ABSTRACT
It was with some measure of foresight that John Milton had Walter Raleigh’s The Cabinet Council published in 1658, for Raleigh stresses just how the people will follow their king; when the king gets drunk they get drunk and when the king laughs they laugh.1 And laugh the new king did, as Samuel Pepys records in his diary entry of 1 February 1663/4. For there he tells us that the Duke of Newcastle and Charles II spent “an hour or two, laughing ... at Gresham College in general ... he mightily laughed at [it], for spending time only in weighing of ayre, and doing nothing else since they sat.”2 Little wonder then that just twelve years later we find Sir Nicholas Gimcrack in Shadwell’s comedy The Virtuoso, a play which “the Royal Family have received favourably,”3 bragging about his fine cellar of well-weighted airs.
