A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (51 page)

Elizabeth counter-attacked, getting her cousin, Ned Montagu (who as Lord Chamberlain was in charge of licensing the theatres), to have Corey arrested. In response Barbara persuaded Charles to overrule Montagu, free the actress and command another performance. Both Barbara and Charles were there. But this time Lady Harvey was prepared, organising her supporters to hiss and fling oranges at the stage. Whitehall was abuzz, and the gossip was that ‘my Lady Castlemayne is now in a higher command over the King then ever; not as a mistress, for she scorns him, but as a tyrant to command him’.
¹⁵

While Barbara played the tyrant off-stage, the new hit in the playhouse was Dryden’s baroque verse drama,
Tyrannick Love, or The Royal Martyr
. This was another roaring Roman epic, the tyrant being the cruel and lustful Emperor Maximin, who orders the torture and death of Catherine of Alexandria, because she refuses to submit to him. Dryden dedicated the play to the Duke of Monmouth, but the portrayal of the martyred St Catherine was, of course, a tribute to the Queen, and the royal couple attended the opening performance. Dramatic and excessive,
Tyrannick Love
played for a fortnight, an almost unheard-of run for a serious play. It was full of absurd, rhetorical speeches, including Maximin’s sadistic gloating over Catherine’s pierced breasts and torture. It also demanded spectacular effects: during her torture, the stage direction read, ‘
Amariel descends swiftly with a flaming Sword, and strikes at the Wheel, which breaks in pieces; then he ascends again.
’
¹⁶

The miniature beauty Margaret Hughes played Catherine, while Nell played Maximin’s well-intentioned daughter, Valeria. She was not good at serious parts, but she was always remembered for this play. At the end, Valeria (like most of the cast) died in suitably gory fashion. But as her bier was carried off, Nell rose again. ‘Hold, are you mad?’ she shouted to the bearer, ‘you damned confounded Dog,/ I am to rise, and speak the Epilogue’. Then she cheekily turned to the audience, in her own person:

Even while
Tyrannick Love
was running, Nell had her tart and cheese-cake, being invited to a banquet to honour Prince Cosimo, heir to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. In the spring of 1669 Charles took her to Newmarket. Back in London. she would slip into the coach that the Chiffinches sent to carry her from the theatre to Whitehall, and run round to the private stairs. Courtiers and civil servants were shocked that Charles should defy custom and choose a common orange girl as his mistress, but this was sound politics as well as sex. Nell was a girl from the people, the only one of his mistresses whom the crowd loved.

In summer Charles left the stench of London for the cool of Windsor. Up to now, the old castle had been used as a base for the garrison and for housing political prisoners. But when Mordaunt resigned in 1668 after his impeachment, Charles appointed Rupert constable in his stead and he began to repair it. The following August, Evelyn still thought it ‘exceedingly ragged and ruinous’. He was also startled by the ‘curious and effeminate pictures’ in Rupert’s bedchamber, so different from the warlike armour and guns and martial scenes in the public rooms ‘which presented nothing but Warr & horror’.
¹⁷
The martial Prince had mellowed. He had never been a natural courtier, and had always been known for his temper, his unkempt dress and habit of eating in ‘ordinary public taverns, paying his bill like everyone else’.
¹⁸
But now he fell in love with the actress Peg Hughes, formerly Sedley’s mistress. The court agreed that Peg ‘brought down and greatly subdued his natural fierceness’.
¹⁹
Their daughter, Ruperta, was born in 1673, and when Rupert died he left them most of his fortune.

Charles spent much of the summer in Windsor, hunting in the park, where Nell allegedly taught him to fish, up to now a sport of commoners not kings. This summer she became pregnant and at the end of the year she left the stage. Charles set her up first in a house at Newman’s Row, to the north of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It was hardly a secret meeting place but it was a private one, and the French ambassador Colbert de Croissy was often summoned there. He reported back to Louis XIV on Charles’s new domesticity, finding him and Nell playing cards among friends, eating pigeon pie and drinking Canary wine.
²⁰
Nell returned to the stage briefly in late 1670 – perhaps a hint to her royal lover that she needed more cash – but then she moved permanently to Pall Mall, graduating from a small house at the far end to a larger one nearer Whitehall. Although she never received lodgings at court, and was not treated with the respect accorded to Barbara Castlemaine or Frances Stuart, Nell did well. Within three years Charles had spent £60,000 on his irrepressible actress, whom Burnet called ‘the indiscreetest and wildest creature that ever was in a court…She acted all persons in so lively a manner, and was such a constant diversion to the King, that even a new mistress could not drive her away.’
²¹

Nell was jokingly proud of her status, and enjoyed her rivalry with Charles’s next mistress, Louise de Kéroualle, in the years to come. Nell’s wit in this Anglo-French rivalry was much enjoyed, as in the famous, if apocryphal story of the time her coach was stopped by an an anti-papist mob during the Exclusion Crisis who took her for Louise. Unperturbed, Nell leaned from the coach window and shouted, ‘Pray good people be civil; I am the
Protestant
whore.’
²²
Nell was loyal to her friends, including Buckingham, Rochester and Monmouth, and never ashamed of her background or her body. She made Charles laugh. She was one of his good bets, part of his life until he died, and part of his legend thereafter.

AFTER CHARLES DISMISSED
parliament in May 1668 he did not call it to Westminster again for eighteen months. The work of government and diplomacy – Arlington’s sphere – was directed through the Privy Council and its four main committees, for naval and military affairs, foreign affairs, trade and ‘Complaints and Grievances’.
¹
In Scotland, Lauderdale’s rule increased in strength; in Ireland Ormond’s power hung in the balance. And in Whitehall, as in parliament, Charles used Buckingham to clear the board of those he thought dangerous. His deployment of Buckingham is puzzling, unless one considers that his policy with regard to troublesome men was threefold. He wanted to clear away the men associated with the Dutch war and put a new team in charge of the navy; to get rid of any lingering supporters of Clarendon, whom many people (Charles included) felt was still capable of stirring up trouble from exile; and to rule out any chance of political uprising by dissenters.

The first man to be brought down was Sir William Coventry. The men Coventry worked with, including Pepys, liked his directness and his refusal to curry favour, but the former naval commissioner and secretary to the Duke of York had many enemies, especially the country MPs, who suspected him of feathering his nest from selling places in the navy. His blunt criticism, especially of the court’s carelessness with money, made Charles so impatient that during one encounter the king turned angrily on his heel and stalked away. But he was not an easy man to dismiss. That would be an affront to a leading family – the Coventry brothers, William and Henry, were uncles to George Savile, Viscount Halifax (who was now firmly separating himself from the Buckingham camp), and Henry Savile, Rochester’s rakish friend. William Coventry had led Charles’s triumphant entry into London on 29 May 1660, and since the middle of the decade he and his brother had dominated the House of Commons. ‘A man of great notions and eminent virtues,’ Burnet called him, ‘the best speaker in the house, and capable of bearing the chief ministry.’
²
And although he had outraged the Duke of York by his attacks on Clarendon, he was still seen as a member of his camp.

The opportunity to oust him came from a crisis of Coventry’s own making, when a rumour spread that he was about to be ridiculed on the stage. The theatre was fast becoming an accepted arena for courtiers to attack their enemies.
The Duke of Lerma
had implicitly demolished Clarendon; Shadwell’s
Sullen Lovers
had caricatured Robert and Ned Howard as ‘Sir Positive At-All’ and ‘Poet Ninny’; Barbara Castlemaine had caused uproar by arranging the mockery of Lady Harvey. Most recently, Kynaston’s spectacular mimicry of Charles Sedley in Newcastle’s
The Heiress
had won the actor a vicious beating from Sedley’s hired thugs. Charles well understood the tactic of demolition through performance. Buckingham’s burlesque of Clarendon had been an effective means of reducing the courtiers’ respect, and later this year, Ralph Montagu, ambassador to Paris, wrote to Arlington in alarm, when a French nobleman told him that Paris was abuzz with (false) rumours of Arlington’s disgrace. Apparently, said Montagu, everyone had heard ‘it is a custom in England that when the King is angry with anybody, that he makes them be acted, and that my Lord Buckingham and Bab May had acted you to the King, and endeavoured to turn you
en ridicule
’.
³

In March 1669, Coventry heard that Buckingham and Robert Howard were planning to ridicule him in their new play,
The Country Gentleman
, as ‘Sir Cautious Trouble-All’. The name stemmed from Charles’s own frustration with Coventry’s pessimism and despair over royal carelessness with money. Coventry had told Pepys the previous December that he was ‘represented to the King by his enemies as a melancholy man, and one that is still prophesying ill events, so as the King called him
Visionaire
’.
⁴
He learnt that in the play, Sir Cautious would be discovered sitting in the middle of a huge circular table (like one that Coventry actually owned), turning round on his chair, fluffing through papers taken from drawers labelled ‘Affairs of Spain’, ‘Affairs of France’, ‘Affairs of Holland’. When Coventry angrily complained to Charles, the king sent for the play but claimed he could find nothing in it – unsurprisingly since the scene had been cut from the script he was shown. Unappeased, Coventry sent an angry challenge to Buckingham. The duke stalled, unwilling to risk another duel after the Shrewsbury affair. Meanwhile rehearsals continued, coming to a halt only when Coventry told Tom Killigrew that he would slit the actors’ noses if they performed it.

As soon as Charles heard about the challenge to Buckingham, he seized on it as a pretext for excluding Coventry from the council. As he explained to Minette:

I am not Sorry that Sir Will: Coventry has given me this good occasion by sending my Lord of Buckingham a challenge, to turn him out of the Council. I do intend to turn him also out of the Tresury. The truth of it is he has been a troublesome man in both places, and I am well rid of him.
⁵

One wonders if Charles had not been an accomplice all along.

Coventry was sent to the Tower, where his many friends rushed to see him, blocking the roads with their coaches. (There were near duels in the Tower itself, the Duke of Richmond drawing his sword on James Hamilton, with Halifax and Rochester in attendance.
⁶
) On 6 March Coventry petitioned the King for a pardon, and when Charles returned from Newmarket two weeks later he set him free. It was a brief imprisonment, but it was the end of Coventry’s government career. Coventry himself could not care less, he said, about being stripped of office. He had had enough of court intrigues. He retired to his home at Minster Lovell in Oxfordshire, keeping his place as an MP and speaking out in parliament against court policies and any alliance with the French.

Sir William Coventry, by John Riley

The Country Gentleman
was not acted but the text shows how absurd it made Coventry look, with his ‘oyster table’ and his papers in piles, forming an instant guide to the alliances and ambitions of all foreign powers. Quite apart from this particular target, the whole play was a scathing satire on the secrecy and cabals of the court, the greed of the new-moneyed men, and the neglect of British virtues and English goods in favour of foreign ways and imports. Country gentlemen, Howard argued, should fight against corrupt placemen and self-seeking plotters, wherever they could be found.
⁷
Sadly, this was exactly what Coventry himself thought, although he belonged to a different faction. The most significant impact of his dismissal was to thrust the royal brothers even further apart. It seemed that Charles was allowing Buckingham to have his way, at the expense, in particular, of the Duke of York. In a strange scene, just after Coventry was imprisoned, Pepys came across the duke and duchess dining at the navy treasurer’s house at Deptford, with Barbara Castlemaine and the Duchess’s maids of honour. All the ladies were sitting on the carpet playing ‘I love my love with an A’, rivalling each other in their wit.
⁸
Their main toast at this picnic, however, was ‘to the union of the two brothers’ – Charles and James.

Charles could afford to shrug off criticism. But if Coventry was a disposable nuisance in Whitehall, as Clarendon had been, there were more difficult problems in the administration of Ireland. The country had been bedevilled for years by the deficit in government funds – something that Coventry, ironically, had tried to solve. The situation there was doubly precarious because of the hostility between Ormond, as Lieutenant Governor, and Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery. In theory, the Irish treasury was controlled by Orrery’s older brother, the Earl of Cork and Burlington, but he was rarely in Ireland and in practice, since Ormond disliked dealing with money, it was managed by the vice-treasurer, Arthur Annesley, Earl of Anglesey. He proved wholly inadequate to the job, his worst blunder being a drastic underestimate of army pay. Although he left the post in 1667 when he was appointed treasurer of the navy, by then the damage was done. The only good financial brain in the Irish administration was Orrery’s, and he fumed at this incompetence, especially at the inadequate payments to his own Munster troops. A man who was always unable to keep still, or to keep quiet, he complained constantly to Ormond in lengthy letters, which Ormond brushed off with late, short replies. At the same time, Orrery began to build up a close relationship with Buckingham, and seeing this, scenting danger, Ormond came hot-foot to Whitehall in May 1668, to make sure nothing would happen behind his back. A month later Orrery also arrived, to prepare a direct attack.

Charles set up a commission of inquiry into the Irish finances, its members drawn from both factions. Anglesey’s accounts were criticised and his fudging answers led Charles to suspend him as navy treasurer (another convenient cleansing of the Navy Board.) When Anglesey rashly challenged the King’s right to dismiss him, Charles immediately removed him from the Privy Council and banished him from court. (Unlike Coventry, Anglesey chose to serve the court side in parliament, and was reinstated on the council two years later.) In the vacant post of treasurer to the navy, Charles appointed not one but two new commissioners, balancing both camps: Arlington’s candidate, Sir Charles Lyttleton, and Buckingham’s supporter, Osborne. When the two men came to kiss the king’s hand at court, Pepys was careful not to join the throng surrounding them, ‘that I might not be seen to look either way’.
⁹

With Anglesey gone, attention turned to Ormond himself. Charles had always admired the duke, and was fond of him, but his staunch support of Clarendon and his lordly ways with Orrery and Buckingham did him no favours. In Ireland itself, there was no doubt that his record in some respects was good. Apart from scattered instances, he had kept the country peaceful and had shown true concern for the welfare of the Irish. After the disaster of the Cattle Bill, he helped Irish farmers turn to ‘salt beef, butter and sheep’, which led to a brisk trade with the colonies and the continent, and he banned imports of linen from Scotland, thus spurring the local linen trade. He also persuaded Charles to assign the Dublin government some of the prize money from captured ships, and urged the Privy Council to allow Irish merchants freedom of trade.
¹⁰
But Ormond’s manner had not made him popular. His regal lifestyle in Dublin, his part in implementing the unpopular land settlement, his tolerance of Catholic worship and his use of his son Ossory as a deputy when he himself was away in England, all made people feel that he saw Ireland as a fiefdom, to be ruled solely by the Butler family.

Ormond’s dismissal as Lord Lieutenant soon seemed inevitable, although his allies in parliament tried to mount a pre-emptive attack on Orrery, who was fiercely defended by the Buckingham group. To save his pride, Charles softened the blow by saying that Ormond’s advice was now needed at Whitehall as Lord Steward, and by giving him a seat on the inner committee of foreign affairs.
¹¹
The new Lord Lieutenant was the ineffective Lord Robartes, ‘a sullen and morose man’, who was attached to no faction, but upset everyone in Dublin by his cynicism, severity and lack of tact.
¹²
He lasted less than a year before he was replaced by the older, genial Lord Berkeley. Ormond remained out of favour during the next decade, and deeply in debt, but he maintained a dignified calm until he was needed, being recalled to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant again in 1677.

As far as Ireland was concerned, with Ormond gone, Charles could feel secure that there would be no over-mighty subject in charge. The opposite was true of Scotland, where Lauderdale was now increasing his power. Lauderdale was a passionate, if self-serving, Scottish patriot, but paradoxically, for that very reason he was also a ferociously loyal supporter of the crown. His aim was to build Scotland into a strong ‘citadel’, a bulwark of monarchical strength, which would bring it revenue and help it progress. He was also useful to Charles, in dealing with the most intractable Scottish question, religion.

To begin with, when the Earl of Rothes took over from Middleton as Charles’s commissioner to the Scottish parliament in 1663, backed by Archbishop James Sharp as head of the kirk, Lauderdale had mostly remained in Whitehall. But the Dutch war placed a great drain on Scottish resources and at the same time Archbishop Alexander Burnet of Glasgow persuaded Rothes to implement a fierce crackdown on covenanters, depicted as potential rebels. The administration expelled ministers and imposed draconian fines on all who attended conventicles, sending out troops to collect them and hunt down illegal meetings. The troops were led by the ruthless Sir James Turner, whose searches became even more brutal when it was feared that covenanters might collude with the Calvinist, republican States General. In November 1666, in reaction to Turner’s raids, and prompted by a passionate exhortation from John Brown, an exiled minister in Holland, rebels gathered in the south-west of Scotland. Affirming their oath to the covenant, they captured Turner at Dumfries and marched on Edinburgh. But they were not strong enough to take the city, and as they turned back to the south they were trapped at Rullion Green in the Pentland Hills. Gilbert Burnet (no relation to the Archbishop), who was twenty-three at the time, and had already written a polemic against the repressive policy of the Scottish bishops, reported the scene in the hills before the rebels faced the government troops: