Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (57 page)

In the elections to Charles’s first parliament those who had fought alongside his father to defend the established Church of England and the king’s role as its supreme governor were returned in large numbers, hence its nickname, the ‘Cavalier Parliament’. In the political ascendant at last, the Cavaliers insisted on the enforcement of rigid Anglican conformity by oaths to be administered on all clergymen, dons, teachers and members of town and city corporations.

The result was known as the Clarendon Code, after Charles’s chief minister and Lord Chancellor, Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. There is dispute as to whether Hyde had planned to subvert Charles’s offer of toleration all along or whether he simply took advantage of circumstances. But there is no doubt that the Code reflected Clarendon’s view that the Church of England was the only true Church and that only the Church of England taught the proper obedience of subjects to the king.

Charles had little sympathy with the Church’s Protestant opponents, whom he blamed for the Civil War and his father’s execution. But with Roman Catholics it was a very different story. The queen mother, Henrietta Maria, was a proselytizing Catholic, and there were persistent rumours that Charles himself had converted to Catholicism, or at least was dangerously partial to it. In fact he had few firm beliefs, and deplored the intolerant zeal of every group. As he said, he ‘should be glad that those distinctions between his subjects might be removed; and that whilst they were all equally good subjects, they might equally enjoy his protection’. Charles sought to address these problems and to salve his conscience over the broken promise of toleration in the Declaration of Breda by issuing a second declaration in December 1662. It referred to the king’s discretionary power to ‘dispense’ with the Clarendon Code for both Protestants and Catholics who ‘modestly and without scandal performed their devotions in their own way’, and called on Parliament to pass an Act to make such a suspension of the Code general and permanent.

But the ultra-royalist Cavalier House of Commons, with its hardline Anglican majority and absolute loyalty to the monarchy, refused their monarch point blank. They had not fought the Civil War and suffered under Cromwell to see the monarchy adopt their enemies’ principles. And Charles, aware above all that Anglicans were the strongest supporters of the restored monarchy, had to acquiesce.

II

After these domestic frustrations, foreign policy seemed to offer an opportunity for decisive action and the glory of war.

The seventeenth century had been the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic. After surviving the Spanish attempt at reconquest in the late sixteenth century with English help that was neither consistently given nor very effective when it was, the Dutch had gone on to become an economic superpower that threatened to take over English trade. The English had already tried to cut them down to size in the first Anglo-Dutch War in the 1650s. Now Charles was persuaded that he should seek to outdo Cromwell by launching a second conflict.

The war began well with the great victory of Lowestoft in 1665, when the fleet, commanded in person by Charles’s brother James, duke of York, as Lord Admiral, defeated the enemy and blew up the Dutch flagship, together with the Dutch commander, Admiral Opdam. But then the attempted seizure of the Dutch East Indies fleet in a neutral port misfired; the domestic disasters of the Great Plague in 1665 and the Great Fire of London the following year hampered the war effort and things hit rock bottom when the Dutch admiral De Ruyter sailed up the Medway, where the English fleet was anchored, captured the flagship the
Royal Charles
, on which the king had returned to England in 1660, burnt others and forced the rest to scatter and beach themselves. As was said in London, ‘The bishops get all, the courtiers spend all, the citizens pay for all, the King neglects all, and the Dutch take all.’

It was a national disaster, which led to a profound bout of introspection. ‘In all things,’ reflected the diarist Samuel Pepys, who was in the thick of events as a naval administrator, ‘in wisdom, courage, force, knowledge of our own streams, and success, the Dutch have the best of us, and do end the war with victory on their side.’ Why was England apparently so feeble in defending even its own shores? A spate of books on the Dutch rushed to offer the explanation. The most interesting is Sir Josiah Child’s
Brief Observations Concerning Trade and the Interest of Money
. Written even before the war was over, it argued that the Dutch Republic was so strong because it had developed secure financial institutions that gave it long-term security and the ability to wage war and expand its commerce, in spite of its geographical disadvantages. Most European monarchs had made a habit, when financially squeezed by the demands of war, of repudiating their creditors, which meant they could borrow only at a high rate of interest. But through the Bank of Amsterdam, with its enviable reputation for honouring its debts, the Dutch could borrow cheaply: a financial advantage that translated into military strength. And Child is to be taken seriously, since he was an expert on finance, having built up one of the greatest City fortunes of his day. Other authors pointed to Dutch religious toleration, which gave the republic domestic peace, as opposed to the civil wars produced by persecution in England. And others again to the superiority of Dutch hygiene, education, poor relief and technical expertise.

Why not, in short, imitate the Dutch instead of fighting them? Why not even ally with them? Especially since a new potent threat to England’s security was arising in Louis XIV’s aggressive, Catholicizing France.

III

France offered an alternative model for a modernizing monarchy. If the Dutch owed their success to innovative republican institutions and consensual government that had made a small and disunited country a world power, then France had become strong by following the opposite path.

France, like England, had been torn apart by civil war in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. But the wars, known as the
Fronde
, were very different. Instead of pitting the king against his subjects, they were a quarrel
within
the highest ranks of the nobility and the royal family itself. They came to an end at roughly the same time, however, when in 1661 the twenty-three-year-old Louis XIV, who had been king since the age of five, began his personal rule.

Louis was Charles’s first cousin and the two were similar in appearance, with their powerful physique, swarthy complexion, full lips and hooked nose. They also shared the same insatiable sexual appetite. But there the resemblance ended.

For Louis, despite his lustfulness, was a man of rigid dignity, inflexible will and unbending self-discipline. His iron self-control meant, for instance, that he was able to give a public audience immediately after an operation, without anaesthetic of course, to treat an anal fistula. And what he expected of himself, he demanded of others.

Louis’s motto, seen to this day on the ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors at the heart of his great palace of Versailles, was
Le Roy gouverne par luimême
: ‘the King rules by himself ’. This meant that there would be no great minister or corrupt court faction or even parliament to come between the king and his people. Instead, he, Louis, would personally direct a close-knit group of departmental officials. They came from modest backgrounds and shared Louis’s appetite for hard work and belief in discipline. Above all, they were at one with his commitment to the glory of France and her king.

Colbert, the minister of finance, directed an ambitious programme of state-sponsored industrial growth and overseas imperial expansion; Vauban, a military architect of genius, protected France’s borders with vast fortifications; Louvois, the minister of war, reorganized the army and oversaw a series of aggressive campaigns that expanded French territory towards her ‘natural frontier’ on the Rhine and beyond; even the arts – painting, music, architecture, the theatre – and science were subjected to central direction and made to hymn the glories of
le Roy soleil
, ‘the Sun King’.

And the medicine seemed to work as, in little more than a decade, France turned from the sick man of Europe into the European super-power. It also became the very model of a modern monarchy.

The rise of France posed for the English the same dilemma as the earlier rise of the Dutch. How would the English see the new France? As a threat? Or as a model?

For most of Charles’s subjects, Louis’s aggressive Catholicism meant that the issue was not in doubt: France not only threatened to become a universal monarchy but what was even worse a universal
Catholic
monarchy.

The result was that when, less than a year after the debacle of the battle of the Medway, England not only made peace with the Dutch but joined them in an alliance against France, the news was greeted with widespread rejoicing.

But not by Charles. The king harboured a grudge against the Dutch for the stain on his honour of defeat by a mere republic. He also took a very different view of both Louis and Catholicism from most of his subjects. Partly it was a matter of family connection. Charles himself was half French through his mother, Henrietta Maria. And the ties were strengthened when his youngest sister, also named Henrietta Maria, married Louis’s brother, Philippe, duke of Orleans. Henrietta, who was as intelligent as she was pretty, promptly became a firm favourite of Louis (indeed, his interest was rumoured to be more than brotherly) and a powerful conduit between the two courts.

And there was a similar family inclination to Catholicism. So when in 1668 Charles’s brother James informed him that he had converted to Rome, Charles, far from expressing horror, confided in him his intention to do the same. It remained only to work out the means.

A secret meeting was summoned on 25 January 1669 in James’s private closet or study, at which only the king, his brother and three confidential advisers were present. Tearfully Charles explained his determination to adopt the true faith. But how? The fear of a Catholicized monarchy was, as everyone knew, enough to rouse Englishmen to arms. In the face of this threat the rest unanimously advised him to inform Louis and seek his powerful advice and assistance.

Charles and Louis had already opened secret negotiations, with Henrietta Maria, duchess of Orleans, as go-between, for a
renversement d’alliances
that would see England and France joining together to make war on the Dutch. Now Charles’s professed resolution to convert to Catholicism raised the stakes still higher.

It took over a year to reach agreement. Finally, in May 1670, under cover of a flying visit by the duchess of Orleans to see her brother, the secret Treaty of Dover was signed. (It was called ‘secret’ because it was so closely guarded that most of Charles’s ministers were not informed of its existence.) In it, Charles reaffirmed his ‘plan to reconcile himself with the Roman Church’, while Louis, for his part, promised Charles a subsidy of 2 million livres to help him suppress any armed resistance to his conversion, together, if need be, with 6000 French troops. The two monarchs were then to coordinate an attack on the Netherlands, with Louis bearing the brunt of the land war and Charles the naval.

Was Charles’s undertaking to convert real? Or a diplomatic ploy that proved too clever by half ? In any case, though the actual text of the Treaty of Dover remained a closely guarded secret, the rumours surrounding it led to a dangerous polarization in English politics. The worst fears of Charles’s opponents were confirmed by the final steps that led to the outbreak of war. On 5 January 1672, Charles unilaterally suspended all payments from the Exchequer for a year; on 15 March he published the Declaration of Indulgence, which, on the model of the abortive declaration of a decade earlier, used the royal prerogative to suspend the Clarendon Code for Catholics as well as Protestant dissenters. Then, two days later, he joined Louis in declaring war on the Dutch.

The effect was to reconfirm the fatal association in the public mind of arbitrary government with Catholicism and an unpopular and, as it turned out, unsuccessful foreign policy. For the Dutch, despite the French occupying five out of their seven provinces, refused to roll over. Instead, they broke the dykes and used the flood waters to stop the French advance into the heartland of Holland. Still worse, from Charles’s point of view, the man who led the heroic Dutch resistance was his own nephew, William, prince of Orange.

For the system of hereditary monarchy meant that the rivalries of the great European powers were also family quarrels. France was ruled by King Charles’s cousin, Louis XIV, while France’s Continental rival Holland was ruled by his nephew William, the son of Charles’s eldest sister, Mary, princess royal of England, and William II, prince of Orange.

But William III was a very different ruler from Louis, the Sun King, the absolute monarch of all he surveyed. For the head of the House of Orange was not sovereign in the Dutch Republic, but first among equals. Sovereignty instead resided in the Estates of the seven provinces. But ever since William the Silent’s leadership of the Dutch Revolt against Spain in the late sixteenth century, his descendants as princes of Orange had traditionally been made
stadholder
or governor of each of the provinces and captain-general and admiral of the armed forces of the republic.

It was an important position. But to exploit its potential required talent and tact on the part of the reigning prince. He also had to cope with strong republican elements among the Dutch urban elites, who were jealous of the quasi-regal pretensions of the House of Orange and were determined to cut it down to size. William would prove more than equal to the task.

His beginnings were inauspicious enough, however. In 1649, his English grandfather, Charles I, was executed, and the following year his own father died of smallpox at the age of only twenty-four. Eight days later, on 14 November 1650, William was born as a posthumous child in a black-hung bedchamber.