A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (56 page)

Over these years, as the pressure mounted, so Charles’s resolve stiffened. He tried still harder to protect his family, not only recalling James, but also briefly allowing the return of Monmouth, the son he loved, until Monmouth’s actions led to a final banishment. In 1680 the situation reached a crisis, as a new parliament brought in a new Exclusion Bill, which was only defeated in the Lords after a famous duel of speeches between Shaftesbury and the eloquent Halifax. Parliament was summoned to meet at Oxford, away from the Whig-dominated City of London, in 1681. Old battles of authority were fought again. Sir Robert Filmer’s
Patriarcha
, written during the conflicts of the 1640s, was now published, arguing that kingship was a ‘divine and natural law’ model of government, like that of a father in the family, instituted by God in the person of Adam: the king alone could be the maker of laws. In opposition, John Locke drafted a reply. Ten years later, Locke’s two
Treatises of Government
would replace both the patriarchal law of Filmer and Hobbes’s theory that submission to arbitrary power was vital to protect society, with a new, contractual argument, in which the right of any government to rule depended on the consent of the people. But the crisis of 1681 was not a moment to utter such thoughts. For a moment, civil war hovered like thunder – people saw visions of pikemen fighting in the sky. Finally, when Shaftesbury not only suggested that Monmouth be declared legitimate, but asserted that parliament could legislate to encompass this without royal consent, Charles stood firm. ‘My Lords’, he said, ‘let there be no self-delusion’:

I will never yield, and will not let myself be intimidated. Men become ordinarily more timid as they grow old; as for me, I shall be, on the contrary, bolder and firmer, and I will not stain my life and reputation in the little time that, perhaps, remains for me to live. I do not fear the dangers and calamities which people try to frighten me with. I have the law and reason on my side. Good men will be with me.
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Just as the Commons were about to pass the bill, Charles summoned the MPs to the Lords, who were sitting in Christ Church. Unknown to anyone, he had smuggled in the full robes and regalia that he wore to the formal opening and closing of a parliament. When the Commons squeezed into the hall, they were confronted by a king in his glory. It was a dazzling piece of theatre. In one sentence, and with one gesture, Charles ordered parliament dismissed. It was the last parliament of his reign. In a declaration, he then appealed directly to his people, many of whom, with memories of the civil war, already felt that parliament had gone too far. His direct appeal was another great gamble, a brilliant propaganda coup. Gradually the tide turned back towards him. The fraudsters of the Popish Plot confessed, one by one, and Shaftesbury was charged with treason. The London jury, full of exclusionists and Whigs, was unable to decide and the charges were dismissed with a plea of
ignoramus
, ‘we do not know’, but in 1682 Shaftesbury would flee to Holland, where he died within a year. Oates was arrested (cruising for boys) and then charged with perjury. After three years in prison he was released – to become a Baptist preacher.

This was the time of ‘the Stuart Revenge’, when a wary Charles was ‘watchful, voracious, ready to spring’.
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Using carefully legal methods, his ministers bullied corporations – including the City of London – removed unhelpful judges and handed out places. In the last years of his reign, with the people quiet and parliament dismissed, the king seemed, astonishingly, to be on the brink of reasserting absolute power almost by sleight of hand. One further plot remained, the Rye House Plot, designed to assassinate both Charles and James on their way back from Newmarket, and to give the throne to the Duke of Monmouth. When it failed (a fire in his lodgings at Newmarket had made Charles leave early), a group of leading Whigs were arrested, although it is doubtful whether their involvement was more than mere talk. The Earl of Essex, who had fought for Charles I in the Civil War, slit his throat while imprisoned in the Tower. Lord William Russell, Algernon Sidney (whose trial was loaded against him by Judge Jeffreys) and the former Leveller John Wildman were executed for treason, becoming known as the famous ‘Whig martyrs’. Here, as in the executions during the Popish Plot, Charles might have intervened. His ‘laziness’, to use Halifax’s term, with regard to judicial vengeance, is a measure of his political ruthlessness, a counter to his personal warmth.
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Why was there so little resistance in Britain to Charles’s personal rule? Partly perhaps the fear of civil war, so fresh in people’s memories; partly the apathy that comes with prosperity – in the early 1680s taxes were light and there was a boom in trade. Despite the Dutch war and the panic over exclusion, the initiatives of his first decade went on from strength to strength. The Royal Society continued their work and the Royal Observatory was founded at Greenwich. The theatre flourished, bringing the great age of Restoration comedy, whose wit belies the darkness of the time. Whatever the reason, people closed their eyes to the fact that no parliament was sitting, no checks were operating on Charles’s power.

In those troubled years Charles’s complicated personal life was relatively serene; its even temper interrupted only by the tempestuous stay of the flamboyant, lushly beautiful Hortense du Mancini, niece of Cardinal Mazarin and cousin of Mary of Modena, thought by many to be yet another French spy. Catherine, his queen, found a way of living in Charles’s hectically amorous court. During the row over the Test Acts she sheltered his mistress Louise, now Duchess of Portsmouth, by including her name among those of her own women. Barbara Castlemaine had long ago been set aside, made Duchess of Cleveland. Nell and Louise stayed by Charles to the end. Nell, never a duchess, lived in her house in Pall Mall, Louise in her Whitehall apartments draped in tapestries depicting French royal palaces, her rooms crammed with vases, mirrors and silver. Charles’s many children were also well cared for: rattles and cradles figure in the royal accounts, looking glasses and laundry-maids as the children grew older.
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He paid for weddings, and gave dowries and allowances. He gave dukedoms to six sons, and made his daughters’ husbands lords. But his affection went beyond material generosity – he teased them, worried over them, loved them. His first son, James, Duke of Monmouth, whom he had doted upon in his childhood and youth, broke his heart by his ambition, his kingly progresses and his involvement in the schemes of Shaftesbury and the Rye House Plot. Banished from court, by the mid-1680s Monmouth was in exile in the Hague.

Charles still loved his pleasures and plans. He never had enough money to rebuild Whitehall as he had dreamed, and after 1670 his ambitious new building at Greenwich lay boarded up and unfinished. But in the bitter winter of 1683, the coldest ever known, he was planning a new palace at Winchester. He went racing, he went to the playhouse, he walked his spaniels in the park. And to the end, his court remained his strength and his weakness. On Sunday 25 January 1685, John Evelyn pursed his lips at the sight of its ‘unexpressable luxury, & prophanesse, gaming and all dissolution, and as it were total forgetfulnesse of God’. The king was ‘sitting, & toying with his concubines’, Louise de Kéroualle, Barbara and Hortense Mancini, with the ‘French boy singing love-songs, in that glorious Gallery, whilst about 20 of the greate Courtiers & other dissolute persons were at Basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2000 in Gold before them’.
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‘Six days later was all in the dust’, Evelyn added with a righteous sigh. A sudden fever struck, followed by a stroke. When Charles neared death – although it is unclear whether he was conscious or comatose – he turned to the Catholic Church. He was received into the faith, and the last rites were administered by Father Huddleston, the priest whom he had met in hiding after the Battle of Worcester, now a chaplain to the queen. Had Charles’s Anglicanism, or his scepticism, been bluffs all along? Or was his confession an honourable fulfilment of his promise to Louis? Or a judicious last gamble, with nothing to lose? Certainly, he received Huddleston with a cry of pleasure, was granted absolution and received the sacrament. He listened to the prayers for the dying and asked Huddleston to repeat the act of contrition, with its final request ‘Mercy, Sweet Jesus, Mercy’. He asked for the curtains to be opened, so that he could see the dawn on the river. On 6 February 1685, at noon, when the tide was high, Charles II died peacefully in his bed, loved by most of his people. A week later he was buried very simply in Westminster Abbey. He had achieved a supreme balancing act, ruling a divided people for twenty-five years. His brother James, that darker mirror image, fled the country after only three.

Present becomes past, past becomes ‘history’. It is different, although less easy to analyse, if we turn it into lives, whether they be farmers and seamstresses, writers and artists, or kings and queens. The gambles Charles II took to stay on his throne succeeded, with the help of subsidies from Louis and a ruthless reliance on, and sacrifice of, his ministers. But in the larger game that continued when he left the table, he lost. He had overestimated the flexibility of James, and the security offered by Louis. And he had underestimated one player, his nephew, William of Orange. When William came over to England in 1670, a few months after the Treaty of Dover, attempting to claim the money owed to his family, Charles arranged for Backwell to repay him over four years, against the security of receipts from the Customs. He treated him with due respect as his sister Mary’s son, giving him precedence over Prince Rupert. But he could not take him seriously. William was too young, too solemn, too Dutch. He disliked the wild court and bitterly resented being made to seem foolish by drink. Charles continued to patronise him as a junior relation, even when he became captain-general of the Dutch forces, and then stadtholder and the husband of his niece Mary. Yet this was the man – cautious and steely – who would topple the Stuarts in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Clarendon’s grandchildren, Mary and Anne, did, as the Chancellor’s opponents had feared long ago, eventually become queens of England.

James II and Mary of Modena leave Whitehall in 1688.

James II and Mary of Modena slipped out of London on the day that William of Orange reached the capital in 1688. Only the Catholics of Ireland rose to support James, and in his bloody attempt to regain his throne, he was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne. He returned to France, becoming a virtual recluse at St Germain. He died there in 1702. His heart was taken to his mother’s chapel at Chaillot, his brain to the Scots College, and his body was buried in the English Benedictine church in Paris – temporarily – until his bones could be brought to England. This never happened. During the French Revolution his tomb was vandalised and his corpse displayed for crowds to gaze at. Then it was destroyed.

Many of those who shone or struggled in the 1660s, like Danby, and Halifax, and Dryden, lived on and made new careers in the reigns of William and Mary and Anne. Others had long departed. Some deaths were quiet, some public and tragic. Rochester died five years before Charles, who had pardoned him so often. They were together at Newmarket at the races in spring 1680, and then Rochester, already ill and nearly mad with a concoction of venereal diseases, went home to Woodstock Park. There he underwent a typically intense, spiritual conversion, declaring his sins dramatically until he died in July. By contrast the sober Arlington died quietly five months after his king, calling, like Charles, for a Catholic confessor on his deathbed. Monmouth died in the Tower in the same month. He had landed in Lyme Regis a month before, in his ill-fated attempt to remove James from the throne, and after his ragged army was defeated at Sedgemoor, he was found hiding in a ditch and carried to London. He died in agony, from five blows of the axe, his death so bungled that those watching would have torn the executioner to pieces, said Evelyn, if he had not been protected by a guard.
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Buckingham died in Yorkshire two years later from a chill caught out hunting, having run through his estate and lost most his friends. He was buried, with a splendour and panache that he would have appreciated, in the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey.

Catherine of Braganza slowly recovered from a profound depression after Charles’s death. Very bravely, she pleaded with James II to spare the life of Monmouth, whom she had been so fond of when he was a boy. She spent some time in the convent that she had founded in Hammersmith and then moved to Somerset House for almost a decade. In 1692 she went home to Portugal, where she lived quietly, until in 1704 she was called to act as regent to her ill brother, Pedro II. Several victories over Spain were won under her rule and she was Regent when she died a year later, at the palace of Bemposta.