A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (44 page)

On 21 July, the Treaty of Breda was signed. As soon the news was confirmed four days later, Charles briskly dismissed the MPs, asserting the crisis was over. They had met for only four days, and many had just unpacked their bags after their journey from the country. ‘The parliament’, wrote Clarendon, putting it mildly, ‘that had been so unseasonably called together from their business and recreations, in a season of the year that they most desired to be vacant, were not pleased to be so soon dismissed.’
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To win them over, Charles ordered the new army to be disbanded within a month, while to soothe the MPs’ anti-Catholic fears, Catholics were purged from civil and military offices by being compelled to take the Oath of Allegiance and Supremacy. They were also banned from court, and British subjects were forbidden to attend mass in any ambassadors’ chapels.
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The Treaty of Breda itself was curiously anti-climactic. Both countries kept their conquests, England forfeiting its claim to Pulo Run and losing the West African forts except Fort James and Cape Coast Castle, but gaining New York and New Jersey. Until the treaty was finally ratified on 24 August, the Dutch kept up the pressure, cruising coolly off the English coast. People were relieved that trade was now free to flourish, but everywhere there was a feeling of let-down, a sense that England had submitted weakly, and dishonourably. The revelation that the French had known of the planned raid on the Medway added to the feeling that Louis had been playing with English interests all along, lulling Charles with false promises.
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When people heard that on the day of the Medway attack, Charles had not stayed with his troops but had come back to London and spent the evening playing at trivial party games after dinner with Barbara Castlemaine, the Duke of Monmouth and others, they were quick to compare him to Nero. And after the treaty was signed Pepys noted that the merchants at the Exchange did not seem glad, ‘but rather the worse, they looking upon it as a peace made only to preserve the king for a time in his lust and ease’.
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It was widely believed, he added, that ‘the king and court were never in the world so bad as they are now for gaming, swearing, whoring and drinking, and the most abominable vices that ever were in the world – so that all must come to naught’. All through the summer, he filled his diary with reported conversations linking the licence of the courts to the national disasters. Even the royal chaplain Dr Creighton, he noted, preached a sermon against adultery, ‘over and over instancing how for that single sin in David, the whole nation was undone’, and then moving swiftly to the lack of ammunition at Chatham.
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Gossip about the court rippled through the bitter post-mortem on the war. In particular a deluge of satire was prompted by two long, pro-government narrative poems. The first was Edmund Waller’s
Instructions to a Painter, for the Drawing of the Posture and Progress of his Majesties Forces at Sea, under the Command of his Highness Royal
which celebrated the Duke of York’s naval victories in 1665. Waller’s imitation of a Venetian poem, in which the poet had celebrated a naval victory over the Turks by instructing a painter how to depict the battle, immediately provoked parodies, offering acid revisions of the heroic accounts. These included
The Second
and
Third Advice to a Painter
, circulated in manuscript in 1666.

In answer to these attacks, Dryden published his
Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders
, which he had been composing since 1665 and which tried to counter the ‘Advice’ poems and prodigy-ridden
Annus Mirabilis
pamphlets by painting the battles and the Fire in epic terms. Just as Dryden had described Charles as a potential Augustus in 1660, now he portrayed him as Aeneas, concerned for his people and the fate of his country. He even took on the assertion that the disasters were a judgement on the King and his court, giving Charles a dramatic prayer during the Fire, in which he asks to be made a sacrifice for the ills of his people.

Annus Mirabilis
was a fine poem, rich in effects and feeling, but in 1667 such rhetoric merely roused scorn. The hollow laughter grew louder after the publication of Marvell’s devastating
Last Instructions to a Painter
in the same year, adding to its sharp picture of the idiocies of the war a blow-by-blow account of the stupidity of factions in parliament.

Andrew Marvell

Instead of lauding their courage, the satires showed the government and its naval and military leaders – with the exception of Albemarle and the brave Captain Douglas – mired in cowardice, chaos, negligence and greed. The printing was actively aided by Marvell and by his patron, the puritan Lord Wharton, and when the ‘Advice’ poems were published in a single volume, the unlicensed printers were rounded up (including Elizabeth Calvert).
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But the poems could not be written off as the work of sectarian conspirators. Most dissenters had been stoutly loyal during the war. The satires were a trenchant critique of government incompetence, mirroring the despair of the whole nation. Furthermore, they showed the first stirrings of a publicly voiced opposition, a new dynamic that would in time replace court intrigue as the nation’s political driving force, leading, through the Whigs, to the party politics that have defined public life ever since.

After the plague and the Fire, who would take the blame for the Medway disaster? The naval commissioners Sir William Coventry and Peter Pett, who was in charge of Chatham dockyard, and Sir Edward Spragge, nominally in command of the ships in the Medway (and doubly under suspicion as an ‘Irish papist’), were all abused for incompetence. There were even mutterings about the doubtful loyalty of the Chatham dock-workers. On 17 June Pett was arrested and taken to the Tower, to be interrogated by a committee of the Privy Council. Coventry’s nephew George Savile, by now Earl of Halifax, wrote to his brother Henry, ‘He is most undoubtedly to be sacrificed; all that are the greater lay the fault upon him in hopes that he is to bear all the blame; the town has no mind to be so satisfied.’
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He was right on both points. The government certainly hoped that the sacrifice of Pett would calm the public rage. The day after Pett’s arrest, Arlington wrote to Ormond, ‘if he deserve hanging, as most thinke he does, and have it, much of the staine will be wip’d off the Government which lyes heavily upon it’.
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That autumn in parliament, a committee of inquiry was appointed into the miscarriages of the war, looking at mishaps as far back as 1664–5. Henry Brouncker, for example, was questioned about taking false orders to Sir John Harman to lower sails and thus let the Dutch get away after the Battle of Lowestoft. The following April, Brouncker was dismissed from the Commons in disgrace.
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Sir William Penn was threatened with impeachment for his part in sharing and selling the cargoes of the East Indiamen that Sandwich had captured. Raising more recent matters, William Coventry, an eloquent speaker who, with his brother Henry, had practically been Leader of the House during the last two years, tried to blame Albemarle for the Medway disaster, but was firmly rebuffed by the General’s supporters.

Pett, however, was the first victim. When he appeared before the Commons committee he made a miserable impression and Albemarle’s statement, accusing him of negligence down to the smallest detail – in not providing sufficient tools and boats, and using deal planks instead of oak boards, so that the shots whistled through them – was devastating.
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The final charge, that he had not taken the
Royal Charles
further upriver as ordered, sealed his fate. ‘It is believed he will prove a very great criminal,’ wrote Sir John Milward, who was following each day’s debate with furrowed brow, ‘but very much friended by the old gang.’
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Despite his powerful friends, Pett was the handy scapegoat, a point that Marvell hammered home in
Last Instructions to a Painter
in angry, echoing rhyme.

Articles of impeachment were drawn up, but when parliament was dismissed in November the matter was dropped. The following February Pett was formally dismissed as commissioner of the navy; he retired into obscurity, dying four years later, never clearing his name. But Arlington’s hope that Pett’s disgrace might shield other government figures proved vain. The public rage was not so easily slaked. And in their mind the chief culprit, among all those deemed responsible, was the Lord Chancellor, Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon.

CLARENDON’S PALATIAL HOUSE
in Piccadilly, said to have been paid for with bribes from the sale of Dunkirk and built with the stones put aside to mend St Paul’s, was still rising, a visible symbol of his overweening power. Charles had been loyal to Clarendon through earlier efforts to unseat him, like Bristol’s attempt at impeachment in 1663. But he had now become irritated. In a haunting passage in
Last Instructions
, Marvell deftly implied the ruthless calculation and knowledge of his courtiers that lay beneath Charles’s mask. In his dreams the king is accosted by a pale and beautiful Britannia (a figure he eyes lustfully, of course, until he sees she is a phantom) and then by the ghost of his grandfather Henry IV and his father Charles I, with the ‘purple thread about his neck’. Dawn breaks.

Charles could let this designing crew do the work, without any effort on his part. Clarendon had become a problem. He was increasingly pompous in defending tradition and blocking measures advocated by new ministers like Arlington and Coventry. Worse, he had lost his old skill at manipulating parliament. In the winter of 1666 he had failed to win the Commons round over the Irish Cattle Bill, and had enraged them by his stubbornness over the Canary Patent. He was so dominant in the council chamber, Downing reported, that the king ‘doth call the Chancellor that insolent man and says that he would not let him speak himself in council’.
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At the start of 1667, Clarendon was ill and tired. After the Fire he had moved from Worcester House, where his lease was almost up, to stay with his son Laurence’s parents-in-law, the Burlingtons, at Berkshire House, opposite St James’s Palace. They were kind and considerate, but as winter drew in he felt out of place, dreading the gout that always came with the cold. It arrived as he expected and while he was laid up, from January to March, forces mobilised against him. Clarendon was fifty-six, but seemed older than his years, tetchy and overbearing, his natural impatience inflamed by stress and pain. And although Charles’s affection for him endured, he had become tired of his lectures and of hearing courtiers joke, ‘There goes your schoolmaster!’ As Thomas Carte put it, ‘The king was weary of a minister, of whom from his earliest youth he had learned to stand in awe, and who still seemed to keep up an authority over him by the remonstrances which he made to him on all occasions and with little ceremony.’
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This impatience is still heard in a story remembered many years later. Charles, it related, seeing a man in the pillory, asked what his crime was. It was libelling Lord Clarendon, he was told. ‘Odds fish! crys the King, why did not the Fool go on libelling of mee, he must now certainly suffer for libelling this great man.’
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The last straw was the idea that Clarendon had interfered in his relationship with Frances Stuart. Charles knew that Clarendon wanted to prevent an affair and he became suspicious when he bumped into Clarendon’s son, Cornbury, who was taking Frances a message from the queen, on the very night that he discovered Frances and Richmond together. Cornbury, wrote Burnet, ‘met the king in the door coming out full of fury’, and Charles ‘spoke to him as one in a rage, that forgot all decency, and for some time would not hear Lord Cornbury speak in his own defence’.
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His opponents whispered that Clarendon had forwarded the Richmond marriage because he feared that Charles might divorce Catherine and marry Frances; their children would then block his own grandchildren’s route to the throne.

The idea that involvement in the Richmond marriage was to blame for Clarendon’s downfall is far-fetched. But it may well be that Charles’s resentment blocked any remaining impulse to protect his chancellor from the coming storm. Clarendon was undoubtedly shaken by the king’s anger, and during the summer, more blows followed. In May his two young grandsons died, James, Duke of Cambridge, and Charles, Duke of Kendal, aged three and one. His old friend Southampton died in the same month and to his distress, instead of appointing a new Lord Treasurer, Charles made the bold decision to put the Treasury in commission. There were six commissioners: Ashley, Clifford and Coventry (all of whom Clarendon loathed), as well as Albemarle, Sir John Duncombe and Downing, as treasury secretary. Together they scrutinised the creaking workings of the old system and put in place fundamental reforms. The old order was passing. Clarendon poured out his anxieties in long letters to Ormond, as if he feared that he too would desert him. Writing of Southampton’s death, he lamented, ‘I have lost a frende, a fast and unshaken frende, and whether my only frende or not, you only know.’
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Would Ormond, the last of the old crowd, stand by him ‘against all temptacions and assaults’?

After the attack on the Medway in June, Clarendon found himself the prime target of popular fury. The trees in front of his Piccadilly house were lopped down, his windows were broken, and a gibbet was painted on his gate. His enemies were gathering. Buckingham had been in hiding since the order for his arrest for commissioning the horoscope in February. But his battles in the last parliament had made him a hero to many, and after the Medway disaster he was sure that the government would not risk more public anger by pressing charges against him. He now came out of hiding and gave himself up. On 28 June he asked Robert Howard to take a letter to Charles, begging forgiveness. Clarendon insisted on a formal surrender, but when he was taken to the Tower, Buckingham staged a triumphal rather than penitential progress. He stopped on the way to dine at the Sun Inn in Bishopsgate with powerful supporters – Lords Rivers, Buckhurst, Vaughan and the Duke of Monmouth. Here ‘he showed himself to a numerous body of spectators with great ceremony from the balcony, openly threatening his accusers, and that Parliament should execute vengeance on his enemies’.
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Clarendon House

Such public theatre was a blatant assertion of Buckingham’s power. In July he was released from the Tower, partly as a sop to his supporters in parliament, who were smarting at their abrupt summons and dismissal after the Breda treaty. In a brief Privy Council hearing, the horoscope charges were dismissed almost as a formality. Buckingham was so confident that he felt able to toss off a careless jibe without fear. ‘It is said,’ wrote Pepys,

that when he was charged with making himself popular (as endeed he is, for many of the discontented Parliament…did attend at the Council-chamber when he was examined), he should answer that whoever was committed to prison by my Lord Chancellor or my Lord Arlington could not want being popular.
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Pepys may have been right that it was Buckingham’s popularity which had most angered Charles in the spring. At that point Charles had not yet fallen out with Clarendon, and he rushed to show the Chancellor the depositions, including the letters to the duke from an astrologer, which, he said, ‘gave him the style of prince, and mentioned what great things his stars promised to him, and that he was the darling of the people, who had set their hearts and affections and all their hopes upon his highness, with many other foolish and fustian expressions’.
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This dangerous ambition was now forgotten, or at least overlooked. When Barbara Castlemaine pleaded for her cousin in July, Charles was not quite ready, and she ‘so far solicited for him’, wrote Pepys, ‘that the King and she are quite fallen out; he comes not to her nor hath for some three or four days, and parted with very foul words, the King calling her a whore, and a jade that meddled with things she had nothing to do withal’.
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But shortly afterwards, Barbara arranged a meeting between Charles and Buckingham at her apartments. The duke was allowed to kiss the king’s hand and return to court. After a quickly staged rapprochement with Arlington he was ready to do battle with Clarendon again.

In the same month Clarendon’s wife Frances fell ill. She died on 9 August, ‘so sudden, unexpected and irreparable a loss, that he had not courage to support’.
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She was buried in Westminster Abbey a week later, and Charles visited Clarendon to offer his sympathy and support. But there was hardly time for private grief. Before another fortnight had passed Clarendon’s son-in-law the Duke of York came to see him, looking troubled. Charles, said James, was concerned at reports that when parliament met the Commons were planning to start proceedings towards impeaching the Chancellor, ‘who was grown very odious to them’. Once proceedings began, Charles would no longer be able to divert them or protect him. The only course, the king believed, was for Clarendon to surrender his seals of office, and go.
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Or, as an anonymous poet put it pithily in the voice of Charles,

As soon as the news leaked that Clarendon had been asked to resign, his family and supporters rallied round. His daughter Anne, Duchess of York, appealed to Charles in tears and his son Cornbury openly blamed Arlington. On 25 August, Charles sent Albemarle to talk to him, and persuade him to give up the seals. Again, Clarendon refused. The next day, around ten o’clock Clarendon went to his room at Whitehall. He had not been there long before the king and Duke came in, by themselves. At once Clarendon went on the offensive. What fault had he committed that Charles should be so severe? Even in Clarendon’s own third-person telling one can almost hear Charles’s indrawn breath, and exasperation. In reply, the king said that he ‘must always acknowledge’, wrote Clarendon, ‘that he had always served him honest and faithfully, and that he did believe that never king had a better servant, and that he had taken this resolution for his good and preservation’. James, Charles asserted, agreed. James demurred, huffed, and contradicted, but Charles talked on. If impeachment began, he insisted, Clarendon would no more be able to defend himself against parliament than his father’s minister Strafford had been all those years ago, whereas if he went now, Charles could at least guarantee his safety. The mention of Strafford, who had been impeached and executed after Charles I signed his death warrant in tears, was a clear warning.

Charles and Clarendon talked for two hours, during which the Chancellor argued strongly that giving in to demands for his dismissal would irrevocably weaken the position of the crown in parliament. Then, fatally, he began to lecture Charles about Barbara Castlemaine, ‘and in the warmth of this relation he found a seasonable opportunity to mention the lady with some reflections and cautions, which he might more advisedly have declined’.
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Charles rose without speaking and left the room. Even James was taken aback. In an oft-described scene, like a climax in Shakespeare, Clarendon walked out into the Privy Garden, where a crowd of courtiers had gathered and, ‘the lady, the Lord Arlington, and Mr May, looked together out of her open window with great gaiety and triumph, which all people observed’.
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It was obvious from the King’s demeanour and from Clarendon’s expression that he would now be dismissed. Barbara, so Pepys heard, leapt from bed and ran into the aviary in her smock, ‘and stood herself joying at the old man’s going away’. Four days later, on 30 August, Charles sent Orlando Bridgeman to collect the Great Seal.

A few days after the dismissal of his Lord Chancellor, Charles had a long meeting with Buckingham. ‘My lord of Buckingham has made but few visits to court since he came out of his trouble,’ wrote Henry Savile, ‘but was yesterday two hours alone with the King in his closet.’
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By the end of September, Buckingham was restored to the Privy Council and to his position close to Charles, as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. He also patched up his quarrels with Barbara, who was eager for an ally in her fight against the Chancellor.

Buckingham, Clarendon’s deadliest opponent, now had the ear of the king, the Lords and the Commons. He was there, in the House of Lords, when parliament met again on 10 October. Almost before proceedings began, his allies, including William Coventry, suggested that both houses should thank the king for removing the Chancellor. Charles assured them that Clarendon would never be employed on official business again. He clearly wanted him to stand down and go to the country. But Clarendon stayed and fought his corner, using all his old legal training. His defiance began to infuriate Charles, already pressured by the Commons’ attack on the handling of the war. On 20 October 1667, bowing to the Commons’ will, he agreed to Clarendon’s impeachment. By early November, Buckingham and Bristol – who had suddenly reappeared to gloat over his old enemy after three years lying low and out of favour – had drawn up seventeen articles of impeachment. These ranged from collecting bribes in relation to the Irish land settlement and the Canary patent, to the sale of Dunkirk, the division of the fleet before the Four Days Battle, and the plan for a standing army. Crucially, he was even accused of divulging secret information to the French, and this highly dubious charge, based only on a casual remark of the Austrian ambassador, Lisola, was tantamount to treason.