It is difficult for us to realize today the intense and terrible bigotry which clouded the minds of otherwise sound and sensible men in the seventeenth century. The loathing which was engendered in our own population by an exceedingly able Ministry of Propaganda against the Germans in the first war gives but a vague idea of the attitude of the Nonconformists to the Anglicans, and of both against the Roman Catholics, in those days. Well- educated Englishmen were hypnotized in 1917 into believing that the Germans gouged out the eyes of our wounded, crucified their prisoners, and melted down their own dead in a corpse factory, that the human fat might be utilized for a variety of purposes. The people of France, Turkey, Montenegro and the Andaman Isles were all wrought up by the same type of nonsense into a fanatic blood lust against their own particular enemies. So, in the time of Charles II, Anabaptists really believed that Papists ate Protestant children and habitually committed sodomy with their wives. Quakers were so terribly convinced that the great mass of their countrymen were heading straight for very real and lasting flames that, as a method of protest, these otherwise sensible people stripped off their clothes and ran stark naked up and down the streets of the northern towns yelling, ‘Woe! Woe! Woe to Yorkshire! ’ and all the other multitudinous sects up and down the land evinced the same wild unreasoning fear, hate, and dread of all who did not agree to their own particular form of ritual in the worship of a common God.
Patiently and tirelessly Charles grappled with this awful problem. From April to July of ’61 he sat day after day in the Conference of Divines, endeavouring to wrest a little tolerance from first one party and then another, but the Cavaliers who had come into power at his Restoration were diehard Anglicans who had fought every bit as much for the complete supremacy of their Church as for the Crown.
To protect a minority of his people from an Anglican St. Bartholomew he was forced once more to take sides against the class who had served him best, and all their power in Parliament over the question of his finances was brought to bear against him.
Already that question of finance was giving the King considerable anxiety. The annual income of his father had been roughly £900,000, and his expenditure £1,100,0000—and Charles found himself saddled with a debt of £530,000 contracted on that account before and during the Civil War. Expenditure under the Commonwealth had risen to the then appalling figure of £2,200,000 per annum. This enormous budget was the price which England had to pay for her increased prestige abroad under Cromwell’s Government. Large fleets and standing armies must be paid for. During the early years of the Commonwealth a considerable portion of the money had been raised by the sale of Crown lands and confiscated Cavalier estates, but such sources were by no means inexhaustible, and a year before the Restoration, England was groaning under a heavier taxation than had ever been known before—yet even this proved inadequate to balance the budget. On his return, therefore, the King found the annual deficit to be nearly £1,000,000, and an accumulated debt of over £2,000,000, in addition to the half-million owing to his father’s account, and his own by no means small debts, contracted during fourteen years of exile. To meet these staggering commitments, the Exchequer showed upon examination the ludicrously inadequate sum of £11 2s. lOd.
Approached by the genial King upon the question of supplies, his faithful Commons proposed to make his revenue up to the sum of £1,200,000 per annum, and had Charles actually received this amount it would have proved quite adequate to his needs after the disbandment of the Army. The trouble was that he did not.
Cromwell’s mailed fist may have scared Europe, but it had almost ruined the trade of the country. In consequence, the actual receipts from taxes voted by Parliament fell far below their estimated value. In the first year of his reign the unfortunate Charles only received £700,000 out of his paper £1,200,000, and during his first twelve years of Government the actual revenue averaged £400,000 per annum short of the necessary expenses.
By the summer of 1663, therefore, we find the King mildly reproving his Parliament with the words, ‘There hath not appeared that warmth in you of late, in consideration of my revenue, as I expected,’ but in the previous February he had, in conformity with his promise, declared for ‘General Toleration’, and the Anglican- minded Commons had grown very cold indeed.
It became obvious that if Charles was to secure sufficient supplies to carry on the affairs of the Kingdom, let alone pay off any portion of his enormous debts, he must give way to the Anglican frenzy which imbued the Parliament. In consequence he allowed four Acts dealing with the religious question to be passed.
The Corporation Act, by which no man could become a member of the municipal bodies which governed the towns and controlled the election of M.P.s unless he took an oath denying the lawfulness of taking up arms against the King, and—received Communion according to the rites of the Church of England.
The Act of Uniformity, by which every clergyman had to take a similar oath and assent to the New Anglican Prayer Book, which contained no less than 600 alterations, most of which were aimed at the Dissenters. To this Bill more than 2,000 of the Nonconformist clergy refused to submit, and in consequence a third measure was brought in.
The Five Mile Act, by which none of these two thousand were allowed to come with five miles of their former living in any town which possessed a Municipal Corporation, unless they took the oath under the Corporation Act. Upon this Charles did his best to secure pensions for the ejected ministers, and, seeing that they were all Nonconformists, his attitude in this matter should be borne in mind when considering those charges which have been brought against him by the Whig historians, who would have us believe that the only reason for his endeavours to secure ‘Liberty of Conscience’ was a personal leaning towards the Church of Rome. The Parliament rejected his humane amendment, and carried the Anglican campaign a stage further by a fourth measure.
The Conventicle Act; by it a conventicle was defined as a meeting of more than four persons outside any family for the purpose of religious celebration, and all such meetings other than those of the Church of England forbidden, under penalty of imprisonment for the first offence and transportation for the third.
Such, despite the King’s hard-fought battle for Liberty of Conscience, were the laws decreed by the Cavalier Parliament in their determined attempt to crush out Dissenters and Catholics alike. But Charles did not surrender —he never surrendered anything. The tide might be running strongly against him for the moment and, like Canute, he realized the wisdom of stepping ashore, but no one knew better than he that everything comes to the man who knows how to wait. In the meantime, he set himself with quiet determination to blunt the weapons which were to be used for the persecution of these poor people on account of their religious beliefs. Parliament might make laws, and he be compelled to ratify them if the national services were to be saved from bankruptcy but in those days it was one thing to make laws and quite another to carry them out. Their execution depended very largely upon their energetic application by the officers of the Crown, and Charles succeeded in nullifying the effect of the persecution laws, to a very marked extent, by throwing large handfuls of grit into the machinery of justice.
In addition to the onerous business of endeavouring to straighten out the tangle in which the Commonwealth had left affairs at home, Charles was faced with the problem of Foreign Relations. Here he exercised the power of the prerogative to the full and refused to allow Parliament to interfere.
The Treaty of the Pyrenees had secured the peace of Europe just before the Restoration, and both France and Holland were bidding for the friendship of the English King. In Holland, after the death of Charles’ brother-inlaw, William II of Orange, ten years before, power had been seized by the popular party who approximated very nearly to the English Parliamentarians of the Civil War. France, on the other hand, was governed by a young and absolute Monarch, so that the natural sympathy of Charles gravitated towards the latter.
A far more important factor, however, l
ay in the commercial potentialities of the countries concerned. Spain and Portugal had passed out of their great century, and, exhausted by a .ong series of expensive wars, were slipping backwards in the race for the world’s markets. France had never seriously counted in the commercial struggle, and so the battle lay between the English and the Dutch.
These were the two great maritime powers, and outside European waters the sailors of both nations waged an unceasing war for Commercial and Colonial supremacy. Charles, who throughout his whole reign sought to foster the trading ambitions of his subjects, saw clearly that every effort must be made to crush the Dutch.
In this his people were with him heart and soul, but unfortunately the question of religion came into the matter once more. Obviously the short road to victory over the Hollanders was alliance with the French, but the French were loathsome Papists, and although the English Protestant merchants were in a fine frenzy to take away the trade of the Dutch Protestant merchants, they fell into an agony of indecision between the equally urgent calls of their pockets and their consciences.
Pockets won, and in 1665 the English fleet set sail under James to drive the Dutchmen from the seas. He encountered them off Lowestoft and won a brilliant victory, twenty Dutch ships put out of action and their Admiral, Opdam, slain. That the action was not completely decisive was due to the cowardly deception practised by one unscrupulous man, Henry Brunker, a person of most unsavoury character, who had sailed with York as Groom of the Bedchamber. As night closed down on the battle, James went to rest, leaving orders that the Dutch should be closely pursued and himself awakened immediately his fleet was in touch with the enemy again. Sir William Penn, the Vice-Admiral, expressed an opinion that the second engagement would be even hotter than the first. When Brunker heard that, he gave orders purporting to be a message from the Duke that they should slacken sail immediately. When James awoke he found his fleet at a standstill and the Dutch disappearing far beyond the horizon.
A large number of young courtiers went with the fleet as volunteers. Rochester, who was interested in mystical speculation, made a pact with two others that if any of the three were killed they should reappear to the survivors. Both the others were killed beside him by a cannon ball, but neither reappeared, and their failure to do so caused him to remain sceptical regarding immortality for the rest of his life.
Buckhurst was also there and on the night before the action he composed the popular song which begins:
‘To all you ladies now on land
We men at sea indite:
But first would have you understand
How hard it is to write—
The Muses now and Neptune too
We must implore, to write to you.’
Among those who lost their lives was young Lord Falmouth, a man very dear to the King so that he grieved bitterly when told his loss.
Even while England was rejoicing at the victory a terrible enemy was at work within her gates. The dread red crosses began to appear on the doors of the houses and soon the wealthier citizens of London were in full flight to the country, seeking safety from ‘The Plague’. For four months previously there had been no rain, and the close-packed dens in the meaner part of the city quickly became charnel houses, loading the air with fresh disease. The remaining inhabitants were seized with terror and caught the contagion in the churches, where they clustered helplessly to pray or fell mortally stricken after wild orgies of debauch in the empty streets. All through that terrible winter and into the following spring the pestilence raged, and the melancholy cry ‘Bring out your dead’ could be heard in the silent streets each night.
Despite this affliction of the capital, the war went on. Charles removed his Parliament to Oxford and wrestled with it for supplies. He had equipped the Fleet entirely at his own expense, and now his credit had become so weak that even the City Bankers were refusing to lend him further money at so high a rate of interest as ten per cent. Yet somehow the King managed to carry on, and Pepys at the Navy Office did Herculean work in supervising the victualling of the Fleet. The Dutch coast towns were raided, and thirty-five enemy ships taken or sunk off the Wellbank.
Early in 1666, the French joined the Dutch under the obligation of an old Treaty, but England fought on undismayed. The Fleet through an error of judgment was now divided, Prince Rupert being set to watch the French in the Channel, and Albemarle the Dutch in the North Sea. On June the 1st, the latter gave battle to De Ruyter in spite of heavy odds; Rupert came to Albemarle’s assistance on the second day, and for four succeeding days and nights a ghastly carnage ensued at sea. The Dutch were given a terrible gruelling, but after the battle the English Fleet returned almost shattered to its ports. However, within two months the surviving ships took their revenge and severely beat the Hollanders at the Weelings.
Buckingham was not among the gallants who volunteered for service, but remained at home engaged in a hectic love-affair with the Countess of Shrewsbury, a woman so notorious for her amours that it was said of her, ‘as no person could boast of being the only one in her favour, so no man could complain of being ill- received’. Her husband alone seems to have remained unaware of her flagrant infidelities, but he learnt of her wild passion for the Duke, and challenged him immediately. The duel took place at Barns Elm on the 16th of January, and, as was the fashion of the times, each was accompanied by two seconds, who also fought. It was a desperate business, all six being seriously wounded. Shrewsbury was killed and one of Buckingham’s seconds died later. It was said that during the encounter the lady, disguised as a page, held the Duke’s horse, and that he slept with her that night ‘all in his bloodie shirt’, which gave great scandal to many.
Two months later he took her to live in his own mansion, and upon the Duchess protesting that it was impossible for herself and Lady Shrewsbury to live in the same house, he gave his wife the brutal reply, ‘So I thought—and I have therefore ordered your coach to convey you to your father.’
In September another terrible blow fell upon England. The ubiquitous Pepys arrived hot and flustered one morning at Whitehall, bringing news that on the previous night a fire had broken out in Pudding Lane and, owing to an easterly gale, was spreading rapidly. Charles sent him with orders to the Lord Mayor that the houses in its path should be demolished, but by evening nothing had been done, and the King, who went out on to the river to view its lurid glare, realized the seriousness of the position. He realized, too, the hopeless incompetence of the Lord Mayor, and took command himself.
During the ensuing days and nights he fought the fire with courage and determination, blowing up houses, rewarding and encouraging his helpers, assisting in the demolitions, and passing buckets of water at the most dangerous points in person. On the fourth morning he stood ankle-deep in water, blackened and exhausted, with two-thirds of his capital lying in ruins about him, but his efforts had not been altogether in vain, for one of his subjects wrote of the matter: ‘All that is left of the city and suburbs is acknowledged to be wholly due to the King and the Duke of York.’
The conflagration consumed 13,000 houses and 89 churches. 200,000 people were rendered homeless, but, amazing to relate, only eight lost their lives. The King busied himself immediately with alleviating the distress of the poor people who were camping in Moorfields, and in supervising plans for the rebuilding of the City. It was his wish to create a new and beautiful capital of broad streets and handsome squares as designed by his principal architect Sir Christopher Wren, but in this he was defeated by the obstinacy of the freeholders, who insisted on rebuilding on their old sites. Nevertheless, his regulations that the new houses should be of neat brick or stone, and of approved types, were strictly enforced. Large areas of slum dwellings had been swept away for ever, and Charles left London a far finer city than he found it.
Meanwhile the war dragged on. In February, ’67, the Council realized that an immediate decision regarding the Fleet could no longer be delayed; reduced to an appalling plight by war, pestilence
, and lack of supplies, it must either be completely re-equipped or laid up and paid off altogether. Charles’ private credit was utterly exhausted, and Parliament stubbornly refused to vote monies for the maintenance of the services. The King, York, Rupert, Albemarle and the Archbishop protested at so drastic a measure, but they could produce no alternative suggestion, so Clarendon and the majority of the Council had their way, and the British Navy was allowed to remain unmanned and without equipment in its harbours.
The nerve of the nation had been shattered by the Plague and Fire. Commerce had been almost brought to a standstill, an anti-Papist scare was running through the country, and there was open insurrection in the North. In these straits, Charles decided that the only policy was a secret agreement for peace with France, and in this he employed ‘Minette’. She had some years before married Philipe D’Orleans, brother of Louis XIV, and the French Queen being a rather stupid invalid, Minette was now the most influential woman at the Court of France. To her assistance he sent the aged Jermyn, Earl of St. Albans since the Restoration, and by their united efforts a secret pact had been agreed with France by April.
While Louis was still busy negotiating a general pacification with the Dutch, their Fleet suddenly appeared in the Thames early in June, stormed Sheer- aess, sailed up the Medway, set fire to five English ships, and departed without let or hindrance, towing the Royal Charles captive behind them.
In vain Charles and his troops rode up and down the banks of the river, brandishing their swords and firing their pistols. Lacking a fleet, England had perforce to submit to this indignity.
Regarded soberly, the episode was by no means so terrible as it has been painted. Compare it, for example, with the brilliant exploit of Robin Holmes, who in the previous year had landed a thousand English on the Dutch coast at Schelling, sacked two towns, burnt one hundred and fifty ships, and destroyed a million pounds worth of Dutch property.
Wheatley, Dennis - Novel 20 Page 8