections to become a habit, and the King, who was the kindest of men, was doubtless loath to cast aside one from whom he had derived so much pleasure.
Castlemaine was by no means a fool for all her tantrums, and materially assisted the prolongation of her reign by a political alliance with Buckingham, Arlington, and the rest of the anti-Clarendonian party. Moreover, when the King’s first passion for her had worn off, and in order to cover her own affair with the spindle-legged Harry Jermyn, she adopted the policy by which Madame de Pompadour later kept Louis XV enslaved for so many years—the production of other, more temporary, occupants for the Royal bed; young women of undoubted physical attractions but insufficient brain to threaten her own supremacy.
The most famous of these was a Miss Frances Stewart, who had lately been a Maid of Honour at the Court of France, and returned to England in the Queen Mother’s train. ‘La Belle Stewart’ was a tall, slender girl of surpassing beauty, but so little brain as to be almost an idiot. Her favourite recreations were building card houses and playing blind man’s buff; she had, however, acquired in France a very excellent taste in dress which was universally admired by both women and men.
Castlemaine took this nymph under her wing, and moreover into her bed, so that Charles might joke with them both together when he paid his morning call, and very soon he was desperately smitten with this little Roman-nosed piece of nonsense.
The Queen at this juncture fell desperately ill, and for some time her life was despaired of. For two nights her Portuguese attendants, by continuous prayer and chanting, kept her from all hope of sleep, and on the third, Charles proved that however much he might be in love with another woman he was none the less a devoted husband. He summoned his own physicians, flung out the priests and danglers of precious relics neck and crop, aired the rooms
, and commanded silence in the corridors; then, kneeling at her bedside, he prayed her, with tears in his eyes, to live for his sake. She wept to see him cry, but took courage from his affection, and after a long illness, during which he was her constant attendant, pulled through. Catherine had already found that life at the Court of this pleasant, kindly Prince was far more agreeable than in a Portuguese convent, and on her recovery this devout Catholic woman rebutted the suggestion of her almoner that a cup of holy bones had saved her by the reply that ‘she owed her life to her husband’s prayers’.
Frances Stewart meanwhile proved stubborn. Whether it was due to a true innocence natural in her sixteen years —but very strange in any friend of Castlemaine’s—or a calculated resistance in the hope that Catherine would die and she be made Queen, is doubtful, but in any case the amorous monarch met with little success. He pursued her into corners upon every possible occasion, and even paid her the compliment of having her fair form stamped upon his coinage, where it may be seen in the image of Britannia to the present day, but the minx would never yield him the least favour.
So enamoured of her was Charles that his passion even brought forth a latent literary ability in this many-gifted Prince.
'I pass all my hours in a shady old grove,
But I live not the day when I see not my love;
I survey every walk now my Phillis is gone,
And sigh when I think we were there all alone,
O then, ’tis O then, that I think there’s no hell,
Like loving, like loving too well.
While alone to myself I repeat all her charms,
She I love may be locked in another man’s arms,
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