A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (36 page)

AS IF TO BOOST
his own spirits, in the spring of 1665 Charles bestowed honours on his favourites, raising their status as wartime leaders. Henry Bennet was created Baron Arlington, while Charles Berkeley was made Baron Botetourt of Langport and Earl of Falmouth. His trips to Paris as an unofficial diplomat were now at an end, and he was one of the first to volunteer to go to sea. At the same time Charles finally gave a dukedom to the Marquess of Newcastle.

In May the fleet gathered at Harwich under the Duke of York’s command. The duchess too arrived in port with her throng of ladies. ‘For the next fortnight,’ wrote Sandwich’s first biographer, ‘the business of victualling was relieved by intervals of merrymaking…Night and day were made merry by the sailors’ wives and sweethearts. Countess, courtesan and country wench, jostled one another both in cabin and forecastle.’
¹
The mood of these jollifications was caught in Buckhurst’s playful song of farewell:

Finally they set sail. The three squadrons were commanded by the Duke of York, Prince Rupert, and Sandwich. With them went old hands like William Coventry, William Penn, William Batten, and the Cromwellian admiral Sir John Lawson. For a month, the British fleet waited, haunting the Dutch coast, hoping to meet de Ruyter’s squadron or to catch returning Indian convoys. But the Dutch lay low and rations ran out, forcing the fleet back to the Norfolk coast. The long wait grated on men’s nerves, and factions and feuds developed. Sent ashore with reports for the King, Berkeley groaned to Clarendon ‘that they were all mad who had wished this war, and that himself had been made a fool to contribute to it, but that his eyes were open, and a month’s experience at sea had enough informed him of the great hazards the king ran in it’.
²
Like many, he began to hope for peace. And so, wrote Clarendon, ‘he returned to the fleet’.

On 3 June the Dutch were sighted off the Suffolk shore, a few miles out from Lowestoft. James, in his flagship the
Royal Charles
, led his fleet out to engage them. The great ships sailed in their favoured ‘line-ahead’ formation, stretched out in single file, 107 ships strung out for nearly seven miles.
³
The line was divided into three, the White squadron in the lead, under the Duke of York, the Red in the centre, under Sandwich, and the Blue in the rear, under Prince Rupert. Smaller vessels, the fifth- and sixth-rates, sailed alongside the warships ready to tow away damaged vessels, to relay signals and carry messages. The Dutch too had a hundred ships, including eighty-one warships and eleven large Indiamen. At first the two fleets passed on opposite tacks, quite far apart, and then they tacked again, the English in some disarray but still managing to keep roughly in line. When the White squadron came parallel to the enemy fleet, with about five hundred yards of water between them, the cannon were fired in great broadsides. The rumble of guns could be heard as far away as the Hague, while in London people flocked to the open spaces, the banks of the river or the leafy park, to hear the cannons boom.

Sometimes, the ships came so close that the hulls crashed together, and the soldiers with their muskets rushed across onto the decks. The hand-to-hand fighting was fierce and bloody. When the Dutch ship
Oranje
attempted to board the
Royal Charles
, other ships came to James’s aid. ‘The vessels were grappled and locked together; the fighting at close quarters was furious; man after man was cut down, or his brains blown out by pistols held only a few feet away.’
⁴
After an hour’s desperate fighting, the
Oranje
surrendered, her men were taken prisoner and she was set on fire. The most terrifying weapons were the fireships, small boats filled with anything that could burn. Volunteers, with mad courage, sailed straight at their target then set the fireship ablaze and rushed to the stern, to escape, if they could, in a smaller boat. Once a fireship hit a larger vessel, its pitch and tar, sails and rigging went up like an inferno. At Lowestoft, the English used these to deadly effect. Their fleet had the wind, and fortune was with them. After the Dutch admiral Opdam was killed and his flagship blown up, the Dutch command fractured into a mess of conflicting commands. With many of their ships burned and sinking, they fled in confusion, in different directions.

London was alight with bonfires when the news arrived: cartloads of wood stood at the doors of the wealthy, ready to burn, and people ran inside to fetch their chairs and tables to hurl on the flames. The French ambassadors, who had decided it was not quite correct to light a bonfire to celebrate their ally’s downfall, had their windows smashed by an angry mob.

For Charles, however, it was a bittersweet triumph. Thousands of sailors had died. He had lost many fine officers, including the old admiral Sir John Lawson. Worst of all, three of his closest courtiers and friends had been standing next to James on board the
Royal Charles
, when a single cannon ball struck them. All three were killed instantly and James was spattered with their blood and brains. They were Charles MacCarthy, Lord Muskerry, whose little dumpy wife had often been a butt of court jokes; Richard Boyle, second son of Lord Burlington; and his beloved Charles Berkeley, Earl of Falmouth. Heartbroken, Charles wrote to Minette,

The Battle of Lowestoft, full of explosive drama

I have had as great a losse as ’tis possible in a good frinde, poore C. Barckely. It troubles me so much, as I hope you will excuse the shortnesse of this letter, having received the newes of it but two hours ago…My head does so ake as I can only add that I am entierely Yours. C.R.
⁵

Many who had seen Charles survive terrible blows of fate ‘were amazed at the flood of tears he shed upon this occasion’, noted Clarendon.
⁶
In the Chancellor’s own view, Berkeley’s death was good riddance, if not even ‘a great ingredient and considerable part of the victory’. No one else had seen the qualities in him that Charles loved, and if he had lived, thought Clarendon with horror, who knows what heights he might have risen to. Pepys too had been suspicious of Berkeley, partly because of his animosity to the naval Commissioner William Coventry whom Pepys admired, and partly because he regarded him as little better than a royal pimp. He wrote on 9 June, ‘The King, it seems, is much troubled at the fall of Lord Falmouth. But I do not meet with any man else that so much as wishes him alive again, the world conceiving him a man of too much pleasure to do the King any good or offer any good office to him.’
⁷
But, he added, he had heard on all sides that he was ‘a man of great Honour’, for volunteering and for his part in the battle. The satirical
Second Advice to a Painter
was cruellest of all:

On 22 June Falmouth was buried in Westminster Abbey, with a hero’s funeral.

Despite the great loss of life, Lowestoft was a victory – but not a complete one. Alarmed by the bloody mess so near the Duke of York, and allegedly keeping a promise to the duchess to keep her husband out of danger, his second in command, Henry Brouncker, had called off the chase while James slept. The remnant of the powerful Dutch fleet ran free, to regroup and fight again.

After Lowestoft, Louis XIV urged Charles to stop the war now that he had proved his dominance at sea. Charles did not listen. He wrote angrily and at length to Louis, repeating his threat that he would seek an alliance with France’s current enemy, Spain. And, he added, ‘to your exception thereunto, lett me minde you that, according to the course of the World, those are better frinds who see they have neede of us, then whose prosperity makes them think we have neede of them’.
⁹
Both sides accused the other of stalling negotiations with regard to any sort of agreement, using the most feeble excuses. ‘Since I have come back to my kingdom,’ the French ambassadors charged Charles with saying, ‘I have nearly forgotten the French language, and in truth the trouble I have in looking for my words allows the escape of my thoughts. I must need have delay in order to be able to reflect and meditate upon things proposed to me in that language.’
¹⁰
A frustrated Courtin offered to use Latin instead, a suggestion politely waved aside. Hunting for ways to catch his prey Courtin tried to enrol Frances Stuart, knowing her love of riding and suggesting to his masters in Paris that ‘embroidered waistcoats sent her for the hunting’ would be an appropriate present.
¹¹

The courtiers who were not at sea kept up their amusements, dinners and flirtations. Diplomatic tensions forgotten, they busied themselves finding a mistress for Courtin (although he was married with four children), obtaining new gun dogs for Verneuil, and drinking chocolate with the Spanish ambassador Molina. Alongside accounts of the plague and reports of the war, one French diplomatic bag contained the precise recipe for Molina’s excellent brew. At a dinner given by Molina for Barbara Castlemaine and her friends the coachmen were so plied with drink that the guests had to use Spanish servants to drive them home, mortally offending those English servants who could still stand, and causing ‘the greatest and most amusing disturbance imaginable’.
¹²
The bloody nature of the sea-battles was reduced to small talk: the Duke of York reported that his dog sought out the very safest place of all on board ship when they were fighting; the Spanish ambassador was received with pomp in the Banqueting House; the French foreign minister sent his young son to Charles’s court to gain polish. Sometimes it was hard to remember that England was at war at all.

Shocked by Berkeley’s death and James’s narrow escape at Lowestoft, Charles had recalled his brother to Whitehall. As heir to the throne, his role as admiral posed too great a risk. That summer Charles, James and Rupert went down to Chatham. They sailed out to the fleet at anchor off the Nore, dined with the captains to rally morale, and, since Rupert refused at that point to contemplate a joint command, appointed Sandwich as the new admiral of the fleet, with Penn as his second in command. William Coventry, the most energetic commissioner for the navy, was knighted and made a member of the Privy Council. But beneath the brave display, the greatest anxiety, as always, was the lack of money to fit out and provision the ships.

Since the plague still raged, Parliament met at Oxford; for several months the townsfolk gaped at the sight of the courtiers in their brilliant silks and lace, and expressed their shock and annoyance at their drinking in the streets, their gambling and curses. Many of the courtiers were also MPs, and Charles relied on them now to push the Commons into granting more money. The initial huge grant for the Dutch war was already running out. Inspired by a speech from Clarendon, the Commons awarded another £1,250,000. But the accounts kept by the Treasury and the Navy Board made it hard to see where the first tranche of money had gone and this time the grant carried strict conditions. The whole sum must go to the war, and any loans raised on the security of the taxes, which would be slow in coming in, should be repaid in order.

This sensible proviso caused great arguments in the Privy Council, since Charles had talked over the conditions of the loans with Coventry and Downing (whose idea they were) but had not discussed them with Ashley, his Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ashley had then opposed the terms, thinking he was serving the King’s interests, and was angry and embarrassed to find this was not so. When Charles sought to soothe matters by letting the whole Privy Council debate the case Ashley was appeased. But the splits between Clarendon and the new men became more and more apparent.

At sea, the main aim was to use the advantage gained at Lowestoft, and to try to capture Dutch trading ships, which were now avoiding the Channel and were thus forced to sail home around Scotland and down through the North Sea. Above all, the English captains wanted to capture well-laden East India convoys or to intercept de Ruyter, returning from Newfoundland with English prize ships taken off the American coast. But there were arguments now about strategy. If the whole fleet gathered in the North Sea, there was no protection for traders in the Mediterranean; yet if the fleet were divided, it would make it weak in any major engagement. The fleet was in fact weakened further by members of the Privy Council themselves, as Ashley, Albemarle and others fitted out privateers to hunt the Dutch, and many experienced sailors transferred from the navy to man them, lured by the hope of profits.