Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration

by Antonia Fraser

  Even this caused fearful trouble with the House of Commons. As William Sacheverell, the fiery Whig MP, put it, ‘If they confirmed this pardon to Lord Danby, they made the King absolute…. What difference was there between that and arbitrary power?’33 The King insisted. The House of Commons did not budge. In the end, Danby was imprisoned in the Tower. It was now that his treatment of Buckingham the previous year came home to roost. Danby was not even allowed to visit his wife, who was believed to be on her death-bed. Buckingham and his friends had vindictive memories.

  The introduction of the First Exclusion Bill was in the King’s opinion a further manifestation of the general attack on his position. When one considers Sacheverell’s sentiments yet again, it is difficult to think the King was wrong. Sacheverell did not take his stand on the need for a Protestant king. ‘Let the King and the Council be as Popish as they will,’ he cried. He took his stand on the far more dangerous point that it did not matter if the King was Popish – so long as ‘we can wind the King to a good will and liking of what we shall do’. In short, ‘The foundation of Government is in the People’s hearts, and upon the same foundation the King came in at his Return….’34 This cut at the very root of the royal position. More to the point, it cut at the root of the practices of a Charles II. If the foundation of government was in the people’s hearts, then clearly the monarchy was not the strongest force in the country, for it lay below that of the people, as expressed by Parliament. The appearance of such radical arguments goes far to explain the personal horror Charles II felt for Exclusion, over and beyond its consequences in banning his brother from the succession.

  For the time being however the Exclusionists were weakened by their own internal disagreements. Exclusion was a comparatively new concept. Essentially it was personal to James: the First Exclusion Bill sought to exclude the Duke of York in particular from ‘the imperial crown of England’ – not any unnamed Catholic successor. But no-one had quite decided how the hand should be played. If James were debarred from succeeding, the main contenders for the throne were his two daughters: Mary, married to William of Orange, and Anne, as yet unmarried (she was only just thirteen). Then there was ‘the Protestant Duke’– James Duke of Monmouth, still the crowd’s darling, still unlegitimized. All sorts of combinations of these figures would be suggested in months to come; but immediately there was no obvious winning card. Anne’s youth obviously ruled her out, but at this point Mary’s marriage made her equally suspect. For it is important to realize that the Whig attitude to William of Orange in 1679 was quite different from what it subsequently became. By no means did he represent a kind of dream candidate. William was at this point regarded pre-eminently as a Stuart, and as such an authoritarian figure.

  Monmouth too was an uncertain quantity. ‘Young Jemmy was a fine lad’ – so ran a popular song. But was he? Sir John Reresby described him as having a fine exterior but not being all of a piece inside, which was probably an accurate assessment. In appearances he had markedly Stuart looks, with that slight heaviness of chin and sensuality of mouth with which many of the members of his family were endowed. But he was undeniably handsome. In character he lacked weight. He could not, for example, conceive of a course of action or an opinion without wishing to give it immediate expression. He had none of the secrecy and substance of his father, the constancy of his uncle the Duke of York. One remembers Evelyn’s charge against his mother, Lucy Walter, that although beautiful she was ‘insipid’: perhaps it was from her that Monmouth derived his own fatal lightness. Or perhaps, more simply, Monmouth was spoiled. ‘So pretty a child’, he had been indulged but not properly educated by his grandmother, Henrietta Maria; that was a dangerous combination.35

  Like many exhibitionists, Monmouth was also quite ignorant of other people’s feelings. As Buckingham wrote, he lived ‘as if the world were made only for him’. It was typical of Monmouth that he described his mistress, Henrietta Wentworth, as his wife on the grounds that he had been too young to know what he was doing when he married Anne, the heiress of Buccleuch. As a contemporary wrote, it is ‘a pretence, very airy and absurd’.36 Nell Gwynn, in her witty way, hit off Monmouth’s mixture of royalty and impudence when she christened him Prince Perkin, a nickname which somehow fits him better than the languishing lines of Dryden on the subject of Charles’ children:

  Of all this numerous progeny was none

  So beautiful, so brave as Absalom.

  The King of course loved him – and also spoiled him. But where Charles was concerned, that did not necessarily mean blind, uncritical appreciation. Charles was on the contrary well aware of Monmouth’s instability. As a father, he may have loved him all the more for frailty; as a monarch, he could not help seeing in Monmouth’s flawed character, in particular his lack of judgement and his choice of ‘knaves and flatterers’ as counsellors, another of his own problems.

  Monmouth’s sponsors were not put off by his flawed character – nor, for that matter, by what was described as his ‘flawed title’. There was even an argument in favour of choosing a prince thus handicapped: he would take care to govern well, as Lord Howard put it, because he could not dispense with popular support. It was basically Monmouth’s Protestantism which made him attractive to backers in the succession stakes. In the November of 1678, as anti-Catholic prejudice mounted, toasts were drunk to Monmouth, the first real indication of his candidature.37 Even so, in the spring of 1679, his genuine backers were not really very numerous. Shaftesbury, for example, still harped on the idea of the King divorcing the Queen (which, with its implied consequence of a new wife and a new family, was the very reverse of supporting Monmouth).

  This was where Monmouth’s lack of acumen hampered him. As he swaggered on the political stage, he could not perceive the obvious fact that his cousins, Mary and Anne, and least of all William of Orange, were hardly likely to support his pretensions. Their reasons were straightforward ones of self-interest. William told Monmouth quite frankly that ‘if he aimed at the crown he could not be his friend, but in all things else he would’.38 The King never supported Monmouth’s pretensions publicly for a moment.fn3 Of course, daydreams could and would be spun concerning Charles’ secret intentions. Yet to secure the succession, with so many disadvantages and opponents, Monmouth needed to work like a mole underground. He was however one of nature’s roosters and could not emulate a mole to save his life (as events in the reign of James II would show).

  Returning to the supporters of Exclusion, it will be seen that their campaign, like Monmouth’s title, was flawed: it had no positive objective as yet, only the negative one of keeping out the Duke of York. Against Exclusion, not only the King but many within Parliament were prepared to argue, as Burnet put it, that ‘it was unlawful in itself, and against the unalterable law of succession (which came to be the common phrase)’.40 Yet even without unity on the part of the Exclusionists, the situation was quite ugly enough for the King. In Parliament he was being pressed on all sides, not simply for or against his brother’s cause. In particular, his faithful servant Lauderdale was being attacked: like the assault on the Duke of York, the campaign smacked of insult to the monarchy.

  Lauderdale’s situation, both in England and in Scotland, was acute. In Scotland there had been the predictable outburst after the imposition of taxes for a ‘Highland Host’ to suppress supporters of the Conventicles. Three thousand Lowlanders and six thousand Highlanders neither managed to suppress these spirited Covenanters nor to ensure peace in the troubled land. In England Shaftesbury chose the spring of 1679 to mount a violent attack on Lauderdale’s Scottish regime in the House of Lords. He took it to symbolize the way things were going generally – downhill towards absolutism. On 25 March he described Scotland as ‘the little sister’ of England. The only difference was that in Scotland slavery was to come first, then Popery; in England it was to be the other way round.41

  Charles II stuck by Lauderdale. He reckoned to be able to protect him, where the discovery of his ‘treasonabl
e’ correspondence had made it impossible to save Danby. In any case, of the two men, the King felt infinitely more bound to Lauderdale, for reasons of long association and political sympathy.

  In Ireland the Test Act had been strictly enforced: Catholics who had crept into the corporations had been hastily eliminated from them and priests proscribed. In Ireland too there was rising tension. Inevitably, Ireland felt the effects of the Popish Plot: where Catholicism was concerned, it was a case of England sneezing and Ireland catching cold.

  In 1677 the Duke of Ormonde, Ireland’s best friend where stability and mercy were concerned, was once more put in charge of the country. Despite his disgrace at the hands of the intriguing Buckingham, Ormonde had been kept in touch with Irish affairs by the former Lord Lieutenant, Essex – another example of the latter’s good sense. Ormonde had not achieved the post without a struggle. The nature of it reveals once again the selfish indifference of the English Court – including its King – towards any interests in Ireland other than its own aggrandizement. For there was an opposition manoeuvre to make Monmouth Lord Lieutenant, a post he would however continue to occupy in the salubrious atmosphere of London, while Lord Conway, as Deputy, did the dirty work on the spot. Although this scheme had the support of both Danby and the Duchess of Portsmouth, for internal reasons to do with their own English-based intrigues, Ormonde emerged triumphant.42

  He now tried to sort out what was undoubtedly the curse of Ireland at the time: the incredibly complicated situation with regard to land titles. This was the product of forty years of settlement and counter-settlement, larded over with unfortunate grants made by the English Crown, often quite ignorantly. Clare and Connaught were in a particular state of chaos. After all, if Charles II placated his suitors with grants of land which actually had lawful occupants already, he was not likely to feel the consequences personally. It was not incidentally that Charles acted more selfishly towards Ireland than the rest of his contemporaries. Like Cromwell in the previous generation, with his ferocious genocidal victories, Charles merely personified the English attitude of his time. But the result was ‘a mere scramble’.43

  A second problem facing Ormonde was that of law and order. The brigands – the original Tories – continued to multiply. Characteristically, Ormonde tackled both the land question and the rising anarchy with measures designed to cast a mantle of forgiveness over the past. The legislation he proposed included a Bill of Oblivion. There was considerable opposition to Ormonde’s plans, some of it comprehensible, since obviously some interlopers might find themselves confirmed in their titles.

  It was in this sense that the Popish Plot, naming the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Peter Talbot, and potentially smearing all Catholics, came at an awkward time. Shaftesbury was only too easily able to play on folk memories of the ‘massacre’ of 1641 by suggesting that there would be another Irish insurrection. It is hardly likely that the Irish off-shoot plot for a French invasion ever existed, any more than the alleged conspiracies of the English Catholic Lords; it was correctly described later by Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, as being ‘all plain Romance’. Nevertheless, as in England there were casualties. Archbishop Talbot died in prison in Dublin late in 1678, and about the same time Plunkett was arrested. Plunkett was a man of the greatest probity, of whom nothing worse could be said than that he had not left Ireland when the Catholic hierarchy was officially banished: yet a charge of high treason was later fabricated against him. Since it proved impossible to find an Irish jury to convict him, two years later this particular witch-hunt was destined to move to England – the land of more amenable jurymen, where a Catholic prelate was concerned – with scandalous results.

  Meanwhile, in England the summer of 1679 seemed unlikely to provide a happy resolution from the King’s point of view. Danby was gone, leaving no obvious successor. The trial of Sir George Wakeman, with possible injury to the Queen, was pending. Parliament was sitting and about to debate the Exclusion Bill. The King as usual lacked money. Popular prejudice had, if anything, heightened since the previous autumn. It is true that Catholics were not actually being torn to pieces by the mob – a negative achievement – but the atmosphere of hysteria was such that no-one, whatever their allegiance, could be confident such a thing would not happen. A satire on ‘Affairs of State’ demanded:

  Would you send Kate to Portugall

  Great James to be a Cardinall …?

  This is your Time.

  Would you send confessors to tell

  Powis, Stafford and Arundell,

  they must prepare their souls for hell?

  This is your Time.44

  It was certainly the time of Titus Oates. In April he was able to postulate publicly such extraordinary fantasies as the fact that James I had been murdered, that the Great Rebellion and the death of Charles I were due to the Jesuits, and that the Duke of York had started the Great Fire! Useless to suggest that no sane person could believe such mad perversions of reason and common-sense – when popular prejudice is aflame, the very madness of such tales brings with it an orgiastic release to hearers: the greater the madness, the greater the satisfaction.

  A famous pamphlet of the time – a best-seller – is a classic illustration of this. Protestant citizens were adjured to go to the top of the Monument in the City and imagine the consequences of Popish rule:

  the whole town in flames, and amongst the distracted crowd, troops of Papists ravishing their [the Protestants’] wives and daughters, dashing out the brains of their little children against the walls, plundering their houses and cutting their throats in the name of [being] heretic dogs. And, tied to a stake in the midst of the flames, they were to picture themselves their fathers or their mothers screaming out to God with hands and eyes uplifted to heaven.45

  What chance did the real Catholics – obscure, oppressed people – stand against this dramatic image?

  In its deliberate excitation of the most basic fears in every human breast, this is the language of the rabble-rouser down the ages. Sir John Reresby wrote afterwards of ‘the Torrent of the Times’ that no one who had not actually witnessed them could conceive ‘what a Ferment that raised among all Ranks and Degrees’.46 But those who have lived through similar periods of irrational persecution, that of the ‘Reds’ in Macarthyite America, for example, can imagine them quite well.

  Related afterwards, the actual events which took place might not amount to much in terms of massacre or the kind of mayhem which chills the blood centuries later. If the innocent died, they died after due – if not fair – trial. But it was an atmosphere in which rational decision and steady action were, if not impossible, exceptionally difficult. No-one knew what the next day would bring, whether they were a Catholic fearing slaughter, or a righteous Englishman fearing the assassination of the ruler, followed by armed insurrection. The predatory Shaftesbury, blowing his hunting-horn to encourage the Whigs, added both to the excitement and to the confusion.

  Charles II maintained his balance by firm adherence to twin principles – for the Queen and against Exclusion.

  1 J. P. Kenyon, The Popish Plot, London, 1972, contains an excellent summary of the various theories in the light of recent research (Appendix A, ‘The Murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey’).

  2 As the Tories took – or rather received – their name from Irish brigands, the Whigs were dubbed after the Whiggamores, Scottish Presbyterian rebels. (The word was originally spelt ‘Whigg’.)

  3 According to Evelyn, Monmouth admitted on the scaffold that Charles II had ‘indeed told him he was but his base [illegitimate] son’.39

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A King at Chess

  So I have seen a King at Chess

  (His Queens and Bishops in distress)

  Shifting about, growing less and less

  With here and there a pawn.

  Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, 1680

  An unacknowledged deadlock existed between Charles II and his Parliament after the fall of
Danby in March 1679. There was no obvious candidate to replace Danby as chief minister, one who would both be acceptable to the King and succeed in managing Parliament. The King listened to the advice of Sir William Temple. It might be that the time had come for a political experiment. He now instituted a new type of Council, consisting of thirty members, half of whom were to be ministers and half without office (Temple himself was a member).

  It was an intelligent move. Such a choice had the desirable effect – from the King’s point of view – of promoting discord between those who were selected and those who were not.1 At the same time, it was the intention of this Council to transform poachers, such as Shaftesbury and Lord Halifax, into gamekeepers. The distinction between these two professions was not necessarily so rigid: unlike most poachers, Shaftesbury and Halifax had been gamekeepers once upon a time. Halifax, member of a great Yorkshire family and endowed with even greater brilliance of intellect, had been made a Privy Councillor in 1672; he had supported the Test Act. Although Halifax accepted the authenticity of the Popish Plot, where James was concerned he did not take a hard line. Halifax stood more for the limitation of James’ powers than for his total Exclusion.

  The other members of this Council, trainee gamekeepers, included Sunderland and Laurence Hyde – ‘Lory’. Like Sunderland, he was in his thirty-ninth year, eleven years younger than his master. He had been a diplomat (accredited to The Hague) as well as an MP; he was made one of the new Lords of the Treasury in March 1679, when Danby fell. Hyde had inherited from his father, the once mighty Clarendon, a certain arrogance. But he had also inherited Clarendon’s great loyalty towards the monarchy. Hyde was considered personally close to the Duke of York and, although he regretted James’ Catholicism, was against Exclusion.