A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (12 page)

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 parliament 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

WHEN CHARLES ARRIVED
, he planned to transform the dilapidated palace at Whitehall into a royal residence that would rival the Louvre and the Escorial. But Whitehall defeated him. This palace with its shadowy corridors and hidden stairs was almost a character in his story, shaping his life.

Driving from the City, down the Strand, past the new square of Covent Garden and the streets stretching up to Holborn and St Giles, coaches swooped around the corner at Charing Cross, straight into the long paved space that led to the jumble of Whitehall. On the northern side a long wall, built by Cromwell, hid the trees of the park and the sheds the Protector had built for his troops, which now housed the Royal Horse Guards. On the river side, behind a row of Elizabethan buildings, the spaces of Scotland Yard rambled down to the wharves, a clutter of timber yards and cider-press houses, heaps of coal and timber, bricks and tiles. Here lay the offices of the Lord Steward’s department and the busy Office of Works.

Next came the Great Gate, giving a glimpse into the courtyard behind, and then the Banqueting House where Charles I had met his fate. Past this, the road squeezed beneath the Holbein Gateway. Designed by Hans Holbein for Henry VIII, the gate arched over passers-by like a misplaced Tudor castle, crowned with red-brick turrets. Then the paved way narrowed until it ducked through a second gate. This short stretch was King Street, or ‘The Street’, the main highway through the maze of Whitehall. Carts clattered over the cobbles, and the gables of inns hung over the way. A web of alleys led off into small courts and gardens – Gardiner’s Court, Cherry Tree Court, Bowman’s Lane – and the grander lodgings of courtiers squeezed next to ordinary houses.

Whitehall was less a palace than a sprawl of separate buildings, a royal village, with tiled roofs and thatched roofs, paving and cobbles, and as many rats as the tenements nearby. A narrow public right of way snaked behind the Banqueting House, across the Great Court and between the palace buildings to the river, where boatmen waited for their fares at the wooden landing stage of Whitehall Stairs. Just upstream a long jetty with a gallery above, called a ‘bridge’, ran out into the Thames so that the royal family and their courtiers could enter their barges, whatever the tide. Standing on the bridge, gazing downriver, Charles could see the heavy, greenish waters of the Thames curving round the bend, sucking at the walls and watergates of the old mansions – Arundel House, Worcester House, Somerset House – flowing on until it rushed under the arches of London Bridge, hidden from view.

Whitehall stairs, looking upriver to Lambeth on the opposite bank, with the sloping public landing-stage and the covered royal ‘bridge’ beyond

The place was a mess, a mix of styles, from the elegant Renaissance Banqueting Hall to old timbered gables and Dutch-style hipped roofs. Over the years courtiers had built rooms and apartments, higgledy-piggledy, clustering like barnacles along the side of the long Privy Gallery that ran from the road to the river and filling up the corners of the squares. One of Charles’s first acts was to divide the buildings around the Cockpit, across King Street on the western side of Whitehall, known as ‘the Parkside’, into yet more lodgings. Albemarle was given the Cockpit itself and the buildings next to it, and Ormond the Tiltyard Gallery and neighbouring houses. When Wren commissioned the mathematician Ralph Greatorex to do a survey in 1670, he found that fifteen hundred rooms were available for courtiers, rented out to around a hundred different people.
¹

The royal apartments were a warren in themselves. Facing the river, they were traditionally reached by crossing the courtyard from the Great Gate and then progressing through rooms that marked increasing stages of intimacy, from Great Chamber to Presence Chamber, to Privy Chamber, and then to smaller rooms like the ‘Lords’ Chamber and Vane room (where James I had installed a weather vane on the roof, linked to a system that showed the wind direction from inside). Then the route turned right into the King’s Bedchamber – this was the most private space, but even so it was often crowded. The habit had grown up, however, of reaching the Bedchamber by taking a shortcut from the stairs into St James’s Park, and walking down the long, covered Privy Gallery that stretched across from the Holbein Gate. So the Bedchamber was under attack, as it were, from both sides.

In France, the royal bedchamber was a key space in court life, even a place to receive ambassadors, and in 1660 Charles raised the Whitehall Bedchamber to similar status. He had the room decorated to resemble that in the Louvre, with the bed with its crimson damask covers set in a special alcove, separated from the rest of the room by a gilded railing with two gates for access and framed with ‘two great draperyes with two flying boyes in them’.
²
The panelling above the chimney had moulded columns, the floor copied French marquetry, the walls were draped with hangings. The artist John Michael Wright painted a grand allegorical scene for the ceiling, showing Astraea, daughter of Zeus and embodiment of justice, returning to earth to bring a new Golden Age – with Charles himself floating in the clouds, and cherubs supporting a flying oak tree.

George Vertue’s engraving of the 1670 plan of Whitehall

Next to the Bedchamber were four smaller rooms, including a dressing room and a cabinet or closet, the inner sanctum that no one could enter without permission, where Charles kept his favourite paintings. (John Evelyn took some of his relations to court in October 1660 to see these rarities, which included miniatures by Peter Oliver, copying Raphael, Titian and other masters, fine cameos and intaglios, tapestries and books.) But the official Bedchamber was clearly no comfortable place for actual sleep, or for any privacy at all, with diplomats and petitioners arriving while you were dressing, so in 1662 Charles created a new, private bedroom in the ‘Turk’s Gallery’ overlooking the river. This was a long, draughty walk from his other great luxury, his bathroom beneath the Privy Gallery, with its tiled floor and sunken bath, filled with water heated in a copper in a small room next door. He had this thoroughly overhauled in 1663, with new panelling, carving and curtains and a painting over the chimney, as well as a little palisade in the Privy Garden to stop people peering in. It even had hangings of crimson Genoa damask, and a small feather bed.
³

WHITEHALL PALACE
, apartments and state rooms: 1 Castlemaine 1660–3, 2 Sandwich, 3 Tennis Court, 4 Albemarle, 5 Monmouth, 6 Prince Rupert, 7 Duke of York, 8 King’s Bedchamber, 1663, 9 Volary Buildings, 1667, 10 Castlemaine, 1663–8, 11 King’s Bedchamber 1660–3, 12 Bathroom and Laboratory (below), 13 Council Chamber (above) 14 Vane Room, 15 Queen’s apartments, 16 Privy Chamber, 17 Presence Chamber, 18 Guard Chamber, 19 Great Hall, 20 Chapel, 21 New Gallery, 1669

From the cluster of royal rooms the Stone Gallery stretched towards Westminster, with another above, known as the ‘matted gallery’. At the far end of this, overlooking the river, lay the apartments of James, Duke of York, and opposite were those of Charles’s cousin Rupert, who had been honoured at the Restoration with a pension of £6,000 a year and lodgings in the palace. Rupert’s windows looked out onto the great space of the Privy Garden, which stretched up to the street. (The one person Charles did not find a London home for was Rupert’s mother, Elizabeth of Bohemia, who arrived in 1661. Instead she moved into the house belonging to Sir William Craven, who had been her loyal companion in the Hague for many years, and was secretly rumoured to be her husband.)

In every courtyard and gallery, in corners and up staircases, were smaller rooms, perfect for secret meetings. The architecture, as the historian Ronald Hutton has put it, ‘was admirably suited to Charles’s style of kingship, at once very open and very devious’.
⁴
Nothing could be more different from Versailles.

Everything was shabby, having been neglected during the Commonwealth even though Cromwell had used the palace for his base. A hasty, but expensive, redecoration began before Charles set sail: by June the royal apartments had already soaked up £1,200 worth of refurbishments. But to begin with – even though he planned to sweep it away – Charles loved its chaotic informality, and rarely spent a night away. It took him back to the world of his childhood and youth, although it was not the place of his birth – that had taken place a few minutes away at St James’s Palace, a quieter spot altogether, set among the green, leafy surroundings of the park. But as a boy, Charles had watched the players gathering for the masques under the painted ceiling of the Banqueting House. He had played in the Privy Garden and on the Bowling Green with his brothers and sisters, Mary, James, Elizabeth and Henry. Only Minette had not known Whitehall. Before the war these royal childhoods had been happy, with winters at St James’s and summers moving from one royal palace to another: Greenwich, Oatlands, Hampton Court. And when Van Dyck painted the children in 1637, Charles I had taken the great canvas to Whitehall and hung it above the table in his breakfast chamber.

In the dignified, ceremonial days of Charles I, access to Whitehall was carefully controlled. But his son opened the palace to all. Anyone could wander through the Great Gate, although porters stopped ‘those who pressed with rudeness or disorder, carried unfit weapons, divines not wearing their robes and those of inferior quality who came muffled, masqued or otherwise disguised’.
⁵
And because people now often approached the palace from the park, Charles also built a grand outside staircase on that side.

In the early years he handed out keys like sweets: 150 double keys, for entry to the ordinary rooms, were cut by the royal locksmith in 1661, and at least ten treble keys, opening the state rooms and the King’s Bedchamber.
⁶
Outside these inner sanctums, it was easy to stage casual meetings in the crowded corridors: well-connected members of London’s great companies hovered here, listening for news and cornering those who might forward their aims. Charles hoped that such easy access would make people of all views feel they might reach him, preventing conspiracies and hardening of discontent. By the end of 1661 however, it was clear that this was not the case, and he gradually grew more circumspect, rearranging the rooms and making it more difficult to reach him.

When he thought of redesigning Whitehall, Charles remembered the great buildings he had seen abroad, particularly the Louvre, a model of an urban riverside palace, regular in plan and formal in style. Almost straight away the architect John Webb, the nephew and former assistant of Inigo Jones, presented him with plans that involved demolishing all the old buildings except the Banqueting House. As his surveyor, Charles appointed Sir John Denham, well known as poet, playwright and gambler, and a busy courier for the exiled court in Paris, but hitherto no architect. Beneath him worked ranks of officials, from the comptroller to the master carpenter, down to mason, glazier and wood carver.

Every morning the officers met in Scotland Yard to decide on work for the day. The labourers had to turn up when the bell rang, and set to work, with half an hour for breakfast. Much of Whitehall was a perpetual building site, with ropes and bricks, scaffolding and tubs and half-built walls. Like all Charles’s offices the ‘King’s Works’ was always strapped for cash, and every year they ran over their budgets, both the ‘ordinary’ allowance, set at £10,000 in 1663 for regular maintenance, and the ‘extraordinary’ allowance for new building projects.
⁷
Loans were raised against various tallies and taxes, but the cash arrived in ‘driblets’ and craftsmen and workmen were owed large sums, sometimes for years. Within a year, partly because of lack of money and partly because of the difficulty of moving all the courtiers from their various apartments, Charles abandoned his plans and set Webb to work instead on ideas for a new palace in Greenwich.
⁸
The rambling corridors and galleries of Whitehall remained unredeemed. The walls were covered with tapestries and hangings but still the wind whistled round corners and made the candles splutter. When it rained, the yards were full of mud and puddles, and in stormy weather, when the tide was high, the Thames lapped into the cellars and flooded the kitchens.