A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (4 page)

Monck also hinted that Charles might find it wise not to remain in Brussels, in the Spanish Netherlands, when Britain and Spain were technically at war. Taking this advice, Charles moved to his sister Mary’s court at Breda. From here, on 4 April, advised by Hyde, he issued his Declaration of Breda, a dashingly confident statement. It met all Monck’s demands: a full pardon to all who appealed to the king within forty days, the only exceptions being those who had signed Charles I’s death warrant; ‘liberty to tender consciences’, unless differences of religion threatened the national peace; and payment of arrears of army pay. Charles also declared, cunningly, that all questions regarding the complicated property deals since 1649 should be resolved by the new parliament.

On the same day Charles wrote a clever, startling letter to the Speaker of the House of Commons. The liberties and powers of both king and parliament, he wrote, were ‘best preserved by preserving the other’. Although he was anxious, he said, to avenge his father’s death, he appealed to MPs as ‘wise and dispassionate men and good patriots’.
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And, he ended humbly, not minimising the pain of exile, ‘We hope that we have made that right Christian use of our affliction, and that the observations and experience we have had in other countries hath been such as that we, and we hope all our subjects, shall be the better for what we have seen and suffered.’

Charles’s followers in Breda held their breath. Sir William Killigrew, Thomas’s brother, who had known Charles I well, spoke for many when he wrote a long letter, begging him to accept any terms for his return, ‘at a time when the Nation call alowde for you! As the only cure for all their Evells.’
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Killigrew’s advice, that he should accept Parliament’s conditions and ‘putt on such golden fetters frankly’, was pragmatic and prophetic. It would be impossible, he wrote, to compensate all those who had served the royalist cause, and all those who were now coming over to his side; half the revenues of England would not suffice. It would be impossible too to satisfy papists seeking toleration, presbyterians, Independents, Congregationists, ‘and all the severall sorts of violent sectaries…whereas if your Majesty be tyed up by Articles none of all these can blame you for not answering their expectations’. If he agreed to their terms and let parliament deal with the detail, he could carry the day: ‘A little honest Arts, Sir, this way, would bring you to more greatness and power than any of your Predecessors ever had.’

The old parliament was dissolved on 17 March and the Convention Parliament (so called because it was a ‘free convention’ rather than a proper parliament as it had not been summoned by a king) met the following month. The new MPs were ready to accept all Charles’s ‘honest Arts’. The House of Commons contained at least fifty Cavaliers, men who had fought for Charles I, or their sons, plus a hundred royalist MPs and many moderate presbyterians. On May Day the House heard the king’s letter and Declaration and immediately passed a resolution to ask for his return. The news flashed round the country. ‘To-day I hear they were very merry at Deal,’ wrote Pepys, ‘setting up the King’s flag upon one of their maypoles, and drinking his health upon their knees in the streets, and firing the guns, which the soldiers of the Castle threatened; but durst not oppose.’
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Maypoles were suddenly everywhere, a huge one in the Strand in London, so tall that sailors had to pull it up with ropes like a mast, and another in Oxford ‘set up on purpose to vex the Presbyterians and Independents’.
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A week later both houses of parliament proclaimed Charles II as king.

Why did the people of Britain – or the majority, at least – want a king so badly? Cromwell’s regime had promised peace, but had plunged the country into war with Spain and with the Dutch, and although the wars brought victories, they were still far from popular. The trade that had flourished was stifled and the merchant ships that ventured out were attacked by privateers. Parliament quickly ran through the funds from the sale of confiscated lands, and slapped on constant, heavy taxes. At Cromwell’s death the government was two million pounds in debt. The team that took over after his death were bitterly divided between the moderate parliamentarians and the holy warriors of the army and there seemed no hope of finding good management. Even more disturbing was the realisation that the country now had a standing army, of around forty thousand men, who were being used to control not only Scotland and Ireland but England as well.
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The army was doubly hated, first because it was paid for by the deeply resented taxes, and secondly because it was dominated by sectarians, whose beliefs and strident moral strictures spoke only to a fraction of the population. Royalists wanted their land, money and jobs back; country gentry on both sides wanted the old local administration; many parishes wanted the familiar services of the abolished Church order; merchants wanted a trade revival; the apprentices whose enthusiasm rocked London wanted a better chance in life. Everyone wanted less tax and fewer soldiers. All these discontents paved Monck’s road south. But they also set challenges for a new king.

In the weeks before parliament’s decision was known, English and Scottish supplicants and place-seekers flooded Breda. Some came to seek pardons for friends and family, paying as much as £1,000; others brought gifts ‘in good English gold’, hoping to be remembered as being among those who first helped the king, after, as Clarendon put it tartly, managing to forget him for so many years. The cash helped Charles pay his debts and give his servants their arrears of wages, with an extra bonus ‘to raise their spirits after so many years of patient waiting for delivery’.
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On 14 May he sailed downriver from Breda, accompanied by gaily decorated yachts. As they reached Dort every cannon in the town was fired, but when they tied up for the night, Sir John Grenville told Charles how parliament had voted, and that Montagu was here to take him home. Immediately, the yachts sailed on to Delft, where huge crowds cheered on the quayside in the dawn. The whole entourage then piled into seventy-three coaches and bowled along roads lined with soldiers to the Hague. Next day, Charles received the parliamentary commissioners, six from the House of Lords and twelve from the Commons, including General Fairfax, of whom he took special notice. He acknowledged their speeches in the friendliest manner, and – with admirable restraint – thanked them politely for their notes of credit for £50,000, plus an additional £10,000 for James and £5,000 for Henry. One highlight was the arrival of a trunk brimming with £10,000 in sovereigns. The messengers who brought it found the king looking down at heel: his best clothes, someone sneered, were not worth forty shillings. When he saw the money he became ‘so joyful, that he called the Princess Royal and Duke of York to look upon it as it lay in the Portmanteau before it was taken out’.
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A trunk full of coins was a blessing, since it was tricky to cash the huge letters of credit from parliament. By now Charles was used to the cautious Amsterdam merchants and knew that it was not easy, even in such an opulent city, to collect such a sum in ready money. In the end he took at least £30,000 back to London in bills of exchange.

The City of London had sent its own representatives to the Hague and Charles was confident that their goldsmiths would honour his bills. Other deputations were less welcome. He spurned an envoy from the judges who had tried his father. And when the presbyterian clergymen raised the question of the hated covenant and claimed that the Book of Common Prayer had been so long out of use that they hoped the king would not reinstate it, he responded ‘with some warmth, that whilst he gave them liberty, he would not have his own taken from them’. He would stick to the prayer book he had used all his life, even ‘in places where it was more disliked than he hoped it was by them’.
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In his week in the Hague, waiting for the storms to calm so that he could set sail, the diplomats of France and Spain who had formerly shunned him held feasts in his honour. The Dutch government, who had been hostile for so long, served a banquet on gold plate which they then presented to him. They then added a gift of a magnificent bed and a gallery of splendid works of art, which would set the style for his own art collecting. He read petitions, he went among the crowds. Men knelt to be blessed, and women seemed to find him irresistible.

The Great Feast the Estates of Holland made to the King and to the Royal Family
, 1660, showing a marked contrast between the cavaliers on the right and the sober Dutch on the left

Finally the calm came and the ships sailed. After the story-telling and night of rejoicing on the sea, by the morning of 25 May Charles’s fleet was close to the coast of Kent. When Charles and the Dukes of York and Gloucester took breakfast, they found that someone had put out the sailors’ rations to show them what a ship’s diet was, so they sat down and ate it: pease pudding and pork and boiled beef. Having identified thus with his sailors, Charles handed over £500 to be distributed among the ships’ officers and men. As they neared the shore, and anchored in the Dover roads, the sheets were lowered and the topsails furled. The cliffs were black with people, cheering and shouting.

Early in the afternoon, to the thunder of a five-round salute from the ship’s guns, answered by the cannon of Dover Castle, Charles climbed down the side of the
Royal Charles
. He rejected the gilded brigantine sent by parliament, and stepped instead into Montagu’s barge.
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Pepys was in one of the smaller boats in his wake, with a royal footman and ‘a dog that the King loved (which shit in the boat, which made us laugh and me think that a King and all that belong to him are but just as others are)’.
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When he stepped on shore around three o’clock Charles knelt and thanked God. Monck was the first to greet him and bow in homage, and the king thanked him soberly, calling him ‘Father’. They walked together up the beach with a canopy of state held over their heads. In front of a marquee filled with nobility and gentry, graciously making the first of his dead-pan equivocations, Charles accepted a Bible from the Mayor of Dover, declaring it ‘the thing he loved above all things in the world’. Onlookers wept. Bonfires flared. Guns boomed and fires sprang from beacon to beacon, lighting him home.

Sailing from Holland, Charles II laid down the beginnings of a myth: the hero of the escape from Worcester, the people’s king, who was ‘just as others are’. Yet if he would bend his ear to all his subjects, as the Declaration of Breda had suggested, he would still tower over them all. Towards the end of the voyage he knocked his head against a low beam, as William Blundell remembered:

I was present on the ship (about five miles from Dover) two or three hours before King Charles II landed in England…when the King (by reason of an accident) took his own measure, standing under a beam in the cabin, upon his place he made a mark with a knife. Sundry tall persons went under it, but there were none that could reach it.
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It was a joke but it made its point. After Charles had landed, Montagu was ecstatic, amazed that he had brought the whole thing off without mishap and sure that honours lay ahead. He came back late to the ship, wrote Pepys,

and at his coming did give me orders to cause the marke to be gilded, and a Crown and C.R. to be made at the head of the coach table, where the King to-day with his own hand did mark his height, which accordingly I caused the painter to do, and is now done, as is to be seen.

Cromwell and Charles I, from
Cavalier Playing Cards
, designed by John Lenthall, 1660–2

IN DOVER
, Charles and Monck climbed into the royal coach and sat facing forward, towards London. James and Henry sat opposite. All was sedate and correct. But then Buckingham, whom Charles had greeted coolly on the shore, leapt into the boot, the great cover over the back wheels with its single seat. When Charles and James changed to horseback, he rode on behind them, a devil at their heels.

As they rode, labourers flung down their rakes and raced to the roadside, village boys clambered on roofs, old men whistled and women cheered, country girls with laced bodices and wide-sleeved smocks hitched up their skirts and ran to throw flowers. It was a strange, delirious greeting, like a moment from some dimly remembered myth. The old king had been killed in the winter chill at the dead, dark turn of the year; the new king had come in the warmth of spring, like life revived. He was a king of the May, the month of his birthday, the month of his return. He was young and virile; he would make the land fecund, bring plenty and peace. On the way, as in a folk-tale, he summoned and conquered armies, but with smiles, not with swords. On windy Barham Downs, where the local races were held, Charles reviewed the troops gathered by Buckingham and the Earls of Oxford, Derby and Northampton, with the soldiers of Viscount Mordaunt, Ashley Cooper and the foot regiments of Kent. The men were ranked with drawn swords and as the king approached they kissed their sword-hilts and waved their glittering blades over their heads before marching in his train into Canterbury. The cathedral bells rang, the streets were strewn with flowers, and the Mayor presented ‘a tankard of massy gold’.
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The courtiers who returned in Charles’s wake after their long exile could hardly believe it. When the elderly Marquess of Newcastle landed at Greenwich, his supper, he said, ‘seem’d more savoury to him, than any meat he had hitherto tasted’.
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Was it still a dream? ‘Surely?’ he thought, ‘I have been sixteen years asleep and am not thoroughly awake yet.’

Not everyone was so happy. To the old republicans it was as if they saw England dancing round an idol, a debauched crew, drinking and swilling their way around a false king. Two days after Charles landed, the governor of Windsor Castle was handed a note reporting that Thomas Lawrence, a dismissed soldier, had said ‘that he was hired of Mr Jenkin of Bishopsgate to kill the king’.
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Dismay spread long before Charles stepped ashore. A Captain Southwold declared that if he got hold of Charles he would dice him up ‘as small as herbs in a pot’ and a Lincolnshire vicar, on ‘the night when bonfires were made for proclaiming the King…kicked the fire about and said, “Stay! The rogue is not yet come over”’.
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Now the rogue had come. While some feared the worst, people in their thousands hoped their lives would change for the better.

From Canterbury Charles wrote to his sixteen-year-old sister Henriette-Anne – Minette, to her family – who was still with her mother in Paris. ‘My head is so prodigiously dazed’, he wrote, ‘by the acclamation of the people and by quantities of business that I know not whether I am writing sense or no.’
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He had plenty of business. He and Hyde both knew that one reason for the warmth of the cheers was that the restoration had been achieved without an armed invasion, without the help of foreign powers, and without loss of life. To keep this peaceful mood Charles must embrace powerful figures from the previous regime, both the ex-Cromwellian republicans and the moderate presbyterians who had fought against his father but had opposed his execution and had been in opposition for most of the Interregnum.

The work of fusing past and present power began straight away in Canterbury, so that the king’s intentions might be clear before he reached London and had to face the Lords and Commons. On Saturday 26 May, after a service in the cathedral – which was almost collapsing into ruins after years of neglect – Charles appointed four new members of the Order of the Garter. The first was General Monck, and Charles told him pointedly that the honour was for ‘your famous actions in military commands, and above all that by your wisdom, courage and loyalty, you have acted principally in our restoration without effusion of blood – acts that have no precedent or parallel’.
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The next was Montagu, also a former servant of Cromwell, and soon made Earl of Sandwich, who received the honour from a herald on board his ship. To balance the two Cromwellians, Charles honoured two royalists, the Marquis of Hertford and Thomas Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton.

From the moment he landed, as in his last days abroad, Charles faced a flood of requests. In his two days in Canterbury petitions poured in and people crowded round asking for an audience, some begging for pardon, others hoping for rewards. The Venetian ambassador, Francesco Giavarini, who raced on horseback from London, was impressed that Charles spoke to him in Italian, and impressed too by his patience as ‘at great personal inconvenience he remained standing many hours to receive the great numbers who came on purpose to kneel and kiss his hand, according to the custom of the country’.
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He stopped here for two days before the procession set off up Roman Watling Street. All the way, the road was lined with cheering people, said Lady Fanshawe, as if it were a single street. At Rochester, morris dancers swirled around the king, and at Chatham, the ships in the dockyard fired echoing rounds. The navy’s loyalty declared, now Charles had to face the army. On 29 May, his thirtieth birthday, he set off for London. But before he rode down the hill into his capital he had to cross Blackheath, where thirty thousand soldiers of the parliamentary army waited, summoned by Monck, perhaps as a silent reminder of his power. Roundheads gazed across at Cavaliers: at James, Duke of York, all in white, at Henry, Duke of Gloucester, in green silk, at Charles in his silver doublet, with gold lace on his cloak and a plume of red feathers in his hat. After a pause the Commonwealth troops laid their arms on the ground. Then they picked them up again as, technically at least, soldiers of the king.

Wenceslaus Hollar,
The long view of London from Bankside
, 1647. The London Charles would have known as a boy had hardly changed when he crossed London Bridge in May 1660.

From there on it was buoyant pantomime. In Deptford, ‘100 Maydens Cloathed in White’ scattered flowers and herbs in their way. At St George’s Fields in Southwark tents were erected and a banquet held. The Lord Mayor, Thomas Allen, knelt and handed the king the sword of the city, and was knighted in return.
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The king rode bareheaded between the old shops on London Bridge, and into the City.

This was still the medieval London, with bells pealing from its hundred old churches, loudest of all from St Paul’s, crouching like a weather-beaten Gothic lion at the head of Ludgate Hill. The procession passed through narrow streets of gabled houses, with their upper storeys, or ‘jetties’, hanging out over the cobbles. Great arches of blossoming hawthorn curved over the way, and huge swags of green oak leaves were nailed to the house-beams. Flags crowned the roofs, and silken banners and rich Turkey carpets were draped from the windows. The sun shone, and the light flashed off swords and spurs, trumpets and cornets, reflected in a thousand glittering window panes. Aldermen, liverymen from the London companies, freemen and apprentices, trumpeters in scarlet, jugglers, heralds and soldiers joined the procession. As it snaked from the Guildhall to Westminster the numbers swelled to twenty thousand, taking many hours to pass. The parade wound down Ludgate Hill, across the Fleet river, past the thieves’ dens and alleys of Alsatia, past the lawyers’ chambers in the Temple and on into the Strand, with its golden-crowned maypole and its great old mansions with their gardens running down to the river. ‘I stood in the Strand, & beheld it & blessed God,’ wrote John Evelyn.

And all this without one drop of bloud, & by that very army, which rebell’d against him: but it was the Lord’s doing,
et mirabile in oculis nostris
: for such a Restauration was never seene in the mention of any history, antient or modern, since the return of the Babylonian Captivity, nor so joyfull a day, & so bright, ever seene in this nation.
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Charles II arriving at the Banqueting House in 1660, after his triumphal procession through the city

The king had conquered his city.

At every point Charles was studiously diplomatic. Replying to speeches of welcome at Whitehall, he addressed the House of Lords in casual, heartfelt tones – who could doubt his sincerity?

My Lords

I am so disordered by my journey, and with the noise still sounding in my ears (which I confess was pleasing to me, because it expressed the affections of the people), as I am unfit at the present to make such a reply as I desire. Yet thus much I shall say unto you, that I take no greater satisfaction to myself in this my change, than that I find my heart really set to endeavour by all means for the restoring of this nation to freedom and happiness; and I hope by the advice of my Parliament to effect it.
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Finally he sat through a ceremonial dinner, viewed by an awed public. Turning at last to leave, he quipped, famously, that he now realised it must have been ‘my own fault that I have been absent so long – for I see nobody that does not protest he has ever wished for my return’.
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For the first few weeks Charles was circumspect, careful to present the sober aspect of the healing king. If he was to be trusted, he had to make his kingship visible, physically and personally, as well as felt in his actions as the ‘Crown’.

When he took the throne he wanted passionately to be seen as the healer of his people’s woes and the glory of his nation. Royal propaganda drew on religion and myth, custom, law and magic. Even before he landed, Samuel Tuke’s
Character
had described him as ‘handsome, graceful, serious, learned, shrewd, and of good morals for some time’.
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Tuke knew Charles well and his portrait, though idealised, does suggest some vital aspects of his charm, his physical ease and his gift of attentivenes, which made people feel they were special when he talked to them:

His motions are so easy and graceful that they do very much recommend his person when he either walks, dances, plays at pall mall, at tennis, or rides the great horse, which are his usual exercises. To the gracefulness of his deportment may be joined his easiness of access, his patience in attention, and the gentleness both in the tune and style of his speech; so that those whom either the veneration for his dignity or the majesty of his presence have put into an awful respect are reassured as soon as he enters into a conversation.
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This ease and accessibility helped his cause, which was furthered by the press, the newsbooks and newsletters. News was disseminated across a vast web, with both formal and informal strands. Sheets of news had been printed and sold since 1641, and had proliferated during the Commonwealth. They were eagerly read in the coffee-houses and taverns, carried by the chapmen to the provinces, and sold in the city streets by ‘flying stationers’ and ‘mercuries’, boys and women who cried their hot news aloud, like hot pies, and often drew large crowds.
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The journalist Henry Muddiman, who had been producing twice-weekly newsbooks for the Rump Parliament, now worked with the royalist Sir John Birkenhead, licenser of the press, to bolster the king’s image in the new official newsbook
Mercurius Publicus
. In addition, local officials and men and women in country districts, or in Ireland, Scotland and the American colonies, relied on manuscript newsletters written by professional news-writers, to keep up with events and gossip.