King Charles II

by Fraser, Antonia

  Henrietta Maria had also changed. She still had something in her face so charming that she was ‘beloved of all’, in the loyal words of Madame de Motteville.2 But she was no longer the gay enchanting creature to whose bright eyes no one could refuse anything. She was a thin, hag-ridden, desperate woman, to whom a great many things had been refused in recent years. Her health had never really picked up after the difficult birth of Henriette-Anne. As for her character, that had never been perfect, but its faults had been exacerbated by suffering. One of Henrietta Maria’s failings was an inordinate possessiveness towards her children, accompanied by a conviction that she had an absolute right to control not only their movements but also their emotions and opinions. These were – anticipating events – the traditional feelings of a widow; if Henrietta Maria had lived out her natural days in England in her sunny court, the beloved wife of a commanding monarch, this disagreeable tendency might never have manifested itself. As it was, she treated her eldest son as a child. But the Prince of Wales indubitably felt himself to be a man.

  Nevertheless, the pattern of life which was now imposed upon him was at best adolescent. His childhood friend Buckingham was once more at his side. The two boys were allotted Thomas Hobbes to teach them mathematics. The worthy and agreeable Dr John Earle read with them for an hour a day. Dr Brian Duppa was also resurrected to brush up the Prince’s education. Halifax, in his Character of a Trimmer, complained that one bad effect of the Civil War was that it forced Charles II to have a foreign education:3 but he did not of course receive a foreign education as we should now understand the term. He simply continued his English education after a considerable interruption.

  With due regard for his father’s oft-repeated remarks concerning the Church of England, Charles paid ostentatious visits to Charenton, the headquarters of French Protestantism. As a matter of fact, Protestantism here took such a severe form that Hyde, still in Jersey, added Charles’ apparent adherence to such an extreme sect to his list of other worries.

  It was not until 14 August that Charles was received by his cousin Louis, then on the eve of his eighth birthday. All the French royal niceties were observed. Something in the French air was encouraging to such ceremonies. Besides, the elaborate formality of the reception was in itself an excuse and justification for the delay. The Prince of Wales rode on the same side of the coach as the young King, and on his right hand, ‘no point of honour being forgotten and nothing omitted that could testify the close ties of consanguinity’.4

  Customarily, such ceremonies lasted three days – no more, no less. So after three days Charles found himself back at Saint-Germain again, his cause no further forward. Those about him periodically began to mutter that they wished they were back in Jersey again.

  It was hardly surprising under the circumstances that the two young men, Charles and Buckingham, got a reputation for idleness. At the time, their books must have appeared to them as a bundle of rather unattractive strangers. But it is also worth recording that somehow or other Charles acquired ‘a great compass of knowledge’: we know this not only from John Evelyn but from the normally critical Burnet.5 Charles understood the ‘mechanics of physic’ and made himself an excellent chemist; he both loved and understood the art of navigation. This kind of expertise, including the mathematics involved, was not obtained by idleness. Like most young people, Charles did not want to be driven to study: but he was obviously capable of great application when his interest was aroused.

  This was also the period blamed by the sober – and the priggish – in later years for inculcating Charles’ taste for ‘gallantry’. One would hardly have blamed the penniless and in effect jobless Charles if he had decided to taste the pleasures of the flesh in compensation for the general frustration of his existence. But there is in fact no particular evidence that he did so.

  All the stories of Charles’ ‘debauchery’ in exile must be treated with extreme caution. At the time it suited the Parliamentary book to spread such propaganda. Later the truth was embroidered, in the light of his subsequent career as a gallant monarch. The facts show him to have been really quite moderate in his tastes for a bachelor prince, by the standards of the time. He was certainly no byword for debauchery.

  Certainly, as a boy of sixteen, the frolics which he enjoyed with Buckingham were comparatively mild. The one person who genuinely charmed him at this point, the delightful, tender Isabelle-Angélique, Duchesse de Châtillon, widow of the Admiral Coligny, was exactly the kind of woman to appeal to an inexperienced young man. Everyone adored Bablon, as she was nicknamed; her wit and softness captivated the entire French Court. Her numerous admirers included the Prince de Condé as well as the Duc de Nemours and England’s own Lord Digby. It was in a sense a safe choice for a young man to make because Bablon’s alluring qualities had been hailed with general approval. Contemporary rumours that Charles wanted to marry her are certainly not true – he was well aware of the use to which his hand in marriage had to be put – but he was much infatuated. Alas for the youthful Prince, the affair was all the more romantic for being Platonic.

  When Henrietta Maria suggested that one solution to the royal finances would be to court the famous heiress the Grande Mademoiselle, Charles applied himself to the task with a kind of jolly gaucherie which hardly suggested the budding rake. Altogether he was not regarded as a very polished figure by the French court at this stage. According to Madame de Motteville, even his natural wit was not apparent because he hesitated and stammered (like his father and his uncle Louis XIII).6 Unlike King Charles I, King Charles II showed no trace of this disability in later life, except for some nervousness as a public orator – so perhaps much of the stammer was due to adolescent dislike of the circumstances in which he found himself.

  Anne-Marie Louise de Montpensier, known as the Grande Mademoiselle, was Charles’ first cousin. Her grandfather, not her father, having been King, she was in reality only a ‘Petit-Enfant de France’, not an ‘Enfant’ like her aunt Henrietta Maria. But the golden glow cast by her Montpensier inheritance tended to make everyone in this period overlook the fact. Louis XIV had no sisters. Anne-Marie Louise rejoiced undisputed in her title of Mademoiselle. With Charles, she formed part of that web of cousinage, the grandchildren of Henri Quatre and Marie de Medici, whose relationships and alliances were to be spun about seventeenth-century Europe: of these grandchildren four would ultimately be paired off – Louis XIV and Maria Teresa, child of the French Princess Elisabeth and the King of Spain; Louis’ brother Philippe and Charles’ sister Henriette-Anne. But Charles and Anne-Marie wee not destined to be amongst that happy (or unhappy) number: they shared a birthday on 29 May (although Anne-Marie was three years older) but otherwise did not have a great deal in common.

  For an heiress – and the Grande Mademoiselle was not only rich but the greatest heiress in Europe – she was not bad-looking, being tall, blonde and buxom. Physically at least, the Prince of Wales and this daughter of Gaston Duc d’Orléans by his wealthy first wife, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, would have made a splendid couple.

  But beneath Anne-Marie’s Amazonian appearance beat a sentimental heart. That again contrasted with quite a shrewd brain. This mixture of shrewdness and sentimentality meant that Anne-Marie put a certain price on her wealth, particularly when courted by an impoverished and exiled young cousin. That price was a properly convincing application of ardour to her conquest.

  Weighed in the scales against the possibility of an august destiny, Charles’ clumsy courtship, so evidently spurred on by his mother, made little progress. For one thing, he declared hopelessly that he really could not speak French. So the sweet nothings which Anne-Marie craved, to make her overlook her cavalier’s lack of fortune, remained firmly stuck behind the language barrier. In the meantime, Charles did manage to communicate successfully with Bablon, but she, of course, was no heiress.

  Even if Charles had spoken to his cousin with the tongues of men and of angels – in French – it is improbable that that fierc
e guardian of national interests, Mazarin, would have allowed such a rich prize to pass outside France. The Grande Mademoiselle herself believed that Charles would become a Catholic to marry her – truly a delusion. That step would be quite fatal to the salvation of the English monarchy, as even the unwise Lord Jermyn pointed out. But the original stumbling-block to the project was Charles’ inability to apply himself to the main chance by the use of his romantic talents.

  Like Madame de Motteville at the same period, Mademoiselle was quite pleased with what she saw: she admired Charles’ upright figure in particular – how tall he was for his age. But she wrote firmly that, as far as anything else was concerned, the Prince of Wales was to her an object of pity, and that was all.7

  The mixture of enforced idleness and poverty, stirred from time to time by a dash of bad news from England, made the court of Queen Henrietta Maria a fertile breeding-ground for quarrels and intrigues. These, which were to prove such an alarming feature of the English Royalist party in exile, ranged from the petty to the fundamental. The personalities of those involved contributed a further bitter tincture to the dose.

  The character of Henry Lord Jermyn, Henrietta Maria’s closest adviser, was either an unfortunate accident or an example of the Queen’s lack of judgement in choosing her intimates. The Queen’s contemporaries who were not her admirers tended to take the latter view, since Jermyn had been a pre-war courtier, not a politician, and owed most of his advancement to the Queen.

  Unlike, for example, Hyde, Jermyn was very much the Queen’s man. He had become her Master of the Horse in 1639. This royal and feminine path to advancement did not prevent Jermyn nourishing political ambitions: he was soon to be found demanding to be made Lord High Admiral. Jermyn was a man equipped neither with political experience nor, what was worse, with natural political understanding. Furthermore, he showed a dangerous lack of sensitivity about the religious obsession of others on the whole question of the Covenant and whether Charles would take it; he never quite grasped what all the fuss was about.

  Yet this man was to become the main influence on Queen Henrietta Maria as the years went by and practical memories of her husband faded. So great was their intimacy that rumours of a stronger tie – amorous, even marital – persisted at least among Parliamentary propagandists. Widowed queens were of course a natural target for such stories; inevitably their very real need for consolation was assumed to take some sexual form by the scandalous. From there it was a small step to suppose a secret marriage had taken place. It has been seen that the same assumption was made of another widowed queen and her adviser: Anne of Austria and Mazarin. The trouble with Jermyn was not so much the intimacy of his connection with Henrietta Maria, if indeed it existed, as the quality of the man himself.

  He was no Mazarin. Meddlesome, petty-minded and impatient, he encouraged the worst side of his royal mistress’s character. Prolonged and wearisome would be the wails of complaint from that other Royalist faction, headed by Hyde, concerning Jermyn’s character during the years of exile. But it is difficult to say that they were basically unjustified. The best thing that could be said about Jermyn was that he employed Cowley as his secretary. As against that, another poet, Marvell, referred to him angrily as having the bearing of a butcher. Neither attribute equipped him for the important role he was destined to play in Royalist counsels.

  The calibre of another adviser, George Lord Digby (later Earl of Bristol), was not of the finest either. He was far too changeable by nature, if charming, a man ‘of phantasticall humours’ who, like Jermyn, adored interfering. Hyde accused him ‘of perplexing and obstructing every thing in which he had no hand’. Even Digby’s best quality in adversity, his optimism, could quickly turn to rashness.

  In August Prince Rupert appeared at the Queen’s court. Charles welcomed his cousin warmly. Nevertheless, the arrival of this experienced man of war only served to augment the disputes which had already arisen there because of clashes of personality. With the waiting and quarrelling, Charles’ spirits sank. Except that he had youth and health, there was not much to be said for his two desultory years at the court of France.

  Scotland was the dragon which threatened to upset the whole English situation. How to deal with this powerful yet irresolute monster? Throughout the summer and autumn of 1646 the King was still under so-called Scottish protection. In January the following year he was handed over to Parliament, and the Scots, regarded by many as traitors as a result, retreated back across their borders.

  In June 1647 the King was abducted once more, albeit peacefully, at the hands of the Army; but in the autumn the Army leaders, headed by Cromwell, allowed the King to slip through their fingers. This was very likely deliberate. They were beginning to need support against their own extremists, the agitators in the Army ranks, and toyed with the possibility of working out some agreement with him. The King got as far as the Isle of Wight, where he was once more made a nominal prisoner, while all concerned awaited the next turn of events before deciding on his exact status. From Carisbrooke Castle in the Isle of Wight the King negotiated once more with the Scots – and incidentally the Irish as well, although that was kept a secret.

  The Scots were by now unhelpfully divided amongst themselves. There were those who adhered strictly to the precepts set out in the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League of 1643, and in principle wished to impose its oath upon everybody else: this would exclude even the mildest religious deviation. These Covenanters were headed by Argyll, dour, canny and for all his fanaticism a man of immense political perception. Temperamentally, the Covenanters were in sympathy with Parliament, particularly its Presbyterian members – their rigidity did not fit with the Independents’ way of thinking. Then there was the group, also Presbyterian, which was more in sympathy with the King. Headed by the Duke of Hamilton and his brother, these men would come to be known as the Engagers after they had gone towards a private agreement, or Engagement, with Charles I. Hamilton was less tricky, but also less able, than Argyll. Thirdly, there were the followers of the great general Montrose: of all the Scots Montrose was a straightforward King’s man.

  Yet, for all their divisions, the Scots as a nation had enormous advantages as possible crusaders to rescue the King. They had an army. They were the King’s subjects: there could therefore be no imputation of restoration by foreign help. On the other hand, the price of their help was liable to be religious demands of an exigent nature.

  This problem of the price of the Scottish help was already central to the question of the restoration of the English monarchy. As has been seen, Hyde had been ruminating unhappily over it in Jersey. It would continue to dominate Royalist counsels until the defeat of Worcester put an end to the dream.

  Was the price – the taking of the Oath of Covenant – too high? Hyde, devoted son of the Church of England, always thought that it was. Like most pre-war English politicians, he disliked the Scots and did not trust them: an understandable point of view. When an emissary came from the Scots to test the reaction of the Prince of Wales to the Covenant, Hyde, still in Jersey, issued a stern directive: the price was too high.

  The trouble was that King Charles I did not by any means maintain such a stern posture in his own dealings with the Scots. With hindsight and with history’s more profound knowledge of his character, one is able to see that the King never indicated that the price was too high for one very good reason – because he had no intention of paying it. His restoration to power was for him an end in itself; from that, all blessings would flow, including the supreme blessing of declaring that all previous commitments, made to secure this position, would not now have to be honoured. Henrietta Maria did not find the price too high, simply because she did not understand the currency in which it would be paid. She did not take these strange Scottish oaths and covenants, which she barely bothered to comprehend, particularly seriously. It has been noted that quite early on she was urging her husband to entertain the notion of Scottish help.

  By D
ecember the King’s secret negotiations with Hamilton’s party were moving towards that point where a Scottish army of rescue was proposed. A new undercover ‘Engagement’ was signed on 26 December by the King and the Scottish commissioners on the Isle of Wight. The King promised to condemn all those Independent non-conformist sects detested equally by the ‘Engagers’ and their Covenanter comrades. Presbyterianism was to be established for three years.

  Abroad however the line was still taken that the Scots were but one possible arrow in the royal quiver, particularly in view of the fact that communications with the King on the Isle of Wight were sparse and unreliable. France, for all her family connections, was failing to show herself a noble champion, and the outbreak of the so-called ‘Parliamentary’ war of the Fronde in October 1648 would effectively put an end to hope in that direction. But France was not the only country in Europe where the Stuarts could claim cousinage. There was also Holland.

  Here the eldest sister of Charles, Mary, and her youthful husband, the Prince of Orange, were loyally anxious to help her distressed father. Gradually the English exiles of independent mind were drifting away from the polite complications represented by France to the more vigorous possibilities now open to them in Holland and Flanders.

  Yet here too the Prince of Orange was much restricted by his own circumstances in the aid he could propose for his father-in-law. His position as Stadtholder of Holland remained ambivalent: he was not, for example, an independent monarch of the rank of his father-in-law or even of some of the German princely rulers. Holland was only one of those provinces which together constituted the United Provinces of the Dutch Netherlands, each of which had its own Stadtholder. William was thus responsible to the States of Holland. On the other hand, those Princes of Orange who were appointed Captain General and Admiral General were also responsible to the States-General: this body was made up of delegations appointed by each province.