King Charles II (44 page)

If Ireland to King Charles was a far-away country of which he knew nothing, Scotland was a country which he knew too well – and from which he hoped to remain as far away as possible. To Clarendon King Charles remarked carelessly in March 1662, ‘For my part, rebel for rebel, I had rather trust a Papist rebel than a Presbyterian one.’ The Lord Chancellor retorted, ‘The difference is, that you have wiped out the memory of the rebellion of the one, whilst the other is liable to all the reproaches.’ But in truth Charles had no memory of the Catholic rebellion. In his ‘Gracious Message’ to his Irish subjects, issued
shortly before his Restoration, he assured them that their former treasons to King Charles
I
were washed away; he quoted the Biblical doctrine by which there was more rejoicing over one lost lamb than over all the other ninety-nine.
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But Ireland was not Charles
II
’s lost lamb. Scotland, if anything, could claim that honour. And nothing about Scotland, lost or found, caused him to rejoice. The subject of Presbyterianism still aroused sufficient ire in him after his Scottish experience, ten years back but never to be forgotten, for him to mask it in another of his characteristic pieces of mockery. Was it possible, he asked, for a man to be a Presbyterian and a gentleman? No doubt he carried Samuel Butler’s satire on the Presbyterians,
Hudibras
, in his pocket (and protected its publication by royal warrant) out of the same teasing animosity.

As Ormonde was to Ireland, Lauderdale was to Scotland. But the two men were of very different calibre. Lauderdale, it is true, had force, an energy nearing on the manic, belied by his indolent appearance, coarse tongue and coarser habits; his period of imprisonment after Worcester had also been spent, rather surprisingly, in religious study and meditation. In his own way he was very much a Scot and later displayed a genuine concern for the future of his native land as a nation, not merely as an English appendage. But at the time of the Restoration, Lauderdale also believed in a healthy and curative measure of revenge. At all events, Argyll was publicly executed, which may have satisfied Lauderdale and at the bottom of his heart not displeased the King – who did not try to save him – but was scarcely a healing gesture. An Act Rescissory also swept away a number of liberties to which Scots had become accustomed.

However, Lauderdale’s attitude to the Covenant in Scotland was at least healthily pragmatic. He suggested to the King that he should denounce it in public, but in private should leave matters very much as they were. This, one must believe, would have accorded with Charles’ general dislike of any policy which involved him thinking about Scotland and the Scots for longer than was necessary. Unfortunately, both Middleton and Clarendon showed more idealism – and more obstinacy. Middleton was convinced that it was essential to restore episcopacy as soon
as possible; a view to which it was easy to get Clarendon’s agreement.

It was left to Lauderdale to watch like a vulture as Middleton tottered and finally fell; when Middleton introduced an unwise Act of Billeting, Lauderdale was able to present it as an attack on the King’s prerogative. In the meantime, government policy on episcopacy foundered, as so often before, on the rock of the Scottish Covenant. Yet another reaction against episcopalian church rule – the Pentland Rising of 1666 – suggested that all the lessons concerning seventeenth-century Scotland had been learned in vain.

While the Catholic Irish people resigned themselves to an ominously unfair land settlement, and the Presbyterian Scots refused to resign themselves in the slightest bit to the bishops they so much disliked, King Charles himself won the hearts of his English people at least by concentration on the fourth quarter of his dominions – the sea. Here on one level there was splendid sport to be had. Charles, with his brother James, was responsible for introducing yachting to the English. It will be remembered how impressed the King had been with that Dutch craft (in fact a yacht) which had brought him from Breda to Delft, and how he had been presented with a replica – paid for by the Dutch East India Company. To this hundred-ton Dutch-built vessel, the
Mary
, falls the honour of founding the British yachting industry.
¹⁵
It was soon copied, virtually identically, by the King’s shipbuilder Peter Pett, at a total cost of £1,335: although Pepys, who considered the
Mary
‘one of the finest things that ever I saw for neatness and room in so small a vessel’, was sceptical whether Pett would succeed in his self-confessed aim ‘to outdo this for the honour of his country’.

Soon yachts were all the rage. But these ‘pleasure-boats’, as they were alternatively called, still retained a distinctively warlike appearance, like the Dutch yachts of the time, with their eight guns and their crews of thirty men. Prince Rupert’s yacht
Fanfan
even took part in an engagement during the Dutch War. This did not stop the Prince referring to the King’s passion as part of the general levity of the new royal set: ‘The King, with his characteristic frivolity, had a yacht moored opposite Whitehall
in which he might fancy himself at sea. The childish hobby was appropriately called
The Folly
, and aboard this yacht was one of the many lounging places of the court.’
¹⁶
But age was making the former swash-buckling commander cantankerous.

To us today, these yachts would appear more like ‘yachts of state’, such as the modern royal yacht
Britannia
, rather than the pleasure craft at Cowes. Expenditure on them was considerable, even lavish. Some of their names –
Catharine
,
Henrietta
– gracefully echoed those of the royal ladies who were officially close to Charles’ heart. The
Greyhound
evoked a tougher image. Later Charles descended
de haut en bas
with a yacht called the
Fubbs
: his pet name (based on the old English word for chubby) for Louise Duchess of Portsmouth. The household accounts are filled with entries for the various yachts’ appurtenances: Holland quilts and pewter chamber-pots for the
Monmouth
in 1673; more luxuriously, a feather bed and crimson damask hangings for Queen Catharine’s own ship. On the
Greyhound
yacht, the King himself indulged in crimson damask for bed and hangings, and gilt leather for the state room, while confining himself to ‘a little bed’ six feet long by three feet six inches broad.
¹⁷

A little healthy sibling rivalry helped on the development of the yacht industry. Soon the brother ship-builders Peter and Christopher Pett were competing on behalf of the royal brothers Charles and James, the King himself visiting Deptford and pronouncing Christopher Pett’s work (for his brother) ‘very pretty’. Another yacht, the
Bezan
, was presented by the Dutch to swell this first British yacht squadron. By 1663 yacht-building was spreading downwards to the aristocracy, so much so that Christopher Pett demanded an extra gratuity for building pleasure-boats, because of all the people he had to entertain. Early owners included Sir William Batten, of the Admiralty office, whose wife (like Queen Catharine) was ungratefully seasick.

It was compared to the great square-rigged ocean-going ships that these new craft seemed so light and compact; contemporaries like Pepys always noted how small they were. They could certainly sail far closer to the wind, with their fore and
aft rigs, and were thus much more suited to racing. The royal brothers took to matching their craft against each other with zest. Evelyn describes one such early yacht race: ‘The King lost it going – the wind being contrary – but saved stakes in returning.’ There was a race between the Dutch-built
Bezan
and the King’s yacht
Jamie
(named for Monmouth), which the former easily won. Yacht-racing, and for that matter yacht-building, came to an inevitable halt at the time of the Dutch War, only to flourish again in the 1670s and 1680s.

Arlington, with more charity than Prince Rupert, summed up the King’s enthusiasm in a memorable phrase when he said that twenty leagues at sea were more pleasing to him than two on land.
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King Charles
II
was certainly not the first English monarch to find happiness on the ocean wave: but the coincidence of his personal passion and the age in which he lived was a fortunate one for his country. For it was not only yachting jaunts which commended themselves to the King. He was also deeply concerned with the Navy.

Here his intellectual curiosity married fruitfully with his own taste for adventure to provide an interest in navigation and astronomy, as well as in docks and ship-building. It amounted to an obsession. Fortifications and naval bases in particular fascinated him: he commissioned Danckerts to paint two views of Plymouth, a view of Falmouth Harbour, two views of Portsmouth and a view of his latest acquisition – the dowry of the Queen – Tangier. In danger of his life, escaping from England after Worcester aboard the
Surprise
, King Charles still managed to take an interest in the navigation of the boat. Renamed the
Royal Escape
, it was fitted up as a yacht after the Restoration and painted at the King’s request by Van de Velde. It was also no coincidence that Charles had discoursed for hours to Sir William Petty on ‘the philosophy of shipping’. In September 1662 the King launched a new type of ship with ‘two bottoms’, invented by Petty, which was aptly christened
The Experiment
. Later the King would tease Petty about his boat’s odd appearance. In vain Petty offered to lay odds for his ship against ‘the King’s best boats’: Charles refused to lay the bet and continued the teasing. Yet Petty, undiscouraged, built other
double-bottomed boats, and made many further experiments in naval design.
¹⁹

As for the sovereign himself, with his diligent visits to coastal fortifications, his inspection of naval plans, even his royal orders to commanders at sea – he would at times prove a mixed blessing to his underlings, teasing apart. Burnet typically extracted some snobbish criticism from the King’s expertise. Charles, he wrote, ‘understood navigation well: but above all he knew the architecture of ships so perfectly, that in that respect he was exact rather more than became a prince’.
²⁰
Evelyn was right when he wrote of Charles
II
, quite simply, that he was a great ‘lover of the sea’.

King Charles’ concern with the sea had theoretical consequences as well. One incident gives a clue. In late 1661 King Charles waxed extremely indignant when the French King jibbed at the tradition by which ‘ships belonging to the crown of England’ (that is, men-of-war on the high seas) were formally saluted. He instructed his ships not to tolerate any diminution in the reverence which was their due, adding that he would be quite unworthy if he quitted a right, and went lower ‘than ever any of my predecessors did’.
²¹

Such a concern with symbolic ritual was uncharacteristic of Charles
II
. Except where the Navy was concerned, he made little of that concept of glory which both inspired and plagued his cousin Louis
XIV
of France and whose pursuit King Louis described as early as 1662 as ‘the principal aim’ of all his actions. Charles had spent too many years as a King with ‘nothing but the name’ to bother himself over an insubstantial notion such as glory. But the reality of power – the security presented by it – preoccupied him, if he only rarely dropped the mask sufficiently to display his feelings.

There was one area in which he deliberately emulated King Louis and that was in the establishment of regiments of Foot Guards, Life Guards and Royal Horse Guards (although he did not approach anything like King Louis’ figure of sixteen thousand of such desirable bulwarks). In theory, these guards were to be used to police State ceremonies, but of course they also secured the person of the King against a possible coup. It was this
aspect rather than the ceremonial side which interested King Charles. The Navy however was his
amant de cœur
, where the Army represented a reliable husband with a strong right arm. And he intended that the Navy he loved should bow to no-one. As King Charles wrote later, ‘It is the custom of the English to have command at sea….’
²²

It was happy for him that the English ship-building industry itself made prodigious advances during his reign. At first, the industry was hard put to it to meet the rise in demand for vessels following the settled times of the Restoration, and there had to be large-scale buying of ships from abroad. However, two acts of Parliament put an end not only to foreign-owned ships carrying English trade (the familiar concept of the Cromwellian Navigation Acts), but also to the employment of foreign-built ships. The result was a speedy advance in native British ship-building. Even in wartime, British tonnage rose rather than fell, since the check to ship-building was more than balanced by the capture of foreign ships as prizes.
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King Charles’ conception of England’s maritime role was also central to his relations with the Dutch.

Charles
II
did not love the Dutch, or the ‘Hollanders’, as they were generally known by the English during this period. But he did not at first feel about them as he felt about the Scots, a visceral dislike based on personal ill-treatment. The Dutch had not treated him notably well during his exile, but then neither had France, Sweden nor Brandenburg, towards all of whom he was prepared to entertain friendly relations. Be it yachts or duck decoys, he was prepared to admire many things about their way of life and introduce them to his own country. If he was not prepared to dedicate himself to vengeance in England, he was still less inclined to the pursuit of old vendettas abroad.

At his Restoration, King Charles accepted the congratulations of Johann De Witt, who, as Pensionary (Minister of State) of the province of Holland, represented the effective power in the Netherlands. When Mary Princess of Orange continued to press her own claims as guardian of the boy Prince William – as well as William’s possible rights as Stadtholder – she found her
brother counselling moderation. At the start of his reign, King Charles certainly implied to De Witt that he was more interested in Dutch support for English policies than in his nephew’s claims.
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