A few years before his death, the Earl of Derby retired to a country house which he had bought, on the banks of the Dee, near Chester. Weary of the cares of life, and of the ordering of his large estate, he made all his possessions over to his son, Lord Strange, reserving to himself a thousand pounds a year for his own maintenance. In 1640 Lord Strange was appointed to share with his father in the office of Lord Chamberlain of Chester. Two years later the old Earl died; and his son succeeding him, “Madame Strange,” as her French and Dutch relatives called her, became Countess of Derby.
In the course of time, since the murder of the Duke of Buckingham, the affairs of the country had gone from bad to worse, and year by year the breach between Royalists and Parliamentarians widened. Outwardly the kingdom not only seemed to prosper, but was in a manner flourishing. Her possessions abroad were increased by new colonies, and her harbours were filled with merchant ships sailing from all parts of the world. Art and learning prospered exceedingly. In the midst of the turmoil of ribaldry and fanaticism of the extreme parties, and the smoke and luridness of battle-fields, learning and civilisation were steadily advancing. Like Archimedes, men of science, painters and scholars, worked on, some of them amid the din of battle; and, with a happier fate than his, lived on, for the most part into calmer days. Others, sheltered in the retirement of country homes, and recking little of papist or puritan shibboleths, wrote and thought, and to this day their work remembers them. Trade flourished, and diversions and junketings were in nowise neglected. Amid all the royal troubles, courtly state was not only well, but splendidly maintained.
A refinement and dignity prevailed in Charles’s Court which fascinated his loyal subjects; and the beauty of the Queen, and the gracious if always melancholy aspect of the King, won hearts, and intellects to boot, which had originally inclined to the side of his disaffected subjects. The French nature of Henrietta Maria delighted in masques and gaieties and music; and though etiquette and sobriety ruled the King’s household, dulness found no part there. Often the people had the chance of looking on their sovereigns as their gilded barge rowed down the river from London to Hampton Court, to the music of lutes and viols, and sweet choiring voices mingling with the song of the birds, not yet driven hence by the smoke and screech of an overcrowded city. From Westminster Stairs on one side, and Lambeth Palace on the other, the banks were still open, clothed with grass and foliage, and dotted here and there with gabled and timbered dwellings, whose gardens glowed with fragrant flowers and ripening fruit. Tothill Fields were rookeries then, as now; but the birds were of another feather. Battersea Fields on the south side still grew simples and herbs for the medicaments of London apothecaries—the “Physic Garden” of Sir Hans Sloane opposite being but a concentrated, double-distilled essence of these older sources. Beyond and behind lay the Five Fields, soon to become notorious for infesting footpads and highwaymen; for the numbers of the gentlemen of the road increased with alarming speed, as the means of travelling improved and increasing opportunities made more and more thieves. Leaving the immediate environing of London, the village of Chelsea reflected its stately mansions and terraces in the clear Thames reaches. And so, onward by the winding stream, till under the shadows of fair Richmond woods the royal beeches and elms of Hampton Court bent their boughs in the summer breeze to their majesties and the courtly train in greeting and in welcome to the palace associated with memories and traditions, not all of them too fair and consolatory, of “my good Lord Cardinal” and his tyrannical lord.
In reasonable pastime and amusements the average subject of King Charles’s day followed the suit of the Court. A sour forbiddance and abhorrence of amusements had not yet come to be the order of the day.
If fasts were duly kept, festivals were in nowise forgotten. The “all work and no play making Jack a dull boy” observance was not yet rendered paramount by the prick-eared, aggressive spirit of Puritanism; for the master enjoyed a sober junketing and relaxation every whit as much as the ’prentice loved his turn at the quintain, or a merry round with the maid of his choice, or a stage play in an inn yard. As to the shameful “sport” of bear-baiting, to give the Puritan his due, he did excellent work indeed when he succeeded in stamping it out; though his consideration for the bear appears to have been somewhat circumscribed, if, as more than one account tells, generally the first proceeding was to kill the bear. Anything less than sweeping reform and a tabula rasa savoured ill to Puritan nostrils; and while Praise-God-Barebones took away the bears, he forgot the abhorrence of nature,—human nature notably—for a vacuum, and that in a few years the lack of all rational diversions, the pulling down of maypoles, the silencing of all music but psalm-singing, would drive man and woman to try and drown care in the pottle-pot. It was small wonder that the English people so soon came to regard the Commonwealth as a not utterly unmitigated blessing. The promised millennium grew to be unsatisfactory to all but the very elect; and outside that pale, the desire for the King to have his own again was to spread fast and wide. The intrinsic worth of that King they were less concerned about; and if, after a few years’ experience of the Merry Monarch’s rule, they found it full of flaws, they endured as they might: not perhaps altogether forgetful that if the young Prince had not been hounded from his country to herd with all sorts and conditions of swashbucklers and adventurers, finding no rest for the sole of his foot, no true and sober counsel in the very years that temptations are strongest upon all men—especially men of his temperament—their restored King’s virtues might have outshone his shortcomings.
To the moderate-minded the typical Royalist and Puritanic extremes of the civil war days could only have been vexatious to a degree. It is curious to observe how many scholars and writers of the middle of the seventeenth century make no allusion to what was passing around them. Take only the one instance of Isaac Walton, who at least lived in the very thick of the fray, in that pargeted and latticed-casemented old house of his at the corner of Chancery Lane. Truly, in his lives of the worthies and divines of the time, he alludes frequently to the religious and political divisions of the country, as indeed his themes entailed; but in his immortal volume, whose secondary title is the significant one of “The Contemplative Man’s Recreation,” scarce a shadow of the gloom of the times darkens its equable, sunshiny humour. Soberly, but with intense enjoyment, Master Isaac Walton takes his way from Fleet Street, and, stretching his legs over Tottenham Hill—no short stretch neither—he falls in with his hunter and falconer, gossips along the road to Ware, whither he is bound that “fine, fresh May morning”; and so the three trudge on together in genial discourse to the text that “good company makes the way to seem shorter.” How thoroughly the wayfarers enjoy the freshness of the country and the green beauty of the “new livery’d year”! How they delight in the milkmaid’s song, and luxuriate in the “honest alehouse with its cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall”!
Last, not least, in the general intellectual and mental life of England in Charles’s reign, comes the band of poets, a goodly train, Cavalier or Puritan, or not greatly concerned for either, but writing in
“numbers,
Since the numbers came.”
Milton, Cowley, Herrick, Lovelace, Herbert, Wither, Dekker, Webster, and many more, breathing forth sweet words and quaint aphorisms which mingle in our every-day talk, and are too familiar for us to pause to think whence or how they rise to the lips. Those dead poets of Charles’s reign resting beneath the hoary old stones of Westminster, or the sod of peaceful village graveyards, or whose dust the venom of bigots and fanatics has scattered, left their country a heritage which cannot perish while the English tongue endures.