ENGLISH KINGS AT THEIR TABLES.
The utilitarians of history have declared that half our treasured incidents of story are myths. Rufus was not slain by Sir Walter Tyrrell; Richard III. was a marvellously proper man; and the young princes were not smothered in the Tower. They have laid their hands on our legends, as Augustus did his on the nose of the dead Alexander, and with the same effect,—under the touch it crumbled into dust. The infidels refuse even to have faith in that table trait of Alfred, which showed him making cakes, or rather marring them, in the neatherd’s cottage. Mr. Wilkie may have prettily painted the incident, but its existence, anywhere but on canvas and in the poet’s brain, they ruthlessly deny. I do not know but that they are right.
We march into the bowels of more trustworthy ground, when we pass the frontier of the Roman period. William the Norman we know had a huge appetite for venison; and the Saxon chronicler says, that he loved the “high deer” as if he had been their father, which is but an equivocal compliment to his paternal affection. His table indulgences cost the life of hundreds, and the ruin of tens of hundreds. It brought on corpulency; his corpulency begot a poor joke in Philip of France; and of this joke was born such wrath in the soul of William, that he carried fire and sword into that kingdom, and was cut short in his career, ere he had accomplished the full measure of his revenge.
Rufus was as fat as his father, and as majestic both in his oaths and his appetites. To every passion he yielded himself a slave; and he feasted, like so many who would affect to be disgusted at his dishonesty, without troubling himself as to who “suffered.” He never paid a creditor whom he could cheat; and again, like many of the same class, he was most affable at table; his drinking companions were on an equality with him; and in such fellowship, over gross food and huge goblets mantling to the brim, he cut unclean jokes on his own unclean deeds, at which his servile and drunken hearers roared consumedly, and swore he was a god. There was some grandeur in his ideas, however, for he built Westminster Hall, as a vestibule to a palace, wherein he intended to hold high revel such as the world had never seen; and a vestibule it has now become, but to a palace wherein sits a different sort of dignity to that dreamed of by the low-statured, fat, fierce, and huge feeding Rufus.
All the Norman kings were fearful objects at which to fling jokes; and the appetite of Henry I. was ruined, and his sanguinary ire aroused, by a derisive passage in a poem by Luke de Barré. The king made the table shake as he declared that he would let wretched versifiers know what they were to expect if they offended the King of England; and Barré suffered the loss of his eyes. Henry ate and drank none the less joyously for the dead. But Beauclerc was a more refined gastronome than his brothers, as befitted his name; and though in many respects his court was horribly licentious, yet when he went from one demesne to another, to consume its revenues upon the spot, the feasting there seems to have been attended by as much moderation as merriment.
Stephen had more to do with fighting than feasting, and with keeping castles rather than cooks; but he knew how to gain allies by the fine science of giving dinners, and there was no more courteous host than he. While the king and the barons kept high mirth, however, the people were in the lowest misery. While the king gave political feasts, his subjects were perishing of starvation by thousands.
His successor, the Second Henry, was but a poor patron of cooks, as was to be expected of a monarch who had continually to defend himself against the rebellions, not only of subjects, but of his own children. Of the latter, the only one who loved him was his natural son Geoffrey. It is no wonder that this melancholy king was the first to do away with the old custom of having a coronation dinner thrice every year, on assembling the States at the three great festivals. He was ever in the midst of affrays; and once he fell among a body of monks, who checked their turbulence to complain to the king; their complaint being that their abbot, the Bishop of Winchester, had cut off three dishes from their table. “How many has he left you?” said the king. “Good heavens!” said the monks, “he has only left us ten.” “Ten!” said the monarch; “I am content with but three; and I hope your bishop will reduce you to a level with your king.” They, of course, were highly disgusted at the remark.
Richard Cœur de Lion, that copper monarch, was too busy with mischief to have leisure for much banqueting; but he loved one thing, and that was venison, the poor stealers of which he punished by the most horrible of mutilations. In his reign, an ox and a horse cost four shillings each; a sow was to be bought for a shilling; a sheep with fine wool, for tenpence, and with coarse wool, for sixpence; so that, taking into account the difference in the valuation of money, people who had the money to purchase with, could procure mutton and pork at a rate about a dozen times cheaper than the same articles can be procured at now. The sovereign did not trouble himself about paying anybody; and when he gave a banquet, the very last thing he thought of was whether it were ever paid for or not.
Richard had no virtue but courage; and John resembled his worthless brother in every thing but courage. He had the same love for venison; and a joke at dinner upon a fat haunch, which he said had come from a noble beast that had never heard mass, was looked upon by the clerical gentlemen present as a reflection upon their corpulency. They never forgot it; and it was, perhaps, partly a consequence of their retentive memory, that the monks of Swineshead poisoned the dish of which the king partook on the occasion of almost his last dinner. He certainly never enjoyed another.
Henry III. was the first of our kings whose reign exceeded half-a-century in duration. He was a moderate man, loved plain fare, and cared more for masses than merriment. He was an easy, indolent monarch, with troubles enough to have fired him to activity; but he would have given half his realm for the privilege of daily dining in peace and quietness, a boon seldom vouchsafed to him. His subjects must have dined as ill as himself, if we may judge by the extraordinary variation in the prices of articles of consumption during his reign. Thus the price of wheat, for instance, varied from one shilling to a pound a quarter. The royal statute upon ale rather displeased all citizens of this period, for by it the price was fixed at a halfpenny per gallon in cities, while in the country the same quantity might be sold for a farthing. A gallon of ale for a halfpenny ought, however, to have satisfied the most thirsty of drinkers.
The frugal Edward I. very little patronised either eating or drinking, beyond what nature required. He was a very moderate wine-drinker, but he exceedingly offended those who were otherwise, by imposing a duty of two shillings a tun on all wine imported, over and above the old existing duty. The unlucky Edward II. was to the first Edward, what Louis XVI. was to Louis XIV., the scape-goat for the crimes of a predecessor and tyrant too powerful to be resisted. The banqueting-room of this Edward, however, was, as is often the case with such princes, oftener used than the council-room, and the favourites feasted with their weak lord until rebellion marred the festivity. There never was a merrier reign (despite public calamity) closed by so terrible a murder as that of this king, whose last dinner would have almost disgusted a dog.
Edward III. was a gorgeous patroniser of the culinary art; the cooks and his guests adored him; and Windsor Castle, which he built as a fortress and a pleasaunce, is a monument of his power and his taste. But his love for good cheer was imitated by his subjects to their ruin; and king and parliament interfered to remedy by penalty, what might have been obviated by good example. Servants were prohibited from eating flesh, meat, or fish, above once a day. By another law, it was ordained that no one should be allowed, either for dinner or supper, above three dishes in each course, and not above two courses; and it is likewise expressly declared that soused meat is to count as one of these dishes. And of these laws I will only observe, that if they were obeyed, servants and citizens of the days of Edward III. were a very different class of people from what they are at present.
When it is stated of Richard II. that two thousand cooks and three hundred servitors were employed in the royal kitchen, we think we become acquainted with the gastronomic tastes of that unhappy king. But as he was one of those whose virtues were his own, and his vices were of others’ making, so this Sardanapalian array of cooks was kept up by those who ruled from behind the throne, and finally left the king to starve, despite his counting cooks by thousands. His chief cuisinier is known only by the initials C. S. S., under which he wrote a culinary work in English, “On the Forme of Cury.” In this work, he speaks of poor Richard, his royal master, as the “best and royallest viander of all Christian kynges.”
Henry IV. kept a princely but not a profuse table. He was the first king in England whose statutes may be said to have acted as a check on the freedom of after-dinner conversation upon religious matters; for in his reign took place the first execution in England, on account of opinions connected with matters of faith. The household expenses of this monarch are set down at something less than £20,000 per annum of the money of the time; and this sum, moderate enough, appears to have been fairly applied to the purposes for which it was intended. A porpoise was a fashionable dish in the time of Henry V., who first had it at the royal table, and thus sanctioned its use at tables of lower degree. Loyal folks in those days copied the example set them by their sovereign, as they did in the later days of George III. boiled mutton and caper sauce, when country gentlemen “dined like the king, sir, at two o’clock.” But Henry V. was oppressed with debts, and, like many men in similar positions, his banquets were all the more splendid, and his prodigality was equal to his liabilities. So extravagant a monarch bequeathed but a poor inheritance to Henry VI., who was occasionally as hard put to it for a dinner as ever the Second Charles was. When Edward IV. jumped into poor Henry’s seat, he found a host of angry persons who disputed his power, and these he took care to conciliate by the most powerful, nay irresistible means that were ever applied to the solution of a difficulty, or the removal of an obstruction. He simply invited them to dinner; and, certainly, up to that time England had never seen a king who gave dinners on so extravagantly profuse a scale. They were marked, however, by something of a barbaric splendour; and the monarch, gay and glittering as he was, dazzling in dress, and overwhelmingly exuberant of spirits, was more like William de la Marck than any more knightly host. In short, Edward was but a coarse beast at table. “In homine tam corpulento,” says the Croyland chronicler, “tantis sodalitiis, vanitatibus, crapulis, luxuriis et cupiditatibus dedito,”—a sort of testimonial to character which neither monarch nor man could be justified in being proud of. The young Edward V. is the “petit Dauphin” of English history, but with a less cruel destiny, for he was at least not starved to death, amid dirt, darkness, and terror, but mercifully, if roughly, murdered, and so saved from the long and yet unexpiated assassination of the innocent and helpless Louis XVII. His murderer sought to make people forget the heinousness of his crime, by the double splendour of his coronation dinners. The ceremony and the festival took place, not only in London, but in York; and Richard hoped he had feasted both the northern and southern provinces into sentiments of loyalty. A curious incident preceded the first dinner,—the anointing of himself and consort at the coronation. There is nothing singular in the fact, but there is in the manner of it. Richard and his queen stripped themselves naked to the waist, in order that the unction might be more liberally poured over them,—and in Richard’s own case, perhaps for another reason, that the great nobles who were present might see that they were not about to sit down to dinner with a sovereign who was as deformed in body as his enemies declared him to be.
Almost all young readers of history take their first permanent idea of Henry VII. from that gallant Richmond, in Shakspeare’s Tragedy, who comes in like an avenging angel, at the beginning of the fifth act, and has it all his own generous way, until he sticks “the bloody and devouring bear,” and sends a note to Elizabeth to come and be married. This Elizabeth, by the way, was the good mother of Henry VIII., and she was the only woman for whom that capricious prince ever felt a spark of pure affection. His love and respect for her were permanent, and the fact merits to be recorded. But to return to Henry VII., and to conduct him to the dinner-table, where alone we have present business with him; I do not know that I can find a better “trait” touching himself and his times, than one connected with his royal visit to York.
He was received in the city with more than ordinary ceremony, and loudly-expressed delight at the sight of his “sweet-favoured” face; “some casting out of obles and wafers, and some casting out of comfits in great quantities, as it had been hailstones, for joy and rejoicing of the king’s coming.” But I must pass over the outward show—how Augustans, Franciscans, Carmelites, and Dominicans met him at Micklegate, and how these, with priors, and friars, and canons of hospitals, and priests, and knights, and noble, and gentle, and simple, accompanied the monarch to the Minster, and thence to the archbishop’s palace, where Henry resided during his stay in the northern capital. The grandest banquet given to him during his sojourn, was in this palace, on the eve of the festival of St. George: the great hall was divided into a centre and two aisles. In each division there were two tables, half-a-dozen in all. The king sat at the centre table, arrayed in all the pomp and glory of a king;—George and garter, crown, and England’s sceptre. One individual only was esteemed worthy of being seated at the same table, namely, the Archbishop of York, who was quite as powerful a man, in his way, as Henry Tudor himself. Knights carved the joints, and earls waited upon prince and prelate. Lord Scrope, of Bolton, because he was a Knight of the Garter, served the king with water; another member of chivalry handed the cup, and the sovereign’s meat was especially carved for him by a Welsh cousin, Sir David Owen. The distribution of the other tables exhibited a judicious mixture of priest and layman. At the first table in the centre of the hall (the cross-table at the top being occupied by the king and the archbishop) sat two secular dignitaries, the Lords Chancellor and Privy Seal, and with them, the Abbots of St. Mary and Fountains, with the archbishop’s suffragans, other prelates, and the royal chaplains; thus the chief members of the clergy were seated in greatest numbers near the king. The second table was entirely occupied by lay nobility, earls, barons, knights and esquires of the king’s body. Of the two tables in the right aisle, the city clergy and the Minster choir occupied one to themselves. At the upper end of the other table were several knights of the garter, all sitting on one side, “and beneath them a void space, and then other honest persons filled that table.” We are glad to fall on the term “other honest,” or we might have been tempted to believe that a distinction was made between honesty and nobility. The tables in the left aisle were occupied, one by the municipal authorities and other citizen guests; the second by the judges, “and beneath them other honest persons,” again. At the rear of the king’s table a stage was erected, on which stood the royal officer of arms, who cried his “largesse” three times, in the usual manner, and doubtless with something of the stentorian powers made familiar to us by the late Mr. Toole, and the present loud and lively Mr. Harker. “The surnape,” we are told, “was drawn by Sir John Turberville, the knight-marshal; and after the dinner there was a voide, when the king and his nobles put off their robes of state, except such as were knights of the garter, who rode to even-song, attired in the habit of their order;” and a very fitting close to a feast,—and a good example is held forth therein to all who rise from a festival without any more thought of being thankful for it, than is implied by trying to find out the reflection of their nose in the mahogany.
The following table story, cited by Southey, furnishes another illustration of social, and, indeed, of political, life about this time:—
“Henry (then Richmond), on his march from Milford, lodged one night with his friend David Llwyd, at Matha’farn. David had the reputation of seeing into the future, and Richmond, whether in superstition or compliment, privately inquired of him, what would be the issue of his adventure. Such a question, he was told, was too important to be immediately answered, but in the morning a reply should be made. The wife of David saw that her husband was unusually grave during the evening; and having learnt the cause, she said, ‘How can you have any difficulty about your answer? Tell him he will succeed gloriously. If he does, you will receive honours and rewards. But, if it fail, depend upon it, he will never come here to reproach you.’” Hence, it is said, a Welsh proverb, “A wife’s advice without asking it.”
Henry VIII. loved to take a quiet dinner, occasionally, with his chancellor, at Chelsea; and there he would walk in the garden, with his arm round that neck which he afterwards flung beneath the axe of the executioner. He was given to indulgences of all sorts, and with respect to those of the appetite and palate, he was well served by his incomparable clerk of the kitchen, honest and clever William Thynne, who was not a mere clerk of the kitchen, but a gentleman and scholar to boot; loving poetry though he was no poet, and editing Chaucer with as much zeal as that with which he regulated the accounts of his kitchen clerkship. Henry ate not wisely, but too well; and this huge feeding brought him at last to such a size, that he could not be moved but by aid of “a machine.” In other words, I suppose, he could not walk, and was compelled to submit to locomotion in a chair. Among the sovereigns who assembled at the Congress of Vienna, and who were as strangely there together as the half-dozen kings whom Candide met at the table d’hôte in Venice, was that monster of a man, the King of Wurtemburg. This mountain of flesh dined daily at the imperial table, where a semicircular piece was cut out of the mahogany, in order that the stomach of the monarch might rest comfortably against the table, when engaged in its appropriate work. He did not lack wit for abounding in fatness, and to him, I believe, is properly attributed the neat saying, when he saw Lord Castlereagh in simple civilian’s dress, without a star, amid the gold lace, gems, jewels, ties, tags, and glittering uniforms of the crowd around him. The king asked who he was, and on being informed, he remarked: “Ma foi! il est bien distingué!” He could not have paid the same compliment to the noble Stewart’s wife, if it be true, as was reported, that at one of the state-dinners, or state balls, she appeared with her husband’s jewelled garter, worn as a bandeau, and “Honi soit qui mal y pense” burning in diamonds upon her forehead.
May it not have been the unpleasant effects of Henry’s gastronomic indulgences that made of him a dabbler in medicine? Many of his prescriptions in his own handwriting are still extant, and some of them are in the British Museum. He invented a plaister, and was the concocter of more than one original ointment for the cure of indigestion. He also prepared “a plaister for the Lady Ann of Cleves, to mollify and lessen certain swellings proceeding from cold, and to dissipate the boils on the stomach.” His majesty in some of his after-dinner ruminations professed also to have discovered a remedy for the plague; the prescription for which he sent to the lord mayor. He was very tender of the health of Wolsey, when the cardinal little regarded his own. His majesty, on one occasion, counsels his minister, if he would soon be relieved from “the sweating,” to take light suppers, and to drink wine very moderately, and to use a certain kind of pill. I do not know if Henry’s cookery and kitchen at all smelt of unorthodoxy before the Reformation, but it is a fact that, when Cardinal Campeggio came over here on the business of the divorce of Henry and Catherine, he was especially charged by the Pope to look into the state of cookery in England generally, and in the royal palace in particular.
The royal table of Elizabeth was a solemnity indeed. But it was all a majestically stupendous sham. The attendants thrice bent their knee as they approached to offer her the different dishes; and when these ceremonies had been gone through, the queen rose and retired to a private room, where the meats were placed before her, and she was left to dine as comfortably as the citizens and their wives of Eastcheap and Aldersgate.
Among the numerous new year’s gifts made to Elizabeth, and by which she contrived to maintain a splendid wardrobe, gifts of good things for her table were not wanting. One of her physicians presented her with a box of foreign sweetmeats; another doctor with a pot of green ginger; while her apothecaries gave her boxes of lozenges, ginger-candy, and other conserves. “Mrs. Morgan gave a box of cherries and one of apricots.” The queen’s master-cook and her serjeant of the pastry presented her with various confectionary and preserves.
Elizabeth and her “maids” both dined and breakfasted upon very solid principles and materials. Beef and beer were consumed at breakfast,—“a repast for a ploughman!” it may be said. Alas! ploughmen are content, or seem so, to strengthen their sinews as they best may of a morning with poor bread and worse tea. Elizabeth made a truly royal bird of the goose,—a distinction which her sister Mary failed to give to the cygnet, the stork, and the crane. These no more suited the national taste than that Crimean delicacy, a Russian oyster, and which all Englishmen who have tasted thereof pronounce to be a poisonous dab of rancid putty. Yet Russian princes are fond thereof, and Russian sovereigns order them for especial favourites;—just as the Prince Regent, whenever Lord Eldon was to dine at Carlton House, always commanded the chancellor’s favourite dish to be placed near him,—liver and bacon.
The household expenditure of James I. amounted to £100,000 sterling yearly; double the sum required for the same purpose by Elizabeth; and if “cock a leekie” and “haggis” were dishes to which his national taste gave fashion, the more foreign delicacies of snails and legs of frogs, dressed in a variety of ways, were readily eaten by the very daintiest of feeders. The taste of the purveyors was, however, something clumsy. What would now be said if a chef sent up to table four huge pigs, belted and harnessed with ropes of sausages, and all tied together to a monstrous bag-pudding?
The court of James I. was uncleanly enough, but it was made worse by the example of the Danish king and his courtiers, on the royal visit to the Stuart. “The Danish custom of drinking healths was scrupulously observed, and in a company of even twenty or thirty, every person’s health was required to be drunk in rotation; sometimes a lady or an absent patron was toasted on the knees, and, as a proof of love or loyalty, the pledger’s blood was even mingled with the wine.” It is well known that the ladies of the court, as well as the gentlemen, got “beastly drunk,” in honour of the visit of the King of Denmark to his sister, the consort of James I.
James, whose taste in gastronomy was not a very delicate one, used to say that if ever he were called upon to provide a dinner for the devil, his bill of fare should consist of “a pig, a poll of ling and mustard, and a pipe of tobacco for digestion.”
There was more temperance under Charles I., and increased moderation under the Commonwealth, when Cromwell’s table was remarkable for its simplicity. The civic feasts of those days were also distinguished by their decorous sobriety; and it is, perhaps, worth noticing that the “show” followed, and did not precede the dinner.
Charles I. was served with a world of old-fashioned ceremony, not unlike that which ought to have made Louis XIV. very uncomfortable. The fact, however, is, that both monarchs were pleased with the cumbrous solemnities of state, and nothing affected our English king more in his fallen fortunes than the rude service which he received at the hands of the Puritan servitors of whose masters he was the captive. When he was in durance at Windsor, his meat was brought to him uncovered, and carried without any observance of respectful form, by the common soldiers. No trial or “say” of the meats was made; no cup presented on the knee. This absence of ceremony wounded Charles to the very quick. It chafed him more than greater sorrows did subsequently. It was, he observed, the refusal to him of a service which was paid, according to ancient custom, to many of his subjects; and rather than submit to the humiliation, he chose to diminish the number of dishes, and to take his meals in strict privacy.
There are few kings who had such variety of experience in matters of the table as Charles II. The first spoonful of medicine that was offered him he resisted with a determined aversion which never left him for that sort of pabulum. His table was but simple enough during the latter years of his father, but it was worse after the fatal day of Worcester. He was glad then, at White Lady’s, to eat “bread and cheese, such as we could get, it being just beginning to be day;” and “bread, cheese, small beer, and nothing else,” sufficed him in the oak. Bread, butter, ale and sack, he swallowed in country inns, and seemed rather to look on the masquerade and the meals as a joke.
When he was lying hid in Spring Coppice, the goodwife Yates brought to his most sacred majesty “a mess of milk, some butter, and eggs,”—better fare than the parched peas which were found, in after days, in the pocket of the fugitive Monmouth. The women provided for him as tenderly in his hour of hunger and trial, as their ebony sisters did for Mungo Park in his African solitude. When Charles arrived at the house at Boscobel, he “ate bread and cheese heartily,” and (as an extraordinary), “William Penderell’s wife made his majesty a posset of fine milk and small beer, and got ready some warm water to wash his feet, not only extremely dirty, but much galled with travel.” The king, in return, called the lady “my dame Joan,” and the condescension quickened her hospitality; for shortly after, she “provided some chickens for his majesty’s supper, a dainty he had not lately been acquainted with.” But the king and his followers not only longed for more substantial fare, but were not very scrupulous as to the means of obtaining it. Colonel Carlis, for instance, went into the sheepcot of a farmer residing near Boscobel, and like an impudent as well as a hungry thief “he chose one of the best sheep, sticks him with his dagger, then sends William for the mutton, who brings him home on his back.” The next morning was a Sunday morning, and Charles, having muttered his prayers, went eagerly to the parlour to look after the stolen mutton. It was hardly cold, but Will Penderell “brought a leg of it into the parlour; his majesty called for a knife and a trencher, and cut some of it into collops, and pricked them with the knife-point, then called for a frying-pan and butter, and fried the collops himself, of which he ate heartily.” Colonel Carlis, the while, being but under-cook (and that, honour enough too), made the fire, and turned the collops in the pan. “When the colonel,” adds the faithful Blount, who records this table trait, “afterwards attended his majesty in France, his majesty, calling to remembrance this passage among others, was pleased merely to propose it, as a problematical question, whether himself or the colonel were the master-cook at Boscobel, and the supremacy was of right adjudged to his majesty.” Circumstances which made of the royal adventurer a king were the spoiling of an excellent cook. When he was secretly sojourning at Trent, his meat was, for the most part, to prevent the danger of discovery, dressed in his own chamber; “the cookery whereof served him for some divertisement of the time.” The king better understood cookery as a science than the machinery of it. When he stood in the kitchen of Mr. Tombs’s house at Longmarston, disguised as “Will Jackson,” the busy cook-maid bade him wind up the jack. “Will Jackson” was obedient and attempted it, but hit not the right way, which made the maid in some passion ask, “What countryman are you, that you know not how to wind up a jack?” Will Jackson answered very satisfactorily, “I am a poor tenant’s son of Colonel Lane, in Staffordshire. We seldom have roast meat, but when we have, we don’t make use of a jack;” which in some measure assuaged the maid’s indignation. Never had the sacredness of majesty been in such peril since the period when Alfred marred instead of made the cakes of the neatherd’s angry wife. But Charles escaped to his rather hungry exile in France;—and see, how sweet are the uses of adversity! When this charming prince was restored to the throne, he brought with him two gifts of which the nation had heard little for some years;—one was the Church Liturgy, and the other, “God d—n ye,”—a fashionable phrase which has tumbled from the court to the alley.
It can hardly be said that Charles, when king, fulfilled the requirement which Lord Chesterfield subsequently laid down, when he insisted that a man should be gentleman-like even in his vices. When William of Orange came to England as the suitor of the king’s niece, the Princess Mary, Charles took an unclean delight in making the Dutchman drunk. Evelyn says:—“One night, at a supper given by the Duke of Buckingham, the king made him (William) drink very hard; the heavy Dutchman was naturally averse to it, but being once entered, was the most frolicsome of the company; and now the mind took him to break the windows of the chambers of the maids of honour; and he had got into their apartments had they not been timely rescued. His mistress, I suppose,” adds Evelyn, and it is a strange comment for so sensible a man, “did not like him the worse for such a notable indication of his vigour.” The monarch who made his paulo-post successor drunk had little difficulty to bring the lord mayor of London into the same condition; and the city potentate and his “cousin the king” had that terrible “other bottle” together, in which men’s reason ordinarily makes shipwreck, with their dignity. But his majesty, of blessed memory, was a trifle devout after his drink, and on the “next morning” he heard anthems in his chapel, and, by way of devotion, would lean over his own pew and play with the curls of Lady Castlemaine, who occupied the next seat to that of “our most religious and gracious king.” When he was pouring the public money into the lap of that precious lady, he was leaving his own servants unpaid; and, on one occasion, when these could not obtain their salaries, they carried off their royal master’s linen, and left him without a clean shirt or a table-cloth!
The priests with whom Louis XIV. and Louis XV. used to transact their religion were wont to excuse all the conjugal infidelities of those anointed reprobates by remarking that they ever treated their consorts with the very greatest politeness. The poets of Charles’s days went further, and extolled his marital affection. Waller, for instance, congratulates the poor queen, that if she were ill, Charles was by to tend and weep over her:—
“But, that which may relieve our care
Is, that you have a help so near
For all the evil you can prove;
The kindness of your Royal Love.
He that was never known to mourn
So many kingdoms from him torn,
His tears reserved for you; more dear,
More prized, than all those kingdoms were!
For when no healing art prevail’d,
When cordials and elixirs fail’d,
On your pale cheek he dropt the shower,
Revived you like a dying flower.”
The illness referred to was a spotted fever; and here is Pepys’ plain prose on the subject:—“20th October, 1663. This evening, at my lord’s lodgings, Mrs. Sarah, talking with my wife and I, how the queen do, and how the king tends her, being so ill. She tells us that the queen’s sickness is the spotted fever; that she was as full of the spots as a leopard, which is very strange that it should be no more known; but perhaps it is not so; and that the king do seem to take it much to heart, for that he hath wept before her; but for all that he hath not missed one night since she was sick, of supping with my lady Castlemaine; which I believe is true; for she says that her husband hath dressed the suppers every night; and I confess I saw him myself coming through the street, dressing up a great supper to-night, which Sarah also says is for the king and her, which is a very strange thing.” Oh, depth of royal grief, that required light suppers and light ladies for its solace!
The Spectator has preserved for us a pleasant story illustrative both of royal and citizen good-fellowship, in the reign of Charles II., and in the person of the king and that of his jolly lord mayor, Sir Robert Viner. The merry monarch had been dining with the chief magistrate and the municipality, at Guildhall, where he had not drunk so deeply himself but he was aware that the jollity of his entertainers was beginning to render them rather oblivious of the respect due to their royal guest. He accordingly, with a curt farewell, slipped away down to his coach, which was awaiting him in Guildhall-yard. But the lord mayor forthwith pursued the runaway, and overtaking him in the yard, seized him by the skirts of his coat, and swore roundly that he should not go till they “had drank t’other bottle!” “The airy monarch,” says the narrator in the Spectator, “looked kindly at him over his shoulder, and with a smile and graceful air (for I saw him at the time, and do now), repeated this line of the old song:—
“‘And the man that is drunk is as great as a king!’
“and immediately turned back, and complied with his landlord.” This anecdote, however, though it be given on the authority of an alleged eye-witness, is probably over-coloured with regard to the conduct of his worship the mayor. Mr. Peter Cunningham quotes (in his story of Nell Gwyn) from Henry Sidney’s Diary, a letter addressed to Sidney by his sister the Countess Dowager of Sutherland, and which refers to the incident of the visit of Charles to Guildhall. The letter in question was written five years after the mayoralty of Sir Robert Viner. “The king had supped with the lord mayor, and the aldermen on the occasion had drunk the king’s health, over and over, upon their knees, wishing every one hanged and damned that would not serve him with their lives and fortunes. But this was not all. As his guards were drunk, or said to be so, they would not trust his majesty with so insecure an escort, but attended him themselves to Whitehall, and, as the lady-writer observes, ‘all went merry out of the king’s cellar.’ So much was this accessibility of manner in the king acceptable to his people, that the mayor and his brethren waited next day at Whitehall, to return thanks to the king and duke for the honour they had done them, and the mayor, confirmed by this reception, was changed from an ill to a well-affected subject.”
But as this merry mourner lived, so may he almost be said to have died. It will be remembered with what disgust Evelyn records the scene at Whitehall, a week before the king’s decease:—“I can never forget,” he says, “the inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming and all dissoluteness, and as it were total neglectfulness of God, it being Sunday evening, which this day sennight I was witness of, the king sitting and toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland, Mazarine, &c.; a French boy singing love-songs in that glorious gallery; whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at basset, round a large table, a bank of at least two thousand pounds in gold before them, upon which two gentlemen who were with me made reflections in astonishment. Six days after, all was in the dust.”
There was more meanness, but not more decency, under James II., but his queen more deeply resented, and that in public, at dinner, the insults levelled at her. When Mrs. Sedly, in 1686, was created Countess of Dorchester, the day on which the nomination passed the Great Seal, and indeed on a subsequent occasion, the queen showed how she was touched by the honours paid to a brazen concubine. “The queen,” says Evelyn, “took it very grievously, so as for two dinners, standing near her, I observed she hardly ate one morsel, nor spake one word to the king, or to any about her; though at other times she used to be extremely pleasant, full of discourse and good-humour.” Such is one of the table traits of the time of James II.
There is little to be said of William III., save that he kept a well-regulated table, and was excessively angry if he detected any faults in the service. He is described as being kind, cordial, open, even convivial and jocose. He would sit at table many hours, and would bear his full share in festive conversation. Burnet, I think, somewhere intimates, but I cannot recollect the precise words, that he was something more than moderately given to Hollands. As much, indeed, has been said of Queen Anne. But Anne was inclined to indulge in good living, and her doctor, Lister, had as many gastronomic propensities as herself. Lister entered into the minutiæ of the kitchen with the exactness of an apothecary weighing poison. On the subject of larks, he says, for the benefit of the queen, and all who love such dainty food, that if twelve larks do not weigh twelve ounces, they are scarcely eatable; they are just tolerable if they reach that weight; but that if they weigh thirteen ounces, they are fat and excellent! On such table matters did royal physicians write, when Anne was queen.
The table of George, Prince Regent, was splendidly served. The court language was French, as though the days of the Normans were come again. But the son of George III., whether as prince or as king, and despite his character of being the first gentleman in Europe, was not naturally refined. He loved to have around him men like Humboldt, who, when his guest, amused him with stories as broad as they were long. He himself would tell similar stories, even in the presence of his mother and sisters, and in spite of a sharp “Fie, George!” and an indignant working of her fan on the part of Queen Charlotte. When king, the female society which he assembled at the Pavilion was very décolleté indeed, both as regarded person and principles, and the appearance of these brilliant looking and light dressed individuals in the day-time gave to Brighton an aspect that put Rowland Hill into fits. There were joyous evenings then at Virginia Water, on “tea and marrow bones,” and there was everything there but refinement. Refinement, indeed, was not the characteristic of any one prince of the house. The Duke of Cumberland revelled in coarse jests, and was delighted when they embarrassed the modesty that could not even comprehend them. The Duke of Cambridge was perhaps the least offensive of the family. He was the professional diner-out of the house; and in his day very few public dinners took place without having the advantage of his presence as president. He was, on such occasions, punctuality itself, and could not tolerate being kept waiting. In such cases, he sometimes wiled away the time by trying over music with the musical gentlemen whose harmony was to relieve the toasts and tedium of the evening, but his impatience sometimes got the better of his politeness and of his reverence for serious things, and we shall not soon forget the effect he produced at a “religious public dinner,” by exclaiming aloud, “Where is the chaplain? d—n him! Why doesn’t he say grace?” Before passing to the next reign, we may take notice of a fact that is not generally known, but which nevertheless cannot be disputed. The coronation banquet of George IV. was one of the most splendid upon record. But there was a world of “leather and prunella” about it, in spite of its reputed splendour. Thus, for instance, the king’s table was one gorgeous display of gold plate, but the plates and dishes at all the other tables, one only, I believe, excepted, were composed of nothing more costly than good, honest pewter. The metal was indeed so splendidly burnished that to the eye no silver highly polished could have been more dazzling; but the truth remains that the peerage that day dined off pewter. But the occasion gave value to the material, and the dishes, in their character of relics of the glory of the last coronation banquet in Westminster Hall, are as highly prized, and as reverently preserved, as though they were composed of materials less strange to Potosi than tin, antimony, and a trifle of copper.
Court life, in the reign of William IV., was but of a very sombre aspect. The good old king used to indulge in giving toasts after dinner, and he made long and somewhat prosy speeches. Of the latter he was particularly fond, and he made the then young Prince George of Cambridge his pupil, by giving the health of his father, the Duke, and inducing the son to rise and return thanks for the honour conferred. It was no bad discipline for one who intended to become a public man. The young prince became a very fair speaker under the old king’s instructions. William detested politics, and he invariably fell asleep during the dessert. It would have violated etiquette to have awoke him; and the queen and her ladies never thought of rising until the royal eye-lids began again to give symptoms of returning wakefulness. He was fond of talking, over the wine, of military details, and was proud of two achievements connected therewith; first, that he had made Colonel Needham shave off his cherished whiskers, according to the new regulations; and that he had succeeded in having all the Waterloo medals worn with the king’s head outwards. He frequently fell asleep during these conversations; and then the guests quietly passed the wine from one to the other, and, as they drank off their glasses, bowed to or smiled at the sleeping sovereign the while. In the evening, there generally was music, during which the Queen Adelaide was as generally engaged in worsted work. The king usually honoured some one with an invitation to sit by his side on the sofa. He then fell asleep again, and the unlucky, honoured individual, did not dare leave his “coign of ’vantage” until the king awoke and gave the signal. William was a very moderate joker, and he loved a joke from others. It is reported that, when heir presumptive, he once said to a Secretary of the Admiralty who was at the same dinner-table, “C——, when I am king, you shall not be Admiralty Secretary! Eh, what do you say to that?” “All that I have to say to that, in such a case, is,” said C——, “God save the king!” I have heard it further said, that William never laughed so loudly as when he was told of a certain parvenu lady, who, dining at Sir John Copley’s, ventured to express her surprise that there was “no pilfered water on the table.”
The dining-tables of deceased monarchs belong to history; and, consequently, the limit of this imperfect record is to be found here. One further illustration, however, of “household” matters may here be not inaptly introduced. A few months ago a gentleman, who had been in his early years the personal friend of the Duke of Kent, was desirous of sending from Sicily a testimonial of his respect to the late Duke’s daughter, our sovereign lady the Queen. His grateful remembrance took the shape of some very rare and choice Sicilian wine, the proper transmission of which was entrusted to the good offices of a friend of the donor. This honorary agent proceeded to the proper office for instructions, and there he was somewhat surprised at being informed that, as soon as the duty had been paid upon the wine, the latter would be forwarded to the “household.” At this strange intimation, the friendly agent wrote to his principal for fresh instructions, and the principal, who had not the slightest intention of showing his respect for the memory of a sire by presenting wine to the “household” of that sire’s royal daughter, at once directed the luscious tribute to be divided among friends who had households of their own, and who could appreciate the present. The rule, with regard to offerings like these, was not in former times so ungraciously severe. When Mrs. Coutts used to send her pleasant tributary haunches of venison to the Pavilion, she was not informed that the “household” would condescend to dine upon the venison: on the contrary, a graceful autograph note from the royal recipient not only made cheerful acknowledgment of the gift, but also gave hearty promise that it would be thoroughly enjoyed. There is more independence, perhaps, in the present system, which discourages all tributes, whatever may be their nature; but there is something very ungracious in the method of its application.
Enough, however, of this matter, or we shall have little time to discuss, even briefly, two other subjects, touching which I would say something, before we are finally called to “supper.” The first of these comes under the head of “Strange Banquets.”