A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (42 page)

While Margaret Cavendish astonished with her ideas, she startled even more by her appearance. She wore no make-up, but covered her face with patches. She also designed her own clothes. ‘I took great delight’, she wrote, ‘in attiring, fine dressing, and fashions, especially such fashions as I did invent myself…I always took delight in a singularity, even in accoutrements of habits.’
¹⁸
Her outdoor dress combined silken gowns with a man’s coat and a broad, plumed, Cavalier hat; her court dress was stiff and heavy, like something from an earlier age, with a train of alarming length. When she and the duke went to see his comedy,
The Humorous Lieutenant
, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, she wore a classical-styled ‘antique’ dress, with bared breasts and scarlet-trimmed nipples – unfortunately more like an actress than an Amazon. At one court ball, when a woman appeared with ‘at least sixty ells of gauze and silver tissue about her, not to mention a sort of pyramid upon her head, adorned with a hundred thousand baubles’, Charles stopped for a moment to think. ‘I bet,’ he said, ‘that it is the Duchess of Newcastle.’
¹⁹

Charles was impressed as well as amused by the duchess. When the Newcastles paid their formal visit to court, he directed them to the queen’s rooms after their audience with him had finished, and later joined them there, something that was considered most unusual. Like the heroine of her fantastical, feminist fiction,
The Blazing World
, which had been published – all too aptly, given its title – in 1666, Margaret Cavendish was proud of being different. She was, she wrote, ‘as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be’. Although she could not be Henry V or Charles II she could be ‘
Margaret
the
First
’. She could not conquer the world like Alexander or Caesar: ‘Yet rather than not be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own: for which no body, I hope, will blame me, since it is in every one’s power to do the like.’
²⁰

In
The Blazing World
, carried off to sea by a ruthless merchant Margaret’s heroine is saved by Providence, in the shape of a storm that carries her beyond the Arctic ice-floes, beyond the Pole to the region of animal-men – walking Bear-men, Fish-men, Bird-men, Spider-men and a host of others, who treat her as a goddess. As empress of her new world, she thinks, discusses and plans her state with care, joining with these wondrous creatures in scientific and philosophical debate. Charles’s court circles abounded in strong women, not all of them brilliant, but many of them brave. But Margaret Cavendish stood out, even in an age when women in many spheres made their mark: as mistresses of estates and court politicians behind the scenes, as actresses and writers, as printers and publishers and businesswomen and scientists.

The frontispiece to Margaret Cavendish’s
Plays, Never before Printed,
1668, uses a portrait of her on a pedestal, engraved ten years earlier, and shows her attended by Minerva, huntress and goddess of the arts, and Apollo, in his guise as god of poetry.

Charles’s capital was humming and the women of all classes were a chief adornment. On May Day, Pepys was walking to Westminster ‘in the way meeting many milk-maids with their garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddler before them; and saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodgings’ door in Drury-lane in her smock sleeves-and bodice, looking upon one – she seemed a mighty pretty creature’.
²¹
Nell Gwyn was a stage star, but the London streets were a perpetual theatre. Every feast day had its show, from the milkmaids and maypoles on May Day to the Lord Mayor’s procession in October and the marches of the guilds on their saints’ days. Every square saw jugglers and acrobats and quack medicine-sellers setting up their stages and booths. Every district rang to the street-cries of the traders.

For the king, at odds with his parliament and anxious about the war and his empty treasury, there was no real breathing space. From time to time in this chilly spring of 1667 his habitual cool seemed to crack. He was unsure how to play his hand. This was seen in his abrupt attack on Buckingham in February over the business of the horoscope. And in the same month, Charles also suffered from a crisis in his affair with Frances Stuart. She was now eighteen. He offered to make her a duchess, promised her lands and swore he would banish Barbara, but still she refused him. She was in a difficult position, since her reputation was tarnished simply by his public attention, and this spring she told one courtier that she felt that she could no longer stay at court ‘without prostituting herself to the King, whom she had so long kept off, though he had liberty more than any other had, or he ought to have, as to dalliance’.
²²
She had come to such a pass, she said, ‘as to resolve to have married any gentleman of 1500l a year that would have had her in honour’.

The man Frances found was another Charles Stuart, the third Duke of Richmond. Still in his twenties, he had been married twice, drank, gambled and was hopeless with money. His marriage to his second wife, Margaret, was furiously acrimonious and within weeks of her death in late 1666, like a man set free, he was courting Frances. Charles already disliked Richmond for his work in Middleton’s now disgraced administration in Scotland. He was also irritated by a duel in 1665, for which Richmond was imprisoned in the Tower. It was alleged, although it says little for Richmond’s reasoning powers, that he first became friendly with Frances because he wanted to get back into Charles’s favour. By early February, when Pepys saw her wearing her hair in a new fashion, ‘done up with puffes’, they were meeting secretly. Later that month, after a tip-off, allegedly from Barbara Castlemaine, Charles entered Frances’s room to find her in bed, with Richmond seated at her pillow.
²³

Richmond fled, and after an angry exchange with the King, Frances appealed tearfully to the queen, explaining that she and Richmond wanted to marry. Sensible and tactful, Catherine persuaded Charles to accept the marriage. But since Richmond was a relative, he required the King’s permission to marry, and Charles stalled obstinately.
²⁴
Despairing of an end to this obstruction, on a stormy night at the end of March Frances crossed London Bridge to meet the duke at the Bear at the Bridge-Foot. They eloped and were married at his estate in Kent. Scrupulously, but insultingly, she left behind the jewels Charles had given her, including a pearl necklace worth over £1,000. On 3 April the couple returned to London, to stay at the lodgings of Frances’s mother, in Somerset House, hoping for forgiveness from court. None came.
²⁵
The personal and political were always linked. Wry jokes were made when people saw the new medal for the Peace of Breda, for which Frances had sat as the model for Britannia, encircled by the motto
Favente Deo
, ‘By God’s Favour’.

The Peace of Breda medal 1667. The front of the medal showed a portrait of Charles II, with the image of Britannia on the reverse, modelled from Frances Stuart, so accurately that both Pepys and Evelyn thought one could recognise her at first glance.

Charles found that other small humiliations hit home. In mid-April he arrived at a Privy Council meeting to find no paper laid out for him on the table. The man responsible explained that he could provide it no longer: he was not well off, had already spent four or five hundred pounds of his own, and had not been paid since the king was restored. After being snubbed by a servant, Charles was then attacked in his own theatre. He had shrugged off uncomfortable plays written by friends before, including Orrery’s
Mustapha
in 1665, with its evil counsellor, threatened succession and infatuated king. Ned Howard’s
The Change of Crownes
, which Charles watched with Catherine on 25 April, should have been standard fare, containing a double plot in which two usurpers, a brother and sister, repent and marry the legitimate rulers. Unfortunately, in the sub-plot, Charles’s favourite comedian John Lacy acted ‘the Country Gentleman come up to Court, who doth abuse the Court with all the imaginable wit and plainness, about selling of places and doing everything for money’.
²⁶
As if the script was not provocative enough, Lacy added his own impromptu gags. Icy with rage, Charles had the actor confined to the porter’s lodge, the theatre closed and the playbill torn down. The play was withdrawn and in the ensuing rows Lacy hit Howard with his cane, shouting that the playwright was ‘more a fool than a poet’. The hierarchies of court and theatre were well and truly ruffled.

Observers thought Charles was behaving wildly. A week after his outburst over the play, on 22 April, the eve of St George’s Day, there was a sumptuous banquet for the Garter knights. This was followed next day by a service, when the knights processed in solemn order, a ceremony mounted with extra show to impress the Swedish ambassador. Four days later Charles and his crew put their Garter robes back on, fooled around the court all day and even rode with them on into the park, ‘which is a most scandalous thing’, thought Pepys, ‘so as all gravity might be said to be lost among us’.
²⁷

The frivolous, rushing, material world that dismayed the men of faith was returning. Yet ten days before the Garter feast, a work of eloquent gravity, in all senses, appeared in the bookshops.
Paradise Lost
passed the censor with hardly a whisper of protest. It was published by Samuel Simmons, the nephew of Milton’s old friend and publisher, next door to the Golden Lion at Aldersgate, where the poet had lived during the early days of the Civil War. (Milton was paid £5 when he signed the contract, and another £5 when the first print run of thirteen hundred copies was sold.) Like the note of a great organ, heard faintly at first, his epic slowly found its readers. His former colleague Marvell wrote a sober, moving tribute and before Milton’s death in 1674, Dryden approached him for permission to turn his poem into an opera for the stage, an impossible project. Charles took note. Around this time, according to Betty Milton, her husband ‘was applied to by message from the King, and invited to write for the Court, but his answer was, that such behaviour would be very inconsistent with his former conduct, for he had never yet employed his pen against his conscience’.
²⁸

In his earlier prose Milton had written with eloquent power of the virtues of the republic, the right to freedom of speech, the need for easier divorce. In his epic he turned to battles in Heaven and joys in Eden, to the Fall, and the promise of redemption from a corrupt world. But if the Good Old Cause and the rule of the saints were behind him, they were not forgotten. His poem was a cry to the nation to defy tyranny and to reject corruption and luxury. Moreover the fallen world that the Archangel Michael shows to Adam and Eve could appear a direct criticism of Charles II’s court:

Driven from Eden by their own sin, banished by the angel’s flaming sword, Milton’s fallen couple enter a world where the future is all uncertain. But they still have the power to choose their way ‘with Providence their guide’.

Charles rejected the guidance of Providence, and thought he could make his own luck. But this proved hard. It seemed a dark hour, yet in this space of winter and spring, between the Fire and the warmer days when the fleets might set out again and threaten war, a powerful sense of life revived flowed through his capital. Its clashing voices were full of energy, from Wren’s grand plans to Margaret Cavendish’s ambitious imaginings, from the experiments of the Royal Society to the sonorous, severe yet lyrical visions of Milton. These too, like the tributaries that flowed into the Thames, mixing their streams and blending at last with the sea, were part of the currents and counter-currents of Charles’s first decade.