4

Majesty

As an eight-year-old, Charles had learned about the impressive majesty of monarchical power from his mentor, the Earl of Newcastle, who had counselled the young prince that ‘you cannot put upon you too much king’. Emphasizing the importance of ceremony – the whole panoply of fine furniture, rich attire, ornate coaches and heralds and trumpeters at court – Newcastle defined it as ‘the mist [that] is cast before’ all subjects.¹ At Charles’s restoration, another author, James Heath, likewise advised the new king that his best strategy was to use ‘State Grandezzas’ to exploit the ‘silent yet awful majesty’ of ‘magnificent public appearances’.² Given his early schooling in the vital importance of spectacle and ceremony in sustaining royal power, we should therefore be wary of accepting at face value Charles’s derision of the Spanish Habsburg court when he objected to Pepys that his namesake Carlos II ‘does nothing but under some ridiculous form or other, and will not piss but another must hold the chamber-pot’.³ While Charles did not require a servant to hold his own chamber-pot, he was overlooking somewhat similar rituals at Whitehall: as a young courtier, Thomas Bruce, Earl of Ailesbury, recalled being required to hold a candle as the king relieved himself, while another groom ‘who always had some amusing buffoonery in his head … held some paper’.⁴

Yet one of the most striking paradoxes about Charles was that, despite promoting a majestic image, reinforced by regular ritual, he was also one of British history’s most accessible monarchs, combining the natural informality of his grandfather James I and VI with an innate gregariousness and personal magnetism. As king, he practised other sound advice he had received from Newcastle as a child, recognizing that sometimes doffing ‘a hat or a smile in the right place will advantage you’.⁵ Having also experienced at first hand the hardships of civil warfare and years of impecunious foreign exile, Charles had acquired rare royal insight into the lives of many of his subjects, as illustrated by his success in concealing his identity and evading capture during his legendary escape from Worcester in 1651, when he had adopted various disguises, from farm labourer to lady’s manservant. Returning with the king from the Netherlands in 1660, Pepys recorded how one of Charles’s favoured dogs ‘[shat] in the boat, which made us laugh’, prompting the twenty-seven-year-old diarist to acknowledge ‘that a King and all that belong to him are but just as others are’. The following year, Pepys confirmed that Charles’s preferred attire was ‘a plain common riding-suit and velvet cap’, ensuring that ‘he seemed a very ordinary man to one that had not known him’.⁶ At Whitehall, Charles enjoyed strolling around and meeting people in the newly redesigned gardens in St James’s Park that included a canal, ornamental waterworks and an aviary. The actor and playwright Colley Cibber later recalled Charles’s ‘indolent amusement of playing with his dogs, and feeding his ducks in St James’s Park’, recognizing that the king’s approachable demeanour ‘made the common people adore him’ and overlook other shortcomings in his personality.⁷

Whereas Charles I had preferred the privacy of Whitehall’s confines, his son frequented plays in public theatres and attended civic entertainments, such as the Lord Mayor’s Show in London. Away from the capital, Charles became particularly relaxed at Newmarket where, as the MP Sir John Reresby observed, he relished the various attractions so much ‘that he let himself down from majesty to the very degree of a country gentleman’, ‘mixed himself among the crowd’ and ‘allowed every man to speak to him that pleased’.⁸ On other occasions, the king’s instinctive spontaneity even tested civic etiquette. Having sailed to Portsmouth in July 1671, for instance, Charles decided on a whim to sail onwards to Plymouth, where the local dignitaries were not only ‘so surprised’ by his sudden appearance in the town but, deprived of a chance to bid a formal farewell, they also ‘went after him in a wherry’ along the coast to the king’s next destination, Mount Edgcumbe.⁹

In London, Charles primarily resided at Whitehall Palace, which initially extended to a chaotic maze of around 1,400 rooms for the royal family and courtiers. With large formal halls, chambers and countless corridors and secret stairways, the palace’s architecture has been described as ‘admirably suited to Charles’s style of kingship, at once very open and devious’.¹⁰ While Charles quickly sought to remodel and improve the outdated accommodation, boundaries between public and private spheres became increasingly blurred as he imported new practices from the continent, such as morning and evening rituals of ‘lever’ and ‘coucher’, whereby the king’s daily dressing, shaving, donning his wig and preparing for bed were attended by courtiers and invited guests. Yet even by the early 1680s, Charles’s court was never fastidious or austere. Ailesbury later recalled discomforts he had endured as a young courtier berthed in close proximity to the king to keep watch on ‘Scotch coal’ burning in smoky fires while ‘a dozen dogs … came to our beds’ and various clocks struck every fifteen minutes, but ‘all not going alike, it was a continual chiming’.¹¹

In a country that regarded ceremonial and communal eating as an accurate indicator of social status, Charles also revived the royal practice of dining in public, both at the Banqueting House and in his Presence Chamber. In doing so, he retained the emphasis on formal dining that had been maintained throughout his exile, despite reduced circumstances, when refined culinary standards survived fears of imminent bankruptcy or malnourishment. When the royal court was located in Paris in the summer of 1653, for example, Edward Hyde admitted that ‘all of us owe for God knows how many weeks to the poor woman that feeds us’.¹² Privation nevertheless remained relative. While based in Cologne, for instance, the exiled court’s lunch on 5 November 1655 comprised a veritable feast of roast chicken and partridge, veal, stewed quinces and fruit, while supper consisted of roast mutton with gravy, pigeon, lark and crayfish, with stewed apples and fruit for dessert.¹³

Unlike his Stuart predecessors, Charles received official deputations in his bedchamber and receptions for foreign ambassadors were as grand as the glittering state banquets laid on for foreign heads of state visiting Britain today. Seventeenth-century diplomatic protocol dictated the lavish exchange of presents, ensuring that in 1660, for example, Charles received a magnificent array of gifts, from Dutch fine art, furniture and sculpture, Russian sable and ermine furs and Venetian gondolas to live lions and ostriches from Morocco.¹⁴ Keen to confirm their support for the restored monarchy, foreign diplomats also organized elaborate firework displays, sumptuous parties and paid for wine to flow in urban conduits. In striking contrast to the sombre mood of Charles I’s execution a generation earlier, so many enthusiastic spectators filled the Banqueting House’s upper balcony to observe a royal audience with the Russian ambassador in December 1662 that Pepys feared it might crash down under their gathered weight. Marvelling at the gifts of ‘rich furs, hawks, carpets, cloths of tissue, and sea-horse teeth’, Pepys watched Charles handle several hawks, his hand protected by a special glove ‘wrought with gold’.¹⁵

To enhance the drama of his restoration, Charles had deliberately delayed his royal entry into London as king until his thirtieth birthday on 29 May 1660. The elaborate procession started in Deptford and passed through St George’s Fields in Southwark before moving through the City and Westminster, where Charles was presented with the sword of the City by the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Allen. Symbolic of the City’s ancient liberties and independence from the crown, the sword was magnanimously returned by Charles to the Lord Mayor, who was then permitted to precede Charles in the ensuing procession. As well as numerous civic entertainments that summer, the City of London’s livery companies also produced a spectacular aquatic pageant two years later, in August 1662, to mark Charles’s marriage to Catherine of Braganza, which compensated for the absence of court-sponsored celebration. Evelyn was enraptured, deeming the display ‘the most magnificent triumph that certainly ever floated on the Thames’ and far superior to ‘all the Venetian bucentaurs [state barges] on Ascension’ Day, when the Doge would famously marry Venice to the sea. In August 1674, Charles organized a martial re-enactment at Windsor of the siege of Maastricht that required the construction of an extensive fort, moat and counterscarp. With around five hundred actors and volunteers serving as ‘soldiers’ in a defensive garrison, another seven hundred ‘troops’ attacked the castle, jointly commanded by the Dukes of York and Monmouth. While the latter had earned commendation for his conduct during the actual siege in June 1673, Charles’s re-enactment ironically proved one of the last times that his brother and eldest son would co-operate, before becoming fatally estranged over attempts to exclude York from the royal succession. Having witnessed the spectacle with Pepys, Evelyn judged the reconstruction ‘really most diverting’, since it had appeared a convincing siege and ‘all without disorder or ill accident, but to the great satisfaction of a thousand spectators’.¹⁶

The most magnificent ceremonial occasion of the reign was, however, Charles’s coronation at Westminster Abbey on 23 April 1661, which included the crucial sacral element that confirmed his status as an individual chosen especially by God to rule. No previous monarch had been crowned on St George’s Day before and, by choosing this date, Charles ensured that the two events would thereafter be celebrated simultaneously. He also insisted that the organizing committee consult archival records to make sure that his coronation conformed to ancient practice, thereby reinforcing the legitimacy of his accession. Having witnessed the lavish outdoor spectacle – also funded by the City of London’s livery companies – that preceded the service, an exhausted Pepys concluded that he need never attend any future displays of ‘state and show’, being certain ‘never to see the like again in this world’, before waking the next day with a painful hangover.¹⁷ The ceremonial theme had been devised by a Scottish impresario, John Ogilby, who presented Charles in heroic vein, both as Aeneas founding Rome following the fall of Troy and as the emperor Augustus, who had presided over the Roman Empire’s most sustained era of peace and prosperity after republican turmoil. There were ample opportunities for spectators to see Charles – who had ordered five suits from Paris for the occasion – while provision of a maypole and Morris dancers indicated that the monarchy’s return would be accompanied by the revival of popular pastimes after a decade of Puritan proscription.

Entertainment aside, the purpose of the occasion was critical to re-establishing princely power. The solemn symbiosis between restored monarchy and the established Church was confirmed when Charles swore the coronation oath, was anointed with holy oil and invested with the royal robes and regalia. In marked contrast to his Scottish coronation in 1651, where Charles had been humiliatingly reminded of his family’s sins and obliged to seek public forgiveness, in the sermon preached at Westminster Abbey a decade later, Bishop George Morley of Worcester drew parallels between Charles and Christ as each sought to rebuild their respective kingdoms. A new set of Crown Jewels was also required for the coronation after their predecessors had been dismantled and melted down after the regicide. Although many of Charles I’s belongings – paintings, statues, tapestries and other goods – had been sequestrated and sold following his execution, the Commonwealth regime recognized the importance of ensuring that the Crown Jewels could not be reconstituted and acquired by the exiled court. In 1661, however, the king’s goldsmith, Robert Vyner, produced such exact replicas that an official guide to the Crown Jewels in the early eighteenth century could assert with confidence that the crown displayed in the Tower of London was that ‘which all the kings of England have been crowned with, ever since Edward the Confessor’s time’.¹⁸

Parallels between Charles and Christ extended to the way in which his subjects regarded the king as a sanctified physician who could cure his subjects’ physical and spiritual ills. Indeed, no attribute underscored the quasi-divine character of English and French monarchs more than the purported gift of ‘touching for the king’s evil’ – as a means of curing scrofula – and Charles’s enthusiastic performance of this thaumaturgical ceremony confirmed the importance he attached to its role in maintaining royal authority (see picture 12). Although the royal touch was regarded by contemporaries as an effective cure for the painful and disfiguring glandular condition, the tendency for scrofula to flare up intermittently meant that receiving the royal touch could easily coincide with natural periods of remission. Between his restoration in 1660 and his death twenty-five years later, Charles touched around a hundred thousand individuals. In a published account of the royal touch – revealingly entitled Charisma Basilicon – one of Charles’s surgeons, John Browne, appended official monthly figures confirming the number of people touched by the king. Charles had also continued the tradition in exile; as Browne recalled, a Scots merchant had ‘made it his business every spring and fall to bring people from Scotland and Newcastle, troubled with the Evil, to the king where ever he was in his troubles’.¹⁹ The ceremony itself involved a sick person kneeling before the king as a royal chaplain read aloud from the Bible, describing Christ’s appearance after he had risen from the dead, with his message to the Apostles: ‘They shall lay their hands on the sick and they shall recover.’²⁰ Each time this verse was read out, the king stroked the scrofula sufferer under the chin with both hands, before the sick person was presented again to the king, and given a commemorative ‘touch-piece’.

Eminent foreign dignitaries were also invited to watch ‘touching’ ceremonies, albeit positioned tangentially so as not to detract from the figure of the king. In January 1682, for instance, the Moroccan ambassador watched a ‘general touch’ at Whitehall, after which he apologized to Charles in some embarrassment for not having presented him with a more extravagant diplomatic gift on his arrival. Having evidently been briefed that Charles was a relatively minor prince, the Moroccan ambassador now ‘found him to be the greatest monarch in Europe’ following this display of divine powers.²¹ More alarmingly, when Charles’s eldest son, the Duke of Monmouth, exploited his uncle’s unpopularity during the Exclusion Crisis by undertaking a quasi-royal progress through Wiltshire, Somerset and Devon in the summer of 1680, it was reported in the London press that Monmouth had ‘touched for the king’s evil’ as a means of promoting his authentically royal lineage and rival claim to succeed as king.

The fact that Charles’s illegitimate son was seeking to claim divine sanction only reinforces the Restoration’s inherent paradoxes. During the coronation service, the placing of a ring on the king’s finger was intended to symbolize both the sovereign’s religious faith and his marriage to his realm. But medieval theories of the monarch’s ‘two bodies’ – the body natural and the body politic – risked derailment during the Restoration as serial adultery, extensive bastardy and wanton decadence raised concerns about the ‘health’ of the body politic as represented by the royal court. Accompanying the ‘Bawdy House Riots’ that erupted in 1668 were satirical broadsides such as The Whores’ Petition in which London’s prostitutes acclaimed the Countess of Castlemaine as the patron saint of their trade. Following Castlemaine’s conversion to Catholicism in 1663, the royal court could thereby be portrayed as an expensive popish brothel. Although Charles’s overt sexuality and numerous offspring proclaimed an energetic virility and fecundity that contrasted sharply with Puritan prudishness, relocating the traditional epithet of ‘Merry Monarch’ to its original literary context was less flattering. In verses unintentionally seen by Charles in 1674 – which resulted in their author’s immediate expulsion from court – John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, dubbed him ‘The easiest king and best-bred man’, observing ‘His sceptre and his prick are of a length’. But ‘Restless he rolls about from whore to whore, / A merry monarch scandalous and poor’.²² While fornication and adultery were forbidden by the country’s civil and canon laws, the king allegedly underwent a ‘mock marriage’ to one mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, in 1671, and Charles remains unique among British monarchs in the extent to which he flaunted his sexual conquests in ways that constantly verged on parodying royal ceremonial. The aristocratic titles and riches conferred on his numerous illegitimate offspring also effectively created a rival ducal caste that was not only expensive to maintain, but also offered alternative means of access to royal influence.

To some extent, the chorus of moral condemnation directed at Charles’s court simply reflected popular disappointment. The eager optimism that had accompanied the Restoration, anticipating the re-establishment of a vigorous and fertile royal line, gradually faded in the face of a barren marriage, increasing numbers of bastard offspring, and carnal hedonism. In an early example of bacchanalian excess, ‘Court wits’ Charles Sackville (later Earl of Dorset) and Sir Charles Sedley appeared on a Covent Garden balcony in July 1663 and, stripped naked, delivered a mock sermon, imitated a swindler selling aphrodisiacs, washed their penises in wine, publicly defecated and threw bottles of urine on to what Pepys described as the ‘thousand people standing underneath to see and hear’ such antics. Although aristocratic privilege gave Sackville immunity from prosecution, Sedley was tried and fined £500; borrowing the money from Charles, Sedley became – as he put it – ‘the first man that paid for shitting’.²³

By the mid 1660s, therefore, with natural calamities of plague and fire ascribed to divine disapproval, policy failures and military defeats were increasingly attributed to the dissipation of royal energies in decadent directions. In July 1667, for instance, the Dean of Wells, Robert Creighton, preached what Pepys described as a ‘strange bold sermon’ before Charles ‘against the sins of the court, and particularly against adultery, over and over instancing’ examples from Scripture, whereby a ‘whole nation was undone’ by a king’s infidelity, before pointedly referring to the recent and humiliating Dutch attack on the English navy in the Medway.²⁴ In practical terms, the sheer amount of time Charles devoted to his mistresses, together with their lavish upkeep, prompted anxiety about the insidious effects of ‘petticoat government’. In 1666 and 1667 – at a time when rehousing those made homeless by the Great Fire remained an urgent priority – the king’s Office of Works carried out the refurbishment of Castlemaine’s apartments in the form of a painted oratory, a panelled bathroom, a bedchamber with adjacent accommodation for her children, a library lined with seven-foot-high glass-fronted bookcases, a grand staircase to a privy garden and an aviary. Destroyed by fire in the 1690s, the countess’s apartments ultimately comprised twenty-four rooms and sixteen garrets which she retained after Charles’s death, while her successor as principal mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth, also occupied around the same number of rooms at Whitehall. Indeed, when Evelyn visited the duchess’s apartments in 1683, he judged their luxury furnishings to have ‘ten times the richness and glory’ of Queen Catherine’s. Admiring the ‘new fabric of French tapestry … Japanese cabinets, screens, pendulum clocks, huge vases of wrought plate, tables, stands, chimney furniture, sconces, brasses … all of massive silver’ as well as ‘his Majesty’s best paintings’, Evelyn needed to remind himself that their acquisition had been achieved only ‘with vice and dishonour’.²⁵ In cash receipts alone, ‘secret service’ payments made to the duchess from Treasury funds amounted to more than £136,000 by 1681.²⁶ Shortly before the anniversary of Charles I’s execution that year, Gilbert Burnet’s alarm at court activities prompted him to write ‘a very plain letter’ to the dead king’s son, drawing attention to ‘his past ill life, and the effects it had on the nation, with the judgements of God that lay on him’, only to be later informed that, having read the letter twice, Charles ‘then threw it on the fire’.²⁷

Holding sway over the Restoration court in much the same way as the male favourites of James I and VI had dominated its early seventeenth-century predecessor, Charles’s mistresses operated as an independent political force. Besides offering regular access to the king, royal mistresses could act as patronage brokers, seek favours, receive diplomatic gifts ultimately intended for the monarch and provide alternative, semi-private venues for political negotiation. Particular – and justified – suspicions attached to the ambitions of Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth. In October 1671 the French ambassador, Croissy, reported approvingly to one of Louis XIV’s ministers that the king was now consorting with the duchess rather than ‘lewd and bouncing orange girls’ – namely, Nell Gwyn – and ventured that ‘she has so got round King Charles as to be the greatest service to our sovereign and master, if she only does her duty’.²⁸ Precisely because of the duchess’s Franco-Catholic affinities, however, the Duke of Monmouth preferred to meet his father at Gwyn’s residence in Pall Mall. Indeed, rivalry between the king’s mistresses served increasingly as a barometer for Whig and Tory attachments. In partisan polemic, the two women were pitted against one another in imaginary exchanges, with one anonymous pamphleteer presenting Gwyn as the honest, rustic English foil to her arrogant and duplicitous French rival, de Kérouaille. When the latter returned to France for three months in 1682, bearing secret messages from Charles to Louis XIV, a contemporary pamphlet imagined Gwyn bidding Portsmouth farewell and denouncing her as ‘a French toadstool’ who ‘to foreign scents [had] betrayed the Royal Game’, while ‘in my clear veins, best British blood does flow’ and, rather than bankrupting the country, ‘I pay my debts, [and] distribute to the poor’.²⁹

In ancien régime France, attacks on both monarchical government and religious scepticism were often accompanied by the rejection of traditional sexual mores. In Restoration England, by contrast, the reverse held true, as allegations of monarchical tyranny at the royal court were fuelled by condemnation of its sexual libertinism and toleration of heterodox ideas. Linking Charles’s amorous preferences with his political priorities, the Whig opposition produced, in June 1680, anonymous ‘Articles of high treason, and other high crimes and misdemeanours’ that listed twenty-two charges against the Duchess of Portsmouth, including accusations of seeking to subvert Church–State relations in England while introducing popery and tyranny; promoting an Anglo-French alliance; persuading Charles that the Popish Plot was fictitious; meddling in government and spending prodigiously. These were presumably intended to form the basis of a parliamentary attack on the duchess, but Charles refused to reconvene Parliament, obliging the Earl of Shaftesbury to present the charges to the Middlesex Grand Jury in June 1680, when the indictment was rejected by the Chief Justice, Sir William Scroggs. Denunciations of individual royal concubines thereby offered an alternative means of articulating anxieties regarding abuse of power, the persecution of Protestant nonconformists, the insidious promotion of Catholicism, and profligate extravagance.

In his posthumously published character sketch of Charles, the Marquis of Halifax observed that Charles had ‘lived with his ministers as he did with his mistresses; he used them, but he was not in love with them’.³⁰ Charles himself contradicted this assessment when he fatalistically observed to his sister Henriette in January 1668 that were she ‘as well acquainted with a little fantastical gentleman called Cupid as I am’, she would appreciate the limited capacity of individuals to control their emotional affairs.³¹ On that occasion, Charles was alluding to his continued infatuation with Frances Stuart, who had notoriously refused his advances before eloping with a distant cousin of the king’s, another Charles Stuart, the Duke of Richmond. Charles’s obsession survived their marriage, however, with Pepys recording in May that the king remained ‘mighty hot upon the duchess of Richmond’. Hovering between vicarious fascination and censorious reproof, Pepys further noted that, the previous Sunday, Charles ‘did on a sudden take a pair of oars or sculler, and all alone, or but one with him’ rowed down the Thames to the duchess’s residence in Somerset House where, ‘the garden door not being open, himself clambered over the walls to make a visit to her … which is a horrid shame!’ Earlier in his Diary, Pepys had been particularly prurient in following the king’s tempestuous relationship with the Countess of Castlemaine. In 1662, for example, he had caught sight of her luxurious lingerie hanging out to dry and confessed that it ‘did me good to look upon them’, while three years later he judged one erotic nocturnal vision ‘the best that ever was dreamed’ in imagining holding the king’s mistress in his own arms, effectively cuckolding Charles, and being ‘admitted to use all the dalliance I desired with her’.³² In addition to Charles, Castlemaine was reputed to have enjoyed love affairs with sundry conquests, including a tightrope walker, Joseph Hall, the actor Charles Hart, the playwright William Wycherley and John Churchill, later Duke of Marlborough. Based in Paris in 1678 and suspected of having started a new liaison with a French aristocrat, she wrote to Charles reminding him that ‘you know, as to love, one is not mistress of one’s self’.³³

The problem for Charles was that, as king, he was meant to be in control of himself, but too often was instead found to have been ‘unkinged’ by women. In satirical poems, he was described, for instance, as ‘The poor Priapus king, led by the nose’ in a reference to the Greek god of fertility, famed for boasting a permanent and oversized erection.³⁴ Pornography and politics became inextricably linked, as illustrated by the popularity of a notorious poem entitled ‘Signor Dildo’. Penned amid anxieties surrounding the Duke of York’s marriage to Mary of Modena in 1673, and often attributed to the Earl of Rochester, the poem imagined ‘Signor Dildo’ arriving in the princess’s entourage and becoming an instant favourite with the ladies at Charles II’s court, being modest, discreet, permanently potent, inexpensive and disease-free. For Charles’s part, although his nickname ‘Old Rowley’ – after a particularly prolific stallion in the royal stables – presented a backhanded compliment, in an anonymous ‘Satire on Old Rowley’ (1680), Charles was nevertheless advised to banish his unpopular mistresses to make ‘Thy people no more doubt thee’, since ‘Thou are not hated, though they are’.³⁵

Foreigners were equally unimpressed. Attending Charles’s court in the late 1660s, the Italian diplomat Magalotti observed that Charles ‘lets himself be so transported by impetuosity that in the courtesies of a lover, he forgets the decorum of a king’.³⁶ Moreover, as Charles became older, he also attracted jibes from younger court wits equating his reported physical impotence with political inadequacy on the international stage. In Rochester’s verse satire of the king, he refers to the ‘pains it costs to poor laborious Nelly’ to employ ‘hands, fingers, mouth and thighs’ to ‘raise the member she enjoys’.³⁷ Charles’s susceptibility to feminine wiles also contrasted unfavourably with the steely resolve of Louis XIV, who specifically advised his son and heir that the time ‘we devote to our love’ must ‘never be taken away from our affairs, because our first object must always be the preservation of our glory and of our authority’. As Louis insisted to his son, ‘while surrendering our heart we remain masters of our mind’ and ‘keep the affections of a lover separate from the decisions of a sovereign’.³⁸ This was borne out more generally: in a sardonic aphorism circulating in 1681, it was recognized that ‘the king of France could whore well and govern well’ while ‘our king could whore well but not govern’.³⁹ Reflecting public perceptions, Evelyn rued – on the day after Charles’s death – that he would have been ‘an excellent prince doubtless had he been less addicted to women’.⁴⁰