Chapter 10

I went with Lord Howard of Norfolk to visit Sir William Ducie at Charlton, where we din’d; the servants made our coachmen so drunk that they both fell off their boxes on the heath,where we were fain to leave them, and were driven to London by two servants of my Lord’s.This barbarous custom of making the masters welcome by intoxicating the servantshad now the second time happen’d to my coachmen.

[The italics are not Evelyn’s.]

A writer, by name Joseph Rigbie, slashingly exposes intemperance and its incentives, thetavernandtoasting:—

The tap-house fits them for a jaile,The jaile to the gibbet sends them without faile;For those that through a lattice sang of lateYou oft find crying through an iron grate.

And again:—

Yea every cup is fast to others wedged.They always double drink, they must be pledged.He that begins, how many so’er they be,Looks that each one do drink as much as he.

And further on, to the same effect:—

Oh! how they’ll wind men in, do what they can,By drinking healths, first unto such a man,Then unto such a woman! Then they’ll sendAn health to each man’s mistresse or his friend;Then to their kindreds or their parents deare,They needs must have the other jug of beere;Then to their captains and commanders stout,Who for to pledge they think none shall stand out;Last to the king and queen they’ll have a cruse.Whom for to pledge they think none dare refuse.[147]

‘We seem,’ wrote Reeve in hisPlea for Nineveh, quoted in Malcolm’sManners and Customs of London, i. p. 286, ‘to be steeped in liquors, or to be the dizzy island. We drink as if we were nothing but sponges ... or had tunnels in our mouths.... We are the grape-suckers of the earth.’

That the ignorant and thoughtless should have been swept into this vortex of dissipation is not surprising, but one marvels that a man of power, and in some sort a philosopher, should have stooped to translate an utterly frivolous and worthless poem of St. Amant, of which a mere quotation is sickening:—

Wine, my boy; we’ll sing and laugh,All night revel, rant, and quaff;Till the morn stealing behind us,At the table sleepless find us.When our bones (alas!) shall haveA cold lodging in the grave;When swift death shall overtake us,We shall sleep and none can wake us.Drink we then the juice o’ the vine,Make our breasts Lyæus’ shrine;Bacchus, our debauch beholding,By thy image I am moulding,Whilst my brains I do replenishWith this draught of unmixed Rhenish;By thy full-branched ivy twine;By this sparkling glass of wine;By thy thyrsus so renowned,By the healths with which th’art crowned;* * * *To thy frolic order call us,Knights of the deep bowl install us;And to shew thyself divine,Never let it want for wine.

It would be thoroughly to the liking of such a patient that Dr. Tobias Whitaker (1638) should publish hisBlood of the Grape, ‘proving the possibility of maintaining Life from Infancy to Old Age without Sickness, by the Use of Wine.’

In point of sobriety the Cavaliers have often been unfavourably contrasted with the Roundheads. The evidence for this, apart from mere recrimination (which in this case is a two-edged sword), has yet to be produced. The manners of the two factions were doubtless diverse. ‘Your friends, the Cavaliers,’ said a Roundhead to a Royalist, ‘are very dissolute and debauched.’ ‘True,’ replied the Royalist, ‘they have the infirmities of men; but your friends the Roundheads have the vices of devils—tyranny, rebellion, and spiritual pride.’ We would fain hope that they were sober all round, and that Cromwell’s description of his troops was unassailable. The mother of Cromwell set up the brewery at Huntingdon which is still flourishing. It was this slight connection with ‘the trade’ which gained for Cromwell the agnomen of ‘the brewer.’

The story is told, ‘a tradition’ (Hume), that one day sitting at table, the Protector had a bottle of wine brought him, of a kind which he valued so highly that he must needs open the bottle himself; but, in attempting it, the corkscrew dropt from his hand. Immediately his courtiers and generals flung themselves on the floor to recover it. Cromwell burst out laughing. ‘Should any fool,’ said he, ‘put in his head at the door, he would fancy, from your posture, that you were seeking the Lord, and you are only seeking a corkscrew.’ Onesees here that Cromwell is addressing his ‘men of religion.’ There was much of it real or unreal; and a curious monument of the fashion then prevalent of giving sacred names to everything and everybody is furnished by the tavern sign of the ‘Goat and Compasses,’ which reveals the naked truth that ‘Praise God Barebones’ preferred drinking his tankard of ale at the tavern whose sign was ‘God encompasseth us’ to any other ale-house. On the other hand it should be noted that, according to the late Thomas Carlyle’sLetters and Speeches of Cromwell, ‘the stories of his wild living while in town ... rest exclusively on Carrion Heath.... Of evidence that he ever lived a wild life about town, or elsewhere, there exists no particle.’

The funeral of the Protector is thus described by Evelyn:—

It was the joyfullest funerall I ever saw, for there were none that cried but dogs, while the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise, drinking and taking tobacco in the streetes as they went.

Clublife was becoming more and more unfavourable to sobriety. The ‘Everlasting Club,’ instituted during the Civil War, was especially bibulous and riotous. So much so, that a good-for-nothing devotee of the bottle was satirically dubbed a member of that club. A writer cited by Timbs notes that ‘since their first institution they have smoked fifty tons of tobacco, drank thirty thousand butts of ale, one thousand hogsheads of red port, two hundred barrels of brandy, andonekilderkine of small beer.’ They sat night and day, one party relieving another. The fire was never allowed to go out, being perpetuated by an old woman in the nature of a Vestal. The delight of the members was in ‘old catches which they sang at all hours, to encourage one another to moisten their clay, and grow immortal by drinking.’

But Eastern products were soon to create a revolution in the national diet. Sir Anthony Shirley, one of the celebrated trio of brothers, travellers, when he arrived at Aleppo in 1598, first tasted a drink that he described as being made of a seed which will ‘soon intoxicate the brain,’ and which, though nothing toothsome, was wholesome: this wascoffee. In 1650 was opened at Oxford the first coffee-house by Jacobs, a Jew, at the Angel, in the parish of St. Peter in the East; and there it was, by some who delighted in novelty, drunk. Hence the antiquary Oldys is incorrect in stating that the use of coffee in England was first known in 1657.

Mr. Edwards, a Turkey merchant, brought from Smyrna to London one Pasqua Rosee, a Ragusan youth, who prepared this drink for him every morning. But the novelty thereof drawing too much company to him, he allowed his said servant, with another of his son-in-law, to sell it publicly, and they set up the first coffee-house in London in St. Michael’s Alley in Cornhill.[148]

Of course it was a panacea for all ills. An original handbill of Rosee’s, headed, ‘The Vertue of the Coffee Drink,’ thus sounds its praises:—

The quality of this drink is cold and dry; and though it be a drier, yet it neither heats nor inflames more than hot posset. It so encloseth the orifice of the stomach, and fortifies the heat within, that it is very good to help digestion; and therefore of great use to be taken about three or four o’clock afternoon, as well as in the morning. It much quickens the spirits, and makes the heart lightsome; it is good against sore eyes, and the better if you hold your head over it and take in the steam that way. It suppresseth fumes exceedingly, and therefore is good against the headache, and will very much stop any defluxion of rheums that distil from the head upon the stomach, and so prevent and help consumptions and the cough of the lungs. It is excellent to prevent and cure the dropsy, gout, and scurvy.... It is better than any other drying drink for people in years, or children that have any running humours upon them, as the king’s evil, &c. It is a most excellent remedy againstthe spleen, hypochondriac winds, and the like. It will prevent drowsiness.... It is observed that in Turkey, where this is generally drunk, that they are not troubled with the stone, gout, dropsy, or scurvy, and that their skins are exceeding clear and white. It is neither laxative nor restringent.

And indeed its virtues must have been generally conceded, for it became fashionable in the reign of Charles II., and is thus alluded to by Pope, who attributes to it an additional virtue:—

Coffee, which makes the politician wise,And see through all things with his half-shut eyes.[149]

The authors of theHistory of Signboardsstate that the ‘Rainbow,’ in Fleet Street, opposite Chancery Lane, is the oldest coffee-house in London:—

I find it recorded that one James Farr, a barber, who kept the coffee-house, which is now the Rainbow, by the Inner Temple gate (one of the first in England), was, in the year 1657, presented by the inquest of St. Dunstan’s in the West, for making and selling a sort of liquor called Coffee, as a great nuisance and prejudice to the neighbourhood, &c., and who would have thought London would ever have had near three thousand such nuisances, and that coffee would have been (as now) so much drank by the best of quality and physicians.

The presentation here alluded to is still preserved among the records of St. Sepulchre’s church. It says:—

We present James Farr, barber, for making and selling a drink called coffee, whereby, in making the same, he annoyeth his neighboors by evill smells, and for keeping of fire the most part night and day, whereby his chimney and chamber has been set on fire, to the great danger and affreightment of his neighboors.[150]

Roger North, attorney-general to James II., says:—

The use of coffee-houses seems newly improved by a new invention called chocolate houses, for the benefit of rooks and cullies of all the quality; where gaming is added to all the rest, ... as if the devil had erected a new university, and those were the colleges of its professors, as well as his school of discipline.[151]

Chocolate was advertised as a new drink in 1657:—

In Bishopsgate Street in Queen’s Head Alley, at a Frenchman’s house, is an excellent West India drink called chocolate to be sold, where you may have it ready at any time, and also unmade, at reasonable rates.

The reputation of chocolate upon its introduction was fluctuating. This appears in the letters of Madame de Sévigné, who at one time recommends it to her daughter with all fervour, whilst at other times she decries it as the root of all evil.

But however much the introduction into our country of such drinks was destined to discover a rival to intoxicants, the fact remains that the public taste had by the habit of long ages become vitiated, and England had earned for herself the distinction of the ‘land of drunkards.’

True it is that the Protector strove to repress intemperance by fines and punishments. The rigid restrictions of the republican rule were manifested in the strict surveillance maintained over the people, with the view of securing temperance. Convictions for drunkenness were of daily occurrence; and it was often the practice to remove all doubts of the sufficiency of testimony by producing the delinquent in court under the influence of drink. Many are the instances in which it is recorded by the convicting justice that some offender was ‘drunk in my view.’ They were in the habit, moreover, of making nice distinctions as to the grades of intoxication.

The ‘drunkard’s cloak’ was an instrument of punishmentthen in use, which might with advantage be revived. It was a cask with a hole at the top, through which the drunkard’s head protruded, and one on each side for either hand. The legs were free for the offender to perambulate with the instrument of disgrace about him.[152]

Some strong language was uttered from the pulpit against drunkenness. Dr. Robert Harris, President of Trinity College, Oxford, in the dedication to theDrunkard’s Cup, a sermon, speaks of thears bibendias having become a great profession:—

There are lawes and ceremonies to be observed both by the firsts and seconds. There is a drinking by thefoot, by theyard, &c., a drinking by thedouzens, by thescores, &c., for thewager, for thevictory,man against man,house against house,town against town. There are also terms of art, fetched from hell, for the better distinguishing of the practitioners; one iscoloured, another isfoxt, a third isgone to the dogs, &c.

In the sermon he speaks of ‘the strange saucinesse of base vermine, in tossing the name of his most excellent Majesty in their foaming mouthes, and in daring to make that a shooing-horne to draw on drink by drinking healths to him.’[153]

Dr. Grindrod draws attention in hisBacchusto a prominent appeal of about the same date entitled,The Blemish of Government, the Shame of Religion, the Disgrace of Mankind: ‘or, a charge drawn up against Drunkards, and presented to his highness the Lord Protector, in the name of all the sober party in the three nations,’ by R. Younge. The book is not procurable; but assuming the quotation to be correct the statistic is astounding:—

It is sad to consider how many will hear this charge for one that will apply it to himself, for confident I am that fifteen of twenty, this city over [London] aredrunkards, yea, seducing drunkards, in the dialect of Scripture, and by the law of God which extends to the heart and the affections.... Perhaps by the law of the land, a man is not taken for drunk except his eyes stare, his tongue stutter, his legs stagger; but by God’s law, he is one that goes often to the drink, or that tarries long at it (Prov. xxiii. 30, 31). He that will be drawn to drink when he hath neitherneed of itnormind to it, to the spending ofmoney, wasting of precioustime, discredit of theGospel, the stumbling-block ofweak ones, and hardening associates ... is a drunkard.

Presuming that Younge’s statement is at all within the mark, it will account for the effort put forth at the London sessions in 1654, wherein it was ordered that ‘no new licences shall be granted for two years.’

Great was the magnificence of the pageant upon the restoration of King Charles II. The conduits flowed with a ‘variety of delicious wines.’ At the Stocks was a fountain, of the Tuscan order, ‘venting wine.’ The event was commemorated at Charing Cross by the sign of the Pageant Tavern, which represented the triumphal arch there and then erected, and which remained some time after. Various were the forms that exuberance assumed. At the rejoicings at Edinburgh for the Restoration, at the Lord Provost’s return he was at every bonfire complimented with thebreaking of glasses—one of the concomitant formalities of toasting.

Beyond the natural outburst of rejoicing at so great an occasion, there is abundant corroboration of the remark of Fosbroke, that ‘drinking healths wasuncommonlyprevalent, and productive of much intemperance, immediately after andon account ofthe Restoration.’ Royalty will be always prominently recognised at our public rejoicings, as a matter of course, and of right. May the health of the Sovereign and Royal Family always be proposed! Always, when the concomitant ofdrinking ithas become obsolete.[154]What a volume could be written on the customs which have gathered about the toasting of our monarchs alone! One of these comes at once to mind in connection with the Second Charles. Pepys, in hisDiary(1662-3), describes his own dining at ‘Chirurgeons’ Hall.’ He tells that:—

Among other observables we drunk the King’s health out of a gilt cup given by King Henry VIII. to this Company, with bells hanging at it, which every man is to ring by shaking after he hath drunk up the whole cup.

Another curious circumstance will be mentioned presently in connection with the toasting his successor, James.

But it is time again to review the material of all this rejoicing. At this period of the seventeenth century the importation of French wines into England was two-fifths of her consumption.[155]Mr. Cyrus Redding states that in 1675, there came to England 7,495 tuns of French wine to 20 of those of Portugal; and in 1676 no less than 9,645 French, to 83 Portuguese; soon after which date French wines were prohibited for seven years.[156]

Navarre wine, which the same author mentions among other wines of the Basses Pyrénées as of goodquality, was coming into fashion. Pepys mentions his dining at Whitehall with the Duke of York, who did ‘mightily commend some new sort of wine lately found out, called Navarr wine, which I tasted, and is, I think, good wine.’ Bacharach was becoming a favourite Rhenish wine. Redding tells that German writers pretend that this Bacharach derived its name from the deity of wine, a stone still existing in the river, which they call Bacchus’ altar.

The famous author ofHudibrasintroduces us to the names of some of these wines which had recently come into vogue:—

Those win the day that win the race;And that which would not pass in fights,Has done the feats with easy flights,Recover’d many a desp’rate campaignWith Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champaign;Restor’d the fainting high and mightyWith brandy, wine, andaqua vitæ;And made ‘em stoutly overcomeWith Bacchrach, Hockamore, and Mum.

What a satirist was Butler, of drink, drinkers, everybody!

Of drink:—

Drink has overwhelmed and drowned,Far greater numbers on dry ground,Of wretched mankind, one by one,Than e’er the flood before had done.

Of drinkers—e.g.‘on a Club of Sots’:—

The jolly members of a toping club,Like pipestaves, are but hooped into a tub,And in a close confederacy linkFor nothing else but only to hold drink.

Of everybody (to whom he was politically opposed)—appealing to the Muse:—

Thou that with ale, or viler liquors,Didst inspire Withers, Prynne, and Vickers,And force them, though it was in spiteOf Nature, and their stars, to write.[157]

Other light wines are sung of in John Oldham’sWorks(1684):—

Let wealthy merchants when they dine,Run o’er their witty names of wine:Their chests of Florence and their Mont Alchine,Their Mants, Champaigns, Chablees, Frontiniacks tell;Their aums of Hock, of Backrag, and Mosell.

No wonder that the doctors complained that their efforts would be fruitless to patch up constitutions so utterly weather-beaten by heat and wet, as we find from Sir Charles Sedley’sThe Doctor and his Patients, where it is told of the family Æsculapius:—

One day he called ‘em all together,And, one by one, he asked ‘em whetherIt were not better by good dietTo keep the blood and humours quiet,With toast and ale to cool their brainsThan nightly fire ‘em with Champains.

And whilst these wines were injurious to their bodies they failed to give any real or permanent relief to their minds, as even the licentious tragedian of the period, Etheridge, admitted:—

At the plays we are constantly making our court,And when they are ended we follow the sportTo the Mall and the Park,Where we love till ‘tis dark;Then Sparkling ChampagnePuts an end to their reign;It quickly recoversPoor languishing lovers;Makes us frolic and gay, and drowns all our sorrow;But alas!we relapse again on the morrow.[158]

We obtain an incidental estimate of the market price of French wine from theTatler, No. 147, where we read:—

Upon my coming home last night, I found a very handsome present of French wine left for me, as a taste—of 216 hogsheads which are to be put to sale at 20l.a hogshead, at Garraway’s coffee-house, in Exchange Alley.

These wines were soldby the candle—i.e.the property was put up by the auctioneer, an inch of candle was lighted, and the last bidder when the light went out was the purchaser.

English vineyards were still here and there attempted. Thus Evelyn (Diary, 1655) ‘went to see Col. Blount’s subterranean warren, and drank of the wine of his vineyard, which was good for little.’

The consumption of FrenchBrandywas very great, and discontent was excited from the notion that the country was suffering from the lack of encouragement to home distillation; permission was accordingly granted to a company todistil brandyfrom wine and malt.

Besides wine and brandy, ale was drunk in various forms.

Chamberlayne states that in 1667 no less than 1,522,781 barrels of beer were brewed in the city of London, each of them containing from 32 to 36 gallons, and that the amount yearly brewed in London had since risen to nearly 2,000,000 barrels; and that the excise for London was farmed out for 120,000l.a year.[159]

Jorevin de Rochefort, whose travels were published at Paris in 1672, says:—‘The English beer is the best in Europe’ (Antiquarian Repertory, vol. iv. p. 607). At Cambridge he had a visit from the clergyman, ‘during which,’ says he, ‘it was necessary to drink two or three pots of beer during our parley; for no kind of business is transacted in England without the intervention of pots of beer.’

At this time people frequently ate no supper but tookbuttered ale, composed of sugar, cinnamon, butter, and beer brewed without hops. It was put into a cup, set before the fire to heat, and drunk hot.

Ciderwas again coming into fashion. Butler (Hudibras) tells of Sidrophel that he knew—

... in what sign best sider’s made.

The manufacture being of sufficient moment for reference to astrology.

A new liquor now introduced from Brunswick was a sort of strong beer calledMum, or, sometimes,Brunswick Mum. The word has been derived frommummeln, to mumble, or from the onomatopœicmum, denoting silence, and from Christian Mummer by whom it was first brewed. It was brewed chiefly from malt made from wheat instead of barley. Pope writes of it:—

The clamorous crowd is hush’d with mugs of mum,Till all, tuned equal, send a general hum.

This foreign drink was rivalled by Dorset beer.[160]

Lastly, we hear still ofMetheglin. Pepys (1666) describes his dining with the king’s servants from meat that came from his Majesty’s table, ‘with most brave drink, cooled in ice; and I, drinking no wine, had metheglin, for the king’s own drinking, which did pleaseme mightilye.’ It was an article of excise.

A good deal has been made of what is termed thereactionin morals after the republican spell. For instance, Mr. Samuelson says (Hist. of Drink):—

These extreme measures of repression on the part of the Puritans led to the result which might be anticipated. They gave courage to those who were anxious for the return of royalty, and reconciled many to its reinstatement who would otherwise have struggled for the maintenance of republican institutions; and when Charles II. was once more safely enthroned, there followed a reaction in morals which has left to that period the unenviable notoriety of being the most corrupt and dissolute in the whole history of our country.

One would almost imagine from this, and kindred statements, that vice was unknown to the Protector and his adherents; whereas it is matter of history that Cromwell’s early life was dissolute and disorderly, and that he consumed in gaming, drinking, debauchery, and country riots, the more early years of his youth.[161]The Roundheads liked ale as well as the Cavaliers. Does not Pepys tell of Monk’s troops (Feb. 13, 1659):—‘The city is very open-handed to the soldiers; they aremost of them drunk all day’? Surely, then, bias must have possessed Lord Macaulay when he would have us believe that ‘in the Puritan camp no drunkenness was seen.’ Some prefer the evidence of a contemporary.

Itispossible to contrast the Courts of the two Charleses, and the contrast is terrible; but was no one responsible besides Charles II. for his wandering life, when he herded with inferiors? If he was a creature of frailty and vice, he was also a creature of circumstance.

Thus much prefaced, let it be freely admitted that drunkenness prevailed in every rank of society, and that the king set the example. Mr. Samuelson adduces fromEvelyn, as an instance, a supper given by the Duke of Buckingham when the Prince of Orange was over on a visit, on which occasion the king made the prince drink hard (though he could not have required much making), under the influence of which, the Dutchman broke the windows of the chambers of the maids of honour, with other mischiefs.

Nor does the famous story in theSpectatorimpress us with his bias towards temperance. The king had been dining with the Lord Mayor at Guildhall, where his cups did not prevent his observing that conviviality had occasioned familiarity; whereupon, with an abrupt farewell, he left the banquet. The mayor pursued the monarch, overtook him in the courtyard, and swore that he should not go till they had ‘drunk t’other bottle!’ The airy monarch looked kindly at him over his shoulder, and, with a smile and graceful air, repeated the line of the old song:—

And the man that is drunk is as great as a king!

and immediately turned back and complied with his host’s bidding.

But the veil is more thoroughly lifted by Pepys, who notes:—

September 23, 1667.—With Sir H. Cholmly to Westminster; who by the way told me how merry the King and Duke of York and Court were the other day, when they were abroad a-hunting. They came to Sir G. Cartaret’s house at Cranbourne, and there were entertained and all made drunk; and, being all drunk, Armerer did come to the king, and swore to him ‘By God, sir,’ says he, ‘you are not so kind to the Duke of York of late as you used to be.’ ‘Not I?’ says the king. ‘Why so?’ ‘Why,’ says he, ‘if you are, let us drink his health.’ ‘Why let us,’ says the king. Then he fell on his knees and drank it; and having done, the kingbegan to drink it. ‘Nay, sir,’ says Armerer, ‘by God, you must do it on your knees!’ So he did, and then all the company: and having done it, all fell a-crying for joy, being all maudlin and kissing one another, the king the Duke of York, and the Duke of York the king; and in such a maudlin pickle as never people were: and so passed the day.

Again he writes (1661):—

At Court things are in very ill condition, there being so much emulacion, poverty, and the vices of drinking, swearing, and loose amours, that I know not what will be the end of it but confusion.

Two of the notables about Court have already been alluded to. Rochester—that is, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester—in the language of Dr. Johnson, ‘blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness,’ dying at the age of thirty-three. Some lines of his favour the notion that the origin of the termtoasting, as given in theTatler, may be the correct one. They are:—

Make it so large that, fill’d with sackUp to the swelling brim,Vasttoastson the delicious lake,Like ships at sea, may swim.

A confirmation of the same may be derived from a verse of Warton:—

My sober evening let the tankard bless,Withtoastembrown’d, and fragrant nutmeg fraught,While the rich draught, with oft-repeated whiffs,Tobacco mild improves.

Of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the criticism of Dryden must suffice—lines well known:—

Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,Was everything by starts and nothing long.But in the course of one revolving moon,Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.Then all for women, paintings, rhyming, drinking,Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.

Another drinking notoriety was Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset (n.1637,ob.1684).

One of his frolics [says Dr. Johnson] has by the industry of Wood come down to posterity. Sackville, who was then Lord Buckhurst, with Sir Charles Sedley and Sir Thomas Ogle, got drunk at the Cock in Bow Street, by Covent Garden, and going into the balcony utterly disgraced themselves. The public indignation was awakened; the crowd attempted to force the door, and being repulsed drove in the performers with stones, and broke the windows of the house. For this misdemeanour they were indicted, and Sedley was fined five hundred pounds: what was the sentence of the others is not known. Sedley employed Killigrew and another to procure a remission from the king; but (mark the friendship of the dissolute) they begged the fine for themselves, and exacted it to the last groat.

Lord Macaulay, in hisHistory of England, chap. vi. has the following description of the same disgraceful event:—

The morals of Sedley were such as even in that age gave great scandal. He on one occasion, after a wild revel, exhibited himself without a shred of clothing in the balcony of a tavern near Covent Garden, and harangued the people who were passing in language so indecent and profane that he was driven in by a shower of brickbats, was prosecuted for a misdemeanour, was sentenced to a heavy fine, and was reprimanded by the Court of King’s Bench in the most cutting terms.

It is perfectly clear that the higher motives for restraint were lacking, though expediency acted as a curb upon occasions. The following passage from Evelyn’sDiarywill serve as an illustration:—

October 30, 1682.—I was invited to dine with Mons. Lionberg, the Swedish Resident, who made a magnificent entertainment, it being the birthday of his king. There dined the Duke of Albemarle, D. of Hamilton, Earle of Bathe, E. of Aylesbury, Lord Arran, Lord Castlehaven, the sonn of him who was executed 50 yeares before, and several greate persons. I was exceeding afraide of drinking (it being a Dutch feast),but the Duke of Albemarle, being that night to waite on his Majestie, excesse was prohibited; and to prevent all, I stole away and left the company as soone as we rose from table.

[Italics not in the original.]

From the same author we find that the same vice beset women of rank. The Duchess of Mazarine, he observes, is reported to have hastened her death by intemperate drinking of strong spirits.

The Lower House of Parliament seems to have been infected with the moral distemper. Evelyn writes:—

December 19, 1666.—Among other things Sir R. Ford did make me understand how the House of Commons is a beast not to be understood, it being impossible to know beforehand the success almost of any small plain thing.... He did tell me, and so did Sir W. Batten, how Sir Allen Brodericke and Sir Allen Apsly did come drunk the other day into the House, and did both speak for half an hour together, and could not be either laughed, or pulled, or bid to sit down and hold their peace, to the great contempt of the king’s servants and cause; which I am grieved at with all my heart.

(What made this worse was that Sir Allen Brodericke was an official—Surveyor-General in Ireland to his Majesty.)

But there was a vast amount of drinking that is really intemperance, though it passes under another name. Very apposite are the words of a contemporary, Sir William Temple:—

Temperance, that virtue without pride, and fortune without envy; ... the best guardian of youth, and support of old age; the precept of reason as well as religion; and physician of the soul as well as the body; the tutelar goddess of health, and universal medicine of life, that clears the head and cleanses the blood, that eases the stomach, and purges the bowels, that strengthens the nerves, enlightens the eyes, and comforts the heart; in a word, that secures and perfects the digestion.... I do not allow the pretence of temperance to all such as are seldom or never drunk, or fall into surfeits; for men may lose their health without losing their senses, and be intemperate every day, without being drunk perhaps once in their lives; nay, for aught I know, if a man should pass the month in a college diet, without excess or variety of meats or of drinks, but only the last day give a loose in them both, and so far till it comes to serve him for physic rather than food, and he utter his stomach as well as his heart, he may perhaps, as to the mere considerations of health, do much better than another that eats every day ... in plenty and luxury, with great variety of meats, and a dozen glasses of wine at a meal, still spurring up appetite when it would lie down of itself; flushed every day, but never drunk.[162]

It is refreshing in reading Johnson’sLivesto come upon a poet really free from a suspicion of fondness for drink. Such a one was Edmund Waller, born 1605, died 1687. Would he have lived so long had he been a drink-hard? Johnson remarks of him:—

In the first parliament summoned by Charles the Second (March 8, 1661) Waller sat for Hastings, in Sussex, and served for different places in all the parliaments of that reign. In a time when fancy and gaiety were the most powerful recommendations to regard, it is not likely that Waller was forgotten. He passed his time in the company that was highest both in rank and wit, from which even his obstinate sobriety did not exclude him. Though he drank water, he was enabled by his fertility of mind to heighten the mirth of Bacchanalian assemblies; and Mr. Saville said that ‘no man in England should keep him company without drinking but Ned Waller.’

An excellent companion for the poet would have been Guy, Earl of Warwick, in whose ‘Tragical History’ occur the lines:—

Phillis.Give me some bread. I prithee, father, eat.Guy.Give me brown bread, for that’s a pilgrim’s meat.Phillis.Reach me some wine; good father, taste of this.Guy.Give me cold water, that my comfort is.I tell you, Lady, your great Lord and IHave thought ourselves as happy as a king,To drink the water of a christal spring.

Coffeecame into general use in England, according to John Evelyn (Diary), about 1667. But he records, under date May 1637, that ‘one Nathaniel Conopios, out of Greece, from Cyrill, the Patriarch of Constantinople, was the first he ever saw drink coffee.’

Tea became a fashionable beverage in England soon after the marriage of Catharine of Braganza with Charles II. It was not exactly introduced by her, as it was procurable in London some months, at any rate, before her marriage; for Pepys writes:—‘Sept. 28, 1660.—I did send for a cup of tea (a China drink), of which I never had drank before.’ Yet she set the fashion for the use of it. Strickland rightly considers that the use of these simple luxuries, tea, coffee, and chocolate, had gradually a beneficial influence on the manners of all classes of society, by forming a counter-charm against habits of intoxication. Waller wrote a complimentary poem on the queen, commending tea, in which are the lines:—

The best of Queens and best of herbs we oweTo that bold nation, who the way did showTo the fair region where the sun doth rise.

All sorts of things have been scribbled about it, good, bad, and indifferent. The same Waller writes:—

The Muses’ friend,Tea, does our fancy aid,Repress the vapours which the head invade,And keeps the palace of the soul serene.

Young could write, on the other hand:—

Tea; how I tremble at thy fatal stream!As Lethe, dreadful to the love of fame.What devastations on thy banks are seen!What shades of mighty names which once have been!A hecatomb of characters suppliesThy painted altars’ daily sacrifice.

In sympathy with Young would be Dr. Parr, in the well-known line of gallantry:—

Nectea-cum possum vivere, nec sine te.

or, in mother tongue—

When failing tea, my soul and body thrive,But failing thee, no longer I survive.

The epigram is still more severe:—

If wine be poison, so is Tea—but in another shape—What matter whether we are kill’d by canister or grape?

We still plump for tea.

One word before leaving the drink of the Restoration. Some may be curious to inquire the nature of their cups. Pepys, telling of his dining at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, says:—

Plenty of wine of all sorts; but it was very unpleasing that we had no napkins nor change of trenchers, and drunk out of earthen pitchers and wooden dishes (cups).

Chaffers remarks that probably pitchers and large pots were usually made of earth and leather, while the cups, or dishes, out of which the liquor was drunk, were of ash; or sometimes, among the more opulent, from cups or tankards of silver:—

His cupboard’s head six earthen pitchers graced,Beneath them was his trusty tankard placed.Dryden’sJuvenal.

It may be here mentioned that Dryden immensely prided himself on his Bacchanalian song entitledAlexander’s Feast. He wrote to his publisher, ‘I am glad to hear from all hands that my ode is esteemed the best of all my poetry.’ Stanza III. is a sufficient specimen:—

The praise of Bacchus then the sweet Musician sung,Of Bacchus ever fair and ever young:The jolly god in triumph comes;Sound the trumpets; beat the drums!Flush’d with a purple graceHe shows his honest face.Now give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes!Bacchus, ever fair and young,Drinking joys did first ordain:Bacchus’ blessings are a treasure,Drinking is the soldiers’ pleasure:Rich the treasure,Sweet the pleasure,Sweet is pleasure after pain.

Legislation.

The Wine Acts of Car. II. were those known as 12 Charles and 22 & 23 Charles. Early in his reign he issued that remarkable proclamation, which could not but reflect on his favourite companions and strongly mark the moral disorders of those depraved times.[163]It is against ‘vicious, debauch’d, and profane persons,’ who are thus described:—

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