[250] Lilly, the astrologer, in his memoirs, notes that Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (the famous collector of the Arundelian marbles now at Oxford), “brought over the new way of building with brick in the city, greatly to the safety of the city, and preservation of the wood of this nation.”
[251] This proclamation “for the suppression of coffee-houses” bears date December 20, 1675, and is stated to have been issued because “the multitude of coffee-houses, lately set up and kept within this kingdom, and the great resort of idle and dissipated persons to them, have produced very evil and dangerous effects,” particularly in spreading of rumours, and inducing tradesmen to neglect their calling, tending to the danger of the commonweal, by the idle waste of time and money. It therefore orders all coffee-house keepers “that they, or any of them, do not presume from and after the tenth day of January next ensuing, to keep any publick coffee-house, or utter, or sell by retail, in his, her, or their house, or houses (to be spent or consumed within the same), any coffee, chocolate, sherbett, or tea; as they will answer it at their utmost peril.”
TRUE SOURCES OF SECRET HISTORY.
This is a subject which has been hitherto but imperfectly comprehended even by some historians themselves; and has too often incurred the satire, and even the contempt, of those volatile spirits who play about the superficies of truth, wanting the industry to view it on more than one side, and those superficial readers who imagine that every tale is told when it is written.
Secret history is the supplement of history itself, and is its great corrector; and the combination of secret with public history has in itself a perfection, which each taken separately has not. The popular historian composes a plausible rather than an accurate tale; researches too fully detailed would injure the just proportions, or crowd the bold design, of the elegant narrative; and facts, presented as they occurred, would not adapt themselves to those theoretical writers of history who arrange events not in a natural, but in a systematic order. But in secret history we are more busied in observing what passes than in being told of it. We are transformed into the contemporaries of the writers, while we are standing on the “vantage ground” of their posterity; and thus what to them appeared ambiguous, to us has become unquestionable; what was secret to them has been confided to us. They mark the beginnings, and we the ends. From the fulness of their accounts we recover much which had been lost to us in the general views of history, and it is by this more intimate acquaintance with persons and circumstances that we are enabled to correct the less distinct, and sometimes the fallacious appearances in the page of the popular historian. He who only views things in masses will have no distinct notion of any one particular; he may be a fanciful or a passionate historian, but he is not the historian who will enlighten while he charms.
But as secret history appears to deal in minute things, its connexion with great results is not usually suspected. The circumstantiality of its story, the changeable shadows of its characters, the redundance of its conversations, and the many careless superfluities which egotism or vanity may throw out, seem usually confounded with that small-talk familiarly termed gossiping. But the gossiping of a profound politician or a vivacious observer, in one of their letters, or in their memoirs, often, by a spontaneous stroke, reveals the individual, or by a simple incident unriddles a mysterious event. We may discover the value of these pictures of human nature, with which secret history abounds, by an observation which occurred between two statesmen in office. Lord Raby, our ambassador, apologised to Lord Bolingbroke, then secretary of state, for troubling him with the minuter circumstances which occurred in his conferences; in reply, the minister requests the ambassador to continue the same manner of writing, and alleges an excellent reason: “Those minute circumstances give very great light to the general scope and design of the persons negotiated with. And I own that nothing pleases me more in that valuable collection of the Cardinal D’Ossat’s letters, than the naïve descriptions which he gives of the looks, gestures, and even tones of voice, of the persons he conferred with.” I regret to have to record the opinions of another noble author, who recently has thrown out some degrading notions of secret history, and particularly of the historians. I would have silently passed by a vulgar writer, superficial, prejudiced, and uninformed, but as so many are yet deficient in correct notions of secret history, it is but justice that their representative should be heard before they are condemned.
His lordship says, that “Of late the appetite for Remains of all kinds has surprisingly increased. A story repeated by the Duchess of Portsmouth’s waiting-woman to Lord Rochester’s valet forms the subject of investigation for a philosophical historian; and you may hear of an assembly of scholars and authors discussing the validity of a piece of scandal invented by a maid of honour more than two centuries ago, and repeated to an obscure writer by Queen Elizabeth’s housekeeper. It is a matter of the greatest interest to see the letters of every busy trifler. Yet who does not laugh at such men?” This is the attack! but as if some half truths, like light through the cranny in a dark room, had just darted in a stream of atoms over this scoffer at secret history, he suddenly views his object with a very different appearance—for his lordship justly concludes that “It must be confessed, however, that knowledge of this kind is very entertaining; and here and there among the rubbish we find hints that may give the philosopher a clue to important facts, and afford to the moralist a better analysis of the human mind than a whole library of metaphysics!” The philosopher may well abhor all intercourse with wits! because the faculty of judgment is usually quiescent with them; and in their orgasm they furiously decry what in their sober senses they as eagerly laud! Let me inform his lordship, that “the waiting-woman and the valet” of eminent persons are sometimes no unimportant personages in history. By the Mémoires de Mons. de la Porte, premier valet-de-chambre de Louis XIV., we learn what before “the valet” wrote had not been known—the shameful arts which Mazarin allowed to be practised, to give a bad education to the prince, and to manage him by depraving his tastes. Madame de Motteville, in her Memoirs, “the waiting lady” of our Henrietta, has preserved for our own English history some facts which have been found so essential to the narrative, that they are referred to by our historians. In Gui Joly, the humble dependant of Cardinal de Retz, we discover an unconscious but a useful commentator on the memoirs of his master; and the most affecting personal anecdotes of Charles the First have been preserved by Thomas Herbert, his gentleman in waiting; Cléry, the valet of Louis the Sixteenth, with pathetic faithfulness, has shown us the man in the monarch whom he served!
Of secret history there are obviously two species; it is positive, or it is relative. It is positive, when the facts are first given to the world; a sort of knowledge which can only be drawn from our own personal experience, or from contemporary documents preserved in their manuscript state in public or in private collections; or it is relative, in proportion to the knowledge of those to whom it is communicated, and will be more or less valued according to the acquisitions of the reader; and this inferior species of secret history is drawn from rare and obscure books and other published authorities, often as scarce as manuscripts.