A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (7 page)

Peter Lely’s portrait of Ormond in armour, celebrating the Restoration in 1660

Over the next fourteen years Ormond strengthened the Anglo-Irish governing class and re-established the Irish Episcopal Church. Even before he arrived, he wrote from London to reassure a truculent Orrery ‘that there may be no apprehension but that a true Protestant interest is the immoveable foundation upon which his Majesty intends to build his security and the happiness of his Kingdoms’.
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Yet Ormond’s own strong Catholic connections and his friendship with presbyterian dissenters led him to treat both kinds of nonconformity as mildly as he could. Honour and duty and a practical faith seemed more important to him than details of doctrine. He steered a pragmatic course that avoided the worst whirlpools of controversial policy, but a deep animosity ran beneath the surface, waiting to spill over as soon as Charles was dead.

The colonies too were part of Charles’s realm, integral to his dream of creating a great trading nation. Since the founding of Virginia in 1606–7, settlements had spread up the eastern seaboard of North America, from Maryland and Baltimore to Newfoundland. The New England confederation – of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven – was by now almost independent, entering a period of prosperity and growth despite constant Indian wars. In defiance of a delegation from Charles these states clung stubbornly to their Commonwealth constitutions and nonconformist faith. After 1660 Charles’s courtiers came forward with their claims: Lord Baltimore was restored to his position as proprietor of Maryland, to find his Catholic colony overrun by puritans, and in 1663 a group of courtiers became the first Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas, among them Clarendon, Albemarle and the Lords Craven and Ashley.

Ashley was also part-owner of a plantation in Barbados. In the West Indies, planters were turning their land over to sugar, while tobacco-growing moved to the mainland.
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And with sugar came the terrible demand for slave labour: in a few years’ time it was reckoned that Barbados alone had around twenty thousand planters and forty thousand slaves. The favourite Caribbean island for new ventures was Jamaica, which had been captured from Spain by William Penn in 1655, and whose warm climate was good for sugar, coffee, ginger, pepper and cinchona. But in all the islands, as the land was cleared for the plantations, the native forests disappeared. In the mid-1660s, the governor of Barbados reported that thirty years of cultivation had leached the soil and heavy rains on the hillsides were now washing it away. By 1665, only one small patch of woodland survived. Two years later, the Privy Council heard that ‘the land is almost worn out, the thickets where cotton and corn are planted so burnt that the inhabitants are ready to desert their plantations’.
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Another report noted that in Barbados, ‘all the trees are destroyed, so that wanting wood to boyle their sugar, they are forced to send for wood to England’.
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As the crown’s representative in the West Indies, Charles reinstated Francis, Lord Willoughby, who had been governor of the ‘Caribees’ in the early 1650s. Autocratic and unpopular, he governed with a council and island representatives, pouring his own fortune into colonisation schemes. His territory included the Windward Islands of Barbados, St Lucia, St Vincent and Tobago, and the Leeward Islands of Antigua, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis. A few colonists also tried to settle on the South American mainland, particularly in Guiana. In 1663 Charles granted Willoughby the area known as Surinam: about four thousand people travelled here, collapsing with sickness as soon as they landed. Further north, the Bermudas, granted to the Earl of Southampton fifty years before, were run as a separate company.

Despite this exploitation, in the British imagination these tropical islands still retained the aura of a refuge, the haven from civil strife that Marvell had celebrated in ‘Bermudas’ in 1654 where the island, riding ‘unespied’ in the bosom of the ocean, provides a ‘grassy stage/ Safe from the storms and prelates’ rage’. The overwhelming natural profusion, the oranges like lamps in the green night, the melons falling at the sailors’ feet, were a gift of Providence. God was their pilot, and he meant the British to exploit the riches of these islands, just as he had given them the forests of New England or the lush soil of Virginia.

AS RULER OF ENGLAND AND WALES
, Charles had been greeted with ecstasy. Yet he faced fundamental problems with regard to the constitution and administration, the army and royal finances, and the vexed issue of religion.
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One of the thorniest initial problems concerned the land that had been confiscated or sold under pressure since 1649 by royalists who now vociferously asked for it back. He and his team tried to resolve most of these issues through parliament, thus diverting any blame from the crown.

To ensure stable government it was vital, first of all, to settle the constitutional status, since no one was very clear, after the republic, exactly what the relative powers of monarch and parliament were. To the French ambassador, Britain did not seem a monarchy at all, since the laws so limited the power both of the king and of his subjects ‘that they seem to be joined by indissoluble ties, in such a manner that if one of the two parties were wanting, the other would go to ruin’.
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From the start, Charles dated his reign not from the Restoration but from the death of his father, and firmly established that his regime was legitimate, its acts valid in law. In July 1660 an act confirmed that while the judgements of the courts under the Commonwealth on all
private
transactions should stand (thus embracing the courts’ decisions and the continuity of common law), no
public
acts – the statutes passed by parliament – were endorsed, because they had never had the consent of the king.
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Cromwell’s legislation was thus simply wiped off the record as illegal.
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In terms of legislation, Charles and his parliament were transported back in time, to 1641.

This return to the status quo of nineteen years before meant that all the radical changes that Cromwell’s parliaments had made in the way the kingdom was governed were swept away. In the English counties and boroughs, the old system of administration was restored, complete with Lords Lieutenant, sheriffs and justices of the peace, prompting, of course, a deluge of petitions for places. The old House of Lords was soon reconstituted, including the twenty-six bishops, who would soon be a bugbear in Charles’s attempts to achieve religious toleration. The concessions that Charles I had made before 1641, in the first year of the Long Parliament, were, however, accepted. These included the abolition of the old perogative courts like the Star Chamber, which had been hated by the gentry for their power to impose taxes without parliamentary agreement, and the acceptance of the Triennial Act, which decreed that a parliament must be called at least once in every three years. Despite these limitations Charles II still emerged at the start of his reign with, theoretically, an astonishing degree of power. Within the bounds of the Triennial Act he could call parliament when he saw fit, appoint ministers, direct the army and navy and control policy at home and overseas. In return, parliament was bound to vote him money for the running of the realm, and extra funds for emergencies, like a state of war.

There lay the rub. In practice Charles’s power was illusory, curtailed throughout his reign by lack of funds. He was the first monarch who had to rely on being voted an annual sum by parliament in peacetime, and this meant that unless he could find funds elsewhere his parliament had to meet at least once a year. In 1660 a House of Commons committee estimated that the running of a peacetime kingdom would cost around £1,200,000.
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The crown’s current income from estates and fees was a third below this, so there was already a large sum to find. And while the estimate of £1,200,000 sounded reasonable, Charles never received even three quarters of this amount. The MPs tried to raise money through excise duties on beer and cider, and new taxes like the hated Hearth Tax of 1662, whereby householders had to pay one shilling for each fireplace within their house, to be collected twice a year.
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But the duties and taxes were misjudged, inefficiently collected and embezzled by agents – there was never enough.

Furthermore, the promise Charles had made at Breda to make up the army arrears of pay put him in hock from the start. The New Model Army was a huge force of 42,000 men. Its soldiers were still fierce in their puritan and republican convictions, and Charles knew that he would have no chance if they ever rose against him. His first parliaments, packed with royalists and moderate presbyterians who detested the soldiers’ sects and factions, were equally keen to disband the troops. Unfortunately for the royal coffers, the Commons underestimated the cost of the back pay and Charles had to raise £40,000, much of it from his own income. But still, the breaking up of the army was managed surprisingly successfully. Instead of turning into bands of discontented ex-soldiers wandering the land, to everyone’s astonishment Cromwell’s forces melted back into their communities, becoming bakers, tailors and candlestick-makers rather than beggarmen or thieves: ‘this Captain turned a shoe-maker; the lieutenant, a baker; this a brewer; that a haberdasher; this common soldier, a porter; and every man in his apron & frock, &c., as if they had never done anything else.’
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The presbyterian minister Richard Baxter marvelled: ‘Thus did God do a more wonderful work in the dissolving of this army than any of their greatest victories.’ It was all due to Monck, he thought, and it was an astounding tribute to the general’s authority, ‘that they should all stand still and let him come on and restore the parliament and bring in the king, and disband themselves, and all this without one bloody nose!’
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Charles cleverly persuaded parliament to let him keep some ‘guards’ and ‘garrisons’. In effect, although the hated term was studiously avoided, this was a standing army. By sleight of hand he won back the power over the troops that the Commons had so fiercely wrested from his father. He kept Monck’s streamlined republican regiment, ‘the Coldstreamers’, as his household troops. These were the men who had marched from Coldstream, Monck’s last Scottish camp before the troops crossed the icy Tweed in December 1859 and headed for London. He also kept a troop of elite cavalry, the Royal Horse Guards, or ‘the Blues’, many of whose officers were former exiles, who had served under the King of France beside his brothers James and Henry. Soon he would also create the Royal Dragoons, officially to guard Tangier, their name coming from the ‘dragon’ muskets they carried. Then in 1665 he created ‘the Buffs’, the Royal East Kent Regiment, ostensibly to fight in Holland. Almost by stealth, Charles mustered forces of his own, highly trained and supremely loyal, whose ranks also gave him a useful way of rewarding petitioners and handing out places.

The constitutional issues and the fate of the army were dealt with quickly. But other problems took longer to solve, especially the question of religious toleration. Religious differences, after all, had been the first cause of revolt in his father’s time. Their faith lay deep in the hearts of most men and women; many had made great sacrifices for it, some gladly, others with a lasting bitterness. During the Interregnum the Anglican bishops had faced sour humiliation: their archbishop, William Laud, had been executed; they had been expelled from the House of Lords, their dioceses had been removed, and the very office of bishop scratched from the rolls. They were determined on reinstatement and, in some cases, on revenge.

While many Church of England congregations wanted to return to the prayer book as amended by James I, with its annual round of holy days and feast days, the presbyterians wanted the plain form and more democratic organisation established under Cromwell. Outside the church itself, a host of sects – often loosely bundled together under the name ‘Anabaptists’ – wanted to retain the freedom to pray and preach as the spirit moved them. Even the Quakers hoped for better days than they had experienced under hostile Interregnum regimes. (Their movement had sprung up like fire in the early 1650s, and they had seemed dangerous to Cromwell’s state because they believed God spoke directly to each individual soul, and denied all worldly authority, abjuring oaths and sacraments as well as fine clothes and hat-doffing.) Meanwhile those people who had never bothered much about the Lord under any guise sauntered in new clothes of brilliant colours, rejoicing in the return of May Day festivals and Christmas feasts.

It was assumed that with the coming of a king there would be a return to a state church. Nonetheless, many hoped that their freedom to worship would continue. Charles, they thought, had promised this at Breda, in these words:

Because the passion and uncharitableness of the times have produced several opinions in religion, by which men are engaged in parties and animosities against each other (which, when they shall hereafter unite in a freedom of conversation, will be composed or better understood), we do declare a liberty to tender consciences, and that no man shall be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matter of religion, which do not disturb the peace of the kingdom, and that we shall be ready to consent to such an Act of Parliament, as upon mature deliberation shall be offered to us, for the full granting that indulgence.
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This statement had appeased the sectaries of the army and smoothed the way to the Restoration. And now that Charles was back, the moderate puritans and presbyterians who had always stayed loyal to the Crown understandably assumed that their freedom to worship would be safe.

Charles was officially Supreme Governor of the Church of England. It was difficult, though, to determine exactly what sort of church the Church of England should be. Should it reinstate the bishops and return to the 1559 prayer book, creating a milder version of the church that Archbishop Laud had left in 1642? Or should it allow for the feelings of the presbyterians, with their Calvinist beliefs in the authority of scripture, in justification by faith, and their churches ruled not by appointed bishops but ministers working with Church committees and synods? Many presbyterians objected to the prayer book, feeling that the prescribed forms for communion, baptism, marriage and burial were too like Catholic rituals. They wanted each of their ministers to be free to pray according to the promptings of his own spirit, and their services to revolve around the pulpit, not the communion table. A minister, too, should be able to punish the sinners in their midst, and expel them from the congregation of the saved. And should all the sects be compelled into the Anglican fold, or should those that could not accept compromise be left to continue with their own forms of worship?

Immediately there were practical problems as well as matters of principle. Many petitions came from clergymen who had lost their livings during the Commonwealth and begged to be reinstated, while an equal number came from their rivals, presbyterian ministers anxious to keep their current places. Initially, Charles and Hyde took the side of the latter. Within three days of Charles’s arrival in London, a royal proclamation decreed that no one would be ejected from his living except by a court of law or an act of parliament. In September the decree was modified to say that the ministers who had been ousted during the Commonwealth could regain their places if they compensated the existing holders: yet another round of buying and selling places was soon under way.

Charles and Hyde knew that they had to move fast to bring the two sides together. The bishops were reinstalled in their sees, some taking their place humbly, others, like Christopher Wren’s ageing uncle Matthew at Ely, crowing in triumph. But Charles signalled that he might listen to the presbyterians too, by appointing ten presbyterian chaplains to his household (though limits were put on their long sermons). One was Richard Baxter, a self-educated preacher from Kidderminster, an influential writer and an earnest, anxious man. ‘The King gave us not only a free audience,’ he remembered, ‘but as gracious an answer as we could get.’ Charles said that he wanted them to reach an agreement, not ‘by bringing one party over to the other, but by abating somewhat on both sides, and meeting in midway; and that if it were not accomplished, it should be long of ourselves and not of him’.
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So relieved were the presbyterian band that one elderly preacher ‘burst out into tears of joy’.

Charles planned a double policy. Comprehension, inclusion of low church puritans and presbyterians within the Church of England, would be matched by indulgence, toleration of the sects who preferred to worship separately. His hope for a healing compromise, a triumph of common sense, was bolstered by the model for union that had been developed by Archbishop Ussher, the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh in the 1640s, and promoted by Richard Baxter in 1655, a form of ‘primitive episcopacy’ that limited the power of bishops by linking them with the presbyterian synods. In the summer and autumn of 1660 Charles and Hyde arranged informal meetings between leading Anglicans and moderate presbyterians. Both sides then met at Clarendon’s current base, Worcester House, in September. After the tired clerics worked tetchily through several drafts, the Worcester House Declaration was issued on 25 October, a solution, Baxter told Clarendon with relief, ‘such as any sober honest Ministers might submit to’.
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The bishops, the Declaration explained, were ‘only to ordain and exercise jurisdiction with the advice of their presbyters’. Individual priests could avoid ‘Popish’ ceremonies like baptism, and rituals like the use of the crucifix and the wearing of surplices, while parish priests would have the right to expel members of their congregation as they did in the ‘free’ churches.
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In addition – a pronouncement that upset the presbyterians as well as the Anglicans – those who did not wish to be brought into the Church should be free to worship as they liked.

When parliament returned after their long recess in November the Worcester House Declaration was presented as the basis for a bill. But already the mood in parliament had changed as the firm Anglicans sensed their power and became determined to fight presbyterian inroads. On 28 November the Commons rejected the bill. From now on it appeared that Charles’s bid for a policy of conciliation that might, if adopted, have created a single, flexible, and inclusive church, was doomed to fail.