Sir Walter, weighted as he was, as writers of his time were, by
the heavy-artillery ideas of diction, reproduce, in _Peveril_ or
_Woodstock_, this light super-civilized fashion of speech, supple
and stinging as a whip? And no writer of fiction since, has quite
captured it, except Mr. Marriott Watson. You remember that episode
in _Galloping Dick_? Exquisite! Charles the Second's talk is
altogether the most admirable thing about him: though courtly, it
had none of the circumlocutions of courtliness; it was exclusive and
pertinent. "All this," as Walton sweetly says of Donne, "with a most
particular grace, and an inexpressible addition of comeliness." The
King's only long story, which for years he was always ready to tell
from the beginning, "ever embellished," says mischievous Buckingham,
"with some new circumstance," and which was wont to gather a knot
of listeners old and new, was the story of his adventures after
the battle of Worcester, in 1650. No heartier romance exists of
pluck and patience, save the later record, so like it, of Prince
Charlie's hardships, and his heroism under them; and its author's
attachment to his only novel is simply a connoisseurship, a piece of
esoteric appreciation: he took and gave delight with such thrilling
biographical details as might have come from the mouth of Odysseus
himself. His short sayings are all sterling, and his nicknames stuck
like burs. Mr. Henry Bennet, afterwards Earl of Arlington, the grave
and too inductive gentleman who so moved the mirth of Miss Frances
Stuart, was "Whereas" to his royal master; the yacht named after the
stout Duchess of Portsmouth, the yacht to whose great sheets the
King and the Duke of York sprang "like common seamen," in a terrible
storm once, off the Kentish coast, was known far and wide as "The
Fubbs." Another joke about "Hans in Keldar," patronizing the ice-fair
on the Thames, and inscribing his name there among the visitors, one
need not recall too circumstantially. The Queen Dowager, Henrietta
Maria, was always "Mam," to her perfectly respectful and solicitous
eldest son; in an alliteration like an early English poet's, he
congratulated his sister on her recovery from a grave illness,
"between Mam's Masses, and M. de Mayerne's pills." His little
portraitures of people, his given reason for a human like or dislike,
his insight into character, and his gently sarcastic turn of phrase
in expressing it,--are they not all superior things of their kind?
He felt it impossible to marry a princess out of Germany: she would
be "so dull and foggy." Of Isaac Vossius, the imperfect sceptic,
Charles said: "Voss refuses to believe nothing, save the Bible." A
celebrated man of affairs, then a deft page at court, won this neat
encomium: "Sidney Godolphin is never in the way, and never out of the
way." Sedley, shining Sedley, whom Charles greatly liked, he dubbed
"Apollo's viceroy." His "Save the Earl of Burford!" when riding under
the window whence Mistress Eleanor Gwynne ironically offered to throw
her small son, since she had no name to call him by, is like the
very finest _coup de théâtre_, and too like him not to be true. This
climate he rated as the best climate, "because it gives the greatest
number of out-of-door days." Not so thought Charles of Orleans,
long before him, arraigning English weather from the standpoint
of its unwilling guest, as at all times "prejudicial to the human
frame." And every one knows the inimitable apology of Charles to his
watchers, for "being so unconscionably long a-dying."
Unlike most wits, he preferred dialogue to monologue. His gravity
and authority were so fixed, his merriment so obviously local and
temporal, that repartee was part of his game; he winced at nothing,
and often accepted, with excellent grace, sharper thrusts than his
own. It is sometimes repeated that he was angered by Rochester's
incomparable epigram, pinned to his chamber door:
"Here lies our sovereign lord the King,
Whose word no man relies on;
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one."
But we have on record his amusing and sufficient footnote, that
his sayings were his own, and his doings were his ministers'.
(This answer, by the way, must have been made to fit the occasion,
and the gay exigency of it, for he was exceedingly jealous of
his unused prerogative. "I assure you," he writes to one of his
family, about 1668, "that my lord of Buckingham does not govern
affairs here." And Clarendon attests later, that "he abhorred to be
thought to be governed by any single person.") At Whitehall, as the
gentlemen-in-waiting laid the plates before the King, they bent a
knee. "You see how they serve me," Charles said pleasantly to his
guest, the Chevalier de Grammont. "I thank your Majesty for the
explanation," that accomplished wag replied, "for I thought they
were begging your Majesty's pardon for so bad a dinner." No reply at
all, were it but pungent, offended him. "Shaftesbury, Shaftesbury,
I do believe thou art the wickedest fellow in my dominions!" "Of a
subject, Sire, mayhap I am." "Killigrew, whither goest thou, booted
and spurred?" "To Hell, to fetch up Oliver to look after the welfare
of the English." As a monitor, this same lewd, lying, scribbling,
kindly, music-loving Killigrew was almost as successful with Charles
as was Nell Gwynne. For sharp sensible comment went home to him; he
saw a point none the less because it told against him. "Such ability
and understanding has Charles Stuart," growled the man who was called
his jester, "that I do long to see him employed as King of England."
Libels and satires had small sting for him. Mistress Holford, a young
lady of the court, seated in her own apartment, warbles _Old Rowley_,
the ballad of close but inelegant libel, at the top of her silvery
voice. A rap comes at the outer door, from one strolling by. "Who's
there?" she asks, with unconcern. "Old Rowley himself, Madam!" in the
"plump bass" of Carolus Secundus. Nothing much more diverting ever
happened to him than the inverted salute of a worthy citizen, who
once ran along in the street, beside his coach, with a half-formed
fervent "God bless your Majesty!" upon his lips: the spaniel pup on
his Majesty's knee, suddenly reaching out, gave the man a nip, and
caused the ready benison to blurt forth incontinently as "God bl--amn
your dogs!" The well-worn tradition of Master Busby of Westminster
School reversing conditions with the King, is characteristic on both
sides: Charles all humor and toleration, the little man stiffened
with conscious reputation, to be upheld at all costs, and heroically
wearing his cap before the face of visiting royalty, "lest the boys
should think there lived a greater than myself." And was it not a
prettier pass yet, between the monarch and his impregnable Quaker who
wanted a charter? Penn came to his first audience with his hat, on
the principle of unconvention and equality, firmly fixed upon his
brows. Presently the King, having moved apart from the attendants,
in his gleaming dress, slowly and ceremoniously bared his head.
Penn interrupted his own plea. "Friend Charles, why hast taken off
thy hat?" "Because it has so long been the custom here," said the
other, with that peculiar lenient smile of his, "for but one person
to remain covered at a time." (It strikes one that a little of this
humor would have saved his father from much woe on a not dissimilar
occasion in the Commons; and, indeed, throughout.) Equally charming
was his behavior, on being laid hold of, by the hiccoughing Lord
Mayor,--Vyner, wasn't that his name?--who insisted that he should
come back and "finish t'other bottle." Charles, instead of glowering,
hummed a line of an old song, a synopsis of the difficult situation
to the company, which none other but he could have given with any
grace:
"The man that is Drunke is as good as a King!"
and sat again. He never became, as his tutor, the loyal Duke of
Newcastle, feared, "seared with majestie."
The Lord's Anointed liked to forego his authority, and come as a mere
spectator into a session of Parliament. "'Tis as good as a play,"
the provoking creature said. He would get down from his throne in
the Lords, to stand with folded arms by the hearth, drawing a group
around him, and breaking up the order and impressiveness of the
place. Those really interested in statecraft, whose fond incubations
he so overturned, must have found him an _enfant terrible_ to an
incorrigible degree. A memorandum-book, to be seen in one of the
cases at the Bodleian, lies open at a bit of scribbled correspondence
between himself and his Chancellor, passed from one to the other in
the middle of debate. The King's share is as wayward and roguish as
Sterne could have made it.
--"I would willingly make a visite to my sister at tunbridge, for a
night or two at farthest. When do you thinke I can best spare that
time?"
--"I know no reason why you may not, for such a tyme (two nights) go
the next weeke about Wednsday or Thursday, and return tyme enough
for the adiournement, which you ought to do the weeke following. I
suppose you will goe with a light Trayne."
--"I intend to take nothing but my night-bag."
--"God, you will not go without forty or fifty horses?"
--"I counte that part of my night-bag."
The young fugitive at Boscobel, a more willing Alfred, insisted on
preparing supper, and produced "Scots collops," with Colonel Careless
for under-cook. His minute solicitude for others, at this time and
after, in the stress of his own troubles, left indelible impress
on many hearts. He was at his bravest on the open road, and in the
secret manor and the oak tree: the odd situations became him as if
he were King of the Romany. For ceremony and trammels of all kinds
he had a thorough disrelish, and passed his time but resignedly
amid "the pomp of music and a host of bowing heads." Cosmo III.,
Grand Duke of Tuscany, relates, in his book of travels, that at a
state banquet at Whitehall, the host privily requested that his
chair be removed and changed, because it was conspicuously the
most comfortable in the room. Could informality farther go? But
Charles maintained his gay grace and easy simplicity deliberately,
and in conjunction with decisive dignity. With mere standoffishness
he had nothing to do. Sir Walter Besant tells us in his _London_:
"The palace was accessible to all; the guard stood at the gate,
but everybody was admitted, as to a town; the King moved freely
about the courts, in the mall, in the parks, sometimes unattended.
The people drove their packhorses or their waggons up and down the
road, and hardly noticed the swarthy-faced man who stood under the
shade of a tree, watching the players along the mall. This easy and
fearless familiarity vanished with the Stuarts." Whosoever wished
it, might see his sovereign dance the brantle, perhaps with the
young delicate-footed Italian Duchess, his brother's wife; or hear
him tell over the "grouse-in-the-gunroom" stories of his Scotch
captivity. Here at home he went his way, with a nod, a smile, and
a word for all: "a far more successful kingcraft," says Macaulay,
"than any his father or grandfather had practised." In the beginning,
Charles had a beggarly income, and whimsically complained of it.
"What troubles me most, is to see so many of you come to me to
Whitehall, and to think that you must go somewhere else to seek your
dinner!" He was hostile only to "fuss and feathers," the dry husk
of social laws. He had his father's instinct for what was beautiful
and imposing. At his coronation, he revived for the last time, and
with its most august splendors, the ancient custom of procession
from the Tower to the Abbey: a personal revelation, moreover, of
that generous kindness towards the common people, which made them
adore him. He also endeavored, though in vain, to re-establish the
masque, the most charming form of court entertainment, intertwined
with all manner of old fragrant poetic associations. At his coming,
he found the Maypoles down, the shows over, races, dances, and
merry-hearted sports cut short; the theatres were dismantled, and
the sole appreciation that actors got, or hoped for, was at the
whipping-post. His first thought was for the London parks and
drives; his second, for the London stage. The way was soon cleared
for those dramas which managers must now handle, as Thoreau handled a
certain newspaper, "with cuffs turned up"; but these, despite their
build and basis, have never been surpassed for wit, vitality, and
mastery of incident. The plays seen by our friends Mr. and Mrs. Pepys
from the middle gallery, were nearly all equipped at the expense
of the King and gentry, and were brought out with nice details of
costly scenery and costuming. Charles, Queen Catherine, and the Duke
of York even gave their coronation suits to the actors. When Nokes
played Sir Arthur Addle, in 1670, before the beautiful Duchess of
Orleans, young Monmouth, beautiful as she, loosened the jewelled
sword and belt which he wore, and enthusiastically clasped them upon
the comedian, proud of both to his dying day. Charles originated the
plot of Crowne's sprightly production, _Sir Courtly Nice_ (the King
died the night of its final rehearsal), and also that of Dryden's
_Secret Love_: he was very vain of the latter when it was nobly
cast, in 1666, and always delighted to have it called his play.
He was responsible, in the same degree, for _Oronokoo_: for it was
he who first discerned, in the affecting tale of the West Indian
insurrection of slaves, led by an enslaved prince, choice material
for a tragedy.
He was no reader, no student, in the usual sense: he read folk, and
not folios. Newcastle had written him, then the child Prince of
Wales: "Whensoever you are too studious, your contemplation will
spoil your government; for you cannot be a good contemplative man,
and a good commonwealth's man. Therefore take heed of too much
book." Never was tutor eventually better obeyed. Charles was a
shrewd observer; he could sift ambassadors, ministers, and "persons
of quality," as ably as Elizabeth herself; and remain, the while,
impervious as rock. His early education was neglected: he was forced
too soon into active life. Fortunately, he had the æsthetic bent of
his race: thought and travel taught this Oxonian, by easy processes,
all he knew. He became a good mathematician, and a good draughtsman;
he was something of an expert in anatomy; he perfectly understood
the sciences of fortification and shipping. He once invited his
beloved Prince Rupert to race "the two sloopes builte at Woolidge,
which have my invention in them." (It is to be hoped the landsman
Rupert of the Rhine did not command his crew, as Monk did, to wheel
to the left!) Charles was as thorough a sailor as his brother, and
would have made as fair a record on deck, had his lines been cast
there. Aboard "The Surprise" Tattersal averred that he directed the
course better than himself. It was this King who gave the charter
to the Royal Society, and founded the Observatory at Greenwich, as
well as the Mathematical School at Christ Hospital. Nor were these
things done perfunctorily, but from close personal interest. Charles
could gossip in several languages. His taste for chemistry was almost
as marked as his cousin Rupert's; and in the month he died, he was
running a process for fixing mercury. Cowley, before that period, had
lapsed into a pretty conceit about his liege lord in the laboratory.
"Where, dreaming chemics, are your pain and cost?
How is your toil, how is your labor lost!
Our Charles, blest alchemist, (tho' strange,
Believe it, future times!) did change
The Iron Age of old
Into this Age of Gold."
Dr. Burney remarks, and almost with justice, that the King seems
never to have considered music as anything but an incentive to
gayety. Catherine of Braganza had a genuine passion for the art,
and was its munificent patron so long as she remained in England.
It is well to remember, when Charles is accused of developing only
the newly-imported French music, that in his day cathedral organs
were re-established, and the way was opened for the return of those
beautiful choral services which had a potent successive influence
over Purcell, Croft, Bennet, Barnby, and which have forever enriched
themselves through association with these dedicated talents. The
King had examined the principles of Romanesque architecture with
some enthusiasm. No one followed Wren's great labor, after the Fire,
especially in S. Paul's, with closer attention; and when he had a
practical suggestion in mind, no one could have offered it more
modestly. It was not Charles the Second who hampered that great
man, and vexed his heart with mean conditions. He had a rational
admiration for Wren; it did not prevent him, however, from jesting on
occasion. The architect was a very little man, and the King a very
tall one. They had an amiable dispute at Winchester. "I think the
middle vault not high enough." "It is high enough, your Majesty."
With the same air, no doubt, the young Mozart contradicted his
Archduke: "The number of notes is not at all too many, but exactly
sufficient." In this case, the critic looked at the roof, and then
he looked at Wren. Presently, he crumpled himself up, and brought
his anointed person erect, within four feet of the floor, as if
from the other's illiberal point of view. "High enough, then, Sir
Christopher!" he said.
His relation to literary men was one of ample appreciation and
no pay. He is reported to have wished to buy the favor of George
Wither, and especially of Andrew Marvell: yet he never approximately
endeavored to discharge his long-standing debts to his own choir.
Sedley, Edmund Waller, Rochester, and the Roscommon of "unspotted
lays," were in no need of encouragement; but it would have befitted
Charles to do something for the others, before it was too late. It
seems to have been his purpose to make Wycherley tutor to the Duke of
Richmond, at fifteen hundred pounds a year, had not Wycherley, in the
nick of time, snubbed the King by marrying Lady Drogheda, and drifted
into the Fleet prison. The poets always returned his liking. Though
he was an entrancingly pat subject for pasquinades, even Marvell
touched him gently.
"I'll wholly abandon all public affairs,
And pass all my time with buffoons and with players,
And saunter to Nelly when I should be at prayers.
I'll have a fine pond, with a pretty decoy,
Where many strange fowl shall feed and enjoy,
And still in their language quack _Vive le roy_."
Charles, at his birth, came into the poetic atmosphere of his more
poetic father. When the latter set out, at the head of a triumphant
train, to return thanks at the Cathedral for his heir, the planet
Venus (_abstit omen!_) was clearly shining in the May-noon sky. The
people saw it, and were wild with superstitious delight; and they
recalled it at the Restoration. Festal lyres, because of it, were
struck with redoubled zest. "Bright Charles," Crashaw began; and old
Ben Jonson's voice arose in greeting:
"Blest be thy birth
That hath so crowned our hopes, our spring, our earth."
And Francis Quarles, not long after, quaintly offered his _Divine
Fancies_ to the "royall budde," "acknowledging myself thy servant,
ere thou knowest thyself my Prince." Again, no sooner was Charles
the Second laid in his grave, than the flood of seventeenth-century
panegyric, which he had never invited, but held back considerably
while he lived, burst forth over England: unstemmed by any
compensating welcomes for the ascendant Duke of York. Dryden, in
his _Threnodia Augustalis_, Otway, Montagu, Earl of Halifax, and a
hundred lesser bards, intoned the requiem. Most of this prosody is
pretty flat: but it has feeling. One of Richard Duke's stanzas is
questionable enough; only the shortsightedness of genuine grief
can save it from worse than audacity. Following Dryden in his
quasi-invocation, he named the dead King as "Charles the Saint"; and
wherever the poor ghost chanced to be, that surely hurt him like an
arrow.
If he was not so protective as he might have been to his poets,
it was not owing to any parsimony on his part. He was by nature a
giver. The thrifty Teutons who inherited the throne and the royal
bric-à-brac have long begrudged divers treasures scattered by Charles
among persons and corporations of his individual fancy. While in
exile, he had sold his favorite horses, to provide comforts for his
suite; and in 1666, when he was in need of all he had, he allowed
nothing to interfere with his lavish and wisely-placed donations to
the houseless City. Perhaps he neglected the fees of literature, as
he neglected to put up a monument to his father's memory: not because
he failed to know his duties, but because he must have held your true
procrastinator's creed, and discovered, in the end, that what can
be done at any time gets done at no time. Dryden helps us to think,
however, that the King was not wholly oblivious of his bookmen:
"Tho' little was their hive and light their gain,
Yet somewhat to their share he threw."
Perhaps he was almost as liberal as his gaping pocket allowed.
Long-headed sirens, too, were battening on the national revenues,
and Charles had no strength of purpose left to withstand them. He
had bartered that for rose-leaves and musk and mandragora: eternal
quackeries which had never for an instant eased him of his sore
conscience. For downright hypocrisy (to which, with whatever wry
faces, he had to come), nothing in the snuffling deeps of Puritanism
can beat the wording of a clause in the grant made to Barbara,
Countess of Castlemaine, in 1670, when she received her magnificent
domains, titles, and pensions, "in consideration," as the patent
states, "of her noble descent, her father's death in the service
of the crown, and by reason of her personal virtues." This lady
"hectored the King's wits out of him." The reason is not far to
seek why Butler went hungry, and _deliciæ decus desiderium ævi
sui_, otherwise Abraham Cowley, Esquire, felt that his fidelity
was at a discount. Royalty occasionally tossed gold to its admired
Dryden, in the shape of several capital suggestions, which availed,
as we know. "Now, were I a poet (and I think I am poor enough to
be one), I should make a satire upon sedition." The parenthesis is
sympathetic. The knights of the ink-bottle were very welcome to
Whitehall; there was no class with which Charles, who was not a
promiscuous friend, liked better to surround himself. It is a pity
he did not have illustrious opportunity to associate with the best
of these altogether and forever, as his cousin of France did, as he
himself seemed born to do; for he had the patronal temperament. There
is a beautiful expression in Montesquieu, which might be applied
as sanctioning as a virtue the passive intellectual perception
of the Stuarts: "Que le prince ne craint point ses rivaux qu'on
appelle les hommes de mérite: il est leur égal dès qu'il les aime."
This is the principle of faith without good works. Charles the
Second, interpreted by it, ought to cut a rather fair figure before
posterity.
He was no stranger to a pen. How well he could employ it, his
speeches, letters, and despatches show. Grace and point are in
every line. He had, in fact, a curious neat mastery of words, not
to be excelled by most trained hands. Good pithy prose came easy
to him: which is a phenomenon, since nobody expects King's English
from a king. He had much to write, "and often in odd situations,"
as Mr. Disraeli the elder amicably adds. His performances in rhyme
seem to have been discredited by himself, and are, perhaps happily,
irrecoverable. Excellent David Lloyd, of Oriel, mentions "several
majestick Poems" of Charles's youth. He does not quote them.
"Majestick" reminds one of the reputed Muse paternal, pontificating
from Carisbrooke:
"And teach my soul, that ever did confine
Her faculties in Truth's seraphic line,
To track the treason of Thy foes and mine."
The son's productions were not quite of this order, if we may judge
from a specimen given by Burney, in the appendix to his _History of
Music_. It is an artificial pastoral, in singable numbers, which
Pelham Humphrey took pains to set in D major.
Humphrey was an ex-chorister boy then newly come back from over seas,
to be "mighty thick with the King"; bringing with him French heresies
of time and tune. Charles had musical theories of his own; and
would sit absently in chapel, swaying his head to Master Humphrey's
rhythm, and laughing at a dissonance in the anthem before the singers
themselves were half-conscious of the slip. When he was not sleeping
there, he seems to have done a deal of laughing in chapel. On one
classic occasion, his father felt called upon to "hit him over the
head with his staff," in S. Mary the Virgin's, Oxford, "for laughing
at sermon-time upon the ladies that sat against him." He sang tenor
to Gostling's great bass: the Duke of York (afterwards James the
Second) accompanying them upon the guitar. His favorite song was an
English one, and a very grave one: Shirley's beautiful dirge in _The
Contention of Ajax and Ulysses_:
"The glories of our birth and state
Are shadows, not substantial things."