CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘I do believe we are not so tied, as if we received satisfaction over the principal matter of the sea, there is scope sufficient for a very near alliance.’
Charles II to Madame in 1668, on the subject of France
At some point late in 1668 King Charles decided formally to pursue an alliance with his cousin Louis XIV by any means that might prove useful (not necessarily of the most honourable or open). As has been mentioned, Charles II had veered towards France since the beginning of his reign, just as he had backed away from the Dutch. He had hoped for French neutrality during the Dutch War. But this decision represented something new.
His cynicism towards his own Parliament was growing, and the French initiative cannot altogether be separated from it. The secret feelings of such a wary character as Charles II must always be analysed with care; nevertheless, the distinct impression is gained that he saw in the French alliance, from the first, one solution to his domestic insecurity. Charles the politician was taking unto himself the maxim of Machiavelli: ‘Every government, whether it be republican or of the princely type, should consider beforehand what adverse times may befall and on what people it may have to rely in times of adversity….’ It was a precept which King Charles I, unassisted in his hour of tribulation by any major power, should have heeded. His son intended to be warier.
The character of Louis XIV also exercised a baleful fascination over Charles II – as indeed it did over the whole of Europe. The two monarchs, who had of course known each other in youth, were not destined to meet after that abortive encounter at Fuenterrabia in 1659. Yet the personality and reputation of Louis XIV represented the living challenge to Charles II, much as that of Oliver Cromwell represented the dead. Critics detecting weakness in Charles were quick to point out strength in Louis – Buckingham was a notable example. Pepys reports a conversation round the dinner table in November 1668 in which ‘the greatness of the King of France’ was the subject of much favourable comment: ‘his being fallen into the right way of making that Kingdom great, which none of his Ancestors did before’.1 There is evidence that King Charles did not care for this atmosphere of odious comparison.
Rationally he was aware that his cousin of France enjoyed the perquisites of absolute monarchy, while he himself had to jog along with something the French Ambassador had critically described in 1664 as ‘at the bottom … very far from being a monarchy’. Charles II would have been less than human not to have resented the contemporary admiration for Louis XIV in view of his considerable efforts to make his own kingdom great. The incident of the Persian Vest, which shows up King Charles for once in a slightly foolish light, is only explicable in terms of his obsession with King Louis.2
Fashion as such never much interested Charles II after 1660. In exile he showed a taste for ordering beaver hats and swords from Paris, and at the moment of restoration a wardrobe of summer clothes from the great Parisian tailor Sourceau, trimmings to be chosen by his mother, was deemed appropriate. These were the predilections of enforced idleness. Afterwards the wardrobe accounts reveal the occasional order for six yards of lace, forty yards of linen – fitting for a King – as special adornment for his birthday; but there is a more characteristic glimpse of him taking off his wig in order to inspect Chatham dockyard in comfort.3 Casualness, even carelessness, rather than magnificence, was the keynote of Charles’ appearance in the eyes of his contemporaries.
The Persian Vest incident was however an example of an early kind of Buy British campaign. Following the great depredations on trade made by the Fire of London, the King ordered French fashions to be abandoned. Instead he donned a loose surcoat, resembling fashions seen in Persian miniatures of the time. ‘Nothing like it since William the Conqueror,’ commented a newsletter. It was John Evelyn, seeing this strange new garb for the first time in October 1666, who compared it to ‘the comeliness and usefulness of Persian clothing’.4 At the Court ball for the birthday of Queen Catharine in November there were one hundred of such vests to be seen, each costing one hundred pounds to make; the King’s was of suitably rich material, with a silver lining.
Unfortunately the Sun King of France, a sartorial connoisseur where his cousin was not, found the opportunity irresistible. He took to dressing his footmen and servants in a parody of the new English fashion. The mockery was reported back across the Channel. King Charles attempted to brazen out his new-fangled elegance. The personality of King Louis was too strong. By the early 1670s the English had surrendered and returned to the French fashion.
The English king’s obsession was however more compounded of admiration than annoyance. And his letters reveal also a true desire for intimacy with King Louis especially remarkable in one who was on his own confession a laggard correspondent. King Charles was in the habit of keeping King Louis in touch with all his family news: when the little Duke of Cambridge, son of the Duke and Duchess of York, died, Charles did not doubt that Louis would be as concerned as usual over everything to do with ‘ma maison’– that is, the House of Stuart. In May 1669 we find King Charles appealing in a handwritten letter to King Louis, his bon frère, to use his authority to intervene in a dispute between Prince Rupert and one of his brothers.5
Religion – or ‘the design about R.’, as Madame coyly termed it – does not seem to have played any part at all in Charles’ calculations at this point. Aiming at greatness abroad, security at home, and having lassoed for the time being the horns of the Dutch, Charles prepared to stalk the bigger game of Louis XIV. He was not ashamed to admit to Madame that the Triple Alliance had its genesis in his disappointment with France. She might be ‘a little surprised’ by the treaty he had concluded with the Dutch, he wrote airily in January 1668, but she should not be. ‘Finding my propositions to France receive so cold an answer, which in effect was as good as a refusal, I thought I had no other way but this to secure myself.’6
Louis XIV was intended to take the point and did. In May Charles was observing to the French Ambassador, Ruvigny, that he saw no reason why the two kings should not talk to each other ‘de gentilhomme à gentilhomme’ (although neither Charles II nor LouisXIV, in their diplomatic dealings, quite justify the use of the word). In August Louis despatched Colbert de Croissy to replace Ruvigny, with specific instructions to break up the Triple Alliance. Among methods recommended was the bribing of the pro-Dutch Arlington. In September Charles allowed himself a crack at LouisXIV’s own support of the Dutch in the past war; in a letter to Madame, mentioning his own new Dutch commitment, he wrote that Louis XIV had recently given him an example of being ‘a martyr to his word’ in that respect. Nevertheless, ‘when I have said this, I do believe we are not so tied, as if we received satisfaction over the principal matter of the sea, there is scope sufficient for a very near alliance’.7
Charles repeated the same sentiment in January of the following year: ‘The only thing which can give any impediment to what we both desire is the matter of the sea, which is so essential point to us here as an union upon any other security can never be lasting.’ By this time cautious negotiations were in fact proceeding. Madame, for example, had planned a visit to England in December. Her arrival had to be postponed owing to her pregnancy; Monsieur insisted on his marital rights, with the precise object of spoiling her plans. Yet the visit had obviously been intended to forward discussions between the two kings.
So the scene was set for Madame’s embassy, the zenith of her life. It was also the most vital period so far (if more commonly rated the nadir than the zenith) in the reign of Charles II. For so, surely, the months between the signature of the Triple Alliance and the signature of the Secret Treaty of Dover in May 1670 must be regarded. Madame was given a special cipher for the purpose by her brother. Nevertheless, she remained the ambassadress of England rather than of France. Nothing emerges more clearly from Madame’s letters to her brother than the continuance of her English as opposed to her French sympathies. As she told Arlington in a personal letter, she was concerned to bring about King Charles’ advantage ‘jusque au plus petite chose’– down to the slightest detail. The death of Henrietta Maria on French soil provided a striking demonstration of this. The Dowager Queen had survived the husband she adored by twenty years. She was only sixty-one; yet she reminded everyone of old, unhappy, far-off things, and her passing was not much regretted. Monsieur wanted to take the opportunity offered by French law to grab all her belongings and jewels for his wife, the only child actually resident in France. But Madame strenuously resisted the process. She insisted on returning to the Crown of England what was due to it.8
Secret but exhilarating negotiations continued throughout the spring and summer of 1669. Madame even described it as ‘perilous’ to confide the design to the Pope, since he would have no part in its execution. Everything was still publicly seen in terms of English victory over Holland. ‘Your glory and profit will coincide in this design,’ wrote Madame on 27 September. ‘Indeed what is there more glorious and more profitable than to extend the confines of your kingdom beyond the sea and to become supreme in commerce, which is what your people most passionately desire and what will probably never occur so long as the Republic of Holland exists.’9
So Madame exulted, and so the prospect of ‘the very near alliance’ grew excitingly nearer to the royal conspirators.
In the spring of 1670 it was the opinion of Andrew Marvell that no king since the Conquest had been so ‘absolutely powerful’ as Charles II. Certainly the King opened the 1670 session of Parliament in state for the first time, a practice which stirred uncomfortable memories of the past for some; to others it was equally disquieting mimicry of the absolute state of Louis XIV across the water. Marvell noted another development which he described as sinister: the King taking his seat in the House of Lords. ‘It is now so old, that it is new,’ he wrote, ‘and so disliked that at any other but so bewitched a time as this it would have been looked on as a high Usurpation, the Breach of Privilege.’10
That was how the royal position appeared from the angle of a critical MP. What was the King’s own attitude to Parliament? Parliament was not yet quite disillusioned with Charles II. But he was certainly, by 1670, disillusioned with it. He was already using the prorogation of Parliament with quite new dexterity throughout 1668 and 1669 as an instrument of strategy; as a result, many fewer Acts were passed.11 It is an inescapable fact that in early 1670, at the very moment Charles was negotiating with France, he played on the hatred of the House of Commons for the French by asking for money to fight them. … The conclusion of the King’s contempt for his Commons is unavoidable.
If one may contrast Charles with Cromwell (a comparison the King would not have appreciated personally), Cromwell continually and rather pathetically believed in the theory of Parliaments. He would summon them, find himself angrily horrified by their selfish behaviour in practice and dismiss them. Charles II duly noted the self-seeking behaviour of the Parliaments in the first decade of his reign, shrugged his shoulders over the theory of the thing and decided to try and manipulate Parliament before it could manipulate him.
What inspired him? It was most emphatically not the vision of an autocratic monarchy: for that would have been once more theory rather than practice. But there was a vision all the same. It was the vision of an England strong abroad and at home, her fleet triumphant, superior to the Dutch, supported and abetted by her natural friend France. In January 1670 Charles II made this quite clear in an important personal memorandum beginning, ‘As a war against Holland would in all respects suit with the interests of England and be very advantageous to it if the King of Great Britain had force ready to be master of the seas: so on the other hand if the Hollanders should be strongest at sea nothing in the world could be so pernicious to England as that war’ – for then English trade would be at the mercy of the Dutch.12
By May 1670 the negotiations with France were sufficiently advanced for Madame to pay her long-deferred, long-desired visit. Monsieur’s permission had of course to be sought – and he gave it with a bad grace. He also attempted to stop Madame’s journey by pregnancy as he had done before, his excuse being that he needed an heir (their only son had died as a baby). Failing, Monsieur granted the minimum period of absence consonant with etiquette. All the same, Madame was at last free to go. She arrived off Dover on 16 May. Unbelievably, it was close on ten years since they had met face to face, for Henriette-Anne had last visited England that winter of 1660 before her marriage. Yet the intimacy was as close as ever.
It was true that the girl Charles held in his arms at their ecstatic reunion aboard the flagship was more exquistely fragile and pale than ever (we now know that she was already seriously ill). But her spirit was as great as before. And the King found in her even greater enchantment. Only the English weather failed to respond to the challenge of Madame’s visit. It poured with rain – cold English spring rain. Surely it never rained at the perfectly arranged Court of Louis XIV? But once the secret dealings were completed, as many royal junketings took place as could be fitted into the short span allowed to Madame. Louis XIV – not Monsieur – had granted her a few extra days. This satisfaction, Charles wrote back in a personal letter, ‘m’oblige si sensiblement’.13 Charles II’s fortieth birthday happily fell within the period.
Notwithstanding the weather, there were parties at sea. Madame showed herself a worthy sister to the sea-loving King, for she was as ‘fearless and bold’ as though she were on dry land, walking along ‘the edges of the ships’.14 There was an inland trip as far as Canterbury, where Madame watched a comedy given by the Duke of York’s troupe. She also attended her favourite ballet (it was not the King’s favourite ballet: something about the art irritated him, and a few years later he would become publicly restless at an Italian ballet performed in honour of another birthday). Throughout Madame’s stay, Charles loaded her with presents. He also gave her two thousand gold crowns to build a chapel at Chaillot in memory of their mother. However, when he tried lightly to obtain one little jewel in exchange – his sister’s lady-in-waiting Louise de Kéroüalle, with her ‘childish simple and baby face’– Madame firmly refused on the grounds that she was responsible to the young lady’s parents in France. The inception of this royal relationship had to wait for another occasion.
In time came the dreaded hour of Madame’s departure for France. Charles and James, overcome with grief, accompanied her on board the ship that would carry her away. Charles in particular could hardly tear himself away. Three times he said goodbye, only to return and embrace her. It was as though he had a presentiment that they would not meet again. The French Ambassador, Colbert de Croissy, wrote that until he witnessed the King’s tears at this farewell he had not realized that Charles II – the cool-hearted monarch – was capable of feeling and expressing so much affection for anyone.15
One can make a case for saying that in her own way the poor, doomed Henriette-Anne was indeed the great love of Charles II’s life. He had experienced other passions, including two unrequited loves for the eligible Henrietta Catharine and the unattainable Frances Stewart. He came to feel genuine admiration for his wife Catharine’s character. He undoubtedly felt sexual passion for Barbara, later for Nell Gwynn and Hortense Mancini. For Louise de Kéroüalle, the mistress of his declining years, as we shall see, his feelings were slightly more complicated. It would be wrong to suggest that love was absent. But Henriette-Anne, with her charm, her affection, her loyalty, not forgetting her intelligence, could possess his whole heart. And sexuality, except in the most unconscious way, was not involved. Madame was that most seductive of things to a man sometimes wearied by the demands of his own sensuality: a ravishingly pretty sister.
Alas for King Charles: Madame, his delight, had only a few days of life left to her on her return to France. On 27 June she wrote a touching letter from Paris to Thomas Clifford in England: ‘This is the ferste letter I have ever write in inglis. you will eselay see it bi the stile and the ortografe … i expose miself to be thought a foulle in looking to make you know how much I am your frind.’16 The first English letter of this expatriate Stuart princess was to be her last. She fell ill on 29 June and died the next day, after convulsions and other agonizing sufferings which appalled all those who attended her death-bed. It has been established that she died of acute peritonitis, following the perforation of a duodenal ulcer (hence the sickness which had ravaged her before she left France for England).17 At the time, of course, the suddenness of her end and the public venom of her husband and of his favourite the Chevalier de Lorraine meant that the inevitable accusations of poisoning were raised. But no poison was in fact needed to finish off poor delicate Madame. She was just twenty-six years old at the time of her death.fn1
It was the famous Abbé Bossuet, himself amongst those present at Madame’s death-bed, who preached her funeral sermon in language which Lytton Strachey, in a critical essay, compared to a stream of molten lava: ‘O nuit désastreuse! O nuit effroyable! où retentit tout à coup, comme un éclat de tonnerre, cette étonnante nouvelle: Madame se meurt! Madame est morte!’ It was Bossuet who had asked her as she was dying, ‘Do you believe in God?’ Madame replied, ‘With all my heart.’ But according to Ralph Montagu, the English envoy, Madame’s last whisper was of her brother: ‘I have loved him better than life itself and now my only regret in dying is to be leaving him.’18
When Charles was brought the desperate news by a courier coming post-haste from France, he collapsed with grief. The rumours of poison hardly helped him to endure the blow. The King did not appear outside his bedroom, where he lay prostrate with grief, for days – the only recorded occasion of a physical collapse in this almost unnaturally self-disciplined monarch, who had hitherto borne the plenitude of crises in his life without giving way to any of them.
It was Lord Rochester who had the last word on Madame. She had died, he said, the most lamented person in both France and England. ‘Since which time dying has been the fashion.’
King Charles II was left to implement the consequences of that treaty which Madame had worked so hard to bring about. It was as though she had died in giving birth to it: the King, the bereaved survivor, now had to raise the infant.
There were in fact two separate treaties. The first treaty, which was kept secret, was signed by the English, including Clifford and Arlington, on 22 May 1670.19 Not only was it secret, but it was also a strange and slippery document, reminding one in its various twists and turns of that legendary wrestler Proteus. King Charles was to support the claims of King Louis to the Spanish monarchical possessions (pursuing his wife’s alleged rights), as and when they should be made; in return, England would receive certain South American territories. But a further clause stipulated that King Louis would not break the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle recently concluded with Spain; that again enabled King Charles to remain, theoretically at least, faithful to the Triple Alliance.
Together the two kings intended to wage a war against the United Provinces, and the military and naval arrangements for such a war were laid down: this might seem clear enough, albeit aggressive. But this clause was linked to another, often regarded as the crucial text in the so-called Secret Treaty. This described the English King as ‘being convinced of the truth of the Catholic religion and resolved to declare it and reconcile himself with the Church of Rome as soon as the welfare of his kingdom will permit’. In order to carry out this declaration (for which no date was given other than the vague phrase, quoted above, concerning the ‘welfare of his kingdom’), Charles II was promised money from the French King, half of it in advance, and troops as well, if necessary. The Anglo-French assault on the Dutch was scheduled to follow rather than precede the undated declaration.
The second treaty was signed by the five members of the Cabal – Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale – on 21 December 1670. It was in effect a cover-up. For those ministers not in the know, a phoney treaty with France was worked out, including details of future Anglo-French action against the Dutch, down to the troop movements. Charles was to supply fifty ships and six thousand soldiers, Louis thirty ships and the rest of the soldiery. The conduct of the naval war was to be left to the English, who were to receive Walcheren, Cadzand and Sluys at the mouth of the Scheldt as their share of the territory about to be conquered. But the ‘Catholic’ clause of the original Secret Treaty of the summer was veiled from the prying eyes of the unsympathetic ministers. Thus no string was attached to the timing of the Anglo-French initiative.
It must be obvious that the strength of this famous – or notorious – Catholic clause was in consequence much diluted. For better or for worse, the way was left open for a combined operation to be mounted against the Dutch, without the King of England declaring himself a Catholic – as indeed happened. There is another significant point to be made about the Catholic clause, one which is sometimes missed by the more prejudiced critics of King Charles II. It was not suggested in the text of the Secret Treaty that Charles was going to change the religion of England as a whole – merely his own. Under the circumstances, the equivocal nature of this clause, dependent upon the ‘welfare of the kingdom’, hardly needs stressing further.
It was the signature of the first treaty which mattered most to Charles II. He had acquired at long last the French support which he conceived as being paramount to his purposes. It is true that by this treaty he also secured a financial subsidy. But it is important to note that the sum involved was by no means exorbitant: modern scholarship has disposed of the notion that vast sums of French gold were laid out. Louis’ official subsidy was intended to be three million livres Tournois a year: in fact, Charles received from France, throughout his reign, a total of nine million nine hundred and fifty thousand livres, amounting to £746,000 (then). Eight million of this came from the Secret Treaty. Money values of times gone by are notoriously difficult to translate into our own terms.fn2 It is more helpful to quote the recent estimate of Dr C. D. Chandaman that this was the equivalent of less than one year of the King’s ordinary income.20 Thus the financial value of the French subsidy is placed in perspective: in the eyes of Charles II, its psychological value was what counted.
This ‘very near alliance’ of France and England, signed by the ministers of the Cabal, was not made public. As for details of the Secret Treaty of Dover, these were not in fact generally known until 1830, when the historian Lingard printed the text. At the time knowledge was restricted to a magic circle. The joyful ambassadress Madame knew everything, of course. Thomas Clifford was also fully involved, and as late as the 1930s the Clifford papers revealed hitherto unknown details of the transactions leading up to the treaty. Of the Cabal, Buckingham, who, although pro-French in foreign policy, was in religious terms pro-Puritan, did not know. Nor did Lauderdale. Arlington knew.21 He disapproved, but, as a professional servant of a royal master and a man ambitious to rise, he bowed to the treaty. Ashley (created Earl of Shaftesbury two years later) did not know at the time, and despite rumours to the contrary, it is unlikely that he ever did. Outside the Cabal, Osborne, just conceivably, knew.22 But the Secret Treaty was in essence the King’s measure, carried out by his sister and most intimate servants to service his private, if nationalistic, policy.
For this treaty Charles II has been harshly judged. He has been condemned for two reasons: first, for the acceptance of French money. Yet this was an age when foreign subsidy was by no means the shocking fact which might be supposed from the disgusted reactions of some of the King’s Whig critics. Richard Cromwell asked for a £50,000 subsidy from Cardinal Mazarin immediately after the death of his father. Poverty-stricken rulers were not alone in their blithe attempts to get the wealthy to support them. Later we shall find not only the Dutch gold of William III, but also the French gold of Louis XIV, finding its way to certain English Whig MPs – opponents of the government. They saw nothing wrong in allowing themselves to be ‘subsidized’ in their opposition by a foreign power. The passionate statement of Sir John Dalrymple is often quoted. Writing in 1771 of his feelings when he discovered from the French despatches that Lord Russell was intriguing with the French Court and Algernon Sidney receiving money from it he declared, ‘I felt very near the same shock as if I had seen a son turn his back in the day of battle.’23 Thus the eighteenth century flinched from the seventeenth.
Where the French subsidy was concerned, Charles II was in the position of the apocryphal judge, who took bribes – but only when the judgement desired coincided with the judgement he had intended to make in the first place.
It was certainly not a particularly scrupulous attitude. Yet in terms of Charles II’s vivid wish to maintain maritime supremacy and extinguish Holland, it was a perfectly intelligible one. One should bear in mind that seven-eighths of the first French payment went directly towards the Navy. As Dr Johnson, as ever a mine of common-sense, exclaimed, ‘If licentious in practice, Charles never failed to reverence the good. Even if he did take money from France, what of that? Never did he betray those over whom he ruled, nor would he ever suffer the French fleet to betray ours.’ Dr Johnson might have added that in the seventeenth century, as in the age that followed it, rulers were expected to be not so much scrupulous (except by their opponents) as successful.
It is the second salvo fired against Charles II which has been most properly responsible for the smoke of treachery surrounding his name. This is the charge that he intended to subvert England to a Roman Catholicism it had rejected, becoming, in the words of Lord Macaulay, the ‘Slave of France’ if not its ‘Dupe’. It has been postulated in the previous chapter that King Charles II was not, by 1670, the convinced Catholic of some imaginings; definitely not the proselyte who would engage himself to such a cause for sheer religious ardour. Supposing, then, this charge to be unjust, it must immediately be granted that a certain mystery surrounds the religious clause of the treaty. What then was its purpose, and indeed its motivation?
One possibility would be that the religious clause – the ‘design about R.’– was inserted to please Madame. There is nothing in the King’s correspondence to contradict such a view: indeed, there is evidence of Madame’s growing preoccupation with religion, her own, her brother’s and that of her native country. Madame may well have believed that she inclined Charles towards its insertion, just as she inclined him towards a French alliance. … In both cases however it is doubtful whether Charles would have allowed himself to go with her tide, had it not suited him in the first place. It is necessary to seek a less charming and more cynical explanation.
The religious clause set the seal, in the King’s view, on that security which he expected to enjoy from the support of Louis XIV. It was not so much a question of Charles II’s religious proclivities as those of Louis XIV: the English King, in signing such a clause, which committed him to a personal declaration with no time schedule whatsoever, expected to bind the French King to him further. In politics, it cannot be denied that the end very often does justify the means. By 1670 Charles II had decided to make this truth – regrettable or otherwise – the principle of his actions both at home and abroad. One may nevertheless agree with Cicero that certain political actions are objectively bad. It is still difficult to apply that judgement to Charles II at this juncture in his career. The maintenance of the Navy, the expansion of empire, the ‘making that Kingdom great’ – these had been the classic preoccupations of those English idols (in their different ways), Queen Elizabeth I and Oliver Cromwell. By means of a French alliance, Charles IIintended to pursue these policies, without being tumbled from his throne, as had Charles I.
1 She died without presenting Monsieur with that male heir he so much desired. But Madame did leave two daughters; from Anne-Marie, who married a Duke of Savoy, the present (Catholic) Wittelsbach claimant to the English throne descends. The claim is based on the fact that the descendants of Henriette-Anne, daughter of Charles I, should have precedence over the present royal family, the descendants of Elizabeth of Bohemia, daughter of James I. But this of course ignores the fact that a Catholic is disqualified by Act of Parliament from occupying the throne of Great Britain.
2 Besides which, the rapid rate of modern inflation often makes the comparison out of date a few years after it is made.