King Charles II (37 page)

As to the absurdity of such fears – that the surviving regicides, aided by the soldiery, plus some new republicans, might overthrow the Crown once more – this was not so striking at the time. In May 1664 the French Ambassador, an intelligent observer, wrote that it did not seem impossible that the English would ‘be tempted again to try and taste a Commonwealth’, remembering their greatness under Cromwell.
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King Charles
II
made his own position on the subject clear in his speech to Parliament of February 1663. Referring to certain ‘rogues’ who had escaped punishment recently for want of legal evidence, including William Stockdale, MP, he said, ‘But let him not believe it, although he creates just the same stirs as were prepared before the Long Parliament, that I, knowing the mischiefs then, will not prevent them now.’ The King went on to say that ‘justice I see must be done against such restless
spirits, and let them not delude themselves into a belief to find me tame’.
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The glorious twenty-ninth of May, then, ushered in an age of anxiety as well as an age of rejoicing.

Yet with these twin provisos of watchfulness against the repetition of revolution and concern for justice to his father’s memory, King Charles
II
arrived in a healing mood. ‘At which Time he prov’d himself the Noah’s Dove, that finding no Rest anywhere, was receiv’d again into his own Ark, and brought a peaceable Olive-Leaf in his mouth’– thus
Titus Britannicus
.
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And the sentiments were not exaggerated. In his determined mercy, King Charles in 1660 did show himself indeed a veritable olive-branch-bearing dove. The only trouble was that to bear the olive-leaf involved another twin pair of considerations: conciliation and reward. One or the other he might have achieved: the conciliation of the Cromwellians, the reward of the exiled and wounded Royalists. To do both was likely to prove very difficult, if not impossible. Nevertheless, the King set out with the highest intentions.

Let us start with reward, the implementation of those hopes whose existence had been so vital to the maintenance of morale during the exile. The loyal petitions began to flood in at once: in fact, many of them had already been received before the King’s arrival, and throughout May Hyde had been deluged with petitions for peerages, ecclesiastical preferments and the like. How many of these petitions related to Worcester! It was not only the King who looked back to that fearful time. One Mary Graves petitioned for having provided twelve steeds: one of these, she was reliably informed, had been shot down from beneath the King during the battle and ‘the other I heard was that happy horse His Majesty got from Worcester upon….’ Less romantic were the drapers of Worcester who had been commanded to clothe the life guard in red cloth and had never been paid; they wanted £450.
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Sir Jonathan Wiseman of Glastonbury spoke for many when he wrote of himself in semi-biblical language: ‘Your poor petitioner hath been tost and tumbled up and down and was
hated of all men, and was tried eleven times for my life, and was imprisoned but still got away….’ And then there were those, not a few, who had served Charles
I
, such as the poignant story of the dead King’s cannoneer, who had lost both his eyes and his arms in service. In general, the Stuarts remembered their old servants. Poignant memories were aroused by some pensions granted. Four women cradle-rockers to ‘our late dear sisters’ the Princesses Elizabeth (dead at Carisbrooke) and Anne (dead as a baby) were rewarded, as well as those who had served Charles
I
and even James
I
.
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It was of course one of the penalties of the unopposed Restoration that very few names could legitimately be struck off the list. Sir William Killigrew, a royal servant who understood the ways of the world (he also wrote plays), had foreseen this in April: ‘Suppose, Sir, that you were now called in without any restrictions. How impossible a work it would be to please all those that have really served your father, and yourself … ’tis not your three kingdoms that will afford half enough places, or employments for them all.’
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There was another problem. Through all these petitions and the Restoration settlement itself, we can discern the obsession of the loyal not only that they should, understandably, be rewarded, but less attractively, that the disloyal should not. The point was made early on concerning the composition of the King’s entourage: ‘It is observed by your Majesty’s said royal party, that all those who were the greatest actors both against your royal father and yourself are the only men who are preferred to the highest places of authority and trust about your Majesty,’ ran one petition. Later Rochester the cynical put the same point as he sneered:

His father’s foes he does reward…

Never was any King endued

With so much grace and gratitude.

When Sir Richard Fanshawe, who had been promised by Charles a post as a Secretary of State, was passed over for Monck’s protégé, William Morrice, he expostulated that he had been
slighted in favour of ‘one that never saw the King’s face’.
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The Morrice incident summed up the King’s difficulties in a nutshell. After the happy ending of the Restoration, he had to go forward and reconstruct the government of the country, and former foes were vitally important for the kind of healing settlement he had in mind. His attitude to the scientist Sir William Petty was characteristic. At the Restoration, Petty felt it necessary to explain that his involvement with the government of Ireland during the Commonwealth and Protectorate (including his celebrated survey of the country) had not been done out of any desire to harm the monarchy. ‘But the King, seeing little to mind apologies, as needless, replied: “But, Doctor, why have you left off your inquiries into the mechanics of shipping?”’ And the conversation quickly passed to such agreeable (to the King) topics as loadstones, guns, the feathering of arrows, the vegetation of plants and the history of trade.
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The first body of men who surrounded the King was indeed a combination of the old and the new (for all the complaints of the loyal petitioner quoted above). It was of course dominated by the trusted counsellor Hyde and the veteran Sir Edward Nicholas, who was given the other secretaryship of State. The Marquess of Ormonde was made Lord Steward of the Household to compensate for the fact that Parliament had appointed Monck Lord Lieutenant of Ireland – although the following year Ormonde was restored to the post for which, as a man who loved and cared for the country, he was so well equipped; he was also given a dukedom. But the Lord Treasurer was to be the Earl of Southampton, a magnate who, if he had had no truck with the Protectoral government, had not shared the exile either; and, even more significantly, his nephew, Anthony Ashley Cooper, who had been a member of the republican Council of State, was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. This group formed, in Hyde’s words, ‘a secret committee’.

Beyond them lay the Privy Council, numbering between forty and fifty. Beyond that lay Parliament, once again two-housed. What were its powers? For that matter, what was its relation to the monarchy? What indeed were the powers of the monarchy? It was one of the remarkable consequences of the King’s
unconditional Restoration that in spite of years of argument, civil war, discussion and experiment, no one in 1660 yet had a clear idea as to what the proper answers to these questions were.

In so far as an accepted
theory
existed, it gave the King wide powers. Although the whole Restoration was based on an optimistic feeling that the King and Parliament would in future amicably share power, there was absolutely no indication as to how this was to be worked out in practice. In the meantime, the King retained his prerogative untouched, and with it the right to prorogue or dissolve Parliaments at will, to control foreign policy and, when necessary, to wage war. As against this, Parliament, it was understood, would vote him the extra monies he might need for such matters, since he was no longer expected to ‘live of his own’ (and even the mediaeval Kings had sought money from Parliament to wage war). But the potential control of Parliament over the King inherent in this situation had no theoretical base to it. It was all very confusing.

In 1664 the French Ambassador commented disapprovingly of the English constitution that it had a monarchical appearance, as there was a king ‘but at the bottom it is very far from being a monarchy’. He questioned whether this confusion was caused by ‘the fundamental laws of the kingdom’ or by the ‘carelessness of the king’.
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In fact, neither was responsible. The confusion developed out of the peculiar circumstances of the Restoration settlement, which presented the King with, on the one hand, very wide powers, and, on the other hand, equally wide problems, which he could not solve without the co-operation of almost everyone in the State.

It was a measure of the uncertainty of the times that the moment was not felt appropriate for a general election. Although the sitting House of Commons had not been elected legally (they lacked the King’s writ), they were confirmed in their existence, and kept there till December to carry out all the vital post-Restoration legislation. This Convention Parliament thus passed a general Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, from which only fifty named individuals were excepted. The King put the argument for such a measure cogently: ‘It will make them [the
former rebels] good subjects to me and good friends and neighbours to you [the loyalists] and we shall have them all our end….’
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Equally important was the settlement of the Army. A measure was passed to the effect that Commonwealth salaries need not be repaid – this reassured General Monck, amongst others – while of course the Act of Indemnity affected the soldiers as much as any section of the community. At the same time, King Charles took a prudent decision to alter the entire composition of the future Army.

Disbanding the old Cromwellian soldiers at considerable financial cost, he welded together by degrees a totally new kind of force out of his former Royalist regiments and whatever military elements in England were indubitably loyal. He retained, for example, the Coldstream Guards, who were a Cromwellian creation. It was, to be frank, the first English standing army – in the sense of a non-political military body in support of the civil power. But considerable effort was made to camouflage the fact: references wee made to ‘guards’ and ‘garrisons’ rather than to the dreaded word ‘army’. And the King’s army was incidentally a convenient source of reward for that other army – of needy place-seekers.

Where the law was concerned, conciliation was more obvious, innovation less apparent. The vital principle was established that service during the Interregnum should be no disqualification: thus both Sir Matthew Hale and Edward Atkins, who had been esteemed judges under Cromwell, were reappointed, and as a result even Bishop Burnet credits Charles with good judges. Furthermore, the judges were for the most part appointed to the more liberal formula of
quamdiu se bene gesserit
– so long as they conducted themselves properly, rather than the more autocratic
durante bene placito
– so long as it pleased the King to appoint them.
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There was one area where public innovation simply could not be avoided, and yet conciliation of all parties was absolutely vital, and that was the vexed area of religion. The question of what sort of State church should exist in England after the Restoration was, like the constitution itself, left wide open at
Charles’ return. The promises given at Breda had however been generous in scope. For the rest of 1660 the omens for some tolerant kind of establishment, allowing for both nonconformist and Catholic dissent, looked more hopeful than they would again for two centuries. The King was by temperament, conviction, and (by the implications of his word at Breda) personally inclined to toleration. As he had told Morrice from Breda, he was confident that he had ‘offered nothing’ in his Declaration and letters ‘that I will not meet punctually and exactly perform’.
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The Puritans who had recently ruled the State church knew that some severe alteration in their position was inevitable after his return. Nonconformists, like the Quakers, were petitioning for a situation by which they could rest within the State – peacefully rather than turbulently as hitherto.

On 25 October 1660 the King issued a declaration in favour of a modified episcopacy, which it was understood that the Presbyterians would also accept. Secretary Morrice offered that this declaration should be embodied in a bill, but this solution, most unfortunately, even tragically, was rejected by the Commons in November. A conference then met at the lodgings of the Bishop of London to work out the details of a compromise by which some Presbyterians could accept preferment.
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It was a defeat, not only for moderation and toleration (leading the way to the much harsher Clarendon Code), but also for the King’s own plan for the English Church. He had taken much interest in the conference, attending it personally. He listened while general concessions were discussed but finally abandoned because the Catholics might benefit. Throughout he held firmly to that view which he had never abandoned in exile, that the Anglican Church represented the right solution for England. He spoke movingly of the Book of Common Prayer: ‘the best we have seen, and we believe that we have seen all that are extant and used in this part of the world….’
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Carlyle denounced the Restoration settlement in his usual fine splenetic style; he took the body of Oliver Cromwell hanging from Tyburn to be ‘a fingerpost’ into ‘very strange country and far from the government of God. It called and thought itself a Settlement of brightest hope and fulfilment,’ he wrote, ‘bright
as the blaze of universal tar-barrels and bonfires could make it: and we find it now, on looking back on it with the insight which trial has yielded, a Settlement as of despair.’ But the despair did not come from the abandonment of Puritanism, as Carlyle fondly believed; it arose through the failure of the English Parliament in 1660 to follow their King’s admirable lead in promoting an established Anglican Church, with the ability to tolerate other law-abiding sects in the wings of its many mansions.