A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (14 page)

Charles was always eager for entertainment. He was notably indulgent, for example, to the young ‘men of mirth’ as Clarendon called them, several still in their teens, like Charles Sedley, Charles Sackville (Lord Buckhurst), Henry Savile and Tom Killigrew’s son Harry. In 1661 Ormond reported gloomily that ‘the king spent most of his time with confident young men, who abhorred all discourse that was serious, and, in the liberty they assumed in drollery and raillery, preserved no reverence towards God or man, but laughed at all sober men, and even at religion itself’.
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This group, with Buckingham and, later, Rochester (who was only thirteen in 1660), would soon form the core of the libertine wits, challenging decorum and questioning the nature of rule, and self-rule.

The court was swept by crazes, for yachting, for dancing, for new forms of music. One of the first things Charles wanted to do was to re-establish a full body of musicians and singers to provide songs and dances and fine music for the Chapel Royal. Before he even arrived, when Henry Lawes and the English composers were writing celebratory compositions, six French musicians turned up, explaining that they had been commissioned to write the ‘festive music’.
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In November 1660, Sandwich reported an evening at Whitehall when John Singleton, a member of the royal orchestra, was royally snubbed: ‘after supper, a play – where the King did put great affront upon Singleton’s Musique, he bidding them stop and bade the French Musique play, which my lord says doth much out-do all ours’.
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Charles admired the violins of the string band of Louis XIV, and he liked strong melodies and dance forms like the new gavotte, minuet and bourrée, ‘something he could tap his feet to’.
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One of the Italians at court was a gifted guitarist. With his fingers flying over the strings, he made it look so easy that a delighted Charles sent guitar lessons to Minette in Paris. But as Anthony Hamilton noted caustically, ‘The truth is, nothing was so difficult as to play like this foreigner’:

The king’s relish for his compositions had brought the instrument so much into vogue, that every person played upon it, well or ill; and you were as sure to see a guitar on a lady’s toilet as rouge or patches. The Duke of York played upon it tolerably well, and the earl of Arran like Francisco himself. This Francisco had composed a saraband, which either charmed or infatuated every person; for the whole
guitarery
at court were trying at it; and God knows what an universal strumming there was.
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While the evenings were spent in dancing, at plays or at cards and dice, many of the courtiers’ days – in between hard sessions of the Privy Council – were spent in hunting, riding, sailing, tennis. Pepys made constant, laconic notes of the times when the Navy Board were due to meet their admiral, the Duke of York, and found him out hunting. Charles was less keen, but went out often and paid regular sums to his Serjeant of Buckhounds, his huntsmen and his grooms. In fine weather the court walked in the Park, or drove out in their carriages, and on summer evenings they took to the Thames in their decorated barges, with supper and music.

In the early years Charles often dined at the houses of his nobles, or went with James to supper and music at the houses of the French and Spanish ambassadors, being reluctant to miss a good evening’s wine and music among the court beauties and ‘the most illustrious libertines of his kingdom’.
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When Charles dined out, the procedure, as described later by the Italian Magalotti, was a typical mix of the ceremonious and the casual. The table was set for one, but many more covers waited on the sideboard and were brought forward as Charles called the people to dine with him, usually all the courtiers standing round. ‘There the King relaxes, he is wholly intent on eating; above all he no more remembers that he has a kingdom than would the most private gentleman who might sit at that table.’
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Sometimes, too, a large royal party set off to dine at courtiers’ houses in the nearby countryside.
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Francis Barlow’s frontispiece to John Playford,
Musick’s Delight on the Cithern
. A young man in courtier’s dress is studying his book to learn new tunes for the cithern, a guitar with wire strings, while older instruments like the mandolin, bass viol and kit hang unused on the wall.

Wherever they were, men drank deep. Albemarle’s iron reputation was reinforced by his capacity to hold his drink when all around him collapsed, rising in the morning and going to parliament as if nothing had happened. Some drank to forget – one common feature of the courtiers was that their confidence and glamour disguised staggering debts. They spent money like water, to appear richer than they were, like the Earl of St Albans, who made a point of losing thousands at the gaming table.
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In fact even some of the greatest grandees were as poor as church mice. Ormond had debts of £130,000; the Duke of Norfolk borrowed £200,000; Buckingham was in hock to the tune of £135,000. Nearly all of them were caught in elaborate webs of mortgages and re-financing of loans.
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They had responsibilities as well as grand positions. The older ones were married: Buckingham to the long-suffering Mary Fairfax, Bristol to Lady Anne Russell, daughter of the Earl of Bedford, and Ossory to the well-connected Aemilia van Nassau, whom he had met in the Netherlands in 1659. But although they were no longer single men filling empty hours, they behaved as though they were. They lived for the moment, strutting and playing.

Drunken evenings ended in quarrels and scuffles and the drawing of swords. Courtiers brawled at taverns and fought at the cockpit. Violence was in the air. Abroad, these young men had fought duels over trifles – in 1659 Richard Talbot had wounded a man over seven sovereigns won at tennis, while Clarendon defined his younger brother Gilbert Talbot as the most useless type of courtier, ‘a half-witted fellow who did not meddle with any thing nor angered any body, but found a way to get good clothes and to play, and was looked upon as a man of courage, having fought a duel or two with stout men’.
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They brought the habit back, following the dangerous French pattern whereby the seconds also fought, with swords and short knives. In August 1660, when Bristol taunted Buckingham that he had done little during the years of exile to deserve his wealth, Buckingham immediately challenged him. A full-scale duel was only stopped by Charles treating his two courtiers like children and confining them to their lodgings until their tempers cooled. At the end of the month he issued a proclamation forbidding duelling altogether, but it had little effect. Two years later, on 18 August 1662, when Harry Jermyn fought and killed Colonel Giles Rawlins. Pepys spoke for many when he wrote that ‘The Court is much concerned in this fray; and I am glad of it, hoping that it will cause some good laws against it.’
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He hoped in vain. Only five months later the House of Lords issued a formal ‘reprehension’, demanding an apology to the house from Lord Middlesex, who had challenged the Earl of Bridgewater in a furious letter, full of ‘many expressions most unfitting and most unworthy of a Person of Honour’. Middlesex’s rage stemmed from his belief that Bridgewater had conspired in the absconding of his Turkish servant, being ‘partial and privie unto the going away of my Moore’.
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This spat, like many, was food for gossip. Through letters, newssheets, lampoons and satirical ballads, the doings of the court spread like idle chatter. The gilded honour that courtiers defended in their duels seemed already tarnished.

The corridors of Whitehall resounded to quarrels as well as mirth. Sometimes, too, cries of angry despair. The main cause of this grinding of teeth was gambling. Gaming was only officially sanctioned during the Christmas feast and Charles himself, it was said, disapproved. Yet on Twelfth Night in January 1662, Evelyn was horrified to see the king open the revels by throwing the dice in the Privy Chamber. ‘He lost £100, the yeare before he won 150 pounds: The Ladyes also plaied very deepe: I came away when the Duke of Ormond had won about 1000 pounds.’ When Evelyn left the courtiers were still playing cards and dice. He shook his head at ‘the wicked folly vanity & monstrous excesse of Passion amongst some loosers, & sorry I am that such a wretched Custome as play to that excess should be countenanc’d in a Court, which ought to be an example of Virtue to the rest of the kingdome’.
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In this complaint, he was not alone.

Even the starchiest of court events could turn into a rout. ‘All the Chancellor has put forward is nothing for me as compared to a
point d’honneur
, connected, were it ever so slightly, with the fame of my crown.’ Thus, in Jusserand’s translation, with its 1890s flavour, wrote the young Louis XIV to his ambassador in London, Godefroy comte d’Estrades, in January 1662.
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It is hard for us today to make sense of the ludicrous lengths to which monarchs went to protect their honour through formal gestures, whether it be in saluting ships at sea (Charles was obsessively concerned that all other nations should salute the English men of war) or in being placed at a royal reception on the right hand of the monarch rather than the left. Yet as with the crowds coming to Charles to be touched for the King’s Evil, the symbolic gesture embodied genuine belief. An ambassador – however pot-bellied and pompous –
was
the king, his incarnation on foreign soil. Any slight was felt as keenly as a physical assault or an act of war, and honour was defended, sometimes to the death.

Foreign ambassadors tripped over themselves in their rush to greet Charles now that he was back on the throne. There were ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ ambassadors, the latter being nobles sent for special celebrations or to add weight to a diplomatic move. Charles greeted them all with great dignity, employing his warmest charm on representatives of countries that had helped him during the exile, and presenting a chilly face to those that had not. The custom was for an ambassador to settle in the capital, sometimes for several weeks, setting up his households, complete with livery, foot soldiers, coaches and assorted finery, so that he had a stylish entourage before making his formal entrance. This entrée, as it was called, was a finely staged fiction. The ambassador had to go back downriver to Greenwich and ‘arrive’ as if he had just sailed from his home port. From there he was rowed up the Thames in a state barge to the Tower, where tumultuous crowds watched his welcome to the City. Then he was driven to Old Palace Yard in Westminster, at the head of a grand parade, in which the ambassadors of all the other countries also rode in their carriages.

One of the first emissaries to go through this elaborate charade was the Prince de Ligne, Ambassador Extraordinary of Philip IV of Spain. The Prince arrived at Tower Wharf on 13 September 1660 with, as the traveller Peter Mundy recorded, three hundred followers and 280 horses. He had sixteen gilded coaches, drawn by black horses, escorted by trumpeters and pages whose capes were so laden with gold and silver lace that ‘the ground was hardly to be discerned’.
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A day or so later, as was the custom, the Prince was received in great splendour in the Banqueting House. The walls were lined with tapestries, musicians played in the balcony, and courtiers and officials crowded in on all sides, thrusting themselves forward between the Yeomen of the Guard to get a good view.

The reception of the Prince de Ligne in the Banqueting Hall, with the crowded gallery above

The Prince’s entry set a standard for grandeur and ceremony which the French ambassador was determined to meet. D’Estrades was a sinuous, courtly figure renowned for his cold-blooded duels. In July 1661 Louis XIV sent him to London with instructions to forward a treaty with England and to protect the dignity of the French crown, ‘allowing no ambassador to go before him’, except that of the Holy Roman Emperor, keeping the Spanish on his left (rather than the distinguished right), and the Venetians firmly behind.
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Unfortunately Londoners always took against the French. In addition, the Spanish ambassador of the day, Baron de Watteville, lived in great style and spent money freely, a sure route to popularity. The tension was serious because both France and Spain, perpetual rivals, wanted an alliance with England. Charles had ended Cromwell’s war with Spain, which was already petering out, by a formal treaty two months after he reached London, but his family links to France, reinforced by Minette’s marriage to Monsieur and his own admiration for all things French, tilted the balance towards Louis.