A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (10 page)

In January 1661, she and Henrietta Maria sailed from Portsmouth, making a calm, slow start with ‘little wind, very smooth water’. But Minette then fell ill and her ship returned to port. The great fear was that this was yet another onslaught of smallpox, but it turned out to be measles. Although that was serious enough in those times, after a few days she and her mother set sail again. This time their crossing was untroubled. ‘The Princess was weak,’ wrote Sir John Lawson in his journal when they arrived in France, ‘yet had been very cheery all the way in her passage over.’
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Yet despite the relief of Minette’s recovery, the New Year was darkened for Charles. The glitter of his return had dulled. Although he was still sure that the major political problems could be resolved, and was caught up in the passionate throes of his own affair with Barbara, everywhere, even in his family and his household, he felt the threat of trouble and death.

THE DEATHS IN CHARLES’S OWN FAMILY
coincided with the violent ends of some of the men who had condemned his father. Charles had not wanted a bloody revenge. As soon as he landed, he tried to cajole his parliament into passing an Act of Oblivion and Indemnity as quickly as possible. This would offer a general pardon for those who had opposed the crown, with the exception of the regicides, the men who had signed his father’s death warrant. Fifteen of these were safely in the American colonies, or lying low in Switzerland and Holland. But nineteen had surrendered immediately after the Declaration of Breda, having read the Declaration to mean they would be pardoned if they gave themselves up within a fortnight. Now they faced trial for treason. While they waited in prison their fellows were rounded up and arrested.

The reactions differed greatly. Colonel Thomas Harrison awaited his arrest with calm, accepting that death would bring him face to face with God. By contrast, Edmund Ludlow, who had hidden in the alleys of London all summer, turned himself in and arranged bail, but when he realised he faced execution, he escaped and fled, eventually slipping away to exile in Geneva. The arrested men were brought to London, paraded through the streets in irons and then held in the Tower. Their families stayed in the capital all summer, begging to see them and pleading their cause.

Many men connected with Cromwell’s administration went into hiding. Among them was John Milton. In June parliament had ordered his arrest, and in August a royal proclamation called for two of his books to be burnt, the
Defence of the English People against Salmasius
and the
Eikonoklastes
. On the 30th of that month the public hangman flung these on the fire at the Old Bailey. Many influential intermediaries begged for clemency for the poet, including his old colleague Andrew Marvell, as well as the Secretary of State William Morice, Arthur Annesley, the Calvinist Earl of Anglesey, and Lady Ranelagh, sister to the Earl of Orrery and to Robert Boyle. In November, when Milton thought himself safe, he was imprisoned for a month, but released on payment of a fine of £150. But he wrote on despite his blindness and his political despair, working on
Paradise Lost
, his ‘heavenly muse’ still singing,

The two poets who had marched beside him behind Cromwell’s bier took different courses under the new regime. Marvell became a dutiful, hard-working MP for Hull, an envoy to Russia, and later one of the government’s most stinging critics, while Dryden turned into a court propagandist. Right at the start he tried to undo his blunder of writing ‘Heroic Stanzas’ to Cromwell by publishing his euphoric poem
Astraea Redux.
This welcomed the returning Charles as a second Augustus, celebrating a new Golden Age after the rule of the ‘Rabble’ in such reverent tones that a shocked Samuel Johnson found it positively sacrilegious:

In
Astraea Redux
Dryden showed a belief in a guiding Providence, and a respect for monarchy that he would retain all his life. But he also noted the human frailty of the king, trusting – in slightly warning tones – that he had learned from his exile:

Dryden’s swerve was far from unusual and his shift in allegiance illustrates very clearly how the mixed traditions of the Interregnum and Restoration could blend together. Short and squat (his friends called him ‘Squab’) with a piercing intellect and self-assured manner, Dryden was the eldest of fourteen children from a land-owning puritan family in Northamptonshire. His cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering, was one of the judges at the trial of Charles I (although he did not sign the death warrant) and he later became Cromwell’s Lord Chamberlain. As a counter to this, Dryden absorbed the classics at Westminster under the brilliant, firmly royalist headmaster John Busby. The clashes continued.
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After Trinity College, Cambridge, he worked for the Commonwealth civil service, yet one of his closest friends was Sir Robert Howard, a son of the Earl of Berkshire. After the Restoration they shared a house, and in 1663 Dryden would marry Howard’s sister Elizabeth. Setting his mind on court favour, Dryden would write a ‘Panegyrick’ on the Coronation, and New Year verses to Hyde, who helped to wring a dowry for Elizabeth from the king, late in payment but still an important court link.

Dryden’s cousin Gilbert Pickering was one of the men excepted from pardon in the Act of Oblivion, although he escaped execution. But while Cromwellians shuddered, the royalist-packed Commons and Lords attacked the Act as a sign of weakness on the part of the crown. The net of exceptions should be spread wider, they argued. All who had dealt with public money must be brought to account and all who held public office should take oaths of allegiance and supremacy. As they fought against the too-lenient act, MPs constantly tried to add names to the list of exceptions. The debates were loud and heated and in addition, the two houses disagreed: more than once a man pardoned by the Commons was rejected by the Lords and vice versa. And even when a man’s name was removed from the dread list, the Commons could still decide if he should keep his lands or lose everything.

Charles’s speeches to the Lords and Commons became increasingly impatient, stressing the need for the speedy passing of the act as an essential foundation to domestic security. He begged his supporters to put aside personal grudges and animosities. Once or twice, through Clarendon, he intervened specifically in rows between the two houses. He promised, for eample, that the republican general John Lambert and the politician Sir Henry Vane, both sentenced to death by the Lords, should be reprieved, as the Commons wished, because they had not been present at his father’s trial. Vane, however, conducted such a brilliant defence that Charles allegedly thought it was too dangerous to let him live: he was eventually executed on Tower Hill in June 1662. Lambert’s fate was almost worse, incarcerated for a quarter of a century in island gaols, until his sanity collapsed.

Charles’s speeches were doubtless drafted by Clarendon, but they reflected his own desire. He knew he could leave it to parliament to obtain a bloody revenge, leaving his own hands relatively clean. But he disliked bloodshed and politically, in purely pragmatic terms, he was wary of creating martyrs. Mercy and indulgence, he insisted, would make his opponents ‘good subjects to me, and good friends and neighbours to you and we have then all our end, and you shall find this the securest expedient to prevent future mischief’.
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It took three months to get the Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion through. When it was passed, on 29 August 1660, the Speaker of the House presented the list of exceptions with this warning: ‘We deal not with men, but monsters, guilty of blood, precious blood, royal blood, never to be remembered without tears.’
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In October the first defendants appeared at the Old Bailey. The procedure at their trials was fair, but the odds were stacked. The judges and prosecutors had already met in secret sessions, allegedly to decide on procedure but actually to prepare the indictments so that they could not be questioned by the defence: the accused were not charged with murdering the king but with ‘compassing and imagining’ his death.
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The jury were vetted for their loyalty and the judges were royal appointments. Among them was the newly ennobled Earl of Sandwich, sitting in silence as men who had been his fellow soldiers in the field were brought into the court, to face almost certain death.

Within a week several of those on trial were convicted, and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered: the sleds carrying the condemned men to Tyburn passed near to Milton’s house in Holborn. The first to die was Colonel Harrison, trusting in the God who had protected him so often in battle: ‘By God I have leapt over a wall, by God I have run through a troop, and by God I will go through this death and he will make it easy for me.’
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As he came to the scaffold the crowd booed and jeered, ‘Where is your Good Old Cause now?’ Harrison replied calmly: ‘Here in my bosom, and I shall seal it with my blood.’ The spectacle did not end with Harrison’s hanging. Cut down semi-conscious, he lay on the scaffold, and the executioner ripped out his bowels with hot tongs, cut out his heart and displayed it to the crowd before he threw it into a bucket. Then he hacked Harrison’s head off and showed this too to the mob. Finally his body was quartered with a cleaver, and the parts carried off to be displayed on the gatehouses of the city.

Each of the eight men executed over the next few days received the same treatment. Royalists exulted. ‘I saw not their execution,’ wrote the sober scholar John Evelyn, ‘but met their quarters, mangld & cutt & reaking as they were brought from the Gallows in baskets on the hurdle: o miraculous Providence of God.’
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But after a fortnight of such scenes, many in the crowd around the scaffold were expressing admiration for the brave speeches of the condemned rather than cheering for the king, and the sober citizens of London were retching at the stench of their burning bowels. This was enough.

The execution of the regicides, October 1660

The remaining regicides were held in prison over the winter, still officially under sentence of death. Others would soon join them. In December the Marquess of Argyll appeared suddenly in Whitehall, gaunt and ruined. Charles refused to see him. He was taken to the Tower and in the spring of 1661 he was sent to Edinburgh to face trial and although it was hard to prove his involvement in the regicide, or to justify the accusation that his activities in the 1650s amounted to treason, Argyll was found guilty, and beheaded in May 1661. His head was placed on the same spike on which he had impaled the skull of Montrose.

Over the next two years Clarendon’s men hunted down others, pursuing them across Europe and America, either dragging them back to trial or employing men to murder them abroad. Charles, however, was against such dirty tricks. Clarendon told Sir George Downing, the ex-Cromwellian now hounding his old colleagues in Holland, that he did not think the king would ever give instructions to have the regicides assassinated, such a measure being against his dignity as a king and a gentleman.

Not all who were captured were charged and tried: in defiance of Magna Carta, some were sent to Jersey or the Isle of Man, technically outside the jurisdiction, where Habeas Corpus did not apply. But the cry for vengeance still rang out. One refugee to the continent was old Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, one of the original signatories of the Scottish covenant. In January 1663 he was arrested in Rouen, brought to England (kidnapped, said his supporters) and imprisoned in the Tower. That June he was sent up to Edinburgh, so broken in body and mind that he could not recognise his own children: it seemed unnecessary and cruel to execute him. With his customary ferocity, Lauderdale described how the Scots Commissioners heard ‘a petition from that wretches children showing that he has lost his memorie & almost his sence & praying for delay till he may be in a fitter condition to dye’.
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Charles refused to show mercy and Wariston was executed in Edinburgh on a gallows of ‘extraordinary height’. His young nephew, the writer Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury, walked with his uncle to the scaffold.

In the winter after the first executions angry mutterings were heard. On 16 December, secretary Nicholas wrote to the Sheriff of Wiltshire, at Charles’s command, saying that they had intelligence that ‘several Persons of looss Principles and of known disaffection to Us and Our government have furnished themselves with such quantities of Arms and Munitions as may justly give suspicion that it is designed to disturb the peace and tranquillity of this Our Kingdom’.
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The Sheriff should raise searches and take action to safeguard the peace, and ‘use all possible diligence to prevent any tumults, insurrections or mutinous and unlawful meetings’. This was a false alarm, but the government were jittery. They reacted sharply when another crisis seemed to threaten in London itself. On the feast of Epiphany, 6 January 1661, a small group of ‘enthusiasts’ of the Fifth Monarchist sect, led by the wine cooper Thomas Venner, marched through London crying ‘No King but Christ’, vowing to keep their swords unsheathed until Christ’s kingdom should triumph and worldly powers be reduced to a ‘hissing and a curse’. They spread alarm through the streets for three days, fighting off the City’s trained bands, until they were finally beaten at Cripplegate and fled into hiding at Kenwood, near Highgate. When Charles heard the news, as he was saying goodbye to his mother and sister at Portsmouth, he dashed back to Whitehall. Gradually the would-be rebels were rounded up and fifteen ringleaders hanged.