His tears reserved for you; more dear,
More prized, than all those kingdoms were!
For when no healing art prevail’d,
When cordials and elixirs fail’d,
On your pale cheek he dropt the shower,
Revived you like a dying flower.”
The illness referred to was a spotted fever; and here is Pepys’ plain prose on the subject:—“20th October, 1663. This evening, at my lord’s lodgings, Mrs. Sarah, talking with my wife and I, how the queen do, and how the king tends her, being so ill. She tells us that the queen’s sickness is the spotted fever; that she was as full of the spots as a leopard, which is very strange that it should be no more known; but perhaps it is not so; and that the king do seem to take it much to heart, for that he hath wept before her; but for all that he hath not missed one night since she was sick, of supping with my lady Castlemaine; which I believe is true; for she says that her husband hath dressed the suppers every night; and I confess I saw him myself coming through the street, dressing up a great supper to-night, which Sarah also says is for the king and her, which is a very strange thing.” Oh, depth of royal grief, that required light suppers and light ladies for its solace!
The Spectator has preserved for us a pleasant story illustrative both of royal and citizen good-fellowship, in the reign of Charles II., and in the person of the king and that of his jolly lord mayor, Sir Robert Viner. The merry monarch had been dining with the chief magistrate and the municipality, at Guildhall, where he had not drunk so deeply himself but he was aware that the jollity of his entertainers was beginning to render them rather oblivious of the respect due to their royal guest. He accordingly, with a curt farewell, slipped away down to his coach, which was awaiting him in Guildhall-yard. But the lord mayor forthwith pursued the runaway, and overtaking him in the yard, seized him by the skirts of his coat, and swore roundly that he should not go till they “had drank t’other bottle!” “The airy monarch,” says the narrator in the Spectator, “looked kindly at him over his shoulder, and with a smile and graceful air (for I saw him at the time, and do now), repeated this line of the old song:—
“‘And the man that is drunk is as great as a king!’
“and immediately turned back, and complied with his landlord.” This anecdote, however, though it be given on the authority of an alleged eye-witness, is probably over-coloured with regard to the conduct of his worship the mayor. Mr. Peter Cunningham quotes (in his story of Nell Gwyn) from Henry Sidney’s Diary, a letter addressed to Sidney by his sister the Countess Dowager of Sutherland, and which refers to the incident of the visit of Charles to Guildhall. The letter in question was written five years after the mayoralty of Sir Robert Viner. “The king had supped with the lord mayor, and the aldermen on the occasion had drunk the king’s health, over and over, upon their knees, wishing every one hanged and damned that would not serve him with their lives and fortunes. But this was not all. As his guards were drunk, or said to be so, they would not trust his majesty with so insecure an escort, but attended him themselves to Whitehall, and, as the lady-writer observes, ‘all went merry out of the king’s cellar.’ So much was this accessibility of manner in the king acceptable to his people, that the mayor and his brethren waited next day at Whitehall, to return thanks to the king and duke for the honour they had done them, and the mayor, confirmed by this reception, was changed from an ill to a well-affected subject.”