There were daily duties to be performed. The King held a levée every morning; he went in state to prayers; he received his ministers and sat at the Council; he dined in public; the Court was open to any one who might venture to claim the rank and consideration of a gentleman; the King was accessible to all. The quiet, dull Court of the Georges was a new thing altogether in the land. Charles kept open house, like the kings of France. He walked fearlessly and almost unattended in the Park and in his gardens; one cannot, I repeat, deny the gambling, singing, and love-making which the King permitted and encouraged; but I plead for Charles that amount of serious attention to his state and dignity of his position, no small amount, which was necessary for the mere maintenance of kingship. In other things the laxness of his morals did not prevent the assertion of his prerogative, especially in his dealings with the City of London. No king before him, for instance, had dared to inflict upon the City so enormous a fine as that when Charles shut up the Exchequer and robbed the merchants of a million and a half of money. This one action, so bold, so calculated both as to the occasion and the probable impotence of the City to resist it, ought to be alone sufficient to set aside completely the old theory of the jaded voluptuary. It was not, again, the jaded voluptuary who plotted, planned, and carried out the destruction of the City liberties; it was a Stuart, with all the cleverness of his race, with all the tenacity of his father and his brother, and with all the inability to discern the forces that were arrayed against him and to comprehend the certainty of their success. He died in the moment of his success, leaving to his brother the fruits of his despotic measures in ruin and deposition (see Appendix I.).