A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (9 page)

But Charles did choose. He ignored some offerings, took others casually and a few so seriously that his very government was affected.

In the summer of 1660 Roger Palmer moved into King Street, across the Privy Garden from Charles’s apartments in Whitehall. Like a conjuring trick, a house had suddenly become available when Cromwell’s cousin, Edmund Whalley, fleeing vengeance, sailed as fast as he could for New England. On 13 July the Palmers invited the king and the Dukes of York and Gloucester to a musical evening. Pepys was working late next door with Sandwich, when they heard music through the wall and stood listening at the old connecting door between the lodgings. They gathered that the king and his two brothers were there, ‘with Madam Palmer, a pretty woman that they have a fancy to, to make her husband a cuckold’.
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For several months the affair was kept quiet and any gossip was quickly hushed up by Hyde. But by the autumn everyone in court circles knew the truth. Charles took Barbara with him to the races, and showed her off in the park. Courtiers ingratiated themselves with her in the hope she would say a word in their favour. Her family, above all, kept as close as they could, particularly Buckingham. Hyde’s dislike of Barbara was partly due to her alliance with this cousin, whom he had blamed so often for distracting Charles in exile. He was also anxious, even in these early months, that the court’s reputation for wildness would undo all his diplomacy. He forbade his own wife to call on her and refused to mention her name, referring to her from now on as ‘the Lady’.

The summer was festive, but in the dog days, the mood at court darkened. In late August Charles’s brother Henry, Duke of Gloucester, caught the smallpox that had spread through London in the heat. His doctors thought it mild, and his family were horrified when he died suddenly, on 13 September. At the age of nine Henry, with his sister Elizabeth, had been the last of the family to see their father, Charles I, on the eve of his execution. When he arrived in Paris five years later, he was incorrigible and wild after his long imprisonment, but he grew into a youth of great sweetness. Charles was badly shaken by the loss of this favourite brother, aged only twenty. As was the custom, his body was carried by barge after sunset from Somerset House to Westminster stairs, with torches flaring on the dark, lapping waters. He was buried at midnight in the Henry VII Chapel in the Abbey, the flaming torches being extinguished at his grave.

The court wore deep mourning for six weeks, and the opening of the new theatres was delayed until November. The family, however, still planned to spend Christmas together, the first time for twenty years. In late September Mary, Princess of Orange, arrived from Holland, barely escaping shipwreck off the Kent coast. Charles sailed down from London in his yacht to meet her at Margate, and escorted her regally up the Thames.
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Although they had sometimes quarrelled, he was devoted to his brisk, strong-minded elder sister. But this was an awkward meeting since Charles had failed to persuade the Dutch States General to have her young son William made stadtholder, captain-general of the republic. She felt angry and betrayed.

More family troubles lay ahead. The court spread outwards from Whitehall, into the streets nearby, to the great mansions with their gardens running down to the Thames. One of these, Hyde’s current home, Worcester House in the Strand, was the site of the first great court scandal of Charles II’s reign. At twenty-six, James, Duke of York, had never been thought serious in his affairs, but it now transpired that on 3 September 1660 he had secretly married the twenty-three-year-old Anne Hyde, the Chancellor’s daughter. Anne had been a maid of honour to Mary, Princess of Orange, since 1655 and had met James during a visit to Paris the following year. When the exiled court was based in Brussels he visited her often, fell in love and in late 1659 agreed a marriage contract. To his alarm – since the sudden hope of a restoration made his chances of a noble marriage brighter – in the spring of 1660 she became pregnant. A few months later, the marriage contract was solemnised.

At first Charles refused them permission to marry, but he finally gave in. The ceremony took place at dead of night in Worcester House. In place of her father, Ormond’s eldest son, the Earl of Ossory, gave the bride away. James’s own chaplain Dr Joseph Crowther conducted the service, and the only other witness was Anne’s maid, Ellen Stroud. The secret marriage did not surface into public knowledge for a while, but it was another source of anxiety while Charles was preoccupied with his Privy Council and parliament, with the settlement of affairs in Scotland and Ireland, the failure of his hopes for agreement about the Church and the imminent trials of the men who had signed his father’s death warrant. James himself kept silent, denying all rumours, but when Anne gave birth to a son, on 22 October, and claimed repeatedly during her labour that they were married, he finally admitted the truth.

By then the news had been buzzing around the court for weeks. The marriage was a blow to the royal family. It threw away the diplomatic advantages to be gained by dangling the possibility of marriage to the duke before foreign nobility. Moreover Anne was a commoner, and the Stuart family stock fell with an alliance to the daughter of a Wiltshire lawyer. People joked that Anne smelt of her father’s green lawyer’s bag. Worse still, her baby son would now be second in line to the throne. Yet Charles’s immediate reaction was one of loyalty to his old adviser. He knew that people would think Hyde was implicated, but he also recognised that the Chancellor adored his daughter and that her pregnancy and furtive marriage would outrage his stiff principles and pride.

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, engraving

As Hyde himself said later, in this crisis Charles acted with generosity and understanding. Realising that he knew nothing, he sent for Hyde’s old friends, Ormond and Southampton, and told them to arrange a meeting for him with the Chancellor, but to break the news first, before he came in. Hyde was, as Charles expected, upset to the point of frenzy, threatening to turn his daughter out of his house as a whore, shouting that she should be sent to the Tower, impeached and executed and that he himself would sign her arraignment. He was full of fear that people would think (as many did) that this was a plot on his part, to get closer to the royal family and the succession. When Charles entered, Southampton told him there was no point talking to his raging Chancellor, ‘Whereupon his majesty’, wrote Hyde, looking upon him with a wonderful benignity, said, ‘Chancellor, I knew this business would trouble you, and therefore I appointed your two friends to confer first with you upon it, before I would speak with you myself: but you must now lay aside all passion that disturbs you, and consider that this business will not do itself; that it will quickly take air; and therefore it is fit that I first resolve what to do before other men presume to give their counsel: tell me therefore what you would have me do and I will follow your advice.
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It was clever of Charles, alert to the quick spread of gossip and shrewd in his understanding of Hyde’s nature, to appeal to him in the role of counsellor, jerking him back to responsibility, forcing him to think of action.

Charles stood by him again when five of James’s friends, in a misguided display of loyalty, claimed to have had sex with Anne. They included Ormond’s second son Richard, Earl of Arran; Harry Jermyn, nephew of Henrietta Maria’s chamberlain and rumoured lover, the Earl of St Albans; Richard Talbot, another of James’s Irish friends, later Earl of Tyrconnell; Charles Berkeley; and young Harry Killigrew. All of them loathed Hyde for different reasons. Their stories were scurrilous and clearly invented, although they have been repeated by court gossips ever since. Arran claimed Anne had pretended to be sick and lured him to a side chamber at the end of the gallery while his sister and Harry Jermyn were playing nine-pins; Talbot said she had made an appointment with him in the Chancellor’s own study ‘and, not paying so much attention to what was upon the table as what they were engaged in, they had spilled a bottle full of ink upon a despatch of four pages, and that the King’s monkey, which was blamed for this accident, had been a long time in disgrace’. Killigrew topped it all by describing them making love in a water closet overhanging the river, with three or four swans as witnesses.
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The suggestion was that since Anne had so many lovers she had no proof that James had fathered her child: she had tricked him into an ‘unlawful’ marriage which could now be declared invalid.
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The cruel stories were a heightened form of the malicious jokes the court loved. Charles was brisk, amused, and realistic: he had given his permission and since he was sure that the marriage was legal, it must stand. There was no question of it being annulled by an act of parliament, as parliament must never interfere with the succession. James must drink as he had brewed. (When he heard, Sandwich was more brutal, quoting his father’s saying, ‘He that doth get a woman with child and marries her afterward it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head.’
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Charles showed greater calm than the rest of his family. Mary was indignant, and Henrietta Maria was outraged. With amazing aplomb Anne herself sailed through it all. In time she proved clever, witty and energetic and made herself a striking presence at court. As the courtier and writer Anthony Hamilton remembered, she had ‘a majestic air, a pretty good shape, not much beauty, a great deal of wit’ and an ability to pick out intelligent, promising figures at court. Furthermore, ‘an air of grandeur in all her actions made her be considered as if born to support her rank which placed her so near the throne.’
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James did not give up his womanising – in October, only a few weeks after his marriage, Pepys saw him talking ‘very wantonly’ to Barbara Palmer through the hangings which curtained off the royal pews in the Chapel Royal – but eight years later he would remark that ‘in all things but his codpiece’, the duke was ‘led by the nose by his wife’.
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Barely a fortnight after Anne’s son was born, on 2 November, Henrietta Maria arrived at Whitehall with her younger daughter Minette. The old queen came partly as the unofficial representative of Cardinal Mazarin, sent to smooth relations between the two countries, but she still had hopes of suppressing this marriage. Furious with James, she refused to recognise Anne as her daughter-in-law, to see their baby son, or to grant Hyde an audience.

Then came the next blow. While the quarrels about James and Anne raged, Charles’s sister Mary, the Princess of Orange, fell ill. Her fever turned out, once again, to be smallpox. Charles sent his mother and Minette away from Whitehall to St James’s Palace to escape infection but he himself stayed behind, visiting Mary constantly, regardless of risk. She died on Christmas Eve, aged twenty-nine, asking Charles to be the guardian to her son. This was not to be, but Charles kept William’s picture in his bedchamber for the rest of his life.

Christmas was marked by grief for the deaths of Henry and Mary, and by lasting embarrassment at the awkwardness of James’s marriage. Henrietta Maria’s chilliness almost created a diplomatic incident, prevented only by Mazarin’s firm messages and Charles’s threat to stop the income from her English estates. Finally she and Hyde met – with deep reluctance on both sides – and on New Year’s Day 1661, when Charles attended the baby’s christening in Worcester House, she deigned to receive her daughter-in-law ‘with much respect and love’.
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In a further defiance of gossip, and to ward off questions in the House of Commons, Charles created Hyde Earl of Clarendon – having offered him the higher honour of a dukedom, which Hyde wisely refused for fear of provoking more jealousy.

Having lost this battle, Henrietta Maria decided to return to France. To the British public she was an ominous reminder of past wars, a foreign, Catholic beauty, heir to the Bourbons and Medicis, now shrunken and plain. Ever since her husband’s execution she had dressed in black, offset by white lace, and she looked much older than her forty-nine years. Her slight, elegant daughter, however, won the people’s hearts by her charm and tact. Like Charles, Minette had a natural graciousness, an instinctive, easy attentiveness to those around her. Although she was, in almost every respect, a French princess, Charles liked to remind her of her English heritage as an ‘Exeter woman’. She had been born there in 1644, amid the flurry of war, and had been smuggled out of England at the age of two by her governess, Lady Dalkeith, who had walked a hundred miles to Dover, carrying the baby. In Paris she joined her mother, who brought her up as a Catholic.

Charles had known Minette when she was a small girl in Paris, but there was a gap of several years before he met her again in late 1659, on his way back to Brussels from Fuentarrabia. She was then fifteen, chestnut-haired, petite, coquettish. In the ten days they spent together, they became extremely close, with the intensity that sometimes defines the relationships of long-separated siblings, a sense of recognition, almost as if they shared a part of the same self. From then on, they wrote to each other more openly than to anyone else, and Charles showed all the protective affection of an elder brother, giving her presents and fighting her corner in the intense quarrels of the French court. In 1660 Minette became engaged to Louis XIV’s brother, the temperamental, bisexual Philippe, duc d’Orléans, and the marriage was due to take place on her return from England. As Louis’s brother the duke was given the courtesy title ‘Monsieur’; after her marriage Minette would be ‘Madame’.