King Charles II (82 page)

If the whole effect of the Popish Plot and its aftermath on Charles
II
was to bring about ‘a severity in his disposition’, this was the public monarch. Halifax later commented on this new sharpness, which we may suppose to be the outward sign of the inward decision to be yet bolder and firmer. He developed, says Halifax, ‘a very peevish memory’: in his anger, scarcely a blot escaped him.
³⁹
In private the King’s life was marked by new contentment as he grew older, and, in terms of good relations with his growing children, he led a life of richness which many men of his age might have envied.

1
The attainder on the Stafford title remained in force until 1824. The original Bill of May 1685, to reverse the attainder, was dropped at the outbreak of Monmouth’s rebellion.

2
For example, one of Nahum Tate’s pedestrian reworkings of Shakespeare,
The History of King Richard the Second
, which opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 11 December 1680, was taken off after three days: the government hastily assumed that the plot must elevate the nobility (that is, the Whigs) at the expense of the King. In fact, the play had no such message, as Tate himself indignantly protested in his Preface to the printed text.
⁹

3
Blue, now the colour of the (Tory) Right in contrast to the red of the (Socialist) Left, was then adopted in opposition to the traditional scarlet of royalty; the Covenanters also wore blue, based on a Biblical text which adjured the children of Israel to put on ‘a ribband of blue’, and Presbyterian preachers threw blue aprons over their preaching-tubs.

4
The actual agreement with Louis
XIV
was for more; five million
livres
for a three-year suspension of Parliament.

5
Later his heavenly status was confirmed. He was beatified in 1920 and canonized in 1975.

6
But since the dukedoms were originally introduced into England and Scotland only for the King’s sons, not for ordinary peers, Charles
II
was, in fact, behaving in an enlightened manner by not penalizing his sons for their illegitimate birth.

7
Today four of these dukedoms still represent the quasi-royal line: Buccleuch (although Monmouth’s own dukedom of Buccleuch is still under attainder), Grafton, St Albans, and Richmond and Lennox.

8
When the King was godfather to Sir George Carteret’s daughter in Jersey the diarist Chevalier was at some pains to explain the derivation of the name Charlotte as being somewhat eccentric.
³⁶

‘I learnt from a Great Man, that we were in no Way of having a Parliament, there being some near the King, who advised him to another way of ruling the Kingdom.’

C
harles
II
spoke directly on the subject of government to Lord Bruce some time after the Oxford Parliament. He confided to him, ‘I will have no more Parliaments unless it be for some necessary acts to be passed that are temporary only as to make new ones for the good of the nation, for,’ he added, ‘God be praised, my affairs are in so good a posture that I have no occasion to ask for supplies.’
¹
In the winter of 1684 Sir John Reresby was informed by a certain ‘Great Man’ that there was no question of a Parliament, since those near the King had ‘advised him to another way of ruling the Kingdom’.

Certainly in the last years of the life of Charles
II
another way of ruling was tried out. It was found highly satisfactory – from the King’s point of view. The nation as a whole also enjoyed that happiness ordinary people are often content to desire, knowing too well the hideous possibilities of disruption which change brings in the lives of the lowly. The connection between prosperity and happiness being ever strong, it was relevant that England enjoyed a trade boom in the early 1680s. This boom, which has been traced in the customs figures, happily transformed the receipts from this source.
²

Unaware of these blessings about to flow, Charles
II
took a firm line about his own finances. The French subsidies could
be counted on to settle outstanding military needs. Where Court and personal expenditure was concerned, the value of economy – an unpleasant prospect, but anything to avoid having to call a Parliament – was recognized. Retrenchment in general was noted at the Court in the spring of 1682: the King was cutting down at his own table and that of everyone else, ‘except that of the Maids of Honour to the Queen’. More painful to him must have been retrenchment in the number of his horses. The Queen herself played her part and remitted to him her marriage settlement for one year, ‘so that his Majesty seems to have taken serious thoughts of endeavouring to live without subsidies from his Parliament’, as an observer (correctly) commented.
³
It is true that the essential needs of a sovereign could not be transformed overnight; bills for beds, one of crimson and orange velvet and silver tissue, costing nearly a thousand pounds, continued to disfigure the accounts. There were new lodgings in Whitehall and a twelve-oared barge for the Queen in 1683.
⁴
This period also included a major building programme for a new royal palace. But that, as we shall see, was envisaged by the King more as a political move than as an architectural foray. The point remained that the King was by now taking the business of ruling without Parliament more seriously than ever before, even if it meant cutting down on the courses at his own table, the horses in his stable.

These were negative gestures. More positive and more practical were those measures taken to consolidate the political base of the monarchy. That these measures were deliberate is generally agreed. A rhyme of April 1684 summed up the angry astonishment in certain quarters at the turn-round in the royal fortunes:

Who could have thought in ’78 that we

So much enslaved by ’84 should be.
⁵

The extent to which the King himself took an active interest in extending his own powers is more difficult to assess. This royal leopard did not choose to change his protective spots of apparent laziness and even indifference. Under the circumstances,
it is certainly possible to make a case for the Duke of York as the master-mind of this absolutist trend.
⁶
James returned from Scotland for good in June 1682. He had made a brief return in March, but headed north again to fetch his Duchess. It was a disastrous expedition. On the way back James and his entire party was shipwrecked off Yarmouth with much loss of life, although as James himself rather callously remarked, no one ‘of quality’ was drowned. The opportunity was given to his enemies to spread the canard by which James had thought only of saving his strongbox, his priests and his dogs. James himself was in fact more guilty of an obstinate and characteristic refusal to abandon ship in face of danger. It was his entourage who beat off the desperate ‘lesser’ passengers with their swords.
⁷

In Scotland James had conducted affairs justly enough by the standards of a troubled time. His administration brought about calm in the Highlands – no mean achievement – and he also coped competently with the Scottish militia and all the problems of Scottish finance. A new Oath of Allegiance imposed upon all officials the necessity of upholding the Protestant religion (from London the King approved it). That hit the extreme Covenanters. But the Catholic minority – who were not officials in the first place – were able to live in unofficial peace. James also approved of much in the Scottish spirit and law, including the fact that the death penalty was imposed for perjury. As he told his niece Charlotte Lichfield grimly: ‘If it had been so in England so many innocent people had not suffered.’
⁸
The only exception to the orderly quality of his rule was his clumsy attempt to eliminate the Earl of Argyll. This ended with the Earl’s escape and the Duke’s red face.

In England James was not without natural sympathizers. He had for example employed the powers of patronage he possessed in the Army both widely and wisely. Many of the bright sparks of the day owed their advancement to the Duke of York, including John Churchill, George Legge, Sir Charles Lyttleton and Henry Jermyn. His native honesty and courage won respect, as they had done throughout his career (although his father’s ‘peremptoriness’, so different from the affability of Charles
II
, was detected in his manner).

James’ climb back to favour and power is one of the features of the reign’s end. By the beginning of 1684 Sir John Reresby commented that the Duke ‘did now chiefly manage affairs’, adding another dig at his ‘haughtiness’. By the end of that year, James’ ‘indefatigability’ at the King’s side was generally remarked. James had certainly always possessed more obvious indefatigability that his brother, who took care to show as little as possible of this worrisome quality. From there it was a short step to assuming that James was actually deciding on the direction government should take.

But the case for James as master-mind is not proved. The fact was that James’ ideas and policies were now convenient to the King. James, for example, approved in his memoirs that campaign for calling in corporations’ charters begun in 1680 and shortly to be stepped up: ‘His Majesty had at last taken those vigorous counsels, and resolute methods the Duke had so long pressed him to.’
⁹
James had been keen on such measures in the sixties – without success. That still did not mean he was responsible for the new initiative. It was Charles who decided when the time was ripe. The indefatigable James was allowed his hand on the tiller just because he was guaranteed to steer the ship in the direction his brother now approved. It was in this way that the royal brothers drew closer and closer together, just as they had grown apart when James had shown himself a liability to Charles. Charles respected his brother but he did not fear him. He had been the senior partner all their lives; he did not desert that position now.

If James’ ‘absolutism’ is rejected, there is an alternative explanation of the events of the King’s later years: that Charles sank into happy cynicism, now that things were going well in the short term, leaving all to his younger ministers. It is an attitude summed up not so much by the prophecy of Louis
XV
– ‘
Après moi le déluge
’– as a more devil-may-care ‘
Après moi je m’en fou
…’. Neither attitude – reliance on James or indifference – seems however to accord psychologically with the decisive, vigorous and above all cheerful King who dismissed the Oxford Parliament; nor with the wily sovereign who would play a subtle hand at foreign policy during the next few years.

Implicitly Charles
II
agreed with the doctrine of Sir Robert Filmer, posthumously published in the 1680s, that a king was a father of his people.
¹⁰
Even Charles
I
had not adhered to Filmer’s extreme doctrines concerning Divine Right; and, where Divine Right was concerned, Charles
II
certainly did not. But when Filmer wrote that ‘anarchy is nothing else than a broken monarchy, where every man is his own monarch or governor’, his words found an echo in the breast of Charles
II
. They also of course found an echo in the hearts of the people. The King instinctively appealed to those sentiments aptly phrased by Oliver Goldsmith eighty years later. Goldsmith denigrated the great Whig leaders who

blockade the throne,

Contracting regal power to stretch their own…

When I behold a factious band agree

To call it freedom when themselves are free…

I fly from petty tyrants to the throne.

As a father, Charles
II
had not yet abdicated his responsibilities.

In May 1682 the King endured another bout of illness, but, as in previous years, he gave the appearance of a complete recovery. Once restored to health, the pattern of exercise was unabated, including such famous killers of the middle-aged as tennis games with much younger men. He rode and hawked as before. Buck-hunting remained a passion: in the course of his sport he was able to introduce his Italian sister-in-law, Mary of Modena, to the English countryside, including Dorset and one of its jewels, the hunting retreat at Cranborne.
¹¹
Physically, this was not a monarch in decline: whatever sharp warnings of the future were being administered in the shape of these attacks, they were intermittent signals delivered to a still active man. There is no reason to suppose that, mentally, the King was in decline either.

People saw what they wanted to see. Where Reresby witnessed the Duke’s indefatigability at the expense of his brother’s indolence, Roger North, writing the life of his brother Lord Keeper Guilford, described quite a different phenomenon: how
the King, after his various illnesses at Windsor, ‘appeared to be more considerative, and grew more sensible of the niceties of State Government, than he had been before, especially relating to the Treasury’. Charles’ words to Burnet – spoken with regard to his championship of Catharine – will be recalled; in the autumn of 1678 he described himself as having led a bad life which he now wished to amend. He was ‘breaking himself of all his faults’.
¹²
Among those faults it is plausible to suppose that he listed a lack of interest in the
minutiae
of government. ‘Another way of ruling’ represented his own attempt to redirect his energies. And in so far as the Duke of York and ministers gave to outsiders the air of being in control, it was because their thoughts and policies coincided with those of the King.