One thing is clear. The Glorious Revolution, if not precisely glorious, was a very good idea. It got rid of the Stuarts. Endless sentimentality has been invested in a family of parasitical adventurers. Mary Queen of Scots, murderous product of the vicious Valois court, teenage guest of honour at a massacre of Huguenots, was essentially a criminal character. James I, innocent of dignity or pride, sidled up to Spain, big and rich, to cadge. Charles I sought absolutism with the resources of an overspent aesthete and would break his word almost as a royal duty.
Charles II, whose life by Jenny Uglow, now in softback, has been rightly praised, was the ablest of them and the most attractive, providing you didn’t trust a word he said. In return for a cheering pension, Louis XIV was, by the secret Treaty of Dover, promised Charles’ conversion to Roman Catholicism and England’s subordination to France. The pension was scrupulously paid. Charles’ reflexive instinct for graceful betrayal postponed the conversion to his deathbed. He kept his treason a secret, modified the terms and took the money. For all that, Charles II was fun. The sex he made even more fashionable, often involved affection. He liked the races, adored his little dogs, went to the theatre as often as possible and encouraged one of the three great ages of the English stage. It was a mad, mad world and very enjoyable. English history between 1660 and 1714 is entirely fascinating.
The New Labour curriculum has boiled history down to the Nazis and Starkeyized early Tudors – sex and violence. The era of two revolutions, restoration and final, cool ejection of the Stuarts by the ultimate men in suits was far more important, and far more interesting. A right of opposition under parliamentary authority was coming into existence, with minds like Halifax’ to articulate it; Newton, Boyle and Leibniz were making their scientific proposals; Congreve and Wycherley wrote the plays and a coffee house was turning into the Stock Exchange. At the same time, we conducted a firework display of religious excess. Hell glowed in intelligent heads. The Great Beast of Revelations lived in the minds of educated men. Newton discovered gravity but believed in alchemy. You can’t trawl 1642-1714 without contradiction and fascination. After that come Robert Walpole, Alexander Pope and mere sense.
Looking narrowly at Charles II, Jenny Uglow is touched by the charm, clear about the failures – and the inherent flaws. Wagner, said Rossini, had marvellous moments, but dreadful quarters of an hour. Likewise Charles, a natural light tenor: at the Great Fire of London in 1666, he took off his coat, carried buckets and directed the destruction of houses for firebreaks. But scrambling for trade prizes, he plunged into Dutch wars which, essentially and expensively, he lost. The very next year, De Ruyter’s fleet came up the Medway and burnt the pride of the English navy at anchor. Samuel Pepys, loyal civil servant, looked longingly back to Oliver Cromwell and Admiral Blake, when we were sovereign and respected, when such things had been unimaginable.
Charles, like all the Stuarts, was part of a family, a mafia, looking supremely after itself. To which end, he would sign that Treaty of Dover, something so secret that until 1826, when John Lingard unearthed papers detailing some parts, it remained unknown. Uglow’s coverage of this business (pp489 passim) is very clear. The European great power in 1670 was France. Its king, Louis XIV, was in and out of war for Austrian territory in Flanders and had designs on the Netherlands. A zealot Catholic, he would, in 1684, at the pre-dawn of the Enlightenment, revoke the freedom of French Protestants, driving a great body of talent to London and Berlin. At Dover, Charles pledged his own conversion to Catholicism, and countenanced French military backing in Britain in return for the money which military failure and an untrusting House of Commons denied him.
At this point, Uglow halts her narrative. The 500 page coverage of the first ten years of the reign has been handled in an episodic way. Rightly so! Charles lived episodically: from crisis to crisis, mistress to mistress, Clarendon to Arlington to Danby, triumphant return to comprehensive betrayal. Equally reasonably, she sums up the consequences in a few lucid pages. For, secrecy notwithstanding, the roots of 1688 lie in 1670. Charles would welsh on much he had promised Louis, but he had defined the Stuarts for ever. For all the fantasy of bad biography and worse fiction, this was a monarch for hire, pleading legitimacy and divine right while playing the market for alternative sponsors.
However, Charles would now emerge as a much better politician. He would face some things quite new, an opposition, an alternative theory of government. Men like Shaftesbury and Halifax would seek to limit the monarchy, make it a player in an undeclared republic. That came about through the consummate idiocy of brother James, deposed after three years. However, while Charles lived (down to 1685), he would juggle ministries, retreat, advance, survive and make a pitch for renewed absolutism. That, though, is another story. Ten years, done so well, will do.
