Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration

by Antonia Fraser

  But Charles’ daughters were not forgotten. Some were married off to lordlings, who were then further ennobled. Mary Tudor was granted the rank and precedence of a Duke’s daughter at the same time as her step-brothers gained their coveted dukedoms. Two of the King’s sons made political alliances – Henry Duke of Grafton married Arlington’s daughter, and Charles Earl of Plymouth married the daughter of Danby.

  Taken all in all, they were an agreeable bunch, with no real black sheep amongst them – unless one counts Monmouth. Out of a dozen children, that was not a bad record. It is true that none of them showed the exceptional calibre of their father, and what one must suppose to have been the exceptional talents of their mother in one direction at least. But then exceptional parents rarely breed exceptional children. Charles II’s extraordinary qualities had been largely forged by adversity: these children enjoyed quite a different upbringing.

  Nor can it be argued that the children of Charles II were noted for their waywardness. Charles Duke of Southampton and later Duke of Cleveland on his mother, Barbara’s, death, was described by her in one of her accesses of maternal disgust as a ‘kockish idle boy’ while at Oxford; and she sent for the Dean of Christ Church to tell him so.33 But such undergraduate behaviour must be regarded as the rule, not the exception. Some of the girls were flighty: not only Anne Countess of Sussex but Mary Tudor, who married the Earl of Derwentwater, caused her husband distress. Yet such infidelities were hardly above the average for well-born ladies during this period. As for the King’s favourite, the solace of his later years, Charlotte Countess of Lichfield, her sweetness and impeccable virtue bore out a pleasanter axiom: that an amoral mother will often produce a paragon of a daughter – for she was the offspring of the hot-tempered Barbara Duchess of Cleveland.

  Charlotte Countess of Lichfield is one of those characters whose goodness survives differences of style and period to charm us still. Her appearance was appealing rather than beautiful: her mouth (like her father’s) was too large and so were her eyes; her face and chin were too small. It was her personality rather than her looks which won hearts. Whether bearing and rearing her enormous family (at the age of nineteen she had four children and gave birth to a total of twenty), playing basset, crimp or billiards, going riding, adorning her houses, her attitude to life recalls that of Queen Charlotte a hundred years later: she wanted each day to bring its own pleasure.

  She was married off in 1677 at the age of twelve, her husband being rewarded with the Lichfield title. The new Earl also received the more spiritual reward of great happiness. Together the Lichfields enjoyed a married life of forty-two years. Their shared monument in Spelsbury Church commemorates the fact that ‘at their marriage they were the most grateful bridegroom and the most beautiful bride and that till death they remained the most constant husband and wife’.

  To King Charles II, in a series of fond if scribbled notes often enclosing money, she was his ‘dear Charlotte’, as once Madame had been his ‘dear sister’.34 He was her ‘loving’ and at other times her ‘kind’ father. There is a vignette of Charlotte tickling the King’s bald pate as he took his post-prandial nap. Other glimpses of family intimacy include fatherly advice on Charlotte’s building plans for a new house, which should not disturb those of her sister Anne, but ‘I think it a very reasonable thing that other houses should not look into your house without your permission.’ When Charlotte is pregnant, the King is delighted and hopes to see the child ere long; when they are apart, he is sorry he will be so long deprived of seeing his ‘dear Charlotte’.

  As for the boys, the King was proud of his fine brood of dukelings: Evelyn’s wry pen gives a portrait of him receiving communion at Easter 1684 with Richmond, Northumberland and St Albans, ‘sons of Portsmouth, Cleveland and Nelly’, three boys on his right hand – and three bishops on his left. Barbara’s second son, Henry – ‘Harry’ – Duke of Grafton, was rated the handsomest; he also pursued a career as a sailor. These two attributes were sometimes in conflict. ‘Your brother Harry is now here and will go in a few days to Holland,’ wrote the King to Charlotte. ‘By the time he returns, he will have worn out in some measure the redness of his face, so as not to fright the most part of our ladies here.’ Charles Earl of Plymouth – ‘Don Carlo’ – much resembled his father. Said to be ‘a fine youth’, he was authorized to raise Plymouth’s Foot for Tangier; he died there in October 1680 before his promise could be fulfilled (he also left a mass of debts including tailors’ bills, so his promise was not entirely military). But the Duke of Northumberland, Barbara’s third son, he who had been born so festively at Merton College, Oxford, was generally considered to be the most like Charles – at eighteen he was ‘a tall black man like his father the King’. Because he was also ‘well-bred, civil and modest’, Evelyn rated Northumberland the ‘most accomplished and worth the owning’ of Charles’ children.35

  Nelly’s sons, one of whom died at the age of nine, and Louise’s boy, belonged to a later period. They were duly ennobled after the frantic efforts of their mothers – Louise’s son was only three when he was raised to the peerage – but were still only in their early teens at the time of their father’s death.

  In general, all the bastards were easily and unselfconsciously treated by their legitimate relatives, whether they pursued the Whig connection of William and Mary or the Jacobite one of James. Their Stuart Christian names emphasized rather than diminished the connection: no fewer than four of the King’s sons were named Charles, two of them James, and Barbara’s third son, like the third son of King Charles I, was christened Henry and nicknamed Harry. The girls were Charlotte, a name otherwise hardly known in England at that date,fn8 or Anne or Mary, the names of Stuart princesses. The King’s daughter by Elizabeth Killigrew was named Charlotte Jemima (for James) Henrietta Maria, a Stuart mouthful. Surnames employed were unashamedly royal: Fitzcharles, Fitzroy, Tudor. The name of Crofts, taken from his guardian, was only used for Monmouth in the desperate days of exile, when a royal connection was not necessarily blazoned. (On his marriage to an heiress, Monmouth took his wife’s surname of Scott.)

  The Duke of York was particularly devoted to his niece, Charlotte Lichfield, and corresponded with her while he was in Scotland;37 he also favoured Harry Duke of Grafton. Charlotte Jemima Henrietta Maria Fitzroy had a daughter by her first marriage, Stuarta Howard, who became a lady-in-waiting to Mary of Modena. Mary Tudor was the mother of the two Jacobite Earls of Derwentwater, who died respectively in 1715 and 1745 in the cause of their Stuart relations; they had been brought up as companions to James Edward, the so-called Old Pretender. Harry Duke of Grafton, on the other hand, supported William of Orange and was rewarded by being integrated into the Whig establishment; he died as a soldier under Marlborough’s command in 1690.

  The King was also extremely fond of Charles, Earl of Burford and then Duke of St Albans, surviving son of Nelly. He too was ‘very pretty’ in youth. There is evidence that Charles worried over Burford’s education more than that of his other children: as though Louise, the bien née, could be trusted with that of her son (in fact she gave him the playwright Wycherley, Barbara’s former lover, as a tutor), but Nelly, the girl of the people, could not. In 1682 George Legge, the King’s intimate, commented on the King’s fondness for the boy: now he was of an age ‘to be bred into the world’, he was to be trusted to Lord Preston in France. Here the King wished him to study mathematics and the art of fortification (two of his own preoccupations), as well as observing the progress of Louis XIV (another of them). Nelly herself was torn between coveting this glorious future for her boy, and not wanting him to leave England before ‘some settlement’ had been made upon him.38 Later Burford justified his father’s faith by fighting the Turks in Hungary – his colonelcy was not to be regarded as a sinecure – and his mother’s by marrying an heiress.

  If the whole effect of the Popish Plot and its aftermath on Charles II was to bring about ‘a severity in his disposition’, this was the public monarch. Halifax
later commented on this new sharpness, which we may suppose to be the outward sign of the inward decision to be yet bolder and firmer. He developed, says Halifax, ‘a very peevish memory’: in his anger, scarcely a blot escaped him.39 In private the King’s life was marked by new contentment as he grew older, and, in terms of good relations with his growing children, he led a life of richness which many men of his age might have envied.

  1 The attainder on the Stafford title remained in force until 1824. The original Bill of May 1685, to reverse the attainder, was dropped at the outbreak of Monmouth’s rebellion.

  2 For example, one of Nahum Tate’s pedestrian reworkings of Shakespeare, The History of King Richard the Second, which opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 11 December 1680, was taken off after three days: the government hastily assumed that the plot must elevate the nobility (that is, the Whigs) at the expense of the King. In fact, the play had no such message, as Tate himself indignantly protested in his Preface to the printed text.9

  3 Blue, now the colour of the (Tory) Right in contrast to the red of the (Socialist) Left, was then adopted in opposition to the traditional scarlet of royalty; the Covenanters also wore blue, based on a Biblical text which adjured the children of Israel to put on ‘a ribband of blue’, and Presbyterian preachers threw blue aprons over their preaching-tubs.

  4 The actual agreement with Louis XIV was for more; five million livres for a three-year suspension of Parliament.

  5 Later his heavenly status was confirmed. He was beatified in 1920 and canonized in 1975.

  6 But since the dukedoms were originally introduced into England and Scotland only for the King’s sons, not for ordinary peers, Charles II was, in fact, behaving in an enlightened manner by not penalizing his sons for their illegitimate birth.

  7 Today four of these dukedoms still represent the quasi-royal line: Buccleuch (although Monmouth’s own dukedom of Buccleuch is still under attainder), Grafton, St Albans, and Richmond and Lennox.

  8 When the King was godfather to Sir George Carteret’s daughter in Jersey the diarist Chevalier was at some pains to explain the derivation of the name Charlotte as being somewhat eccentric.36

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Another Way of Ruling

  ‘I learnt from a Great Man, that we were in no Way of having a Parliament, there being some near the King, who advised him to another way of ruling the Kingdom.’

  Sir John Reresby, Memoirs

  Charles II spoke directly on the subject of government to Lord Bruce some time after the Oxford Parliament. He confided to him, ‘I will have no more Parliaments unless it be for some necessary acts to be passed that are temporary only as to make new ones for the good of the nation, for,’ he added, ‘God be praised, my affairs are in so good a posture that I have no occasion to ask for supplies.’1 In the winter of 1684 Sir John Reresby was informed by a certain ‘Great Man’ that there was no question of a Parliament, since those near the King had ‘advised him to another way of ruling the Kingdom’.

  Certainly in the last years of the life of Charles II another way of ruling was tried out. It was found highly satisfactory – from the King’s point of view. The nation as a whole also enjoyed that happiness ordinary people are often content to desire, knowing too well the hideous possibilities of disruption which change brings in the lives of the lowly. The connection between prosperity and happiness being ever strong, it was relevant that England enjoyed a trade boom in the early 1680s. This boom, which has been traced in the customs figures, happily transformed the receipts from this source.2

  Unaware of these blessings about to flow, Charles II took a firm line about his own finances. The French subsidies could be counted on to settle outstanding military needs. Where Court and personal expenditure was concerned, the value of economy – an unpleasant prospect, but anything to avoid having to call a Parliament – was recognized. Retrenchment in general was noted at the Court in the spring of 1682: the King was cutting down at his own table and that of everyone else, ‘except that of the Maids of Honour to the Queen’. More painful to him must have been retrenchment in the number of his horses. The Queen herself played her part and remitted to him her marriage settlement for one year, ‘so that his Majesty seems to have taken serious thoughts of endeavouring to live without subsidies from his Parliament’, as an observer (correctly) commented.3 It is true that the essential needs of a sovereign could not be transformed overnight; bills for beds, one of crimson and orange velvet and silver tissue, costing nearly a thousand pounds, continued to disfigure the accounts. There were new lodgings in Whitehall and a twelve-oared barge for the Queen in 1683.4 This period also included a major building programme for a new royal palace. But that, as we shall see, was envisaged by the King more as a political move than as an architectural foray. The point remained that the King was by now taking the business of ruling without Parliament more seriously than ever before, even if it meant cutting down on the courses at his own table, the horses in his stable.

  These were negative gestures. More positive and more practical were those measures taken to consolidate the political base of the monarchy. That these measures were deliberate is generally agreed. A rhyme of April 1684 summed up the angry astonishment in certain quarters at the turn-round in the royal fortunes:

  Who could have thought in ’78 that we

  So much enslaved by ’84 should be.5

  The extent to which the King himself took an active interest in extending his own powers is more difficult to assess. This royal leopard did not choose to change his protective spots of apparent laziness and even indifference. Under the circumstances, it is certainly possible to make a case for the Duke of York as the master-mind of this absolutist trend.6 James returned from Scotland for good in June 1682. He had made a brief return in March, but headed north again to fetch his Duchess. It was a disastrous expedition. On the way back James and his entire party was shipwrecked off Yarmouth with much loss of life, although as James himself rather callously remarked, no one ‘of quality’ was drowned. The opportunity was given to his enemies to spread the canard by which James had thought only of saving his strongbox, his priests and his dogs. James himself was in fact more guilty of an obstinate and characteristic refusal to abandon ship in face of danger. It was his entourage who beat off the desperate ‘lesser’ passengers with their swords.7

  In Scotland James had conducted affairs justly enough by the standards of a troubled time. His administration brought about calm in the Highlands – no mean achievement – and he also coped competently with the Scottish militia and all the problems of Scottish finance. A new Oath of Allegiance imposed upon all officials the necessity of upholding the Protestant religion (from London the King approved it). That hit the extreme Covenanters. But the Catholic minority – who were not officials in the first place – were able to live in unofficial peace. James also approved of much in the Scottish spirit and law, including the fact that the death penalty was imposed for perjury. As he told his niece Charlotte Lichfield grimly: ‘If it had been so in England so many innocent people had not suffered.’8 The only exception to the orderly quality of his rule was his clumsy attempt to eliminate the Earl of Argyll. This ended with the Earl’s escape and the Duke’s red face.

  In England James was not without natural sympathizers. He had for example employed the powers of patronage he possessed in the Army both widely and wisely. Many of the bright sparks of the day owed their advancement to the Duke of York, including John Churchill, George Legge, Sir Charles Lyttleton and Henry Jermyn. His native honesty and courage won respect, as they had done throughout his career (although his father’s ‘peremptoriness’, so different from the affability of Charles II, was detected in his manner).

  James’ climb back to favour and power is one of the features of the reign’s end. By the beginning of 1684 Sir John Reresby commented that the Duke ‘did now chiefly manage affairs’, adding another dig at his ‘haughtiness’. By the end of that year, James’ ‘indefatigability�
� at the King’s side was generally remarked. James had certainly always possessed more obvious indefatigability that his brother, who took care to show as little as possible of this worrisome quality. From there it was a short step to assuming that James was actually deciding on the direction government should take.

  But the case for James as master-mind is not proved. The fact was that James’ ideas and policies were now convenient to the King. James, for example, approved in his memoirs that campaign for calling in corporations’ charters begun in 1680 and shortly to be stepped up: ‘His Majesty had at last taken those vigorous counsels, and resolute methods the Duke had so long pressed him to.’9 James had been keen on such measures in the sixties – without success. That still did not mean he was responsible for the new initiative. It was Charles who decided when the time was ripe. The indefatigable James was allowed his hand on the tiller just because he was guaranteed to steer the ship in the direction his brother now approved. It was in this way that the royal brothers drew closer and closer together, just as they had grown apart when James had shown himself a liability to Charles. Charles respected his brother but he did not fear him. He had been the senior partner all their lives; he did not desert that position now.

  If James’ ‘absolutism’ is rejected, there is an alternative explanation of the events of the King’s later years: that Charles sank into happy cynicism, now that things were going well in the short term, leaving all to his younger ministers. It is an attitude summed up not so much by the prophecy of Louis XV – ‘Après moi le déluge’– as a more devil-may-care ‘Après moi je m’en fou …’. Neither attitude – reliance on James or indifference – seems however to accord psychologically with the decisive, vigorous and above all cheerful King who dismissed the Oxford Parliament; nor with the wily sovereign who would play a subtle hand at foreign policy during the next few years.