The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events

by Leigh Hunt

We gladly escape from these subjects into the poetical atmosphere of the Masque, the only glory of King James's reign, and the greatest glory of Whitehall.

But the Masque, in which James's Queen was a performer, reminds us that we must first say a word or two of herself and the other princely inmates of Whitehall during this reign. The Queen, Anne of Denmark, has been represented by some as a woman given to love intrigues, and by others to intrigues political. We take her to have been a common-place woman, given as much perhaps to both as her position and the surrounding example induced;—the good-natured wife (after her fashion) of a good-natured husband, sympathising with him in his pleasures of the table, and dying of a dropsy. She danced and performed in the Masques at court, not, we should guess, with any exquisite grace. Her daughter Elizabeth, who married the Elector Palatine, afterwards struggling King of Bohemia, and who has found an agreeable biographer and panegyrist in the late Miss Benger, appears to have partaken of her good nature, with more levity, and was very popular with the gentry for her affable manners and her misfortunes. When she accompanied the Elector to the altar, in the chapel at Whitehall, she could not help laughing out loud, at something which struck her fancy. Her brother Henry, Prince of Wales, who died in the flower of his youth, and who, like all princes who die early, has been extolled as a person of wonderful promise, obtained admiration in his day for frequenting the tilt-yard while his father was lying in bed, and for announcing himself as the opponent of his anti-warlike disposition. There was probably quite as much of the opposition of heirs apparent in this, as anything more substantial; for Henry seems to have exhibited his father's levity and inconsistency of character. He was thought to be no adorer of the fair sex, yet has the credit of an intrigue with the Countess of Essex; and though he reprobated his father's swearing, made no scruple of taunting his brother Charles for his priestly education, and "quizzing" him for not being straight in the legs. As to poor Charles ("Baby Charles," as his father called him, for he was a fond parent, though not a wise one), he became at once the ornament of his family, and the most unfortunate of its members; but he seems from an early age to have partaken of the weakness of character, and the consequent mixture of easiness and obstinacy, common to the family. Buckingham lorded it over him like a petulant elder brother. He once rebuked him publicly, in language unbefitting a gentleman; and at another time, threatened to give him a knock on the head.

BANQUETING HOUSE, WHITEHALL.

We have seen court mummeries in the time of Henry the Eighth, and pageants in that of Elizabeth. In the time of James, the masquings of the one, and the gorgeous shows of the other, combined to produce the Masque, in its latest and best acceptation; that is, a dramatic exhibition of some brief fable or allegory, uniting the most fanciful poetry and scenery, and generally heightened with a contrast of humour, or an anti-masque. Ben Jonson was their great poetical master in the court of James; and Inigo Jones claimed to be their no less masterly and important setter-forth in scene and show. The poet and artist had a quarrel upon this issue, and Inigo's memory suffers from divers biting libels in the works of his adversary. The noble Banqueting-house remains to show that the architect might have had some right to dispute pretensions, even with the author of the "Alchemist" and the "Sad Shepherd;" for it is a piece of the very music of his art (if we may so speak)—the harmony of proportion. Within these walls, as we now see them, rose, "like a steam of rich distilled perfumes," the elegant lines of Ben Jonson, breathing court flowers,—the clouds and painted columns of Jones—and the fair faces, gorgeous dresses, and dances, of the beauties that dazzled the young eyesight of the Miltons and Wallers. Ben's burly body would then break out, as it were, after his more refined soul, in some burlesque anti-masque, now and then not a little coarse; and the sovereign and the poet most probably concluded the night in the same manner, though not at the same table, in filling their skins full of wine.

The Court of Charles I. was decorum and virtue itself in comparison with that of James. Drunkenness disappeared; there were no scandalous favourites; Buckingham alone retained his ascendency as the friend and assistant; and the King manifested his notions of the royal dignity by a stately reserve. Little remained externally of the old Court but its splendour; and to this a new lustre was given by a taste for painting, and the patronage of Rubens and Vandyke. Charles was a great collector of pictures. He was still fonder of poetry than his father, retained Ben Jonson as his laureate, encouraged Sandys, and May, and Carew, and was a fond reader of Spenser and Shakspeare; the last of whom is styled by Milton (not in reproach, as Warton strangely supposed; for how could a poet reproach a King with loving a poet?) the "closet companion" of the royal "solitudes." Walpole, as Mr. Jesse observes, was of opinion, that—

"The celebrated festivals of Louis XIV. were copied from the shows exhibited at Whitehall, in its time the most polite court in Europe." Bassompierre, in mentioning his state introduction to Charles and Henrietta, says, "I found the King on a stage raised two steps, the Queen and he on two chairs, who rose on the first bow I made them on coming in. The company was magnificent, and the order exquisite." "I never knew a duller Christmas than we have had this year," writes Mr. Gerrard to the Earl of Strafford: "but one play all the time at Whitehall, and no dancing at all. The Queen had some little infirmity, the bile or some such thing, which made her keep in; only on Twelfth Night she feasted the King at Somerset House, and presented him with a play newly studied, the Faithful Shepherdess (Fletcher's) which the King's players acted in the robes she and her ladies acted their pastoral in last year. I had almost forgot to tell your Lordship, that the dicing night, the King carried away in James Palmer's hat 1,850l. The Queen was his help, and brought him that luck; she shared presently 900l. There are two masques in hand; first, the Inns of Court, which is to be presented on Candlemas-day; the other, the King presents the Queen with on Shrove Tuesday, at night: high expenses; they speak of 20,000l. that it will cost the men of the law."[352]

"Charles was not only well informed," says Mr. Jesse, "in all matters of court etiquette, and in the particular duties of each individual of his household, but enjoined their performance with remarkable strictness. Ferdinand Masham, one of the esquires of his body, has recorded a curious anecdote relative to the King's nice exaction of such observances. 'I remember,' he says, 'that coming to the King's bedchamber door, which was bolted in the inside, the Earl of Bristol, then being in waiting and lying there, he unbolted the door upon my knocking, and asked me "What news?" I told him I had a letter for the King. The earl then demanded the letter of me, which I told him I could deliver to none but to the King himself; upon which the King said, "The esquire is in the right: for he ought not to deliver any letter or message to any but myself, he being at this time the chief officer of my house; and if he had delivered the letter to any other, I should not have thought him fit for his place."' It seems, that after a certain hour, when the guard was set, and the 'all right' served up, the royal household was considered under the sole command of the esquire in waiting. 'The King,' says Lord Clarendon, 'kept state to the full, which made his court very orderly, no man presuming to be seen where he had no pretence to be.'"[353]

The truth is, that both from greater virtue and a less jovial temperament, Charles carried his improvement upon the levity of his father's court too far. Public opinion had long been quitting the old track of an undiscerning submission; and, though it was the King's interest to avoid scandal, it was not so to provoke dislike. It was on the side of manner in which he failed. His reformations, the more scandalous ones excepted, appear to have been rather external than otherwise. Mrs. Hutchinson, while she speaks of them highly, intimates that there was still a good deal of private licence; and though it is asserted that Charles discountenanced swearing, perhaps even this was only by comparison. It is reported of Charles II., that in answer to a remonstrance made to him on the oaths in which he indulged, he exclaimed in a very irreverent and unfilial manner, "Oaths! why, your Martyr was a greater swearer than I am." It has been questioned also, whether in other respects Charles's private conduct was so "immaculate," to use Mr. Jesse's phrase, as the solemnity of his latter years and his fate has led most people to conclude. Indeed, it is a little surprising how anybody, partisans excepted, could have supposed, that a prince, brought up as he was, and the friend of Buckingham, should be entirely free from the licence of the time. His manners and speeches to women, though not gross for that age, would be thought coarse now; and, at all events, were proofs of a habit of thinking quite in unison with custom. But the present age has been far stricter in its judgment on these points than any which preceded it—at least up to the time of George III. It was not the question of his gallantries, or of his freedom with them, that had anything to do with Charles's unpopularity. The people will pardon a hundred gallantries sooner than one want of sympathy. Charles I. would not have been unpopular in the midst of court elegancies, if he had not been stiff and repulsive in his manners. Unfortunately he wanted address; he had a hesitation in his speech; and his consciousness of a delicate organization and of infirmity of purpose, with the addition of a good deal of the will common to most people, and particularly encouraged in princes, made him afraid of being thought weak and easy. He therefore, in what he thought self-defence, took to an offensive coldness and dryness of behaviour, and gradually became not unwilling even to wreak upon other people the irritability occasioned by it to himself. He got into unseemly passions with ambassadors, and neither knew how to refuse a petition gracefully, nor to repel an undue assumption with real superiority. Even his troubles did not teach him wisdom in these respects till the very last. He was riding out one day during the wars, when a "Dr. Wykes, dean of Burian in Cornwall," says Mr. Jesse, "an inveterate punster, happened to be near him, extremely well mounted. 'Doctor,' said the King, 'you have a pretty nag under you; I pray, how old is he?' Wykes, unable to repress, even in the presence of majesty, the indifferent conceit which presented itself, 'If it please your Majesty' he said, 'he is in the second year of his reign' (rein). Charles discovered some displeasure at this unlicensed ribaldry. 'Go,' he replied, 'you are a fool!'" Now that the dean was a fool there can be no doubt; but that this blunt, offensive, and never-to-be-forgotten word was the only one which a king in a state of war with his subjects could find, in order to discountenance his folly, shows a lamentable habit of subjecting the greater consideration to the less.