By SIR PETER LELY.
Full-Length.
(Standing by a Table, on which are his Helmet and Staff.)
Born, 1630. Died, 1685.—He was the second surviving son of Charles I., by Henrietta Maria of France, born at St. James’s Palace, on the 29th of May. When only twelve years old was appointed to the command of a troop of horse, his father’s Body Guard at York, and sent with the title of General, to serve in the Royal army when fifteen. After the defeat of Naseby, he went to Scilly, then to Jersey, and in 1646 joined his mother, at Paris. He was at the Hague, when the news of his father’s death reached him, and he immediately assumed the title of King. In 1649, he was proclaimed King at Edinburgh. He left Holland, returned to Paris, and thence again to Jersey, where he received a deputation from Scotland, and accepted the Crown offered him by the Presbyterians, under such humiliating conditions, as disgusted him with that sect, for the rest of his life. In 1650, he arrived in Scotland, being compelled to take the Covenant before he landed; was crowned at Scone on New Year’s Day, 1651; but marched south, on hearing of the advance of Cromwell, and was proclaimed King at Carlisle. Defeated by Cromwell, at the Battle of Worcester, Charles had a narrow escape, with all the well known incidents of the hiding place in Boscobel Oak, etc. He embarked from Shoreham for Normandy, thence to Paris, Bruges, Brussels. In the latter city he heard of the Protector’s death; then, when at Calais and Breda, he kept up constant communication, not only with General Monk, and his own acknowledged partisans, but he also sent addresses to both Houses of Parliament. On the 1st, of May 1660, they voted his restoration; on the 8th, he was proclaimed in London; on the 23rd, he embarked from the Hague; and on the 29th, his thirtieth birthday, he made his public entry into London, amidst the enthusiastic acclamations of the people. In 1662, he married Catherine of Braganza, daughter of John IV., King of Portugal, and died at Whitehall, in the twenty-fifth year of his reign. Some say he confessed himself a Roman Catholic; some that he was a victim to poison. It was his brother’s wish to prove the former statement, and several of his contemporaries, including the Duke of Buckingham, believed the latter. The last named nobleman gives apparently an impartial character of the “Merry Monarch,” who was remarkable for contradictions, and inconsistencies, even above the average, in an inconsistent world. Buckingham says: “His very countenance set all rules of physiognomy at defiance, for being of a cheerful and compassionate disposition, his expression was melancholy, and repelling. He had a wonderful facility in comprehending trifles, but had too little application to master great matters. Generous, extravagant, lavish in the extreme, he had a reluctance to part with small sums, and it was often remarked that he grudged losing five pounds at tennis to the very people on whom at other times he would bestow five thousand. Gentle and yielding in trifles, he was inflexible in important matters. Profligate in the extreme, weak and capricious, he was,” says the same witness, “a civil and obliging husband, a kind master, an indulgent father, and an affectionate [and he might have added, forbearing] brother. Hating the formalities of royalty, he was ready to assert his dignity, when it was necessary to do so. So agreeably did he tell a story, that his hearers never cavilled at its repetition, not through civility, but from the desire to hear it again, as is the case with a clever comedy.”
So far the Duke of Buckingham. We know what his boon companion Rochester, wrote of him, in a provisional epitaph; perhaps one of the only sallies proceeding from his favourite, that “Old Rowley” did not relish:
“Here lies our Sovereign lord the King,
Whose word no man relies on:
Who never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one.”