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Authors: Jenny Uglow
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claimed he could find nothing in it – unsurprisingly since the scene had been cut from the script he was shown. Unappeased, Coventry sent an angry challenge to Buckingham. The duke stalled, unwilling to risk another duel after the Shrewsbury affair. Meanwhile rehearsals continued, coming to a halt only when Coventry told Tom Killigrew that he would slit the actors’ noses if they performed it.
As soon as Charles heard about the challenge to Buckingham, he seized on it as a pretext for excluding Coventry from the council. As he explained to Minette:
I am not Sorry that Sir Will: Coventry has given me this good occasion by sending my Lord of Buckingham a challenge, to turn him out of the Council. I do intend to turn him also out of the Tresury. The truth of it is he has been a troublesome man in both places, and I am well rid of him. 5
One wonders if Charles had not been an accomplice all along.
Coventry was sent to the Tower, where his many friends rushed to see him, blocking the roads with their coaches. (There were near duels in the Tower itself, the Duke of Richmond drawing his sword on James Hamilton, with Halifax and Rochester in attendance. 6 ) On 6 March Coventry petitioned the King for a pardon, and when Charles returned from Newmarket two weeks later he set him free. It was a brief imprisonment, but it was the end of Coventry’s government career. Coventry himself could not care less, he said, about being stripped of office. He had had enough of court intrigues. He retired to his home at Minster Lovell in Oxfordshire, keeping his place as an MP and speaking out in parliament against court policies and any alliance with the French.
Sir William Coventry, by John Riley
The Country Gentleman was not acted but the text shows how absurd it made Coventry look, with his ‘oyster table’ and his papers in piles, forming an instant guide to the alliances and ambitions of all foreign powers. Quite apart from this particular target, the whole play was a scathing satire on the secrecy and cabals of the court, the greed of the new-moneyed men, and the neglect of British virtues and English goods in favour of foreign ways and imports. Country gentlemen, Howard argued, should fight against corrupt placemen and self-seeking plotters, wherever they could be found. 7 Sadly, this was exactly what Coventry himself thought, although he belonged to a different faction. The most significant impact of his dismissal was to thrust the royal brothers even further apart. It seemed that Charles was allowing Buckingham to have his way, at the expense, in particular, of the Duke of York. In a strange scene, just after Coventry was imprisoned, Pepys came across the duke and duchess dining at the navy treasurer’s house at Deptford, with Barbara Castlemaine and the Duchess’s maids of honour. All the ladies were sitting on the carpet playing ‘I love my love with an A’, rivalling each other in their wit. 8 Their main toast at this picnic, however, was ‘to the union of the two brothers’ – Charles and James.
Charles could afford to shrug off criticism. But if Coventry was a disposable nuisance in Whitehall, as Clarendon had been, there were more difficult problems in the administration of Ireland. The country had been bedevilled for years by the deficit in government funds – something that Coventry, ironically, had tried to solve. The situation there was doubly precarious because of the hostility between Ormond, as Lieutenant Governor, and Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery. In theory, the Irish treasury was controlled by Orrery’s older brother, the Earl of Cork and Burlington, but he was rarely in Ireland and in practice, since Ormond disliked dealing with money, it was managed by the vice-treasurer, Arthur Annesley, Earl of Anglesey. He proved wholly inadequate to the job, his worst blunder being a drastic underestimate of army pay. Although he left the post in 1667 when he was appointed treasurer of the navy, by then
As soon as Charles heard about the challenge to Buckingham, he seized on it as a pretext for excluding Coventry from the council. As he explained to Minette:
I am not Sorry that Sir Will: Coventry has given me this good occasion by sending my Lord of Buckingham a challenge, to turn him out of the Council. I do intend to turn him also out of the Tresury. The truth of it is he has been a troublesome man in both places, and I am well rid of him. 5
One wonders if Charles had not been an accomplice all along.
Coventry was sent to the Tower, where his many friends rushed to see him, blocking the roads with their coaches. (There were near duels in the Tower itself, the Duke of Richmond drawing his sword on James Hamilton, with Halifax and Rochester in attendance. 6 ) On 6 March Coventry petitioned the King for a pardon, and when Charles returned from Newmarket two weeks later he set him free. It was a brief imprisonment, but it was the end of Coventry’s government career. Coventry himself could not care less, he said, about being stripped of office. He had had enough of court intrigues. He retired to his home at Minster Lovell in Oxfordshire, keeping his place as an MP and speaking out in parliament against court policies and any alliance with the French.
Sir William Coventry, by John Riley
The Country Gentleman was not acted but the text shows how absurd it made Coventry look, with his ‘oyster table’ and his papers in piles, forming an instant guide to the alliances and ambitions of all foreign powers. Quite apart from this particular target, the whole play was a scathing satire on the secrecy and cabals of the court, the greed of the new-moneyed men, and the neglect of British virtues and English goods in favour of foreign ways and imports. Country gentlemen, Howard argued, should fight against corrupt placemen and self-seeking plotters, wherever they could be found. 7 Sadly, this was exactly what Coventry himself thought, although he belonged to a different faction. The most significant impact of his dismissal was to thrust the royal brothers even further apart. It seemed that Charles was allowing Buckingham to have his way, at the expense, in particular, of the Duke of York. In a strange scene, just after Coventry was imprisoned, Pepys came across the duke and duchess dining at the navy treasurer’s house at Deptford, with Barbara Castlemaine and the Duchess’s maids of honour. All the ladies were sitting on the carpet playing ‘I love my love with an A’, rivalling each other in their wit. 8 Their main toast at this picnic, however, was ‘to the union of the two brothers’ – Charles and James.
Charles could afford to shrug off criticism. But if Coventry was a disposable nuisance in Whitehall, as Clarendon had been, there were more difficult problems in the administration of Ireland. The country had been bedevilled for years by the deficit in government funds – something that Coventry, ironically, had tried to solve. The situation there was doubly precarious because of the hostility between Ormond, as Lieutenant Governor, and Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery. In theory, the Irish treasury was controlled by Orrery’s older brother, the Earl of Cork and Burlington, but he was rarely in Ireland and in practice, since Ormond disliked dealing with money, it was managed by the vice-treasurer, Arthur Annesley, Earl of Anglesey. He proved wholly inadequate to the job, his worst blunder being a drastic underestimate of army pay. Although he left the post in 1667 when he was appointed treasurer of the navy, by then
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