King Charles II

by Fraser, Antonia

  Scarlet cloth was used in abundance, including a false ceiling of red baize for St Edward’s Chapel and red cloth to cover the benches in both Westminster Hall and the Abbey. More mundanely, blue cloth was used to line the way from the Hall steps to the choir in the Abbey. Everything contributed to the overall impression of magnificence, but everything – down to the silk towel held by the Bishops before Communion – had to be paid for.

  Nevertheless, the impact on observers, both native and foreign, was all the King could have wished. As far as the former were concerned, it was not a complete coincidence that the coronation took place shortly before the elections to the new Parliament. Visitors from abroad were duly impressed to discover that England was not at all the barbaric place that they had imagined it to be, cut off for twenty years behind its own iron curtain of republicanism. Henry Fagel, a ‘Foreigner at the Court of Charles II’, describing a sight-seeing tour of England at the time of the coronation, was astonished at the splendour of palaces such as Windsor and Hampton Court, as an Englishman today might be amazed at the richness of the palaces preserved in Poland or some other Iron Curtain country. And he was particularly impressed by the spectacle of the coronation itself, which excelled in splendour anything he had conceivably expected.8

  The culmination of the ancient and solemn service in Westminster Abbey was the moment when the King’s crown was finally placed on his head by the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘A great shout’ began.fn2 Immediately afterwards the whole nobility swore fealty. Thus they ‘firmly ascended the throne, and touched the King’s Crown, promising by that Ceremony to be ever ready to support it, with all their Power’. It was no empty oath. Within their lifetime, it could be that they would be called upon to implement it, as their fathers had. All this took place beneath the watchful eyes of the envoys who packed the gallery, from foreign powers as diverse as Spain and Sweden, Venice and Hamburg, as well as personal representatives of foreign dignitaries such as the Duc d’Orléans.

  Even the weather (proverbially unkind to royal occasions in our own day) rallied to the King’s support. It had been extremely rainy throughout the previous month, but the day of the coronation itself dawned dry or, as a rising poet, John Dryden, subsequently described it:

  Soft western winds waft o’er the gaudy spring

  And open’d Scenes of flow’rs and blossoms bring

  To grace this happy day,…

  The weather continued dry throughout the ceremonies. If it was not quite balmy enough to justify Dryden’s ecstasy, a little over-enthusiasm can be forgiven on his part, in view of the fact that his last public work had been ‘Heroical Stanzas’ on Cromwell’s death. However, in the evening a violent thunderstorm broke out just as the King was leaving Westminster Hall. This satisfied everyone. The superstitious were able to prognosticate a gloomy future for the realm or its King or both from the thunder and lightning; optimists pointed to the auspiciously sunny day.10

  And still the ceremonies were not done. They were rounded off by an ostentatious post-coronation feast held in Westminster Hall. Here the chivalric ritual extended to the service of the food, with the Earl Marshal, Lord High Steward and Lord High Constable appearing in their coronets, riding richly caparisoned horses, to present the first course. Even the humble Clerks of the Kitchen, who brought up the vast procession of servers, wore black figured satin gowns and velvet caps.

  The King’s official champion, Sir Edward Dymoke, was there on his white charger, and made a grand entry preceded by trumpeters. Throwing down his gauntlet, he made the traditional challenge: ‘If any person of what degree soever, high or low, shall deny, or gainsay our Sovereign Lord King Charles the Second … here is his champion, who saith that he lieth, and is a False Traitor.’

  This was the very Hall in which twelve years earlier the King’s father had been tried for his life. But the ghost of Cromwell did not answer.

  At long last the King was able to wash his hands – in water ceremoniously brought to him by the Earl of Pembroke and a host of attendants – and, having done so, depart from Westminster as he had come, by barge along the river Thames.

  But there was a fitting epilogue to all this parade of power and pomp ‘deemed … inferior in magnificence to none in Europe’.11 The King and the Duke of York subsequently presented their coronation robes not to a museum for posterity – but to the theatre. They were used in a play by Sir William Davenant. And in Henry V in 1664 (a version by Orrery), Owen Tudor wore the coronation suit of King Charles II. For all the sacred ceremony at its heart, there had after all been a strong element of the charade about the King’s gorgeous gold and scarlet crowning.

  Henry Fagel had described the English ladies at the coronation with enthusiasm as ‘everyone dressed as a Queen’.12 But the position was in fact vacant; and Court and King alike stood in need of an incumbent. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’, wrote Jane Austen in the nineteenth century, ‘that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ In the seventeenth century it was a universally acknowledged truth that a single King must be in want of a Queen – although he might expect to acquire the good fortune along with his bride. The concept of monarchy extended beyond the immediate person of the King, if only because the question of the succession could never be overlooked in this age of high and chancy mortality from every kind of disease.

  This royal family had recently been depleted by two deaths, both by smallpox: Mary Princess of Orange at the age of twenty-nine, and Harry Duke of Gloucester at the age of twenty-one. The demise of this promising young man, described by Hyde as being ‘in truth the finest youth and of the most manly understanding that I have ever known’, ranks with the earlier death of his namesake Henry Prince of Wales as being one of the accidental tragedies of the house of Stuart. The death of the fabled Henry Prince of Wales left his younger brother to succeed as King Charles I, with dire results; the removal of the determinedly Protestant Duke of Gloucester from the royal succession (remember the steel with which he combated his mother’s Catholicism) was equally fatal. As it was, the Duke of York remained in effect the only heir to King Charles II throughout his reign who was both male and legitimate – and wholly English.fn3 But he was first a suspected, then an acknowledged Catholic. If the ‘sweet Duke of Gloucester’ had lived as an alternative Protestant heir, matters might have gone very differently.

  The Duke of York’s prestige and importance were inevitably increased by his brother’s death. At the same time he had recently forfeited much of his previous popularity in Court circles, as well as his suitability to follow Charles II on the throne, if necessary, by what was generally regarded as a most unfortunate marriage. It was ironic that the lady in question was actually the daughter of Charles’ faithful servant Sir Edward Hyde (he had been raised to the rank of Earl of Clarendon at the coronation, by which name he will in future be known). James had seduced Anne Hyde while she was acting as a Maid of Honour to his sister Mary; as a result she became pregnant. James then made a secret contract with Anne and was married to her privately by his chaplain on 3 September 1660.

  Once the marriage had taken place, James had second thoughts. Now he behaved in the most ungentlemanly fashion; he ignored the contract and tried to wriggle out of the situation by suggesting that others than himself could have been the father of the child. He wished the marriage to be declared invalid. James’ explanation in his Memoirs was that the contract had been made ‘in the first warmth of his youth’ (he was twenty-six).14 But he was unable to make the mud stick. On 22 October the child was born; it was a boy, who died. The marriage itself was generally known by the end of the year.

  The irony lay in the fact that Clarendon himself was furious at the match. Marriage to his own daughter was no part of his elaborate web of marital plans, redolent of diplomatic alliances and wealthy dowries, for the two bachelor princes under his sway. At the same time, he incurred a great deal of odium for having apparently aimed to make his daughter Queen of Englan
d. It was unfair, but, given the relationship, natural. Really the only person who came out of the rather squalid incident of the York marriage at all well was King Charles. He refused to have the match declared invalid, which might have been politically wise, saying that it was unkind to Anne Hyde’s reputation, to say nothing of her condition. And he ostentatiously visited her during her confinement, showing a lead which the Court reluctantly followed. As for the idea of having Parliament annul the marriage, he refused to allow Parliament to interfere with the succession – a stand for which James would one day be grateful.

  Once the coarse jibes against Anne Duchess of York, based on her pregnancy but inspired by the Clarendon connection, had died away, she was able to establish herself as a considerable character at the Restoration Court. She was certainly no beauty: Pepys called her downright plain. But Anne was nevertheless both witty and intelligent, and the French Ambassador went so far as to describe her as having courage, cleverness and energy almost worthy of a king’s blood.15

  The untimely death of the Duke of Gloucester, the unsuitable marriage of the Duke of York: both of these increased the urgency to marry off the King. The eventual choice, the Infanta Catharine of Portugal, was no new candidate. Her father, King John IV, under whom Portugal had become liberated from Spain in 1640, had suggested it long ago when the bride and groom were respectively seven and fourteen. For sentimental reasons, it was pleasant to know that King Charles I had at the time favoured the match. But of course the point of the union to Portugal was very far from nostalgic. Put at its simplest, marriage into the Portuguese royal family brought England down firmly on the Portuguese side against Spain in the long-drawn-out struggle between the two Iberian countries. This contest was influenced by the fact that the young Portuguese King Alfonso was pretender to the Spanish throne through his grandmother the Duchess of Braganza; and his mother, the Queen-Regent of Portugal, was anxious to secure, by whatever means she could, the preservation of the relics of the Portuguese colonial empire (including of course Brazil).

  Again, put simply, any support of Portugal was welcome to Spain’s other neighbour, aggressive France. By the Peace of the Pyrenees with Spain in 1659, France had bound herself specifically not to aid Portugal; but already her resolute young King Louis XIV was casting ambitious eyes towards the Spanish Netherlands. If peace between Spain and France was not to be lasting, then it suited France to have Portugal, her natural ally against Spain, bolstered up by England. So that Charles’ projected match could not only count on French support, but also, by implication, drew England within the French network of European alliances.

  Republican England had of course been the official ally of France; in consequence, King Charles had been forced to throw himself on the mercies of Spain. Despite this disagreeable memory and the perfidy of his French relations, the King was by temperament far more in sympathy with the French than with the Spaniards. After his Restoration, he was prepared to let bygones by bygones. Forgiveness was made easier by the fact that the young King Louis XIV, now grasping the reins of power for the first time at roughly the same moment as Charles II was restored, had not been responsible for the French betrayal. The moment the Restoration was effected, the English royal family tilted back contentedly to their French-oriented sympathies. It was a fact underlined by the betrothal of Charles’ surviving sister, the beguiling Henriette-Anne, to Louis XIV’s brother, Philippe Duc d’Orléans (generally known as Monsieur, as she will now be known as Madame). The marriage took place shortly before the coronation.

  Negotiations with the King of Portugal were known to be under way some time in late 1660, probably helped on by the presence of Queen Henrietta Maria, who approved of the match, in England. By February 1661 the Spanish Ambassador was energetically advocating the rival claims of the Hapsburg Princesses of Parma, who would be endowed by his master with a suitably large dowry for the occasion. (However, the Earl of Bristol gave left and right of disapprobation in his report on these young ladies: the elder, he said, was very ugly, and the younger monstrously big.)16 Undaunted, the Spaniards continued to propose the claim of almost every princess in Europe, it seemed: a Danish Princess, a Princess of Saxe – anyone except the Portuguese Infanta.

  King also protested to King. Philip IV of Spain expostulated that such a match cut across a previous Anglo-Spanish agreement. Charles II of England replied curtly that his marrying whomsoever he thought fit should not interrupt this friendship, much less cause ‘everlasting war’. It is in this context, incidentally, that the spiteful remark of the Spanish Ambassador that the Infanta Catharine was barren should be seen. As it happened, he turned out to be right; but the prophecy was a brilliant piece of ill-wishing, rather than the product of any intimate medical knowledge, and should not be cited as any kind of evidence.

  The Portuguese Ambassador was at least on the right track in emphasizing the dowry of his own candidate. From the first, the English showed themselves mesmerized by the enormous fortune offered with the hand of the Infanta. Augustin Coronel Chacon, known as ‘the little Jew’, who acted as consular and financial agent to the King in London, had outlined its glittering dimensions to General Monck before the King returned to England.17 The actual implications of the match played a smaller part. It was as though the economic straits of the Crown had produced a kind of siege economy in which the first essential was to acquire money, any money; the diplomatic consequences could be sorted out later. So that although French support for the marriage was influential, it does not seem to have been crucial, as is sometimes suggested.

  The Infanta’s portion, dangled before English eyes, was to be two million crowns, or about £360,000 (then), the possession of Tangier on the Mediterranean coast, Bombay on that of India. At the time, the King had to be shown where Tangier was on the map. It was more to the point that the dowry itself was to be paid in such diverse coins as sugar, Brazilian wood and cash itself; part on the day of the bride’s embarkation, the rest in staggered payments. Clarendon swore to the Portuguese Ambassador that the principal inducement to the marriage was the ‘piety, virtue and comeliness’ of the Infanta: but then gave the game away by asking for Tangier to be handed over ‘quickly’ to reassure the English….18

  A proxy courtship was carried out on the King’s behalf in Portugal by the English Ambassador, Sir Richard Fanshawe. Charles himself was soon writing as flowery letters as could be managed, not only to the young lady herself but also to her powerful mother. He even made the effort to write in Spanish (the Portuguese Queen was Spanish-born), although he had to ask Clarendon to check his letters over for mistakes. To Catharine he referred to his sanguine feelings for the future; she responded in kind. By May 1661 the King and Clarendon were able to inform the English Parliament that negotiations were complete. Soon Charles in London was signing himself to Catharine in Lisbon: ‘The very faithful husband of Your Majesty, whose hand he kisses.’

  The odd thing was that no proxy marriage between the pair of royal correspondents, of the kind familiar to European royalties down the ages, had in fact taken place, although the King’s language would seem to indicate that it had. Later congratulatory verses, part of a collection presented by Oxford University, made the same assumption, philosophizing thus on proxy marriage:

  Kings have ubiquity, while vulgar minds,

  Like bodies, Nature to one place confines….19

  But since the Pope had refused to approve the independence of Portugal from Spain, his dispensation for such a ceremony was not asked, and this King at least was vulgarly confined to one place. Catharine was simply designated Queen of England, while remaining in Lisbon.

  Nearly a year elapsed before she made the long and stormy sea journey to her new home, escorted by Lord Sandwich in the lucky ship which had restored her husband, the Royal Charles. Catharine arrived at Portsmouth on 13 May 1662. One of her first actions was to ask for a cup of tea. It was in its own way a milestone in our social history. It is true that tea-drinking had been known in England
before this date but it was extremely rare. The national beverage was ale and that was what the Queen was offered. As no-one who wants a cup of tea has ever been satisfied with a glass of ale (and vice versa), it must have been a low moment. Subsequently Queen Catharine did a great deal to popularize the general drinking of tea; in 1680 Edmund Waller wrote a whimsical poem on the connection between the ‘best of herbs’ and the ‘best of queens’:

  Venus her myrtle, Phoebus has his bays,

  Tea both excels which she vouchsafes to praise….

  In the meantime, still for the time being tealess, the English worried over the delivery of the dowry, the garrisoning of Tangier and other practical considerations. Once the Queen’s arrival was imminent, another practical arrangement preoccupied Clarendon and his master. Some sort of wedding had, finally, to take place. The Queen could not simply assume the married state. (Although it might have saved a lot of trouble in the long run if she had.) The question was, what sort of wedding?

  Queen Catharine was of course a Catholic, like most of the royal princesses of Europe other than those cold northern ladies disdained by Charles. Her religion had already caused annoyance in those English quarters who disapproved of the Portuguese match in the first place. Yet a Catholic Queen, however irritating, could hardly be rated a cultural shock to seventeenth-century England. There were few alive in England who could remember a time when there had been a Protestant Queen, since James I’s consort, Anne of Denmark, became a Catholic convert. A Catholic Queen might therefore be said to be the norm rather than otherwise, while the appurtenances of such a creature, chapels, the Mass, friars, confessors and the like, however distasteful to honest Protestant Englishmen, were at least very familiar to them. In any case, the Portuguese Ambassador had assured King Charles of his bride’s docility on the subject: that it was ‘true she was a Catholic, and would never depart from her religion; but was totally without that meddling and activity in her nature, which many times made those of that religion troublesome and restless when they came to another country.’20 In short she was no Henrietta Maria.