Charles II: The Last Rally

by Hilaire Belloc, Dr. John McCarthy (Preface by)

Overview

In The Last Rally, Belloc narrates with clarity and vigor a central episode in the decline of the English Monarchy. Restored to the throne following the interlude of Cromwell's "Commonwealth," Charles II devoted his life as King of England to maintaining the integrity of the throne against all the forces arrayed against it: the power of the great landowners who worked through the Parliament; the influence of the Lawyers' Guild; and the irresistible mercantile and financial strength of the city of London. The story that Belloc brings to life is thus one of survival: the story of a ship of state brought "through peril and storm under a great captain." It is also the story of manhood and determination in the face of overwhelming odds; as such it is a story that Hilaire Belloc was eminently qualified to write.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605700007
Publisher:	IHS Press
Publication date:	06/01/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Hilaire Belloc began his academic career with a lecture tour of the United States in 1892. He became a member of the Fabian Society in the early 1900s and met George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, who helped him obtain work with newspapers such as the Daily News and The Speaker. Eventually he became literary editor of the Morning Post. He was elected to the House of Commons in 1906. He also wrote several novels, such as Mr. Clutterbuck's Election and A Change in the Cabinet, along with historical works such as The French Revolution and History of England. Belloc also published a series of historical biographies: Oliver Cromwell, James II, Richelieu, Wolsey, Napoleon, and Charles I.

Read an Excerpt

Charles II: The Last Rally

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By Hilaire Belloc

IHS Press

Copyright © 2003 IHS Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-932528-34-3

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CHAPTER 1

THE LAST RALLY

THIS BOOK IS A SEQUEL AND COMPANION TO MY BOOK UPON Louis XIV. To that book I gave the title "Monarchy," as my theme was the eternal conflict between One Man Government and the Rich.

Napoleon said it: "The only institution ever devised by men for mastering the Money-power in the State, is Monarchy." It is obviously true and is the most practically important of all political truths. The Government of the United States, with its large development of presidential powers in modern times and the present struggle between those powers and plutocracy, is a very good example in point. A still more forcible example is to be seen actively at work before our eyes: the new governments calling themselves "Totalitarian" are essentially extreme monarchies at issue with the plutocratic rule in the older world around them: to a large extent in France and obviously in Great Britain.

As I dealt in my former book with the leading case of Louis XIV of France as a monarch standing up to the Money-power (and, upon the whole successfully), so in this book I deal with the parallel and complementary case of his contemporary and first cousin, Charles II, Stuart King of England.

He also found himself faced by that inescapable conflict between the Money-power and Monarchy; but, unlike his cousin Louis, Charles failed. The Money-power was too much for him. So long as he lived he managed to fend it off though not to tame it; but immediately after his death, in the less competent hands of his brother James (the last real and active King of England, as also the last by hereditary right) Monarchy went down. The Monarch was driven out and the powers of Government in England were taken over by a Governing Class of wealthy men which class has remained in the saddle ever since. For England in this our day is the one great example of aristocratic government in the Old World.

It is essential to affirm here, at the outset, that the conflict between Monarchy and Money-power is not a conflict between good and evil. One may legitimately prefer government by the wealthy to government by one man, which is the opposite of, and the corrective to, government by the wealthy. In the particular case of the English monarchy its breakdown after Charles II had struggled so manfully to maintain it did not involve the ruin of England: quite the contrary. The aristocratic government which then succeeded to monarchy proceeded from one triumph to another. It expanded the English Dominions beyond the seas. It laid the foundations of a vastly enhanced position by the acquisition of India in the face of French rivalry; it triumphantly maintained the power of England against European rivals. It produced an unrivalled fleet which at last, after a century of aristocratic government, obtained (in 1794) complete mastery of the seas and was largely instrumental in defeating the French Revolution and Napoleon the heir thereof.

Meanwhile during those two and a half centuries of aristocratic government the commerce and wealth of England perpetually increased, and increased enormously. So did the population after Charles II's time. Even at the end of the reign, in 1684, England had not much more than six million inhabitants; at the end of the next century (1800) England had twelve million inhabitants. Today Great Britain, as a whole, has nearer four times as many inhabitants as it had then.

Further, under class government and the direction of the wealthy, England began and developed the "Industrial Revolution": modern machinery, especially modern transport, to a large extent modern armament, and all the rest of it. Those therefore who prefer aristocracy or class government to monarchy, those who would rather have a state controlled and directed by the rich than directed by the will of one man, have a great deal to say for themselves on the material side.

They have also a great deal to say for themselves on the moral side. For though aristocratic government degrades a people by neglecting human equality and human dignity, yet it does foster individual liberty. All aristocratic or plutocratic protests against monarchy have used this argument and have been at least half sincere in using it. On the other hand, government by the rich in England destroyed the independent farmers of which the English State had formerly consisted. Whether we call them peasants (the Continental name) or yeomanry (the specifically English name), such a body of free men was at the basis of all English society until the rich destroyed the English Monarchy after the last effort of Charles II to maintain it.

The English after 1600 were generally transformed from a comparatively small nation of independent agricultural men, shopkeepers, individual traders and sea captains owning or part-owning their ships, into a vast mass of proletarian men existing upon a wage, their livelihood more and more dependent upon a few masters who controlled all the activities of the State. Today the life of England has fallen almost wholly into the hands of monopolists, especially the monopolists of credit under the banking system.

This new book of mine, "The Last Rally," being the episode of Charles II and his reign, deals mainly with the development of a struggle between Monarchy and Money-power; but it has to speak of other things, some almost equally important.

First among those is the personal figure and story of the man who took up the challenge and attempted to make monarchy supreme over the great merchants and financiers of the City of London and the great landowners: Charles II himself.

The character and adventures of this king are of a dramatic interest beyond the ordinary. His boyhood began in the splendour of a Court wherein he was unquestioned heir to authority and glory for the future. Suddenly, abruptly, all was changed. The Royal boy, ten years old in 1640, becomes the lad who, in his teens, shares in the defeat and shame of his house. At twelve he is under the shadow of Civil War, at sixteen he is a fugitive and at nineteen he shudders, in exile, to hear of his father's murder.

All the formative years of his life, from puberty to his thirtieth year, were passed either in the atmosphere of the Great Rebellion or in wandering misery. First when his father Charles I was desperately trying to save the throne; next, after his father's execution in 1649, Charles is a hunted man in recurrent poverty and distress – often extreme destitution.

From the end of his teens until his full and mature manhood in his thirtieth year Charles Stuart knew no repose, little luxury and even less security. His contemporaries all believed that the English Monarchy had come to an end for ever and that the House of Stuart had fallen to be replaced by a sort of military republic, the symbolic head of which was Oliver Cromwell.

Mazarin, the great statesman who was ruling in France in those early years of the young King's tragedy, took it for granted that he must ally himself with Cromwell, and turned the impoverished and ruined Prince of England out of France.

Charles Stuart is driven from pillar to post, now in Holland, now trying to retrieve his fortunes again in France, now in Germany; hoping for succour from here, from there, and never receiving it.

His mother, the aunt of the young French King, does her best to maintain him but can hardly do so. Up to the very end of his ordeal he himself could hardly believe that he would be restored to the throne. Contemporary Europe did not believe it for one moment.

Yet restored he was by a singular and most arresting chain of circumstance, chief of which was the presence in the English republican army (inherited from Cromwell) of a determined, ambitious, secretive, thoroughly disreputable man, the once Royalist, later republican, soldier Monck, who again betrayed his side. It was through General Monck's abandoning the English republican cause and suddenly rallying to that of the young King that Charles was able to return to England.

Then followed that illusion of a shining recovery which "Restoration" provoked. The English were delirious with joy at the return of their national monarchy and of their legitimate royal line. The hatred men had felt for the oppressive years of the Commonwealth, with their intolerable taxation and their even more intolerable series of confiscations and robberies, had grown explosive under the last restrictions before the whole top-heavy tyranny broke down; and immediately on the King's return in 1660 men imagined that the old state of affairs before the Civil Wars would come back again and that a young, powerful King, restored to his righteous authority, would lead England into some happy and glorious future, immediately to hand.

As I have said, all that was an illusion, and here again appears one of the most dramatic contrasts in European history: the contrast between the imagined Restoration of royal power founded on popular loyalty, and its real supplanting by a new government of mere wealth. The great landowners who formed the two Houses of Parliament (the House of Commons and the House of Lords) proceeded not only to enrich themselves at the expense of the people of England but to fight the Monarchy: sometimes with conscious intent, sometimes instinctively, but throughout all the years of the reign increasingly.

With them also there worked the powerful and rich guild of lawyers who were by this time inextricably mixed up with the landed families. Many of the wealthier fathers had put their sons into the law, and the new Governing Class had allied itself and was soon identified with the lawyers, who more and more enjoyed large public salaries and great offices as well as the high revenues of their trade in advocacy.

A further element, which became at last the most important matter of all in this struggle, was the City of London; that is, the mercantile and financial centre of the country.

The rise of London at this moment from no more than a large town to a great capital of world-wide importance, is another of the major marks of Charles's reign. The very stones of London – or rather, its brick and wooden and plaster houses – suffer or enjoy a material Revolution at the same time. It is the period of the Great Plague (fifth year after the Restoration), of the Great Fire (sixth year) and of the complete reconstruction of the town and of the port. London came before Charles died to deal with three-quarters of sea-borne commerce, and that commerce was expanding out of all knowledge.

Meanwhile the banking interest of London was growing rapidly and was beginning to rival that of Amsterdam. It got the King thoroughly in its grasp. Charles was constantly and hopelessly in debt to the financial interests, which grudgingly advanced him for purposes of the national government credits on which he had sometimes to pay as much as ten per cent., and nearly always at least eight per cent., while arrears would often run on at compound interest. Against such crushing burdens it was impossible that the monarchy should, in the long run, win.

But Charles II put up not only a very gallant fight but a subtle and pertinacious one. He was the next best diplomat and politician of his day, only second to his own cousin the King of France who excelled in all forms of negotiation. Charles was able to play off the rich men of the House of Commons and the House of Lords against the threat from the military strength of France and the commercial and financial rivalry of Holland. Whenever the power of Parliament had almost swamped him he obtained secret advances of money from the King of France. When the King of France would next have used this power to make English policy subservient to himself Charles deftly swung over and left his new ally in the lurch; and all the while Charles continuously supported and expanded, relied upon and increased, the naval power of England.

The splendid fleet, which began under his father Charles I (built out of revenue provided by the wise, direct, tax of Ship Money), had been trained under the Commonwealth through the accident of long service, not designed but imposed by the necessities of war. A body of professional sailors thus arose. Charles and his brother James, who ruled over the Admiralty, started a permanent corps of officers out of which a regular naval service could and did develop. The same diplomatic talent by which this King played off the French against the Dutch and both of them against the encroachments of the English wealthier classes in Parliament upon the English Crown, was used to counterbalance Dutch naval power with the new English naval power.

Charles is himself, of course, the central figure in all this. His very tall, dark figure, his easy, courteous manner, his concealed tenacious energy, the personal devotion which he inspired, his successful struggle against the depression which early misfortune might have bred in him, his firm hold upon what was left of his rights and upon anything that could benefit the future of the Crown – all these are like the grasping of a helm, and that passion for the sea, that possession of his soul by the sea which came to him in early youth, provides a metaphor for all his course. The reign of Charles II is a passage through peril and storm under a great captain, a great sailor, and his story is the story of the Fleet, side by side with which go two matters later of paramount importance – the new English Colonies in America and the vast growth of trade and of the Port of London.

It was a period during which the future of English Religion lay in doubt. The country was predominantly anti-Catholic and the newly established church (hardly a hundred years old) would now certainly remain of a Protestant complexion; but there survived a large Catholic minority – very much larger than our official textbooks would give us to understand.

Those who were in varying degree sympathetic with the old national religion were still, until the end of the reign, something like a quarter of the population. That point must be insisted upon as clearly as possible, for it is at once ill recognised and of determining importance.

It was part of the political skill of Charles II that in spite of his own conviction of Catholic truth he never joined himself with thelarge Catholic-minded minority of the English people as they then were. He would not be formally received into the Catholic Church himself until the very article of Death. During all his reign he attempted to hide his sympathies. He sacrificed the Irish people and the lives of his own innocent fellow countrymen to his one fixed object of restoring the Throne.

Not so his brother and heir, James. This brother and heir was converted to the old religion by the influence of that remarkable woman his wife, Anne Hyde. She thought and reasoned herself into the Church, and after her death James could hesitate no more. His open profession of Catholicism, the knowledge that Charles was in secret sympathy with him were, between them, the reason that the English monarchy fell; for not only had most of England by this time lost its old Catholic tone but a very large minority – and that by far the most powerful part of the nation – the richest, the best organised and most tenacious – had become vigorously anti-Catholic, whether from inherited vested interests in Church lands, or from new religious family traditions recently acquired; or (still more) from a novel mystic passion for the Nation itself which had long become the lasting object of general worship in men's hearts: and such it still remains. "Patriotism is the Religion of the English." France close at hand, the head of the Catholic culture, highly centralised, far more numerous and with a much larger revenue, was an ever-present contrast and incentive to eager resistance against all Catholic forces within the State. This very difficult interplay of religious sentiment during the reign must be made clear, because legend and myth upon it have warped all our historical teaching.

This double conversion, public and private, is the capital event of 1660–1685 for it decided the future of England.

But the colonial story is also of great moment. It was the Stuarts who made the colonial empire of England; the North Atlantic seaboard of America they gradually reduced to one complete English-speaking whole. It was Charles II who negotiated for and conquered the exception, which had cut the English-speaking colonial shore in two – the Dutch settlement at the mouth of the Hudson. New Amsterdam became New York, taking its name from the Duke of York. That also determined the future not only of England but of the New World.

With this colonial expansion of England under Charles goes the long struggle for religious toleration among the various Protestant sects; an idea always associated with the Stuart name, ultimately failing upon the English side of the ocean though later more rapidly established on the American. It achieved the moral unity of England: necessarily at the expense of English Catholicism which was virtually wiped out in the next century.

The end of the reign rises, as befits any dramatic episode, to a climax of interest.

The King appeared before he died to have won his battle. He had got the people mainly in support of him against the pretensions of the rich to supplement the Throne. He was free of the big landowners, bankers and merchants of the two Houses of Parliament. He governed single-handed. The revenue of the Crown and the wealth of the people were rapidly increasing.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Charles II: The Last Rally by Hilaire Belloc. Copyright © 2003 IHS Press. Excerpted by permission of IHS Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

INTRODUCTION by Dr. John P. McCarthy,
Charles II: The Last Rally,
THE LAST RALLY,
THE TASK,
THE FORMATION,
THE ANNEALING,
FIRST GRASP OF THE HELM,
THE FAIR RUN,
THE FLEET AND EMPIRE,
THE SUNKEN REEF,
THE TRIANGLE,
GATHERING STORM,
WHIGGERY,
THE WOMEN,
FULL GALE: THE POPISH PLOT.,
HURRICANE AND HARBOUR,
DROP ANCHOR,