"We don't want to fight:
But, by Jingo, if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men,
We've got the money, too.")
(Of Harry Killigrew.) "I am glad the poore wrech has gott a meanes of subsistence; but have one caution of him, that you beleeve not one worde he sayes of us heere; for he is a most notorious lyar, and does not want witt to sett forth his storyes pleasantly enough."
"There is nobody desires more to have a strict frindship with the King of France than I do; but I will never buy it upon dishonourable termes; and I thanke God my condition is not so ill but that I can stande upon my own legges, and beleeve that my frindship is as valuable to my neighbours as theirs is to me."
"I have sent, this post, the extracts of the letters to my Ld. Hollis, by which you will see how much reason I have to stande upon the right my father had, touching the precedency of my ambassador's coach before those of the princes of the blood there. I do assure you, I would not insist upon it, if I had not cleerely the right on my side; for there is nobody that hates disputes so much as I do, and will never create new ones, espetially with one whose frindship I desire so much as that of the King of France. But, on the other side, when I have reason, and when I am to yeelde in a point by which I must goe less than my predesessours have done, I must confesse that consernes me so much as no frindship shall make me consent unto."
"Your kindnesse I will strive to diserve by all the endeavours of my life, as the thing in the worlde I value most."
Charles was dear to the masses, as any ruler of his unimperious humor is sure to be. When the King and Queen came down from Hampton Court in their barge, the Thames watermen shouted cheerfully at him: "God bless thee, King Charles, and thy good woman there. Go thy ways for a wag!" Among his inferior subjects he never lacked partisans and apologists. He was something of a hero even to his valet: faithful Tobias Rustat, Yeoman of the Robes, spent a fortune putting up statues, at Chelsea and Windsor, "domino suo clementissimo." The Roundheads whom Charles had released, chiefly men of no rank or influence, watched him after, with friendliest longing and regret; never without extenuations, and certain hope of change. "By enlarging us," they said in their message of thanks, "you have multiplied our captivity, and made us more your prisoners than we could be in the Tower." When Death gave him his abrupt summons, "amid inexpressible luxury and profaneness," on a wintry Monday in his town palace, the poor crowded the churches, for the whole six days, "sobs and tears interrupting the prayers of the congregations." Joy-bells and bonfires bespoke their relief at the mistaken report that he was convalescent. Every schoolboy, prentice, and serving-maid in London wore mourning for him; although he had been buried secretly by night, and there was no pageant at Westminster to memorialize their grief. Always, and despite all, he was sure of the loyalty of the people. "Fret not that I go unattended," he would tell his brother: "for they will never kill me, James, to make you king." "The horrid plot" found him the coolest head in England. But towards the end, it began to tell upon him and dash his spirits. He closed his doors for the first time, and went abroad with a guard, hurt and dejected. This was but an incident in a life as free from suspicion as a tree's. The folk who came to see Charles at his masques and fairs and Twelfth-Night dice-throwings and Easter alms-givings; the two hundred and forty thousand whom, with great boredom and greater patience, he touched for the King's Evil; the multitudes who had experienced his concern and practical energy during the Fire, when he had done them all manner of personal service,—these were his vassals to the last. Nor had he ever a private enemy. He was popular in the extreme; and might be commemorated as an admirable prince, if tested by the measure of Martial's epigram, that a prince's main virtue is intimate knowledge of his subjects. Tradition does not aver that he made integrity of living contagious among them, though society copied his tolerance and affability, his sense, spirit, and gracefulness. But nothing ever broke their faith in him. Says Lingard: "During his reign the arts improved, trade met with encouragement, the wealth and comforts of the people increased. To this flourishing state of the nation we must attribute the acknowledged fact, that whatever the personal failings or vices of the King, he never forfeited the love of his subjects. Men are always ready to idolize the sovereign under whose sway they feel themselves happy." Charles might have confessed with Elia: "How I like to be liked, and what don't I do to be liked!" His wheedling charm was irresistible. He was an adept, when he willed, in the science of honeyed suasion. Like the Florentine painters, he could suffer no slovenly detail, nor a convention to pass him without some individualizing touch. Before he had contracted the Portuguese alliance, Count Da Ponte had taken his letter to Lisbon: "To the Queen of Great Britain, my wife and lady, whom God preserve." The blood royal has a pretty etiquette of its own; not quite this, however. How beautifully, again, was it said to the Commons, shortly after the accession: "I know most of your faces and names, and can never hope to find better men in your places." And this intimate conciliatory tone, which it was Charles's pleasure to employ towards others, others used in speaking of him. There is a fatherly pang in some of the little messages plying between the noble colleagues, Clarendon and Ormonde. "The King is as decomposed as ever: which breaks my heart.... He seeks for his satisfaction and delight in other company, which do not love him so well as you and I do." And there is nothing tenderer in all history than the narration of Charles's leave-taking from his hushed Whitehall, written at the time by the Reverend Francis Roper, chaplain to the Bishop of Ely, unless it be an account of the same strange and moving scene, sent later by the Catholic Earl of Perth to the Catholic Countess of Kincardine, on the tenth of December, 1685.
Every street-corner evangelist may harp on the rottenness of the Restoration: what concerns us is its human sparkle. There was an astonishing dearth of dull people; the bad and bright were in full blossom, and the good and stupid were pruned away. The company reminds one of Aucassin's hell, which, on a certain occasion, he chose with such gusto, for its superior social qualities. "Charles the Second!" exclaims William Hazlitt, in his most enjoying mood: "what an air breathes from the name! What a rustle of silks and waving of plumes! What a sparkle of diamond earrings and shoe-buckles! What bright eyes! (Ah, those were Waller's Sacharissa's, as she passed.) What killing looks and graceful motions! How the faces of the whole ring are dressed in smiles! How the repartee goes round; how wit and folly, elegance, and awkward imitation of it, set one another off!" These are the days when young Henry Purcell bends for hours over the Westminster Abbey organ, alone; and Child, Locke, Lawes, and Gibbons are setting ballads to entrancing cadences, and conveying them to Master W. Thackeray, the music-printer, at The Angel, in Duck Lane; when another Gibbons, rival of the spring, carving on wood, makes miraculous foliage indoors, to cheat the longing wind; when a diligent Clerk of the Acts of the Navy, curiously scanning the jugglers and gymnasts on his leisurely way, trots by in "a camlett coat with silver buttons"; when Robert Herrick, the town-loving country vicar, ordering his last glass, stands watching through the tavern window-pane the King gravely pacing the greensward with Hobbes and Evelyn, or bantering Nell Gwynne over her garden wall; when Walton angles with his son Cotton in the Dove, and Claude Duval exquisitely relieves travellers' bags of specie; when the musical street-cries run like intersecting brooks: "Rosemary and sweetbrier: who'll buy my lavender?" "Fresh cheese and cream for you!" "Oranges and citrons, fair citrons and oranges!" when Richardson, the eater of glass and fire, is bidden to entertain in drawing-rooms, broiling an oyster on a live coal held in his mouth, and the instant he departs, hears the company fall to playing blind-man's buff, and "I love my love with an A"; when the click of duelling swords is heard in the parks at sundown, and groups of affectionate gentlemen sway homewards by the fainter morning ray, and coaches roll along lending glimpses of pliant fans, and of Lely's languishing faces. In and out of this whirl of thoughtless life move the august figures of Sir Thomas Browne and "that Milton that wrote for the regicides," and, later, of Sir Isaac Newton; the golden shadow of Jeremy Taylor, and the childish footsteps of Steele and his head boy Addison, regenerators to be; the vanishing presence of Clarendon, and the patriots, Russell, Vane, Algernon Sydney, good hearts in the dungeon and at the block; of Bunyan the tinker, and the fighters Fairfax and Rupert, and the scholar poets who prodigally strew their delicate numbers on the wind. Execrable ministries, Dutch defiances and insults, French pensions, pestilence and plot: but still the moth-hunts go on. "At all which I am sorry, but it is the effect of idleness" (who should it be but Pepys, making this deep elemental excuse?) "and having nothing else to employ their great spirits upon." The irised bubbles were soon to scatter, and the Hanoverian super-solids to come and stay. The great change is germinal, as all great changes are, and more visible in its processes than most. The reign of Charles the Second is full of supplements and reserves; nothing is so lawless as it seems; the genius ever unemployed, the virtue in arrest, "tease us out of thought," and change color under our eyes. Hornpipes turn to misereres; masks, one by one, fall away. Mrs. Aphra Behn, be it remembered, was, off the printed page, nothing more unspeakable than a decent industrious woman. That bygone England played at having no moral sense: on a subtle argument of Browning's, one may quarrel with it that it did not play equally well to the end. Neither was it the minor actor of the Restoration who, near the exit, flagged, saw visions, and spoke strange words out of his part: it was Rochester, it was Louise de Quérouailles, it was the King. "Without desire of renown," Macaulay finds him, "without sensibility to reproach." Why arraign the King? He will agree with Macaulay or another, charge by charge: which is damaging to the arraigner. As for accusations not personal, his retorts might be less gentle. Great Britain sued for him: and he never posed for a moment as other than he was. His coming hastened a reparative holiday; itself but the breath of reaction. That inevitable abuses should be ranked among the laws of Nature, is one of Vauvenargues' fine profound inferences. If, in some of his inspirational moments, the King exceeded his prerogative (by endeavoring, for instance, to abrogate the code bearing so cruelly upon all persons of other religious opinions than those of the State), Parliament and the people had foregone their right of complaint: they had deliberately chosen to make him an autocrat. No fanatic on any point, Charles would have bound himself readily to reasonable conditions, while his fortunes were pending; yet no pledges were exacted. Moderate precautions and safeguards, suggested in the Commons by Hale and Prynne, had been set aside by Monk, and overruled. Monk was but a dial's shadow, "the hand to the heart of the nation." He brought in not only the monarchy, but a potent individuality: one not led hither and thither, but a maker and marrer of his time. That melancholy figure was the axis of fast-flying and eccentric revelry. To some of us he is one of the most complex and interesting men in history. Judge him by old report and general current belief, and he is "dead body and damnèd soul"; examine his own speech and script, and the testimony of those who had him at close range from his boyhood: and lo, he has heights and distances, as well as abysses; he is self-possessed, not possessed of the devil; he is dangerous, if you will, but not despicable. Following an evil star, he, at least, after Ovid, perceived and approved the highest. Until the Georgian succession, his was a popular memory. But with the Stuart decadence, and the consummation of what The Royalist smartly labels as "the great Protestant Swindle," down went his name with better names: all, from Laud to Claverhouse, doomed to share a long obloquy and calumny, from which they are singly being rescued at last, as from the political pit. I know nothing so illustrious of Charles the Playgoer as that he was able to win the strong attachment of Dr. Samuel Johnson, albeit a century of ill repute lay between. Our wise critic, though he formulated it not, must have seen clearly the duplex cause of the King's failure in life. For half of that failure there is a theological term. Permit me to use it, and to illumine the whole subject by it: no flash-light is keener. Charles the Second was unfaithful to Divine Grace. Again, no man, endowed with so exquisite a sense of humor in over-development, can, of his own volition alone, escape lassitude, errancy, and frivolity founded on scorn. Humor, as a corrective, is well: but
——"the little more, and how much it is!"
To have been born with a surplus of it is to be elf-struck and incapacitated. Nothing is worth while, nothing is here nor there; the only way to cut short the torture of self-observation and the infamy of not being able to form a prejudice, is to abandon ideals. Pass over, in the King, this too mordant and too solvent intelligence, and you lose the key to a strange career. Perhaps two of his ancestors, two of the Haroun-al-Raschid temper, dominated him: the gallant Gudeman of Ballangleich, and as a nearer influence on Charles, that gay, beloved, fickle, easily-masterful man, his grandsire of Navarre. He was like these, and in harmony with their adventurous soldier-world: naturally, he was incurably out of joint with his own isle, her confused introspective moods hardly subsided. He was a philosopher, and above all, an artist: such a king, in England, can never be the trump card. He seems to have thought out the situation, and to have capitulated with all his heart. We need not tell each other that he might have been different. Let us mend our tenses, and agree that he would and must have been different, in Scotland or in France.
Yet Lord Capell's dying word was right: his King, though a traitor, and intellectually as homesick for France as Mary Stuart before him, was "a very perfect Englishman": he had, in some degree, every quality which goes to make up the lovableness of English character; and his Latin vices, large to the eye, are festooned around him, rather than rooted in him. One who knows the second Charles, all in all, and still preserves a great kindness for him, might do worse than borrow for his epitaph what Mr. Henley has written of Lovelace, Richardson's Lovelace, "the completest hero of fiction." "He has wit, humor, grace, brilliance, charm: he is a scoundrel and a ruffian; and he is a gentleman, and a man."