Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration

by Antonia Fraser

  Parliament bayed for blood. The Chancellor’s windows in Piccadilly were broken; it was the fate of another old servant of the State, the Duke of Wellington, whose windows at Apsley House were broken two centuries later by the mob. At some point, flight was suggested to the elderly Chancellor to avoid the penalties of impeachment. Lady Clarendon in her anguish was ‘given over for dead’. The Chancellor duly went, his departure witnessed by Arlington, amongst others, ‘with great gaiety and triumph’ from Barbara’s windows. Clarendon looked up. ‘Pray remember that, if you live, you will grow old,’ he said to the radiant favourite.6

  So the ageing Earl of Clarendon took up his residence at Montpellier, to enjoy the health of which he had boasted only six months before to Nicholas. Only he employed it not to contemplate the aggregate of his worldly possessions with serenity, his pastures, his mansions and his apple-trees, but to write, with measured anger but also with sonorous recall, the history of his own times.

  Most likely it was the King who suggested his flight, promising in return that his estates and honours would be safe. It was no part of his plan that Clarendon should have an opportunity to justify himself against the accusations of his enemies. The general charge of high treason brought against Clarendon would never have been made to stick; but the episode might have had unpleasant ramifications. Besides, Charles avoided confrontations, by temperament, whenever possible. The King did not attempt to conceal that Clarendon’s disappearance from the political scene was a profound relief to him personally. He regretted of course that Clarendon would not allow the dismissal to be handled ‘privately’– he had asked James to get his father-in-law to resign. Beyond that, ‘the truth is, his behaviour and humour was grown so insupportable to myself, and to all the world also, that I could not longer endure it’. But the nub of the matter came in the next sentiment: ‘It was impossible for me to live with it,’ wrote Charles to Ormonde, ‘and do those things with Parliament that must be done or the government will be lost.’7

  Long, long ago Charles II had decided to run before the storm, whenever that storm, if faced, was likely to buffet the royal vessel beyond repair. The decision was not therefore the product of weakness, still less of cowardice: rather of his own particular brand of strength; one might even term it ruthlessness. The point has been made that the members of Parliament – like intelligent, trained animals – learned a new trick from the Clarendon affair, which they subsequently turned against their master. The impeachment of the King’s minister could be the first road to office. The control of patronage rather than the mere removal of an unpopular minister was the ultimate result. Thus Arlington’s adherents would drive out Buckingham; Shaftesbury would drive out Danby. … It was in this sense that James long after referred to the impeachment as ‘the most fatal blow the King gave himself to his power and prerogative’.8 The remark illustrates a profound difference of character between the two brothers. James saw the royal prerogative as something which had to be seen to be wielded; Charles merely wished to wield it when absolutely necessary. In 1667 he saw his problem quite correctly as ruling with Parliament – his policies, their supplies – and this Clarendon had not enabled him to do. The King hoped to do better in the future. Referring to the recent ‘revolution’– the common seventeenth-century word to denote a change-round in affairs – Charles showed himself confident that it would bring about ‘a real and visible amendment’ to his affairs. Already it seemed to him ‘well liked in the world’.9 Indeed, in view of Clarendon’s failures, and the demands of Parliament, it is difficult to see that the King was politically wrong. The spectacle of a sovereign ‘dropping the pilot’ – the phrase applied to the dismissal of Bismarck by the Kaiser – is never an attractive one. But from 1660 onwards King Charles II was not in business to charm by his actions. To rule, if possible with the approval of Parliament, struck him as being the first duty of the King.

  Who now gained political power? Certainly the Buckingham faction benefited from Clarendon’s fall. Osborne became a Joint Treasurer of the Navy. Other supporters of Buckingham were preferred. But it was not simply a case of the rise of the Cabal – that acronym which, as every schoolboy knows (or tries desperately to remember), conveniently covers the names of Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale. For one thing, the Cabal was not nearly as united as the acronym suggests, particularly in the late 1660s, and it would be several years before anything like a Cabal policy could be discerned. Nor did Buckingham assume that total leadership which Clarendon had once enjoyed. Arlington was popularly regarded as his rival for the King’s favour in the group.10

  The most striking immediate effect of Clarendon’s fall was to divide the King and the Duke of York. The closeness which had existed between them earlier in the reign gave way to a ‘kind of inward distance’, in Pepys’ phrase.11 This change was in part engineered by Buckingham. With hindsight, we know that Clarendon was not to emerge from his exile (he died in 1674) and that Montpellier proved no Colombey-les-deux-Eglises. But Buckingham and his supporters lived in terror that matters might be suddenly reversed. And the Duke of York, as Clarendon’s son-in-law, they conceived would be the principal agent in such a reversal.

  At this point it is worth taking a cool look both at the position and the character of the Duke of York towards the end of the first decade of Charles’ reign. For one thing, it is not conceivable that the seeds of discord could have been sown between the two brothers if Charles’ attitude towards James had not already been slightly ambiguous. On the surface, there was genuine camaraderie – not only the jolly, competitive yacht races, but also brother advancing brother, as Charles promoted James’ interests at the Admiralty. But Charles’ complicated feelings towards the presence of James at sea have also been noted. James had grown up to be an interesting character: he was brave, genuinely so, and not unintelligent. But he had a rigidity which sometimes goes with courage. Charles, on the other hand, had decided early on to bend, not break. This makes the political contrast between the two remaining brothers of the Stuart family peculiarly intriguing. Their experiences – many of them shared – had pointed them in totally different directions.

  The same contrast can be discerned in their respective attitudes towards the Catholic religion. Unlike Charles, James had shown a propensity towards it during the later years of exile, as though its certainties appealed to that streak of the martinet in his own nature. At the Restoration he was described as ‘a professed friend to the Catholics’. The inclinations of his first wife played their part. Anne Duchess of York died as a Catholic in March 1671, having leant in that direction for several years. James was increasingly unfaithful to her throughout their marriage: but, as a woman of strong character (and strong build – for she took refuge in eating), Anne continued to influence the more serious side of his life.12 The precise date of his own conversion is not known – it is given as 1669 in his Memoirs and it was probably at about that time, or slightly earlier, that he became convinced of Catholic truths. By July 1671 James was telling the French Ambassador that he felt extremely pressed by his conscience to declare himself publicly; he had not taken Communion at Easter that year. It seems that he was officially received into the Catholic Church early in 1672. However, he continued to attend Anglican services until 1676. After that his conversion was an open secret, although, at his brother’s request, he never declared it publicly. This proved a tactical advantage at the time of the Exclusion debates, when it was argued by some that it was not yet ‘legally’ certain that James was a Catholic.13

  With Charles the whole process was very different. It was not that he had any temperamental aversion to changing his religion: many of his forebears had done so. The religion of princes – and people – was changeable for reasons of expediency in the seventeenth century to an extent that it is sometimes difficult for the twentieth century to conceive. But Charles drew a sharp distinction between a political standpoint and a private faith.fn1 With regard to the former, his fierce declarations
of Protestantism in exile and at the Restoration gradually gave way to a more relaxed attitude. Then the notion of his own conversion, leading on to that of England herself, began to serve as a useful card in the tortuous negotiations with the Catholic King Louis XIV. Later still, the furore of the Popish Plot made royal Catholicism once again dangerous. All this remained in the domain of politics.

  Where the King’s private faith was concerned, the most revealing description was that given by Bishop Burnet, who wrote in 1683 that the King had formed ‘rather an odd idea’ of the goodness of God in his mind. He thought that ‘to be wicked and to design mischief, is the only thing God hates …’. As a result, the King felt free to gratify his appetites if they did no harm.14 It was – and is – an attractive philosophy, if not precisely orthodox. Time and his own tastes, including, we must assume, that philosophy, led Charles inexorably towards Catholicism, a religion where the frailty of the flesh has always been understood. At all events, his devout proclivities grew with age, a development not confined to kings. A number of other factors were at work, including the docility of the English Catholics, the intolerance of the Anglicans, the Catholic timbre of his Court, even the Queen’s pious sweetness. At last, on his death-bed, the King allowed himself to be received. By then it was too late for any declaration to damage the position of the monarchy. The need for a political standpoint was over. He went to his royal grave a Catholic, and at peace.

  Yet it is a wood so large that it has sometimes obscured the trees – the fact that Charles never did declare himself to be a Catholic during his active life. Not only did he tell Madame (in 1670) that he was not yet satisfied with the Catholic truth: in November of the same year he received a visit from the Papal Nuncio at which the subject of his hypothetical conversion was not mentioned – odd indeed if this tumultuous change had recently taken place. As late as 1675 he told the French Ambassador Barrillon that his brother James’ Catholicism endangered the throne – which was of course true. Even at the King’s death-bed, Louise Duchess of Portsmouth, the mistress who shared the intimacy of his later years and probably knew more of his private inclinations than anyone else, herself an ardent (if not pious) Catholic, could not say more to Barrillon than that the King had always been a Catholic at heart.15 It was a strange remark, if the King had been converted many years earlier.

  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