A Royalist and a Puritan.
Another Royalist of these times, of a different temper, was Sir John Suckling:[52] a poet too, very rich, bred in luxury, a man of the world, who had seen every court in Europe worth seeing, who dashed off songlets and ballads between dinners and orgies; which songlets often hobbled on their feet by reason of those multiplied days of high living; but yet they had prettinesses in them which have kept them steadily alive all down to these prosaic times. I give a sample from his “Ballad upon a Wedding,” though it may be over-well known:
“Her cheeks so rare a white was on
No daisy makes comparison
(Who sees them is undone):
For streaks of red were mingled there
Such as are on a Catharine pear,
The side that’s next the sun.
Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out
As if they feared the light.
But O, she dances such a way!
No sun upon an Easter day
Is half so fine a sight!”
He was a frequenter of a tavern which stood at the Southwark end of London Bridge. Aubrey says he was one of the best bowlers of his time. He played at cards, too, rarely well, and “did use to practise by himself abed.” He was rich; he was liberal; he was accomplished—almost an “Admirable Crichton.” His first military service was in support of Gustavus Adolphus, in Germany. At the time of trouble with the Scots (1639) he raised a troop for the King’s service that bristled with gilded spurs and trappings; but he never did much serious fighting on British soil; and in 1641—owing to what was counted treasonable action in behalf of Strafford, he was compelled to leave England.
He crossed over to the Continent, wandered into Spain, and somehow became (as a current tradition reported) a victim of the Inquisition there, and was put to cruel torture; a strange subject surely to be put to the torture—in this life. He was said to be broken by this experience, and strayed away, after his escape from those priest-fangs, to Paris, where, not yet thirty-five, and with such promise in him of better things, he came to his death in some mysterious way: some said by a knife-blade which a renegade servant had fastened in his boot; but most probably by suicide. There is, however, great obscurity in regard to his life abroad.
He wrote some plays, which had more notice than they should have had; possibly owing to a revival of dramatic interests very strangely brought about in Charles I.’s time—a revival which was due to the over-eagerness and exaggeration of attacks made upon it by the Puritans: noticeable among these was that of William Prynne[53]—“utter barrister” of Lincoln’s Inn. “Utter barrister” does not mean æsthetic barrister, but one not yet come to full range of privilege.
This Prynne was a man of dreadful insistence and severities; he would have made a terrific schoolmaster. He was the author, in the course of his life, of no less than one hundred and eighty distinct works; many of them, it is true, were pamphlets, but others terribly bulky—an inextinguishable man; that onslaught on the drama and dramatic people, and play-goers, including people of the Court, called Histriomastix, was a foul-mouthed, close-printed, big quarto of a thousand pages. One would think such a book could do little harm; but he was tried for it, was heavily fined, and sentenced to stand in the pillory and lose his ears. He pleaded strongly against the sentence, and for its remission upon “divers passages [as he says in his petition] fallen inconsiderately from my pen in a book called Histriomastix.”
But he pleaded in vain; there was no sympathy for him. Ought there to be for a man who writes a book of a thousand quarto pages—on any subject? The violence of this diatribe made a reaction in favor of the theatre; his fellow-barristers of Lincoln’s Inn hustled him out of their companionship, and got up straightway a gay masque to demonstrate their scorn of his reproof.
They say he bore his punishment sturdily, though the fumes of his book, which was burned just below his nose, came near to suffocate him. Later still, he underwent another sentence for offences growing out of his unrelenting and imperious Puritanism—this time in company with one Burton (not Robert Burton,[54] of the Anatomy of Melancholy), who was a favorite with the people and had flowers strown before him as he walked to the pillory. But Prynne had no flowers, and his ears having been once cropt, the hangman had a rough time (a very rough time for Prynne) in getting at his task. Thereafter he was sent to prison in the isle of Jersey; but he kept writing, ears or no ears, and we may hear his strident voice again—hear it in Parliament, too.