"Tho' little was their hive and light their gain,
Yet somewhat to their share he threw."
Perhaps he was almost as liberal as his gaping pocket allowed. Long-headed sirens, too, were battening on the national revenues, and Charles had no strength of purpose left to withstand them. He had bartered that for rose-leaves and musk and mandragora: eternal quackeries which had never for an instant eased him of his sore conscience. For downright hypocrisy (to which, with whatever wry faces, he had to come), nothing in the snuffling deeps of Puritanism can beat the wording of a clause in the grant made to Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine, in 1670, when she received her magnificent domains, titles, and pensions, "in consideration," as the patent states, "of her noble descent, her father's death in the service of the crown, and by reason of her personal virtues." This lady "hectored the King's wits out of him." The reason is not far to seek why Butler went hungry, and deliciæ decus desiderium ævi sui, otherwise Abraham Cowley, Esquire, felt that his fidelity was at a discount. Royalty occasionally tossed gold to its admired Dryden, in the shape of several capital suggestions, which availed, as we know. "Now, were I a poet (and I think I am poor enough to be one), I should make a satire upon sedition." The parenthesis is sympathetic. The knights of the ink-bottle were very welcome to Whitehall; there was no class with which Charles, who was not a promiscuous friend, liked better to surround himself. It is a pity he did not have illustrious opportunity to associate with the best of these altogether and forever, as his cousin of France did, as he himself seemed born to do; for he had the patronal temperament. There is a beautiful expression in Montesquieu, which might be applied as sanctioning as a virtue the passive intellectual perception of the Stuarts: "Que le prince ne craint point ses rivaux qu'on appelle les hommes de mérite: il est leur égal dès qu'il les aime." This is the principle of faith without good works. Charles the Second, interpreted by it, ought to cut a rather fair figure before posterity.
He was no stranger to a pen. How well he could employ it, his speeches, letters, and despatches show. Grace and point are in every line. He had, in fact, a curious neat mastery of words, not to be excelled by most trained hands. Good pithy prose came easy to him: which is a phenomenon, since nobody expects King's English from a king. He had much to write, "and often in odd situations," as Mr. Disraeli the elder amicably adds. His performances in rhyme seem to have been discredited by himself, and are, perhaps happily, irrecoverable. Excellent David Lloyd, of Oriel, mentions "several majestick Poems" of Charles's youth. He does not quote them. "Majestick" reminds one of the reputed Muse paternal, pontificating from Carisbrooke:
"And teach my soul, that ever did confine
Her faculties in Truth's seraphic line,
To track the treason of Thy foes and mine."
The son's productions were not quite of this order, if we may judge from a specimen given by Burney, in the appendix to his History of Music. It is an artificial pastoral, in singable numbers, which Pelham Humphrey took pains to set in D major.
Humphrey was an ex-chorister boy then newly come back from over seas, to be "mighty thick with the King"; bringing with him French heresies of time and tune. Charles had musical theories of his own; and would sit absently in chapel, swaying his head to Master Humphrey's rhythm, and laughing at a dissonance in the anthem before the singers themselves were half-conscious of the slip. When he was not sleeping there, he seems to have done a deal of laughing in chapel. On one classic occasion, his father felt called upon to "hit him over the head with his staff," in S. Mary the Virgin's, Oxford, "for laughing at sermon-time upon the ladies that sat against him." He sang tenor to Gostling's great bass: the Duke of York (afterwards James the Second) accompanying them upon the guitar. His favorite song was an English one, and a very grave one: Shirley's beautiful dirge in The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses:
"The glories of our birth and state
Are shadows, not substantial things."
Many a time young Bowman was bidden to the solitary king, and chanted those austere measures. The true semblance of the Merry Monarch, undreamed-of by Gibbons or Lely, would be his portrait as he sat listening, in a tapestried alcove, to the touching text on the vanity of mortal pride, and the ever-during fragrance of "the actions of the just": his little dogs at his feet, his dark eyes fixed on the unconscious lad; the motley somehow fallen from him, and a momentary truce set up between him and his defrauded thinking soul. How the court which he had taught, the court with its sarcasms and sallies, would have laughed at the preposterous situation! Yet, if he had any outstanding spiritual characteristic, it was precisely this love for serious and worthy things. His perception of human excellence was never clouded. We all know his famous saying, which must have been more than half in jest, and unallowable even so, that the "honor" of every man and of every woman has its price. Yet this furious cynic was a tender believer in disinterestedness, wherever he found it. Not once or twice alone did he yield applause to a life which followed virtue "higher than the sphery chime," though his cue lay not in that part, though he went back on the morrow to the Hörselberg. From the middle of the revelry which filled his opening years in London, he stole away privately to Richmond, to kneel beside the dying Bishop Duppa, and beg a blessing. He had a most deferent regard for Sir William Coventry. Towards the close of his life, he was troubled with memories of the fate of Sidney and Russell. He was not thinking of intellectual achievement when he said: "I hear that Mr. Cowley is dead. He hath left no better man behind him." He appreciated something else beside the comeliness of the sweet Duchess of Grammont (la belle Hamilton), when he wrote to his favorite sister in Paris: "Be kinde to her: for besides the meritt her family has, she is as good a creature as ever lived." That young lily of perfection, Mistress Godolphin, observed a rule of her own in never speaking to the King. How prudent, to be sure, and how obtuse! And it will be admitted by every reader of historical gossip that, to whatever humiliations Charles subjected his poor queen (who ceased not to love him, and to love his memory) he would at no time hear her disparaged, were she even so disparaged ostensibly for his own political advantage. For he respected in her the abstract unprofanable woman. He wrote to his Chancellor, on his first sight of Catherine, who had been described to him as an ugly princess: "Her face is not so exact as to be called a beauty, though her eyes are excellent good; and not anything on her face that can in the least shoque one. On the contrary, she has as much agreeableness altogether in her look as ever I saw, and if I have any skill in Physiognomy (which I think I have!) she must be as good a woman as ever was born." And again: "I must be the worst man living, (which I hope I am not,) if I be not a good husband." In Edward Lake's diary, we are told that to the patron who recommended Dr. Sudbury to the Deanery of Durham, and Dr. Sandcroft to that of S. Paul, the King said, after some years of that attentive observation of his saints which no one would suspect in him: "My lord, recommend two more such to me, and I will return you any four I have for them." Most pertinent of all such cases, was that of the beloved Bishop Ken. When the King went to Winchester, in 1681, to superintend Wren's building of his palace, he put up at the Deanery, and sent word to Ken, then one of the Prebendaries, to resign his house to Nell Gwynne. Ken stoutly refused, to the fear and amazement of the time-servers. Three years later, the last year of the King's life, there was a great scramble for a rich vacant see. Charles did not lack a dramatic inspiration. "Od's fish!" he cried: "who shall have Bath and Wells but the little fellow that would not give poor Nelly a lodging!" In 1679, the King did his best to keep in their high offices the many useful and loyal magistrates whom his councillors voted to supplant on account of their being "favourable to Popery." His more general plea having been passed by, he read the list of names over again, before placing the signature which he could no longer refuse; and since his opposition was then as strenuous as ever, took leave of the subject in some remembered oblique remarks. Why depose Such-a-one? He had peerless beef in his larder, and no kickshaws. What had So-and-so done, that he should be removed? Surely, no man kept better foxhounds! And he could not only thus discern and prefer goodness, but he submitted himself to it, and bore reproofs from it with boyish humbleness. There is no reminiscence of the Prince's comic catechumen experiences in Scotland, in the accents of "your affectionate friend, Charles Rex," addressed to the admonishing Mr. James Hamilton, a minister of Edinburgh, from Saint Germain. "Yours of the 26th May was very welcome to me, and I give you hearty thanks for all your good counsel, which I hope God will enable me the better to follow through your prayers: and I conjure you still to use the same old freedom with me, which I shall always love." But his instinct was sharp: his sarcasms were forth in a moment against mere bullies and meddlers. Checked once for employing a light oath, he had ready a shockingly brusque though legitimate retaliation: "Your Martyr swore twice more than ever I did!"