The young fugitive at Boscobel, a more willing Alfred, insisted on preparing supper, and produced "Scots collops," with Colonel Careless for under-cook. His minute solicitude for others, at this time and after, in the stress of his own troubles, left indelible impress on many hearts. He was at his bravest on the open road, and in the secret manor and the oak tree: the odd situations became him as if he were King of the Romany. For ceremony and trammels of all kinds he had a thorough disrelish, and passed his time but resignedly amid "the pomp of music and a host of bowing heads." Cosmo III., Grand Duke of Tuscany, relates, in his book of travels, that at a state banquet at Whitehall, the host privily requested that his chair be removed and changed, because it was conspicuously the most comfortable in the room. Could informality farther go? But Charles maintained his gay grace and easy simplicity deliberately, and in conjunction with decisive dignity. With mere standoffishness he had nothing to do. Sir Walter Besant tells us in his London: "The palace was accessible to all; the guard stood at the gate, but everybody was admitted, as to a town; the King moved freely about the courts, in the mall, in the parks, sometimes unattended. The people drove their packhorses or their waggons up and down the road, and hardly noticed the swarthy-faced man who stood under the shade of a tree, watching the players along the mall. This easy and fearless familiarity vanished with the Stuarts." Whosoever wished it, might see his sovereign dance the brantle, perhaps with the young delicate-footed Italian Duchess, his brother's wife; or hear him tell over the "grouse-in-the-gunroom" stories of his Scotch captivity. Here at home he went his way, with a nod, a smile, and a word for all: "a far more successful kingcraft," says Macaulay, "than any his father or grandfather had practised." In the beginning, Charles had a beggarly income, and whimsically complained of it. "What troubles me most, is to see so many of you come to me to Whitehall, and to think that you must go somewhere else to seek your dinner!" He was hostile only to "fuss and feathers," the dry husk of social laws. He had his father's instinct for what was beautiful and imposing. At his coronation, he revived for the last time, and with its most august splendors, the ancient custom of procession from the Tower to the Abbey: a personal revelation, moreover, of that generous kindness towards the common people, which made them adore him. He also endeavored, though in vain, to re-establish the masque, the most charming form of court entertainment, intertwined with all manner of old fragrant poetic associations. At his coming, he found the Maypoles down, the shows over, races, dances, and merry-hearted sports cut short; the theatres were dismantled, and the sole appreciation that actors got, or hoped for, was at the whipping-post. His first thought was for the London parks and drives; his second, for the London stage. The way was soon cleared for those dramas which managers must now handle, as Thoreau handled a certain newspaper, "with cuffs turned up"; but these, despite their build and basis, have never been surpassed for wit, vitality, and mastery of incident. The plays seen by our friends Mr. and Mrs. Pepys from the middle gallery, were nearly all equipped at the expense of the King and gentry, and were brought out with nice details of costly scenery and costuming. Charles, Queen Catherine, and the Duke of York even gave their coronation suits to the actors. When Nokes played Sir Arthur Addle, in 1670, before the beautiful Duchess of Orleans, young Monmouth, beautiful as she, loosened the jewelled sword and belt which he wore, and enthusiastically clasped them upon the comedian, proud of both to his dying day. Charles originated the plot of Crowne's sprightly production, Sir Courtly Nice (the King died the night of its final rehearsal), and also that of Dryden's Secret Love: he was very vain of the latter when it was nobly cast, in 1666, and always delighted to have it called his play. He was responsible, in the same degree, for Oronokoo: for it was he who first discerned, in the affecting tale of the West Indian insurrection of slaves, led by an enslaved prince, choice material for a tragedy.
He was no reader, no student, in the usual sense: he read folk, and not folios. Newcastle had written him, then the child Prince of Wales: "Whensoever you are too studious, your contemplation will spoil your government; for you cannot be a good contemplative man, and a good commonwealth's man. Therefore take heed of too much book." Never was tutor eventually better obeyed. Charles was a shrewd observer; he could sift ambassadors, ministers, and "persons of quality," as ably as Elizabeth herself; and remain, the while, impervious as rock. His early education was neglected: he was forced too soon into active life. Fortunately, he had the æsthetic bent of his race: thought and travel taught this Oxonian, by easy processes, all he knew. He became a good mathematician, and a good draughtsman; he was something of an expert in anatomy; he perfectly understood the sciences of fortification and shipping. He once invited his beloved Prince Rupert to race "the two sloopes builte at Woolidge, which have my invention in them." (It is to be hoped the landsman Rupert of the Rhine did not command his crew, as Monk did, to wheel to the left!) Charles was as thorough a sailor as his brother, and would have made as fair a record on deck, had his lines been cast there. Aboard "The Surprise" Tattersal averred that he directed the course better than himself. It was this King who gave the charter to the Royal Society, and founded the Observatory at Greenwich, as well as the Mathematical School at Christ Hospital. Nor were these things done perfunctorily, but from close personal interest. Charles could gossip in several languages. His taste for chemistry was almost as marked as his cousin Rupert's; and in the month he died, he was running a process for fixing mercury. Cowley, before that period, had lapsed into a pretty conceit about his liege lord in the laboratory.
"Where, dreaming chemics, are your pain and cost?
How is your toil, how is your labor lost!
Our Charles, blest alchemist, (tho' strange,
Believe it, future times!) did change
The Iron Age of old
Into this Age of Gold."
Dr. Burney remarks, and almost with justice, that the King seems never to have considered music as anything but an incentive to gayety. Catherine of Braganza had a genuine passion for the art, and was its munificent patron so long as she remained in England. It is well to remember, when Charles is accused of developing only the newly-imported French music, that in his day cathedral organs were re-established, and the way was opened for the return of those beautiful choral services which had a potent successive influence over Purcell, Croft, Bennet, Barnby, and which have forever enriched themselves through association with these dedicated talents. The King had examined the principles of Romanesque architecture with some enthusiasm. No one followed Wren's great labor, after the Fire, especially in S. Paul's, with closer attention; and when he had a practical suggestion in mind, no one could have offered it more modestly. It was not Charles the Second who hampered that great man, and vexed his heart with mean conditions. He had a rational admiration for Wren; it did not prevent him, however, from jesting on occasion. The architect was a very little man, and the King a very tall one. They had an amiable dispute at Winchester. "I think the middle vault not high enough." "It is high enough, your Majesty." With the same air, no doubt, the young Mozart contradicted his Archduke: "The number of notes is not at all too many, but exactly sufficient." In this case, the critic looked at the roof, and then he looked at Wren. Presently, he crumpled himself up, and brought his anointed person erect, within four feet of the floor, as if from the other's illiberal point of view. "High enough, then, Sir Christopher!" he said.
His relation to literary men was one of ample appreciation and no pay. He is reported to have wished to buy the favor of George Wither, and especially of Andrew Marvell: yet he never approximately endeavored to discharge his long-standing debts to his own choir. Sedley, Edmund Waller, Rochester, and the Roscommon of "unspotted lays," were in no need of encouragement; but it would have befitted Charles to do something for the others, before it was too late. It seems to have been his purpose to make Wycherley tutor to the Duke of Richmond, at fifteen hundred pounds a year, had not Wycherley, in the nick of time, snubbed the King by marrying Lady Drogheda, and drifted into the Fleet prison. The poets always returned his liking. Though he was an entrancingly pat subject for pasquinades, even Marvell touched him gently.
"I'll wholly abandon all public affairs,
And pass all my time with buffoons and with players,
And saunter to Nelly when I should be at prayers.
I'll have a fine pond, with a pretty decoy,
Where many strange fowl shall feed and enjoy,
And still in their language quack Vive le roy."
Charles, at his birth, came into the poetic atmosphere of his more poetic father. When the latter set out, at the head of a triumphant train, to return thanks at the Cathedral for his heir, the planet Venus (abstit omen!) was clearly shining in the May-noon sky. The people saw it, and were wild with superstitious delight; and they recalled it at the Restoration. Festal lyres, because of it, were struck with redoubled zest. "Bright Charles," Crashaw began; and old Ben Jonson's voice arose in greeting:
"Blest be thy birth
That hath so crowned our hopes, our spring, our earth."
And Francis Quarles, not long after, quaintly offered his Divine Fancies to the "royall budde," "acknowledging myself thy servant, ere thou knowest thyself my Prince." Again, no sooner was Charles the Second laid in his grave, than the flood of seventeenth-century panegyric, which he had never invited, but held back considerably while he lived, burst forth over England: unstemmed by any compensating welcomes for the ascendant Duke of York. Dryden, in his Threnodia Augustalis, Otway, Montagu, Earl of Halifax, and a hundred lesser bards, intoned the requiem. Most of this prosody is pretty flat: but it has feeling. One of Richard Duke's stanzas is questionable enough; only the shortsightedness of genuine grief can save it from worse than audacity. Following Dryden in his quasi-invocation, he named the dead King as "Charles the Saint"; and wherever the poor ghost chanced to be, that surely hurt him like an arrow.
If he was not so protective as he might have been to his poets, it was not owing to any parsimony on his part. He was by nature a giver. The thrifty Teutons who inherited the throne and the royal bric-à-brac have long begrudged divers treasures scattered by Charles among persons and corporations of his individual fancy. While in exile, he had sold his favorite horses, to provide comforts for his suite; and in 1666, when he was in need of all he had, he allowed nothing to interfere with his lavish and wisely-placed donations to the houseless City. Perhaps he neglected the fees of literature, as he neglected to put up a monument to his father's memory: not because he failed to know his duties, but because he must have held your true procrastinator's creed, and discovered, in the end, that what can be done at any time gets done at no time. Dryden helps us to think, however, that the King was not wholly oblivious of his bookmen: