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.’”