From Chapter 2: smoking was not confined to the auditors on the stage, who paid sixpence each for a stool. There was the "lords' room" over the stage, which seems to have corresponded with the modern stage boxes, the price of admission to which appears to have been a shilling, where the pipe was also in full blast. Dekker tells how a gallant at a new play would take a place in the "twelve penny room, next the stage, because the lords and you may seem to be hail fellow, well met"; and Jonson, in "Every Man out of his Humour," 1600, speaks of one who pretended familiarity with courtiers, that he talked of them as if he had "
taken tobacco with them over the stage, in the lords' room."
From Chapter 5: The year 1660 that restored Charles II to his throne, restored a gaiety and brightness, not to say frivolity of tone, that had long been absent from English life. The following song in praise
of tobacco, taken from a collection which was printed in 1660, is touched with the spirit of the time; though it is really founded on, and to no small extent taken from, some verses in praise
of tobacco written by 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.