With All My Heart

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  CHAPTER VI

  “AND NOW, as if things were not bad enough, my mother-in-law is coming!” With a dramatic gesture Catherine laid down Edward Hyde’s formal letter apprising her of the fact. Realization that her family life was reduced to a few formal notes exchanged between Hampton and Whitehall, where her husband now spent most of his time, had as much to do with her feeling of flat despair as the arrival of Henrietta Maria.

  “The Queen Dowager is returning from France?” chorused her new English ladies, with an unflattering revival of high spirits.

  “Almost immediately, I understand,” said Catherine, unhappily aware of how deadly her deserted Court must be for them. “His Majesty and the Duke are preparing to meet her.”

  Since it was to be a family occasion, and she missed her own relations, she would have liked to go too; but the letter said nothing about it and here at Hampton she seemed to be left out of everything. From time to time news floated into her quiet little backwater about the gay swirl of doings in London; but evidently she was not wanted there. And when Charles had his mother she would be wanted less than ever. Probably, too, thought Catherine, it would mean yet another person to criticize her conduct and laugh at her old-fashioned ideas of respectability. An influential woman from the licentious Paris Court ... “She is sure to think everything her eldest son does is perfect!” she prophesied, sticking a vindictive needle into her embroidery.

  “Not Charles the First’s widow!” smiled the Countess of Shrewsbury, who was old enough to remember the contentious days before the Commonwealth. “It was always her husband who was perfect.”

  “She was inclined to be rather domineering with her children,” confirmed the Duchess of Suffolk, settling down to a good gossip. “And I myself think that if she had a favourite son it was York.”

  The Duke was tall and florid and, as everyone knew, a fine courageous fighter; but he had neither Charles’s wit nor Charles’s charm. “I cannot comprehend how anyone could prefer —” began Catherine; then, remembering her resentment, bit off the words with her thread.

  “They do say that it is because he is secretly of his mother’s faith,” whispered the old Countess, leaning close to the Queen under the pretext of passing her some fresh silks.

  “Although her Majesty will want to meet both her sons, surely it will be a very sad visit for the poor lady — seeing again all the places where she was once so happy with the murdered king?” suggested donna Penalva, out of that gentle capacity she had for putting herself in other people’s places.

  “But it will not be for the first time,” explained the Duchess of Suffolk. “She came on a visit with her daughters, the late Princess Mary of Orange and young Princess Henrietta — Minette, as the King calls her — soon after the Restoration.”

  “To share in the rejoicings, I suppose?” sighed Catherine enviously.

  “The King wanted her to, of course. But she came partly to try to prevent the York marriage. Only the Channel was so rough she arrived too late.”

  “Domineering and interfering!” thought Henrietta Maria’s daughter-in-law.

  “The Dowager Queen always did hate the Hydes,” added the gossip-loving Duchess.

  “Well, if she goes about breaking up her sons’ marriages and thinks that I should be treated as I am —” muttered Catherine.

  “Oh, but she was delighted with your marriage, Madame!” young Lady Ormonde assured her. “Did you not read us the charming letter of welcome she wrote?”

  “Making the best of a Portuguese princess instead of a French one!” smiled Catherine, who knew something of European diplomacy.

  “And there was the gold toilette set she sent,” donna Penalva reminded her.

  “Which I certainly like best of all my wedding gifts,” allowed Catherine, glancing with pride at the long box fitted with comb and beauty patches and mirror, before which she had so often made herself desirable for Charles.

  “Well, let us hope devoutly that she does not stay long!” summed up donna Elvira, looking down her own domineering nose. “There are enough Stuarts in this country already!”

  “It is their country!” snapped pretty Lettice Ormonde.

  “And if you do not like it you can always go back to your own,” old Agnes Shrewsbury reminded her tartly.

  Whether they sat down to embroider or strolled in the gardens to chat, Catherine’s Portuguese and English attendants never failed to finish up by bickering; so in order to preserve the peace she remembered that it would soon be time for vespers and bade them all bestir themselves to change her dress.

  But she was still in her crimson petticoat with her dark hair curling about her shoulders when the door was flung wide and the King was announced. Although he had come by road and his cavalcade must have clattered into the courtyard, all sound of their arrival had been deadened by the rain beating against the casements and the blustering wind in the tall elms. Catherine stood petrified before her mirror with one of her priceless pearl necklaces dripping from her hand. It was the first time he had been in her private apartments for weeks.

  And he was an astonishingly different Charles.

  All his grim sulkiness was gone, and even his habitual pose of indolence. He was as completely natural as when he was working in his laboratory or doing things with boats. His tall riding boots were splashed with mud, and his almond shaped eyes sparkled beneath their sleepy looking-lashes. “Why, Kate, that petticoat becomes you!” he cried throwing plumed hat and leather gloves across her table as informally as though he and she had parted the best of friends but yesterday. “You’ve heard the good news? That my mother leaves Calais tomorrow morning?”

  Catherine stared at him in bewilderment — at a more genial, unguarded Charles than she had ever seen. “I have been officially notified of the fact by your Chancellor,” she said stiffly.

  “Ah, yes, I told Ned to write you as soon as it was known in Council, and I hoped to get here sooner to tell you myself. But. I was delayed seeing Admiral Montagu and that naval Secretary fellow, Pepys, about the escort ships.” Although his wife was still standing, he threw himself unceremoniously into her special chair, stretching his long legs comfortably before him, still full of his plans. “I have sent Ormonde to have my mother’s old apartments at Greenwich prepared so that she can land immediately and rest before coming to London. And I would have you take coach and wait upon her there.”

  So, after all, she was not to be left out. This was a family affair in which a man’s mistress, however possessive, could have no part.

  “B-but what about yourself?” she stammered, almost too overcome by conflicting emotions for intelligent speech.

  “James and I will be sailing down to the Nore as soon as the tide serves, then embarking on the ‘Royal Charles’ to meet my mother in mid-Channel. To surprise her,” he answered as eager as a schoolboy.

  Catherine, in her petticoat, came closer. “And you want me to go to meet her — alone?” she repeated, feeling very young and inadequate. She was. remembering the painting of Henrietta Maria which hung above the old-fashioned dais in the Great Hall — a dark, slender, energetic looking woman, of great dignity. The famous widowed queen whose name had been on everyone’s lips a decade ago, and whose far-away misfortunes had stirred even the girls in Catherine’s convent. A capable daughter of the great Henri Quatre of France.

  Charles viewed his wife’s evident perturbation with understanding amusement. “She will probably have been very seasick and you are good at being kind to people,” he suggested, knowing full well that none of his kin was ever troubled by the elements, but seeking to dissolve Catherine’s awe. To which end he levered himself up from her chair and crossed to a window to survey the angry, swollen Thames. “Just Mam’s ill luck at sea!” he laughed, thereby reducing the stiff regality of Van Dyck’s portrait to the easy conception of a teased and human parent.

  While his back was turned Catherine had signed to her women to complete her toilette; but her husband would have no
ne of it. “That crimson thing becomes you vastly,” he repeated; and disregarding the vesper bell, he waved them all away, bidding her come and talk to him on the fireside settle and so while away an impatient hour waiting for the tide.

  “Does her Majesty, your mother, always have bad weather then?” enquired Catherine, striving to hide her resentment that he should suddenly see fit to treat her so pleasantly and expect the same response.

  “It has become a family joke,” said Charles. “When I was small my father used to jig me up and down upon his knee. For us it was riding a horse. But Mam always insisted it was the waves rocking her ship when she first came to this benighted country to marry him — a shy little foreign bride like you!”

  His devastating brown eyes quizzed her, softening her reasonable animosity. It was an unfair advantage, Catherine felt. But she felt too, as often before, that even his most frivolous remarks were made purposely, prompted by a deep understanding of human nature. Certainly the thought that the imperious Queen had once been as frightened as herself should help her in the coming rencontre. Charles stretched his arms casually along the back of the settle so that one of his fine, long hands lay close to her shoulder; but he made no attempt to touch her ... And Catherine, wrestling with the flesh, prayed dutifully that she might become less physically aware of him. “And years later when my father and I were being driven from battlefield to battlefield,” he went on, “I can remember Mam going to my sister at the Hague and bringing back stores and arms for him through one of the worst storms in history. ‘No English queen has ever yet been drowned at sea!’ she told her shrieking women; but she admitted to me afterwards that she quite expected to be the first.”

  “She must be very brave,” said Catherine, comparing the drama of the Stuarts’ lives with the tameness of her own and at the same time wondering how recently those fine hands of his had been fondling Barbara Castlemaine.

  “As. brave as she has been misfortunate — losing husband, home, crown and three children,” he answered more thoughtfully. “One of the stories Mary and I enjoyed best was about our mother’s reception at some northern English port after that same awful voyage. It appears that Cromwell’s guns began pounding the house she was lodging in, and she and her ladies had to go out and lie in a ditch. In the excitement her favourite dog, an ugly old brute called Mitte, had been forgotten. Mam suddenly remembered that she had left him asleep on her bed, so she picked up her skirts and ran all the way back up the street through shattering gunfire to get him.”

  Catherine began to think that there must be much of his mother in Charles. “I suppose you love her very dearly?” she said, struggling to combat a fresh cause of jealousy.

  “Of course I love her. But that does not signify that we agree about any mortal thing!” he laughed. “She manages and meddles until she drives me mad. And I imagine I have been a disappointment to her ever since the day I was born.”

  “You? A disappointment?”

  “Why, yes. Being such an infernally ugly baby, and then disgracing her by speaking abominable French when she had cajoled all her rich European relatives into giving me refuge. And, of course, not being a Catholic — or even a good living Protestant like my father.”

  Catherine had to laugh at his airy diffidence. “And now you are making her coming an excuse to escape from all your tedious Councils and Parliaments and get away to sea!” she accused.

  But Charles was wont to assume a misleading air of indifference where work was concerned. “London is quite amusing now we have gaming again and two good theatres,” he told her, with one of his inimitable shrugs. “But I wager neither James nor I is ever so well content as when we have a lively deck beneath our feet.”

  So it seemed that love making in Lady Castlemaine’s luxurious apartments was by no means the highlight of existence for him. “I have been in your country three whole months and never yet seen London,” Catherine ventured to remind him.

  “It is not over healthy in summer.”

  The lines at the side of his mouth looked stern and Catherine still wondered if it were her health he had been considering or just that he had wanted to enjoy himself without her. But his next words dispelled her doubts.

  “Did I not tell you that when my eldest sister, Mary, who was so unimaginably good to me in Holland, came over for my coronation, she caught a pox in London and died?” he reminded her. “And a few months before that it was my favourite brother, Henry. He was blue-eyed and sandy — as a Scotsman, should be — and barely twenty-one ... We had planned to do so many things together and never till then had I had a spare groat to spend on him ...”

  “Oh, my dear!” Touched to her tender heart, Catherine slid a hand through his arm as he sat staring before him, and without looking at her he patted it absently. No wonder he had kept her through the hot summer months at Hampton. “I will come whenever it shall please you,” she said meekly. “And in the meantime I will pay my duty to your mother at Greenwich.”

  “Then I will send coaches for the Portuguese Ambassador and all your people,” he promised, rising to take leave of her.

  All that night and the next the autumnal gales blew, and Catherine scarcely left her oratory where she prayed that her husband’s ship would ride out the storm. And, thanks either to her fervour or to superb seamanship, her prayers were answered. And when at last beacons were lighted from hill to hill and church bells rang out the good news that the ships were met and sighted off the Nore, she ignored her brother’s instructions about converting foreign fashion to the modest farthingale and set out for Greenwich in black velvet elegant enough to please even a Frenchwoman’s taste.

  The great palace of Greenwich and the ships lying at anchor in the broad slapping river were an impressive sight. And the concourse of people was so great that Catherine hoped Charles would not notice that, in spite of her entreaties, the disgruntled Ambassador from Portugal had excused himself from using the proffered coaches on the plea of sudden illness. Whether he noticed or not — and little, she knew, escaped him — he was graciousness itself to her, giving her fingers a secret encouraging nip as he led her up the wide staircase.

  It was the first time Catherine had appeared in public since that hateful day when her rival had been presented to her and she had swooned, and it seemed to her that all the people who had witnessed her humiliation were pressing close behind her now, watching to see what would happen next. And standing at the top of the stairs — waiting to look her over, she felt — was her mother-in-law, who would no doubt already have heard a garbled version of her gauche behaviour. “And to think that we do not speak a word of each other’s language so that I cannot try to explain!” thought Catherine, desperately searching for some dutiful phrase in English.

  In spite of her lined face and perpetual aura of mourning Henrietta Maria, in her late fifties, still retained traces of past beauty; and she held herself so that people were deceived into thinking her tall. Charles kissed her hand and presented his little bride; and Catherine, still in speechless confusion, sank down in a curtsy before her.

  But the slender, compelling hands they had kissed were raising her. A kindly finger lifted her chin for inspection and a warm, vivacious French voice was saying, “Mais, Charles, comme elle est charmante, ta petite brunette!” Henrietta Maria kissed Catherine as affectionately as her own mother might have done and led her by the hand into the magnificent audience chamber. She made more of the new little daughter-in-law than of either of her stalwart sons. “Come and sit beside me and let us take some refreshment en famille,” she invited, in clear penetrating tones so that all who had ever slighted Catherine should hear. “For I would not have come to England except for the pleasure of seeing you. To love you as a daughter and to serve you as a Queen.”

  It was the kindest thing any woman could have done for her. And so utterly unexpected. And although Catherine felt, and would always feel, that she was in the presence of the real Queen of England, she realized gratefully that the older
woman, with her self-composure and wider experience, was deliberately making every courtier present aware of how the King’s wife ought to be treated and was, by her own example, shaming all who had neglected her. Catherine, subdued for weeks by lack of appreciation, rose to the occasion. Her manners were demurely charming, her pearls no brighter than her eyes — and Charles was smiling at her approvingly.

  During the happy hours they spent at Greenwich he did his best to translate to her the gist of fraternal allusions and to include her in the brilliant quick-fire of a bilingual family conversation, while Catherine in her turn tried to pass on some of the Stuart kindness to James’s poor disapproved of wife. There was much talk of the eldest sister’s orphaned boy being invited on a visit to England, and of the youngest sister’s recent marriage to the Duc d’Orleans. Indeed, most of the conversation between Charles and his mother seemed to be about this Minette, as he called her; and although Catherine could not follow the half of it she noticed how their voices softened to affection whenever they spoke of her.

  “It is the first time I see you all together — as a family,” she managed to say in English. But the words so painstakingly assembled appeared to be ill-chosen after all, for although the Queen Mother patted her hand encouragingly the happy animation was wiped from her face, leaving it worn and tired. “Those of us who are left,” she said sadly. “Last time I came to England we were all here together — except, of course, my beloved husband and our little daughter Elizabeth who died in captivity with those vile Cromwellians.”

  “And this time,” added Charles sombrely, “Mam could not bring Minette.”

  But Catherine had been received into the Stuart family and was surrounded by their easy charm. In high spirits, planning her next visit to her mother-in-law and their state entry into London, she rode back to Hampton. It was wonderful to be driving through the country with Charles again, and for the first time since their quarrel they supped together in public so that the old palace seemed to come to life and a wave of joyful excitement swept spectators and servants alike. After supper there was dancing and Charles insisted upon teaching her the steps of the popular new bransle — so as to be ready for Whitehall, he said.