Another hectic party in which Buckhurst was concerned took place at the ‘Cock Tavern’ in Bow Street, kept by old Oxford Kate, this time with Sir Charles Sedley and Sir Thomas Ogle for companions. With Buckhurst it appears to have been a particularly loquacious evening, which is as good as saying that he was very drunk indeed. So drunk, in fact, were the whole party that they stripped off all their clothes and proceeded to dance round the room stark naked. This would not have mattered greatly, but they needs must perform the same antics upon the first floor balcony in full view of the street, and proceeded to scandalize the assembled multitude by adopting all the most vicious postures in the nude which they could think of. The mob were furious at this indecency, and the roisterers were only rescued from the clutches of the angry crowd, who stormed the tavern, with the greatest difficulty. All London was shocked and offended by this unseemly exhibition, and the lewd jesters were bound over to keep the peace in a sum of £5,000.
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was the son of that great Cavalier who had been the King’s companion during the flight after Worcester, and when in 1664 he presented himself at Court, he was naturally given a very kind reception. He was then a thin-faced, fair-haired stripling fresh from his travels in France and Italy and adorned with a natural modesty—which, with his quick intelligence and ready wit, soon won him a foremost place among the King’s intimates.
How long he preserved that modesty is not recorded, but his wit is with us still, and as a satirist he holds a high place in English literature. Unfortunately much of his most amusing verse is quite unprintable at the present day, but, on the other hand, many of his poems possess a delicacy of thought and purity of motive which approach sheer beauty. He was capable of writing the most indecent satires in one mood, and, in another, songs of such airy charm as the following:
‘I Promis’d Sylvia to be true;
Nay, out of Zeal, I swore it too
And that she might believe me more,
Gave her in writing what I swore;
Not Vows, not Oaths can Lovers bind;
So long as bless’d, so long they’re kind:
’Twas in a Leaf, the Wind but blew,
Away both Leaf and Promise flew.’
Rochester soon became one of the most powerful patrons of the drama, and Dryden owed much of his first success to his friendship. Later, however, they quarrelled and the Earl gave his patronage to Settle and Crowne. In the meantime he had found ample leisure to go the pace with the wildest rakes of Whitehall, and on account of one escapade had been sent to the Tower before he was nineteen.
This affair concerned a Miss Mallet, a beauty of considerable fortune from the north. He fell violently in love with her, and, since her family would not listen to his suit, he took the law into his own hands. The lady was proceeding home one night in her coach, accompanied by her grandfather, when Rochester and his bravoes fell upon them at Charing Cross. The girl was dragged out and placed in another coach which drove off at all speed to Uxbridge, but the abduction was a failure as the family set off in hot pursuit and regained possession of the lady.
It seems that the enchanting Miss Mallet had a number of beaux, and she herself summed up her situation with regard to them in the following neat manner: ‘Lord Hinchinbroke was indifferent to have her, Lord John Butler might not have her, Lord Herbert would have her, Sir Francis Popham would do anything to have her, and Lord Rochester would have her by force.’ And Rochester did have her, for, although he had to wait two years, he married her in the end.
He was far from being a faithful husband, yet a very real devotion existed between the two, right up till his death. It was his practice to spend each winter at Court and the summer in the country, and he seems to have taken great pleasure in the rural joys of his estates, where life in the bosom of his family was enlivened by his zest for practical jokes. Often he roamed the country disguised as a tramp, and on one occasion visited Burford in the guise of a tinker. There he collected all the pots and pans he could lay his hands on, but instead of mending them he knocked all their bottoms out, for which piece of nonsense the angry villagers clapped him in the stocks. His wit, however, proved equal to the occasion. He sent a note to his steward for his coach, and when it arrived that night, his henchmen dug up stocks, Rochester, and all—and thus conveyed him home.
It was principally during these long sojourns in the country that he composed his scandalous satires against the people at Court, and many were at a loss to know how he procured his uncanny knowledge of their most secret peccadilloes. The truth of the matter was that he had engaged a footman who knew everybody of note by sight, equipped the fellow with a red coat and a musket, and kept him posted every night near the Whitehall lodgings of those about whom he required information. Nobody, of course, suspected a sentry, and Rochester secured first-hand knowledge of all the latest amours.
Charles’ own dictum on humour was, ‘Good jests should bite like lambs—not dogs; they should cut, not wound,’ but Rochester’s opinion was very different. Even when his satires were aimed at his best friends he could not restrain his pen from a cruel malice, and his bitter humour earned him many enemies—yet these so feared the lash of further attacks that they dared not quarrel with him openly.
One may perhaps be excused for quoting the opening lines of ‘A Satyr’ which he one day slipped into the King’s pocket, since, although it is by no means so indecent as many of his verses, nothing can so well exemplify the nature of his scurrilous attacks—as this, upon a generous friend and master.
‘Preserv’d by wonder in the Oak O Charles
And then brought in by the Duke of Albemarle
The first by Providence, the next all Devil,
Show’s thour’t a Compound made of Good and Evil—
The Bad we’ave too long known, the Good’s to come,
But not expected till the day of Doom;
Was ever Prince’s Soul so meanly Poor,
To be a slave to every little Whore?
The Seamans Needle nimbly points the Pole
But thine still turns to every * * *
******** *******
***********
* * * is the Mansion House where thou dost dwell,
But thou art fix'd as Tortoise to her shell,
Whose Head peeps out a little now and then
To take air, and then creeps in again.’
For this witty piece of nastiness he was sent to the Tower, and indeed from the time of his first coming to Court there was rarely a year elapsed when he was not sent upon a similar excursion for the same type of offence. Yet Charles was ever more ready to forgive than punish, and it went against the grain to deprive himself of this amusing companion for long—so Rochester was always speedily set at liberty again.
The Comte de Grammont, that amusing Frenchman who was banished by Louis XIV for looking too amorously at one of his own lady loves, and passed the most agreeable of exiles at the Court of Charles, who adopted him into his innermost circle, once said of Rochester, ‘If he could by any means divest himself of one half of his wit, the other would make him the most agreeable man in the world’—and we may assume that it was that second half which so endeared him to the King.
Such, then, were the principal personages, nearly all in their riotous twenties, among whom Charles moved and had his being, during the first decade of his actual kingship, and it must not be imagined that they were only occasional visitors to his Court.
The Palace of Whitehall in those early days was a great rambling mass of buildings, which covered more than a quarter of a million square feet along the bend of the river bank. Between it and the City proper lay three miles of private gardens, open spaces and suburbs; the highway between the two being the splendid waterway of the Thames, which at that time carried such an abundance of colourful traffic that it has been compared to the Grand Canal in Venice. The Palace and its adjacent buildings were as a little town set completely apart, anil there were housed not only the Que
en and Duchess of York, with their Maids of Honour, but the Mistresses Ministers, great Officers of State, Courtiers and Soldiers, together with their dependants and retainers.
The King, as the head and virtual father of this vast multitude resembling almost an Oriental family, met them constantly in the galleries and the anti-chambers, or on the river steps and bowling green, with a pleasant word, and kindly thoughtfulness for the welfare of them all.
Upon their lives, therefore, his character must have exercised considerable influence, yet no one can deny that by such constant contact their age and circumstances must have had much influence on his own.
Five
The Power behind the Throne
From the foregoing description of the tastes and morals of Charles’ most intimate companions, one might well imagine that the legend of him—as an idle, dissipated Monarch, who allowed the affairs of his Kingdom to go hang—is correct.
That he was dissipated there is no doubt, and we have ample proof that he developed ‘the gentle art of idling gracefully’ to an apotheosis, but what the historians of our school-days fail to point out is that Charles put in a nineteen-hour day.
Up at five in the morning with the greatest regularity, and rarely in bed before midnight, his magnificent physique enabled him to ride, hunt, shoot, fish, swim, or row upon the river in the early hours of the morning, laze among his courtiers in the evening, indulge his amorous propensities by candle-light—and yet devote the middle hours of the day to business with intelligence and ability.
Rochester once nailed the oft-quoted verse upon his bedroom door:
‘Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King,
Whose Promise none relies on;
He never said a Foolish Thing,
Nor ever did a Wise One.’
‘That may well be,’ replied the Monarch with his quiet, dark smile. ‘For my discourse is my own, but my actions are my Ministers’.’ Yet in actual fact no statement could be less true.
In European history one often comes across a phrase ‘The Power behind the Throne’ in application to various influences ranging from the genius of a Cardinal Richelieu to the perfumed breath of a Madame du Barry. In the case of Charles II it was a sort of dual personality. A Second Man with a firm chin and able brain who lurked at the elbow of the amiable, good-natured Monarch, embodying all his finest qualities—that alone was the Power behind the Throne.
With consummate skill he selected the men most appropriate for his Ministers, utilized ifiem to deal with his unruly Parliaments, > d and encouraged them to put forward measures wtuen he wished to pass, or gently curbed their impetuosity; so that they acted always in accordance with his will, though often in ignorance of his secret policy, which he pursued with tranquil, undeviating determination.
His first business upon his Restoration was to make legal the promises which he had given in the Declaration of Breda.
Firstly, he had undertaken that the Standing Army should receive their arrears of pay and be disbanded. For an entire decade it had ruled the country with a ruthless force, subject to no authority but that of its leaders. It was detested by the people who had suffered under an appalling burden of taxation for its upkeep, and Charles was quick to realize how helpless he would be in the face of any sudden opposition from this armed body, drawn from stern Puritan sources. Therefore, by a stupendous financial effort, he raised the money to satisfy their demands, and, with a sigh of thankfulness, saw these 40,000 sober Ironsides lay down their weapons.
At the same time the shrewd King felt that a small body of highly trained, well-armed men who were devoted to his person might prove extremely useful in times of trouble; so he retained Monk’s crack regiment, the Coldstream, as household troops, and a cohort of picked cavalry who became known as ‘The Blues’. Further, he re-embodied two new regiments whose loyalty could be depended on—‘The Royal Scots’, from Cavaliers who in exile had taken service under the King of France, and ‘The Buffs’, from similar adherents who had served under the banner of Holland.
The second question was the granting of a General Amnesty for all who had taken up arms against his father or himself. The only exceptions to this were to be the Regicides who had participated in the trial and execution of Charles I, but upon this question the nation did not show by any means the same unanimity as it had in the disbandment of the Army.
The new Parliament met in January, 1661, and as a result of the tremendous reaction it was Royalist to the backbone. Many of the members were extremely young, but on this being pointed out to the King, he was so delighted by their first demonstration of loyalty that he exclaimed, ‘Odd’s fish—what matter, I will keep them till they grow beards,’ but he soon found that their exuberance took a very dangerous form.
Had he allowed them to have their way, the result would have been appalling—nothing less than a White Terror would have swept through the land, engulfing the old Parliamentarians in a tornado of fines, imprisonment, and death. There was not a country squire in the length and breadth of England but had some insult or persecution to avenge, and the new Cavalier Parliament was packed with their representatives.
Quietly but firmly Charles undertook the difficult task of setting his face against his own most devoted supporters. In vain they accused him of being a bad son forgetful of his father’s death, and a false friend who neglected to right the wrongs that they had suffered in his cause. With good-natured remonstrance he quieted their cries for blood and vengeance, decreeing that the twenty-eight Regicides alone should go to execution, and that for the rest—the hatchet must be buried.
The bodies of Cromwell and Ireton were dug up and, having swung in clanking chains, the grim fruit of the gallows tree, were re-buried with public ignominy at Tyburn. Those who are interested will find the spot with ease. Face Hyde Park upon the south-western comer of Edgware Road, step off the pavement, and there inserted in the road about half-way between the kerb and the taxi- rank will be seen a triangular piece of steel. That is the spot where so many reprobates ‘danced upon the empty air’.
Having satiated his loyal citizens with this senseless but harmless barbarity against the dead, Charles exerted himself to save the living. When he heard later of the excesses committed in his name by the new Royalist Governor. Sir William Berkeley, in far-away Virginia, he exclaimed angrily, ‘That old fool has put to death more people in that naked country than I did here for the murder of my father.’ At home, when only ten of the Regicides had paid the extreme penalty, the King scribbled some words upon a piece of paper and pushed it across the table to Clarendon. It read, ‘I confess I am weary of hanging—let it rest.’ And so, by his great clemency, even the majority of the Regicides were reprieved at last.
The third matter was even more difficult than the second, since it concerned ‘Security of Tenure’ for those who held lands formerly the property of the Crown, the Church, or the Cavaliers participant in the Civil War. Not unnaturally, everybody who had in any way served the Royalist cause expected their property back, and more if they could get it, but to have wiped out at one stroke every transaction in property which had taken place during the last eighteen years would obviously have been a terrible injustice to many. In a large number of cases lands originally confiscated or sold to assist the Royalist cause had changed hands a dozen times, the first purchasers were dead and the present owners men no less loyal than their original holders. What was to be done? Obviously there was no solution which could satisfy all parties, and so a middle course was taken—All lands which had been arbitrarily confiscated by the Common- weath were to returned to their first owners; lands sold by Royalists for whatever purpose were to remain the property of the present holders.
The Crown, the Church, and the Great Nobles came off well by this arrangement, while the country gentry fared badly. Hundreds of the latter had been compelled to sell their estates upon a falling market in order to pay the fines imposed by Parliament for having taken up arms on behalf of the King during the Civil
War, or participation in Royalist risings at a later date. Now, at the Restoration, all their hopes of regaining their estates were dashed by a new law which debarred them from them for ever.
A howl of execration went up against the King, and on every side he was accused of base ingratitude towards those who had served him best. Yet he was only carrying out the promise to which his restoration had been subject, and it is difficult to see how else he could have dealt with this problem unless he was prepared to face another revolution. -
This law giving ‘Security of Tenure’ becomes of first importance when considering Parliament’s attitude to the King later in his reign. By it he unwillingly penalized the Cavalier Squires and alienated their affections. Their influence in Parliament, as we have already noted, was extremely strong, and it was very largely due to a desire to get their own back that they afterwards so consistently refused to vote him adequate funds.
The last and most difficult problem which he had to face as the result of the Declaration of Breda was his promise of ‘Liberty of Conscience’.
There can be no doubt that Charles’ personal views on the question of religion were a hundred and fifty years ahead of his time. He stood heart and soul for that attitude which has only become really general during the last fifty years—namely the belief ‘That every man should have freedom to make his service to God in the manner which he considers best’—but to the great majority of the people of England at that time, such an attitude was regarded as almost worse than being an atheist.
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