A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (32 page)

Trade also brought new ideas and broadened intellectual horizons. In the gallery of merchants, one of the most striking was Paul Rycaut, youngest son of a great Flemish shipowner and financier based in London. Rycaut became chancellor of the Levant Company’s factory at Constantinople in the early 1660s. Soon he took on the role of ambassador, filling his notebooks with accounts of the sultan’s empire, armies, people and culture.
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In 1667 Charles received a copy of the beautifully bound, gold-tooled folio of his
Present State of the Ottoman Empire
, and ten years later came Rycaut’s famous
History of the Ottoman Empire
, a source for writers ever since. Rycaut’s orientalism had its inevitable bias, but his work was an exemplary example of the ‘rational’ belief – shared by his king – that men are, in essence, the same the world over and that the differences between communities stem not from the ‘natural’ inferiority or superiority of races but from external factors like climate, history or wealth.

These distant lands that the traders reached seemed exotic, strange, laden with treasure and sensual delights, and not all writers were as responsible as Rycaut when they came to describe them. In 1664 Thomas Head published a picaresque, pornographic novel,
The English Rogue
, that effectively turned India into a paradise of sexual fantasy. (It was banned as obscene, but swiftly republished.)
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Travellers’ tales of all kinds, serious or not, caught Charles’s imagination, especially when linked to profit. In 1665, when the court was in Oxford, Prince Rupert introduced the French explorers Radisson and des Groseilliers, who had discovered an untapped wealth of fur in the wilds of North America. This wilderness could be reached, they said, by sea via Hudson Bay. The French would not back them, but with Rupert’s urging Charles – who had loved the furs brought by the Muscovy embassy – took the risk. It seemed a good bet, with little to lose. Within five years, he granted a charter to the Hudson’s Bay Company, with Rupert as its first governor. With sublime disregard for any local inhabitants the charter gave the company the right to trade in furs and exploit the mineral rights over all the land draining into the bay. The area named so vaguely was then unknown, but turned out to extend to a million square miles, from Labrador to the Rockies. The company were also obliged, decreed Charles, to hunt for the long-imagined North-West Passage. The Hudson’s Bay charter completed his vision of Britain’s trading empire, circling the globe and stretching from pole to pole.

THERE WAS NO DOUBT
that the most successful European traders, and England’s greatest rivals, were the Dutch. There were grudges on both sides. The Dutch resented the English Navigation Acts, however impossible they proved to enforce, and complained that the new Fishery Company threatened their fishing in the North Sea. The British claimed compensation for captured vessels and still demanded that the Dutch honour their agreement to hand back the Indonesian island of Pulo Run. Each side accused the other of foul tactics. In particular the British were jealous of Dutch control of the Spanish routes to the East Indies and Spanish America, a licence granted after foreign vessels began to encroach on the trade routes of the declining Spanish empire.

At first, Charles was keen on obtaining a trade treaty with Holland. After the years of exile at the Hague, his household had many links by marriage with the Dutch.
¹
But their fundamental political differences kept the countries apart. The republican States General were determinedly anti-monarchist, and Charles knew that Holland was sheltering Commonwealth rebels. From the Dutch viewpoint, Charles was a threat to their republic, since he clearly wished to restore the old powers of the House of Orange. This was an issue of intense personal importance to Charles, since it concerned his own family, notably his nephew William, his sister Mary’s son.
²
William’s great-grandfather, the first William of Orange, had led the United Provinces at the start of the war that followed their declaration of independence from Spain in 1581. His sons Maurice and Frederick, and then the latter’s son, William II, later took over this role. The Princes were not, however, technically the heads of government. The ‘states’ or assemblies of each province, dominated by the Regents – rich city magistrates and merchants – sent representatives to the States General, which dealt with matters relating to the republic as a whole, under the leadership of their Grand Pensionary, currently the formidable Johann de Witt. But since the Princes of Orange were usually the elected stadtholder of all the provinces, a position which brought with it the post of captain-general of the armed forces, they wielded considerable power. With their control of the army and their personal wealth, William’s forebears thus had an unofficial, but very real, semi-monarchical status.

When William II died in 1650, a week before the birth of his son, a long struggle began between the Regents of the States General and the House of Orange. The post of captain-general was abolished and some provinces agreed to leave the office of stadtholder vacant. Taking this a step further, in 1654, under pressure from Cromwell, the states of Holland agreed never to adopt a Prince of Orange as stadtholder. Matters improved slightly for the Orangists at the Restoration, when the Dutch were reluctant to offend the new King by slighting his sister and nephew, and a compromise was reached by which William was made a ‘child of state’, with a government allowance and the promise of an education that would fit him for some future major role. But when Mary died in December 1660, all this was thrown out. Since then, to Charles’s fury, de Witt had turned his ferocious energy to demolishing the Orange cause. Beneath the surface, Charles’s attitude towards the Dutch was always governed by his wish to restore to his nephew William the power that his father had held.

In mid-1662 ferocious Dutch lampoons and squibs circulated, blackening the name of the English King and the Prince of Orange. Meanwhile Amsterdam was booming, having become the import–export hub and the money-lending centre for the whole of northern Europe. Its rich burghers built tall canal-side houses and had their portraits painted in imposing groups. Their ‘brim-full vessels’, as Dryden described them, brought balm and spices and gold and their decks were laden with exotic plants for hot-houses and gardens. The low interest rates meant that merchants could keep large inventories of stock and Amsterdam became the place where ‘anything could be obtained, at any time’.
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As William Petty exclaimed, the Dutch were the heirs of the great classical empires: ‘Do they not work the sugars of the west, the timber and iron of the Baltic? The lead, tin and wool of Turkey?’ ‘To be short,’ he added, and this was the key point, ‘in all the ancient states and empires, those who had the shipping had the wealth.’
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And those who had the wealth had the power.

The approach to Amsterdam in 1665, crowded with merchant ships and yachts, with a city panorama behind

One area in which the English tried to seize that wealth was Africa. In 1660 Charles granted a charter to ‘The Royal Company of Adventurers Trading into Africa’, to trade with the Gambia and Guinea. The company’s first governor was the veteran voyager Prince Rupert, who had visited the Gambia in 1652, and the whole venture was not only ‘Royal’ but strongly royalist: more than half of the thirty-two named beneficiaries were courtiers, including Charles, Albemarle and Buckingham, and the Earls of Bath, Ossory, Pembroke, St Albans and Sandwich. When the company was reconstituted in 1663, with James, Duke of York at its head, the shareholders included twenty dukes, earls and peers, although many of these investors (including Charles) never bothered to pay the sum they had promised to subscribe, and the venture was hampered from the start, lacking almost a third of the promised capital of £120,000.
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The court-controlled venture also upset the mercantile class by favouring the aristocrats at the expense of the seasoned companies. In 1662, for example, James snubbed an offer of a merger from the East India Company, which had been trading very successfully along the West African coast and had now lost its privileges. There was a hint that James and Rupert were challenging not only the Dutch but the class they disliked at home, the presbyterian merchants.

Initially the company was set up to trade in ivory and gold, from which ‘Guineas’ were first minted. But the main business soon became the lucrative supply of slaves to the sugar and tobacco plantations of the West Indies. No one spoke out against this traffic until the first Quaker complaints in 1671. Black servants were status symbols, appearing, beaming and dark, behind their pale, languid mistresses in Lely’s portraits. Lord Sandwich happily brought back ‘a little Turke and a negro’ on his flagship from the Mediterranean in 1662 as pages for his daughters, an unremarked part of a cargo of exotics that included ‘many birds and other pretty noveltys’.
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But as far as slaves for the plantations were concerned, the vile trade was less lucrative than promised. Packed into the holds, many slaves died before they reached the plantations. Moreover, the planters were used to living on credit and rarely came up with ready cash, and complained of the company’s high prices. (Their complaints reveal the extent of the trade: in 1664 one owner complained of the price of ‘3000 negroes bought by him of the Royal African Company at £20 a head’.
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)

An added difficulty was that West Africa was already a war zone. The English and Dutch had quarrelled over the gold reefs on the West African coast for many years, and the creeks and rivers and off-shore islands had long been a major site of Dutch trade. The Portuguese, the Danes, the Swedes and the French also sent ships, but were minor players in this early scramble for Africa. The first Africa Company ships found themselves under attack at sea, and unable to trade on land with a local population already linked to the Dutch. But the new company was aggressive, indeed so blatantly provocative that it has been seen less as a trading company than a kind of advance attacking force, organised by the court, to take on the Dutch.

Instead of promoting the settling of unoccupied land, the company made direct assaults on Dutch possessions. In 1661 it sent a convoy to seize Dutch holdings under Sir Robert Holmes, who had been a captain under Rupert, a man whom Pepys wrote off as a ‘rash, rich coxcomb’ and, on another occasion, as ‘an idle, proud, conceited, though stout fellow’.
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Holmes was a strong character, who could be seen either as a difficult-to-discipline, but well-intentioned naval man, or simply as an out-of-control, headstrong buccaneer, violent and hot-tempered and always lusting for action. His justification for attacking the Dutch factories on the coast was that these were in fact English colonies seized by the Dutch a decade before. One by one, he sacked the Dutch forts. In retaliation the Dutch seized company vessels and blockaded the Gold Coast, and their control of the whole coast became so fixed that within two years the British company was almost bankrupt, and had to be given a new charter.
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Once that was done, Holmes was sent south again, with the secret backing, indeed instructions, of the Privy Council.

In 1662, while the first African skirmishes were at their height, it seemed that a full-scale war was imminent. ‘Great talk there is of a fear of a war with the Dutch,’ wrote Pepys, worrying about demands on the navy office,

and we have order to pitch upon 20 ships to be forthwith set out; but I hope it is but a scarecrow to the world, to let them see that we can be ready for them; though God knows, the King is not able to set out five ships at this present without great difficulty, we having neither money, credit, nor stores.
¹⁰

Yet war did not break out that year. In England, Charles was distracted by the religious controversies and the fear of rebellion and needed to concentrate his forces on possible unrest at home, rather than an enemy abroad. He also held back from war as long as he could, partly because he was trying to work out what the Dutch were really up to. De Witt was a powerful opponent, a ‘professional calculator’, a man who worked out the odds, as Charles himself did: ‘in effect, the first probability theorist to govern a great power’.
¹¹
It was hard to gauge his intentions, although Downing’s intelligence network sent back copies of the States General’s resolutions.
¹²
Downing made no secret of his contempt for the Dutch government, assuring Charles that after their experience against Cromwell’s navy in the 1650s, when the crisis came they would not fight but would give in to English demands. He worked hard to resolve the problems of trade, and in September 1662 England and the United Provinces signed a treaty by which both sides agreed to drop compensation claims and the Dutch promised finally to hand over Pulo Run.

Meanwhile the hopes of English merchants were caught up in even more complicated tangles of European power-play and diplomacy. The royal marriage treaty had committed Charles to helping Portugal against Spain, which retaliated by encouraging skirmishes at sea and in the West Indies. Charles soon tired of this obligation to Portugal: the Spanish attacks were costly, Bombay had still not been handed over and Tangier was proving impossible to defend. (In one ambush the Governor, Lord Teviot, with four hundred men, was killed in an ambush by the Moors.) After smoothing relations with Spain through Bennet and Bristol, Charles sent Sir Richard Fanshawe to Madrid to try to end the Spanish–Portuguese war, warning the Portuguese to co-operate and asking the Spanish for the same trading terms as the Dutch.

The overtures to Spain, in turn, caused problems with the French. Knowing that Philip IV of Spain was dying, and his weak-minded son Carlos was unlikely to father an heir, Louis XIV had revived the claim of his wife, Philip’s daughter Maria-Teresa, to the Spanish Netherlands. As soon as Philip died, Louis intended to invade Flanders to claim her property. To prevent trouble on the northern borders of Flanders, in 1662, to the alarm of Charles and the British parliament, he signed a treaty with the Dutch. As part of this treaty, he agreed to support the Dutch if they were attacked.

On one level it would seem that the last thing Louis wanted was an Anglo-Dutch war, which would divert his troops from the campaigns he planned in Flanders. For that reason, watching the growing tension between England and Holland, he began long, delaying negotiations to mediate a peace. But on the other hand, he was trying himself to build up French trade and had just founded a French East India Company – a war might sap the wealth and strength of both these sea-going nations and allow French ships to capture their trade routes. Knowing this, many people in England suspected that he actually wanted, indeed actively prompted, an Anglo-Dutch conflict. But Louis was even cooler at this game than his English cousin, and gave nothing away. He could afford to play a long, slow game, while Charles was increasingly under pressure.

If war broke out, Charles wanted Louis on his side, if possible, and if not, then he wanted to be sure that he would not fulfil his obligations to support the Dutch. In July 1663 he put on a show of strength to impress Cominges, organising a general muster in St James’s Park of four thousand soldiers drawn up in battalions, headed by Albemarle. But negotiations with the French foreign ministry once again became bogged down over protocol, as both Cominges in London and the English ambassador in Paris became obsessed with disputes over precedence and status.