He stands foursquare, centre canvas, looking straight out at the viewer in the pose reserved for kings. Elegant in silk and lace, self-assured with one hand resting on the head of a boarhound, symbol of strength, the seven-year-old Charles Stuart is flanked by the four younger royal siblings who were alive in 1637 when Van Dyck painted this idyll of privileged childhood. It is a masterful group portrait of children (notoriously difficult to paint) and we admire it. It is charming and we are charmed by it. It is also our first real glimpse of the boy destined to become the third and penultimate Stuart king. (In earlier depictions of the infant prince he is little more than a sumptuously dressed doll.) Does it tell us anything about the child already being groomed to inherit the pleasures and burdens of monarchy?
We see, as courtiers and visitors to court saw, that Charles is more like his mother, Henrietta Maria, than his father. The dark eyes, the full lips and the luxuriant hair framing the podgy features bespeak his Medici-Bourbon inheritance. There is a marked contrast with the thin face and wary eyes we encounter in pictures of Charles I at about the same age. A stiffness, a nervous tension hover about the images of the father created by an earlier generation of portraitists which is decidedly absent from the relaxed pose of the son.
Most responsible parents try to avoid the errors and replicate the virtues they perceive in their own upbringing and Charles I and Henrietta Maria were responsible parents. Charles had passed a miserable childhood. Even by the standards of the day he was brought up remote from his father and mother and was starved of affection. King James and Queen Anne were often at loggerheads and sometimes used their children as weapons in their domestic feuds. James was a pompous political theorist with an exalted view of kingship which he imposed on his heir. He wrote treatises, Basilicon Doron and The True Lawe of Free Monarchies, for Charles, in which he set out the virtues and responsibilities of a semi-divine ruler and he entrusted his son’s education to a succession of pious clerics. The boy tried desperately hard to live up to his father’s theories. What made that more difficult was that James did not practise what he preached. He was addicted to hunting and gave himself over to pleasures, often of a coarse and very ungodlike nature, when he should have been attending to affairs of state. As a result of all this Charles emerged into adolescence as a devout, serious, refined young man, determined, when the time came, to be a responsible, respected Christian king, presiding over an elegant court where the highest moral and cultural standards would prevail. As a father he found physical demonstrations of love well-nigh impossible. There was nothing ‘touchy-feely’ about Charles I. His wife was altogether different.
Charles I’s marriage to a French princess in 1625, when he was twenty-four and she fifteen, was a mismatch. He was painfully reserved; she was an extrovert. He was serious; she was frivolous. He was wholly committed to the Protestant Church of England; she was an ardent French Catholic. He believed that queens should be submissive creatures dedicated to producing heirs and appearing in public as graceful and decorative consorts. She had been reared in a royal tradition which alowed wives and mothers considerable influence. The couple were, therefore, locked together in emotional dependence and had to find a modus vivendi. That they did so, after an initial period of tumultuous strife, is to their mutual credit. The fact that, under the pressure of civil war, their harmony broke down, is no matter for surprise.
Henrietta Maria was brought up in a court where luxury, corruption, Catholic devotion and intrigue fed off each other. She was the youngest child of Henry IV of France, ‘Henry the Great’ as he was fondly remembered by many of his countrymen, but never knew her father, who was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic within six months of her birth. Her mother, Marie de Medici, thus became the dominant influence in her life. Marie was a veritable femme formidable. Regent of France during the minority of her son Louis XIII, she refused to be prised away from power when he came of age. With the aid of her creature, Armand-Jean du Plessis, later Cardinal Richelieu, she continued to dominate a faction-ridden court. Before Henrietta Maria left Paris in 1625 she had witnessed her mother’s incredible self-glorification in the series of narrative paintings celebrating her life commissioned from Peter Paul Rubens for the walls of her new Luxembourg palace. (Ten years later this became the inspiration for the same artist’s glorification of James I, which Charles I had commissioned for the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall. Charles II thus had two grandparents immortalised by the leading Flemish artist of the age.)
What stories about Henry IV, one wonders, were passed on to his grandchildren? It is an interesting speculation because Charles II shared certain characteristics with his illustrious grandsire. Both were pragmatists who had to cope with bitter religious strife. Both converted to Catholicism. Both were notorious womanisers. Marie was appalled at her husband’s infidelities. She may even have shared the view of many Catholics that his conversion from Calvinism in order to stifle political opposition was something less than wholehearted. Certainly the queen regent was passionate in her allegiance to Rome and brought up the pampered baby of the family to share this commitment. Henrietta Maria believed that her marriage to the King of England was part of a crusade to bring that nation back into the Roman fold and was petulantly disappointed when Charles remained doggedly loyal to his national Church.
By the time the heir to the English throne was born Marie de Medici’s ace had been trumped. The man she had placed at young Louis’ right hand no longer needed her. Richelieu was ready and able to run France by himself. When her intrigues failed, the queen mother was dismissed from the court and, early in 1631, fled to the Spanish Netherlands. In 1638 Charles I was obliged to play unenthusiastic host to his mother-in-law when she arrived for a visit which dragged on for two and a half years. His eldest son would long remember the wet, windy October day when he was lined up with his siblings in the courtyard of St James’s Palace to greet this truly overpowering royal exile. She arrived with a modest retinue of six coaches and seventy horses but still managed to dominate the wintry scene. Throughout her stay she preserved a haughty mien to every member of the host country who approached her. She immediately began to take charge of her own family and, though she bestowed an austere affection on her grandchildren, they must have found her a rather frightening old lady.
Marie de Medici also exacerbated the religious divisions within the court. In their ardour to deliver their family and the lands ruled by their family from the sins of heresy and schism, Charles’ mother and grandmother took every opportunity to achieve his conversion. He was taken to mass in the baroque exuberance of Henrietta Maria’s chapel at Somerset House and was made much of by the Capuchin priests in her entourage. The king, whose personal convictions and political awareness combined to create the certainty that any desertion from the Church of England would be disastrous for the dynasty, deliberately countered these influences. He admonished his son to honour his mother and obey her in all things, save in matters of religion. As he listened to the theological discussions and arguments between his parents and various of their chaplains and friends, doctrinal and ecclesiological niceties will have passed well above the boy’s head but certain associations will have become lodged in his unconscious.
It was not only in matters of their children’s religious upbringing that king and queen differed. Henrietta Maria was concerned about her husband’s personality and style of kingship. The protocol of the English court was stiff and formal, more like that of Spain than France. Not only did she find it hard to accommodate herself to it, she was convinced that it created unnecessary problems. Monarchs should never condescend too far but neither should they appear stiff and unapproachable. Bishop Burnet reflected towards the end of Charles II’s reign on the influence of his mother:
The queen mother observed often the great defects of the late king’s breeding and the stiff roughness that was in him, by which he disobliged very many and did often prejudice his affairs very much; so she gave strict orders that the young princes should be bred to a wonderful civility.2
Henrietta provided most of the parental warmth the royal children received and especially was this true for Charles. For him and his siblings visits to their mother’s quarters were fun. Henrietta Maria was surrounded by dwarfs, dogs of all shapes and sizes, jesters and monkeys. She was always devising all sorts of entertainments. Charles was the queen’s favourite child and, in the gaiety of her household, moral restraints were not severe. Flirtations, affairs and gossip about those flirtations and affairs were part of the daily routine and, if adulterous liaisons were not officially approved of, everyone knew they happened. The sexual implications of life in the queen’s suite must only have dawned slowly on the growing child but he enjoyed being with these courtiers who were always devising games, jokes and diversions into which he entered with enthusiasm. The queen’s women adored dressing the royal children in beautiful costumes and rehearsing with them their lines and dance movements for the sumptuous plays and masques which were a feature of court life in the 1630s. It was from Henrietta Maria’s side that most of the initiatives came that created the extraordinary cultural hothouse of the Stuart beau monde.
But Henrietta Maria and her awesome mother were not the only formidable women who dominated Charles’ early years. They had other concerns more pressing than the day-to-day nurture of tiny princes and princesses. The woman with whom Charles spent most of his time was his nurse, Christabella Wyndham. No less than Charles’ mother and grandmother, Christabella was a strong, determined woman. In the Civil War she would show herself to be a veritable Amazon (see here). She was also a great beauty. Clarendon, who heartily disapproved of her and her influence over the heir, commented acerbically that there was ‘nothing of woman in her but her body’, and that her distinguishing marks were ‘great rudeness and a country pride’.3 But Clarendon was not alone in this opinion. Years later one of Samuel Pepys’ informants recollected that Mrs Wyndham ‘was nurse to the present king, and one that while she lived governed him and every thing else … as a minister of state’,4 and her CV provides ample evidence that she was, indeed, an overbearing and ambitious matriarch who, if she did not govern her grasping husband, certainly urged him up the ladder of royal favour.
She was the daughter and sole heiress of Hugh Pyne, a successful lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn, who had invested heavily in property in Somerset and who married her to Sir Edmund Wyndham, one of the leading gentlemen of the county who also had strong court connections. From the beginning of Charles I’s reign the young couple set about courting the monarch’s favour and extracting the maximum material advantage. They importuned for several lucrative offices, for some of which they were locked in legal combat with other claimants. Edmund, a seventeenth-century ‘fat cat’, was involved in whatever moneymaking scheme was going. He extracted profit from the manufacture of soap, the re-use of wine barrels by the brewing industry and mineral rights in Wales. The Wyndhams were typical of the grasping courtiers who provoked the indignation of those outside the charmed royal circle. In 1640 parliament adjudged Edmund guilty of peculation and deprived him of his seat as MP for Bridgwater. Despite, or perhaps because of, being so pushy he and his wife advanced in royal favour and received several marks of royal esteem. By 1635 Christabella was in her mid-twenties and the full flush of her beauty. This was the year in which she was appointed nurse to the infant Charles. Whatever her initial responsibilities and privileges may have been, she immediately set about adding to them and was soon insisting on being addressed as ‘Lady Governess’. She and her husband were close to the king and queen. When one of their daughters was baptised the king attended the ceremony and Prince Charles stood sponsor for the baby. Christabella was the first woman who demonstrated love to Charles physically. It was to his nurse that the toddler turned for kisses and cuddles and for comfort when he had hurt himself. The boy developed and retained a strong attachment to Christabella, who became the archetype of many of the women who were to feature in his life – pretty, domineering, emotionally demonstrative and grasping.5
The ravishing fairyland of Charles I’s court during the ‘golden years’ (1629–40) when he ruled without a parliament was a deliberate creation; the work of painters such as Rubens, Van Dyck and Gerrit van Honthorst, poets and playwrights of the stature of Ben Jonson, William Davenant and James Shirley, and the master of stagecraft, Inigo Jones. It was a sumptuous, self-conscious, introverted, highly elitist little cosmos. Charles and, more specifically, his queen had something to prove to their dull, boorish subjects. Stuart kingship was a glorious semi-divine gift from God. Charles and Henrietta Maria were the mother and father of a fortunate people, the epitome of harmony and wedded bliss,
Charles the best husband, while Maria strives To be, and is, the very best of wives.6
Their glittering court rivalled those of France and Italy, hitherto regarded as the trend setters of fashion and sophistication. The denizens of this court looked down from the kaleidoscopic sinuousness of their baroque palaces on the dour, drab world of ordinary mortals. James I had adumbrated that a king and a subject were different in kind and the assertive luxuriousness of his son’s court proclaimed that arrogantly to the world.
Yet another marked difference between Charles I and his wife was that never for a moment did he think that splendid display was the be-all and end-all of kingship. He had a profound sense of duty. Every day was lived to a nice schedule of private devotion, work, public audience and recreation. Though he entered happily into court entertainments, he was concerned not to give the impression that the pleasure principle was allembracing. He frequently urged courtiers to go back to their shires and employ at least some of their time in care of their estates.
Charles and Henrietta Maria were, by the standards of the day, devoted parents. They spent quite a lot of time with their children, perhaps, in part, because neither of them had received much affection in their own early years. Both had been denied the care of loving fathers. Henrietta Maria had never known Henry IV; Charles had experienced James I as more of a schoolmaster than a father. The royal family were often seen walking together in their palace parks, and courtiers and ambassadors remarked that the princes and princesses passed many evenings with their parents playing games or being amused by fools and hired entertainers. As he grew up, young Charles was taken riding and hunting by his father. He was also gradually initiated into the formal aspects of court life.
From about 1638 he was provided with his own household and apartments and from this time he was less involved with either the queen and her women or his nurse. Now began his induction into a man’s world and he was provided with guides whom the king considered best qualified to prepare him for his sacred future. The king’s choice of mentors provides clear evidence of his concern to wean the boy away from the Catholicising, flippant self-indulgence of his mother and her friends.
The king took seriously his responsibility to train his heir, not by writing long, windy treatises such as he had been subjected to by James, but by personal instruction and example. He was, himself, the book from which he wished his heir to learn – pious beyond the standard of many who called themselves ‘Puritan’ and encased in the eggshell of royal mystique. Thus, from the age of about seven, the boy stood beside his father to receive ambassadors and, even earlier, he had had his first experience of the long, elaborate Garter ceremony which the king so much loved. Around the time of his eighth birthday he was made the central figure of a scarcely less grand ritual when he was invested as Prince of Wales. We know that the king was, above all contemporary monarchs, a stickler for the most pernickety details of court etiquette and ensured that he and his family were attended with the utmost deference. There exists a painting by van Honthorst of the prince dining formally with his parents. They sit in a vast hall attended by scores of servants, watched from a respectful distance by privileged sightseers.
Yet, alongside this steady process of induction went very careful protection of the heir. Charles I had vivid memories of his own unhappy childhood – the lone hours of careful study, the parental reprimands, the painful self-discipline as he tried to meet James’ exacting standards, the embarrassment of being expected, as a shy, stammering boy, to make speeches and debate publicly with clever theologians. By contrast, he was indulgent and spared his son such miseries. Thus, the lively royal youngster was brought up in an atmosphere of sharp contrasts – family informality at the heart of rigid ceremonial; regular devotional exercise without over-zealous exposition to personal holiness; an educational regime which placed emphasis on exercise and did not make great intellectual demands.
We can deduce much about the boy’s tutoring from a letter written by his governor which set out the philosophy behind his training. The man given the job of supervising the prince’s education was William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle. The earl, in his mid-forties at the time of his appointment, was a seasoned courtier-diplomat who had faithfully served the dynasty all his adult life. He was a man of many parts; a substantial and efficient northern landowner, a sportsman who sat a horse better than most of his contemporaries, an effective military leader, a munificent host whose entertainments of the court at Welbeck and Bolsover were, in the words of Clarendon, such as ‘had scarce before ever been known in England’,7 a patron of the arts, lionised as a veritable Maecenas by the literary establishment, who enjoyed the company of talented men such as Ben Jonson, Dryden, Davenant, Thomas Hobbes and, during his exile, René Descartes, but who was also, in his own right, a poet and a playwright with several stage productions to his credit (though Pepys was contemptuously dismissive of his lordship’s dramatic talents). Newcastle was an ambitious man, who understood the ways of the court and the peccadilloes of the Stuart monarchs and successfully exploited both in his own interests. He was essentially a pragmatist, as Clarendon, who was far from being an unqualified admirer of Newcastle, more than hinted:
He was a very fine gentleman, active and full of courage, and most accomplished in those qualities of horsemanship, dancing and fencing, which accompany a good breeding; in which his delight was. Besides that, he was amorous in poetry and music, to which he indulged the greatest part of his time; and nothing could have tempted him out of those paths of pleasure which he enjoyed in a full and ample fortune, but honour and ambition to serve the King …
He loved monarchy, as it was the foundation and support of his own greatness; and the Church, as it was well constituted for the splendour and security of the Crown; and religion as it cherished and maintained that order and obedience that was necessary to both; without any other passion for the particular opinions which were grown up in it and distinguished it into parties … as he detested whatsoever was like to disturb the public peace.8
This urbane, highly cultured nobleman was a man at peace with himself and consequently easy in his relationships with others. After the Restoration he would have no qualms about withdrawing from court life to devote himself to horse racing and belles-lettres, and his wife, one of the most eccentric creatures in Carolean London, would then describe Newcastle’s demeanour as ‘courtly, easy, civil and free, without formality or constraint, and yet have something in it of grandeur, that causes an awful respect for him’.9 The verdict is scarcely unbiased but, taken with everything else we know about Cavendish, has a strong ring of truth. Certainly Charles maintained a lifelong affection for his old governor who, during the brief time that Cavendish had charge of the prince’s welfare, studied to make himself agreeable to his pupil, especially fostering in the young man a love of horseflesh and imparting something of his own skill in the saddle. The contrast between this avuncular figure and Charles’ prim, intense father was very obvious and cannot fail to have had its effect on the boy’s impressionable mind.
Newcastle wrote a mini-treatise of advice for his royal charge which is instructive about both the intentions of his mentor and the receptivity of his pupil.10 It takes little reading between the lines to discover that young Charles was no scholar. Newcastle observes frankly, ‘Sir, you are in your own disposition … not very apt to your book.’ But the earl does not write this in a spirit of carping criticism. On the contrary, he counsels, ‘I would not have you too studious, for too much contemplation spoils action, and virtue consists in that.’ Moreover, ‘the greatest clerks are not the wisest men, and … the greatest captains were not the greatest scholars; neither have I known bookworms for great statesmen’. The wise ruler will concentrate on studying men. The only kind of literature Newcastle did advocate was histories, ‘that so you may compare the dead with the living’ (advice which an as yet obscure Cambridgeshire gentleman, Oliver Cromwell, also gave to his son). With this caveat, the governor recommends those subjects to which Charles should apply his mind:
Sir, it is fit you should have some languages, though I confess I would rather have you study things than words, matter than language; for seldom a critic in many languages hath time to study sense … at best he is or can be but a living dictionary …
Eight years later, when the prince paid his first visit to France, it was a matter of comment that he could not speak the tongue of his maternal ancestors. It is something of a surprise that the boy who had often been in the company of his mother and grandmother and their modish friends had learned so little French. He simply had not made the effort and Newcastle’s easygoing regime had not inculcated the discipline of study.
Another of the earl’s recommendations Charles had no difficulty following related to religion:
Beware of too much devotion for a king, for one may be a good man but a bad king; and how many [examples] will history represent to you that, in seeming to gain the Kingdom of Heaven, have lost their own.
Could any words have been more prophetic? In little more than a decade King Charles would become the Church of England’s foremost martyr. Unable to relinquish or modify his religious principles he had lost both his kingdom and his head. In 1638, when the very idea of civil war would have appalled court and people, did Newcastle see where the king’s pious intransigence might lead? At the very time that he wrote his advice, irate Scots were uniting behind the National Covenant, signifying their resistance to the imposition of an English prayer book. Newcastle, the northern magnate, understood well the feelings aroused by religion over the border. Newcastle, the courtier, knew how determined the king was to have his way in the matter. Though he could not be specific, he warned the prince about following his father’s lead. What Cavendish advocated was a statesman’s religion, a grafting of willow on oak. He would have been failing in his duty if he had not addressed what was, in fact, the burning issue of the day. For twenty years continental Europe had been plunged into bloody chaos by the clashes of Reformation and Counter-Reformation armies. For five years Archbishop Laud had been stirring strife within England by enforcing the spread of what many regarded as covert Catholicism. The pragmatic earl well judged the danger of hardline religious politics.
Yet, while he steered Prince Charles away from his father’s bigotry, he also tried to buttress him against a temptation to which he was more prone – apathy:
… if you have no reverence at prayers, what will the people have, think you? They go according to the example of the prince. If they have none, then they have no obedience to God; then they will easily have none to your Highness … [By contrast] if any be Bible mad, over much burned with fiery zeal, they may think it a service to God to destroy you … Thus one way you may have civil war, the other a private treason.
Towards the end of his brief discourse this worldly-wise councillor extolled noblesse oblige: ‘be courteous and civil to everybody’. Smiles and tokens bestowed by princes bought better allegiance than disdain. Above all, a king in training should be gracious towards women, who especially appreciate little marks of favour. And let him always be calculating as to his own advantage: ‘the king must know at what time to play the king and when to qualify it’. He must use the trappings of monarchy to his own ends:
For what preserves you king more than ceremony? The cloth of estate, the distance people are with you, great officers, heralds, drums, trumpeters, rich coaches, rich furniture for horses, guards, marshall’s men making room … their staff of office and [crying] ‘now the king comes;’ … this is the mist cast before us and [dazzles] the commonwealth … In all triumphs whatever or public showing yourself you cannot put upon you too much King …
Yet – and these are the most remarkable words in the letter – ‘I would not have you so seared with majesty as to think you are not of mankind, nor suffer others, or yourself, to flatter you so much.’ James I had urged his successor always to remember that the Almighty ‘made you a little god to sit on his throne and rule over other men’.11 Newcastle realised the corrosive power of such megalomania. The earl never wavered in his loyalty to the Stuart cause but, like many royalist politicians, he did not buy into divine right extremism.
The elegant, charming and perceptive letter was obviously the distillation of the advice which the Earl of Newcastle offered by word and personal example during the two years that he had charge of the Prince of Wales. It urged Cavendish’s own practical and practicable principles while, at the same time, responding to his charge’s strengths and weaknesses. It well judged the differences between the two Charleses, father and son, and, therefore, offers us a glimpse of the boy who would become king – intellectually lazy and unlikely to become the slave of high principle, affable, not especially devout, equally easy in the company of male and female companions. These, at least, were the traits Newcastle wished to foster, and the young prince, at an impressionable age, allowed himself to be guided.
One attribute that came naturally to Charles, and that Newcastle had little need to stress, was chivalry towards women. From his earliest years he enjoyed female company. In the prevailing culture of the day it was unquestioningly accepted that women were inferior to men, that they existed for the use and support of their husbands and for their physical necessity as baby-making machines. But that did not square with Charles’ experience. The women in his early life were forceful, fun-loving and sympathetic. Nor did the king present an obvious counterbalance. Most boys learn from their fathers how to develop the macho, sexually aggressive aspects of their character but the aesthetic, refined Charles I presented a model of stylised courtesy, constancy, consideration and genuine affection (if stilted in its emotional expression) for his wife, daughters and female companions. The prince was developing into a ‘ladies’ man’ in the full sense of that expression and it is not difficult to see why.
But there were other influences also at work during his early years. The king ring-fenced his son’s education with good, sound Church of England clergy. The boy’s nominated tutors were Brian Duppa, John Earle and Richard Steward. They were all academics who came from the same school of Oxford theologians and were what we would today call high churchmen. They were committed supporters of Archbishop Laud’s determination to make the Church of England hierarchy a major power in the state and they shared his intolerance of ‘free’ spirits who demurred at following in every particular the rites ordained by the establishment. It was their task to impress upon the heir to the throne the essential, divinely decreed and, therefore, indissoluble link between crown and mitre. Charles was never fully convinced.
Brian Duppa, Bishop of Chichester (he was translated to Salisbury in 1641), was an ecclesiastic of stately bearing who was specifically charged by the king with being the guardian of his son’s conscience. He was a frequent visitor to court, having at an early stage in his career won the patronage of the Earl of Dorset, lord chamberlain to the queen, whose wife was governess to the royal infants. More significantly, Duppa’s career was advanced by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the royal favourite whose family was closely (and disastrously) bound up with the Stuarts for much of the century. The bishop seems to have been able to combine the almost mutually exclusive arts of the courtier and the man of God (his published works include, as well as sermons, a book of valedictory poems on the death of Ben Jonson), or, at least, so the prince thought. Duppa was a party man who stuck firmly to his convictions when, during the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, they were politically incorrect. The religious certainties he sought to inculcate in his pupil stemmed from his belief in the episcopal system which he understood to have behind it the weight of 1,600 years of tradition. Like the king, like Newcastle, like many who within a few years took up the royalist cause, Duppa regarded Church and State as inextricably bound together, so that any attempt to loosen the bond or assert the primacy of individual conscience was both sinful and criminal and could only bring about the collapse of an ordered society. As James I had succinctly put it, ‘No bishops, no king.’
The sour Bishop Burnet regarded Duppa’s appointment as a disaster. Acknowledging that Salisbury was ‘a meek and humble man and much loved for the sweetness of his temper’, he yet thought that he was quite unfit – presumably because of the extreme nature of his opinions – to have a formative influence over the heir.12 Newcastle was, however, satisfied with the tutor. He reported that the bishop wore his scholarship lightly so as not to bore a lively boy who had very little interest in doctrinal or ecclesiastical disputes. As for the future king, he held his teacher in awe – later, if not at the time. Charles always had a genuine respect for men who exhibited a sanctity he had no desire to emulate himself. He remained a lifelong friend of Duppa and was present at his deathbed.
John Earle’s personality can hardly have been more different. Of him Burnet wrote, ‘He was the man of all the clergy for whom the king had the greatest esteem. He had been his subtutor, and had followed him in all his exile with so clear a character, that the king could never see or hear of any one thing amiss in him. So he, who had a secret pleasure in finding out anything that lessened a man esteemed eminent for piety, yet had a value for him beyond all the men of his order.’13 The reasons are not difficult to understand. Clarendon found Dr Earle to be
a man of great piety and devotion, a most eloquent and powerful preacher; and of a conversation so pleasant and delightful, so very innocent and so very facetious [i.e. elegant], that no man’s company was more desired and loved. No man was more negligent in his dress, and habit, and mien; no man more wary and cultivated in his behaviour and discourse … He was amongst the few excellent men who never had nor ever could have an enemy.14
Though a skilled disputant with Puritans, Earle was firmly opposed to persecuting them for their sincerely held views. One might say that he represented the acceptable face of high Anglicanism. Perhaps it was for this reason – as a foil to Duppa – that he was chosen to be the bishop’s understudy. It certainly seems that Charles’ love of toleration had its tap root in the gentle, lively teaching of this amiable man.
Earle formed a connection between the court and what we might call the ‘Bloomsbury Set’ of the 1630s. Great Tew, on the edge of the Cotswolds, was the seat of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, one of the most attractive characters of a troubled age. He turned his house into what was almost an open university college. Scholars, courtiers, politicians, poets and wits came to Great Tew from Oxford and London to discuss with a freedom impossible elsewhere the burning political and religious issues of the day. The atmosphere generated by Cary seemed to dissipate the bitter partisanship which was dragging the country towards civil war. Here were to be found scholarly discussion and the creative exchange of ideas. John Earle, one of the bright young men of the day, was a habitué of this learned clique and claimed to have gained more from the Cary circle than from his studies at Merton. His writings, as well as the good opinion of his contemporaries, show him to have been a scholar of wit and moderation. In 1641 Earle succeeded Duppa as senior tutor to the princes. The royal children cannot have felt the furious clash of ideas and emotions that, during the years of their father’s personal rule, were raising some men to places of distinction in the Church, incarcerating some in prison, and driving still others to seek refuge beyond the seas. Yet, through their tutors, they will have become aware of some of the issues of the day and of different ways of confronting them. Prince James’ temperament inclined him to take his stand on principle. His brother was ever disposed to seek eirenical solutions.
However, it is not sufficient simply to label the future Charles II as a ‘tolerant’ monarch. Very different attitudes to life parade under the banner of ‘toleration’ and men hold those attitudes as a result of combined life experience and intellectual conviction. For detached seventeenth-century scholars mutual acceptance came from a close study of the conflicting issues and a realisation of their complexity. John Earle had a deep respect for sincere partisans of a cause he could not himself subscribe to – and went on arguing with them. A man like Lucius Cary was impelled by Christian charity. He longed to see people of dramatically opposed opinions living and letting live or striving for compromise. So depressed was he at the drift into war that, at the battle of Newbury, he deliberately led a suicidal charge. Others, and there must have been many such in these islands in the 1630s, could not or would not see what all the fuss was about. Lacking deep religious convictions of their own, they were impatient with the devotees of theological and political abstractions who foolishly believed that breaking heads and burning houses somehow proved their points. Charles II’s concept of ‘toleration’ was of this last order. He hated conflict, wanted contending parties to agree and found it difficult to understand why they would not.
These attitudes and various permutations of them were present in the upbringing of young Charles Stuart. Since he was too young to form mature judgements and since, anyway, he was not of a scholarly disposition, he responded more to personalities than to abstruse arguments about episcopacy, divine right, uniformity in religion, and the privileges of parliament.
It may have been the prince’s lack of passion for the Church of England that prompted King Charles, at the height of the war, to appoint Richard Steward, his clerk of the closet, to his son’s entourage, with the strict injunction that he was to guide the heir in all matters pertaining to the Church. Steward was an ecclesiastical politician who had entered the royal court in 1633 and had, ever since, been an intimate of the household and a trusted adviser. He was a fierce controversialist frequently put up by the Laudians to defend the honour, power and privileges of bishops. Clarendon gives us a picture of him in oratorical spate during one of the many debates that took place during the war years. The Church of England, Steward insisted, was the body ‘to which God had vouchsafed the most perfect reformation’ of all the Protestant churches. It had retained episcopacy, without which there could be ‘no ordination of ministers, and consequently no administration of sacraments, or performance of the ministerial functions’.15 It was men like Steward who steeled Charles I to that unyielding commitment to those principles that brought him to the block.
Peer pressure among older children and adolescents is always a powerful factor, though it counted for less in an age which held elders in greater respect than does our own. Charles had his circle of intimate friends, with whom he indulged in boisterous escapades and shared secrets. Prominent among them were the Villiers boys. George and Francis were the sons of the first Duke of Buckingham, the widely hated royal favourite who had gained such a mastery over Charles I before his accession and had dominated policy in the early years of the reign. When Buckingham was struck down by an assassin’s dagger in 1628, the king, prostrate with grief and guilt, pledged himself to look after his friend’s orphaned children. They were brought up with his own, and young Charles, therefore, never knew a time when he did not have two slightly older ‘brothers’ (Francis was senior by a year and George by two and a quarter years). It would have been natural for the prince to idolise and emulate George Villiers and they were, indeed, throughout youth very close. The influence of the young duke a few years later was, according to the straitlaced Burnet, deplorable:
… he was wholly turned to mirth and pleasure: he had the art of turning persons or things into ridicule beyond any man of the age: he possessed the young king with very ill principles, both as to religion and morality, and with a very mean opinion of his father, whose stiffness was with him a frequent subject of raillery.16
The bishop was writing from hearsay several years after the event. What is interesting about his verdict is that it coincides with observations made by other contemporaries about Charles’ attitude towards his father. As a young man the prince and later king cast aside the mantle handed down by the serious, conscientious, pernickety monarch, and writers were obliged to find some reason for his unfilial behaviour. Naturally, they looked for the explanation to Charles’ more boisterous companions. But the roots of his cynical, worldly-wise approach to life and his rejection of his father’s style ran deep into his earliest years.
Such, then, were some of the influences that went to the making of Charles, Prince of Wales. He was brought up in a closed environment by parents committed to their family and to the principle of monarchical power. The king and queen differed both in personality and in their understanding of what it meant to rule the Stuart dominions but both impressed upon the heir the need to prepare himself for his divinely ordained destiny, and his education and training for his future role had already begun. Of course, to a child the prospect of actually being king lay in the far, hazy future. His father might live another twenty, thirty or more years. Meanwhile, he could concentrate on enjoying himself and in the hothouse atmosphere of his parents’ court there was much to enjoy – including amorous adventures.
Love and sex were everyday topics in palace chambers and no stories were considered as having an ‘18 rating’, unsuitable for juvenile ears. Courtiers boasted of their conquests and the queen’s women gossiped about the latest affairs. While courtly love was the dominant subject of fashionable poets, more basic tales formed the subject matter of popular ballads bought on London streets and eagerly learned by the amateur musicians of the royal household.
There is no doubt that Charles I and his queen tried to set a high moral tone at the centre of national life. The importance of personal example had been impressed upon the king by his own father:
… this glistering worldly glory of kings is given them by God, to teach them to press so to glister and shine before their people in all works of sanctification and righteousness that their persons, as bright lamps of godliness and virtue may, going in and out before their people, give light to all their steps.17
Much has been written about the rarefied atmosphere of Stuart court dramas and the pure, exalted sentiments they expressed. Similarly, the libertinism of the Restoration theatre is well known. However, we must be careful not to make too stark a contrast between the dramatic art of the 1630s and that of a generation later. Charles II was a great lover of the stage and its people – especially actresses – and it is important to understand how his enthusiasm developed.
Charles I was a martinet, concerned as much for the morals of his people as for their religion. Just as he sought to control the worship in parish churches through Archbishop Laud, so all places of entertainment were kept under scrutiny by his master of the revels, Sir Henry Herbert, brother of the priest-poet George Herbert. This official performed his work diligently – some would have said officiously. He licensed every kind of public game and show from billiards to the display of elephants and other ‘savage beasts’ and even attempted to extend his mandate to cover the publication of books.
Herbert’s first responsibility was the supervision of stage pieces presented at court, of which there were over 400 between 1625 and 1640. He and the king ensured that virtue was the theme of everything presented to the household. This emanated from Charles himself who laboured conscientiously to be a model of piety, courtesy, taste and culture and who impressed upon all members of his creative team the need for his court to be a school of morality. It followed that a strict censorship governed all stage performances. Masques were elaborate conceits featuring gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, which identified the life of Olympus with that of the Stuart court. Plays might treat of more down-to-earth subjects but they, too, were vetted in accordance with a well-defined set of moral guidelines.
A contemporary referred to one element of the prevailing royal cult as ‘a love called Platonic … abstracted from all corporeal gross impressions and sensual appetite’.18 In music, stage productions, poetry and painting the king and queen were represented as the emblems of chaste marital fidelity and the leaders of a court society which had forsworn the vulgarity of the merely carnal.
Such high-mindedness was less easily asserted outside the walls of royal palaces but every play presented in the London theatres had to be licensed by Herbert (for a fee) and we know from one incident how assiduously he went through submitted manuscripts. In 1633 he took objection to certain lines in William Davenant’s new play The Wits and excised such expletives as ‘faith’ and ‘death’. The author complained to the king, and Charles carefully went over the piece with his master of the revels. He it was who decided that the offending words were ‘asseverations not oaths’ and sanctioned their reinstatement, much to Herbert’s disgruntlement. In 1639 Charles approved a bolder initiative when his wife brought over a troupe of actors from Paris – which included women. Pious citizens were scandalised but the earth did not open up to swallow the perpetrators of such impudence. Clearly, the king was more broadminded than the religious extremists (he and the queen both sponsored companies of actors) but he shared their concerns and the culture clash in the capital should certainly not be seen in over-simplified terms as a war between Puritans and players.
One cause of royal anxiety was the fact that the worlds of court and capital overlapped. Writers for the popular stage met the demand for bombast, rumbustious action, bawdy, salacious innuendo, satire and comedy based on observation of real London life. A dramatist like Richard Brome, whose smash hit Sparagus Garden (1635) was a roistering comedy of unredeemed coarseness, openly boasted that his plays sought only to make his audiences laugh, unlike the ‘classicising poet-bounces’ favoured by cultural snobs. Gentlemen and ladies of the royal household were eager followers of fashion and that included keeping up with the latest productions at the Cockpit, the Curtain, the Globe and other venues where plays were performed for public or private audiences. While court revels apostrophised the establishment, these pieces all too often poked fun at authority. Whereas masques upheld Christian values, popular plays chronicled the triumphs of low cunning and basic passions. The disparity between the two strands of drama is well illustrated by the queen’s attendance at The Triumphs of the Prince d’Amour, a relatively inoffensive offering presented at the Middle Temple. It was noted that Henrietta Maria came clothed in ‘citizen’s habit’.
The artistic set pieces presented at court had a strong didactic element aimed at counteracting that lewdness which was inevitable in a velvet-wrapped enclave where young men and women were thrown together with little to occupy their energies but the pursuit of pleasure. The courtier-versifier, Thomas Carew, virtually gave the game away in adulatory lines written for Henrietta Maria:
Thou great Commandress, that dost move
Thy sceptre o’er the crown of Love,
And through his empire, with the awe
Of thy chaste beams, dost give law;
From his profaner altars we
Turn to adore thy deity.
He only can wild lust provoke;
Thou those impurer flames canst choke;
And where he scatters looser fires
Thou turnst them into chaste desires.19
The ‘impurer flames’ were being regularly fed, not only by popular stage productions, but by bawdy songs, ribald stories and popular ballads such as the tale of Peg and Kate, two good-time girls who spent the night at an inn carousing with a generous benefactor who feasted them well in return for their favours only to leave them with the bill in the morning; and ditties with such self-explanatory titles as ‘A Good Throw for Three Maidenheads’ and ‘This Maid Would Give Ten Shillings for a Kiss’. In their efforts to assert and maintain high standards the royal trend setters were, therefore, up against the formidable obstacles of everyday life in an enervating world of wealth and luxury. The royal court has never existed which lived out the ideals represented by Stuart propaganda. Moreover, the privileged denizens of Charles’ entourage rejected the kinds of restraints urged by earnest preachers and Puritan pamphleteers. Fashionable élites always scorn conventional morality. Like money, style and privilege, libertarianism is part of the insignia which sets them apart from the ‘common herd’. Thus, while Charles and his queen and their more sober attendants were adumbrating chaste refinement, their younger, less restrained followers were setting a tone of modish hedonism.
Outside their charmed circle growing resentment was shown to the behavioural norms of the favoured few. Among royal watchers there is always a mix of responses – veneration, envy, resentment, irritation – on display to the pampered, highly publicised lifestyle of the top family. Among the severe critics of the regime the most vitriolically outspoken was William Prynne, lawyer, pamphleteer and militant Puritan. His book, Histriomastix, was a 1,000-page indictment of the theatre and one third of Prynne’s invective was kept for the bad example set by the court, which the author castigated for
effeminate mixed dancing, stage plays, lascivious pictures, face painting, health drinking, long hair, love locks, periwigs, woman’s curling, powdering and cutting of their hair, bonfires, New Year’s gifts, May games, amorous pastimes, lascivious effeminate music, excessive laughter, luxurious, disorderly Christmas-keeping, mummeries, with sundry suchlike vanities …20
The book is interesting, not for its hysterical overstatement of the case, but for the equally exaggerated response it provoked. Charles saw the book as a personal attack and a complete distortion of the highly moral tone he believed that his court was setting. He was stung into using the full weight of the law to crush the impudent Prynne. The offender was incarcerated in the Tower for a year before his case came to trial and when it did he was sentenced to life imprisonment, a stupendous £5,000 fine, deprivation of his Oxford degree, and the loss of both his ears. When he refused to be chastened by this treatment he was subjected to further punishments, including being branded on both cheeks and confined in Jersey’s Mount Orgueil Castle, where, it was hoped, he would be far removed from any sympathisers.
It was not just Prynne’s presumption that angered the king. Histriomastix claimed that he was failing to set a Christian moral tone even within his own household. It was not only fanatical Puritans who regarded as unseemly much that passed for normality at court. Crowds congregated at the trials of Prynne and his fellow prisoners to shout their support. As soon as Charles was forced to summon parliament one of the assembly’s first acts was to order the release of the miscreants and to denounce their persecution as ‘bloody, wicked, cruel, barbarous and tyrannical’.21 Prynne re-entered London as a hero, accompanied by 2,000 horsemen, 100 coaches and a multitude of pedestrian supporters who cheered him all the way. The rarefied culture of the court and the king’s increasingly draconian methods of dealing with opposition were different facets of the same asserted reality: monarchs and subjects are clean different things and it is presumptuous to refuse the ‘mystical reverence that belongs unto them that sit in the throne of God’.22
These were some of the background elements to the life of the young Prince of Wales. Much of that life was given over to games and pocket adventures in St James’s Park and the familiar but fascinating corridors, passages and cheek-by-jowl buildings of Whitehall Palace. But, by gradual degrees, he became aware of events and feelings outside his own highly protected environment. As his young mind embraced the existence of a wider and potentially more exciting world beyond the confines of royal residences he grew curious about that world. He cannot have been kept in ignorance of the more stirring and intriguing affairs eagerly discussed about the court. His early love of dressing up, acting and everything to do with the magic, fantasy world of the players’ companies gave him an interest in the performances taking place within a couple of miles’ radius of Whitehall. Did he ever manage to sneak away to one of the disreputable London theatres or was he obliged to remain content with second-hand reports of the latest stage successes? As he approached adolescence with its resentment of control and its inevitable questioning of parental attitudes and values he may well have found the restraints of court life irksome. But he comprehended little in detail of the darker forces moving outside Eden. For as long as possible his parents tried to shield their children from the unpleasant realities closing in on them like the inexorable jaws of some slow-moving trap but Charles could sense the growing tension between his mother and father and the increasing anxiety among their friends and confidants.
It was in May 1641 that the implications of being heir to the throne began to come home to the young Charles. His father despatched him to the House of Lords with a letter vainly pleading for the life of his friend and minister, the Earl of Strafford, hoping that the youth and innocence of the emissary might move the hearts of those determined to make an example of the agent of royal absolutism. The ploy failed. The parliamentary leaders now began to take a close interest in the Prince of Wales. If the father proved obstinate, the son, if properly reared during his formative years, might be made more amenable to sharing power with the representatives of the people. The main obstacle to be overcome was the Earl of Newcastle:
They liked not that he should have the government of the Prince, as one who would infuse such principles into him as would not be agreeable to their designs and would dispose him to no kindness to their persons, and that they would not rest till they saw another man in that province; in order to which they would pick all quarrels they could, and load him with all reproaches which might blast him with the people, with whom he had a very good reputation.23
The king who had signed Strafford’s death warrant was in no position to stick up for Newcastle so the earl saved him the embarrassment by resigning. The prince thus said goodbye to this exuberant mentor and friend with whom he had delighted to ride and fence and saw him replaced by the elderly Marquis of Hertford of whom it was said, ‘He was of an age not fit for much activity and … was wedded so much to his ease that he loved his books above all exercises’.24 A few weeks later Charles also lost his grandmother. The symbol of French autocracy was another irritant in the relations between king and parliament. So, much to Henrietta Maria’s distress, she went once more on her travels and died a year later, an exile to the last.
As politics encroached more and more on the gay world of the court, and specifically on the routine and personnel of the prince’s immediate environment, he began to share his parents’ insecurity and anxiety. His father was plunged into black despair at his guilt over Strafford’s death and his mother, increasingly irritated by the king’s seeming inability to stand up to his presumptuous subjects, was constantly trying to stiffen his backbone. In the autumn, as the mood in the City grew ugly, the king sent his family away to Oatlands, a royal manor in Surrey. But he could not bear to be parted from them for long and they returned to the capital within weeks. Early in the New Year, goaded mercilessly by his wife, Charles made a rapid descent on the House of Commons to arrest five of his most outspoken critics. He returned empty-handed and humiliated. Six days later, amidst hasty bustle and confusion, the royal siblings were told to make ready for a journey. The Stuart family were unceremoniously fleeing their fragile paradise.
On 10 January 1642 King Charles took his wife and children away from Whitehall and up the Thames to Hampton Court. It was a hasty, ill-prepared departure. The crisis at Westminster had boiled up rapidly. Parliament had won its tactical battle with the king. A showdown was inevitable. The City was triumphantly en fête, confident of seeing the royal power further curbed. Charles, against the advice of his council, decided to distance himself from further humiliation and also to give himself more freedom of manoeuvre. At Hampton Court all was at sixes and sevens. Charles and his siblings found their usual quarters unprepared and they had to spend their first night sleeping in makeshift beds in their parents’ room.
Six weeks later the family was split up, never to be reunited. The king sent his wife and daughter Mary to the continent for their safety and in order to buy foreign support in the armed conflict which was becoming inevitable. The excuse offered to parliament was that the ten-year-old princess, recently married to the Prince of Orange, had to be escorted to her husband’s home. The leave-taking at Hampton Court was tearful and it marked a turning point in Charles’ life. Now the boy was to be plunged into a man’s world, and a rough world at that.