Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Kings & Queens (15 page)
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Authors: Malcolm Day
Charles II liberates devils from Puritan prison
W
hen Charles II came to the throne in 1660 England had suffered nearly two decades of unhappiness. First, a long civil war ended miserably with the execution of her king, then a puritanical Commonwealth ruled the nation, during which all manner of repression prevented the people from enjoying themselves. Virtually every outdoor recreation had been banned by the Puritans on the ground of being a distraction from the path of God.
Come the Restoration and hunting, wrestling, animal-baiting, tennis, ice-skating and the earliest forms of organized football all reappeared in public. Horse-racing drew large crowds again – principally on the back of Charles’s personal patronage of Newmarket race course, where he kept several Arab horses.
The arts flourished again. With the King’s encouragement theatres reopened to riotous abandon. New bawdy plays, subsequently known as Restoration Drama, were staged in which actresses were used for the first time, replacing boys who previously acted female roles. One of the first to hit the stage was Nell Gwynne, formerly an orange seller, who so delighted the King she became one of his many mistresses. Charles had set the tone for a lewd society on the very first night of his reign, when he slipped away from the celebrations to spend a little time with a mistress.
Stung by remarks about poor English navigation at a reception for a French visitor, Charles II boasted that his astronomers could chart the movement of the stars with great accuracy. When told that England’s equipment was not up to the task, the King ordered Christopher Wren to build an observatory that would outdo all rivals. Thus was produced the Royal Observatory near the Palace of Greenwich. From its Octagonal Room, ‘Greenwich Mean Time’ was established as the world’s temporal yardstick.
Widespread relief at the relaxation of Puritan restrictions, however, meant members of society, like liberated felons, went about with gay abandon. Gambling, prostitution and promiscuity caused some to question the good of such freedom. Even the liberal-minded civil servant Samuel Pepys looked down his nose at ‘the lewdness and beggary of the court which I am feared will bring all to ruin again.’
Not all spokesmen for the Puritan ideal had disappeared underground. When the poet, John Milton, retired from politics at the Restoration of the monarchy to concentrate on poetry, he produced one of the longest laments in the English language on the desperate state of society.
With his eyes deteriorating into blindness, he dictated 10,500 lines in
Paradise Lost
to ‘justify the ways of God to men’, sadly conceding that Satan is the most beguiling of characters.
Two calamities occurred at about the same time which confirmed to many the truth of the poet’s vision. For 18 months from the spring of 1665, England was in the grip of its worst outbreak of the plague since the Black Death three centuries earlier. At its peak, the epidemic was claiming 7,000 Londoners a week, and it spread mercilessly across the country.
Scarcely had the plague died down than a second disaster struck, in the Great Fire of September 1666. Some with fervid imagination noted that without the first numeral of the year, the remaining figure pointed to the apocalyptic anti-Christ of
The Revelation of St John
. Perhaps the wrath of retribution was indeed being visited on this licentious land!
The brief reign of James II
W
hen the Catholic James II came to the throne in 1685, aged 52, he had spent most of his life abroad in exile. As the second son, and one of six children, born to Charles I and the French Henrietta Maria, James spent his adolescence dodging anti-royalists in the Civil War.
He escaped from house arrest in St James’s Palace disguised as a girl and fled first to Holland to be with his sister Mary, and then to Paris to be with his mother (the French king’s daughter), and finally to Scotland. Later he joined the French and Spanish armies, before at last retunring to England when his elder brother Charles II had restored the monarchy.
However, James’s accession to the throne in 1685 was opposed by many in the Commons who feared the return of Catholicism in government (Roman Catholics had been excluded from the House of Commons since 1678). Coupled with a haughty arrogance, this meant James only lasted three years as king.
The birth of his son, and therefore another Catholic heir, proved an unpalatable prospect for many parliamentarians, who instead invited an invasion from William of Orange, the Protestant son of James’s sister Mary, who had married the sovereign prince of Holland.
Declared abdicated, the king, with an all too vivid memory of what had happened to his father, soon fled into exile again – this time to the colourful French milieu of Louis XIV where he would live out much of his remaining life.
When Parliament forced James II to abdicate in favour of William of Orange, supporters of the old Stuart regime were bent on reversing their fortunes. Largely Catholic, though also including some Protestants who did not accept the new Orange regime, these supporters were known as Jacobites (after
Jacobus
, the Latin for James).
A year after his dethronement, James attempted to recover the crown in 1689, landing in Ireland with a large French army, joined by numerous Jacobite sympathisers. On July 1, a Jacobite army of 21,000 mostly French and Irish troops massed on the south bank of the River Boyne outside Dublin, while William and his army of 35,000 confronted them from the north. The King’s superior forces proved too great, however, and James was forced to flee the bogs. The Orange Order still commemorates the victory, erroneously said to have occurred on July 12, hence their reference to ‘The Glorious Twelfth’.
Any Jacobite hopes of reclaiming the English throne were thus stalled. James’s son, the ‘Old Pretender’, did join another doomed effort in 1715. The cause was then left to James’s grandson, the ‘Young Pretender’, Bonnie Prince Charlie, to take up the mantle in the ‘Forty-Five Rebellion’, but this brave effort eventually petered out after defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.
Mary distraught at having to marry unattractive William
M
ary II was the daughter of James duke of York (later James II) by his first wife, Lady Anne Hyde, who died when Mary was still only nine. Although her mother bore eight children, only Mary and her younger sister Anne (future Queen Anne) survived into adulthood. Unlike her father, who converted to Catholicism when she was six, Mary and Anne continued in the Protestant faith, as demanded by her uncle Charles II who was still king.
When, aged 15, Mary was told she would have to marry a foreigner eleven years her elder whom she had never met, she wept for days. Even learning he was her cousin from the House of Orange in Holland made it no better. Indeed she was reported to have cried her eyes out at the wedding. The man in question, William, was hardly an attractive prospect, being asthmatic, stooped, shy and rather quiet – hardly one to lead the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9.
But as Mary would discover when she became queen of England in a joint monarchy with William III, this man had virtues. Indeed, as far as Parliament was concerned he was perfect for the English throne: a reasonable, malleable and, above all, Protestant immigrant, with none of the previous baggage about divine right to rule. Recent events that had led to James II’s forced abdication had shaken the government. Now was an opportunity to fix things.
After the overthrow of James II there remained in Scotland a stubborn loyalty to the Stuart cause. To pre-empt any rebellion, William ordered all Scottish chieftains to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown. He deliberately chose a mid-winter deadline of December 31, 1691, at the remote stronghold of Fort William (named after the English king).
Most obeyed, but the MacDonalds of Glencoe, delayed by bad weather, were a few days late. William’s government wished to make an example of them and ordered their erstwhile enemy, the Campbells, to carry out reprisals. After enjoying a fortnight of traditional Highland hospitality with the MacDonalds, one morning before dawn the Campbell troops massacred the clan chief and 38 of his men, women and children in one of the most savage acts in Scottish history.
Unlike the horrific French Revolution a century later, the English people managed simply to swap one king for another in a bloodless takeover. Then over the course of several years they managed to amend the constitution in their favour – all under the auspices of a willing, benign monarchy.
Tragically, Mary died of smallpox in 1694 and William continued to reign alone. Much of the king’s time was taken up with European politics and war, especially endeavouring to limit France’s imperial ambitions in Western Europe and to safeguard his native Holland. While these matters preoccupied the king, Parliament was free to concentrate on drafting key changes to the constitution to their advantage.
On coming to the throne, William and Mary had had to agree to a Declaration of Rights, the terms of which effectively established a limited monarchy. The king or queen was no longer allowed, as James II had been, to exercise a royal prerogative in ignoring any inconvenient laws. The monarch was not above the law.
The Commons also put themselves in charge of royal expenditure. And to prevent any further instability from religious cause, as happened again in the previous regime, the Act of Settlement required all future monarchs to be members of the Church of England.
One further development during the reign of William and Mary was the creation of the Bank of England, in 1694. This became a privately owned establishment, set up as an official fund-raiser for the Government. Its first task was to rebuild the navy which had been decimated by the French in the Battle of Beachy Head – not a popular topic for English history lessons!
Yet none to continue Stuart line
I
t was sadly appropriate that Queen Anne – the last Stuart to rule Britain – was born in 1665, the year of the Great Plague. Her life was to be overshadowed by tragedy and ill-health.
Anne’s great sorrow was her inability to bear living children: 17 pregnancies in 16 years left her with no heir and a shattered constitution. Her only child to survive infancy died aged eleven. By the time she succeeded her brother-in-law, William III, to the throne in 1702 at the age of 37, she was an obese invalid suffering frequent pain from gout and convulsive fits.
Being rendered immobile at times by her condition, the Queen had to be moved about on chairs and by pulleys – even to be lowered through trap doors. As a result, she led a largely sedentary life, disliking the outdoors, and restricting herself to public appearances only when necessary.
It was Queen Anne who is largely responsible for turning Bath into a fashionable resort for the aristocracy. Her visit in 1702 to ‘take the waters’, which were deemed to have healing qualities, set the trend for Georgian society.
Despite her misfortunes, Anne was a popular and conscientious ruler with a devoted husband in Prince George of Denmark. The alliance she made with her sister Mary against their father, James II, later left Anne with guilty feelings. By way of compensation, perhaps, she reigned with fairness and consideration for different opinions in politics. She is credited with overseeing the Act of Union of Scotland and England in 1707, which has persisted to the present day, and also the acquisition of territorial gains which laid the foundation of the British Empire.
But Anne’s failure to produce an heir spelled the end of the Stuart dynasty when she died in 1714. The throne would pass to a stranger who spoke no English.