Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (64 page)

In other words, if the Restoration political settlement was a qualified win for the king, it was an unalloyed triumph for the largely conservative local nobility and gentry. Political leaders would ignore this basic fact at their peril. Flouting Charles II’s intentions at Breda, the aristocracy had already created winners and losers. The success or failure of the Restoration Settlements would ultimately depend on the new king’s willingness to ally with those winners and accommodate his policies to their power.

Charles II and the Unraveling of the Restoration Settlements

It is practically impossible to separate the failure of the Restoration Settlements from the personality of King Charles II (see
plate 19
). In an age of personal monarchy, royal personality
mattered.
At first, as with nearly all new rulers, only the king’s good points shone through. Charles II was highly intelligent. He spoke fluent French and some Italian; he had a particular interest in science, maintaining a laboratory and serving as the founding patron of the Royal Society. He was also witty, affable, and approachable. (He would, in our own day, have made a terrific TV talk-show host.) This was in sharp and, for the most part, agreeable contrast to his father, who had been impossibly aloof and formal. The new king was also vigorous, as he proved on the tennis court and in the bedroom: in the words of one historian, he was “unmistakably the ‘sport’ of his line.”
²
More importantly, he was tolerant, flexible, and open to compromise – again, in welcome contrast to his father. Above all, Charles II saw the need for healing after a quarter-century of bitter conflict. At Breda he had promised forgiveness to his enemies, and, in general, he lived up to that promise: fewer than 40 old rebels and servants of the Commonwealth and Protectorate were left out of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (1660). The most serious revenge was reserved for those who had signed Charles I’s death warrant and, of these, only 11 were executed. Those unfortunate souls, however, suffered the full fury of the traditional punishments associated with treason: they were hanged, drawn, and quartered, and their boiled remains impaled on the City gates. The new regime even vented its wrath on the dead: the bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, and John Bradshaw were exhumed and hanged at Tyburn in their shrouds. Afterwards their heads were placed on pikes at Westminster Hall – the place of Charles I’s trial – as a warning to all potential rebels.
³

On the other hand, Charles II forgave many surviving Roundheads, reappointing them to the offices they had performed so well for the Commonwealth and Protectorate, rewarding them for their new-found loyalty with titles, pensions, and lands. This eased bitterness on their part and it kept experienced and competent people in government. But it also left many old Royalists, impoverished by their long and faithful service to the Stuarts in defeat and exile, resentful that they were not rewarded more generously. In fact, most Royalist nobility and gentry regained the lands lost during the Interregnum, but those further down the social scale were not so lucky. A fund of £60,000 was established for indigent officers, but individual pay-outs were tiny. Hence the dark Royalist joke that the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion meant indemnity for the king’s former enemies and oblivion for his friends.

Plate 19
Charles II as Patron of the Royal Society,
by Laroon. Reproduced by kind permission of Christ’s Hospital.

Charles II’s willingness to slight old friends for new ones was, in fact, characteristic of the man. As his reign progressed, it became increasingly clear that his loyalty to servants and favorites was undependable; that his intelligence frequently manifested itself as cunning and duplicity; that his charm was often deceptive and self-serving; that his easy-going nature was also lazy and indecisive; and that his flexibility was, in part, the corollary of having no long-term goal or plan. Basically, Charles II was a cynic – and who could blame him? After all, the people who now professed their undying loyalty and affection for him were the very ones who had fought against his father. He would never fully understand their prejudices. On his last visit to his dominions in 1651 he had been forced to hide in a tree before sneaking out of the country in disguise. During the ensuing exile of over eighteen years he had been threatened, denounced, promised to, lied to, used, and spied on by them – as well as by every government in Europe. Often, he would find that a confidential servant was in the pay of his enemies; or that a fellow monarch had used him as a pawn in some diplomatic game of chess with Cromwell. No wonder that he trusted no one. He never knew when the English, Scots, and Irish would change their minds once more and force him to go “on his travels” again.

So, perhaps understandably, the young but wizened king decided to make hay while the sun shone. Hence his laziness. Hence his apparent lack of a long-term plan, besides survival. Hence his almost obsessive interest in “diversion”: having fun and relieving boredom through the pursuit and patronage of art, music, literature, the theater, witty conversation, gambling, drinking, and womanizing. A positive result of these tendencies was that the Restoration court was the greatest center for cultural patronage of its day. It has been credited with introducing England to the comedy of intrigue, the first stage actresses, new French and Italian styles in both sacred and secular music, the man’s three-piece suit, periwigs, and such delicacies as champagne, tea, and ice cream. The king promoted, if he did not necessarily pay for, the careers of the poets John Dryden (1631–1700) and John Wilmot, earl of Rochester (1647–80); the dramatists George Etherege (1636–91/2) and William Wycherley (ca. 1641–1716); the painters Sir Peter Lely (1618–80) and Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723); the musicians Henry Purcell (1659?–95) and John Blow (ca. 1648–1708); the woodcarver Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721); and the architect Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723), among many others. This concentration of talent made the Restoration court supremely attractive and entertaining. According to the French ambassador:

There is a ball and a comedy every other day; the rest of the days are spent at play (gambling), either at the Queen’s or at the Lady Castlemaine’s, where the company does not fail to be treated to a good supper.
⁴

The two ladies referred to in the above quote were not insignificant. The first was Charles II’s wife, Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705). She was a Portuguese princess (and, therefore, a Catholic) who had brought a huge dowry at their marriage in 1662: the ports of Tangier on the north coast of Africa and Bombay on the west coast of India. It was hoped that the marriage would provide England with prosperous trading colonies overseas and heirs to the throne at home. It did neither. Tangier proved expensive and disease-ridden and was abandoned in 1683–4. Bombay had more potential, but it would take the East India Company many years to realize it. As for the royal marriage, it proved to be passionless, not least because poor Catherine seems to have been the one woman in the British Isles whom the king could not impregnate.

This brings us to “the other woman” in the quote, Barbara
née
Villiers Palmer, countess of Castlemaine (1641–1709). Castlemaine, later duchess of Cleveland, was only the most prominent in a virtual harem of mistresses maintained by Charles II. Among the others were the actress Nell Gwyn (1651?–87) and the French Catholic aristocrat Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth (1649–1734). The king’s notorious infidelity (one of his nicknames was “Old Rowley” after his most successful stud-horse) had several important results.

First was the birth of 14 acknowledged but illegitimate children. Nearly all were given titles, offices, and estates. A second result of the king’s amorous adventures was that they provided opportunities for individual women at court to gain in wealth and status. Charles II was, like his grandfather James I, generous to a fault. His government spent over £60,000 a year at the beginning of the reign just to feed his court; by its end, it was spending £180,000 (one-seventh of the royal revenue) on pensions.

Third, Charles II’s openness and pleasure-seeking led people to assume that his courtiers, mistresses, and drinking companions wielded immense influence over him. Thus, when the king took a fancy to pretty young Frances, “La Belle” Stuart (1647–1702), George Villiers, second duke of Buckingham (1628–87), saw an opportunity to increase his influence through her, forming “a committee … for the getting of Mrs. [Mistress] Stuart for the King.”
⁵
Certainly, royal mistresses and Bedchamber servants could act as gatekeepers to the king, facilitating – or preventing – the access of anyone who wanted to see him. But historians now doubt that they had much power to influence Charles II’s decisions when it really counted. Whether or not they could do so
in fact,
there is no doubt that their
reputation
for being able to do so, combined with the king’s apparent luxury and decadence, disgruntled the taxpayer and lessened respect for the monarchy – thus weakening both his finances and his standing in the localities. But the king’s love of pleasure also did much to bring the ruling class back to court, both physically and figuratively, after the upheavals of the Civil War years. In short, tensions and differences of perspective between court and country, center and locality would remain a feature of English political, social, and cultural life.

Finally, the king’s inability to produce a legitimate heir had one further significance. It increased the importance of his brother, James, duke of York, as both heir apparent and the father of two little girls who might themselves succeed to the throne eventually: Princess Mary (1662–94) and Princess Anne (1665–1714; see genealogy 3, p. 431). This, too, would have profound consequences.

Problems of Sovereignty, Finance, Religion, and Foreign Policy, 1660–70

In the meantime, it should be obvious that the king’s personality hardly fit him to deal with the great issues left over from his predecessors’ reigns. Take sovereignty. Despite the Restoration compromise between those who favored unqualified royal sovereignty and those who favored Parliament’s claims to partnership (if not supremacy), Charles II proved to be every inch a Stuart, no more ready to share power with or accommodate his policies to Parliament than his father or grandfather had been. Worse, he had spent much of his exile on the continent, in the shadow of his absolutist cousin, the Sun King, Louis XIV (1638–1715; reigned 1643–1715).
⁶
The French king, who did not have to get his policies approved or funded by a parliament, was in the 1660s fast becoming the most powerful and successful monarch in Europe, and, therefore, something of a role model for Charles II. France was replacing Spain as the continent’s greatest military power and most feared nation. As we shall see, this came to alarm contemporary English men and women, not least when the Catholic Louis began to eye the vast Spanish Empire. But Charles II could not help but envy it all, and many suspected he would seek to emulate it.

Those fears may have been exaggerated; “absolute rule” was more of an occasional pipedream for Charles II than an ever-present goal. He had neither the resources, personal determination, capacity for hard work, nor sheer ruthlessness to achieve the control that Louis XIV possessed. Nor did he have a first minister who might have supplied the necessary toughness to manage Parliament for him. Instead, the lackadaisical king left government in the hands of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, a principled but old-fashioned man who believed that the Elizabethan methods of Lord Treasurer Burghley would still work in the age of Charles II. He thought that if he could just explain the king’s position clearly enough, Parliament would see its reasonableness and vote the necessary funds. As we have seen, such methods had not worked under Charles I and they did not always work now.

Nevertheless, king and Parliament maintained fairly good relations early in the reign. This was, in part, because that body still feared a return of anarchy and disorder more than it did the powers of the Crown. Working from painful memory, the first few sessions of the Cavalier Parliament passed not only the Cavalier Code and Licensing Act, but also made it a crime to denigrate royal authority, call the king a Catholic, gather more than 20 signatures on a petition or deliver it with a delegation larger than 10. In 1664 Parliament repealed the penalty clauses to the Triennial Act, so that, in effect, the sovereign could now once again rule without calling on them – if he could afford to do so. In 1668 they gave the king greater freedom to dismiss judges with whom he disagreed. And yet, as we saw in the case of religion, there were certain issues upon which even the Cavalier Parliament would not cave. By the early 1670s these loomed larger and automatic support for royal policy evaporated.