King Charles II (53 page)

‘I do believe we are not so tied, as if we received satisfaction over the principal matter of the sea, there is scope sufficient for a very near alliance.’

A
t some point late in 1668 King Charles decided formally to pursue an alliance with his cousin Louis
XIV
by any means that might prove useful (not necessarily of the most honourable or open). As has been mentioned, Charles
II
had veered towards France since the beginning of his reign, just as he had backed away from the Dutch. He had hoped for French neutrality during the Dutch War. But this decision represented something new.

His cynicism towards his own Parliament was growing, and the French initiative cannot altogether be separated from it. The secret feelings of such a wary character as Charles
II
must always be analysed with care; nevertheless, the distinct impression is gained that he saw in the French alliance, from the first, one solution to his domestic insecurity. Charles the politician was taking unto himself the maxim of Machiavelli: ‘Every government, whether it be republican or of the princely type, should consider beforehand what adverse times may befall and on what people it may have to rely in times of adversity….’ It was a precept which King Charles
I
, unassisted in his hour of tribulation by any major power, should have heeded. His son intended to be warier.

The character of Louis
XIV
also exercised a baleful fascination
over Charles
II
– as indeed it did over the whole of Europe. The two monarchs, who had of course known each other in youth, were not destined to meet after that abortive encounter at Fuenterrabia in 1659. Yet the personality and reputation of Louis
XIV
represented the living challenge to Charles
II
, much as that of Oliver Cromwell represented the dead. Critics detecting weakness in Charles were quick to point out strength in Louis – Buckingham was a notable example. Pepys reports a conversation round the dinner table in November 1668 in which ‘the greatness of the King of France’ was the subject of much favourable comment: ‘his being fallen into the right way of making that Kingdom great, which none of his Ancestors did before’.
¹
There is evidence that King Charles did not care for this atmosphere of odious comparison.

Rationally he was aware that his cousin of France enjoyed the perquisites of absolute monarchy, while he himself had to jog along with something the French Ambassador had critically described in 1664 as ‘at the bottom … very far from being a monarchy’. Charles
II
would have been less than human not to have resented the contemporary admiration for Louis
XIV
in view of his considerable efforts to make his own kingdom great. The incident of the Persian Vest, which shows up King Charles for once in a slightly foolish light, is only explicable in terms of his obsession with King Louis.
²

Fashion as such never much interested Charles
II
after 1660. In exile he showed a taste for ordering beaver hats and swords from Paris, and at the moment of restoration a wardrobe of summer clothes from the great Parisian tailor Sourceau, trimmings to be chosen by his mother, was deemed appropriate. These were the predilections of enforced idleness. Afterwards the wardrobe accounts reveal the occasional order for six yards of lace, forty yards of linen – fitting for a King – as special adornment for his birthday; but there is a more characteristic glimpse of him taking off his wig in order to inspect Chatham dockyard in comfort.
³
Casualness, even carelessness, rather than magnificence, was the keynote of Charles’ appearance in the eyes of his contemporaries.

The Persian Vest incident was however an example of an
early kind of Buy British campaign. Following the great depredations on trade made by the Fire of London, the King ordered French fashions to be abandoned. Instead he donned a loose surcoat, resembling fashions seen in Persian miniatures of the time. ‘Nothing like it since William the Conqueror,’ commented a newsletter. It was John Evelyn, seeing this strange new garb for the first time in October 1666, who compared it to ‘the comeliness and usefulness of Persian clothing’.
⁴
At the Court ball for the birthday of Queen Catharine in November there were one hundred of such vests to be seen, each costing one hundred pounds to make; the King’s was of suitably rich material, with a silver lining.

Unfortunately the Sun King of France, a sartorial connoisseur where his cousin was not, found the opportunity irresistible. He took to dressing his footmen and servants in a parody of the new English fashion. The mockery was reported back across the Channel. King Charles attempted to brazen out his new-fangled elegance. The personality of King Louis was too strong. By the early 1670s the English had surrendered and returned to the French fashion.

The English king’s obsession was however more compounded of admiration than annoyance. And his letters reveal also a true desire for intimacy with King Louis especially remarkable in one who was on his own confession a laggard correspondent. King Charles was in the habit of keeping King Louis in touch with all his family news: when the little Duke of Cambridge, son of the Duke and Duchess of York, died, Charles did not doubt that Louis would be as concerned as usual over everything to do with ‘ma maison’– that is, the House of Stuart. In May 1669 we find King Charles appealing in a handwritten letter to King Louis, his
bon frère
, to use his authority to intervene in a dispute between Prince Rupert and one of his brothers.
⁵

Religion – or ‘the design about R.’, as Madame coyly termed it – does not seem to have played any part at all in Charles’ calculations at this point. Aiming at greatness abroad, security at home, and having lassoed for the time being the horns of the Dutch, Charles prepared to stalk the bigger game of Louis
XIV
. He was not ashamed to admit to Madame that the Triple
Alliance had its genesis in his disappointment with France. She might be ‘a little surprised’ by the treaty he had concluded with the Dutch, he wrote airily in January 1668, but she should not be. ‘Finding my propositions to France receive so cold an answer, which in effect was as good as a refusal, I thought I had no other way but this to secure myself.’
⁶

Louis
XIV
was intended to take the point and did. In May Charles was observing to the French Ambassador, Ruvigny, that he saw no reason why the two kings should not talk to each other ‘de gentilhomme à gentilhomme’ (although neither Charles
II
nor Louis
XIV
, in their diplomatic dealings, quite justify the use of the word). In August Louis despatched Colbert de Croissy to replace Ruvigny, with specific instructions to break up the Triple Alliance. Among methods recommended was the bribing of the pro-Dutch Arlington. In September Charles allowed himself a crack at Louis
XIV
’s own support of the Dutch in the past war; in a letter to Madame, mentioning his own new Dutch commitment, he wrote that Louis
XIV
had recently given him an example of being ‘a martyr to his word’ in that respect. Nevertheless, ‘when I have said this, I do believe we are not so tied, as if we received satisfaction over the principal matter of the sea, there is scope sufficient for a very near alliance’.
⁷

Charles repeated the same sentiment in January of the following year: ‘The only thing which can give any impediment to what we both desire is the matter of the sea, which is so essential point to us here as an union upon any other security can never be lasting.’ By this time cautious negotiations were in fact proceeding. Madame, for example, had planned a visit to England in December. Her arrival had to be postponed owing to her pregnancy; Monsieur insisted on his marital rights, with the precise object of spoiling her plans. Yet the visit had obviously been intended to forward discussions between the two kings.

So the scene was set for Madame’s embassy, the zenith of her life. It was also the most vital period so far (if more commonly rated the nadir than the zenith) in the reign of Charles
II
. For so, surely, the months between the signature of the Triple Alliance and the signature of the Secret Treaty of Dover in May 1670 must be regarded. Madame was given a
special cipher for the purpose by her brother. Nevertheless, she remained the ambassadress of England rather than of France. Nothing emerges more clearly from Madame’s letters to her brother than the continuance of her English as opposed to her French sympathies. As she told Arlington in a personal letter, she was concerned to bring about King Charles’ advantage ‘jusque au plus petite chose’– down to the slightest detail. The death of Henrietta Maria on French soil provided a striking demonstration of this. The Dowager Queen had survived the husband she adored by twenty years. She was only sixty-one; yet she reminded everyone of old, unhappy, far-off things, and her passing was not much regretted. Monsieur wanted to take the opportunity offered by French law to grab all her belongings and jewels for his wife, the only child actually resident in France. But Madame strenuously resisted the process. She insisted on returning to the Crown of England what was due to it.
⁸

Secret but exhilarating negotiations continued throughout the spring and summer of 1669. Madame even described it as ‘perilous’ to confide the design to the Pope, since he would have no part in its execution. Everything was still publicly seen in terms of English victory over Holland. ‘Your glory and profit will coincide in this design,’ wrote Madame on 27 September. ‘Indeed what is there more glorious and more profitable than to extend the confines of your kingdom beyond the sea and to become supreme in commerce, which is what your people most passionately desire and what will probably never occur so long as the Republic of Holland exists.’
⁹

So Madame exulted, and so the prospect of ‘the very near alliance’ grew excitingly nearer to the royal conspirators.

In the spring of 1670 it was the opinion of Andrew Marvell that no king since the Conquest had been so ‘absolutely powerful’ as Charles
II
. Certainly the King opened the 1670 session of Parliament in state for the first time, a practice which stirred uncomfortable memories of the past for some; to others it was equally disquieting mimicry of the absolute state of Louis
XIV
across the water. Marvell noted another development which he described as sinister: the King taking his seat in the House of Lords. ‘It is now so old, that it is new,’ he wrote, ‘and so disliked
that at any other but so bewitched a time as this it would have been looked on as a high Usurpation, the Breach of Privilege.’
¹⁰

That was how the royal position appeared from the angle of a critical MP. What was the King’s own attitude to Parliament? Parliament was not yet quite disillusioned with Charles
II
. But he was certainly, by 1670, disillusioned with it. He was already using the prorogation of Parliament with quite new dexterity throughout 1668 and 1669 as an instrument of strategy; as a result, many fewer Acts were passed.
¹¹
It is an inescapable fact that in early 1670, at the very moment Charles was negotiating with France, he played on the hatred of the House of Commons for the French by asking for money to fight them. … The conclusion of the King’s contempt for his Commons is unavoidable.

If one may contrast Charles with Cromwell (a comparison the King would not have appreciated personally), Cromwell continually and rather pathetically believed in the theory of Parliaments. He would summon them, find himself angrily horrified by their selfish behaviour in practice and dismiss them. Charles
II
duly noted the self-seeking behaviour of the Parliaments in the first decade of his reign, shrugged his shoulders over the theory of the thing and decided to try and manipulate Parliament before it could manipulate him.

What inspired him? It was most emphatically not the vision of an autocratic monarchy: for that would have been once more theory rather than practice. But there was a vision all the same. It was the vision of an England strong abroad and at home, her fleet triumphant, superior to the Dutch, supported and abetted by her natural friend France. In January 1670 Charles
II
made this quite clear in an important personal memorandum beginning, ‘As a war against Holland would in all respects suit with the interests of England and be very advantageous to it if the King of Great Britain had force ready to be master of the seas: so on the other hand if the Hollanders should be strongest at sea nothing in the world could be so pernicious to England as that war’ – for then English trade would be at the mercy of the Dutch.
¹²

By May 1670 the negotiations with France were sufficiently
advanced for Madame to pay her long-deferred, long-desired visit. Monsieur’s permission had of course to be sought – and he gave it with a bad grace. He also attempted to stop Madame’s journey by pregnancy as he had done before, his excuse being that he needed an heir (their only son had died as a baby). Failing, Monsieur granted the minimum period of absence consonant with etiquette. All the same, Madame was at last free to go. She arrived off Dover on 16 May. Unbelievably, it was close on ten years since they had met face to face, for Henriette-Anne had last visited England that winter of 1660 before her marriage. Yet the intimacy was as close as ever.