by Uglow, Jenny
Not all who were captured were charged and tried: in defiance of Magna Carta, some were sent to Jersey or the Isle of Man, technically outside the jurisdiction, where Habeas Corpus did not apply. But the cry for vengeance still rang out. One refugee to the continent was old Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, one of the original signatories of the Scottish covenant. In January 1663 he was arrested in Rouen, brought to England (kidnapped, said his supporters) and imprisoned in the Tower. That June he was sent up to Edinburgh, so broken in body and mind that he could not recognise his own children: it seemed unnecessary and cruel to execute him. With his customary ferocity, Lauderdale described how the Scots Commissioners heard ‘a petition from that wretches children showing that he has lost his memorie & almost his sence & praying for delay till he may be in a fitter condition to dye’.9 Charles refused to show mercy and Wariston was executed in Edinburgh on a gallows of ‘extraordinary height’. His young nephew, the writer Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury, walked with his uncle to the scaffold.
In the winter after the first executions angry mutterings were heard. On 16 December, secretary Nicholas wrote to the Sheriff of Wiltshire, at Charles’s command, saying that they had intelligence that ‘several Persons of looss Principles and of known disaffection to Us and Our government have furnished themselves with such quantities of Arms and Munitions as may justly give suspicion that it is designed to disturb the peace and tranquillity of this Our Kingdom’.10 The Sheriff should raise searches and take action to safeguard the peace, and ‘use all possible diligence to prevent any tumults, insurrections or mutinous and unlawful meetings’. This was a false alarm, but the government were jittery. They reacted sharply when another crisis seemed to threaten in London itself. On the feast of Epiphany, 6 January 1661, a small group of ‘enthusiasts’ of the Fifth Monarchist sect, led by the wine cooper Thomas Venner, marched through London crying ‘No King but Christ’, vowing to keep their swords unsheathed until Christ’s kingdom should triumph and worldly powers be reduced to a ‘hissing and a curse’. They spread alarm through the streets for three days, fighting off the City’s trained bands, until they were finally beaten at Cripplegate and fled into hiding at Kenwood, near Highgate. When Charles heard the news, as he was saying goodbye to his mother and sister at Portsmouth, he dashed back to Whitehall. Gradually the would-be rebels were rounded up and fifteen ringleaders hanged.
Even as they hung in the wind the royalists bayed for still more blood. Charles, they said, had been too soft on his enemies. Calls for the deaths of more of the regicides grew louder, accompanied by a symbolic vengeance as ghoulish and theatrical as the trials and executions. One article of the Act of Oblivion had made the Act retrospective so that the list of ‘exceptions’ could include four dead men: Oliver Cromwell, Colonel Henry Ireton, John Bradshawe (chief judge at the trial of Charles I) and Thomas Pride, purger of the Long Parliament. In late January their graves were dug up. On the anniversary of Charles I’s death, 30 January 1661, while the clergy offered prayers for the king in churches across the land, the coffins were taken to the Red Lion inn in Holborn. Carters then carried the rotting bodies in their shrouds to the Old Bailey and propped them up limply against the bar, so that the judge could pronounce the death sentence for traitors. Then they were dragged on sledges through the streets, and hanged unceremoniously at Tyburn. At sunset the dangling corpses were taken down, their heads cut off and their bodies flung into a pit beneath the gallows. The crowd was vast. The heads of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshawe were stuck on poles above Westminster Hall, alongside the crow-pecked skulls of Thomas Harrison and John Cooke. (A fortnight later, it was rumoured, wrongly, that ‘Cromwell’s head is stolen away since it was set up’.11)
In the weeks that followed, this lynching of the dead continued. Parliamentary leaders, colonels, admirals, preachers, teachers, even Cromwell’s mother and daughter were disinterred. Once the mob had hooted at the bodies, gravediggers threw the remains into a large pit in St Margaret’s Westminster.
These deaths, real and symbolic, were part of the spectacle of London. The Dutch painter William Schellinks, being shown around the town by Huguenot merchant friends established in London, went to see the lions in the Tower and the minting of the new money there, attended the playhouse and watched the king dine in public. But he also watched a woman burned alive for stabbing her husband with a tobacco pipe, and on 6 February 1662, he made careful notes of the punishment of three men who had attended the trial of Charles I, but were spared execution because they did not sign the death warrant. ‘We walked with thousands of people to Tyburn,’ Schellinks wrote,
and saw there Lord Monson, Sir Henry Mildmay and Mr Wallop lying in their tabards on a little straw on a hurdle being dragged through under the gallows, where some articles were read to them and then torn up. After that they were again dragged through the town back to the Tower. Their sentence is that they are to be dragged through under the gallows on this day every year.12
The executions and ritual punishments confirmed the king’s power as arbiter of vengeance and dispenser of mercy. But he also had to re-establish the royal glamour. The year before, the Marquess of Newcastle had written at extreme length, advising Charles on how this should be done. Newcastle looked back to tradition and Tudor power: a king must control the militia, win over the City, be a firm head of the Church, restrict the press, curb the universities and squash the lawyers. He should sweeten the pill with royal grandeur, fairs and feast-days: bread and circuses. ‘Ceremony though it is nothing in itself’, wrote Newcastle, ‘yet it doth everything – for what is a king, more than a subject, but for ceremony and order. When that fails him, he’s ruined.’13 What preserves kings more than ceremony? he asked:
The cloth of estates, the distance people are with you, great officers, heralds, drums, trumpeters, rich coaches, rich furniture for horses, guards, martialls men making room, disorders to be labored by their staff of office and cry ‘now the king comes’…even the wisest though he knew it and was accustomed to it, shall shake off his wisdome and shake for fear of it…you cannot put upon you too much king.14
Charles took heed. In early April 1661, while elections were being held for the new parliament, in a glorious three-day ceremony at Windsor Castle he formally installed all the Knights of the Garter created in the past twenty years. The records of the knights had been held and updated, in his father’s day, by Matthew Wren, as Dean of Windsor, and then, when he became Bishop of Ely, by his younger brother Dean Christopher Wren. But the dean’s house was ransacked by parliamentary forces and the Garter papers stolen and he worked painstakingly to recover the records until his death in 1658. They were returned to Charles II by his son, the future architect of St Paul’s, Christopher Wren, on 11 August 1660. Their return was a key moment of restoration, in all senses, and the beginning of a lifelong association between Charles and Wren.15
A week after the Garter ceremony, Charles created new Knights of the Bath in Westminster Hall.16 His nobles, many already impoverished, had to buy expensive new robes, like the Duke of Hamilton’s carefully listed outfit:
1 pair of silk trousers, 1 pair of trunk breeches and doublet of silver tabby with silver lace, silver and white satin ribbon and three of knots of the same ribbon and a pair of shoes: a surtout of crimson velvet lined with white taffeta with hood, sword, scabbard and belt of the same.17
Having cemented relations with the nobility, Charles played to the masses. At Easter, he had performed the humble Maundy Thursday task of washing the feet of paupers at Whitehall. And on the day before his coronation, which was planned for 23 April – St George’s Day – he revived the old tradition of the Coronation Eve cavalcade, carrying the monarch from the Tower to Westminster. He was acutely aware of the importance of playing to English monarchical traditions, tying him to earlier glories like the magnificent processions of Elizabeth I, and the route was designed by John Ogilby as a virtual parade of propaganda.
When the day came, Charles trav
elled by royal barge from Whitehall to the Tower, where he was greeted at eight in the morning by the Knights of the Bath. It was a full day, from dawn to dusk, for the king and for many Londoners. ‘Up early,’ wrote Pepys, ‘and made myself as fine as I could, and put on my velvet coat, the first day that I put it on, though made half a year ago.’18 With his colleagues from the Navy Office, Pepys and his wife Elizabeth went to a flag-maker’s in Cornhill where they took over a room ‘with wine and good cake, and saw the show very well’. And a fine show it was: knights and squires, barons and bishops, soldiers all in white, and even a company dressed as Turks. The streets were railed and gravelled, keeping the crowds at a respectful distance as the king rode by. He wore his plumed hat, while the Duke of York in front and Monck behind both rode bareheaded. Charles thrilled the people by singling out individuals in the throng, mingling state with the common touch. The houses along the route were hung with banners and rich carpets, and the ladies leaned out of their windows. ‘So glorious was the show with gold and silver, that we were not able to look at it, our eyes at last being so much overcome.’
The heavy dose of gold and glory came at a cost. ‘The City, upon this occasion,’ wrote one pamphleteer, ‘was at a very great Expence, to which, as it was understood, they were obliged by their Charter.’19 The dirty streets of the city were transformed into a grand stage set and the aldermen and companies paid £10,000 for four triumphal arches a hundred feet high – imitating the Romans, said Ogilby. The themes were appropriate: ‘The King’s Happy Arrival’ in Leadenhall Street, a naval display at the Royal Exchange, a Temple of Concord in Cheapside and and an optimistic Garden of Plenty in Fleet Street.20 The slogans used, however, also reminded the king that this great Restoration was dependent on the will of the people. Unitas, they declared, Pater Patriae and Mens Omnibus Una. Players performed long pageants at each arch. At St Paul’s the pupils of Christ’s Hospital stood on a scaffold while a boy delivered a speech. At one impromptu stop, like a good opportunist politician, Charles allegedly stopped at a tavern to kiss a newborn infant.
Next morning, the foreign ambassadors and British nobles and the lucky civil servants with a place in Westminster Abbey rose early, putting on their finery at dawn. Once in their seats, they settled down to wait, admiring the rich blue carpet that stretched from end to end of the abbey. The details of the ceremony had been planned for months, by the Garter King of Arms, Sir Edward Walker. At eleven Charles entered, his head bare but his garments a mass of crimson and gold and ermine. One problem that had faced the organisers was that the coronation regalia had been melted down during the Commonwealth, including the royal crown of St Edward. The goldsmith Sir Robert Vyner replaced everything exactly as it had been, at a cost of £30,000.21 From the abbey door the new regalia was carried before the king, Ormond bearing the crown, Albemarle the sceptre, Buckingham the orb and Lord Shrewsbury the sword. These were laid on the altar and then the barons of the Cinque Ports – Buckingham and Albemarle again, with Lord Berkshire and Lord Sandwich – held a cloth of gold over Charles for his anointing. When the Archbishop of Canterbury placed the crown on Charles’s head a great shout swelled through the abbey. The nobles filed up to swear their loyalty, ‘and a Generall Pardon was read out by the Lord Chancellor, and medals flung up and down by my Lord Cornwallis, of silver’. Those medals looked back to the miraculous escape from Worcester. They showed an oak in full leaf, with the motto Iam Florescit, ‘Now it flourishes’.
Hollar’s frieze ran across the pages of John Ogilby’s Entertainment of Charles II, in his Passage Through the City of London to his Coronation, 1662. It shows Sergeants at Arms preceding the dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine, followed by Black Rod and the Lord Mayor. The next group includes the Lord Chamberlain and Lord Marshal and finally, after a phalanx of footmen and pages, comes the king (bottom left), with Monck riding behind as Master of Horse.
More ceremonies followed, but by now Pepys, who had got to the abbey soon after four, desperately needed to piss, so he sneaked out and across to Westminster Hall. There, in the great space where Charles I had faced his accusers at his trial, he saw the women (including his wife Elizabeth) waiting on specially built scaffolds. When the king arrived he sat at the high table, and lords carried the opening course up to him on horseback. Between courses, Sir Edward Dymock, ‘the King’s Champion’, rode in ‘on a goodly white Courser’, fully armed, with a plume of blue feathers in his helmet. To the blast of trumpets he vowed to ‘adventure his life against any who denies the king’. Then, riding slowly on, he threw down his gauntlet and paused, reining in his horse. Three times he repeated his challenge, but no one came forward.
This engraving of the coronation shows two moments. In the middle distance the Archbishop places the crown on the king’s head, as the great cry echoes round the Abbey from the nobles seated in their ranks. In the foreground, Charles is enthroned on the dais.
There was music, feasting and drinking, and a satisfying scuffle over a canopy between the royal footmen and the barons of the Cinque Ports. After a month of downpours, prompting prophecies of mud, sodden cloaks and ermine trailing in puddles, the sun had shone all day: ‘not one drop of raine, falling in all this time,’ wrote one loyal chronicler, ‘as very much had done at least ten days before’.22 Then around six in the evening, thunder rattled, lightning flashed and the rain came down – the omens for the new reign could be read both ways. Edmund Ludlow was one who felt sure the storm signalled the wrath of the Lord at the destruction of his work. Before the meal was half ended, he wrote, ‘this mock king was enforced to rise and run away’. While his supporters read this as an expression of heavenly joy, Ludlow thought that ‘others, more understanding in the dispensations of the Lord’:
supposed it rather a testimony from heaven against the wickedness of those that would not only that he should rule over them, but were willing to make them a captaine to leade them into Egiptian bondage; from which the Lord by his providence plainly spake his desire to have delivered them.23
Although the fireworks were cancelled Pepys noted that the city still ‘had a light like a glory round it, with bonefyres’. He and Elizabeth went to Axe-yard, where there were three great fires ‘and a great many great gallants, men and women’ who made them kneel and drink the king’s health, ‘Which we thought a strange Frolique. But these gallants continued thus a great while, and I wondered to see how the ladies did tipple.’24 At last Pepys sent the women home and went on to another friend, who held the post of Yeoman of the King’s Wine-cellar. They drank the king’s health ‘till one of the gentlemen fell down stark drunk and lay there spewing’. Pepys staggered to sleep at Sandwich’s house, waking to find that he was spewing too. ‘Thus did the day end with joy everywhere.’
The coronation that began with prayers in the abbey ended with drunks in the gutter. But Charles was safely crowned. He had established his power in relation to parliament, disbanded a hostile army, wreaked vengeance on his father’s killers and established a public image of mystery and glamour. The awe he inspired was offset by his affability, and – so far – only slightly undermined by the wildness of his court. The celebrations continued, with smaller tributes, like the presentation of Evelyn’s ‘Panegyric to Charles the Second’. According to Lord Mordaunt Charles asked warily if this was in Latin and ‘hoped it would not be very long’.25
When the new Cavalier Parliament opened in May, Charles took his seat in Westminster Hall in full regalia, wearing his heavy crown, surrounded by his officers of state, with the lords and bishops in their places. Then he summoned the members of the Commons, who rushed into the Upper House, standing behind their Speaker at the bar, to hear the royal address. The MPs Charles faced were even more fiercely royalist than the Convention Parliament that had greeted his return. They were largely the sons of country gentry, and many were also staggeringly young. When this was pointed out to Charles he allegedly declared, ‘What matter, I will keep them till they grow beards’ – which he did, for the par
liament was not formally dissolved until eighteen years later, in 1679. The arguments about the Act of Indemnity still rumbled on, and Andrew Marvell reported to the Hull Corporation that he feared the debates would never end. ‘But his Majesty is most fixedly honorable & true to that business as in all things else so that by Gods blessing I hope we shall arrive at an happy period in it. Otherwise we shall be broken against that rock.’26
A month after the coronation, the date of 29 May, Charles’s birthday and the day he had entered London in 1660, was set aside as a perpetual holiday: ‘The anniversary of His Majesty’s most Joyful Restitution of the Crown of England’. The chaplain Peter Heylyn preached to a packed chapel in Westminster, reminding them how Charles had been pursued for years across the continent ‘like a partridge by a falcon’, and had returned to his country ‘not with an Army to besiege it, to smite it with the edge of a sword, but as a Prince of Peace, or the Son of David’.27
Two months later, the youthful parliament put forward a bill for the execution of nineteen more regicides. Charles could not be seen to pardon them, but he wanted no more bloodshed. Clarendon, as so often, thought of the solution: the Bill ‘should sleep in the houses’ and not be brought to the king for his consent. Charles agreed. ‘I must confess,’ he scrawled, ‘that I am weary of hanging except upon new offences.’
‘After this business is settled,’ suggested Clarendon, ‘shall I mooue it heare? That wee may take care that it comes not to you?’
‘By all meanes,’ Charles replied, ‘for you know that I cannot pardon them.’28
