King Charles II (47 page)

On one level, such a charge was obviously idle. It is true that the Court abandoned the sinking ship (leaving it in this case to the rats who brought the infection). But the plague was not a peril which could be fought manfully by a public example of courage – as King George
VI
was to expose himself to the London Blitz during World War
II
. Indeed, we shall discover King Charles
II
setting just such an example, in the following year of the Great Fire, when bravery and concern could have some effect on the capital’s welfare. To have had the monarch die of the plague would have served no particular purpose, beyond upsetting the dearly won stability of England once more. The same excuse cannot be made for the flight of the President of the Royal College of Physicians, which was indeed culpable.

Yet it is true that the Court’s departure did nothing to arrest the general breakdown of the central authority which aggravated the sufferings of those left behind. (While those who did stay, such as Lord Craven, earned the devotion of the people.) The Lord Mayor, for instance, had no control over the outer parishes; it was not until nine JPs were specifically appointed to deal with the problem that organization at least improved. The plague certainly became a hideous example of the sufferings of the poorer classes. The primitive Anti-Plague Laws of 1646, advocated by the College of Physicians, simply meant that the
inhabitants of a plague-ridden building were immured behind a sealed door until they either died or recovered (generally the former). In the crowded tenements, as many as six families could be shut off – and die together.

The connection between infection and hygiene was not remotely appreciated. All sorts of customs entered our social life as methods of warding off the plague – including chewing tobacco, for the story was spread about that no tobacconist had ever died of the plague. The surviving fashion for blessing one who sneezes (a more spiritual preventive) has its origin in the days of the plague, since to sneeze was considered to be the first sign of an attack.

The whole period in London was, as one eighteenth-century historian would write, a ‘prodigious mixture of Piety and Profaneness at the same time’. There were even comic moments (again, the comparison with the Blitz can be made) to relieve the popular horror: a drunkenly insensible bagpiper was carried away on the death-cart; when he awoke and proceeded to play his pipes, he was taken for the Devil himself. One house would bear the legend, ‘Lord have mercy on us.’ In the next there would be ‘tippling and whoring’, as the inhabitants chose a different way of passing the time till eternity.
⁷

Yet those stricken households who chose the pious exhortation had good reason to cry out, in view of the semi-criminal nature of those left to tend the sick. These plague nurses were barely paid, and mainly illiterate: they supplemented their living by stealing from the dying bodies of those who should have been their patients and became their victims.
^fn1
In the meantime, the restrictions were easily flouted by the upper classes, who either did not report the existence of the disease, or had themselves smuggled away from their sealed houses to the country.

By September the lack of traffic in the streets meant that the grass was beginning to grow in the main thoroughfare of
Whitehall. And although the plague was found to have reached its peak during the week of 17 September, with a total of seven thousand deaths recorded, it was slow to die away. The official total of deaths exceeded sixty-eight thousand, but the true figure may have been something over one hundred thousand. There was general under-reporting, quite apart from the fact that certain sections of the community, such as Quakers, Anabaptists and Jews, were frequently not included in the church returns.

The King returned to Whitehall on 1 February 1666. He had got as far as Hampton Court by the end of January, despite rumours of the recurrence of the plague (which may in fact have been due to an outbreak of typhus). He told Madame that ‘already the Plague is in effect nothing’, but added, with a note of impatience, ‘Our women are afraid of the name’, and indeed Queen Catharine lingered at Oxford. By March Arlington, writing off to the envoy Carlingford abroad, was able to assure him that the disease really was declining, commenting that as a result ‘the [funeral] bells are so silent’.
⁸

But the fear naturally remained, since it was hardly to be foreseen that such a decimating disease would now die away. Parliament was again prorogued from mid-April to late September on the excuse of the plague, as it had been the previous year. The King personally may have acted with cunning rather than dread in order to get rid of a Parliament which was proving most irritating towards his plans, yet the excuse was held to be plausible. It would be a long time before the shadow of the disease which in a few months had claimed between a third and a quarter of the total population of the capital would lift altogether.

All this occurred at a moment when the honeymoon of the King and his people was, as has been noted, fast approaching its conclusion. A sick people, who are also at war, are hardly likely to love their monarch the more for such disasters. Nor had the events of the Great Plague increased the popularity of the Court, as may be imagined, particularly as news of their merry debaucheries and
dolce far niente
way of life was already beginning to spread downwards. At least one commentator put the Great Plague down to God’s desire to punish these said
debaucheries;
⁹
although, if this was indeed the Almighty’s intention, he executed it but clumsily in sending a punishment which fell heavily on the poor, and was easily avoided by the rich.

At Oxford on 28 December ‘my lady Castlemaine’, as Barbara was now generally called, had given the King a very public Christmas present in the shape of a son, born at Merton College, where she was lodged. She was not otherwise having a very fruitful time in the university city, since a nasty libel had been pasted on her door: £1,000 was offered to discover the author, but in vain. Besides, the ties of affection, of not sensuality, which bound her to Charles were being alarmingly stretched.

It was not the little Portuguese Queen who was the danger, but a girl called Frances Stewart. Here was a most disquieting kind of rival. It could not be denied that Frances was elegantly dressed, with a sense of style which the French Ambassador complacently attributed to her education in his country – she had been at the court of Henrietta Maria and was now a maid of honour to Queen Catharine. Then her beauty was also without question, Madame describing her as ‘the prettiest girl in the world and the most fitted to adorn a court’. Even Pepys, glimpsing her in black and white lace, head and shoulders adorned by diamonds, hailed her as ‘a glorious sight’, and later deserted his favourite Barbara to call Frances ‘the beautifullest creature’ he had ever seen.
¹⁰
Her lovely figure and long legs, much admired by the King, enabled her to wear the man’s dress made fashionable by the Queen; Barbara, constantly pregnant, can hardly have shone in such garb, for all her voluptuousness. Frances was also eight years younger than Barbara, never the happiest of situations for the older rival in fear of being supplanted.

But Frances’s youth was not the worst of it. Most dangerous of all, Frances Stewart was actually virtuous! In the summer of 1665, after several years at the English Court, Lely could paint her without irony as ‘chaste Diana’, a rare compliment. There was indeed something child-like, even childish, about Frances which accorded with her virginity and her determination to preserve it, Clarissa-like, against assault. She loved, for example, to play Blind Man’s Buff, to build card castles, amusements
which were harmless, if slightly frivolous. At the same time, she tantalized: as when she had an exciting dream that she was in bed with three French Ambassadors (what could the explanation for that be?) and told it to the Courts. The combination of provocation and virtue drove the King mad. He was discovering the fatal appeal of innocence, which allured and failed to satisfy all at the same frustrating moment. Charles, pursuing his suit with all the amorousness of Henry
VIII
, but without the cruelty, was heard to groan that he wished to see Frances become old and willing….
¹¹

At first, Barbara attempted to deal with the situation in her own way. She set up some seemingly harmless diversions, with highly erotic overtones, featuring both herself and the younger girl. There was a mock marriage, featuring Barbara and Frances as ‘bride’ and ‘groom’, the couple being subsequently bedded in the traditional post-wedding ceremony. Barbara also made a point of inviting Frances to sleep with her. That in itself was not a particularly unusual gesture in an age of communal living and sleeping. But the manner in which Barbara followed it up smacked more of Laclos’ eighteenth-century France than of Restoration England; for she then proceeded to tempt the King deliberately with the delicious sight of Frances asleep, Frances in bed. No doubt Barbara planned to make Frances the King’s junior mistress, under her own control.

The plan failed, as did the King’s own assaults, on the rock of Frances’ virtue. As a result, the King’s passion for this ‘rising sun’ only increased. He expressed it himself in a poem in which his unrequited desire took a graceful pastoral form, beginning,

I pass all my hours in a shady old grove,

But I live not the day when I see not my love;

I survey every walk now my Phillis is gone,

And sigh when I think we were there all alone;

and with the repeated refrain:

O then, ’tis O then, that I think there’s no hell

Like loving, like loving too well.

There was a further complication, still less pleasing to Barbara’s jealous ears. Despite what the French Ambassador called ‘regular assiduity’ on the King’s part,
¹²
as well as those therapeutic visits to spas, Queen Catharine still had not succeeded in becoming pregnant.
^fn2
Were the Queen to die – and she had been extremely ill in 1663 – the King would be free to marry again. There were plenty of precedents for Kings marrying British ladies not of royal birth
en deuxième noces
– even if the examples of Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth Woodville were not exactly quotable. Frances came of a good Scottish family. Her very virtue, her youth, her good spirits, all made her a not implausible candidate. It was happily appropriate that King Charles had her engraved with helmet and trident as Britannia, to preside over the British coinage for three centuries. She was a charming symbol of womanhood.

Then, in April 1667, Frances suddenly eloped with the Duke of Richmond. She did so exhausted by the pressures put upon her, and as if to prove once and for all that she valued a wedding-ring over the perquisites of a royal mistress. The King was appalled and then angry, although Frances’ gesture, so much out of keeping with the age in which she lived, called forth poetic admiration from Edmund Waller. Frances carried the correctness of her behaviour to the extent of returning to the King the jewels he had given her. Charles in his turn carried his frustrated rage into his correspondence with Madame: ‘You may think me ill-natured,’ he wrote, ‘but if you consider how hard a thing ’tis to swallow an injury done by a person I had so much tenderness for, you will in some degree [understand] the resentment I use towards her.’ The next year, when Frances caught smallpox, the King gave way to
Schadenfreude
, ‘fearing’ she would be much marked. Fortunately his better nature returned when he heard that she was untouched: he told Madame that her affliction had brought him to overlook the past: when all was said and done, ‘I cannot hinder myself from wishing her very well.’
¹³
But the uncommon exhibition of annoyance does
bear witness to the degree of love the King had once felt; love no doubt spurred on by her rejection, yet love nonetheless. With Henrietta Catharine of Orange, Frances Stewart could claim to have possessed the heart, as opposed to that more frequently bestowed gift, the body of King Charles
II
. It was surely no coincidence that both were unconsummated passions.

There is a postscript to the story of Charles and Frances. Subsequently restored to favour, Frances and her husband were sent to Denmark, where the Duke was given the role of Ambassador. The Duke died prematurely, but Frances never remarried. She gave up her later years to cats and cards: at her death her cats were bequeathed to various female friends, with money for their upkeep. Since Frances also died childless, one can argue that she would not in the end have been a suitable bride for the King. Perhaps there was something externally girlish, frozen, even frigid about her, which fascinated but in the end would have disappointed the King. There was another hell, beyond ‘loving … loving too well’, and that was the failure of desire. Both the King and Frances took care to guard themselves against that dismal fate.

In the spring of 1666 the King’s campaign to gain allies against ‘the Hollanders’ was not much more successful than his pursuit of Frances Stewart. It was true that Louis
XIV
’s support of them proved nominal and he did not, as Charles had feared at one point, send troops against England. But Charles still lacked help. In vain the previous summer Arlington had urged Lord Carlingford to secure the support of Bishops, Princes, Electors, but above all that of the Emperor; Carlingford’s mission to Leopold
I
had been fruitless, as had been that of Sir Richard Fanshawe at the courts of Lisbon and Madrid. Carlingford’s instructions cast some light on the complications of diplomatic life at the time: on the one hand, he was to allow no aspersions on his master’s Protestantism, while, on the other, he was to take care not to discourage the Pope.
¹⁴

In January 1666 Carlingford was deputed to tell the Emperor that the English King was by now inclined to peace with Holland – provided he could get good terms. The Emperor was
not tempted by the prospect. Still these imperial dignitaries continued to play their own ‘crafty games’, as Arlington despairingly termed them, seeing no particularly good reason why they should not back France or Spain ‘as it shall suit their occasions’. No one seemed prepared to sacrifice anything for the sake of England. By the end of April Arlington was deploring the treachery of the Bishop of Munster, whose support had been counted upon: ‘God be thanked,’ wrote Arlington. ‘His Majesty hath a good fleet to supply the unfaithfulness of his friends and the fraudulent artifices of his enemies.’
¹⁵