The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  Nay, wits had pensions, and young lords had wit; . . .

  The modest fan was lifted up no more,

  And virgins smiled at what they blushed before. 108

  It was taken for granted that wives were as unfaithful as husbands; these demanded fidelity only from their mistresses. 109 The memoirs of Count Philibert de Gramont, written in French by his brother-in-law Anthony Hamilton, read at times like a roster of roosters, a concatenation of cuckolds as seen by the Count in his happy exile at Charles’s court.

  Hours were given to dancing, horse races, cockfights, billiards, cards, chess, floor games, and gay masquerades. Then, says Burnet, “both the King and Queen” and “all the court went about masked, and came into houses unknown, and danced there, with a great deal of wild frolic.” 110 Play was often for high stakes. “This evening,” says Evelyn, “according to custom, his Majesty opened the revels . . . by throwing the dice himself in the privy chamber . . . and lost his £ 100. (The year before, he won £ 1,500.) The ladies also played very deep.” 111 The example of the court in gambling and promiscuity spread through the upper classes. Evelyn speaks of the “depraved youth of England, whose prodigious debaucheries . . . far surpass the madness of all other civilized nations whatsoever.” 112 Homosexuality flourished, especially in the army; Rochester wrote a play entitled Sodomy, which was performed before the court. A number of brothels for homosexual prostitution apparently existed in England. 113

  Love marriages were increasing in number, and we hear of some pretty instances, as of Dorothy Osborne with William Temple. This proved a happy marriage; yet Dorothy wrote: “To marry for love were no reproachful thing if we did not see that of the thousand couples that do it, hardly one can be brought for example that it may be done and not repented afterward.” 114 Swift, writing to a young lady about her marríage, speaks of “the person your father and mother have chosen for your husband,” and adds, “Yours was a match of prudence and common good feeling, without any hindrance of the ridiculous passion” of romantic love. 115 “My first inclination to marriage,” Clarendon recalled, “had no other passion in it than an appetite to a convenient estate.” 116

  Theoretically the husband had full control over his wife, including the dowry she brought him. In all classes the husband’s will was law. In the lower classes he used his legal rights to beat his wife, but the law forbade him to use any stick thicker than his thumb. 117 Family discipline was strong, except in upper-class London; there Clarendon complained that parents had no manner of authority over their children, nor children any obedience or submission to their parents, but “everyone did what was good in his eyes.” 118 Divorce was rare, but might be allowed by act of Parliament. Bishop Burnet, like Luther and Milton, thought that polygamy might in certain cases be permitted, and offered this plan to Charles II because of the Queen’s sterility; but Charles refused to further humiliate his wife. 119

  Crime continually threatened life and property. Thieves, cutpurses, and pickpockets congregated in gangs and sallied forth at night. Dueling was forbidden by law, but it remained the privilege of a gentleman; and if the killing was done according to rule, the victor usually escaped with a brief and courteous imprisonment. The law struggled to discourage crime with what seems to us barbarous punishments; but perhaps sharp measures had to be used to penetrate dull minds. For treason the penalty was torture and death; for murder, felony, or counterfeiting the currency, hanging; the wife who killed her husband was to be burned alive. Petty larceny was punished by whipping, or the loss of an ear; striking anyone in the King’s court incurred loss of the right hand; forgery, cheating, false weights or measures, invited the pillory, sometimes with both ears nailed to the board, or with perforation of the tongue with a hot iron; 120 usually the spectators enjoyed witnessing these punishments, 121 and crowded in holiday spirit to see a prisoner hanged. Under the Merrie Monarch there were ten thousand persons in jail for debt. Prisons were filthy, but wardens could be bribed to provide some comforts. Punishments were more severe than in contemporary France, but the law was more liberal; there were no lettres de cachet in England, and there were habeas corpus and jury trial.

  Social morality shared in the general laxity. Charity was growing, but the forty-one almshouses in England may have been merely another side to the greed of the strong. Nearly everyone cheated at cards. 122 Corruption was above normal in all classes. Pepys’s Diary smells with corruption in business, in politics, in the navy, and in Pepys. Business firms watered their stock, falsified their accounts, and charged exorbitant prices to the government. 123 Funds voted to the army or navy were diverted in part into the pockets of officials and courtiers. High officers of state, even when their salaries were ample and paid, sold titles, contracts, commissions, appointments, and pardons on such a scale that “the regular salary was the smallest part of the gains.” 124 Heads of government like Clarendon, Danby, and Sunderland grew rich in a few years, and bought or built estates far beyond their salaries. Members of Parliament sold their votes to ministers, even to foreign governments; 125 on some votes two hundred members were “taken off” the opposition by ministerial lubrication. 126 In 1675 it was estimated that two thirds of the Commons were in the pay of Charles II, and the other third in the pay of Louis XIV. 127 The French King found it quite feasible to bribe members to vote against Charles whenever Charles deviated troublesomely from Bourbon policies. As for Charles, he repeatedly accepted large sums from Louis to play the French game in politics, religion, or war. It was the gayest and most rotten society in history.

  VI. MANNERS

  As in France, manners tried to redeem morals, and gave a ceremonious grace to ornate dress, obscene literature, and profane speech. Charles himself was a model of manners; his courtesy and charm spread through the upper classes, and left their mark on English life. Men kissed each other on meeting, and kissed a lady on being introduced to her. Ladies in London, as in Paris, received gentlemen while in bed. There was an invigorating frankness, a scorn of hypocrisy, in the literature, the theater, and the court. But the candor released a flood of coarseness on the stage and in daily speech. Profanity was unparalleled. Here Charles was among, the exceptions, confining himself to “Odds fish” as his favorite oath. The surviving Puritans were clean of speech except in belaboring their opponents; and the Quakers refused to swear.

  Men outdid the women in fanciful dress, from powdered wigs to silk stockings and buckled shoes. The wig or periwig was another import from France. Cavaliers and others whose hair was short, and who were loath to be mistaken for close-cropped Puritan Roundheads, covered their shortage with alien cuttings; and men whose hair was turning gray or white found the wig useful in disguising their age, for then nearly all men shaved. It offset in some measure the King’s Spanish complexion and Brobdingnagian nose. Pepys made his first wig a critical affair, and mourned that his own beloved hair had to be shorn to make way for his peruke and provide hair for another head; 128 periodically he had his wig “cleansed of its nits.” 129 The stiff Elizabethan-Jacobean ruff had now disappeared. Doublet and long cloak were giving way to waistcoat and surcoat; the waistcoat or vest, however, reached to the calf of the leg, and was bound to the body by a sash. Breeches stopped at the knee. Swords dangled at the side of aristocratic or moneyed legs. Velvet and lace, ribbons and frills, helped to complete the courtly man; and in winter he might keep his hands warm in a muff hung from his neck.

  Fashionable women powdered and perfumed their hair, curled it into ringlets over their foreheads, and supplemented it with false locks mounted on secret wires. They feathered their hats with rare plumage. They painted black spots (“patches”) upon their cheeks, foreheads, or chins as added inducements to the chase. They exposed their shoulders and generous portions of their breasts; so Louise de Kéroualle had Lely paint her with one breast naked, and Nell Gwyn went her one better. Legs were alluringly concealed. Dainty articles of toilette were in rising demand. Woman was already so intricate an artifact that a Restorati
on play pictured her in hyperbole:

  Her teeth were made in the Blackfriars, her eyebrows in the Strand, and her hair on Silver Street. . . . She takes herself asunder, when she goes to bed, into some twenty boxes, and about noon the next day is put together again like a great German clock. 130

  Extravagance was de rigueur. Life, become ceremonious again, required elaborate equipment. Servants had to be hired in gross; Evelyn’s father had half a hundred; Pepys had a cook, a housemaid, a lady’s maid, and a serving girl. Meals were tremendous; note Pepys’s dinner on January 26, 1660, long before his salad days:

  My wife had got ready a very fine dinner—viz., a dish of marrow bones, a leg of mutton, a loin of veal, a dish of fowl, three pullets, and two dozen of larks all in a dish; a great tart, a neat’s tongue, a dish of anchovies, a dish of prawns and cheese.

  The main meal was taken about one o’clock. Cooking was English. Gramont, when Charles explained that the servants waited on him on bended knee as a mark of respect, said (or so he tells us): “I thank your Majesty for the explanation; I thought they were begging your pardon for serving you so bad a dinner.” 131

  Drinking of alcoholic beverages was no merely social function. Water was scarcely ever drunk, even by children; 132 beer was easier to find than water fit to drink. So everybody, of any age, drank beer, and the well-to-do added whiskey or imported wine. Most people visited a tavern once a day, and all classes got drunk now and then.

  Coffee had come in from Turkey about 1650; till 1700 most of it was imported from the region around Mocha in the Yemen; in the eighteenth century the Dutch transplanted it to Java, the Portuguese to Ceylon and Brazil, the English to Jamaica. The use of coffee to overcome drowsiness and stimulate the wits spread its popularity. London opened its first coffeehouse in 1652; by 1700 there were three thousand of them in the capital. 133 Every man of any account made one or another of them his regular rendezvous, where he could meet his friends and learn the latest scandal and news. Charles II tried to suppress the coffeehouses as centers of political agitation and conspiracy, but the itch to talk and drink and smell tobacco smoke frustrated him. From some coffeehouses sprang the clubs that played a role in eighteenth-century politics, and then became a refuge from monogamy. The coffeehouses, however, differed from the later clubs, not only because coffee was the favorite drink, but because conversation was encouraged. Literary lions like Dryden, Addison, and Swift had their rostrums in coffeehouses. English freedom of speech was nourished there.

  Tea came to England from China about 1650, but it was so expensive that a century passed before it displaced coffee in the English ritual. Pepys thought it quite an adventure when he had his first cup of tea. 134 Meanwhile the cacao bean had been imported from Mexico and Central America; about 1658 a new drink was made by adding vanilla and sugar to cacao; the resultant chocolate became a popular drink during the Restoration, and was served in many coffeehouses.

  All classes, including many women and some children, now smoked tobacco, always through long pipes. The women thought it had some antiseptic value, as in averting plague. Probably from this notion the habit arose, in this period, of taking snuff—i.e., inhaling powdered tobacco.

  Now that the Puritan incubus was lifted, games and sports flourished. The poor again enjoyed puppet shows, circuses, cockfighting, bear and bull baiting, tightrope walkers, wrestlers, jugglers, pugilists, conjurers. The rich took to venery in both its senses. Charles II played tennis till he was fifty-three. Evelyn liked bowling on the green, which is still a pretty sight in England today. Cricket was beginning to be a national pastime; in 1661 we find the first mention of a ground specifically reserved for it. In that year Vauxhall Gardens were laid out on the south bank of the Thames, and soon became a fashionable resort. St. James’s Park was opened to the public by Charles II. Hyde Park was now established as the place where the elite, led by the King and Queen, drove carriages on pleasant afternoons. “Society” was beginning to take the waters at Bath.

  All but the poorest classes traveled in stagecoaches, which had begun a regular “penny post” service in 1657, and a scheduled passenger service in 1658. “Hackney coaches” had served intracity traffic since 1625. The very rich traveled in a “coach-and-six”; the three teams were not for display, but to pull the coach through muddy stretches; sometimes the local cattle had to be hitched in front of the horses to tug the coach out of hubdeep mire. Roads were mud or dust. The roadside inns, with their lively mixture of coachmen, travelers, actors, salesmen, thieves, and tarts, were preparing to make their contribution to the literature of England. The rough, lusty, lovable England that Dickens knew in his youth was taking form.

  VII. RELIGION AND POLITICS

  Amid this human pullulation the struggle of the faiths continued, and the old conflict between king and Parliament was renewed. The Merrie Monarch was saddened to find that the House of Commons, after the honeymoon of its proferred obedience, was jealous of his power, and sparing of its funds. Tender in heart but tough in conscience, Charles turned to the French King for private loans. He promised—and apparently desired—to alleviate the disabilities of the English Catholics, to support the policy of Louis XIV against the Netherlands, and to sell to France the Channel port of Dunkirk, which Cromwell’s soldiers had won. Dunkirk was costly to defend; it was a thorn in the side of France; Charles let it go (1662) for five million francs, which, along with secret Bourbon subsidies, enabled him to ignore for a while the oligarchy of land and money that now ruled Parliament.

  The oligarchs, however, thought that the funds of the government should be used to wage another profitable war against the Dutch. The same rivalry in commerce and fisheries that had produced the First Dutch War in 1652 supported the Second Dutch War in 1664. Charles resisted the martial current as long as he could, for he much preferred love. “I never saw so great an appetite for war,” he wrote to his sister, “as is in both this town and country, especially in the Parliament men. I find myself the only man in my kingdom who doth not desire war.” 135

  Everything went badly. The English navy, ill-fed, ill-clothed, illmunitioned, fought bravely, but lost as often as it won; and at the height of the war plague and fire left London desolate and England bankrupt. Toward the end of 1666 the Dutch opened negotiations for peace; Charles, glad to come to terms, sent commissioners to Breda. Confident that an agreement was in sight, and seeing himself at the end of his finances, he laid up part of the English fleet in the Medway, and allowed the sailors to take service in merchantmen. In June, 1667, de Ruyter led a Dutch squadron into the Thames and the Medway, and destroyed most of the unmanned ships. That very night, says Pepys, “the King did sup with my Lady Castlemaine at the Duchess of Monmouth’s, and they were all mad in hunting a poor moth.” 136 When the news of the attack reached London every able-bodied man was called to arms. But the Dutch too wanted peace, for the French had invaded Flanders. The Treaty of Breda (July 21, 1667) ended the Second Dutch War on terms unsatisfactory to all.

  The position of the King was so weakened by the fiasco and the accumulated misfortunes of London that some Englishmen thought of deposing him. Parliament demanded parliamentary supervision of governmental expenses; Charles yielded, being penniless, and another step was taken toward parliamentary supremacy. Parliament demanded the dismissal of Clarendon for mishandling foreign affairs; Charles was not unwilling to let him go, for his Chancellor had opposed his moves toward religious toleration, and had censured his absorption in mistresses. Not satisfied with Clarendon’s resignation, the Commons drew up a proposal to impeach him for subservience to France. Clarendon took the King’s advice and fled to the Continent. It was a pitiful and cruel end for a long career of service. The old man glorified his exile by writing the finest historical work that English literature had yet produced. He died at Rouen in 1674, aged sixty-five.

  Charles appointed five men to replace him (1667): Sir Thomas Clifford, the Earl of Arlington, the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Ashley (soon to be the first Earl
of Shaftesbury), and the Earl of Lauderdale. Their initials made the word cabal, by which the new ministry came to be called. Clifford was an avowed Catholic, Arlington was inclined toward that faith, Buckingham was a rake, Shaftesbury was a tolerant skeptic, Lauderdale was a former Covenanter who with fire and sword forced episcopacy upon his fellow Scots. Charles listened to their conflicting counsels, but more and more followed his own.

  His aims were basically two: to renew absolute monarchy, and to elevate Roman Catholicism in England. He looked with hope to being succeeded by his Catholic brother James. He corresponded with the general of the Jesuits in Rome, and gave a secret interview to a papal internuncio who came to London from Brussels. 137 In January, 1669, he told his brother, Clifford, Arlington, and Lord Arundell that he wished to reconcile himself with the Church of Rome, and bring all England back to the old faith. 138 His sister Henrietta never ceased to urge him to boldly announce his conversion.

  In May, 1670, Louis XIV sent Henrietta to England, aided by subtle diplomats, to bind Charles to a French and Catholic policy. On June 1, 1670, Clifford, Arundell, and Arlington signed for England the secret Treaty of Dover. The French King agreed to pay Charles £ 150,000 whenever Charles should announce his conversion to Catholicism; if need should arise, Louis would furnish Charles with six thousand soldiers, to be maintained at French expense; Charles, when called upon, was to join France in war against the United Provinces; he was to receive £ 225,000 a year while the war continued; he was to take and keep some Dutch islands; and he was to support the claims of Louis to inherit Spain. 139 To deceive the Parliament and the people of England, Charles sent Buckingham to Paris to draw up a sham treaty, which was signed on December 21, 1670, and was published to the world; it pledged England to war against the Dutch, but made no mention of religion.