King Charles II (70 page)

Charles was perfectly prepared to sacrifice a number of things in the good cause of the peace of his kingdom – ranging from the abstract, such as the truth, to the concrete, such as his
financial independence; but he was not prepared to sacrifice that peace itself. The use of the Army would have been another ‘false Step’, like the Stop on the Exchequer; this one might have disrupted the careful structure of the kingdom altogether.

It was easier to prorogue Parliament yet again. Charles
II
’s so-called Long Parliament was adjourned on 15 July. Perhaps peace in Europe would after all be matched by the return of ‘tranquillity’ at home.

1
There are many versions of this epigram, which has been transformed into an epitaph in the best known version of all, beginning ‘Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King …’. But since Rochester predeceased Charles
II
, it could hardly have originated in this form. The epigram does not appear in the early editions of Rochester’s works. The version above, with the circumstances which led up to it, was first given by Thomas Hearne in his
Remarks and Collections
(notes for his historical works) in his entry for 17 November 1706.

2
The King, as usual, was more generous on paper than in fact. He was a long time paying the various bills, including that of Anne’s wedding dress; but this was due to financial necessity. The ceremony, and the King’s official acknowledgement of Anne’s paternity, certainly made it improbable that she was actually Roger Palmer’s child (
see here
).

3
The other children of James and Mary Beatrice – all daughters – died young during the reign of Charles
II
. It was the birth of a son in June 1688 then called James Edward, known to history as the Old Pretender, which provoked the crisis which led to the departure of James
II
from the throne.

‘On the other hand, some argued against the exclusion that it was unlawful in itself, and against the unalterable law of succession (which came to be the common phrase).’

T
he August of 1678 was fiercely hot: a surprise which even the English summer can sometimes spring. Charles
II
, revelling in all the varied enchantments of Windsor, went fishing and tried to let his cares run softly by the waters of the sweet Thames.

One of his minor cares was the danger of assassination. It was a seventeenth- as well as a sixteenth-century weapon (the first Duke of Buckingham had fallen to an assassin’s dagger; the Royalist conspirators had aimed frequently, if unsuccessfully, at the death of Cromwell). There had been various plots against Charles’ own life, from the Fifth Monarchists of 1661 onwards. Given the King’s temperament, both courageous and fatalistic, it is unlikely that it represented more than just that – a minor care. A man who had the habit of an early morning walk represented an easy target; a man who regularly promenaded among his subjects in St James’s Park obviously counted on his popularity rather than his guards to protect him.

Nevertheless, having survived so far, Charles
II
did not intend to fall victim either to clamorous opposition in Parliament or to armed attack elsewhere. As a plotter himself, he believed in keeping a casual eye on such tendencies in others. He also appreciated instinctively, better than we can today, just what his
contemporaries might hope to achieve by the death of a king. He had seen the devastation brought upon the monarchy by the execution of his father. The substitution of one monarch for another, be that monarch any one of his assorted relatives, might be plausibly expected to bring about a great alteration in affairs: religious, political, or both.

Shortly before the King left London, a man named Christopher Kirkby warned him about a plot against his life. Kirkby was known to the King because he shared his interest in chemical experiments.
¹
With some difficulty Kirkby managed to deliver the first part of his warning just as Charles was entering St James’s Park on his morning saunter. Although Kirkby suggested that the assassination might be carried out imminently in the park itself, the King still proceeded on his way. It was only in the evening, still unassassinated, that he hearkened further to Kirkby’s dramatic tale. This story was subsequently supported by one Israel Tonge, a slightly dotty Anglican clergyman who had allegedly uncovered the plot.

The plot’s substance was however quite incredible: it involved the Catholics in England, notably the Jesuits, and Louis
XIV
ganging up together to kill the King; then they would all take up arms together to prevent the accession of the Duke of York; the end result would be the conquest of England for France. The assassination complex of the time had taken Charles as far as listening to Kirkby and Tonge – at his leisure – but it could take him no further, given the ludicrous nature of their revelations. It was therefore probably because the accused Catholics included a member of the Queen’s household, Sir George Wakeman, that Charles handed the matter over to Danby.
²
Then he went to Windsor.

In Danby, Tonge found a more susceptible audience. Danby did not love France, to put it mildly, and had a prejudiced Anglican view of the Papists. Besides, it was Danby’s duty to ensure the safety of the King. Tonge produced papers which Danby found sufficiently convincing to proceed to a further examination of the subject. It was in this way that another character was summoned onto the stage, one whose sheer roguery should, if there had been any justice, have shown it up
at once and for ever for what it was. This was a man named Titus Oates.

Titus Oates had been born in the year of the execution of Charles
I
and was thus nearly thirty at the time of the egregious events for which he was later remembered. Westminster School and Merchant Taylor’s, Gonville and Caius College and St John’s: all these could claim the honour of his education. Despite these advantages, up till 1678 Oates had had a generally disreputable career. Betrayal was its keynote. He was himself a practising homosexual but had chosen to bring this charge against another man (it was dismissed). From being in Anglican Orders, Oates was converted to Catholicism; instructed as a Jesuit, he abandoned his new faith in 1677. His
curriculum vitae
was certainly not one which should have inspired any confidence in his testimony.

Contemporary descriptions of Titus Oates are almost universally unfavourable. His low forehead, little nose, tiny deep-set eyes, fat cheeks and vast wobbling chins make him sound more like a pig than a man. Once he had achieved fame, or infamy, Oates also showed a taste for playing the dandy which must have made him still more grotesque. But such descriptions also dwell on his voice. It was the ‘speech of the gutter’ wrote a Jesuit historian: in a tone both ‘strident and sing-song’ he ‘wailed rather than spoke’.
³
One suspects that, like many others whose true impact has perished with them, including Rasputin, Oates was a bit of a mesmerist. Otherwise he could hardly have maintained his remarkable career, even allowing for anti-Popery, over three reigns.

First examined by the Council, at Tonge’s suggestion, on 28 September, Oates produced a fusillade of fantastic accusations. Some of his rounds were fired across the water at the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Peter Talbot, amongst others. Most of his charges constituted a tarradiddle of lies, easily contradicted. It was only when Oates pointed his weapon wildly but enthusiastically in the direction of the personal servants of the royal family that he met with a piece of undeserved luck. Oates named Sir George Wakeman, Queen Catharine’s physician, and Edward Coleman, secretary to the Duchess of York.
⁴
Using Wakeman’s
medical expertise, they were supposed to have plotted the death of the King by poison. And very soon the Council did bring to light some highly unwise correspondence between Coleman and the confessor to Louis
XIV
.

The trouble was that these royal Catholic households presented a sitting target for the charges of the malicious, such as Oates, and had done so since the days of Henrietta Maria. At best, they were tolerated, their existence guaranteed in theory by a marriage treaty, but their numbers were heavily circumscribed and subjected to disgruntled questioning from time to time by the House of Commons. At worst, they were harried and suspected. At all times such Papist enclaves were highly unpopular. As a result, these worlds within a world were Byzantine in character. The men concerned were often cut off from the ordinary life of England for years, even if they had been born there; they were thus quite ignorant of it. And where Catharine of Braganza and Mary Beatrice of Modena were modest, pious, charming women, their servants did not always have the same standards of behaviour. Coleman, the son of an Anglican clergyman, was full of the traditional zeal of the convert. No doubt, on his arrival in the household of the Duke of York in 1675, he did see intriguing with France as part of the work he should do to restore the true Faith to England (although that of course was a far cry from planning the assassination of Charles
II
). The King had several times asked his brother to dismiss Coleman (but that again hardly gave Coleman a motive for a daring murder).

Coleman’s indiscreet and of course treacherous correspondence had consequences beyond its own intrinsic importance. For, using guilt by association, it enabled a finger to be pointed at the Queen’s household. Sir George Wakeman firmly rebutted the charges against him, which were more than usually ridiculous. He was a highly respected physician, a former Royalist and a devoted servant of the Stuarts restored: the death of Charles
II
by poison would have broken not only his Hippocratic oath but also his oath of loyalty to his sovereign. As John Evelyn, who was ‘well acquainted’ with him, commented, he was ‘a worthy gentleman’ and one who would have totally
abhorred such a deed as the assassination.
⁵
Yet the discovery of Coleman’s correspondence provided the necessary fire to make the smoke go whirling round Wakeman’s head. And these clouds of smoke might spread to envelop the Queen.

The relationship of Charles
II
and Catharine of Braganza had changed since those rather pathetic days when Catharine first came to England. How could it not? Marriage is no exception to the rule that time transforms all alliances. Charles and Catharine had now been married for over sixteen years, almost as long as Charles’ parents, before the Civil War separated them. The King, with his ready sense of guilt and tenderness where the fair sex was concerned, now felt quite different emotions towards the woman who had been at his side longer than any of his mistresses – except Barbara, now dismissed.

Besides, the Queen herself had changed. She no longer resembled Princess Katharine of France: there was no more talk of ‘bilbo’, no oaths sworn by mistake. Like many good women, Queen Catharine had gained support from her virtue over a long period and had emerged as a character of remarkable fortitude. (In this heredity was on her side: both her mother and grandmother had been women of strong character.)

Dryden’s play about Antony and Cleopatra,
All for Love
, was first performed in 1677 and dedicated to Danby. Dryden in his own preface purported to ‘imitate the divine Shakespeare’. But there is an interesting variation from Shakespeare’s construction when Antony’s rejected wife Octavia confronts Cleopatra and, from a position of wifely dignity, has the better of the exchange. As Cleopatra angrily exclaims,

You bear the specious title of a wife,

To gild your cause, and draw the pitying world

To favour it …

There is emphasis in general on the respect due to a royal consort –‘Justice and pity both plead for Octavia. For Cleopatra neither,’ says Ventidius – and the triumph of goodness – ‘My wife has brought me, with her prayers and tears …,’ cries Antony. Both had their echoes in the situation at the English
Court, where Dryden had been Poet Laureate since 1670.

It was not only a case of the King’s esteem and that of the Court. Where the English public were concerned, Catharine’s dignity and goodness were just the sort of qualities to appeal to them in their Queen over a long period. It was significant that Catharine’s servants had been excepted from the ill effects of the Test Act in 1673.

In contrast to the royal mistresses, Catharine displayed no taste for impertinent show. At the same time, she made it clear that she enjoyed the life and pleasures of her adopted country – a feat which may have cost her more pain than she admitted in public, judging from her sad little remark to Princess Mary. The House of Lords in debate positively ‘went upon the virtues of the Queen’. When it was all over, the King was able to write with satisfaction to Catharine’s brother in Portugal concerning the accusations: ‘Such of them as took but time to deliberate how the Queen hath lived found motives to reject the complaint … instead time was spent magnifying her virtues.’
⁶
It had taken another foreign Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria, ten years to gain the opprobrium of such as Prynne, who termed her the dancing goblin. Catharine, in a far more anti-Catholic period, spent ten years building up a solid reputation. In public, the Queen also maintained a regal serenity as her husband dallied with a succession of mistresses. She continued to do so until his death: there were to be no more scenes such as had sullied the early months of her marriage – at any rate, in the mind of the King. Like Queen Alexandra, consort of the equally errant Edward
VII
, she saw that supreme dignity – and love – lay in tolerance.