y
Samuel Rowlands in his "Knave of Clubs," 1611:

_To feed on flesh is gluttony,
It maketh men fat like swine;
But is not he a frugal man
That on a leaf can dine?

He needs no linnen for to foul
His fingers' ends to wipe,
That has his kitchin in a box,
And roast meat in a pipe.

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?

Ge