Stuart dynasty

248 THE STUART DYNASTY.
Lord Crofts and Sir Jdhu Denham were also sent
as ambassadors to Poland, where the English mer-
chants lent 10,000/., while the Czar of Muscovy and
the Venetian Senate were solicited in vain in the
same high interest. To crown all, we have Cardinal
de Retz's assurance that he found the Queen mother
of England living with her daughter, the Duchess
of Orleans, absolutely without a faggot to light a
fire in the apartment of the Louvre which they
inhabited.* It is also well known that at the request
of her father, Charles L, the Princess of Orange lent
a sum of money to her royal brother, Charles II., to
recover which William of Orange, her son, paid his
first visit to England in the " Merry Monarch's "
reign.f
Thus alternations of indigence and luxury con-
spired to ruin entirely a character by no means
endowed originally with stability. Of Charles's wit
and merry complacency — which, though unmixed
with any true nobleness of character, yet rendered
him personally popular — there are numerous in-
stances recorded, while the high spirit he preserved
during a long train of misfortunes likewise served
in his lifetime to condone his lamentable profligacy .J
At the close of his first sojourn at the Hague,
Charles II. learned how Cromwell's victorious legions
* ' Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz,' p. 142.
f Cunningham's ' History of Great Britain,' vol. i. p. 15 ; also ' History
of England during the Reigns of the Royal House of Stuart,' edition 1790,
p. 549.
% Charles II. declared Isaac Barrow to be the unfairest preacher he ever
heard, because he exhausted his subject and left nothing for others to say.
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