A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (33 page)

There was, however, another route to the French king which could bypass the ambassadors. Minette, trapped in her marriage to the vain and spiteful Monsieur, was very close to Louis, and may even briefly have been his lover. Having proved her loyalty in tortuous court intrigues, she had his complete trust. From late 1663 Charles’s letters to Minette often contained indirect messages to Louis.

After a lull, in the spring of 1664 English and Dutch hostilities accelerated again. The gossip in the playhouse and the coffee-houses was all of war. In February Pepys went to the coffee-house with his friend the hemp-merchant George Cocke,

Who discoursed well of the good effects in some kind of a Dutch war and conquest (which I did not consider before, but the contrary), that is, that ‘the trade of the world is too little for us two, therefore one must down; 2ndly, that though our merchants will not be the better husbands by all this, yet our wool will bear a better price by vaunting of our cloths, and by that our tenants will be better able to pay rents, and our lands will be more worth, and all our owne manufactures, which now the Dutch outvie us in.’
¹³

But was this really a merchant’s war? Some people felt it was fomented by factions at court. Others thought Charles hoped to crush the Dutch republic in order to safeguard his own throne, or to aid the Orange cause.
¹⁴
But as far as trade was concerned, Captain Cocke was right to point first at the issue of cloth. In March 1664, a committee of the House of Commons was set up to look into complaints by clothiers about the state of their industry. The committee was then enlarged and its brief widened to include trading problems generally, and merchants were asked to bring their grievances to parliament, particularly those that related to Dutch traders. To some contemporaries, the hidden agenda was all too clear: the government wanted an excuse for war. Was Charles playing a devious game? Captain George Cocke told Pepys, ‘The king’s design is, by getting under-hand the merchants to bring in their complaints to the parliament, to make them in honor begin a war.’
¹⁵

Some merchants were horrified at the threat of war, as a grave disruption. But there was no doubt that they feared the Dutch were gaining a monopoly of international trade, and that such a monopoly also implied a wider ‘dominion’ over the seas. Since 1662 the East India Company had submitted petition after petition couched in these terms, claiming, for example that the Dutch were aiming ‘to perfect at once their long-designed work of ruining the whole trade of the English in India and dispossessing the Portuguese of the little that still remains in their hands’.
¹⁶
They also suspected them of planning to capture the Levant trade, and the navy provided convoys in the Mediterranean to protect shipping there. The Royal Africa Company in particular was adamant the Dutch must be stopped. On 21 April, Sir Thomas Clifford, now head of the Council for Trade, told the Commons that the Dutch were ‘the greatest single obstruction to foreign trade’. The Commons agreed, passing a resolution to assist the king ‘against all opposition whatsoever’.
¹⁷
From this point on, the war party – led by the Duke of York and Albemarle – urged full-scale conflict. Clarendon advised against it and so did William Coventry, both of them arguing cogently that trade was better served by peace and greater mercantile efficiency.

Everywhere the Dutch were roundly abused. A Dutchman, it was said, ‘is a lusty, Fat, Two-legged Cheese Worm. A creature that is so addicted to eating Butter, Drinking Fat Drink and Sliding [skating] that all the world knows him for a Slippery Fellow.’
¹⁸
And because the Dutch themselves proudly proclaimed that they were ‘masters’ of the seas, of the Indies, of Africa – many British commentators saw their ambitions as imperial and global. Day by day the mood swung towards war.

News from West Africa travelled slowly. For weeks the ships tacked their way up the African coast, past the Straits of Gibraltar and the cliffs of Portugal, and across the Bay of Biscay. In the spring of 1664, the Privy Council finally heard that Holmes had captured the island of Goree off Cape Verde, one of the chief Dutch bases, and a string of other stations further south along the Gold Coast. To capitalise on this, Charles agreed to send the British warships south to Guinea under Rupert’s command.

In May Charles showed off his warships, letting them parade in formation in the Channel, and two months later he took Catherine to see the fleet sail out of Chatham and down the Medway (‘taking off his wig and
pourpoint
to be more at his ease, by reason of the extreme heat of the sun’ and catching a bad, feverish cold as a result).
¹⁹
As he told Minette, he was still sure, or still hoping, that the Dutch would cave in. It was, however, increasingly difficult to calm the British public. ‘Sir George Downing is come out of Holland,’ he wrote in June, ‘and I shall now be very busy upon that matter’:

the States keep a great braging and noise, but I believe, when it comes to it, they will look twise before they leap. I never saw so great an appetite to a warre as is, in both thise towne and country, espetially in the parlament-men, who, I am confident, would pawne their estates to maintaine a warre, but all this shall not governe me, for I will looke merely at what is just and best for the honour and good of England, and will be very steady in what I resolve.
²⁰

If war did come he would be ready with good ships and men, and leave the rest to God.

Three weeks later he told her that he was providing a man-of-war to accompany eight East India vessels, stressing that this was only for fear of Dutch attacks. The Dutch ambassador had arrived, he said, and was begging him not to let the ships sail, lest hostilities might be sparked by the ‘indiscretion of some of the captaines…You may guesse, by such a simple proposition, whether these people are not affraide!’
²¹
To cap his show of strength he agreed that his forces should remove the ‘nuisance’ of New Amsterdam, the Dutch stronghold nestling in the heart of British colonies on America’s eastern seaboard. In mid-May four vessels sailed from Portsmouth, commanded by Captain John Nicholls, arriving off New England in late July. Soon the British men-of-war appeared at the mouth of the Hudson river, having come, Nicholls told Governor Stuyvesant, to support the English title to the lands. The Dutch colony had no defences, and on 27 August Stuyvesant surrendered. New Amsterdam was handed without bloodshed to the English crown, having been granted in advance by a confident Charles to his brother James, Duke of York. As news trickled home, bells were rung in triumph. But Charles was very careful, in his correspondence with Minette, to convey to Louis – who was obliged by his treaty with Holland to act only if the Dutch were the victims, and not the initiators, of aggression – that this was simply a justified recapture of British property. ‘’Tis a place of great importance to trade, and a very good towne,’ he wrote. ‘It did belong to England heretofore, but the Duch by degrees drove our people out of it, and built a very good towne, but we have gott the better of it, and ‘’tis now called New Yorke’.
²²

Sending his letters to Minette through safe messengers, Charles tried to find a formula for a treaty of ‘strict friendship’ that might keep France out of the war. Meanwhile, despite the threat of conflict, trade went on. Ships sailed up the Thames to the Pool of London from the West Indies and the East, and from India itself. Some brought priceless gifts for Charles, including jewels in a purse of purple satin: a huge yellow diamond, a fine ruby, a blue-and-white sapphire, and a great pearl which he gave to Catherine.
²³

But the tension was rising. One of the Privy Council’s fears was that the English republicans who had fled to Holland would use this as an opportunity to foment another uprising: they did in fact form an English regiment to fight with the Dutch. To find out about such plots, and about Dutch plans and naval manoeuvres, Henry Bennet set up a network of spies.
²⁴
The system was profoundly inefficient, not only because the post was routinely opened and the coded letters were all too easy to decipher, but because many informers worked as double agents. William Scott, the son of the regicide Thomas Scott, former head of Cromwell’s intelligence services, who had been executed in 1660, was now living in Flanders. He routinely fed Downing misleading information and as soon as the English agents were in place, Scott betrayed them to the Dutch.

In late summer, however – although this was not something the spies picked up – it seemed as if the Dutch were willing to enter talks. Through Downing, de Witt put forward a highly secret proposal, agreeing to many of the long-standing English demands.
²⁵
Yet the Privy Council remained silent. Were they waiting for yet more concessions, or could it be, as some suspected, that they really wanted war after all?

In October the pretext came. Despite Holmes’s successes, since early summer the Royal African Company had been complaining of ‘insolent protests and threats from the Dutch’ off the African coast.
²⁶
The ships for Rupert’s new expedition were almost ready to sail but the Dutch had pre-empted them. In October news reached the Privy Council that the admiral Michael de Ruyter had already sailed south with part of the Dutch Mediterranean fleet to West Africa. Charles at once ordered all naval vessels to join Rupert at Portsmouth, and appointed commissioners to supervise treatment of the wounded, and prisoners of war.

Waiting for action, the Duke of York was bored. Longing to deploy his fleet he spent all day and most of the night down at the wharves, seeing his ships armed and stores taken on board. Charles, too, visited the dockyards and boarded the ships, often dragging Catherine and her sea-sick ladies with him. In the November rain and hail he talked to the captains and watched the great new ships being launched. Swept up by such enthusiasm and by the simple longing for a fight, courtiers and aristocrats like the Dukes of Richmond, Buckingham and Norfolk volunteered to serve on board ship, even if they could not tell one end of a hawser from another.

A small Dutch warship, drawn by Hollar

Both Charles and James were passionate about the navy, and knowledgeable about ships. The British navy had a range of warships, arranged in order of importance from the great first-rates, which could carry as many as a hundred guns, to the small sixth-rates.
²⁷
The big three-masted first-rates, which were only brought out in wartime, were heavy, deep-hulled, powerful beasts, beautifully ornamented and carrying acres of sail. They needed enormous crews of up to eight hundred men, under the command of the captain and his lieutenants and the non-commissioned officers, and they also had to carry their own surgeons and doctors, cooks and carpenters, trumpeters and gun-smiths, and often a troop of soldiers, forerunners of the marines.

Discipline was harsh, space below decks was horribly cramped, sanitation non-existent. The crew survived the long periods of waiting largely through being permanently drunk – beer and spirits was one area the navy was liberal in. They were led by officers out for glory, often rash and violent, jealous of each other’s victories and endlessly quarrelling among themselves. To add to the feuds, there was a clear division between the ‘tarpaulins’ – the commanders who had risen from the ranks during the Commonwealth, like Monck, Sandwich and Lawson – and the ‘Cavaliers’, who included veterans from Prince Rupert’s civil-war fleet, like Holmes and Thomas Allin, and men whose command came through the patronage of the King or Duke.

This was the fleet now assembling. On 18 December, the Privy Council ordered attacks on Dutch shipping wherever possible. The next day, with only eight ships under his command, Allin attacked the Dutch Smyrna convoy coming out of the Straits of Gibraltar, thirty merchantmen and three men-of-war. He took three ships, bringing his prizes and his prisoners slowly back to port. At a meeting at Worcester House, Clarendon and Southampton, who were known to be against the war, finally admitted its reality, telling the company there was no longer time to debate if it should be ‘war or no war: it was come upon us, and we were now only to contrive the best way of carrying it on with success; which could only be done by raising a great present sum of money’.
²⁸
At the opening of the parliamentary session Charles appealed to the Commons in his speech, for a minimum of £800,000 upon which a back-bench MP, Sir Robert Paston, coached by Clarendon, that it should be no less than £2,500,000.
²⁹
The silent house ‘sat in amazement’, until the motion was seconded, with all the court placemen carefully staying silent until the Speaker proposed the vote.
³⁰
This massive grant, to be raised over three years, was the largest ever won by a monarch. But even this was too little, said the Navy Board, since there was so much pay in arrears and so many ships to be repaired before any real fitting out could be done.