Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (65 page)

The conversation took place on the stage of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. ‘China’ is course a euphemism for male sperm, as all the members of the audience knew, and
The Country Wife
by William Wycherley soon gained a reputation for indecency. Yet, in the 1670s, this was not considered to be a great offence. It was, perhaps, a quality to be praised.

Two companies of players were re-established immediately after the restoration of the king, the King’s Players under the management of Thomas Killigrew and the Duke of York’s Servants under Sir William Davenant. They played at first in makeshift venues until such time as suitable playhouses were erected. They did in any case cater for a considerably diminished audience since the great days of the Globe and the Fortune; the new theatrical public was largely made up of ‘the quality’ or ‘the fashion’ as well as those members of the middling classes who wished to emulate them.

The ‘sparks’ and ‘wits’ of the court were also in attendance and would, in the words of Etherege from
She Wou’d if She Cou’d
, roam ‘from one play-house to the other play-house, and if they like neither the play nor the women, they seldom stay any longer than the combing of their periwigs, or a whisper or two with a friend; and then they cock their caps, and out they strut again’. The play began at half past three in the afternoon, and lasted for approximately two hours. The gentlemen brought their own wine with them and often made more noise than the players on the stage, hectoring or exchanging badinage with the actors.

In
The Country Wife
Horner feigns impotence in order to deceive husbands and enter into clandestine amours with their wives; among these is Margery Pinchwife, an innocent young bride from the country who is fiercely guarded by her husband. The usual complications of sexual farce ensue amid innuendo and double meaning, with the principal women desperate to enjoy Horner’s favours by clandestine means. Lady Fidget herself does not deplore the hypocrisy of seeming virtuous. ‘Our reputation! Lord, why should you not think that we women make use of our reputation, as you men of yours, only to deceive the world with less suspicion?’ As Leigh Hunt once remarked of these seventeenth-century dramas, ‘we see nothing but a set of heartless fine ladies and gentlemen, coming in and going out, saying witty things at each other, and buzzing in some maze of intrigue’.

But this is the heart of the comedies of the Restoration period. They reflect a hard, if brittle, society where the prize goes to the most devious or hypocritical; they represent a world in which all moral values are provisional or uncertain; they convey a general sense of instability in which no one knows quite what to believe or how to behave. It is the perfect complement to Restoration tragedy in which fantastic notions of love or valour are pitched past the reality of life or true feeling; they are contrived and sentimental vehicles for rant and rhetoric.

The comedies, unlike the tragedies, of the period are at least set in real time and real place. The time is always the present moment, and the place is always London.

Sparkish:
Come, but where do we dine?

Horner:
Even where you will.

Sparkish:
At Chateline’s?

Dorilant:
Yes, if you will.

Sparkish:
Or at the Cock?

Dorilant:
Yes, if you please.

Sparkish:
Or at the Dog and Partridge?

This was a world in which the participants must ‘stay, until the chairs come’, in which the prostitutes always wore vizards, and in which the women ‘all fell a-laughing, till they bepissed themselves’. The protagonists are always those of the gentry or nobility, or at least those who aspire to be such; the playwrights were of the same mould, as were the members of the audience. Everyone knew everyone else but, in this multiple game of mirrors, we may glimpse the shape of the age.

The characters of course express themselves in prose; good conversation was considered be the medium of truth as well as of manners. Nothing was so delightfully true as that which was perfectly expressed. The notion of ‘wit’ is crucial here since, as Horner expresses it, ‘methinks wit is more necessary than beauty, and I think no young woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable without it’. Wit was not simply the effect of an epigram but, rather, the product of a fertile mind and keen observation. Wit was the currency of the court of Charles II.

The obscenity was also as much part of the court as of the stage. Horner apologizes to Lady Horner for bringing to her from France ‘not so much as a bawdy picture, new postures, nor the second part of the
École des Filles’
. Pepys described the latter publication as ‘the most bawdy, lewd book that ever I saw … so that I was shamed of reading it’. So the comic stage was used to strong meat. Yet not, perhaps, as strong as this:

In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,

Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.

A touch from any part of her had done ’t:

Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt.

The author, John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, was an indispensable element of the court of Charles II. At the age of seventeen, on Christmas Day 1664, he arrived at Whitehall bearing a letter to the king from the duchess of Orléans in France. Soon enough he was enrolled in the circle of wits that surrounded the king and by the spring of 1666 he had been appointed as one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber. He had all the qualities that the king admired. He was witty and he was fluent; he had a lightness of manner, and indeed of conscience, that were of paramount importance in such surroundings:

That pattern of virtue, Her Grace of Cleveland,

Has swallowed more pricks than the ocean has sand;

But by rubbing and scrubbing so large it does grow,

It is fit for just nothing but Signior Dildo.

He was sent to the Tower after attempting to abduct a lady; on his release, at the king’s orders, he played a valiant or perhaps foolhardy role in one of the conflicts with the Dutch. His subsequent life at court principally consisted of liberal doses of drink and sex, interlarded with fashionable atheism or, as it was sometimes known, ‘Hobbeism’. He recalled that at an atheistical meeting at the house of a ‘man of quality’ ‘I undertook to manage the cause, and was the principal disputant against God and piety, and … received the applause of the whole company’. This conveys sufficiently the presiding atmosphere of Whitehall.

For five years he was, by his own account, continually drunk and was so little master of himself that he forgot many of his ‘wild and unaccountable’ actions. Like most of his contemporaries at court he was deeply engaged in the theatre of the time; in fact the drama can perhaps best be seen as an extension of the court itself. Rochester patronized playwrights such as Dryden and Otway; he wrote a comedy and a tragedy as well as various prologues. Yet he is still remembered principally for his satirical invectives and for his mastery of obscenity:

Much wine had passed, with grave discourse,

Of who fucks who, and who does worse …

A character in
The Country Wife
asks, ‘Is it not a frank age? And I am a frank person.’ The ‘frankness’ might have consisted principally of blasphemy and obscenity, but it was also part of a novel dispensation represented by the cogent social analysis of Thomas Hobbes and the decision of the experimenters of the Royal Society to deal in things and not in words. It was an attempt to see the world anew, after the realization that religious obscurantism and doctrinaire prejudices had previously brought England into confusion. Horace Walpole wrote that ‘because the presbyterians and religionists had affected to call every thing by a scripture-name, the new court affected to call every thing by its own name’. It was time to clear away the rubble of untested assumptions, false rhetoric and standard appeals to authority or to tradition. This was the context for the ironical, cynical and materialist atmosphere of the Restoration court.

44

Noise rhymes to noise

When James arrived at his brother’s sickroom in Windsor Castle he fell to his knees, and it is reported that the two men burst into tears. The king had recovered some of his strength and was already out of danger. Yet the two claimants to the throne, the dukes of York and Monmouth, were now in confrontation; each had his own band of supporters, but James for the moment had the upper hand. His sudden return to England had not caused an insurrection, as some had feared, and he had indeed been received with deference; the lord mayor and the aldermen of London, for example, had come to kiss his hand. He did not wish to return to exile in Brussels, and seems to have made it clear that he would leave England only if the duke of Monmouth also made his exit. It was agreed therefore that Monmouth would retire into Holland, out of harm’s way, while James would be dispatched to Edinburgh as a kind of viceroy. He remained there for almost three years.

It had already become clear that, in the election of the summer, the Whigs had won the majority and that those who had voted against the ‘exclusion’ of James were generally turned out of office. Charles refused to allow this parliament to sit, however, and prorogued it to the beginning of the following year, 1680. He told his nephew, William of Orange, that he had no choice in the matter and that otherwise ‘they would have his crown’; he also feared that the Commons would proceed to the impeachment of his brother and his wife for their Catholic beliefs. Few expected parliament to meet again.

Shaftesbury was discharged from his office as lord president of the new council, and at once entered his true role as leader of the opposition to the court and Crown. Yet he knew well enough that he had no real power unless or until parliament was assembled. The Commons was his praetorian guard. Almost at once, therefore, he planned to launch petitions from all parts of the country for its return. His organization was such that his agents, together with notable local men, went from parish to parish collecting marks and signatures. No one, not even the poorest, was overlooked.

On 17 November the Green Ribbon Club, opposed to Catholics and to the court, organized a great pageant in London in which it was claimed that 200,000 people took part. A variety of Catholic personages were in representation dragged through the streets, and the procession eventually halted in Fleet Street just by the King’s Arms, the headquarters of the club; here effigies of the pope and of the devil, as well as sundry monks, nuns and Jesuits, were hurled into the flames of a fire accompanied by a great shout that, according to a pamphlet, ‘London’s Defiance to Rome’, reached France and Rome ‘damping them all with a dreadful astonishment’. Macaulay remarks in his
History of England
that two words became current at this time, ‘mob’ and ‘sham’.

When the duke of Monmouth arrived in London unexpectedly from exile, he was greeted with bonfires and jubilant crowds as the natural Protestant successor to the throne; he was not so warmly received by his father, however, who told him to be gone from court. His son disobeyed on the grounds that he must stay in order to preserve the life of his father from the designs of the papists.

At the beginning of December 1679, with a party of fifteen other peers, Shaftesbury stopped Charles on his way to the royal chapel and presented him with a petition for the sitting of parliament. The king was so irate that he prorogued the assembly for a further eleven months and issued a proclamation against petitioning itself. His supporters were said to ‘abhor’ the conduct of those who were trying to force the king’s hand; for a while grew up the factions of ‘the Abhorrers’ and ‘the Petitioners’.

After some months of impasse Shaftesbury once more raised the temperature when in the early summer of 1680 he tried to present, to a Middlesex grand jury, the duke of York as a papist and the duchess of Portsmouth, Charles’s mistress, as a prostitute. The latter had already attracted the dislike and suspicion of many, and it had often been suggested that she should be sent packing to France as soon as possible. Shaftesbury’s action was of course an open affront to the king, and an obvious attempt to inflame public opinion. The king hastened to London from Windsor where he instructed the chief justice, William Scroggs, to dismiss the grand jury before it heard any evidence for the charges. The damage had been done, however, compounded by the fact that Shaftesbury received no rebuke.

When parliament finally met, towards the end of October, the Commons was full from the very first session. The king’s ministers, known as ‘the chits’ because of their relative youth, had formulated what they hoped was a consistent policy; they intended to defuse the threat of exclusion by imposing limitations on the power of a future King James, and to seek an alliance with the United Provinces against the French. It was still important to signal hostility to Louis XIV, even though Charles had been engaged in constant negotiations to obtain money from him.

The Whigs were not to be averted from their purpose, however, and at the beginning of November a second Exclusion Bill against the duke of York was introduced. It received its third reading within nine days and was then sent up to the Lords. The duke of Monmouth came back to London from a triumphal tour of the West Country in order to participate in the discussions.

The king also attended this long session of the peers, from eleven in the morning to nine at night, and listened to them with eager attention. It had been believed that he would abandon his brother, however reluctantly, for the sake of public peace; he was known to fear, more than anything else, the outbreak of another civil war. But in fact he remained firm and made his feelings known during the course of the Lords’ debate. When Monmouth expressed his concern for his father, Charles called out, ‘It is a Judas kiss that he gives me!’ The sentiments of the king may have helped to concentrate the minds of the Lords. They voted, sixty-three to thirty, against the Exclusion Bill. Shaftesbury’s measure had failed.