King Charles II (54 page)

It was true that the girl Charles held in his arms at their ecstatic reunion aboard the flagship was more exquistely fragile and pale than ever (we now know that she was already seriously ill). But her spirit was as great as before. And the King found in her even greater enchantment. Only the English weather failed to respond to the challenge of Madame’s visit. It poured with rain – cold English spring rain. Surely it never rained at the perfectly arranged Court of Louis
XIV
? But once the secret dealings were completed, as many royal junketings took place as could be fitted into the short span allowed to Madame. Louis
XIV
– not Monsieur – had granted her a few extra days. This satisfaction, Charles wrote back in a personal letter, ‘m’oblige si sensiblement’.
¹³
Charles
II
’s fortieth birthday happily fell within the period.

Notwithstanding the weather, there were parties at sea. Madame showed herself a worthy sister to the sea-loving King, for she was as ‘fearless and bold’ as though she were on dry land, walking along ‘the edges of the ships’.
¹⁴
There was an inland trip as far as Canterbury, where Madame watched a comedy given by the Duke of York’s troupe. She also attended her favourite ballet (it was not the King’s favourite ballet: something about the art irritated him, and a few years later he would become publicly restless at an Italian ballet performed in honour of another birthday). Throughout Madame’s stay, Charles loaded her with presents. He also gave her two thousand gold crowns to build a chapel at Chaillot in memory of their mother. However, when he tried lightly to obtain one little jewel in
exchange – his sister’s lady-in-waiting Louise de Kéroüalle, with her ‘childish simple and baby face’– Madame firmly refused on the grounds that she was responsible to the young lady’s parents in France. The inception of this royal relationship had to wait for another occasion.

In time came the dreaded hour of Madame’s departure for France. Charles and James, overcome with grief, accompanied her on board the ship that would carry her away. Charles in particular could hardly tear himself away. Three times he said goodbye, only to return and embrace her. It was as though he had a presentiment that they would not meet again. The French Ambassador, Colbert de Croissy, wrote that until he witnessed the King’s tears at this farewell he had not realized that Charles
II
– the cool-hearted monarch – was capable of feeling and expressing so much affection for anyone.
¹⁵

One can make a case for saying that in her own way the poor, doomed Henriette-Anne was indeed the great love of Charles
II
’s life. He had experienced other passions, including two unrequited loves for the eligible Henrietta Catharine and the unattainable Frances Stewart. He came to feel genuine admiration for his wife Catharine’s character. He undoubtedly felt sexual passion for Barbara, later for Nell Gwynn and Hortense Mancini. For Louise de Kéroüalle, the mistress of his declining years, as we shall see, his feelings were slightly more complicated. It would be wrong to suggest that love was absent. But Henriette-Anne, with her charm, her affection, her loyalty, not forgetting her intelligence, could possess his whole heart. And sexuality, except in the most unconscious way, was not involved. Madame was that most seductive of things to a man sometimes wearied by the demands of his own sensuality: a ravishingly pretty sister.

Alas for King Charles: Madame, his delight, had only a few days of life left to her on her return to France. On 27 June she wrote a touching letter from Paris to Thomas Clifford in England: ‘This is the ferste letter I have ever write in inglis. you will eselay see it bi the stile and the ortografe … i expose miself to be thought a foulle in looking to make you know how much I am your frind.’
¹⁶
The first English letter of this expatriate
Stuart princess was to be her last. She fell ill on 29 June and died the next day, after convulsions and other agonizing sufferings which appalled all those who attended her death-bed. It has been established that she died of acute peritonitis, following the perforation of a duodenal ulcer (hence the sickness which had ravaged her before she left France for England).
¹⁷
At the time, of course, the suddenness of her end and the public venom of her husband and of his favourite the Chevalier de Lorraine meant that the inevitable accusations of poisoning were raised. But no poison was in fact needed to finish off poor delicate Madame. She was just twenty-six years old at the time of her death.
^fn1

It was the famous Abbé Bossuet, himself amongst those present at Madame’s death-bed, who preached her funeral sermon in language which Lytton Strachey, in a critical essay, compared to a stream of molten lava: ‘O nuit désastreuse! O nuit effroyable! où retentit tout à coup, comme un éclat de tonnerre, cette étonnante nouvelle: Madame se meurt! Madame est morte!’ It was Bossuet who had asked her as she was dying, ‘Do you believe in God?’ Madame replied, ‘With all my heart.’ But according to Ralph Montagu, the English envoy, Madame’s last whisper was of her brother: ‘I have loved him better than life itself and now my only regret in dying is to be leaving him.’
¹⁸

When Charles was brought the desperate news by a courier coming post-haste from France, he collapsed with grief. The rumours of poison hardly helped him to endure the blow. The King did not appear outside his bedroom, where he lay prostrate with grief, for days – the only recorded occasion of a physical collapse in this almost unnaturally self-disciplined monarch, who had hitherto borne the plenitude of crises in his life without giving way to any of them.

It was Lord Rochester who had the last word on Madame. She had died, he said, the most lamented person in both France and England. ‘Since which time dying has been the fashion.’

King Charles
II
was left to implement the consequences of that treaty which Madame had worked so hard to bring about. It was as though she had died in giving birth to it: the King, the bereaved survivor, now had to raise the infant.

There were in fact two separate treaties. The first treaty, which was kept secret, was signed by the English, including Clifford and Arlington, on 22 May 1670.
¹⁹
Not only was it secret, but it was also a strange and slippery document, reminding one in its various twists and turns of that legendary wrestler Proteus. King Charles was to support the claims of King Louis to the Spanish monarchical possessions (pursuing his wife’s alleged rights), as and when they should be made; in return, England would receive certain South American territories. But a further clause stipulated that King Louis would not break the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle recently concluded with Spain; that again enabled King Charles to remain, theoretically at least, faithful to the Triple Alliance.

Together the two kings intended to wage a war against the United Provinces, and the military and naval arrangements for such a war were laid down: this might seem clear enough, albeit aggressive. But this clause was linked to another, often regarded as the crucial text in the so-called Secret Treaty. This described the English King as ‘being convinced of the truth of the Catholic religion and resolved to declare it and reconcile himself with the Church of Rome as soon as the welfare of his kingdom will permit’. In order to carry out this declaration (for which no date was given other than the vague phrase, quoted above, concerning the ‘welfare of his kingdom’), Charles
II
was promised money from the French King, half of it in advance, and troops as well, if necessary. The Anglo-French assault on the Dutch was scheduled to follow rather than precede the undated declaration.

The second treaty was signed by the five members of the Cabal – Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale – on 21 December 1670. It was in effect a cover-up. For those ministers not in the know, a phoney treaty with France
was worked out, including details of future Anglo-French action against the Dutch, down to the troop movements. Charles was to supply fifty ships and six thousand soldiers, Louis thirty ships and the rest of the soldiery. The conduct of the naval war was to be left to the English, who were to receive Walcheren, Cadzand and Sluys at the mouth of the Scheldt as their share of the territory about to be conquered. But the ‘Catholic’ clause of the original Secret Treaty of the summer was veiled from the prying eyes of the unsympathetic ministers. Thus no string was attached to the timing of the Anglo-French initiative.

It must be obvious that the strength of this famous – or notorious – Catholic clause was in consequence much diluted. For better or for worse, the way was left open for a combined operation to be mounted against the Dutch,
without
the King of England declaring himself a Catholic – as indeed happened. There is another significant point to be made about the Catholic clause, one which is sometimes missed by the more prejudiced critics of King Charles
II
. It was not suggested in the text of the Secret Treaty that Charles was going to change the religion of England as a whole – merely his own. Under the circumstances, the equivocal nature of this clause, dependent upon the ‘welfare of the kingdom’, hardly needs stressing further.

It was the signature of the first treaty which mattered most to Charles
II
. He had acquired at long last the French support which he conceived as being paramount to his purposes. It is true that by this treaty he also secured a financial subsidy. But it is important to note that the sum involved was by no means exorbitant: modern scholarship has disposed of the notion that vast sums of French gold were laid out. Louis’ official subsidy was intended to be three million
livres
Tournois a year: in fact, Charles received from France, throughout his reign, a
total
of nine million nine hundred and fifty thousand
livres
, amounting to £746,000 (then). Eight million of this came from the Secret Treaty. Money values of times gone by are notoriously difficult to translate into our own terms.
^fn2
It is more helpful to quote
the recent estimate of Dr C. D. Chandaman that this was the equivalent of less than one year of the King’s ordinary income.
²⁰
Thus the financial value of the French subsidy is placed in perspective: in the eyes of Charles
II
, its psychological value was what counted.

This ‘very near alliance’ of France and England, signed by the ministers of the Cabal, was not made public. As for details of the Secret Treaty of Dover, these were not in fact generally known until 1830, when the historian Lingard printed the text. At the time knowledge was restricted to a magic circle. The joyful ambassadress Madame knew everything, of course. Thomas Clifford was also fully involved, and as late as the 1930s the Clifford papers revealed hitherto unknown details of the transactions leading up to the treaty. Of the Cabal, Buckingham, who, although pro-French in foreign policy, was in religious terms pro-Puritan, did not know. Nor did Lauderdale. Arlington knew.
²¹
He disapproved, but, as a professional servant of a royal master and a man ambitious to rise, he bowed to the treaty. Ashley (created Earl of Shaftesbury two years later) did not know at the time, and despite rumours to the contrary, it is unlikely that he ever did. Outside the Cabal, Osborne, just conceivably, knew.
²²
But the Secret Treaty was in essence the King’s measure, carried out by his sister and most intimate servants to service his private, if nationalistic, policy.

For this treaty Charles
II
has been harshly judged. He has been condemned for two reasons: first, for the acceptance of French money. Yet this was an age when foreign subsidy was by no means the shocking fact which might be supposed from the disgusted reactions of some of the King’s Whig critics. Richard Cromwell asked for a £50,000 subsidy from Cardinal Mazarin immediately after the death of his father. Poverty-stricken rulers were not alone in their blithe attempts to get the wealthy to support them. Later we shall find not only the Dutch gold of William
III
, but also the French gold of Louis
XIV
, finding its way to certain English Whig MPs – opponents of the government. They saw nothing wrong in allowing themselves to be ‘subsidized’ in their opposition by a foreign power. The passionate statement of Sir John Dalrymple is often quoted.
Writing in 1771 of his feelings when he discovered from the French despatches that Lord Russell was intriguing with the French Court and Algernon Sidney receiving money from it he declared, ‘I felt very near the same shock as if I had seen a son turn his back in the day of battle.’
²³
Thus the eighteenth century flinched from the seventeenth.

Where the French subsidy was concerned, Charles
II
was in the position of the apocryphal judge, who took bribes – but only when the judgement desired coincided with the judgement he had intended to make in the first place.

It was certainly not a particularly scrupulous attitude. Yet in terms of Charles
II
’s vivid wish to maintain maritime supremacy and extinguish Holland, it was a perfectly intelligible one. One should bear in mind that seven-eighths of the first French payment went directly towards the Navy. As Dr Johnson, as ever a mine of common-sense, exclaimed, ‘If licentious in practice, Charles never failed to reverence the good. Even if he did take money from France, what of that? Never did he betray those over whom he ruled, nor would he ever suffer the French fleet to betray ours.’ Dr Johnson might have added that in the seventeenth century, as in the age that followed it, rulers were expected to be not so much scrupulous (except by their opponents) as successful.

It is the second salvo fired against Charles
II
which has been most properly responsible for the smoke of treachery surrounding his name. This is the charge that he intended to subvert England to a Roman Catholicism it had rejected, becoming, in the words of Lord Macaulay, the ‘Slave of France’ if not its ‘Dupe’. It has been postulated in the previous chapter that King Charles
II
was not, by 1670, the convinced Catholic of some imaginings; definitely not the proselyte who would engage himself to such a cause for sheer religious ardour. Supposing, then, this charge to be unjust, it must immediately be granted that a certain mystery surrounds the religious clause of the treaty. What then was its purpose, and indeed its motivation?