King Charles II
Page 43
Today the Rowley mile at Newmarket still commemorates Charles II in its own fashion: it was named after that famous stallion of the day, sire of a vast progeny – and, as has been mentioned, Charles himself was nicknamed Old Rowley in honour of his own similarly prolific powers. As for Newmarket itself, Alexander Pope wrote angrily in the next century,
In Days of Ease, when now the weary Sword
Was sheath’d, and Luxury with Charles restor’d …
The Peers grew proud in Horsemanship t’excel,
Newmarket’s Glory rose, as Britain’s fell …
Today, as British horse-racing and breeding flourish, following the lead of Charles II, many would think that, on the contrary, Newmarket’s glory had contributed to that of Britain.
There was a bucolic side to the life centred there. One is reminded of the lush pastoral backgrounds to some of Lely’s portraits. One incident, inspired by Queen Catharine’s wish to go to a fair incognito, has overtones of another country-minded Queen, Marie Antoinette. Catharine set off for the fair on the back of a cart-horse ridden by a courtier, in what she fondly imagined to be true country style. Unfortunately, both Queen and courtiers, including Frances, now Duchess of Richmond, and the Duchess of Buckingham, ‘had all over-done it in their disguise’. In their red petticoats and waistcoats, they looked more like ‘Antiques than Country folk’. Catharine continued for a while innocently to enjoy herself. At a booth she bought a pair of yellow stockings ‘for her sweetheart’. But of course, quite apart from her ‘antique’ clothes, her heavy foreign accent – what a witness unkindly called her ‘gibberish’ – could not help drawing attention. Soon a crowd gathered to gape at these strange birds in their even stranger plumage, and eventually mobbed the Queen.36
There was another rather different natural extension to the King’s love of physical exercise – his addiction to garden and park planning. A work on gardening printed in 1670, Le Jardin de Plaisir, by André Mollet, which was dedicated to Charles, suggested with true nationalistic fervour that his good taste in gardens must derive from his French blood. Perhaps there was something in it; although those years of French environment probably played quite as much part as his French heredity in influencing the King. At all events, it was after consulting the French master Le Nôtre that he reafforested Greenwich. Avenues of Spanish chestnuts were planted and over six thousand elms, as well as small coppices of birch, hawthorn, ash and privet, Greenwich today still being remarkable for its luxuriant hawthorn. At Hampton Court the King planted what Evelyn approvingly described as ‘sweet rows of lime trees’. Botany also caught his scientific fancy: a famous picture shows King Charles II, before the façade of Ham House, being shown the first pineapple cultivated in England.
Not every British sovereign has had a genuine love of London. Charles II felt this passion for the city of his birth. St James’s Park was his chef d’œuvre. Here he loved to walk on his fast daily round or ‘saunter’ from the adjacent Palace of Whitehall, accompanied by his dogs: one charming tradition associates this saunter, or morning ‘constitutional’, with the naming of Constitution Hill, which today runs up beside Buckingham Palace to Hyde Park Corner.fn8 St James’s Park indeed benefited as much from the King’s patronage as Newmarket, although, as with Windsor Castle, the fact has been obscured by its later history (in both cases George IV swept away many of the improvements of Charles II in favour of further improvements of his own: today we see a park ‘anglicized’ by John Nash). The area had originally taken its name from a thirteenth-century hospital for female lepers, called St James in the Fields; in the seventeenth century it came to have more pleasurable connotations. The marshy area was drained. Then Charles completely transformed the layout into something very much in the French manner. Water was an integral part of the vision. Once again influenced by Le Nôtre, he had a formal pattern of ornamental water and avenues designed, which recalled the Versailles of Louis XIV. There was a further foreign influence: from Venice the Doge despatched two gondolas – ‘very rich and fine’ – to ride on the new canal.38
The King’s gesture in throwing open the park to the public was however genuinely English. As were the games which he either introduced or extended in their range. Croquet and bowls, both of which the King enjoyed, were played in the park. For the game variously called pêle-mêle or pall-mall, a form of croquet using a wooden ring suspended above the ground, a fine new mall or alley, nearly fifteen hundred feet long, was laid out on the site of the present-day Mall. It was surfaced with fine cockleshells under the supervision of yet another official on royal pleasure bent – the King’s Cockle-strewer. The King was an expert at the sport: in Waller’s phrase (not too sycophantic, one hopes),
He does but touch the flying ball
And ’tis already more than half the Mall….fn9
There was also wrestling in the park. Evelyn attended one match, held in the presence of ‘a vast assemblage of Lords and other spectators’; the prize was £1,000, and the ‘Western men’ wrested it from the ‘Northern men’.39
The King’s new rectangular lake (or canal), for all its formality, was another new source of popular pleasure. Although only the King swam in it, winter was different. That of 1662 was one of the harsh seasons common at the time. The Dutch practice of ‘sliding’, as it was known (although we should now call it skating), was quickly introduced. Pepys, much taken with the spectacle of the ‘sliders’, with their skates, in the park, described it as being ‘a very pretty art’, the Duke of York being a particularly skilful slider. Evelyn was equally impressed by the dexterity of the practitioners, who would swoop to a graceful stop exactly in front of the King and Queen.
Summer brought its own delights. It was fashionable to drink warm milk, freshly drawn from the herd of cows placidly grazing in the parks, at a kind of early milk bar provided for the purpose. The women in attendance advertised their wares: ‘A can of milk, ladies, a can of red cow’s milk, sir!’ In adjacent Green Park the King had a ‘snow-house’ and an ‘ice-house’ constructed on the site of the former duelling-ground, in order to ‘cool wines and other drinks for the summer season’; it was another taste he had acquired in France.40
Much as he enjoyed catering to his subjects’ tastes – and his own – King Charles’ real excitement within the confines of the park consisted in the various species of bird which he introduced, both in his specially built aviary and on the ‘Duck Island’ in the middle of the lake.41 It was true that exotic livestock had been seen in St James’s Park before: James I, another connoisseur of wild life, had introduced two young crocodiles as well as duck and pheasants. Charles II was able to make the more picturesque, less predatory addition of a pair of pelicans from Astrakhan, a present from the Russian Ambassador. Evelyn, who was fascinated by the pelican’s appearance, as well as the way it played with fish before devouring them, described it as ‘a fowl between a Stork and a Swan’ and otherwise, more imaginatively, as ‘a Melancholy Water Fowl’. Once again the King’s interest in rare birds is remembered in the name of Birdcage Walk, just beside Buckingham Palace, and Storey’s Gate, called after his aviary keeper.
Less exotic fowl also flourished. A duck decoy was created on the Dutch model – despite the King’s feelings about the Dutch, he was not above introducing those original aspects of their way of life which appealed to him, including yacht-racing and flower cultivation. A chain of pools, fed by a subterranean passage to the Thames at high tide, kept the duck happy, and they bred abundantly; while the household accounts also reveal expenditure on hemp-seed for their delectation. On the site of the present Marlborough House a pheasantry was established.
It is necessary to stress the outdoor character of many of the sports and amusements which marked the reign of Charles II since, in contrast to the so-called debauchery of the Court, they united him with, rather than divided him from, his humbler subjects. It is less necessary to stress his well advertised love of the theatre. It has been mentioned how many of his friends were patron
s of playwrights. So, for that matter, were many of his mistresses, including Barbara, Nell Gwynn and Louise. Writers as a whole amused Charles II. He enjoyed the vicarious sport of suggesting subjects to them. We hear of the King walking with Dryden in the Mall and confiding to him the subject for a poem which he would write himself ‘if I was a poet and I think I am poor enough to be one …’. Dryden took the hint, wrote the poem along the lines suggested by the King, and became a little less poor himself as a result.42
When John Crowne was suffering from that familiar complaint, playwright’s block, the King presented him with a ready-made plot to encourage him – in the shape of a Spanish play to adapt. Crowne subsequently scored great success with the result, Sir Courtly Nice or It Cannot Be.43fn10 To Thomas Otway the King is said to have suggested the character of Antonio (based on that of Shaftesbury) in Venice Preserv’d.
As for attending performances, obviously a man who chose at least two of his best known mistresses from amongst the celebrated actresses of the day had a strong motive to do so. This was, after all, the period in which women first flourished on the public stage. But Charles’ enthusiasm extended beyond merely casing the joint for the latest pretty face. The King would almost as soon see a new play, wrote one wag, as have a new mistress (at times of course he was able to combine the two experiences). It was in keeping with his general desire to cry ‘Hence, loathéd Melancholy’ that he preferred comedy to tragedy. One can imagine that the King felt that he had had enough of tragedies in his own life not to want to see them re-enacted upon the stage as an evening’s entertainment. John Lacy, a comic actor, was a special favourite with the King. Lacy’s forte was dialect: in 1663, for example, Pepys described his playing of an Irish footman in Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee as ‘beyond imagination’. The King commissioned his portrait from Michael Wright and hung it at Windsor Castle in a passage on the way to his withdrawing room (it is still in the royal collection). ‘The greatest pleasure he had from the stage was in comedy,’ wrote Crowne, ‘and he often commanded me to write it.’44 One way and another, the King visited the theatre regularly and with pleasure – almost daily, while the Court was in London, in his younger years.
If the allure of the theatre remains constant, its hours have changed considerably. It is interesting to reflect that performances in the Restoration period were held in the early afternoon, taking advantage of the natural light, with the addition of chandeliers over the actors’ heads and footlights (double burners) in front of the stage. They were thus in effect matinées, bywords for respectability today, but the perfect occasion for saucy rendezvous then. The King would dine beforehand and take his place in the royal box – ‘the King’s box’ – at the Dorset Garden Theatre. Heavily adorned with gilt and decorated with the royal arms, a gilded figure of Apollo towered over it. Dryden, criticizing Settle’s play The Empress of Morocco, said that, if Settle convinced him of its absurd message, he would be ‘as great an Apollo as he over the Kinge’s Boxe …’.45
Gallants were everywhere, including in the ‘tiring-rooms’ of the actresses. Gentry who preferred it went and sat downstairs amongst the ‘naughty women’, whom, in the words of Mr Pinchwife in The Country Wife, they ‘toused and moused’. Ladies of higher social strata, offering themselves for similar experiences, went masked. But that, as Mr Pinchwife observed, ‘like a covered dish’, gave a man ‘appetite’. Masks or no masks, ‘ogling’ went on without cease, despite the fact that the smell was horrific – a fact generally acknowledged at the time, when the exact recipe for a protective nosegay was discussed with as much seriousness as a cooking recipe today. The King however kept his tousing and mousing for supper after the play.
In contrast to the pit, magnificence was the keynote of what actually transpired on the stage. Indeed, at first sight those heavily bewigged figures, waddling about in their bepadded and bepuffed clothes, would hardly strike us as symbols of libertarianism. For it is important to realize that throughout the Restoration age there was a feeling that a politer – not a bawdier – form of art was being introduced and performed. It is also worth noting that, while the language used on stage was certainly extremely ‘frank’, in Sparkish’s phrase, and sex the theme of many of the plays, the action itself was not overtly sexual.
The first plays put on after the Restoration tended to be revivals, Beaumont and Fletcher being especially popular. Then there was a tiresome wave of plays whose subject-matter was intended as a kind of loyal rebuttal of the recent Protectoral regime: a typical title was The Usurper. After that the great orchard of Restoration drama was planted, and began to flower with all its multitudinous fruit-trees. But some of the old plays, notably a coarse piece called Hamlet, caused disgust to ‘this refined age’, whose elegant taste had been formed by the King’s long absence abroad. They were often performed in bastard or adapted versions.
Shakespeare’s language continued to be criticized for its (unnecessary) bawdiness throughout the Restoration period, while those very plays were being freely performed which we today consider almost synonymous with bawdiness, whatever their other merits. About 1680 Nicholas Clément, the French royal librarian, made a note in his catalogue on the subject, in which he expressed the opinion that, although the playwright’s thoughts were natural, his words ingeniously chosen, and he showed ‘a somewhat fine imagination’, nevertheless ‘these happy qualities’ were obscured by ‘the dirt’ Shakespeare persisted in introducing into his plays.46
As the theatres proliferated, so did the theatrical companies. The King’s first troop had been formed a year after his own birth – ‘Prince Charles’ Players’. Only three months after the Restoration he issued patents to Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant to form two licensed theatre companies – the King’s Players and the Duke’s Players respectively. It was a speedy return to normal after the long interval in which Puritan forces had waged war on the theatre as an immoral influence (although the new-fangled opera had crept in under their guard). The King’s Players eventually came to rest at the new Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in May 1663; the Duke’s Players’ best-known theatre was at Dorset Garden, designed by Wren, which opened in 1671. In 1682 the two licensed companies, under the sons of Killigrew and Davenant respectively, amalgamated and inhabited the Dorset Garden Theatre. As a sign of the way things were going, the Duke of Monmouth’s Servants were licensed in 1669, and the Duchess of Portsmouth’s (Louise de Kéroüalle) Servants licensed in about 1673. In 1671 King Charles was keeping eleven ‘Women Comedians’ and sixteen Men, who were allowed ‘several’ yards of scarlet cloth and crimson velvet every second year; Queen Catharine also had her Comedians.47
This is not the place for a history of the Restoration theatre. Suffice it to note that King Charles II, in his genuine passion for the art, was once again united with rather than divided from his subjects. The gentry – and the orange-girls – who saw him at ease at the play did not love him the less for sharing in their own pleasures. As for the advancement of at least one former orange-girl – Nell Gwynn – that, like the story of Cinderella or the boss who marries the secretary, gave encouragement to all the rest.
Lord Halifax, summing up the character of King Charles II, presented him as not altogether a common type of man. The age over which Charles II presided was not altogether a common one either. Perhaps it was not quite the golden age of glittering plenty predicted in that eve-of-coronation address of 1661. Yet if the plenty is forgotten, that other phrase, ‘In Good King Charles’ Golden Days’, is still appropriate. John Evelyn, more simply than Halifax, wrote of Charles II as ‘a Prince of many virtues, and many great imperfections’, who brought in ‘a politer way of living’ – even if he turned later to luxury and expense.48 A kind of freedom existed in the first decade of the King’s reign, not only for hedonism but also for enquiry and experiment. That freedom took its cue from the free, enquiring and of course hedonistic spirit of the King himself.
1 A fact expressed by Rochester in these lines:
His sceptre and his — are of a length.
2 The louche William Chiffinch succeeded his brother Thomas in 1666. But it should be noted that Chiffinch too was a lover of the arts of painting and music – as well as of the arts of love.
3 The repetition of the Christian name is supposed to have led Nell to refer to her lovers as Charles I, II and III.
4 An alternative story has Nell Gwynn threatening to drop the child out of the window of a house just as the King was passing, unless he granted the boy a title. The site of the house varies. The drama of the tale does not.
5 The King Charles breed of spaniel was registered at the formation of the Kennel Club in 1873 and the Cavalier King Charles breed in 1926.
6 There are several versions of it. One of the most plausible involves Oxford. Dr Martin Routh, President of Magdalen College, who died in 1854 in his hundredth year, used to say that, when young, he had known an old lady who as a little girl saw King Charles walking with his spaniels in Oxford. (The author, who lived in Oxford as a child in the 1930s, likes to think she might have known someone old enough to have met Dr Routh.)
7 Today the north part of the site is occupied by the International Stores, and the south-east block is part of a nineteenth-century building called Palace House Mansions; the latter name at least recalls its occupation by Charles II.
8 Although authorities are doubtful that this road was named Constitution Hill as early as the reign of Charles II, the true origin of the name remains mysterious;37 so that one can still speculate happily on the connection with the King’s morning saunter.