CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Peace For His Own Time

‘For he was not an active, busy or ambitious Prince … he seemed to be chiefly desirous of “Peace and Quiet for his own Time”.’

Sir John Reresby, Memoirs

By 1676 it was the opinion of Sir John Reresby that King Charles II was ‘chiefly desirous of “Peace and Quiet for his own Time”’. But this was not necessarily the unambitious lethargy outlined by Reresby. ‘Peace and Quiet’ still had a wonderful resonance to those who remembered the troubles of the previous generation. It is notable that when Lord Halifax in his Character of a Trimmer wanted to sum up the effects of the two political extremes, Absolute Monarchy and Commonwealth, he conceded the ferment created by the latter: ‘[Absolute] Monarchy, a thing that leaveth men no liberty, and a Commonwealth, such a one as alloweth them no Quiet.’¹ The views of Charles II on the monarchy remained at this point as amorphous as those of most of his contemporaries; but he would have profoundly agreed with Halifax on the subject of Commonwealths.

‘Peace and Quiet for his own Time’ had for him no ring of appeasement. It was a thoroughly laudable aim. Oddly enough, for a brief period between the prorogation of Parliament in the autumn of 1675 and its reconvening in 1677, it seemed possible that he might achieve it without a struggle.

It was true that a ‘Country’ – as opposed to ‘Court’ – opposition was being developed by the coalition of Shaftesbury and Buckingham. Increasingly this group had to be reckoned with. Although we shall hear more of the Green Ribbon Club towards the end of the decade, its constitution was in existence by 1676, even if its meetings were not yet recorded. The Green Ribbon Club provided an important rallying point for those discontented with the government – particularly when Parliament was not sitting. ‘Les mal intentionnés’ was how Charles had described them to the French Ambassador when they persisted in voting against him. The King’s Head Tavern, at the junction of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, proved a convenient rendezvous. For all the efforts of government spies to permeate the meetings, the Green Ribbon Club succeeded in linking together the various disparate elements – former Puritans, merchants, lawyers and so forth – which would go to make the future ‘Whig’ party. The first of the long line of English political clubs, it performed a function which even the most capacious private house could not fulfil.²

From another angle, the Green Ribbon Club also survived the clampdown on the coffee-houses because it was a private association. It is interesting to consider that beverages like coffee, chocolate and even sherbert, seemingly innocuous to us (because they are non-alcoholic), began life in England as dangerous, expensive and exciting symbols of dissidence. At the new meeting-places, the eternal beer of the English was replaced by a heady combination of coffee – and political sympathy. As a result, the government came to identify the places with the politics. An Order was given in December 1675 to suppress the coffee-houses as once race meetings had been suppressed under the Protectorate.

All the same, the appearance of peace was maintained. And the upswing in the royal and the national finances increased the illusion of a widespread, placid prosperity. As late as June 1677 the King told the French Ambassador that England enjoyed ‘a profound tranquillity’. She successfully enriched herself, while other nations were drained or ruined by war. The English would one day thank him, he observed, for having kept them by prudence in ‘so happy a state and so advantageous for their commerce’.³

In fact, the trade boom broke early in 1676.⁴ And as the seventies wore on, the image of a liberal and healing King was being succeeded by something rather different. It is true that towards individuals the King had lost none of his humorous affability. It was a quality which he would retain till his dying hour. He was still the bonhomous monarch who supped with jockeys when at Newmarket. There are several well-known stories which illustrate his particular kind of ironic benevolence. One has the King watching a man who boasted of having invented a new process by which he could stand on the point of a steeple for an unprecedented length of time. At the end of the display Charles announced himself to be duly impressed and said that he would buy the patent of the process – to prevent any of his other subjects using it. Another described him dining with Sir Robert Viner in the City. Viner, overcome with the honour, became hopelessly drunk towards the evening and tried to stop the King from departing. ‘Sir, you shall stay and take the other bottle!’ cried Viner. Where other European monarchs might have resorted to a ferocious frown, Charles II merely smiled and quoted a popular song: ‘He that’s drunk is as great as a King.’ Then he allowed himself to be led back.

When William Penn, as a Quaker, insisted on remaining covered in the King’s presence – an extraordinary piece of lèsemajesté for those days – Charles took off his own hat.

‘Friend Charles,’ Penn is supposed to have asked, ‘why dost thou not keep on thy hat?’

‘It is the custom of this place that only one man should remain uncovered at a time,’ replied the unruffled King.⁵

He remained a most accessible sovereign, in the modern phrase. It was Charles II who set the style by which the royal withdrawing-room, hitherto a select preserve, was open to any ‘Person of Quality as well as our servants and others who come to wait on us’. The King would emerge from time to time to discourse with these Persons of Quality: and so the style was set for the official court ‘Drawing Rooms’ of later centuries. Even his bedchamber, dominated by the great bed, railed in in the French manner, was not particularly intimate. Its door was left open. Here he would receive ministers and favoured individuals; he would also use it to eat in slightly more privacy than the stately public meals allowed. True privacy, in so far as a seventeenth-century prince enjoyed it, was enjoyed in his closet (where he kept the scientific rarities and little treasures described by Evelyn), although even here he would receive certain advisers.⁶

Charles II fell back on another form of privacy. The long legs which had carried him successfully away from Worcester now served increasingly to carry him away from the pleas and complaints of his subjects. As the King grew older, his daily walk in St James’s Park was taken at a faster and faster pace, the sovereign considering it enough to scatter random ‘God bless yous’ about him as he strode, like jesting Pilate, not stopping for an answer. Indoors he took to taking out his watch (wise men made themselves scarce at this signal) and falling asleep after meals, another cunning way of resisting importunities.

Part of this change of image was due to the inevitable erosion of time. The thick black periwig which he now habitually wore recalled in memory, no more, the black love-locks of yester-year, for the King, having gone grey, was now almost entirely bald. As he was obviously no longer young, he was also no longer debonair. The melancholy which, as we have seen, lay at the core of his being often overlaid the engaging gaiety he had chosen to manifest in the sixties, in public. His face was already lined at the Restoration and adversity was the cause. The later portraits – that of 1675 by Lely onwards – display with relentless truth the deep lines which time had laid on his face; cynicism and an inner weariness at the folly of men – and women – were responsible.

Besides, a new generation was growing up who did not remember the Restoration or those happy years when an invited monarch came from overseas to heal and to forgive. A young man of twenty in 1676 would barely recollect that inauguration of a golden age – as it had seemed to so many – let alone the perils of Commonwealth and Civil War from which the restored monarch had rescued his country.

While the King retained his popular touch with individuals, many of his policies – such as the Stop of the Exchequer – presented him in a much less attractive light. Then there was the question of his honour. Naturally the full extent of the deceit which he had employed in foreign policy – and was still employing while he received French money – was known to very few. But a feeling that the King’s word, like the King’s financial bond, was to be regarded with caution, began to pervade Court and political circles, nonetheless. And from there the malaise had the chance of spreading outwards. This is not to suggest that Boy Scout ethics either were or should be expected in a seventeenth-century monarch. But Lord Halifax probably got it about right when he wrote of dissimulation in a ruler, that it was a defect not to practise it at all, and a fault to practise it too much: ‘It is necessary and yet it is dangerous too.’⁷

The King’s persistent poverty contributed to his practice of deception. Charles II was no exception to the rule that debtors are often liars for the sake of survival, where rich men can afford the luxury of honesty. An anonymous burlesque of 1670 summed up the connection which was felt to exist between the King’s lack of money (through extravagance) and the King’s lack of truth; Charles was portrayed addressing Parliament as follows: ‘You may perhaps think it dangerous to make me too rich, but do not fear it, I promise you faithfully whatever you give me, I will always still want: though in many other things my word may be thought but slender security, yet in this you may rely upon me….’⁸

The sardonic epigram ascribed to Lord Rochester on his master also comes to mind:

We have a pritty witty King

Whose word no man relies on,

Who never said a foolish thing

Nor ever did a wise one.^fn1

Admittedly Rochester was supposed to have first produced the verse in the following fashion: the King, in his easy way, told his courtiers that ‘he would leave everyone to his liberty in talking when Himself was in company, and would not take what was said at all amiss’. At which Rochester saw his opportunity and lunged. Perhaps the King was not totally enchanted by the sally of his friend. For he responded with a thrust of his own blade: his words were his own, he retorted, but his deeds were his ministers’. But, like all slurs with a taste of truth in them, Rochester’s wicked little rhyme has survived the test of time, where the King’s equally quick riposte is often forgotten.

Even more fatally, Charles II ignored the force of popular prejudice with regard to Catholicism, France, and their hated bedfellow, arbitrary government. That twenty-year-old man alluded to above would contemplate a Catholic Court or, what was almost worse, a French-dominated one, for the links with France were increasingly resented on almost every level. Yet in his youth Charles had shown extraordinary determination in avoiding the Catholic taint while in exile, lest his chances of restoration perish. This degeneration of his sensitivities had come with age. Half of him was aware that the price of ‘Peace and Quiet for his own Time’ was eternal vigilance where Parliament and the nascent Whigs were concerned, plus a willingness to bow to the strong feelings of the majority of his subjects, however prejudiced and distasteful. The other half relaxed, and hoped that by successful juggling of French money, Parliamentary supplies, and those forces represented by Danby, Shaftesbury and even Buckingham, the same result could be achieved. He would shortly receive a terrible lesson.

Before that happened, Charles II was subjected to an assault of a rather pleasanter nature: from a beautiful woman. The rise – and fall – of Hortense Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin, demonstrated two things. First, that those closest to the King continued to believe tenderly that he could be influenced by a woman. Second, that the King’s sexuality was not yet extinct. The affair with Hortense would be his last very public throw in that direction. But Hortense, unlike Louise, was not of the material of which successful mistresses are made. She was an attractive, self-destructive creature whose wanton disregard for her own best interests (in the worldly sense) seduces from afar, even if it drove her promoters mad.

Once upon a time Hortense could have had the impecunious and throneless King as a husband; as the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, she would have been a useful wife for Charles in the late 1650s. In the intervening years Hortense as well as Charles had seen some revolutionary changes in her state. Her first husband, created Duc de Mazarin in her honour, proved to have a touch of religious mania. The unappreciative Hortense fled to Savoy, a decision which had caused Charles to quip to Madame at the time, ‘I see wives do not love devout husbands….’⁹ In Savoy an episode with the Duke led to her expulsion from the country after his premature death. But on leaving Savoy, Hortense was noted to be gaily ‘bewigged and befeathered’ at the head of a train of twenty men, as though nothing particularly humiliating had happened. Accompanied by her black page, Mustapha, she now turned to England to try her fortunes there.¹⁰

Despite her mature age – she was about thirty – there was something unalterably splendid about Hortense’s appearance, in which her Italian inheritance predominated. She was ‘one of those lofty Roman beauties’, said a French admirer, ‘in no way like our Baby-visaged and Puppet-like Faces of France’; Edmund Waller in a poem similarly termed her the ‘Roman eagle’. She was blessed with a mass of black waving hair, and eyes said to be of three colours – combining the sweetness of the blue, the Irishness of the grey and the fire of the black. Ruvigny, a Protestant, sniffed that she was not really so beautiful: which, he added as a Frenchman, did not stop her being more beautiful than anyone else in England.¹¹

Hortense also had an avidity for life which recalls that of Barbara in her prime. Indeed, in many ways the reign of Hortense represents a short-lived reversion of the King to the type of mistress of his younger days, high-spirited and reckless, as opposed to the domestic docility offered by Louise. In Hortense’s amatory exploits there were hints of sexual ambiguity: as Saint Evremond, commenting on the triumph of this new siren (‘Fair beauties of Whitehall give way/Hortensia does her charms display’), saw fit to remark, ‘Each sex provides its lovers for Hortense’. Certainly most aspects of pleasure lured her. She was a compulsive gambler, a lover of good food, adored dogs – three favourites were named Boy, Little Rogue and Chop – as well as cats, monkeys and birds which included a white sparrow, a canary, a starling called Jacob, and a parrot called Pretty. She was an excellent shot who could bring down quail. She too, like Charles, loved to swim, if she was not quite so adept at it: we hear of the faithful Mustapha (who luckily swam like a fish) dragging her about in the water on her front and her back. Hortense, wrote a contemporary, thought of nothing but enjoying herself: she triumphed over everything by an excess of folly. These were surely delightful attributes in a lover, if Hortense lacked the fundamental application for such a serious role (as Louise would have had it) as that of royal mistress.

Hortense’s ostensible reason for arriving in England in the winter of 1675 was her cousinship to Mary Beatrice, Duchess of York. But her conquest of the King (on whom Louise’s domesticated charms were perhaps temporarily palling) was rapid. By the summer of 1676 it was being said that the only time Hortense was not at the King’s side was when he was bathing. Courtin told Louis XIV in another piece of Gallic chauvinism, ‘It is the only decency which they observe in this country. There is a great deal of laxness in the rest of their conduct.’¹² By August Louise was in floods of tears – and Hortense was in Barbara’s old apartments.

Naturally the rise of a new mistress caused a flurry of wings in the political dovecots. Arlington, who had attempted unsuccessfully to pursue his early alliance with Louise, now turned to Hortense, hoping to put down Danby. In consequence, Hortense was rumoured to be pro-Dutch. There seems no real proof that Hortense was anything quite so solid-sounding. Besides, Danby quickly adapted to her friendship. But Hortense did create a great deal of trouble by intriguing in a more intimate sphere. For she developed a passionate friendship with Anne Countess of Sussex, one of the King’s two daughters by Barbara. The Earl of Sussex, previously Lord Dacre, had been given the superior title on his marriage to Anne in 1674. The wedding, at Hampton Court, had been a glittering affair, attended by royalties on both sides of the blanket, including Prince Rupert, the Duke of York and the Duke of Monmouth. Anne received a £20,000 dowry from the King, who also played the father’s role at the wedding; the bridegroom got a £2,000 a year pension. Despite this largesse, the new Lord Sussex intended to be master in his own house.^fn2

He disapproved of the connection with Hortense. Nevertheless, Anne, who had some of her mother’s obstinate temperament, persisted in it. The two ladies took fencing lessons together, proceeding to St James’s Park for the purpose on one occasion, with drawn swords beneath their nightgowns. The crisis came when Anne announced her intention of sharing a balcony in Cheapside with Hortense at the Lord Mayor’s Show in November. Barbara, like many another mother with a purple past, found it in her to write an extremely priggish letter to her daughter from France, advising ‘wifely obedience’.¹³ Eventually Lord Sussex took his wayward spouse in high dudgeon to the country. But he should have been warned. His troubles with her were not over – nor, for that matter, were Barbara’s.

Returning to Hortense and her brief but victorious sway over the King, this was still sufficiently marked in February 1677 for her to be quoted by the French ambassador as being ‘in a very prominent position raised above all the other ladies’ at the opening of Parliament.¹⁴ By the summer however the eternal Eve in Hortense had reasserted itself. She indulged in a prolonged and public flirtation with the Prince de Monaco. Hortense was dismissed. Louise dried her tears. The King settled back with a shrug into her waiting arms. Since Hortense had not presented the King with a child, alone among his mistresses-in-chief to fail to do so, the main residue of her reign was the unfortunate political impression she created. Marvell expressed the general indignation

That the King should send for another French whore

When one already hath made him so poor.

Charles II had not sent for Hortense. But the smear remained.

William of Orange, with the necessary tenacity of the ruler of a small country, had forgotten nothing of his plan for wresting England away from France. Nor after the Treaty of Westminster was he in any position to rest on his laurels. The military campaigns of Louis XIV proceeded apace. The year 1677 would see spectacular advances by the French. Before that date William had already put out feelers concerning marriage with his first cousin Mary, Protestant daughter of the Duke of York.¹⁵ He found a receptive audience in the English Ambassador, the erudite and agreeable Sir William Temple.

Temple had viewed with deprecation England’s entanglement with France. He was now in a much stronger position to exert pressure to end it. Having been withdrawn from the Netherlands in 1671 when his pro-Dutch views were clearly incompatible with the pro-French ones of the English government, he was recalled to government service over the negotiation of the Treaty of Westminster. Shortly afterwards, declining both the Embassy at Madrid and a Secretaryship of State (leaving it scornfully to Sir Joseph Williamson), Temple took up residence at The Hague.

The spring of 1677 brought a wave of victories for Louis XIV. ‘I have loved war too much,’ declared the French King on his death-bed. But his triumphant campaign brought him at the time not only his own heart’s desire but also his country’s. In the United Provinces William girded himself for another span of heroic defence. Much depended yet again on the attitude of England. Charles II had shown himself able and willing to act as a mediator in the past, once the forced Treaty of Westminster had put an end to his more ambitious plans. Louis XIV, who was paying good money over to his cousin, naturally hoped for Charles’ French sympathies to be exhibited in a more positive manner: neutrality would however be better than nothing. The pro-Dutch party in England, on the other hand, keenly desired England to come to the rescue of that poor beleaguered country.

This projected marriage of the Prince of Orange and the niece of Charles II was one subterranean manoeuvre. Having been backed by Temple in Holland, it was taken up by Danby at home. However, early in 1677 there was a renewed opportunity for Parliamentary interference on the subject of foreign policy. It was time for Parliament to reconvene after its prorogation – high time, in the opinion of such leading members as Buckingham. Indeed, so long had been the gap (fifteen months) that a new and wily argument was developed by Shaftesbury and others for the necessity of a general election. The King had prorogued Parliament beyond the legal limits, so ran the proposition, and thus automatically ensured a dissolution.

It was nonsense, of course. Buckingham addressed the House of Lords on the subject in February. The great Duke had lost his sense of personal magnificence – or did not care. By 1679 not only was he wearing false teeth, but Nell Gwynn, who remained his friend, begged him at least to wear new shoes and a new periwig when he knocked at her door, so as not to stink the place out.¹⁶ Was this the son of the gorgeous George Villiers, whose sheer physical beauty had fascinated two generations? To the King he may have seemed like a curio, preserved for the sake of ancient loyalties from youth and childhood, where a Henry VIII might have employed the purgative axe. Buckingham, no longer the peacock he had once been, was in fact more like a wasp, an angry wasp at that, determined not to recognize the end of his own personal summer; like a wasp, he retained his sting, as the King and Danby would soon discover.

In the House of Lords he certainly made a bold show, attended by a host of followers ‘in great bravery in liveries of blue’.¹⁷ The argument was nonetheless rejected by both Houses. The King was furious. He was also deeply worried by the implications of the incident. Was this perhaps that first rumbling of the revolution he had long, consciously or unconsciously, dreaded? Danby pounced forthwith on the four principal peers involved. At the orders of the House of Lords Buckingham was imprisoned in the Tower, as were Shaftesbury, Salisbury and Wharton. It was held at the time to be an over-reaction. Later, when Danby too found himself in the same ominous prison, Bishop Burnet at least thought it a ‘just retaliation’ for the ‘violence’ of this incident.¹⁸ But if Danby was the public instrument, there is no doubt that the King approved of the gesture.

Latterly the officials of the law in general were being subjected to his critical scrutiny. There were complaints that the quality of the King’s judges was declining. Following the departure of Matthew Hale as Lord Chief Justice in 1676, tenure itself was insecure. In June Sir William Ellis was dismissed from the Court of Common Pleas on the advice of Danby. His substitute, William Scroggs, a sinister if clever fellow described by Roger North as ‘a great Voluptuary’ whose debaucheries were ‘egregious’, was, in addition to all this, very much a royal nominee. In 1678 the process continued, Chief Justice Ramsford departing in May and Twisden in December, their respective ages of seventy-three and seventy six being given as an excuse (although even today these ages do not debar incumbents from such positions).¹⁹

Obviously such a campaign did not pass without remark. Marvell chose to comment on it in his trumpet blast, published in 1677, Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England: ‘What French counsel, what standing forces, what parliamentary bribes, what national oaths, and all the other machinations of wicked men have not yet been able to effect,’ he cried, ‘may be more compendiously acted by twelve judges in scarlet.’ He saw it as part of the general decline in English life, set off by the noxious spread of Catholicism; on which topic itself he exploded with eloquent bigotry: ‘Were it either open Judaism, or plain Turkery, or honest Paganism, there is yet a certain bona fides in the most extravagant belief … but this [Popery] is a compound of all the three.’

The meeting of Parliament itself was dominated by the needs of the Navy. The continuation of the quarrel between the two Houses over the issue raised by the Shirley v. Fagg case helped Danby to maintain some kind of control. A stirring speech by Samuel Pepys secured a supply of £600,000 for the ships. So far, so good, even if Danby was probably over-confident in those MPs he listed as supporting the Crown – because such type of prognostication was still in its infancy.

In addition, Danby’s strategy was leading him into some strange paths. He may not have fully thought out the significance of what he preached when he urged the King to declare the war in April – against France – on the grounds that then Parliament would have to grant him a fully paid-up Army and a Navy, and then he would be independent of them….²⁰ The first implication of this was that the King might well use these forces for a purpose other than that for which they were voted by Parliament. That was not only outside his powers as generally understood at the time, but was also of course the development that many Members of Parliament had been ostentatiously dreading over the years. Had Charles II not constantly denied such suggestions as ‘malicious’ and ‘jealousies’? The second implication, more serious still, was that he might use the Army and Navy to suborn the rule of Parliament.

But the King declined to declare war, either at the instance of Danby or of the House of Commons. The Dutch partisans there continued to agitate for some show of help for Holland, in face of the sweeping French victories. On 23 May the Commons asked in plain terms for an offensive and defensive alliance with Holland. This was quite beyond their rights: public interference with foreign policy undeniably invaded the royal prerogative and the King said so sharply. To mark his displeasure and his determination to preserve his prerogative, he prorogued Parliament until 16 July.

There was an uncomfortable feeling of stalemate by the summer of 1677. Parliament would not vote all the money needed for a war until the King declared that war. The King naturally would not declare war without money. Nor was the opposition quashed. Buckingham emerged from the Tower in July. Marvell believed it to be at the instance of the King’s boon companions: ‘This was by Nelly, Middlesex, Rochester and the merry gang….’²¹ He had already been allowed out for two days in June to oversee the building of his grand new palace at Cliveden – a sign of the King’s indulgence or Buckingham’s priorities. Shaftesbury attempted in vain to secure his own release by appealing to the King’s Bench for a writ of Habeas Corpus. He lingered there for the next six months. But his confinement was now much less severe; and, as he was able to receive visits from his colleagues, he was by no means cut off from the opposition’s continuing intrigues.

Still without proper funds from Parliament, Charles II signed his third secret agreement with Louis XIV, by which Charles was to hold off his anti-French Parliament until the following May, and in return Louis was as usual to pay up. At the same time Danby was making progress in the negotiations for the Dutch marriage: in this area the King wished to accommodate his minister. It was as though the King were astride a giant see-saw, with William and Danby on one side, Louis XIV on the other, and Parliament determined to upset the whole structure. Rather than let that happen, Charles determined to shift his weight dexterously now to one side, now to the other, rather than lose his balance.

Danby therefore was able to derive comfort from the success of the Dutch marriage project. Temple’s mission to tie up the details of the marriage between William and Mary was accomplished. William had characteristically made enquiries about the girl’s disposition. Fortunately, Lady Temple was a close friend of the Princess’ governess, so that William could satisfy himself on this score: the link with England was evidently not his sole consideration. To Sir William Temple he observed prosaically, if sensibly, on the whole subject ‘that if he should meet with one to give him trouble at home, it was what he should not be able to bear, who was like to have enough abroad in the course of his life’.²² The only unhappy principal in the whole affair was the fifteen-year-old Princess. She wept ‘grievously’ when she heard the news. She saw herself being exiled for political reasons to an unappealing country, on the arm of an equally unappealing bridegroom: William was several inches shorter than she – to her hysterical eye, virtually a dwarf.

Queen Catharine, ever kind-hearted, tried to make things better by pointing out: ‘Child, when I came to England I had not even seen the King.’

‘Madam, you came into England!’ exclaimed Mary with the despair and cruelty of youth, ‘But I am going out of England.’²³ Shades of earlier Stuart princesses who had made suitable Protestant matches abroad – her great-aunt Elizabeth of Bohemia and her aunt Mary Princess of Orange. The odd thing was that the marriage of this Mary, begun in tears, was to turn out the most successful of them all in a worldly sense. Not for this Mary the years of impecunious exile endured by her great-aunt, the premature widowhood of her aunt. Not only would she occupy the throne of England, but, probably even more to her satisfaction – for she had an essentially shy nature – her marriage of convenience turned into a love affair on her side. She loved her William devotedly and dutifully, becoming a true Dutchwoman in the way her proud aunt had never condescended to do.

It may seem surprising that Charles II should welcome or even tolerate a public event calculated to outrage the susceptibilities of Louis XIV. It is true that Danby pressed the match with great firmness, so that in a sense Charles was able to plead political pressure with perfect accuracy. But Charles, now that he was in his balancing mood, could see another advantage to it. Mary was the heiress presumptive to the throne in the younger generation, or, as it was put at the time of her wedding, ‘the Eldest Daughter of the Crown’, who was now happily sleeping in ‘Protestant Arms’. In his speech to Parliament the following January, Charles referred pointedly to the fact that he had done all he could ‘to remove all sorts of jealousies, I have given my niece to the Prince of Orange; by which I hope I have given full assurance that I shall never suffer his interest to be ruined’.²⁴

The King trusted that the nuptial arrangements of Mary, deposited in Protestant arms, would distract attention from the fact that her father, who was even closer to the succession, was sleeping in Catholic ones. What was more, Mary Beatrice was pregnant; this always aroused the fear that she might give birth to a son to be brought up a Catholic (she had already borne two daughters). In fact, the baby, born just three days later, was a boy. But the public, who received the news coldly, might have spared their disapproval: by December, this latest Duke of Cambridge had perished like his half-brothers, who had in turn borne the unlucky title.^fn3

But the pregnancy had at least played its part in persuading James to agree to Mary’s match, which was otherwise most distasteful to him. Nor, on the occasion of the marriage, could there be any doubts where the popular sympathies lay. According to Pepys, nobody had been pleased at Mary’s birth: a disappointing girl and Clarendon’s grand-daughter at that. Now, in contrast, such ‘bells and bonfires’ and general rejoicing had not been seen since the Restoration, wrote Sir Charles Lyttelton.²⁵ Edmund Waller, the Court poet, represented it as a romantic union of a soldier king and a beautiful princess:

Nor all the force he leads by land

Could guard him from her conqu’ring eyes…

It was a measure of the general satisfaction at the Protestant combination that it should be rumoured – quite falsely – that Mary had been adopted as the King’s own daughter.

All that Charles II actually did at the ceremony in November 1677 was to play the part of a jolly, slightly bawdy uncle. He told the groom to remember ‘Love and War do not agree very well together’. When William put down the traditional handful of gold on the prayer book (symbol of all his worldly goods), Charles said briskly to his niece, ‘Take it up, take it up. It’s all clear gain to you.’ And he urged on the prim William on his wedding night, ‘Hey nephew, to your work! Hey, St George for England!’

It was left to Louis XIV to exclaim with predictable disgust and horror at the consummation of his worst fears. His reported reactions ranged from the disagreeable (‘two beggars were well-matched in public’) to the histrionic: he behaved as if he had just lost an army when he heard the news, and told the Duke of York, ‘You have given your daughter to my mortal enemy.’²⁶ More to the point, Louis XIV stopped payment of the latest subsidy to Charles II. He also attempted to prick the King’s exposed flank by its own Machiavellian means. An obvious weakness of Charles II’s position was the dislike of the opposition for Danby – an emotion only sharpened by his imprisonment of Buckingham and Shaftesbury. From the point of view of the French King, Danby’s resolute pro-Dutch stance could therefore be circumvented by the time-honoured expedient of pressing money into the palms of his political enemies.

Thus men like Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney – later advertised as champions of liberty – as well as Buckingham were in correspondence with Barrillon, the representative of Versailles (a home of Catholic absolutism, if ever there was one), and, what was more, were receiving funds from that tainted source. At the time, the intrigue was not exactly shocking: it was merely one more manoeuvre in the endlessly complicated wheeling and dealing which went on in Europe at the time, before Louis XIV would and the Dutch could make peace.

Charles II retaliated against Louis XIV’s blocking of the subsidy by summoning Parliament for early February – not May, as proposed; he then brought it forward another ten days. By this time he had already allowed Laurence Hyde to sign a defensive alliance with the Dutch on 10 January. Yet the Dutch never ratified the treaty, and the English never went to war as promised; this treaty should be seen as yet another manoeuvre.

Charles’ speech at the opening of Parliament on 28 January had a noble ring. He recalled his own efforts at mediation, by which he had hoped to procure ‘an honourable and safe peace for Christendom’. It was not his fault, he said, if he now came before them seeking supplies for the Navy and Ordnance, finding that peace was ‘no longer to be hoped for by fair means’ and that which ‘be not obtained by force … cannot be had otherwise’.²⁷ But the King’s inner hope was not for war. He trusted that Louis would accede to this form of blackmail and negotiate a peace all the same, along lines acceptable to Charles and his nephew William.

The fall of Ghent to Louis XIV on 27 February made the possibility of a compromise peace more remote. At the same time it increased the demands for a positive Dutch alliance in Parliament. In general, the mood there was obstreperous, even ugly, especially on the subject of supplies. William Sacheverell, the rising orator, declared on 4 February that he knew ‘what mind the country are of. They will not be pleased if we thrust a sum of money blindly into those hands that have so ill managed affairs.’²⁸

Shaftesbury was finally released from the Tower on 26 February. Halifax had presented his first petition a fortnight earlier; but it was not until Shaftesbury had fully and publicly recognized his error, both in demanding a dissolution and in appealing to the King’s Bench thereafter, that he was allowed to go free. It all had the air of an abject apology. But wise observers like the French ambassador saw in Shaftesbury’s reappearance ‘a great mortification’ for Danby. Shaftesbury after all understood only too well the art of reculer pour mieux sauter. And he was probably aware in advance of Louis XIV’s negotiations, since Lord Russell had been a frequent visitor to the Tower. Buckingham, who, like Rochester, had the knack of hitting on the unpleasant truth about his contemporaries (hence his demolition of Dryden in The Rehearsal), compared Shaftesbury to a Will-o’-the-Wisp ‘that uses to lead men out of the way, then leads them at last in a ditch and darkness and nimbly retreats for self-security’.²⁹

All the same, neither side had yet devised a way out of the familiar stalemate – a policy of If No War, Then No Money on Parliament’s side; If No Money, Then No War on the King’s. Charles II made an equally familiar move on 25 March when he wrote privately to Louis XIV. He suggested that in return for a subsidy of six million livres annually for the next three years, he would secure a proper peace in Europe, along conciliatory lines. But his winning streak had not left King Louis in the mood for territorial compromise: for the time being, he rejected both terms and subsidy.

King Charles was left with the elaborate Parliamentary game of cat and mouse which was being played at home over the question of supplies: with Parliament as the cat and the King for once in the position of the mouse. Later it was claimed in the memoirs of James II that at this point the House of Commons was in reality far more jealous of the King’s power than of that of France.³⁰ Certainly their behaviour lent plausibility to the theory. The opposition bore every sign of being terrified that the King would escape their financial clutches. Although they were armed with their own private subsidies from France, they set up a continual caterwaul that help should be given to the Dutch; yet when money was finally voted which would enable the King to declare war on France (should he so wish), Parliament immediately followed this up by an embargo on French imports. Since the only effective way of raising money quickly was to use the Excise, and since the French imports provided by far the largest share of this, it will be seen that the second action effectively nullified the first…. The result was, as before, a stalemate.

The absolute monarch, Louis XIV, Charles was beginning to find, was easier to cope with than his own elected Parliament. A deft piece of diplomatic blackmail from the English king – the threat of an alliance with Holland, Spain and Austria – did produce the first promised payment of six million livres from the French King in May.

In the meantime, Charles II was not the only one at home who was beginning to think back edgily to the events of 1641 and 1642. So traumatic had been the experience of those days on two generations – the men in their prime and the young who also suffered the consequences – that the survivors tended to see fearful parallels when certain circumstances prevailed. Trouble with the Scots, especially on religious matters, was always held to be a bad omen, so that when an English Parliamentary attack was mounted on the King’s regent in Scotland, the Duke of Lauderdale, in May, that too seemed all of a piece. Charles II suspected that the English opposition had been stirring up Lauderdale’s new enemies, the Scottish supporters of ‘Conventicles’, as had previously suspected Shaftesbury of being in touch with the Hamiltonians.

‘Conventicles’ were a form of independent religious gathering unlawful under the new regime, and a series of moves of increasing severity were made against those taking part in them from 1669 onwards. In fact, the rise of this new type of Covenanter was a manifestation of the Scottish national character which Lauderdale, and by implication Charles II, should have taken more seriously. Originally, they had been animated not so much by political motives as by a sincere desire to practise their religion in their own fashion. It was really impossible to cut out the truly Presbyterian heart of the Scots, as successive rulers had found to their cost.

It was made incumbent upon local magnates to put down Conventicles held upon their land. Yet as the Covenanters were driven towards more violent resistance, it was virtually out of the question for the landowners to carry out this provision without force. And force, military force, should surely be provided by the central government. Furthermore, if it was to be a question of a military crusade against the Covenanters, that raised the second question of who was going to pay for it. In July 1678 the Scottish Parliament voted an extremely large sum – £1,800,000 – for the suppression of the Conventicles. It was quite clear that the raising of this money would be enormously resented by those who did not wish the Conventicles suppressed in the first place. No, the auguries in Scotland were definitely not encouraging.

In England, the address against Lauderdale was carried through the Commons, for all Danby’s sedulous efforts to prevent it. Charles, although it was in his nature, as his brother James said, ‘to keep measures with everybody’, was obviously furious at the impertinence of the Commons. Saying icily that he preferred not to answer the address, he adjourned Parliament for ten days.

In Europe a further impetus towards peace was given by the exhaustion of the Dutch. And Louis XIV, already worried by Charles II’s little gambit of proposing a quadruple alliance excluding France, was not averse to being involved in further negotiations. Even so, he retained a very hard-headed notion of the value of his own conquests: the peace negotiations underwent one further check, until Charles II, either in genuine disgust or more probably to bring about the conference he desired, proposed sending some English troops to Flanders to assist the Dutch. The way was finally cleared for the negotiations which led to the Peace of Nymegen on 10 August. By this, France was left with a good deal of the conquered Flemish territory, if not all she had desired; she also secured a workable boundary with the Spanish Netherlands.

The Dutch got the respite that they, rather than William, wanted. William had been reluctant to see his ‘mortal enemy’ confirmed in so much new ground; nevertheless, he too was able to use the temporary lull of the next few years to build up himself and his country against the final assault. Sir William Temple hailed the role of Charles II in all of this grandiloquently: the King, he declared, was once more ‘at the head of the affairs of Christendom’.³¹ This was the reassurance the King wanted since the waning of his European prestige after 1673.

The same happy claim could not be made for the King’s affairs at home. So ragged had relations between Parliament and King become by the summer of 1678 that it has been suggested that Danby at least was considering the maintenance of the King’s authority by use of the Army internally. It has also been proposed that the King himself might have contemplated such action.³² But there is no proof that Charles II ever contemplated what would have been – by his standards – a disastrous course. Mending and patching, ironing over, smoothing down, these were the natural instincts of Charles II. So deeply were they ingrained that even an outbreak of passion, as over the Lauderdale incident or the Commons’ open interference with foreign policy the previous year, was generally followed by a show of regained composure. And there were two good reasons to dissuade him.

First, there was a practical point. He had no money in hand with which to pay the soldiers on any grand scale. It is true that the Commons had voted supplies for the ‘disbandment’ of the Army on 30 May, the King having told them a week earlier that the issue of peace or war would depend upon their supplies: ‘I leave it to you to consider whether to provide for their [the Army’s] subsistence so long or for their disbanding sooner.’ The Commons opted for the latter course on the grounds that the King was obviously determined not to fight France: peace would leave him in control of just that kind of force the Commons dreaded, unless something was done about it. When the King asked for – and was refused – an extra £300,000 a year on 18 June to ensure peace, the Commons were even more suspicious. The King was, however, left with the ‘disbandment’ supplies, which he proceeded to use for the Army’s maintenance. But this sum alone would not take him very far.

One lesson taught by the Commonwealth was that unpaid soldiers sought new masters. It was true Charles II had emerged from the Restoration with full powers as Commander-in-Chief of the Army. As Sir Joseph Williamson pointed out in 1678, ‘I know of nothing that can hinder the King from raising what forces he pleases, if he pays for them himself.’³³ But there was no way that a king hamstrung financially could possibly have financed such an arbitrary force in such a way as to maintain power by it for any effective period.

The second reason, which was psychological, was even more important. Charles II had witnessed at first hand the fatal – because it was unsuccessful – use of the Army by his own father. He had himself been restored by the Commonwealth Army, but in their good time, not his own; his Army in exile had proved useless in recapturing the throne. He loved the new English Army which he had constructed since 1661, devoting much time to details of its welfare. Yet an interest in the special red and black uniforms of his hundred Yeomen of the Guard – ‘a livery coat of fine red cloth guarded with black velvet with Rose and Crown, his Majesty’s motto and Scroll C R, back and breast, embroidered with silver and gilt spangles. Similar breeches’ – should not be equated with a manic wish to take away the Parliamentary bauble by military means, as Oliver Cromwell had once done.³⁴

Charles was perfectly prepared to sacrifice a number of things in the good cause of the peace of his kingdom – ranging from the abstract, such as the truth, to the concrete, such as his financial independence; but he was not prepared to sacrifice that peace itself. The use of the Army would have been another ‘false Step’, like the Stop on the Exchequer; this one might have disrupted the careful structure of the kingdom altogether.

It was easier to prorogue Parliament yet again. Charles II’s so-called Long Parliament was adjourned on 15 July. Perhaps peace in Europe would after all be matched by the return of ‘tranquillity’ at home.

1 There are many versions of this epigram, which has been transformed into an epitaph in the best known version of all, beginning ‘Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King …’. But since Rochester predeceased Charles II, it could hardly have originated in this form. The epigram does not appear in the early editions of Rochester’s works. The version above, with the circumstances which led up to it, was first given by Thomas Hearne in his Remarks and Collections (notes for his historical works) in his entry for 17 November 1706.

2 The King, as usual, was more generous on paper than in fact. He was a long time paying the various bills, including that of Anne’s wedding dress; but this was due to financial necessity. The ceremony, and the King’s official acknowledgement of Anne’s paternity, certainly made it improbable that she was actually Roger Palmer’s child (see here).

3 The other children of James and Mary Beatrice – all daughters – died young during the reign of Charles II. It was the birth of a son in June 1688 then called James Edward, known to history as the Old Pretender, which provoked the crisis which led to the departure of James II from the throne.