Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration

by Antonia Fraser

  2 This deliberately sets aside two contemporary references to a pregnancy in early 1666, one from Pepys, who heard that the Queen had miscarried, and one in the Hatton Correspondence. But Clarendon, who mentioned the 1666 miscarriage in the Continuation of his History, stressed the King’s belief that it had ‘been a false conception’.18 The King made no reference to this pregnancy or miscarriage in his correspondence with his sister, where such matters were always much to the fore. His testimony – the testimony of the husband – that the 1668 pregnancy was the first, clinches the matter.

  3 The author is grateful to Sir John Dewhurst, President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, for his consideration of the medical evidence concerning the pregnancies of Catharine of Braganza, which supports this view. The sweeping theory of C. MacLaurin in Mere Mortals (New York, 1925) that the Queen’s major illness of November 1663 was pelvic peritonitis, which left her sterile after an inflammation of the Fallopian tubes, takes no account of these later conceptions and is not otherwise supported by evidence.

  4 His correct title: he succeeded his father, William II of Orange. He subsequently became William III of England. To avoid confusion, in this narrative he will henceforward be known as William of Orange.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A Very Near Alliance

  ‘I do believe we are not so tied, as if we received satisfaction over the principal matter of the sea, there is scope sufficient for a very near alliance.’

  Charles II to Madame in 1668, on the subject of France

  At some point late in 1668 King Charles decided formally to pursue an alliance with his cousin Louis XIV by any means that might prove useful (not necessarily of the most honourable or open). As has been mentioned, Charles II had veered towards France since the beginning of his reign, just as he had backed away from the Dutch. He had hoped for French neutrality during the Dutch War. But this decision represented something new.

  His cynicism towards his own Parliament was growing, and the French initiative cannot altogether be separated from it. The secret feelings of such a wary character as Charles II must always be analysed with care; nevertheless, the distinct impression is gained that he saw in the French alliance, from the first, one solution to his domestic insecurity. Charles the politician was taking unto himself the maxim of Machiavelli: ‘Every government, whether it be republican or of the princely type, should consider beforehand what adverse times may befall and on what people it may have to rely in times of adversity….’ It was a precept which King Charles I, unassisted in his hour of tribulation by any major power, should have heeded. His son intended to be warier.

  The character of Louis XIV also exercised a baleful fascination over Charles II – as indeed it did over the whole of Europe. The two monarchs, who had of course known each other in youth, were not destined to meet after that abortive encounter at Fuenterrabia in 1659. Yet the personality and reputation of Louis XIV represented the living challenge to Charles II, much as that of Oliver Cromwell represented the dead. Critics detecting weakness in Charles were quick to point out strength in Louis – Buckingham was a notable example. Pepys reports a conversation round the dinner table in November 1668 in which ‘the greatness of the King of France’ was the subject of much favourable comment: ‘his being fallen into the right way of making that Kingdom great, which none of his Ancestors did before’.1 There is evidence that King Charles did not care for this atmosphere of odious comparison.

  Rationally he was aware that his cousin of France enjoyed the perquisites of absolute monarchy, while he himself had to jog along with something the French Ambassador had critically described in 1664 as ‘at the bottom … very far from being a monarchy’. Charles II would have been less than human not to have resented the contemporary admiration for Louis XIV in view of his considerable efforts to make his own kingdom great. The incident of the Persian Vest, which shows up King Charles for once in a slightly foolish light, is only explicable in terms of his obsession with King Louis.2

  Fashion as such never much interested Charles II after 1660. In exile he showed a taste for ordering beaver hats and swords from Paris, and at the moment of restoration a wardrobe of summer clothes from the great Parisian tailor Sourceau, trimmings to be chosen by his mother, was deemed appropriate. These were the predilections of enforced idleness. Afterwards the wardrobe accounts reveal the occasional order for six yards of lace, forty yards of linen – fitting for a King – as special adornment for his birthday; but there is a more characteristic glimpse of him taking off his wig in order to inspect Chatham dockyard in comfort.3 Casualness, even carelessness, rather than magnificence, was the keynote of Charles’ appearance in the eyes of his contemporaries.

  The Persian Vest incident was however an example of an early kind of Buy British campaign. Following the great depredations on trade made by the Fire of London, the King ordered French fashions to be abandoned. Instead he donned a loose surcoat, resembling fashions seen in Persian miniatures of the time. ‘Nothing like it since William the Conqueror,’ commented a newsletter. It was John Evelyn, seeing this strange new garb for the first time in October 1666, who compared it to ‘the comeliness and usefulness of Persian clothing’.4 At the Court ball for the birthday of Queen Catharine in November there were one hundred of such vests to be seen, each costing one hundred pounds to make; the King’s was of suitably rich material, with a silver lining.

  Unfortunately the Sun King of France, a sartorial connoisseur where his cousin was not, found the opportunity irresistible. He took to dressing his footmen and servants in a parody of the new English fashion. The mockery was reported back across the Channel. King Charles attempted to brazen out his new-fangled elegance. The personality of King Louis was too strong. By the early 1670s the English had surrendered and returned to the French fashion.

  The English king’s obsession was however more compounded of admiration than annoyance. And his letters reveal also a true desire for intimacy with King Louis especially remarkable in one who was on his own confession a laggard correspondent. King Charles was in the habit of keeping King Louis in touch with all his family news: when the little Duke of Cambridge, son of the Duke and Duchess of York, died, Charles did not doubt that Louis would be as concerned as usual over everything to do with ‘ma maison’– that is, the House of Stuart. In May 1669 we find King Charles appealing in a handwritten letter to King Louis, his bon frère, to use his authority to intervene in a dispute between Prince Rupert and one of his brothers.5

  Religion – or ‘the design about R.’, as Madame coyly termed it – does not seem to have played any part at all in Charles’ calculations at this point. Aiming at greatness abroad, security at home, and having lassoed for the time being the horns of the Dutch, Charles prepared to stalk the bigger game of Louis XIV. He was not ashamed to admit to Madame that the Triple Alliance had its genesis in his disappointment with France. She might be ‘a little surprised’ by the treaty he had concluded with the Dutch, he wrote airily in January 1668, but she should not be. ‘Finding my propositions to France receive so cold an answer, which in effect was as good as a refusal, I thought I had no other way but this to secure myself.’6

  Louis XIV was intended to take the point and did. In May Charles was observing to the French Ambassador, Ruvigny, that he saw no reason why the two kings should not talk to each other ‘de gentilhomme à gentilhomme’ (although neither Charles II nor Louis XIV, in their diplomatic dealings, quite justify the use of the word). In August Louis despatched Colbert de Croissy to replace Ruvigny, with specific instructions to break up the Triple Alliance. Among methods recommended was the bribing of the pro-Dutch Arlington. In September Charles allowed himself a crack at Louis XIV’s own support of the Dutch in the past war; in a letter to Madame, mentioning his own new Dutch commitment, he wrote that Louis XIV had recently given him an example of being ‘a martyr to his word’ in that respect. Nevertheless, ‘when I have said this, I do believe we are not so tied, as if we recei
ved satisfaction over the principal matter of the sea, there is scope sufficient for a very near alliance’.7

  Charles repeated the same sentiment in January of the following year: ‘The only thing which can give any impediment to what we both desire is the matter of the sea, which is so essential point to us here as an union upon any other security can never be lasting.’ By this time cautious negotiations were in fact proceeding. Madame, for example, had planned a visit to England in December. Her arrival had to be postponed owing to her pregnancy; Monsieur insisted on his marital rights, with the precise object of spoiling her plans. Yet the visit had obviously been intended to forward discussions between the two kings.

  So the scene was set for Madame’s embassy, the zenith of her life. It was also the most vital period so far (if more commonly rated the nadir than the zenith) in the reign of Charles II. For so, surely, the months between the signature of the Triple Alliance and the signature of the Secret Treaty of Dover in May 1670 must be regarded. Madame was given a special cipher for the purpose by her brother. Nevertheless, she remained the ambassadress of England rather than of France. Nothing emerges more clearly from Madame’s letters to her brother than the continuance of her English as opposed to her French sympathies. As she told Arlington in a personal letter, she was concerned to bring about King Charles’ advantage ‘jusque au plus petite chose’– down to the slightest detail. The death of Henrietta Maria on French soil provided a striking demonstration of this. The Dowager Queen had survived the husband she adored by twenty years. She was only sixty-one; yet she reminded everyone of old, unhappy, far-off things, and her passing was not much regretted. Monsieur wanted to take the opportunity offered by French law to grab all her belongings and jewels for his wife, the only child actually resident in France. But Madame strenuously resisted the process. She insisted on returning to the Crown of England what was due to it.8

  Secret but exhilarating negotiations continued throughout the spring and summer of 1669. Madame even described it as ‘perilous’ to confide the design to the Pope, since he would have no part in its execution. Everything was still publicly seen in terms of English victory over Holland. ‘Your glory and profit will coincide in this design,’ wrote Madame on 27 September. ‘Indeed what is there more glorious and more profitable than to extend the confines of your kingdom beyond the sea and to become supreme in commerce, which is what your people most passionately desire and what will probably never occur so long as the Republic of Holland exists.’9

  So Madame exulted, and so the prospect of ‘the very near alliance’ grew excitingly nearer to the royal conspirators.

  In the spring of 1670 it was the opinion of Andrew Marvell that no king since the Conquest had been so ‘absolutely powerful’ as Charles II. Certainly the King opened the 1670 session of Parliament in state for the first time, a practice which stirred uncomfortable memories of the past for some; to others it was equally disquieting mimicry of the absolute state of Louis XIV across the water. Marvell noted another development which he described as sinister: the King taking his seat in the House of Lords. ‘It is now so old, that it is new,’ he wrote, ‘and so disliked that at any other but so bewitched a time as this it would have been looked on as a high Usurpation, the Breach of Privilege.’10

  That was how the royal position appeared from the angle of a critical MP. What was the King’s own attitude to Parliament? Parliament was not yet quite disillusioned with Charles II. But he was certainly, by 1670, disillusioned with it. He was already using the prorogation of Parliament with quite new dexterity throughout 1668 and 1669 as an instrument of strategy; as a result, many fewer Acts were passed.11 It is an inescapable fact that in early 1670, at the very moment Charles was negotiating with France, he played on the hatred of the House of Commons for the French by asking for money to fight them. … The conclusion of the King’s contempt for his Commons is unavoidable.

  If one may contrast Charles with Cromwell (a comparison the King would not have appreciated personally), Cromwell continually and rather pathetically believed in the theory of Parliaments. He would summon them, find himself angrily horrified by their selfish behaviour in practice and dismiss them. Charles II duly noted the self-seeking behaviour of the Parliaments in the first decade of his reign, shrugged his shoulders over the theory of the thing and decided to try and manipulate Parliament before it could manipulate him.

  What inspired him? It was most emphatically not the vision of an autocratic monarchy: for that would have been once more theory rather than practice. But there was a vision all the same. It was the vision of an England strong abroad and at home, her fleet triumphant, superior to the Dutch, supported and abetted by her natural friend France. In January 1670 Charles II made this quite clear in an important personal memorandum beginning, ‘As a war against Holland would in all respects suit with the interests of England and be very advantageous to it if the King of Great Britain had force ready to be master of the seas: so on the other hand if the Hollanders should be strongest at sea nothing in the world could be so pernicious to England as that war’ – for then English trade would be at the mercy of the Dutch.12

  By May 1670 the negotiations with France were sufficiently advanced for Madame to pay her long-deferred, long-desired visit. Monsieur’s permission had of course to be sought – and he gave it with a bad grace. He also attempted to stop Madame’s journey by pregnancy as he had done before, his excuse being that he needed an heir (their only son had died as a baby). Failing, Monsieur granted the minimum period of absence consonant with etiquette. All the same, Madame was at last free to go. She arrived off Dover on 16 May. Unbelievably, it was close on ten years since they had met face to face, for Henriette-Anne had last visited England that winter of 1660 before her marriage. Yet the intimacy was as close as ever.

  It was true that the girl Charles held in his arms at their ecstatic reunion aboard the flagship was more exquistely fragile and pale than ever (we now know that she was already seriously ill). But her spirit was as great as before. And the King found in her even greater enchantment. Only the English weather failed to respond to the challenge of Madame’s visit. It poured with rain – cold English spring rain. Surely it never rained at the perfectly arranged Court of Louis XIV? But once the secret dealings were completed, as many royal junketings took place as could be fitted into the short span allowed to Madame. Louis XIV – not Monsieur – had granted her a few extra days. This satisfaction, Charles wrote back in a personal letter, ‘m’oblige si sensiblement’.13 Charles II’s fortieth birthday happily fell within the period.

  Notwithstanding the weather, there were parties at sea. Madame showed herself a worthy sister to the sea-loving King, for she was as ‘fearless and bold’ as though she were on dry land, walking along ‘the edges of the ships’.14 There was an inland trip as far as Canterbury, where Madame watched a comedy given by the Duke of York’s troupe. She also attended her favourite ballet (it was not the King’s favourite ballet: something about the art irritated him, and a few years later he would become publicly restless at an Italian ballet performed in honour of another birthday). Throughout Madame’s stay, Charles loaded her with presents. He also gave her two thousand gold crowns to build a chapel at Chaillot in memory of their mother. However, when he tried lightly to obtain one little jewel in exchange – his sister’s lady-in-waiting Louise de Kéroüalle, with her ‘childish simple and baby face’– Madame firmly refused on the grounds that she was responsible to the young lady’s parents in France. The inception of this royal relationship had to wait for another occasion.

  In time came the dreaded hour of Madame’s departure for France. Charles and James, overcome with grief, accompanied her on board the ship that would carry her away. Charles in particular could hardly tear himself away. Three times he said goodbye, only to return and embrace her. It was as though he had a presentiment that they would not meet again. The French Ambassador, Colbert de Croissy, wrote that until he witnessed the King’s tears at this farewell h
e had not realized that Charles II – the cool-hearted monarch – was capable of feeling and expressing so much affection for anyone.15

  One can make a case for saying that in her own way the poor, doomed Henriette-Anne was indeed the great love of Charles II’s life. He had experienced other passions, including two unrequited loves for the eligible Henrietta Catharine and the unattainable Frances Stewart. He came to feel genuine admiration for his wife Catharine’s character. He undoubtedly felt sexual passion for Barbara, later for Nell Gwynn and Hortense Mancini. For Louise de Kéroüalle, the mistress of his declining years, as we shall see, his feelings were slightly more complicated. It would be wrong to suggest that love was absent. But Henriette-Anne, with her charm, her affection, her loyalty, not forgetting her intelligence, could possess his whole heart. And sexuality, except in the most unconscious way, was not involved. Madame was that most seductive of things to a man sometimes wearied by the demands of his own sensuality: a ravishingly pretty sister.

  Alas for King Charles: Madame, his delight, had only a few days of life left to her on her return to France. On 27 June she wrote a touching letter from Paris to Thomas Clifford in England: ‘This is the ferste letter I have ever write in inglis. you will eselay see it bi the stile and the ortografe … i expose miself to be thought a foulle in looking to make you know how much I am your frind.’16 The first English letter of this expatriate Stuart princess was to be her last. She fell ill on 29 June and died the next day, after convulsions and other agonizing sufferings which appalled all those who attended her death-bed. It has been established that she died of acute peritonitis, following the perforation of a duodenal ulcer (hence the sickness which had ravaged her before she left France for England).17 At the time, of course, the suddenness of her end and the public venom of her husband and of his favourite the Chevalier de Lorraine meant that the inevitable accusations of poisoning were raised. But no poison was in fact needed to finish off poor delicate Madame. She was just twenty-six years old at the time of her death.fn1