A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (52 page)

Their ministers did all they could by preaching and praying to infuse courage into them: and they sung the seventy-fourth and the seventy-eighth Psalms. And so they turned on the king’s forces. They received the first charge that was given them by the troop of guards very resolutely, and put them in disorder. But that was all the action; for immediately they lost all order, and ran for their lives. It was now dark: about forty were killed on the spot, and a hundred and thirty were taken.
¹³

Ironically, Rothes was in London, assuring Charles of the security of his northern kingdom, when the rising broke out. Now he came scurrying back with a new title, as general-in-chief of the army. In their interrogation of the prisoners, and in their hunt for conspirators in the country, Rothes’s men used torture (which was banned by law in England but remained legal in Scotland) to obtain information. This horrified all who heard of it and many people risked their lives to save the rebels. The leaders were tried, convicted and strung up in groups on the gallows, still refusing to renounce the covenant. ‘For all the pains of torture,’ wrote Burnet, describing the death of the young preacher Maccail, he ‘died in a rapture of joy’:

His last words were, Farewell sun, moon and stars, farewell kindred and friends, farewell world and time, farewell weak and frail body; welcome eternity, welcome angels and saints, welcome saviour of the world, and welcome God the Judge of all: which he spoke with a voice and manner that struck all that heard it.

According to this account, Archbishop Burnet watched the men hang, deliberately keeping a reprieve from the king in his pocket. Charles had sent an urgent message, saying that he thought enough blood had been shed: all prisoners who agreed to obey the law should be released, and those who refused should be sent to the Plantations. But the king and the cleric had different notions of justice. Charles was pragmatic, wanting just enough judicial murder to stop further risings, but not enough to create martyrs. The Archbishop simply wanted revenge.

Lauderdale was appalled by the brief, tragic Pentland Rising and its consequences, but used it swiftly to increase his own influence. In early 1667, with the usual help from Robert Moray, who talked over affairs with Charles in the privacy of his Whitehall laboratory, Lauderdale persuaded Charles, correctly, that Rothes himself had in fact provoked moderate dissenters into becoming hard-line rebels by his clampdown on conventicles. First he turned Charles against Archbishop Sharp, whom the King had never liked, then slowly undermined Rothes’s power. In September, since Charles, said Lauderdale, found it so hard ‘to say bleak things’, he had personally drafted the letter revoking Rothes’s appointment as commissioner. The leading noble in Scotland was now Lauderdale’s close friend the Earl of Tweeddale, and soon Lauderdale himself held the post of commissioner, which he had coveted for so long.
¹⁴

With regard to nonconformity, of whatever kind, Charles was simply concerned to keep the peace as far as he could in all his three kingdoms, distinguishing conscientious religious dissent from republicanism and sedition. Thus in Ireland, Robartes and Berkeley were instructed to follow Ormond’s tolerant line, bolstering the strength of the Church of Ireland, encouraging Catholic clergy who supported the crown and reining in those who were difficult or obstructive. In Scotland, in 1669 (at the same time as he was attempting to suppress the more extreme dissenting meetings in England), Charles was asking Lauderdale to take a line of appeasement, while still urging that extremists should be ruthlessly weeded out. On 7 June Charles granted the ‘First Indulgence’, by which a long-discussed idea was finally put into practice, allowing moderate Scottish presbyterian ministers to be reappointed to their former parishes or to empty livings. When Archbishop Burnet and his followers objected, and sent an address to the king, Moray managed to slant their protest so that it looked like an attempt to force his arm. Charles, angry, ordered the Archbishop to resign. During this time, he told Moray, ‘in most pungent and unanswereable terms’, that he profoundly disliked the persecution of people for their religious beliefs.
¹⁵
His motivation was purely politcal.

In England, Charles’s attempt at comprehension had been a tactic to impose his authority as Supreme Head of the Church, disciplining the bishops and disarming dissent. But after the failure of that effort, his policy was straightforward: woo the moderates and crush the extreme sects. There were inevitable confrontations, the most significant of these being with the Quakers, and their new spokesman William Penn. In Ireland, the young Penn had helped Ormond put down the Carrickfergus mutiny but while there he had been impressed by Quaker meetings at Cork, and had returned to London (to the alarm of his father Sir William and the disgust of Pepys) as a member of the Society of Friends. Trained as a lawyer, Penn was an eloquent spokesman and skilled polemicist. His uncompromising attitude was shown by the title page of
Truth Exalted
, in 1669, written, it declared, ‘By William Penn the Younger, whom Divine Love constrains in a holy attempt to trample on Egypt’s glory, not fearing the King’s wrath, having beheld the Majesty of him who is invisible’.

In 1669 Penn also published a Quaker critique of the Restoration court and its culture in
No Cross, No Crowne
, and the following year he would make his first stand as a political activist when he defied the new Conventicle Act, writing
The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience
, addressed directly to Charles. When he and his colleague Richard Meade were tried for addressing a ‘tumultous assembly’ in Gracechurch Street, in court Penn defended his right to freedom of religious conscience as the right of every English citizen. Both Penn and Meade were acquitted, setting a key precedent in English law.
¹⁶
Tumult followed. The angry Lord Mayor imprisoned the jury, who were then released by the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, Sir John Vaughan, establishing yet another principle, the independence of juries.

In late 1669, when Penn made his protests in defence of liberty of conscience, the new Scottish parliament, persuaded by Lauderdale, passed a series of acts. One was an Act of Supremacy, drafted by Moray, recognising Charles’s authority over the Kirk, something that was deeply resented both by the presbyterians and the Scottish bishops. Another was a new militia act, which gave the King authority to raise twenty thousand men in Scotland. A third piece of legislation was a ferocious act against conventicles. ‘Never was King soe absolute as you in poor old Scotland,’ Lauderdale told Charles in November 1669.
¹⁷

Since the end of the Dutch war, in which Scotland faced high taxes and lost many men, with little hope of reward from the trade that the war was supposed to save, Lauderdale had aimed at stabilising Scotland’s position. The best way, he thought, would be through a more formal union with England, so that Scotland too would benefit from the Navigation Acts, and other protective legislation. By the end of 1669, thanks to Lauderdale’s management of the Scottish legislators, Charles had come round to the idea of union, and put the proposal to the Westminster parliament. Immediately, he met opposition, partly due to the spectre of the 20,000 Scottish troops that he could now supposedly call on at any time, but more because of the deep-rooted English distrust of the Scots, born of the two Civil Wars. Despite this opposition, Charles did appoint commissioners to examine the possibility, but in November 1670 he told them to set it aside, and meet ‘later’. It would be thirty-seven years until the union was actually achieved, in 1707.

The reaction to ‘Gyant Lauderdale…This haughty monster with his ugly claws’, and his ideas of union (which were seen as pimping his own mother nation for the King), was uniformly harsh. Satirists drew him as an absolutist, a chapbook villain, who

Lauderdale also roused enmity because of his flamboyant personal style. In 1669, the year he was campaigning for union with England, he took up again with an old flame from the 1650s, Elizabeth, ‘Bess of Dysart’, now a red-haired, dynamic woman in her forties. In reaction, Lauderdale’s wife Anne went to Paris in disgust. When she died there in 1671, he married Bess. She had great beauty, thought Burnet, but it was her clever conversation and passion that made her stand out:

She had studied not only divinity and history, but mathematics and philosophy. She was violent in everything she set about, a violent friend, but a much more violent enemy. She had a restless ambition, lived at a vast expence, and was ravenously covetous; and would have stuck at nothing by which she might compass her ends.
¹⁹

The Lauderdale establishments in Edinburgh and at Ham House in Richmond were notoriously sumptuous and extravagant. Bess was a political force in her own way, and it was under her influence that Lauderdale dropped his allies, Moray and Tweeddale, early in the next decade.

The careers of Ormond and Lauderdale followed opposite curves. While Ormond fell in the late 1660s and waited in the wings to be recalled, Lauderdale soared into power. In 1672, on the eve of the third Dutch War, Charles made him a duke, and then a knight of the Garter. He clung to his power like a tyrant, and Charles backed him in all his repressive measures. But while Ormond was restored in the mid-1670s, and remained Lord Lieutenant of Ireland until Charles’s death, by the end of that decade it was clear that Lauderdale had over-reached himself and must fall. Ousted from office and disabled by a stroke, he died in 1682, three years before his king.

BEHIND THE SCENES
Charles was brooding again over his country’s position in Europe, and its control of the seas. What would be his best move? Ostensibly he was still firmly behind the protestant triple alliance with the Dutch and the Swedes, but privately he had not forgiven the Dutch and still saw them as the great competitors, who must be checked if British trade was to flourish. The triple alliance was an interim move, to prove his strength and independence of his cousin Louis. Charles admired and envied Louis, for his style, his wealth, his palaces, his official mistresses, his balls and ballets, fetes and fireworks. He envied him even more for his obliging officials, his vast standing army, his overflowing treasury, and above all for his freedom to rule without being weighed down by parliament, like a shackle around the leg. He too would have liked to say ‘
L’Etat, c’est moi.
’ But while he may have had a hankering for absolutism, Charles’s style was very different. He was by nature more informal, more humorous, more sceptical. Recognising the changes that the Interregnum had brought, and the ideas that had inspired the Commonwealth, he accepted that things had changed. A British monarch must now rule with parliament.

Charles was concerned for his country’s honour but had only a touch of Louis’s obsession with glory, or his notions of the divinity of kingship. While Louis desired to be the ‘Most Christian King’ of a Catholic nation that tolerated no heresy, Charles felt religion was a personal matter, although one of great concern to the state where it challenged the regime’s power. And although Louis held a far better hand, Charles’s pragmatic approach and willingness to bluff gave him certain advantages.

Louis XIV could be seen as the supreme embodiment of the Age of Absolutism, while Charles II, with all his faults and failures, was a monarch of the dawning Age of Reason. Below the surface, France was riven by division, and its trade and industry were stifled by the control and restrictions of the state, while the fluid conditions in Britain fostered an individualism that helped the growth of a commercial and industrial nation. Louis’s far-sighted minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, recognised the problems. In 1660 nearly all the produce from French colonies had been carried in Dutch or English ships, but from the middle of the decade Colbert began reorganising the state finances, setting up state industries, like the great textile factories, and attempting to find some way for France to share in the expanding global trade. Trading companies were formed in quick succession: La Compagnie des Indes Orientales in 1664, des Indes Occidentales, 1665, du Nord, 1669, du Levant, 1670. To support these, Colbert strengthened the navy, and fortified the ports.

Louis, however, was more concerned with his army and his ambitions on land, expanding his boundaries to bolster the security of his dynasty. His ambitions, and his thirst for
la gloire
, as well as his anger with the Dutch for interfering in his campaigns in Flanders, seemed to offer Charles the chance of a favourable alliance. The intermediary, as before, was his sister Minette. During the spring and summer of 1668 their letters were full of court gossip and of concerns for Minette’s health. One enduring theme was the atrocious state of her marriage and the intrigues in the French court, which made those of Whitehall seem like village flirtations. Despite his own infidelities and his overwhelming devotion to the unscrupulous chevalier de Lorraine, Minette’s husband, the duc d’Orléans, was ferociously jealous, to the point of implying that Minette might even be having an affair with the nineteen-year-old Monmouth. She herself was not innocent. In the early years of her marriage she had encouraged the beau of the court, Armand, comte de Guiche, at the expense of another suitor, the marquis de Vardes. When the latter complained to Louis, the King sent de Guiche to a military post far from Paris. As de Vardes, encouraged by this success, grew increasingly insolent, Minette turned for help to her mother, to Charles, and to Louis, who reacted (or overreacted) by banishing him to the Camargue for twenty years. De Vardes’s revenge came through his friend, the chevalier de Lorraine, who virtually took over Minette’s house. She was feeling anxious and lonely, consoled only by Charles’s suggestion that they might meet again soon. He asked Monmouth, on his second trip to France that year, to try to arrange a visit which, he promised his sister, ‘if we can bring to passe, will be the greatest happiness to me imaginable’.
¹

In August 1668 a new French ambassador was sent to London, Colbert’s younger brother, Charles Colbert, marquis de Croissy. As before, reams of letters flowed between London and Paris, as Colbert sifted court gossip and reported on factions and feuds. Charles did not trust him and became still more firmly resolved to settle matters privately, cousin to cousin, king to king. This time he was in a stronger position, since he was working closely within the triple alliance and discussing the inclusion of other protestant states. So when Louis offered the terms Charles had asked for in 1667 (payment for troops during any war, and control of Ostend and Nieuwpoort), he shifted the ground. Politely expressing his sincere desire for closer union, but citing the alarm of his people, he asked that Louis abandon the strengthening of his navy and remove the protectionist tariffs.
²
Louis, as Charles suspected, was bound to decline.

Now that Louis was making overtures, Charles played hard to get. To begin with, he proposed a treaty of commerce. This, he explained to Minette, was where they must begin, ‘because I must enter first upon those matters which will render the rest more plausible here, for you know that the thing which is nearest the harte of the nation is trade and all that belongs to it’.
³
Beyond this, he suggested a treaty of friendship, its terms as yet unspecified. By December 1668, matters had become so delicate that Charles sent his sister a cipher to use in future letters. One complication was that Buckingham, always keen on a French alliance, was feeding information to Colbert and promising him that he could swing the deal within a year. Buckingham’s supporter Sir Ellis Leighton (‘a mad frieking fellow’ according to Pepys) carried urgent letters to Paris, addressed to Minette, Henrietta Maria and St Albans.
⁴
Charles watched every move, keeping his own approaches secret. When Colbert told him of Leighton’s visit to Paris, he expressed intense surprise and annoyance, as if he knew nothing of it at all.

Determined to break the triple alliance, and making little headway with Charles, in early 1669 Louis approached the Dutch, seeking an agreement on trade and assurances that they would not interfere more in Flanders. But de Witt too was now arguing from strength, and the talks came to nothing. Meanwhile Charles wrote to Louis, as he told Minette, assuring him of ‘the desire I have to enter into a personall frindship with him’:

and to unite our interests so, for the future, as there may never be any jealousys between us. The only thing which can give any impediment to what we both desire is the matter of the Sea, which is so essenciall a point to us here, as an union upon any other security can never be lasting.
⁵

It was vital, he stressed, that no word should get out about these negotiations, so that no advances he made towards France ‘may ever turn to my prejudice’. This time, he suggested that any alliance between them could be kept secret, so that he could still maintain the façade of the triple alliance. He waited for a response. But even as he waited, he had a further move in mind. In return for a large sum of money, he would declare himself a Catholic.

Before he committed himself to making such a dramatic and fateful promise, Charles needed to create the right diplomatic team to support it. Bluff or not, in order to convince Louis, it was important that this team themselves should all be convinced of the sincerity of his desire to convert. He needed people who would be fired by zeal for the Catholic cause, and ask no awkward questions. According to his brother James, on 25 January 1669 – the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul – Charles called a private meeting. Those present included James himself; Arlington, a Catholic sympathiser despite his Dutch wife; his loyal, pro-Catholic right-hand man Clifford; and the elderly Catholic courtier Lord Arundell of Wardour, who was Master of the Horse to Henrietta Maria and would therefore have a good excuse for frequent trips to Paris. James himself still conformed outwardly to the Church of England, but he had already come to believe that salvation could only be found in Roman Catholicism. In James’s recollection, at this meeting Charles declared his longing to proclaim his Catholic faith, ‘with tears in his eyes’. Moved, the group came up quite independently with the novel idea of approaching Louis XIV.

James’s ‘memoirs’, compiled by others from his notes in the nineteenth century, are embroidered with hindsight and confused about timing. While some see his account as fantasy, most accept that the meeting happened (though some cavil at Charles’s tears), and one or two suggest that his conversion was genuine.
⁶
Yet it rings true of Charles as consummate actor and dissembler, and also as a man who, despite his scepticism, longed for lost certainties. He had little time for doctrine and no evident fear for his soul, but he would have been a Catholic if he could, for the sake of community and family. It was imperative for this group to believe him sincere. It was important too, that Minette should accept his desire to convert as genuine. Despite her fashionable ways, she was pious, and while she could be Machiavellian in her understanding of strategy, and was keenly alert to the danger of Charles making any public avowal, the religious aspect of the secret deal became crucial to her. Charles needed France, she once wrote revealingly, ‘to ensure the success of the design about R’, as if that were his main aim.

The negotiations continued. Charles deliberately used unlikely couriers to carry his letters and seems to have actively amused himself in choosing them. One night in February 1669, shortly after Coventry was arrested and Ormond had been dismissed from his office in Ireland, Charles was dining at the Dutch embassy. After dinner, according to the ever knowing Pepys, ‘they drank and were pretty merry’.
⁷
In their cups, Tom Killigrew outraged Rochester by teasing him about keeping his wife in the country and not letting her see London. When Killigrew complained, Rochester gave him a box on the ear, at which Charles ‘very angerley called my Lord R. an impertinent fellow and bad him be gon’.
⁸
Technically, for Rochester to cast a blow in front of the King, was
lèse-majesté
, or treason. This time it had happened publicly, and embarrassingly, in a foreign embassy. But not only did Charles cheerily pardon Rochester (‘which doth give much offence to the people here at Court, to see how cheap the King makes himself’), next day he walked up and down with him ‘as free as ever’.
⁹
Rochester ruined this reprieve almost at once by joining in the duel while Coventry was in the Tower and as a token banishment Charles sent him off to Paris, carrying a letter to Minette. ‘You will find him not to want witt’, he told her drily, ‘and did behave him selfe, in all the duch warr, as well as anybody, as a volunteer.’
¹⁰

When he wrote this, Charles was in Newmarket. Instead of travelling decorously he had delayed his departure and had to rush, early on the morning of 8 March. The day before was a Sunday, and there was good news as Sir Thomas Allin had finally concluded an agreement with the Algerians, who had taken a ship hostage at Tangier.
¹¹
Charles and James met at Arlington’s house, ostensibly to discuss the Tangier deal. But was this really the subject of their abrupt Sunday meeting? On the same day, Charles finally sent Arundell to Minette, carrying a detailed offer to Louis. His cover was attending Henrietta Maria, and Minette should on no account, Charles told her, suggest he had any mission from himself. Respecting his sister’s interest in English affairs, he explained, too, his irritation with Coventry, and brushed off her enquiry about Ormond by explaining that he did, of course, still trust the Duke and the reasons for his dismissal were ‘too long for a letter’.
¹²
Then he signed off hastily, ‘and so my dearest sister good night, for tis late, and I have not three howers to sleepe this night’.

After that brief sleep, Charles and James, with Rupert and Monmouth, set off for Newmarket at three in the morning. In the rush, their coach overturned at King’s Gate in Holborn, ‘and the King all dirty, but no hurt’.
¹³
The cause was a mystery, except that it was dark ‘and the torches did not, they say, light the coach as they should do’. There were rumours of a plot but this was, it appeared, a simple accident. The next ten days at Newmarket were free of incident, except for the entertainment provided by the Abbé Pregnani, Louis’s incompetent courier and spy. Pregnani was an amateur astrologer who had worked out a foolproof system for finding winners by the stars. To Charles’s amusement he lost on every race, and the Duke of Monmouth, following his tips, lost even more.

Charles’s bid was now on the table, waiting for Louis to respond. Charles’s terms were that the triple alliance would remain in place, but England and France would make a private alliance, both offensive and defensive. As part of this, Louis should agree to drop his naval expansion, and if there was a war (which Charles did not yet accept) England should receive money, ships and men. The most startling clause followed. If Louis gave £200,000 to make his position safe, Charles would declare himself a Catholic.

After initial shock, the French response to ‘the Grand Design’ was encouraging. Louis stopped his negotiations with de Witt, agreed to abide by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (keeping the peace with Spain that the triple alliance had worked for), and promised to build no warships for a year. On the issue of trade, he agreed that there might be grounds for commercial co-operation. And as for the religious issue, he would send Charles the money he asked for to support his Catholic conversion. But he too now laid down a condition: any agreement must be founded on a war with the Dutch. At present this was the last thing Charles wanted. For a few months, the negotiations stopped.