CHARLES SACKVILLE, 6TH EARL OF DORSET, K.G.
_From the portrait by_ SIR GODFREY KNELLER _in the Poets’ Parlour at Knole_ ]
It is not known precisely in what year he was born, but it was either 1639, 1640, or 1642, so that he must have been a young man somewhere in the neighbourhood of twenty when Charles II came to the throne. He had been educated by a tutor, one Jennings, and sent abroad with him: as Jennings wrote home of him in measured terms surprising in that age of sycophancy, saying “I doubt not he will attain to some perfection,” he probably held but a low opinion of the abilities of his pupil. I do not know at what age Lord Buckhurst, as he then was, returned to England, but he must have been quite young, for in 1660 he becomes Colonel of a regiment of foot, commands 104 men, and receives a yearly allowance of £70 from his father, and the references to him in Pepys begin in 1661 when he was not more than twenty-one or twenty-two. He was, says Dr. Johnson with characteristic disapproval and severity, “eager of the riotous and licentious pleasures which young men of high rank, who aspired to be thought wits, at that time imagined themselves entitled to indulge.” Many of his pranks have been placed on record. They are neither very funny nor very edifying. On one occasion he and his brother Edward, with three friends, were committed to Newgate for killing an innocent man in a brawl, and should no doubt have been tried for murder, but as those contretemps could be arranged with very little difficulty the charge was modified to manslaughter.[8] On another occasion, the full details of which are not allowed to remain in the expurgated edition of Pepys, Lord Buckhurst, Sir Charles Sedley, and Sir Thomas Ogle got drunk at the Cock Tavern in Bow Street, where they went out on to a balcony, and Sedley took off all his clothes and harangued the crowd which collected below: the crowd, in indignation, drove them in with stones, and broke the windows of the house; for this offence all three gentlemen were indicted and Sedley was fined £500. On yet another occasion Buckhurst and Sedley spent the night in prison for brawling with the watch, and were delivered only on the King’s intervention. On yet another, Pepys records that “the King was drunk at Saxam with Sedley and Buckhurst, the night that my Lord Arlington came thither, and would not give him audience, or could not.” These and similar exploits recall the more celebrated escapade of Rochester as an astrologer, which at least had in it a humorous element entirely lacking in the mere rioting of drunken young men like Buckhurst and Sedley. It is not very surprising to learn that although he “inherited not only the paternal estate of the Sackvilles but likewise that of the Cranfields, Earls of Middlesex in right of his mother, yet at his decease his son, then only eighteen years of age, possessed so slender a fortune that his guardians when they sent him to travel on the Continent allowed him only eight hundred pounds a year for his provision,” nor that “extenuated by pleasures and indulgences, he sank into a premature old age.” Before sinking into this old age, however, he lived through the full enjoyment of a splendid youth. It is difficult to imagine an era in English history more favourable to a young man of his type and fortune than the early years of Charles II, when the King himself was the ringleader in the outburst of revolt against that iron-grey period of Puritanism through which the country had just passed. Dresses became extravagant, silver ornate, speech licentious; the theatres, which had been closed for over twenty years, reopened, the costumes and scenery being now on an elaborate scale never contemplated before; women—a daring innovation—appeared in the women’s rôles; the King and his brother patronised the play-houses with all the young bloods of the court; coaches clattered through the streets of London, yes, even on a Sunday. There is, of course, another side to the picture—the sullen disapproval of the serious-minded, the squalor of a London shortly to be rotted by plague and terribly purified by fire—but with this side we have in the present connection no concern. We are in the gay upper stratum of prosperity and fashion, fortunate in the extraordinary vividness of our visualisation; we know not only the principal characters, but also the crowd of “supers” pressing behind them; we know their comings and goings, their intrigues, their rivalries, their amusements, the names of their mistresses. We are now at Whitehall, now at Epsom, now at Tunbridge Wells, now at Richmond. We are, indeed, very deeply in Pepys’ debt.