Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution

by Peter Ackroyd

  These measures against ‘toleration’ came at a price. Pepys reported that all of the ‘fanatics’ were discontented and ‘that the king do take away their liberty of conscience’; he deplored ‘the height of the bishops who I fear will ruin all again’. The puritan clergy were ordered to abandon their livings on 24 August 1662, St Bartholomew’s Day, and in many places the congregations came in great numbers to hear and lament their ‘farewell sermons’. More spirited protest was also expected. Ever since the king’s arrival in England minor uprisings by ‘fanatics’ had disturbed the peace, and through the spring and summer of 1662 fears rose of some concerted puritan resistance. A general rising was supposed to be planned for August, and from all over the country came reports of seditious meetings and treasonable speeches. Lord Fauconberg, lord-lieutenant of the North Riding of Yorkshire, claimed that in Lancashire ‘not one man in the whole county intends to conform’; reports of the same nature came from his own county of Yorkshire and the West Country, while London was known to be the spiritual home of zealotry and sectarianism. The lords-lieutenant of the various counties were told to watch ‘all those known to be of the Republic party’.

  Yet these apprehensions were generally without foundation. The Anglican Church was now supreme under the leadership of the cleric who in 1663 was consecrated as archbishop of Canterbury; Gilbert Burnet wrote of Archbishop Sheldon that ‘he seemed not to have a deep sense of religion, if any at all, and spoke of it most commonly as of an engine of government and a matter of policy’. The bishops, for example, had been returned to their seats in the House of Lords where they could exert a strong influence upon national legislation; yet it was also true that parliament, and not the Church, had taken control of the nature and direction of the national religion.

  The actual faith of the people was no doubt as inchoate and confused as ever. One Lancastrian apprentice, Roger Lowe, recorded in 1663 that ‘I was pensive and sad and went into the town field and prayed to the Lord, and I hope the Lord heard’.

  * * *

  At a meeting of the council, just after parliament had been summoned, Charles told his advisers that he had decided to marry the infanta of Portugal, Catherine of Braganza; he had already announced his preferences when he said that ‘I hate Germans, or princesses of cold countries’. The mother of the intended bride, the queen regent of Portugal, had also offered £800,000 together with her colonial territories of Bombay and Tangier in order to sweeten the arrangement. English merchants were also to be permitted to trade freely throughout the Portuguese Empire, thus assisting England in its rivalry with the Dutch. In return Portugal wished to recruit English soldiers in its war with the neighbouring power of Spain, which was eager to take back its rebellious province. A marriage could accomplish a great deal.

  Another matrimonial alliance completed what may be called the ‘foreign policy’ of Charles. His sister Henrietta was married off to the homosexual brother of Louis XIV and helped to inaugurate closer relations between France and England that came in the end to be too close. Louis XIV was feared and distrusted for his attempt to raise himself up as ‘universal monarch’ in the face of Spanish decline; nevertheless Charles admired his absolutist and centralized rule that he had some obscure hope of emulating.

  The king travelled down to Portsmouth to meet his bride, and reported to Clarendon that ‘her face is not so exact as to be called a beauty though her eyes are excellent good, and not anything in her face that in the least degree can shock one’. This may not amount to a ringing endorsement but, for a royal union, it was fairly satisfactory. Her teeth stuck out a little, and her hair was swept to the side in the Portuguese fashion. The king is said privately to have remarked, ‘Gentlemen, you have brought me a bat.’ One of Catherine’s first requests was for a cup of tea, then a novelty. Instead she was offered a glass of ale.

  She had arrived with what one contemporary, the comte de Gramont, described as ‘six frights, who called themselves maids-of-honour and a duenna, another monster, who took the title of governess to those extraordinary beauties’. Much fun was also made of their great fardingales, or hooped skirts of whalebone beneath their dresses.

  Catherine had some formidable competition. The king was known to be an insatiable and compulsive philanderer, and Pepys calculated that he had had seventeen mistresses even before the Restoration. John Dryden, in Absalom and Achitophel, characterized him thus:

  Then, Israel’s monarch, after Heaven’s own heart,

  His vigorous warmth did variously impart

  To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command,

  Scatter’d his Maker’s image through the land.

  Or, as the earl of Rochester put it more bluntly,

  Restless he rolls from whore to whore,

  A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.

  By a previous lover, Lucy Walter, he had a son who would in 1663 become duke of Monmouth. His present mistress was Barbara Palmer, whose husband had been ennobled as the earl of Castlemaine; Lady Castlemaine soon became indispensable to his pleasure, and it was reported by Pepys that she ruled the king by employing ‘all the tricks of Aretino [a poet of obscenity] … in which he is too able having a large—’ The rest is silence. The lady was already heavily pregnant by the time that Catherine arrived in England.

  The king’s appetite for Lady Castlemaine was such that he appointed her to be his wife’s lady-of-the-bedchamber. Catherine objected to the convenient arrangement, and her anger led to an estrangement between the royal couple. The new queen of England was receiving company at Hampton Court when her husband led Lady Castlemaine into the room; she may not have correctly heard her name since she received her calmly enough but, on being made aware of the lady’s identity, she burst into tears before fainting. Clarendon was used by the king as a mediator and, in the end, the queen gave way and welcomed her rival.

  In truth she had become devoted to her husband, and in no way wished to alienate his affections. She could do nothing, however, to fulfil her primary role; she seemed to be incapable of bearing children. It was not for want of trying. An Italian visitor at the court, Lorenzo Magalotti, heard that the queen was ‘unusually sensitive to pleasure’ and that after intercourse ‘blood comes from her genital parts in such great abundance that it does not stop for several days’.

  In time the king would become enamoured of another mistress, Frances Stewart, of whom the comte de Gramont said that it would be difficult to imagine less brain combined with more beauty. She was the model, complete with helmet and trident, for the figure of Britannia on British coins. Charles was always in love with someone or other. By seventeen of his known mistresses he had thirteen illegitimate children, some of whom became dukes or earls. The story of Nell Gwynn has often been told.

  The royal court itself had become the object of much scandal and remark. Macaulay, in an essay for the Edinburgh Review, remarked of a no doubt exaggerated example that ‘a dead child is found in the palace, the offspring of some maid of honour by some courtier, or perhaps by Charles himself. The whole flight of pandars and buffoons pounces upon it and carries it to the royal laboratory, where his majesty, after a brutal jest, dissects it for the amusement of the assembly, and probably of its father among the rest.’

  The rule of the saints had been replaced by the rule of the sinners who seemed to compete with each other in drunkenness and debauchery. When a bishop preached in the royal chapel against ‘mistaken jollity’ the congregation laughed at him. When the court visited Oxford a scholar, Anthony Wood, observed that ‘they were nasty and beastly, leaving at their departure their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coalhouses, cellars. Rude, rough, whore-mongers; vain, empty, careless.’ And of course they took their morals and manners from their royal leader. Other royal courts were no doubt characterized by profligacy and sexual licence – the court of William II comes to mind – but never had they been so widely observed and criticized.

  A circle of ‘wits’ emerged around the king; amon
g them were George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, and Charles, Sir Sedley. They were accustomed to meet in the apartments of the king’s latest lover or in the lodgings of the notorious William Chiffinch who became ‘keeper of the king’s private closet’, where their most notable contribution to court life was a number of highly obscene poems and stories. Their wit was manifested in verbal extravagance and dexterity, in puns and allusions, or, as Robert Boyle put it, ‘a subtlety in conceiving things … a quickness and neatness in expressing them’.

  There was much to ridicule. In the summer of 1663 Lord Sedley appeared naked on the balcony of the Cock Inn in Bow Street where, according to Samuel Pepys, he proceeded to enact ‘all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined, and abusing of scripture’. He delivered a mock sermon in which he declared that ‘he hath to sell such a powder as should make all the cunts in town run after him’. After the recital ‘he took a glass of wine and washed his prick in it and then drank it off; and then took another, and drank the king’s health’. He then took down his breeches and proceeded to ‘excrementize’.

  On the following day he was brought before the chief justice, who asked him if he had ever read Henry Peacham’s The Complete Gentleman. He was then bound over to keep the king’s peace on a bond of £500, whereupon he said that ‘he thought he was the first man that paid for shitting’. The bond was paid with money borrowed from the king himself.

  37

  On the road

  On the course of their journey Faithful and Christian came upon Talkative, a gentleman who ‘was something more comely at a distance than at hand’. Then he conversed with his fellow travellers.

  Talkative: I will talk of things heavenly, or things earthly; things moral, or things evangelical; things sacred, or things profane; things past, or things to come; things foreign, or things at home; things more essential, or things circumstantial; provided that all be done to our profit.

  He walked out of their way for a little, whereupon Christian and Faithful began to discuss their new companion.

  Faithful: Do you know him, then?

  Christian: Know him! Yes, better than he knows himself.

  Faithful: Pray what is he?

  Christian: His name is Talkative; he dwelleth in our town. I wonder that you should be a stranger to him, only I consider that our town is large.

  Faithful: Whose son is he? And whereabout doth he dwell?

  Christian: He is the son of one Say-well; he dwelt in Prating Row; and is known of all that are acquainted with him, by the name of Talkative in Prating Row; and notwithstanding his fine tongue, he is but a sorry fellow.

  Faithful: Well, he seems to be a very pretty man.

  Christian: That is, to them who have not thorough acquaintance with him, for he is best abroad, near home he is ugly enough.

  John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress has often been characterized as the first English novel; it is as if he had the actual characters before him, in imagination, and simply wrote down what he heard; he also employed the plain speech of the time, to the extent that we can hear the ordinary people of the late seventeenth century talking to one another. Yet The Pilgrim’s Progress is more than a novel.

  John Bunyan, born in Bedfordshire in 1628, gathered the rudiments of learning while young but may have been largely self-educated; he was thoroughly acquainted with the vernacular Bible and with Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, but in his youth he read the ballads and romances of the time. He joined the New Model Army at the age of fifteen, but it is not clear whether he saw any active service before his disbandment three years later.

  After his marriage to a poor woman he entered a period of spiritual struggle, documented by Grace Abounding, in which he fell into despair and fearfulness before being tempted by false hope. He was still afflicted by anxiety and depression when in 1655 he joined a separatist church in Bedford; he began his preaching before that congregation where slowly he found strength and confidence. His ministry widened, therefore, and he came into conflict with the authorities. In 1661 he was consigned to Bedford Prison where, refusing to renounce his right to preach, he remained for the next eleven years. He wrote many books and treatises during this period, but none more popular and significant than The Pilgrim’s Progress.

  In part it might be read as an account of any seventeenth-century journey, over rough roads, encumbered by mud and puddles, endangered by mires and ditches, pits and deep holes. The travellers must sometimes reconnoitre steep hills where they may catch ‘a slip or two’. Sometimes they go ‘out of the way’ and among ‘turnings’ and ‘windings’ lose themselves; ‘wherefore, at last, lighting under a little shelter, they sat down there till the day brake; but being weary they fell asleep’. We hear the dogs barking at their presence. If they are unfortunate they may be taken for vagrants, and placed in the stocks or in the ‘cage’. If they are fortunate they will find lodgings on the course of their journey, where they will be asked, ‘What will you have?’

  They must also face the dangers of robbers waiting for them along the road.

  So they came up all to him, and with threatening language bid him stand. At this Little-Faith looked as white as a clout, and had neither power to fight nor fly. Then said Faint-Heart, Deliver thy purse … Then he cried out, Thieves, thieves!

  In the face of such dangers some travellers formed a company for the sake of friendship and security.

  ‘Then I hope we may have your good company.’

  ‘With a very good will, will I be your companion.’

  ‘Come on, then, let us go together…’

  Such snatches of conversation are often heard on the road. They are eager to meet one another and, leaning upon their staves, they talk. ‘Is this the way?’ ‘You are just in your way.’ ‘How far is it thither?’ ‘Whence came you?’ ‘Have you got into the way?’ One will greet another with ‘What have you met with?’ or ‘What have you seen?’ ‘Whither are you going?’ ‘Back, back.’ Some travellers want ‘to make a short cut of it, and to climb over the wall’. What does it matter how they reach their destination? ‘If we are in, we are in.’

  The vividness of the prose is derived from its immediacy and contemporaneity. ‘I met him once in the streets,’ Faithful says of Pliable, ‘but he leered away on the other side, as one ashamed of what he had done; so I spake not to him.’ Christian says to a man, ‘What art thou?’ and is told, ‘I am what I was not once.’ He tells Hope, ‘I would, as the saying is, have given my life for a penny … this man was one of the weak, and therefore he went to the wall … And when a man is down, you know, what can he do?’ The simplicity and vigour have been tested on the anvil of suffering experience but they also derive from Bunyan’s reading of the vernacular Bible. The words seem to come to him instinctively but they have absorbed the cadence and imagery of the Scriptures.

  They come also from Bunyan’s identity as a Calvinist. To read The Pilgrim’s Progress is to return to that world of fierce struggle and debate in which deeply held religious faith was the only stay against the dark. Bunyan is nothing like the caricatures of Tribulation Wholesome, Snarl, or Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy, in seventeenth-century drama. He is too desperate and determined to be that. Christian decides to embark upon his journey alone ‘because none of my neighbours saw their danger as I saw mine’. This is the heart of it, this awareness of imminent destruction. It is the source of what he calls his ‘dumps’ that might also be expressed as despair and distraction, of melancholy close to madness, afflicting those who believed themselves to be in danger of spiritual destruction. This fear animates the life of the seventeenth century. It is the fear of what Bunyan calls ‘the bottomless pit … out of the mouth of which there came in an abundant manner smoke, and coals of fire, with hideous noises’. To be saved by the infinite and unlooked-for grace of God, unworthy though you be, is to experience the transformation of the spirit. It is a glimpse into the heart of the fervent spirituality of the seventeenth-century world.

  38

 
To rise and piss

  The prosperous citizen of London would wear a cloth doublet, open at the front to display his shirt and lawn scarf; breeches, stockings and buckled shoes completed the ensemble. For the outdoors he donned his wig and sugarloaf hat, together with a short cloak, and a sword at his side. His wife would naturally wear a brocaded silk dress, looped to display her quilted petticoat; her neck and shoulders were covered with a kerchief and she wore the fashionable French hood of the day.

  The house in which they lived, in the period of Charles I and Cromwell, would have been perhaps too dull and plain for modern taste; the floors were of polished wood, some of the walls wainscoted and the ceilings panelled with oak. The rooms were solid and well-proportioned, but a little gloomy and confined; the floors creaked under foot. Only towards the end of the seventeenth century was there a general movement towards lighter and more gracious interiors.

  The houses of those who were known as ‘the middle rank’ contained between three and seven rooms; the household would characteristically contain between four and seven people, including servants. In the more prosperous of these dwellings the hall, parlour and kitchen took up the ground floor while above them were one or two bedrooms. Of ornament there was very little. The windows rarely boasted curtains; carpets and armchairs were not widely used. Clocks, looking glasses and pictures were still relatively scarce but they were more in evidence towards the close of the period; this was also the time when the cabinet-maker, working in walnut and mahogany, became more popular. The richer households, however, might place hangings against some of the walls.