King Charles II (31 page)

The next step was to remove her son from Lucy’s care. It was not a pretty story. Repeated efforts were made – abduction, if not outright kidnapping, was planned in what the King called ‘the matter of the child’.
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By 1658 James had been successfully removed to the care of his grandmother, Henrietta Maria, in Paris. Yet in view of the fact that Lucy died shortly afterwards
of venereal disease, the removal, however callously performed, was clearly in the child’s best interests.

Any emotion that the young Charles might have felt for the young Lucy back in those halcyon days before his father’s death had certainly been exhausted many years back. But to the years of his exile does belong the story of one romance which clearly did mean something more to him than mere dalliance and desire. The extent of King Charles’s feelings for the Princess Henrietta Catharine of Orange, daughter of the Dowager Princess and sister-in-law to Mary, has newly come to light. It is revealed in a series of letters written in Charles’ own hand to his friend Lord Taaffe, to whom he confided his warm aspirations in this direction.
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Princess Henrietta Catharine, a Dutch Protestant (evidently not be confused with those despised Nordic princesses from cold countries), was a perfectly reputable match for Charles. It will be recalled that quite early on her elder sister Louise Henrietta, now the wife of the Elector of Brandenburg, had been suggested as a possible bride for him. Orange and Stuart were naturally drawn to each other in marriage, as representing two powerful Protestant houses. Two unions actually took place in the seventeenth century, but several more were plausibly suggested.

Nevertheless, it was as much Henrietta Catharine’s character as her eligibility which attracted Charles. She was a girl of spirit: for example, she totally refused to marry the fiancé given her in infancy, a Friesian prince, on the grounds of her unconquerable aversion to his person. It was an unfashionable objection at the time, and cannot have been easy to sustain in the face of a determined mother like the Dowager Princess of Orange. Henrietta Catharine matched Charles’ protestations with her own, as he related to Taaffe: ‘The professions I receive from her every letter, are large and full as either you do or can say.’
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The genuine passion in Charles’ own utterances suggest that he was only too pleased to give himself up on this occasion to a courtship which was both materially suitable and romantically inspiring. Charles’ gallantries were manifold. Six pairs of gloves were ordered for ‘my friend’ (at other times she became ‘my
best friend’, and her code name was the ‘infanta’. Charles himself used the pseudonym ‘Don Lauren’ or ‘Loran’). The gloves arrived in the name of Taaffe because they were not up to Charles’ own standards; he had ordered some like his sister’s from Paris, but they would not arrive till Easter. On Shrove Tuesday he planned to eat pancakes and draw valentines with the women, while privately drinking the ‘infanta’s’ health. ‘For I cannot choose but say she is the worthiest to be lov’d of all the sex,’ boasted Charles to Taaffe of his Princess.
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If love burgeoned in the King’s heart at Bruges, to that town also fell a more surprising honour on the face of it: it could claim to be the founding place of a famous regiment, for it was here in 1656 that Charles formed his own King’s Regiment of Guards, much later – after Waterloo – officially known as the Grenadiers. The reason for the formation was rooted in that clause of the Spanish treaty concerning Royalist troops which has already been mentioned.

It was not only a question of transferring Irish soldiers from the French Army: King Charles also undertook to raise some troops of his own. As a result, one regiment of English guards was placed under Rochester, a Scottish unit under Middleton and an Irish one under Ormonde. Early in 1657 three more regiments were added under the respective commands of the Duke of Gloucester, the Earl of Bristol (the former Lord Digby) and the Earl of Newburgh. Later the Duke of York was put in overall command, adding a small Life Guard under Berkeley. This international brigade went into service under the Spanish flag in June 1657. Later it would form the nucleus of the post-Restoration Army. At the time, its existence seemed to raise as many difficulties as it solved.

The names of the commanders have a solid and appropriate ring. It was the men serving in the regiments who presented the problems. Thurloe’s spies were full of contempt for them. ‘Of all the armies in Europe there is none wherein so much debauchery is to be seen as in these few forces which the said King hath gotten together,’ wrote one of them, ‘being so exceedingly profane from the highest to the lowest.’ The Irish
in particular were singled out as being ‘better versed in the art of begging than fighting’. They were fierce enough to acquire financial contributions from whomsoever they accosted, ‘whose fear makes him more liberal than his character’.
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It was indeed the perennial lack of money which was responsible for these troubles. The men, underpaid if paid at all, were ill-equipped and thus ill-disciplined. Hyde referred to these new regiments as ‘naked soldiers’ – a sad spectacle.
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Such troops were hardly likely to provide patterns of martial behaviour. For the lamentable truth was that the fabulous Spanish gold had failed to materialize. In some ways, King Charles was even worse off than he had been before the move to the Low Countries: in Cologne he had lived off hope and the French pension. Now the latter source had, naturally, dried up. And as Charles found the Spanish ‘Don Devil’ as recalcitrant a banker as ever the French Cardinal had been, the fountain of hope began to drain away.

For all the bright horizons extended by the Spanish treaty, 1657 proved to be a year in which the English King touched the depths of depression. He had told Jermyn in the preceding October,
à propos
Mazarin’s warmth towards Cromwell, ‘You will do well to put him in mind that I am not yet so low, but that I may return both the courtesies and the injuries I have received.’
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Yet as the months wore on, the King’s ability either to reward or punish merely declined. In the summer campaign of Spanish against French, Don Juan would not allow Charles to the front, but insisted on him remaining passively at Bruges. It was a hard fate for a former commander-in-chief of a Scottish army, whose courage had never been called in question. The King’s melancholia was once again the subject of comment. The fate of his younger brothers James and Harry, permitted to shine at the front, was enviable.

Refuge was taken in absurd schemes, and still more absurd rumours. Oliver Cromwell, for example, was said to have tried to lure Charles over to England in a single ship, accompanied by his two brothers, with a view to shooting all three of them out of hand on arrival. A glimpse of things as they really were was provided when Buckingham decided to desert; returning to
England, he married the heiress of Sir Thomas Fairfax. Although he ended up clapped into prison by the Protector for his pains, Buckingham had made it clear by his behaviour that he regarded the Royalist vessel as a sinking ship. In the autumn of 1657 Hyde summed up the mood of the Royalists at home as ‘heartbroken’: as a result, they looked for redress from ‘some extraordinary act of providence’ rather than from any endeavours of their own.
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Nor, by the autumn, had the Spaniards shown any sign of mounting that extraordinary force against England, based on Flanders, the promise of which had been the mainspring of the projected treaty. Out of England herself, those radicals discontented with the Protectoral regime, the Levellers, explored the possibilities of Spanish help via their agent Sexby. But the Spaniards, by no means convinced that the moment was ripe for any invading force, continued to indulge in that gentle art of procrastination, whose subtleties they understood so well.

In December it was the bright suggestion of Don Juan that some further light might be cast on the English situation if Ormonde reconnoitred it. If Ormonde was impressed by the state of readiness he found there, then it would still not be too late for a Spanish army to invade before the end of the winter season. So Ormonde set out at the turn of the year, dyeing his famous poll of fair hair black. Despite some nerve-racking experiences within London itself, which should have cautioned him concerning the strong grip of the Protectoral government, Ormonde returned a favourable report.

It was the final proof of the Protectoral government’s confidence, of which Ormonde was unaware, that his escape was probably due to a decision by Cromwell to turn a blind eye.
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The arrest of Ormonde in England, it was thought, would be politically embarrassing, and unnecessary as long as he quit the country.

Ormonde suggested that the King could land near Yarmouth with safety – a view for which there was no real justification. But Ormonde found himself coping with the renewed demands of the Action Party in England for the presence of their sovereign, to which once again they attributed miraculous powers
of rallying otherwise reluctant insurgents. In the event, the petty risings of 1658 were easily, almost effortlessly, put down by the Protectoral government. That was not really so surprising in view of the fact that most of the Royalist organizations, including the Sealed Knot, were by now permeated with government spies. The Protectorate Navy was also now blockading the Spanish Netherlands, which ruled out any question of the despatch of the reluctant Spanish Armada.

King Charles now moved to Antwerp, a more convenient jumping-off ground for a projected invasion than Bruges-la-Morte. Here he gave in at last to the incessant clamour for honours with which the exiles were wont to greet his ears, as though peerages and decorations would at least stuff their starving mouths with glory. There is a particular despair shown in the decision to give the Garter, the sacred Garter, to a French Count not even of royal blood. Charles had already pawned his beloved George to pay for Ormonde’s expedition.

At a ball given by the Countess of Newcastle, the intellectual wife of his former governor, a speech of the ‘highest hyperbole’ was made to the King by a Major Mohun, dressed in black velvet for the occasion and wearing a garland of bays. Major Mohun followed this success with another speech ‘by way of prophecy of his Majesty’s establishment’ in England.
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If there were any present who paid serious attention to the prophecy, by the spring of 1658 King Charles
II
was hardly likely to be amongst them.

The summer saw the climax of the seemingly endless war between Spain and France. The Spanish were defeated by the French and the English combined, at the mighty Battle of the Dunes; as a result, Dunkirk was given over to the England of the Protectorate. It was true that the Stuart brothers behaved valiantly throughout the campaign. James continued to add to his reputation as a soldier, and even Charles was allowed to lead one charge at Mardyke, which he did with his usual
éclat
. The arrival of an English Protectoral force in Flanders in support of France did at least provide some motive for Don Juan to employ the English King as a kind of counter-attraction. Yet the long war between Spain and France, from which Charles had tried
so hard to extract some advantage, was drawing to its close. It was not a
dénouement
which favoured the Stuarts. If anything, the course of the war had assisted revolutionary England rather than the exiled Royalists. It ended altogether the following year.

The English King could think of no further expedient, apart from a personal appeal to the Spanish King. He was told that his presence in Spain would not be welcome.

Disconsolately, Charles set off on a hunting and hawking expedition from Antwerp. Even that seemed to suffer from a kind of doom. He found very few partridges and too much standing corn. He was actually at Hoogstraeten, on the borders of the Netherlands, and playing tennis – rapidly becoming his favourite game – when, on 10 September 1658, Sir Stephen Fox came and told him a remarkable piece of news. A week earlier, in the words of one of Hyde’s correspondents, ‘it had pleased God out of His infinite goodness to do that which He would not allow any man the honour of doing’.
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Oliver Cromwell had died of natural causes.

1
But written for another Charles Stuart who led his followers into exile, King Charles
II
’s great-nephew, Bonnie Prince Charlie.

2
To prove that Charles married Lucy secretly, the point is sometimes made that Mary of Orange referred to her in letters as his ‘wife’. But Mary also referred to Lucy’s other admirers as ‘husbands’, e.g. ‘her husband here’, ‘she thinks of another husband’. The allusions are clearly jocular. We should probably say ‘sweetheart’ today.
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‘The King of Scots hath an army at the waterside, drawn down towards the waterside, ready to be shipped for England….’