Notwithstanding all this, the country gentlemen of England, of good blood, who had sniffed scornfully at the scent of the beer-vats which hung about the name of Cromwell, welcomed this clever, swarthy, black-haired, dissolute Prince, who had a pedigree which ran back on the father’s side to the royal Bruce of Scotland, and on the mother’s side to the great Clovis, and to the greater Charlemagne.
You will find a good glimpse of this scion of royalty in Scott’s story of Peveril of the Peak. The novel is by no means one of the great romancer’s best; but it is well worth reading for the clear and vivid idea it will give one of the social clashings between the reserves of old Puritanism and the incontinencies of new monarchism; you will find in it an excellent sample of the gruff, stalwart Cromwellian; and another of the hot-tempered, swearing cavalier; and still others of the mincing, scheming, gambling, roystering crew which overran all the purlieus of the court of Charles. Buckingham was there—that second Villiers,[70] of whom I had somewhat to say when the elder Buckingham came up for mention in the days of Charles I.; this younger Villiers running before the elder in all accomplishments and all villainies; courtly; of noble bearing; with daintiest of speeches; a pattern of manly graces; capable of a tender French song, with all his tones in exultant accord with best of court singers, and of a comedy that drew all the play-goers of London to the “Rehearsal;” capable too, of the wickedest of plots and of the foulest of lies. And yet this Buckingham was one of the best accredited advisers of the Crown.
To the same court belonged Rochester,[71] his great, fine wig covering a great, fine brain; he writing harmonious verses about—“Nothing”—or worse than nothing; and at the last wheedling Bishop Burnet into the belief that he had changed his courses, and that if he might rise from that ugly deathbed where the good-natured, pompous bishop sought him, he would be enrolled among the moralists. I think it was lucky that he died with such good impulse flashing at the top of his badnesses.
Dorset belonged to this court, with his pretty verselets, and Sedley and Etherege; also the Portsmouth and Lady Castelmaine, and the rest of those venturesome ladies who show their colors of cheek and bosom, even now, in the well-handled paintings of Sir Peter Lely. When you go to Hampton Court you can see these fair and frail beauties by the dozen on the walls of the King William room. Sir Peter Lely[72] was a rare painter, belonging to these times; a great favorite of Charles; and he loved such subjects for his brush; he drew the delicatest hands that were ever put on canvas—too delicate and too small, unfortunately, to cover the undress of his figures.
But, at the worst, England was not altogether a Pandemonium in those days following upon the Restoration. I think, perhaps, the majority of historians and commentators are disposed to over-color the orgies; it is so easy to make prodigious effects with strong sulphurous tints and blazing vermilions. Certain it is that Taine, in writing of these times, has put an almost malignant touch into his story, blinking the fact that the trail which shows most of corrupting phosphorescence came over the Channel with the new King; forgetting that French breeding was at the bottom of the new tastes, and that French gold made the blazonry of the chariots in which the Jezebels rode on their triumphal way through London to—perdition.
Then, again, English vice is more outspoken and less secretive than that of the over-Channel neighbors. It is now, and has always been true, that when his Satanic majesty takes possession of a man (or a woman), he can cover himself in sweeter and more impenetrable disguise under the pretty perukes and charming millinery of French art than in a homely British body, out of which the demon horns stick stark through all the wigs and cosmetics that art can put upon a man.
It is worth while for us to remember that in this London, when the elegant Duke of Rochester was beating time with his jewelled hand to a French gallop, Richard Baxter’s[73] ever-living Saints’ Rest was an accredited book, giving consolation to many a poor soul wrestling with the fears of death and of future judgment. It was published, indeed, somewhat earlier; but its author was still wakeful and earnest; and many a time his thin, stooping figure might be seen threading a way through the street crowds to his chapel in Southwark, where delighted listeners came to hear him, almost upon the very spot where Shakespeare, eighty years before, had played in the Globe Theatre.
The eloquent Tillotson, too, in these times—more liberal than Baxter or Doddridge—was writing upon The Wisdom of Being Religious and the right Rule of Faith, and by his catholicity and clear-headedness winning such favor and renown as to bring him later to the see of Canterbury.