The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

The London to which Jermyn was about to return was already appreciably different to the city into which he had been born.

  His new building work at St James’s had already increased the size of London, shifting the focus away from the City of London, and creating new areas in the west, both for social and political life that had never existed before.

  Jermyn Street was now finished and had in turn stimulated others to build along the rutted lane that ran parallel to it – Piccadilly. Pall Mall was completely lined with neatly built classically-proportioned brick houses. St Albans Street and Bury Street (named after Bury St Edmunds, near his family home of Rushbrook) were nearing completion, followed closely by King Street, Duke of York Street and Charles Street.

  Only St James’s Square itself was substantially unfinished. Jermyn had hoped to lease out plots for ‘thirteen or fourteen great and good houses, fit for the dwelling of persons of quality and needed for the beauty of the town and convenience of the Court’. But so far only he and Arlington had built themselves houses in the square. Its frontage, like that of Arlington’s, was part of what Jermyn hoped would become the uniform façade running right around the Square, with three classically-proportioned stories, punctuated by regularly placed sash windows.

  The design seems unremarkable to us now because we are so used to seeing it repeated all over cities across the world. But in Jermyn’s day, it was startlingly new. Compared with the jumble of Jacobean and Tudor architecture that it superseded, the houses’ simple, clear proportions, combined with the scale of Jermyn’s plans for St James’s, were truly revolutionary. Jermyn left Calais by frigate on Monday, 3 September.

  If he looked into the skies to the north, he would have felt a tremendous foreboding at the sight of a lurid orange glow filling the sky over London.

  It was caused by the third night of the Great Fire of London. The blaze had started on the parched floor of a bakery in Pudding Lane at the eastern side of the City. Fanned by the breeze, the flames had consumed the timber wharves nearby and then hissed through the narrow streets, leaping gleefully across the high-pilled thatch of the cluttered roofs.

  By the time Jermyn’s coach rattled into London, there was little of the city left. Old St Paul’s Cathedral had been physically blown to pieces by the heat, the molten lead from its roof congealing in puddles all the way down Ludgate Hill. The magnificent Royal Exchange, the pride of Elizabethan London, was a smoking mound. The house where Jermyn had been born in St Margaret’s, Lothbury, was a pile of blackened timbers.

  Jermyn’s ever-active mind would have seethed with questions. Had the terrible inferno spread from the City to blaze westwards down the Strand? Had its searing heat razed the stones of his beloved Somerset House to rubble? Had venerable old Whitehall Palace, together with Inigo Jones’s magnificent Banqueting House, been reduced to ash? Had Jermyn Street and the rest of St James’s been left smouldering?

  Miraculously, the answers were no. While the City merchants piled their belongings into barges and fled the conflagration, the court had turned out to fight the flames.

  Charles; the Duke of York; Prince Rupert and Jermyn’s nephew Harry had all joined soldiers throwing buckets of water onto the flames and blowing up houses to make fire-breaks to contain the destruction. The dreadful inferno had reached the east end of the Strand. Everything to the west had been saved.

  On Tuesday, 2 October 1666, Jermyn entertained King Charles II to dinner in his magnificent new mansion in St James’s Square. Built at a cost of £5,000, Jermyn’s new house was one of the finest in London ‘hung with gilded leather containing tapestry, pictures, andirons [log-holders], chairs of velvet and damask… the great dining-room with a suite of green damask hangings with yellow borders, six chairs with arms and seven others of red velvet’. It was, literally, ‘fit for a King’.

  Though Charles had pushed Jermyn away at several points in his life, he always came back to his faithful henchman in the end. The older man was, it seemed, politically indestructible. In part, it was Jermyn’s engaging character alone that ensured his continued success. Jermyn’s intricate web of political connections in France made him indispensable on the diplomatic front. He was an intimate part of the King’s mother’s life, and any dealings with her automatically involved Jermyn.

  Yet was there more to it even than that? Was there, lurking at the bottom of Charles’s inconstant, but ultimately life-long affection for Jermyn, a genuine belief that this aging courtier might actually be his father – or a hope, even, that he was? Surrounded by fawning career-politicians and their buxom wives, each on the make, half of them as turn-coat perhaps as Charles I had found the preceding generation, did Charles II long for a connection based on something stronger than mere lip-serving loyalty?

  The King had recently started copying Jermyn’s habit of dressing in sombre black satin. Aged thirty-five, he was no longer the exuberant young man who had galloped away from Paris to join the Spanish army, just over a decade before. Now the cynical arcs of his eyebrows were accompanied by furrowed brows and the shadows of bags were edging their way under his deep brown Tuscan eyes.

  For a year, the City had been starved of commerce by war and plague. Now it was a smoking ruin. A Franco-Dutch attack now could destroy the navy, overrun the colonies and probably precipitate another revolution. The substance of the conversation between Jermyn and Charles II that evening has not been recorded, but it is not hard to envisage Jermyn outlining his peace plans, as only Jermyn could, and the King listening very attentively indeed.

  Secretary of State Arlington, however, with his ostentatious little black nose-patch, had almost finished negotiating a treaty with the Hapsburgs. Alarmed by the King’s change of heart after the dinner in St James’s Square, Arlington stalled Jermyn’s return to France by offering their indecisive master a series of alternative plans.

  Deeply frustrated, Jermyn had then to use his own powers of persuasion, again, to draw Charles back to committing himself to accept French mediation.

  Jermyn succeeded, but the powers to negotiate which Jermyn carried back to France, written grudgingly by Arlington and approved by the ever-cautious Hyde, were vexingly restrictive. Yet we should remember, in judging what follows, that had Jermyn and his unique influence over the King not existed, there would never have been any negotiations at all.

  Jermyn finally set sail for France on Tuesday, 29 January 1667. He crossed the Channel unmolested by Dutch ships, but when he stepped ashore he heard that Henrietta Maria had died.

  Then, as the grieving Jermyn’s carriage pounded through the snow-bound forests of Normandy, robbers leapt out from the trees and plundered his chests, taking £20,000 in gold, an instalment of the Queen’s English pension. The loss of the gold was irrevocable, but before he reached Paris he learned, to his immense joy, that the news of the Queen’s death had been false, and the two were happily reunited again.

  Jermyn’s arrival in France was again interpreted as a clear indication of Charles’s willingness to end the war.

  Louis summoned him to Versailles, then merely a hunting lodge in the chestnut woods outside Paris. But when Jermyn was forced to admit how limited his negotiating powers were, Louis was immensely disappointed. Nevertheless, Lionne stirred himself to discuss Jermyn’s terms with van Beuningen. A week later, he gave Jermyn two sealed draft treaties to send to Charles. Either of them, said Lionne, would be acceptable to the Dutch.

  With the treaties safely dispatched to London, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria relaxed, attending a grand carnival at Versailles together. While fireworks exploded like rising suns, Lionne and Jermyn had a chat.

  During the course of this, Lionne realised he had omitted from both treaties the critical English demand that the Dutch should return Pularoon (or Pulau Run). The recovery of this miniscule member of the Moluccas (the Spice Islands), that lay between New Guinea and Sulawesi in the Indian Ocean, had been one of Charles’s stated objectives in going to war. Barely two miles in length, the island was not just a spo
t on the map, though: its plantations brimmed with cloves and nutmeg, that commanded astronomical prices in Europe. Pularoon’s plantations might just as well have grown gold: a treaty without its inclusion would never be accepted in Whitehall.

  Lionne rather wretchedly suggested taking Jermyn to discuss the matter with the volatile van Beuningen. Jermyn’s powers did not include negotiating directly with the Dutch. In these extraordinary circumstances, however, it seemed wise to follow Lionne’s impromptu plan.

  When they met on Monday, 18 February, van Beuningen was civil. When Lionne mentioned Pularoon, however, the Dutchman’s face flushed. When Jermyn explained that the return of Pularoon was essential if peace was to be made, van Beuningen went scarlet. Didn’t Jermyn realise that England was in no position to stand up to the Franco-Dutch alliance? How dare he try to dictate terms in this manner!

  As Jermyn opened his mouth to speak again, van Beuningen’s tirade degenerated into a barrage of guttural Dutch. His arms flailing like windmills, he threw himself at Jermyn. With great difficulty Lionne managed to drag van Beuningen away and help Jermyn escape.

  The strain of the negotiations had a dreadful effect on Jermyn’s gout. He spent March negotiating with Lionne from his bed in the Hôtel de la Bazinière.

  His constant pain added a blunt edge to his normally courtly letters home. He told Hyde that letting peace depend on a tiny island was ridiculous. If the French could not calm van Beuningen down, Charles would simply have to accept the loss of Pularoon. ‘Pray be pleased to tell me’, Jermyn added fractiously, ‘whether there be in the treaty of [sixteen] sixty two anything, besides the article of Pularoon, that makes you affect the observation of it for the future’.

  Jermyn’s ultimatum had a surprising affect. On Friday, 22 March 1667, Hyde authorised him to set the question of Pularoon aside. Negotiations for a formal peace treaty could now go ahead. The place chosen for the talks was Breda.

  In the fifteen months during which England and France had been at war, their forces had not clashed. Now, with peace in sight, the Dutch demanded that Louis should honour his promise to attack. When Jermyn visited the Sun King at Versailles on Tuesday, 2 April, they discussed the matter frankly and agreed their countries would not attack each other in the next month. This was just as well as, a week later, van Beuningen appeared at Versailles, demanding an immediate French naval strike on England.

  On the basis of his agreement with Jermyn, Louis refused. As Jermyn was able to report triumphantly to Hyde, Beuningen promptly ‘fell into flames of passion’. The next day, Louis came to Colombes to collect a secret promise which Jermyn had persuaded Charles to sign just in case, agreeing not to intervene against Louis’s invasion of Flanders.

  Confident that the Anglo-Dutch war was almost over, Louis assembled his armies for what Jermyn described as his ‘open-faced’ invasion of Spanish-owned Flanders.

  Alarmed at the build-up of French soldiers on the border, Sir William Temple, Charles’s diplomatic representative in Flanders, wrote to Jermyn,

  We are so amazed with the number and bravery of the French preparations to invade this country, that we can hardly lift up our eyes against the rising of this sun, that, it is said, intends to burn up all before it.

  On Wednesday, 8 May, Jermyn and Lionne watched rank after rank of soldiers marching out of Paris.

  With them went the nobility and Princes of the Blood, their ornamented armour glittering in the brilliant spring sunshine. And at their head, his shining breastplate moulded like the chest of Apollo, rode the Sun King himself.

  Jermyn had hoped to be one of the negotiators at Breda. But when Hyde and Arlington decided to send Denzil Holles and an up-and-coming diplomat, Henry Coventry, instead, Jermyn accepted the decision gracefully.

  Instead, he asked to be Ambassador Extraordinary to Louis’s court, so as to oversee the formal signing of the resulting treaty. Unwilling to allow Jermyn any more power, Hyde prevented this. And because he was not an Ambassador Extraordinary, Jermyn could not leave Paris with Louis and the French court.

  Instead, he had to communicate with Holles and Coventry in Breda, and with Louis at the Flemish front, by post. This, as he warned, was bound to lead to misunderstandings.

  He was right. Honoré Courtin, one of the French negotiators at Breda, received a letter from Paris suggesting Jermyn had agreed to England fulfilling all the conditions contained in the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1662, whereas the King had agreed to no such thing. When Coventry queried this with Jermyn, he wrote back denying it.

  But the Dutch refused to accept that Courtin had been wrong, and insisted on England standing by what Jermyn had been reported to have said. When Louis heard about this, he told the Dutch to be reasonable, or he would withdraw his military support for them.

  When news of this sudden escalation of tempers at Breda reached England, Charles panicked. Hyde wrote to Jermyn, urging him to catch up with Louis and clear the misunderstanding up personally. Had Jermyn been appointed Ambassador Extraordinary as he had wanted, he would already have been with Louis.

  Instead, he was now he faced with a long journey on his own. And hurrying mile upon weary mile over sun-baked ruts in an un-sprung seventeenth century carriage was agony for a late-middle-aged man with severe gout.

  As he jolted north-east towards the Flemish border, Jermyn heard that Louis was laying siege to the border town of Douai. But when he reached the market town of Arras he could go no further. The twelve mile hinterland between Arras and Douai was infested with hostile Spanish soldiers.

  So he waited in a down-at-heel tavern in Arras until, on Thursday, 20 June, he received a letter from Hyde. As he started to read, a sickening sense of horror crept through him.

  The Dutch had hoped to make peace only after the English navy had been destroyed. On Monday, 27 May, when it was clear Louis was not going to do this for them, the leader of the Dutch States General, Jan De Witt, sent the Dutch fleet to sea. On Wednesday, 12 June, it sailed up the Thames estuary.

  Taken by surprise, the fortress at Sheerness was quickly overrun and the boom across the mouth of the Medway was blasted to pieces. The English fleet lay defenceless.

  On the shore, James, Duke of York and Jermyn’s nephew Harry ran about ordering the sailors to defend the ships. But it was too late. Dutch cannon balls and firebombs crashed repeatedly into the English ships.

  The sailors on the Royal Charles, unable to move the great vessel out of the way of the Dutch fire ships, abandoned it. Clambering on board, Dutch sailors hoisted their own flag and sailed away, singing triumphantly. When breathless messengers spread the news through the charred ruins of London the citizens panicked. The Royal Charles was captured, the fleet destroyed, and all was lost.

  Having sent Jermyn this dreadful news, Charles’s government was finally prepared to grant Jermyn what he had wanted all along – authority to use his own discretion to end the war. But, cut off from Douai and Breda by the war, he could only send an intrepid messenger galloping towards Louis’s camp. Jermyn then hurried back to Paris, where he could use the secure and speedy military postal links to communicate more freely with Louis and the ambassadors at Breda.

  Jermyn’s return to Paris was widely misinterpreted. Unaware that he had been cut off from Douai by the fighting, false reports circulated throughout Europe asserting that he had reached Douai, where Louis had accused him of lying about Charles’s intentions, and banished him from the French court, in the ignominious manner related in the poem at the start of this chapter. Despite this later being known to have been palpably untrue, the story remained, stuck to Jermyn’s reputation. He is often seen now as the incompetent ambassador, who ‘repeated on gilt-edged paper the formulae drafted by Lionne, sank cosily into the French atmosphere in which he felt at home, and staked his life on the pacifism of France’, who was eventually sent packing by Louis in disgrace.

  Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, Jermyn’s message had reached Douai safely and was forwarded to the Eng
lish ambassadors in Breda. Although the peace treaty allowed the Dutch to keep Pularoon, the danger of further attacks on England had at last been averted. On Sunday, 30 June 1667, the terms of the Anglo-Dutch peace treaty were finally concluded.

  But that was just the start of it.

  XX

  THE GRAND DESIGN 1667 – 1668

  Most fears he [Jermyn] the Most Christian [Louis] should trepan

  Two saints at once, St Germain and St Alban,

  But thought the Golden Age was now restored,

  When men and women took each other’s word.

  from Last Instructions to a Painter (1681),

  attributed to Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

  From the safety of Colombes, Jermyn heard anxiously that Parliament and the London mob alike were baying for a scapegoat for the loss of the fleet. In some quarters, he was being blamed as the ‘author of these misfortunes’.

  Parliament accused Hyde of corresponding with Jermyn without the King’s knowledge, and of passing on secrets that the French had in turn told the Dutch. But the King had authorised the correspondence, so this false accusation was dropped.

  In the scathing political satires circulating London, Jermyn was portrayed as ‘full of soup and gold’ – incompetent, but not downright treacherous:

  St Alban’s writ to, that he may bewail

  To Master Louis, and tell coward tale,

  How yet the Hollanders do make a noise

  Threaten to beat us, and are naughty boys

  Ultimately, Jermyn was not a leading royal minister, and the furore soon passed him by.

  Goaded by Arlington, the storm of voices demanding vengeance gradually focused on the King’s First Minister, Hyde. Hearing this from Lionne’s agents in London, Jermyn warned his old enemy to take care for the sake of ‘the King’s service and your own quiet’.