A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (11 page)

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’.
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)

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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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A week after the Garter ceremony, Charles created new Knights of the Bath in Westminster Hall.
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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.
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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 travelled 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.’
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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
.’
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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’: