Part 10
[_Laughing._] Allowed. I was contending that Charles the Second had wit, and a keen survey of men and things: he had the literary-philosophic turn, in short. He wasn't good, he wasn't beautiful, he wasn't much of a Protestant, or a Constitutional Sovereign; but it is my long-standing theory that he was an indolent original genius of the first water, and a fine character spoiled. Here, billy, quack, quack, quack!
WETHERELL
Your indolent original point of view! I don't deny we have some pretty valuable bequests from that bacchanalian reign: the Habeas Corpus Act, for instance. But Charles himself! Who is a neater Pocket Compendium of all the vices? How are you going to excuse him? Because he was weak?
CLAY
Why do you think he must be excused? My pious intention is only to extra-illustrate him: "naught extenuate, and naught set down in malice." I mean to provide the ordinary listener at the Institute with a little dispassionate extra acquaintanceship, pleasant in its nature, with the gentleman in question; and I distinctly mean not to tamper with what knowledge of him he may have acquired on other themes, and from other sources. You see how sly a plan of campaign it is. But your adjective, Wetherell, will never do. Weak? Where did you hear that fiddle-faddle? He had the most tremendous will. Repeatedly, and with the greatest severity and despatch, he took matters over into his own hands; and very often he was right, and ahead of contemporary policy. Look at the way he prorogued Parliament, in the May of 1679, after the famous quarrel over the trial of the five lords; the way he rejected the application of the Roos divorce bill, shaped so as to give himself latitude and precedent; his speech in the Upper House, insisting on holding to the terms of pardon which he had offered from Breda; his letters to the young Duke of Gloucester, when there was rumor of a change of religion; or, to come to smaller and uglier matters, look at his obstinate maintenance of his right to appoint the ladies of the Queen's bedchamber, his whole inexcusable treatment of the great Chancellor. Weak! Haven't you read Green? Green, who comes down hard on him, would sooner have you think him an accomplished tyrant, and so should I.
WETHERELL
Ungrateful, then. He was ungrateful to the very people who brought about the Restoration, wasn't he?--Rhoda, these swans are actually fatter than Lord Whidbourne's. (Do you like to hear Clay talk? I am egging him on; it does me good.)
MRS. WETHERELL
I shall ask him to dinner, Percy, to atone for you. Yes: it is great to find so much animation expended on dead issues.
CLAY
Never wilfully ungrateful, that I can see. Think of the times, think of the hue and cry after indemnities and offices; think of the million million services, little and great, reported, invented, exaggerated, and real, all being urged together, on the day when fortune first smiled on the King. Could any one man satisfy such greed? Might not any one man get confused in such a muddle of beseeching hungry hands, and despair of ever dealing justly, save with the few he knew and remembered? And those he never forgot: not the least Penderell among them.
WETHERELL
How about the epigram,--Barrow's, wasn't it? A very good hit: let me see. _Te magis_, that's it:
_Te magis optavit rediturum, Carole, nemo: Et nemo sensit te rediisse minus._
CLAY
That is just the sort of dig Charles enjoyed. It isn't malicious. He was immensely amused by the protestations of the realm which, according to its own tale, had prayed for him, longed for him, and labored to bring him to his own again. He said ironically: "The fault is plainly mine that I came not before." How did he keep his patience through the incessant begging? He must have suffered more than a newly-elected president in America. As it was, he granted innumerable pardons, and restitutions, and awards, "hearing anybody against anybody," and sure to be of propitious bent when petitions forced their way into his own hand. But he kept no memoranda. Or, as his apologist, Roger North, put it in capital plain Saxon, "he never would break his Head with Business." Long before there was much chance of his securing his succession to the crown, the hints of his adherents fell about him as thick as snow-flakes. Hasn't he told us how the country innkeeper, alone with him a moment, during his fugitive days, read him through his disguise? "He kissed my hand that was upon the back of the chair, and said to me: 'God bless you wherever you go, for I do not doubt, before I die, to be a lord, and my wife a lady.' So I laughed and went away.... He proved very honest." That same innkeeper must have turned up, two hundred strong at least, at Whitehall. Again, you know how poor the King was, and how estates and emoluments had been parcelled out, and tied up, during the Protectorate. He had actually nothing, at first, to give.
WETHERELL
Except scandal.
CLAY
Irrelevant!
WETHERELL
And, of course, the immortal house-warming: a gift to the imaginations of all Englishmen forever. I am sorry I wasn't there myself.
CLAY
O that day! What a wonderful procession it must have been, from London Bridge to Whitehall, through what Evelyn, in his Diary, so beautifully calls "a lane of happy faces," and troops pressing to their lips the hilts of their weapons, and waving them overhead, in a unique salutation; the King, whom the Speaker of the House of Commons was about to address as King of Hearts, riding, on his thirtieth birthday, between his brothers of York and Gloucester, past the long waving of scarfs and glitter of rapiers, bowing to left and right, like a dark pine in the wind; the saddle-cloths of purple and gold, the salvos, the tears, "the ways strewn all with flowers, bells ringing, steeples hung with tapestries, fountains running with wine, trumpets, music, and myriads of people flocking; and two hundred thousand horse and foot brandishing their swords, and shouting with inexpressible joy."
WETHERELL
Yes; joy with a bill of expenses. England clamored against the Judges, and for the King; and, like Saul, he came: tall, robust, keen, suave, comely, with the curse of retrogression behind him.
MRS. WETHERELL
Hear the magnificent phrases!
CLAY
But they are true.
WETHERELL
Our collaborated Prose Works, specimen sheets.
MRS. WETHERELL
And to think you are all out of practice!
WETHERELL
Of what, shepherdess? Of truth?
MRS. WETHERELL
Mr. Clay, haven't you some more nice Charles-Secondy things to tell me? I am so interested.
WETHERELL
More of your ingenious charities, Clay, by all means. Those faithless ducks of yours are seceding to the children, and Rhoda and I are out for a walk. Come, let us sink to the occasion. We might pace up and down awhile, under the trees beyond, at the edge of the old tilt-yard. Then let us all go together to the Abbey. We have promised to meet two American relatives of Rhoda's, at half after three. They wrote us that they arrived only yesterday; but your homing pigeon of a Yankee always must make straight for the Abbey. Meanwhile, can't you give us a sort of rehearsal of that lecture?
MRS. WETHERELL
He will, he will!
CLAY
I haven't all my notes with me. You are sure it won't tire you?
WETHERELL
Never. I love the æsthetic point of view. If any man remind me now that my father was a Whig, I will bray at him.
CLAY
Well, well, nice of you, I'm sure. You know my idea is just to present a special plea. How will you have me begin? I can't go on automatically, as if you were the Public Eye.
WETHERELL
Oh, anecdotes: or his witticisms. There must be scores of them running wild. Leave out the done-to-death ones. Cut me no sirloin, sirrah; starve me no Nellies.
CLAY
I believe "Sir Loin" to be spurious. It belongs with ever so many Charles Lamb puns, sayable enough, only not said by the sayer.
WETHERELL
There isn't much chance for a king who has a genius for concise conversation.
CLAY
No. He doesn't get reported correctly, for one thing. How could Sir Walter, weighted as he was, as writers of his time were, by the heavy-artillery ideas of diction, reproduce, in _Peveril_ or _Woodstock_, this light super-civilized fashion of speech, supple and stinging as a whip? And no writer of fiction since, has quite captured it, except Mr. Marriott Watson. You remember that episode in _Galloping Dick_? Exquisite! Charles the Second's talk is altogether the most admirable thing about him: though courtly, it had none of the circumlocutions of courtliness; it was exclusive and pertinent. "All this," as Walton sweetly says of Donne, "with a most particular grace, and an inexpressible addition of comeliness." The King's only long story, which for years he was always ready to tell from the beginning, "ever embellished," says mischievous Buckingham, "with some new circumstance," and which was wont to gather a knot of listeners old and new, was the story of his adventures after the battle of Worcester, in 1650. No heartier romance exists of pluck and patience, save the later record, so like it, of Prince Charlie's hardships, and his heroism under them; and its author's attachment to his only novel is simply a connoisseurship, a piece of esoteric appreciation: he took and gave delight with such thrilling biographical details as might have come from the mouth of Odysseus himself. His short sayings are all sterling, and his nicknames stuck like burs. Mr. Henry Bennet, afterwards Earl of Arlington, the grave and too inductive gentleman who so moved the mirth of Miss Frances Stuart, was "Whereas" to his royal master; the yacht named after the stout Duchess of Portsmouth, the yacht to whose great sheets the King and the Duke of York sprang "like common seamen," in a terrible storm once, off the Kentish coast, was known far and wide as "The Fubbs." Another joke about "Hans in Keldar," patronizing the ice-fair on the Thames, and inscribing his name there among the visitors, one need not recall too circumstantially. The Queen Dowager, Henrietta Maria, was always "Mam," to her perfectly respectful and solicitous eldest son; in an alliteration like an early English poet's, he congratulated his sister on her recovery from a grave illness, "between Mam's Masses, and M. de Mayerne's pills." His little portraitures of people, his given reason for a human like or dislike, his insight into character, and his gently sarcastic turn of phrase in expressing it,--are they not all superior things of their kind? He felt it impossible to marry a princess out of Germany: she would be "so dull and foggy." Of Isaac Vossius, the imperfect sceptic, Charles said: "Voss refuses to believe nothing, save the Bible." A celebrated man of affairs, then a deft page at court, won this neat encomium: "Sidney Godolphin is never in the way, and never out of the way." Sedley, shining Sedley, whom Charles greatly liked, he dubbed "Apollo's viceroy." His "Save the Earl of Burford!" when riding under the window whence Mistress Eleanor Gwynne ironically offered to throw her small son, since she had no name to call him by, is like the very finest _coup de théâtre_, and too like him not to be true. This climate he rated as the best climate, "because it gives the greatest number of out-of-door days." Not so thought Charles of Orleans, long before him, arraigning English weather from the standpoint of its unwilling guest, as at all times "prejudicial to the human frame." And every one knows the inimitable apology of Charles to his watchers, for "being so unconscionably long a-dying."
Unlike most wits, he preferred dialogue to monologue. His gravity and authority were so fixed, his merriment so obviously local and temporal, that repartee was part of his game; he winced at nothing, and often accepted, with excellent grace, sharper thrusts than his own. It is sometimes repeated that he was angered by Rochester's incomparable epigram, pinned to his chamber door:
"Here lies our sovereign lord the King, Whose word no man relies on; Who never said a foolish thing, Nor ever did a wise one."
But we have on record his amusing and sufficient footnote, that his sayings were his own, and his doings were his ministers'. (This answer, by the way, must have been made to fit the occasion, and the gay exigency of it, for he was exceedingly jealous of his unused prerogative. "I assure you," he writes to one of his family, about 1668, "that my lord of Buckingham does not govern affairs here." And Clarendon attests later, that "he abhorred to be thought to be governed by any single person.") At Whitehall, as the gentlemen-in-waiting laid the plates before the King, they bent a knee. "You see how they serve me," Charles said pleasantly to his guest, the Chevalier de Grammont. "I thank your Majesty for the explanation," that accomplished wag replied, "for I thought they were begging your Majesty's pardon for so bad a dinner." No reply at all, were it but pungent, offended him. "Shaftesbury, Shaftesbury, I do believe thou art the wickedest fellow in my dominions!" "Of a subject, Sire, mayhap I am." "Killigrew, whither goest thou, booted and spurred?" "To Hell, to fetch up Oliver to look after the welfare of the English." As a monitor, this same lewd, lying, scribbling, kindly, music-loving Killigrew was almost as successful with Charles as was Nell Gwynne. For sharp sensible comment went home to him; he saw a point none the less because it told against him. "Such ability and understanding has Charles Stuart," growled the man who was called his jester, "that I do long to see him employed as King of England." Libels and satires had small sting for him. Mistress Holford, a young lady of the court, seated in her own apartment, warbles _Old Rowley_, the ballad of close but inelegant libel, at the top of her silvery voice. A rap comes at the outer door, from one strolling by. "Who's there?" she asks, with unconcern. "Old Rowley himself, Madam!" in the "plump bass" of Carolus Secundus. Nothing much more diverting ever happened to him than the inverted salute of a worthy citizen, who once ran along in the street, beside his coach, with a half-formed fervent "God bless your Majesty!" upon his lips: the spaniel pup on his Majesty's knee, suddenly reaching out, gave the man a nip, and caused the ready benison to blurt forth incontinently as "God bl--amn your dogs!" The well-worn tradition of Master Busby of Westminster School reversing conditions with the King, is characteristic on both sides: Charles all humor and toleration, the little man stiffened with conscious reputation, to be upheld at all costs, and heroically wearing his cap before the face of visiting royalty, "lest the boys should think there lived a greater than myself." And was it not a prettier pass yet, between the monarch and his impregnable Quaker who wanted a charter? Penn came to his first audience with his hat, on the principle of unconvention and equality, firmly fixed upon his brows. Presently the King, having moved apart from the attendants, in his gleaming dress, slowly and ceremoniously bared his head. Penn interrupted his own plea. "Friend Charles, why hast taken off thy hat?" "Because it has so long been the custom here," said the other, with that peculiar lenient smile of his, "for but one person to remain covered at a time." (It strikes one that a little of this humor would have saved his father from much woe on a not dissimilar occasion in the Commons; and, indeed, throughout.) Equally charming was his behavior, on being laid hold of, by the hiccoughing Lord Mayor,--Vyner, wasn't that his name?--who insisted that he should come back and "finish t'other bottle." Charles, instead of glowering, hummed a line of an old song, a synopsis of the difficult situation to the company, which none other but he could have given with any grace:
"The man that is Drunke is as good as a King!"
and sat again. He never became, as his tutor, the loyal Duke of Newcastle, feared, "seared with majestie."
The Lord's Anointed liked to forego his authority, and come as a mere spectator into a session of Parliament. "'Tis as good as a play," the provoking creature said. He would get down from his throne in the Lords, to stand with folded arms by the hearth, drawing a group around him, and breaking up the order and impressiveness of the place. Those really interested in statecraft, whose fond incubations he so overturned, must have found him an _enfant terrible_ to an incorrigible degree. A memorandum-book, to be seen in one of the cases at the Bodleian, lies open at a bit of scribbled correspondence between himself and his Chancellor, passed from one to the other in the middle of debate. The King's share is as wayward and roguish as Sterne could have made it.
--"I would willingly make a visite to my sister at tunbridge, for a night or two at farthest. When do you thinke I can best spare that time?"
--"I know no reason why you may not, for such a tyme (two nights) go the next weeke about Wednsday or Thursday, and return tyme enough for the adiournement, which you ought to do the weeke following. I suppose you will goe with a light Trayne."
--"I intend to take nothing but my night-bag."
--"God, you will not go without forty or fifty horses?"
--"I counte that part of my night-bag."
The young fugitive at Boscobel, a more willing Alfred, insisted on preparing supper, and produced "Scots collops," with Colonel Careless for under-cook. His minute solicitude for others, at this time and after, in the stress of his own troubles, left indelible impress on many hearts. He was at his bravest on the open road, and in the secret manor and the oak tree: the odd situations became him as if he were King of the Romany. For ceremony and trammels of all kinds he had a thorough disrelish, and passed his time but resignedly amid "the pomp of music and a host of bowing heads." Cosmo III., Grand Duke of Tuscany, relates, in his book of travels, that at a state banquet at Whitehall, the host privily requested that his chair be removed and changed, because it was conspicuously the most comfortable in the room. Could informality farther go? But Charles maintained his gay grace and easy simplicity deliberately, and in conjunction with decisive dignity. With mere standoffishness he had nothing to do. Sir Walter Besant tells us in his _London_: "The palace was accessible to all; the guard stood at the gate, but everybody was admitted, as to a town; the King moved freely about the courts, in the mall, in the parks, sometimes unattended. The people drove their packhorses or their waggons up and down the road, and hardly noticed the swarthy-faced man who stood under the shade of a tree, watching the players along the mall. This easy and fearless familiarity vanished with the Stuarts." Whosoever wished it, might see his sovereign dance the brantle, perhaps with the young delicate-footed Italian Duchess, his brother's wife; or hear him tell over the "grouse-in-the-gunroom" stories of his Scotch captivity. Here at home he went his way, with a nod, a smile, and a word for all: "a far more successful kingcraft," says Macaulay, "than any his father or grandfather had practised." In the beginning, Charles had a beggarly income, and whimsically complained of it. "What troubles me most, is to see so many of you come to me to Whitehall, and to think that you must go somewhere else to seek your dinner!" He was hostile only to "fuss and feathers," the dry husk of social laws. He had his father's instinct for what was beautiful and imposing. At his coronation, he revived for the last time, and with its most august splendors, the ancient custom of procession from the Tower to the Abbey: a personal revelation, moreover, of that generous kindness towards the common people, which made them adore him. He also endeavored, though in vain, to re-establish the masque, the most charming form of court entertainment, intertwined with all manner of old fragrant poetic associations. At his coming, he found the Maypoles down, the shows over, races, dances, and merry-hearted sports cut short; the theatres were dismantled, and the sole appreciation that actors got, or hoped for, was at the whipping-post. His first thought was for the London parks and drives; his second, for the London stage. The way was soon cleared for those dramas which managers must now handle, as Thoreau handled a certain newspaper, "with cuffs turned up"; but these, despite their build and basis, have never been surpassed for wit, vitality, and mastery of incident. The plays seen by our friends Mr. and Mrs. Pepys from the middle gallery, were nearly all equipped at the expense of the King and gentry, and were brought out with nice details of costly scenery and costuming. Charles, Queen Catherine, and the Duke of York even gave their coronation suits to the actors. When Nokes played Sir Arthur Addle, in 1670, before the beautiful Duchess of Orleans, young Monmouth, beautiful as she, loosened the jewelled sword and belt which he wore, and enthusiastically clasped them upon the comedian, proud of both to his dying day. Charles originated the plot of Crowne's sprightly production, _Sir Courtly Nice_ (the King died the night of its final rehearsal), and also that of Dryden's _Secret Love_: he was very vain of the latter when it was nobly cast, in 1666, and always delighted to have it called his play. He was responsible, in the same degree, for _Oronokoo_: for it was he who first discerned, in the affecting tale of the West Indian insurrection of slaves, led by an enslaved prince, choice material for a tragedy.
He was no reader, no student, in the usual sense: he read folk, and not folios. Newcastle had written him, then the child Prince of Wales: "Whensoever you are too studious, your contemplation will spoil your government; for you cannot be a good contemplative man, and a good commonwealth's man. Therefore take heed of too much book." Never was tutor eventually better obeyed. Charles was a shrewd observer; he could sift ambassadors, ministers, and "persons of quality," as ably as Elizabeth herself; and remain, the while, impervious as rock. His early education was neglected: he was forced too soon into active life. Fortunately, he had the æsthetic bent of his race: thought and travel taught this Oxonian, by easy processes, all he knew. He became a good mathematician, and a good draughtsman; he was something of an expert in anatomy; he perfectly understood the sciences of fortification and shipping. He once invited his beloved Prince Rupert to race "the two sloopes builte at Woolidge, which have my invention in them." (It is to be hoped the landsman Rupert of the Rhine did not command his crew, as Monk did, to wheel to the left!) Charles was as thorough a sailor as his brother, and would have made as fair a record on deck, had his lines been cast there. Aboard "The Surprise" Tattersal averred that he directed the course better than himself. It was this King who gave the charter to the Royal Society, and founded the Observatory at Greenwich, as well as the Mathematical School at Christ Hospital. Nor were these things done perfunctorily, but from close personal interest. Charles could gossip in several languages. His taste for chemistry was almost as marked as his cousin Rupert's; and in the month he died, he was running a process for fixing mercury. Cowley, before that period, had lapsed into a pretty conceit about his liege lord in the laboratory.
"Where, dreaming chemics, are your pain and cost? How is your toil, how is your labor lost! Our Charles, blest alchemist, (tho' strange, Believe it, future times!) did change The Iron Age of old Into this Age of Gold."