A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (55 page)

ON
3
JUNE
, carrying the treaty, and accompanied by her court, Minette sailed for France. The treaty was ratified on 4 June, and twelve days later she celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday. Towards the end of the month she wrote her only known letter in English, her spelling as vivid as a spoken voice. The note was to Clifford, asking him to remind Charles of the promise he had made about the marriage of Arlington’s little daughter:

When I have write to the King from Calais I praid him to tel milord Arlington an you what he had promised for mi bothe. His ansers was that hi gave me againe his word, that hee would performe the thing, but that hi did not think it fit to exequte it now…

This is the ferste letter I have ever write in inglis. You will eselay see it bi the stile and tograf [autograph] prai see in the same time that I expose mi self to be thought a foulle in looking to make you know how much I am your frind.
¹

By this time Minette had left Paris to stay at St Cloud, where she could sit in the shade and stroll in the gardens by moonlight, listening to the fountains and talking to her friends. On the afternoon of 29 June, complaining of a pain in her side, she drank a glass of iced water, flavoured with chicory. Immediately she cried out in agony, fearing she was poisoned. For the next few hours she was in terrible pain. People rushed to her side, including Ralph Montagu, and Louis himself, bringing with him the queen and his rival mistresses, both of whom had been Minette’s maids of honour. Ralph Montagu arrived just after she made her last confession.
²
After sending last messages to Charles, and asking Montagu to retrieve her very private letters to her brother, Henriette-Anne, ‘Madame’, duchesse d’Orléans, died at three in the morning on 30 June 1670. According to Montagu, her last thoughts were with her brother. ‘I have loved him better than life itself,’ she whispered, ‘and now my only regret in dying is to be leaving him.’
³

The royal doctors pronounced the cause of death as ‘cholera morbus’, and the accepted view now is that she probably died of peritonitis as a result of a burst duodenal ulcer. But rumours that Minette had been poisoned by allies of the chevalier de Lorraine circulated fast. An hour after she died Montagu wrote to Arlington to tell him the news, adding ‘God send the King, our master, patience and constancy to bear so great an affliction. Madame declared she had no reluctancy to die, but out of the grief she thought it would be to the King, her brother.’
⁴
Sir Thomas Armstrong, who had also been present at her death, travelled without stopping to bring the news to Charles. Shouting in pain and rage, ‘Monsieur is a villain’, Charles turned and shut himself in his bedroom. Convinced that his sister had been poisoned, he refused to see Colbert de Croissy, or Louis’s official envoy. (Rochester, who was back at Whitehall, told his wife that the King was enduring ‘the highest affliction imaginable’, before thanking her for some cheeses and signing off cheerily ‘tarara’.
⁵
)

Charles emerged after five days. He sent Buckingham to Paris for Minette’s state funeral, carrying with him, to Charles’s bitter amusement, the fake ‘secret treaty’.

The Treaty of Dover that Minette had helped Charles to achieve was the biggest gamble of his reign. It paid off, in the sense that the money from Louis paid over the years relieved the pressure of being totally reliant on parliament. But the sum was less important than the security of having Louis on his side in case of crisis. It was not uncommon for monarchs to receive subsidies from foreign rulers – indeed Richard Cromwell had asked for a large sum from Mazarin in 1658. As to his religious promise, if he had really meant to pronounce his Catholicism and reinstall the faith, now would have been the moment to act, backed by Louis’s arms and money. But Charles knew that one virtue of his restoration was that it had taken place without bloodshed, and without help from foreign armies. He was no man of stubborn principle, like his father and his brother James. Furthermore, he had cleverly agreed only to his
own
conversion, not that of his country. As far as this was concerned, he said tactfully to Minette that he was not yet satisfied with the Catholic truth. When the papal nuncio visited in November, there was no word of conversion.
⁶

It was the secrecy of the treaty that was so significant. For a king who had intended to be so open and accessible, this was an admission that he must now rule in a different way. His assertion at the Restoration that he wanted to rule with his parliament was implicitly denied, and his actions were the forerunner of many later deals, when heads or cabinets of allegedly democratic states commit their nation to action without the knowledge or full agreement of parliament and people. To modern eyes, the treachery may lie less in ‘the design about R’, which so shocked his contemporaries, than in Charles’s committing his country to fight a pointless war in which thousands of lives might be lost.

The people who gathered on the Dover shore in May 1660, and the crowds that greeted him in London or petitioned him from all his three nations, had expected their lives to change. And so they had, not always for the best. The euphoria of regime change did not last long. Many royalists won back their lands, but others did not, and those that had were often crippled by loans and mortgages. Trade survived, even flourished, and the rising ‘middling class’ were buying newly fashionable walnut furniture, paintings and books, but the poor did not benefit and the prisons were full of debtors. The people welcomed him as a prince of peace and plenty, only to experience a decade of war, plague and fire. They had sought stable government and lower taxes, but the factions still fought and the taxes were higher than ever. And there was one great gulf that Charles could not bridge. At the restoration the traditionalist Anglicans had hoped for a strong, united, state church to which all must conform, while those who held other views, from the presbyterians within the Commonwealth church to the Catholics and the sects outside it, had hoped only to be allowed to worship in peace. No group had achieved what they desired, and after the struggles of the 1660s those whose tender consciences Charles had vowed to respect now found themselves outside the law.

The events of 1670 drew a line in the sand, which marked the end of all the experiments of that first decade. Defeated in his attempts at comprehension the year before and unable to get funds from parliament, Charles had turned his back on the would-be reformists, and embraced the old Anglican, royalist faction. When he signed the Treaty of Dover, his future track was set. From now on, although the surface charm remained, he became increasingly wary and withdrawn, his thinking even harder to fathom, his course with regard to parliament and the public ever more duplicitous. In the parliamentary session from October 1670 to the following April, the Commons granted yet another huge sum, supposedly to boost the navy in the face of France’s increasing strength, but actually to fight the Dutch.

For Charles, his family came first, even more than his nation. His loyalty to his brother James – the only one of his siblings still alive – would bedevil the rest of his reign. If one takes a whirlwind view forward, dashing through time like the comets that swooped over England in the mid-1660s, this becomes all too clear.

James had decided to become a Catholic in 1668. A month before Minette landed at Dover, he told Colbert de Croissy that his wife Anne (who had practised confession since she was twelve) planned to convert and that both were keen for the secret treaty to be signed so that they could declare their faith.
⁷
Anne was received into the Catholic Church this winter. At Charles’s request, James kept her conversion secret.

Alarm flared in 1672, when Charles issued his second Declaration of Indulgence to fend off opposition among powerful dissenters in the country and the city to the coming war with the Dutch. This not only allowed dissenters to open meeting houses but freed Catholics to worship in their homes. It was supported by Buckingham and by Ashley, who was made Earl of Shaftesbury and Lord Chancellor. At the outbreak of war, Charles was seeking support on all sides, but despite Louis’s promises, funds were desperately short, so much so that Charles agreed to Clifford’s drastic suggestion of a Stop of the Exchequer, which meant that government loans were no longer to be repaid. ‘The Robbery at the Exchequer’, satirists called it, pointing to yet another arbitrary action by the crown. Small lenders were ruined and the bankers who had lent a fortune to the crown, including Backwell, Robert Vyner and Francis Child, lost many thousands.

The war opened with French successes, although neither the English nor the Dutch fleets could claim victory at sea. In Holland, an Orangist coup, in which the de Witt brothers were removed from power and murdered by the mob, made William of Orange stadtholder at last. When William rejected peace terms – thus making a mockery of any claim from Charles that the war had been fought to aid his cause – rumours circulated that Britain had only been dragged into war at France’s behest. As before, anti-French and anti-Catholic feeling grew strong. Under this pressure, Charles switched tack once again, withdrawing the Declaration of Indulgence and agreeing to the passing of the Test Acts by which all public office-holders must deny Catholic doctrines.

After the Test Acts, James’s resignation as Lord Admiral made his Catholic allegiance public. His wife Anne had died two years before, and now he married the Catholic Mary of Modena and stayed away from Anglican communion. It was clearer than ever that if Charles had no legal offspring, Britain faced the prospect of a Catholic dynasty. In response a powerful opposition grew around Buckingham and then around Shaftesbury: ‘For close designs and crooked counsels fit’, as Dryden described him, ‘Sagacious, bold and turbulent of wit’.
⁸
The protests in parliament were vehement, and, at James’s request, Charles dismissed Shaftesbury. This was an error, since when parliament met again Shaftesbury’s supporters tried to impeach Buckingham, Lauderdale and Arlington. The threat was stopped, but the power of these ministers faded: by the end of 1674 Buckingham was finally dismissed, Arlington demoted to Lord Chamberlain, and Lauderdale was losing ground in Scotland. Once again Charles had to shore up his position and settle vast debts, which he did with the help of Buckingham’s former supporter Thomas Osborne, who was created Earl of Danby.

Secretly, Charles obtained more subsidies from Louis, but publicly, in two gestures of protestant appeasement, he signed the peace with Holland and began negotiating for James’s daughter Mary to marry William of Orange. But this was still not enough and in 1677, the year of William and Mary’s marriage, many agreed with Marvell, when he wrote in his
Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government
, that for ‘divers years’ there had been a plot to change the ‘Lawful Government of England into an Absolute Tyranny’, and to convert the lawful Church into ‘down-right Popery’.
⁹
A year later, their fears seemed confirmed when the ‘Popish plot’ was ‘discovered’ by the criminally mendacious Titus Oates.

According to Oates and his followers, as part of this plot, Catholic families would rise up and massacre protestant Londoners in their beds; incendiaries would fire the city; the king would be mugged by Irish ruffians, stabbed with knives, shot with silver bullets in St James’s Park – and poisoned by the queen’s physician. Charles was dismissive, but Oates persuaded the Privy Council, and when the magistrate Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey was found murdered, the country panicked. With backing from Shaftesbury, the charges proliferated beyond reason. The Jesuits were blamed as instigators and the Archbishop of Dublin, the Pope and even the queen were implicated. In the hysteria that followed there were ‘Pope burnings’ across the country. Apprentice gangs carried arms, and one cutler was said to have sold three thousand knives in a day. And despite Charles’s belief that the whole thing was a fabrication, he let twenty-four ‘plotters’ go to the scaffold, unwilling to contest with the courts and the popular will. Many other suspects were imprisoned, including, briefly, Samuel Pepys.

A contemporary playing card showing scenes from the Popish Plot

Amid this passion, in 1679 the Commons brought in the Exclusion Bill, voting that James should be excluded from the succession, which should pass instead to the Duke of Monmouth. At this point, Charles finally dissolved the Cavalier Parliament that had served him since 1661. He sent James and Mary to Brussels, eventually bringing his brother back but giving him a post in Scotland, away from the centre of power. From the ensuing struggle came the ragged birth of party politics, with Shaftesbury’s supporters dubbed Whigs (from the name the Scots had given to their covenanter rebels, ‘Whiggamores’ – ‘whigg’ being Scots for sour milk) and Danby’s known as Tories (from the Irish ‘
toraidhe
’, the pro-royalist Catholics who had turned bandits, or ‘bog-trotting brig-ands’, in the civil wars). But Shaftesbury’s power was greater, and although Charles tried hard to save Danby, eventually he was committed to the Tower, where he spent the next five years.