may venture to conjecture, that when Mr. Oliver purchased this "rich cloth of estate," it was not without a latent motive of its service to the new owner.*

There is one circumstance remarkable in the feeling of Charles the First for the fine arts: it was a passion without ostentation or egotism; for although this monarch was inclined himself to participate in the pleasures of a creating artist, the king having handled the pencil and composed a poem, yet he never suffered his private dispositions to prevail over his more majestic duties. We do not discover in history that Charles the First was a painter and a poet. Accident and secret history only reveal this softening feature in his grave and king-like character. Charles sought no glory from, but only indulged his love for, art and the artists. There are three manuscripts on his art, by Leonardo da Vinci, in the Ambrosian library, which bear an inscription that a King of England, in 1639, offered one thousand guineas of gold for each. Charles, too, suggested to the two great painters of his age the subjects he considered worthy of their pencils; and had for his "closet-companions" those native poets for which he was censured in "evil times," and even by Milton!

In his imprisonment at Carisbrook Castle, the author of the "Eikon Basilike" solaced his royal woes by composing a poem, entitled in the very style of this memorable volume, Majesty in Misery, or an Imploration to the King of kings;" a title probably not his own, but like that volume, it contains stanzas fraught with the most tender and solemn feeling; such a subject, in the hands of such an author, was sure to produce poetry, although in the unpractised poet we may want the versifier. A few stanzas will illustrate this conception of part of his character:-

The fiercest furies that do daily tread

Upon my grief, my grey-discrowned head,
Are those that own my bounty for their bread.

With my own power my majesty they wound;
In the king's name, the king himself uncrowned;
So doth the dust destroy the diamond.

After a pathetic description of his queen "forced in pil

* Some may be curious to learn the price of gold and silver about 1650. It appears by this manuscript inventory that the silver sold at 4s. 11d. per oz. and gold at £3 10s.; so that the value of these metals has little varied during the last century and a half.

grimage to seek a tomb," and "Great Britain's heir forced into France," where,

Poor child, he weeps out his inheritance!

Charles continues:

They promise to erect my royal stem;
To make me great, to advance my diadem;
If I will first fall down and worship them!

But for refusal they devour my thrones,
Distress my children, and destroy my bones;

I fear they'll force me to make bread of stones.

And implores, with a martyr's piety, the Saviour's forgiveness for those who were more misled than criminal:

Such as thou know'st do not know what they do.*

As a poet and a painter, Charles is not popularly known; but this article was due, to preserve the memory of the royal votary's ardour and pure feelings for the love of the Fine Arts.t

* This poem is omitted in the great edition of the king's works, published after the Restoration; and was given by Burnet from a manuscript of his "Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton;" but it had been previously published in Perrenchief's "Life of Charles the First." It has been suspected that this poem is a pious fraud, and put forth in the king's name as likewise was the "Eikon Basilike." One point I have since ascertained is, that Charles did write verses, as rugged as some of these. And in respect to the book, notwithstanding the artifice and the interpolations of Gauden, I believe that there are some passages which Charles only could have written.

This article was composed without any recollection that a part of the subject had been anticipated by Lord Orford. In the "Anecdotes of Painting in England," many curious particulars are noticed the story of the king's diamond seal had reached his lordship, and Vertue had a mutilated transcript of the inventory of the king's pictures, &c., discovered in Moorfields; for, among others, more than thirty pages at the beginning relating to the plate and jewels were missing. The manuscript in the Harleian Collection is perfect. Lord Orford has also given an interesting anecdote to show the king's discernment in the knowledge of the hands of the painters, which confirms the little anecdote I have related from the Farrars. But for a more intimate knowledge of this monarch's intercourse with artists, I beg to refer to the third volume of my "Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First," chapter the sixth, on "The Private Life of Charles the First.-Love of the Arts."

336

SECRET HISTORY OF CHARLES THE FIRST, AND HIS
QUEEN HENRIETTA.

THE secret history of Charles the First, and his queen Henrietta of France, opens a different scene from the one exhibited in the passionate drama of our history.

The king is accused of the most spiritless uxoriousness; and the chaste fondness of a husband is placed among his political errors. Even Hume conceives that his queen "precipitated him into hasty and imprudent counsels," and Bishop Kennet had alluded to "the influence of a stately queen over an affectionate husband." The uxoriousness of Charles is reechoed by all the writers of a certain party. This is an odium which the king's enemies first threw out to make him contemptible; while his apologists imagined that, in perpetuating this accusation, they had discovered, in a weakness which has at least something amiable, some palliation for his own political misconduct. The factious, too, by this aspersion, promoted the alarm they spread in the nation, of the king's inclination to popery; yet, on the contrary, Charles was then making a determined stand, and at length triumphed over a Catholic faction, which was ruling his queen; and this at the risk and menace of a war with France. Yet this firmness too has been denied him, even by his apologist Hume: that historian, on his preconceived system, imagined that every action of Charles originated in the Duke of Buckingham, and that the duke pursued his personal quarrel with Richelieu, and taking advantage of these domestic quarrels, had persuaded Charles to dismiss the French attendants of the queen.

*

* Hume, vol. vi. p. 234. Charles seems, however, to have constantly consulted his favourite minister, the Duke of Buckingham, on the subject, though his letters express clearly his own determination. In Harleian MSS., 6988, is a letter written to Buckingham, dated Hampton Court, 20th November, 1625, he declares, "I thought I would have cause enough in short time to put away the Monsieurs," from the quarrels they would ferment between himself and his wife, or his subjects, and begs of him to acquaint "the queen-mother (Mary de Medicis) with my intention; for this being an action that may have a show of harshness, I thought it was fit to take this way, that she to whom I have had many obligations may not take it unkindly." In another long letter, preserved among the Rawlinson MSS. in the Bodleian Library, he enters minutely into his domestic grievances-"What unkindnesses and distastes have fallen between my wife and me"-which he attributes to the "crafty counsels" of

There are, fortunately, two letters from Charles the First to Buckingham, preserved in the State-papers of Lord Hardwicke, which set this point at rest: these decisively prove that the whole matter originated with the king himself, and that Buckingham had tried every effort to persuade him to the contrary; for the king complains that he had been too long overcome by his persuasions, but that he was now "resolved it must be done, and that shortly!"*

It is remarkable, that the character of a queen, who is imagined to have performed so active a part in our history, scarcely ever appears in it; when abroad, and when she returned to England, in the midst of a winter storm, bringing all the aid she could to her unfortunate consort, those who witnessed this appearance of energy imagined that her character was equally powerful in the cabinet. Yet Henrietta, after all, was nothing more than a volatile woman; one who had never studied, never reflected, and whom nature had formed to be charming and haughty, but whose vivacity could not retain even a state-secret for an hour, and whose talents were quite opposite to those of deep political intrigue.

Henrietta viewed even the characters of great men with all the sensations of a woman. Describing the Earl of Strafford to a confidential friend, and having observed that he was a great man, she dwelt with far more interest on his person: "Though not handsome," said she, "he was agreeable enough, and he had the finest hands of any man in the world." Landing at Burlington-bay in Yorkshire, she lodged on the quay; the parliament's admiral barbarously pointed his cannon at the house; and several shots reaching it, her favourite, Jermyn, requested her to fly: she safely reached a cavern in the fields, but, recollecting that she had left a lap-dog asleep in its bed, she flew back, and amidst the cannon-shot returned with this other favourite. The queen related this incident of the lap-dog to her friend Madame Motteville; these ladies considered it as a complete woman's victory. It is in these memoirs we find, that when Charles went down to the house, to seize on the five leading members of the opposition, the

her servants. On 7th August, 1626, he writes a final letter to the duke, ordering him to send them all away, "if you can by fair means (but stick not long in disputing), otherwise force them away, driving them away like so many wild beasts, until ye have shipped them, and so the devil go with them." Lord Hardwicke's State-papers, II. 2, 3.

queen could not restrain her lively temper, and impatiently babbled the plot; so that one of the ladies in attendance despatched a hasty note to the parties, who, as the king entered the house, had just time to leave it. Some have dated the ruin of his cause to the failure of that impolitic step, which alarmed every one zealous for that spirit of political freedom which had now grown up in the Commons. Incidents like these mark the feminine dispositions of Henrietta. But when at sea, in danger of being taken by a parliamentarian, the queen commanded the captain not to strike, but to prepare at the extremity to blow up the ship, resisting the shrieks of her females and domestics. We perceive how, on every trying occasion, Henrietta never forgot that she was the daughter of Henry the Fourth; that glorious affinity was inherited by her with all the sexual pride; and hence, at times, that energy in her actions which was so far above her intellectual capacity.

And, indeed, when the awful events she had witnessed were one by one registered in her melancholy mind, the sensibility of the woman subdued the natural haughtiness of her character; but, true woman! the feeling creature of circumstances, at the Restoration she resumed it, and when the new court of Charles the Second would not endure her obsolete haughtiness, the dowager-queen left it in all the full bitterness of her spirit. An habitual gloom, and the meagreness of grief, during the commonwealth, had changed a countenance once the most lively; and her eyes, whose dark and dazzling lustre was ever celebrated, then only shone in tears. When she told her physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne, that she found her understanding was failing her, and seemed terrified lest it was approaching to madness, the court physician, hardly courtly to fallen majesty, replied, "Madam, fear not that; for you are already mad." Henrietta had lived to contemplate the awful changes of her reign, without comprehending them.

Waller, in the profusion of poetical decoration, makes Henrietta so beautiful, that her beauty would affect every lover "more than his private loves." She was "the whole world's mistress." A portrait in crayons of Henrietta at Hampton-court sadly reduces all his poetry, for the miraculous was only in the fancy of the court-poet. But there may be some truth in what he says of the eyes of Henrietta :

Such eyes as yours, on Jove himself, had thrown

As bright and fierce a lightning as his own.