The Age of Louis XIV
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England waited impatiently for its Protector’s death. Plots to assassinate him multiplied. He had to be always on the watch, and now he raised his bodyguard to 160 men. A former radical, Lieutenant Colonel Sexby, engaged one Sundercombe to kill him; the plot was detected (January, 1657). Sundercombe was arrested, and died in the Tower. In May Sexby published a pamphlet under the title Killing No Murder, which was an outright appeal for the murder of Cromwell. Sexby was found, and he too died in the Tower. Conspiracies against the Protector took form in the army, and in royalist circles where hope for a Stuart restoration was rising feverishly. Cromwell’s eldest daughter, married to the radical Major General Charles Fleetwood, adopted republican principles, and deplored her father’s dictatorship. 68
Cares, fears, and bereavements broke the iron man’s spirit. Like so many others who had tasted power to the dregs, he sometimes regretted that he had ever left the quiet of his early life as a rural squire. “I can say in the presence of God . . . I would have lived under my woodside, to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than undertook such a government as this is.” 69 In August, 1658, his best-loved daughter, Elizabeth, died after a long and painful illness. Shortly after her funeral Cromwell took to bed with intermittent fever. Quinine might have cured him, but his physician rejected it as a newfangled remedy introduced into Europe by idolatrous Jesuits. 70 Cromwell seemed to recover, and spoke bravely. “Do not think that I shall die,” he told his wife; “I am sure of the contrary.” 71 His Council asked him to name his successor; he answered, “Richard”—his eldest son. On September 2 he suffered a relapse, and sensed his end. He prayed God to forgive his sins and protect the Puritans. The next afternoon he died. Secretary Thurloe wrote, “He is gone to heaven, embalmed with the tears of his people, and upon the wings of the prayers of the saints.” 72 When news of Cromwell’s death reached Amsterdam the city “was lighted up as for a great deliverance, and children ran along the canals, shouting for joy that the Devil was dead.” 73
VIII. THE ROAD BACK: 1658–60
His son did not have the devil in him, nor the steel that might have held England in the chains that force and piety had forged. Richard Cromwell shared with his sister the tenderness of mind that had made them look with secret dread upon their father’s policy of blood and iron. Richard, on his knees, had begged Cromwell to spare the life of Charles I. During the Commonwealth and the Protectorate he had lived peaceably on the rural estate that his marriage had brought him. It was through no ambition of his own that on September 4, 1658, by his father’s will, he became Lord Protector of England. Lucy Hutchinson described him as “gentle and virtuous, but a peasant in his nature, and became not greatness.” 74
All the divisions that Oliver had kept in check now emerged, more boldly as they saw the weakness of Richard’s fiber. The army, resenting his civil background, and wishing to keep in its hands the authority that under his father had been frankly martial, petitioned him to yield all military direction to Fleetwood. He refused, but mollified his brother-in-law by making him lieutenant general. As the treasury was empty and burdened with debt, he summoned a Parliament, which met on January 27, 1659. A rumor spread that it was planning to reinstate the Stuart monarchy. The army officers, followed by bands of soldiers, came to Richard and asked him to dismiss the Parliament. He sent for his guards to protect him; they ignored his orders. Yielding to force, he signed an order dissolving the Parliament (April 22). He was now at the mercy of the army. The ardent republicans in the army, led by Major General John Lambert, invited the surviving members of the Long Parliament to reassemble, and to assume the authority which, as the Rump, they had held until Cromwell, aided by the ardent republicans in the army, dismissed them in 1653. The new Rump convened at Westminster May 7, 1659. Richard, weary of politics, sent it his resignation (May 25). He retired into private life, and in 1660 he disappeared into France, where he lived in seclusion under the pseudonym of John Clarke. He returned to England in 1680, and died there in 1712, aged eighty-six.
“Chaos,” wrote a royalist on June 3, 1659, “was a perfection compared to our present order and government.” 75 The contest for power between army and Parliament continued; but those parts of the army that were stationed in Scotland or Ireland favored Parliament, and in the predominantly republican Parliament there was a strong royalist faction. On October 13 Lambert stationed soldiers at the entrance to Westminster Palace, excluded the Parliament, and announced that the army would for the present take over the government. It seemed as if the whole sequence of events that had begun with Pride’s Purge was to be repeated, with Lambert a new Cromwell.
Milton called Lambert’s coup d’état “most illegal and scandalous, I fear me barbarous . . . that a paid army . . . should thus subdue the supreme power that set them up,” 76 but the poet was powerless. The only force in Britain that could oppose the military dictatorship was another army, the ten thousand soldiers that Parliament had assigned to General George Monck to maintain its authority in Scotland. We do not know whether any personal ambitions were concealed behind Monck’s resolve to challenge the London army’s usurpation of power. “I am engaged in conscience and honor,” he declared, “to free England from that intolerable slavery of a sword government.” 77 His statement roused to courage a variety of other elements opposed to martial rule. The people refused to pay taxes; the army in Ireland, the fleet in the Downs, the apprentices in the capital declared for the Parliament. The London financiers refused to the usurping leaders the loans that had been depended upon for the payment of the troops. The mercantile and manufacturing classes, which had approved the deposition of Charles I, now felt that the deepening and spreading disorder threatened the economic life of England, and began to wonder whether political or economic stability could be restored without a king whose legitimacy would comfort the people, bring in taxes, and quiet the storm. On December 5 Monck led his forces into England. The army leaders sent troops to oppose him; they refused to fight. The usurping officers admitted defeat, restored the Parliament, and submitted themselves to its mercy (December 24).
The triumphal Parliament, numbering thirty-six men, was still republican. One of its first acts required all present and future members to abjure the Stuart line. It refused admission to the Presbyterian survivors of the pre-Rump Parliament, on the ground that they favored the restoration of Charles II. The people scorned it as merely a revived Rump unrepresentative of England, and expressed its sentiments by the “Roasting of the Rump” in effigy in a multitude of bonfires—thirty-one in a single London street. Monck, whose army had reached London on February 3, 1660, notified the Parliament that unless it called for a new and wider election, and dissolved itself by May 6, he would no longer protect it. He advised the House to admit the excluded Presbyterians; it did. The enlarged Commons re-established the presbyterian organization of religion in England, issued a call for a new election, and declared itself dissolved. Now at last the Long Parliament came to its official and legal end (March 16, 1660).
On that same day a workman blotted out with paint the inscription Exit Tyrannus, Regum Ultimus (“Exit the Tyrant, Last of the Kings”) which the Commonwealth had set up in the Exchange; then he threw up his cap and cried, “God bless King Charles the Second!”; whereupon, we are told, “the whole Exchange joined with the greatest shout.” 78 The next day Monck gave a secret interview to Charles’s emissary, Sir John Greenville. Soon Greenville was on his way to Brussels with Monck’s message to the throneless King.
IX. THE KING RETURNS: 1660
Since his arduous escape from England in 1650, Charles had led almost a vagabond’s life on the Continent. His mother, Henrietta Maria, received him in Paris; but the French had impoverished her, and for a while Charles and his entourage lived like paupers; his faithful future Chancellor, Edward Hyde, was reduced to one meal a day; and Charles himself, having no food at home, ate in taverns, mostly on the credit of his expectations. When Louis XIV returned to affluence he gave Charles a pension of
six thousand francs, and Charles began to enjoy life too freely to please his mother.
In those Paris days he learned to love with his purest affection his sister, Henrietta Anne. Mother and sister exerted themselves to win him to Catholicism; Catholic emigrés from England did not let him forget how they had fought for his father. Presbyterian emissaries promised to aid his restoration if he would accept and protect their faith. He listened to both sides courteously, but expressed his determination to adhere to that Anglican Church for which his father had suffered. 79 The arguments that besieged him may have inclined him to a skepticism of all religion. But the Catholic worship, which he saw all around him in France, seems to have made a strong impression on him; it became an open secret in his little court that if his hands were free he would join the Roman Church. 80 In 1651 he wrote to Pope Innocent X, promising, if restored to the throne of England, to repeal all laws against Catholics. The Pope made no answer, but the general of the Jesuits informed Charles that the Vatican could not support an heretical prince. 81
When Mazarin began to negotiate an alliance with Cromwell, Charles’s advisers persuaded him to leave France, and the Cardinal agreed to continue his pension. He moved to Cologne, then to Brussels. There, toward March 26, 1660, Greenville brought him Monck’s message: If he would promise a general amnesty, excepting not more than four persons, grant liberty of conscience, and confirm the present possessors of confiscated property, Monck would help him; meanwhile, since England was still at war with Spain, it would be advisable for Charles to leave the Spanish Netherlands. He moved to Breda in Dutch Brabant, and there (April 14) signed an agreement accepting Monck’s terms in principle, but leaving precise conditions to the new Parliament.
The elections returned an overwhelmingly royalist House of Commons, and forty-two peers took their seats in the new House of Lords. On May 1 the letters that Greenville had brought from Charles were read to both houses. In this “Declaration of Breda” the young King offered amnesty to all, “excepting only such persons as shall hereafter be excepted by Parliament”; he left to Parliament the adjustment of confiscated properties; he promised that “no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matters of religion which do not disturb the peace of the Kingdom”; and he added a judicious statement prepared for him by Chancellor Hyde:
We do assure you upon our royal word that none of our predecessors have had a greater esteem of Parliament than we have . . . We do believe them to be so vital a part of the constitution of the Kingdom, and so necessary to the government of it, that we well know neither prince nor people can be in any tolerable degree happy without them . . . We shall always look upon their counsels as the best we can receive, and shall be as tender of their privileges, and as careful to preserve and protect them, as of that which is most near to ourself, and most necessary for our own preservation.
Parliament was pleased. On May 8 it proclaimed Charles II King of England, dated his title from the moment of his father’s death, and derived it not from any act of Parliament but from inherent birthright. The sum of fifty thousand pounds was voted to be sent to Charles, with an invitation to come at once and take his throne.
Nearly all England rejoiced that two decades of violence had ended in the restoration of order without the shedding of one drop of blood. Bells rang throughout the land; in London men knelt in the streets and drank to the health of the King. 82 All the crowned heads of Europe acclaimed the triumph of legitimacy; even the United Provinces, firmly republican, feted Charles as he traveled from Breda to The Hague, and the States-General, which had heretofore ignored him, offered him thirty thousand pounds for his expenses, as a persuasive to future good will. An English fleet, already decked with pennants and the initials “C. R.,” came to The Hague and took Carolus Rex on board (May 23).
On May 25 the fleet reached Dover. Twenty thousand people had gathered on the beach to receive the King. When his boat neared the shore they fell on their knees; and he, touching land, knelt and thanked God. “Old men who were there,” wrote Voltaire, “told me that nearly everyone was in tears. Perhaps there has never been a more moving sight.” 83 Along roads lined in every mile with happy crowds Charles and his escort, followed by hundreds, rode to Canterbury, to Rochester, to London. There 120,000 citizens came out to welcome him; and even the army that had fought against him joined Monck’s army in the parade. The houses of Parliament awaited him in the Palace of Whitehall. “Dread Sovereign,” said the Speaker of the Lords, “you are the desire of three kingdoms, the strength and stay of the tribes of the people, for the moderating of extremities, the reconciling of differences . . . and for restoring the collapsed honor of these nations.” 84 Charles accepted all compliments with grace and private humor. As he retired to his rest, exhausted with triumph, he remarked to a friend, “It must surely have been my fault that I did not come before, for I have met with no one today who did not protest that he always wished for my restoration.” 85
FIG. 25—TENIERS THE YOUNGER: Temptation of St. Anthony. Louvre, Paris
FIG. 26—JACOB VAN RUISDAEL: The Storm. Louvre, Paris
FIG. 27—MEINDERT HOBBEMA: Water Mill with the Great Red Roof. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan
FIG. 28—VERMEER: Head of a Girl Mauritshuis, The Hague (Photo by A. Dingjan)
FIG. 29—EDWARD PIERCE: John Milton. Christ College, Cambridge (Photo by Stearn & Sons, Cambridge, England)
FIG. 30—SIR PETER LELY: Oliver Cromwell. Pitti Gallery, Florence (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 31—SIR PETER LELY: Charles II of England. By Permission of His Grace the Duke of Grafton and the Royal Academy of Arts, London
FIG. 32—SIR GODFREY KNELLER: Henry Purcell. National Portrait Gallery, London (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 33—PETER PAUL RUBENS: George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Albertina Museum, Vienna
FIG. 34—CHRISTOPHER WREN: Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford (Bettmann Archive)
Architect’s original model (Bettmann Archive)
Photograph of cathedral today (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 35—CHRISTOPHER WREN: St. Paul’s Cathedral (1675–1710), London
FIG. 36—SIR GODFREY KNELLER: Sir Christopher Wren. National Portrait Gallery, London (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 37—SIR PETER LELY: Nell Gwyn. National Portrait Gallery, London (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 38—ANTHONY VANDYCK: James II as a Boy. Turin Gallery, Italy (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 39—CHARLES JERVAS: Jonathan Swift. National Portrait Gallery, London (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 40—JOHANN GOTTFRIED SCHIDOW: Frederick the Great. Sans Souci, Potsdam (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 41—KUPETZKI THE ELDER: Peter the Great. Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig, Germany
FIG. 42—BALDASSARE LONGHENA: Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice. (Building at right) Courtesy of the Italian State Tourist Office
FIG. 43—SALVATOR ROSA: Tobias and the Angel Raphael. Louvre, Paris
FIG. 44—ANDREA POZZO: Altar of St. Ignatius in Church of II Gesù, Rome (Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 45—SEBASTIEN BOURDON: Queen Christina of Sweden. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
FIG. 46—CLAUDIO COELLO: Charles II of Spain. Museo del Prado, Madrid.
CHAPTER VIII
Milton
1608–74
I. JOHN BUNYAN: 1628–88
IN THEIR enthusiasm for religion and morality, the Puritans felt no need of secular literature. The King James Bible was literature enough; nearly everything else seemed trivial or sinful dross. A member of Parliament proposed in 1653 that nothing should be studied in the universities except the Scriptures and “the work of Jakob Böhme, and such like.” 1 This seems depressing, but we should note that at the height of the Puritan ascendancy (1653) Sir Thomas Urquhart published his spirited translation of Rabelais,* preferring scatology to eschatology. And in the same year Izaak Walton cast his Compleat Angler upon the waters. Even today, with judicious leaps from one fish to
another, that book is refreshing in its simple, fresh-air mood; and it is a reminder that while England was passing through a revolution as violent as 1789, men could go quietly to snare some eager creature in rural streams. “Turn out of the way a little, good Scholar, toward yonder high honeysuckle hedge; there we’ll sit and sing whilst this shower falls so gently upon the teeming earth.” 2
Andrew Marvell kept his head, everywise, during the shuffling of governments between his birth in 1621 and his death in 1678. He welcomed Cromwell’s return from Ireland with a vigorous and melodious ode, but in it he dared to write with sympathy of the dying Charles I:
He nothing common did, or mean,
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try.
Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right,