A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (47 page)

Buckingham’s own attachment to the idea of toleration was genuine and enduring, despite the vagaries of his life. In a private justification, he later wrote that he had always inclined ‘to some moderate way in matters of Conscience’, not out of hatred of the Church, ‘but only because I thought that to be the surest way to settle the Church and unite the Nation’.
¹⁸
A toleration bill for protestant dissenters had been drafted in October 1667 to soothe anti-Catholic fears after the Fire and the raid on the Medway, especially to appease the rich dissenting merchants. But the bill was set aside while parliament continued to pick over the mishandling of the war.
¹⁹
The delay gave Sheldon time to gather his supporters. That autumn a spate of pamphlets appeared, revealing sharp differences of opinion even among the would-be reformers. Some thought that the best course was comprehension, relaxing the strict law on services and doctrine so that presbyterians could feel at ease within the Church of England itself. Others opted for toleration, keeping the Act of Uniformity as it stood, but accepting different forms of worship outside the church. Despite these differences, both protestant dissenters and Catholics were full of anticipation. ‘The Catholics’, reported a puzzled Magalotti, ‘say that their number increases daily, and that the Act of Comprehension would be the truest means of establishing religion in the kingdom. The Presbyterians promise themselves the same advantage…I do think I can say that the nobility would be catholic and the rich men Presbyterians’.
²⁰

Over the Christmas holiday, Orlando Bridgeman, Keeper of the Seals, consulted with Richard Baxter and the London presbyterians. At the same time the remarkable John Wilkins, now a royal chaplain and soon to be Bishop of Chester, marshalled the moderate Anglican divines.
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Wilkins had a two-hour conference with Charles, and won his support for a set of proposals based on the Breda declaration. He also suggested that those who could not accept a broader, more inclusive church should be allowed to worship separately in licensed meeting houses. Catholic services, however, would still be forbidden and extreme sects would be denied a licence. By the end of January 1668, the Privy Council had accepted the idea, and a comprehension bill was drafted by the distinguished lawyer Sir Matthew Hale.
²²

Charles needed Buckingham’s men to push Hale’s bill through parliament. That was why he pardoned his duel so swiftly. When he opened parliament in February, he first announced the signing of the triple alliance, which was greeted with enthusiasm, then turned to his vision of a broader church which might reunite English protestants.
²³
But here he badly misjudged the Commons’ mood. They had already talked before the king arrived and it took them only half an hour to make a stand. ‘This day the vote was passed’, wrote John Milward, ‘to prevent the bringing in the bill of comprehension, which will be brought in and countenanced by very great persons.’
²⁴
Far from accepting the bill, the angry MPs called for firmer enforcement of the current laws.

The debates over the next few weeks were fierce and wide-ranging but there was no doubt that the idea of comprehension was dead.
²⁵
In the House of Lords, the whole argument about freedom of debate and the state’s rule over religious matters was revived again. Hobbes’s works, in particular, were attacked as giving heart to dissenters. The bishops refused to let
Leviathan
be reprinted, and copies were soon selling second-hand at ten times their original price. The publication of Hobbes’s new work,
Behemoth
, was stopped, and his Latin translation of
Leviathan
, with a long appendix defending himself from the charge of heresy, had to be published abroad, in Amsterdam. Charles knew that this persecution was also aimed partly at himself. While one camp damned him as a papist, another feared him as a Hobbesian atheist. On his birthday the previous year, he had been halted in his long stride through Whitehall by the sight of some graffiti, topped with a royal crown, on the wall of one of the corridors:

He merely asked for the wall to be cleaned. But he now detached himself from Hobbes, as he had done from Hyde.

Since the comprehension bill had failed, the only relief for dissenters was that the Conventicle Act of 1664, which forbade religious meetings, was due to relapse at the end of the parliamentary session. A new bill was rapidly introduced, but delays and adjournments kept it from being passed before parliament was prorogued. For a time the dissenters could meet together without fear. The reprieve was brief, since a new, even sterner act would be passed in 1670, described by Marvell as ‘the Quintessence of Arbitrary Malice’. Marvell, with his low-church sympathies and puritan friends, had always supported comprehension. When parliament closed he even drafted an address begging Charles to act separately, to use his prerogative in ecclesiastical affairs – as he had tried to do in 1663 – ‘for the better composure and union of the minds of his protestant subjects’.
²⁷
It is strange to find this stalwart, satirical, anti-absolutist MP appealing to the King to overrule parliament, but perhaps this direct action was what Marvell had meant when he begged Charles to ignore those advisers who were cutting him off from his people.

Realising that they could expect no help from parliament, the dissenters appealed with increasing vehemence to the liberty of ‘individual conscience’. People must be allowed to choose their own religion, according to an inward persuasion. In
Paradise Lost
, now in readers’ hands, Milton’s Archangel Michael had forewarned Adam that in human history some so-called Christian ministries would seek to impose spiritual laws by force ‘on every conscience’:

With this idea of the individual ‘living Temple’ went the realisation that each person’s definition of their faith might be subtly different. Writers began to argue, almost like Fellows of the Royal Society, for an unbounded intellectual perspective, so that religious truth, like the truth of ‘other sciences’, could develop freely ‘into variety of Thoughts and Principles’. And if variety of thought was accepted, there could be no possibility of imposing ‘uniformity’ except as an act of repression.
²⁹

In the spring of 1668, once the religious reforms were defeated, the MPs returned to their tireless wrangling over the war. Marvell caused uproar in a debate on the shambolic intelligence system, when he not only condemned its inefficiency but implied that Arlington had bought his way to power and title. The money allowed for intelligence was so small, he fumed, that ‘the intelligence was accordingly – a libidinous desire in men for places makes them think themselves fit for them – the place of Secretary ill gotten, when bought with £10,000 and a barony’. He was called to explain himself, but ‘said the thing was so plain that it needed not’.
³⁰
Many MPs were as angry as Marvell, if less outspoken. The situation was chaotic. ‘God almighty sett all our heades right,’ Arlington wrote to Ormond in February, ‘for there are few that are not verry giddy!’
³¹
In the same month Pepys scribbled morosely, ‘The house is in a most broken condition’:

nobody adhering to anything, but reviling and finding fault; and now quite mad at the ‘Undertakers’, as they are commonly called – Littleton, Lord Vaughan, Sir R. Howard, and others that are brought over to the Court and did undertake to get the King money; but they despise and will not hear them in the House, and the Court doth do as much, seeing that they cannot be useful to them as was expected.
³²

In this climate, Sir Richard Temple’s promotion of a new Triennial Bill, which sought to flatter the Commons by restricting the time that the King was allowed to prorogue parliament, was ‘condemned by all moderate men’, declared John Milward, as being ‘composed of strange and very dangerous heads to take away the King’s power’.
³³
The backbenchers resented being managed by the undertakers even more than they minded directions from the crown.

Having lost face by supporting the court, Buckingham and his gang – Temple, Osborne, Seymour and Howard – now turned against it. Far from getting Charles a good supply, as they had promised, they now argued that the house should not vote any money at all until there was a full investigation of the war. Fearful civil servants decided the only course was to stall and delay. When Henry Brouncker, facing the allegations of incompetence at Lowestoft, pleaded with Charles to save him, ‘with tears in his eyes the King did say he could not, and bid him shift for himself at least until the House is up’.
³⁴
Charles dared not alienate the Commons until he had his money. At last, the Commons voted £300,000 to pay for the navy, as long as the money was not raised by a land tax or excise. The preference was for taxes on foreign goods, French commodities and especially wine (with a jovial proviso from one MP that a tax should be put on spirits ‘to prevent excessive drinking, but not upon anything to hinder good hospitality’).
³⁵

As the session ended, however, a political storm of a different kind erupted in the capital. On 10 March Charles responded to the Commons’ fury over the comprehension bill by issuing the proclamation that they demanded, to enforce the Act of Uniformity and accompanying laws.
³⁶
The London dissenters, who had been hoping for a relaxation of the law, were outraged. On Easter Monday, 23 March, a fine spring day, the City apprentices gathered to attack a favourite holiday target, the bawdy houses. This was an old tradition, but this time it was given a new slant. If the King was going to persecute honest people by applying the religious laws strictly, the apprentices implied, then they would persecute him – and all his whoring courtiers – by enforcing the laws against sexual licence, the creed by which the court lived.
³⁷

The trouble began in Poplar where the mob’s first target was a brothel run by Damaris Page, ‘the great bawd of the seamen’. Next day riots spread rapidly through Moorfields, Smithfield, Shoreditch and Holborn. By Wednesday, thousands of young men were on the streets – some said forty thousand – armed with iron bars and staves, organised into ‘regiments’, wearing the colour green, and led by captains, in the fashion of the City’s trained bands. An anxious Charles asked the Lord Mayor to gather the militia, and also sent in troops of his own, commanded once again by the excitable Lord Craven ‘riding up and down to give orders like a madman’.
³⁸

Some of those involved said openly ‘that they did ill in contenting themselves in pulling down the little bawdy-houses and did not go and pull down the great bawdy-house at Whitehall’.
³⁹
During the days of rioting, three satires appeared, pointing at the vices of the court, and specifically at Charles’s ‘Catholic whore’, Barbara Castlemaine. The first attack,
The Poor Whore’s Petition
, written as an appeal from the prostitutes of the town, recorded Barbara’s lubricious rise to power and asked sardonically for her protection against the apprentices ruining their business, and, by implication, threatening hers. The second and third satires, in manuscript and print respectively, were Castlemaine’s ‘answer’.
⁴⁰
The printed
Gracious Answer
was particularly devastating since it was clearly written by someone who had watched Barbara recently at the theatre at Whitehall, dripping with jewels, ‘which the (abhorred and undone) people of this kingdom have paid for’.
⁴¹
She was made to speak like a vain, self-regarding woman, gloating over the provision for her children, and a self-satisfied Catholic, blithely attacking the Church of England and presenting the Privy Council as pimps for the papist interest. If they had their way, she promised, the sects would be crushed but court Catholics would be spared since ‘venereal pleasure, accompanied with looseness, debauchery and prophaneness are not such heinous crimes and crying sins’.

Charles and the council saw at once that the riots and pamphlets were less about sex than about the church and political power. Among the slogans shouted were ‘Liberty of Conscience!’ and the promise that the next popular holiday, May Day, would be a ‘bloody day’. When the leaders were arrested they were not charged with pulling down brothels but with treason, and their attempts at reform of manners smoothly reinterpreted by the Chief Justice Kelyng (the man who had tried Bunyan in 1660) as usurping ‘regal authority’.
⁴²

Buckingham had nothing to do with these riots, yet his popularity in the City was well known and his hand was suspected. In several ways his efforts during the past months had backfired. The intense debates in the Commons had revealed a curious pattern. While almost everything pushed by Buckingham’s ‘undertakers’ failed, their efforts had nudged the MPs, in opposition to their pressure, into more and more open declarations of support for the king. In reaction, Buckingham snarled. He attacked former allies like Sir William Coventry and Lord Anglesey, who was soon deprived of his post as treasurer to the navy. Then he turned on old enemies, including Ormond. Scenting trouble, Ormond dashed to London. Days later, on 9 May, Charles dissolved the Commons.