King Charles II (69 page)

But the pregnancy had at least played its part in persuading James to agree to Mary’s match, which was otherwise most distasteful to him. Nor, on the occasion of the marriage, could there be any doubts where the popular sympathies lay. According to Pepys, nobody had been pleased at Mary’s birth: a disappointing girl and Clarendon’s grand-daughter at that. Now, in contrast, such ‘bells and bonfires’ and general rejoicing had not been seen since the Restoration, wrote Sir Charles Lyttelton.
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Edmund Waller, the Court poet, represented it as a romantic union of a soldier king and a beautiful princess:

Nor all the force he leads by land

Could guard him from her conqu’ring eyes…

It was a measure of the general satisfaction at the Protestant combination that it should be rumoured – quite falsely – that Mary had been adopted as the King’s own daughter.

All that Charles
II
actually did at the ceremony in November 1677 was to play the part of a jolly, slightly bawdy uncle. He told the groom to remember ‘Love and War do not agree very well together’. When William put down the traditional handful of gold on the prayer book (symbol of all his worldly goods), Charles said briskly to his niece, ‘Take it up, take it up. It’s all clear gain to you.’ And he urged on the prim William on his wedding night, ‘Hey nephew, to your work! Hey, St George for England!’

It was left to Louis
XIV
to exclaim with predictable disgust and horror at the consummation of his worst fears. His reported reactions ranged from the disagreeable (‘two beggars were well-matched
in public’) to the histrionic: he behaved as if he had just lost an army when he heard the news, and told the Duke of York, ‘You have given your daughter to my mortal enemy.’
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More to the point, Louis
XIV
stopped payment of the latest subsidy to Charles
II
. He also attempted to prick the King’s exposed flank by its own Machiavellian means. An obvious weakness of Charles
II
’s position was the dislike of the opposition for Danby – an emotion only sharpened by his imprisonment of Buckingham and Shaftesbury. From the point of view of the French King, Danby’s resolute pro-Dutch stance could therefore be circumvented by the time-honoured expedient of pressing money into the palms of his political enemies.

Thus men like Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney – later advertised as champions of liberty – as well as Buckingham were in correspondence with Barrillon, the representative of Versailles (a home of Catholic absolutism, if ever there was one), and, what was more, were receiving funds from that tainted source. At the time, the intrigue was not exactly shocking: it was merely one more manoeuvre in the endlessly complicated wheeling and dealing which went on in Europe at the time, before Louis
XIV
would and the Dutch could make peace.

Charles
II
retaliated against Louis
XIV
’s blocking of the subsidy by summoning Parliament for early February – not May, as proposed; he then brought it forward another ten days. By this time he had already allowed Laurence Hyde to sign a defensive alliance with the Dutch on 10 January. Yet the Dutch never ratified the treaty, and the English never went to war as promised; this treaty should be seen as yet another manoeuvre.

Charles’ speech at the opening of Parliament on 28 January had a noble ring. He recalled his own efforts at mediation, by which he had hoped to procure ‘an honourable and safe peace for Christendom’. It was not his fault, he said, if he now came before them seeking supplies for the Navy and Ordnance, finding that peace was ‘no longer to be hoped for by fair means’ and that which ‘be not obtained by force … cannot be had otherwise’.
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But the King’s inner hope was not for war. He trusted that Louis would accede to this form of blackmail and
negotiate a peace all the same, along lines acceptable to Charles and his nephew William.

The fall of Ghent to Louis
XIV
on 27 February made the possibility of a compromise peace more remote. At the same time it increased the demands for a positive Dutch alliance in Parliament. In general, the mood there was obstreperous, even ugly, especially on the subject of supplies. William Sacheverell, the rising orator, declared on 4 February that he knew ‘what mind the country are of. They will not be pleased if we thrust a sum of money blindly into those hands that have so ill managed affairs.’
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Shaftesbury was finally released from the Tower on 26 February. Halifax had presented his first petition a fortnight earlier; but it was not until Shaftesbury had fully and publicly recognized his error, both in demanding a dissolution and in appealing to the King’s Bench thereafter, that he was allowed to go free. It all had the air of an abject apology. But wise observers like the French ambassador saw in Shaftesbury’s reappearance ‘a great mortification’ for Danby. Shaftesbury after all understood only too well the art of
reculer pour mieux sauter
. And he was probably aware in advance of Louis
XIV
’s negotiations, since Lord Russell had been a frequent visitor to the Tower. Buckingham, who, like Rochester, had the knack of hitting on the unpleasant truth about his contemporaries (hence his demolition of Dryden in
The Rehearsal
), compared Shaftesbury to a Will-o’-the-Wisp ‘that uses to lead men out of the way, then leads them at last in a ditch and darkness and nimbly retreats for self-security’.
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All the same, neither side had yet devised a way out of the familiar stalemate – a policy of If No War, Then No Money on Parliament’s side; If No Money, Then No War on the King’s. Charles
II
made an equally familiar move on 25 March when he wrote privately to Louis
XIV
. He suggested that in return for a subsidy of six million livres annually for the next three years, he would secure a proper peace in Europe, along conciliatory lines. But his winning streak had not left King Louis in the mood for territorial compromise: for the time being, he rejected both terms and subsidy.

King Charles was left with the elaborate Parliamentary game of cat and mouse which was being played at home over the question of supplies: with Parliament as the cat and the King for once in the position of the mouse. Later it was claimed in the memoirs of James
II
that at this point the House of Commons was in reality far more jealous of the King’s power than of that of France.
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Certainly their behaviour lent plausibility to the theory. The opposition bore every sign of being terrified that the King would escape their financial clutches. Although they were armed with their own private subsidies from France, they set up a continual caterwaul that help should be given to the Dutch; yet when money was finally voted which would enable the King to declare war on France (should he so wish), Parliament immediately followed this up by an embargo on French imports. Since the only effective way of raising money quickly was to use the Excise, and since the French imports provided by far the largest share of this, it will be seen that the second action effectively nullified the first…. The result was, as before, a stalemate.

The absolute monarch, Louis
XIV
, Charles was beginning to find, was easier to cope with than his own elected Parliament. A deft piece of diplomatic blackmail from the English king – the threat of an alliance with Holland, Spain and Austria – did produce the first promised payment of six million livres from the French King in May.

In the meantime, Charles
II
was not the only one at home who was beginning to think back edgily to the events of 1641 and 1642. So traumatic had been the experience of those days on two generations – the men in their prime and the young who also suffered the consequences – that the survivors tended to see fearful parallels when certain circumstances prevailed. Trouble with the Scots, especially on religious matters, was always held to be a bad omen, so that when an English Parliamentary attack was mounted on the King’s regent in Scotland, the Duke of Lauderdale, in May, that too seemed all of a piece. Charles
II
suspected that the English opposition had been stirring up Lauderdale’s new enemies, the Scottish supporters of ‘Conventicles’, as had previously suspected Shaftesbury
of being in touch with the Hamiltonians.

‘Conventicles’ were a form of independent religious gathering unlawful under the new regime, and a series of moves of increasing severity were made against those taking part in them from 1669 onwards. In fact, the rise of this new type of Covenanter was a manifestation of the Scottish national character which Lauderdale, and by implication Charles
II
, should have taken more seriously. Originally, they had been animated not so much by political motives as by a sincere desire to practise their religion in their own fashion. It was really impossible to cut out the truly Presbyterian heart of the Scots, as successive rulers had found to their cost.

It was made incumbent upon local magnates to put down Conventicles held upon their land. Yet as the Covenanters were driven towards more violent resistance, it was virtually out of the question for the landowners to carry out this provision without force. And force, military force, should surely be provided by the central government. Furthermore, if it was to be a question of a military crusade against the Covenanters, that raised the second question of who was going to pay for it. In July 1678 the Scottish Parliament voted an extremely large sum – £1,800,000 – for the suppression of the Conventicles. It was quite clear that the raising of this money would be enormously resented by those who did not wish the Conventicles suppressed in the first place. No, the auguries in Scotland were definitely not encouraging.

In England, the address against Lauderdale was carried through the Commons, for all Danby’s sedulous efforts to prevent it. Charles, although it was in his nature, as his brother James said, ‘to keep measures with everybody’, was obviously furious at the impertinence of the Commons. Saying icily that he preferred not to answer the address, he adjourned Parliament for ten days.

In Europe a further impetus towards peace was given by the exhaustion of the Dutch. And Louis
XIV
, already worried by Charles
II
’s little gambit of proposing a quadruple alliance excluding France, was not averse to being involved in further negotiations. Even so, he retained a very hard-headed notion of
the value of his own conquests: the peace negotiations underwent one further check, until Charles
II
, either in genuine disgust or more probably to bring about the conference he desired, proposed sending some English troops to Flanders to assist the Dutch. The way was finally cleared for the negotiations which led to the Peace of Nymegen on 10 August. By this, France was left with a good deal of the conquered Flemish territory, if not all she had desired; she also secured a workable boundary with the Spanish Netherlands.

The Dutch got the respite that they, rather than William, wanted. William had been reluctant to see his ‘mortal enemy’ confirmed in so much new ground; nevertheless, he too was able to use the temporary lull of the next few years to build up himself and his country against the final assault. Sir William Temple hailed the role of Charles
II
in all of this grandiloquently: the King, he declared, was once more ‘at the head of the affairs of Christendom’.
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This was the reassurance the King wanted since the waning of his European prestige after 1673.

The same happy claim could not be made for the King’s affairs at home. So ragged had relations between Parliament and King become by the summer of 1678 that it has been suggested that Danby at least was considering the maintenance of the King’s authority by use of the Army internally. It has also been proposed that the King himself might have contemplated such action.
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But there is no proof that Charles
II
ever contemplated what would have been – by his standards – a disastrous course. Mending and patching, ironing over, smoothing down, these were the natural instincts of Charles
II
. So deeply were they ingrained that even an outbreak of passion, as over the Lauderdale incident or the Commons’ open interference with foreign policy the previous year, was generally followed by a show of regained composure. And there were two good reasons to dissuade him.

First, there was a practical point. He had no money in hand with which to pay the soldiers on any grand scale. It is true that the Commons had voted supplies for the ‘disbandment’ of the Army on 30 May, the King having told them a week earlier that the issue of peace or war would depend upon their supplies: ‘I
leave it to you to consider whether to provide for their [the Army’s] subsistence so long or for their disbanding sooner.’ The Commons opted for the latter course on the grounds that the King was obviously determined not to fight France: peace would leave him in control of just that kind of force the Commons dreaded, unless something was done about it. When the King asked for – and was refused – an extra £300,000 a year on 18 June to ensure peace, the Commons were even more suspicious. The King was, however, left with the ‘disbandment’ supplies, which he proceeded to use for the Army’s maintenance. But this sum alone would not take him very far.

One lesson taught by the Commonwealth was that unpaid soldiers sought new masters. It was true Charles
II
had emerged from the Restoration with full powers as Commander-in-Chief of the Army. As Sir Joseph Williamson pointed out in 1678, ‘I know of nothing that can hinder the King from raising what forces he pleases, if he pays for them himself.’
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But there was no way that a king hamstrung financially could possibly have financed such an arbitrary force in such a way as to maintain power by it for any effective period.

The second reason, which was psychological, was even more important. Charles
II
had witnessed at first hand the fatal – because it was unsuccessful – use of the Army by his own father. He had himself been restored by the Commonwealth Army, but in their good time, not his own; his Army in exile had proved useless in recapturing the throne. He loved the new English Army which he had constructed since 1661, devoting much time to details of its welfare. Yet an interest in the special red and black uniforms of his hundred Yeomen of the Guard – ‘a livery coat of fine red cloth guarded with black velvet with Rose and Crown, his Majesty’s motto and Scroll C R, back and breast, embroidered with silver and gilt spangles. Similar breeches’ – should not be equated with a manic wish to take away the Parliamentary bauble by military means, as Oliver Cromwell had once done.
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