Authors: Antonia Fraser
King Charles
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was not particularly philosophically inclined towards – or against – the Jews: such was not the measure of the man. But he was kind and he was tolerant. He had another useful quality, gratitude, and, like Cromwell, he too was practical. In exile he had promised certain Royalist Jews in Amsterdam toleration in return for a loan: ‘When God shall restore us … we shall extend that protection to them which they can reasonably expect and abate that rigour of the Laws which is against them in our several dominions.’ He may also have been aided by Augustin Coronel Chacon – ‘the little Jew’ – later agent to the King of Portugal in London. In the summer of 1660 the King’s personal repute with the Jewish leaders was high. Conversations with the then powerful Monck produced this verdict: ‘
Segundo todos dizem he sua Benignidade tanta que nào se nesesitava de medianero algum
.’ (According to what everyone says his good will is such that no intermediary is necessary).
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For all this, the atmosphere immediately after the Restoration was tense so far as the Anglo-Jewish community was concerned. For they were still without written permission to resettle. Although their synagogue in Cree Lane became one of the tourist sights of London (the ever-curious Pepys paid it two visits, and Gentile women made nuisances of themselves gaping) it was still theoretically possible to eject the Jews once more. The frowning rivalry of the English merchants remained a threat, and there were hostile references in the House of Commons. The Jews felt harassment to be on the increase. Then the Conventicle Act, that part of the Clarendon Code forbidding any religious assembly not in accordance with the laws of the Church of England, offered a chance to the Jews’ enemies: no synagogue could possibly fit in with its provisions. First, Paul Ruycart threatened the Jewish leaders with removal under the new law. Then the Earl of Berkshire, son of the King’s old governor, intervened in a manner which was hardly more attractive. He offered to intercede with the King on the Jews’
behalf – but they would have to come to a speedy financial arrangement with him first, otherwise ‘he will endeavour and prosecute the seizure of their estates’. In short, it was blackmail. Desperately, the Jewish leaders decided to go directly to the King. Their petition reminded him of their good behaviour and asked that they might remain ‘under the like Protection with the rest of your Majesty’s subjects’.
An unpublished Hebrew letter from Rabbi Jacob Sasportas to Rabbi Josiah Pardo of Rotterdam describes the incident: ‘We live at a time in which God has seen fit greatly to ameliorate the condition of his people, bringing them forth from the general condition of serfdom into freedom, and to set them beneath the authority of one appropriate indeed to hold them in a subjection that is itself the essence of liberty [that is, Charles
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]: specifically, in that we are free to practise our own true religion…. A further miracle has been vouchsafed us in these last days. Two nobles, being themselves in possession of access to the royal council, approached us purporting to have been given authority over our persons and property. We requested them to give us time, and we apprised the King, who chuckled and spat at the business; and a written statement was issued from him, duly signed, affirming that no untoward measures had been or would be initiated against us, and that “they [the Jews] should not look towards any protector other than his Majesty: during the continuance of whose lifetime they need feel no trepidation because of any sect that might oppose them, inasmuch as he himself would be their advocate and assist them with all his power.” Blessed be the Lord….’ So Charles
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implemented that promise made in exile.
On 22 August 1664 the Jews trading in England received from the Privy Council the precious, long-sought document, an Order in Council, by which they might ‘promise themselves the effects of the same favour as formerly they have had, so long as they demean themselves peaceably and quietly with due obedience to His Majestie’s laws and without scandal to his Government’.
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Charles
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, as good as his word, continued to act generously towards the Jews, granting letters of endenization (that is, moderated naturalization) with an open hand, so that
the Jewish community increased and flourished in his reign. Recognition of their religious status was further granted in 1673.
If only the King could have acted in a similar manner towards all those dissenters living ‘peaceably and quietly’ within his dominions! Such was certainly his inclination, and it was the good fortune of the Jews that they at least were able to benefit from it. Catholics, because held to be politically dangerous (which no one considered the Jews to be), were another matter.
Parliament was the bane. The basic trouble was with its composition. The newly elected body was subject almost immediately to an enormous turnover.
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Part of this was due to natural (noble) wastage: a quantity of MPs who were eldest sons of peers replaced their fathers in the House of Lords between 1661 and 1667. Other MPs, of proven loyalty, were sent to the Lords as a reward. By 1664 forty-eight seats had changed their occupants and by the fall of Clarendon in 1667 well over a hundred. A body chosen in a moment of popular acclaim was subtly if unintentionally transformed. As a result, King Charles found himself reaping a bleak harvest. He could not in the end reconcile, in an age when the national divisions turned out to be great, and the art of parliamentary management was not yet understood.
On 30 January 1662, a day dedicated to the solemn commemoration of the murder of the late King, Pepys reported, ‘All people discontented, some that the King doth not gratify them enough; and the others, Fanatiques of all sorts, that the King doth take away their liberty of conscience….’ By April 1663 Parliament was capable of being described by the same source as being ‘in a very angry pettish mood’.
It is true that 1664 saw the repeal of one Triennial Act and the introduction of a new one. It would prove a remarkably convenient victory for the Crown, even if the fact was not realized at the time. The Triennial Act of 1641 had laid down that a King should meet Parliament once every three years and its passing had been considered a notable concession by Charles
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. The Act of 1664, however, referred to that of 1641 as ‘in derogation of his Majesty’s just rights and prerogative’, as a result of which it might ‘much endanger the peace and safety
of his Majesty and all his liege people …’. In the future, while it was regarded as right that no more than three years should elapse between Parliaments, it was left to the King to secure this happy state of affairs; no procedure was suggested for compelling him. This victory was the result of clever manœuvring on the part of the Crown, playing on those general fears regarding ‘peace and safety’ to which the Act alluded. Yet the Crown’s tactics – proceedings were pushed ahead rapidly to avoid a full house – were aimed at this single success, rather than general Parliamentary management.
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The King’s policy towards the House of Lords did nothing to reverse this effect created in the Commons.
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It was Clarendon, not the King, who was eager to readmit the Anglican Bishops to the seats from which they had been expelled in 1641 – the King’s Catholic friends, such as Lord Bristol, feared for their effect on Catholic toleration. And, unlike his father and his brother, Charles was not free with his new creations. After the first rewards for loyalty were over, creations only outweighed extinctions over his whole reign by nine; only ten peers were created between 1662 and 1670. As a result, the House of Lords during this period was once again by no means the docile Royalist body which might have been expected. Had not thirty of its members fought against Charles
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? It would be a powerful hostile element in the fall of Clarendon. The fuss over the Irish Castle Bill, in which Buckingham kept the House of Lords talking till the candles ran out, was a typical example of the unruly paths down which these post-Restoration peers could stray.
There was then little appreciation of the importance of the composition of Parliament in the 1660s. This did not mean that no effort at all was made to carry through the royal policies. In Clarendon’s efforts to form some kind of Court party in the Commons – rather than in later Whiggery – have been sought the origins of the English party system.
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Through these manœuvres a new kind of man emerged to represent the King’s interests in Parliament. Such a figure was Henry Bennet, created Baron Arlington in 1665 (by which name he will for simplicity’s sake be known).
Arlington had little in common with the magisterial figures who had supported, advised and even overborne the young King in exile. Twelve years older than the King, ten years younger than Clarendon, he was in essence a civil servant. Clarendon wrote of him crossly that he ‘could dictate; he could not lead’. But Arlington could also serve, and that was the type of man the King was beginning to need in an age where the theoretical rights of King and Parliament were amorphous, yet their practical relationship had to be hammered out day by day. Burnet noted that Arlington had the ‘art of observing the King’s temper, and managing it beyond all the men of that time’, a quality he used to good effect once he had been given the Privy Purse; in October 1662 he replaced the ageing Nicholas as Secretary of State.
Arlington had a particular love of and interest in Spain, having begun his career on a diplomatic mission there in 1657. Soon the affairs of Spain, France, Portugal and Holland were channelled through him rather than the other Secretary of State, Sir William Morrice; Arlington taking advantage of his knowledge of languages, an attribute not shared by all his English contemporaries. With his rich dress, like that of a Spanish grandee, his air of formality described as ‘his Castilian bearing’, a strange piece of black sticking-plaster across his nose (the relic of a war wound), Arlington was something of an outward oddity at the Court of King Charles. But the intimacy he soon enjoyed with the King was based on usefulness: he was given a lodging from which he could easily reach the royal apartments by a private staircase. As time would show, it was the subservient Arlington, not the magisterial Clarendon, who represented the type of the King’s advisers in the future.
For one thing, the King did not share Clarendon’s great belief in the Privy Council as an instrument.
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In Clarendon’s declared opinion, this body was ‘the most sacred, and hath the greatest authority in the government next the person of the King’. He envisaged a constitution in which the legislature consisted of the King in Parliament and the executive of the King in Council – with the two completely separate. Although we might be tempted to think that he occupied the role of Prime Minister,
Clarendon himself considered the idea of an official chief adviser highly un-English: it was exemplified by Richelieu and Mazarin across the Channel, as the French origin of the words
premier ministre
indicated.
To Clarendon it was Parliament which represented the danger, and the powerful aristocrats there who might try to exercise control over the King, as they had done in the previous reign. How much more desirable to Clarendon appeared a Privy Council (dominated of course by himself), which would withdraw from Parliament, for instance, control of the Treasury and the Navy. In Clarendon’s view, Parliament was there to vote the money – but the Council was there to spend it.
But to King Charles
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, aristocratic control via the Privy Council was scarcely more appealing than that by Parliament. When the King expatiated in 1664 on his affection for Parliaments, his honeyed words were not pure hypocrisy. ‘I need not tell you how much I love Parliaments,’ he declared. ‘Never King was so much beholden to Parliaments as I have been….’ There was much truth in the sentiment. Officially, Monck’s part in restoring him was now forgotten. He had been, if anything, restored by Parliament. He certainly preferred the concept of a Parliament to that of a Council, which, being closer to the person of the King, was potentially more disagreeable. When Queen Henrietta Maria complained of the Privy Council that it ‘shadowed the King too much, and usurped too much of his authority and too often superseded his own commands’, she was expressing a valid point from the monarchical point of view.
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So the relationship between the King and Clarendon was not entirely easy, for all the jocularity of their scribbled exchanges within the Privy Council itself:
Clarendon to the King on a prospective visit to Tunbridge: ‘I suppose you will go with a light Train.’
King Charles: ‘I intend to take nothing but my night bag.’
Clarendon: ‘Yes, you will not go without forty or fifty horse.’
The King: ‘I count that part of my night bag….’
The religious settlement had aroused a passion, if a frustrated
one, in the King. He showed a great deal less day-to-day interest in the settlement of those vast tracts of his kingdom, Ireland and Scotland. He had never visited Ireland, and it therefore exercised over him no powerful memories, good or bad. If anything, he was inclined to be favourable to those Catholic Irish who had supported his father, many of whom had served under him in the army of exile; in general, he had found them an agreeable lot, and in certain cases, such as Theobald Taaffe (now Lord Carlingford), real friendship had grown up.
The Duke of Ormonde, a man of great wisdom and equity, echoed this feeling for the loyalties and wrongs of the Catholic Irish – although himself a Protestant. He was determined to bring about a land settlement where the Catholic Irish, and those who had served in the Army in support of the late King in particular, would not find their claims ignored in favour of the Protestants, soldiers and adventurers who had merely supported the new King’s restoration. In Ireland this aroused unhappy memories of Ormonde’s Treaty of 1649, which had been surrounded by bitter controversy. In England Ormonde proved to be a lone voice amongst the King’s other advisers, including Clarendon, who were happy with the status quo in Ireland – either because it suited them economically, or perhaps because it caused less trouble. For all Ormonde’s efforts, justice was not done to the Catholic Irish. Even though Catholics were restored to trading privileges in 1661, the land settlement of Ireland remained very much as it had been in Cromwellian times: under the control of a Protestant ascendancy.