OTIUM CUM DIGNITATE. THE NEW EARL. A ROYAL WATER JOURNEY TO HAMPTON
COURT. “MERRIE ENGLAND.” CAVALIERS AND ROUNDHEADS. “HOUSEHOLD WORDS.”
THE NEW LETTER-POST. HACKNEY COACHES. LINEN. FAITHFUL FRIENDS. A
LORDLY HOME
A few years before his death, the Earl of Derby retired to a country
house which he had bought, on the banks of the Dee, near Chester. Weary
of the cares of life, and of the ordering of his large estate, he made
all his possessions over to his son, Lord Strange, reserving to himself
a thousand pounds a year for his own maintenance. In 1640 Lord Strange
was appointed to share with his father in the office of Lord Chamberlain
of Chester. Two years later the old Earl died; and his son succeeding
him, “Madame Strange,” as her French and Dutch relatives called her,
became Countess of Derby.
In the course of time, since the murder of the Duke of Buckingham, the
affairs of the country had gone from bad to worse, and year by year the
breach between Royalists and Parliamentarians widened. Outwardly the
kingdom not only seemed to prosper, but was in a manner flourishing. Her
possessions abroad were increased by new colonies, and her harbours were
filled with merchant ships sailing from all parts of the world. Art and
learning prospered exceedingly. In the midst of the turmoil of ribaldry
and fanaticism of the extreme parties, and the smoke and luridness of
battle-fields, learning and civilisation were steadily advancing. Like
Archimedes, men of science, painters and scholars, worked on, some of
them amid the din of battle; and, with a happier fate than his, lived
on, for the most part into calmer days. Others, sheltered in the
retirement of country homes, and recking little of papist or puritan
shibboleths, wrote and thought, and to this day their work remembers
them. Trade flourished, and diversions and junketings were in nowise
neglected. Amid all the royal troubles, courtly state was not only well,
but splendidly maintained.
A refinement and dignity prevailed in Charles’s Court which fascinated
his loyal subjects; and the beauty of the Queen, and the gracious if
always melancholy aspect of the King, won hearts, and intellects to
boot, which had originally inclined to the side of his disaffected
subjects. The French nature of Henrietta Maria delighted in masques and
gaieties and music; and though etiquette and sobriety ruled the King’s
household, dulness found no part there. Often the people had the chance
of looking on their sovereigns as their gilded barge rowed down the
river from London to Hampton Court, to the music of lutes and viols, and
sweet choiring voices mingling with the song of the birds, not yet
driven hence by the smoke and screech of an overcrowded city. From
Westminster Stairs on one side, and Lambeth Palace on the other, the
banks were still open, clothed with grass and foliage, and dotted here
and there with gabled and timbered dwellings, whose gardens glowed with
fragrant flowers and ripening fruit. Tothill Fields were rookeries then,
as now; but the birds were of another feather. Battersea Fields on the
south side still grew simples and herbs for the medicaments of London
apothecaries—the “Physic Garden” of Sir Hans Sloane opposite being but a
concentrated, double-distilled essence of these older sources. Beyond
and behind lay the Five Fields, soon to become notorious for infesting
footpads and highwaymen; for the numbers of the gentlemen of the road
increased with alarming speed, as the means of travelling improved and
increasing opportunities made more and more thieves. Leaving the
immediate environing of London, the village of Chelsea reflected its
stately mansions and terraces in the clear Thames reaches. And so,
onward by the winding stream, till under the shadows of fair Richmond
woods the royal beeches and elms of Hampton Court bent their boughs in
the summer breeze to their majesties and the courtly train in greeting
and in welcome to the palace associated with memories and traditions,
not all of them too fair and consolatory, of “my good Lord Cardinal” and
his tyrannical lord.
In reasonable pastime and amusements the average subject of King
Charles’s day followed the suit of the Court. A sour forbiddance and
abhorrence of amusements had not yet come to be the order of the day.
If fasts were duly kept, festivals were in nowise forgotten. The “all
work and no play making Jack a dull boy” observance was not yet rendered
paramount by the prick-eared, aggressive spirit of Puritanism; for the
master enjoyed a sober junketing and relaxation every whit as much as
the ’prentice loved his turn at the quintain, or a merry round with the
maid of his choice, or a stage play in an inn yard. As to the shameful
“sport” of bear-baiting, to give the Puritan his due, he did excellent
work indeed when he succeeded in stamping it out; though his
consideration for the bear appears to have been somewhat circumscribed,
if, as more than one account tells, generally the first proceeding was
to kill the bear. Anything less than sweeping reform and a _tabula rasa_
savoured ill to Puritan nostrils; and while Praise-God-Barebones took
away the bears, he forgot the abhorrence of nature,—human nature
notably—for a vacuum, and that in a few years the lack of all rational
diversions, the pulling down of maypoles, the silencing of all music but
psalm-singing, would drive man and woman to try and drown care in the
pottle-pot. It was small wonder that the English people so soon came to
regard the Commonwealth as a not utterly unmitigated blessing. The
promised millennium grew to be unsatisfactory to all but the very elect;
and outside that pale, the desire for the King to have his own again was
to spread fast and wide. The intrinsic worth of that King they were less
concerned about; and if, after a few years’ experience of the Merry
Monarch’s rule, they found it full of flaws, they endured as they might:
not perhaps altogether forgetful that if the young Prince had not been
hounded from his country to herd with all sorts and conditions of
swashbucklers and adventurers, finding no rest for the sole of his foot,
no true and sober counsel in the very years that temptations are
strongest upon all men—especially men of his temperament—their restored
King’s virtues might have outshone his shortcomings.
To the moderate-minded the typical Royalist and Puritanic extremes of
the civil war days could only have been vexatious to a degree. It is
curious to observe how many scholars and writers of the middle of the
seventeenth century make no allusion to what was passing around them.
Take only the one instance of Isaac Walton, who at least lived in the
very thick of the fray, in that pargeted and latticed-casemented old
house of his at the corner of Chancery Lane. Truly, in his lives of the
worthies and divines of the time, he alludes frequently to the religious
and political divisions of the country, as indeed his themes entailed;
but in his immortal volume, whose secondary title is the significant one
of “The Contemplative Man’s Recreation,” scarce a shadow of the gloom of
the times darkens its equable, sunshiny humour. Soberly, but with
intense enjoyment, Master Isaac Walton takes his way from Fleet Street,
and, stretching his legs over Tottenham Hill—no short stretch neither—he
falls in with his hunter and falconer, gossips along the road to Ware,
whither he is bound that “fine, fresh May morning”; and so the three
trudge on together in genial discourse to the text that “good company
makes the way to seem shorter.” How thoroughly the wayfarers enjoy the
freshness of the country and the green beauty of the “new livery’d
year”! How they delight in the milkmaid’s song, and luxuriate in the
“honest alehouse with its cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and
twenty ballads stuck about the wall”!
Last, not least, in the general intellectual and mental life of England
in Charles’s reign, comes the band of poets, a goodly train, Cavalier or
Puritan, or not greatly concerned for either, but writing in
“numbers,
Since the numbers came.”
Milton, Cowley, Herrick, Lovelace, Herbert, Wither, Dekker, Webster, and
many more, breathing forth sweet words and quaint aphorisms which mingle
in our every-day talk, and are too familiar for us to pause to think
whence or how they rise to the lips. Those dead poets of Charles’s reign
resting beneath the hoary old stones of Westminster, or the sod of
peaceful village graveyards, or whose dust the venom of bigots and
fanatics has scattered, left their country a heritage which cannot
perish while the English tongue endures.
Only a comparison between the closing years of James I.’s reign, and the
opening ones of Charles II., a period of thirty-five years at the
utmost, can afford a true estimate of the improvements in the public and
social conditions of the country. Among these was the establishment of
regular inland postal communication in 1635. The proclamation “for
settling of the letter-office of England and Scotland” sets forth that
“there hath been no certain or constant intercourse between the kingdoms
of England and Scotland,” and commands “Thomas Witherings, Esq., his
Majesty’s postmaster of England for foreign parts, to settle a
running-post or two to run night and day between England and Scotland
and the city of London, to go thither and come back in six days.”
Ireland was included in these arrangements. The horses for conveyance of
the letters were furnished by the postmasters at the rate of
twopence-halfpenny a mile. In 1649 letters were forwarded once a week to
all parts of the kingdom.
Another public benefit was the setting-up of hackney coaches. These
predecessors of our four-wheelers and hansoms were first started from
Hackney—then a fair-sized village—to London, for those who had business
or pleasure in the metropolis. Very soon the coaches began to ply in
London streets, making their stands at the inns. There were twenty of
them in 1625 under the superintendence of one Captain Bailey, an old
sea-officer.
For its linen industries Ireland owes a deep debt of gratitude to the
memory of the Earl of Strafford. While Governor of Ireland, he observed
that the soil of the Green Isle was suited to the production of flax. He
sent to Holland for the seed, and to France and the Netherlands for
skilful workmen. To promote still further the undertaking, he advanced a
considerable sum from his own private fortune, thus establishing
Ireland’s most important manufacture.
England was later in the field: for linen was not produced in this
country to any degree of perfection until twoscore years later, when the
French Protestant refugees sought shelter here at the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes. Under their skilful instructions, the English
manufacturers wrought immense improvement in the material. It is small
wonder that housewives and betrothed maidens of the olden days set such
store by the contents of their linen-presses and dowry-chests. The Queen
of Henry VI. could boast only two linen shifts. The scarcity of this
commodity when Lady Strange first arrived in England, doubtless accounts
for her writing for so many articles of clothing for her young family to
be sent from France.
From such a quickening of industrial activity through the length and
breadth of the nation, quite independently of the improvements in
printing, or rather of the dissemination of books, in engraving and in
etching, it is obvious that time no longer necessarily hung heavy on the
hands of country gentlemen. The wits of the domestic “ffoole” were no
longer so indispensable now that the lord of the manor had material upon
which to exercise his own. If, _faute de mieux_, he had hitherto
bestowed all his time on his hawk and his hound, the pleasures of the
table, and a vast amount of sleep, he was no longer forced to confine
himself to these pastimes. “To divert at any time a troublesome fancy,”
says worthy Master Fuller, “run to thy books. They presently fix thee to
them, and drive the other out of thy thoughts. They always receive thee
with the same kindness.”
With many other noblemen and gentlemen of that time, the Earl of Derby
fell in with this sound advice. “His life,” says Walpole,[9] “was one of
virtue, accomplishments, and humanity.” Neither firebrand, busybody, nor
time-server—too high of rank to desire to be higher—James, seventh Earl
of Derby, nearing on to middle life at the time of his father’s death,
lived chiefly on his own estates, and these preferably at Lathom House.
He appeared rarely at Court, finding full occupation in the affairs of
his own estate, of which the kingdom of Man formed an important and
seemingly difficult part to manage. “But,” says one of his biographers,
“peaceful years and charitable acts fill few pages in history; and Lord
Derby owes his place there, not to virtues arising from his own choice
and goodwill, but to those which were struck from him by the blows of
fortune, as fire is struck from flint stones.”
Footnote 9:
_Noble Authors._
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