Part 11

Whilst he lay dying of his wound at St. Malo, some priests tried to convert him to the Roman faith; but he would have nothing to say to them, and sent for a clergyman of his own Communion forthwith. By his own wish his body was taken across to Jersey. It lay in state at the Constable's house at St. Helier's, guarded by his exiled soldiers. The funeral was performed with all military honours, on 3rd October, 1646, and the corpse was laid in a vault in the church or 'Temple' of St. Helier's, near that of Maximilian Norys. His income had been about £800 a year before the troubles of the Civil War; but he had lost it all.

Sir Henry married a lady named Jemima Bael, and by her had one son, Henry. He too was a warrior; and fell, a Major in the King's army, at Bridgewater in 1644, whilst defending a magazine of provisions against an attack by the Parliamentary troops: 'a very hopeful young man,' says Clarendon, 'the son of a gallant and most deserving father.'

As we have already seen, three daughters only were the fruit of old Sir Henry's first marriage with Katherine Cooke.

Sir William Killigrew, Knight, the first Sir Henry's next brother, now claims a short notice. He too--Killigrew-like--was about the Court, for he was a Groom of the Privy Chamber to James I., and was sworn in Chamberlain of the Exchequer on 28th November, 1605. He married Margaret Saundars of Uxbridge, a widow lady; and they seem to have been a steady-going old couple, to whom, it may be mentioned, John Fox and Robert Some dedicated a volume of their sermons. There is some correspondence about Sir William in the Lansdowne MSS. touching his 'farming' the Seals of the Queen's Bench and Common Pleas, to which the Chief Justice of the latter court objected; and Sir William, who was appointed to his post by Burghley, seems to have ultimately compromised matters by receiving the sum of £3,000. The Additional MSS. contain other references to him; but hardly anything of sufficient interest to warrant our lingering over his share in the family history. He died at Lothbury on 23rd November, 1622; and his portrait, with that of Thomas Carew, by Van Dyck, is preserved in the collection of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. Richard Carew says that he was 'the most kind patron of all his country and countrymen's (county) affairs at Court.'

But from this Sir William and 'Mystresse Margarye' descended Killigrews who have made some noise in the world, as we shall presently find. Besides two daughters, Katherine and Elizabeth--both of whom married, but make no figure in our story--they had a son, Sir Robert Killigrew of Hanworth, a wealthy man, and Chamberlain to two Queens of England, viz., Elizabeth and the hapless consort of Charles I. He too kept up the old family connexion with Pendennis Castle--of which he was made Governor in succession to Sir John Parker, on 11th June, 1632, towards the close of his life; and he further served the Crown by going, in 1625, as an Ambassador to the United Provinces. Sir Robert was an original shareholder in the New River Company (incorporated in 1619); and was a great stickler for his rights in the matter of the reclaimed lands in Lindsey Level, Lincolnshire (as to which, see Dugdale's 'History of Embanking'); moreover, Farnaby, the celebrated schoolmaster, dedicated to him the 1624 edition of his translations of 'Martial's Epigrams.' He was once 'sequestered' for a manual scuffle in the House, in 1614, as appears in Spedding's 'Works of Francis Bacon;' and he was mixed up in the story about the poisoned powder administered to Sir Thomas Overbury, though it was clearly proved that Killigrew was not to blame in that matter; but it is nevertheless true that he was sent from the Council Table to the Fleet Prison for talking with Overbury at his prison-window, after having paid a visit to Sir Walter Raleigh in the Tower of London.

Sir Robert gave Whitelocke 'a place for Helston,' whereupon Whitelocke caused his brother-in-law Bulstrode to be returned for that place. He must have had a fine seat at Hanworth; for Conway, writing to Buckingham on 3rd May, 1623, says that on that day the King passed Sir Robert Killigrew's, 'and there saw the designment of a fine ground: a pretty lodge, a gracious lady, a fair maid, the daughter, and a fine bouquet. He saw the pools, the deer, and the herondry; which was his errand.'

When he took to himself a wife, he went to a good stock, for he selected Mary Wodehouse, a daughter of Sir Henry Wodehouse, of Kimberley, Norfolk,[78] known as the 'young' or the 'French' Lady Killigrew. She was a niece of one whose name (erroneously as we apply it) is familiar to every Englishman--I mean Lord Bacon. Of Sir Robert himself, little more need be said here than that he died on the 26th November, 1632; but his offspring will detain us much longer.

Sir Robert had six daughters and five sons; and it may be as well to offer first the slight result of my inquiries into the careers of the former.

They were about the Court of Charles II.; and one of them, Elizabeth, who married Viscount Shannon, became one of the dissolute King's mistresses. She died at her house in Pall Mall on 28th July, 1684, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, 'having no Coat-of-arms of her own, as the King had assigned her none.' Mary married Sir John James, Knight; and has a monument at the east end of the north choir aisle in Westminster Abbey. Of the others, I can only learn that they married men of title--one the Earl of Yarmouth; another Berkeley, Lord Fitz-Hardinge; and one married into a grand old Cornish family--the Godolphins. Another, Anne, 'a beauty and a poetess,' was the first wife of George Kirk, and the unhappy lady was drowned at London Bridge, in the Queen's barge, in July, 1641; like so many others of her race, she was interred in Westminster Abbey.

Robert, the eldest son, died young. The only trace I can find of him is the following college exercise on the birth of Charles II.:

'Dum Solis radios abscondit Luna, videmus Reginæ ex utero surgere Solem alium: Quid tu, Phœbe, redis? et cur te pœnitet umbræ? Non deerit, vel te deficiente, dies.'

His brother William, next in age, succeeded him as the representative of the family--a position which he must have held for about seventy years; for he was nearly ninety when he died, in or about 1694. When a Gentleman Commoner of Oxford he wrote some verses, which Henry Lawes thought good enough to set to music; he also wrote four plays; and when he left the University (where he afterwards took the degree of D.C.L.), he was forthwith welcomed at Court, and became a Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber, and afterwards Vice-Chamberlain to Queen Katherine. About 1661 he was made a Baronet, probably on account of his loyal attachment to the late King, whose body-guard he often commanded. At York, when the Civil War broke out in 1642, he commanded a troop of cavalry, composed of servants and retainers of the 1st troop of Life Guards, under Lord Bernard Stuart; and at Edgehill he was one of the foremost in Prince Rupert's fiery charge--a charge which at once began and had almost ended the battle.

Old Sir William kept up the Killigrew connexion with the West-country, by being, in his turn also, made Governor of Pendennis; but he is best known and remembered by two little books which he wrote very late in life, and especially by his 'Artless Midnight Thoughts,' written when he was eighty-two years old, and described by himself as the reflexions 'of a gentleman at Court, who for many years built on sand, which every Blast of Cross Fortune has defaced; but now he has laid new Foundations on the Rock of his Salvation, which no Storms can shake; and will outlast the Conflagration of the World, when Time shall melt into Eternity.'[79]

This curious little work is full of pious reflexions and thoughts, both in prose and verse. It was dedicated first to Charles II., and afterwards to James II., who had made his old age much happier than ever his youth was, 'when I shared in all the glories of this Court, and splendour of Four great Kings for three score years.' He himself describes the book as 'a small parcel of such fruit as my little cell in White Hall doth naturally produce from the barren brains of 82 years old.' He also wrote some plays of a very different stamp from those of his younger brother, as may be judged from the following lines:

'COMMENDATORY VERSES BEFORE THREE PLAYS[80] OF SIR WILLIAM KILLIGREW.--(By T. L.)

'That thy wise and modest Muse Flies the Stage's looser use; Not bawdry _Wit_ does falsely name, And to move laughter puts off shame:-- 'That thy theatre's loud noise May be virgin's chaste applause; And the stoled matron, grave divine, Their lectures done, may tend to thine:--

'That no actor's made profane, To debase Gods, to raise thy strain; And people forced, that hear thy Play, Their money and their _souls_ to pay:--

'That thou leav'st affected phrase To the shops, to use and praise; And breath'st a noble Courtly vein,-- Such as may Cæsar entertain,

'When he wearied would lay down The burdens that attend a crown; Disband his soul's severer powers, In mirth and ease dissolve two hours;--

'These are thy inferior arts, These I call thy second parts;-- But, when thou carriest on the plot, And all are lost in th' subtle knot,

* * * * *

'Th' easy and the even design; A plot, without a God, divine!-- Let others' bold pretending pens Write acts of Gods, that know not men's; In this to thee all must resign; Th' Surprise of th' Scene is wholly thine.'

He was buried at the Savoy some time between 1693 and 1695, and left by his wife, Mary Hill, a Warwickshire lady, one son, Sir Robert, Vice-Chamberlain to Queen Anne of Denmark, and some time Lord of the Manor of Crediton, in Devon, whose only son Sir Henry died in St. Giles'-in-the-Fields, without issue. Of his two daughters, one, Elizabeth, married Sir Francis Clifton; the other, Mary, married Frederic de Nassau, Lord of Zulestein. Their son William Henry was in great favour with our William III., who, in 1695, created him Baron Enfield, Viscount Tonbridge, and Earl of Rochford; but, as we have seen, the descent, in _the male line_, from old Sir William became extinct.

The venerable author of the 'Artless Thoughts' had, however, two brothers--Thomas[81] and Henry--and of these we have now to speak. Of the former, 'Tom Killigrew, the King's jester,' as he is sometimes inaccurately styled--probably more persons have heard than of any other member of this family; and for his fame he is indebted, perhaps, in as great a degree to his being enshrined in the pages of that delightful gossip, Samuel Pepys, as to his printed plays.

Tom was Sir Robert's fourth son, and was born in 1611. Very early he became, through the family influence, a Page of Honour to Charles I.; and he followed into exile that monarch's dissolute son, to whom, on the Restoration, he became a Groom of the Bedchamber and Master of the Revels, with a salary of £400 per annum. He seems to have added to his income by taking fees from those who were silly enough to offer them for using his interest in procuring for the gullible candidates the post of 'King's physic-taster,' or His Majesty's 'curtain-drawer.' Doubtless Killigrew was sometimes a minister to the profligacies of the 'merry' monarch; yet he was also one who could venture to tell a home-truth to the King when it was absolutely necessary, and when no one else durst do it. The following story may serve as an example. One day, Tom Killigrew came into the King's presence, clothed in pilgrim's weeds, and with a staff in his hand, evidently prepared for some long journey. 'Whatever are you about now, Killigrew?' cried the King; 'where are you going?' 'To hell, sir!' replied Tom, 'to fetch back one Oliver Cromwell to this unfortunate country; it was governed badly enough in his time, but infinitely better then than it is now.' An engraved portrait of him, dressed as a pilgrim, and another after Wissing, representing him with a beard, and armed with a sword, are preserved in the Print Room of the British Museum. Another instance of his adroitness in recalling Charles to a sense of his duty may be mentioned. The King found councils tedious; and would often leave them before the business was concluded,

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair,

greatly to the disgust of (amongst others) Lauderdale. Accordingly, on a certain day, Tom Killigrew--between whom and the Chancellor no love seems to have been lost--offered to bet £100 that _he_ could bring the King to the council, though the minister himself could not. The bet was concluded, and Killigrew started off after His Majesty, knowing probably better than anyone else where he was likely to be found. At once he disclosed to Charles what had happened, and urged the King to let him win the bet, whereby he, Tom Killigrew, would be £100 (sorely wanted, perhaps) in pocket; whilst Lauderdale, who was remarkable for the tight grip with which he held his money, would be mulct in that amount. Charles could not resist the double pleasure of annoying Lauderdale and gratifying Killigrew, and so granted the latter's request, and won his bet for him.

Thomas Killigrew was sent--not without some misgivings, as it would seem--by Charles II., whilst in exile, as 'Resident' to Venice; and his instructions from the King (with many other papers, some of which are in Killigrew's own writing, are preserved among the Harleian MSS., in the British Museum) throw an amusing light upon the circumstances of the Ambassador and his Royal Master. They were, amongst other things, 'to presse the Duke to furnish Us with a present Some of Money and We will engage Ourself by any Act or Acts to repay with Interest, and so like wise for any Armes and Ammunition hee shalbe pleased to furnish Us withall. The summe you shall moue him to furnish Us with shall be Ten thousand Pistolls.'

Killigrew's first paper was presented to the Duke and Senate in Venice, 14th February, 1649-50. It consists of five closely-written folio pages in Latin, and he quotes in it King James's saying of 'Sublato Episcopo tollitur Rex,' in support of his arguments against the cause of 'the Rebels,' who, Charles feared, might be sending an ambassador of their own, on a similar errand, to that Court.

This mission does not seem to have proved very successful; and Tom Killigrew and his servants got into sad disgrace at Venice with the Doge, Francis, Erizzo, and other authorities, for their riotous behaviour, the result being that the whole party were dismissed; deservedly perhaps, but somewhat informally. On Thomas Killigrew's return to the English Court, Sir John Denham addressed him in these lines:

'Our Resident Tom From Venice is come, And has left all the statesmen behind him; Talks at the same pitch, Is as wise, and as rich, And just where you left him you'll find him.

'But who says he's not A man of much plot May repent of this false accusation; Having plotted and penned Six plays, to attend On the farce of his negotiation.'

The last three lines naturally lead us to a consideration of the 'Resident's' dramatic works, written, as he says, to beguile the tedium of exile. Thomas Killigrew wrote eleven plays in all; and, according to Genest, strictly speaking wrote but two at Venice; but the four written at Naples, Rome, Turin and Florence, were probably completed before his return to Paris. Dibdin, in his 'History of the Stage,' points out that these plays are by no means original, tracing some of them to their sources, and calling them 'paste-and-scissors' affairs. But this is not their chief defect. I have, as I thought myself in duty bound, read one of them, and intend never to read another. How it was possible, even in that dissolute age--'never to be recalled,' as Macaulay says, 'without a blush'--for a man to sit down and deliberately write such obscene buffoonery, and dedicate it to ladies--some of whom were his own relations--I cannot imagine. Plays too, of which one, at least, 'The Parson's Wedding,' was to be performed wholly by women! and in which the words assigned to those who played the women's parts are scarcely less offensive than those supposed to be spoken by men![82] We find ourselves indeed 'surrounded by foreheads of bronze, hearts like the nether millstone, and tongues set on fire of hell.' I must add that they have scarcely a sparkle of that witty wickedness which one meets with in the writings of Sir Charles Sedley;--luckily they are dead, and they deserved to die! It is difficult to find an extract which is now presentable; and I can put my hand on no better specimen, on the whole, than this:

WALKING.

'_Fine Lady._ I am glad I am come home, for I am weary of this walking; for God's sake whereabouts does the pleasure of walking lie? I swear I have often sought it till I was weary; and yet I could ne'er find it.'

Not all of the plays were performed; though 'The Parson's Wedding' certainly was, at the King's House, and Luellin told Pepys that it was 'an obscene, loose play.' 'Claracilla,' a 'tragi-comedy,' Pepys himself went to see on 4th July, 1661; he merely says, however, that when he first saw it, it was 'well acted.' On a second occasion, when he saw it performed at the Cockpit, he thought it 'a poor play.' He might, in my opinion, have said the same of them all; but they were nevertheless sumptuously printed. King Charles II.'s own copy is in the British Museum (644, m. 11), and a portrait of the author contemplating the huge pile of his precious productions is prefixed to the volume. The original of this portrait was painted by W. Sheppard, and splendidly engraved by William Faithorne; another portrait (also by Sheppard, according to Redgrave) is in the possession of Mr. J. Buller East, to whom it was presented, shortly before her death in 1819, by Frances Maria Killigrew, the last of her name. There is yet another portrait of Thomas Killigrew, which represents him, not, as Walpole says in his 'Anecdotes of Painting,' 'in a studious posture,' but stooping, worn out with his vicious life, with a gibbering monkey at his side, and clad in a tawdry dressing-gown, on which are represented the portraits of a host of the wantons of his acquaintance. The lines at the foot of this rare engraving by Bosse (British Museum, {669. f. 4}/90) are an even more savage caricature than the picture itself.

Of Tom Killigrew's early fondness for plays, Pepys' story will serve as an illustration. 'I would not forget,' he writes, 'two passages of Sir J. Minne's at yesterday's dinner, one being Thomas Killigrew's way of getting to see plays when he was a boy. He would go to the Red Bull, and when the man cried to the boys, "Who will go and be a devil, and he shall see the play for nothing?" then would he go in, and be a devil upon the stage, and so get to see plays.' Would it be going too far to say that throughout his connection with the stage he stuck to his youthful part? He talked, however, much better than he wrote; with Cowley the case was the reverse; hence Denham's epigram:

'Had Cowley ne'er spoke, Killigrew ne'er writ, Combined in one they'd make a matchless wit.'

Pepys describes him as 'a merry droll, but a gentleman of great esteem with the King; he told us many merry stories;' again, that Killigrew was 'a great favourite with the King on account of his uncommon vein of humour;' though on one occasion, when the King went to the Tower of London, to see the Dunkirk money, the conversation of Killigrew and the others was but 'poor and frothy.' More than once, however, Tom Killigrew, to his credit, spoke out, and to the point, in a tone of which we have already heard something; and Pepys himself has thus chronicled it:

'Mr. Pierce did also tell me as a great truth, as being told it by Mr. Cowley (Abraham Cowley the poet), and who was by and heard it, that _Tom Killigrew_ should publickly tel the King that his matters were coming into a very ill state; but that yet there was a way to help all. Says he, "There is a good, honest, able man that I could name, that if your Majesty would employ, and command to see all things well executed, all things would soon be mended; and this is one Charles Stuart, who now spends his time in employing his lips about the Court, and hath no other employment; but if you would give him this employment, he were the fittest man in the world to perform it."'

On another occasion, when even Charles reproached the 'chartered libertine' with his many 'idle words,' Killigrew did not shrink from retorting, with special significance, on the King, that, after all, '_idle promises_ and _idle patents_' were even worse.

But something should be said of the domestic affairs of the subject of these observations. He lived, I believe, near that part of the old Court of Whitehall where Scotland Yard now stands; and, whilst there, married his first wife, Cecilia, daughter of Sir James Croft--a maid of honour to Henrietta Maria, and a lady whose portrait by Vandyck is in her present Majesty's collection.

The weather was rude and boisterous on the wedding-day, which gave rise to the following lines by Thomas Carew:

'Such should this day be; so the sun should hide His bashfull face, and let the conquering bride Without a rivall shine, whilst he forbeares To mingle his unequall beames with hers; Or if sometime he glance his squinting eye Betweene the parting clouds, 'tis but to spye, Not emulate her glories; so comes drest In vayles, but as a masquer to the feast.'

I fear their wedded life must have been stormy throughout; the very first thing we hear of their courtship is a dispute in which they became engaged; and by-and-by we hear of Madam Killigrew's 'Case,' which sets forth that she brought her husband a fortune of £10,000, which Tom, writing from the Hague in 1654[83] (the year in which his wife died of small-pox), solemnly promised not to waste or otherwise dispose of. Two houses in Scotland Yard were built with the money, or part of it. Francis Quarles thus bemoaned the hapless lady's fate: 'Sighes at the contemporary deaths of those incomparable Sisters--the Countesse of Cleaveland and Mistrisse Cicily Killegreue.' (They appear to have been buried in the same tomb, and to have died within twice two days of each other.) The little poem ends thus:

'My pen, Thou hast transgrest; Archangels, and not Men Should sing the story of their Rest: But we have done, we leave them to the trust Of heaven's eternall Towre, and kisse their sacred Dust.'

About this time we come across a characteristic little story about Tom Killigrew in Evelyn's 'Diary.'

Sir Richard Browne, writing from Nantes, 1st November, 1653, to Hyde, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, says that he has sent to him, carriage paid, three barrels of canary wine to Mr. Thomas Killigrew's care. But Hyde does not seem to have got them, at any rate for a very long time. He heard of the arrival of the consignment at Paris, and that it was there 'conceaved to be Mr. Killigrew's own wyne'!--very possibly, it may be feared, from the use to which the consignee was putting it.

Thomas Killigrew was associated with Dryden, Sir William Davenant, and others, in obtaining a license (which, by the way, Sir Henry Herbert, his predecessor in the office of Master of the Revels, vainly endeavoured to get revoked) for a company of players, and a playhouse which was called the Theatre Royal, and which was situated somewhere between Drury Lane and Bridge Street.[84]