A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game Page 6

  Charles seemed to need to fill every minute, from dawn to dusk. Ten days after his arrival a newsletter reported, ‘His Majesty’s only recreation as yet is at tennis by 5 o’clock in the morning for an hour or two.’27 In mid-August Pepys hurried to Whitehall to find Sandwich, only to discover that the king had ‘gone this morning at five in the morning to see a Dutch pleasure boat below bridge, where he dines and my Lord with him. The King do tire all his people that are about him with early rising since he come.’28 The boat Charles had gone to see was the Mary, presented to him by the Dutch East India Company. Sailing, which he had learnt as a youth in Jersey, became another of his great passions. It was an exhilarating relief from the stifling court, fighting the river currents and harnessing the wind, hearing the slapping of the water and the cries of the crew. The following year he had an even finer yacht, the Catherine, built for him at Deptford. The Duke of York also had a yacht built, the Anne, and the brothers raced from Greenwich to Gravesend, tacking past wharves and warehouses out into the estuary, past the mud-flats and sand-banks and marshes. The wager was £100 and Charles lost sailing downstream against a contrary wind, but saved his stake on returning. The large yachts, each around a hundred tons, were a rare sight on a river crowded with traffic, their sails billowing among the forest of masts.

  The royal yacht ‘Bezan’, 1661

  Charles also had a smaller Dutch pleasure boat, the Bezan, which was often used by members of the Navy Board to take them up and down to Deptford and Greenwich.29 He lavished money on his yachts, fitting them out and making them luxurious. Account books over the years are full of entries such as ‘carpett in the Henrietta yacht’, or ‘one fine Turkey carpet for the King’s yacht Isabelle’. The Isabelle had walnut armchairs and stools, a walnut bed with a carved end and a very large strong table with twisted pillars for legs, which would fold down on both sides.30 On his yachts, as on the tennis court, Charles showed off his sporting ability, his keen eye and love of speed.

  This physical power was part of his allure, his presence as a strong, youthful king. He packed work into the mornings to leave the rest of the day free. One day in October he dashed off a note to Hyde at eight o’clock:

  I am going to take my usual Physique at tennis. I send you heere the letters which my Ld Aubigny desires me to write, look them ouer, and if there be no exceptions to them returne them by twelue a clock, for I would willingly dispatch them this afternoone.31

  In the afternoons, after the Council’s work was done and Hyde had hobbled home, the king was free. Now was the time for entertainments, high and low. In August 1660, in the Great Hall where his parents had staged their elegant masques, he watched a show with tight-rope dancers. The skill of the dancers was legendary on the continent and now they, and three new court acrobats, entranced the English court. The next month, in a very different venue, he went to the Lady Fair across the river in Southwark. The fair, which had been subdued during the Interregnum, now burst into life again in a fortnight of riotous entertainment, with freak shows, and monkeys dressed as court gallants, turning somersaults on the wire, carrying lighted candles or balancing cups of water, ‘without spilling a drop’. All the court went to see ‘the Italian Wench daunce to admiration, & performe all the Tricks of agility on the high rope’, and to admire her father, who could lift enormous weights by the hair of his head alone.32

  Charles, however, wanted to bring smarter entertainment to London, and soon began negotiating with an Italian opera company and with foreign musicians. At Whitehall he had the old Cockpit theatre fitted with a new stage floor and pavilions in the gallery for musicians and players. Men worked through the nights to get it ready for the first performance on 19 November. In the same month, in a disdainful gesture at puritan restraint, Charles granted an exclusive patent to Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant to build two playhouses and create new theatrical companies. They opened in converted tennis courts, Killigrew’s King’s Company, with experienced actors and the rights to many old plays, in Gibbon’s Tennis Court in Vere Street, and Davenant’s Duke’s Company, patronised by James, in Salisbury Court near Whitefriars. Davenant was the most innovative, with a young, dynamic company and new writers, and in 1661 he moved to a newly built theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, complete with movable scenery. Both troupes lavished money on costumes, sets and music.

  The most startling attraction was seeing women on stage, as in continental theatres. To begin with boys still played female roles. The current darling was the seventeen-year-old Edward Kynaston, ‘a Compleat Stage Beauty’, whom the ladies of quality swept off in their coaches to Hyde Park, still in his costume, as if he were one of them.33 But Kynaston’s reign was now over. The royal patent turned puritan disapproval on its head, declaring, tongue in cheek, that since it had been ‘scurrilous’ and unnatural to see men taking the parts of women, from now on all female parts should be acted by women, so that the plays would be ‘not only harmless delights but useful and instructive representations of human life to such of our good subjects as shall resort to the same’.34 Court women, including Henrietta Maria, had acted in the royal masques, and in 1656 an actress, Mrs Coleman, had appeared in a private performance before Cromwell of Davenant’s own opera, The Siege of Rhodes. But the first time a woman stepped onto the public London stage was as Desdemona with the King’s Company on 8 December 1660. Within a year every play was sporting dancing, fast jigs, and cross-dressing roles to show off the actresses’ fine legs.

  Charles’s other new public passion was the park. He and James often walked with their courtiers and their dogs in St James’s Park, and in his first autumn three hundred labourers were called in to dig a new canal. He planted trees and groves and fruit trees and added to the exotic animals and birds that had been in the royal menagerie since the time of his grandfather James I. Foreign ambassadors and English trading companies brought new additions, from the Russian ambassador’s pelican from Astrakhan to eighty-two ostriches from Morocco. There were deer of all kinds and flocks of wild fowl, for whom Charles created a decoy, ‘which for being neere so great a City, & among such a concourse of Souldiers, Guards & people, is very diverting’.35

  St James’s Park, in Faithorne’s map of 1658, before the new canal was dug, showing the road curving round from Charing Cross to Whitehall, and Berkshire House opposite St James’s Palace. To the north, Piccadilly is an open country road.

  Here too Charles was on display, showing off his physical grace by playing pell-mell on the new court he had built (on the site of the present Pall Mall), over eight hundred paces long, modelled on one at Utrecht. Here, enthused the poet Edmund Waller,

  …a well-polished Mall gives us the joy

  To see our prince his matchless force employ:

  His manly posture and his graceful mien,

  Vigour and youth in all his motions seen;

  His shape so lovely and his limbs so strong

  Confirm our hopes we shall obey him long.

  No sooner has he touched the flying ball

  But ’tis already more than half the Mall;

  And such a fury from his arm has got,

  As from a smoking culverin ’twere shot.36

  In Waller’s rapturous verse he is the emobodiment of martial force, as well as youthful beauty, his game a warning to the nation as well as a diversion.

  The court itself was diverting, as if dressed for a play. The very cut of court clothes spoke defiance and proclaimed a new age. Only two years before, Sir John Reresby had arrived in London after brawling and seducing his way round Europe, to find that his clothes and his black servant immediately marked him out as a target:

  The citizens and common people of London had then soe far imbibed the custome and manners of a Commonwealth that they could scarce endure the sight of gentlemen, soe that the common salutation to a man well dressed was ‘French dog’ or the like. Walkeing one day in the street with my valet de chambre, who did wear a feather in his hatt, some workemen who were mending
the street abused him and threw sand upon his cloaths, at which he drew his sword, thinking to follow the custome of France in the like cases. This made the rabble fall upon him and me, that had drawn too in his defence, till we got shelter in a house, not without injury to our bravery and some blowes to ourselves.37

  Now these French fashions were flaunted in the face of the people. The men were peacock-fine from top to toe, from their shallow-brimmed beaver hats, trimmed with ostrich feathers, to their beribboned shoes or loose-topped boots, with boot-hose tumbling over the top. Their short doublets covered floppy linen shirts, which flowed down to wide-legged trousers called ‘Rhinegraves’ or ‘petticoat breeches’, hanging loosely from the hips, and garnished with yards of ribbons.38 Some had legs so wide that Pepys wrote of one man who ‘put both his legs through one of his Knees of his breeches, and went so all day’.39

  From France came a new vogue for wigs (Louis XIV had forty wigmakers). This too was new and unsettling. ‘Counterfeit hair’, wrote the author Randle Holme, is ‘a thing much used in our days by this generation of Men, contrary to our forefathers, who got Estates, loved their Wives, and wore their own hair’.40 Soon wigs, like the new silk handkerchiefs that men waved nonchalantly as they walked, became a target for London thieves, tweaked off the head by a clever dog or by a small boy carried on another’s shoulders. Many courtiers adopted black tumbling locks, mimicking the king, but there was a considerable choice. You could have simple locks to cover the ears and neck, fixed to a cap under your hat; a short bob; a ‘campaign wig’, complete with knots, bobs and a curled forehead; or a frise, full of small crisped curls. It was in fashion to comb the hair in public with large combs, a nicety to be cultivated, like taking snuff.

  Clothes could cost a fortune. Buckingham allegedly spent £30,000 on his jewel-encrusted suit for the coronation. Although Charles’s own coronation clothes were ordered from Paris at great expense, in daily life he was less flamboyant. One day in 1661 he turned up to see the Chancellor in a plain riding-suit and velvet cap, ‘in which he seemed a very ordinary man to one that had not known him’.41 But however casually he acted, he stayed stylish and cool, a pattern of good breeding. He dressed elegantly and formally, following Ormond whom he had always revered as a model. Ormond wore his hat stiff ‘as the king did, without a button and uncocked’, and had waistcoats laid out for him every morning – ‘satin, silk, plain and quilted’ – to choose according to the weather. In winter-time people were allowed to come to court with double-breasted coats, a sort of undress. ‘The Duke would never take advantage of that indulgence; but let it be ever so cold, he always came in his proper habit; and indeed the king himself, the best judge of manners of his time, always did the same, though too many neglected his example.’42

  In these early months, magic and ceremony and archaic formality collided at court with colour and fashion, liberty and licence. Charles was at once formal and engagingly human. A month after his arrival an urgent personal appeal appeared in Mercurius Publicus, asking help in finding his dog. It was black,

  between the greyhound and a spaniel, no white about him only a streak on his breast, and tayl a little bobbed. It is His Majesties own dog, and doubtless was stolen. Whoever finds him may acquaint any at Whitehall for the dog was better known at Court than those who stole him. Will they never leave robbing His Majestie? Must he not keep a dog?43

  The urgent but witty tone was not that of a self-important monarch. ‘So affable was he in the galleries and park,’ wrote one courtier of Charles’s later days, ‘he would pull off his hat to the meanest.’44 But this very affability meant that when he chose to ‘take on Majesty’, his dignity was even more striking and effective. Charles understood the language of gesture and the old forms of kingship, but it was clear to all who watched him that his personal style was something quite new.

  4 Three Crowns and More

  Nor gold, nor Acts of grace; ’tis steel must tame

  The stubborn Scot: a prince that would reclaim

  Rebels by yielding, doth like him (or worse)

  Who saddled his own back to shame his horse…

  No more let Ireland brag her harmless nation

  Fosters no venom, since the Scots plantation.

  JOHN CLEVELAND, ‘The Rebel Scot’

  IT WAS A HUGE TASK to re-establish monarchical government, while taking into account, as Charles had promised, ‘the advice of my Parliament’. He and his advisers had to remake the administration, bringing in leading figures from the past regime, while ensuring that the king was surrounded by people he could trust. The structure inherited from medieval times remained the model.1 Power flowed from the king through the administration, divided between the Privy Council, the Exchequer and the Chancery. These were headed respectively by the two Secretaries of State, the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Treasurer. The Secretaries were responsible, among other duties, for representatives abroad, and for the Signet Office, which dealt with royal letters and grants; the Chancellor was head of the legal side of government and authorised grants of privileges and royal charters under the ‘Great Seal’.

  Charles held his first Privy Council meeting in Canterbury, within a couple of days of landing. He had already appointed Hyde as Lord Chancellor in exile, in 1658. Now, continuing his careful policy of conciliation, he chose as one of his two Secretaries of State, not the loyal Sir Richard Fanshawe who had shared his exile and expected the post, but Monck’s secretary William Morice, who was, Fanshawe complained, ‘a fierce Presbiterian, and one that never saw the King’s face’.2 Morice was balanced by Sir Edward Nicholas, who had served Charles I and given loyal service in the dark days abroad, while another royalist, the old Earl of Southampton, became Lord Treasurer. These men, with Ormond and Monck – now made Duke of Albemarle – were the innermost circle, ‘the Secret Council’, officially the Committee for Foreign Affairs, sometimes described as the forerunner of the cabinet. They were joined by Southampton’s ambitious nephew by marriage, Anthony Ashley Cooper, a former member of the Protectorate’s Council of State. After speaking eloquently on behalf of the crown in the House of Commons, as MP for Wiltshire, he was made Lord Ashley, and became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the spring of 1661.

  Charles’s full Privy Council numbered about forty men. It included his brothers James and Henry and seven of his councillors in exile, but the central pillar was Hyde. As a young man, Edward Hyde had been a brilliant lawyer and politician, the shrewdest of Charles I’s advisers. At that stage, as he said himself, he had been proud and passionate, ‘of a humour between wrangling and disputing, very troublesome’.3 He had mellowed into affability, he thought, and he knew that his integrity was above temptation and that he was ‘firm and unshaken in his friendships’. But many found him stern, unable to see another’s point of view, stubborn and unchanging in his opinions. In 1660, judged Burnet, he was the ‘absolute favourite, and the chief or the only minister, but with too magisterial a way. He was always pressing the King to mind his affairs, but in vain.’4

  His lectures would later cause friction but for now Charles listened. Among Hyde’s papers are bundles of scribbled notes, pushed across the table in their private meetings before Privy Council sessions, or slipped across to Whitehall by messenger. And outside the chamber Charles and Hyde talked through delicate business where no one could hear them, walking on the ‘leads’, the roof of the low Whitehall apartments by the river, which formed a sort of terrace. They discussed many things, among them what should be done with one of Montrose’s Scottish judges, who had come down to London and was, said Charles, ‘undoubtedly doing all the mischieue he can, why he should not be layd up I can not tell’.5

  Scotland was much on Charles’s mind. He had three separate kingdoms. England and Wales formed one, with Scotland, and Ireland, which had an unusual semi-colonial status. Each required different treatment.6 Although his grandfather James I of England and VI of Scotland had hoped to unite the kingdom, following the union of the two crowns in his
own person when he succeeded to the English throne, Scotland had remained a separate nation. Her parliament was dominated by the crown through royal nominees, the Lords of the Articles, but her presbyterian Church resisted all efforts to bring it under state control. Charles I’s fatal mistake had been to try to impose a full hierarchy of bishops and the Anglican prayer book, which Kirk leaders saw as a weapon of Rome. By 1638 they were in revolt. In the twists and turns of the civil wars, they turned back to supporting the king. Finally, three years after their army’s defeat at Worcester, they were subdued by the short-lived Cromwellian Union of 1654.