Chapter VI: Part 6

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."

"Your kindnesse I will strive to diserve by all the
endeavours of my life, as the thing in the worlde I value
most."

Charles was dear to the masses, as any ruler of his unimperious humor is sure to be. When the King and Queen came down from Hampton Court in their barge, the Thames watermen shouted cheerfully at him: "God bless thee, King Charles, and thy good woman there. Go thy ways for a wag!" Among his inferior subjects he never lacked partisans and apologists. He was something of a hero even to his valet: faithful Tobias Rustat, Yeoman of the Robes, spent a fortune putting up statues, at Chelsea and Windsor, "domino suo clementissimo." The Roundheads whom Charles had released, chiefly men of no rank or influence, watched him after, with friendliest longing and regret; never without extenuations, and certain hope of change. "By enlarging us," they said in their message of thanks, "you have multiplied our captivity, and made us more your prisoners than we could be in the Tower." When Death gave him his abrupt summons, "amid inexpressible luxury and profaneness," on a wintry Monday in his town palace, the poor crowded the churches, for the whole six days, "sobs and tears interrupting the prayers of the congregations." Joy-bells and bonfires bespoke their relief at the mistaken report that he was convalescent. Every schoolboy, prentice, and serving-maid in London wore mourning for him; although he had been buried secretly by night, and there was no pageant at Westminster to memorialize their grief. Always, and despite all, he was sure of the loyalty of the people. "Fret not that I go unattended," he would tell his brother: "for they will never kill me, James, to make you king." "The horrid plot" found him the coolest head in England. But towards the end, it began to tell upon him and dash his spirits. He closed his doors for the first time, and went abroad with a guard, hurt and dejected. This was but an incident in a life as free from suspicion as a tree's. The folk who came to see Charles at his masques and fairs and Twelfth-Night dice-throwings and Easter alms-givings; the two hundred and forty thousand whom, with great boredom and greater patience, he touched for the King's Evil; the multitudes who had experienced his concern and practical energy during the Fire, when he had done them all manner of personal service,--these were his vassals to the last. Nor had he ever a private enemy. He was popular in the extreme; and might be commemorated as an admirable prince, if tested by the measure of Martial's epigram, that a prince's main virtue is intimate knowledge of his subjects. Tradition does not aver that he made integrity of living contagious among them, though society copied his tolerance and affability, his sense, spirit, and gracefulness. But nothing ever broke their faith in him. Says Lingard: "During his reign the arts improved, trade met with encouragement, the wealth and comforts of the people increased. To this flourishing state of the nation we must attribute the acknowledged fact, that whatever the personal failings or vices of the King, he never forfeited the love of his subjects. Men are always ready to idolize the sovereign under whose sway they feel themselves happy." Charles might have confessed with Elia: "How I like to be liked, and what don't I do to be liked!" His wheedling charm was irresistible. He was an adept, when he willed, in the science of honeyed suasion. Like the Florentine painters, he could suffer no slovenly detail, nor a convention to pass him without some individualizing touch. Before he had contracted the Portuguese alliance, Count Da Ponte had taken his letter to Lisbon: "To the Queen of Great Britain, my wife and lady, whom God preserve." The blood royal has a pretty etiquette of its own; not quite this, however. How beautifully, again, was it said to the Commons, shortly after the accession: "I know most of your faces and names, and can never hope to find better men in your places." And this intimate conciliatory tone, which it was Charles's pleasure to employ towards others, others used in speaking of him. There is a fatherly pang in some of the little messages plying between the noble colleagues, Clarendon and Ormonde. "The King is as decomposed as ever: which breaks my heart.... He seeks for his satisfaction and delight in other company, which do not love him so well as you and I do." And there is nothing tenderer in all history than the narration of Charles's leave-taking from his hushed Whitehall, written at the time by the Reverend Francis Roper, chaplain to the Bishop of Ely, unless it be an account of the same strange and moving scene, sent later by the Catholic Earl of Perth to the Catholic Countess of Kincardine, on the tenth of December, 1685.

Every street-corner evangelist may harp on the rottenness of the Restoration: what concerns us is its human sparkle. There was an astonishing dearth of dull people; the bad and bright were in full blossom, and the good and stupid were pruned away. The company reminds one of Aucassin's hell, which, on a certain occasion, he chose with such gusto, for its superior social qualities. "Charles the Second!" exclaims William Hazlitt, in his most enjoying mood: "what an air breathes from the name! What a rustle of silks and waving of plumes! What a sparkle of diamond earrings and shoe-buckles! What bright eyes! (Ah, those were Waller's Sacharissa's, as she passed.) What killing looks and graceful motions! How the faces of the whole ring are dressed in smiles! How the repartee goes round; how wit and folly, elegance, and awkward imitation of it, set one another off!" These are the days when young Henry Purcell bends for hours over the Westminster Abbey organ, alone; and Child, Locke, Lawes, and Gibbons are setting ballads to entrancing cadences, and conveying them to Master W. Thackeray, the music-printer, at The Angel, in Duck Lane; when another Gibbons, rival of the spring, carving on wood, makes miraculous foliage indoors, to cheat the longing wind; when a diligent Clerk of the Acts of the Navy, curiously scanning the jugglers and gymnasts on his leisurely way, trots by in "a camlett coat with silver buttons"; when Robert Herrick, the town-loving country vicar, ordering his last glass, stands watching through the tavern window-pane the King gravely pacing the greensward with Hobbes and Evelyn, or bantering Nell Gwynne over her garden wall; when Walton angles with his son Cotton in the Dove, and Claude Duval exquisitely relieves travellers' bags of specie; when the musical street-cries run like intersecting brooks: "Rosemary and sweetbrier: who'll buy my lavender?" "Fresh cheese and cream for you!" "Oranges and citrons, fair citrons and oranges!" when Richardson, the eater of glass and fire, is bidden to entertain in drawing-rooms, broiling an oyster on a live coal held in his mouth, and the instant he departs, hears the company fall to playing blind-man's buff, and "I love my love with an A"; when the click of duelling swords is heard in the parks at sundown, and groups of affectionate gentlemen sway homewards by the fainter morning ray, and coaches roll along lending glimpses of pliant fans, and of Lely's languishing faces. In and out of this whirl of thoughtless life move the august figures of Sir Thomas Browne and "that Milton that wrote for the regicides," and, later, of Sir Isaac Newton; the golden shadow of Jeremy Taylor, and the childish footsteps of Steele and his head boy Addison, regenerators to be; the vanishing presence of Clarendon, and the patriots, Russell, Vane, Algernon Sydney, good hearts in the dungeon and at the block; of Bunyan the tinker, and the fighters Fairfax and Rupert, and the scholar poets who prodigally strew their delicate numbers on the wind. Execrable ministries, Dutch defiances and insults, French pensions, pestilence and plot: but still the moth-hunts go on. "At all which I am sorry, but it is the effect of idleness" (who should it be but Pepys, making this deep elemental excuse?) "and having nothing else to employ their great spirits upon." The irised bubbles were soon to scatter, and the Hanoverian super-solids to come and stay. The great change is germinal, as all great changes are, and more visible in its processes than most. The reign of Charles the Second is full of supplements and reserves; nothing is so lawless as it seems; the genius ever unemployed, the virtue in arrest, "tease us out of thought," and change color under our eyes. Hornpipes turn to misereres; masks, one by one, fall away. Mrs. Aphra Behn, be it remembered, was, off the printed page, nothing more unspeakable than a decent industrious woman. That bygone England played at having no moral sense: on a subtle argument of Browning's, one may quarrel with it that it did not play equally well to the end. Neither was it the minor actor of the Restoration who, near the exit, flagged, saw visions, and spoke strange words out of his part: it was Rochester, it was Louise de Quérouailles, it was the King. "Without desire of renown," Macaulay finds him, "without sensibility to reproach." Why arraign the King? He will agree with Macaulay or another, charge by charge: which is damaging to the arraigner. As for accusations not personal, his retorts might be less gentle. Great Britain sued for him: and he never posed for a moment as other than he was. His coming hastened a reparative holiday; itself but the breath of reaction. That inevitable abuses should be ranked among the laws of Nature, is one of Vauvenargues' fine profound inferences. If, in some of his inspirational moments, the King exceeded his prerogative (by endeavoring, for instance, to abrogate the code bearing so cruelly upon all persons of other religious opinions than those of the State), Parliament and the people had foregone their right of complaint: they had deliberately chosen to make him an autocrat. No fanatic on any point, Charles would have bound himself readily to reasonable conditions, while his fortunes were pending; yet no pledges were exacted. Moderate precautions and safeguards, suggested in the Commons by Hale and Prynne, had been set aside by Monk, and overruled. Monk was but a dial's shadow, "the hand to the heart of the nation." He brought in not only the monarchy, but a potent individuality: one not led hither and thither, but a maker and marrer of his time. That melancholy figure was the axis of fast-flying and eccentric revelry. To some of us he is one of the most complex and interesting men in history. Judge him by old report and general current belief, and he is "dead body and damnèd soul"; examine his own speech and script, and the testimony of those who had him at close range from his boyhood: and lo, he has heights and distances, as well as abysses; he is self-possessed, not possessed of the devil; he is dangerous, if you will, but not despicable. Following an evil star, he, at least, after Ovid, perceived and approved the highest. Until the Georgian succession, his was a popular memory. But with the Stuart decadence, and the consummation of what _The Royalist_ smartly labels as "the great Protestant Swindle," down went his name with better names: all, from Laud to Claverhouse, doomed to share a long obloquy and calumny, from which they are singly being rescued at last, as from the political pit. I know nothing so illustrious of Charles the Playgoer as that he was able to win the strong attachment of Dr. Samuel Johnson, albeit a century of ill repute lay between. Our wise critic, though he formulated it not, must have seen clearly the duplex cause of the King's failure in life. For half of that failure there is a theological term. Permit me to use it, and to illumine the whole subject by it: no flash-light is keener. Charles the Second was unfaithful to Divine Grace. Again, no man, endowed with so exquisite a sense of humor in over-development, can, of his own volition alone, escape lassitude, errancy, and frivolity founded on scorn. Humor, as a corrective, is well: but

----"the little more, and how much it is!"

To have been born with a surplus of it is to be elf-struck and incapacitated. Nothing is worth while, nothing is here nor there; the only way to cut short the torture of self-observation and the infamy of not being able to form a prejudice, is to abandon ideals. Pass over, in the King, this too mordant and too solvent intelligence, and you lose the key to a strange career. Perhaps two of his ancestors, two of the Haroun-al-Raschid temper, dominated him: the gallant Gudeman of Ballangleich, and as a nearer influence on Charles, that gay, beloved, fickle, easily-masterful man, his grandsire of Navarre. He was like these, and in harmony with their adventurous soldier-world: naturally, he was incurably out of joint with his own isle, her confused introspective moods hardly subsided. He was a philosopher, and above all, an artist: such a king, in England, can never be the trump card. He seems to have thought out the situation, and to have capitulated with all his heart. We need not tell each other that he might have been different. Let us mend our tenses, and agree that he would and must have been different, in Scotland or in France.

Yet Lord Capell's dying word was right: his King, though a traitor, and intellectually as homesick for France as Mary Stuart before him, was "a very perfect Englishman": he had, in some degree, every quality which goes to make up the lovableness of English character; and his Latin vices, large to the eye, are festooned around him, rather than rooted in him. One who knows the second Charles, all in all, and still preserves a great kindness for him, might do worse than borrow for his epitaph what Mr. Henley has written of Lovelace, Richardson's Lovelace, "the completest hero of fiction." "He has wit, humor, grace, brilliance, charm: he is a scoundrel and a ruffian; and he is a gentleman, and a man."

CLAY

(_After a pause, shyly._) That's all. Will it do, Wetherell?

WETHERELL

Why, yes; on the whole. It is--well, lopsided; and so mortal serious, you know. Not that it isn't great fun, too. You will carry the audience. You really ought not to: it is a sort of abduction! (_They stroll out through the Horse Guards, and towards Parliament Square._)

MRS. WETHERELL

I thought you might say something about Chelsea Hospital. It is a good thing, I am sure; and Charles the Second was the founder.

WETHERELL

No, Nell Gwynne: she put him up to it. I am told the old war-dogs over there will eat you, Lord love 'em, if you say a word against either of these.

MRS. WETHERELL

What was she like?

CLAY

Oh, wild honey. Just such a one as Mr. Du Maurier's Trilby.

WETHERELL

Quite true, quite true! (_They laugh._) A capital comparison: thank you for it. And comparisons, being odorous, remind me of my dinner. Rhoda very much wishes you to come home with us.

MRS. WETHERELL

Please do, Mr. Clay, and quite as you are. No one but ourselves and my nice New York cousins, whom we are going to meet. We shall dine early, so that you may have time afterwards, before your lecture.

WETHERELL

To repent.

CLAY

Aye, quicksilver creature! to re-dress. There! Mrs. Wetherell, have I not understood you and avenged you, too?

MRS. WETHERELL

Indeed, you always do. Will you come?

CLAY

Many thanks to you; I should like nothing better. Will you mind if we go directly into the Abbey? It is early yet for your appointment; but I should delight in showing you the effigy. I'll wager a full farthing Percy never saw it.

MRS. WETHERELL

The effigy?

CLAY

Yes; King Charles the Second's.

WETHERELL

Heigho! it would seem that we have not buried the biographee, after all. But I am sceptical. I remember no effigy. Unfold.

CLAY

Here we are at the porch. Just follow me.... (_They go quietly in file through the north transept and ambulatory, and up the great steps of Henry the Seventh's Chapel._) There: to the right; inside, east end. How dark it is!

MRS. WETHERELL

Aren't you coming?

CLAY

No; if you will excuse me. Conceive of me as sentimental; I hate to step over that slab, or go by it, somehow.

WETHERELL

(_Farther up._) Not a soul here, to adore this surpassing tomb of Lady Richmond. There's art for you! But no effigy of yours visible. Your infallibility waneth. _Animus vester ego, Argilla mea!_ the which is choice Schoolboy for--Mind your eye, O Clay.

CLAY

Of course there's none now.

WETHERELL

Avaunt, then, deceiving monster!

CLAY

But it used to stand, with Anne, William and Mary, and with Monk behind it, there on the site of the old altar-stone; his name is cut over the vault. That is where Dr. Johnson visited it often.

WETHERELL

I had forgotten. What were you saying about stepping over the slab?

CLAY

Not that slab. I meant the other, where Mrs. Wetherell is standing. The tragic names are all together there: Mary Queen of Scots, Rupert, and the lovely and dear Queen of Bohemia, and young Henry of Gloucester, and poor Arabella Stuart, and--

MRS. WETHERELL

(_Slowly reading_)--ten infant children of King James the Second, and eighteen infant children of Queen--

WETHERELL

Tee-hee!

MRS. WETHERELL

Percy!

CLAY

Sure enough, it does sound ticklish! But hush, Wetherell: people will hear. (_They descend._) That verger in the dim amber light, standing in the dear little doorway of S. John's, will let us see the cases in the chantry. You have to show the Dean's pass. Wait a moment: I must get mine. (_He draws a card from his pocket and approaches the verger, who immediately leads the way to the stair of the Islip Chapel._)

MRS. WETHERELL

(_First on the stair, five minutes after._) Ghastly things! Truly, aren't they perfectly appalling?

THE VERGER

Oh, it's wax, you know, _isn't_ it? We think them uncommonly precious. So ancient, ma'am. Carried at their own funerals, and dressed in their own clothes. King Charles the Second, this is: he's the oldest genuine one of those we show.

MRS. WETHERELL

Can it be possible that this lace all black with age, this beautiful lace--? Yes, it is point! (_Hangs enraptured._)

WETHERELL

The head is surprisingly fine, for anything of the half-spook half-dolly order. You say it was modelled on the death-mask?

CLAY

Yes; you have seen it in the Museum.

WETHERELL

I like it better than any of the portraits. It gives one a gentler impression, somehow. Who are these? (_He and his wife move on to the Duchess of Buckinghamshire and Queen Anne._)

CLAY

As for me, I shall stay with you, of course, my poor old never-obsolete Most Sacred Majesty. What a pity you shirked your work so!

"Qu'as-tu fait, ô toi que voilà,
De ta jeunesse?"

Ah, well! It is not beyond my right to say that to you, since I am the only one alive who loves you.

TWO FEMALE VOICES BELOW

Cousin Rhoda! Rhoda! Percy! We saw you come up, from where the Coronation Chair is; and the little door was left open. Oh, isn't this splendid to find you? How DO you do?

THE VERGER

I beg your pardon, gentlemen; Evensong is just about to begin.

WETHERELL

Thank you; then we the heathen must go at once. Clay, let me present you to---- See: he's in dreamland.

MRS. WETHERELL

I wonder if thoughts of dinner can rouse him.

WETHERELL

Not unless you can provide the suitably archaic wild boar, and the flask of canary.

THE MISSES FRANEY

You both look so well! Dreadful, Percy, if you'll believe it. The stewardess said there had not been such a passage for--

MRS. WETHERELL

Hurry, Cornelia. The service is beginning.

(_A strain from the organ wakes Clay. He follows them down, tiptoeing past the filling pews, covering the oak-twig still in his hat._)

WETHERELL

(_In an undertone, on the threshold._) The air is good, again. Lo, I perceive the genial 'bus yonder, also several nimble cabs. Come, ladies fair; come, Clay. You shall eat posthumously in the nineteenth century, and make us all drink the health of "the Blackbird"; as the old song has it,

[Music: "With a fa la lá, la-la, la-la, la la lá, with a fa la lá, la-la, lá, lá."]

(_Clay smiles, and they pass out into the Square._)

THIS BOOK WAS PRINTED BY
JOHN WILSON AND SON, AT
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE,
MASSACHUSETTS, DURING
MAY, 1897

These essays have appeared, during the last ten years, in The Contributor's Club of _The Atlantic Monthly_, _The Chap-Book_, _The Independent_, _The Catholic World_, and _The Providence Journal_. _An Open Letter to the Moon_, and _On Teaching One's Grandmother to Suck Eggs_, are reprinted, by permission, from _Goose-Quill Papers_, Roberts Brothers, Boston, 1885.

[Transcriber's Note: Obvious printer errors have been corrected without note.]