King Charles II

by Fraser, Antonia

  9 The recent transformation of the Mall to a pedestrian precinct on Sundays gives it an air of popular recreation again.

  10 But Charles himself never saw it, for he died on the first day of rehearsal.

  PART FOUR

  The Monarchy in Danger

  ‘The Monarchy itself is in great Danger, as well as His Majesty’s person….’

  JAMES DUKE OF YORK to William of Orange, 1679

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Subsisting Together?

  ‘Affairs are at present here in such a state as to make one believe that a King and a Parliament can no longer subsist together; that they [the King and the Duke of York] must now think only of the war against the Dutch, using the means which they now have, without further recourse to Parliament.’

  James Duke of York, July 1671

  The position of Charles II in the two years following the Secret Treaty of Dover of 1670 would have struck any cognizant observer as ironical, even humorous. On the one hand, the English King was committed by the treaty to a war against Holland as soon as was convenient – and the French King was committed to participate in the action. For such a war Charles II would need an ample additional ‘supply’ from his Parliament. Quite apart from the troops promised, this was especially true if his beloved Navy was to acquit itself with glory. The new French subsidy was nothing like sufficient for a land and sea campaign.

  On the other hand, the very existence of this treaty was unknown to the English Parliament as a whole: of those ministers who were in the secret, only the most intimate knew the whole truth. In the next few years many members of both Houses would begin to guess from the pro-French drift of the King’s actions that something of the sort had taken place. But the ability to make foreign treaties, like that to make peace and war, remained within the most closely guarded enclave of the royal prerogative.

  One result of this secrecy was that Members of Parliament remained extremely suspicious about the use the King might make of the supplies they voted. Just as the King feared in the recesses of his mind the return of revolution, or something approaching it, Parliament feared the arrival of absolutism. In February 1673, after the start of the Third Dutch War, Charles II castigated Parliament for ‘a jealousy … that is maliciously spread abroad’, so weak and frivolous that he would not have mentioned it, but for the fact that it had gained ground with some ‘well-minded people’: and that is, ‘that the forces I have raised in this war were designed to control law and property’.1

  But the fact was that the King’s growing disgust with Parliament, the cynical if understandable determination he showed to circumvent it where possible, contributed to this paranoia on its part. Equally, the King’s own wariness about the attacks on his prerogative – where would it all end? With another 1642? With another 1649? – was fed by the obstreperous nature of Parliament from 1671 onwards. Neither side trusted the other. And there was a good deal to be said for both points of view.

  The behaviour of the Parliament called by the King in February 1671 did nothing to smooth the situation. Back in the early 1660s, how lovingly the King had spoken of Parliaments: with genuine emotion he had declared that neither King nor Parliament could function without the other. By July 1671, in contrast, the Duke of York was doubting whether Parliament could contribute anything at all to the current royal project. ‘Affairs are at present here in such a state,’ he wrote, ‘as to make one believe that a King and a Parliament can no longer subsist together; that they [that is, the King and the Duke of York] must now think only of the war against the Dutch, using the means which they now have, without further recourse to Parliament.’2

  This session of Parliament ended in April, when the King prorogued it once more; Parliament did not meet again till February 1673. The most significant effect of this session was to demonstrate the new amity of the royal brothers. The Roos divorce case had come and gone. A precedent had been set up that a man could gain a divorce by Act of Parliament. The King had not availed himself of it. Succession-watchers – who comprised most members of the Court and many Members of Parliament – considered that the Duke of York’s position was in consequence much strengthened.

  The trouble was that the King still needed money to make his promised war, and his finances were in their familiar critical state. By adjourning Parliament, he had forfeited certain valuable revenues not yet voted to him. This was the background to the desperate new remedy proposed – probably by Clifford – known as the Stop of the Exchequer. This measure put a violent end to the system started in 1667 by which direct assignments of revenue were issued by the Treasury in return for loans to the government. These paper orders or tallies were registered in the Treasury Book in order to be paid off in order of issue by funds on their way to the Exchequer. Now the King announced that in future monies would go directly to the Exchequer, regardless of these tallies.

  Much later the King would say of the Stop to Lord Bruce: ‘It was a false step.’ It was certainly a colossal psychological mistake. Marvell expressed the national mood of indignation when he called it ‘the Robbery at the Exchequer’. Many of those ruined were the weak, those traditionally at the mercy of the mighty. There was another side to it, equally psychologically damaging, the destruction of the strong. Evelyn referred to the Stop in poignant and angry terms as ‘an action which not only lost the hearts of his subjects, and ruined many widows and orphans, whose stocks were lent him, but the reputation of his Exchequer forever’. Two banking businesses never recovered. Edward Backwell, for example, he who had persistently put his trust in a prince’s credit, held nearly three hundred thousand pounds’ worth of paper orders, many incurred in the interests of paying off William of Orange, and as a result he could never lend on a large scale again.3 The fatal impression was created that it was too dangerous to lend money to the English monarchy.

  While it is not possible to quarrel with the King’s own estimate of the Stop – it was a false step – one can also sympathize with the circumstances which drove him to it. The goldsmiths were reluctant to lend: the interest they charged – between eight and ten per cent – was not inordinate in an age when fifteen, even twenty per cent was known and they themselves were probably having to pay six per cent. Loans were difficult to obtain.4 The real culprit was the current English banking system, or rather the lack of it. The problems were not properly solved before the reign of William III, when not only was the Bank of England founded (the happy Dutch already had a national bank), but the concept of a ‘perpetual fund’ was developed; while William’s Parliament – unlike that of Charles II – was willing to underwrite the debts of the State.

  The unpopularity and distrust incurred over the Stop did not assist the King in the promulgation of his next measure, done without the support of Parliament. This was the Declaration of Indulgence, given out by the King on 15 March 1672.5 Its terms made it quite clear that it rested solely upon the powers of the King. Charles II had long wished to do something for both types of religious extremist contained within his kingdom, dissenters and Catholics. It will be remembered that back in 1662 he had issued a declaration granting toleration to both sets of believers.

  Then he attempted – in vain – to get the declaration ratified by the authority of Parliament. Now he made no such attempt. The King himself in the new Declaration referred bitterly to the ‘sad experience’ of the past twelve years and how there was ‘very little fruit’ from it. Now therefore he felt himself obliged to make use of ‘that supreme power in ecclesiastical matters which is not only inherent in us, but hath been declared and recognized to be so by several statutes and Acts of Parliament …’. Resting on this power, he proposed to suspend all the penal laws against nonconformists and Catholics. Nonconformists should further be allowed public places of worship by license; the Catholics would be allowed to worship in their own way privately in their homes.

  The words were bold, the sentiments admirable. The measure was taken ‘for the quieting the minds of our good su
bjects … for inviting strangers in this conjuncture to come and live under us’– the language being reminiscent of that of another exponent of toleration, Oliver Cromwell, who declared himself as ‘loving strangers’, hoping that they would live in England’s midst. Like Cromwell, Charles II was to be unsuccessful in swaying the spirit of the times.

  The trouble was that it was by no means generally agreed that the King possessed any such ‘supreme power in ecclesiastical matters’. The attempt of Charles II to exercise such a power without seeking Parliamentary ratification, while Parliament was not even in session, provoked several types of fear. The Stop of the Exchequer had scarcely prepared the way for the popularity of the King’s personal policies. Now the Declaration of Indulgence, by appearing to favour Catholics (for so it was inevitably interpreted by the anti-Popish lobby), confirmed suspicions already aroused by the rumoured conversion of the Duke of York.

  Even so, the King might have spiritedly carried through the Declaration of Indulgence, were it not for the demands of the Dutch War. Without money voted by Parliament, he would not be able to carry out that provision of the Secret Treaty of Dover most precious to him. Seen from that angle, the timing of the Declaration of Indulgence, a few days off from another declaration – that of war against Holland – was too spirited altogether. There was a rancorous outcry, not only from Westminster but from far beyond its purlieus. ‘It is incredible how much excitement the measure causes all over the country,’ wrote the Venetian Ambassador. Neither all the criticism, nor all the support, came from predictable quarters. The judges, for instance, disapproved of the measure because they considered the King was claiming powers he did not possess – this despite the fact that since 1668 they had generally held their offices durante bene placito (at the King’s good pleasure) rather than quamdiu se bene gesserit (so long as they behaved themselves).6 Lord Ashley, on the other hand, approved of it because he believed that it was widening the basis of the Church of England.7 Shortly afterwards he was created Earl of Shaftesbury, as part of a general distribution of honours to members of the Cabal on the eve of the war, by which name he will in future be known. Arlington also received an earldom, Clifford a barony, and Lauderdale a dukedom.

  There was another crucial element in the treatment of the Declaration within Parliament. And that was the ability of the King’s ministers to provide some sort of Court bloc. Lately Clifford’s and Arlington’s right-hand man, Sir Joseph Williamson, had apparently been more successful in this respect, although the fact that by February 1671 well over two hundred seats had changed hands since the original election of the Cavalier Parliament in 1661 meant that the composition of the body was more mysterious than the Court managers supposed.

  Williamson, another government official of the King’s own generation, had begun his career in the office of Sir Edward Nicholas. He transferred to the service of Arlington when the latter succeeded Nicholas as Secretary of State. Williamson entered Parliament himself in 1669, after various attempts; in 1672 he became Clerk of the Council, and was knighted. Possessing exceptional diligence, he also acted as editor of the London Gazette, the official publication of the government, which had grown out of a news-sheet disseminated in Oxford at the time of the Court’s residence there in 1665. He was, then, like Arlington, an able and devoted servant of the Crown.

  But the abortive affair of the Declaration of Indulgence would demonstrate that, for all the work of Williamson, Arlington and Clifford, the King might have his way in small things, but he still could not push through any measure to which Parliament was opposed. His ‘supreme power in ecclesiastical matters’ was a hollow boast.

  There were a series of ostensible excuses for making war on Holland. The official line was given by Charles II in March 1672, when he wrote of England (to his brother) as ‘having received many wrongs and indignities from the States General of the United Provinces’. Wrongs were suffered in Surinam, over the East India trade and the English fisheries; indignities were also suffered by the King’s Majesty in a series of Dutch satirical pamphlets and medallions. English tactics leading up to the war were however more frankly summed up by Arlington: ‘Our business is to break with them and yet to lay the breach at their door.’8

  Charles’ unwavering personal view was given by the Venetian Ambassador: ‘The King is convinced that the hatred of the Dutch for England is hereditary, that it increased because of trade and became implacable owing to the pretensions of the United Provinces.’ As to the place of France in the awkward triangle which had existed for the last five years between the three countries, the King told the Council, ‘The French will have us or Holland always with them and if we take them not, Holland will have them.’9

  These were familiar arguments: later Shaftesbury would cry out for the destruction of the Dutch, quoting the famous phrase of the Roman senator, on another hereditary feud between two peoples: ‘Delenda est Carthago’. With more convictions than Shaftesbury, because he had held the view much longer, Charles II believed in the need to crush, or at any rate curb, the United Provinces at sea, in the various corners of the growing English empire and wherever else their ‘pretensions’ might prickle the English. This, plus a French alliance, was the foreign policy he had worked out for himself. Under the circumstances, a dreadful insult endured by the English yacht Merlin at the hands of the Dutch was largely irrelevant – and almost wholly manufactured. All the same, the mixture was not quite as before. On the Dutch side, there was a new and explosive element present. This was their recently appointed General, William of Orange.

  It is time to return to this solemn youth, last heard of visiting England in 1670 and attempting to get his engaging uncle to pay his debts to the House of Orange. William too was busy working out the proper direction of his foreign policy. In February 1672 he was made Captain General and Admiral General of the Dutch forces in the field. But, faced as he was with the hordes of France only an inadequate land-mass away, he could hardly afford the luxury of treating England as a foe. Besides, the natural link between England and Holland, from the Orangists’ point of view, was one of warm family alliance rather than enmity.

  The Orangists naively believed that William’s new office would sway his uncle of England in his approach to Holland. They could not understand that Charles’ debonair approach to William concealed a genuine inability to understand his nephew’s point of view. The insensitivity which Charles continued to show in his letters to William throughout 1672 is striking in such a normally diplomatic man. In April Charles suggested that although ‘our interests seem to be a little differing at this present’ – a blithe way of alluding to a state of war between their respective countries – he had still done William a considerable service; for had war not broken out, William would never have become General of the Dutch forces!

  In July Charles was confident that if William would only follow his advice, ‘I make little doubt by the blessing of God of establishing you in the power there [that is, in Holland] which your forefathers always aimed at.’ Charles was presumably taking the line to himself that the terms of the Secret Treaty of Dover stood to carve a hereditary principality out of the United Provinces for his nephew. Equally obtuse were Charles’ attempts later in the year to make a humiliating peace with Holland via William: ‘Such a one as in the bad condition of your affairs will be much better for you and that poor people than any war can be….’10 To Charles II’s amazement, William did not answer.

  This insensitivity is striking. It is also surprising. One is obliged to conclude that it sprang from Charles II’s own peculiar and deep-seated attitude to family relationships. Towards the end of the seventies these relationships – with his brother, his wife – were tested in a crucible and survived. In the mean time, because Charles II felt warmly towards his family, he obviously expected his relatives to feel the same. In the case of his sister Mary, his expectations had been fulfilled. In the case of her son William, they were to be grievously disappointed.

  As Will
iam told Buckingham and Arlington, on a joint mission to Holland in 1673 in search of a satisfactory peace – satisfactory to England, that is –‘he liked better the condition of Stadtholder they [the Dutch] had given him … he believed himself obliged in conscience and honour not to prefer his interest before his obligation.’11 For the next few years William, all unaware of the Secret Treaty of Dover, would see his obligation as the task of detaching England from France. First however he had to win his spurs in his own country, by saving it from extinction.

  When war was declared on 17 March, the total forces of French and English far outnumbered those of the Dutch, both by land and by sea. Only in naval guns – 4,500 to the allies’ 6,000 – did the Dutch approach any kind of equality. Charles II was confident that the spoils of war would include not only those Dutch territories specified in the Secret Treaty, but also some rich naval prizes calculated to swell his depleted Treasury. Since the conduct of the war at sea was left to the English, Charles construed it as his ‘obligation’, as William would have put it, to interfere himself whenever possible. He paid two visits to the Nore off Chatham, where the Duke of York was once more installed in charge of the fleet; at the end of June he was accompanied by Queen Catharine and Shaftesbury, as Lord Chancellor; at the start of September he took Prince Rupert, Shaftesbury and other members of the Council.

  At the beginning of May Charles also wrote James a long letter in his own handwriting, beginning, ‘I was this day in our meeting for the business of the fleet, and amongst other things I thought it not amiss to give you this hint….’12 The hint was the inadvisability of fighting with the Dutch alone: the Duke ought to wait until he had joined up with the French squadron. But at the first proper battle of the war, neither French nor English – nor, by implication, the English commander the Duke of York – covered themselves with glory.