If we are to believe the memoir writers and dramatists of this period, the national manners and morals had suffered a decided deterioration. Licentious as was the court of Queen Elizabeth, there was a certain dignity and outward decorum preserved, but James introduced such coarseness and grossness of manner, such low debauch and buffoonery, that even the salutary restraint which fashion had imposed was stripped away, and all classes exhibited the most revolting features. In the reign of Henry, Edward, and Elizabeth, we had such women as the daughters of Sir Thomas More, Lady Jane Grey, Catherine Parr, and others, who cultivated literature and philosophy, the Queens Mary and Elizabeth themselves setting the example in reading and translating the most illustrious classical authors. But after James came in, notwithstanding all his learned pedantry, you hear nothing more of such tastes amongst the Court ladies, and it is very singular that amid that blaze of genius which distinguished the time under review, we find no traces of feminine genius there. On the contrary, both English dramatists and foreign writers describe the morals and manners of women of rank as almost destitute of delicacy and probity. They are described as mingling with gentlemen in taverns amid tobacco smoke, songs, and conversation of the most ribald character. They allowed liberties which would startle women of the lowest rank in these times, were desperate gamblers, and those who had the opportunity were wholesale dealers in political influence. Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, boasts of the effect of the bribes that he was accustomed to distribute amongst them. Whilst such women as the infamous and murderous Countess of Essex and the Dowager Countess Villiers were the leading stars of the Court, the tone of morals must have been low indeed. Whilst the ladies were of this stamp, we cannot expect the gentlemen to have been better, and there is no doubt but that the honours and wealth and royal favour heaped on such men as Somerset, Hay, Ramsay, and Buckingham, made debauchery and villainy quite fashionable. The character of Englishmen on their travels, Howell tells us, was expressed in an Italian proverb:—
"Inglese Italianato
E Diavolo incarnato."
"An Italianised Englishman is a devil incarnate." This was said of the debauched conduct of our young men on their travels. At home they were a contemptible mixture of foppery and profanity. Buckingham and the other favourites led the way. We have recorded the audacious behaviour of Buckingham at the courts of France and Spain, and the enormous foppery of his apparel. He had a dress of uncut white velvet, covered all over with diamonds, valued at eighty thousand pounds, a great feather of diamonds, another dress of purple satin covered with pearls, valued at twenty thousand pounds, and his sword, girdle, hatbands, and spurs were thickly studded with diamonds. He had, besides these, five-and-twenty other dresses of great richness, and his numerous attendants imitated him according to their means. They began now to patch their faces with black plaister, because the officers who had served in the German wars wore such to cover their scars; and the ladies did the same. Duelling was now introduced, cheating at play was carried to an immense extent, and the dandy effeminacy of the Cavaliers was unexampled. They had the utmost contempt of all below them, and any attempt to assume the style or courtesies of address which they appropriated to themselves was resented as actual treason. The term "Master" or "Mr." was used only to great merchants or commoners of distinction; and to address such as "gentlemen" or "esquires" would have roused all the ire of the aristocracy. In proceeding through the streets at night, courtiers were conducted with torches, merchants with links, and mechanics with lanthorns.
We may imagine the feeling with which the sober and religious Puritans beheld all this, and the proud contempt with which their strictures were received. When the Civil War broke out, which was a war of religious reform as much as of political, the Puritans displayed a grave manner, a sober dress, and chastened style of speech; and the Cavaliers, in defiance and contempt, swore, drank, and indulged in debauchery all the more, to mark their superiority to the "sneaking Roundhead dogs."
Charles endeavoured to restrain this loose and indecent spirit, but it was too strong for him; and though the Puritans put it effectually down during the Commonwealth, it came back in a flood with the lewd and ribald Charles II. Charles I. also introduced a more tasteful style of Court pageants and festivities. Under James all the old fantastic masques and pageantries—in which heathen gods, goddesses, satyrs, and giants figured—prevailed. Charles gave to his pageantries a more classical character, but when the Puritans came in they put them all down, along with Maypoles, and all the wakes, and church-ales, and the like, which James had encouraged by his "Book of Sports." The Court festivals, so long as the monarchy remained, were marked by all the profusion, displays of jewellery, and dresses of cloth of gold and embroidery, which prevailed in the Tudor times. The old-fashioned country life, in which the gentlemen hunted and hawked, and the ladies spent their leisure in giving bread to the poor and making condiments, preserves, and distilled waters, was rapidly deserted during the gay days of James and Charles, and the fortune-making of favourites.
Merchants and shopkeepers were growing rich, and though they still conducted their businesses in warehouses which would appear mean and miserable to City men of to-day, and in shops with open fronts, before which the master or one of his apprentices constantly paraded, crying, "What d'ye lack?" had stately suburban houses, and vied with the nobles in their furniture and mode of living. The moral condition of the people of London at this period, according to all sorts of writers, was something inconceivably frightful. The apprentices, as we have seen, were a turbulent and excitable race, who had assumed a right to settle political matters, or to avenge any imagined attack on their privileges. At the cry of "Clubs!" they seized their clubs and swords and rushed into the streets to ascertain what was amiss. They were easily led by their ringleaders against any body or any authority that was supposed to be invading popular rights. We have seen them surrounding the Parliament House, demanding such measures as they pleased, and executing their notions of suitable chastisement of offenders by setting fire to Laud's house, and breaking down the benches of the High Commission Court. They were equally ready to encounter and disperse the constabulary or the City Guard, and to fight out their quarrels with the Templars, or others with whom they were at feud.
