A History of Britain, Volume 2 (36 page)

History was now respooling fast. Men who had not shown themselves in politics for many years, like Sir Thomas Fairfax, reappeared along with their colleagues from the Long Parliament who had never forgotten the humiliation of their ‘seclusion' in 1648. Two of the ‘birds' of 1642, Denzil Holles and Arthur Haselrig, now faced each other, doubtless in mutual mortification – one of them about to be a republican on the run, the other headed for a Stuart peerage. But the pragmatists, not least Montagu, passed smoothly from one regime to the other. The parliament, which had first assembled twenty years before, now – heavily nudged by Monck's soldiers and an armed royalist militia – killed itself off, ordering its own dissolution and the ‘free election' that all concerned knew would produce a parliament for Restoration.

Although, in a last gesture of piety towards the civil-war parliamentarians, royalists who had actually fought for Charles I were excluded, a hundred of them were none the less elected and duly took their seats in the ‘Convention' Parliament of March 1660. Another fifty-eight members were unequivocal royalist supporters. Virtually the same number – close to 150 – were parliamentarians, although that did not make them republicans. Most of them belonged to the gentry, who had all along wanted a reformed monarchy. And now, so they hoped, they would at last get one. The terms that they sent with Monck and their commissioners to Charles II at Breda in the Netherlands were calculated to test his willingness for a reconciliation: an amnesty for those on the parliamentary side in the civil war (the regicide signers of Charles I's death warrant excepted), a degree of liberty for ‘tender consciences' and guarantees against reversing the changes in property that had taken place during the interregnum. But the Convention Parliament did not insist, as a precondition, on the king committing himself to executing these policies. For his part, Charles's response from Breda on 4 April was shrewdly handled, offering a forty-day period of ‘grace' for amnesties but leaving any exceptions to the discretion of later parliaments, the same going for matters of religion and property. To make parliament, rather than himself, the arbiter of these matters already seemed to advertise that the son would not go the way of the father.

On 23 May 1660, Samuel Pepys watched Charles, along with his younger brothers and his cousin the boy Prince of Orange (later to be
King William III) come on board the flagship of the Commonwealth, the
Naseby,
at Scheveningen near The Hague. Pepys kissed their royal hands to the sound of ‘infinite shooting of guns' and took dinner ‘in a great deal of state'. After dinner the
Naseby's
name was repainted as the
Royal Charles
. For Pepys and his patron Montagu, as well as for Monck and Thurloe – all Cromwellians – it was as painless as that. In the afternoon they set sail for England and the king

Pepys listened and listened, obviously agog. This was not what he had anticipated. The tall man with his mother's black curly hair, dark eyes and thick lips was a spell-binder – someone who could, when he chose, scatter magic. Literally days after disembarking, Charles had touched 600 sufferers from scrofula in one emphatic demonstration of the healing power of the king. Thirteen years before, parliament had appointed a commission to draft a declaration denouncing the practice of touching for the ‘king's evil' as an absurd superstition. But here were the hordes of ordinary people, some with swollen or tumorous lymph glands, others with styes or mouth blisters, all convinced that royal magic had returned. In twenty years, 90,000 of the scrofulous would receive the royal touch and a gold chain to hang around their necks.

John Evelyn, who had endured the kingless decade with unrepentant royalism burning in his breast, could hardly credit what was happening: ‘The greedinesse of all sorts, men, women & children, to see his Majesty & kisse his hands, in so much as he had scarce leasure to Eate for some dayes.' Even as hard-bitten an old Presbyterian as Denzil Holles of Dorchester, who had fought Charles I at Edgehill, now addressed his son with slavish adulation as ‘the light of their [the people's] eyes, the breath of their nostrils, their delight and all their hope'. On 29 May, Charles II's birthday, not far from where Pepys had counted bonfires, Evelyn watched the cavalcade of 20,000 horse and foot escorting the king through London,

Not everyone was celebrating in the heady days of May 1660. Edmund Ludlow, fortieth on the list of fifty-nine signatories of the death warrant of the king, watched the same revels with mounting disgust and disbelief. Jerusalem had suddenly become Sodom. What could you expect? ‘The Dissolution and Drunkenness of that Night,' he hurrumphed, ‘was so great and scandalous, in a Nation which had not been acquainted with such Disorders for many Years past, that the King . . . caused a Proclamation to be publish'd, forbidding the drinking of Healths. But resolving, for his own part, to be oblig'd to no Rule of any Kind, he publickly violated his own Order in a few days, at a Debauch in the Mulberry Garden.' Above all, Ludlow was horrified to see ‘the Horse that had formerly belonged to our army, now put upon an Employment so different from that which they had first undertaken; especially . . . that for the most part . . . they consisted of such as had engaged themselves from a Spirit of Liberty.'

On 30 January 1661 – the anniversary of Charles I's execution – the remains of Oliver Cromwell, his son-in-law, Ireton, and John Bradshaw, who had presided over the court that had judged the king, were ‘dragged', as Evelyn gleefully wrote, ‘out of their superbe Tombs [in Westminster among the kings], to Tyburne, & hanged on the Gallows there from 9 in the morning 'til 6 at night, & then buried under that fatal & ignominious Monument, in a deepe pitt.' Evelyn thought back to the chaotic magnificence of Cromwell's funeral in 1658. It had been just two and a half years between embalming and dismemberment. ‘Oh,' he exclaimed ‘the stupendious, & inscrutable Judgements of God.'

As far as Ludlow was concerned, Cromwell got what he deserved. For it had been his betrayal of the nation's liberties and his greed for power that had killed the republic. But now the unswerving friends of liberty were paying the price. Dismay was followed by consternation and fear as army ‘grandees' were abruptly turned into fugitives or supplicants desperately working the good offices of men who had been timely turncoats. The republicans looked on in horror as old friends and comrades
associated with the death of Charles were brought before punitive tribunals, swiftly condemned and subjected to hanging and live quartering. Two of the regicides were dragged on a sled to Tyburn while facing the decapitated head of a third, the Fifth Monarchist ‘Saint' Major-General Thomas Harrison. Ludlow made contingency plans for a rapid escape. Milton, now quite blind, reflected on the iniquities that must have deserved this rod across their backs.

What of those who
had
jumped in time, who had been instrumental in bringing about the Restoration? Did these rituals of revenge make them just a little nervous? In May 1661 Samuel Pepys stood in the immense, glimmering cave of Westminster Abbey on the coronation day of Charles II and watched while fistfuls of silver and gold were flung high in the air, the coins and medals ringing as they hit the stone slabs. But the shower of treasure did not fall on his shoulders, positioned as he was at a properly respectful distance from the throne. The tailor's son may have come a long way from Fleet Street, but he was still just clerk to the Navy Board. So he was obliged to observe while his betters scrambled for the royal bounty, like so many bridesmaids scuffling for the nosegay. ‘I could not come of any,' he complained ruefully to his diary.

What could he ‘come of'? What could men like Pepys expect from the new reign? It was one thing to purr contentedly as he was massaged by the famous royal affability; another to be completely confident that men who had served what was now euphemistically referred to as ‘The Old State' would find the same favour in the kingdom. The presence, both political and physical, of the portly Lord Chancellor Clarendon – who had inflated alarmingly along with his new peerage – helped calm some of these anxieties. Clarendon was, without question, the ballast of the Restoration, the man who could bring a dose of political sobriety to the understandable inebriation of the vindicated Cavaliers. In the Long Parliament, as Edward Hyde, he had been a reformer. But so much had since happened to make those mild changes pale into insignificance that Clarendon's moderation could now pass as the staunchest royalist conservatism. Without surrendering the legitimate prerogative of the Crown, Clarendon was anxious to reanchor it in a stable constitution: parliament and king engaged in trusting, mutual dependence. While Pepys, along with many of the younger servants of the Restoration, was as apt as any courtier to snigger and cavil at Clarendon's weighty self-importance, he was actually very grateful for his settling authority. Clarendon, he knew, was unlikely to spurn the talents of ex-officers of the Protectorate – especially in so critical an area of expertise as the navy – merely to keep the kingdom pure. Purity did not seem to be much on Charles II's mind. So
Pepys would have been gratified, but not perhaps surprised, to see his patron Edward Montagu promoted to the earldom of Sandwich. Pepys was also enough of a realist to appreciate that, if some carcasses had to be thrown to the baying hounds of the Cavaliers, he had better make sure his was not one of them. No one with so well-developed a sense of irony would have missed the fact that those who were now most incriminated by the posthumous notoriety of Cromwell were – like Vane, Bradshaw, Ludlow and Harrison – precisely the republicans who had most hated him! So, with his wife Elizabeth, Pepys could move into his new lodgings at the Navy Board secure in the knowledge that this new state, like the old state, needed capable, industrious men like him; men who knew where to find things like guns, ships, men and money. Especially money.

All the same, though, he was bound to have felt just a little uncomfortable amid the obscure gorgeousness of the coronation. The serried ranks of bishops and barons were men who seemed to know by instinct, as well as by education, how to play their parts in this ponderously antique performance. What would Cromwell have made of the apparition of the ‘King's Champion' riding, in full coat of mail, into Westminster Hall during the banquet and flinging down his gage to challenge anyone who might impugn his royal master?

Well, perhaps King Oliver might even have suffered this nonsense as a necessary mummery, a plaything for the landed and the hare-brained. But he would certainly not, like Charles, have rounded up the scrofulous to be touched ‘for the king's evil'. Could the ironic, urbanely quizzical Charles really believe in all this foolishness? It was the same Charles, after all, who patronized the natural philosophers of Gresham College, and who endorsed a ‘Royal Society' as a fellowship of the learned who might converse and even dispute without destructive acrimony. To some, in fact, the king himself seemed to be of this inquisitive mind, poring as he did over the latest time-pieces and telescopes, scrutinizing the universe as an ingeniously constructed apparatus put together by the Celestial Mechanic.

So, when all was said and done, could Charles be expected to preside over a realm of even-tempered reason? The Declaration of Breda, issued in April 1660, had promised ‘Liberty to tender Consciences' precisely as an antidote to ‘the Passion and the uncharitablenesse of the times [which] have produced severall Opinions in Religion, by which men are engaged in parties and animosities against each other'. But what transpired in the first years of his reign hardly fulfilled the promised hopes of ‘freedom of conversation'. Charles may have wished to be sweetly reasonable, but the ‘Cavalier' Parliament, elected in March and April 1661 – and not replaced
until 1679 – was much more interested in vindication than moderation. The old soldiers who had bled for the king (either in their persons or in their purses) doubtless felt the savage punishments meted out to the republicans were merited by the enormity of their crimes. But the real thirsters after satisfaction were the clergy, especially the bishops, who after the downfall of Laud had suffered humiliations inconceivable in the history of the English Church: the imprisonment and execution of the Archbishop, expulsion from the House of Lords and extirpation from their own dioceses, the very name and office of bishop made shameful. Now the mitres and monstrances were back, nowhere more triumphantly than at Ely, where Christopher Wren's formidable uncle Matthew was restored after years of unrepentant incarceration in the Tower of London where he had shared a cell with Laud. Matthew was Zadok glorified, Oded set up on high, and he let it be known in no uncertain terms that the pernicious pack of ‘fanatics and sectaries' who had desecrated the sanctity of the Church of England would never again be allowed to delude the credulous and make trouble in the house of the Lord.