by Uglow, Jenny
In York, Lord Fairfax, the greatest of the early parliamentarian generals, who had resigned at the time of Charles I’s trial, brought his volunteer forces to join Monck’s parade. With him came Buckingham, who had spent much of the Interregnum trying by devious means to regain his sequestered estates – half of which had been given to Cromwell and half to Fairfax – and had married Fairfax’s daughter Mary, an alliance that stunned royalists and Cromwellians alike. On 3 February Buckingham and Monck reached the capital. Within days of Monck’s arrival, wrote Pepys, ‘Boys do now cry “Kiss my Parliament!” instead of “Kiss my arse!” so great and general a contempt is the Rump come to among all men, good and bad.’8
General Monck, Duke of Albemarle
On 11 February, with the support of the Common Council of the City of London, Monck forced the Rump Parliament to admit the moderate MPs who had been excluded by ‘Pride’s Purge’ in 1648, and arrange for a ‘free’ election. Excited citizens plied Monck’s soldiers with drinks and money. Church bells pealed. Bonfires blazed along Cheapside, down Fleet Street and the Strand and in St James’s. Rumps of beef were roasted in the street and the butchers made music with their knives.
A few brave spirits tried to stem the tide flowing so strongly towards a restoration. Among them was John Milton, who dashed into print with The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. England should press on, Milton argued, not leaving a task unfinished, but fighting for a perpetual republic. ‘What I have spoken’, he wrote solemnly, ‘is the language of that which is not called amiss the Good Old Cause.’9 But everywhere the cry was for the return of the king.
Meanwhile, spies and emissaries dashed between London and Brussels, as royalist courtiers made contact with the presbyterian leaders of the now fully restored Long Parliament, trying to guess Monck’s next move. Simultaneously Charles was approached, daily, from all sides. Even members of Cromwell’s old Council of State like Anthony Ashley Cooper, who had so far spurned all royalist approaches, began corresponding with Charles’s advisers. He stayed cool, evenly friendly to all. One of these advances, however, now paid off. This came from Sir John Grenville, who had been one of Charles’s first appointments as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber in the West Country fifteen years before, had defended the Scillies for the Crown, and then stayed quietly in England during the Interregnum. Grenville also happened to be Monck’s cousin. The previous autumn he had suggested that he might contact the General on Charles’s behalf. At the end of March Charles wrote diplomatically to Monck, sending his letter through Grenville:
You cannot but believe, that I know too well the power you have to do me good or harm, not to desire you should be my friend…And whatever you have heard to the contrary, you will find to be false as if you had been told that I have white hair and am crooked…
However I cannot but say, that I will take all the ways I can, to let the world see, and you and yours find, that I have an entire trust in you, and as much kindness for you, as can be expressed by
Your affectionate friend, Charles R.10
In accepting, after some hesitation, this very personal letter, Monck at last showed his hand, telling Grenville that he hoped the king would forgive what was past. He had always been faithful to him at heart, he said, but never able to serve him until now. He laid down no conditions that would curtail royal power but merely demanded the guarantees he needed to win the army’s support: a general indemnity, religious toleration, payment of arrears of pay, and security of possession in the lands bought from sequestered estates.
Monck also hinted that Charles might find it wise not to remain in Brussels, in the Spanish Netherlands, when Britain and Spain were technically at war. Taking this advice, Charles moved to his sister Mary’s court at Breda. From here, on 4 April, advised by Hyde, he issued his Declaration of Breda, a dashingly confident statement. It met all Monck’s demands: a full pardon to all who appealed to the king within forty days, the only exceptions being those who had signed Charles I’s death warrant; ‘liberty to tender consciences’, unless differences of religion threatened the national peace; and payment of arrears of army pay. Charles also declared, cunningly, that all questions regarding the complicated property deals since 1649 should be resolved by the new parliament.
On the same day Charles wrote a clever, startling letter to the Speaker of the House of Commons. The liberties and powers of both king and parliament, he wrote, were ‘best preserved by preserving the other’. Although he was anxious, he said, to avenge his father’s death, he appealed to MPs as ‘wise and dispassionate men and good patriots’.11 And, he ended humbly, not minimising the pain of exile, ‘We hope that we have made that right Christian use of our affliction, and that the observations and experience we have had in other countries hath been such as that we, and we hope all our subjects, shall be the better for what we have seen and suffered.’
Charles’s followers in Breda held their breath. Sir William Killigrew, Thomas’s brother, who had known Charles I well, spoke for many when he wrote a long letter, begging him to accept any terms for his return, ‘at a time when the Nation call alowde for you! As the only cure for all their Evells.’12 Killigrew’s advice, that he should accept Parliament’s conditions and ‘putt on such golden fetters frankly’, was pragmatic and prophetic. It would be impossible, he wrote, to compensate all those who had served the royalist cause, and all those who were now coming over to his side; half the revenues of England would not suffice. It would be impossible too to satisfy papists seeking toleration, presbyterians, Independents, Congregationists, ‘and all the severall sorts of violent sectaries…whereas if your Majesty be tyed up by Articles none of all these can blame you for not answering their expectations’. If he agreed to their terms and let parliament deal with the detail, he could carry the day: ‘A little honest Arts, Sir, this way, would bring you to more greatness and power than any of your Predecessors ever had.’
The old parliament was dissolved on 17 March and the Convention Parliament (so called because it was a ‘free convention’ rather than a proper parliament as it had not been summoned by a king) met the following month. The new MPs were ready to accept all Charles’s ‘honest Arts’. The House of Commons contained at least fifty Cavaliers, men who had fought for Charles I, or their sons, plus a hundred royalist MPs and many moderate presbyterians. On May Day the House heard the king’s letter and Declaration and immediately passed a resolution to ask for his return. The news flashed round the country. ‘To-day I hear they were very merry at Deal,’ wrote Pepys, ‘setting up the King’s flag upon one of their maypoles, and drinking his health upon their knees in the streets, and firing the guns, which the soldiers of the Castle threatened; but durst not oppose.’13 Maypoles were suddenly everywhere, a huge one in the Strand in London, so tall that sailors had to pull it up with ropes like a mast, and another in Oxford ‘set up on purpose to vex the Presbyterians and Independents’.14 A week later both houses of parliament proclaimed Charles II as king.
Why did the people of Britain – or the majority, at least – want a king so badly? Cromwell’s regime had promised peace, but had plunged the country into war with Spain and with the Dutch, and although the wars brought victories, they were still far from popular. The trade that had flourished was stifled and the merchant ships that ventured out were attacked by privateers. Parliament quickly ran through the funds from the sale of confiscated lands, and slapped on constant, heavy taxes. At Cromwell’s death the government was two million pounds in debt. The team that took over after his death were bitterly divided between the moderate parliamentarians and the holy warriors of the army and there seemed no hope of finding good management. Even more disturbing was the realisation that the country now had a standing army, of around forty thousand men, who were being used to control not only Scotland and Ireland but England as well.15 The army was doubly hated, first because it was paid for by the deeply resented taxes, and secondly because it was dominated by sectarians, whose beliefs and strident mora
l strictures spoke only to a fraction of the population. Royalists wanted their land, money and jobs back; country gentry on both sides wanted the old local administration; many parishes wanted the familiar services of the abolished Church order; merchants wanted a trade revival; the apprentices whose enthusiasm rocked London wanted a better chance in life. Everyone wanted less tax and fewer soldiers. All these discontents paved Monck’s road south. But they also set challenges for a new king.
In the weeks before parliament’s decision was known, English and Scottish supplicants and place-seekers flooded Breda. Some came to seek pardons for friends and family, paying as much as £1,000; others brought gifts ‘in good English gold’, hoping to be remembered as being among those who first helped the king, after, as Clarendon put it tartly, managing to forget him for so many years. The cash helped Charles pay his debts and give his servants their arrears of wages, with an extra bonus ‘to raise their spirits after so many years of patient waiting for delivery’.16
On 14 May he sailed downriver from Breda, accompanied by gaily decorated yachts. As they reached Dort every cannon in the town was fired, but when they tied up for the night, Sir John Grenville told Charles how parliament had voted, and that Montagu was here to take him home. Immediately, the yachts sailed on to Delft, where huge crowds cheered on the quayside in the dawn. The whole entourage then piled into seventy-three coaches and bowled along roads lined with soldiers to the Hague. Next day, Charles received the parliamentary commissioners, six from the House of Lords and twelve from the Commons, including General Fairfax, of whom he took special notice. He acknowledged their speeches in the friendliest manner, and – with admirable restraint – thanked them politely for their notes of credit for £50,000, plus an additional £10,000 for James and £5,000 for Henry. One highlight was the arrival of a trunk brimming with £10,000 in sovereigns. The messengers who brought it found the king looking down at heel: his best clothes, someone sneered, were not worth forty shillings. When he saw the money he became ‘so joyful, that he called the Princess Royal and Duke of York to look upon it as it lay in the Portmanteau before it was taken out’.17 A trunk full of coins was a blessing, since it was tricky to cash the huge letters of credit from parliament. By now Charles was used to the cautious Amsterdam merchants and knew that it was not easy, even in such an opulent city, to collect such a sum in ready money. In the end he took at least £30,000 back to London in bills of exchange.
The City of London had sent its own representatives to the Hague and Charles was confident that their goldsmiths would honour his bills. Other deputations were less welcome. He spurned an envoy from the judges who had tried his father. And when the presbyterian clergymen raised the question of the hated covenant and claimed that the Book of Common Prayer had been so long out of use that they hoped the king would not reinstate it, he responded ‘with some warmth, that whilst he gave them liberty, he would not have his own taken from them’. He would stick to the prayer book he had used all his life, even ‘in places where it was more disliked than he hoped it was by them’.18
In his week in the Hague, waiting for the storms to calm so that he could set sail, the diplomats of France and Spain who had formerly shunned him held feasts in his honour. The Dutch government, who had been hostile for so long, served a banquet on gold plate which they then presented to him. They then added a gift of a magnificent bed and a gallery of splendid works of art, which would set the style for his own art collecting. He read petitions, he went among the crowds. Men knelt to be blessed, and women seemed to find him irresistible.
The Great Feast the Estates of Holland made to the King and to the Royal Family, 1660, showing a marked contrast between the cavaliers on the right and the sober Dutch on the left
Finally the calm came and the ships sailed. After the story-telling and night of rejoicing on the sea, by the morning of 25 May Charles’s fleet was close to the coast of Kent. When Charles and the Dukes of York and Gloucester took breakfast, they found that someone had put out the sailors’ rations to show them what a ship’s diet was, so they sat down and ate it: pease pudding and pork and boiled beef. Having identified thus with his sailors, Charles handed over £500 to be distributed among the ships’ officers and men. As they neared the shore, and anchored in the Dover roads, the sheets were lowered and the topsails furled. The cliffs were black with people, cheering and shouting.
Early in the afternoon, to the thunder of a five-round salute from the ship’s guns, answered by the cannon of Dover Castle, Charles climbed down the side of the Royal Charles. He rejected the gilded brigantine sent by parliament, and stepped instead into Montagu’s barge.19 Pepys was in one of the smaller boats in his wake, with a royal footman and ‘a dog that the King loved (which shit in the boat, which made us laugh and me think that a King and all that belong to him are but just as others are)’.20
When he stepped on shore around three o’clock Charles knelt and thanked God. Monck was the first to greet him and bow in homage, and the king thanked him soberly, calling him ‘Father’. They walked together up the beach with a canopy of state held over their heads. In front of a marquee filled with nobility and gentry, graciously making the first of his dead-pan equivocations, Charles accepted a Bible from the Mayor of Dover, declaring it ‘the thing he loved above all things in the world’. Onlookers wept. Bonfires flared. Guns boomed and fires sprang from beacon to beacon, lighting him home.
Sailing from Holland, Charles II laid down the beginnings of a myth: the hero of the escape from Worcester, the people’s king, who was ‘just as others are’. Yet if he would bend his ear to all his subjects, as the Declaration of Breda had suggested, he would still tower over them all. Towards the end of the voyage he knocked his head against a low beam, as William Blundell remembered:
I was present on the ship (about five miles from Dover) two or three hours before King Charles II landed in England…when the King (by reason of an accident) took his own measure, standing under a beam in the cabin, upon his place he made a mark with a knife. Sundry tall persons went under it, but there were none that could reach it.21
It was a joke but it made its point. After Charles had landed, Montagu was ecstatic, amazed that he had brought the whole thing off without mishap and sure that honours lay ahead. He came back late to the ship, wrote Pepys,
and at his coming did give me orders to cause the marke to be gilded, and a Crown and C.R. to be made at the head of the coach table, where the King to-day with his own hand did mark his height, which accordingly I caused the painter to do, and is now done, as is to be seen.
II Clubs / trefles
Cromwell and Charles I, from Cavalier Playing Cards, designed by John Lenthall, 1660–2
3 How to Be King
Make hast (Great Sir) to our Arcadian Plain
And blesse this Island with your beams again…
May the Sun’s influence of thy fair beams
Give store unto our Plains, life to our Streams.
So shall our Flocks yield us a good encrease
When Plenty’s ushered in by welcome Peace.
Long may you live king of th’Arcadian land
And we learn to obey what you command.
ANON., The Countrey-Man’s Vive le Roy, 1660
IN DOVER, Charles and Monck climbed into the royal coach and sat facing forward, towards London. James and Henry sat opposite. All was sedate and correct. But then Buckingham, whom Charles had greeted coolly on the shore, leapt into the boot, the great cover over the back wheels with its single seat. When Charles and James changed to horseback, he rode on behind them, a devil at their heels.
As they rode, labourers flung down their rakes and raced to the roadside, village boys clambered on roofs, old men whistled and women cheered, country girls with laced bodices and wide-sleeved smocks hitched up their skirts and ran to throw flowers. It was a strange, delirious greeting, like a moment from some dimly remembered myth. The old king had been killed in the winter chill at the dead, dark turn of the ye
ar; the new king had come in the warmth of spring, like life revived. He was a king of the May, the month of his birthday, the month of his return. He was young and virile; he would make the land fecund, bring plenty and peace. On the way, as in a folk-tale, he summoned and conquered armies, but with smiles, not with swords. On windy Barham Downs, where the local races were held, Charles reviewed the troops gathered by Buckingham and the Earls of Oxford, Derby and Northampton, with the soldiers of Viscount Mordaunt, Ashley Cooper and the foot regiments of Kent. The men were ranked with drawn swords and as the king approached they kissed their sword-hilts and waved their glittering blades over their heads before marching in his train into Canterbury. The cathedral bells rang, the streets were strewn with flowers, and the Mayor presented ‘a tankard of massy gold’.1
