King Charles II (35 page)

A happier omen, from Charles’ point of view, could be discerned in the presence of a laughing young woman named Barbara. She had been born Barbara Villiers, a cousin of the Duke of Buckingham, and was married to a Catholic Royalist named Roger Palmer; but she was already in the months before the Restoration contributing in her own way to the King’s royal good humour. Of less cheerful links with the past, poor Lucy Walter had died in Paris a year back. The King’s son, James Crofts, now renamed Fitzroy, remained in the care of Queen Henrietta Maria. There, with his grandmother, the handsome, engaging young man had his head thoroughly turned. That too was an omen for the future.

Throughout all this period, the King and his train were wined and dined in a series of banquets whose gorgeous dishes were intended to indicate the exceptional warmth everyone had now discovered they felt for the English Court. Sauces steamed continuously by day and by night: pheasants were employed in
one particular collation, with the lavishness of salt and pepper. In all this, stories of assassination plots and of the sabotage of the King’s ship seemed to come out of a remote unpleasant past. They were correctly dismissed as malicious rumours.

The final banquet was given by the States of Holland. The King had his aunt Elizabeth of Bohemia on his right, his sister Mary on his left. Was he bored by the eternal junketings? One doubts it. A Danish observer noted that all through the courtyard and up the stairs of the house where Charles was now lodged, there were Englishmen kneeling to their king.
³¹
No one knew better than Charles
II
, for all his restlessness in the face of protocol, that the alternative to royal ceremony was very often royal flight. Hyde wrote in his
History
of this marvellous period, ‘In this wonderful manner and with this miraculous expedition, did God put an end in one month … to a rebellion that had raged near twenty years.’ In May 1660 Charles was acutely aware that what had been built up in one little month, could be as easily and in as short a time destroyed again. So he sat through the endless ceremonies, and with good grace.

Now the good ship
Royal Charles
was riding at anchor and waiting to convey him towards England herself. (It had, as a matter of fact, only just stopped being the good ship
Naseby
.) A hundred pounds of roast beef had been put aboard, and silver plate to serve it on. Everything – at last – was to be fit for a king.

Thus from the Belgick States delicious seat

Triumphantly departed Charles the Great!

cried the poet William Lower, who was in attendance on the scene and noted every detail. That night of 23 May more than fifty thousand people went to watch the departure of the English King. But in fact there
was
no night; the torches and flares of the royal equipage illuminated the darkness. The drums beat a heavy and continuous assembly. Mary Princess of Orange broke down in tears and the tender-hearted Charles wept in sympathy.

The sea was calm, the heavens clear. Charles Stuart, the second, went up onto the poop of the ship to take a last look
at Holland. It was also to be his last true sight of foreign parts. For the rest of his life he would not set foot outside England again. The King was coming into his own.

1
In view of Mary’s concentration on the subject, it should be recorded that she never did have to yield her proud position as eldest daughter of the King of England to her brother’s wife: by the time Charles
II
married, Mary was dead.

2
This nickname, familiar to us from historical fiction, such as Margaret Irwin’s
A Royal Cinderella
, survives in fact in a few letters from the King. Otherwise, Charles always referred to Henriette-Anne in letters as ‘his dear sister’ and even ‘his dear dear sister’. It has been suggested that it was Charles’ baby name for her, only recalled in his most affectionate moments.
¹⁴
To her mother Henrietta Maria she was always ‘ma fille’. Later we shall know Henriette-Anne under her married title of Madame de France.

‘At which Time he prov’d himself the Noah’s Dove, that finding no Rest anywhere, was receiv’d again into his own Ark, and brought a peaceable Olive-Leaf in his mouth.’

A
t Dover on 25 May 1660 the flags waved, the trumpets blew, and high above the heads of the crowd vast indications of new glories could be seen: the royal arms, publicly flaunted in joy.

On the sea voyage, however, the King himself deliberately turned his thoughts back to the past. He was, as usual, physically ‘active and stirring’, striding up and down the deck. But his conversation was of old times.
¹
He talked, almost gossiped, of that flight after Worcester: it was a significant recitation. For the King was speaking not so much to Samuel Pepys, making notes at his side, as to himself. This King, who was about to be restored, never intended to let himself forget what he had endured – and might one day have to endure again. Thus he dwelt consciously on the nadir of his fortunes, where other men might have been puffed up with contemplation of the future.

Not that life on board was all retrospection. Before they sailed there had been pleasanter diversions, such as the renaming of the royal ships, to rescue them from their unpleasant Protectoral nomenclature. This probably took place on the quarter-deck table ‘under the awning’: thus the
Richard
(Cromwell) became the
James
(Duke of York), the
Speaker
(of the House of Commons) became the
Mary
(Princess of Orange) and the
Dunbar
(oh hateful Scottish word!) the
Henry
(for the Duke of Gloucester). Pepys, like many of those suddenly enjoying intimate contact with royalty, allowed himself to be charmed by such evidence of the King’s humanity as the fact that his dogs were busy making messes on the deck, just like any other dogs. Finally, at the King’s suggestion, the three royal brothers, Charles, James and Henry, tucked into a seaman’s breakfast of pork, pease and boiled beef.

The King was rowed ashore about three o’clock in the afternoon in the Admiral’s barge: Pepys followed in a smaller boat which included one of Charles’ errant dogs, escorted by a footman. Once on dry land, Charles, with his usual tactful sense of occasion, knelt down and thanked God for his safe arrival. And he continued to acknowledge the divine course of his salvation when the Mayor of Dover presented him with a rich Bible.

It was, said the King promptly, ‘the thing he loved above all other things in the world’.

General Monck’s claims to have assisted the Almighty in bringing out this happy state of affairs were not mentioned. But then they scarcely needed to be. Monck was the first to receive the King, with all obeisance and honour. And now it was time for the ordnance to speak. The thunder started with guns and cannons there in Dover, and spread all the way to Tower Hill in London, just as the bonfires sprang from hill to hill, from town to town, a sight commemorated by Abraham Cowley:

All England but one Bonfire seems to be,

One Aetna shooting flames into the sea.

But it was the ordnance which impressed the King. Indeed, so dominant did the sheer noise of his reception become that it would become the principal theme of the King’s commentary upon it. As he told his sister Henriette-Anne in a letter the next day, ‘My head is so prodigiously dazed by the acclamation of the people … that I know not whether I am writing sense or no.’
²

From Dover Charles went on to Canterbury, and from thence
to Rochester. He took his time in treading the triumphal route, now lined by the local militia of Kent, as well as more gracefully strewn with herbs by Kentish maidens. The dalliance at Canterbury included Sunday service in the ancient cathedral, the first meeting of his new Privy Council and the presentation of the Garter to General Monck. All these events could as well have taken place in London. But the King’s thirtieth birthday was imminent. It was part of the perfect timing of things, the way everything now fell into place with such marvellous felicity, that the King would be able to take possession of his capital on such an auspicious day.

At Rochester King Charles deserted his coach for horseback, and it was on horseback that he greeted the Army, drawn up for his benefit – or perhaps as a reminder of the source of his power – by Monck at Blackheath. It was on horseback too that he saluted the more pacific Morris dancers who gambolled on the heath. It was on horseback and bareheaded, riding between his two brothers, all three in silver doublets, that on Tuesday, 29 May, the King finally entered the capital. Met by the Lord Mayor at Deptford, he first rode through the borough of Southwark and then, preceded by the Mayor, crossed London Bridge. So clogged was the structure with wooden houses on both sides, that the royal party had to be content with a twelve-foot passage, while heralds and maids and other attendants milled about them. None of this diminished the general ecstasy. As John Evelyn, the Anglican and former exile, wrote in his
Diary
of the spectacle on Restoration Day, ‘I stood in the Strand and beheld it and blessed God.’
³

It was of course the King that the populace crowded to see. But the pomp of this first royal procession indicated that King Charles
II
did not intend to return as a suppliant exile – more as ‘the Chiefest Ray of Lustre to all this Splendid Triumph’.
⁴
Not only a monarchy but a whole way of life was being restored. The cortège which reached London included three hundred gentlemen in doublets of cloth of silver, and an equivalent number in velvet coats, accompanied by footmen and lackeys in purple liveries and other uniforms of sea-green and silver. The buff coats of the soldiers evoked now no painful memories
of the Civil War, adorned as they were with sleeves of cloth of silver, and other trimmings of silver lace. To this spectacle of affluence was joined that of the Sheriff’s men in their red cloaks and still more silver lace, the gentlemen from the London companies, opulent in velvet coats and golden chains, the Aldermen of London in scarlet gowns also richly adorned.

The noise remained fulminating. It was a noise of guns and cannon, the bells which never stopped, the clattering of the soldiers and their horses, but above all the noise of the people – over twenty thousand of them, laughing, shouting and crying and jostling to see the King coming into his own. That day and night they were all Royalists. The streets literally flowed with wine: the Venetian Ambassador kept a perpetual supply on tap outside his house. It was seven o’clock in the evening before the King, surrounded by this happy tumult, reached Whitehall.

Here he was addressed by the Speakers of both Houses of Parliament. The Earl of Manchester, for the peers, began his address in a style which was almost ludicrously obsequious: ‘Dread Sovereign!’ he cried, ‘I offer no flattering titles, but speak the words of Truth: you are the desire of three Kingdoms, the strength and stay of the Tribes of the People, for the moderating of Extremities, the reconciling of Differences, the satisfying of all Interests’, and so forth and so on.
⁵
Yet it was true, as Manchester proceeded to point out, that the great magnates of the realm had found the destiny of the peerage had been peculiarly linked to the monarchy’s own: the House of Lords had been abolished just after the execution of King Charles
I
, and, despite some Cromwellian experiments, had not really found its place again in the constitution in any proper form.

The King’s ‘Gracious answer’, as it was afterwards described, was very short. To excuse its brevity, he said that he was disorientated by his journey and above all by the noise still sounding in his ears; but ‘I confess [it] was pleasing to me, because it expressed the affections of my people,’ the King quickly added.
⁶