those austere measures. The true semblance of the Merry Monarch,
undreamed-of by Gibbons or Lely, would be his portrait as he sat
listening, in a tapestried alcove, to the touching text on the vanity
of mortal pride, and the ever-during fragrance of "the actions of
the just": his little dogs at his feet, his dark eyes fixed on the
unconscious lad; the motley somehow fallen from him, and a momentary
truce set up between him and his defrauded thinking soul. How the
court which he had taught, the court with its sarcasms and sallies,
would have laughed at the preposterous situation! Yet, if he had any
outstanding spiritual characteristic, it was precisely this love for
serious and worthy things. His perception of human excellence was
never clouded. We all know his famous saying, which must have been
more than half in jest, and unallowable even so, that the "honor" of
every man and of every woman has its price. Yet this furious cynic
was a tender believer in disinterestedness, wherever he found it. Not
once or twice alone did he yield applause to a life which followed
virtue "higher than the sphery chime," though his cue lay not in that
part, though he went back on the morrow to the Hörselberg. From the
middle of the revelry which filled his opening years in London, he
stole away privately to Richmond, to kneel beside the dying Bishop
Duppa, and beg a blessing. He had a most deferent regard for Sir
William Coventry. Towards the close of his life, he was troubled
with memories of the fate of Sidney and Russell. He was not thinking
of intellectual achievement when he said: "I hear that Mr. Cowley
is dead. He hath left no better man behind him." He appreciated
something else beside the comeliness of the sweet Duchess of Grammont
(la belle Hamilton), when he wrote to his favorite sister in Paris:
"Be kinde to her: for besides the meritt her family has, she is
as good a creature as ever lived." That young lily of perfection,
Mistress Godolphin, observed a rule of her own in never speaking to
the King. How prudent, to be sure, and how obtuse! And it will be
admitted by every reader of historical gossip that, to whatever
humiliations Charles subjected his poor queen (who ceased not to love
him, and to love his memory) he would at no time hear her disparaged,
were she even so disparaged ostensibly for his own political
advantage. For he respected in her the abstract unprofanable woman.
He wrote to his Chancellor, on his first sight of Catherine, who
had been described to him as an ugly princess: "Her face is not so
exact as to be called a beauty, though her eyes are excellent good;
and not anything on her face that can in the least shoque one. On
the contrary, she has as much agreeableness altogether in her look
as ever I saw, and if I have any skill in Physiognomy (which I think
I have!) she must be as good a woman as ever was born." And again:
"I must be the worst man living, (which I hope I am not,) if I be
not a good husband." In Edward Lake's diary, we are told that to the
patron who recommended Dr. Sudbury to the Deanery of Durham, and Dr.
Sandcroft to that of S. Paul, the King said, after some years of
that attentive observation of his saints which no one would suspect
in him: "My lord, recommend two more such to me, and I will return
you any four I have for them." Most pertinent of all such cases, was
that of the beloved Bishop Ken. When the King went to Winchester,
in 1681, to superintend Wren's building of his palace, he put up at
the Deanery, and sent word to Ken, then one of the Prebendaries, to
resign his house to Nell Gwynne. Ken stoutly refused, to the fear and
amazement of the time-servers. Three years later, the last year of
the King's life, there was a great scramble for a rich vacant see.
Charles did not lack a dramatic inspiration. "Od's fish!" he cried:
"who shall have Bath and Wells but the little fellow that would not
give poor Nelly a lodging!" In 1679, the King did his best to keep
in their high offices the many useful and loyal magistrates whom his
councillors voted to supplant on account of their being "favourable
to Popery." His more general plea having been passed by, he read the
list of names over again, before placing the signature which he could
no longer refuse; and since his opposition was then as strenuous as
ever, took leave of the subject in some remembered oblique remarks.
Why depose Such-a-one? He had peerless beef in his larder, and no
kickshaws. What had So-and-so done, that he should be removed?
Surely, no man kept better foxhounds! And he could not only thus
discern and prefer goodness, but he submitted himself to it, and bore
reproofs from it with boyish humbleness. There is no reminiscence
of the Prince's comic catechumen experiences in Scotland, in the
accents of "your affectionate friend, Charles Rex," addressed to the
admonishing Mr. James Hamilton, a minister of Edinburgh, from Saint
Germain. "Yours of the 26th May was very welcome to me, and I give
you hearty thanks for all your good counsel, which I hope God will
enable me the better to follow through your prayers: and I conjure
you still to use the same old freedom with me, which I shall always
love." But his instinct was sharp: his sarcasms were forth in a
moment against mere bullies and meddlers. Checked once for employing
a light oath, he had ready a shockingly brusque though legitimate
retaliation: "Your Martyr swore twice more than ever I did!"
As we have seen, he had no appetite whatever for compliments. He
probably thought quite as Pepys did, regarding the silly adulations
lavished on a certain January tennis-playing. "Indeed, he did play
very well, and deserved to be commended; but such open flattery is
beastly." Charles _fils_ habitually "kept his head," as we say in one
of the most telling of our English idioms. It was difficult indeed so
to do, through the highest known fever of national enthusiasm, while
he was fed every hour of every day with praises out of all proportion
to the deeds of an Alexander. Virtuous men like Cowley went into
frenzies of approbation at the outset of the reign; sensible men
like Evelyn thanked Heaven with seraphic devotion for each execution
and exhumation wherewith the King, or rather the wild popular will,
to which he was no breakwater, signalized his entry. Hear the same
temperate Evelyn, in a dedication: "Your Majesty was designed of God
for a blessing to this nation in all that can render it happy; if
we can have the grace but to discover it, and be thankful for it."
Genuine toadies had small countenance from this acute Majesty. When
he propounded his celebrated joke to The Royal Society, concerning
a dead fish, _i.e._, that a pail of water receiving one would weigh
no more than before, and when he watched the wiseacres all solemnly
conferring, it cannot have been that they were unanimously caught
by the impish query he had put upon them, but rather that they
would avoid correcting the Crown: fain would they humor it with an
acquiescent reason why. But one little hero of science, far down the
table, greatly daring, spake: "I--I--I do believe the pail _would_
weigh heavier!" and was acquitted by a peal of the royal laughter:
"You are right, my honest man." Waller's clever excuse, when rallied
on his fine Cromwellian strophes, and on their superiority to those
written for the King's home-coming, that "poets succeed better in
fiction than in truth," must have been met with the appreciative
smile due to so exquisite a casuistry. Persons chosen to preach
before Charles, bored him, long after his accession, with superfluous
abuse of the Regicides and of the mighty Protectorate in general. One
bishop, squarely asked why he read his sermons instead of delivering
them impromptu, made the elegant response to his questioner, that
it was for awe of such august assemblies, and of so wise a prince.
Charles instantly rejoined that it was a monstrous pity no such
consideration weighed with himself, in reading his speeches in the
House: for the truth was, he had prayed for money so often, he could
no longer look his hearers in the face! To the Earls of Carlisle
and Shaftesbury, unduly anxious for the Protestant succession,
who announced themselves as able to prove Monmouth's legitimacy,
to the satisfaction of the nation, the King replied: "Dearly as I
love the Duke, rather than acknowledge him will I see him hanged on
Tyburn tree." Plain-speaking at a crisis was the hallmark of the
loose and conniving time. When a clergyman of the Establishment
was called to see the Duke of Buckingham, and inquired, by way of
the usual preliminary, in what religion he had lived, the dying
firefly answered gallantly: "In none, I am well pleased to say; for
I should have been a disgrace to any. Can you do me any good now,
bestir yourself." It was this engaging reprobate, (remembered rather
through Pope and Dryden than through his own extraordinary talent)
to whom the King once gave a kindly but authoritative rebuke for his
atheistic talk. It is possible that on that occasion fastidiousness,
and not reverence, was the motive power in Charles.
For it was his humor to disarm all moral questions by applying to
them the measure of mere good taste. We know the characteristic
exception he took to Nonconformity, as being "no religion for a
gentleman." He had, in the perfect degree, what Mr. James Russell
Lowell calls "that urbane discipline of manners, which is so
agreeable a substitute for discipline of mind." As in Prince Charlie,
(whose career was so closely to resemble his own, much in its heyday,
and more in its decline), winning courtesy was founded on genuine
sweetness of nature. He brought back into storm-beaten England the
vision of the Cavalier: a vision like a rainbow, which made beholders
giddy. The very first things he did, on his triumphant entry into
London, on May 29th, 1660, were gracious grand-opera things: he
singled out the pink-cheeked hostess of The Rose, in the Poultry,
kissing his hand to her, as he passed; and he brought the tears to
the eyes of Edmund Lovell, riding at the head of his troop of horse
raised for the Restoration, by drawing off his rich leather gauntlets
then and there, as a memento of thanks for one loyal welcome. Such
a carriage was sure to establish him in the popular heart: he might
light his fire with Magna Charta! His tact and his evenness of
deportment stood forth like moral perfections. Addison, who, as a
child, had seen the King humming lyrics over D'Urfey's shoulder, and
knew all the folk-tales of his twenty-five years' reign, must surely
have been thinking of him, when he painted this picture of "one of
Sir Roger's ancestors." "He was a man of no justice, but great good
manners. He ruined everybody that had anything to do with him, but
never said a rude thing in his life; the most indolent person in the
world, he would sign a deed that passed away half his estate, with
his gloves on, but would not put on his hat before a lady, if it
were to save his country." All this enchanting punctilio was but the
velvet sheathing of uncommon power and purpose. Charles was never
off his guard. No contingency ever got the better of him. He had
reasons for being gentle and affable, for being, as the peerless Lady
Derby thought him, on her own staircase, "the most charming prince
in the world," for keeping his extremely happy chivalry of speech,
equal to that of his cousin Louis the Fourteenth: the speech "which
gives delight and hurts not." "Civility cannot unprince you," was
another saying of the Newcastle beloved of his childhood, who seems
to have had a strong influence over him. The gay address and gentle
bearing, deliberate as we now perceive them to have been, had the
highest extrinsic value in that severe masculine personality. "These
advantages," says a contemporary writer, "were not born with him, for
he was too reserved in his youth." It is ludicrous that we should
speak of him as The Merry Monarch. He was, in sober truth, under his
beautiful mask of manners, a morose, tormented, unhappy man. It was
part of his perfect courage that he had learned small talk, banter,
puns, games, and dances: they were so many weapons to keep the blue
devils at bay. He had to beguile the thing he was with perpetual
cap and bells. Before he became a distinguished actor, he was not
"merry." The gilded courtiers of France, during his exile, found
him a serious and awkward figure of a lad; his admired Mademoiselle
Montpensier, the great prime-ministerial Mademoiselle, trailing her
new satin gowns back and forth under Henrietta Maria's knowing eye,
looked on Henrietta Maria's son, standing reticent the while, lamp in
hand, with girlish derision.
Nothing in human history is plainer, I think, than this double
personality of Charles the Second, evoked by the inescapable
situation in which he lived and died. He had the benefit of parental
example, and he started life as a good, slow, attractive, thoughtful
child, the sad-eyed child of Vandyck's tender portraits between 1632
and 1642. He was not strong of frame then. "His Highness' particular
grief," we smile to read in the pages of the good Lloyd, "is thought
to be a consumption." From that house where all the children were
fondly measured and painted and chronicled from year to year, his
mother wrote of him to Madame Saint George, and to Marie de Medicis.
"He has no ordinary mien ... he is so full of gravity." Prince James,
however, was her favorite. At four years old, Charles staggered
some Oxford dons with a display of infant philosophy. A twelvemonth
before that, as we learn from a pretty passage in the Harleian MSS.,
he had been condemned to take a certain drug; and his attempts to
get off, his retaliating talk afterward, are already very much of a
piece with the makeshifts of the Charles the Second we know. But in
general, he cannot be said to have been in the bud what he was in
the flower. Besides his seriousness, he had other apparently exotic
qualities: piety and candor among them. Lord Capell declared on the
scaffold: "For certainly, I have been a counsellor to him, and have
lived long with him, and in a time when discovery is easily enough
made; (he was about thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen years
of age, those years I was with him,) and truly I never saw greater
hopes of virtue in any young person than in him: great judgment,
great understanding, great apprehension; much honor in his nature,
and truly a very perfect Englishman in his inclination. And I pray
God restore him to this kingdom." Montrose, on the scaffold, in his
turn, "exceedingly commended," says Clarendon, in his _History_, "the
understanding of the present King." The glorious Marquis bore no
testimony to Charles's ethic make-up: but that could have lacked no
lustre in his eyes, since the January of the preceding year, when the
heir to the crown twice offered his life, or the acceptance of any
conditions imposed upon himself, in exchange for his father's safety.
Madame de Motteville assures us that "the greatest heroes and sages
of antiquity did not rule their lives by higher principles than this
young Prince at the opening of his career."
The poverty and inaction of his eleven years' exile, the sickness
of hope deferred, the temporizing, the misery of his faithful
friends, the wretched worry and privation of the sojourn at Brussels
and Breda, he bore passing well: but they spoiled him. He grew
recklessly indifferent; at thirty he could have said his _Diu
viximus_, for the savor of life was gone. An innate patrician, he
could never have been ruined, as most men are all too ready to be,
by "success and champagne." Hardship, which heartens the weak, was a
needless ordeal for him: yet he had nothing else from his fourteenth
to his thirty-first year. In him, endurance and courage were already
proven, and the "mild, easy, humble" temperament which, long after,
was to be allotted to him in _Absalom and Achitophel_. His chief
diversions, while abroad, were the single military campaign in
Spain, the reading and staging of amateur plays, the ever-welcome
associations with his brothers and sisters. When Grenville brought
thirty thousand pounds, and the invitation from the Parliamentary
Commissioners, to the ragged royalties at the Hague, Charles
called his dear Mary and James to look at the wonder, jingling it
well before he emptied it from the portmanteau: a more innocent
satisfaction than he was able to take later when, as Bussy de Rabutin
remarked, "the King of England turned shopkeeper, and sold Dunkirk,"
and rode to the Tower to see the first three million livres rolled
into his coffers. That he managed to fight besetting trouble may
be inferred from his letters to Mr. Henry Bennet. "Do not forget
to send me the Gazette Burlesque every week.... My cloaths at last
came, and I like them very well, all but the sword, which is the
worst that ever I saw.... We pass our time as well as people can do,
that have no more money, for we dance and play as if we had taken
the Plate Fleet.... Pray get me pricked down as many new corrants
and sarrebands, and other little dances, as you can, and bring them
with you; for I have got a small fiddler that does not play ill on
the fiddle." King Charles the First, in his affecting last advices
to his eldest son, had apprehended nothing but good results for him
from the difficult circumstances of his minority. "This advantage
of wisdom have you above most Princes, that you have begun and now
spent some years of discretion in the experience of trouble and the
exercise of patience.... You have already tasted of that cup whereof
I have liberally drunk, which I look upon as God's physic, having
that in healthfulness which it lacks in pleasure." But too much trial
is enervating, as well as too little. Could the spirited Prince
have had, ever and again, through those dark seasons, a pittance
of the abounding prosperity which befell him after he had given up
self-discipline, and had almost given up hope, it might have saved
from fatal torpor "the only genius of the Stuart line."
So perverted grew his habit of mind, that eventually the strongest
incentives could barely move, anger, or rouse him. To act like a
man awake, he needed a shock, an emergency. He was of the greatest
possible use at the Fire; he was of no use at all during the
Plague. Planning a thing out, thinking of it beforehand, came to be
intolerable to him. He who feared nothing else, feared communion with
himself. "For he dared reflect, and be alone," is a sentence in the
_Warwick Memoirs_, touching Charles the First, which looks as if it
were intended for an oblique comment on his son. As it was, even at
the worst, he prided himself on certain temperances. He liked good
wine, but he kept his brain clear of hard drinking. "It is a custom
your soul abhors," said the Speaker of the Commons before him, in
the August of 1660. He liked a game of chance, but he never won or
lost a pound at dice. In a time of the silliest superstition, when
my lord and my lady conferred mysteriously with M. le Voisin or the
Abbé Pregnani over in France, to whom the casting of horoscopes and
the concocting of philters were "easy as lying," Charles held his
own strong-minded attitude, and was delighted to see some applauded
predictions quite overturned in the Newmarket races. "I give little
credit to such kind of cattle," he writes to Henrietta, "and the
less you do it, the better; for if they could tell anything, 'tis
inconvenient to know one's fortune beforehand, whether good or bad."
Yet he amused himself with the psychological, when it suited him.
"Sir A.H. and Mrs. P., I beleeve, will end in Matrimony: I conclude
it the rather because I have observed a cloud in his face, any time
these two months, which Giovanni Battista della Porta, in his
_Physionomia_, says, foretells misfortune." He frowned on irreligion,
and stopped religious controversy with a wave of his hand. "No man,"
says Roger North, "kept more decorum in his expression and behavior
in regard to things truly sacred than the King.... And amongst his
libertines, he had one bigot, at least, (Mr. Robert Spencer) whom
he called Godly Robin, and who used to reprove the rest for profane
talking."
"Until near twenty," we learn from an anonymous pamphleteer who
claims to have been eighteen years in the Prince's friendship and
service, "until near twenty, the figure of his face was very lovely.
But he is since grown leaner, and now the majesty of his countenance
supplies the lines of beauty." "Majesty" sounds euphemistic; yet
there was a great deal of genuine majesty in Charles the Second.
Black armor was always wonderfully becoming to him, as we see in at
least one Cooper miniature, in the print by Faithorne, and the rarer
one by Moncornet. The lines of his cheek and mouth were very marked;
when he needlessly began to wear a wig, their severity became
intensified. He had the shadowy Stuart eyes, red-brown, full of soft
light; but his look, in all of his portraits, is something so sombre
that we have no English word for it: it is _morne_, it is _macabre_,
Leigh Hunt well implies, in _The Town_, that such an appearance,
linked with such a character, was a witticism in itself. He says:
"If the assembled world could have called out to have a specimen
of 'the man of pleasure' brought before it, and Charles the Second
could have been presented, we know not which would have been greater,
the laughter or the groans." His face was brown as a Moor's, and
singularly reserved and forbidding; though "very, very much softened
whensoever he speaks." One hardly knows why it was thought necessary
to blacken it further with walnut-juice, for disguise, to provide the
"reechy" appearance dwelt upon in Blount's narrative, when he set
out from Boscobel. His long hair had been of raven hue, thick and
glossy, "naturally curling in great rings"; but at the Restoration he
was already becoming "irreverendly gray." When he turned suddenly
upon you, we read, in _Ralph Esher_ (Hunt, first and last, shows a
Rembrandtesque preoccupation with this dusky King), "it was as if a
black lion had thrust his head through a hedge in winter." To the Rye
House conspirators he was known as "the Blackbird," as they named
the Duke of York, who was blonde, "the Goldfinch." It is a little
curious that a Jacobite ballad, very familiar in Ireland, dating from
before the Fifteen, bestows the same secret name (as a love-name, it
need hardly be added) on James the Third, called the Pretender. James
Howell, in a dedication to Charles the child, says:--
"Wales had one glorious Prince of haire and hue
(Which colour sticks unto him still!) like you."