There was no purge and many prizes, but the dizzy merriness of Charles’s court glossed over a precarious and darkling tension: this England was paranoic, fissiparous and vicious. Regicides were hanged and quartered; the great Oliver was exhumed, his head displayed.
Tall, swarthy, playful, insouciant and Italianate (via his Medici grandmother) in looks and temperament, Charles was a maestro of secret manoeuvrings, but no orator – ‘he speaks the worst ever I heard a man’, noted Pepys. ‘All I observed is the silliness of the king, playing with his dog or his codpiece.’ As flawed as he was debonair, Charles avoided decisions whenever possible – not always a bad habit in politics. ‘The king,’ wrote Pepys, ‘do mind nothing but pleasures and hates the very sight or thoughts of business.’ Charles made no apology. ‘Appetites are free,’ he said, ‘and Almighty God will never damn a man for allowing himself a little pleasure.’ In fact his appetites were far from free, and he still depended on Parliament for money.
An heir was essential: a Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza, brought the dowry of Bombay and Tangier, but she was unable to have children, awkward when her husband could not stop fathering them. His heir remained his brother, James, duke of York, which soon became a problem that encapsulated and exacerbated the English crisis.
The ‘Merrie brothers’ were very different: Charles, a wavering Protestant, was courageous but supple, subtle and patient; James, who converted to Catholicism in 1669, was darkly sturdy, brainlessly brave and obstinate. He shared the king’s sexual enthusiasm but not his taste: Charles laughed that James’s ‘ugly wenches’ were so plain they must be a penance ordered by his confessor.* While they were in exile, James had seduced Anne, daughter of his brother’s adviser, Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon and Lord Chancellor, promising her marriage if she succumbed. Honouring his word, he married her and, after six of their children had died, she gave birth to two daughters, Mary and Anne, both raised as Protestants, both future queens. James was lord high admiral and so worked closely with Pepys, who praised his modesty and industry, and observed how affectionate he was with his daughters – ‘like an ordinary private father’ – though he was also a lothario who ‘did eye my wife mightily’.
The brothers immediately unleashed England’s mercantile spirit to compete globally with the paramount trading power, de Witt’s Holland. Charles followed Oliver in passing Navigation Acts designed to promote trade in African slaves and Indian luxuries. Hearing about Gambia’s ‘mountain of gold’, Charles and James founded the Company of Royal Adventurers, rechartered as the Royal Africa Company (RAC) in 1672, which traded 16,000 Africans in seven years, founded forts along the coast and seized the Dutch slave castle Cape Coast, built by the Swedes. James was its governor, its shareholders ranging from Charles and Prince Rupert to the philosopher John Locke (whose ancestor John Lok had been a west African pioneer), Pepys and a merchant from Bristol named Edward Colston, later its deputy governor. In Africa, nine out of ten of its English representatives died of disease, and the RAC like other European slave traders were never powerful enough to defeat the African leaders who often challenged them. Nonetheless, the British share in the trade rose in the first ten years from 33 per cent to 74. Between 1662 and 1731, the Company transported approximately 212,000 slaves, of whom 44,000 died en route during over 500 voyages. Most were sold to the Caribbean.
Clashes with the Dutch outraged the ‘mad for war’ public. ‘All the world rides us,’ said James to Pepys, ‘and I think we shall never ride anybody.’ Actually England’s time was coming. In 1665, the two Protestant powers went to war with James commanding the fleet, fitted out by Pepys. Off Lowestoft, James defeated the Dutch, though he was spattered with brains when the head of a nearby officer was pulped; and the English took Trinidad and New Amsterdam, which Charles renamed New York, completing the contiguous coastline of English colonies from New England to another newly created estate, the Carolinas, named after Charles himself.*
