Charles II: Catholic or Cavalier policies?

The secret Treaty of Dover
British Library
Public domain

After the downfall of Clarendon, two distinct courses of action were open to Charles II. Historians have labelled these ‘Cavalier’ and ‘Catholic’.

(a) 'Cavalier': a recognition that the king’s power base lay in the Church of England; therefore unqualified support for the restored Church and the suppression of nonconformity by the enforcement of the Clarendon Code; a ‘Protestant’ foreign policy.
(b) 'Catholic': toleration for Catholics and Protestant nonconformists; a French alliance.

Charles’s own inclinations supported (b) but he was hampered by parliamentary opinion. He was a prisoner of his parliaments and increasingly resenting this fact.

The situation was further complicated by the fact that from the late 1660s the heir to the throne, James, duke of York, and his wife, Anne Hyde, were moving towards conversion to Rome. As Charles had no legitimate heir, this fact was hugely significant.

The Cabal

After the fall of Clarendon, Charles made his own policy, and never again allowed himself to be controlled by a chief minister. However a group of influential men around him were important in policy-making. Five of them have been (exaggeratedly) seen as key and because of their initials the period 1667-1674 has been known as the Cabal.
• Henry Bennet, earl of Arlington, from 1672 (Secretary of State),  probably the most influential of the five. 
• Thomas, Baron Clifford (Lord Treasurer from 1672)
• George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, Master of the Horse, a notorious debauchee.
• Anthony Ashley Cooper (Lord Chancellor from 1672)
• John Maitland, duke of Lauderdale (Lord High Commissioner from 1669).

It is mistaken to see them as a group that acted together. Apart from a dislike of the narrow intolerance of the restored Church of England, they had little in common and vied with each other for power.


Clifford was a secret Catholic, with pro-French sympathies, and Arlington a Catholic sympathizer, with pro-Spanish, pro-Dutch sympathies. Ashley and Buckingham were both associated with freethinkers. Lauderdale was preoccupied with Scotland. Ashley (created earl of Shaftesbury in 1672) had a Cromwellian background and was wary of any extension of the king’s power. He was to become the king's most formidable enemy.

The differences within the Cabal left Charles with plenty of scope to divide and rule.

The Triple Alliance

Even before the Dutch war was over, many parliamentarians believed that the real danger came from the France of Louis XIV. Early in 1667 Louis had put in a claim to the Spanish Netherlands (present-day Belgium) by the so-called right of ‘devolution’ which he claimed was vested in his Spanish-born wife. In May 1667 the French easily over-ran the Spanish Netherlands and now posed a direct threat to the United Provinces (the Dutch Republic). Many Englishmen now believed that Louis, like Philip II of Spain, aimed at universal empire. They had come to recognize the most significant fact of seventeenth-century geopolitics: that France had replaced Spain as the great expansionist European power.

In January 1668 England joined the United Provinces and Sweden in a formal anti-French treaty, in which each promised to help the other if attacked, though Charles still hankered after an alliance with France. But the alliance was popular in England, where anti-French sentiment was growing.

The secret Treaty of Dover

With th ending of the War of Devolution in 1668 Louis surrendered most of his conquests but retained the frontier towns of Lille, Douai and Charleroi. Following the treaty Louis and his chief minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert believed he had surrendered too much and began to plan a further war against the Dutch. But he needed allies.

Secret negotiations began between Charles and the French, and included his correspondence in cipher with his sister, Henriette (Madame), duchess of Orleans. Humiliated by her husband’s homosexuality, Henriette consoled herself by acting as unofficial envoy to her adored brother, and, playing on Louis’ fondness for her, became a very effective mediator. 

The French alliance had another powerful advocate in the crypto-Catholic duke of York. Arlington was also won over as was Lady Castlemaine, who had been a Catholic since 1663.

Henrietta, duchess of Orléans
attributed to Peter Lely
Public domain

On 16 May 1670, Henriette arrived in England, ostensibly just to visit her brother. On 22 May Arlington, Clifford and the French ambassador signed the secret Treaty of Dover (now in the Clifford Papers in the British Library). 

Both kings agreed that their joint resolution was ‘to humble the pride of the States General’;

(i) Louis was to pay Charles £225,000 p. a. during the ensuing war against the Dutch;
(ii) Following the war, parts of the Dutch Republic were to be ceded to England and France, while the remainder would become the hereditary principality of the Prince of Orange;
(iii) The penal laws against Catholic were to be suspended;
(iv) Charles declared that ‘being convinced of the truth of the Roman Catholic religion [he] is resolved to declare it and to reconcile himself with the Church of Rome as soon as his country’s affairs permit’;
(v) In order to cope with the expected opposition, Louis agreed to pay Charles £150,000 and to provide and pay 6,000 troops ‘for the execution of his design’. But the timing of the announcement of his conversion was left to Charles.

The other three members of the Cabal were ignorant of the treaty, and outside a very close circle, only the duke of York knew of its contents. With typical perfidy, Charles appointed Buckingham and Ashley to negotiate a second treaty, the traité simulé (eventually ratified in December) which did not contain religious clauses.

The very secrecy of the treaty has made it difficult for historians to assess Charles’s motives and intentions. The subsidies (which totalled £375,000) were certainly not sufficient to solve his financial problems. Probably two other factors were important: admiration for Louis; an intense dislike of the Dutch and a desire for revenge for the Medway disaster. Perhaps Charles should not be blamed for failing to foresee the threat posed by French hegemony. Cromwell had made the same mistake.

The real problem lies in the Catholic clause. What were Charles’s motives? There was also an ambiguity in the treaty - what was to come first - war or conversion? If Charles was a crypto-Catholic, how sincere was he?

A new mistress

 On 30 June, shortly after her return to France, Madame died of peritonitis. But she had left one of her ladies-in-waiting behind in England, the Breton Louise de Kéroualle (1649-1734). In July Barbara Villiers, now duchess of Cleveland, was more or less pensioned off - for years she and Charles had been tiring of each other, and she had taken up with John Churchill. 

Louise de Kéroualle
duchess of Portsmouth
Studio of Sir Peter Lely
Public domain

It seemed for a while as if her position would be usurped by Nell Gwynn (who first met the king in 1668), or by Mary Davis, who also became Charles's mistress, but both mistresses were soon to be eclipsed by Louise. 

Nell Gwynn
Sir Peter Lely
Public domain

Pressurised by Louis XIV she agreed to become Charles’s mistress, which she did at a houseparty at Arlington’s mansion at Euston, Suffolk in October 1671.  Exactly nine months later, she produced a son. In 1673 she was created duchess of Portsmouth.

A royal death

In the spring of 1671, before Louise had become Charles's mistress, Anne Hyde, duchess of York died, probably from breast cancer. On the morning of her death, she asked the duke to tell the Anglican bishops of her conversion to Catholicism. She died in agony without the rites of her new faith and was quickly buried. Neither Charles nor James attended the funeral. She left two surviving children, Mary aged nine and her sister Anne, aged six. As he was without a male heir, it was inevitable that the duke would marry again.

The 'Stop of the Exchequer'

In the traité simulé Charles and Arlington provisionally planned the war with the Netherlands for the spring of 1672. By the beginning of the year it was clear that royal finances were insufficient to wage a major war. On 20 January 1672, Charles proclaimed the ‘Stop of the Exchequer’ – a suspension of the repayment of all previous loans. In effect, the Crown declared itself bankrupt. In the long term this was to make financiers reluctant to lend money to the Crown, but in the short term it released about £1.2 million for the war.

The Declaration of Indulgence

All this took place against a background of increasing parliamentary concern over Charles’s religious policies. In March 1672 he issued his second Declaration of Indulgence which suspended all penal laws, allowed Roman Catholics to worship in their own homes, and offered licenses to Protestant dissenters to hold public worship. He invoked what he claimed to be his ‘supreme power in ecclesiastical matters'. Parliament disagreed. They believed that only 'the King in Parliament' had this power.

Charles was again gambling on a Catholic/dissenter alliance to free him from his dependence on Anglicanism. But this policy was never going to succeed, because the two groups remained deeply suspicious of each other, and the main result of the Declaration was to make Protestants close ranks. 

The Third Dutch War

Two days after the Declaration of Indulgence (17 March) Charles declared war on the Dutch. At the same time he gave new titles to Arlington (who became an earl) and Ashley (created Earl of Shaftesbury). But this war went badly for England. The main engagement was the indecisive battle off Southwold (Sole Bay) on 28 May 1672, where two English flagships were sunk and Pepys’s patron, the earl of Sandwich was drowned. ‘The two sides fought to a grudging standstill, their heroisms mutually acknowledged.’ The war was eventually ended by treaty in 1674, which simply confirmed the status quo. There were to be no more wars with the Dutch.

The French invasion of the Netherlands

On 30 May 120,000 French troops crossed the Rhine and soon occupied Utrecht. The Dutch responded by flooding their dykes but this strategy could only be temporary - the French could advance one they froze in the winter. The result of this massive crisis in the United Provinces (which the Dutch call the 'year of disaster') was the downfall (and murder) of the Pensionary, Johan de Witt, and his brother Cornelius and the appointment of the twenty-two-year-old William of Orange as Stadtholder. Louis XIV did not know it, but he was now confronted with his most implacable foe.

The Test Act

In February 1673 Parliament met for the first time since April 1671. They voted Charles money to continue the war and concentrated their fire on the Declaration of Indulgence. In the counties anti-Catholicism had reared its head and the debates of February and March were conducted in hysterical terms, the hysteria fanned by skilful Dutch propagandists, who were hinting at a sinister pro-French conspiracy at the highest levels - a rare example, perhaps, of a conspiracy theory being correct! 

It was now clear that many Anglicans were prepared to consider relief for Protestant Dissenters in an attempt to mount a common front against Catholicism. On 14 February the Commons voted 168/116 that ‘penal statutes in matters ecclesiastical cannot be suspended but by an act of Parliament’, and went on to claim that Charles was ‘very much misinformed’ to believe that he had the power to suspend statutes. All Charles's policy had achieved had been to unite Anglicans and Dissenters against what was perceived to be the common enemy.

On 8 March Charles announced the cancellation of the Declaration of Indulgence. A few days later he gave his assent to a Test Act, which excluded all non-Anglicans from public offices by forcing office-holders

1. to swear the Oaths of supremacy and allegiance
2. to take a declaration repudiating transubstantiation
3. to provide documentary proof that they had recently received communion according to the Church of England.

Charles’s right to appoint his own advisors had been dramatically curtailed.

The most dramatic effect of the Test Act was the resignation of the duke of York as Lord High Admiral in June. James had failed to take the Anglican sacrament at Easter - now his Catholicism was out in the open. Clifford also resigned his post as Lord Treasurer; he never recovered from this blow and died in October.

In September James married (by proxy) Princess Maria Beatrice Eleanora D’Este of Modena (Mary of Modena), the great-niece of Cardinal Mazarin, whose family were clients of Louis XIV. She had wished to be a nun but was overruled by Pope Clement X, who told her it was her religious duty to marry James. If they had a son he would displace James’s Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne, and open up the prospect of a Catholic dynasty. 

Mary of Modena
the new duchess of York,
By Simon Pietersz Verelst
Public domain

On 5 November all London flocked to a great pope-burning, with the additional attraction that an effigy of a Frenchman could be shot at by spectators.

The end of the Cabal

The resignation of Clifford marked the first stage in the disintegration of the Cabal. With the Dutch war going badly, Shaftesbury no longer supported the government. He was now convinced that Charles intended to promote Catholicism and he was determined to prevent a Catholic becoming monarch. On 9 November 1673 Charles dismissed Shaftesbury from his office of Lord Chancellor, and thus created his most formidable and implacable enemy.

Conclusion

1. The period saw a series of swings between Anglian 'Cavalier' policies and the king's leanings, sometimes secret, at other times open, to a 'Catholic' policy.
2. By the middle of the 1670s many were disturbed by what they saw as twin threats: the Catholicism of the heir to the throne and the expansionist policy of Louis XIV's France.