A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (18 page)

For some Restoration writers the countryside and rural life were still hallowed by the notion, however false, of a Georgic idyll, remote from the bustle and corruption of city and court. Poets and writers developed a dream of rural England as a retreat, and the country as a fragile realm, easily lost. Charles Cotton, the ‘old-fashion’d Squire, no whit refin’d’, was in fact a highly cultured poet. In the 1660s he was living in Staffordshire with his first wife, his cousin Isabella, and their many children, acting as a magistrate and local revenue commissioner. A passionate fisherman, he contributed to his friend Isaac Walton’s
Compleat Angler
and when he could, he retreated to his library, writing a popular burlesque of Virgil,
Scarronides
, and later achieving fame as the translator of Montaigne. Yet still, he was happy to style himself a ‘countrey bumpkin’.
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And despite all the work there was to do at Welbeck, Margaret Cavendish declared roundly – and often – that she would not leave its peace ‘to live in a metropolitan city, spread broad with vanity, and almost smothered with crowds of creditors for debts’.
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Her tenants might have disagreed, but when she compared country to town her conclusion was clear: ‘In short, there is so much difference in each sort of life as the one is like Heaven, full of peace and blessedness, the other full of trouble and vice.’

As king, Charles existed in that world of trouble and vice. He enjoyed being in open parkland or on the downs, hunting and hawking, riding and racing, but he was no farmer George, with an interest in turnips and pigs. When he left his capital, he travelled with his courtiers, taking his own small world with him, whether to Newmarket in the east or to Oxford or Bath in the west. Like most Londoners, he rarely ventured north. When he travelled, he carried the breath of Whitehall on his clothes, and the dust of London on his boots.

The Ace of Diamonds showing the constellation ‘Draco’, ‘The dragon’, in astrological playing cards of the time of Charles II

ALL OVER THE LAND
, in cities and market towns and country villages, nonconformist subjects were anxious about their future. As a matter of principle, Charles wanted to set aside the strict, persecuting ways of the church in his father’s day under Archbishop Laud, and as a pragmatist he recognised the strength of the presbyterians and wanted to satisfy them. Yet in practice, before a single law was passed, the old forms of Anglican worship were already being used, and high church trimmings like surplices and choirs had begun to be fashionable again.

From the start, Charles himself used the old Book of Common Prayer at Whitehall. He attended services in the Chapel Royal in his own private gallery, looking down through a window on his courtiers in the main body of the chapel. On the feast days, dressed in formal robes, he came down to join the congregation. William Schellinks was there at Candlemas in February 1662, when the music was ‘extraordinarily beautiful’, and a sword was carried before the king, who knelt at the altar and placed his alms, gold pieces, in a fine silver dish.
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The small panelled chapel had been vandalised during the Interregnum, its stained glass broken, its cross pulled down and wall paintings plastered over, before it was repaired for Cromwell’s use, with a huge central pulpit. Now it had carpets and wall hangings and galleries for court and musicians. A new style of court music flourished. Soon after the Restoration Pepys heard ‘very good Musique, the first time I remember ever to have heard the Organs and singing-men in Surplices in my life’. A few months later he heard an anthem, ‘ill sung, which made the king laugh’.
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The new master of music, Henry Cooke, assembled a choir (including the father of Henry Purcell, who was then a toddler growing up near Westminster Abbey across the square). Pepys admired their rendering of Psalm 51, arranged for five voices, ‘And here I first perceived that the King is a little musicall, and kept good time with his hand all along the anthem.’
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In 1662 the royal strings were ordered to play in the chapel, disconcerting traditionalists like Evelyn, who lamented that instead of the ‘antient grave and solemn wind musique accompanying the Organ’ he had to listen to violins ‘betweene every pause, after the French fantastical light way, better suiting a Tavern or a Play-house than a Church’.
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The king liked a good anthem, and he liked a good sermon. He appreciated the preaching of scholars like Isaac Barrow, and the sermons of clever, articulate men with genuine faith like Thomas Ken and Robert Frampton, even though they might rebuke him for his way of life. (Ken refused to put Nell Gwyn up for the night in Winchester, but Charles still made him Bishop of Bath and Wells.
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) But while he enjoyed the ceremony, he was almost too clever, and too sardonic, to understand the depths of feeling and bitter animosities that religion could arouse. He confessed that the logic of the factions and splits defeated him: why did Anglicans condemn dissenters from cutting loose from the mother church, when the Church of England itself had split from Rome?
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He disliked the fuss over ritual, the ‘wrangling about forms and gestures’.

Clarendon agreed, although in contrast to Charles, he had a deep, almost fatalistic faith, holding that history was the working out of providence and it was a ruler’s duty to fulfil the laws of God as well as the crown. But to begin with, he too wanted inclusion. It was safer, he thought, to bring dissenters
into
the state church, rather than forcing them out and fuelling future conflicts.
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In some ways, it was already too late. As soon as the Restoration was secure, the old forces had made their move. Around seven hundred of England’s nine thousand ministers had left their parishes by the end of the first year, either because the original incumbents paid them to get their livings back, or because they were forced out by local Anglican landlords. As far as the sects outside the church were concerned, magistrates saw that there was no need to wait for any new religious legislation: plenty of useful statutes remained from Tudor days. The thirty-two-year-old John Bunyan was one of many convicted under such an act. A tinker’s son, briefly a member of the New Model Army, and now attached to the Bedford brotherhood of Baptists, on 12 November 1660 Bunyan was arrested while preaching in the village of Samsell. He was taken before the magistrate Francis Wingate, a zealous Anglican, and a landowner whose estate had suffered badly during the Interregnum. Citing the Elizabethan Act against Conventicles, Wingate committed Bunyan to Bedford gaol.

The act decreed that the penalty for preaching to such gatherings was three months’ imprisonment, to be followed by transportation if the offender would not give up preaching and conform to the established church.
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In January 1661, when Bunyan appeared at the quarter sessions, the odds again seemed stacked against him, since the chief magistrate was Sir John Kelyng, a loyal Cavalier, counsel for the crown in the trial of the regicides and a future judge. Kelyng (whom Bunyan dubbed ‘Lord Hategood’) took the case seriously, exchanging detailed scriptural arguments before lapsing into frustrated bluster when he saw that Bunyan would never promise to stop preaching – a simple move that would have won his freedom. Despite many petitions, Bunyan lingered in gaol for twelve years. Yet he was no belligerent protester. He wrote from prison that he did not plan to disturb the peace of the nation. He looked upon it as his duty, he said, ‘to behave myself under the King’s government, both as becomes a man and a Christian; and if occasion was offered me, I should willingly manifest my loyalty to my Prince, both by word and deed’.
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Most dissenters were prepared to abide by the law as long as they could worship in peace. Their situation, however, was imperilled in January 1661, when Venner’s uprising roused all the old fears of puritans and ‘fanatics’. Dissenting meetings, whispered government spies, were held only on pretence of religion; their real aim was revolution. Rattled, Charles issued a proclamation against ‘Fanaticks and Sectaries’ (acknowledging that it infringed some part of the Breda promise), by which meetings of ‘Anabaptists, Quakers and Fifth Monarchy men, or some such like appellation’ were forbidden.
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The Privy Council ordered the Lords Lieutenant to raise the militia and hunt down anyone suspected of disaffection to the king or his government. Over four thousand Baptists and Quakers were imprisoned.

The frontispiece to
The Dippers Dipt
, a satirical account of the Baptists and other sects by Daniel Featley, chaplain to Charles I, published in 1645 and reissued in 1660

Charles was less rigid and vindictive than the bishops and the partisan gentry in parliament. The fear of uprisings cast its shadow over the Savoy Conference, the next meeting of the church leaders and presbyterian divines, which opened on 15 April 1661 at Savoy Palace, the seat of the Bishop of London, Gilbert Sheldon. Dark-haired, beetle-browed, intense and intellectual, Sheldon had been a leading figure in Oxford life since the 1630s. He had been a chaplain to Charles I and had stayed in touch with royalist hopes during the Interregnum. As soon as Charles II returned, he was appointed Dean of the Chapel Royal and then Bishop of London. Sheldon had been a reformer, in opposition to Laud in the 1630s, but he took a far harder line than the king and Chancellor in his designs for the restored church. The Florentine Lorenzo Magalotti, visiting London a few years later, had no doubt of his ambition or his duplicity, dismissing him as of ‘very ordinary birth…a man of great refinement, of much talent and brains; externally all mildness and internally all malice’.
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This was unfair, but Sheldon was certainly shrewd and determined. He only attended the opening days of the conference, and then left the delegates alone, but everyone present accepted that he was the ‘doer and disposer’ behind the scenes.

The conference was supposed to work out the fine print of an Act of Uniformity broad enough to bring in the dissenting factions, but the presbyterians were wary and Baxter and his fellow campaigner Edmund Calamy – who had both turned down offers of bishoprics – scrupulously debated every point. The way was set for months of wrangling. Baxter, for one, was convinced that they were speaking to the deaf and that the bishops would accept none of their demands, but would wilfully misinterpret every utterance as a signal of lingering republicanism. His despair is clear in his notes, where raised eyebrows count as much as formal speeches:

Among all the Bishops there was none who had so promising a Face as Dr Sterne, the Bishop of Carlisle: he look’d so honestly, and gravely, and soberly, that I scarce thought such a Face could have deceived me; and when I was intreating them not to cast out so many of their brethren through the
Nation
as scrupled a ceremony which they considered indifferent, he turn’d to the rest of the Reverend Bishops, and noted me for saying ‘in the Nation’: ‘He will not say “in the Kingdom”, saith he, ‘lest he own a King.’ This was all that ever I heard that worthy Prelate say.
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The Savoy Conference broke up in the summer, leaving the detailed working out of the church agreement to the new parliament. Sheldon manipulated this passionately loyal parliament with great skill, chivvying the reinstated bishops in the Lords, and organising pet MPs to steer through votes for the legislation he wanted, rather than for a broader settlement. In mid-May, within two weeks of its opening, the Commons passed an order decreeing that all MPs should take the sacrament according to Church of England rites, and commanding the Solemn League and Covenant to be burned.

Archbishop Sheldon, by Samuel Cooper

Charles did not help his own cause. Later in the year it was widely noted that he and Barbara and the Duke of York – and Sheldon – all enjoyed the new production of Ben Jonson’s
Bartholomew Fair
. The performances included the original puppet show, mocking the puritans, which had not been acted for forty years. As a rather shocked Pepys noted, ‘it being so satyricall against puritanisme, they durst not till now; which is strange they dare to do it, and the King to countenance it’.
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Two puppets were even made up to look like Baxter and Calamy. Charles found it hard not to be irreverent. A little later he joked to the Bishop of Derry, who had been deep in discussions with the nonconformists, ‘telling me he heard I had been fighting with the beasts at Ephesus’.
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If this was the attitude of the court the response of parliament was no surprise. Repressive laws against dissenters were inevitable.

The first legislation was the Corporation Act in December 1661, which decreed that all magistrates, and anyone holding municipal office, had to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, swear that taking up arms against the king was illegal (thus damning all those who had fought on parliament’s side in the Civil Wars), and abjure the Solemn League and Covenant. This effectively wrested power in the corporations and the countryside from the hands of nonconformists and returned it to the Church of England gentry, nostalgic for the restoration of an ‘old order’ that had never really existed.