King Charles II Read Online Free PDF

legal-minded Hyde disapproved of his master’s delicate secret negotiations with his Irish supporters: he foresaw correctly the danger to the King’s reputation if they were uncovered. It was as much to take Hyde’s keen nose off the scent of this correspondence as to safeguard his son that the King despatched his wise counsellor to Bristol.
    Hyde therefore viewed himself as one deputed to supervise – and, where necessary, restrict – the young Prince of Wales. He was a man of extreme gravity of character even in his younger years, the sort of gravity which is quickly taken for pomposity by the young. Charles on the other hand was being encouraged to see himself as having a useful and expanding role to play. Hyde liked to guide by disapproval; Charles liked to learn by encouragement: it was never an ideal combination. From the first Hyde was not sufficiently tolerant, Charles not sufficiently appreciative. By April Charles was said by Hyde (in his later History ) to be encouraging disrespect towards his Council at Bridgwater. 3 But it was neither necessary nor politic to try and swaddle the Prince for ever.
    Some of Hyde’s disapproval was certainly incurred by another fairly natural piece of youthful folly. In Bridgwater Charles encountered once more his former nurse, Mrs Christabella Wyndham, wife of the governor of the town. On the Continent Queen Henrietta Maria dangled the hand of her eldest son in marriage as a bait to raise money, now that her jewels were in danger of running out. Louise Henrietta, eldest daughter of the Prince of Orange (Mary’s sister-in-law), was offered this fine prospect in return for Dutch money, but her father declined the honour. Earlier there had been plans to marry Charles to the wealthy Infanta Joanna of Portugal, or to the daughter of the Duc d’Orléans, the super-rich Anne-Marie Louise de Montpensier, known to history as La Grande Mademoiselle. But in the West Country Charles was showing more interest in sex than in marriage.
    To Mrs Wyndham, in Bridgwater, should probably be accorded the honour of having seduced her former nurseling,the Prince of Wales. By the sexual standards of the time, to play such a gracious role in the life of a young prince was more of a privilege than an offence, as Madame de Beauvais played it for Louis XIV . Charles was nearly fifteen. Certainly by the time of his arrival in Jersey a year later he was a fully fledged man in the physical sense, capable of a proper love affair. That was not particularly precocious. In an age when princes were frequently married off before they reached their teens, early sexual maturity was desirable rather than the reverse.
    In some ways Mrs Wyndham, ‘a celebrated beauty and an opulent heiress’, was a suitable choice. 4 Where Mrs Wyndham did overstep the mark, according to contemporary mores , was by showing gross familiarity to the Prince of Wales in public, including such spontaneous gestures as diving across a room and covering his face with kisses. In doing so, she greatly shocked and annoyed Hyde, who wrote about the whole episode quite lewdly in his History ; 5 the simple act of seduction accomplished in private, might, one feels, have been discreetly glossed over. Furthermore Mrs Wyndham, in Hyde’s view, distracted Charles from the conduct of his own business.
    Complaints concerning Charles and his work are to be reiterated down the decades and Hyde is very often to be the source of the complaint. In his view Charles had hitherto been ‘very little conversant with business, nor spent his time so well towards the improvement of his mind and understanding as might have been expected from his years and fortune’ – a somewhat sour comment in view of the wartime conditions in which the Prince had been raised. Yet Charles did apply himself, as even Hyde admitted, ‘with great ingenuity’ to the affairs of the Council. Now Mrs Wyndham, besides her public fondlings, was also guilty of playing on Charles’