Characters from the Histories & Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century Part 2

[Footnote 5: _State Papers_, 1773, vol. ii, pp. 288-9.]

[Footnote 6: Letter of March 16, 1647; _infra_ p. 275.]

[Footnote 7: Letter of January 8, 1647; T.H. Lister, _Life of Clarendon_, 1837, vol. iii, p. 43.]

[Footnote 8: Ed. 1857, part 1, -- 85; omitted in the edition of 1759.]

[Footnote 9: Of the thirty-seven characters by Clarendon in this volume, twenty-seven are from the 'Ma.n.u.script Life'.]

[Footnote 10: _State Papers_, 1786, vol. iii, supp., p. xlv.]

[Footnote 11: Clarendon's lifetime coincided almost exactly with Milton's. He was two months younger than Milton, and died one month later.]

[Footnote 12: December 14, 1647; _infra_ p. 275.]

[Footnote 13: Book ix, _ad init._; ed. Macray, vol. iv, p. 3.]

[Footnote 14: See note, p. 129, ll. 22 ff.]

[Footnote 15: Evelyn's _Diary_, December 20, 1668. See the account of 'The Clarendon Gallery' in Lady Theresa Lewis's _Lives of the friends of Clarendon_, 1852, vol. i, pp. 15* ff., and vol. iii, pp. 241 ff.]

IV. Other Character Writers.

When Clarendon's _History_ was at last made public, no part of it was more frequently discussed, or more highly praised, than its characters--'so just', said Evelyn, 'and tempered without the least ingredient of pa.s.sion or tincture of revenge, yet with such natural and lively touches as show his lordship well knew not only the persons' outsides, but their very interiors.'[1] About the same time, and probably as a consequence of the publication of Clarendon's work, Bishop Burnet proceeded to put into its final form the _History_ on which he had been engaged since 1683. He gave special attention to his characters, some of which he entirely rewrote. They at once invited comparison with Clarendon's, and first impressions, then as now, were not in their favour. 'His characters are miserably wrought,' said Swift.[2]

Burnet was in close touch with the political movements of his time.

'For above thirty years,' he wrote, 'I have lived in such intimacy with all who have had the chief conduct of affairs, and have been so much trusted, and on so many important occasions employed by them, that I have been able to penetrate far into the true secrets of counsels and designs.'[3] He had a retentive memory, and a full share of worldly wisdom. But he was not an artist like Clarendon. His style has none of the sustained dignity, the leisurely evolution, which in Clarendon is so strangely at variance with the speed of composition.

All is stated, nothing suggested. There is a succession of short sentences, each perfectly clear in itself, often unlinked to what precedes or follows, and always without any of the finer shades of meaning. It is rough work, and on the face of it hasty, and so it would have remained, no matter how often it had been revised. Again, Burnet does not always have perfect control of the impression he wishes to convey. It is as if he did not have the whole character in his mind before he began to write, but collected his thoughts from the stores of his memory in the process of composition. We are often uncertain how to understand a character before we have read it all. In some cases he seems to be content to present us with the material from which, once we have pieced it together ourselves, we can form our own judgement. But what he tells us has been vividly felt by him, and is vividly presented. The great merit of his characters lies in their realism. Of the Earl of Lauderdale he says that 'He made a very ill appearance: He was very big: His hair red, hanging oddly about him: His tongue was too big for his mouth, which made him bedew all that he talked to.' There is no hint of this in Clarendon's character of Lauderdale, nor could Clarendon have spoken with the same directness.

Burnet has no circ.u.mlocutions, just as in private life he was not known to indulge in them. When he reports what was said in conversation he gives the very words. Lauderdale 'was a man, as the Duke of Buckingham called him to me, of a blundering understanding'.

Halifax 'hoped that G.o.d would not lay it to his charge, if he could not digest iron, as an ostrich did, nor take into his belief things that must burst him'. It is the directness and actuality of such things as these, and above all his habit of describing men in relation to himself, that make his best characters so vivid. Burnet is seldom in the background. He allows us to suspect that it is not the man himself whom he presents to us but the man as he knew him, though he would not have admitted the distinction. He could not imitate the detachment of Clarendon, who is always deliberately impersonal, and writes as if he were p.r.o.nouncing the impartial judgement of history from which there can be no appeal. Burnet views his men from a much nearer distance. His perspective may sometimes be at fault, but he gets the detail.

With all his shrewd observation, it must be admitted that his range of comprehension was limited. There were no types of character too subtle for Clarendon to understand. There were some which eluded Burnet's grasp. He is at his best in describing such a man as Lauderdale, where the roughness of the style is in perfect keeping with the subject.

His character of Shaftesbury, whom he says he knew for many years in a very particular manner, is a valuable study and a remarkable companion piece to Dryden's _Achitophel_. But he did not understand Halifax. The surface levity misled him. He tells us unsuspectingly as much about himself as about Halifax. He tells us that the Trimmer could never be quite serious in the good bishop's company.

We learn more about Halifax from his own elaborate study of Charles II. It is a prolonged a.n.a.lysis by a man of clear vision, and perfect balance of judgement, and no prepossessions; who was, moreover, master of the easy pellucid style that tends to maxim and epigram. A more impartial and convincing estimate of any king need never be expected.

In method and purpose, it stands by itself. It is indeed not so much a character in the accepted sense of the word as a scientific investigation of a personality. Others try to make us see and understand their men; Halifax anatomizes. Yet he occasionally permits us to discover his own feelings. Nothing disappointed him more in the merry monarch than the company he kept, and his comprehensive taste in wit. 'Of all men that ever _liked_ those who _had wit_, he could the best _endure_ those who had _none_': there is more here than is on the surface; we see at once Charles, and his court, and Halifax himself.

As a cla.s.s, the statesmen and politicians more than hold their own with the other character writers of the seventeenth century.

Shaftesbury's picture of Henry Hastings, a country gentleman of the old school, who carried well into the Stuart period the habits and life of Tudor times, shows a side of his varied accomplishments which has not won the general recognition that it deserves. It is a sketch exactly in the style of the eighteenth century essayists. It makes us regret that the fragmentary autobiography in which it is found did not come down to a time when it could have included sketches of his famous contemporaries. The literary skill of his grandson, the author of the _Characteristicks_, was evidently inherited.

Sir Philip Warwick has the misfortune to be overshadowed by Clarendon.

As secretary to Charles I in the year before his execution, and as a minor government official under Charles II, he was well acquainted with men and affairs. Burnet describes him as 'an honest but a weak man', and adds that 'though he pretended to wit and politics, he was not cut out for that, and least of all for writing of history'. He could at least write characters. They do not bear the impress of a strong personality, but they have the fairmindedness and the calm outlook that spring from a gentle and una.s.sertive nature. His Cromwell and his Laud are alike greatly to his credit; and the private view that he gives us of Charles has unmistakable value. His _Memoires_ remained in ma.n.u.script till 1701, the year before the publication of Clarendon's _History_. It was the first book to appear with notable characters of the men of the Civil Wars and the Protectorate.

The Histories and Memoirs of the seventeenth century contain by far the greatest number of its characters; but they are to be found also in scattered Lives, and in the collections of material that mark the rise of modern English biography. There are disappointingly few by Fuller. In his _Worthies of England_ he is mainly concerned with the facts of a man's life, and though, in his own word, he fleshes the bare skeleton of time, place, and person with pleasant pa.s.sages, and interlaces many delightful stories by way of ill.u.s.trations, and everywhere holds us by the quaint turns of his fertile fancy, yet the scheme of the book did not involve the depicting of character, nor did it allow him to deal with many contemporaries whom he had known. In the present volume it has therefore been found best to represent him by the studies of Bacon and Laud in his _Church-History_. Bacon he must have described largely from hearsay, but what he says of Laud is an admirable specimen of his manner, and leaves us wishing that he had devoted himself in larger measure to the worthies of his own time.

There are no characters in Aubrey's _Brief Lives_, which are only a series of rough jottings by a prince of gossips, who collected what he could and put it all on paper 'tumultuarily'. But the extracts from what he says of Hobbes and Milton may be considered as notes for a character, details that awaited a greater artist than Aubrey was to work them into a picture; and if Hobbes and Milton are to be given a place, as somehow or other they must be, in a collection of the kind that this volume offers, there is no option but to be content with such notes, for there is no set character of either of them. The value of the facts which Aubrey has preserved is shown by the use made of them by all subsequent biographers, and notably by Anthony a Wood, whose _Athenae Oxonienses_ is our first great biographical dictionary.

Lives of English men of letters begin in the seventeenth century, and from Rawley's _Life of Bacon_, Sprat's _Life of Cowley_, and the anonymous _Life of Fuller_ it is possible to extract pa.s.sages which are in effect characters. But Walton's _Lives_, the best of all seventeenth century Lives, refuse to yield any section, for each of them is all of a piece; they are from beginning to end continuous character studies, revealing qualities of head and heart in their affectionate record of fact and circ.u.mstance. There is therefore nothing in this volume from his _Life of Donne_ or his _Life of Herbert_. As a rule the characters that can be extracted from Lives are much inferior to the clearly defined characters that are inserted in Histories. The focus is not the same. When an author after dealing with a man's career sums up his mental and moral qualities in a section by itself, he does not trust to it alone to convey the total impression. He is too liable also to panegyric, like Rawley, who could see no fault in his master Bacon, or Sprat who, in Johnson's words, produced a funeral oration on Cowley. There are no characters of scholars or poets so good as Clarendon's Hales, or Earle, or Chillingworth, or Waller; and for this reason, that Clarendon envisages them, not as scholars or poets but as men, and gains a definite and complete effect within small compa.s.s.

Roger North made his life of his brother Lord Keeper Guilford an account of the bench and bar under Charles II and James II. Of its many sketches of lawyers whom he or his brother had known, none is so perfect in every way as the character of Chief Justice Saunders, a remarkable man in real life who still lives in North's pages with all his eccentricities. North writes at length about his brother, yet nowhere do we see and understand him so clearly as we see and understand Saunders. The truth is that a life and a character have different objects and methods and do not readily combine. It is only a small admixture of biography that a character will endure. And with the steady development of biography the character declined.

A character must be short; and it must be entire, the complete expression of a clear judgement. The perfect model is provided by Clarendon. He has more than formal excellence. 'Motives', said Johnson, 'are generally unknown. We cannot trust to the characters we find in history, unless when they are drawn by those who knew the persons; as those, for instance, by Sall.u.s.t and by Lord Clarendon.'[4]

[Footnote 1: Letter to Pepys, January 20, 1703; Pepys's _Diary_, ed.

Braybrooke, 1825, vol. ii, p. 290.]

[Footnote 2: 'Short Remarks on Bishop Burnet's _History_,' _ad init._]

[Footnote 3: _History_, preface]

[Footnote 4: Boswell, 1769, ed. G.B. Hill, vol. ii, p. 79.]

Sooner or later every one who deals with the history or literature of the seventeenth century has to own his obligations to Professor C.H. Firth. My debt is not confined to his writings, references to which will be found continually in the notes. At every stage of the preparation of this volume I have had the advantage of his most generous interest. And with his name it is a pleasure to a.s.sociate in one compendious acknowledgement the names of Dr. Henry Bradley and Mr.

Percy Simpson.

Oxford, September 16, 1918.

D.N.S.

1.

JAMES I.

_James VI of Scotland 1567. James I 1603._

_Born 1566. Died 1625._

By ARTHUR WILSON.

He was born a King, and from that height, the less fitted to look into inferiour things; yet few escaped his knowledge, being, as it were, a _Magazine_ to retain them. His _Stature_ was of the _Middle Size_; rather tall than low, well set and somewhat plump, of a ruddy Complexion, his hair of a light brown, in his full perfection, had at last a Tincture of white. If he had any predominant _Humor_ to Ballance his _Choler_, it was Sanguine, which made his _Mirth Witty_.

His Beard was scattering on the Chin, and very thin; and though his Clothes were seldome fashioned to the _Vulgar_ garb, yet in the whole man he was not uncomely. He was a King in understanding, and was content to have his Subjects ignorant in many things; As in curing the _Kings Evil_, which he knew a _Device_, to ingrandize the _Vertue_ of Kings, when _Miracles_ were in fashion; but he let the World believe it, though he smiled at it, in his own _Reason_, finding the strength of the _Imagination_ a more powerfull _Agent_ in the _Cure_, than the _Plaisters his Chirurgions_ prescribed for the _Sore_. It was a hard _Question_, whether his Wisedome, and knowledge, exceeded his _Choler_, and _Fear_; certainly the last couple drew him with most violence, because they were not acquisit.i.tious, but _Naturall_; If he had not had that _Allay_, his high touring, and mastering _Reason_, had been of a _Rare_, and sublimed _Excellency_; but these earthy _Dregs_ kept it down, making his _Pa.s.sions_ extend him as farre as _Prophaness_, that I may not say _Blasphemy_, and _Policy_ superintendent of all his _Actions_; which will not last long (like the _Violence_ of that _Humor_) for it often makes those that know well, to do ill, and not be able to prevent it.

He had pure _Notions_ in _Conception_, but could bring few of them into _Action_, though they tended to his own _Preservation_: For this was one of his _Apothegms_, which he made no timely use of. _Let that Prince, that would beware of Conspiracies, be rather jealous of such, whom his extraordinary favours have advanced, than of those whom his displeasure hath discontented. These want means to execute their Pleasures, but they have means at pleasure to execute their desires_.

Ambition to rule is more vehement than Malice to revenge. Though the last part of this _Aphorism_, he was thought to practice too soon, where there was no cause for prevention, and neglect too late, when time was full ripe to produce the effect.

Some _Parallel'd_ him to _Tiberius_ for _Dissimulation_, yet _Peace_ was maintained by him as in the Time of _Augustus_; And _Peace_ begot _Plenty_, and _Plenty_ begot _Ease_ and _Wantonness_, and _Ease_ and _Wantonnesse_ begot _Poetry_, and _Poetry_ swelled to that _bulk_ in his time, that it begot strange _Monstrous Satyrs_, against the King[s] own person, that haunted both _Court_, and _Country_, which exprest would be too bitter to leave a sweet perfume behind him.

And though bitter ingredients are good to imbalm and preserve dead _bodies_, yet these were such as might indanger to kill a living name, if _Malice_ be not brought in with an _Antidote_. And the tongues of those times, more fluent than my _Pen_, made every little _miscarriage_ (being not able to discover their true operations, like smal _seeds_ hid in earthy _Darknesse_) grow up, and spread into such exuberant _branches_, that evil _Report_ did often pearch upon them.

So dangerous it is for _Princes_, by a _Remisse Comportment_, to give growth to the least _Error_; for it often proves as _fruitful_ as _Malice_ can make it.