Horace Walpole, who was a true royalist whenever the arts were concerned, if not slyly in every other respect, thus speaks of that great but vain effort to build in London a palace worthy of the country. “The whole fabric,” he says, referring to Jones’s designs for Whitehall, “was so glorious an idea, that one forgets in a moment, in the regret for its not being executed, the confirmation of our liberties obtained by a melancholy scene that passed before the windows of that very Banqueting-house.”[[168]] The misfortunes of this eminent man now began. Inigo Jones was a Roman Catholic, and, as such, was peculiarly obnoxious to the Parliament party. His very name, too, was mingled with associations of those arts and that magnificence, which, from being the cause of envy, were now the objects of detestation to certain of the people. “Painting had now,” says Walpole, “become idolatry; monuments were deemed carnal pride, and a venerable cathedral seemed equally contradictory to Magna Charta and the Bible.” Even the statue of Charles at Charing Cross was regarded as of ill-omen, and taken away lest it should bring back unpleasant recollections.
“The Parliament did vote it down,
And thought it very fitting,
Lest it should fall and kill them all,
In the house where they were sitting.”
It had become a matter of wonder that society could ever have tolerated those masques patronized by James, by Charles, and by Buckingham, in which the masks, costumes, and scenes were designed by Jones, and the poetry written by Jonson. These representations had been indeed interrupted by the quarrel between Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson; and in the civil war they ceased entirely. With the royal family and their followers literature and the arts were banished; they were restored with the monarchy, but good taste was not revived. “The history of destruction” superseded that reign of elegance and learning which had a brief duration under Charles, and which, whilst Buckingham was at the head of affairs, was the main-spring of every impulse. “Ruin was the harvest of the Puritans, and they gleaned after the reformers.” Of course vengeance fell on the unfortunate royal architect and stage manager, Inigo Jones. His face had been seen at every gorgeous revel; his hand was traceable in many a country seat, even in the picturesque college of St. John’s at Oxford; he had designed the chapel of Henrietta Maria at St. James’s; he had erected the arcade and church of Covent Garden: every familiar scene was haunted with his presence.
The party that condemned him felt neither gratitude nor pity; two years before the King’s death, he was fined 500l. for malignancy. Afraid of a sequestration of all his revenues, he is stated to have buried his money, as did Stone, the painter, in Scotland Yard; and to have removed it, when fearful of discovery, to Lambeth Marsh. He lived to see Cromwell occupy Whitehall, which he had hoped to renovate; and to hear that Charles had suffered beneath the very windows of that fine and perfect fragment of a palace which was still, in spite of all the terrors of that execution, called the Banqueting-house; he lived to be called “Iniquity Jones,” by the successor of that Earl of Pembroke who had once been his generous patron; he lived to learn that the wit, the poetry, the scenery that had combined to render the masques at Burleigh a feast not only for the senses, but for the intellect, were construed into heathenism. All gallantry and romance were gone--and gone for ever; wit, indeed, flourished after the Restoration, but it was wit without decency or feeling. The old man must have felt that he had lived too long. Somerset House had been with great difficulty saved from the destruction of the Parliamentary decree; it gave poor Inigo, who still appears to have nominally held his former office, a refuge wherein he could lay down his head and die. He was buried in the church of St. Bennet, at Paul’s Wharf; a monument erected there to his memory was destroyed in the Fire of London, and the great architect of the Banqueting-house remains without any memorial, save the works of his genius.
Vandyck was not settled in England, under the patronage of Charles I., until after the death of Buckingham. Mytens, whose position as the King’s principal painter was, as he believed, encroached on by the celebrity of Vandyck, was patronized by Buckingham, for whom he painted a portrait of Sir Jeffrey Hudson.
This little wonder of the seventeenth century was nine years old only at the Duke’s death. He had been domesticated at Burleigh on account of his diminutive stature, which did not, at that time, exceed seven or eight inches. Jeffrey was the plaything of the Court: at the marriage-feast of Charles I., the Duchess of Buckingham had him inserted in a cold pie, and served up at table to the Queen, by way of presenting him to the royal bride, who took him in her lap, and kept him. Until the age of thirty, this little personage never grew. He then suddenly shot up three feet nine inches, which he carried off with infinite dignity, and remained at that height. He was still the butt of all the idlers at Whitehall, and the theme of a poem, by Davenant, called “Jeffresdos,” the subject being a battle between the dwarf and a turkey-cock.
Henceforth he became important--went over to France on a mission of great confidence, to fetch an experienced sage-femme for the Queen--was taken by the Pirates off Dunkirk on his return--was rescued, only to encounter the incessant raillery of the courtiers, which, to a man of his present size and importance, became exasperating. Faithful and trusty, he went with Henrietta Maria into France, and there, being goaded on by renewed insults from a Mr. Crofts, sent a challenge. Crofts came to fight him provided only with a squirt; the duel was to be on horseback, and with pistols, that Jeffrey, or, as he had now become, Sir Jeffrey, might be more on a level with his antagonist. By the first shot, Crofts was struck dead. The next event in this adventurous life was the capture of Jeffrey by a Turkish rover, during one of his voyages; he was sold as a slave, and taken into Barbary; he was, however, ransomed, or set free, so as to resume his attendance on the Queen. After the Restoration, he was suspected of being concerned in the Popish plot, and confined in the Gate House at Westminster. Here, a life that had been rendered worthy of record even by his very littleness was closed, in 1682; his old enemy, a gigantic porter at Whitehall in Charles’s time, with whom the little creature was in incessant strife, having long since been displaced--and another giant, Oliver Cromwell’s porter, established in his stead.