Rochester E-Book

Charles Williams

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

It was night when at last the Penderel brothers brought a ladder and the King of England came down from his tree. One of his few friends, a certain Colonel Careless, had been hidden with him all day in the branches; another, the Lord Wilmot, lay at a house some miles off. The remainder of the army, which three days before had been utterly defeated at Worcester, was either prisoner to Cromwell or fugitive through the countryside. Priests' holes were occupied in manor-houses; forgotten paths through the woods were retrodden. The Parliamentary horse searched roads and woods; about all the villages went rumours of the whereabouts of captain and colonel, and of the dark, tall, humorous creature of twenty-one, who stood now at the bottom of the ladder among his peasant saviours, the proclaimed public enemy, Charles Stuart.

Leseprobe

From the Painting in the National Portrait Gallery THE EARL OF ROCHESTER (Attributed to J. Huysmans)]

ROCHESTER

 

BY

 

CHARLES WILLIAMS

1935 © 2021 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782383832249 

CONTENTS

CHAPTER IThe Romantic ForestCHAPTER IIThe Education of a RomanticCHAPTER IIIThe Engagement with DeathCHAPTER IVThe Duel with Miss HobartCHAPTER VThe Duel with Lord MulgraveCHAPTER VIThe Actor and the TheatreCHAPTER VIIInterludes in the CountryCHAPTER VIIIThe Way of SensationCHAPTER IXThe Way of ArgumentCHAPTER XThe Way of ConversionCHAPTER XIThe Way of UnionINDEXIndex

CHAPTER I

The Romantic Forest

It was night when at last the Penderel brothers brought a ladder and the King of England came down from his tree. One of his few friends, a certain Colonel Careless, had been hidden with him all day in the branches; another, the Lord Wilmot, lay at a house some miles off. The remainder of the army, which three days before had been utterly defeated at Worcester, was either prisoner to Cromwell or fugitive through the countryside. Priests' holes were occupied in manor-houses; forgotten paths through the woods were retrodden. The Parliamentary horse searched roads and woods; about all the villages went rumours of the whereabouts of captain and colonel, and of the dark, tall, humorous creature of twenty-one, who stood now at the bottom of the ladder among his peasant saviours, the proclaimed public enemy, Charles Stuart.

The tree and the darkness, the descent and the subsequent flight, are the picturesque properties of a romantic tale. The scattered figures, escaping through the western counties, are the climax of defeat. They disappear along the roads, into London, into scattered manors, into small ships in remote harbours, and every way into obscurity. It is nine years before they, or their sons and inheritors, return. As again they approach, from foreign places, from statelier ships, from restored manors, a gaudier light abolishes the dim landscape of the forest of the flight. The palaces of Whitehall and St. James expand to receive them. Time and the world have changed.

The wood in which, on the evening of that Saturday, September 1651, Charles II. stood, was symbolical of another forest—a thing of the spirit. The King's was not the only English tree which had contained at times a mortal inhabitant. Four years before Worcester, in another part of the country, another young man of twenty-one, named George Fox, also took refuge in woods. He wrote of his own flight: "My troubles continued…. I fasted much and walked abroad in solitary places many days, and often took my Bible, and went and sate in hollow trees and lonesome places till night came on; and frequently, in the night, walked mournfully about by myself: For I was a man of sorrows in the times of the first workings of the Lord in me."

He also was pursued; unlike the King, he did not escape his pursuer. A spirit captured his spirit; for him also the world changed. "Now was I come up in spirit, through the flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words could utter."

The King escaped from his wood to temporal poverty, first in France, and afterwards in Whitehall; George Fox to spiritual richness in the paradise of God. The one emerged into a state of dubious and difficult royalty, within as without; the other, without as within, found a state of being of utter significance, of wholly desirable passion, and what he called "the hidden unity." The two exits were at opposite ends of that dark spiritual forest, in the maze of which were other wanderers, three of whom should be named.

One is of interest only as an historical coincidence. George Fox, interpreting his paradise into terms of mortal action, came to Derby, and there interrupted with vigorous theological protests a religious address by one of the military leaders of the Army of the Parliament. He was brought before the magistrates; there was high controversy. The magistrates, Fox thought, were still roaming in the old entanglements of human language, opinion, and desire. They asked him if he were "sanctified." "I answered: 'Sanctified! yes,' for I was in the paradise of God. Then they asked me if I had no sin. I answered, 'Sin! Christ, my Saviour, has taken away my sin, and in Him there is no sin.' They asked how we knew that Christ did abide in us. I said, 'By His Spirit, that He has given us.' They temptingly asked if any of us were Christ. I answered, 'Nay, we are nothing, Christ is all.'" After which "for the avowed uttering and broaching of divers blasphemous opinions contrary to a late Act of Parliament," he was committed to prison, where he remained for a year.

In 1651 there came to Derby, marching on the way to Worcester, other regiments of the army; with them a certain soldier from Nottingham, by name Rice Jones. By accident he came into propinquity, and into argument, with the imprisoned Fox. It grieved Fox to discover that Rice Jones was a Gnostic; he altogether denied the objectivity of Christ's sufferings—there were never any such things happened; the history of the Passion was a mystical tale, to be understood mystically. Fox called these interpretations "imaginations and whimsies." The unmoved Rice Jones marched on to Worcester with his company; it is pleasant to think that he, intensely concerned with his subjective transmutation, was one of those who rode under the tree where Charles Stuart, intensely aware of his own objective inconvenience, hid.

Rice Jones belonged to one of the wilder and more ancient tribes of the romantic spiritual forest. A fortnight after he had fought in the battle of Worcester, on Thursday, 18th September, while the King was resting in comparative comfort under the roof of a friend, a small boy, the son of an Edinburgh lawyer, kept his eighth birthday. His name was Gilbert Burnet; under the care of his father, a grave and slightly harsh practitioner of religion, he was already well advanced in the Latin tongue and the knowledge of classical authors. As he grew older, he read law and studied divinity. His divine studies led him, not to the obscure copses of Rice Jones's thought, or to the clear fields, beyond the forest, of Fox, or to the cleared spaces, on the hither side, of the scepticism of the King, but to one of the two great roads that then ran through the forest, the road of Anglican doctrine and the road of Roman doctrine. He became orthodox; he even became a bishop. More astonishingly, and less excusably, he came to believe that Christianity was rational. He had gone into the wilder retreats of the mystics, but had returned.

"The Misticks," he wrote, after reading St. Teresa and other such explorers, "being writ by recluse, melancholy people, … are full of rank enthusiasm."

He was a little surprised to find that his own close study of the Scriptures and religious discipline of life did not lead him with them into "all the extravagancies of Enthusiasme." He attributed his salvation from this danger to his having nothing of the spleen of melancholy in his constitution and to his philosophical studies. Philosophy taught him a certain disdain; it taught him to distinguish (he said) "between a heat in the animal spirits which was mechanicall, and that which lay in the superior powers of the soul."

In allusion to St. Teresa and George Fox, such a distinction is irrelevant enough. There are, however, less efficient travellers in the mystical depths than those two, and at least one of them was tamed by Gilbert Burnet's orthodox intelligence. Lady Henrietta Lindsay, daughter of the Countess of Balcarres, at the age of eighteen, fell into "histericall fits," in which she seemed to converse with God and the angels, and spoke, while the fit lasted, without interruption. It has been remarked that wiser visionaries allow God and the angels a greater share in the conversation than did the Lady Henrietta. One fit lasted ten hours; to the angels time is not so noticeable as to us. Burnet was called in; he advised her mother to send for a physician, and the fits ceased.

Yet Burnet was not without a longing for that stranger way. He practised asceticism; at one time he undervalued those who did not. He thought of abandoning the world, and of going unknown into a remote place to live and die, there to teach the poor. He desired mightily an "internal apprehension of extraordinary impulses," but he never found it. He had, in fact, a great number of romantic emotions, but philosophy and time subdued them. There remained in him only that enthusiasm which is the inevitable accompaniment of Christianity, the irrational creed warring with the scepticism which is at bottom all that philosophy can offer. At that time Descartes was writing in France, cogito, ergo sum, and begging the question with every word.

Another than Descartes had, in that same year 1651—the year of the King's escape, of Fox's release, of Gilbert Burnet's eighth birthday—in one great sentence, set an axe to the trunk of every tree in the wide romantic forest and, as it were, at the same time barred the high roads that ran through it. The young King, when he had been Prince of Wales, had had a mathematical tutor, by name Thomas Hobbes. In 1651 Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan. On the fifth page of that lucid work was the sentence which helped, both for good and evil, to set an age free from romantic vision and romantic entanglement. The sentence was: "Imagination is nothing but decaying sense." A little pallidly perhaps, and not with the full perfection of George Fox's day, its clarity breaks through the dark night of the soul. It freed those who walked in its light from much trouble; it even justified them in not taking trouble. Hobbes removed vision and the intellect of vision, and for it he substituted the senses and the intelligence of the senses; it is why he can never be neglected. It was he who, if he did not prepare the place, at least lit the candles in the palace of the consciousness of Whitehall. In that philosophical air he justified sensation to minds already eager for sensation. There were (he said) no motions in the soul. It is an historical and symbolical fact that Charles Stuart escaped from England, driven by the military ardour and spiritual motions of Rice Jones and his comrades, to the city of Paris, where Leviathan had that year been published.

Among the peers and gentlemen who had followed the King to Worcester was Henry, Lord Wilmot. This lord was of a West Country family, of no very great standing; a man of gusto, enjoying his loyalty as he enjoyed his wine, and as apt to quarrel with his companions over the one as over the other. There is nothing to show that he ever cared much about the kind of tree to which George Fox retreated, but he was a gay and gallant companion of the lesser romanticism. He had accompanied Charles from the field, and after the main body of the King's companions had ridden off in other directions, he rode with him to Whiteladies, where the Penderels were. In their house, while the hasty discussions concerning disguise, flight, and safety went on, Henry Wilmot did his romantic best to assist them by setting to work to cut the King's long hair. It was significant devotion; it seems to have been no less significant that he did it badly, so that one of the woodcutters (perhaps more experienced—professional hairdressers were not in every hamlet) had to be called to finish it. On the Saturday which the King spent in his tree, Wilmot lay in concealment in another house some miles away. On the Monday, the King set out to join him. When, again in the dim evening, they met the loyalist master of the house at the great door, Wilmot proclaimed to him the coming of the King in a fine phrase of rhetoric: "This is your master, my master, the master of us all."

The King, through the weeks that followed, went in disguise. Henry Wilmot, except for a hawk on his wrist, refused disguise. Certainly it was more necessary for Charles, who had the more noticeable figure—"almost two yards high," the Parliamentary proclamations called him. It is romantic that the King should have been disguised, and just as romantic that the Lord Wilmot should not. Sometimes together, sometimes separate, they rode on through those dangerous weeks towards the coast; and after them, in one form or another, rode the spiritual mystic, more deeply romantic than either—Serjeant Obadiah Bind-their-kings-in-chains-and-their-nobles-with-links-of-iron. The future, however—the intellectual future—was to be neither to the noble nor the Serjeant. Wilmot had left behind him, at his estate of Ditchley, in Oxfordshire, his wife and a young son, then four years old, John. When that child grew to manhood he was to find, for most of his life, his nearest kinship in the inverted romanticism of the King. But both Fox and Hobbes were to have their part in John Wilmot; their great names describe different and contending states of his being. It was in the contention between those two states, and in the comment upon them of the third state, which can more properly be attributed to Charles Stuart, that the significance of John Wilmot's life was to lie.

When at last the little ship from Brighthelmstone containing Charles Stuart drew in to Normandy, the Lord Wilmot continued to be romantic in exile, though with little active success. He had, like Burnet, a mighty desire, but his gusto was for more possible things. The enthusiasms of the beggarly Court were for promises and titles. They asked of the King "very improper reversions because he could not grant the possession, and were solicitous for honours, which he had power to grant, because he had no fortunes which he could give to them." Henry Wilmot was solicitous to be an earl. The King, in those midnight wanderings and rests, had committed himself to warm gratitude to his companion. His companion desired the face value of those words to be justified. It is the disadvantage of kings and lovers that they are so held to their phrases. At first Wilmot asked no more than a general promise of an earldom some day—when it was convenient to the King. The King, grateful for the moderation, promised. Time betrayed him; presently, in the vagrant diplomacy of that vagrant Court, it seemed desirable to send an ambassador privately to the Diet of the Empire at Ratisbon. It was thought that the German princes might be willing to restore, to support, or at least to shelter, the King, since his more immediate brothers of France and Spain were by now rivals for the favour of the Lord Protector Cromwell. But there was no money to send an ambassador in formal state. Wilmot, seizing the opportunity, proposed that he should be made an earl and go privately. An English earl would be equal to any princes of the Empire, and he promised great results—reputation, money, men. The romantic desire of a title galloped level with the romantic dream of a Restoration; the Lord Wilmot indulged both emotions and found them satisfying. Charles had fewer hopes, but he yielded. The French Government, hoping to get Charles out of the country, supplied the money. Charles supplied the dignity and commission. Wilmot became Earl of Rochester, and the eight-year-old boy at Ditchley, in the custom of the English nobility, became in turn Lord Wilmot.

Wilmot was not the only messenger. Some years earlier the dramatist and (future) theatre manager, Sir Thomas Killigrew, had gone to Venice on something the same purpose. He had done his best; he had even published a full account of a great Royalist victory. Rather unfortunately, as things turned out, he put the scene of triumph at Worcester; months afterwards came the news of the actual battle, and ensured the underhand dismissal of the ambassador, in spite of the horrid reports of the Puritans which Killigrew had spread. He announced that St. Paul's Cathedral, "comparable with St. Peter's at Rome, remains desolate, and is said to have been sold to the Jews for a synagogue." He spoke of the publication of the Koran, "translated from the Turkish so that people may be imbued with Turkish manners, which have much in common with the actions of the rebels." It is true, no doubt, that Mahommedans, Jews, and Puritans all disliked images, but it seems unlikely that the Puritans fell back on the Koran as an incitement against idolatry. "Casting out Beelzebub by Beelzebub" could have no better example.

At Ratisbon the Earl of Rochester secured something like ten thousand pounds from some of the lesser princes. He spent a good deal on the negotiations; he made arrangements with old German officers; he plunged directly into the business of getting an army. It was, however, one thing to get an army; another, to pay it; a third, to use it. Edward Hyde, afterwards the Chancellor Clarendon, who disliked Rochester, commented gloomily: "So blind men are whose passions are so strong, and their judgments so weak that they can look but upon one thing at once." The Earl looked at least on two, as even Clarendon admitted. Having become Earl and been Ambassador, he looked to being Commander-in-Chief. In 1655 news reached the Court of all kinds of possibilities in England—risings in Kent, in the West, in the North. Rochester, signed commissions in his pocket, crossed to London. He was arrested on the way, and released; again arrested, and released; at last he was there. He sat among his friends, good fellows all, and anyone who was bold for the King and gallant with Henry Wilmot heard details of the risings. He sent off his companions, one to the West, one to the North. He wrote the most cheerful letters to the King, who allowed himself to become a little hopeful, and lay at Middleburgh ready to cross. Presently the Earl himself followed to the North. There, in Yorkshire, he became uneasy; preparations were not sufficiently advanced, prospects not sufficiently good. He and his allies "parted with little goodwill to each other," and the Earl set out on his return to London. "He departed very unwillingly from places where there was good eating and drinking"; he was nearly caught at Aylesbury. But the genius of his capacity for solitary romantic escapes stood by him and persuaded the innkeeper to assist him. He got away in time, lay for a while in London, and escaped at last back to Flanders and Cologne. It was his last adventure; in 1657 he died.

Charles Stuart, his romantic followers having failed him, found the realism of General Monk, of the Chancellor Hyde, and of the mass of the English, achieving at last the incalculable thing. The obscure forest of religious search, intellectual speculation, and romantic adventure receded. First London, then Whitehall, lay clear. Himself teased at once by a sceptical mind and an appetite for sensation, he was able to maintain a perilous superiority over the romantics and the anti-romantics by whom he was, and was to be, surrounded. He was to walk sensitively on the borders of the forest of the spirit with a sardonic smile, not much different to that he gave to the suppers at which Lady Castlemaine soon provided him with the sensations of the flesh. Central to himself and determined not to yield that centre to the keeping of any romantic passion, he was content to allow romantic passion as much freedom as he conveniently could. Once at least in his life it got the better of him, when the evil of a romantic horror surged through London, and abandonment screamed round the gallows and shouted from the Bench in the iniquitous myth of the Popish Plot. Once, at the very end of his life, he submitted to a romantic glory, ordered and mediated through the classic instrument of the Roman Church. But both those moments were far off. Cosmopolitan and sceptical, he landed on the beach at Dover. With him, more by accident than design, and without any philosophical intensity, mediated through the desires of the Court, came the sensationalism of Leviathan. Its author had already composed his own sensations by making peace with Cromwell. The King was thirty. On the beach he embraced General Monk, and spoke to him beautifully as "Father." Before thousands of eyes the Mayor of Dover presented him with a copy of a volume full of the myths of the most extreme experiences of man, the Bible. The King looked at it and received it. "Mr. Mayor," says the King, emotionally handing it to one of the Court, "I love it above all things in the world."

CHAPTER II

The Education of a Romantic

John Wilmot was born on 1st April 1647. Such a birthday has a kind of significance. It fits all of us, and John Wilmot especially, but only because he was fooled by Life rather more ostentatiously than most of us are. His genius assisted; his sensitive apprehensions summed up their thwarted desires in several of the most improper poems in the English language. The author of those poems on the failure of fruition, on "the imperfect enjoyment," on the indignant nymph and the impotent swain, was born in the same year in which George Fox seemed to himself to emerge from the entangled forest of the spirit into the paradise of "the hidden unity" which he found on the farther side.

Henry Wilmot had had no temptations to take refuge in a hollow tree from the celestial pursuit, nor had he ever been concerned with Hobbes's philosophical denial that the soul had motions in herself. He had been concerned with a world of more flagrant emotion. His wife, innocently, was related to the more fashionable world of sensation under the restored Monarchy. She was kindred to Barbara Villiers, afterwards Lady Castlemaine, the lurid and termagant mistress of Charles II.; "the most profane, imperious, and shameless of harlots," Macaulay called her, in a prose as shameless as his subject. Anne Wilmot was very different. She, like her husband Henry, came from the West Country; she, like him also, had been married before—to Sir Henry Lee, of Ditchley, in Oxfordshire. John was thus the son of second marriages on both sides. While Henry Wilmot went off to fight for and ride with his King and that King's heir, his own heir lived quietly at home. While Henry diplomatized in fairy-tales for Charles II., Anne devoted herself to the preservation of the estate and the protection of her son. She nourished them both excellently. She was a lady of a firm mind and not very wide sympathies; allusions in the later letters of her son to his wife suggest difficulties between Lady Wilmot and her daughter-in-law. She was a Puritan and the friend of Puritans, but the word covers a good deal; there is no reason to suppose she was harsh or austere. Her friend and co-guardian of the child, Sir Ralph Verney, was also Puritan by inclination, but he had fought on the King's side. In 1647 the lines of division between parties were changing every day, and the most intense desire of most of England was for a quiet life—with the King in possession, if possible; without, if there were no help for it. Lady Wilmot sat still, kept her soul, guarded her son, and hoarded her revenues.

John's horoscope was cast, and remains to us. "The sun governed the horoscope, and the moon ruled the birth hour." Lady of illusions, she did! "The conjunction of Venus and Mercury in M. coeli, in Sextile of Luna, aptly denotes his inclination to poetry." Perhaps, but in relation to the moon, mythical mistress of deceits, the conjunction of love and speed suggests, even more aptly, other characteristics. Venus indeed, most suitably "visible in full daylight," had adorned the day of Charles's birth; she and Mercury conjoined their effectiveness over many ladies and gentlemen of his court. They were the chief planets to rule over the ways that led from the dark forest of wandering minds to the palace of sensual delights. "The great reception of Sol with Mars and Jupiter posited so near the latter bestowed a large stock of generous and active spirits, which constantly attended on this excellent native's mind, so that no subject came amiss to him." Mars was to draw his active spirits to war with the Navy; Jupiter may have moved them to set up as a quack in Tower Street; it must have been the pride of Sol that so enraged his generous spirits as to allow them ungenerously to know of footmen with cudgels set in ambush for John Dryden.

In the education of her son Anne Wilmot had the assistance of Sir Ralph Verney, and of the Reverend Francis Giffard, her chaplain. Since, after the Revolution, Giffard was one of those who refused to take the oaths of allegiance to William and Mary, it is to be supposed that he too was a Royalist of strong principles. After his retirement he lived at Oxford, and there vented his reminiscences on the antiquary Thomas Hearne; it was then 1711, sixty years after he had educated John. He recounted, a little mysteriously, how he used "to lie with him in the family to prevent any ill accidents." The boy was then under twelve, for at twelve he left home for Oxford. Presumably Mr. Giffard succeeded, for he remembered his sometime charge as "very hopeful," "very virtuous and good-natur'd," "ready to follow good advice," "well-inclined to laudable undertakings." Hearne had heard different reports of John's later manhood. By 1711 John Wilmot had been dead for more than thirty years, but his reputation still burned. He was spoken of as "mad Rochester" and "the mad Earl." But the accounts of his childhood are all alike benign. He went from Mr. Giffard's teaching to the Grammar School at Burford. They found him extremely docile and extremely industrious. In Latin especially he was noted as being of extraordinary proficiency. It was a period when attention was paid to the distinguished young, and part of the attention was to see that they repaid the rest of it with all the diligence they could.

There is, however, no reason to doubt that the young John was both docile and industrious, an exemplary student. He was always apt to learn; the Court later found him as exemplary as had Mr. Giffard. He outwent his teachers and his examples—the Court, Cowley, Gilbert Burnet—all except the King. In such promise he went up, 15th January 1660, to Oxford, a fellow-commoner at Wadham.

It had originally been intended that Mr. Giffard should accompany him—so Mr. Giffard said—"and to have been his governor, but was supplanted." Mr. Giffard reluctantly abandoned Oxford and remained in the country, where the Countess of Rochester engaged earnestly in politics, being active to secure the return of her other son, Henry Lee, and Sir Ralph Verney to the Convention Parliament of 1660. At Wadham the young Earl, under the care of the University authorities, pursued his studies. In May 1660 the first cloud of distraction appeared. Under the Protector's rule, the English weather had not been usually propitious to such clouds; an overpowering sun of godliness threw a drought upon the land. With the return of Charles Stuart a thirsty people rejoiced. The King was up; Puritanism was down. Loyalty and liberty came back, and riot ran to meet them. The King might love the Bible, as he told the Mayor of Dover, beyond all things in the world, but the English in general were very ready to love a number of other things almost as much. They had, for some years, been compelled to be monogamous to the Bible. Even at Oxford a little sensational polygamy was felt to be desirable. There were revels and riots. There were almost, in comparison with the past, orgies; there were certainly delights, and they attracted John Wilmot. "He began to love these disorders too much." Till then he had had no disorders to love. The first chance, and still more the first sense, of outbreak, of a kind of communal outbreak, ran across his quick and vivid mind. He was just thirteen. He had docilely explored Latin and the great classics. At the moment when his own sense of liberty and power was growing in him it was met by a sudden enthusiasm of liberty and power from without. The King's return meant all this, and accidentally it meant something more. John Wilmot was now, by his father's death, Earl of Rochester; he was the son of the King's friend. It meant a good deal more now than it could have done before. He had been taught loyalty, but now he was in possession of lordship. His family and his University had exalted the person of the King; all the nation rejoiced in the person of the King. He was—and at thirteen in the seventeenth century he must have known it—one of those who had access, in the due future, to the Court and the person of the King. Many were looking forward to place and title, but he had a title already, and could have a place.

He produced a poem, or so it was said. It was also said later that one of his tutors, Dr. Whitehall (prophetic name!), a physician, of Merton, had actually produced it, and affixed his pupil's name to it. It seems almost certain that Dr. Whitehall had a hand in it, so advanced is it for thirteen years, even the thirteen years of the seventeenth century. The opening quatrain has in it something of the last mad metaphors of the metaphysical poets. It may be hoped, and perhaps believed, that the future "mad Earl" wrote a good deal of it. His wildness was always akin to theirs, and he admired Cowley, we know. Cowley might have written:

Vertue's triumphant Shrine! who dost engage At once three Kingdoms in a Pilgrimage; Which in ecstatick Duty strive to come Out of themselves, as well as from their home.

So the Earl, or his tutor, addressed Charles. Dryden, on the same occasion, was plunging as wildly into a similar religious metaphor. He assured the King

It is no longer Motion cheats your view, As you meet it, the Land approacheth you. The Land returns, and in the white it wears The marks of Penitence and Sorrow bears.

So useful to poets are the white cliffs of Dover. But the comparison of Charles to a triumphal shrine of virtue had even less exactitude of detail to recommend it. If Rochester wrote it, it was his first poem to the King, and the last in that particular style. His later addresses were quite different. The conclusion of his poem differed from Dryden's. The greater John had written an earlier poem upon the death of the Lord Protector, to which he did not now refer. He contented himself with saying that the world would now have a monarch, "and that Monarch You." (The italics are Dryden's.) But Rochester was able to end by recalling, if not his own past, at least his father's; he alluded (great Sir) to Henry Wilmot's "daring loyalty." Perhaps at the moment Charles preferred Dryden's, if he saw either; there were too many recollections of daring loyalties appearing in hopeful joy about his path.

Dr. Whitehall seems to have been an actual example of the semi-fabulous, less reputable, Church of England clergyman of the time. He had been brought up at Westminster under the great Busby, and had thence become a student of Christ Church. In 1648, at a parliamentary visitation, he was asked whether he would submit to their authority, and answered:

My name's Whitehall, God bless the poet, If I submit the King shall know it.

Provoked by the royalism and unplacated by the rhyme, the visitors turned him out. In 1650, however, he came back, this time to Merton, as a Fellow. It was commonly reported that he had gained this favour by subservience to the Ingoldsby family, who were his neighbours in the country, and especially to Richard Ingoldsby, the regicide, "before whom he often acted the part of a mimic and buffoon on purpose to make him merry." The riotous heart of Whitehall proceeded to occupy itself with physic and poetry. He remained in favour with the Government, being made a Doctor of Physic in 1657 at the letters of Richard Cromwell, then chancellor of Oxford. He produced a number of Latin poems in honour of Oliver Cromwell, Richard Cromwell, King Charles II., and Lord Clarendon; and certain English poems of quite another type.[1] He produced one poem to his pupil Rochester, sent with a portrait of himself, from which we gather that he had, in a practical way, assisted his pupil's levity as well as his learning:

Tis not in vest, but in that gowne Your Lordship daggled through this towne To keep up discipline, and tell us Next morning where you found good-fellows.

It ends with a jest, more dexterous than decent, and was sent to the Earl five years later, on New Year's Day 1666/7.