A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (5 page)

Books and pamphlets, woodcuts and prints also spread the word. Within a year, works like Thomas Blount’s
Boscobel: or the history of His Sacred Majestie’s…preservation
appeared, retailing the dramatic flight from Worcester, as exciting as a chap-book legend. The painter Isaac Fuller produced a series of huge canvases, like a set of tapestries, turning classical and courtly poses into a crude, colourful drama of the king in disguise, the folk-hero of the people.
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One of the pageants at the next Lord Mayor’s show, staged outside the Nag’s Head in Cheapside, also represented the ‘great Woode, with the royal Oake, & history of his Majesties miraculous escape’.
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At the same time,
Eikon Basilike…or the true pourtraiture of Charles II
summoned the ghost of Charles’s martyred father, sanctified after his death in a book of the same name. Closely echoing Tuke’s words, the ‘true portraiture’ displayed the king to readers who had not seen the tall dark man riding on horseback in the London processions. He was, it explained, ‘so exactly formed’ that

from the crown of his head to the soule of his foot the most curious eye could not discern an error or a spot…Until he was near twenty years of age, his face was very lovely but of late he is grown leaner with care and age; the dark and night complexion of his face, and the twin stars of his quick and sharp eyes sparkling in that night; he is most beautiful when he speakes, his black shining locks normally curled with great rings…his motions easie and graceful, and plainly majestick.
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Isaac Fuller,
Charles II and Colonel Careless Hiding in the Boscobel Oak

To add to the fervour, city priests and country vicars preached lengthy sermons, whose message was clear: ‘God’s command is – Fear God, Honour the King.’
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Kingship was more than an office of state. A king was the heart that pumped blood and gave life to the nation: through his representatives his will flowed through all institutions of state and Church. He created peers and bishops, gave charters to boroughs, appointed judges, directed the army and navy, made war and declared peace. If he wished, he could confiscate all land, and he could levy taxes on all who walked upon it, on the crops and cattle in the fields, the fish in the rivers, the riches in the mines. It was treason to curse him, and to wish, or even imagine, his death. He carried his subjects, as Hobbes said, like Jonah in the belly of the great Leviathan.

The potency of royalty was almost magical, and Charles did not hesitate to exploit it. Of the many portraits painted of him, all except a handful showed him in ceremonial robes or in armour, rather than as a mere mortal in everyday dress.
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Within a week of his landing, queues built up of people begging to be touched for ‘the King’s Evil’, a tradition that went back to Edward the Confessor, the holy king. The evil was scrofula, a tubercular disease of the lymph nodes, but the trail of supplicants usually contained sufferers from many other ailments. Charles himself was sceptical and wary, but more than ready to exploit the mystique.

To begin with the touchings took place in the open air, but after a deluge in June, when the sick waited for hours in the rain, ceremonies were held in the Banqueting House. In the first two months Charles touched around seventeen hundred people – stroking their faces with both hands, while his chaplain intoned, ‘He put his hands upon them, and he healed them.’ A thousand more waited. Exhausted, he announced that while he was ‘graciously pleased to dispatch all that are already come’, he would have to defer the rest ‘to a more reasonable opportunity’. Patients could get tickets at the sign of the Hare in Covent Garden for Wednesday and Friday, ‘which two days His Majesty is pleased to set apart for this so pious and charitable work’.
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The stream never stopped, running on average to between three thousand and four thousand a year. Many proclaimed themselves cured, perhaps the result of auto-suggestion, perhaps because a disease like scrofula naturally waxed and waned. It was an expensive magic – Charles placed round the neck of each supplicant a gold coin, an angel, strung on a white ribbon – but it was money well spent. To some sufferers, the royal magic was innate in his person and needed no ceremonial trappings. According to John Aubrey, the visionary Arise Evans had ‘a fungous nose and had said that the King’s hand would cure him, and on the first coming of Charles II into St James’s Park, he kissed the King’s hand and rubbed his nose with it; which disturbed the King, but cured him’.
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The power of touching, like the extravagant rituals and processions, tied Charles’s person to medieval ideas of divine kingship, and reinforced the link to the chivalric orders of romance. But it also brought Charles into close physical contact with the poorest of his people and he managed this with ease. His time roaming the streets of foreign cities, and even his wanderings from Worcester, had made Charles less formal than his father, or other European monarchs. Observers were staggered by his lack of pomp. He stood bare-headed, gasped the Venetian resident, a style not used by any other crowned head in Europe, ‘but adopted by this king with everyone, whatever his character, for he excels all other potentates in humanity and affability’.
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Charles touching for the King’s Evil, with his chaplains on his left, courtiers on his right and Yeomen holding back the crowds

Yet Charles wanted it both ways. He gambled on his personal power, and in doing so staked his reputation as a sober king. He wanted the magnificence and ceremony, but he also wanted to show that his court was not hidebound by antique custom, but young, exciting, European in outlook. Although he rarely seemed hurried, in the months after his return he worked like a demon, but work done, he enjoyed himself. In the years of exile, Hyde had often lamented that he could not control the leisure of Charles and his circle, and the same was true now. Charles was already establishing a rival image to that which his advisers were engineering so carefully, and one that would prove harder to control. A brilliant, witty and sometimes wild court was beginning to form around him.

Schooled by Hyde, Charles began with good intentions as regards the behaviour of his court. The Establishment Book for Whitehall in 1660 is entitled ‘Regulations for the better service in the household’, and declares its aim simply and solemnly, ‘to establish good government and order in our Court, which from then may spread with more honour through all parts of our kingdom’.
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Immediately, however, it gives a sense of what Whitehall was really like, when it decrees that in future there should be ‘no Houses, Tents, Booths, or places to be employed for Tipling, selling or taking Tobacco, Hott waters or for any kind of Disorder’. The marshals must remove vagrants, rogues, beggars, idle and loose people and the porters keep out ‘stragling and Masterless men, any suspitious Person or Uncivill, uncleanly and Rude People’. There must be no profanity, swearing or fighting. The sense of incipient chaos even touched the Chapel Royal. There had been, declares the little rule book, ‘a very great Indecence and irreverence here…a throng of persons talk aloud & walk in time of divine service’. In future, all those guilty would be banned. As if primed for trouble, the rules insisted, too, that the Yeomen in the quasi-public Great Chamber who controlled the press of people bringing petitions or having business at court should be tall, strong and ‘of manly Presence’. These royal bouncers apart, there were an infinity of roles to be performed and rooms and corridors to be supervised.

The new court set a very different style from the formality of Charles I. In the summer of 1660 rakes swaggered in velvet coats and high-heeled shoes, flocking around Charles as he walked in Hyde Park. Courtiers crowded into skiffs in the evening cool, following the royal barge and watching the fireworks fly. Charles was restless and energetic. (Several of the formal portraits suggest how much he disliked sitting still.) He rode, he swam in the Thames, he played bowls on the Whitehall green, and even on a large barge moored near the palace, where a spiral staircase led from the deck to a bowling green on the roof, covered with green cloth. ‘It is level like a green in the open air,’ noted one amazed spectator, ‘with wooden tubs all round planted with all kinds of flowering plants and trees.’
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And wherever he was, Charles played tennis. First he refitted the tennis court at Hampton Court, and then installed a new court at Whitehall, the first for a hundred years. In this great room, with a court 118 feet long, lit by windows high in the wall, Charles played constantly. It was a hard, physical, sweaty game, played with cork and felt balls hit with heavy wooden rackets that had scarcely changed since Tudor times, their head about the size of a hand (this is the French
jeu de paume
). The ball rocketed off the high walls and the penthouse roof, and was served, fiendishly fast, at the opponent at the ‘hazard end’. Unlike some kings, Charles did not always expect to win. In 1662 Pepys watched him play with Sir Arthur Slingsby, ‘beating three and loosing two sets against my Lord of Suffolke and my Lord Chesterfield’.
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And he did not mind an audience. A few years later, the Italian visitor Lorenzo Magalotti noted, ‘He usually plays there three times a week in a doublet; the guards stand at the street door, but do not refuse entry to anyone who has the face or attire of a gentleman’.
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Crowds came to watch him too as he dined in public, three times a week, in the Banqueting House or the presence chamber, where the crush was so great that a balustrade was erected in front of the table.

Charles seemed to need to fill every minute, from dawn to dusk. Ten days after his arrival a newsletter reported, ‘His Majesty’s only recreation as yet is at tennis by 5 o’clock in the morning for an hour or two.’
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In mid-August Pepys hurried to Whitehall to find Sandwich, only to discover that the king had ‘gone this morning at five in the morning to see a Dutch pleasure boat below bridge, where he dines and my Lord with him. The King do tire all his people that are about him with early rising since he come.’
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The boat Charles had gone to see was the
Mary
, presented to him by the Dutch East India Company. Sailing, which he had learnt as a youth in Jersey, became another of his great passions. It was an exhilarating relief from the stifling court, fighting the river currents and harnessing the wind, hearing the slapping of the water and the cries of the crew. The following year he had an even finer yacht, the
Catherine
, built for him at Deptford. The Duke of York also had a yacht built, the
Anne
, and the brothers raced from Greenwich to Gravesend, tacking past wharves and warehouses out into the estuary, past the mud-flats and sand-banks and marshes. The wager was £100 and Charles lost sailing downstream against a contrary wind, but saved his stake on returning. The large yachts, each around a hundred tons, were a rare sight on a river crowded with traffic, their sails billowing among the forest of masts.