The King's Chameleon

by Richard Woodman

  Gooding sat at the table and called for some eggs as Faulkner exchanged a glance with Katherine. ‘I cannot leave you alone.’

  ‘Do not be so foolish. He is harmless … now.’

  Faulkner regarded Gooding. He did not believe for a moment that Gooding’s prayers had had the slightest influence on Judith’s cancer and saw him only as a man who did not behave rationally.

  Feeling Faulkner’s eyes upon him, Gooding looked up and smiled again. ‘Do you wait upon Sir Henry Johnson, Kit?’ he asked blithely.

  ‘That is … was my intention.’

  Gooding looked at the summer sunshine streaming through the window and nodded happily. ‘I think that I shall accompany you. Yes, I shall, if you have no objection.’

  The thought of having Gooding under his supervision rather than left in the house with Katherine and the servants weighed more heavily than having to explain the presence and behaviour of a lunatic to Johnson. Fifteen minutes later they stepped out and set their faces towards Blackwall just as they had done years earlier when they had been building the Duchess of Albemarle.

  The summer passed like a dream. With peace finally concluded at Breda in July, almost the entire household embarked in the Hawk and sailed for Harwich. They anchored in the Blackwater before reaching the Naze of Essex and, as they made their approach to the harbour at Harwich, Faulkner pointed out, to those interested, the fort at Landguard Point where the Dutch had landed before their descent upon the Medway. ‘You will recall you heard the guns,’ he reminded Edmund.

  ‘Good heavens, so I did,’ said Edmund, beaming at his boys.

  As for Gooding – though it required a certain legerdemain on the part of Faulkner and Edmund – he had been allowed to think that he had resumed his old role as a partner. In fact they gave him the most complex book-keeping tasks and requested he audit the accounts for some years, checking especially how much money had been remitted to the King. Apparently contended enough, Gooding took on these tasks willingly, asking nothing more than his daily bread and the opportunity to join a dissenting congregation. For the most part, once it had been established, he was left to his routine, though he accompanied them to Harwich, along with Edmund, Hannah and her two boys.

  The Hawk was crowded, especially so, it seemed, for Hannah was expecting again.

  ‘Hannah thinks she is carrying twins,’ Katherine confided as they lay in their cots in their tiny cabin, ‘for she is so exceedingly large.’

  After visiting Harwich and Ipswich they sailed about the rivers Stour and Orwell, whose confluence forms the harbour, before returning to London. It proved a hard beat to windward, helped by the tide but discommoded by the short, sharp sea this induced. The young Drinkwater boys thought it a great lark; their expectant mother was less enthusiastic as the Hawk scooped buckets of sparkling spray over her weather bow. As they beat up the Thames, Gooding took it upon himself to point out to the ladies all the ships for which they were responsible, either as owners in part or in full, or for which they acted as agents. To this he added a babble of sundry details of a recondite nature attaching to the business of ship-owning and ship-broking. By the time they approached their moorings off Wapping the ladies professed themselves exhausted by the encyclopedic catalogue displayed by Gooding. Even the boys found Uncle Nathan a source of the most amazing tales, Gooding having mixed in his narrative a sufficient stock of yarns about the adventures enjoyed by the sailors they saw on the scores of ships past which they sailed.

  As they stepped ashore they were met by Charlie Hargreaves, who had been left in charge and was shaping up well, entirely answering the expectations of his employers. Hargreaves bowed to the ladies, ignored the two boys and briefed Edmund and Faulkner on the latest news from Fort St David. Gravely, Gooding stood close to the other three men, for all the world a party to their deliberations.

  Noting this, Katherine smiled, discreetly remarking to Hannah that, ‘One would never guess.’

  ‘Indeed not,’ agreed Hannah, more anxious for her two scallywags whose proximity to the water’s edge and their fascination with a filthy old man in a stinking Peter boat promised undesirable consequences.

  The cold of winter brought Hannah to bed. The birth was difficult and the services of the midwife proved inadequate. A barber-surgeon was summoned and was as swiftly kicked out of the house by Edmund, desperate as his wife lay bleeding. Only one of the twins, an undersized girl, survived. Hannah lived for nine days before puerperal fever killed her; the little girl, though put to a wet-nurse, was buried with her mother. Edmund was distraught and withdrawn, raging against fate and the barber-surgeon who, he maintained, had condemned his beautiful wife to an early death. Faulkner found him inconsolable, and it was many months before Edmund could be induced to take more than a passing interest in affairs, both public and private. Oddly, Gooding filled some of the vacuum, diligently working at his books and unwilling to be distracted from what he was apt to call his ‘essential labours’. The importance of these tasks he gave as his excuse for declining an invitation to the wedding of Faulkner and Katherine the following year. The nuptials were quiet, attended by those few of the Trinity Brethren with whom he had been long acquainted.

  A fortnight after the wedding a recovering Edmund brought the news that the Duchess of Albemarle was no longer fit for any service. ‘’Tis the ravages of the ship-worm,’ Edmund explained.

  ‘What would you have done with her?’ Faulkner asked. ‘The old order changeth, and all things must pass.’

  ‘That is for you to decide, for Nathan explained to me that she has some entailment.’

  Faulkner smiled. ‘Nathan remembered that, eh? Well, well.’

  ‘To the letter. I understand the King has personally enjoyed the profits of her voyages.’

  ‘You knew that, surely? You commanded her.’

  ‘I do not recall you ever telling me.’

  ‘Did I not? Oh, well, perhaps tomorrow you will ask Nathan to be good enough to draft me a letter to the King explaining her condition and her end. In the circumstances it will be best that she is broken up.’

  Edmund smiled. ‘That is sufficiently important for Nathan’s attention,’ he said.

  ‘Quite so,’ Faulkner agreed with the mild irony.

  In the months that followed Gooding regarded the importance of his work undiminished, but he accomplished less and less, his intellectual grasp failing with a sharp decline in his health. For some months he lay a-bed and died five days before Christmas 1669.

  Death now seemed Faulkner’s constant companion. He long mourned the loss of Brian Harrison, his old friend and neighbour at Wapping. They had served together on the raid on Sallee. Then, less than a fortnight after Gooding’s death, on a freezing January day, Honest George Monck, First Duke of Albemarle, died sitting in a chair at his lodgings in Whitehall Palace. He had been unwell for many months and had a year earlier retired to his country seat at New Hall, in Essex. Afflicted by the dropsy, breathing with difficulty, he had been expected to die. The country braced itself, for Honest George was regarded as a prop without which Charles’s throne would topple. Taking some pills made for him by an old companion-in-arms turned quack, Albemarle’s oedema lessened and he was again to be seen in London. Men and women breathed easily again. But this remission did not last for long. Allowed privileged access at any time to the King’s chamber, the old man who had saved the throne, who had remained in London throughout the plague and there nipped in the bud a conspiracy against the king, whose ruthlessness had made enemies and whose courage compelled admiration, gasped his last surrounded by officers from the army as though on the field of battle.

  Anne, his home-spun duchess, died within days of her husband, but while his widow was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, Albemarle’s funeral was delayed. Although laid in state caparisoned for war, he was unburied for lack of sufficient money to provide his obsequies with sufficient pomp. Eventually, four months after his death, he followed his wife to his grave in the great Abb
ey, attended by the King in a procession of almost regal grandeur.

  Accompanied by Katherine, Faulkner attended the crowded funeral. As they emerged from the Abbey, Faulkner found himself close to Prince Rupert, who immediately paid his respects to Katherine, congratulating the pair on their marriage. He discreetly drew the couple to one side and asked, ‘Sir Christopher, if I had need of advice could I rely upon you?’

  Faulkner was non-plussed. ‘You can rely upon me, Your Highness, but as to what advice I might—’

  Rupert cut him off. ‘Albemarle thought highly of you, mentioned you several times and commended you to me. I know enough of you myself to heed the old fellow’s words and there may come a time …’ Rupert smiled and cast his gaze over the milling congregation debouching from the Abbey in the wake of the King. ‘This is not it, however.’ He took Katherine’s hand and raised it to his lips. ‘Your devoted servant, Lady Faulkner. Your services and devotion to my mother can never be requited.’

  She dropped her elegant curtsey, and beside her Faulkner footed a bow as Rupert, surrounded by a group of ladies and gentlemen, withdrew to his coach and escort. Faulkner turned to his wife, only to see her face flushed.

  ‘You are angry?’

  ‘What does he mean by that?’ she asked shortly. ‘Surely he does not wish you to go to sea again at your age!’

  ‘I have no idea what he means,’ he temporized. ‘He mentioned advice, not a seagoing post; I have served on a commission before; perhaps he means something similar.’

  Katherine bit her lip, thought for a moment and then said in a low voice as she took his arm and led them to where their own hired carriage awaited them, ‘There is talk again of war, and I know these Stuarts, they take no consideration of those they command.’

  ‘Kate, you of all people know that if he commands, I must obey.’ He spoke in a low voice, embarrassed by Katherine’s uncharacteristic and public outburst, aware that they were within a few feet of a company of guards drawn up after escorting Albemarle’s body from Whitehall. Their officers were taking post to move them off, and an order was barked close to them. But Katherine had not yet finished with him.

  She stopped, disengaged his arm and confronted him for all the world to see. ‘I would ask you to promise that you will refuse to serve at sea; others have done the same, even Albemarle – but I know that you do not keep your promises.’ As she cast the last words at him she nodded at his ear. She had never previously mentioned the minor blemish to his looks. Faulkner stood stock-still, his face flushed, lost for words. Katherine was about to turn and resume her walk when a voice spoke close behind Faulkner.

  ‘Milady, you seem to have dropped your handkerchief.’ They turned to find a handsome young officer of the guards who, removing his plumed hat and making a most elegant bow, offered Katherine the embroidered silk with a flourish.

  ‘You are most kind, sir,’ Katherine took the handkerchief with a ravishing smile and twinkling eyes that Faulkner knew was intended to incite jealousy in himself. ‘May I ask your name, sir?’ Katherine went on.

  ‘Churchill, Milady, Ensign John Churchill of His Majesty’s Guards.’

  ‘Thank you, Mister Churchill.’

  They went home in silence.

  The King’s Chameleon

  January 1670–August 1672

  In the eight years since they had been together following the death of Elizabeth of Bohemia, Faulkner and Katherine had not exchanged a cross word. It was as if the pain of the past, the misunderstandings and the separations had combined with advancing years to remove causes for disagreement, but Katherine’s conduct outside the Abbey, although far less conspicuous than Faulkner supposed, had deeply galled him. He sat silent on that homeward journey fulminating, alternately dismissing the notion that Katherine had deliberately dropped her handkerchief and then admitting the possibility. He knew the gossip about young Churchill and suspected Katherine also did. If so her flirtation was as deliberate as it was ridiculous, for he was known to be close to the Duchess of Cleveland, Katherine’s distant kinswoman and the King’s most influential mistress.

  Casting the occasional glance across the coach in Katherine’s direction he could see her face was pale, except for two points of colour high on her cheeks, marking her anger. She remained fixed, staring at the street scene as they rumbled and jolted eastwards. He handed her down and into the house with neither word nor thanks and, once inside, went directly to the upper room he continued to use as an office. Here he sat for an hour, listening to the house creak quietly about him, the street-noises muted by the ring of tinnitus in his ears. His body creaked like the house and he felt tired, exhausted by the long ceremony, confused by the mixture of liturgy, pomp, politics and plain hypocrisy that attended Albemarle’s ritualized end. Faulkner remembered the old warrior defying the Dutch, eager to stop a Dutch ball and end his association with the humiliation of a country whose fate he had assiduously guided, only to watch it frittered away by the King’s thoughtless lust and luxury. And now it seemed to an anxious Faulkner that Katherine had fallen into the louche ways of the Court; at her age it was ridiculous. No – despite her inherent beauty – it was grotesque.

  At the same time he could not believe it. Surely, he thought, he had got it all wrong. It was all so uncharacteristic. He sat thus musing for some time until he was driven to ease himself at the piss-pot. He rose, crossed the room and stood confronting the effects of age, when a knocking came at the door. It began to open, and Katherine entered, averting her gaze until he had finished. ‘I would speak with you,’ she began. He remained silent, bereft of comment. They stood, confronting each other across the table on which lay the ledgers, the pens and ink-pots, the scattered papers, sealing wax and accoutrements of his trade. ‘It was not what you think, Kit,’ she said softly. ‘I was not such a fool as to think I might flirt with young Churchill, nor did I do so to make you jealous.’

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘Because I was angry.’

  ‘Angry?’

  ‘Yes, angry. With you and with the Prince.’

  ‘What had I done? What had Rupert done?’

  Katherine sighed, as though the explanation was too complex and Faulkner nothing but a child and difficult to persuade. ‘He says come, and thou cometh, and he says go, and thou goest,’ she quoted, at last. ‘He commands and you are obedient unto death.’

  ‘But Kate, he is a Prince, an Admiral, and I am a commissioned Captain in His Majesty’s Navy. It is for him to command and for me to obey, just as it is for an officer under me to obey my commands. That is the authority that compels order out of anarchy.’

  ‘But you are old, Kit, old … The affairs of this world must pass to younger men, men like John Churchill.’

  ‘You do not understand; there is too much at stake. There are too many factions in the fleet, in the army, in Parliament. Old Albemarle understood, as does Rupert. Their respective coteries hated each other, intrigued the one against the other, yet Rupert and Albemarle stood above such factions, riding those half-hearted rogues who resented fighting the Dutch as fellow Protestants, fighting tooth-and-nail to have the seamen fed and paid, despite the King’s wanton excesses, for fear of what a want of willing men would cause. Albemarle died not in Whitehall, but on the banks of the Medway three years ago. Rupert knows, as Albemarle knew, that we must fight the Dutch yet again. Ask Edmund, our trade depends upon it.’

  ‘But why you?’ she broke in. ‘Why such an old man as yourself who are near Albemarle’s age; why you?’

  ‘Because,’ he said, ‘like Albemarle, like Rupert and perhaps like a dozen other men of near my age and experience, the vicissitudes of our lives have taught us some wisdom.’ He paused, choosing his words carefully, the spectre of old Sir Henry Mainwaring at his side. ‘There are those who say that Albemarle was a murderer, a bigamist, a turncoat. He was ruthless in war yet once said he bore no man malice beyond the necessity of war. He detested extremes in religion, saw the legitimacy of a proper Parliament a
nd the dangers in an army with a mind of its own. In consequence he maintained discipline with an iron hand, yet was laughed at for his parsimony at table, the coarseness of his Duchess and the ordinariness of his manners. Despite all this, he was approved of by Rupert, the embodiment of the opposition, who perceived his solid virtue and sought him out. Both men knew that weakness in the state’s government, whether Royal or Republican, made fertile ground for dissension, and that civil division and strife are the worst misfortune to befall a people.

  ‘Oh, to be sure there were those, even those of staunch principle, who considered them as slippery as lizards, or as able to turn their coats as a chameleon does. Such men, it is believed by many, have no principle but that of cynicism which combines with so overwhelming a lust for power that they must be resisted. Such men stand in the second rank, unfit for high-office, or the understanding of it. They place their moral judgements above the necessity of keeping the peace of the nation, confusing it with God’s business – which in my eyes is best left to God. Those of us who see the virtue in these few chameleons must of necessity support them, or all will again descend into anarchy. Young men, especially young men brought up in the licentiousness of the present age, lack this knowledge … this wisdom.’

  She shook her head. ‘That is all very well, and selfless and noble, but not my point. You forget my own experience of life’s vicissitudes, of my years of exile …’

  ‘Kate, how could I forget—’

  ‘Be silent! Hear me out. You have no knowledge of my years of servitude, none at all. From the earliest days until but a few years ago when I was bound hand and foot to Rupert’s mother. A tragic figure to be sure, but a tyrannical old woman, every inch of her a Stuart: demanding, unforgiving, entitled by her high station, but with not a bone of compassion or thought for others in her entire body.’ She had silenced him now. ‘Oh, I was pleased enough with the billet, to be sure, for I had no other, and on the occasions we went abroad my station as a lady-in-waiting might persuade me, at least for an hour or two, that I was not a drudge. But I was like the prentice boy, bound to my mistress body and soul, night and day, year in year out. That is the price the House of Stuart levies for its protection and condescension. Rupert, though full of charm, is his mother’s son.’ She paused again then, catching his eye, she concluded. ‘When he summons, refuse … Refuse on grounds of ill-health, but refuse. I no longer ask you to promise me, but I shall not expect to hear otherwise.’