KING CHARLES'S RETURN
By B. IFOR EVANS
THE Exhibition of the King's Pictures made me realise that Charles I was the greatest collector in English history. It was a fact not mentioned in the text-books. Not only had he bought widely and with discrimination, but he was a genuine patron of artists, of Rubens and Van Dyck and many others. Had he not built a special landing-stage by Van Dyck's house at Blackfriars, so that his own frequent visits might be rendered more simple? Then, with the Commonwealth, the whole of this, the greatest collec- tion made in the days of Christendom, was dispersed and in part destroyed. Most of the gold and silver plate was melted down and used in the Mint. Cromwell kept a few of the pictures, and the rest were sold by auction and went mostly to the royal and princely houses on the Continent. What might this London have been today if all of King Charles's pictures had still remained in the capital, or were available for circulation through the cities of Great Britain!
Then I recalled that there was at least one gracious memorial of King Charles in London. This was the statue of him in Trafalgar Square looking down at Whitehall:
Comely and calm he rides, Hard by his own Whitehall ; Only the night wind glides ; No crowds, nor rebels brawl. Gone, too, his Court ; and yet The stars his courtiers are: Stars in their courses set, And every wandering star: After all, the statue of King Charles was one of the most beautiful in London. The mounted figure of the king was held by a slim pedestal of Portland stone, very handsomely proportioned, with the
royal arms carved at each end. It had always seemed to me a miniature of the Cenotaph. The king himself sat in armour on his horse, holding himself proudly erect, with, in his right hand a baton, resting on his thigh. His face was stronger and far more full of vigour than it appeared in the famous triple portrait by Van Dyck.
It had survived a great deal, this noble brass statue since Hubert Le Sueur had made it on the commission of the Earl of Portland in 1633. It is sobering to realise that the whole construction of the statue in the seventeenth century was completed for only £600, while when the Office of Works had the monument covered with sandbags in the war of 1914-18 the cost was nearly 440o. Charles's statue had in one way or another survived all the accidents of the centuries. After the Civil War it fell into the hands of the Commonwealth men, who, so the story goes, disposed of it to John Rivet, a brazier who lived at the Dial near Holborn Conduit, with the most impera- tive orders that it should be broken up. Rivet seems to have been a man of parts, either a loyalist or an artist, or perhaps only a good business man. He was determined not to destroy this thing of loveliness that had come into his possession. So he resorted to guile. The legend is, that he hid the statue in the vaults of the Church of St. Paul's at Covent Garden, and then to satisfy the Commonwealth men he made trinkets of brass and sold them, saying that he had fashioned them from King Charles and his horse. Both royalists and regicides bought his wares, either for motives of pious memory or of impious hatred. With the Restoration, so at least one old chronicler writes, John Rivet produced the statue from his vaults and presented it to Charles II.
So I went to Trafalgar Square to see this beautiful statue once again. The pedestal was there, but nothing on it. Still in this spring of 1947 the authorities who had put the monarch into safe keeping for the war had been unable to find the time and labour to put him back again. Of course I know that the authorities have many things to think about, but they had found time, I noticed, to reinstate George III with his silly little pigtail, close-by in Cock- spur Street. Why, I wondered, not leave George III in his hiding- place, perhaps for ever, and instead bring back one of the most beautiful statues in London? Do the citizens of London no longer cherish their city that they tolerate this bureaucratic inertia? . . . It was only after I had written thus far that I read the statement of the Minister of Works last Monday that King Charles has been repaired and will soon be on his pedestal again. Letts Deo.
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