The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  He returned to London in March, 1666. In April, at the request of Bishop Sheldon, he drew up a plan for repairing the tottering cathedral, then almost six hundred years old. On August 27 a Commission for the Repair of St. Paul’s accepted Wren’s plan. Two weeks later the church was destroyed in the historic fire of London; the melted lead of its roof ran in the streets.

  That conflagration, razing two thirds of the capital, gave architecture an opportunity unprecedented since the burning of Rome. The fire was still smoldering when Wren offered to Charles II a majestic design for rebuilding the city. Charles accepted it, but could not find funds for it, and it conflicted with powerful property rights. Wren busied himself with other projects. In 1673 he prepared a classical design for a new St. Paul’s. The cathedral chapter objected that the design smacked of a pagan temple, and urged Wren to adhere to the Gothic style of the old church. He reluctantly agreed to a compromise by which the interior would have Gothic arches, transept, and choir, but the façade would be a Renaissance columnar portico with a classical pediment and two baroque towers. The result is an unpleasant mixture of styles, but Wren redeemed it by crowning the transept with a dome rivaling Brunelleschi’s at Florence and Michelangelo’s in Rome. St. Paul’s remains the finest church ever built by Protestants.

  While that project went on through thirty-five years, Wren, having succeeded Denham as surveyor general, designed fifty-three other churches, many of them famous for towers and spires that united his sense of beauty with his mathematical bent. Add the Custom House in London, the Greenwich and Chelsea hospitals, the chapels of Pembroke College at Cambridge and Trinity College at Oxford, the library of Trinity College at Cambridge, the classical east wing of Hampton Court Palace, thirty-six guildhalls, a number of private houses, and it seems that “no building of importance was erected during the last forty years of the seventeenth century of which Wren was not the architect.” 88 Through the reigns of Charles II, James II, William and Mary, and Anne, he retained his place as surveyor general. He retired from practice at eighty-six, but continued for five years more to superintend the work at Westminster Abbey; and some credit him with its towers. He died in his ninety-first year, and was buried in St. Paul’s.

  Sculpture was still an orphan in England, but wood carving was a major art. Grinling Gibbons was a worthy collaborator with Wren, carving the choir stalls and magnificent organ case in St. Paul’s, and decorations at Windsor Castle, Kensington Palace, and Hampton Court.

  English painting continued to import its masters and discourage its sons. Nevertheless some have ranked John Riley as the best portrait painter of the Restoration. He knew that a mature face is an autobiography; he could read its lines, and between them, with patient insight, he revealed its secrets with unprofitable courage. He was almost ruined by Charles II’s comment on Riley’s portrait of him: “Is that like me? Then, odds fish, I am an ugly fellow!” Much time elapsed before the court realized that this war a spontaneous compliment to the artist’s honesty. Riley transmitted with similar fidelity James II the foolish king, Edmund Waller the turncoat poet, and the Earl of Arundel the vain aristocrat. But when he paitned Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle he recognized genius, and caught its marks in the face and its light in the eyes. “With a quarter of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s vanity,” said Horace Walpole, “Riley might have persuaded the world that he was a master.” 89 He died in 1691, aged forty-five.

  Lely the Dutchman and Kneller the German were the fashionable portrait painters of that second Stuart age. Lely’s father was a Dutch soldier, van der Faes, whose nickname Lely (from a lily painted on his house) passed down to his son. Pieter was born in Westphalia (1618), studied painting in Haarlem, and took ship to England (1641) on hearing that Charles I had taste and pounds. He succeeded Vandyck as the most sought-for portraitist in England, and continued so under Cromwell and Charles II. He adopted Vandyck’s trick of endowing his sitters with elegance, even if only in dress. The beauties of the court besieged him; so in the National Portrait Gallery we see Nell Gwyn plump and naughty, and the Countess of Shrewsbury, notorious for her gallantries; and at Hampton Court Palace Lady Castlemaine and Louise de Kéroualle still flaunt their nipples from the walls. Lovelier is John Churchill pictured as a child, with his sister Arabella; 90 who would expect this angelic boy and angelic girl to become the invincible Duke of Marlborough and the irremovable mistress of James, Duke of York? Lely achieved knighthood and riches by such portraits. Charles II and half a dozen dukes sat for him. Pepys found him “a mighty proud man . . . and full of state,” 91 living in “pomp and victuals,” 92 and dated three weeks ahead.

  In 1674, six years before Lely’s death, a German arrived in London, resolved to succeed Sir Peter in portraiture, profits, and knighthood; and he accomplished his program. Gottfried von Kneller was then twenty-eight. Charles II made him court painter, and Kneller kept that post under James II and William III, who dubbed him knight. Sir Godfrey painted forty-three members of the politically powerful Kit Cat Club, 93 and ten sirens of William’s court, 94 and deprived Dryden and Locke of character. As everyone itched for immortality, Kneller turned his luxurious studio into a mass-production factory with an unprecedented staff of aides, each charged with some specialty—hands, drapery, lace. Sometimes he took fourteen sitters in a day. He built a mansion in the country, and commuted between it and his town house in a coach-and-six. He kept his head on his neck through all political overturns, and died in bed and honors at seventy-seven (1723). In that year Reynolds was born, Hogarth was twenty-six, and native painting was coming into its own.

  The Puritans had nearly obliterated art, but they had not silenced music. All but the lowliest homes had some musical instruments. Amid the great fire Pepys noticed virginals on almost every third boat carrying salvaged goods on the Thames. 95 “Music and women,” he wrote, “I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is”; and he mentions his flageolet, lute, theorbo, and “viollin” as frequently as his amours. 96 Everybody in his Diary plays music and sings; he takes it for granted that his friends can join in part song; 97 he and his wife and their maids sing in harmony in his garden, and so bearably that neighbors open their windows to hear them.

  In the Restoration jubilation music burst forth in all its forms. Charles brought in musicians from France, and soon let it be known that he favored tuneful, cheerful, intelligible compositions that did not take mathematics for melody. Organs were built again, and rumbled in the churches of the Establishment; those designed for St. George’s Chapel at Windsor and the cathedral at Exeter were among the wonders and thunders of the age. But even in church choirs solemnity was replaced by dramatic displays of instrumental virtuosos and vocal soloists. Charles II and James II ordered music for odes and masques to celebrate royal events; churches commissioned music; theaters ventured on opera. English composers and performers began to eat again.

  In 1656 Sir William Davenant persuaded the Protectorate government to let him reopen a theater on the ground that he would produce not a play but an opera. The First Dayes Entertainment that he staged was less an opera than a series of dialogues preceded, interrupted, and followed by music; but in that same year Davenant presented, in his own Rutland House, the first English opera, The Siege of Rhodes. 98 The closing of the theaters by the plague and the fire interfered with these experiments, but in 1667 the enterprising Davenant offered a musical adaptation of his alleged father’s Tempest. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas marked the full arrival of opera in England.

  As so often in musical history, Henry Purcell’s genius was in large part a product of social heredity—i.e., adolescent environment. His father was master of the choristers at Westminster Abbey; his uncle was “composer in ordinary for the violins to his Majesty”; his brother was a composer and dramatist, his son and his grandson continued his role as organist in the Abbey. He himself was allowed only thirty-seven years of life (1658–95). As a boy he sang in the Chapel Royal till his voice broke. As a youth he composed anthems that co
ntinued to be heard in English cathedrals for a century. His twelve sonatas (1683), for two violins and organ or harpsichord, brought the sonata form from Italy to England. His songs, anthems, cantatas, and chamber music, said Burney, “so far surpassed whatever our country had produced or imported before, that all other musical compositions seem to have been instantly consigned to contempt or oblivion.” 99

  Busy with his work as organist and composer, it was not till 1689 that Purcell produced Dido and Aeneas, for a select audience at a girls’ school in London. The music, even the famous overture, seems to us now thin and feeble; we have to remember that opera was still young, and that audiences did not then have our liking for noise. The final aria—Dido’s lament, “When I am laid in earth”—is one of the most moving airs in the whole history of opera.

  King Arthur (1691), for which Dryden wrote the words and Purcell the music, is not quite an opera, since the music seems to have little relation to the mood or events of the play—just as the play had little connection with the Arthurian cycle as we know it in Malory and Tennyson. A year later Purcell made a further advance with incidental music for The Fairy Queen, an anonymous adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He did not live to see it produced; the music was lost, was discovered in 1901, and is now ranked with Purcell’s best.

  In 1693 he composed the most elaborate of his many odes for St. Cecilia’s Day. But the finest of these is the joyful Te Deum and Jubilate of 1694; this was performed annually at the festival of the Sons of the Clergy till 1713, when it shared the honor with Handel’s Utrecht Te Deum in alternate years till 1743. For Queen Mary’s funeral (1695) Purcell wrote a famous anthem, “Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts.” In his final years he contributed incidental music to Dryden’s Indian Queen. Apparently he fell sick before he could complete this, for the music of the concluding masque was provided by his brother Daniel. He died, probably of consumption, on November 21, 1695.

  Despite the vitality of the Restoration, English music had not yet recovered from the cutting of its Elizabethan traditions by the Puritan interlude. Instead of rooting itself again in English soil, it followed the royal lead and bowed to French styles and Italian voices. After Dido and Aeneas the English operatic stage was dominated by Italian operas sung by Italians. “English music,” wrote Purcell in 1690, “is yet but in its nonage, a forward child, which gives hope of what it may be hereafter . . . when the masters of it shall find more encouragement.” 100

  V. MORALS

  Let us at once distinguish the masses from the classes. The sexual riot of the Restoration ran through the court to the upper middle class and the “people about town” who frequented the theatres. The morals of the unrecorded commoners were probably better than under Elizabeth, for economic routine kept them steady, they did not have the means to be wicked, and they still felt the stimulus and surveillance of their Puritan faiths. But in London, and above all at the court, the release and reaction from Puritan restraints engendered an hilarious promiscuity. Young aristocrats uprooted from England, and at loose ends in France, left their morals behind them in their exile, and brought a fluid chaos with them on their return. Avenging years of oppression and spoliation, they turned against the dress and speech, the theology and ethics, of the Puritans all the acid of their wit, until no man of their class dared say a word for decency. Virtue, piety, and marital fidelity became forms of rural innocence, and the most successful adulterer (as in Wycherley’s Country Wife) became the hero of the hour. Religion had literally lost caste; it belonged to tradesmen and peasants; most preachers were put down as long-faced, long-eared, long-winded hypocrites and bores. The only religion fit for a gentleman was a polite Anglicanism wherein the master attended Sunday services to lend support to a chaplain who kept the villagers in fear of hell, and who said grace with due brevity from the foot of the master’s board. It became more fashionable to be a materialist with Hobbes than a Christian with Milton, a blind old fool who took Genesis as history. Hell, overdone for the past twenty years, had lost its terrors for the possessing classes; heaven, for them, was here and now, in a society freed from social rebellion and moral inhibitions, under a court and King that gave the example and set the pace in lechery, gambling, and merriment.

  There were several good men and women at the court. Clarendon was a man of principle and conduct until his daughter allowed herself to be seduced, whereupon he lost his head and recommended that she should lose hers. The fourth Earl of Southampton and the first Duke of Ormonde were decent men. There were some sincerely religious men among the Anglican clergy, even in the hierarchy. The Queen, and Lady Fanshaw, and Miss Hamilton, and, later, Mrs. Godolphin, dared to be good. There were doubtless others, lost to history because virtue makes no news.

  The higher the rank, the lower the morals. The King’s brother James, Duke of York, seems to have exceeded even the royal allotment of mistresses. 101 While still in exile in Holland he had found his way to the bed of Anne Hyde, daughter of the Chancellor. When she became pregnant she begged him to marry her; he procrastinated, but finally made her secretly his legal wife seven weeks before she gave birth (October 22, 1660). On hearing of the marriage Clarendon, according to his own autobiography, 102 protested to the King that he had known nothing of this alliance; that “he had much rather his daughter should be the Duke’s whore than his wife”; that if they were really married, “the King should immediately cause the woman to be . . . cast into a dungeon”; and that “an act of Parliament should be immediately passed for cutting off her head, to which he would not only give his consent, but would very willingly be the first man that should propose it.” Charles shrugged the matter off as much ado about nothing. Probably the Chancellor knew that Charles would not take him at his word, and spoke with such Roman severity to offset any suspicion that he had arranged the marriage in order to make his daughter a queen. Anne, however, died of cancer in 1671, aged thirty-four.

  While motherhood distracted his wife, James made a mistress of Arabella Churchill, whose brother accepted the situation philosophically as favoring his advancement in the army. To aid Arabella and Anne the Duke took some supplementary bedmates; Evelyn was especially disgusted by his “bitchering” with Lady Denham (1666). 103 James’s conversion to Catholicism made no apparent change in his morals. “He was perpetually in one amour or another,” wrote Burnet, “without being very nice in his choice; upon which the King once said he believed his brother had his mistresses given him by his priests for penance.” 104 The liaison with Arabella continued as an organ tone during these variations; it survived the death of Anne, and James’s marriage (1673) to Mary of Modena.

  We should add that there were some admirable qualities in the Duke of York. As Lord High Admiral (1660–73) he toiled to overcome the disorder in the navy, due to the poor pay, victualing, and training of the seamen; and he conducted himself with courage and skill in the engagements with the Dutch. He attended ably and faithfully to the tasks of administration. He never wavered in his affectionate fidelity to his brother, and waited patiently through a quarter of a century before succeeding him on the throne. He was frank and sincere and easy of access, but too conscious of his rank and authority to be popular. He was a firm friend but an unforgiving enemy. His mind was rather laborious than keen; and he was suicidally immune to advice.

  Close below him at the court was George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham. Son of James I’s assassinated favorite, he fought for Charles I in the Civil War and for Charles II at Worcester; and the restored King made him a privy councilor. Handsome and witty, genial and generous, he for a time dominated the court with his charm. He wrote a brilliant comedy, The Rehearsal, and dallied with alchemy and the violin. But his face and his fortune ruined him. He passed from one woman to another, indulged in disgraceful frolics, and squandered his rich estate. Desiring the Countess of Shrewsbury, he challenged her husband to a duel; she, disguised as a page, held Buckingham’s horse while he fought; he killed the Count; the happ
y widow embraced the victor, who was still covered with her husband’s blood; then they returned in triumph to the victim’s home. 105 Buckingham was dismissed from office (1674), abandoned himself to degeneration, and died in poverty and disgrace (1688).

  His rival in figure, wit, revelry, and decay was John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester. John received the master’s degree at Oxford at the incredible age of fourteen (1661), was admitted to the court at seventeen, and became gentleman of the bedchamber to the King. At nineteen, needing money, he made love to a rich heiress; finding her dilatory, he kidnaped her, suffered imprisonment, won the lady’s sympathy, then her hand, then her fortune. Charles repeatedly banished him from the court, and repeatedly let him return, relishing his wit. Like Buckingham, Rochester was an expert mimic. He delighted to disguise himself as a porter, a beggar, a merchant, a German physician, and so successfully that he deceived his closest friends. As a physician he pretended to effect difficult cures through his knowledge of astrology; he attracted hundreds of patients and cured several; soon the ladies of the court came to him for treatment, and even those who had known him well failed to recognize him. 106 In nearly all these disguises he pursued women, quite disregarding their rank, and they pursued him. He amused himself by writing satirical obscenities, ruined his health with liquor and lechery, and boasted of having been drunk uninterruptedly through five years. He died in poverty and penitence at thirty-three.

  There were so many others like him at the court that Pepys, himself no amateur in adultery, wondered “what will be the end” of “so much . . . drinking, swearing, and loose amours.” 107 Or, as Pope was to phrase it in his Essay on Criticism, not with full justice to the King:

  When love was all an easy monarch’s care,

  Seldom at council, never in a war,

  Jilts ruled the state, and statesmen farces writ;