Read Online A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game by Jenny Uglow - Free Book Online

everyone’s advice, he rowed out for a drunken evening with the captain of an English frigate moored off Elsinore. In the darkness he missed his step between ship and boat and plummeted into the icy waters. He died the same evening. Frances did not remarry, but stayed at court with the queen. Since she had no children, after her husband’s death the Richmond and Lennox title reverted to the crown: in 1675 Charles would bestow it on his son by his mistress of the next decade, Louise de Kéroualle.
     
    Charles’s many children were all dear to him, although his favourite was always Monmouth, now a handsome, wayward and easily influenced teenager. In early 1668, when Monmouth was in Paris, Charles asked Minette to look after him for, he confessed, ‘I do love him very well’. He was anxious that she should keep him from joining Louis’s army in Flanders, where he might be plunged into a ‘hot campaign’. When Monmouth went back again to France in June, he wrote an amused paternal letter: ‘He intendes to put on a perriwig againe, when he comes to Paris, but I believe you will thinke him better farr, as I do, with his short haire.’ 27

    James, Duke of Monmouth, in his glamorous teenage years
    For the last two years rumours had been circulating that Charles was thinking of making Monmouth legitimate and even of acknowledging a marriage with Lucy Walter, a course strongly urged by Buckingham and Ashley. These hints caused friction between Charles and James, who were never as close as they had been after Clarendon’s fall. Here was another split around which factions could grow. James’s anxieties about the succession were also heightened by Charles’s sudden interest in divorce. In 1669 he personally attended the hearings in the House of Lords when John Manners, Lord Roos, appealed for a private act of parliament to obtain a divorce from his wife Anne. Roos had already won an ecclesiastical separation on the grounds of Anne’s adultery, and a private act bastardising her children. But a civil divorce would mean that he could remarry and produce a legitimate heir. The case gripped the news-devouring public, firstly because of the revelations about Anne’s promiscuity, but also because an act allowing the husband to marry again would set a crucial precedent, challenging the indissolubility of marriage. The bill was promoted in the Lords by John Wilkins, now Bishop of Chester, who pointedly remarked that divorce might be granted not only for adultery but also for ‘immundicity of the womb, which is given forth to [be] the queen’s condition’. 28 Charles’s influence undoubtedly helped the passing of the bill in 1670.
    Charles himself said that he followed the Roos case simply because, as he put it, the revelations were as good as a play. It was partly true. And it was also true that in his current unsettled mood, plays offered the best escape from the strains of his life. And players, too, he thought, could offer such release, a freedom from any real commitment.

37 Troublesome Men

    Sir Cautious Trouble-all . You must know Sir Gravity, that upon the model of an Oyster table, I have plodded out a Table for business. Sir Gravity Empty . Y’gad that’s very neat, what model can this bee?
    …
    Sir Cautious …. ’tis only thus: if enemies opposite, one here t’other there, if friends – close touch – So I never trouble myself with reading newes books or Gazets, but go into my chamber, looke upon my Table, and snap, presently I’le tell you how the whole world is disposed.
    ROBERT HOWARD , The Country Gentleman
    AFTER CHARLES DISMISSED parliament in May 1668 he did not call it to Westminster again for eighteen months. The work of government and diplomacy – Arlington’s sphere – was directed through the Privy Council and its four main committees, for naval and military affairs, foreign affairs, trade and ‘Complaints and Grievances’. 1 In Scotland, Lauderdale’s rule increased in strength; in Ireland