The king's repartees were some of them really good, and he obtained in his day the reputation of being quite a wit, while yet all his actions, and the whole of his management of his affairs, were so utterly unwise and so wholly unworthy of his station, that every one was struck with the contrast. One of the wits of his court one day wrote an epitaph for him, over his door, as follows:
"Here lies our sovereign lord the king,
Whose word no man relies on,
Who never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one."
When the king came and saw this inscription, he stopped to read it, and said, "Yes, that is very true; and the reason is, my doings are those of my ministers, while my sayings are my own."
Charles had, in fact, very little to do with the public affairs of his kingdom. He liked to build palaces and ships, and he expended vast sums, not very judiciously, on these plans. Sir Christopher Wren, the famous architect, planned one of these palaces, and Charles, when he went to see it, complained that the rooms were too small. Sir Christopher walked about with a self-important air, looking up at the ceiling, and said that he thought they were high enough. Sir Christopher was very small in stature. Charles accordingly squatted down as well as he could, to get his head in as low a position as the architect's, and walked about the room in that ridiculous attitude, looking up in mimicry of Sir Christopher's manner, and then said, "Oh, yes, now I think they are high enough."
These building plans, and other similar undertakings, together with the vast amounts which the king lavished upon his numerous female favorites, exhausted his resources, and kept him in continual straits for money. He was always urging Parliament to make new grants, and to lay more taxes, until, as he said himself, he was ashamed to look his Parliament in the face, he was so continually begging them for supplies. The people caricatured him by the representation of a poverty stricken man, with his pockets turned inside out, and begging money. At another time the caricature took the form of a man led along against his will by two women, and threatened by a third, wearing all the time a countenance expressive of helplessness and distress.
The king bore all these things with the utmost good nature, satisfied, apparently, if he could only enjoy the pleasures of dissipation and vice, and continue, in his palaces, a perpetual round of reckless merriment and fun. Some of the stories which are gravely told by the historians of the day are scarcely credible. For instance, it is said that a thief one day found his way, in the guise of a gentleman, into one of the royal drawing rooms, and contrived to get a gold snuff box out of the pocket of one of the noblemen there. Just as he had successfully accomplished his object, unobserved, as he supposed, he looked up, and saw the king's eyes fastened upon him. Knowing his majesty's character, the thief had the presence of mind to give him a wink, with a sly gesture enjoining secrecy. The king nodded assent, and the thief went away with his prize. When the nobleman missed his snuff box, the king amused himself some time with his perplexity and surprise, and then told him that it was of no use for him to search for his snuff box, for a thief had gone off with it half an hour ago. "I saw him," said the king, with a countenance full of fun, "but I could not do any thing. The rascal made me his confidant, and, of course, you know, I could not betray him."
Under the government of such a sovereign, it could not be expected that the public affairs of the realm would have gone on very prosperously. Still, however, they might have been conducted with ordinary success by his ministers, and perhaps they were, in fact, managed as well as was usual with the governments of Europe in those days. It happened, however, that three great public calamities occurred, all of a most marked and signal character, which were, perhaps, not owing at all to causes for which Charles was responsible, but which have nevertheless connected such associations in men's minds with this unfortunate reign, as that Englishmen have since looked back upon it with very little pleasure. These three calamities were the plague, the fire, and the Dutch invasion.
There have been a great many seasons of plague in London, all inconceivably dreadful; but as King Charles's fire was first among conflagrations, so his plague was the greatest pestilence that ever ravaged the city. London was, in those days, in a condition which exactly adapted it to be the easy prey of pestilence, famine, and fire. The people were crowded together in vast masses, with no comforts, no cleanliness, no proper organization. The enormous vegetable and animal accumulations of such a multitude, living more like brutes than men, produced a continual miasma, which prepared the constitutions of thousands for any infection which might chance to light among them. Pestilence is, in fact, the rude and dreadful remedy which nature provides for the human misery which man himself can not or will not cure. When the dictates of reason and conscience are neglected or disobeyed, and the ills which they might have averted sink the social state into a condition of degradation and wretchedness so great that the denser accumulations of the people become vast and corrupted swarms of vermin instead of organized communities of men, then plague and fever come in as the last resort-half remedy, half retribution-devised by that mysterious principle which struggles perpetually for the preservation of the human race, to thin off the excessive accumulation by destroying a portion of the surplus in so frightful a way as to drive away the rest in terror.
The great plague of London took place in 1665, one year before the fire. The awful scenes which the whole city presented, no pen can describe. A hundred thousand persons are said to have died. The houses where cases of the plague existed were marked with a red cross and shut up, the inmates being all fastened in, to live or die, at the mercy of the infection. Every day carts rolled through the otherwise silent and desolate streets, men accompanying them to gather up with pitchforks the dead bodies which had been dragged out from the dwellings, and crying "Bring out your dead" as they went along. [Footnote: Sometimes the living were pitched into the cart by mistake instead of the dead. There is a piece of sculpture in the Tottenham Court road in London intended to commemorate the following case. A Scotch piper, who had been wandering in homeless misery about the streets, with nothing but his bagpipes and his dog, got intoxicated at last, as such men always do, if they can, in times of such extreme and awful danger, and laid down upon the steps of a public building and went to sleep. The cart came along in the night, by torchlight, and one of the men who attended it, inserting the point of his fork under the poor vagabond's belt, tossed him into the cart, bagpipes and all. The dog did all he could to defend his master, but in vain. The cart went thundering on, the men walking along by its side, examining the ways for new additions to their load. The piper, half awakened by the shock of his precipitation into the cart, and aroused still more by the joltings of the road, sat up, attempted in vain to rally his bewildered faculties, looked about him, wondering where he was, and then instinctively began to play. The men, astonished and terrified at such sounds from a cart loaded with the dead, fled in all directions, leaving the cart in the middle of the street alone.
What a mysterious and inconsistent principle is fear. Here are men braving, unconcerned and at their ease, the most absolutely appalling of all possible human dangers, and yet terrified out of their senses at an unexpected sound.]Thousands went mad with their uncontrollable terror, and roamed about the streets in raving delirium, killing themselves, and mothers killing their children, in an insane and frenzied idea of escaping by that means, somehow or other, from the dreadful destroyer.