King Charles II (85 page)

In September 1682 Evelyn described the King as ‘mightily pleased’ by his plans; building began the following May. He intended Winchester, wrote Evelyn, to be the seat of ‘autumnal field diversions’ (as Newmarket had once been).
³⁹
Long before the structure became habitable, the Court flocked down to the grave and charming cathedral town. They devoured it for lodgings, as once they had raided Oxford, producing an atmosphere of revelry reminiscent of Comus’ rout. The houses of the
Cathedral clergy were not immune. During the King’s early visits he lodged with the Bishop of the town, to the extent that a polite enquiry was made whether he intended to make the Bishop’s house his inn.

A King was one thing but a mistress was another. When a new Bishop was needed for Winchester, it was made clear to the incoming incumbent that his duties included lodging his sovereign. But Thomas Ken was furious at the sacrilege of being asked to house Nell Gwynn. He considered it sacrilege on the not unreasonable grounds that ‘a woman of ill-repute ought not to be endured in the house of a clergyman,’ adding, ‘least of all that of the King’s chaplain’. Ken’s fervour did him no harm. Later, when the bishopric of Bath and Wells fell empty, Charles recalled the incident – ‘God’s fish! the little black fellow who would not give poor Nelly a night’s lodging’ – and laughingly approved Ken’s appointment. As for Nell Gwynn, she found a niche at the deanery, overruling further protests.
⁴⁰

In the last year of the King’s life virtually the whole of September was spent at Winchester. Considerable expenses were also run up for furniture for the future for both King and Queen; for example, green damask chairs and stools embroidered in gold and white silk were ordered for Catharine, green remaining a favourite colour. The main expense was of course the structure itself. Only a shell had been completed when the King died – outside walls and a roof – but various payments had been authorized, although, in the general fashion of the time, not necessarily paid. The £90,000 found in the King’s strong-box after his death was probably intended for this purpose. It was indeed expense rather than distaste for the new palace which caused James to halt building immediately on his brother’s death. He probably intended to return to it at a leisure moment in his reign: but such a moment never arrived.

So Winchester Palace lingered on, the subject of vague royal plans from time to time. Queen Anne contemplated it as a residence for her consort Prince George of Denmark; in the end the financial demands of her foreign wars took precedence. French prisoners-of-war were incarcerated there in the middle of the eighteenth century, and in the Napoleonic wars the
quondam palace was used as a barracks. At the end of the nineteenth century it finally burnt down. It was a melancholy end for a project which had once been intended to rival Versailles; at least the Versailles imitation of Ludwig of Bavaria, Herrenchiemsee, survives on its island, more substantial if equally melancholy.

The true memorial to Winchester Palace lies in the eager conversation of Charles
II
with Lord Bruce on one of the last evenings of his life. The King spoke with enthusiasm of the ‘favourite castle’ he was building, and how he would arrange for Bruce to be in waiting there. ‘I shall be so happy this week as to have my house covered with lead,’ he exclaimed.
⁴¹
As the King’s body was wrapped in its lead coffin within the week, it was a prophecy – of the ambiguous sort beloved of the Greek oracle – that came grimly true.

In the last years of Charles
II
, his restless mind did not cease to turn over new schemes, explore new horizons. Less power-obsessed, more fruitful than Winchester Palace was another foundation – that of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, in 1682.
⁴²
This home for veteran soldiers, or for those incapacitated by wounds, was created directly on the model of the Kilmainham Hospital, Dublin, recommended by Sir Stephen Fox to the King. The site of Chelsea College, which had been founded by James
I
for controversialists against Catholicism and had then been granted to the Royal Society, was purchased for £1,300. Fox put up the money. Yet even here the influence of Louis
XIV
was felt: Monmouth, describing to his father the Hôtel des Invalides, a similar form of hostel built in 1670 in Paris, had also ignited his imagination.
⁴³
In-Pensioners, as the residents were termed, were to be organized on military lines, and occupy a single quadrangle known as Figure Court. (The Royal Hospital today is considerably expanded, although Figure Court still exists.)

The Royal Hospital was not opened until 1692, by which date Charles
II
had been seven years in his house of lead. It fell into the kind of financial difficulties which might be expected and the money granted in maintenance proved hard to come by. Nevertheless, Founder’s Day was regularly celebrated on 29
May – Oak Apple Day and the King’s Birthday – in honourable acknowledgement of his part in it all.
^fn1

Not only the welfare of his Army and the well-being of his fleet were dear to the King’s heart. He had other far-flung interests. In general, the reign of Charles
II
saw a remarkable accession of distant lands to the English flag. The great Hudson’s Bay Company was founded in 1670. Not only in North America, but in the West Indies and West Africa, this was an age of territorial expansion and, above all, commercial energy. Along with his concern for soldiers and sailors, this nascent feeling for ‘empire’ was something which Charles
II
had in common with his great predecessor Cromwell. So unalike in so many ways, the two men shared a vague missionary feeling for the benefits of British rule extended, which was in its own fashion a kind of patriotism. In the case of Charles
II
, his curiosity drove him on, even if he did not understand the economic implications of colonial aggrandizement.

In India, for example, it was the great trading companies which were the sovereigns, not Charles
II
. The latter was quite content to hand over Queen Catharine’s dowry of Bombay, which it had taken several years to possess owing to local opposition, to the East India Company. In April 1681 Charles
II
granted a vast tract of land, now Pennsylvania, to William Penn the Quaker – no doubt a far more congenial activity than his disbanding of the Oxford Parliament, which took place about the same time, particularly as it was in discharge of a Crown debt. He liked to hear details of life in the Carolinas, where busy colonists were enjoying a more fruitful kind of exile than he had known. Life in Tangier, because of its military importance, was something he could probably understand more readily; he took the eventual evacuation of the fortress hard.

At home in July 1683 there took place a royal event which might even, had Providence decreed, have granted one final
satisfaction: a peaceful future for the monarchy. This was the marriage of James’ daughter Anne to Prince George of Denmark. In this same year Bishop Burnet had made ‘a melancholy speculation’ on the withering of the Protestant succession in ‘this family that [once] put forth so fair and promising a blossom’.
⁴⁴
It was true that at the time of Anne’s marriage the legitimate succession, Protestant or Catholic, was problematic. As had happened once before to the royal family of Stuart in Scotland, the harvest of descendants of James
I
had suddenly become a very meagre one; this despite the fruitful marriages of Charles
I
and Elizabeth of Bohemia, with six and thirteen surviving children respectively.

The two Catholic daughters of Madame were as yet childless: Marie Louise was married without children and Anne Marie, from whom Madame’s line descends, did not marry until the following year. The Catholic Mary Beatrice Duchess of York had not yet succeeded in producing offspring who survived childhood. As for the Protestants, Mary of Orange had been married for six years and showed no signs of producing any heirs. The vast family of Elizabeth of Bohemia had proved itself as yet astonishingly infertile: the Elector Palatine was childless, while one sister had succeeded Madame as the next Duchesse d’Orléans, which put her within the unsuitable French Catholic orbit. Prince Rupert had died a bachelor at the end of the previous year.

The hand of the eligible Anne had been sought within England itself, notably by the Earl of Mulgrave. The King angrily snubbed his pretensions. An outside claimant was the Prince of Hanover, the son of Anne’s youngest Palatine cousin the Electress Sophia (from his line, ironically enough, was to spring Anne’s own successor). George of Denmark was widely rated to be a French-inspired choice, because the King of Denmark fell within the diplomatic network controlled by Louis
XIV
. In the Cambridge University
epithalamiun
celebrating the match, Matthew Prior referred to it gloriously as the mating of Venus and Mars. Given the protagonists, that was perhaps going a little far.

Nevertheless, very soon this amiable Protestant pair did
produce a child. Little significance was attached to the fact that this first baby died: it was merely one of the commonplace griefs of the time. The important point was that Princess Anne had proved herself fertile. Other children would surely follow. No one could foresee that the unfortunate woman would be condemned to bear seventeen children, not one of whom survived childhood.

As the last year of the life of King Charles
II
dawned, from the point of view of the monarchy there was no longer any reason to fear and much reason to hope.

1
The actual date changed; first it was too close to the birthday of George
III
on 4 June; then, in the 1920s, it was too close to the Chelsea Flower Show, celebrated in its grounds. Founder’s Day and its Parade is now held on the Thursday of the first week in June.

No one would live past years again,

Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remains,

And from the dregs of life think to receive

What the first spritely running could not give….

T
he last year of the King’s life was exteriorly a tranquil one. His country was at peace and he took care that it should remain so. A soft sunlight of prosperity illumined the perilous landscape of his finances: however transient these shafts, they were enough to light him to the end of his reign. No major domestic embroilment ruffled the calm of these autumnal days – neither the angry debates of a Parliament nor the demands of a Pumpkin Plot nor official cries of anguish on the subject of the succession.

The French subsidy, which had been phased over three years, came to an end in theory (although the money had not yet been paid in full).
¹
In any case the King remained openly, even gaily pro-French. He sent a message of congratulation to Louis
XIV
on his acquisition of Luxembourg. The Truce of Ratisbon in the summer of 1684 confirmed the French monarch not only in that precious possession but also Strasbourg. Without English help, there was no way that the United Provinces could play an aggressive part in keeping the French wolf at bay: the checking of this all-conquering animal would have to wait for another day, another reign.

The foreign policy of Charles
II
gave him no trouble at all during the last year of his life because, while it was emotionally
pro-French, that meant being practically neutral.

Two matters could however have plagued him, had he allowed them to do so. One was the continued incarceration of Danby in the Tower of London, five years after he had been consigned there (without a formal trial). The other was the return of Parliament, which had now been dissolved for over three years; this was a significant period, although the Act of 1664 left it conveniently to the King to decide to call Parliament; there was no machinery to compel him to do so. One matter bothered the King, the other his opponents. As it fell out, one was resolved successfully, the other not. In both cases the result was only to further the King’s mastery over the political scene.

The freeing of Danby on bail was not quite such a simple matter as the alterations in the character of the judiciary, stressed earlier, might have promised. Indeed, the anxiety of the judges concerned not to act in any way outside their own consciences illustrates an important point about them. Merely believing in the sanctity of the royal prerogative did not make the judges corrupt: it was a question of political conviction leading (generally) to docility, rather than a built-in pliability.

Danby in the Tower became quite desperate early in 1684, when there was a change of judges on the Court of the King’s Bench. Holloway and Wallcott, the newcomers, asked for a longer time to consider the matter of giving Danby his freedom. On learning from his daughter-in-law, Lady Scroop, that the King had ‘good intentions’ towards him, Danby wrote back to Charles in alarm, ‘But I would find that was not sufficient….’ As to the new judges’ plea for more time: ‘If your Majesty will please yourself to let these two Judges know your mind and not let them be left to be informed by others I shall have relief this term.’ Otherwise Danby feared to wait for the next legal term, and then any judge would once again ask for more time and so forth and so on. ‘The way to my liberty is very obvious,’ cried Danby.
²
He meant through the exercise of the royal will.