CHAP. III.
The Quarters of Royalty and Government.
WHITEHALL, PAST AND PRESENT.—DOWNING STREET.—PARIS AND LONDON.—ENGLISH AND FRENCH STATESMEN.—THE DIFFERENCE.—THE ADMIRERS OF FRANCE.—ENGLISH RESPECT FOR THE ARISTOCRACY.
FOUR large streets lead from Trafalgar Square to the East, West, North, and South. This square (village and garden-ground in the days of Edward the Confessor) is, in our own days, one of the central points of London life. Trafalgar Square, which drank the blood and witnessed the agonies of Hugh Peters, Scrope, Jones, Harrison, and many others, who were killed in expiation of the execution of Charles I.—where many hundreds were decapitated, stigmatised, and mutilated, to satisfy the vengeance of the Stuarts and their adherents—forms, in 1852, the peaceable, ever-moving, central point, where the roads from the West meet the roads from the East. Down there, where the equestrian statue of Charles I. stands, the street leads to Whitehall, Westminster, the Houses of Parliament, and the Thames. We will walk in that direction; it leads us to places that are among the grandest and most interesting of which London, or any other city on the face of the earth, can boast.
We are here—as Leigh Hunt says—within the atmosphere of English royalty. Each step in this part of the town awakens the strangest recollections, and reminds one of Wolsey, the gifted, the proud, the terrible—of Henry, the coarse and cruel—Elizabeth, the cunning and quarrelsome—James, the pedant and the clown—Charles, the misguided and melancholic—Cromwell, the harsh and unbending—the contemptible, dissolute second Charles—and the doubly contemptible, dissolute Stuart, who succeeded him, and whose Government robbed Whitehall of its glories. The very air is full of reminiscences of the Tudors and the Stuarts—of their splendour and feasting—of their intrigues and vulgarities—of their despotic rule and bloody punishments; and as we walk through the streets, we cannot divest ourselves of the thought, what a strange and quaint sight it would be, if those princes, and their ministers and courtiers, could, for an hour, return to the sunny light of day! What gravity and merriness, madness and thoughtlessness, guilt, misery, and ingratitude! Visible and invisible, singly and grouped, here are the monuments of the history of English royalty, from the downfall of Wolsey to the downfall of James II. That epoch is grand, important, and instructive, and a fit study for the kings and nations of our own days.
Whitehall, such as it is in 1852, bears little resemblance to the Whitehall of 1652.
Wolsey lived in York Palace. He was most vain, fond of splendour, conceit, and tyranny; but for all that, he was the most remarkable man among the prelates of England. His palace was the richest booty which his downfall procured for his master, who at once settled down in it. Here he married Anna Boleyn; here he died; here did all the great men meet, who flattered that crowned tiger until he consigned them to the hands of the executioner, and impaled their heads on London Bridge. Among them were Cavendish, Thomas Cromwell, and Wolsey. Erasmus, also, and Hans Holbein, whose low degree alone saved them from sharing the fate of the king’s friends and wives. Among these were the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt the poet, Catharine of Arragon, Anna Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Catharine Howard, Anne of Cleves, and Catharine Parr, the least unfortunate among these unfortunate women; and the children that were to wear crowns—Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth—these were they that passed in and out of York Palace in the days of Henry VIII.
The spirits of the murdered have probably cast a gloomy shadow on those golden walls, for after Henry’s decease his successors avoided Whitehall, and Elizabeth was the first to establish her court there. A change comes over the figures of the past—Cecil and Burleigh, the two Bacons, Drake and Raleigh, Spenser and Shakespere, Sydney and Lee, Leicester and Essex, stand before us. And after them James I. and his darling “Steenie,” and Charles I., Cromwell, and—the executioner.
Charles I. was very active in the improvement of Whitehall. Inigo Jones, the great architect of those days, was employed on it, and Rubens painted the ornaments of the ceiling, for which he received £3000 and the honour of knighthood. It is mere calumny, to say that Cromwell, in puritanic brutality, destroyed the works of art which he found in Whitehall. On the contrary, he made great exertions to save them; we owe it to him that the famous cartoons by Raphael may this day be seen at Hampton Court. But, of course, the Great Protector put a stop to the dissolute and merry life which formerly ruled in the palace. There was no end of praying and preaching in Whitehall; the Barebones Parliament assembled here after the dissolution of the Long Parliament; it was here that Cromwell refused the crown; and here he died, while a dreadful thunderstorm convulsed the heavens. His friends said that nature sympathised with the great man, and his enemies would have it that it was the devil going off to hell with “Old Noll,” his brother.
Richard Cromwell, too, passed his short season of power at Whitehall. He was followed by Monk, who kept the place for Charles II. But the merry olden times were gone for ever; they returned not with the dissolute, gloomy-faced prince, although more money was wasted on the Duchess of Portsmouth—not to mention His Majesty’s other ladies—than ever had been spent on an English queen.
Evelyn, in his memoirs, thus describes one of the closing scenes of royal dissipation:—“I can never forget the inexpressible luxury and prophanenesse, gaming and all dissoluteness, and, as it were, total forgetfullnesse of God (it being Sunday evening), which this day se’nnight I was witnesse of, the king sitting and toying with his concubines—Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarine, etc.; a French boy singing love songs, in that glorious gallery, whilst about twenty of the greate courtiers, and other dissolute persons, were at Basset round a large table; a bank of at least 2000 in gold before them, upon which two gentlemen, who were with me, made reflectious with astonishment. Six days after was all in the dust!”—Evelyn’s Memoirs, vol. i. p. 549.