The mistresses did not fare so well. Most of their latter ends would have satisfied a Puritan moralist. Nell Gwynn died – of a stroke – two years after her royal Charles. She was only thirty-five. The King’s death had plucked from her at the last minute the coveted title of Countess of Greenwich. She also endured the common struggle of the late King’s pensionaries to secure those payments she had been promised. At one point she addressed James in language strangely reminiscent of another ill-treated royal servant, Cardinal Wolsey, a character with whom she cannot otherwise be said to have had much in common (perhaps one may attribute the Shakespearean echo to Nelly’s theatrical education): ‘Had I suffered for my God as I have done for your brother and you, I should not have needed either of your kindness or justice to me,’ she told the new King.
In general, James did his best by the mistresses and their children, hampered in his turn by lack of money, but recognizing the duty of their upkeep. He did make the point very firmly to Louise Duchess of Portsmouth that her debts must be paid: but the ladies, like their late protector, remained a byword for negligence. To quote Nelly once more: ‘The King’s Mistresses are accounted ill Paymasters….’8
Barbara Duchess of Cleveland was made of more lasting stuff. She may have lived to regret her own durability. For at the age of sixty-five she married a much younger man, a notorious rake known as Beau Fielding, who treated her abominably; what was more, the marriage itself proved to be bigamous. As for Louise, she survived (in France) to the then remarkable age of eighty-five – the yacht Fubbs named in her honour lasted even longer: it was not broken up until 1770.9 She died, wrote Saint Simon, ‘very old, very penitent and very poor’. The Louise who held luxurious court at Whitehall beneath Evelyn’s fascinated gaze would have deplored all three states, but particularly the last.
Catharine of Braganza survived too. It was characteristic of her tenderness that she pleaded with James II for the life of Monmouth, who was certainly too desperate to appreciate the irony of his supplication to the childless Queen: ‘Being in this unfortunate condition, and having none left but your Majesty that I think may have some compassion for me; and that, for the last King’s sake …’ In her first widowhood Catharine withdrew to Hammersmith and spent her time amongst the nuns in a convent she had founded there. Later she moved to Somerset House, the palace which belonged by right to a Queen Dowager (Henrietta Maria had also occupied it). She was present at the controversial birth of James II’s son, the so-called Warming-pan Baby, and acted as the child’s godmother; she subsequently bore witness that no act of substitution had taken place. Catharine was still in England at the Revolution of 1688, her return to Portugal having been delayed by a lawsuit against her former Chamberlain. She finally sailed back to Portugal in March 1692, after thirty years spent in England, during which, as Evelyn said: ‘She deported herself so decently upon all occasions … which made her universally beloved.’10
Even then her public life was not over. Catharine’s last years were spent acting as Regent of Portugal for her sick brother Pedro. Her efforts were rewarded in at least one direction: in 1703 she was able to see an alliance with England, the so-called Methuen Treaty, which she advocated, carried through. Catharine of Braganza died at the end of 1705, twenty years after the husband she had loved, served, and in all but one vital respect over which she had no control, satisfied. In her case a magnificent state funeral in Portugal testified to the general esteem in which this practical and pious lady was held.
King Charles II had inherited a country war-torn and poor, divided, restless and suspicious. He left behind him a country outwardly at harmony. He was personally beloved from his early days, when the crowds saluted their Black Boy come again, to those last years, when he still basked in national affection. One mourning sermon of the time – ‘A Loyal Tear Dropt on the Vault of the High and Mighty Prince Charles II’, dedicated to the Bishop of Winton, Prelate of the Garter, by a Hampshire vicar – referred repeatedly and with evident sincerity to the late King’s ‘Clemency and Tenderness’. These were enduring – and endearing – qualities. When Evelyn wrote of his sovereign as having ‘many Virtues and many great Imperfections’ he did not specify the contents of either category. The balance of the character of Charles II, where vice and virtue are concerned, was in fact a very human one which could not fail to appeal to many of his subjects and fellow-sinners. Here was a man who knew all about Sloth and Lust, but was singularly free from Pride, Greed, Avarice, Anger and Envy. As for the Virtues, he was touched in some measure by them all, from Charity downwards, including Temperance while in exile, and Prudence at home.
The admonition of Halifax at the very end of his Character of King Charles II (written some time after 1688) expresses the final mood of that time: ‘Let his royal ashes then lie soft upon him, and cover him from harsh and unkind censures; which though they should not be unjust can never clear themselves of being indecent.’ For all Halifax’s criticisms of his master, Halifax and his contemporaries understood that they had good reason to be grateful to him.
But his royal ashes have not in fact lain particularly softly upon the King. History is inevitably a long avenue of hindsight: and the basic law by which men are judged according to what follows after them, whereas they act in accordance with what has come before, is illustrated to the full in the life of Charles II. The ‘Glorious’ Revolution of 1688 casts its shadow backwards without difficulty across his career, whereas the obscurities and murkiness left behind by the English Civil War are too often ignored.
The historiography of his reign, a fascinating subject in its own right, is however not the concern of the present volume.fn2 Here it is more appropriate to judge the character of King Charles II in the light of those challenges he actually faced. The first of these – and indeed the key challenge throughout most of his career – was the challenge to the position of the monarchy. Where Charles was concerned, it proved a triple contest.
First, as Prince of Wales, he had to endure the strange and unexpected ordeal of civil unrest, followed by war. If Charles was by nature a straightforward, affectionate, essentially normal creature, his early upbringing confirmed that tendency. Loved by his parents, endowed with a happy family life, and many brothers and sisters, he found it natural to display exactly that kind of open and gracious character most suited to his position. He made the transition to a martial young prince, courageous and determined, without much apparent difficulty, but then it was not on the surface a very difficult one to make. If royal princes had not been conducting the arts of war recently, there was a strong chivalric tradition that the Prince of Wales must be equipped to do so. Charles in Western England, the Scilly Islands and Jersey did as well as, or even better than, he could have been expected to do. The scars – for there must have been scars, as his whole secure world was reft asunder and his father murdered – did not as yet show.
The obvious ordeal began a few years before he inherited the crown. The ordeal, none the less burdensome for being nominal, came in the shape of months, then years and finally over a decade of expectation, despair, inertia all mixed – with a great deal of the last. It is surely impossible to over-estimate the effect of the exile upon his character. Charles II was like a soldier captured in his first youth, who spends the crucial span of his development as a prisoner-of-war. He was never in command of his own destiny at a time when he should have been flexing his muscles both as a man and a ruler.
In public the King survived all this admirably, putting out more flags. The second challenge to the monarchy, one more often faced in the twentieth century than in the seventeenth, that of enduring a protracted period of exile and then emerging capax imperator, was one which Charles II met better than most. He kept his nerve. He kept up his spirits. Like another more ferocious leader, Satan, he ever took the line in public: ‘What though the field be lost? All is not lost …’ He also emerged in 1660 untainted. He had preserved himself against the ‘slur of the Catholic religion’, on the one hand,
the rather different slur of a bad character on the other.
It was hardly surprising that ever after there was something different, pessimistic about him in private, a knowledge that this world is to be regarded with a cynical eye if one is not to be betrayed by it. The exile also bred other characteristics. They do not sound attractive on paper, although they were not without their uses in the tricky post-Restoration era. To dissimulate successfully was one essential lesson Charles had to learn – for there is no evidence that he was a born deceiver. Like vacillation, another quality which stole upon him in the exiled years, it was alien to the young Hotspur he once was. Nor, it seems, did he convince himself of the rightness of deception, even if he came to understand the necessity. Late in life – discussing his championship of the Queen – he told Burnet that he regarded falsehood and cruelty as ‘the greatest of crimes in the sight of God’.11 Cruelty at least he eschewed, as all his contemporaries testified.
Laziness, or at any rate a desire to concentrate on the pleasurable over the dutiful, was, on the other hand, more inherent. Everyone after the Restoration commented on the King’s apparent sloth, from Madame his sister downwards. It should therefore be noted that the King was never actually let down by this laziness (except in so far as the low estimate of his contemporaries let him down). On the contrary, he was quite often successfully served by his powers of delay, or by what is sometimes termed a ‘Negative Capability’ – for which Queen Elizabeth I, another procrastinator, has been much praised. When the true moment of crisis came for the monarchy the King acted with despatch. The sovereign who disposed of the Oxford Parliament in 1681 was neither lazy nor irresolute.
The extent to which King Charles II overcame the third challenge to the monarchy, that embodied in the reign itself, is more debatable. Certainly by his last year the King had so shored up the hereditary monarchy that it gave every appearance of being secure, unthreatened in its traditional powers. The theory behind all his moves was the same: the traditional authority of the Crown, eroded in the past, was being properly upheld once more. This theoretical emphasis on the traditional is characteristic of the period, which takes its very name from an act of Restoration. It poses a problem concerning King Charles II himself. Given that many of these moves were practical encroachments, how far did he evolve a new theory of monarchy?
Here his reputation for indifference, even cynicism, was probably fully justified. Neither he, nor indeed his opponents, in the main the Whigs, had overcome the basic problem lurking at the heart of a hereditary office – and still for that matter lurking there today, if in a less extreme form. In the twentieth century memory the engine of our constitutional monarchy juddered at the hands of Edward VIII, needing a George VI to steady its forward progress. The central role of the monarch calls at least for an actor suited to the part, if a great actor is not available. But such casting can never be ensured by the hereditary couch. It was significant that both Tory and Whig philosophies depended upon a good king to make them work. Faced with such a need, it cannot be argued that Charles II ever came to grips with the problem of his own successor.
Pragmatic rather than lazy, he took the whole succession question only as it came along. This he dealt with in the short term, but never in the long. A mixture of deference to his much-betrayed Queen, and allegiance to the principle of legitimate monarchy embodied by his brother, kept him from the more ruthless settlement implied by a divorce on the one hand, legitimization of a bastard on the other. One emotion was a private weakness (where a less sympathetic man might have been stronger); the other fell into the Whigs’ own trap of confusing the succession with the powers of the Crown. Because they spent so much energy in denouncing Catholic James, as though the constitution depended on it, the King too began to believe the two were synonymous.
Of course a far-seeing king can still leave behind him an unintentional legacy of succession troubles. It is peculiar to the case of Charles II that he seems to have been under little illusion about the consequences of his brother succeeding. The frame of mind of Charles II in his very last phase reminds one of Dryden’s paraphrase of Horace:
Happy the Man, and happy he alone,
He, who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine,
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
That kind of noble resolution, admirable in a private individual, is more complicated in a king with responsibilities to the next reign. Yet one has to face the fact that Charles II regarded his brother’s succession not only as inevitable – but in a curious way right. Here, perhaps, the deep melancholy of the once-exiled King, the ex-prisoner-of-war, came into play.
In other ways, in a confused and transitional period, Charles II was a highly estimable king. Not every prince in a position to do so has practised the virtue of gratitude so thoroughly. The determined healing of the first ten years should be balanced against the more rigorous absolutism of the last five. The healing was policy. The absolutism, as King Charles saw it, was forced upon him. Indeed, so hand-to-mouth was the absolutism of this last period, so little was it based on a cunning philosophy, that the King has been criticized for not pursuing such policies rigorously enough.
The kind of propaganda exercise indulged in by Louis XIV, with every breath he drew every day of his life, was unthinkable to Charles II. The arts, for example, were there for enjoyment: a simple and even laudable view, but not one that has been shared by every monarch in history. The bewigged and padded creatures of his stage, the saucy mistresses in their boys’ clothing, the graceful wielders of his garlanded violins, the shepherds and satyrs of his masques: none of these conspired to glorify the monarchy; if they did so, it was purely by accident. Dryden as Poet Laureate was given no great direction for his verse.12 Satire – often of the monarchy itself – was a far more potent theme in the reign of Charles II than propaganda.
It would be going too far to say that the King enjoyed the satirical attacks on himself, his friends and his mistresses. Very few notable figures have enjoyed being satirized. But temperamentally the King was inclined to shrug his shoulders at personal lampoons (otherwise his friendship with Rochester, to say nothing of Buckingham, would have rapidly withered). Here again one is inclined to seek the explanation in the years of exile, as well as in Charles’ natural affability. Charles II could hardly say with Charles I that a king and a subject were two quite different things – or, if he had said so, he could hardly have believed it. He came of a long line of kings, but he himself had once been Charles Stuart, the wanderer. Like Lear, he had experienced the storm on the heath. He had also watched how easily might could be turned into royalty in the case of Cromwell.
The lack of sheer interest in regal formality displayed by Charles was another topic of general comment among his contemporaries. Mulgrave, who knew Charles well, wrote of him as having a ‘natural aversion’ to it: ‘He could not on premeditation act the part of a King for a moment, which carried him to the other extreme … of letting all distinction and ceremony fall to the ground as useless and foppish.’ He preferred, as Bruce tells us, to take off his hat to ‘the meanest’ as he strode through the royal galleries or the parks.13
Charles II would surely have found the propagandist pranks of his father and grandfather, virtually deifying themselves through the medium of art, deeply embarrassing. One can imagine the wisecracks with which he might have distanced himself from such practices. To that extent he was a highly modern monarch, if not a highly modern dictator. Such unconcern, attractive to contemplate from afar, was not the stuff of which a strong absolute monarchy, the magnet of the country, was made.
Two great institutions, one ancient and the other comparatively new, the English Church and the City of London, might have been moulded into pillars of support had Charles II had the Nietzschean will to do so. This will he singularly lacked. He took
the situation as he found it, got on with it as best he could. Where the Church was concerned, he preferred toleration to repression, an admirable view, but against his time: one must never forget that Charles’ personal tolerance, so attractive to us, was considered a liability by his contemporaries – be it for the Catholics or the Jews. As for the City of London, his attitude never extended much beyond a preference for low-interest loans, which was hardly surprising. All the interests of Charles II in scientific experiment and the way things worked went to make him a great pragmatist, not a political philosopher.
It was perfectly appropriate that he lived in an age when political theories were so chaotic. It left him free to follow his natural bent, which was to ignore such matters. He wished to incarnate that kind of monarch described by Dryden, ‘who is just and moderate in his nature’, and provides ‘a government which has all the advantages of a liberty beyond a commonwealth, and all the marks of kingly sovereignty, without the danger of a tyranny’.14 To many people who remembered the Commonwealth, it was a republic which ‘gave that mock appearance of a liberty where all who have no part in government are slaves’. As these memories faded, so the unifying and unrestrained role of the King was no longer necessary. No-one, including the King, yet knew what was to be put in its place.