King Charles II

by Fraser, Antonia

  There was then little appreciation of the importance of the composition of Parliament in the 1660s. This did not mean that no effort at all was made to carry through the royal policies. In Clarendon’s efforts to form some kind of Court party in the Commons – rather than in later Whiggery – have been sought the origins of the English party system.11 Through these manœuvres a new kind of man emerged to represent the King’s interests in Parliament. Such a figure was Henry Bennet, created Baron Arlington in 1665 (by which name he will for simplicity’s sake be known).

  Arlington had little in common with the magisterial figures who had supported, advised and even overborne the young King in exile. Twelve years older than the King, ten years younger than Clarendon, he was in essence a civil servant. Clarendon wrote of him crossly that he ‘could dictate; he could not lead’. But Arlington could also serve, and that was the type of man the King was beginning to need in an age where the theoretical rights of King and Parliament were amorphous, yet their practical relationship had to be hammered out day by day. Burnet noted that Arlington had the ‘art of observing the King’s temper, and managing it beyond all the men of that time’, a quality he used to good effect once he had been given the Privy Purse; in October 1662 he replaced the ageing Nicholas as Secretary of State.

  Arlington had a particular love of and interest in Spain, having begun his career on a diplomatic mission there in 1657. Soon the affairs of Spain, France, Portugal and Holland were channelled through him rather than the other Secretary of State, Sir William Morrice; Arlington taking advantage of his knowledge of languages, an attribute not shared by all his English contemporaries. With his rich dress, like that of a Spanish grandee, his air of formality described as ‘his Castilian bearing’, a strange piece of black sticking-plaster across his nose (the relic of a war wound), Arlington was something of an outward oddity at the Court of King Charles. But the intimacy he soon enjoyed with the King was based on usefulness: he was given a lodging from which he could easily reach the royal apartments by a private staircase. As time would show, it was the subservient Arlington, not the magisterial Clarendon, who represented the type of the King’s advisers in the future.

  For one thing, the King did not share Clarendon’s great belief in the Privy Council as an instrument.12 In Clarendon’s declared opinion, this body was ‘the most sacred, and hath the greatest authority in the government next the person of the King’. He envisaged a constitution in which the legislature consisted of the King in Parliament and the executive of the King in Council – with the two completely separate. Although we might be tempted to think that he occupied the role of Prime Minister, Clarendon himself considered the idea of an official chief adviser highly un-English: it was exemplified by Richelieu and Mazarin across the Channel, as the French origin of the words premier ministre indicated.

  To Clarendon it was Parliament which represented the danger, and the powerful aristocrats there who might try to exercise control over the King, as they had done in the previous reign. How much more desirable to Clarendon appeared a Privy Council (dominated of course by himself), which would withdraw from Parliament, for instance, control of the Treasury and the Navy. In Clarendon’s view, Parliament was there to vote the money – but the Council was there to spend it.

  But to King Charles II, aristocratic control via the Privy Council was scarcely more appealing than that by Parliament. When the King expatiated in 1664 on his affection for Parliaments, his honeyed words were not pure hypocrisy. ‘I need not tell you how much I love Parliaments,’ he declared. ‘Never King was so much beholden to Parliaments as I have been….’ There was much truth in the sentiment. Officially, Monck’s part in restoring him was now forgotten. He had been, if anything, restored by Parliament. He certainly preferred the concept of a Parliament to that of a Council, which, being closer to the person of the King, was potentially more disagreeable. When Queen Henrietta Maria complained of the Privy Council that it ‘shadowed the King too much, and usurped too much of his authority and too often superseded his own commands’, she was expressing a valid point from the monarchical point of view.13

  So the relationship between the King and Clarendon was not entirely easy, for all the jocularity of their scribbled exchanges within the Privy Council itself:

  Clarendon to the King on a prospective visit to Tunbridge: ‘I suppose you will go with a light Train.’

  King Charles: ‘I intend to take nothing but my night bag.’

  Clarendon: ‘Yes, you will not go without forty or fifty horse.’

  The King: ‘I count that part of my night bag….’

  The religious settlement had aroused a passion, if a frustrated one, in the King. He showed a great deal less day-to-day interest in the settlement of those vast tracts of his kingdom, Ireland and Scotland. He had never visited Ireland, and it therefore exercised over him no powerful memories, good or bad. If anything, he was inclined to be favourable to those Catholic Irish who had supported his father, many of whom had served under him in the army of exile; in general, he had found them an agreeable lot, and in certain cases, such as Theobald Taaffe (now Lord Carlingford), real friendship had grown up.

  The Duke of Ormonde, a man of great wisdom and equity, echoed this feeling for the loyalties and wrongs of the Catholic Irish – although himself a Protestant. He was determined to bring about a land settlement where the Catholic Irish, and those who had served in the Army in support of the late King in particular, would not find their claims ignored in favour of the Protestants, soldiers and adventurers who had merely supported the new King’s restoration. In Ireland this aroused unhappy memories of Ormonde’s Treaty of 1649, which had been surrounded by bitter controversy. In England Ormonde proved to be a lone voice amongst the King’s other advisers, including Clarendon, who were happy with the status quo in Ireland – either because it suited them economically, or perhaps because it caused less trouble. For all Ormonde’s efforts, justice was not done to the Catholic Irish. Even though Catholics were restored to trading privileges in 1661, the land settlement of Ireland remained very much as it had been in Cromwellian times: under the control of a Protestant ascendancy.

  If Ireland to King Charles was a far-away country of which he knew nothing, Scotland was a country which he knew too well – and from which he hoped to remain as far away as possible. To Clarendon King Charles remarked carelessly in March 1662, ‘For my part, rebel for rebel, I had rather trust a Papist rebel than a Presbyterian one.’ The Lord Chancellor retorted, ‘The difference is, that you have wiped out the memory of the rebellion of the one, whilst the other is liable to all the reproaches.’ But in truth Charles had no memory of the Catholic rebellion. In his ‘Gracious Message’ to his Irish subjects, issued shortly before his Restoration, he assured them that their former treasons to King Charles I were washed away; he quoted the Biblical doctrine by which there was more rejoicing over one lost lamb than over all the other ninety-nine.14 But Ireland was not Charles II’s lost lamb. Scotland, if anything, could claim that honour. And nothing about Scotland, lost or found, caused him to rejoice. The subject of Presbyterianism still aroused sufficient ire in him after his Scottish experience, ten years back but never to be forgotten, for him to mask it in another of his characteristic pieces of mockery. Was it possible, he asked, for a man to be a Presbyterian and a gentleman? No doubt he carried Samuel Butler’s satire on the Presbyterians, Hudibras, in his pocket (and protected its publication by royal warrant) out of the same teasing animosity.

  As Ormonde was to Ireland, Lauderdale was to Scotland. But the two men were of very different calibre. Lauderdale, it is true, had force, an energy nearing on the manic, belied by his indolent appearance, coarse tongue and coarser habits; his period of imprisonment after Worcester had also been spent, rather surprisingly, in religious study and meditation. In his own way he was very much a Scot and later displayed a genuine concern for the future of his native land as a nation, not merely as an English appendage. But at the time of the Restora
tion, Lauderdale also believed in a healthy and curative measure of revenge. At all events, Argyll was publicly executed, which may have satisfied Lauderdale and at the bottom of his heart not displeased the King – who did not try to save him – but was scarcely a healing gesture. An Act Rescissory also swept away a number of liberties to which Scots had become accustomed.

  However, Lauderdale’s attitude to the Covenant in Scotland was at least healthily pragmatic. He suggested to the King that he should denounce it in public, but in private should leave matters very much as they were. This, one must believe, would have accorded with Charles’ general dislike of any policy which involved him thinking about Scotland and the Scots for longer than was necessary. Unfortunately, both Middleton and Clarendon showed more idealism – and more obstinacy. Middleton was convinced that it was essential to restore episcopacy as soon as possible; a view to which it was easy to get Clarendon’s agreement.

  It was left to Lauderdale to watch like a vulture as Middleton tottered and finally fell; when Middleton introduced an unwise Act of Billeting, Lauderdale was able to present it as an attack on the King’s prerogative. In the meantime, government policy on episcopacy foundered, as so often before, on the rock of the Scottish Covenant. Yet another reaction against episcopalian church rule – the Pentland Rising of 1666 – suggested that all the lessons concerning seventeenth-century Scotland had been learned in vain.

  While the Catholic Irish people resigned themselves to an ominously unfair land settlement, and the Presbyterian Scots refused to resign themselves in the slightest bit to the bishops they so much disliked, King Charles himself won the hearts of his English people at least by concentration on the fourth quarter of his dominions – the sea. Here on one level there was splendid sport to be had. Charles, with his brother James, was responsible for introducing yachting to the English. It will be remembered how impressed the King had been with that Dutch craft (in fact a yacht) which had brought him from Breda to Delft, and how he had been presented with a replica – paid for by the Dutch East India Company. To this hundred-ton Dutch-built vessel, the Mary, falls the honour of founding the British yachting industry.15 It was soon copied, virtually identically, by the King’s shipbuilder Peter Pett, at a total cost of £1,335: although Pepys, who considered the Mary ‘one of the finest things that ever I saw for neatness and room in so small a vessel’, was sceptical whether Pett would succeed in his self-confessed aim ‘to outdo this for the honour of his country’.

  Soon yachts were all the rage. But these ‘pleasure-boats’, as they were alternatively called, still retained a distinctively warlike appearance, like the Dutch yachts of the time, with their eight guns and their crews of thirty men. Prince Rupert’s yacht Fanfan even took part in an engagement during the Dutch War. This did not stop the Prince referring to the King’s passion as part of the general levity of the new royal set: ‘The King, with his characteristic frivolity, had a yacht moored opposite Whitehall in which he might fancy himself at sea. The childish hobby was appropriately called The Folly, and aboard this yacht was one of the many lounging places of the court.’16 But age was making the former swash-buckling commander cantankerous.

  To us today, these yachts would appear more like ‘yachts of state’, such as the modern royal yacht Britannia, rather than the pleasure craft at Cowes. Expenditure on them was considerable, even lavish. Some of their names – Catharine, Henrietta – gracefully echoed those of the royal ladies who were officially close to Charles’ heart. The Greyhound evoked a tougher image. Later Charles descended de haut en bas with a yacht called the Fubbs: his pet name (based on the old English word for chubby) for Louise Duchess of Portsmouth. The household accounts are filled with entries for the various yachts’ appurtenances: Holland quilts and pewter chamber-pots for the Monmouth in 1673; more luxuriously, a feather bed and crimson damask hangings for Queen Catharine’s own ship. On the Greyhound yacht, the King himself indulged in crimson damask for bed and hangings, and gilt leather for the state room, while confining himself to ‘a little bed’ six feet long by three feet six inches broad.17

  A little healthy sibling rivalry helped on the development of the yacht industry. Soon the brother ship-builders Peter and Christopher Pett were competing on behalf of the royal brothers Charles and James, the King himself visiting Deptford and pronouncing Christopher Pett’s work (for his brother) ‘very pretty’. Another yacht, the Bezan, was presented by the Dutch to swell this first British yacht squadron. By 1663 yacht-building was spreading downwards to the aristocracy, so much so that Christopher Pett demanded an extra gratuity for building pleasure-boats, because of all the people he had to entertain. Early owners included Sir William Batten, of the Admiralty office, whose wife (like Queen Catharine) was ungratefully seasick.

  It was compared to the great square-rigged ocean-going ships that these new craft seemed so light and compact; contemporaries like Pepys always noted how small they were. They could certainly sail far closer to the wind, with their fore and aft rigs, and were thus much more suited to racing. The royal brothers took to matching their craft against each other with zest. Evelyn describes one such early yacht race: ‘The King lost it going – the wind being contrary – but saved stakes in returning.’ There was a race between the Dutch-built Bezan and the King’s yacht Jamie (named for Monmouth), which the former easily won. Yacht-racing, and for that matter yacht-building, came to an inevitable halt at the time of the Dutch War, only to flourish again in the 1670s and 1680s.

  Arlington, with more charity than Prince Rupert, summed up the King’s enthusiasm in a memorable phrase when he said that twenty leagues at sea were more pleasing to him than two on land.18 King Charles II was certainly not the first English monarch to find happiness on the ocean wave: but the coincidence of his personal passion and the age in which he lived was a fortunate one for his country. For it was not only yachting jaunts which commended themselves to the King. He was also deeply concerned with the Navy.

  Here his intellectual curiosity married fruitfully with his own taste for adventure to provide an interest in navigation and astronomy, as well as in docks and ship-building. It amounted to an obsession. Fortifications and naval bases in particular fascinated him: he commissioned Danckerts to paint two views of Plymouth, a view of Falmouth Harbour, two views of Portsmouth and a view of his latest acquisition – the dowry of the Queen – Tangier. In danger of his life, escaping from England after Worcester aboard the Surprise, King Charles still managed to take an interest in the navigation of the boat. Renamed the Royal Escape, it was fitted up as a yacht after the Restoration and painted at the King’s request by Van de Velde. It was also no coincidence that Charles had discoursed for hours to Sir William Petty on ‘the philosophy of shipping’. In September 1662 the King launched a new type of ship with ‘two bottoms’, invented by Petty, which was aptly christened The Experiment. Later the King would tease Petty about his boat’s odd appearance. In vain Petty offered to lay odds for his ship against ‘the King’s best boats’: Charles refused to lay the bet and continued the teasing. Yet Petty, undiscouraged, built other double-bottomed boats, and made many further experiments in naval design.19

  As for the sovereign himself, with his diligent visits to coastal fortifications, his inspection of naval plans, even his royal orders to commanders at sea – he would at times prove a mixed blessing to his underlings, teasing apart. Burnet typically extracted some snobbish criticism from the King’s expertise. Charles, he wrote, ‘understood navigation well: but above all he knew the architecture of ships so perfectly, that in that respect he was exact rather more than became a prince’.20 Evelyn was right when he wrote of Charles II, quite simply, that he was a great ‘lover of the sea’.

  King Charles’ concern with the sea had theoretical consequences as well. One incident gives a clue. In late 1661 King Charles waxed extremely indignant when the French King jibbed at the tradition by which ‘ships belonging to the crown of England’ (that is, men-of-war on the high seas) were for
mally saluted. He instructed his ships not to tolerate any diminution in the reverence which was their due, adding that he would be quite unworthy if he quitted a right, and went lower ‘than ever any of my predecessors did’.21

  Such a concern with symbolic ritual was uncharacteristic of Charles II. Except where the Navy was concerned, he made little of that concept of glory which both inspired and plagued his cousin Louis XIV of France and whose pursuit King Louis described as early as 1662 as ‘the principal aim’ of all his actions. Charles had spent too many years as a King with ‘nothing but the name’ to bother himself over an insubstantial notion such as glory. But the reality of power – the security presented by it – preoccupied him, if he only rarely dropped the mask sufficiently to display his feelings.

  There was one area in which he deliberately emulated King Louis and that was in the establishment of regiments of Foot Guards, Life Guards and Royal Horse Guards (although he did not approach anything like King Louis’ figure of sixteen thousand of such desirable bulwarks). In theory, these guards were to be used to police State ceremonies, but of course they also secured the person of the King against a possible coup. It was this aspect rather than the ceremonial side which interested King Charles. The Navy however was his amant de cœur, where the Army represented a reliable husband with a strong right arm. And he intended that the Navy he loved should bow to no-one. As King Charles wrote later, ‘It is the custom of the English to have command at sea….’22