CHAPTER SIXTEEN

This Revolution

‘Many particulars … have inclined me to this revolution, which already seems to be well liked in the world and to have given a real and visible amendment to may affairs.’

Charles II to Ormonde, on the fall of Clarendon

For a long time Charles II’s relationship with the Earl of Clarendon had been permeated by resentment. Some of this was personal. It was not pleasant to be treated as a lazy schoolboy, as the King approached his fortieth year. Whether King Charles was laggard in his transactions of business or not, Clarendon should perhaps have put his knowledge of history to work on the subject of monarchs and their former bear-leaders – the early intimacy generally making tact more important rather than less. The notes passed between Charles and Clarendon in the Privy Council, despite the humorous exchanges, illustrate how firmly the elder man considered himself in control.

But there was more to the fall of Clarendon from Charles’ favour than mere annoyance at an irksome manner: that, the King could have easily pretended to tolerate, if it had suited his book to do so. Had he not cultivated in exile an unusual ability to mask his feelings? The fact was that the King was by now evolving his own theories on how the country should be governed, along pragmatic lines. It has already been noted that he did not favour Clarendon’s emphasis on the Privy Council, whose domination seemed to him scarcely preferable to that of Parliament. He would have liked to free the Privy Purse, the source of his personal expenditure, from the overlordship of the Exchequer, and equally to place the Irish Seal above the Great Seal so that Irish affairs (and money) could be handled by him directly when necessary. He had also suffered acutely in recent years from Clarendon’s failure to control the House of Commons (he did not appreciate the real need for able speakers on the Court side), or for that matter the Lords.¹ As a result, its ‘angry pettish’ members had in his opinion kept him woefully short of funds. Nor had Clarendon produced the French alliance of his dreams, which would have made the whole Dutch business so much easier to pursue.

Affluent, pompous, by his very virtues reminding everyone uncomfortably of an earlier age, Clarendon had no widespread popularity to counteract the loss of the royal favour. Two marriages were further held against him – the alien Portuguese match to Catharine was laid as his door; while the fact that his own daughter was likely to be Queen, if Charles died without issue, only increased Clarendon’s unpopularity, exacerbated by the failure of the Dutch War.

In the meantime, the King was discovering for himself the advantages of younger, more accommodating servants. Besides Arlington, now married to a rich Dutchwoman, and Thomas Clifford, there was Buckingham’s Yorkshire protégé Thomas Osborne, two years younger than the King. Osborne was a handsome fellow who probably joined the anti-Clarendon group when Clarendon slighted him over the profitable Yorkshire Excise. The King himself understood his worth: for example, Osborne’s name was inserted in the King’s own handwriting into the list of commissioners appointed to examine the Irish accounts.²

One mark of Buckingham’s Yorkshire-based group, in Clarendon’s prejudiced opinion, was exhibitionism. They were, he wrote, ‘all bold speakers, and meant to make themselves considerable by saying upon all occasions what wiser men would not, whatever they thought’.³ As a matter of fact, Osborne had diligence as well as boldness, as his subsequent career in the King’s service would demonstrate. Nevertheless, the sport of Chancellor-baiting was an easy one for these younger men to propose in the embittered atmosphere of that autumn of 1667.

There was a temporary reverse in Buckingham’s fortunes in the summer, a silly matter of the King’s horoscope being cast. By September however the ebullient Duke, his good looks becoming puffy with age, but his spirits in no way weighted down, was back in favour. Nor was Buckingham the only one to see in the fall of Clarendon a convenient solution to the expensive fiasco of the Dutch War. Arlington was joined with Buckingham in the cause. Barbara Castlemaine, who hated Clarendon – the feeling was mutual – joined with her cousin Buckingham and exerted what was literally petticoat influence: after Clarendon’s disgrace she was spotted in her aviary at Whitehall, wearing a smock and ‘joying herself at the old man’s going away’.⁴

Under different circumstances, Clarendon might have survived these animosities. In the spring of 1667 he wrote to his old friend Nicholas that he intended to lodge peaceably in his own (newly built and magnificent) house and enjoy his sustained good health, ‘which is worth a great deal of money’.⁵ But the violent Parliamentary attacks coincided with the King’s own feeling that the Chancellor had outlasted his usefulness, and that he needed to evolve a different method of handling the government, if the monarchical role was to be played as he wished. New advisers raised in him hopes of new and better parliamentary management.

The public move against Clarendon came from Arlington and Sir William Coventry combined. Coventry, another of the new men who was roughly the same age as the King, was an attractive character, possessing both wit and courage, as his career in the Civil War as a very young soldier had demonstrated; his work at the Admiralty, under the Duke of York, was devoted and intelligent, and in the summer of 1667 he was made a Joint Commissioner of the Treasury. Now Coventry turned to the attack on Clarendon with zest.

Parliament bayed for blood. The Chancellor’s windows in Piccadilly were broken; it was the fate of another old servant of the State, the Duke of Wellington, whose windows at Apsley House were broken two centuries later by the mob. At some point, flight was suggested to the elderly Chancellor to avoid the penalties of impeachment. Lady Clarendon in her anguish was ‘given over for dead’. The Chancellor duly went, his departure witnessed by Arlington, amongst others, ‘with great gaiety and triumph’ from Barbara’s windows. Clarendon looked up. ‘Pray remember that, if you live, you will grow old,’ he said to the radiant favourite.⁶

So the ageing Earl of Clarendon took up his residence at Montpellier, to enjoy the health of which he had boasted only six months before to Nicholas. Only he employed it not to contemplate the aggregate of his worldly possessions with serenity, his pastures, his mansions and his apple-trees, but to write, with measured anger but also with sonorous recall, the history of his own times.

Most likely it was the King who suggested his flight, promising in return that his estates and honours would be safe. It was no part of his plan that Clarendon should have an opportunity to justify himself against the accusations of his enemies. The general charge of high treason brought against Clarendon would never have been made to stick; but the episode might have had unpleasant ramifications. Besides, Charles avoided confrontations, by temperament, whenever possible. The King did not attempt to conceal that Clarendon’s disappearance from the political scene was a profound relief to him personally. He regretted of course that Clarendon would not allow the dismissal to be handled ‘privately’– he had asked James to get his father-in-law to resign. Beyond that, ‘the truth is, his behaviour and humour was grown so insupportable to myself, and to all the world also, that I could not longer endure it’. But the nub of the matter came in the next sentiment: ‘It was impossible for me to live with it,’ wrote Charles to Ormonde, ‘and do those things with Parliament that must be done or the government will be lost.’⁷

Long, long ago Charles II had decided to run before the storm, whenever that storm, if faced, was likely to buffet the royal vessel beyond repair. The decision was not therefore the product of weakness, still less of cowardice: rather of his own particular brand of strength; one might even term it ruthlessness. The point has been made that the members of Parliament – like intelligent, trained animals – learned a new trick from the Clarendon affair, which they subsequently turned against their master. The impeachment of the King’s minister could be the first road to office. The control of patronage rather than the mere removal of an unpopular minister was the ultimate result. Thus Arlington’s adherents would drive out Buckingham; Shaftesbury would drive out Danby. … It was in this sense that James long after referred to the impeachment as ‘the most fatal blow the King gave himself to his power and prerogative’.⁸ The remark illustrates a profound difference of character between the two brothers. James saw the royal prerogative as something which had to be seen to be wielded; Charles merely wished to wield it when absolutely necessary. In 1667 he saw his problem quite correctly as ruling with Parliament – his policies, their supplies – and this Clarendon had not enabled him to do. The King hoped to do better in the future. Referring to the recent ‘revolution’– the common seventeenth-century word to denote a change-round in affairs – Charles showed himself confident that it would bring about ‘a real and visible amendment’ to his affairs. Already it seemed to him ‘well liked in the world’.⁹ Indeed, in view of Clarendon’s failures, and the demands of Parliament, it is difficult to see that the King was politically wrong. The spectacle of a sovereign ‘dropping the pilot’ – the phrase applied to the dismissal of Bismarck by the Kaiser – is never an attractive one. But from 1660 onwards King Charles II was not in business to charm by his actions. To rule, if possible with the approval of Parliament, struck him as being the first duty of the King.

Who now gained political power? Certainly the Buckingham faction benefited from Clarendon’s fall. Osborne became a Joint Treasurer of the Navy. Other supporters of Buckingham were preferred. But it was not simply a case of the rise of the Cabal – that acronym which, as every schoolboy knows (or tries desperately to remember), conveniently covers the names of Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale. For one thing, the Cabal was not nearly as united as the acronym suggests, particularly in the late 1660s, and it would be several years before anything like a Cabal policy could be discerned. Nor did Buckingham assume that total leadership which Clarendon had once enjoyed. Arlington was popularly regarded as his rival for the King’s favour in the group.¹⁰

The most striking immediate effect of Clarendon’s fall was to divide the King and the Duke of York. The closeness which had existed between them earlier in the reign gave way to a ‘kind of inward distance’, in Pepys’ phrase.¹¹ This change was in part engineered by Buckingham. With hindsight, we know that Clarendon was not to emerge from his exile (he died in 1674) and that Montpellier proved no Colombey-les-deux-Eglises. But Buckingham and his supporters lived in terror that matters might be suddenly reversed. And the Duke of York, as Clarendon’s son-in-law, they conceived would be the principal agent in such a reversal.

At this point it is worth taking a cool look both at the position and the character of the Duke of York towards the end of the first decade of Charles’ reign. For one thing, it is not conceivable that the seeds of discord could have been sown between the two brothers if Charles’ attitude towards James had not already been slightly ambiguous. On the surface, there was genuine camaraderie – not only the jolly, competitive yacht races, but also brother advancing brother, as Charles promoted James’ interests at the Admiralty. But Charles’ complicated feelings towards the presence of James at sea have also been noted. James had grown up to be an interesting character: he was brave, genuinely so, and not unintelligent. But he had a rigidity which sometimes goes with courage. Charles, on the other hand, had decided early on to bend, not break. This makes the political contrast between the two remaining brothers of the Stuart family peculiarly intriguing. Their experiences – many of them shared – had pointed them in totally different directions.

The same contrast can be discerned in their respective attitudes towards the Catholic religion. Unlike Charles, James had shown a propensity towards it during the later years of exile, as though its certainties appealed to that streak of the martinet in his own nature. At the Restoration he was described as ‘a professed friend to the Catholics’. The inclinations of his first wife played their part. Anne Duchess of York died as a Catholic in March 1671, having leant in that direction for several years. James was increasingly unfaithful to her throughout their marriage: but, as a woman of strong character (and strong build – for she took refuge in eating), Anne continued to influence the more serious side of his life.¹² The precise date of his own conversion is not known – it is given as 1669 in his Memoirs and it was probably at about that time, or slightly earlier, that he became convinced of Catholic truths. By July 1671 James was telling the French Ambassador that he felt extremely pressed by his conscience to declare himself publicly; he had not taken Communion at Easter that year. It seems that he was officially received into the Catholic Church early in 1672. However, he continued to attend Anglican services until 1676. After that his conversion was an open secret, although, at his brother’s request, he never declared it publicly. This proved a tactical advantage at the time of the Exclusion debates, when it was argued by some that it was not yet ‘legally’ certain that James was a Catholic.¹³

With Charles the whole process was very different. It was not that he had any temperamental aversion to changing his religion: many of his forebears had done so. The religion of princes – and people – was changeable for reasons of expediency in the seventeenth century to an extent that it is sometimes difficult for the twentieth century to conceive. But Charles drew a sharp distinction between a political standpoint and a private faith.^fn1 With regard to the former, his fierce declarations of Protestantism in exile and at the Restoration gradually gave way to a more relaxed attitude. Then the notion of his own conversion, leading on to that of England herself, began to serve as a useful card in the tortuous negotiations with the Catholic King Louis XIV. Later still, the furore of the Popish Plot made royal Catholicism once again dangerous. All this remained in the domain of politics.

Where the King’s private faith was concerned, the most revealing description was that given by Bishop Burnet, who wrote in 1683 that the King had formed ‘rather an odd idea’ of the goodness of God in his mind. He thought that ‘to be wicked and to design mischief, is the only thing God hates …’. As a result, the King felt free to gratify his appetites if they did no harm.¹⁴ It was – and is – an attractive philosophy, if not precisely orthodox. Time and his own tastes, including, we must assume, that philosophy, led Charles inexorably towards Catholicism, a religion where the frailty of the flesh has always been understood. At all events, his devout proclivities grew with age, a development not confined to kings. A number of other factors were at work, including the docility of the English Catholics, the intolerance of the Anglicans, the Catholic timbre of his Court, even the Queen’s pious sweetness. At last, on his death-bed, the King allowed himself to be received. By then it was too late for any declaration to damage the position of the monarchy. The need for a political standpoint was over. He went to his royal grave a Catholic, and at peace.

Yet it is a wood so large that it has sometimes obscured the trees – the fact that Charles never did declare himself to be a Catholic during his active life. Not only did he tell Madame (in 1670) that he was not yet satisfied with the Catholic truth: in November of the same year he received a visit from the Papal Nuncio at which the subject of his hypothetical conversion was not mentioned – odd indeed if this tumultuous change had recently taken place. As late as 1675 he told the French Ambassador Barrillon that his brother James’ Catholicism endangered the throne – which was of course true. Even at the King’s death-bed, Louise Duchess of Portsmouth, the mistress who shared the intimacy of his later years and probably knew more of his private inclinations than anyone else, herself an ardent (if not pious) Catholic, could not say more to Barrillon than that the King had always been a Catholic at heart.¹⁵ It was a strange remark, if the King had been converted many years earlier.

Most cogent of all is the testimony of Father Huddleston, the priest who finally received the King. Charles II, in his general confession, declared himself heartily sorry ‘for that he had deferr’d his Reconciliation [to the Catholic Church] so long’.¹⁶ That again was a strange statement for a man to make on the eve of his death, if it was not true; and a strange statement for Father Huddleston to publish afterwards if it was demonstrably false.

It is true that one account exists by which the King, in an affecting scene, proclaimed ‘his mind in regard to religion’ on 25 January 1669. He was said to have shed ‘tears of joy at the thought of the revival of the Romish religion in England’ in front of an audience consisting of James himself, Lord Arundel (a Catholic), Arlington (a Catholic sympathizer) and Clifford (a future Catholic). But the provenance of the story makes it suspicious. The authority is found in the so-called Memoirs of James II – in fact, a document compiled by other hands to supplement James’ own notes.¹⁷ It was edited and printed in the early nineteenth century: most of the original has since disappeared and cannot be compared with the text. One cannot therefore regard these memoirs as a first-hand or even reliable source on such an important topic. This is not to say that the story was invented, only that the details were coloured up in the light of the King’s death-bed conversion. Probably Charles made one of his welcoming speeches on the subject of Catholicism – to be compared with his warm words to Father Huddleston after Worcester. But his indubitably secretive behaviour on the subject of religion was not altered.

At the same time, Charles the pragmatist was not without a reluctant admiration for James the man of principle, where religion as well as politics were concerned. It was as though he was fascinated by James’ intransigence, that very quality he had dismissed for himself as being disastrous in a king. He never, for example, wished James to suffer for his religious principles, and even, incredibly, did not forbid James’ second Catholic marriage – a manifest political disaster. Then there was the whole question of the succession. That too was crucial to the relationship between the two brothers. Like the religion of Charles II, it was not at all a straightforward matter.

James’ position as heir presumptive went through several phases during the 1660s, first weakened by the King’s marriage, then strengthened by the Queen’s apparent infertility. For as the years went by Catharine still did not succeed in conceiving.^fn2 It was not until 7 May 1668 that the King wrote to his sister that his wife had miscarried that morning. On the same date Pepys reported that the Queen had miscarried ‘of a perfect child’ about ten weeks old. Charles was more cautious: ‘And though I am troubled’, he wrote, ‘yet I am glad that ’tis evident she was with child, which I will not deny to you till now I did fear she was not capable of.’¹⁹ Poor Catharine had already endured the primitive suffering of a barren wife for six long years of marriage. Not only was her fertility the subject of constant speculation, but Barbara’s growing brood constituted a perpetual reminder that the fault lay with her and not her husband. Now her hopes were once more dashed.

By this time several of the notorious ways of dealing with a barren wife had already been publicly mentioned. At the time of Charles’ unrequited romance with Frances, the notion of his remarriage – perhaps on the Queen’s death, perhaps on divorce – had been vaguely mooted in gossip, if nowhere more substantial. By May 1668 the rumours had grown. Meanwhile, the ground swell of suggestion that Monmouth was actually legitimate, or would be now legitimized, grew.

In the spring of 1669 there were two further developments. First, Lord Roos, suffering from a wanton wife and separated from her in the spiritual courts, decided to take his case to the House of Lords in order to secure a civil divorce as well. He wished to remarry, and a special Act of Parliament was his only possible recourse at this date. The Roos case was followed with extreme interest by all parties who felt themselves concerned with the question of the succession. No such extreme step had been taken before. The case was widely regarded as a kite flown to test the wind in that direction for the King himself, should he wish to divorce Catharine. Not only was it advocated by Buckingham and Bristol, his confidants, but the King made a point of attending the debates, commenting gaily that the action was as good as a play. James and his faction were not unnaturally most hostile to the Bill.

Then in May, exactly a year after her first conception, the Queen was pronounced – possibly – pregnant again by the King. ‘My wife has been a little indisposed for some days,’ he told Madame, ‘and there is hope that it will prove a disease not displeasing to me. I should not have been so forward in saying this much without more certainty, but that I believe others will write it to Paris and say more than there is.’ As if in confirmation of this, Pepys wrote in his Diary a few days later that everyone at the Court concluded that the Queen was far gone with child! A week later the diarist himself saw the Queen in a white pinner and apron, the maternity dress of the time.²⁰

Madame of course was overcome with excitement and agitation, and demanded full details. She was rewarded with a letter full of medical exposition on 24 May. The relevant passage reads:

She missed those [that is, her period] almost, if not altogether, twice, about this time she ought to have them, and she had a kind of colic the day before yesterday which pressed downwards and made her apprehend she would miscarry, but today she is so well she does not keep her bed. The midwives who have searched her say that her matrix is very close, though it be a little low; she has now and then some little shows of them, but in so little quantity as it only confirms the most knowing women here that there is a fair conception.²¹

Alas for these expectations. On 7 June the King wrote again to his sister informing her that a miscarriage had taken place ‘after all our hopes’ and ‘without any visible accident’ (although one story has it the misadventure was caused by the Queen’s pet fox). The King reported the doctors as being still divided ‘whether it had been on a false conception or a good one’; nevertheless it seems likely on the evidence that the wretched woman had indeed conceived twice.^fn3 If Burnet is to be believed, then Dr Willis, the celebrated physician, told Dr Lloyd (who told Burnet) that the Queen miscarried so late on an unspecified occasion that the sex of the child could have been identified.²² What is quite certain is that Catharine never conceived again. Even more to the point, she was not expected to do so. The King, who had, on his own admission, been doubtful of her capability in 1668, definitely gave up hope after the fiasco of 1669, which in any case had been antedated by the appearance of the Roos case.

The clear loser from any royal divorce was James. For it might soon endow his brother with a new and fertile wife, a quiverful of children. It is no coincidence therefore that this period, in which Charles tentatively, even whimsically, played with the notion of divorcing Catharine, was also a period of coolness between the royal brothers. It was not such an absolutely shocking suggestion. As the King himself was supposed to have observed about this time, if a man could be divorced for impotency, he did not see why a woman should not be divorced for barrenness.

The divorce of a Queen who failed to provide an heir was hardly without precedent: by the laws of the Catholic church, barrenness constituted one clear ground for annulment. Matters would be made easier if Catharine herself agreed to retire into a nunnery, thus acknowledging her own fault. Buckingham was rumoured to have suggested kidnapping her, if she would not agree to this comforting solution. Marvell heard that Madame would arrange for a marriage with a Frenchwoman, or alternatively a sister of the King of Denmark or even ‘a good virtuous Protestant here at home’.²³

Many rumours do not necessarily add up to one hard fact, particularly if unsupported by firm evidence of the King’s own commitment. Charles’ public interest in the Roos Bill does seem to provide this evidence. John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, who was its chief intellectual promoter, referred significantly to the fact that ‘divorce might be not only in case of adultery but also of the immundicity of the womb, which is given forth to [be] the queen’s condition’.²⁴

The Roos case was decided in the husband’s favour but the King did not take advantage of the decision. There is a sharp distinction to be drawn between the King’s flirtation – it may have been no more than that – with the idea of a divorce, and the parallel rumours concerning the legitimization of Monmouth. This move would have been of course even more unwelcome to James. A new Queen (who might prove barren in her turn) had to be accepted; at least her offspring would stand quite indubitably ahead of him in the succession. The legitimization of Monmouth was quite another matter, constituting a lethal snub to James. And although rumours continued to fly about on the subject, it has to be faced that the King never at any time gave them countenance.

The favourite canard was that Charles would declare himself to have legally married Lucy Walter (who had died a few years before he married Catharine, so that the validity of this second ceremony would not be affected). As has been pointed out, the idea of this marriage was a fantasy, the King having been very much otherwise engaged at the time, unlikely to contemplate any wife except a rich and powerful princess. There is no solid evidence to suggest that Charles ever contemplated dispossessing James by a piece of calculated deception concerning Monmouth’s birth. On the other hand, it may easily have crossed his mind to divorce Catharine, and thus by implication dispossess James – but that move would incidentally have been in direct contradiction to the policy of legitimizing Monmouth.

The Monmouth coterie, like Monmouth himself, were the prey of their own optimistic visions: how the King would like to ‘own’ Monmouth but did not know how to do so. But the King did nothing. Catharine remained undivorced, Monmouth unacknowledged. Meanwhile, this temporary ruffle between King and York became gradually smoothed. A better relationship was established. James’ stature as heir presumptive was undiminished.

The King’s true preoccupation from the fall of Clarendon onwards was not his own successor but his serpentine discussions with France. He may even have been cynically pleased that the hue and cry over Queen, Duke and Monmouth diverted the loud mouths of the Commons and Court from a secret wooing which was taking place between the two kings, Charles II and Louis XIV. For Charles, described so often by his contemporaries as being lazy at business, was not showing himself lazy where foreign policy was concerned. Quite as much as his subjects, he was humiliated and furious at the memory of that ‘Black Day accurs’d’ when the Dutch had ravished the chaste Medway. By the end of 1668 he had secured a remarkable diplomatic triumph from this degrading position. After the Peace of Breda, a Triple Alliance was constructed between England, Holland and Sweden. Newly vulnerable, France immediately concluded the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle with Spain, and an ostensible tranquillity prevailed across the map of Europe.

It is probably correct to regard this apparent turnabout in alliances – two of the three powers concerned had recently been fighting each other in a nasty and quite prolonged war – as mere shadow-boxing. There is no evidence that Charles II’s competitive aversion to the Dutch had abated. But he hoped that the Triple Alliance might prove an efficient way of dealing with his growing domestic problems. These included a bankrupt Treasury and a highly restive House of Commons, many of whose members were beginning to voice anti-French – and anti-Catholic – sentiments. The Triple Alliance had a nice Protestant sound to it; more money might be forthcoming from Parliament as a result. It is significant that Clifford, ever representing the naval point of view, disliked the Alliance. At the same time, of course, Charles had effectively prevented Holland from ganging up with France against England once more.

Across the straits of the North Sea, Johann De Witt was animated by a similar consideration, to keep England from the arms of France. Indeed, the first move towards the alliance came from De Witt.²⁵ The notion was delicately conveyed to Charles’ Ambassador in Holland, Sir William Temple, in the autumn of 1667. Temple was instructed to explore the possibility. From the first it was an unnatural alliance, much less sweet to Charles than the ultimate prospect of ‘revenge on Holland’. Nevertheless there was certain unfinished business between the Dutch and English rulers which these negotiations might assist. This was the position of Charles’ nephew, William III of Orange.^fn4

At the end of the war, De Witt considered it prudent to have the seventeen-year-old boy admitted to the Council of State; but at the same time the Stadtholdership of Holland was abolished (although not hereditary it might have been granted to William as Prince of Orange). William however showed some sign of that implacable political quality which would one day both chill and dazzle Europe. He went before the States of Zeeland and pleaded successfully to be admitted as first noble, by right of his inherited position as Margrave of Flushing and Vere. On his eighteenth birthday, 14 November 1668, he was declared to have come of age.

There was also the question of the considerable sums of money Charles had borrowed from the private coffers of the House of Orange, while in exile. These monies had never been returned and even the late Princess Mary’s dowry had never been paid in full: the total was nearly a quarter of a million pounds. William paid a four-month visit to England in 1670 to try to secure them – an optimistic foray in view of his uncle’s financial position. However recourse was had to one of the King’s chief financial agents, Edward Backwell. He had already burnt his fingers over the Queen’s dowry by advancing money to the King before the Portuguese paid up (a slow business as it proved and never satisfactorily completed). Even so, valuing the royal connection, Backwell took on the task of paying off William over a period of four years on the security of orders on the Customs’ receipts.²⁶

More immediately William was given the due precedence of his blood royal, out-ranking, for example, his cousin Prince Rupert (also the son of a Stuart princess) in an age when such things were marked. For Charles, whatever cozening noises he made towards his nephew’s Dutch hopes, continued to view him as a Stuart dependent who was conveniently placed in the enemy’s camp.

A portrait of William as a boy, by Adriaen Hanneman, together with a portrait of his dead mother Mary, hung in the King’s bedchamber at Whitehall: unconsciously Charles may still have thought of him as that child. The King’s attitude to the young man was both patronizing and critical. The French Ambassador reported that King Charles found Prince William too passionate a Hollander, too much a Protestant.²⁷ The King’s surprise that this should be so, in view of William’s upbringing (did he expect a Catholic-oriented Frenchman?), betrays a certain naïveté. Given their respective tastes and characters, it was perhaps not to be expected that Charles II and the future William III would fall into each other’s arms. Nevertheless, the stance adopted by the uncle towards his nephew did nothing to increase the prospect. As it was, Charles, who expected both to help William by the alliance and be helped by him, was disappointed.

The Dutch involvement was popular with the English Parliament because it aimed at France. Nor did all Charles’ ministers disapprove of it as Clifford did: Arlington, for example, the Spanish sympathizer, with a Dutch heiress for a wife –‘Espagnol par lui-même et Hollandais par sa femme’, as Ruvigny termed him – loved the concept. ‘God be thanked it is done,’ he exclaimed.²⁸ Determined to fan some financial warmth out of the Members of Parliament with his new bellows, the King spoke eloquently in February 1668 of his renewed need for money: ‘I lie under great debts contracted in the last war; but now the posture of our neighbours abroad, and the consequence of the new alliance will oblige me, for our security, to set out a considerable fleet to sea this summer.’ Fortifications had to be repaired and ‘besides, I must build more great ships’.²⁹

The King’s financial situation at the time is best summed up by the later witticism, ‘desperate but not serious’. A committee was set up for retrenchment; pensions were cut, or stopped, without being cancelled, by the simple expedient of not paying them. Ambassadorial expenses were severely checked and plate, often regarded as a perquisite of office, was demanded back after use. When Lord Sandwich asked for £5,000 for his mission to Spain, he was asked to be more specific about his needs.³⁰

Nor did the influence of Buckingham introduce any kind of order into the chaos. Buckingham, as has been observed, devoted his elastic energies to the demolition of the York party, in the process of which he chose to bring about the fall of Sir William Coventry. It was comparatively easy to lay the blame for the naval failures at the Admiralty’s door. In October 1668 Pepys described Buckingham as ‘all in all’ and determined to ‘ruin Coventry if he can’.³¹ Despite the fact that Coventry had joined in the hue and cry against Clarendon, he was attacked in his turn, and attacked successfully. A brief spell of imprisonment in the Tower in the spring of 1669 followed an imbroglio with Buckingham over a satirical play; later Coventry retired altogether from politics.

Far more serious was Buckingham’s freakish vengeance on the Duke of Ormonde, which resulted in the fall of that genuinely great man. Buckingham had the frivolous energy of a born intriguer, which from small beginnings will often secure calamitously great results. Ormonde’s removal from the Lord Lieutenancy was brought about in February 1669. Probably there were some instances during his period of office which justified impeachment, or at least did not bear close inspection. Ormonde would have been unique in his period to have headed an administration in Ireland without stain. Yet in another way Ormonde was unique: in his appreciation of the native quality of Ireland. He had, for example, influenced the foundation of the Irish College of Physicians, and prohibited the import of Scottish linen in revenge for the iniquitous Bill (Buckingham’s delight) prohibiting the import of Irish cattle into England. Ormonde’s removal, followed by the appointment of the ineffective Lord Robartes, demonstrated once again how adversely the feuding of English internal politics seemed to affect Ireland’s internal destiny.

If Buckingham, and for that matter Osborne, had pursued some constructive policy of their own, their destructive efforts in other directions might not have proved so catastrophic. As it was, they were more obsessed with building up and maintaining their own power base without in fact offering the King, within Parliament, a particularly solid structure.³² It was true that there were numerous Court officials. Also, Buckingham could muster his own body of MPs, the Duke of York (once reconciled to his brother) and his friends, another body. Counting those MPs who had demonstrated a willingness to support the Crown on various occasions, there was in theory a substantial conglomerate at the King’s disposal.

Reality was very different. Between the pro-Dutch sympathies of Arlington, for example, and the pro-French leanings of Buckingham there was an obvious and unbridgeable gulf. Other pettier divisions existed. In the late 1660s nothing like a homogeneous Court party was in fact at the command of Charles II. His groans to Madame over his constant financial troubles amply illustrate one side of this, as do his reiterated pleas to Parliament itself on the subject of money. Charles expressed it to Parliament, called again in October 1669 after an eighteen months’ gap for this precise purpose, thus: ‘I desire that you will now take my debts effectually into your consideration.’ The House of Commons remained more interested in its internal disputes, arguments over the relative powers of the House of Lords. In February of the following year the King was reduced to begging that their squabbles should cease, while asking for money ‘with greater instance’.³³

This irksome impotence was the background not only to the King’s crucial initiative in foreign policy in the direction of France, but also to the efforts of Lauderdale to bring about a proper union between England and Scotland. In 1667 Lauderdale had acquired at last the position he coveted, as Lord High Commissioner for Scotland. His protégé Lord Rothes was further installed as Chancellor. Lauderdale played some part in the fall of Clarendon, and subsequently developed that influence over Charles which had begun as far back as 1648, when Lauderdale turned out to be the one Scot Charles really liked. He paid his first visit to Edinburgh in his splendid new vice-regal role in October 1669. Neither Lauderdale himself nor his termagant red-haired wife, the former Bess Countess of Dysart, allowed any tinge of austerity to touch their conception of their Scottish court. Bribery, nepotism, corruption, louche – and lavish spending: these would be amongst the charges whispered and shouted against the Lauderdales. For all that, Lauderdale was no Buckingham in his lack of a proper policy to pursue.

The coarseness of the man, the extravagance of his entourage (he was said to cost the King £18,000 a year in Scotland), should not blind one to the fact that Lauderdale was intent on offering something positive to his sovereign in the shape of a Scottish policy. To him the country he referred to as ‘poor old Scotland’ could nevertheless be turned into ‘a citadel for his Majesty’s service’.³⁴ To be frank, it was about the one proposition for Scotland’s future which was likely to sound musically in Charles’ ears. If Scotland could genuinely be transformed into a monarchical citadel, how much more fortunate might Charles II prove than Charles I, for whom Scotland had been a quagmire rather than a bastion?

It was Lauderdale’s conviction that Scotland’s internal government – and problems – should be her own, while the strong central administration which he expected to set up would ensure her a place in the British monarchical scheme of things. To draw a line between Lauderdale’s instinct for self-aggrandizement in all this, and his genuine desire to discover some solution for a strong Scotland, is probably impossible: like many men of force, Lauderdale was inclined to equate his own best interests with his country’s. Yet in the sense that Lauderdale did intend to right the many grievances of the Scots – suffering as second-class citizens – by an Act of Union, he did display both understanding and patriotism. He showed an unfortunate impatience towards his Presbyterian opponents, characteristic of one side of him; yet even in the opinion of Robert Law, a Covenanting minister, he was ‘a man very national’.³⁵

To many Lauderdale was quite simply ‘the Hector of State,/The rascal we hate’ as in the rude rhyme of the Earl of Aboyne. Yet he reacted with genuine indignation to the Navigation Acts, whose careless neglect of the very existence of Scottish trade caused the country much unplanned suffering. Ever since the reign of James VI and I, indeed, the Scots had been penalized over their trading, whether with the colonies or the Dutch. The fact that this sprang more from lordly English indifference to Scottish interests than deliberate victimization still did not endear the process to the Scots. Lauderdale demanded that Scottish trade conditions should revert to the situation as it was before the punitive Navigation Acts. He considered it intolerable, for example, that the Scots should have to pay duties on English imports.

To Lauderdale the Union offered the Scots the opportunity to flourish equally with England. In his rough and wily way (the two adjectives were compatible where Lauderdale was concerned) he was a patriot. By offering brilliantly to Charles a ‘citadel’ where his prerogative would be respected and enforced, he hoped to overcome those coldly negative feelings which the King had long entertained, in so far as he entertained any feelings at all, towards Scotland. In return, the King would ameliorate the conditions of Scottish trade.

By October 1669 Lauderdale had worked on Charles sufficiently to win him to the idea of a Union. The King recommended the idea to his Parliament. Unfortunately, by exaggerating the nature of the support the King would find there he also laid up further political troubles along the way. There was a question of a body of 24,000 men: the King believed in its existence, taking Rothes’ word for it, and the opposition fulminated at the idea. Yet all along this force was more of a phantom army than a power base.

The Union of 1670 failed however not so much on this aspect as through English xenophobia. Another Union had failed in the same way, that finely conceived Union proposed by King James I in 1606 (which, if accepted, might have altered the entire internal history of the two countries). King James had spoken of ‘a perpetual marriage’, suggesting eloquently that two nations ‘under one roof or rather in one Bed’ ought to have economic integration. But the House of Commons merely expressed disgust at granting parity to the carpet-bagging Scots. The Parliament of Charles II had similar doubts. Nor were the Scots for their part accommodating, after sixty years of maltreatment, including the Cromwellian occupation. They claimed – without success – equal representation in the united Parliament.

In the House of Commons Andrew Marvell symbolized the angry English reaction to these proposals: when Lauderdale was given the Garter, Marvell declared he actually deserved a halter. The King himself was not prepared to transform cautious approval of the Union into anything much warmer. In November 1670, he told the commissioners appointed to look into the whole matter that they must meet later: union was not at present feasible. Thus the Union of 1670 joined the ranks of Anglo-Scottish unions – and Anglo-Scottish opportunities – lost. King James’ two nations in one bed would continue to toss and turn restlessly, without the perpetual marriage of his dreams, for another thirty-seven years.

1 A more modern parallel may be drawn between the Catholicism of King Charles II and that of the first Catholic President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. He made it clear that he drew a distinction between his role as President and as a private member of the Catholic Church; as the former, for example, he was not subject to the authority of the Papacy.

2 This deliberately sets aside two contemporary references to a pregnancy in early 1666, one from Pepys, who heard that the Queen had miscarried, and one in the Hatton Correspondence. But Clarendon, who mentioned the 1666 miscarriage in the Continuation of his History, stressed the King’s belief that it had ‘been a false conception’.¹⁸ The King made no reference to this pregnancy or miscarriage in his correspondence with his sister, where such matters were always much to the fore. His testimony – the testimony of the husband – that the 1668 pregnancy was the first, clinches the matter.

3 The author is grateful to Sir John Dewhurst, President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, for his consideration of the medical evidence concerning the pregnancies of Catharine of Braganza, which supports this view. The sweeping theory of C. MacLaurin in Mere Mortals (New York, 1925) that the Queen’s major illness of November 1663 was pelvic peritonitis, which left her sterile after an inflammation of the Fallopian tubes, takes no account of these later conceptions and is not otherwise supported by evidence.

4 His correct title: he succeeded his father, William II of Orange. He subsequently became William III of England. To avoid confusion, in this narrative he will henceforward be known as William of Orange.