The Comic History of England

by Gilbert Abbott À Beckett

The king endeavoured, by courting personal popularity, to avert from himself some of the odium that attached to nis creatures and his Government. Knowing that the suspicion of his entertaining Popish predilections was very much about, he married his niece, the Lady Anne, to Prince George of Denmark, a Protestant. No consideration would induce him, however, to call another Parliament, and though he was bothered for money on all sides, without the power of raising a supply, he preferred, as he said, "rubbing on," to the chance of getting some much harder rubs from the legislative body, in the event of one having been summoned. He greatly preferred doing just as he pleased with other people's money, to the annoyance of getting any of his own upon the conditions that a Parliament would certainly have attached to the grant of it. His credit being almost unlimited, he never wanted for anything that cash could procure; and he led a much more independent life by setting Parliament at defiance, and having nothing to thank it for, than he could have done had he called it together, and taken an annual supply, the amount of which would have been in some measure contingent on his good behaviour.

Charles had become as absolute as the last case of a Latin noun, but he was not happy, and his gaiety beginning to forsake him, the picture of the sad dog was gloomily realised. He fell into a succession of fits of the blues, and on Monday, the 2nd of February, 1685, he put his hand to his head, turned very pale, and seemed to be in a very shaky condition. Dr. King, an eminent physician, with a taste for experimental philosophy, was sent for; but his experiments either failed, or were put off too long, for Charles fell on the floor as if dead when the doctor arrived to prescribe for him. Dr. King resolved on bleeding the royal patient, who came to as fast as he had gone off, and in a fit of generosity the Council ordered the surgeon £1000, which, in a fit of oblivion, was forgotten, and he was never paid anything. Perhaps payment may have been disputed, on the ground that the doctor's treatment had not been permanently effective, for a bulletin had scarcely been issued declaring the king out of danger, when it was found necessary to issue another bulletin declaring him in again. The physicians handed him over to the ministers of the church, but Charles would not have about him any Protestant divine, and the Duchess of Portsmouth then told it as a great secret to the French ambassador, that the king, at the bottom of his heart, was a Catholic. This information revealed two facts about which there might have been considerable doubt, namely, that the king possessed some religion, though it was the one which he had been during the whole of his reign persecuting and executing others for following; and secondly, that he had a heart sufficiently capacious for any moral or virtuous principle to lie at the bottom of.

The moment the true character of Charles's faith was known to the French ambassador, he used his utmost ingenuity to smuggle a confessor to the death-bed of the sovereign. The English bishops, however, stuck to the expiring monarch so pertinaciously that no Romish priest could approach, until one Huddleston was hunted up, who had formerly been a Popish clergyman, but had so terribly neglected his business, that the office of confessor was quite strange to him. A wig and gown were put upon him to disguise him, and he was taken to a Portuguese monk to be "crammed" for the task he had to perform; and having been brought up the back staircase to the royal chamber, he got through the duty very respectably. Such was the disreputable imposture that was resorted to for supplying Charles the Second with the only religious assistance or consolation that he received before his dissolution. The Protestant bishops, who had been all hurried into the next room, did not know exactly what to make of it; but there were various whispers and shrewd suspicions current among the churchmen and the courtiers.

Soon after his interview with Huddleston, who was huddled up in a cloak to get him out of the palace without being discovered, Charles got a little better, and sent for his illegitimate children to give them his blessing. A catalogue of these young ladies and gentlemen would occupy more space perhaps than they are worth, but it is sufficient perhaps to say, that Master Peg and Miss Peg, the king's son and daughter by Mrs. Catherine Peg, were absent from the family circle in consequence of their having died in their infancy. Master James Walters, the eldest of the group of naturals, who had been created Duke of Monmouth, was not mentioned by his father in his last illness; but little Charlie Lennox, the young Duke of Richmond, and his mother, the Duchess of Portsmouth—Mademoiselle Querouaille—were especially recommended to the Duke of York's attention. The dying reprobate had the good feeling to put in a word for Mrs. Eleanor Gwynne, the actress, ancestress of the noble house of St. Alban's; but as he only said, "Do not let poor Nelly starve," it does not seem that his views with regard to her were very munificent. The bishops, however, were scandalised selon les règles at even this brief allusion to the "poor player," who had invariably refused all titles of honour; but it is said that their holinesses were not nearly so much shocked at the mention of the Duchesses of Portland and Cleveland, who were morally not a bit better than Nell Gwynne, though they had electrotyped their infamy with rank, which formed in those days, as we are happy to say it does not in these, the only real substitute for virtue.

At six in the morning of the 6th of February, 1685, Charles asked what o'clock it was, and requested those about him to open the curtains, that he might once more see daylight. Where he was to see it at that time of the morning in the darkest period of the year is, like the daylight itself, under such circumstances, not very visible. His senses, which must have been already wandering, were by ten o'clock quite gone, and at half-past eleven he expired without a struggle. He was in the fifty-fifth year of his age, and the twenty-fifth of his actual reign, though, according to legal documents, he was king for thirty-six years, inasmuch as while he was flying about from place to place, and perching upon trees to elude discovery, he was supposed, by a loyal fiction, to be still sitting on the throne of England.

A report got abroad that Charles had been poisoned, but although this deadly operation had been performed on his mind by the evil and corrupt councillors into whose hands he fell after the death of Clarendon, there is no reason for believing that physical poisoning was the fate of this disreputable sovereign.

The characters of the kings and queens it is our duty to pass in review give many a pang to our loyal bosom, and we regret to say that our heart has been perforated, nay, riddled to an alarming extent, by the melancholy riddle which the character of Charles presents to us. We will begin with him as a companion—not that we should be very anxious for his company; but because it was in the capacity of a companion that he presented the most amiable aspect. His manners were engaging; but as his engagements were scarcely ever kept, the quality in question was only calculated to lead to disappointment among those who had anything to do with him. His wit, raillery, and satire are said to have been first-rate, but we find none of his bon-mots recorded which would have been worth more than two pence a dozen to any regular dealer in jokes, though for private distribution they might have been a little more-valuable, on account of their royal authorship. For his private life he has found apologists in preceding historians * one of whom appears to imagine that the disgusting selfishness familiarly termed "jolly-dogism" is the highest social virtue of which human nature is capable. Charles was, we are told, a good father, but it was to those of whom he ought never to have been the father at all; a generous lover to those whom he could not make the objects of generosity without the grossest injustice to others; and a pleasing companion to those with whom he ought to have avoided all companionship. We do not concur in that sort of laxity which looks at the domestic ties as so many slip-knots that may hang about the wearer as loosely as he may find convenient.

* Hume calls him "an obliging husband."

For his public character, even those who admire him in his private relations have not ventured to offer any apology; and his utter disregard of the honour, the religion, the liberty, and the material interests of the nation over which he ruled cannot be made the subject of laudation. It is suggested that a certain reckless gaiety formed some excuse for his defects as a sovereign; but monarchy in sport becomes tyranny in earnest, when its affairs are conducted by a negligent and heartless libertine. His reign was one long hoax as far as religion was concerned, for he was a Catholic at heart while pursuing the Papists with the most cruel persecution; and though his behaviour towards that class would, under any circumstances, have been hateful, it seems doubly detestable when we remember that he was himself guilty of holding the opinions for which he sent so many to the scaffold.

There can be no doubt that the fate of his father, and the disgust occasioned by the tyranny arising out of the ascendency of the rabid friends of freedom during the Commonwealth, were mainly instrumental in obtaining toleration for the vices and oppressive cruelties of Charles the Second. The dissatisfaction caused by the abuse of the royal power in the preceding reign must have burst out with more earnestness had it been kept bottled up until the accession of the libertine monarch, whose supposed sufferings during exile had attracted towards him a large share of sympathy. Had he comc to the throne in due course, without the intervention of a republic, he would have been swept off by a storm of general indignation; but the rebound of public feeling in favour of monarchy carried him in triumph to the same position that his father had occupied.