Civil War: The History of England Volume III (67 page)

The duke of Monmouth, the Protestant candidate for the succession, now covered himself with glory or at least with blood. A band of covenanters dragged the primate of Scotland, Archbishop Sharp, from his coach outside the town of St Andrews and stabbed him to death in front of his daughter; they then went on to defeat a royalist squadron sent after them. Monmouth was now dispatched to the north with a large army where, at Bothwell Bridge, he routed the covenanters. The subsequent repression of these enthusiasts became known as ‘the killing time’. Monmouth became the hero of the hour, his ambitions for the throne significantly increased; as a Protestant he was Shaftesbury’s preferred candidate, and James looked on in alarm from his exile in Brussels as the king’s favour towards his natural son increased.

Charles had, a few months earlier, signed a document in which he explained that ‘for the voiding of any dispute which may happen in time concerning the succession of the Crown, I do hereby declare in the presence of Almighty God that I never gave nor made any contract of marriage, nor was married to any woman whatsoever, but to my present wife Queen Catharine now living’. He had declared to the world that Monmouth was illegitimate, therefore, but the king was not inexpert at lying.

When Monmouth returned to London, the people assembled in the streets where bonfires were lit and toasts were drunk. He was considered by many to be the champion of the Protestant faith and,
as the first illegitimate son of Charles II, the true heir to the throne. Despite the king’s denial it was claimed that a ‘black box’, carefully concealed, contained a contract of marriage between Charles and Lucy Walters; Lucy Walters had been one of his first mistresses, while in continental exile, and had borne this particular son. Monmouth was handsome and affable, in every respect a royal boy, and on his journeys through the kingdom he was treated with as much ceremony as his father. Wherever he went he was escorted by columns of gentlemen and admirers. He was, in the words of Macaulay, ‘the most popular man in the kingdom’. It is perhaps no wonder that his thoughts turned towards the crown. The shield that bore his coat of arms quartered the lions of England and the lilies of France as a symbol of his aspirations. He had even begun to ‘touch’ for the king’s evil.

In July 1679, the king decided to turn the prorogation of parliament into a dissolution, pending a new general election; he was gambling that public sentiment had turned towards him. And indeed there were many now who questioned the wisdom and loyalty of Shaftesbury in his relentless pursuit of the duke of York. Yet at the hustings in the summer of the year the Whig Party, as we may now term it, was in full cry against the Catholic heir. When the clergy of Essex were believed to incline to the court interest, they were called ‘dumb dogs . . . Jesuitical dogs . . . dark lanterns . . . Baal’s priests . . . jacks and villains . . . the black guard . . . the black regiment of hell!’ The Whigs were in turn dismissed by the Tories as a ‘rabble’ of disloyal and rebellious traitors. Lists were drawn up by both sides, noting down the names of ‘the vile’ and ‘the worthy’. Sir Ralph Verney, soon to become a member of parliament, remarked that ‘there are vast feuds in our Chilterns as well as in our Vale, occasioned by elections, and so ’tis, I suppose, all over England’.

But then all the problems of succession became more acute. Towards the end of August the king fell seriously ill, and was for two or three days in danger of death. James was summoned from Brussels to be by his brother’s side, and perhaps to take the crown; he came to England disguised in a black wig. Meanwhile Monmouth’s supporters began to intrigue on his behalf. The political nation was in confusion.

43

Or at the Cock?

On 12 January 1675, a conversation took place in London. It was ostensibly about china, that commodity then being the rage of the town. Lady Fidget desires some from a dear male acquaintance ‘for he knows china very well, and has himself very good, but will not let me see it lest I should beg some’. The gentleman’s name is Horner, whose welcome for Lady Fidget alarms her husband.

Sir Jaspar:
Wife! My Lady Fidget! He is coming into you the back way!

Lady Fidget:
Let him come, and welcome, which way he will.

Sir Jaspar:
He’ll catch you, and use you roughly, and be too strong for you.

Lady Fidget:
Don’t you trouble yourself, let him if he can.

Horner, having been detained in his chamber with Lady Fidget, is asked a few minutes later if he has any china left.

Horner:
Upon my honour I have none left now.

Mrs Squeamish:
Nay, nay, I have known you deny your china before now, but you shan’t put me off so. Come.

Horner:
This lady had the last there.

Lady Fidget:
Yes indeed, madam, to my certain knowledge he has no more left.

Mrs Squeamish:
Oh, but it may be he may have some you could not find.

Lady Fidget:
What, d’ye think if he had any left, I would not have had it too? For we women of quality never think we have china enough.

The conversation took place on the stage of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. ‘China’ is course a euphemism for male sperm, as all the members of the audience knew, and
The Country Wife
by William Wycherley soon gained a reputation for indecency. Yet, in the 1670s, this was not considered to be a great offence. It was, perhaps, a quality to be praised.

Two companies of players were re-established immediately after the restoration of the king, the King’s Players under the management of Thomas Killigrew and the Duke of York’s Servants under Sir William Davenant. They played at first in makeshift venues until such time as suitable playhouses were erected. They did in any case cater for a considerably diminished audience since the great days of the Globe and the Fortune; the new theatrical public was largely made up of ‘the quality’ or ‘the fashion’ as well as those members of the middling classes who wished to emulate them.

The ‘sparks’ and ‘wits’ of the court were also in attendance and would, in the words of Etherege from
She Wou’d if She Cou’d
, roam ‘from one play-house to the other play-house, and if they like neither the play nor the women, they seldom stay any longer than the combing of their periwigs, or a whisper or two with a friend; and then they cock their caps, and out they strut again’. The play began at half past three in the afternoon, and lasted for approximately two hours. The gentlemen brought their own wine with them and often made more noise than the players on the stage, hectoring or exchanging badinage with the actors.

In
The Country Wife
Horner feigns impotence in order to deceive husbands and enter into clandestine amours with their wives; among these is Margery Pinchwife, an innocent young bride from the country who is fiercely guarded by her husband. The usual complications of sexual farce ensue amid innuendo and double meaning, with the principal women desperate to enjoy Horner’s favours by clandestine means. Lady Fidget herself does not deplore
the hypocrisy of seeming virtuous. ‘Our reputation! Lord, why should you not think that we women make use of our reputation, as you men of yours, only to deceive the world with less suspicion?’ As Leigh Hunt once remarked of these seventeenth-century dramas, ‘we see nothing but a set of heartless fine ladies and gentlemen, coming in and going out, saying witty things at each other, and buzzing in some maze of intrigue’.

But this is the heart of the comedies of the Restoration period. They reflect a hard, if brittle, society where the prize goes to the most devious or hypocritical; they represent a world in which all moral values are provisional or uncertain; they convey a general sense of instability in which no one knows quite what to believe or how to behave. It is the perfect complement to Restoration tragedy in which fantastic notions of love or valour are pitched past the reality of life or true feeling; they are contrived and sentimental vehicles for rant and rhetoric.

The comedies, unlike the tragedies, of the period are at least set in real time and real place. The time is always the present moment, and the place is always London.

Sparkish:
Come, but where do we dine?

Horner:
Even where you will.

Sparkish:
At Chateline’s?

Dorilant:
Yes, if you will.

Sparkish:
Or at the Cock?

Dorilant:
Yes, if you please.

Sparkish:
Or at the Dog and Partridge?

This was a world in which the participants must ‘stay, until the chairs come’, in which the prostitutes always wore vizards, and in which the women ‘all fell a-laughing, till they bepissed themselves’. The protagonists are always those of the gentry or nobility, or at least those who aspire to be such; the playwrights were of the same mould, as were the members of the audience. Everyone knew everyone else but, in this multiple game of mirrors, we may glimpse the shape of the age.

The characters of course express themselves in prose; good conversation was considered be the medium of truth as well as of manners. Nothing was so delightfully true as that which was perfectly
expressed. The notion of ‘wit’ is crucial here since, as Horner expresses it, ‘methinks wit is more necessary than beauty, and I think no young woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable without it’. Wit was not simply the effect of an epigram but, rather, the product of a fertile mind and keen observation. Wit was the currency of the court of Charles II.

The obscenity was also as much part of the court as of the stage. Horner apologizes to Lady Horner for bringing to her from France ‘not so much as a bawdy picture, new postures, nor the second part of the
École des Filles
’. Pepys described the latter publication as ‘the most bawdy, lewd book that ever I saw . . . so that I was shamed of reading it’. So the comic stage was used to strong meat. Yet not, perhaps, as strong as this:

In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,

Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.

A touch from any part of her had done ’t:

Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt.

The author, John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, was an indispensable element of the court of Charles II. At the age of seventeen, on Christmas Day 1664, he arrived at Whitehall bearing a letter to the king from the duchess of Orléans in France. Soon enough he was enrolled in the circle of wits that surrounded the king and by the spring of 1666 he had been appointed as one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber. He had all the qualities that the king admired. He was witty and he was fluent; he had a lightness of manner, and indeed of conscience, that were of paramount importance in such surroundings:

That pattern of virtue, Her Grace of Cleveland,

Has swallowed more pricks than the ocean has sand;

But by rubbing and scrubbing so large it does grow,

It is fit for just nothing but Signior Dildo.

He was sent to the Tower after attempting to abduct a lady; on his release, at the king’s orders, he played a valiant or perhaps foolhardy role in one of the conflicts with the Dutch. His subsequent life at court principally consisted of liberal doses of drink and sex, interlarded with fashionable atheism or, as it was sometimes
known, ‘Hobbeism’. He recalled that at an atheistical meeting at the house of a ‘man of quality’ ‘I undertook to manage the cause, and was the principal disputant against God and piety, and . . . received the applause of the whole company’. This conveys sufficiently the presiding atmosphere of Whitehall.

For five years he was, by his own account, continually drunk and was so little master of himself that he forgot many of his ‘wild and unaccountable’ actions. Like most of his contemporaries at court he was deeply engaged in the theatre of the time; in fact the drama can perhaps best be seen as an extension of the court itself. Rochester patronized playwrights such as Dryden and Otway; he wrote a comedy and a tragedy as well as various prologues. Yet he is still remembered principally for his satirical invectives and for his mastery of obscenity:

Much wine had passed, with grave discourse,

Of who fucks who, and who does worse . . .

A character in
The Country Wife
asks, ‘Is it not a frank age? And I am a frank person.’ The ‘frankness’ might have consisted principally of blasphemy and obscenity, but it was also part of a novel dispensation represented by the cogent social analysis of Thomas Hobbes and the decision of the experimenters of the Royal Society to deal in things and not in words. It was an attempt to see the world anew, after the realization that religious obscurantism and doctrinaire prejudices had previously brought England into confusion. Horace Walpole wrote that ‘because the presbyterians and religionists had affected to call every thing by a scripture-name, the new court affected to call every thing by its own name’. It was time to clear away the rubble of untested assumptions, false rhetoric and standard appeals to authority or to tradition. This was the context for the ironical, cynical and materialist atmosphere of the Restoration court.