King Charles II (38 page)

The land settlement was in general more successful than the religious settlement, because here the status quo could be, and was, respected – except in the case of Crown and Church lands – even at the cost of the Royalists: it has been established that surprisingly little land actually changed hands at the Restoration. The Crown and Church lands were successfully restored, despite the conflict of interest with those who had acquired them, as a result of the successful manœuvres of Hyde and the King.
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This was partly due to the fact that the sequestered Royalists had retained ownership of their forfeited lands more than was lawful by making it over to trustees or relatives; but it was also the innate wish of Parliament and King not to disturb England, as she was, more than was absolutely necessary to bring about justice. And in the view of some Royalists of course the justice brought about was rough indeed.

Where pomp was concerned, Charles
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was outwardly traditional rather than innovatory. It was in keeping with this that the first year of his reign was always referred to as the twelfth – as though the eleven years’ Interregnum since his father’s death was of no account. And of course his display had a political purpose. He had after all been brought back to incarnate not a republican head of state, but the beloved old monarchy for which the people yearned.

Thus the immediate needs of a restored sovereign were felt to include tradespeople of all sorts, tinker and tailor, as well as soldier and sailor: an Arras worker, a bookbinder, a brewer, a coffee-maker, a fishmonger, mat-layer, milliner, fruiterer, saddler, milkman, woollen draper, clock-maker, comb-maker, corn-cutter
(awarded a special scarlet livery, as was the royal rat-killer).
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This list of positions was as endless as were the petitions to fill them: the equivalent to the royal warrants today, the coveted right to state ‘By Appointment to…’.

On a grander level, the King needed, naturally, a Master of Tents, a Surveyor of Stables, Falconers, Cormorant Keepers. On the most important level of all, he needed to reorganize the entire paraphernalia of the royal existence, which had fallen into desuetude during the previous twenty years. Here the King’s return was to take a palpable form, in terms of building and artistic commission, summed up by the great allegorical ceiling of the Restoration itself commissioned from Michael Wright and placed in the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall. His father’s great art collection had been tragically sold after his death by the Commonwealth officials, and it was with a view to replacing it to some small degree that Charles had already acquired some paintings of his own while in the Netherlands.
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The new collection was further augmented by twenty-seven old masters (including a famous Titian) hastily presented by the Dutch government, who hoped by this propitiatory gesture to atone for their previous slights to the English King.

The tastes of the new age dictated many of the earliest pieces of renovation: within the Whitehall complex the Cockpit Theatre was soon made ready. By June, over £1,200 had already been spent in furnishing the royal apartments. It would be two years before the King’s bedroom, with its black and white marble paving and chimney-piece, its ‘flying boys’ holding the curtains of the bed alcove and its ‘great eagles’ over the bed itself, would be complete. Even then there was much mention of ‘night work’– the seventeenth-century equivalent of overtime – needed to complete it.
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A sun-dial in the Privy Garden was however given priority, as was the ‘King’s Tube’, or astronomical telescope. That was another indication of the way the new reign would go. The King’s own natural bent for scientific discussion and discovery could now be given a free rein. Like the jackdaws who were his favourite birds, he was not only a great collector of curiosities, but inquisitive to boot. It was the kind of mind peculiarly suited
to a monarch, who could engage his subjects in conversation as and when he pleased, on what topics had currently seized his fancy, without fear of seeming to bore them. It is true that Charles
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felt fascination for practical results rather than investigation for its own sake. His was not the intellect of a Newton, as described by Wordsworth, ‘Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone’ (although Charles
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patronized Newton). But then a practical turn of mind was a very useful thing for a sovereign in charge of the welfare of his people to possess.

Thus we find Charles happily discoursing with John Evelyn on the elimination of the ‘wearisome’ smoke from London (a problem which remained unsolved for three hundred years), as well as his more conspicuous interests, such as shipping and the improvement of gardens and buildings. Evelyn was privileged to hold the candle while the King was having his face crayonned by the great miniaturist Samuel Cooper, for the benefit of the new coinage: naturally, the King seized the opportunity to chat away about painting and engraving.
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He adored all clocks and watches. In the end there were no fewer than seven clocks in his bedroom (their ill-synchronized chiming drove his attendants mad), while another clock in the antechamber told not only the hour but also the direction of the wind. Hooke’s balance-spring action was demonstrated in front of the King, while the royal accounts contain many items for the purchase of further clocks. The sun-dial referred to above had a particular function – for the King used to set his watch by it.

When the Royal Society came to be formed in November 1660 it was not mere flattery which caused the King to become its Fundator (or founder); he granted the Royal Charter on 15 July 1662. The man who was obsessed by the need to possess a lunar globe, with the hills, eminences and cavities of the moon’s surfaces as well as the degree of whiteness solidly moulded, was well fitted to occupy the position. At the Society’s inception it was reported that the King ‘did well approve’ of the new body and would be ‘ready to give encouragement’ to it.
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Later he responded in style, presenting a mace to the Society and granting its arms.

The charm and catholicity of the early proceedings of the Society recall the King’s own conversations.
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Topics raised included oysters (at Colchester), ships in North America, the weather in Greenland and beer. The King’s unsettling friend inspired a typically elusive entry in the Society’s proceedings: ‘The Duke of Buckingham promised to bring to the society a piece of an unicorn’s horn.’ It was a two-way process. The King made science fashionable by his own burning interest in the subject. At the same time, he was naturally drawn to those who shared it. While many of the founding members of the Society were, or had been, part of the Puritan establishment, others were former Royalists, the King’s personal friends. Two of his doctors, his chaplain and his brother’s secretary were amongst the founder members. Sir Robert Moray, who first told the King of the establishment of the Society, was a staunch Royalist, who had been Colonel of the Scots Guards in France and one of Charles
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’s intimates.

Now Moray, together with Sir Paul Neile, a Gentleman Usher to the King, was used as a conduit for the King’s messages and enquiries to the Society.
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It was Moray who reported Charles’ earnest questions as to why sensitive plants contracted to the touch, why ants’ eggs were sometimes larger than the insect itself. Moray produced a discourse on coffee written by Dr Goddard at the King’s command; he also reported an experiment of the King’s own, keeping a sturgeon in fresh water in St James’ Park.

At first the King’s interest in the Society was so zealous that, as reported by Moray, he wanted it to examine every philosophical or mechanical invention before the patent was passed. The King recommended to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland that the officers and new settlers of that country (the Adventurers) should contribute to the Society. He made the Society gifts of curiosities. In later years the King’s acute interest in the Society faded (although he continued to send venison for its anniversary dinners). But his interest in mathematics, navigation and his own laboratory experiments – his own and others’ – did not. He was responsible for the foundation of the Mathematical School at Christ’s Hospital in 1673 to instruct boys in navigation
as well as mathematics; subsequently the King took an interest in the boys’ apprenticeships. He was also responsible for the foundation of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich two years later. This was designed by Wren, as he himself confessed, ‘for the Observator’s habitation and a little for Pompe’.
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Where science was concerned, Charles
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made an excellent natural leader of post-Restoration society.

Only the chronic want of money hung over the new reign, a bad fairy at its christening, promising hardships ahead. In August 1660, a few months after his return, the King observed ruefully of his position: ‘I must tell you, I am not richer, that is, I have not so much money in my purse as when I came to you.’ A year later Pepys was describing how ‘the want of money puts all things … out of order’.
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As a result the search for a bride for the King was much influenced by the question of her dowry; and once the lot had fallen upon the well-endowed Portuguese Infanta, it was a further sign of the King’s financial straits that the dowry was already being pledged as a security for loans in September 1661, eight months before the bride herself actually landed in England. When she did arrive, the unhappy member of her entourage deputed to administer the dowry was Eduarte Da Silva, a New Christian (that is, a Jew converted to meet the requirements of the Inquisition). Da Silva had a spell in the Tower of London when the payments did not come quickly enough for the embarrassed King.
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How much was this situation of the King’s own making? It was suggested by his enemies and critics at the time, and has been suggested by many critics ever since, that such qualities in the King as extravagance and mismanagement brought about the perpetual financial straits in which the Crown soon found itself. This view leaves out of account two important aspects of the Restoration. First, since Charles
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had been brought back to personify royalty, that in itself necessitated all the traditional trappings of a king. Such things always had and always would cost a great deal of money, but to do otherwise would be to confound both popular and courtly expectations. Lord Halifax believed that the very reason that the English character was biased in favour of a monarchy was because of its childish taste
for ‘the bells and the tinsel, the outward pomp and gilding’. Secondly, the sum of money Charles
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was originally voted by Parliament, although seemingly adequate, proved difficult to collect and in any case the yield had been over-estimated.

Immediately on his return, then, Charles
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was torn between the fantasy of kingship and the reality of England’s economic situation. Of course the very use of the latter term is anachronistic. To the contemporaries of Charles
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, it was the kingship which represented reality, so that the conflict between the two was very imperfectly understood, if at all. In this way, from the very beginning, the Crown was immersed in a mire of debt from which it had little hope of escaping – by natural means. As we shall see, the King eventually resorted to unnatural means. But it was hardly his own fault that he found himself floundering in the first place.

The King’s annual peacetime expenses were estimated by Parliament at £1,200,000; war was to be considered an extra, as had been customary in previous reigns. The sum itself was comparatively generous by the standards of the time – if not lavish – but the income which the King actually received was appreciably smaller. It has been estimated however that, on average over the entire course of his reign, the King received of those monies about £945,000 a year, increased to something under £980,000 by his private income.
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Assuming he kept within his theoretical income, that in itself produced a gap between this annual income and his annual expenditure which Mr Micawber would have aptly summed up as ‘result misery’. In fact, a paper on the state of the revenue shows that between Michaelmas 1661 and Michaelmas 1662 the King’s expenditure was roughly £1,500,000, compared to the aforesaid official figure of £1,200,000. This was a state of affairs which would certainly have upset Mr Micawber still further.

But there were graver problems. With the Exchequer in control of agents for collection, rather than of the actual collection of revenues, administration of the Crown’s finances was inefficient, corrupt and above all laggardly. Actual receipts were particularly low at the start of his reign, so that early on the King had to resort to the traditional monarchical expedient
of high-interest loans in order to keep going at all. Prudent men like Sir George Downing were found advocating the punctual payment of the interest on the Treasury loans at least – in order to uphold the King’s credit abroad.

Yet Charles
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had little choice. Not only was austerity in a sovereign impossible to conceive in a body politic where rank was very much demonstrated by outward display – a fact amply borne out by the household accounts of the great magnates of the day, some of which vied with and even surpassed those of the King in generosity. But the very prestige of the nation seemed bound up with the appearance of the monarchy.

It was in keeping with his subjects’ aspirations, therefore, as well as his own that the King now embarked on preparations for two ceremonies with their origins rooted deep in English history. He would hold a ceremony for the installation of the new Knights of the Garter – the first for twenty years. And after that, with even more magnificence, would follow the coronation, the joyous celebration of all that had happened over the last twelve months since that suppliant message had come from the House of Commons: that the King should come into his own again.