King Charles II (4 page)

Here a bed with hangings of green satin was made ready at a cost of nearly seven hundred pounds. Luxurious beds were one of the major outlays of the time, as will be seen in the magnificent beds caparisoned for Charles himself, his wife and mistresses – rather as expensive cars are bought today.

Finally, Queen Henrietta Maria reached that ‘happy hour for herself and us’, as one contemporary put it.
¹⁴
Her labour began at about four o’clock in the morning. Shortly before noon, the baby was born in one of the Tudor rooms to the south of Colour Court, fronting St James’ Court.
^fn6
Almost immediately, according to the custom of the time, he was taken from his mother and given to a wet-nurse to be fed. Rockers stepped forward to the royal cradle: that too was according to the custom of the time, the only thing of note about them being the fact that they were Protestants. It had been part of Henrietta Maria’s marriage contract, carefully laid down, that her children should not be nursed by Catholics. But the King presented the successful midwife, who, being French, probably
was
a Catholic, with £1,000.

The baptism, which took place on 27 June, was also according to the rite of the English Church. The ceremony was performed by the Bishop of London, the King’s friend William Laud. It was a significant and appropriate choice. Although it would be another three years before he was created Archbishop of Canterbury, already Laud’s name was synonymous with the repression of Puritanism within the English Church. Laud was nearing sixty, but his whole preferment had come since the accession of King Charles
I
: he had been made a Privy Councillor and had recently taken part in a harsh judgement against the Puritan Leighton in the Star Chamber.

For the baptism, the Lord Mayor of London presented a silver font. The Duchess of Richmond stood proxy for the godmother, the Queen of France, and, as a tribute to her principal’s status, was fetched in a coach drawn by six plumed horses: her retinue (both sexes) arrived wearing white satin set off by crimson silk stockings. The baby’s wet-nurse received a chain of rubies from Marie de Medici, the dry-nurse being given a silver plate; the six (Protestant) cradle-rockers were given a selection of silver spoons, cups and salt-cellars. From a less successful relation, the Elector Palatine, the husband of his aunt Elizabeth, the baby received a jewel.
¹⁵

Charles began his life in the traditional long white clothes of linen and satin. But, unlike English babies of the time, he was not swaddled. Aristocratic French mothers did not approve of this habit of rolling up the baby like a tiny mummy – the Huguenot heiress Charlotte de la Trémouille, wife of the Earl of Derby, fought the same battle in her nursery at about the same date. Psychologists who have recently pointed out the dangers of deprivation of physical contact in the new-born would be happy to think that the baby Charles was allowed to lie freely (and he undoubtedly showed every sign of enjoying physical contact uninhibitedly in his later years).

The next step was to dress the child in tiny linen shirts (still preserved in the Royal collection). In 1631 he was handed over to the Countess of Dorset, who became his official governess, and given his own miniature establishment. Unlike the first choice of governess, the Catholic Countess of Roxburgh, she was an impeccable Anglican. The Countess of Dorset replaced the dry- and wet-nurses he had enjoyed since birth. One of these foster-mothers, Mrs Christabella Wyndham, was to feature in Charles’ life in another interesting connection. Later the early experience was recalled most favourably by Charles’ foster-sister Elizabeth Elliott. It had been the greatest happiness that could befall her, she wrote at the Restoration, ‘to suck the same breast with so great a monarch’; she therefore petitioned the monarch for some financial recognition of the fact.
¹⁶

The nursery of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria, once established, was soon filled with healthy and charming
children. For all her fragility Henrietta Maria proved a most efficient child-bearer, after her first bad experience. With speed and love that nursery made for ever famous by Van Dyck was created. The Queen bore a total of nine children in fourteen years, of whom six survived infancy, a gratifyingly high proportion by the standards of the time, when even petted royalty would consider themselves lucky to provide so many healthy heirs.

Mary, the Princess Royal, the ringleted girl with rosebud mouth and slightly droopy, chubby cheeks, who stands at the fore of the most famous Van Dyck picture, was born in November 1631. James Duke of York followed in October 1633, and Elizabeth, Van Dyck’s grave-eyed child, on the Feast of the Holy Innocents in 1635. At the time the coincidence puzzled the local panegyrists: as her
Carmen Natalitum
, produced by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, put it, ‘Hast thou dared to be born on the day when infancy was a crime?’
¹⁷
Later, in view of her early death, commentators found it sadly appropriate. Henry Duke of Gloucester was born in 1639, and Henriette-Anne in 1644.

These were the survivors. But of course the royal nursery was not without its tragedies. A baby Katharine died at birth. Princess Anne, Van Dyck’s delicious infant, stretching out one fat arm to the world, died a little later of consumption. Bishop Fuller described her affecting death-bed, and how he said a short prayer over the child: ‘“Lighten mine eyes, O Lord, lest I sleep the sleep of death.” … This done the little lamb gave up the ghost.’
¹⁸

For Charles it was a loving childhood. Like many children throughout history down to our own day, he formed an attachment to an odd toy ‘without which in his arms he would never go abroad or lie in his bed’.
¹⁹
In his case the object was a piece of wood, which led courtiers to predict either that blockheads would one day be his favourites or else that he would rule with the club – wrongly in both cases. Like many children of his own time, the Prince was also obliged to wear uncomfortable iron supports for his legs until one of his nurses braved the King’s wrath and hid them. For all this, by the grim standards
of childhood of the time, Charles enjoyed a great deal of uncritical affection.

He was also expected to demonstrate love and care to others. As one of the speakers in Herrick’s ‘Pastoral’ upon his birth had it:

And I a sheep-hook will bestow,

To have his little Kingship know,

As he is Prince, he’s Shepherd too.

Henrietta Maria, with the awakening of her deep protective feeling for her husband, had noticed the damage done by his stiff manner, to which a speech impediment contributed. Courtiers and populace alike were unnecessarily antagonized. She wanted her eldest son ‘to be bred to wonderful civility’ in contrast. The little Prince, by nature affectionate and affable, found the lesson an easy one to learn. The result, wrote Bishop Burnet with his usual carping tone where Charles was concerned, was that the adult man was ‘civil rather to an excess’; there was ‘a softness and a gentleness in him, both in his air and his expression’; in this he outdid even his brother James, in whom the same lesson had been inculcated.
²⁰

But it is difficult to see that in this case Burnet’s disapproval was justified. For the rest of his life Charles displayed the radiant civility of a happy nature to all comers, in marked contrast to the dreadful public awkwardness of his father, whose natural charm was only seen in his immediate family circle. The quality enabled him to endure the indignities of his exile, on the one hand, and on the other hand in better days to transform himself into that popular monarch summed up by Evelyn as ‘debonair and easy of access … down to the spaniels who dwelt in his bedchamber’. Elizabeth of Bohemia summed it up: ‘Though he be my nephew, I must say this truth of him, that he is extremely civil….’
²¹

That was one keynote of his upbringing. The other, unquestionably if at first sight surprisingly, was the high moral tone of the royal family as a whole. In this respect the nurseries merely echoed the prevailing attitudes at court. Unlike almost any other
seventeenth-century monarch, King Charles
I
was absolutely faithful to his wife, and the Queen equally devoted. Any court is essentially a chameleon, taking its colour from its principal figure: King Charles
I
was extravagant, building up an incomparable art collection which unfortunately he could ill afford, but he was not wanton.

In short, Charles in youth was surrounded with security: he was granted the supreme blessing of a happy childhood.

By the mid-1630s Queen Henrietta Maria had already sufficient anxious reason to hope that the son would not repeat the character of the father she loved so much. Beneath the level of official rejoicing, there had been certain grumblings at the birth of Charles. If there was one bad fairy at his christening it was a Puritan sprite. Puritans resented the fact that the Catholic Queen had proved herself fertile: hopes had been pinned on the accession of one of Elizabeth of Bohemia’s enormous brood of children. As her brother’s heir before the birth of Charles, Elizabeth was in those days regarded as a Puritan sympathizer, her children as Protestant white hopes.

As the children moved on their cheerful round, winters at St James’s Palace, happy summers at any one of a number of royal palaces such as Greenwich, Hampton Court and Oatlands, their father was playing out his part in a very different kind of drama. It is difficult to date precisely that moment at which the King’s troubles began in earnest. His first great Parliamentary defeat, ending in the acceptance of the Petition of Right, had taken place in June 1628, two years before Charles’ birth. In August the King suffered a personal as well as a political blow when his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham – already under pressure from Parliament – was assassinated. Thus Charles had been born into a time of tranquillity only if, in the words of the intelligent Puritan sympathizer Lucy Hutchinson, ‘that quietness may be call’d peace, which was rather like the calm and smooth surface of the sea, whose dark womb is already impregnated of a horrid tempest’.
²²

The King had accepted the Petition of Right with reluctance and only because the acute financial demands of his foreign
policy left him no choice but to conciliate Parliament. He was obliged to make certain concessions concerning arbitrary arrests and taxation in order to continue to operate as he wished in the foreign sphere. But at the same time he was extremely careful to make it clear that his personal prerogative, that vexed but vital attribute of a British monarch, had been left intact.

The exact nature of the royal prerogative, which like a phoenix rose again in the reign of his son from the ashes of the Commonwealth, was a subject of running debate throughout the seventeenth century. But in 1628 no-one denied its actual existence. In practice the King was generally allowed the sole right to direct foreign policy. More vaguely, he claimed to be able to wield certain special powers, beyond those possessed by King and Parliament in concert – but here, with the theory of it all, argument began, and would not end with his death, nor with the death of his eldest son. It was more to the point, once again speaking practically, that the King had the power to prorogue or to dissolve Parliament without the agreement of the Commons. Prorogation was a form of suspension and did not necessitate a fresh election before Parliament met again. Dissolution on the other hand implied an election and with it the possibility of a differently constituted House of Commons. But neither prorogation nor dissolution bound the King to recall Parliament within a specified period of time.

In the spring of 1629 King Charles
I
dissolved Parliament after a series of unruly scenes and, as he saw it, ‘seditious’ speeches from the MPs calling attention to such financial abuses as the levying of tunnage and poundage. Parliament did not sit again until 1640. In the meantime the King governed, or attempted to do so, by use of his prerogative powers without the assent of the Commons. Charles was therefore born into the second year of what was afterwards termed the Eleven Years’ Tyranny.

With Parliament in abeyance, there was still no closed season for religious differences. The early 1630s were a time of constant abuse and counter-abuse in this respect. The Puritans can be roughly divided into the Independents (such as Oliver Cromwell), who believed in the primacy of conscience and a general
tolerance of sects, and the Presbyterians (including many leading Scottish nobles); the latter believed, as the Greek root of their name indicates, in the authority of the elders, and thus the need for conformity. Both factions, while disagreeing with each other fiercely on matters of church organization, condemned any excrescences on the plain surface of the Church of England. The Puritan opposition in the House of Commons – and Lords – had included Independents as well as Presbyterians.

Their protests arose, as so many protests do, out of fear. Their particular fear was ‘Popery’ or ‘Papistry’, but since Roman Catholicism was in fact proscribed by the law in England, and the numbers of Catholics were diminishing, their precise target was the right wing of the English Church. The Puritan argument suggested that those guilty of High Church or ‘Arminian’ practices (named after a Dutch theologian) might turn into Catholics at any moment. The sulphurous path leading to the Roman Church was, in the opinion of Puritans, thoroughly adorned with such ‘Arminian’ trappings as surplices, altar rails, crucifixes and statues. These were to the Puritans horrifying and idolatrous symbols; even the celebration of Christmas was denounced as being a piece of Popish flummery.

It was in this sense that the Catholicism of Henrietta Maria, although strictly supervised by her husband, was always a potential source of weakness to the Crown. The Queen’s Chapel in St James’s, newly designed by Inigo Jones, was granted to her: here, angry subjects were aware, the Mass was being said daily. When William Prynne, the Puritan demonstrator, wrote about Henrietta Maria’s frizzled locks, her odious dancing and so forth (small crimes to us if at all) he knew himself to be on safe ground with a great many of his contemporaries – because the Queen was a Catholic