A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (20 page)

That autumn, Pepys’s friend Robert Blackborne, a former Commonwealth naval official and convinced puritan, spoke bitterly of how thousands of ‘pious Ministers of God’ had to beg for bread, while the reinstated clergy behaved so arrogantly ‘that they are hated and laughed at by everybody’.
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The King should honour his promises of toleration as a matter of prudence:

He tells me that the King by name, with all his dignities, is prayed for by them that they call Fanatiques, as heartily and powerfully as in any of the other churches that are thought better: and that, let the King think what he will, it is them that must help him in the day of war. For so generally they are the most substantiall sort of people, and the soberest.

Of all the old soldiers of the New Model Army, how many could you see begging on the streets? asked Blackborne. None. All had taken up trades. By contrast to the rowdy young royalists, with their daggers in their belts and swords by their side, these old soldiers were so peaceable that ‘the King is safer from any evil meant by them a thousand times more than from his own discontented cavaliers’.
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His Privy Council and parliament disagreed.

As the year ended Charles’s wish to honour the ‘tender consciences of his people’ seemed crushed. In addition, many critics surmised that his hidden game was not to protect protestant dissenters but to benefit Catholics. It did not help that only a month after the nonconformist ministers were ejected, the queen’s Catholic chapel at St James’s, built for Henrietta Maria by Inigo Jones, was declared ready for Catherine, staffed by Benedictine friars and Portuguese Franciscans. The queen attended, conspicuous in her devotion. So did noted protestants at court, not least Barbara Castlemaine. Was Charles perhaps, already a Catholic himself?

Charles’s relaxed attitude towards Catholic dissent was not solely a matter of his own leanings, or concern for his friends. Roman Catholics accepted authority without question, even if it be the authority of pope rather than sovereign, whereas puritans taught people to obey God and their consciences rather than man – an easy route to defiance. The freedom to debate that had been claimed since the Reformation, he came to think, had led people to argue matters of state as well as religion. Gradually, with the constant talk of plots, Charles’s initial tolerance gave way to frustration with the mass of sects ‘each interpreting according to their vile notions and to accomplish their horrid wickednesses’.
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His irritation was increased by the flood of sermons attacking the pernicious influence of Rome or the sins of lewdness in high places. These were directed straight at him, his mistresses and his friends, and he resented them.

Charles rather encouraged the view that he took his faith lightly: that he slept for the sermon, but woke for the music. He declared several times that a man’s religion was personal and private and should never be the subject of persecution. His own beliefs are hard to pin down, suggesting an uneasy fit between public pronouncements and private feelings. As king, he held to his father’s strict injunction that he should uphold the doctrines of the Church of England. In exile he had been horrified when his mother tried to bully his younger brother Henry into Catholicism, yet at the same time he was astounded when he discovered the number of penal laws against English Catholics, and declared himself determined to abolish them. All his life he was surrounded by Catholics, including his mother, his wife, at least two of his mistresses and, from 1669, his brother James. There is no evidence that he became a Catholic convert in his years abroad (the Pope would hardly have kept this coup a secret), although his later minister, Halifax, vowed that ‘when he came into England he was as certainly a Roman Catholick, as that he was a Man of Pleasure; both very consistent by visible Experience’.
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It was part of Charles’s mask, his innate duplicity, thought Halifax, to joke and tease and make the world think he cared nothing for religion. Ormond, who had stuck strongly to his own protestant beliefs in the midst of a large Catholic family, also believed that Charles was a convert, having seen him at mass in Brussels, but he did not think this necessarily made him a devout believer. It was not, Ormond thought, that Charles was a total sceptic, or an atheist: he showed little concern for religion, yet ‘he did not want a sense of it’. He set aside time for private devotions and professed his belief in the Deity, the Messiah and the afterlife, ‘but had very large notions of God’s mercy, that he would not make his creatures for ever miserable on account of their personal failing. Upon this notion he indulged himself in his pleasures.’
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Ormond noticed too that he laid little stress on the different systems of religion ‘and would frequently take delight to tease his brother, who was very serious and zealous in his way, with reflecting on the scandalous lives of some popes, and laughing at some particular tenets of the Roman Catholics’.
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For Charles, religious attitudes were inseparable from politics. In domestic matters he must appear a stout protestant, but in his international dealings it was in his interest to make it appear to his cousin Louis XIV that he was a Catholic at heart. One catches something of Charles’s own dry wit in the French ambassador’s report, ‘He will do nothing against our religion, except under the pressure of Parliament. I find he is well aware that no other creed matches so well with the absolute authority of kings.’
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His flippancy and scepticism may also have been a mode of self-defence, a way of warding off the over-earnest. The keen-eyed Magalotti noted this horror of anything deep: ‘Serious men terrify him, merry and amusing ones fill him with delight.’ But, he thought, ‘He is very light hearted about religion, but if he were obliged to reflect upon it I do not think he would find salvation outside the Catholic faith.’
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RELIGIOUS POLICY
was one area where Charles’s private life collided with his actions as the crown. In the summer of 1662, the Bedchamber Crisis, as it became known, when Barbara Castlemaine fought to become part of Catherine’s retinue, was a matter of high politics as well as sex.

Clarendon doggedly maintained his hostility to Barbara and to her friends, forbidding his wife to receive her, or speak to her at court. He could not accept that the king was no longer the adolescent he had chivvied long ago and still lectured him at length. But by now Charles was shaking off his long habit of deference to his adviser. Clarendon seemed old and priggish and his refusal to accept his mistress was exasperating. For her part, Barbara’s rage made her long, she said, to see the Chancellor’s head set on a spike, like the regicides at Westminster Hall. The spirited courtier Daniel O’Neill wrote to his old friend Ormond in Ireland, ‘I dare say she says no less to the King for there is no limit to her power nor his fondness.’
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Then he joked, linking Barbara’s ‘parts’ – her intelligence – to her private parts, ‘It’s happy her parts does not answer else she would make mad work.’

Barbara’s parts, her cleverness and shrewd assessment of political realities, were far from lacking. She was aiming at a new role in British court life, that of an official ‘
maîtresse en titre
’, like the powerful mistresses of French monarchs. Recognising the power of image-making, she was one of the first to patronise Lely when he was made court painter in 1661. Lely adored her, declaring that her ‘sweetness and incomparable beauty’ were ‘beyond the power of art’. He painted her in many guises: as a pensive, penitent Magdalen with hair streaming over her shoulder; as a powerful-looking Amazon, or an Arcadian shepherdess. He even painted her as St Catherine, an ironic tribute to the queen, and as quasi-Madonna with her infant son, a deliberately provocative pose, since, unlike the queen, she appeared to be pregnant again.
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These portraits, copied in paint and engraved as prints, established a template for court beauty: sloe-eyed sexiness, full lips, sloping shoulders and snowy bosoms.

Lely’s portrait of Barbara Castlemaine in her blue robe, holding her son Charles Fitzroy, has ironic echoes of the Madonna and Child: the baby is not her husband’s child but the son of the most powerful being in the land.

Barbara was continuing her campaign to control the Queen’s household by manoeuvring to have the Countess of Pendalva sent back to Portugal, thus depriving Catherine of her chief link with home. Not only was Barbara’s aunt, the Countess of Suffolk, her Mistress of the Robes, but her supporters among the loyal Killigrew family were in key positions, Sir William as Catherine’s vice-chamberlain, his sister-in-law Charlotte as Keeper of the Sweet Coffers (looking after gloves and feathers, fans and hats and perfumes) and soon his wife Mary as one of her dressers.
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The Castlemaine house in King Street operated as a kind of alternative court salon. Many returning courtiers decorated their apartments in the French style, with lighter furniture, candlelight reflected off mirrors, and Turkey carpets and polished plate shining against the old panelling. Barbara’s cook was good, and after dinner her guests could drift into another room for cards or for music. Friends gathered for the witty conversation and excellent food, but also because the king was often to be found there in an off-duty mood so that it was easy to get him on one side. Barbara virtually ran her own royal ‘withdrawing room’, like the circle that gathered around the queen or the queen mother in the early evenings, where both sexes were welcome and the talk was informal. But here the mood was far livelier, and flirtation and politics mixed. King Street became a base for a particular group of courtiers, united chiefly by their hostility to the Chancellor. Clarendon had alienated many individual courtiers for different reasons, and both the Catholics and presbyterians at court blamed him, as much as the bishops, for the Act of Uniformity. The King Street clique contained partisans for both the Catholic and nonconformist cause, as well as young politicians on the make.

Among the Catholics, the most vehement was George Digby, Earl of Bristol, who was now, in Clarendon’s view, doing all he could to please the king, arranging ‘meetings and jollities’ and inviting Charles and Barbara to his country house in Wimbledon.
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Also in Barbara’s salon was the rising star Sir Henry Bennet, who was not a Catholic but whose history and pro-Spanish views linked him firmly to Bristol, although at this point he also carefully kept in with Clarendon. Like Clarendon, Bennet came from a modest family, but with connections at court: one of his aunts was married to Thomas Killigrew and his cousin Will Crofts had long been a key figure in Charles’s household. As a young man, Bennet had entered Bristol’s service in 1643 as his secretary and had then followed his relation, Sir Kenelm Digby, on his journeys to seek help for Charles I in Rome and Paris. He then became a secret messenger between Henrietta Maria and Ormond in Ireland before joining the exiled court, and acting as secretary to James, Duke of York, whom he heartily detested.

Bennet was one of the wild group of courtiers who provided some diversion after the disaster of Worcester and Charles became very fond of him: his letters to his ‘dear Harry’ are some of the liveliest and most intimate of the exile, jumping easily from politics to gossip and the latest style in cloaks. In 1657 he was knighted and sent as an ambassador to Spain and he had remained in Madrid at the Restoration, returning to London in April 1661. This was rather late to stake a claim to the best posts, and Bennet was now looking for a way to lever himself up, if not through Clarendon then through Barbara Castlemaine and her allies.

In his early forties, Bennet was a striking figure, stalking the Whitehall corridors wearing a black velvet suit and swirling cape. He was extremely tall, with pale eyes set in a long, dark face made sinister by a black plaster worn to cover a Civil War scar on the bridge of his nose. A tireless worker, able to read five languages, he appeared cold and secretive yet curiously exhibitionist at the same time. While people laughed at him for his fastidious ‘Castilian’ air, even his enemies admitted that when he was at ease he could be charming, and ‘had the best turns of wit in a particular conversation’.
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Furthermore, ‘he had the art’, wrote Burnet, ‘of observing the King’s temper, and managing it beyond all the men of that time’.
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Charles knew his talents and gave him his head – it is hard to tell quite who was ‘managing’ who. In August 1661, partly through Barbara’s influence, Bennet was made Keeper of the King’s Privy Purse, an extremely useful position that allowed him to dole out large sums of money on request, without going through official channels.

The protestant partisans in this circle included Barbara’s cousin Buckingham, who despite his erratic ways stoutly espoused the presbyterian cause until his death. There were also several members of the distinguished Montagu family, headed by the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Manchester. His ambitious sons, Edward and Ralph, were now Masters of Horse to the King and the Duke of York respectively, and their cousin, Sandwich, was also a prominent guest when Barbara gave a ball that autumn. Barbara herself – to the surprise of those who thought she had no serious aims, – fought fiercely for the cause of the nonconformists. ‘You will hardly believe it,’ hissed O’Neill, ‘but it’s very true, that the powerful Lady is…the fiercest solicitor these ejected Ministers have. She has falne out with the king.’
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But although they had fallen out that autumn, Charles’s passion had not abated and he showered her with favours ‘all which the virtuous Quene bears with a masculine courage and patience’. A fortnight later, O’Neill confessed he could not see how the tranquillity of the court could continue: how could Catherine endure ‘the neglect of the king and the insolency of the dame’.
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Barbara’s support for the nonconformists may have stemmed less from principle than from a desire to unseat Clarendon, whose arrogance had by now also upset Bennet. In exile, Clarendon had been Bennet’s mentor, but he was wary of the younger man’s ambition and blocked him from two posts, first as ambassador to France in January 1662 and then as Postmaster General, a position that Charles, urged by Barbara, had openly promised him. In mid-September O’Neill drily surmised that Clarendon’s stubbornness was an error, enraging Charles, and that ‘this puts the King upon an other designe that Bennet will find more his advantage in and that will less please the chancellor’.
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He was right. The next month, October, the King Street faction took two steps nearer to power. First Charles persuaded one of his two Secretaries of State, Sir Edward Nicholas, who was now nearly seventy, to take a golden handshake of £10,000 and retire to the country. Nicholas went, believing that his son would succeed him. Instead Charles gave the post to Bennet, who immediately moved into rooms at Whitehall, knocking out a doorway that led onto the king’s private stairs so that they could meet without people knowing. Next, he gave Bennet’s old place as Keeper of the Privy Purse to Charles Berkeley. ‘The young men get uppermost,’ wrote Pepys on 17 October, ‘and the old serious lords are out of favour.’
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Mopping up the gossip, Pepys labelled Berkeley ‘a most vicious person’, having been told by the King’s surgeon, Mr Pierce ‘(at which I did laugh to myself)’, that Berkeley had offered Pierce’s beautiful wife £300 a year to be his mistress. Pierce added that no one had the king’s ear more than Bennet and Berkeley and Lady Castlemaine.

Bennet’s new position was one of real influence. In consultation with the inner ‘foreign committee’ of the Privy Council, the two Secretaries of State were responsible for all diplomatic negotiations, dividing the territories between them. Bennet’s brief included France, Spain, Portugal, the Dutch States, Flanders, Italy, Turkey, ‘Barbary’ and the Indies, while Morice looked after Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Poland, Switzerland, the Holy Roman Empire and the German states. But Morice was seldom at court and in reality Bennet ruled all. At Ormond’s request, he also took over Irish affairs. In addition, he supervised security at home, managing the Post Office and the secret service.

So far Clarendon had dealt with all these matters, even though they were not strictly his province. Now he found, to his alarm, that Bennet was acting alone, without asking his advice. Clarendon’s popularity sank still further, if that were possible, when news broke in late October of the sale of Dunkirk to the French for five million livres. This was a ploy to bring in money, and also get rid of a port that was a permanent drain on the exchequer, but the symbolic impact of selling Britain’s one continental possession to her old enemy the French was incalculable, and damaging. At once there was outcry. London merchants sent a deputation to Whitehall protesting that the loss of Dunkirk would make shipping vulnerable to privateers, who would use it as a base, and Charles had to beg Louis XIV to issue an edict against them using the harbour. But the cash reward was great. The goldsmith Edward Backwell and others crossed the Channel in the fast royal yachts to collect the money from Calais. Backwell brought back two million livres at once and Charles and James dashed to the Tower to see the silver ecus glinting in their coffers at the Mint.
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The rest of the money flowed through in quarterly payments.

At the same time, another, overlapping clique was forming in opposition to the Chancellor, with the same determination to overturn the new religious laws. After spending some months at Greenwich, Henrietta Maria had moved into Somerset House in the Strand. Charles’s sporadic account books, which noted oil-cloths for his barge, sums for Killigrew’s revels, black velvet caps for watermen, summer liveries for choirboys and presents for the ambassadors, often listed gifts for his mother, including satin, silver lace and silver twists for a new dress.
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At Somerset House, as at Greenwich, Henrietta Maria established her evening ‘circle’, which had been a key part of the court day when she was queen. Catherine dutifully attended, and so did many other courtiers, and often Charles and James dropped in. Secure of her place, Henrietta Maria set about winning friends – including Lady Castlemaine – and used all her influence to combat the new religious laws.

In the autumn of 1662 Clarendon lamented to Ormond, ‘That which breakes my hearte is that the same affections continew still, the same lazynesse and unconcernednesse in business, and a proportionable abatement of reputation.’
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These were the accusations he had levelled at Charles all through his youth, and in a way he was right. But habit had blinded him; far from being lazy, this autumn Charles was feverishly concerned with ‘businesse’. Over the summer various members of the King Street set, including Bristol and Bennet, had met regularly at Manchester’s house to lay plans against the religious legislation, and had drafted a declaration for the king to propose. In this they were helped by the presbyterian Lord Robartes, and by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley, a brilliant orator and a latitudinarian in spirit, who was rapidly becoming the patron of nonconformism in the Lords.