ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
XXVII.—CHARLES
AMONG all the English Sovereigns there is no instance of a popular favourite to whose memory such injustice has been done intellectually as it has to the so-called "Merry Monarch." The popular conception of Charles Stuart the younger—and among the general English public there is no king of whom there is a more distinct conception—is of an easy, good- natured, if not good-hearted voluptuary—socially an accomplished gentleman and wit, but with neither the capacity nor the desire for government or serious affairs, who managed to saunter through a reign of a quarter of a century, getting as much pleasure and irresponsibility as he could for himself amidst the general scramble of unprincipled men for power and place ; but without the enter- prise or persistence necessary to any scheme for establishing the auto- cracy of the Crown, and with such a wholesome dread of "going again on his travels," or renewing the fatal scene at the window in Whitehall, as to afford a sure guarantee that he would retreat from any such attempt on the first serious demonstration of popular resentment. As might be expected, there is much in this conception of Charles which belonged to his real character ; yet as a representation of that character as a whole it is defective and delusive.
Whatever may be our difficulty in ascertaining what his real character was—and there are remarkable difficulties in his case—there can be no doubt of one point, and that is, that Charles was by far the ablest of the English Stuarts. This is not high praise in itself, but we have unexceptionable evi- dence that as an individual, as distinguished from a Ruler, there have been few men who have mounted the throne of England who can bear comparison with him in intellectual capabilities. -Sir William Temple—who whatever may be his disqualifications for judging of the character of Charles as a whole, was eminently qualified for forming a correct judgment of him in this point of view—gives us the following estimate, with which we may fitly introduce our own observations on the subject. Speaking of an interview which he had with the King, he says :—" I never saw him in better humour, nor ever knew a more agreeable conversation when he was so, and where he was pleased to be familiar ; great quickness of conception, great pleasantness of wit, with great variety of knowledge, more observation, and truer judgment of men than one would have imagined by so careless and easy a manner as was natural to him in all he did and said. He desired nothing but that he might be easy himself, and that everybody else should be so." The last sentence, which conveys an inference and speculation on Temple's own part, whether true or false, stands, of course, on another basis of evidence from the specific results of his own observation, recorded in the sentences which precede, and which are tolerably conclusive as to the marked capacity of Charles in matters of serious import.
The character of Charles, whatever it may have been originally, appears to us to have been influenced in its practical development by two somewhat conflicting circumstances. He was the repre- sentative of the principle of legitimacy, and he was an adventurer. Born in the purple, he had scarcely time to realize the notions of high prerogative and right divine which were in the ascendant in the Court of Charles I., when, at the age of twelve he was placed in the nominal command of a guard raised by his father, at the outbreak of a great struggle, in which the validity of those royal
pretensions was subjected to the severe practical test of civil war ; and from that time his life for the next four years was the wander- ing one of a soldier, varied only by the hollow and fleeting honours of a puppet-court. When even a remote island of his father's dominions was no longer a safe seat for this factitious royalty, he became at the age of sixteen a refugee in a foreign country ; and for nearly fourteen years he led the life of a needy adventurer and an almost hopeless Pretender, scarcely relieved by the short and doubtful interlude of his roving royalty as "King of Scots." When at the age of thirty—mature in body and mind—he at length acquired his long-deferred inheritance, except so far as his personal pretensions as a disinherited prince, and their occasional recognition by foreign rulers might have modified it, his character had been essentially moulded in the type of an adventurer. A certain amount of ability, or at least of adroitness, presence of mind, and self-reliance must necessarily be the result of such a school of circumstances. The amount of enterprise engendered may be a variable quantity, but the virtues of endurance, patience, and (in some form or other, and to some extent) of self- control, are necessary products of this discipline. Much, of course, must depend on the quality of the original material thus affected, and the natural temperament and intellectual capacity of Charles must form a principal and determining element in any analysis of his character ; but (be these what they might) he could never escape from his recollections of half a generation as a struggling adventurer.
It might seem at first as if there could have been little more in common between Charles and the English world into which his "Restoration" (as it was called) really first introduced him, than a recognition of those hereditary pretensions which the country of his birth was at length proclaiming with wild and vague enthusi- asm. His own past life—which must always have been to him the most thoroughly realized portion of his life—lay quite apart from that of England during the same period, and it might seem that there could be little sympathy between the two. Yet the life of Englishmen at home had also been during the past twenty years very much that of adventurers, full of strange vicissitudes, new and untrodden ways, and restless uncertainty and change. A desire for repose, under almost any conditions, had for the time succeeded the fever of their aspirations for the highest types of national and individual life. They too welcomed the restoration of the exiled Stuarts as an epoch not of hope, but of rest, in which they might forget what they had been, in a dream of indolent pleasure. What to Charles was the realiza- tion of his wildest hopes was with the nation really (notwithstand- ing the external delirium of joy) the resignation of disappointed hope. The adventures of both People and Ruler had ended, and they welcomed each other, and exchanged greetings, with a not entirely dissimilar retrospect, and with identical wishes for the present, though their feelings were really essentially different, and as such gave no security for harmony between them in the future. The public mind in England had been nearly as much affected and demoralized by the spirit of the past as had that of the adventurer whom they summoned to their aid, and the history of the succeeding years is as much an exemplification of the effects of this training on the character of the nation at large as of Charles himself ; and this fact rendered the completeness of his change of scene and associations more apparent than real.
The" Restoration" brought to Charles rest—as it did momentarily to the nation—but the rest was not similar in character. In the nation it was the torpor of exhaustion, in the King it was the repose of a more assured position. To call Charles indolent is to mistake his disposition, or to place an unusual meaning on the word. The love of pleasure and of ease was, no doubt, a con- stituent and important element of his nature. Pleasure and the undisturbed pursuit of pleasure were certainly a great feature in his purposes of life, but the enjoyment of life as a whole was his real and leading disposition. He did not confine his attention to or even take the most keen interest in what are called, par excellence, the pleasures of life. He indulged in these to excess, but he carried his spirit of enjoyment into departments which are con- sidered the most alien to pleasure as such. His conception of the sphere of enjoyment indeed covered the whole field of life. His mind was much too active and powerful to rest satisfied with the narrow province of the ordinary pleasure-seeker. The very scepticism which he had imbibed from the school in which he had been brought up, as to the reality of great principles, and of the recog- nized axioms of human conduct, widened his field of amusement. What was to earnest men a grave matter of serious and business- like attention, became in his eyes an amusing comedy of errors. The play of human feelings, and the phantasmagoria of politics, had an irresistible and sensuous charm for him. He was not 'satisfied until he had fathomed the character and natures of all the leading actors in the scenes passing around him, and then it was his great pleasure to set the whole machine in motion, and play a game of life according to his preconceived ideas of the value -and import of the various figure-pieces. He looked at everything, mot with reference to what it was, but to what it might be made to appear—and at men not with regard to their characters and princi- ples, but to the significance of the parts they had undertaken to play. To acquire this minute knowledge of men and circumstances, so 48 to obtain a quiet mastery over them, at least in his own mind, appeared, indeed, to him essential to the preservation of his power -of enjoying life according to his wishes, and he made a new plea- -sure out of a supposed necessity. Although careless in his manner, a carelessness which expressed faithfully his estimate of the im- portance of human life and actions, but not his interest and amuse- ment in them, he had naturally an inquisitive as well as an -observant mind, and though he affected to trifle with consequences, he was not the less anxious to pry into the secrets of nature. His knowledge, though not contemptible, came from observation rather "than from study. So far as observation and quickness of percep- tion would carry him, his mind was scientific in its tone. He diked to attend anatomical dissections—it was said popularly from Anxiety about his own health, and no doubt he was desirous it should be attributed to that cause alone, in order to preserve his popular character of indifference to wider considerations. But he Also engaged in chemical experiments, took great interest in the .scientific improvement of artillery, and directed his attention 'beyond anything else to naval architecture. The empirical and perceptive faculties implied in scientific pursuits, as distinguished from a priori truths and the elements of an intelligent faith—of -Science, in fact, in its unreligious aspect—were peculiarly con- genial to his mind. He was an earnest man, so far as one to whom principles and men were alike unreal and conventional could be so. But he had learned the lesson from the events of his -early life, that the secret of obtaining and retaining real power lies 4n obtaining and preserving a character for careless indifference, in -never parading the possession of power before the public eye, and yet -always treating its absence as a provisional accident. In this way he secured an amount of actual licence for his own will which realised the wildest aims of his father. He tried, and usually with success, to avoid any appearance of annoyance at unexpected or successful -opposition to his plans. He regarded such contretemps as 'inevitable, and gave way for the time as little as he could, but quite as much as was needed. He received Lord Russell and his colleagues as his ministers without apparent distaste, -and when the time was ripe, and he had quietly made their position untenable, blandly accepted their resignations "with all his heart." He never entirely broke with any man of influence or ability until he felt that he could be turned to no further account, and was only a dangerous nuisance. From the first he was deter- mined himself to govern, though this should not be seen by the public, and only felt imperfectly by his Ministers themselves. He had his own ideas (though they never amounted to fixed plans) as to the government and organization of England, just as he took pleasure and displayed considerable skill in planting, gardening, and building. But he kept his ideas in the former case to himself, and never made a confidant of any one man or woman. Nor did he ever commit himself definitely and unreservedly to any one line of policy, or place himself in the hands entirely of any one minister. He resembled his father tin entertaining several plans at the same time, but he had the diplomatic talent, in which his father was entirely wanting, of making their very discrepancies and antagonisms subservient to his general purpose. He had usually two or three plans of policy yin seeming suspense, and two or three ministers each rejoicing in a very limited, but, as he supposed, undivided confidence. Most of the men of his time, no doubt, he regarded with amused con- tempt. He had gauged the exact amount of the talents, and she had a clear knowledge and appreciation of the special characters and prejudices of a Shaftesbury, an Arlington, a Danby, a Halifax, and a Russell, and he made use of them all in turn, and from the conflict or balance of their charac- ters and prejudices managed to avoid the dictation of any of them, while it became quite impossible to gather his real mind from the composition of any of his administrations. His own policy was always ambiguous, and the public leapt to the conclusion that he was a careless indifferentist who had no policy at all. He carried this ambiguity even into the province of his personal debaucheries. if he had a mistress with French or Roman Catholic proclivities to raise the hopes of one faction, he had also a Protestant mis- tress at the same time to reassure the fears of others. The story is well known of Nell Gwyne's coarse but effective explana- tion when she was assailed by a Protestant mob in mistake for the Duchess of Portsmouth. He never ignored or directly opposed national prejudices when they assumed formidable dimensions, but he never succumbed to them. He temporized, made concessions, evaded decided issues, and waited and watched till, by skilfully availing himself of the course of events, he seemed to have been released by them rather than to have released himself from his engagements. Popular suspicion of any designs of his own was effectually disarmed by his seemingly idle habits and his cheerful affability. Who could have suspected a Royal conspirator in the chatty man of pleasure feeding the ducks in St. James's Park! Nature had attempted to mark the true character of the man by the grim sardonic features with which she had endowed him ; bat he persuaded his people to disbelieve in the evidence of nature. But if he deluded his own people, he deluded foreign powers also. He was, it is well known, the pensioner of France, but it is an entire mistake to suppose that he was the mere servile tool of Louis. He had made up his mind that it was quite impossible to lead the independent life he required, and escape the surveillance and interference of Parliament, if he was to be dependent for his revenue on it alone. He was too shrewd to resort to the systema- tic illegalities of his father to obtain extra-Parliamentary supplies; and he resolved to achieve his cud out of the coffers of Louis. He cared little for the degradation to himself of such a position in the eyes of France or of his own people, when it was accidentally disclosed to them. He was resolved not to be wholly dependent on Louis, any more than on the House of Commons, and he played off the one resource against the other with marvellous skill and success. Louis, in fact, could scarcely count more surely on Charles's support, as the reward of his money-payments, than he could on that of the popular leaders whom he also paid for opposing their King. King and patriots alike took his money, and acted very much as they would have done if they had had other resources. Charles had no desire to commit himself either to a Catholic or Protestant affiance, and though the occasions of his changes of policy might be to some ex- tent affected by the money of Louis, on the whole, except in the political humiliation of England, Louis was decidedly the loser, and the dupe in these pecuniary transactions ; and Charles himself preserved substantially a position of independence. He had nearly always the alternative to offer of a popular and anti-French policy, which would secure him willing supplies from Parliament, or of abstinence from such a course at the price of French gold ; and Louis had generally no alternative but to open his coffers.
The conventional aspect in which most questions presented themselves to the mind of Charles had at least one good effect. They rendered him comparatively unsusceptible to the feelings of resentment and implacability. Naturally good-tempered, and in his familiar social intercourse willing to bear defeat in his encounters of wit with good-humour, he did not, as a rule, feel any personal grudge to those who thwarted or opposed his poli- tical schemes. He was cold-hearted enough, it is true, to pro- nounce their doom with calm indifference, if policy seemed to render their removal desirable ; but apart from this, he avoided the shedding of blood, and would seldom condescend to remember personal injuries. The men who had condemned his father to the scaffold he sent to a cruel death with entire phlegm, though in so doing he probably followed a policy of Royal self-assertion, and consulted the demands of excited partizans, rather than those of his own feelings. He did not press the sentence on Lambert, while he pronounced the greatest possible panegyric on the abili- ties and character of Vane, in pronouncing him, in his opinion, too dangerous a man to let live. Russell and Sidney suffered probably less from any fear of their personal ability than from a strong belief in their influence as the heads of a party-which, but for their removal, might have succeeded after the King's death in preventing the succession of the Duke of York. On this latter point Charles had followed his usual policy of balanc- ing pretensions and keeping his real purpose in suspense. He had indulged his own fondness for Monmouth freely, and in so doing had held in check the intrigues of James, and the uncompromising party who gathered round that Prince, while at the same time he never allowed Monmouth to assume the position of his intended heir, or to become anything else than a useful link between the Crown in his own person, and the popular aspirations which associated themselves with the name of his son. As a fact, Charles probably had a strong feeling as to the abstract rights of his brother, although he did not choose to commit himself quite irretrievably
in public to thin doctrine. He had however a settled opinion that any alteration in the succesion, if made at all, should proceed from his own will, and not from the demands and imagined necessities of the nation. In subsequent years Halifax and Sheffield (afterwards Duke of Buckingham), who both knew him well, asserted that Charles was himself an Atheist. We, however, now know that he became a member of the Roman Catholic Church before the Resto- ration. The truth probably is that Charles had a belief in the existence of a God, but of such a God as he himself would con- ceive as the highest type of absolute Sovereignty—perfectly irre- ponsible —watching in serene seclusion the course of human affairs, and employing as the external agents of his religious administra- tion a Church. ofconventional forms and conventional doctrines.
When he had once recognized this agent of the Divine, he did not think it necessary to identify himself more closely with it until he received its certificate of salvation on his death-bed, satisfied till then with assisting it when convenient to him, and making use of it much as he would of any other human machinery. When he had received this necessary passport to the next world his sense of duty was satisfied, and he apologised politely to the expectant courtiers for being so long in dying.
As far, however, as the practical affairs of life and of his own Government were concerned, Charles was an Atheist. He believed in nothing and in nobody except in himself, and in his own power of managing his own business. Having no faith, he had no real object, except the passive one of securing his own freedom of action or inaction, and carrying on the Government of England as pleasantly and with as little turmoil as possible. In this sense there is great truth in Temple's remark, which we have already quoted, that "he desired nothing but that he might be easy himself, and that everybody else should be so." It is impos- sible to conceive of a greater contrast than that offered between his Government in this respect and that of the Protector Oliver. If ever there was an attempt made to realize the presence and government of God in the administration of this country, it was made, and to some extent successfully made, by the great Pro- tector. But able and sagacious and clear-sighted as Charles was, he may be truly said to have "lived without God," and the un-Godlike in the full sense of the term became the distinguishing stamp of his reign. At the best, his administra- tion was a successful subterfuge, a clever imposture, an adroit pis-aller. He had a profound faith in his own traditional position as Sovereign, and he had an intense pride in his own personality as the arbiter of the situation. Yet his plan of Government ren- dered it necessary that he himself should skulk behind a screen of falsehood and chicanery, and that his personality should be merged in a puppet-show. He wished well to England, yet he degraded her in the eyes of every nation of Europe, and set a stamp of ignominy on his foreign administration in the eyes of nearly every Englishman. Not a few important and valuable laws are con- nected with his reign, yet not one is in popular memory connected with his name and fame. We know from the personal character of his administration that he must have passively or willingly sanctioned their enactment, but he has succeeded by his system of dissimulation in preventing us from assigning with certainty any personal merits to him for any one of them. He affected to favour contradictory policies of many men in succession, so that his own position lost all distinctness; and if he escaped from the general discredit, he forfeited all claim to particular merits. He had clever ideas on public affairs, and a thorough insight into, at least, the lower motives of human action. He probably meant to putsue some policy of his own, but he ended as he began, with merely evading complicity in the policy of others. He had the ability to have set his stamp upon the age,—he only succeeded in obliterating himself.
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