Curiosities of Literature Volume Ii Part 21

"By this, sire, your majesty may perceive that this queen is every day trying new inventions to escape from this pa.s.sage (that is, on fixing her marriage, or the succession). She thinks that the Duke of Norfolk is princ.i.p.ally the cause of this insisting,[91] which one person and the other stand to; and is so angried against him, that, if she can find any decent pretext to arrest him, I think she will not fail to do it; and he himself, as I understand, has already very little doubt of this.[92]

The duke told the earl of Northumberland, that the queen remained steadfast to her own opinion, and would take no other advice than her own, and would do everything herself."

The storms in our parliament do not necessarily end in political s.h.i.+pwrecks, whenever the head of the government is an Elizabeth. She, indeed, sent down a prohibition to the house from all debate on the subject. But when she discovered a spirit in the commons, and language as bold as her own royal style, she knew how to revoke the exasperating prohibition. She even charmed them by the manner; for the commons returned her "prayers and thanks," and accompanied them with a subsidy.

Her majesty found by experience, that the present, like other pa.s.sions, was more easily calmed and quieted by following than resisting, observes Sir Symonds D'Ewes.

The wisdom of Elizabeth, however, did not weaken her intrepidity. The struggle was glorious for both parties; but how she escaped through the storm which her mysterious conduct had at once raised and quelled, the sweetness and the sharpness, the commendation and the reprimand of her n.o.ble speech in closing the parliament, are told by Hume with the usual felicity of his narrative.[93]

ANECDOTES OF PRINCE HENRY, THE SON OF JAMES I., WHEN A CHILD.

Prince Henry, the son of James I., whose premature death was lamented by the people, as well as by poets and historians, unquestionably would have proved an heroic and military character. Had he ascended the throne, the whole face of our history might have been changed; the days of Agincourt and Cressy had been revived, and Henry IX. had rivalled Henry V. It is remarkable that Prince Henry resembled that monarch in his features, as Ben Jonson has truly recorded, though in a complimentary verse, and as we may see by his picture, among the ancient English ones at Dulwich College. Merlin, in a masque by Jonson, addresses Prince Henry,

Yet rests that other thunderbolt of war, Harry the Fifth; to whom in face you are So like, as fate would have you so in worth.

A youth who perished in his eighteenth year has furnished the subject of a volume, which even the deficient animation of its writer has not deprived of attraction.[94] If the juvenile age of Prince Henry has proved such a theme for our admiration, we may be curious to learn what this extraordinary youth was even at an earlier period. Authentic anecdotes of children are rare; a child has seldom a biographer by his side. We have indeed been recently treated with "Anecdotes of Children,"

in the "Practical Education" of the literary family of the Edgeworths; but we may presume that as Mr. Edgeworth delighted in pieces of curious machinery in his house, these automatic infants, poets, and metaphysicians, of whom afterwards we have heard no more, seem to have resembled other automata, moving without any native impulse.

Prince Henry, at a very early age, not exceeding five years, evinced a thoughtfulness of character, extraordinary in a child. Something in the formation of this early character may be attributed to the Countess of Mar. This lady had been the nurse of James I., and to her care the king intrusted the prince. She is described in a ma.n.u.script of the times, as "an ancient, virtuous, and severe lady, who was the prince's governess from his cradle." At the age of five years the prince was consigned to his tutor, Mr. (afterwards Sir) Adam Newton, a man of learning and capacity, whom the prince at length chose for his secretary. The severity of the old countess, and the strict discipline of his tutor, were not received without affection and reverence; although not at times without a shrewd excuse, or a turn of pleasantry, which latter faculty the princely boy seems to have possessed in a very high degree.

The prince early attracted the attention and excited the hopes of those who were about his person. A ma.n.u.script narrative has been preserved, which was written by one who tells us, that he was "an attendant upon the prince's person since he was under the age of three years, having always diligently observed his disposition, behaviour, and speeches."[95] It was at the earnest desire of Lord and Lady Lumley that the writer of these anecdotes drew up this relation. The ma.n.u.script is without date; but as Lord Lumley died in April, 1609, and leaving no heir, his library was then purchased for the prince, Henry could not have reached his fifteenth year; this ma.n.u.script was evidently composed earlier: so that the _latest_ anecdotes could not have occurred beyond his thirteenth or fourteenth year,--a time of life when few children can furnish a curious miscellany about themselves.

The writer set down every little circ.u.mstance he considered worth noticing, as it occurred. I shall attempt a sort of arrangement of the most interesting, to show, by an unity of the facts, the characteristic touches of the mind and dispositions of the princely boy.

Prince Henry in his childhood rarely wept, and endured pain without a groan. When a boy wrestled with him in earnest, and threw him, he was not "seen to whine or weep at the hurt." His sense of justice was early; for when his playmate the little Earl of Mar ill-treated one of his pages, Henry reproved his puerile friend: "I love you because you are my lord's son and my cousin; but, if you be not better conditioned, I will love such an one better," naming the child that had complained of him.

The first time he went to the town of Stirling, to meet the king, observing without the gate of the town a stack of corn, it fancifully struck him with the shape of the top he used to play with, and the child exclaimed, "That's a good top." "Why do you not then play with it?" he was answered. "Set you it up for me, and I will play with it." This is just the fancy which we might expect in a lively child, with a shrewdness in the retort above its years.

His martial character was perpetually discovering itself. When asked what instrument he liked best, he answered, "a trumpet." We are told that none could dance with more grace, but that he never delighted in dancing; while he performed his heroical exercises with pride and delight, more particularly when before the king, the constable of Castile, and other amba.s.sadors. He was instructed by his master to handle and toss the pike, to march and hold himself in an affected style of stateliness, according to the martinets of those days; but he soon rejected such petty and artificial fas.h.i.+ons; yet to show that this dislike arose from no want of skill in a trifling accomplishment, he would sometimes resume it only to laugh at it, and instantly return to his own natural demeanour. On one of these occasions, one of these martinets observing that they could never be good soldiers unless they always kept true order and measure in marching, "What then must they do," cried Henry, "when they wade through a swift-running water?" In all things freedom of action from his own native impulse he preferred to the settled rules of his teachers; and when his physician told him that he rode too fast, he replied, "Must I ride by rules of physic?" When he was eating a cold capon in cold weather, the physician told him that that was not meat for the weather. "You may see, doctor," said Henry, "that my cook is no astronomer." And when the same physician, observing him eat cold and hot meat together, protested against it, "I cannot mind that now," said the royal boy, facetiously, "though they should have run at tilt together in my belly."

His national affections were strong. When one reported to Henry that the King of France had said that his b.a.s.t.a.r.d, as well as the b.a.s.t.a.r.d of Normandy, might conquer England, the princely boy exclaimed, "I'll to cuffs with him, if he go about any such means." There was a dish of jelly before the prince, in the form of a crown, with three lilies; and a kind of buffoon, whom the prince used to banter, said to the prince that that dish was worth a crown. "Ay!" exclaimed the future English hero, "I would I had that crown!"--"It would be a great dish," rejoined the buffoon. "How can that be," rejoined the prince, "since you value it but a crown?" When James I. asked him whether he loved Englishmen or Frenchmen better, he replied, "Englishmen, because he was of kindred to more n.o.ble persons of England than of France;" and when the king inquired whether he loved the English or the Germans better, he replied the English; on which the king observing that his mother was a German, the prince replied, "'Sir, you have the wyte thereof;'--a northern speech," adds the writer, "which is as much as to say,--you are the cause thereof."

Born in Scotland, and heir to the crown of England at a time when the mutual jealousies of the two nations were running so high, the boy often had occasion to express the unity of affection which was really in his heart. Being questioned by a n.o.bleman, whether, after his father, he had rather be king of England or Scotland, he asked, "Which of them was best?" Being answered, that it was England; "Then," said the Scottish-born prince, "would I have both!" And once, in reading this verse in Virgil,

Tros Tyriusve mihi nullo discrimine agetur,

the boy said he would make use of that verse for himself, with a slight alteration, thus,

Anglus Scotusve mihi nullo discrimine agetur.

He was careful to keep alive the same feeling in another part of the British dominions; and the young prince appears to have been regarded with great affection by the Welsh; for when once the prince asked a gentleman at what mark he should shoot, the courtier pointed with levity at a Welshman who was present. "Will you see, then," said the princely boy, "how I will shoot at Welshmen?" Turning his back from him, the prince shot his arrow in the air. When a Welshman, who had taken a large carouse, in the fulness of his heart and his head, said in the presence of the king, that the prince should have 40,000 Welshmen, to wait upon him against any king in Christendom; the king, not a little jealous, hastily inquired, "To do what?" The little prince turned away the momentary alarm by his facetiousness: "To cut off the heads of 40,000 leeks."

His bold and martial character was discoverable in minute circ.u.mstances like these. Eating in the king's presence a dish of milk, the king asked him why he ate so much child's meat. "Sir, it is also man's meat," Henry replied; and immediately after having fed heartily on a partridge, the king observed that that meat would make him a coward, according to the prevalent notions of the age respecting diet; to which the young prince replied, "though it be but a cowardly fowl, it shall not make me a coward." Once taking strawberries with two spoons, when one might have sufficed, our infant Mars gaily exclaimed, "The one I use as a rapier and the other as a dagger!"

Adam Newton appears to have filled his office as preceptor with no servility to the capricious fancies of the princely boy. Desirous, however, of cheris.h.i.+ng the generous spirit and playful humour of Henry, his tutor encouraged a freedom of jesting with him, which appears to have been carried at times to a degree of momentary irritability on the side of the tutor, by the keen humour of the boy. While the royal pupil held his master in equal reverence and affection, the gaiety of his temper sometimes twitched the equability or the gravity of the preceptor. When Newton, wis.h.i.+ng to set an example to the prince in heroic exercises, one day practised the pike, and tossing it with such little skill as to have failed in the attempt, the young prince telling him of his failure, Newton obviously lost his temper, observing, that "to find fault was an evil humour." "Master, I take the humour of you."

"It becomes not a prince," observed Newton. "Then," retorted the young prince, "doth it worse become a prince's master!" Some of these harmless bickerings are amusing. When his tutor, playing at shuffle-board with the prince, blamed him for changing so often, and taking up a piece, threw it on the board, and missed his aim, the prince smilingly exclaimed, "Well thrown, master;" on which the tutor, a little vexed, said "he would not strive with a prince at shuffle-board." Henry observed, "Yet you gownsmen should be best at such exercises, which are not meet for men who are more stirring." The tutor, a little irritated, said, "I am meet for whipping of boys." "You vaunt, then," retorted the prince, "that which a ploughman or cart-driver can do better than you."

"I can do more," said the tutor, "for I can govern foolish children." On which the prince, who, in his respect for his tutor, did not care to carry the jest farther, rose from the table, and in a low voice to those near him said, "he had need be a wise man that could do that." Newton was sometimes severe in his chastis.e.m.e.nt; for when the prince was playing at goff, and having warned his tutor, who was standing by in conversation, that he was going to strike the ball, and having lifted up the goff-club, some one observing, "Beware, sir, that you hit not Mr.

Newton!" the prince drew back the club, but smilingly observed, "Had I done so, I had but paid my debts." At another time, when he was amusing himself with the sports of a child, his tutor wis.h.i.+ng to draw him to more manly exercises, amongst other things, said to him in good humour, "G.o.d send you a wise wife!" "That she may govern you and me!" said the prince. The tutor observed, that "he had one of his own;" the prince replied, "But mine, if I have one, would govern your wife, and by that means would govern both you and me!" Henry, at this early age, excelled in a quickness of reply, combined with reflection, which marks the precocity of his intellect. His tutor having laid a wager with the prince that he could not refrain from standing with his back to the fire, and seeing him forget himself once or twice, standing in that posture, the tutor said, "Sir, the wager is won, you have failed twice."

"Master," replied Henry, "Saint Peter's c.o.c.k crew thrice."--A musician having played a voluntary in his presence, was requested to play the same again. "I could not for the kingdom of Spain," said the musician, "for this were harder than for a preacher to repeat word by word a sermon that he had not learned by rote." A clergyman standing by, observed that he thought a preacher might do that: "Perhaps," rejoined the young prince, "for a bishopric!"

The natural facetiousness of his temper appears frequently in the good humour with which the little prince was accustomed to treat his domestics. He had two of opposite characters, who were frequently set by the ears for the sake of the sport; the one, Murray, nicknamed "the tailor," loved his liquor; and the other was a stout "trencherman." The king desired the prince to put an end to these broils, and to make the men agree, and that the agreement should be written and subscribed by both. "Then," said the prince, "must the drunken tailor subscribe it with chalk, for he cannot write his name, and then I will make them agree upon this condition--that the trencherman shall go into the cellar, and drink with Will Murray, and Will Murray shall make a great wallet for the trencherman to carry his victuals in."--One of his servants having cut the prince's finger, and sucked out the blood with his mouth, that it might heal the more easily, the young prince, who expressed no displeasure at the accident, said to him pleasantly, "If, which G.o.d forbid! my father, myself, and the rest of his kindred should fail, you might claim the crown, for you have now in you the blood-royal."--Our little prince once resolved on a hearty game of play, and for this purpose only admitted his young gentlemen, and excluded the men: it happened that an old servant, not aware of the injunction, entered the apartment, on which the prince told him he might play too; and when the prince was asked why he admitted this old man rather than the other men, he rejoined, "Because he had a right to be of their number, for _Senex bis puer_."

Nor was Henry susceptible of gross flattery, for when once he wore white shoes, and one said that he longed to kiss his foot, the prince said to the fawning courtier, "Sir, I am not the pope;" the other replied that "he would not kiss the pope's foot, except it were to bite off his great toe." The prince gravely rejoined: "At Rome you would be glad to kiss his foot and forget the rest."

It was then the mode, when the king or the prince travelled, to sleep with their suite at the houses of the n.o.bility; and the loyalty and zeal of the host were usually displayed in the reception given to the royal guest. It happened that in one of these excursions the prince's servants complained that they had been obliged to go to bed supperless, through the pinching parsimony of the house, which the little prince at the time of hearing seemed to take no great notice of. The next morning the lady of the house coming to pay her respects to him, she found him turning over a volume that had many pictures in it; one of which was a painting of a company sitting at a banquet: this he showed her. "I invite you, madam, to a feast." "To what feast?" she asked. "To this feast," said the boy. "What! would your highness give me but a painted feast?" Fixing his eye on her, he said, "No better, madam, is found in this house."

There was a delicacy and greatness of spirit in this ingenious reprimand far excelling the wit of a child.

According to this anecdote-writer, it appears that James the First probably did not delight in the martial dispositions of his son, whose habits and opinions were, in all respects, forming themselves opposite to his own tranquil and literary character. The writer says, that "his majesty, with the tokens of love to him, would sometimes interlace sharp speeches, and other demonstrations of fatherly severity." Henry, who however lived, though he died early, to become a patron of ingenious men, and a lover of genius, was himself at least as much enamoured of the pike as of the pen. The king, to rouse him to study, told him, that if he did not apply more diligently to his book, his brother, duke Charles, who seemed already attached to study, would prove more able for government and for the cabinet, and that himself would be only fit for field exercises and military affairs. To his father, the little prince made no reply; but when his tutor one day reminded him of what his father had said, to stimulate our young prince to literary diligence, Henry asked, whether he thought his brother would prove so good a scholar. His tutor replied that he was likely to prove so. 'Then,'

rejoined our little prince, 'will I make Charles Archbishop of Canterbury.'"

Our Henry was devoutly pious, and rigid in never permitting before him any licentious language or manners. It is well known that James the First had a habit of swearing,--expletives in conversation, which, in truth, only expressed the warmth of his feelings; but in that age, when Puritanism had already possessed half the nation, an oath was considered as nothing short of blasphemy. Henry once made a keen allusion to this verbal frailty of his father's; for when he was told that some hawks were to be sent to him, but it was thought that the king would intercept some of them, he replied, "He may do as he pleases, for he shall not be put to the oath for the matter." The king once asking him what were the best verses he had learned in the first book of Virgil, Henry answered, "These:--

'Rex erat aeneas n.o.bis, quo justior alter Nec pietate fuit, nec bello major et armis.'"

Such are a few of the puerile anecdotes of a prince who died in early youth, gleaned from a contemporary ma.n.u.script, by an eye and ear witness. They are trifles, but trifles consecrated by his name. They are genuine; and the philosopher knows how to value the indications of a great and heroic character. There are among them some which may occasion an inattentive reader to forget that they are all the speeches and the actions of a child!

THE DIARY OF A MASTER OF THE CEREMONIES.

Of court-etiquette few are acquainted with the mysteries, and still fewer have lost themselves in its labyrinth of forms. Whence its origin?

Perhaps from those grave and courtly Italians, who, in their petty pompous courts, made the whole business of their effeminate days consist in _punctilios_; and, wanting realities to keep themselves alive, affected the mere shadows of life and action, in a world of these mockeries of state. It suited well the genius of a people who boasted of elementary works to teach how affronts were to be given, and how to be taken; and who had some reason to pride themselves in producing the Cortegiano of Castiglione, and the Galateo of Della Casa. They carried this refining temper into the most trivial circ.u.mstances, when a court was to be the theatre, and monarchs and their representatives the actors. Precedence, and other honorary discriminations, establish the useful distinctions of ranks, and of individuals; but their minuter court forms, subtilised by Italian conceits, with an erudition of precedents, and a logic of nice distinctions, imparted a mock dignity of science to the solemn fopperies of a master of the ceremonies, who exhausted all the faculties of his soul on the equiponderance of the first place of inferior degree with the last of a superior; who turned into a political contest the placing of a chair and a stool; made a reception at the stairs'-head, or at the door, raise a clash between two rival nations; a visit out of time require a negotiation of three months; or an awkward invitation produce a sudden fit of sickness; while many a rising antagonist, in the formidable shapes of amba.s.sadors, were ready to despatch a courier to their courts, for the omission or neglect of a single _punctilio_. The pride of nations, in pacific times, has only these means to maintain their jealousy of power: yet should not the people be grateful to the sovereign who confines his campaigns to his drawing-room: whose field-marshal is a tripping master of the ceremonies; whose stratagems are only to save the inviolability of court-etiquette; and whose battles of peace are only for precedence?

When the Earls of Holland and Carlisle, our amba.s.sadors extraordinary to the court of France, in 1624, were at Paris, to treat of the marriage of Charles with Henrietta, and to join in a league against Spain, before they showed their propositions, they were desirous of ascertaining in what manner Cardinal Richelieu would receive them. The Marquis of Ville-aux-Clers was employed in this negotiation, which appeared at least as important as the marriage and the league. He brought for answer, that the cardinal would receive them as he did the amba.s.sadors of the Emperor and the King of Spain; that he could not give them the right hand in his own house, because he never honoured in this way those amba.s.sadors; but that, in reconducting them out of his room, he would go farther than he was accustomed to do, provided that they would permit him to cover this unusual proceeding with a pretext, that the others might not draw any consequences from it in their favour. Our amba.s.sadors did not disapprove of this expedient, but they begged time to receive the instructions of his majesty. As this would create a considerable delay, they proposed another, which would set at rest, for the moment, the _punctilio_. They observed, that if the cardinal would feign himself sick, they would go to see him: on which the cardinal immediately went to bed, and an interview, so important to both nations, took place, and articles of great difficulty were discussed by the cardinal's bedside!

When the Nuncio Spada would have made the cardinal jealous of the pretensions of the English amba.s.sadors, and reproached him with yielding his precedence to them, the cardinal denied this. "I never go before them, it is true, but likewise I never accompany them; I wait for them only in the chamber of audience, either seated in the most honourable place, or standing till the table is ready: I am always the first to speak, and the first to be seated; and besides, I have never chosen to return their visit, which has made the Earl of Carlisle so outrageous."[96]

Such was the ludicrous gravity of those court etiquettes, or _punctilios_, combined with political consequences, of which I am now to exhibit a picture.

When James the First ascended the throne of his united kingdoms, and promised himself and the world long halcyon days of peace, foreign princes, and a long train of amba.s.sadors from every European power, resorted to the English court. The pacific monarch, in emulation of an office which already existed in the courts of Europe, created that of MASTER OF THE CEREMONIES, after the mode of France, observes Roger c.o.ke.[97] This was now found necessary to preserve the state, and allay the perpetual jealousies of the representatives of their sovereigns. The first officer was Sir Lewis Lewknor,[98] with an a.s.sistant, Sir John Finett, who at length succeeded him, under Charles the First, and seems to have been more amply blest with the genius of the place; his soul doted on the honour of the office; and in that age of peace and of ceremony, we may be astonished at the subtilty of his inventive s.h.i.+fts and contrivances, in quieting that school of angry and rigid boys whom he had under his care--the amba.s.sadors of Europe!

Sir John Finett, like a man of genius in office, and living too in an age of diaries, has not resisted the pleasant labour of perpetuating his own narrative.[99] He has told every circ.u.mstance, with a chronological exact.i.tude, which pa.s.sed in his province as master of the ceremonies; and when we consider that he was a busy actor amidst the whole diplomatic corps, we shall not he surprised by discovering, in this small volume of great curiosity, a vein of secret and authentic history; it throws a new light on many important events, in which the historians of the times are deficient, who had not the knowledge of this a.s.siduous observer. But my present purpose is not to treat Sir John with all the ceremonious _punctilios_, of which he was himself the arbiter; nor to quote him on grave subjects, which future historians may well do.

This volume contains the rupture of a morning, and the peace-makings of an evening; sometimes it tells of "a _clash_ between the Savoy and Florence amba.s.sadors for precedence;"--now of "_questions_ betwixt the Imperial and Venetian amba.s.sadors, concerning _t.i.tles_ and _visits_,"

how they were to address one another, and who was to pay the first visit!--then "the Frenchman takes _exceptions_ about _placing_." This historian of the levee now records, "that the French amba.s.sador gets ground of the Spanish;" but soon after, so eventful were these drawing-room politics, that a day of festival has pa.s.sed away in suspense, while a privy council has been hastily summoned, to inquire _why_ the French amba.s.sador had "a defluction of rheum in his teeth, besides a fit of the ague," although he hoped to be present at the same festival next year! or being invited to a mask, declared "his stomach would not agree with cold meats:" "thereby pointing" (shrewdly observes Sir John) "at the invitation and presence of the Spanish amba.s.sador, who, at the mask _the Christmas before_, had appeared in the first place."

Sometimes we discover our master of the ceremonies disentangling himself and the lord chamberlain from the most provoking perplexities by a clever and civil lie. Thus it happened, when the Muscovite amba.s.sador would not yield precedence to the French nor Spaniard. On this occasion, Sir John, at his wits' end, contrived an obscure situation, in which the Russ imagined he was highly honoured, as there he enjoyed a full sight of the king's face, though he could see nothing of the entertainment itself; while the other amba.s.sadors were so kind as "not to take exception," not caring about the Russian, from the remoteness of his country, and the little interest that court then had in Europe! But Sir John displayed even a bolder invention when the Muscovite, at his reception at Whitehall, complained that only one lord was in waiting at the stairs'-head, while no one had met him in the court-yard. Sir John a.s.sured him that in England it was considered a greater honour to be received by one lord than by two!

Sir John discovered all his ac.u.men in the solemn investigation of "Which was the upper end of the table?" Arguments and inferences were deduced from precedents quoted; but as precedents sometimes look contrary ways, this affair might still have remained _sub judice_, had not Sir John oracularly p.r.o.nounced that "in spite of the chimneys in England, where the best man sits, is that end of the table." Sir John, indeed, would often take the most enlarged view of things; as when the Spanish amba.s.sador, after hunting with the king at Theobalds, dined with his majesty in the privy-chamber, his son Don Antonio dined in the council-chamber with some of the king's attendants. Don Antonio seated himself on a stool at the end of the table. "One of the gentlemen-ushers took exception at this, being, he said, irregular and unusual, that place being ever wont to be reserved _empty for state_!" In a word, no person in the world was ever to sit on that stool; but Sir John, holding a conference before he chose to disturb the Spanish grandee, finally determined that "this was the _superst.i.tion_ of a gentleman-usher, and it was therefore neglected." Thus Sir John could, at a critical moment, exert a more liberal spirit, and risk an empty stool against a little ease and quiet; which were no common occurrences with that martyr of state, a master of ceremonies!

But Sir John,--to me he is so entertaining a personage that I do not care to get rid of him,--had to overcome difficulties which stretched his fine genius on tenter-hooks. Once--rarely did the like unlucky accident happen to the wary master of the ceremonies--did Sir John exceed the civility of his instructions, or rather his half-instructions. Being sent to invite the Dutch amba.s.sador and the States' commissioners, then a young and new government, to the ceremonies of St. George's day, they inquired whether they should have the same respect paid to them as other amba.s.sadors? The bland Sir John, out of the milkiness of his blood, said he doubted it not. As soon, however, as he returned to the lord chamberlain, he discovered that he had been sought for up and down, to stop the invitation. The lord chamberlain said Sir John had exceeded his commission, if he had invited the Dutchmen "to stand in the closet of the queen's side; because the Spanish amba.s.sador would never endure them _so near him, where there was but a thin wainscot board between, and a window which might be opened_!"

Sir John said gently, he had done no otherwise than he had been desired; which however the lord chamberlain, _in part_, denied, (cautious and civil!) "and I was not so unmannerly as to contest against," (supple, but uneasy!) This affair ended miserably for the poor Dutchmen. Those new republicans were then regarded with the most jealous contempt by all the amba.s.sadors, and were just venturing on their first dancing-steps, to move among crowned heads. The Dutch now resolved not to be present; declaring they had just received an _urgent invitation_, from the Earl of Exeter, to dine at Wimbledon. A piece of _supercherie_ to save appearances; probably the happy contrivance of the combined geniuses of the lord chamberlain and the master of the ceremonies!

I will now exhibit some curious details from these archives of fantastical state, and paint a courtly world, where politics and civility seem to have been at perpetual variance.