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Charles II: His Life and Times by Antonia Fraser (revised 1993 edition)

Lady Antonia Fraser published her life of Charles II in 1979. 14 years later she published this big hardback version, which is basically a large-format coffee-table book, with the text drastically cut back in order to make room for hundreds of beautiful and fascinating full-colour illustrations.

As I have detailed the political events leading up to the civil wars in other blog posts, this review will focus on snippets and insights into Charles’s private life, seeing the events of this turbulent time from his personal perspective.

Birth Charles was born on 29 May 1630, one year into his father’s Personal Rule i.e. Charles I’s determination to rule without troublesome parliaments.

Heredity Charles had a swarthy complexion. He was nicknamed the Black Boy and this is the origin of hundreds of pubs of the same name across England. Through his father, Charles I, Charles was one quarter Scots, one quarter Danish (his grandfather James I was married to Anne of Denmark); through his mother, Henrietta Maria, he was one quarter French, one quarter Italian. Hence the ‘foreign’ look which many commentators pointed out.

Charles I’s wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, bore nine children, six of whom survived infancy. It was in the marriage contract between Henrietta Maria and Charles I that all their children should be suckled only by Protestant wet-nurses.

Trial of Strafford Charles’s idyllic early childhood was overshadowed by clouds of approaching war. As Prince of Wales, aged just ten, he sat through the entire seven-week trial of Charles I’s adviser, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, who’d acquired the nickname of ‘Black Tom Tyrant’. When Parliament passed an Act of Attainder declaring Strafford a traitor sentenced to death, 10-year-old Charles was sent to Parliament with a petition for mercy, which was rejected.

Orange In 1642 Charles’s sister, Mary, aged just nine, was married off to Prince William of Orange, aged 12. Their marriage produced a son who was to become William III of Britain 46 years later.

Wedding portrait of William II, Prince of Orange, and Mary Stuart, daughter of Charles I, future parents of King William III, by Anthony van Dyck

Nottingham As the political crisis deepened Charles I kept his sons, Charles and James, by his side, leaving his other children in London when he fled the capital in 1642. They were with him when Charles raised his standard of war at Nottingham Castle on 22 August 1642.

Edgehill Charles was nearly captured by a troop of Roundheads at the Battle of Edgehill, 23 October 1642. In a much-repeated anecdote, the 12-year-old drew his sword and prepared to fight, before Royalist soldiers came to the rescue. Charles accompanied his father to Oxford where a Royalist Parliament was set up. His youngest siblings, Elizabeth and Henry, had remained in royal nurseries in London, where they were seized by Parliamentarians and given Roundhead governesses.

Hyde Aged 14, early in 1645, Charles was given nominal leadership of the Royalist Western Association and departed Oxford. He was never to see his father again. He was to be supervised by Sir Edward Hyde, a lawyer who had initially attacked Charles’s policies in Parliament, but came round to being an advocate for a new type of constitutional Royalism, became firm friends with Charles I, and then the trusted guardian and mentor of his son for the next 20 years.

Flight The battle of Naseby, 14 June 1645, was the decisive military engagement of the first civil war in which the Royalist army was soundly beaten, followed by further Royalist defeats in the West. Young Charles had moved between Bristol and Bridgewater. Now he clearly needed to flee. His party were pushed by advancing Roundheads down into Cornwall and then took ship to the Scilly Isles. Charles was thrilled by the sea journey and at one point took the tiller himself, whetting an appetite for sea sports which was to resurface after the Restoration.

In Bristol, in Bridgewater, in Cornwall and in the Scillies, argument had raged about where Charles should ultimately flee. Hyde was insistent he remain on British soil, for its symbolic importance. But eventually Charles gave in to the wishes of his mother, Henrietta Maria, who had fled back to her native France in July 1645.

Puritan iconoclasm To give a sense of Roundhead iconoclastic zeal, when Henrietta had fled London, Parliament voted to destroy her private chapel at Somerset House and to arrest the Capuchin friars who maintained it. In March, Henry Marten and John Clotworthy forced their way into the chapel with troops and destroyed the altarpiece by Rubens, smashed many of the statues and made a bonfire of the Queen’s religious canvases, books and vestments.

Charles in Paris King Louis XIV of France was Charles’s cousin (the son of his mother, Henrietta Maria’s, brother) and eight years younger i.e. 8 when the 16-year-old Charles arrived in Paris. Henrietta Maria received a small pension from the French court, but Charles received nothing at all – for political reasons on both sides – and had to ask his mother for maintenance, a situation which led to increasing discord. He was reunited with his boyhood friend, the Duke of Buckingham and they both acquired reputations for laziness and ‘gallantry’.

Holland The next two years were spent among the bickering little court of Royalist exiles around Henrietta Maria. In 1648 a Scottish army invaded England. Charles was invited to put himself at the head of it but was fatally deterred by his advisers and instead sent to Holland where part of the British fleet had mutinied. Here he was reunited with his younger brother James. They sailed in the fleet to Yarmouth, optimistic that the Royalist uprising would soon result in the liberation of Charles I who was in prison on the Isle of Wight.

Preston But young Charles and the invading Scots engaged in the same old argument about whether Presbyterianism would be imposed on England, and during these squabbles Cromwell led an army north and destroyed the Scots forces at the Battle of Preston, 17 August 1648.

Birth of Monmouth So Charles’s little fleet sailed sadly back to Holland where he became dependent on the personal charity of the Prince of Orange, living in the Hague. He took a mistress, Lucy Walter, who on 9 April 1649 bore him a son, James, the future Duke of Monmouth, who was to lead a rebellion against Charles’s brother, his uncle James, in 1685.

Execution of Charles I While the Royalists squabbled amongst themselves, the pace of events in England speeded up. It took a while for news to come through that King Charles was to be put on trial, and even then it took some days for young Charles to realise his father might actually be killed. Henrietta Maria sent a letter to Parliament begging to be with her husband but this was ignored, and lay unsealed and unread for decades. Charles sent an envoy to plead with the Dutch Estates General to send official envoys to intercede, but by the time they arrived in London it was too late.

Legend has it that Charles signed a blank piece of paper to be given to the Roundhead court, indicating that he would agree to any terms at all, so long as his father was spared.

Tearful farewells This is a very personal history and so Fraser dwells on the last meeting between the doomed Charles I and his two youngest children who had been kept in Parliamentarian care since the outbreak of war, 13-year-old Princess Elizabeth and 8-year-old Henry Duke of Gloucester, who both broke down in tears. Accounts of this meeting, plus Charles’s last loving letters to his wife, helped to shape the image of Charles the gentle, saintly martyr, which became so powerful in subsequent royalist propaganda.

The Covenanters In September Charles and advisers sailed back to Jersey, with a view to preparing to raise a Royalist rebellion in Ireland. But while they waited, fretted and argued, Cromwell crushed Irish resistance. The royalist party sailed back to the Netherlands. Scotland remained the only hope. An embassy of Covenanters visited Charles in April 1650, insisting that he agree to impose Presbyterianism on all three kingdoms. Charles set off for Scotland and very reluctantly signed the Covenant, the grand document of the Scottish rebels. However, the army of Scots Covenanters which invaded England was crushed by Cromwell at the Battle of Dunbar on 3 September 1650. In any case, Charles had grown to hate the Covenanters and their narrow, bickering worldview.

King of Scotland Defeated in battle, the Scots Covenanters now realised they had to ally with the Royalist Scots if they were to mount a successful invasion of England. To this end, it was arranged for Charles to be crowned King of Scotland on 1 January 1651. He went on a tour of north and east Scotland to raise support. He turned 21 on 29 May 1651. Divisions continued among the Scots, some of whom refused to join the army being raised to invade England. Again.

Worcester The Scots were defeated at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1653. Charles fought bravely, escaped and went on the run. His experience of being hidden in the homes and priest holes of recusant Catholic families was to influence his thinking about this loyal but persecuted minority when he was restored. Maybe as a result of being locked up in various tiny hidey-holes, Charles in later life developed claustrophobia.

At one point Charles was disguised as a servant to Jane Lane, accompanying her on a visit to Bristol. He cut south to Lyme, expecting to rendezvous with a ship but when this didn’t appear, was forced back inland. Fraser tells the story with breathless excitement but then, it was a genuinely exciting adventure.

European travels Eventually Charles took ship from Brighton back to the Continent. His sojourn in Paris is brought to an end when the French decide they want to ally with Cromwell’s England and Charles was given ten days to pack his bags. He went to Spa in Belgium, then Cologne, then Dusseldorf. He conceived the plan of an alliance with Spain so went to the Spanish Netherlands, settling in Bruges.

The Restoration I have given a detailed account of the negotiations leading up to the Restoration in another blog post. The procession from Dover, wine flowing in the streets, garlands of flowers. The actual coronation the next year, on 23 April 1661. In the same month, the first awards of the Order of the Garter for a generation.

Catherine of Braganza His people and traditionalists expected magnificence but this came at a cost and Charles was soon spending more than the million or so pounds he was awarded by Parliament. Hence betrothal to Catherine of Braganza. The poor woman was 23, had been raised in a convent, and was sold to Charles along with a dowry of two million crowns or £360,000. But almost all this money was mortgaged before she even arrived in the country. She brought Dunkirk as part of her dowry but in 1662 Charles was forced to sell it to the French (at the admittedly impressive price of £400,000).

Infertility When she was introduced to Charles’s mistress, Barbara Villiers, Catherine had a fit, burst out crying and collapsed on the floor. Over time she learned to manage herself and her feelings in the alien court with its alien religion, surrounded by scheming courtiers, and her husband’s open dalliances with various mistresses. And then it turned out she was ‘barren’ (as we used to say), infertile, incapable of having children. She couldn’t get pregnant. She visited Bath and other spas to take the healing waters. No effect. It must have been incredibly hard.

Frances Stuart The traditional image of Britannia is based on the beautiful but maddeningly virtuous Frances Stuart, who Charles became infatuated with.

The cabal I found it interesting that Fraser thinks, or thought, that every schoolchild ought to know that the word cabal is an acronym for the five statesman who administered Charles’s affairs after he had dismissed the unpopular Earl of Clarendon, who was made to take the blame for the unpopular and humiliating Dutch war – namely Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale (p.156). Does every schoolchild know that? Ought they to?

Painting of Charles II in his coronation robes

King Charles II in his coronation robes by John Michael Wright

Sporty Charles was physically restless and interested in all forms of activity. He was notorious for his fast walking pace which wore out younger companions. He played ‘real’ tennis almost every day. He liked swimming in the Thames. He liked fishing. All of these activities might see him rising at 5am to indulge. He was definitely not a lazy slugabed.

Horse racing Charles loved hunting game in the royal forests e.g. the New Forest and Sherwood Forest, which he had restocked. Charles was an excellent horseman, he loved horse-racing, instituted the Epsom Derby, was no mean jockey himself, and regularly visited the racing at Newmarket. A famous stallion of the day which was used to breed a vast progeny was named Old Rowley and some people nicknamed the king Old Rowley for Charles’s similar tendencies.

St James Park Charles threw open St James’s Park to the public and had the lake built, which he liked to swim in. When it froze over Pepys wrote about the new Dutch fashion for skating or ‘sliding’ as it was called. Birdcage Walk is named after Charles’s interest in rare birds and the aviary he had constructed.

Science Charles loved clocks. He had at least seven in his personal rooms, which all kept different time and struck the hour at random, driving his servants crazy. It was part of his general love of gadgets which fed into serious interests in mathematics and the new sciences – the so-called Scientific Revolution which had seen him found the Royal Society in 1662.

Final illness Fraser’s description of Charles’s death is harrowing. He woke in the night, was feverish, struggled through to morning, let out a great shriek while being shaved, and was thereafter subjected to the monstrous interventions of half a dozen doctors, which included letting a staggering amount of blood, administering cantharides, red hot pokers to his shaved skull (!), cups, blistering and so on. The historian Macauley commented 150 years ago, that Charles was killed by his doctors.

Deathbed conversion to Catholicism Even more dramatic is the story of his deathbed conversion to Catholicism, laden with pathos since the priest who received him into the Catholic church was none other than the Father Huddleston who had helped hide Charles in the homes of local Catholics after the crushing defeat at Worcester all those years ago. He was procured and brought in secret to Charles’s bed-chamber by his brother, James. Fraser’s description of the catechism Huddleston administered and Charles’s conversion are very moving. After 45 minutes Huddleston left. Only his brother James and two other hand-picked gentlemen witnessed it. The great throng of nobles and all the Anglican bishops who had assembled, had been pushed out into ante-chambers and had no inkling of what was taking place.

An exemplary death But Charles didn’t die at once, he lingered. In fact, with characteristic politeness, he apologised to the gentlemen surrounding his bed for being so long a-dying. He called his wife and his two final mistresses in to see him. His many children were brought in and he blessed them one by one. It was an exemplary death from a man who had, throughout his life, striven to be noble and decent. A final example of his loyalty to those who helped him, and his confident way with the people who he so easily mixed with, in St James’s Park or Newmarket, sailing or racing, which endeared him to ‘the people’.

Parliaments Fraser’s account leaves you feeling that Charles wanted to be, and had the abilities to be, genuinely the father of his people. It was his Parliaments, the early ones determined on vicious revenge against Puritans and dissenters, the later ones obsessed by the Catholic threat, which poisoned the politics of his reign, especially the last seven or eight years.

If only Henry Duke of Gloucester, Charles I’s youngest son and widely admired as a young man, had not died in 1660, aged just 20, maybe Charles would have accepted the Whig attempts to exclude James II from the succession in favour of Protestant Henry, and all the disruption which followed would have been avoided.

If only Catherine of Braganza had borne him at least one child who would have been raised a Protestant and ensured the Stuart succession.

But Henry died and Catherine could not get pregnant, and so James Duke of York was left as the most legitimate successor to Charles, and so on 6 February 1685 his doomed reign began.

Restoration art

British Baroque: Power and Illusion @ Tate Britain (2020)

Restoration comedies

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by Simon on September 2, 2020 • Permalink

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Tagged 17th century history, Anne of Denmark, Anthony van Dyck, Arlington, Ashley, Barbara Villiers, Battle of Dunbar, Battle of Edgehill, Battle of Naseby, Battle of Preston, Battle of Worcester, Biography, Birdcage Walk, Black Boy, Black Tom Tyrant', Buckingham, Cabal, Catherine of Braganza, Catholicism, Charles I, Charles II, Civil Wars, Clifford, Covenanters, Cromwell, Duke of Buckingham, Duke of Monmouth, Dunkirk, Earl of Strafford, early modern Britain, Edward Hyde, England, Epsom, Father Huddleston, fishing, France, Frances Stuart, Henrietta Maria, Henry Duke of Gloucester, Henry Marten, history, horse racing, Isle of Wight, James II, Jane Lane, John Clotworthy, Lady Antonia Fraser, Lauderdale, Louis XIV, Lucy Walter, Macauley, Newmarket, Old Rowley, Parliament, presbyterianism, Protestantism, Puritanism, restoration, Roman Catholicism, Roundehads, Royal Society, Royalism, Rubens, Scientific Revolution, Scotland, Somerset House, St James's Park, Thomas Wentworth, Wars of Three Kingdoms, William of Orange

Posted by Simon on September 2, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/02/charles-ii-life-and-times-antonia-fraser/

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 6. The restoration of Charles II

Introduction
Timeline of the Restoration
- 1659
- 1660
The reign of Charles II, the 1660s
Timeline of the 1660s
The reign of Charles II, the 1670s
The reign of Charles II, the Popish Plot and after
- Whigs and Tories
Death of Charles II

Introduction to the restoration of Charles II

When Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658 there was no immediate sense that the Commonwealth would collapse and the king be restored. Rule passed smoothly to Oliver’s son, Richard – but things quickly started to unravel.

Cromwell’s rule had never reconciled the ever-increasing number of conflicting constituencies or parties or groups within not only England, but the other kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland. His rule rested ultimately on his control of the army, and the loyalty to him of (most) of the army generals. From this secure base he made attempts throughout the Protectorate, 1653-58, to reach out to:

in religion, episcopalians, moderate Anglicans, Presbyterians and independents
in politics, to moderate Royalists, to republicans and to the revolutionaries who had denounced his regime after the regicide
in Scotland and Ireland to moderate leaders prepared to accept his authority and work with him

These two central elements a) military authority and b) the intricate skein of negotiated settlements with all these constituencies, often based on personal acquaintance – vanished with his death.

The actual sequence of constitutional, parliamentary and political events following Cromwell’s death are extremely complex, but a high-level summary is that the general in Cromwell’s army tasked with running Scotland, General Monck, got in touch with representatives of the king and offered his services to broker a restoration.

Monck’s main concern was the material demands of the army:

there was to be a general pardon for actions carried out under orders
arrears of pay were to be fully met
titles to former Crown and Church lands bought during the Interregnum were to be confirmed
religious toleration for moderate sectarians was to be guaranteed

Charles and his advisers prepared a conciliatory declaration that offered a free pardon and amnesty to everyone who would swear loyalty to the Crown within forty day of the King’s return. However, Charles was canny enough to avoid the main points of contention, saying he’d put them off to be agreed by the first Parliament elected.

The result of these negotiations was the Declaration of Breda, signed by Charles on 4 April 1660, Breda being a town in the southern part of the Netherlands, where Charles had relocated for the negotiations.

Copies of the Declaration were sent to the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the army, the fleet and the City of London. A new Parliament had been elected in April 1660, and when Sir John Grenville delivered the Declaration to it on 1 May, both Houses unanimously voted for the Restoration.

Timeline of the Restoration

The timeline below gives some sense of the confusion and potential anarchy which spread after Richard Cromwell was forced to abdicate and then nobody knew what was happening or what to expect.

1659

May 7 – Richard Cromwell forced by the Council of Officers to reinstate the Rump Parliament.
May 24 – Resignation of Richard Cromwell after Parliament refuses to recognise the Protectorate.
June 7 – Parliament commissions Charles Fleetwood commander-in-chief of the armies in England and Scotland but retains the power to appoint or promote officers.
July 3 – Viscount Mordaunt arrives in England to co-ordinate a general Royalist insurrection.
August 5-19 – Booth’s Uprising: Royalist revolt in Cheshire, suppressed by Colonel John Lambert.
September – Officers of Lambert’s army meet at Derby and draw up a petition setting out their demands for the government of the nation.
September 22-3 – Parliament forbids any further petitioning by soldiers. Sir Arthur Hesilrige calls for Lambert’s arrest.
October 12 – Parliament revokes the commissions of Lambert and eight other senior officers.
October 13 – Lambert’s troops occupy Westminster and prevent Parliament from sitting.
October 15 – The Council of Officers appoints a ten-member Committee of Safety to consider how to carry on the government.
October 20 – General Monck sends a declaration from Scotland demanding the return of Parliament.
October 25 – The Council of State dissolved; the Committee of Safety re-appointed by Army leaders.
November 3 – Lambert marches north from London with 12,000 troops to block Monck’s route into England.
November 12 – Monck’s representatives arrive in London for talks with the Council of Officers.
November 24 – Former members of the Council of State appoint Monck commander of all military units in England and Scotland and empower him to take military action against the enemies of Parliament if necessary.
December 3 – Sir Arthur Hesilrige secures Portsmouth for Parliament.
December 5 – Riots in London for the return of Parliament.
December 8 – Monck crosses the border and establishes his headquarters at Coldstream.
December 14 – Vice-Admiral John Lawson sails for the Thames, threatening to blockade London in support of Parliament.
December 26 – Fleetwood forced to recall the Rump Parliament.

1660

January 1 – General Monck marches from Coldstream for London.
January 9 – Sir Henry Vane expelled from Parliament for having sided with the military junta.
January 11 – Lord Fairfax meets Monck at York and urges him to restore the Monarchy.
February 3 – Monck’s army arrives in London.
February 9 – Parliament orders Monck to remove the City gates and portcullises after citizens of London demand the reinstatement of Presbyterian MPs purged in 1648.
February 11 – Monck demands the re-admission of the purged MPs and apologises for his actions in removing the City gates.
February 21 – The Long Parliament restored: surviving MPs purged in 1648 re-admitted to Parliament under Monck’s protection.
March 5 – John Lambert imprisoned in the Tower of London.
March 16 – The Long Parliament calls free elections and votes for its own dissolution.
April 10 – Lambert escapes from the Tower and tries to rally resistance to the Restoration.
April 22 – Lambert and his followers defeated at Daventry; Lambert returned to London as a prisoner.
April 25 – The Convention Parliament assembles.
May 1 – Charles II’s manifesto the Declaration of Breda read in Parliament.
May 8 – The Convention Parliament declares Charles II to have been King since 30th January 1649.
May 14 – Parliament orders the arrest of all surviving regicides.
May 25 – Charles II lands at Dover.
May 29 – Charles II makes a triumphal entry into London.

The reign of Charles II, the 1660s

Charles’s reign breaks up into a number of periods and is dominated by a few key themes.

First, was how to deal with the legacy of the Civil War. Charles was in favour of forgiveness and tried to steer the first Parliament of his reign, the Convention Parliament, in that direction. However, the second Parliament, which came to be known as the Cavalier Parliament, not to mention the newly restored House of Lords, contained many who had suffered severely, lost land and family to the Roundheads. They were determined to push the clock back, to recover their lost land and money, to savagely punish all those responsible for the wars and the regicide, and to re-establish a rigid conformity in religion.

Convention Parliament

The Convention Parliament sat until the end of 1660. It was responsible for implementing the terms for the initial Restoration settlement under which Charles II established his administration.

The Convention passed the Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion, which was intended to reunite the nation under the restored monarchy by pardoning the majority of those who had opposed the Crown during the civil wars and Interregnum. It also undertook the task of disbanding the army which had underpinned the Commonwealth and Protectorate régimes. First steps were taken towards settling disputes over lands which had been sold off during the Interregnum, and initial legislation to provide revenue for the restored monarchy was set out. Charles dissolved the Convention Parliament on 29 December 1660.

The Clarendon Code

The Restoration religious settlement comprised four acts of Parliament known collectively as the Clarendon Code. The name derived from Sir Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, who served as Charles II’s lord chancellor – though Clarendon was not the chief instigator of the acts and even argued against some of the more severe aspects.

The Corporation Act (1661)

This required all office holders in towns and cities to take oaths of allegiance to the Crown, to renounce the Solemn League and Covenant and to take the sacrament in accordance with the doctrines of the Church of England.

The Act of Uniformity (1662)

This brought all ordained clergymen under the doctrines and liturgy of the established Church. Candidates for the ministry had to be ordained by a bishop according to the rites of the Church of England. They were required to renounce the Solemn League and Covenant and to declare their acceptance of the revised Book of Common Prayer and all doctrinal articles sanctioned by the Church. Hundreds of Presbyterian and non-conformist clergymen were expelled from their livings on St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August) 1662 for refusing to comply with the Act of Uniformity.

The Conventicle Act (1664)

This was intended to prevent clergymen ejected by the Act of Uniformity from forming their own congregations. Fines or imprisonment were imposed on anyone attending an independent prayer meeting or act of worship (a so-called ‘conventicle) that was not in accordance with the Anglican liturgy.

The Five-Mile Act (1665)

This was intended to curb the influence of dissenting clergymen by prohibiting them from residing within five miles of any living they had held before the Act was passed. Furthermore, they were required to take an oath of non-resistance to royal authority before accepting any appointment as tutor or schoolmaster.

Money

Once again a Stuart king let himself become poor, spending a fortune on the two stupid Dutch wars and frittering it away on mistresses and favourites at home.

A timeline of the 1660s

1661 Corporation Act – aimed at Presbyterians, the Act provided that no person could be legally elected to any office relating to the government of a city or corporation, unless he had within the previous twelve months received the sacrament of ‘the Lord’s Supper’ according to the rites of the Church of England. He was also commanded to take the Oaths of Allegiance and the Oath of Supremacy, to swear belief in the Doctrine of Passive Obedience, and to renounce the Covenant.
1662 Act of Uniformity compels Puritans to accept the doctrines of the Church of England or leave the church.
1662 Royal Society for the improvement of science founded

Catherine of Braganza

Charles married Catherine of the Portuguese royal house of Braganza. He married her for money but her dowry was quickly spent and then Britain found itself drawn into Portugal’s war against Spain. And, crucially, Catherine turned out to be ‘barren’ or incapable of conceiving children. Charles wasn’t. He was to acknowledge fatherhood of eighteen bastards (the most famous being the Duke of Monmouth, born as early as 1649, when Charles himself was only 19).

The lack of a male heir from the Braganza marriage meant the throne would pass to his brother James who was an overt Catholic i.e. more or less condemned the Stuart line to come to an end. As with Henry VIII, the infertility of a royal marriage was to have seismic consequences for the British.

1664 England seizes the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, changing its name to New York.
1665 Outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War
1665 The Great Plague strikes London and over 60,000 die.
1666 The Great Fire of London rages for four days and three nights. Two thirds of central London is destroyed and 65,000 are left homeless

1667 As part of The Second Dutch War A Dutch fleet sails up the River Medway captures the English flagship The Royal Charles and sinks three other great ships. This humiliation provided Charles with a pretext to blame and thus get rid of the Earl of Clarendon, the statesman who had guided and mentored him in exile and dominated the first seven years of his rule.

Fall of Clarendon

Clarendon was replaced by a set of five statesmen or advisers who come to be known as The Cabal and held power from 1668 to 1674.

The Cabal

The linchpin of the Cabal was probably George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Although he only held the household office of Master of the Horse, with responsibility for overseeing the King’s travel arrangements, Buckingham was a long and close associate of King Charles II. They had practically been raised together since they were children, during the close association of their fathers, Charles I and the first Duke of Buckingham, a relationship they consciously compared themselves to in adulthood, and might have replicated, had the younger Buckingham possessed the skills of his father. Nonetheless, Buckingham was in constant contact and a clear favourite of the king, and the centre of the Cabal’s grip on power. Gilbert Burnet, who knew some of its members personally, said that Buckingham stood apart from the rest of the Cabal, hating them and being hated in return.

The Lord High Treasurer Wriothesley having died just before Clarendon’s departure, the Treasury came under the nominal chairmanship of George Monck (Duke of Albermarle). But as Monck was practically retired from public life, control of the Treasury commission was taken up by Sir Thomas Clifford (Comptroller and soon Treasurer of the Household) and Anthony Ashley Cooper (Chancellor of the Exchequer). With the assistance of their close associates John Duncombe (Ashley’s deputy at the Exchequer), Stephen Fox (the Paymaster of the Forces) and Sir George Downing, the secretary to the Treasury commission, Clifford and Ashley overhauled the monarchical finances, placing them in a much more solvent state than before.

Foreign affairs was directed by Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington (Secretary of the South), with occasional assistance from George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. (Although foreign affairs were notionally in the purview of the Secretary of the North, the Cabal bullied Sir William Morice into selling the seat to Sir John Trevor, and then sidelined the latter.)

John Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale (Secretary of State for Scotland) had already consolidated his position in 1663 by securing the dismissal of his principal rival, John Middleton (Lord High Commissioner to the Parliament of Scotland) and his replacement by the more pliable John Leslie, Earl of Rothes. In 1669, Lauderdale went one step further, and got Leslie dismissed and the Lord High Commissioner position for himself, consolidating his hold and ruling Scotland as a virtual autocrat for the remainder of his career.

Sir Orlando Bridgeman, the Royalist lawyer who had prosecuted the Regicides, and who took over Clarendon’s duties as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in 1667, was outside of this inner circle, although cooperated with their goals.

Despite their comparative energy and efficiency, the Cabal was a fractious and unpopular group. Although perceived as a secretive and unsavoury junta, they rarely formed a united front, and their internal quarrels often spilled over into the public arena.

J. P. Kenyon suggests that the King actually encouraged the Cabal members to quarrel, in the belief that this made them easier to control. They in turn, never trusted him not to bring them down as he had brought down Clarendon, and as Kenyon remarks, they hardly dared turn their backs on him for fear of sudden dismissal.

It was said that the King treated his ministers very much as he did his mistresses: ‘He used them, but he was not in love with them, and was tied to them no more than they to him, which implies sufficient liberty on either side’.

Sir William Coventry, the Secretary to the Admiralty, resigned from office following a duel challenge from the Duke of Buckingham, and re-emerged in the House of Commons at the head of a group of MPs known as the ‘Country Party’, which loudly opposed the Cabal and its policies.

Charles II acceded to the Cabal’s recommendation to prorogue parliament repeatedly, keeping it out of session for as long as he could, and leaving the Cabal to run the country on their own. When he found himself in financial difficulties following the Great Stop of the Exchequer in 1672 and the outbreak of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, Charles was obliged to re-convene parliament in 1673 and the parliamentarians were bent on revenge.

Fall of the Cabal

The Cabal began to split in 1672, particularly over the autocratic nature of the King’s Royal Declaration of Indulgence, the financing of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, and Britain’s relationship with France.

Personal rivalries and a conflict over foreign policy between Buckingham and Arlington escalated. The Ministry became very unpopular. The public saw them as ‘untrustworthy, venal and self-seeking, their eyes always on the main chance”.

Towards the end of the year, Ashley, now the Earl of Shaftesbury, became Lord Chancellor, leaving Treasury matters to Clifford and the Exchequer to Duncombe. He pressed publicly for greater reform of government, taking the side of the Opposition against his colleagues and the King.

Clifford resigned over the in-fighting and retired from public life: as an open Roman Catholic he would in any case have been debarred by the Test Act of 1673 from holding office in the future. Shaftesbury was replaced by Viscount Osborne, soon to become Earl of Danby, in the summer of 1673, on the recommendation of Buckingham and Clifford.

Danby immediately established his authority over the remaining members of the Cabal. Buckingham’s feud with Arlington saw him leak the details of the Treaty of Dover and fall from favour in 1674. Arlington survived as Southern Secretary until September of that year. Lauderdale retained his position and his relatively autonomous power in Scotland, becoming an enemy of Shaftesbury.

Shaftesbury began to agitate against Charles and his brother, the Duke of York, later James II. He briefly returned to government in the Privy Council Ministry and took a lead in forming the partisan group that would eventually become known as the Whigs.

Reign of Charles II – the 1670s

1670 – Charles signs the secret Treaty of Dover, by which Charles agrees to declare himself a Catholic, suspend penal laws against Catholics in England in return for secret subsidies from Louis XIV of France.
1670 – Second Conventicle Act
1670 – Hudson Bay Company founded in North America

1672 – Charles issues the Declaration of Indulgence, allowing dissenters and Catholics to practice their religion in private
1672 – Outbreak of the Third Dutch War as part of the secret treaty with France, the French invading the Spanish Netherlands while the British fleet engaged the Dutch fleet. The Dutch defeated the British fleet at Sole Bay and repelled a land invasion by France by flooding their dykes.
1672 James Duke of York’s wife, Anne Hyde (daughter of the disgraced Earl of Clarendon) died in childbirth, having delivered him two daughters, Mary (b.1662) and Anne, both of whom were brought up as Protestants. Who suspected, then, that they would both reign as queens of England?

1673 – James, Duke of York remarried, taking as his second wife Mary of Modena, a Catholic who was only four years older than his daughter, Mary. James came out publicly as a Catholic which caused a scandal.

1673 – When Charles allowed the Cavalier Parliament to sit again in 1673, it was inflamed by rumours of Charles’s deals with the King of France and Catholic influence in British statecraft, and so the vengeful Anglicans passed a Test Act which required everybody holding public office to take Anglican communion and swear an oath against a belief in transubstantiation – that the wafer of bread and the wine administered during communion actually and literally become the blood of Christ, a central premise of Roman Catholicism. In other words, the Act was expressly designed to keep Roman Catholics out of political office. The Catholic Treasurer Lord Clifford resigned his office then took his life. Charles’s brother, James Duke of York, resigned as High Admiral of the Navy.

In 1677 the Earl of Danby, who had emerged as Charles’s most capable minister, persuaded both Charles and James to let him make a strategic alliance by marrying James’s daughter Mary to her cousin, the Protestant Stadtholder of Holland, William III of Orange. William was the son of the King’s late sister, Mary, Princess Royal, and thus fourth in the line of succession after James, Mary, and Ann. When James told Mary that she was to marry her cousin, ‘she wept all that afternoon and all the following day’. She was 15.

Reign of Charles II – the Popish Plot and after

1678 – The fantasist Titus Oates concocted the Popish Plot, the notion of a complex, far-reaching plot to murder Charles and convert Britain to a Catholic dictatorship. His initial claims were passed up the chain of command to Charles himself who handed them to Danby to investigate, and with each telling they became more fantastic and baroque. They played into the sense that Britain was being sold into Catholic influence which had haunted the 1670s, what with James’s overt Catholicism, his marriage to a Catholic princess, with Charles repeatedly allying with Catholic France against the Protestant Dutch. Oates’s fabrications helped create a McCarthy witch-hunt atmosphere. Even when he accused the Queen of being a member of the plot to assassinate her own husband, he was widely believed.

A second Test Act (1678) was passed which excluded all known Catholics from both Houses of Parliament. Known Catholics were ordered to leave London and many Protestants in the city openly carried weapons to defend themselves against the impending Catholic ‘onslaught’. Shops in London were boarded up, chains were stretched across major roadways, ferry passengers were detained for questioning, a fleet of lesser crooks and narks emerged to inform on their neighbours and rivals. Some twenty-four utterly innocent people were tried and executed, while Oates was awarded rooms in Whitehall and a pension.

The hysteria lasted from 1678 to 1681. A new Parliament was elected in March 1679 which presented a bill seeking to prevent the succession of the Catholic James. Charles worked on numerous fronts to address concerns, taking opponents into his Privy Council, sending James out of the kingdom, being prepared to sign a bill limiting the power of a Catholic monarch. But he would not concede the right to determine the royal succession to Parliament and so he dissolved this Parliament and called a second one. The second Parliament of 1679 was called amid mounting hysteria and opposition was orchestrated by the Earl of Shaftesbury amid press campaigns and petitions.

The coalition of allies which Shaftesbury put together around this central anti-Catholic approach was arguably the first political party in Britain and became known as the Whigs. The king’s supporters quickly copied the new organisational tactics of the Whigs and began to be known as the Tories. Charles refused to let the second Parliament sit, proroguing it seven times over the course of a year. Whig propagandists played on fears of Catholic tyranny; Tories revived memories of 1641 and the way a Parliament trying to seize the king’s prerogatives had led to 20 years of chaos.

Whigs and Tories

The term Whig was originally short for whiggamor, a term meaning ‘cattle driver’ used to describe western Scots who came to Leith for corn. In the reign of Charles I the term was used during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms to refer derisively to a radical faction of the Scottish Covenanters who called themselves the Kirk Party (see the Whiggamore Raid). It was then applied to Scottish Presbyterian rebels who were against the King’s Episcopalian order in Scotland.

The term Whig entered English political discourse during the Exclusion Bill crisis of 1678–1681 when there was controversy about whether or not King Charles II’s brother, James, should be allowed to succeed to the throne on Charles’s death. Whig was a term of abuse applied to those who wanted to exclude James on the grounds that he was a Roman Catholic. The fervent Tory Samuel Johnson often joked that ‘the first Whig was the Devil’.

In his six-volume history of England, David Hume wrote:

The court party reproached their antagonists with their affinity to the fanatical conventiclers in Scotland, who were known by the name of Whigs: The country party found a resemblance between the courtiers and the popish banditti in Ireland, to whom the appellation of Tory was affixed. And after this manner, these foolish terms of reproach came into public and general use; and even at present seem not nearer their end than when they were first invented

In response, King Charles prorogued Parliament and then dissolved it, but the subsequent elections in August and September saw the Whigs’ strength increase. This new parliament did not meet for thirteen months but when it did in October 1680, an Exclusion Bill was introduced and passed in the Commons without major resistance, but Charles was in attendance when it was rejected in the Lords and Charles dissolved Parliament in January 1681.

As Mark Kishlansky summarises, ‘the governing class was now irredeemably divided.’

The next attempt at a Parliament met in March at Oxford, but when it also determined on the Exclusion Bill, Charles dissolved it after only a few days. He then he made an appeal to the country against the Whigs and ruled for the rest of his reign without Parliament.

In February, Charles had made a deal with the French King Louis XIV, who promised to support him against the Whigs. Without Parliament, the Whigs gradually crumbled, mainly due to government repression following the discovery of the Rye House Plot, which directly implicated many of them.

1683 The Rye House Plot a conspiracy to kill Charles and his brother James and return to parliamentary rule is uncovered. The Rye House Plot of 1683 was a plan to assassinate King Charles II of England and his brother (and heir to the throne) James, Duke of York. The royal party went from Westminster to Newmarket to see horse races and were expected to make the return journey on 1 April 1683, but because there was a major fire in Newmarket on 22 March (which destroyed half the town), the races were cancelled, and the King and the Duke returned to London early. As a result, the planned attack never took place.

There seems to have been disagreement among the plotters on almost every aspect, including whether there even would be an assassination or whether it should be a kidnapping, and exactly how the subsequent uprising would be started and managed.

Once information about it was leaked, the plotters incriminated each other and letters and diaries were discovered which spread the net wider and wider.

Unlike the Popish Plot, Rye House was a genuine conspiracy involving an extended network of Whigs, politicians and non-conformists. Twelve were executed including William Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney, two condemned to death but pardoned, 10 imprisoned including the ageing Leveller John Wildman, 10 fled into exile including the noted philosopher John Locke and, most importantly, the Earl of Shaftesbury, who had been the effective leader of the Whig party. These formed a core of Whig opposition in exile, in the Netherlands.

As Anglican pledges of support flooded in from round the country, the authorities took the opportunity to crack down in dissenters and over 1,300 Quakers were imprisoned over the next 12 months.

Charles undertook a policy of reincorporation, systematically placing loyalist country officers around the country.

Death of Charles II

Charles died on 5 February 1685, aged just 54, only barely outdoing his father, who died aged 48. On his deathbed he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. In the absence of any legitimate male heirs, the crown passed to his younger brother, who became King James II.

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by Simon on August 31, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in History

Tagged Act of Uniformity, Algernon Sidney, Anglicans, Anne Hyde, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion, Book of Common Prayer, Cabal, Catherine of Braganza, Cavalier Parliament, Charles II, Civil Wars, Clarendon Code, Committee of Safety, Commonwealth, Conventicle Act, Convention Parliament, Corporation Act, Council of Officers, Country Party, Declaration of Breda, Declaration of Indulgence, Duke of Albermarle, Duke of Buckingham, Duke of Monmouth, Earl of Arlington, Earl of Clarendon, Earl of Lauderdale, Earl of Rothes, Earl of Shaftesbury, England, Exclusion Bill, Five-Mile Act, General Monck, George Villiers, Gilbert Burnet, Great Fire of London, Great Plague, Henry Bennet, House of Commons, House of Lords, independents, interregnum, Ireland, James II, John Duncombe, John Lambert, John Leslie, John Locke, John Maitland, John Middleton, John Wildman, Long Parliament, Lord Fairfax, Lord Russell, Louis XIV, Mary of Modena, New York, North America, Oliver Cromwell, Parliament, Politics, Popish Plot, Portugal, Presbyterians, Protectorate, Quakers, Republicans, Richard Cromwell, River Medway, Roman Catholic, Royal Society for the improvement of science, Royalists, Rump Parliament, Rye House Plot, Scotland, Second Anglo-Dutch War, Second Conventicle Act, Second Dutch War, second Test Act, Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Sir Edward Hyde, Sir George Downing, Sir Henry Vane, Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Sir William Coventry, Sole Bay, Solemn League and Covenant, Third Anglo-Dutch War, Titus Oates, Tories, Treaty of Dover, whiggamor, Whigs, William III of Orange

Posted by Simon on August 31, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/31/a-monarchy-transformed-mark-kishlansky-6-the-restoration/

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 3. The reign of Charles I

The reign of Charles I

The 1620s

King James I died on 25 March 1625 and was succeeded by his son, Charles I. A month and a half later Charles married the French Princess Henrietta Maria (sister of King Louis XIII) by proxy in a ceremony in Paris. She was then sent to Kent where they met and spent their marriage night.

Charles was crowned in Westminster in February 1626 but Henrietta’s Catholicism prevented her from being crowned with him and this lack of a formal coronation, along with her overt Catholicism and the stipulation that she be allowed to practice her Catholicism in the royal court, were all to build up popular animosity against her.

In fact, the French stipulation that she be allowed to bring up her children in the Catholic religion lay the seeds of the overthrow of her son James II in 1685. It’s odd that Charles’s advisers didn’t grasp this obvious fact.

With James dead, Charles gave hid father’s former favourite, and his own best friend, the Duke of Buckingham, his head to launch a war against Spain. Yet just like his father, Charles soon found himself stymied.

Brave talk of capturing the annual Spanish treasure fleet coming from South America turned out to be pointless as the fleet had already safely arrived in Spain.
Buckingham led a naval attack on the port of Cadiz which failed to achieve anything.
Ships which the British lent the French to combat the Spanish off the coast of Holland, ended up being used, instead, to attack France’s own Protestant rebels holed up in the Atlantic port of La Rochelle.

Like his father, Charles called a Parliament expecting patriotic enthusiasm and uncritical support, and was taken aback when it promptly launched a series of attacks on him and his favourite adviser.

Instead of voting him the subsidies he wanted, Parliament impeached Buckingham. Charles responded by imprisoning the leaders of the impeachers, which led to predictable outcries about free speech, which Charles ended by shutting Parliament altogether. So much for the Parliament of 1625.

The forced loan

Charles initiated a ‘forced loan’ i.e. the compulsory taxation of his rich subjects, but this led to a storm of protest and Charles found himself having to imprison a whole series of eminent protesters and other officials to carry it through. By this stage relations with France had collapsed – both sides were confiscating each others’ ships – and Charles and Buckingham spent the £200,000 raised by the loan to launch a well-equipped campaign to relieve La Rochelle, the Atlantic port which had become the focus for Protestant resistance to the Catholic king and his chief adviser, Cardinal Richelieu.

The British fleet and army attacked the island of Saint-Martin-de-Ré in order to relieve the Siege of La Rochelle but, for a number of reasons, the siege was a failure, many English lives were lost, and the expedition was eventually forced to withdraw in humiliation.

The 1628 Parliament

Charles was forced to call another Parliament, in May 1628, which immediately began debating the various measures he had taken the preceding year, plus abuses arising from the passing of martial law to organise the troops sent to France. Many aspects of this – for example, billeting soldiers on civilians – had become deeply unpopular.

The Petition of Right

The upshot was that before Parliament voted him more money, it insisted on Charles agreeing to a ‘Petition of Right’. This was drawn up to confirm four traditional liberties:

freedom from arbitrary arrest
freedom from taxation not approved by parliament aka arbitrary taxation
freedom from the billeting of troops
freedom from being governed by martial law

Assassination of Buckingham

Charles was careful to specify that these liberties did not affect his own prerogative, and then agreed. Parliament voted him the subsidies he wanted. Buckingham hurried off to Portsmouth to ready the fleet for another attempt to relieve the French Protestants. Then Buckingham was assassinated.

The Duke was stabbed to death on 23 August 1628 at the Greyhound Pub in Portsmouth, where he had gone to organise yet another campaign. According to an eye-witness account, he lived just long enough to jump up, shouting ‘Villain!’ and making to chase after his assailant, but then fell down dead. The assassin was John Felton, an army officer who had been wounded in the earlier military adventure and believed he had been passed over for promotion by Buckingham.

Felton

Buckingham was by now so hated that his assassin, John Felton, was feted as a hero, had poems and pamphlets written about him. He was tried and executed, of course, but when his body was taken back to Portsmouth to be publicly hung up, it became an object of popular veneration. A few months later, in October 1628 La Rochelle finally fell to French Catholic forces.

So his favourite was dead and the policy which had driven his first four years as king had completely failed. Charles needed to regroup. He sought to make peace with both France and Spain, and he knew he needed to call one more Parliament. The first of his reign had refused to grant the traditional tonnage and poundage tax to him for the whole reign. He needed that money. But in the meantime…

Peace

Charles signed peace treaties with France in 1629 and Spain in 1630. Sick to death of confrontations with Parliament he decided – now he no longer needed special funds for war – not to call another one, and so ruled through his council and by exercising the Personal Prerogative. In fact, he wasn’t to call another Parliament until 1640, a period of 11 years which is referred to as the period of his Personal Rule or (by his harshest critics) as the Eleven Years Tyranny.

After the tribulations of the 1620s, Charles tried to make the 1630s a decade of peace and reconciliation. But such was the distrust generated by the opening years of his reign, that everything he did tended to be misinterpreted for the worst, and in four or five main areas of government, he took aggressively centralising decisions which alienated large numbers of his subjects.

Issues of the 1630s

Ship Money

Charles was still chronically short of money and his Chancellors came up with a series of ever-more ingenious ways of mulcting money from his subjects. The most controversial was ship money. This was a traditional and well-accepted tax imposed on coastal communities to pay for ships to be built and crewed to defend coastal towns. Ship money had traditionally been authorised only during wars, and only on coastal regions.

Charles, however, argued that there was no legal bar to collecting the tax for defence during peacetime and throughout the whole of the kingdom. Ship money, paid directly to the Treasury of the Navy, provided between £150,000 to £200,000 annually between 1634 and 1638, after which yields declined. Opposition to ship money steadily grew, but the 12 common law judges of England declared that the tax was within the king’s prerogative, though some of them had reservations. The prosecution of John Hampden for non-payment in 1637–38 provided a platform for popular protest, and the judges only found against Hampden by the narrow margin of 7–5.

Monopolies

Charles also raised money by the granting of monopolies for specific trades. This was despite a statute forbidding such action, which, though inefficient, raised an estimated £100,000 a year in the late 1630s.

Act of Revocation

Charles also raised funds from the Scottish nobility, at the price of considerable acrimony, by the Act of Revocation (1625), whereby all gifts of royal or church land made to the nobility since 1540 were revoked. If the owners wanted to continue in possession of their property, they had to pay an annual rent.

Forest money

In addition, the boundaries of the royal forests in England were extended to their ancient limits as part of a scheme to maximise income by exploiting the land and fining land users within the expanded boundaries for ‘encroachment’.

Sales of Royal lands, especially the large expanses of under-developed Royal forests was another way of raising money. The programme arranged for the sale of forest lands for development as pasture and arable, or in the case of the Forest of Dean, development for the iron industry. This included providing compensation to people using common land, but not for people who had settled illegally. Pushed off land they had been working for some time, many of these rioted. In fact such was the sale of the discontent in the west of England it became known as the Western Rising, with other scattered riots in Feckenham Forest and Malvern Chase.

Despite all these measures, Charles still faced bankruptcy in the summer of 1640. The City of London refused to make any further loans to the king. Pushed to extreme measures, Charles then seized the money held in trust at the mint of the Exchequer in the tower of London. This represented the capital of the merchants and goldsmiths of the city. In August Charles seized all the stocks of pepper held by the East India Company, and sold it off cheap.

You can see how virtually every expedient Charles developed to raise money alienated and embittered large groups of subjects, and especially merchants in the City of London, who came to think of the king as a public menace.

Strafford and Ireland

Another long-term problem for any British king was the situation in Ireland. Throughout the Tudor period, from Henry VIII through Elizabeth, parts of Ireland had been settled by ‘planters’, not without resistance from the native Irish and their traditional lords, who rose in repeated uprisings.

But the so-called ‘Flight of the Earls’ in 1607 had left a lot of the land in north-east Ireland leaderless, and so James I set about organising the Plantation of Ulster, a plan to encourage emigrants from Scotland to settle in what is now known as Ulster, with funding from the City of London.

With the result that Ireland, by Charles’s time, contained about four identifiable groups:

the Irish population, mostly rural peasants
the Irish leadership – the traditional lords of various lands and estates who, however, a century of negotiating and compromising with their English invaders had split into various parties, some for compromise, some for submission, some burning for rebellion and independence
the ‘Old English’ settlers i.e. the originally English families who had been in Ireland for generations and begun to think of themselves as in a sense Irish, appreciated local customs and laws and who were often put out or deprived by the new plantation
the ‘New English’ who had arrived in the past generation and who had a vested interest in expanding and consolidating the new plantation

Managing this situation took a firm hand, and Charles was clever in selecting Thomas Wentworth, the Earl of Strafford, to be his Viceroy in Ireland. Strafford brought all sides to heel, though at the cost of uniting them all in hatred of his strong-arm, inflexible approach.

Archbishop Laud and religion

Something similar happened in religion, where Charles appointed Laud as archbishop of Canterbury. Charles wanted order and clarity and beauty in his church. However, religion continued to be a source of discontent among virtually all his subjects.

Arminianism

Charles’s reign saw the spread of Arminianism among Anglican intellectuals. The Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius reacted against the iron predestinationism of Calvin and the Calvinists. According to Calvin, God had already chosen who was saved (the Elect) and who was damned. All we could do was examine our own lives with scrupulous attention and live as purely as possible in the hope we were one of the Elect.

This was in sharp contrast to traditional Catholic teaching which is the more commonsense view that we attain salvation through our works. We may sin and err but we can be forgiven through Church rituals such as confession and the Mass.

Starting in the 1610s, Arminius proposed a sort of middle way, adopting the outlines of Calvinism, and certainly espousing a Christianity much purified of Catholic superstitions (veneration of saints, the Virgin Mary, miracles and so on). But still he modified the harshness of Calvinist theology, asserting that the Atonement of Christ offers each individual some leeway, some freedom, in determining their own salvation or damnation.

To Puritans this was blasphemy, but it was attractive to Charles and his archbishop, Laud. The rise of Arminianism within moderate sections of the Anglican church therefore became a battleground with more radical Puritans.

Buildup to the outbreak of civil war

Thus there were many long-term issues which Charles was struggling with. But the first spark which led to outright violence was his attempt to impose a new prayer book on the Scottish church or Kirk as they called it.

On a visit to Scotland, Charles and Laud had been upset at the variation in church services there, and the scrappy state of many of the churches. Being a devout Christian Charles thought it was his duty as King to renovate and improve the Scottish church. He gave money to repair buildings. But in the same vein he wanted to bring Scottish church practice in line with English. And so he commissioned English clerics to write a new unified prayer book.

When this was first used in a service at Edinburgh in July 1637, it caused a riot. It was seen as an imposition of English values on Scottish religion, and as blasphemously Arminian, or pseudo-Catholic. Religious chauvinism combined with Scottish nationalism. With characteristic arrogance, Charles had held no consultations, either in the Scottish Parliament or in an Assembly of the Kirk.

The protests quickly spread across Scotland, and – as with many religious disturbances – became a handy opportunity for the powerful in the land to push for more independence (and power) from England.

The Scottish National Covenant

Quickly they organised the Scottish National Covenant. In February 1638, at a ceremony in Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, large numbers of Scottish noblemen, gentry, clergy and burgesses signed the Covenant, committing themselves under God to preserving the purity of the Kirk. Copies were distributed throughout Scotland for signing on a wave of popular support. Those who hesitated were often intimidated into signing and clergymen who opposed it were deposed. This was followed in August 1639 by a series of acts passed by the Parliament of Scotland that amounted to a constitutional revolution.

First Bishops’ War

Charles decided to invade Scotland and impose his will. A complicated plan to co-ordinate a land invasion and an amphibious landing failed (remember the long list of military failures which characterised the 1620s). A Scottish army was raised and marched to within a few miles of the English border. Talks were held and a peace treaty signed, but both sides regarded it only as a truce.

Charles called a Parliament, as usual hoping for patriotic support and money but, as usual, the Parliament immediately drew up a list of grievances, notably ship money and the arbitrary behaviour of the feared Star Chamber, and called for the impeachment of many of his advisers, so Charles promptly dissolved it.

Second Bishops’ War

Alexander Leslie, 1st Earl of Leven, had fought in the Thirty Years War. He led a vastly better trained and provisioned Scottish army into England in August 1640, which swept aside the ill-trained English militias and seized Newcastle, main source of coal for London. The Scots were in the driving seat. The Scots insisted on being paid £850 per day maintenance.

The Long Parliament

Charles was forced to call a Parliament to raise the money to pay the Scots. What was to become known as the Long Parliament organised to take revenge on Charles, impeaching his advisers, and demanded the return of Strafford from Ireland. Strafford was tried and executed Strafford in May 1641 and in August the Scots finally evacuated Northern England after the Treaty of London.

The Irish Rising

However, the withdrawal of Strafford, the only man strong enough to balance the conflicting sides in Ireland, turned out to be a disaster. In October 1641 the Irish Rebellion broke out, beginning as an attempted coup d’état by Irish Catholic gentry, who tried to seize control of the English administration in Ireland to force concessions for Catholics, but developing into an ethnic conflict between Irish Catholics on one side, and English and Scottish Protestants on the other. Thousands of English and Scots were forced to flee their homes, amid scare stories of burning and looting and murder and rape.

When news of this arrived in London it transformed the atmosphere from crisis into hysteria. Once again the Protestants felt the deadly paranoia of a Catholic conspiracy. Both Charles and Parliament realised an army needed to be raised quickly to combat the Irish rebels, but neither side trusted the other with such a large force.

And that crux, control of the army raised to put down the Irish rebellion, was the issue which triggered the civil war.

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by Simon on August 27, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in History, War

Tagged 1625, 1625 Parliament, 1628 Parliament, 1637, Act of Revocation, Alexander Leslie, Archbishop Laud, Arminianism, Cadiz, Calvin, Calvinism, Cardinal Richelieu, Charles I, Charles II, Duke of Buckingham, Earl of Strafford, East India Company, Edinburgh, Eleven Years Tyranny, Feckenham Forest, First Bishops War, First Earl of Leven, Flight of the Earls, Forest money, France, Henrietta Maria, Holland, Holy Roman Empire, Ireland, Jacobus Arminius, James I, John Felton, John Hampden, La Rochelle, Louis XIII, Malvern Chase, New English, Newcastle, Old English, Personal Rule, Plantation of Ulster, Protestantism, royal Prerogative, Saint-Martin-de-Ré, Scotland, Scottish National Covenant, Scottish prayer book, Second Battle of Newbury, Second Bishops War, Ship Money, Siege of La Rochelle, Spain, Star Chamber, Strafford, Thirty Years War, Thomas Wentworth, Wars of Three Kingdoms, Western Rising

Posted by Simon on August 27, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/27/a-monarchy-transformed-mark-kishlansky-3-charles-i/

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 2. The reign of James I

The reign of James I

Queen Elizabeth I died aged 70 on 24 March 1603. She had resisted marrying a husband or bearing an heir throughout her reign and now died childless. King James VI of Scotland was chosen to inherit the crown of England, ascending the throne at the age of 37, having himself ascended the Scottish throne while still a child aged 13 months, after his mother, Mary Queen of Scots was forced to abdicate in his favour.

James had been brought up by four regents and umpteen guardians, and had survived the poisonous faction-fighting of the Scottish court for 20 years since coming of age.

Kidnapping Scottish kings was almost constitutional practice and James himself was abducted twice. (p.79)

Upon hearing he’d inherited the throne of England, James hastened south to Scotland’s rich, sunny neighbour and never went back. Unfortunately, he brought quite a few Scottish aristocrats and dependents with him, who he awarded key posts in his private council and chamber – although wisely continuing most Elizabethan officials in their posts.

The Scots incomers were unpopular not only with English officials whose jobs they took, but with the man in the street. An ordinance had to be passed against ‘swaggerers’, who were beating up Scots in the streets of London.

James wanted peace and unity, Beatifi Pacifici was his motto. He came in with a promise to make a clean sweep and a new start after the increasingly frozen and paralysed years at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. To this end:

Spain

James negotiated an end to the war with Spain, which had been rumbling on for 20 years, with the 1604 Treaty of London, and thereafter tried to curry favour with Spain, widely thought to be the most powerful Catholic power in Europe. He tried to arrange a Spanish marriage for his eldest son, Henry; and in 1618 he had the old Elizabethan hero Sir Walter Raleigh executed, after he’d led an abortive expedition against Spain in South America. This did nothing to impress the Spanish but upset many of James’s new subjects.

Religion

James was petitioned about reforming the Church of England before he’d even arrived in London. He called a conference in 1604 at Hampton Court to address religious issues, the most practical outcome of which was a new translation of the Bible into English, which was published in 1611 and became known as ‘the Authorised version’ or ‘the King James Bible’ (pp.72-3).

James managed to adjust and renew Elizabeth’s ‘middle way’ (between Catholicism on the conservative wing and Calvinism on the radical wing), not least by his wise appointment of the best theologians or churchmen for the job – the moderate George Abbott as archibishop of Canterbury, John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes as preachers.

But religion proved to be an intractable problem. The remaining Catholics (including some very influential families) and the fringe of extreme Puritan groups both hoped for greater toleration of their beliefs, and even within the established Church of England there was a broad range of opinion. It was impossible to please everyone and James found himself forced to reinforce the outline of the Elizabethan settlement.

There were Catholic plots from the start. The Pope had long ago established a parallel Catholic church hierarchy waiting to be imposed on England once the Protestant king was liquidated and powerful Catholic members of the aristocracy had risen up to place a Catholic claimant on the throne.

There were two minor Catholic plots within a year of James’s coronation and then the Gunpowder plot of November 1605 – a plan to blow up the king and all the members of the Houses of Parliament before imposing a Catholic regime – and even after the exemplary torture and punishment of the Guy Fawkes conspirators, other plots followed. Taking the long view, the country was still subject to Catholic scares and even hysterias, into the 1670s and 80s.

Royal finances

But the real problem of James’s reign was money. He spent money like an oligarch’s wife – he renovated the royal palaces, paid for his predecessor’s state funeral and his own coronation, then had to set up his wife (Queen Anne of Denmark) and his sons (Henry and Charles) with their own establishments.

And then James became notorious for having a succession of ‘favourites’, handsome young men who he lavished money and titles on. Most unpopular of all was George Villiers, raised from obscurity and showered with titles and responsibilities to become the most powerful man in the country, the Duke of Buckingham.

Kishlansky very casually mentions that Buckingham became James’s lover (p.98). The impact of this on the king, the court and his wife, Queen Anne of Denmark, is not at all explored.

As James got deeper into debt, a succession of ministers and officials (notably the Earl of Salisbury, Lord Treasurer from 1608) were tasked with extracting more money from the country. Taxes and customs were increased, old forms of extraction revived, James sold monopolies of trade and discovered he could fine people if he offered them a knighthood and they refused to accept. James’s increasingly mercenary sale of titles, and his creation of a new rank in the peerage, the baronetcy, prompted widespread mockery, particularly in Jacobean plays.

James was used to the Scottish style of politics, to a face-to-face form of government, where you sized a man up and manipulated him accordingly (p.79). He struggled to understand or manage the infinitely more complex ways of English government, with its obstinate Parliament and maze of committees and officials.

His frequent exasperation explains the lengthy and sometimes angry lectures he was wont to give English officials and sometimes Parliament as a whole. Witness the failure of the so-called ‘Addled Parliament’ which met for just nine weeks in 1614 but refused to concede any of James’s schemes to raise money and so which he angrily dismissed.

Divine Right of Kings

James was a noted scholar and had written several books on the idea of the Divine Right of Kings, so he struggled to understand how the entire English ruling class claimed to agree with him about this but then presented him with a never-ending stream of precedents and liberties which had the practical effect of completely stymying and blocking his divine wishes.

Scotland

James hoped from day one that his old kingdom and his new one could be united. He was king of both and he wanted it to be, so it would happen, right? No. Once again the legal complexities of the situation escaped him but not the hordes of constitutional lawyers and advisers who explained why it couldn’t be done. Plus the visceral fear of many English aristocrats and officials that if the two countries were legally united, then the flow of Scots finding office in the south would turn into a flood.

Ireland

The advent of a Scottish king on the throne of England opened the way for the settlement of Ulster i.e. lots of poor Scots had wanted to emigrate to Ireland but been prevented when it was run by the English crown. James’s advent unlocked the floodgates. Thousands of emigrants settled along the coast of north-east Ireland then moved inland, settling land seized from the Irish owners.

Much of it had belonged to the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell who forfeited it when they absconded to the continent in 1607 in a bid to work with Spain to raise an army, invade Ireland, and restore the Irish aristocracy to the lands and powers it had enjoyed before the Elizabethan conquest.

The Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell

Their plan was never carried out for a number of reasons:

the Spanish government of King Philip III didn’t want to rock the boat, wanted to maintain the new peace with the new Stuart dynasty (established in 1604) in order to focus its energies on its long-running war with the Dutch Republic. In fact discussions had opened about marrying Prince Henry to a Spanish royal bride
Spain had recently [1598] gone bankrupt – again
the Spanish fleet had only just been destroyed by a Dutch fleet at the Battle of Gibraltar, 25 April 1607 and so wasn’t in a position to mount any kind of invasion

Instead the net result of what became known as ‘the Flight of the Earls’ was a watershed in Irish history. They set sail on a ship to France and thence to Spain but neither they, their heirs or any of their ninety or so followers ever returned. As such, the Flight of the Earls represented the moment when the ancient Gaelic aristocracy of Ulster went into permanent exile. And this opened the way for the settlement of Ulster by Presbyterian Scots – the Plantation of Ulster – and the creation of the Ulster problem which has bedevilled British politics for over a century (pp.70-71).

The Thirty Years War

In Kishlansky’s account the outbreak of war in the Holy Roman Empire in 1618 changed the tone of James’s rule. Having just read Peter H. Wilson’s vast account of the war, I found myself disagreeing with the way Kishlansky tells the story. He leaves facts out, his summary feels incomplete and a bit misleading.

In Wilson’s version, Protestant nobles in the Kingdom of Bohemia, worried by the pro-Catholic and anti-Protestant trend of recent policies of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, raised a rebellion against him and sought allies among the Protestant leaders of the Empire’s scores of independent states. Ferdinand was titular King of Bohemia, but the rebels rejected his kingship and offered the crown to a solidly Protestant prince, the Count Palatine of the Rhine (i.e. ruler of the territory know as the Palatinate) Frederick V – not least because he was the leader of the Protestant Union, a military alliance founded by his father.

Frederick accepted, was crowned King of Bohemia in 1619, and led the military struggle against the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor – but he lost. The Bohemian army was crushed at the Battle of White Mountain just outside Prague on 8 November 1620. Frederick and his wife fled. Because he had only reigned for one calendar year he and his wife became known as the Winter King and the Winter Queen.

Following the Battle of White Mountain the Emperor’s Catholic army seized Prague, the Emperor was reinstated as King of Bohemia, and then his forces, along with a Spanish army led by the Marquis de Spinola, went on to seize the Palatinate, Frederick’s original territory, as well as engaging the Protestant states who had allied with the Bohemians. The Emperor took the opportunity of his victory to impose tough new pro-Catholic policies on all the conquered territory.

The Winter Queen

Why did this have an impact in faraway Britain? Because Frederick had been married to Elizabeth Stuart, James’s daughter, in 1613. The marriage took place in London, in the Palace of Whitehall, and was attended by a vast mob of British aristocracy. John Donne wrote a poem about it. Thus it was the British king’s daughter and son-in-law who were violently overthrown by a Catholic super-power and went into exile (in the Hague in the Dutch Netherlands).

From that point onwards King James, and then his successor, King Charles, were pestered by advisers and commentators and pamphlet writers begging the king to intervene, to send money or, preferably, an army.

Protestants of all stripes saw the war – which didn’t end with the capture of Prague but spread into a number of other Protestant states of the empire, and was destined to rumble on for generations – as an attack by the Catholic Habsburgs on all their Protestant subjects.

When you added in the resumption of the long war between Catholic Spain (also ruled by a branch of the Habsburg family) to suppress the rebels of the Protestant Dutch Netherlands, it wasn’t difficult to claim there was a vast Catholic conspiracy to defeat and exterminate Protestantism.

If you add in memories of the Gunpowder plot a generation earlier, or the attempt by the Irish Earls to persuade Spain to reconquer Ireland for Catholicism, you can begin to enter into the embattled, paranoid state of mind of many British Protestants – and to understand their growing frustration at the way James refused to become embroiled in the war, but tried to position himself as some kind of arbiter for peace (pp.102-3).

(A book like this, taking things from the British point of view, makes all this seem like a plausible strategy. Peter H. Wilson’s book, looking from the European perspective, emphasises how laughably grandiose, inept and ineffectual James’s peace initiatives appeared to the participants in the war. The Brits spent a lot of money on pompous embassies which achieved nothing.)

1621 Parliament

In 1621 James called a Parliament to provide funds for some kind of intervention in the Empire and, sure enough, member after member rose to pledge their lives and fortunes to the cause of restoring the king’s son-in-law to his rightful kingdom of the Palatinate. But Parliament and king could not agree on the best strategy. The subsidies Parliament voted James were inadequate to finance serious military operations in aid of Frederick, while MPs went on to inflame the situation by calling for a war – not in Germany – but aimed squarely against Spain. They went on to raise a petition demanding that Prince Charles marry a Protestant, and for enforcement of existing anti-Catholic laws.

James was scandalised and warned Parliament that intrusion into his royal prerogative would trigger punishment. This announcement scandalised Parliamentarians, who issued a statement protesting their rights, including freedom of speech. Egged on by the Duke of Buckingham, James ripped this protest out of the Parliamentary record book, dissolved Parliament and imprisoned five of its leaders.

The Spanish match

All this time negotiations with Spain for Charles to marry the Spanish Infanta Maria Anna dragged on, with the Spanish King (Philip IV) putting endless obstacles in the way.

Eventually, in 1623 Charles, Prince of Wales (aged 23) and the Duke of Buckingham (aged 31) set off on an epic journey to Spain, crossing the Channel, resting in Paris, then riding south to Spain. The Spanish king and his adviser, Duke Olivares, were astonished at their unannounced arrival, but proceeded to delay things even more.

Amazingly, six months of delay and obfuscation prevented Charles even meeting the intended bride more than a handful of times, while the Spanish negotiators put all kinds of barriers in his way, insisting that Charles convert to Catholicism and allow the bride to freely practice her religion, and lowering her dowry (in part to pay for the Spanish occupation of the Palatinate).

1624 Parliament

Eventually, Charles and Buckingham realised they were being played and left in high dudgeon, Buckingham especially, because members of the hyper-formal Spanish court made no effort to conceal their contempt for him, due to his originally humble background.

(Maria Anna eventually married the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand III, a much better choice.)

Charles and Buckingham returned to London determined to take revenge for this humiliation, and Charles persuaded his father to call another Parliament. This assembled and renewed its enthusiasm for war but, once again, didn’t vote nearly enough money to create a realistic military force. Buckingham was now sounding out the French about an alliance with them and a French princess for Charles to marry.

Death

James died on 25 March 1625. He had lavished a lot of education and hopes on his eldest son, Prince Henry, but Henry died in 1612 aged just 18, of typhoid, so the crown now passed to the next eldest son, Charles, who became King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland.

Summary

James became unpopular because of:

the crude and greedy Scots he brought with him to the English court
his rapacious, novel and sometimes legally dubious ways of raising money
his failure to settle the (insoluble) religious problem
his alleged pro-Catholicism and his sustained failure to support the Protestant, Bohemian cause in Europe
his angry confrontations with Parliament
his association with the deeply unpopular Duke of Buckingham

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by Simon on August 25, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in History

Tagged 1604, 1621 Parliament, 1624 Parliament, Addled Parliament, Authorised version, Battle of Gibraltar, Battle of White Mountain, Beatifi Pacifici, Catholicism, Count Palatine of the Rhine, Divine Right of Kings, Duke of Buckingham, Duke Olivares, Earl of Salisbury, Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, Elizabeth Stuart, Emperor Ferdinand II, England, Flight of the Earls, Frederick V, George Abbott, George Villiers, Gunpowder plot, Hampton Court conference, history, Holy Roman Empire, Infanta Maria Anna, Jacobean, James I, James VI of Scotland, John Donne, King James Bible, Kingdom of Bohemia, Lancelot Andrewes, Marquis de Spinola, Mary Queen of Scots, Peter H. Wilson, Philip III, Philip IV, Plantation of Ulster, Prague, Protestant Union, Queen Anne of Denmark, Queen Elizabeth I, religion, Scotland, Sir Walter Raleigh, Spain, Spanish match, Thirty Years War, Treaty of London, Ulster, Winter Queen

Posted by Simon on August 25, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/25/a-monarchy-transformed-mark-kishlansky-2-james-i/

Charles I: King and Collector @ the Royal Academy

King Charles I is most famous for getting his head chopped off in 1649, at the climax of the civil war he had triggered against his Puritan, ’roundhead’ opponents in Parliament.

(I am aware that there’s controversy about all aspects of the wars, from their very name [should it be called the Great Rebellion, the British Civil Wars, the Wars of Three Kingdoms, etc] through to the dates, because the civil wars across all four of his realms actually started with the rebellion of the Scots at having an English prayer book imposed on them in 1637 – which triggered Charles’s hapless manoeuvrings with his Parliament to get them to fund an army to repel the Scots invasion of 1638 – although it wasn’t until rebellion broke out in Ireland in 1641 that the final breach between Charles and his Puritan opponents in Parliament became irreconcilable. It’s a much more complicated story than usually depicted.)

Anyway, before he mismanaged his kingdoms so badly that he triggered war in all three of them (Wales was not a kingdom but a principality) Charles had been one of the most sophisticated royal patrons and collectors of art anywhere in Europe. This big exhibition at the Royal Academy brings together an impressive number of the sculptures, paintings, tapestries and so on that Charles either directly commissioned or purchased through his roving agents from the leading artists of the day. it is a magnificent display of some 150 works of art, ranging from classical sculptures to Baroque paintings, and from exquisite miniatures to monumental tapestries.

Equestrian painting of Charles I with M. de St Antoine by Anthony van Dyck (1633)

Scattered and reunited

A simple but important point about the exhibition – and a demonstration of the vanity of human wishes – is that, having spent a lifetime collecting all these riches, soon after Charles’s execution the new Puritan regime sold them off to pay their soldiers and all these masterpieces were scattered across Europe.

Some were tracked down and rebought by his son, Charles II after his restoration to the throne in 1660, especially the ones which had gone to British purchasers who were no keen to ingratiate themselves with the new king. Most remained abroad and, indeed, made very nice additions to the royal collections of the Louvre and the Prado. But what was returned, along with the works which Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria, had taken to France and brought back in 1660, went on to form the core of the future Royal Collection.

Charles the collector

In 1623, two years before he became king, Prince Charles visited Madrid. The purpose of the visit was to sound out the possibility of marriage to Maria Anna of Spain, daughter of King Philip III of Spain. Negotiations broke down when the new king, Philip IV, demanded that Charles convert to the Catholic Church and live in Spain for a year as pre-conditions.

But although the diplomatic aim of the visit failed, one thing made a deep impact on the future king of England, namely the huge and dazzling art collection of the Philip IV. This, thought Charles, was the magnificence and grandeur befitting a divinely appointed monarch! Charles went shopping and returned to England with a number of works, including paintings by Titian and Veronese, while agents were sent to France and Italy to snap up anything which came on the market. Thus Charles was able to snap up the famous Gonzaga collection which had been accumulated by successive dukes of Mantua, through the work of Nicolas Lanier, his Master of Music and agent.

It was this collection which included Andrea Mantegna’s monumental series, The Triumph of Caesar, (1484 to 1492) which is given a whole room to itself in the exhibition.

Triumph of Caesar: The Vase Bearers by Andrea Mantegna (1484 to 1492)

But it wasn’t just a matter of liking fine art. A king’s collection bespoke his power, both to the few subjects who saw it, but, more importantly, to visiting ambassadors and princes. According to historian Jenny Uglow, ‘ceremonies were delayed and dinners cooled as he showed visiting dignitaries proudly round’ his collection, including the so-called Bear Gallery containing works like Titian’s portrait of Charles V with a Dog (1533) and Rubens’s Daniel in the Lions’ Den (1616), to the Privy Lodging Rooms which housed works by Titian, Correggio, Giorgione and others; and then, the core of the collection, the Cabinet Room, which held 80 paintings, 36 statues and statuettes, as well as bas-reliefs, miniatures, books, engravings, drawings, medals and precious objects.

Charles V with a Dog by Titian (1533) Museo Nacional del Prado

Moreover portraits, such as those by van Dyck, then had multiple copies made of them which could be sent to foreign monarchs as testaments to Charles’s majesty and glory.

By 1649, Charles’s collection comprised around 1,500 paintings and 500 sculptures. An inventory compiled by Abraham van der Doort (c.1580 to 1640), first Surveyor of The King’s Pictures, recorded the contents of the collection, providing a detailed account of the artistic tastes and high level of connoisseurship within the king’s circle.

Changing British taste

One of the aims of the exhibition is to demonstrate how Charles was the first British monarch to really grasp the artistic culture of the Continent. The Protestant Tudor monarchs (Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth I), with the brief exception of the Catholic Queen Mary (1553 to 1558), had been wary of Catholic Europe and its culture.

But Charles’s father, James I, changed this policy. During the long reign of Queen Elizabeth Catholic Spain had been the enemy, justifiably so since its king, Philip II, had launched an armed invasion of England, which, if it had succeeded, would have resulted in the forced conversion of the church and people back to strict Roman Catholicism, with untold numbers of arrests, tortures and public burners of recusants.

James came from a different family and tradition and so was able to break with Elizabeth’s policy and seek a rapprochement with Catholic Spain. During his reign the treaties with Spain were moderate but still sparked murmurs of dissent from the Protestant aristocracy. (Anti-Spanish murmurings became louder when the Protestant hero, Sir Walter Raleigh, was beheaded in 1618, largely at the behest of the Spanish ambassador, and as a result of a last, ill-fated expedition to South America in 1617.)

The apotheosis of James I, commissioned by Charles I from Peter Paul Rubens to form the centrepiece of the newly refurbished Banqueting House, completed in 1636

James’s eldest son, Henry, surrounded himself with scholars, artists and musicians and acquired ‘Catholic’ paintings from Holland and from Florence. On Henry’s death in 1612 his collection passed to his mother, Anne of Denmark, who herself became a keen patron of painters, dramatists and architects as well as court masques, and filled her rooms at Somerset House and Oatlands Palace with religious pictures, still-lifes, landscapes and allegorical scenes.

So this was the family atmosphere Charles grew up in, far more relaxed about Catholic culture than his Protestant forebears of the previous century. The Puritans in Parliament disliked this cultural shift, as they had disliked Charles’s trip to Spain (still Europe’s most Catholic power) and then really disliked Charles’s marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria, youngest daughter of Henry IV of France, who – to the Puritans’ outrage – was allowed to attend Catholic masses in the Royal Palaces.

But Charles wasn’t alone in his taste for Continental art. Other super-rich aristocrats vied with him to create superb collections, including Thomas Howard (1586 to 1646), Earl of Arundel, and George Villiers (1592 to 1628), Duke of Buckingham. At the height of his success, Buckingham’s palace in the Strand contained over 300 paintings by artists including Rubens, Titian, Tintoretto and Bassano. It became a fashion and a competition.

Titian was the main man. Titian (1490 to 1576) had loyally served Habsburg monarchs, sending them paintings on a wide range of subject from his base in Venice. Titian’s portraits, especially those of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, proved him the supreme painter of kingly, military and diplomatic power, and Charles wanted some.

The Allocution of Alfonso d’Avalos to His Troops by Titian (1540 to 1541) Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Charles and Van Dyck

The artist most associated with Charles is Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599 to 1641). Charles persuaded the great Flemish painter to come to London in 1632, where he was appointed ‘principalle Paynter in Ordenarie to their Majesties’.

Triple Portrait of Charles I by Sir Anthony van Dyck (1636)

Van Dyck’s achievement was immense. His fluency and sense of composition, his extraordinary ability to capture not just the likeness but the mood and character of his sitters, was unparalleled. The exhibition includes some of his most spectacular works, including:

Charles I and Henrietta Maria with Prince Charles and Princess Mary (1632)
his two magnificent equestrian portraits, Charles I on Horseback with M. de St. Antoine (1633) and Charles I on Horseback (1638)
‘Le Roi à la chasse’ (1635)

Many portraits were done in several versions, to be sent as diplomatic gifts or given to supporters of the increasingly embattled king. Altogether van Dyck has been estimated to have painted forty portraits of Charles himself, as well as about thirty of the Queen.

Such was the impact and range of his works that van Dyck became the dominant influence on English portrait-painting for the next 150 years. Charles awarded him a knighthood and a £200 annual pension. When van Dyck died young, in 1641, he was buried in (the old) St Paul’s Cathedral.

The Mortlake tapestries

But it wasn’t just van Dyck. Charles I commissioned some of the most important artists of his day. Beside the ceiling of the Banqueting House (above) Charles commissioned from Peter Paul Rubens paintings such as ‘Minerva Protects Pax from Mars’ (1630) and his ‘Landscape with Saint George and the Dragon’ (1630 to 1635).

Another major highlight of the exhibition is the Mortlake tapestries of Raphael’s Acts of the Apostles. These have a complicated history. In 1513 Pope Leo X commissioned Raphael to design a set of tapestries of the Acts of the Apostles to be hung in the Sistine Chapel. Detailed versions of the works were painted in gouache on sheets of paper which were glued together to achieve the scale required, and these preparatory studies are referred to as ‘cartoons’. These cartoons were the send to Brussels, at that time the premiere centre of tapestry making in Europe. The final tapestries took some time to create but were complete and delivered to Rome by the time of the Pope Leo’s death in 1521.

The cartoons were kept on at the workshops in Brussels for some years, and more versions of the tapestries created from them. But a hundred years later many had found their way back to Italy, to the city of Genoa to be precise. And it was here that one of Charles’s agents ascertained that they were available for sale and so young Prince Charles hurriedly bought them.

His aim was to bring the cartoons to England, where they could be used as models for the tapestry factory established in 1619 by his father, James I, at Mortlake in south-west London, and several partial sets of the Acts of the Apostles were indeed woven here over the next two decades. After passing through the hands of various monarchs, the reassembled cartoons were eventually gifted to the Victoria and Albert Museum. And it’s these huge and awesome works that the visitor can see in a room devoted to them.

The Miraculous Draft of Fishes by Raphael (1515 to 1516)

Summary

To visit the exhibition is to bask, for a while, in the reflected glory and magnificence of royalty, strolling past the masterpieces mentioned above as well as stunning works by other Renaissance artists such as Correggio, Agnolo Bronzino, Jacopo Bassano, Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese as well as Albrecht Dürer, Jan Gossaert, Hans Holbein the Younger and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. What a banquet of Baroque art, a visual feast fit for a king.

The promotional video

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by Simon on February 17, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, History

Tagged Abraham van der Doort, Agnolo Bronzino, Albrecht Dürer, Andrea Mantegna, Anne of Denmark, Anthony van Dyck, apotheosis of James I, art, Banqueting Hall, Baroque art, Baroque painting, Bassano, Bishops War, British Civil Wars, Brussels, Catholic church, Catholic Europe, Charles I, Charles I on Horseback, Charles I with M. de St Antoine, Charles I: King and Collector, Charles V, Charles V with a Dog, Civil Wars, Correggio, Daniel in the Lions’ Den, Duke of Buckingham, duke of Mantua, Earl of Arundel, Edward VI, Elizabeth I, exhibition, George Villiers, Giorgione, Great Rebellion, Hans Holbein the Younger, Henrietta Maria, Henry IV, Henry VIII, Holy Roman Emperor, Ireland, Irish Rebellion, Jacopo Bassano, James I, Jan Gossaert, Jenny Uglow, King Charles I, King James I, King Philip III of Spain, Maria Anna of Spain, Nicolas Lanier, Painting, Paolo Veronese, Parliament, Peter Paul Rubens, Philip II, Philip IV, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Pope Leo X, portrait painting, Prado Museum, Prince Charles, Prince Henry, Protestantism, Puritans, Queen Mary, Raphael, Raphael’s Acts of the Apostles, Renaissance art, Royal Academy, royal collection, royal patrons, Rubens, Sir Anthony van Dyck, Sir Walter Raleigh, Somerset House, Spain, St Paul's cathedral, Surveyor of The King’s Pictures, tapestries, the Gonzaga collection, The Mortlake tapestries, the Restoration, the Royal Collections Trust, the Sistine Chapel, The Triumph of Caesar, Thomas Howard, Tintoretto, Titian, Triple Portrait of Charles I, Tudor monarchs, Van Dyck, Venice, Veronese, Victoria and Albert Museum

Posted by Simon on February 17, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/02/17/charles-the-first-king-and-collector-royal-academy/

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