A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (45 page)

One by one, the MPs spoke, with mounting bitterness. In the notes on the debate, one can feel their resentment of Clarendon as a man who had held the reins of power too tight, for too long, infuriating MPs by his apparent contempt for them. Charles offered no support, and in November Clarendon wrote him an impassioned letter, declaring that he was so broken under the signs of his displeasure, that he did not know what to do or to wish for. He was innocent in every respect, he pleaded, including involvement in the marriage of Frances Stuart and Richmond, where he was as free of guilt as an unborn child. He asked the King’s pardon for any ‘saucy or overbold expressions’ he might have used, and begged him, appealing to the memory of his father Charles I, to ‘put a stop to this severe persecution against me’.
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Charles, Clarendon later recorded in neutral tones, was in his cabinet when the letter was brought to him. As soon as he read it he burned it in the flame of a candle standing on the table, and said ‘that there was somewhat in it that he did not understand, but that he wondered that the chancellor did not withdraw himself’.

Clarendon still refused to flee, sure of his innocence and determined to beat his foes. It was now becoming too late to retreat to his country house, where he could easily be arrested. At this point Charles sent another old friend to see him, the gentle Bishop Morley, accompanied by the Bishop of Hereford, who brought assurances of safe passage if he would leave the country. He replied that he was too ill to travel fast, and that he must have a safe pass from the king to save him from arrest while still in England. Buckingham’s ally Edward Seymour had already taken the indictment to the House of Lords, asking them to order Clarendon’s committal. The Duke of York was absent from the Lords, recovering from a mild bout of smallpox, but Ashley, Sheldon and most of the bishops spoke on Clarendon’s behalf, while Bristol, Albemarle, Arlington and Ossory, the son of his old friend Ormond, all spoke against him. On 20 November Buckingham protested vehemently against the Lords’ reluctance to try the Chancellor on a general charge of treason, a charge which, if he were found guilty, brought the penalty of death. When they refused to impeach him, dismissing Lisola’s remark about his dealings with the French, Clarendon was triumphant.

Opposed by his own House of Lords, Charles smarted with rage. Word spread that he would soon dismiss parliament and arrange for Clarendon to be tried by twenty-four of his peers, in a special court, chaired by Buckingham. Such a court would almost inevitably sentence him to death. The French ambassador offered him refuge (a promise that would later prove problematic), and the Duke of York persuaded Morley to visit him again and tell him that he must leave at once.

Morley saw Clarendon on the morning of 30 November. Later that day, Evelyn found him ‘at his new built Palace sitting in his Gowt wheel charyre’ gazing at the gates and the fields to the north, where ‘he looked & spake very disconsolately’.
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Evelyn took his leave, and next morning heard that he was gone. A friend had arranged for a custom cutter to wait for him down the Thames at Erith, and when darkness fell Clarendon clambered into his coach, accompanied by two servants. His two sons rode with him. An hour later they said their farewells and the boat cast off, only to be becalmed as the wind slackened and carried briefly back upstream by the tide. At last, the cutter sailed down the Thames, past the marshes of Kent and Essex, into the King’s Channel and then south, to France. Three days later Clarendon was in Calais. After many months of illness and adventures, he settled in Montpellier, where he lived until his death in December 1674. He occupied his time in writing his
Life
, a continuation of the
History of the Great Rebellion
that he had written during his first long exile. He never relinquished his hopes of returning home.

DESPITE BUCKINGHAM’S SCORN
in this verse, full of the bile of later battles, Charles had in fact learnt the rudiments of the ruling art. He wanted to steer his ship of state alone, and Clarendon’s fall allowed him to go ahead with changes he had been pondering for some time. He wanted to loosen the control of the Privy Council, which he had sometimes found as irksome as that of the House of Commons. He also wanted to handle his own money, freeing the Privy Purse from the rule of the Exchequer. In late August 1667, when he demanded the chancellor’s seals from Clarendon, he had a team at the ready. He was determined that no one councillor would dominate as Clarendon had done, almost as if he took note of Marvell’s accusation that his advisers were cutting him off from the nation:

His decision to gamble on being more open, and to display his majesty in public rather than letting his people judge him through salacious rumours, showed in small but significant things. He began to dine in public again in the state apartments, a practice that had been abandoned in the economies of 1663. In early August, after noting a trivial chat with the king about swimming, a delighted Evelyn wrote, ‘Now did his Majestie againe dine in the Presence in antient State, with Musique and all the Court ceremonies which had been interrupted since the late warr.’
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In politics, his decision to take a personal, public lead meant that courtiers and officials felt even less secure. In particular Charles set about juggling carefully between the men of the moment, Arlington and Buckingham. These two were seen as the leaders of a new inner group of five. The others were Ashley, Clifford, and Lauderdale, now firmly ensconced in Edinburgh. But despite the neat shorthand of their initials – Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale – there was no coherent ‘Cabal’. They were not natural allies. Arlington and Buckingham could not stand each other, Lauderdale was preoccupied with Scotland, Clifford was a near-Catholic, while Buckingham sympathised with the dissenters, and so did Ashley, who also retained much of his earlier republican loyalties. This was not a team that would form a policy based on shared principles. Instead their approach was pragmatic, reacting to events more than guiding them. If Charles himself had a long-term aim, it was carefully concealed.

In late 1667, as recriminations about the war echoed through Westminster, Charles’s main concern was to put the humiliations of the Medway attack and the Breda treaty behind him. It was as if he narrowed his eyes and looked at Europe as a chequerboard spread out before him and worked out the odds, placing groups of counters in different combinations and seeing what advantages they might bring. He needed a pause to work out his next direction.

The increasing power of France at sea, and Louis’s bold sweep across the Spanish Netherlands on land, made Charles seek conciliation with the French as soon as possible. This tack was favoured by Buckingham, who was keen to join the French in a booty-taking war against Spain. Arlington, by contrast, had been pro-Spanish and anti-French since his time in Madrid in the 1650s, so his instinct was to forge a Dutch treaty first. This inclination was bolstered by his surprise marriage in April 1666, in the middle of the war, to Isabella van Beverweerd, daughter of Lodewyck van Nassau, head of the Dutch embassy to Britain at the Restoration. At a quiet wedding at Arlington’s country house, Moor Park, the bride was given away by Ormond’s son Ossory, who had married Isabella’s sister Aemilia in the last days of exile. Isabella brought important connections, not only with Ossory and Ormond: her father was an illegitimate son of Prince Maurice of Orange and she was thus cousin to William of Orange. She also brought a dowry of a hundred thousand guilders to add to Arlington’s income from fees and from the Post Office, of which he became head in December 1666. On a personal level, she was a skilful hostess, as serious and discreet as her husband. Their only child, the adored ‘Tata’, was born in 1667. At the Restoration Arlington had come back from Madrid with virtually nothing, but he was now a man of substance, owning Euston Hall in Suffolk (handy for Newmarket), and Goring House, at the end of St James’s Park, on the site of the later Buckingham Palace. He could not yet rival Buckingham, but with Isabella he made Goring House a centre for London’s polite society. He was a power in the land and, he hoped, in Europe.

At the end of November 1667, in uneasy partnership, Arlington and Buckingham met the French ambassador, Henri de Massue, marquis de Ruvigny.
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They offered to recognise Louis’s conquests in the Spanish Netherlands in return for an alliance against the Dutch, and British control of the ports of Ostend and Niuewpoort. Arlington was on crutches, limping from an accident when his coach was overturned, and as they left and he struggled ahead, so that he would not hold up their coach, Ruvigny grabbed Buckingham and urged him to persuade Charles to a French deal.
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The omens looked promising but although he wanted the treaty, Louis, secure in his conquest, rejected Charles’s particular demands. Without a quiver, Charles immediately did a swift volte-face and discreetly approached the Dutch. Although they had so recently been England’s enemies, this line was more likely to be popular at home, where outrage at French ‘perfidy’ was loud. The first move had come, rather surprisingly, from Holland, when Johann de Witt hinted that the Dutch were alarmed at French aggression in Flanders: an alliance with England might, perhaps, be possible, its aim being to stop the war between France and Spain in the Low Countries. The twists and turns continued. Three days after Buckingham and Arlington talked with Ruvigny the Privy Council sent Sir William Temple, a man of immense energy and commitment, to make approaches to de Witt. He carried with him the minutes of the meeting with the French ambassador, subtly edited by Arlington to show how the French were manoeuvring against their supposed Dutch allies. ‘You shall plainly tell Monsieur de Witte’, Arlington told him, that the Privy Council would like to know if England and Holland could form a league to protect the Spanish Netherlands, ‘and if the interests of both Nations shall require it, even against France itselfe’.
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Temple was also specifically instructed to say that although Charles still felt ‘all possible kindness for his nephew, the Prince of Orange’, this should not interfere with ‘the great interest betwixt the nations, which must ever be superior to that particular one’.
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At the cost of family loyalty, one major cause of friction was therefore shelved.

Arlington was still slightly concerned that de Witt might be using the threat of an English alliance to force concessions from the French. He therefore worked hard to ensure that British merchants’ fears about a Dutch monopoly were recognised, demanding that the Dutch should not block access to independent trading districts by building forts, or make exclusive contracts with local peoples. Not all the demands were met, but nonetheless, in early January, Temple and de Witt worked out a deal with lightning speed, and Charles signed the agreement on 13 January. In London, ‘with the sincerity of a great actor throwing himself into a new role’, Charles charmed the Dutch ambassador with his zeal for the new alliance.
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Glibly, he justified his actions to Minette: ‘finding my propositions to France receave so cold an answere, which was in effect as good as a refusal, I thought I had no other way but this to secure my selfe’.
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The Swedish ambassador in London had also been brought into the talks, and at the end of January a triple alliance was signed between England, Holland and Sweden. Charles was intent, it now seemed, on establishing himself as a thoroughly protestant prince. Louis was infuriated and a distinct coolness arose between London and Paris.

The new allies were committed, as part of the agreement, to endeavouring to end the fighting between France and Spain. The first course was to weaken support for France, and in April, after long, hard work, Sandwich finally negotiated a peace between Spain and Portugal, thus depriving Louis of his Portuguese allies. (Charles was pleased, but so angry with Sandwich on grounds of protocol, because he had signed the treaty second, after the Spanish ambassador, that he froze his expenses.) Louis fought on regardless, taking the Spanish-owned Franche-Comté, on the eastern borders of France, which he then cleverly used as a bargaining counter; in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in May he handed it back to Spain in return for keeping his gains in Flanders. This new treaty was greeted with bonfires in Paris and audible relief in London. Sir John Reresby, who had been busy rebuilding his house in Yorkshire, took his family down to the capital this spring, ‘where the Court and town’, he found, ‘were in great joy and galentry, peace being now concluded with France, Denmarke, and the States-Generall, and also with Spain’.
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Ambassadors were dashing to and fro across the Channel, he noted, ‘and received with great splendour to confirm the same between the said princes’. But despite the gallantry and celebrations, the protestant allies rubbed along uneasily, and the Royal Africa Company and East India Company were still demanding government support in their quarrels with the Dutch. When the jubilation over the triple alliance had died down Clifford wrote prophetically, ‘Well, for all this noise, we must yet have another war with the Dutch, before it be long.’
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William III

While their eyes were on the threat from France, both de Witt and Charles overlooked the fact that a new, quiet player had joined their table. Neither appreciated how cool and strong William of Orange was becoming. He was now eighteen, but both still thought of him as a boy. At the end of the war, William had been admitted to the Dutch Council of State, but since the old post of stadtholder of Holland had been abolished, he could never hope to become head of the whole kingdom. Calmly, he began to reassert his position, beginning by persuading the states of Zeeland that as Margrave of Flushing and Vere, he should be ‘first noble’ in the province, and therefore its stadtholder. (Arlington rushed to persuade de Witt that Charles had no hand in the affair.) And in the late 1660s he also began looking at his accounts, working out how to recover the vast sums that the House of Orange had lent to the Stuarts during the Civil Wars and the exile. Combined with a large chunk of his mother’s dowry which had never been paid, the debt added up to around £250,000. Soon he intended to come to London to demand it.