King Charles II (29 page)

The Protector did not finally reject the notion of a royal crown until April 1657, and then only at the end of a period of agonized indecision. During this time a betting man would have gambled on his acceptance. For the next few years, the Protector’s increasingly monarchical state presented to the European powers, including Spain, a continual reminder of the impotent situation of the theoretical monarch of the country. It was not a good augury for the Spanish negotiations.

There were rumours, as time went on, that one of Cromwell’s pretty young daughters might provide a bride for the exiled King.
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In this way, the Protectoral House of Cromwell and the Royal House of Stuart could be fused to the advantage of both: presumably the next step would have been the accession of King Charles and his Cromwellian Queen to an English throne left vacant by the death of Oliver. It is easy to despise the rumour as foolish; but in the slough following the Penruddock fiasco it was not such a ridiculous idea. The return of the royal family in modern Spain was accomplished when a dictator adopted a King to rule after his death. Monarchy can be restored in many different ways.

The ‘dead calm’ in England in the summer of 1655, and the renewed talk of ‘making a king’ (namely Cromwell), combined to render the state of the exiled Royalists particularly harsh.
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Their brethren, who had trickled back to England and settled for the status quo, were well off by contrast. The shrill tune of poverty, which is the theme song of these bitter years, was chanted louder than ever by the exiles.

In July Charles was reported to be too poor to eat meat for ten days; in December a gift of a pack of hounds from England gave rise to dreadful embarrassment, since it cost a fortune to
keep the hounds in food, and yet it was naturally out of the question to return them to their donor. The next year Dorothy Chiffinch could not even get together the money for the King’s washing, and in September 1657 Hyde noted that everything, literally everything (‘every bit of meat, every drop of drink, all the fire and all the candles’) which had come the King’s way had been acquired on credit. About the same date the King was said to have sunk so low that he had to manage with a single dish for his meals – just as well, perhaps, if nothing whatsoever had been paid for, but an extraordinary state of affairs by the standards of the time, when the meals of a king had a prestigious life of their own. By 1659 Hyde was writing of ‘insupportable debts’.
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In the correspondence of the King’s servants the phrases of want and desperation occur and recur. Sir Marmaduke Langdale described himself as being in such a ‘mean condition’ that he could not seek out the company of persons of quality. George Lane was in torment, trying to get money for his sick wife and child. A Scottish knight named Maxwell who quarrelled with his unpaid landlord was given this sapient advice by Ormonde: first of all to eat his words, and then (gratefully) his supper. Lord Norwich wrote of being dull, lame, cold, and totally out of money, to the extent that when his coat was badly singed he had to cut off the blackened area and continue to wear it as before, since he had no other. Even Thurloe’s spies, set to watch the exiled court, were moved to pity. ‘How they will all live God knows! I am sure I do not!’ exclaimed one.
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As the year went by, many of the Royalists experienced those feelings so eloquently expressed by Lord Macaulay in ‘A Jacobite’s Epitaph’.
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For him I threw lands, honour, wealth away,

And one dear hope, that was more prized than they.

For him I languished in a foreign clime,

Grey-haired with sorrow in my manhood’s prime….

And some elected to make the sacrifice no longer.

To one prospective resettler in England, Hyde wrote anxiously, ‘Ask yourself (for you must take a large prospect) … whether, if you were there, you would retain all your own zeal for your Master’s interests.’
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Hyde worried in particular that the creation of Cromwell the King would involve returning Royalists in an oath of loyalty to him – or at least an Oath of Abjuration from King Charles. But neither the neurosis of Hyde, nor the valiance of Charles, could prevent the gradual attrition of the royal cause within and without England.

In February 1655 the King had suggested to Anthony Ashley Cooper that his experience would tell him ‘how unsettled all things must be, till I am restored to that which belongs to me, which would restore peace to the nation’. Ashley Cooper was an important West Country magnate who had elected to throw in his lot with the Protectoral regime by becoming a member of the Council of State. Unfortunately, his experience clearly told him the exact contrary. He never answered the letter.
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He was typical of many who for the foreseeable future identified stability with Cromwell, not Charles.

It was in this context that the prospects of Spanish assistance were assessed with a mixture of hope and apprehension in the autumn of 1655. In the letters of Nicholas, for example, we find on the one hand confidence that the Spanish King will declare war on Cromwell for the rape of Jamaica: ‘Which done, I doubt not but (for his own interest) he will find it most necessary to espouse the king’s quarrel.’ On the other hand, only a few weeks earlier Nicholas had summed up with far greater accuracy the complications inherent in any endorsement of Charles
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: ‘I do not think that the [Spanish] king will so suddenly and heartily embrace our Master’s interests,’ he wrote, ‘having observed how slow his Majesty’s party in England are to rise for him, how much he is entangled in the snares of France, and how many about him are suspected for their loyalty.’
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One step which the English King now felt it essential to take, if he was to make any progress at all with the Spanish, was to move nearer the centre of things. Besides, Cologne was beginning to pall. There was ‘a jolly journey’ – Hyde’s words – to the
Frankfurt Fair in September, with Mary. In theory, brother and sister travelled incognito, but, as Charles wryly commented to his aunt Elizabeth of Bohemia, ‘’tis so great a secret that not above half the town of Cologne knows it.’ He also told Elizabeth that he hoped to be furnished with ‘some good stories’ before the end of their journey. Which expectation was no doubt fulfilled, since at Frankfurt the King encountered the English actor-manager George Jolly, famous for employing ‘skilful women’ in his troupe, at a time when females on the stage were a distinct novelty. The King’s patronage of Jolly was secured, and, in happier times back in England, would be amplified.
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Yet the King could not linger for ever in this outpost, making the occasional merry sortie to paper over the cracks in his confidence. His aim was to reach the Low Countries, preferably the Spanish Netherlands, where the presence of the influential governor, Don Juan (an illegitimate son of the Spanish King), would surely expedite a Spanish alliance. Finally, Charles secured permission to come to Brussels, the capital of the Spanish Netherlands, arriving there in March 1656. The crucial negotiations – from the English point of view – began.

The letters of the King back to his mentor Hyde on the subject make at times touching reading. The King showed a frantic desire to address Don Juan correctly, which was quite alien to his normal practice, and even regretted not having brought with him Hyde’s guide to etiquette: ‘your book of inscriptions, subscriptions and superscriptions’. In its absence, he had to copy the correct mode of address off another letter. The King’s concern for proper communication extended to a desire to learn Spanish himself: he asked Ormonde to get him a Spanish New Testament, ‘for I think we have much need of that language’.
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As for the negotiations, they were on the surface successful, or, as Charles himself told Hyde, ‘At first I found them [the Spanish] dry … yet at last they began to be very free with me.’
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Projected clauses of the Spanish Treaty (which was not actually signed until 2 April 1658) included a monthly allowance of three thousand crowns for Charles himself and half that amount for James. The Spanish ports would in future welcome the English
Royalist privateers, while, most important of all, Spanish armed help was promised to place the King of England on his throne. In return, Charles promised the suspension, and if possible the Parliamentary revocation, of the penal laws against English Catholics once he had been restored; he also swore to maintain an alliance with the Irish Catholics. Lastly, the existing Royalist soldiers abroad, notably the fair number of Irish soldiers currently serving with France, were to be pressed into service with Spain – against France.

One may believe that Charles gave the promises concerning English Catholicism with a light heart, since he was evidently a very long way off being able to implement them. But the clause concerning the Royalist soldiers had the immediate effect of angering his brother James. The Duke of York had enjoyed service in the French Army; prospering, he had been offered a French command in Italy by Mazarin. Now he was expected to transfer his allegiance and also his fighting command to Spain. In an understandable huff at this high-handed disposal of himself, James declined to come to his brother’s side but went instead to the United Provinces. It was left to Ormonde to act as peacemaker and conciliate James; in the meantime, Henry Duke of Gloucester served as a volunteer with the Spanish.

In Holland, too, Mary Princess of Orange was not best pleased by the Spanish alliance. Her beloved brother, the centre of her emotional life since the death of her husband – she would not live until she saw him again, she wrote of her departure from Düsseldorf – had joined with the hereditary enemy of the United Provinces. Mary’s efforts to establish herself there as Princess of Orange and mother of William were not helped by her brother’s action. For once Mary had something in common with her mother, since Henrietta Maria naturally abhorred the Spanish trend, which made her own position in France similarly awkward.

There was a period of coldness between Charles and Mary, the once devoted pair. Mary visited her mother in France at her own expense, to demonstrate her opinion of the Spanish alliance (although she may also have harboured a private ambition to marry her cousin Louis
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, seven years her junior). Later
Charles came to criticize Mary for the lack of prudence in her behaviour. She quarrelled with Lord and Lady Balcarres, whom he had placed in her train, and he blamed her for her romance with the young Harry Jermyn, nephew of her mother’s favourite. Mary pouted. In general, these were neither happy nor united times for the Stuart royal family, whose internal quarrels and dissension mirrored those of King Charles’ advisers.

Of course, the bickering of brother and sister, brother and brother, was as nothing beside the fundamental division which did exist within the structure of the family. That lay between Queen Henrietta Maria on the one side, and King Charles on the other, and concerned the vital and by now highly political topic of religion. It sprang both from Henrietta Maria’s missionary Catholicism, and from her son’s rejection of it.

Much has been written on the subject of the religion of Charles
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, about which only two things can be stated with absolute certainty: that he was born a member of the Church of England (like his father), and that he died fifty-five years later a member of the Roman Catholic Church (like his mother). The exact moment at which the change was made, first in his own heart, secondly in the form of an official conversion divulged to a Catholic priest, can only be suggested, not known. It is nevertheless important to point out the savagery with which Charles
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denounced his mother’s Catholic fervour in the 1650s, in order to refute firmly the proposition that this conversion took place in exile.

On the evidence, nothing was further from King Charles’ mind. He was horribly aware that even a rumour of his conversion might fatally damage the prospects of his restoration to the English throne. At the same time, he was subject to constant surveillance from the spies and agents of the English government, who for their part were well aware of the propagandist value of such charges. The King’s ‘praying ministers’, for example, were reported as wearing long black gowns, like those of Catholic priests, in Brussels; furthermore, they were actually said to have entered Catholic chapels in these vestments,
causing scandal. Whenever the exiled King could, he issued denials of such tales.
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It would be wrong to claim for King Charles as a young man any excessive spirituality; and his interest in comparative religion, as seen in the dialogue with Father Huddleston, was more naively curious than deeply reflective. But he was extremely interested in the political effects of religious allegiance, as perforce the early experiences of his father, and his own dealings with the Scots and Irish, had trained him to be. When his grandfather, the great Henri, had changed religion, he had done it for a blatantly political reason. Now that Charles was dealing with the notoriously Catholic Spanish, he trod delicately to preserve the image of his own personal Protestantism; otherwise, he would not only be restored by the agency of an alien Catholic power, but in the guise of a Catholic alien himself.

This is not to exclude visits to Catholic churches and chapels, and even attendance at Mass. Ormonde was supposed to have seen the King at Mass.
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There are sufficient travellers’ tales and spies’ reports of such incidents to make it perfectly plausible that the King in this way did join in the life of the countries where he found himself, during the long years of exile. But a strong distinction must be drawn between stories of attendance as Mass, when in a Catholic country, and conversion. A comparison can be made with Protestant or agnostic tourists today visiting Catholic countries such as Italy: it is as though every such attendance at a Mass in an Italian Catholic chapel was held to be evidence of a conversion. James Duke of York, who bore less responsibility, leant towards Rome sooner than his brother. The incidence of his visits to Catholic churches may also have increased the stories about the King, since it was easy for rumour to mistake one brother and another.