King Charles II (51 page)

Most cogent of all is the testimony of Father Huddleston,
the priest who finally received the King. Charles
II
, in his general confession, declared himself heartily sorry ‘for that he had deferr’d his Reconciliation [to the Catholic Church] so long’.
¹⁶
That again was a strange statement for a man to make on the eve of his death, if it was not true; and a strange statement for Father Huddleston to publish afterwards if it was demonstrably false.

It is true that one account exists by which the King, in an affecting scene, proclaimed ‘his mind in regard to religion’ on 25 January 1669. He was said to have shed ‘tears of joy at the thought of the revival of the Romish religion in England’ in front of an audience consisting of James himself, Lord Arundel (a Catholic), Arlington (a Catholic sympathizer) and Clifford (a future Catholic). But the provenance of the story makes it suspicious. The authority is found in the so-called Memoirs of James
II
– in fact, a document compiled by other hands to supplement James’ own notes.
¹⁷
It was edited and printed in the early nineteenth century: most of the original has since disappeared and cannot be compared with the text. One cannot therefore regard these memoirs as a first-hand or even reliable source on such an important topic. This is not to say that the story was invented, only that the details were coloured up in the light of the King’s death-bed conversion. Probably Charles made one of his welcoming speeches on the subject of Catholicism – to be compared with his warm words to Father Huddleston after Worcester. But his indubitably secretive behaviour on the subject of religion was not altered.

At the same time, Charles the pragmatist was not without a reluctant admiration for James the man of principle, where religion as well as politics were concerned. It was as though he was fascinated by James’ intransigence, that very quality he had dismissed for himself as being disastrous in a king. He never, for example, wished James to suffer for his religious principles, and even, incredibly, did not forbid James’ second Catholic marriage – a manifest political disaster. Then there was the whole question of the succession. That too was crucial to the relationship between the two brothers. Like the religion of Charles
II
, it was not at all a straightforward matter.

James’ position as heir presumptive went through several phases during the 1660s, first weakened by the King’s marriage, then strengthened by the Queen’s apparent infertility. For as the years went by Catharine still did not succeed in conceiving.
^fn2
It was not until 7 May 1668 that the King wrote to his sister that his wife had miscarried that morning. On the same date Pepys reported that the Queen had miscarried ‘of a perfect child’ about ten weeks old. Charles was more cautious: ‘And though I am troubled’, he wrote, ‘yet I am glad that ’tis evident she was with child, which I will not deny to you till now I did fear she was not capable of.’
¹⁹
Poor Catharine had already endured the primitive suffering of a barren wife for six long years of marriage. Not only was her fertility the subject of constant speculation, but Barbara’s growing brood constituted a perpetual reminder that the fault lay with her and not her husband. Now her hopes were once more dashed.

By this time several of the notorious ways of dealing with a barren wife had already been publicly mentioned. At the time of Charles’ unrequited romance with Frances, the notion of his remarriage – perhaps on the Queen’s death, perhaps on divorce – had been vaguely mooted in gossip, if nowhere more substantial. By May 1668 the rumours had grown. Meanwhile, the ground swell of suggestion that Monmouth was actually legitimate, or would be now legitimized, grew.

In the spring of 1669 there were two further developments. First, Lord Roos, suffering from a wanton wife and separated from her in the spiritual courts, decided to take his case to the House of Lords in order to secure a civil divorce as well. He wished to remarry, and a special Act of Parliament was his only possible recourse at this date. The Roos case was followed with
extreme interest by all parties who felt themselves concerned with the question of the succession. No such extreme step had been taken before. The case was widely regarded as a kite flown to test the wind in that direction for the King himself, should he wish to divorce Catharine. Not only was it advocated by Buckingham and Bristol, his confidants, but the King made a point of attending the debates, commenting gaily that the action was as good as a play. James and his faction were not unnaturally most hostile to the Bill.

Then in May, exactly a year after her first conception, the Queen was pronounced – possibly – pregnant again by the King. ‘My wife has been a little indisposed for some days,’ he told Madame, ‘and there is hope that it will prove a disease not displeasing to me. I should not have been so forward in saying this much without more certainty, but that I believe others will write it to Paris and say more than there is.’ As if in confirmation of this, Pepys wrote in his
Diary
a few days later that everyone at the Court concluded that the Queen was far gone with child! A week later the diarist himself saw the Queen in a white pinner and apron, the maternity dress of the time.
²⁰

Madame of course was overcome with excitement and agitation, and demanded full details. She was rewarded with a letter full of medical exposition on 24 May. The relevant passage reads:

She missed
those
[that is, her period] almost, if not altogether, twice, about this time she ought to have them, and she had a kind of colic the day before yesterday which pressed downwards and made her apprehend she would miscarry, but today she is so well she does not keep her bed. The midwives who have searched her say that her matrix is very close, though it be a little low; she has now and then some little shows of
them
, but in so little quantity as it only confirms the most knowing women here that there is a fair conception.
²¹

Alas for these expectations. On 7 June the King wrote again to his sister informing her that a miscarriage had taken place ‘after all our hopes’ and ‘without any visible accident’ (although
one story has it the misadventure was caused by the Queen’s pet fox). The King reported the doctors as being still divided ‘whether it had been on a false conception or a good one’; nevertheless it seems likely on the evidence that the wretched woman had indeed conceived twice.
^fn3
If Burnet is to be believed, then Dr Willis, the celebrated physician, told Dr Lloyd (who told Burnet) that the Queen miscarried so late on an unspecified occasion that the sex of the child could have been identified.
²²
What is quite certain is that Catharine never conceived again. Even more to the point, she was not expected to do so. The King, who had, on his own admission, been doubtful of her capability in 1668, definitely gave up hope after the fiasco of 1669, which in any case had been antedated by the appearance of the Roos case.

The clear loser from any royal divorce was James. For it might soon endow his brother with a new and fertile wife, a quiverful of children. It is no coincidence therefore that this period, in which Charles tentatively, even whimsically, played with the notion of divorcing Catharine, was also a period of coolness between the royal brothers. It was not such an absolutely shocking suggestion. As the King himself was supposed to have observed about this time, if a man could be divorced for impotency, he did not see why a woman should not be divorced for barrenness.

The divorce of a Queen who failed to provide an heir was hardly without precedent: by the laws of the Catholic church, barrenness constituted one clear ground for annulment. Matters would be made easier if Catharine herself agreed to retire into a nunnery, thus acknowledging her own fault. Buckingham was rumoured to have suggested kidnapping her, if she would not agree to this comforting solution. Marvell heard that Madame
would arrange for a marriage with a Frenchwoman, or alternatively a sister of the King of Denmark or even ‘a good virtuous Protestant here at home’.
²³

Many rumours do not necessarily add up to one hard fact, particularly if unsupported by firm evidence of the King’s own commitment. Charles’ public interest in the Roos Bill does seem to provide this evidence. John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, who was its chief intellectual promoter, referred significantly to the fact that ‘divorce might be not only in case of adultery but also of the immundicity of the womb, which is given forth to [be] the queen’s condition’.
²⁴

The Roos case was decided in the husband’s favour but the King did not take advantage of the decision. There is a sharp distinction to be drawn between the King’s flirtation – it may have been no more than that – with the idea of a divorce, and the parallel rumours concerning the legitimization of Monmouth. This move would have been of course even more unwelcome to James. A new Queen (who might prove barren in her turn) had to be accepted; at least her offspring would stand quite indubitably ahead of him in the succession. The legitimization of Monmouth was quite another matter, constituting a lethal snub to James. And although rumours continued to fly about on the subject, it has to be faced that the King never at any time gave them countenance.

The favourite canard was that Charles would declare himself to have legally married Lucy Walter (who had died a few years before he married Catharine, so that the validity of this second ceremony would not be affected). As has been pointed out, the idea of this marriage was a fantasy, the King having been very much otherwise engaged at the time, unlikely to contemplate any wife except a rich and powerful princess. There is no solid evidence to suggest that Charles ever contemplated dispossessing James by a piece of calculated deception concerning Monmouth’s birth. On the other hand, it may easily have crossed his mind to divorce Catharine, and thus by implication dispossess James – but that move would incidentally have been in direct contradiction to the policy of legitimizing Monmouth.

The Monmouth
coterie
, like Monmouth himself, were the prey
of their own optimistic visions: how the King would like to ‘own’ Monmouth but did not know how to do so. But the King did nothing. Catharine remained undivorced, Monmouth unacknowledged. Meanwhile, this temporary ruffle between King and York became gradually smoothed. A better relationship was established. James’ stature as heir presumptive was undiminished.

The King’s true preoccupation from the fall of Clarendon onwards was not his own successor but his serpentine discussions with France. He may even have been cynically pleased that the hue and cry over Queen, Duke and Monmouth diverted the loud mouths of the Commons and Court from a secret wooing which was taking place between the two kings, Charles
II
and Louis
XIV
. For Charles, described so often by his contemporaries as being lazy at business, was not showing himself lazy where foreign policy was concerned. Quite as much as his subjects, he was humiliated and furious at the memory of that ‘Black Day accurs’d’ when the Dutch had ravished the chaste Medway. By the end of 1668 he had secured a remarkable diplomatic triumph from this degrading position. After the Peace of Breda, a Triple Alliance was constructed between England, Holland and Sweden. Newly vulnerable, France immediately concluded the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle with Spain, and an ostensible tranquillity prevailed across the map of Europe.

It is probably correct to regard this apparent turnabout in alliances – two of the three powers concerned had recently been fighting each other in a nasty and quite prolonged war – as mere shadow-boxing. There is no evidence that Charles
II
’s competitive aversion to the Dutch had abated. But he hoped that the Triple Alliance might prove an efficient way of dealing with his growing domestic problems. These included a bankrupt Treasury and a highly restive House of Commons, many of whose members were beginning to voice anti-French – and anti-Catholic – sentiments. The Triple Alliance had a nice Protestant sound to it; more money might be forthcoming from Parliament as a result. It is significant that Clifford, ever representing the naval point of view, disliked the Alliance. At the same time, of
course, Charles had effectively prevented Holland from ganging up with France against England once more.

Across the straits of the North Sea, Johann De Witt was animated by a similar consideration, to keep England from the arms of France. Indeed, the first move towards the alliance came from De Witt.
²⁵
The notion was delicately conveyed to Charles’ Ambassador in Holland, Sir William Temple, in the autumn of 1667. Temple was instructed to explore the possibility. From the first it was an unnatural alliance, much less sweet to Charles than the ultimate prospect of ‘revenge on Holland’. Nevertheless there was certain unfinished business between the Dutch and English rulers which these negotiations might assist. This was the position of Charles’ nephew, William
III
of Orange.
^fn4

At the end of the war, De Witt considered it prudent to have the seventeen-year-old boy admitted to the Council of State; but at the same time the Stadtholdership of Holland was abolished (although not hereditary it might have been granted to William as Prince of Orange). William however showed some sign of that implacable political quality which would one day both chill and dazzle Europe. He went before the States of Zeeland and pleaded successfully to be admitted as first noble, by right of his inherited position as Margrave of Flushing and Vere. On his eighteenth birthday, 14 November 1668, he was declared to have come of age.

There was also the question of the considerable sums of money Charles had borrowed from the private coffers of the House of Orange, while in exile. These monies had never been returned and even the late Princess Mary’s dowry had never been paid in full: the total was nearly a quarter of a million pounds. William paid a four-month visit to England in 1670 to try to secure them – an optimistic foray in view of his uncle’s financial position. However recourse was had to one of the King’s chief financial agents, Edward Backwell. He had already
burnt his fingers over the Queen’s dowry by advancing money to the King before the Portuguese paid up (a slow business as it proved and never satisfactorily completed). Even so, valuing the royal connection, Backwell took on the task of paying off William over a period of four years on the security of orders on the Customs’ receipts.
²⁶