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The Whig Prince: Prince Rupert and the Court vs. Country Factions During the Reign of Charles II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Leslie Chree O'Malley
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Extract

Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the origins of political parties in England during the reign of King Charles II. Yet the fact that a prominent courtier and member of the king's own family, Prince Rupert, was also a leader of the opposition or “country” party has frequently been overlooked by historians. J. R. Jones, for example, in The First Whigs, fails to mention the prince, and even Rupert's biographer, Eliot Warburton, has dismissed the last decade in his subject's life by saying that, after 1673, the ailing prince was too ill to play a role in English government.

But Prince Rupert was, in fact, very active politically in the two decades following the Restoration. He sat in the House of Lords as duke of Cumberland and served on parliamentary committees. He had a seat on the Privy Council and was a member of all four of its standing committees. Rupert was often selected to serve the crown: as special emissary to his friend, Emperor Leopold I, in 1661 with the task of preventing an Anglo-imperial rupture over the marriage of King Charles to a Portuguese princess; as England's representative in negotiations with Denmark in 1669 and Brandenburg in 1670; as joint admiral of the fleet during the second Anglo-Dutch War, and de facto commander of the fleet during the third conflict with the United Provinces. Although the prince became openly critical of the royal government as early as 1667 and, by 1673, had allied with Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury, to form an opposition group, the future country or Whig party, he also retained many ties with the court.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , Winter 1976 , pp. 333 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1976

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References

1 Part of the reason for this omission is that the usual sources for England's history during this period, the Calendar of State Papers Domestic, as well as the British Museum's list of councillors for the reconstructed Privy Council of April. 1679. fail to mention Rupert's political activities. In addition, there was the prince's caution in avoiding involvement in any action which might be considered treason. He was, after all, a German, born in Bohemia, and, like his cousin Charles II, Rupert did not wish to resume the wanderings which had occupied the first forty years of his life. For these reasons, it is necessary to work from other sources to reconstruct Rupert's political role: the diplomatic reports of foreign representatives at the London court (Colbert de Croissy, Ruvigny, Nauvitz, Waldstein) now in the Public Record Office and the Viennese archives; Rupert's letters to his sister Sophie now in the Hanoverian state archives; contemporary letters and diaries (for example, Burnet, Essex, Pepys, Halifax); and the records of the Privy Council Committee for Intelligence and the Journals of the House Lords.

2 All dates are old style except where otherwise noted. The year, however, has been adjusted to begin on January 1 rather than March 25.

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58 Ibid.

59 Lockyer, p. 348.

60 Report of Nauvitz, November 10, December 25, 1679, January 19, 1680 (n.s.), Klopp, II:228.

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