The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain

by Ian Mortimer

  THE THREE RESTORATION KINGS

  Charles II is often described as ‘the merry monarch’ on account of his taste for gambling, mistresses, horse racing and general high living. The Frenchman Monsieur Misson describes him as ‘fonder of women, ease and pleasure than of Dunkirk, England and all the crowns in the universe’.51 But this playful image conceals a cautious, calculating, pragmatic survivor, whose only unshakable principle is never to risk being ousted from his throne. Faced with a disaster, he will readily sacrifice one of his ministers as a scapegoat. As Lord Halifax says of him: he ‘lives with his ministers as he does with his mistresses; he uses them but he is not in love with them’.52 His mistresses would no doubt agree, although Charles remains close to two of them – Lady Castlemaine (by whom he has four children) and Nell Gwyn (by whom he has two). Sadly, he has no children by his Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza, whose repeated miscarriages merely add to the humiliation of her husband’s public philandering.

  Charles is a cultivated man – devoted to music, art, the theatre, science and technology, and highly knowledgeable of naval affairs. Anatomy in particular fascinates him, and he attends dissections of human corpses. In 1663, after learning that a horse has passed four kidney stones of enormous size, he orders the horse’s dung to be searched every day for more examples.53 In politics, he is duplicitous. He secretly promises the French king in 1670 that he will convert to Catholicism but, knowing it will cause another revolution in England if he does so publicly, fulfils his vow only when he is on his deathbed, fifteen years later. It is not surprising that he acquires a reputation for untrustworthiness. The earl of Rochester writes a mock epitaph on him:

  Here lies our Sovereign Lord, the King

  Whose word no man relies on

  Who never said a foolish thing

  Nor ever did a wise one.

  To which the king replies, ‘My words are my own but my actions those of my ministers’ – a witty reply, but one that, yet again, shows his readiness to blame someone else.

  Perhaps Charles’s biggest political gamble as king is to support his brother James as his heir apparent, after it becomes widely known that James has converted to Catholicism. The result is a protracted political battle. The so-called Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81 gives rise to the forerunners of Britain’s modern political parties. Those who want James excluded from the throne and the king’s authority curbed are called Whigs – ‘whigs’ being slang for rabidly anti-Catholic Scottish cattlemen. They are met head-on by those who intend to uphold the king’s prerogative, who are called Tories – slang for Irish Catholic thieves. The Whigs raise the spectre of the pope and burn his effigy; the Tories respond by reminding people of the extremism of Cromwell’s government. Eventually, the king and the Tories are victorious. When Charles dies on 6 February 1685, the crown passes to James without opposition. By the time of his death, Charles has succeeded in creating a form of kingship that is rich, dynamic, colourful and responsible, and yet is still imbued with mystique and majesty. He is one of the great innovators in the development of the monarchy.

  James II does not have his brother’s political judgement, or his wit. Worst of all, he lacks his pragmatism and flexibility. His outlook on the monarchy is that it ‘must be either more absolute or quite abolished’. And absolutism presents a significant problem for a Catholic who rules over an Anglican country – and is officially head of its Church.

  Over the course of his lifetime, James gradually becomes obsessed with the idea that it is his duty to restore the Catholic faith in England. His long period of exile in France before 1660 convinces him that Catholicism is the one true religion. His much-loved first wife, Anne Hyde, daughter of the earl of Clarendon, converts to Catholicism in 1669; James himself secretly does likewise not long afterwards. After Anne’s death in 1671, he decides to go public with his faith: at Christmas 1672 he refuses to take communion alongside his brother, the king. The following year he openly acknowledges his conversion to Catholicism, and in September he marries the Catholic princess Mary of Modena, by proxy, in a Catholic ceremony. The success of the king and the Tories in the Exclusion Crisis that follows only reinforces James’s conviction that God’s providence is directing him to bring about the restoration of English Catholicism. This in turn strengthens his resolve that he must stand firm in all his unpopular dealings with the British people.

  At the outset of James II’s reign, the people are on his side. An uprising in Scotland, led by the earl of Argyll, is crushed by the Scots. In England, a rebellion led by the duke of Monmouth (Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son) is defeated at the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685. But this is the high-water mark of James’s popularity. The Bloody Assizes that follow the battle, in which James refuses to pardon any of those who are sentenced to death, become notorious. Thereafter he loses the confidence of the people. High-handed actions in bullying Parliament into suspending anti-Catholic legislation, refusing to accept the outcomes of elections by the Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, and locking up seven bishops in the Tower of London only underline the dangers to Protestants. To be fair to James, his vision of tolerating all religions is heartfelt. But what he does not appreciate is that such toleration is widely perceived as a pretext for encouraging Catholicism and, in Protestants’ eyes, Catholic practices that have no foundation in the Bible are heretical. His arrogant determination to pursue a policy of toleration is thus the cause of his downfall – which, you have to admit, is something of an irony.

  James II reigns for less than four years. Unable to believe that his own daughter, Mary, and her husband, Prince William of Orange (who is also his nephew), will invade England in defence of Protestantism, he leaves it too late to take appropriate military measures. William lands in Torbay on 5 November 1688 and marches to Exeter, where he sets up his headquarters. The local gentry flock to him. James II sets out to rally his troops at Salisbury, but all the providential signs are against him. Memorably, he has a series of terrible nosebleeds, which rather prevent him from striking a dramatic warrior-hero pose. His advisors tell him to retreat to London. On 11 December he attempts to flee the country, but he is recognised in Faversham and brought back to the city. When Prince William requests James to leave the capital, he sheepishly goes to Rochester and from there finally sails for France.

  If you visit Britain in the early days of 1689 you will find that neither England nor Scotland has a head of state. William of Orange, however, is recognised as the sole guarantor of peace throughout both realms, and that is important. The memory of the breakdown of law and order in 1658–60 makes everyone fear what will happen if William returns to Holland. Parliament is summoned and charged with debating the question of the succession. The MPs decide to offer William the throne, on four conditions. First, he has to agree to share the throne with his wife in a joint monarchy, so that there is no break in the succession (although actual power is vested in William alone). Second, he has to accept new oaths of loyalty. Third, he has to listen to a Bill of Rights that outlines limitations on the powers of the monarch. And fourth, he has to acknowledge that the children of his sister-in-law, Anne, will take precedence in the succession over any children of his by a later marriage, in the event of Mary’s death.

  William III, as a result, rules on a very different basis from his grandfather, Charles I. He has to listen to a declaration by both Houses of Parliament that the king may not suspend any statute legislation, tax people without the consent of Parliament, maintain an army in peace-time without Parliament’s approval or inflict excessive fines or ‘cruel and unusual punishments’ on his subjects. In addition, the king must henceforth allow Protestants to bear arms to defend themselves, permit his subjects to petition him without fear of persecution, guarantee the freedom of elections, allow free speech in Parliament without the speaker being liable in any court, and summon Parliament to meet regularly. Parliament sits every year from 1689, and from 1694 is freshly elected every three years.

  Histor
ians refer to the events of 1688–9 as ‘The Glorious Revolution’. Sometimes you hear modern commentators cast doubt on this, arguing that, as no blood is spilled, it is insufficiently radical to be a true revolution. However, when you look at the transition of government from near absolutism to constitutional monarchy over the whole period of the Restoration, it is difficult to think of a better word to describe it other than ‘revolutionary’.

  Women

  Just as there is enormous inequality between the various sorts of people, so too there is great inequality between the sexes. It amounts to sexism on a scale that you will barely be able to countenance. And there is nothing hidden or underhand about it. As the marquess of Halifax puts it, in his advice to his own daughter:

  You must first lay it down for a foundation in general that there is inequality in the sexes, and that for the better economy of the world the men, who were to be the lawgivers, had the larger share of reason bestowed upon them … We are made of different tempers that our defects might be mutually supplied. Your sex wanteth our reason for your conduct, and our strength for your protection; ours wanteth your gentleness to soften and entertain us.54

  This attitude should not be confused with misogyny, a hatred of women. There are plenty of men who deeply love their wives (and are loved by them in return) and yet such men still chastise their partners and beat them, often genuinely thinking it is for their own good. Also, you need to be aware that not all women think that greater equality between the sexes is desirable, let alone possible; a great many believe that women should be subordinate to men because that is the natural order of things. Even some well-educated women hold this view. Mrs Lucy Hutchinson, for example, is a translator of Latin prose and poetry, a poetess in her own right and the author of a biography of her husband, as well as an autobiography. She is exactly the sort of person whom you would expect to make a stand for women. Instead she maintains that they are intellectually inferior to men.55 This is the amazing thing about sexism in Restoration Britain: the prejudices against females are so deep-seated that many women share them.

  The legal position of women in England is much the same as it has been for centuries. In short, a husband is lord and master of his wife and of his unmarried daughters, and of all their possessions. As Edward Chamberlayne neatly puts it in his Anglia Notitia, or The Present State of England (1669), ‘if any goods or chattels be given to a married woman, they all immediately become her husband’s. She cannot let, set, sell or give away anything without her husband’s consent.’56 Even her clothes do not belong to her. Wives cannot borrow money without their husband’s permission, nor can they make a will. They may not admit a person into the matrimonial home against their husband’s command. If a wife runs away from her husband, he has the right to enter someone else’s property to drag her home. A husband can beat his wife with impunity as long as he does not actually kill her. If she refuses to make love with him, he is within his rights to force her. She cannot give evidence against him in any court, no matter what the charge. Therefore, if she catches him in flagrante making love to another woman, she cannot give evidence in court of his adultery. And so on. There are few things you can be sure of in seventeenth-century Britain, but one of them is this: if there is a disagreement between husband and wife, the woman is legally in the wrong, even if she is actually in the right.

  It is not so much the laws themselves that affect married life as the framework they provide for everyday relations. A ‘good woman’ is not one who behaves in a natural way but one who represses her instincts. As one writer puts it, a woman ‘may do nothing against God’s will but many things must she do against her own will, if her husband require her’.57 You get repeated glimpses of this in the relationship between Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys. On 9 January 1663, Elizabeth reads aloud to her husband a copy of a letter outlining her grievances (she has already given him a copy but he burnt it without reading it). The letter is full of sadness for her lonely life without a companion when he is away at the office. Pepys is horrified that she has committed such criticisms of their home life to paper, which could be read by other people. He not only rips up the copy of the letter she has just read, but a whole bundle of other letters she has been keeping, including his early love letters to her, forcing them from her hands and tearing them up in front of her as she cries floods of tears.58 It does not matter that he is totally within his rights to do this. It does not matter that later that same day, when writing his diary, he regrets his actions. What matters is that the law justifies a husband’s actions against his wife so completely that it makes him arrogant and uncompromising. Mere disagreements escalate into personal humiliations. You cannot help but feel for Elizabeth: it is simply oppressive to live with someone who believes he is wholly in the right and justified in his anger towards you, even if he later regrets causing you harm.

  The general prejudices against women (as opposed to wives) are no less depressing. A girl has great difficulty obtaining a Latin education and therefore most women are not properly schooled, by the standards of the time. Even if they are taught by private tutors, they cannot go to university or obtain a professional post, such as that of a lawyer or a schoolmaster. If a woman does practise medicine, she is not allowed to charge a fee for her services. Women cannot be MPs or magistrates; nor can they be freemen of a town – so they cannot become aldermen or mayors, either. Nor can they vote for an MP. Even if a woman is a duchess in her own right, she cannot sit in the House of Lords. Amongst the high-born, a lord’s daughter must stand by and watch each and every one of her younger brothers inherit, before she has a chance of seeing anything of her father’s estate, and sometimes this includes males in collateral branches too. Lady Anne Clifford, the only surviving daughter of the third earl of Cumberland, has to wait for her uncle and cousin (the fourth and fifth earls) to die before she can take possession of her father’s estate and ancestral castles. In the meantime she has to put up with two unhappy marriages. Scolding women are punished by being strapped into a cucking stool on the end of two long beams and then dunked into a pond or stream: a humiliation amplified by the jeering delight of all the community who come to watch. Argumentative men, it should be noted, face no such reprimand.

  Despite all this, you will hear people say things like ‘if there were a bridge over into England, it is thought that all the women in Europe would run thither’; or ‘in some things, the laws of England are, above other nations, so favourable to that sex, as if the women had voted at the making of them’.59 Given what you’ve just learnt, this begs an explanation: Elizabeth Pepys, for example, might consider running in exactly the opposite direction if there were a bridge over the Channel. Part of the answer can be found in what Lorenzo Magalotti writes about London women in his journal:

  The women of London are not inferior to the men either in stature or in beauty, for they are all of them handsome, and for the most part tall, with black eyes, abundance of light-coloured hair, and a neatness which is extreme, their own personal defect being their teeth, which are not, generally speaking, very white. They live with all the liberty that the custom of the country authorises. This custom dispenses with that rigorous constraint and reservedness which are practised by the women of other countries, and they go whithersoever they please, either alone or in company; and those of the lower order frequently go so far as to play at ball publicly in the streets … They do not easily fall in love, nor throw themselves into the arms of men, but if they are smitten by the amorous passion they become infatuated and sacrifice all their substance for the sake of the beloved object, and if he deserts them, they are sunk into great despair and affliction. Their style of dressing is very elegant, entirely after the French fashion, and they take more pride in rich clothes (which are worn of value even by women of the lowest rank) than in precious jewels, all their expense in the latter article being confined to pearls; consequently pearls are of great esteem and request in England … Such and so great is the respect which the English entertai
n for their women that in their houses, the latter govern everything despotically, making themselves feared by the men.60

  Here Magalotti is looking beyond the letter of the law and observing women’s actual lives. Englishwomen, in his eyes, have both greater liberty than their Italian cousins and more control over their husbands because their menfolk respect and, indeed, fear them. And that pattern of greater liberty and male fear is also true of the relationship between Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys. Samuel allows his wife to stay out at entertainments by herself, even though he can be insanely jealous of the thought that she might fancy another man. As for his fear of her, when he considers one day in 1662 whether or not he dare try to seduce a maidservant, he decides against the idea ‘for fear she should prove honest and refuse and then tell my wife’ – and there is no saying to what that might lead.61 On 25 October 1668 he finds out, when his wife walks in on him with his hand up a maidservant’s skirts and, as he admits in his diary, ‘with my hand in her cunny’.62 This does not go down well with Mrs Pepys. Her quiet wrath reduces her proud and arrogant husband to a shivering, apologetic wreck. For several weeks afterwards she gives him grief, or, as he puts it, ‘the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world’.

  In some respects, both the law and customs protect women. For example, if a man travels abroad for a long time and returns to find his wife pregnant, he has to bring the child up as his own, even if he has been away for more than a year.63 Likewise, if a woman is pregnant when she marries, the child is deemed to have been fathered by the husband and, if male, will become his heir, whether or not he is the biological father. The law is so adamant that a man should control his wife that it necessarily follows that married women guilty of treason can only have been obeying their husbands’ commands, and thus be not guilty. A woman automatically acquires the rank of her husband by marrying – so, if he is a lord, she becomes a lady – but a woman of higher rank than her husband does not sink down the pecking order; a duke’s daughter retains her status as a ‘lady’ even if she marries a mere tradesman. As for the customs of the country, these make even more of a difference. A wife is her husband’s right hand in all domestic arrangements. Defoe declares that ‘a man with good husbandry, and thought in his head, brings home his earnings honestly to his family [and] commits it to the management of his wife.’64 Although divorce is nigh on impossible, and does not always permit you to remarry, a couple can choose formally to separate, and in such cases a court may determine that a husband should pay his estranged wife alimony. In 1677 the Court of Arches orders Sir Francis Throckmorton to pay his wife £300 per year while they live apart.65 On top of these formal arrangements are those old customs that empower women in ways that make the modern mind boggle. Monsieur Misson tells us that