There was a sudden burst of song. A robin, apparently unaware that autumn had already passed into the dank misery of early December, was singing his autumn song in the wet dripping bush at the head of Lucy’s grave. He sang his song, spread his wings and flew away. Dr. Cosin found that his mood had changed. “I am married to the beauty of the world.”
Nineteen
1
There are days in the lives of nations, as in the lives of individuals, that do not seem to belong to this world. They pass like a pageant of sunlight clouds across the sky, lifted above the sorrows of the mundane world beneath. For a short while the brightness of the passing falls upon the things below, ugliness is blotted out and possessed by joy men do not merely exist but live. Centuries after they have passed into history they are still alive in a nation’s memory. John Evelyn wrote on one such day, “I beheld it and blessed God.” It was the day when the King came home to London.
Oliver Cromwell had died, and through the dark confusion of the days that followed his death the desire of the people had begun to push up like green shoots through the earth. Across the water the exiles had waited, shivering and hungry through the coldest and most poverty stricken winter of all. Then the miracle happened and spring burst through. The majority of Englishmen and women were weary of the iron power that had held them captive for so long. They had never forgotten the young Prince of Wales who had been so much loved years ago. He was a man now and their King. They asked him to come home.
All the way from Dover to London, through Canterbury and Rochester, along the lanes that wound between flower-decked hedges, under the arching green trees and through the villages where the bells pealed in the church towers, the progress was one of mounting joy and triumph. May the twenty-ninth, the King’s thirtieth birthday, was the day when London unveiled her face and was a widow woman no longer. It was a fine day and from dawn the people were astir. The walls were hung with tapestries, flags flew from every tower and spire and the streets were strewn with spring flowers. Everyone was dressed in their gay best and the girls wore white. The bells started ringing early and all through the morning the tension mounted. The procession of the King and the princes, leaving Blackheath in the early afternoon, would pass over London Bridge to the city.
Midday drew near, every window was crowded with faces and the streets were lined with excited people, good-natured foot soldiers ready with their pikes to hold them back should their enthusiasm pass all bounds. The army would be much in evidence in today’s procession for it had been General Monk, marching from Scotland through the snow of the previous winter, who had been largely responsible for translating the longing of the people into action; and with no blood spilt. That was one of the joys of this great occasion. The revolution that had brought back the King had been a bloodless one.
All the clocks of London struck twelve. Officers came and went with shining swords, notables passed by and were cheered, dogs crossed the streets and were also cheered. Cats likewise. The fountains began to run with wine and then at last, far off, came the roar of cheering. They were coming. Bells were pealing and trumpets sounding and the roar grew until it drowned even the bells in its deep thunder. Golden coaches appeared as though from a fairy tale. Cavalry in silver doublets trotted by followed by infantry tramping joyously and waving their swords. Sheriffs, heralds, trumpeters all streamed by in gorgeous garments and were greeted with cheers. Then a pause and more flowers began to fall from the windows.
Then, riding alone, a curious little lonely space before them and behind them, came three fine young men riding three magnificent horses. People were crying and laughing together, the cheers choked in their throats when they actually saw his face, so that just where he was he seemed to carry an aura of quietness with him, a small circle of peace at the centre of the thunder of rejoicing. He rode a little ahead of his brothers, plainly dressed in a dark suit, the only points of colour the blue ribbon of the Garter and the scarlet feather in the hat he carried. He rode slowly, looking up to the windows, raising the great plumed hat in greeting, looking straight into the eyes of his people when he could and smiling at them with a grave tenderness. The hard bitter lines that had so aged his face through the worst years of the exile were scarcely visible today and he looked what he was, a young man in the prime of life, tall, straight and strong, possessed of great dignity and elegance and extraordinary charm. And something more, a hint of power. They had not got a weak king, they realized with relief, and the power was not the bigoted sort that had recently enslaved them. There was tolerance in the strong face.
The King rode on through the cheering crowds and came at last to his Palace of Whitehall, and what his thoughts were as he rode past the spot where his father had died, and was brought into the banqueting hall where the last hours of the late King’s life had been passed, no one knew. They only knew he was not able to finish the speech he had prepared or to fulfil quite to the end the programme planned for his first evening. He said he was weary.
2
Some while later, tired but no longer exhausted, the King found himself alone at evening in the great bedchamber whose windows looked out on the Thames and its shipping. The discreet and invaluable Chiffinch, his servant, had just helped him to dress for a supper party he was giving, a small and intimate affair of great importance to him. Chiffinch had suggested, with great respect, that the royal watch was fast, but had been so snapped at, hurried and chivied, that the King was arrayed for conquest thirty minutes too soon. The clocks of Westminster said so, striking the hour, and could not be gainsaid. He had laughed, apologized to Chiffinch and told him to fetch him when she came. She was twenty years old and incomparably beautiful. He had met her first in Holland and now they were reunited in England. She was Buckingham’s cousin. He had never been so greatly in love. Except perhaps that first time.
The bedchamber was vast and a little lonely and he went up a flight of steps to the King’s closet, which he planned to make his private sanctum of which only himself and Chiffinch should possess a key. He intended to hang a few exquisite pictures on the walls and to keep here the collection of clocks and watches he was planning. Timepieces fascinated him. They were like living creatures, busy as bees and as full of talk and song as birds in spring.
He shut the door behind him, went to the window, opened it and leaned out. It had been a hot day but the wind had changed and a cool air was coming off the water. The sun had just disappeared behind a bank of cloud to the west but overhead the sky was still deep and clear and a few white gulls circled there. Looking to right and left he could see the amazing jumble of buildings that was Whitehall and here and there light shone from a tall window and was reflected, broken and trembling, in the water. Just below his own window floated one perfect white swan. There was peace in his mind and he thought of his sisters, Mary and Minette, and of his mother and Jackie. Especially he thought of Jackie and longed for him. Presently they would come over, his mother and sisters to visit him, Jackie to be always with him, and there would once more be dancing and music at Whitehall and the citizens of London would row up the river at evening to listen to the music of the King’s fiddlers floating over the water.
But first must come hard work and difficult adjustment. He had to learn to be a king. He knew very well that behind the façade of the rapturous welcome he had many enemies. He must win them over. He must get to know his people and they must get to know him. What sort of king did he want to be? He thought he had expressed it in one of the speeches he had been endlessly making. “My whole wish is to make you as happy as I am myself.” He had meant that. After all the years of exile he wanted to be happy. He wanted to be the cheerful King of a happy people. He did not want for England an unsmiling greatness. A people and their King could, he believed, be both great and gay. His old idealism had not been quite destroyed by the exile, it had surged up again in this new spring and he had made his plans. There was to be an Act of Indemnity and Oblivio
n and the words of it were already forming in his mind. He wanted forgiveness, not vengeance. He knew he would be forced to bring some of the regicides to justice but it should be as few as possible. He wanted the foundation stone of his reign to be forgiveness.
He stopped thinking and his mind became as still as his body that was leaning against the side of the window, utterly relaxed for the first time in years. London, stretched out along the river, seemed as dreamily quiet as he was himself. Perhaps after their rapturous reunion she was now as glad to rest as he was. The breeze was blessedly cool against his face and he was aware that it was freshening. It was his fancy that it brought him a breath of the sea. Along the western shores of his kingdom the waves were now beginning to sound out their presence, surging over the rocks and into the caves. A gust of wind blew over the river and again came the fancied breath of the sea. There was a sudden sweep of white wings, a rush of air passed his face, an impression of beauty and power as a gull swept past the window.
“O Dduw, y mae yr hapusrwydd yma yn ormod yw ddal.”
He straightened up and for a moment his whole body trembled, though not with fear; more as though a lute, tuned to the same pitch as another, vibrated to its song. Where had the voice come from? From the wind and the sea or from within himself? A trick of his own memory, something triggered off because she had loved gulls so much? Yet he was held in a moment of serene, profound happiness. It held him, and still held, and might have held for ever had not some sudden harsh sound in the palace broken the spell. He moved from the window and a past memory came with disturbance to his mind, dragging him back into the web of human machinations. What if that letter had told the truth? Sorting through a mass of papers before he came to England he had found a letter written to him by Anne Hill, a letter which a secretary had not given him yet through some extraordinary negligence had not destroyed. The letter had been confused, badly written and badly expressed. He had read it through quickly, thought the girl mad, destroyed and forgotten it. Now he remembered it perfectly.
For a few moments he fought against belief, since it is the nature of man to fight against truth, and because he was deeply in love with another woman. But the little closet was filled with the freshness of the sea and the echo of that happiness sounded on, and presently he believed. The acceptance of belief made Jackie doubly precious and suddenly everything else was lost in longing for his son. But Jackie would come. One day they would lean out of this window together and look at London lying along the Thames.
He became aware of a discreet coughing and an anxious shuffling movement below. It was Chiffinch. How long had he been down there in the bedchamber and what was it that he was supposed to do now? He remembered, went to the window of the closet and closed it. Something of her would always be here among his ticking clocks and watches but life had to go on and he was greatly in love.
He went down the steps to the bedchamber. Chiffinch bowed. “Sir, Your Majesty’s guests await you and supper is served.”
Note
A reader who can persevere to the end of this book may like to know what became of some of the characters. The tragedy of Jackie is well-known, It is interesting that the pocket-book found on him when he was captured after Sedgemoor, and which is now in the British Museum, contains prayers written in the manner of Jeremy Taylor, and one wonders if his mother wrote them? His imprisonment in the Tower as a boy must have made a great impression on him because when twenty-nine years later he was there again, under sentence of death, he begged that his execution might be postponed for twenty-four hours, that he might be still alive on Thursday July the sixteenth, the date when he and his mother were set free. Perhaps he hoped that deliverance might come again on that day. His request was not granted and he died on Wednesday July the fifteenth.
Mary was re-united with her father, who after the Restoration became the Earl of Carlingford, and lived with him in Ireland for six years. She then married William Sarsfield of Mayo, who brought her to England, but four years later he died of smallpox. Her second husband was William Fanshawe of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, Master of the Requests to Charles the Second, and her home became the part of London that Lucy had known so well. She was the mother of children and she appears to have had the gift of healing, for she touched for the king’s evil. The Covent Garden apple women, knowing her to be the sister of the Duke of Monmouth, called her Princess Fanshawe. Mary died before her husband and was buried in Barking church, and when William Fanshawe also died he was buried beside “his dearly beloved wife.”
Lord George Scott, in his researches, could find no reference to Justus after 1656, but Richard married and had children. We can hope that the Dewi of this book had his wish and became the royal servant of whom Pepys wrote, “being a Welshman will talk very broad of the King’s being married to his sister.” A David Walter, groom of the bedchamber, is several times mentioned in the Calendar of Domestic State Papers.
Dr. Cosin was appointed Prince Bishop of Durham by a grateful King. In his direst poverty he had refused to sell his books and in the Restoration was also restored to his library. He was a well-loved but well-feared Bishop. It has been written of him, “He snuffed battle from afar, sought it out with zest, and laid about him with undisguised relish. He never sank to the vulgarity of abuse but enlivened each encounter with a ready trenchant wit.” He continued to suffer much pain and at the end of his life was greatly distressed that he could not kneel. He would say, “Lord, I bow the knees of my heart.”
The Child From the Sea Page 78
