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Oct. 1651. The 14th day of this moneth King Charles the Second went from our towne out of Mr. Smiths house and was taken abroad by Nics: Tetersoale [&] carreyed by him to Fraunce, etc. And retorned [h]ome & landed at Dover againe the 29th of May 1660.
Adam Cartwright, town clerk, writing in the parish register of Brighton
The Cavalier Parliament met for the first time in May 1661, and sat for nearly three-quarters of Charles II’s twenty-five-year reign. It became known as ‘the Pensioner Parliament’ because of the number of awards granted by the king to those who had supported him during his time waiting for the throne. As Colonel Gunter commented, when comparing the dire days of the autumn of 1651 with the subsequent prospects of rich prizes: ‘So few friends then had his Sacred Majesty in his distresses, now so numerous in expectation of reward.’1
Those who had any claim at all to compensation for their services or their loyalty to the Crown came forward. Among them were the truly worthy, such as Mary Graves, who had helped to supply the king’s army in Worcester during the run-up to the battle, and had also sent Charles two fine horses for his own use, and ten mounted fighting men for his army. After supporting a failed Royalist uprising in 1659 she had suffered the confiscation of all her property. She now sought £30,000 from the king.
George Paterick had served both Charles I and II in the army and the navy for sixteen years, and had consequently been imprisoned on several occasions by Parliament. A former waterman who ferried passengers across the Thames for a fee, he now asked for the honour of a place as an oarsman on the royal barge.
Katherine de Luke had suffered repeatedly and terribly for the Crown. She lost her husband to battlefield wounds, and a son to indentured slavery. After being caught smuggling secret letters she was sentenced to imprisonment, with the added punishment of a whipping every other day. She was tortured on various occasions, with lit matches applied to her body to try to get her to betray fellow Royalists.
Some other claims were, it has to be said, more tenuous. One man hoped for remuneration for having been in charge of Charles’s tennis shoes and ankle socks as a young man. A Robert Thomas expected reward for being the son of Charles’s childhood seamstress, even though she was dead. Another petitioner, Robert Chamberlain, trusted that the king would see fit to reward him because he was, he claimed, 110 years old. He seems to have confused the quality of loyalty with the luck of longevity.
Elizabeth Elliot hoped for special treatment. She was the daughter of Christabella Wyndham, who had served as wet-nurse to Charles as a baby, and been his first lover when he was fourteen. Relying on her mother’s earlier role in the king’s life, Elizabeth referred to herself in her petition as ‘His Majesty’s foster sister’, and assured Charles that it was ‘the greatest happiness that could befall her, to suck the same breast with so great a monarch’.2 This was not to prove a strong enough bond for her to secure a rich reward.
All those who were known to have helped the king on his famous escape were celebrated for their involvement in it. The new monarch wanted everyone to know about the adventure, and even planned to found an exalted new chivalric fellowship based on the most celebrated episode during his time as a fugitive: the Order of the Oak Tree. Meanwhile, 29 May, the day of Charles’s restoration, became Oak Apple Day, a public holiday that would serve as an annual celebration of the miraculous escape. With this desire to luxuriate in the tale came a necessity to reward its key players.
Lord Wilmot did not live to see the Restoration. At the end of 1652 Charles had granted ‘his faithful and watchful attendant’, as Colonel Gunter would call him, the first peerage of his reign, making him the 1st Earl of Rochester.
The new earl was sent on an embassy to the diet of the Holy Roman Empire at Regensburg, in Bavaria. Against the expectations of the demoralised court in exile, he managed to secure the promise of £68,000. When payment was delayed he circulated Germany, overseeing its collection with determination and charm. The money eventually raised by Rochester would pay Charles and his attendants’ expenses for three years.
Less successful was a return to England in 1655, to instigate and oversee the northern part of a general Royalist rebellion, led by Colonel John Penruddock, whose other focus was in Salisbury. Cromwell’s spies were aware of Rochester’s presence from the moment he landed, but the Lord Protector chose to follow his progress closely, rather than seize the Royalist hero. This time Rochester did resort to disguises, one of them as a Frenchman with a blond wig. Another, which must have been more challenging for this caricature of a high-living Cavalier to carry off, had him dressing as a peasant farmer.
Rochester spread the word of the impending uprising amongst Royalist sympathisers, meeting groups of them in bogus hunting parties. They were to meet at Marston Moor, scene of their crushing defeat eleven years earlier, and then march on York. Based on promises that had been made to him, Rochester counted on the support of 4,000 men, but only a tiny fraction of that number materialised at the appointed time and place, many having become confused about key details, including the date on which they were meant to muster.
The result was, in a way, a repeat of Worcester, with cautious Englishmen remaining at home to see the outcome of the first encounter before venturing their lives in the king’s cause. When Rochester saw how few men had actually rallied, he decided to abandon the endeavour, and ordered everyone to stand down.
On his way south afterwards he showed his customary disregard for his own safety, staying in a succession of inns rather than keeping off the beaten track, and even making a detour to inspect some of his wife’s property. His luck ran out when he was detained in Aylesbury, but he bribed his captor and got away to London. There he was on the point of being recaptured, but he was alerted to the danger by the regicide Colonel Hutchinson, and managed to ride on to Sussex, where he once again called on the assistance of Colonel George Gunter. This time Gunter and his old servant John Day were able to secure a small boat at Emsworth in Hampshire that took Rochester across the Channel to safety. He eventually reached Charles in Cologne.
In 1656 Rochester led the English regiment that Charles had placed in Spanish service to fight the French, after France had allied with Cromwell’s England. Rochester was thus the first colonel of the Grenadier Guards, the senior infantry regiment of the British Army to this day.
During the winter of 1657–58, conditions in camp were terrible. Rochester became ill, dying at Sluys in Flanders on 19 February 1658, at the age of forty-five, and was buried in Bruges. After the Restoration his body was moved to the family tombs in Spelsbury church, in Oxfordshire.
His son John, 2nd Earl of Rochester, was born on 10 April 1647.* Addicted to women and wine, and famous for his lewdness and wit, young Lord Rochester became one of the more outrageous figures in Charles II’s hedonistic court. His verses included blatant digs at his partner in excess, Charles II. One reads:
Here lies our sovereign Lord the King
Whose word no man relies on.
Who never said a foolish thing
Nor ever did a wise one.
Many of the other participants in the escape were still alive at Charles’s restoration, nine years after the escape from Worcester.
Before the king left for Bristol disguised as Jane Lane’s servant, he promised to look after Father John Huddleston if he was ever restored to the throne. Some time after this Huddleston joined the Catholic order of the Benedictines of the Spanish Congregation. After the Restoration in 1660 he was invited to live at Somerset House in London, under the protection of Queen Henrietta Maria.
In 1661 the General Chapter of the English Benedictines, held at Douai, elected Huddleston to the titular dignity of cathedral prior of Worcester, in recognition of his services to the Crown a decade earlier. After Henrietta Maria’s death in 1669 he was appointed chaplain to Queen Catherine, Charles II’s wife, with a salary of £100 a year and a pension of a further £100. On the accession of James II in 1685 Huddleston continued to stay with Queen Catherine at Somerset House. He died at the age of ninety, after a period of dementia.
Charles had made a similar personal promise to the Penderels to reward them should he ever return to the throne. This was given when he thanked four of the brothers after they had safely delivered him to Lord Wilmot at Moseley Hall. It was immediately honoured. On 13 June 1660, when Charles had only been back in England two weeks, the five brothers and their mother Jane were summoned to come to see the king at Westminster. During this audience the family took great pleasure in reminding Charles of Humphrey’s line when leading his slow horse through the night from Boscobel House to Moseley Hall: ‘My liege, can you blame the horse to go heavily, when he has the weight of three kingdoms on his back?’
‘Trusty Richard’ received £200, to which a pension was later added, for him and his heirs in perpetuity. Richard died of a fever in February 1672, while visiting London. He was buried at St Giles-in-the-Fields, a church then on the outskirts of the capital, which had strong connections with Charles I and the Royalists.
Elizabeth, the Penderel sister who was the widow of the Francis Yates who guided Charles II to Whiteladies, and who was later hanged at Oxford without revealing the king’s whereabouts, was given an annual pension of £50 ‘for her and her heirs forever’.
Margaret, the Penderel sister who fed the king in Spring Coppice while the enemy was all around, was married to the Francis Yates who lent Charles ten shillings and helped to take him from Boscobel to Moseley. This Francis Yates knew immediately after the Restoration that he was dying, and it was noted ‘that the said Francis had lately died of grief, that he could not present himself to his Majesty’.3
Another of the women from the family, Joan, the wife of William Penderel, had to wait for her reward for a key moment in the escape. The Calendar of State Papers records that on 10 July 1663 there was a warrant ‘for £100 for Joan Pendrel, the person who gathered sticks and diverted the horseman from the oak His Majesty was in’.
Humphrey, the fourth Penderel brother – the miller – lived till 1710. In 1673 he claimed that the pension he had been awarded was only being paid in part, and that he was consequently in debt. Seven years after that, Samuel Pepys noted that Humphrey was ‘still’ serving Queen Catherine as a footman in Somerset House.
Major William Careless, having joined Charles in France after his own escape, returned to serve him in Flanders in 1656, fighting alongside other Royalist exiles, including Wilmot, in the English force that Charles put forward to fight the French. In May 1658 Charles marked Careless out for unique distinction, having the major change his name to ‘Carlos’, the Spanish version of the king’s Christian name. He also granted Carlos a coat of arms that would forever recall their most celebrated day together. The Letters Patent describe it as being ‘upon an oak proper, in a field or, a foss gules, charged with three royal crowns of the second, by the name of Carlos. And for his crest a civic crown, or oak garland, with a sword and sceptre crossed through it saltier-wise.’ This was a suitable honour for a man who, the king would inform the College of Arms, possessed ‘singular fidelity’ and ‘an ever generous heart’.
After the Restoration Carlos was made the beneficiary of various petty taxes levied around London, involving horse feed and shipping supplies, and he received a pension as well. He was one of those who would have become a Knight of the Royal Oak, had that order come into being. He was buried near Boscobel House on Oak Apple Day, 1689.
Once the story of Charles’s flight from Worcester became well known, the Boscobel oak became the most celebrated tree in England. It was a point of pilgrimage after 1660, with souvenir hunters pulling bits off it as relics of what was seen as a tale of divine intervention. Snuffboxes were made from it, and walking sticks carved from it. In 1680 a wall had to be built to protect it, but it could not be fully shielded, and by 1712 the oak was all but destroyed. Its acorns were harvested, and a descendant of the original tree thrived in much the same spot until it was badly damaged in a storm in 2000.
Charles had got on very well with Anne, the widowed mother of Thomas Whitgreave, during his stay at Moseley Hall. On the Restoration he made sure she received the confiscated estate and house back in her name, something repeatedly denied to her during the years of Cromwell and the Commonwealth because of her family’s Royalism and Roman Catholicism.
Francis Reynolds, one of the three boys tutored by Father Huddleston who had acted as lookouts at Moseley, was rewarded for having been ‘very serviceable in holding the king’s horses’ before he rode from Moseley to Bentley. Huddleston noted that Reynolds ‘received considerable kindness from the King since, by an office’ in the Royal Household,4 but he lost it during the enormous political instability in England in 1678, in the wake of the Popish Plot.
This ‘plot’ was a fabrication put about by the Anglican priest Titus Oates, claiming that Roman Catholics were conspiring to kill Charles II. While this provoked a backlash against Catholics, Parliament voted that Major Carlos, Father Huddleston, Thomas Whitgreave, the Penderel family, and all the main Catholics involved in the king’s escape should ‘for their said service live as freely as any of the King’s Protestant subjects, without being liable to the penalties of any of the laws relating to Popish recusants’.
Jane Lane had been a popular member of the court in exile since her arrival there at the end of 1651. John Evelyn would record proudly in his diary how he had met her: ‘Came to visit my wife Mrs Lane, the Lady who conveyed the King at his escape from Worcester to the seaside.’5 The dowager queen Henrietta Maria and Charles himself greatly enjoyed her lively company.
In 1652, as Charles settled reluctantly back into a life of waiting – hoping – for a chance to reclaim his throne, he had found Jane a position in his sister Mary of Orange’s household in the Netherlands. That summer Jane wrote to Charles, saying that he had probably already forgotten her, while informing him that her elderly father, whose supposed grave illness had been so crucial during their travels, and her brother, Colonel John Lane, had been imprisoned by Parliament. Charles replied with playful affection, gratitude, and some concern:
Mrs Lane,
I did not think I should ever have begun a letter to you in chiding, but you give me so just cause by telling me your fear you are wearing out of my memory that I cannot choose but tell you I take it very unkindly that after all the obligations I have to you, ’tis possible for you to suspect I can ever be so wanting to myself as not to remember them on all occasions to your advantage, which I assure you, I shall and hope before long I shall have it in my power to give you testimonies of my kindness to you which I desire. I am very sorry to hear that your father and brother are in prison, but I hope it is of no other score than the general clapping of all persons who wish me well and I am the more sorry for it. Now it hath hindered you from coming along with my sister that I might have assured you myself how truly I am
Your Most affectionate friend, For Mrs Lane,
Charles R.
Charles made good his promise eight years later. On his restoration to the throne he granted Jane £1,000 per year for life, and gave her a portrait of himself, as well as a gold watch and a lock of his hair. He also rewarded the Lane family as a whole, allowing them to incorporate the three lions of England into their coat of arms. Included in the design was the strawberry roan horse on which Charles had ridden to Bristol with Jane. It is seen carrying a crown, and the motto ‘Garde Le Roy’ – ‘Protect the king’. In the general celebration of Royalism that marked the return of the king to England, Parliament voted Jane a further £1,000, with which to buy a memento of her part in Charles’s escape.
In December 1663 she married Sir Clement Fisher, who had hidden Lord Wilmot in his Warwickshire mansion when Wilmot had been on his way to join Jane and the king at Abbots Leigh. Sir Clement had other Royalist credentials, having been fined heavily for his service to the Crown. This loyal couple’s marriage was officiated by the Archbishop of Canterbury. There would be no children. Jane lived an extravagant life, perhaps relying on the timely payment of her pension when it was, in reality, often delayed owing to hiccoughs in the royal finances. At her death in 1689 she left just £10.
George Norton, Jane’s cousin, in whose home, Abbots Leigh, Charles had hidden till Ellen Norton’s miscarriage, was given a knighthood and a pension.
Henry Lascelles, the cornet who accompanied Charles and Jane, died in or before 1662. On the back of her late brother’s service, his sister sought a place as laundress to the queen.
The other woman to help Charles on his way on horseback, Juliana Coningsby, petitioned in 1665 for a pension that had been promised to her, and was eventually awarded £200 a year.
Father Humphrey Henchman, so helpful in the final leg of the escape, was made the Bishop of Salisbury.
Colonel George Gunter had died, in his late sixties, a year before the Restoration.
His cousin, Captain Thomas Gunter, was made Clerk of the Crown for North Wales in 1661. He also received a bounty of £200 for his help in getting Charles away from Shoreham.
Colonel Robert Phillips was arrested and committed to the Tower of London in 1653. He escaped and joined Charles in France. After the Restoration he was granted a pension of £500. A lawyer, he became an MP and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
Colonel Francis Wyndham, of Trent in Somerset, had been imprisoned as a suspected rebel after Penruddock’s unsuccessful rising of 1655. At the Restoration the military ability of the brave defender of Dunster Castle was recognised when he was made a major in the Royal Horse Guards. His important part in the king’s escape was also acknowledged on 17 December 1660, when the speaker of the Commons thanked him on behalf of the House for ‘great and eminent service, whereby it pleased God to make you instrumental in the safeguard and preservation of his Majesty’s sacred person’. Wyndham was voted an annual pension of £1,000. He was also given a reward of £10,000 in 1670, and was created a baronet. As an MP he took particular interest in suppressing highwaymen. In 1675, when very ill indeed, he wrote from Bath: ‘I fear I shall not hereafter be capable to do His Majesty any further service than by my prayers for the long continuance of his prosperity and happiness.’ He died the following year, aged sixty-six, and was buried at Trent.
Anne Wyndham, the colonel’s wife, was given a pension for life of £400, but its payment was delayed, and she only received it from 1667 onwards.
Thomas Symonds, Charles’s well-oiled host at dinner in Hambledon, who had goaded the king for being a Roundhead, was rewarded at the Restoration with the fitting gift of a drinking cup.
Francis Mançell, the French merchant, had been declared an outlaw by the Commonwealth and left penniless. After the Restoration he was granted a pension of £200. In 1667 he petitioned to have it honoured, since he had not received the money for four years.
At the Restoration, the Surprise became a fifth-rate vessel in Charles II’s navy, and was renamed the Royal Escape. Her captain, Nicholas Tattersall, was given a pension of £100, a miniature of the king, and the rank of captain in the navy. This promotion was not a success, and he was subsequently dismissed. He died in the summer of 1674. On his tombstone was a fourteen-line verse that included a very full celebration of his part in the story:
… In this cold clay he hath now taken up his station
At once preserved ye church, ye Crown and Nation
When Charles ye Great was nothing to a breath
This valiant soul stepped between him and death …
Which glorious act of his for Church and State
Eight princes in one day did congratulate …6
Lieutenant General David Leslie, Charles’s deputy in the Scottish invasion of England, who had held back his men from engaging at Worcester, and had then ridden north in the hope of escape, had spent the intervening eight and a half years in the Tower of London, where he took to drink.
Soon after arriving there, Leslie was allowed to have the liberty of the Tower and to have his servant with him. In contrast to other prisoners who were suffering appalling treatment within the same walls, he was permitted to receive friends bringing clothes and other supplies, ‘provided they only speak to him in the presence of the Lieutenant [of the Tower], or such as he shall appoint’. The Scottish general’s lenient treatment had long been anticipated, an eyewitness who had seen him in Newcastle nine days after the defeat at Worcester writing: ‘I believe old Leslie may find the more civil usage, in regard he was formerly a General for the Parliamentarians in England.’7
Many of those closest to Charles remained convinced that Leslie had acted treacherously. Thomas Wall wrote to his brother John at the end of 1651: ‘All intelligent people conclude that [the king] was betrayed by David Leslie.’8 But the king saw fit to free him, and even reward him, giving him the title of 1st Baron Newark for his services to the Royalist cause. This was seen as a slap in the face to many Cavaliers who had suffered more harshly for true loyalty.
Leslie’s fellow Scottish lieutenant general, John Middleton, also prospered. He had been taken prisoner by Parliamentary troops at the battle of Preston in 1648, and had been released on condition that he never fight against them again. When he had been wounded at, and quickly captured after, Worcester, it seemed all but certain that he would be charged with treason for breaking his word, and sentenced to death. Awaiting trial, he managed to escape from the Tower of London by changing clothes with his wife during one of her visits. He joined Charles in exile in Paris, and returned to Scotland in 1654 to lead an unsuccessful rising, before returning to the king’s side. His reward at the Restoration was being created Earl of Middleton, and receiving various high offices. Having been humiliated by the Scottish Presbyterians a decade earlier, when they forced him to wear sackcloth and ashes in public penance, he now focused on cutting back their power, and restoring the bishops.
There were losers as well as winners.
One of Charles’s reasons for allying with the Scots had been to have their assistance in bringing his father’s murderers to justice. More than twenty of the eighty regicides had died in the eleven years between Charles I’s execution and the Restoration, but the rest were now held to account for their crime.
The first to be sentenced was Major General Thomas Harrison, who was connected so closely in people’s consciousness with Charles I’s final journey to trial and execution. He was also remembered clearly by Charles II, as the man put in charge of his capture after the battle of Worcester. Harrison refused to flee at the return of the Stuart regime. He was arrested at home, and brought to London. He readily admitted to his actions in court, and was condemned to die by hanging, drawing and quartering. Harrison was magnificently brave on the day of his execution, firm in his belief that whatever suffering he had to undergo, it was for his God. After being hanged half to death, then mutilated terribly by the executioner with knives and other tools, he still managed to swing a punch that sent his slaughterer flying. Samuel Pepys witnessed the major general’s death, recording how ‘his head and heart [were] shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy’.
In vengeance for the death of the Marquess of Montrose, his great enemies were executed. The Marquess of Argyll went to London on the Restoration to pay his respects to the new king, but Charles refused to see him, and had him arrested. Argyll was taken north, and sentenced to death. The watching crowd expected to see a cowardly display on the scaffold, but he died with dignity. Montrose’s rotted head was removed from the spike on Tolbooth prison, and replaced by Argyll’s.
Sir Archibald Johnston, Lord Wariston, fled abroad at the Restoration, but was captured in Rouen in early 1663. His wife petitioned Charles for mercy, stating that she ‘and her 12 children were reduced to a poor and desolate condition’,9 but it was no good. He was sent on a procession through Edinburgh, similar to that endured by Montrose, watched over by Charles’s life guards ‘with their carbines and naked swords’ at the ready, kettle drums and trumpets sounding, and a regiment of Edinburgh’s soldiers displaying their colours. He ended his life on ‘gallows of extraordinary height’ at Mercat Cross.
Montrose’s limbs were retrieved from Aberdeen, Glasgow, Perth and Stirling, and his trunk and bowels were brought from Burgh Moor. The parts were placed together in a coffin, and interred with fitting ceremony in the High Kirk of St Giles in Edinburgh.
The Covenanters received payment for the humiliation they had heaped on Charles a decade earlier, when he had chosen to sacrifice his and his father’s principles in his ill-fated bid for the English throne. Now he renounced the Covenants that he said had been forced out of him by the Scots. In 1662 they were rendered unlawful oaths, which nobody in public office could subscribe to. In a final vindication of his father’s stand, bishops were brought back to oversee the Scottish Church.
A long way further down the religious pecking order, the Reverend Benjamin Westley, the Puritan parson of Charmouth who had raised the alarm over the king’s presence nearby, was deprived of his parish. He continued his ministry as an itinerant preacher. The following century his great-grandsons, John and Charles Wesley, would found Methodism.
Sir Edward Hyde had a key hand in brokering the generous terms on which the king returned, and became his most important and trusted adviser. Charles was happy to dump the hard work and subtle requirements of government on Hyde’s shoulders, while he buried himself in pleasure.
The ecstasy that had greeted Charles’s return soon turned to disappointment, as his extravagance became out of control. Further goodwill was eroded early in his reign when in 1662 he sold the French port of Dunkirk to Louis XIV for five million livres. There were also disasters that Charles was not responsible for: in 1665–66, the bubonic plague claimed the lives of 200,000 of his subjects, while in 1666 the Great Fire of London consumed more than 13,000 houses in the city. There was national humiliation in 1667, when the Dutch fleet sailed up the River Medway and destroyed thirteen ships while capturing the Royal Charles. It was this last that proved disastrous for Hyde.
Just as Charles had turned away from Hyde when he had advised playing a waiting game, and not allying with enemies of England and its established Church, so he chose to listen to Hyde’s enemies in court and Parliament. They were jealous of his influence, which had increased in 1660 when the Duke of York married Hyde’s daughter Anne, whom he had made pregnant. Hyde was given the title of Earl of Clarendon, and £20,000 to support that position, the following year. In 1663 he became one of the eight Lords Proprietor of a huge tract of land in America that became the colony of Carolina.†
Clarendon disapproved of much of Charles’s behaviour, and never shirked from telling him so. A particular bone of contention was the king’s pleasure-seeking, which Clarendon resented because it kept him from the business of kingship. Clarendon would make the fatal mistake of meddling in matters involving the king’s mistresses.
In 1663 Charles became infatuated with Frances Stuart, a fifteen-year-old member of his wife’s court. She was the daughter of another court beauty, famous for her dancing skills, and of a doctor. Samuel Pepys reckoned Frances the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The Comte de Gramont qualified this assessment: ‘It would be difficult to imagine less brain combined with more beauty.’ Her favourite pastimes certainly tended to the childish: ‘blindman’s buff, hunt the slipper, and card-building’.10 Her nickname at court was ‘La Belle Stuart’.
Charles’s lust reached new heights when Frances seemed unobtainable, refusing to become his mistress. When his queen was seriously ill, he contemplated taking Frances as his wife as soon as he became a widower. At other times he was so distracted by sexual longing that he thought of divorce, to free himself for Frances’s hand in marriage.
The king was therefore furious when, in the spring of 1667, he learnt that his cousin the Duke of Richmond, whose second wife had recently died, had secretly married Frances. The Earl of Lauderdale, who had endured nine years of imprisonment by Parliament after the battle of Worcester, and who was now Charles II’s favourite, wrote that he had never seen the king ‘more offended than he is at the duke, and all concerned’.11 Clarendon was viewed as having had a hand in the furtive marriage. His enemies said he wanted to keep Charles married to a queen who could not have children, rather than jeopardise the inheritance of his own granddaughters, who stood second and third in line to the throne.
Clarendon also managed to cross swords with Barbara Castlemaine, the king’s favourite mistress throughout the 1660s. Charles wanted Barbara on hand in the court, even after the arrival of his wife Catherine of Braganza in 1662. The queen implored Clarendon to spare her from this humiliation, but when Clarendon asked the king to reconsider Castlemaine’s court position, Charles bared his teeth: ‘If you desire to have the continuance of my friendship, meddle no more with this business … whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy in this matter, I do promise, upon my word, to be his enemy as long as I live.’12 Castlemaine worked with Clarendon’s rivals to unseat him. There were plenty of enemies to help in this, because of his famed arrogance and short temper, as well as jealousy at his power and influence.
Charles, bored with Clarendon’s moralising and resentful of his executive power, agreed to his dismissal in disgrace. In 1667 Clarendon was made the scapegoat for the Dutch naval triumph in the Medway. Having originally hoped that he could ride out his master’s displeasure, Clarendon took Charles’s heavy hints and removed himself to France, hoping that this would eventually lead to forgiveness and accommodation. There he finished writing his great history of the Civil Wars before dying suddenly of a stroke, at the age of sixty-five, in 1674. Two of his granddaughters, Mary and Anne, became queens of England.
* John’s childhood tutor was a member of the Giffard family, which had provided Whiteladies and Boscobel House as hiding places during Charles’s flight.
† A fellow Lord Proprietor was Sir George Carteret, who had held the island of Jersey for the Crown, and had twice provided a safe haven there for Charles in the five years before Worcester. Carteret was also given joint ownership of a large tract of land between the Delaware River and the Hudson River. This was named ‘New Jersey’.