The clamorous crowd is hush’d with mugs of mum,
Till all, tuned equal, send a general hum.
This foreign drink was rivalled by Dorset beer.[160]
Lastly, we hear still of Metheglin. Pepys (1666) describes his dining with the king’s servants from meat that came from his Majesty’s table, ‘with most brave drink, cooled in ice; and I, drinking no wine, had metheglin, for the king’s own drinking, which did please me mightilye.’ It was an article of excise.
A good deal has been made of what is termed the reaction in morals after the republican spell. For instance, Mr. Samuelson says (Hist. of Drink):—
These extreme measures of repression on the part of the Puritans led to the result which might be anticipated. They gave courage to those who were anxious for the return of royalty, and reconciled many to its reinstatement who would otherwise have struggled for the maintenance of republican institutions; and when Charles II. was once more safely enthroned, there followed a reaction in morals which has left to that period the unenviable notoriety of being the most corrupt and dissolute in the whole history of our country.
One would almost imagine from this, and kindred statements, that vice was unknown to the Protector and his adherents; whereas it is matter of history that Cromwell’s early life was dissolute and disorderly, and that he consumed in gaming, drinking, debauchery, and country riots, the more early years of his youth.[161] The Roundheads liked ale as well as the Cavaliers. Does not Pepys tell of Monk’s troops (Feb. 13, 1659):—‘The city is very open-handed to the soldiers; they are most of them drunk all day’? Surely, then, bias must have possessed Lord Macaulay when he would have us believe that ‘in the Puritan camp no drunkenness was seen.’ Some prefer the evidence of a contemporary.
It is possible to contrast the Courts of the two Charleses, and the contrast is terrible; but was no one responsible besides Charles II. for his wandering life, when he herded with inferiors? If he was a creature of frailty and vice, he was also a creature of circumstance.
Thus much prefaced, let it be freely admitted that drunkenness prevailed in every rank of society, and that the king set the example. Mr. Samuelson adduces from Evelyn, as an instance, a supper given by the Duke of Buckingham when the Prince of Orange was over on a visit, on which occasion the king made the prince drink hard (though he could not have required much making), under the influence of which, the Dutchman broke the windows of the chambers of the maids of honour, with other mischiefs.
Nor does the famous story in the Spectator impress us with his bias towards temperance. The king had been dining with the Lord Mayor at Guildhall, where his cups did not prevent his observing that conviviality had occasioned familiarity; whereupon, with an abrupt farewell, he left the banquet. The mayor pursued the monarch, overtook him in the courtyard, and swore that he should not go till they had ‘drunk t’other bottle!’ The airy monarch looked kindly at him over his shoulder, and, with a smile and graceful air, repeated the line of the old song:—
And the man that is drunk is as great as a king!