The story of Nell Gwyn (8 page)

THE STORY OF NELL GWYN

belt, which Nokes took care to laugh at, by wearing a still shorter coat of the same character, to which the Duke of Monmouth added a sword and belt from his own side, so that he looked, as old Downes the prompter assures us, more like a dressed-up ape, or a quiz on the French, than Sir Arthur Addle. The jest took at once, King Charles and his whole Court falling into an excess of laughter as soon as he appeared upon the stage, and the French showing their chagrin at the personality and folly of the imitation. The sword, which the Duke had buckled on the actor with his own hands, was kept by Nokes to his dying day.

It was in the character of Almahide in The Conquest of Granada^ and while wearing her broad-brimmed hat and waist-belt in the prologue to the same play, that Charles became more than ever enamoured of Nelly. A satirist of the time has expressed the result of the performance in a couplet not wholly destitute of force :

There Hart's and Rowley's souls she did ensnare, And made a King a rival to a player ;—

while Granville, who enjoyed the friendship of Waller, and lived to be the patron of Pope, has told the result in his poem called The Progress of Beauty :

Granada lost, behold her pomps restor'd, And Almahide again by Kings adored.

An eflfect from a stage performance which some

still live to remember, when it found a parallel in

the passion which George IV., when Prince of

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Wales, evinced for Mrs. Robinson, while playing the part of Perdita in A IVtnfer's Tale. What a true name is Perdita indeed for such a fate, and what a lesson may a young actress learn from the story of poor Mrs. Robinson, when told, as I have heard it told, by her grave in Old Windsor churchyard ! Nor is Nelly's story without its moral—and now that we have got her from the purlieus of Drury Lane, and the contaminations of the greenroom,—for the part of Almahide was her last performance on the stage,—we shall find her true to the King, and evincing in her own way more good than we should have expected to have found from so bad a bringing up.

CHAPTER IV. TERSONAL CHARACTER OF KING CHARLES II.

The character of King Charles II. has been drawn with care and skill by several writers of distinguished reputation to whom he was known : by the great Lord Clarendon ; by the Marquess of Halifax ; by the Duke of Buckingham ; by Evelyn and Sir William Temple ; by Burnet, Dryden, and Roger North. Lord Clarendon had been acquainted with him from his boyhood, and had been his principal adviser for many years ; Halifax had been his minister ; Buckingham had received distinguished marks of favour at his hands ; Evelyn not only frequented his Court, but had often conversed with him on matters of moment, and was intimate with many who knew him well ; Temple had been his ambassador ; Burnet had spoken to him with a freedom which nothing but his pastoral character would have sanctioned ; Dryden was his Poet Laureate; and North added

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to his own his brother the Lord Keeper's experience of the King's character. From such writers as these, and with the aid of such incidental illustrations as a lengthened interest in the subject will supply, I propose to draw the portraiture of the King, using, where such fidelity is requisite, the very words of the authorities I employ.

His personal appearance was remarkable. He was five feet ten inches in height, and well made, with an expression of countenance somewhat fierce, and a great voice.^ He was, says Saville, an illustrious exception to all the common rules of physiognomy ; for, with a most saturnine, harsh countenance, he was both of a merry and merciful disposition. His eyes were large and fine ; and his face so swarthy, that Monck, before the Restoration, used to toast him as "the black boy."" " Is this like me?" he said to Riley, who had just completed his portrait; " then, odds fish, I am an ugly fellow." Riley, however, must have done him an injustice ; certainly, at all events, he is not an ugly fellow on the canvas of Lely, in the miniatures of Cooper, the sculpture of Gibbons, or the coins of Simon.

He lived a Deist, but did not care to think on the subject of religion, though he died professedly a Roman Catholic. His father had been severe with him, and once, while at sermon at St. Mary's in Oxford, had struck him on the head with his staff for laughing at some of the ladies sitting

1 Evelyn, ed. 1850, ii. 207. * Hinton's Memoirs, p. 29.

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opposite to him.' Later in life the ill-bred familiarity of the Scottish divines had given him a distaste for Presbyterian discipline, while the heats and animosities between the members of the Established Church and the Nonconformists with which his reign commenced made him think indifferently of both. His religion was that of a young prince in his warm blood, whose inquiries were applied more to discover arguments against belief than in its favour. The wits about his Court, who found employment in laughing at Scripture—

All by the King's example liv'd and lov'd—

delighted in turning to ridicule what the preachers said in their sermons before him, and in this way induced him to look upon the clergy as a body of men who had compounded a religion for their own advantage.^ So strongly did this feeling take root in him, that he at length resigned himself to sleep at sermon-time—not even South or Barrow having the art to keep him awake. In one of these half-hours of sleep when in chapel, he is known to have missed, doubtless with regret, the gentle reproof of South to Lauderdale during a general somnolency :—" My lord, my lord, you snore so loud you will wake the King."

He loved ease and quiet; and it was said, not untruly, that there was as much of laziness as of love in all those hours he passed among his

1 Dr. Lake's Diary, p. 26. "^ Clarendon's Life, ed. 1826, iii. 3. 64

Q.A/3Jy Swynn^.

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mistresses. Few things, remarked Burnet,* ever went near his heart. It was a trouble to him to think. Ujithinkingiicss^ indeed, was said by Hahfax to be one of his characteristics 2—and

Unthinking Charles, ruled by unthinking thee,

is a line in Lord Rochester. Sauntering is an epithet applied to him by Sheffield, Saville, and Wilmot. He chose rather to be eclipsed than to be troubled, to receive a pension from France rather than ask his Parliament for subsidies.

His affection for his children was worthy of a better man. He loved the Duke of Monmouth with the fondness of a partial parent, and forgave him more than once for injuries, almost amounting to crimes of magnitude, personal and political. 'The Duke of Grafton, one of his sons by the Duchess of Cleveland, he loved " on the score of the sea,"^ and for the frankness of his nature. His queen's manners and society he never could have liked, though his letter to Lord Clarendon, written from Portsmouth, upon her first arrival, is ardent in passion, and might have been held to promise the most constant affection for her person.* He grew at last to believe that she never could

^ Burnet, ed. 1823, ii. 469,

' Hahfax, p. 4.

' Pcpys's Tani^icr Diary, ii. 36.

* See it among the Latisdovine MSS. {1236, f. 124) in the British Museum. It is not fit to print. [The one sentence in the letter which might possibly shock our wonderful twentieth-century purists is that referring to the Queen's feverish condition ; it is couched in orthodo.\ medical language.]

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bring him an heir,i an opinion in which he was confirmed by the people about him ; but, anxious as he certainly was for another wife, he rejected with scorn a proposition that was made to him to send her away in disguise to a distant region. His steadiness to his brother, though it may, and indeed must, in a great measure be accounted for on selfish principles, had at least, as Fox remarks, a strong resemblance to virtue.^ Prince Rupert he looked upon, not unjustly, as a madman.^ If he was slow to reward and willing to forgive, he was not prone to forget. His secret service expenses record many payments, and at all periods, to the several branches of the Penderells, to whom he was indebted for his preservation after the battle of Worcester.*

He lived beloved, and died lamented, by a very large portion of his people. What helped to endear him has been happily expressed by Waller:

the first English bom

That has the crown of these three kingdoms worn.

Then, the way in which he was seen in St. James's Park feeding his ducks; '• or in the Mall playing a manly game with great skill; ^ or at

1 Clarendon's Life, ed. 1826, iii. 60.

2 Fox's James II., p. 70.

3 Pepys's Tangier Diary, ii. 36.

■* Printed for the Camden Society. Mr. Macaulay says, harshly enough—" Never was there a mind on which both services and injuries left such faint and transitory impressions."

Cibber's Apology, 8vo, 1740, p. 26. * Waller's poem " On St. James's Park."

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the two theatres encouraging English authors, and commending English actors and actresses, added to his popularity. He really mixed with his subjects ; and though a standing army was first established in his reign, it was needed more for his throne than for his person.

He did not study or care for the state which most of his predecessors before him had assumed, and was fond of dropping the formality of a sovereign for the easy character of a companion. He had lived, when in exile, upon a footing of equality with his banished nobles, and had partaken freely and promiscuously in the pleasures and frolics by which they had endeavoured to sweeten adversity. He was led in this way to let distinction and ceremony fall to the ground, as useless and foppish, and could not even on premeditation, it is said, act for a moment the part of a king either at parliament or council, either in words or gesture. When he attended the House of Lords, he would descend from the throne and stand by the fire, drawing a crowd about him that broke up all the regularity and order of the place. In a very little time he would have gone round the House, and have spoken to every man that he thought worth speaking to.^ He carried his dogs to the council table—

1 Burnet, ed. 1823, i. 472-3. In his speech in the House of Commons, March i, 1661, he says : " In a word, I know most of your faces and names, and can never hope to find better men in your places."

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Hi-s very dog al council board Sits grave and wise as any lord.i

and allowed them to lie in his bedchamber, where he would often suffer them to pup and give suck, much to the disgust of Evelyn, and of many who resided at Court.''' His very speeches to his parliament contain traits of his personal character. "The mention of my wife's arrival," he says, "puts me in mind to desire you to put that compliment upon her, that her entrance into the town may be with more decency than the ways will now suffer it to be, and for that purpose I pray you would quickly pass such laws as are before you, in order to the amending those ways, and that she may not find Whitehall surrounded by water." ^ Nothing but his character, as Sir Robert Walpole observed of Sir William Yonge, could keep down his parts, and nothing but his parts support his character.

His mistresses were as different in their humours as in their looks. He did not care to choose for himself, so that, as Halifax observes, it was re-

' Lord Rochester's Poems, 1697, p. 150. [Cf. also Pepys's Diary (Sept. 4, 1667). Like his father, Charles IL was fond of dogs, and the " King Charles's spaniel" became quite a fashionable breed. In Notes and Queries (jth ser., vii. 26) are three quaint advertisements for dogs stolen from him, reprinted from the Merctirius Publicus and the hitel-lige liter.']

~ Evelyn, vol. ii. p. 207, ed. 1850. Charles was fond of animals and natural history. In the Works Accounts at Whitehall for 1667-8, I observe a payment for "the posts whereon the king's bees stand."

' Speech, March i, 1661-2. See the allusion explained in my Handbook for London, art. "Whitehall."

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solved generally by others whom he should have in his arms as well as whom he should have in his councils. Latterly he lived under the traditional influence of his old engagements ; and though he had skill enough to suspect, he had wit enough not to care.^ His passion for Miss Stewart, as I have already said, was a stronger feeling of attachment than he is thought to have entertained for anybody else.^

His understanding was quick and lively ; but he had little reading, and that tending to his pleasures more than to instruction. He had read men rather than books. The Duke of Buckingham happily characterised the two brothers in a conversation with Burnet. "The King," he said, "could see things if he would, and the Duke would see things if he could." ^ Nor was the observation of Tom Killi-grew, made to the King himself in Cowley's hearing, without its point. This privileged wit, after telling the King the ill state of his affairs, was pleased to suggest a way to help all. " There is," says he, "a good honest able man that I could name, whom if your majesty would employ, and command to see things well executed, all things would soon be mended, and this is one Charles Stewart, who now spends his time in employing his lips about the Court, and hath no other employment; but if you would give him this employment, he were the fittest man in the world to perform it." *