When change comes, fortune favours those who embrace it. So what if the Restoration made me rich? But that’s not why you’re asking, is it? You know what I did to get rich. You’re curious about why I did what I did.
Why does anyone get off their backside to do anything? To survive! Don’t you dare judge me until you’ve been in my shoes. I’d seen enough poverty and suffering in my life. I wasn’t going to inflict it on myself or my family for the sake of something as pointless as principle. It was a case of shaft or be shafted. It’s all very well for that impertinent scribbler Pepys to call me “a perfidious rogue”. He just sat on the sidelines chewing his quill.
I know the old Parliamentarians…muttering away in their prayer meetings…they call me the great Judas. The great one, indeed. But I only delivered three men to the new king. There were 59 signatures on his father’s death warrant. Why don’t you go digging for the others who gave up their friends to prove their loyalty to Charles Stuart, second of that name, the man they fought against at Worcester?
Did I wish it on those men, the ones you call my comrades – being half-strangled, disembowelled and then quartered? Of course not. But I think you’re being overly sentimental about comradeship. This was still the aftermath of a bloody Civil War. Horrible deaths were the normal penalty for mistakes on the field of battle – or off it. Plenty of folk switched coats depending on which way the tide was turning. Of course, men like Okey had a cause. They claimed that they were fighting for the rights of commoners and purity of religion. And then Cromwell became more of a dictator than the old Charles. But some didn’t see the irony. Power corrupts and whoever has got it – well you need to be in their good books.
You know, I didn’t question things when I was young. I was part of a community of Puritans and I knew nothing else. So I was for Parliament. It was kind of Okey to fund my studies at Harvard. But I had paid my dues to him. I could have stayed with my first job preaching in the Caribbean, but I sailed to cold, wet England and served in his regiment. I was a chaplain, but that didn’t spare me from musket fire and pike pushes, I assure you.
Then I had to struggle for my position in the Commonwealth. Even they mocked me as a colonial with an inferior education. I didn’t get an easy job, by any means. I got a poisoned chalice called Holland. The Dutch hated me, and I hated them, but with both republics run by merchants who wanted to squabble over trade routes and colonies, that was inevitable.
And after Cromwell died…well, I only wanted to keep my source of income. I might have been a bit pre-emptive, handing over my intelligence reports to Charles before his return. But the Commonwealth was collapsing and I had a duty to my country, not to any particular government. I was just being a good civil servant. The arrest of the regicides? Well, in the end I did have to give Charles what he really wanted. Revenge.
Look. I didn’t ask His Majesty to make me a Baronet and give me a lucrative plot of land by St James’ Park. He probably wished that he hadn’t when we had more trouble with the Dutch in the 1660s. But I did get New Amsterdam re-named New York – after his brother.
Really? You want to drag me back to John Barkstead, Miles Corbet, and my esteemed sponsor and commander – John Okey. Yes, I tricked the Dutch into letting me arrest them on Dutch soil and send them back to England. Yes, I tricked those men into thinking that Charles would spare them if they submitted to him. That was my job! “Diplomat” doesn’t mean being nice and talking a lot. It meant getting things done for your government in someone’s else’s jurisdiction.
What? Did it trouble my faith to trick them? Faith? Do you assume that everyone who put on black and called out to God in those days was a good Christian? There were hundreds of godly men springing up. I wasn’t the only opportunist! Anyway, I could find you a dozen quotes from the Bible that might justify my actions, just as you might find a dozen that would condemn them.
I was just like any other creature – driven to eat and find shelter so that I could live. And I succeeded. I had a natural death at a ripe old age and I was a very rich man. Whatever you think of me, Doctor nosy historical blogger, I did what I had to do, and, after all, I have left a huge symbolic legacy to my country. And that’s what really irks you, isn’t it?
Who remembers Okey? How many really know anything about Charles the Second, apart from his womanising? People all around the world know my name, because it’s on their screens every time there is political news from the United Kingdom. Knocking down Old Mother Hampden’s house and building that smart terrace that is still called Downing Street – that was my smartest move. It’s not the only street in England built by blood money, but it is the best.
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Photo of 10, Downing Street from Wikipedia.
