Part 11

Dr. Burney remarks, and almost with justice, that the King seems never to have considered music as anything but an incentive to gayety. Catherine of Braganza had a genuine passion for the art, and was its munificent patron so long as she remained in England. It is well to remember, when Charles is accused of developing only the newly-imported French music, that in his day cathedral organs were re-established, and the way was opened for the return of those beautiful choral services which had a potent successive influence over Purcell, Croft, Bennet, Barnby, and which have forever enriched themselves through association with these dedicated talents. The King had examined the principles of Romanesque architecture with some enthusiasm. No one followed Wren's great labor, after the Fire, especially in S. Paul's, with closer attention; and when he had a practical suggestion in mind, no one could have offered it more modestly. It was not Charles the Second who hampered that great man, and vexed his heart with mean conditions. He had a rational admiration for Wren; it did not prevent him, however, from jesting on occasion. The architect was a very little man, and the King a very tall one. They had an amiable dispute at Winchester. "I think the middle vault not high enough." "It is high enough, your Majesty." With the same air, no doubt, the young Mozart contradicted his Archduke: "The number of notes is not at all too many, but exactly sufficient." In this case, the critic looked at the roof, and then he looked at Wren. Presently, he crumpled himself up, and brought his anointed person erect, within four feet of the floor, as if from the other's illiberal point of view. "High enough, then, Sir Christopher!" he said.

His relation to literary men was one of ample appreciation and no pay. He is reported to have wished to buy the favor of George Wither, and especially of Andrew Marvell: yet he never approximately endeavored to discharge his long-standing debts to his own choir. Sedley, Edmund Waller, Rochester, and the Roscommon of "unspotted lays," were in no need of encouragement; but it would have befitted Charles to do something for the others, before it was too late. It seems to have been his purpose to make Wycherley tutor to the Duke of Richmond, at fifteen hundred pounds a year, had not Wycherley, in the nick of time, snubbed the King by marrying Lady Drogheda, and drifted into the Fleet prison. The poets always returned his liking. Though he was an entrancingly pat subject for pasquinades, even Marvell touched him gently.

"I'll wholly abandon all public affairs, And pass all my time with buffoons and with players, And saunter to Nelly when I should be at prayers.

I'll have a fine pond, with a pretty decoy, Where many strange fowl shall feed and enjoy, And still in their language quack _Vive le roy_."

Charles, at his birth, came into the poetic atmosphere of his more poetic father. When the latter set out, at the head of a triumphant train, to return thanks at the Cathedral for his heir, the planet Venus (_abstit omen!_) was clearly shining in the May-noon sky. The people saw it, and were wild with superstitious delight; and they recalled it at the Restoration. Festal lyres, because of it, were struck with redoubled zest. "Bright Charles," Crashaw began; and old Ben Jonson's voice arose in greeting:

"Blest be thy birth That hath so crowned our hopes, our spring, our earth."

And Francis Quarles, not long after, quaintly offered his _Divine Fancies_ to the "royall budde," "acknowledging myself thy servant, ere thou knowest thyself my Prince." Again, no sooner was Charles the Second laid in his grave, than the flood of seventeenth-century panegyric, which he had never invited, but held back considerably while he lived, burst forth over England: unstemmed by any compensating welcomes for the ascendant Duke of York. Dryden, in his _Threnodia Augustalis_, Otway, Montagu, Earl of Halifax, and a hundred lesser bards, intoned the requiem. Most of this prosody is pretty flat: but it has feeling. One of Richard Duke's stanzas is questionable enough; only the shortsightedness of genuine grief can save it from worse than audacity. Following Dryden in his quasi-invocation, he named the dead King as "Charles the Saint"; and wherever the poor ghost chanced to be, that surely hurt him like an arrow.

If he was not so protective as he might have been to his poets, it was not owing to any parsimony on his part. He was by nature a giver. The thrifty Teutons who inherited the throne and the royal bric-à-brac have long begrudged divers treasures scattered by Charles among persons and corporations of his individual fancy. While in exile, he had sold his favorite horses, to provide comforts for his suite; and in 1666, when he was in need of all he had, he allowed nothing to interfere with his lavish and wisely-placed donations to the houseless City. Perhaps he neglected the fees of literature, as he neglected to put up a monument to his father's memory: not because he failed to know his duties, but because he must have held your true procrastinator's creed, and discovered, in the end, that what can be done at any time gets done at no time. Dryden helps us to think, however, that the King was not wholly oblivious of his bookmen:

"Tho' little was their hive and light their gain, Yet somewhat to their share he threw."

Perhaps he was almost as liberal as his gaping pocket allowed. Long-headed sirens, too, were battening on the national revenues, and Charles had no strength of purpose left to withstand them. He had bartered that for rose-leaves and musk and mandragora: eternal quackeries which had never for an instant eased him of his sore conscience. For downright hypocrisy (to which, with whatever wry faces, he had to come), nothing in the snuffling deeps of Puritanism can beat the wording of a clause in the grant made to Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine, in 1670, when she received her magnificent domains, titles, and pensions, "in consideration," as the patent states, "of her noble descent, her father's death in the service of the crown, and by reason of her personal virtues." This lady "hectored the King's wits out of him." The reason is not far to seek why Butler went hungry, and _deliciæ decus desiderium ævi sui_, otherwise Abraham Cowley, Esquire, felt that his fidelity was at a discount. Royalty occasionally tossed gold to its admired Dryden, in the shape of several capital suggestions, which availed, as we know. "Now, were I a poet (and I think I am poor enough to be one), I should make a satire upon sedition." The parenthesis is sympathetic. The knights of the ink-bottle were very welcome to Whitehall; there was no class with which Charles, who was not a promiscuous friend, liked better to surround himself. It is a pity he did not have illustrious opportunity to associate with the best of these altogether and forever, as his cousin of France did, as he himself seemed born to do; for he had the patronal temperament. There is a beautiful expression in Montesquieu, which might be applied as sanctioning as a virtue the passive intellectual perception of the Stuarts: "Que le prince ne craint point ses rivaux qu'on appelle les hommes de mérite: il est leur égal dès qu'il les aime." This is the principle of faith without good works. Charles the Second, interpreted by it, ought to cut a rather fair figure before posterity.

He was no stranger to a pen. How well he could employ it, his speeches, letters, and despatches show. Grace and point are in every line. He had, in fact, a curious neat mastery of words, not to be excelled by most trained hands. Good pithy prose came easy to him: which is a phenomenon, since nobody expects King's English from a king. He had much to write, "and often in odd situations," as Mr. Disraeli the elder amicably adds. His performances in rhyme seem to have been discredited by himself, and are, perhaps happily, irrecoverable. Excellent David Lloyd, of Oriel, mentions "several majestick Poems" of Charles's youth. He does not quote them. "Majestick" reminds one of the reputed Muse paternal, pontificating from Carisbrooke:

"And teach my soul, that ever did confine Her faculties in Truth's seraphic line, To track the treason of Thy foes and mine."

The son's productions were not quite of this order, if we may judge from a specimen given by Burney, in the appendix to his _History of Music_. It is an artificial pastoral, in singable numbers, which Pelham Humphrey took pains to set in D major.

Humphrey was an ex-chorister boy then newly come back from over seas, to be "mighty thick with the King"; bringing with him French heresies of time and tune. Charles had musical theories of his own; and would sit absently in chapel, swaying his head to Master Humphrey's rhythm, and laughing at a dissonance in the anthem before the singers themselves were half-conscious of the slip. When he was not sleeping there, he seems to have done a deal of laughing in chapel. On one classic occasion, his father felt called upon to "hit him over the head with his staff," in S. Mary the Virgin's, Oxford, "for laughing at sermon-time upon the ladies that sat against him." He sang tenor to Gostling's great bass: the Duke of York (afterwards James the Second) accompanying them upon the guitar. His favorite song was an English one, and a very grave one: Shirley's beautiful dirge in _The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses_:

"The glories of our birth and state Are shadows, not substantial things."

Many a time young Bowman was bidden to the solitary king, and chanted those austere measures. The true semblance of the Merry Monarch, undreamed-of by Gibbons or Lely, would be his portrait as he sat listening, in a tapestried alcove, to the touching text on the vanity of mortal pride, and the ever-during fragrance of "the actions of the just": his little dogs at his feet, his dark eyes fixed on the unconscious lad; the motley somehow fallen from him, and a momentary truce set up between him and his defrauded thinking soul. How the court which he had taught, the court with its sarcasms and sallies, would have laughed at the preposterous situation! Yet, if he had any outstanding spiritual characteristic, it was precisely this love for serious and worthy things. His perception of human excellence was never clouded. We all know his famous saying, which must have been more than half in jest, and unallowable even so, that the "honor" of every man and of every woman has its price. Yet this furious cynic was a tender believer in disinterestedness, wherever he found it. Not once or twice alone did he yield applause to a life which followed virtue "higher than the sphery chime," though his cue lay not in that part, though he went back on the morrow to the Hörselberg. From the middle of the revelry which filled his opening years in London, he stole away privately to Richmond, to kneel beside the dying Bishop Duppa, and beg a blessing. He had a most deferent regard for Sir William Coventry. Towards the close of his life, he was troubled with memories of the fate of Sidney and Russell. He was not thinking of intellectual achievement when he said: "I hear that Mr. Cowley is dead. He hath left no better man behind him." He appreciated something else beside the comeliness of the sweet Duchess of Grammont (la belle Hamilton), when he wrote to his favorite sister in Paris: "Be kinde to her: for besides the meritt her family has, she is as good a creature as ever lived." That young lily of perfection, Mistress Godolphin, observed a rule of her own in never speaking to the King. How prudent, to be sure, and how obtuse! And it will be admitted by every reader of historical gossip that, to whatever humiliations Charles subjected his poor queen (who ceased not to love him, and to love his memory) he would at no time hear her disparaged, were she even so disparaged ostensibly for his own political advantage. For he respected in her the abstract unprofanable woman. He wrote to his Chancellor, on his first sight of Catherine, who had been described to him as an ugly princess: "Her face is not so exact as to be called a beauty, though her eyes are excellent good; and not anything on her face that can in the least shoque one. On the contrary, she has as much agreeableness altogether in her look as ever I saw, and if I have any skill in Physiognomy (which I think I have!) she must be as good a woman as ever was born." And again: "I must be the worst man living, (which I hope I am not,) if I be not a good husband." In Edward Lake's diary, we are told that to the patron who recommended Dr. Sudbury to the Deanery of Durham, and Dr. Sandcroft to that of S. Paul, the King said, after some years of that attentive observation of his saints which no one would suspect in him: "My lord, recommend two more such to me, and I will return you any four I have for them." Most pertinent of all such cases, was that of the beloved Bishop Ken. When the King went to Winchester, in 1681, to superintend Wren's building of his palace, he put up at the Deanery, and sent word to Ken, then one of the Prebendaries, to resign his house to Nell Gwynne. Ken stoutly refused, to the fear and amazement of the time-servers. Three years later, the last year of the King's life, there was a great scramble for a rich vacant see. Charles did not lack a dramatic inspiration. "Od's fish!" he cried: "who shall have Bath and Wells but the little fellow that would not give poor Nelly a lodging!" In 1679, the King did his best to keep in their high offices the many useful and loyal magistrates whom his councillors voted to supplant on account of their being "favourable to Popery." His more general plea having been passed by, he read the list of names over again, before placing the signature which he could no longer refuse; and since his opposition was then as strenuous as ever, took leave of the subject in some remembered oblique remarks. Why depose Such-a-one? He had peerless beef in his larder, and no kickshaws. What had So-and-so done, that he should be removed? Surely, no man kept better foxhounds! And he could not only thus discern and prefer goodness, but he submitted himself to it, and bore reproofs from it with boyish humbleness. There is no reminiscence of the Prince's comic catechumen experiences in Scotland, in the accents of "your affectionate friend, Charles Rex," addressed to the admonishing Mr. James Hamilton, a minister of Edinburgh, from Saint Germain. "Yours of the 26th May was very welcome to me, and I give you hearty thanks for all your good counsel, which I hope God will enable me the better to follow through your prayers: and I conjure you still to use the same old freedom with me, which I shall always love." But his instinct was sharp: his sarcasms were forth in a moment against mere bullies and meddlers. Checked once for employing a light oath, he had ready a shockingly brusque though legitimate retaliation: "Your Martyr swore twice more than ever I did!"

As we have seen, he had no appetite whatever for compliments. He probably thought quite as Pepys did, regarding the silly adulations lavished on a certain January tennis-playing. "Indeed, he did play very well, and deserved to be commended; but such open flattery is beastly." Charles _fils_ habitually "kept his head," as we say in one of the most telling of our English idioms. It was difficult indeed so to do, through the highest known fever of national enthusiasm, while he was fed every hour of every day with praises out of all proportion to the deeds of an Alexander. Virtuous men like Cowley went into frenzies of approbation at the outset of the reign; sensible men like Evelyn thanked Heaven with seraphic devotion for each execution and exhumation wherewith the King, or rather the wild popular will, to which he was no breakwater, signalized his entry. Hear the same temperate Evelyn, in a dedication: "Your Majesty was designed of God for a blessing to this nation in all that can render it happy; if we can have the grace but to discover it, and be thankful for it." Genuine toadies had small countenance from this acute Majesty. When he propounded his celebrated joke to The Royal Society, concerning a dead fish, _i.e._, that a pail of water receiving one would weigh no more than before, and when he watched the wiseacres all solemnly conferring, it cannot have been that they were unanimously caught by the impish query he had put upon them, but rather that they would avoid correcting the Crown: fain would they humor it with an acquiescent reason why. But one little hero of science, far down the table, greatly daring, spake: "I--I--I do believe the pail _would_ weigh heavier!" and was acquitted by a peal of the royal laughter: "You are right, my honest man." Waller's clever excuse, when rallied on his fine Cromwellian strophes, and on their superiority to those written for the King's home-coming, that "poets succeed better in fiction than in truth," must have been met with the appreciative smile due to so exquisite a casuistry. Persons chosen to preach before Charles, bored him, long after his accession, with superfluous abuse of the Regicides and of the mighty Protectorate in general. One bishop, squarely asked why he read his sermons instead of delivering them impromptu, made the elegant response to his questioner, that it was for awe of such august assemblies, and of so wise a prince. Charles instantly rejoined that it was a monstrous pity no such consideration weighed with himself, in reading his speeches in the House: for the truth was, he had prayed for money so often, he could no longer look his hearers in the face! To the Earls of Carlisle and Shaftesbury, unduly anxious for the Protestant succession, who announced themselves as able to prove Monmouth's legitimacy, to the satisfaction of the nation, the King replied: "Dearly as I love the Duke, rather than acknowledge him will I see him hanged on Tyburn tree." Plain-speaking at a crisis was the hallmark of the loose and conniving time. When a clergyman of the Establishment was called to see the Duke of Buckingham, and inquired, by way of the usual preliminary, in what religion he had lived, the dying firefly answered gallantly: "In none, I am well pleased to say; for I should have been a disgrace to any. Can you do me any good now, bestir yourself." It was this engaging reprobate, (remembered rather through Pope and Dryden than through his own extraordinary talent) to whom the King once gave a kindly but authoritative rebuke for his atheistic talk. It is possible that on that occasion fastidiousness, and not reverence, was the motive power in Charles.

For it was his humor to disarm all moral questions by applying to them the measure of mere good taste. We know the characteristic exception he took to Nonconformity, as being "no religion for a gentleman." He had, in the perfect degree, what Mr. James Russell Lowell calls "that urbane discipline of manners, which is so agreeable a substitute for discipline of mind." As in Prince Charlie, (whose career was so closely to resemble his own, much in its heyday, and more in its decline), winning courtesy was founded on genuine sweetness of nature. He brought back into storm-beaten England the vision of the Cavalier: a vision like a rainbow, which made beholders giddy. The very first things he did, on his triumphant entry into London, on May 29th, 1660, were gracious grand-opera things: he singled out the pink-cheeked hostess of The Rose, in the Poultry, kissing his hand to her, as he passed; and he brought the tears to the eyes of Edmund Lovell, riding at the head of his troop of horse raised for the Restoration, by drawing off his rich leather gauntlets then and there, as a memento of thanks for one loyal welcome. Such a carriage was sure to establish him in the popular heart: he might light his fire with Magna Charta! His tact and his evenness of deportment stood forth like moral perfections. Addison, who, as a child, had seen the King humming lyrics over D'Urfey's shoulder, and knew all the folk-tales of his twenty-five years' reign, must surely have been thinking of him, when he painted this picture of "one of Sir Roger's ancestors." "He was a man of no justice, but great good manners. He ruined everybody that had anything to do with him, but never said a rude thing in his life; the most indolent person in the world, he would sign a deed that passed away half his estate, with his gloves on, but would not put on his hat before a lady, if it were to save his country." All this enchanting punctilio was but the velvet sheathing of uncommon power and purpose. Charles was never off his guard. No contingency ever got the better of him. He had reasons for being gentle and affable, for being, as the peerless Lady Derby thought him, on her own staircase, "the most charming prince in the world," for keeping his extremely happy chivalry of speech, equal to that of his cousin Louis the Fourteenth: the speech "which gives delight and hurts not." "Civility cannot unprince you," was another saying of the Newcastle beloved of his childhood, who seems to have had a strong influence over him. The gay address and gentle bearing, deliberate as we now perceive them to have been, had the highest extrinsic value in that severe masculine personality. "These advantages," says a contemporary writer, "were not born with him, for he was too reserved in his youth." It is ludicrous that we should speak of him as The Merry Monarch. He was, in sober truth, under his beautiful mask of manners, a morose, tormented, unhappy man. It was part of his perfect courage that he had learned small talk, banter, puns, games, and dances: they were so many weapons to keep the blue devils at bay. He had to beguile the thing he was with perpetual cap and bells. Before he became a distinguished actor, he was not "merry." The gilded courtiers of France, during his exile, found him a serious and awkward figure of a lad; his admired Mademoiselle Montpensier, the great prime-ministerial Mademoiselle, trailing her new satin gowns back and forth under Henrietta Maria's knowing eye, looked on Henrietta Maria's son, standing reticent the while, lamp in hand, with girlish derision.