King Charles II (36 page)

The oration of the Speaker of the House of Commons, delivered in the Banqueting Hall, took much longer. At the end of it the King was forced to acknowledge that he was so
exhausted that he could hardly speak, but all the same wished the Speaker to know that ‘whatsoever may concern the good of this people, I shall be as ready to grant as you shall be able to ask’. He was certainly too tired to attend a Thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey, so that a shorter service was held in the Presence Chamber. At the end of it all the King still had to dine ceremoniously in public, showing himself to his people at his food, as his ancestors had always done.

Was the weary King solaced nonetheless by his mistress Barbara Palmer? Legend had it so. And for once, in view of the birth of Barbara’s daughter Anne, almost exactly nine months later, on 25 February 1661, the legend seems perfectly plausible. It is true that Barbara’s husband, Roger Palmer, did acknowledge Anne as his own at the actual time of her birth, either because he was hoodwinked by Barbara into doing so, or because he chose to turn a blind eye to an unpleasant situation in order to preserve his marriage. But as Anne grew up, her royal paternity became quite obvious. She was officially designated the King’s daughter at the time of her marriage, created Countess of Sussex in her own right, and, with Charlotte Countess of Lichfield, Barbara’s second daughter by the King, came to form an important part of his inner family circle.

To return to the legend, it would have been quite in character for the King to have relaxed in Barbara’s arms after his triumphant if noisy processional: even if one cannot prove that he did so. Certainly he was in a high good humour at the time, giving vent to one of those wry, self-mocking observations at which he excelled. Turning to those about him with a smile, King Charles remarked that it was undoubtedly his own fault that he had been absent so long, since he had met no-one ‘who did not protest that he had ever wished for his return’.

The man the crowds cheered through London on his thirtieth birthday was an engaging but not a merry monarch. This is confirmed by all contemporary accounts. For one thing, Charles
II
was no longer young by the standards of the time. (He was in fact over half-way through his own life, but of course the average life expectancy of the time was far less than sixty.) His
appearance had much changed from those far-off days when Cromwell was wont to refer to him jocularly as ‘the young man’ and ‘the young gentleman’. Sir Samuel Tuke, in a character of Charles
II
written to coincide with his Restoration, referred to the fact that his face, which had been ‘very lovely’ until he was twenty, had now become grave and even severe in repose, although much softened when he spoke. One witness of the royal procession commented on Charles
II
’s new resemblance to his father, calling him ‘black and very slender faced’.
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Undoubtedly his face was much leaner. The nose too had markedly lengthened. Already the characteristic deep lines which are seen in all the later portraits had formed from nostril to chin, curving round the wide mouth. They are already visible in a portrait painted towards the end of his exile, and praised by Pepys for being ‘the most pleasant’ and ‘the most like him that I ever saw picture in my life’,
⁸
as well as the many engravings commemorating the Restoration. Sometimes attributed to debauchery, these particular lines were more likely caused by the tribulations of exile.

In general, it was majesty, not youth, which supplied the charm of his appearance. ‘You may read the King in every lineament’ was the general verdict on his face. His tall figure, ‘so exactly formed that the most curious eye cannot find any error in his shape’, was as appropriate in a monarch as it had been inappropriate in a fugitive; its symmetry commanded universal admiration, as did his fine long legs and shapely hands.
⁹
Once again, there was favourable comment on his shining black hair, which had not yet started to go grey: surprisingly, for his father’s black hair had silvered prematurely. The Plea Roll portrait of Michaelmas 1661 shows the curly black moustache which he preserved to the end of his life (Charles, unlike his father, was never bearded), the mass of black hair and heavy black brows which together gave a saturnine cast to his countenance – the exact word used by his contemporaries. However, even Charles was not to enjoy his thick black locks for long: three years later he went in his turn ‘mighty grey’ and adopted a periwig in consequence like everyone else.
¹⁰

The King’s other good feature, his ‘quick and sparkling’ eyes,
attracted attention. But behind the sparkle, the expression remained watchful. And the King’s habitual demeanour on his return was grave. As Pepys put it, ‘The King seems to be a very sober man’; it was the fourteen-year-old George Boddington who ran back to his father after witnessing the procession and reported that the restored monarch was ‘a black grim man’.
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And gravity, even temperance, was the keynote of the character now presented to his loyal subjects. An
Eikon Basilike
of Charles
II
(imitating the title of the famous book ascribed to his martyred father), published within a few months of his landing in England and probably written by Sir Richard Fanshawe, gives an interesting sidelight on the image of the new reigning monarch. Here Charles was inevitably credited with such sterling qualities as good judgement and apprehension, magnanimity and public-mindedness, as well as sheer goodness. (He was more good than great, as one phrase had it, contrasting Charles le Bon and Charlemagne: that recalled his father’s last letter.) But the King was also presented as having ‘sobriety and temperance’: his diet spare, his attire plain, his recreations moderate, and his speech sober – a detail incidentally confirmed by Sir Samuel Tuke, who remarked how the King never swore.
^12
fn1

It was hardly surprising if the new King was at heart sober, serious, even melancholy, rather than merry. Here was a man who had been undergoing harrowing experiences since boyhood: including his father’s death, his family’s poverty and his own humiliation. He had known, in Dante’s words,

sì come sa di sale

Lo pane altrui, e com’ è duro calle

Lo scendere e ’l salir per l’ altrui scale

(‘the salt flavour of other’s people’s bread, the hard path up and down other people’s stairs’). He had endured all this. He had
never given up. Nevertheless, it is useless to pretend that this ‘black grim man’ was the same brave boy of Edgehill, or even the spirited general on the eve of Worcester fight. It was not that King Charles
II
never intended to feel again: as we shall see, he remained, admirably, a feeling man all his life, full of affectionate impulses, one of which (towards his wife) would bedevil the monarchy’s future. But this was in private.

In public, he was determined never to be subjected again to the experience of humiliation, accompanied by helplessness. With this resolution went the presentation of a public mask of cynicism, gaiety, indifference – it could take many forms, according to the interpretation of the beholders. Behind the mask lay a melancholy which nothing, not all the fabled delights of the Restoration Court, quite dislodged.

But of course, this melancholy coexisted easily with an iron determination to preserve what was his, now wrested back from unlawful hands. Charles
II
believed passionately that monarchy was the rightful government of Britain: this conviction was built into his personal philosophy by his upbringing and had been welded there solidly by the death of his father. It was not a purely selfish view: of course he did not intend to go on his travels again, but he also, less personally and less selfishly, did not intend that his country should suffer again, as it had suffered so cruelly in the Civil War.

In the same way, an underlying melancholy was compatible with, and even inspired, a degree of doubt about the country which was now welcoming him with such rapture. He felt himself to be somewhat of an expert on the changeability of crowds. It was in keeping with the King’s suspicions that he prided himself on being able to read people’s characters from their faces, having studied the subject in a book –
Physonomia
, by G. B. della Porta.
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As he searched the smiling visages of those surrounding him at this ‘continuous Jubilee’, he was aware of the darker passions which lay concealed – and which might return. It is tempting to suppose that King Charles enjoyed at least one day of unalloyed happiness as monarch – Restoration Day. But did he in fact do so? Is there not in all his remarks and behaviour on that auspicious occasion, including the quip
that it was undoubtedly his own fault he had been away so long, a note of amiable but unmistakable caution?

As the bells rang out and finally died away, the myriad bonfires were reduced to ashes, the King remained wary. Outwardly, he could and would forgive the past – except for those directly involved in his father’s murder. Even then he showed himself more merciful than those around him. The corpses of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw (President of the court which tried Charles
I
) were exhumed and publicly hung at Tyburn, a gesture which did but little harm to the deceased. Of the forty-one surviving regicides, those who had signed the warrant and a few others closely associated with the King’s death as well as the two (unidentified) executioners of Charles
I
, twelve died altogether. It was the King who prevented a further nineteen of their number, those who had given themselves up, from being pursued by the law; he told Hyde that while he could not pardon them, he was ‘weary of hanging’.
¹⁴
He did not save Argyll in Scotland, but then Argyll was responsible for the death of Montrose; Sir Henry Vane, who also died, was charged with treason against Charles
II
rather than against Charles
I
.

The judicial process which brought the regicides to book was a great deal fairer than that allowed to King Charles
I
, since the prisoners were patiently heard in their own defence, and, in general, the rules of contemporary justice were observed. Charles was present at some of the executions, but John Evelyn put his attendance in the correct perspective. The executions were performed, he wrote, to avenge the murder of King Charles
I
and in the presence of ‘the King his son, whom they also sought to kill’. Otherwise Charles
II
, never a personally vindictive man, proved himself ‘no Orestes’.
¹⁵

He preferred positive memorials to his father: as late as 1678 the House of Commons voted £70,000 for a funeral and a monument for the murdered King, a quite incredible sum. Perhaps it was too incredible: for the money never arrived, although Wren did produce a design for a monument.
^fn2
But it
was the measure of the King’s forgiveness that by a decade after his Restoration he was accepting hospitality from Henry Cromwell, second son of the late Protector, at his home near Newmarket.

Nevertheless, in Charles
II
a temperamental disinclination to vengeance was not at all the same thing as an inclination to forget the past. Revolution, and its possible consequences, was one spectre which stalked the corridors of the King’s palace from the inception of his reign to its end (even though this spectre would take different guises in different decades). But at no point was the presence of such a threatening ghost felt more acutely than in the early 1660s. To understand this, one has to be wary of hindsight. Not to the monarch riding down towards Whitehall on 29 May was there granted the cheerful knowledge that he would die in his bed twenty-five years later. On the contrary, he arrived in a country in desperate need of settlement, coming from a Europe in which the tide of revolution, flowing strongly in 1648, was only just beginning to subside. Like his first cousin Louis
XIV
, Charles had been formed against a background of such experiences.

Thus one finds the implicit fear of another revolution expressed continuously and in all sorts of different ways in the early years of the reign. There were significant details such as the preference for Windsor Castle as a royal fortress, not simply because it was ‘the most romantique castle that is in the world’, but because it could be properly garrisoned.
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There were broader policies, such as the concentration on forming a proper body of guards to surround the monarch. Richard Cromwell, exiled and debt-ridden, was clearly a burnt-out case: yet it was considered worth while reporting on his movements. A general jumpiness animated surveys of the careers of those with regicide connections.

Still more important is it to realize that in the early years plots were not only feared, but actually existed. Periodically substance was given to these apprehensions; otherwise they
might have dissolved in the growing stability of the Restoration state. In January 1661, for instance, the Fifth Monarchy men, members of a millenarian sect, ran amok under a Thomas Venner; the later plots of 1663 and 1664 led to the production of diligent if circumstantial reports on the subversive activities of republicans, Quakers, and other sectaries. The year 1663 also produced quite a serious republican plot in Ireland; similar disturbances in Scotland evoked from Pepys the nervous reaction that the Bishops’ Wars might be happening all over again – tremors which demonstrate how finely balanced popular stability was considered to be in the early years of the reign. During the Dutch War there were genuine conspiracies in London, to give colour to royal and other fears.

The fatal years after 1640 had left their curse behind: never again could revolution be unimaginable. Not only had Charles himself suffered the strong marks of an impressionable child, but nearly all his current ministers had been sufficiently active to have retained potent memories of republicanism – from one angle or the other. One of the King’s little jokes commemorated the fact, pleasantly but pointedly: he told the former Commonwealth commanders in his splendid new Navy that ‘they all had had the plague but they were quite sound now and less accessible to the disease than others’.
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