THE spirit of the seventeenth century Cavaliers has been made familiar
to us by historians and romancers, but it did not find very adequate
expression in contemporary verse. There are two perfect songs by
Lovelace, “To Althea from Prison” and “To Lucasta, on Going to the
Wars.” But if we look into collections like Charles Mackay’s “Songs of
the Cavaliers,” we are disappointed. These consist mainly of political
campaign songs little removed from doggerel, satires by Butler and
Cleveland, and rollicking ballad choruses by Alexander Brome, Sir Roger
L’Estrange, Sir Richard Fanshawe, who was Prince Rupert’s secretary; or
haply by that gallant royalist gentleman, Arthur Lord Capel, executed,
though a prisoner of war, after the surrender of Colchester. You may
remember Milton’s sonnet “To the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of
Colchester.” These were the marks of a Cavalier ballad: to abuse the
Roundheads, to be convivial and profane, to profess a reckless daring in
fight, devotion to the ladies, and loyalty to church and king. The gay
courage of the Cavalier contrasted itself with the grim and stubborn
valor of the Roundhead. The bitterest drop in the cup of the defeated
kingsmen was that they were beaten by their social inferiors, by muckers
and religious fanatics who cropped their hair, wore narrow bands instead
of lace collars, and droned long prayers through their noses; people
like the butcher Harrison and the leather-seller, Praise-God Barebones,
and the brewers, cobblers, grocers and like mechanical trades who
figured as the preachers in Cromwell’s New Model army. The usual
commonplaces of anti-Puritan satire, the alleged greed and hypocrisy of
the despised but victorious faction, their ridiculous solemnity, their
illiteracy, contentiousness, superstition, and hatred of all liberal
arts, are duly set forth in such pieces as “The Anarchie,” “The Geneva
Ballad,” and “Hey then, up go we.” The most popular of all these was the
famous song, “When the King enjoys his own again,” which Ritson indeed
calls—but surely with much exaggeration—the most famous song of any
time or country.
And though today we see Whitehall
With cobwebs hung around the wall,
Yet Heaven shall make amends for all
When the King enjoys his own again.
But somehow the finer essence of the Cavalier spirit escapes us in these
careless verses. Better are the recorded sayings in prose of many
gallant gentlemen in the King’s service. There, for instance, was Sir
Edmund Verney, the royal standard bearer who was killed at Edgehill. He
was offered his life by a throng of his enemies if he would deliver the
standard. He answered that his life was his own, but the standard was
his and their sovereign’s and he would not deliver it while he lived. At
the outbreak of the war he had said to Hyde: “I have eaten his [the
King’s] bread and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base
a thing as to forsake him; I choose rather to lose my life—which I am
sure to do—to preserve and defend those things which are against my
conscience to preserve and defend; for I will deal freely with you: I
have no reverence for bishops for whom this quarrel subsists.”
And there was that high-hearted nobleman, the Marquis of Winchester,
whose fortress of Basing House, with its garrison of five hundred men
and their families, held out for years against the Parliament. It was
continuously besieged from July, 1643, to November, 1645, and at one
time Sir William Waller attacked it in vain, with a force of seven
thousand. At last Cromwell took it by storm, whereupon the Marquis, made
prisoner, “broke out and said that if the King had no more ground in
England but Basing House, he would adventure as he did, and so maintain
it to the uttermost; comforting himself in this disaster that Basing
House was called Loyalty.” The sack of this great stronghold yielded
over 200,000 pounds, and Clarendon says that on its every windowpane was
written with a diamond point “_Aimez Loyauté_.”
The Cavalier spirit prolonged itself down into the Jacobite songs of the
eighteenth century which centre about the two attempts of the Stuarts to
regain their crown—in 1715 and in “the Forty-five.”
It was a’ for our rightfu’ King
That we left fair Scotland’s strand:
It was a’ for our rightfu’ King
That we e’er saw Irish land.
He turned his charger as he spake
Beside the river shore:
He gave his bridle rein a shake,
Cried “Adieu for evermore, my love;
Adieu for evermore.”
The Hanoverians have been good enough constitutional monarchs but
without much appeal to the imagination. “I never can think of that
German fellow as King of England,” says Harry Warrington in “The
Virginians,” who has just been snubbed by George II, the sovereign who
hated “boetry and bainting.” The Stuarts were bad kings, but they
managed to inspire a passionate loyalty in their adherents, a devotion
which went proudly into battle, into exile, and onto the scaffold: which
followed them through their misfortunes and survived their final
downfall. They were a native, or at least a Scottish dynasty; and
Scotland, though upon the whole Presbyterian in religion and Whiggish in
politics, was most tenacious of the Jacobite tradition. Consider the
loss to British romance if the Stuarts had never reigned and sinned and
suffered! Half of the Waverley novels and all the royalist songs, from
Lovelace toasting in prison “the sweetness, mercy, majesty, and glories
of his King,” down to Burns’s “Lament for Culloden” and the secret
healths to “Charlie over the water.” Three centuries divide Chastelard,
dying for Mary Stuart, from Walter Scott, paralytic, moribund, standing
by the tomb of the Young Pretender in St. Peter’s and murmuring to
himself of “Charlie and his men.” Nay, is there not even to-day a White
Rose Society which celebrates yearly the birthday of St. Charles, the
martyr: some few score gentlemen with their committees, organs,
propaganda, still bent on dethroning the Hanoverians and bringing in
some remote collateral descendant? thinnest ghost of legitimism, walking
in the broad sunlight of the twentieth century, under the nose of crown
and parliament, disregarded of all men except, here and there, a writer
of humorous paragraphs for the newspapers?
For the passion of loyalty is extinct—extinct as the dodo. It was not
patriotism, as we know it; nor was it the personal homage paid to great
men, to the Cromwells, Washingtons, Bonapartes, and Bismarcks. It was a
loyalty to the king as king, to a symbol, a fetich whom divinity doth
hedge. In the political creed of the Stuarts, such homage was a
prerogative of the crown, and right royally did they exact it, accepting
all sacrifices and repaying them with neglect, ingratitude, and
betrayal. Yes, loyalty is obsolete, and the Stuarts were unworthy of it.
But no matter, it was a fine old passion.
After all, one of the finest things ever said of Charles I was said by a
political opponent, the poet Andrew Marvell, Milton’s assistant in the
secretaryship for foreign tongues, when speaking of the King’s dignified
behavior upon the scaffold, he wrote:—
He nothing common did or mean,
Upon that memorable scene
But, with his keener eye,
The axe’s edge did try;
Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite,
To vindicate his helpless right,
But bowed his comely head
Down as upon a bed.
The Cavalier stood for the church as well as for the king, but he was
not commonly a deeply religions man. The church poetry of that
generation is often sweetly or fervently devout, but it was written
mostly by clergymen, like George Herbert or Herrick—a rather worldly
parson: now and then by a college recluse, like Crashaw—who became a
Roman Catholic priest; or sometimes by a layman like Vaughan—who was a
doctor; or Francis Quarles, whose gloomy religious verses have little to
distinguish them from Puritan poetry. These poets were royalists but
hardly Cavaliers. The real Cavaliers, the courtly and secular poets like
Suckling, Lovelace, Cleveland, and the rest, stood for the church for
social reasons. It was the church of their class, ancient, conservative,
aristocratic. Carlyle, of Scotch Presbyterian antecedents, speaks
disrespectfully of the English Church, “with its singular old rubrics
and its four surplices at All-hallowtide,” and describes the Hampton
Court Conference of 1604 as “decent ceremonialism facing awful, devout
Puritanism.” Charles II tried to persuade the Scotch Earl of Lauderdale
to become an Episcopalian, assuring him that Presbyterianism was no
religion for a gentleman. Says the spirit in Dipsychus:—
The Church of England I belong to
And think dissenters not far wrong too;
They’re vulgar dogs, but for his _creed_
I hold that no man will be d——d.
The Cavalier was the inheritor of the mediaeval knight and the
forerunner of the modern gentleman. To the stern Puritan conscience he
opposed, as his guiding motive, the knightly sense of honor, a sort of
artificial or aristocratic conscience. The Puritan looked upon himself
as an instrument of the divine will. He acted as ever in his great
taskmaster’s eye: his sword was the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.
Hence his sturdy, sublime courage. You cannot lick a Calvinist who knows
that God is with him. But honor is not so much a regard for God as for
oneself—a finer kind of self-respect. Inferior in momentum to the
Puritan’s sense of duty, there is something gallant and chivalrous about
it. The Cavalier spirit was not so grave as the knight’s. Though he
fought for church and king, there was lacking the vow of knighthood, the
religious dedication of oneself to the service of the cross and of one’s
feudal suzerain. But you notice how the Cavalier, like the knight,
relates his honor to the service of his lady. Lovelace’s famous lines:—
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more,
may stand for the Cavalier motto.
Like the knight, the chevalier of the Middle Ages, the seventeenth
century Cavalier too, as his name implies, was a horseman. Rupert’s
cavalry was the strongest arm of the King’s service. Prince Rupert or
Ruprecht, the nephew of the King, was the son of that Elizabeth Stuart,
nicknamed the Queen of Hearts, whom Sir Henry Wotton celebrated in his
lofty lines “On his Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia,”
You meaner beauties of the night
That poorly satisfy our eyes,
More by your number than your light;
You common people of the skies;
What are you when the moon shall rise?
The impetuous charges of Rupert’s cavalry won the day at Edgehill and
all but won it at Marston Moor. But they were an undisciplined troop and
much given to plunder—a German word, by the way, which Prince Rupert
introduced into England. Perhaps you have seen the once popular
engraving entitled “The Cavalier’s Pets.” A noble staghound is guarding
a pair of riding boots, a pair of gauntlets, a pair of cavalry pistols
and a wide hat with sweeping plume. The careless Cavalier songs have the
air of being composed on horseback and written down on the saddle
leather: riding ballads in a very different sense from the old riding
ballads of the Scottish Border. Robert Browning has reproduced very
exactly the characteristics of the species in his “Cavalier Tunes.” In
“Give a Rouse” he presents the Cavalier drinking; in “Boot and Saddle”
the Cavalier riding, and in all of them the Cavalier swearing, laughing,
and cheering for the King.
Kentish Sir Byng stood for his King,
Bidding the crop-headed Parliament swing;
And, pressing a troop unable to stoop
And see the rogues flourish and honest folk droop,
Marched them along, fifty-score strong,
Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song.
God for King Charles! Pym and such carles
To the Devil that prompts ’em their treasonous parles!
Hampden to hell, and his obsequies’ knell
Serve Hazelrig, Fiennes, and young Harry as well!
Hold by the right, you double your might;
So, onward to Nottingham, fresh for the fight.
Indeed many modern poets, such as Burns, Scott, Browning, George Walter
Thornbury, and Aytoun in his “Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers,” have
caught and prolonged the ancient note, with a literary skill not often
vouchsafed to the actual, contemporary singers.
Here, for instance, is a single stanza from Thornbury’s overlong ballad,
“The Three Troopers”:—
Into the Devil Tavern three booted troopers strode,
From spur to feather spotted and splashed
With the mud of a winter road.
In each of their cups they dropped a crust
And stared at the guests with a frown;
Then drew their swords and roared, for a toast,
“God send this Crum-well-down!”
The singing and fighting Cavalier was most nobly represented by James
Graham, Marquis of Montrose, a hero of romance and a great partisan
leader. With a handful of wild Irish and West Highland
clansmen,—Gordons, Camerons, McDonalds,—with no artillery, no
commissariat, and hardly any cavalry, Montrose defeated the armies of
the Covenant, took the towns of Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow, and
Edinburgh, and in one brief and brilliant campaign, reconquered Scotland
for the King. Nothing more romantic in the history of the Civil War than
Montrose’s descent upon Clan Campbell at Inverlochy, rushing down from
Ben Nevis in the early morning fogs upon the shores of wild Loch Eil.
You may read of this exploit in Walter Scott’s “Legend of Montrose,” as
you may read of the great Marquis’s death in Aytoun’s ballad, “The
Execution of Montrose.” For his success was short. He could not hold his
wild army together: with the coming of harvest the clansmen dispersed to
the glens and hills. Montrose escaped to Holland and, after the death of
the King, venturing once more into the Highlands, with a commission from
Charles II, he was defeated, taken prisoner, sentenced to death in
Edinburgh, hanged, drawn, and quartered. His head was fixed on an iron
spike on the pinnacle of the tollbooth; one hand set over the gate of
Perth and one over the gate of Stirling; one leg over the gate of
Aberdeen, the other over the gate of Glasgow. Montrose wrote only a
handful of poems, rough, soldierly pieces,—one on the night before his
execution, one on learning, at the Hague, of the King’s death. But by
far the best and the best known of these are the famous lines of which I
will quote a part. You will notice that, under the form of a lover
addressing his mistress, it is really the King speaking to his kingdom.
You will notice also the fine Celtic boastfulness of the strain and the
high-hearted courage of its most familiar passage—the gambler’s courage
who stakes his all on a single throw.
My dear and only love, I pray that little world of thee
Be governed by no other sway than purest monarchy;
For if confusion have a part, which virtuous souls abhor,
I’ll hold a synod in my heart and never love thee more.
As Alexander I will reign and I will reign alone;
My thoughts did ever more disdain a rival on my throne.
He either fears his fate too much, or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch, to gain or lose it all,
But if no faithless action stain thy love and constant word,
I’ll make thee glorious by my pen and famous by my sword:
I’ll serve thee in such noble ways was never heard before:
I’ll crown and deck thee all with bays and love thee more and more.
I have dwelt almost exclusively upon the military and political aspect
of Cavalier verse. A wider view would include the miscellaneous poetry,
and especially the love poetry of Carew, Herrick, Waller, Haberton,
Lovelace, Suckling, Cowley, and others, who, if not, strictly speaking,
Cavaliers, were royalists. For the only poets in England who took the
Parliament’s side were Milton, George Wither, and Andrew Marvell. Of
those I have named, some had much to do with public affairs and others
had little. Thomas Carew, the court poet, died before the outbreak of
the Civil War. Herrick was a country minister in Devonshire, who was
deprived of his parish by Parliament and spent the interregnum in
London. Edmund Waller, a member of the House of Commons, intrigued for
the king and came near losing his head; but, being a cousin of Oliver
Cromwell and very rich, was let off with a heavy fine and went to
France. Sir John Suckling, a very brilliant and dissipated court
favorite, a very typical Cavalier, had raised a troop of horse for the
King in the Bishops’ War: had conspired against Parliament, fled to the
continent, and died at Paris by his own hand. Colonel Richard Lovelace
fought in the royal armies, was twice imprisoned, spent all his large
fortune in the cause and hung about London in great poverty, dying
shortly before the Restoration. Cowley was a Cambridge scholar who lost
his fellowship and went to France with the exiled court: became
secretary to the queen, Henrietta Maria, and carried on correspondence
in cipher between her and the captive King.
The love verses of these poets were in many keys: Carew’s polished,
courtly, and somewhat artificial; Herrick’s warm, natural, sweet, but
richly sensuous rather than passionate; Cowley’s coldly ingenious;
Lovelace’s and Haberton’s serious and tender; Suckling’s careless, gay,
and “agreeably impudent,” the poetry of gallantry rather than love, with
a dash of cynicism: on its way to become the poetry of the Restoration
wits.