Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  It really is a very tangled story — this inner history of the fall of Clarendon, with which the school-books are not concerned. In a sense, it is also the story of the King’s marriage and of Catherine of Braganza, his unfortunate little ugly Queen, who must have suffered as much as any woman wedded to a sultan in any country where the seraglio is not a natural and proper institution.

  If Clarendon could not be said to have brought about the marriage, at least he had given it his suffrages when proposed by Portugal, which was anxious to establish an alliance with England as some protection against the predatory designs of Spain. He had been influenced by the dowry offered — five hundred thousand pounds in money, Tangier, which would give England a commanding position on the Mediterranean, and the Island of Bombay. Without yet foreseeing that the possession of Bombay, and the freedom to trade in the East Indies — which Portugal had hitherto kept jealously to herself — were to enable England to build up her great Indian Empire, yet the commercial advantages alone were obvious enough to make the match desirable.

  Catherine of Braganza sailed for England, and on the lath of May, 1662, Charles, attended by a splendid following, went to meet his bride at Portsmouth. He was himself a very personable man, tall — he stood a full six feet high — lean and elegantly vigorous. The ugliness of his drawn, harsh-featured face was mitigated by the glory of full, low-lidded, dark eyes, and his smile could be irresistibly captivating. He was as graceful in manner as in person, felicitous of speech, and of an indolent good temper that found expression in a charming urbanity.

  Good temper and urbanity alike suffered rudely when he beheld the wife they brought him. Catherine, who was in her twenty-fifth year, was of an absurdly low stature, so long in the body and short in the legs that, dressed as she was in an outlandish, full-skirted farthingale, she had the appearance of being on her knees when she stood before him. Her complexion was sallow, and though her eyes, like his own, were fine, they were not fine enough to redeem the dull plainness of her face. Her black hair was grotesquely dressed, with a long fore-top and two great ribbon bows standing out, one on each side of her head, like a pair of miniature wings.

  It is little wonder that the Merry Monarch, the fastidious voluptuary, with his nice discernment in women, should have checked in his long stride, and halted a moment in consternation.

  “Lord!” was his wry comment to Etheredge, who was beside him. “They’ve brought me a bat, not a woman.”

  But if she lacked beauty, she was well dowered, and Charles was in desperate need of money.

  “I suppose,” he told Clarendon anon, “I must swallow this black draught to get the jam that goes with it.”

  The Chancellor’s grave eyes considered him almost sternly what time he coldly recited the advantages of this marriage. If he did not presume to rebuke the ribaldry of his master, neither would he condescend to smile at it. He was too honest ever to be a sycophant.

  Catherine was immediately attended — in the words of Grammont — by six frights who called themselves maids-of-honour, and a governess who was a monster. With this retinue she repaired to Hampton Court, where the honeymoon was spent, and where for a brief season the poor woman — entirely enamoured of the graceful, long-legged rake she had married — lived in a fool’s paradise.

  Disillusion was to follow soon enough. She might be, by he grace of her dowry, Queen of England, but she was soon to discover that to King Charles she was no more than a wife de jure. With wives de facto Charles would people his seraglio as fancy moved him; and the present wife de facto, the mistress of his heart, the first lady of his harem, was that beautiful termagant, Barbara Villiers, wife of the accommodating Roger Palmer, Earl of Castle-maine.

  There was no lack — there never is in such cases — of those who out of concern and love for the happily deluded wife lifted the veil for her, and made her aware of the facts of his Majesty’s association with my Lady Castle-maine — an association dating back to the time when he was still a homeless wanderer. The knowledge would appear to have troubled the poor soul profoundly; but the climax of her distress was reached when, on her coming to Whitehall, she found at the head of the list of ladies-in-waiting assigned to her the name of my Lady Castlemaine. The forlorn little woman’s pride rose up before this outrage. She struck out that offending name, and gave orders that the favourite was not to be admitted to her presence.

  But she reckoned without Charles. For all his urbane, good-tempered, debonair ways, there was an ugly cynical streak in his nature, manifested now in the manner in which he dealt with this situation. Himself he led his boldly handsome favourite by the hand into his wife’s presence, before the whole Court assembled, and himself presented her to Catherine, what time that Court, dissolute and profligate as it was, looked on in amazement at so outrageous a slight to the dignity of a queen.

  What followed may well have exceeded all expectations. Catherine stiffened as if the blow dealt her had been physical. Gradually her face paled until it was grey and drawn; tears of outraged pride and mortification flooded her eyes. And then, as if something snapped within her brain under this stress of bitter emotion, blood gushed from her nostrils, and she sank back in a swoon into the arms of her Portuguese ladies.

  Confusion followed, and under cover of it Charles and his light of love withdrew, realizing that if he lingered not all his easy skill in handling delicate situations could avail him to save his royal dignity.

  Naturally the experiment was not to be repeated. But since it was his wish that the Countess of Castlemaine should be established as one of the Queen’s ladies — or, rather, since it was her ladyship’s wish, and since Charles was as wax in her ladyship’s hands — it became necessary to have the Queen instructed in what was, in her husband’s view, fitting. For this task he selected Clarendon. But the Chancellor, who had so long and loyally played Mentor to Charles’s Telemachus, sought now to guide him in matters moral as he had hitherto guided him in matters political.

  Clarendon declined the office of mediator, and even expostulated with Charles upon the unseemliness of the course upon which his Majesty was bent.

  “Surely, sire, it is for her Majesty to say who shall and who shall not be the ladies of her bedchamber. And I nothing marvel at her decision in this instance.”

  “Yet I tell you, my lord, that it is a decision that shall be revoked.”

  “By whom, sire?” the Chancellor asked him gravely.

  “By her Majesty, of course.”

  “Under coercion, of which you ask me to be the instrument,” said Clarendon, in the tutorly manner he had used with the King from the latter’s boyhood. “Yourself, sire, at a time when your own wishes did not warp your judgment, have condemned the very thing that now you are urging. Yourself, sire, hotly blamed your cousin, King Louis, for thrusting Mademoiselle de Valliere upon his queen. You will not have forgotten the things you said then of King Louis.”

  Charles remembered those unflattering criticisms which he was now invited to apply to his own case. He bit his lip, admitting himself in check.

  But anon — no doubt in obedience to the overbearing suasion of my Lady Castlemaine — he returned to the attack, and sent the Chancellor his orders in a letter demanding unquestioning obedience.

  “Use your best endeavours,” wrote Charles, “to facilitate what I am sure my honour is so much concerned in. And whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to be his enemy so long as I live.”

  My Lord Clarendon had few illusions on the score of mankind. He knew his world from froth to dregs — having studied it under a variety of conditions. Yet that letter from his King was a bitter draught. All that Charles possessed and was he owed to Clarendon. Yet in such a contest as this, Charles did not hesitate to pen that bitter, threatening line: “Whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to be his enemy so long as I live.”

  All that Clarendon had done in the pas
t was to count for nothing unless he also did the unworthy thing that Charles now demanded. All that he had accomplished in the service of his King was to be swept into oblivion by the breath of a spiteful wanton.

  Clarendon swallowed the draught and sought the Queen, upon that odious embassy with whose ends he was so entirely out of sympathy. He used arguments whose hollowness was not more obvious to the Queen than to himself.

  That industrious and entertaining chronicler of trifles, Mr. Pepys, tells us, scandalized, in his diary that on the following day the talk of the Court was all upon a midnight scene between the royal couple in the privacy of their own apartments, so stormy that the sounds of it were plainly to be heard in the neighbouring chambers.

  You conceive the poor little woman, smarting under the insult of Charles’s proposal by the mouth of Clarendon, assailing her royal husband, and fiercely upbraiding him with his lack not merely of affection but even of the respect that was her absolute due. And Charles, his purpose set, urged to it by the handsome termagant whom he dared not refuse, stirred out of his indolent good-nature, turning upon her, storming back, and finally threatening her with the greater disgrace of seeing herself pack ed home to Portugal, unless she would submit to the lesser disgrace he thrust upon her here.

  Whether by these or by other arguments he made his will prevail, prevail it did. Catherine of Braganza swallowed her pride and submitted. And a very complete submission it was. Lady Castlemaine was not only installed as a Lady of the Bedchamber, but very soon we find the Queen treating her with a friendliness that provoked comment and amazement.

  The favourite’s triumph was complete, and marked by an increasing insolence, most marked in her demeanour towards the Chancellor, of whose views on the subject, as expressed to the King, she was aware. Consequently she hated him with all the spiteful bitterness that is inseparable from the nature of such women. And she hated him the more because, wrapped in his cold contempt, he moved in utter unconcern of her hostility. In this hatred she certainly did not lack for allies, members of that licentious court whose hostility towards the austere Chancellor was begotten of his own scorn of them. Among them they worked to pull him down.

  The attempt to undermine his influence with the King proving vain — for Charles was as well aware of its inspiration as of the Chancellor’s value to him — that crew of rakes went laboriously and insidiously to work upon the public mind, which is to say the public ignorance — most fruitful soil for scandal against the great. Who shall say how far my lady and the Court were responsible for the lampoon affixed one day to my Lord Clarendon’s gatepost:

  Three sights to be seen:

  Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren queen.

  Her ladyship might well have considered the unpopularity of the Chancellor as the crown of her triumph, had this triumph been as stable as she could have wished. But, Charles being what he was, it follows that her ladyship had frequent, if transient, anxious jealousies to mar the perfection of her existence, to remind her how insecure is the tenure of positions such as hers, ever at the mercy of the very caprice to existence.

  And then, at long length, there came a day of horrid dread for her, a day when she found herself bereft of her influence with her royal lover, when pleadings and railings failed alike to sway him. In part she owed it to an indiscretion of her own, but in far greater measure to a child of sixteen, of a golden-headed, fresh, youthful loveliness, and a nature that still found pleasure in dolls and kindred childish things, yet of a quick and lively wit, and a clear, intelligent mind, untroubled either by the assiduity of the royal attentions or the fact that she was become the toast of the day.

  This was Miss Frances Stewart, the daughter of Lord Blantyre, newly come to Court as a Lady-in-Waiting to her Majesty. How profound an impression her beauty made upon the admittedly impressionable old Pepys you may study in his diary. He had a glimpse of her one day riding in the Park with the King, and a troop of ladies, among whom my Lady Castlemaine, looking, as he tells us, “mighty out of humour.” There was a moment when Miss Stewart came very near to becoming Queen of England, and although she never reached that eminence, yet her effigy not only found its way into the coinage, but abides there to this day (more perdurable than that of any actual queen) in the figure of Britannia, for which she was the model.

  Charles wooed her openly. It was never his way to study appearances in these matters. He was so assiduous that it became customary in that winter of 1666 for those seeking the King at Whitehall to inquire whether he were above or below— “below” meaning Miss Stewart’s apartments on the ground-floor of the palace, in which apartments his Majesty was a constant visitor. And since where the King goes the Court follows, and where the King smiles there the Court fawns, it resulted that this child now found herself queening it over a court that flocked to her apartments. Gallants and ladies came there to flirt and to gossip, to gamble and to pay homage.

  About a great table in her splendid salon, a company of rustling, iridescent fops in satin and heavy periwigs, and of ladies with curled head-dresses and bare shoulders, played at basset one night in January. Conversation rippled, breaking here and there into laughter, white, jewelled hands reached out for cards, or for a share of the heaps of gold that swept this way and that with the varying fortunes of the game.

  My Lady Castlemaine, seated between Etheredge and Rochester, played in silence, with lips tight-set and brooding eyes. She had lost, it is true, some £1500 that night; yet, a prodigal gamester, and one who came easily by money, she had been known to lose ten times that sum and yet preserve her smile. The source of her ill-humour was not the game. She played recklessly, her attention wandering; those handsome, brooding eyes of hers were intent upon watching what went on at the other end of the long room. There, at a smaller table, sat Miss Stewart, half a dozen gallants hovering near her, engaged upon a game of cards of a vastly different sort. Miss Stewart did not gamble. The only purpose she could find for cards was to build castles; and here she was building one with the assistance of her gallants, and under the superintendence of his Grace of Buckingham, who was as skilled in this as in other equally unstable forms of architecture.

  Apart, over by the fire, in a great chair of gilt leather, lounged the King, languidly observing this smaller party, a faint, indolent smile on his swarthy, saturnine countenance. Absently, with one hand he stroked a little spaniel that was curled in his lap. A black boy in a gorgeous, plumed turban and a long, crimson surcoat arabesqued in gold — there were three or four such attendants about the room — proffered him a cup of posset on a golden salver.

  The King rose, thrust aside the little blackamoor, and with his spaniel under his arm, sauntered across to Miss Stewart’s table. Soon he found himself alone with her — the others having removed themselves on his approach, as jackals fall back before the coming of the lion. The last to go, and with signs of obvious reluctance, was his Grace of Richmond, a delicately-built, uncomely, but very glittering gentleman.

  Charles faced her across the table, the tall house of cards standing between them.

  Miss invited his Majesty’s admiration for my Lord of Buckingham’s architecture. Pouf! His Majesty blew, and the edifice rustled down to a mere heap of cards again.

  “Symbol of kingly power,” said Miss, pertly. “You demolish better than you build, sire.”

  “Oddsfish! If you challenge me, it were easy to prove you wrong,” quoth he.

  “Pray do. The cards are here.”

  “Cards! Pooh! Card castles are well enough for Buckingham. But such is not the castle I’ll build you if you command me.”

  “I command the King’s Majesty? Mon Dieu! But it would be treason surely.”

  “Not greater treason than to have enslaved me.” His fine eyes were oddly ardent. “Shall I build you this castle, child?”

  Miss looked at him, and looked away. Her eyelids fluttered distractingly. She fetched a sigh.

  “The castle that your Majesty would build for any but your Queen m
ust prove a prison.”

  She rose, and, looking across the room, she met the handsome, scowling eyes of the neglected favourite. “My Lady Castlemaine looks as if she feared that fortune were not favouring her.” She was so artless that Charles could not be sure there was a double meaning to her speech. “Shall we go see how she is faring?” she added, with a disregard for etiquette, whose artlessness he also doubted.

  He yielded, of course. That was his way with beauty, especially with beauty not yet reduced into possession. But the characteristic urbanity with which he sauntered beside her across the room was no more than a mask upon his chagrin. It was always thus that pretty Frances Stewart used him. She always knew how to elude him and, always with that cursed air of artlessness, uttered seemingly simple sentences that clung to his mind to tantalize him.

  “The castle your Majesty would build for any but your Queen must prove a prison.” What had she meant by that? Must he take her to queen before she would allow him to build a castle for her?

  It was an insistent, haunting thought, wracking his mind. He knew there was a party hostile to the Duke of York and Clarendon, which, fearing the succession of the former, and, so, of the grandchildren of the latter, as a result of Catherine of Braganza’s childlessness, strongly favoured the King’s divorce.

  It was a singular irony that my Lady Castlemaine should be largely responsible for the existence of that party. In her hatred for Clarendon, and her blind search for weapons that would slay the Chancellor, she had, if not actually invented, at least helped to give currency to the silly slander that Clarendon had deliberately chosen for Charles a barren queen, so as to ensure the ultimate succession of his own daughter’s children. But she had never thought to see that slander recoil upon her as it now did; she had never thought that a party would come to rise up in consequence that would urge divorce upon the King at the very moment when he was consumed by passion for the unattainable, artlessly artful Frances Stewart.