He could, of course, like other monarchs, have dismissed them when he wearied of their favours, or kept them in subjection by the threat of some practical manifestation of the Royal displeasure. If he had followed that course he would have spared himself many petty worries, but such an attitude was foreign to his nature. They were all old friends- with whom he had spent many happy hours, and therefore, even at the expense of much trouble to himself, there could never be any question of disgrace or punishment. Instead they must be allowed their freedom to live at Court upon the handsome pensions which he made them.
Unfortunately, by some strange freak of nature, the majority of women respond more readily to rougher treatment by their men, nor for some reason are they often faithful to the lover possessed of the human understanding which prompts him to condone their follies and forgive their faults.
Charles’ lack of a capacity to hurt his women debarred him from gaining the entire devotion of any one of them except Nell—although it is doubtful if even she considered him a great lover—and, curiously enough, his Queen.
To the rest he was an extremely competent amorist, the most amusing of companions, and a man whose fathomless generosity made him easy game. They were a greedy, rapacious lot, and lost no opportunity of plaguing and tormenting him for gifts and honours while they conducted flagrant infidelities with other men.
The cynical King can never have been their dupe, but he preferred to bear with them as lovely, wicked children, rather than have to reproach himself for ingratitude—not for the services which they had rendered but for the relaxation and pleasure which they had enabled him to take to himself in their company when harassed by those weighty problems which constantly beset him.
After the mourning for Minette, the merry suppers and galas at the Theatre went on once more. Buckingham turned playwright and produced his Rehearsal, a rollicking farce in which the heavy mannerisms of the other dramatists were deliciously satirized. Admittedly he was aided in its composition, but he was the principal author of the piece and undoubtedly possessed a high critical faculty.
In one of Dryden’s plays the heroine, in as moving and affected a tone as she could muster, had to speak the line:
‘My wound is great—because it is so small,’
and having spoken, paused, looking the very picture of woebegone beauty. Upon which Buckingham immediately sprang up in his box, and cried in a ringing voice:
‘Then t’would be greater—were it none at all.'
The house dissolved in tears of mirth, and the incident cost poor Dryden his benefit night.
The mad Duke had no more respect for the pulpit than the stage, as witness a scene in the Chapel Royal. A young and bashful preacher had been chosen to deliver his first sermon. In accordance with the custom of the day he wore black gloves, and, the dye chancing to be of inferior quality, when he drew his hand across his perspiring face, long black streaks appeared, which gave him the most ludicrous appearance. He then announced his text: ‘Behold! I am fearfully and wonderfully made.’ Buckingham did not attempt to restrain his amusement, but gave one gigantic guffaw of laughter which had the effect of discharging the pent-up mirth of the whble Court upon the unfortunate divine.
Charles was the ever-present centre about which this gay world revolved. He was one of those clever people who, while actually very busy, always seem to have abundance of time. He hunted the stag at Windsor, indulged his passion for the ‘Sport of Kings’ at Newmarket, amused himself by pitting the wit of his mistresses against one another in Whitehall. Yet in the solitude of the little cabinet behind his bedchamber—to which William Chiffinch alone in all the land had entry, and where he kept his treasured collection of antiques and clocks—he worked steadily upon his secret policy.
All the ministers of the CABAL, Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Lauderdale, and even Ashley Cooper, the rabid Protestant Earl of Shaftesbury, had now been involved, although the latter was not permitted to know the terms of the innermost treaty of all, whereby Charles had promised to accept Conversion and declare himself a Catholic.
In this last matter the King showed no eagerness, and he must have derived considerable amusement from composing letters excusing his delay to the earnest-minded Louis. At first ‘the Pope was dying, and he would not undertake so great a step with the Holy Father in that condition’. Then he really felt ‘that an Englishman should be given the honour of his conversion and he had no one suitable about him’, and, lastly, ‘the divine concerned must also be a chemist, that he might be capable of resolving certain scientific doubts which still lingered in his mind’—and, of course, Charles knew quite well that, learned as the prelates of the Roman Church might be, there was not one among them quite so erudite as that.
The last excuse was by no means so thin as it may sound, for all the world knew that he was deeply interested in science and spent many hours in his laboratory. This interest formed one of the principal links in his friendship with the otherwise irresponsible Buckingham, who spent much time and an incredible amount of money in his search for the Philosopher’s Stone.
Another deeply interested in scientific research was that queer, macabre figure the King’s uncle, Prince Rupert of the Rhine. From the dashing cavalry leader of the Civil Wars he had passed to years of strange adventure with the remnant of the Royalist Fleet as a buccaneer upon the Spanish Main, then after the Restoration he had held high command in the naval war against the Dutch. After the war his restless spirit had sent him out in ’68 as leader of the English Russian Company’s expedition to the North, and in ’70 Charles had presented him with the Charter for the establishment of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Now, having explored the waters of both hemispheres, this rough, passionate man set himself to unravel the secrets of the laboratory, and amongst other things we owe to him the discovery of the art of mezzo- tinto.
The King’s experiments were of a more practical nature than those of the other two. He founded the ‘Royal Society’ and was a constant attendant at their meetings. In his humorous vein he could not resist twitting them with ‘spending all their time weighing air', and once perplexed their proceedings for a whole month by demanding a solution of the problem: ‘Why is it that a bucket of water into which a fish has been thrown weighs no more after the fish has been put in than it did before?’ How he laughed, too, when it was reported, with great excitement, that Sir Paul Neal had discovered an elephant in the moon—and on investigation it turned out to be only a mouse that had got into the wrong end of the telescope. But Charles also possessed a very sober side, and it is not too much to say that by his personal encouragement, patronage, and protection of enquiring minds such as Sir Isaac Newton’s, the seeds were sown for the great harvest of scientific knowledge reaped in the following century.
In March, 1672, all the principal men in the Council now being a party to the Treaty with the French, Charles felt himself strong enough to issue an Indulgence suspending the penal laws against Roman Catholics and Dissenters alike. The anti-Papist feeling in the country had been growing by leaps and bounds, so the measure brought forth a storm of abuse; but the attention of the nation was largely distracted by his honouring his other obligations under the Treaty, and declaring war upon the Dutch.
At the same time, Louis’ enormous armies advanced to the attack through Flanders, and it seemed for the moment as if the Dutch would be completely overwhelmed. Yet the courage of this little nation, which had resisted the might of Spain in the previous century, proved equal to the ordeal. They revolted against their Parliamentary Party, murdered its leader, De Witt, and placed power in the hands of Charles’ young nephew, William HI of Orange. De Ruyter, with his Fleet, came upon James, watering in South wold Bay, and at once gave battle. The action was fought in a ghostly fog, amidst blinding smoke, with the ships locked at close quarters. Both navies suffered terrible casualties, but the Dutch escaped destruction and for the remainder of the war gave England as good as they got. On land, the energetic young sovereign, a
fterwards to be William III of England, employed a mightier power than Louis’ hundred and twenty thousand troopers. By opening his dykes he devastated great areas and caused terrible distress, but the roaring waters annihilated the French advance, and by this drastic measure he saved his country.
Early in 1673 Charles found himself in financial straits again. The war had cost him more money than he had received in subsidies from France; thus he was in an even worse position than he had been before the signing of the Treaty of Dover. There was nothing for it but to summon Parliament. They met in an angry, threatening mood, determined not to vote one penny unless Charles aban* doned his policy of Toleration. With vigorous firmness the King resisted their demands, and for the moment it looked like Civil War. Then Louis intervened, begging Charles rather to surrender on the question of religion than divide the country so that it could no longer assist him against the Dutch. Reluctantly, Charles withdrew his Declaration of the previous year, but worse was to come.
The Parliamentary bigots made the grant of funds for the continuation of the war subject to the passing of the Test Act. By this, all persons refusing to take the Anglican Sacrament and an oath against the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation were declared incapable of holding public office.
This measure broke the CABAL. Young Clifford, one of Charles’ staunchest friends, had to surrender his staff of office; Arlington, suddenly filled with unexpected weakness and vacillation, retired. Buckingham openly went over to the enemy, and Shaftesbury intrigued against his master, secretly plotting the divorce of the poor, barren, Catholic Queen.
It was a desperate spring and summer. Fuel was added to the anti-Catholic fire by the open knowledge that James, the heir to the throne, was a declared Romanist He was forced to resign his post as Lord High Admiral, and, Anne Hyde being dead, Parliament was filled with added fury at the choice of his new bride, the young Catholic Princess Mary of Modena. Rupert, with ill-equipped and insufficient ships, was hard put to it to prevent a repetition of the Medway. The treasury was empty, revolution in the air, and the Council at loggerheads, not one of them having a policy to offer which might bring the nation back to sanity.
Charles alone kept his head, replying merrily enough to an anxious enquirer, ‘The truth is that this year the Government (meaning himself, of course) thrives marvellously well, for it eats, and drinks, and sleeps as heartily as I have ever known it; nor does it vex and disquiet itself with that foolish, idle, and impertinent thing called business.’ But, although he put a bold face on it for the benefit of his enemies and the idle crowd, in secret he was worried and anxious.
With the long, lazy stride that other people found it so difficult to keep up with, he walked miles of country that summer, dark-faced and thoughtful, missing nothing of the ever-growing panic around him, yet disclosing his secret mind to no man. Then in October, when Parliament met again—filled with the same angry spirit of revolt which its predecessor had shown against his father in ’41—he acted. After a nine days’ session, to save the faithful Lauderdale from impeachment, he closed the House till January, dismissed the treacherous Shaftesbury, and to the amazement of the nation placed power in the hands of Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby.
The King never liked Danby, but his decision was nothing less than a stroke of genius. It was the first time that it had occurred to any Monarch to rule a fractious Parliament through their own chosen leader. Danby was an Anglican, a Cavalier and, more important still, a first- class business man. He alone w’as able to persuade his followers that, unless the country was to go to rack and ruin, they must grant adequate funds to carry on the necessary services of state.
In the meantime, Charles dealt equally skilfully with foreign affairs. He put it to Louis that the war was costing more than the amount received from France, which had not been the intention of the pact, therefore Louis must balance accounts or the war was off. Louis refused an adequate amount, so Charles opened negotiations with the Dutch. They, too, were utterly exhausted, and happy to buy a peace by which they agreed to secede the right of dipping to the English flag, and to pay an indemnity of £200,000. Thus, despite all the difficulties with which he had been beset, Charles brought the war to a victorious conclusion, and from that time on Britain became the undisputed Mistress of the Seas.
The power of the Dutch having been broken, the benefits of trade began to accrue to England, and in the following year the beginnings of a new prosperity were felt throughout the land. By this, Danby’s task was greatly facilitated, and in the following year the receipts from Customs and Excise rose to such a degree that for the first time in the reign income at last balanced expenditure. In this period of good fortune it stands to Charles’ honour that he did not forget his old creditors. Two years’ compound interest was allotted to the bankers who had suffered so severely by the closing of the Exchequer, and the King even managed to pay off the last instalments of his father’s debts with which he had been struggling all these years.
Happy times might have ensued and the people come to a better understanding of their Prince but for the embittered vanity and ambition of one unscrupulous man. Shaftesbury, the disgraced ex-Minister, set himself, with a zeal worthy of a better cause, to stir up strife and bring discredit on the Monarchy. He took up his residence in the City and initiated a tireless campaign against the Court, supervising the issue of a thousand scurrilous pamphlets and fanning the flames of rebellion by impassioned speeches to the malcontents who gathered at the Green Ribbon Club.
Shaftesbury’s efforts resulted in the formation of the Whig Party, pledged to overthrow the Tories under Danby and to exterminate the Catholics by an English Protestant Inquisition. The type of man who made up the better elements of his following may be judged by the seventeen Gloucestershire Lords who sent a remonstrance to the King. ‘Among them there was not one who either to himself or to his father could lay claim to any honourable service performed either to the King or his father during the time of the great rebellion.’ As to the worst elements, they were the fanatics and madmen who pester every Government—the human dock rats from Wapping, the hooligans, the jail-birds, and the very scum of the London gutters.
Buckingham also took up his residence in the city and hobnobbed with the old republicans to the vast amusement of Charles, who dubbed him ‘Alderman George’; whilst Rochester, the perpetual jester, banished from the Court for another libellous satire on the King, enlivened these dark days by setting up on Tower Hill disguised as an astrologer. The great world flocked to see him, and came away marvelling at Doctor Alexander Bendo’s uncanny knowledge of their pasts. He also carried on a roaring trade in quack medicines, giving particular attention to dubious draughts guaranteed to kill—or relieve young women of unwanted progeny.
Danby, with his Anglican sympathies, was strongly in favour of a policy to resist the aggrandizement of France, and, despite Charles’ assurance that he would never permit a war against his old ally, Louis became extremely frightened. He therefore adopted new tactics and took as his love the strangest of all bedfellows for an absolute and Catholic King—the English Whig Party. Barillion, the French Ambassador, was duly instructed, and during the next few years many thousands of pounds passed through his hands into the ready palms of the Whig Lords, that these patriots might firmly resist the passing of any vote of supplies through the House which should enable England to go to war.
For five years the struggle between Danby’s pro-Dutch Anglicans and Shaftesbury’s pro-French Nonconformists was waged with ever-increasing bitterness. In the Minister gained a brilliant victory by negotiating the marriage of Mary—James’ eldest daughter and granddaughter to old Chancellor Clarendon—with William of Orange. He thus provided for a Protestant succession, and so popular was the alliance with the mass of the people that for the moment it looked as if Shaftesbury and his Whigs were completely undone. Yet in the autumn of the following year a terrible scourge was to be brought into play upon the party that upheld the Crown.
&nb
sp; Titus Oates, a grim and sinister figure, made his appearance and laid an information before Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a London magistrate, regarding a ‘Popish Plot’. All was in readiness, so ran his tale, to kill the King, set the Romanist James upon the throne, land a French Army and force Catholicism upon England by the sword. The prompt acceptance of this amazing story was greatly facilitated by the disappearance of the magistrate to whom it had been told, and the discovery of his dead body in a ditch near Primrose Hill some days later. It was immediately assumed that he had been murdered by the Papists.
Shaftesbury seized with avidity upon the incident and stirred the anti-Catholic mob into a frenzy of fear and panic. Oates was deemed the saviour of his country, voted a pens'on, and brought before the King.
From the very beginning, Charles, with his shrewd common sense, had been sceptical about the man. The fact that Oates had been expelled from his school, the Navy, and two Jesuit colleges—and in addition had been twice convicted of perjury—did not beget confidence in any sane examiner, and now his strange appearance was far from that of an open, honest man. His head was like a vast, inverted U, he had no neck, a horrid fleshy face, with a straight gap for mouth, and little cunning eyes, but his lies concerning this gigantic conspiracy, in which every Catholic of any importance in the whole of Europe seemed to be involved, were fashioned with considerable adroitness.
Charles examined him in person and twice caught him out in an obvious lie. First, by asking what Don John, who was supposed to be in the conspiracy, looked like— to which Oates, knowing the majority of Spaniards to be dark, replied, ‘A tall, black-haired man’, when actually he was short and fair—the second time by enquiring the whereabouts in Paris of the Jesuit College. Oates said, ‘Neare the Louvre,’ upon which Charles shrugged with disgust, ‘As well say Gresham College stands in Westminster.’
Wheatley, Dennis - Novel 20 Page 10