Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration

by Antonia Fraser

  On 7 June, lying in Southwold Bay, off the East Anglian coast between Yarmouth and Lowestoft, the combined squadrons were surprised by the great Dutch Admiral De Ruyter. In the ensuing action both sides endured vast losses. On the English side, the Duke of York had to abandon two successive flagships, the Prince and St Michael. Lord Sandwich was killed; his body, drifting anonymously in the sea, was only recognized by the George it still wore, the insignia of the Garter. De Ruyter was now limited by lack of funds to using guerrilla tactics. Yet this he did brilliantly, using his superior knowledge of the shoals and islands off the Dutch coast to pounce and harass, then disappear.

  It was on land that the Dutch situation seemed most desperate. How could the unfortunate Dutch hope to hold off the great swoop of the French forces through the southern and eastern provinces? The answer was the dramatic and totally unexpected response of a small nation to the aggression of a great power. The Dutch opened their dykes, flooding the land in the face of the oncoming invader. Shortly afterwards William received supreme civilian as well as military command.

  The French had been held off, but that was all: the crisis remained. There was no prophet to foresee that 8 July 1672, the date on which William III became Stadholder, had ushered in a new era in Europe.

  In August Johann De Witt and his brother were murdered by ‘the people’ – as Charles II described the killers in one of his missives to William – for being ‘the authors and occasion of the war’. William kept himself coldly aloof from the crime. It is extremely unlikely that he participated, as his enemies suggested.13 Nevertheless, the assassins went unpunished, and later he paid one of them a pension. Admittedly, it was granted for quite a different reason, but the implication that William was not sorry to see Johann De Witt out of the way was easily drawn.

  In England, in contrast to fierce and fighting Holland, reactions to the war were desultory. By June, many of the English were talking openly of peace. Even her forces were not immune from this general malaise. In August Sir Charles Lyttelton wrote back from his ship, ‘I never saw people so intolerably weary as they are all of being at sea, not only land men and volunteers, but the seamen themselves.’14 In general, the autumn of 1672 was not a golden time for good King Charles. William, as we have seen, did not acknowledge his uncle’s vulpine overtures for peace. Then Charles had a growing problem with the Catholicism of the Duke of York: much publicity was given to the fact that the Duke had not taken Anglican Communion at Easter. A smashing naval victory under the Duke’s command might have given him some further mileage in the popular esteem; instead, he was faced with the responsibility for Southwold Bay.

  The Duke of York was not the only prominent Catholic who had newly swum into the public gaze. The King’s latest mistress, that well-born French girl who had caught his eye in his sister’s train at Dover, Louise de Kéroüalle, was also a Catholic. Out of the Queen’s discreetly conducted but acknowledged Catholicism, the conversion of Barbara Duchess of Cleveland, the suspected Catholicism of Clifford and even Arlington, it was possible for the imaginative to weave a positive web of Popery around the King.

  Under the circumstances, it cannot be denied that the choice of a new Catholic mistress was unfortunate – assuming that any political criterion at all was to be used in such matters. It was additionally unfortunate that Louise was French. Thus in her beguiling person she managed to combine the two attributes most likely to worry the English paranoiacs.

  On the surface, there was some substance to these fears. There is evidence that Louis XIV did indeed view Louise as his secret French weapon. Madame cannot be accused of forwarding the plot, having frowned on her brother’s proposed abduction of Louise at Dover. But her death freed the girl to accept an invitation probably phrased in the first instance by Buckingham.15 But, as ever, the wayward Duke showed a reluctance to carry through his own settled plans. He allowed Louise to wait in vain at a French port for his yacht to convey her across the Channel. It was an unwise piece of neglect. As a result of her suffering, Louise arrived in England the friend of Arlington, who treated her with greater courtesy; it was not until later that the firm alliance of Buckingham and Louise became a feature of the scene at Court.

  Louise arrived at Court a virgin. Such was her mixture of romance, propriety and ambition, that she may actually have convinced herself that the King intended to marry her before she allowed him to seduce her. She certainly spoke of the Queen’s health to the Ambassador, Colbert de Croissy, as though it was likely to deteriorate violently at any moment; then she would marry the King. With similar wishful thinking, Louise later reckoned on making her son, the little Duke of Richmond, the King’s heir at a time when the prospect of a half-French, wholly Catholic bastard succeeding was remote indeed. Where marriage was concerned, Louise never even enjoyed the putative chance of Frances Stewart. If Queen Catharine had died in the 1670s, the King would surely have headed for some rich princess, with a European alliance as an additional dowry. Louise, while retaining the pretensions of a lady, as Nelly angrily protested, suffered the vicissitudes of an older profession: she is reported to have caught the pox from the King, who gave her a pearl necklace to make her better.16

  In other ways Louise did not suffer quite so much. Her baby face, with the fat cheeks that led the King to nickname her Fubbs (for chubby), stares innocently out of her lovely portrait by Gascar, surrounded by a halo of dark curls. One small round breast is revealed: altogether, she resembles a fat little pigeon, or the soft white dove beneath her hand. Though she was described by a contemporary as ‘wondrous handsome’, we should probably term her merely pretty – and wondrous appealing.17

  There is no trace in the portraits of Louise’s slight cast, which caused Nelly to christen her ‘Squintabella’ at first sight; so perhaps jealous Nell exaggerated. But there is shrewdness in the expression of her almond-shaped eyes, dark and watchful in the childish face. Louise was nearly twenty-one when she caught the King’s eye in Madame’s train; it was surprising that such a beautiful girl remained unmarried: ‘la Belle Bretonne’ she was called at the French Court, where the manners were politer than Nell Gwynn’s. The explanation lay in her parents’ poverty: Louise had no dowry. As a result, she imported into her role as maitresse en titre a nice sense of the importance of money. It was respectable French Louise who saw to it that her pension was tied to the profitable wine excise, where reckless English Barbara settled for a much less stable source of income.18 When the dukedoms were being handed out to the royal bastards, Louise saw to it that her son gained precedence over Barbara’s by the stratagem of getting Danby to sign the relevant document at midnight on the given date.

  Tears and hysterics, as well as respectability, were part of Louise’s stock-in-trade; it was not for nothing that Nelly chose to nickname her the ‘weeping willow’ when bored by ‘Squintabella’. Louise had correctly summed up Charles as a man who would be made uncomfortable, then guilty, by such things. Later she would swoon and threaten suicide in order to avoid losing his favour. In one sense she overplayed her hand. The Duchess of Monmouth relates the story of the King being told – not for the first time – that Louise was dying: ‘God’s fish!’ he answered. ‘I don’t believe a word of all this; she’s better than you or I are, and she wants something that makes her play her pranks over this. She has served me so often so, that I am as sure of what I say as if I was part of her.’19 Yet he never did quite get rid of her…. Louise would survive the determined broadsides of that magnificent fighting ship, Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin, and come to safe harbour as the resident mistress at the time of Charles’ death.

  Sir John Reresby, a vigilant observer of such matters, described Louise as ‘the most absolute of all the King’s mistresses’. She was certainly the most disliked by the populace. None of the ballads of the time were particularly tasteful – Barbara was generally depicted as insatiable in her sexual appetites – but the language addressed to Louise was notably intemperate:

  Portsmout
h, the incestuous Punk,fn1

  Made our most gracious Sovereign drunk,

  And drunk she made him give that Buss

  That all the Kingdom’s bound to curse…

  So ran a fragrant piece, of 1673, entitled ‘The Royal Buss Rock’. The most playful piece of satire – if such an innocent adjective may be used – was that dialogue which, taking advantage of the King’s notorious weakness for his dogs, made Louise and Nelly into two pampered pets, named Snappy and Tutty. Even so, there was a social sneer: Snappy (Louise) was made to criticize Tutty (Nell) for her low breeding and suggest that she return to her ‘dunghill’.20

  Louise’s rise was rapid. Her seduction by the King – if one may use the word for an event so obviously planned on both sides – seems to have taken place in October 1671 at Euston Hall, Arlington’s splendid new county house near Newmarket. The scene, as reported, had dramatic overtones which must have pleased Louise’s histrionic nature, while its erotic ones pleased everyone else. For there was a ‘mock marriage’, at which ‘the Fair Lady Whore’ (Evelyn’s phrase for Louise) ‘was bedded one of these nights and the stocking flung, after the manner of a married bride’. By July 1672 her ascendancy was great enough for a large new coach for ‘Madame Carwell’, as her incomprehensible Breton name was anglicized, to feature in the royal expenses.21 In the same year, roughly nine months after the ‘marriage’ at Euston Hall, she gave birth to her only child; this boy was, incidentally, to be the last of the acknowledged royal bastards. In February 1673 Louise was created Duchess of Portsmouth, Countess of Fareham and Lady Petersfield – while Nelly still languished as Mrs Gwynn.

  As befitted her position as she interpreted it, the new Duchess kept increasing state in the large area over which she held sway in Whitehall – she finally acquired a total of twenty-four rooms and sixteen garrets. Evelyn described her appartments as having ‘ten times the richness and the glory’ of the Queen’s.22 He also paints an inviting picture of Louise having her hair combed by her maids in bed, while the King and his gallants stood around. Three times her rooms were redecorated (amazing luxury). Her acquisitions included French tapestries specially woven at her command, such diversities as Japanese cabinets, clocks, silver, great vases of wrought plate and ornamental screens, as well as paintings originally belonging to the Queen.

  ‘What contentment can there be in the riches and splendour of this world, purchased with vice and dishonour?’ enquired Evelyn in elegant disgust. The answer was that Louise Duchess of Portsmouth found a great deal of contentment in such things; riches and splendour, after all, were visible to the naked eye, which was more than could be said for vice and dishonour.

  For all this, Louis XIV did not really succeed in planting a Trojan horse in the person of the desirable Duchess. The reason for the failure lay in the character of Charles II. The varied intrigues which led to the establishment of Louise, the whole process of dangling this nubile beauty before a famously susceptible King, all presupposed that Charles’ political sympathies followed his amorous inclinations. In the cool light of history, one cannot view the King in quite such a romantic light. As with Madame, so with Louise: it seems more likely that the reverse was true. Charles chose a confidante whose views or tastes accorded with his own, rather, than tailoring his to fit those of the lady.

  Oddly enough, Louise’s strongest card with the King appears to have been the aura of charming domesticity which she cast around her. In the end, it was this traditional attribute of a French mistress down the ages which delighted Charles II: the ability to provide agreeable surroundings and good food (Louise was famous for her table) as much as her physical appeal. Mercenary as she may have been, haughty to her social inferiors, at times tiresomely hysterical, Louise possessed an excellent instinct where men were concerned. She was clever enough to spot that Charles II was reaching an age where a settled and comfortable salon possessed at least as much attraction as a voluptuous bedroom. It was in this manner that Louise’s French blood won Charles II, rather than in any more Machiavellian sense of political alignment.

  Nevertheless, the murmurs against Popery in high places grew from the spring of 1672 onwards. Charles might in fact be immune from petticoat persuasion; but it was too much to expect his raucous popular critics to believe such a paradoxical fact about a King of such evident ‘amorous complexion’. The rise of Louise, for all the private ease it granted, coincidental with the conversion of the Duke of York, and the disappointing course of the war, increased the problems the King had to face by the autumn of 1672.

  To the north, the outlook was not much brighter. Lauderdale had promised his sovereign a citadel in Scotland. But in June 1672 the Scottish Parliament demonstrated that its sympathies lay – perhaps not surprisingly – with the Protestant Dutch, with whom the Scots did a great deal of trade, rather than with the Catholic French. Lauderdale’s appeal to this body for much-needed money to prosecute the Dutch War was therefore not a success. Moreover, the coarse and tactless streak in the man had been enhanced with age: Lauderdale no longer managed his Scottish opponents with the same wiliness that he had displayed in the 1660s, while his foul-mouthed manner gained him additional enemies.

  Nevertheless, the old warhorse remained sufficiently canny to see the most obvious dangers of his situation. In England, Shaftesbury was his particular enemy. In Scotland, the Duke of Hamilton led a rising faction against his policies. Lauderdale could see for himself that the patronage of the King was vital to his survival. Therefore his management of Scotland was dedicated to giving Charles II what he wanted.

  At least the King was quite clear what that was. He continued to regard Scotland as a useful reservoir of money and men, and that was about all. His letter to Lauderdale of August 1672, which he himself admitted to be both overdue and over-brief, concentrated on the needs for an invasion of the United Provinces. If the first attempt of the English to land were to succeed, he would want additional troops at hand to back them up: ‘therefore if it were possible to have two thousand men ready in Scotland upon such an occasion …’.23 In the event, there was no invasion, so that the crisis was not reached. All the same, the tide of revolt against Lauderdale’s vice-regal rule was rising in Scotland, with the King quite unaware of the danger.

  It was as well for Charles II, concentrating on the needs of an ‘important necessary and expensive war’, as he would later call it to Parliament, that Ireland was in one of her rare periods of quiescence. The Irish Army was, like the country, poor, and not much reliance could be placed on reinforcements from that source.fn2 Sir William Petty analysed the situation in the island in 1672: 800,000 Papists, 200,000 English and 100,000 Scots. It was not a prescription for future happiness. Yet after the horrors of Cromwell’s campaign and the subsequent wave of settlement (following on so many waves of settlement), Ireland in the 1670s temporarily resembled Gibbon’s description of Abyssinia: ‘the world forgetting by the world forgot’ – even if it would hardly be allowed to sleep for a thousand years. In November 1670 the Dublin Gazette actually ceased to appear on the wonderful – for Ireland – grounds that ‘there was no news’.24

  The country’s condition was ameliorated still further when the Earl of Essex succeeded the corrupt Lords Berkeley and Robartes as Lord Lieutenant in 1672. Essex was much esteemed by his contemporaries for his upright character as well as his love of learning, and of libraries in particular. He was the son of a war hero – always a passport to respect. His father Arthur Capel, who had been in Cornwall with Charles II (when Prince of Wales), was executed in 1649 shortly after Charles I. Charles II, having the death of a beloved father in common, paid young Capel special attention; he was created Earl of Essex at the Restoration.

  In Ireland, Essex’s determination to stamp out English corruption was symbolized by his fight against the rapacity of Barbara Duchess of Cleveland. Barbara may well have received £10,000 from Berkeley as the price of his office. She was certainly granted Phoenix Park in Dublin, as well as some deliciously fer
tile lands round it, by the King. He showed by the gift his total lack of knowledge of the geography of the town as well as his indifference to Irish affairs. Essex was furious. ‘I will not have the least concurrence with it,’ he announced.25 He was undeniably influenced by the fact that Phoenix Park was the only place where the Lord Lieutenant could walk or ride in comfort, Dublin Castle being hideously uncomfortable. Yet by Essex’s action Phoenix Park was saved for future generations (remaining to this day one of the largest public parks in the world).

  The cancellation of the Declaration of Indulgence was a blow to Irish Catholics, as it had been to English: Essex was instructed to ‘suppress the insolency of the Irish Papists’, this insolency having among its component parts ‘convents, seminaries, friaries, nunneries and Popish schools’. But Essex, like all the wisest rulers of Ireland during this period (and like Charles II himself), distinguished between Catholic gentlemen and Catholic rebels. He pointed out that there were several hundred thousand Catholics in the country and that to ‘suppress’ them – the word was frequently used – he would need an army of over fifteen thousand, regularly paid….26 As it was, not all the titular Catholic bishops left the country according to the new proclamation; the lesser clergy were often left in peace.

  The existence of the ordinary people as a whole was not enviable; but the harsh choice of the next centuries, emigration or misery at home, had not yet reached them. Catholic laymen, although virtually excluded from Parliament, were able to practise most other professions. Essex’s main domestic problem was one he shared with the Irish people as a whole – the failure of law and order (the rise of those brigands known locally as Tories brought the word into the vocabulary of the English people).