King Charles II (59 page)

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:

Nor are his high desires above his strength,

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.

9
The recent transformation of the Mall to a pedestrian precinct on Sundays gives it an air of popular recreation again.

10
But Charles himself never saw it, for he died on the first day of rehearsal.

‘Affairs are at present here in such a state as to make one believe that a King and a Parliament can no longer subsist together; that they [the King and the Duke of York] must now think only of the war against the Dutch, using the means which they now have, without further recourse to Parliament.’

T
he position of Charles
II
in the two years following the Secret Treaty of Dover of 1670 would have struck any cognizant observer as ironical, even humorous. On the one hand, the English King was committed by the treaty to a war against Holland as soon as was convenient – and the French King was committed to participate in the action. For such a war Charles
II
would need an ample additional ‘supply’ from his Parliament. Quite apart from the troops promised, this was especially true if his beloved Navy was to acquit itself with glory. The new French subsidy was nothing like sufficient for a land and sea campaign.

On the other hand, the very existence of this treaty was unknown to the English Parliament as a whole: of those ministers who were in the secret, only the most intimate knew the whole truth. In the next few years many members of both Houses would begin to guess from the pro-French drift of the King’s actions that something of the sort had taken place. But the ability to make foreign treaties, like that to make peace and war, remained within the most closely guarded enclave of the royal prerogative.

One result of this secrecy was that Members of Parliament remained extremely suspicious about the use the King might
make of the supplies they voted. Just as the King feared in the recesses of his mind the return of revolution, or something approaching it, Parliament feared the arrival of absolutism. In February 1673, after the start of the Third Dutch War, Charles
II
castigated Parliament for ‘a jealousy … that is maliciously spread abroad’, so weak and frivolous that he would not have mentioned it, but for the fact that it had gained ground with some ‘well-minded people’: and that is, ‘that the forces I have raised in this war were designed to control law and property’.
¹