The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  He died May 1, 1700. Much confusion attended his funeral, rival factions contesting for his corpse; but finally he was laid to rest beside Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.

  It is difficult to love him. To all appearances he was an opportunist trimmer, who praised Cromwell’s memory under the Protectorate, praised Charles and his mistresses, praised Protestantism under a Protestant King and Catholicism under a Catholic, and courted pensions with all his melody. He made so many enemies that there must have been something unlovable in him. He rivaled all his competitors in the licentiousness of his plays and the piety of his verse. His power of satire was so great as to evoke our sympathies for his victims as for martyrs burning at the stake. But he was without question the greatest English poet of his generation. Much of his poetry was written to the occasion, and time seldom preserves what was addressed to the time. But his satires still live, for no one has equaled them in etching characters in acid scorn. He developed the heroic couplet to such compactness and flexibility that it dominated English poetry for a century. His influence was better in prose: he cleared it of cumbersome involutions and alien idioms, and disciplined it to a classic clarity and ease. His contemporaries were right: they feared rather than loved him, but they knew that by the force of his will and the labor of his art he had won the right to preside over them as the arbiter of letters and the sovereign of rhyme. He was the Jonson and Johnson of his age.

  IV. A CATALOGUE

  Let us gather into a lifeless catalogue some minor figures who gave life and literature to this epoch, but with whom we cannot stay long enough to see them live.

  The greatest poem of the pagan Restoration was a Puritan epic, but the most famous poem was an anti-Puritan mock epic, Hudibras (1663–78). Samuel Butler, as a lusty youth, spent uncomfortable years in the service of Sir Samuel Luke, an ardent Presbyterian colonel in Cromwell’s army, stationed at Cople Hoo, a citadel of Puritan politics and prayer. When the Restoration came Butler revenged himself by publishing a rollicking satire in which Sir Hudibras, the chivalric knight, leads his squire, Ralpho, on a crusade against sin. From the beginning you may judge the whole:

  When civil dudgeon first grew high,

  And men fell out, they knew not why;

  When hard words, jealousies, and fears

  Set folks together by the ears,

  And made them fight, like mad or drunk,

  For Dame Religion as for punk; . . .

  When Gospel-trumpeter, surrounded

  With long-eared rout, to battle sounded,

  And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,

  Was beat with fist instead of stick:

  Then did Sir Knight abandon dwelling,

  And out he rode a-colonelling. . . .

  For ’t has been held by many that

  As Montaigne, playing with his cat,

  Complains she thought him but an ass,

  Much more she would Sir Hudibras . . .

  We grant, although he had much wit,

  H’was very shy of using it,

  As being loath to wear it out,

  And therefore bore it not about

  Unless on holidays or so,

  As men their best apparel do. . . .

  For his religion, it was fit

  To match his learning and his wit;

  ‘Twas Presbyterian true blue,

  For he was of that stubborn crew

  Of errant saints, whom all men grant

  To be the true Church Militant:

  Such as do build their faith upon

  The holy text of pike and gun,

  Decide all controversies by

  Infallible artillery,

  And prove their doctrine orthodox

  By Apostolic blows and knocks; . . .

  A sect whose chief devotion lies

  In odd perverse antipathies; . . .

  That with more care keep holiday

  The wrong than others the right way;

  Compound for sins they are inclined to

  By damning those they have no mind to. 43

  And so on, to the pain of the Puritans and the delight of the King. Charles rewarded the author with three hundred pounds. Every royalist praised it except Pepys, who could not “see where the wit lies,” though “the book [is] now in the greatest fashion for drollery.” 44 Butler hurried to bring out continuations (1664, 1678), but he had no further arrows in his quiver, and had run out of rhymes. The strife of Protestant and Catholic replaced that of royalist and Puritan; Butler was forgotten, and died in obscure poverty (1680). Forty years later a monument was erected to him in Westminster Abbey. “He asked for bread,” said an epigram, “and he received a stone.” 45

  Better than such rhyme-chasing doggerel was the stately prose of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, which appeared in 1702–4, though written in 1646–74. Men could see, in Queen Anne’s reign, how careful had been the composition of those eight volumes, how splendid their style, how penetrating those sketches of character, how magnanimous had been the spirit of the old beaten Chancellor. Gilbert Burnet, likewise, had played no small part in The History of His Own Time, which by his order was published (1724) only after his death. His History of the Reformation of the Church of England (1679, 1681, 1715) was a more substantial work, a labor of long research; it came at a time when Protestant England feared a Catholic revival; both houses of Parliament thanked him for it. Enemies and editors have found a thousand errors in it; it is still warm with partisanship, and occasionally sullied with invective; but it remains the greatest book on its theme. Burnet strove to widen religious toleration, and earned the hostility of the mob.

  Three other men sought to enlarge the present with the past. Thomas Fuller, passing through his loved land county by county, collected his History of the Worthies of England (1662), enlivening his dead heros with anecdotes, epigrams, and wit. Anthony Wood told the history of Oxford, and compiled a biographical dictionary of its graduates—careful works from which many an author has nibbled stealthily. John Aubrey gathered juicy fragments about 426 English notables, hoping to co-ordinate the material into a history, but laziness and death prevented him, and his Minutes of Lives saw print only in 1813; 46 his relics have cheered us on our way. Colonel John Hutchinson, a Puritan gentleman, voted for the execution of Charles I, was imprisoned by Charles II, was released, died soon afterward, and was enshrined by his widow, Lucy, in a loving and illuminating Life of Colonel Hutchinson; but Lucy suffered from delayed periods, her sentences sometimes running through a page. John Arbuthnot, able physician and loyal friend of Swift, Pope, Queen Anne, and many others, joined in the Tory campaign to stop the war with France, by issuing (1712) a series of pamphlets satirizing the Whigs, and describing an imaginary character, John Bull, who became thenceforth a symbol of England. John, wrote John, was

  an honest, plain-dealing fellow, choleric, bold, and of a very inconstant temper. . . . If you flattered him you might lead him like a child. John’s temper depended very much upon the air; his spirits rose and fell with the weather-glass. John was quick and understood his business very well; but no man alive was more careless in looking into his accounts, or more cheated by partners, apprentices, or servants. This was occasioned by his being a boon companion, loving his bottle and his diversion; for to say truth, no man kept a better house than John, nor spent his money more generously. 47

  What would Sir William Temple say if he could find himself reduced to a paragraph in a chapter culminating in his secretary? Perhaps he would say, if his fine manners would permit, that historians neglected him because he had not kept two women dangling on the edge of matrimony till the death of one and the exhaustion of the other; that he had not sold his pen to Tory ministers out of pique at Whigs, nor dipped it in acid against mankind; but had served his country quietly in successful diplomacy, and, in an age of corruption and licentiousness, had given England an unostentatious example of decent family life. For seven years he courted Dorothy Osborne, whose lively letters to him became a part of E
nglish literature; 48 she accepted him despite the opposition of both their families; and he married her after an attack of smallpox had destroyed her beauty. He entered politics, but preferred tasks that took him far away from the fever of London; and he avoided “that laborious, that invidious, that closely watched slavery which is mocked with the name of power.” 49 He was among the first to warn against the territorial ambitions of Louis XIV, and he was the chief architect of the Triple Alliance that checked the French King in 1668. In 1674 and 1677 he was offered the secretaryship of state, but he preferred his diplomatic post at The Hague. His farseeing negotiations brought about the marriage of Mary, daughter of James II, to the future William III, which made possible the “Glorious Revolution.” In 1681 he retired from politics to a life of studying and writing at Moor Park, his estate in Surrey. Swift thought him cold and reserved, but Sir William’s wife and sister alike worshiped him as the heart of kindness and courtesy. The most famous of his essays, Of Ancient and Modern Learning (1690), lauded the ancients, and belittled modern science and philosophy in the very teeth of Newton, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke. Bentley caught him in a famous error. Sir William retreated into his garden, and comforted himself with Epicurus. We shall meet him again.

  V. EVELYN AND PEPYS

  John Evelyn agreed with Temple that “where factions were once entered and rooted in a state, they thought it madness for good men to meddle with public affairs.” 50 When Civil War loomed he judged it time to travel. He left England in July, 1641, but a stroke of conscience brought him back in October. He joined the King’s army at Brentford just in time to participate in its retreat. After a month of service he retired to his paternal estate at Wotton in Surrey; and on November 11, 1643, he crossed again to the Continent. He traveled leisurely through France, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and again in France. In Paris he married an English girl. For a time he oscillated between France and England; finally, the Civil War over, he returned to his home (February 6, 1652). He paid Cromwell’s government to leave him alone. He corresponded with the exiled Charles II, and in 1659 he labored to promote the Restoration. After Charles had reached the throne Evelyn was persona grata at the court, though he condemned its immorality. He filled some minor governmental posts, but for the most part he preferred to plant trees and write thirty books at his country home. He wrote on everything from Lucretius to Sabbatai Zevi. His Fumifugium failed to clear the air of London, but his Sylva (1664) pleaded effectively for the reforestation of England, and he spurred the government to plant trees throughout London, whose trees are now its greatest glory and delight. His Life of Mrs. Godolphin is an idyl of womanly virtues amid the Restoration riot.

  From 1641, when he was twenty-one, to February 3, 1706, twenty-four days before his death, he kept a diary of what he saw or heard in England or on the Continent. As a man of “quality” he could not afford to record such sins and intimate views as lure us to Pepys’s longer Diary; but his descriptions of European cities have helped us to see the color of the time. He has some vivid pages, as on the Simplon Pass; 51 and sometimes he opens his heart in tender passages, as on the death of his five-year-old son. His diary remained unpublished till 1818.

  Its references to Samuel Pepys led to the examination of the six volumes, in shorthand, that had been bequeathed by Pepys to Magdalene College, Cambridge. After three years of labor the 3,012 pages were deciphered; they were published in 1825, abbreviated and purified; now, still incomplete, they fill four thick tomes. They have made Pepys one of the most intimately and erroneously known characters in history. Intimately, because his diary was obviously intended for only posthumous publication if any, and therefore included details many of which had to be kept secret in his lifetime, and some of which are still “unprintable.” Erroneously, for the diary covers less than a decade (January 1, 1660, to May 31, 1669) of Pepys’s life, and gives no adequate account of his work at the Admiralty—the headquarters of the English navy—where he served in more and more important capacities from 1660 to 1689. Long after his death he was remembered and honored there as an able and industrious administrator.

  His father was a London tailor, one of those younger sons of the gentry who took to trade because the oldest son alone inherited the estate. Samuel went to Cambridge on a scholarship, and took the bachelor’s and master’s degrees with no other discount than a public reprimand for having once been “scandalously overseene in drinking,” and again for writing a romance, Love is a Cheat, which he afterward destroyed. At the age of twenty-two (1655) he married Elizabeth St. Michel, daughter of a Huguenot. In 1658 he was operated on for the stone; the affair went off successfully, and he gratefully celebrated its anniversary every recorded year thereafter.

  Sir Edward Montagu, his distant kinsman, made him his secretary (1660), and Samuel accompanied him when Montagu commanded the fleet that brought Charles back from exile. Before that year was out, Pepys was appointed clerk of the acts in the navy office. He studied naval affairs as sedulously as his pursuit of women would permit, and since his superiors were also devoted to that ancient sport, he soon came to know naval details more fully than the admirals (Montagu and the Duke of York) who depended on his information. During the war with the Dutch (1665–67) he managed with notable competence the victualing of the fleet, and during the plague he kept to his post after most governmental officials had run away. When (1668) the navy office was attacked in Parliament, Pepys was entrusted with the defense, and his three hours’ speech in the Commons won for the office an unmerited exoneration. Pepys then drew up for the Duke of York two papers exposing the incompetence of navy personnel, and these papers played a part in the reform of the fleet. He worked hard, usually rising at 4 A.M., 52 but he saw to it that his salary of £ 350 a year was aided by presents, commissions, and other perquisites, some of which might now be called bribes, but which in those amiable days were considered legitimate amplifications. His own superior, Lord Montagu, had explained to him that “it was not the salary of any place that did make a man rich, but the opportunity of getting money while he is in the place.” 53

  All of Pepys’s faults are revealed in the diary with a candor unpretentious and relatively complete. Why he kept it so honestly is not clear. He concealed it carefully during his life, and wrote it in his own system of shorthand, using 314 different characters, and made no arrangements for its posthumous publication. Apparently he took pleasure in so reviewing his daily activities, his physiological disturbances, his marital quarrels, his flirtations and adulteries; he could, on secretly rereading the record, find the same clandestine satisfaction that we derive from looking at ourselves in the mirror. He tells us how he had his wife cut his hair, and “found in my head and body about twenty lice, . . . more than I have had, I believe, these twenty years.” 54 He learned to love his wife, but only after many quarrels, some that “vexed” him “to the guts”; often, on his own telling, he was mean to her; on one occasion he “pulled her by the nose”; 55 on another “I did strike her over her left eye such a blow as the poor wretch did cry out and was in great pain, but yet her spirit was such as to endeavor to bite and scratch me; but I coying with her made her leave crying.” 56 He had a poultice applied to her eye, and went out to a paramour. He returned home for dinner, then sallied out, found “Bagwell’s wife . . . and took her away to an alehouse, and there made I much of her, and then away thence to another and endeavored to caress her, but elle ne voulait pas, which did vex me.”

  It is astonishing what energy the man had—every few months another amour; he pursued women till they repulsed him with pins. 57 He confessed the “strange slavery that I stand in to beauty.” 58 In Westminster Abbey “I heard a sermon, and spent (God forgive me) most of my time in looking at Mrs. Butler.” 59 He looked with especial longing, almost with lèse majesté, upon Lady Castlemaine; seeing her in Whitehall Palace, “I glutted myself with looking at her.” 60 He had to content himself with her petticoats hanging on a line; “it did me good to look upon them”;
61 and “so home to supper and to bed, fancying myself to sport with Mrs. Stewart [Lady Castlemaine] with great pleasure.” 62 But his taste was not confined to court beauties. A neighbor, Mrs. Diana, passed his door; he drew her “into my house upstairs, and there did dally with her a great while.” 63 He took a Mrs. Lane to Lambeth, but, “after being tired of her company,” he resolved “never to do so again while I live.” 64 On one occasion his wife caught him hugging a girl; she threatened to leave him; he appeased her with vows, and rushed off to his latest mistress. He seduced his wife’s maid, Deborah Willet; he loved to have her comb his hair; but his wife came upon him during his explorations; he made new vows; Deborah was dismissed; Pepys visited her as part of his day’s work.

  His lust continued even when his eyesight failed. His habit of reading and writing by candlelight began in 1664 to impair his vision. But in the critical years that followed he worked especially hard, despite the progress of his trouble. On May 31, 1669, he made the last entry in his diary:

  And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my Journal. . . . Whatever comes of it, I must forbear; and therefore resolve, from this time forward, to have it kept by my people in longhand, and must therefore be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know; or, if there be anything—which cannot be much, now my amours with Deborah are past, and my eyes hindering me in almost all other pleasures—I must endeavor to keep a margin in my book open, to add, here and there, a note in shorthand with my own hand. And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave; for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!—S.P.