A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (8 page)

Wenceslaus Hollar, Westminster from the river, showing St Stephen’s Chapel, where the Commons met, Westmister Hall and the Abbey, with skiffs crowding up to Westminster stairs

The glorious summer was rapidly turning into an autumn of disquiet. Religious issues aside, even the stoutest royalists were angered by the problem of the land that had changed hands in the wake of the civil wars. Many royalist gentry had been forced to sell estates when prices were falling, to pay the fines imposed on them. Now they wanted their land back, or at least some compensation.

The Convention Parliament made it clear from the start that they would distinguish between private sales and ‘public acts’ like confiscation. The former were regarded as legal transactions: the land had gone for ever. Confiscated lands, by contrast, had to be returned to their original owners. These included crown and church lands and some private estates which had been taken by the republic and then sold, often to army officers. The process of reclaiming them was difficult, as sale had followed sale, and sometimes the first owners were dead, so that it was by now very hard to untangle the deals and to assess the value, although Charles set up a commission to assess compensation. And while the crown and the Church usually got their land back, scores of private owners had to fight for their property, either by pressing forward with lawsuits or pushing private bills through parliament. The extraordinary thing is that they largely succeeded: most royalists – especially the great nobles – were back in their old houses within ten years. But many among them were crippled by the huge mortgages taken out to regain their land.

The gentry had thought that life would swing on its axis back to the old easy days. Baffled, they bombarded Charles with their requests. The crush of petitioners in Canterbury was repeated in London. John Evelyn, who was trying to present letters sent from Henrietta Maria, was shocked by the way people literally pressed about Charles:

It was indeed intollerable, as well as unexpressable, the greedinesse of all sorts, men, women & children, to see his Majesty & kisse his hands inso much that he had scarce leasure to Eate for some dayes, coming as they did from all parts of the Nation: And the King on the other side as willing to give them that satisfaction, would have none kept out but gave free accesse to all sorts of people.’
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In greeting people so courteously, Charles was following the advice proffered the year before by his old tutor, the elegant and worldly William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle. Good manners were always the best tactic, wrote Newcastle, ‘and, believe it, the putting off of your hat and making a leg pleases more than reward or preservation, so much does it take all kind of people’.
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But he simply could not doff his hat to all. Over the coming months ‘loyal petitions’ arrived in their hundreds, even thousands. Corporations sent proclamations of loyalty. Companies sent requests for new charters. Countless individuals asked for restitution of lands or repayment of debts. Others begged royal pardons for offices held under the Commonwealth or for arms taken against the king. Still more asked for posts in the royal household, as clerks, officers of customs, keepers of forests. Evelyn himself was one of these petitioners, trying to keep close to the king. Like many, he had been loyal for two decades and more. In 1641 he had travelled to Holland and Belgium with Charles’s sister Mary, Princess Royal; he had come back briefly to fight, and had then spent four years travelling to France and Italy, before his marriage to the young Mary Browne, daughter of the English resident in Paris. On the eve of the Restoration he published three royalist tracts, countering rumour and scandal.
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He now hoped for a post for himself (and later for Mary in the service of the queen) and also wanted to settle the disputed possession of his house, Sayes Court, and to get back the money owed to his father-in-law for his work in Paris. Everyone who clustered round the court had stories like this, their own needs, hopes and fears.

John Evelyn, painted by Kneller as a Fellow of the Royal Society, c. 1689

Those petitions that reached the state committees were only a smidgeon of the whole. The place-seeking – and the exchange of cash that went with it – filtered down the whole pyramid. New place-seekers offered cash to those who had held them in the previous regime and thrust their petitions and demands on anyone with influence, from aldermen to landowners, accompanying their requests with gifts of money and plate. Complicated deals were done, and many positions were bought from former holders. It was rumoured that officials and go-betweens were making a fortune. Petitioners chose their intermediaries carefully, former parliamentarians applying to the king through Morice or Lord Manchester or through Albemarle (whose wife became notorious for the fees she charged). Anxious letters were written, tiring journeys taken. It was as if half the nation were holding out their hands and many were on the road to besiege Charles in person. All through the summer of 1660 they descended on London, jolting in their carriages over the rutted roads, changing horses and crowding into inns on their way from Northumberland and Dorset, Lancashire and Norfolk.

The long wait for answers to their many requests left petitioners feeling let down and angry. A witticism soon circled that Charles was passing an Act of Indemnity for his Enemies and Oblivion for his Friends. The joke wounded him sharply.
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As early as August 1660, ‘The Complaint of the Royal and Loyal Party to the King’ bitterly lamented that those who had helped the king were now ruined, that the ‘greatest opposers’ were preferred to the leading places in government and at court, and that their petitions were never fully read, but were dealt with by secretaries, a charge that rings true. In March 1662 Pepys thoroughly enjoyed a scorching sermon by Richard Creighton, ‘the great Scotch man’, delivered with great gusto and wit before the king and the Duke of York. Creighton’s text was ‘Roule yourself in dust’ and his theme was that it would have been

…better for the poor cavalier never to have come in with the King into England again; for he that hath the impudence to deny obedience to the lawful magistrate and to swear to the oath of allegiance &c, were better treated nowadays in Newgate then a poor Royalist that hath suffered all his life for the King is at Whitehall among his friends.
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The Cavalier gentry and the churchmen were not the only groups making demands. The merchants too were flocking to Whitehall. Many companies had received charters from Cromwell and numbered keen parliamentarians among their leading men. Some, like John Bland in
Trade Revived
, feared a new era of competition, calling for the old guilds to be revived to control their trades and for the king to regulate commerce as his Tudor predecessors had done. On the eve of the Restoration the twelve leading guilds had held a dinner for General Monck, and when Charles rode triumphantly through London they had turned out in their livery to greet him. The East India Company gave a huge gift of plate (most of the royal plate having been melted down in the civil wars), and all the companies and guilds made sure that anyone with royal connections was promoted so that they could play a useful part in deputations to the king. Not surprisingly, Charles encouraged them, especially when they brought gifts. He granted new charters to the East India Company and the Levant Company, to the Eastland Company that traded with the Baltic and even to the Merchant Adventurers, who had ostentatiously supported Cromwell. In July he went to the great City feast, ‘with as much pompe and splendour as any Earthly prince could do’, admiring the pageants along the route, despite the pouring rain.
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He established a Council of Trade, which usually met in the Mercers’ Hall, so that ‘every interest may be righted’ and listened to the members’ advice on measures ‘as may tend to the rectifying those errors which the corruption of late times have introduced’.
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But if the merchants were appeased, the nobles and gentry were increasingly frustrated. They were missing out on government posts and on the restitution of their lands, and Charles even seemed to wish to deny them justice. What they wanted, to persuade them that the bad times were truly at an end and that their day had come again in this ‘wonderful pacifick year’, was vengeance – and blood.

THERE WAS A CLEAR
political danger in drawing analogies between Lucretius’ atomic philosophy, fashionable among intellectuals, and the freedom of ‘bodies’ in social structures, whether it be the state or the family. Charles had never been free to run his course ‘without Design, or Fate, or Force’. And ever since childhood one of the constraints on his freedom, which appeared minor but was not, had always been his relationship with strong women. As a small boy he had to find ways to negotiate life with his temperamental mother. Tiny and upright, a foot shorter than her eldest son, who had to bend down to talk to her, Henrietta Maria was a creature of the court, with an iron will. Her father was murdered when she was a baby, and she grew up under the eye of her dominating Italian mother, Marie de’ Medici. She showed far more affection to the court dwarf, Jeffrey Hudson, a ‘gift’ to her from the first Duke of Buckingham, than to the children who were later born to her. As queen, she loved to act, playing leading parts in the lavish court masques, and she manipulated her own children like puppets in a game of power, raging and storming when they defied her. As a counter to his mother, Charles was cared for by the flamboyant Christabella Wyndham, his nurse (a formal title rather than a real task). She later greeted him as an adolescent in the West Country so effusively that the whole company were sure she had seduced him.

He grew up enjoying the company of women of wit and intelligence, and they abounded in his close circle. In the bitter winter before the news of his father’s trial arrived, he danced and flirted in the Hague with the good-looking, effervescent women of the House of Orange, and his talented cousins, daughters of Elizabeth of Bohemia. Charles, however, was already in love. On a brief visit to the Hague in July 1648 he had met Lucy Walter. They were both eighteen. Lucy’s parents were Pembrokeshire gentry who had separated when she was young, and she and her mother had lived in London, mingling in the down-at-heel royalist circles during the Civil Wars. In her teens she became the mistress of Algernon Sidney, the youngest son of the Earl of Leicester. The Sidneys, like so many families, had divided allegiances, and when Algernon went to fight for Cromwell Lucy turned to his royalist brother, Robert. She moved with him to the Hague, changing her name to ‘Mrs Barlow’, ‘a browne, beautiful, bold but insipid creature’, according to Evelyn.

Lucy and Charles became lovers and their son James – later Duke of Monmouth – was born in Rotterdam on 9 April 1649. It was a genuine love affair, but when Charles left for Jersey and then Scotland in 1650 Lucy had no means of support and soon turned to other men. After Charles returned, and told her their affair was over, she made ceaseless demands for money and caused numerous public scandals. At one point she came to London where she was arrested as a spy and sent to the Tower – causing much mirth in the newssheets – before being despatched back to the Netherlands. Worried for his son, Charles tried various means of inveigling him away, and even tried to abduct him by force. Lucy fought hard but eventually, in 1658, one of Charles’s spymasters, Ross, snatched the nine-year-old James while her back was turned. He was brought to Paris, to the household of Henrietta Maria, where he took the name of James Crofts after his guardian, one of Charles’s Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, William Crofts.

Lucy Walter, Mrs Barlow, in the late 1650s

Lucy followed her son to Paris, where she died a year later, supposedly from syphilis. She was twenty-eight. She made a deathbed confession to John Cosin, later Bishop of Durham, declaring that she was Charles’s legal wife, a claim that was never proved but would cause much trouble in years to come.

During his exile various unsuccessful schemes were set in motion to marry Charles off profitably and form useful alliances. The boldest and most hopeless was Henrietta Maria’s attempt to force him on her niece, Anne-Marie Louise d’Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, known as ‘La Grande Mademoiselle’ and one of the wealthiest women in Europe. Charles, who was half-hearted anyway, had no chance of such a prize. Among the duchesses and princesses of his relations his own first choice was his cousin Sophie. She was curly-haired, clever and completely natural, but also wise enough to see that such a marriage would be foolish. When Charles told her, as they walked by the canals in the dusk, that she was more beautiful than Lucy Walter, she slowly withdrew and their evening walks ended. In her memoirs she admitted that ‘he had shown a liking for me with which I was most gratified’, but she had ‘sense enough to know that marriages of great kings are not made up by such means’.
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Whispers of affairs followed Charles as he moved from place to place. In Paris he became briefly infatuated with Isabelle-Angelique, duchesse de Chatillon, whose young husband had died in the wars of the Fronde in 1649. The engaging ‘Bablon’ was a charming widow with many admirers. When Charles visited her in the country, this ‘raised a confident rumour that he was married to that lady’, sighed the exasperated Hyde, just as his liaison with Lucy had done.
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But his suit was never serious. The Duchess became a close friend of Minette and Charles remained fond of her. Her name often appears in his letters to his sister: he helped her to get a licence to import alum into England, which was used in the chalky make-up of court beauties; he worried about her second marriage to a German prince (which did not last long); and he assured Minette that ‘upon any occasion that lies within my power, I shall ever be ready to serve Bablon’.
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The names were beginning to form a longish list. One of Charles’s mistresses in exile was Elizabeth Killigrew, sister of the Killigrew brothers and now the wife of Francis Boyle, another son of the Earl of Cork. They met in the Dutch Republic, where Elizabeth was in the household of Mary, Princess of Orange, but when Elizabeth became pregnant she was swiftly bustled back to Ireland. Their daughter was born there, named Charlotte Jemima Henrietta Maria Fitzcharles. After the Restoration Charles made Elizabeth’s husband Viscount Shannon, and she spent the rest of her life on their country estate.
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Another affair was with Eleanor, Lady Byron, whom Evelyn marked down, with grand exaggeration, as ‘the king’s seventeenth whore abroad’.
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Yet another was with Catharine Pegge, daughter of a Derbyshire royalist, with whom he had two children, Charles Fitzcharles, nicknamed ‘Don Carlos’, later Earl of Plymouth, and a daughter, Catherine. After he returned to London he installed this small family in a house in Pall Mall.

Still, the hunt for a respectable wife went on. In the early years of his exile, the possibility was raised of his marriage to Princess Louise, a daughter of the Orange stadtholder Frederick, and sister to the future William II, his sister Mary’s husband. Seeing no advantage, the House of Orange quickly declined the offer. But ten years later Charles’s strongest, and last, love abroad was Louise’s sister, the lively Henrietta Catherine. This was a genuine, reciprocal passion, squashed by her grandmother Amalia, the elderly Dowager Princess of Orange, who was convinced of the hopelessness of Charles’s quest to be king and probably equally put off by his philandering.
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(Henrietta then sensibly married the safe and solemn German prince.)

Charles was not really as wild as the Dowager Princess thought, preferring long, easy relationships to perpetual hunt and chase. He had strong feelings, and if not faithful, he was loyal. But he had great charm, and when women flung themselves at him, as they often did, or were steered into his path by ambitious courtiers, he certainly responded with great sensual pleasure. In Halifax’s view, his ‘inclinations to love were the effects of health and a good constitution, with as little mixture of the seraphic part as ever man had’.
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A couple of months before his return he enclosed a note in a letter to Lord Taaffe – who had been his emissary in his exchanges with Henrietta – asking Taaffe to give it to ‘
la petite souris
’ and adding, ‘there is here a very pritty sourie but the divell ont is the dame is so jealous that it must be a very good mouser that can take it.’
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The prize that he did take, and would cling to over the coming years, was Barbara Villiers, Mrs Palmer, whom he met in Flanders just before his return. Barbara was another ravishingly beautiful and spirited young woman with impeccable royalist credentials. Her grandfather came from the powerful Villiers clan, and was half-brother to the first Duke of Buckingham. Her father, Viscount Grandison, had died of wounds received at the siege of Bristol in 1643, when she was three, and her uncle Ned Villiers was a founder of the resistance group the Sealed Knot, and one of Hyde’s most valued agents. The Grandisons lost everything in the service of the crown, while her mother’s merchant family, the Baynings, squandered their wealth on grand drainage schemes in the fens. And although her widowed mother married the Earl of Anglesey (her late husband’s cousin and yet another Villiers), his estates too were sequestered. Like Lucy Walter, who was only two years older, the near-penniless Barbara shifted as best she could in the royalist circles of Interregnum London.

Like Lucy, too, she took a rich lover: she was ‘a little lecherous girl when she was young’, Pepys heard. At sixteen she became the mistress of Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, an affair that continued even after she married the worthy but rich Roger Palmer in 1659. Discovering the affair, Palmer threatened to remove his wife from town completely (always the worst fate for women in Restoration drama). He was resolved, she wailed to Chesterfield, ‘that nobody shall see me when I am in the country’. Her letter was almost an invitation to an elopement: ‘for I am ready and willing to go all over the world with you, and I will obey your commands, that am whilst I live – Yours’.
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Chesterfield did not rise to the bait, being immersed in the disastrous plans for royalist uprisings that summer, which saw him imprisoned six times. In January 1660 he fled England for Paris after killing a man in a duel. At the same time, Roger Palmer joined those royalists who gambled on getting a good post at the hoped-for restoration by making a donation to the cause, in his case a substantial £1,000. He also acted as an agent, supplying Hyde with information about debates in the Council of State. Barbara may therefore have gone to Brussels, not aiming to reach Chesterfield in Paris, as has been suggested, but as an inconspicuous messenger. Meanwhile Hyde worked to get Palmer elected to the Convention Parliament, and Charles himself took an interest in his case, prompted perhaps by mentions of Palmer’s ‘gay wife’. There is no definite mention of their meeting, but when they did meet, Charles fell fast.

It was rumoured that when Charles left Whitehall, exhausted, on the night of his triumphant return to London, he went to bed, not in his palace, but with the mesmerising Mrs Palmer. The report was typical of critics who saw her malign influence everywhere, right from the start of the reign. But certainly, they were lovers within a month of his return. Barbara had piles of dark hair – rich auburn in some lights – ‘alabaster skin’, blue, near-violet eyes, and conversation-stopping sexual allure. And from the start her relationship with Charles had a political edge. She was no tool, being too intelligent and fiery to be used lightly. But her relations, especially her Villiers uncles, and her uncle by marriage, James Howard, Earl of Suffolk, prepared her for her role. They knew Charles’s weakness for women, and believed that one path to power was through his bed. Halifax would later write that the placing of a mistress was ‘No small matter in a court and not unworthy the thoughts even of a party’:

A mistress, either dextrous in herself or well instructed by those that are so, may be very useful to her friends, not only in the immediate hours of her ministry, but by her influences and insinuations at other times. It was resolved generally by others whom he should have in his arms, as well as whom he should have in his councils. Of a man who was so capable of choosing, he chose as seldom as any man that ever lived.
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