King Charles II (5 page)

The fabric of religious dispute was shot through with political colours even before the King dissolved Parliament in 1629; political and religious issues remained interwoven throughout the so-called Eleven Years’ Tyranny. For example it was relevant that those Anglicans who supported the secular authority of the bishops, in Parliament tended to be more favourable to the King. This in turn persuaded the King that Puritanism was to
be identified with attacks upon the monarchy as well as upon the Church.

In Scotland the ritual of the English Church had always been dourly regarded. At least old King James had known, none better, how to deal with that country, in which he had not only been born and brought up but also spent most of his adult life. King Charles
I
had been born there, but that was all. Neither by upbringing nor by temperament was he able to understand the Scottish nation, at once so arrogant and so sincere. When little Charles was three years old, his father paid a disastrous visit to Scotland. In the course of it he managed to remind the Scots by a series of tactless gestures, including an elaborate coronation ceremony, of exactly those religious observances which most disgusted them. The imposition of a new prayer book in 1637 was but a further proof of the King’s total lack of comprehension of the very nature of his Scottish subjects.

The year 1637, by which, according to the Jesuit tradition, the young Charles’ character had been formed for ever, was in other ways a year of destiny for Great Britain. In England, in the heart of the quiet Buckinghamshire countryside, John Hampden refused to pay that tax known as ship-money, on the grounds that the King had no right to levy taxes on his subjects at will: ship-money was normally levied on the coastal counties and no extra peril justified the extension. The King took the line that he was the best judge of any extra peril, and the law narrowly upheld him. In the same year William Prynne, along with two others, was mutilated and left in the stocks, for the crime of seditious libel. Early in the next year the Scots formed the greater National Covenant, a direct and stark answer to the imposition of the hateful new Prayer Book. Those who took its Oath pledged their lives to resist the recent innovations in the Church, which they declared to be contrary to the Word of God – and to the spirit of the Reformation. They vowed to defend ‘the true religion’ of Scotland. It was a document which in one form or another (for it was extended five years later) would haunt the King’s son for the next twenty years.

The year 1637 was also that in which Van Dyck painted all five of the surviving royal children at the behest of their father –
that celebrated picture which focuses on the solid head of an enormous mastiff. After haggling over the payment and reducing it from £200 to £100, the King hung the portrait above the table in his Breakfast Chamber at Whitehall.

Like many weak but upright men, the King had pronounced views on everything, not only the nature of the Scottish Prayer Book, but also how his children should be painted. Even on canvas, they were not to be swaddled or over-protected. Two years earlier Van Dyck had irritated him by painting Charles in infant ‘coats’. The picture was intended by Henrietta Maria for her sister the Duchess of Savoy, but it had taken some time to complete because one of the subjects, Mary, would never sit still for long enough. Normally boys at this period were put into jackets, lace collars and breeches at about five: the ‘breeching’ was made a little ceremony by the formal attendance of the tailor to measure his new client, and a miniature sword was generally thrown in, to the delight of the recipient. At the King’s behest, Charles was painted in grown-up clothes, in contrast to his younger brother James; the picture probably ended up being hung by Henrietta Maria at Somerset House.
²³

In the spring of 1638, as the Scottish horizons grew dark with the clouds of approaching war, the young Charles was made a Knight of the Garter and Prince of Wales. The medal struck for the occasion – presciently – showed ‘the Royal Oak’ under a Prince’s Coronet. He was also granted his own household, according to the serene routine of the time. Charles had made his first public appearance at the age of six in one of Inigo Jones’ airy fantastic masques,
The King and Queen’s Entertainment
. Now he was established with both a governor, the Earl of Newcastle, and a tutor, Dr Brian Duppa.

Both choices were indicative of the King’s growing desire to bind to him men of proven loyalty in a time of mounting crisis. Newcastle, now in his forties, was being rewarded for his championship over a long period, a championship which was not entirely disinterested. As Clarendon put it, he ‘loved monarchy, as it was the foundation and support of his own greatness’. That apart, Newcastle was an obvious choice, because he combined a love of sport (he was an expert horseman and authority on
equitation) with a passion for the arts. Newcastle was ‘active and full of courage’: he particularly enjoyed pastimes such as fencing and dancing, while being at the same time ‘amorous of poetry and music’.
²⁴
One recognizes in this determination to enjoy the world in all its appealing aspects a pattern which his royal pupil would also display.

In any case, there need be no doubts as to the kind of advice which Newcastle pressed on the Prince by precept and example, since he took care to write it down.
²⁵
His most famous piece of advice was to avoid being too devout, since one can be a good man and a bad king. Like another gubernatorial tip he gave Charles, ‘Above all be civil to women’, it cannot have had an unwelcome sound to his pupil’s ears.

Dr Duppa had the capacity to exercise a very different kind of influence. At fifty he was a distinguished divine, a protégé of Laud, through whose patronage he had recently become Bishop of Chichester. By nature he was both learned and devout, but, as Newcastle bore witness, Duppa took care to ‘hide the scholar in him’ in order not to appear a tiresome pedant to Charles. The result was that Charles was undoubtedly fond of him – years later, as the newly restored King, he rushed to his old tutor’s death-bed at Richmond and knelt to ask for his blessing. Nevertheless, the values which Charles carried into his adult life were those of Newcastle, not Duppa.

The tutor who succeeded Duppa, John Earle, later also Bishop of Salisbury, scored more success with the Prince by his unglossed mixture of piety and charity. Earle later went into exile with his pupil. Perhaps the charm of Earle’s manner – his light, ‘facetious’ conversation – won the Prince’s heart; more likely it was his lack of hypocrisy. As Bishop Burnet observed, Charles was ever on the look-out for pretence of this kind. At any rate, at the Restoration Earle was duly rewarded along with those others to whom Charles felt properly grateful.

It was important for Charles’ future that his little world also included the orphaned Duke of Buckingham and his brother Lord Francis Villiers (killed in the Civil War). Indeed, it is impossible to understand the extraordinarily deep bond which existed between Charles and Buckingham in later years – despite
the most reckless behaviour on Buckingham’s part – unless one remembers this shared childhood. Buckingham shared all the memories of Charles’ halcyon past, since after the assassination of his father he was taken with Francis Villiers into the royal household. The King made the gesture not only out of loyalty to his dead friend, but also because the boys’ mother was a Catholic, and as such considered unsuitable to have guardianship of such important infants. So the two were ‘bred up’ by the King with his own children. For Charles to reject Buckingham would in a sense have been to abandon his own happiest memories.

Charles was a spirited and cheerful child. He was also a normal boy, as Henrietta Maria’s first letter to ‘her dear sone the Prince’ reveals: ‘Charles, I am sore that I must begin my first letter with chiding you, because I hear that you will not take physick, I hope it was only for this day and that tomorrow you will do it….’ She threatened to tell Lord Newcastle.
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Whether or not the threat worked, Charles’ own first known letter is also on the vexed subject of ‘physick’. To Lord Newcastle he wrote, at the age of nine, ‘My Lord, I would not have you take too much physick, for it doth always make me worse and I think it will do the like with you….’
²⁷

In the Van Dyck portrait, Charles’ steady gaze is central to the picture. He looks out, his cheeks still childishly round, the sensual mouth slightly more set, his hair dark and long, his eyes dark and enigmatic. It is a study of confidence. The accidents of childhood, a broken arm, a fever, jaundice, were surely the worst that could befall him. The Prince’s world must have seemed as steady as the head of the dog on which he rests his hand.

It was not so, however. By the summer of 1639 his father the King was taking the high road to Scotland, armed on this occasion not with the Prayer Book but with the sword. The confrontation which ensued was subsequently known as ‘the First Bishops’ War’, the specific cause of its outbreak being the resentment felt by the Scottish Presbyterians towards the Bishops’ new Prayer Book. The Bishops’ position was considered to be quite incompatible with the system of Presbyterian church
government envisaged by the National Covenant. Nevertheless, beneath the open assault on the Bishops was concealed, at any rate in the opinion of Charles
I
, a covert attack on the royal authority. It was a situation covered by his father’s famous dictum: ‘No Bishop, no King’. So the drama commenced.

The King himself once correctly predicted his own eventual fate, when he took the so-called
Sortes Virgilianae
in a library at Oxford, at the request of Lord Falkland; this was a method of dipping at random into a book and discovering a text. The King hit upon Dido’s fearful imprecation against Aeneas, the prophecy that he would be ‘torn from his subjects’ and his son’s embrace’ and ‘fall untimely by some hostile hand’.
²⁸
It would have been an advanced seer who was able in 1639 to visualize just how that might come about. Nevertheless, by the age of nine Charles’ own life was permanently altered.

‘The Prince … hastens apace out of his childhood’, wrote Duppa in September, ‘and is likely to be a man betimes, and an excellent man if my presage deceive me not, and flattery and humoring him, the bane of Princes, do not spoil him.’
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It was, however, not flattery which now threatened the Prince of Wales. Heaven had been liberal at his birth. But it would be over twenty years before Heaven showed itself liberal again.

1
For the astrologically minded – as most of Charles’ contemporaries were – it is of interest to note that he was born with the Sun in Gemini, Virgo on the ascendant, the Moon and Venus both in Taurus. The celestial picture is thus dominated by Mercury, denoting a quick intelligence and a certain restlessness of temperament; there is also an earthly love of pleasure, a stubborn loyalty, and, with Mars in Leo, physical courage.
²

2
The single Christian name Charles, in Part One, is always used to denote its central figure, the future Charles
II
. His father is usually referred to as ‘the King’, for clarity’s sake, with occasional variants of ‘Charles
I
’.

3
His father was the second son of James
VI
and
I
, only succeeding his brother, the legendary and lamented Henry Prince of Wales, as heir on his death in 1612; in any case both princes were born before James ascended the English throne in 1603, uniting the three crowns of Scotland, England and Ireland.

4
As she will be known, according to the English custom, and to distinguish her from her daughter, later Duchesse d’Orléans and Madame de France, who will be called Henriette-Anne (baptized Henrietta, the name Anne being added later as a compliment to Anne of Austria). The Queen herself naturally used the French version of her name, signing herself as Henriette Marie throughout her life; but the English at the time often found the whole name too confusing to cope with and she sometimes appears merely as Mary. One of the Royalist watchwords at the Battle of Naseby, when Charles
I
was fighting for survival, was ‘For God and Queen Mary’.

5
Burnet, the Scottish-born Bishop of Salisbury, was the author of the
History of My Own Time
, first published in 1723 (after his death); frequent allusions to it will be made in this work since Burnet provides many fascinating sidelights on the period. Nevertheless, allowance must always be made for his highly prejudiced pro-Whig and anti-Catholic views.

6
Few traces remain today of Henry
VIII
’s palace other than the Gatehouse, parts of the Chapel Royal and the old Presence Chamber. The present Marlborough House was then Friary Court, where Henrietta Maria installed her Capuchin confessors.

‘Seeing the sudden and quick march of the enemy towards you … your Highness was pleased to tell me, you feared them not, and drawing a pistol … resolved to charge them.’