Merivel: A Man of His Time

by Rose Tremain

  The morning before she left for Shottesbrooke – a day of cold winds and a perturbation of hail, which spattered all the parkland with its white stones – I sat with Margaret beside the Library fire, trying to fortify my spirits with a continuous sip-sipping of some fine Alicante, yet knowing how horribly visible my Melancholy appeared. (I have lately acquired the habit, from the reading of the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, of trying to see myself de près, or ‘close up’, not looking only outwards, but inwards upon my own demeanour and my own responses, with the eternal aim of acquiring some wisdom about the Person that I am, or might become.)

  Trying to cheer me a little, Margaret began promising she would send me frequent letters from Cornwall, describing the beauty of the secret coves where the sea washes in and ebbs out in its perpetual restlessness, and the intricacy of the shells that she and Mary might discover there.

  ‘Ah,’ said I, ‘and the intricacy of all the Wrecked Ships attacked by Pirates, then torn apart upon the rocks, and of all the Dead washed ashore …’

  Margaret regarded me with sorrow, as a mother disappointed by the behaviour of her child. ‘Father,’ she said, after a moment of silence, ‘I have been thinking about something.’

  ‘I am glad of that,’ I said, ‘for a mind empty of thought is prone to terrible Error.’

  ‘Hush and do not mock, for once.’

  ‘Puffins again, I suppose? You have been thinking of those?’

  ‘No. I have been thinking of a thing Sir James said to me when I was last at Shottesbrooke, and that was the Importance – in a man’s brief time on the earth – of embarking on some Life’s Work.’

  ‘I agree with him. But do not look at your father in that accusatory way, Margaret. You know that I have a great deal of work already, and—’

  ‘He was talking about writing, Papa: the composition of a treatise upon some subject of Importance. He himself is embarked upon a very long and substantial Work he has entitled Observations upon the Poor and upon the Prevalence of Crime in England. And he told me that this labour of his gives him much satisfaction, for it takes him quite out of his own world …’

  ‘You cannot say entirely out,’ I snapped. ‘Sir James is a magistrate, as you know, and his dealings with the Criminal Poor are therefore very frequent.’

  ‘Indeed. But he is not one of them. He does not have to try to make his way in the world by selling oysters or by petty thievery. He is not shuffled onwards and always onwards from one parish to another, because no one wishes to have the expense of his care …’

  ‘True. However—’

  ‘The proposition I am trying to make, Father, is that I think, were you to embark upon some great enterprise of Writing, you might be less sunk into yourself and more contented with the world.’

  I gaped at my daughter. It is true that I have brought her up to perfect a certain Independence of Thought, but when that same Independence appears directed, like a barbed Arrow, against myself, I feel … well, what do I feel? I suppose that I simply feel Foolish. Yet it is a Foolishness mixed with Fear. (Was not the life of old King Lear brought all to naught by the Independence of Thought of his most beloved daughter?)

  I drew nearer the fire, stretching out my hands to warm them. I was within a whisper of relating to Margaret – as some pitiful Defence of what she sees as my idleness and absence of cheer – my earlier attempts to set down the Story of my Life in The Wedge, but I remembered in the Nick of Time that this Life reveals, in all their naked horror, many of my Follies and Wickednesses, including the Wickedness I showed towards her own mother. I thus drew back from presenting it to her.

  I resumed my sipping of the Alicante. Warmed a little by this, I said: ‘It is very kind of you to be devoting your thoughts to my Welfare and do not think that I am not touched by this. And you are right that we are held to the world by our Endeavours in it, and yet …’

  ‘And yet what?’

  ‘Oh, Margaret,’ I said, ‘you did not know me when I was young! For then I was All Endeavour. For every minute of my Existence I was composing some great and Marvellous Plan. I even tried to become an Artist – until some vainglorious portraitist told me I had no talent. There were not hours in the day, nor days in the year, sufficient for all my Schemes. But after you were born and when Bidnold was restored to me, I resolved that I would calm my restless ways and settle down here in Norfolk to take care of you and pursue my profession, and to think no more of Glory or Preferment, or any worldly thing.’

  Margaret rose from her chair and came to kneel by my feet, and rested her arms on my knees. ‘Papa,’ she said gently, ‘I was not speaking about Glory.’

  I lingered long in my chair after Margaret had gone to bed. ‘Merivel,’ said I to myself, ‘to sit alone like this, day after day, while Margaret is gone to Cornwall, will assuredly bring you to a dark despondency. You must rise up and look about you, in some new place.’

  Perhaps it was Margaret’s mention of the word ‘Glory’ that brought to my mind the idea of travelling to France, to the Court of Louis XIV? I knew that what I longed for in these, my declining years, was to be dazzled by Wonders. At Versailles I would surely find them.

  3

  I HAVE COME to London.

  I am attired in a very smart Russet Coat and brown Breeks, with a Cascade of lace at my neck and upon my head a very Lively Hat, which seems to shift its own warm weight from time to time as though it might be some tame, nesting Pheasant I had reared in Norfolk.

  My wig is full and shiny and new. And I am wearing the Sword – a thing I have not done for some while, so that it keeps dragging upon my coat and threatening to make me stumble and topple me into the gutter. Luckily, I have also brought with me one of my ebony walking Canes and, with this to steady me, I am able to make a reasonably elegant progress down Birdcage Walk.

  I am on my way to visit the King, having secured my Audience most easily by messenger and receiving from His Majesty a most delightful short Response, which reads as follows:

  Ah, my dear Merivel,

  You cannot know, in these sombre and Difficult Times, how much it cheers Us to have word of you. You may come to the Apartments of the Duchess of Portsmouth (our sweet ‘Fubbs’) at Noon, where you will find Us more Grey and Grave than when last we met, but not lacking in Gladness to see you. And I hope that we may coax Laughter from our hearts.

  Charles Rex

  In the Walk, so called for its many airy Birdcages installed by the path, I am jostled by a great quantity of people, who perambulate up and down within that vast shadow still cast by the Palace of Whitehall upon the nation’s heart.

  I know that the King, who seems to have wearied of every one of his Parliaments and now rules without them Absolutely, is less admired and revered than at his Coming In, when he appeared to us like a god. Indeed, there is a restless or even seditious spirit abroad in the Coffee Houses – or so I am told – and the country would much prefer England to be steered towards war with Catholic France by a Parliament, than to behold in the King’s chambers a French mistress planted in splendour, and no Parliament anywhere to be seen. But yet I think there are many men (and women) who still suffer, as I suffer, from an old Disease and that is the Disease of Loving the King.

  Though John Pearce, in his Quaker hatred of Monarchy and the Hierarchy of the so-called Nobility that it begets, tried to his dying moment to cure me of this malady, and though I struggled always to be the person that Pearce wanted me to be, I find, still, that the sight of the King – or even the mere thought of his arrival at Bidnold – wakes in my heart an extraordinary gladness that I am not able to suppress. And I think it may now be true that I no longer care to suppress it. The King’s nature is very like mine, a composite of yearning appetite and sullen hypochondria, so we console each other, and this Consolation is very well understood by both of us.

  I go on, without tripping or stumbling, into St James’s Park, my heavy Sword making a vexing clicking noise as it bounces against my thighs,
and come to a stop by the canal there, where a group of fops are gawping at a Crocodile, which is paddling itself out of the water.

  ‘Mon dieu! Mon dieu!’ yelp the fops, pointing at the creature and clutching at each other’s shoulders in mock terror. ‘What a Brute! Oh, but imagine that great Jaw opening and closing upon one’s leg!’

  ‘Or upon one’s torso!’

  ‘Oh, horror! Or upon one’s parts!’

  And they scuttle away at a jaunty run, laughing like Choirboys, with all their Swords clicking together and the silk of their stockings catching little glints of sunlight as their legs skip up.

  I stand and stare at the Crocodile. It lies upon the grass in an attitude of boredom, as though asking itself how it came here, to London, to be an entertainment for fops and visitors from Norfolk, and I note the seeming thickness of its skin, as though it were a thing born in armour, and valiant always in its readiness for war.

  And I remind myself that almost every animal on earth has something about it that calls forth my Respect. Even a Mouse or a horned Beetle: by the softness and silence of the Mouse and the hard shine of the Beetle I am caught in momentary wonder. I have no idea why this should be so, but yet it is. For the beautiful chestnut mare, Danseuse, given to me by the King, I felt an admiration that bordered upon worship. At the death of this animal, I wept for many days.

  King Charles receives me in the petit salon of his Mistress’s apartments, which, I am told, possess more grandeur even than the Queen’s, and where, indeed, the King appears very content, lying among furs on a Chaise longue, with an amused smile upon his face.

  I kneel at his feet. My knees creak and my Sword clanks upon the floor.

  ‘Ah, Merivel,’ says His Majesty, ‘I am glad to hear you are just as noisy as you ever were!’

  A laugh bursts out of me.

  The King claps his hand upon my shoulder. ‘Excellent!’ he says. ‘I have not heard your laughter for far too long! I am drinking Sack. Will you join me?’

  ‘I never find myself capable of refusing Sack, Your Majesty,’ I say.

  Then I endeavour to raise myself up from my fawning position, but the sheath of my pesky Sword lodges itself behind one of the legs of the Chaise and I tilt forward, only saving myself from falling into the King’s lap by reaching out the hand holding my Pheasant Hat and pressing it against the Royal Leg.

  I murmur my apologies as I rise at last and am relieved to find that the King is still smiling. It is at that moment that I first take note of how – in the year or more that I have not seen him – he has aged.

  Then I am settled comfortably on a chair and given a tumbler of Sack, and the King begins a melancholy discourse upon his state of mind, which, he tells me, ‘is becoming prone to irrational Fear and only longs for Peace and Quiet’.

  ‘That I can comprehend,’ I say. ‘Indeed, Sir, I have no doubt I would long for it too, were it not already a little too peaceful and quiet at Bidnold.’

  ‘Ah, Bidnold. A singular and very lovely place. We shall come there when the winter is past. How is Gates?’

  ‘Well. I must admit he is causing me … some moderate anguish, Your Majesty,’ I say, and proceed to lay out for the King my Great Dilemma with regard to Will – ending with the conceit that I, in due time, am destined to become Will’s Nurse.

  Though this entertains the King for a moment (in particular my account of how long it takes Will to walk across my Withdrawing Room, viz. three or four, or even five minutes), his features soon enough become grave and he says to me: ‘We must never cast away the few who have been loyal, Merivel. Some close to me want me to get rid of my Queen, because she has given me no Heir. But I say to them, “wherefore should I cast her out, she, who has such goodness of heart and abides in her love for me through all my Amours?” I say to them, “You, too, should bow down before the Queen, as I bow down, because there is no one in the Kingdom as noble as she.”’

  I nod very vigorously, remembering how Queen Catherine once saved me from casting up my dinner onto the Royal Tennis Court by the bringing out of oranges from her native Portugal at a moment when I was faint and sick with running about after the King’s balls. Then the King says: ‘But we should get to the Main Business of your visit, Merivel. You have come to ask something of me. Or am I mistaken?’

  I take a gulp of the Sack. The King’s ability to read what is in my mind has always disconcerted me. I cannot suppress a sigh before I say: ‘I do not know precisely how to explain why I am here.’

  ‘Perhaps that is because you do not precisely know?’

  I look about me at the room and cannot help but notice that the colours with which it has been decorated recall, albeit in tasteful measure, the scarlets, crimsons, magentas and golds I once scattered around the interiors of Bidnold, and I conclude that the Duchess of Portsmouth (born in Paris, Louise de Kéroüalle and known by the King as ‘Fubbs’ or ‘Fubbsy’, for reason of her succulent fatness) may have about her some lingering vulgarity of Taste.

  Then I turn to the King and say: ‘My daughter is going into Cornwall and I shall thus be all alone at Bidnold. And I have it in mind, Sire, to travel to France, to bring about some change of mood in me …’

  ‘What mood do you wish to change?’

  ‘Well, I know that I am becoming self-pitying. Gates sees it all too well. I find myself very often sunk in memories of the Past …’

  ‘Ah. The Past is always with us. Our lives fill up with it, till there is a brimming-over. How can France help you?’

  ‘It can help me, I believe, because I have never been there. I imagine that the very air is altered, and the weather, and the shape of things …’

  ‘Most true. But what will you do there?’

  ‘Well, Sir,’ I stammer, ‘I do not know exactly, but I had rather not go there as some poor wanderer, knowing no one. And I had begun to wonder whether, in the weeks that I am there, my medical skills might somehow be of service … if I might be introduced to—’

  ‘I see. You wish to be received at the Court of my Cousin King Louis?’

  ‘I know that is a very great presumption. Yet my mind has merely begun to meander on the idea of being of some use to His Majesty le Roi …’

  ‘Do you remember when you first came to me, I gave you the care of my dogs?’

  ‘I remember it very well, Sir.’

  ‘You saved my little Lou-Lou from death and I rewarded you. You might perform the same task for Louis, but alas, he does not like dogs. The French have not our sentimental love of animals. On the other hand my cousin is surrounded by a great Multitude of fawning supplicants. Such is their anxiety to be recognised or rewarded by their King, who is regarded as a demi-god, we can well imagine that their poor hearts might be in some distress. So perhaps, you – of all people – might be of use there, devising physic for the hearts of the plaideurs?’

  Though a little disconcerted by the King’s emphasis upon the phrase ‘you, of all people’, I force myself to nod and bow my assent.

  ‘You must understand, Merivel, that Louis’s Court at Versailles is so vast that it eclipses all that surrounds it. It is France itself. This poor Whitehall of mine and these curtailed powers I have as King of England are as naught in comparison with the universe that is Louis’s. It is a Wonder of the World. Did you know that thirty-six thousand people worked upon its construction?’

  ‘No, I did not, Sir.’

  ‘Thirty-six thousand men! And as for the gardens, entire Forests were uprooted in Normandy and dragged there, tree by tree. I fancy Versailles may be greater in its ambition than Ancient Rome. I think you must go there and feel its beauty and its burning.’

  I am about to stammer how full of joy I would be to be received at Versailles when the King sets aside his tumbler of Sack and rises suddenly to his feet. I am obliged to follow suit, scrabbling out of my chair and knocking my Pheasant to the floor.

  ‘I will consider how it might be for you at Versailles,’ he says. ‘The immediate problem I fore
see is that nobody will laugh at your Jokes. The French have a much graver and more cruel kind of wit, and Louis has no sense of humour at all. But now there is something that I want to show you. Follow me.’

  Servants rush to the King’s side, but he waves them away. I note, then, that, as he walks, he limps very slightly, favouring his right leg, yet he strides on and leads me by fast turns out of the Duchess’s apartments and on to a narrow stairway, heading upwards.

  It becomes colder as we ascend and when we reach the topmost floor I can hear the wind sighing in the slates of the roof. And I am put in mind, just for a moment, of the West Tower at Bidnold, which Space was the only Space restored to me when I returned in 1667, and in whose confines I had to make my entire existence for many months. The sound of the wind that keened always, just above my waking and my sleeping, is something I have not been able to forget.

  We go in at last to a low Room, lit with lamps and in which a small fire is burning. Seated on a chair and surrounded by bits and ends of half-completed embroidery is a middle-aged woman. Her hair, once brown, is streaked with grey. She wears a grey gown.

  She looks up when we enter and a wan smile crosses her features. She does not stand up or curtsey to the King. It is as though she does not know that this person is the King. Instead, she holds out towards us the piece of embroidery on which she is working, with threads of blue and gold, and says: ‘I have completed all the flowers of the Ground. Will you note? All save a few small things of no consequence.’

  ‘Very pretty,’ says the King. ‘Do you not think so, Merivel?’

  ‘Indeed,’ I say. ‘Admirable work.’