Richard had no virtue but courage; and John resembled his worthless brother in every thing but courage. He had the same love for venison; and a joke at dinner upon a fat haunch, which he said had come from a noble beast that had never heard mass, was looked upon by the clerical gentlemen present as a reflection upon their corpulency. They never forgot it; and it was, perhaps, partly a consequence of their retentive memory, that the monks of Swineshead poisoned the dish of which the king partook on the occasion of almost his last dinner. He certainly never enjoyed another.
Henry III. was the first of our kings whose reign exceeded half-a-century in duration. He was a moderate man, loved plain fare, and cared more for masses than merriment. He was an easy, indolent monarch, with troubles enough to have fired him to activity; but he would have given half his realm for the privilege of daily dining in peace and quietness, a boon seldom vouchsafed to him. His subjects must have dined as ill as himself, if we may judge by the extraordinary variation in the prices of articles of consumption during his reign. Thus the price of wheat, for instance, varied from one shilling to a pound a quarter. The royal statute upon ale rather displeased all citizens of this period, for by it the price was fixed at a halfpenny per gallon in cities, while in the country the same quantity might be sold for a farthing. A gallon of ale for a halfpenny ought, however, to have satisfied the most thirsty of drinkers.
The frugal Edward I. very little patronised either eating or drinking, beyond what nature required. He was a very moderate wine-drinker, but he exceedingly offended those who were otherwise, by imposing a duty of two shillings a tun on all wine imported, over and above the old existing duty. The unlucky Edward II. was to the first Edward, what Louis XVI. was to Louis XIV., the scape-goat for the crimes of a predecessor and tyrant too powerful to be resisted. The banqueting-room of this Edward, however, was, as is often the case with such princes, oftener used than the council-room, and the favourites feasted with their weak lord until rebellion marred the festivity. There never was a merrier reign (despite public calamity) closed by so terrible a murder as that of this king, whose last dinner would have almost disgusted a dog.
Edward III. was a gorgeous patroniser of the culinary art; the cooks and his guests adored him; and Windsor Castle, which he built as a fortress and a pleasaunce, is a monument of his power and his taste. But his love for good cheer was imitated by his subjects to their ruin; and king and parliament interfered to remedy by penalty, what might have been obviated by good example. Servants were prohibited from eating flesh, meat, or fish, above once a day. By another law, it was ordained that no one should be allowed, either for dinner or supper, above three dishes in each course, and not above two courses; and it is likewise expressly declared that soused meat is to count as one of these dishes. And of these laws I will only observe, that if they were obeyed, servants and citizens of the days of Edward III. were a very different class of people from what they are at present.
When it is stated of Richard II. that two thousand cooks and three hundred servitors were employed in the royal kitchen, we think we become acquainted with the gastronomic tastes of that unhappy king. But as he was one of those whose virtues were his own, and his vices were of others’ making, so this Sardanapalian array of cooks was kept up by those who ruled from behind the throne, and finally left the king to starve, despite his counting cooks by thousands. His chief cuisinier is known only by the initials C. S. S., under which he wrote a culinary work in English, “On the Forme of Cury.” In this work, he speaks of poor Richard, his royal master, as the “best and royallest viander of all Christian kynges.”
Henry IV. kept a princely but not a profuse table. He was the first king in England whose statutes may be said to have acted as a check on the freedom of after-dinner conversation upon religious matters; for in his reign took place the first execution in England, on account of opinions connected with matters of faith. The household expenses of this monarch are set down at something less than £20,000 per annum of the money of the time; and this sum, moderate enough, appears to have been fairly applied to the purposes for which it was intended. A porpoise was a fashionable dish in the time of Henry V., who first had it at the royal table, and thus sanctioned its use at tables of lower degree. Loyal folks in those days copied the example set them by their sovereign, as they did in the later days of George III. boiled mutton and caper sauce, when country gentlemen “dined like the king, sir, at two o’clock.” But Henry V. was oppressed with debts, and, like many men in similar positions, his banquets were all the more splendid, and his prodigality was equal to his liabilities. So extravagant a monarch bequeathed but a poor inheritance to Henry VI., who was occasionally as hard put to it for a dinner as ever the Second Charles was. When Edward IV. jumped into poor Henry’s seat, he found a host of angry persons who disputed his power, and these he took care to conciliate by the most powerful, nay irresistible means that were ever applied to the solution of a difficulty, or the removal of an obstruction. He simply invited them to dinner; and, certainly, up to that time England had never seen a king who gave dinners on so extravagantly profuse a scale. They were marked, however, by something of a barbaric splendour; and the monarch, gay and glittering as he was, dazzling in dress, and overwhelmingly exuberant of spirits, was more like William de la Marck than any more knightly host. In short, Edward was but a coarse beast at table. “In homine tam corpulento,” says the Croyland chronicler, “tantis sodalitiis, vanitatibus, crapulis, luxuriis et cupiditatibus dedito,”—a sort of testimonial to character which neither monarch nor man could be justified in being proud of. The young Edward V. is the “petit Dauphin” of English history, but with a less cruel destiny, for he was at least not starved to death, amid dirt, darkness, and terror, but mercifully, if roughly, murdered, and so saved from the long and yet unexpiated assassination of the innocent and helpless Louis XVII. His murderer sought to make people forget the heinousness of his crime, by the double splendour of his coronation dinners. The ceremony and the festival took place, not only in London, but in York; and Richard hoped he had feasted both the northern and southern provinces into sentiments of loyalty. A curious incident preceded the first dinner,—the anointing of himself and consort at the coronation. There is nothing singular in the fact, but there is in the manner of it. Richard and his queen stripped themselves naked to the waist, in order that the unction might be more liberally poured over them,—and in Richard’s own case, perhaps for another reason, that the great nobles who were present might see that they were not about to sit down to dinner with a sovereign who was as deformed in body as his enemies declared him to be.
Almost all young readers of history take their first permanent idea of Henry VII. from that gallant Richmond, in Shakspeare’s Tragedy, who comes in like an avenging angel, at the beginning of the fifth act, and has it all his own generous way, until he sticks “the bloody and devouring bear,” and sends a note to Elizabeth to come and be married. This Elizabeth, by the way, was the good mother of Henry VIII., and she was the only woman for whom that capricious prince ever felt a spark of pure affection. His love and respect for her were permanent, and the fact merits to be recorded. But to return to Henry VII., and to conduct him to the dinner-table, where alone we have present business with him; I do not know that I can find a better “trait” touching himself and his times, than one connected with his royal visit to York.
He was received in the city with more than ordinary ceremony, and loudly-expressed delight at the sight of his “sweet-favoured” face; “some casting out of obles and wafers, and some casting out of comfits in great quantities, as it had been hailstones, for joy and rejoicing of the king’s coming.” But I must pass over the outward show—how Augustans, Franciscans, Carmelites, and Dominicans met him at Micklegate, and how these, with priors, and friars, and canons of hospitals, and priests, and knights, and noble, and gentle, and simple, accompanied the monarch to the Minster, and thence to the archbishop’s palace, where Henry resided during his stay in the northern capital. The grandest banquet given to him during his sojourn, was in this palace, on the eve of the festival of St. George: the great hall was divided into a centre and two aisles. In each division there were two tables, half-a-dozen in all. The king sat at the centre table, arrayed in all the pomp and glory of a king;—George and garter, crown, and England’s sceptre. One individual only was esteemed worthy of being seated at the same table, namely, the Archbishop of York, who was quite as powerful a man, in his way, as Henry Tudor himself. Knights carved the joints, and earls waited upon prince and prelate. Lord Scrope, of Bolton, because he was a Knight of the Garter, served the king with water; another member of chivalry handed the cup, and the sovereign’s meat was especially carved for him by a Welsh cousin, Sir David Owen. The distribution of the other tables exhibited a judicious mixture of priest and layman. At the first table in the centre of the hall (the cross-table at the top being occupied by the king and the archbishop) sat two secular dignitaries, the Lords Chancellor and Privy Seal, and with them, the Abbots of St. Mary and Fountains, with the archbishop’s suffragans, other prelates, and the royal chaplains; thus the chief members of the clergy were seated in greatest numbers near the king. The second table was entirely occupied by lay nobility, earls, barons, knights and esquires of the king’s body. Of the two tables in the right aisle, the city clergy and the Minster choir occupied one to themselves. At the upper end of the other table were several knights of the garter, all sitting on one side, “and beneath them a void space, and then other honest persons filled that table.” We are glad to fall on the term “other honest,” or we might have been tempted to believe that a distinction was made between honesty and nobility. The tables in the left aisle were occupied, one by the municipal authorities and other citizen guests; the second by the judges, “and beneath them other honest persons,” again. At the rear of the king’s table a stage was erected, on which stood the royal officer of arms, who cried his “largesse” three times, in the usual manner, and doubtless with something of the stentorian powers made familiar to us by the late Mr. Toole, and the present loud and lively Mr. Harker. “The surnape,” we are told, “was drawn by Sir John Turberville, the knight-marshal; and after the dinner there was a voide, when the king and his nobles put off their robes of state, except such as were knights of the garter, who rode to even-song, attired in the habit of their order;” and a very fitting close to a feast,—and a good example is held forth therein to all who rise from a festival without any more thought of being thankful for it, than is implied by trying to find out the reflection of their nose in the mahogany.
The following table story, cited by Southey, furnishes another illustration of social, and, indeed, of political, life about this time:—
“Henry (then Richmond), on his march from Milford, lodged one night with his friend David Llwyd, at Matha’farn. David had the reputation of seeing into the future, and Richmond, whether in superstition or compliment, privately inquired of him, what would be the issue of his adventure. Such a question, he was told, was too important to be immediately answered, but in the morning a reply should be made. The wife of David saw that her husband was unusually grave during the evening; and having learnt the cause, she said, ‘How can you have any difficulty about your answer? Tell him he will succeed gloriously. If he does, you will receive honours and rewards. But, if it fail, depend upon it, he will never come here to reproach you.’” Hence, it is said, a Welsh proverb, “A wife’s advice without asking it.”