Civil War: The History of England Volume III (57 page)

Parliament met on 8 May; the proximity of the two occasions was a tribute to the notion of ‘the crown in parliament’, the title of supreme power in England. Since half of the new members came from families that had suffered in the royalist cause, it became known as ‘the Cavalier Parliament’. They were for the most part young men but the king remarked that ‘he would keep them till they got beards’; he fulfilled the promise by maintaining this parliament for a further eighteen years.

They of course supported his cause, and that of the bishops, but they were most intent on maintaining the privileges of the gentry from which they had largely come. The Presbyterians were in a small minority, and were in no position to check or obstruct what might be described as the conservative tide. In a series of Acts, over a period of five years, parliament enforced Anglican supremacy upon the nation. Two weeks after it met the ‘solemn league and covenant’, which had pledged the nation to a Presbyterian settlement with Scotland, was summarily burned by the common
hangman at Westminster and other places in the city. John Evelyn remarked, ‘Oh, prodigious change!’

By the Corporation Act of 1661, the municipal leaders of town or city were confined to those who received communion by the rites of the Church of England; the mayors and aldermen were also obliged to take an oath of allegiance and affirm that it was not lawful to take up arms against the king. The Act was designed to remove those of a nonconformist persuasion whose loyalty might be suspect.

An Act of Uniformity was passed in the following year which restricted the ministry to those who had been ordained by a bishop and who accepted the provisions of the Book of Common Prayer. These conditions effectively disqualified 1,700 puritan clergy, who were therefore ejected from their livings. It was the most sudden alteration in the religious history of the nation. Some said that it was an act of revenge by the Anglicans after their persecution during the days of the commonwealth, but it may also have been a means whereby the royalist gentry regained control of their parishes.

Some of the ejected clergy were reduced to poverty and the utmost distress. One of their number, Richard Baxter, recalled that ‘their congregations had enough to do . . . to help them out of prisons, or to maintain them there’. John Bunyan, for example, was imprisoned in Bedford Prison for nonconformist preaching. He wrote that ‘the parting with my wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling of the flesh from the bones’; yet in his prison cell he dreamed of eternity.

Much popular derision was directed at the godly ministers. The dissenting preachers were mocked and hooted at in the street. Ben Jonson’s
Bartholomew Fair
, in which puritans were roundly scorned, was revived with great popular success. The Quakers in particular were badly treated and, during the reign of Charles, 4,000 were consigned to prison; Clarendon had said that they were ‘a sort of people upon whom tenderness and lenity do not at all prevail’.

Yet the rigour of the new law was averted in some areas. Many Presbyterians or ‘church puritans’ were more flexible in obeying the law; the clergy of these congregations might well retain their livings in acts of subtle compromise. Some authorities were in any case reluctant to enforce the law, and the ecclesiastical courts were not always efficient.

In two further Acts of subsequent years the attendance at religious assemblies, other than those of the official Church, was punished by imprisonment; no puritan clergyman or schoolmaster could come within 5 miles of a town or city. These measures did not reflect the king’s promise of toleration for all honest Christians, as he had announced in the ‘declaration’ of Breda before sailing to England, but it is likely that he was being pressed by the young men of parliament; he acceded to their demands because he did not wish to lose their support in the funding of his revenues.

It would in the end prove impossible to subdue the whole body of nonconformist worshippers, now bound together by the pressure of shared persecution; but, by attempting to impose Anglican worship, the members of the ‘Cavalier Parliament’ opened up the great fissure between Anglicanism and dissenting faiths that would never be resolved. An informal network of meetings brought together Independents, Baptists and Presbyterians in sharp distinction to the established Church. No national religious settlement had been achieved. The days of the disputes between church and chapel would soon come.

Other measures followed in what was a series of busy parliamentary sessions. A new ‘hearth tax’ was passed in the spring of 1662, with a charge of 1 shilling for each hearth to be paid twice a year; the response was clamant and immediate. A saying passed through the streets of London to the effect that ‘the bishops get all, the courtiers spend all, the citizens pay for all, the king neglects all and the devil takes all’. A Licensing Act was approved, by which it was ordered that no book might be published without the approval of an official censor; this was largely directed against nonconformist writings that would now come under the gaze of the bishop of London and the archbishop of Canterbury. The atmosphere of free debate that had pertained for much of Cromwell’s rule came to an end.

These measures against ‘toleration’ came at a price. Pepys reported that all of the ‘fanatics’ were discontented and ‘that the king do take away their liberty of conscience’; he deplored ‘the height of the bishops who I fear will ruin all again’. The puritan clergy were ordered to abandon their livings on 24 August 1662, St Bartholomew’s Day, and in many places the congregations came in great numbers to hear and
lament their ‘farewell sermons’. More spirited protest was also expected. Ever since the king’s arrival in England minor uprisings by ‘fanatics’ had disturbed the peace, and through the spring and summer of 1662 fears rose of some concerted puritan resistance. A general rising was supposed to be planned for August, and from all over the country came reports of seditious meetings and treasonable speeches. Lord Fauconberg, lord-lieutenant of the North Riding of Yorkshire, claimed that in Lancashire ‘not one man in the whole county intends to conform’; reports of the same nature came from his own county of Yorkshire and the West Country, while London was known to be the spiritual home of zealotry and sectarianism. The lords-lieutenant of the various counties were told to watch ‘all those known to be of the Republic party’.

Yet these apprehensions were generally without foundation. The Anglican Church was now supreme under the leadership of the cleric who in 1663 was consecrated as archbishop of Canterbury; Gilbert Burnet wrote of Archbishop Sheldon that ‘he seemed not to have a deep sense of religion, if any at all, and spoke of it most commonly as of an engine of government and a matter of policy’. The bishops, for example, had been returned to their seats in the House of Lords where they could exert a strong influence upon national legislation; yet it was also true that parliament, and not the Church, had taken control of the nature and direction of the national religion.

The actual faith of the people was no doubt as inchoate and confused as ever. One Lancastrian apprentice, Roger Lowe, recorded in 1663 that ‘I was pensive and sad and went into the town field and prayed to the Lord, and I hope the Lord heard’.

At a meeting of the council, just after parliament had been summoned, Charles told his advisers that he had decided to marry the infanta of Portugal, Catherine of Braganza; he had already announced his preferences when he said that ‘I hate Germans, or princesses of cold countries’. The mother of the intended bride, the queen regent of Portugal, had also offered £800,000 together with her colonial territories of Bombay and Tangier in order to sweeten the arrangement. English merchants were also to be permitted to
trade freely throughout the Portuguese Empire, thus assisting England in its rivalry with the Dutch. In return Portugal wished to recruit English soldiers in its war with the neighbouring power of Spain, which was eager to take back its rebellious province. A marriage could accomplish a great deal.

Another matrimonial alliance completed what may be called the ‘foreign policy’ of Charles. His sister Henrietta was married off to the homosexual brother of Louis XIV and helped to inaugurate closer relations between France and England that came in the end to be too close. Louis XIV was feared and distrusted for his attempt to raise himself up as ‘universal monarch’ in the face of Spanish decline; nevertheless Charles admired his absolutist and centralized rule that he had some obscure hope of emulating.

The king travelled down to Portsmouth to meet his bride, and reported to Clarendon that ‘her face is not so exact as to be called a beauty though her eyes are excellent good, and not anything in her face that in the least degree can shock one’. This may not amount to a ringing endorsement but, for a royal union, it was fairly satisfactory. Her teeth stuck out a little, and her hair was swept to the side in the Portuguese fashion. The king is said privately to have remarked, ‘Gentlemen, you have brought me a bat.’ One of Catherine’s first requests was for a cup of tea, then a novelty. Instead she was offered a glass of ale.

She had arrived with what one contemporary, the comte de Gramont, described as ‘six frights, who called themselves maids-of-honour and a duenna, another monster, who took the title of governess to those extraordinary beauties’. Much fun was also made of their great fardingales, or hooped skirts of whalebone beneath their dresses.

Catherine had some formidable competition. The king was known to be an insatiable and compulsive philanderer, and Pepys calculated that he had had seventeen mistresses even before the Restoration. John Dryden, in
Absalom and Achitophel
, characterized him thus:

Then, Israel’s monarch, after Heaven’s own heart,

His vigorous warmth did variously impart

To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command,

Scatter’d his Maker’s image through the land.

Or, as the earl of Rochester put it more bluntly,

Restless he rolls from whore to whore,

A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.

By a previous lover, Lucy Walter, he had a son who would in 1663 become duke of Monmouth. His present mistress was Barbara Palmer, whose husband had been ennobled as the earl of Castlemaine; Lady Castlemaine soon became indispensable to his pleasure, and it was reported by Pepys that she ruled the king by employing ‘all the tricks of Aretino [a poet of obscenity] . . . in which he is too able having a large—’ The rest is silence. The lady was already heavily pregnant by the time that Catherine arrived in England.

The king’s appetite for Lady Castlemaine was such that he appointed her to be his wife’s lady-of-the-bedchamber. Catherine objected to the convenient arrangement, and her anger led to an estrangement between the royal couple. The new queen of England was receiving company at Hampton Court when her husband led Lady Castlemaine into the room; she may not have correctly heard her name since she received her calmly enough but, on being made aware of the lady’s identity, she burst into tears before fainting. Clarendon was used by the king as a mediator and, in the end, the queen gave way and welcomed her rival.

In truth she had become devoted to her husband, and in no way wished to alienate his affections. She could do nothing, however, to fulfil her primary role; she seemed to be incapable of bearing children. It was not for want of trying. An Italian visitor at the court, Lorenzo Magalotti, heard that the queen was ‘unusually sensitive to pleasure’ and that after intercourse ‘blood comes from her genital parts in such great abundance that it does not stop for several days’.

In time the king would become enamoured of another mistress, Frances Stewart, of whom the comte de Gramont said that it would be difficult to imagine less brain combined with more beauty. She was the model, complete with helmet and trident, for the figure of Britannia on British coins. Charles was always in love with someone
or other. By seventeen of his known mistresses he had thirteen illegitimate children, some of whom became dukes or earls. The story of Nell Gwynn has often been told.

The royal court itself had become the object of much scandal and remark. Macaulay, in an essay for the
Edinburgh Review
, remarked of a no doubt exaggerated example that ‘a dead child is found in the palace, the offspring of some maid of honour by some courtier, or perhaps by Charles himself. The whole flight of pandars and buffoons pounces upon it and carries it to the royal laboratory, where his majesty, after a brutal jest, dissects it for the amusement of the assembly, and probably of its father among the rest.’

The rule of the saints had been replaced by the rule of the sinners who seemed to compete with each other in drunkenness and debauchery. When a bishop preached in the royal chapel against ‘mistaken jollity’ the congregation laughed at him. When the court visited Oxford a scholar, Anthony Wood, observed that ‘they were nasty and beastly, leaving at their departure their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coalhouses, cellars. Rude, rough, whoremongers; vain, empty, careless.’ And of course they took their morals and manners from their royal leader. Other royal courts were no doubt characterized by profligacy and sexual licence – the court of William II comes to mind – but never had they been so widely observed and criticized.

A circle of ‘wits’ emerged around the king; among them were George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, and Charles, Sir Sedley. They were accustomed to meet in the apartments of the king’s latest lover or in the lodgings of the notorious William Chiffinch who became ‘keeper of the king’s private closet’, where their most notable contribution to court life was a number of highly obscene poems and stories. Their wit was manifested in verbal extravagance and dexterity, in puns and allusions, or, as Robert Boyle put it, ‘a subtlety in conceiving things . . . a quickness and neatness in expressing them’.

There was much to ridicule. In the summer of 1663 Lord Sedley appeared naked on the balcony of the Cock Inn in Bow Street where, according to Samuel Pepys, he proceeded to enact ‘all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined, and abusing of scripture’. He delivered a mock sermon in which he declared that
‘he hath to sell such a powder as should make all the cunts in town run after him’. After the recital ‘he took a glass of wine and washed his prick in it and then drank it off; and then took another, and drank the king’s health’. He then took down his breeches and proceeded to ‘excrementize’.