The king had his own peculiar way of celebrating the Sabbath. On that day he usually collected his mistresses around him, and amused himself by toying with them and humoring their caprices. We have a picture by a contemporaneous writer of one of his Sunday evenings at Whitehall, where the court resided. It was shortly before his death. Charles sat in the centre of a group of these women, indulging in the most frivolous amusements, and apparently in high humor. At a little distance stood a page singing love-songs for the delectation of the king’s mistresses, while round a gambling-table were seated a number of his courtiers, playing for stakes which sometimes ran as high as ten thousand dollars of our money.[295] The orgies of the night were kept up until daylight broke in upon the revelers. At eight o’clock the same morning the king was seized with a fit of apoplexy, and died within a week.
James II., though of a grave and stern character, was scarcely less amorous in his temperament than Charles. They differed, however, in their tastes. Charles required beauty in his mistresses; and Nell Gwynne and some of his other concubines were not only beautiful in person but possessed of intellectual graces which gilded their gross sensuality. James cared but little for personal attractions, and lavished his favors on coarse-featured and coarse-minded women. His wife was below him in rank, and he did not stoop to her for her beauty, for she was plain, if not downright ugly in her features. He soon transferred his affections to a still plainer mistress, Arabella Churchill. His strongest attachment was, however, that which he entertained for Catharine Sedley, who possessed a powerful influence over him. She was the daughter of Sir Charles Sedley, and seems to have inherited from him the strong passions and reckless disregard of public opinion by which he was distinguished. Sedley’s writings were more licentious than those of any of his contemporaries. His literary talents were not of a high order, but he possessed fair conversational abilities, which made his society attractive. The extreme dissoluteness of his life and disregard of all decency provoked censure even in that age of loose morals. On one occasion, after a drunken revel with some of his profligate companions, he presented himself on the balcony of a tavern near Covent Garden in a state of complete nudity, and commenced a harangue so full of lewdness and obscenity that the crowd pelted him with stones and other missiles, and compelled him to withdraw into the house. A daughter inheriting these propensities, and brought up under the influence of this example, could not fail to become conspicuous for similar traits of character. Her person possessed none of the attributes which render women attractive. A lank, spare figure, a hollow cheek, sallow face, and an eye of glaring brightness comprised the sum total of her charms.
Charles, whose taste was more cultivated, remarked that his confessor must have recommended Catharine to his brother as a penance for his sins. She herself had the discrimination not to be insensible to the truth of this remark, and was even in the habit of boasting of her own plain looks. Her taste for finery was as great as if she possessed attractions worth setting off by its aid. James, when he formed this connection, had advanced to middle age, and it is difficult to account for the influence which she contrived to exercise over him. On his accession to the throne he promised the queen to abandon her, but his good resolutions soon gave way. Whenever the absence of his wife afforded the opportunity, Chiffinch might be seen conducting Catharine through the private passage leading to his chamber. Notwithstanding all the affected austerity of his manners, James was, in reality, but little better than his volatile brother.
At no period in the history of England, as we have just shown, had the licentiousness of the court been greater than it was during the reigns of Charles II. and James II.; only to be exceeded, perhaps, by the fearful abyss of debauchery and atheism which a few years later was beheld in the courts of Louis XV. and the Regent of France. The vigor and intellect of the early part of the reign of Louis XIV., the magnificence of his tastes, and the glory of his enterprises, stand out in powerful contrast to the doings of the imbecile, corrupt, and utterly profligate and debased court of England. The influence of this most pernicious example it is somewhat difficult to arrive at. The great body of the people, especially in the country, in those times of difficult communication, were probably but little affected by the extravagance of the restored Cavaliers, added to which there was a powerful leaven of religious feeling working through the country, which did not for some time settle down into the apathy that called for a new manifestation of Puritan feeling in the establishment of Wesleyan Methodism. In the upper classes of society, however, the core-rottenness of the courts of Charles and James was yet felt, throughout the reigns of the succeeding sovereigns, even down to the time of George III. The writings of contemporary authors, especially of the comic dramatists, “the abstract and brief chronicles of the times,” are a fair type of the public morals and intelligence in all ages. At this epoch we have from these sources overwhelming evidence of the reaction which had taken place.
After the removal of the compulsory restraint of Puritan control, the nation seemed at once to have lost its reason: modesty and decency were badges of Puritan Republicanism, and therefore unsuited to loyal men, who showed their attachment to the monarchy by their abandonment of decorum and violation of every moral virtue. The productions of the favorite authors teem with coarse images, unequivocal allusions, and gross facts. Wit degenerated into blasphemy, liveliness into obscenity, metaphors into lasciviousness. The scenes that took place in the court, and which constituted its daily amusements, were disgusting to the last degree. The mere commerce of the sexes, and the libertinism of the period in that respect, were the smallest vices, and might almost be considered merely follies, but the venality and corruption were open and shameless. The courtiers cast aside the last rag of patriotic propriety, and avarice, cruelty, lust, and perjury filled the measure of wickedness. On one occasion, it is said, an infant was prematurely born in one of the rooms of the palace, and Charles, with many jocular remarks, had the body conveyed to his own closet for dissection by his own hand! An incident of such brutality, which might be frequently paralleled by others equally bad in degree, though different in fact, shows the hideous destitution of all decency with which the court must have been cursed. The pages of Rochester, Etherege, Buckingham, Congreve, Vanburgh, and Fletcher, in the close of the seventeenth, and Prior, Gay, Swift, and scores of inferior writers in the commencement of the eighteenth century, all exhibit this state of affairs, while the noble Muse even of a Dryden could stoop to earn base applause by lending her powers to the decoration of vice, and voluntarily quitting her native regions to wallow in the mire.
The vices of this period must have left an ineradicable taint behind them, when, after the full tide of iniquity had swept on, and purer waters were succeeding, we find Lord Chesterfield, a British statesman of distinguished ability and high position, thus advising his own son: “Let the great book of the world be your principal study. Nocturna versate manu versate diurna, which may be rendered thus: Turn over men by day and women by night: I mean only the best editions.”
While, as we have already observed, there was probably a wholesome religious element in a portion of the population, which operated as an antiseptic against the rottenness of the court, it is impossible but that the capital must have been imbued with the reckless iniquity, outrageous dissoluteness, and general immorality of the higher classes. The poets, playwrights, essayists, and biographers of the age all bear traces of the effects of bad example in high places on public manners. A critic of those days says, “The accomplished gentleman of the English stage is a person that is familiar with other men’s wives and indifferent to his own, and the fine lady is generally a composition of sprightliness and falsehood.” A thorough disrespect for female virtue, or rather the admiration of libertinism, tainted the life’s blood of the capital. And when, passing over the coarse wit of Prior, or the perverted genius of Dryden, we come to the sober and moderate writings of essayists and satirists, we find material which gives us some little insight into the lower London life of the period, and that which has more immediate interest for us in this inquiry.
In the delightful and ever youthful pages of the Spectator, there are some incidents of great pathos touching the state of those unfortunates whose condition was then, as now, one of the disgraces of civilization. One paper contains a singularly apposite remark. “I was told,” says the writer (a woman of the town), “by a Roman Catholic gentleman last week, who I hope is absolved for what then passed between us, that in countries where Popery prevails, besides the advantages of licensed stews, there are larger endowments given for the Incurabili, I think he called them. This manner of treating poor sinners has, we think, great humanity in it; and as you, Mr. Spectator, are a person who pretends to carry your reflections upon all subjects which occur to you, I beg therefore of you to lay before the world the condition of us poor vagrants, who are really in a way of labor instead of idleness.”
At another time the Spectator himself meets “a slim young girl of about seventeen, who, with a pert air, asked me if I was for a pint of wine. I could observe as exact features as ever I had seen; the whole person, in a word, of a woman exquisitely beautiful. She affected to allure me with a forced wantonness in her look and air, but I saw it checked with hunger and cold. Her eyes were wan and eager; her dress thin and tawdry; her mien genteel and childish. This strange figure gave me much anguish of heart, and, to avoid being seen with her, I went away, but could not avoid giving her a crown. The poor thing sighed, courtesied, and with a blessing, expressed with the utmost vehemence, turned from me. This creature is what they call newly come upon the town.”
The arts of the procuresses; their experiments on inexperienced country girls; their attendance at coach-offices and public places to hunt for and entrap the unwary; the regular customers they have for new wares; the mode, first of offering them to private sale, and, when the first gloss is worn off, casting them on the public market, are all as true of 1858 as of the day for which it was written. In one case, the Spectator, being at a coach-office, overhears a lady inquiring of a young girl her parentage and character, and especially if she has been properly brought up, and has been taught her Catechism. Desirous of seeing a lady who had so proper an idea of her duties to servants, he peeps through and sees the face of a well-known bawd, thus decoying a young girl just arrived in London. One amusing cheat in the business of these go-betweens is complained of by a lady correspondent: for a consideration, they profess to introduce some ambitious foreigner or country gentleman to the favors of ladies of high degree, ruling toasts, leading belles, etc. Some lady, Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs, is foisted upon the deluded customer, who must, of course, be ignorant of the person of his inamorata, and he walks off boasting, in great self-gratulation, of his good fortune, to the great injury of an irreproachable woman’s fame.[296]