King Charles II (55 page)

One possibility would be that the religious clause – the ‘design about R.’– was inserted to please Madame. There is nothing in the King’s correspondence to contradict such a view: indeed,
there is evidence of Madame’s growing preoccupation with religion, her own, her brother’s and that of her native country. Madame may well have believed that she inclined Charles towards its insertion, just as she inclined him towards a French alliance. … In both cases however it is doubtful whether Charles would have allowed himself to go with her tide, had it not suited him in the first place. It is necessary to seek a less charming and more cynical explanation.

The religious clause set the seal, in the King’s view, on that security which he expected to enjoy from the support of Louis
XIV
. It was not so much a question of Charles
II
’s religious proclivities as those of Louis
XIV
: the English King, in signing such a clause, which committed him to a personal declaration with no time schedule whatsoever, expected to bind the French King to him further. In politics, it cannot be denied that the end very often does justify the means. By 1670 Charles
II
had decided to make this truth – regrettable or otherwise – the principle of his actions both at home and abroad. One may nevertheless agree with Cicero that certain political actions are objectively bad. It is still difficult to apply that judgement to Charles
II
at this juncture in his career. The maintenance of the Navy, the expansion of empire, the ‘making that Kingdom great’ – these had been the classic preoccupations of those English idols (in their different ways), Queen Elizabeth
I
and Oliver Cromwell. By means of a French alliance, Charles
II
intended to pursue these policies, without being tumbled from his throne, as had Charles
I
.

1
She died without presenting Monsieur with that male heir he so much desired. But Madame did leave two daughters; from Anne-Marie, who married a Duke of Savoy, the present (Catholic) Wittelsbach claimant to the English throne descends. The claim is based on the fact that the descendants of Henriette-Anne, daughter of Charles
I
, should have precedence over the present royal family, the descendants of Elizabeth of Bohemia, daughter of James
I
. But this of course ignores the fact that a Catholic is disqualified by Act of Parliament from occupying the throne of Great Britain.

2
Besides which, the rapid rate of modern inflation often makes the comparison out of date a few years after it is made.

‘A Prince of many virtues, and many great imperfections’

T
he summer of 1670 – when Charles
II
reached his fortieth birthday – represented a turning-point. To a far greater extent than such anniversaries generally do, it marked his emergence not only as a fully fledged governor of his own kingdom but also as a mature man set in his ways. The years of youthful exile, while they had developed in him abnormal courage and resilience, had also artificially held him back as a ruler. Such development had to take place in his thirties, and was further retarded by the presence of Clarendon until 1667. After the great manager’s departure, King Charles was left to discover certain facts about himself, his views and intentions for the first time. By the summer of 1670 these facts were fully known to him.

On 29 May 1660 the crowds cheering the restored monarch had been greeted by an evidently wary, if affable, man. By 29 March 1670 the reserve had become so deep as to be impenetrable. The affability was virtually impenetrable too. A man of political strength, cunning and purpose, he was prepared to show himself at all times gracious to his people. The hope of Henrietta Maria that the son would not repeat the clumsy, shy discourtesies of the father had borne fruit. As a monarch, Charles
II
was renowned for his friendliness, the ease of access
which he offered to his subjects, to include not only the poorest amongst them but also a traditionally less welcome category for kings – his critics.

There was however one aspect of his public face in which his subjects might feel that ease had gone altogether too far. It was after the fall of Clarendon that the Court of King Charles
II
began to enjoy that reputation for debauchery which has surrounded it in the popular imagination ever since. Gone was the attractive picture of a temperate king painted by Sir Richard Fanshawe in 1660 – or at any rate swallowed up in a series of vignettes of Court life depicted in far more lurid colours. Clarendon had been an imposing figurehead, who might not be revered but whose name was certainly never synonymous with debauchery. Buckingham offered a very different image.

A duel in which the husband of his mistress, Anna Maria Countess of Shrewsbury, was mortally wounded caused scandal, and a temporary fall from grace for Buckingham himself. The King, although he subsequently pardoned those involved, showed himself extremely stern on the subject of duelling, which he wished to stamp out. But,
autre temps autre mœurs
, the gesture which provoked the most genuine horror, even among the charitable, was Buckingham’s decision to have his illegitimate son by Lady Shrewsbury christened in Westminster Abbey. A duel was a duel, an unhappy feature of the times, but such a baptism offended against the established order of society.

Sir Charles Sedley and Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst (later Earl of Dorset), two culpable rakes in Pepys’ view, were involved in an inglorious drunken orgy at a Fleet Street tavern which brought them before the magistrates. The mutilation of Sir John Coventry was another highly discreditable incident. When Sir John Berkenhead tried to avert the imposition of a tax on the playhouses on the grounds that they had been of much service to the King, Sir John Coventry enquired cheekily whether he meant the men or women players …? After which the troopers of the Duke of Monmouth waylaid Coventry and all but cut off the wretched man’s nose.

Of the Cabal, not only Buckingham gave offence. The Duke of Lauderdale was in private life a gross figure and his wife
Bess a legendary amorist who even claimed to have dangled Cromwell’s scalp at her belt. The story was certainly not true – there are always ladies to claim the favours of great men – but Bess, holding her court at Ham House, made characteristically bold play with it. As against that, it should in fairness be pointed out that Clifford’s Devonshire-based life was a pattern of domesticity; Arlington’s private life was impeccable, as might be expected from such a ‘Castilian’ figure; Shaftesbury’s interests lay in political controversy rather than in private indulgence, and an open verdict has been returned by his biographer on the various theatrical references to his ‘lechery’.
¹

Can it then be argued that this reputation for debauchery in ‘Good King Charles’ Golden Days’ has been much exaggerated? That a few vicious shooting stars have distracted attention from a host of lesser lights, who shone, in so far as they shone at all, with virtue? This view would of course discount not only the legends which have followed the reign – ever a necessary process – but the manifest criticisms and exclamations on the subject of the King’s contemporaries. The clue is to concentrate not so much on the question of debauchery but on the true keynote of the King’s Court after 1667: and that was laxity.

Much of the colourful aura which surrounds the Restoration Court in the popular imagination is derived from the behaviour of ‘the Wits’, rather than of the more powerful ministers. This little group, which flourished for about fifteen years after 1665, included John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, Henry Jermyn, Lord Buckhurst, John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, Henry Killigrew, Sir Charles Sedley, and the playwrights Wycherley and Etherege, as well as Buckingham (who straddled both circles). The first point to be made about the Wits, with regard to Charles
II
, was that they were in the main much younger than the King. Their characters had not been honed like his by fighting in the Civil War: they had grown up in the post-war years, when the atmosphere was very different. (Buckingham, as usual, was the exception.) Rochester, for example, was seventeen years younger than Charles, born only a few years before his father shared the King’s escape from Worcester; Mulgrave was younger still.

Rochester’s portrait shows a young man of almost insolent sensuality, wide lips curling with devilment, but with ‘something of the Angel yet undefac’d in him’, as was said of Etherege’s cynical rake based on Rochester, Dorimant, in
The Man of Mode
. To his own gaping generation Rochester was ‘so idle a rogue’– Pepys was in a tizzy at the idea of Charles making him his constant companion
²
– a virtual alcoholic as well as a brilliant and therefore hurtful satirist. To ours he has become the poet who, for all his obscenity, understands the sad side of passion.

The King enjoyed the outrageous side of his company and, where possible, shrugged off his excesses. There are many anecdotes of Rochester’s wildness. One of the most characteristic has Rochester wandering drunkenly in the Privy Garden at Whitehall; on spying the King’s favourite sun-dial, one of the rarest in Europe, he flung his arms around it and, quoting Shirley’s famous lines,

Sceptre and crown

Must tumble down,

he added, ‘And so must thou!’ Whereupon he hurled it to the ground.
³
That kind of zany dash and style had always fascinated the more cautious house of Stuart: one is reminded of the madcap pranks of the elder Buckingham, catching the eye of James
I
. In Rochester’s case the style included a genuine love of literature in many different forms.

These high-spirited gentlemen – the ‘merry gang’, as Marvell called them – diverted themselves at times with poetry, plays and literature in general, at times with sardonic comment on everything about them, couched, very often, in scabrous language. Their tendency to the latter has become more famous than their patronage of the former: yet it was to the Wits that much of the abundance of Restoration drama was owed, a more important achievement than their unprintable rhymes about the King’s mistresses. It did not harm the theatre that play-writing became a fashionable occupation, practised by aristocrats, aspired to by gentlemen. At least one play, Wycherley’s
The Plain Dealer
, was saved by the applause of the Wits, as theatre-goers hesitated,
uncertain of their own taste.
⁴
Rochester was the friend of Aphra Behn and the model for Willmore,
The Rover
, in her play of that name. Buckingham himself wrote a play,
The Rehearsal
: an attack, full of humorous ingenuity, on Dryden and heroic drama in general. Its fame crossed the Channel: Louis
XIV
twitted his own prime minister on not being able to write a successful farce, as his cousin’s had done. It is still occasionally performed, if better known as the work from which Sheridan took his own play,
The Critic
.

Buckhurst loved drunken frolics, but his lyric on the eve of a naval battle against the Dutch in 1665, ‘To all you ladies now at land …’, represents courtly elegance; later in life he gave himself over to literary patronage. The notorious Sedley was also a great lover of the arts. Known to his contemporaries as ‘Apollo’s Viceroy’, he was the author of several plays as well as lyrics set exquisitely to music by Purcell. Baptist (‘Bab’) May, who became Keeper of the Privy Purse to the King, was a
bon viveur
whose appetite for life was matched by his appreciation of the arts. The brother of Hugh May, the architect who worked on the renovation of Windsor Castle, Bab May made a valuable collection of pictures in his own right.

In the eighteenth century the reputation of the Wits became further exaggerated, and Rochester in particular was the subject of gloating, frequently inaccurate, biographies.

While the King indulged himself with the company of these boon companions as a form of relaxation, he is definitely not to be identified with them. Far from being a ‘Wit’ himself, he could even be called their victim – along with anything else even remotely established which came within their sights. From time to time he issued reprimands: Grammont describes Rochester as having been sent away from Court at least once a year;
⁵
the ‘profane’ Earl even had a spell in the Tower after eloping with an heiress, although he was subsequently forgiven. One suspects that the ‘merry gang’ had something in common with the lovely ladies of the Court: their irreverent company helped to dispel the unspoken melancholy lying within the King’s nature.

This was above all a liberal or, as we should now say, a
permissive era. People of rank took their pleasures as they found them and made no secret of their practices because they saw no harm in them. ‘Is it not a frank age?’ asked the young blade Sparkish in Wycherley’s
The Country Wife
. ‘And I am a frank person.’ If it is accepted that the level of ‘sin’ remains roughly constant in human behaviour, then the difference between the age of Charles
II
and that preceding it – the so-called Puritan age of Cromwell – was this: after 1660 it was not considered necessary to hide these things. Naturally not everything which crept in under this permissive umbrella was equally desirable. Laxity towards moral behaviour at Court, in contrast to the rigidity of the Commonwealth period, meant that vice was able to take its chance with virtue and frequently – but not always – won.