A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (17 page)

The progress from Hampton Court to Whitehall, 23 August 1662, with the canopied barges of the livery companies accompanying the King and Queen

Pepys was watching from a roof at Whitehall. ‘There were 10,000 barges, I think,’ he wrote later, ‘for we could see no water for them, nor discern the King nor Queen.’ When they landed the great guns on the other side of the Thames fired a salute. But there was a warning note, a figure in the crowd. ‘That which pleased me best’, wrote the adoring Pepys, ‘was that my Lady Castlemayne stood over against us upon a piece of White-hall – where I glutted myself with looking on her.’
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Roger Palmer was with her. They nodded, but did not talk, and every now and then one of them would take their child from the nurse and dandle it in their arms. When a scaffold collapsed, Barbara alone among the grand ladies rushed to help an injured child. It was windy, and she borrowed a hat from a man she was talking to, a very ordinary hat, ‘But methought it became her mightily, as everything else do.’

It was obvious to everyone at Whitehall that Charles thought so too. Barbara had returned to King Street and Charles was up at six, ready before seven and by eight or nine was in her room, spending most of the day with her. The crowds in the Presence Chamber ignored the queen and clustered around the mistress. And while Catherine tried to ignore the situation, her bravery and apparent good humour outraged her supporters, like her chaplain Peter Talbot, who urged her to fight, describing Barbara as an ‘enchantress’. To Catherine, Talbot’s language implied actual witchcraft, a force that she – like most people in Europe, and in Britain – took extremely seriously. Alarmed, she told Charles. He in turn told Barbara, who stormed and wept and demanded Talbot’s immediate dismissal.

As it seemed as though Catherine could not win, she adopted a new approach. That November, one observer, Edward Weston, wrote home to his wife in the country, ‘I have sene the young Quene who is the very picture of modesty.’
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Indeed, he thought (perhaps with an agenda of his own), she offered a pattern to all wives in her unworldliness, since she hated patches and paint so much and avoided looking in the mirror. Her great virtue in Weston’s eyes was her obedience, and, he added, ‘It is generally believ’d the King loves her very passionatly.’ This was hardly so, although Charles did value Catherine’s new manner. He had gambled that he could have both queen and mistress at court and his game plan, shabby as it sometimes seemed, appeared to have worked. Increasingly isolated, Catherine had pulled herself up and decided on tactics of conciliation, rather than confrontation. At last she accepted Barbara as a Lady of the Bedchamber.

THERE WAS A BACKGROUND
to Charles’s hectic court and political life that he did not really see. How well did he know the countryside and the towns of the nations that he was so proud to rule? On his sole visit to Scotland in 1650, Charles had seen the east-coast towns and Edinburgh with its lawyers in their chambers and ministers in their kirks. He did not like what he saw. He had never been to Ireland, or crossed the border into Wales. As for England, in 1651 he had ridden with his army from north to south, across the northern counties and down to the Severn, stopping in Midland towns like Stafford before the defeat at Worcester. He knew the West Country from his youth during the Civil Wars and from his perilous ride after Worcester. So far, that was the only time that he met people closely enough to gain a sense of their lives.

Many of his MPs and peers, by contrast, went to the country as soon as the parliamentary sessions were finished. Each time they moved back and forth, the landed grandees took their favourite chairs, desks, carpets and hangings. Setting out in their up-to-the-minute coaches, with glass windows and improved, though far from perfect, suspension, they were sometimes followed by a dozen or more carts. All the landowners were intent on building up their estates after the ravages of past years, or making a start on new lands the king had granted them. Clarendon, immersed in Privy Council business, wrote in February 1662 to his son at Cornbury. He was sorry about the dearth of trees, but understood that more were ready to plant and advised digging holes in readiness. He reminded him to plant the lime trees, to pay the workmen on time, and to tell the gardener to set seeds in ‘a round or square place’ which might be a fine thicket in three or four years’ time.
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The dreamed-of future lay in the cherished land.

William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle, retreated to the country altogether. Although he concealed it well, he was hurt at being left out of the circle of high-ranking appointments, and asked to exchange his regular duties at court for occasional attendance, so that he ‘might retire into the country and settle, if possible, his confused, entangled and almost ruined estate’.
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After a week on the road the Cavendishes arrived in Nottingham, a fine town with a good market. From there it took them another day, travelling through Sherwood Forest, to reach Welbeck Abbey, a gloomy enough house at the best of times but now, after their long absence, denuded of furniture, paintings, and all comforts. One of Newcastle’s first acts was to restock his farm, ordering ‘sixty bullocks, twelve cows, six teams of oxen, six horses and hundreds of sheep and pigs’.
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This was only one of many projects he had to undertake. He also owned estates in Nothumberland, and smaller ones in Yorkshire, and in Somerset, Devon and Kent. Meanwhile his cousins, the Devonshire Cavendishes, owned Chatsworth, most of the Peak District and thousands of scattered acres elsewhere.

Charles’s nobles were repossessing the land as fast as they could. In the early 1660s Henry Somerset, Lord Herbert, Marquess of Worcester and Lord Lieutenant of Wiltshire, settled down at Badminton. To begin with his income was small, as he was paying off his father’s debts through a trust, but by the end of the decade his fortunes had mended. His wife Mary could buy damask linens and wax candles, tapestries and paintings, and exotic plants, and he could buy more land. He added nine hundred acres to his deer park, dissected by avenues that radiated from Badminton like the signs of the zodiac from the sun. Further away, he bought land in Monmouthshire and Gloucestershire, and took over his father’s manors in Bedfordshire, Dorset, Glamorganshire, Hampshire, Herefordshire, Hertfordshire, Westmorland. The map was dotted with the Somersets’ land.
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Such landowners returning from exile, inspired by the grand estates of Holland and France, introduced new plants, shrubs and trees and laid out formal gardens with canals and statues and vistas, orangeries and hot-houses.

There were many large landowners like the Cavendishes and Somersets, and no one quite worked out the complexity of all their landholdings, even for the purpose of taxes. And no one, including Charles, was absolutely sure how many people lived in England, although again, several people tried to calculate this. It seems that the population dipped slightly at the end of the 1650s to around five and a half million – and most of them lived in the country.
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In distant areas the change from crown to Commonwealth and back made little difference to the lives of those who worked the fields or toiled in the mines. Their relationships with their landlords and employers, whether they be puritan squires or royalists returning to their manor houses, were based on custom and deference as they had been for two hundred years.

The roads that the Romans laid down were still the main routes, converging on London like a spider’s web. The rivers, too, were highways, carrying barges full of goods: the Thames and its many tributaries; the Trent, curving through the Midland counties before flowing north to meet the Humber; the Severn, snaking along the borders of Wales and flowing down to the estuary and the port of Bristol, with boats carrying fruit and corn and hops, timber and iron, wool and woven goods. Bristol was now England’s second city, with thirty thousand souls, thriving on the import of sugar and tobacco from America and the West Indies, pulling in local people to work in the new sugar-houses and tobacco factories. The greatest trade, however, as Charles well knew, was still in wool and cloth. English wool came in many varieties, from coarse to fine, short to long, and each region produced a different kind of cloth, their manufacture regulated by a mass of statutes. The price was lower than in Tudor times, largely due to over-production, but Charles protected the cloth industry by banning the export of raw wool, thus denying it to foreign weavers (although the quality was so high that many bales were smuggled out to continental markets).
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Francis Barlow’s frontispiece to John Ogilby,
Britannia
, 1675

Charles heard from his committees and from his own land-owning courtiers how some counties relied largely on agriculture alone, like Leicestershire with its sheep farms and Northamptonshire with its good grazing land. But he heard less about the day-labourers who worked that land, who might earn only three and a half pence a day in winter and four and a half pence in summer.
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(The accepted cost of living for a week for the poor was four or five shillings.) When Barbara Castlemaine gambled £500 in a single evening at cards, she was throwing away years of earnings for a hedger or ditcher in the English countryside.

For the larger tenant farmers and big landowners, however, life was improving. The harvests were good, and the growing towns needed feeding. Farmers began to look for ‘improvement’, a newly fashionable word, particularly attractive to royalists who had regained their land and needed to pay off large debts. The rush to enclose the land was less obvious than in the days of Elizabeth, but there was still a sudden surge in private bills, passed by a parliament that closed its eyes to infringements of the old laws.
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On their enclosed land, farmers were keen to adopt new techniques. In the beef-fattening lands of the southern counties they planted clover and lucerne, introduced in the 1650s, to enrich the pasture and provide winter fodder. The turnip was tentatively cultivated in Norfolk and Suffolk. Elsewhere, brave spirits made a start with the unpopular potato, as recommended by John Forster in the aptly named
England’s Happiness Increased
(1664). Experts published tracts on fertilisers, lime and ash, on irrigation and the flooding of water meadows, on clover, crop rotation and the germination of seeds.
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In many counties industry and agriculture went hand in hand: weaving, hosiery, shoe-making and silk-weaving in Nottinghamshire, furniture-making in Buckinghamshire; cloth-making in Somerset, iron-smelting, ship-building and rope-making in Sussex, tin-mining in Cornwall. In Essex, whose farmers produced cheese and corn and calves for the London markets, Dutch and Huguenot settlers had encouraged a growing textile industry, and Colchester was now the centre of the ‘New Draperies’, woven in the villages around, dealing in lighter weaves than the old broadcloth and kerseys. Further east, the East Anglian counties were slowly rising in prosperity as the fens were drained. Pumps turned by windmills sucked the water from the marsh. Corn grew where the reeds had waved.

Far to the north, in Buckingham’s fiefdom of Yorkshire, the townsfolk were prospering: the clothiers of Leeds, Wakefield and Halifax; the cutlery-makers of Sheffield. Further north still, the great landowners and industrialists of Northumberland and Durham coined money from coal and iron, sending thousands of tons of coal each year to London, Holland and France, and as far as the Mediterranean. Horses drew cartloads of ‘black gold’ along primitive wooden railways down to the docks. Along the coast, glinting over the sandbanks at the mouth of the Tyne, fires burned night and day, evaporating brine in the salt pans. On the other side of the Pennines, Manchester, Bolton and Rochdale were beginning to work cotton imported from the Middle East. In the mountains of Cumberland and Westmorland, the people depended on sheep and salmon-fishing, but even here there were copper and silver mines in the hills and gunpowder mills in the valleys. Sir John Lowther, MP for Cumberland, rarely visited his estate on the northern fringes of the county, staying in London and directing work through his estate and colliery agents. But he expanded his collieries as fast as he could, selling coal to Dublin, and built the port and town of Whitehaven to invest in voyages to Virginia and the Baltic.
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For most people local trade was more important than such grand designs. Every county had its weekly markets and seasonal fairs and chapmen’s rounds. The chapmen, with their heavy baskets – some so large that it was like carrying a table – were licensed by local corporations. They walked the roads carrying ribbons and muffs, ballads and books, to the remotest farmhouses. The lace and pins and stockings in their packs were made by people in the towns, and as such trades flourished so the markets prospered and new shops opened, selling small goods like cutlery and clocks. The country gentry, however, were wary of the growing towns since many tradesmen and artisans were nonconformists and former supporters of Cromwell. So the towns developed their own identity on a more informal, but powerful, level. The irony was that when local merchants prospered and sought a better way of life they started hankering for a title, forsaking their town roots and their dissenting faith – and moved to the country.

One aspect of the countryside gripped everyone’s attention. While there were relatively few protests about enclosure of commons, people did resent encroachment on woodland, cherishing their rights to collect timber for building houses and fences, or brushwood for fires. Once a wood was enclosed, to get the timber they had to trespass. Once caught, they were prosecuted. How could old rights be reclassified as crimes?

The forest was an emblem of national freedom and the plight of the woodland came to be seen as a symbol of the devastation of the country as a whole. During the Commonwealth, merchants had exploited the timber from confiscated lands and the trees had been felled, brushwood taken and saplings uprooted.
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Newcastle estimated that around £45,000 worth of timber had disappeared from his Midland estates. His wife, Margaret Cavendish, wrote that she ‘had never perceived him sad or discontented for his own Losses and Misfortunes’, yet when he saw his ruined park at Clipstone, where the trees had been felled for charcoal, she saw that he was troubled, ‘only saying, he had been in hopes it would not have been so much defaced as he found it, there being not one timber-tree in it left for shelter’.
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The use of wood for local industries was one thing that could not stop: between 1660 and 1667 over thirty thousand trees went to feed the iron furnaces in the Forest of Dean.
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But the woods also had particular meaning to Charles, since they provided timber for his navy. It was partly as a result of a plea from the Navy Board that in 1662 John Evelyn took on the task of surveying the scarred woodland. His book
Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees, and the Propagation of Timber
(1664) was a plea for a complete regeneration of the countryside and above all for the planting of trees. It was dedicated to Charles, the monarch whose very life had been preserved by the sheltering branches of the oak. And although it was full of practical advice on everything from producing mature timber to pollarding coppices and growing nut trees, it was equally full of classical allusions and rhetorical flights, a hymn to the forest as the heart of England.