1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  However, life at court must have seemed fairly absurd at the best of times, and no one appears to have taken offence. The two boys did some male bonding by hunting together, and at the end of three days the visit was declared a success. From the English point of view, it hadn’t been perfect – Charles didn’t receive any gifts or money, for example – but as one English courtier observed, ‘these civilities are better than neglects’.

  That winter, the French court returned to Paris and this time Charles was allowed to join in the fun. He ignored his tutors’ entreaties to study, and devoted himself to enjoying balls, masques (costume parties) and plays, the only irritation being that his mother Henriette-Marie had taken it into her head to try and improve their family finances by marrying him off to one of his immensely wealthy, and hugely patronizing, French cousins.

  The lucky girl was Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, known at court as Mademoiselle – the title traditionally given to the most senior female heir to the throne. She was the daughter of a brother of Louis XIII, a blood princess three years older than Charles and, by her own account at least, a good catch. In her memoirs, she wrote of ‘my fine figure, my good looks, my pale complexion, the splendour of my fair hair’. Not exactly a shrinking violet.

  Charles’s mother had no problem convincing Mademoiselle that the English Prince was crazy about her – how could he be anything else? But Charles was having none of his mother’s schemes, and began a single-minded sabotage campaign. Not only did he refuse to woo Anne-Marie, he said that he couldn’t speak to her because he didn’t know any French. He was forced to squire her to functions and escort her home afterwards, but didn’t open his mouth except to eat and drink. It was almost as though he had bets going on how long he could hold out.

  His mother alternated between bouts of fury at her stubborn son and desperate face-saving sessions with Anne-Marie. Charles was just shy, she said, and his silence was nothing more than a symptom of his infatuation – though this lie became slightly less credible when courtiers observed that Charles had learned enough French to chat up the lovely duchesse de Châtillon, who was notorious for her string of noble lovers. He was also seen dancing and joking with maids of honour at the same soirées where he maintained a stony silence with Anne-Marie. The Princess’s bafflement soon turned to indignation, and the marriage was officially called off.

  In purely financial terms, this was annoying, and politically it was a total disaster, because the new Republican rulers of England were demanding that Louis XIV should hand over his royal refugee for imprisonment. Unmarried and tied to France only by his mother’s nationality, Charles was in danger of becoming Cardinal Mazarin’s latest bargaining tool.

  But then in the spring of 1648, Charles was spirited out of Paris to join his father’s cause, leaving behind him at least one furious princess, a few fondly smiling French ladies and a general impression that he was a bit too fun-loving and disrespectful to be a political threat if ever he came to power in England – which goes to show that you shouldn’t underestimate a man just because he wears a big floppy wig.*

  No way to win a wife

  When Charles returned to Paris shortly after his father’s execution in 1649, he was a king without a country and – worse – without any money. And it seems to have been sheer poverty that drove him to give in to his mother’s pleas and have a more serious go at courting Mademoiselle Anne-Marie-Louise.

  Henry Jermyn, Henriette-Marie’s secretary, was duly sent to Mademoiselle with letters professing Charles’s boundless admiration for her. This time, even Mazarin was in favour of the match and informed Mademoiselle that Charles was ‘passionately in love’ with her, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

  With the tradition of marrying princesses off at the age of twelve to wrinkly old kings in exchange for a promise not to declare war in the near future, it seems strange that everyone should have gone to such lengths to convince Anne-Marie that this was going to be a love match. But she was acutely conscious of her wealth and status, and had an annoying habit of trying to organize her own marriage. The only option was to appeal to her vanity and convince her that she was irresistible.

  Charles (or, more likely, his mother) sent word that although he was now a poor, landless king – with the word ‘king’ no doubt written slightly larger than ‘poor’ and ‘landless’ – if Anne-Marie consented to the match, he would marry her, and then go away to ‘seek his fortune’.

  The ploy failed. The surprisingly modern Mademoiselle said that she was not some object to be wed and then abandoned, and refused. Even so, it seems that she was tempted by the offer, because she later confessed in her memoirs that all she wanted was for Charles to woo her by whispering sweet nothings – douceurs – to her: ‘Without being a coquette, I might listen to a king who says he wants to marry me.’ If Charles had only played the French lover and told her that she was as scrumptious as foie gras and sweeter than crème brûlée, he could have become a ridiculously wealthy chateau-owner, living it up in the Loire Valley until the English decided to invite him back.

  Despite her initial refusal, Anne-Marie was persuaded to give the young Englishman yet another chance and meet him at the royal chateau of Compiègne, north of Paris. On the day of the visit, Anne-Marie even got up early to have her hair curled, a piece of coquetry for which she was teased by her ladies in waiting. It seemed that Charles was just one ‘oh, you’ve changed your hairdo’ away from a massive dowry.

  The French royal party, including the young King Louis XIV, accompanied Anne-Marie out into the forest, where it had been agreed that Charles would meet them. And when the English King arrived, the reunion was an affectionate one. Protocol demanded that Charles talk to Louis first, and this he did, chatting amiably in French about hunting while the expectant Anne-Marie waited for him to turn his attention to less gory matters. But when his man-to-man with Louis came to an end and the ladies tried to engage him in more flirtatious conversation, to everyone’s astonishment he said he couldn’t speak French and, once again, didn’t utter a word to poor Anne-Marie.

  After dinner at the chateau, things got even worse. Someone was unrealistic enough to suggest that the happy couple-to-be might want to be left alone, and poor Mademoiselle had to suffer the indignity of watching Charles repeat the mime act he had perfected on so many previous occasions. This time, he sat completely mute by her side for a full quarter of an hour. Finally, in desperation, Anne-Marie summoned a gentleman to join them, at which point Charles came out of his trance and began merrily chatting to the newcomer in French.

  Charles knew, of course, that this was no way to win a woman, French or otherwise. By now he was quite an expert on the subject. So why did he go to such elaborate lengths to insult Anne-Marie? Was her new curly hairdo too ridiculous for him? Did he still have the bet on with his courtiers? Or perhaps he really did want to marry Anne-Marie for financial and political reasons but was just too sincere to go through with it. He was, after all, still a teenager, and not (yet) a cynical man of the world.

  In fact, it seems that he had two main motives for annoying Mademoiselle and having a bit of a joke at Mazarin’s expense. First, he was probably just paying lip service to his mother’s urgings. She was behind the marriage idea, and was much keener than Charles on an Anglo-French union. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Charles could not forgive the French for failing to send their condolences when his father was executed – to avoid appearing overtly Royalist in Cromwell’s eyes, Mazarin had not even sent a message of sympathy. Charles didn’t blame the affable young Louis, but he wanted nothing to do with the French political establishment.

  When he left France this time, Charles told his mother that he was going to ‘obey his own reason and judgement’ from now on, and ‘did as good as desire her not to trouble herself in his affairs’.

  The seeds of the great Anglo-French falling-out had been sown.

  Say it with chairs

  In 1651, after an aborted attempt to regain
the English throne, Charles returned briefly to France and regaled the court with the story of his dramatic escape disguised as a woodcutter, and his risky trek across England during which he had actually had to cook some of his own meals. He had been hidden and helped by a whole succession of loyal supporters, he told everyone, but refused to reveal a single name for fear of treachery. He no longer trusted the French.

  He was now even more penniless than before, and seemed unlikely ever to reign – which may explain why he resorted to torturing poor Mademoiselle Anne-Marie yet again. This time, though, he deigned to speak to her, and even turned on the charm, saying how good it was to be back in Paris and that he hoped they would get the chance to dance together soon. Against all odds, Anne-Marie actually gave him the time of day, and they began to meet up, with Charles breaking protocol and leaving his allotted armchair to go and squat with the girls. An English Cromwellian spy noted that the King had taken to ‘wit and jesting’ with Anne-Marie. At last, it seems, Charles had learned to fake it the French way.

  But so had Anne-Marie. It turned out that she was simply playing her old English tormentor along, and had set her mind on marrying Louis XIV – an absurd plan, because Louis was eleven years younger and planning to marry a foreign bride. In any case, Charles was definitely off her wish list. And as soon as he discovered this, Charles gave up all pretence. At soirées, he began to stay in his designated armchair rather than sitting with Anne-Marie. Royal seats said it all once again – the on-off courtship was finished.

  The inevitable result of this was that Charles and his mother began to feel the pinch. Begging from Louis XIV produced plenty of promises but little cash, and Charles would often lose that at cards.

  Several of Charles’s courtiers complained that they had no carriage and had to travel around Paris on foot, and King Charles himself was, as one of his followers said, ‘reduced to so low a condition that he is forced to eat his meals in taverns, having not the commodity of dining at home’. French restaurants clearly weren’t Michelin-star standard in those days.

  In the end, it was Mazarin who gave Charles the cash he needed. In 1654, the cardinal decided that he wanted the troublesome Englishman out of France so that he could sign a formal treaty with Oliver Cromwell. So Mazarin gave Charles a lump sum, and the young English exile left Paris on horseback, with his clothes and bedding travelling alongside in a simple cart. He went to seek refuge with his sister Mary, who was nominally Queen of Holland and had some reasonable accommodation to offer him, even if the Dutch court was a tad more Puritan than Paris.

  Charles was in danger of becoming just another bitter ex-royal stranded far from his throne, like some Romanian princeling photographed in a Swiss casino alongside a gaggle of face-lifted nouveau-riche widows. As one of Charles’s courtiers reported (rather exaggeratedly), ‘the King is now as low as to human understanding he can be.’

  Charles signs a pact with the diable

  Of course, as we now know, Charles was not destined to sponge off his sister for ever, because Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, and in 1660 the Royalists took control of England and told the King he was back in a job.

  He wasn’t a great success as a monarch, and as his friend, the satirist John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, wrote, he ‘never said a foolish thing, nor ever did a wise one.’ His biggest weakness was his calamitous financial management, and it was this that drew him dangerously close to France.

  In 1661, Charles married his youngest sister, Henrietta Anne, to Louis XIV’s brother Philippe, and although the marriage was an unhappy one – mainly because Philippe was a violently jealous husband despite being openly gay – at least Charles had a reliable ally in Paris. And it was Henrietta Anne who began the negotiations with Louis for what would later become known as the Secret Treaty of Dover. (Obviously, it was not called that at the time because it might have made it obvious that Charles was trying to hide something.)

  There was a good reason for keeping the discussions secret, because if they had been public, some influential Englishmen might well have decided to send the King straight back into exile, or worse. In essence, Charles was willing to guarantee that, in return for a sizeable annual backhander from Louis XIV, he would support France’s territorial claims in Holland – with which Charles had family connections, don’t forget – and convert England and Scotland back to Catholicism. He would even allow a French army to come to England and ‘assist with the conversion’. Charles was selling not only his soul but his family and his country.

  The Secret Treaty was signed in 1670, and led to Charles’s Royal Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, in which he surprised everyone by offering his countrymen complete religious freedom. This was purportedly aimed at ending the persecution of non-conformist Protestants (like the Puritans who sailed to America on the Mayflower), but Parliament rightly suspected Charles of trying to open the way for a national conversion to Catholicism, and blocked the move.

  Charles had therefore failed to deliver on the religious clause of the treaty, but he kept his word on the military front, and entered into what is now known as the Third Dutch War. And it was during this relatively minor conflict that Anglo-French relations took their irreversible turn for the worse.

  The war began in April 1672, when a French army invaded Holland by land while a Franco-British fleet tried and failed to impose a blockade on Dutch shipping. Baulking at the cost of the campaign, Charles quickly offered the Dutch a peace agreement whereby he would recognize their independence and even cede the British herring quota, in exchange for (you guessed it) a large cash payment. But these negotiations failed and the war lumbered on, characterized mainly by some bizarre naval encounters.

  In June 1672, for example, Dutch ships crossed the Channel, hoping to attack the Anglo-French fleet as it lay at anchor off the Suffolk coast. The French spotted the Dutch on the horizon and quickly raised anchor, but instead of engaging them, the French ships ‘accidentally’ took the wrong course, sailing away from the enemy and contenting themselves with shooting from a distance. This left the English to fight alone and in the ensuing Battle of Solebay, the English commander, Charles’s brother James, had to change ships twice when his flagships were destroyed under him, and the Earl of Sandwich (an ancestor of the inventor of the snack of the same name) was killed, his charred body recognizable only from remnants of his clothing.

  A year later, in June 1673, the first Battle of Schooneveld went much the same way. In this engagement off the Dutch coast, a massively superior Anglo-French fleet commanded by Charles II’s German cousin, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, was unexpectedly beaten off by the Dutch – a defeat that was mainly caused by a large gap that suddenly appeared in the French line, enabling the Dutch to launch a piercing counter-attack. This rapid manoeuvre was acknowledged by the French as a piece of brilliant sailing, and they practically applauded as the Dutch floated by and started to fire broadsides at the English.

  In the second battle of the same name a week later, a similar debacle occurred when French ships failed to follow the English into an attack, claiming that they did not understand Prince Rupert’s signals. Worse, when the French came under fire, they disengaged immediately rather than replying, and left the English fleet to take all the punishment.

  In English minds, these French failures to hold their own at sea suddenly took on a sinister aspect. Was it all down to misunderstandings between the Brits and the French in the heat of battle? Or could it be that France’s plan all along was to let England and Holland destroy one another’s shipping and bankrupt themselves with excessive military spending, so that France could step into the void and conquer them both?

  Charles II was no genius, but he began to see that he had been royally had by Louis XIV. The French had even managed to destabilize England’s internal politics – by agreeing to attack Protestant Holland, Charles had fuelled fears at home that he was a closet Catholic. Parliament had tried to clarify the situation by passing a law requiring all government officials to d
enounce Catholicism as ‘idolatry and superstition’, only for Charles’s brother James to resign from the military rather than take the vow. Suddenly, the two sides of Britain’s religious schism were shaking crucifixes at each other again, and Charles II was forced to make peace with the Dutch to avoid a repeat of the civil strife that had cost his father his head and his throne.

  As with Charles’s treatment of Anne-Marie, a very basic question about his motives has to be asked: what the hell was he up to? This was far more serious than snubbing a French princess – it was treason. And his only possible excuse for trying to sell his realm’s independence was that his former poverty and insecurity made him do foolish things for money. Or that he had matured into a frivolous, cash-loving cynic. If the truth had been known at the time, he might well have ended up on the same chopping block as his dad.

  But in the final analysis Charles can probably be forgiven, because his crude attempt at subterfuge actually strengthened his country in one vitally important way.

  From now on, no one in Britain – Catholic or Protestant, king or queen, soldier or civilian – would ever trust French political motives again.

  * Apologies to historical hair experts for this anachronism. In fact, according to the diarist Samuel Pepys, Charles did not start wearing a wig until his hair went grey in 1663.

  9

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