King Charles II (58 page)

Yet as the King grew older, the enthusiasm for hunting gave way to a passionate involvement in racing: it was the Duke of York who was left as the chief upholder of hunting in the royal family, as Charles’ teasing remark to George of Denmark indicates. Charles
II
concentrated on what has become known appropriately enough as the Sport of Kings. The value of his patronage to British racing can hardly be over-estimated: at the beginning of his reign, race meetings were still suffering from the blight put upon them during the Protectorate, when they were banned as being opportunities for the seditious to meet (the first meeting of the monarchist Western Association had actually taken place at Salisbury races). By 1685 racing was thoroughly established as an integral part of British social and sporting life.

The King probably first went racing at Epsom Downs in 1661: but it was Newmarket in particular which owed so much to his prolonged personal patronage.
³²
The Duke of Tuscany, who paid the town a visit, drew attention to ‘the almost level territory which lies in every direction around it’ and commented, ‘It has, in the present day, been brought into repute by the king….’ This was true. The royal stables there were referred to as ‘ruinous’ in 1661. John Baypole, Surveyor of the Royal Stables, was granted £800 for immediate work, and though restoration proceeded slowly, since the money, in its usual fashion, trickled through slower than had been anticipated, enough was found to breed there twelve choice horses a year. The King also came to maintain four jockeys-in-ordinary.

There were races at Newmarket by March 1663. In 1666 Charles
II
paid his first visit to the spring meeting; thereafter he went two or three times a year for visits lasting several weeks. Although tents and pavilions formed part of the royal baggage,
the King himself stayed at Audley End with the Earl of Suffolk, and used the Earl of Thomond’s town residence. Gradually the King found Audley End so convenient for his racing life that in 1669 he bought it for £50,000. His enthusiasm continued to grow: in March that year he left London before three a.m. in order to reach Newmarket in good time, only to be rewarded – or punished – for his early rise by having his coach overturn at King’s Gate, Holborn. ‘The King all dirty but no hurt,’ wrote Pepys philosophically.
³³

There was an acute lack of money at the time (this was the period of so-called retrenchment) and the price of Audley End was never paid in full. In any case, £10,000 had to be spent on it straight away for essential improvements. Buildings inside Newmarket also began to be made more ‘commodious’, in the Duke of Tuscany’s phrase, as the visits of the
noblesse
proliferated. The King himself decided to build a palace in the town and commissioned Wren to draw up plans, the old palace having been knocked down under the Commonwealth.
^fn7
Evelyn however found it a very odd sort of palace, which lay ‘in a dirty street … without any court or avenue’. And even Charles had some complaints about the low ceilings of Wren’s rooms. Wren, who was a short man, assured the King that they were quite high enough.

‘Aye, Sir Christopher,’ replied the King, squatting down from his great height, ‘I think they are….’
³⁴

The King’s involvement in racing embraced every aspect of this rich and many-sided sport, including, on occasion, dining with the jockeys. He instituted four-mile heats at twelve stone for a Plate ‘for ever’– the precursor of all the subsequent royal Plate races at Newmarket. The idea of these heats over such a long distance – by modern standards – was to develop the breeding of ‘big stout horses’. What was more, the Plate race had something generally lacking in races at the time, a set of formal rules. Otherwise informality was so great that the King
was sometimes used as an adjudicator. On one famous occasion, in April 1682, he was called in to decide the rights and wrongs of a race between Sir Robert Kerr’s horse and a gelding belonging to Sir Robert Geeres.

The King would get up early to watch the training gallops, either installed in his ‘Chair’, a small pavilion on top of the hill, or riding on his own hack. His overflowing energy prevented him from being a mere spectator whenever there was an alternative. The Duke of Tuscany described how the King would watch the races on horseback with his friends, riding parallel with the runners as they approached the finish, until the roll of drums and the blare of trumpets signalled the winner. Finally he rode in a number of races himself. In 1671 he rode the winner of the Plate – ‘a flagon of £32 price’ – beating, amongst others, the Duke of Monmouth. In 1675, when he was in his mid-forties, the King rode in three heats, a course and the Plate, all being ‘hard and near run races’; he won the Plate by what Sir Robert Kerr assured a correspondent was sheer ‘good horsemanship’.
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Today the Rowley mile at Newmarket still commemorates Charles
II
in its own fashion: it was named after that famous stallion of the day, sire of a vast progeny – and, as has been mentioned, Charles himself was nicknamed Old Rowley in honour of his own similarly prolific powers. As for Newmarket itself, Alexander Pope wrote angrily in the next century,

In Days of Ease, when now the weary Sword

Was sheath’d, and Luxury with Charles restor’d …

The Peers grew proud in Horsemanship t’excel,

Newmarket’s Glory rose, as Britain’s fell …

Today, as British horse-racing and breeding flourish, following the lead of Charles
II
, many would think that, on the contrary, Newmarket’s glory had contributed to that of Britain.

There was a bucolic side to the life centred there. One is reminded of the lush pastoral backgrounds to some of Lely’s portraits. One incident, inspired by Queen Catharine’s wish to go to a fair incognito, has overtones of another country-minded
Queen, Marie Antoinette. Catharine set off for the fair on the back of a cart-horse ridden by a courtier, in what she fondly imagined to be true country style. Unfortunately, both Queen and courtiers, including Frances, now Duchess of Richmond, and the Duchess of Buckingham, ‘had all over-done it in their disguise’. In their red petticoats and waistcoats, they looked more like ‘Antiques than Country folk’. Catharine continued for a while innocently to enjoy herself. At a booth she bought a pair of yellow stockings ‘for her sweetheart’. But of course, quite apart from her ‘antique’ clothes, her heavy foreign accent – what a witness unkindly called her ‘gibberish’ – could not help drawing attention. Soon a crowd gathered to gape at these strange birds in their even stranger plumage, and eventually mobbed the Queen.
³⁶

There was another rather different natural extension to the King’s love of physical exercise – his addiction to garden and park planning. A work on gardening printed in 1670,
Le Jardin de Plaisir
, by André Mollet, which was dedicated to Charles, suggested with true nationalistic fervour that his good taste in gardens must derive from his French blood. Perhaps there was something in it; although those years of French environment probably played quite as much part as his French heredity in influencing the King. At all events, it was after consulting the French master Le Nôtre that he reafforested Greenwich. Avenues of Spanish chestnuts were planted and over six thousand elms, as well as small coppices of birch, hawthorn, ash and privet, Greenwich today still being remarkable for its luxuriant hawthorn. At Hampton Court the King planted what Evelyn approvingly described as ‘sweet rows of lime trees’. Botany also caught his scientific fancy: a famous picture shows King Charles
II
, before the façade of Ham House, being shown the first pineapple cultivated in England.

Not every British sovereign has had a genuine love of London. Charles
II
felt this passion for the city of his birth. St James’s Park was his
chef d’œuvre
. Here he loved to walk on his fast daily round or ‘saunter’ from the adjacent Palace of Whitehall, accompanied by his dogs: one charming tradition associates this saunter, or morning ‘constitutional’, with the naming of
Constitution Hill, which today runs up beside Buckingham Palace to Hyde Park Corner.
^fn8
St James’s Park indeed benefited as much from the King’s patronage as Newmarket, although, as with Windsor Castle, the fact has been obscured by its later history (in both cases George
IV
swept away many of the improvements of Charles
II
in favour of further improvements of his own: today we see a park ‘anglicized’ by John Nash). The area had originally taken its name from a thirteenth-century hospital for female lepers, called St James in the Fields; in the seventeenth century it came to have more pleasurable connotations. The marshy area was drained. Then Charles completely transformed the layout into something very much in the French manner. Water was an integral part of the vision. Once again influenced by Le Nôtre, he had a formal pattern of ornamental water and avenues designed, which recalled the Versailles of Louis
XIV
. There was a further foreign influence: from Venice the Doge despatched two gondolas – ‘very rich and fine’ – to ride on the new canal.
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The King’s gesture in throwing open the park to the public was however genuinely English. As were the games which he either introduced or extended in their range. Croquet and bowls, both of which the King enjoyed, were played in the park. For the game variously called pêle-mêle or pall-mall, a form of croquet using a wooden ring suspended above the ground, a fine new mall or alley, nearly fifteen hundred feet long, was laid out on the site of the present-day Mall. It was surfaced with fine cockleshells under the supervision of yet another official on royal pleasure bent – the King’s Cockle-strewer. The King was an expert at the sport: in Waller’s phrase (not too sycophantic, one hopes),

He does but touch the flying ball

And ’tis already more than half the Mall….
^fn9

There was also wrestling in the park. Evelyn attended one match, held in the presence of ‘a vast assemblage of Lords and other spectators’; the prize was £1,000, and the ‘Western men’ wrested it from the ‘Northern men’.
³⁹

The King’s new rectangular lake (or canal), for all its formality, was another new source of popular pleasure. Although only the King swam in it, winter was different. That of 1662 was one of the harsh seasons common at the time. The Dutch practice of ‘sliding’, as it was known (although we should now call it skating), was quickly introduced. Pepys, much taken with the spectacle of the ‘sliders’, with their skates, in the park, described it as being ‘a very pretty art’, the Duke of York being a particularly skilful slider. Evelyn was equally impressed by the dexterity of the practitioners, who would swoop to a graceful stop exactly in front of the King and Queen.

Summer brought its own delights. It was fashionable to drink warm milk, freshly drawn from the herd of cows placidly grazing in the parks, at a kind of early milk bar provided for the purpose. The women in attendance advertised their wares: ‘A can of milk, ladies, a can of red cow’s milk, sir!’ In adjacent Green Park the King had a ‘snow-house’ and an ‘ice-house’ constructed on the site of the former duelling-ground, in order to ‘cool wines and other drinks for the summer season’; it was another taste he had acquired in France.
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Much as he enjoyed catering to his subjects’ tastes – and his own – King Charles’ real excitement within the confines of the park consisted in the various species of bird which he introduced, both in his specially built aviary and on the ‘Duck Island’ in the middle of the lake.
⁴¹
It was true that exotic livestock had been seen in St James’s Park before: James
I
, another connoisseur of wild life, had introduced two young crocodiles as well as duck and pheasants. Charles
II
was able to make the more picturesque, less predatory addition of a pair of pelicans from Astrakhan, a present from the Russian Ambassador. Evelyn, who was fascinated by the pelican’s appearance, as well as the way it played with fish before devouring them, described it as ‘a fowl between a Stork and a Swan’ and otherwise, more imaginatively, as ‘a Melancholy Water Fowl’. Once again the King’s interest in rare
birds is remembered in the name of Birdcage Walk, just beside Buckingham Palace, and Storey’s Gate, called after his aviary keeper.

Less exotic fowl also flourished. A duck decoy was created on the Dutch model – despite the King’s feelings about the Dutch, he was not above introducing those original aspects of their way of life which appealed to him, including yacht-racing and flower cultivation. A chain of pools, fed by a subterranean passage to the Thames at high tide, kept the duck happy, and they bred abundantly; while the household accounts also reveal expenditure on hemp-seed for their delectation. On the site of the present Marlborough House a pheasantry was established.

It is necessary to stress the outdoor character of many of the sports and amusements which marked the reign of Charles
II
since, in contrast to the so-called debauchery of the Court, they united him with, rather than divided him from, his humbler subjects. It is less necessary to stress his well advertised love of the theatre. It has been mentioned how many of his friends were patrons of playwrights. So, for that matter, were many of his mistresses, including Barbara, Nell Gwynn and Louise. Writers as a whole amused Charles
II
. He enjoyed the vicarious sport of suggesting subjects to them. We hear of the King walking with Dryden in the Mall and confiding to him the subject for a poem which he would write himself ‘if I was a poet and I think I am poor enough to be one …’. Dryden took the hint, wrote the poem along the lines suggested by the King, and became a little less poor himself as a result.
⁴²

When John Crowne was suffering from that familiar complaint, playwright’s block, the King presented him with a ready-made plot to encourage him – in the shape of a Spanish play to adapt. Crowne subsequently scored great success with the result,
Sir Courtly Nice or It Cannot Be
.
^43
fn10
To Thomas Otway the King is said to have suggested the character of Antonio (based on that of Shaftesbury) in
Venice Preserv’d
.