The kings bed, p.29
The King's Bed, page 29
Well again, Charles was persuaded to take the heat out of the crisis by exiling both the family rivals, his brother and his son: James to Scotland this time, and Monmouth to Utrecht. It didn’t work. The people’s temper continued to rise, stirred up by a blitz of broadsides, pamphlets and speeches from the Whigs and mass petitions demanding a recall of Parliament. One exclusionist petition pleaded for it to meet in London, the stronghold of the Whigs, and not in royalist Oxford. In the ancient city of spires, ‘neither Lords nor Commons could be in safety but daily would be exposed to the swords of the Papists and their adherents of whom too many have crept into His Majesty’s guards’.
It is a strange fact in the history of this crisis that there was very little violence, though the threat of it hung in the air throughout. Within two months Monmouth was back in the country, without the King’s permission. The thirty-year-old Duke arrived at the Palace of Westminster to find his entrance barred. His father refused to see him and he turned to his father’s women for help. Louise refused him too. She declared that she would do nothing for him, ‘so long as he was an enemy to the King and to her’. Nell Gwyn took pity on him and gave him shelter in her house. She reportedly hid him in a closet when the King called, but when the little actress did judge the moment right to plead his case and approached the King, he slapped her down. ‘Be quiet!’ he ordered after she brought up Monmouth’s name.
Charles stripped the Duke of his remaining offices and again ordered him out of the country. Monmouth ignored the command and set off on what would prove to be the first of a number of semiroyal progresses through the western counties. Bells rang, bonfires burned and gentlemen brought out their tenantry to applaud the Protestant Duke as he passed. He even effected that magical curative power which reigning monarchs were supposed to possess: ‘touching for the King’s evil’. One of the barrage of propaganda stories put out by his supporters described the miracle cure of a girl with scrofula whose head he had stroked.
On several occasions, meanwhile, the King was reported to be on the point of succumbing to the Whigs and deserting his brother’s cause. In March 1680, Whig leaders offered to abandon exclusion in return for concessions by the King, among them the dropping of Louise and Sunderland. At the mention of her name the King walked away. However, later that year the Duchess herself claimed to have worked on Charles so successfully that she reported him ready to surrender. His price was a supply of £600,000 from Parliament.28
Distrust killed the deal. There was so little faith in the King’s word, and he was so chary of the opposition, that neither side was prepared to move first. A stand-off prevailed. The turning point in the crisis came in the spring of 1681 and was occasioned by another huge secret pay-off from Louis XIV. This disarmed Charles’s Whig and Republican opponents, for it furnished sufficient money for him to defy them and rule without Parliament till the end of his life. The first instalment of the subsidy of five million livres was delivered to Charles’s factotum William Chiffinch on 8 April 1681. The King had delivered his part of the deal by closing down Parliament just eleven days earlier.
In the years that followed, royalists were to focus on the injustice of setting aside not only James but his two children too, and a backlash against exclusion developed. James was welcomed back from exile, tens of thousands signed addresses ‘abhorring’ the campaign against him, and for a while the King appeared more securely on the throne than at any time since the 1660s. Admittedly Whig and Republican conspirators posed a threat to Charles, but for the most part the King was able to relax and continue to indulge himself and his women.
Indeed, 1682 was marked by a grand reappearance at court: Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland was back. There was a rapprochement between Barbara and Charles who, true to form, had found it impossible to deny her wish to return to England. The royal court had, after all, been the stage on which she had played out her life for sixteen rumbustious, exuberant, excessive years. Now she was back where she belonged.
Meanwhile, the following year, Louise’s self-confidence almost brought her to grief. She had an affair with a French nobleman, Philippe de Vendome, who bore the title Grand Prior of France. Vendome was the nephew of Hortense Mancini. Handsome, charming and immoral, he arrived in England in June 1683 to visit his aunt. The chemistry that soon existed between Louise and the twenty-eight-year-old Vendome was clear to everyone, and the story went round that Charles had caught the couple in bed.
The French ambassador, Barillon, told his master Louis XIV that ‘prudence’ necessitated Portsmouth telling her lover to go. ‘But I do not yet observe any disposition on her part to do so. Those who would give her such counsel would be certain to displease her.’29
According to one view, Charles did not have it in him to confront his mistress: ‘with increasing years, he had become so indolent and enervated, and so completely her slave, that he had no power of revolt left in him.’ Charles sent Lord Sunderland to tell Vendôme to stop visiting the Duchess. The Frenchman complied for a few days but was soon back at Louise’s door. This time Charles employed Barillon to intervene by ‘gently’ telling the suitor to go back to France. The young man, described by John Evelyn as ‘a young wild spark’, wouldn’t listen.30 He secured an audience with the English King and began to try to justify himself, only to find that Charles was in no mood to hear him. Vendôme emerged from the palace defiant and then stuck it out in London for months despite threats of being carted off to Dover by the royal guards and forcibly bundled onto a ship. Desperate to stay, he offered to keep out of London, insisting with extraordinary impudence that under Magna Carta the King had no right to deport him. The reply came that those rights extended to Englishmen alone. The troublesome lover finally condescended to go in November 1683. Louis XIV ensured that he never returned to England.
Far from the Vendôme episode cooling Charles’s ardour for Louise, he seems to have grown warmer towards his errant mistress. Bishop Burnet recorded that Charles kissed and caressed Louise in public as he had never done before. Her hold on him was tighter than ever.
The widespread discontent over the shape and colour of the House of Stuart’s rule that had surfaced during the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis bubbled up once more in this period. Opposition groups ranging from downright revolutionaries to Whig grandees discussed ways of unseating Charles. Plans ranged from insurrection to assassination. Monmouth was again widely mentioned as a possible successor, not least by himself. In the midst of all the turmoil, one apparently viable plot emerged. The King and the Duke of York would be murdered as they returned to London from the Newmarket races in the spring of 1683.
The plan was simple: to secrete a squad of assassins in the grounds of an old manor known as Rye House, situated beside the Newmarket Road, and when the royal entourage passed by to leap out and kill the King and his brother. The date was set for 1 April, when the spring races would have ended. But there had been a major fire in Newmarket and the races were cancelled. Charles and James returned to London early and the assassination never took place.31
In June, word of the plot leaked out. A large-scale round-up of suspected plotters saw the arrest of many revolutionaries and several important opposition figures including Lord Russell, Lord Gray, the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Earl of Essex, and Algernon Sidney. After the ensuing treason trials, eleven were executed, including Russell and Sidney. Many more were imprisoned and a large number fled into exile. One of the significant aspects of the plot was the eminence of many of those supposedly involved. Charles may have come within a whisker of being the second Stuart king to be killed by his own subjects, or he may have whipped up the whole thing as pretext for clamping down on the Whig and republican opposition. Historians differ on the matter.
Despite the upheavals, these were good times for Charles’s mistresses, especially the Duchess of Portsmouth. The stories of her rapacity continued to mount. In return for persuading the King to bring his brother back from exile, she extracted a promise of £5000 from the Duke. She also benefited from the fallout from the Rye House conspiracy. One of the conspirators, Lord Gray, escaped to the Continent and was condemned to death in his absence, with all his estates confiscated. Charles was inclined to allow Gray’s children to inherit their father’s estates. Louise put a stop to that, ensuring the children were disinherited, and acquired a large chunk of the estates for herself.
As for Charles, he must have hoped that at last he could relax, secure in his position as ruler, the opposition crushed, no Parliament to deny him and a conduit to ready cash from France. Maybe now he could spend a comfortable middle age with his women, his horses and his yachts.
Fourteen months later, he was dead.
19
DEATH OF THE KING
On Monday, 1 February 1685, having spent the previous evening in the company of Louise, Barbara and Hortense, Charles rose from his bed at seven in the morning and collapsed, suffering a seizure. Fortuitously, two of the royal physicians were in the palace. One of them, fittingly named Dr King, decided Charles must instantly be bled, took a lance from his pocket, opened a vein in his arm and drew off sixteen ounces of royal blood.
Bleeding was thought to help restore equilibrium to the humours and hence to restore health. Dr King was taking a risk, for to bleed the monarch without the permission of his chief physician amounted to an assault and could be treasonable. Luckily for Dr King, when the King’s chief physician, Sir Charles Scarborough, was called he agreed that the junior man’s actions were justified.1
With the physicians fearing that the King could die at any moment, the Bishop of London was called. He informed the King that he must prepare for whatever might be about to befall him. Charles did not answer.2 Over the next four days, Charles rallied and deteriorated in turn. He began to drift in and out of consciousness. A team of fourteen or more physicians came and tried all they knew. Several stayed beside Charles around the clock, together with senior churchmen. The Duke of York hardly left his brother’s bedside. At night, several gentlemen of the bedchamber slept in the room with the man whom they had tended and grown to know so intimately over twenty-five years. The fire was kept blazing and his spaniels dozed by his bed. The atmosphere grew warm and fetid with the odour of lactating dogs and hardly-washed men.
The physicians bled the King several times, finally going so far as to open the veins in his neck. They gave him an enema and purging potions to drink. On Wednesday, Charles seemed briefly to rally, then his condition worsened once more. They shaved his head and applied to his scalp a blistering ointment made of poisonous cantharides to draw off bad humours. Between those and other remedies, the physicians expertly hastened his end. The King’s doctors, of course, had no idea what was wrong. They tried more extreme remedies, including a potion made from a human skull, prepared in the King’s own laboratory.3 By Thursday morning he was close to death.
The Queen came to see him, as did his sons, all except for the disgraced Duke of Monmouth, his first son, whom he loved so much but who now lived in exile, dreaming he might succeed his father as king. Charles’s health declined further throughout Thursday and the Bishop of London offered to administer absolution according to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Charles put him off, saying there was time enough for that. The King’s refusal of the Anglican rites was noted with dismay by almost everyone present, most especially by the bishops who came and went. Soon the reason would become known. With his life ebbing away, Charles, a man who loved subterfuge and secrets as much as his father had before him, became the centre of one last conspiracy.
The doctors told the Duke of York that the King was unlikely to last another day.4 The Duke recalled that at this moment ‘all hope vanished.’5 He acted swiftly, arranging for the French ambassador, Barillon, to be admitted to Whitehall. Once inside the palace, Barillon was summoned to the Duchess of Portsmouth’s chambers. When he arrived, the Duchess said she was going to tell him a great secret — the King wished to die in the folds of the Roman Catholic Church.6 At the heart of this conspiracy were the King’s brother James, Duke of York, and the Duchess herself, who was finally fulfilling the secret role given to her by Louis XIV fifteen years before. She would ensure Charles was faithful to the terms of the Treaty of Dover and converted to Catholicism. Even with the help of the King’s brother, it was a dangerous and challenging undertaking. The ambassador was then summoned to an anteroom close by the King’s bedchamber, where the Duke of York could speak to him in private. The Duke was anxious that when the time came, France would see him, the new king, as its friend and ally. It was important that Charles should receive the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church.7
Barillon went again to the apartment of the Duchess, who confided that she had not been able to locate a priest who could be brought secretly into the palace to carry out the ceremony. With time running out, Louise remembered – or was reminded of – Fr John Hudleston, a chaplain to the Queen, who had helped hide the King at Moseley Hall in Staffordshire after the Battle of Worcester. Hudleston was fetched from Somerset House, where he served the Queen at her private chapel. He came to the palace and made his way to the back stairs of the Queen’s apartments, where he was asked to wait. Hudleston had been told to bring everything necessary to administer the last rites. In his haste, or by dint of being dim-witted or disorganised, he arrived without the sacrament.8
One of the Queen’s Portuguese priests, Fr Benito De Leos, was called to bring it. Like his colleagues, Fr Benito could not have carried out the last rites for the King, for he spoke little or no English and could not have heard his confession. Meanwhile Hudleston was shown up to the King’s apartments. At the King’s request, Hudleston was admitted to his bedchamber. And so it was that Charles’s last secret assignation was not with some actress brought surreptitiously up the river under cover of night but with a disorganised priest.
Hudleston knelt by the dying King’s bed. When Charles told him he wished to die in communion with the Roman Catholic Church, the priest replied that an act of penance was required before absolution could be given. At this, according to Hudleston, the King ‘made an exact confession of his whole life’.9 If this were so, it must have been quite something. For Charles II to have recounted even half of his many philanderings and adulteries would have taken not only some time but a quite Herculean effort for a dying man. One is forced to conclude that, whether out of kindness or due to an eye on posterity, Huddleston’s testimony overstates the King’s confession.
Whatever the actual form and duration of the confession, Hudleston was satisfied enough to utter the time-honoured words, ‘Dominus noster Jesus Christus te absolvat.’ As he moved on to administer the oil of extreme unction, he was interrupted by a call to go to the door. There he found Fr De Leos with the forgotten sacrament. Hudleston administered Holy Communion. According to Bishop Burnet, the host stuck in the King’s throat and a glass of water had to be called for. After this, the King asked for the act of contrition to be repeated.10 For a man who had left so much to chance in life, Charles seemed unwilling to leave anything to chance in leaving it.
At midnight, the Queen came to visit for the last time. She was so moved by her husband’s plight that she fainted and had to be carried to her rooms. When she recovered she sent word to Charles, imploring that if she offended she should be forgiven. ‘Alas, poor woman,’ said Charles. ‘She begs my pardon! I beg hers with all my heart.’ In this brief interchange lay all the previously unspoken regrets of more than twenty years of marriage, during which the Queen had failed to provide an heir and the King had taken up with many other women, leaving his wife to an unfulfilled and often lonely existence.
The King turned his mind to his other relationships. He asked his brother James to look after both the Duchess of Portsmouth and Nell Gwyn. The latter was perhaps the only one of his mistresses who loved Charles for himself. Charles instructed James not to let ‘Poor Nelly’ starve.11 In the early hours, he was visited by many of his illegitimate children. The Dukes of Richmond, Grafton, Southampton, St Albans, and Northumberland all came. From what we can gather, none of Charles’s daughters visited him, though this is not certain. Either they were not considered to be of such consequence as their brothers, or it was thought the deathbed was not the right place for young women.
At six o’clock on the morning of Friday, 6 February, Charles asked to be raised up in his bed and the curtains drawn back so he could see the sunrise. It was obvious to all that as the sun came up the King was sinking fast. His brother James was with him. The doctors could do nothing. Sir Charles Scarborough recorded their frustration and grief – ‘Woe’s me!’ he wrote.12 Shortly before noon, Charles died peacefully in his bed with his brother by his side. For the first time in British history, the throne was passed from monarch to monarch at a deathbed. That afternoon, between three and four, James was publicly announced as the new monarch. He would not have a coronation, as the Archbishop of Canterbury could not crown a Catholic.
Within hours, Charles’s surgeons carried out an autopsy. The chief reason was to look for signs of poisoning, in case Charles had been murdered. Sir Charles Scarborough reported nothing suspicious. But according to Bishop Burnet, there were suspicious signs in the body which were covered up. Burnet wrote that ‘Lower and Needham, two famous physicians, told me, they plainly discerned two or three blue spots on the outside of the stomach’, but that when Needham called to have the stomach opened up it was taken away unopened. According to Burnet’s hearsay evidence, another doctor called Short suspected foul play and spoke out about it. Shortly afterwards, Short was poisoned and believed himself the victim of a plot because of what he had said about the death of the King. Before he died, Short told two fellow physicians that he had been poisoned in the house of a Papist patient.13 This might point to a Catholic plot, but it is doubtful whether any of it can be believed. A Protestant plot, designed to put Monmouth on the throne, seems equally unlikely, as James was able to succeed unopposed and Monmouth’s rebellion was yet some months away.
