A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game Page 7

  The Prayer Book riots in Scotland, 1637

  Ninety per cent of Scots lived on the land, a third of them above the Highland line. Most of these were crofters and landless labourers, dependent on their tenant-in-chief, their clan lord. The smaller lairds, holding land from the tenant-in-chief, were poor in comparison. And in the towns, especially in Edinburgh, a new middle class was growing, consisting of lawyers for Scotland’s separate legal system, and merchants, who traded their linen, wool and salt, fish, coal and grain, with England and Ireland, Holland, France, Germany and Scandinavia. When the Scottish parliament was restored in 1660, it was dominated by the sons of hereditary noblemen and Highland chieftains. In June, when Scots aristocrats and gentry came to London, Charles asked them to advise him on the course he might take and as an interim government he restored the old Committee of Estates.

  As his highest officers Charles appointed the Scots who had been loyal to him in exile, balanced by the more moderate leaders of the kirk. The Earl of Middleton was declared High Commissioner, responsible for summoning the parliament and raising troops, with his ally the Earl of Glencairn as Chancellor. But he gave the vital post of Secretary of State to the former Covenanter John Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale, who had been imprisoned ever since his capture at Worcester and had crossed to Breda on his release, just before the Restoration. Six foot five, with bristling red hair, violently outspoken, Lauderdale could launch into tirades in English, Latin, Greek or Hebrew. At court he was over-exuberant and dared to help himself to the royal snuff – altogether ‘uncouth, boisterous, shaggy, ugly and cunning’.7 Burnet knew him well, to his cost:

  He made a very ill appearance: he was very big: his hair red, hanging oddly about him: his tongue was too big for his mouth, which made him bedew all that he talked to: and his whole manner was rough and boisterous, and very unfit for a Court…He was a man, as the Duke of Buckingham called him to me, of a blundering understanding. He was haughty beyond expression, abject to those he saw he must stoop to, but imperious to all others. He had a violence of passion that carried him often to fits like madness, in which he had no temper.8

  Lauderdale was supported in the English court by Sir Robert Moray, whose easy tact and knowledge of chemistry and astronomy endeared him to Charles. Lauderdale himself never entirely won Charles’s affection (the joke was that Charles stopped him coming to dinner by serving horse piss instead of syllabub), but he saw him as the man to push measures through the Scottish parliament and to keep the nation quiet.

  The Scots had no intention of keeping quiet. In August, a group of leading kirk ministers met, to remind the king of his promise at Stirling to uphold the covenant, decrying him for restoring the bishops and following the Book of Common Prayer, ‘upon which they made terrible denunciations of heavy judgements from God on him, if he did not stand to the Covenant, which they called the oath of God’.9 The ministers were clapped in prison. Although they were soon released and the outcry in their sermons was silenced, ‘they could not hold from many sly and secret insinuations, as if the ark of God was shaking and the glory departing’. Middleton’s arrival in Edinburgh as High Commissioner in late 1660 made things worse. He outraged the Kirk ministers with his magnificence and extravagance, and his entourage shocked the people by drinking through the night and fighting in the streets.

  The Scottish parliament, however, were generous when they met in January, voting Charles £40,000 per year to raise troops, from an excise on beer and ale. In 1661 Middleton also managed to force them to pass the drastic ‘Act Recissory’ that wiped the slate clean of all legislation passed by the covenanters’ parliaments in almost thirty years, and another act replacing the presbyterian kirk by the episcopal church. The heated debates in the Scottish parliament boded ill for Charles’s hopes of peace: ‘It was a mad roaring time,’ Burnet remembered, ‘full of extravagance.’ Exhilarated, Middleton then began trying to consolidate his power, passing acts that demanded the renunciation of the covenant, and imposing penalties on leading figures in the Scottish regime of the 1650s. This was clearly designed to target Lauderdale, and tensions were bound to arise. Far from benefiting from the Restoration, Scotland faced an era of bitter frustration, its government a nest of rivalry, its merchants restricted in their trade, and its national church under attack.

  During the Interregnum, Ireland too had been forced into union with England and had lost its own assembly. Twenty years before, in 1641, the Irish Catholics had rebelled in a furious and bloody uprising against the domination of the English and the protestants. The Catholic gentry then ran the country until the end of that decade, and in 1649, after the execution of Charles I, Ormond had reached an agreement with the Catholic lords, promising toleration of their religion, before he attempted, in vain, to put together an effective royalist army. This was brutally crushed by Cromwell. Under his regime all Catholic lands were confiscated and settled by protestant veterans of the New Model Army, members of the Merchant Adventurers and Scottish Covenanters.

  Charles was, in fact, restored to the throne in Ireland almost before he reached England. At the end of 1659, a group of parliamentary officers, led by the renegade royalist Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, began talks with Charles and in February 1660 they had called a convention in Dublin, which declared in his favour. He was proclaimed king there on 14 May. Once in power, he restored the Irish assembly and chose Monck as his Lord Lieutenant, perhaps to reassure the Irish protestants. But since Monck stayed in London, and his deputy, the morose presbyterian Lord Robartes, made himself so unpopular with the Irish commissioners that he was dismissed before he set foot in Ireland, the running of the nation was effectively left with a committee of three Lords Justices, including Roger Boyle.

  Boyle’s grandfather had acquired his Irish land under the Tudors, while his father Richard, the ‘upstart earl’, was an unscrupulous opportunist who bought the title of Earl of Cork from James I and became Lord Justice and Treasurer of Ireland. (The Earl did everything on a large scale: he owned over forty thousand acres in Munster and had eight daughters and seven sons. The oldest son, Richard, Lord Burlington, would inherit the title and the youngest, Robert Boyle, would become the famous chemist.) Instead of going into exile Roger, the third son, served the Cromwell regime in the hopes of regaining the family estates. In May 1660 he came to London, arguing loudly for the protestant landholders against the Catholics and Old Irish. Charles liked his style and energy – and his talent for writing plays. In September he created him Earl of Orrery and made him president of his home province, Munster.

  A difficult, interminable process of negotiation began, in an attempt to return lands obtained by the Cromwellian planters to their old owners. In July 1662 Charles replaced Monck as Lord Lieutenant with his loyal supporter Ormond, whom he had now raised to the status of duke. In contrast to the Boyles, Ormond’s family had been in Ireland since the fourteenth century, and were linked in an intricate mesh of kinship with the old Catholic families. With his stylish manner and mane of fair hair that won him the nickname ‘James the White’, Ormond borrowed cash and velvet coats and shining swords to make a suitably impressive return. He then moved into Dublin Castle, where he lived in grand vice-regal style, despite his massive debts.10 Intensely nettled, Orrery was left with nothing except his presidency of Munster. From now on, beneath their co-operation, ran a tense rivalry.

  With regard to the land disputes, Ormond negotiated a complex Act of Settlement, which was pushed painfully through the Dublin parliament. Charles – who upset the protestants by often intervening in individual cases, and seeming to favour the old Catholics – set up a court of claims to hear grievances. The Commissioners were bombarded with competing claims. In 1665 Ormond put through an Act of Explanation, by which Cromwellians had to surrender a third of the lands they held at the Restoration, but the court of claims was still sitting two years later and many of the original proprietors were still unsatisfied. The Catholics now owned less than a quarter of the land, as opposed to
almost two thirds before the civil wars. The problems seemed intractable. ‘I confess I am not able to see through the end of a settlement,’ Ormond sighed to Hyde. If all the claims were accepted, ‘there must be new discoveries made of a new Ireland for the old will not serve to satisfy these engagements’.11 It was in connection with Irish deputations that Charles said flippantly to Clarendon in 1661, ‘For my part, rebell for rebell, I had rather trust a papist rebell than a presbiterian one’ – only to have Clarendon remind him forcibly that he had forgotten the earlier rebellion against the English in 1641.12

  Peter Lely’s portrait of Ormond in armour, celebrating the Restoration in 1660

  Over the next fourteen years Ormond strengthened the Anglo-Irish governing class and re-established the Irish Episcopal Church. Even before he arrived, he wrote from London to reassure a truculent Orrery ‘that there may be no apprehension but that a true Protestant interest is the immoveable foundation upon which his Majesty intends to build his security and the happiness of his Kingdoms’.13 Yet Ormond’s own strong Catholic connections and his friendship with presbyterian dissenters led him to treat both kinds of nonconformity as mildly as he could. Honour and duty and a practical faith seemed more important to him than details of doctrine. He steered a pragmatic course that avoided the worst whirlpools of controversial policy, but a deep animosity ran beneath the surface, waiting to spill over as soon as Charles was dead.

  The colonies too were part of Charles’s realm, integral to his dream of creating a great trading nation. Since the founding of Virginia in 1606–7, settlements had spread up the eastern seaboard of North America, from Maryland and Baltimore to Newfoundland. The New England confederation – of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven – was by now almost independent, entering a period of prosperity and growth despite constant Indian wars. In defiance of a delegation from Charles these states clung stubbornly to their Commonwealth constitutions and nonconformist faith. After 1660 Charles’s courtiers came forward with their claims: Lord Baltimore was restored to his position as proprietor of Maryland, to find his Catholic colony overrun by puritans, and in 1663 a group of courtiers became the first Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas, among them Clarendon, Albemarle and the Lords Craven and Ashley.

  Ashley was also part-owner of a plantation in Barbados. In the West Indies, planters were turning their land over to sugar, while tobacco-growing moved to the mainland.14 And with sugar came the terrible demand for slave labour: in a few years’ time it was reckoned that Barbados alone had around twenty thousand planters and forty thousand slaves. The favourite Caribbean island for new ventures was Jamaica, which had been captured from Spain by William Penn in 1655, and whose warm climate was good for sugar, coffee, ginger, pepper and cinchona. But in all the islands, as the land was cleared for the plantations, the native forests disappeared. In the mid-1660s, the governor of Barbados reported that thirty years of cultivation had leached the soil and heavy rains on the hillsides were now washing it away. By 1665, only one small patch of woodland survived. Two years later, the Privy Council heard that ‘the land is almost worn out, the thickets where cotton and corn are planted so burnt that the inhabitants are ready to desert their plantations’.15 Another report noted that in Barbados, ‘all the trees are destroyed, so that wanting wood to boyle their sugar, they are forced to send for wood to England’.16

  As the crown’s representative in the West Indies, Charles reinstated Francis, Lord Willoughby, who had been governor of the ‘Caribees’ in the early 1650s. Autocratic and unpopular, he governed with a council and island representatives, pouring his own fortune into colonisation schemes. His territory included the Windward Islands of Barbados, St Lucia, St Vincent and Tobago, and the Leeward Islands of Antigua, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis. A few colonists also tried to settle on the South American mainland, particularly in Guiana. In 1663 Charles granted Willoughby the area known as Surinam: about four thousand people travelled here, collapsing with sickness as soon as they landed. Further north, the Bermudas, granted to the Earl of Southampton fifty years before, were run as a separate company.

  Despite this exploitation, in the British imagination these tropical islands still retained the aura of a refuge, the haven from civil strife that Marvell had celebrated in ‘Bermudas’ in 1654 where the island, riding ‘unespied’ in the bosom of the ocean, provides a ‘grassy stage/ Safe from the storms and prelates’ rage’. The overwhelming natural profusion, the oranges like lamps in the green night, the melons falling at the sailors’ feet, were a gift of Providence. God was their pilot, and he meant the British to exploit the riches of these islands, just as he had given them the forests of New England or the lush soil of Virginia.

  5 This Wonderful Pacifick Year

  Methinks I see how throngs of people stand,

  Scarce patient till the vessel come to land,

  Ready to leap in, and, if need require,

  With tears of joy to make the waters higher.

  JOHN WILD, ‘Iter Borealis’, 1660

  AS RULER OF ENGLAND AND WALES, Charles had been greeted with ecstasy. Yet he faced fundamental problems with regard to the constitution and administration, the army and royal finances, and the vexed issue of religion.1 One of the thorniest initial problems concerned the land that had been confiscated or sold under pressure since 1649 by royalists who now vociferously asked for it back. He and his team tried to resolve most of these issues through parliament, thus diverting any blame from the crown.

  To ensure stable government it was vital, first of all, to settle the constitutional status, since no one was very clear, after the republic, exactly what the relative powers of monarch and parliament were. To the French ambassador, Britain did not seem a monarchy at all, since the laws so limited the power both of the king and of his subjects ‘that they seem to be joined by indissoluble ties, in such a manner that if one of the two parties were wanting, the other would go to ruin’.2

  From the start, Charles dated his reign not from the Restoration but from the death of his father, and firmly established that his regime was legitimate, its acts valid in law. In July 1660 an act confirmed that while the judgements of the courts under the Commonwealth on all private transactions should stand (thus embracing the courts’ decisions and the continuity of common law), no public acts – the statutes passed by parliament – were endorsed, because they had never had the consent of the king.3 Cromwell’s legislation was thus simply wiped off the record as illegal.4 In terms of legislation, Charles and his parliament were transported back in time, to 1641.

  This return to the status quo of nineteen years before meant that all the radical changes that Cromwell’s parliaments had made in the way the kingdom was governed were swept away. In the English counties and boroughs, the old system of administration was restored, complete with Lords Lieutenant, sheriffs and justices of the peace, prompting, of course, a deluge of petitions for places. The old House of Lords was soon reconstituted, including the twenty-six bishops, who would soon be a bugbear in Charles’s attempts to achieve religious toleration. The concessions that Charles I had made before 1641, in the first year of the Long Parliament, were, however, accepted. These included the abolition of the old perogative courts like the Star Chamber, which had been hated by the gentry for their power to impose taxes without parliamentary agreement, and the acceptance of the Triennial Act, which decreed that a parliament must be called at least once in every three years. Despite these limitations Charles II still emerged at the start of his reign with, theoretically, an astonishing degree of power. Within the bounds of the Triennial Act he could call parliament when he saw fit, appoint ministers, direct the army and navy and control policy at home and overseas. In return, parliament was bound to vote him money for the running of the realm, and extra funds for emergencies, like a state of war.

  There lay the rub. In practice Charles’s power was illusory, curtailed throughout his reign by lack of funds. He was the first monarch who had to rely on being voted
an annual sum by parliament in peacetime, and this meant that unless he could find funds elsewhere his parliament had to meet at least once a year. In 1660 a House of Commons committee estimated that the running of a peacetime kingdom would cost around £1,200,000.5 The crown’s current income from estates and fees was a third below this, so there was already a large sum to find. And while the estimate of £1,200,000 sounded reasonable, Charles never received even three quarters of this amount. The MPs tried to raise money through excise duties on beer and cider, and new taxes like the hated Hearth Tax of 1662, whereby householders had to pay one shilling for each fireplace within their house, to be collected twice a year.6 But the duties and taxes were misjudged, inefficiently collected and embezzled by agents – there was never enough.

  Furthermore, the promise Charles had made at Breda to make up the army arrears of pay put him in hock from the start. The New Model Army was a huge force of 42,000 men. Its soldiers were still fierce in their puritan and republican convictions, and Charles knew that he would have no chance if they ever rose against him. His first parliaments, packed with royalists and moderate presbyterians who detested the soldiers’ sects and factions, were equally keen to disband the troops. Unfortunately for the royal coffers, the Commons underestimated the cost of the back pay and Charles had to raise £40,000, much of it from his own income. But still, the breaking up of the army was managed surprisingly successfully. Instead of turning into bands of discontented ex-soldiers wandering the land, to everyone’s astonishment Cromwell’s forces melted back into their communities, becoming bakers, tailors and candlestick-makers rather than beggarmen or thieves: ‘this Captain turned a shoe-maker; the lieutenant, a baker; this a brewer; that a haberdasher; this common soldier, a porter; and every man in his apron & frock, &c., as if they had never done anything else.’7 The presbyterian minister Richard Baxter marvelled: ‘Thus did God do a more wonderful work in the dissolving of this army than any of their greatest victories.’ It was all due to Monck, he thought, and it was an astounding tribute to the general’s authority, ‘that they should all stand still and let him come on and restore the parliament and bring in the king, and disband themselves, and all this without one bloody nose!’8