There are few kings who had such variety of experience in matters of the table as Charles II. The first spoonful of medicine that was offered him he resisted with a determined aversion which never left him for that sort of pabulum. His table was but simple enough during the latter years of his father, but it was worse after the fatal day of Worcester. He was glad then, at White Lady’s, to eat “bread and cheese, such as we could get, it being just beginning to be day;” and “bread, cheese, small beer, and nothing else,” sufficed him in the oak. Bread, butter, ale and sack, he swallowed in country inns, and seemed rather to look on the masquerade and the meals as a joke.
When he was lying hid in Spring Coppice, the goodwife Yates brought to his most sacred majesty “a mess of milk, some butter, and eggs,”—better fare than the parched peas which were found, in after days, in the pocket of the fugitive Monmouth. The women provided for him as tenderly in his hour of hunger and trial, as their ebony sisters did for Mungo Park in his African solitude. When Charles arrived at the house at Boscobel, he “ate bread and cheese heartily,” and (as an extraordinary), “William Penderell’s wife made his majesty a posset of fine milk and small beer, and got ready some warm water to wash his feet, not only extremely dirty, but much galled with travel.” The king, in return, called the lady “my dame Joan,” and the condescension quickened her hospitality; for shortly after, she “provided some chickens for his majesty’s supper, a dainty he had not lately been acquainted with.” But the king and his followers not only longed for more substantial fare, but were not very scrupulous as to the means of obtaining it. Colonel Carlis, for instance, went into the sheepcot of a farmer residing near Boscobel, and like an impudent as well as a hungry thief “he chose one of the best sheep, sticks him with his dagger, then sends William for the mutton, who brings him home on his back.” The next morning was a Sunday morning, and Charles, having muttered his prayers, went eagerly to the parlour to look after the stolen mutton. It was hardly cold, but Will Penderell “brought a leg of it into the parlour; his majesty called for a knife and a trencher, and cut some of it into collops, and pricked them with the knife-point, then called for a frying-pan and butter, and fried the collops himself, of which he ate heartily.” Colonel Carlis, the while, being but under-cook (and that, honour enough too), made the fire, and turned the collops in the pan. “When the colonel,” adds the faithful Blount, who records this table trait, “afterwards attended his majesty in France, his majesty, calling to remembrance this passage among others, was pleased merely to propose it, as a problematical question, whether himself or the colonel were the master-cook at Boscobel, and the supremacy was of right adjudged to his majesty.” Circumstances which made of the royal adventurer a king were the spoiling of an excellent cook. When he was secretly sojourning at Trent, his meat was, for the most part, to prevent the danger of discovery, dressed in his own chamber; “the cookery whereof served him for some divertisement of the time.” The king better understood cookery as a science than the machinery of it. When he stood in the kitchen of Mr. Tombs’s house at Longmarston, disguised as “Will Jackson,” the busy cook-maid bade him wind up the jack. “Will Jackson” was obedient and attempted it, but hit not the right way, which made the maid in some passion ask, “What countryman are you, that you know not how to wind up a jack?” Will Jackson answered very satisfactorily, “I am a poor tenant’s son of Colonel Lane, in Staffordshire. We seldom have roast meat, but when we have, we don’t make use of a jack;” which in some measure assuaged the maid’s indignation. Never had the sacredness of majesty been in such peril since the period when Alfred marred instead of made the cakes of the neatherd’s angry wife. But Charles escaped to his rather hungry exile in France;—and see, how sweet are the uses of adversity! When this charming prince was restored to the throne, he brought with him two gifts of which the nation had heard little for some years;—one was the Church Liturgy, and the other, “God d—n ye,”—a fashionable phrase which has tumbled from the court to the alley.
It can hardly be said that Charles, when king, fulfilled the requirement which Lord Chesterfield subsequently laid down, when he insisted that a man should be gentleman-like even in his vices. When William of Orange came to England as the suitor of the king’s niece, the Princess Mary, Charles took an unclean delight in making the Dutchman drunk. Evelyn says:—“One night, at a supper given by the Duke of Buckingham, the king made him (William) drink very hard; the heavy Dutchman was naturally averse to it, but being once entered, was the most frolicsome of the company; and now the mind took him to break the windows of the chambers of the maids of honour; and he had got into their apartments had they not been timely rescued. His mistress, I suppose,” adds Evelyn, and it is a strange comment for so sensible a man, “did not like him the worse for such a notable indication of his vigour.” The monarch who made his paulo-post successor drunk had little difficulty to bring the lord mayor of London into the same condition; and the city potentate and his “cousin the king” had that terrible “other bottle” together, in which men’s reason ordinarily makes shipwreck, with their dignity. But his majesty, of blessed memory, was a trifle devout after his drink, and on the “next morning” he heard anthems in his chapel, and, by way of devotion, would lean over his own pew and play with the curls of Lady Castlemaine, who occupied the next seat to that of “our most religious and gracious king.” When he was pouring the public money into the lap of that precious lady, he was leaving his own servants unpaid; and, on one occasion, when these could not obtain their salaries, they carried off their royal master’s linen, and left him without a clean shirt or a table-cloth!
The priests with whom Louis XIV. and Louis XV. used to transact their religion were wont to excuse all the conjugal infidelities of those anointed reprobates by remarking that they ever treated their consorts with the very greatest politeness. The poets of Charles’s days went further, and extolled his marital affection. Waller, for instance, congratulates the poor queen, that if she were ill, Charles was by to tend and weep over her:—
“But, that which may relieve our care
Is, that you have a help so near
For all the evil you can prove;
The kindness of your Royal Love.
He that was never known to mourn
So many kingdoms from him torn,