The King's Henchman

by Anthony Adolph

  But it was too late. Parliament decided to accuse Hyde of treason. Desperately dissociating himself from the failed war, Charles was forced to abandon his old mentor. Hyde was sacked on Friday, 30 August. Three months later, the storm not having abated, the King had no choice but to send him into exile.

  As he trailed disconsolately away from Whitehall, the last thing Hyde saw was the King’s mistress, Barbara Villiers, taunting him from her balcony.

  Jermyn, Earl of St Albans, as a Knight of the Garter, painted by Sir Peter Lely

  The first thing Hyde did when he landed in France was to write to Jermyn, asking him to use his influence with Louis to find him somewhere to stay.

  Despite everything he had done to them, Jermyn and Henrietta Maria could not help but feel sympathetic to the gouty old lawyer. But to help Hyde would risk criticism and maybe even guilt by association. Consequently Jermyn sent a curt reply, refusing to help.

  Hyde wandered through France until he reached Montpelier, where he settled down. He occupied himself until his death in 1674 writing an autobiography, which became one of the most influential histories of the period.

  Not surprisingly, when he mentioned Jermyn he did so in the most critical terms. He portrayed him as man who grasped greedily at power, yet could never have wielded it effectively had he succeeded. It set the tone for the way Jermyn has been viewed ever since, and has been followed rather slavishly, even by most academic historians. But you, reading this book, now know the truth.

  For all his vitriol, the bookish Hyde was unable to disguise a sneaking admiration for Jermyn, who was as happy laughing with his drinking companions in St James’s as he was joking with his gambling-partners at Versailles, and who could treat the King both as a close friend and, even, as a son.

  Hyde’s last word on Jermyn was written in April 1669: ‘if he dies without some very signal calamity, he may well be looked upon as a man of rare felicity’.

  Louis’s invasion of Flanders was repulsed by the Spanish. But even as the autumn frosts put an end to the campaigning season, the Sun King resolved to try again the following year.

  Temporarily appointed Ambassador Extraordinary in Paris, Jermyn negotiated a treaty whereby Charles and Louis would launch a joint attack on Flanders in 1668. But after he had sent the treaty to be signed in London he had a terrible shock.

  With Hyde in exile, Arlington had seized the opportunity to step into the role of First Minister. Having done so, he concluded an alliance with the Dutch and Swedes, aimed at preventing further French expansion.

  The Triple Alliance, signed on Monday, 13 January 1668, was a massive setback to Jermyn’s long-term plans. But his response was deft. Having agreed a strategy with Henrietta Maria and Louis, Jermyn made a flying visit to London to see Charles personally.

  As ever, Jermyn’s long-standing and complex relationship with the King enabled him to do what nobody else could do so well. Probably over a few bottles of fine Burgundy, he talked Charles into changing his mind. All of a sudden, the King’s policies became quite different – and perfectly harmonised with the objective for which Jermyn and Henrietta Maria had been striving. Declaring that the Triple Alliance had been Arlington’s idea, not his own, Charles now agreed to follow a new version of Jermyn’s Closer Alliance – the Grand Design.

  The Grand Design was to be an alliance between Charles and Louis for the joint conquest of Flanders and Holland. The Dutch trading empire would be carved up. The Dutch parliament, the States General, would be disbanded and William of Orange would be elevated from being a mere salaried Stadtholder, or military leader, to the status of a sovereign prince.

  To show his permanent commitment to his alliance with Catholic France, Charles would convert to Catholicism and declare freedom of worship for all denominations. To safeguard Charles against Parliament, Louis would guarantee military assistance if and when needed, and pay him an annual subsidy of two million crowns (about £25 million now, but again, comparisons in value are fraught with difficulty: government spending was vastly less than it is now, so this sum basically guaranteed that Charles would be able to rule perfectly effectively without needing Parliament to vote him any tax revenue).

  It was a bold policy, aimed at changing Britain and Europe forever. It was also a perilous one. If Parliament found out before the agreement was concluded, revolution would be inevitable. Besides Arlington, only a handful of Catholic courtiers were told the secret.

  At the end of 1668 Jermyn ceased to be Ambassador Extraordinary. This did not imply loss of any real power on his part: it was simply so that, if the plan was ever found out, nobody could claim that it was being promoted by one of Charles’s officials.

  A new permanent ambassador, Abbé Walter Montagu’s young cousin Ralph Montagu, was appointed to replace Jermyn as ambassador. Charming, apparently irresistible to women and deeply spiteful towards those whom he disliked, Ralph was told nothing of the Grand Design.

  Although Arlington was strongly sympathetic to Catholicism, he was still passionately anti-French. Louis sent Charles Colbert de Croissy to be his ambassador in London, with special instructions to cultivate Arlington with a bribe of 200,000 gold pieces.

  Charles’s sister Henrietta Anne had already started corresponding with Arlington as well, trying to draw him, as she had done so successfully with Charlie Berkeley, into the pro-French camp. But what really changed Arlington’s mind was Charles himself.

  With a rare show of fortitude, the King told Henrietta Anne – and by implication Arlington himself – that the notion that ‘my ministers are anything but what I will have them’ was untrue. By the end of 1668, Arlington had become an enthusiastic promoter of Jermyn’s Grand Design. The question now was this. Could Jermyn bring his grandiose plans for Europe to fruition?

  XXI

  SAINT-DENIS 1669

  And thou, my love, art sweeter far

  Than balmy incense in the purple smoke;

  Pure and unspotted, as the cleanly ermine ere

  The hunter sullies her with his pursuit;

  Soft as her skin, chaste as th’ Arabian bird

  That wants a sex to woo, or as the dead

  That are divorced from warmth, from objects,

  And from thought…

  Theander (Jermyn) to Eurithea (Henrietta Maria), Sir William D’Avenant, The Platonic Lovers (1636).

  By April 1669, Jermyn was indeed enjoying the good fortune – the ‘rare felicity’ – that had inspired so much envy in Hyde.

  Through the French windows of his study at Colombes he could have looked out to see the swathes of spring flowers, such as pale yellow narcissi and bright red tulips, in the château garden.

  Years of peering at ciphered correspondence by candlelight had strained his eyes so much that the flowers were no more than a blur. All the same, he could still have filled in from memory the other details of the landscape: the cattle grazing quietly in the water-meadows, the broad sweep of the Seine, and the purple silhouette of spires and towers of Saint-Germain on the horizon.

  The plans Jermyn had formed years before were now blossoming. With the exception of St James’s Square, his new classically-inspired developments in London were virtually complete. His rivals were exiled or brought to heel. The Closer Union of England and France was close to fruition.

  There was only one pressing worry. Henrietta Maria had been ill for the last quarter century with an alternating succession of migraines, toothaches, coughs and attacks of bronchitis. Now, her condition had grown suddenly worse. On Saturday, 10 April Jermyn wrote to Arlington, who was expecting him back in London,

  she is not yet near so well as we wish to see her. She hath, since my last, taken very little rest at nights, and consequently recovered very little strength… yesterday [her physicians] let her blood, for the third time since this sickness, in her foot; her rest this night hath not been so good as we hoped her bleeding would have procured.

  She had a little fever in the night, which is not yet totally gone
, and therefore they have again, this morning, let her blood in the arm. Her fever is so little, that it can scarce be discerned whether she have any or no; and if it increase not, there is cause to be as confident as we have been that the danger is past; if the fever increase, as nobody is safe in such assaults, so she that is of so delicate a constitution, will be more to be apprehended than other in the like case.

  You will easily conjecture that, in this state of the matter, I am not like to remove from hence until I see a change of it, and her health perfectly established.

  Jermyn was relieved when Henrietta Maria started to recover. A week after her recovery started he wrote, ‘she coughs not much, and the matter she spits is not ill-conditioned; she takes asses’ milk, and I believe to-morrow she will be purged, from whence is expected the last hand of her recovery’.

  Jermyn had to return to London to help Charles and Arlington persuade the Privy Council to agree to a treaty with France that would serve as a cover for the secret Grand Design.

  His movements, so often taken as a barometer for Anglo-French relations, caused much speculation in the City. ‘You cannot imagine what a noise Lord St Alban’s coming has made here’, Charles told his sister Henrietta Anne.

  Jermyn, as the Venetian ambassador observed, presented his most inscrutable face to the public. His business finished, he hurried back to Henrietta Maria, who had gone to her nunnery at Chaillot with her friend Madame de Motteville.

  What he found there concerned him deeply. Henrietta Maria was thinner and greyer than ever. She was eating much less than before. But besides taking her home to Colombes, there was little Jermyn could do to help her.

  In August, the Duke of York’s podgy four-year-old daughter Anne came to stay, so that she could be treated by a French eye specialist. Jermyn hoped the presence of Henrietta Maria’s granddaughter might give the Queen some energy back. It did, but only very briefly.

  When Henrietta Anne and her husband the Duke of Orléans came to see the young princess, they too were gravely concerned by Henrietta Maria’s health. Jermyn, who had been with her every day, had now grown used to her slow decline, but to the Duke and Duchess the deterioration was more starkly apparent. They summoned Louis’s doctors at once.

  The doctors came hurrying up the gravel driveway of Colombes on Saturday, 28 August. Two days later, on Monday, 30 August, as the greyness of dawn seeped through the gaps in the heavy velvet curtains, Jermyn sat down at his ornate desk, picked up a quill pen in his trembling hand and told Charles what had happened next:

  If that which hath happened here could or ought to be concealed from you my hand should not be the first in giving you notice of it. It hath pleased God to take from us this morning, about 3 o’clock the queen your mother and notwithstanding her long sickness as unexpectedly and with as much surprise as if she never had been sick at all.

  On Saturday last she had a consultation of physicians at which assisted M. Vallot, M. D’Acquin, M. Esprit and M.Evelin. The result of the consultation was to give her the usual remedy on Sunday night for preparing her against Monday morning to be purged with a certain opiate designed for that purpose. It was also a result of the consultation to give towards night in order to the quieting of the humours in her body from whence they conjectured the great disorder came with some rest a grain of Laudanum. About ten o’clock she was in too much heat to venture the grain of Laudanum and the resolution was taken not to give it all. She caused thereupon her curtains to be drawn and sent us all away just as she used to do for several nights before, fearing herself no more than she had done nor indeed imprinting in any of us the least imagination of that which immediately followed.

  Not being able to sleep of herself, she called to M. D’Acquin for the grain. He contrary to his former resolution and as he said to his opinion when he did it suffered himself to be over-ruled by the queen and gave it her in the yolk of an egg. She fell presently asleep he sitting by her perceiving her to sleep too profoundly and her pulse to alter, endeavoured by all the means he could to wake her and bring to herself but could effect neither by all the several remedies used in such cases. She lasted thus till between three and four o’clock and then died.

  That which doth further concern this matter I shall give my Lo[rd]: Arlington an account of. God of heaven give you all necessary consolations in it.

  Jermyn had sent word to Louis at once, but was still surprised when, at six o’clock in the morning, a carriage and six horses came pounding up the driveway.

  It was the Duke of Orléans, hurrying there not out of concern for Henrietta Maria, but to lay claim to her belongings. Abruptly, Orléans told Jermyn that Louis was sending two officers to seal the Queen’s apartments, to stop her servants stealing anything.

  Jermyn protested that this intrusion on the Queen of England’s house by French officers would offend Charles, and asked the Duke to speak to Ambassador Ralph Montagu first. Impatient and unsympathetic, Orléans told the old man he was imagining things and that Charles would have nothing to complain about.

  When the French officers arrived, Jermyn hobbled out and asked them if they had spoken to Ambassador Montagu. Bemused, the officers said they knew nothing about ambassadors: their orders came direct from Louis. Deflated, Jermyn gave in. The soldiers sealed Henrietta Maria’s apartments and the offices of her principal officers, Jermyn’s included.

  Orléans now started harassing Jermyn because Henrietta Maria’s will could not be found. She had made one before she left England in 1665 but, although Jermyn knew she had intended to cancel it, he did not know if she had done so, or if she had made a new one.

  It soon emerged that Henrietta Maria’s 1665 will was intact. It appointed Jermyn as one of her executors. She left everything she had to Charles. Yet in the short period before the will was found, Jermyn had the upsetting task of trying to fend off Orléans’ claims.

  The next morning Jermyn went to Saint-Cloud. Henrietta Anne was in tears, and at last the two of them could benefit from each other’s genuine sympathy. Ambassador Montagu was there as well, putting on a show of concern. But Montagu disliked Jermyn, probably because he suspected the older statesman of being involved in secret talks with Louis, from which he had been excluded.

  It turned out that the idea of sealing the apartments at Colombes had originated with Montagu, who revealed his sneering contempt for Jermyn in a letter to Arlington. ‘I am sure without this,’ he told the Secretary of State, ‘my lord St Albans would not have left a silver spoon in the house’.

  While Jermyn was at Saint-Cloud, surgeons visited Colombes to remove the Queen’s heart from her body and place it in a silver casket. Jermyn returned soon afterwards. As the cool of evening settled over the Seine valley, he led a slow procession of household staff from Colombes to Chaillot.

  Here, at Henrietta Maria’s own desire, the casket was placed above the altar of the convent chapel.

  Over the next few days, Jermyn raised a £27,000 loan to pay for the official mourning and funeral. He asked Arlington if the English government would guarantee the loan as ‘the easiest way of carrying on things here with decency… You ought to pity me’, he told Arlington,

  as much as to lament yourself, that you receive this trouble from my hand. I have no more pleasure in the matter than I am like to find in others, but receiving no reproaches from my own heart for not having done my duty to the queen during her life, so I would have that [which] I owe to her memory of the same piece.

  Instead of allowing himself time to come to terms with his loss, Jermyn found as much as possible to do. As soon as Henrietta Maria’s body had been laid out in state at Saint-Denis, the ancient sepulchral church of the Bourbon dynasty, he hurried over to England. He found Charles at Hampton Court, told him in detail about the funeral arrangements, and fussed over the English Court’s mourning.

  Understanding Jermyn’s need to be involved, Charles appointed him as one of the four commissioners responsible for settling Henrietta Maria’s estate.


  Somerset House and Greenwich became part of the dower lands of Queen Catherine, Charles II’s much-neglected Portuguese wife. The rebuilding of Greenwich Palace, a project Jermyn had set into motion in 1661, was brought to a stop with only one of the planned two blocks finished, for Catherine lacked the desire or money to continue the project. Colombes and the Queen’s property at Chaillot were given to Henrietta Anne.

  For the next three years, Jermyn was kept busy arbitrating disputes over wages from Henrietta Maria’s servants, claims by creditors and settling arguments over leases for parts of her estate.

  Years later, the occasional dispute still had to be referred to him. He never complained: long after Henrietta Maria’s death, he could feel, through such work, that he was still able to serve her.

  On Monday, 27 September, after a month of nervous confusion, Jermyn collapsed. Charles’s doctors put him to bed in his chamber at Hampton Court and diagnosed a massive attack of gout.

  For a few days they made Jermyn stay lying down, but he was determined to go back to France, so that he could be involved in the arrangements Louis was making for the funeral.

  Henrietta Maria de Bourbon, Queen Mother of England and Scotland, was buried at Saint-Denis on Wednesday, 10 November 1669.

  At ten o’clock that morning, the congregation began to proceed solemnly into the ancient cathedral. On entering, they heard the angelic voices of the royal choristers way up in the choir loft, speeding prayers for the Queen up to Heaven.

  The procession began with members of the French government and the ambassadors of Venice and Savoy. Following them came the Queen’s household, led by her senior lady-in-waiting and long-standing friend the Duchess of Richmond. Amongst the Queen’s ladies was Rebecca Jermyn, Jermyn’s sister-in-law (and mother of young Harry Jermyn), as disconsolate as the rest at the loss of her beloved mistress.