King Charles II (76 page)

The Duke of York went back to the Continent three weeks later, but not before he had been assured that, had the King died, the Lord Mayor of London would have proclaimed James as his successor. The point was taken by courtiers and politicians alike that, were a similar crisis to arise, the Duke of York would
be the gainer. The King’s health could never again be taken for granted: it was about this time that a ‘sleeping chair’ was ordered for the King’s progresses, symbolic of a general easing up in his restlessness.
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In the following May he was ill again (with twice-daily bulletins on his progress). Thus the whole episode secured an ascendancy for the established candidate, in which the pretender Monmouth was the inevitable loser. Monmouth still had much to prove, and he did not help matters by his own behaviour.

It was in vain that Monmouth had attempted to prevent the return of the Duke of York. His own welcome from Scotland as the ‘clement victor’ was now eclipsed. Charles
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preferred the interests of his brother – representing the ‘descent in the right line’– over those of his son (although Monmouth and his backers seemed unable to take in the point). It was Monmouth who was deprived of his general’s commission and, like the Duke of York, was asked by the King to absent himself from the felicity of the royal circle for a while.

The people had rejoiced to see Monmouth. Bonfires in abundance were lit in the streets on his behalf. But mob appeal, which Monmouth clearly possessed, was no substitute for his father’s
imprimatur
. There were those at Court who wondered whether the King’s attitude was ‘but a feint’; wiser heads decided that he was ‘in good earnest’.
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Monmouth, unconvinced, lingered for a while disconsolately. Then he headed for The Hague. There he managed to cause the King even more annoyance by striking up an unholy alliance with William of Orange: something which Charles, in a sharp autumnal mood, believed was directed against his own French interests.

The ascendancy of the Duke of York was not achieved without sacrifice. Charles was prepared to protect his brother’s right to the succession, but no more than that. In return for the dismissal of Monmouth as Captain General, James was obliged to agree to leave the centre of things himself. He was appointed as yet to no official position in Scotland; it was a year later that Lauderdale resigned ‘for your own solid and wise reasons’, as the King put it. Nevertheless on 27 October 1679 James and his family, whom he had collected from Brussels, set off north.
It was significant of what had passed that it was something in the nature of a royal progress. Gentlemen took care to greet the heir presumptive to the throne on his way. It was an expression of that law described by Halifax: ‘Men’s thoughts are naturally apt to ramble beyond what is present; they love to work at a distance …’,
¹⁴
and put even more poetically by the great Queen Elizabeth: ‘Men ever seek to worship the rising sun….’

At the centre of things, Charles
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was left to cope with what was present. There was a trail of damage left by his illness and the behaviour of his brother and son. Meanwhile, the General Election of the summer had given him another House of Commons. The bitterness of the anti-Popish mood of the capital persisted. The popular celebrations in November reached a new pitch not only of hysterical malevolence, but also of organization. What was more, the date was shifted from 5 November – Guy Fawkes Day – to 17 November – the Accession Day of Queen Elizabeth. The shift was deliberate. The famous Queen’s image was menacingly paraded, with its implied reproach to a lesser sovereign. As Marvell’s satiric ‘Dialogue between the Two Horses’ had it:

A Tudor! A Tudor! We’ve had Stuarts enough,

None ever reigned like old Bess in a ruff….

In the organization, the Green Ribbon Club took a hand. Buckingham also put his knowledge of the theatre to brilliant, if Luciferian, use. The result was a show at once spectacular and inflammatory. So dazzling was it to the eye that even the poor Catholics it was directed against could not resist watching it, as the Jews might have watched the great military rallies pass in Nazi Germany. So rousing was the show to the spirits of the rabble that many felt compelled to express the anti-Popish fire within by lighting real bonfires in the streets.

One of the newspapers supporting Oates,
Domestick Intelligence
, gave a gleeful report of it all. The centre-piece of the show was still the Pope himself. His figure cost £40 in wax alone: indeed, the total cost of the whole show, including claret for spectators, was nearly £2,500, a colossal sum for the times. Figures of devils
attended the Pope – ‘Hail Holy Father’ – but more ominous to the Court were his other attendants: nuns – ‘the Pope’s Whores’ – labelled ‘Courtesans in Ordinary’. Another typical placard showed a Jesuit with a bloody sword and pistol and the legend: ‘Our Religion is Murder, Rapine and Rebellion.’ The spectre of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey demanded vengeance.
¹⁵
Finally, as Dryden put it, ‘the mitred poppet [doll] from his chair they drew’, and the Pope was duly consigned to the fierce bonfire which, it was hoped, symbolized his ultimate destination.

In such an atmosphere, it was hardly surprising that when a new Plot was put forward for popular inspection by one Thomas Dangerfield, it was not found wanting. Dangerfield, a scurrilous rascal, belonged to the tradition of Oates and Bedloe as a witness; his novel invention consisted of uncovering a plot involving the Whig leaders, including Shaftesbury. When that failed, he turned the plot on its head and vowed that a Popish conspiracy, centring on the death of the King, lay at the heart of it after all. This new farrago was nicknamed the Meal Tub Plot, after the hiding-place where a Catholic midwife was supposed to have concealed incriminating papers. The King, commenting that ‘he loved to discover Plots, but not to create any’, made it clear that he regarded it all, Whig coup d’état and Popish assassination, midwife and meal tub, as dangerous nonsense.
¹⁶
But there was no doubt that the absence of a clamorous House of Commons assisted him in maintaining this firm view. The whole parading mob, with their lighted torches, were not half as threatening to him as a few vocal Members of Parliament.

Under the circumstances, animated also by the renewal of the French negotiations, the King decided not to meet his new Parliament. At this point, Shaftesbury went too far for the second time. Just as he had infuriated the King in the autumn of 1673 by his open attack on the Duke of York, which then seemed
lèse-majesté
, he now called a meeting of the Privy Council to discuss James’ projected departure for Scotland. He suggested the matter should have been discussed in the Council first (he pretended to believe the journey was being made without the royal assent).

The King dismissed Shaftesbury instantly, and the next day drove the message home by telling the Council that he did not propose to allow Parliament to meet until the following January. The ‘Chits’ were appointed with Laurence Hyde replacing Essex as First Lord of the Treasury. On 10 December the King let it be known that he had thought better of that date too, and, still further buoyed up by the progress of matters with France, indicated that Parliament would not actually meet again until November 1680. By December 1679 the irrepressible Monmouth had still further blotted his copybook by returning from the Netherlands against the King’s specific orders. Monmouth’s – and his backers’ – reasoning was that the absence of the Duke of York in Scotland provided a heaven-sent opportunity. Monmouth could build up just that kind of solid support which he needed to press his own claims and, thinking ahead, secure the King’s acknowledgement of them. There were many fingers in this Protestant pie, some of them the pretty, meddling fingers of the royal mistresses. Nell Gwynn, for example, justified her popular reputation as a staunch protagonist of that religion by supporting Monmouth; later even Louise Duchess of Portsmouth, her Catholic counterpart, took part in an intrigue to get the King to name his own successor.

But it was unwise to count on the susceptibility of Charles
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to petticoat government. The King was plainly furious with Monmouth; Nelly’s poignant descriptions of the wan looks of Charles’ once-beloved son, his Absalom, did nothing to allay his fury. They might cry ‘God bless Monmouth’ in the playhouses, but at Court the young Duke was ostentatiously stripped of his various civil and military positions. In February the Duke of York was permitted to return from Scotland. In the absence of a Parliamentary session, an angry war of pamphleteering concerning the claims of the rival dukes (and not ignoring those of the two Protestant princesses) broke out in the late summer.

In particular, the legend of the King’s marriage to Monmouth’s mother, watered by the hopes of the opposition, grew apace. The campaign of rumour had begun in the late summer. All sorts of stories were given credence, generally on the sanguine principle that two improbabilities added together make a
possibility, and four improbabilities a certainty. It was pointed out gleefully that James had once tried to deny his marriage to Anne Hyde; another comparison was made to Edward
IV
’s refutation of Lady Eleanor Talbot in order to marry Elizabeth Woodville. The fact that James had been contracted to Anne Hyde, and the supposition that Edward
IV
had been contracted to Eleanor Talbot, were given as proofs that Charles’ refutation of Lucy Walter was also false: it was smear by analogy.
¹⁷
Even details of the supposed marriage were now given: solemnized by the late Bishop of Lincoln (who was of course dead) in the house of an innkeeper at Liège, and witnessed by certain lords. The marriage certificate was said to be preserved in an exciting ‘Black Box’, one of those objects of which it could be said that everyone knew of someone else who had definitely seen it.
¹⁸

The trouble was that a putative marriage was by far the most convenient way of establishing Monmouth’s claim: it hurt no one (except the Papist Duke of York, and who cared about that?) and provided a neat solution to the problem of the succession – so at least ran the argument of Monmouth’s sponsors. Thus the rumours nagged and badgered the King and would not go away.

The total lack of substance in these rumours need not be reiterated. By the spring of 1680 Charles was beginning to feel rather the same way. For a long time his instinct had been to ignore the matter as being too ridiculous to dignify with official discussion. Early in 1679 however he had made, with some reluctance, a declaration to four of his councillors, including the Archbishop of Canterbury. Two months later he repeated this declaration to the Council as a whole, and also committed it to paper, ‘it being all written and signed in his Majestie’s own hand’. This he judged to be the best way to kill this particular snake.

The document, dated partially according to the old style by which the year began on 25 March, is worth quoting in full:

For the voiding of any dispute which may happen in time to come concerning the succession to the Crown, I do here declare in the presence of Almighty God, that I never gave
nor made any contract of marriage, nor was married to any woman whatsoever, but to my present wife Queen Catharine [‘Queene Catarine’ in the original] now living. Whitehall the 3rd day of March 1678/9. Charles R.

The impatience can be seen in the handwriting, the words ‘Almighty God’ being the only ones written with any care at all. This document was ordered to be kept in the Council Chest.
^fn1
19

But the snake was scotched, not killed.

In the summer of 1680, driven beyond endurance on the subject, the King decided to put an end to these rumours once and for all. The
London Gazette
of 8 June, the official government organ, gave a prolonged recitation of the steps leading up to this decision, with the preamble: ‘We cannot but take notice of the great Industry and Malice wherewith some men of a Seditious and Restless Spirit, do spread abroad a most false and scandalous Report of a Marriage or Contract of Marriage….’

In particular, care was taken to nail the story that there was ‘a Writing yet Extant’ – that is, a marriage certificate; it was pointed out that the very lords said to have been present at the marriage had been examined and had denied the allegation. Then the
London Gazette
printed the King’s own declaration to his Council in full.

‘Though I am confident that this Idle Story cannot have any effect in this Age …’, wrote the King. But the idle story persisted simply because it suited men’s purposes at the time. It would haunt the first year of James
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’s reign for the same reason, and bring the wretched Monmouth to his death.

In general, the spring of 1680 was a period redolent of anger and disgust on all sides. Halifax wrote frankly in January that it would be pleasanter in a wasps’ nest than in London at the present time.
²⁰
In January also seven Catholic priests were tried merely on grounds of their ministry (although it was stated that they were not on trial for their lives, unlike those priests already
executed in the provinces). Lack of cash meant that even members of the royal household were clamouring for their salaries. The King, encouraged by Sunderland, took refuge in the hope that foreign policy would once more rescue him from his bonds.

Sunderland’s strategy was based on the notion of a series of treaties bringing in Spain, the Austrian Empire and even the United Provinces.
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It was of course the reloading of the see-saw. France was not likely to view this new weighting with approval. Charles
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acknowledged the change by making no official gesture at the time of the wedding of Louis
XIV
’s son. The secret talks with Barrillon were however not excluded, as they had not been excluded during the sway of the pro-Dutch Danby. Sunderland, like Danby, simply occupied one end of the see-saw. The Austrian Emperor, however, a vital character in the proposed new alliance, declined to commit himself. In common with the rest of Europe’s happily absolute monarchs, he was anxious to see how the King of England would deal with this obstreperous Parliament of his. Thus the foreign policy of Charles
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, which he trusted to free him from Parliament by the manipulation of foreign powers, remained uncomfortably dependent upon it.