A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game Read online

  The execution of Charles I, 30 January 1649

  In 1660 the chance of a republic vanished for ever, but time did not curve backwards. The waters did not close over the eighteen years since the civil wars began, as though they had never been. The constitutional fracture, wrought by the execution of the king and the brief republic, coincided with marked shifts in ideas of men and women’s relation to society. In all areas of life, from experimental science to personal belief, people searched for new philosophies to explain the world. Contrary to myth, the years under Cromwell had not all been dank and drab. The maypoles, fairs and festivals largely disappeared but victories were won, trade boomed and luxuries flooded into the capital. The achievements of Charles II’s reign built on the energy and intellectual ferment of the Interregnum. But in the late 1650s the mood had soured, and while dissenters and republicans lamented, the mass of people called for the return of a king.

  Everyone over twenty-five had some memory of the two civil wars, of 1642–6 and 1648, when thousands of ordinary citizens had died and families had been torn apart. No one, high or low, wished to return to such a state. Many royalists changed sides in the early 1650s simply for self-preservation. Now many who had served parliament changed back again. The Commonwealth had, however, given the common people a stronger view of their rights. When the London apprentices issued a ‘Remonstrance’ calling for the king’s return, they stated that they would defend with their ‘Lives and Fortunes the Laws of this Land and the Liberty of the Subject’.8 The radical sects had also taught people to look inwards, to consider conscience as the true authority, often in defiance of the state. The newsletters, pamphlets and broadsheets, and the discussions in taverns and early coffee-houses, began to create a new forum for public opinion. At the same time, the power of the merchants and goldsmiths who had bankrolled Cromwell brought a new relationship between the City and the state that was hard to roll back. The idea of contract and exchange as the basis of social relations, rather than authority and command, was widely discussed.

  As Archbishop Tillotson would later say, ‘The fashion of the age is to call every thing into question.’9 This questioning was applied to the very make-up of the universe and the nature of man. While some people still believed in portents and prodigies and the mysteries of alchemy, others were pondering the mechanical theories of Descartes and imbibing the scepticism of Montaigne. Indeed many people did both at the same time. One best-selling book of the late seventeenth century was Richard Allestree’s Whole Duty of Man, published in 1658, which assumed a world guided by Providence and advocated pious, sober living and respect for authority. It was almost rivalled, however, by the translations of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, which put the philosophy of Epicurus into seductive verse, denying divine design and depicting the universe as a whirl of atoms, in a perpetual state of flux.10 In a witty poem, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, substituted a new puzzle for the scholastic conundrum of how many angels could fit on the head of a pin – how many atoms, or separate worlds, existed within the earrings of a court beauty?

  For millions of these atoms may be in

  The head of one small, little, single pin.

  And if thus small, then ladies well may wear

  A world of worlds as pendents in each ear.11

  This world-view did not preclude belief in God. But for some adherents it led logically to a philosophy of living for the moment, through the senses. Lucretius challenged ideas about the immortality of the soul and the superiority of man to beast, while his materialism fostered secular, as opposed to spiritual, theories of the state.

  A generation younger than his advisers, Charles was attuned to these new ideas as well as to the regal ceremonial of court life. Thomas Hobbes, who was briefly his mathematics tutor in Paris, had sent ripples of controversy through the intellectual, religious and political worlds with his Leviathan, in 1651. His description of the ‘state of nature’, when men are driven by strong primal drives ‘without a common Power to keep them in awe’, conjured up a chaos that must have seemed terrifyingly vivid to those who remembered the civil wars:

  there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of the Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short.12

  The cure for this terror was for the people to submit to the strong ruler who could make them safe, the ‘Leviathan’ sucking power into himself. Although Hobbes allowed for some vague deity to keep this all-powerful leader in check, the state was a man-made construct, based on force. ‘Because the major part hath by consenting voices declared a sovereigne’, wrote Hobbes, ‘he that dissented must now consent with the rest; that is, be contented to avow all the actions he shall do, or else be justly destroyed by the rest.’13 In 1651, Leviathan appeared to justify submission to Cromwell as the de facto ruler and Hobbes was damned by the royalists. But could his doctrine of submission now also apply to the nation under Charles?

  Almost more influential than his authoritarian vision was Hobbes’s relativism, his insistence that language and moral judgements were not given by God but constructed by societies: ‘True and False are attributes of Speech, not of Things.’14 Good and evil, said Hobbes, were merely names that signified inclination or aversion, and these differed between men and societies, according to their different customs and opinions.15 Once again, everything came into question, including the virtues of reason and language, the capacities held to separate man from beasts.

  Charles swam among such uncertainties. The sober historical accounts that chart the political intricacies and cultural shifts of his reign inevitably focus on particular institutions, events and theories. Perhaps, by looking at his life from many perspectives, we can get a different view of the real choices he made, the risks and chances he took when faced with an almost impossible situation. Charles had few great ambitions, thought Halifax when he wrote his memoirs in his disillusioned last years, apart from living an easy life. No more exile, no more bowing and scraping and smiling, no more shabby clothes and quarrelling, hungry followers. Little enough, were it not that this meant staying on the throne and amassing enough income to maintain his kingdom and his court – two of the hardest things in the world.

  This book charts Charles’s game in his first decade on the throne. His first task is to assume the mantle of king, settle outstanding problems and make his mark, and from the start the manners of his followers signify a new era. The next round follows ideas in action: the conflicts of faith, the discoveries of science, the mentality of the court, and the expression of conflict through performance, on stage and off. The third brings crisis, war with the Dutch, plague and fire. At the end of the decade, Charles fends off blame, deals with factions and takes his great gamble, the secret alliance with France. The period was dramatic and mixed, and any story that follows its fortunes has the air of a grand tragi-comedy, the favourite genre of the Restoration stage. Merchants whisper in a corner, a royal mistress sulks, a man pores through his microscope at a flea. Angry MPs push forward, rowdy courtiers brawl, Quakers are hustled into gaol, shrouded plague victims fade into the wings. The scenery shifts to rolling waves, with a line of warships, cannon blazing. Or a cityscape appears, red with fire. There are crowd scenes, tender duets, harsh betrayals. In the centre, from first to last, is a solitary hero, playing a game. He shuffles the cards, deals, looks at his hand and lays down his bets.

  I The Deal / la donne

  Habit de Cartier, by Nicolas de Larmessin, c. 1690

  1 Sailing

  At length, by wonderful impulse of fate,

  The people call him back to help the State;

  And what is more, they send him money,
too,

  And clothe him all from head to foot anew

  ANON., ‘A Historicall Poem’1

  IT WAS LATE SPRING, with a fair May breeze in the Channel. Ahead lay England, the hollow lanes of Kent heavy with hawthorn, the hedgerows dusty with chalk. Behind lay Holland: Delft, with its bridges and canals and poor-boxes in every theatre; the neat houses of the Hague where maypoles stood outside each door. Behind lay wintry exile; before lay summer and glorious return.

  All afternoon Charles paced the deck in his new clothes. As he walked with long, fast strides, the sailors examined their king. At twenty-nine, he was tall and dark, his face strong, with a long nose, heavy jaw and brown eyes slanting under thick, arched brows. He wore his own dark hair, and bore a hint of a moustache above full lips. His mouth could curl in amusement, purse in thought, tighten in anger. A mobile, sensual face. Today he smiled and cracked jokes to the audience that scuttled behind him, weaving between barrels, tripping over ropes.

  The very ship shouted his triumph. Until the evening before, 23 May 1660, when it was still moored off Scheveningen, the port of the Hague, it had been the flagship Naseby, named after the battle of 1645 when Cromwell routed the royalist forces. It was built ten years later, a powerful three-decker, bulging with tiers of guns behind square portholes. When it was launched John Evelyn and his brother went to see ‘the greate Ship, newly built, by the Usurper Oliver, carrying 96 brasse Guns, & of 1000 tunn: In the prow was Oliver on horseback trampling 6 nations under foote, a Scott, Irishman, Dutch, French, Spaniard & English’. A statue of Fame ‘held a laurell over his insulting head, & the word God with us’.2

  God and the people, it seemed, had now made a different choice. Before the fleet weighed anchor the king and his brother James, Duke of York – who had been reinstated by parliament as High Admiral of the Fleet, a role his father had given him when he was nine – amended the names of the ships. The Naseby, which had trumpeted the royalists’ humiliation, became the Royal Charles. The Richard (son of Cromwell) took the Duke’s name, James, while the Dunbar, also marking defeat in battle, became the Henry, named after Charles’s younger brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester. The Speaker, voicing the power of the Commons, became the feminine Mary, for his sister the Princess of Orange, and the Lambert, honouring the brave republican general, took the name shared by Charles’s mother and youngest sister, Henrietta. This family flotilla was surrounded by maritime cheers: the Winsley became the Happy Return; the Cheriton the Speedwell; the Bradford the Success, and with them sailed the London and the Swiftsure. The flotilla was blessed, as with an amulet, with a necklace of names.

  Over the past month, when the Royal Charles-to-be had stood at anchor in the Downs off Deal, carpenters, sail-makers and chandlers rushed to refurbish it. The insulting figurehead of Cromwell was ripped down and replaced by Neptune flourishing his trident, riding on a sea-shell drawn by horses rising from the waves.3 Edward Montagu, who was in charge of the fleet, asked his twenty-six-year-old assistant Samuel Pepys to order silk flags and ‘scarlett waistcloathes’ – the painted canvas covering the hammocks when they were stowed away – and to arrange for a special barge to bring the king on board, with trumpets and fiddlers. The ship was stocked with provisions, including a hundred pounds of beef, and silver plate for the royal table. Montagu had been in secret communication with Charles for the past month and on 10 May he received a message from General Monck saying that ‘the King’s friends thought his Majesty’s present repair to London was absolutely necessary and therefore wished me to sail and waft the King over as soon as I could’.4 Two days later he set sail for the Dutch coast, leaving the rest of his small fleet to follow. Even so, the ship was not quite prepared. On the voyage tailors and painters hastily cut yellow cloth into the shape of a crown and ‘C.R.’ and sewed it onto a fine sheet, which they tacked onto the flag instead of the State’s arms.5 They arrived in Dutch waters two days later. For the next week a gale rocked the ships at their anchors, in winds so violent that any thought of leaving was set aside. The time was spent in diplomatic gatherings, exchanges of courtesies, banquets and feasts.

  At last the storms calmed. On Tuesday 22 May, the Duke of York – tall, thickset, handsome and stubborn – boarded the Naseby, so soon to be renamed, accompanied by the Duke of Gloucester. With a bevy of dignitaries the two dukes toured the ship and feasted off sides of beef on Montagu’s silver plate. It was an eve of celebration and firing of cannon (Pepys fired his own gun outside his cabin and gave himself a black eye).6 Next morning streams of people poured on board including the eighteen Lords Commissioners, sent to bring Charles home, and the royalist courtiers and their families. Chief among these was Edward Hyde, Charles’s adviser since his youth, his guide in exile and architect of his return. Hyde was now a corpulent fifty, often wincing from the gout he had suffered since his thirties, when he accompanied the fifteen-year-old Charles to the West Country. Since then he had been the leading figure in his entourage, exhorting the prince to stay sober, avoid women and be more diplomatic to his hosts, in whatever country they were drifting through. He also orchestrated affairs at home through a system of spies, penning endless letters from icy rooms, when candles and food were running low. In recent weeks he had organised audiences, received petitions, dealt with volumes of correspondence. Now, with his three sons also on board, he might expect some relief.

  The boarding parties were swollen by lawyers and priests, actors and poets, equerries, hairdressers, pages and cooks. The decks and gangways were jammed with men elbowing past each other, squeezing into corners, cramming into the cabins. Mid-morning, Charles arrived in his coach and stepped into a small boat, decked with garlands and crowns of flowers, which took him to the admiral’s barge where Montagu waited in his finest clothes, glittering with silver and gold braid. As the king embraced him, kissing him on both cheeks, the sailors huzza’d and threw their caps in the air, into the sea, ‘and even their doublets and waistcoats’.7 Over fifty thousand people thronged the shoreline to see Charles leave and the water was black with boats. Torches and flares lit the sky. Guns fired in a chaos of noise. The smoke swirling through the rigging was so thick that for a moment it hid the ships completely from the watchers on the shore.

  Following Charles and the Dukes of York and Gloucester, the women swept on board. First came their sister, Mary, with her ten-year-old son William, Prince of Orange, and then Charles’s aunt Elizabeth of Bohemia, sister of Charles I, ‘a very debonaire, but plain lady’, thought Pepys. Almost half a century ago, in 1613, Elizabeth had married the German Elector Palatine, Frederick V. Six years later he was offered the crown of Bohemia but he ruled for less than a year before Catholic armies drove him from Prague in the winter snows – hence Elizabeth’s title of ‘the Winter Queen’. Having lost both Bohemia and the Palatinate, they settled in the Hague where they brought up their large family, including Prince Rupert, the dashing Cavalier general. (Rupert was a baby when they fled Prague and was almost left behind in the panic, being thrown at the last moment into the boot of the coach.)8 A huge influence on her nephew Charles, the indomitable Elizabeth of Bohemia was the oldest of this Stuart family to learn the lessons of exile.

  The royal party dined in state in the ‘coach’, a cabin on the quarterdeck which was usually the officers’ wardroom. After Elizabeth, Mary and Prince William went ashore, the anchors were weighed and the sails were raised, their heavy cream canvas crackling and soughing in the breeze. Easing out of the harbour, tacking past the shallows and sandbanks, ‘with a fresh gale and most happy weather’, they sailed south and west, for Dover.

  Charles was returning in peace to a land he had left in conflict. He had fought since the age of twelve, when his childhood of dignity and ceremony, tutors and music was shattered by the outbreak of the first civil war in 1642. The close, loving family was separated. In February that year Charles I took Henrietta Maria and their daughter Mary from Windsor to Dover, and put them on board ship. As they sailed, he galloped along the cli
ffs, waving to his wife and daughter, until their ship was lost to view.

  Prince Charles himself left five years later, in June 1647, in the dying days of the royalist cause, yielding to his father’s entreaties to quit England. Aged seventeen, he went first to the Scilly Isles, then Jersey and finally to France, to stay with his mother. In April 1648, his brother James also reached the continent, escaping from St James’s Palace during a carefully staged game of hide-and-seek, disguised as a girl, and then boarding a Dutch ship. Eventually he arrived at the court of his sister Mary and her husband William II, Prince of Orange. That summer, when part of the parliamentary fleet mutinied and sailed to the Hague, Prince Charles came from Paris to see James. But instead of letting his fifteen-year-old brother be admiral in fact as well as name, he gave the command to his cousin Prince Rupert, a snub that James never forgot.

  At the end of 1648, when rumours spread of plans to put his father on trial, Charles lobbied the courts of France and Spain and the Dutch republic with angry, but fruitless, persistence. The trial began on 20 January 1649. A week later Charles I was sentenced, and on the 30th, famously wearing two shirts so that he would not shiver and appear to show fear, he stepped through the window of the Whitehall Banqueting House, onto the platform prepared for his execution. The news reached his son on 5 February. His chaplain, Stephen Goffe, entered the room and hesitated, before addressing him slowly as ‘Your Majesty’. Charles could not speak, but wept, furiously. Some reports say he dismissed Goffe with a wave, others that he rushed from the room. All agree that for the next few hours, he remained alone.