Read Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Online
Authors: David Starkey
His first parliament met in January 1659, but by April the council of officers was calling on Richard to dissolve Parliament and entrust himself to the army. Their intention was to preserve the Protectorate under military rather than parliamentary control. Richard, unwilling that one drop of blood should be spilled to preserve his greatness, as he was supposed to have said, reluctantly agreed. He dissolved Parliament and threw himself on the mercy of the council of officers.
But dissension in the ranks quickly thwarted the council’s plan, as junior officers and republicans joined together to call for the restoration of the Rump Parliament that Richard’s father, Oliver Cromwell, had dismissed in 1653. The generals were forced to concede and the Rump, reassembled on 7 May 1659, immediately voted to abolish the Protectorate. Richard resigned from office just eight months after his investiture. The reign of Queen Dick, as Richard was derisively known, was over.
Once the army would have stepped decisively into the breach. But the army, for the first time, was divided. There was no unifying vision of how England should be governed and no recognized commander. In London its leadership was weak, self-interested and vacillating. In Scotland, however, General George Monck had power and influence enough to decide the situation. Monck was a canny politician who had fought on the royalist side in the Civil War until his capture and imprisonment by parliamentary forces. In exchange for his promise to command a parliamentary army, Monck was released. Now, as leader of the English army in Scotland, he took action.
But Monck was a restorer, not a revolutionary. He decided that Britain would never be at peace until the traditional forms of government were brought back. That certainly meant a new parliament; but might it also mean a king? On 26 December 1659, under pressure from Monck, the Rump Parliament was restored yet again and it appointed him commander-in-chief of the military forces. A week later, Monck and his army crossed the River Tweed and entered England.
For the first time events in England now offered Charles II, still in exile in the Low Countries, real hope. His advisers had been quick to spot the opportunity offered by the split in the army and the rise of Monck, and they put out secret feelers to him. But Monck had played a subtle game. So subtle indeed that his real motives still remain debatable. Was he resolved on the restoration of Charles II all along, or was he open minded about everything apart from the necessity for constitutional legitimacy? At any rate, Monck kept his contemporaries guessing and hoping long enough to head off the risk of renewed civil war and to let events acquire their own momentum. And it was a momentum, as irresistible as a force of nature, towards monarchy.
IV
By spring 1660, the English Parliament and its army were in disarray. England teetered on the brink of another civil war. It seemed to everyone, especially Monck, that the only authority that could rule England was a Stuart monarchy. Samuel Pepys recorded, ‘Everybody now drinks the King’s health without any fear, whereas before it was very private that a man may do it.’
On 4 April, Charles II wrote formally to the Speaker of the House of Commons from exile in the Netherlands. It was a tactful letter, offering his help and stating how the presence of the monarch might give the country the stability it had been lacking since the death of Lord Protector Cromwell. His approach was a masterpiece of clemency and statecraft.
The Declaration of Breda, as it became known, was intended to serve both as a manifesto for his restoration and as a blueprint for a comprehensive settlement after the turmoil of twenty years of civil war and unrest. And it shows that the lessons of those years had been well learnt. Its principal argument in favour of monarchy was that the proper rights and power of the king were the guarantor of the rights of everybody else, and without the king’s rights nothing and no one was safe. As Cromwell had found, only monarchy could tame a fractious army and a power-hungry parliament. But as Charles now argued, only a Stuart monarchy had the legitimacy to guarantee known laws and a stable line of succession.
Most importantly, the Declaration stated that there would be no bloody reprisals or the restoration of the Stuart monarchy as it had existed under Charles I. Instead, the restoration would not be the victory of the royalist cause, but a continuation of strong government as it had existed under Cromwell. Finally, the Declaration of Breda promised to bind up the wounds of a bleeding nation. It offered pardon to all, save effectively those directly participating in the late king’s execution. But most strikingly and unthinkably for the heir of Charles I, it also offered liberty of worship. ‘We do Declare a Liberty to tender consciences; and that no Man shall be disquieted or called in question for Differences of Opinion in matter of Religion, which do not disturb the Peace of the Kingdom.’ Was the genie of the Royal Supremacy, with its fatal harnessing of politics and religion, to be exorcized at last?
In April 1660, a new parliament, known as the Convention, was elected. Edward Montagu, earl of Manchester, who a decade and a half earlier had opposed the king’s trial and execution, was appointed Speaker of the House of Lords. Overwhelmingly pro-royalist, the Convention first undertook to debate the question of the restoration of the monarchy. The parliament that only eleven years earlier had helped kill the king now debated the return of his son, Charles II.
On 30 April, the Convention MPs processed to hear a sermon in St Margaret’s, Westminster. Preached by the Presbyterian Richard Baxter, who, a few years previously, had been so shocked by the religious anarchy of the New Model Army, it was entitled ‘A Sermon of Repentance’. It argued that both the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians had sinned by fighting each other to establish their exclusive vision of the Church. Instead they should unite in as comprehensive a national Church settlement as possible. His call was heeded, and the next day both sides joined together to vote for the recall of the king.
On 1 May 1660, Parliament declared that the government should be by king, Lords and Commons. A week later, Charles was proclaimed by both Houses. The king and his court made haste to return to England. He was greeted with joy in London, where he processed through the streets. The diarist John Evelyn recorded: ‘I stood in the Strand, and beheld it, and blessed God: And all this without one drop of blood, and by that very army, which rebelled against him.’
On 23 April 1661, Charles II, who had already been crowned king of Scotland a decade earlier, processed to Westminster Abbey for his second coronation, this time as king of England, almost a year after his return. It was St George’s Day, and everything was done to restore the traditional forms. The king had even revived the eve-of-coronation procession from the Tower to Westminster that had been dispensed with by his father and grandfather. The procession took over five hours to pass and was of unparalleled magnificence, as was the coronation. All the ancient robes and regalia, which had been deliberately destroyed after the abolition of the kingship, were lovingly re-created as far as possible to the old dimensions and forms.
The service followed the text used for his father and grandfather, and at the ensuing coronation banquet held in Westminster Hall the King’s Champion flung down his gauntlet in the traditional challenge to fight in single combat any who would deny the claim of Charles II to be the rightful heir to the Imperial Crown of England.
It was almost as though the Civil War, the Republic and the Protectorate had never been. But political clocks cannot be turned back so easily, as Charles II, his Church and people quickly discovered.
Charles II, James II
AT ROCHESTER ON 23 DECEMBER 1688,
King James II of England, who had reigned less than four years, fled into exile. It was the second time in forty years that the English had dethroned a king.
There was to be none of the high tragedy of the trial and execution of Charles I, James’s father, the last time the English rid themselves of a king. Instead, James’s downfall was a pitiable farce. He had already tried and somehow failed to flee from his subjects a fortnight earlier on the 11th, when, after throwing the Great Seal into the Thames, he rode disguised as an ordinary country gentleman to the north Kent coast. There he embarked for France. But his boat was intercepted by suspicious and disrespectful fishermen and forced back to Faversham. And even his second attempt at flight succeeded only with the connivance of his sonin-law and usurper, William III, who sensibly wanted him out of the way.
But, despite these elements of black humour, James’s dethronement brought about lasting change in a way which his father’s hadn’t. This, the fourth part of the book, tells the story of how this came about. It follows the resulting spread of the values of property, prosperity and freedom from these islands across the globe. And it shows that despite some conspicuous exceptions individual kings and queens tended to help rather than hinder the process.
But it begins at the monarchy’s lowest point, by explaining how the House of Stuart lost the throne again only thirty years after James’s elder brother, Charles II, had regained it in the Restoration of 1660. The old issues of religion and succession had arisen once more. But so too did a new question: which model of modernity should the British monarchy follow – the French or the Dutch? At stake were fundamental choices: between persecution and religious toleration, between absolutism and government by consent, and between success and failure.
I
Outside the Banqueting House in Westminster every Friday from June 1660 a huge crowd waited impatiently to be admitted into the presence of their newly restored sovereign, King Charles II. Many of them may well have remembered a very different scene at this same spot eleven years previously, when King Charles I had been publicly beheaded following his trial for treason.
But now England’s experiment with republicanism was at an end, and once more a son of the House of Stuart sat beneath the canopy of state to receive his people. But they were here not merely to pay their respects. They had come instead to be cured by the magical caress of their sovereign, for it was firmly believed that the king’s hands could banish scrofula, a disfiguring tuberculosis of the lymph nodes. Every Friday Charles would touch for the King’s Evil, and over the course of his reign he would lay his hands on more than ninety thousand of his grateful subjects.
The ceremony of touching for the King’s Evil was a sign of the divine nature of English kingship. But ever since the reign of Henry VIII, the connection between divinity and kingship had been more than mystical – it was political.
The assumption of religious authority was an enormous boost to royal power and prestige, but for Henry’s successors the Supremacy had proved to be something of a poisoned chalice as, inevitably, the monarchy had become the focus of the violent religious conflicts provoked by the Protestant Reformation. Charles II had grown up as these disputes reached their culmination in political meltdown, civil war and regicide. Now he had been swept back with popular rejoicing to take the crown that had been abolished with his father’s execution. He would soon find, however, that the quarrels that had led England into civil war were far from settled.
At first sight, King Charles was well suited to pick his way through the political quagmire that followed Cromwell’s death. Charles I had lost the throne by his unbending adherence to principle: to the authority of the king in the state and of the bishops in the Church. In contrast, the only rigid thing about Charles II was his male member. He fathered at least fourteen children by nine different mothers and more or less single-handedly repopulated the depleted ranks of the English nobility. When he was egregiously hailed as ‘Father of his people’, Charles laughed, replying that he had certainly fathered a great number of them.
Otherwise there was nothing to which he would not stoop his six-foot frame; no corner, however tight, which he could not turn; and no loyalty, however deep, which, once it ceased to be convenient, he recognized as binding.
Like many such men, he had an easy charm. He was affable, good humoured and witty, though his intelligence was practical rather than scholarly. But he was as lazy as he was treacherous, and really applied himself only when his back was to the wall. In short, Charles could ride almost any tide. But steering a consistent course was beyond him.
The first test of both Charles’s resolution and his honesty came over religion. As one MP said, the principles of the restored monarchy were that Charles should ‘not be king of this or that party, but to be king of all’. Charles realized that it was good politics to live up to this. In the Declaration of Breda, the manifesto that had helped win him the throne, Charles had made an unequivocal promise of ‘liberty to tender consciences’, or religious toleration, for all the disparate groups that had rebelled against the Stuart monarchy. All the other undertakings of Breda about disputed title to land, war crimes and arrears of army pay were swiftly passed into legislation by the Convention Parliament, often using the precise, carefully chosen words of the Declaration itself.
But not religious toleration. Before the Civil War, Parliament had split over the intertwined issues of royal power and religion. The king’s Anglican supporters took as their biblical text Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which he states that ‘the powers that be are ordained of God’. Anglicans interpreted this to mean that their highest religious duty was to obey the monarch, no matter what he did.
Opposing them were the Presbyterians, and other more extreme Protestant dissenting sects, who countered with Peter’s saying in the Acts of the Apostles: ‘It is better to obey God than man.’ These opponents of absolute royal power had won the Civil War, but with the Restoration they had lost the peace.