PART THREE
Great Sir, the Star which at your happy Birth Joy’d with his Beams (at Noon) the wandering earth; Did with auspicious lustre then presage The glittering plenty of this Golden age….
EVE OF CORONATION ADDRESS TO CHARLES II, 1661
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘At which Time he prov’d himself the Noah’s Dove, that finding no Rest anywhere, was receiv’d again into his own Ark, and brought a peaceable Olive-Leaf in his mouth.’
Aurelian Cook, Titus Britannicus
At Dover on 25 May 1660 the flags waved, the trumpets blew, and high above the heads of the crowd vast indications of new glories could be seen: the royal arms, publicly flaunted in joy.
On the sea voyage, however, the King himself deliberately turned his thoughts back to the past. He was, as usual, physically ‘active and stirring’, striding up and down the deck. But his conversation was of old times.1 He talked, almost gossiped, of that flight after Worcester: it was a significant recitation. For the King was speaking not so much to Samuel Pepys, making notes at his side, as to himself. This King, who was about to be restored, never intended to let himself forget what he had endured – and might one day have to endure again. Thus he dwelt consciously on the nadir of his fortunes, where other men might have been puffed up with contemplation of the future.
Not that life on board was all retrospection. Before they sailed there had been pleasanter diversions, such as the renaming of the royal ships, to rescue them from their unpleasant Protectoral nomenclature. This probably took place on the quarter-deck table ‘under the awning’: thus the Richard(Cromwell) became the James (Duke of York), the Speaker (of the House of Commons) became the Mary (Princess of Orange) and the Dunbar (oh hateful Scottish word!) the Henry (for the Duke of Gloucester). Pepys, like many of those suddenly enjoying intimate contact with royalty, allowed himself to be charmed by such evidence of the King’s humanity as the fact that his dogs were busy making messes on the deck, just like any other dogs. Finally, at the King’s suggestion, the three royal brothers, Charles, James and Henry, tucked into a seaman’s breakfast of pork, pease and boiled beef.
The King was rowed ashore about three o’clock in the afternoon in the Admiral’s barge: Pepys followed in a smaller boat which included one of Charles’ errant dogs, escorted by a footman. Once on dry land, Charles, with his usual tactful sense of occasion, knelt down and thanked God for his safe arrival. And he continued to acknowledge the divine course of his salvation when the Mayor of Dover presented him with a rich Bible.
It was, said the King promptly, ‘the thing he loved above all other things in the world’.
General Monck’s claims to have assisted the Almighty in bringing out this happy state of affairs were not mentioned. But then they scarcely needed to be. Monck was the first to receive the King, with all obeisance and honour. And now it was time for the ordnance to speak. The thunder started with guns and cannons there in Dover, and spread all the way to Tower Hill in London, just as the bonfires sprang from hill to hill, from town to town, a sight commemorated by Abraham Cowley:
All England but one Bonfire seems to be,
One Aetna shooting flames into the sea.
But it was the ordnance which impressed the King. Indeed, so dominant did the sheer noise of his reception become that it would become the principal theme of the King’s commentary upon it. As he told his sister Henriette-Anne in a letter the next day, ‘My head is so prodigiously dazed by the acclamation of the people … that I know not whether I am writing sense or no.’2
From Dover Charles went on to Canterbury, and from thence to Rochester. He took his time in treading the triumphal route, now lined by the local militia of Kent, as well as more gracefully strewn with herbs by Kentish maidens. The dalliance at Canterbury included Sunday service in the ancient cathedral, the first meeting of his new Privy Council and the presentation of the Garter to General Monck. All these events could as well have taken place in London. But the King’s thirtieth birthday was imminent. It was part of the perfect timing of things, the way everything now fell into place with such marvellous felicity, that the King would be able to take possession of his capital on such an auspicious day.
At Rochester King Charles deserted his coach for horseback, and it was on horseback that he greeted the Army, drawn up for his benefit – or perhaps as a reminder of the source of his power – by Monck at Blackheath. It was on horseback too that he saluted the more pacific Morris dancers who gambolled on the heath. It was on horseback and bareheaded, riding between his two brothers, all three in silver doublets, that on Tuesday, 29 May, the King finally entered the capital. Met by the Lord Mayor at Deptford, he first rode through the borough of Southwark and then, preceded by the Mayor, crossed London Bridge. So clogged was the structure with wooden houses on both sides, that the royal party had to be content with a twelve-foot passage, while heralds and maids and other attendants milled about them. None of this diminished the general ecstasy. As John Evelyn, the Anglican and former exile, wrote in his Diary of the spectacle on Restoration Day, ‘I stood in the Strand and beheld it and blessed God.’3
It was of course the King that the populace crowded to see. But the pomp of this first royal procession indicated that King Charles II did not intend to return as a suppliant exile – more as ‘the Chiefest Ray of Lustre to all this Splendid Triumph’.4 Not only a monarchy but a whole way of life was being restored. The cortège which reached London included three hundred gentlemen in doublets of cloth of silver, and an equivalent number in velvet coats, accompanied by footmen and lackeys in purple liveries and other uniforms of sea-green and silver. The buff coats of the soldiers evoked now no painful memories of the Civil War, adorned as they were with sleeves of cloth of silver, and other trimmings of silver lace. To this spectacle of affluence was joined that of the Sheriff’s men in their red cloaks and still more silver lace, the gentlemen from the London companies, opulent in velvet coats and golden chains, the Aldermen of London in scarlet gowns also richly adorned.
The noise remained fulminating. It was a noise of guns and cannon, the bells which never stopped, the clattering of the soldiers and their horses, but above all the noise of the people – over twenty thousand of them, laughing, shouting and crying and jostling to see the King coming into his own. That day and night they were all Royalists. The streets literally flowed with wine: the Venetian Ambassador kept a perpetual supply on tap outside his house. It was seven o’clock in the evening before the King, surrounded by this happy tumult, reached Whitehall.
Here he was addressed by the Speakers of both Houses of Parliament. The Earl of Manchester, for the peers, began his address in a style which was almost ludicrously obsequious: ‘Dread Sovereign!’ he cried, ‘I offer no flattering titles, but speak the words of Truth: you are the desire of three Kingdoms, the strength and stay of the Tribes of the People, for the moderating of Extremities, the reconciling of Differences, the satisfying of all Interests’, and so forth and so on.5 Yet it was true, as Manchester proceeded to point out, that the great magnates of the realm had found the destiny of the peerage had been peculiarly linked to the monarchy’s own: the House of Lords had been abolished just after the execution of King Charles I, and, despite some Cromwellian experiments, had not really found its place again in the constitution in any proper form.
The King’s ‘Gracious answer’, as it was afterwards described, was very short. To excuse its brevity, he said that he was disorientated by his journey and above all by the noise still sounding in his ears; but ‘I confess [it] was pleasing to me, because it expressed the affections of my people,’ the King quickly added.6
The oration of the Speaker of the House of Commons, delivered in the Banqueting Hall, took much longer. At the end of it the King was forced to acknowledge that he was so exhausted that he could hardly speak, but all the same wished the Speaker to know that ‘whatsoever may concern the good of this people, I shall be as ready to grant as you shall be able to ask’. He was certainly too tired to attend a Thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey, so that a shorter service was held in the Presence Chamber. At the end of it all the King still had to dine ceremoniously in public, showing himself to his people at his food, as his ancestors had always done.
Was the weary King solaced nonetheless by his mistress Barbara Palmer? Legend had it so. And for once, in view of the birth of Barbara’s daughter Anne, almost exactly nine months later, on 25 February 1661, the legend seems perfectly plausible. It is true that Barbara’s husband, Roger Palmer, did acknowledge Anne as his own at the actual time of her birth, either because he was hoodwinked by Barbara into doing so, or because he chose to turn a blind eye to an unpleasant situation in order to preserve his marriage. But as Anne grew up, her royal paternity became quite obvious. She was officially designated the King’s daughter at the time of her marriage, created Countess of Sussex in her own right, and, with Charlotte Countess of Lichfield, Barbara’s second daughter by the King, came to form an important part of his inner family circle.
To return to the legend, it would have been quite in character for the King to have relaxed in Barbara’s arms after his triumphant if noisy processional: even if one cannot prove that he did so. Certainly he was in a high good humour at the time, giving vent to one of those wry, self-mocking observations at which he excelled. Turning to those about him with a smile, King Charles remarked that it was undoubtedly his own fault that he had been absent so long, since he had met no-one ‘who did not protest that he had ever wished for his return’.
The man the crowds cheered through London on his thirtieth birthday was an engaging but not a merry monarch. This is confirmed by all contemporary accounts. For one thing, Charles II was no longer young by the standards of the time. (He was in fact over half-way through his own life, but of course the average life expectancy of the time was far less than sixty.) His appearance had much changed from those far-off days when Cromwell was wont to refer to him jocularly as ‘the young man’ and ‘the young gentleman’. Sir Samuel Tuke, in a character of Charles II written to coincide with his Restoration, referred to the fact that his face, which had been ‘very lovely’ until he was twenty, had now become grave and even severe in repose, although much softened when he spoke. One witness of the royal procession commented on Charles II’s new resemblance to his father, calling him ‘black and very slender faced’.7
Undoubtedly his face was much leaner. The nose too had markedly lengthened. Already the characteristic deep lines which are seen in all the later portraits had formed from nostril to chin, curving round the wide mouth. They are already visible in a portrait painted towards the end of his exile, and praised by Pepys for being ‘the most pleasant’ and ‘the most like him that I ever saw picture in my life’,8 as well as the many engravings commemorating the Restoration. Sometimes attributed to debauchery, these particular lines were more likely caused by the tribulations of exile.
In general, it was majesty, not youth, which supplied the charm of his appearance. ‘You may read the King in every lineament’ was the general verdict on his face. His tall figure, ‘so exactly formed that the most curious eye cannot find any error in his shape’, was as appropriate in a monarch as it had been inappropriate in a fugitive; its symmetry commanded universal admiration, as did his fine long legs and shapely hands.9 Once again, there was favourable comment on his shining black hair, which had not yet started to go grey: surprisingly, for his father’s black hair had silvered prematurely. The Plea Roll portrait of Michaelmas 1661 shows the curly black moustache which he preserved to the end of his life (Charles, unlike his father, was never bearded), the mass of black hair and heavy black brows which together gave a saturnine cast to his countenance – the exact word used by his contemporaries. However, even Charles was not to enjoy his thick black locks for long: three years later he went in his turn ‘mighty grey’ and adopted a periwig in consequence like everyone else.10
The King’s other good feature, his ‘quick and sparkling’ eyes, attracted attention. But behind the sparkle, the expression remained watchful. And the King’s habitual demeanour on his return was grave. As Pepys put it, ‘The King seems to be a very sober man’; it was the fourteen-year-old George Boddington who ran back to his father after witnessing the procession and reported that the restored monarch was ‘a black grim man’.11
And gravity, even temperance, was the keynote of the character now presented to his loyal subjects. An Eikon Basilike of Charles II (imitating the title of the famous book ascribed to his martyred father), published within a few months of his landing in England and probably written by Sir Richard Fanshawe, gives an interesting sidelight on the image of the new reigning monarch. Here Charles was inevitably credited with such sterling qualities as good judgement and apprehension, magnanimity and public-mindedness, as well as sheer goodness. (He was more good than great, as one phrase had it, contrasting Charles le Bon and Charlemagne: that recalled his father’s last letter.) But the King was also presented as having ‘sobriety and temperance’: his diet spare, his attire plain, his recreations moderate, and his speech sober – a detail incidentally confirmed by Sir Samuel Tuke, who remarked how the King never swore.12fn1
It was hardly surprising if the new King was at heart sober, serious, even melancholy, rather than merry. Here was a man who had been undergoing harrowing experiences since boyhood: including his father’s death, his family’s poverty and his own humiliation. He had known, in Dante’s words,
sì come sa di sale
Lo pane altrui, e com’ è duro calle
Lo scendere e ’l salir per l’ altrui scale
(‘the salt flavour of other’s people’s bread, the hard path up and down other people’s stairs’). He had endured all this. He had never given up. Nevertheless, it is useless to pretend that this ‘black grim man’ was the same brave boy of Edgehill, or even the spirited general on the eve of Worcester fight. It was not that King Charles II never intended to feel again: as we shall see, he remained, admirably, a feeling man all his life, full of affectionate impulses, one of which (towards his wife) would bedevil the monarchy’s future. But this was in private.
In public, he was determined never to be subjected again to the experience of humiliation, accompanied by helplessness. With this resolution went the presentation of a public mask of cynicism, gaiety, indifference – it could take many forms, according to the interpretation of the beholders. Behind the mask lay a melancholy which nothing, not all the fabled delights of the Restoration Court, quite dislodged.
But of course, this melancholy coexisted easily with an iron determination to preserve what was his, now wrested back from unlawful hands. Charles II believed passionately that monarchy was the rightful government of Britain: this conviction was built into his personal philosophy by his upbringing and had been welded there solidly by the death of his father. It was not a purely selfish view: of course he did not intend to go on his travels again, but he also, less personally and less selfishly, did not intend that his country should suffer again, as it had suffered so cruelly in the Civil War.
In the same way, an underlying melancholy was compatible with, and even inspired, a degree of doubt about the country which was now welcoming him with such rapture. He felt himself to be somewhat of an expert on the changeability of crowds. It was in keeping with the King’s suspicions that he prided himself on being able to read people’s characters from their faces, having studied the subject in a book – Physonomia, by G. B. della Porta.13 As he searched the smiling visages of those surrounding him at this ‘continuous Jubilee’, he was aware of the darker passions which lay concealed – and which might return. It is tempting to suppose that King Charles enjoyed at least one day of unalloyed happiness as monarch – Restoration Day. But did he in fact do so? Is there not in all his remarks and behaviour on that auspicious occasion, including the quip that it was undoubtedly his own fault he had been away so long, a note of amiable but unmistakable caution?
As the bells rang out and finally died away, the myriad bonfires were reduced to ashes, the King remained wary. Outwardly, he could and would forgive the past – except for those directly involved in his father’s murder. Even then he showed himself more merciful than those around him. The corpses of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw (President of the court which tried Charles I) were exhumed and publicly hung at Tyburn, a gesture which did but little harm to the deceased. Of the forty-one surviving regicides, those who had signed the warrant and a few others closely associated with the King’s death as well as the two (unidentified) executioners of Charles I, twelve died altogether. It was the King who prevented a further nineteen of their number, those who had given themselves up, from being pursued by the law; he told Hyde that while he could not pardon them, he was ‘weary of hanging’.14 He did not save Argyll in Scotland, but then Argyll was responsible for the death of Montrose; Sir Henry Vane, who also died, was charged with treason against Charles II rather than against Charles I.
The judicial process which brought the regicides to book was a great deal fairer than that allowed to King Charles I, since the prisoners were patiently heard in their own defence, and, in general, the rules of contemporary justice were observed. Charles was present at some of the executions, but John Evelyn put his attendance in the correct perspective. The executions were performed, he wrote, to avenge the murder of King Charles I and in the presence of ‘the King his son, whom they also sought to kill’. Otherwise Charles II, never a personally vindictive man, proved himself ‘no Orestes’.15
He preferred positive memorials to his father: as late as 1678 the House of Commons voted £70,000 for a funeral and a monument for the murdered King, a quite incredible sum. Perhaps it was too incredible: for the money never arrived, although Wren did produce a design for a monument.fn2But it was the measure of the King’s forgiveness that by a decade after his Restoration he was accepting hospitality from Henry Cromwell, second son of the late Protector, at his home near Newmarket.
Nevertheless, in Charles II a temperamental disinclination to vengeance was not at all the same thing as an inclination to forget the past. Revolution, and its possible consequences, was one spectre which stalked the corridors of the King’s palace from the inception of his reign to its end (even though this spectre would take different guises in different decades). But at no point was the presence of such a threatening ghost felt more acutely than in the early 1660s. To understand this, one has to be wary of hindsight. Not to the monarch riding down towards Whitehall on 29 May was there granted the cheerful knowledge that he would die in his bed twenty-five years later. On the contrary, he arrived in a country in desperate need of settlement, coming from a Europe in which the tide of revolution, flowing strongly in 1648, was only just beginning to subside. Like his first cousin Louis XIV, Charles had been formed against a background of such experiences.
Thus one finds the implicit fear of another revolution expressed continuously and in all sorts of different ways in the early years of the reign. There were significant details such as the preference for Windsor Castle as a royal fortress, not simply because it was ‘the most romantique castle that is in the world’, but because it could be properly garrisoned.16 There were broader policies, such as the concentration on forming a proper body of guards to surround the monarch. Richard Cromwell, exiled and debt-ridden, was clearly a burnt-out case: yet it was considered worth while reporting on his movements. A general jumpiness animated surveys of the careers of those with regicide connections.
Still more important is it to realize that in the early years plots were not only feared, but actually existed. Periodically substance was given to these apprehensions; otherwise they might have dissolved in the growing stability of the Restoration state. In January 1661, for instance, the Fifth Monarchy men, members of a millenarian sect, ran amok under a Thomas Venner; the later plots of 1663 and 1664 led to the production of diligent if circumstantial reports on the subversive activities of republicans, Quakers, and other sectaries. The year 1663 also produced quite a serious republican plot in Ireland; similar disturbances in Scotland evoked from Pepys the nervous reaction that the Bishops’ Wars might be happening all over again – tremors which demonstrate how finely balanced popular stability was considered to be in the early years of the reign. During the Dutch War there were genuine conspiracies in London, to give colour to royal and other fears.
The fatal years after 1640 had left their curse behind: never again could revolution be unimaginable. Not only had Charles himself suffered the strong marks of an impressionable child, but nearly all his current ministers had been sufficiently active to have retained potent memories of republicanism – from one angle or the other. One of the King’s little jokes commemorated the fact, pleasantly but pointedly: he told the former Commonwealth commanders in his splendid new Navy that ‘they all had had the plague but they were quite sound now and less accessible to the disease than others’.17
As to the absurdity of such fears – that the surviving regicides, aided by the soldiery, plus some new republicans, might overthrow the Crown once more – this was not so striking at the time. In May 1664 the French Ambassador, an intelligent observer, wrote that it did not seem impossible that the English would ‘be tempted again to try and taste a Commonwealth’, remembering their greatness under Cromwell.18
King Charles II made his own position on the subject clear in his speech to Parliament of February 1663. Referring to certain ‘rogues’ who had escaped punishment recently for want of legal evidence, including William Stockdale, MP, he said, ‘But let him not believe it, although he creates just the same stirs as were prepared before the Long Parliament, that I, knowing the mischiefs then, will not prevent them now.’ The King went on to say that ‘justice I see must be done against such restless spirits, and let them not delude themselves into a belief to find me tame’.19
The glorious twenty-ninth of May, then, ushered in an age of anxiety as well as an age of rejoicing.
Yet with these twin provisos of watchfulness against the repetition of revolution and concern for justice to his father’s memory, King Charles II arrived in a healing mood. ‘At which Time he prov’d himself the Noah’s Dove, that finding no Rest anywhere, was receiv’d again into his own Ark, and brought a peaceable Olive-Leaf in his mouth’– thus Titus Britannicus.20 And the sentiments were not exaggerated. In his determined mercy, King Charles in 1660 did show himself indeed a veritable olive-branch-bearing dove. The only trouble was that to bear the olive-leaf involved another twin pair of considerations: conciliation and reward. One or the other he might have achieved: the conciliation of the Cromwellians, the reward of the exiled and wounded Royalists. To do both was likely to prove very difficult, if not impossible. Nevertheless, the King set out with the highest intentions.
Let us start with reward, the implementation of those hopes whose existence had been so vital to the maintenance of morale during the exile. The loyal petitions began to flood in at once: in fact, many of them had already been received before the King’s arrival, and throughout May Hyde had been deluged with petitions for peerages, ecclesiastical preferments and the like. How many of these petitions related to Worcester! It was not only the King who looked back to that fearful time. One Mary Graves petitioned for having provided twelve steeds: one of these, she was reliably informed, had been shot down from beneath the King during the battle and ‘the other I heard was that happy horse His Majesty got from Worcester upon….’ Less romantic were the drapers of Worcester who had been commanded to clothe the life guard in red cloth and had never been paid; they wanted £450.21
Sir Jonathan Wiseman of Glastonbury spoke for many when he wrote of himself in semi-biblical language: ‘Your poor petitioner hath been tost and tumbled up and down and was hated of all men, and was tried eleven times for my life, and was imprisoned but still got away….’ And then there were those, not a few, who had served Charles I, such as the poignant story of the dead King’s cannoneer, who had lost both his eyes and his arms in service. In general, the Stuarts remembered their old servants. Poignant memories were aroused by some pensions granted. Four women cradle-rockers to ‘our late dear sisters’ the Princesses Elizabeth (dead at Carisbrooke) and Anne (dead as a baby) were rewarded, as well as those who had served Charles I and even James I.22
It was of course one of the penalties of the unopposed Restoration that very few names could legitimately be struck off the list. Sir William Killigrew, a royal servant who understood the ways of the world (he also wrote plays), had foreseen this in April: ‘Suppose, Sir, that you were now called in without any restrictions. How impossible a work it would be to please all those that have really served your father, and yourself … ’tis not your three kingdoms that will afford half enough places, or employments for them all.’23
There was another problem. Through all these petitions and the Restoration settlement itself, we can discern the obsession of the loyal not only that they should, understandably, be rewarded, but less attractively, that the disloyal should not. The point was made early on concerning the composition of the King’s entourage: ‘It is observed by your Majesty’s said royal party, that all those who were the greatest actors both against your royal father and yourself are the only men who are preferred to the highest places of authority and trust about your Majesty,’ ran one petition. Later Rochester the cynical put the same point as he sneered:
His father’s foes he does reward…
Never was any King endued
With so much grace and gratitude.
When Sir Richard Fanshawe, who had been promised by Charles a post as a Secretary of State, was passed over for Monck’s protégé, William Morrice, he expostulated that he had been slighted in favour of ‘one that never saw the King’s face’.24
The Morrice incident summed up the King’s difficulties in a nutshell. After the happy ending of the Restoration, he had to go forward and reconstruct the government of the country, and former foes were vitally important for the kind of healing settlement he had in mind. His attitude to the scientist Sir William Petty was characteristic. At the Restoration, Petty felt it necessary to explain that his involvement with the government of Ireland during the Commonwealth and Protectorate (including his celebrated survey of the country) had not been done out of any desire to harm the monarchy. ‘But the King, seeing little to mind apologies, as needless, replied: “But, Doctor, why have you left off your inquiries into the mechanics of shipping?”’ And the conversation quickly passed to such agreeable (to the King) topics as loadstones, guns, the feathering of arrows, the vegetation of plants and the history of trade.25
The first body of men who surrounded the King was indeed a combination of the old and the new (for all the complaints of the loyal petitioner quoted above). It was of course dominated by the trusted counsellor Hyde and the veteran Sir Edward Nicholas, who was given the other secretaryship of State. The Marquess of Ormonde was made Lord Steward of the Household to compensate for the fact that Parliament had appointed Monck Lord Lieutenant of Ireland – although the following year Ormonde was restored to the post for which, as a man who loved and cared for the country, he was so well equipped; he was also given a dukedom. But the Lord Treasurer was to be the Earl of Southampton, a magnate who, if he had had no truck with the Protectoral government, had not shared the exile either; and, even more significantly, his nephew, Anthony Ashley Cooper, who had been a member of the republican Council of State, was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. This group formed, in Hyde’s words, ‘a secret committee’.
Beyond them lay the Privy Council, numbering between forty and fifty. Beyond that lay Parliament, once again two-housed. What were its powers? For that matter, what was its relation to the monarchy? What indeed were the powers of the monarchy? It was one of the remarkable consequences of the King’s unconditional Restoration that in spite of years of argument, civil war, discussion and experiment, no one in 1660 yet had a clear idea as to what the proper answers to these questions were.
In so far as an accepted theory existed, it gave the King wide powers. Although the whole Restoration was based on an optimistic feeling that the King and Parliament would in future amicably share power, there was absolutely no indication as to how this was to be worked out in practice. In the meantime, the King retained his prerogative untouched, and with it the right to prorogue or dissolve Parliaments at will, to control foreign policy and, when necessary, to wage war. As against this, Parliament, it was understood, would vote him the extra monies he might need for such matters, since he was no longer expected to ‘live of his own’ (and even the mediaeval Kings had sought money from Parliament to wage war). But the potential control of Parliament over the King inherent in this situation had no theoretical base to it. It was all very confusing.
In 1664 the French Ambassador commented disapprovingly of the English constitution that it had a monarchical appearance, as there was a king ‘but at the bottom it is very far from being a monarchy’. He questioned whether this confusion was caused by ‘the fundamental laws of the kingdom’ or by the ‘carelessness of the king’.26 In fact, neither was responsible. The confusion developed out of the peculiar circumstances of the Restoration settlement, which presented the King with, on the one hand, very wide powers, and, on the other hand, equally wide problems, which he could not solve without the co-operation of almost everyone in the State.
It was a measure of the uncertainty of the times that the moment was not felt appropriate for a general election. Although the sitting House of Commons had not been elected legally (they lacked the King’s writ), they were confirmed in their existence, and kept there till December to carry out all the vital post-Restoration legislation. This Convention Parliament thus passed a general Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, from which only fifty named individuals were excepted. The King put the argument for such a measure cogently: ‘It will make them [the former rebels] good subjects to me and good friends and neighbours to you [the loyalists] and we shall have them all our end….’27
Equally important was the settlement of the Army. A measure was passed to the effect that Commonwealth salaries need not be repaid – this reassured General Monck, amongst others – while of course the Act of Indemnity affected the soldiers as much as any section of the community. At the same time, King Charles took a prudent decision to alter the entire composition of the future Army.
Disbanding the old Cromwellian soldiers at considerable financial cost, he welded together by degrees a totally new kind of force out of his former Royalist regiments and whatever military elements in England were indubitably loyal. He retained, for example, the Coldstream Guards, who were a Cromwellian creation. It was, to be frank, the first English standing army – in the sense of a non-political military body in support of the civil power. But considerable effort was made to camouflage the fact: references wee made to ‘guards’ and ‘garrisons’ rather than to the dreaded word ‘army’. And the King’s army was incidentally a convenient source of reward for that other army – of needy place-seekers.
Where the law was concerned, conciliation was more obvious, innovation less apparent. The vital principle was established that service during the Interregnum should be no disqualification: thus both Sir Matthew Hale and Edward Atkins, who had been esteemed judges under Cromwell, were reappointed, and as a result even Bishop Burnet credits Charles with good judges. Furthermore, the judges were for the most part appointed to the more liberal formula of quamdiu se bene gesserit – so long as they conducted themselves properly, rather than the more autocratic durante bene placito – so long as it pleased the King to appoint them.28
There was one area where public innovation simply could not be avoided, and yet conciliation of all parties was absolutely vital, and that was the vexed area of religion. The question of what sort of State church should exist in England after the Restoration was, like the constitution itself, left wide open at Charles’ return. The promises given at Breda had however been generous in scope. For the rest of 1660 the omens for some tolerant kind of establishment, allowing for both nonconformist and Catholic dissent, looked more hopeful than they would again for two centuries. The King was by temperament, conviction, and (by the implications of his word at Breda) personally inclined to toleration. As he had told Morrice from Breda, he was confident that he had ‘offered nothing’ in his Declaration and letters ‘that I will not meet punctually and exactly perform’.29 The Puritans who had recently ruled the State church knew that some severe alteration in their position was inevitable after his return. Nonconformists, like the Quakers, were petitioning for a situation by which they could rest within the State – peacefully rather than turbulently as hitherto.
On 25 October 1660 the King issued a declaration in favour of a modified episcopacy, which it was understood that the Presbyterians would also accept. Secretary Morrice offered that this declaration should be embodied in a bill, but this solution, most unfortunately, even tragically, was rejected by the Commons in November. A conference then met at the lodgings of the Bishop of London to work out the details of a compromise by which some Presbyterians could accept preferment.30 It was a defeat, not only for moderation and toleration (leading the way to the much harsher Clarendon Code), but also for the King’s own plan for the English Church. He had taken much interest in the conference, attending it personally. He listened while general concessions were discussed but finally abandoned because the Catholics might benefit. Throughout he held firmly to that view which he had never abandoned in exile, that the Anglican Church represented the right solution for England. He spoke movingly of the Book of Common Prayer: ‘the best we have seen, and we believe that we have seen all that are extant and used in this part of the world….’31
Carlyle denounced the Restoration settlement in his usual fine splenetic style; he took the body of Oliver Cromwell hanging from Tyburn to be ‘a fingerpost’ into ‘very strange country and far from the government of God. It called and thought itself a Settlement of brightest hope and fulfilment,’ he wrote, ‘bright as the blaze of universal tar-barrels and bonfires could make it: and we find it now, on looking back on it with the insight which trial has yielded, a Settlement as of despair.’ But the despair did not come from the abandonment of Puritanism, as Carlyle fondly believed; it arose through the failure of the English Parliament in 1660 to follow their King’s admirable lead in promoting an established Anglican Church, with the ability to tolerate other law-abiding sects in the wings of its many mansions.
The land settlement was in general more successful than the religious settlement, because here the status quo could be, and was, respected – except in the case of Crown and Church lands – even at the cost of the Royalists: it has been established that surprisingly little land actually changed hands at the Restoration. The Crown and Church lands were successfully restored, despite the conflict of interest with those who had acquired them, as a result of the successful manœuvres of Hyde and the King.32 This was partly due to the fact that the sequestered Royalists had retained ownership of their forfeited lands more than was lawful by making it over to trustees or relatives; but it was also the innate wish of Parliament and King not to disturb England, as she was, more than was absolutely necessary to bring about justice. And in the view of some Royalists of course the justice brought about was rough indeed.
Where pomp was concerned, Charles II was outwardly traditional rather than innovatory. It was in keeping with this that the first year of his reign was always referred to as the twelfth – as though the eleven years’ Interregnum since his father’s death was of no account. And of course his display had a political purpose. He had after all been brought back to incarnate not a republican head of state, but the beloved old monarchy for which the people yearned.
Thus the immediate needs of a restored sovereign were felt to include tradespeople of all sorts, tinker and tailor, as well as soldier and sailor: an Arras worker, a bookbinder, a brewer, a coffee-maker, a fishmonger, mat-layer, milliner, fruiterer, saddler, milkman, woollen draper, clock-maker, comb-maker, corn-cutter (awarded a special scarlet livery, as was the royal rat-killer).33 This list of positions was as endless as were the petitions to fill them: the equivalent to the royal warrants today, the coveted right to state ‘By Appointment to…’.
On a grander level, the King needed, naturally, a Master of Tents, a Surveyor of Stables, Falconers, Cormorant Keepers. On the most important level of all, he needed to reorganize the entire paraphernalia of the royal existence, which had fallen into desuetude during the previous twenty years. Here the King’s return was to take a palpable form, in terms of building and artistic commission, summed up by the great allegorical ceiling of the Restoration itself commissioned from Michael Wright and placed in the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall. His father’s great art collection had been tragically sold after his death by the Commonwealth officials, and it was with a view to replacing it to some small degree that Charles had already acquired some paintings of his own while in the Netherlands.34 The new collection was further augmented by twenty-seven old masters (including a famous Titian) hastily presented by the Dutch government, who hoped by this propitiatory gesture to atone for their previous slights to the English King.
The tastes of the new age dictated many of the earliest pieces of renovation: within the Whitehall complex the Cockpit Theatre was soon made ready. By June, over £1,200 had already been spent in furnishing the royal apartments. It would be two years before the King’s bedroom, with its black and white marble paving and chimney-piece, its ‘flying boys’ holding the curtains of the bed alcove and its ‘great eagles’ over the bed itself, would be complete. Even then there was much mention of ‘night work’– the seventeenth-century equivalent of overtime – needed to complete it.35
A sun-dial in the Privy Garden was however given priority, as was the ‘King’s Tube’, or astronomical telescope. That was another indication of the way the new reign would go. The King’s own natural bent for scientific discussion and discovery could now be given a free rein. Like the jackdaws who were his favourite birds, he was not only a great collector of curiosities, but inquisitive to boot. It was the kind of mind peculiarly suited to a monarch, who could engage his subjects in conversation as and when he pleased, on what topics had currently seized his fancy, without fear of seeming to bore them. It is true that Charles II felt fascination for practical results rather than investigation for its own sake. His was not the intellect of a Newton, as described by Wordsworth, ‘Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone’ (although Charles II patronized Newton). But then a practical turn of mind was a very useful thing for a sovereign in charge of the welfare of his people to possess.
Thus we find Charles happily discoursing with John Evelyn on the elimination of the ‘wearisome’ smoke from London (a problem which remained unsolved for three hundred years), as well as his more conspicuous interests, such as shipping and the improvement of gardens and buildings. Evelyn was privileged to hold the candle while the King was having his face crayonned by the great miniaturist Samuel Cooper, for the benefit of the new coinage: naturally, the King seized the opportunity to chat away about painting and engraving.36
He adored all clocks and watches. In the end there were no fewer than seven clocks in his bedroom (their ill-synchronized chiming drove his attendants mad), while another clock in the antechamber told not only the hour but also the direction of the wind. Hooke’s balance-spring action was demonstrated in front of the King, while the royal accounts contain many items for the purchase of further clocks. The sun-dial referred to above had a particular function – for the King used to set his watch by it.
When the Royal Society came to be formed in November 1660 it was not mere flattery which caused the King to become its Fundator (or founder); he granted the Royal Charter on 15 July 1662. The man who was obsessed by the need to possess a lunar globe, with the hills, eminences and cavities of the moon’s surfaces as well as the degree of whiteness solidly moulded, was well fitted to occupy the position. At the Society’s inception it was reported that the King ‘did well approve’ of the new body and would be ‘ready to give encouragement’ to it.37 Later he responded in style, presenting a mace to the Society and granting its arms.
The charm and catholicity of the early proceedings of the Society recall the King’s own conversations.38 Topics raised included oysters (at Colchester), ships in North America, the weather in Greenland and beer. The King’s unsettling friend inspired a typically elusive entry in the Society’s proceedings: ‘The Duke of Buckingham promised to bring to the society a piece of an unicorn’s horn.’ It was a two-way process. The King made science fashionable by his own burning interest in the subject. At the same time, he was naturally drawn to those who shared it. While many of the founding members of the Society were, or had been, part of the Puritan establishment, others were former Royalists, the King’s personal friends. Two of his doctors, his chaplain and his brother’s secretary were amongst the founder members. Sir Robert Moray, who first told the King of the establishment of the Society, was a staunch Royalist, who had been Colonel of the Scots Guards in France and one of Charles II’s intimates.
Now Moray, together with Sir Paul Neile, a Gentleman Usher to the King, was used as a conduit for the King’s messages and enquiries to the Society.39 It was Moray who reported Charles’ earnest questions as to why sensitive plants contracted to the touch, why ants’ eggs were sometimes larger than the insect itself. Moray produced a discourse on coffee written by Dr Goddard at the King’s command; he also reported an experiment of the King’s own, keeping a sturgeon in fresh water in St James’ Park.
At first the King’s interest in the Society was so zealous that, as reported by Moray, he wanted it to examine every philosophical or mechanical invention before the patent was passed. The King recommended to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland that the officers and new settlers of that country (the Adventurers) should contribute to the Society. He made the Society gifts of curiosities. In later years the King’s acute interest in the Society faded (although he continued to send venison for its anniversary dinners). But his interest in mathematics, navigation and his own laboratory experiments – his own and others’ – did not. He was responsible for the foundation of the Mathematical School at Christ’s Hospital in 1673 to instruct boys in navigation as well as mathematics; subsequently the King took an interest in the boys’ apprenticeships. He was also responsible for the foundation of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich two years later. This was designed by Wren, as he himself confessed, ‘for the Observator’s habitation and a little for Pompe’.40 Where science was concerned, Charles II made an excellent natural leader of post-Restoration society.
Only the chronic want of money hung over the new reign, a bad fairy at its christening, promising hardships ahead. In August 1660, a few months after his return, the King observed ruefully of his position: ‘I must tell you, I am not richer, that is, I have not so much money in my purse as when I came to you.’ A year later Pepys was describing how ‘the want of money puts all things … out of order’.41 As a result the search for a bride for the King was much influenced by the question of her dowry; and once the lot had fallen upon the well-endowed Portuguese Infanta, it was a further sign of the King’s financial straits that the dowry was already being pledged as a security for loans in September 1661, eight months before the bride herself actually landed in England. When she did arrive, the unhappy member of her entourage deputed to administer the dowry was Eduarte Da Silva, a New Christian (that is, a Jew converted to meet the requirements of the Inquisition). Da Silva had a spell in the Tower of London when the payments did not come quickly enough for the embarrassed King.42
How much was this situation of the King’s own making? It was suggested by his enemies and critics at the time, and has been suggested by many critics ever since, that such qualities in the King as extravagance and mismanagement brought about the perpetual financial straits in which the Crown soon found itself. This view leaves out of account two important aspects of the Restoration. First, since Charles II had been brought back to personify royalty, that in itself necessitated all the traditional trappings of a king. Such things always had and always would cost a great deal of money, but to do otherwise would be to confound both popular and courtly expectations. Lord Halifax believed that the very reason that the English character was biased in favour of a monarchy was because of its childish taste for ‘the bells and the tinsel, the outward pomp and gilding’. Secondly, the sum of money Charles II was originally voted by Parliament, although seemingly adequate, proved difficult to collect and in any case the yield had been over-estimated.
Immediately on his return, then, Charles II was torn between the fantasy of kingship and the reality of England’s economic situation. Of course the very use of the latter term is anachronistic. To the contemporaries of Charles II, it was the kingship which represented reality, so that the conflict between the two was very imperfectly understood, if at all. In this way, from the very beginning, the Crown was immersed in a mire of debt from which it had little hope of escaping – by natural means. As we shall see, the King eventually resorted to unnatural means. But it was hardly his own fault that he found himself floundering in the first place.
The King’s annual peacetime expenses were estimated by Parliament at £1,200,000; war was to be considered an extra, as had been customary in previous reigns. The sum itself was comparatively generous by the standards of the time – if not lavish – but the income which the King actually received was appreciably smaller. It has been estimated however that, on average over the entire course of his reign, the King received of those monies about £945,000 a year, increased to something under £980,000 by his private income.43 Assuming he kept within his theoretical income, that in itself produced a gap between this annual income and his annual expenditure which Mr Micawber would have aptly summed up as ‘result misery’. In fact, a paper on the state of the revenue shows that between Michaelmas 1661 and Michaelmas 1662 the King’s expenditure was roughly £1,500,000, compared to the aforesaid official figure of £1,200,000. This was a state of affairs which would certainly have upset Mr Micawber still further.
But there were graver problems. With the Exchequer in control of agents for collection, rather than of the actual collection of revenues, administration of the Crown’s finances was inefficient, corrupt and above all laggardly. Actual receipts were particularly low at the start of his reign, so that early on the King had to resort to the traditional monarchical expedient of high-interest loans in order to keep going at all. Prudent men like Sir George Downing were found advocating the punctual payment of the interest on the Treasury loans at least – in order to uphold the King’s credit abroad.
Yet Charles II had little choice. Not only was austerity in a sovereign impossible to conceive in a body politic where rank was very much demonstrated by outward display – a fact amply borne out by the household accounts of the great magnates of the day, some of which vied with and even surpassed those of the King in generosity. But the very prestige of the nation seemed bound up with the appearance of the monarchy.
It was in keeping with his subjects’ aspirations, therefore, as well as his own that the King now embarked on preparations for two ceremonies with their origins rooted deep in English history. He would hold a ceremony for the installation of the new Knights of the Garter – the first for twenty years. And after that, with even more magnificence, would follow the coronation, the joyous celebration of all that had happened over the last twelve months since that suppliant message had come from the House of Commons: that the King should come into his own again.
1 The King’s language remained moderate. ‘Oddsfish’ – his favourite expletive – was in fairly common use in the seventeenth century; it occurs in the work of Otway, Congreve and Vanbrugh. It was a corruption of God’s Flesh, as the nineteenth-century ‘Golly’ stood for God.
2 But Le Sueur’s equestrian statue of Charles I was re-erected on the site of the regicides’ executions, with a pedestal designed by Wren, executed by Grinling Gibbons. It can still be seen at Charing Cross, and is regularly adorned with wreaths on 30 January, the anniversary of the death of Charles I.