the usual pageant was observed in London. The conduits ran with wine. The same reception greeted the king shortly after at Oxford. The drinking habits of the monarch are well known, though Evelyn speaks of him as naturally averse to drink. After the death of the queen, he became more addicted to his favourite drink, Hollands gin. The banqueting-house at Hampton Court, which was used by him as a drinking and smoking room, has been described as a royal gin-temple. Enemies he had in abundance, and so intense was their hatred, that, in their hours of debauch, they drank to the health of Sorrel, meaning the horse that fell with the king, and, under the appellation of the ‘little gentleman in velvet,’ toasted the mole that raised the hill over which the horse had stumbled.[170] Let us hope that it was the same hostility that accused the queen of fondness for drink. However this may be, it is certain that her physicians warned her most plainly against a strong spirituous cordial to which she resorted in large doses when ill.
From highest to lowest intemperance raged in the reign of William and Mary. De Foe remarks:—
If the history of this well-bred vice was to be written, it would plainly appear that it began among the gentry, and from them was handed down to the poorer sort, who still love to be like their betters. After the Restoration, when the king’s health became the distinction between a Cavalier and Roundhead, drunkenness began to reign. The gentry caressed the beastly vice at such a rate that no servant was thought proper unless he could bear a quantity of wine; and to this day, when you speak well of a man, you say he is an honest, drunken fellow—as if his drunkenness was a recommendation to his honesty. Nay, so far has this custom prevailed, that the top of a gentlemanly entertainment has been to make his friend drunk, and the friend is so much reconciled to it that he takes it as the effect of his kindness. The further perfection of this vice among the gentry appears in the way of their expressing their joy for any public blessing. ‘Jack,’ said a gentleman of very high quality, when, after the debate in the House of Lords, King William was voted into the vacant throne, ‘Jack, go home to your lady, and tell her we have got a Protestant king and queen, and go make a bonfire as big as a house, and bid the butler make ye all drunk, ye dog.’[171]
From highest to lowest, we repeat, intemperance raged. Andrew Fletcher, of Saltoun, writing upon the curse and terrorism of mendicancy, complains that many thousands of beggars ‘meet together in the mountains, where they feast and riot for many days; and at country weddings, markets, burials, and the like public occasions, they are to be seen, both men and women, perpetually drunk, cursing, blaspheming, and fighting together.’[172]
The dissoluteness of the time found its expression, not only upon the stage, but among the actors themselves. Terribly significant is the following note by Derrick on a play written by Higden, to whom Dryden wrote a poetical epistle:—
This gentleman (Henry Higden, Esq.) brought a comedy on the stage in 1693, called The Wary Widow, or Sir Noisy Parrot, which was damned, and he complains hardly of the ill-usage; for the bear-garden critics treated it with cat-calls. It is printed and dedicated to the courtly Earl of Dorset; Sir Charles Sedley wrote the prologue, and it was ushered into the world with several copies of verses. The audience were dismissed at the end of the third act, the author having contrived so much drinking of punch in the play, that the actors all got drunk, and were unable to finish it.[173]
Even the offices of religion enjoyed no immunity. Apart from the annual item of ‘communion wine,’ a by no means uncommon charge upon the parish was ‘wine for the vestry.’ A dignitary of the Church, evidently of the Mapes and Still species, thought it not beneath the dignity of his office to compose the bibulous epigram:—
Si bene commemini, causæ sunt quinque bibendi;
Hospitis adventus; præsens sitis; atque futura;
Et vini bonitas; et quælibet altera causa.[174]
which has been rendered into English:—