The Prospect

History is seamless. But, if we must pick a thread and start this story somewhere, then the port of Dover in the year 1670 is as good a place and time as any. The occasion is the brokering of a secret treaty of peace and alliance between England and France. Catholic France wants to carve up the erstwhile Protestant alliance of Holland England and Sweden; if possible, to carve up England itself. And King Charles II of England, the "Merry Monarch", and as improvident as he is undoubtedly merry, is, to put it bluntly, broke. Handsome, witty, and indescribably lazy, this was the Charles who had inspired the poet John Wilmot to compose for him a premature epitaph which ran

Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King
Whose promise none relies on.
He never said a foolish thing
Nor ever did a wise one.

In the generally porous circles of the Restoration Court, such a jib was bound to find its way back to the King's ear; who, having as little malice in him as he had application, simply responded in kind:

Quite so, for my words are my own, but my actions, they are my ministers'.
But at the Conference of Dover, Charles does for once act for himself. Whether he does so wisely or foolishly is a matter later hotly debated, though it will be many years before the details of this treaty become public. Away from the eyes of Parliament, and through the careful negotiation of his Catholic younger sister (married to the French King’s oafish brother) he signs up to what is perhaps the most ignominious contract ever signed by a British Monarch. In order to avoid the humiliation of going begging regularly to Parliament for more money, Charles accepts a pension from Louis XIV of France. His own side of the bargain has two parts. Firstly, he agrees to renege on his former alliance with Holland and instead, with France, attack her. Secondly, and crucially for this story, he agrees to become a Catholic himself.

As easy as it was for many to be shocked at the sight of a King so casually betraying his country, it may be hard for some in more secular times to understand why this constituted a betrayal at all. To do so we need to picture England as it saw itself then; an heroic flag-bearer for the true faith of Protestantism, standing virtually alone on the edge of Europe under constant threat from the much larger (and richer) Catholic Kingdoms of France and Spain. The Secret Treaty of Dover was possibly the subtlest of all the many Catholic plots, and very nearly succeeded in making England a vassal of France.

Charles was not, it should be stressed, agreeing to Catholicize England; he was astute enough to recognise the frailty of his position as King. His father Charles I, leaning too far toward Catholicism and arbitrary government had paid for the dalliance with his life. For Charles II to do the same would probably start a second Civil War, one that he would have been by no means certain of winning. He knew that he had only been invited back from exile to take the throne because Oliver Cromwell’s son Richard had failed to do as his father had done and hold the Government and Army together.

Charles was still in 1670 trying to consolidate his position as King; and for this he needed an heir. He had married, in 1662, the Portuguese Princess Catherine of Bragança, but despite all the King's efforts his placid and pious Queen remained childless. After 8 years of marriage, this was causing some alarm in the Kingdom of England, and to alarm was added frustration, at the seeming ease with which the King's mistresses bore him bastards. There were already seven by the time he married; at his death he acknowledged twice that number. Barbara Palmer (married off to the (at first) unsuspecting Lord Castlemaine) alone bore him five.

In the year of his marriage the young King Charles brought over to the English court the eldest of these bastards, heir to the throne if only he had been legitimate, a strapping and lively lad of 13 named James Scott. Charles doted upon the boy, swiftly marrying him to a rich heiress, creating him a knight of the Garter, and bestowing on him the title of duke of Monmouth.
The new duke's mother was one Lucy Walter, a Welsh "strumpet" whom the diarist John Evelyn described as "a brown [ie brown-haired], beautiful, bold, but insipid creature"; Aubrey wrote that she "could deny nobody". Certainly she could not deny the young Charles Stuart when she met him in his years of exile from the English Commonwealth. Both were 18 at the time, and within a year Lucy was pregnant with the first of their two children. Charles dismissed her with some money a little while later, but it didn’t last long and she died in Paris, in poverty, of venereal disease in 1658, two years before the Commonwealth collapsed and Charles was invited to return to England to re-establish the old monarchy.

Rumours circulated that Lucy Walter and the prince had in fact married in the town of Liege in 1648, and these rumours were to resurface with ever-increasing regularity through the 1660's and 70's, especially as it became clear that Charles' queen would neither bear the country an heir nor die conveniently and allow him to remarry.

When Charles signed the Secret Treaty of Dover he managed to insert a get-out clause for himself; that he would convert to Rome only ‘when the interest of the kingdom allowed’. This he managed to spin out until he found himself on his death bed in February 1685, but as he died without recognising his popular son as heir the crown passed smoothly to his deeply unpopular younger brother, the duke of York, who was duly crowned James II. And thus Charles' secret bargain with France was fulfilled; for James was already a Catholic.
James II and the duke of Monmouth both shared King Charles’ aristocratic good looks, though neither had a large share of his intelligence. In fact it was not just James II's religion that made him unpopular, although for many English people that would have been enough; he was also arrogant, overbearing, myopic and cruel. For a joke like John Wilmot's mock epitaph for Charles II James might well have had the poet executed; he did it to enough other people. Imagine a Catholic King so widely hated that when, after only three years of his rule, a group of peers invites the King’s Protestant daughter and son-in-law over from Holland to take his throne, the move receives a blessing from the Pope. It is perhaps also true that for the Pope, even a Protestant England was better than a Catholic England allied to and dependant on France.

But this is jumping ahead. Back to 1685.

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