King Charles II

by Fraser, Antonia

  Implicitly Charles II agreed with the doctrine of Sir Robert Filmer, posthumously published in the 1680s, that a king was a father of his people.10 Even Charles I had not adhered to Filmer’s extreme doctrines concerning Divine Right; and, where Divine Right was concerned, Charles II certainly did not. But when Filmer wrote that ‘anarchy is nothing else than a broken monarchy, where every man is his own monarch or governor’, his words found an echo in the breast of Charles II. They also of course found an echo in the hearts of the people. The King instinctively appealed to those sentiments aptly phrased by Oliver Goldsmith eighty years later. Goldsmith denigrated the great Whig leaders who

  blockade the throne,

  Contracting regal power to stretch their own…

  When I behold a factious band agree

  To call it freedom when themselves are free…

  I fly from petty tyrants to the throne.

  As a father, Charles II had not yet abdicated his responsibilities.

  In May 1682 the King endured another bout of illness, but, as in previous years, he gave the appearance of a complete recovery. Once restored to health, the pattern of exercise was unabated, including such famous killers of the middle-aged as tennis games with much younger men. He rode and hawked as before. Buck-hunting remained a passion: in the course of his sport he was able to introduce his Italian sister-in-law, Mary of Modena, to the English countryside, including Dorset and one of its jewels, the hunting retreat at Cranborne.11 Physically, this was not a monarch in decline: whatever sharp warnings of the future were being administered in the shape of these attacks, they were intermittent signals delivered to a still active man. There is no reason to suppose that, mentally, the King was in decline either.

  People saw what they wanted to see. Where Reresby witnessed the Duke’s indefatigability at the expense of his brother’s indolence, Roger North, writing the life of his brother Lord Keeper Guilford, described quite a different phenomenon: how the King, after his various illnesses at Windsor, ‘appeared to be more considerative, and grew more sensible of the niceties of State Government, than he had been before, especially relating to the Treasury’. Charles’ words to Burnet – spoken with regard to his championship of Catharine – will be recalled; in the autumn of 1678 he described himself as having led a bad life which he now wished to amend. He was ‘breaking himself of all his faults’.12 Among those faults it is plausible to suppose that he listed a lack of interest in the minutiae of government. ‘Another way of ruling’ represented his own attempt to redirect his energies. And in so far as the Duke of York and ministers gave to outsiders the air of being in control, it was because their thoughts and policies coincided with those of the King.

  The attempt to secure a friendly judiciary was an essential part of ‘another way of ruling’. For all the indignation of the Whigs, the calibre of the new men was not low.13 Thomas Raymond, Edmund Saunders, Robert Atkins and Francis Pemberton, Evelyn’s ‘very learnedest of the judges’, were all estimable appointments. What they did share however, and share with the Crown, was the view that their tenure sprang from that Crown and depended upon it. Once again the King was taking advantage of tradition, the judiciary merely failing to flout it. (It is however that kind of flouting which leads to progress.)

  Most significant of all was the appointment of the Chief Justice, Francis North, as Lord Keeper in succession to Lord Nottingham in December 1682 (North was created Lord Guilford the following year). North was a good man and a distinguished judge: the manner in which he swayed the trial of Stephen College to secure the desired guilty verdict in August 1681 was probably the only blot on his career. But he was famous for his loyalty to the royal prerogative. It was his declared opinion that ‘a Man could not be a good lawyer and honest, but he must be a Prerogative Man. So Plain were the Law Books in these cases.’14

  In 1683 Jeffreys, not such an agreeable man, succeeded as Chief Justice on the death of Sir Edmund Saunders. Under his presidency, the King’s Bench began to produce the pro-governmental verdicts for which the King and his coterie hoped.15 By the end of 1683 eleven judges had been removed – at the King’s wish – and a new model judiciary had come into being. It is true that the difficulty the King experienced in getting Danby released would show that this new model was not totally subservient. But as Guilford’s words on the prerogative amply demonstrated, their hearts – and their judgements – were in the right place.

  The other angle to any verdict was provided by the jury. It was here that the great weakness of the King’s flank had been demonstrated in his attack on Shaftesbury: the City of London continued to throw up Whig juries, because juries were ‘pricked’ or chosen by the sheriffs and the London sheriffs were Whigs. At midsummer 1682 Tory sheriffs were duly elected, although the skulduggery of the manoeuvres involved did not bear inspection.

  More charters of corporations were called in, along the lines referred to earlier in chapter 23, whenever some light excuse of misdemeanour could be found to justify it. The excuse given for calling in the charter of York had at least a nice period touch to it. The Lord Mayor was said to have refused a mountebank permission to erect a stage, although the fellow had been recommended by the King himself.16

  In the last year of the King’s life, towns in the four corners of England were included in those who lost their original charters. Colchester, Swansea, Lyme Regis and Wigan … east and west and south and north the King’s messengers, like those of Lars Porsena, went forth. On occasion the arrival of the new charter was greeted with loyal demonstrations which underlined the popularity of the settled regime, or at least of a skilful Royalist mayor; at seaside Lyme there were all-night bonfires and great shouts of ‘God save the King and the Royal family.’ Elsewhere, at Berwick and at Malmesbury, for example, there was a disturbing air of resentment.17

  The varied popular reaction was less important than the fact that the warrants on the new charters all contained the vital clause which gave the King a veto over the election of the officers. Suitable Tory figures locally would see to it that equally suitable Tory figures were returned to Westminster – if the occasion ever arose.

  The apex of this campaign was the great struggle to secure the charter of the City of London. It was said that the Common Council there had imposed an illegal tax at the time of the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire; and, furthermore, the Council had sent in a disrespectful petition in 1680. In June 1683 the Court of the King’s Bench voted that, consequent upon these heinous acts, the charter should be put in the King’s hands. At last, as Jeffreys put it, ‘the King of England is likewise King of London’. By 1684 the charters of the Livery Companies in the City of London, including the Plumbers, Goldsmiths, Grocers and Apothecaries, were being surrendered with petitions for their renewal.18

  About the same time as the collapse of the City’s independence, the Convocation of Oxford University passed a decree condemning ‘certain pernicious books and damnable doctrines, destructive to the sacred person of princes, their state and government, and of all human society’. The decree only survived until 1688.19 Since it explicitly denied that there was any compact between a prince and the people, that a prince forfeited his right to rule through misgovernment, and that civil authority itself was in any way derived from the people, it represented a highwater mark of Royalist theory.

  In the country the Crown’s approaches, if more subtly deployed, were twofold. Authority over the country magistrates was built up, and so long as care was exercised not to infuriate the local magnates, the King was able to re-emphasize his right to appoint and dismiss Lords Lieutenant.

  A Commission for Ecclesiastical Preferments was set up in 1681 to review appointments. These were monitored carefully, both by William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, and by the King’s minister Rochester. Their conservative (as opposed to Catholic) tenor was illustrated by the fact that many of them had connections with the Duke of York. Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely, had been his personal chaplain, as had Wi
lliam Thomas at Worcester; Thomas White, Bishop of Peterborough, had been chaplain to Anne Duchess of York. For the Duke of York, as a political figure, continued to represent a kind of solid conservatism at variance with his actual religious beliefs.

  In the last year of his life the King even revoked this commission. He resumed a free hand in the election of bishops, and as there were a notable amount of sees falling vacant, received an ideal opportunity to strengthen the number of his personal nominees (such as Thomas Ken, his chaplain, and Thomas Sprat, Dean of Westminster) in bishoprics.

  The printed word continued to be regarded as the dragon’s teeth. Francis Smith was put in the pillory in June 1684 for disseminating that famous and gross libel, ‘The Raree Show’. Savage penalties were extended to James Holloway in April of the same year for that astonished rhyme on the change-round in the royal fortunes already quoted. On 17 December 1684 Sunderland, on behalf of the King, granted to Roger L’Estrange, as Surveyor or Overseer of the stationers, the power to stop ‘these intolerable liberties of the press’, with the right to search and seize.20 Yet it should be pointed out that the mere existence of such blanket ordinances and their reiteration showed that censorship – like the control of the judiciary – was far from complete.

  Nor was England subjected to more restrictions than the rest of Europe in this respect and at this date. As with all other aspects of an absolute rule, she still lagged behind.

  The first real effects of these policies were felt in the King’s handling of the so-called Rye House Plot of the spring of 1683. The Whigs as a whole were quiescent after the disbanding of the Oxford Parliament – it is notable that only a few ardent members of the Green Ribbon Club played any part in events after 1681. The autumn of 1682 went without the flickering fires and raucous cries of the great Pope-burnings of recent years: such political conflagrations were now banned. The streets were patrolled to make the ban effective.21

  The Whig leaders however could not bring themselves to regard the question of the succession as solved. In the late July of 1681 William of Orange had paid a visit to London. But the Whigs as a whole were still not converted to the concept of William as sole candidate for the Protestant succession. For his part, the King deliberately contributed to the confusion. He prevented William from dining with the Whig faction in the City by the simple means of inviting him to dinner at Windsor on the same date.

  The increased cordiality between the King of England and the Prince of Orange was gloomily noted by the Whigs; nor was William’s attitude to his uncle of York sufficiently hostile to be satisfactory. Thus the taint of Stuart authoritarianism had not been removed from William in the Whig view. William, for his part, was not in a mood to be particularly accommodating. He calculated that a man who stood to become an English King one day (through his wife) had no motive for becoming a Whig pawn in advance.

  So the most active Whigs continued to concentrate on Monmouth, fearing the painted devil of William. This support, in particular the growing embroilment of Shaftesbury, took place despite ominous signs of the King’s official disfavour towards his son. These only thickened between the summer of 1681 and the spring of 1683.

  The dashing Duke – he could no longer truly be counted as young, being now older than his father had been at his Restoration – had not ceased to trail his coat in the last few years; he had learned nothing from his father’s public fury. When Monmouth ostentatiously stood bail for Shaftesbury, that increased the King’s ire to the point where, with equal ostentation, he gave offices previously occupied by Monmouth to his half-brothers Richmond and Grafton. Then there was the matter of the Chancellorship of Cambridge University. Monmouth was removed from this in April 1682, by royal injunction, and his portrait burnt.

  Yet throughout 1682 Monmouth continued to fly high. He tried, for example, to eliminate Halifax from his father’s counsels by accusing him of prejudice against him, and, failing in that, challenged Halifax to a duel. The King coldly sided with Halifax. Monmouth was treated as a pariah by the Court. Then Monmouth resorted to his previous habit of making a progress in the country, with all the panache of the true-born prince he believed himself to be. The progress turned out no better than the challenge to Halifax, for on 20 September Monmouth was arrested at Stafford, allegedly disturbing the public peace, and brought to London. He was then banned altogether from appearing at Court.

  It was some time in the summer of 1682 that the Rye House Plot was hatched. A certain confusion of aim existed from the first, and persisted in the matured plot. There were those, like Shaftesbury, who believed in a series of risings in the country – as did Monmouth. But there were also those who were republicans, like Algernon Sidney – as Monmouth was of course not. The matter of assassination was particularly clouded in mystery. Afterwards Monmouth swore that he had never agreed to any plot which necessitated the killing of his father – ‘I wish I may die this moment I am writing if ever it entered into my head’ – he had on the contrary worked to distract the conspirators from this heinous course by concentrating on the possibility of risings.22 It seems only fair to accept Monmouth’s word: he was weak and vain but not without affection for the father who had done much for him.

  On 28 September the fateful election of Tory sheriffs in the City of London convinced Shaftesbury that he was once more in serious danger from the King, and this time he might find it more difficult to wriggle out of a tight corner. It was a development which had been predicted in advance of the election in ‘Advice to the City’, a famous burlesque by Thomas D’Urfey, set to music by Signor Opidar. Its Tory sentiments so enchanted the King that he sang it with D’Urfey himself at Windsor, leaning familiarly on his shoulder and holding a corner of the paper. The opening lines were enough to commend themselves:

  Remember ye Whiggs what was formerly done,

  Remember your mischiefs in forty and one [1641]…

  When cap was aloft and low was the crown

  The rabble got up and nobles went down….

  The chorus was equally rousing:

  Then London be wise and baffle their power

  And let them play the old game no more.

  Hang, hang up the sheriffs, those barons in power,

  Those popular thieves, those rats of the tower….

  As for ‘Tony’ – Anthony Lord Shaftesbury – the rabbles’ ‘speaker’, the song went on: ‘He knows if we prosper that he must run….’23 And so it proved. ‘Tony’ did run. He went into hiding for a few weeks and then fled to convenient Holland. In Holland the sickness which had so long threatened but not sweetened Shaftesbury at last overcame him: he died in January 1683. If he had personally advocated a rising in England, he certainly left it without making any practical plans concerning troops and money.

  Shaftesbury had a notion of the after-life which is uncharacteristically romantic to our ears: he believed that the souls of men entered stars after death and animated them. If so, then the star animated by the soul of Shaftesbury was sure to be brilliant; one feels that it might also cause trouble in the galaxy. In England, the tangled webs left behind by Shaftesbury found public expression in the Rye House Plot.

  The Plot took its name from the Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire home of one Richard Rumbold, who long before had acted as a guard at the execution of Charles I. The Rye House (its previous owner, whose widow Rumbold married, had been a maltster) was conveniently sited from an assassin’s point of view, for it lay at a peculiarly narrow point on the Newmarket road. The bones of this particular plot seem to have consisted of a plan to ‘lop’ both King and Duke of York on their way to or from their sporting retreat. It went wrong, as such brilliant ideas often do, as a result of a fortuitous accident: a fire made the royal brothers leave Newmarket early.24 The alleged plot, having been put off, was then betrayed.

  So far there might seem nothing earth-shaking in an unsuccessful move towards a double assassination – for, as we have seen, the King’s life was regarded as generally under threat, like that of any
modern head of state, and the Catholic Duke of York was certainly not without enemies. The importance of the Rye House Plot derived from the involvement of the Whig leaders. That gave an extra nightmare quality to the violent daydreams of certain old Cromwellians.

  Both Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney were arrested; Lord Grey of Werke escaped. The latter was a zealous Exclusionist and an avowed supporter of Monmouth. His private life was as colourful as that of some of the Wits: he had eloped with his sister-in-law and was tried for the offence. William Russell, the Whig aristocrat who intrigued with the Catholic Louis XIV as and when it suited his own best interests, had seconded the Exclusion Bill in March 1681. Algernon Sidney, the proud self-confessed republican or ‘Commonwealthsman’, as he significantly termed himself, had only narrowly escaped condemnation as a regicide in 1660. After wanderings abroad he had just returned to England in time to plague the King with his joyous support of Exclusion in 1677.

  A colleague whose implication in the plot deeply distressed the King was Essex, once his serious and respected minister. Essex committed suicide. The King exclaimed that he would not have demanded his death when he heard the news.

  ‘I owed him a life!’ he said, referring to the execution of Essex’s father, the Royalist hero Arthur Capel, thirty years before.25

  The existence of the plot was only discovered officially at the beginning of June. It was convenient timing. As with the alleged plots against the life of Queen Elizabeth, so deftly handled by Walsingham, the sovereign’s life was wonderfully preserved without having been actually endangered. Popular sympathy was however in proportion to the peril averted rather than the ordeal endured. From Holland, William of Orange hastened to send his own favourite, Bentinck, with a message of congratulations to his uncles on their joint escape. It is highly unlikely that he had been implicated in the plot himself;26 but he was personally embarrassed by the presence of certain of the escaped conspirators in Holland, and wished to make the point of his continued Stuart loyalties.