NOTES FOR THE CURIOUS

FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, when I wrote a factual study of political events between 1678 and 1681 to surround the murder of a London magistrate, and called it The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, I did not think I should ever return to the bustling and brawling of the later Restoration. But, through all those years between, I had not ceased to read about it. The amount of factual material on which I have drawn for The Devil in Velvet—especially as regards the minutiae of speech, manners, customs, background, dress, eating, drinking, swordplay—has grown out of hand.

To add an extended bibliography to a novel intended only for entertainment would overweigh the story and sound like frantic pedantry. The first duty of any novelist, a duty so often forgotten nowadays, is to tell a story. Yet these details of the story, as well as the characters of the genuine historical personages, are all true. The foreshadowing of the “Popish plot” is true. In case some of the curious might be tempted to probe further into this matter, I am happy to add some notes on matters colourful or picturesque.

CHARACTER OF CHARLES THE SECOND

“The King of England,” wrote the French Ambassador, Barrillon, to Louis the Fourteenth, “has a manner so well-concealed and so difficult to penetrate that the shrewdest are deceived by it.” (Barrillon to Louis, Sept. 9/19th, 1680, Dalrymple, ii, 204.) “The King,” privately declared that eminent jurist, Sir Franics North, “understands foreign affairs better than all his counsellors put together.” (Roger North, Life of Lord Guilford, 1816 ed., ii, 181.) “He is so shrewd,” commented Sir John Reresby in his Memoirs, “that you never know what he is about.” So speak a few of his contemporaries who knew him.

The Letters, Speeches, and Declarations of Charles II (collected and edited by Mr. Arthur Bryant, 1935) show his wit as well as his common sense and his policy. To young Thomas Bruce, later Earl of Ailesbury, Charles really defined his aim: “God’s fish, they have put a set of men about me; but they shall know nothing!” (Ailesbury, Memoirs, 1890 ed., 112.)

Charles’s whole intention was to keep the stability of the kingdom, ensure the rightful succession, and never again to go “on his travels.” After the work of such later historians as Sir John Pollock, Mr. Arthur Bryant, Mr. Cyril Hughes Hartmann, nobody takes seriously the grotesque parody of him which for long had comic place in the schoolbooks.

The reason for this schoolbook notion is easy to find. In Charles’s own lifetime his Court party became known as Tories, and Shaftesbury’s Country party as Whigs. Now history, throughout the Victorian age, was for the most part written by Whigs. And Whigs, notably Macaulay, had no liking for a King who upheld the monarchial principle with such skill as did Charles the Second.

Drawing on such sources as Anthony Hamilton’s Memoirs of Count Grammont, the Diary of John Evelyn, the Diary of Samuel Pepys (all obtainable in many editions), the Whigs drew on anecdotes which honest Pepys received at third or fourth hand as gossip from his hairdresser, and tried to picture the King as little more than wencher and fool. Wencher he assuredly was. The populace loved him for it. “God,” said Charles, “will not damn a man for taking a little irregular pleasure by the way”; and Dr. (later Bishop) Burnet noticed that few things touched him to the heart. (Gilbert Burnet, History of My Own Time, 1833 ed., i, 23.) But the Whig historians achieved something of a feat: for years they showed as Jack-fool a King who was the shrewdest man in Europe.

By the way, it is a joy and delight to read the History of My Own Time in its edition of 1833, which of course was from a text published originally in 1724. But this one is reproduced as it was once edited by Dean Swift, Burnet’s bitter enemy. While the text moves ponderously on, gleaming-eyed Swift runs riot with such footnotes as “Liar!” or “Scotch dog!”

CHARACTER OF LORD SHAFTESBURY

The character and a great part of Shaftesbury’s career have been sketched out in this novel. One date in his life has been altered by a year; otherwise all dates and historical events stand as they are stated. Aside from contemporary reports of him by Bishop Burnet, John Dryden, Roger North, and Sir Roger L’Estrange (especially in L’Estrange’s The Mystery of the Death of Sir E. B. Godfrey Unfolded, 1688), he has had his official biography in W. D. Christie’s Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (2 vols., 1871). And there is a fine analysis in H. D. Traill’s Shaftesbury, in the English Worthies series (1886).

Tory and Whig united to condemn him when the fever of the age had gone, though Christie (Life, ii, 287-293) attempts to slur over some of his violence. But we must see him as he was. He was not a villain, except insofar as he was a fanatic. He would not take a bribe. But he would cheerfully have a man hanged on false evidence or privately murdered. That razorish face can be deciphered only if, to his fierce ambition, we add Traill’s suggestion of an honest blazing belief that Parliament must triumph over the King.

OF GALLANTRY AND LOVE-MAKING

Hazlitt, writing lectures in 1818, praised Wycherley’s comedy, The Country Wife. Long afterwards, the editor of a ‘new edition’ of these lectures in book form, On the English Poets and Comic Writers (Bell & Daldy, 1870), endorsed Hazlitt’s praise. But he endorsed it because “the drama is said to be the best picture extant of the dissolute manners of the court of Charles II.”

Let us omit the word “dissolute” and proceed. The Country Wife really did cause a sensation on the stage, but not because it was found dissolute. In this play Horner (the hero) seduces Mrs. Marjory Pinchwife (the heroine), luring her into his bedchamber with a promise to show her his fine set of china. Mrs. Marjory, enraptured, calls for so much more china that presently Horner must protest he has no china left. As a real-life result of the play, it was months before any respectable woman in London dared venture into a shop and say she wanted china.

Now this was the sort of joke which made playgoers truly whoop: just as, on the other hand, they loved firework displays of wit. It was a combination of the adolescent and the sophisticated, which to a great degree sums up the Restoration.

The best comic dramatists of the time, Wycherley and Etherege and Shadwell—together with Congreve and Vanbrugh, who appeared much later but demonstrated that the spirit of the Merry Monarch was still alive—gave playgoers their best crazy situations and their best wit. Congreve, especially in Love for Love and The Way of the World, is almost too witty. He flashes in your eyes like Tinker Bell; sometimes you wish he would stop coruscating and sit down.

What we must understand is that the fine ladies and “men of quality,” in real life, were not really like these glittering stage figures. They wished to be. They tried hard to be. They had the same blunt speech, the same frank amorousness. But they were not one-tenth as clever, or one-half as cold-hearted.

“In our sins, too,” cries Brass to Dick Amlet, in Vanbrugh’s The Confederacy, “I must own you still kept me under. You soared up to adultery with the mistress, while I was at humble fornication with the maid. Nay, in our punishments too: when I was sentenced but to be whipped, I cannot deny you were condemned to be hanged. In all things your inclinations have been greater and nobler than mine.” This is a compressed but not expurgated version of the speech.

Even true-life wits at the beginning of the Restoration, Buckingham or Sedley or Rochester or the King himself, could not have fired off such a string of bons mots as does Manly in Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer, or made love with such splendour as does Valentine in Congreve’s Love for Love.

OF MANNERS, CUSTOMS, BACKGROUNDS

The Spring Gardens (or plain Spring Garden, if you prefer) were the old and original Spring Gardens. You may mark a part of the site to this day in Spring Garden Street, behind Cockspur Street as you go down to Trafalgar Square. The place must not be confused with what Evelyn calls “the new Spring Garden at Lambeth,” (Diary, 2nd July, 1661). This refers to Vauxhall Gardens (Pepys’s “Fox-Hall”) on the other side of the river. Through the years Vauxhall gradually outshone and destroyed the old gardens, because of much greater space, more arbors, quaint illumination, and music. It had nearly two centuries of gay existence. See John Timbs, The Romance of London or Walks and Talks about London, both in many editions.

The Tower of London has a bibliography in itself. The Lion Gate has long been destroyed; and “Julius Caesar’s Tower” is of course the White Tower. As for the Royal Menagerie, which is described in this story, it was removed in 1834. Yet you may still have a drink, not far from its site, at a pub called The Tiger. Nine years after the removal of the menagerie, the stagnant moats on the land side were drained. A map as early as Tudor times shows the gun wharf built out from the wall on the river side. Ned Ward, writing of a visit to the Tower in 1698, tells how they stuffed the fierce lion called King Charles the Second, and preserved him after death (The London Spy, 1929, Arthur L. Hayward, ed., 225-236).

The plan of London in 1678, published by the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, consists of so many sheets that they fill the whole wall of a room when you fit them together. On this map, with its thick guide, you will find marked the position of every building, house, or place down to those of the very smallest importance: the home of a minor nobleman, a tolerable tavern. To the student of minutiae it is invaluable, as is the plan of Whitehall Palace in the Guildhall Library. In passing, it may be remarked that a plaque still marks the position of the “new” Duke’s Theatre, and of the King’s Head tavern.

As for the ordinary speech of these people, see their own letters and books. For example: compare the few authentic letters of Nell Gwynn published in Peter Cunningham’s The Story of Nell Gwyn and the Sayings of Charles II. (H. B. Wheatley­, ed., 1892) to the dazzling speech of Millament in the play. Nelly merely prattles, as rapidly as she is said to have spoken, in dictating the letters; and her name may be spelled in three different ways.

Or compare the formal speech of their books against one I prefer: four books, issued variously in 1665, 1668, 1674, 1680, under the general title of The English Rogue. This is a work of fiction. You need not believe one-tenth of the author’s (or authors’) adventures. But its breezy speech is authentic, like its background. And you may trust its thieves’ cant, which scarcely varies a word from “A Dictionary of the Cant Language” in the famous Life and Adventures of Bampsylde-Moore Carew (printed for Thomas Martin, 1738).

OF SWORDPLAY

It has been indicated in the narrative that the swordplay of the time circa 1675 was unlike modern fencing. It was undeveloped; full of jumpings, circlings, foul thrusts and tricks considered quite fair; yet it was far more spectacular. No trick used in this story has been invented: all were really used. What may seem the curious guard adopted by Duroc in the fight on the sentry walk was the guard of many swordsmen, who tried to scare opponents with it.

For this subject the comprehensive and in fact the essential book is Egerton Castle’s Schools and Masters of Fence, Illustrated with Old Engravings etc. (George Bell & Sons, 1893). Here the wealth of engravings shows the exact details, as in The English Rogue the engravings give a far better picture of costume than some modern plate.

The botte by which Fenton disarms Duroc may be found in another valuable work, Mr. J. D. Alyward’s The Small-Sword in England (Hutchinson & Co., 1946), which deals with the transition of the rapier into the smallsword as well as the smallsword itself. Granting Duroc’s sword in the story to have such quillons, and there were many such swords, Fenton could have disarmed him in that way—but in hardly any other way. When in book or film you see the hero disarming his adversary by some weird slap or other, it is pure nonsense.

Finally, for a general survey of swords or other weapons, see Hewitt or Laking, both very fine standard works in their field, as, for example, is Taylor on medical jurisprudence.