The Social History of SmokingApperson, George Latimer
History
The Social History of Smoking
Apperson, George Latimer
Smoking
The cause wherefore few rich men's sons
Prove disputants in schools,
Is that their fathers fed on flesh,
And they begat fat fools.
This fulsome feeding cloggs the brain
And doth the stomach choak
But he's a brave spark that can dine
With one light dish of smoak._
There is nothing to show that King Charles smoked, nor what his
personal attitude towards tobacco may have been.
His Majesty was pleased, however, in a letter to Cambridge University,
officially to condemn smoking by parsons, as at the same time he
condemned the practice of wig-wearing and of sermon-reading by the
clergy. But the royal frown was without effect. Wigs soon covered
nearly every clerical head from the bench of bishops downwards; and it
is very doubtful indeed whether a single parson put his pipe out.
Clouds were blown under archiepiscopal roofs. At Lambeth Palace one
Sunday in February 1672 John Eachard, the author of the famous book or
tract on "The Contempt of the Clergy," 1670, which Macaulay turned to
such account, dined with Archbishop Sheldon. He sat at the lower end
of the table between the archbishop's two chaplains; and when dinner
was finished, Sheldon, we are told, retired to his withdrawing-room,
while Eachard went with the chaplains and another convive to their
lodgings "to drink and smoak."
If the restored king did not himself smoke, tobacco was far from
unknown at the Palace of Whitehall. We get a curious glimpse of one
aspect of life there in the picture which Lilly, the notorious
astrologer, paints in his story of his arrest in January 1661. He was
taken to Whitehall at night, and kept in a large room with some sixty
other prisoners till daylight, when he was transferred to the
guardroom, which, he says, "I thought to be hell; some therein were
sleeping, others swearing, others smoaking tobacco. In the chimney of
the room I believe there was two bushels of broken tobacco pipes,
almost half one load of ashes." What would the king's grandfather, the
author of the "Counterblaste," have said, could he have imagined such
a spectacle within the palace walls?
General Monk, to whom Charles II owed so much, is said to have
indulged in the unpleasant habit of chewing tobacco, and to have been
imitated by others; but the practice can never have been common.
Tobacco was still the symbol of good-fellowship. Winstanley, who was
an enemy of what he called "this Heathenish Weed," and who thought the
"folly" of smoking might never have spread so much if stringent "means
of prevention" had been exercised, yet had to declare in 1660 that
"Tobacco it self is by few taken now as medicinal, it is grown a
good-fellow, and fallen from a Physician to a Complement. 'He's no
good-fellow that's without ... burnt Pipes, Tobacco, and his
Tinder-Box.'"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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