A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (25 page)

Although he was intrigued, Charles was not exactly forthcoming with funds. In October 1662 he sent orders for a small grant to be made out to Moray and Boyle, in trust for the society, from funds in Ireland, but it turned out that these funds had already been promised to other claimants. A few years later, in 1669, he granted the society Chelsea College, which had been founded by his grandfather to train protestant priests. The idea was that they should use this as a base, but the society never moved in and the property caused them nothing but headaches. Charles eventually bought it back in 1682, as a home for old soldiers, the Royal Chelsea Hospital, and the society then invested the proceeds in the East India Company. Beyond this was that there was simply no government money to be had. When Colbert and Louis XIV, who had instructed his ambassadors to find out about the Royal Society, established the state-funded Académie des Sciences in 1666 the Fellows made bitter comparisons. Charles’s special interest in navigation, however, did prompt him to found the Mathematical School at Christ’s Hospital in 1673, and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich two years later, two significant achievements.

After his initial burst of interest he sat back and let the Royal Society run its own affairs, while enjoying his own alchemical experiments at Whitehall, and sending his good wishes and a side of venison for their annual dinners. Although he was made a Fellow, he was never so involved as James and Prince Rupert. The latter deluged the society with papers, submitting ideas for testing ‘a gunpowder eleven times stronger than normal; a novel water pump; an early machine gun; a perspective aid for artists; and improved sea charts and navigational instruments’.
²⁹
By contrast Charles’s enquiries grew ever more flippant. In July 1663 Sir Robert Moray ‘mentioned that the King had made an experiment of keeping a sturgeon in fresh water in St James’s Park for a whole year: it was moved to kill it and see how it would eat’.
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Charles’s interest was still largely in curiosities of the natural world, plants, bees, fish. Once he sent ‘that wonderful horne of the fish, which struck a dangerous howle in the keele of a ship, in the India seas’ (in fact off Barbados) ‘which being broake off with the violence of the fish, & left in the timber, preserv’d it from foundring’. Some months later Moray turned up with ‘a discourse on coffee written by Dr Goddard at the King’s command’ and in August 1666 mentioned ‘that the King had been discussing of ant’s eggs, and inquiring how they came to that bigness, which sometimes exceeded that of the insect itself’.
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The Royal Society suffered because their scientific researches seemed so abstruse, while their social schemes proved too ambitious and expensive, whether it was Evelyn’s ambitious plan for London or Petty’s desire to reform taxation. Petty was mocked at court as a conjuror or a fanatic. In February 1664 Pepys recorded that ‘the King came and stayed an hour or two, laughing at Sir W Petty, who was there about his boat, and at Gresham College in general…for spending time only in weighing of ayre and doing nothing else since they sat’.
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He once called the Fellows his ‘fous’, his court jesters, and took substantial bets on the results of their experiments: Moray reported that ‘the King has laid a wager of fifty pounds to five for the compression of air by water: and that it was acknowledged, that his Majesty had won the wager’.
³³

Hollar’s frontispiece to Thomas Sprat’s
The History of the Royal
S
ociety
, 1667, shows the bust of Charles II being crowned by Fame, with the Society’s first President, Viscount Brouncker, in a classical robe on the left, and Francis Bacon on the right.

The society had shown that a forum could be created where debate was open yet contained, and posed no threat to the state, and although Charles had wanted more practical results and less pure research, he was pleased to be called ‘Patronus et fundator’. In Hollar’s frontispiece to Sprat’s propagandist
History of the Royal Society
of 1667, the King’s bust, crowned with a laurel wreath by Fame, stands on a plinth with Lord Brouncker on his left and Francis Bacon on his right, and the air-pump, quadrants, and other instruments in the background.
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Quizzically, he raises an eyebrow at posterity.

In his own laboratory Charles dabbled with Moray and the ‘King’s Chymist’, Nicaise Le Fèvre (often called Lefebure), whose interests were more alchemical. Charles was intrigued by the old secrets of alchemy, whose philosophy of transformation, regeneration and purification embraced both matter and spirit, finding a universe of hidden correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm. Like all alchemists he felt the lure of quicksilver, the mercury that flowed and collected and pooled and separated, and showed such dramatic and varied transformations, turning into red crystals when mixed with nitric acid, into poisonous white powder when heated, into amalgams with other metals. It seemed to transcend solid and liquid, heaven and earth. Anything that might change base metal into gold was bound to appeal, but Charles was also moved by the human and spiritual analogies, the transformation of man to a state of perfection, and of society from an iron to a golden age.

CATHERINE RELAXED
as her English improved and she enjoyed herself more. She did, however, have to put up with constant small humiliations. When Henrietta Maria arrived in the autumn of 1662 she brought with her Charles’s son by Lucy Walter, who was still being introduced – with no one fooled – as James Crofts, the nephew of William Crofts, his guardian in France. Fascinated observers noted the shifting alliances in the queen mother’s evening circle. Here was the queen, wrote Pepys in September, ‘not very charming, yet she hath a good, modest and innocent look…here I also saw Madam Castlemayne and, which pleased me most, Mr Crofts the King’s bastard, a most pretty spark of about 15 year old’ (he was thirteen), ‘who I perceive doth hang much upon my Lady Castlemayne and is alway with her.’
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The royal party stayed until dark and when they left, into the leading coach piled the king and queen, young James – and Barbara.

Although the autumn of 1662 was troubled by fear of plots after the ejection of the nonconformist ministers, for the court, there was always time for pleasure. Towards the end of November Londoners woke to find their rooftops covered with snow, the first for three years. It was the start of weeks of icy cold. Charles took Catherine to St James’s Park to watch people skating on the new canal. This was a novel diversion, learnt in Holland by many exiles who had brought back their iron and steel skates. The watchers were entranced, among them John Evelyn who waxed lyrical about the ‘strange and wonderful dexterity of the sliders’, how fast they sped by, ‘how sudainly they stop in full carriere upon the Ice, before their Majesties’.
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Evelyn went home by water, ‘but not without exceeding difficultie, the Thames being froze, greate flakes of yce incompassing our boate’.

Appropriately, the snow coincided with the arrival of three envoys from Tsar Alexis of Russia. Charles greeted them warmly, acknowledging the Tsar’s kindness during his years of exile and his boycott of trade with Cromwell’s Commonwealth. York House was fitted out for the Russians at considerable cost, the City’s trained bands and the King’s Guards turned out to escort them, and the people flocked to admire them, or to laugh and jeer. The tall Russians in their great fur hats were dashing figures as they rode in their coaches through the crowded streets, their attendants following with hawks on their wrists to present to the King. At their audience in the Banqueting House the gallery was so packed that people feared it might fall. They wore tunics embroidered with gold and pearls and bore gifts of furs – sable, black fox and ermine – Persian carpets, cloths of gold and velvet and even ‘sea-horse teeth’.
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Charles was given a gold glove, on which he held three hawks, while the chief envoy raised the letters from the Tsar ceremoniously on high and then prostrated himself full length at the king’s feet. The envoys had come to bring congratulations and to ask for a loan. They did not get one, but Charles did repay the money that the Tsar had lent him twelve years before, when he was at his lowest ebb.

Rebellions forgotten, the mood at court was festive. Charles and Catherine watched plays in the Cockpit, and as Christmas approached the builders put up scaffolding for seats in the Great Hall and made a stage for the King’s Company. Not everyone approved. On Christmas Day old Bishop Morley preached in the Chapel Royal on ‘goodwill towards men’, distinguishing between true Christian joy and the ‘mistaken jollity’ of the court, particularly their ‘excess in playes and gameing’. In Morley’s view the groom porter, who supervised the court gambling in the twelve days of Christmas, was no better than a second in a duel. ‘Upon which’, noted Pepys, ‘it was worth observing how far they are come from taking the reprehensions of a Bishop seriously, that they all laugh in the chapel when he reflected on their ill actions and courses.’
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Dancing was as much part of court life as gambling and plays, and on New Year’s Eve Charles gave a great ball. For the first dance, the French
branle
, he led out Anne, Duchess of York, while James led the Duchess of Buckingham, and the young James Crofts took the hand of Barbara Castlemaine. This was followed by a stately courante, and then, impatient for livelier tunes, Charles ordered country dances, ‘the King leading the first which he called for; which was – says he,
Cuckolds all a-row
the old dance of England’.
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Between Christmas and Lent, every night saw a different kind of entertainment. In late January Ambassador Cominges reported rather primly to Louis XIV that there was a ball and a comedy every other day, and the rest of each day was spent in play, either in the queen’s rooms or Lady Castlemaine’s ‘where the company does not fail to be treated to a good supper. In this way, Sire, is the time occupied in this country.’
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On 2 February Catherine gave a Candlemas masquerade, celebrating the ancient festival that marked the mid-point of winter between Christmas and Easter. ‘The queen was a woman of sense,’ declared Gramont’s memoirs, ‘and used all her endeavours to please the king, by that kind obliging behaviour which her affection made natural to her: she was particularly attentive in promoting every sort of pleasure and amusement especially such as she could be present at herself.’
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This particular night was long remembered for Buckingham’s complicated practical jokes, for the lavish and bizarre dresses, with yards of gauze, silver tissue and yellow ribbons, and for the noisy, stamping country dances. Here, as so often, the plain short queen was surrounded by glamour. Yet Catherine’s goodness won many hearts. Perhaps she took solace, too, in the fact that Charles slept with her often, no matter how many mistresses he had.

He did so, she knew, to beget an heir. And at court Catherine had to contend with his children as well as his women. The Castlemaine children were tucked up out of sight in their rooms across the Privy Garden, but Charles doted publicly on Jemmy, as James Crofts was called, who had his father’s dark hair and dark eyes and a sweet, open temperament. No one pretended he was clever. When he arrived at Henrietta Maria’s court at the age of nine after his troubled childhood he could hardly read or write, and although Charles had ordered intensive teaching, he was still far behind his peers. Almost as soon as he arrived the tale began to spread that he was in fact the lawful heir, Charles having married his mother in secret. This was reinforced when Charles made him wealthy, granting him an income of £8,000 a year, derived from a patent regulating the export of all new drapery. He also began negotiations for James’s marriage.

The chosen bride was Anne Scott, the twelve-year-old Countess of Buccleugh, who shone as one of the best young dancers at the New Year ball. Since her father stipulated that she marry someone of the same name, James changed his name from Crofts to Scott, was knighted, and soon ennobled as Duke of Monmouth. After the wedding, which took place on 20 April, soon after his fourteenth birthday, he was given the additional title of Duke of Buccleugh. Although Anne would remain with her parents until she was eighteen, Charles ordered a new set of lodgings to be constructed for the young couple in the Cockpit. In a typical Whitehall improvisation, the old Great Tennis Court built for Henry VIII was divided into two floors, with new chimneys and staircases, sash windows and lavish plaster-work ceilings.
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The queen was kind to Monmouth and welcomed him to her rooms, where he played cards with her maids of honour. Eventually she won his deep affection. But his presence was a constant reminder that she had as yet borne no legitimate heir, whereas Barbara Castlemaine had produced a child each year and was pregnant again. Barbara’s greed and ambition were flagrant. All the Christmas presents given to the king found their way to her, and at the king’s ball her costume dripped with more jewels than those of the queen and the Duchess of York put together. Sarah, the cook at Sandwich’s house, next door to Barbara’s, told Pepys that the king supped there four or five times a week and ‘most often stays till the morning with her and goes home through the garden all alone privately’.
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Even the sentries, watching him stride across in the dawn, knew all about it. But this year such excursions would end, when Barbara was given fine new quarters within Whitehall itself, over the west end of the Privy Gallery and Holbein Gate, with the upper floor overlooking the park.

Even so, Charles appeared slightly less enamoured with Barbara than he had been, and sharp courtiers began to spy out another beauty who might help their cause if she became his mistress. Soon they thought they had found one. Before Catherine’s arrival Henrietta Maria and Minette had recommended suitable attendants from France. At least two of her maids of honour were French, Mademoiselle de la Garde and Mademoiselle Bardou, but a third girl from Paris was Frances Stuart, whose father, a son of Lord Blantyre, had been a physician at the court of Henrietta Maria in exile. Frances’s widowed mother had brought her to England in January 1662, with a glowing recommendation from Minette.

Dressed in Paris fashions and speaking fluent French,
la belle Stuart
, as she was known, was approaching her fifteenth birthday. She danced beautifully, was playfully childish and gossipy, and laughed at all Charles’s jokes: here was no brilliant, independent, scheming mind à la Castlemaine. ‘It was hardly possible for a woman to have less wit and more beauty,’ decided Gramont. In fact Frances would grow into a far cleverer and more capable woman than such a judgement suggests, but in the early 1660s she was very young, and enjoyed being the new darling of the court. Her current passion was said to be building card castles, an abuse of good cards that baffled the men engaged in the high-bidding games in her apartments. Buckingham, always on the look-out for a route to Charles’s favour, paid her lavish attention, building sky-high card castles, writing songs, making up stories and generally becoming indispensable. Barbara Castlemaine too saw the charm, and the danger, of the slender, fair-haired adolescent and enrolled her as a sexual accessory: ‘The king, who seldom neglected to visit the countess before she rose, seldom failed likewise to find Miss Stewart in bed with her.’
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In February 1663, the two apparently undertook a mock marriage, ‘with ring and all other ceremonies of church service, and ribbands and a sack-posset in bed and flinging the stocking’. And then, ‘my Lady Castlemaine, who was the bridegroom, rose, and the King came and took her place with pretty Mrs Stuart.’
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It was all public, all a ‘frolique’ – but not quite.

Frances Stuart, by Samuel Cooper

Charles’s dalliance with Frances had begun before New Year. After the audience for the Russian envoys, Charles, the Duke of York and assorted nobles, including the Earl of Chesterfield, had rolled into Frances’s apartments at Whitehall, talking of the extraordinary appearance of the ambassadors. When Will Crofts declared that the Russians, as if in a fairy story, all had handsome wives, and all their wives had handsome legs, Charles maintained that no woman had such fine legs as Miss Stuart. To prove the truth of his assertion, ‘with the greatest imaginable ease’, Frances immediately showed her legs, riffling her skirts up above her knee.
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Colonel George Hamilton, one of her many would-be lovers, was later astounded by Frances’s competitive desire to prove her beauty, and her total lack of concern at showing off her body. ‘I really believe’, he declared, ‘that, with a little address, it would not be difficult to induce her to strip naked, without ever reflecting upon what she was doing.’
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Charles was amused by Frances, and by his courtiers’ intrigues and rows, ribaldry and wit. But to outsiders the court had begun to seem scandalous, cut off from reality. MPs muttered about the court’s extravagance, and about Charles’s open adultery and bastard children, asserting that neglect of his wife was the reason why she had not conceived. Under such criticism Charles’s attention swerved back to Catherine. In May 1663, in hope that the waters would aid conception, he took her to the spa at Tunbridge Wells, where Henrietta Maria had gone before his own birth. ‘Every method of getting a successor to the English Thorne is to be tried’, Cominges explained, ‘and the King on his part contributes all that could be asked of true affection and regular assiduity.’
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Within easy reach of London, Tunbridge was a fashionable resort. Catherine’s entourage stayed in the neat houses that straggled around the Wells, and in the mornings they drank the waters and promenaded down the tree-shaded walk. One side of this was lined with shops for lace and jewellery, gloves and stockings, with a new amusement, the ‘raffle’ copied from the fair at St Germain. On the other side lay the market, where country girls with straw hats sold their produce. In the long afternoons they watched the courtiers play bowls, a diversion that astonished Ambassador Cominges. In France this was the sport of labourers and servants, whereas here, he reported, it was ‘the exercise of gentlemen…and the places where it is practised are charming, delicious little walks, called bowling-greens, which are little square grass plots, where the turf is almost as smooth and level as the cloth of a billiard table’.
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The green was also a gaming-table, since every spectator was free to lay a bet, and in the evenings it became a ballroom where courtiers whirled on the smooth turf until the early hours. Catherine loved Tunbridge, inventing entertainments, and matching its natural ease and freedom by dispensing with ceremony. The town in its summer dress dripped with intrigue, as if the waters had gone to people’s heads. ‘Well may they be called
les eaux de scandale
,’ wrote Cominges in July 1663, ‘for they nearly ruined the good name of the maids and of the ladies (those I mean who were there without their husbands).’
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It did not suit everyone. Two years later the young rake Henry Savile decided, ‘that Tunbridge is the most miserable place in the world is very certain, and that the ladies do not look with very great advantage at three in the morning is as true’.
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