PART FIVE

His Autumnal Fortune

‘In his autumnal fortune … yet there remaineth still a stock of warmth in men’s hearts for him.’

LORD HALIFAX, Character of King Charles II

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Bolder and Older

‘Men ordinarily become more timid as they grow old; as for me, I shall be, on the contrary, bolder and firmer and I will not stain my life and reputation in the little time that perhaps remains for me to live.’

Charles II, March 1681

With the defeat of the Second Exclusion Bill, it might appear that Charles II, that expert on the subject of survival, had survived yet again. To Sir John Reresby, on the eve of Christmas 1680, the King had never seemed more at his ease, his sang-froid never more marked. At his couchée, that semi-official gathering of an evening, Charles weighed in a humorous vein against the fallacy and emptiness of those who pretended to a greater degree of sanctity than their neighbours: they were most of them ‘Abominable Hypocrites’. Above all, as the King had told Reresby the previous month, he was aware of the need of sticking by his old friends, otherwise ‘I shall have no Body to stick by me.’¹

Much of this must be regarded as whistling to keep the royal spirits up – as well as the spirits of those surrounding the royal person. The King’s real mood was better expressed a few months later at that classic confrontation, the Oxford Parliament, when he observed something along these lines: ‘Men ordinarily become more timid as they grow old; as for me, I shall be, on the contrary, bolder and firmer and I will not stain my life and reputation in the little time that perhaps remains for me to live.’² The deaths resulting from the Popish Plot, the persistent chicaneries (as he saw them) of the Whig opposition, the attacks on his wife, mistress and ministers, had produced a new ‘Severity in his Disposition’.

James Welwood attributed this directly to the Catholic executions: and Welwood, although writing some time after the event, at the request of Mary of Orange (he was her physician), knew the Court gossip.³ It is also possible that such severity had always been latent beneath the courageous forgiveness which Charles II displayed at the Restoration. But a more plausible case can be made for the fact that all the Stuarts became more conservative as they became older – those that survived to do so. James I, who died in his late fifties, certainly developed a kind of obstinacy very different from the dexterity he displayed as monarch of Scotland. It scarcely needs stressing that Charles I, who was executed at the age of forty-seven, had shown these tendencies; James Duke of York had been marked for his rigidity since his thirties. Charles II, a far more flexible character in every way, who had learnt in a hard school the value of pliancy, was nevertheless not quite immune from the same tendency.

The next few months constituted the greatest challenge yet to the King’s nerve. He discovered in the course of them that this new boldness, the boldness brought by age, led to triumph, not disaster. This result did not encourage the King to revert to his previous easy-going stance. The concept of ‘peace for his own time’ was abandoned since, like so many other attitudes of appeasement, it had manifestly failed.

The day after the defeat of the Exclusion Bill, Shaftesbury struck again. He still did not reckon himself to be totally overborne on the subject of the King’s successor. ‘Sick in health’, he was ‘yet in action nimble and busy as a body louse’.⁴ If Monmouth’s chances had temporarily vanished beneath a hail of mockery from Halifax, then the other expedient (of divorce) could be resurrected. In the House of Lords the next day, Shaftesbury outlined another project ‘as the sole remaining chance of liberty, security and religion’. This was designed to separate the King from his existing Queen, and provide him with an opportunity for ‘a Protestant consort’, and thus leave the Crown to his legitimate issue.

This gained little support in the Lords. It also offered the King an opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to his wife publicly. That night he ostentatiously supped with the Queen, when he had been in the habit of supping with the Duchess of Portsmouth. And, even more ostentatiously, he took his post-prandial nap in the Queen’s chamber. It was a signal rebuke to Shaftesbury’s plans. Queen Catharine had been ill that autumn, her fragility producing the usual unattractive speculation about her possible successors, including some cold ‘northern princesses’ and the daughter of the Earl of Manchester. Now the King had made it clearer than ever that she could not be attacked with impunity.

His speech to Parliament on 15 December was one of bitterness and disappointment. He had not succeeded in obtaining those funds which would enable Tangier to be made secure; as he saw it, Parliament had preferred to concentrate on this perpetual bickering over his successor, while forgetting the wider issue. He had hoped for a united front; they had responded with dissension. He had given them assurances concerning religion and they had not responded with any kind of financial backing. ‘I should be glad to know from you,’ exclaimed the King, ‘as soon as may be, how far I shall be assisted by you, and what it is you desire from me.’⁵

One further piece of Parliamentary presumption he ignored. During the autumn session the House of Commons had reacted to the King’s new treatment of the judiciary by asking for a change in the tenure of the judges – or else for some limitation to their powers. The King made no reference to this request. All the same, the mantle of royal protection could not be flung out much further than the King’s own circle. In January the House of Commons made a move towards the impeachment of Lord Chief Justice Scroggs (in the event, the House of Lords refused to take him into custody and then Parliament was prorogued). More serious was the move of the House of Commons against Lord Stafford.

The five Catholic lords were still languishing in the Tower of London, to which they had been committed two years before. Although various Catholic priests, mainly Jesuits, had been put to death, and others condemned, no trial had yet taken place of these far more prominent victims. Scaffolding had been erected in May with a view to preparing Westminster Hall for such a magnificent public event. The mob, with its taste for gloating rhyme, had sung of the preparations beneath the windows of the imprisoned peers.

The death of one of the chief movers of the plot, Bedloe, in the summer of 1680, was a blow to the prosecution: it was not until the autumn of 1680 that it was decided by the House of Commons to move against Lord Stafford.

This particular peer was chosen because the witnesses against him had the greatest air of plausibility.⁶ Thus the verdict of guilty which was given against him was in a sense justified by the evidence produced – except that it happened to be perjured evidence. Witnesses happily swore that Lord Stafford had bribed them to kill the King, that Oates had delivered to him a commission to act as Paymaster-General for the Pope’s Army, and so on and so forth.

The condemnation of this decent and harmless old man was a blot on the age in which he lived. Already the ridiculous ‘Pumpkin Plot’, as it would be described satirically two years later in Otway’s masterpiece Venice Preserv’d, was beginning to be revealed for what it was: ‘It is indeed a Pumpkin-plot, which, just as it was mellow, we have gathered, and now we have gathered it, prepared it and dressed it, shall we throw it like a pickled cucumber out of the window?’ But in his prologue Otway spoke more soberly of the period of suspicion through which he had lived:

In these distracted times, when each man dreads

The bloody stratagems of busy heads;

When we have feared three years we know not what,

Till witnesses begin to die o’ the rot.

It was thanks to the ‘bloody stratagems of busy heads’ that, while the pampered Protestant ladies shivered in their coaches, Lord Stafford was executed on 29 December.^fn1

His fellow lords remained in prison for the next five years, with the exception of Lord Petre, who was released earlier by death. But there were no cheers from the crowd when Lord Stafford’s head was held up by his executioner. The publication of his affecting last speech, the ‘Brief and Impartial Account’ (which was, unusually, not forbidden), brought further waves of uneasy sympathy. ‘My good Child,’ so Lord Stafford addressed his daughter Delphina, ‘this is the last time I shall write unto you, I pray God bless you. Your poor old Father hath this Comfort, that he is totally innocent of what he is accused of, and confident of God’s mercy….’⁷

Charles II told Thomas Bruce that Lord Stafford’s blood was on the heads of those who had brought about his murder – ‘I sign with tears in my eyes’; and he made clear his anger and disgust at those peers who had voted guilty, especially those whom he considered to be supporters of the Court.⁸ But he did not reprieve Stafford, as he would later fail to reprieve Oliver Plunkett. He could only remit the more extreme penalties for treason, including the traditional and disgusting mutilation – and even this merciful remission was criticized by the House of Commons, who wondered whether the sovereign had the right to grant it.

Then, on 18 January, the King dissolved Parliament and announced that the next Parliament would meet in March – and in Oxford.

It was an audacious move. It indicated that the King was at last prepared to take the initiative. Even before this, the Crown was at last mounting some kind of propaganda campaign, equivalent to the agile manoeuvres of Shaftesbury and his associates.^fn2 The anti-Tory Green Ribbon Club had after all proved itself to be a more dangerous enemy than the anti-Popish mob. Noise merely battered the ears; propaganda wooed them. The point was there to be taken. There were the efforts of Roger L’Estrange in particular. Certainly the new Parliament turned out to be no more Whig in complexion than the previous one, and possibly slightly less – a notable improvement on the record of the previous two years, when each successive Parliament had marked a further setback for the King’s party. Against this background, the choice of Oxford, whose University was a secure Royalist nursery, was inspired. Here was no London mob, hostile to so many of the King’s entourage. Perhaps the setting was the suggestion of Danby, for although still immured in the Tower, he was now able to receive visits and thus proffer advice. Eighteen months before he had proposed: ‘Parliament to be called to some other place; the King to reside out of London’, in a memorandum.¹⁰

The removal of Parliament from the seething capital did not merely recognize the dangers threatening the monarchy; it also took advantage of the very wide powers remaining with the King. It is true that he had not felt himself able to save Lord Stafford, but a man who could choose the venueof Parliament without contradiction was still in a very strong position. There was much aggressive talk in the capital in February. One of the City MPs, Sir Thomas Player, a notorious anti-Papist, answered boldly when questioned at dinner as to why Parliament would not raise money to preserve Tangier and pay His Majesty’s debts.

‘Hang Tangier!’ he replied. ‘We resolve to raise no money to pay the whores at Whitehall and arbitrary government. And, as the King has called us to Oxford, we know the next will be to York, but for all that we will give him no money.’ Sir Thomas went on to say that the disposing of the Crown was in the Commons and as alterable as the exchanging of pipes between men, ‘and taking up pipes in his hand [he ex-]changed them’.¹¹ For all this kind of public boasting, the Commons had not the ability to deny the King his choice. To Oxford, then, reluctantly but without the ability to resist, came the Whig leaders.

The King and Court did not come there directly, but took in the spring race meeting at Burford, twenty miles away in the stony, beautiful Cotswolds. It was a meeting at which the King’s twelve-stone heats for the royal Plate were due to be run. However, on this occasion Burford was transformed into something of a political Ascot; the Duke of Monmouth was amongst those who contested and there was a quality of nervous display about the whole occasion. Only the King himself kept up that appearance of relaxation which subsequently trapped his enemies and destroyed them. He hawked across the nearby fields and dined with Sir John Lenthall, son of the celebrated, if acquisitive, speaker of the Commonwealth House of Commons.

Once the Court reached Oxford, the scene was a curious mixture of the significant and the profane. Of course the Court was not unknown to the university city. Nor for that matter was Parliament. The King had been careful to reassure himself on that front, in an age when precedents, however dubious, were held to cover a multitude of sins. There were one or two (including Charles himself) who could remember Oxford as the seat of his father’s government nearly forty years ago; but it was only fifteen years since not only the whole Court but also Parliament had merrily romped off to Oxford to be out of danger at the time of the Plague. It was then that Barbara had given the King her Christmas present of a son, born at Merton College. Now both the Duchess of Portsmouth and Nell Gwynn were in attendance, as was the Queen; but the atmosphere was more political than lascivious, and there were to be no presents of such an exciting nature. Once again Merton was a Royalist stronghold, as were Christ Church and Corpus Christi. The Whigs concentrated on Balliol: Shaftesbury directed that ‘the younger sort of students’ should retire to make room for the elderly politicians.

There remained that concomitant of courtly pleasure, the theatre; while that concomitant of the theatre, a good row, was also to be found. The King’s Players petitioned furiously to be admitted, despite the claims of the Irish Company, which were supported by the Duke of Ormonde as Chancellor of Oxford University. The Irish were ‘a barbarous Mass’, said the King’s Players, and in the end this xenophobic view prevailed. More satisfactory than this squabble was the actual performance attended by the King on 19 March: Tamerlane the Great, by Charles Saunders, with an Epilogue by Dryden to make the message even more acceptable.¹²

Troops of soldiers as well as actors were present. Even more than the players they set the scene. It seems that their total did not exceed five hundred.¹³ Yet since they lined the roads on the way to Oxford, and lounged in the streets of the city itself, the impression of a trial of strength was there. The Whigs arrived at Oxford marked out by the bows of satin in their hats, blue and with the words ‘No Popery! No Slavery!’ woven into the material at a cost of two shillings a yard (these impudent bows were afterwards used to arraign Shaftesbury).^fn3 But the Whigs, like the King, were armed with something more serious than satin bows. They brought their own troops with them, if they did not have the possibility of a full standing army to back them. At St Mary’s, that same church where the young Charles had shocked his governor by laughing and eyeing the ladies in the congregation, the rival parties now carefully took their places according to political allegiance and eyed each other across the church.

And of course the Press was there. A flurry of news-writers gave the scene at Oxford something of the air of a modern party conference – except that on this occasion both parties were present. Cartoons played their part. So did lampoons. The Whigs made as much use as possible of the weapon of satire, some of it gross, in order to portray the King’s choice of Oxford as an act of absolutism. ‘The Raree Show’ depicted him as a man with a travelling peep-show, a pack of Parliamentary motions on his back, and the ‘Saints’ pulling him into the mire. The Duke of York was shown, more venomously, as a figure half-Jesuit and half-devil, setting fire to London.

Halloo! The Hunt’s begun,

Like Father, Like Son…

so ran the verse (before proceeding with considerable indecency). It was a gloomy and, as it turned out, inaccurate prediction. A loyal poem of the time, occasioned by seeing the ageing King walking near the river, was nearer the mark when it adjured him:

Go on, blest Prince! the power of years defy…¹⁴

The King’s opening speech to his new Parliament on 21 March was however placatory rather than defiant. It is true that there was a warning contained in the phrase, ‘I, who will never use arbitrary government myself, am resolved not to suffer it in others’ (the classic anti-Whig position). But at the time it seemed more important that the King stressed his continued affection for his dissident Lords and Commons: ‘No irregularities in parliaments shall make me out of love with them.’ It was a gruesome echo of those words uttered by the King shortly after his Restoration: ‘I need not tell you how much I love Parliaments. … Never King was so much beholden to Parliaments as I have been.’ Then the King had felt quite a measure of love for the body which had shown the good taste to restore him; how, seventeen years later, love had well and truly grown cold, but the question remained how the King was to deal with his inconvenient old flame.

On the subject of religion and the succession, the King went out of his way to emphasize that he wanted ‘to remove all reasonable fears that may arise from the possibility of a Popish successor’s coming to the Crown’ and was therefore ready ‘to hearken to any such expedient, by which the religion might be preserved, and the monarchy not destroyed’. Was the King contemplating imposing some form of regency upon James, to be undertaken by William and Mary jointly, under the influence of Halifax? The words were at least capable of that construction and gave hope to the ‘moderate’ Exclusionists in the Commons, who believed that the King was to be counted amongst their number. But the rest rated this a ‘subtle and crafty’ speech, ‘so unexpected that they should be put upon taking new measures’.¹⁵

Shaftesbury, in the makeshift House of Lords sited in the Oxford Geometry School, wasted no time in returning to the attack. He demanded the consideration of a Bill, already passed by both Houses, which would give relief to nonconformists but not to Catholics. The House of Commons, in cramped quarters which gave rise to complaint, reverted to their favourite subject of Exclusion. Fatally – from their own point of view – the Commons felt no particular urgency. The debate was postponed until the following Saturday, 26 March, so that there might be an opportunity for compromise, possibly along the lines touched on in the King’s speech.

During the next few days the King, brilliantly, paid out the rope for the Whigs. Shaftesbury, for example, was encouraged to come right out with his own solution. This was the legitimization of Monmouth by a Parliamentary Bill. But of course this had the effect of dividing the opposition. Many Whigs quite sensibly preferred Mary of Orange (who was generally understood to represent rule by William) to Monmouth. Here was descent in the right line of a sort, since Mary, as James’ heiress, would receive the Crown one day in any case; while to know the wayward Monmouth was not necessarily to trust him in a position of authority. Time was rectifying the Whig distrust of William’s ‘Stuart’ authoritarianism; whatever the nature of the animal was, William clearly did not resemble his uncle the Duke of York, nor for that matter his grandfather, Charles I.

The House of Commons in the meantime concentrated on the fortunes of yet another Pumpkin Plotter, one Edward Fitzharris. In an age when plots were endemic, as poison to the age of the Borgias, Fitzharris does not shine out as a particularly fascinating figure. It remains obscure where his allegiances lay and as a plotter he lacked the baroque, if horrifying, imagination of Titus Oates. Nevertheless, Fitzharris was to have a significance beyond the revelations he proffered. In themselves, these were contradictory; on the one hand, Fitzharris knew of a plot whereby the Duke of York would kill the King; on the other hand, he possessed the draft of a pamphlet in which the King was accused of being a Papist like his brother. The Commons at Oxford decided that these matters were best dealt with by impeachment for high treason in the House of Lords, instead of by a straightforward trial.

The Lords declined to impeach Fitzharris. All the old antagonism between the two Houses – from which the King had already profited – was aroused all over again, and at the very moment when the latest Exclusion Bill was to be read in the Commons: Charles himself, advised by Halifax, even went so far as to suggest a regency of the Princess Mary. It was probably a gambit, for it was however about this time that Charles II made those remarks, quoted at the beginning of the chapter, on the subject of boldness and age, which concluded, ‘I do not fear the dangers and calamities which people try to frighten me with. I have the law and reason on my side.’ Under the circumstances, it seems more likely that the King was still paying out the rope for the Whigs to hang themselves than that he was actively contemplating such a regency. James, as he well knew, would never agree to such a humiliating proposition. To agree to it was tantamount to condemning the country to civil strife on his death – the one course he was determined to avoid.

This debate in the Commons took place on the Saturday, 26 March. Taking advantage of the Commons’ complaints of their uncomfortable accommodation, the King pleasantly suggested that they should meet the following Monday in the Sheldonian Theatre.

The Sunday was passed by the King in secret conference at Merton College.

On Monday the King took his place in the House of Lords, now set in the Hall of Christ Church. There was nothing out of the ordinary about his costume. But Thomas Lord Bruce, who knew him well, received ‘a most gracious smile’ and noted his exceptional bonhomie.¹⁶ As for the peers, they too were in ordinary dress, having been given no notice to put on their robes. Very few present were aware that the King’s own robes and crown, those trappings essential to a dismissal of Parliament, had been secretly smuggled into the building.

The King proceeded to send for the House of Commons, who were engaged in discussing the various precedents over Exclusions from the throne. Indeed, one of the members was in the very act of complaining at the isolation of Oxford in that respect: ‘Amongst our misfortunes in being called to this place, we are far remote from Records and Books.’ He went on, ‘I have heard of Record 4.E.3 where when the Earl of March—’ At that moment the official, Black Rod, arrived, to command the Commons’ attendance at the House of Lords.¹⁷ So off the Commons trooped, and the member’s clinching comparison with the past was never completed. The Commons however trooped off not so much disconsolately as eagerly, expecting some new offer or concession.

The entrance to the Hall was narrow, down a little flight of steps. There was a crush as the Commons pressed through it. The sight which met their eyes – the monarch attired in full robes and crown – was both unexpected and for one moment inexplicable. The Lords themselves had barely taken in the sudden transformation. There was a babble of voices, and in the confusion the Serjeant at Arms had to call for silence three times before the noise died away. Then the King in a single sentence ordered the Lord Chancellor to dissolve Parliament: ‘All the world may see to what a point we are come, that we are not like to have a good end when the divisions at the beginning are such.’¹⁸

Finch carried out the King’s command. Charles promptly left the Hall. He had wasted neither time nor breath. These, the last words he would ever speak in Parliament, were brusque to the point of incivility. They came from a man otherwise famed for the graciousness of his manner. They represented the end of a downhill road and a long-declining relationship.

Afterwards, however, the King displayed ‘a most pleasing and cheerful countenance’ as he took off those smuggled robes. It was the MPs who greeted the news with ‘dreadful faces’ and ‘loud sighs’. The King, good humour fully restored, observed to Bruce, ‘I am now a better man than you were a quarter of an hour since; you had better have one King than five hundred.’¹⁹

Charles then dined in public, as was his custom; but he did so with exceptional rapidity. Then it was down the backstairs and into Sir Edward Seymour’s coach, standing ready. The King joined his own coach at the next stage, to which he had prudently sent it in advance. And so he went on to Windsor, along a route discreetly guarded – another precaution. The King’s Oxford troops clattered away unused. The Whigs, baffled and outpointed, had no choice but to leave as well, taking their own unused troops with them. Many of them had furnished their Oxford lodgings for a long stay – the measure of their astonishment.

Gradually Oxford became quiet again. Parliament never met again during the lifetime of King Charles II.

It is logical to suppose that the King arrived in Oxford with a rough plan of action already in his head. It was time to take on the Whigs. Given that he was prepared to act with decision, it was in fact an uneven match – not so much because the King was inordinately strong as because the Whigs were extremely weak. Nothing so far had gone right for them. In the House of Commons they had not succeeded in acquiring control of the Militia, for example, but had both alarmed and alerted the King by demanding it. Their battles with the House of Lords, also not yet conclusively won, occupied much of their attention, and had distracted them at several crucial moments. In terms of Whig policy, they concentrated their minds wonderfully on the question of the King’s Papist successor; yet the King was not a Papist himself and no one (pace Fitzharris) seriously supposed that he was.

All this loaded the dice in favour of a sovereign with very wide theoretical powers at his command, who was also able to demonstrate the sheer intransigence of the Whigs by appearing to offer compromise. Above all, the Whigs had not made up their minds about the practical possibilities of resistance to the Crown, if any. It was scarcely likely that they would succeed against the sovereign until they did.

Nevertheless, the nerve demanded from the King by the dissolution was considerable. There were troops present – on both sides. Armed clashes in the streets of Oxford, and the further nightmare of civil strife, were to be dreaded, whatever their outcome. Oxford University was Royalist, but the city itself was known to be Whig. The feeling that revolution – some new violent turnabout – was pending was not confined to the King. Men could read the signs, or thought they could. A correspondent wrote to Pepys in January, ‘I cannot but pray God to preserve us from the tumults, confusions and rebellions of 1641 and 1642, which seem to threaten us on one hand as much as Popery on the other.’²⁰ No-one wanted a return to unsettled times; the man who risked plunging his country once more into such ‘tumults, confusions and rebellions’ bore a heavy responsibility if his plan went awry. It was therefore relevant that on 8 April, the day on which a long Declaration from the King on the subject of the recent Parliament was ordered to be read throughout the country, he also received the first payment of a new subsidy from Louis XIV. The two events were closely connected.

This fresh agreement had been negotiated by word of mouth between Barrillon and Laurence Hyde. About the same time Hyde also spoke comfortingly to Barrillon on the subject of England’s tiresome involvement with Spain, that treaty negotiated by Sunderland a year back: Charles II would gradually divest himself of this obligation, which of course cut quite across French interests. Hyde, shortly to become Viscount Hyde and then Earl of Rochester after the death of Charles II’s sardonic friend, certainly deserved Dryden’s sobriquet of Hushai: ‘the friend of David in distress’. For without this agreement, it is doubtful that the English King – in the character of David – could have grappled so successfully with his ‘Goliath’ of a Parliament.

The confidence that Charles II needed to organize his abrupt dissolution came from France. Even though the Whigs had not made up their minds to anything except to press raucously and childishly for the Exclusion of the Duke of York, this mental disarray might not prevail for ever. It was not even a question of the money which Charles II would now receive from Louis XIV – about 4,300,000 livres or over £300,000 spread over the next four years; although it was true that that would enable the King to jog along comfortably without Parliament for the time being.^fn4 Once more, as in the 1660s, Charles II drew strength from the notion that Louis XIV was on his side and would help him, if need be, to uphold his ‘legitimate authority’.²¹

Armed with this knowledge, the English King was able to display those qualities of attack and surprise which constituted one side of his nature; the other side, which craved ease and knew that delay often brings its own solution to difficulties, had enjoyed a long run. Fortune, which traditionally favours the bold, smiled upon the new determination of Charles II.

The Declaration on the subject of the recent Parliament, ordered to be read aloud in all churches on 8 April, was as long as the message of dissolution had been short.²² It was also hypocritical. No-one should be persuaded that he was not going to use Parliament in the future, declared the King: this was merely ‘the restless malice of ill men who are labouring to poison our people, some out of fondness for their old beloved Commonwealth principles, and some out of anger at being disappointed in their own ambitions’. He repeated his familiar theme: no ‘irregularities’ would make him out of love with Parliaments. The King showed more of himself in disdaining responsibility for what had happened: ‘Having done our part … it cannot be justly imputed to us that the success hath not answered our expectations.’

Charles II had done with dealing with five hundred Kings. In future he would deal with one French King and rest master of his own fate.

The summer of 1681 bore a very different air from that of the previous year. Then there had been some dawnings of loyalty to the Crown visible to a discerning eye. Now the reactionary sun’s rays could be felt in a variety of ways. 13 April 1681 saw the first issue of Roger L’Estrange’s newspaper The Observator. Nahum Tate wrote of L’Estrange’s energies in attacking the Whigs, playing on his paper’s name: ‘He with watchfull eye/Observes and shoots their treasons as they fly….’ When the King and Queen went to dine at the Guildhall, the people’s rejoicing as they entered and left the City was considered to be in marked contrast to the coolness of previous years. As Henry Sidney wrote in his Diary at the end of June, ‘But which is most extraordinary is the favour the Queen is in.’²³She had emerged unscathed from the crucible of the bad years. It would take further time for the Duke of York (still in Scotland) to recover his lost popular prestige: nevertheless, the rehabilitation of the Catholics was part of the overall popular shift away from Whig influences.

It was true that the summer of 1681 witnessed the dissection of yet another Pumpkin Plot at the trial of Edward Fitzharris. But Charles II’s cool and vigorous attitude towards this episode demonstrated as much as anything else how far he had moved from the worried stance of 1678. Optimists among plot-watchers expected, as usual, great things from Fitzharris’ revelations, and a connection with the household of the Duchess of Portsmouth was deemed encouraging.²⁴ In the event, the King made it quite clear that he expected to see this petty informer condemned and executed. And executed he duly was, on 1 July. Justice was certainly done, since Fitzharris had sought to bring about the execution of a great many more. All the same, it was a public blow to the repute of the Whigs, notably Shaftesbury; it demonstrated how far their vicious control of these events had slipped. The condemnation and execution of another informer, an anti-Papist joiner named Stephen College (amongst whose alleged crimes was the singing of the gross ballad ‘The Raree Show’ at Oxford),²⁵ continued the trend.

About the same time quite a different trial, that of Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, showed up both English justice and the royal character in a less attractive light. Plunkett’s trial on a charge of high treason was a travesty. Dragged to England and kept in prolonged imprisonment there, he was unable to secure satisfactory Irish witnesses because of the expense and difficulty of travel. Those that did manage to arrive presented an alien spectacle, with their thick, often incomprehensible Irish accents, and were correspondingly badly treated in court. The witnesses produced on the other side, for this conspiracy that never was, puffed up with their own perjury, received a gentler welcome.

Thus Oliver Plunkett was found guilty and on 1 July went presumably to his heavenly reward.^fn5 As Sir Charles Lyttleton wrote, he was ‘generally pitied and believed to die very innocent of what he was condemned’.²⁶ Yet no one cared to save him, not the Earl of Essex, who, as former Lord Lieutenant, knowing the Irish scene, might have protested effectively against his condemnation – nor, for that matter, the King. Charles II could see the significance of condemning Fitzharris, but, in common with most Englishmen, no matter how liberal, could not see that there was much to be gained from saving this Irish archbishop.

The royal eye was fixed elsewhere. The newly piercing glance of the King was focused on Shaftesbury. On 2 July, the day after the executions, Shaftesbury was arrested. The King’s move was not unexpected. Shaftesbury had wagered his strength against the King’s in a series of provocative actions, including the attacks on Louise and James as prostitute and recusant, as well as the sallies at Oxford. Shaftesbury was also on excellent terms with those the King considered his enemies, such as the arch-informer Titus Oates, still at large, if not quite the popular hero of yester-year.

The charge against Shaftesbury was frankly weak, as weak as some of the charges against the Catholic priests who had died (the fact has to be faced that Charles II did not regard the course of justice as imperturbable, any more than the Whigs had done). Shaftesbury was accused of treason because he had conspired to levy war against the King at Oxford; but the most cogent piece of evidence against him was a Bill of Association, a list of people who were to be invited to protect the King and prevent the Catholic succession.

The truth was that Shaftesbury’s arrest was an aggressive action which Charles II now felt himself strong enough to make. He was also animated by his strong personal dislike of the fair-haired villain. This dislike, like his rare outbursts of jealousy, stood out in contrast to his generally mild attitude to politicians. On the whole, Charles was content to be guided by their usefulness. In this way he amiably agreed to a reconciliation with the ‘Judas’ Sunderland in the following summer after some pleading from Louise, Sunderland’s long-term ally.²⁷ But Shaftesbury was different. He was the burr under the saddle of the King, as Charles’ obstinate pursuit of his trial and conviction this autumn proceeded to demonstrate.

It would have been wiser to have let Shaftesbury depart for the Carolinas, as he himself wished.²⁸ Shaftesbury had business interests there. An absent Shaftesbury was all the King really required in terms of safety. Instead, carried away one must believe by an animosity founded on fear, the King demanded a trial. He was punished for deserting his own former policies of forgiveness and flexibility. The new Lord Chief Justice, Pemberton, made strenuous efforts to secure Shaftesbury’s condemnation. He quoted the Act of 1661 by which it was treasonable to try and interfere with the King’s liberty. This, it was claimed, Shaftesbury had done at Oxford, supported by the presence of armed men. The famous blue silk bows in their hats were quoted in evidence against him. But on 24 November a Grand Jury composed of resolute Whigs returned a verdict of Ignoramus and Shaftesbury went free.

In short, the King had struck too far too soon. He should have been more wary of the deeply Whig sympathies of the City: at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet a few weeks earlier ‘every little fellow’ was said to have censured both the King and ‘his proceedings at that time’.²⁹ The acquittal of Shaftesbury was a personal blow. The Lord Mayor himself, on the King’s instructions, refused to allow the bonfires or rejoicing which the Whigs wished to mount. But neither King nor Lord Mayor could prevent the striking of a celebratory medal in honour of the event, adorned with the humiliating motto Laetamur – ‘Let us rejoice’. The obverse showed the sun emerging radiant from clouds over the Tower of London. Laetamur! No, the King did not rejoice.

There were however other causes of rejoicing. There is an interesting juxtaposition between public and private happiness in the lives of famous men. The presence of private happiness can always atone for the lack of public fulfilment, if the man himself will suffer it to be so. The personal life of Charles II during the last years of his life was extremely happy, even serene. Queen Catharine, comforted by his championship, had settled into a role which suited her and did not conflict with the King’s other pleasures. She had, for example, protected Catholic Louise from the consequences of the Test Act of 1678 by including her name in the list of her own ladies who were not to be expelled. In explanation Catharine said that Louise had always behaved ‘decently’ towards her, unlike Barbara, who had been ‘cruel’.³⁰ By now, the King’s mistresses resembled the great ships he also loved, floating grandly on the tide of the royal favour, their hulls weighed down with jewels and other riches. They flew their ducal titles like pennants, their ennobled offspring following in their wake like flotillas of lesser boats. Emotionally however the King had reverted to the ‘monogamy’ of the first decade of his reign, on which Pepys had commented.

While Nell Gwynn retained what Aphra Behn called her ‘eternal sweetness’, the solace of the King’s later years, Madame de Maintenon to his Louis XIV, was Louise. Relaxation, not religion, was however what Louise offered. Just as the King’s accord with his wife and her own popularity were the subject of comment, the domestic ascendancy of Louise was also remarked. She had grown plumper, more ‘fubbsy’ than ever, as her later portraits show; it only increased her air of luxurious cosiness.

Absence was one test of the King’s affections. With her son, Louise paid a visit to France in the autumn of 1684; she secured the settlement of the Aubigny estates and dukedom upon the boy as a result of Charles’ intercession with Louis XIV. The King’s delight at her return was unqualified. He also passed that other test of love, the appearance of a rival. When stories were circulated of Louise’s dalliance with Philippe de Vendôme, nephew of Hortense de Mazarin, Charles had the presumptuous swain thrown out of the country. To celebrate her ascendancy, Louise had her own medal struck, embellished with a Cupid and bearing the legend: Omnia Vincit – it was a more flirtatious form of insolence than Shaftesbury’s.

It is impossible to be certain when – if ever – the sexual bond between King and Duchess ceased. In January 1682 there were rumours that the King had not slept with the Duchess for four months. Bruce’s testimony that the King supped with Louise ‘without intent’ is to be taken more seriously because of Bruce’s intimate position in the King’s household.³¹ Yet no outsider can pronounce with complete confidence on such matters. Given the continued healthy vigour of the King, absolute cease seems unlikely. What is much more certain is that the domestic bond increased. In principle, King Charles, Queen Catharine and Duchess Louise created a master triangle in which all parties, for the first time in their lives, were roughly content with the status quo.

The King does not appear to have practised any form of birth control – there are no references to the topic by any of the interested parties. He also derived a great deal of happiness from his children. As far as one can keep track of them, the total of those that survived long enough to feature in the royal records was a round dozen. As Buckingham brightly observed, a King is supposed to be the Father of his People, and Charles II was certainly the father of a good many of them. These twelve known bastards were born from seven women: Lucy Walter, Elizabeth Killigrew, Catharine Pegge, Barbara Villiers (mother of five), Nell Gwynn (mother of two), Moll Davis and Louise de Kéroüalle. The King certainly did not suffer from that complex characteristic of some Casanovas who must claim the paternity of every child conceived within their orbit: to be cynical, he could scarcely afford to do so, since paternity for a sovereign was a serious (financial) business. At the same time he honoured his genuine paternal obligations with a mixture of love and liberality.

The royal accounts include payments which have a distinctly nursery flavour – rattles, cradles and so forth. As the children grew older, more substantial sums were disbursed. In April 1684 Lady Mary Tudor, daughter of Moll Davis, received a suite of tapestry hangings, a looking-glass, a little crimson damask bed for country use, a bed of druggett for her gentlewoman, and for her chambermaid, laundry-maid, page and footman 150 ells of Holland to make six pairs of sheets. There were wedding expenses, which any father might expect to pay (the King’s heart was in the right place: as we have seen over the wedding of Anne Fitzroy, he accepted the responsibility, even if payment came at a characteristically slow pace). There were dowries and allowances. As late as 1693 Charles Duke of Southampton was still being allotted an allowance of £6,000 a year.³²

Where the emotions were concerned, so affectionate were the relations of Charles II with his illegitimate children that it was all the more regrettable that he should lack legitimate heirs. The next century would see disputes between royal father and son become the norm, not the exception. Since children tend to reproduce the family pattern they have experienced, a terrible chain reaction was set up. King and Prince of Wales were in constant conflict. The boy dreamt of by Queen Catharine in her delirium would have had a happier fate, since Charles II had always enjoyed delightful relations with Charles I. For that matter, Charles I had been greatly loved by his own father. The Stuarts, for all their weaknesses in other respects, made good parents; unlike the Hanoverians, they were characterized by warm family relationships. Charles II would have been an excellent father – within the marriage bond.

As it was, he did make an excellent father – but outside it. His blood courses down through the veins of the English aristocracy into the body of English life. His descendants, if not quite as numerous as the sands of the sea, are at any rate numerous enough for the line to be unlikely to die out. ‘Six bastard Dukes survive his luscious Reign’: so Defoe summed up the King’s achievement; and it is a point often made today in attacks on the hereditary House of Lords that so many dukedoms derive from the amours of King Charles II.^fn6 Such critics would undoubtedly approve the contemporary satire of Marvell on the subject:

The misses take place, each advanced to be duchess

With pomp great as queens in their coach and six horses,

Their bastards make dukes, earls, viscounts and lords,

With all the title that honour affords …

In fact, six of the King’s sons received nine dukedoms: Monmouth and Buccleuch for Lucy Walter’s son; Southampton, Northumberland and Grafton and Cleveland, on her death, for Barbara’s three boys; St Albans for Nelly’s surviving son; Richmond and Lennox (joined together) for Louise’s only child.^fn7 Monmouth’s marriage to Anne Duchess of Buccleuch in her own right, led to the pair being created Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch in England jointly. After his death, Duchess Anne was allowed to retain her own Scottish Buccleuch title, although that of Monmouth was swallowed up in her husband’s disgrace.

But Charles’ daughters were not forgotten. Some were married off to lordlings, who were then further ennobled. Mary Tudor was granted the rank and precedence of a Duke’s daughter at the same time as her step-brothers gained their coveted dukedoms. Two of the King’s sons made political alliances – Henry Duke of Grafton married Arlington’s daughter, and Charles Earl of Plymouth married the daughter of Danby.

Taken all in all, they were an agreeable bunch, with no real black sheep amongst them – unless one counts Monmouth. Out of a dozen children, that was not a bad record. It is true that none of them showed the exceptional calibre of their father, and what one must suppose to have been the exceptional talents of their mother in one direction at least. But then exceptional parents rarely breed exceptional children. Charles II’s extraordinary qualities had been largely forged by adversity: these children enjoyed quite a different upbringing.

Nor can it be argued that the children of Charles II were noted for their waywardness. Charles Duke of Southampton and later Duke of Cleveland on his mother, Barbara’s, death, was described by her in one of her accesses of maternal disgust as a ‘kockish idle boy’ while at Oxford; and she sent for the Dean of Christ Church to tell him so.³³ But such undergraduate behaviour must be regarded as the rule, not the exception. Some of the girls were flighty: not only Anne Countess of Sussex but Mary Tudor, who married the Earl of Derwentwater, caused her husband distress. Yet such infidelities were hardly above the average for well-born ladies during this period. As for the King’s favourite, the solace of his later years, Charlotte Countess of Lichfield, her sweetness and impeccable virtue bore out a pleasanter axiom: that an amoral mother will often produce a paragon of a daughter – for she was the offspring of the hot-tempered Barbara Duchess of Cleveland.

Charlotte Countess of Lichfield is one of those characters whose goodness survives differences of style and period to charm us still. Her appearance was appealing rather than beautiful: her mouth (like her father’s) was too large and so were her eyes; her face and chin were too small. It was her personality rather than her looks which won hearts. Whether bearing and rearing her enormous family (at the age of nineteen she had four children and gave birth to a total of twenty), playing basset, crimp or billiards, going riding, adorning her houses, her attitude to life recalls that of Queen Charlotte a hundred years later: she wanted each day to bring its own pleasure.

She was married off in 1677 at the age of twelve, her husband being rewarded with the Lichfield title. The new Earl also received the more spiritual reward of great happiness. Together the Lichfields enjoyed a married life of forty-two years. Their shared monument in Spelsbury Church commemorates the fact that ‘at their marriage they were the most grateful bridegroom and the most beautiful bride and that till death they remained the most constant husband and wife’.

To King Charles II, in a series of fond if scribbled notes often enclosing money, she was his ‘dear Charlotte’, as once Madame had been his ‘dear sister’.³⁴ He was her ‘loving’ and at other times her ‘kind’ father. There is a vignette of Charlotte tickling the King’s bald pate as he took his post-prandial nap. Other glimpses of family intimacy include fatherly advice on Charlotte’s building plans for a new house, which should not disturb those of her sister Anne, but ‘I think it a very reasonable thing that other houses should not look into your house without your permission.’ When Charlotte is pregnant, the King is delighted and hopes to see the child ere long; when they are apart, he is sorry he will be so long deprived of seeing his ‘dear Charlotte’.

As for the boys, the King was proud of his fine brood of dukelings: Evelyn’s wry pen gives a portrait of him receiving communion at Easter 1684 with Richmond, Northumberland and St Albans, ‘sons of Portsmouth, Cleveland and Nelly’, three boys on his right hand – and three bishops on his left. Barbara’s second son, Henry – ‘Harry’ – Duke of Grafton, was rated the handsomest; he also pursued a career as a sailor. These two attributes were sometimes in conflict. ‘Your brother Harry is now here and will go in a few days to Holland,’ wrote the King to Charlotte. ‘By the time he returns, he will have worn out in some measure the redness of his face, so as not to fright the most part of our ladies here.’ Charles Earl of Plymouth – ‘Don Carlo’ – much resembled his father. Said to be ‘a fine youth’, he was authorized to raise Plymouth’s Foot for Tangier; he died there in October 1680 before his promise could be fulfilled (he also left a mass of debts including tailors’ bills, so his promise was not entirely military). But the Duke of Northumberland, Barbara’s third son, he who had been born so festively at Merton College, Oxford, was generally considered to be the most like Charles – at eighteen he was ‘a tall black man like his father the King’. Because he was also ‘well-bred, civil and modest’, Evelyn rated Northumberland the ‘most accomplished and worth the owning’ of Charles’ children.³⁵

Nelly’s sons, one of whom died at the age of nine, and Louise’s boy, belonged to a later period. They were duly ennobled after the frantic efforts of their mothers – Louise’s son was only three when he was raised to the peerage – but were still only in their early teens at the time of their father’s death.

In general, all the bastards were easily and unselfconsciously treated by their legitimate relatives, whether they pursued the Whig connection of William and Mary or the Jacobite one of James. Their Stuart Christian names emphasized rather than diminished the connection: no fewer than four of the King’s sons were named Charles, two of them James, and Barbara’s third son, like the third son of King Charles I, was christened Henry and nicknamed Harry. The girls were Charlotte, a name otherwise hardly known in England at that date,^fn8 or Anne or Mary, the names of Stuart princesses. The King’s daughter by Elizabeth Killigrew was named Charlotte Jemima (for James) Henrietta Maria, a Stuart mouthful. Surnames employed were unashamedly royal: Fitzcharles, Fitzroy, Tudor. The name of Crofts, taken from his guardian, was only used for Monmouth in the desperate days of exile, when a royal connection was not necessarily blazoned. (On his marriage to an heiress, Monmouth took his wife’s surname of Scott.)

The Duke of York was particularly devoted to his niece, Charlotte Lichfield, and corresponded with her while he was in Scotland;³⁷ he also favoured Harry Duke of Grafton. Charlotte Jemima Henrietta Maria Fitzroy had a daughter by her first marriage, Stuarta Howard, who became a lady-in-waiting to Mary of Modena. Mary Tudor was the mother of the two Jacobite Earls of Derwentwater, who died respectively in 1715 and 1745 in the cause of their Stuart relations; they had been brought up as companions to James Edward, the so-called Old Pretender. Harry Duke of Grafton, on the other hand, supported William of Orange and was rewarded by being integrated into the Whig establishment; he died as a soldier under Marlborough’s command in 1690.

The King was also extremely fond of Charles, Earl of Burford and then Duke of St Albans, surviving son of Nelly. He too was ‘very pretty’ in youth. There is evidence that Charles worried over Burford’s education more than that of his other children: as though Louise, the bien née, could be trusted with that of her son (in fact she gave him the playwright Wycherley, Barbara’s former lover, as a tutor), but Nelly, the girl of the people, could not. In 1682 George Legge, the King’s intimate, commented on the King’s fondness for the boy: now he was of an age ‘to be bred into the world’, he was to be trusted to Lord Preston in France. Here the King wished him to study mathematics and the art of fortification (two of his own preoccupations), as well as observing the progress of Louis XIV(another of them). Nelly herself was torn between coveting this glorious future for her boy, and not wanting him to leave England before ‘some settlement’ had been made upon him.³⁸ Later Burford justified his father’s faith by fighting the Turks in Hungary – his colonelcy was not to be regarded as a sinecure – and his mother’s by marrying an heiress.

If the whole effect of the Popish Plot and its aftermath on Charles II was to bring about ‘a severity in his disposition’, this was the public monarch. Halifax later commented on this new sharpness, which we may suppose to be the outward sign of the inward decision to be yet bolder and firmer. He developed, says Halifax, ‘a very peevish memory’: in his anger, scarcely a blot escaped him.³⁹ In private the King’s life was marked by new contentment as he grew older, and, in terms of good relations with his growing children, he led a life of richness which many men of his age might have envied.

1 The attainder on the Stafford title remained in force until 1824. The original Bill of May 1685, to reverse the attainder, was dropped at the outbreak of Monmouth’s rebellion.

2 For example, one of Nahum Tate’s pedestrian reworkings of Shakespeare, The History of King Richard the Second, which opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 11 December 1680, was taken off after three days: the government hastily assumed that the plot must elevate the nobility (that is, the Whigs) at the expense of the King. In fact, the play had no such message, as Tate himself indignantly protested in his Preface to the printed text.⁹

3 Blue, now the colour of the (Tory) Right in contrast to the red of the (Socialist) Left, was then adopted in opposition to the traditional scarlet of royalty; the Covenanters also wore blue, based on a Biblical text which adjured the children of Israel to put on ‘a ribband of blue’, and Presbyterian preachers threw blue aprons over their preaching-tubs.

4 The actual agreement with Louis XIV was for more; five million livres for a three-year suspension of Parliament.

5 Later his heavenly status was confirmed. He was beatified in 1920 and canonized in 1975.

6 But since the dukedoms were originally introduced into England and Scotland only for the King’s sons, not for ordinary peers, Charles II was, in fact, behaving in an enlightened manner by not penalizing his sons for their illegitimate birth.

7 Today four of these dukedoms still represent the quasi-royal line: Buccleuch (although Monmouth’s own dukedom of Buccleuch is still under attainder), Grafton, St Albans, and Richmond and Lennox.

8 When the King was godfather to Sir George Carteret’s daughter in Jersey the diarist Chevalier was at some pains to explain the derivation of the name Charlotte as being somewhat eccentric.³⁶