CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
‘Let his royal ashes then lie soft upon him, and cover him from harsh and unkind censures.’
Halifax, Character of King Charles II
After the death of King Charles II the ordinary people walked about ‘like ghosts’. Roger North wrote that ‘almost every living soul cried before and at his Decease, as for the loss of the best Friend in the World’.1 Others felt that they had lost a father, that feeling spontaneously expressed at the King’s death-bed when all present, not only his children, had knelt for his paternal blessing.
The universal application was given its first expression when the King’s body lay in state in the Painted Chamber at Whitehall for several days. As was the custom of the time, his wax effigy, standing upright over the catafalque, dominated the scene. It was dressed in robes of crimson velvet trimmed with ermine, and surmounted with an imperial crown of tin gilt, all specially ordered for the occasion by the Lord Chamberlain. Such effigies, taken from the death-mask, often have a haunted look: the lines on the face of Charles II are deep, the face is slightly twisted, the expression very sad. Still to be seen exhibited in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, it commemorates the cruel sufferings of his death-bed.
Queen Catharine, as befitted a devout woman who had once been a Portuguese Infanta, understood how to conduct her official position as widow with stately grief. She received the Ambassadors and other great persons who came to offer their condolences on a vast black bed of mourning. Her whole chamber, from the ceiling to the floor, was hung with black, and lit by innumerable tapers. The callers came thronging and their sympathy was not purely formal: no-one doubted the sincerity of the Queen’s own passion for the King, and besides, she had won universal respect.
One does however detect a firm, even righteous hand, in the way the funeral and other mourning arrangements kept the mistresses at last in their place. The royal concubines were allowed to wear black themselves in their official capacity as ladies-in-waiting, but could not put their households into mourning, a privilege reserved for royal persons. There were other nice distinctions preserved, such as that between the cambric doled out to the Queen’s entourage, while the rest made do with mere muslin. It was not for nothing that the Lord Chamberlain commanded from the Treasury yards of black and white satin for eight escutcheons showing the royal arms of England and Portugal.2
The funeral itself took place on the night of 14 February. The King’s body was enclosed in a lead coffin – that ‘house of lead’ which had been prophesied – bearing a solid silver plate with an inscription which began: ‘Depositum Augustissimi et Serenissimi Principis Caroli Secundi….’ In its last line, ‘Regnique sui tricesimo septimo’ (‘in the thirty-seventh year of his reign’), the inscription dated the King’s accession once again from his father’s execution.
Then the body of Charles II was laid to rest in a vault beneath the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey. There it remains to this day.fn1 Many of the King’s natural children were later buried near him: Charles Earl of Plymouth had already been placed there in his early grave.
Careful provision was made for discreet display – banners of black taffeta with strings and tassels of black silk – and appropriate sad sound – black-coated trumpeters, kettle-drummers, and a fife. Despite this care, despite the fact that the body was carried under a velvet canopy from the Painted Chamber to Westminster Abbey in a procession headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Norroy, King of Arms, and attended by James II, Mary of Modena, various other royalties, nobles and their servants, the rumour has arisen that, in the words of John Evelyn, ‘the King was very obscurely buried’.4
This has sometimes been ascribed to the religious embarrassment caused by the King’s last-minute conversion. The new monarch, it is suggested, did not wish his brother’s body to be buried according to the Anglican rite and did not dare employ the Catholic one. This is also the explanation sometimes given for the fact that James himself stayed away from the burial. The truth is rather less dramatic. Royal interments at the time were traditionally held privately at night, as for example that of the Duke of Gloucester in 1660 and of Prince Rupert in 1682. It was according to custom that the nearest relative stayed away, the role of Chief Mourner devolving upon an officially designated person: in the case of Charles II it fell upon the stalwart shoulders of his nephew-in-law, Prince George of Denmark. He was ‘supported’ by the Dukes of Somerset and Beaufort, and ‘assisted’ by sixteen earls – hardly a meagre representation.5
An exception was the state funeral of Cromwell, the Lord Protector, in 1658. Like a coronation, this august ceremony had its own rhythm: it took place three months after his death (both impressing and disgusting Evelyn). The actual burial might even be separate from the State ceremony: Cromwell’s corpse was secretly interred about a fortnight before this took place, because the embalming had failed. Such a magnificent piece of pageantry was mounted with the explicit intention of demonstrating the strength of the regime – in the case of the Cromwellian Protectorate, to bolster its prestige abroad against a young man then known as Charles Stuart. The money spent was crippling: not much less than £50,000.6
Where the late King Charles II was concerned, no such demonstration was felt to be necessary. A staid succession was, surely, to be followed by a steady reign. Above all, there was the question of paying for such pageantry: the monies voted by Parliament for the late King all came to an end with his death, while Charles himself had left large debts. James II, faced with a financial crisis and the daunting prospect of a Parliament to solve it, was in no mood for unnecessarily lavish expenditure. The shade of Charles II, no stranger to State penury and its ramifications, would certainly have agreed.
The outbreak of verse on the King’s death (including an ode by the Quaker Penn, a tribute to the King’s tolerant spirit, and Otway’s long poem on Windsor Castle, a tribute to his artistic enthusiasm) showed a genuine spirit of lamentation.
Sad was the morn, the Sadder Week began…
was Aphra Behn’s contribution. Two other slightly bathetic starts were as follows:
No more, he’s gone, with Angel’s wings he fled…
and:
O God! Some pity, and I am turned to stone…
All however stressed the state of serenity in which King Charles left his realm. One, by Edmund Arwaker, will serve for many:
The best of Christians as the best of Kings:
By him such Blessings to his Realms were given;
He seemed created for his People’s good…7
So, in a mellow atmosphere of regret the King was buried. It seemed that the peace which he so much desired for his country had fallen upon it, even as he himself was laid to peace in his grave.
It was not to be. Only a few months later those characters dismissed from the stage by the final curtain of one play, found themselves engaged in quite a different drama. There was to be no happy ending to the reign of King James II.
Monmouth died at the executioner’s axe after his foolish and bloody rebellion, only a few months after his father’s death. Three years later James himself was fighting off the political onslaught of William of Orange and his own daughter Mary; the birth of the long-dreaded Catholic Prince to Mary Beatrice in June 1688 had brought disaster in its wake. By 1689 Titus Oates, savagely whipped after trial for perjury in May 1685, was being received by William, now King of England: Oates remained a weather-vane for the direction of the English political wind. As a counter-poise it is good to relate that Father Huddleston lived on to the ripe old age of ninety – protected in the household of Queen Catharine at Somerset House.
Another mercurial figure, whose story had been even more closely entwined with that of Charles II, did not survive to see the new Protestant reign. Buckingham had divided himself from the opposition in the King’s last years, unable to remain in accord with Shaftesbury, and had thus been received back into Charles’ favour. On the accession of James, he retired to his great Yorkshire estates, which his friend Etherege complained was like the hero leaving the play at the beginning of the fourth act. But Buckingham’s health was failing, through prolonged dissipation, as it was generally thought. He died two years after his master and childhood friend; but it was somehow characteristic of the man that his burial at least – like that of Charles himself in the Henry VII chapel at Westminster Abbey – was a most splendid affair. As for the younger politicians, Sunderland, Rochester, Godolphin and the like, for the most part they stepped willingly onto the new stage to act out all the intricate if not heroic dramas of politics in the ages of William and Mary, and Anne.
The mistresses did not fare so well. Most of their latter ends would have satisfied a Puritan moralist. Nell Gwynn died – of a stroke – two years after her royal Charles. She was only thirty-five. The King’s death had plucked from her at the last minute the coveted title of Countess of Greenwich. She also endured the common struggle of the late King’s pensionaries to secure those payments she had been promised. At one point she addressed James in language strangely reminiscent of another ill-treated royal servant, Cardinal Wolsey, a character with whom she cannot otherwise be said to have had much in common (perhaps one may attribute the Shakespearean echo to Nelly’s theatrical education): ‘Had I suffered for my God as I have done for your brother and you, I should not have needed either of your kindness or justice to me,’ she told the new King.
In general, James did his best by the mistresses and their children, hampered in his turn by lack of money, but recognizing the duty of their upkeep. He did make the point very firmly to Louise Duchess of Portsmouth that her debts must be paid: but the ladies, like their late protector, remained a byword for negligence. To quote Nelly once more: ‘The King’s Mistresses are accounted ill Paymasters….’8
Barbara Duchess of Cleveland was made of more lasting stuff. She may have lived to regret her own durability. For at the age of sixty-five she married a much younger man, a notorious rake known as Beau Fielding, who treated her abominably; what was more, the marriage itself proved to be bigamous. As for Louise, she survived (in France) to the then remarkable age of eighty-five – the yacht Fubbs named in her honour lasted even longer: it was not broken up until 1770.9 She died, wrote Saint Simon, ‘very old, very penitent and very poor’. The Louise who held luxurious court at Whitehall beneath Evelyn’s fascinated gaze would have deplored all three states, but particularly the last.
Catharine of Braganza survived too. It was characteristic of her tenderness that she pleaded with James II for the life of Monmouth, who was certainly too desperate to appreciate the irony of his supplication to the childless Queen: ‘Being in this unfortunate condition, and having none left but your Majesty that I think may have some compassion for me; and that, for the last King’s sake …’ In her first widowhood Catharine withdrew to Hammersmith and spent her time amongst the nuns in a convent she had founded there. Later she moved to Somerset House, the palace which belonged by right to a Queen Dowager (Henrietta Maria had also occupied it). She was present at the controversial birth of James II’s son, the so-called Warming-pan Baby, and acted as the child’s godmother; she subsequently bore witness that no act of substitution had taken place. Catharine was still in England at the Revolution of 1688, her return to Portugal having been delayed by a lawsuit against her former Chamberlain. She finally sailed back to Portugal in March 1692, after thirty years spent in England, during which, as Evelyn said: ‘She deported herself so decently upon all occasions … which made her universally beloved.’10
Even then her public life was not over. Catharine’s last years were spent acting as Regent of Portugal for her sick brother Pedro. Her efforts were rewarded in at least one direction: in 1703 she was able to see an alliance with England, the so-called Methuen Treaty, which she advocated, carried through. Catharine of Braganza died at the end of 1705, twenty years after the husband she had loved, served, and in all but one vital respect over which she had no control, satisfied. In her case a magnificent state funeral in Portugal testified to the general esteem in which this practical and pious lady was held.
King Charles II had inherited a country war-torn and poor, divided, restless and suspicious. He left behind him a country outwardly at harmony. He was personally beloved from his early days, when the crowds saluted their Black Boy come again, to those last years, when he still basked in national affection. One mourning sermon of the time – ‘A Loyal Tear Dropt on the Vault of the High and Mighty Prince Charles II’, dedicated to the Bishop of Winton, Prelate of the Garter, by a Hampshire vicar – referred repeatedly and with evident sincerity to the late King’s ‘Clemency and Tenderness’. These were enduring – and endearing – qualities. When Evelyn wrote of his sovereign as having ‘many Virtues and many great Imperfections’ he did not specify the contents of either category. The balance of the character of Charles II, where vice and virtue are concerned, was in fact a very human one which could not fail to appeal to many of his subjects and fellow-sinners. Here was a man who knew all about Sloth and Lust, but was singularly free from Pride, Greed, Avarice, Anger and Envy. As for the Virtues, he was touched in some measure by them all, from Charity downwards, including Temperance while in exile, and Prudence at home.
The admonition of Halifax at the very end of his Character of King Charles II (written some time after 1688) expresses the final mood of that time: ‘Let his royal ashes then lie soft upon him, and cover him from harsh and unkind censures; which though they should not be unjust can never clear themselves of being indecent.’ For all Halifax’s criticisms of his master, Halifax and his contemporaries understood that they had good reason to be grateful to him.
But his royal ashes have not in fact lain particularly softly upon the King. History is inevitably a long avenue of hindsight: and the basic law by which men are judged according to what follows after them, whereas they act in accordance with what has come before, is illustrated to the full in the life of Charles II. The ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688 casts its shadow backwards without difficulty across his career, whereas the obscurities and murkiness left behind by the English Civil War are too often ignored.
The historiography of his reign, a fascinating subject in its own right, is however not the concern of the present volume.fn2 Here it is more appropriate to judge the character of King Charles II in the light of those challenges he actually faced. The first of these – and indeed the key challenge throughout most of his career – was the challenge to the position of the monarchy. Where Charles was concerned, it proved a triple contest.
First, as Prince of Wales, he had to endure the strange and unexpected ordeal of civil unrest, followed by war. If Charles was by nature a straightforward, affectionate, essentially normal creature, his early upbringing confirmed that tendency. Loved by his parents, endowed with a happy family life, and many brothers and sisters, he found it natural to display exactly that kind of open and gracious character most suited to his position. He made the transition to a martial young prince, courageous and determined, without much apparent difficulty, but then it was not on the surface a very difficult one to make. If royal princes had not been conducting the arts of war recently, there was a strong chivalric tradition that the Prince of Wales must be equipped to do so. Charles in Western England, the Scilly Islands and Jersey did as well as, or even better than, he could have been expected to do. The scars – for there must have been scars, as his whole secure world was reft asunder and his father murdered – did not as yet show.
The obvious ordeal began a few years before he inherited the crown. The ordeal, none the less burdensome for being nominal, came in the shape of months, then years and finally over a decade of expectation, despair, inertia all mixed – with a great deal of the last. It is surely impossible to over-estimate the effect of the exile upon his character. Charles II was like a soldier captured in his first youth, who spends the crucial span of his development as a prisoner-of-war. He was never in command of his own destiny at a time when he should have been flexing his muscles both as a man and a ruler.
In public the King survived all this admirably, putting out more flags. The second challenge to the monarchy, one more often faced in the twentieth century than in the seventeenth, that of enduring a protracted period of exile and then emerging capax imperator, was one which Charles II met better than most. He kept his nerve. He kept up his spirits. Like another more ferocious leader, Satan, he ever took the line in public: ‘What though the field be lost? All is not lost …’ He also emerged in 1660 untainted. He had preserved himself against the ‘slur of the Catholic religion’, on the one hand, the rather different slur of a bad character on the other.
It was hardly surprising that ever after there was something different, pessimistic about him in private, a knowledge that this world is to be regarded with a cynical eye if one is not to be betrayed by it. The exile also bred other characteristics. They do not sound attractive on paper, although they were not without their uses in the tricky post-Restoration era. To dissimulate successfully was one essential lesson Charles had to learn – for there is no evidence that he was a born deceiver. Like vacillation, another quality which stole upon him in the exiled years, it was alien to the young Hotspur he once was. Nor, it seems, did he convince himself of the rightness of deception, even if he came to understand the necessity. Late in life – discussing his championship of the Queen – he told Burnet that he regarded falsehood and cruelty as ‘the greatest of crimes in the sight of God’.11 Cruelty at least he eschewed, as all his contemporaries testified.
Laziness, or at any rate a desire to concentrate on the pleasurable over the dutiful, was, on the other hand, more inherent. Everyone after the Restoration commented on the King’s apparent sloth, from Madame his sister downwards. It should therefore be noted that the King was never actually let down by this laziness (except in so far as the low estimate of his contemporaries let him down). On the contrary, he was quite often successfully served by his powers of delay, or by what is sometimes termed a ‘Negative Capability’ – for which Queen Elizabeth I, another procrastinator, has been much praised. When the true moment of crisis came for the monarchy the King acted with despatch. The sovereign who disposed of the Oxford Parliament in 1681 was neither lazy nor irresolute.
The extent to which King Charles II overcame the third challenge to the monarchy, that embodied in the reign itself, is more debatable. Certainly by his last year the King had so shored up the hereditary monarchy that it gave every appearance of being secure, unthreatened in its traditional powers. The theory behind all his moves was the same: the traditional authority of the Crown, eroded in the past, was being properly upheld once more. This theoretical emphasis on the traditional is characteristic of the period, which takes its very name from an act of Restoration. It poses a problem concerning King Charles II himself. Given that many of these moves were practical encroachments, how far did he evolve a new theory of monarchy?
Here his reputation for indifference, even cynicism, was probably fully justified. Neither he, nor indeed his opponents, in the main the Whigs, had overcome the basic problem lurking at the heart of a hereditary office – and still for that matter lurking there today, if in a less extreme form. In the twentieth century memory the engine of our constitutional monarchy juddered at the hands of Edward VIII, needing a George VI to steady its forward progress. The central role of the monarch calls at least for an actor suited to the part, if a great actor is not available. But such casting can never be ensured by the hereditary couch. It was significant that both Tory and Whig philosophies depended upon a good king to make them work. Faced with such a need, it cannot be argued that Charles II ever came to grips with the problem of his own successor.
Pragmatic rather than lazy, he took the whole succession question only as it came along. This he dealt with in the short term, but never in the long. A mixture of deference to his much-betrayed Queen, and allegiance to the principle of legitimate monarchy embodied by his brother, kept him from the more ruthless settlement implied by a divorce on the one hand, legitimization of a bastard on the other. One emotion was a private weakness (where a less sympathetic man might have been stronger); the other fell into the Whigs’ own trap of confusing the succession with the powers of the Crown. Because they spent so much energy in denouncing Catholic James, as though the constitution depended on it, the King too began to believe the two were synonymous.
Of course a far-seeing king can still leave behind him an unintentional legacy of succession troubles. It is peculiar to the case of Charles II that he seems to have been under little illusion about the consequences of his brother succeeding. The frame of mind of Charles II in his very last phase reminds one of Dryden’s paraphrase of Horace:
Happy the Man, and happy he alone,
He, who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine,
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
That kind of noble resolution, admirable in a private individual, is more complicated in a king with responsibilities to the next reign. Yet one has to face the fact that Charles II regarded his brother’s succession not only as inevitable – but in a curious way right. Here, perhaps, the deep melancholy of the once-exiled King, the ex-prisoner-of-war, came into play.
In other ways, in a confused and transitional period, Charles II was a highly estimable king. Not every prince in a position to do so has practised the virtue of gratitude so thoroughly. The determined healing of the first ten years should be balanced against the more rigorous absolutism of the last five. The healing was policy. The absolutism, as King Charles saw it, was forced upon him. Indeed, so hand-to-mouth was the absolutism of this last period, so little was it based on a cunning philosophy, that the King has been criticized for not pursuing such policies rigorously enough.
The kind of propaganda exercise indulged in by Louis XIV, with every breath he drew every day of his life, was unthinkable to Charles II. The arts, for example, were there for enjoyment: a simple and even laudable view, but not one that has been shared by every monarch in history. The bewigged and padded creatures of his stage, the saucy mistresses in their boys’ clothing, the graceful wielders of his garlanded violins, the shepherds and satyrs of his masques: none of these conspired to glorify the monarchy; if they did so, it was purely by accident. Dryden as Poet Laureate was given no great direction for his verse.12 Satire – often of the monarchy itself – was a far more potent theme in the reign of Charles II than propaganda.
It would be going too far to say that the King enjoyed the satirical attacks on himself, his friends and his mistresses. Very few notable figures have enjoyed being satirized. But temperamentally the King was inclined to shrug his shoulders at personal lampoons (otherwise his friendship with Rochester, to say nothing of Buckingham, would have rapidly withered). Here again one is inclined to seek the explanation in the years of exile, as well as in Charles’ natural affability. Charles II could hardly say with Charles I that a king and a subject were two quite different things – or, if he had said so, he could hardly have believed it. He came of a long line of kings, but he himself had once been Charles Stuart, the wanderer. Like Lear, he had experienced the storm on the heath. He had also watched how easily might could be turned into royalty in the case of Cromwell.
The lack of sheer interest in regal formality displayed by Charles was another topic of general comment among his contemporaries. Mulgrave, who knew Charles well, wrote of him as having a ‘natural aversion’ to it: ‘He could not on premeditation act the part of a King for a moment, which carried him to the other extreme … of letting all distinction and ceremony fall to the ground as useless and foppish.’ He preferred, as Bruce tells us, to take off his hat to ‘the meanest’ as he strode through the royal galleries or the parks.13
Charles II would surely have found the propagandist pranks of his father and grandfather, virtually deifying themselves through the medium of art, deeply embarrassing. One can imagine the wisecracks with which he might have distanced himself from such practices. To that extent he was a highly modern monarch, if not a highly modern dictator. Such unconcern, attractive to contemplate from afar, was not the stuff of which a strong absolute monarchy, the magnet of the country, was made.
Two great institutions, one ancient and the other comparatively new, the English Church and the City of London, might have been moulded into pillars of support had Charles II had the Nietzschean will to do so. This will he singularly lacked. He took the situation as he found it, got on with it as best he could. Where the Church was concerned, he preferred toleration to repression, an admirable view, but against his time: one must never forget that Charles’ personal tolerance, so attractive to us, was considered a liability by his contemporaries – be it for the Catholics or the Jews. As for the City of London, his attitude never extended much beyond a preference for low-interest loans, which was hardly surprising. All the interests of Charles II in scientific experiment and the way things worked went to make him a great pragmatist, not a political philosopher.
It was perfectly appropriate that he lived in an age when political theories were so chaotic. It left him free to follow his natural bent, which was to ignore such matters. He wished to incarnate that kind of monarch described by Dryden, ‘who is just and moderate in his nature’, and provides ‘a government which has all the advantages of a liberty beyond a commonwealth, and all the marks of kingly sovereignty, without the danger of a tyranny’.14 To many people who remembered the Commonwealth, it was a republic which ‘gave that mock appearance of a liberty where all who have no part in government are slaves’. As these memories faded, so the unifying and unrestrained role of the King was no longer necessary. No-one, including the King, yet knew what was to be put in its place.
It was not that Charles II was ill served. In their different ways men such as Clarendon, Arlington and Danby, and on a lower level Williamson – and Pepys – were highly talented at home; in Scotland Lauderdale displayed strength and some national feeling; in Ireland one can go much further in praise of Ormonde and even Essex. Talented as they were, these men were, like their King, floundering in an age of change. The role of Parliament? The role of the people? Because the era of the Civil War ha ended in such a complete theoretical ‘Restoration’, such questions were still unresolved.
There is one charge which is constantly levelled against Charles II – lack of patriotism, based on his acceptance of secret French subsidies. But it is a charge which must lead directly to a question: what was the nature of patriotism then? No one can deny that Charles himself loved England (and things English) with a passion. He also equated the happiness of England with stable monarchical government. In a memorable phrase he told Lord Bruce: ‘I would have everyone live under his own vine and fig-tree. Give me my just prerogative and I will never ask for more.’ That was very far from being an outrageous view at the time: most of his subjects shared it for most of his reign and in 1660 virtually all of them did.
The next step, the employment of the French funds in order to do without the boa-constrictor’s embrace of Parliament, is more controversial. The acceptance of such subsidies then was not of course the national scandal it would be today: let us remember not only the bribes administered by William of Orange to English MPs but also the guileful manner in which the Whig leaders, those showy enemies of absolutism, allowed themselves to receive similar payments from the absolute Louis XIV. Nevertheless, had Charles IIintended to use these funds to change the religion of the country to Catholicism against its will it would be impossible to defend him as a patriot. But Charles II never even changed his own religion until it was too late to matter, let alone took any step to change that of the country as a whole.
His conception of the French money was as a support in his struggles with his Parliamentary enemies; without this support he feared, rightly or wrongly, that he would go the way of his father. And that, he sincerely believed, would lead to the perdition of his country once again. The receipt of foreign subsidies, far from being in contrast to such overtly (by our standards) patriotic actions as the maintenance of the Navy, the extension of the Empire, was part of the same process. One may therefore criticize Charles II for his Machiavellian policies, but not for lack of patriotism.
There is a comparison to be made with another popular charge: that Charles II was the political plaything of his mistresses. In fact, their opinions tended to echo his own predilections of the time rather than the other way round. One may criticize him for extravagance towards these ladies, or indeed for having mistresses in the first place – but not for succumbing to their political influence.
There must be ‘condescensions from the throne, like kind showers from heaven’, wrote Halifax. Of these condescensions, not to be confused with stiffer formalities, Charles II was a master. Dryden spoke of him awakening the English from the ‘natural reservedness’ of their dull and heavy spirits on his Restoration.15 The enthusiasm with which his presence galvanized so many sides of English life was not assumed.
Both sport and the arts brought him towards his people. It was easy for him to discern the human being behind the office. He dined with the jockeys not only because of his passion for racing, but because he found jockeys good company. In the same way actors, and of course actresses, were for the first time treated with proper respect in English society during his reign, because of the King’s love of the theatre. His love of a pretty face extended to a general respect for women: the position of women in the second half of the seventeenth century was in many ways preferable to their position in the nineteenth. Was it a complete coincidence that the climate of the Restoration led to a remarkable flowering of female playwrights not paralleled till our own day? Charles II was fascinated by science and patronized the Royal Society. Delight in his Navy and his Army extended to care for the welfare of his sailors and soldiers. His connection with Purcell has been mentioned, spreading out from his love of the new instrumental music brought from France which flourished during his era. Gardens and paths sprang up, as the King laid out and sauntered through his own.
Witty and kind, grateful, generous, tolerant, and essentially lovable, he was rightly mourned by his people, walking in the streets ‘like ghosts’ after his death, their faces suffused with tears. He had been their spirited young prince, their Black Boy, ‘born the divided world to reconcile’, in Waller’s phrase, whose restoration brought about the return of ease. As a father to them in later years, he had incarnated so much of what they pined for in a ruler. Cynical and dissimulating, it can be argued that Charles II was not a king for all seasons. But he was the right king for that strange, demanding season in which he lived.
He was not a Merry Monarch – never has a popular catch-phrase been so deceiving. The age itself might be merry in many of its jollier public aspects: but the man who presided over it was in contrast marked by melancholy at the very heart. More important to his people was the fact that he understood one deep need of their nature. ‘If he loved too much to lie upon his own down bed of ease,’ wrote Halifax, ‘his subjects had the pleasure during his reign of lolling and stretching upon theirs.’ Many a monarch has had a worse epitaph than giving back peace to a torn nation.
Let his royal ashes lie soft upon King Charles II.
1 According to Dean Stanley, that great Victorian guardian of the Abbey, the vault was accidentally disclosed in 1867 in the process of laying down the apparatus for warming the Chapel. The lead coffin was very much corroded and had collapsed; the King’s remains were visible. In 1977, when the vault was again opened, the remains, as described by Dean Stanley, were still visible.3
2 The best introductions to it are J. P. Kenyon, ‘Review Article: The Reign of Charles II’, Cambridge Historical Journal, vol. XIII, 1957, and K. H. D. Haley, Charles II, Historical Association Pamphlet, 1966.