'Travellers report, that the place wherein the body of Absalom was buried is still extant at Jerusalem, and that it is a solemn custome of pilgrims passing by it to cast a stone on the place; but a well-disposed man can hardly go by the memory of this worthy person without doing grateful homage thereunto in bestowing upon him one or two of our observations.
'It's a question sometimes whether diamond gives more lustre to the ring it's set in, or the ring to the diamond; this gentleman received honour from his family, and gave renoun to it. Writing is the character of the speech, as that is of the mind. From Tully (whose orations he could repeat to his dying day) he gained an even and apt stile, flowing at one and the selfsame height. Tully's Offices, a book which boys read, and men understand, was so esteemed of my Lord Burleigh, that to his dying day he always carried it about him, either in his bosome or his pocket, as a compleat piece that, like Aristotle's rhetorick, would make both a scholar and an honest man. Cicero's magnificent orations against Anthony, Catiline and Verres; Cæsar's great Commentaries that he wrote with the same spirit that he fought; flowing Livy; grave, judicious and stately Tacitus; eloquent, but faithful Curtius; brief and rich Salust; prudent and brave Xenophon, whose person was Themistocles his companion, as his book was Scipio Affricanus his pattern in all his wars; ancient and sweet Herodotus; sententious and observing Thucidides; various and useful Polybius; Siculus, Halicarnasseus, Trogus, Orosius, Justine, made up our young man's retinue in all his travels where (as Diodorus the Sicilian writes) he "sate on the stage of human life, observing the great circumstances of places, persons, times, manners, occasions, etc, and was made wise by their example who haue trod the path of errour and danger before him." To which he added that grave, weighty and sweet Plutarch, whose books (said Gaza) would furnish the world, were all others lost. Neither was he amazed in the labyrinth of history, but guided by the clue of cosmography, hanging his study with maps, and his mind with exact notices of each place. He made in one view a judgement of the situation, interest, and commodities (for want whereof many statemen and souldiers have[74] failed) of nations; but to understand the nature of places, is but a poor knowledge, unless we know how to improue them by art; therefore under the figures of triangles, squares, circles and magnitudes, with their terms and bounds, he could contrive most tools and instruments, most engines, and judge of fortifications, architecture, ships, wind and water-works, and whatever might make this lower frame of things useful and serviceable to mankinde; which severer studies he relieved with noble and free Poetry-aid, once the pleasure and advancement of the soul, made by those higher motions of the minde more active and more large. To which I adde her sister Musick, wherewith he revived his tired spirits, lengthened (as he said) his sickly days, opened his oppressed breast, eased his melancholy thoughts, graced his happy pronunciation, ordered and refined his irregular and gross inclinations, fixed and quickened his floating and dead notions; and by a secret, sweet and heavenly Vertue, raised his spirit, as he confessed, sometime to a little less than angelical exaltation. Curious he was to please his ear, and as exact to please his eye; there being no statues, inscriptions or coyns that the Vertuosi of Italy could shew, the antiquaries of France could boast off, or the great hoarder of rarieties the great duke of Tuscany (whose antic coyns are worth £100,000) could pretend to, that he had not the view of. No man could draw any place or work better, none fancy and paint a portraicture more lively; being a Durer for proportion, a Goltzius for a bold touch, variety of posture, a curious and true shadow, an Angelo for his happy fancy, and an Holben for works.
'Neither was it a bare ornament of discourse, or naked diversion of leisure time; but a most weighty piece of knowledge that he could blazon most noble and ancient coats, and thereby discern the relation, interest, and correspondence of great families, and thereby the meaning and bottom of all transactions, and the most successful way of dealing with any one family. His exercises were such as his employments were like to be, gentle and man-like. Whereof the two most eminent were riding and shooting that at once wholesomely stirred, and nobly knitted and strengthened his body. Two eyes he said he travelled with; the one of wariness upon himself, the other of observation upon others. This compleat gentleman was guardian to the young Brandon in his younger years, agent for Sir John Mason in king Edward the sixth's time, and the first embassador for the state in Queen Elizabeth's time. My Lord Cobham is to amuse the Spaniard, my Lord Effingham to undermine the French, and Sir Henry Killigrew is privately sent to engage the German princes against Austria in point of interest, and for her majesty in point of religion: he had a humour that bewitched the elector of Bavaria, a carriage that awed him of Mentz, a reputation that obliged them of Colen and Hydelberg, and that reach and fluency in discourse that won them all. He assisted the Lords Hunsdon and Howard at the treaty with France in London, and my Lord of Essex in the war for France and Britain. Neither was he less observable for his own conduct than for that of others, whose severe thoughts, words and carriage so awed his inferiour faculties, as to restrain him through all the heats of youth, made more than usually importunate by the full vigour of a high and sanguine constitution; insomuch that they say he looked upon all the approaches to that sin, then so familiar to his calling as a souldier, his quality as a gentleman, and his station as a courtier, not onely with an utter disallowance in his judgement, but with a natural abhorrency and antipathy in his very lower inclinations. To which happiness it conduced not a little, that though he had a good, yet he had a restrained appetite (a knife upon his throat as well as upon his trencher) that indulged itself neither frequent nor delicate entertainment; its meals, though but once a day, being its pressures, and its fast, its only sensualities; to which temperance in diet, adde but that in sleep, together with his disposal of himself throughout his life to industry and diligence, you will say he was a spotless man, whose life taught us this lesson, (which, if observed, would accomplish mankinde; and which King Charles the first would inculcate to noble travellers, and Dr. Hammond to all men), viz.: To be furnished always with something to do; a lesson they proposed as the best expedience for innocence and pleasure; the foresaid blessed man assuring his happy hearers, "That no burden is more heavy, or temptation more dangerous, then to have time lie on one's hand: the idle man being not onely" (as he worded it) "the Devil's shop, but his kingdome too; a model of, and an appendage unto Hell, a place given up to torment and to mischief."'
He left four daughters only, Anna, Dorothy, Elizabeth, and Mary, by his wife Katherine, fourth of the erudite daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, of Giddy Hall, Essex, the accomplished Preceptor of Edward VI.—'vir antiqua serenitate,' according to Camden—from whom (as Strype tells us) his 'daughter Killigrew' inherited, amongst other things, 'a nest of white bowls.'
Dame Katherine was skilled, after the manner of the learned ladies of her time, in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and in poetry; and both Sir John Harrington and Thomas Fuller commend and quote her compositions. But that, with all her learning, she had, what was even better, a devotedly affectionate heart, let the following lines testify, which she addressed to her sister Mildred, who had married Cecil, Lord Burghley.[75] The Lord Treasurer was about to send his young relative on a diplomatic mission to France, at a dangerous juncture—whether before or after the death in that country of Thomas Hobby, who married her sister Elizabeth, and who also went to France as an ambassador, I am uncertain—while the loving Katherine thought her husband would be safer and happier with her in Cornwall—probably either at Arwenack, or at Rosmeryn in Budock, or at Trevose in Mawgan, or at Penwerris, at all of which places were estates of the Killigrews. The dauntless wife thus threatens Elizabeth's solemn First Minister:
Of which, for the benefit of (some few at least of) my lady readers in these later days, I have appended Fuller's harsh translation:
Fortunately, thanks to the poetic skill of my friend Mr. H. G. Hewlett, I am able to give his smoother and more classical rendering of the lines:
I do not know the exact date of Dame Katherine Killigrew's death; but she was alive on the 22nd May, 1576. She was buried in the Church of St. Thomas the Apostle, in the Vintry Ward of the City of London, where there is—or rather was, for the church is destroyed—'her elegant monument;' and many Greek and Latin verses were addressed to her memory by her sister Elizabeth and others. She thus wrote her own epitaph:
By his second wife, Jael de Peigne, the friend and hostess of Isaac Casaubon, our Sir Henry left two sons, Sir Joseph and Sir Henry Killigrew, and one daughter; but nearly all traces of Sir Joseph and his sister Jane are lost, save what is interesting to the genealogist alone.
But Henry was a man of some mark. He was one of those loyal Members of the House of Commons who refused to join the Parliament against the Crown, and is described by Clarendon as 'a person of entire affections to the King,' and as commanding a troop of horse on Charles I.'s march from Shrewsbury to London in 1642.[76] The Lords Capel and Hopton were particular friends of his; and with such Royalist connexions and predilections, one is not surprised to learn that, together with Messrs. Coryton, Scawen, and Roscarroth, he was elected one of the Royal Commissioners for the County of Cornwall; and that, when Pendennis Castle was besieged, he was one of its stout defenders, remaining in it to the very last, and striving, both by sword and pen, to shake off the grip of the Roundhead bulldogs; all in vain, as we have already seen. The following letter from Lord Jermyn, who had married his cousin Katherine, serves to show, at once how sore were the straits of the besieged, and how highly their efforts were rated by Queen Henrietta Maria. (It will be remembered that Harry Jermyn was commander-in-chief of the army which marched from York to Oxford for the relief of Charles I., under the Queen, who used to style herself, 'She Majesty Generalissima over all.' It is believed that relations of too intimate a character existed between the Queen and her commander-in-chief.)
'My dear Cousin Harry,
'I have received yours, and truly do, with all the grief and respect that you can imagine to be in any body, look upon your sufferings and bravery in them; and do further assure you that the relief of so many excellent men, and preservation of so important a place, is taken into all the considerations that the utmost possibility, that can be in the Queen to contribute to either, can extend to. The same care is in the prince, from whose own hand you will particularly understand it.
'I have now only time to tell you, that I am confident those little stores that will give us and you time to stay and provide for more, will be arrived with you; and I do not so encourage you vainly, but to let you know a truth that cannot fail, that if you, as I do no way doubt, have rightly represented the state of the place, and of the minds that are in it, you shall be enabled to give the account of it you wish beyond your expectations; and already some money is at the sea-side for this purpose, and more shall daily be sent. I entreat most earnestly of you that the Governor, Sir John Digby, and those other gentlemen that did me the honour to write to me, may find here that I shall not fail to give them answer by the next. In the mean space, God of heaven keep you all, and give us, if he please, a meeting with you in England. I have no more to add.
'I am, most truly,
'Your most humble and most faithful Servant,
'He. Jermyn.'
On the surrender of the Castle,[77] Sir Henry appears to have gone to St. Malo, where he died on 27th September, 1646, from splinter-wounds received in the forehead by the explosion of a firearm whilst he was discharging it in the air after the capitulation of Pendennis. Clarendon sums up his character for us as being 'a very gallant gentleman, of a noble extraction, and a fair revenue in land; he was of excellent parts and great courage, and was exceedingly beloved. He was a passionate opposer of the extravagant proceedings of the Parliament;' and, when it came to blows, though he 'was in all actions, and in those parts where there was most danger, yet he would take no command in the army, yet he was always consulted; he was of great courage, and of a pleasant humour, but was a sharp reprover of those who neglected their duty. His loss was much lamented by all good men.' The Rev. Lionel Gatford (who acted as chaplain to the Royalists during the siege of Pendennis) preached Sir Henry Killigrew's funeral sermon, which is described in a MS. in the possession of S. Elliott Hoskins, M.D., F.R.S., Guernsey, as 'une perle de grand prix, lequel ravissoit le cœur de ses auditeurs.'
Whilst he lay dying of his wound at St. Malo, some priests tried to convert him to the Roman faith; but he would have nothing to say to them, and sent for a clergyman of his own Communion forthwith. By his own wish his body was taken across to Jersey. It lay in state at the Constable's house at St. Helier's, guarded by his exiled soldiers. The funeral was performed with all military honours, on 3rd October, 1646, and the corpse was laid in a vault in the church or 'Temple' of St. Helier's, near that of Maximilian Norys. His income had been about £800 a year before the troubles of the Civil War; but he had lost it all.
Sir Henry married a lady named Jemima Bael, and by her had one son, Henry. He too was a warrior; and fell, a Major in the King's army, at Bridgewater in 1644, whilst defending a magazine of provisions against an attack by the Parliamentary troops: 'a very hopeful young man,' says Clarendon, 'the son of a gallant and most deserving father.'
As we have already seen, three daughters only were the fruit of old Sir Henry's first marriage with Katherine Cooke.
Sir William Killigrew, Knight, the first Sir Henry's next brother, now claims a short notice. He too—Killigrew-like—was about the Court, for he was a Groom of the Privy Chamber to James I., and was sworn in Chamberlain of the Exchequer on 28th November, 1605. He married Margaret Saundars of Uxbridge, a widow lady; and they seem to have been a steady-going old couple, to whom, it may be mentioned, John Fox and Robert Some dedicated a volume of their sermons. There is some correspondence about Sir William in the Lansdowne MSS. touching his 'farming' the Seals of the Queen's Bench and Common Pleas, to which the Chief Justice of the latter court objected; and Sir William, who was appointed to his post by Burghley, seems to have ultimately compromised matters by receiving the sum of £3,000. The Additional MSS. contain other references to him; but hardly anything of sufficient interest to warrant our lingering over his share in the family history. He died at Lothbury on 23rd November, 1622; and his portrait, with that of Thomas Carew, by Van Dyck, is preserved in the collection of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. Richard Carew says that he was 'the most kind patron of all his country and countrymen's (county) affairs at Court.'
But from this Sir William and 'Mystresse Margarye' descended Killigrews who have made some noise in the world, as we shall presently find. Besides two daughters, Katherine and Elizabeth—both of whom married, but make no figure in our story—they had a son, Sir Robert Killigrew of Hanworth, a wealthy man, and Chamberlain to two Queens of England, viz., Elizabeth and the hapless consort of Charles I. He too kept up the old family connexion with Pendennis Castle—of which he was made Governor in succession to Sir John Parker, on 11th June, 1632, towards the close of his life; and he further served the Crown by going, in 1625, as an Ambassador to the United Provinces. Sir Robert was an original shareholder in the New River Company (incorporated in 1619); and was a great stickler for his rights in the matter of the reclaimed lands in Lindsey Level, Lincolnshire (as to which, see Dugdale's 'History of Embanking'); moreover, Farnaby, the celebrated schoolmaster, dedicated to him the 1624 edition of his translations of 'Martial's Epigrams.' He was once 'sequestered' for a manual scuffle in the House, in 1614, as appears in Spedding's 'Works of Francis Bacon;' and he was mixed up in the story about the poisoned powder administered to Sir Thomas Overbury, though it was clearly proved that Killigrew was not to blame in that matter; but it is nevertheless true that he was sent from the Council Table to the Fleet Prison for talking with Overbury at his prison-window, after having paid a visit to Sir Walter Raleigh in the Tower of London.
Sir Robert gave Whitelocke 'a place for Helston,' whereupon Whitelocke caused his brother-in-law Bulstrode to be returned for that place. He must have had a fine seat at Hanworth; for Conway, writing to Buckingham on 3rd May, 1623, says that on that day the King passed Sir Robert Killigrew's, 'and there saw the designment of a fine ground: a pretty lodge, a gracious lady, a fair maid, the daughter, and a fine bouquet. He saw the pools, the deer, and the herondry; which was his errand.'
When he took to himself a wife, he went to a good stock, for he selected Mary Wodehouse, a daughter of Sir Henry Wodehouse, of Kimberley, Norfolk,[78] known as the 'young' or the 'French' Lady Killigrew. She was a niece of one whose name (erroneously as we apply it) is familiar to every Englishman—I mean Lord Bacon. Of Sir Robert himself, little more need be said here than that he died on the 26th November, 1632; but his offspring will detain us much longer.
Sir Robert had six daughters and five sons; and it may be as well to offer first the slight result of my inquiries into the careers of the former.
They were about the Court of Charles II.; and one of them, Elizabeth, who married Viscount Shannon, became one of the dissolute King's mistresses. She died at her house in Pall Mall on 28th July, 1684, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, 'having no Coat-of-arms of her own, as the King had assigned her none.' Mary married Sir John James, Knight; and has a monument at the east end of the north choir aisle in Westminster Abbey. Of the others, I can only learn that they married men of title—one the Earl of Yarmouth; another Berkeley, Lord Fitz-Hardinge; and one married into a grand old Cornish family—the Godolphins. Another, Anne, 'a beauty and a poetess,' was the first wife of George Kirk, and the unhappy lady was drowned at London Bridge, in the Queen's barge, in July, 1641; like so many others of her race, she was interred in Westminster Abbey.
Robert, the eldest son, died young. The only trace I can find of him is the following college exercise on the birth of Charles II.:
His brother William, next in age, succeeded him as the representative of the family—a position which he must have held for about seventy years; for he was nearly ninety when he died, in or about 1694. When a Gentleman Commoner of Oxford he wrote some verses, which Henry Lawes thought good enough to set to music; he also wrote four plays; and when he left the University (where he afterwards took the degree of D.C.L.), he was forthwith welcomed at Court, and became a Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber, and afterwards Vice-Chamberlain to Queen Katherine. About 1661 he was made a Baronet, probably on account of his loyal attachment to the late King, whose body-guard he often commanded. At York, when the Civil War broke out in 1642, he commanded a troop of cavalry, composed of servants and retainers of the 1st troop of Life Guards, under Lord Bernard Stuart; and at Edgehill he was one of the foremost in Prince Rupert's fiery charge—a charge which at once began and had almost ended the battle.
Old Sir William kept up the Killigrew connexion with the West-country, by being, in his turn also, made Governor of Pendennis; but he is best known and remembered by two little books which he wrote very late in life, and especially by his 'Artless Midnight Thoughts,' written when he was eighty-two years old, and described by himself as the reflexions 'of a gentleman at Court, who for many years built on sand, which every Blast of Cross Fortune has defaced; but now he has laid new Foundations on the Rock of his Salvation, which no Storms can shake; and will outlast the Conflagration of the World, when Time shall melt into Eternity.'[79]
This curious little work is full of pious reflexions and thoughts, both in prose and verse. It was dedicated first to Charles II., and afterwards to James II., who had made his old age much happier than ever his youth was, 'when I shared in all the glories of this Court, and splendour of Four great Kings for three score years.' He himself describes the book as 'a small parcel of such fruit as my little cell in White Hall doth naturally produce from the barren brains of 82 years old.' He also wrote some plays of a very different stamp from those of his younger brother, as may be judged from the following lines:
'COMMENDATORY VERSES BEFORE THREE PLAYS[80] OF SIR WILLIAM KILLIGREW.—(By T. L.)
He was buried at the Savoy some time between 1693 and 1695, and left by his wife, Mary Hill, a Warwickshire lady, one son, Sir Robert, Vice-Chamberlain to Queen Anne of Denmark, and some time Lord of the Manor of Crediton, in Devon, whose only son Sir Henry died in St. Giles'-in-the-Fields, without issue. Of his two daughters, one, Elizabeth, married Sir Francis Clifton; the other, Mary, married Frederic de Nassau, Lord of Zulestein. Their son William Henry was in great favour with our William III., who, in 1695, created him Baron Enfield, Viscount Tonbridge, and Earl of Rochford; but, as we have seen, the descent, in the male line, from old Sir William became extinct.
The venerable author of the 'Artless Thoughts' had, however, two brothers—Thomas[81] and Henry—and of these we have now to speak. Of the former, 'Tom Killigrew, the King's jester,' as he is sometimes inaccurately styled—probably more persons have heard than of any other member of this family; and for his fame he is indebted, perhaps, in as great a degree to his being enshrined in the pages of that delightful gossip, Samuel Pepys, as to his printed plays.
Tom was Sir Robert's fourth son, and was born in 1611. Very early he became, through the family influence, a Page of Honour to Charles I.; and he followed into exile that monarch's dissolute son, to whom, on the Restoration, he became a Groom of the Bedchamber and Master of the Revels, with a salary of £400 per annum. He seems to have added to his income by taking fees from those who were silly enough to offer them for using his interest in procuring for the gullible candidates the post of 'King's physic-taster,' or His Majesty's 'curtain-drawer.' Doubtless Killigrew was sometimes a minister to the profligacies of the 'merry' monarch; yet he was also one who could venture to tell a home-truth to the King when it was absolutely necessary, and when no one else durst do it. The following story may serve as an example. One day, Tom Killigrew came into the King's presence, clothed in pilgrim's weeds, and with a staff in his hand, evidently prepared for some long journey. 'Whatever are you about now, Killigrew?' cried the King; 'where are you going?' 'To hell, sir!' replied Tom, 'to fetch back one Oliver Cromwell to this unfortunate country; it was governed badly enough in his time, but infinitely better then than it is now.' An engraved portrait of him, dressed as a pilgrim, and another after Wissing, representing him with a beard, and armed with a sword, are preserved in the Print Room of the British Museum. Another instance of his adroitness in recalling Charles to a sense of his duty may be mentioned. The King found councils tedious; and would often leave them before the business was concluded,
greatly to the disgust of (amongst others) Lauderdale. Accordingly, on a certain day, Tom Killigrew—between whom and the Chancellor no love seems to have been lost—offered to bet £100 that he could bring the King to the council, though the minister himself could not. The bet was concluded, and Killigrew started off after His Majesty, knowing probably better than anyone else where he was likely to be found. At once he disclosed to Charles what had happened, and urged the King to let him win the bet, whereby he, Tom Killigrew, would be £100 (sorely wanted, perhaps) in pocket; whilst Lauderdale, who was remarkable for the tight grip with which he held his money, would be mulct in that amount. Charles could not resist the double pleasure of annoying Lauderdale and gratifying Killigrew, and so granted the latter's request, and won his bet for him.
Thomas Killigrew was sent—not without some misgivings, as it would seem—by Charles II., whilst in exile, as 'Resident' to Venice; and his instructions from the King (with many other papers, some of which are in Killigrew's own writing, are preserved among the Harleian MSS., in the British Museum) throw an amusing light upon the circumstances of the Ambassador and his Royal Master. They were, amongst other things, 'to presse the Duke to furnish Us with a present Some of Money and We will engage Ourself by any Act or Acts to repay with Interest, and so like wise for any Armes and Ammunition hee shalbe pleased to furnish Us withall. The summe you shall moue him to furnish Us with shall be Ten thousand Pistolls.'
Killigrew's first paper was presented to the Duke and Senate in Venice, 14th February, 1649-50. It consists of five closely-written folio pages in Latin, and he quotes in it King James's saying of 'Sublato Episcopo tollitur Rex,' in support of his arguments against the cause of 'the Rebels,' who, Charles feared, might be sending an ambassador of their own, on a similar errand, to that Court.
This mission does not seem to have proved very successful; and Tom Killigrew and his servants got into sad disgrace at Venice with the Doge, Francis, Erizzo, and other authorities, for their riotous behaviour, the result being that the whole party were dismissed; deservedly perhaps, but somewhat informally. On Thomas Killigrew's return to the English Court, Sir John Denham addressed him in these lines:
The last three lines naturally lead us to a consideration of the 'Resident's' dramatic works, written, as he says, to beguile the tedium of exile. Thomas Killigrew wrote eleven plays in all; and, according to Genest, strictly speaking wrote but two at Venice; but the four written at Naples, Rome, Turin and Florence, were probably completed before his return to Paris. Dibdin, in his 'History of the Stage,' points out that these plays are by no means original, tracing some of them to their sources, and calling them 'paste-and-scissors' affairs. But this is not their chief defect. I have, as I thought myself in duty bound, read one of them, and intend never to read another. How it was possible, even in that dissolute age—'never to be recalled,' as Macaulay says, 'without a blush'—for a man to sit down and deliberately write such obscene buffoonery, and dedicate it to ladies—some of whom were his own relations—I cannot imagine. Plays too, of which one, at least, 'The Parson's Wedding,' was to be performed wholly by women! and in which the words assigned to those who played the women's parts are scarcely less offensive than those supposed to be spoken by men![82] We find ourselves indeed 'surrounded by foreheads of bronze, hearts like the nether millstone, and tongues set on fire of hell.' I must add that they have scarcely a sparkle of that witty wickedness which one meets with in the writings of Sir Charles Sedley;—luckily they are dead, and they deserved to die! It is difficult to find an extract which is now presentable; and I can put my hand on no better specimen, on the whole, than this:
Walking.
'Fine Lady. I am glad I am come home, for I am weary of this walking; for God's sake whereabouts does the pleasure of walking lie? I swear I have often sought it till I was weary; and yet I could ne'er find it.'
Not all of the plays were performed; though 'The Parson's Wedding' certainly was, at the King's House, and Luellin told Pepys that it was 'an obscene, loose play.' 'Claracilla,' a 'tragi-comedy,' Pepys himself went to see on 4th July, 1661; he merely says, however, that when he first saw it, it was 'well acted.' On a second occasion, when he saw it performed at the Cockpit, he thought it 'a poor play.' He might, in my opinion, have said the same of them all; but they were nevertheless sumptuously printed. King Charles II.'s own copy is in the British Museum (644, m. 11), and a portrait of the author contemplating the huge pile of his precious productions is prefixed to the volume. The original of this portrait was painted by W. Sheppard, and splendidly engraved by William Faithorne; another portrait (also by Sheppard, according to Redgrave) is in the possession of Mr. J. Buller East, to whom it was presented, shortly before her death in 1819, by Frances Maria Killigrew, the last of her name. There is yet another portrait of Thomas Killigrew, which represents him, not, as Walpole says in his 'Anecdotes of Painting,' 'in a studious posture,' but stooping, worn out with his vicious life, with a gibbering monkey at his side, and clad in a tawdry dressing-gown, on which are represented the portraits of a host of the wantons of his acquaintance. The lines at the foot of this rare engraving by Bosse (British Museum, {669. f. 4}/90) are an even more savage caricature than the picture itself.
Of Tom Killigrew's early fondness for plays, Pepys' story will serve as an illustration. 'I would not forget,' he writes, 'two passages of Sir J. Minne's at yesterday's dinner, one being Thomas Killigrew's way of getting to see plays when he was a boy. He would go to the Red Bull, and when the man cried to the boys, "Who will go and be a devil, and he shall see the play for nothing?" then would he go in, and be a devil upon the stage, and so get to see plays.' Would it be going too far to say that throughout his connection with the stage he stuck to his youthful part? He talked, however, much better than he wrote; with Cowley the case was the reverse; hence Denham's epigram:
Pepys describes him as 'a merry droll, but a gentleman of great esteem with the King; he told us many merry stories;' again, that Killigrew was 'a great favourite with the King on account of his uncommon vein of humour;' though on one occasion, when the King went to the Tower of London, to see the Dunkirk money, the conversation of Killigrew and the others was but 'poor and frothy.' More than once, however, Tom Killigrew, to his credit, spoke out, and to the point, in a tone of which we have already heard something; and Pepys himself has thus chronicled it:
'Mr. Pierce did also tell me as a great truth, as being told it by Mr. Cowley (Abraham Cowley the poet), and who was by and heard it, that Tom Killigrew should publickly tel the King that his matters were coming into a very ill state; but that yet there was a way to help all. Says he, "There is a good, honest, able man that I could name, that if your Majesty would employ, and command to see all things well executed, all things would soon be mended; and this is one Charles Stuart, who now spends his time in employing his lips about the Court, and hath no other employment; but if you would give him this employment, he were the fittest man in the world to perform it."'
On another occasion, when even Charles reproached the 'chartered libertine' with his many 'idle words,' Killigrew did not shrink from retorting, with special significance, on the King, that, after all, 'idle promises and idle patents' were even worse.
But something should be said of the domestic affairs of the subject of these observations. He lived, I believe, near that part of the old Court of Whitehall where Scotland Yard now stands; and, whilst there, married his first wife, Cecilia, daughter of Sir James Croft—a maid of honour to Henrietta Maria, and a lady whose portrait by Vandyck is in her present Majesty's collection.
The weather was rude and boisterous on the wedding-day, which gave rise to the following lines by Thomas Carew:
I fear their wedded life must have been stormy throughout; the very first thing we hear of their courtship is a dispute in which they became engaged; and by-and-by we hear of Madam Killigrew's 'Case,' which sets forth that she brought her husband a fortune of £10,000, which Tom, writing from the Hague in 1654[83] (the year in which his wife died of small-pox), solemnly promised not to waste or otherwise dispose of. Two houses in Scotland Yard were built with the money, or part of it. Francis Quarles thus bemoaned the hapless lady's fate: 'Sighes at the contemporary deaths of those incomparable Sisters—the Countesse of Cleaveland and Mistrisse Cicily Killegreue.' (They appear to have been buried in the same tomb, and to have died within twice two days of each other.) The little poem ends thus:
About this time we come across a characteristic little story about Tom Killigrew in Evelyn's 'Diary.'
Sir Richard Browne, writing from Nantes, 1st November, 1653, to Hyde, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, says that he has sent to him, carriage paid, three barrels of canary wine to Mr. Thomas Killigrew's care. But Hyde does not seem to have got them, at any rate for a very long time. He heard of the arrival of the consignment at Paris, and that it was there 'conceaved to be Mr. Killigrew's own wyne'!—very possibly, it may be feared, from the use to which the consignee was putting it.
Thomas Killigrew was associated with Dryden, Sir William Davenant, and others, in obtaining a license (which, by the way, Sir Henry Herbert, his predecessor in the office of Master of the Revels, vainly endeavoured to get revoked) for a company of players, and a playhouse which was called the Theatre Royal, and which was situated somewhere between Drury Lane and Bridge Street.[84]
In fact, Killigrew was playhouse mad, as may be further seen by this extract from Pepys, date 1664:
'To King's playhouse: saw Bartholomew Fayre. I chanced to sit by Tom Killigrew, who tells me that he is setting up a nursery: that is, is going to build a house in Moorefields, wherein he will have common plays acted. But four operas it shall have in the year, to act six weeks at a time, where we shall have the best scenes and machines—the best musique, and everything as magnificent as is in Christendome, and to that end hath sent for voices and painters, and other persons from Italy.'
'It might naturally have been supposed' (observes Genest in his 'History of the Stage') 'that Killigrew, on becoming patentee of the Theatre Royal, would have brought out some of his own plays; it does not, however, appear that any of them were ever acted, except "The Parson's Wedding" and "Claricilla." On the contrary, the silence of Langbaine and Downes does not amount to a proof that none were acted; as Langbaine did not frequent the theatres till several years after the Restoration, and Downes's account of the Theatre Royal is very imperfect. "The Pilgrim" is a good T. (theatre) play, with judicious alterations it might have been made fit for representation. "Cicilia" and "Clarinda," "Thomaso" and "Bellamira's Dream," are, each of them, rather one play in ten acts, than two distinct plays. When a play is written in two parts, there ought to be some sort of a conclusion at the end of the fifth act, but in these plays there is no more conclusion at the end of the fifth act than at the end of the first; improprieties occur in numberless plays, but perhaps no author ever made such strange jumbles as Killigrew has made in "The Princess," and "Cicilia" and "Clarinda." All his plays are in prose—most of them are of an enormous and tiresome length—verbosity is his perpetual fault—there is scarcely a scene in which the dialogue might not be shortened to advantage.'
But to return to Killigrew's domestic affairs. Tom married a second time—one Charlotte Van Hess, who is described as first Lady of the Queen's Privy Chamber in 1662, and as also holding the apparently delectable appointment of Keeper of Her Majesty's Sweet Coffer. By this marriage there were three sons—Thomas, Robert, and Charles, of whom more hereafter.
Tom Killigrew must have been nearly sixty years old when he narrowly escaped assassination in St. James's Park. He had had an intrigue with Lady Shrewsbury, but found a dangerous and more successful rival in the Duke of Buckingham; whereupon the disappointed rake turned upon the lady a stream of foul and venomous satire. The result was that one evening, on his return from the Duke of York's, some ruffians, probably hirelings of the inconstant fair one, set upon Tom's chair, through which they made no less than three passes with their swords, one of them wounding him in the arm. The assassins fled, leaving Tom Killigrew in danger of death, and his man quite dead.[85] This brings nearly to a close all that needs be said about Thomas Killigrew, who died thirteen or fourteen years after the foregoing event, on the 19th March, 1682/3, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Notwithstanding his vices, it may at least be recorded to his credit that he was faithful to the Stuart cause which he adopted; was never ambitious, or avaricious; and that it was said of him when he died, that 'he was bewailed by his friends, and truly wept for by the poor.'
His will is dated on the 15th March, and was proved in the Prerogative Court on the 19th of the same month by his son Henry, his executor, and residuary legatee. He left some houses in Scotland Yard, and he mentions a pension from the King. 'In the will,' says my authority, 'there is no jest.' That his pecuniary affairs were not in a very satisfactory condition would seem to be the case from a statement of 'Secret Money Services Charles II. and James II.,' 'Payd to several persons for the respective causes, uses and purposes undr-menc'oned, as by divers acquittances & a particular accompt signed & allowed in the like manner on the 14th day of June, 1683, doth appear, several sumes amounting to £4,743 4½d.—amongst others To James Gray, for and towards the funeral charges of Thos. Killigrew, deceased, £50.' This supposition would also appear to be confirmed by the following autograph letter, written when Tom Killigrew must have been about seventy years old (Harl. MSS. 2, 7005, art. 42):—