King Charles II (39 page)

1
The King’s language remained moderate. ‘Oddsfish’ – his favourite expletive – was in fairly common use in the seventeenth century; it occurs in the work of Otway, Congreve and Vanbrugh. It was a corruption of God’s Flesh, as the nineteenth-century ‘Golly’ stood for God.

2
But Le Sueur’s equestrian statue of Charles
I
was re-erected on the site of the regicides’ executions, with a pedestal designed by Wren, executed by Grinling Gibbons. It can still be seen at Charing Cross, and is regularly adorned with wreaths on 30 January, the anniversary of the death of Charles
I
.

The best of Queens, the most obedient wife …

His life the theme of her eternal prayer –

T
he Garter ceremony of April 1661 was a moving time for those who remembered the old order. The coronation of King Charles
II
, which took place immediately afterwards, on 23 April, was however more of a public demonstration of the strength of the new, as modern leaders parade their troops and armaments before the eyes of foreign ambassadors.

The Garter procession took place by ancient custom at Windsor on 15 April, but there was such a plethora of Knights to be installed that the ceremonies had to be staggered over three days.
¹
Princes like James Duke of York and Rupert of the Rhine, for instance, had received the Garter from Charles
I
at Oxford in 1645, but sixteen years later had never been installed. The ceremony itself had not been held since Charles
I
left London on the eve of the war.

The new Knights’ hatchments, and those of the Elector of Brandenburg and the late William of Orange, were now hung up for the first time. That loyal servant, the Duke of Ormonde, whose Garter was a fitting reward for all his efforts in exile, was there to swear his oath in person. It was however significant that the Knights’ costumes had been redesigned along more elaborate lines. Possibly they were influenced by the French King’s Knights of the Saint Esprit:
²
if so, it was part of
the general new admiration of the English for French Court ceremonial.

The coronation began as a piece of panoply in which much attention was paid to the presumed wishes of the populace.
³
On the eve of his coronation, for example, the King took part in the traditional procession from the Tower of London to Whitehall, which was officially described as ‘a spectacle so grateful [pleasing] to the people’. He trod the same route as the mediaeval kings such as Richard
II
.
^fn1

Like modern coronations, this procession demanded an early start; everyone had to be mustered on Tower Hill by eight o’clock in the morning. What was more, they had to take care that their mounts were not ‘unruly or stinking’. As a result, John Evelyn felt able to comment favourably on the elegance of the prancing horses. Pepys, on the other hand, showed his particular interests by noting that the houses along the route had wealthy carpets and ladies (an interesting example of zeugma) hung out of their windows.
⁴

Once again the conduits in the streets ran with wine, as on Restoration Day. But this time the streets were railed, and gravelled. As the foot guards of the King passed, their plumes of red and white feathers contrasting with the black and white of the Duke of York’s guard, they represented the established order – and monarchical strength. The coronation medal bore the royal oak bursting into leaf and the appropriate motto
Iam Florescit
– now it flourishes. This was the Crown triumphant, come out of its hiding-place.

The symbolic references of the triumphal arches under which the King passed made the same point.
⁵
One arch supported a woman dressed as Rebellion, in a crimson robe crawling with snakes, a bloody sword in her hand. Her attendant, Confusion, was represented by a deformed shape, with the ruins of a castle on her head, a torn crown, and broken sceptres in each hand. At every turn it was heavily emphasized that the King himself stood, in contrast, for stability – for the whole social order. The
dialogue between the figures of Rebellion and Monarchy, for example, went along simple lines, Rebellion beginning with ‘I am Hell’s daughter, Satan’s eldest child’, and Monarchy replying in valiant style, ‘To Hell foul Fiend, shrink from this glorious light….’ And so on and so on, for what to the King under his canopy must have surely seemed a very long time indeed, for all the impeccable nature of the sentiments.

The pleasantest arch to encounter was probably that supporting the woman Plenty, who addressed the King in the following glowing terms:

Great Sir, the Star which at your happy Birth

Joy’d with his Beams (at Noon) the wandering earth;

Did with auspicious lustre then presage

The glittering plenty of this Golden age….

Glittering plenty was exactly what the King needed.

A certain amount of it had already been expended on replacing the regalia essential to any decent coronation, most of which had disappeared or been melted down during the Interregnum. A committee had sat regularly to produce the requirements, retaining the ‘old names, and fashion’, and the total cost was over £30,000.
⁶
The figure however was not really surprising, considering the determination to crown the King in style and the elaborate paraphernalia needed, including two crowns (one of which was known as St Edward’s crown, as before) and a quantity of ceremonial apparel for the King himself. The coronation ceremonial demanded, it seemed, an unceasing change of clothing for the monarch.
⁷
Most of it was made of cloth of gold or some equally costly substance, from the King’s golden sandals with high heels (which must have made him tower over the assorted bishops and nobles around him) to his series of mantles of crimson velvet furred with ermine; even his under trousers, breeches and stockings were made of crimson satin. Rich golden tissue was also needed for the chairs of state. Then there was the horse of state, whose saddle was richly embroidered with pearls and gold, and although a large oriental ruby was donated by a jeweller named William Gomeldon, the further
twelve thousand stones needed for the stirrups and bosses were only lent.

Scarlet cloth was used in abundance, including a false ceiling of red baize for St Edward’s Chapel and red cloth to cover the benches in both Westminster Hall and the Abbey. More mundanely, blue cloth was used to line the way from the Hall steps to the choir in the Abbey. Everything contributed to the overall impression of magnificence, but everything – down to the silk towel held by the Bishops before Communion – had to be paid for.

Nevertheless, the impact on observers, both native and foreign, was all the King could have wished. As far as the former were concerned, it was not a complete coincidence that the coronation took place shortly before the elections to the new Parliament. Visitors from abroad were duly impressed to discover that England was not at all the barbaric place that they had imagined it to be, cut off for twenty years behind its own iron curtain of republicanism. Henry Fagel, a ‘Foreigner at the Court of Charles
II
’, describing a sight-seeing tour of England at the time of the coronation, was astonished at the splendour of palaces such as Windsor and Hampton Court, as an Englishman today might be amazed at the richness of the palaces preserved in Poland or some other Iron Curtain country. And he was particularly impressed by the spectacle of the coronation itself, which excelled in splendour anything he had conceivably expected.
⁸

The culmination of the ancient and solemn service in Westminster Abbey was the moment when the King’s crown was finally placed on his head by the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘A great shout’ began.
^fn2
Immediately afterwards the whole nobility swore fealty. Thus they ‘firmly ascended the throne, and touched the King’s Crown, promising by that Ceremony to be ever ready to support it, with all their Power’. It was no empty oath. Within their lifetime, it could be that they would be called upon
to implement it, as their fathers had. All this took place beneath the watchful eyes of the envoys who packed the gallery, from foreign powers as diverse as Spain and Sweden, Venice and Hamburg, as well as personal representatives of foreign dignitaries such as the Duc d’Orléans.

Even the weather (proverbially unkind to royal occasions in our own day) rallied to the King’s support. It had been extremely rainy throughout the previous month, but the day of the coronation itself dawned dry or, as a rising poet, John Dryden, subsequently described it:

Soft western winds waft o’er the gaudy spring

And open’d Scenes of flow’rs and blossoms bring

To grace this happy day,…

The weather continued dry throughout the ceremonies. If it was not quite balmy enough to justify Dryden’s ecstasy, a little over-enthusiasm can be forgiven on his part, in view of the fact that his last public work had been ‘Heroical Stanzas’ on Cromwell’s death. However, in the evening a violent thunderstorm broke out just as the King was leaving Westminster Hall. This satisfied everyone. The superstitious were able to prognosticate a gloomy future for the realm or its King or both from the thunder and lightning; optimists pointed to the auspiciously sunny day.
¹⁰

And still the ceremonies were not done. They were rounded off by an ostentatious post-coronation feast held in Westminster Hall. Here the chivalric ritual extended to the service of the food, with the Earl Marshal, Lord High Steward and Lord High Constable appearing in their coronets, riding richly caparisoned horses, to present the first course. Even the humble Clerks of the Kitchen, who brought up the vast procession of servers, wore black figured satin gowns and velvet caps.

The King’s official champion, Sir Edward Dymoke, was there on his white charger, and made a grand entry preceded by trumpeters. Throwing down his gauntlet, he made the traditional challenge: ‘If any person of what degree soever, high or low, shall deny, or gainsay our Sovereign Lord King Charles the
Second … here is his champion, who saith that he lieth, and is a False Traitor.’

This was the very Hall in which twelve years earlier the King’s father had been tried for his life. But the ghost of Cromwell did not answer.

At long last the King was able to wash his hands – in water ceremoniously brought to him by the Earl of Pembroke and a host of attendants – and, having done so, depart from Westminster as he had come, by barge along the river Thames.

But there was a fitting epilogue to all this parade of power and pomp ‘deemed … inferior in magnificence to none in Europe’.
¹¹
The King and the Duke of York subsequently presented their coronation robes not to a museum for posterity – but to the theatre. They were used in a play by Sir William Davenant. And in
Henry V
in 1664 (a version by Orrery), Owen Tudor wore the coronation suit of King Charles
II
. For all the sacred ceremony at its heart, there had after all been a strong element of the charade about the King’s gorgeous gold and scarlet crowning.

Henry Fagel had described the English ladies at the coronation with enthusiasm as ‘everyone dressed as a Queen’.
¹²
But the position was in fact vacant; and Court and King alike stood in need of an incumbent. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’, wrote Jane Austen in the nineteenth century, ‘that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ In the seventeenth century it was a universally acknowledged truth that a single King must be in want of a Queen – although he might expect to acquire the good fortune along with his bride. The concept of monarchy extended beyond the immediate person of the King, if only because the question of the succession could never be overlooked in this age of high and chancy mortality from every kind of disease.

This royal family had recently been depleted by two deaths, both by smallpox: Mary Princess of Orange at the age of twenty-nine, and Harry Duke of Gloucester at the age of twenty-one. The demise of this promising young man, described by Hyde as being ‘in truth the finest youth and of the most manly
understanding that I have ever known’, ranks with the earlier death of his namesake Henry Prince of Wales as being one of the accidental tragedies of the house of Stuart. The death of the fabled Henry Prince of Wales left his younger brother to succeed as King Charles
I
, with dire results; the removal of the determinedly Protestant Duke of Gloucester from the royal succession (remember the steel with which he combated his mother’s Catholicism) was equally fatal. As it was, the Duke of York remained in effect the
only
heir to King Charles
II
throughout his reign who was both male and legitimate – and wholly English.
^fn3
But he was first a suspected, then an acknowledged Catholic. If the ‘sweet Duke of Gloucester’ had lived as an alternative Protestant heir, matters might have gone very differently.