A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (40 page)

The poster for Dean Sancroft’s sermon, with Hollar’s engraving of St Paul’s in flames

In the eyes of his critics, Charles’s record was not good. When the London poor were being shovelled into plague pits, he went to Newmarket and set up a prize for an annual race. When war with France was declared, he was off to Newmarket again. His tendency to turn to pleasure at moments of crisis could be seen as icy cool, or a symptom of strained nerves. Either way it pleased no one. His court was damned not only for its French connections but also for its excessive luxury. Even in the King’s Theatre, the criticism continued, in a self-mocking, lighthearted vein, a kind of inoculation against the disease. In October 1666 in James Howard’s
The English Monsieur
(there were four Howard playwrights, Robert, James, Ned and Henry), Nell Gwyn portrayed a wealthy widow in love with her servant. It was John Lacy, however, who took the plaudits, playing the ‘Monsieur’, Mr Frenchlove, a courtier obsessed with all things Gallic, an anticipation, perhaps, of Etherege’s ludicrous Sir Fopling Flutter.

Noting all this, Charles decided a gesture was needed to counter the slurs. Thus was born the strange episode of the ‘Persian Vest’. In October, while Howard’s play was still running, Charles banned French fashions from court. Instead of a stiff collar, doublet and cloak he adopted a loose knee-length tunic of black cloth with white silk trimmings, with an open coat like those in Persian miniatures, with a girdle or sash. Below this ‘the legs were ruffled with black riband like a pigeon’s leg’, observed the admiring Pepys (who had his own vest for Sunday best, but was afraid he would catch cold in it).
²⁰

A fashionable man wearing the long coat and tunic of the Persian vest style in their richest form

Charles’s new style was intended, he told the Privy Council, to teach the nobility thrift. John Evelyn was delighted, having recommended a similar style in a pamphlet,
Tyrannus
, which he had given to the king, ‘an invective against…inconstancy & our so much affecting the French fashion’.
²¹
To other observers, however, it merely suggested the king’s frivolity in the face of his people’s sufferings. That autumn there were masquerades, plays and parties every night at Whitehall. In November, when a magnificent ball was held for Catherine’s birthday, Charles’s own version of the vest was hardly thrifty, being made of rich cloth with a silver lining. The regulations for court mourning were relaxed, and the ballroom was ablaze with silver, silks, gold lace and jewels. (The most beautiful of all the women was Frances Stuart, wearing black with white lace, her head and shoulders dressed with diamonds.) A hundred courtiers wore their new Persian coats, each costing £100. As the New Year came there were dances and comedies, and in February a wrestling match for a prize of £1,000, between teams from the north and the west, before a huge crowd of lords, ladies and commons, at which ‘greate sums were abetted’. That evening there was a ball, where Evelyn admired the dancers, and especially the men ‘in their richly embroidred, most becoming Vests’.
²²

Charles swore never to drop his Persian style, prompting sardonic courtiers to lay bets as to how long this vow would last. He did indeed wear it from time to time for the next five years, and the slim coat over a long waistcoat gradually became the standard pattern for the elegant gentleman’s dress well into the next century. But in its bolder form its death blow as a major court fashion was dealt by Louis XIV who found the style so comical, according to London gossip, that he dressed all his servants in it and ordered his noblemen to do the same, ‘which, if true, is the greatest indignity ever done by one prince to another. And would incite a stone to be revenged.’
²³

Hollar’s ‘The Swan and the Stork’, from Ogilby’s
Aesopics
, 1668 with the newly fashionable coat lording it over the old-style cloak

While the French court laughed, the British public – if they noticed at all – felt that a sartorial gesture was unlikely to solve the court’s finances, let alone appease the Almighty, or to protect the people. If plague and fire were acts of God, the mismanagement of the war was clearly the work of men. Their critics were ready to pounce.

IN LATE
1666 Charles faced onslaughts from all quarters: hostility in parliament, disapproval of his court, unrest in Scotland and Ireland, and war with Holland and France. Although the great companies revived so quickly after the Fire they had lost trade during the war, while landowners and farmers saw their profits devoured by high taxes. The price of coal had risen steeply, as the Dutch targeted the coastal ships from Newcastle, and the poor were perishing from cold. Everywhere Charles turned, the arrows flew.

When the Commons met on 21 September, ranging themselves according to loyalties, Marvell compared them to the ‘men’ in trick track, or tic tac, a popular version of backgammon. Their mood was distressed and wary. The division between the ‘court’ party, who supported the king, and the ‘country’ party was beginning to be clear. In particular the country MPs were ready to question the expenditure of every penny raised in taxes. And Charles was once more appealing desperately for money. The plague had stopped the collection of taxes and the Fire had halted loans from London companies and goldsmiths. Meanwhile the sailors were still unpaid and the ships again needed refitting.

The Commons were ready to grant funds, but this time they asked to see accounts to estimate what was needed, irritating the King and throwing the Navy Board into a minor panic about the poor state of their books. However, after Sir William Coventry persuasively laid out the case for increased grants to the navy, the Commons voted yet another £1,800,000. But then fiery arguments followed as to how this should be raised, delaying other parliamentary business by about three weeks. The Privy Council and their pet MPs argued not for a tax on land but a general excise duty. This in turn was fiercely resisted as a universal tax that ruined trade, the dread Dame Excise,

Critics thought it would breed a swarm of officials and that it was merely an excuse for a standing army, needed to enforce it. In the end, it was decided, reluctantly, that some of the money would be found from an assessment on property, some from a tax on legal documents, and the rest from a new variation on the poll tax.

In the autumn of 1666, after the Fire, Buckingham returned to court. At the start of the war the duke had been incensed when he was denied command of a flagship and refused a place on the Naval Council. He had turned, instead, to industry, building a huge, innovatory glassworks at Lambeth, until Charles sent him north to arrange coastal defences against the Dutch; he and his deputy lieutenant George Savile were both given commissions to raise a troop of horse in Yorkshire. But this summer he had also begun a fatal, obsessive affair with Anna Maria Brudenell, Countess of Shrewsbury, a fiery beauty already famed for her lovers. He filled his commonplace book with broodings on love, fate and women – ‘Their power is so absolute, that I think the Devil’s promise was made good to women, when he said, You shall be like gods’ – and returned to London fired up, eager to plunge back into court intrigue.
²

Anna Maria Brudenell, Countess of Shrewsbury

Buckingham was now nearly forty. His face was puffier and more jowly, his elegant figure lost, but his wit was as keen as ever and his desire for revenge strong. In early October he took his seat in the Lords, attended all the debates and won seats on the key committees. From the start he set out to forge a link between groups in the House of Lords and others in the Commons, and to lead the growing opposition, particularly the criticism of the government’s handling of the war. He seduced all critics, thought Clarendon, and astonished those who knew him by his application in gathering these allies.

The Duke of Buckingham took more pains than was agreeable to his constitution to get an interest in all such persons, invited them to his table, pretended to have a great esteem of their parts, asked counsel of them, lamented the king’s neglecting his business, and committing it to other people who were not fit for it; and thus reported all the license and debauchery of the court in the most lively colours, being himself a frequent eye and earwitness of it.
³

‘It cannot be imagined’, continued the appalled Clarendon, considering the loose life Buckingham led, how powerful his influence was, and how many in both houses of parliament ‘would follow his advice and concur in what he proposed’.

Buckingham’s adherents were a motley crowd, ranging from presbyterians keen for toleration to royalists unhappy with the Restoration settlement and the ways of the court. As well as the angry royalist Sir Richard Temple and the playwright Robert Howard, they included the eloquent speakers John Vaughan and Sir Thomas Littleton, and two young men, Edward Seymour and Thomas Osborne. Both these men were destined for power, Seymour as Speaker of the House, and Osborne as Earl of Danby, one of Charles’s most powerful ministers. In the Lords, Buckingham had the support of Ashley. He managed to unite his followers by focusing their complaints on the suspicion that the crown was moving more towards French-style absolutism, and encouraged them to damn the heavy taxation, hint at corruption among officials, and attack the squandering of resources that denied honest seamen their pay.

Behind all this, Buckingham also had a personal agenda, the desire for revenge on Clarendon and Ormond, the grand old men who had criticised his wildness since the early days of exile and whom he blamed for his current disfavour at court. At this precise moment he had a new grudge against Ormond, whose second son, the Earl of Arran, had just married Buckingham’s niece Mary, daughter of the Duke of Richmond and Lennox. As he had no children himself, a child of this marriage would not only inherit the Richmond estates in Scotland, but would be heir-at-law to all his own Villiers estates. The thought of his land passing to Ormond’s family was intolerable. As it happened, Mary died the following July, aged eighteen, but in the autumn of 1666 the threat seemed real, and was deeply resented. The Duke’s first target therefore was Ormond, and Ireland.

Most English MPs saw Ireland as a nuisance, a drain on the revenue. In the early 1660s they were more worried about the poverty of the English countryside than about the Irish landlords and peasants. To protect England’s farmers, in 1663 the Commons had passed a partial restriction on importing cattle from Ireland, limiting the trade to certain months. They later tried to extend this, but when it reached the Lords Charles declared firmly that he would never give the royal assent. This autumn, when Charles’s position was weakened by his need for money, the Commons reintroduced the bill in a more extreme form, banning the import of Irish cattle outright. It was a controversial measure, backed by the members from the ‘breeding party’ in Wales and the northern and western counties, who wanted to raise the prices of local-bred cattle and prevent rents from falling, but opposed by those who represented the ‘feeding’ counties, of East Anglia, and by Londoners who wanted cheap meat.

The Irish were appalled and Charles resisted the bill firmly, knowing that the cattle trade was Ireland’s one hope of relief. Without it the economy would be devastated and the Irish government reliant on English subsidies. The Dublin treasury was already so empty that Ormond was reduced to paying the troops out of his own pocket. When there was mutiny among the garrison at Carrickfergus, he rode there himself at the head of four hundred men, but even these troops had not been paid for seven months, and he feared that they too might join the rebels.
⁴
If they did so, when the French had landed there would be no one to oppose them (This was no fantasy: passing through Paris the following year the Earl of Essex was horrified to find Henrietta Maria trying to mediate between Louis and Irish Catholics seeking money and troops.)
⁵
The passing of the bill, said Ormond, might stir yet more unrest.

In direct, almost jubilant opposition, the Buckingham clique picked up the Irish Cattle Bill and ran with it. Temple pushed the bill forward in the Commons, and it was passed after only three weeks, with a key clause, added by Seymour, describing the trade as a ‘common and public nuisance’, a technicality that prevented Charles from using his prerogative to reinstate it. Then came a month of acrimonious argument in the Lords, where Buckingham and Ashley (who had investments in Scottish cattle and hated Ormond and the Irish) faced Clarendon, Anglesey and the bishops and Catholic peers, eager to win royal favour. During one debate, Buckingham quipped, amid much ‘mirth and laughter’, that those who opposed the bill ‘had either an Irish interest or an Irish understanding’. (Which, noted Pepys, ‘is as much as to say he is a fool’.
⁶
) Enraged at this slight, Ormond’s son Ossory challenged Buckingham: both men were sent to the Tower for three days until they apologised to the House. The quarrel threatened to spread. Arlington was apparently ‘so warm in defence of Ossory’ that if the House of Lords had not interposed, a new challenge would have ‘sprang out of the embers of the former’.
⁷
A month later came another row, in which Ossory taunted Ashley for his past Cromwellian loyalties, and called Buckingham a liar.

Finally the Irish Cattle Bill was voted through the Lords, but with Seymour’s nuisance clause removed. The angry Commons promptly reinstated it. At the same time, urged by Howard and the disgruntled royalist William Garraway, they added a proviso to the Poll Tax Bill, which decreed that new money should only be raised if the government gave parliamentary commissioners an account of all funds spent since the war began. This was an extremely worrying development, the first time the Commons had asserted their right to examine and question royal expenditure. On the night of the final Commons vote, Charles allegedly ordered the Lord Chamberlain to send to the playhouse and bawdy houses to make all the court MPs go back to parliament and vote to get rid of the clause.
⁸
The vote still went against him. He was saved, briefly, when the House of Lords then rejected the proposed parliamentary commission and petitioned the King to name his own team of inquiry. At this the Commons were outraged again.

While the Poll Tax Bill was still being debated, and Charles was not yet sure of his supply, the Buckingham faction in the Commons pushed forward yet another divisive issue. This concerned Lord Mordaunt, Charles’s spymaster during the exile. In November the House received a petition claiming that as Constable of Windsor Castle, Mordaunt had illegally tried to evict a castle official, sending in troops, who hurled out his furniture and frightened his son so badly that he died. Mordaunt, it was said, had thrown the official into prison and had also tried to rape his daughter. In December, the Commons drew up articles of impeachment, a process that had not been used for twenty years. When the House rose for the Christmas holiday Mordaunt’s future looked bleak.

A further issue, this time a direct onslaught on Clarendon, concerned the Canary Patent. Trade with the Canaries had been established since Tudor times, and when he was ambassador in Madrid in the 1650s Clarendon had become convinced that the wine growers were exploiting the competitive English market by pushing up their prices. After the Restoration he persuaded seventy British merchants to ask for a charter of incorporation, so that they could combine together and offer the Spaniards a single price ‘which they would have to take or leave’.
⁹
In 1665, despite protests from merchants left out of the favoured group, and from the City of London, a charter was given to the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants trading to the Canary Islands’, to regulate the trade. But the sailings had been challenged by private carriers and badly affected by the war and the Fire and by opposition in the Canaries themselves, and the merchants found themselves in difficulties. Aggrieved traders who had been excluded claimed that Clarendon had been bribed to set up the patent. There were several petitions to parliament against the charter, which was bound, sooner or later, to be overturned.

In the run-up to Christmas, Westminster had become tense and unruly. In the Commons, MPs turned up drunk and would not stop talking. In the Lords, on 19 December Buckingham deliberately jostled the Marquess of Dorchester, a small man known for his hot temper, provoking a stand-up fight. Wigs were lost, hair was pulled, blows were exchanged, and both were briefly sent to the Tower.
¹⁰
Buckingham began to seem out of control. A few days after his release, he leant across the table at a meeting, grabbed the Marquess of Worcester by the nose and ‘pulled him about’. Charles intervened and Buckingham was despatched to the Tower again. Observers were baffled by Charles’s patience with him. It was not loyalty to childhood memories, since although Charles could be sentimental, he was no fool. Certainly some of his decisions were tactical, but he seems almost to have admired the duke’s manic brilliance. He provided a kick of adrenalin, like the other things Charles loved – sailing in a hard wind, fierce games of tennis, racing, sex. The aura of imminent danger added to his allure.