Sir Nicholas is in spirits again when making love to one whom he considers a woman of rank and fortune. No cavalier could then vie with him in finery. “I protest,” he says, “I was at least at sixteen brokers, before I could put myself exactly in the fashion.” But with all this, he is a craven again when he is called upon to enter and address her who awaits the wooing with impatience. “Come!” he exclaims, “I will go to the tavern and swallow two whole quarts of wine instantly; and when I am drunk, ride on a drawer’s back, to visit her.” Wheadle suggests that “some less frolic will do, to begin with.”—“I will cut three drawers over the pate, then,” says the knight, “and go with a tavern-lanthorn before me at noonday;”—just as very mad gallants were wont to do.
The liquor has not the effect of rendering Oliver’s knight decent, for in proposing the health of “my lord’s sister,” he does it in the elegant form of “Here’s a brimmer to her then, and all the fleas about her;” offers to break the windows to show his spirit, and in the lady’s very presence exclaims, “Hither am I come to be drunk, that you may see me drunk, and here’s a health to your flannel petticoat.” The latter gentillesse is by way of proof of the knight’s quality, for it was of the very essence of polite manners, when a spirited gentleman drank to a spirited lady, to strain the wine through what the Chesterfields and Mrs. Chapones of that day, if such were to be found, would not have blushed to call “their smocks.”
But enough of the way in which the stage represented “one of Oliver’s knights.” He is not worse than the courtiers and gentlemen by whom he is swindled out of his money and into a wife. Nay, nearly the last sentence put into his mouth is, at least, a complimentary testimony to the side of which Sir Nicholas is but an unworthy member. “If I discover this,” he remarks, “I am lost. I shall be ridiculous even to our own party.”—The reader will, probably, not require to be reminded that before Etherege drew Cully, Jonson had depicted Sogliardo, and that the latter, in the very spirit of Oliver’s knight, remarks:—“I do not like the humor of challenge; it may be accepted.”
The stage, from about the middle of the seventeenth century to nearly the middle of the succeeding century, was uncommonly busy with knights as heroes of new plays. The piece which brought most money to the theatrical treasury, after the “Comical Revenge,” was the “Sir Martin Mar-all,” an adaptation by Dryden, from the “Etourdi” of Molière. Such adaptations were in fashion, and the heroes of the French author were invariably knighted on their promotion to the English stage. Such was the case with “Sir Solomon, or the Cautious Coxcomb,” adapted by Carill, from Molière’s “Ecole des Femmes.” The same course was adopted by Mrs. Behn when she transferred Molière’s “Malade Imaginaire” to the stage at Dorset Gardens, and transformed Argon into Sir Patient Fancy. One of the characters in this intolerably indecent play instructs the city knight’s lady how to divide her time according to the fashion set by “the quality.” “From eight to twelve,” he says, “you ought to employ in dressing. Till two, at dinner. Till five, in visits. Till seven, at the play. Till nine, in the park; and at ten, to supper with your lover.”
In the “Sir Barnaby Whig, or No Wit like a Woman’s,” one of D’Urfey’s comedies, and produced in 1681, we have again a hero who is described as one of Oliver’s knights. The play is avowedly a party piece, and the author, in his prologue, remarks,
“That he shall know both parties now, he glories;
By hisses, Whigs; and by their claps, the Tories.”
The audience at the “Theatre Royal,” in the days of Charles II., was made especially merry by this poor jest. Sir Barnaby is represented as a Cromwellian fanatic, who will not drink the King’s health; is in an agony of terror at hearing that an army of twenty thousand men is about to sweep every rebel from the land; turns traitor; sings a comic song against the Roundheads; is saluted as Rabbi Achitophel; offers to turn Roman Catholic or Mohammedan; and is finally consigned to Newgate.
Mrs. Behn, in the same year, had her political knight as well as D’Urfey. In this lady’s more than usually licentious play, the “City Heiress,” performed at Dorset Gardens, she has a Sir Timothy Treat-all for her comic hero. She boasts in her introduction that her play is political, loyal, true Tory all over; and as “Whiggism has become a jest,” she makes a caricature of Sir Timothy, an old, seditious, Oliverian knight, who keeps open house for commonwealth-men and true-blue Protestants. He is contrasted with two Tory knights, Sir Anthony and Sir Charles Meriwill, and a Tory gentleman, named Wilding. The old Whig knight, however, is by far the least disreputable fellow of the lot. The Tory knights and their friends are rogues, perjurers, and something worse. When they are not on the stage, Mrs. Behn is not afraid to tell what they are about, and that in the very plainest language. “D—n the City!” exclaims the courtly Sir Charles. “Ay, ay!” adds his uncle, Sir Anthony, “and all the Whigs, Charles, d—n all the Whigs!”—And in such wise did Mrs. Afra Behn take vengeance upon political enemies, to the infinite delight of loyal audiences. How the Whig knights ever kept their own against the assaults made on them in plays, prologues, and epilogues, is, as Mr. Slick says, “a caution!” It is a fact, however, that these political plays were far more highly relished than those which merely satirized passing social follies. Audiences roared at the dull jokes against the Oliverian knights, but they had no relish for the rhyme-loving Sir Hercules Buffoon, of Lacy.
For one stage knight we may be said to be indebted to Charles II. himself. It was from a hint from him that Crowne wrote his “Sir Courtly Nice,” produced at the Theatre Royal shortly after the death of Charles. Sir Courtly alludes to the death of one, and the accession of a new, king, in very flattering terms:—