King Charles and his Friends.
We open this morning upon times when New-England towns were being planted among the pine-woods, and the decorous, courtly, unfortunate Charles I. had newly come to the throne. Had the King been only plain Charles Stuart, he would doubtless have gone through life with the reputation of an amiable, courteous gentleman, not over-sturdy in his friendships[47]—a fond father and good husband, with a pretty taste in art and in books, but strongly marked with some obstinacies about the ways of wearing his rapier, or of tying his cravat, or of overdrawing his bank account.
In the station that really fell to him those obstinacies took hold upon matters which brought him to grief. The man who stood next to Charles, and who virtually governed him, was that George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who by his fine doublets, fine dancing, and fine presence, had very early commended himself to the old King James, and now lorded it with the son. He was that Steenie who in Scott’s Fortunes of Nigel plays the braggadocio of the court: he had attended Prince Charles upon that Quixotic errand of his, incognito, across Europe, to play the wooer at the feet of the Infanta of Spain; and when nothing came of all that show of gallantry and the lavishment of jewels upon the dusky heiress of Castile, the same Buckingham had negotiated the marriage with the French princess, Henrietta. He was a brazen courtier, a shrewd man of the world; full of all accomplishments; full of all profligacy. He made and unmade bishops and judges, and bolstered the King in that antagonism to the Commons of England which was rousing the dangerous indignation of such men as Eliot and Hampden and Pym. Private assassination, however, took him off before the coming of the great day of wrath. You must not confound this Duke of Buckingham with another George Villiers, also Duke of Buckingham, who was his son, and who figured largely in the days of Charles II.—being even more witty, and more graceful, and more profligate—if possible—than his father; a literary man withal, and the author of a play[48] which had great vogue.
Another striking figure about the court of Charles was a small, red-faced man, keen-eyed, sanctimonious, who had risen from the humble ranks (his father having been a clothier in a small town of Berkshire) to the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. So starched was he in his High-Church views that the Pope had offered him the hat of a cardinal. He made the times hard for Non-conformists; your ancestors and mine, if they emigrated in those days, may very likely have been pushed over seas by the edicts of Archbishop Laud. His monstrous intolerance was provoking, and intensifying that agitation in the religious world of England which Buckingham had already provoked in the political world; and the days of wrath were coming.
This Archbishop Laud is not only keen-sighted but he is bountiful and helpful within the lines of his own policy. He endowed Oxford with great, fine buildings. Some friend has told him that a young preacher of wonderful attractions has made his appearance at St. Paul’s—down on a visit from Cambridge—a young fellow, wonderfully handsome, with curling locks and great eyes full of expression, and a marvellous gift of language; and the Archbishop takes occasion to see him or hear him; and finding that beneath such exterior there is real vigor and learning, he makes place for him as Fellow at Oxford; appoints him presently his own chaplain, and gives him a living down in Rutland.