And moderation fair, wore the red marks
Of superstition’s scourge.”
Imagination, as we read the history of the later Stuarts, ever and anon places before us side by side the confessor’s dungeon and the voluptuary’s chamber. The scenes which the Count de Grammont depicts, the characters which he draws, and the intrigues which he unravels; the entire want of moral principle, the absence of common shame, the bare-aced profligacy, the devices to excite and gratify the lowest passions, which he, who had lived at Court and shared in its pleasures, so graphically and yet so complacently portrays, make us blush for our race. The reaction from the simple manners and severe virtues of the Commonwealth was tremendous. Courage, or rather an irritable sense of honour, leading the gallant to wreak revenge upon any who offended him, came to be the chief virtue of Cavalier Courtiers. Vices and crimes were treated as petty foibles: beauty, liveliness, and wit alone were counted meritorious; and “the manners of Chesterfield united with the morals of Rochefoucault.” The Count’s book is indeed a reflection of the age—elegant in style, but licentious in character—a veil of embroidered gauze cast over a putrescent corpse.
1685.
In the midst of this depravity death suddenly appeared. Art has portrayed two scenes at Whitehall which point a moral never to be forgotten. The one represents the Sunday night when Evelyn saw inexpressible profaneness, gambling, and dissoluteness—the King sitting and toying with his concubines, the French boy singing love songs, and the Courtiers playing basset with a bank of 2,000 guineas piled up on the table. The other exhibits what was witnessed a few days afterwards in the anterooms of the chamber where the Royal Sybarite awaited the summons of the Almighty; noblemen and ladies, with heartless etiquette, performing their Court attendance; prelates at a distance, hoping for an opportunity to administer to him the last offices of that Church, which had called the dying man its Defender, whilst, as he is in the act of renouncing communion with it, a delicate hand is seen extended from behind a timorously opened door, to receive a glass of water to assist in swallowing the wafer, laid upon the Royal tongue by a disguised priest. These pictures[132] illustrate the mutability of earthly grandeur, and the righteous retribution of God upon a life spent in sin. Charles II. died on the 6th of February, 1685,—within three weeks of William Jenkyn.
DEATH OF CHARLES.
Very confused and contradictory accounts are given of the circumstances connected with this event; but there is enough of what is perfectly credible, to show that Charles died in a state of reconciliation with the Church of Rome. The Duke of York, his brother, who watched him to the last moment, states that two Protestant Bishops read by his bedside the service of the Visitation of the Sick, and that one of them, Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells, after receiving from the sick man a faint acknowledgment of sorrow for his sins, pronounced absolution, and offered him the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, which was declined. But the Duke makes no mention of the pathetic strain in which that prelate addressed the King, or of the faithful exhortation addressed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The Duke further relates that he arranged for the clandestine introduction to the chamber, of a Benedictine Monk, who had aided Charles’ escape after the battle of Worcester; that when the room had been cleared of all, except the Earl of Bath and Lord Feversham, the priest, brought up into a private closet by a back pair of stairs, was taken to the bedside; and that, after confession, he administered the last rites of the Popish Communion—that the expiring man uttered pious ejaculations, lifting up his hands and crying, “Mercy, sweet Jesus, mercy,” till the priest gave him extreme unction—that as the host was presented, he raised himself up, and said “Let me meet my Heavenly Lord in a better posture than lying on my bed.” But the Duke says not a word of Charles’ blessing his natural children, and the rest of the persons present; nor of any one begging the Royal benediction, calling the King the father of them all.
1685.
Yet these circumstances are related by others, as well as the utterance of the words, “Do not let poor Nelly starve;” and Charles’ reply to the Queen’s message asking forgiveness. “She ask my pardon, poor woman?—I ask hers with all my heart.” James, in his Memoirs, is evidently intent upon one thing, to show that Charles died a sincere Papist, which we can well believe from what we know of his previous history.[133]