It was better to concentrate on the magnificent possibilities of war. In December 1664 Captain Thomas Allin was ordered to attack the Dutch merchant fleet, homeward bound from Smyrna: in the event, the attack did not produce much effect. In February of the following year King Charles, tired of waiting for King Louis, declared war.fn2
There were wise heads who opposed the war. But they were overruled. Apart from these counsellors there were few in England who did not anticipate a glorious outcome of ‘the Dutch business’. Dryden captured the heroic mood of patriotic anticipation on the eve of the Dutch War, when he wrote,
Now, anchors weighed, the seamen shout so shrill
That heaven, and earth, and the wide ocean rings….
1 Historically, this is always known as the Second Dutch War, the First Dutch War having taken place under the Commonwealth, 1652–4. It is here referred to as ‘the Dutch War’ for the convenience of the narrative.
2 The Dutch were responsible for an outburst of unusually coarse language from the King to Madame. Told that a Dutchman had insulted him, he countered, ‘You know the old saying in England, the more a T—— is stirred, the more it stinks, and I do not care a T—— for anything a Dutchman says of me.’30 It was the language of exasperation.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Black Day
Black Day accurs’d!…
When aged Thames was bound with Fetters base, And Medway chaste ravish’d before his Face…
Andrew Marvell
The Dutch War brought in its train a series of damaging assaults on reputation. First, there were the Dutch victories, which, in view of English complacency beforehand, were difficult to assimilate psychologically. Then there was the attack on the credit of those who could be held officially responsible for the war – principally Clarendon. Thirdly, of most moment to the biographer of Charles II, there was the corrosion of the King’s own royal image, like a bright statue tarnished by bad weather – the storms in this case being those of naval defeat.
It was ironic that King Charles had gone to war, in part at least, to satisfy that English appetite for martial success against their traditional seventeenth-century foes. The attitudes of a war lord were not even particularly agreeable to the King. Striking attitudes in general seemed to him to be a waste of enthusiasm. He had travelled far since those golden days at York on the eve of the Civil War, when, as a boy prince, he had vaulted onto his horse in full armour like Hotspur. The travels were as much of the spirit as of the body.
It was also ironic, as well as unfortunate, that such a militaristic conception of leadership had been incarnated quite recently – by the Protector Cromwell. The sour smell of national disgrace recalled sweeter perfumes. How different had been yesterday’s battles! The shadows of the remembered Cromwellian triumphs lengthened and grew black across the reputation of the Stuart king. From memories they became myths, and no less menacing for that. As a legendary leader in the minds of his people, King Charles II had begun to fail.
There is a comparison to be made with the similar decline in the public esteem of King James I at the beginning of the century. On his accession, he had been greeted with delight, as a welcome respite from the cantankerous old woman Queen Elizabeth had become. A few years later such realities were quite forgotten in the shower of golden illusions which surrounded the name of ‘the great Eliza’.
Pepys’ later diary entries – towards the end of the sixties – are full of flattering references to ‘Oliver’. In the early 1670s it was possible for Marvell to depict the two equestrian statues at Charing Cross arguing over the foreign policies of Cromwell and Charles II respectively. One horse declared himself firmly for Cromwell:
Though his government did a tyrant resemble
He made England great and his enemies tremble…
Even the French Ambassador was reported to have snubbed the English King with the remark that Cromwell had been a great man and made himself feared by land and by sea.
It was unfair perhaps to identify a monarch so closely with the fortunes of his country. But so long as national figureheads existed – and Charles II had been restored on that ticket – it was unavoidable. Besides, was not the ability to declare war – in short, the direction of foreign policy – one of the planks of the King’s prerogative? The personalization of war remained a factor during this period. As the Lord Treasurer enquired plaintively of Charles’ strenuous efforts to borrow money for the war from the City, ‘Why will they not trust the King as well as Oliver?’1 The perilous Commonwealth finances were apparently forgotten, as were Cromwell’s own difficulties in securing money from the City.
To Charles in his innocence the prosecution of the Dutch War seemed at first a not unenjoyable occupation. Evelyn gives a delightful vignette of him stopping a chapel service to hear news of a battle, and then promptly turning the occasion into a thanksgiving.2 It certainly gave him ample opportunities to pursue his naval interests: the inspection of coastal fortifications replaced visits to the yacht-builders’ yards. At the beginning of the war the English had about 160 ships, with 5,000 guns and something over 25,000 men; the Dutch had fewer and smaller ships – but these were of course easier to manage in shallow waters; they also had more guns and more men. The English Navy was put under the command of the Duke of York, who had been confirmed in his boyhood title of Lord High Admiral at the Restoration. The appointment was not purely nepotistic; James, like his brother, was fascinated by the sea. He had already gained much popularity within the Admiralty Office for his serious approach to naval matters.
At the first proper engagement of the war, the Battle of Lowestoft on 13 June 1665, the Dutch were resoundingly defeated by the English under James’ command. The element of personal involvement was carried further, the two flagships actually fighting each other, until the Royal Charles (carrying the duke of York) succeeded in sinking its opposite number, killing the Dutch commander in the process. But James’ position as heir presumptive to the throne was a complication: an odd incident during the battle led to the Royal Charles eschewing the rest of the fighting; possibly secret orders had been given to preserve James’ life from danger.3 After the battle Charles certainly forbade James to risk it further by presence at the scene of action.
The veto did of course make sense, particularly in view of the lack of suitable heirs to the throne. It was pure chance which had saved James aboard the Royal Charles. No less than three of his friends had died as a result of a single gunshot. Standing amidst them, he had been drenched by their blood. Nevertheless, casting one’s mind back to that episode in 1648, when Charles refused to let his brother go to sea, one cannot altogether acquit the King of rivalry. As a character, King Charles was certainly not poisoned by jealousy, as the evidence of his private life will show; but, like most human beings, he knew the emotion. The prospect of James’ direct participation in naval warfare (an area of such obsession to Charles) may well have aroused it.
It was the superiority of the English guns which carried the day at Lowestoft. They were loud enough to be heard, speaking ‘thick like angry men’ in the capital itself. Dryden gives an unforgettable picture of the reaction of those in London to the noise of the bombardment: ‘Everyone went following the sound as his fancy led him; and, leaving the town almost empty, some took towards the Park, some across the River, others down it, all seeking the noise in the depth of silence.’4
Although the Dutch claimed Lowestoft as a victory (much as the Royalists had claimed that first Cromwellian success at Marston Moor), it was indubitably an English triumph. Less fortunate was the course of the war immediately afterwards. The daring Dutch Admiral de Ruyter – who had not been present at Lowestoft – captured a rich merchant fleet in northern waters. Furthermore, the English failed to recover it by a clumsy rescue attempt which depended on the connivance of the King of Denmark. In the end, the Danes even allied with the Dutch, although their participation remained nominal.
This England under stress of war was als
o beset by an enemy within. It was during the summer of 1665 that the ominous and disgusting signs of plague began to be found in London.5 The first Bill of Mortality, giving it as the cause of death, occurred in the parish of St Giles in the Fields in early May. The June heatwave which followed – that same glorious weather which gave the English fleet off Lowestoft ‘not a cloud in the sky, nor the least appearance of any alteration of wind or weather’ – gave a fatal impetus to the spread of the disease. In one week alone at the end of June, one hundred plague deaths were registered. Soon the thin summer darkness was illuminated by the lights of innumerable night burials. Many unidentifiable corpses went to their resting-place under such pathetic labels as ‘a child from Kingshead alley’, ‘a man from New Street’, ‘a maid from the Crown in Fleet Street’. On 10 August Pepys considered it time to draw up his own will –‘the town growing so unhealthy that a man cannot depend upon living two days to an end’. By the end of the month, burial in consecrated ground had been abandoned in favour of communal plague pits.
The King and Court remained in the capital till July and then headed for Oxford. Parliament was prorogued, and the Exchequer transferred to Nonsuch, a palace near Ewell. It was not a particularly convenient move, in view of the development of the Dutch War – not quite that easily terminated struggle which the English had anticipated. There would have to be a new campaign in the new year. Arlington commented in November on the difficulty of raising money at this distance (that is, from Nonsuch) ‘towards our preparations for the next spring’.6 It was also possible to criticize the Court for cowardice.
On one level, such a charge was obviously idle. It is true that the Court abandoned the sinking ship (leaving it in this case to the rats who brought the infection). But the plague was not a peril which could be fought manfully by a public example of courage – as King George VI was to expose himself to the London Blitz during World War II. Indeed, we shall discover King Charles II setting just such an example, in the following year of the Great Fire, when bravery and concern could have some effect on the capital’s welfare. To have had the monarch die of the plague would have served no particular purpose, beyond upsetting the dearly won stability of England once more. The same excuse cannot be made for the flight of the President of the Royal College of Physicians, which was indeed culpable.
Yet it is true that the Court’s departure did nothing to arrest the general breakdown of the central authority which aggravated the sufferings of those left behind. (While those who did stay, such as Lord Craven, earned the devotion of the people.) The Lord Mayor, for instance, had no control over the outer parishes; it was not until nine JPs were specifically appointed to deal with the problem that organization at least improved. The plague certainly became a hideous example of the sufferings of the poorer classes. The primitive Anti-Plague Laws of 1646, advocated by the College of Physicians, simply meant that the inhabitants of a plague-ridden building were immured behind a sealed door until they either died or recovered (generally the former). In the crowded tenements, as many as six families could be shut off – and die together.
The connection between infection and hygiene was not remotely appreciated. All sorts of customs entered our social life as methods of warding off the plague – including chewing tobacco, for the story was spread about that no tobacconist had ever died of the plague. The surviving fashion for blessing one who sneezes (a more spiritual preventive) has its origin in the days of the plague, since to sneeze was considered to be the first sign of an attack.
The whole period in London was, as one eighteenth-century historian would write, a ‘prodigious mixture of Piety and Profaneness at the same time’. There were even comic moments (again, the comparison with the Blitz can be made) to relieve the popular horror: a drunkenly insensible bagpiper was carried away on the death-cart; when he awoke and proceeded to play his pipes, he was taken for the Devil himself. One house would bear the legend, ‘Lord have mercy on us.’ In the next there would be ‘tippling and whoring’, as the inhabitants chose a different way of passing the time till eternity.7
Yet those stricken households who chose the pious exhortation had good reason to cry out, in view of the semi-criminal nature of those left to tend the sick. These plague nurses were barely paid, and mainly illiterate: they supplemented their living by stealing from the dying bodies of those who should have been their patients and became their victims.fn1 In the meantime, the restrictions were easily flouted by the upper classes, who either did not report the existence of the disease, or had themselves smuggled away from their sealed houses to the country.
By September the lack of traffic in the streets meant that the grass was beginning to grow in the main thoroughfare of Whitehall. And although the plague was found to have reached its peak during the week of 17 September, with a total of seven thousand deaths recorded, it was slow to die away. The official total of deaths exceeded sixty-eight thousand, but the true figure may have been something over one hundred thousand. There was general under-reporting, quite apart from the fact that certain sections of the community, such as Quakers, Anabaptists and Jews, were frequently not included in the church returns.
The King returned to Whitehall on 1 February 1666. He had got as far as Hampton Court by the end of January, despite rumours of the recurrence of the plague (which may in fact have been due to an outbreak of typhus). He told Madame that ‘already the Plague is in effect nothing’, but added, with a note of impatience, ‘Our women are afraid of the name’, and indeed Queen Catharine lingered at Oxford. By March Arlington, writing off to the envoy Carlingford abroad, was able to assure him that the disease really was declining, commenting that as a result ‘the [funeral] bells are so silent’.8
But the fear naturally remained, since it was hardly to be foreseen that such a decimating disease would now die away. Parliament was again prorogued from mid-April to late September on the excuse of the plague, as it had been the previous year. The King personally may have acted with cunning rather than dread in order to get rid of a Parliament which was proving most irritating towards his plans, yet the excuse was held to be plausible. It would be a long time before the shadow of the disease which in a few months had claimed between a third and a quarter of the total population of the capital would lift altogether.
All this occurred at a moment when the honeymoon of the King and his people was, as has been noted, fast approaching its conclusion. A sick people, who are also at war, are hardly likely to love their monarch the more for such disasters. Nor had the events of the Great Plague increased the popularity of the Court, as may be imagined, particularly as news of their merry debaucheries and dolce far niente way of life was already beginning to spread downwards. At least one commentator put the Great Plague down to God’s desire to punish these said debaucheries;9 although, if this was indeed the Almighty’s intention, he executed it but clumsily in sending a punishment which fell heavily on the poor, and was easily avoided by the rich.
At Oxford on 28 December ‘my lady Castlemaine’, as Barbara was now generally called, had given the King a very public Christmas present in the shape of a son, born at Merton College, where she was lodged. She was not otherwise having a very fruitful time in the university city, since a nasty libel had been pasted on her door: £1,000 was offered to discover the author, but in vain. Besides, the ties of affection, of not sensuality, which bound her to Charles were being alarmingly stretched.
It was not the little Portuguese Queen who was the danger, but a girl called Frances Stewart. Here was a most disquieting kind of rival. It could not be denied that Frances was elegantly dressed, with a sense of style which the French Ambassador complacently attributed to her education in his country – she had been at the court of Henrietta Maria and was now a maid of honour to Queen Catharine. Then her beauty was also without question, Madame describing her as ‘the prettiest girl in the world and the most fitted to adorn a court’. Even Pepys, glimpsing her in black and white lace, head and shoulders adorned by diamond
s, hailed her as ‘a glorious sight’, and later deserted his favourite Barbara to call Frances ‘the beautifullest creature’ he had ever seen.10 Her lovely figure and long legs, much admired by the King, enabled her to wear the man’s dress made fashionable by the Queen; Barbara, constantly pregnant, can hardly have shone in such garb, for all her voluptuousness. Frances was also eight years younger than Barbara, never the happiest of situations for the older rival in fear of being supplanted.
But Frances’s youth was not the worst of it. Most dangerous of all, Frances Stewart was actually virtuous! In the summer of 1665, after several years at the English Court, Lely could paint her without irony as ‘chaste Diana’, a rare compliment. There was indeed something child-like, even childish, about Frances which accorded with her virginity and her determination to preserve it, Clarissa-like, against assault. She loved, for example, to play Blind Man’s Buff, to build card castles, amusements which were harmless, if slightly frivolous. At the same time, she tantalized: as when she had an exciting dream that she was in bed with three French Ambassadors (what could the explanation for that be?) and told it to the Courts. The combination of provocation and virtue drove the King mad. He was discovering the fatal appeal of innocence, which allured and failed to satisfy all at the same frustrating moment. Charles, pursuing his suit with all the amorousness of Henry VIII, but without the cruelty, was heard to groan that he wished to see Frances become old and willing….11