16.
Mémoires Of the reigne of King Charles I. With a Continuation to the
Happy Restauration of King Charles II. By Sir Philip Warwick, Knight.
Published from the Original Manuscript. With An Alphabetical Table.
London, 1701. (pp. 64-75.)
Warwick (1609-83) was Secretary to Charles in 1647-8. 'When I think of dying', he wrote, adapting a saying of Cicero, 'it is one of my comforts, that when I part from the dunghill of this world, I shall meet King Charles, and all those faithfull spirits, that had virtue enough to be true to him, the Church, and the Laws unto the last.' (Mémoires, p. 331.) Passages in the Mémoires show that they were begun after the summer of 1676 (p. 37), and completed shortly after May 18, 1677 (p. 403).
Page 55, l. 13. Sir Henry Vane, the elder.
l. 14. dyet, allowance for expenses of living.
Page 56, l. 26. [Greek: Eikon Basilikae]. The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Maiesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings was published in February 1649. Charles's authorship was at once doubted in Milton's [Greek: EIKONOKLASTAES] and in [Greek: EIKON ALAETHINAE]. The Pourtraicture of Truths most sacred Majesty truly suffering, though not solely, and supported in [Greek: EIKON AKLASTOS], in [Greek: EIKON AE PISTAE], and in The Princely Pellican, all published in 1649. The weight of evidence is now strongly in favour of the authorship of John Gauden (1605-62), bishop of Exeter at the Restoration. Gauden said in 1661 that he had written it, and examination of his claims is generally admitted to have confirmed them. See H.J. Todd's Letter concerning the Author, 1825, and Gauden the Author, further shewn, 1829; and C.E. Doble's four letters in The Academy, May 12-June 30, 1883.
Carlyle had no doubt that Charles was not the author. 'My reading progresses with or without fixed hope. I struggled through the "Eikon Basilike" yesterday; one of the paltriest pieces of vapid, shovel-hatted, clear-starched, immaculate falsity and cant I have ever read. It is to me an amazement how any mortal could ever have taken that for a genuine book of King Charles's. Nothing but a surpliced Pharisee, sitting at his ease afar off, could have got up such a set of meditations. It got Parson Gauden a bishopric.'—Letter of November 26, 1840 (Froude's Thomas Carlyle, 1884, vol. i, p. 199).
Page 57, l. 4. Thomas Herbert (1606-82), made a baronet in 1660. Appointed by Parliament in 1647 to attend the King, he was latterly his sole attendant, and accompanied him with Juxon to the scaffold. His Threnodia Carolina, reminiscences of Charles's captivity, was published in 1702 under the title, Memoirs of the Two last Years of the Reign of that unparalleled Prince, of ever Blessed Memory, King Charles I. It was 'printed for the first time from the original MS.' (now in private possession), but in modernized spelling, in Allan Fea's Memoirs of the Martyr King, 1905, pp. 74-153.
l. 10. Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), bishop of Salisbury, 1689, the historian whose characters are given in the later part of this volume. His Mémoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William Dukes of Hamilton, 1677, his first historical work, appeared while Warwick was writing his Mémoires of Charles. It attracted great attention, as its account of recent events was furnished with authentic documents. 'It was the first political biography of the modern type, combining a narrative of a man's life with a selection from his letters' (C.H. Firth, introduction to Clarke and Foxcroft's Life of Burnet, 1907, p. xiii).
l. 15. affliction gives understanding. Compare Proverbs 29. 15, and Ecclesiasticus 4. 17 and 34. 9; the exact words are not in the Authorised Version.