A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game Read Online Free PDF Page B

grants to the navy, the Commons voted yet another £1,800,000. But then fiery arguments followed as to how this should be raised, delaying other parliamentary business by about three weeks. The Privy Council and their pet MPs argued not for a tax on land but a general excise duty. This in turn was fiercely resisted as a universal tax that ruined trade, the dread Dame Excise,
    A thousand Hands she has and thousand Eyes
    Breaks into Shops and into Cellars pryes. 1
    Critics thought it would breed a swarm of officials and that it was merely an excuse for a standing army, needed to enforce it. In the end, it was decided, reluctantly, that some of the money would be found from an assessment on property, some from a tax on legal documents, and the rest from a new variation on the poll tax.
     
    In the autumn of 1666, after the Fire, Buckingham returned to court. At the start of the war the duke had been incensed when he was denied command of a flagship and refused a place on the Naval Council. He had turned, instead, to industry, building a huge, innovatory glassworks at Lambeth, until Charles sent him north to arrange coastal defences against the Dutch; he and his deputy lieutenant George Savile were both given commissions to raise a troop of horse in Yorkshire. But this summer he had also begun a fatal, obsessive affair with Anna Maria Brudenell, Countess of Shrewsbury, a fiery beauty already famed for her lovers. He filled his commonplace book with broodings on love, fate and women – ‘Their power is so absolute, that I think the Devil’s promise was made good to women, when he said, You shall be like gods’ – and returned to London fired up, eager to plunge back into court intrigue. 2

    Anna Maria Brudenell, Countess of Shrewsbury
    Buckingham was now nearly forty. His face was puffier and more jowly, his elegant figure lost, but his wit was as keen as ever and his desire for revenge strong. In early October he took his seat in the Lords, attended all the debates and won seats on the key committees. From the start he set out to forge a link between groups in the House of Lords and others in the Commons, and to lead the growing opposition, particularly the criticism of the government’s handling of the war. He seduced all critics, thought Clarendon, and astonished those who knew him by his application in gathering these allies.
     
    The Duke of Buckingham took more pains than was agreeable to his constitution to get an interest in all such persons, invited them to his table, pretended to have a great esteem of their parts, asked counsel of them, lamented the king’s neglecting his business, and committing it to other people who were not fit for it; and thus reported all the license and debauchery of the court in the most lively colours, being himself a frequent eye and earwitness of it. 3
     
    ‘It cannot be imagined’, continued the appalled Clarendon, considering the loose life Buckingham led, how powerful his influence was, and how many in both houses of parliament ‘would follow his advice and concur in what he proposed’.
    Buckingham’s adherents were a motley crowd, ranging from presbyterians keen for toleration to royalists unhappy with the Restoration settlement and the ways of the court. As well as the angry royalist Sir Richard Temple and the playwright Robert Howard, they included the eloquent speakers John Vaughan and Sir Thomas Littleton, and two young men, Edward Seymour and Thomas Osborne. Both these men were destined for power, Seymour as Speaker of the House, and Osborne as Earl of Danby, one of Charles’s most powerful ministers. In the Lords, Buckingham had the support of Ashley. He managed to unite his followers by focusing their complaints on the suspicion that the crown was moving more towards French-style absolutism, and encouraged them to damn the heavy taxation, hint at corruption among officials, and attack the squandering of resources that denied honest seamen their pay.
    Behind all this,