A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (46 page)

DURING THE MONTHS
of convoluted talks with the French ambassador, Charles had been keen to impress on Louis that although the constitutions of their two countries were different, in Britain as in France, the king was the ultimate power. In March 1668 he wrote to his sister, countering her anxiety about factions in parliament. He was, he admitted, in debt after the war and it would take time to get out of it, but his position was secure:

I will not deny but that naturally I am more lazy than I ought to be, but you are very ill informed if you do not know that my treasure, and in deede all my other affaires, are in as good a methode as our understandings can put them into. And I think the peace I have made between Spaine and Portugal and the defensive league I have made with Holland, should give some testimony to the world that we think of our interest heere. I do assure you that I neglect nothing for want of paines. If we faile by want of understanding there is no helpe for it.
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Later in the letter he added tersely, ‘I do assure you that my Lord of Buckingham does not governe affairs here.’ He was not ‘a slave to Buckingham’ or anyone else.

The disclaimer was needed because Buckingham was very much in the public eye in 1668. It was a year of duels and dissenters. In the parliamentary debates after the Dutch war, a real battle was fought over who ruled the nation. When court audiences watched Dryden’s
Conquest of Granada
a couple of years later, many royalists thought that Charles, like Dryden’s King Boabdelin, had been too merciful to his enemies, with the result that a powerful opposition was growing in parliament. At its heart stood Buckingham, with Ashley beside him. This spring, however, Ashley fell dangerously ill, suffering from a liver ulcer that turned into a festering tumour, a plight from which he was rescued by a young doctor and scholar from Oxford, John Locke.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury

The balance between the crown and parliament, which Locke would later examine in his
Two Treatises of Government
, was increasingly uneasy. Charles’s game plan was to rule as much as he could on his own, making policy in the Privy Council and more secretly, with his inner cabinet and his Gentlemen of the Bedchamber. But parliament held the purse strings and had the power to crush any bills he wished to push through. Parliament’s drive to make the monarch accountable was also growing more vocal, both in their demand to see accounts and in the enquiries into mismanagement of the war. The nascent court and country parties, Marvell’s ‘Trick track men’, were preparing the way for the emergent Whigs and Tories later in the reign. But the factions that worried Minette also upset many MPs. Pepys’s cousin Roger, speaking for the independent country gentlemen, said he ‘never knew what it was to be tempted to be a knave in his life, till he did come into the House of Commons, where there is nothing done but by passion and faction and private interest’.
²

As Charles saw it, managing parliament was now his biggest challenge. The Commons were delighted at the removal of Clarendon but they were still bristling, fearful of the threat of a standing army, and wary of the king’s use of the money they had granted. It seemed, at first, that Buckingham, with his energy and popularity, would be a useful tool, if he could be converted to working for the government rather than against it. In the autumn of 1667 he and his supporters had enjoyed the taste of battle, demanding public accounts, demolishing navy officials, attacking Mordaunt and, most of all, trying to impeach Clarendon.
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A signal that his group was gaining favour came when his right-hand man, George Savile, was created Baron Savile of Eland and Viscount Halifax, in January 1668. Outside parliament, Buckingham cultivated former republicans, and intellectuals like John Wilkins and his chaplain Thomas Sprat, historian of the Royal Society. Marshalling his forces, he may have felt that he was using Charles, rather than the other way round. Once more, the issue was one of what exactly it meant to rule, to be in control.

While Buckingham drew the public gaze, it was Arlington, stouter now but still with his odd black plaster over his nose, who gained most by Clarendon’s fall. Cautiously, he picked his way through the mess that followed the wars. He would be the most potent minister of state for the next five years, and a considerable influence for a decade to come. Charles was careful to put Arlington’s protégés into positions where they actually had some effective power, while appeasing Buckingham by letting him buy the non-political position of master of the horse, at a huge price. (This was doubly clever, since Buckingham’s Yorkshire stables added good blood-stock to the royal stud.)

Charles watched both his ministers coolly, as Halifax, who served him later, could see. ‘He lived with his Ministers as he did with his mistresses,’ Halifax wrote; ‘he used them, but he was not in love with them. He shewed his judgment in this, that he cannot properly be said ever to have had a
Favourite
, though some might look so at a distance.’
⁴
His later courtier Ailesbury was equally sure that there was a ruthlessness in the way Charles watched favourites sparring and noted that he often quoted the maxim, ‘When rogues fall out, then the master is like to know the truth.’ By the same maxim, added Ailesbury, the King ‘rather fomented underhand than otherwise the two parties of Whig and Tory’.
⁵

By keeping Buckingham in favour, Charles would make Arlington wary and more dependent, and stop him becoming too powerful.
⁶
At the same time, making Buckingham work on the government side should divert the dangerous energy that had stirred up the previous session. The only risk in this ploy lay in Buckingham’s volatility. Many people felt he was unstable, including, with hindsight, Gilbert Burnet. ‘He had no principles’, decided Burnet, ‘of religion, virtue, or friendship. Pleasure, frolic, or extravagant diversion, was all that he laid to heart. He was true to nothing, for he was not true to himself. He had no steadiness nor conduct: he could keep no secret, nor execute any design without spoiling it.’
⁷
This judgement resembles Dryden’s baleful picture of Buckingham during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, as Zimri in
Absalom and Achitophel
,

Dryden was writing with both political and personal hostility, aggravated by Buckingham’s caricature of him as the foolish playwright Bayes in
The Rehearsal
. But even in 1668 Buckingham was Dryden’s ‘blessed madman’, thinking up a new scheme every hour, a compelling orator with no middle course:

Buckingham badly wanted to stay in high office, needing the revenue from fees and gifts to pay the interest on his staggering debts. When Magalotti was collecting gossip for sketches of leading courtiers, he drew Buckingham as a total contradiction, eloquent and brilliant, yet ‘atheistical’, depraved and especially violent to his male, as opposed to female, lovers. (Buckingham, when accused of sodomy, replied neatly, ‘God knows, I have much to answer for in the plain way, but I never was so great a Virtuoso in my lusts.’
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) But at the start of 1668, ‘in the ‘plain way’, he was already teetering on extremes: ‘a man of no more sobriety than to fight about a whore’, decided Pepys.
¹⁰
The previous September his mistress, Anna Maria Brudenell, Lady Shrewsbury, had suddenly left England and gone to live in a convent in France. A month later, when Harry Killigrew insulted her at the theatre, Buckingham lost his temper and hit Killigrew over the head with the flat of his sword. Once again, Charles took his side. Killigrew had already damaged his standing with Charles by making slurs on Barbara Castlemaine’s reputation and by his mounting debts, and after this fracas he was virtually banished to France. Anxious that this should not be misinterpreted as approving of Lady Shrewsbury, Charles wrote to Minette, sending his letter via Buckingham’s sister, the Dowager Duchess of Richmond, who was about to become Henrietta Maria’s Lady of the Bedchamber. ‘Though I cannot commende my Lady Shrewsbury’s conduct in many things,’ he wrote firmly, ‘yett Mr Killigrew’s carriage towards her has been worse than I will repeate, and for his demele with my Lord of Buckingham he ought not to brag of, for it was in all sorts most abominable.’ Forestalling any criticism she might hear when Killigrew put his side of the story, he added that Minette should not believe ‘one word he says of us here, for he is a most notorious lyar, and does not want witt to sett forth his storyes pleasantly enough’.
¹¹

Although Lord Shrewsbury had been complaisant about his wife’s earlier lovers, in January 1668 he issued a challenge to Buckingham. They gathered their seconds, Bernard Howard and Sir John Talbot supporting Shrewsbury, and a Mr Jenkins and Robert Holmes backing Buckingham.
¹²
When Charles heard that a duel was planned, full of alarm, he told Albemarle to try to keep Buckingham indoors, and at least make sure that he did not fight. The General, misunderstanding, or mishearing, and thinking his role was only to be an informer, did nothing. On 21 January the duellists met at Barn Elms. Howard ran furiously at Jenkins and stabbed him fatally, Holmes slashed Talbot across the arm, and Buckingham dodged, feinted, and plunged his sword into Shrewsbury’s chest. Shrewsbury’s seconds bundled him into a coach, soaked in blood, and drove to Arundel House.

A doctor said that although the wound was grave, Shrewsbury would live. Six days later he received a royal pardon for indirectly causing Jenkins’s death. Buckingham and his seconds were also pardoned by ‘immediate warrants’ authorised by Charles’s signature alone, rather than by the Privy Seal, Lord Robartes, who might not have been so lenient.
¹³
At the next council meeting, Charles had to argue his case forcefully, invoking the services to the crown of everyone involved, and promising ‘the extreme penalty’ in the case of another duel. It seemed that Buckingham could do anything. On 10 February he was at the opening of parliament, his popularity only slightly dented by the duel. But during these weeks, while Buckingham spoke passionately in favour of toleration, or enjoyed himself watching Etherege’s new play, Shrewsbury was slowly weakening from septicaemia. Six weeks later he died.

All this time, Lady Shrewsbury had stayed in France. Yet this did not stop the stories that she had gone to the duel dressed as a page, holding her lover’s horse, and then spent the night with him, his shirt drenched with her husband’s blood. After Shrewsbury died she returned to London, mourning with theatrical grief. Buckingham himself was shocked, but spellbound. ‘Her sadness became her so well’, he wrote sardonically, ‘that it bred delight in everyone else,’ and, even more tartly, ‘’Twas her husband grieved whilst he was living, ’tis reasonable she should do it now he is dead.’
¹⁴
Despite his sarcasms Buckingham was still obsessed. When Harry Killigrew came back from France, still sneering that the countess was any man’s for the asking, she hired a gang of footpads and watched from her coach as they waylaid Killigrew, killed his servant, and stabbed him nine times, leaving him for dead. At court, Buckingham defended her, saying the gang only meant to scare Killigrew and that his wounds were his own fault, as he had run at them with his sword. James and Rupert both suggested Buckingham was part of the conspiracy to attack him, but Charles did not listen.

Even more defiantly, in May Buckingham moved Lady Shrewsbury openly into his own house. As the newsmongers reported, when his wife protested that she could not share a house with his mistress, he answered, ‘Why Madam, I did think so; and therefore have ordered your coach to be ready to carry you to your father’s.’
¹⁵
Which, noted Pepys, ‘was a devilish speech, but they say true; and my Lady Shrewsbury is there it seems’. Even sharper gasps of horror were heard when he had their child christened in Westminster Abbey.

Again, Charles did not blink. He needed Buckingham in the House of Lords, and he needed his allies in the Commons. A deal was hatched whereby particular men would act as ‘undertakers’ in parliament, working to get the king a good grant of money in return for offices. One of the things Charles hoped for in the spring session was that these undertakers, in addition to securing his funds, would speak for the nonconformist interest, arguing for greater liberty of conscience. He still smarted from the failure in 1663 of his Declaration of Indulgence, and this strategy would finally let him fulfil his Breda promises, and, he hoped, pacify the growing discontent among protestant nonconformists. Charles’s renewed interest was also driven by a desire to snub the bishops, nearly all of whom had backed Clarendon and blamed his fall on Barbara Castlemaine. When Charles tried to consult Sheldon about Clarendon, the Archbishop had merely said, ‘Sir, I wish that you would put away this woman that you keep.’ This time he went too far. Charles removed him from the Privy Council and would not let him preach at Whitehall.
¹⁶
He never regained his previous power.
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