Upon that memorable scene
But, with his keener eye,
The axe’s edge did try;
Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite,
To vindicate his helpless right,
But bowed his comely head
Down as upon a bed.
The Cavalier stood for the church as well as for the king, but he was not commonly a deeply religions man. The church poetry of that generation is often sweetly or fervently devout, but it was written mostly by clergymen, like George Herbert or Herrick—a rather worldly parson: now and then by a college recluse, like Crashaw—who became a Roman Catholic priest; or sometimes by a layman like Vaughan—who was a doctor; or Francis Quarles, whose gloomy religious verses have little to distinguish them from Puritan poetry. These poets were royalists but hardly Cavaliers. The real Cavaliers, the courtly and secular poets like Suckling, Lovelace, Cleveland, and the rest, stood for the church for social reasons. It was the church of their class, ancient, conservative, aristocratic. Carlyle, of Scotch Presbyterian antecedents, speaks disrespectfully of the English Church, “with its singular old rubrics and its four surplices at All-hallowtide,” and describes the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 as “decent ceremonialism facing awful, devout Puritanism.” Charles II tried to persuade the Scotch Earl of Lauderdale to become an Episcopalian, assuring him that Presbyterianism was no religion for a gentleman. Says the spirit in Dipsychus:—
The Church of England I belong to
And think dissenters not far wrong too;