his swarthy little successor; but he must have forgotten that the
hero had his sobriquet from his dread prowess, or his armor, not from
his complexion. Charles was well-made. "Le roi ne cédait à personne,
ni pour la taille ni pour la mine." But he was too grim and gaunt
to be handsome. Burnet, who had no regard for him, tells us that
he resembled the Emperor Tiberius: "a statue of the latter at Rome
looks like a statue made for him." (Any reader of Tacitus knows
that the parallel could be maintained throughout. But it would be
unfair. Tiberius, with all his high handed capability, was jealous
and perfidious; Tiberius,--this is the core of the matter,--could
not take a joke!) Standing before the portrait of himself by Riley,
Charles sighed sympathetically: "Od's fish! but I'm the ugly
fellow." Vanity was not in him, and he left the last refinements of
the fashions, the crève-coeur locks and the passagère, and the
venez-à-moi, to his retainers, to the men of great personal beauty,
like the Villiers, Wilmots, and Sidneys, whom they became. He turned
dress-reformer in 1666, and brought the whole court to habits of
simplicity. No better and manlier clothing ever was devised: the
silk doublet and breeches, the collar, shoes and sword-belt of the
time, without the slashes or the furbelows. But he was driven out
of his model costume by the bantering motion of the French monarch,
who immediately arrayed his footmen in it. This is a fine historic
instance of the truth of Hazlitt's epigram: "Fashion is gentility
running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken by it." At
Whiteladies, in old days, the young King was eager to get into his
leathern doublet and white and green yarn stockings, "his Majesty
refusing to have any gloves," though his hands were of tell-tale
shape and slenderness. His fellow-fugitive, Lord Wilmot, was not so
enchanted at the prospect of a peasant disguise; "he saying that he
should look frightfully in it." "Wilmot also endeavored to go on
horseback," continues the playful King's own animated dictation to
Pepys, "in regard, as I think, of his being too big to go on foot."
Charles himself was a hard rider, though he preferred, whenever he
could, to walk. His little suite had every reason to remember his
posting through France and Spain, in 1659, when his energy tired them
all out. His long legs always went at a tremendous pace. "I walked
nine miles this morning with the King," Claverhouse writes wearily in
1683, "besides cockfighting and courses." (He was waiting, in vain,
to catch his sovereign in a humor for business.) Charles was fond of
foot-racing, tennis, pall-mall, and all out-of-door sports. According
to Reresby, he would have preferred retirement, angling, and hearty
country life, to his thorny throne. But who, except a tyrant, would
not? Most of the Stuarts were excellent marksmen, and he among them.
He took intelligent care of his health, and liked to weigh himself
after exercise. We learn that his lonely leisure was sometimes
invaded by afflicted but admiring subjects. "Mr. Avise Evans," writes
dear garrulous Aubrey, "had a fungous nose; and said it was revealed
unto him that the King's hand would cure him; so at the first coming
of King Charles Second into S. James's Park, he kissed the royal hand
and rubbed his nose with it. Which did disturb the King, but cured
him."
Charles's physical activity set in early; he succeeded, at nine,
in breaking his arm. All his life, he was up with the lark: it was
almost the only circumstance in which he differed from _Le Roi
d'Yvetot_, in Béranger's biting ballad, which did so take Mr.
Thackeray; and he played all morning and every morning. Early-risen
Londoners, like the child Colley Cibber, used to watch him romping
with his hounds and spaniels, stroking the deer, feeding the
wooden-legged Balearic crane, or visiting the old lion in the Tower,
not the least of his pets, whose death, accepted as a portent, was
soon almost to coincide with his own. For birds he had a passion; he
was an unexampled dog-lover. He squandered much of his professional
time in the society, innocent at least, of these favorite animals,
and much of his professional money, in seeking and reclaiming such
of them as were lost. There is a funny little advertisement in
_Mercurius Publius_ for June 28th, 1660, the sly good-humor of which
marks it as having been written out by none but the King himself.
The advertisement was a renewed one. "We must call upon you again
for a Black Dog, between a greyhound and a spaniel; no white about
him, onely a streak on his Brest, and Tayl a little bobbed. It is
His Majesties own Dog, and doubtless was stoln, for the Dog was
not born or bred in England, and would never forsake his Master.
Whosoever findes him, may acquaint any at Whitehall, for the Dog
was better known at Court than those who stole him. Will they never
leave robbing His Majesty? Must he not keep a Dog? This Dog's place,
(though better than some imagine) is the onely place which nobody
offers to Beg."
It is not uncharacteristic of his hatred of suffering, that it was
Charles the Second who abolished the statute which had thoughtfully
provided for the roasting of heretics. He might quite as well have
abolished "cockfighting and courses," but he did not. On a certain
22nd of July, he wrote to his "deare, deare Sister" Henrietta: "I am
one of those Bigotts who thinke that malice is a much greater sinn
than a poore frailty of nature." And Burnet has assured us that the
same remark was made, by the same moralist, to him, "that cruelty and
falsehood are the worst vices": an opinion of pedigree, antedated by
Taliesin, Chief of the Bards, in the sixth century. It would seem
an irresistible inference that Butler must have heard of the royal
speculation when he penned his immortal couplet:
"Compound for sins they are inclined to,
By damning those they have no mind to."
(Charles used to carry in his pocket a copy of _Hudibras_ which
Buckhurst gave him.) Cruelty, especially, was very far from this
indulgent King. His first official appearance had been on an errand
of mercy. As a spectator of ten, he had sat through the first session
of Strafford's trial, "in his little chair beside the throne"; but
he was sent as Prince of Wales, to carry his father's letter to the
Peers, urging them to forbear or delay Strafford's execution. As
the young nominal leader of the army in the west, he was full of
compassion. "There's a child," said the Earl of Lindsay, "born to
end this war we now begin. How gravely doth he pity the dead, the
sick, the maimed!" His nature was thoroughly humane; and more: it
was affectionate. It is the modern fashion to say he had no feeling.
In this regard he has never been fairly appraised, and no wonder!
He affected cynicism, and disclaimed sensitiveness; he made no
confidences; he avoided "scenes." Yet he originated at least two
scenes, which may be worth something to those who recognize true
emotion, from whatever unexpected source, and honor it. One was in
1663, when the good Queen fell very ill, and when Charles, more and
more conscience-stricken, dropped beside the bed, and begged her,
with tears, to live for his sake. The other was when he himself lay
dying, in his fifty-fifth year; when his old friend, the Benedictine
priest, John Huddleston, came into the room before the lords,
physicians, and gay gentlemen, to reconcile him to the Catholic
Church, and give him the Holy Communion. The King was extremely
weak, and in the greatest pain; but he was with difficulty kept
in his recumbent position. "I would kneel," he said aloud several
times, endeavoring to rise, "I would kneel to my Heavenly Lord." What
if by such touching demonstrations, rather than by his miserable
stifling stoicism, his taint of drugged indifference, he were to be
judged? But to some he had always shown his heart. The dearest to
him were those longest about him: even his old nurse, Mrs. Wyndham,
had an extraordinary hold upon him. He was kindness itself to his
sister-in-law, Anne Hyde, the first Duchess of York, at the very time
when she was exposed to ridicule, and most needed a powerful friend;
and he was no less kind to her successor, Mary of Modena, who never
forgot him. His attachment to Monmouth is beyond question; yet it
was no greater than his attachment to James, whose succession he
safeguarded, with whom he had few qualities in common. For besides
being the perfect companion Hume allows him to have been, he was
a perfect brother. Mrs. Ady (Julia Cartright) justly observes, in
the preface to _Madame_, her valuable memoir of Charles the First's
youngest daughter, Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, that the private
letters from the French archives, there first printed, written by
Charles the Second, establish two novel points greatly in his favor:
"the courage and spirit with which he could defend the privileges of
his subjects and the rights of the British flag," and the extreme
love and concern he had for his only surviving sister. Patriotism
and affection are about the last things of which historians seem
even yet likely to accuse him. Let us have a few of these epistolary
extracts, at random; they are delightful, and worded with a careless
idiomatic force equal to that of any correspondence of the time.
Moreover, they make one surmise that a volume of Charles's less
accessible letters to his mother and Prince Rupert, those to his
sister Mary, not excluding the beautiful one on the occasion of their
father's death, those to Clarendon, Lord Jermyn and others, would
make, if collected from the private packets or state papers where
they lie unread, in his own delicate, clear, whimsical hand, an
uncommonly pleasant publication.
"To my deare, deare Sister.
"Pour l'avenir, je vous prie, ne me traitez pas avec
tant de cérémonie, en me donnant tant de 'majestés,' car
je ne veux pas qu'il y ait autre chose entre nous deux,
qu'amitié."
"I will not now write to you in French, for my head is
dosed with business!"
"Pray send me some images, to put in prayer-books: they
are for my wife, who can gett none heere. I assure you it
will be a great present to her, and she will looke upon
them often; for she is not onlie content to say the greate
office in the breviere every day, but likewise that of Our
Lady too; and this is besides goeing to chapell, where she
makes use of none of these. I am iust now goeing to see a
new play; so I shall say no more but that I am intierly
yours." (These are "the pretty pious pictures" which Pepys
saw and admired.)
"They who will not beleeve anything to be reasonably
designed unless it be successfully executed, have neede
of a less difficult game to play than mine; and I hope
friends will thinke I am now too old, and have had too much
experience of things and persons to be grossly imposed
upon; and therefore they who would seem to pity me so for
being so often deceeved, do upon the matter declare what
opinion they have of my understanding and judgment. And I
pray you, discountenance those kind of people."
"I hope it is but in a compliment to me, when you say my
niece" (the little Marie-Louise d'Orléans, afterwards Queen
of Spain) "is so like me: for I never thought my face was
even so much as intended for a beauty! I wish with all my
heart I could see her; for at this distance I love her."
"Sir George Downing is come out of Holland, and I shall now
be very busy upon that matter. The States keepe a great
braying and noise, but I beleeve, when it comes to it, they
will looke twise before they leape. I never saw so great an
appetite to a warre as is in both this towne and country,
espetially in the parlament-men, who, I am confident, would
pawne there estates to maintaine a warre. But all this
shall not governe me, for I will look meerly to what is
just, and best for the honour and goode of England, and
will be very steady in what I resolve: and if I be forsed
to a warre, I shall be ready with as good ships and men as
ever was seen, and leave the successe to God." (Here we
have a sort of original for the modern chant:
"We don't want to fight:
But, by Jingo, if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men,
We've got the money, too.")
(Of Harry Killigrew.) "I am glad the poore wrech has gott
a meanes of subsistence; but have one caution of him, that
you beleeve not one worde he sayes of us heere; for he is a
most notorious lyar, and does not want witt to sett forth
his storyes pleasantly enough."
"There is nobody desires more to have a strict frindship
with the King of France than I do; but I will never buy it
upon dishonourable termes; and I thanke God my condition is
not so ill but that I can stande upon my own legges, and
beleeve that my frindship is as valuable to my neighbours
as theirs is to me."
"I have sent, this post, the extracts of the letters to
my Ld. Hollis, by which you will see how much reason I
have to stande upon the right my father had, touching the
precedency of my ambassador's coach before those of the
princes of the blood there. I do assure you, I would not
insist upon it, if I had not cleerely the right on my side;
for there is nobody that hates disputes so much as I do,
and will never create new ones, espetially with one whose
frindship I desire so much as that of the King of France.
But, on the other side, when I have reason, and when I
am to yeelde in a point by which I must goe less than my
predesessours have done, I must confesse that consernes me
so much as no frindship shall make me consent unto."
"Your kindnesse I will strive to diserve by all the
endeavours of my life, as the thing in the worlde I value
most."
Charles was dear to the masses, as any ruler of his unimperious humor
is sure to be. When the King and Queen came down from Hampton Court
in their barge, the Thames watermen shouted cheerfully at him: "God
bless thee, King Charles, and thy good woman there. Go thy ways for
a wag!" Among his inferior subjects he never lacked partisans and
apologists. He was something of a hero even to his valet: faithful
Tobias Rustat, Yeoman of the Robes, spent a fortune putting up
statues, at Chelsea and Windsor, "domino suo clementissimo." The
Roundheads whom Charles had released, chiefly men of no rank or
influence, watched him after, with friendliest longing and regret;
never without extenuations, and certain hope of change. "By enlarging
us," they said in their message of thanks, "you have multiplied our
captivity, and made us more your prisoners than we could be in the
Tower." When Death gave him his abrupt summons, "amid inexpressible
luxury and profaneness," on a wintry Monday in his town palace,
the poor crowded the churches, for the whole six days, "sobs and
tears interrupting the prayers of the congregations." Joy-bells
and bonfires bespoke their relief at the mistaken report that he
was convalescent. Every schoolboy, prentice, and serving-maid in
London wore mourning for him; although he had been buried secretly
by night, and there was no pageant at Westminster to memorialize
their grief. Always, and despite all, he was sure of the loyalty
of the people. "Fret not that I go unattended," he would tell his
brother: "for they will never kill me, James, to make you king."
"The horrid plot" found him the coolest head in England. But towards
the end, it began to tell upon him and dash his spirits. He closed
his doors for the first time, and went abroad with a guard, hurt and
dejected. This was but an incident in a life as free from suspicion
as a tree's. The folk who came to see Charles at his masques and
fairs and Twelfth-Night dice-throwings and Easter alms-givings; the
two hundred and forty thousand whom, with great boredom and greater
patience, he touched for the King's Evil; the multitudes who had
experienced his concern and practical energy during the Fire, when he
had done them all manner of personal service,--these were his vassals
to the last. Nor had he ever a private enemy. He was popular in the
extreme; and might be commemorated as an admirable prince, if tested
by the measure of Martial's epigram, that a prince's main virtue is
intimate knowledge of his subjects. Tradition does not aver that he
made integrity of living contagious among them, though society copied
his tolerance and affability, his sense, spirit, and gracefulness.
But nothing ever broke their faith in him. Says Lingard: "During his
reign the arts improved, trade met with encouragement, the wealth
and comforts of the people increased. To this flourishing state of
the nation we must attribute the acknowledged fact, that whatever
the personal failings or vices of the King, he never forfeited the
love of his subjects. Men are always ready to idolize the sovereign
under whose sway they feel themselves happy." Charles might have
confessed with Elia: "How I like to be liked, and what don't I
do to be liked!" His wheedling charm was irresistible. He was an
adept, when he willed, in the science of honeyed suasion. Like the
Florentine painters, he could suffer no slovenly detail, nor a
convention to pass him without some individualizing touch. Before he
had contracted the Portuguese alliance, Count Da Ponte had taken his
letter to Lisbon: "To the Queen of Great Britain, my wife and lady,
whom God preserve." The blood royal has a pretty etiquette of its
own; not quite this, however. How beautifully, again, was it said to
the Commons, shortly after the accession: "I know most of your faces
and names, and can never hope to find better men in your places."
And this intimate conciliatory tone, which it was Charles's pleasure
to employ towards others, others used in speaking of him. There is
a fatherly pang in some of the little messages plying between the
noble colleagues, Clarendon and Ormonde. "The King is as decomposed
as ever: which breaks my heart.... He seeks for his satisfaction and
delight in other company, which do not love him so well as you and I
do." And there is nothing tenderer in all history than the narration
of Charles's leave-taking from his hushed Whitehall, written at the
time by the Reverend Francis Roper, chaplain to the Bishop of Ely,
unless it be an account of the same strange and moving scene, sent
later by the Catholic Earl of Perth to the Catholic Countess of
Kincardine, on the tenth of December, 1685.
Every street-corner evangelist may harp on the rottenness of the
Restoration: what concerns us is its human sparkle. There was an
astonishing dearth of dull people; the bad and bright were in full
blossom, and the good and stupid were pruned away. The company
reminds one of Aucassin's hell, which, on a certain occasion,
he chose with such gusto, for its superior social qualities.
"Charles the Second!" exclaims William Hazlitt, in his most
enjoying mood: "what an air breathes from the name! What a rustle
of silks and waving of plumes! What a sparkle of diamond earrings
and shoe-buckles! What bright eyes! (Ah, those were Waller's
Sacharissa's, as she passed.) What killing looks and graceful
motions! How the faces of the whole ring are dressed in smiles! How
the repartee goes round; how wit and folly, elegance, and awkward
imitation of it, set one another off!" These are the days when young
Henry Purcell bends for hours over the Westminster Abbey organ,
alone; and Child, Locke, Lawes, and Gibbons are setting ballads to
entrancing cadences, and conveying them to Master W. Thackeray, the
music-printer, at The Angel, in Duck Lane; when another Gibbons,
rival of the spring, carving on wood, makes miraculous foliage
indoors, to cheat the longing wind; when a diligent Clerk of the
Acts of the Navy, curiously scanning the jugglers and gymnasts on
his leisurely way, trots by in "a camlett coat with silver buttons";
when Robert Herrick, the town-loving country vicar, ordering his
last glass, stands watching through the tavern window-pane the King
gravely pacing the greensward with Hobbes and Evelyn, or bantering
Nell Gwynne over her garden wall; when Walton angles with his son
Cotton in the Dove, and Claude Duval exquisitely relieves travellers'
bags of specie; when the musical street-cries run like intersecting
brooks: "Rosemary and sweetbrier: who'll buy my lavender?" "Fresh
cheese and cream for you!" "Oranges and citrons, fair citrons and
oranges!" when Richardson, the eater of glass and fire, is bidden
to entertain in drawing-rooms, broiling an oyster on a live coal
held in his mouth, and the instant he departs, hears the company
fall to playing blind-man's buff, and "I love my love with an A";
when the click of duelling swords is heard in the parks at sundown,
and groups of affectionate gentlemen sway homewards by the fainter
morning ray, and coaches roll along lending glimpses of pliant
fans, and of Lely's languishing faces. In and out of this whirl
of thoughtless life move the august figures of Sir Thomas Browne
and "that Milton that wrote for the regicides," and, later, of Sir
Isaac Newton; the golden shadow of Jeremy Taylor, and the childish
footsteps of Steele and his head boy Addison, regenerators to be;
the vanishing presence of Clarendon, and the patriots, Russell,
Vane, Algernon Sydney, good hearts in the dungeon and at the block;
of Bunyan the tinker, and the fighters Fairfax and Rupert, and the
scholar poets who prodigally strew their delicate numbers on the
wind. Execrable ministries, Dutch defiances and insults, French
pensions, pestilence and plot: but still the moth-hunts go on. "At
all which I am sorry, but it is the effect of idleness" (who should
it be but Pepys, making this deep elemental excuse?) "and having
nothing else to employ their great spirits upon." The irised bubbles
were soon to scatter, and the Hanoverian super-solids to come and
stay. The great change is germinal, as all great changes are, and
more visible in its processes than most. The reign of Charles the
Second is full of supplements and reserves; nothing is so lawless as
it seems; the genius ever unemployed, the virtue in arrest, "tease
us out of thought," and change color under our eyes. Hornpipes turn
to misereres; masks, one by one, fall away. Mrs. Aphra Behn, be it
remembered, was, off the printed page, nothing more unspeakable than
a decent industrious woman. That bygone England played at having no
moral sense: on a subtle argument of Browning's, one may quarrel
with it that it did not play equally well to the end. Neither was it
the minor actor of the Restoration who, near the exit, flagged, saw
visions, and spoke strange words out of his part: it was Rochester,
it was Louise de Quérouailles, it was the King. "Without desire of
renown," Macaulay finds him, "without sensibility to reproach." Why
arraign the King? He will agree with Macaulay or another, charge
by charge: which is damaging to the arraigner. As for accusations
not personal, his retorts might be less gentle. Great Britain sued
for him: and he never posed for a moment as other than he was. His
coming hastened a reparative holiday; itself but the breath of
reaction. That inevitable abuses should be ranked among the laws of
Nature, is one of Vauvenargues' fine profound inferences. If, in
some of his inspirational moments, the King exceeded his prerogative
(by endeavoring, for instance, to abrogate the code bearing so
cruelly upon all persons of other religious opinions than those of
the State), Parliament and the people had foregone their right of
complaint: they had deliberately chosen to make him an autocrat.
No fanatic on any point, Charles would have bound himself readily
to reasonable conditions, while his fortunes were pending; yet no
pledges were exacted. Moderate precautions and safeguards, suggested
in the Commons by Hale and Prynne, had been set aside by Monk, and
overruled. Monk was but a dial's shadow, "the hand to the heart
of the nation." He brought in not only the monarchy, but a potent
individuality: one not led hither and thither, but a maker and marrer
of his time. That melancholy figure was the axis of fast-flying and
eccentric revelry. To some of us he is one of the most complex and
interesting men in history. Judge him by old report and general
current belief, and he is "dead body and damnèd soul"; examine his
own speech and script, and the testimony of those who had him at
close range from his boyhood: and lo, he has heights and distances,
as well as abysses; he is self-possessed, not possessed of the devil;
he is dangerous, if you will, but not despicable. Following an evil
star, he, at least, after Ovid, perceived and approved the highest.
Until the Georgian succession, his was a popular memory. But with
the Stuart decadence, and the consummation of what _The Royalist_
smartly labels as "the great Protestant Swindle," down went his name
with better names: all, from Laud to Claverhouse, doomed to share a
long obloquy and calumny, from which they are singly being rescued
at last, as from the political pit. I know nothing so illustrious of
Charles the Playgoer as that he was able to win the strong attachment
of Dr. Samuel Johnson, albeit a century of ill repute lay between.
Our wise critic, though he formulated it not, must have seen clearly
the duplex cause of the King's failure in life. For half of that
failure there is a theological term. Permit me to use it, and to
illumine the whole subject by it: no flash-light is keener. Charles
the Second was unfaithful to Divine Grace. Again, no man, endowed
with so exquisite a sense of humor in over-development, can, of his
own volition alone, escape lassitude, errancy, and frivolity founded
on scorn. Humor, as a corrective, is well: but
----"the little more, and how much it is!"
To have been born with a surplus of it is to be elf-struck and
incapacitated. Nothing is worth while, nothing is here nor there;
the only way to cut short the torture of self-observation and
the infamy of not being able to form a prejudice, is to abandon
ideals. Pass over, in the King, this too mordant and too solvent
intelligence, and you lose the key to a strange career. Perhaps two
of his ancestors, two of the Haroun-al-Raschid temper, dominated
him: the gallant Gudeman of Ballangleich, and as a nearer influence
on Charles, that gay, beloved, fickle, easily-masterful man, his
grandsire of Navarre. He was like these, and in harmony with their
adventurous soldier-world: naturally, he was incurably out of joint
with his own isle, her confused introspective moods hardly subsided.
He was a philosopher, and above all, an artist: such a king, in
England, can never be the trump card. He seems to have thought out
the situation, and to have capitulated with all his heart. We need
not tell each other that he might have been different. Let us mend
our tenses, and agree that he would and must have been different, in
Scotland or in France.
Yet Lord Capell's dying word was right: his King, though a traitor,
and intellectually as homesick for France as Mary Stuart before
him, was "a very perfect Englishman": he had, in some degree, every
quality which goes to make up the lovableness of English character;
and his Latin vices, large to the eye, are festooned around him,
rather than rooted in him. One who knows the second Charles, all in
all, and still preserves a great kindness for him, might do worse
than borrow for his epitaph what Mr. Henley has written of Lovelace,
Richardson's Lovelace, "the completest hero of fiction." "He has wit,
humor, grace, brilliance, charm: he is a scoundrel and a ruffian; and
he is a gentleman, and a man."
CLAY
(_After a pause, shyly._) That's all. Will it do, Wetherell?
WETHERELL