Restoration

With the Restoration, courtship-in high society, at all events-lapsed again into an Ovidian sport. Robert Herrick helped on the celebrations with a display of erotic squibs. To pique the Puritans, who had been grumbling for so long about the display of 'turgent paps', he produced saucy odes with titles like 'Upon the Nipples of Julia's Breast' (which he likened to strawberries half-drowned in cream). Here he is, full of devilry:

Anthea bade me tie her shoe;
I did; and kist the instep too;
And would have kist unto her knee
Had not her blush rebuked me.

And again, in curiously schoolboy vein:

Pain would I kiss my Julia's dainty leg,
Which is as white and hairless as an egg.

Lovely women had no imperfections for Herrick. He was an undiscriminating lover:

Would ye oil of blossoms get?
Take it from my Julia's sweat. . . .

The Restoration, of course, inspired better love poetry than this. Herrick is more widely esteemed for his poem in which he tells how provoking is a careful carelessness in Julia's attire:

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness. . . .

Even a careless shoe-string he finds more bewitching

. . . than when art
Is too precise in every part.

With Herrick, love poetry (still far from matrimonial in purpose) became inextricably bogged in the pastoral convention. The loved one could not be publicly identified, so names like Julia or Corinna, Cynthia or Chloe were as good a cover as any. Besides, there was always the chance that half a dozen ladies might recognize themselves under the conventional name (it was like dedicating a book 'to one who will understand').

The behaviour of Restoration society in its pleasure-gardens was far removed from the simple dalliance of Arcady. On all sides morals began to slip. Skill at love-making, as represented by the successful siege of a 'cry'd up', orgulous beauty, was sufficient admission ticket to society. Why learn a trade when the trade of love yielded such dividends? Courtship was a counter in a game in which the prizes were titles and lands and fortunes. To the Court of Charles II came adventurers like the Count de Grammont, trailing the scent of continental boudoirs. His friend St Evremond warned him that 'however easy the English may be in respect of their wives they can by no means bear the inconstancy of their mistresses'.

It was not long before the sport of heiress-kidnapping was revived. A notable victim was the much-courted Mrs Elizabeth Malet, granddaughter of Lord Hawley, One night, while she was returning to her lodgings with her grandfather as escort, her coach was held up by masked men at Charing Cross. She was hustled out into another coach-a six-horsed one-and found herself beside the Earl of Rochester, whose proposal of marriage she had declined. The coach then took the road to the north. As kidnappings go, it was a considerate one, for the Earl had provided two ladies to receive his guest. The episode was not one the indulgent monarch could overlook. Rochester was sent to the Tower, but soon wheedled his release on the remarkable grounds of 'inadvertence, ignorance of the law and passion'. Some years later the lady he had kidnapped became his wife.

At the Court of Savoy de Grammont and his companion Monsieur de Malta had attached themselves as 'professed lovers' to two highborn ladies, wearing their mistresses' liveries and squiring them to jousts and other functions. Their office, says the Count's biographer, was never to quit their mistresses in public and never to approach them in private. Also, they were expected to ingratiate themselves with the ladies' husbands. 'What a plaguy odd ceremony do they require of us in this country,' grumbled Monsieur de Matta, 'if we cannot pay our compliments without being in love with the husband!'

There was, usually, a gloss of manners over immorality- manners copied, like much else, from the Sun King's Court. In Dryden's Marriage a la Mode, first acted in 1673, Melentha, an 'affected woman', is made to say: 'How charming is the French air and what an etourdi bite is one of our untravelled islanders!' France is the source of all that is delicate and bien tourne. She complains that her lover 'comes pawing upon me and doing all things so maladroitly'. Yet already the artificialities of courtship in France were being scoffed at by Moliere, whose Les Precieuses Ridicules had deeply offended an influential section of the Court, though not the King, in 1659. The play presented two affected sisters who were indignant because the suitors sent by their father to woo them had started off, in their bestial ignorance, by proposing marriage. The proper system (they explained) was for the lover first to worship at a distance, hiding his passion; then to propose in a garden alley; to be rebuffed with a show of anger, and temporarily banished from the lady's presence; to find an opportunity to appease the lady, and gradually accustom her to the talk of his passion; then to suffer intervention by rivals, and jealousies inspired by false appearances; to endure parental persecution, bouts of despair, kidnappings. . . . For a suitor to talk of conjugal union at the outset was intolerable-'il ne se peat rien de plus marchand'. It is hard, at this stage, to see how Moliere's discomfiture of these precious sisters and the follies they stood for could have led to such impassioned appeals to ban the play. The preciosities were, of course, a reaction from the brutal amours of an earlier day; but the civilizing salons had so absurdly complicated their codes of manners that mockery was inevitable. And the mocking mood spread to England.

Among the fashions which came from the Continent was that of ladies receiving gentlemen guests while lying in bed, or even in their baths. The privileged glimpses thus obtained could not fail to inspire a man of wit to audacious flatteries. From Italy and France, too, came the vogue for fans and masks, agencies of coquetry, once the tools of prostitutes, The fan, cunningly used, could be as potent as a rapier. It had an infinity of employments. Firstly, like a cigarette between the fingers of a modern girl, it was something to hold. It was also something to drop, when it became necessary to drop something. It could hide blushes and it could hide the absence of blushes. It could be used to display a graceful hand, a well-shaped arm. It could shield a bosom from a lustful eye-or draw the eye to a bosom. Wafted in one way it could be used to attract attention; wafted in another, to discourage attention. Closed with a crack, it could convey displeasure-or merely lend emphasis. It was something a suitor might be allowed to kiss, in the first formal stages of an affaire. It could be used to rap roving fingers in the later stages. But its language was subtler and more equivocal than all this. As a Frenchman said: 'It prohibits what it permits, and intercepts its own message'. Its main purpose, perhaps, was to tease, to tantalize. There are many so-called codes of fan language (touch left cheek with fan-'I want to get rid of you'; lift fan to lips-'kiss me', and so on) but they need not be taken too seriously. A woman with a fan could make her meaning clear enough without having to memorize a deaf-and-dumb language. And when there were no suitors in sight, she could always waft the ambient air with it.