A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (34 page)

Some MPs were suspicious that the funds were merely for court indulgences. Others, who had been urging war for some time, saw corruption in the Privy Council as the reason why it had not yet begun. Clarendon was currently building a huge house on land granted to him in Piccadilly, employing the best craftsmen and using the most expensive materials. Almost as soon as the scaffolding went up people had called it ‘Dunkirk House’, implying he had been bribed by the French. Now they called it ‘Holland House’, shouting that the bribes came from the Dutch. To get the money from parliament Charles had to promise that once he had the grant, he would not simply make a quick peace with the Dutch, and then spend it on himself.

The winter of 1664–5 was grim. In Paris, the Dutch ambassador Van Benningen proved alarmingly persuasive at keeping Louis to his word, and at blaming the English for all the hostilities, despite the good efforts of Charles Berkeley, sent as Charles’s personal envoy. People seeking omens looked anxiously at the sky as a new comet flared across Europe. Out at sea, Sandwich charted its progress for several weeks in his log, seeing it as a broom sweeping the constellations, as if a creature of myth was interfering with his navigation: ‘After sunset I saw the Blazing Star again in the Whale’s Mouth…and observed his distance from Aldebaran…The stream of his light like a brush besome stretched out towards Orion’s head.’
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But Charles – unlike most of his subjects – chose to decide that the comet was a portent for good, and his court still celebrated the festivals of the New Year in their old style. And at Candlemas, 2 February 1665, there was a fine masque of ten dancers, ‘surprizing his Majestie’.
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However relaxed he seemed, war was on his mind. In his letters, he teased Minette about her latest pregnancy, wishing her an easy labour: ‘A boy will recompense two grunts more, and so good night, for feare I fall into naturale philosophy, before I think of it.’
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The weather was so icy that he could hardly hold his pen, yet he wrote longer and longer letters, fearing that Van Benningen had used ‘all possible artes and trickes’ to make him seem the aggressor, and threatening that if no agreement with France was offered, he would look elsewhere, to Spain.
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Meanwhile, backed by an eager parliament, he sent Sandwich, with eighteen ships, to hunt down the Dutch fleet in the North Sea.

In late February, disconcerting news arrived – the talk at the Exchange was all of de Ruyter’s exploits and of the British being ‘beaten to dirt at Guiny’.
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Charles reassured the Commons that he had asked Downing ‘to demand speedy justice and reparation’. He did not doubt, he said, that the States General, as good allies, would agree to his demands.
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By now this rang hollow, but he still hoped that the Dutch would back down, and that if they did not, at least Louis would not feel bound to help them. Both hopes would prove false. The Dutch stood firm, while Louis called Charles’s bluff about seeking a Spanish treaty, and blocked his attempts to find allies elsewhere. English envoys criss-crossed Europe seeking alliances. On their way back from Russia, the Earl of Carlisle and Marvell called in vain at the courts of Sweden and Denmark. No help at all was forthcoming, not from France or Scandinavia, Spain or Portugal. Britain was on its own. On 4 March 1665, Charles declared war on Holland.

THE NEWS THAT BRITAIN
was at war with the Dutch was announced by heralds sent to the Exchange in London and to the major cities in the provinces. When she heard of it Minette wrote to her brother, clearly passing on a message from Louis. She wrote calmly that as it would ‘not be desireable’ for the French King to enter the war on the side of the Dutch, perhaps now was the time for Charles to come to a separate agreement that would keep the French neutral:

I beg of you to consider if some secret treaty could not be arranged, by which you could make sure of this, by giving a pledge that you would help in the business he will soon have in Flanders…Think this over well, I beg you, but never let anyone know that I was the first to mention it to you.
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Soon Louis sent two extra ambassadors to join Cominges, in what became known as ‘
la célèbre ambassade
’. As they drove from Dover to London, the new ambassadors reported, many people asked what their mission was, and ‘being informed that we meant to secure peace between England and Holland, they without hesitation answered: “If they come for nothing else, they might as well go back”’.
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One of the envoys was a lawyer, Honoré Courtin, a shrewd choice since Charles took to this short, rather absurd figure with his ironic smile, easy manner and clever mind. The other was the sixty-four-year-old Henri de Bourbon, duc de Verneuil, illegitimate brother of Henrietta Maria, and thus uncle to both kings, ‘an handsome old man & a greate hunter’ as Evelyn described him.
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He had brought his dogs and two dozen horses with him. In all his months here the hunt seemed of far more importance than the war.

The old concept of honour that the duc de Verneuil represented, however lazily, underpinned Charles’s attitude to the war as much as his mercantile interests. The two were strangely, dangerously, intertwined. And the conflicts between old and new values were often argued out in that mirror of the times, the theatre. Early the previous year, at the King’s Theatre, Dryden and Howard had written and produced
The Indian Queen.
The play was set in Mexico and Peru, with a fictional ‘restoration’ plot, in which Montezuma, a noble savage who has to learn the restraints of so-called civilisation, is restored to the Mexican throne. The production was lavish and the play set a new style of heroic drama, dealing with the clashes of passion and duty, desire and honour. This was a self-consciously aristocratic mode, a resurrection of lost ideals of chivalry and the sun-like glory that surrounds a king, a glory that was fast disappearing from Charles himself. At one point, the fearsome queen Zempolla asks if honour itself is merely indulgent self-display:

In the spring of 1665, Charles saw the King’s Company perform the sequel,
The Indian Emperour, or The Conquest of Mexico
. Here – using the same sets and costumes for economy’s sake – Dryden brought Europe face to face with the exotic New World, through the arrival of Pizarro and the supremely honourable Cortez. The idea of conquest itself was double-edged since Cortez is ‘vanquished’ by passion for Montezuma’s daughter, Cydaria, while Montezuma is also enfeebled by love – a double warning to a womanising king. Cortez was played by Charles Hart and Cydaria (very badly) by the fourteen-year-old Nell Gwyn, in her first recorded role. The two stars, as everyone knew, were lovers. Love and war, distant as they seemed, echoed each other in fervour and despair.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

In the real war, the young blades, and the not so young, were eager to prove their code of honour in the heat of battle. Their vaunted heroism would later inspire furious satire, and just as Marvell demolished the posturing of the war leaders, so Dryden’s pretensions to grand heroic tragedy would be punctured by Buckingham and Rochester. This spring the words ‘love’ and ‘honour’ were also bandied about in the latest court scandal, starring Rochester himself. He was now eighteen and in need of a rich wife and for some time he had been pursuing the heiress Elizabeth Mallet without luck, although Charles himself urged her to accept him. In late May Rochester decided to abduct Elizabeth, and hired armed men to grab her on her way home from supper with Frances Stuart and bundle her into a coach. She was soon found, but Charles, enraged, sent Rochester to the Tower. A month later he sent the King a vehement petition, declaring,

That Inadvertency, Ignorance in the Law, and Passion were the occasions of his offence. That had hee reflected on the fatall consequence of incurring your Majesties displeasure, he would rather have chosen death ten thousand times then done it. That your Petitioner in all humility & sence of his fault casts himself at your Majesties feet, beseeching you to pardon his first error, & not suffer one offence to bee his Ruine.
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The comically self-abasing appeal would have fitted straight into a stage tragedy. Perhaps amused, Charles released him and bundled him off with a note to Sandwich, enlisting him as a ‘volunteer’ for the fleet.

While the court debated points of honour, both romantic and military, the Privy Council rushed to get ready for war. Urgently needing accurate information about the Dutch plans, they expanded the network of spies, both men and women. One person recruited was another future playwright, the first professional female English writer, the young Aphra Behn. In Surinam in 1663, Behn had met the dissident William Scott. He was clearly attracted to her, and Governor Willoughby alerted Bennet, who saw that such a connection might be useful. Tom Killigrew, who knew her well, also backed the idea of employing her. Behn was given vague instructions and set off to find Scott, who was now in Flanders, with the intention of gleaning information and persuading him to work for the British.
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Her code name was Astraea, and Scott’s Celadon. But this was no starry personal romance. Scott fed her false information, Bennet failed to pay her and she had to pawn her rings to keep out of debtor’s prison.
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The whole intelligence system was a shambles. And while the information from abroad was scanty, the government were distracted by scare-mongering reports from informers at home, insisting that radical groups were colluding with the enemy and were waiting for the Dutch to invade so that they could rise up and topple the King.

By late spring, the hard-working Navy Board had managed to pull together a fleet of over a hundred ships, including converted merchantmen. But despite heroic efforts by civil servants like Pepys, vital supplies of tar and canvas and guns were still low, and un-paid suppliers refused to fill further orders. When the ships did sail, they were short of clothing and food, and indeed of sailors. Thirty thousand men were needed for a large wartime fleet and countless seamen were impressed against their will from country towns and fishing villages, and the back streets of Britain’s cities. They deserted by the dozen when they reached port. Those who served could expect little reward. Instead of pay they received vouchers called ‘tickets’, which they often sold at lower value in the nearest seaport, made desperate by waiting for the cash.

Another problem, as Clarendon noted bitterly, was the need to make provision for the injured, and for the prisoners of war. In mid-April two Dutch vessels were captured and brought back to London. Technically any prisoners were now under the charge of the newly appointed commissioners for the prisoners of war, one of whom was John Evelyn. Since the other commissioners were either in the country or had volunteered to serve at sea, he rushed to Whitehall to take advice. Now came a moment, almost medieval, where courtesy and conflicting loyalties cut across hostilities, indicating again how Charles’s court was poised between ancient and modern. Charles asked for one of the captains among the prisoners to be brought directly to him. This was twenty-three-year-old Cornelis Evertsen, the eldest son of the vice admiral of Zeeland, the Dutch province most friendly to the House of Orange. When Evertsen arrived, Charles gave him his hand to kiss, granted him his freedom, questioned him about the battle and sent him off to the Dutch embassy with a gift of gold pieces, to await his passport home. His generosity was a gesture of honour. Orangists were not, he felt, and never would be his enemies, only republicans.

Samuel Pepys in 1666, by John Hayls

Meanwhile guards were sent to watch the prisoners at Chelsea, and Evelyn arranged for doctors to attend the wounded, ‘both Enemies, & others of our owne…severall their leggs & armes off, miserable objects God knows’.
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His experience brought home the suffering of the combatants and their families. Like many people, he sought someone to blame. Against a date at the start of this month, on the day set aside for public fasting, years later he added a note to his diary. This had been a day of humiliation and prayers, he remembered, ‘for success of this terrible Warr, begun doubtless at secret instigation of the French &c to weaken the States, & Protestant interest’.
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And this was only the prelude.