The movement, of course, elicited a violent opposition. Poets and dramatists were banded together in denouncing the subservience to France of a portion of English society. At times, these nationalists went perhaps too far in their praise of old manners and old fashions. Assuredly any reasonable man will side with Sir Fopling Flutter in preferring the wax candle, albeit from France, to the time-honoured tallow candle.[130]
Butler's notebooks, which were published a few years ago, reveal in the man a singularly conservative state of mind. The French are the same, he thinks, to the English nation as the Jews or the Greeks were to the Romans of old. Fashions, cooking, books, all that comes from France is to be abhorred.[131]
One day Evelyn, champion as he was of all generous ideas, determined to bring his countrymen back to their forefathers' simplicity. He accordingly wrote an "invective" against the fashions of France and proposed to adopt in their stead the "Persian costume," "a long cassock fitted close to the body, of black cloth, and pinked with white silk under it, and a coat over it, and the legs ruffled with black ribbon." Under the title of Tyrannus or the Mode, the pamphlet was dedicated to the King. Apparently Charles ii. was very idle at the time: the idea pleased him and he donned the "oriental vest." Several members of the House of Commons, probably by way of protesting against the dissoluteness of the Court, had forestalled him. While Evelyn was gravely congratulating himself on the good effect of his pamphlet, the King, in the vein of irrepressible "blague" that was his characteristic trait, remarked that the "pinking upon white made his courtiers look like so many magpies." A few days after, upon hearing that the King of France had caused all his footmen to be put into vests, Charles ii. quietly reverted to the French fashion, "which," as Guy Miège wrote after the Revolution, "has continued ever since."[132]
Though beaten in that particular instance, the nationalists were to carry the day, thanks to the power of tradition and the strong individualism of the English nation. For a hundred years at least, it had been recognised as an assured principle that an Englishman ran the risk of depravation if he ventured abroad.[133] What could the fancy of a few courtiers avail against universal consent? All the satirical poets—Wyatt, Gascoigne, Bishop Hall, Butler—had successfully declaimed against foreigners and frenchified Englishmen. Even Charles ii. applauded Howard's comedy, The English Monsieur. Then, as now, for the average Englishman, Paris was pre-eminently the pleasure-city. It was even worse at times: if gentlemen fought private duels, it was to copy the French.[134] A man as well-informed as the Earl of Halifax feared that the famous poisoning cases in which the Marquise de Brinvilliers and the woman Voisin were concerned, might find imitators in England, "since we are likely to receive hereafter that with other fashions."[135] As the Chinese in modern America, so the Frenchman was looked upon as a suspicious character; not altogether without cause: the cooks, tailors, and valets, the adventurers of the Gramont type lurking about the Court, were redolent of vice. Pepys, who had nothing of the saint about him, could not hide his aversion for Edward Montagu's French valet, the mysterious Eschar, most probably a spy. The great ladies had the habit, which seems so strange to us, to be waited upon by valets instead of maids. When the valet came from France, the pretext for scandal was eagerly seized upon.[136]
If anglomania was unknown to France in the seventeenth century, yet Frenchmen were found who appreciated England. Some lived at Court, during Louis xiv.'s minority and later, when the King of England was in the pay of his cousin, the Grand Monarch. No doubt English literature did not profit by those good dispositions, for the simple reason that none of those Frenchmen knew English.
Both Cardinal Mazarin and the Grande Mademoiselle caused horses to be imported from England, but Colbert found them rather expensive. When he received instructions to build Versailles, the minister had to be resigned to extravagance. Henrietta of England stood in high favour with the King, and all that came from England proved acceptable; overwhelmed with work, responsible for the national finances, the navy and public prosperity, the great minister was compelled to discuss trivial details; the same year as the Treaty of Dover was signed, he corresponded with Ambassador Colbert de Croissy about the purchase for the canal at Versailles of two "small yachts." The boats were built in Chatham dockyard, sent to France, and workmen were dispatched to carve and gild the figure-heads.[137]
POPULAR REPRESENTATON OF AN ENGLISHMAN
After Bonnart
When Locke visited Paris in 1679, he found some admirers of England. He was told that Prince de Conti, then aged seventeen, proposed to learn English.[138] No wonder the princes of the blood were anxious to know all about the allies of France. The King himself had shown as much curiosity as his exalted station allowed. He had asked his envoys to forward him reports on the government and institutions of the newly-discovered land, on the state of arts and sciences there, on the latest Court scandals. In the Colbert papers may be found reports on the state of the English navy, by superintendent Arnoul, a learned disquisition on the origin of Parliaments, and amusing bits of information, such as the following, about Charles ii.'s Queen: "She is extremely clean and takes a bath once every six weeks, winter and summer. Nobody ever sees her in her bath, not even her maids, curtains being drawn around."