Authors: Antonia Fraser
The single story of the King being seen to take the Sacrament of Communion is extremely dubious. It comes from the Commonplace Book of George Boddington, a clothworker of London, later a director of the Bank of England, and MP in 1702.
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As a boy, Boddington went to watch Charles
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ride through the streets of London on Restoration Day and was told on return by his angry father that the King he had watched was
no true Protestant: he had seen him take the host at Antwerp, together with his brother the Duke of York. Such a secondhand tale is hardly enough to balance the weight of evidence the other way: that, as an English minister wrote, it was ‘a thing so contrary to probability’. It is far more significant that Buckingham, whose intimacy with the King dated from childhood, certainly did not subscribe to the notion of his conversion in exile. He referred to him as having no religion at all except a kind of vague ‘deism’.
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The crucial incident in all this is the attempt of Queen Henrietta Maria to convert Henry Duke of Gloucester to Catholicism in the autumn of 1654, when he was fifteen. First the King wrote ‘Harry’ a very strong letter on the subject, sufficiently vehement to dispose of any idea that he himself was contemplating such a step. Then he wrote to his mother in even plainer terms: if she was really determined to change Harry’s religion, ‘I cannot expect your Majesty does either believe or wish my return into England. For you will force me to do that which must disoblige all Catholics [that is, denounce the conversion] and on the other side all that I can say or do will never make my Protestant subjects believe but that it is done with my consent….’ The King’s analysis was incidentally perfectly correct. Even an English Catholic wrote of Harry’s possible conversion that it would benefit the King, but only provided he was thought to have nothing to do with it, ‘otherwise both His Majesty and we shall lose the fruits of it’.
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Plainest of all was the conclusion of Charles’ letter to his mother: ‘And remember the last words of my dead father (whose memory I doubt not will work upon you) which were to charge him – Harry – never to change his religion, whatsoever mischief shall fall either upon me or my affairs, hereafter.’ Harry duly remained a Protestant and in September 1655 joined Mary at The Hague. The ghost of King Charles
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, like Hamlet’s murdered father, was quite enough to prevent his son from forgetting the Anglican cause for which he had died.
For two reasons then, political and emotional, the theory of Charles
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’s Catholic conversion in exile can be dismissed. For all the rumours, it is significant that nothing was ever proved in
this respect. Yet, in the heady atmosphere immediately preceding the Restoration, there would be many who would have liked to have done so. A careful investigation of the subject, for example, by a minister of a Protestant church in Rouen, written to a friend in London and printed immediately after the Restoration, could confirm nothing. The sharp remark of Charles to Lord Bristol when the latter became converted to Catholicism – that his father had trained him to be a Protestant – was cited. The previous rumours concerning the King’s religion, concluded the minister, ‘came from hell’.
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They did not come from hell exactly, but from a more worldly source. As John Mordaunt pointed out in November 1659 of a current canard of Charles’ Catholicism, he would be ‘utterly ruined’ if the story were true, and with
both
sides: ‘’tis his stability in that point that gains daily.’ About the same period the King was taking enormous care to have a story that he had been seen at Mass at St Jean de Luz contradicted. He took it for a good omen that his enemies used such feeble ‘bullrushes’ to attack him, he wrote. As for parading this Catholicism – did they suppose he was ‘in love with banishment’?
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Against this oft-repeated public constancy, the assertion of Bishop Burnet, written much later in his history, that King Charles was privately received while in exile by the Cardinal de Retz, with only his cousin Lord Aubigny in the secret, seems poor fodder indeed.
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If it took place late in his exile, such a conversion would have been a most dangerous hostage to fortune, at a time when the King was desperately trying to assure the world of his Protestant ‘stability’. If it took place earlier on, then, quite apart from the hypocrisy evinced in the correspondence about Harry, it is strange that the English King never chose to play this card in his dealings with the Catholic Spanish, and the militantly Catholic Don Juan.
Most difficult of all to explain, under these circumstances, would be the unsuccessful course of King Charles’ negotiations with the Pope. Naturally, Charles was not averse to the notion of Papal support, along with any other form of European support available. This included money. The Pope was rich, the King was poor. As Charles told the Count of Neuburg in
January 1656, if the Pope’s ‘goodness’ led him to ‘make me some good present … you know that I am not in the state to refuse’.
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But the money did not come.
Hyde’s attitude was slightly different. His eyes ever turned towards the English phoenix from whose ashes he expected restoration, Hyde was concerned that the King should preserve the allegiance of the English Catholics. King Charles, he wrote, was the sole ruler from whom they could hope for ‘repeal or modification of the penal laws’.
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But by the time Oliver Cromwell was well settled in his Protectoral role, that was no longer true. Cromwell, and the Protectoral government generally, showed considerable brilliance in the way they dangled before both Pope and Cardinal Mazarin the prospect of toleration for Catholics, without ever quite granting it officially. As a result, the condition of English Catholics did generally improve in the mid 1650s, before the demands of Cromwell’s anti-Catholic Parliament of 1657 put a stop to the amelioration. In the meantime, Catholic records show an increase in conversions in England, and the attendance of the English at the Catholic Embassy chapels went up markedly.
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Against these practical improvements, King Charles had little to offer the Pope except the hope – or promise – of toleration when he recovered his throne. It was another bar to Papal support that he remained a Protestant. To Charles’ indignation, he was never fully supported by the Pope. It is surely out of the question that something as favourable to his cause with the Pope as his own secret conversion would not have been mentioned had it taken place.
King Charles enjoyed Brussels after Cologne. But he was not allowed to remain there long by his new allies, the Spaniards. The so-called ‘Spanish Method’ of diplomacy was traditionally slow – very slow. Don Juan intended to take his time before implementing his promises to Charles. Meanwhile, it was thought better if the King of England removed himself and his little train from the capital of the Spanish Netherlands lest their mere presence enabled them to become too exigent. Charles took up his residence in the beautiful town of Bruges, a watery paradise
of light and ancient buildings about nine miles from the North Sea; here rows of gabled houses were mirrored in the calm surface of the canals. It was a city redolent of the great days of Flanders and the Burgundian Dukes. Now however it was a backwater. Especially did it appear as such to Charles, anxious to prosecute his affairs at the centre. In the sixteenth century, when its trade declined, the town had been known as Bruges-la-Morte: Charles
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agreed.
Nevertheless, it was here that the King was destined to spend a large part of the remainder of his exile. And gradually he established himself. He visited the enclosed English convent in the Rue des Carnes which had been founded in 1629; despite its enclosure, the King’s rank gained him a collation from the Mother Prioress. His silver arrived from Cologne, together with a private cabinet for his papers – that seventeenth-century equivalent of the safe and an essential of the time for anyone as much immersed in secret correspondence as Charles
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came to be. His household plate and linen however had to be left behind in Cologne until his debts were paid. At first, the King lived in the home of one of his Irish supporters, Thomas Preston, later Viscount Tara, at the back of the belfry. He recalled the episode with gratitude after the Restoration in a handwritten letter commending the return of their Irish estates to the Preston children; he even remembered to commend the maiden aunt – ‘Miss Warren’ – who had also formed part of the household.
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Later Charles moved to the Rue Haute, where he occupied a pleasant house, with a garden at its back going down to the canal.
The burghers too treated him with great courtesy. The King was made patron of the Guilds of St George and St Sebastian – for crossbowmen and archers respectively. To these Guilds the English King promised certain monies after his death: it is good to relate that they were actually paid somewhat sooner – in 1662, two years after the Restoration. The Flemings, said Charles, were ‘the most honest and true-hearted race of people he had met with’.
How debauched was this court at Bruges? It is necessary to ask this question, since rumours concerning the dissipation of
the King’s entourage, spread by English government propagandists, were on a level with the stories of his extravagance – and of course of his Catholicism. In December 1656, for instance, one of Thurloe’s spies wrote with contempt of ‘Charles Stuart’s court’ and how ‘fornication, drunkenness and adultery’ were esteemed ‘no sin amongst them’. The spy went on to comfort himself with the reflection that God would certainly never ‘prosper any of the attempts’ of such people.
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As for the King himself, the same zealous vigilantes were anxious to discover fresh mistresses for him by every post. A bachelor prince is ever a target for such innuendoes: Charles
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suffered even more than most because it suited his enemies to spread them. By the Restoration, Charles had been endowed with three more illegitimate children to follow James Crofts. Charlotte Jemima Henrietta Maria Fitzroy, born in 1651, was the daughter of Elizabeth Killigrew. Some eight years older than Charles and the sister of the Duke of York’s chaplain, ‘Betty’ Killigrew had married Francis Boyle, later Viscount Shannon, shortly before the Civil War. Charles’ principal mistress at Bruges, Catharine Pegge, the beautiful daughter of a Derbyshire squire, presented him with a son in 1657 and a daughter in 1658. The girl died, but the son, Charles Fitzcharles, survived to enjoy the patronage of his restored father: he was nicknamed Don Carlo, commemorating his ‘Spanish’ origins.
Charles had had another, older mistress in Paris, the twice-widowed Lady Byron, born Eleanor Needham, daughter of Viscount Kilmorey. She did not bear him a child, but did acquire some money from him: a tribute to her pertinacity, in view of the King’s straitened circumstances (she did less well after 1660, having to make do with a pension of £500 a year, and the odd
ex gratia
payment). In the nine years between Worcester and the Restoration there were also encounters with pretty women who, like Charles himself, saw nothing wrong in such dalliance between consenting adults.
By the standards of the time none of this amounted to profligacy in a young unmarried monarch. As to the tell-tales, Charles dismissed them in a letter to Lord Taaffe as ‘blind
Harpers’, adding that he would never have had the time to enjoy half the ladies attributed to him.
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Despite these efforts, the watchers at Bruges and elsewhere were not particularly successful in making the charges of debauchery stick during the years of exile – in sharp contrast to post-Restoration times. Charles’ habit of having French players to entertain him on the Sabbath caused quite as much scandal as anything else. He played cribbage and piquet with his courtiers: he won, he lost – that was the level of excitement. He sent for Italian books to pass the time – such as
Il Pastor Fido
, by Guarini – ‘if nothing better could be found’. Certain of his followers in their ‘right Highland apparel’ did provide amazement, as they swaggered about the town.
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But of outrageous sexual scandal there was little trace.
The truth is that King Charles
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was at this time the reverse of high-spirited, and he did not try to cure his melancholia by debauchery. A portrait painted by a Spanish artist during the Bruges period shows rather a sad as well as a saturnine young man: it is a very different picture from those two traditionally associated with him, the brave young hero of Worcester – cheerful, even up his oak-tree – and the confident monarch of 1660 onwards – cynical, amused, above all in total command of himself and the situation. This is an introverted, even listless, figure.
For whatever the conditions of the latter years of exile offered, they certainly did not offer merriment. It was not so much the continuous demands of intelligence and counter-intelligence – at which Thurloe, having so much more money, would always win – as the debilitating mixture of depression and danger which these years provided. The King’s life was popularly supposed to be in danger from assassination at the hands of the English government; one cannot totally dismiss the possibility (just as some of the Royalists aimed at the assassination of Cromwell). A story of Charles visiting Mary at The Hague in disguise, and being warned that he was in danger of his life by the Protectoral envoy there, Sir George Downing, is probably apocryphal.
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Yet it illustrates the tensions and loyalties amidst which Charles lived.
Lucy Walter, mother of James Crofts, was the one who had gone from the King’s embraces to lead a life of genuinely tragic dissipation. Taaffe having been amongst those who enjoyed her generous affections, that made him, in the King’s opinion, the ideal person to deal with the problem which poor Lucy came to represent as the years went by. The royal connection was too well known. ‘Advise her, both for her sake and mine, that she goes to some place more private than the Hague,’ wrote Charles to Taaffe in May 1655, ‘for her stay there is very prejudicial to us both.’ Besides, there was the boy: ‘every idle action of hers brings your majesty upon the stage,’ wrote Charles’ Groom of the Bedchamber, Daniel O’Neill, in February 1656.
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Her alleged misdeeds included procuring the abortion of two further illegitimate children; she was also accused of murdering a maid – the charge was later dropped. In the summer of the same year Lucy thought up another ‘idle’ action: having shown the seven-year-old James to his father, she took herself off to England with James and his sister Mary, only to be arrested by Cromwell’s emissaries and then put in prison. Here she was at one point described as ‘the Wife or Mistress’ of Charles Stuart, but the former title was obviously not believed, since she was easily able to persuade her captors to release her; a more accurate description was Charles Stuart’s ‘Lady of pleasure’.
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Lucy made her way back to the Continent. Here her allowance, put in the hands of Taaffe, remained a vexed subject – vexed, that is, by the King’s general inability to pay any allowance, be it honourable or otherwise, with regularity.