A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game
Read A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game Online
Authors: Jenny Uglow
For Steve
In quotations, style follows the source cited, hence the variations in spelling and capitalisation.
The spelling of names follows that in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, and these change as people receive new titles and ranks (Hyde to Clarendon, Monck to Albemarle, Palmer to Castlemaine etc.)
Charles II ruled three kingdoms – England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Where the interests of all three are combined, I have occasionally used the term ‘Britain’.
With regard to dates, until 1753, the English used the Julian calendar and the rest of Europe the revised Gregorian calendar, which was ten days ahead (eleven in the next century). I have given the dates used in British documents and diaries.
‘A King in a Commonwealth is like the Heart in a Body, the Root in the Tree…the Sun in the Firmament.’
THOMAS REEVE
,
England’s Beauty in seeing King Charles restored
, 1661
‘A pox on all kings!’
AN OLD WOMAN
, watching Charles’s entry into London, 1660
‘It is in the Lawes of a Commonwealth, as in the Lawes of Gameing; whatsoever the Gamesters all agree on, is Injustice to none of them.’
THOMAS HOBBES
,
Leviathan,
1651
Hazard is the most bewitching game that is played on the Dice; for when a man begins to play, he knows not when to leave off; and having once accustomed himself to play at Hazard, he hardly, ever after, minds anything else.
attrib.
CHARLES COTTON
,
The Compleat Gamester
, 1674
CHARLES II WAS A GAMBLING MAN
. He was not a wild player at dice or cards – he left the big stakes to his courtiers. But he took risks, judged odds and staked all, including his kingdom. He kept his cards close to his chest and made it hard to guess his hand. He borrowed to cover his bets. Some said his soul was in hock to the French king, the Pope, or the Devil. Many asked whether Charles was playing for himself, or for the nation. And who were the winners and losers?
This book is about the first ten years of the Restoration, from 1660 to 1670, looking at the life of Charles II through the lens of these years, glancing back at what formed him and forwards to what followed. In his hazardous game, sometimes he lost, sometimes he won and sometimes he was at the mercy of events, charting his way through opposing factions or riding his luck, living for the moment and being ruled by his desires. At the end of the decade the die was cast. From then on he would rule in a different way. It was an extraordinary decade, marked by struggles for power in state and Church and by blows like the Plague, the Great Fire and the Dutch war. But it had an exhilarating bravado and energy, embodied in talented, flamboyant women as well as clever and sometimes unscrupulous men. It saw the founding of the Royal Society, the return of the theatre, the glamour, fashion, gossip and scandal of the court, and the resurrection of London, rising like a phoenix from the ashes.
No single person makes ‘history’, the intricate, national and international shuffle and roar of events, personalities, ideas and beliefs, grinding through human time like the shifting of tectonic plates. But people sometimes make decisions that tip subsequent events in a particular direction. Charles II was one such person. His return in May 1660 was a crucial turning point, and although the Stuart dynasty would soon lose the crown, the way that Charles played his hand is part of the reason that Britain is still a monarchy today: we call the Commonwealth and Protectorate the ‘Interregnum’, as if it was a gap in an accepted sequence.
Every regime change that is held to express the will of the people holds out the hope of lives transformed. A tired, demoralised nation calls out for change. There are petitions, riots, demonstrations, candle-lit processions. A young, charismatic man is called to power, greeted in his capital by vast cheering crowds. But what happens when the fireworks fade and the euphoria cools? Can he unite the divided nation, or will he be defeated by vested interests, entrenched institutions and long-held prejudices?
The reign of Charles II had a distinct atmosphere that set it apart from what had gone before and what followed after. The two rulers before him, his father Charles I and the Great Protector, Oliver Cromwell, had both been men of single-minded principle, and this contributed in part to the collapse of the regimes they tried to impose. Charles I’s belief in the authority of king over parliament and subjects led to his death; Cromwell’s strength forged a unity that fractured when he died. Charles II, by contrast, was pragmatic and sceptical. He had principles, but was ready to bend them to keep his throne safe, protect the Stuart line and create space for his own pleasures. The problem was that for a king at this point in European history there was no private space. Every aspect of his life, his mistresses, his theatre-going, even his choice of clothes was a reflection on his state. The king literally embodied his kingdoms. And while Charles had the common touch, and liked to present himself as a kind of folk-hero, heir to the Tudors, and close to his people, he was in fact closer to the old cousinship of European monarchs. The tall man who claimed the English throne by divine right and by blood had Scottish and Danish grandparents on his father’s side, and French and Italian on his mother’s. From his maternal grandmother, Marie de Medici, he derived the dark hair and olive-skinned Italian looks that won him the name of the ‘Black Boy’.
It is a challenge for someone like me, whose sympathy lies with the radicals and artisans protesting against abuse of power, to venture into the centre, the heart of that power. Yet it is alluring. And while I have written about artists and writers, inventors and scientists, what if a person’s art is also his life, his role simply ‘being the king’? For anyone interested in the relationship between the public and private self, there are few more intriguing characters than Charles II. The first puzzle is simply how did Charles manage to stay on the throne? His father was executed and his brother James lasted less than three years before he was ousted by William of Orange in 1688. Yet Charles stayed in place for twenty-five years. What balancing skills did he have that his father and brother lacked?
The bare facts suggest a man who needed to create a carapace to survive, to protect any coherent sense of self. He was loved by his parents, brought up as the adored eldest son in a luxurious court, entertained by masques of gods and goddesses, until jolt after jolt shattered this idyll. At twelve he stood by his father when the standard was raised at Nottingham, marking the beginning of the Civil War, the unthinkable turning of subjects against their king. He saw the palaces abandoned, the capital closed. At Edgehill a cannonball narrowly missed him. At fifteen, he was sent west as general of the Western Army; at sixteen he fled to the Scilly Isles, then Jersey, then to France. He was nineteen when his father was executed. In the years that followed he scoured foreign courts for aid, broke and hopeless.
In exile he devised a strategy based on charm, outward compliance and private evasion. He escaped the competing demands of his mother Henrietta Maria and his anxious senior courtiers, not in books but in wild bodily release: riding, tennis, sailing, gambling and sex. He knew what it was to cadge loans and dodge creditors. He kept up all the structures of court life, appointing Privy Councillors and arranging presence chambers for audiences, even while living in cold rented rooms. To hide hurt, or hope, he practised looking as if he took nothing seriously, especially not work or religion. He found an inner life by absenting himself, mentally. He knew too, what it was to fail. ‘Those who will not believe anything to be reasonably designed, except it be successfully executed,’ he wrote when he was twenty-five, ‘had need of a less difficult game to play than mine is.’
1
The Restoration was an age of performance, from the triumphal processions of the court and the City to the plays in the theatres and the festivals of the streets. Charles was a supreme performer, a leading player in a huge cast. As ‘Charles II’, he was both a man and a function, a wayward, clever individual and a king, whose actions were constrained by his parliament and his vast band of followers and hangers-on. He acted through others. He knew it too, hence his quick riposte to this verse of Rochester’s:
We have a pritty witty king,
And whose word no man relys on:
He never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one.
When Charles found this pinned to the door at Whitehall, he is supposed to have remarked, with typical laconic evasion, ‘This is very true: for my words are my own, and my actions are my ministers’.’
2
As king he inhabited a construct, constantly trying to shape it to his own desires. Charles-king was split into three entities. As ‘the crown’, he was the head of three countries – England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland – ruling through his ministers, gathering revenues, declaring war, laying down religious policy as Defender of the Faith. As patron, he used his kingly power to promote certain movements or groups and to turn a cold shoulder towards others, granting charters to trading companies, fostering the Royal Society, awarding patents to the theatres. And then, as if he flung his crown onto a chair and tugged on comfortable boots, he became the suave courtier, the merry monarch. Yet crown, patron and courtier are all performances. It is hard to find the secret, non-performative self.
Charles was clever, affable and courtly. Yet he was also a cynic, with a reserve and unpredictability fostered by his wandering youth. He found it hard to give his full assent to any commitment or spiritual doctrine. He was physically restless and easily bored, sensual and sentimental, prone to unthinking acts of generosity and sudden infatuations. He loved to be entertained, to be made to laugh. This is why he adored the theatre, but also partly why he forgave his childhood friend Buckingham so often, despite his dangerous manoeuvres, and pardoned the brilliant young Rochester for his wildness and disrespect. Whenever a new scandal occurred, or an old story was told, Charles would lean forward, asking to hear all the details. His court, with its endless intrigues, was like a private menagerie: he indulged his courtiers like pet animals. In a world of backbiting, he was among the few kind figures, ‘tender and generous’, one observer said, but this very generosity could make him seem a fool. Not everyone liked Charles’s act, but they admitted that the mask was superb. So good, in fact, that it was hard to work out if he was cunning or naïve, clever or lucky.
Our modern obsession with the inner self was alien to the people of the Restoration, except in terms of the soul’s relationship with God, something that Charles does not discuss. His wit and flashes of anger appear in notes he scribbled at the Privy Council, but no diaries survive, and few letters. Even the intimate letters to his sister Henriette-Anne, ‘Minette’, leave out vital parts of his life. But others watched him. Spreading out from the court, the king’s actions affected everyone, traders and dancers, farmers and doctors, seamen and schoolchildren. They made their own narratives to explain what was happening and used their own modes of description – Pepys’s busy diary, Aubrey’s scattered gossip, Hamilton’s quasifictional memoirs of the comte de Gramont, the stoical rebuttals of Bunyan and Milton. Their facts may err, but the telling is true to what they believed they saw. This is the weather in the streets.
Charles thus appears to us reflected and refracted in the accounts of others, distorting mirrors where the image is bent by the writer’s own stance. John Evelyn, trying to be fair, praised through negatives: ‘A Prince of many Virtues, & many greate Imperfections, Debonaire, Easie of accesse, not bloudy or Cruel’.
3
Clarendon, who had known him since he was fifteen, wrote sadly in his last exile of Charles’s great abilities, his laziness, his bad companions. Halifax, who served him towards the end of his reign, drew him as a brilliant dissembler, a man of pleasure with a vacuum where principle should lie, while Bishop Burnet saw him as a cynic whose experience had convinced him that no one served him out of love: ‘And so he was quits with all the world, and loved others as little as he thought they loved him.’
4
This was written long after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. By then Charles’s dealings with France and his deathbed conversion to Catholicism were known, and the horrified Burnet, to whom these were the worst possible deceptions – ‘a chain of black actions, flowing from blacker designs’ – re-read the king as an arch conspirator. But in 1683, in Charles’s lifetime, Burnet made no such judgement. He saw Charles as having a ‘softness and gentleness with him, both in his air and expressions that has a charm in it’.
5
And, like Halifax, Burnet found that the king’s most frustrating characteristic was that he was impossible to judge at all:
The King has a deal of wit, indeed no man more, and a great deal of judgment, when he thinks fitt to employ it; he has strange command of himselfe, he can pass from pleasure to business and business to pleasure in so easy a manner that all things seem alike to him; he has the greatest art of concealing himself of any man alive, so that those about him cannot tell, when he is ill or well pleased, and in private discourse he will hear all sorts of things in such a manner, that a man cannot know, whether he hears them or not, or whether he is well or ill pleased with them.
6
This is the mask of the gamester, looking at his cards, giving nothing away. Charles had the typical gambler’s tendency to compartmentalise his life, and ignore the way that extravagance in one area might bring destruction in another. He had the gambler’s belief, too, that he could outwit his opponents, that the next play would make everything right, in a single stroke. He was not always cool and calculating. Sometimes he dithered. Sometimes he underestimated others at the table and misread the run of play. But he had a streak of ruthlessness that saw him through.
With the death of Charles I in 1649, the sanctity of monarchy had vanished. Monarchs had died violently before in wars and coups, but this death was particularly shocking because the king had been tried like a common felon, and executed by his own people. The appeal to law, and the implication that some kind of contract existed, in which a king was bound to protect his people and if he broke this they had a right to dethrone and even kill him, was new, and startling. His son had no blank page on to which he could inscribe his own ideas of kingship. Instead he had to negotiate his way through a welter of battling interests.
The post-Restoration government, where the monarch was theoretically head of state yet parliament held the purse-strings and passed the laws, was unique in Europe. And while the continent offered a great range of models, none provided an answer as to how this new, uneasy balance might evolve. At one extreme were the autocracies of the Ottoman Empire and Russia and the absolutist monarchies of Spain, Austria and France. (Charles’s long stay in France, some people thought, had induced a leaning towards absolute power, and brought him to feel that ‘a king who might be checked, or have his ministers called to account by a parliament was but a king in name’.
7
) At the opposite end of the spectrum lay the republics of the United Provinces, Venice and Poland–Lithuania, the loose confederation of Switzerland and a host of smaller states and city governments. There was no ‘natural’ state.
