With All My Heart

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “Or is it only because through your telescope you will be able to see your shipping in the Solent?” she laughed.

  “You may be right,” he admitted, tweaking her ear. “But the place will have other charms. John Evelyn is advising me about the gardens, and though we cannot aspire to anything like Louis’s fountains and parterres, here, between a long avenue of English trees, we will look down upon the lovely cathedral city where once our Saxon Kings were crowned.”

  Once more he was sauntering through life, talking to the people who interested him and passing the day in the country pursuits which he loved. At a year or two past fifty he was as lean and athletic as when he had outwitted the Roundheads after Worcester, searching for an unwatched ship.

  “You should walk miles a day like me, George,” he would say, poking the Duke of Buckingham in his thickening stomach.

  “But what would be the use of it if he came in with the wolfish appetite that you acquire?” pointed out Catherine, who often worried lest her husband overdid such strenuous exercise.

  And time proved that her anxiety was not without cause; for there came a day at Windsor when he insisted upon playing singles against John Churchill — that same John Churchill whom he had caught in Barbara Castlemaine’s bedroom and who had justified his indulgence by a meteoric rise from beardless ensign to full blooded Colonel. Besides being the acknowledged tennis champion, Churchill was many years his junior. Catherine watched Charles put up a magnificent fight and take a beating with his habitual good grace; but she knew that, much as he had enjoyed the game, it had been a strain, and she wished that he had not got so hot. All the more so as he was obliged to return to London immediately to meet the Commissioners of Accounts to enquire into alleged evasions of the Hearth Tax.

  After a rub down and a too hasty meal he went aboard his barge and Catherine, accompanying him. to the water’s edge, through the airless afternoon, called after him, “Be careful not to catch a chill!” Charles waved and nodded; but she knew as well as he did that the moment he was round the bend of the reach he would throw off wig and coat and order all the cabin windows to be opened. And, of course, the next day he was down with a raging fever. However lightly he weathered them, past anxieties must have taken their toll, and by the time his Ministers had sent for her he had had some kind of fit, so alarming that he had gasped out orders for James to come home from Brussels and in the general consternation no one had raised the least objection. Mercifully for Catherine, by the time she reached Whitehall Charles was already partially recovered, his life having been saved, the doctors said, by the new remedy of Jesuit’s bark which caused high fevers to abate. She found him scarcely able to breathe for the press of anxious surgeons and apothecaries, and the surge of curious people about him and, remembering what he had done for her when she had been so ill, she tried her utmost to have most of them turned out and to give him some peace and privacy. But so patient and sweet tempered was he with them all that she began to think it was more the calmness of his disposition than the Jesuit’s bark which had restored him to her. And by the time James arrived, hurrying breathless and unannounced into the room, Charles, in spite of all medical warnings, was up and about again.

  But his short, sharp illness had been dangerous enough to teach his people how much they loved him — how much they depended upon his wisdom and lack of all vindictiveness for their untroubled way of life.

  “Now indeed, caro mio, you will have to take life more easily,” Catherine insisted; and for several happy weeks he heeded her, convalescing at Windsor, going to bed at sunset and indulging in only the gentler sports. She would sit beside him quietly while he fished, play basset with him after supper or join him in archery contests at the butts, becoming so proficient with a bow herself that, to the equal delight of both of them, the Fraternity of Bowmen of London invited her to become their Patroness.

  But as the pleasant months slipped by Charles, with his amazing constitution, seemed to be as well as ever. And soon he was off to Newmarket with James, where he watched the hawking and the cock fighting, and rode again upon the heath. Catherine was glad for him to be there, with a chance to forget all the ugly things which had happened in London. But gladder still to receive his letter telling her that he was coming home again. “James and I think to leave here on the twenty-fourth, lodging the last night of our journey at the Rye House in Hertfordshire, so hope to be with you by the end of the week,” he wrote.

  But the messenger had scarcely gone when she was amazed to hear him at her door, laughing with James at the surprise they would be springing upon her. “Whatever has happened?” she cried, the letter still in her hand.

  “Yet another fire!” grinned Charles, shaking the rain from his hat and coming to greet her.

  “Not here in our newly built London?”

  “Oh, no, my dear. Only my poor tumbledown racing place at Newmarket which I have been intending to rebuild these years past. And the weather turned so atrocious ’twas not much loss of sport.”

  “But what caused it?”

  “A stable boy lying in the hay with a borrowed pipe smoking some of Admiral Penn’s pernicious Virginia tobacco!” James told her.

  “But we saved all the horses,” said Charles.

  “And the rest of you? No one was hurt?”

  “No, my dear; though we lost some of the coaches that could not be pulled out in time. But I assure you ’twas a great deal of panic and pother about nothing. They forgot they had two experts from the Fire of London on the spot! James rescued two shrieking chamber maids from a top window and I contented myself with the head groom’s fat wife.”

  They were still laughing and telling her all about it when, from her vantage point by the fireplace, she saw the Earl of Ailesbury’s young son, whom her husband had just taken into his personal service, come running into the room through the open door behind them. The young man’s face was white with agitation; but at sight of them he stopped still in his tracks and stared as if he had seen a couple of ghosts. His behaviour was so odd that although they were still talking to her Catherine could not help watching him. But as soon as the King and his brother became aware of him he seemed to make a great effort to pull himself together.

  “You did not expect us for a couple of days?” said Charles kindly, noticing how strained he looked and putting it down, no doubt, to some neglected new duty.

  “Why, no, Sir. I — I certainly did not. But I thank God you have come!” And quite inexplicably the agitated young man went down on his knees and began fervently kissing the King’s hand.

  “Why, Bruce, you are a bundle of nerves, man! Get up!” Charles ordered him testily. “You cannot be fully recovered from that ridiculous duel wound yet. We must feed my good friend’s cub up, Kate.”

  But after the King had taken himself off to change and James had gone to his now adoring Mary, the young man just slumped down on to the nearest window seat. “What is really the matter, Bruce?” asked Catherine, going quietly to him.

  Feeling her hand on his shoulder, he managed to spring to his feet. “I beg your Majesty’s pardon —” he began evasively.

  “I think you came to tell me something and would have done so had they not been here,” she insisted.

  Bruce began to laugh at himself with boyish awkwardness. “The most absurd thing, I suppose, Madame! But I had not heard the King and the Duke arrive, and when I was over at milord Chamberlain’s lodgings awhile since a man rode in from Scotland. A servant of milord Provost’s. For days he had been in the saddle. He had been sent to find out if it were true ... And when I saw them here I thanked God and could not bring myself to speak of it ...”

  “Speak of what?” asked Catherine, touched by the young man’s obvious devotion.

  “It seems it is rumoured all over Edinburgh that —” he gulped and nodded his head towards the door through which his master had just departed — “that both of them are dead.”

  “Dead?” Catherine recoiled in horror. Then �
� since only a moment ago she had both touched and seen them — she began to laugh with relief, “Oh, I see. Just another of these absurd plots!” she chided.

  “Of course, you must be right, Madame,” he admitted, reddening. “It was foolish of me to think of alarming you.”

  “No, no, Bruce. We have all lived through such alarming times of late that ’tis but natural. I suppose they said it was a Popish plot?”

  “Why, no, Madame. Not this time. It was thought to be the work of a remnant of political malcontents. They were supposed to have set an ambush — near a place called the Rye House — by supporters of his Grace of Monmouth.”

  Catherine’s whole demeanour changed. “The Rye House?” she repeated, unfolding the King’s letter again.

  “Is there such a place, Madame?”

  “Yes. Although I never heard of it until this day.” In silence she offered him the King’s brief note to read. “It is strange,” she murmured, searching his intelligent young face as he handed it back to her.

  “So strange,” agreed the young man gravely, “that it almost looks as if some impatient person with foreknowledge of what was going to happen sent to rouse Scotland — some hours too soon.”

  It was decided that the King must be told of it, but in his comfortable frame of mind, and lulled by the love his subjects showed him, he dismissed the matter lightly. It was like the old fable of the shepherd boy calling “Wolf! Wolf!” so often that when the wolf really descended upon his flock nobody heeded. When a wild eyed Anabaptist named Keeling came to the Palace to pour out the same ambush story to one of the upper servants, he was laughed at for his pains. But fortunately the man had the pertinacity to return. And this time he brought with him solid witnesses, one of whom openly acknowledged his own intended guilt, so that the corroboration of the affair reached higher levels. Charles himself interrogated the men, and was convinced that but for the last minute alteration of their plans he and his brother would both have been dead by now. This time the intended plot had been all too real.

  A haycart was to have been pulled across the road just outside Ware, and a dozen or so conspirators were to have been lying in a wayside ditch with loaded muskets, waiting for the hold-up of the royal coach which so invariably outdistanced the rest of the cavalcade. There was no doubt at all that milords Russell, Howard and Essex, together with Algernon Sydney and a handful of others, had intended to murder them and had made grandiose plans for seizing Whitehall, rousing Scotland and the West of England and setting up Monmouth as a puppet king, with the real power in their own hands.

  The whole kingdom was profoundly shocked. The regicides were to be rounded up for trial. “Forgiving, humble, bounteous, just and kind John Dryden wrote of me in his sweet partiality,” said Charles. “But this time he and all men else will find me more just than kind. Send me,” he ordered his Secretary, “a list of the conspirators. Of them all, I will spare only Essex because I owe him a life. His father died for mine.”

  But Essex, in an agony of remorse, had already cut his own throat.

  The plot — abortive as the Gunpowder Plot — -was over and done with and so, very soon, would be the traitors who had planned it. So small a remnant of dissatisfaction had fermented it that, unlike that Popish effort, it would soon sink into oblivion. But though thanks were offered in every church in the country for the sparing of King Charles’s life, Charles the man was not to be spared a stab almost as sharp as Death itself.

  The first Catherine knew of it was when he came to her room one evening, and even then, because it was growing dusk, she was not at first aware of anything amiss. Putting down her book of evening devotions, she would have risen from the small circle of candlelight in which she sat. But he made some vague gesture which forestalled her. She saw then that he had a roll of thick parchment in his hand. He came straight to her and unrolled it for her to read. Instead of his usual indolent grace there was a brusqueness in his movements. In the stillness of the room she heard the parchment crackle sharply between his hands. It was the list of the men who had plotted to take his life. And in the steady light of her tall candles she saw that the first name upon the list was James Scott, Duke of Monmouth and Buccleuch — his own firstborn.

  “Jemmie!” she cried, scarcely above a whisper.

  Charles let the accursed list roll back on itself and threw it aside. “He was away in the West,” he said in a voice thick with suffering. “I thought he was just a handle for their vile treachery. No more than a headstrong, affectionate young fool ... I would have sworn on God’s Body — that he loved me ... But it is I who am the fool, Kate ...”

  He was clown on his knees with his head in her lap — he, the cool, cynical King of England. Tomorrow, no one would guess at it. His eyes would be amused or mocking, his voice as crisp as ever. This was just a moment between man and wife — one of those moments which shows them to be one in something more than flesh. And it mattered nothing to Catherine that it was the fruit of his sin with which she condoled. Her pride was nothing. Her arms were about him, holding him, her pitying hands stroking his bent head. All her frustrated motherhood leaped to join forces with her wifehood, pouring out in one stream to comfort him.

  He had come to her for consolation.

  And after awhile as his loved body relaxed a little the thought came to her — like a warming flame through the gathering darkness — “Even Minette, whom he adored, had only his glad moments. It was always he who comforted and protected her. His heart, when it is wounded, is brought to me!”

  CHAPTER XXIII

  AS THE evidence was sorted out it seemed possible that Monmouth had not known of his associates’ intent to kill, and that he had been led to believe that the King and Duke would only be held as hostages. Certainly, he had not been present.

  “But it is horrible to imagine,” protested all thinking people, “that with even the least suspicion of this foul plot he should not have quit whatever dubious company he was in and run himself out of breath, without food or sleep, to lay his fears before the King!”

  And James, for his part, would have had him executed out of hand.

  But Catherine understood how Charles must temporize — how he could not bring himself to destroy one so dear. She knew how the thought of his son’s beautiful head being severed tortured him through sleepless nights, and what a cruel temptation it was for him to have the final power to save. She was with him by the sundial in the rose garden when, seemingly occupied with the setting of his watch, he had said almost savagely to Bruce, who was young and whose life stretched uncondemned before him, “You are a Bedfordshire man and should know all the backways where a traitor can hide. You had better go and arrest my son, who, I hear, is skulking there.”

  Catherine had not dared to speak but her eyes had met Bruce’s entreatingly, and to her surprise the young gentleman-of-the-bedchamber, out of the extraordinary love he bore the King, had dared to hedge, excusing himself on the grounds that he was not well over his sickness and would attend-to it later. Catherine held her breath, wondering if he would be put under arrest. She had never before heard a man disobey the King like that. But after Bruce had mumbled on for a moment or two and then fallen silent, she saw Charles slip the watch back in his pocket, straighten himself with a sigh of relief and give the embarrassed lad such a look of affectionate gratitude as she had seldom beheld. And then he left them without another word and went indoors, hoping for strength, she supposed, to bring himself to say those terrible words again some other day.

  “I do not know how, if Jemmie were found guilty, I should ever bring myself to sign his death warrant,” he told her afterwards, with affecting simplicity.

  “My poor Charles! You have but to love a thing for it to be taken from you!” she answered, thinking of all he had lost and of how only she — with-whom he had never been in love — and James, who so often exasperated him, were left.

  “It is hard for you too, Catherine, who were fond of him,” he said gently. “Though God
knows why you should have loved my bastard!”

  But she had turned on him almost angrily then. “Surely you know, Charles, that since he returned your unfailing kindness with treachery I cannot love him any more! That any love I had for him is swallowed up in my love for you!”

  And in the end there was no need for him to bring his son to trial; for Monmouth ploughed his father’s pride into the dust by turning King's evidence to save his own skin, betraying his supporters and begging for a private interview — an interview at which Charles insisted that James, whom he had also wronged, should be present.

  “And what did the ungrateful wretch say?” Catherine asked of her brother-in-law, feeling that she could not make Charles go over it all again.

  “He admitted his knowledge of the whole conspiracy,” said James, “except the part concerning our assassination, which, he swears, the others withheld from him because they knew he would never be brought to consent. He begged our pardons in the humblest manner and promised us his dutiful behaviour for the future. What he says may or may not be true; but how Charles can forgive him I do not know!”

  “Jemmie still talks like a spoiled child, always putting the responsibility of his acts upon those who persuade him.”

  “And changes like a weather-vane! But at least Charles, for all his indulgence, had the sense to pin him down to his confession by making him write it down and sign it.”

  “Oh, James,” sighed Catherine. “Were he a son of mine, I would rather see him dead!”

  “No son of yours — or Charles’s, for that matter — would ever play the coward!” James told her, his face all harsh with bitterness.