CHAPTER THE THIRD. CHARLES THE SECOND (CONTINUED).
THE Duke of York, the king's brother, being an acknowledged Papist, the people began to look out for a Protestant successor, and turned their eyes upon young Monmouth, a natural son of Charles, who was almost a natural in more respects than one, for his mental capacity was more—or less—than dubious. He was, indeed, a good-looking idiot, and nothing more; but, coming after such a king as Charles, the nation might have been satisfied with him; and, to oblige York, the fellow was formally declared illegitimate. The prosecution of the Catholics was carried on with unabated animosity; and several, among whom was the aged Lord Stafford, were put to death, under the pretence of advancing the cause of "peace and goodness."
The particulars of the sacrifice of Stafford afford such a faithful sample of the mode in which justice was administered in the reign of Charles the Second, that, converting ourselves into "our own reporter," we give a brief sketch of the trial. The defendant in the action, which was in the nature of an impeachment, was accused of high treason, and the three witnesses against him were Oates, Dug-dale, and Turberville, three scamps who made a regular business—and a very profitable one—of giving false evidence. Oates swore he had seen somebody deliver a document signed by somebody else, appointing Stafford paymaster to some army, which at some time or other was going to be got together somehow, somewhere, for the purpose of doing something against the Government, and in favour of the Catholics. Dugdale swore that the accused had engaged him, Dugdale, to murder the king at so much a week, with the offer of a saintdom in the next year's almanack. Turberville swore ditto to Dugdale, and though Stafford was able to disprove their evidence in many very important points, the trio of perjurers had gone so boldly to work that there was a large balance of accusation remaining over that could not be upset, in consequence of the unfortunate impossibility of proving a negative.
Stafford succeeded in damaging the credit of the witnesses, but as they came forward professedly in the character of hard swearers, who, so as they got the prisoners executed, were indifferent about being believed, the attack on their reputations affected them very little. The unhappy prisoner was so taken aback by the effrontery of his accusers, that he hardly gave himself a fair chance in his defence, which consisted chiefly of ejaculations expressive of wonder at the excessive impudence and audacity of the witnesses. Such exclamations as "Well, I'm sure! what next?" though natural enough under the circumstances, did not make up, when all put together, a very eloquent speech for the defence, and after a trial of six days' duration, the Peers, by a majority of twenty-four, found poor Stafford guilty.
Sentence of death was passed upon him, but the more ignominious portion of the punishment having been remitted by the king's order, the two sheriffs were seized with a most sanguinary fit of system, and objected to the omission of hanging and quartering, because, as they said, the leaving out of these barbarities would be altogether irregular. In order to satisfy the scruples of these very punctilious gentlemen, the Peers pronounced them "over nice," and the Commons passed a resolution of indemnity, by which the sheriffs were made aware that they would not be considered to have "scamped" their work, if they merely cut off Stafford's head without proceeding to the more artistical details of butchery.
Stafford died nobly, and the fickle populace, who had howled for his condemnation, began sighing and grieving at his fate; but as all this sympathy was almost in the nature of a post obit, it was of little or no value to the nobleman on whose behalf it was contributed. The executioner himself turned tender-hearted at the last moment, and twice raised the fatal axe, but a coarse brute near him on the scaffold—perhaps one of the thwarted sheriffs—desired the headsman not to make two bites at a cherry, and the blow was forthwith administered.
These excesses of the Parliament caused even the dissolute Charles to try, the effect of dissolution; but there was no going on for any length of time without a House of Commons to vote the supplies; and the king, thinking to withdraw the legislature from the influence of London mobs, appointed the next to be held at Oxford. This a arrangement gave great dissatisfaction to the opposition, and both parties came as if prepared for a battle, the speakers on each side being, no doubt, abundantly supplied with the leaden ammunition that is customarily used for debating purposes. It was during the party bickerings prevailing about this time, that the definitions, since so famous—and sometimes so infamous—of Whig and Tory, were first hit upon. The former was given to the popular party, merely because it had been given to some other popular party, in some other place, at some previous time, and the latter was given to the courtiers, because some Popish banditti in Ireland had been once called Tories; * but why they had been, or why, if they had been, the courtiers of Charles the Second's time need have been, are points that the reader's ingenuity must serve him to elucidate.
* Somebody, who was of course a nobody, says the word Tory
is derived from Torrco, to roost, because the Tories were
always clever at roasting their antagonists.
The king had usually been civil enough to his Parliaments, but on the occasion of the assembly at Oxford he determined to speak his mind, and his speech, being a reflection of his mind, was of course very rambling and irregular. He complained of the last Parliament having been refractory, and expressed a hope that the "present company" would know how to behave themselves. He disavowed all idea of acting in an arbitrary manner himself, but he was thoroughly determined not to be "put upon" by any one else; and so now they knew what he meant, and he trusted that no misunderstanding would arise to mar their efforts for the public benefit. The Commons listened to all this with a few mental "Oh, indeed's!" "Dear me's!" "No! 'Pon your honour's!" and "You don't say so's!" but they were not in the least over-awed, and they set to work exactly in the old way to choose the same Speaker and adopt the same measures as the last Parliament, of which many of them had been members.
The new Parliament was of course found by Charles to be no better than any of its predecessors, and when it was a week old he jumped into a sedan chair, had the crown put under the seat, and the sceptre slung across the back, when, in reply to the chairman's inquiry, "Where to, your honour?" the sovereign with a dignified voice, directed that he might be run down to the place where Parliament was sitting. This was the morning of the 28th of March, and Charles, bursting into the hall where the Lords had met, dissolved the fifth and the last of his Parliaments.
This proceeding, which, in the days of a monarchy's decline, would have been exclaimed against as highly unconstitutional, was hailed as a piece of vigour at a time when royalty, having been recently maltreated, united in its favour the general sympathies. Charles, finding that courage was likely to tell, became very liberal of its exercise, and began to abuse the opponents of his policy with more than common energy. "There is nothing like taking the bull by the horns," Charles would say to his intimate friends, "and John Bull especially should be taken by the horns, to prevent his making unpleasant use of them."
Shortly after the dissolution, Charles brought out for general perusal a justification of the course he had thought proper to pursue; for, like many other people in the world, he first took a step, and then began to look for the reasons of his having taken it. The opposition brought out a reply, written by Messrs. Somers, Sydney, and Jones, but it did not sell, and as these gentlemen could not afford to give it away, it had very little influence. Charles managed to get a number of addresses presented to him, congratulating him on his deliverance from the republicans, but the Lord Mayor and Common Council having come down to Windsor with an address of a different kind, were told that the king was not at home, but they had better go to Hampton Court. On their arriving at the latter address there was a great deal of whispering among the royal servants, who would give no other information than the words "Yes, yes; it's all right!" At length, upon a signal from above, a domestic exclaimed, "Now, then, gentlemen, you may walk up;" and on going into a room on the first floor, they found the Lord Chancellor sitting there, looking as black as thunder. His lordship, putting on a voice to match his countenance, began asking them how they dared to come with anything like a remonstrance to their sovereign; and the Lord Mayor, with the Common Council, slinking timidly out of the room, made the best of their way back to the point they had started from.
A few more plots of an insignificant character were got up against the Government, but met with no success; and the Bye-House conspiracy, so called perhaps from the wry faces the parties put on when they were found out, stands out from among the rest, which have been long ago buried under their own insignificance. Some have suggested that the Bye-House plot was a name invented as a kind of sequel to the notion of Oates, and the conspiracy of the Meal-Tub; but the hypothesis is far too trifling for us to dwell upon. As it has taken a position of some importance in history, we must furnish a few particulars of this Bye-House plot, which in the old nursery song, * taking for its theme the domestic arrangements of royalty, seems to have had a slight foreshadowing.
* "Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye."
On the 12th of June, 1683, one Josiah Keyling, who had formerly been a red-hot Whig, and was by trade a salter, was seized with the infamous idea of applying his skill in business to the affairs of his country, which he resolved to put, if he could, into a precious pickle. He went to Lord Dartmouth, for the purpose of revealing a conspiracy that had been formed to take away the king's life; and he declared one Burton, a decayed cheesemonger, Thompson, a carver, who had been trying to carve his own fortunes in vain, and Barber, an instrument-maker, as his accomplices in the intended act of regicide. They were all to have gone down to the house of one Bumbold, a maltster, at a place called the Bye, where they were to have taken a chop, and cut off the king and his brother on their return from Newmarket. They were to have purchased blunderbusses, but, perhaps by some blunder, missing the 'bus, the London conspirators never left town, and did not arrive at the "little place" of Bumbold the maltster. The disclosures made by Keyling included, at first, a few names only; but, as a brother historian * has well and playfully suggested, "he subsequently went into a regular crescendo movement," and indulged in an ad libitum, introducing several new accompaniments to the strain he had originally adopted, besides adding new circumstances and dragging in new persons into his accusation, without the slightest regard to harmony of detail. He at length went off into a largo of such wide and unmeasured scope, that he included William Lord Russell in the charges made, and his lordship was committed to the Tower.
* Macfarlane's Cabinet History of England, vol. xiii., p.
142.
Lord Grey, who was also accused, was rather more fortunate; for, having been taken in the first instance to the home of the jailor, he had the satisfaction of finding that official reeling about in a state of helpless drunkenness. Lord Grey, perceiving that the functionary who had charge of him was not in a situation to appreciate any consideration that might be shown to him, quietly walked out at the door-way of the serjeant's house, and jumping into a boat on the Thames, hailed a ship for Holland. Lord Howard of Escrick, another of the alleged conspirators, was pulled neck and heels down a chimney, into which he had climbed for concealment, in his house at Knights-bridge. His character has been blackened almost as much as his dress, by this ignoble act, for it is recorded of him that when pulled out from the grate, he looked fearfully little. He trembled, sobbed, and wept, or in other words, had a regular good cry, and the tears forming channels through the soot, rendered his aspect exceedingly ludicrous. He at once confessed that he did not come out of the affair with clean hands, but he was guilty of the very dirty trick of implicating many of his own friends and kindred by his pusillanimous confession.
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Besides other less illustrious victims, Lord Russell was sacrificed; and his kinsman Howard, whom we have just had the pleasure of dragging before the world from the chimney into which he had slunk, was one of the witnesses against the nobleman we have mentioned. Russell behaved with great dignity throughout his trial and during its fatal result; but the execution was scarcely over, when the town rang with his last speech, of whioh some enterprising Catnach of the period had obtained the manuscript. It was actually in print before the fated event took place; but there is every reason to believe that it was genuine, for speculation had not in those days learned to anticipate reports, notwithstanding the occurrence of the events described in them having been by some accident prevented.
Individuals of lesser note than Russell were condemned to share his fate, and among them was one Rouse, who was executed at Tyburn for having endeavoured to house the populace. A declaration, containing a narrative of the Rye-House plot, was published by the king, who was exceedingly fond of performing the office of his own historian. It enabled him to "touch up" the events in which he himself was concerned, and give them a colouring favourable to himself; but happily for the cause of truth, notes were being taken on its behalf, and materials were thus collected for such truthful chronicles as those the reader's eye now rests upon.
The trial and death of Algernon Sidney, the last of the Commonwealth men, took place soon after Russell's execution. Though it is to be hoped that few people in these days can be ignorant of the character of this remarkable man, yet there may be a section of the British public from whom will have burst the cry of "Sidney! Who is Sidney?" directly we mentioned him. Sidney then—we state the fact for the benefit of the benighted classes—was son of the Earl of Leicester, and had always been a republican, and had been named one of the judges on the trial of the king; but he was either too lazy or too loyal to take his seat amongst-them. He opposed Cromwell's elevation, from which it might have been inferred that he would have had no objection to the Restoration; but he opposed that, and having nothing else to excite his resistance, he opposed himself by refusing to take advantage of a general bill of indemnity. He had been obliged to remain out of England, but finding that he was seriously opposing his own interest by his absence from home, he applied for the king's pardon, which was sent him by an early post, and he arrived in England with his protection in his pocket. Party spirit was running very high when Sidney returned, and he was not the man to do anything with a view to moderation, so that he was soon at his old trick of opposing the Government. He began talking largely about liberty, and he was really going on in a very improper way, for he fell into the common error of patriots, namely, that of spouting commonplace claptraps instead of attempting every legal means to bring about a reform of the evils that may be in need of remedy.
Sidney now became a marked man, whom the royalists were determined to crush, and a pretext was speedily found for bringing him to trial. Several witnesses were brought forward to prove the existence of a plot; but what plot and what Sidney had to do with it, or whether he was concerned in it at all, did not form any part of the subject of the evidence. Having established a plot, the next thing to be done was to show that Sidney was at the head of it, and the abject Howard—no relation to the philanthropist—made his sixth or seventh appearance as a royalist witness for the purpose specified. According to law, it was necessary to have the testimony of a second person; but there were not two Howards in the world, and a supplementary scoundrel to swear away Sidney's life was nowhere to be met with.
Some papers found in the house of the accused were examined in lieu of a second witness; and though this was a flagrant evasion of the law, the proceeding was pronounced by the infamous Jeffreys to be perfectly regular. He asserted that written documents were better than living witnesses, for the former could not give an evasive reply; but the judicial villain forgot that the papers, unless the writing happened to be crossed, would not admit of the test of cross-examination like other witnesses. Sidney pleaded that his hand-writing had not been proved; and that even supposing him to be the author of the documents, he might have been "only in fun;" but this was a frivolous excuse, for it is dear that if "only in fun" were a good plea, there would be great difficulty in getting over it. A verdict of "Guilty" was returned by a jury so discreditably packed, that the box in which they sat should have been called a packing-case.
Judge Jeffreys "came out" exceedingly on the occasion of Sidney's sentence being passed, and insisted on proceeding to the last extremity, notwithstanding a mass of irregularities having been pointed out to him. Jeffreys would listen to nothing in the prisoner's favour; and upon one Mr. Bampfield, a barrister, venturing an opinion as amicus curia, that unhappy junior was smashed, snubbed, and silenced by the judge, who recommended the learned gentleman to confine himself to those points of practice upon which his opinion was required. The scene between Sidney and Judge Jeffreys degenerated into a mere personal squabble before the unhappy affair was concluded, and it ended in Jeffreys telling Sidney to keep cool, while the judge himself was boiling over with rage, and the prisoner tauntingly requested his "lordship" to feel his—the prisoner's—pulse, which the latter declared was more than usually temperate. Sidney followed the practice, prevalent at the time, of placing a paper in the hands of the sheriff by way of legacy on the scaffold; but we have been unable to account for the strange partiality felt by persons at the point of death for the individual principally concerned in their execution.
Hampden was selected as the next victim to the political persecution so much in vogue during Charles's reign, but it was thought more profitable to fine this gentleman than to execute him, and he was adjudged to pay a penalty of £40,000, which added a large sum to the royal treasury, besides saving the executioner's fee and the cost of a scaffold. Judge Jeffreyss though balked in this instance of an opportunity for gratifying his sanguinary propensities, took his revenge upon some inferior prisoners, for it was his practice when one eluded the gallows by any chance, to hang two, as a poor compensation for the disappointment he had suffered. Professor Holloway, who had been concerned in the Rye-House plot, was accordingly condemned to death, with Sir Thomas Armstrong, who had had a small and very unprofitable share in the plot.
Judge Jeffreys, who figured in these sanguinary transactions, was one of the most extraordinary specimens of ruffianism that the world ever produced; and if history—like Madame Tussaud—were to get up a Chamber of Horrors, Judge Jeffreys would certainly take his place in it by the side of Danton, Sawney Bean, Marat, Mrs. Brownrigg, and Robespierre. Before he went on circuit he used to say he was going to give the provinces "a lick with the rough side of his tongue"—a vulgar threat which he carried out to its fullest extent, for he not only used his tongue, but his teeth, in the lickings he administered to the unfortunate prisoners brought before him for trial. He was not much interested in dry points of law, and indeed he endeavoured to moisten them as much as he could by drinking copiously before he went into court, and he sometimes reeled about so unsteadily as he took his place on the bench, that a facetious usher of the period declared Jeffreys should be called the Master of the Rolls, for he was always rolling about from side to side when he approached the seat of judgment.
The king endeavoured, by courting personal popularity, to avert from himself some of the odium that attached to nis creatures and his Government. Knowing that the suspicion of his entertaining Popish predilections was very much about, he married his niece, the Lady Anne, to Prince George of Denmark, a Protestant. No consideration would induce him, however, to call another Parliament, and though he was bothered for money on all sides, without the power of raising a supply, he preferred, as he said, "rubbing on," to the chance of getting some much harder rubs from the legislative body, in the event of one having been summoned. He greatly preferred doing just as he pleased with other people's money, to the annoyance of getting any of his own upon the conditions that a Parliament would certainly have attached to the grant of it. His credit being almost unlimited, he never wanted for anything that cash could procure; and he led a much more independent life by setting Parliament at defiance, and having nothing to thank it for, than he could have done had he called it together, and taken an annual supply, the amount of which would have been in some measure contingent on his good behaviour.
Charles had become as absolute as the last case of a Latin noun, but he was not happy, and his gaiety beginning to forsake him, the picture of the sad dog was gloomily realised. He fell into a succession of fits of the blues, and on Monday, the 2nd of February, 1685, he put his hand to his head, turned very pale, and seemed to be in a very shaky condition. Dr. King, an eminent physician, with a taste for experimental philosophy, was sent for; but his experiments either failed, or were put off too long, for Charles fell on the floor as if dead when the doctor arrived to prescribe for him. Dr. King resolved on bleeding the royal patient, who came to as fast as he had gone off, and in a fit of generosity the Council ordered the surgeon £1000, which, in a fit of oblivion, was forgotten, and he was never paid anything. Perhaps payment may have been disputed, on the ground that the doctor's treatment had not been permanently effective, for a bulletin had scarcely been issued declaring the king out of danger, when it was found necessary to issue another bulletin declaring him in again. The physicians handed him over to the ministers of the church, but Charles would not have about him any Protestant divine, and the Duchess of Portsmouth then told it as a great secret to the French ambassador, that the king, at the bottom of his heart, was a Catholic. This information revealed two facts about which there might have been considerable doubt, namely, that the king possessed some religion, though it was the one which he had been during the whole of his reign persecuting and executing others for following; and secondly, that he had a heart sufficiently capacious for any moral or virtuous principle to lie at the bottom of.
The moment the true character of Charles's faith was known to the French ambassador, he used his utmost ingenuity to smuggle a confessor to the death-bed of the sovereign. The English bishops, however, stuck to the expiring monarch so pertinaciously that no Romish priest could approach, until one Huddleston was hunted up, who had formerly been a Popish clergyman, but had so terribly neglected his business, that the office of confessor was quite strange to him. A wig and gown were put upon him to disguise him, and he was taken to a Portuguese monk to be "crammed" for the task he had to perform; and having been brought up the back staircase to the royal chamber, he got through the duty very respectably. Such was the disreputable imposture that was resorted to for supplying Charles the Second with the only religious assistance or consolation that he received before his dissolution. The Protestant bishops, who had been all hurried into the next room, did not know exactly what to make of it; but there were various whispers and shrewd suspicions current among the churchmen and the courtiers.
Soon after his interview with Huddleston, who was huddled up in a cloak to get him out of the palace without being discovered, Charles got a little better, and sent for his illegitimate children to give them his blessing. A catalogue of these young ladies and gentlemen would occupy more space perhaps than they are worth, but it is sufficient perhaps to say, that Master Peg and Miss Peg, the king's son and daughter by Mrs. Catherine Peg, were absent from the family circle in consequence of their having died in their infancy. Master James Walters, the eldest of the group of naturals, who had been created Duke of Monmouth, was not mentioned by his father in his last illness; but little Charlie Lennox, the young Duke of Richmond, and his mother, the Duchess of Portsmouth—Mademoiselle Querouaille—were especially recommended to the Duke of York's attention. The dying reprobate had the good feeling to put in a word for Mrs. Eleanor Gwynne, the actress, ancestress of the noble house of St. Alban's; but as he only said, "Do not let poor Nelly starve," it does not seem that his views with regard to her were very munificent. The bishops, however, were scandalised selon les règles at even this brief allusion to the "poor player," who had invariably refused all titles of honour; but it is said that their holinesses were not nearly so much shocked at the mention of the Duchesses of Portland and Cleveland, who were morally not a bit better than Nell Gwynne, though they had electrotyped their infamy with rank, which formed in those days, as we are happy to say it does not in these, the only real substitute for virtue.
At six in the morning of the 6th of February, 1685, Charles asked what o'clock it was, and requested those about him to open the curtains, that he might once more see daylight. Where he was to see it at that time of the morning in the darkest period of the year is, like the daylight itself, under such circumstances, not very visible. His senses, which must have been already wandering, were by ten o'clock quite gone, and at half-past eleven he expired without a struggle. He was in the fifty-fifth year of his age, and the twenty-fifth of his actual reign, though, according to legal documents, he was king for thirty-six years, inasmuch as while he was flying about from place to place, and perching upon trees to elude discovery, he was supposed, by a loyal fiction, to be still sitting on the throne of England.
A report got abroad that Charles had been poisoned, but although this deadly operation had been performed on his mind by the evil and corrupt councillors into whose hands he fell after the death of Clarendon, there is no reason for believing that physical poisoning was the fate of this disreputable sovereign.
The characters of the kings and queens it is our duty to pass in review give many a pang to our loyal bosom, and we regret to say that our heart has been perforated, nay, riddled to an alarming extent, by the melancholy riddle which the character of Charles presents to us. We will begin with him as a companion—not that we should be very anxious for his company; but because it was in the capacity of a companion that he presented the most amiable aspect. His manners were engaging; but as his engagements were scarcely ever kept, the quality in question was only calculated to lead to disappointment among those who had anything to do with him. His wit, raillery, and satire are said to have been first-rate, but we find none of his bon-mots recorded which would have been worth more than two pence a dozen to any regular dealer in jokes, though for private distribution they might have been a little more-valuable, on account of their royal authorship. For his private life he has found apologists in preceding historians * one of whom appears to imagine that the disgusting selfishness familiarly termed "jolly-dogism" is the highest social virtue of which human nature is capable. Charles was, we are told, a good father, but it was to those of whom he ought never to have been the father at all; a generous lover to those whom he could not make the objects of generosity without the grossest injustice to others; and a pleasing companion to those with whom he ought to have avoided all companionship. We do not concur in that sort of laxity which looks at the domestic ties as so many slip-knots that may hang about the wearer as loosely as he may find convenient.
* Hume calls him "an obliging husband."
For his public character, even those who admire him in his private relations have not ventured to offer any apology; and his utter disregard of the honour, the religion, the liberty, and the material interests of the nation over which he ruled cannot be made the subject of laudation. It is suggested that a certain reckless gaiety formed some excuse for his defects as a sovereign; but monarchy in sport becomes tyranny in earnest, when its affairs are conducted by a negligent and heartless libertine. His reign was one long hoax as far as religion was concerned, for he was a Catholic at heart while pursuing the Papists with the most cruel persecution; and though his behaviour towards that class would, under any circumstances, have been hateful, it seems doubly detestable when we remember that he was himself guilty of holding the opinions for which he sent so many to the scaffold.
There can be no doubt that the fate of his father, and the disgust occasioned by the tyranny arising out of the ascendency of the rabid friends of freedom during the Commonwealth, were mainly instrumental in obtaining toleration for the vices and oppressive cruelties of Charles the Second. The dissatisfaction caused by the abuse of the royal power in the preceding reign must have burst out with more earnestness had it been kept bottled up until the accession of the libertine monarch, whose supposed sufferings during exile had attracted towards him a large share of sympathy. Had he comc to the throne in due course, without the intervention of a republic, he would have been swept off by a storm of general indignation; but the rebound of public feeling in favour of monarchy carried him in triumph to the same position that his father had occupied.
It was remarked of Charles the Second, that he never said a foolish thing or ever did a wise one; an observation which either he—or some one for him—happily turned to account, by observing that his words were his own, while his acts where those of his ministry. He has left nothing very valuable to posterity, notwithstanding the alleged wit or wisdom of his words, for the only persons who have been able to turn him to profitable account are the dramatists, who have founded a few farces on the career of that sad scamp—the Merry Monarch.
