In view of the King’s instantaneous strong defence of the Queen, and in view of their success in other areas, it can be argued that Oates and Bedloe made a psychological error in trying to implicate Catharine in the first place. Charles blamed Shaftesbury, the fair-haired villain, at the time.17 But Shaftesbury, with his superior intelligence (and superior knowledge of the King’s mind), had not attempted to attack the Queen. Of course the element of calculation in Oates’ behaviour, once he had tasted the heady wine of popular approval, should not be exaggerated; it would have been an elementary precaution to have ascertained the nature of the Queen’s apartments, for example. Yet Oates, in concentrating on the Queen, had touched on one of the King’s few genuinely sensitive spots: he might let Clarendon go without too much regret, and sacrifice Danby perforce; but, as he had already shown over the prospect of a divorce, Catharine was another matter.
He told Burnet, à propos the Queen, that ‘considering his faultiness to her in other matters, it would be a terrible thing to abandon her now’. He went on to say that he knew that he had led a bad life (‘of which he spoke with some sense’), but he was breaking himself of all his faults and he would never again do a base and wicked thing. And more strongly than that: ‘They think I have a mind to a new wife; but for all that I will not see an innocent woman abused.’ Queen Catharine wrote a most moving letter to her brother the King of Portugal on ‘the care which he [Charles II] takes to defend my innocence and truth. Every day he shows more clearly his purpose and goodwill towards me, and thus baffles the hate of my enemies…. I cannot cease telling you what I owe to his benevolence, of which each day he gives better proofs, either from generosity or compassion.’18 The result naturally was to draw the royal couple still closer together. By acting as knight errant to his Queen in distress, Charles had at last found a way of atoning to Catharine for all the pain he had caused her.
None of this however enabled him to dismiss Oates’ allegations. He was obliged rather to rebut them and to strike back. In another sense therefore Oates’ attack on the Queen was a brilliant (if unintentional) coup. By involving the King so personally, Oates ensured that the whole matter of the Popish Plot was given a gravity it lacked in essence. Meanwhile Shaftesbury whipped up his pack, ready for the full hunting of the game so conveniently started for the opposition.
At the end of November the House of Commons presented the King with a Bill for placing the Militia under the control of Parliament. This, the very measure which had precipitated the Civil War, was a sign of hostility to the prerogatives of the Crown which Charles II was hardly likely to miss. For the first time in his reign the King employed his veto to put an end to the Bill.
So far he was holding his own. But the King had an Achilles heel in politics as well as in private life. This was the position of Danby. September had seemed to mark splendid new advancement in Danby’s success, when he married his daughter Bridget Osborne to the King’s illegitimate son by Catharine Pegge, ‘Don Carlo’, the Earl of Plymouth. Then there was his coup in carrying the amendment concerning the Duke of York’s position through Parliament. But Danby was a marked man where the opposition was concerned. When an opportunity came to hunt him down in his turn, it was likely to be taken with gusto. Less important to the King emotionally than the attack on his wife, the crisis over Danby represented a far more critical assault on the position of the monarchy.
The occasion of the attack was provided by yet another unsavoury character, if not in the same class as Titus Oates either by birth or behaviour: Ralph Montagu, the English Ambassador to the Court of France. Women brought luck to Montagu. He married an heiress. Before he was appointed to the Court of France as Ambassador Extraordinary at the time of the Secret Treaty of Dover, he had worked his way up the Stuart household ladder; he was successively Master of the Horse to Anne Duchess of York and Queen Catharine. It was he who attended and reported the piteous death-bed of Madame in France. As a ladies’ man, Grammont described him as one to be feared more on account of his assiduity than his appearance – the most dangerous sort of gallant.19
Returned to the Court of France as full Ambassador, Montagu became the lover of that full-blown expatriate beauty, Barbara Duchess of Cleveland; but he also allowed himself the luxury of trifling with the affections of her daughter, Anne Countess of Sussex. This promising Liaisons Dangereuses situation was spoilt by Barbara’s unpredictable temper; she incarcerated her wayward daughter in a convent. But Anne, lured by Montagu, bounced out again. Barbara peppered Charles II with letters of outraged complaint. Montagu was now ‘the most abominable man’; Anne had been ‘up with Montagu till 5 a.m.’, sending her servants away. Like many another ageing courtesan, Barbara clearly found herself gravely shocked by the morals of the younger generation. ‘I am so afflicted that I can hardly write this for crying,’ she exclaimed.20 In revenge, Barbara revealed some of Montagu’s intrigues with Danby (he was a great intriguer, as well as a ladies’ man). Montagu returned to England to defend himself and was sacked for making the journey without permission.
The motto of all this might appear to be that Hell hath no fury like a mother scorned in favour of her daughter. But as a matter of fact Montagu, an Ambassador scorned, now ran Barbara close. And, in sheer damage done around him, he far outstripped her. In view of the prolonged secret relationship of Charles II and Louis XIV and his own position as intermediary, Montagu obviously had some powerful weapons at his command. He also had an ally in the French Ambassador in London, Barrillon, no friend to Danby and the pro-Dutch policy he represented.
Buoyed up with French money and French promises, Montagu now stood for Parliament himself – nor could Danby’s much-vaunted organization prevent him from being elected, an eloquent commentary on its growing failure in these late days of 1678. Montagu’s intention was to gain immunity for his attack on Danby.
In vain Danby tried to seize Montagu’s papers. Two crucial letters eluded the snatch. Supported by Barrillon, Montagu revealed their contents to the House of Commons. They were lethal. Here was Danby undeniably proposing to Louis XIV that England would settle the war in return for a substantial whack of cash. It would have taken much less than that to bring the gleeful cry of ‘Impeachment!’ to the eager lips of the members of the House of Commons.
For all his charms and intrigues, Montagu was not an adept politician. He was not, for example, in the same class as Charles II, whom he had dismissed airily but inaccurately as ‘a governable fool’. Montagu’s declared intention was to secure the acknowledgement of Monmouth as Prince of Wales, and he took strength from the fact that Louis XIV seemed not averse to such a prospect. But the French King’s real interest was in the promising confusion which a disputed succession would bring about in English affairs. Barrillon, echoing his master in wiliness, never paid Montagu all the money he had been assured. And Charles II, recognizing danger when he saw it, employed that potent weapon which remained quite unblunted in his hand – the termination of Parliament at the sovereign’s will.
In a sense, the attack on Danby was a familiar crisis: Charles II had grown up against a background of impeachment, or threatened impeachment, of a minister, ever since that day when, as a child prince, he had pleaded with Parliament for Strafford’s life. But in another sense the move against Danby was part of the grave new threat to the position of the monarchy. The fact was that Montagu’s former position – he may even have known the full truth of the Secret Treaty of Dover – made him peculiarly dangerous. The King acted with swiftness and decision. At Danby’s suggestion, he wrote, ‘I approve of this letter C.R.’ on the drafts of Danby’s letters produced in Parliament to protect him.21 And to protect himself he then got rid of Parliament on 30 December by dissolving it.
Shaftesbury and the Whigs had nevertheless scented blood. The smell encouraged them wonderfully. Their noses were firmly pointed towards the man at the King’s side, the man described by Montagu as a ‘wilful fool’, as opposed to his ‘governable fool’ of a brother: J
ames Duke of York. For it was a fact that James’ position as heir presumptive remained as yet officially untouched, despite all the attacks upon it – just as the Crown’s ability to control the timing of Parliament was also untouched. It was time, felt Shaftesbury and his associates, to remedy that disagreeable state of affairs.
The General Election of February 1679 was the first to be held for eighteen years. Not only was the experience therefore novel to the country as a whole, but that country was also in a continuing bubbling state of ferment, attendant on the ‘Popish’ revelations of the previous autumn. In the quick-heating capital, there were many unpleasant manifestations of the unpopularity of the Court. Louise Duchess of Portsmouth continued to embody that kind of alien immorality which even the greatest English sinners saw it as their duty to resent. Lady Gerard, who was taken for ‘the French whore’, found her chair surrounded by a hostile mob (as a respectable woman, she did not have the wit or the opportunity to deal with the situation as Nelly did). At the Duke’s Theatre the real-life duchess was booed and the theatre closed in consequence.22
Louise’s loss was Nell’s gain. For Nell was now the recipient of new praise. Aphra Behn, for example, that ornament to Nell’s sex and the playwright’s profession, dedicated a play, The Feign’d Curtezans, to her in 1679 (in this war of the dedication, Louise would score three years later with Venice Preserv’d, from Thomas Otway). There was a swings-and-roundabouts element about it all. Janna Divorum, a study of gods and goddesses by Robert Whitcomb, referred to Nell as possessing the primitive wisdom of Apollo, the pristine wit of Mercury, the greatness of mind of Juno, the delicate beauty of Venus, and the God-like courage and brave spirit of Hercules. With such high-flown praise sounding in her ears, Nell could afford to ignore those critics who described her somewhat less pleasingly as ‘puddle Nell’, the ‘hare-brained Whore’, and the ‘darling Strumpet of the Crowd’.23
The Court wits continued to snarl out their smutty jokes. They exhibited nothing but derision for Charles II at this juncture. Rochester, for instance, took pleasure in hammering home the message that the King cared for nothing but sex. In ‘The Royal Angler’ he alluded crudely to the ‘fatal bait’ which Rowley would always greedily swallow:
And howe’er so weak and slender be the string,
Bait it with Whore, and it will hold a King.
Buckingham with equal rudeness referred to the monarch as one who could sail a yacht, trim a barge and loved ducks, tarts and ‘buttered buns’.24
But the King’s comrades did not necessarily see behind the mask of indifference he wore. And perhaps he chose them for that very reason. No doubt Charles II would far rather not have dealt with a major political crisis in the nineteenth year of his restored reign. As we have seen, he had originally tried to coast through his political difficulties, ‘living from day to day’. But given the challenge of the Popish Plot and Montagu’s machinations, leading to the Whig attack headed by Shaftesbury, the King responded to it.
In the spring of 1679 he took a solemn decision concerning the future of his brother. His contemporaries, fooled by the mask, did not immediately appreciate that it had been made. There were also interested parties, like Shaftesbury and Monmouth, who either believed or wished to believe themselves that the King favoured Exclusion – and certainly wanted to convince those around them that he did. As Henry Sidney wrote in his diary later in the summer, they did great harm in that respect, bringing MPs to quite the wrong conclusion concerning the King and Exclusion – ‘Which everybody knows he is utterly against’.25 Indeed, for the next six years, Charles II was steadfast, even obstinate, in support of James’ claims to succeed, as he had been over very few things in his essentially flexible life.
On the surface, the King appeared to be pliant in the face of necessity, as so often before. In February he told the Duke of York that he must leave England for the time being. The King’s letter to his brother was couched in gracious terms: ‘You may easily believe that it is not without a great deal of pain I write you this, being more touched with the constant friendship you have had for me than with anything else in the world….’26 Nevertheless, this was no more than a characteristic allusion to shared family loyalties in the days of yore.
The crucial observation was that made by the King to Parliament at the end of April. As the new session was ending, he volunteered to accept any law whatsoever that the House of Commons could devise ‘that may preserve your Religion’ – provided that there was no interference with ‘the Descent of the Crown in the right Line’ – that is, the legitimate succession. There is no clearer statement of the conviction Charles II had reached with regard to the future of the monarchy. The Lord Chancellor’s long explanatory statement reiterated the point at the end: ‘If anything else can occur to the Wisdom of the Parliament, which may further secure Religion and Liberty against a Popish Successor, without defeating the Right of Succession itself, his Majesty will most readily consent to it.’27
Why had he reached this conviction? First of all, he was not fighting for an absolutist role for his brother; he would subsequently show himself willing to accept various kinds of compromise concerning James’ actual position, including the humiliating concept of a guardianship of James by his own children. When it was all over and Exclusion defeated, the King even told Barrillon that he might have agreed to it if Parliament had offered more money and they had not attacked his prerogative at the same time – particularly as it would not have stopped James succeeding all the same!
Nor did Charles II reach this conviction out of an increased opinion of his brother as a potential ruler. James was no Hamlet, ‘like to prove most royal’. While Charles continued to respect James’ bull-necked strength of character, he also continued to deplore the lack of tact which went with it. To the last years of the reign of Charles II belong his various unflattering references to James, featuring ‘la sottise de mon frère’. When James remonstrated with Charles for his famous habit of walking in St James’s Park, frequently unattended, Charles is supposed to have replied lightly, ‘I am sure no man in England will take away my life to make you King.’28
Most famous of all is that remark made to William of Orange, when Charles observed that Exclusion would make little difference in the end, since if James succeeded to the throne, with his ‘turbulent and excessive temperament’ he would not stay on it four years.29 This judgement has gained prominence for the wrong reason. Because it proved uncannily correct as a prophecy, it is generally held to be illuminating about the character of James II. But its real importance lies in the light it casts on Charles II. Here was a king who had decided, faute de mieux, that he must uphold the principle of the legitimate monarchy; in his usual clear-sighted, if cynical, way, Charles recognized the material he had to deal with in implementing his decision.
The conviction of Charles II concerning the need for ‘the descent in the right line’ was based on the present danger to his own monarchy rather than on any future dangers to the monarchy as a whole. He identified attacks on the legitimate succession as part of a campaign which would turn on the royal prerogative, decimate the other wide powers of the Crown, and in general transform the face of English politics. From there, the slippery slope led downwards all the way, via political strife in Parliament to the dreaded abyss of civil war and revolution. Thus ‘descent in the right line’ became closely, almost mystically, linked in the King’s mind with that beneficent order he sought to preserve in his kingdom.
The temperament of Charles II as he approached fifty was turning to pessimism. The steel of his youth, that essential quality of public hope which had carried him from Worcester to exile and back to England again, was no longer necessary. Charles II’s famous remark about his brother and the future sprang from his own deep-seated conviction of the essential melancholy of human affairs.
The Duke of York, accompanied by Mary Beatrice, sailed for the Netherlands on 3 March. The ostensible reason for his journey was to visit his son-in-law and
daughter, William and Mary of Orange.
He left behind him a political scene unpleasantly transformed by the recent General Election. This, which has been described as the first English General Election fought along ‘distinctively party lines’,30 resulted in a happy triumph for that Country group increasingly identified as the Whigs over those of the Court nicknamed Tories.fn2 It was also incidentally marked by such heavy drinking on all sides that ‘Sober Societies’ were later formed in towns – an interesting example of locking the stable door after the horse had fully refreshed itself. Far from gaining new adherents, the government did not gain more than thirty seats, against 150 to their opponents. The Crown had miscalculated.
The men who now mustered at Westminster were later described in James’ memoirs as being like ‘so many young Spaniels that run and bark at every lark that springs’. But they were not wholly without a sense of purpose. Quite apart from the subject of Exclusion, there remained the unsettling matter of Danby. The King probably hoped that Danby might be allowed to settle his affairs – and the King’s – and then depart with something like dignity. Danby probably hoped, with Charles’ support, to be able to ride the storm and survive afloat.31 But the ‘young Spaniels’, organized by Shaftesbury, were not content with such a tame solution. The Commons requested Danby’s arrest and the Lords agreed. This of course posed a threat to Danby’s actual safety as well as his ministerial position.
Danby, reluctantly, offered his resignation. On 25 March the King, after assuring the House of Lords that he had authorized the Montagu letters, accepted it. Afterwards Danby blamed the King’s decision on a new man in his counsels: Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland. Originally designated as Montagu’s successor in Paris, Sunderland belonged to the rising generation (he was in his thirties) which would increasingly dominate political events in the last years of the King’s reign. But Sunderland was merely echoing the general feeling of the Court party that Danby had to go.32 Besides, Charles himself could propose no better solution to save Danby than to pardon him for all the offences he had committed up till 27 February.