History of England 1-6

One of the principal tasks of the re-established council was to decide upon the nature of the new upper chamber, but some of their proceedings took place in the absence of the Protector. Cromwell was now being called, even by his intimates, ‘the old man’; his signature was no longer bold and striking but tremulous. He spent much of the summer in the healthful air of Hampton Court, but he was suffering from painful catarrh.

The second session of the second protectorate parliament reassembled on 20 January 1658, but immediately it began to confront the military regime. The members of the new House of Lords were largely chosen from Cromwell’s most loyal supporters and, as a result, the Commons became antagonistic; some of the most inveterate of Cromwell’s opponents, who had been excluded from the previous session on the grounds of ‘immorality’ or ‘delinquency’, were returned to Westminster where at once they began to question the authority of the ‘other house’.

Cromwell summoned both houses to the Banqueting House, five days after they had first met, and urged them to be faithful to the cause. But his intervention had no material effect, and the Commons remained as hostile as before. One of its most formidable members, Sir Arthur Haselrig, made a speech in which he scorned the actions of the House of Lords in the past. ‘And shall we now rake them up,’ he asked, ‘after they have so long laid in the grave?’ An observer at Cromwell’s court noted that the assertions of the Commons, and the divisions between the two houses, threw the Protector ‘into a rage and passion like unto madness’. His anger was augmented by the fact that elements of the army in fact supported the Commons in its affirmation of supremacy.

On a cold morning, 4 February, Cromwell rose early and announced his determination to go to Westminster. He could not journey down the frozen Thames, and so impulsively he took the first coach for hire he could find. When he arrived in the retiring room of the Lords, his son-in-law and close military colleague, Charles Fleetwood, remonstrated with him on learning his intention. ‘You are a milksop,’ Cromwell said to him, ‘by the living God I will dissolve the house.’ And that was what he proceeded to do.

He told the Commons that ‘you have not only disquieted yourselves, but the whole nation is disquieted’. With the prospect of invasion from abroad, and rebellion from within, they had done nothing. ‘And I do declare to you here that I do dissolve this parliament. And let God be judge between you and me.’ To which pious aspiration some of the members cried out, ‘Amen!’ Cromwell’s latest, and last, constitutional experiment had come to an end. It was a sign of the radical anomaly of military rule that none of his parliaments had succeeded. He was now being openly criticized. The envoy from Venice reported that the people were ‘nauseated’ by the present government; the Dutch ambassador similarly noted that Cromwell’s affairs were ‘in troubled and dangerous condition’ while a visitor from Massachusetts remarked that many men ‘exclaim against him with open mouths’.

A royalist agent in London, Allan Broderick, reported to Edward Hyde that the army ‘is infected with sedition’ and that the treasury was exhausted; he added that the countries of Europe were ‘cold friends or close enemies’ and that the people of England were labouring under ‘an unwearied restless spirit of innovation’. Yet Broderick said of Cromwell himself that ‘the man is seemingly desperate, any other in his condition would be deemed irrecoverable, but as the dice of the gods never throw out, so is there something in the fortune of this villain that often renders ten to one no odds’.

This message was designed to encourage Charles Stuart. It was reported that the exiled king was waiting in Flanders with an army of 8,000 men, ready to strike at the first favourable opportunity. Another royalist insurrection was planned for the spring, but once more the plotters were betrayed and taken; four of them were found by Colonel Barkstead, the lieutenant of the Tower, in what he called ‘a desperate malignant alehouse’. Other royalists were beheaded or hanged, drawn and quartered, but the majority were consigned to gaol.

Another fortunate throw of the dice also favoured Cromwell. In the early summer of the year the forces of the French and English scattered the Spanish just outside Dunkirk in the ‘battle of the dunes’; Dunkirk, hitherto held by Spain, was then surrendered to England. It was the first piece of continental territory to fall into English hands since the time of Calais. Since there was a royalist contingent in the Spanish army, victory for Cromwell was all the sweeter. The French king now hailed him as ‘the most invincible of sovereigns’. Yet this praise concealed the truth that the Protector’s expenditure far outran his income; the exchequer was often bare and the pay of his soldiers was in arrears. It was said that his ministers had to go ‘a-begging’ to the merchants of the City.

Sickness was also in the air. A malignant fever, called ‘the new disease’, had arisen. In the spring of 1658 the new epidemic spread, in the words of a contemporary, Dr Willis, ‘as if sent by some blast of the stars’. Cromwell himself laboured under the burden of personal rule to the extent that, as one of his servants, John Maidstone, said, ‘it drank up his spirits’. His private suffering was then increased by the death of his most loved daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, at the beginning of August from an obscure or undiagnosed disease; the event, though long expected, had a violent effect upon him. Thurloe reported that ‘he lay very ill of the gout and other distempers, contracted by the long sickness of my lady Elizabeth, which made great impressions on him’; he became dangerously ill, but then recovered sufficiently to ride in Hampton Court Park.

When one of the leaders of the Quakers, George Fox, visited Cromwell, however, he reported that ‘I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him, and when I came to him he looked like a dying man’. In the last week of August Cromwell fell sick again with a condition then known as ‘tertian ague’, a form of malaria with fits every three days. It began with chills and sensations of coldness which were followed by a stage of dry heat that ended in a drenching sweat.

He was taken back to Whitehall where, as Thurloe put it, ‘our fears are more than our hopes’. Prayer meetings assembled throughout the capital. His condition varied from rally to relapse, as all the time he grew weaker, but he was said to have prayed for ‘God’s cause’ and ‘God’s people’. He asked one of his doctors why he looked so sad.

‘How can I look otherwise, when I have the responsibility of your life upon me?’

‘You doctors think I shall die.’ His wife was sitting by his bedside and he took her hand. ‘I tell thee I shall not die of this bout; I am sure I shall not. Do not think I am mad. I tell you the truth.’ He then told the astonished doctor that this was the answer God had given to his prayers. He also questioned one of his chaplains.

‘Tell me. Is it possible to fall from grace?’

‘It is not possible.’

‘Then I am safe; for I know that I was once in grace.’

He had always been sustained by the notion that he was one of the elect; his pride and his piety were thereby combined, giving him that irresistible power to remove all obstacles in his path. Yet there were many times when he did not know what to do, when he waited for a sign. He once said that no man rises so high as one that does not know where he is going. He had reached the height of his command through a mixture of guile, zeal and adventitious circumstance; no one could have predicted the series of measures and counter-measures that had led to his ascendancy. It did not matter that he was inconsistent, in turns pragmatic and authoritarian, as long as the force of righteousness was with him. That is why he believed above all else in ‘providence’ as both the cause and justification of his actions.

On Thursday 2 September it became clear that he was dying. One of his physicians offered him a sleeping draught but he replied that ‘it is not my design to drink or to sleep, but my design is to make what haste I can to be gone’. Five officers, called to the deathbed, testified that he had declared that his son, Richard Cromwell, should succeed him. He died on the afternoon of 3 September which had been called by him his ‘fortunate day’ as the anniversary of his victories at Dunbar and at Worcester. His battles were all now over.

*

When in 1650 Oliver Cromwell came back to England, after his successful campaign in Ireland, he was greeted by ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland’. It has been described as the greatest political poem in the English language, but it is not the most transparent. Andrew Marvell was at this time a poet of no great account. He had been educated well, and had made the obligatory tour of Europe. He might have become a clergyman or secretary to some great man; instead he lived off the sale of some lands in the north, and revolved in the circles of London literature.

He seems to have first been attached to some royalist poets or poetasters but the crucial victories of Cromwell, and the execution of the king, gave him pause. It might be time to find patronage among the new rulers of the land, and it may be that he composed his ‘Ode’ with some such purpose in sight. Yet his words, distilled as if in an alembic, testify to his creative ambiguity and equivocation. His mind is so finely tempered that he can become both royalist and republican at the same time; he is open to all possible opinions, and thus finds it impossible to choose between them. He is in the position of one who, on coming to a judgement, realizes at the same time that the opposite is also true. We may therefore discuss Marvell here as representative of the confusion that must have been experienced by many others in this period of change and conflict. The poem itself was composed in the interval between Cromwell’s return from Ireland and his subsequent campaign in Scotland.

In the opening lines of the ‘Ode’ Cromwell is one who finds fulfilment not in ‘the inglorious Arts of Peace’ but in ‘advent’rous War’ through which he takes his ‘fiery way’. This might not necessarily be construed as a compliment but Marvell is withholding judgement as well as praise. He goes on to declare that:

’Tis Madness to resist or blame

The force of angry Heavens flame:

And, if we would speak true,

Much to the Man is due.

This is as much as to say that Cromwell cannot be resisted and should not in any case be censored or condemned. He may have emerged into the light as part of the inexorable movement of time, or of historical necessity, but in that respect his personal failings are of no consequence. It was his destiny (providential or otherwise) to

… cast the Kingdom old

Into another Mold.

Though Justice against Fate complain,

And plead the antient Rights in vain:

But those do hold or break

As Men are strong or weak.

Cromwell is in other words a strong man whose strength is its own reward. If justice has been sacrificed in the process, it is a necessary and inevitable consequence of change. Cromwell is in any case a creature of ‘Fate’ rather than of ‘Justice’, decisive and undeflectable. A leader may be both redeemer and despot. It had often happened in the history of the world, and Marvell’s contemporaries were thoroughly acquainted with the career of Julius Caesar.

So this is a poetry of doubt and ambiguity rather than of praise and affirmation, which may thus reflect a more general distrust and uncertainty concerning Cromwell’s motives in these crucial years. It can only be confirmed that he has:

Nor yet grown stiffer with Command,

But still in the Republick’s hand:

How fit he is to sway

That can so well obey.

It can at least be said that Cromwell has not become a tyrant. Marvell does not take sides because there are no sides to take, and we may recall T. S. Eliot’s remark upon Henry James that ‘he had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’. Marvell’s almost impenetrable reserve and self-effacement are also evident. He utters no real opinion of his own, and seems ready to retreat at almost any moment into silence. This, too, may have been the stance of many contemporaries in the face of Cromwell’s supremacy.

Four years later Marvell applied himself once more to the phenomenon of Oliver Cromwell with ‘THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY of the Government under O.C.’. This is a much more positive account of Cromwell’s rule, but it would be fair to say that it is a panegyric on the nature of protectorate government rather than on the Protector himself. Cromwell is compared to Amphion who with his brother raised the city of Thebes by means of music. So:

No Note he struck, but a new Story lay’d

And the great Work ascended while he play’d.

Cromwell is here praised for creating a structure of government that will, like Thebes, endure. He has also been able to create a unique form of leadership that was an appropriate substitute for royal government:

For to be Cromwell was a greater thing,

Then ought below, or yet above a King:

Therefore thou rather didst thy Self depress,

Yielding to Rule, because it made thee Less.

This polity has created a system of government that avoids the extremes of liberty or oppression:

’Tis not a Freedome, that where All command;

Nor Tyranny, where One does them withstand:

But who of both the Bounders knows to lay

Him as their Father must the State obey.

As a result England was respected and feared by all of its neighbouring nations:

He seems a King by long Succession born,

And yet the same to be a King does scorn.

Abroad a King he seems, and something more,

At Home a Subject on the equal Floor.

This might be described as the ‘party line’ for Cromwell’s adherents, and may or may not reflect Marvell’s private thoughts on the matter. The difficulties of Cromwell’s position as Protector, and the emergence of many agents of opposition to his rule, are not mentioned. Marvell is giving expression to the opinions of many people, however, who seem to have believed that the government of a Protector was more effective than the government of parliament. The poetry here is of great fluency and sophistication; it is precise but not pointed, hard but not wooden, eloquent but not facile.

The last poem by Marvell on Cromwell is also the most intimate. He had become by this time well known to the Protector’s household; he had been asked to compose songs for the marriage of Mary Cromwell to Lord Fauconberg, and had been commissioned by Cromwell to write poems for Christina of Sweden. In 1657 he had been given employment as assistant to John Milton in Milton’s position as Secretary of Foreign and Latin Tongues. So ‘A Poem upon the Death of O.C.’, written in 1658, was his last gift to an employer whom he may have come to love as well as admire. It seems more than likely that he was allowed to enter the death chamber and to view Cromwell’s corpse:

I saw him dead, a leaden slumber lyes,

And mortal sleep over those wakefull eyes:

Those gentle Rays under the lids were fled,

Which through his looks that piercing sweetnesse shed;

That port which so Majestique was and strong,

Loose and depriv’d of vigour, stretch’d along:

All wither’d, all discolour’d, pale and wan,

How much another thing, no more that man?

35

The young gentleman

It was believed by some that after the death of Oliver Cromwell the fabric of the commonwealth would be torn apart; the centre would not hold. Yet the succession of his oldest son, Richard Cromwell, passed off without any commotion. No great public mourning was aroused by his father’s death, and very little debate was instituted about his role or his legacy. John Evelyn witnessed the Protector’s funeral where ‘there were none that cried but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise, drinking and taking tobacco in the streets as they went’.

Richard Cromwell was a modest and selfeffacing man with none of the natural authority or commanding presence of his father. He was, according to an appendix to James Mackintosh’s Eminent British Statesmen, ‘a person well skilled in hawking, hunting, horse-racing, with other sports and pastimes’. Allusions were made to ‘Queen Dick’. He admitted soon after his accession that ‘it might have pleased God, and the nation too, to have chosen out a person more fit and able for this work than I am’.

Yet almost at once he was engaged in the defining question of the moment. Should the army, or parliament, control this new gentry republic? Some of the army officers had already been demanding that they should have a commander-in-chief separate from the Protector, which meant in practice that they rejected the authority of the civil state. These officers were accustomed to meet at Wallingford House, the residence of Major-General Charles Fleetwood, who was their natural leader. Richard Cromwell, or ‘the young gentleman’ as he was known to some of them, did not concede their demand.

His position was strengthened in the election of a new parliament at the beginning of 1659, when a majority of the members seem to have been moderate or conservative men who supported the government of the protectorate and disliked the pretensions of the army; some of them were secret royalists, sustained by the impression or belief that the nation was with them. They demanded that all political activity in the army should come to an end, which at once aroused Fleetwood and his supporters. The soldiers refused to obey the order, and the few colonels who supported it found themselves abandoned by their men. Fleetwood, the regiments of the army with him at St James’s, demanded that parliament be dismissed forthwith.

The impasse might have signalled the beginning of another war, but Richard Cromwell took fright at the prospect. He is reported to have said that ‘for the preservation of my greatness (which is a burthen to me) I will not have one drop of blood spilt’. So he dissolved parliament and then, towards the end of May, abdicated his post as Protector. John Evelyn wrote in his diary that ‘several pretenders and parties strive for the government: all anarchy and confusion; Lord have mercy on us!’

The leaders of the army decided against all precedent to revive the Rump Parliament that had been dissolved by Oliver Cromwell in the spring of 1653. In the beginning it had comprised some 200 members but the number had now fallen to 50. On their reappearance, however, they refused to be cowed by the authorities of the army and set about to reassert their power by granting the commission of officers to their Speaker rather than to Fleetwood. An open division between the two competing powers could not long be delayed.

A rebellion against the army, organized by a coalition of royalists and disaffected Presbyterians, was effectively put down in the summer by General John Lambert, who had returned from his retirement to play once more a leading role in military affairs, yet within two months he and eight other officers were dismissed by parliament for promoting a petition deemed to be seditious. Lambert then in turn expelled the Rump and instituted a very short reign of the army. A ‘committee of safety’ was formed consisting of twenty-three officers and committed to govern without the rule of ‘a single person’ and without a House of Lords.

The army itself was divided. One of its most senior officers, General George Monck, had been given the task by Oliver Cromwell of governing Scotland; from this vantage he looked upon the bewildering events in England with a wary and suspicious eye. He had thought of supporting Richard Cromwell but had then drawn back. He was considered by some to be a secret royalist. Now he refused to support Lambert and Fleetwood, but instead demanded the recall of the parliament so recently expelled.

It might seem that anarchy had been loosed upon the world, but the world went its own way. A contemporary, quoted in the Clarendon State Papers, observed that in London ‘in all the hurly burly the streets were full, every one going about their business as if not at all concerned, and when the parliament sent unto the city to relieve them, they answered that they would not meddle with the dispute’. John Milton was not so sanguine and wrote that it was ‘most illegal and scandalous, I fear me barbarous, or rather scarce to be exampled among any barbarians, that a paid army should … thus subdue the supreme power that set them up’.

Lambert was also forced to confront divisions among his own soldiers; they declared that they themselves would not fight Monck or anyone else, but would form a ring in which their officers could contest one against another in some form of prize fight; the troops stationed at Plymouth, and the entire fleet, then declared the Rump as the least worst alternative to unconstitutional military rule. They desired a justly established government as well as freedom of worship. On 24 December Fleetwood, declaring that ‘God had spit in his face’, delivered the keys of parliament to its Speaker, William Lenthall.

On that day the troopers now loyal to parliament marched to Lenthall’s house in Chancery Lane, where they pledged to live and die with the assembly at Westminster. Lenthall, thus encouraged, decided to reconvene parliament on 26 December; the leading officers no longer had the will, or the support, to discourage him. On 4 January 1660, Lambert, who had made an unsuccessful attempt to march north and confront Monck, was now obliged to submit himself to the restored parliament; the members ordered him ‘to one of his dwelling houses most remote from the City of London, in order to the quiet and peace of this commonwealth’. The confusion and uncertainty were the direct effect of Oliver Cromwell’s inability to create a stable governance. Hartgill Baron, a royalist supporter, wrote that ‘all things here at present are in so great a cloud that the most quick-sighted or wisest man living is not able to make a judgment of what may be the issue’. There were many, like him, who now looked to the king beyond the sea for deliverance from the chaos around them.

General Monck, at the end of 1659, began marching south from Edinburgh with 8,000 men. His intentions were not clear, perhaps not even to himself; he said only that he had come into England in order to maintain the commonwealth. He may have believed that the army’s seizure of power had been misguided, but he was so taciturn and secretive that it is hard to be sure even of this. Pepys described him as ‘a dull heavy man’.

When he arrived in London at the beginning of February many citizens called for ‘a free parliament’; that meant the removal of the Rump and a return to the duly elected authority that had been purged by Colonel Pride eleven years before. Parliament responded by ordering Monck to enter the city in order to restore public order and to arrest its leading opponents. On 9 February Monck obeyed by removing all the gates, portcullises, posts and chains that were the symbols of the city’s strength. The citizens believed that they had been betrayed and seem to have been beset with fear and dismay. It may have been that Monck deliberately set out to demonstrate the lengths to which parliament would go to protect its authority, and thus bring the people over to his side. No certainty is possible in the matter.

Two days later, however, the unfathomable Monck wrote a letter to the Rump with the order to dissolve itself and to call for fresh elections. The effect was immediate and profound; according to one pamphleteer, Roger L’Estrange, the people ‘made bonfires very thick in every street and bells ringing in every church and the greatest acclamations of joy that could possibly be expressed’. Rumps of beef were roasted on every street-corner; rumps were tied on sticks and carried about; a great rump was turned on a spit on Ludgate Hill. Pepys reported that boys ‘do now cry “kiss my parliament” instead of “kiss my arse”, so great and general a contempt is the Rump come to…’ Ten days later Monck made a short cut by readmitting all the members of the Long Parliament who had before been excluded. These had been largely Presbyterian in temper and had been removed precisely because of their willingness to negotiate a settlement with Charles I.

The newly restored parliament promptly decided to erase all the proceedings in the aftermath of Pride’s Purge, which meant that it now resumed supreme authority in obtaining a settlement with the king. Lambert was sent to the Tower along with other members of the previous regime. On 6 March Pepys noted that ‘everybody now drinks the king’s health without fear, whereas before it was very private that a man dare do it’.

Charles II was still uncertain. He was not sure what Monck intended, and feared that the general might still set himself up as Lord Protector; there was even talk that Richard Cromwell might be asked to return to the post. Other supporters of the king did not trust Monck but believed that he would, in the old phrase, ‘play fast and loose’. The king had experienced so many false hopes that now he could do nothing but wait. If he took any premature action, it might ruin everything. Monck himself was obliged to proceed very carefully. He may have surmised that the restoration of the king would be the best possible outcome for the nation but he could not yet fully support the popular mood; he had to maintain the unity of his army, and could not afford to alienate those who were still called ‘commonwealth men’. He did not want to be suspected at this stage, as it was said, of ‘carrying the king in his belly’. A month or two later it was reported that Monck was determined either to restore the king by his own actions, and thus reap the subsequent rewards, or to prevent Charles’s return.

In the middle of March 1660, parliament dissolved itself and prepared the nation for a new assembly in the following month. The Long Parliament had finally come to an end, after a haphazard and interrupted rule of a little over nineteen years. In this month a known royalist supporter, Sir John Grenville, was smuggled into St James’s Palace for a clandestine interview with Monck; Monck did not wish to write anything down but he intimated to Grenville, through an intermediary, that it might be fit and proper for the king to send him a letter setting out the intentions of the royal party. The general would then keep the letter in trust and reveal its contents at an appropriate time. By this happy subterfuge he might be able to ease the king’s path to England. In another account of this secret affair Grenville had brought a letter from Charles to the general, offering Monck high office in a royal administration; the general replied that he had always intended to restore Charles. Whatever the exact circumstances it is clear that the king and the general were coming to an understanding.

At the beginning of April the king issued a ‘declaration’ from his temporary home at Breda in the Protestant Netherlands; no doubt he had consulted Monck’s wishes or suggestions in their clandestine consultations. The king offered a free pardon and amnesty to anyone who swore allegiance to the Crown, with the exception of those who had voted for the late king’s death; this was the only way of closing the chapter on the legacy of the civil war. Among other provisions was the promise of religious toleration to all peaceful Christians. Only thus could the struggles between Anglicans, Presbyterians and sectarians be resolved. Yet the king left all these measures to the final decision of parliament; this was seen by many to be a conciliatory gesture, but it also meant that parliament rather than king now incurred the responsibility of what might befall.

So all was set fair for the first elected parliament in almost two decades. It was known as the Convention Parliament since, in theory, no parliament could be called without a writ from the king to that effect. It soon became clear that many of a royalist persuasion had been elected; the king’s friends had returned to Westminster. Charles’s declaration was read to both Houses of Parliament and was received with enthusiasm. On the morning of 1 May the Lords, now with many royalist peers readmitted on the orders of General Monck, declared that ‘according to the ancient and fundamental laws of this kingdom, the government is, and ought to be, by King, Lords and Commons’; the Commons assented that afternoon. It was now generally believed that a stable parliamentary government could only be established upon royal power. The republic had come to an end, and the aspirations of the army had been defeated.

On May Day, the once prohibited maypoles were set up all over the country. When the vice-chancellor and beadles of Oxford university tried to saw down a pole set up outside the Bear Inn, they were attacked by a crowd and beaten off. Pepys reported ‘great joy all yesterday at London, and at night more bonfires than ever, and ringing of bells, and drinking of the king’s health upon their knees in the streets, which methinks is a little too much’.

Charles II had removed to The Hague, where six members of the Lords and twelve members of the Commons were ushered into his presence; they presented the humble invitation and supplication of the parliament that his majesty should return and take the government of the kingdom into his hands. They also presented him with the sum of £50,000 to expedite his journey. Fourteen London citizens then came forward and offered the king a further £10,000. The city had not in previous years been wholly favourable to the royalist cause, and so its penitence was doubly appreciated. The king told them that he entertained a particular affection for London, as it was his place of birth, and knighted all of the citizens.

He set sail for England on 24 May, having embarked on a vessel newly christened The Prince; early on the morning of 26 May he arrived at Dover, where he knelt on the shore to give thanks. Monck was waiting for him, kneeling on the pier. The mayor of Dover presented him with a Bible; the king accepted it, saying ‘it was the thing that he loved above all things in the world’. We may excuse him on this occasion of any attempt at irony.

Monck and the king travelled together to Canterbury where Charles listened to the Anglican service, according to the Book of Common Prayer, in the cathedral. Wherever he went he was surrounded by crowds. He had time to write to his youngest sister, Henrietta Anne, that ‘my head is so dreadfully stunned with the acclamations of the people that I know not whether I am writing sense or nonsense’. From here the king progressed towards London to confirm and celebrate the fact of the Restoration.

36

Oh, prodigious change!

The return of Charles II was greeted with jubilation that was for the most part sincere. At Blackheath, just before entering the capital, he was met by what one newsletter described as ‘a kind of rural triumph, expressed by the country swains, in a morris dance with the old music of the tabor and pipe’. It was believed that the restoration of the king would be accompanied by the revival of the old customs and traditions of the nation.

He rode in a dark suit through all the pomp of the procession, from the Strand to Westminster, raising his hat with its crimson plume time and time again. The streets were covered in flowers, and the houses hung with ornate tapestries; the sound of bells and trumpets mingled with the greetings of the crowd. John Evelyn noted in his entry for 29 May 1660, that ‘I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God. And all this was done without one drop of blood shed, and by that very army which rebelled against him; but it was the Lord’s doing, for such a restoration was never mentioned in any history, ancient or modern, since the return of the Jews from the Babylonish captivity; nor so joyful a day and so bright ever seen in this nation, this happening when to expect or effect it was past all human policy.’

As he passed under the gateway of the Banqueting House he glanced upwards to the site of his father’s execution and at this point he came close to tears. When he was placed beneath the canopy of state such was the disorder and confusion that the king himself seemed to be in a daze. Yet he soon recovered himself. He had been greeted with such delight and enthusiasm that he remarked, with a smile, that he should have come back sooner. It was the wit of a man who had no illusions about human nature.

It was the king’s thirtieth birthday, but he seemed older. His hair was already streaked with grey; men did not yet, in this period, wear wigs. The years of exile had made him lean, accentuating his height of 6 feet 2 inches. One contemporary, Sir Samuel Tuke, observed that ‘his face is rather grave than severe, which is very much softened whensoever he speaks; his complexion is somewhat dark but much enlightened by his eyes, which are quick and sparkling’. With his large nose and heavy jaw, he was not handsome. He looked sad, and rather lugubrious, with a hint of dissipation and a trace of cruelty. ‘Oddsfish,’ he used to say, ‘I am ugly.’ ‘Oddsfish’ was a corruption of ‘God’s flesh’.

In this heady period he was affable to all he met, even to those whom he suspected of being his secret enemies. Yet behind this assumption of good humour he was calculating and even cunning. He had been brought up in the hard school of exile and, as he used to say, at all costs he wished to avoid ‘going on my travels’ once again. So his first decisions were made out of policy towards his erstwhile opponents rather than of gratitude to his friends. He believed that all men were governed by self-interest and therefore was not reluctant to consult his own.

When the king returned to his palace at Whitehall, it was much as he had remembered it from his childhood; it survived as a maze of a place with closets, cubby-holes, back staircases, corridors, corners and courtyards; it had grown piece by piece out of a variety of different dwellings and encompassed chapels, tennis courts and bowling greens. It covered 23 acres and contained approximately 2,000 rooms, some of which flooded when the Thames rose too high. The king loved the place, however, and rarely left it during the first full year of his reign. The great court as well as some of the terraces and galleries were in effect open to the public, and these areas were thronged with suitors hoping to gain the king’s favour; others came simply to watch the splendour of majesty.

The king dined in public at midday, but he managed his business in the privacy of his bedchamber. There was also a secret closet beyond the chamber, to which few were ever admitted; soon enough this would testify to the king’s penchant for secrecy and intrigue. The marquis of Halifax noted that ‘he had backstairs to convey informations to him, as well as for other uses’; we may surmise what those other ‘uses’ were.

There was space enough at the palace for all of the king’s principal councillors. Chief among them was a man who had been at his side for the years of exile. Edward Hyde, later to become the 1st earl of Clarendon and author of the monumental History of the Rebellion, was austere and assiduous even if, as he wrote himself, he was ‘in his nature inclined to pride and passion’; he had a high opinion of his own judgement and rectitude, even to the point of lecturing his master on his shortcomings. His status was soon enhanced when his daughter, Mary Hyde, was married to the king’s brother James, duke of York. It had been discovered that she was pregnant by him, prompting Samuel Pepys to recall how a wit once observed that ‘he that doth get a wench with child and marries her afterward it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head’.

Hyde, as lord chancellor, was one of a group of six confidants who formed what was called a ‘secret committee’ that, in the words of Hyde himself, was appointed by the king ‘to consult all his affairs before they came to the public debate’. They were assisted by a privy council of some thirty to forty members, twelve of whom had carried arms against the king’s father. Charles had decided to accommodate the recent past.

The king was at first diligent in his duties but he soon tired of the details of his administration. He grew easily bored at the meetings of his council and disliked the paperwork of office; it was reported by the marquis of Halifax that his ministers ‘had to administer business to him as doctors do physic, wrap it up in something to make it less unpleasant’. It was also a convenient way for him to disown responsibility for certain policies. As he once said, ‘My words are my own but my acts are my ministers’.

The sale and ownership of land were pressing issues. Many of the royalists had been forced to sell their estates in order to pay fines or to meet the ‘decimation tax’. They now petitioned for their lands to be returned to them, but parliament decided that it was not in its power to reverse what had been in theory voluntary sales. The decision caused much resentment, and contributed to the feeling that the king had turned his back on his former supporters.

That feeling was compounded by one of the measures of the Convention Parliament in this year. An Act of Indemnity and Oblivion was passed, by means of which any crime or treason committed ‘by virtue or colour’ of parliamentary or regal authority over the last twenty-two years was to be ‘pardoned … and put in utter oblivion’. All the rage of the past was therefore to be redeemed or, at least, forgotten. The measure incensed those royalists who believed themselves to have been injured by the actions of the military regime, and it was remarked that the king was consenting to an indemnity for his enemies and to oblivion for his friends.

The regicides, those who had signed the death warrant of the late king, were excepted from the indemnity. In the autumn of the year, in one of the few acts of vengeance perpetrated by the new administration, ten of these malefactors were hanged, drawn and quartered; they met their deaths with defiance and one of them had the strength, as his naked body was sliced open before disembowelling, to strike the executioner. Richard Cromwell had already fled from England to lead a life of decent obscurity in Europe. Charles was inclined to clemency, however, and when nineteen other regicides were about to be brought to trial for their lives he wrote to Clarendon that ‘I must confess that I am weary of hanging except upon new offenses; let it sleep’.

It was a nice matter also to deal with the army. Under the command of Monck it had helped to place the king on his throne, but it might equally well be used to eject him from it. A poll tax was reintroduced to fund the payments of the soldiers’ arrears and, by the autumn, they were retired; they returned, where possible, to their old homes and occupations. They were allowed to keep their swords, however, and the more radical of them still maintained ‘the good old cause’ of the republic. At the end of the year a declaration banned them from assembling in London, but in truth they posed no serious threat. Most of them melted away causing the preacher, Richard Baxter, to observe that ‘thus did God do a more wonderful work in the dissolving of this army than any of their greatest victories’.

Yet as always the cause of religion was pre-eminent, with a division of the clergy between those who avowed the Anglican persuasion and those who adopted the puritan or Presbyterian case. There was no particular example from the ‘defender of the faith’. It is still difficult to write with any clarity of the king’s religion. He died after being received into the Catholic Church, and it is possible that he had become a secret member of that faith even while in exile. Yet perhaps he did not have the conviction to espouse any particular creed; it was not his business to be pious but to be politic. The various forms of religion held no real interest for him and he used to tease his rigidly Catholic brother, James, about the scandalous lives of the popes. He was apt to say, of his own sexual escapades, that God would not damn a man for seeking a little pleasure. He had a light heart and an easy conscience.

Within a month of his return to England, however, Charles was busily engaged in the ceremony of ‘the king’s touch’ whereby through the agency of God he could heal those afflicted with scrofula or ‘the king’s evil’. It was a signal instance of the divine dispensation that had made him the Lord’s anointed and, as a spectacle of majesty, he deployed it frequently. Once a month, until the end of his reign, hundreds of scrofulous people flocked to the Banqueting House where with patience and dignity he laid his hands upon them.

The old order had been reasserted, but it had been subtly changed by the recent broils. The French ambassador, for example, wrote to Louis XIV that ‘this government has a monarchical appearance because there is a king, but at bottom it is very far from being a monarchy’. The power of parliament had increased immeasurably after its success in the civil war; it was impossible for the king to raise money from his subjects, or to arrest any person, without its consent. Charles also now depended for his finances on the annual sum assigned to him by the members at Westminster.

The king’s power had also diminished in other ways. The Star Chamber would not be revived. Any attempt at a large standing army would be treated with grave suspicion. The influence of the City had also grown, and from the events of these years we may date the true beginning of a commercial and mercantile state.

The rule that had once radiated from one person, whether Stuart or Cromwell, had become more balanced and diffused. The departments of the two secretaries of state, devoted to the administration of domestic as well as foreign affairs, were established; permanent boards were also created for such business as the assignment and collection of taxation. The treasury broke away from royal control and became responsible for approving all payments. Thirty committees were soon in session and, later in 1660, a council of trade and a council of foreign plantations were at work.

Yet this was not a bureaucracy in the modern sense, since it was based upon patronage and the lavish giving or taking of ‘fees’ for services rendered. Many of the officials were not technically the servants of the state but were paid by more senior officials. The more important posts were considered to be private property, to be kept for life and subsequently sold to a close relative or to the highest bidder. It was not necessarily a corrupt system, since it represented the only way in which government could be made to work.

The central differences between the two epochs of republic and restored monarchy were less palpable. The people put no faith in paper constitutions, such as Cromwell had imposed; the religious dimension of public affairs was no longer as relevant as once it was, and piety eventually became a matter of private conscience. There would be no more zealotry at Westminster. Political theory more frequently became the preserve of philosophers, such as Locke and Hobbes, rather than of theologians. This may be the reason for the suggestion of many contemporaries that religious belief itself was in decline. Thomas Sprat, the chronicler of the Royal Society, noted that ‘the influence which Christianity once obtained on men’s minds is now prodigiously decayed’.

The certainties of the religious wars, if we may call them that, had begun to dissolve within a new public discourse that favoured reason and civility. A man might now gather his opinions from the coffee-house rather than from the church or conventicle (in the year of the king’s restoration the drinks of tea, coffee and chocolate are first mentioned). The king was obliged by parliament to impose Anglicanism upon the nation, as we shall see, but the puritans and dissenters could not in the end be silenced. Compulsion was eventually to be replaced by persuasion.

*

The formal coronation of Charles II was delayed until St George’s Day, 23 April 1661, just two weeks before the opening of his first parliament. Charles II was the last monarch ever to ride in state through the streets of London on the day preceding the event, since he knew well enough that ceremony was at the centre of kingship. He ordered that all the ancient records should be studied so that the traditional solemnity of the occasion should be maintained; the crown jewels had been broken up and sold after his father’s execution, but he ordered that a new set should replicate the old in every minute particular. He wore robes of gold and silver, together with a crimson cap of velvet lined with ermine. The first coronation mugs, sold as souvenirs, are a measure of the popularity of the occasion. The day itself was serene and fair but Pepys observed in his diary that, immediately after the ceremony, ‘it fell a-raining and thundering and lightning as I have not seen it do for some years’. Some obvious prognostications were made.

Parliament met on 8 May; the proximity of the two occasions was a tribute to the notion of ‘the crown in parliament’, the title of supreme power in England. Since half of the new members came from families that had suffered in the royalist cause, it became known as ‘the Cavalier Parliament’. They were for the most part young men but the king remarked that ‘he would keep them till they got beards’; he fulfilled the promise by maintaining this parliament for a further eighteen years.

They of course supported his cause, and that of the bishops, but they were most intent on maintaining the privileges of the gentry from which they had largely come. The Presbyterians were in a small minority, and were in no position to check or obstruct what might be described as the conservative tide. In a series of Acts, over a period of five years, parliament enforced Anglican supremacy upon the nation. Two weeks after it met the ‘solemn league and covenant’, which had pledged the nation to a Presbyterian settlement with Scotland, was summarily burned by the common hangman at Westminster and other places in the city. John Evelyn remarked, ‘Oh, prodigious change!’

By the Corporation Act of 1661, the municipal leaders of town or city were confined to those who received communion by the rites of the Church of England; the mayors and aldermen were also obliged to take an oath of allegiance and affirm that it was not lawful to take up arms against the king. The Act was designed to remove those of a nonconformist persuasion whose loyalty might be suspect.

An Act of Uniformity was passed in the following year which restricted the ministry to those who had been ordained by a bishop and who accepted the provisions of the Book of Common Prayer. These conditions effectively disqualified 1,700 puritan clergy, who were therefore ejected from their livings. It was the most sudden alteration in the religious history of the nation. Some said that it was an act of revenge by the Anglicans after their persecution during the days of the commonwealth, but it may also have been a means whereby the royalist gentry regained control of their parishes.

Some of the ejected clergy were reduced to poverty and the utmost distress. One of their number, Richard Baxter, recalled that ‘their congregations had enough to do … to help them out of prisons, or to maintain them there’. John Bunyan, for example, was imprisoned in Bedford Prison for nonconformist preaching. He wrote that ‘the parting with my wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling of the flesh from the bones’; yet in his prison cell he dreamed of eternity.

Much popular derision was directed at the godly ministers. The dissenting preachers were mocked and hooted at in the street. Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, in which puritans were roundly scorned, was revived with great popular success. The Quakers in particular were badly treated and, during the reign of Charles, 4,000 were consigned to prison; Clarendon had said that they were ‘a sort of people upon whom tenderness and lenity do not at all prevail’.

Yet the rigour of the new law was averted in some areas. Many Presbyterians or ‘church puritans’ were more flexible in obeying the law; the clergy of these congregations might well retain their livings in acts of subtle compromise. Some authorities were in any case reluctant to enforce the law, and the ecclesiastical courts were not always efficient.

In two further Acts of subsequent years the attendance at religious assemblies, other than those of the official Church, was punished by imprisonment; no puritan clergyman or schoolmaster could come within 5 miles of a town or city. These measures did not reflect the king’s promise of toleration for all honest Christians, as he had announced in the ‘declaration’ of Breda before sailing to England, but it is likely that he was being pressed by the young men of parliament; he acceded to their demands because he did not wish to lose their support in the funding of his revenues.

It would in the end prove impossible to subdue the whole body of nonconformist worshippers, now bound together by the pressure of shared persecution; but, by attempting to impose Anglican worship, the members of the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ opened up the great fissure between Anglicanism and dissenting faiths that would never be resolved. An informal network of meetings brought together Independents, Baptists and Presbyterians in sharp distinction to the established Church. No national religious settlement had been achieved. The days of the disputes between church and chapel would soon come.

Other measures followed in what was a series of busy parliamentary sessions. A new ‘hearth tax’ was passed in the spring of 1662, with a charge of 1 shilling for each hearth to be paid twice a year; the response was clamant and immediate. A saying passed through the streets of London to the effect that ‘the bishops get all, the courtiers spend all, the citizens pay for all, the king neglects all and the devil takes all’. A Licensing Act was approved, by which it was ordered that no book might be published without the approval of an official censor; this was largely directed against nonconformist writings that would now come under the gaze of the bishop of London and the archbishop of Canterbury. The atmosphere of free debate that had pertained for much of Cromwell’s rule came to an end.

These measures against ‘toleration’ came at a price. Pepys reported that all of the ‘fanatics’ were discontented and ‘that the king do take away their liberty of conscience’; he deplored ‘the height of the bishops who I fear will ruin all again’. The puritan clergy were ordered to abandon their livings on 24 August 1662, St Bartholomew’s Day, and in many places the congregations came in great numbers to hear and lament their ‘farewell sermons’. More spirited protest was also expected. Ever since the king’s arrival in England minor uprisings by ‘fanatics’ had disturbed the peace, and through the spring and summer of 1662 fears rose of some concerted puritan resistance. A general rising was supposed to be planned for August, and from all over the country came reports of seditious meetings and treasonable speeches. Lord Fauconberg, lord-lieutenant of the North Riding of Yorkshire, claimed that in Lancashire ‘not one man in the whole county intends to conform’; reports of the same nature came from his own county of Yorkshire and the West Country, while London was known to be the spiritual home of zealotry and sectarianism. The lords-lieutenant of the various counties were told to watch ‘all those known to be of the Republic party’.

Yet these apprehensions were generally without foundation. The Anglican Church was now supreme under the leadership of the cleric who in 1663 was consecrated as archbishop of Canterbury; Gilbert Burnet wrote of Archbishop Sheldon that ‘he seemed not to have a deep sense of religion, if any at all, and spoke of it most commonly as of an engine of government and a matter of policy’. The bishops, for example, had been returned to their seats in the House of Lords where they could exert a strong influence upon national legislation; yet it was also true that parliament, and not the Church, had taken control of the nature and direction of the national religion.

The actual faith of the people was no doubt as inchoate and confused as ever. One Lancastrian apprentice, Roger Lowe, recorded in 1663 that ‘I was pensive and sad and went into the town field and prayed to the Lord, and I hope the Lord heard’.

*

At a meeting of the council, just after parliament had been summoned, Charles told his advisers that he had decided to marry the infanta of Portugal, Catherine of Braganza; he had already announced his preferences when he said that ‘I hate Germans, or princesses of cold countries’. The mother of the intended bride, the queen regent of Portugal, had also offered £800,000 together with her colonial territories of Bombay and Tangier in order to sweeten the arrangement. English merchants were also to be permitted to trade freely throughout the Portuguese Empire, thus assisting England in its rivalry with the Dutch. In return Portugal wished to recruit English soldiers in its war with the neighbouring power of Spain, which was eager to take back its rebellious province. A marriage could accomplish a great deal.

Another matrimonial alliance completed what may be called the ‘foreign policy’ of Charles. His sister Henrietta was married off to the homosexual brother of Louis XIV and helped to inaugurate closer relations between France and England that came in the end to be too close. Louis XIV was feared and distrusted for his attempt to raise himself up as ‘universal monarch’ in the face of Spanish decline; nevertheless Charles admired his absolutist and centralized rule that he had some obscure hope of emulating.

The king travelled down to Portsmouth to meet his bride, and reported to Clarendon that ‘her face is not so exact as to be called a beauty though her eyes are excellent good, and not anything in her face that in the least degree can shock one’. This may not amount to a ringing endorsement but, for a royal union, it was fairly satisfactory. Her teeth stuck out a little, and her hair was swept to the side in the Portuguese fashion. The king is said privately to have remarked, ‘Gentlemen, you have brought me a bat.’ One of Catherine’s first requests was for a cup of tea, then a novelty. Instead she was offered a glass of ale.

She had arrived with what one contemporary, the comte de Gramont, described as ‘six frights, who called themselves maids-of-honour and a duenna, another monster, who took the title of governess to those extraordinary beauties’. Much fun was also made of their great fardingales, or hooped skirts of whalebone beneath their dresses.

Catherine had some formidable competition. The king was known to be an insatiable and compulsive philanderer, and Pepys calculated that he had had seventeen mistresses even before the Restoration. John Dryden, in Absalom and Achitophel, characterized him thus:

Then, Israel’s monarch, after Heaven’s own heart,

His vigorous warmth did variously impart

To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command,

Scatter’d his Maker’s image through the land.

Or, as the earl of Rochester put it more bluntly,

Restless he rolls from whore to whore,

A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.

By a previous lover, Lucy Walter, he had a son who would in 1663 become duke of Monmouth. His present mistress was Barbara Palmer, whose husband had been ennobled as the earl of Castlemaine; Lady Castlemaine soon became indispensable to his pleasure, and it was reported by Pepys that she ruled the king by employing ‘all the tricks of Aretino [a poet of obscenity] … in which he is too able having a large—’ The rest is silence. The lady was already heavily pregnant by the time that Catherine arrived in England.

The king’s appetite for Lady Castlemaine was such that he appointed her to be his wife’s lady-of-the-bedchamber. Catherine objected to the convenient arrangement, and her anger led to an estrangement between the royal couple. The new queen of England was receiving company at Hampton Court when her husband led Lady Castlemaine into the room; she may not have correctly heard her name since she received her calmly enough but, on being made aware of the lady’s identity, she burst into tears before fainting. Clarendon was used by the king as a mediator and, in the end, the queen gave way and welcomed her rival.

In truth she had become devoted to her husband, and in no way wished to alienate his affections. She could do nothing, however, to fulfil her primary role; she seemed to be incapable of bearing children. It was not for want of trying. An Italian visitor at the court, Lorenzo Magalotti, heard that the queen was ‘unusually sensitive to pleasure’ and that after intercourse ‘blood comes from her genital parts in such great abundance that it does not stop for several days’.

In time the king would become enamoured of another mistress, Frances Stewart, of whom the comte de Gramont said that it would be difficult to imagine less brain combined with more beauty. She was the model, complete with helmet and trident, for the figure of Britannia on British coins. Charles was always in love with someone or other. By seventeen of his known mistresses he had thirteen illegitimate children, some of whom became dukes or earls. The story of Nell Gwynn has often been told.

The royal court itself had become the object of much scandal and remark. Macaulay, in an essay for the Edinburgh Review, remarked of a no doubt exaggerated example that ‘a dead child is found in the palace, the offspring of some maid of honour by some courtier, or perhaps by Charles himself. The whole flight of pandars and buffoons pounces upon it and carries it to the royal laboratory, where his majesty, after a brutal jest, dissects it for the amusement of the assembly, and probably of its father among the rest.’

The rule of the saints had been replaced by the rule of the sinners who seemed to compete with each other in drunkenness and debauchery. When a bishop preached in the royal chapel against ‘mistaken jollity’ the congregation laughed at him. When the court visited Oxford a scholar, Anthony Wood, observed that ‘they were nasty and beastly, leaving at their departure their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coalhouses, cellars. Rude, rough, whore-mongers; vain, empty, careless.’ And of course they took their morals and manners from their royal leader. Other royal courts were no doubt characterized by profligacy and sexual licence – the court of William II comes to mind – but never had they been so widely observed and criticized.

A circle of ‘wits’ emerged around the king; among them were George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, and Charles, Sir Sedley. They were accustomed to meet in the apartments of the king’s latest lover or in the lodgings of the notorious William Chiffinch who became ‘keeper of the king’s private closet’, where their most notable contribution to court life was a number of highly obscene poems and stories. Their wit was manifested in verbal extravagance and dexterity, in puns and allusions, or, as Robert Boyle put it, ‘a subtlety in conceiving things … a quickness and neatness in expressing them’.

There was much to ridicule. In the summer of 1663 Lord Sedley appeared naked on the balcony of the Cock Inn in Bow Street where, according to Samuel Pepys, he proceeded to enact ‘all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined, and abusing of scripture’. He delivered a mock sermon in which he declared that ‘he hath to sell such a powder as should make all the cunts in town run after him’. After the recital ‘he took a glass of wine and washed his prick in it and then drank it off; and then took another, and drank the king’s health’. He then took down his breeches and proceeded to ‘excrementize’.

On the following day he was brought before the chief justice, who asked him if he had ever read Henry Peacham’s The Complete Gentleman. He was then bound over to keep the king’s peace on a bond of £500, whereupon he said that ‘he thought he was the first man that paid for shitting’. The bond was paid with money borrowed from the king himself.

37

On the road

On the course of their journey Faithful and Christian came upon Talkative, a gentleman who ‘was something more comely at a distance than at hand’. Then he conversed with his fellow travellers.

Talkative: I will talk of things heavenly, or things earthly; things moral, or things evangelical; things sacred, or things profane; things past, or things to come; things foreign, or things at home; things more essential, or things circumstantial; provided that all be done to our profit.

He walked out of their way for a little, whereupon Christian and Faithful began to discuss their new companion.

Faithful: Do you know him, then?

Christian: Know him! Yes, better than he knows himself.

Faithful: Pray what is he?

Christian: His name is Talkative; he dwelleth in our town. I wonder that you should be a stranger to him, only I consider that our town is large.

Faithful: Whose son is he? And whereabout doth he dwell?

Christian: He is the son of one Say-well; he dwelt in Prating Row; and is known of all that are acquainted with him, by the name of Talkative in Prating Row; and notwithstanding his fine tongue, he is but a sorry fellow.

Faithful: Well, he seems to be a very pretty man.

Christian: That is, to them who have not thorough acquaintance with him, for he is best abroad, near home he is ugly enough.

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress has often been characterized as the first English novel; it is as if he had the actual characters before him, in imagination, and simply wrote down what he heard; he also employed the plain speech of the time, to the extent that we can hear the ordinary people of the late seventeenth century talking to one another. Yet The Pilgrim’s Progress is more than a novel.

John Bunyan, born in Bedfordshire in 1628, gathered the rudiments of learning while young but may have been largely self-educated; he was thoroughly acquainted with the vernacular Bible and with Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, but in his youth he read the ballads and romances of the time. He joined the New Model Army at the age of fifteen, but it is not clear whether he saw any active service before his disbandment three years later.

After his marriage to a poor woman he entered a period of spiritual struggle, documented by Grace Abounding, in which he fell into despair and fearfulness before being tempted by false hope. He was still afflicted by anxiety and depression when in 1655 he joined a separatist church in Bedford; he began his preaching before that congregation where slowly he found strength and confidence. His ministry widened, therefore, and he came into conflict with the authorities. In 1661 he was consigned to Bedford Prison where, refusing to renounce his right to preach, he remained for the next eleven years. He wrote many books and treatises during this period, but none more popular and significant than The Pilgrim’s Progress.

In part it might be read as an account of any seventeenth-century journey, over rough roads, encumbered by mud and puddles, endangered by mires and ditches, pits and deep holes. The travellers must sometimes reconnoitre steep hills where they may catch ‘a slip or two’. Sometimes they go ‘out of the way’ and among ‘turnings’ and ‘windings’ lose themselves; ‘wherefore, at last, lighting under a little shelter, they sat down there till the day brake; but being weary they fell asleep’. We hear the dogs barking at their presence. If they are unfortunate they may be taken for vagrants, and placed in the stocks or in the ‘cage’. If they are fortunate they will find lodgings on the course of their journey, where they will be asked, ‘What will you have?’

They must also face the dangers of robbers waiting for them along the road.

So they came up all to him, and with threatening language bid him stand. At this Little-Faith looked as white as a clout, and had neither power to fight nor fly. Then said Faint-Heart, Deliver thy purse … Then he cried out, Thieves, thieves!

In the face of such dangers some travellers formed a company for the sake of friendship and security.

‘Then I hope we may have your good company.’

‘With a very good will, will I be your companion.’

‘Come on, then, let us go together…’

Such snatches of conversation are often heard on the road. They are eager to meet one another and, leaning upon their staves, they talk. ‘Is this the way?’ ‘You are just in your way.’ ‘How far is it thither?’ ‘Whence came you?’ ‘Have you got into the way?’ One will greet another with ‘What have you met with?’ or ‘What have you seen?’ ‘Whither are you going?’ ‘Back, back.’ Some travellers want ‘to make a short cut of it, and to climb over the wall’. What does it matter how they reach their destination? ‘If we are in, we are in.’

The vividness of the prose is derived from its immediacy and contemporaneity. ‘I met him once in the streets,’ Faithful says of Pliable, ‘but he leered away on the other side, as one ashamed of what he had done; so I spake not to him.’ Christian says to a man, ‘What art thou?’ and is told, ‘I am what I was not once.’ He tells Hope, ‘I would, as the saying is, have given my life for a penny … this man was one of the weak, and therefore he went to the wall … And when a man is down, you know, what can he do?’ The simplicity and vigour have been tested on the anvil of suffering experience but they also derive from Bunyan’s reading of the vernacular Bible. The words seem to come to him instinctively but they have absorbed the cadence and imagery of the Scriptures.

They come also from Bunyan’s identity as a Calvinist. To read The Pilgrim’s Progress is to return to that world of fierce struggle and debate in which deeply held religious faith was the only stay against the dark. Bunyan is nothing like the caricatures of Tribulation Wholesome, Snarl, or Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy, in seventeenth-century drama. He is too desperate and determined to be that. Christian decides to embark upon his journey alone ‘because none of my neighbours saw their danger as I saw mine’. This is the heart of it, this awareness of imminent destruction. It is the source of what he calls his ‘dumps’ that might also be expressed as despair and distraction, of melancholy close to madness, afflicting those who believed themselves to be in danger of spiritual destruction. This fear animates the life of the seventeenth century. It is the fear of what Bunyan calls ‘the bottomless pit … out of the mouth of which there came in an abundant manner smoke, and coals of fire, with hideous noises’. To be saved by the infinite and unlooked-for grace of God, unworthy though you be, is to experience the transformation of the spirit. It is a glimpse into the heart of the fervent spirituality of the seventeenth-century world.

38

To rise and piss

The prosperous citizen of London would wear a cloth doublet, open at the front to display his shirt and lawn scarf; breeches, stockings and buckled shoes completed the ensemble. For the outdoors he donned his wig and sugarloaf hat, together with a short cloak, and a sword at his side. His wife would naturally wear a brocaded silk dress, looped to display her quilted petticoat; her neck and shoulders were covered with a kerchief and she wore the fashionable French hood of the day.

The house in which they lived, in the period of Charles I and Cromwell, would have been perhaps too dull and plain for modern taste; the floors were of polished wood, some of the walls wainscoted and the ceilings panelled with oak. The rooms were solid and well-proportioned, but a little gloomy and confined; the floors creaked under foot. Only towards the end of the seventeenth century was there a general movement towards lighter and more gracious interiors.

The houses of those who were known as ‘the middle rank’ contained between three and seven rooms; the household would characteristically contain between four and seven people, including servants. In the more prosperous of these dwellings the hall, parlour and kitchen took up the ground floor while above them were one or two bedrooms. Of ornament there was very little. The windows rarely boasted curtains; carpets and armchairs were not widely used. Clocks, looking glasses and pictures were still relatively scarce but they were more in evidence towards the close of the period; this was also the time when the cabinetmaker, working in walnut and mahogany, became more popular. The richer households, however, might place hangings against some of the walls.

Their furniture was not comfortable, being comprised of high-backed chairs, stools, chests and benches with perhaps a few cushions to soften the hard wood. The dining table would have no ornament, and cutlery of the modern type was not in use; the crockery was of pewter rather than of earthenware. A display of plate might be set on the sideboard, but otherwise ostentation was still slight. The rooms were heated with coals. Sanitation was of the most rudimentary, with only the occasional mention of a pewter chamber pot or a ‘close-stool’. There is no evidence of any utensils for washing.

The good citizen might engage in trade as a merchant or in commerce as a shopkeeper, but there was no firm distinction between the various avocations of the city. In the reign of Charles II 3,000 merchants could be found in the Royal Exchange, and in this period foreign trade, domestic industry and shipping all enjoyed rapid growth in advance of that period that became known to twentiethcentury historians as the ‘commercial revolution’. In A Discourse of Trade, published in 1670, Roger Coke stated that ‘trade is now become the lady which in this present age is more courted and celebrated than in any former by all princes and potentates of the world’. The list of imported commodities included tobacco, sugar, indigo and ginger from the colonies as well as Indian calicoes and chintzes; a large proportion of these goods was then re-exported in English ships to continental Europe.

The gentry and the local administrators of the counties must not be forgotten since in this period they exercised full control of their neighbourhoods. It was a time when the old principles of the social hierarchy were reinforced. The ‘Cavalier Parliament’ had extended the authority of the local aristocracy in such matters as the control of the militia and the administration of the Poor Law. The justices of the peace had almost complete possession of local affairs, from imprisoning vagabonds to fining parish officials for breach of their duties.

The gentry had resumed their role as the leaders of local society, after the unfortunate experiment of republicanism, but they seemed not to have returned to their old complacency. Many of them, for example, paid very close attention to the new methods of agricultural practice. The farmers themselves were engaged in what were known as ‘improvements’ that increased the profitability of the land; in this period the country was able to export grain to mainland Europe.

A large class of ‘professional men’ had also emerged in this period; the lawyers and the doctors were principal among them, but accountants and professional administrators of estates were also to be found. Samuel Pepys has become for posterity the master of this world, and his diary does in some degree provide a mirror for his age. He is twenty-six at the time of his first entry; living with his wife in Axe Yard, near Downing Street, he is about to be appointed as secretary to Edward Mountagu, the lord admiral. This was the period when the Rump Parliament had reassembled and General Monck was beginning his march from Scotland.

And so we read that on 3 January 1660, ‘Mr Sheply, Hawley and Moore dined with me on a piece of beef and cabbage, and a collar of brawn’. Meat was the principal item in the diets of the period, and it is characteristic that Pepys should have two types; dinner was eaten at noon. On another occasion Pepys sat down to a dish of marrow bones and a leg of mutton, a loin of veal and a dish of fowl together with two dozen larks. He also had dinners of fish but, on being offered a dish of sturgeon, ‘I saw very many little worms creeping, which I suppose was through the staleness of the pickle’.

He drank ale and ‘strong water’ that was most probably gin. After dinner there was often a ‘mad stir’ with games and forfeits. Sports were of all kinds including one that Pepys called ‘the flinging at cocks’, in which sticks were hurled at a bird that was tethered by its leg or held down by some other means; whoever rendered it unconscious was allowed to cook and eat it. He also visited a cock-fight in a new pit by Shoe Lane. Other vignettes of the period emerge from his notations. A new disease sprang up in the autumn of 1661, consisting of ‘an ague and fever’.

The cleanliness of the age is perhaps in doubt. He had ‘like to have shit in a skimmer that lay over the house of office’. He made a cloth suit out of a cloak ‘that had like to have been beshit behind a year ago’. ‘This night I had a strange dream of bepissing myself, which I really did.’ He was en route to the Guildhall, ‘by the way calling to shit at Mr Rawlinson’s’. He had forgotten his chamber pot one night, ‘so was forced to rise and piss in the chimney’. In the theatre, ‘a lady spat backward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me’. He sometimes washed himself with warm water, and sometimes washed his feet, but the occurrences were rare enough to merit mention. His wife, Elizabeth, visited a ‘hot-house’ and ‘pretends to a resolution of hereafter being very clean – how long it will hold, I can guess’. Sure enough, on a later occasion, ‘she spent the whole day making herself clean, after four or five weeks being in continued dirt’. Two months later, however, ‘she finds that I am lousy, having found in my head and body above twenty lice, little and great’.

He was particular about his clothes. He ordered a coat of velvet, what he called a ‘close-kneed coloured suit’ with stockings of the same colour together with belt and a new gilt-handled sword, as well as a black cloth suit with white lining. In the autumn of 1663 he bought a new shag-gown, trimmed with gold buttons, and two periwigs. He then decided that the wig-maker should cut off his hair and make another periwig with it, and ‘after I had caused all my maids to look upon it and they conclude it to become me’. Soon after he also purchased a black cloth suit trimmed with scarlet ribbon as well as a cloak lined with velvet. ‘Clothes’, he wrote, ‘is a great matter.’ He went into the street ‘a little to show forsooth my new suit’. A poor fellow was one ‘that goes without gloves for his hands’.

It was a society of spectacle and display, in which all the leading characters were also actors. In his bright costume and new wig he might promenade with his wife in certain select neighbourhoods, such as Gray’s Inn, followed by ‘a woman carrying our things’. It was quite usual to stop and enquire of a ‘common’ person if he or she were ready to fetch this or to deliver that for a small fee. Servants could be severely treated, even in the relatively peaceful household of the Pepyses; Pepys sometimes beat his boy until his wrist hurt and Elizabeth was obliged ‘to beat our little girl; and then we shut her down into the cellar, and there she lay all night’.

His adventures with women are well enough known. When he was observed kissing a woman in the window of a winehouse, someone in the street called out, ‘Sir, why do you kiss the gentlewoman so?’ and threw a stone towards the window. He decided to join the congregation of St Dionis Backchurch after he had noticed that a ‘very great store of fine women there is in this church’. He was always ogling and touching. One young lady, in the congregation of another church, took some pins out of her pocket to prick him if he molested her. He wrote in code about his sexual encounters; ‘mi cosa naked’, for example, was ‘my bare penis’. He ‘had his way’ and ‘got it’, as he said, on many occasions. Yet he could be less demanding. ‘I got into the coach where Mrs Knipp was, and got her upon my knee (the coach being full) and played with her breasts and sung.’

Violence in the streets was not uncommon. During one altercation ‘I did give him a good cuff or two on the chops; and seeing him not oppose me, I did give him another’. The constable and his watch were there to prevent mischief or riot; they once found Pepys’s backyard door open ‘and so came in to see what the matter was’.

Pepys often ‘fell to cards’. Cards, and gaming in general, were the delight of the age; gambling was endemic in all classes of the society, and lotteries were used as a method of public finance. On one afternoon he paid 18 pence to join a ‘coffee club’ of the Rota that met in the Turk’s Head Tavern in Gerrard Street; coffee-houses had come to London eight years before, and had immediately become a success among the merchants and lawyers of London. Yet the merchants and lawyers were not alone. Roger L’Estrange complained that ‘every carman and porter is now a statesman, and indeed the coffee-houses are good for nothing else’. No regard was given to ‘degrees or order’ but in the coffee-house, according to Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras, ‘gentleman, mechanic, lord and scoundrel mix’.

In a city dominated by conversation and speculation, by news and gossip, they were the single most important venue of public recreation and of public information. London was characterized by its coffee-houses, and it became common to address letters to a citizen ‘at the Grecian’ or ‘at the Rainbow’. Macaulay said that they almost became a political institution. Yet they were not wholly concerned with ‘news piping hot’. On one visit Pepys ‘sat long in good discourse with some gentlemen concerning the Roman empire’. At the end of 1664 he stepped into a coffee-house to taste the new drink of ‘Jocolatte’, ‘very good’.

And then ‘after dinner we had a pretty good singing and one, Hazard, sung alone after the old fashion’; music and song were everywhere. There were ‘song rounds’. While he waited for a lawyer, ‘I sat in his study singing’. Before he retired to his bed, he often played the lute. In one of the rooms of a coffee-house he heard a variety of Italian and Spanish songs as well as a canon for two voices on the words ‘domine salvum fac regem’. When he came for recreation to Epsom Wells he observed some townsmen, met by chance, singing together in company. Pepys and his young male servant were accustomed to sing psalms and motets together. During the time of the plague he hired a boat that already had a passenger, so that ‘he and I sung together the way down’.

Like many of his contemporaries he seemed to have an open mind about the vagaries of faith and devotion. On one Sunday, ‘I went out and looked into several churches’; if he liked the sermon he might stay until the end, but there were times when he slept through the oration. When the inventor Sir Samuel Morland and his wife entered a church with two footmen in livery the congregation took ‘much notice of them’, especially on ‘going into their coach after sermon with great gazeing’. He observed also ‘that I see religion, be it what it will, is but a humour … and so the esteem of it passeth as other things do’. There was always room for superstition, however. He carried a hare’s foot as a charm against illness, but a companion noticed that it did not have the proper ‘join’ in it. No sooner did he touch his friend’s charm than ‘my belly begin to be loose and to break wind’.

In pursuit of his duties at the Navy Office it was a matter of routine to accept gifts from various claimants to office or privileges. On one occasion he was offered in turn a rapier, a vessel of wine, a gown, and a silver hatband, in return for ‘a courtesy’. His master, Mountagu, told him that ‘in the meantime I will do you all the good jobs I can’ for making money. He was eager to make a profit from the hiring of some ships for service in Tangiers; he received a share of the proceeds ‘which I did not demand but did silently consent to it’. When he was handed a packet containing money, he emptied out a piece of gold and some pieces of silver, all the time averting his eyes so ‘that I might say I saw no money in the paper if ever I should be questioned about it’. Commerce of every kind was the essence of the state, and Pepys was keen to acquire a good wife for his brother ‘worth two hundred pounds in ready money’. He noted that at court all was ‘lust and gain’.

He had some interesting encounters. He recorded how one gentleman had served eight different governments in one year, 1659, ‘and he did name them all, and then failed unhappily in the ninth, viz that of the king’s coming in’. He was beside the king when a Quaker woman delivered a petition to him; Charles argued with her, ‘she replying still with these words, “O King!” and “thou’d” him all along’. He conversed with an experimenter, John Spong, who told him ‘that by his microscope of his own making he doth discover that the wings of a moth is made just as the feathers of the wing of a bird’. While he and Spong were talking, several sectarians were arrested for attending a service at a conventicle. Pepys added that ‘they go like lambs, without any resistance’. It was common for men and women to weep in this period, whether out of joy or sorrow.

This was an age of much observation and experiment. An acquaintance brought to his house one evening a 12-foot glass, through which they endeavoured to see the moon, Saturn and Jupiter. He met Robert Hooke in the street by chance, and the experimenter told him that he could estimate the number of strokes a fly made with its wings ‘by the note that it answers to in music during their flying’. Pepys had previously attended a lecture by Hooke on the art of feltmaking. While travelling by boat from Rotherhithe to Gravesend, he read Robert Boyle’s Hydrostatical Paradoxes.

He noticed ‘a fine rarity: of fishes kept in a glass of water’. When he purchased a watch he found it so marvellous that he kept it in his hand ‘seeing what a-clock it is 100 times’. He visited the country house of a goldsmith, Sir Robert Viner, where ‘he showed me a black boy that he had that died of a consumption; and being dead, he caused him to be dried in an oven, and lies there entire in a box’. Black servants, slaves brought back from West Africa, had become very fashionable.

On Thanksgiving Day, 14 August 1666, in celebration of a recent sea victory over the Dutch, family and friends were very merry ‘flinging our fireworks and burning one another and the people over the way’. They then began ‘smutting one another with candle-grease and soot, till most of us were like devils’. They drank, and danced, and dressed up. One man put on the clothes of the serving boy and danced a jig; Elizabeth Pepys and her female friends put on periwigs. Pepys sometimes observed that, where there was no company, there was little pleasure.

Some phrases are redolent of the period. ‘He talked hog-high.’ ‘I am with child that…’ or ‘I am in pain for…’ meant I am anxious and impatient to be told something or for an imminent event. Someone’s antics ‘would make a dog laugh’. ‘I did laugh till I was ready to burst.’ ‘As she brews, let her bake.’

As he was writing, one winter night, a watchman came by with his bell under the window and cried out, ‘Past one of the clock, and a cold, frosty, windy morning.’ And so to bed.

39

And not dead yet?

The early hopes for Charles’s reign had now faded. It had become clear enough that he was a very poor match for Oliver Cromwell, and the erstwhile cavaliers were bitterly hostile to a corrupt court and a mismanaged government; the revenues were misused while the king himself was at the gambling table with what John Evelyn described as ‘vast heaps of gold squandered away in a vain and profuse manner’. The great questions of state and of religion were left unsettled in an atmosphere of squabbling, cynicism, corruption and faction-fighting; the only thing that the king’s ministers shared was mutual hatred. The king did not have the patience or the intellect to formulate clear lines of policy or enunciate the ideas that might sustain them. He was reticent and secretive, ever intent upon concealing his opinions on men or on measures. Clarendon wrote to the duke of Ormonde in 1662 that ‘the worst is, the king is as discomposed as ever, and looks as little after his business, which breaks my heart, and makes me and other of your friends weary of our lives’.

Yet Clarendon himself, the most loyal and substantial figure of the regime, was also under attack. In the autumn of 1662 it emerged that he had been the prime agent in the sale of Dunkirk to the French; it had been captured by Cromwell’s men from the Spanish, but the one continental possession in English hands was now to be delivered to the nation’s old enemy. There were good reasons for the sale; the port was costly to maintain and was in no way essential to the national interest, but its surrender (so it was called) was considered to be an act of betrayal. Clarendon was accused of accepting French bribes, and the great mansion he was then building in London was dubbed ‘Dunkirk House’. The merchants in particular feared that Dunkirk would be used as a base for privateers intent upon seizing their ships; when the mobs of London grew restless at the news of the sale, the gates of the city were shut and double guards posted in various sensitive locations.

At the close of the year the king attempted to heal the religious divisions of the nation by making a ‘declaration of indulgence’ in which he expressed his regret at his failure to introduce ‘a liberty for tender consciences’; he proposed to ask parliament to give him the power to dispense some of his subjects from the Act of Uniformity and to begin removing penal legislation directed at those Roman Catholics ‘as shall live peaceably, modestly and without scandal’. It is the clearest possible evidence that he believed parliament had gone too far in imposing Anglican orthodoxy upon the realm. For this, he may also have blamed Clarendon. The lord chancellor was at the time crippled with gout and forced to keep to his house; he was in no position to object.

Yet the king’s appeal was ignored. When the fourth session of the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ assembled in February 1663, the Commons refused to ratify the declaration. The king therefore was obliged to drop the matter and retire from a possible confrontation. It was in truth a significant failure, since he had proved himself unable to sustain the power of his royal prerogative in religious issues. In the spring of 1663 a new Militia Act was passed that reformed the local militia and placed them under the control of the lords-lieutenant of each county; they were given adequate funds, and were thus able to recruit more men for their service. It was reported that the measure was necessary to combat the continual threat of conspiracy and sedition, but it was feared by some that the king might use the troops for other purposes.

The navy rather than the army, however, was the priority. When parliament resumed once more in the spring of 1664 one of its first measures was a declaration or ‘trade resolution’ against the Dutch, complaining that ‘the subjects of the United Provinces’ had invaded the king’s rights in India, Africa and elsewhere by attacking English merchants and had committed ‘damages, affronts and injuries’ closer to home. It was believed that the Dutch wished to establish a trade monopoly throughout the known world, which was as dangerous as the ‘universal monarchy’ sought by Louis XIV.

The republic was therefore seen as a threat to English ships and to English commerce, but of course its very existence as a republic could be interpreted as an essential menace to the kingdom of England. The religion of the enemy was Calvinist in temper, and it was feared that the Dutch would support the cause of their co-religionists in England; they could thereby sow dissension against the king and the national faith. The ‘trade resolution’ was an aspect of the Anglican royalism asserted both by Lords and Commons. The fervour of the Commons, in particular, was matched by their actions. They agreed to raise the unprecedented sum of £2.5 million to assist the king in his prosecution of hostilities.

The formal declaration of war came, in February 1665, after months of preparation. The cause seems to have been largely popular, as far as such matters can be ascertained, particular among those merchants and speculators who would benefit from the embarrassment of Dutch trade; one of these was the king’s brother, James, duke of York. He led the Royal Africa Company that specialized in the business of slavery, and he invested in other commercial ventures. The conflict has therefore been described as the first purely commercial war in English history. As one hemp merchant, Captain Cocke, put it, ‘the trade of the world is too little for us two, therefore one must go down’.

A great victory was won at Lowestoft in the beginning of June under the leadership of the duke of York, when twenty-six Dutch vessels were seized or sunk. Each fleet would sail past the other firing its guns into the enemy’s hull and rigging until one or more ships ‘broke the line’, in which case the disabled vessels would be boarded or sunk with fire-ships. The two sides ‘knocked it out’, in the phrase of the time, for several hours.

The sound of the guns was heard even in London, and in an essay John Dryden recalled that ‘the noise of the cannon from both navies reached our ears about the city, so that all men being alarmed with it, and in a dreadful suspense about the event which we knew was then deciding, everyone went following the sound as his fancy led him…’ The success would have been even greater if a courtier, while the duke of York was asleep in his cabin, had not called off the pursuit of the remaining ships, whether for fear of waking him, or of engaging once more with the enemy, is not known. In any case the momentum of the victory was not maintained in the wider war.

In August a squadron of English ships attacked a merchant convoy, but was beaten back. In the same month the fleet under the command of the earl of Sandwich was held off the Suffolk coast as a result of poor victualling, and then spent the next few weeks chasing Dutch ships through storm and rain. Some were captured but, when the prizes were dispersed among the flag officers, charges of fraud and theft were made against Sandwich; he never really managed to refute them, and the navy itself seemed complicit in corruption. The earl was deprived of his command and sent as an ambassador to Spain. Later in the year, when the English ships were laid up for repair, some Dutch vessels appeared at the mouth of the Thames and commenced a blockade; it was dispersed only when disease, and lack of supplies, forced them to return home. The blockade, however, had compounded the problems of high taxes and uncertain business that already beset the merchants. Overseas trade had been seriously set back by the war on the high seas, and the Baltic trade shrank away almost to nothing; woollen manufacture, the staple of England’s exports, was similarly depressed. A war fought for trade had become a war fatal to trade.

Yet already a greater threat had emerged in the streets of London. In his diary entry for 7 June 1665, ‘the hottest day that ever I felt in my life’, Samuel Pepys noted that

This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there – which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that to my remembrance I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell to and chew – which took away the apprehension.

The plague had come back to London; houses infected with the distemper were shut up, the victims still often within, and a red cross 1 foot in height was painted on the doors. Pepys had purchased tobacco as a medical precaution.

So began a time of peril and great fear. The first signs of the disease were ‘tokens’ of discoloured skin; after three or four days ‘buboes’ or carbuncles erupted over the body and, if they did not suppurate, death was certain. Many victims were tied to the bed in the event of frenzy.

The ‘dead carts’ or ‘pest carts’ trundled through the lanes and alleys with their burden of corpses to be discharged in one of the many pits dug for the purpose; it is reported that in their misery some of the living flung themselves among the piles of the dead. Some lay dead, or dying, in the streets. Others fled wailing to the fields around London. Some people locked themselves away, and those that ventured outside looked on one another fearfully. ‘And not dead yet?’ ‘And still alive?’ Some, desperate beyond fear, sang and danced and drank in promiscuous gatherings. Others fell into a stupor of despair. It was whispered that demons in human shape wandered abroad; they were known as ‘hollow men’, and those that they struck soon died.

Prophets and fanatics roamed the streets bawling out threats and warnings. One of them, walking naked with a pan of burning coals on his head, invoked the judgement of God on the sinful city. Through the searingly hot months of July and August the fury of the plague rose ever higher. The principal thoroughfares were all but overgrown with grass. In September fires of sea-coal, one fire for every twelve houses, were kept burning in the streets for three days and nights. Yet they had no effect. As many as 10,000 fatalities were listed each week in the bills of mortality. It seemed that soon enough the city would be empty. But by the beginning of December the sickness abated, and the new year witnessed a return of many London families who had fled in panic. It was estimated that 100,000 had died.

The new year, 1666, was one of ill omen. The number had long been considered significant, heralding perhaps the coming of the Antichrist; for some it signified fire and apocalypse. In its Latin form, ‘MDCLXVI’, it is unique for including every Roman numeral once and in reverse sequence. The solar eclipse at the beginning of July, in this year, convinced many that the end of days was coming.

The prognostications elsewhere were not good. The king of France had signed a defensive treaty with the Dutch and, at the beginning of the year, he declared war upon England. In truth he did not do much for the benefit of his new ally, but his intervention increased public anxiety about the conduct of hostilities. There was no money and the lord high treasurer, the 4th earl of Southampton, asked Samuel Pepys, clerk of the naval board, ‘What would you have me do? I have given all I can for my life. Why will people not lend their money? Why will they not trust the king as well as Oliver?’ The reference to Cromwell’s success is interesting. The nation had received no benefit, and acquired no material gains, from these inconclusive and inglorious battles against the Dutch.

They were in any case still a formidable enemy. A battle at the beginning of June off the Flemish and English coasts lasted for four days, and at the end of it the English had lost twice as many ships and men as their rivals; the two sides had fought each other to exhaustion and, as one English commander put it, ‘they were as glad to be quit of us as we of them’. It was a desperate and bloody fight, leaving 6,000 Englishmen dead. Many of them were found floating in the seas wearing their dark ‘Sunday clothes’; they had previously been taken by the press-gangs on leaving church.

News then came, a week later, that the French had taken over the colonial possession of St Kitts. Louis XIV had decided to take a more active part in the maritime struggle and ordered his fleet to sea. The melancholy aspect of affairs convinced many that the government and the king were about to fall. A battle in late July was the occasion for some celebration, however, after the English fleet had pursued the fleeing Dutch over the North Sea for some thirty-six hours. The cry that had gone up before the engagement was: ‘If we do not beat them now, we shall never do it!’ But all of the participants were growing weary of a war that would last for another year.

London was not spared further horror. After the disaster of the plague, a small chimney fire at a bakery in Pudding Lane began a conflagration that would envelop most of the city. It was the very beginning of September 1666, after an unusually hot August had left the thatch and timber of the city bone dry; the fire was carried by strong southeast winds towards London Bridge and Fish Street.

It burned steadily towards the west, and John Evelyn noted that ‘the noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses and churches, was like an hideous storm, and the air all about so hot and inflamed that at the last one was not able to approach it’. The molten lead from the roof of St Paul’s ran through the streets, according to John Evelyn, ‘glowing with fiery redness’. The Guildhall stood immured in flame like a burning coal. The people took to the water or fled to the fields in the north of the city, seeking safety from the burning drops that rained down upon them. The smoke now stretched for 50 miles. Yet not everyone ran in terror. The royal brothers, Charles and James, took an active part in exhorting, and even joining, those who were trying to contain the engulfing fires.

The fire abated after three days, having consumed five-sixths of the city and leaving a trail of destruction and desolation a mile and a half in length and half a mile in breadth. When John Evelyn clambered among the ruins, the ground still hot beneath his feet, he often did not know where he was. Yet the vitality of the city was not seriously harmed. The usual round of trade and commerce was established again within a year, and the work of rebuilding in brick and stone began; within two years of the Great Fire 1,200 houses had been constructed, and in the following year another 1,600. By 1677 most of the city was once again in place. It was said that it rose almost as quickly as it fell.

The year of ill omen, however, seemed to have fulfilled its destiny. In the month after the fire parliament reassembled in a state of gloom and anxiety. Rumours of conspiracy, by the French and Dutch, were everywhere. The Catholics, and the Quakers, were also blamed. One of those returned to parliament, Roger Pepys, cousin to Samuel, predicted that ‘we shall all be ruined very speedily’. A general fast was imposed upon the nation as a penance for what John Evelyn described as ‘our prodigious ingratitude, burning lusts, dissolute court, profane and abominable lives’. In the same period the king ordained that all French fashions should be banished from the court and that in their place a simple ‘Persian’ coat and tunic were to be worn; it was supposed to be a gesture towards thrift but it was essentially a token of his flippancy. The style was in any case soon abandoned.

After much debate, and intense scrutiny of the accounts provided by the Navy Board, the king was voted sufficient funds to fight another year of war; yet there was intense wrangling about the means of furnishing them. Should it be a hearth tax or a poll tax? Nobody seemed to know. As they talked and debated it was rumoured that the French were preparing an invasion, but this was discounted as a government ploy to hasten a decision.

The assessment was finally passed in the middle of January 1667, but of course the revenues were not collected. In the following month the Navy Board declared to the duke of York that ‘we are conscious of an utter incapacity to perform what his majesty and your royal highness seem to look for from us’. The shipyards were laid up without supplies or repairs. The seamen, deprived of pay and even of the necessities of life, were provoked to riot on several occasions. The City refused to lend money, and the treasury was exhausted.

It was time for peace. The king and his council had tentatively begun the process of negotiation with the Dutch, and Charles himself was at the same time engaged in private negotiations with the French king; they had no reason to fight against each other, and it was eventually agreed that they should abstain from mutual hostilities. Charles also trusted that his fellow sovereign would be able to persuade or bully his Dutch allies into signing a similar agreement. Charles and Louis had sent their letters through Henrietta Maria, respectively mother and paternal aunt of the two men; the English king kept the matter secret from even his most intimate councillors, thus emphasizing his propensity for clandestine dealings.

In the meantime, to save expenditure, the privy council had no choice but to reduce the scale of naval operations; only a ‘summer guard’ of ships would be sent to sea in order to protect the merchant vessels. It was also believed that, given the increasingly futile nature of the war, hostilities were about to be suspended. This incapacity led directly to one of the most humiliating episodes in English naval history.

At the beginning of May 1667, a great conference between the warring parties was called at Breda; it soon became clear to the Dutch, however, that the English were not prepared to be over-generous in the negotiations. So they decided to try force for the final time to extort concessions and to hasten the progress of the discussions. In the following month, therefore, they launched a raid into the Thames estuary; they broke the defences of the harbour at Chatham and proceeded to burn four ships before towing away the largest ship of the fleet, the Royal Charles, and returning with it undamaged.

Panic ran through the streets of London. It was said that the Dutch were coming, and the trained bands were called out for the city’s defence. In truth the enemy fleet could have found its way to London Bridge without much difficulty. It was reported that Harwich, Colchester and Dover were already burned. The reports were false but the events at Chatham were a symbolic, as well as a naval, disaster. One parliamentarian, John Rushworth, wrote that ‘the people are ready to tear their hairs off their heads’. Sir William Batten, surveyor of the navy, exclaimed, ‘By God! I think the devil shits Dutchmen!’

The Dutch now pressed their advantage and the king, humiliated at home and abroad, conceded some of their demands. The principle of negotiation was that of ‘uti possidetis’, by means of which the parties retained possession of that which they had taken by force in the course of conflict. As a result, England lost much of the West Indies to France and the invaluable island of nutmeg, Run, part of Indonesia, to the Dutch. In return, however, it retained New Netherland; this was the colonial province of the Netherlands that included the future states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Connecticut. Yet at the time the gains did not match the loss of national prestige.

After the disaster at Chatham talk of corruption and conspiracy was once more in the air; some blamed the papists, and others even blamed the bishops. It was said that, at the time of the Dutch raid, the king was chasing a moth in the apartments of Lady Castlemaine. It was supposed by many that the nation was so mismanaged by the king that it would once more turn against the Stuarts and become a republic. Charles was the subject of distrust as well as dislike, and it was feared that he was colluding with Louis XIV in some popish plot to impose absolute rule. At times of peril and disaster, fear is contagious.

Yet opinion turned in particular against Clarendon who was, quite unfairly, accused of mismanaging the war; he had in fact opposed it from the start, but he was a convenient scapegoat. He had always been disliked by the men and women about the king – whom John Evelyn described as ‘the buffoons and the misses’ – while an attempt to impeach him had already been made by the earl of Bristol in the Lords. But the chancellor was now in infinitely greater danger. It was being said that the king had turned against him. Charles disliked being lectured or patronized; serious men in any case made him feel uncomfortable. It was not that Clarendon annoyed the king; he bored him. He was disliked by parliament for his fervent support of the prerogative power of the king, and by dissenters for his equally vehement espousal of the established Church. Gilbert Burnet, the historian of his own time, wrote that ‘he took too much upon him and meddled in everything, which was his greatest error’.

The enemies of Clarendon now gathered for the kill. His wife had died early in August, and his obvious grief incapacitated him from robustly defending himself. His absence from the privy council encouraged other councillors to speak against him; the king was told that Clarendon prevented the advice of others from reaching him and that he had denied any freedom of debate within the council chamber itself. Thus all the ills of the kingdom could, in one form or another, be blamed upon him. If he was removed, the hostility towards the administration might abate. Certainly his departure would gratify the Commons that had long despised him; it might help to lighten the mood of the next session.

In the middle of August the king sent the duke of York to the lord chancellor with the request that he resign his office. Clarendon unwisely refused and a week later, on 25 August, a more peremptory demand came that he should surrender the seals of office forthwith. Again, Clarendon refused. The affair was the sole news of the court, and it had become necessary for Charles to assert his authority against this overweening councillor. The king demanded the seals, in redoubled fury, and they were at last returned.

The king told one of Clarendon’s allies, the duke of Ormonde, that ‘his behaviour and humour was grown so unsupportable to myself, and to all the world else, that I could no longer endure it, and it was impossible for me to live with it, and do those things with the parliament that must be done or the government will be lost’. Yet the affair may not be as straightforward as that. Pepys was told that there were many explanations ‘not fit to mention’. The king may genuinely have believed that the lord chancellor was no longer capable of service, but there are suggestions that in some way Clarendon had interfered with his love-life; he seems to have been instrumental, for example, in the sudden marriage of one of the king’s mistresses. It is impossible now to untangle the myriad webs of court intrigue.

The pack was in full pursuit of Clarendon, now that royal favour had fallen away, and it was believed that the king had become very interested in his former confidant’s prosecution. The charges brought against Clarendon by the Commons included illegal imprisonment of various suspects, the intention of imposing military rule, and the sale of Dunkirk to the French. Since the lord chancellor had always been an advocate of arbitrary government, the charges may have been in large measure true. The Lords, however, resolved that Clarendon could not be committed; they seem to have concluded that one of their own members should not be impeached on a whim of the lower house. The king wondered aloud why his once chief minister was still in the country, and by the end of November it was rumoured that he would pick a tribunal of peers prepared to try Clarendon and execute him. The earl now heeded the advice of those closest to him and secretly took ship for France where he began an exile in the course of which he would write perhaps the most interesting history of his times.

It is now pertinent to note that after the forced abdication of the lord chancellor the administration of the king’s affairs became ever more murky and corrupt. In the absence of Clarendon the senior councillors were now Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley Cooper and Lauderdale, whose initials spelled out ‘cabal’; for ever afterwards, the word was employed to designate secretive and self-interested administration. They were an alphabetical coalition, and in truth they can now be seen as mere ciphers in the game of politics; their policies brought nothing about, and their principal object was to make as much money as they could from their period of office before the wheel turned. Clifford, in particular, was known as ‘the Bribe Master General’.

They suited the king, however, because he could manipulate them. George Savile, the 1st marquess of Halifax, wrote that ‘he lived with his ministers as he did with his mistresses; he used them, but he was not in love with them’. The king was now in charge of all affairs and, without the interference of Clarendon, he could bend and twist in whichever way he wished. So arose one of the most devious and inconsistent periods of English history.

In the beginning the acknowledged first minister was George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, described by Gilbert Burnet as one who was ‘never true either to things or persons, but forsakes every man and departs from every maxim, sometimes out of levity and unsettledness of fancy and sometimes out of downright falsehood’. This was a fit companion for a king. He had already emerged as one of the circle of wits at court, but now he had ambitions to be a statesman as well as a satirist.

He was the son of the ill-fated 1st duke, assassinated by John Felton at the beginning of the reign of Charles I. He was thereafter brought up in the royal household in the company of Charles II, and had shared many exploits with the young king; he had fought beside him at Worcester. His rise after the fall of Clarendon was still remarkable, however, he having previously only obtained the rank of Master of the Horse. The king consulted him on all matters of importance, and the foreign ambassadors generally applied to him for advice before being admitted to the king’s presence.

If Buckingham had one abiding principle, it was that of religious toleration; he had so many religious whims and fancies of his own that he was happy to allow freedom of thought to others. The nonconformists were in any case now in a more secure position than before. Fears of a papist court and of a papist queen, and a prevailing belief that the ‘Great Fire of London’ had been concocted by Roman Catholics in the service of France, gave sectarians and dissenters a novel air of loyalty and trustworthiness.

Quakers began to meet in London, and soon enough monthly assemblies were in place all over the country; they were safer now than at any previous time. The Baptists of Bristol regathered. The Conventicle Act of 1664 was effectively dead, and was formally abolished in 1668. Certain Presbyterian ministers prepared the ground for a separate Church if they could not be assimilated within the established one. At the sessions and assizes of the realm Catholic recusants, rather than nonconformists, were presented for judgement.

The bishop of Norwich preached a sermon in 1666 in which he declared that ‘it is an honour which learned men owe to one another to allow liberty of dissent in matters of mere opinion’. That liberty was already apparent in the survival of Brownists, Fifth Monarchy men, Sabbatarians, Muggletonians, Ranters, Anabaptists, General Baptists, Particular Baptists and Familists. We may invoke the words of John Bunyan, ‘I preached what I felt, what I smartingly did feel.’ They were perhaps not a force to challenge the popular Anglicanism of the high-church party, but the once stringent laws against them were now unenforced or only hesitantly invoked. A contemporary tract, Discourse of the Religion of England, 1667, observed that nonconformists were ‘spread through city and country; they make no small part of all ranks and all sorts of men. They are not excluded from the nobility, among the gentry they are not a few; but none are more important than they in the trading part of the people.’ That is why London was a city of dissent.

From this period, then, we can trace the emergence of the doctrine known as Latitudinarianism that propounded comprehension and tolerance in all matters of doctrine and practice. The ‘Latitude men’, as they were known, emphasized the power of reason as ‘the candle of the Lord’ and believed that such matters as liturgy and ritual were ‘things indifferent’. This might be said to be the unwritten principle of eighteenth-century Anglicanism. God, and Christianity, were no longer mysterious.

40

The true force

In the early autumn of 1664 a young scholar visited Stourbridge Fair, just outside Cambridge, where he purchased a prism; he took the instrument back to his lodging at Trinity College where ‘having darkened my chamber, and made a small hole in my window-shuts, to let in a convenient quantity of the sun’s light, I placed my prism at his entrance, that it might be thereby refracted to the opposite wall’. By these means did Isaac Newton experiment with ‘the celebrated phenomena of colours’.

In this year, too, he also experimented upon himself. He inserted a bodkin or large needle ‘betwixt my eye and the bone as near to the backside of my eye as I could’; at the risk of blinding himself, he wished to alter the curve of his retina and observe the results. These were the preliminary steps to his theory of colour that would revolutionize the discipline of optics; it was he who made the discovery that white light was not some primary or basic hue but a mixture of all the other colours in the spectrum. The conclusion was so contrary to the principles of common sense that no one had ever considered it before.

So began the career of the most remarkable mathematicians of the seventeenth century and one who, more than anyone else, has shaped the perceptions of the modern world. The scientists of NASA, in the United States, still use the calculations of Isaac Newton. The two years after he purchased the prism at Stourbridge Fair were his years of glory, during which he penetrated the mysteries of light and gravitation. The story of the falling apple may or may not be accurate but it is true enough that, at the age of twenty-three, he began his exploration of the enigma of that force which held the world and universe together. John Maynard Keynes was to call him ‘the last of the magicians’.

The time came when he was obliged to enter the public world of seventeenth-century science and, at the end of 1671, he allowed his 6-inch reflecting telescope to be displayed to the Fellows of the Royal Society. Newton had made the instrument himself, fashioning his own tools for the purpose, and it was taken in triumph to Charles II, who marvelled at it. Newton was duly elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, to which institution he was attached for the rest of his life.

The Royal Society may be deemed to be the jewel of Charles II’s reign. At the end of November 1660, a group of physicians and natural scientists announced the formation of a ‘college for the promoting of physic-mathematical experimental learning’; they were in part inspired by Francis Bacon’s vision of ‘Solomon’s House’ in The New Atlantis, and they shared Bacon’s passion for experimental and inductive science. They were men of a practical and pragmatic temper, with a concomitant interest in agriculture as well as navigation, manufactures as well as medicine. All questions of politics or religion were excluded from the deliberations of the Fellows, and indeed their pursuit of practical enquiry was in part designed to quell the ‘enthusiasm’ and to quieten the spiritual debates that had helped to foment the late civil wars. They met each week, at Gresham College in Bishopsgate, where papers were read on the latest invention or experiment. It was in their company that Sir Isaac Newton first propounded his revolutionary theories of light.

The last four decades of the seventeenth century in fact witnessed an extraordinary growth in scientific experiment to the extent that, in 1667, the historian of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat, could already celebrate the fact that ‘an universal zeal towards the advancements of such designs has not only overspread our court and universities, but the shops of our mechanicks, the fields of our gentlemen, the cottages of our farmers, and the ships of our merchants’.

An enquiring and inventive temper was now more widely shared, whereby the whole field of human knowledge became the subject of speculation. The Fellows of the Royal Society debated a method of producing wind by means of falling water; they explored the sting of a bee and the feet of flies; they were shown a baroscope that measured changes in the pressure of the air and a hygroscope for detecting water in the atmosphere; they set up an enquiry into the state of English agriculture and surveyed the methods of tin-mining in Cornwall. They conducted experiments on steam, on ventilation, on gases and on magnetism; thermometers, pumps and perpetual motion machines were brought before them. The origins of the industrial and agricultural ‘revolutions’, conventionally located in the eighteenth century, are to be found in the previous age. In the seventeenth century, providentially blessed by the genius of Francis Bacon at its beginning, we find a general desire for what Sprat described as ‘the true knowledge of things’.

At a meeting of the society in the early months of 1684 Edmund Halley, Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were discussing the dynamics of planetary motion. Halley put a question to them. Could the force that keeps the planets moving around the sun decrease as an inverse square of its distance? Wren and Hooke agreed that this was very likely, but no one had as yet been able to prove the point. So Halley travelled to Cambridge, where he consulted Newton on the problem of the sun and the revolving planets. Newton readily concurred in Halley’s hypothesis.

‘How do you know this?’

‘Why, I have calculated it.’

This was a reply that, as in Halley’s words, struck him ‘with joy and amazement’. No one had ever done it before. By the end of the year Newton had revisited his calculations and had produced a short treatise, De motu corporum in gyrum, that deciphered and proved mathematically the motion of bodies in orbit. He pressed on with his deliberations and, within the space of eighteen months, had completed the treatise that would confer upon him the acclamation of the world. He formulated the three laws of motion that are the foundation of his theory of universal gravitation, a revolutionary principle that proclaims the universe to be bound together by one force that can be mathematically promulgated and understood. It was the great revelation of the seventeenth century. Newton had understood the cosmos, and made it amenable to human laws. There was indeed a force that bound the sun and all the stars. ‘It is now established’, he wrote, ‘that this force is gravity, and therefore we shall call it gravity from now on.’

Newton was eventually chosen to become president of the Royal Society and for the last twenty years of his life governed its meetings with a somewhat forbidding dignity. He ruled that there should be no ‘whispering, talking nor loud laughters. If dissensions rose in any sort … they tended to find out truth, but ought not to arise to any personality.’ These were to be the new truths of science, objective and impersonal, as adumbrated in seventeenth-century London. One Fellow, William Stukeley, recalled that ‘everything was transacted with great attention and solemnity and decency’ for in truth this was the century in which science became a new form of religion with its laws and principles treated as matters of unassailable dogma. Newton himself declared that natural philosophy now ‘consists in discovering the frame and operations of Nature and reducing them, as far as may be, to general rules or laws, establishing these rules by observations and experiments, and thence deducing the causes and effects of things’. This is our inheritance from the seventeenth century.

41

Hot news

The casual deviousness of the king soon became apparent when at the beginning of 1668 he negotiated a ‘Triple Alliance’ with the Dutch republic and Sweden to oppose the French armies that had already occupied part of the Spanish Netherlands; it was a general defensive league against the encroaching power of the French and, at the time, it was regarded as a great stroke of policy. It was considered to be better to be allied with two Protestant powers against a common Catholic enemy. It was, more pertinently, meant to prove to Louis XIV that England still possessed significant influence in the game between the states.

Yet the king wrote to his sister residing at the French court, Henrietta, duchess of Orléans, that ‘I have done nothing to prejudice France in the agreement’. Even as he allied himself with the Dutch, in fact, he was preparing to move ever closer to France in a secret plan to destroy their republic. He had the ability to pursue two different, and indeed opposing, policies at the same time. Feeling great admiration for his cousin, Louis XIV, he also needed the French king’s money and perhaps, in some future contingency, his men. Louis ruled the most powerful state in Europe, and it was much better to be his ally than his enemy; he was also part of the family and, in dynastic terms, family was more important than country.

Suspicion was in the air. Pepys reported that in London ‘people do cry out in the streets … that we are betrayed by people about the king and shall be delivered up to the French’. In the ‘bawdy-house riots’ of the spring, the apprentices of London revised the ancient custom of attacking brothels on Shrove Tuesday. But this was no ritual performance; fifteen of their leaders would be tried for high treason, and four of them were hanged. The demonstrations involved thousands of people, and lasted for five days.

The riots began on Easter Monday when some brothels in Poplar were attacked and demolished; the insurrection spread on the following day to Moorfields, East Smithfield and Holborn. On Wednesday the apprentices, swelled by an appreciable force from Southwark, attacked the bawdy-houses of Moorfields. They did not form an inchoate crowd: they were mustered into regiments and marched behind flags; they carried iron bars and axes. Some of the more notorious prisons were also besieged.

The king himself professed not to understand the motive of the apprentices in attacking the brothels. ‘Why, why, do they go to them, then?’ he is reported to have asked. But in fact the brothels were a sign, or token, of what was for many a larger problem. In attacking the brothels the Londoners were attacking the perceived morals of the court and, in opposing its morals, they were disowning its principles. One of their cries was that ‘ere long they would come and pull Whitehall down’.

The king’s favourite mistress, Lady Castlemaine, had converted to Roman Catholicism at the end of 1663. She was a sign, therefore, of the court’s leaning towards papistry and was a target of much virulent comment as a ‘whore’ and worse. That is another reason why the brothels were attacked. The bishops were also condemned for keeping mistresses, and the archbishop of Canterbury was rumoured to retain a prostitute; other prelates were ‘given to boys’. When the apprentices called out for ‘reformation’ they were giving voice to the pleas of the dissenters who distrusted or hated the established Church.

So sexual laxity was associated with papistry, and papistry with treason, and treason with the king of France. It was an unstable compound of rumour and fear, but all the more potent for that. The rioters could not have discerned the king’s secret purposes but, in their distrust, they were in fact close to the truth. Soon after the formation of the ‘Triple Alliance’ Buckingham entered negotiations with the duchess of Orléans in France. Charles meanwhile apologized to the French envoy for having entered the treaty with Holland and Sweden insinuating that he would like to establish a much closer union with Louis. In the spring of 1668 the king decided to prorogue parliament for what turned out to be the unprecedented period of seventeen months; in its absence he might more easily plot and plan.

At the beginning of 1669 he sprang a surprise. He called his brother, James, and three of his most important councillors to his private chamber where with tears in his eyes he announced his desire for conversion to the Catholic faith. His brother was soon to be received into that communion, and would remain a staunch and indeed almost hysterical Catholic for the rest of his life. The honesty and fidelity of the king are more doubtful. If Charles was preparing himself for negotiations with the devout French king, what could be better than to declare his espousal of the same religion?

A secret emissary was sent to the French court in March with the offer of an offensive and defensive alliance together with a request for men, money and ships in the event of a war with the Dutch. Charles also promised to declare himself a Catholic if, in return, Louis XIV would give him the sum of £200,000 to secure himself against public wrath. He never did make any such announcement, and it seems that he was converted only on his deathbed; he was adept at the arts of dissimulation and hypocrisy even in the great affairs of state.

Throughout this year, and the first half of the next, negotiations between the two kings continued in absolute secrecy. The English ambassador in Paris, and the French ambassador in London, were not informed. Charles’s anti-Catholic ministers were not told. The king continued negotiations with the Dutch as if nothing in the world had changed. By late summer or early autumn 1669, Charles and Louis reached agreement. Louis would come to Charles’s aid whenever the English king announced his Catholicism, and the two would join together in an assault upon the Dutch.

Henrietta, duchess of Orléans, arrived at Dover in the middle of May 1670, with diverse documents from the French court that she gave to her brother. Among these was a secret paragraph which read that ‘the king of England, being convinced of the truth of the Roman Catholic religion, is resolved to declare it, and to reconcile himself with the Church of Rome as soon as the state of his country’s affairs permit’. Charles hoped and believed that the majority of his subjects had such affection for him that they would not protest ‘but as there are unquiet spirits who mask their designs under the guise of religion, the king of England, for the peace of his kingdom, will avail himself of the assistance of the king of France’. The king was still engaged in subterfuge against his most intimate councillors. He allowed Buckingham, for example, to negotiate a version of the treaty that did not contain this important paragraph concerning the king’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. Instead he was asked to press on with a treaty of alliance that made no mention of the secret. He was not aware of the collusion. It is unlikely that Charles ever had any intention of announcing his conversion, however, and the commitment was in large part a ploy to bind the French king more tightly to him.

The financial reward granted to the king was not large. He was to be paid £140,000 – half in advance – as a token of the French king’s favour. He was also to be paid approximately £210,000 during each year of the proposed war with the Dutch, with the first instalment to be sent to him three months before the actual declaration of hostilities. The king of England had become a pensionary of the king of France, and had in effect sold his sovereignty. Another difficulty was apparent. If the French king should ever release into the world the secret paragraph, Charles’s hold over his subjects might be destroyed; so Louis had a potent weapon in any confrontation with his fellow sovereign.

The counterfeit treaty was signed towards the close of the year, while the secret agreement reached earlier in the spring was not revealed even to the king’s confidants. The alliance with Louis against the Dutch, however, could not be concealed for ever. The popular sentiment against France was already very strong, and the Venetian ambassador commented that ‘although the king may join France, his subjects will not follow him’. A rumour was spread that French agents were kidnapping English children to take their blood as a cure for Louis’s supposed leprosy. It was clear to the king’s men that, if there was to be a war with the Dutch, it would have to be very short and very successful before public anger turned against them.

Yet how was any proposed war to be financed? In the intervals between various recesses and prorogations, parliament voted only modest supplies. The French pension itself was not over-generous. The king’s own hereditary revenues were all pledged to repay old debts but, as a sign of boldness or desperation, it was determined to postpone the repayment of all those loans. This became known as ‘the stop’, imposed on 2 January 1672. All payments due from the exchequer were cancelled, so that incoming revenues could be spent upon the preparations for war.

The principal victims were the goldsmiths operating as bankers, who in turn passed on the loss and refused to discharge to their clients the cash they held on deposit. It seemed that ‘the stop’ might also soon be put to trade itself. Yet another casualty, however, was the king, who at a stroke lost credibility; the financial probity of the government was severely undermined and it was not at all clear that anyone would lend to it again. One contemporary confided to his diary that the decision ‘will amaze all men and ruin thousands’.

In the spring of 1672, the French declared war on the Dutch; Charles immediately followed their example, and justified hostilities by citing the attempts of the republic to supplant English trade and to harass English traders. He also mentioned the fact that he was personally insulted by Dutch caricatures and publications. Two days before the call to war, Charles had honoured another undertaking to Louis by issuing a ‘declaration of indulgence’ that included his Catholic subjects. The nonconformists were granted complete freedom of worship while the Roman Catholic ‘recusants’ were permitted to worship in their private houses. It was a signal use of the royal prerogative at a time when parliament was not in session. Licences to hold public meetings were now generously and variously distributed to the nonconformists. John Bunyan was one of those released from prison. It may also have occurred to dissenters and Catholics that their new religious liberties now depended upon royal favour.

The measure could also have been designed to assist the king’s brother, who had recently been received into the Catholic communion. James, duke of York, by his own account, had been converted after reading certain tracts for and against the Roman faith; he also perused church histories and came to the conclusion that none of the English reformers ‘had power to do what they did’. His faith was a matter of conviction and principle; for his brother it was a question of expediency.

It was said by the earl of Arlington that the ‘declaration of indulgence’ was so intended ‘that we might keep all quiet at home while we are busy abroad’. Yet hostilities had already begun. In the middle of March an English squadron attempted to detain and board a rich Dutch fleet of merchant vessels on its way home from Smyrna and Malaga. Its commander had been warned in advance, however, and was accompanied by a convoy that allowed him to elude the English enemy. It was a humiliation for Charles, who had also been deprived of the treasure he had hoped to capture. The affair did not bode well for the greater war.

The duke of York had been appointed as lord high admiral, but Charles played a large part in preparing and arming the fleet. In the early summer of 1672 an inconclusive battle took place near Sole Bay, off the coast of Suffolk, in which both sides claimed success. Since the original plan of the English was to sail across the North Sea and blockade the Dutch in their home ports, they could hardly be described as the victors. It was clear enough that this would be no easy fight for the seas. The French fleet, ostensibly present to aid their allies, had played no part in the battle and thus earned the angry rebukes of the English; soon enough, in popular opinion, the French would be far more hated than the Dutch. John Evelyn observed in his diary entry for 27 June that the inconclusive battle ‘showed the folly of hazarding so brave a fleet, and losing so many good men, for no provocation but that the Hollanders exceeded us in industry, and in all things but envy’.

The armies of Louis XIV had more success. They poured across the Rhine in the first two weeks of June and attacked the territories of the United Provinces; there seemed no possibility of withstanding their advance, and some of the principal cities were obliged to open their gates to the invaders. The fires from the French camps could be seen from Amsterdam. Of the seven republics of the United Provinces, only Holland and Zealand remained unconquered. At this perilous juncture the Dutch opened their dykes and flooded the country to prevent any further French advance. The land war came to a peremptory halt.

Charles had asked for a further £1 million from the French king, for the maintenance of the war, but Louis had refused. So Charles had no choice but to recall parliament in the hope of obtaining funds. Parliament returned in February 1673. In its absence a war had been declared and a declaration of religious indulgence had been issued. It might have seemed superfluous to requirements, except that it knew its power over the raising of money. The king had hoped to meet its members after a successful campaign against the Dutch, but that possibility had been removed.

A new lord chancellor had become the king’s official spokesman in the lords. The earl of Shaftesbury would soon become the most controversial man in the kingdom but, in these years, he was one of the most vigorous supporters of the royal prerogative; Charles would eventually describe him as ‘the weakest and wickedest man of the age’ but at this time he relied upon his judgement as an administrator and adviser. Shaftesbury had been an enthusiastic supporter of Oliver Cromwell, and even a member of the Barebone’s Parliament, but by dint of eloquence and industry he had managed to exorcize his interesting past. He would in turn inspire one of the most powerful pieces of satirical verse when he was denounced by John Dryden in Absalom and Achitophel:

For close designs, and crooked counsels fit;

Sagacious, bold and turbulent of wit:

Restless, unfixt in principles and place;

In pow’r unpleas’d, impatient of disgrace.

A fiery soul which, working out its way,

Fretted the pigmy-body to decay.

Parliament met in an unsettled and fractious mood. It was angry in particular that the king had seen fit to issue a declaration of religious indulgence without obtaining its consent; his action was deemed to be unconstitutional. Parliament was not necessarily opposed to the Dutch war but, if it was to vote supplies for the continuation of hostilities, its authority must be reasserted. The Commons then passed a resolution that parliamentary statutes concerning religion could not be suspended or cancelled except by Act of Parliament, thus denying the king’s power in matters of ‘indulgence’.

Charles tried to resist with the help of the Lords but, in desperate need of money, eventually he submitted. After a number of rancorous exchanges he cancelled the declaration of indulgence and said that ‘what had been done with respect to the suspension of the penal laws should never be drawn into consequence’. The king broke the seal of the original declaration with his own hands. Bonfires were lit in the streets of London and, by the end of the month, Charles had received the supply of funds he so badly needed.

Parliament had taken aim at papists rather than dissenters, since the Catholic recusants were still believed to pose a threat to the state. Abednego Seller, in The History of Passive Obedience, suggested that ‘treason in papists is like original sin to mankind; they all have it in their natures, though many of them may deny it, or not know it’. Some members believed that the ‘declaration’ had in fact been part of a papist plot concocted by Charles and Louis to impose that religion upon England.

So in March 1673, the Commons passed a measure that became known as the Test Act. All aspirants to office or to a place of trust were to swear the oath of royal supremacy as well as the oath of allegiance, thus placing king before pope; they were also obliged to take the sacrament according to the rite of the Church of England and to swear that ‘I declare that I believe there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, or in the elements of bread and wine, at or after the consecration thereof by any person whatsoever’. This struck at the heart of Catholic belief. When the king gave his assent to the Test Act a ‘great hum’ of approval arose in parliament. Charles was heard to say that he would now purge his court of all Catholics except his barber, ‘whom he mean[s] to keep in despite of all their bills, for he was so well accustomed to his hand’. The remark had a point; the king trusted the Catholic who put a razor to his throat.

The first casualty was James, duke of York, who was obliged to retire from public life. He resigned as lord high admiral and command of the fleet was entrusted to Prince Rupert, who last appeared in these pages as the leader of the royalist cavalry during the Civil War. It was therefore advertised to the world that the king’s brother and heir apparent was a Roman Catholic; immediately rumour and innuendo began to surround him. It was widely believed, for example, that the lord chancellor himself, the earl of Shaftesbury, was plotting against him in an effort to exclude him from the throne. When James did not receive communion with his brother in the royal chapel John Evelyn wrote in his diary that it ‘gave exceeding grief and scandal to the whole nation, that the heir of it, and the son of a martyr for the Protestant religion, should apostatize. What the consequence of this will be, God only knows, and wise men dread.’

One of the king’s principal councillors and one of the original ‘cabal’, Thomas Clifford, also resigned all of his posts. He was a secret Catholic, and it had been suggested that the Test Act was in part formulated by his rivals precisely in order to remove him from office. He died soon after. Confidence now flowed to yet another of Charles’s ministers. Thomas Osborne, soon to become the earl of Danby, was a staunch Anglican who had opposed the Dutch war; he had also been a signal success as an administrator and, on Clifford’s resignation, he was appointed to be lord treasurer.

The preparation for another year of hostilities with the Dutch was not undertaken with any great enthusiasm; the discovery of James’s Catholicism called into further question the alliance with papist France and the attack upon a fellow Protestant state. The king himself is reported to have been vacillating and inconsistent, ready to prosecute war on one day and ready to retire from conflict on the next. Shaftesbury said of his master that ‘there is not a person in the world, man or woman, that dares rely upon him or put any confidence in his word or friendship’.

In July Charles ordered Rupert to avoid any naval confrontation unless he could be sure to win it decisively. He had already returned to negotiations with the Dutch, and simply wished to apply pressure upon them. No such clear outcome emerged from the last sea battle of the war, the battle of the Texel, when the Dutch and English vessels fought a long and inconclusive struggle that left the waters filled with wreckage and floating bodies. It was notable, also, for the inactivity of the French fleet that simply stood apart and watched. Prince Rupert wrote later of the French admiral’s reluctance to become involved that ‘it wanted neither signal nor instruction to tell him what he should then have done; the case was so plain to every man’s eye in the whole fleet’. It was now believed by many that Louis XIV was happy to watch the two maritime nations destroy one another’s navies, thus adding more fire to the anger of the English against their nominal allies.

James increased the anti-Catholic bias of the nation by taking advantage of the parliamentary recess to betroth himself to a papist princess. His previous wife, Anne Hyde, had died two years earlier, leaving him with two Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne. The new bride was of quite another nature. Mary of Modena was fifteen but already a devout Catholic, and it was reported that the French king highly approved of the match and might even provide a dowry for the occasion. The imminent prospect of a royal Catholic dynasty was not one that the English favoured. When Mary eventually arrived in England she was generally greeted with sullen silence by the populace. When she was allowed to sit in the queen’s presence, the English ladies ‘humped’ and walked out.

When parliament reconvened towards the end of October 1673, the outcry against the marriage was immediate. Sir William Temple declared that the effort to defeat papistry with the Test Act would come to nothing ‘if it got footing so near the throne’ and he begged the king to forbid the proposed match. A resolution to that effect was almost unanimously approved.

A broader assault upon the administration now began. Some of the members had already stated that they would not vote a penny more for the war unless and until they had a voice in its management. A resolution to that effect was amended with the proviso that no money should be granted until the previous supply of war funds had been collected. It was also found necessary to give room for a debate on ‘grievances’, principal among them the French alliance and the war against the Dutch. At the beginning of November it was declared that the standing army was also a ‘grievance’, perhaps not the most appropriate note to be struck during a war. On 5 November the old sport of pope-burning returned to the streets, when the effigy of Pope Clement X was set on fire by the London apprentices. A figure of a Frenchman was also used for target practice.

Charles was aware that his lord chancellor, the earl of Shaftesbury, had helped to foment opposition against his brother and that he was steadily becoming the leading spokesman for the Protestant interest. So he dismissed him from his councils, and appointed Heneage Finch as lord chancellor; it was reported that the king changed his mind six times, in as many hours, over the appointment. The Venetian envoy reported to the doge and senate that ‘the king calls a cabinet council for the purpose of not listening to it, and the ministers hold forth in it so as not to be understood’.

Shaftesbury did not go quietly, however, and against the king’s direct order remained in London to recruit allies for his anti-Catholic cause; for the rest of his political life he would organize the opposition to the king. When parliament met again at the beginning of 1674, after a brief prorogation, the attack moved on to the king’s principal ministers who were ‘popishly affected, or otherwise obnoxious and dangerous’. Lauderdale had ruled on the king’s behalf in Scotland, and was accused of favouring absolutism; it was resolved therefore that the king should remove him from ‘all his employments and from the royal presence and councils for ever’.

The duke of Buckingham was next to be arraigned and agreed to speak before the Commons; he tried to excuse himself by shifting the blame onto the ineptitude of others, and declared that ‘I can hunt the hare with a pack of hounds but not with a pack of lobsters’. It was widely believed that the lobsters in question were the king and his brother. His wit did not impress the Commons, however, and it was determined that he should also be removed from all of his employments. Buckingham later complained that ‘men ruined by their princes and in disgrace are like places struck with thunder; it is accounted unlawful to approach them’.

Arlington was then in turn impeached for treason and crimes of high misdemeanour, but his case was ceded to a special committee. The ‘cabal’ had in any case now been dissolved. It was obvious to everyone that the king was ready to sacrifice ministers when he had no further use for them.

He was also engaged in extreme and unwise deception. Shaftesbury had opposed the king’s measures in part because he had become acquainted, by one means or another, with the secret treaty whereby Charles became the pensionary of the king of France in exchange for his conversion to Catholicism. At the opening of parliament in January 1674, however, Charles stated that rumours of ‘secret articles of dangerous consequence’ were completely untrue and he declared, ‘I assure you, there is no other treaty with France, either before or since, not already printed, which shall not be made known.’ He was perceived to fumble with his notes at this point.

It had now become clear that the war against the Dutch could not be continued; the Spanish had now entered an alliance with the enemy and it was unthinkable that England would also declare war against Spain. Too much trade was at stake. So the Dutch now appointed the Spanish envoy in London as an arbitrator for peace. It could not come soon enough for all the participants. The Dutch agreed to pay an indemnity and consented to salute the English flag at sea; this was really a question of saving face, on the English side, and the outcome was hardly enough to justify a costly and bloody war of two years’ duration. The king announced the peace to parliament on 24 February, and then unexpectedly prorogued the session until November. The members of the Commons looked upon one another in amazement in light of the fact that, in the words of Lord Conway, ‘they had sat so long upon eggs and could hatch nothing’. Conway also observed that ‘now there will be a new game played at court, and the designs and interests of all men will be different from what they were’.

*

Thomas Osborne, who had emerged as the king’s principal minister, was created earl of Danby in the summer of the year. He was a determined and pugnacious Yorkshireman who firmly believed that the Anglican faith was of paramount importance in unifying the nation and who had as a result favoured alliances with the Protestant states of Europe. He was determined to reform royal finances, and to maintain control over parliament by any and every means possible; those methods included clandestine payments to members from secret service funds and the select distribution of various titles or offices. Danby did his best to demonstrate that the king was wholly in favour of the Anglican cause, and that Charles was determined to maintain an anti-French and an anti-Catholic stance.

As a pronounced royalist and courtier he was of course opposed by the earl of Shaftesbury and by the duke of Buckingham who, abandoned by the king, now joined together in the campaign against the court. It has been often observed that in the creation of these factions and interests we may see the modest beginnings of ‘party’ in the contemporary sense. From 1674 forward an ‘opposition’ to the royal cause began to emerge in the Commons, with the aim of imposing restrictions upon the king’s power and of upholding the supremacy of parliament.

Its members did not consider or call themselves a party, because the term implied disruption or disloyalty, yet in 1673 a member of parliament, Sir Thomas Meres, could speak of ‘this side of the house and that side’. The term was considered to be unparliamentary but it was observed, for example, that a cluster of members sat together in the ‘southeast corner’ of the chamber. The ‘court’ and ‘country’ parties were also distinguished. The former were intent upon maintaining all the rights and privileges of the throne while the latter wished, according to the parliamentarian Sir John Reresby, ‘to protect the country from being overburdened in their estates, in their privileges and liberties’.

In the spring of 1675 parliament reassembled. Here was another opportunity for Danby to reassert the primacy of orthodox Anglicanism at the court of Charles II. He had recently engaged in what Andrew Marvell called ‘window-dressing’ by taking in hand the rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire; the first stone of Christopher Wren’s design was laid in the early summer. A brass statue of Charles I was also raised on its pedestal at Charing Cross.

Now in parliament, Danby wished to reintroduce a bill that compelled members of parliament and holders of public office to declare that resistance to the king was unlawful; they were also to be obliged to disown any alteration in Church or government. It was a measure designed to please what was still a ‘Cavalier Parliament’ in its fourteenth year. In a ‘Letter from a Person of Quality’ Shaftesbury denounced the proposal as a plot by ‘high episcopal men and cavaliers’ to establish an absolute government. In a speech to the Lords he had questioned that ‘if a king would make us a province, and tributary to France, and subdue the nation by a French army, or to the papal authority, must we be bound in that case tamely to submit’? The question was never answered. A formal battle between the Lords and the Commons, over the extent of their respective rights, meant that no business could be introduced. Danby’s measure failed, therefore, and the king prorogued parliament until October.

The summer of 1675 was spent in preparation and calculation. Some of the votes in the last session of parliament had been very close; there were occasions when frustration and anger erupted in mild violence as periwigs were pulled off and swords were drawn. On one occasion the Speaker had to bring the mace crashing down upon the table in order to restore order. Danby himself had been obliged to fight off charges of impeachment made against him by some of the Commons. So he was determined to create a majority for the court by what was called ‘high bribing’. Some thirty members were given pensions on the excise while others were granted minor offices.

In this same summer Charles also received another subsidy from the French king on condition that he further prorogued parliament or, in the event of a difficult session in October, dissolved the assembly altogether. Louis did not wish his cousin to be forced into measures against the French, while at the same time envoys from Spain, the United Provinces and elsewhere were busily bribing individual members of the parliament. Everyone was bribing everyone else.

The parliament of the autumn was not a success; the Commons voted £300,000 for the navy, but then vetoed the introduction of any new money bills. In the Lords the supporters of Shaftesbury and Buckingham argued for a dissolution, on the grounds that the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ was now old and corrupt. So on 22 November the king, without attempting to make a speech, prorogued parliament once more for a further fourteen months.

A report compiled for Danby, after the session was over, reveals the calculations of one of his managers.

Sir Nicholas Slanning. He was absent most part if not all last session. Lord Arundel should be sure to take care of him. Mr Josiah Child. I am loath to speak plain English, but if he were well observed he might be proved to be a capital offender. Mr Joseph Maynard. He seldom or never goes right. Mr John Grubham Howe. Your lordship knows who can influence him … Sir Thomas Bide is past cure. Sir John Cotton. He is a very good man, and rarely misses his vote, and then by mistake only. Some person (trusty) should always sit near him. Sir John Newton. I suspect he has been corrupted by Sir Robert Carr … Mr Henry Monson. Mr Cheney must take care of this gentleman, and that most particularly, for he is very uncertain unless one be at his elbow.

In the parliamentary recess Charles was angered into taking a clumsy and ill-considered measure to silence idle tongues. It was a winter of discontent at the failure of parliament and the maladministration of the king. So he agreed to issue a proclamation that closed all the coffee-houses of the city, in the knowledge that these were the places where his opponents gathered to plot and to plan. Those who followed Shaftesbury, for example, were accustomed to meet at Kid’s Coffee House otherwise known as the Amsterdam. The government employed at least one ‘coffee-house spy’ to keep an account of their proceedings.

Some observers blamed the appetite for news and scandal on the consumption of coffee. In the days of the tavern, sack and claret created an atmosphere of gaiety; but the city chamberlain, Sir Thomas Player, complained that ‘these sober clubs produce nothing but scandalous and censorious discourses, and at these nobody is spared’.

The king might also have taken the opportunity to close down the bookshops attended by the opposition which, in a memorandum, Danby described as devoted to spreading false news through city and country. The temperature of public debate and interest in the politics of the day was such that young law students flocked to the shops and stalls every afternoon, together with those citizens and gentry who were eager for the latest reports. The agents of every faction circulated among them, ready to lend their interpretation to any turn of events. The bookshops remained open, however, and such was the outcry over the closing of the coffee-houses that the proclamation was withdrawn. They had been shut down in January 1676, but were reopened ten days later. The volte-face was characteristic of the hesitation and confusion that beset all aspects of public policy.

At a later date, however, an attempt was made to exclude satires and newsletters that were composed, according to the king, by ‘sordid mechanic wretches who, to gain a little money, had the impudence and folly to prostitute affairs of state’. Yet the appetite for news could not be curbed or diminished. There was only one newspaper that was granted official authorization, the London Gazette, but this consisted mainly of proclamations, official pronouncements and advertisements.

Everybody needed news. Everybody wanted news. News was known as ‘hot’. It was a society of conversation so that rumour and gossip passed quickly through the streets. At times of more than usual excitement papers and pamphlets were dropped in the street and were eagerly snatched up and passed from hand to hand. Anonymous publications, without a printer’s imprint, were also widely circulated. One owner of a coffee-house trained his parrot to squawk ‘What’s the news?’ at his customers.

42

New infirmities

And what was the news? After the Commons had declined to pass any new money bills, Charles was once more compelled to turn to his French cousin for financial aid. It was agreed in the early months of 1676 that Louis would pay him a yearly pension, and that both kings would refrain from agreements with other powers without mutual consent. Charles told his brother about the arrangement and was congratulated for his fidelity to the Catholic sovereign. He also informed Danby, who was wholly opposed to any transactions with the French; he disapproved, and asked his master to take the advice of the privy council. Charles was in no mood to consult anyone, however; he wrote out the secret treaty in his own hand, and delivered it to the French ambassador. The king then retired to Windsor, where he supervised certain ‘improvements’ to the castle and went fishing.

When parliament reassembled in February 1677, after a prorogation of fifteen months, it was claimed by Shaftesbury and others that such a long suspension of proceedings was illegal; Buckingham proposed a motion to that effect and cited two statutes of Edward III, which ordained that parliament should meet ‘once a year, or oftener, if need be’. This was considered to be an affront to the royal prerogative. Shaftesbury and Buckingham were ordered to retract their ‘ill-advised’ action and to ask pardon of king and Lords. Both men refused and were promptly dispatched to the Tower for an indefinite period together with two other dissenting lords. Buckingham confessed his fault soon afterwards, and was released, while Shaftesbury preferred to remain in prison. ‘What, my lord,’ he called down to Buckingham as he departed the Tower, ‘are you leaving us so soon?’

‘Ay, my lord, you know that we giddy-pated fellows never stay long in one place at a time.’

France was still continuing its land war against the United Provinces, despite English withdrawal from the conflict, and in the spring of this year the French enjoyed a series of victories. The Commons reacted by reaffirming its animus against the French. The king was in any case suspect. He had in recent years acquired a French mistress, Louise de Kérouaille, made duchess of Portsmouth, thus binding his ties to the French court of which she was a prominent member as duchess of Aubigny. There is a famous story of the crowd threatening the coach of Nell Gwynn under the misapprehension that it contained the duchess; she called out, ‘Be silent, good people! I am the Protestant whore!’

Charles was in every sense a Frenchified king. An address was issued by both Houses of Parliament calling upon him to allay the anxieties of the nation by entering appropriate alliances with the opponents of Louis. At an audience with one of the ambassadors from the United Provinces, he threw his handkerchief into the air with the exclamation, ‘I care just that for parliament.’

On 23 May, however, the king invited the Commons to the Banqueting House in which he declared that ‘I do assure you on the word of a king that you shall not repent any trust you repose in me’; he then proceeded to ask for a further supply of money, ‘both to defend my subjects and offend my enemies’. They did not place very much faith in the king’s word, however, and two days later they found themselves ‘obliged (at present) to decline the granting your majesty the supply your majesty is pleased to demand’. They also called for the king to unite himself with the Dutch against the power of France.

An angry king then adjourned parliament on 28 May with a speech in which he said that ‘could I have been silent, I would rather have chosen to be so, than to call to mind things so unfit for you to meddle with’. He had told the French ambassador, the month before, that ‘I put myself in trouble with my subjects for love of the French king’. Soon enough he was negotiating for further supplies from his much loved cousin that would more than match the money withheld from him by parliament. He had adjourned that assembly to the summer, but in fact it did not meet again until the beginning of the following year.

In the meantime the earl of Danby endeavoured to burnish the Protestant credentials of the regime by furthering the scheme of marrying Mary, elder daughter of the duke of York and therefore niece of the king, to William of Orange. William was the leader of the United Provinces even then threatened by the French; since he was a Protestant champion, the union might have seemed unwise to a king who relied upon French money. Yet Charles assented to the match in part to placate the public clamouring for an alliance with the United Provinces, and in part with the hope that he might be able to negotiate some treaty of peace between William and Louis. He could then emerge as the saviour of Europe. He was, in short, looking both ways at once. The belief of Louis XIV that the English king was quite unreliable was amply confirmed. He suspended his financial subsidy, and rejected Charles’s proposal for an extended truce between France and the United Provinces. The marriage between William and Mary was solemnized at the beginning of November, to much public rejoicing. The Protestant powers were matched.

Parliament met finally in the last week of January 1678, in a more amenable atmosphere. In his opening speech the king confirmed that he ‘had made such alliances with Holland as are for the preservation of Flanders’, and that he now required ‘a plentiful supply’. The Commons resolved that all trade between England and France should be curtailed and that no peace could be made until France had withdrawn to its previous frontiers. In February the members proceeded to vote him £1 million for prosecuting the war against France. The money would not in fact be enough to wage a successful campaign, but Charles had in any case no intention of declaring war on Louis.

He was in a trap or, rather, by his double-dealing he had trapped himself. A period followed in which parliament was adjourned or reconvened on almost a monthly basis; the shortest session was 6 days and the longest 172 days while the recesses lasted from 10 days to 15 months. This aberrant pattern is a measure of the confusion into which public policy had fallen. Charles did not know where to turn. He wanted the French subsidy from Louis but he had also been promised by parliament £1 million to furnish the means to attack him. He was making active preparations for war against France, while at the same time assuring the French ambassador of his devotion to Louis.

Parliament was also thrown into doubt. It had voted funds to raise an army of 30,000 men, but what if the king should use that army for his own ends? Charles and Danby were consequently feared and distrusted. The French king was liberally distributing bribes to various parties, and all men complained that darkness and deep mist covered the affairs of state. Sir William Temple explained in his Memoirs that ‘from these humours arose those uncertainties in our counsels that no man, who was not behind the curtain, could tell what to make of’ the confused rumours and reports.

Towards the end of March 1678 the king instructed Danby to write to the English ambassador in Paris, Ralph Montagu, with an outline of possible peace proposals; Charles then demanded the payment of 6 million livres a year (more than £4,000 of gold) for three years, in return for using his influence with the Dutch to negotiate a treaty. The whole arrangement was to be hidden in the most complete secrecy and Montagu ‘must not mention a syllable of the money’. In his own hand the king added that ‘I approve of this letter’. It was perhaps the only way that he could have persuaded Danby to write it. Louis promptly refused the request, but Charles had left another hostage to fortune that would in time severely damage Danby himself.

Then Louis caught Charles unawares by making a separate peace with the United Provinces, leaving no room for the English king to manoeuvre himself into the good graces of one party or the other. He had in a sense been abandoned by his French cousin. This gave him pause for thought. He was walking through St James’s Park on a summer morning, in the middle of August, when he was approached by a chemist who worked in the royal laboratory. Charles, ever affable and courteous, greeted Christopher Kirkby with a salutation.

Kirkby then informed him that a Jesuit plot had been detected against his life; the sovereign was to be stabbed or poisoned so that the Catholic James, duke of York, could be raised to the throne. Charles, always inclined to dismiss such conspiracies as little more than hot air, advised Kirkby to consult his confidential secretary. Some desultory enquiries followed, in the course of which a long indictment against certain Jesuits was discovered. The supposed author of this indictment, Titus Oates, was then brought before a committee of the privy council to justify his accusations. Thus began the episode that became known as the ‘Popish Plot’.

Roger North described Oates as ‘a low man, of an ill cut, very short neck; and his visage and features were most particular. His mouth was the centre of his face…’ He had a low forehead, long nose, and huge chin; his voice was high, and his manner dramatic. Yet he was very plausible. He outlined the meetings and consultations of the Jesuits in confident detail, and went on to name two prominent men as the authors of the plot. He accused Sir George Wakeman, physician to the queen, of planning to poison Charles; he also cited Edward Coleman, her secretary and previously secretary to the duke of York. The Catholic heir apparent was therefore touched. One of the councillors who listened to this damning testimony, Sir Henry Coventry, observed that ‘if he be a liar, he is the greatest and adroitest I ever saw’.

Then a sudden death seemed to confirm Oates’s testimony. He had previously sworn an affidavit to the truth of these matters before a London magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey; he had told Godfrey that he had attended a clandestine meeting of Jesuits at the White Horse Tavern in the Strand, where the various methods of assassinating the king were discussed. It seems that Godfrey was alarmed to see the name of an acquaintance, Edward Coleman, on the list of suspects. On 12 October Godfrey did not return to his home. Five days later his body was found in a ditch on Primrose Hill, run through with his own sword. A coroner’s inquest then concluded that the body had been taken to Primrose Hill on the day it was discovered, and that multiple bruising about the upper part of it and, in particular, the neck was indication that he had been strangled. Had he been murdered by the Catholics in fear of their discovery? Had he been killed by the supporters of Oates, who feared that his lying would be proven? Had he committed suicide? The truth of the matter will never be known.

Alarms and prophecies were already circulating. In the previous year a blazing comet had hurtled through the sky, and in 1678 occurred three eclipses of the sun and two of the moon. William Dade’s Prognostication divined ‘frenzies, inflammations and new infirmities proceeding from cholerick humours’ while John Partridge’s Calendarium Judaicum predicted ‘troubles from great men and nobles’. In this atmosphere of anxiety, the discovery of Godfrey’s body prompted mass panic and hysteria about a possible Catholic rising. The lords-lieutenant of the counties were ordered to search the homes of Catholics for hidden weapons, and of course the more general fear of a French invasion in favour of an uprising was never far from the surface. It was also widely believed that many thousands of apparently orthodox Protestants were in fact Catholics in disguise, waiting for a sign. One contemporary observer, Sir John Reresby, wrote that ‘it seemed as if the very cabinet of hell had been laid open’.

When the papers of Edward Coleman were taken it was revealed that he had written certain suspect letters to Jesuit priests, close to Louis XIV, asking for money on the grounds that he and his colleagues ‘had a mighty work on their hands, no less than the conversion of three kingdoms’. It may have been a piece of bravura, and seemed to have no connection with the plot outlined by Oates, but in the present circumstances it was explosive.

The publication of this plot, together with the possible collusion of James, admirably suited the intentions of Shaftesbury who could come forward as the champion of Protestantism. He had left the Tower for his Dorset estates a few months before, after making a formal apology to the king, but he could now take up the cause of ‘No Popery!’ with fresh justification and enthusiasm. It had become his abiding purpose to exclude James from the throne of England. He commented later that ‘I will not say who started the game, but I am sure I had the full hunting of it’.

When parliament reassembled on 21 October 1678, he and his supporters were in charge of the pack. Committees were established to secure the king’s safety and to investigate the plot. Both Houses of Parliament unanimously carried a resolution that ‘there has been, and still is, a damnable and hellish plot contrived and carried on by popish recusants, for the assassinating and murdering the king, and for subverting the government and rooting out and destroying the Protestant religion’. Oates appeared before the Commons on three consecutive days and, as a result of his testimony, five Catholic peers were arrested. A bill was passed that excluded Catholics from both houses. Shaftesbury proposed that the king should be asked to dismiss James, duke of York, from his council.

At the end of November Titus Oates further raised the temperature when he appeared at the bar of the House of Commons. ‘I, Titus Oates, accuse Catherine, queen of England, of high treason.’ This alarmed the members who voted that the queen and her household should be removed from Whitehall. The Lords were not so hasty, however, and examined the witnesses who had testified against her; they were not convinced of their veracity and suppressed the charges brought by Oates. The king had previously held a private interview with Oates during which the informer had laid the charges against his wife; he kept his temper but ordered that all of Oates’s papers should be seized and that his consultations with other people should be supervised.

The king does not seem to have believed a word that Oates uttered, but he could not openly withstand the full force of Protestant rage. As one of his ministers, the marquis of Halifax, put it, ‘it must be handled as if it were true, whether it were so or no’. Measures against papists were made more severe, therefore, and the five Catholic lords held in the Tower were impeached of high treason. A second Test Act was passed obliging all Catholics in the Lords or Commons to repeat the oaths of allegiance and supremacy. In the course of the debate one peer declared that ‘I would not have so much as a popish man or a popish woman to remain here; not so much as a popish dog or a popish bitch; not so much as a popish cat to purr or mew about the king’. At the beginning of December Edward Coleman was dragged to Tyburn where he was hanged, drawn and quartered; in 1929 he was beatified as a Catholic martyr.

Another act of this political drama now opened with the decision of Ralph Montagu to attack the earl of Danby. It was he who, as ambassador in Paris, had received the earl’s letter concerning a secret subsidy from the French king to Charles. He had lost his office in the summer of this year, for the crime of corrupting the daughter of the king’s former mistress, Lady Castlemaine, and now sought revenge. Another party may also have been involved. Louis XIV, knowing of Danby’s antipathy to the French cause, had reasons enough to want him removed.

On being elected to the Commons for the borough of Northampton, Montagu arranged that his ‘secret letters’ from Danby should be disclosed to parliament. It became apparent that Danby, with the approval of the king, had asked for a bribe from Louis at the same time as he had solicited funds from the Commons to raise an army against France. As Lord Cavendish put it, ‘it will appear by those papers that the war with France was pretended, for the sake of an army, and that a great man carried on the interest of an army and popery’. In the Commons the member for Shaftesbury, Thomas Bennet, said that ‘I wonder the House sits so silent when they see themselves sold for six million livres to the French’. The situation was rendered infinitely worse for Danby by the fact that the army itself was still in existence; the king had no money either to deploy it or disband it.

The earl could not survive. Seven articles of impeachment were passed against him, amongst them the charge of keeping up an army to subvert the government and of being ‘popishly affected’. In the Lords Danby defended himself with vigour. He poured scorn upon his accuser, Montagu, for perfidy and duplicity against his royal master; he denied the charges and demanded a speedy trial.

Charles then decided to suspend the proceedings against his chief minister by proroguing parliament. At a meeting of the privy council in the first weeks of 1679 the king told his councillors that he would not seek their advice because they were more afraid of parliament than they were of him. He dissolved the assembly on 24 January. So ended the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ that had first met in 1661, just after the restoration of the king; it had lasted seventeen years and in that period had turned from an assembly of the king’s supporters into a fractious and suspicious body ready to turn upon the king’s ministers and even upon the king himself.

*

Yet Charles and his ministers influenced the country in ways of which they were wholly unaware. The ending of the naval war with the Dutch in 1674, for example, materially increased the volume of the country’s export trade. The excise returns after that year rose markedly in such staple items as beer, ale, tea and coffee, which in turn indicates a sharp rise in consumption. The increase in revenue had a significant effect upon royal income, too, which began to rise. Contemporary reports also suggest that the ‘middling classes’ were now indulging their taste for imported ‘luxuries’ and that the labouring poor were purchasing such items as knitted stockings, earthenware dishes and brass pots. The ‘commercial revolution’ of the eighteenth century had its origins three or four decades earlier. The successful colonization of portions of North America and of the West Indies, undertaken in the realms of the early Stuart kings and under the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, now found its fruit in the ever-increasing rate of trade. By 1685 the English had the largest merchant fleet in the world, and their vessels were filled with the merchandise of sugar, tobacco and cotton on their way to the great emporium of London.

Other evidence supports this picture of material advantage. By 1672, for example, stagecoaches ran between London and all the principal towns of the kingdom; it was reported that ‘every little town within twenty miles of London swarms with them’. The ubiquity of the stagecoach is the harbinger of the reforms of transport in the next century, with the further development of turnpike roads and canals; the country was slowly quickening its pace while at the same time finding its unity.

It is now a commonplace of economic history that the ‘agricultural revolution’ of the eighteenth century in fact began in the middle of the seventeenth century. The introduction of new crops, and the steady spread of ‘enclosures’ designed to achieve cohesion and efficiency of farming land, were already changing the landscape of England. The abundance of grain, for example, was such that in 1670 cereal farmers were allowed to export their crop without any regard to its price in the domestic market.

John Houghton, in Collection of Letters for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, wrote in 1682 that ‘since his majesty’s most happy restoration the whole land hath been fermented and stirred up by the profitable hints it hath received from the Royal Society by which means parks have been disparked, commons enclosed, woods turned into arable, and pasture land improved by clover, St. Foine [a grass], turnips, coleseed [rape], parsley, and many other good husbandries, so that the food of the cattle is increased as fast, if not faster, than the consumption…’ It is a sign that practical experiment and innovation were already proving fruitful.

Another revolution began during the reigns of the later Stuarts. The exact conditions for the whirlwind of invention, commerce and trade that comprised the industrial revolution may not yet have been present; but the atmosphere was changing. English shipbuilding reached an unprecedented and unrepeated ‘peak’ in the seventeenth century. From the mines of England issued more coal, tin and iron ore than ever before; the coal production of the north-east of England, for example, more than doubled between 1600 and 1685. The old trade of heavy cloths was now being replaced by that of lighter cloths made in what were known as ‘woollen manufactories’. Sugar refineries, iron foundries and glass works were ubiquitous by the close of the seventeenth century. The industries of brewing and soap-boiling had already been created. The rapid growth of towns such as Manchester and Birmingham, Halifax and Sheffield, testified to the interdependence between industrialization and urbanization. Birmingham had under the Tudors been little more than a village but, by the turn of the century, it would have at least 8,000 inhabitants. The population of the whole country may have stabilized, but a larger proportion of it was now migrating from the country to the town.

*

The election in the early weeks of 1679, after the dissolution of the ‘Cavalier Parliament’, was necessarily fought on the choice between king and parliament. Since the mood of the country had turned against the king, after the revelation of the ‘Popish Plot’ and the disgrace of Danby, the new parliament was even more hostile to the court than its predecessor. The king himself remarked that a dog would be elected if it stood against a figure from court. Shaftesbury, the principal benefactor of this change of mood, calculated that 158 ‘courtiers’ had been elected against 302 of the ‘opposition’.

The king had to deal with two pressing matters in advance of negotiating with the new parliament. He met the earl of Danby and requested him to resign his office; in exchange he would be granted the title of marquis, and receive a large annual pension. Since most of his dependants had been voted out of parliament, his ministry was effectively already at an end. A new politics, of agitation and campaign, had emerged.

The archbishop of Canterbury had been asked to discuss with James, duke of York, the prospect of his returning to the Anglican communion; the duke refused. The king then summoned his brother and ordered him to retire beyond the seas as the only way of averting the displeasure of parliament. James fought hard against this sentence of exile but, at the beginning of March, made a lachrymose departure for the Spanish Netherlands on the pretext that he was visiting his daughter and new son-in-law, William of Orange.

Yet the new parliament would not be diverted from its pursuit of the ‘Popish Plot’ or the impeachment of Danby, especially after it was revealed that the earl had received a pardon from the king. A week after its assembly he resigned and in the following month he was sent to the Tower by the Lords. When Lord Halifax condemned the decision to confer a marquisate upon ‘a traitor to his country’ he fixed his eyes upon the king who was watching the proceedings. ‘My God!’ the king was said later to have exclaimed, ‘how I am ill-treated; and I must bear it, and keep silence!’

In the spring of the year, just after the parliament had met, the king announced a change in the administration. He dissolved the privy council and established in its place a smaller council of thirty-three members comprising office-holders and independents. In what at the time seemed a surprising and even shocking move he appointed Shaftesbury as its lord president together with four members of parliament who had always been resolute in opposing him. His purpose may have been to tame or to corrupt these men, but the nominations may simply have afforded a screen to conceal his real intentions. Some of the new counsellors lost their former influence, in any case, and were widely regarded as having sold themselves to the king. The members of the council were soon divided among themselves, and proved to be singularly ineffective. That may also have been the king’s intention. Charles distrusted all of them and confided to the earl of Aylesbury that ‘they shall know nothing’. He was isolated, after Danby had been removed from office, and he told Sir William Temple that ‘he had none left with whom he could so much as speak of them in confidence’. In his fight against vigorous and well-organized parliamentary opponents, he was on his own.

Towards the end of April 1679, an address was introduced that was designed to exclude the duke of York from the crown of England; it was said that the ‘Popish Plot’ had been encouraged by his likely succession to the throne. It marked the formal beginning of what became known as the ‘exclusion crisis’, and was the cause of much partisan rancour. Pamphlets and verse satires came from the presses; the votes of parliament were published and widely disseminated. The ‘exclusionists’ in large part controlled the Commons, but legislation could not pass without the consent of the king and the Lords.

Nevertheless an Exclusion Bill quickly received its first and second readings; it pronounced that the duke of York had been seduced by papal agents into entering the Roman communion, and that it was the duty of parliament to exclude him from the throne. One member, Sir John Trevor, stated that ‘the king’s eyes are closed; he knows nothing of the danger that we are in…’ The mood of hysteria was translated beyond the walls of parliament. It was said that the citizens slept with pistols beside them, and that their wives carried knives into the street. At the beginning of July Charles, exasperated by the proceedings, prorogued parliament. The unpopularity of his decision was such that he doubled the guards at Whitehall. Shaftesbury declared that the royal advisers should pay for the decision with their heads.

The session left only one permanent memorial in the form of a Habeas Corpus Act which decreed that no person could be unlawfully detained and that all those charged with felony or treason should be granted a speedy trial or discharge from prison. This was designed as a means of public safety in the event of James’s ascending the throne. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England Sir William Blackstone wrote that ‘the point of time at which I would choose to fix this theoretical perfection of our public law is the year 1679; after the habeas corpus act was passed, and that for licensing the press had expired…’ The sudden prorogation had indeed meant that the laws inhibiting the press had not been renewed, so that the rage of party could now be fully conveyed in the public prints.

In the latter half of 1679, the terms of ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ became common currency. The Presbyterian rebels of Scotland, ever zealous for a stricter covenant, had been given the name of Whiggamores after the Scottish word for corrupt or sour whey; the Irish royalist Catholics, who had been reduced to banditry, had the Gaelic name of toraihde. Soon enough Shaftesbury’s Whigs, who supported the Protestant Church and favoured the exclusion of James, would oppose Danby’s Tories, who were prepared to countenance a Catholic king as part of the divine order of natural succession. The Whigs were the enemies of popery and arbitrary government, and thus wished to limit royal power; the Tories were determined to defend the monarch and the constitution against the onslaught of those whom they considered to be republicans or rebels. Various factions could of course be observed on both sides and a third group of ‘trimmers’, who pursued a middle course, was also evident. A sympathetic witness, the duke of Ormonde, described the ‘trimmers’ as using the language of ‘moderation, unity and peace’ combining the Whig concern for the maintenance of property and the true religion with the Tory desire for a secure monarchy and an untouched royal prerogative.

Moderation and unity were not readily apparent in a political nation violently divided. The Green Ribbon Club, perhaps the first ever political club, consisted of a variety of groups of Whigs including dissenters, lawyers and merchants; it met at the King’s Head Tavern on the corner of Fleet Street and Chancery Lane, where it was accustomed to plan its strategy and to coordinate its tactics. As avowed supporters of Shaftesbury, its members wore green ribbons and thus identified themselves as a ‘party’. They paid customary obeisance to the royal prerogative but more often than not they talked of their responsibilities to ‘the people’; one phrase, ‘salus populi suprema lex’, was often repeated: ‘the safety of the people is the supreme law’. This would in effect have created a political revolution, albeit without the bloodshed of another civil war.

Charles believed that if his opponents managed to get rid of James he himself would surely follow. He was engaged in a battle for his survival. His opponents believed that, under increasing pressure, he would eventually submit and bar his brother from the throne; many now looked to the king’s illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth, a Protestant, as the next heir. Shaftesbury even argued that the king was pretending to oppose exclusion while all the time hoping to be ‘forced’ to agree to his natural son’s accession. It is true that he had a low opinion of his brother. When James cautioned him from walking in St James’s Park without a guard he replied, ‘I am sure no man in England will take away my life to make you king.’ It was unlikely, however, that Charles would deny James his lawful right to succeed.

The French ambassador observed that the king’s ‘conduct is so secret and impenetrable that even the most skilful observers are misled. The king has secret dealings and contacts with all the factions and those who are most opposed to his interests flatter themselves that they will win him over to their side.’ The ambassador may have credited the king with too much cunning; it is possible that Charles simply moved from one expedient to the next.

The duke of Monmouth, the Protestant candidate for the succession, now covered himself with glory or at least with blood. A band of covenanters dragged the primate of Scotland, Archbishop Sharp, from his coach outside the town of St Andrews and stabbed him to death in front of his daughter; they then went on to defeat a royalist squadron sent after them. Monmouth was now dispatched to the north with a large army where, at Bothwell Bridge, he routed the covenanters. The subsequent repression of these enthusiasts became known as ‘the killing time’. Monmouth became the hero of the hour, his ambitions for the throne significantly increased; as a Protestant he was Shaftesbury’s preferred candidate, and James looked on in alarm from his exile in Brussels as the king’s favour towards his natural son increased.

Charles had, a few months earlier, signed a document in which he explained that ‘for the voiding of any dispute which may happen in time concerning the succession of the Crown, I do hereby declare in the presence of Almighty God that I never gave nor made any contract of marriage, nor was married to any woman whatsoever, but to my present wife Queen Catharine now living’. He had declared to the world that Monmouth was illegitimate, therefore, but the king was not inexpert at lying.

When Monmouth returned to London, the people assembled in the streets where bonfires were lit and toasts were drunk. He was considered by many to be the champion of the Protestant faith and, as the first illegitimate son of Charles II, the true heir to the throne. Despite the king’s denial it was claimed that a ‘black box’, carefully concealed, contained a contract of marriage between Charles and Lucy Walters; Lucy Walters had been one of his first mistresses, while in continental exile, and had borne this particular son. Monmouth was handsome and affable, in every respect a royal boy, and on his journeys through the kingdom he was treated with as much ceremony as his father. Wherever he went he was escorted by columns of gentlemen and admirers. He was, in the words of Macaulay, ‘the most popular man in the kingdom’. It is perhaps no wonder that his thoughts turned towards the crown. The shield that bore his coat of arms quartered the lions of England and the lilies of France as a symbol of his aspirations. He had even begun to ‘touch’ for the king’s evil.

In July 1679, the king decided to turn the prorogation of parliament into a dissolution, pending a new general election; he was gambling that public sentiment had turned towards him. And indeed there were many now who questioned the wisdom and loyalty of Shaftesbury in his relentless pursuit of the duke of York. Yet at the hustings in the summer of the year the Whig Party, as we may now term it, was in full cry against the Catholic heir. When the clergy of Essex were believed to incline to the court interest, they were called ‘dumb dogs … Jesuitical dogs … dark lanterns … Baal’s priests … jacks and villains … the black guard … the black regiment of hell!’ The Whigs were in turn dismissed by the Tories as a ‘rabble’ of disloyal and rebellious traitors. Lists were drawn up by both sides, noting down the names of ‘the vile’ and ‘the worthy’. Sir Ralph Verney, soon to become a member of parliament, remarked that ‘there are vast feuds in our Chilterns as well as in our Vale, occasioned by elections, and so ’tis, I suppose, all over England’.

But then all the problems of succession became more acute. Towards the end of August the king fell seriously ill, and was for two or three days in danger of death. James was summoned from Brussels to be by his brother’s side, and perhaps to take the crown; he came to England disguised in a black wig. Meanwhile Monmouth’s supporters began to intrigue on his behalf. The political nation was in confusion.

43

Or at the Cock?

On 12 January 1675, a conversation took place in London. It was ostensibly about china, that commodity then being the rage of the town. Lady Fidget desires some from a dear male acquaintance ‘for he knows china very well, and has himself very good, but will not let me see it lest I should beg some’. The gentleman’s name is Horner, whose welcome for Lady Fidget alarms her husband.

Sir Jaspar: Wife! My Lady Fidget! He is coming into you the back way!

Lady Fidget: Let him come, and welcome, which way he will.

Sir Jaspar: He’ll catch you, and use you roughly, and be too strong for you.

Lady Fidget: Don’t you trouble yourself, let him if he can.

Horner, having been detained in his chamber with Lady Fidget, is asked a few minutes later if he has any china left.

Horner: Upon my honour I have none left now.

Mrs Squeamish: Nay, nay, I have known you deny your china before now, but you shan’t put me off so. Come.

Horner: This lady had the last there.

Lady Fidget: Yes indeed, madam, to my certain knowledge he has no more left.

Mrs Squeamish: Oh, but it may be he may have some you could not find.

Lady Fidget: What, d’ye think if he had any left, I would not have had it too? For we women of quality never think we have china enough.

The conversation took place on the stage of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. ‘China’ is course a euphemism for male sperm, as all the members of the audience knew, and The Country Wife by William Wycherley soon gained a reputation for indecency. Yet, in the 1670s, this was not considered to be a great offence. It was, perhaps, a quality to be praised.

Two companies of players were re-established immediately after the restoration of the king, the King’s Players under the management of Thomas Killigrew and the Duke of York’s Servants under Sir William Davenant. They played at first in makeshift venues until such time as suitable playhouses were erected. They did in any case cater for a considerably diminished audience since the great days of the Globe and the Fortune; the new theatrical public was largely made up of ‘the quality’ or ‘the fashion’ as well as those members of the middling classes who wished to emulate them.

The ‘sparks’ and ‘wits’ of the court were also in attendance and would, in the words of Etherege from She Wou’d if She Cou’d, roam ‘from one playhouse to the other playhouse, and if they like neither the play nor the women, they seldom stay any longer than the combing of their periwigs, or a whisper or two with a friend; and then they cock their caps, and out they strut again’. The play began at half past three in the afternoon, and lasted for approximately two hours. The gentlemen brought their own wine with them and often made more noise than the players on the stage, hectoring or exchanging badinage with the actors.

In The Country Wife Horner feigns impotence in order to deceive husbands and enter into clandestine amours with their wives; among these is Margery Pinchwife, an innocent young bride from the country who is fiercely guarded by her husband. The usual complications of sexual farce ensue amid innuendo and double meaning, with the principal women desperate to enjoy Horner’s favours by clandestine means. Lady Fidget herself does not deplore the hypocrisy of seeming virtuous. ‘Our reputation! Lord, why should you not think that we women make use of our reputation, as you men of yours, only to deceive the world with less suspicion?’ As Leigh Hunt once remarked of these seventeenth-century dramas, ‘we see nothing but a set of heartless fine ladies and gentlemen, coming in and going out, saying witty things at each other, and buzzing in some maze of intrigue’.