A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game Page 5
The courtiers who returned in Charles’s wake after their long exile could hardly believe it. When the elderly Marquess of Newcastle landed at Greenwich, his supper, he said, ‘seem’d more savoury to him, than any meat he had hitherto tasted’.2 Was it still a dream? ‘Surely?’ he thought, ‘I have been sixteen years asleep and am not thoroughly awake yet.’
Not everyone was so happy. To the old republicans it was as if they saw England dancing round an idol, a debauched crew, drinking and swilling their way around a false king. Two days after Charles landed, the governor of Windsor Castle was handed a note reporting that Thomas Lawrence, a dismissed soldier, had said ‘that he was hired of Mr Jenkin of Bishopsgate to kill the king’.3 Dismay spread long before Charles stepped ashore. A Captain Southwold declared that if he got hold of Charles he would dice him up ‘as small as herbs in a pot’ and a Lincolnshire vicar, on ‘the night when bonfires were made for proclaiming the King…kicked the fire about and said, “Stay! The rogue is not yet come over”’.4 Now the rogue had come. While some feared the worst, people in their thousands hoped their lives would change for the better.
From Canterbury Charles wrote to his sixteen-year-old sister Henriette-Anne – Minette, to her family – who was still with her mother in Paris. ‘My head is so prodigiously dazed’, he wrote, ‘by the acclamation of the people and by quantities of business that I know not whether I am writing sense or no.’5 He had plenty of business. He and Hyde both knew that one reason for the warmth of the cheers was that the restoration had been achieved without an armed invasion, without the help of foreign powers, and without loss of life. To keep this peaceful mood Charles must embrace powerful figures from the previous regime, both the ex-Cromwellian republicans and the moderate presbyterians who had fought against his father but had opposed his execution and had been in opposition for most of the Interregnum.
The work of fusing past and present power began straight away in Canterbury, so that the king’s intentions might be clear before he reached London and had to face the Lords and Commons. On Saturday 26 May, after a service in the cathedral – which was almost collapsing into ruins after years of neglect – Charles appointed four new members of the Order of the Garter. The first was General Monck, and Charles told him pointedly that the honour was for ‘your famous actions in military commands, and above all that by your wisdom, courage and loyalty, you have acted principally in our restoration without effusion of blood – acts that have no precedent or parallel’.6 The next was Montagu, also a former servant of Cromwell, and soon made Earl of Sandwich, who received the honour from a herald on board his ship. To balance the two Cromwellians, Charles honoured two royalists, the Marquis of Hertford and Thomas Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton.
From the moment he landed, as in his last days abroad, Charles faced a flood of requests. In his two days in Canterbury petitions poured in and people crowded round asking for an audience, some begging for pardon, others hoping for rewards. The Venetian ambassador, Francesco Giavarini, who raced on horseback from London, was impressed that Charles spoke to him in Italian, and impressed too by his patience as ‘at great personal inconvenience he remained standing many hours to receive the great numbers who came on purpose to kneel and kiss his hand, according to the custom of the country’.7
He stopped here for two days before the procession set off up Roman Watling Street. All the way, the road was lined with cheering people, said Lady Fanshawe, as if it were a single street. At Rochester, morris dancers swirled around the king, and at Chatham, the ships in the dockyard fired echoing rounds. The navy’s loyalty declared, now Charles had to face the army. On 29 May, his thirtieth birthday, he set off for London. But before he rode down the hill into his capital he had to cross Blackheath, where thirty thousand soldiers of the parliamentary army waited, summoned by Monck, perhaps as a silent reminder of his power. Roundheads gazed across at Cavaliers: at James, Duke of York, all in white, at Henry, Duke of Gloucester, in green silk, at Charles in his silver doublet, with gold lace on his cloak and a plume of red feathers in his hat. After a pause the Commonwealth troops laid their arms on the ground. Then they picked them up again as, technically at least, soldiers of the king.
Wenceslaus Hollar, The long view of London from Bankside, 1647. The London Charles would have known as a boy had hardly changed when he crossed London Bridge in May 1660.
From there on it was buoyant pantomime. In Deptford, ‘100 Maydens Cloathed in White’ scattered flowers and herbs in their way. At St George’s Fields in Southwark tents were erected and a banquet held. The Lord Mayor, Thomas Allen, knelt and handed the king the sword of the city, and was knighted in return.8 The king rode bareheaded between the old shops on London Bridge, and into the City.
This was still the medieval London, with bells pealing from its hundred old churches, loudest of all from St Paul’s, crouching like a weather-beaten Gothic lion at the head of Ludgate Hill. The procession passed through narrow streets of gabled houses, with their upper storeys, or ‘jetties’, hanging out over the cobbles. Great arches of blossoming hawthorn curved over the way, and huge swags of green oak leaves were nailed to the house-beams. Flags crowned the roofs, and silken banners and rich Turkey carpets were draped from the windows. The sun shone, and the light flashed off swords and spurs, trumpets and cornets, reflected in a thousand glittering window panes. Aldermen, liverymen from the London companies, freemen and apprentices, trumpeters in scarlet, jugglers, heralds and soldiers joined the procession. As it snaked from the Guildhall to Westminster the numbers swelled to twenty thousand, taking many hours to pass. The parade wound down Ludgate Hill, across the Fleet river, past the thieves’ dens and alleys of Alsatia, past the lawyers’ chambers in the Temple and on into the Strand, with its golden-crowned maypole and its great old mansions with their gardens running down to the river. ‘I stood in the Strand, & beheld it & blessed God,’ wrote John Evelyn.
And all this without one drop of bloud, & by that very army, which rebell’d against him: but it was the Lord’s doing, et mirabile in oculis nostris: for such a Restauration was never seene in the mention of any history, antient or modern, since the return of the Babylonian Captivity, nor so joyfull a day, & so bright, ever seene in this nation.9
Charles II arriving at the Banqueting House in 1660, after his triumphal procession through the city
The king had conquered his city.
At every point Charles was studiously diplomatic. Replying to speeches of welcome at Whitehall, he addressed the House of Lords in casual, heartfelt tones – who could doubt his sincerity?
My Lords
I am so disordered by my journey, and with the noise still sounding in my ears (which I confess was pleasing to me, because it expressed the affections of the people), as I am unfit at the present to make such a reply as I desire. Yet thus much I shall say unto you, that I take no greater satisfaction to myself in this my change, than that I find my heart really set to endeavour by all means for the restoring of this nation to freedom and happiness; and I hope by the advice of my Parliament to effect it.10
Finally he sat through a ceremonial dinner, viewed by an awed public. Turning at last to leave, he quipped, famously, that he now realised it must have been ‘my own fault that I have been absent so long – for I see nobody that does not protest he has ever wished for my return’.11
For the first few weeks Charles was circumspect, careful to present the sober aspect of the healing king. If he was to be trusted, he had to make his kingship visible, physically and personally, as well as felt in his actions as the ‘Crown’.
When he took the throne he wanted passionately to be seen as the healer of his people’s woes and the glory of his nation. Royal propaganda drew on religion and myth, custom, law and magic. Even before he landed, Samuel Tuke’s Character had described him as ‘handsome, graceful, serious, learned, shrewd, and of good morals for some time’.12 Tuke knew Charles well and his portrait, though idealised, does suggest some vital aspects of his
charm, his physical ease and his gift of attentivenes, which made people feel they were special when he talked to them:
His motions are so easy and graceful that they do very much recommend his person when he either walks, dances, plays at pall mall, at tennis, or rides the great horse, which are his usual exercises. To the gracefulness of his deportment may be joined his easiness of access, his patience in attention, and the gentleness both in the tune and style of his speech; so that those whom either the veneration for his dignity or the majesty of his presence have put into an awful respect are reassured as soon as he enters into a conversation.13
This ease and accessibility helped his cause, which was furthered by the press, the newsbooks and newsletters. News was disseminated across a vast web, with both formal and informal strands. Sheets of news had been printed and sold since 1641, and had proliferated during the Commonwealth. They were eagerly read in the coffee-houses and taverns, carried by the chapmen to the provinces, and sold in the city streets by ‘flying stationers’ and ‘mercuries’, boys and women who cried their hot news aloud, like hot pies, and often drew large crowds.14 The journalist Henry Muddiman, who had been producing twice-weekly newsbooks for the Rump Parliament, now worked with the royalist Sir John Birkenhead, licenser of the press, to bolster the king’s image in the new official newsbook Mercurius Publicus. In addition, local officials and men and women in country districts, or in Ireland, Scotland and the American colonies, relied on manuscript newsletters written by professional news-writers, to keep up with events and gossip.
Books and pamphlets, woodcuts and prints also spread the word. Within a year, works like Thomas Blount’s Boscobel: or the history of His Sacred Majestie’s…preservation appeared, retailing the dramatic flight from Worcester, as exciting as a chap-book legend. The painter Isaac Fuller produced a series of huge canvases, like a set of tapestries, turning classical and courtly poses into a crude, colourful drama of the king in disguise, the folk-hero of the people.15 One of the pageants at the next Lord Mayor’s show, staged outside the Nag’s Head in Cheapside, also represented the ‘great Woode, with the royal Oake, & history of his Majesties miraculous escape’.16
At the same time, Eikon Basilike…or the true pourtraiture of Charles II summoned the ghost of Charles’s martyred father, sanctified after his death in a book of the same name. Closely echoing Tuke’s words, the ‘true portraiture’ displayed the king to readers who had not seen the tall dark man riding on horseback in the London processions. He was, it explained, ‘so exactly formed’ that
from the crown of his head to the soule of his foot the most curious eye could not discern an error or a spot…Until he was near twenty years of age, his face was very lovely but of late he is grown leaner with care and age; the dark and night complexion of his face, and the twin stars of his quick and sharp eyes sparkling in that night; he is most beautiful when he speakes, his black shining locks normally curled with great rings…his motions easie and graceful, and plainly majestick.17
Isaac Fuller, Charles II and Colonel Careless Hiding in the Boscobel Oak
To add to the fervour, city priests and country vicars preached lengthy sermons, whose message was clear: ‘God’s command is – Fear God, Honour the King.’18 Kingship was more than an office of state. A king was the heart that pumped blood and gave life to the nation: through his representatives his will flowed through all institutions of state and Church. He created peers and bishops, gave charters to boroughs, appointed judges, directed the army and navy, made war and declared peace. If he wished, he could confiscate all land, and he could levy taxes on all who walked upon it, on the crops and cattle in the fields, the fish in the rivers, the riches in the mines. It was treason to curse him, and to wish, or even imagine, his death. He carried his subjects, as Hobbes said, like Jonah in the belly of the great Leviathan.
The potency of royalty was almost magical, and Charles did not hesitate to exploit it. Of the many portraits painted of him, all except a handful showed him in ceremonial robes or in armour, rather than as a mere mortal in everyday dress.19 Within a week of his landing, queues built up of people begging to be touched for ‘the King’s Evil’, a tradition that went back to Edward the Confessor, the holy king. The evil was scrofula, a tubercular disease of the lymph nodes, but the trail of supplicants usually contained sufferers from many other ailments. Charles himself was sceptical and wary, but more than ready to exploit the mystique.
To begin with the touchings took place in the open air, but after a deluge in June, when the sick waited for hours in the rain, ceremonies were held in the Banqueting House. In the first two months Charles touched around seventeen hundred people – stroking their faces with both hands, while his chaplain intoned, ‘He put his hands upon them, and he healed them.’ A thousand more waited. Exhausted, he announced that while he was ‘graciously pleased to dispatch all that are already come’, he would have to defer the rest ‘to a more reasonable opportunity’. Patients could get tickets at the sign of the Hare in Covent Garden for Wednesday and Friday, ‘which two days His Majesty is pleased to set apart for this so pious and charitable work’.20 The stream never stopped, running on average to between three thousand and four thousand a year. Many proclaimed themselves cured, perhaps the result of auto-suggestion, perhaps because a disease like scrofula naturally waxed and waned. It was an expensive magic – Charles placed round the neck of each supplicant a gold coin, an angel, strung on a white ribbon – but it was money well spent. To some sufferers, the royal magic was innate in his person and needed no ceremonial trappings. According to John Aubrey, the visionary Arise Evans had ‘a fungous nose and had said that the King’s hand would cure him, and on the first coming of Charles II into St James’s Park, he kissed the King’s hand and rubbed his nose with it; which disturbed the King, but cured him’.21 The power of touching, like the extravagant rituals and processions, tied Charles’s person to medieval ideas of divine kingship, and reinforced the link to the chivalric orders of romance. But it also brought Charles into close physical contact with the poorest of his people and he managed this with ease. His time roaming the streets of foreign cities, and even his wanderings from Worcester, had made Charles less formal than his father, or other European monarchs. Observers were staggered by his lack of pomp. He stood bare-headed, gasped the Venetian resident, a style not used by any other crowned head in Europe, ‘but adopted by this king with everyone, whatever his character, for he excels all other potentates in humanity and affability’.22
Charles touching for the King’s Evil, with his chaplains on his left, courtiers on his right and Yeomen holding back the crowds
Yet Charles wanted it both ways. He gambled on his personal power, and in doing so staked his reputation as a sober king. He wanted the magnificence and ceremony, but he also wanted to show that his court was not hidebound by antique custom, but young, exciting, European in outlook. Although he rarely seemed hurried, in the months after his return he worked like a demon, but work done, he enjoyed himself. In the years of exile, Hyde had often lamented that he could not control the leisure of Charles and his circle, and the same was true now. Charles was already establishing a rival image to that which his advisers were engineering so carefully, and one that would prove harder to control. A brilliant, witty and sometimes wild court was beginning to form around him.
Schooled by Hyde, Charles began with good intentions as regards the behaviour of his court. The Establishment Book for Whitehall in 1660 is entitled ‘Regulations for the better service in the household’, and declares its aim simply and solemnly, ‘to establish good government and order in our Court, which from then may spread with more honour through all parts of our kingdom’.23 Immediately, however, it gives a sense of what Whitehall was really like, when it decrees that in future there should be ‘no Houses, Tents, Booths, or places to be employed for Tipling, selling or taking Tobacco, Hott waters or for any kind of Disorder’. The marshals must remove vagrants, rogues, beggars, idle and loose people an
d the porters keep out ‘stragling and Masterless men, any suspitious Person or Uncivill, uncleanly and Rude People’. There must be no profanity, swearing or fighting. The sense of incipient chaos even touched the Chapel Royal. There had been, declares the little rule book, ‘a very great Indecence and irreverence here…a throng of persons talk aloud & walk in time of divine service’. In future, all those guilty would be banned. As if primed for trouble, the rules insisted, too, that the Yeomen in the quasi-public Great Chamber who controlled the press of people bringing petitions or having business at court should be tall, strong and ‘of manly Presence’. These royal bouncers apart, there were an infinity of roles to be performed and rooms and corridors to be supervised.
The new court set a very different style from the formality of Charles I. In the summer of 1660 rakes swaggered in velvet coats and high-heeled shoes, flocking around Charles as he walked in Hyde Park. Courtiers crowded into skiffs in the evening cool, following the royal barge and watching the fireworks fly. Charles was restless and energetic. (Several of the formal portraits suggest how much he disliked sitting still.) He rode, he swam in the Thames, he played bowls on the Whitehall green, and even on a large barge moored near the palace, where a spiral staircase led from the deck to a bowling green on the roof, covered with green cloth. ‘It is level like a green in the open air,’ noted one amazed spectator, ‘with wooden tubs all round planted with all kinds of flowering plants and trees.’24
And wherever he was, Charles played tennis. First he refitted the tennis court at Hampton Court, and then installed a new court at Whitehall, the first for a hundred years. In this great room, with a court 118 feet long, lit by windows high in the wall, Charles played constantly. It was a hard, physical, sweaty game, played with cork and felt balls hit with heavy wooden rackets that had scarcely changed since Tudor times, their head about the size of a hand (this is the French jeu de paume). The ball rocketed off the high walls and the penthouse roof, and was served, fiendishly fast, at the opponent at the ‘hazard end’. Unlike some kings, Charles did not always expect to win. In 1662 Pepys watched him play with Sir Arthur Slingsby, ‘beating three and loosing two sets against my Lord of Suffolke and my Lord Chesterfield’.25 And he did not mind an audience. A few years later, the Italian visitor Lorenzo Magalotti noted, ‘He usually plays there three times a week in a doublet; the guards stand at the street door, but do not refuse entry to anyone who has the face or attire of a gentleman’.26 Crowds came to watch him too as he dined in public, three times a week, in the Banqueting House or the presence chamber, where the crush was so great that a balustrade was erected in front of the table.