As we have seen, he had no appetite whatever for compliments. He probably thought quite as Pepys did, regarding the silly adulations lavished on a certain January tennis-playing. "Indeed, he did play very well, and deserved to be commended; but such open flattery is beastly." Charles fils habitually "kept his head," as we say in one of the most telling of our English idioms. It was difficult indeed so to do, through the highest known fever of national enthusiasm, while he was fed every hour of every day with praises out of all proportion to the deeds of an Alexander. Virtuous men like Cowley went into frenzies of approbation at the outset of the reign; sensible men like Evelyn thanked Heaven with seraphic devotion for each execution and exhumation wherewith the King, or rather the wild popular will, to which he was no breakwater, signalized his entry. Hear the same temperate Evelyn, in a dedication: "Your Majesty was designed of God for a blessing to this nation in all that can render it happy; if we can have the grace but to discover it, and be thankful for it." Genuine toadies had small countenance from this acute Majesty. When he propounded his celebrated joke to The Royal Society, concerning a dead fish, i.e., that a pail of water receiving one would weigh no more than before, and when he watched the wiseacres all solemnly conferring, it cannot have been that they were unanimously caught by the impish query he had put upon them, but rather that they would avoid correcting the Crown: fain would they humor it with an acquiescent reason why. But one little hero of science, far down the table, greatly daring, spake: "I—I—I do believe the pail would weigh heavier!" and was acquitted by a peal of the royal laughter: "You are right, my honest man." Waller's clever excuse, when rallied on his fine Cromwellian strophes, and on their superiority to those written for the King's home-coming, that "poets succeed better in fiction than in truth," must have been met with the appreciative smile due to so exquisite a casuistry. Persons chosen to preach before Charles, bored him, long after his accession, with superfluous abuse of the Regicides and of the mighty Protectorate in general. One bishop, squarely asked why he read his sermons instead of delivering them impromptu, made the elegant response to his questioner, that it was for awe of such august assemblies, and of so wise a prince. Charles instantly rejoined that it was a monstrous pity no such consideration weighed with himself, in reading his speeches in the House: for the truth was, he had prayed for money so often, he could no longer look his hearers in the face! To the Earls of Carlisle and Shaftesbury, unduly anxious for the Protestant succession, who announced themselves as able to prove Monmouth's legitimacy, to the satisfaction of the nation, the King replied: "Dearly as I love the Duke, rather than acknowledge him will I see him hanged on Tyburn tree." Plain-speaking at a crisis was the hallmark of the loose and conniving time. When a clergyman of the Establishment was called to see the Duke of Buckingham, and inquired, by way of the usual preliminary, in what religion he had lived, the dying firefly answered gallantly: "In none, I am well pleased to say; for I should have been a disgrace to any. Can you do me any good now, bestir yourself." It was this engaging reprobate, (remembered rather through Pope and Dryden than through his own extraordinary talent) to whom the King once gave a kindly but authoritative rebuke for his atheistic talk. It is possible that on that occasion fastidiousness, and not reverence, was the motive power in Charles.
For it was his humor to disarm all moral questions by applying to them the measure of mere good taste. We know the characteristic exception he took to Nonconformity, as being "no religion for a gentleman." He had, in the perfect degree, what Mr. James Russell Lowell calls "that urbane discipline of manners, which is so agreeable a substitute for discipline of mind." As in Prince Charlie, (whose career was so closely to resemble his own, much in its heyday, and more in its decline), winning courtesy was founded on genuine sweetness of nature. He brought back into storm-beaten England the vision of the Cavalier: a vision like a rainbow, which made beholders giddy. The very first things he did, on his triumphant entry into London, on May 29th, 1660, were gracious grand-opera things: he singled out the pink-cheeked hostess of The Rose, in the Poultry, kissing his hand to her, as he passed; and he brought the tears to the eyes of Edmund Lovell, riding at the head of his troop of horse raised for the Restoration, by drawing off his rich leather gauntlets then and there, as a memento of thanks for one loyal welcome. Such a carriage was sure to establish him in the popular heart: he might light his fire with Magna Charta! His tact and his evenness of deportment stood forth like moral perfections. Addison, who, as a child, had seen the King humming lyrics over D'Urfey's shoulder, and knew all the folk-tales of his twenty-five years' reign, must surely have been thinking of him, when he painted this picture of "one of Sir Roger's ancestors." "He was a man of no justice, but great good manners. He ruined everybody that had anything to do with him, but never said a rude thing in his life; the most indolent person in the world, he would sign a deed that passed away half his estate, with his gloves on, but would not put on his hat before a lady, if it were to save his country." All this enchanting punctilio was but the velvet sheathing of uncommon power and purpose. Charles was never off his guard. No contingency ever got the better of him. He had reasons for being gentle and affable, for being, as the peerless Lady Derby thought him, on her own staircase, "the most charming prince in the world," for keeping his extremely happy chivalry of speech, equal to that of his cousin Louis the Fourteenth: the speech "which gives delight and hurts not." "Civility cannot unprince you," was another saying of the Newcastle beloved of his childhood, who seems to have had a strong influence over him. The gay address and gentle bearing, deliberate as we now perceive them to have been, had the highest extrinsic value in that severe masculine personality. "These advantages," says a contemporary writer, "were not born with him, for he was too reserved in his youth." It is ludicrous that we should speak of him as The Merry Monarch. He was, in sober truth, under his beautiful mask of manners, a morose, tormented, unhappy man. It was part of his perfect courage that he had learned small talk, banter, puns, games, and dances: they were so many weapons to keep the blue devils at bay. He had to beguile the thing he was with perpetual cap and bells. Before he became a distinguished actor, he was not "merry." The gilded courtiers of France, during his exile, found him a serious and awkward figure of a lad; his admired Mademoiselle Montpensier, the great prime-ministerial Mademoiselle, trailing her new satin gowns back and forth under Henrietta Maria's knowing eye, looked on Henrietta Maria's son, standing reticent the while, lamp in hand, with girlish derision.
Nothing in human history is plainer, I think, than this double personality of Charles the Second, evoked by the inescapable situation in which he lived and died. He had the benefit of parental example, and he started life as a good, slow, attractive, thoughtful child, the sad-eyed child of Vandyck's tender portraits between 1632 and 1642. He was not strong of frame then. "His Highness' particular grief," we smile to read in the pages of the good Lloyd, "is thought to be a consumption." From that house where all the children were fondly measured and painted and chronicled from year to year, his mother wrote of him to Madame Saint George, and to Marie de Medicis. "He has no ordinary mien ... he is so full of gravity." Prince James, however, was her favorite. At four years old, Charles staggered some Oxford dons with a display of infant philosophy. A twelvemonth before that, as we learn from a pretty passage in the Harleian MSS., he had been condemned to take a certain drug; and his attempts to get off, his retaliating talk afterward, are already very much of a piece with the makeshifts of the Charles the Second we know. But in general, he cannot be said to have been in the bud what he was in the flower. Besides his seriousness, he had other apparently exotic qualities: piety and candor among them. Lord Capell declared on the scaffold: "For certainly, I have been a counsellor to him, and have lived long with him, and in a time when discovery is easily enough made; (he was about thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and sixteen years of age, those years I was with him,) and truly I never saw greater hopes of virtue in any young person than in him: great judgment, great understanding, great apprehension; much honor in his nature, and truly a very perfect Englishman in his inclination. And I pray God restore him to this kingdom." Montrose, on the scaffold, in his turn, "exceedingly commended," says Clarendon, in his History, "the understanding of the present King." The glorious Marquis bore no testimony to Charles's ethic make-up: but that could have lacked no lustre in his eyes, since the January of the preceding year, when the heir to the crown twice offered his life, or the acceptance of any conditions imposed upon himself, in exchange for his father's safety. Madame de Motteville assures us that "the greatest heroes and sages of antiquity did not rule their lives by higher principles than this young Prince at the opening of his career."
The poverty and inaction of his eleven years' exile, the sickness of hope deferred, the temporizing, the misery of his faithful friends, the wretched worry and privation of the sojourn at Brussels and Breda, he bore passing well: but they spoiled him. He grew recklessly indifferent; at thirty he could have said his Diu viximus, for the savor of life was gone. An innate patrician, he could never have been ruined, as most men are all too ready to be, by "success and champagne." Hardship, which heartens the weak, was a needless ordeal for him: yet he had nothing else from his fourteenth to his thirty-first year. In him, endurance and courage were already proven, and the "mild, easy, humble" temperament which, long after, was to be allotted to him in Absalom and Achitophel. His chief diversions, while abroad, were the single military campaign in Spain, the reading and staging of amateur plays, the ever-welcome associations with his brothers and sisters. When Grenville brought thirty thousand pounds, and the invitation from the Parliamentary Commissioners, to the ragged royalties at the Hague, Charles called his dear Mary and James to look at the wonder, jingling it well before he emptied it from the portmanteau: a more innocent satisfaction than he was able to take later when, as Bussy de Rabutin remarked, "the King of England turned shopkeeper, and sold Dunkirk," and rode to the Tower to see the first three million livres rolled into his coffers. That he managed to fight besetting trouble may be inferred from his letters to Mr. Henry Bennet. "Do not forget to send me the Gazette Burlesque every week.... My cloaths at last came, and I like them very well, all but the sword, which is the worst that ever I saw.... We pass our time as well as people can do, that have no more money, for we dance and play as if we had taken the Plate Fleet.... Pray get me pricked down as many new corrants and sarrebands, and other little dances, as you can, and bring them with you; for I have got a small fiddler that does not play ill on the fiddle." King Charles the First, in his affecting last advices to his eldest son, had apprehended nothing but good results for him from the difficult circumstances of his minority. "This advantage of wisdom have you above most Princes, that you have begun and now spent some years of discretion in the experience of trouble and the exercise of patience.... You have already tasted of that cup whereof I have liberally drunk, which I look upon as God's physic, having that in healthfulness which it lacks in pleasure." But too much trial is enervating, as well as too little. Could the spirited Prince have had, ever and again, through those dark seasons, a pittance of the abounding prosperity which befell him after he had given up self-discipline, and had almost given up hope, it might have saved from fatal torpor "the only genius of the Stuart line."
So perverted grew his habit of mind, that eventually the strongest incentives could barely move, anger, or rouse him. To act like a man awake, he needed a shock, an emergency. He was of the greatest possible use at the Fire; he was of no use at all during the Plague. Planning a thing out, thinking of it beforehand, came to be intolerable to him. He who feared nothing else, feared communion with himself. "For he dared reflect, and be alone," is a sentence in the Warwick Memoirs, touching Charles the First, which looks as if it were intended for an oblique comment on his son. As it was, even at the worst, he prided himself on certain temperances. He liked good wine, but he kept his brain clear of hard drinking. "It is a custom your soul abhors," said the Speaker of the Commons before him, in the August of 1660. He liked a game of chance, but he never won or lost a pound at dice. In a time of the silliest superstition, when my lord and my lady conferred mysteriously with M. le Voisin or the Abbé Pregnani over in France, to whom the casting of horoscopes and the concocting of philters were "easy as lying," Charles held his own strong-minded attitude, and was delighted to see some applauded predictions quite overturned in the Newmarket races. "I give little credit to such kind of cattle," he writes to Henrietta, "and the less you do it, the better; for if they could tell anything, 'tis inconvenient to know one's fortune beforehand, whether good or bad." Yet he amused himself with the psychological, when it suited him. "Sir A.H. and Mrs. P., I beleeve, will end in Matrimony: I conclude it the rather because I have observed a cloud in his face, any time these two months, which Giovanni Battista della Porta, in his Physionomia, says, foretells misfortune." He frowned on irreligion, and stopped religious controversy with a wave of his hand. "No man," says Roger North, "kept more decorum in his expression and behavior in regard to things truly sacred than the King.... And amongst his libertines, he had one bigot, at least, (Mr. Robert Spencer) whom he called Godly Robin, and who used to reprove the rest for profane talking."
"Until near twenty," we learn from an anonymous pamphleteer who claims to have been eighteen years in the Prince's friendship and service, "until near twenty, the figure of his face was very lovely. But he is since grown leaner, and now the majesty of his countenance supplies the lines of beauty." "Majesty" sounds euphemistic; yet there was a great deal of genuine majesty in Charles the Second. Black armor was always wonderfully becoming to him, as we see in at least one Cooper miniature, in the print by Faithorne, and the rarer one by Moncornet. The lines of his cheek and mouth were very marked; when he needlessly began to wear a wig, their severity became intensified. He had the shadowy Stuart eyes, red-brown, full of soft light; but his look, in all of his portraits, is something so sombre that we have no English word for it: it is morne, it is macabre, Leigh Hunt well implies, in The Town, that such an appearance, linked with such a character, was a witticism in itself. He says: "If the assembled world could have called out to have a specimen of 'the man of pleasure' brought before it, and Charles the Second could have been presented, we know not which would have been greater, the laughter or the groans." His face was brown as a Moor's, and singularly reserved and forbidding; though "very, very much softened whensoever he speaks." One hardly knows why it was thought necessary to blacken it further with walnut-juice, for disguise, to provide the "reechy" appearance dwelt upon in Blount's narrative, when he set out from Boscobel. His long hair had been of raven hue, thick and glossy, "naturally curling in great rings"; but at the Restoration he was already becoming "irreverendly gray." When he turned suddenly upon you, we read, in Ralph Esher (Hunt, first and last, shows a Rembrandtesque preoccupation with this dusky King), "it was as if a black lion had thrust his head through a hedge in winter." To the Rye House conspirators he was known as "the Blackbird," as they named the Duke of York, who was blonde, "the Goldfinch." It is a little curious that a Jacobite ballad, very familiar in Ireland, dating from before the Fifteen, bestows the same secret name (as a love-name, it need hardly be added) on James the Third, called the Pretender. James Howell, in a dedication to Charles the child, says:—
"Wales had one glorious Prince of haire and hue
(Which colour sticks unto him still!) like you."
Howell had in mind the Black Prince, when he set out so to compliment his swarthy little successor; but he must have forgotten that the hero had his sobriquet from his dread prowess, or his armor, not from his complexion. Charles was well-made. "Le roi ne cédait à personne, ni pour la taille ni pour la mine." But he was too grim and gaunt to be handsome. Burnet, who had no regard for him, tells us that he resembled the Emperor Tiberius: "a statue of the latter at Rome looks like a statue made for him." (Any reader of Tacitus knows that the parallel could be maintained throughout. But it would be unfair. Tiberius, with all his high handed capability, was jealous and perfidious; Tiberius,—this is the core of the matter,—could not take a joke!) Standing before the portrait of himself by Riley, Charles sighed sympathetically: "Od's fish! but I'm the ugly fellow." Vanity was not in him, and he left the last refinements of the fashions, the crève-cœur locks and the passagère, and the venez-à-moi, to his retainers, to the men of great personal beauty, like the Villiers, Wilmots, and Sidneys, whom they became. He turned dress-reformer in 1666, and brought the whole court to habits of simplicity. No better and manlier clothing ever was devised: the silk doublet and breeches, the collar, shoes and sword-belt of the time, without the slashes or the furbelows. But he was driven out of his model costume by the bantering motion of the French monarch, who immediately arrayed his footmen in it. This is a fine historic instance of the truth of Hazlitt's epigram: "Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken by it." At Whiteladies, in old days, the young King was eager to get into his leathern doublet and white and green yarn stockings, "his Majesty refusing to have any gloves," though his hands were of tell-tale shape and slenderness. His fellow-fugitive, Lord Wilmot, was not so enchanted at the prospect of a peasant disguise; "he saying that he should look frightfully in it." "Wilmot also endeavored to go on horseback," continues the playful King's own animated dictation to Pepys, "in regard, as I think, of his being too big to go on foot." Charles himself was a hard rider, though he preferred, whenever he could, to walk. His little suite had every reason to remember his posting through France and Spain, in 1659, when his energy tired them all out. His long legs always went at a tremendous pace. "I walked nine miles this morning with the King," Claverhouse writes wearily in 1683, "besides cockfighting and courses." (He was waiting, in vain, to catch his sovereign in a humor for business.) Charles was fond of foot-racing, tennis, pall-mall, and all out-of-door sports. According to Reresby, he would have preferred retirement, angling, and hearty country life, to his thorny throne. But who, except a tyrant, would not? Most of the Stuarts were excellent marksmen, and he among them. He took intelligent care of his health, and liked to weigh himself after exercise. We learn that his lonely leisure was sometimes invaded by afflicted but admiring subjects. "Mr. Avise Evans," writes dear garrulous Aubrey, "had a fungous nose; and said it was revealed unto him that the King's hand would cure him; so at the first coming of King Charles Second into S. James's Park, he kissed the royal hand and rubbed his nose with it. Which did disturb the King, but cured him."
Charles's physical activity set in early; he succeeded, at nine, in breaking his arm. All his life, he was up with the lark: it was almost the only circumstance in which he differed from Le Roi d'Yvetot, in Béranger's biting ballad, which did so take Mr. Thackeray; and he played all morning and every morning. Early-risen Londoners, like the child Colley Cibber, used to watch him romping with his hounds and spaniels, stroking the deer, feeding the wooden-legged Balearic crane, or visiting the old lion in the Tower, not the least of his pets, whose death, accepted as a portent, was soon almost to coincide with his own. For birds he had a passion; he was an unexampled dog-lover. He squandered much of his professional time in the society, innocent at least, of these favorite animals, and much of his professional money, in seeking and reclaiming such of them as were lost. There is a funny little advertisement in Mercurius Publius for June 28th, 1660, the sly good-humor of which marks it as having been written out by none but the King himself. The advertisement was a renewed one. "We must call upon you again for a Black Dog, between a greyhound and a spaniel; no white about him, onely a streak on his Brest, and Tayl a little bobbed. It is His Majesties own Dog, and doubtless was stoln, for the Dog was not born or bred in England, and would never forsake his Master. Whosoever findes him, may acquaint any at Whitehall, for the Dog was better known at Court than those who stole him. Will they never leave robbing His Majesty? Must he not keep a Dog? This Dog's place, (though better than some imagine) is the onely place which nobody offers to Beg."