Henry VIII. loved to take a quiet dinner, occasionally, with his chancellor, at Chelsea; and there he would walk in the garden, with his arm round that neck which he afterwards flung beneath the axe of the executioner. He was given to indulgences of all sorts, and with respect to those of the appetite and palate, he was well served by his incomparable clerk of the kitchen, honest and clever William Thynne, who was not a mere clerk of the kitchen, but a gentleman and scholar to boot; loving poetry though he was no poet, and editing Chaucer with as much zeal as that with which he regulated the accounts of his kitchen clerkship. Henry ate not wisely, but too well; and this huge feeding brought him at last to such a size, that he could not be moved but by aid of “a machine.” In other words, I suppose, he could not walk, and was compelled to submit to locomotion in a chair. Among the sovereigns who assembled at the Congress of Vienna, and who were as strangely there together as the half-dozen kings whom Candide met at the table d’hôte in Venice, was that monster of a man, the King of Wurtemburg. This mountain of flesh dined daily at the imperial table, where a semicircular piece was cut out of the mahogany, in order that the stomach of the monarch might rest comfortably against the table, when engaged in its appropriate work. He did not lack wit for abounding in fatness, and to him, I believe, is properly attributed the neat saying, when he saw Lord Castlereagh in simple civilian’s dress, without a star, amid the gold lace, gems, jewels, ties, tags, and glittering uniforms of the crowd around him. The king asked who he was, and on being informed, he remarked: “Ma foi! il est bien distingué!” He could not have paid the same compliment to the noble Stewart’s wife, if it be true, as was reported, that at one of the state-dinners, or state balls, she appeared with her husband’s jewelled garter, worn as a bandeau, and “Honi soit qui mal y pense” burning in diamonds upon her forehead.
May it not have been the unpleasant effects of Henry’s gastronomic indulgences that made of him a dabbler in medicine? Many of his prescriptions in his own handwriting are still extant, and some of them are in the British Museum. He invented a plaister, and was the concocter of more than one original ointment for the cure of indigestion. He also prepared “a plaister for the Lady Ann of Cleves, to mollify and lessen certain swellings proceeding from cold, and to dissipate the boils on the stomach.” His majesty in some of his after-dinner ruminations professed also to have discovered a remedy for the plague; the prescription for which he sent to the lord mayor. He was very tender of the health of Wolsey, when the cardinal little regarded his own. His majesty, on one occasion, counsels his minister, if he would soon be relieved from “the sweating,” to take light suppers, and to drink wine very moderately, and to use a certain kind of pill. I do not know if Henry’s cookery and kitchen at all smelt of unorthodoxy before the Reformation, but it is a fact that, when Cardinal Campeggio came over here on the business of the divorce of Henry and Catherine, he was especially charged by the Pope to look into the state of cookery in England generally, and in the royal palace in particular.
The royal table of Elizabeth was a solemnity indeed. But it was all a majestically stupendous sham. The attendants thrice bent their knee as they approached to offer her the different dishes; and when these ceremonies had been gone through, the queen rose and retired to a private room, where the meats were placed before her, and she was left to dine as comfortably as the citizens and their wives of Eastcheap and Aldersgate.
Among the numerous new year’s gifts made to Elizabeth, and by which she contrived to maintain a splendid wardrobe, gifts of good things for her table were not wanting. One of her physicians presented her with a box of foreign sweetmeats; another doctor with a pot of green ginger; while her apothecaries gave her boxes of lozenges, ginger-candy, and other conserves. “Mrs. Morgan gave a box of cherries and one of apricots.” The queen’s master-cook and her serjeant of the pastry presented her with various confectionary and preserves.
Elizabeth and her “maids” both dined and breakfasted upon very solid principles and materials. Beef and beer were consumed at breakfast,—“a repast for a ploughman!” it may be said. Alas! ploughmen are content, or seem so, to strengthen their sinews as they best may of a morning with poor bread and worse tea. Elizabeth made a truly royal bird of the goose,—a distinction which her sister Mary failed to give to the cygnet, the stork, and the crane. These no more suited the national taste than that Crimean delicacy, a Russian oyster, and which all Englishmen who have tasted thereof pronounce to be a poisonous dab of rancid putty. Yet Russian princes are fond thereof, and Russian sovereigns order them for especial favourites;—just as the Prince Regent, whenever Lord Eldon was to dine at Carlton House, always commanded the chancellor’s favourite dish to be placed near him,—liver and bacon.
The household expenditure of James I. amounted to £100,000 sterling yearly; double the sum required for the same purpose by Elizabeth; and if “cock a leekie” and “haggis” were dishes to which his national taste gave fashion, the more foreign delicacies of snails and legs of frogs, dressed in a variety of ways, were readily eaten by the very daintiest of feeders. The taste of the purveyors was, however, something clumsy. What would now be said if a chef sent up to table four huge pigs, belted and harnessed with ropes of sausages, and all tied together to a monstrous bag-pudding?
The court of James I. was uncleanly enough, but it was made worse by the example of the Danish king and his courtiers, on the royal visit to the Stuart. “The Danish custom of drinking healths was scrupulously observed, and in a company of even twenty or thirty, every person’s health was required to be drunk in rotation; sometimes a lady or an absent patron was toasted on the knees, and, as a proof of love or loyalty, the pledger’s blood was even mingled with the wine.” It is well known that the ladies of the court, as well as the gentlemen, got “beastly drunk,” in honour of the visit of the King of Denmark to his sister, the consort of James I.
James, whose taste in gastronomy was not a very delicate one, used to say that if ever he were called upon to provide a dinner for the devil, his bill of fare should consist of “a pig, a poll of ling and mustard, and a pipe of tobacco for digestion.”
There was more temperance under Charles I., and increased moderation under the Commonwealth, when Cromwell’s table was remarkable for its simplicity. The civic feasts of those days were also distinguished by their decorous sobriety; and it is, perhaps, worth noticing that the “show” followed, and did not precede the dinner.
Charles I. was served with a world of old-fashioned ceremony, not unlike that which ought to have made Louis XIV. very uncomfortable. The fact, however, is, that both monarchs were pleased with the cumbrous solemnities of state, and nothing affected our English king more in his fallen fortunes than the rude service which he received at the hands of the Puritan servitors of whose masters he was the captive. When he was in durance at Windsor, his meat was brought to him uncovered, and carried without any observance of respectful form, by the common soldiers. No trial or “say” of the meats was made; no cup presented on the knee. This absence of ceremony wounded Charles to the very quick. It chafed him more than greater sorrows did subsequently. It was, he observed, the refusal to him of a service which was paid, according to ancient custom, to many of his subjects; and rather than submit to the humiliation, he chose to diminish the number of dishes, and to take his meals in strict privacy.