Civil War: The History of England Volume III (61 page)

It was time for peace. The king and his council had tentatively begun the process of negotiation with the Dutch, and Charles himself was at the same time engaged in private negotiations with the French king; they had no reason to fight against each other, and it was eventually agreed that they should abstain from mutual hostilities. Charles also trusted that his fellow sovereign would be able to persuade or bully his Dutch allies into signing a similar agreement. Charles and Louis had sent their letters through Henrietta Maria, respectively mother and paternal aunt of the two men; the English king kept the matter secret from even his most intimate councillors, thus emphasizing his propensity for clandestine dealings.

In the meantime, to save expenditure, the privy council had no choice but to reduce the scale of naval operations; only a ‘summer guard’ of ships would be sent to sea in order to protect the merchant vessels. It was also believed that, given the increasingly futile nature of the war, hostilities were about to be suspended. This incapacity led directly to one of the most humiliating episodes in English naval history.

At the beginning of May 1667, a great conference between the warring parties was called at Breda; it soon became clear to the Dutch, however, that the English were not prepared to be over-generous in
the negotiations. So they decided to try force for the final time to extort concessions and to hasten the progress of the discussions. In the following month, therefore, they launched a raid into the Thames estuary; they broke the defences of the harbour at Chatham and proceeded to burn four ships before towing away the largest ship of the fleet, the
Royal Charles
, and returning with it undamaged.

Panic ran through the streets of London. It was said that the Dutch were coming, and the trained bands were called out for the city’s defence. In truth the enemy fleet could have found its way to London Bridge without much difficulty. It was reported that Harwich, Colchester and Dover were already burned. The reports were false but the events at Chatham were a symbolic, as well as a naval, disaster. One parliamentarian, John Rushworth, wrote that ‘the people are ready to tear their hairs off their heads’. Sir William Batten, surveyor of the navy, exclaimed, ‘By God! I think the devil shits Dutchmen!’

The Dutch now pressed their advantage and the king, humiliated at home and abroad, conceded some of their demands. The principle of negotiation was that of ‘
uti possidetis
’, by means of which the parties retained possession of that which they had taken by force in the course of conflict. As a result, England lost much of the West Indies to France and the invaluable island of nutmeg, Run, part of Indonesia, to the Dutch. In return, however, it retained New Netherland; this was the colonial province of the Netherlands that included the future states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Connecticut. Yet at the time the gains did not match the loss of national prestige.

After the disaster at Chatham talk of corruption and conspiracy was once more in the air; some blamed the papists, and others even blamed the bishops. It was said that, at the time of the Dutch raid, the king was chasing a moth in the apartments of Lady Castlemaine. It was supposed by many that the nation was so mismanaged by the king that it would once more turn against the Stuarts and become a republic. Charles was the subject of distrust as well as dislike, and it was feared that he was colluding with Louis XIV in some popish plot to impose absolute rule. At times of peril and disaster, fear is contagious.

Yet opinion turned in particular against Clarendon who was,
quite unfairly, accused of mismanaging the war; he had in fact opposed it from the start, but he was a convenient scapegoat. He had always been disliked by the men and women about the king – whom John Evelyn described as ‘the buffoons and the
misses
’ – while an attempt to impeach him had already been made by the earl of Bristol in the Lords. But the chancellor was now in infinitely greater danger. It was being said that the king had turned against him. Charles disliked being lectured or patronized; serious men in any case made him feel uncomfortable. It was not that Clarendon annoyed the king; he bored him. He was disliked by parliament for his fervent support of the prerogative power of the king, and by dissenters for his equally vehement espousal of the established Church. Gilbert Burnet, the historian of his own time, wrote that ‘he took too much upon him and meddled in everything, which was his greatest error’.

The enemies of Clarendon now gathered for the kill. His wife had died early in August, and his obvious grief incapacitated him from robustly defending himself. His absence from the privy council encouraged other councillors to speak against him; the king was told that Clarendon prevented the advice of others from reaching him and that he had denied any freedom of debate within the council chamber itself. Thus all the ills of the kingdom could, in one form or another, be blamed upon him. If he was removed, the hostility towards the administration might abate. Certainly his departure would gratify the Commons that had long despised him; it might help to lighten the mood of the next session.

In the middle of August the king sent the duke of York to the lord chancellor with the request that he resign his office. Clarendon unwisely refused and a week later, on 25 August, a more peremptory demand came that he should surrender the seals of office forthwith. Again, Clarendon refused. The affair was the sole news of the court, and it had become necessary for Charles to assert his authority against this overweening councillor. The king demanded the seals, in redoubled fury, and they were at last returned.

The king told one of Clarendon’s allies, the duke of Ormonde, that ‘his behaviour and humour was grown so unsupportable to myself, and to all the world else, that I could no longer endure it, and it was impossible for me to live with it, and do those things
with the parliament that must be done or the government will be lost’. Yet the affair may not be as straightforward as that. Pepys was told that there were many explanations ‘not fit to mention’. The king may genuinely have believed that the lord chancellor was no longer capable of service, but there are suggestions that in some way Clarendon had interfered with his love-life; he seems to have been instrumental, for example, in the sudden marriage of one of the king’s mistresses. It is impossible now to untangle the myriad webs of court intrigue.

The pack was in full pursuit of Clarendon, now that royal favour had fallen away, and it was believed that the king had become very interested in his former confidant’s prosecution. The charges brought against Clarendon by the Commons included illegal imprisonment of various suspects, the intention of imposing military rule, and the sale of Dunkirk to the French. Since the lord chancellor had always been an advocate of arbitrary government, the charges may have been in large measure true. The Lords, however, resolved that Clarendon could not be committed; they seem to have concluded that one of their own members should not be impeached on a whim of the lower house. The king wondered aloud why his once chief minister was still in the country, and by the end of November it was rumoured that he would pick a tribunal of peers prepared to try Clarendon and execute him. The earl now heeded the advice of those closest to him and secretly took ship for France where he began an exile in the course of which he would write perhaps the most interesting history of his times.

It is now pertinent to note that after the forced abdication of the lord chancellor the administration of the king’s affairs became ever more murky and corrupt. In the absence of Clarendon the senior councillors were now Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley Cooper and Lauderdale, whose initials spelled out ‘cabal’; for ever afterwards, the word was employed to designate secretive and self-interested administration. They were an alphabetical coalition, and in truth they can now be seen as mere ciphers in the game of politics; their policies brought nothing about, and their principal object was to make as much money as they could from their period of office before the wheel turned. Clifford, in particular, was known as ‘the Bribe Master General’.

They suited the king, however, because he could manipulate them. George Savile, the 1st marquess of Halifax, wrote that ‘he lived with his ministers as he did with his mistresses; he used them, but he was not in love with them’. The king was now in charge of all affairs and, without the interference of Clarendon, he could bend and twist in whichever way he wished. So arose one of the most devious and inconsistent periods of English history.

In the beginning the acknowledged first minister was George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, described by Gilbert Burnet as one who was ‘never true either to things or persons, but forsakes every man and departs from every maxim, sometimes out of levity and unsettledness of fancy and sometimes out of downright falsehood’. This was a fit companion for a king. He had already emerged as one of the circle of wits at court, but now he had ambitions to be a statesman as well as a satirist.

He was the son of the ill-fated 1st duke, assassinated by John Felton at the beginning of the reign of Charles I. He was thereafter brought up in the royal household in the company of Charles II, and had shared many exploits with the young king; he had fought beside him at Worcester. His rise after the fall of Clarendon was still remarkable, however, he having previously only obtained the rank of Master of the Horse. The king consulted him on all matters of importance, and the foreign ambassadors generally applied to him for advice before being admitted to the king’s presence.

If Buckingham had one abiding principle, it was that of religious toleration; he had so many religious whims and fancies of his own that he was happy to allow freedom of thought to others. The nonconformists were in any case now in a more secure position than before. Fears of a papist court and of a papist queen, and a prevailing belief that the ‘Great Fire of London’ had been concocted by Roman Catholics in the service of France, gave sectarians and dissenters a novel air of loyalty and trustworthiness.

Quakers began to meet in London, and soon enough monthly assemblies were in place all over the country; they were safer now than at any previous time. The Baptists of Bristol regathered. The Conventicle Act of 1664 was effectively dead, and was formally abolished in 1668. Certain Presbyterian ministers prepared the ground for a separate Church if they could not be assimilated within
the established one. At the sessions and assizes of the realm Catholic recusants, rather than nonconformists, were presented for judgement.

The bishop of Norwich preached a sermon in 1666 in which he declared that ‘it is an honour which learned men owe to one another to allow liberty of dissent in matters of mere opinion’. That liberty was already apparent in the survival of Brownists, Fifth Monarchy men, Sabbatarians, Muggletonians, Ranters, Anabaptists, General Baptists, Particular Baptists and Familists. We may invoke the words of John Bunyan, ‘I preached what I felt, what I smartingly did feel.’ They were perhaps not a force to challenge the popular Anglicanism of the high-church party, but the once stringent laws against them were now unenforced or only hesitantly invoked. A contemporary tract,
Discourse of the Religion of England, 1667
, observed that nonconformists were ‘spread through city and country; they make no small part of all ranks and all sorts of men. They are not excluded from the nobility, among the gentry they are not a few; but none are more important than they in the trading part of the people.’ That is why London was a city of dissent.

From this period, then, we can trace the emergence of the doctrine known as Latitudinarianism that propounded comprehension and tolerance in all matters of doctrine and practice. The ‘Latitude men’, as they were known, emphasized the power of reason as ‘the candle of the Lord’ and believed that such matters as liturgy and ritual were ‘things indifferent’. This might be said to be the unwritten principle of eighteenth-century Anglicanism. God, and Christianity, were no longer mysterious.

40

The true force

In the early autumn of 1664 a young scholar visited Stourbridge Fair, just outside Cambridge, where he purchased a prism; he took the instrument back to his lodging at Trinity College where ‘having darkened my chamber, and made a small hole in my window-shuts, to let in a convenient quantity of the sun’s light, I placed my prism at his entrance, that it might be thereby refracted to the opposite wall’. By these means did Isaac Newton experiment with ‘the celebrated phenomena of colours’.

In this year, too, he also experimented upon himself. He inserted a bodkin or large needle ‘betwixt my eye and the bone as near to the backside of my eye as I could’; at the risk of blinding himself, he wished to alter the curve of his retina and observe the results. These were the preliminary steps to his theory of colour that would revolutionize the discipline of optics; it was he who made the discovery that white light was not some primary or basic hue but a mixture of all the other colours in the spectrum. The conclusion was so contrary to the principles of common sense that no one had ever considered it before.