Part 12

Nothing in human history is plainer, I think, than this double personality of Charles the Second, evoked by the inescapable situation in which he lived and died. He had the benefit of parental example, and he started life as a good, slow, attractive, thoughtful child, the sad-eyed child of Vandyck's tender portraits between 1632 and 1642. He was not strong of frame then. "His Highness' particular grief," we smile to read in the pages of the good Lloyd, "is thought to be a consumption." From that house where all the children were fondly measured and painted and chronicled from year to year, his mother wrote of him to Madame Saint George, and to Marie de Medicis. "He has no ordinary mien ... he is so full of gravity." Prince James, however, was her favorite. At four years old, Charles staggered some Oxford dons with a display of infant philosophy. A twelvemonth before that, as we learn from a pretty passage in the Harleian MSS., he had been condemned to take a certain drug; and his attempts to get off, his retaliating talk afterward, are already very much of a piece with the makeshifts of the Charles the Second we know. But in general, he cannot be said to have been in the bud what he was in the flower. Besides his seriousness, he had other apparently exotic qualities: piety and candor among them. Lord Capell declared on the scaffold: "For certainly, I have been a counsellor to him, and have lived long with him, and in a time when discovery is easily enough made; (he was about thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen years of age, those years I was with him,) and truly I never saw greater hopes of virtue in any young person than in him: great judgment, great understanding, great apprehension; much honor in his nature, and truly a very perfect Englishman in his inclination. And I pray God restore him to this kingdom." Montrose, on the scaffold, in his turn, "exceedingly commended," says Clarendon, in his _History_, "the understanding of the present King." The glorious Marquis bore no testimony to Charles's ethic make-up: but that could have lacked no lustre in his eyes, since the January of the preceding year, when the heir to the crown twice offered his life, or the acceptance of any conditions imposed upon himself, in exchange for his father's safety. Madame de Motteville assures us that "the greatest heroes and sages of antiquity did not rule their lives by higher principles than this young Prince at the opening of his career."

The poverty and inaction of his eleven years' exile, the sickness of hope deferred, the temporizing, the misery of his faithful friends, the wretched worry and privation of the sojourn at Brussels and Breda, he bore passing well: but they spoiled him. He grew recklessly indifferent; at thirty he could have said his _Diu viximus_, for the savor of life was gone. An innate patrician, he could never have been ruined, as most men are all too ready to be, by "success and champagne." Hardship, which heartens the weak, was a needless ordeal for him: yet he had nothing else from his fourteenth to his thirty-first year. In him, endurance and courage were already proven, and the "mild, easy, humble" temperament which, long after, was to be allotted to him in _Absalom and Achitophel_. His chief diversions, while abroad, were the single military campaign in Spain, the reading and staging of amateur plays, the ever-welcome associations with his brothers and sisters. When Grenville brought thirty thousand pounds, and the invitation from the Parliamentary Commissioners, to the ragged royalties at the Hague, Charles called his dear Mary and James to look at the wonder, jingling it well before he emptied it from the portmanteau: a more innocent satisfaction than he was able to take later when, as Bussy de Rabutin remarked, "the King of England turned shopkeeper, and sold Dunkirk," and rode to the Tower to see the first three million livres rolled into his coffers. That he managed to fight besetting trouble may be inferred from his letters to Mr. Henry Bennet. "Do not forget to send me the Gazette Burlesque every week.... My cloaths at last came, and I like them very well, all but the sword, which is the worst that ever I saw.... We pass our time as well as people can do, that have no more money, for we dance and play as if we had taken the Plate Fleet.... Pray get me pricked down as many new corrants and sarrebands, and other little dances, as you can, and bring them with you; for I have got a small fiddler that does not play ill on the fiddle." King Charles the First, in his affecting last advices to his eldest son, had apprehended nothing but good results for him from the difficult circumstances of his minority. "This advantage of wisdom have you above most Princes, that you have begun and now spent some years of discretion in the experience of trouble and the exercise of patience.... You have already tasted of that cup whereof I have liberally drunk, which I look upon as God's physic, having that in healthfulness which it lacks in pleasure." But too much trial is enervating, as well as too little. Could the spirited Prince have had, ever and again, through those dark seasons, a pittance of the abounding prosperity which befell him after he had given up self-discipline, and had almost given up hope, it might have saved from fatal torpor "the only genius of the Stuart line."

So perverted grew his habit of mind, that eventually the strongest incentives could barely move, anger, or rouse him. To act like a man awake, he needed a shock, an emergency. He was of the greatest possible use at the Fire; he was of no use at all during the Plague. Planning a thing out, thinking of it beforehand, came to be intolerable to him. He who feared nothing else, feared communion with himself. "For he dared reflect, and be alone," is a sentence in the _Warwick Memoirs_, touching Charles the First, which looks as if it were intended for an oblique comment on his son. As it was, even at the worst, he prided himself on certain temperances. He liked good wine, but he kept his brain clear of hard drinking. "It is a custom your soul abhors," said the Speaker of the Commons before him, in the August of 1660. He liked a game of chance, but he never won or lost a pound at dice. In a time of the silliest superstition, when my lord and my lady conferred mysteriously with M. le Voisin or the Abbé Pregnani over in France, to whom the casting of horoscopes and the concocting of philters were "easy as lying," Charles held his own strong-minded attitude, and was delighted to see some applauded predictions quite overturned in the Newmarket races. "I give little credit to such kind of cattle," he writes to Henrietta, "and the less you do it, the better; for if they could tell anything, 'tis inconvenient to know one's fortune beforehand, whether good or bad." Yet he amused himself with the psychological, when it suited him. "Sir A.H. and Mrs. P., I beleeve, will end in Matrimony: I conclude it the rather because I have observed a cloud in his face, any time these two months, which Giovanni Battista della Porta, in his _Physionomia_, says, foretells misfortune." He frowned on irreligion, and stopped religious controversy with a wave of his hand. "No man," says Roger North, "kept more decorum in his expression and behavior in regard to things truly sacred than the King.... And amongst his libertines, he had one bigot, at least, (Mr. Robert Spencer) whom he called Godly Robin, and who used to reprove the rest for profane talking."

"Until near twenty," we learn from an anonymous pamphleteer who claims to have been eighteen years in the Prince's friendship and service, "until near twenty, the figure of his face was very lovely. But he is since grown leaner, and now the majesty of his countenance supplies the lines of beauty." "Majesty" sounds euphemistic; yet there was a great deal of genuine majesty in Charles the Second. Black armor was always wonderfully becoming to him, as we see in at least one Cooper miniature, in the print by Faithorne, and the rarer one by Moncornet. The lines of his cheek and mouth were very marked; when he needlessly began to wear a wig, their severity became intensified. He had the shadowy Stuart eyes, red-brown, full of soft light; but his look, in all of his portraits, is something so sombre that we have no English word for it: it is _morne_, it is _macabre_, Leigh Hunt well implies, in _The Town_, that such an appearance, linked with such a character, was a witticism in itself. He says: "If the assembled world could have called out to have a specimen of 'the man of pleasure' brought before it, and Charles the Second could have been presented, we know not which would have been greater, the laughter or the groans." His face was brown as a Moor's, and singularly reserved and forbidding; though "very, very much softened whensoever he speaks." One hardly knows why it was thought necessary to blacken it further with walnut-juice, for disguise, to provide the "reechy" appearance dwelt upon in Blount's narrative, when he set out from Boscobel. His long hair had been of raven hue, thick and glossy, "naturally curling in great rings"; but at the Restoration he was already becoming "irreverendly gray." When he turned suddenly upon you, we read, in _Ralph Esher_ (Hunt, first and last, shows a Rembrandtesque preoccupation with this dusky King), "it was as if a black lion had thrust his head through a hedge in winter." To the Rye House conspirators he was known as "the Blackbird," as they named the Duke of York, who was blonde, "the Goldfinch." It is a little curious that a Jacobite ballad, very familiar in Ireland, dating from before the Fifteen, bestows the same secret name (as a love-name, it need hardly be added) on James the Third, called the Pretender. James Howell, in a dedication to Charles the child, says:--

"Wales had one glorious Prince of haire and hue (Which colour sticks unto him still!) like you."

Howell had in mind the Black Prince, when he set out so to compliment his swarthy little successor; but he must have forgotten that the hero had his sobriquet from his dread prowess, or his armor, not from his complexion. Charles was well-made. "Le roi ne cédait à personne, ni pour la taille ni pour la mine." But he was too grim and gaunt to be handsome. Burnet, who had no regard for him, tells us that he resembled the Emperor Tiberius: "a statue of the latter at Rome looks like a statue made for him." (Any reader of Tacitus knows that the parallel could be maintained throughout. But it would be unfair. Tiberius, with all his high handed capability, was jealous and perfidious; Tiberius,--this is the core of the matter,--could not take a joke!) Standing before the portrait of himself by Riley, Charles sighed sympathetically: "Od's fish! but I'm the ugly fellow." Vanity was not in him, and he left the last refinements of the fashions, the crève-coeur locks and the passagère, and the venez-à-moi, to his retainers, to the men of great personal beauty, like the Villiers, Wilmots, and Sidneys, whom they became. He turned dress-reformer in 1666, and brought the whole court to habits of simplicity. No better and manlier clothing ever was devised: the silk doublet and breeches, the collar, shoes and sword-belt of the time, without the slashes or the furbelows. But he was driven out of his model costume by the bantering motion of the French monarch, who immediately arrayed his footmen in it. This is a fine historic instance of the truth of Hazlitt's epigram: "Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken by it." At Whiteladies, in old days, the young King was eager to get into his leathern doublet and white and green yarn stockings, "his Majesty refusing to have any gloves," though his hands were of tell-tale shape and slenderness. His fellow-fugitive, Lord Wilmot, was not so enchanted at the prospect of a peasant disguise; "he saying that he should look frightfully in it." "Wilmot also endeavored to go on horseback," continues the playful King's own animated dictation to Pepys, "in regard, as I think, of his being too big to go on foot." Charles himself was a hard rider, though he preferred, whenever he could, to walk. His little suite had every reason to remember his posting through France and Spain, in 1659, when his energy tired them all out. His long legs always went at a tremendous pace. "I walked nine miles this morning with the King," Claverhouse writes wearily in 1683, "besides cockfighting and courses." (He was waiting, in vain, to catch his sovereign in a humor for business.) Charles was fond of foot-racing, tennis, pall-mall, and all out-of-door sports. According to Reresby, he would have preferred retirement, angling, and hearty country life, to his thorny throne. But who, except a tyrant, would not? Most of the Stuarts were excellent marksmen, and he among them. He took intelligent care of his health, and liked to weigh himself after exercise. We learn that his lonely leisure was sometimes invaded by afflicted but admiring subjects. "Mr. Avise Evans," writes dear garrulous Aubrey, "had a fungous nose; and said it was revealed unto him that the King's hand would cure him; so at the first coming of King Charles Second into S. James's Park, he kissed the royal hand and rubbed his nose with it. Which did disturb the King, but cured him."

Charles's physical activity set in early; he succeeded, at nine, in breaking his arm. All his life, he was up with the lark: it was almost the only circumstance in which he differed from _Le Roi d'Yvetot_, in Béranger's biting ballad, which did so take Mr. Thackeray; and he played all morning and every morning. Early-risen Londoners, like the child Colley Cibber, used to watch him romping with his hounds and spaniels, stroking the deer, feeding the wooden-legged Balearic crane, or visiting the old lion in the Tower, not the least of his pets, whose death, accepted as a portent, was soon almost to coincide with his own. For birds he had a passion; he was an unexampled dog-lover. He squandered much of his professional time in the society, innocent at least, of these favorite animals, and much of his professional money, in seeking and reclaiming such of them as were lost. There is a funny little advertisement in _Mercurius Publius_ for June 28th, 1660, the sly good-humor of which marks it as having been written out by none but the King himself. The advertisement was a renewed one. "We must call upon you again for a Black Dog, between a greyhound and a spaniel; no white about him, onely a streak on his Brest, and Tayl a little bobbed. It is His Majesties own Dog, and doubtless was stoln, for the Dog was not born or bred in England, and would never forsake his Master. Whosoever findes him, may acquaint any at Whitehall, for the Dog was better known at Court than those who stole him. Will they never leave robbing His Majesty? Must he not keep a Dog? This Dog's place, (though better than some imagine) is the onely place which nobody offers to Beg."

It is not uncharacteristic of his hatred of suffering, that it was Charles the Second who abolished the statute which had thoughtfully provided for the roasting of heretics. He might quite as well have abolished "cockfighting and courses," but he did not. On a certain 22nd of July, he wrote to his "deare, deare Sister" Henrietta: "I am one of those Bigotts who thinke that malice is a much greater sinn than a poore frailty of nature." And Burnet has assured us that the same remark was made, by the same moralist, to him, "that cruelty and falsehood are the worst vices": an opinion of pedigree, antedated by Taliesin, Chief of the Bards, in the sixth century. It would seem an irresistible inference that Butler must have heard of the royal speculation when he penned his immortal couplet:

"Compound for sins they are inclined to, By damning those they have no mind to."

(Charles used to carry in his pocket a copy of _Hudibras_ which Buckhurst gave him.) Cruelty, especially, was very far from this indulgent King. His first official appearance had been on an errand of mercy. As a spectator of ten, he had sat through the first session of Strafford's trial, "in his little chair beside the throne"; but he was sent as Prince of Wales, to carry his father's letter to the Peers, urging them to forbear or delay Strafford's execution. As the young nominal leader of the army in the west, he was full of compassion. "There's a child," said the Earl of Lindsay, "born to end this war we now begin. How gravely doth he pity the dead, the sick, the maimed!" His nature was thoroughly humane; and more: it was affectionate. It is the modern fashion to say he had no feeling. In this regard he has never been fairly appraised, and no wonder! He affected cynicism, and disclaimed sensitiveness; he made no confidences; he avoided "scenes." Yet he originated at least two scenes, which may be worth something to those who recognize true emotion, from whatever unexpected source, and honor it. One was in 1663, when the good Queen fell very ill, and when Charles, more and more conscience-stricken, dropped beside the bed, and begged her, with tears, to live for his sake. The other was when he himself lay dying, in his fifty-fifth year; when his old friend, the Benedictine priest, John Huddleston, came into the room before the lords, physicians, and gay gentlemen, to reconcile him to the Catholic Church, and give him the Holy Communion. The King was extremely weak, and in the greatest pain; but he was with difficulty kept in his recumbent position. "I would kneel," he said aloud several times, endeavoring to rise, "I would kneel to my Heavenly Lord." What if by such touching demonstrations, rather than by his miserable stifling stoicism, his taint of drugged indifference, he were to be judged? But to some he had always shown his heart. The dearest to him were those longest about him: even his old nurse, Mrs. Wyndham, had an extraordinary hold upon him. He was kindness itself to his sister-in-law, Anne Hyde, the first Duchess of York, at the very time when she was exposed to ridicule, and most needed a powerful friend; and he was no less kind to her successor, Mary of Modena, who never forgot him. His attachment to Monmouth is beyond question; yet it was no greater than his attachment to James, whose succession he safeguarded, with whom he had few qualities in common. For besides being the perfect companion Hume allows him to have been, he was a perfect brother. Mrs. Ady (Julia Cartright) justly observes, in the preface to _Madame_, her valuable memoir of Charles the First's youngest daughter, Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, that the private letters from the French archives, there first printed, written by Charles the Second, establish two novel points greatly in his favor: "the courage and spirit with which he could defend the privileges of his subjects and the rights of the British flag," and the extreme love and concern he had for his only surviving sister. Patriotism and affection are about the last things of which historians seem even yet likely to accuse him. Let us have a few of these epistolary extracts, at random; they are delightful, and worded with a careless idiomatic force equal to that of any correspondence of the time. Moreover, they make one surmise that a volume of Charles's less accessible letters to his mother and Prince Rupert, those to his sister Mary, not excluding the beautiful one on the occasion of their father's death, those to Clarendon, Lord Jermyn and others, would make, if collected from the private packets or state papers where they lie unread, in his own delicate, clear, whimsical hand, an uncommonly pleasant publication.

"To my deare, deare Sister.

"Pour l'avenir, je vous prie, ne me traitez pas avec tant de cérémonie, en me donnant tant de 'majestés,' car je ne veux pas qu'il y ait autre chose entre nous deux, qu'amitié."

"I will not now write to you in French, for my head is dosed with business!"

"Pray send me some images, to put in prayer-books: they are for my wife, who can gett none heere. I assure you it will be a great present to her, and she will looke upon them often; for she is not onlie content to say the greate office in the breviere every day, but likewise that of Our Lady too; and this is besides goeing to chapell, where she makes use of none of these. I am iust now goeing to see a new play; so I shall say no more but that I am intierly yours." (These are "the pretty pious pictures" which Pepys saw and admired.)

"They who will not beleeve anything to be reasonably designed unless it be successfully executed, have neede of a less difficult game to play than mine; and I hope friends will thinke I am now too old, and have had too much experience of things and persons to be grossly imposed upon; and therefore they who would seem to pity me so for being so often deceeved, do upon the matter declare what opinion they have of my understanding and judgment. And I pray you, discountenance those kind of people."

"I hope it is but in a compliment to me, when you say my niece" (the little Marie-Louise d'Orléans, afterwards Queen of Spain) "is so like me: for I never thought my face was even so much as intended for a beauty! I wish with all my heart I could see her; for at this distance I love her."

"Sir George Downing is come out of Holland, and I shall now be very busy upon that matter. The States keepe a great braying and noise, but I beleeve, when it comes to it, they will looke twise before they leape. I never saw so great an appetite to a warre as is in both this towne and country, espetially in the parlament-men, who, I am confident, would pawne there estates to maintaine a warre. But all this shall not governe me, for I will look meerly to what is just, and best for the honour and goode of England, and will be very steady in what I resolve: and if I be forsed to a warre, I shall be ready with as good ships and men as ever was seen, and leave the successe to God." (Here we have a sort of original for the modern chant:

"We don't want to fight: But, by Jingo, if we do, We've got the ships, we've got the men, We've got the money, too.")

(Of Harry Killigrew.) "I am glad the poore wrech has gott a meanes of subsistence; but have one caution of him, that you beleeve not one worde he sayes of us heere; for he is a most notorious lyar, and does not want witt to sett forth his storyes pleasantly enough."

"There is nobody desires more to have a strict frindship with the King of France than I do; but I will never buy it upon dishonourable termes; and I thanke God my condition is not so ill but that I can stande upon my own legges, and beleeve that my frindship is as valuable to my neighbours as theirs is to me."

"I have sent, this post, the extracts of the letters to my Ld. Hollis, by which you will see how much reason I have to stande upon the right my father had, touching the precedency of my ambassador's coach before those of the princes of the blood there. I do assure you, I would not insist upon it, if I had not cleerely the right on my side; for there is nobody that hates disputes so much as I do, and will never create new ones, espetially with one whose frindship I desire so much as that of the King of France. But, on the other side, when I have reason, and when I am to yeelde in a point by which I must goe less than my predesessours have done, I must confesse that consernes me so much as no frindship shall make me consent unto."