A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (53 page)

Nanteuil’s portrait of Louis XIV, 1664, with the armour beneath his fine cravat hinting at the ruthless calculation beneath his elegance

Charles’s offer to convert to Catholicism may, perhaps, have been intended largely to support his brother. James was clearly drifting towards Catholicism, and disastrous as Charles felt this to be, it would make sense to have Louis’s support in place if trouble arose about his claim to the throne. Buckingham and Ashley had already been campaigning behind the scenes against James, expressing their determination to have a protestant heir. Charles advised Minette, in heavy code, to write to Buckingham warmly to keep him sweet, but ‘pray have a care you do not say any thing to him which may make him thinke that I have employed anybody to Louis’.
¹⁴
It was vital that he should not suspect ‘that there is something of Catholic interest in the case’.

The problem of the succession was currently uppermost in Charles’s mind. That spring, less than a year after her last miscarriage, Catherine fell pregnant again. Charles gave Minette all the details, anxiously, but also with the briskness of a man who had fathered several children. She had missed her periods twice, he reported:

and she had a kind of colic the day before yesterday which pressed downwards and made her apprehend she should miscarry, but today she is so well as she does not keep her bed. The midwives who have searched her say that her matrix is very close, though it be a little low; she has now and then some little shows of
them
, but in so very little quantity as it only confirms the most knowing women here that there is a fair conception.
¹⁵

Two weeks later he ended another heavily enciphered letter with this news. ‘I have no more to add, but to tell you that my wife, after all our hopes, has miscarried again, without any visible accident.’
¹⁶
The denial of an accident referred to rumours that Catherine had become frightened when Charles’s pet fox suddenly appeared in her bedroom. He would take no blame, but nor would he entertain any more hopes. ‘The physicians are divided whether it were a false conception or a good one, and so good night, for ’tis very late.’ James would, after all, be his heir.

In May, plans for Minette’s visit had to be postponed because she too was pregnant. As she sweltered heavily in the summer heat, bedridden for much of the time, she longed for a son. Her daughter Marie Louise was now six, but her infant son, the duc de Valois, had died of a fever three years before. Since then she had suffered a miscarriage. She longed to produce an heir, largely as her duty to Monsieur would then be done. At midnight on 27 August she gave birth to a girl, Anne Marie. Exhausted, she sank into depression.

A fortnight later came the news that Henrietta Maria had died suddenly. Frail and unable to sleep, she had defied her doctors’ advice and taken a large dose of opium, sleeping never to awake. Despite her move to Paris Henrietta Maria had been very much a part of British court life, and with her death an era ended. She had made no will, and Charles was her sole heir. He gave Minette her mother’s rope of pearls and her house at Colombes, but many jewels and fine paintings now made their way to Whitehall. When she died, Minette’s daughter Marie Louise and the Yorks’ daughter Anne, who was receiving treatment for her eyes in Paris, were both staying with their grandmother. Now they came to Minette. The nursery at St Cloud was full of girls, instead of the longed-for boys. But in time two of these three girls would be queens – Marie Louise as Queen of Spain and Anne Queen of England – and the baby Anne Marie would be Duchess of Savoy.

Minette’s knowledge that Henrietta Maria had passionately wanted her sons to become Catholics made her support the religious element of the Anglo-French agreement even more strongly. As the letters went back and forth, over the summer Charles shored up his bargaining position. Forty warships patrolled the coast in ostentatious fashion. His diplomats worked hard within the triple alliance and his envoys scurried across Europe, arranging talks with the princes of Germany and the Scandinavian governments, canvassing alliances, mediating in disputes and arranging commercial treaties. He was in a strong position when the autumn arrived, bringing a new round of diplomatic juggling. Once again, Louis approached the Dutch, and once again Charles approached Louis. This time Charles was less hostile to the idea of a war, following Minette’s cynical advice that he should simply agree with Louis’s demands for a war, take the spoils of victory, and then ruthlessly use his alliances with German princes and with Spain to contain French power. Thoughtfully, he placed new demands on the table.

This was the position when parliament met again in October 1669, ignorant of the dealings behind the curtain. Hoping that both the Commons and the Lords would finally have put the disasters of the Dutch war behind them, Charles greeted them in his most affable and charming style, asking for funds to continue his successful foreign policy with the triple alliance. To his dismay, the Commons plunged back into old disputes, Buckingham attacking Arlington’s friend Sir George Carteret, treasurer of the navy during the war, and Arlington and Ormond attempting to impeach Buckingham’s ally, the Earl of Orrery. Sir John Verney kept a score, as if this were a tennis match:

13 Oct. Bucks and Arlington are still pecking one the other.

10 Nov. Bucks and Arlington were made friends on Saturday last, and long it will last.

16 Nov. Bucks and Arlington are broke out again.
¹⁷

When the Commons finally proposed a grant of supply, not only was it too low but there were fierce arguments about how it should be raised. Throwing up his hands, on 11 December, Charles abruptly prorogued parliament until February. The move was shrewd. Greeting the MPs and Lords at the opening of the session on Valentine’s Day 1670, Charles was friendly but severe: ‘One thing I must earnestly recommend to the prudence of both Houses: that you will not suffer any occasion of difference between yourselves to be revived, since nothing but the unity of your minds and counsels can make this meeting happy, either to me or to the nation.’
¹⁸

The farcical disputes were dropped. The break had allowed Charles’s naval officials to work out a way of planning for the future and their proposals were accepted. Treading carefully, Charles now worked to keep both houses sweet. He agreed to the Commons’ demand for a new Conventicle Act (the blow to the dissenters that would prompt the defiance of Penn), but insisted that the act should carry a clause, like the one that Lauderdale had steered through in Scotland, affirming that the king had supreme authority over Church affairs. This, he believed, would allow a window of hope for him to introduce more toleration in the future. Treading carefully, he backed the Commons in their dispute with the Lords over who had jurisdiction in such cases as
Skinner
vs
the East India Company
, the subject of long debates that had blocked the previous session. And lest that decision in favour of the Commons should offend the Lords, he made a conspicuous point of attending debates in the House of Lords personally, including the discussion of Lord Roos’s divorce. The strategy worked. With minimum fuss parliament granted £400,000, to be raised by new taxes on wine and vinegar.

This amicable agreement allowed Charles to continue his own complicated dealings, hidden from Westminster. Early in November Louis had demanded that Colbert de Croissy be informed of all the terms of the treaty under discussion, including the religious clause. This was done, but Ralph Montagu, now ambassador in Paris, was kept in the dark, lest word should leak back to London. Negotiations in Paris were therefore carried on by Minette. By December Charles had come round to the prospect of another Dutch war, but the new terms he offered Louis were staggering. He asked for £1 million down, and then £600,000 a year until the war ended (this was not, in fact, inflated, being roughly the sum that the Navy Board judged essential to pay existing debts and keep a large fleet afloat). In territory, if Holland was defeated, Charles asked for three ports controlling the trade entering the Rhine. Louis would keep faith with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, thus allowing Charles to remain, in this respect, true to the triple alliance. If Louis continued with any further plans to dismantle the old Spanish empire, then Britain must have a share in South American territories. Charles must affirm his Catholicism before any Dutch war was begun, but Louis must pay the money he had promised for this act of conversion within six months of the treaty, even if no declaration had been made.

Swallowing his shock, Louis reduced the number of warships that he had calculated the English would need to contribute to the proposed war, thus cutting the giant sums requested. Eventually the two sides ironed out their differences: Charles would send sixty ships and forty thousand soldiers; Louis would pay nearly £250,000 for the ships and fund the troops himself. Any prizes that English vessels took would belong to Charles.
¹⁹
It seemed that Charles had nothing to lose. He would get the money for his conversion, but could delay the war indefinitely by delaying the announcement of his Catholicism, which both sides had agreed would come first, but for which no date had been set.

After more talks and secret meetings, more letters, more dextrous web-weaving, Charles and Louis finally reached an agreement. Thomas Clifford drafted papers, the Irish peer Richard Belling translated them into French and Arlington led the negotiations. In April Colbert and Arlington wrangled over the final details. Charles was in Newmarket again, and in a desperate last attempt to get him to soften requested restrictions on the French navy, Colbert rushed up to Suffolk to see him. He would not budge, and a weary Colbert finally advised Louis that he must give in or call the whole thing off. On 2 May the deal was done.
²⁰

Minette’s visit was now imminent. Louis had suggested that she come over from Dunkirk while the French court was touring through the conquered territories in Flanders, thus making it look simply like a convenient trip to see her brother. The problem was the hostility of Monsieur to such a visit. Over the past year, he had persuaded Louis to deprive his wife of her two closest friends, imprisoning Bishop Cosin and banishing her children’s governess, the Countess of Chaumont (who had both been involved in Minette’s plots to disgrace the chevalier de Lorraine). Ralph Montagu, who was devoted to Minette, wrote passionately from Paris to Arlington and to Charles, who protested firmly.
²¹
Louis took note. In the ensuing arguments he found a pretext to have the chevalier arrested for slander and in mid-winter, in a furious sulk, Monsieur whisked his wife off to virtual banishment in their gloomy country house at Villers-Cotteret, near Soissons.

A Dutch print from the early 1670s, showing Louis XIV chasing Charles, offering him gold, while French troops attack Holland. Allegorical figures of peace and trade stand on the left, but on the right battle rages.