King Charles II (67 page)

All the same, the appearance of peace was maintained. And the upswing in the royal and the national finances increased the illusion of a widespread, placid prosperity. As late as June 1677 the King told the French Ambassador that England enjoyed ‘a profound tranquillity’. She successfully enriched herself, while other nations were drained or ruined by war. The English would one day thank him, he observed, for having kept them by prudence in ‘so happy a state and so advantageous for their commerce’.
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In fact, the trade boom broke early in 1676.
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And as the seventies wore on, the image of a liberal and healing King was being succeeded by something rather different. It is true that towards individuals the King had lost none of his humorous affability. It was a quality which he would retain till his dying hour. He was still the bonhomous monarch who supped with jockeys when at Newmarket. There are several well-known stories which illustrate his particular kind of ironic benevolence. One has the King watching a man who boasted of having invented a new process by which he could stand on the point of a steeple for an unprecedented length of time. At the end of the display Charles announced himself to be duly impressed and said that he would buy the patent of the process – to prevent any of his other subjects using it. Another described him dining with Sir Robert Viner in the City. Viner, overcome with the honour, became hopelessly drunk towards the evening and tried to stop the King from departing. ‘Sir, you shall stay and take the other bottle!’ cried Viner. Where other European monarchs might have resorted to a ferocious frown, Charles
II
merely smiled and quoted a popular song: ‘He that’s drunk is as great as a King.’ Then he allowed himself to be led back.

When William Penn, as a Quaker, insisted on remaining covered in the King’s presence – an extraordinary piece of
lèsemajesté
for those days – Charles took off his own hat.

‘Friend Charles,’ Penn is supposed to have asked, ‘why dost thou not keep on thy hat?’

‘It is the custom of this place that only one man should remain uncovered at a time,’ replied the unruffled King.
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He remained a most accessible sovereign, in the modern phrase. It was Charles
II
who set the style by which the royal withdrawing-room, hitherto a select preserve, was open to any ‘Person of Quality as well as our servants and others who come to wait on us’. The King would emerge from time to time to discourse with these Persons of Quality: and so the style was set for the official court ‘Drawing Rooms’ of later centuries. Even his bedchamber, dominated by the great bed, railed in in the French manner, was not particularly intimate. Its door was left open. Here he would receive ministers and favoured
individuals; he would also use it to eat in slightly more privacy than the stately public meals allowed. True privacy, in so far as a seventeenth-century prince enjoyed it, was enjoyed in his closet (where he kept the scientific rarities and little treasures described by Evelyn), although even here he would receive certain advisers.
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Charles
II
fell back on another form of privacy. The long legs which had carried him successfully away from Worcester now served increasingly to carry him away from the pleas and complaints of his subjects. As the King grew older, his daily walk in St James’s Park was taken at a faster and faster pace, the sovereign considering it enough to scatter random ‘God bless yous’ about him as he strode, like jesting Pilate, not stopping for an answer. Indoors he took to taking out his watch (wise men made themselves scarce at this signal) and falling asleep after meals, another cunning way of resisting importunities.

Part of this change of image was due to the inevitable erosion of time. The thick black periwig which he now habitually wore recalled in memory, no more, the black love-locks of yester-year, for the King, having gone grey, was now almost entirely bald. As he was obviously no longer young, he was also no longer debonair. The melancholy which, as we have seen, lay at the core of his being often overlaid the engaging gaiety he had chosen to manifest in the sixties, in public. His face was already lined at the Restoration and adversity was the cause. The later portraits – that of 1675 by Lely onwards – display with relentless truth the deep lines which time had laid on his face; cynicism and an inner weariness at the folly of men – and women – were responsible.

Besides, a new generation was growing up who did not remember the Restoration or those happy years when an invited monarch came from overseas to heal and to forgive. A young man of twenty in 1676 would barely recollect that inauguration of a golden age – as it had seemed to so many – let alone the perils of Commonwealth and Civil War from which the restored monarch had rescued his country.

While the King retained his popular touch with individuals, many of his policies – such as the Stop of the Exchequer –
presented him in a much less attractive light. Then there was the question of his honour. Naturally the full extent of the deceit which he had employed in foreign policy – and was still employing while he received French money – was known to very few. But a feeling that the King’s word, like the King’s financial bond, was to be regarded with caution, began to pervade Court and political circles, nonetheless. And from there the malaise had the chance of spreading outwards. This is not to suggest that Boy Scout ethics either were or should be expected in a seventeenth-century monarch. But Lord Halifax probably got it about right when he wrote of dissimulation in a ruler, that it was a defect not to practise it at all, and a fault to practise it too much: ‘It is necessary and yet it is dangerous too.’
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The King’s persistent poverty contributed to his practice of deception. Charles
II
was no exception to the rule that debtors are often liars for the sake of survival, where rich men can afford the luxury of honesty. An anonymous burlesque of 1670 summed up the connection which was felt to exist between the King’s lack of money (through extravagance) and the King’s lack of truth; Charles was portrayed addressing Parliament as follows: ‘You may perhaps think it dangerous to make me too rich, but do not fear it, I promise you faithfully whatever you give me, I will always still want: though in many other things my word may be thought but slender security, yet in this you may rely upon me….’
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The sardonic epigram ascribed to Lord Rochester on his master also comes to mind:

We have a pritty witty King

Whose word no man relies on,

Who never said a foolish thing

Nor ever did a wise one.
^fn1

Admittedly Rochester was supposed to have first produced the verse in the following fashion: the King, in his easy way, told his courtiers that ‘he would leave everyone to his liberty in talking when Himself was in company, and would not take what was said at all amiss’. At which Rochester saw his opportunity and lunged. Perhaps the King was not totally enchanted by the sally of his friend. For he responded with a thrust of his own blade: his words were his own, he retorted, but his deeds were his ministers’. But, like all slurs with a taste of truth in them, Rochester’s wicked little rhyme has survived the test of time, where the King’s equally quick riposte is often forgotten.

Even more fatally, Charles
II
ignored the force of popular prejudice with regard to Catholicism, France, and their hated bedfellow, arbitrary government. That twenty-year-old man alluded to above would contemplate a Catholic Court or, what was almost worse, a French-dominated one, for the links with France were increasingly resented on almost every level. Yet in his youth Charles had shown extraordinary determination in avoiding the Catholic taint while in exile, lest his chances of restoration perish. This degeneration of his sensitivities had come with age. Half of him was aware that the price of ‘Peace and Quiet for his own Time’ was eternal vigilance where Parliament and the nascent Whigs were concerned, plus a willingness to bow to the strong feelings of the majority of his subjects, however prejudiced and distasteful. The other half relaxed, and hoped that by successful juggling of French money, Parliamentary supplies, and those forces represented by Danby, Shaftesbury and even Buckingham, the same result could be achieved. He would shortly receive a terrible lesson.

Before that happened, Charles
II
was subjected to an assault of a rather pleasanter nature: from a beautiful woman. The rise – and fall – of Hortense Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin, demonstrated two things. First, that those closest to the King continued to believe tenderly that he could be influenced by a woman. Second, that the King’s sexuality was not yet extinct.
The affair with Hortense would be his last very public throw in that direction. But Hortense, unlike Louise, was not of the material of which successful mistresses are made. She was an attractive, self-destructive creature whose wanton disregard for her own best interests (in the worldly sense) seduces from afar, even if it drove her promoters mad.

Once upon a time Hortense could have had the impecunious and throneless King as a husband; as the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, she would have been a useful wife for Charles in the late 1650s. In the intervening years Hortense as well as Charles had seen some revolutionary changes in her state. Her first husband, created Duc de Mazarin in her honour, proved to have a touch of religious mania. The unappreciative Hortense fled to Savoy, a decision which had caused Charles to quip to Madame at the time, ‘I see wives do not love devout husbands….’
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In Savoy an episode with the Duke led to her expulsion from the country after his premature death. But on leaving Savoy, Hortense was noted to be gaily ‘bewigged and befeathered’ at the head of a train of twenty men, as though nothing particularly humiliating had happened. Accompanied by her black page, Mustapha, she now turned to England to try her fortunes there.
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Despite her mature age – she was about thirty – there was something unalterably splendid about Hortense’s appearance, in which her Italian inheritance predominated. She was ‘one of those lofty Roman beauties’, said a French admirer, ‘in no way like our Baby-visaged and Puppet-like Faces of France’; Edmund Waller in a poem similarly termed her the ‘Roman eagle’. She was blessed with a mass of black waving hair, and eyes said to be of three colours – combining the sweetness of the blue, the Irishness of the grey and the fire of the black. Ruvigny, a Protestant, sniffed that she was not really so beautiful: which, he added as a Frenchman, did not stop her being more beautiful than anyone else in England.
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Hortense also had an avidity for life which recalls that of Barbara in her prime. Indeed, in many ways the reign of Hortense represents a short-lived reversion of the King to the type of mistress of his younger days, high-spirited and reckless, as opposed to the domestic docility offered by Louise. In
Hortense’s amatory exploits there were hints of sexual ambiguity: as Saint Evremond, commenting on the triumph of this new siren (‘Fair beauties of Whitehall give way/Hortensia does her charms display’), saw fit to remark, ‘Each sex provides its lovers for Hortense’. Certainly most aspects of pleasure lured her. She was a compulsive gambler, a lover of good food, adored dogs – three favourites were named Boy, Little Rogue and Chop – as well as cats, monkeys and birds which included a white sparrow, a canary, a starling called Jacob, and a parrot called Pretty. She was an excellent shot who could bring down quail. She too, like Charles, loved to swim, if she was not quite so adept at it: we hear of the faithful Mustapha (who luckily swam like a fish) dragging her about in the water on her front and her back. Hortense, wrote a contemporary, thought of nothing but enjoying herself: she triumphed over everything by an excess of folly. These were surely delightful attributes in a lover, if Hortense lacked the fundamental application for such a serious role (as Louise would have had it) as that of royal mistress.

Hortense’s ostensible reason for arriving in England in the winter of 1675 was her cousinship to Mary Beatrice, Duchess of York. But her conquest of the King (on whom Louise’s domesticated charms were perhaps temporarily palling) was rapid. By the summer of 1676 it was being said that the only time Hortense was
not
at the King’s side was when he was bathing. Courtin told Louis
XIV
in another piece of Gallic chauvinism, ‘It is the only decency which they observe in this country. There is a great deal of laxness in the rest of their conduct.’
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By August Louise was in floods of tears – and Hortense was in Barbara’s old apartments.

Naturally the rise of a new mistress caused a flurry of wings in the political dovecots. Arlington, who had attempted unsuccessfully to pursue his early alliance with Louise, now turned to Hortense, hoping to put down Danby. In consequence, Hortense was rumoured to be pro-Dutch. There seems no real proof that Hortense was anything quite so solid-sounding. Besides, Danby quickly adapted to her friendship. But Hortense did create a great deal of trouble by intriguing in a more intimate sphere. For she developed a passionate friendship with Anne
Countess of Sussex, one of the King’s two daughters by Barbara. The Earl of Sussex, previously Lord Dacre, had been given the superior title on his marriage to Anne in 1674. The wedding, at Hampton Court, had been a glittering affair, attended by royalties on both sides of the blanket, including Prince Rupert, the Duke of York and the Duke of Monmouth. Anne received a £20,000 dowry from the King, who also played the father’s role at the wedding; the bridegroom got a £2,000 a year pension. Despite this
largesse
, the new Lord Sussex intended to be master in his own house.
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He disapproved of the connection with Hortense. Nevertheless, Anne, who had some of her mother’s obstinate temperament, persisted in it. The two ladies took fencing lessons together, proceeding to St James’s Park for the purpose on one occasion, with drawn swords beneath their nightgowns. The crisis came when Anne announced her intention of sharing a balcony in Cheapside with Hortense at the Lord Mayor’s Show in November. Barbara, like many another mother with a purple past, found it in her to write an extremely priggish letter to her daughter from France, advising ‘wifely obedience’.
¹³
Eventually Lord Sussex took his wayward spouse in high dudgeon to the country. But he should have been warned. His troubles with her were not over – nor, for that matter, were Barbara’s.