Characters from the Histories & Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century Part 22

Page 42, l. 23. _M'r Cowly_, an indication of Cowley's fame among his contemporaries. This was written in 1668, after the publication of _Paradise Lost_, but Clarendon ignores Milton.

l. 25. _to own much of his_, 'to ascribe much of this' _Life_ 1759.

Page 43, l. 2. _M'r Hyde_, Clarendon himself.

13.

A New Volume of Familiar Letters, Partly Philosophicall, Politicall, Historicall. The second Edition, with Additions. By James Howell, Esq.

London, 1650. (Letter XIII, pp. 25-6.)

This is the second volume of _Epistolae Ho-Elianae_, first published 1645 (vol. 1) and 1647 (vol. 2). The text is here printed from the copy of the second edition which Howell presented to Selden with an autograph dedication: 'Ex dono Authoris ... Opusculum hoc honoris ergo mitt.i.tur, Archiuis suis reponendum. 3 non: Maij 1652.' The volume now reposes in the Selden collection in the Bodleian library. The second edition of this letter differs from the first in the insertion of the bracketed words, ll. 22, 23, and the date.

The authenticity of the letters as a whole is discussed in Joseph Jacob's edition, 1890, pp. lxxi ff. This was probably not a real letter written to his correspondent at the given date. But whenever, and in whatever circ.u.mstances, Howell wrote it, the value of the picture it gives us of Ben Jonson is not impaired.

PAGE 43, l. 9. _Sir Tho. Hawk_. Sir Thomas Hawkins, translator of Horace's _Odes and Epodes_, 1625; hence 'your' Horace, p. 44, l. 4.

l. 17. _T. Ca._ Thomas Carew, the poet, one of the 'Tribe of Ben'.

PAGE 44, l. 6. _Iamque opus_, Ovid, _Metam._ xv. 871; cf. p. 202, l. 13. l. 8. _Exegi monumentum_, Horace, _Od._ iii. 30. i. l. 10. _O fortunatam_, preserved in Quintilian, _Inst. Orat._ ix. 4. 41 and xi.

I. 24, and in Juvenal, _Sat._ x. 122.

14.

This remarkable portrait of a country gentleman of the old school is from the 'Fragment of Autobiography', written by the first Earl of Shaftesbury (see Nos. 68, 69) towards the end of his life. The ma.n.u.script is among the Shaftesbury papers in the Public Record Office, but at present (1918) has been temporarily withdrawn for greater safety, and is not available for reference. The text is therefore taken from the modernized version in W.D. Christie's _Memoirs of Shaftesbury_, 1859, pp. 22-5, and _Life of Shaftesbury_, 1871, vol. i, appendix i, pp. xv-xvii.

The character was published in Leonard Howard's _Collection of Letters, from the Original Ma.n.u.scripts_, 1753, pp. 152-5, and was reprinted in _The Gentleman's Magazine_ for April 1754, pp. 160-1, and again in _The Connoisseur_, No. 81, August 14, 1755. _The Gentleman's Magazine_ (1754, p. 215) is responsible for the error that it is to be found in Peck's _Desiderata Curiosa_.

Hastings was Shaftesbury's neighbour in Dorsetshire. A full-length portrait of him in his old age, clad in green cloth and holding a pike-staff in his right hand, is at St. Giles, the seat of the Shaftesbury family. It is reproduced in Hutchins's _History of Dorset_, ed. 1868, vol. iii, p. 152.

PAGE 44, ll. 24-26. He was the second son of George fourth Earl of Huntingdon. Shaftesbury is describing his early a.s.sociates after his marriage in 1639: 'The eastern part of Dorsetshire had a bowling-green at Hanley, where the gentlemen went constantly once a week, though neither the green nor accommodation was inviting, yet it was well placed for to continue the correspondence of the gentry of those parts. Thither resorted Mr. Hastings of Woodland,' &c.

Page 47, l. 12. '_my part lies therein-a_.' As was pointed out by E.F.

Rimbault in _Notes and Queries_, 1859, Second Series, vol. vii, p.

323, this is part of an old catch printed with the music in _Pammelia.

Musicks Miscellanie. Or, Mixed Varietie of Pleasant Roundelayes, and delightfull Catches_, 1609:

There lies a pudding in the fire, and my parte lies therein a: whome should I call in, O thy good fellowes and mine a.

_Pammelia_, 'the earliest collection of rounds, catches, and canons printed in England', was brought out by Thomas Ravenscroft. Another edition appeared in 1618.

15.

Clarendon, MS. Life, pp. 383-4; _History_, Bk. XI, ed. 1704, vol. iii, pp. 197-9; ed. Macray, vol. iv, pp. 488-92.

The sense of Fate overhangs the portrait in which Clarendon paints for posterity the private virtues of his unhappy master. The easy dignity of the style adapts itself to the grave subject. This is one of Clarendon's greatest pa.s.sages. It was written twenty years after Charles's death, but Time had not dulled his feelings. 'But ther shall be only incerted the shorte character of his person, as it was found in the papers of that person whose life is heare described, who was so nerely trusted by him, and who had the greatest love for his person, and the greatest reverence for his memory, that any faythfull servant could exspresse.' So he wrote at first in the account of his own life.

On transferring the pa.s.sage to the _History_ he subst.i.tuted the more impersonal sentence (p. 48, l. 27--p. 49, l. 5) which the general character of the _History_ demanded.

Page 48, l. 15. _our blessed Savyour_. Compare 'The Martyrdom of King Charls I. or His Conformity with Christ in his Sufferings. In a Sermon preached at Bredah, Before his Sacred Majesty King Charls The Second, And the Princess of Orange. By the Bishop of Downe. Printed at the Hage 1649, and reprinted at London ... 1660'. Clarendon probably heard this sermon.

l. 21. _have bene so much_, subst.i.tuted in MS. for 'fitt to be more'.

_treatises_. E.g. _Elenchus Motuum Nuperorum in Anglia_ (part 1), 1649, by George Bate or Bates, princ.i.p.al physician to Charles I and II; _England's black Tribunall. Set forth in the Triall of K. Charles I_, 1660; and the sermon mentioned above.

Page 51, l. 20. _educated by that people_. His tutor was Sir Peter Young (1544-1628), the tutor of James. Patrick Young (1584-1652), Sir Peter's son, was Royal Librarian.

l. 26. _Hambleton_. Cf. p. 18, l. 24.

16.

Memoires Of the reigne of King Charles I. With a Continuation to the Happy Restauration of King Charles II. By Sir Philip Warwick, Knight.

Published from the Original Ma.n.u.script. With An Alphabetical Table.

London, 1701. (pp. 64-75.)

Warwick (1609-83) was Secretary to Charles in 1647-8. 'When I think of dying', he wrote, adapting a saying of Cicero, 'it is one of my comforts, that when I part from the dunghill of this world, I shall meet King Charles, and all those faithfull spirits, that had virtue enough to be true to him, the Church, and the Laws unto the last.'

(_Memoires_, p. 331.) Pa.s.sages in the _Memoires_ show that they were begun after the summer of 1676 (p. 37), and completed shortly after May 18, 1677 (p. 403).

Page 55, l. 13. _Sir Henry Vane_, the elder.

l. 14. _dyet_, allowance for expenses of living.

Page 56, l. 26. [Greek: Eikon Basilikae]. _The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Maiesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings_ was published in February 1649. Charles's authorship was at once doubted in Milton's [Greek: EIKONOKLASTAES] and in [Greek: EIKON ALAETHINAE]. _The Pourtraicture of Truths most sacred Majesty truly suffering, though not solely_, and supported in [Greek: EIKON AKLASTOS], in [Greek: EIKON AE PISTAE], and in _The Princely Pellican_, all published in 1649. The weight of evidence is now strongly in favour of the authorship of John Gauden (1605-62), bishop of Exeter at the Restoration. Gauden said in 1661 that he had written it, and examination of his claims is generally admitted to have confirmed them. See H.J. Todd's _Letter concerning the Author_, 1825, and _Gauden the Author, further shewn_, 1829; and C.E. Doble's four letters in _The Academy_, May 12-June 30, 1883.

Carlyle had no doubt that Charles was not the author. 'My reading progresses with or without fixed hope. I struggled through the "Eikon Basilike" yesterday; one of the paltriest pieces of vapid, shovel-hatted, clear-starched, immaculate falsity and cant I have ever read. It is to me an amazement how any mortal could ever have taken that for a genuine book of King Charles's. Nothing but a surpliced Pharisee, sitting at his ease afar off, could have got up such a set of meditations. It got Parson Gauden a bishopric.'--Letter of November 26, 1840 (Froude's _Thomas Carlyle_, 1884, vol. i, p. 199).

Page 57, l. 4. Thomas Herbert (1606-82), made a baronet in 1660.

Appointed by Parliament in 1647 to attend the King, he was latterly his sole attendant, and accompanied him with Juxon to the scaffold.

His _Threnodia Carolina_, reminiscences of Charles's captivity, was published in 1702 under the t.i.tle, _Memoirs of the Two last Years of the Reign of that unparalleled Prince, of ever Blessed Memory, King Charles I_. It was 'printed for the first time from the original MS.'

(now in private possession), but in modernized spelling, in Allan Fea's _Memoirs of the Martyr King_, 1905, pp. 74-153.

l. 10. Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), bishop of Salisbury, 1689, the historian whose characters are given in the later part of this volume.

His _Memoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William Dukes of Hamilton_, 1677, his first historical work, appeared while Warwick was writing his _Memoires of Charles_. It attracted great attention, as its account of recent events was furnished with authentic doc.u.ments.

'It was the first political biography of the modern type, combining a narrative of a man's life with a selection from his letters' (C.H.

Firth, introduction to Clarke and Foxcroft's _Life of Burnet_, 1907, p. xiii).

l. 15. _affliction gives understanding_. Compare Proverbs 29. 15, and Ecclesiasticus 4. 17 and 34. 9; the exact words are not in the Authorised Version.

l. 30. Robert Sanderson (1587-1663), Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, 1642, Bishop of Lincoln, 1660. Izaak Walton wrote his _Life_, 1678.

Page 58, l. 20. Sir Dudley Carleton (1573-1632), created Baron Carleton, 1626, and Viscount Dorchester, 1628; Secretary of State, 1628.

l. 21. Lord Falkland, see pp. 71-97; Secretary of State, 1642.

Page 59, ll. 11-13. Plutarch, Life of Alexander the Great; opening sentences, roughly paraphrased.

Page 60, l. 20. _Venient Romani_, St. John, xi. 48. See _The Archbishop of Canterbury's Speech or His Funerall Sermon, Preacht by himself on the Scaffold on Tower-Hill, on Friday the 10. of Ianuary, 1644. London_, 1644, p. 10: 'I but perhaps a great clamour there is, that I would have brought in Popery, I shall answer that more fully by and by, in the meane time, you know what the Pharisees said against Christ himself, in the eleventh of _Iohn_, _If we let him alone, all men will beleeve on him_, Et venient Romani, _and the Romanes will come and take away both our place and the Nation_. Here was a causelesse cry against Christ that the Romans would come, and see how just the Iudgement of G.o.d was, they crucified Christ for feare least the Romans should come, and his death was that that brought in the Romans upon them, G.o.d punishing them with that which they most feared: and I pray G.o.d this clamour of _veniunt Romani_, (of which I have given to my knowledge no just cause) helpe not to bring him in; for the Pope never had such a Harvest in England since the Reformation, as he hath now upon the Sects and divisions that are amongst us.'