CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘All the news now is what will become of the Dutch business, whether war or peace. We all seem to desire it, as thinking ourselves to have advantages at present over them; but for my part I dread it.’
Samuel Pepys, Diary, 30 April 1664
On 8 May 1661 King Charles II opened the newly elected Parliament: it was twenty years since a reigning English monarch had given the traditional speech from the throne. It was more than twenty years since there had been a legally elected Parliament. A comment was made on the youth of the members. ‘I will keep them till their beards grow,’ replied King Charles ominously.1 And he was as good as his word. This body, known as the Cavalier Parliament, would yield little to its predecessor in longevity, for it was not to be dissolved until 1679.
Yet its first tasks were still redolent of the past. For all the valiant work of the Convention Parliament, there remained much to achieve in the nature of settlement for this new body, quite apart from confirming the acts of its predecessor. One outstanding question was of course religion. That wonderfully open, peaceful desire of Breda, that no-one should be ‘disquieted or called in question’ for their religious opinions, so long as they did not disturb the peace, still remained to be implemented after the fiasco of the previous autumn. What finally emerged as a religious settlement – the so-called Clarendon Code enacted between 1662 and 1665 – was however as far from the heady spirit of Breda as could be imagined. Only two-and-a-half years divided the Declaration of Breda from the first Act of the Clarendon Code, but it might have been an aeon.
The Clarendon Code was in fact a direct reversion to the harsh laws promulgated by the Puritans against the Church of England: such, sadly, was to be the Anglican revenge. It embraced a number of provisions. The Corporation Act, for example, excluded from municipal bodies all those who refused to take the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. These rites themselves were later defined by the Act of Uniformity to include not only episcopal government, but a standard liturgy: it was in essence a reinforcement of the Act of 1559, which had been generally enforced up till 1640. It was not even necessary to pass a new Act penalizing those who refused to adhere to the rites: the old Act of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I came happily to hand. The way was paved for the Conventicle Act; whereas the Act of Uniformity penalized those who did not attend Anglican services, the Conventicle Act penalized those who worshipped elsewhere. The subsequent Five Mile Act harried the nonconformist ministers by forbidding them to live in certain areas.
To understand this rigidity, one has to appreciate that it was certainly greater than Clarendon had contemplated, for all that the code bears his name. There is much argument over the exact nature of Clarendon’s Anglicanism and how far he was genuinely prepared to exercise tolerance to dissenters.2 What is however unarguable is the enormous decline of official toleration from the Breda high point to the Clarendon Code low, a decline to which Clarendon the man certainly acceded. We have also seen how staunchly he defended Anglicanism under attack during the Interregnum, how bitterly he resented the compromise with the Covenanters.
Breda itself had represented nonetheless a new deal. Yet almost immediately Clarendon found himself occupying that treacherous political territory, the middle ground. As plots and conspiracies, many of them found amongst the dissenters, darkened the political horizon, it was easy for Clarendon to revert to the exclusive Anglicanism which in his heart of hearts he had probably never really deserted.
For these measures King Charles himself held no brief at all. They represented if anything the exact reverse of what he conceived as the best religious settlement. Quickly he made his own position clear, by proposing a Declaration of Indulgence which would allow him to exempt certain individuals from the effects of the Act of Uniformity. To the fury of the Court and King (but not to that of Clarendon, who had thought it folly), the measure failed to pass through the Lords. ‘That which shocks most people in it is the favourable mention of Roman Catholics,’ wrote the King’s rising new assistant, Henry Bennet.3
In August 1662 nearly a thousand nonconformist incumbents of livings had to vacate them or wrestle with their consciences for ever more. The Victorian division of ‘church and chapel’ was for the first time introduced into the fabric of English society, as nonconformity became a social force of its own, albeit a deprived one. And there was nothing whatsoever the King could do about it. William Denton, one of the King’s physicians and a political writer, described a significant incident in that same August 1662. Some Presbyterian ministers visited Charles as ‘humble suitors’ for an indulgence against the laws. They ended up before some judges who declared that the King could not dispense with an Act of Parliament. ‘So,’ commented Denton, ‘their cake is dough at present.’4
The King’s cake was in an equivalent condition. The rejection of the sovereign’s own measure, the Declaration of Indulgence, showed how ineffective the King was to control the Parliamentary will, once it ran contrary to his own.
Only one body of dissenters actually managed to derive benefit from the Clarendon Code. This was the Anglo-Jewish community.5 A series of historical accidents, as well as the genial nature of Charles II, contributed to this. The Jews had been expelled from England at the end of the thirteenth century, but had nevertheless been resettling secretly in the country for many years until their lot publicly improved under the Commonwealth. Cromwell was philo-semitic for philosophical reasons; practically, he also employed Jews in his intelligence service. It was therefore on his ‘nod’, as Lord Protector, that the Jews’ presence in England was once more tacitly acknowledged. However, a large proportion of the English merchant community remained resolutely anti-semitic from traditional motives of commercial rivalry: to the great distress of the Jews’ leaders, they did not secure an official recognition of their position.
King Charles II was not particularly philosophically inclined towards – or against – the Jews: such was not the measure of the man. But he was kind and he was tolerant. He had another useful quality, gratitude, and, like Cromwell, he too was practical. In exile he had promised certain Royalist Jews in Amsterdam toleration in return for a loan: ‘When God shall restore us … we shall extend that protection to them which they can reasonably expect and abate that rigour of the Laws which is against them in our several dominions.’ He may also have been aided by Augustin Coronel Chacon – ‘the little Jew’ – later agent to the King of Portugal in London. In the summer of 1660 the King’s personal repute with the Jewish leaders was high. Conversations with the then powerful Monck produced this verdict: ‘Segundo todos dizem he sua Benignidade tanta que nào se nesesitava de medianero algum.’ (According to what everyone says his good will is such that no intermediary is necessary).6
For all this, the atmosphere immediately after the Restoration was tense so far as the Anglo-Jewish community was concerned. For they were still without written permission to resettle. Although their synagogue in Cree Lane became one of the tourist sights of London (the ever-curious Pepys paid it two visits, and Gentile women made nuisances of themselves gaping) it was still theoretically possible to eject the Jews once more. The frowning rivalry of the English merchants remained a threat, and there were hostile references in the House of Commons. The Jews felt harassment to be on the increase. Then the Conventicle Act, that part of the Clarendon Code forbidding any religious assembly not in accordance with the laws of the Church of England, offered a chance to the Jews’ enemies: no synagogue could possibly fit in with its provisions. First, Paul Ruycart threatened the Jewish leaders with removal under the new law. Then the Earl of Berkshire, son of the King’s old governor, intervened in a manner which was hardly more attractive. He offered to intercede with the King on the Jews’ behalf – but they would have to come to a speedy financial arrangement with him first, otherwise ‘he will endeavour and prosecute the seizure of their estates’. In short, it was blackmail. Desperately, the Jewish leaders decided to go directly to the King. Their petition reminded him of their good behaviour and asked that they might remain ‘under the like Protection with the rest of your Majesty’s subjects’.
An unpublished Hebrew letter from Rabbi Jacob Sasportas to Rabbi Josiah Pardo of Rotterdam describes the incident: ‘We live at a time in which God has seen fit greatly to ameliorate the condition of his people, bringing them forth from the general condition of serfdom into freedom, and to set them beneath the authority of one appropriate indeed to hold them in a subjection that is itself the essence of liberty [that is, Charles II]: specifically, in that we are free to practise our own true religion…. A further miracle has been vouchsafed us in these last days. Two nobles, being themselves in possession of access to the royal council, approached us purporting to have been given authority over our persons and property. We requested them to give us time, and we apprised the King, who chuckled and spat at the business; and a written statement was issued from him, duly signed, affirming that no untoward measures had been or would be initiated against us, and that “they [the Jews] should not look towards any protector other than his Majesty: during the continuance of whose lifetime they need feel no trepidation because of any sect that might oppose them, inasmuch as he himself would be their advocate and assist them with all his power.” Blessed be the Lord….’ So Charles II implemented that promise made in exile.
On 22 August 1664 the Jews trading in England received from the Privy Council the precious, long-sought document, an Order in Council, by which they might ‘promise themselves the effects of the same favour as formerly they have had, so long as they demean themselves peaceably and quietly with due obedience to His Majestie’s laws and without scandal to his Government’.7 Charles II, as good as his word, continued to act generously towards the Jews, granting letters of endenization (that is, moderated naturalization) with an open hand, so that the Jewish community increased and flourished in his reign. Recognition of their religious status was further granted in 1673.
If only the King could have acted in a similar manner towards all those dissenters living ‘peaceably and quietly’ within his dominions! Such was certainly his inclination, and it was the good fortune of the Jews that they at least were able to benefit from it. Catholics, because held to be politically dangerous (which no one considered the Jews to be), were another matter.
Parliament was the bane. The basic trouble was with its composition. The newly elected body was subject almost immediately to an enormous turnover.8 Part of this was due to natural (noble) wastage: a quantity of MPs who were eldest sons of peers replaced their fathers in the House of Lords between 1661 and 1667. Other MPs, of proven loyalty, were sent to the Lords as a reward. By 1664 forty-eight seats had changed their occupants and by the fall of Clarendon in 1667 well over a hundred. A body chosen in a moment of popular acclaim was subtly if unintentionally transformed. As a result, King Charles found himself reaping a bleak harvest. He could not in the end reconcile, in an age when the national divisions turned out to be great, and the art of parliamentary management was not yet understood.
On 30 January 1662, a day dedicated to the solemn commemoration of the murder of the late King, Pepys reported, ‘All people discontented, some that the King doth not gratify them enough; and the others, Fanatiques of all sorts, that the King doth take away their liberty of conscience….’ By April 1663 Parliament was capable of being described by the same source as being ‘in a very angry pettish mood’.
It is true that 1664 saw the repeal of one Triennial Act and the introduction of a new one. It would prove a remarkably convenient victory for the Crown, even if the fact was not realized at the time. The Triennial Act of 1641 had laid down that a King should meet Parliament once every three years and its passing had been considered a notable concession by Charles I. The Act of 1664, however, referred to that of 1641 as ‘in derogation of his Majesty’s just rights and prerogative’, as a result of which it might ‘much endanger the peace and safety of his Majesty and all his liege people …’. In the future, while it was regarded as right that no more than three years should elapse between Parliaments, it was left to the King to secure this happy state of affairs; no procedure was suggested for compelling him. This victory was the result of clever manœuvring on the part of the Crown, playing on those general fears regarding ‘peace and safety’ to which the Act alluded. Yet the Crown’s tactics – proceedings were pushed ahead rapidly to avoid a full house – were aimed at this single success, rather than general Parliamentary management.9
The King’s policy towards the House of Lords did nothing to reverse this effect created in the Commons.10 It was Clarendon, not the King, who was eager to readmit the Anglican Bishops to the seats from which they had been expelled in 1641 – the King’s Catholic friends, such as Lord Bristol, feared for their effect on Catholic toleration. And, unlike his father and his brother, Charles was not free with his new creations. After the first rewards for loyalty were over, creations only outweighed extinctions over his whole reign by nine; only ten peers were created between 1662 and 1670. As a result, the House of Lords during this period was once again by no means the docile Royalist body which might have been expected. Had not thirty of its members fought against Charles I? It would be a powerful hostile element in the fall of Clarendon. The fuss over the Irish Castle Bill, in which Buckingham kept the House of Lords talking till the candles ran out, was a typical example of the unruly paths down which these post-Restoration peers could stray.
There was then little appreciation of the importance of the composition of Parliament in the 1660s. This did not mean that no effort at all was made to carry through the royal policies. In Clarendon’s efforts to form some kind of Court party in the Commons – rather than in later Whiggery – have been sought the origins of the English party system.11 Through these manœuvres a new kind of man emerged to represent the King’s interests in Parliament. Such a figure was Henry Bennet, created Baron Arlington in 1665 (by which name he will for simplicity’s sake be known).
Arlington had little in common with the magisterial figures who had supported, advised and even overborne the young King in exile. Twelve years older than the King, ten years younger than Clarendon, he was in essence a civil servant. Clarendon wrote of him crossly that he ‘could dictate; he could not lead’. But Arlington could also serve, and that was the type of man the King was beginning to need in an age where the theoretical rights of King and Parliament were amorphous, yet their practical relationship had to be hammered out day by day. Burnet noted that Arlington had the ‘art of observing the King’s temper, and managing it beyond all the men of that time’, a quality he used to good effect once he had been given the Privy Purse; in October 1662 he replaced the ageing Nicholas as Secretary of State.
Arlington had a particular love of and interest in Spain, having begun his career on a diplomatic mission there in 1657. Soon the affairs of Spain, France, Portugal and Holland were channelled through him rather than the other Secretary of State, Sir William Morrice; Arlington taking advantage of his knowledge of languages, an attribute not shared by all his English contemporaries. With his rich dress, like that of a Spanish grandee, his air of formality described as ‘his Castilian bearing’, a strange piece of black sticking-plaster across his nose (the relic of a war wound), Arlington was something of an outward oddity at the Court of King Charles. But the intimacy he soon enjoyed with the King was based on usefulness: he was given a lodging from which he could easily reach the royal apartments by a private staircase. As time would show, it was the subservient Arlington, not the magisterial Clarendon, who represented the type of the King’s advisers in the future.
For one thing, the King did not share Clarendon’s great belief in the Privy Council as an instrument.12 In Clarendon’s declared opinion, this body was ‘the most sacred, and hath the greatest authority in the government next the person of the King’. He envisaged a constitution in which the legislature consisted of the King in Parliament and the executive of the King in Council – with the two completely separate. Although we might be tempted to think that he occupied the role of Prime Minister, Clarendon himself considered the idea of an official chief adviser highly un-English: it was exemplified by Richelieu and Mazarin across the Channel, as the French origin of the words premier ministre indicated.
To Clarendon it was Parliament which represented the danger, and the powerful aristocrats there who might try to exercise control over the King, as they had done in the previous reign. How much more desirable to Clarendon appeared a Privy Council (dominated of course by himself), which would withdraw from Parliament, for instance, control of the Treasury and the Navy. In Clarendon’s view, Parliament was there to vote the money – but the Council was there to spend it.
But to King Charles II, aristocratic control via the Privy Council was scarcely more appealing than that by Parliament. When the King expatiated in 1664 on his affection for Parliaments, his honeyed words were not pure hypocrisy. ‘I need not tell you how much I love Parliaments,’ he declared. ‘Never King was so much beholden to Parliaments as I have been….’ There was much truth in the sentiment. Officially, Monck’s part in restoring him was now forgotten. He had been, if anything, restored by Parliament. He certainly preferred the concept of a Parliament to that of a Council, which, being closer to the person of the King, was potentially more disagreeable. When Queen Henrietta Maria complained of the Privy Council that it ‘shadowed the King too much, and usurped too much of his authority and too often superseded his own commands’, she was expressing a valid point from the monarchical point of view.13
So the relationship between the King and Clarendon was not entirely easy, for all the jocularity of their scribbled exchanges within the Privy Council itself:
Clarendon to the King on a prospective visit to Tunbridge: ‘I suppose you will go with a light Train.’
King Charles: ‘I intend to take nothing but my night bag.’
Clarendon: ‘Yes, you will not go without forty or fifty horse.’
The King: ‘I count that part of my night bag….’
The religious settlement had aroused a passion, if a frustrated one, in the King. He showed a great deal less day-to-day interest in the settlement of those vast tracts of his kingdom, Ireland and Scotland. He had never visited Ireland, and it therefore exercised over him no powerful memories, good or bad. If anything, he was inclined to be favourable to those Catholic Irish who had supported his father, many of whom had served under him in the army of exile; in general, he had found them an agreeable lot, and in certain cases, such as Theobald Taaffe (now Lord Carlingford), real friendship had grown up.
The Duke of Ormonde, a man of great wisdom and equity, echoed this feeling for the loyalties and wrongs of the Catholic Irish – although himself a Protestant. He was determined to bring about a land settlement where the Catholic Irish, and those who had served in the Army in support of the late King in particular, would not find their claims ignored in favour of the Protestants, soldiers and adventurers who had merely supported the new King’s restoration. In Ireland this aroused unhappy memories of Ormonde’s Treaty of 1649, which had been surrounded by bitter controversy. In England Ormonde proved to be a lone voice amongst the King’s other advisers, including Clarendon, who were happy with the status quo in Ireland – either because it suited them economically, or perhaps because it caused less trouble. For all Ormonde’s efforts, justice was not done to the Catholic Irish. Even though Catholics were restored to trading privileges in 1661, the land settlement of Ireland remained very much as it had been in Cromwellian times: under the control of a Protestant ascendancy.
If Ireland to King Charles was a far-away country of which he knew nothing, Scotland was a country which he knew too well – and from which he hoped to remain as far away as possible. To Clarendon King Charles remarked carelessly in March 1662, ‘For my part, rebel for rebel, I had rather trust a Papist rebel than a Presbyterian one.’ The Lord Chancellor retorted, ‘The difference is, that you have wiped out the memory of the rebellion of the one, whilst the other is liable to all the reproaches.’ But in truth Charles had no memory of the Catholic rebellion. In his ‘Gracious Message’ to his Irish subjects, issued shortly before his Restoration, he assured them that their former treasons to King Charles I were washed away; he quoted the Biblical doctrine by which there was more rejoicing over one lost lamb than over all the other ninety-nine.14 But Ireland was not Charles II’s lost lamb. Scotland, if anything, could claim that honour. And nothing about Scotland, lost or found, caused him to rejoice. The subject of Presbyterianism still aroused sufficient ire in him after his Scottish experience, ten years back but never to be forgotten, for him to mask it in another of his characteristic pieces of mockery. Was it possible, he asked, for a man to be a Presbyterian and a gentleman? No doubt he carried Samuel Butler’s satire on the Presbyterians, Hudibras, in his pocket (and protected its publication by royal warrant) out of the same teasing animosity.
As Ormonde was to Ireland, Lauderdale was to Scotland. But the two men were of very different calibre. Lauderdale, it is true, had force, an energy nearing on the manic, belied by his indolent appearance, coarse tongue and coarser habits; his period of imprisonment after Worcester had also been spent, rather surprisingly, in religious study and meditation. In his own way he was very much a Scot and later displayed a genuine concern for the future of his native land as a nation, not merely as an English appendage. But at the time of the Restoration, Lauderdale also believed in a healthy and curative measure of revenge. At all events, Argyll was publicly executed, which may have satisfied Lauderdale and at the bottom of his heart not displeased the King – who did not try to save him – but was scarcely a healing gesture. An Act Rescissory also swept away a number of liberties to which Scots had become accustomed.
However, Lauderdale’s attitude to the Covenant in Scotland was at least healthily pragmatic. He suggested to the King that he should denounce it in public, but in private should leave matters very much as they were. This, one must believe, would have accorded with Charles’ general dislike of any policy which involved him thinking about Scotland and the Scots for longer than was necessary. Unfortunately, both Middleton and Clarendon showed more idealism – and more obstinacy. Middleton was convinced that it was essential to restore episcopacy as soon as possible; a view to which it was easy to get Clarendon’s agreement.
It was left to Lauderdale to watch like a vulture as Middleton tottered and finally fell; when Middleton introduced an unwise Act of Billeting, Lauderdale was able to present it as an attack on the King’s prerogative. In the meantime, government policy on episcopacy foundered, as so often before, on the rock of the Scottish Covenant. Yet another reaction against episcopalian church rule – the Pentland Rising of 1666 – suggested that all the lessons concerning seventeenth-century Scotland had been learned in vain.
While the Catholic Irish people resigned themselves to an ominously unfair land settlement, and the Presbyterian Scots refused to resign themselves in the slightest bit to the bishops they so much disliked, King Charles himself won the hearts of his English people at least by concentration on the fourth quarter of his dominions – the sea. Here on one level there was splendid sport to be had. Charles, with his brother James, was responsible for introducing yachting to the English. It will be remembered how impressed the King had been with that Dutch craft (in fact a yacht) which had brought him from Breda to Delft, and how he had been presented with a replica – paid for by the Dutch East India Company. To this hundred-ton Dutch-built vessel, the Mary, falls the honour of founding the British yachting industry.15 It was soon copied, virtually identically, by the King’s shipbuilder Peter Pett, at a total cost of £1,335: although Pepys, who considered the Mary ‘one of the finest things that ever I saw for neatness and room in so small a vessel’, was sceptical whether Pett would succeed in his self-confessed aim ‘to outdo this for the honour of his country’.
Soon yachts were all the rage. But these ‘pleasure-boats’, as they were alternatively called, still retained a distinctively warlike appearance, like the Dutch yachts of the time, with their eight guns and their crews of thirty men. Prince Rupert’s yacht Fanfan even took part in an engagement during the Dutch War. This did not stop the Prince referring to the King’s passion as part of the general levity of the new royal set: ‘The King, with his characteristic frivolity, had a yacht moored opposite Whitehall in which he might fancy himself at sea. The childish hobby was appropriately called The Folly, and aboard this yacht was one of the many lounging places of the court.’16 But age was making the former swash-buckling commander cantankerous.
To us today, these yachts would appear more like ‘yachts of state’, such as the modern royal yacht Britannia, rather than the pleasure craft at Cowes. Expenditure on them was considerable, even lavish. Some of their names – Catharine, Henrietta – gracefully echoed those of the royal ladies who were officially close to Charles’ heart. The Greyhound evoked a tougher image. Later Charles descended de haut en bas with a yacht called the Fubbs: his pet name (based on the old English word for chubby) for Louise Duchess of Portsmouth. The household accounts are filled with entries for the various yachts’ appurtenances: Holland quilts and pewter chamber-pots for the Monmouth in 1673; more luxuriously, a feather bed and crimson damask hangings for Queen Catharine’s own ship. On the Greyhound yacht, the King himself indulged in crimson damask for bed and hangings, and gilt leather for the state room, while confining himself to ‘a little bed’ six feet long by three feet six inches broad.17
A little healthy sibling rivalry helped on the development of the yacht industry. Soon the brother ship-builders Peter and Christopher Pett were competing on behalf of the royal brothers Charles and James, the King himself visiting Deptford and pronouncing Christopher Pett’s work (for his brother) ‘very pretty’. Another yacht, the Bezan, was presented by the Dutch to swell this first British yacht squadron. By 1663 yacht-building was spreading downwards to the aristocracy, so much so that Christopher Pett demanded an extra gratuity for building pleasure-boats, because of all the people he had to entertain. Early owners included Sir William Batten, of the Admiralty office, whose wife (like Queen Catharine) was ungratefully seasick.
It was compared to the great square-rigged ocean-going ships that these new craft seemed so light and compact; contemporaries like Pepys always noted how small they were. They could certainly sail far closer to the wind, with their fore and aft rigs, and were thus much more suited to racing. The royal brothers took to matching their craft against each other with zest. Evelyn describes one such early yacht race: ‘The King lost it going – the wind being contrary – but saved stakes in returning.’ There was a race between the Dutch-built Bezan and the King’s yacht Jamie (named for Monmouth), which the former easily won. Yacht-racing, and for that matter yacht-building, came to an inevitable halt at the time of the Dutch War, only to flourish again in the 1670s and 1680s.
Arlington, with more charity than Prince Rupert, summed up the King’s enthusiasm in a memorable phrase when he said that twenty leagues at sea were more pleasing to him than two on land.18 King Charles II was certainly not the first English monarch to find happiness on the ocean wave: but the coincidence of his personal passion and the age in which he lived was a fortunate one for his country. For it was not only yachting jaunts which commended themselves to the King. He was also deeply concerned with the Navy.
Here his intellectual curiosity married fruitfully with his own taste for adventure to provide an interest in navigation and astronomy, as well as in docks and ship-building. It amounted to an obsession. Fortifications and naval bases in particular fascinated him: he commissioned Danckerts to paint two views of Plymouth, a view of Falmouth Harbour, two views of Portsmouth and a view of his latest acquisition – the dowry of the Queen – Tangier. In danger of his life, escaping from England after Worcester aboard theSurprise, King Charles still managed to take an interest in the navigation of the boat. Renamed the Royal Escape, it was fitted up as a yacht after the Restoration and painted at the King’s request by Van de Velde. It was also no coincidence that Charles had discoursed for hours to Sir William Petty on ‘the philosophy of shipping’. In September 1662 the King launched a new type of ship with ‘two bottoms’, invented by Petty, which was aptly christened The Experiment. Later the King would tease Petty about his boat’s odd appearance. In vain Petty offered to lay odds for his ship against ‘the King’s best boats’: Charles refused to lay the bet and continued the teasing. Yet Petty, undiscouraged, built other double-bottomed boats, and made many further experiments in naval design.19
As for the sovereign himself, with his diligent visits to coastal fortifications, his inspection of naval plans, even his royal orders to commanders at sea – he would at times prove a mixed blessing to his underlings, teasing apart. Burnet typically extracted some snobbish criticism from the King’s expertise. Charles, he wrote, ‘understood navigation well: but above all he knew the architecture of ships so perfectly, that in that respect he was exact rather more than became a prince’.20 Evelyn was right when he wrote of Charles II, quite simply, that he was a great ‘lover of the sea’.
King Charles’ concern with the sea had theoretical consequences as well. One incident gives a clue. In late 1661 King Charles waxed extremely indignant when the French King jibbed at the tradition by which ‘ships belonging to the crown of England’ (that is, men-of-war on the high seas) were formally saluted. He instructed his ships not to tolerate any diminution in the reverence which was their due, adding that he would be quite unworthy if he quitted a right, and went lower ‘than ever any of my predecessors did’.21
Such a concern with symbolic ritual was uncharacteristic of Charles II. Except where the Navy was concerned, he made little of that concept of glory which both inspired and plagued his cousin Louis XIV of France and whose pursuit King Louis described as early as 1662 as ‘the principal aim’ of all his actions. Charles had spent too many years as a King with ‘nothing but the name’ to bother himself over an insubstantial notion such as glory. But the reality of power – the security presented by it – preoccupied him, if he only rarely dropped the mask sufficiently to display his feelings.
There was one area in which he deliberately emulated King Louis and that was in the establishment of regiments of Foot Guards, Life Guards and Royal Horse Guards (although he did not approach anything like King Louis’ figure of sixteen thousand of such desirable bulwarks). In theory, these guards were to be used to police State ceremonies, but of course they also secured the person of the King against a possible coup. It was this aspect rather than the ceremonial side which interested King Charles. The Navy however was his amant de cœur, where the Army represented a reliable husband with a strong right arm. And he intended that the Navy he loved should bow to no-one. As King Charles wrote later, ‘It is the custom of the English to have command at sea….’22
It was happy for him that the English ship-building industry itself made prodigious advances during his reign. At first, the industry was hard put to it to meet the rise in demand for vessels following the settled times of the Restoration, and there had to be large-scale buying of ships from abroad. However, two acts of Parliament put an end not only to foreign-owned ships carrying English trade (the familiar concept of the Cromwellian Navigation Acts), but also to the employment of foreign-built ships. The result was a speedy advance in native British ship-building. Even in wartime, British tonnage rose rather than fell, since the check to ship-building was more than balanced by the capture of foreign ships as prizes.23
King Charles’ conception of England’s maritime role was also central to his relations with the Dutch.
Charles II did not love the Dutch, or the ‘Hollanders’, as they were generally known by the English during this period. But he did not at first feel about them as he felt about the Scots, a visceral dislike based on personal ill-treatment. The Dutch had not treated him notably well during his exile, but then neither had France, Sweden nor Brandenburg, towards all of whom he was prepared to entertain friendly relations. Be it yachts or duck decoys, he was prepared to admire many things about their way of life and introduce them to his own country. If he was not prepared to dedicate himself to vengeance in England, he was still less inclined to the pursuit of old vendettas abroad.
At his Restoration, King Charles accepted the congratulations of Johann De Witt, who, as Pensionary (Minister of State) of the province of Holland, represented the effective power in the Netherlands. When Mary Princess of Orange continued to press her own claims as guardian of the boy Prince William – as well as William’s possible rights as Stadtholder – she found her brother counselling moderation. At the start of his reign, King Charles certainly implied to De Witt that he was more interested in Dutch support for English policies than in his nephew’s claims.24
Mary’s premature death in December 1660 (while on a visit to England) upset this equilibrium. From the grave, Mary still emphasized that proud rank of a Stuart princess to which she had paid such marked attention in life. Her brother and mother were left as joint-guardians of the eleven-year-old William, with no mention at all of the States of Holland. It was hardly surprising that the States refused to confirm the guardianship of a foreign monarch, whatever his blood relationship.
Besides, there was still Mary’s old enemy, her mother-in-law, to be reckoned with. By early 1663 the Dowager Princess, who possessed the enormous advantage of being actually resident in the Netherlands, had seen the wisdom of joining forces with De Witt rather than fighting him over the boy’s future. She agreed to De Witt’s conditions for William’s education, and there was nothing the King and Council across the water in England could do about it.
King Charles’ annoyance over the whole affair was in direct proportion to his rising anger with the Dutch on more fundamental matters. In this, as in his love of the sea, he echoed the prevailing emotion of his people.25 With the exception of certain Protestant leaders, who found the theology of their Dutch counterparts sympathetic, the English as a whole in the middle of the seventeenth century glared across the Channel at their Dutch neighbours as a dog surveys a rival dog across the way. And, like quarrelling dogs, the two countries could not resist from time to time having a go at each other.
From the English point of view, this basic dislike made good commercial sense, since it was in commercial rivalry that it was rooted. The Dutch had in general the advantage of the English, being more adept at trade and having faster and cheaper ships: war offered the English an attractive alternative way of defeating them. For the Dutch cut across the English in certain vital areas: in Baltic trading, for example, and in distant lands, such as the West of Africa. Here a long-drawn-out struggle was already in progress for the possession of fortified trading-posts – the commodities traded to include of course slaves. … Communications were extraordinarily slow between the mercantile capital London and the fever-ridden swamps of Guinea, where the English and Dutch agents vied with each other, but they did exist. Elsewhere, in Asia, the policy of the East India Company was to try and secure equal trading rights, as well as compensation for past wrongs, from the Dutch. As the Dutch were clearly stronger than the English in Indian waters, it was once again in the interests of the Company to have the Dutch defeated in a European war.
If it is an exaggeration to say that King Charles had at this stage a coherent economic policy, it is certainly an anachronism to say that he had a foreign one. Yet in so far as his instincts on the subject could be summed up in the early years of the reign, they were expressed by Thomas Mun inEngland’s Treasure by Foreign Trade, written in the 1620s and reprinted in 1664. Mun fulminated on the subject of the Dutch: all over the world, by their trading ‘they do hinder and destroy us in our lawful course of living, hereby taking bread out of our mouths’.26 This was a point of view shared by many of the King’s most vociferous subjects, for this was an area where courtiers and merchants alike were frequently joined in a would-be profitable commercial enterprise via a trading company.
As King Charles came to share these feelings, he was further weighted against the Dutch not only by their threat to his beloved shipping, but also by his own natural preference for the French. The use of Madame as a conduit for correspondence with Louis XIV – ‘this private channel’ – arose naturally enough in the first place out of her marriage to the French King’s brother. Monsieur himself provided little competition for Charles as the central figure in his wife’s existence. It was not purely a question of his homosexuality: many princesses in that age lived perfectly happily with husbands whose proclivities lay elsewhere. Monsieur fulfilled his duties as a husband sufficiently frequently for Madame to endure numerous pregnancies and miscarriages during her short life. But he was a spiteful creature, jealous of Madame’s superior intelligence, her grace, and even the charm which otherwise enchanted the entire Court of Louis XIV. Burnet called him ‘poor spirited and voluptuous’ – a horrid combination.27
In face of such unhappiness within her marriage, like a sunflower Madame turned elsewhere. A brief period of romantic dalliance with her brother-in-law Louis XIV (the true extent of which can only be guessed) established a warm and loving trust between them. Nevertheless, Charles remained the lodestone of her life. A visit to London before her marriage had confirmed the intimacy of 1659. The King’s love grew and deepened. As a result, Madame’s sway over him in political and religious matters has been much stressed. The King himself added to the legend by stating that Madame was the only woman who had ever had any influence over him. Bishop Burnet chimed in by stating that Charles could deny her nothing. Yet the hard evidence points to the reverse: it was the King who influenced Madame rather than the other way round.
It is Madame whom we find in the Dutch War burning with English patriotism. ‘It is only with impatience that I can endure to see you defied by a small handful of wretches,’ she wrote to her brother. ‘This is perhaps pushing glory a little too far, but I cannot help it, and everyone has his own humour, and mine is to be very keenly alive to all your interests.’ An English observer in France thought Madame would literally have died at the news of an English reverse – all this from a Princess half-French by birth, brought up in France and married to a French prince. When Henriette-Anne visited England just after the Restoration with her mother, she had enchanted a deputation from the House of Commons with her tactful disposal of the fact that she could speak little of their allegedly common language. She had, she said, ‘an English heart’ if not ‘an English tongue’.28One must believe that this violent partisanship sprang from her feelings for her brother.
Such English sympathies of course only increased Madame’s value as an intermediary with Louis XIV. Gradually Charles’ letters were transformed from mere repositories of cosy family news to business letters – which nevertheless concluded, ‘I am entirely yours. C.’ Certainly Madame was a far abler ambassadress for her native country than its official representative in Paris, the Presbyterian elder statesman, Lord Holles, who disliked the place. When Holles became involved in an absurd controversy over the precedence of his coach, Charles carefully upheld him in public for reasons of honour, but expected Madame to explain away his bêtise in private.
Following the Restoration the King had already made his choice of France over Spain according to his personal inclination. This orientation became more obvious after the Cromwellian acquisition Dunkirk, occupying a key position between France and the Spanish Netherlands, was sold to the former. It was true that financial necessity played some part in Charles’ decision: quite apart from the high price paid by France (some £400,000), Dunkirk cost a fortune to maintain. But the drift of the English King’s diplomatic desires was clear, even without his anti-Spanish Portuguese marriage, so gratifying to France. Into these dreams, the Franco-Dutch defensive treaty of 1662 came as an unpleasant reminder of the French King’s priorities.
It was a question of the future ownership of the Spanish Netherlands, which in itself formed part of the general problem of the Spanish succession. In 1660 Louis XIV had married another farthingaled Infanta, Maria Teresa, daughter of Philip IV of Spain by his first marriage to Elisabeth of France. At that point the acknowledged heir to the vast Spanish dominions was Philip’s only son Carlos, the fruit of his second marriage to an Austrian Hapsburg. Carlos was however congenitally retarded, probably as a result of too close intermarriage – his parents were first cousins. Such matches were not always disastrous – Maria Teresa and Louis XIV were first cousins, as were Madame and Monsieur. Both couples produced a line of descendants. But there was something unhealthy about the Hapsburg blood, which the luckier grandchildren of the vital Henri Quatre escaped. At any rate, it was always clear that Carlos would die childless, despite the fact that he was an unconscionable time doing so (in the phrase associated with Charles II): he survived until 1700.
It was much less clear who would succeed him. The Infanta Maria Teresa specifically renounced her own claim on her marriage: but at the death of her father in 1665 Louis found it easy to discover that the renunciation was void, since the other clauses of the marriage treaty had not been carried out. Even before this there was a continuing sense of crisis about the Spanish dominions, particularly ones so carefully designed, surely, to round off the French frontiers, so strategically placed for French invasion, as the Spanish Netherlands. As early as December 1661 letters from France were warning Clarendon, for example, that ‘the King of France, when the King of Spain [Philip IV] dies, will send an army into Flanders to seize the country in the right of his wife’.29
Under the circumstances, Louis XIV looked on Holland less as England’s commercial rival than as Flanders’ potentially aggressive neighbour. King Charles was left to try and form a Northern league whereby the tiresome Hollanders would be confronted by a united Scandinavian phalanx. Sir Gilbert Talbot was sent on a mission to Copenhagen, but the project broke down on another traditional rivalry, that of Denmark and Sweden. This move, coupled with a partial (and unsuccessful) raid on the Dutch at Bergen, shows how far the King’s anti-Dutch feelings were escalating.fn1 He was probably speaking the truth when he told Madame in September 1664 that he did not desire war – ‘almost the only man in his kingdom’ who did not. He further described himself as lacking the ‘brutal appetite’ which induces rulers to break the peace.31 That again had a recognizable ring. Brutal appetites in general had been eliminated by the claustrophobic years of exile, the perpetual need for self-control.
But lack of passion is in itself an ineffective weapon, particularly when confronted by zeal. Most of the Court and Parliament were full of contempt for the Hollanders – avid for personal gain – and were, in Pepys’ phrase, ‘mad for a Dutch war’.32 If the King had been firmly convinced of the foolishness of such an enterprise, he might have been able to combat the wave of nationalist feeling. As it was, it coincided with his own deep hopes for English maritime ascendancy. Moreover, Charles was still in the same cautious mood of his Restoration Day, aware how quickly fortunes could change. It was always easier to go with the crowd.
Besides, he trusted – no, he believed – the English would prove superior to the Hollanders. In this conviction, and in the subsequent débâcle, the role of the English envoy at The Hague, Sir George Downing, was crucial. Originally a Puritan businessman, Downing was one of those adept characters who had ridden the storm of the Restoration period, to glide smoothly from his position as envoy under Cromwell to that of the King’s ambassador. In many ways he was worthy of the post, being highly intelligent and energetic – taking a lot of trouble, for instance, to acquire copies of letters from the Dutch archives.
But Downing had a failing. He was arrogant, and his arrogance took the form of such a low estimate of the Dutch national character that he ended by seriously misleading his own country. Again and again Downing reassured the King and Council that, whatever happened, the Dutch simply would not fight. ‘Go on in Guinea,’ he confidently advised. ‘If you bang them there, they will be very tame.’33
Pepys showed infinitely more percipience than Downing, the man-on-the-spot, when he confided to his Diary at the end of April 1664, ‘All the news now is what will become of the Dutch business, whether war or peace. We all seem to desire it, as thinking ourselves to have advantages at present over them; but for my part I dread it.’34
Downing’s assurances were music to the pro-war party in England, who saw in a series of predatory raids on the passive Dutch in Africa the opportunity of still further gains at little cost to themselves. The war party included not only the East India Company lobby but the Duke of York, with his special interest in the Navy, Buckingham – possessed, as ever, of more personal influence than his character warranted – and Barbara Castlemaine, whose importance lay not so much in the influence she exerted over Charles, as in the influence she was presumed to exert by outsiders. From Africa House, the Admiralty and Navy offices there emitted powerful signals for war.
Fighting broke out during the winter of 1663–4, in Africa, where the English enjoyed success, and America, where the New Netherlands were seized. Nearer at hand in the Channel, the English fleet acquired a series of Dutch ships as prizes, victories which neatly combined prestige and profit. Downing’s prognostications of glory appeared to be triumphantly justified.
In the autumn of 1664 the King still hesitated. Part of his vacillation was due to a laudable desire to be sure that the Navy was suitably prepared. The work of Sir William Coventry, Secretary to James and one of the Commissioners to the Navy, was however beaver-like in its application. On the eve of the war the two navies were at least comparable in strength.
The King’s hesitancy was also in part a propaganda exercise. King Charles was understandably keen to woo King Louis away from the side of the Dutch, to whom the latter was only committed by a defensive, not an offensive, treaty. To achieve this it was necessary in propaganda terms to prove that the Dutch, not the English, were the assailants. King Charles sent to Madame a series of long letters hammering the point home from the summer of 1664 onwards: how the bellicosity of the Dutch was being – surely unintentionally – encouraged by the French King.
‘For I assure you, they brag very much already of his friendship,’ Charles told Madame in August; without Louis XIV’s support, ‘it may be they would not be so insolent as they are’. In September he wrote of the Dutch preparations, ‘I am resolved they shall now send first, that all the world may see I do not desire to begin with them, and that if there comes any mischief by it, they have drawn it upon their own heads.’ In October he described almost casually the capture of one Dutch possession on the East coast of America: ‘A very good town, but we have got the better of it, and ’tis now called New York.’ Even here he made it clear the town ‘did belong to England heretofore’. In late December he was sending her a printed paper, ‘which will clearly inform you of the state of the quarrel between me and Holland, by which you will see that they are the aggressors and the breakers of the peace, and not me’. He asked Madame to read it carefully, for he was sure that the Dutch Ambassador in Paris would use ‘all sorts of arts’ to ‘make us seem the aggressors’.35
But King Louis did not budge.
Already by November the sheer aggression of ordinary Englishmen, and of Members of Parliament in particular, towards the Dutch was making it difficult for the King to continue his delaying tactics much longer. As he admitted to Madame in September, ‘the truth is they [the Dutch] have not great need to provoke this nation, for except myself I believe there is scarce an Englishman that does not desire passionately a war with them’. On 24 November the King gave vent to a calculatedly patriotic speech to Parliament on the subject of his preparations for war: ‘If I had proceeded more slowly, I should have exposed my own honour and the honour of the nation, and should have seemed not confident of your affections.’36
It was significant that the King also had to dismiss as ‘a vile jealousy’ the rumour that he might graciously accept the war subsidy now voted by Parliament, and then, having made a sudden peace, turn it to his own uses. War did pose an acute financial problem to a Crown already heavily embarrassed. It was true that the nationalistic optimism which pervaded the period, in the matter of this Dutch War, made light of such difficulties: Dutch prizes were expected to compensate for military costs. But so notoriously unstable were the King’s finances by now, that he found the greatest difficulty in raising the actual cash needed in the first place. New remedies were desperately sought. Sir George Downing had always advocated the punctual payment of interest on Treasury loans to uphold the King’s credit, but this had not always been done – because it had not always been possible to do it. This was the occasion of the issue of a government fiduciary currency; those who advanced the King money were for the first time enabled to obtain repayment ‘in course’, that is in rotation as funds reached the Exchequer.37 Thus inevitably expenditure galloped ahead of revenue. Even so, people were reluctant to lend for the Dutch War – at eight or ten per cent interest. They might cheer the brave British sailors and shake their fists at the cowardly Dutch. But when it came to the deployment of funds, the government’s finances were not such as to inspire any kind of confidence among the hard-headed.
It was better to concentrate on the magnificent possibilities of war. In December 1664 Captain Thomas Allin was ordered to attack the Dutch merchant fleet, homeward bound from Smyrna: in the event, the attack did not produce much effect. In February of the following year King Charles, tired of waiting for King Louis, declared war.fn2
There were wise heads who opposed the war. But they were overruled. Apart from these counsellors there were few in England who did not anticipate a glorious outcome of ‘the Dutch business’. Dryden captured the heroic mood of patriotic anticipation on the eve of the Dutch War, when he wrote,
Now, anchors weighed, the seamen shout so shrill
That heaven, and earth, and the wide ocean rings….
1 Historically, this is always known as the Second Dutch War, the First Dutch War having taken place under the Commonwealth, 1652–4. It is here referred to as ‘the Dutch War’ for the convenience of the narrative.
2 The Dutch were responsible for an outburst of unusually coarse language from the King to Madame. Told that a Dutchman had insulted him, he countered, ‘You know the old saying in England, the more a T—— is stirred, the more it stinks, and I do not care a T—— for anything a Dutchman says of me.’30 It was the language of exasperation.