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

  During the year that followed, all the European powers accepted Cromwell’s authority, while Charles vainly begged for their support. By 1650 he seemed desperate, seeking distraction and choosing as his companion George Villiers, the mercurial Duke of Buckingham, five years his senior. After the violent stabbing of his father, the first duke, hated favourite of James I and Charles I, the baby George and his brother Francis, born after his father’s death, were made royal wards. The Villiers brothers had thus grown up with the royal children but during the civil wars they toured the continent with their tutors, lingering in the Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici, studying amid Rome’s baroque splendour, dallying in Venice and Geneva. On their return to England in 1649 they joined a reckless uprising in which Francis was killed, trapped with his back pinned against an oak tree. Buckingham fled to the exiled court. Both he and Charles had known tragedy, but to Charles, at nineteen, his friend’s life seemed glamorous in contrast to his own shifting existence. In the words of Gilbert Burnet, Buckingham was then ‘a man of noble appearance and of a most lovely wit, wholly turned to mirth and pleasure…the pleasantness of his humour and conversation, the extravagance and sharpness of his wit, unrestrained by any modesty or religion, drew persons of all affections and inclinations to like his company.’9 But in Burnet’s view, his scepticism and propensity to ridicule was dangerous, ‘he possessed the young king with very ill principles both as to religion and morality, and with a very mean opinion of his father, whose stiffness was with him a frequent subject of raillery’.

  The charismatic Buckingham played his part in the next disastrous move, when Charles, whose armies in Ireland had now been defeated, turned to the Scots. This was a painful choice. The Scottish rebellion against his father’s imposition of the Anglican prayer book, and their signing of the National Covenant to uphold the presbyterian principles of the Scottish kirk, had spurred the course towards war in the late 1630s. And although they had later changed sides to support the king, they had finally handed him over to the parliamentary forces, and thus to his death. In approaching the Scots Charles was urged on by Buckingham, the Marquess of Argyll, the dominant figure in the kirk regime, and the Earl of Lauderdale, a Covenanter who nevertheless in 1648 had negotiated the ‘Engagement’ that secured Scottish support for the defeated Charles I. At last, after weeks of fraught negotiations, Charles agreed to accept the authority of the kirk. If his protestant French grandfather Henry IV had thought Paris worth a mass, Argyll reminded him, then perhaps Britain was worth a covenant. He was too late, however, to stop the Earl of Montrose, whom he had previously ordered to invade Scotland. By the time Charles’s message arrived, Montrose’s small army had been slaughtered in a Highland glen. Montrose himself was executed in Edinburgh, proclaiming his loyalty to the last.

  After a long and stormy North Sea passage Charles landed at Garmouth, on the Spey, and on 3 July 1650, still aboard ship, he swore the solemn oath to uphold the National Covenant, and promised to follow the presbyterian form of worship approved by the General Assembly of the Kirk, ‘and shall never make any opposition to any of these, nor endeavour any alteration therein’.10 It was a cynical oath, sworn in desperation. The Scots knew this, and gloried in their power. When Charles travelled south down the coast to Aberdeen, he found the hand of Montrose nailed to the Tolbooth across the road from his lodgings. He said nothing, but he would never forget nor forgive. Although he was taken with great ceremony to Edinburgh and then to Perth, he was virtually the prisoner of the kirk, enduring long sermons and humiliating lectures.

  Within a month of his arrival, Cromwell invaded, and in September the Scots army was defeated at Dunbar. The setback was made worse by the news that his sister Elizabeth, a prisoner at Carisbrooke Castle, had died of consumption, at the very point that she and his young brother Henry were given leave to go to France. In early October Charles used the pretext of a hunting trip to escape, hoping to raise royalist support in the Highlands, but he was soon overtaken, found exhausted in a peasant’s cottage, and brought back to Perth. The Scots tried to make amends in January by crowning him King of Scotland in Scone, but as the months passed he grew increasingly bitter and when parliamentary troops crossed the Firth of Forth in July, he burst into action. With twelve thousand troops, he marched south. He hoped England would rise to greet him, but the people were sick of war and few would march with their old enemy the Scots. Buckingham sulked when Charles refused to let him lead the troops and when they were deep in England, with no chance of turning back, Cromwell caught up with them at Worcester. With twice the number of soldiers, on 3 September 1651, fighting through the narrow streets, he destroyed the Scottish army.

  Princess Elizabeth, portrayed in the frontispiece of Christopher Wase’s translation of Sophocles’ Electra, 1649. This was dedicated to the princess, thus casting Charles II as Orestes.

  Everyone present praised Charles’s courage. ‘Certainly a braver Prince never lived,’ said one of his officers, ‘having in the day of the fight hazarded his person much more than any officer of his army, riding from regiment to regiment.’11 His escape, too, was quick, decisive and bold. Now, nine years later, as he strode the deck of the Royal Charles, this was the story he returned to. ‘All the afternoon the King walked here and there, up and down (quite contrary to what I thought him to have been), very active and stirring,’ wrote Pepys.12

  Upon the quarterdeck he fell into discourse of his escape from Worcester, where it made me ready to weep to hear the stories that he told of his difficulties that he had passed through, as his travelling four days and three nights on foot, every step up to his knees in dirt, with nothing but a green coat and a pair of country breeches on, and a pair of country shoes that made him so sore all over his feet, that he could scarce stir.

  Although a huge reward of £1,000 was on his head, and all were asked to watch out for ‘a tall black man, over two yards high’, Charles dodged his pursuers with the help of the royalist network and his own wits and charm. He took refuge with Catholic gentry in Shropshire and Staffordshire before cutting his long black hair short and working his way across the West Country as a servant of Jane Lane, a colonel’s daughter travelling to help her sister-in-law in childbirth. As a servant should, he rode on horseback with her, doffing his cap to his betters, overseeing the shoeing of a horse, fumbling with a kitchen jack, joking with ostlers and grooms. Finding no chance of a boat from Bristol or Bridport in Dorset, both bristling with Commonwealth troops, Charles turned east, along the south coast. People guessed who he was, but no one betrayed him. In Brighton, as he stood with his hands on the back of a chair near the fire, an innkeeper knelt down and kissed his hand, ‘saying, that he would not ask him who he was, but bid God bless him whither he was going’.13

  Colonel Wilmot escorting Charles and Jane Lane

  At last, after nearly six weeks, he found a passage in a collier brig from Shoreham in Sussex to Fécamp in Normandy. In a final scare, just off the French coast, the crew spotted a boat nearby that looked like a privateer and Charles and his companion Henry Wilmot, who had stayed by his side since Worcester at constant risk of his life, slipped into a small cock-boat manned by the ship’s mate, a Quaker named Carver. As they neared the shore, Carver hoisted Charles onto his shoulders and carried him through the surf. By the time he reached Rouen he was so exhausted and ragged that the innkeepers took him for a vagrant and before he left they checked his room to see if anything was stolen.

  In gratitude, the following year Charles created Wilmot Earl of Rochester, and when Wilmot died in 1658 he made his ten-year-old son John his foster son, the small boy who would grow up to be poet, satirist and tragic libertine. For years Charles stayed quiet about these adventures for fear of reprisals against his helpers, but now, on board ship, he could speak, and later he would shower them with honours. The escape from Worcester became a favourite story, soon embellished with the account of his day in the great oak at Boscobel, spying through the branches on the searchers below. The sto
ry was a reminder, to himself and to others, of what he could achieve. He had been cool and quick-thinking in sudden danger; he had enjoyed the variety, the disguise, the challenges, the fast pace. He had been courteous, never rattled, getting on easily with men and women he would not normally meet, from country matrons to soldiers, merchants and servants. Perhaps, too, he returned to these days so often because the help of the common people had given him a sense that he was loved, something he rarely felt in the flattery of the court.

  When he told his story in mid-Channel in May 1660, his hearers were astounded, just as he intended. That evening he ate alone in his newly gilded cabin, treading luxurious Turkey rugs, slipping between fine linen sheets, pulling up the covers with their gold and silver fringes. But late into the night, in less comfortable quarters, Pepys and his friends were still talking of the king’s escape, ‘as how he was fain to eat a piece of bread and cheese out of a poor boy’s pocket; how, at a Catholique house, he was fain to lie in the priest’s hole a good while’. It was a calm night, with the waves lapping against the hull under a full moon, and the stars and flaring torches on the boats reflected in the inky Channel deeps. So calm, indeed, that wherries took excited groups back and forth, visiting their friends in the other ships into the early hours. Finally the company broke up. Under sail all night, the ships were quiet except for the cry of the watch.

  2 Landing

  And welcome now, great monarch, to your own;

  Behold th’ approaching cliffs of Albion;

  It is no longer motion cheats your view,

  As you meet it, the land approacheth you.

  JOHN DRYDEN, ‘Astraea Redux’

  AS DAY DAWNED, the company on the Royal Charles rose early. Pepys dressed up in his best stockings and showed off the new wide tops to his boots. ‘Extraordinary press of Noble company, and great mirth all the day…Walking upon the decks, where persons of Honour all the afternoon.’1 Among the crowd was the playwright Thomas Killigrew, now in his late forties, who had been a page to Charles I and a favourite of Henrietta Maria. He had followed their son into exile, acting as Charles’s agent in Venice (sent back after complaints of his debauchery), and had then married a wealthy Dutch wife and settled in Holland, fighting for the Friesland army.2 The Killigrews had been a court family since the time of Elizabeth I, and Thomas’s elder brothers, William and Henry, were a diplomat and a royal chaplain. But while they were university-educated, Thomas was not. The most exuberant of twelve children of a lively musical and intellectual family, he made his way by his wits. On board ship he told risqué stories and composed a song about the cut-purse Moll Frith, ‘which he sang to Charles II till tears of laughter ran down the merry monarch’s cheeks’.3

  To Lady Fanshawe, who had been by her husband’s side all through the hard years of exile, this was a voyage of ‘joy and gallantry’. She rejoiced in the vessels sailing before the wind, ‘with vast cloths and streamers, the neatness and cleanness of the ships, the strength and jollity of the mariners, the gallantry of the commanders, the vast plenty of all sorts of provisions. Above all, the glorious majesties of the king and his two brothers were so beyond man’s expectation and expression!’4

  The new king was well aware how great those expectations were. When he told the tale of Worcester, he did not carry the story forward from his landing in the surf. In 1650 he had landed on the shores of a continent devastated by decades of religious conflict. The Thirty Years War, which had begun with the Czech protestant rebellion in Bohemia that placed his aunt Elizabeth briefly on the throne, had ended only two years before. The rich lands of Bohemia and Bavaria and northern Germany had been stripped of crops and trees, their peasants strung up, their nobles decapitated, their castles razed. Sweden had been drawn into the war, then Denmark, France and Spain. In the exhausted aftermath Spain clung to the remnants of its empire under its crumbling Habsburg dynasty. In the Netherlands, after eighty years of resistance, William II of Orange wrested freedom from Spain for the seven United Provinces in 1648. For decades to come France and Spain would wrangle over the southern provinces of Flanders, the Spanish Netherlands.

  Charles’s own royal relations, born of a scattering of dynastic marriages across Europe, were in trouble. In 1641 his sister Mary, then nine years old, had married the fourteen-year-old Prince William of Orange. At the start of the civil war she crossed to the Hague. But although the House of Orange supported the royalist cause, it was locked in a struggle with the States General of the United Provinces – the most powerful province being Holland, a name that the English often gave the whole country. As well as having its own assembly, each province also elected a stadtholder, a governor, and this post was usually held simultaneously in all the states by the current Prince of Orange, since the family were revered by the common people for leading them in their war of independence. But when William II died of smallpox in 1650, eight days before his son was born, the republican government immediately reduced his family’s power. Republicans in England rejoiced. ‘God taketh away our enemies abroad viz the Prince of Orange,’ wrote the puritan Essex vicar Ralph Josselin, ‘which is great work as things stood there and here.’5 When Charles fled from Worcester Mary was fighting her own battles. She could not know then that her son would survive to become one of the most powerful monarchs of Europe, as William III of England.

  Nor could Charles expect much from the family of his mother, Henrietta Maria. France was not only fighting Spain but suffering its own civil war, the Fronde, the uprising of the great nobles and the parlements of Paris and the provinces. (In Paris gangs of old soldiers hardened by fighting in Germany used their frondes, or slings, to hurl stones through the windows of the royal palaces.) Charles’s cousin Louis XIV was only six and until he came of age France was ruled by the Queen-Regent, Anne of Austria, and her adviser Cardinal Mazarin, who smiled on the English exile when it suited him and ignored him coolly when it did not.

  Charles camped with Henrietta Maria in her quarters in the Louvre and St Germain, skulking in the freezing corridors, bored and poor. Soon all the family were in exile, as parliament finally gave the youngest brother, Henry, leave to cross the Channel in February 1653. In Britain, any uprisings were badly planned and soon routed. The exiled court quarrelled constantly, with the Queen’s party opposing that of Hyde and James Butler, Marquess of Ormond, while the ‘Swordsmen’, loyal to Prince Rupert, veered between the two. Everywhere Charles went, he tried to keep up the appearance of a royal prince, dining off good plate, playing tennis, dancing. But for years he turned and turned and turned again, trailing his shabby band from court to court, palming royal pensions, smiling and bowing, learning to keep his counsel. In 1654, when Mazarin was making overtures to the Commonwealth and Charles was no longer welcome in France, he moved to Cologne as a pensioner of the Imperial court. His hopes rose when the Dutch were at war with England in the mid-1650s, and the Orange party flourished briefly again, but he was still unwelcome in Holland.

  He was watched at every turn. From Cologne he wrote to Elizabeth of Bohemia, ‘my sister and I goe on Sunday in the afternoone towards frankeforde…tis so great a secret that not above half of the town of Collen knows of it…I hope we shall be furnished with some good storyes before the ende of our voyage.’6 When the German welcome ran out, he approached Spain, and in 1656 settled his court in Bruges, in the Spanish Netherlands, promising to help fight any French advance. By now he was adept at making promises he could not keep. In June 1658 the Anglo-French army defeated the Spanish and as a reward, Dunkirk was ceded to Cromwell’s Britain. In exile many of Charles’s supporters lost all they possessed. In the bitter March winds of this year the elderly Lord Norwich was wearing a cut-down coat, singed in a fire. ‘Wonder not at my silence,’ Norwich wrote in one letter, ‘for I have been dull, lame, cold, out of money, clothes and what not.’7

  Then came a glimmer through the clouds. In September 1658, on the seventh anniversary of the Battle of Worcester, Oliver Cromwell died, after a summer of
storms and portents. His corpse, decaying too fast and badly embalmed, was stored away and a doll-like wax effigy of the Great Protector, robed like a king with a crown on his head, was propped up amid a blaze of candles in Somerset House for the people to file past. Two months later, the effigy was cloaked in black velvet and carried in state in an open chariot to Westminster Abbey. John Milton, Cromwell’s Latin secretary, and his assistants, Andrew Marvell and the young John Dryden, marched in the great funeral procession.

  When Cromwell’s son Richard, ‘Tumbledown Dick’, was forced to resign by the New Model Army in May 1659, royalists in Britain at last saw a chance of action, planning risings across the country. But these were designed to coincide with a Spanish attack, and when Spanish support failed to come, many groups dispersed. The last hope lay with Sir George Booth, who was fighting a surprisingly successful campaign in Cheshire. Charles rode to Calais, only to learn, just as he was about to set sail for England, that Booth’s men had been defeated and the leaders imprisoned. In his frustration, he made one last effort to wring help from France and Spain. The two powers were now allies again, and their representatives were to meet in October on the Spanish border to settle the marriage of Louis XIV to the Spanish Infanta, Maria Teresa. Charles sailed down the French coast to the port of Fuentarrabia in the Basque country, but although he impressed all present with his charm, intelligence and drive, he won nothing. While he was there, however, news came from London that turned his thoughts in a different direction. Visiting his mother and sister in Paris on the way, he sped back to Brussels.

  The news that drove him north came from England, where old animosities had flared between the republican New Model Army and the Rump Parliament, which failed to meet one of the conditions on which the army had restored it to power, namely to give the troops their arrears of pay. In October, General John Lambert marched to London and summarily dismissed the Rump. Power now lay with the army council, and government broke down. Taxes went uncollected and the goldsmiths took their hoard out of the capital. The army itself was split by faction and on Boxing Day – when Charles arrived back in Brussels – the Rump Parliament reassembled and ordered Lambert to disband his forces. He refused. The resolution of the impasse lay far to the north, on the Scottish border, where George Monck, supreme commander of the army in Scotland, had massed his troops. For weeks, Monck gave no hint which way he would jump. Then on New Year’s Day 1660, he crossed the border. In a cold January with great falls of snow, he marched south. He claimed that he was coming to the capital to demand pay for his troops, but he was besieged on all sides by petitioners asking that he press for a ‘full and free Parliament’, a newly elected body. Everyone knew that such a parliament would vote for the king’s return.