The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  It was with great delight that Hyde arranged for Charles and his Royalist followers to settle in Spanish-occupied Flanders, where they would be able to preserve their honour by serving in the Hapsburgs’ army. In July 1654, therefore, King Charles II, Hyde and almost all of the English Royalists rode away from Paris. Jermyn could not go with them, for his duty was to remain with Henrietta Maria. In any case, Charles was so fed up with both of them now that he probably would not have taken Jermyn anyway.

  Relations between Jermyn and Charles seemed at their lowest ebb, yet, amazingly, there was still worse to come. That autumn, Henrietta Maria gave up hope of a Restoration and decided to convert her youngest son, Prince Henry, to Catholicism. Jermyn disagreed with this strongly, yet had no choice but to obey her commands and take the boy to the abbey of Pontoise, to be indoctrinated by its English abbot, the ex-courtier, Walter Montagu.

  When news reached Charles’s court, Hyde knew how to make brilliant use of it. In a vituperative letter echoing Hyde’s insinuations, the King accused Jermyn of covering up the Queen’s efforts to ‘pervert’ Prince Henry. Provide proof of your innocence, Charles told his former mentor, or ‘you must never think to see me again, and that this shall be the last time you shall ever hear from me’.

  Relations between Jermyn and Henrietta Maria themselves were now under severe strain. We hear of them rowing. Wasn’t associating the Royal family with Rome, Jermyn may have suggested, the best way of insuring that the Restoration never happened?

  Henrietta Maria could have pointed out that the Restoration was as unrealistic a dream as the conquest of Madagascar. In any case, wasn’t saving Prince Henry’s immortal soul more important than earthly considerations? Yes, Jermyn might have replied, but you’ll alienate your eldest son for good in the process. ‘Get out!’ she reportedly shrieked at Jermyn, ‘you are too impertinent!’

  The argument between Jermyn and Henrietta Maria was quickly resolved and forgotten. To Charles, Jermyn wrote that his prime duty was to obey his mistress, whatever she ordered. Once Henry himself had told Charles how much Jermyn had disagreed with Henrietta Maria’s plan, the King backed down and wrote rather lamely that ‘all’s well’.

  All was not well, however. Over the next few years, in his political despatches to Charles, Jermyn tried unsuccessfully to repair the breach between mother and son. ‘You are not to judge of the queen’s affections’, he told Charles in a note added to the end of a cold letter from Henrietta Maria in January 1656, ‘no more by her stile then by her words, for they are both sometimes betrayers of her thoughts and have sharpness, that in her heart she is not guilty of’.

  However hopeless the situation seemed, Jermyn knew that the route back to power and influence lay through reconciliation with the King. So he waited, Jermynesque, constantly alert for the opportunity he needed to achieve his goal.

  XIV

  THE CHTEAU OF COLOMBES

  1656 – 1660

  I cannot chose but embrace some faint hopes that things are so disposing themselves in England that old friends may think of meeting again once before they die.

  Jermyn to Sir Marmaduke Langdale; Senlis, France, 22 November 1654

  Once Charles II and his retinue had abandoned Paris, there was little point in Jermyn and Henrietta Maria rattling about the echoing chambers of the Louvre.

  A month after Charles’s departure they had moved over the road into smaller apartments in the Palais Royale, a modern, classically-styled palace built by Cardinal Richelieu.

  But living there was inconvenient, for it was much in use by the French Court. Sometimes they even bumped into Cromwellian envoys in the corridors. ‘Lord Jermyn’, the English ambassador reported to Cromwell on one such occasion, ‘did cast an angry eye upon me’.

  In November 1654, therefore, the Queen bought a mansion at Chaillot and turned it into a convent for the Poor Nuns of the Visitation of Mary, with a small suite reserved for her personal use. For the rest of her life the convent, with its beautiful views out to the blue hills of Meudon and Châtillon, would be Henrietta Maria’s favourite place of retreat.

  In 1657, Queen Anne bought Henrietta Maria a new home. The Château of Colombes lay in the low-lying oxbow of land where the Seine makes its great semi-circular sweep from north to west before running down towards the ramparts of Saint-Germain.

  Five miles from the centre of Paris, Colombes had been owned by Basil Fouquet, brother of the French finance minister. It was a grand neo-classical chateau, two stories high with a third row of shuttered windows in the mansard roof, ranged around a central courtyard whose high, ornamental iron gates faced out onto the little town of Colombes. Behind, stretched Italianate ornamental gardens. Inside, its main feature was a magnificent ceiling painted by Simon Vouet, showing Venus (Aphrodite) and Bacchus (Dionysius) – the goddess of love, and the god of wine, a combination that could lead to all manner of trouble.

  Back in the 1630s, it would have been an almost shockingly appropriate ceiling for Henrietta Maria and Jermyn to dine beneath. Now, the diminutive Queen Mother and her stout Lord Chamberlain were little different than any of the other middle-aged married couples whose villas dotted the water meadows and hunting parks around them.

  Henrietta Maria as a widow

  Colombes was an elegant, comfortable residence, but it was a far cry from the world of flamboyant luxury that Jermyn loved. They made periodic returns to their apartments in the Palais Royale, and Jermyn maintained his office there. There must have been dark days when he wondered whether all his efforts were for nought, but despite that Jermyn never gave up hope that one day all things might be restored to their proper order.

  The Chateau of Colombes was demolished in 1793. No pictures survive of it, but next door stood a secondary mansion that was also part of Henrietta Maria’s estate. This is a picture of the courtyard of the latter, which was itself demolished in the 1960s

  In December 1653, Oliver Cromwell’s ascendancy was made official when he became Lord Protector of England. The Rump Parliament, so-called because it had been purged of all possible dissenting members, had been dissolved eight months earlier. In 1655, the country was divided into eleven divisions, each run by an authoritarian Major General.

  The government became infamous for its repressive Puritanism. Plays were banned and the celebration of Christmas was forbidden, for being too pagan. In Canterbury, the initial enforcing of this ban by Parliament back in 1647 had provoked an outright riot during which the mayor was pelted with Christmas Puddings in the city’s Butter Market. Now, under Cromwell, this ban was enforced again.

  Thereafter, Christmas celebrations could only be held surreptitiously. D’Avenant, who had returned to London hoping to make a living for his family, tried to find a way around the ban on plays by setting the words of his dramas to music, thus inventing the opera. But despite such furtive efforts, life in ‘Merrie Englande’, especially for the well-to-do, had become martial, mechanistic – and miserable.

  Of this, Jermyn was well aware. To Jermyn, the Commonwealth was not an exciting experiment in forging a new world: it was merely an abortive experiment in doing without a King. But, perhaps more importantly, he was not the only Englishman who yearned for the bright days of plenty before the Civil War.

  Throughout Britain, an increasing number of people who had once taken sides against the King in the hope of a better future were becoming disillusioned. Very few people had ever believed the execution of Charles I was right, and now an increasing proportion of the population began to long for the Stuarts to return.

  Using smuggled correspondence and secret agents, both Jermyn and Hyde were in contact with many such disillusioned people. Hyde’s main point of contact was the Sealed Knot, a group of staunchly Anglican conspirators. Jermyn’s network of agents established their own contacts, particularly with Presbyterians, encouraging them not only to rise up against Cromwell but also to look to Jermyn, and not Hyde, for leadership.

  Everything was surreptitious and f
urtive. Each agent had code-names, often more than one. Over the years, Jermyn, the spymaster, had many, of which we know but a few – ‘Mr Jackson’; ‘Mr Juxley’, ‘Mr Welworth’ and, possibly, ‘Nemo’ and ‘Lord Clancarrl’.

  One of Jermyn’s successes, that put anybody off writing his biography three centuries after his death, was the volume of information about his own activities and those of his agents which he managed to keep secret. We know he had a spy network, but the vast majority of his underground connections remained forever where he intended them to be, in darkness.

  Occasionally, a fortuitous hole, such as his dealings with Colonel Joseph Bampfield (1622-1685), exposes a tiny part of the whole. In the 1650s, Bampfield became a double-agent, selling Jermyn information about the Commonwealth government in London, and at the same time selling the Commonwealth government information about his conversations with Jermyn. Before then, Bampfield had been a Royalist spy, ostensibly, at any rate, though the nature of his true loyalties is impossible to fathom, unless they were simply to himself. Hyde had picked up on Bampfield’s unreliability by 1653, yet as late as 1657 Jermyn was protesting the colonel’s loyalty to the Crown, and risking being branded as a double-agent himself as a result. Had he been duped, or was he trying to play both Bampfield and Hyde along? Who can say: but we do know that, when Jermyn found out about Cromwell’s prospective treaty with Spain in 1657, it had been Bampfield who had alerted him.

  D’Avenant was almost certainly an agent-cum-spy of Jermyn’s. Abraham Cowley certainly was. Another, more surprising one, was the young Duke of Buckingham.

  Born in 1628, in the very year when his father, that volatile favourite of James I and Charles I, had been murdered, young Buckingham was a close friend of Charles, boisterous, extravagant and utterly irresponsible. Like Jermyn’s poets, he returned to London, pretending that he had abandoned all hope of Restoration, and was prepared to live now under Cromwell.

  In 1658 Cromwell, obviously suspicious of Buckingham’s real motives, slung him into the Tower of London. When news of this filtered back to the Palais Royale, Jermyn visited Mazarin at Fontainebleau, the royal palace 60 miles up the Seine from Paris, to ask him to intercede with Cromwell for young Buckingham’s release.

  The night of 2 September 1658 must have seemed like Jermyn’s nadir.

  Overhead, a terrible storm howled across Europe, rattling the windowpanes and ripping branches off the trees in the palace gardens of Fountainebleau. The King of England held him in contempt thanks to the machinations of Hyde: the King of France’s First Minister was so frightened of upsetting Cromwell he would not even intervene for young Buckingham.

  For a man who had based his career on his ability to influence others, Jermyn was not doing very well at all.

  What Jermyn did not know was that, in London, Oliver Cromwell lay helpless in bed, listening to the storm winds moaning along the corridors of Whitehall, his warty face drenched with feverish sweat.

  The following day, 3 September, while Jermyn watched the gardeners clearing the fallen debris away from the ornamental gardens, Cromwell died.

  What Jermyn was astute enough to know was that, like so many dictatorships, Cromwell’s regime had been based on his own force of character. Now that force, like the September storm, was spent, the regime was doomed.

  True, the ‘great Hell-cat’ had forced Parliament to vote him authority to nominate a successor and, being a typical seventeenth century gentleman at heart, he had nominated his son, Richard. But Richard, in common with so many other sons of domineering fathers, was weak, feckless and hopeless with money. His attempts to run the republic lasted eight months, before he was forced to resign by the recently restored Rump Parliament. Even as Oliver was being lowered into his grave, Jermyn knew there was a good chance that the English upper classes, hankering after the good old days, might soon ask Charles to return home.

  Mazarin was no less politically astute than Jermyn. On Thursday, 9 September 1658, the Cardinal put on his best scarlet robes and came hurrying to pay his personal respects to Henrietta Maria. The next day, Jermyn wrote to Charles, triumphantly anticipating the end of the alliance between France and Cromwellian England – ‘the engagements contracted with the dead monster [Cromwell]’, he wrote, ‘expire suddenly’.

  Charles II was now twenty-eight. He had long since gained his independence from Henrietta Maria and Jermyn, and forgotten his youthful resentment towards them. She was, after all, his mother, and Jermyn – whatever Jermyn really was in relation to him – was working harder than anyone else to help restore him to his throne. And this was, let us remember, an extraordinary situation. The King and his ministers were in the Low Countries. Nothing on paper suggested that his mother’s Lord Chamberlain in Paris should necessarily be playing any role in politics at all, let alone blazing the trail towards the Restoration.

  The new developments in England offered the King a perfect excuse to send a very friendly letter to his mother, urging her and Jermyn to seek any diplomatic, financial or military backing that Mazarin might be willing to give. Delighted to shine in use once more, Jermyn talked the Cardinal into loaning him the services of Marshal Turenne and a small army to send to England the following summer, to support a Royalist rising.

  Jermyn and Henrietta Maria spent their last pennies on a frigate to carry the King home. But in doing so they acted prematurely. A member of Hyde’s Sealed Knot group of conspirators betrayed the planned rising to the Council of State in London, who promptly arrested the rebellion’s leaders. Neither the frigate nor Turenne’s troops ever crossed the English Channel.

  Now that he had lost his alliance with Cromwell, and the backing of the powerful English navy, Cardinal Mazarin was anxious to make a peace treaty with his old adversary, Spain. Talks were opened at Fuentenarabia in the Pyrenees in the summer of 1659. Only once the treaty was concluded would the Cardinal devote himself to helping the Royalists in earnest. Frustrating though the delay was, both Charles and Jermyn agreed that their best hope now lay in persuading both France and Spain to include an agreement to promote the Restoration in the peace treaty.

  As soon as news of the failure of the English rising reached Charles, he set off with a handful of attendants to join the French court at Toulouse, and sent a message to Jermyn, ordering him to join him there as well.

  Jermyn left Paris on Wednesday, 5 October. His coachman pounded through Orléans, Bourges and Limoges, the high peaks of the Massif Centrale jolting past outside the window. They passed through the warm vineyards of Cahors and thundered through the gateway of the ancient city of Toulouse, ending a journey of 350 miles.

  Here, Jermyn had an audience with the increasingly plump Queen Anne. But he was too late to reach Mazarin before the Peace of the Pyrenees was signed. Contrary to all hopes, it contained no special provisions for aiding Charles’s restoration.

  The King sent for Jermyn to join him near Biarritz. Jermyn clambered back into his coach and set off west along the foothills of the Pyrenees. On Friday, 4 November, with the smell of the Atlantic tingling in his nostrils, he reached the village of Saint-Vincent and was spotted by Lord Colepeper. ‘I see we carry our lousy fate with us wheresoever we go’, grumbled the Kentish Cavalier in a letter to Secretary Nicholas, ‘we all of us (except one) being as beggars here as we were at Brussels, and I in particular being…in an old thread-bare French suit for want of money’. That ‘except one’, of course, was the ever-dapper Jermyn.

  The excited villagers told them Mazarin was on his way. As soon as the Cardinal’s entourage lumbered into the village, Jermyn approached him and asked for an audience. The outcome was that Mazarin agreed to draw up a special agreement with Spain, independent of the peace treaty, agreeing to support the Royalists.

  Travelling north, Jermyn reached Bordeaux on Friday, 11 November. After an anxious five days’ wait, the King arrived. The two men had not met for five years. As Jermyn knelt to kiss Charles’s hand, he knew his future, as well as the Queen’s, depended on how
the grown-up King treated him. But the younger man’s frustrated anger had long-since dissipated. Instead, he was only too happy to accept the fatherly embrace of a man he knew would give his life to serve him. To Jermyn’s delight, Charles said he wanted to visit his mother at Colombes. That extraordinary relationship between Jermyn and Charles II that had flourished in the early 1650s had been reaffirmed.

  Jermyn reached Paris on Wednesday, 23 November, two days ahead of the King. Henrietta Maria, through a misunderstanding, was spring-cleaning their old apartments at the Palais Royale instead. She received the news that Charles wanted to see her in the more intimate surroundings of Colombes ‘with mighty joy’.

  There were tearful scenes when Charles was reunited with his mother at Colombes on Friday, 25 November. It had been so long since he had seen his sister Henrietta Anne that he almost kissed one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting by mistake. It did not matter. The Royal Family was united again and Jermyn was exultant, and relieved, as he ushered his surrogate family indoors, out of the bitterly cold November afternoon.

  While the snow fell heavily outside, Jermyn and Charles spent many hours shut away by a blazing fire in Jermyn’s offices, deep in conference. Their select companions included a young Presbyterian Royalist, John Mordaunt. Mordaunt belonged to a network of English conspirators called ‘The Trust’. The last time Mordaunt had visited Paris, Jermyn had recognised his potential value and made friends with him.

  Mordaunt was now staying in Jermyn’s personal apartments, ‘the best quartered of anybody’, as he told his wife, ‘and my Lord Jermyn treats me dinner and supper’.

  Jermyn had acted wisely because the young man had the most exciting news from England. The recently-restored Rump Parliament had been dissolved. The old Cromwellian regime was disintegrating. Martial law had been declared. Only General Monck and the remains of the Cromwellian army retained any real power. Mordaunt’s contacts included friends and relations of Monck’s. He felt sure the General could be persuaded to declare his loyalty to the King, especially if the French would back him up with a promise of armed support. Securing the latter, of course, would be Jermyn’s job, whilst Charles returned to his home-in-exile in Brussels.