The best account of the sale is that written by Horace Walpole, who used for his purpose the notes of George Vertue, the engraver. The prices were fixed, but the highest bidder, if more was offered, was adjudged the buyer. We cannot do better than take some items from Walpole’s list. The cartoons of Raphael were bought in by Cromwell for the insignificant sum of 300l. The other cartoons, those representing the triumphs of Cæsar, by Andrea Mantegna, went for 1000l., and were also reserved for Cromwell. They had formed part of the Mantua Gallery already referred to. Apparently they had been removed from Whitehall to Hampton Court, where they have ever since remained. We read of many Madonnas; one, said to be by Raphael, fetching 800l.; but another Raphael, afterwards estimated much more highly, was the celebrated “St. George and the Dragon,” sometimes called “St. Michael,” now in the Louvre. A Venus, called “Del Pardo,” by Titian, sold for 600l. The “Mercury teaching Cupid, with Venus standing by,” painted by Correggio, which is now in the National Gallery, went for 800l. This had also formed an item in the great Mantua Collection. The picture had many adventures. The Duke of Alva took it to Spain and subsequently it became the property of the famous Prince of the Peace, in whose collection it remained until 1808, when it fell into the hands of Murat. It thus found its way back into Italy. Lord Castlereagh bought it and the “Ecce Homo,” which hangs near it, from the ex-Queen of Naples at Vienna, and in 1834 it was purchased from Lord Londonderry for the National Gallery. Rubens’ “Peace and War” was presented to Charles by the painter in 1630. It now only fetched 100l., and went to the Doria Gallery at Genoa, whence it was sold, brought back to England, and presented to the National Gallery in 1828 by the first Duke of Sutherland. After the Restoration, strong efforts were made to gather the dispersed pictures again. The States of Holland bought the whole collection of Gerard Reyntz and presented them to Charles II. on his restoration. The Government went to law with Van Leemput, who had bought a great portrait of King Charles I., by Van Dyck, for 150l. There were various negotiations, in which Van Leemput was offered a fair compensation. As he refused, the law was put in force, and Van Leemput got nothing. This must not be confused with the Marlborough Van Dyck which is now in the National Gallery. It is plain, remarks Walpole, from a catalogue made for James II., that a large number of pictures remained at Whitehall unsold, and it is very possible that Oliver Cromwell intervened, when he had the power, to prevent their sale. We must always thank his taste for having rescued the two great sets of Mantegna’s and Raphael’s cartoons. It will be observed that though the store was by no means exhausted, the sales ceased in 1653, the year of his inauguration as Protector. In 1660 Cromwell’s widow tried in vain to retain possession of some pictures and other treasures.
Before we go on to speak of the great tragedy which gave Whitehall a world-wide celebrity, we may make a note from a passage quoted by Mr. Law in his catalogue of the pictures at Hampton Court. One of these pictures represents Charles I. and his Queen dining in public. The picture is by Van Bassen, who also painted the King and Queen of Bohemia similarly employed. Mr. Law’s account of the first-named picture is very interesting, and relates mainly to life at Whitehall. The King and Queen are being “served by gentlemen-in-waiting with dishes, more of which are being brought in from the door opposite them by attendants. In the right corner is a sideboard, and wine cooling in brass bowls on the floor. Several dogs are running about. At the end of the hall is a raised and recessed daïs, where spectators are looking on through some columns. The decoration of the hall is in the classic taste, and is very fine and elaborate. On the walls hang several pictures.” Though this doubtless belonged to Charles I., it is not found catalogued among his pictures; but in the catalogue of James II. we find No. 937: “A large piece, where King Charles the First and Queen, and the Prince are at dinner.” It is dated over the door, on the right, 1637. It is engraved in Jesse’s Memoirs of the Stuarts, and is chiefly valuable for the architecture and decoration, and as exhibiting the manners of the time, and the prevalent custom in that age of royalty dining in public. “There were daily at Charles I.’s Court, 86 tables, well furnished each meal; whereof the King’s table had 28 dishes; the Queen’s, 24; 4 other tables, 16 dishes each, and so on. In all about 500 dishes each meal, with bread, beer, wine and all things necessary. There was spent yearly in the King’s house, of gross meat, 1500 oxen; 7000 sheep, 1200 calves; 300 porkers, 400 young beefs, 6800 lambs, 300 flitches of bacon; and 26 boars. Also 140 dozen geese, 250 dozen of capons, 470 dozen of hens, 750 dozen of pullets, 1470 dozen of chickens; for bread, 364,000 bushels of wheat; and for drink, 600 tuns of wine and 1700 tuns of beer; together with fish and fowl, fruit and spice, proportionately.” (Present State of London, 1681.)
As to Henrietta Maria at dinner, an anecdote is reported by Jesse: “Notwithstanding her conciliating manners on her first arrival in England, it soon became evident that the spirit of Henry IV. was not entirely dormant in the bosom of his daughter. A singular scene, which took place at Court, shortly after her marriage, is thus described by an eye-witness. ‘The Queen, howsoever very little of stature, is yet of a pleasing countenance, if she be pleased, but full of spirit and vigour, and seems of a more than ordinary resolution. With one frown, diverse of us being at Whitehall to see her, being at dinner, and the room somewhat over-heated with the fire and company, she drove us all out of the chamber. I suppose none but a Queen could have cast such a scowl.’” (See Jesse’s Court of England under the Stuarts, ii. 16.)
The whole sad history of the Great Rebellion has been told at full length in divers places, and only incidentally concerns us here. We see that Charles was shifty and wanting in straightforwardness. None of his political opponents could trust even his promises. No one could deny him both courage and coolness in the hour of danger. We might dwell on what might have happened if he had saved Strafford; but the bold policy in which that would have landed him—the policy Strafford himself described as “thorough”—though it might have rid him of his enemies, would have cost a tremendous price to the nation. When Charles promised Strafford to save his life, he had scarcely power to make his promise true. He gained nothing by Strafford’s death, and only lost one of the two or three really able advisers he had. It is not possible to believe that he thought the savage fanatics who clamoured for the great minister’s blood would pause and ask no more. “Moderation” was a word that did not exist in their vocabulary, and it is rather melancholy to see John Milton made the mouthpiece of a series of foul scandals on a King whose private life seems to have been absolutely pure, as Milton must have known. But politics were up to boiling point in those days. It was not enough to defeat an opponent in the House or at the poll; he must be put to death. So far the traditions of the Tudor times survived. Having stimulated their appetite by the death of Strafford, under legal forms and with the unwilling consent of the King, they proceeded to murder, by the travesty of a judicial process, the highest they could find in the country. Archbishop Laud was brought to trial, or rather to condemnation, in March, 1644, and in January, 1645, he was beheaded. There was only left to quench their thirst for the best blood in the land a few nobles—the Duke of Hamilton, the Earl of Holland, and others; but there was one victim, the highest of all, and they had no notion of sparing him, though, by compassing his death, they ruined their own cause.
Lambeth and Whitehall.
From the Engraving by W. Hollar.
We can easily see that a Prime Minister like Strafford had done many things to make himself hated. We can see that Laud was also hated, mainly for being an archbishop. Another minister or another archbishop would be appointed in course of time, and both would be hated, and that, too, by a great many people who were, on the whole, loyal to the Crown, if not to the person of Charles. The death of Charles at Whitehall changed the feelings of this whole class. They may have groaned, as we hear they did. Some groaned because their King was killed, even though they may have thought he deserved his fate; but the great majority saw that all the good the popular party might have carried out for the people was annihilated at that one blow. Murderers are seldom moderate and beneficent reformers, though Agathocles did contrive to succeed in both these rôles in Sicily. But that was a long time ago and a long way off, and few of the truer patriots of 1649 looked at these violent proceedings without both apprehension and horror—apprehension lest a murder of such huge dimensions should only mean anarchy in the Government and oppression of the people—as, in effect, it did—and horror at the perpetration of such an irrevocable crime without any reference to the people, either at the hustings or by a direct vote. But it appeared as if the Parliament, though, with the help of the army, it could kill the King, could not dissolve itself. The soldiers, however, without the Parliament, could, and did, force a dissolution, and in our next chapter we shall see the chief leader of the rebels residing in the old palace of Whitehall as a sovereign prince.
The greatest of all these changes was simply this. If we allow, as many of the so-called Puritans did, that the King had strictly forfeited his life, imprisonment, like that inflicted on Henry VI. for many years, or exile, like that which James II. afterwards underwent, would have been a sufficient penalty. France would not have gone to war to reinstate a Protestant dynasty, as it did not half a century later go to war to reinstate a Romanist, and the longer Charles I. lived the more improbable the return of his son became. But that scaffold at Whitehall altered the state of affairs. Instead of a King who certainly had not deserved well of his people, it gave them a young and, so far as they knew, an innocent and blameless King, whose coming they were forced, by the violence of the dominant faction, to hope for as for the salvation of their country.
Very little of the history of the Great Rebellion concerns Whitehall, at least until Oliver Cromwell assumes possession, and apes royalty in the old halls; but in Rymer’s Fœdera we may observe that, from the beginning of the reign of James I., “Whitehall” gradually and more and more becomes the official designation of the palace. Charles naturally was not there during a long term of years. He was marching and counter-marching in the north, and so mismanaging all his affairs successively that, regarded as a game, the Civil War consisted of a series of alternate military and diplomatic defeats. The inevitable consequence was the utter ruin of the royal cause. In January, 1649 (then reckoned 1648), the King, a prisoner, was brought from Windsor Castle and lodged at St. James’s. On Saturday, the 20th, he walked, strongly guarded, across the park to Whitehall. He probably entered his old palace by the stairs near the tilt-yard, and traversed the passage which led to his former apartments. Here was a “bridge,” or floating pier on the water’s edge, and he was put into a boat and rowed up to Westminster, where he was placed in Sir Robert Cotton’s house. The King was then brought into Westminster Hall and allowed a seat. Bradshaw was president of the Court, and there were some eighty commissioners. The King attended the Court four times in all, sometimes going in a Sedan chair, sometimes, as we have seen, by boat. We need not detail the proceedings of Bradshaw and his assessors; but there is one thing which must be noted, namely, the dignity and tact of the King’s behaviour when brought up to receive sentence. Green, who had but little sympathy with him, observes, quoting Marvel, “Whatever had been the faults and follies of his life—