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

  Charles cleverly persuaded parliament to let him keep some ‘guards’ and ‘garrisons’. In effect, although the hated term was studiously avoided, this was a standing army. By sleight of hand he won back the power over the troops that the Commons had so fiercely wrested from his father. He kept Monck’s streamlined republican regiment, ‘the Coldstreamers’, as his household troops. These were the men who had marched from Coldstream, Monck’s last Scottish camp before the troops crossed the icy Tweed in December 1859 and headed for London. He also kept a troop of elite cavalry, the Royal Horse Guards, or ‘the Blues’, many of whose officers were former exiles, who had served under the King of France beside his brothers James and Henry. Soon he would also create the Royal Dragoons, officially to guard Tangier, their name coming from the ‘dragon’ muskets they carried. Then in 1665 he created ‘the Buffs’, the Royal East Kent Regiment, ostensibly to fight in Holland. Almost by stealth, Charles mustered forces of his own, highly trained and supremely loyal, whose ranks also gave him a useful way of rewarding petitioners and handing out places.

  The constitutional issues and the fate of the army were dealt with quickly. But other problems took longer to solve, especially the question of religious toleration. Religious differences, after all, had been the first cause of revolt in his father’s time. Their faith lay deep in the hearts of most men and women; many had made great sacrifices for it, some gladly, others with a lasting bitterness. During the Interregnum the Anglican bishops had faced sour humiliation: their archbishop, William Laud, had been executed; they had been expelled from the House of Lords, their dioceses had been removed, and the very office of bishop scratched from the rolls. They were determined on reinstatement and, in some cases, on revenge.

  While many Church of England congregations wanted to return to the prayer book as amended by James I, with its annual round of holy days and feast days, the presbyterians wanted the plain form and more democratic organisation established under Cromwell. Outside the church itself, a host of sects – often loosely bundled together under the name ‘Anabaptists’ – wanted to retain the freedom to pray and preach as the spirit moved them. Even the Quakers hoped for better days than they had experienced under hostile Interregnum regimes. (Their movement had sprung up like fire in the early 1650s, and they had seemed dangerous to Cromwell’s state because they believed God spoke directly to each individual soul, and denied all worldly authority, abjuring oaths and sacraments as well as fine clothes and hat-doffing.) Meanwhile those people who had never bothered much about the Lord under any guise sauntered in new clothes of brilliant colours, rejoicing in the return of May Day festivals and Christmas feasts.

  It was assumed that with the coming of a king there would be a return to a state church. Nonetheless, many hoped that their freedom to worship would continue. Charles, they thought, had promised this at Breda, in these words:

  Because the passion and uncharitableness of the times have produced several opinions in religion, by which men are engaged in parties and animosities against each other (which, when they shall hereafter unite in a freedom of conversation, will be composed or better understood), we do declare a liberty to tender consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matter of religion, which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom, and that we shall be ready to consent to such an Act of Parliament, as upon mature deliberation shall be offered to us, for the full granting that indulgence.9

  This statement had appeased the sectaries of the army and smoothed the way to the Restoration. And now that Charles was back, the moderate puritans and presbyterians who had always stayed loyal to the Crown understandably assumed that their freedom to worship would be safe.

  Charles was officially Supreme Governor of the Church of England. It was difficult, though, to determine exactly what sort of church the Church of England should be. Should it reinstate the bishops and return to the 1559 prayer book, creating a milder version of the church that Archbishop Laud had left in 1642? Or should it allow for the feelings of the presbyterians, with their Calvinist beliefs in the authority of scripture, in justification by faith, and their churches ruled not by appointed bishops but ministers working with Church committees and synods? Many presbyterians objected to the prayer book, feeling that the prescribed forms for communion, baptism, marriage and burial were too like Catholic rituals. They wanted each of their ministers to be free to pray according to the promptings of his own spirit, and their services to revolve around the pulpit, not the communion table. A minister, too, should be able to punish the sinners in their midst, and expel them from the congregation of the saved. And should all the sects be compelled into the Anglican fold, or should those that could not accept compromise be left to continue with their own forms of worship?

  Immediately there were practical problems as well as matters of principle. Many petitions came from clergymen who had lost their livings during the Commonwealth and begged to be reinstated, while an equal number came from their rivals, presbyterian ministers anxious to keep their current places. Initially, Charles and Hyde took the side of the latter. Within three days of Charles’s arrival in London, a royal proclamation decreed that no one would be ejected from his living except by a court of law or an act of parliament. In September the decree was modified to say that the ministers who had been ousted during the Commonwealth could regain their places if they compensated the existing holders: yet another round of buying and selling places was soon under way.

  Charles and Hyde knew that they had to move fast to bring the two sides together. The bishops were reinstalled in their sees, some taking their place humbly, others, like Christopher Wren’s ageing uncle Matthew at Ely, crowing in triumph. But Charles signalled that he might listen to the presbyterians too, by appointing ten presbyterian chaplains to his household (though limits were put on their long sermons). One was Richard Baxter, a self-educated preacher from Kidderminster, an influential writer and an earnest, anxious man. ‘The King gave us not only a free audience,’ he remembered, ‘but as gracious an answer as we could get.’ Charles said that he wanted them to reach an agreement, not ‘by bringing one party over to the other, but by abating somewhat on both sides, and meeting in midway; and that if it were not accomplished, it should be long of ourselves and not of him’.10 So relieved were the presbyterian band that one elderly preacher ‘burst out into tears of joy’.

  Charles planned a double policy. Comprehension, inclusion of low church puritans and presbyterians within the Church of England, would be matched by indulgence, toleration of the sects who preferred to worship separately. His hope for a healing compromise, a triumph of common sense, was bolstered by the model for union that had been developed by Archbishop Ussher, the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh in the 1640s, and promoted by Richard Baxter in 1655, a form of ‘primitive episcopacy’ that limited the power of bishops by linking them with the presbyterian synods. In the summer and autumn of 1660 Charles and Hyde arranged informal meetings between leading Anglicans and moderate presbyterians. Both sides then met at Clarendon’s current base, Worcester House, in September. After the tired clerics worked tetchily through several drafts, the Worcester House Declaration was issued on 25 October, a solution, Baxter told Clarendon with relief, ‘such as any sober honest Ministers might submit to’.11 The bishops, the Declaration explained, were ‘only to ordain and exercise jurisdiction with the advice of their presbyters’. Individual priests could avoid ‘Popish’ ceremonies like baptism, and rituals like the use of the crucifix and the wearing of surplices, while parish priests would have the right to expel members of their congregation as they did in the ‘free’ churches.12 In addition – a pronouncement that upset the presbyterians as well as the Anglicans – those who did not wish to be brought into the Church should be free to worship as they liked.

  When parliament returned after their long recess in November the Worcester House Declaration was presented as the basis for a bill. But already the mood in parliame
nt had changed as the firm Anglicans sensed their power and became determined to fight presbyterian inroads. On 28 November the Commons rejected the bill. From now on it appeared that Charles’s bid for a policy of conciliation that might, if adopted, have created a single, flexible, and inclusive church, was doomed to fail.

  Wenceslaus Hollar, Westminster from the river, showing St Stephen’s Chapel, where the Commons met, Westmister Hall and the Abbey, with skiffs crowding up to Westminster stairs

  The glorious summer was rapidly turning into an autumn of disquiet. Religious issues aside, even the stoutest royalists were angered by the problem of the land that had changed hands in the wake of the civil wars. Many royalist gentry had been forced to sell estates when prices were falling, to pay the fines imposed on them. Now they wanted their land back, or at least some compensation.

  The Convention Parliament made it clear from the start that they would distinguish between private sales and ‘public acts’ like confiscation. The former were regarded as legal transactions: the land had gone for ever. Confiscated lands, by contrast, had to be returned to their original owners. These included crown and church lands and some private estates which had been taken by the republic and then sold, often to army officers. The process of reclaiming them was difficult, as sale had followed sale, and sometimes the first owners were dead, so that it was by now very hard to untangle the deals and to assess the value, although Charles set up a commission to assess compensation. And while the crown and the Church usually got their land back, scores of private owners had to fight for their property, either by pressing forward with lawsuits or pushing private bills through parliament. The extraordinary thing is that they largely succeeded: most royalists – especially the great nobles – were back in their old houses within ten years. But many among them were crippled by the huge mortgages taken out to regain their land.

  The gentry had thought that life would swing on its axis back to the old easy days. Baffled, they bombarded Charles with their requests. The crush of petitioners in Canterbury was repeated in London. John Evelyn, who was trying to present letters sent from Henrietta Maria, was shocked by the way people literally pressed about Charles:

  It was indeed intollerable, as well as unexpressable, the greedinesse of all sorts, men, women & children, to see his Majesty & kisse his hands inso much that he had scarce leasure to Eate for some dayes, coming as they did from all parts of the Nation: And the King on the other side as willing to give them that satisfaction, would have none kept out but gave free accesse to all sorts of people.’13

  In greeting people so courteously, Charles was following the advice proffered the year before by his old tutor, the elegant and worldly William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle. Good manners were always the best tactic, wrote Newcastle, ‘and, believe it, the putting off of your hat and making a leg pleases more than reward or preservation, so much does it take all kind of people’.14 But he simply could not doff his hat to all. Over the coming months ‘loyal petitions’ arrived in their hundreds, even thousands. Corporations sent proclamations of loyalty. Companies sent requests for new charters. Countless individuals asked for restitution of lands or repayment of debts. Others begged royal pardons for offices held under the Commonwealth or for arms taken against the king. Still more asked for posts in the royal household, as clerks, officers of customs, keepers of forests. Evelyn himself was one of these petitioners, trying to keep close to the king. Like many, he had been loyal for two decades and more. In 1641 he had travelled to Holland and Belgium with Charles’s sister Mary, Princess Royal; he had come back briefly to fight, and had then spent four years travelling to France and Italy, before his marriage to the young Mary Browne, daughter of the English resident in Paris. On the eve of the Restoration he published three royalist tracts, countering rumour and scandal.15 He now hoped for a post for himself (and later for Mary in the service of the queen) and also wanted to settle the disputed possession of his house, Sayes Court, and to get back the money owed to his father-in-law for his work in Paris. Everyone who clustered round the court had stories like this, their own needs, hopes and fears.

  John Evelyn, painted by Kneller as a Fellow of the Royal Society, c. 1689

  Those petitions that reached the state committees were only a smidgeon of the whole. The place-seeking – and the exchange of cash that went with it – filtered down the whole pyramid. New place-seekers offered cash to those who had held them in the previous regime and thrust their petitions and demands on anyone with influence, from aldermen to landowners, accompanying their requests with gifts of money and plate. Complicated deals were done, and many positions were bought from former holders. It was rumoured that officials and go-betweens were making a fortune. Petitioners chose their intermediaries carefully, former parliamentarians applying to the king through Morice or Lord Manchester or through Albemarle (whose wife became notorious for the fees she charged). Anxious letters were written, tiring journeys taken. It was as if half the nation were holding out their hands and many were on the road to besiege Charles in person. All through the summer of 1660 they descended on London, jolting in their carriages over the rutted roads, changing horses and crowding into inns on their way from Northumberland and Dorset, Lancashire and Norfolk.

  The long wait for answers to their many requests left petitioners feeling let down and angry. A witticism soon circled that Charles was passing an Act of Indemnity for his Enemies and Oblivion for his Friends. The joke wounded him sharply.16 As early as August 1660, ‘The Complaint of the Royal and Loyal Party to the King’ bitterly lamented that those who had helped the king were now ruined, that the ‘greatest opposers’ were preferred to the leading places in government and at court, and that their petitions were never fully read, but were dealt with by secretaries, a charge that rings true. In March 1662 Pepys thoroughly enjoyed a scorching sermon by Richard Creighton, ‘the great Scotch man’, delivered with great gusto and wit before the king and the Duke of York. Creighton’s text was ‘Roule yourself in dust’ and his theme was that it would have been

  …better for the poor cavalier never to have come in with the King into England again; for he that hath the impudence to deny obedience to the lawful magistrate and to swear to the oath of allegiance &c, were better treated nowadays in Newgate then a poor Royalist that hath suffered all his life for the King is at Whitehall among his friends.17

  The Cavalier gentry and the churchmen were not the only groups making demands. The merchants too were flocking to Whitehall. Many companies had received charters from Cromwell and numbered keen parliamentarians among their leading men. Some, like John Bland in Trade Revived, feared a new era of competition, calling for the old guilds to be revived to control their trades and for the king to regulate commerce as his Tudor predecessors had done. On the eve of the Restoration the twelve leading guilds had held a dinner for General Monck, and when Charles rode triumphantly through London they had turned out in their livery to greet him. The East India Company gave a huge gift of plate (most of the royal plate having been melted down in the civil wars), and all the companies and guilds made sure that anyone with royal connections was promoted so that they could play a useful part in deputations to the king. Not surprisingly, Charles encouraged them, especially when they brought gifts. He granted new charters to the East India Company and the Levant Company, to the Eastland Company that traded with the Baltic and even to the Merchant Adventurers, who had ostentatiously supported Cromwell. In July he went to the great City feast, ‘with as much pompe and splendour as any Earthly prince could do’, admiring the pageants along the route, despite the pouring rain.18 He established a Council of Trade, which usually met in the Mercers’ Hall, so that ‘every interest may be righted’ and listened to the members’ advice on measures ‘as may tend to the rectifying those errors which the corruption of late times have introduced’.19

  But if the merchants were appeased, the nobles and gentry were increasingly frustrated. They were missing out on government posts and
on the restitution of their lands, and Charles even seemed to wish to deny them justice. What they wanted, to persuade them that the bad times were truly at an end and that their day had come again in this ‘wonderful pacifick year’, was vengeance – and blood.

  6 Family Matters

  Lucretius with a Stork-like fate

  Born and translated in a State

  Comes to proclaim in English Verse

  No Monarch rules the Universe

  But Chance and Atomes make this All

  In Order Democratical,

  Where Bodies freely run their course

  Without Design, or Fate, or Force.

  EDMUND WALLER, introductory poem to Evelyn’s translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura

  THERE WAS A CLEAR political danger in drawing analogies between Lucretius’ atomic philosophy, fashionable among intellectuals, and the freedom of ‘bodies’ in social structures, whether it be the state or the family. Charles had never been free to run his course ‘without Design, or Fate, or Force’. And ever since childhood one of the constraints on his freedom, which appeared minor but was not, had always been his relationship with strong women. As a small boy he had to find ways to negotiate life with his temperamental mother. Tiny and upright, a foot shorter than her eldest son, who had to bend down to talk to her, Henrietta Maria was a creature of the court, with an iron will. Her father was murdered when she was a baby, and she grew up under the eye of her dominating Italian mother, Marie de’ Medici. She showed far more affection to the court dwarf, Jeffrey Hudson, a ‘gift’ to her from the first Duke of Buckingham, than to the children who were later born to her. As queen, she loved to act, playing leading parts in the lavish court masques, and she manipulated her own children like puppets in a game of power, raging and storming when they defied her. As a counter to his mother, Charles was cared for by the flamboyant Christabella Wyndham, his nurse (a formal title rather than a real task). She later greeted him as an adolescent in the West Country so effusively that the whole company were sure she had seduced him.