A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (13 page)

When people spoke of ‘Whitehall’, they could mean the place or its inhabitants, ‘the court’: high-ranking servants of the crown, families of dukes and earls, whose rank entitled them to a place within royal circles, or the King’s own cronies, his companions in drinking and womanising, at the races and the theatre. But the court was also a great unwieldy structure of officials and servants, so elaborate that no one was very sure how it worked. Technically, it was divided between the ‘Chamber’ (the household ‘above stairs’) and the ‘Household’. The Chamber was under the sway of the Lord Chamberlain, Edward Montagu, Lord Manchester, assisted by the vice-chamberlain, Sir George Carteret, who had played host to Charles in the early years of exile in the Channel Islands. Their staff was huge, almost nine hundred people, and they were responsible for ceremonial and security, and for all the state rooms – the Banqueting Hall, Great Hall, Presence Chamber and Privy Chamber, and the Chapel Royal.

The Household, meanwhile, dealt with the supply of services under Ormond, as Lord Steward. (Within it, there was also the separate department of the Bedchamber, the intimate servants of the king, which operated independently.) The Household was a profitable place for sharp financial spirits like Stephen Fox, who had looked after Charles’s money in exile and was appointed clerk comptroller in 1660, in charge of the daily household expenses. Fox had joined the court twenty years ago when he was thirteen, and though he was only a servant, he had often played with Charles and James who were about the same age. In exile he had risen from page-boy to a Gentleman of Horse to Charles, taking over the accounts for the stables and organising the constant travel, (and lending money for his gambling debts). In 1661 he was given an additional role, as paymaster to the King’s Guards, eventually solving the problem of their erratic pay by undertaking the loans himself so that they would be paid regularly, taking a shilling in the pound commission, which eventually made him very rich indeed.
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Beneath the high officials and organisers like Fox, whom Charles valued because he was easy-going and sweet-natured as well as efficient, the Household as a working institution encompassed about five hundred people. It was essential, Charles thought at first, to keep up the lavishly appointed life suitable to a king, as grand as his cousin, Louis XIV. And while he ridiculed the elaborate formality of the Spanish court, where, as he put it, the king ‘doth nothing but under some ridiculous form or other; and will not piss but another must hold the chamber-pot’,
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he always travelled with an elaborate entourage. When Henrietta Maria and Minette visited England at the end of 1660, Charles dashed off a note asking Clarendon if he had time to visit Minette at Tunbridge Wells before parliament adjourned. The Chancellor reckoned he could: ‘I suppose you will goe with a light Trayne?’

‘I intend to take nothing but my night bag.’

‘Yes,’ scoffed Hyde, ‘you will not go without 40 or 50 horse!’

‘I counte that part of my night bag,’ replied Charles.
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Many Household posts were sought for status, and paid for with hard cash. This was quite accepted and indeed it was rare not to pay. Fox pocketed a hefty sum from selling posts, and the lists of places sold by Ormond as Lord Steward show that he raked in well over £15,000.
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Among the petitions which piled high, crinkling at the edges as the secretaries shuffled demands, were requests for positions with titles like something out of Arthurian romance: Yeoman of the Wood-yard, Elder Yeoman of the Slaughterhouse; Yeoman of the Confectionery, Brusher of the Robes, Comptroller of Tents and Revels. Sons and grandsons followed their forebears in the royal service as messengers, trumpeters, librarians, picture dealers, barge masters and watermen. Daughters and granddaughters also claimed their place on the grounds of loyalty to the royal cause. Joan Collins applied ‘for the place of Turn-Broach in the Royal Kitchen, having lost a leg at the battle of Edgehill’, while Bridget Rumney asked to be restored ‘to the office of providing Flowers and Sweet Herbs for the Court, granted by the late King to herself and her late mother, who, with her own two sons, was slain at the battle of Naseby’.
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A certificate notes that she was appointed ‘Garnisher & Trimmer of the chapel, presence & privy lodgings’.

The cost of paying, feeding and housing such a staff was huge. Traditionally the whole court ate at about eighty communal ‘tables’ at the crown’s expense. These were looked after by the Board of Greencloth who supervised about twenty departments, like the Kitchen Larder, Buttery and Pantry, and also oversaw ‘Purveyance’, the royal right to buy supplies at cost.
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From time to time the amount of tables had been labelled an anachronistic magnificence, but Charles I had cast aside all attempts to restrict it. In 1660 all the court tables were fully revived, although the practice of purveyance was stopped, with the results that costs soared. Not that the food was good – courtiers familiar with the cuisine of France and the banquets of Italy lamented that English cooking was very dull, but it would be another century before sauces and ragouts transformed the much-vaunted ‘English plain fare’. The royal chef Robert May, now in his early seventies, published his own cook-book praising national cookery, looking back nostalgically to the grand feasts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, with sides of beef and elaborate tarts and custards.
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The only real changes were outside the court proper: the exotic fruits grown in the new Dutch glasshouses; the private suppers and French taverns where the meal was presented
à la française
with a whole array of dishes arriving at once; the coffee and chocolate in the coffee-houses and soon the arrival of tea.

Tradespeople also lined up for posts or presented ancient bills from the previous reign: clock-and watchmakers, printers, fishmongers, saddlers, tailors, upholsterers. Thomas Hooper applied to be ‘combmaker to his majesty, as he has been to the last two late Kings’, while Dr Robert Morison became botanical physician and chief herbalist, caring for the Privy Garden and the physic garden at St James’s. His herbal medicines shared space with the pots and leeches of four other physicians, and a royal chirurgeon, or surgeon, as well as two apothecaries.

There were also posts for musicians, artists and the ‘sculptor to his majesty’. Charles I had been a passionate art collector, sending emissaries around Europe and making great acquisitions, like the collection of the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua, a host of Raphaels, Titians, Caravaggios and Mantegnas at one swoop. After his execution, a series of sales had scattered these treasures but Charles II was determined to regain what he could. The process began before he set foot in Dover. On 9 May 1660, the day after the proclamation of the Restoration, the House of Lords set up a committee to collect information as to where the king’s goods, jewels and pictures might be, and to advise on getting them back. The Commons was granted special powers of seizure, and an order was published that anyone possessing such goods should hand them to the Commons, on pain of forfeiture. By the time Charles arrived in Whitehall the walls were no longer bare.

The remaining empty niches and faded patches where large canvases had hung were partly filled by the works he brought with him from Europe. He had bought some paintings of his own while he was in exile but these were trebled by the ‘Dutch Gift’, organised by the Anglophile connoisseur Constantijn Huygens at the Restoration. Together with a rich bed of state, this was a present from the Dutch Republic, anxious to atone for earlier rudeness. The works of art, largely acquired from the collection of the Reynst brothers in Amsterdam, included twelve antique sculptures, twenty-four Italian paintings – one of them a superb Titian – and several modern Dutch scenes. When the collection arrived it was exhibited in the Banqueting House and when Charles paid a formal visit to view it, he was clearly delighted.

Charles needed someone he could trust to take charge of the staggering trove of pictures and he turned, without hesitation, to Thomas Chiffinch. Old enough to be his father, Chiffinch had been attached to his service since Charles was fourteen, and had taken his young family abroad during the exile. On his return, he was made Keeper of the King’s Jewels, while his wife became laundress and seamstress to the king. Charles and Chiffinch puzzled hard, consulting John Evelyn, as to exactly where all these priceless works of art should be placed to provide a suitably awe-inspiring and magnificent display, to impress foreign princes. Chiffinch was well rewarded, and by 1663 shared the post of receiver-general of all the plantations in Africa and America.

But the hunting for the lost artworks still went on. Emanuel de Critz, the former Serjeant-Painter, reckoned he had spent £900 in rescuing from Parliament ‘the incomparable statue of the late King by Bernino and £300 more to buy in statues, pictures etc now in his majesty’s possession’.
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As ‘Master of Our Great Wardrobe’, Sandwich was responsible for collecting the goods when Charles issued a proclamation to try and recover royal property. This claimed that:

during the manifold Disorders of the late time – much Plate, Jewels, household-stuff, Cabinets, Statues, Inscriptions, pictures, Drawings, Sculptures, Rugs, Stones, ancient Coyns, Medals, books, Manuscripts, Pieces of Art and the goods and chattels which did belong unto our late dear father, our Mother the Queen or to Our Self have been purloined and embezilled, dispersed, detained and conceald.
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In his ‘Princely Clemency and care to prevent suits and prosecutions’, the notice declared, the king was now placing a public advertisement: if the goods were restored no prosecutions would follow. Slowly, piece by piece, throughout Whitehall, he was restoring his kingly state.

CHARLES HAD AN IDEAL
of the courtier, but it was one from which he often slipped. The model of the perfect courtier had been set early in his life by the Marquess of Newcastle, who was, in Clarendon’s words:

A very fine gentleman, active and full of courage, and most accomplished in those qualities of horsemanship, dancing and fencing, which accompany good breeding; in which his delight was. Besides that, he was amorous in poetry and music, to which he indulged the greatest part of his time; and nothing could have tempted him out of those paths of pleasure which he enjoyed in a full and ample fortune, but honour, and ambition to serve the king.
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Charles absorbed some of Newcastle’s advice, like the virtue of a calm indifference to study and to religion, both of which, his tutor felt, could preoccupy a nobleman to the detriment of his exercise of power. Equally, he admired Ormond’s wit and easy elegance, and, like him, he believed in making life look effortless. But he had another model, his cousin Louis XIV, now free of the control of his mother and Mazarin and firmly installed on his throne. Like Charles, Louis loved his pleasures yet remained always elegant and polite with ‘a flood of wavy hair around his beautiful face’.
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Although Charles never aspired to the numbing protocol of the French court, there was a visible hierarchy at Whitehall, despite the more informal mood. In cold winter evenings in the large drawing room, the king and the inner circle of nobles stood around the fire, while lesser courtiers, talking among themselves, had to hover in chillier corners. Yet Charles had the gift of making everyone feel important. He took careful note of the minor, yet useful presences around the court, beckoning them forward, letting their relatives come and view the curiosities, including a fabled ‘unicorn’s horn’, talking easily about every subject under the sun. In January 1662, for example, he called in John Evelyn to pass the time while Samuel Cooper was sketching his profile for the new milled coinage, which would come into circulation in March the following year. Evelyn held the candle, since Cooper preferred sketching at night ‘& by candlelight for the better finding out the shadows; during which his Majestie was pleasd to discourse with me about severall things relating to Painting & Graving &c.’
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Samuel Cooper’s profile sketch of Charles II, for the new milled coinage

Yet however easy he made life look, Charles ordered his court according to his own wishes. At the heart of court life was the royal Bedchamber, and at the heart of court circles were the twelve Gentlemen of the Bedchamber appointed by the king. In manipulating court politics Charles granted and withdrew this position of honour with a certain steeliness, a quick way of indicating who was in and out of favour. The department of the Bedchamber had been invented by James I as a kind of personal cabinet, a forum to discuss policy away from the Privy Council. The Gentlemen were peers, often holding other high offices, and most of Charles’s appointees were his intimate friends and old supporters. The Gentlemen were responsible for the private rooms, where the king paced and argued and made his own political choices, free of his council. To be part of this group, so close to the king, was to warm yourself at his fire – a position that gave much influence, and patronage. The Gentleman on duty spent the night in the Bedchamber with the king, sleeping on a trestle bed put up every evening, a closeness that allowed him to ask favours – a commission for a poor relation, a boon for a friend – and gave Charles a space to discuss life freely. At their head, as ‘First Gentleman and Groom of the Stool’, Charles placed Sir John Grenville, who had been with him since he was a boy and whose closeness to Monck had done so much to bring about his smooth restoration. But Grenville also held important positions in his native West Country – he was Lord Steward of the Duchy of Cornwall and Governor of Plymouth – and was often absent. The real ‘First Gentleman’ was Charles himself.

The next level of courtiers were the twelve Grooms of the Bedchamber, men like Ned Progers, who provided the king’s linen and attended him constantly in his rooms and at meals, and undertook delicate and sensitive commissions. Almost all the Grooms had been with Charles in exile, some even sharing his humiliations in Scotland. Below them came the six Pages, who really ran the royal apartments, taking care of the clocks and pictures, building the fires, making sure the rooms were clean and running innumerable secret errands. The intimacy was extraordinary. At the very end of Charles’s life, Thomas Bruce, Lord Ailesbury, remembered him retiring to bed, and how ‘according to his usual custom, he went to ease himself, and he stayed long generally, he being there free of company, and loved to discourse, nobody having entrance but the lord and groom of the bedchamber in waiting’.
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In this most private space, ‘he laughed and was most merry and diverting: I holding the candle and the groom of the bedchamber, Mr Henry Killigrew, who always had some amusing buffoonery in his head, held the paper.’

The frontispiece to
The Courtier’s Calling
, 1675, showing the deference due to the King

This was a public life to an extreme degree. As Charles moved through the days, his existence seemed encrusted, as if he were wearing a heavy robe, with layer upon layer of tasks, row upon row of people. But among the flocking crowds that scuttled down the galleries of Whitehall, some characters stood out. As well as the quartet of grandees – Clarendon, Ormond, Nicholas and Southampton, who pursed their lips disapprovingly at the antics of the young – there were a few older courtiers in their late forties, like Tom Killigrew, now officially the Master of the Revels, and the volatile George Digby, Earl of Bristol.

Bristol’s father had been Charles I’s ambassador to the Spanish court. He had grown up there, becoming fluent in the language, until his father was recalled when he was twelve. In the political upheavals before the Civil War, as MP for Dorset, he had challenged royal misgovernment, but had shifted sides to oppose the attainder and execution of Strafford, the king’s minister and friend. From then on he became one of the monarch’s most passionate defenders and outspoken advisers, often not with the best results. Despite his recklessness, Charles II valued Bristol’s loyalty in the past, and his knowledge of Spanish in the present. In exile he had been one of the inner circle, although he lost all his offices when he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1658 – an ill-timed piece of opportunism aimed at winning him more influence in Spain. At the Restoration he was restored to his old lands and titles, and as Earl of Bristol, he became a striking figure at court. Talented and extravagant (he bought Henrietta Maria’s former palace at Wimbledon in 1661), he was full of tempestuously self-destructive schemes, famous for his flamboyant entertainments and heavy gambling.

Although they did not always take him seriously, Bristol stood out amid the younger courtiers. Both Charles and James had their own confidants, particularly James, who had a separate court of his own, like a grand French duke. Among their closest friends were Ormond’s two sons, the twenty-six-year-old Thomas, Earl of Ossory, and Richard, Earl of Arran, now twenty-one. They were among the leaders of the several Irish families at court. One of the richest courtiers, Charles’s Groom of the Bedchamber Daniel O’Neill, came from a proud native family from County Down, but most of the Irish, like the Ormonds, the Hamiltons and the Talbots (five brothers who were constant thorns in Charles’s side), belonged to Anglo-Norman or English families who had owned lands in Ireland since the fourteenth century or before. James Hamilton, another Groom of the Bedchamber, was the eldest of nine children of Irish Catholic aristocrats, although he himself became a protestant. His mother was Ormond’s sister, and the Hamiltons, like the Ormonds, had joined the exiled court and were granted lands at the Restoration. James’s brother George became an officer of the Horse Guards, and their younger brother Anthony later poured a mass of carefully collected court gossip into the quasi-fictional
Memoirs
of his brother-in-law, the comte de Gramont. (The
Memoirs
give him another ‘m’, as ‘Grammont’.) Hamilton also wrote acclaimed French fairy tales, and indeed the French class the ‘memoirs’ as one of the popular
romans prétendus historiques
of the time.
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In contrast to the Irish, very few Scottish peers, with the exception of Sir Robert Moray, made the English court their base. They preferred to look after their interests in Scotland, coming south only when they had business. The bulk of courtiers, unsurprisingly, came from the English nobility, headed by the old ducal families: Grafton, St Albans, Newcastle, Richmond, Beaufort, Devonshire, Norfolk. But the lesser gentry were represented here too. One man who won the hearts of both the royal brothers was the Somerset-born Sir Charles Berkeley. In exile he had been a cavalry officer under the command of James, whose influence won him a knighthood, the post of lieutenant-governor of Portsmouth, and the receipts from mooring fees on the Thames below London Bridge. All this made him rich enough to buy a house beside the Whitehall bowling green.
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Now he commanded James’s regiment of guards and was one of his closest friends. In 1661 he was elected MP for New Romney, one of several court placemen in the Cavalier Parliament.

Charles came to love Berkeley. Not especially clever, witty or handsome, he was a good listener and a perfect confidant, who would happily dash between the king and Barbara. He had no pomposity, and the more Charles showered honours on him, the more easy-going he seemed; ‘and so sincere in all his proceedings’, records Gramont’s
Memoirs
drily, ‘that he would never have been taken for a courtier’.
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Swimming through court intrigues as if everything was easy, in 1664 he married one of the prettiest and nicest of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, the dark-haired Mary Bagot. Berkeley’s sincerity had added charm since it was hard, sometimes, for Charles to distinguish between true friendship and self-interest. He found it difficult to deny requests, showering favourites with honours, posts and gifts. This had been a weakness, in Clarendon’s view, from the early days of exile, when it was understandable for a boy of great ‘sweetness of disposition’, floundering in insecurities, to think he could buy love and lasting loyalty: ‘If I did not hope he would outgrow that infirmity it would break my heart.’
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Already there were cliques. One formed around the Duke of York, another around the charismatic Duke of Buckingham, with his pale, long face and elegant, fluttering hands. ‘When he came into the presence chamber,’ remembered Dean Lockier, ‘’twas impossible for you not to follow him with your eye as he went along – he moved so gracefully.’
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Buckingham, like Charles, was a natural actor, yet unlike Charles, he had found no role. He was restless and volatile. During that first summer he was busily pushing through his petition for the return of his estates. In exile he had gradually sold off the treasures from his father’s York House – books, statues and paintings including nineteen Titians, seventeen Tintorettos, two Giorgiones, thirteen Veroneses, three Leonardos, thirteen Rubenses and three Raphaels. Now his fortune had returned. His lands in Yorkshire, his rivers and forests, mines and rents, and new, lucrative posts brought him a fabulous income of £20,000 a year. But all of this was swallowed up in mortgages and loans, taken out at exorbitant rates. All the time, his debts were spiralling.

Charles was still suspicious of Buckingham after his switches of allegiance in the 1650s. He kept him out of the Privy Council and did not admit him as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber until August 1661. But however doubtfully he eyed him, their shared history bound them, and Buckingham made him laugh. Buckingham’s wit was a political tool. His party piece was his mimickry of Clarendon, when he hung a pair of bellows from his belt to imitate the Great Seal and limped goutily across the room, thrusting out his belly, pursing his lips and grimacing at the company as he bemoaned the antics of the dissolute young. A friend followed, slinging the fire-tongs over his shoulder like a mace. The act was ludicrous, but uncomfortably close, an act of demolition through ridicule. Buckingham could mimic anyone: no one was safe, even the king.