9
Charles II: The Veriest Rogue That Ever Reigned
The Restoration of Charles II was a joyful affair for most of the king’s subjects, but an unhappy turn for supporters of the commonwealth regime. Behind the accolades for the restored royal government were the mutterings of malcontents who found it hard to close the door on two decades of revolution. Although multitudes greeted their king with acclamation, a disgruntled minority continued to speak ill of the monarch. Cromwellian diehards and supporters of ‘the good old cause’ had no fair words for any Charles Stuart, and some would deny allegiance to any hereditary king. Several unreconstructed republicans were indicted for speaking approvingly of regicide, some going so far as to say that ‘all kings’ heads should be cut off’.1 These were extreme opinions, rarely voiced, but the authorities could not afford to ignore them.
Some of this anti-monarchical language was associated with plots to reverse the Restoration, but much of it was just alehouse chatter. Dreams of a republican England became mixed with the ordinary anti-authoritarian belligerence of drunk or disgruntled commoners. The authorities remained vigilant, for nobody could tell whether loose talk betrayed a treasonable project, or how deep a conspiracy might run. The restored Stuart regime could not allow dangerous talk to go unchecked, and making an example of seditious speakers was part of the process of restoration.
Hundreds of English men and women came before authorities in Charles II’s reign ‘for speaking irreverent and unmannerly and uncomely words concerning the king’s majesty’, or for uttering words that were ‘desperate and dangerous’, ‘scandalous and treasonable’, ‘treasonable and seditious’, or ‘words tending to treason’.2 Most of those cited were men, and the majority were of plebeian social condition. Of 232 recorded cases of seditious or treasonable language before the Middlesex Sessions between 1660 and 1688, 182 (78 per cent) involved men and 50 (22 per cent) women.3 Among 216 individuals similarly indicted at county assizes, 17 were gentlemen (8 per cent), 12 clerics (6 per cent), 68 yeomen (31 per cent), 60 labourers (28 per cent), and the rest (27 per cent) various kinds of artisans and tradesmen or their wives.4 Their words posed challenges to the restored Stuart monarchy, though they reflected only a minority opinion.
Restoration Stirs
Both Houses of Parliament concerned themselves with ‘treasonable words’ in the crucial transitional month of May 1660. Francis Newport told his uncle Sir Richard Leveson on 22 May 1660 that ‘divers have been committed for treasonable words against the king’.5 Informers reported ‘very treasonable and dangerous words’ amongst soldiers and sailors, including threats to Charles II’s life. Often enough the reports were exaggerated, malicious, or unfounded. Hearing that a Mr Trevill had said ‘that he would kill the king with his own hands’, the Commons referred the matter to a committee to discover ‘the truth of the business’ and to see ‘what else may conduce thereunto’.6 The Lords took up the case of Justice Baynes, a brewer in Southwark, who under examination denied and ‘abhorred’ the ‘treasonable words against his majesty’ attributed to him. Particularly troubling were the words of a Captain Henbury, that, ‘if we must have a king, he did not doubt but to flatter him… yet he hoped and did not doubt to see the king hanged before his own gate at Whitehall within six months after he came thither’.7
A dangerous strain of opinion involved nostalgia for the Commonwealth and fantasies about alternative successions. Told that ‘we shall have a king’, the Yorkshireman Richard Abbott avowed, ‘if I had but one bat in my belly I would give it to keep the king out, for Cromwell ruled better than ever the king will’.8 The Londoner William Hammond said likewise ‘that Oliver was as good a man as King Charles was’, for which words he was cited to the Middlesex sessions.9 William Cox of Wapping said ‘that my Lord Lambert deserved the crown and to be a king better than Charles II’.10 The Yorkshireman Francis Ryder spoke similarly that Lambert would have been a better successor to Cromwell, who ‘governed better than ever the king will do’.11 Discussion of this sort went on for decades, arguing whether Charles I was justly executed, whether Cromwell was a better man than the king, or which of the two was the greater traitor.12
Speaking for other defeated republicans, the Middlesex shoemaker Edward Jones said in May 1660 that the king reigned ‘on sufferance, for a little time, and it would be theirs again before it be long’.13 ‘There is a crown provided, but the king will never wear it,’ and ‘your king ere long will have nothing left to set his crown upon’, declared the former Roundhead officer John Hodgson. Hodgson’s case reveals some of the reversals of fortune and settling of scores that accompanied the Stuart restoration. Hodgson’s enemies secured his arrest and imprisonment in Bradford gaol, and the magistrate at his trial was one he himself had formerly reprimanded. He was eventually freed, after five months in prison, and took the oath of allegiance.14
The Declaration of Breda of April 1660 had barely been promulgated when Thomas Willis, a minister at Twickenham, Middlesex, preached against ‘a malignant plot to bring in Charles Stuart’ and thanked God ‘for delivering us from that bloody family’.15 Others ventured the opinion that the incoming king would not live to be crowned, or that Charles I’s fate would soon overtake his son. Several prophesied a short reign and a bloody one for the newly restored monarch.
On hearing the news of Charles II’s accession, Margaret Dixon of Newcastle upon Tyne flew into a rage of invective:
What! Can they find no other man to bring in than a Scotsman? What! Is there not some Englishman more fit to make a king than a Scot? There is none that loves him but drunk whores and whoremongers. I hope he will never come into England, for that he will set on fire the three kingdoms as his father before him has done. God’s curse light on him. I hope to see his bones hanged at a horse tail, and the dogs run through his puddins.16
Even before his own sexual appetites had become widely known, the incoming monarch was described as ‘a rogue’ and ‘the son of whore’.17
John Botts, the minister of Darfield, Yorkshire, warned parishioners in May 1660 that Charles II ‘would bring in superstition and popery’. His sermon reached its peroration: ‘Let us fear the king of heaven and worship him, and be not so desirous of an earthly king, which will tend to the embroiling of us again in blood.’ Report of these words brought Botts before the northern assizes, where he was allowed to plead the king’s pardon and go free.18 ‘We should have nothing but popery,’ feared the Yorkshire-man William Poole.19
Edward Medburne, a glazier of Wapping, Middlesex, avowed in May 1660 ‘that if he met the king he would run his knife into him to kill him, and that he did not care though he were hanged for it himself’. If General Monck (the maker of the Restoration) and King Charles were hanged together, Medburne fantasized, ‘he did not care if he were the hangman himself, and would spend that day five shillings for joy’.20 Anthony Chapman, a London labourer, similarly said ‘that he hoped to meet the king at the gallows’.21
William Fenn of St Martin in the Fields went further when he said ‘that he hoped to wash his hands in the king’s blood’ and offered to thrust ‘an old rusty sword… up to the hilt in his heart’. An old rusty sword was, perhaps, the sign of a Cromwellian veteran. Fenn boldly repeated his threat ‘that if the king were in the room, he would run a sword that was there up to his heart’.22
William Sparkes of Stepney greeted the Restoration with ‘irreverent and unmannerly and uncomely words’ to the effect that Charles II was ‘a poor and beggarly king’ and that his days would not be long. The thanksgiving day for the Restoration, Sparkes predicted, ‘would be the best day that ever the king should have’, as if he should not live to enjoy many more.23 Margaret Osmond likewise prophesied in June 1660 that Charles II ‘shall not reign one year’.24
Thomas Lunn of Bootham, labourer, appeared at the Yorkshire assizes for saying in June 1660 that ‘the king shall never be crowned, and if he is crowned he shall never live long. His father’s head was taken off with an axe, but a bill [an agricultural hand tool] shall serve to take off his.’ These were treasonous words, though what price Lunn paid for them is uncertain. Difficulties with witnesses and juries impaired the chance of conviction, and punishment could not be guaranteed.25 Similarly cited for ‘speaking and uttering desperate and treasonable words’ in Middlesex, Joseph Exton avowed: ‘I will be hanged if ever King Charles be crowned.’26 Nicholas Wright, a wheelwright of Hornchurch, Essex, appeared before magistrates ‘for speaking seditious words against our sovereign, by saying “if there were a king”, when his majesty was proclaimed’.27 ‘A pox on all the kings,’ said Mary Greene of St Paul’s Covent Garden soon after the Restoration, adding that ‘she did not care a turd for never a king in England for she never did lie with any’.28
Though most of those cited for seditious speech were commoners, outside the traditionally constituted ‘political nation’ they also included a few incautious aristocrats. Viscount Purbeck, a somewhat protean figure with both Catholic and Protestant leanings, both royalist and parliamentarian credentials, and claims to at least four surnames (Villiers, Danvers, Howard, and Wright), was called before parliament in June 1660 for his ‘treasonable words and blasphemous speeches’. He had said over dinner with Lord Monmouth ‘that it was a very commendable and just action to put the last king to death, and that if an executioner had been wanting, he would have been the person’.29 It is not clear exactly when Purbeck said these words, if indeed he did so, but similar sentiments were aired in alehouses both before and after the Restoration.
The execution of the regicides prompted the Canterbury shoemaker Simon Oldfield to say in December 1660 that ‘King Charles I had a fair and legal trial, and [the Regicides] which were lately executed for the same were executed and suffered wrongly’. Leaving no doubt about his commonwealth loyalties, Oldfield also declared that ‘the king is no more head of the church than I am, and I was always against kingly government’.30
Rumour and gossip further discredited the restored Stuart monarchy. All sorts of defamatory stories were recited, including the claim that Charles I had helped to poison his father, and that Henrietta Maria’s children were sired by the courtier Henry Jermyn.31 A Whitechapel woman, Jane Blun-stone, comprehensively denigrated the royal family, saying that ‘the queen is the great whore of Babylon, and the king is the son of a whore, and the Duke of York is a rogue, and such like words’.32 A Yorkshireman gave out that ‘the king is a bastard and the son of a whore’.33 John Tyler of St Martin in the Fields repeated the claim that ‘King Charles was a bastard’.34 Commentary of this sort had a long life, reappearing in the 1670s in the claim that Charles II was begot by one Barry, a cobbler, on ‘the French witch’ Henrietta Maria,35 and that both ‘the king and Duke of York were bastards’.36 Others spoke derisively of the royal family’s origins, saying ‘one of them formerly run away into another land and got to be steward to some great man there, and so changed their name to be Stewart’.37 Several subjects made the somewhat puzzling claim that Charles II was ‘but a chimney sweeper’.38
Some of these comments reveal an almost visceral hatred for the house of Stuart. When the king’s younger brother died in September 1660, ‘a miscreant villain in Kent, getting into a pulpit, affronted God with thanks for the death of the Duke of Gloucester, adding blasphemous desires for the same upon the rest of the royal stock’, so one gentleman informed another.39 A similar sentiment was heard at Guernsey in July 1663, when Thomas le Marchant responded to the question ‘what news?’: ‘Good news,’ he replied, ‘the Princess Royal is dead, and I wish it were the last of the family.’40
Malicious and Advised Speaking
New legislation of 1661 was designed to protect the king and his government against ‘all treasonable and seditious practices and attempts’ and to prevent a relapse into ‘the miseries and calamities’ of recent years. Invoking the ‘right good and profitable law’ of Queen Elizabeth (13 Eliz. I c. 1, 1571), and reiterating principles dating back to Edward III, the Restoration statute made treason any attempt to ‘compass, imagine, invent, devise, or intend’ the death or deposition of the monarch. ‘Such compassings’, it explained, included hostile expressions or utterances ‘by any printing, writing, preaching, or malicious and advised speaking’. Words by themselves could once again secure a traitor’s death. Simply to ‘affirm the king to be an heretic or a papist, or that he endeavours to introduce popery’, was also a crime, short of treason, as was any writing or speaking ‘to incite or stir up the people to dislike of the person of his majesty or the established government’. It became illegal to declare that parliament had a legislative power independent of the king. Those found guilty faced exclusion from office and such ‘punishments as by the common laws or statutes of the realm may be inflicted’, including the penalties of praemunire.41 (Praemunire, from the Latin for forewarning, was a complex medieval law, best expressed in 16 Richard II c. 5 in 1392, which punished contempt against the crown, such as introducing a foreign or papal power into England. It had been deployed as an effective weapon in Henry VIII’s reformation. The penalties for praemunire included forfeiture of property, imprisonment at pleasure, and disqualification from public office, but not execution.)
The treason statute of Charles II ‘altered the former law greatly’, so Lord Chief Justice Francis Pemberton explained when he used it against the Whig Earl of Shaftesbury in 1681. The ancient treason law still operated, but this ‘more copious statute… has enlarged that of Edward III in a great many particulars’, to include designs ‘but uttered and spoken’. ‘Formerly,’ Pemberton told the Grand Jury, ‘words alone would not make treason; but since this act, gentlemen, words, if they import any malicious design against the king’s life and government, any traitorous intention in the party, such words are treason now within this act.’42
One of the first to suffer under this statute was the Fifth Monarchist preacher John James, who had been overheard at a conventicle in White-chapel declaring ‘that the king was a bloody tyrant, a blood-sucker, and blood-thirsty man’ and ‘that the death and destruction of the king drew very near’. Tried for high treason in November 1661 in King’s Bench, James protested that ‘there was no law of God to take away a man’s life for words’. The Attorney General, however, insisted that James spoke treason, ‘for which he ought to die’. The jury found him guilty after fifteen minutes’ deliberation, and he was condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. At his execution, however, ‘the sheriff and hangman were so civil to him… as to suffer him to hang till he was dead before he was cut down’.43
More fortunate was one Alicock, charged in Hilary term 1662 to have said that ‘the king is a bastard, his mother is a whore, he is gone to convey the whore out of the kingdom (the king being then gone to leave his mother at Portsmouth in order for her transportation to France) but may come short home, if I meet him I will kill him’. These were dangerously incriminating words, but the witnesses in this case included ‘women of ill fame’ and people with grudges against the defendant. The jury found Alicock not guilty.44
Even in cases where the words were undisputed, it was not always clear whether they were treasonable. Lawyers, juries, and the public at large had different understandings of the peril of the law, which tended to change with the climate of danger. To say, as did Michael Mallet in 1678, that the king was a ‘rogue’ could lead to both legal and political wrangling. Mallet was a member of parliament, but had spoken privately in Berkshire. Secretary of State Coventry advised the Attorney General: ‘I am not lawyer enough to tell how far this is a crime, but am sure it is a great one. The Lord Chancellor thinks he should be taken into custody for treasonable words, and that there is no privilege of parliament in the case.’ Despite protests from the Commons, Mallet was held in the Tower while the Council conducted examinations, and was released four months later only on grounds of ill health. It did not help that the Popish Plot was raging at this time, and parties on all sides were especially nervous.45 The difficulty of determining the legal weight of disloyal language is suggested by reference to ‘words tending to treason’, words ‘which we conceive import high treason or are too near it’, and ‘dangerous and seditious words, bordering upon if not altogether treasonous’.46
The readiness of juries to find political offenders ‘not guilty’, despite strong evidence of their seditious words, may have inclined some officials not to pursue prosecutions. Magistrates were generally more likely to treat seditious speech as a symptom of disorder than a serious threat to the state. But their tolerance for words of ‘envenomed malice’ varied with the politics of the moment as much as with the particularities of language. As a government lawyer advised the Duke of Beaufort in 1682, certain words spoken at Leominster ‘require nimble prosecution to justice; for as long as the traitorous, saucy, and malicious tongues of the subjects are at liberty to scandalize his majesty, his royal highness and government, we cannot expect a well-grounded peace’.47
Punishments for crimes of the tongue included the pillory, fines, and varying periods of imprisonment. Guilty offenders would stand in the pillory in a public place for an hour at a time, often with a paper on their head describing their crime. Their necks and hands would be restrained, but there was no talk now of nailing or removing ears. Fines could range from a few shillings to several hundred pounds, but the larger sums were probably remitted for people without resources. Defendants stayed in gaol while their cases were examined, and often remained in gaol until their fine had been paid or sureties obtained. Custodial sentences were normally short, up to six months, though occasionally an offender was held at the king’s pleasure. Seditious speakers against Charles II were not normally treated to a whipping, but the labourer Matthew Webb, who said in 1683 that the king ‘will die as his father did’, was sentenced ‘to be flogged on his naked back until it shall be bloody’, the flogging to continue across London from Smithfield, through St John’s Street to Swan Alley, through Old Street, then Whitecross Street, ‘to the door of his own house there’, as well as to pay £3 6s. 8d.48
People continued to talk wherever they gathered, at market, at church, in the alehouse, and in the street. News and opinion spread like fractals, from the court to the city, to the suburbs, and beyond. A new venue for conversation emerged with the Restoration, the remarkable phenomenon of the coffee house. Not just in London, where their numbers grew by the dozen, but also in provincial England, coffee houses provided their customers with reading matter and commentary as well as refreshment. By 1666 the Earl of Clarendon was concerned that coffee houses were centres of sedition. They allowed, he said, ‘the foulest imputations [to be] laid upon the government, and the people generally believed that those houses had a charter of privilege to speak what they would, without being in danger to be called into question’.49
To counter this threat, Clarendon proposed insinuating government spies into coffee houses to record dangerous conversations, perhaps along the lines of the ‘mouches’ employed by the police of Paris. Information gathered over the next few years, including reports of conversations in coffee houses, suggests that, at least informally, parts of Clarendon’s proposal went into effect. Several members of Charles II’s government proposed suppressing the coffee houses to quieten their discourse. They were targets of royal proclamations in 1672 and 1674 against the utterance of false news and ‘licentious talking of matters of state’. Again in 1675 the coffee houses were condemned as places where ‘idle and disaffected persons’ spread ‘false reports to the defamation of the government and disturbance of the peace of the realm’. A few coffee-house keepers were arrested for promulgating ‘seditious discourses’, but the sheer popularity of the coffee habit, and its contribution to the revenue and the economy, forced the authorities to back down. Another magistrate complained in 1683 that coffee houses were ‘places where false and seditious news are uttered and spread abroad to delude and poison the people’, but they continued to thrive as hubs of commentary on public affairs.50
Historians have become enamoured with later Stuart coffee houses, seeing them as crucial to the burgeoning ‘public sphere’. The effect of the coffee bean upon demeanour and conversation has been compared favourably to the effects of alcohol.51 But coffee houses were by no means the sole nexus of critical or dangerous talk. Nor was coffee the sole stimulant on sale at such venues. Alehouses, inns, taverns, and victualling rooms continued to attract political conversation, alongside places of business and other areas of congress. Reports of ‘dangerous words’ in Charles II’s reign were more likely to come from such drinking establishments as the Bell in Bell Yard, the Devil in Fleet Street, the Sun in Holborn, the Swan at Sittingbourne, or the White Lion at Cambridge than coffee houses in London or the provinces. And coffee-house clients charged with speaking seditious or dangerous words were as likely to have been drinking punch or other intoxicating beverages as coffee.
A Pox on the King
Charles II was crowned on St George’s Day, April 1661, and reigned another twenty-four years. Although some subjects grew to like him, and most acknowledged his majesty as a divinely anointed monarch, seditious talk continued to trouble the authorities. As Charles’s character became better known, public commentary grew all the more scandalous. Outspoken commoners frequently asserted that the king was a ‘knave’ or a ‘rogue’, that he was a ‘son of a whore’ and a ‘keeper of whores’, and, after the arrival of Catherine of Braganza in 1662, that the queen herself was a whore.52
In February 1661 Henry Welburne of Brandesburton, labourer, said: ‘the king is a rogue, and if he does not depart the land presently he shall die the sorest death that ever king died.’53 ‘The devil take [the] king,’ said Robert Thornell of St Paul’s Covent Garden in August 1662.54
William Pierce was held at Newgate in October 1663 for ‘treasonable and traitorous words’ to the effect that ‘the king is a rogue’. Tried on the lesser charge of uttering scandalous words against the king (‘pro propalando verba scandalosa contra regem’), he was fined five marks, made to stand in the pillory for an hour at Westminster, Charing Cross, and New market, and then to stay in prison until his fine was paid and sureties found for his good behaviour.55 That same autumn the Yorkshire labourer William Moulthrope was indicted at Pontefract for asking ‘is the king better than another man?’56 The yeoman James Parker, a former Cromwellian soldier, appeared at the northern assizes in November 1663 for saying, ‘as for the king, I am not beholding to him, I care not a fart for him’, but the jury set him free.57
Cases of this sort are abundant, though the records rarely allow us to reconstruct conversations. The indictments do not necessarily reproduce the actual words spoken, though they capture the essence of the offence. They display a limited vocabulary of abuse in service to a wide range of indignation.
Peter Sourceau and Everard Blake were indicted in Middlesex in May 1664 for ‘scandalous, seditious and treasonable words’, saying that ‘the king of England is not fitting nor capable to govern his kingdoms’.58 The labourer Anthony Derrew of Whitechapel called the king ‘a vagabond and a rogue and a knave’, as well as a keeper of whores.59 ‘God damn his majesty,’ cursed John Mayling of Newcastle after the second Dutch war, ‘what was he more than another man, that so many men had suffered death for him?’60 The king, said the yeoman Henry Northit, was ‘a traitor to this land and nation’.61 ‘The king is the son of a whore and the veriest rogue that ever reigned, and has no more right to the crown than I have,’ declared a former Cromwellian soldier in 1670.62
Several people in Essex heard the blacksmith Henry Newington say that ‘the king had none but sons of whores and bastards belonging to him, and that he should not reign two years longer, and after him should never any king reign more in England’. Though witnesses described Newington ‘as deboshed a rude and base knave as any in England… not fitting to live in civil society’, this did not so much mitigate as sharpen his offence, which the Privy Council examined early in 1671.63 Elizabeth Phillips had to answer at the Middlesex sessions that year for saying that ‘the king keeps a company of rogues about him’.64
An Admiralty investigation of treasonable talk in 1673 led to more detailed information. At the Three Tuns tavern in July that year, ‘discourse being had about state affairs’, a Mr Hosier spoke ‘treasonable words… that the king had betrayed his people’. One of those present, the naval officer Captain Perriman, protested that they ought not to talk of such topics, and ‘noted down the words in his book’. It was Perriman’s report a week later that led to Hosier being examined by the Admiralty board. When Hosier said he remembered nothing and may have been drunk, the board advised him ‘to prepare a better answer to justify himself, or else we fear it will go hard with him when the Lords shall be acquainted with it. Indeed,’ they noted, ‘the poor man is very much afflicted at this unhappy business’. The offender’s remorse, and the possibility that the case against him was driven by malice, may have led to the matter being dropped.65
In another conversation in 1674, Alexander Malley of St Margaret’s, Westminster, derided King Charles as ‘a ridiculous prince for making peace with the Dutch’, and prophesied that ‘the king of France will be king of England before two years come to an end, and all protestants will be made slaves as in Turkey, or be banished’.66
Not a year went by without somebody being cited for saying that the king was a ‘rogue and knave’,67 or ‘a fool’,68 or bidding the king ‘to the devil’ .69 ‘The king of England is no more than another man… and I myself am as good a man as he,’ declared the yeoman Samuel Morris of Whitechapel in 1676.70 Offering to ‘drink damnation to the king and the duke’, the Westminster apothecary Edward Warren said in 1677 that ‘if [King] Charles were here he would fling the beer in his face’.71 ‘His majesty is a pitiful fellow and a rascally rogue,’ said the labourer Thomas Sothin of Chatham, which words cost him a fine of £200 at the 1679 Kent assizes.72 George Speke in Somerset gave his opinion in 1681 ‘that the king was no more fit to govern than his ass’.73 ‘God damn the king’ was a frequently repeated curse.74
Charles II’s sex life attracted lively commentary, often intermingled with discussion of the succession. John Weeden of St Giles in the Fields remarked in August 1674 that ‘our king keepeth nothing but whores and he is a scourge to the nation’.75 Henry Langley of St Martin in the Fields was charged with uttering ‘opprobrious and seditious words’ and bringing the king ‘into hatred and contempt’. He allegedly said, ‘I would the king had been burnt before he came into the land,’ referring to burning with the pox rather than consumption by fire.76 A London libel in May 1675 set down what many were saying: ‘the king has given up his life, his understanding, and his conscience into the disposal of whores and ladies of pleasure, who do with him what they will.’77
A libel found in December 1675 on the king’s statue in Lombard Street declared ‘that his majesty was in a worse condition than his father, having disobliged all his friends, and that he was going to live in France with Madame Curwell, Duchess of Portsmouth’ (Louise de Kerouaille). Other copies of the libel were cast in the gallery and fixed on a door at court, provoking lively conversation. A Mr Sisted, drinking at the Palsgrave’s Head in Temple Bar, embellished the news to say ‘that his majesty had sold Tangiers, and Madame Curwell was to have the money, and that his majesty was about selling all the foreign plantations to the French king’. A fellow drinker, James Allardice of the Strand, told Sisted that ‘he deserved to be hanged for speaking such seditious and treasonable words’, but Sisted insisted that it was all true. Examined a few days later by Secretary of State Williamson, he admitted repeating gossip that the king had secretly and bigamously married ‘the French lady’, adding that Dr Bourne’s wife had told him that Madame Queroualle had told the queen ‘that she was as much the king’s wife as the queen, only that she was not married by a bishop’.78
Royal dalliances provided an excuse to Sir Matthew Pearson of Sileby, Leicestershire, who protested in May 1678 ‘that he kept but one whore and had but one bastard, but that the king kept twenty and had twenty bastards’. When report of these words reached local magistrates, one said it ‘was of that nature that he durst not meddle with it’. The accuser, Elizabeth Church (perhaps the target of Pearson’s attentions), then related the matter to Secretary of State Williamson.79
In 1681 the Yorkshireman William Beever remarked that ‘the king is sick of the pox with using so many whores… and there hangs a great judgement over the nation’s head for his wickedness’.80 Speaking at the Crown in Ilminster that year, the Somerset gentleman George Speke shared his view ‘that the nation was governed by a company of whores’, and suggested, with a nod to Henry VIII, ‘let the king cut off the queen’s head, and then he may marry again and have children’.81 This was similar to the view of Gabriel Shadd, a prisoner in Wood Street Counter, who suggested in 1683 that King Charles ‘ought to be divorced from the queen that there might be an heir to the crown’.82
Hang the Knave
Many of the most outspoken opponents of Charles II not only scorned or denounced him but wished him dead. Some predicted his early demise, while others offered to hasten him to the grave. While few of the king’s subjects had the opportunity to do him harm, a surprising number acknowledged the aspiration. The unfortunately named republican shoemaker Edward King of Westerham, Kent, spoke treason in July 1662 when he declared: ‘If I could have my opportunity, I would be the death of the king.’ There were 30,000 of his sort, he declared, who were prepared ‘at an hour’s warning’ for ‘the biggest fight that ever was known in England’.83
By 1663 some people were predicting ‘that there would be wars shortly again in England’, or that soon ‘many will arise in England and Scotland as will cut the throats of all those that were for the king’.84 ‘Before the twelvemonth’s end we shall see King Charles’s head in a poke, as his father’s was,’ predicted the knife-maker George Parkin of Attercliffe, Yorkshire, in October 1663.85 ‘I know a hundred people that would fight against the king, and I would be the first,’ declared the husbandman John Bromley from Kent.86 Rumours of plots encouraged republicans to imagine a change of regime.87
Talk of republican risings mingled with casual anti-monarchical bluster. ‘If thou and the king were both hanged, it would be better for the common weal,’ Edward Cuthbert told a neighbour at Newcastle in December 1663.88 The former Cromwellian soldier Henry Ashton of North Shields declared in 1664 that killing cavaliers was ‘as pleasant to him as killing of bucks and does’, and ‘he would do the like to the king if he had him’.89 ‘Hang the king, he is a knave and a whoremasterly knave,’ declared Anthony Peele of Ullock, Cumberland, in September 1665.90
Some subjects blamed the king for the nation’s ills and the increased burden of taxation. King Charles ‘did take the same ways that his father did to be ill beloved’, said Henry Philip in Middlesex in 1664, adding that ‘the chimney money [Hearth Tax] would prove a worse burden then formerly the Ship Money was’.91 ‘The king is the only causer of the plague and pestilence,’ claimed the Yorkshireman William Thomson in 1665, adding, ‘if this king had been hanged when the other was beheaded we should have none of these taxes, but I think we must all rise’. Despite strong evidence of these treasonable words, the assize jury found him not guilty.92 The clothier William Duncke of Hawkhurst, Kent, also thought the king should be ‘served as his father was served’, and then he might stop oppressing Quakers.93
Casual talk of killing the king stained countless conversations. Warned in 1667 that ‘the king’s watch would take her’ in her drunken condition, Jane Singleton of Middlesex answered ‘that she wished the king hanged on the highest tree in England’.94 The Warwickshire mercer George Sadler was indicted in 1669 for drawing his sword against the constable and saying ‘that if it had been the king himself he would have done as much to him’.95 ‘The king might be hanged, and I will hang the king and you too for a groat,’ the Kentish yeoman John Cullenbeam told a tax-collector in 1671.96
A chain of reportage brought the words of James Dalley, ‘a dissolute unlicensed alehouse keeper’ of Horsell, Surrey, to the attention of the king’s Council in May 1672. George Massey told Thomas Blundell, who reported the matter to the justice John Windebank, who referred it to his colleague Henry Hildeyard of East Horsley, who then wrote to Sir John Williamson, the Clerk of the Council, enclosing reports of his examinations. Dalley allegedly said ‘that the king was the beginning of the wars with the Dutch… and wished that the king might be set in the forefront of the battle and be killed first, and then there would be an end of the wars’. Under examination, Dalley ‘denied it totally, but with such perturbation and agony as amounted to a very probable presumption of his consciousness’, so Henry Hildeyard told the Council; ‘but as he would confess nothing, and was accused but by a single testimony, and that not precise in the time, I dared not commit him, the statute requiring two witnesses’. Dalley remained free on bond while the Council pressed Massey to remember who else had been present on the night in question.97
The carpenter Henry Heywood of Northbury, Cheshire, was reported to have said in January 1673 that ‘he wished the king’s head were off and in his hand, and his body where it is’, but in this case too there was only one witness so the prosecution came to nought.98 Anthony Croft said at York in May 1679 that ‘the parliament… will do away with this king as they did with the last, and then we shall be men’.99 Other subjects reportedly said that they wished the king dead, that the king would soon be dead, or that they would willingly assist in his killing.100
Conversation of this sort was endemic, and seemed to last as long as monarchy. ‘We should never be happy in England till the king were made a John the Baptist and we had his head in a charger,’ declared Ferdinando Gorges of Leominster in1682.101 ‘I wish the king were dead, to see who would fight for the English crown,’ said the Middlesex yeoman’s wife Elizabeth Bryan in January 1685, as Charles II indeed lay dying.102 The spectacle she wished for, as a political observer, was soon dramatically to unfold.
Popery and Plots
If people were suspicious of the king’s religion, they were unforgiving about that of his brother. Most people accepted Charles II as Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England. But he was married to a Catholic, surrounded by papists, and took popish mistresses to his bed. Although the king’s own attachment to Rome remained secret, the rumour persisted that King Charles had turned papist. A dangerous strain of discourse developed, comparable to one that bedevilled Charles I, on the mystery of the king’s religion.
So long as Charles II remained childless, at least through Queen Catherine of Braganza, his brother James, duke of York, was heir to the throne. After 1670 it became public knowledge that the duke had been reconciled to Rome, and some thoughts turned to altering the succession. At stake were not just the faith and devotion of the royal family but the religious orientation and discipline of the nation.
Suspicions about Charles II’s religion circulated even before he was crowned. John Watson, a mariner of Stepney, Middlesex, was found guilty at Maidstone assizes in March 1661 for saying that ‘the king prays and goes to mass twice a day’. For this, and for calling the king’s followers ‘a bloodsucking crew’, he was sentenced to be pilloried and to be gaoled at his majesty’s pleasure.103 Subjects in Yorkshire also claimed that the king was for popery ‘and went to mass with the queen’, a canard that had previously attached to Charles I.104 ‘The king hath brought popery into this land,’ declared a Surrey basket-maker in 1663.105 The Essex blacksmith Henry Newington declared in 1670 that Charles II was a papist and a rogue, and that the money given to the king was to maintain whores and knaves.106 King Charles was guilty both of tyranny and of aiding the popish faction, according to a libel discussed in London in 1675.107
Though Charles II bore the title Defender of the Faith, observed John Martin, the rector of St Andrew’s, Guernsey, in 1677, it was the Catholic faith ‘of his concubines’. The king, he continued, ‘savoured strongly of their papistry, and he feared he would soon act accordingly like his brother the Duke of York’. Augmenting these remarks, Martin recalled that, when the king was in exile in France, ‘his majesty went every day from the mass to the brothel, and from the brothel to the mass’. Reports of these scandalous words reached Secretary Williamson in September 1677, and the king himself took note of the information, initiating prosecution of the outspoken Mr Martin.108 It was also in 1677 that the yeoman Thomas Walker of St Martin in the Fields declared that ‘he hoped to see the Prince of Orange king of England, and that the king (meaning our most serene lord Charles II) should live no longer’. Walker said furthermore that ‘if he were one of the States of Holland, he would fight to the last drop of his blood against all kings’.109
By this time belief in the king’s embrace of popery was overwhelmed by suspicion of his openly Catholic brother. The duke’s proximity to the throne fuelled rumours that he was actually a bastard, whereas the illegitimate Duke of Monmouth sprang from a lawful union. The king, York, and Monmouth featured in hundreds of conversations, in which people prayed for, or feared, particular outcomes. Drinking the Duke of York’s health could be hazardous, but a glass raised to Monmouth or the king could also provoke a scuffle or a torrent of regrettable words.110
Late in December 1675 the company at the Swan at Sittingbourne, Kent, heard the ‘abominable’ false news ‘that the king and the Duke of York had a falling out, and that the duke had stabbed or wounded the king so that he was either dead or dying, and that the duke was fled into France, and that the whole city of London was up in arms’. The bearers of this misinformation, two men from Sandwich, ‘said it was very true, since they had it from a kinsman of the king’s secretary’. Since these tale-tellers had disappeared by the time the authorities came to investigate, they arrested the landlord of the Swan, in whose house the words had been spoken. Eventually, in January 1676, the Sandwich men were tracked down at Thanet and taken to Dover Castle. They were identified as Stephen Wooten and Thomas Venterman, ‘very honest ignorant fellows’, who had served as seamen in the Dutch wars. They ‘immediately confessed they had spoken the words’ and claimed that their story came from two women they had met in Southwark. At this point investigation of the rumour ceased, but on that very day, 7 January 1676, the Council drafted a new proclamation against seditious libels.111
Revelations of a Jesuit conspiracy to kill the king and restore Catholicism dominated the news in the autumn of 1678. By October the rumour ran from Yarmouth to Ostend that King Charles was already recently dead.112 As told by Titus Oates and Israel Tongue, the plot ran close to the king’s brother and implicated dozens of Catholics at court. Before confidence in the conspiracy crumpled, with the perjury of its principal witness, some eighty alleged traitors were arrested and fifteen put to death. The state trials of 1678 to 1681 attracted widespread attention, and details were circulated nationally by the popular press. Equally compelling were the parliamentary ‘exclusion’ crisis and its accompanying popular politics, through which the Whigs tried to alter the royal succession. England succumbed to a period of anxiety, in which the meanings of words and gestures were easily misconstrued. Printed pamphlets and unlicensed news-sheets augment the archival record, allowing detailed reconstruction of some episodes.
One early victim of the frenzy, in which casually seditious comments could be taken as high treason, was the London goldsmith William Stayley. Stayley, a Roman Catholic, was unfortunate to be overheard conversing in French with a foreigner in a London victualling house, the Black Lion in King Street. Their exchange took place in the presence of other diners, over ‘a quart of ale and a slice of roast beef’. One of the eavesdroppers knew enough French to translate Stayley’s remarks, that King Charles ‘was the greatest heretic in the world, that he was a great rogue’, and that ‘I will with this hand kill him’. Stayley allegedly emphasized his remarks by clapping his hand on his heart and stamping his foot ‘in great fury’. Though he strenuously denied the charge and said he was misheard, Stayley fell foul of the 1661 statute that made ‘desperate words to be treason’. He was tried in November 1678 ‘for speaking dangerous and treasonable words against his most sacred majesty the king’. Despite his protestations of loyalty to the crown, Stayley knew himself to be ‘a dying man by the statute’. Though he spoke no worse than several dozen others, the politics of the time were against him. The jury found him guilty, and within days he was taken to Tyburn to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Rough transcripts of Stayley’s case appeared quickly in print with such titles as Treason Justly Punished.113
In 1681 the government used the same Restoration treason law against the populist Whig nobleman Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury had been foremost in efforts to exclude the Catholic Duke of York from the royal succession, and had helped to inflame fears of popish plotting. He was arrested in July 1681 and held in the Tower on charges of high treason. Witness after witness declared that Shaftesbury ‘spake very irreverently and slightingly of the king’. He had declared with a loud voice that
the king was a man of no faith, and that there was no trust in him, and that our said lord the king deserved to be deposed as well as Richard II… that he [Shaftesbury] would never desist until he had brought this kingdom of England into a commonwealth without a king… and that our said lord the king and all his family should be rooted out.
Asked about the king’s religion, Shaftesbury allegedly answered that King Charles ‘hath no more religion than a horse’. He had also said that the king was ‘not fit to rule, being false, unjust, and cruel to his people’, that he was weak and inconstant, ‘of no firm and settled resolution’, and ‘that the king would never be quiet till he came to his father’s end’. Some witnesses even claimed that Shaftesbury spoke of other noblemen, such as the Duke of Buckingham, having as good a hereditary claim to the throne as any Stuart. Citing both the treason act of Edward III and the legislation of 1661, the indictment claimed that Shaftesbury’s words ‘compassed, imagined, and intended the death and final destruction’ of the king, and revealed the earl’s ‘wicked treasons, traitorous compasses, imaginations and purposes’.114
Shaftesbury, by this account, was a loose-lipped lord, a magnet for malcontents, who recklessly spoke treason in his private dining room and at public gatherings. But most of the witnesses against him were of questionable integrity, men of shifting allegiance who ‘made shipwreck of their consciences’, so claimed the defence. In any case, the worst of Shaftesbury’s remarks were no more remarkable than many in popular parlance. According to the diarist Roger Morrice, the Lord Chief Justice acknowledged ‘that there was nothing but words against the Earl of Shaftesbury, and that he could not make words an overt act, and therefore the charge would not reach his life’. Without delay the Whig jury returned the bill ignoramus, to much ‘hollowing and whooping’ in the court and bonfires in the streets. Shaftesbury went free, but hastily produced accounts of his trial reported the proceedings, including the words in question, to an avid politicized public.115
The last years of Charles II’s reign saw no abatement in the flow of malicious discourse.
High political and principled opposition fused with the chatter of the alehouse and the street. Many humbler voices than Shaftesbury’s were raised against the king and his brother, their cry, ‘No York, no York! A Mon-mouth, a Monmouth!’ catching the gist of numerous conversations.116
‘If the Duke of York was here, I would run my sword into the heart’s blood of him up to the hilt,’ declared the Middlesex labourer William Orpoole in February 1681.117 ‘I wonder the parliament doth not chop off his head,’ mused the tailor James Groves in April that year.118 Blamed for the fire of London, the Duke of York ‘now was come again to cut our throats’, claimed a commoner in 1682.119 The Kentish labourer William Burman named the Duke as ‘a great wizard’ and feared ‘that he is preparing for a field of blood with his witchcraft, and … will lay the nation in blood and popish slavery’.120 ‘If the Duke of York should succeed his brother, he would be a worse popish tyrant than ever Queen Mary was,’ declared Robert Humes of Stepney, Middlesex.121 Other alehouse patriots assailed the future James II as ‘the son of a whore and worse than a murderer’,122 and ‘a papist dog’ who ‘should be hanged at his own door’.123
Rumour spread that the king would soon be poisoned or otherwise murdered.124 It was common talk in 1682 ‘that the king would not live another six months’.125 Some predicted that the king’s head ‘would be cut off as his father’s was’, but ‘the Duke of York shall not successively reign, nor any of the royal family’.126 The Council learned in 1682 of bravado remarks in Southwark about ‘old Oliverian boys who know how to ride’,127 and prospective rebels in Devon who ‘hoped to draw a sword’ against the court as their forefathers had done.128
Some of this noise expressed frustration at the political collapse of the exclusion movement. But elements of plebeian conversations invoked commonwealth political theory. Railing against the king in October 1682, the nonconformist Peter Bell declared: ‘we trust him with our lives and fortunes like fools as we are. He governs as well by a trust from us as by inheritance, and if you had ever read the coronation oath you would find it so.’ These ‘scandalous’ words and others brought Bell to Newgate, where he languished for several months. When his excuse that he had spoken ‘in a great passion, improved by excess of brandy’ failed to dislodge the charges against him, he offered to tell secrets to the Duke of York if that would get him out of gaol.129
Also exposed to commonwealth principles, the company at the Bell in Thetford, Norfolk, heard William Cropley of Kilveston say in May 1683 ‘that the king is an elective king, and that the people, who have the power to set up, have power to pull down’. It did not take long for report of these remarks to reach the Privy Council in London.130
The Council also heard of one Aaron Smith who called King Charles ‘a damned dog to deprive his subjects of the rights of Magna Carta’. Smith went on to damn the king ‘and his co-rogue the Duke of York, they are both worse than the devil… he that destroyed them and their whole family, root and branch, did God service’.131 Raising the stakes, a Captain Baker swore in London in July 1683: ‘God damn me, I will pistol the Duke of York, if ever I meet him I will send a brace of bullets into his head, because he is a villain and a traitor against his brother.’ In mitigation Baker said that he had been told that ‘it was not treason to kill a duke’.132
Against these seditions, upholders of traditional royal authority repeated many of the classic arguments for divine-right kingship. William Clifford reminded listeners at Wakefield in October 1681 that ‘a king is the greatest of all earthly blessings’. He used his pulpit to excoriate those ‘incendiaries’ who ‘magnify the power of the people to break open the cabinet of state’, with their ‘diabolical dialogue of speaking evil of dignities’.133 John Burrell preached on a similar theme in January 1683, insisting it was no business of subjects to make judgements of princes, ‘as though the foot must judge the head’.134 Preaching at Salisbury in June 1683 the prebendary Paul Lathom built on Proverbs 8. 15—’By me king’s reign’—to explain that kings ‘are great ministers of the divine providence’ and instruments of God’s purpose on earth. To speak ill of them, to speak evil of dignities, was offensive and dangerous, especially for ‘men that move in lower spheres’.135 Such pieties had little influence on the likes of the Kentish yeoman George Brewer, who declared in 1684, ‘damn your government, I care not a fart for it’.136 The institution of monarchy would continue, but English kingship was forever desacralized.