And having got to the “majesty of the people,” I am reminded of a “popular majesty,” the citizen king, Louis Philippe. He was a monarch economically minded, and kept the most modest yet not worst furnished of tables. His family often sate down before he arrived, detained as he often was by state affairs. When all rose as he quietly entered the dining-room, his stereotyped phrase was, “Que personne ne se dérange pour moi,” and therewith ensued as little ceremony as when “William Smith” and his household sate down to an uncrowned dinner at the little inn at Newhaven.
They who are curious to see how admirably Louis Philippe was constituted for making a poor-law commissioner, or a parochial relieving overseer, should peruse the graphic biography of the king written by Alexander Dumas. Therein is a list, made out by the monarch, of what he thought was sufficient for the table of the princes and princesses; and Louis of Orleans condescends to name the number of plates of soup, or cups of coffee, that he deemed sufficient for the requirement and support of the younger branches of his house. It shows that the soul of a crafty “gargottier” was in the body of the citizen king. But we have not yet contemplated the appearance and behaviour of our own sovereigns at table, out of respect for whom we now allot a chapter, but a brief one, to themselves.
ENGLISH KINGS AT THEIR TABLES.
The utilitarians of history have declared that half our treasured incidents of story are myths. Rufus was not slain by Sir Walter Tyrrell; Richard III. was a marvellously proper man; and the young princes were not smothered in the Tower. They have laid their hands on our legends, as Augustus did his on the nose of the dead Alexander, and with the same effect,—under the touch it crumbled into dust. The infidels refuse even to have faith in that table trait of Alfred, which showed him making cakes, or rather marring them, in the neatherd’s cottage. Mr. Wilkie may have prettily painted the incident, but its existence, anywhere but on canvas and in the poet’s brain, they ruthlessly deny. I do not know but that they are right.
We march into the bowels of more trustworthy ground, when we pass the frontier of the Roman period. William the Norman we know had a huge appetite for venison; and the Saxon chronicler says, that he loved the “high deer” as if he had been their father, which is but an equivocal compliment to his paternal affection. His table indulgences cost the life of hundreds, and the ruin of tens of hundreds. It brought on corpulency; his corpulency begot a poor joke in Philip of France; and of this joke was born such wrath in the soul of William, that he carried fire and sword into that kingdom, and was cut short in his career, ere he had accomplished the full measure of his revenge.
Rufus was as fat as his father, and as majestic both in his oaths and his appetites. To every passion he yielded himself a slave; and he feasted, like so many who would affect to be disgusted at his dishonesty, without troubling himself as to who “suffered.” He never paid a creditor whom he could cheat; and again, like many of the same class, he was most affable at table; his drinking companions were on an equality with him; and in such fellowship, over gross food and huge goblets mantling to the brim, he cut unclean jokes on his own unclean deeds, at which his servile and drunken hearers roared consumedly, and swore he was a god. There was some grandeur in his ideas, however, for he built Westminster Hall, as a vestibule to a palace, wherein he intended to hold high revel such as the world had never seen; and a vestibule it has now become, but to a palace wherein sits a different sort of dignity to that dreamed of by the low-statured, fat, fierce, and huge feeding Rufus.
All the Norman kings were fearful objects at which to fling jokes; and the appetite of Henry I. was ruined, and his sanguinary ire aroused, by a derisive passage in a poem by Luke de Barré. The king made the table shake as he declared that he would let wretched versifiers know what they were to expect if they offended the King of England; and Barré suffered the loss of his eyes. Henry ate and drank none the less joyously for the dead. But Beauclerc was a more refined gastronome than his brothers, as befitted his name; and though in many respects his court was horribly licentious, yet when he went from one demesne to another, to consume its revenues upon the spot, the feasting there seems to have been attended by as much moderation as merriment.
Stephen had more to do with fighting than feasting, and with keeping castles rather than cooks; but he knew how to gain allies by the fine science of giving dinners, and there was no more courteous host than he. While the king and the barons kept high mirth, however, the people were in the lowest misery. While the king gave political feasts, his subjects were perishing of starvation by thousands.
His successor, the Second Henry, was but a poor patron of cooks, as was to be expected of a monarch who had continually to defend himself against the rebellions, not only of subjects, but of his own children. Of the latter, the only one who loved him was his natural son Geoffrey. It is no wonder that this melancholy king was the first to do away with the old custom of having a coronation dinner thrice every year, on assembling the States at the three great festivals. He was ever in the midst of affrays; and once he fell among a body of monks, who checked their turbulence to complain to the king; their complaint being that their abbot, the Bishop of Winchester, had cut off three dishes from their table. “How many has he left you?” said the king. “Good heavens!” said the monks, “he has only left us ten.” “Ten!” said the monarch; “I am content with but three; and I hope your bishop will reduce you to a level with your king.” They, of course, were highly disgusted at the remark.
Richard Cœur de Lion, that copper monarch, was too busy with mischief to have leisure for much banqueting; but he loved one thing, and that was venison, the poor stealers of which he punished by the most horrible of mutilations. In his reign, an ox and a horse cost four shillings each; a sow was to be bought for a shilling; a sheep with fine wool, for tenpence, and with coarse wool, for sixpence; so that, taking into account the difference in the valuation of money, people who had the money to purchase with, could procure mutton and pork at a rate about a dozen times cheaper than the same articles can be procured at now. The sovereign did not trouble himself about paying anybody; and when he gave a banquet, the very last thing he thought of was whether it were ever paid for or not.