In March 1663, the intemperate Digby launched a premature attack on Hyde himself. As had happened before, Charles stood loyally by his Lord Chancellor, greatly strengthening Hyde’s position.
Jermyn’s failure to oust Hyde’s grip on the government coincided with the first of many spasms of pain, which shot through Jermyn’s feet like red-hot musket bullets. His decades of eating and drinking the finest food the courts of England and France had debilitated his health.
At fifty-eight, Jermyn’s bountiful acquisition of soup and gold had brought him gout. For the rest of his life he would spend days or weeks on end suffering agonizing bouts, affecting first his feet, then his legs and eventually his whole body.
On one occasion in the 1670s, ‘a large fit of the gout’ affected his hand, forcing him to dictate his correspondence. He joked that it was a good excuse to use a secretary, but the crabbed handwriting of a note he scrawled at the end of the same letter remains a silent testimony, to this very day, of the pain that had become part of his daily life.
The disease was caused by a build-up of uric acid in his joints. Today, there are pills to disperse the acid and remove all discomfort, but in Jermyn’s day it was incurable. To alleviate the agony, some doctors recommended beating the affected areas with bunches of nettles. Others advocated burning cones of dried moss on the most painful area of skin. The sensation of a small area of flesh being burned raw was apparently a welcome relief from the excruciating pain of the gout itself.
The combination of gout and age forced Jermyn to reappraise his future. With younger men like Arlington and Charlie Berkeley energetically seeking ever higher office, Jermyn realised he was too old to succeed Hyde.
The goal he had pursued for decades had finally eluded him. But with this acceptance came a moment of epiphany when he realised he had no need to be seen as ‘Premier Minister’ after all. If he could succeed again in influencing Charles as he had done in the past, it was possible that he could exercise more power than men constrained by the responsibility of high office. There was still a way forward, Jermyn realised, after all.
XVIII
THE SECOND ANGLO-DUTCH WAR 1664 – 1666
Well he the title of St Albans bore,
For never Bacon studied nature more;
But age allaying now that youthful heat,
Fits him in France to play at cards and treat.
…..
France had St Albans promised (so they sing),
St Albans promised him [Hyde], and he the King;
The Count [Jermyn] forthwith is ordered all to close,
To play for Flanders and the stake to lose
While, chained together, two ambassadors
Like slaves shall beg for peace at Holland’s doors.
from Last Instructions to a Painter (1681), attributed to Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
By a royal charter dated Tuesday, 18 December 1660, Jermyn, Henrietta Maria, Prince Rupert and sixty-three leading courtiers became colonial proprietors of the Guinea coast of West Africa.
The extensive rights of their new ‘Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa’ included being able to trade with the native Africans. It seemed that all the spice, ivory, gold and gems that D’Avenant had dreamed up on the fantasy-island of Madagascar would now be theirs in reality.
There was another commodity, however, that D’Avenant would never have advocated: slaves. Every month, English galleys left the Guinea coast carrying closely packed cargoes of manacled Africans to the plantations of the Caribbean. Unwittingly or not, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria had become early profiteers from the slave trade.
Their Company’s ships and traders soon came into conflict with the Dutch, who also claimed a monopoly of the lucrative trade in human cargo. Soon fleets were sailing for Africa from both countries, each attacking and recapturing slaving-posts from the other.
In spring 1664, Charles II’s younger brother James, Duke of York, escalated the conflict by sending a fleet to north America, capturing the village of New Amsterdam and renaming it New York.
In London the mob, Parliament and the City merchants bayed for full-scale war with the Dutch. At court, Charles and his younger companions – Arlington; Rupert, Barbara and particularly Charlie Berkeley, now Earl of Falmouth, rubbed their hands in anticipation of the pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war.
Though no lovers of the Dutch republic themselves, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria could not support the war. When Hyde had scuppered Jermyn’s proposed defensive treaty with France in 1662, Louis had signed a similar one with the Dutch. If Charles declared war on Holland, Louis would have to side with the Dutch against England.
Over the Ombre tables at Somerset House, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria tried to promote peace. To win back the high-spirited Charlie Berkeley, they arranged for the Queen’s daughter Henrietta Anne, now Duchess of Orléans, to start corresponding with him.
His chivalrous loyalty to the beautiful princess aroused, Charlie dutifully changed sides and joined Jermyn’s ‘Peace Party’.
Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orleans
Two unexpected recruits to the ‘Peace Party’ were Lord Chancellor Hyde and Lord Treasurer Southampton. It was clear to their mature minds that England’s navy could not prevail against the combined fleets of Holland and France.
And if the war was lost, it was they, the senior members of the government, who would receive the blame. Hyde and Jermyn were probably both as surprised as each other to find themselves on the same side at long last.
Louis also wanted to prevent war. He had plans to drive the Spanish out of Flanders and had no desire to waste his military resources attacking England. He sent the Marquess of Ruvigny to bribe leading Members of Parliament to join Jermyn’s Peace Party. Louis also offered to mediate between the English and Dutch. Overcoming his pride, Hyde proposed sending Jermyn to Paris as Ambassador Extraordinary to represent England in the talks.
Unfortunately, the Secretary of State, Lord Arlington, still sporting his ostentatious nose-patch, had by now become as adept as Hyde and Jermyn in influencing the King. In the matter of war, Arlington had the upper hand, and overruled the Lord Chancellor.
In November 1664, Parliament voted Charles a quarter of a million pounds to attack the Dutch.
On Wednesday, 22 February 1665, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria listened despondently as the crowds in the Strand cheered the official opening of hostilities. The Second Anglo-Dutch war – so called to distinguish it from Cromwell’s conflict with Holland in the previous decade – had begun.
Jermyn’s diplomatic efforts to prevent outright conflict continued. Early on the evening of Thursday, 6 April, Jermyn, his excitable cousin Charlie Berkeley and the French ambassador, Gaston de Cominges, waited on the river-steps of Exeter House in the Strand to greet two special ambassadors from Louis – Honoré Courtin, a seasoned diplomat, and Henrietta Maria’s illegitimate half-brother, the Duke of Verneuil.
But despite Jermyn presenting the Célèbré Ambassade, as it was known, to the King personally, and giving all his encouragement to the subsequent talks, the desire of Arlington and Charles for war would not be shaken.
The Dutch and English navies met on Saturday, 3 June, off the coast of Suffolk near Lowestoft. Commanding the English fleet on board his flagship, the Royal Charles, was James, Duke of York, accompanied by Jermyn’s nephew Harry Jermyn and Charlie Berkeley who, however much he had been against the war, was as keen to defend his country from the Dutch as anyone else.
The English attacked the Dutch flagship, their cannon balls ripping at the planks of the Dutch vessel until it exploded with a deafening blast.
In London, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria listened anxiously to the booms. Without the incessant noise of motorised traffic to mask it, the roar of the cannons was clearly audible over the hundred miles of gently undulating countryside that lay between them and the battle. In the evening, messengers brought news of what had happened.
Twenty-six Dutch ships had been
destroyed. But the victory came at a terrible price. Harry and James were unharmed but their finely embroidered coats were stained with the blood of three of their friends who, standing next to them, had had their bodies ripped open by a single Dutch bullet. One of the three dead friends was the Earl of Falmouth – Jermyn’s young cousin Charlie Berkeley.
Lowestoft was a victory for the English, but it had been a hard-fought one. The King, his battle-fever checked sharply by Charlie Berkeley’s death, imagined the consequences of his battered navy being confronted by a superior French force. On Friday, 24 June 1665, with Hyde rubbing his podgy hands in agreement, Charles appointed Jermyn as his Resident Minister in Paris. His instructions were simple: keep Louis out of the war.
Henrietta Maria announced that she would go too. Her excuse was that she wanted to drink the medicinal waters at Bourbon, to combat her worsening bronchitis. But the truth was that she simply wanted to be with Jermyn.
Leaving England was no hardship for her, either. The stench of the streets of London that summer was worse than anyone could remember. Open sewers swarmed with flies. Rats, some the size of small dogs, were everywhere. Plague stalked London’s alleys in one of the worst epidemics since the Black Death of 1340s. As it ravaged Londoners, it caused the lymph glands or ‘buboes’ in their armpits, necks and groins to bloat up into agonising swellings, whilst fever ravaged their generally undernourished bodies, torturing them with cramps and seizures, bleeding and comas until the cold hand of death snatched them inevitably away.
People had not died like this in such numbers since the Black Death in the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, down the few narrow streets where the Great Plague had not cast its fetid shadow, the London mob was out, hollering for the blood of Dutch and French alike.
Jermyn and Henrietta Maria crossed the Channel under heavy escort to protect them from Dutch attack. Their old apartments in the Palais Royale were occupied, so they leased the Hôtel de la Bazinière on the Quai Malaquais, just over the Seine from the Louvre. Despite its name, it was a private house, belonging to a nobleman currently serving a spell in the Bastille. Built in classical style in 1644, the Hôtel de la Bazinière was a typical Parisian residence, with an arched gateway leading into a central courtyard, completely enclosed from the murderous streets outside. In the dispossessed Bazinières’s sumptuously furnished staterooms the Queen could receive the obligatory stream of visiting French Princes of the Blood, and Jermyn could entertain his fellow diplomats and officials to large meals and long evenings of Ombre and Crimpo.
Amongst the guests alternately winning and losing piles of gold livres with them, and on their many evenings out in the fashionable salons of Paris, were leading members of the Sun King’s cabinet, including the fifty-six year-old Hugues de Lionne, ‘who hath’, wrote Jermyn, ‘more particularly than the other ministers, the Foreign affairs in his repartition, and is appointed, to treat with me’.
Widely acknowledged as a political genius, Lionne was also intensely lazy, cramming his work into short periods of frenzied exertion, followed by long days slouched drunkenly round gaming tables, such as those of the Hôtel de la Bazinière – a modus operandi that brought him into frequent, easy contact with Jermyn.
Jermyn’s tactics were twofold. First, he argued that the renewal of the ancient treaties between England and France, which he and Louis had signed in 1661, prohibited Louis from attacking Charles. To Jermyn’s dismay, Lionne denied this.
The treaties had to be renewed within a year of the accession of a new monarch, argued Lionne. Jermyn and Louis had signed the renewals in 1661, just over a year after the Restoration. But because Charles himself insisted that his reign had begun when Charles I was executed in 1649, then the treaty, Lionne, concluded with a smug smile, had been signed twelve years late and must therefore be invalid!
Jermyn’s second tactic was to out-bid the Dutch by offering Louis a new, more beneficial treaty. If France kept out of the Anglo-Dutch war, England would not interfere with Louis’s attack on Flanders. Better still, Jermyn suggested, they could invade the entire Netherlands together, keeping part each and letting Charles’s nephew William of Orange rule the rest, not as a Stadtholder – effectively an employee of the Dutch States General – but as a sovereign prince.
After a summer of negotiations, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria retired to Colombes to await Louis’s decision.
On Monday, 21 August, a magnificently gilded state-coach rolled up their gravel driveway, pulled by six white horses plumed with gold feathers and escorted by a heavily-armed troop of musketeers.
Out stepped the athletic twenty-seven year old Sun King, his long hair curling down the edges of his handsome face like the scroll of a Baroque picture frame. In the cool interior of the château he had a long conversation with his aunt and Jermyn. Although he loved his cousin Charles, he could not trust him while he did the bidding of his Francophobic Parliament and ministers like Arlington. If Charles persisted with the war, he must inevitably come to blows with France.
Having failed to bring Charles back to truly pro-French stance by correspondence, Jermyn returned to see him in person in November. The plague was still rampaging through London: by the time it abated the following year 100,000 Londoners – about a tenth of the city’s population – would be dead. The court had escaped to enjoy the cleaner air of Oxford, carousing in the college buildings, just like they had during the Civil War.
It was not the Plague, though, but the impending war with France that dominated everyone’s thoughts. Jermyn swapped his governorship of Jersey in exchange for a £1,000 pension, to allow for the appointment of a resident governor, who could prepare the island against a French invasion.
The fleet was being re-equipped. Arlington was seeking new alliances with the Hapsburgs. Yet despite the state of panic, Jermyn could not convince Charles that Louis would actually attack England. It therefore came as a genuine shock to Charles (though not perhaps to Jermyn himself) when, on Wednesday, 17 January 1666, France declared war on him.
In fact, this was Louis’s bluff. Anxious to devote his energy to invading Flanders, the Sun King had no intention of fighting England, but he did hope to scare Charles into accepting French mediation. Exactly as planned, Charles agreed, instructing Jermyn to return to Paris to open new talks.
But while Charles and Hyde dithered over the exact nature of Jermyn’s instructions, the war escalated. Although the French navy remained at anchor, the French colonies now joined the bewildering maelstrom of attack and counter-attack that the English and Dutch had been playing amongst themselves. War raged across the globe, from the west coast of America and across the Caribbean to the troubled shores of Africa to the rich spice islands of Indonesia.
When Jermyn was finally able to return to Paris in April, his journey was widely interpreted as a sign of Charles’s desire for peace. Yet because they were framed by the cautious lawyer Hyde, who still did not fully trust his erstwhile enemy, Jermyn’s powers to negotiate were severely and frustratingly limited.
Very, wisely, Jermyn did not tell the French this. On Easter Monday, 16 April 1666, he and the Queen invited the leading players to meet under the watching eyes of Aphrodite and Dionysius, whose lively images dominated the ceiling of their great painted hall at Colombes.
Considering the personalities involved, it is not hard to understand why the French and Dutch were at war with the English. Representing Louis was the genial but chronically lazy Lionne.
For England, besides Jermyn and the Queen, was the regular ambassador Denzil Holles. Although he was one of Jermyn’s old Presbyterian allies, Holles’s natural disdain for the French had been made worse by having to deal with them diplomatically. He refused to speak French, and insisted that, as Charles’s ambassador, he was entitled to keep his hat on in Louis’s presence – which, to the protocol-obsessed French court, was anathema.
The Dutch were represented by the forty-four year old Conrad van Beuningen, a vigorous xenophobe, who regarded the war as a just crus
ade against the English, whom he loathed.
The main issues for an Anglo-Dutch peace treaty were who should pay compensation for losses incurred in the war, and whether captured colonies should be handed back to their original owners.
Van Beuningen demanded maximum compensation for the Dutch, and continued possession of all the English colonies they had seized. When Jermyn and Lionne gently suggested that there might be scope for compromise, the Dutchman became enraged and the talks halted.
Jermyn made better progress with Louis that August. Playing on the Sun King’s unwillingness to attack England, Jermyn suggested he should make a token show of aggression to appease the Dutch. In return, Charles would make peace with the Dutch and would also sign a secret agreement promising not to interfere with Louis’s planned invasion of Flanders.
Louis agreed, but, due to his limited powers, Jermyn could not finalise this agreement. He had now to persuade Charles to agree, and to do that, he had to make another trip to London.
As Jermyn left Paris on his return journey to London, he knew that the fate of Europe depended on his ability to influence that most fickle of monarchs, King Charles II.
XIX
THE ROAD TO BREDA 1666 – 1667
But Louis was of memory but dull,
And to St Albans too undutiful,
Nor word nor near relation did revere,
But asked him bluntly for his character.
The gravelled Count did with the answer faint
His character was that which thou didst paint
And so enforced, like enemy or spy
Trusses his baggage and the camp does fly.
from Last Instructions to a Painter (1681), attributed to Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
The King's Henchman Page 23
