A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (6 page)

The royal yacht
‘Bezan’
, 1661

Charles also had a smaller Dutch pleasure boat, the
Bezan
, which was often used by members of the Navy Board to take them up and down to Deptford and Greenwich.
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He lavished money on his yachts, fitting them out and making them luxurious. Account books over the years are full of entries such as ‘carpett in the Henrietta yacht’, or ‘one fine Turkey carpet for the King’s yacht Isabelle’. The
Isabelle
had walnut armchairs and stools, a walnut bed with a carved end and a very large strong table with twisted pillars for legs, which would fold down on both sides.
³⁰
On his yachts, as on the tennis court, Charles showed off his sporting ability, his keen eye and love of speed.

This physical power was part of his allure, his presence as a strong, youthful king. He packed work into the mornings to leave the rest of the day free. One day in October he dashed off a note to Hyde at eight o’clock:

I am going to take my usual Physique at tennis. I send you heere the letters which my Ld Aubigny desires me to write, look them ouer, and if there be no exceptions to them returne them by twelue a clock, for I would willingly dispatch them this afternoone.
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In the afternoons, after the Council’s work was done and Hyde had hobbled home, the king was free. Now was the time for entertainments, high and low. In August 1660, in the Great Hall where his parents had staged their elegant masques, he watched a show with tight-rope dancers. The skill of the dancers was legendary on the continent and now they, and three new court acrobats, entranced the English court. The next month, in a very different venue, he went to the Lady Fair across the river in Southwark. The fair, which had been subdued during the Interregnum, now burst into life again in a fortnight of riotous entertainment, with freak shows, and monkeys dressed as court gallants, turning somersaults on the wire, carrying lighted candles or balancing cups of water, ‘without spilling a drop’. All the court went to see ‘the Italian Wench daunce to admiration, & performe all the Tricks of agility on the high rope’, and to admire her father, who could lift enormous weights by the hair of his head alone.
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Charles, however, wanted to bring smarter entertainment to London, and soon began negotiating with an Italian opera company and with foreign musicians. At Whitehall he had the old Cockpit theatre fitted with a new stage floor and pavilions in the gallery for musicians and players. Men worked through the nights to get it ready for the first performance on 19 November. In the same month, in a disdainful gesture at puritan restraint, Charles granted an exclusive patent to Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant to build two playhouses and create new theatrical companies. They opened in converted tennis courts, Killigrew’s King’s Company, with experienced actors and the rights to many old plays, in Gibbon’s Tennis Court in Vere Street, and Davenant’s Duke’s Company, patronised by James, in Salisbury Court near Whitefriars. Davenant was the most innovative, with a young, dynamic company and new writers, and in 1661 he moved to a newly built theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, complete with movable scenery. Both troupes lavished money on costumes, sets and music.

The most startling attraction was seeing women on stage, as in continental theatres. To begin with boys still played female roles. The current darling was the seventeen-year-old Edward Kynaston, ‘a Compleat Stage Beauty’, whom the ladies of quality swept off in their coaches to Hyde Park, still in his costume, as if he were one of them.
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But Kynaston’s reign was now over. The royal patent turned puritan disapproval on its head, declaring, tongue in cheek, that since it had been ‘scurrilous’ and unnatural to see men taking the parts of women, from now on all female parts should be acted by women, so that the plays would be ‘not only harmless delights but useful and instructive representations of human life to such of our good subjects as shall resort to the same’.
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Court women, including Henrietta Maria, had acted in the royal masques, and in 1656 an actress, Mrs Coleman, had appeared in a private performance before Cromwell of Davenant’s own opera,
The Siege of Rhodes
. But the first time a woman stepped onto the public London stage was as Desdemona with the King’s Company on 8 December 1660. Within a year every play was sporting dancing, fast jigs, and cross-dressing roles to show off the actresses’ fine legs.

Charles’s other new public passion was the park. He and James often walked with their courtiers and their dogs in St James’s Park, and in his first autumn three hundred labourers were called in to dig a new canal. He planted trees and groves and fruit trees and added to the exotic animals and birds that had been in the royal menagerie since the time of his grandfather James I. Foreign ambassadors and English trading companies brought new additions, from the Russian ambassador’s pelican from Astrakhan to eighty-two ostriches from Morocco. There were deer of all kinds and flocks of wild fowl, for whom Charles created a decoy, ‘which for being neere so great a City, & among such a concourse of Souldiers, Guards & people, is very diverting’.
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St James’s Park, in Faithorne’s map of 1658, before the new canal was dug, showing the road curving round from Charing Cross to Whitehall, and Berkshire House opposite St James’s Palace. To the north, Piccadilly is an open country road.

Here too Charles was on display, showing off his physical grace by playing pell-mell on the new court he had built (on the site of the present Pall Mall), over eight hundred paces long, modelled on one at Utrecht. Here, enthused the poet Edmund Waller,

In Waller’s rapturous verse he is the emobodiment of martial force, as well as youthful beauty, his game a warning to the nation as well as a diversion.

The court itself was diverting, as if dressed for a play. The very cut of court clothes spoke defiance and proclaimed a new age. Only two years before, Sir John Reresby had arrived in London after brawling and seducing his way round Europe, to find that his clothes and his black servant immediately marked him out as a target:

The citizens and common people of London had then soe far imbibed the custome and manners of a Commonwealth that they could scarce endure the sight of gentlemen, soe that the common salutation to a man well dressed was ‘French dog’ or the like. Walkeing one day in the street with my valet de chambre, who did wear a feather in his hatt, some workemen who were mending the street abused him and threw sand upon his cloaths, at which he drew his sword, thinking to follow the custome of France in the like cases. This made the rabble fall upon him and me, that had drawn too in his defence, till we got shelter in a house, not without injury to our bravery and some blowes to ourselves.
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Now these French fashions were flaunted in the face of the people. The men were peacock-fine from top to toe, from their shallow-brimmed beaver hats, trimmed with ostrich feathers, to their beribboned shoes or loose-topped boots, with boot-hose tumbling over the top. Their short doublets covered floppy linen shirts, which flowed down to wide-legged trousers called ‘Rhinegraves’ or ‘petticoat breeches’, hanging loosely from the hips, and garnished with yards of ribbons.
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Some had legs so wide that Pepys wrote of one man who ‘put both his legs through one of his Knees of his breeches, and went so all day’.
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From France came a new vogue for wigs (Louis XIV had forty wigmakers). This too was new and unsettling. ‘Counterfeit hair’, wrote the author Randle Holme, is ‘a thing much used in our days by this generation of Men, contrary to our forefathers, who got Estates, loved their Wives, and wore their own hair’.
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Soon wigs, like the new silk handkerchiefs that men waved nonchalantly as they walked, became a target for London thieves, tweaked off the head by a clever dog or by a small boy carried on another’s shoulders. Many courtiers adopted black tumbling locks, mimicking the king, but there was a considerable choice. You could have simple locks to cover the ears and neck, fixed to a cap under your hat; a short bob; a ‘campaign wig’, complete with knots, bobs and a curled forehead; or a
frise
, full of small crisped curls. It was in fashion to comb the hair in public with large combs, a nicety to be cultivated, like taking snuff.

Clothes could cost a fortune. Buckingham allegedly spent £30,000 on his jewel-encrusted suit for the coronation. Although Charles’s own coronation clothes were ordered from Paris at great expense, in daily life he was less flamboyant. One day in 1661 he turned up to see the Chancellor in a plain riding-suit and velvet cap, ‘in which he seemed a very ordinary man to one that had not known him’.
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But however casually he acted, he stayed stylish and cool, a pattern of good breeding. He dressed elegantly and formally, following Ormond whom he had always revered as a model. Ormond wore his hat stiff ‘as the king did, without a button and uncocked’, and had waistcoats laid out for him every morning – ‘satin, silk, plain and quilted’ – to choose according to the weather. In winter-time people were allowed to come to court with double-breasted coats, a sort of undress. ‘The Duke would never take advantage of that indulgence; but let it be ever so cold, he always came in his proper habit; and indeed the king himself, the best judge of manners of his time, always did the same, though too many neglected his example.’
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In these early months, magic and ceremony and archaic formality collided at court with colour and fashion, liberty and licence. Charles was at once formal and engagingly human. A month after his arrival an urgent personal appeal appeared in
Mercurius Publicus
, asking help in finding his dog. It was black,

between the greyhound and a spaniel, no white about him only a streak on his breast, and tayl a little bobbed. It is His Majesties own dog, and doubtless was stolen. Whoever finds him may acquaint any at Whitehall for the dog was better known at Court than those who stole him. Will they never leave robbing His Majestie? Must he not keep a dog?
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The urgent but witty tone was not that of a self-important monarch. ‘So affable was he in the galleries and park,’ wrote one courtier of Charles’s later days, ‘he would pull off his hat to the meanest.’
⁴⁴
But this very affability meant that when he chose to ‘take on Majesty’, his dignity was even more striking and effective. Charles understood the language of gesture and the old forms of kingship, but it was clear to all who watched him that his personal style was something quite new.

IT WAS A HUGE TASK
to re-establish monarchical government, while taking into account, as Charles had promised, ‘the advice of my Parliament’. He and his advisers had to remake the administration, bringing in leading figures from the past regime, while ensuring that the king was surrounded by people he could trust. The structure inherited from medieval times remained the model.
¹
Power flowed from the king through the administration, divided between the Privy Council, the Exchequer and the Chancery. These were headed respectively by the two Secretaries of State, the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Treasurer. The Secretaries were responsible, among other duties, for representatives abroad, and for the Signet Office, which dealt with royal letters and grants; the Chancellor was head of the legal side of government and authorised grants of privileges and royal charters under the ‘Great Seal’.

Charles held his first Privy Council meeting in Canterbury, within a couple of days of landing. He had already appointed Hyde as Lord Chancellor in exile, in 1658. Now, continuing his careful policy of conciliation, he chose as one of his two Secretaries of State, not the loyal Sir Richard Fanshawe who had shared his exile and expected the post, but Monck’s secretary William Morice, who was, Fanshawe complained, ‘a fierce Presbiterian, and one that never saw the King’s face’.
²
Morice was balanced by Sir Edward Nicholas, who had served Charles I and given loyal service in the dark days abroad, while another royalist, the old Earl of Southampton, became Lord Treasurer. These men, with Ormond and Monck – now made Duke of Albemarle – were the innermost circle, ‘the Secret Council’, officially the Committee for Foreign Affairs, sometimes described as the forerunner of the cabinet. They were joined by Southampton’s ambitious nephew by marriage, Anthony Ashley Cooper, a former member of the Protectorate’s Council of State. After speaking eloquently on behalf of the crown in the House of Commons, as MP for Wiltshire, he was made Lord Ashley, and became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the spring of 1661.

Charles’s full Privy Council numbered about forty men. It included his brothers James and Henry and seven of his councillors in exile, but the central pillar was Hyde. As a young man, Edward Hyde had been a brilliant lawyer and politician, the shrewdest of Charles I’s advisers. At that stage, as he said himself, he had been proud and passionate, ‘of a humour between wrangling and disputing, very troublesome’.
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He had mellowed into affability, he thought, and he knew that his integrity was above temptation and that he was ‘firm and unshaken in his friendships’. But many found him stern, unable to see another’s point of view, stubborn and unchanging in his opinions. In 1660, judged Burnet, he was the ‘absolute favourite, and the chief or the only minister, but with too magisterial a way. He was always pressing the King to mind his affairs, but in vain.’
⁴

His lectures would later cause friction but for now Charles listened. Among Hyde’s papers are bundles of scribbled notes, pushed across the table in their private meetings before Privy Council sessions, or slipped across to Whitehall by messenger. And outside the chamber Charles and Hyde talked through delicate business where no one could hear them, walking on the ‘leads’, the roof of the low Whitehall apartments by the river, which formed a sort of terrace. They discussed many things, among them what should be done with one of Montrose’s Scottish judges, who had come down to London and was, said Charles, ‘undoubtedly doing all the mischieue he can, why he should not be layd up I can not tell’.
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Scotland was much on Charles’s mind. He had three separate kingdoms. England and Wales formed one, with Scotland, and Ireland, which had an unusual semi-colonial status. Each required different treatment.
⁶
Although his grandfather James I of England and VI of Scotland had hoped to unite the kingdom, following the union of the two crowns in his own person when he succeeded to the English throne, Scotland had remained a separate nation. Her parliament was dominated by the crown through royal nominees, the Lords of the Articles, but her presbyterian Church resisted all efforts to bring it under state control. Charles I’s fatal mistake had been to try to impose a full hierarchy of bishops and the Anglican prayer book, which Kirk leaders saw as a weapon of Rome. By 1638 they were in revolt. In the twists and turns of the civil wars, they turned back to supporting the king. Finally, three years after their army’s defeat at Worcester, they were subdued by the short-lived Cromwellian Union of 1654.

The Prayer Book riots in Scotland, 1637

Ninety per cent of Scots lived on the land, a third of them above the Highland line. Most of these were crofters and landless labourers, dependent on their tenant-in-chief, their clan lord. The smaller lairds, holding land from the tenant-in-chief, were poor in comparison. And in the towns, especially in Edinburgh, a new middle class was growing, consisting of lawyers for Scotland’s separate legal system, and merchants, who traded their linen, wool and salt, fish, coal and grain, with England and Ireland, Holland, France, Germany and Scandinavia. When the Scottish parliament was restored in 1660, it was dominated by the sons of hereditary noblemen and Highland chieftains. In June, when Scots aristocrats and gentry came to London, Charles asked them to advise him on the course he might take and as an interim government he restored the old Committee of Estates.

As his highest officers Charles appointed the Scots who had been loyal to him in exile, balanced by the more moderate leaders of the kirk. The Earl of Middleton was declared High Commissioner, responsible for summoning the parliament and raising troops, with his ally the Earl of Glencairn as Chancellor. But he gave the vital post of Secretary of State to the former Covenanter John Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale, who had been imprisoned ever since his capture at Worcester and had crossed to Breda on his release, just before the Restoration. Six foot five, with bristling red hair, violently outspoken, Lauderdale could launch into tirades in English, Latin, Greek or Hebrew. At court he was over-exuberant and dared to help himself to the royal snuff – altogether ‘uncouth, boisterous, shaggy, ugly and cunning’.
⁷
Burnet knew him well, to his cost:

He made a very ill appearance: he was very big: his hair red, hanging oddly about him: his tongue was too big for his mouth, which made him bedew all that he talked to: and his whole manner was rough and boisterous, and very unfit for a Court…He was a man, as the Duke of Buckingham called him to me, of a blundering understanding. He was haughty beyond expression, abject to those he saw he must stoop to, but imperious to all others. He had a violence of passion that carried him often to fits like madness, in which he had no temper.
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Lauderdale was supported in the English court by Sir Robert Moray, whose easy tact and knowledge of chemistry and astronomy endeared him to Charles. Lauderdale himself never entirely won Charles’s affection (the joke was that Charles stopped him coming to dinner by serving horse piss instead of syllabub), but he saw him as the man to push measures through the Scottish parliament and to keep the nation quiet.

The Scots had no intention of keeping quiet. In August, a group of leading kirk ministers met, to remind the king of his promise at Stirling to uphold the covenant, decrying him for restoring the bishops and following the Book of Common Prayer, ‘upon which they made terrible denunciations of heavy judgements from God on him, if he did not stand to the Covenant, which they called the oath of God’.
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The ministers were clapped in prison. Although they were soon released and the outcry in their sermons was silenced, ‘they could not hold from many sly and secret insinuations, as if the ark of God was shaking and the glory departing’. Middleton’s arrival in Edinburgh as High Commissioner in late 1660 made things worse. He outraged the Kirk ministers with his magnificence and extravagance, and his entourage shocked the people by drinking through the night and fighting in the streets.

The Scottish parliament, however, were generous when they met in January, voting Charles £40,000 per year to raise troops, from an excise on beer and ale. In 1661 Middleton also managed to force them to pass the drastic ‘Act Recissory’ that wiped the slate clean of all legislation passed by the covenanters’ parliaments in almost thirty years, and another act replacing the presbyterian kirk by the episcopal church. The heated debates in the Scottish parliament boded ill for Charles’s hopes of peace: ‘It was a mad roaring time,’ Burnet remembered, ‘full of extravagance.’ Exhilarated, Middleton then began trying to consolidate his power, passing acts that demanded the renunciation of the covenant, and imposing penalties on leading figures in the Scottish regime of the 1650s. This was clearly designed to target Lauderdale, and tensions were bound to arise. Far from benefiting from the Restoration, Scotland faced an era of bitter frustration, its government a nest of rivalry, its merchants restricted in their trade, and its national church under attack.

During the Interregnum, Ireland too had been forced into union with England and had lost its own assembly. Twenty years before, in 1641, the Irish Catholics had rebelled in a furious and bloody uprising against the domination of the English and the protestants. The Catholic gentry then ran the country until the end of that decade, and in 1649, after the execution of Charles I, Ormond had reached an agreement with the Catholic lords, promising toleration of their religion, before he attempted, in vain, to put together an effective royalist army. This was brutally crushed by Cromwell. Under his regime all Catholic lands were confiscated and settled by protestant veterans of the New Model Army, members of the Merchant Adventurers and Scottish Covenanters.

Charles was, in fact, restored to the throne in Ireland almost before he reached England. At the end of 1659, a group of parliamentary officers, led by the renegade royalist Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, began talks with Charles and in February 1660 they had called a convention in Dublin, which declared in his favour. He was proclaimed king there on 14 May. Once in power, he restored the Irish assembly and chose Monck as his Lord Lieutenant, perhaps to reassure the Irish protestants. But since Monck stayed in London, and his deputy, the morose presbyterian Lord Robartes, made himself so unpopular with the Irish commissioners that he was dismissed before he set foot in Ireland, the running of the nation was effectively left with a committee of three Lords Justices, including Roger Boyle.

Boyle’s grandfather had acquired his Irish land under the Tudors, while his father Richard, the ‘upstart earl’, was an unscrupulous opportunist who bought the title of Earl of Cork from James I and became Lord Justice and Treasurer of Ireland. (The Earl did everything on a large scale: he owned over forty thousand acres in Munster and had eight daughters and seven sons. The oldest son, Richard, Lord Burlington, would inherit the title and the youngest, Robert Boyle, would become the famous chemist.) Instead of going into exile Roger, the third son, served the Cromwell regime in the hopes of regaining the family estates. In May 1660 he came to London, arguing loudly for the protestant landholders against the Catholics and Old Irish. Charles liked his style and energy – and his talent for writing plays. In September he created him Earl of Orrery and made him president of his home province, Munster.

A difficult, interminable process of negotiation began, in an attempt to return lands obtained by the Cromwellian planters to their old owners. In July 1662 Charles replaced Monck as Lord Lieutenant with his loyal supporter Ormond, whom he had now raised to the status of duke. In contrast to the Boyles, Ormond’s family had been in Ireland since the fourteenth century, and were linked in an intricate mesh of kinship with the old Catholic families. With his stylish manner and mane of fair hair that won him the nickname ‘James the White’, Ormond borrowed cash and velvet coats and shining swords to make a suitably impressive return. He then moved into Dublin Castle, where he lived in grand vice-regal style, despite his massive debts.
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Intensely nettled, Orrery was left with nothing except his presidency of Munster. From now on, beneath their co-operation, ran a tense rivalry.

With regard to the land disputes, Ormond negotiated a complex Act of Settlement, which was pushed painfully through the Dublin parliament. Charles – who upset the protestants by often intervening in individual cases, and seeming to favour the old Catholics – set up a court of claims to hear grievances. The Commissioners were bombarded with competing claims. In 1665 Ormond put through an Act of Explanation, by which Cromwellians had to surrender a third of the lands they held at the Restoration, but the court of claims was still sitting two years later and many of the original proprietors were still unsatisfied. The Catholics now owned less than a quarter of the land, as opposed to almost two thirds before the civil wars. The problems seemed intractable. ‘I confess I am not able to see through the end of a settlement,’ Ormond sighed to Hyde. If all the claims were accepted, ‘there must be new discoveries made of a new Ireland for the old will not serve to satisfy these engagements’.
¹¹
It was in connection with Irish deputations that Charles said flippantly to Clarendon in 1661, ‘For my part, rebell for rebell, I had rather trust a papist rebell than a presbiterian one’ – only to have Clarendon remind him forcibly that he had forgotten the earlier rebellion against the English in 1641.
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