CHAPTER ELEVEN

At the Waterside

‘The King of Scots hath an army at the waterside, drawn down towards the waterside, ready to be shipped for England….’

Cromwell on Charles II, 1658

There was a short burst of wild but foolish rejoicing when the news of Cromwell’s death on 3 September 1658 reached the Netherlands. Some people who should have known better danced in the streets. For one wonderful moment it did seem as though that ‘extraordinary act of providence’ referred to by Hyde had actually arrived to save them all. In France Cardinal Mazarin forgot himself sufficiently to refer to Cromwell as ‘the dead monster’; he also hinted to Queen Henrietta Maria that the Anglo-French treaty might be running out.

This warmth proved ephemeral. An express letter from Bristol to Hyde, breaking the news, arrived marked ‘cito, cito, cito’: but there was in fact no hurry.¹ About the most significant effect of the Protector’s sudden death – he died after a short period of illness, and the Royalists in Europe were taken unawares – was to forward the suit of King Charles to his ‘best friend’ Princess Henrietta Catharine. For a moment the Dowager Princess of Orange, like Cardinal Mazarin, seemed in danger of losing her head. She fondly imagined that from a penniless émigré her daughter’s admirer had been transformed into a powerful monarch just about to embark for his kingdom.

King Charles himself did not let the opportunity slip. He proposed immediately. Henrietta Catharine became ill with emotion. The news of the betrothal, as it was tacitly allowed to be, had the side-effect of infuriating Mary Princes of Orange. She was still smarting under Charles’ denunciation of her romance with the young Harry Jermyn. Besides, it would have meant Mary yielding precedence to her sister-in-law as Queen of England, and the subject of precedence, as we have seen, always aroused a great deal of proprietorial anguish in Mary’s breast.^fn1

As it turned out, Mary had little need to worry. By November the Dowager Princess, in common with the rest of Europe (and Cardinal Mazarin), had realized her mistake: King Charles found coolness where once there had been ardour. Early next year, a ‘new gallant’ for Henrietta Catharine made his appearance: John George of Anhalt-Dessau. She subsequently married him, evidently finding no unconquerable aversion to this particular person. Towards her own behaviour, the King was philosophical as well as generous. He told Taaffe that his fondness for her inspired in him a real wish for her true happiness. He had convinced himself that Henrietta Catharine loved her prince, and would not interfere. Towards her mother he showed less tolerance, referring to her privately as ‘an old strumpet’ and suggesting in even cruder terms that the Dowager Princess had resented his lack of attentions to herself.²

The news of the Protector’s death did not merely fail to crown Charles’ efforts as a romantic lover, it also ushered in an even more extraordinary phase in a life already full of paradox. Nineteen months were to pass between the death of Oliver and the restoration of Charles. To those abroad, including the King, who had no means of knowing in advance at what hour the final curtain was destined to be rung down on revolutionary England, if at all, the last act seemed interminable.

The first figure to occupy the stage vacated by Oliver was his son Richard Cromwell. Theoretically chosen by his father’s dying voice, Richard was immediately confirmed in his new position by the Council of State; Protector Richard was thus easily and uncontroversially substituted for Protector Oliver. Like the sons of Charlemagne, Richard Cromwell was a fainéant, a weak plant who had grown up thinly in the shadow of the strong stem of his father. He had taken refuge from the challenge of his father’s personality early on in a kind of gentle wastrel’s incompetence. Finance was never Richard’s strong point: when the time came for him to step down from his Protectoral eminence, one of his chief reasons for not wishing to leave the precincts of the Palace of Whitehall was because they conferred immunity from arrest for debt.

But he was not a bad man, and therefore not a bad figurehead for the English state as it now stood. There were a number of dramas to be played out before any true desire for the return of the Stuarts could be anticipated. Shortly after the elder Protector’s death, Nicholas wrote to King Charles that he was pleased to hear ‘the rebels endeavour to set up Cromwell’s son rather than a republic’.³ That was a wise observation. The return of a republic would indeed have been a far more sinister development.

Yet at the time a pervasive hopelessness spread like a wide, calm surface of water over the shifting sands of the King’s affairs. The death of Cromwell had broken this surface with a sudden sharp splash. Now even the ripples caused by it appeared to have died away. The real trouble was the strange tranquillity which settled over England, as Hyde put it: ‘the same or a greater calm in the kingdom than had been before’.⁴ This serenity was attested on all sides, both Royalist and Cromwellian.

Sir George Downing, the Ambassador at The Hague, thought that the death had come just too soon for the various foreign conspirators, perhaps two months too soon. But Thurloe, writing in England, used the same language as Hyde: ‘There is not a dog that wags his tongue, so great a calm are we in.’⁵ It was this public lethargy which was disastrous for the King’s prospects in Europe. Now, if ever, was the psychological moment for Charles to prove to Spain that there existed a vast body of popular support to welcome him in England, should he reach its shores. But he could not point to any manifestations of unrest.

So Spain did not move. In one of his speeches to the Parliament of 1658, Cromwell had referred to a great army and navy of a foreign power, threatening them on behalf of the ‘King of Scots … drawn down towards the waterside, ready to be shipped for England’. But there the Spanish fleet in Flanders remained. There were vague discussions of help from minor powers, like the Elector of Brandenburg and the Duke of Saxe-Lauenberg; perhaps Dunkirk would declare for the King, and perhaps Marshal Turenne would head a force for the invasion of England. But in general, French, Spanish and German princes were not inclined to contemplate any form of Stuart crusade until their peace was established; the Treaty of the Pyrenees between France and Spain was not signed until May 1659. The gloom of the situation may be judged by the fact that Charles was even proposed for Lambert’s daughter – the Cromwell ‘princesses’ were by now both married.⁶

The next stirring came, as before, from within England herself. But it was not an ‘extraordinary act of providence’, as the death of Cromwell had been – merely an inevitable development of the fainéant Protectorate set up under Richard. By January 1659 a body of Army officers, including Lambert and Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law, Fleetwood, and his brother-in-law, Desborough, had come to feel in themselves rather than in Richard the source of the true power in England. Those opposed to them caused a Parliament to be summoned, sometimes known as Richard’s Parliament. In this assembly, republicans, Presbyterians, and secret Royalists jostled with each other: from the other side of the water the King had at least managed to encourage some secret Royalists to put themselves up for election.

At the same time no one, certainly not King Charles nor the Royalist conspirators within England, dreamed that the time for military invasion had passed. In March of the same year John Mordaunt was given permission to form a new action group, to the annoyance of the Sealed Knot. Once again the King’s presence in England, that magic talisman to which such powers were attributed, was being demanded. With quarrels between the rival conspirators, indecision from Charles, foreign missions, English intrigues, and a good deal of governmental counter-intelligence, it seemed that the whole dreary cycle was taking place all over again. And with the same lack of success.

The Protectoral Parliament was dissolved on 22 April. Protector Richard was transformed into Tumbledown Dick and slipped away to silence and exile in his turn. A Council of State became the new titular head of the government. A slightly desperate expedient, the return of the Rump Parliament – elected, in its original form, an unbelievable nineteen years previously – was employed. But desperation did not imply in any sense a return to monarchy. It is notable that at this critical juncture nobody suggested for a moment recourse to Charles Stuart, down by the waterside across the English channel. Yet exactly twelve months later he would be gladly, even ecstatically, summoned. So the dramatic story of the Restoration continued to unfold without forfeiting its surprise and tension.

The vital element in this summer’s royal plans was deemed to be the army of King Charles, not the reappearance of the Rump. He now had as many as 2,500 men with him in the Low Countries, the effect of the new military organization following the Spanish treaty. Mordaunt paid the King a flying visit at Brussels in June. Unfortunately, it was clear that there was considerable opposition to Mordaunt within the Royalist ranks. Brodrick, who ran the so-called New Cavalier party, disliked Mordaunt; Mordaunt in return described Brodrick, no doubt accurately, as ‘sadly given to drink’. Nevertheless, Mordaunt did succeed in his mission: he persuaded the King that things were sufficiently advanced in England. As a result, Charles assured Mordaunt on 24 June: ‘I do therefore resolve that myself or one of my brothers, or both of us will (with God’s blessing) be with you as soon as you shall desire.’ He would sail on 11 July.⁷

At this point the question of the treachery of Sir William Willys, one of the founders of the Sealed Knot, and probably its secret betrayer ever since, reared its ugly head. Obviously Willys could not have acted as a double-agent for quite so long without suspicions being aroused. But the timing of the charges against him in July was particularly bad. An open placard on the subject in London caused every kind of dissension, accusation and counter-accusation to be aired. It was the very worst atmosphere in which to plan, let alone carry out, a complicated rising, depending on co-ordination throughout the country. The King suspended judgement while enquiries were made. The date for his arrival was postponed till August.

The motives of Willys, an ultra-ambivalent man in an ambivalent time, as well as the extent of his treachery, continue to baffle.⁸ There was however much soundness in the argument which Willys used against this particular rising: it would unite the common people against the King, rather than causing them to rise on his behalf; especially since it was harvest time, and no sensible man would want to run the risk of starving in the winter, whoever was in power. But the eventual course of the rising showed that, like the Bourbons after the French Revolution, the Royalists in England had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing since their last disastrous concerted effort of 1655.

Once again the affair went off half-cock. It became popularly known by the name of Sir George Booth, because his force, easily put down by Lambert at Chester, was all that properly featured of the various para-military bodies promised. But Booth himself had not hitherto been a Royalist. Shades of 1655! This time King Charles took himself to Calais, for his impending departure. The Sealed Knot sulked. Rows, not only in England, but also with Hyde abroad, played their damaging role. By 9 September Jermyn was writing to Ormonde that the news from England was ‘not only worse than we looked for, but even as ill as we could have imagined’. About the same date two other Royalists agreed that ‘Hope cleaveth to the bottom of the box, and is not easily shaken out.’⁹ The only good thing to be noted about the abortive Booth’s rising was that, although the government speedily clapped the leaders in prison, they did not bother with the severe penalties of previous years.

To that extent, conditions in England were ameliorating. But of course lack of repression can signify lack of threat, as well as lack of confidence. It was a point not lost on contemporary observers.

*

King Charles, disillusioned yet again, resolved to seek his fortune in Spain herself. Perhaps he could galvanize that long-promised assistance by his presence. He was unaware that the single man who would play the most crucial part in his restoration had already come to a private conclusion which favoured the return of the monarchy.

George Monck was a professional soldier, who, being born in 1608, belonged more properly to the generation of King Charles I than to that of his son. Not only had the army been in a large measure his career, but he also took his high standards of order and efficiency from the conventional military ideals. In Scotland, where he not only held down but positively governed the Scots with his Cromwellian army, his rule was both wise and firm. He had not benefited personally from confiscated Royalist and church land in England and had thus no financial stake in the continuation of the Protectorate: Monck had been loyal to Oliver Cromwell. He would have been loyal to Richard too, had he considered that the younger Protector had any capacity for maintaining within England that law and order which he found so precious. As Monck expressed it, ‘Richard forsook himself, else I had never failed my promise to his father or regard to his memory.’ It is the contention of Monck’s latest biographer that in August 1659 Monck had already reached a decision.¹⁰ If England was not to dissolve into chaos once more (and Monck of course had both lived and fought through the Civil War), what he thought of as ‘the old order’ – that is, the King in Parliament – must be restored. It would be six months before Monck gave any public sign of this decision: yet in order to explain the suddenness of the events of 1660 one is forced to the conclusion that by the autumn of 1659 not only Monck but also some of the other leaders, and even more of the ordinary people, were in their heart of hearts beginning to explore this possibility.

For all his age, Monck represented a new type of man. Here was no regicide. Monck had played no part whatsoever in the death of King Charles I. He had not signed the warrant, nor been a member of the High Court of Justice which condemned Charles I. This was important. The feelings of Charles II on the subject of his father’s murder had been passionate and were to remain so. As we shall see, he made no attempt to disguise the fact, and the penalties paid by the regicides after the Restoration were virtually the only area where the incoming King’s vengeance went to work. Even in the dire straits of 1655 Charles refused to meet his cousin the Elector Palatine at Frankfurt, because the Elector had deserted his father. The incident occurred at the theatre, where the English royal party turned on their heels. Afterwards this was considered ‘unnatural strangeness’ on the part of Charles.¹¹ But it showed the depth of his obsession.

None of this mud could be attached to Monck. Recognizing his potential usefulness, the King had tried without success to make surreptitious contact with him in the summer of 1659 through his brother Nicholas Monck, a clergyman living in Cornwall. Even before Cromwell’s death, Charles had been careful to distinguish Monck from some of his confrères in a memorandum drafted by Hyde, for a letter to be sent to the General: ‘I am confident that George Monck can have no malice in his heart against me, nor hath he done anything against me which I cannot very easily pardon’– it was the latter sentiment which was important. Tentative offers of land, a title even, were made through various intermediaries, including Viscount Fauconberg, a Yorkshire magnate who had married Mary Cromwell, but possessed the diplomatic attribute of making himself indispensable to every regime. By 5 September Nicholas Monck believed that his brother would support a rising of the King’s friends, if it occurred.¹²

A rising – that was not the way that George Monck’s mind tended.

Under the circumstances, King Charles’ foray to the Spanish borders at Fuenterrabia in the winter of 1659 proved unnecessary. At the time, the expedition annoyed and worried Hyde, since 1658 proud possessor of the Lord Chancellor’s Seal. However, as the King more or less jumped on a ship and set sail down the French Atlantic coast, there was not much that Hyde could do about it, except fuss over the prospect of his being captured by an English vessel.

But this kind of spontaneous gesture of frustration was rare in Charles these days, as is shown by Hyde’s comment that, in the forthcoming negotiations with Spain, he expected the King’s chief assets to be his own ‘dexterity and composedness’. There had been good reports recently of the royal character: people were beginning to be persuaded that the King could conduct his own affairs properly (although Hyde could not resist ending on a familiar note of chiding about his lack of ‘industry’).¹³ All the same, Hyde put his finger on the King’s problem, one common to heads of state in exile then and now: he had to show himself a potentially wise leader, so that all the advantages of statesmanship should not go to the other side. And he had to do so in a vacuum, or at his own mimic court. At the same time, the King had to keep up the pressures of opposition, acting as a partisan leader to his own followers.

As it turned out, events at Fuenterrabia were of no particular international significance either way, although the King’s energy and intelligence continued to make a good impression. The Spaniards maintained their reluctance to provide armed support. By this time the news had spread that the English ice was thawing. This put the King’s advisers in a panic. It was suddenly dangerous for the King to seem too dependent upon Spain.

But the expedition did have one consequence of great importance in the King’s personal life. In December he rediscovered his youngest sister, Henriette-Anne. They had not met for over five years, since the involuntary retreat from France. Charles remembered Henriette-Anne (or Minette, as she was occasionally known)^fn2 as a thin little girl living in straitened circumstances with her mother. Henriette-Anne was still physically delicate. Louis XIV rudely described her as looking like the bones of the Holy Innocents when she married his brother. Her fragility was emphasized by the fact that she had one shoulder higher than the other, the relic of her difficult birth during the siege of Exeter. In her youth she acted in a masque at the French Court, and brought tears to the eyes of the spectators with her verse:

Mon jeune et royal aspect

Inspire avec le respect

La pitoyable tendresse.

For the rest of her short lift, Henriette-Anne never lost that capacity to inspire both pity and tenderness.

Yet in other ways she had changed and blossomed so much that the court women tricked the King agreeably by introducing the wrong young lady as his sister. It was her brilliant colouring, combined with her doll-like figure, which made Henriette-Anne so captivating. She had bright chestnut hair and eyes of a startling blue (the traditional colouring of the later Stuarts, Charles being the exception). Her teeth, unlike those of so many beauties of the time, were white and regular, and she had a smile of exceptional sweetness. As for her complexion, perhaps her best point, that was termed ‘roses and jasmine’ by a lyrical Madame de Motteville.¹⁵

But the real secret of the enchantment which Henriette-Anne undoubtedly exercised over her contemporaries was in her ability both to give and receive love. A childhood deprived of physical necessities had left her rich in love at least, from her widowed mother. As a result, as the Abbé de Choisy put it, one loved her without thinking one could do otherwise.

Naturally King Charles fell under her spell. They got on immediately, in spite of the long absence. As brothers and sisters with an enormous age gap (fourteen years in this case) sometimes do, they fell into a relationship which on his side was half-way between that of father and brother. Perhaps on Charles’ side it was even a little lover-like, but all within the safe emotional degrees of the family circle. Their correspondence burst into flower immediately after they parted, proliferating with endearments and little tendernesses of every sort, as though to make up for the lost years. Early on, Charles asked Henriette-Anne not to put so many ‘majesties’ in her letters: ‘for I do not wish that there should be anything between us but friendship’.¹⁶

By now the King’s relationship with his mother was thoroughly soured. Mary in Holland had her own drawbacks of temperament. James had a restricting sense of his position as his brother’s heir: besides, he tended to side with his mother. But with Charles’ ‘dear dear sister’ all was pleasure and lightheartedness, the thrill of discovery and rediscovery. ‘I am yours entirely,’ he ended a letter dated 26 May 1660, written on board the boat which was taking him towards England.¹⁷ Charles did not fail to think of Henriette-Anne even in the hour of his glory. It was a portent of the important role she would play as his ambassadress.

In the memoirs of James II (dealing with his campaigns as Duke of York) the beginning of 1660 was described as the ‘lowest ebb’ of Charles II’s hopes, a time when all his optimism had left him. Yet, when only a few short months had passed, King Charles was to be restored ‘without one drop of bloodshed, to the astonishment of all the Christian world’.¹⁸ How did this seemingly amazing reversal come about, a revolution (in the strict seventeenth-century sense of the word, a turnabout) which on the surface astonished everyone by its dramatic arrival? As Samuel Pepys, an up-and-coming young civil servant, noted in the diary which he had only just begun to keep, ‘Indeed it was past imagination both the greatness and the suddenness of it.’¹⁹

The first thing to be noted is that the Restoration of King Charles II was a strictly internal process. Charles was not restored by any of the efforts of the various foreigners whose aid he had sought down all the years of exile, not by the help of Spain, not by the encouragement of France, certainly not by the assistance of the Pope, nor by virtue of Scotland, nor the Scandinavian Kings and Queens, not by the German princes, bishops and Electors, nor the intricate politics of the Dutch. … The manœuvres and prayers of Queen Henrietta Maria, the obstinate but clear principles of Edward Hyde had equally counted for nothing. Nor was that oft-predicted magnificent – and successful – Royalist rising ever destined to take place.

The final irony of the years of exile lay in the fact that King Charles was in the end restored not for any efforts of his own, but just because the mighty tide of revolution had somehow exhausted itself quite early in the Protectorate. The vast waves of change which had crashed down on English shores had given way to gentler waters. Stability and order had become the concern of almost everyone in the state. That yearning for order had been satisfied by the old Protector, particularly as his successive disillusionments with his Parliaments had revealed him as an increasingly conservative figure. Ever since, a series of experiments had gradually led men of good sense (such as Monck) to think longingly of the old monarchy. None of these experiments had, mercifully, involved the King over the water. He was not contaminated. That was the King’s strong – unconscious – appeal.

On 1 January 1660 Ormonde told Jermyn that ‘the general disposition of the people … seems to promise great advantages to the king; four parts of five of the whole people besides the nobility and gentry, being devoted to him’.²⁰ For an explanation of this seeming volte face, one cannot do better than quote Milton’s sonorous outcry against the whole topic of restoration: ‘For this extolled and magnified nation, regardless both of honour won, or deliverances vouchsafed from heaven, to fall back or rather creep back … to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship!’ It was true. England did fall back – or perhaps creep back is the more accurate term.

Did King Charles himself then play no part at all in these stirring events? Was he merely a royal puppet, twitched on a string held by mightier hands than his own – including the strongest hand of all, the hand of Fate? First it must be said that Charles, who had shown himself far from deficient in those qualities which compel admiration in a monarch such as courage, resilience and tenacity, was not directly invited back as a result of them. But this is not to deny the King participation in his own triumph. On the contrary, the character of the King was of extreme importance to the whole question of the Restoration. But it was of negative importance.

He did not scupper his own cause. And in this he did better than many a royal or political exile before or since.

Thomas Clifford, later the King’s minister, noted in his commonplace book under the heading ‘Reputation’: ‘The reputation of his Majesty was more instrumental for his restoration than an army.’ Yet how many hidden rocks and shoals had existed in the years of exile on which King Charles IImight well have wrecked both the reputation of the monarchy and his own! Foremost amongst these was certainly the charge of Catholicism. His strenuous efforts to maintain his Protestant reputation have been noted. It was King Charles’ personal reward that, for example, in March 1660 the Puritan divine Richard Baxter was convinced of it: the King, having been born and duly educated in the true religion, had ‘never departed from the public profession of it’. And this, after years in France and the Spanish Netherlands, gleefully described by the Commonwealth propagandist Marchamont Nedham as ‘the most jesuited place in the world’, was no mean feat.²¹

Had the charge been made to stick, it is possible that the claims of Henry Duke of Gloucester to the throne might have been considered (the Duke of York’s religion was already in doubt). But that would have brought with it a number of consequences, including a rift in the Stuart royal family. Moreover, Henry would have ascended the throne, not as Charles did, free and unencumbered by promises, but already fettered – as a compromise candidate is always fettered. The whole character of the Restoration would have been altered.

Secondly, King Charles played the foreign hand as best he could, so that no positively disastrous charges of foreign intervention could be made against him. It is true that luck as well as judgement featured here. King Charles, as we have seen, was never averse to the assistance of either the French or the Spanish or the Dutch: but even in his lowest moments he was not prepared to make those sacrifices, such as a change in his religion, which could conceivably have swayed these powers. In this the influence of Hyde, ever aware of the dangers, was prominent. But that strange streak of vacillation, or masterly inaction, or sheer intrigue, depending on your point of view, which began to develop in an otherwise straightforward character in exile, also helped. It is a quality which will emerge more pronouncedly after the Restoration.

Thirdly, the King did not allow himself to be painted as either very debauched, or very extravagant, or very wild, or very inattentive to business, with impunity. Most of these charges were made at one time or another, mainly by government propagandists. But they could not be made to stick. It was possible to regard King Charles II, on 1 January 1660, as a decent, serious man. He was no saint certainly, as princes seldom were, but past his first youth, without too many peccadilloes to be overlooked, too much dissipation to be forgiven. He was after all in his thirtieth year. Yet once again, what opportunities of debauchery, founded on despair, an exile might have offered!

Fourthly, in public at least, King Charles II was never seen to commit the sin of despair. And that was his most important contribution to his own return.

Early in 1660 there were visible fissures in the surface of England. On 1 January Monck marched from Scotland, not only in search of pay for his woefully deprived men, but also with the avowed intention of restoring the sovereignty of Parliament. When he reached London, he forced the Rump Parliament to admit to its ranks a number of members hitherto excluded for political reasons. That was the first step. But in any form, however liberal, the hated Rump could not last long.

Pepys’ reportage of the situation in February 1660 is as vivid as any: ‘Boys do now cry “Kiss my Parliament” instead of “Kiss my arse” so great and general contempt is the Rump come to among all men, good and bad,’ he wrote. A few days later there were thirty-one bonfires to be seen at one glance at the Strand bridge: and everywhere ‘rumps’ (of beef) were being roasted. One notes the progress in Pepys’ Diary, from the man who showed him a clandestine Lion and Unicorn at the back of his chimney on 5 March, to the prevalent clamour on 16 March when people were beginning to ‘talk loud of the king’.²² It was on that date that the Rump finally dissolved itself, and a free election was announced – although a last-ditch attempt was unsuccessfully made to block the sons of former Royalists from standing. By the end of March, effigies of King Charles were being made.

Yet the continued uncertainty of the times is revealed in Hyde’s correspondence. As late as 4 February he was worried over Monck’s ‘lewd carriage’: if he continued to show himself so obstinate, they might still have to owe their recovery to a foreign army….²³And Monck continued to play his cards close to his chest, denying publicly that he had any intention of acting for ‘Charles Steward’. The fiction, as we must believe it to be, was to be preserved a little longer. A more revealing glimpse of the way things were blowing was given by the behaviour of Ashley Cooper. Despite the fact that he had been pursued ardently by the Royalists in tempting correspondence, Ashley Cooper had continued to reject their overtures. He appeared deaf to the personal appeals of the King. He had been elected to the Council of State by the Rump, although he was of the majority of the Council who refused to accept the additional clause renouncing Charles Stuart, proposed by Desborough. But it was not until February 1660 that he allowed himself to be drawn into correspondence with the exiled court, as we know from Hyde’s complaints on the subject.

When on 24 February Lady Willoughby de Broke told Hyde that Ashley Cooper was ‘his Majesty’s fast friend’, Hyde replied tartly that this was the first he had heard of it. Nearly twenty years later, when Ashley Cooper (transformed into the Earl of Shaftesbury) came to the conclusion that the monarchy had once more failed, he referred to his own feelings about the Restoration of 1660. He had discerned ‘the hand of Providence’ in the fact that there had been various forms of government, and several types of men in power, yet to none of them had Providence granted ‘a heart to use it as they should’. For all Hyde’s understandable fears and cautions, Providence was by now firmly pointing in the direction of Charles Stuart.

And that pejorative name itself was no longer heard. Hyde was assured that those formerly most against King Charles would now present themselves with halters round their necks and yield to his mercy. The cry was all: ‘A King, a King!’²⁴

At Brussels the King, now being acclaimed, continued to play the hand superbly – that is to say, with an air of universal friendliness. He told Mordaunt, for example, that the Royalists must take particular care not to ‘discountenance anybody who may be made to do good service’, for the sake of private jealousies or animosities amongst themselves. Of a warring pair, he observed, ‘It may be they may both do me the more service even from … their dislike of each other.’ Yet, in common with the rest of the court at Brussels, he was of course following the English news with bated breath. On 24 March he told Lord Jermyn (now created Earl of St Albans for his faithful service to Queen Henrietta Maria) that a report had come via Calais of a vote being passed in Parliament for ‘King, Lords and Commons’.²⁵ It was premature. Yet such rumours were easily spread in the atmosphere of rising excitement in which they were living.

On 27 March King Charles sent Monck a letter which was in itself a masterpiece of tact: it was certainly the kind of missive which his father had never learnt to write.²⁶ First he paid diplomatic tribute to Monck’s demonstrably strong position in England: ‘I know too well the power you have to do me good or harm, not to desire you should be my friend.’ Then King Charles protested his own desire for peace and happiness – in words which do have a gleam of his characteristic humour: ‘And whatever you have heard to the contrary, you will find to be as false as if you had been told that I have white hair and am crooked.’ There is a blandness too about the King’s phrase of desiring to secure ‘all good men’ in the possession of ‘what belongs to them’. Who these good men might be, and in what those belongings might consist, was left charmingly vague: yet these would of course be two of the most vexed points concerning the Restoration settlement, as in the aftermath of any civil war.

King Charles ended on a note of enormous warmth: ‘However I cannot but say, that I will take all the ways I can, to let the world see, and you and yours find, that I have an entire trust in you, and as much kindness for you, as can be expressed by Your affectionate friend. Charles R.’ As a result Charles received from Monck at the end of March a piece of kindly advice in the form of a secret message: to remain at Brussels, under Catholic sovereignty, when Spain and England were also officially at war, would be imprudent. As once before, the King retreated to the useful quasi-neutral town of Breda. He had absolutely no wish to show himself imprudent – now.

It was thus from Breda that on 4 April King Charles wrote formally to the Speaker of the House of Commons. On the same day he gave out the Declaration of Breda. The letter to the Speaker was a triumph of double-think, far in advance of his communication to Monck.²⁷ It referred constantly to the need for Parliaments, and how the presence of a monarch was justified by his role in preserving them. Ghosts must have danced – not only that of his father, but also of Strafford, and even of Oliver Cromwell. But King CharlesII was able to observe unblushingly that their mutual liberties and authorities – King and Parliament – were ‘best preserved by preserving the other’.

‘We look on you,’ wrote the King, ‘as wise and dispassionate men and good patriots, who will raise up those banks and fences which have been cast down.’ And he boasted of the Protestantism from which he had not swerved. There was only one drum-beat of revenge – his pointed allusion to his father’s death. That ‘crying sin’ he believed that they would be quite as anxious to avenge as he was himself, being equally ‘solicitous’ to redeem the nation from ‘that guilt and infamy’. Yet he ended on a note which still has the power to touch one, in view of the trials he had endured in the previous ten years: ‘And we hope that we have made that right Christian use of our affliction, and that the observations and experience we have had in other countries hath been such as that we, and we hope all our subjects, shall be the better for what we have seen and suffered.’

The Declaration of Breda was largely the work of Hyde. Unlike the King’s letter to Parliament, it was a deliberately bold document. First it granted a free and full pardon to anyone appealing to the King for his ‘grace and favour’ within forty days, with only a few exceptions to be decided by Parliament. The thought of the regicides continued to outrage the King. Otherwise no-one would be punished for their behaviour to either Charles I or Charles II; nor would their properties be touched.

Even more strikingly, the Declaration of Breda referred to the ‘passion and uncharitableness of the times’ which had resulted in many differences in religion. The King promised, via an Act of Parliament, ‘a liberty to tender consciences’. No man was to be in future ‘disquieted or called in question’ for differences in religion, so long as these differences did not threaten the peace of the kingdom. Alas, for the Act of Parliament: it was not to be. Nevertheless, the intention at least in that brave happy April was there. Furthermore, it was for Parliament to deal with all the various transactions concerning property, inevitable after ‘so many years, and so many and so great revolutions’. Last of all, the arrears of pay of the Army and its officers, under Monck, should be paid.

The Declaration of Breda was a remarkable piece of clemency combined with statecraft, the latter largely springing from the former. But these were remarkable times: King Charles II at Breda was living through a situation which even in his wildest fantasies of exile he cannot have envisaged. By mid-April in England it was reported by one of Hyde’s young relations, an apprentice in the City, that ‘those formerly called Cavaliers begin to appear in garbe fit for gentlemen, and their masters “turn tide”’. About the end of April there was actually a muster in Hyde Park, with trumpets sounding through the streets: the cry was heard loud and without fear that ‘the King shall enjoy his own again’.²⁸ Through all this festivity, Lambert, the former darling general, whose daughter only a brief six months ago had been contemplated as a bride for the King, was brought as a prisoner. By the end of April too, Buckingham, a most reliable guide to the way the wind was blowing, was wearing his Garter in public.

It was on 1 May that Charles’ letter and the Declaration of Breda were officially read out in the House of Commons. And on the same auspicious day – a day of national mirth and rejoicing which the Puritans had tried hard to obliterate – the House of Commons passed an official resolution to desire Charles to take the government of the kingdom upon his shoulders.

Most remarkable of all these remarkable events was the fact that not one single condition was suggested, let alone imposed upon the King. The storm of revolution had blown itself out so thoroughly that those Presbyterians reported by Pepys as wanting to bring back Charles tied by such conditions ‘as if he had been in chains’ could find not the slightest support. Instead, the scenes on May Day itself were so ecstatic as to turn Pepys’ stomach. He witnessed people actually drinking the King’s health on their knees in the streets, which he described as ‘a little too much’.²⁹

Well might King Charles be reminded of that lucky star which was said to have attended his birth. As the Estates of Zeeland put it, ‘If Great Britain hath made bon-fires at the birth of your Majesty, what should it do now in this marvellous conjuncture?’ He decided to move on from Breda to The Hague, in order the better to receive the delegation of Parliamentary Commissioners who were coming to offer him the government of his own kingdom.³⁰ The journey was made by water. Charles was offered the barge of the Dowager Princess of Orange for the occasion (o tempora, o mores, O Henrietta Catharine), but chose instead a larger vessel. It was in fact a jaght schip (hunt ship), a name anglicized as ‘yacht’. He liked it so much that he decided to order one for himself, and was subsequently presented by the Estates with an identical copy named the Mary. Other members of the court and royal family also embarked in borrowed yachts.

James Duke of York was in charge of the whole expedition, and saw to it that there were sufficient kitchens in the floating cortège of thirteen yachts for meals of up to twenty dishes to be served aboard (O Cologne, O Bruges, O vanished austerity of yesteryear!). Unfortunately, Princess Mary, who had a capacity for untimely suffering, was badly sea-sick, which upset the journey. Nevertheless, when the royal party reached Delft, there was a vast crowd waiting to see ‘this miraculous prince’, despite the hour – it was dawn. The continuing volleys of the musketeers and the heavy explosions of the cannon became quite irritating to the royal ears: so quickly can a pleasure based on novelty pall.

Yet such petty complaints soon faded away in the bright stream of experiences, each one more wonderful than the next, which now came the King’s way. It was a precious and solemn moment when Sir John Grenville asked to present the letters of the House of Commons, not least because he employed with veneration the sacred title of ‘majesty’, ‘which not long since was the aversion of varlets and fanaticks’. The King, for his part, graciously did find his way to accepting the invitation to return…. In general, the Commissioners of Parliament satisfied everyone with their becoming reverence; it was agreed that the reference of Denzil Holles, that old parliamentary warhorse, to the twenty years’ tyranny of Cromwell was most moving. It was touching too that amongst those who were received at this point were the master and captain of the ship which had transported the King to France after Worcester.

By the time the Speaker of the House of Commons received the royal acceptance, he was already dwelling in a capital where euphoria was breaking out on all sides. ‘Our Bells and our Bonfires, and the report of our Artillery have already begun to proclaim the King and to publish our Joy,’ observed the Speaker.

And at The Hague too these were never-to-be-forgotten days. The ‘wonderful changes which were almost daily produced’ in England had taken Europe by surprise. The Spaniards in particular, the King’s laggard allies, found that ‘His Majesty was almost in his own country’ before they had taken in that there was ‘any Revolution’ towards it. They hastened to take advantage of his presence at The Hague before it was too late. All was sweetness and light – and honeyed invitation. There were rival French and Spanish dinner-parties to toast the future ruler. The Catholic-Irish clique joined with the Spanish-French clique in seeking promises of Catholic toleration for the future.

As for the petitions, the letters, the reminders of favours and loyalties past, the pleas for forgiveness of (regrettable but surely explicable) disloyalties – these all flowed in a happy, bubbling current towards the person of the twenty-nine-year-old King. Again, it was hardly surprising that amidst such amiable sycophancy Charles was in ‘the best of humour that ever he was seen to be’. It would have been paradoxical indeed for the man who had kept such resolute public cheerfulness throughout the dark times of exile, to have turned the corners of his mouth down now.

King Charles on the contrary enjoyed himself to the full, his enjoyment only enhanced by a nice personal sense of the irony of things. He touched, constantly, for the King’s evil, that strange mediaeval ritual which he had also performed in hiding at Moseley. Then the act had been a desperate confirmation that he was still King. Now it was an agreeable gesture to please others, not himself. He was pleased to receive from the States of Holland a magnificent bed which had been intended for his sister Mary’saccouchement, but had been stored when the news came of her husband’s death a few days before. And his nine-year-old nephew William of Orange, the baby deprived of the bed, rode wonderingly in the King’s cortège as it passed through The Hague – although even now the States of Holland tried to avoid any diplomatic situation where William of Orange (Charles’ nephew, but a prince in his own right) might rank behind James Duke of York and Henry Duke of Gloucester, the King’s brothers. The complicated juxtaposition of Orange and Stuart remained to plague the new reign.

A happier omen, from Charles’ point of view, could be discerned in the presence of a laughing young woman named Barbara. She had been born Barbara Villiers, a cousin of the Duke of Buckingham, and was married to a Catholic Royalist named Roger Palmer; but she was already in the months before the Restoration contributing in her own way to the King’s royal good humour. Of less cheerful links with the past, poor Lucy Walter had died in Paris a year back. The King’s son, James Crofts, now renamed Fitzroy, remained in the care of Queen Henrietta Maria. There, with his grandmother, the handsome, engaging young man had his head thoroughly turned. That too was an omen for the future.

Throughout all this period, the King and his train were wined and dined in a series of banquets whose gorgeous dishes were intended to indicate the exceptional warmth everyone had now discovered they felt for the English Court. Sauces steamed continuously by day and by night: pheasants were employed in one particular collation, with the lavishness of salt and pepper. In all this, stories of assassination plots and of the sabotage of the King’s ship seemed to come out of a remote unpleasant past. They were correctly dismissed as malicious rumours.

The final banquet was given by the States of Holland. The King had his aunt Elizabeth of Bohemia on his right, his sister Mary on his left. Was he bored by the eternal junketings? One doubts it. A Danish observer noted that all through the courtyard and up the stairs of the house where Charles was now lodged, there were Englishmen kneeling to their king.³¹ No one knew better than Charles II, for all his restlessness in the face of protocol, that the alternative to royal ceremony was very often royal flight. Hyde wrote in hisHistory of this marvellous period, ‘In this wonderful manner and with this miraculous expedition, did God put an end in one month … to a rebellion that had raged near twenty years.’ In May 1660 Charles was acutely aware that what had been built up in one little month, could be as easily and in as short a time destroyed again. So he sat through the endless ceremonies, and with good grace.

Now the good ship Royal Charles was riding at anchor and waiting to convey him towards England herself. (It had, as a matter of fact, only just stopped being the good ship Naseby.) A hundred pounds of roast beef had been put aboard, and silver plate to serve it on. Everything – at last – was to be fit for a king.

Thus from the Belgick States delicious seat

Triumphantly departed Charles the Great!

cried the poet William Lower, who was in attendance on the scene and noted every detail. That night of 23 May more than fifty thousand people went to watch the departure of the English King. But in fact there was no night; the torches and flares of the royal equipage illuminated the darkness. The drums beat a heavy and continuous assembly. Mary Princess of Orange broke down in tears and the tender-hearted Charles wept in sympathy.

The sea was calm, the heavens clear. Charles Stuart, the second, went up onto the poop of the ship to take a last look at Holland. It was also to be his last true sight of foreign parts. For the rest of his life he would not set foot outside England again. The King was coming into his own.

1 In view of Mary’s concentration on the subject, it should be recorded that she never did have to yield her proud position as eldest daughter of the King of England to her brother’s wife: by the time Charles II married, Mary was dead.

2 This nickname, familiar to us from historical fiction, such as Margaret Irwin’s A Royal Cinderella, survives in fact in a few letters from the King. Otherwise, Charles always referred to Henriette-Anne in letters as ‘his dear sister’ and even ‘his dear dear sister’. It has been suggested that it was Charles’ baby name for her, only recalled in his most affectionate moments.¹⁴ To her mother Henrietta Maria she was always ‘ma fille’. Later we shall know Henriette-Anne under her married title of Madame de France.