For the Queen's satisfaction there were matters from the Near East in the way of ivory and ebony inlay, carved ebony, introductions of small black beings into designs, always in obvious subjection to white masters. But these were exotics of a sort that English taste preferred to import rather than manufacture. Ladies who took to embroidering affected the Bombay designs and colours.
Charles II had been reigning but six years when the Great Fire swept away uncountable treasures in the way of furniture. To be sure, there was all the rest of England. But at that time London was practically all of elegant England. Country gentlemen had estates and big houses, but owing to the impossibility of transportation on the always miry, rutted roads, they went without the luxuries of town life. So, with the Great Fire of London perished so much of old oak and walnut furniture as to make collectors weep who turn their thoughts thereon.
But as the phoenix rises unabashed from the flames, so rose the inspirations of Sir Christopher Wren, Grinling Gibbons, and of minor artists and artisans. Wren rebuilt the fallen monuments, giving to the world his great St. Paul's, and a pattern of church steeple that climbs high in American settlements as well as all through London; and the lesser workers gave men new patterns in beds and chairs for repose, and in tables for comforting viands, for games, or for the gossip which was a deep game of the day.
CHAPTER IV
CAROLEAN STYLES OR THE RESTORATION
CHARLES II, 1660 TO 1685
If it was to the Queen of Charles II that the Carolean period of furniture owed its Portuguese strain and the evidence of strange things from the East, it was from a woman of quite another sort that the predominating influence came. French styles were the vogue at court, not because the Queen, poor dull woman, wished it, but because Louise de Querouailles was the strong influence, and with her advent came follies and fashions enough to please the light side of one of the lightest of monarchs. France, in the person of Louis XIV, felt that England would bear watching while a Stuart strutted and flirted, oppressed and vacillated. And the French ways of those days being directed by such craft as that of the astute Cardinal Mazarin, a woman was sent from France to charm the King and stay closer beside the throne than any man could bide.
Charles created the light and lovely Louise the Duchess of Portsmouth and the mother of the little Duke of Richmond; and, that so much of extravagant beauty might be royally housed, he spent much time and more money in fitting her apartments at Whitehall. Three times were they demolished at her whim, the extravagant fittings failing to suit her insatiable caprice.