King Charles II (63 page)

Thirdly, as has been stressed, the characters boldly lit up on the public stage of the Court were beginning to have a Catholic air. Or, as Evelyn put it, the ‘fopperies of the Papists’ were now coming out in the open.
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To the suspicious country, the Court appeared to be going rapidly Catholic – a disastrous state of affairs.

The King continued to view these matters from quite a different angle. Since Worcester, he had seen the poorer Catholics in their true light as essentially loyal, if unhappy, creatures. It was a point of view he had twice tried to impose on the law of the land by repealing the penal laws, without success. When he drew up the Army at Blackheath in the autumn of 1673, it was a gesture widely interpreted as menacing towards the capital. But no evidence has ever been found that Charles
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intended to parody in such a way the actions (and mistakes) of his predecessor Cromwell – let alone use his standing army as a Popish instrument.
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He made nothing of the Catholic air of the Court: he breathed it with enjoyment, but to him it did not reek of absolutism. Because this connection between Catholicism and
absolutism did not exist, he seemed unable to grasp that it played a part in the suspicions of Parliament. To the extent that he was unwilling to check his brother’s Catholic marriage plans, Charles set up an intricate tangle for himself in the autumn of 1673.

The political scene was further complicated by the mounting intrigues of William of Orange, to bring about that separate peace with England, cutting off France, on which he had set his heart. His plan was to concentrate on the manifestly weak link in the chain of the King’s pro-French foreign policy – the House of Commons. Various agents were employed, principal amongst them Peter Du Moulin. A code language evolved in which, for example, the King was known as ‘Mr Young’, the Duke of York ‘Mr Cook’ and the Catholics ‘the Stone-Chandlers’. It was Du Moulin, a man of devious yet lucid intelligence, who had first pointed out to the Dutch prince that England was setting her compass in the direction of France. In his report on the subject, he had underestimated the personal control of Charles
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over the nation’s affairs. Nevertheless, his original plan of sowing dissension amongst the various members of the Cabal, while at the same time emphasizing the threat of France to the House of Commons, could hardly be said to have failed.
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Even if he had misunderstood the wide powers remaining with the King – and who did understand the disposition of power between King and Parliament at this point? – it was perfectly true that by the summer of 1673 the King’s ministers were in demonstrable disarray. Dutch money was also dispensed with a generosity not usually associated with a country described by an English statesman later as ‘offering too little and taking too much’. Perhaps most of it was spent on satirical pamphlets and other pieces of sordid but carefully aimed abuse, rather than on paying the English MPs on a large scale. Nevertheless, the presence of Dutch
largesse
on any scale provides a sardonic counterpart to the King’s own reception of French subsidies. It was an age when political purses somehow existed on a very different level from political principles.

The Catholic marriage project of the Duke of York was an open invitation to the Dutch-inspired satirists to spread their
calculated venom. In his search for a bride, one of the Duke’s aims was to provide himself with a male heir whose claims to the succession would supersede those of his two surviving daughters Mary and Anne, now eleven and eight respectively. But the Duke, who was showing himself almost as convincing a womanizer as his brother, also paid a particular attention to his future wife’s appearance: as he approached forty, his taste ran to young and beautiful girls.

It was ironic that James’s first choice, the widowed Susan Lady Belasyse, was actually a Protestant: and he selected her for the good reason that he was much in love with her. Charles made short work of the project. James, he said, had made a fool of himself once and was not to be allowed to do so again. He had in mind a foreign princess who would bring some prestige and power in her train, even some money, rather than a mere Englishwoman. As for love, it was Charles who dismissed the whole notion of marrying with that in mind – one could get used to anyone’s face in a week, he remarked.
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Charles’ witticism that his brother’s mistresses were so plain that they must have been imposed on him by his confessors as a penance is sometimes quoted as evidence of James’ general boorishness – there is something very unattractive about having a positive taste for plain women. Anne Hyde was undoubtedly plain, but perhaps this early experience gave James a good fright. For Lely made of James’ post-Restoration mistress Lady Chesterfield a doe-like creature with nothing plain about her. The evidence of this quest for a bride is also very much to the contrary: it is Charles who concentrates on the worldly position of the lady, James who anxiously queries her physical attributes.
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A taste for pretty girls was really James’ only vice: unless you took into account that sinister rigidity, increasing with the years, remarked on earlier. Gradually the brave, bluff Duke of York was being moulded by circumstances and age into the future James
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. His appearance had altered markedly from the slender, thoughtful youth he was in exile. By the mid-1660s he had become ‘all fat and ruddy and lusty’ from the sun and air aboard ship.
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James’ character had also expanded, strengthened and hardened. His courage was turned in another direction. Buckingham’s
clever saying of the King and the Duke, that Charles could see things if he would and James would see things if he could, contained a kernel of truth, as such aphorisms often do, albeit simplified. The trouble was that the things James
did
see were the need for ‘Papistry’ and ‘arbitrary government’– matters with which most English people were quite out of sympathy.

Having adopted his Catholicism ‘with full deliberation’, he could not imagine himself abandoning it, ‘though I were sure it would restore me into the good opinion and esteem of the nation which I once had’, as he told Laurence Hyde (Clarendon’s son) in 1681. His great-grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, had made the same kind of proud declaration when urged to embrace the Protestant religion to please Queen Elizabeth: ‘Constancy becometh all folks well, and none better than princes, … and specially in matters of religion.’
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However admirable, it was a very different spirit from that of Henri Quatre – and Charles
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.

His religion was only one aspect of his development. James had also acquired a youthful conviction of the rightness of absolutist government from his years in the French Army – here, if anywhere, was the connection of Catholicism and absolutism feared by his brother’s Parliamentary critics. It is sometimes forgotten, in stressing French influences of all sorts on Charles
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, from the political to the literary, that he was expelled from the country in 1654. In no sense did he return from
France
to England in 1660. James, on the other hand, both spent more of his exile in direct touch with French influences and had happier memories of the experience.

The Duke of York was also, understandably, a stern advocate of the legitimate succession. In 1675 he made a significant remark to the French Ambassador: Queen Elizabeth, he said, had been as much of a usurper as Cromwell. This alluded to Elizabeth’s birth, which by Catholic standards was illegitimate, and left Mary Queen of Scots as the proper sovereign of England by her legitimate Tudor descent. The Duke of York clearly intended the same standards to prevail a hundred years later. On another occasion Admiral Tromp told him not to worry about his lack of a son, since England had been well ruled by women. James replied tartly that the reign of Queen Elizabeth
had been ‘the worst reign since the Conquest’.
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He referred here as much to the growth of Parliamentary liberty as to her bastard birth. As the Duke of York fired off on the subject of Elizabeth the disaster, the English people were busy celebrating her Accession Day with increasing Protestant fervour. It was a symbolic contrast.

Over his impending marriage, the Duke of York certainly displayed all the resolution for which one alternately admires and condemns him. The King’s choice had been an Austrian archduchess; but she was wrested from James’ grasp when the Emperor, finding himself unexpectedly a widower, promptly made the archduchess his own. The plain Princess of Neuburg was banned by James – to Charles’ amazement – and Charles himself banned a Princess of Württemberg, either because he continued to dislike princesses of ‘cold Northern countries’ or for the more rational reason that she had a trouble-making mother.

There was a certain haste over the enquiries, because James at least was determined to marry before the autumn, when Parliament was due to reconvene. He was under no illusion as to what their reactions would be to the kind of Catholic match he now had in mind. When word came of the availability of
two
Princesses of Modena, the fifteen-year-old Mary Beatrice and her thirty-year-old aunt, James’ marital pulse raced – particularly when he learnt that these pious Catholic ladies would be backed up by substantial payments from Louis
XIV
. For Modena lay within the French interest: Mary Beatrice’s mother had been a niece of Cardinal Mazarin. In the end, reports of Mary Beatrice’s beauty – ‘her hair black as jet’ and her graceful figure – as well as her tender age, inclined the Duke of York towards her. The proxy marriage was performed on 20 September with Lord Peterborough acting the part of the groom.
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When the news was made public, the uproar was immense. It became the violent concern of Parliament to fend off this marriage with ‘the daughter of the Pope’, as Mary Beatrice was unkindly termed, before it could actually be consummated.

Shaftesbury in particular was vociferous in his opposition. In any case, this strange, warped and talented politician was veering
towards more public opposition to the King, and his days as Lord Chancellor were clearly numbered. Admittedly, he had voted for the Declaration of Indulgence, but he had also, like Arlington, voted for the Test Act. Like Arlington, he was on increasingly hostile terms with the Duke of York as a result, and by the autumn was reported to be unable to sit at the same Council Table with him. At the same time, the balance of power in the King’s inner councils altered.

In June 1673 Thomas Osborne was made Lord High Treasurer: he was also created Lord Latimer, and the next year Earl of Danby (by which name he will in future be designated). Danby’s contemporaries did not bother their heads with jealousy, cynically supposing that in view of the state of the economy the post of Lord High Treasurer was calculated to ruin anyone.
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But the rise of Danby, a firm Anglican, a supporter of the Triple Alliance, and a man obstinately determined to put the King’s finances on a better footing, was in fact the most hopeful thing which had happened to Charles
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, domestically, for several years, although its full effects would not be felt immediately.

The angry chaos provoked by the news of the Duke of York’s match remained. Charles, as so often before when under pressure, took refuge in delay. On the one hand, he withdrew his offer of the public chapel of St James to Mary Beatrice: she would have to make do with a private one. The Queen was made to claim the St James’ chapel in order to gloss over the affront. On the other hand, Charles put off the summoning of Parliament for a crucial week, hoping that in the meantime Mary Beatrice would arrive in the country and the marriage would be duly consummated before any further protests could be heard.

London was already awash with ugly rumours. The notion that the King might divorce the Queen – and thus at a stroke defeat the Duke of York’s Popish plans – was once more publicly discussed.
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More talk was heard on the subject of the King’s favourite son, the Duke of Monmouth. The ‘Revolting Darling’, as a popular ballad described him – flattery was intended – was now twenty-three; his marriage to Anne, the heiress of Buccleuch, had presented him with a solid base of money and estates. The Catholicism of his youth (he had been
educated at one point at the Oratory in Paris at the orders of Henrietta Maria) was a thing of the past; Monmouth had been quick to see the advantages of a Protestant position.

Delay for Charles
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did not mean irresolution, nor the desertion of the Duke of York. It was Parliament the King hoped to outwit, not his brother. Shaftesbury in particular was showing his hand in a way which was ominous in such an adroit politician. He was sympathetic to the Dutch, rather than actually working with them. But his marked hostility to the Duke of York made it unlikely that the King could preserve both men within the same regime, even if he wanted to. Shaftesbury showed his hand even more publicly when he suggested in Council that the King should divorce Catharine and marry a Protestant. In addition, Charles suspected Shaftesbury of stirring up trouble for Lauderdale in Scotland. He was probably wrong. But even if this particular charge was unjust, Charles had had enough of Shaftesbury.

To know Shaftesbury and his ‘slippery humour’ was not necessarily to love him. He has been immortalized as Dryden’s Achitophel:

Restless, unfixed in principles and place,

In power unpleas’d, impatient of disgrace….

While Charles
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did not match Dryden in venom, he did not subscribe to the view that Shaftesbury’s various changes in ‘principles and place’ sprang from a deep concern for the common weal. As Clarendon expressed it, ‘Few men knew Lord Ashley [Shaftesbury] better than the King himself did, and had a worse opinion of his integrity.’ Charles for once did not trouble to hide his opinion. On one occasion at the theatre, observing the swarthy appearance of the Murderers in
Macbeth
, he enquired rhetorically, ‘Pray, what is the meaning that we never see a Rogue in a Play, but, Godsfish! they always clap him on a black Periwig? When, it is well known one of the greatest Rogues in England always wears a fair one …’ – an allusion to Shaftesbury’s florid looks, as well as, no doubt, to the King’s own dark ones.
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