Margaret the First

by Danielle Dutton

  KISSES ON THE LAWN AT ST. JOHN’S GREEN. A PERFECT SUMMER gloom of vegetal bravado: peonies, bugloss, native beetles singing. The horses stamped a path through the starry dark. Alone in the carriage, flying through England, I imagined myself a beauty in satin; I imagined a crown of diamonds on my head; I imagined I’d soon be married to a celebrated general, but that days after the wedding my husband would fall in battle, so that I, in a silver coat to my waist, with a broad sword in my hand, would have no choice but to rally his troops and lead them onto the field; I imagined a royal reception, the road strewn with petals, bells.

  But the coach stopped the following night in an obscure and narrow lane. The horses slobbered, a squat door opened, and I was sped inside, a strange man gripping my elbow. It was a baker’s home, a safe house. I did not sleep, kept my wits. Amid the city’s tolling bells, the smell of yeast and mold, I crept to the window and saw a stack of soldiers’ bodies.

  Morning brought another man, rain, a series of crowded hallways, then around a corner and I stood before the queen—the queen!—stunning and Catholic and dressed in red and ermine. Dozens of silent courtiers stood pressed against the walls. But it was as if I’d watched it all unfold within a book, as if I turned the pages from safe inside my room: the dead soldiers, the baker’s house, the courtiers, the queen. Until someone whispered, “How simple she looks,” and all at once I awoke.

  I found myself in an unknown universe, whirling far into space: African servants, dogs in hats, platonic ideals, sparkling conversation, and ivy-coated quadrangles with womanizing captains, dueling earls, actors. I met Father Cyprien de Gamache, her majesty’s wily confessor; William, a poet, who claimed to be Shakespeare’s son; and a giggling dwarf called Jeffry, who’d been presented to the queen in a pie. I met the ladies-in-waiting, too, who hardly looked my way, busy as they were, bickering over who went where and when, who wore what and when, who fetched what and why, who said what and to whom, and what gave her the right to say that. Nor was Oxford itself at all what I’d expected: dead horses clogged the waterways, corpses from both sides were flung on Jews’ Mount. Grain was stored in Law & Logic, boots cobbled in the School of Astronomy & Music. At the center of it all, the queen, newly pregnant, rarely left her makeshift palace, and I, as one of her ladies-in-waiting, waited each day by her side. With downcast eyes, I minded her fan. I minded her red fox train.

  Worst of all: I was permanently underdressed, in my older sisters’ outmoded hand-me-downs and caps. So I designed in my mind a sugar-spun golden gown to walk the path to church in, trailing crimson flowers and greenish beetle wings. Then someone cupped my breasts—two-handed!—as I passed like a ghost down the hall. I never spoke, but immediately sent word to my mother, begging to be allowed back home. “It is a mistake,” I wrote, “and not where I belong.” Mother as promptly refused. Bad as I thought I had it, life outside was swiftly unraveling for those still loyal to the king. “Be tranquil,” her note advised, “this war will soon be over.”

  But the following spring it was not.

  IN HIDING AT A ROYALIST ESTATE IN EXETER—THE SEA, THE AIR, THE double white violet, the wallflower, stock-gilliflower, cowslip, flower-de-lices, cherry trees in pink—the queen gave birth to a princess, soft and yellow, streaked with blood, the labor causing hysterical blindness and a lingering pain in Her Majesty’s chest.

  THE CHANNEL TO PARIS

  1644–1645

  TO BEGIN CAME AN ATTACK BY PARLIAMENTARIAN SHIPS—THE VICE Admiral, Warwick, and Paramour—just off the coast of Devon. Cannons fantastically loud! Then French ships sailed out to meet us and the Parliamentarians quickly fled, so we unfurled the purple banners—Long live the King—but rough winds blew us westward into storms.

  The ship pitched, banging doors. England disappeared.

  In one small cabin six beds hung like cradles from a beam, and beneath my own a barrel of beans was home to a mischief of rats. My cabinmates were sick, vomiting into chamber pots they took on deck to dump. I sat and watched the sea exhaust itself out a circular glass, swells as high as any hill in Essex. If light allowed, I read. Twelfth Night in a gale. Would Viola’s fate be mine, washed ashore in a strange new world and dressed up like a man? I tucked up my feet and waited, swinging in the bed.

  But no wreck came. Nor were we mistaken for pirates by fishermen out at dawn. We rowed ashore, at last, on the rocky coast of Brittany, struggled up a cliff. Next, by land, passing monks and bullocks and avenues of walnuts. We stopped in Bourbon to catch our breath, walk our spaniels. An ancient château sat over a monastery and a warm medicinal spring, where the queen soaked, finches whistling, as French physicians pierced her abscessed breast. Finally, in November, queen and court reached Paris, where the Regent of France, on behalf of the six-year-old king, had granted us use of the Louvre. I read, sticking to Spenser and Donne. “She is unsociable,” the others said, “and cannot grasp French.” I paced the cloister, the bells of Notre Dame clanging in the distance. I read. I wrote letters to my mother and sisters. And idly one afternoon, I wrote something else:

  “I had rather be a meteor, singly, alone.”

  Plus Paris itself was noisome. Even with its glittering bridges and orangeries, even if the birthplace of ballet.

  “I had rather been a meteor, than a star in a crowd.”

  There was the humidity, the innumerable crashing coaches, and French aristocrats and servants relieving themselves in the halls. All summer, heaps of shit steamed on the palace steps. I swear I nearly died of the purging flux that August, saved by a powder of opium, pearls, and gold taken in a bread-pill each night before I slept.

  O the fever. The dreams!

  Yet most of all, I was bored—so bored. Having arrived at the height of history, the very middle of the world, I was shocked to find myself with less to do than when alone in the country back home. Though marbled and with warbling fountains, the Louvre was vast and always cold. As ladies-in-waiting schemed down endless mirrored corridors, the once-luminous queen retreated, weeping, desperate for the baby she’d been forced to leave in England—safe from the perils of our escape. Some days it seemed as if my fever had never broken: the incessant pointless duels, those ghostly caryatids, a monkey in a doublet roaming halls. Too, I’d grown aware of some new flimsiness in my body—stretching out my long thin arms, the skin as light as muslin, as likely to rip or tear. Even weeks after my illness, my face was white as clay. I refused to run, refused to break a sweat. While ladies-in-waiting pranced and spun, gave chase to honking swans, I only sat and watched them from the knotted flower beds, ignored the book in my lap, and recalled the grounds at St. John’s Green: the fields of purpling wild lettuce, the spidery fern-ringed pond.

  Then one downcast afternoon, as I approached my shaded bench, I saw a woman, tall even seated, broad-shouldered and tanned, yet elegantly gowned in gray and pearl ropes. It was a peculiarly informal meeting: I simply sat. My stiff skirts brushed that lady’s, and I opened my book in silence. Yet despite this odd behavior, she took pity on a hushed and sighing girl. “My Mary,” she said, pointing to a child amid the topiary shapes, “who was ten this past July.”

  Thus, in a tonsured garden, near a wall of autumn roses, it happened that I made a friend—my first. Lady Browne was newly arrived from London, wife of Sir Richard, French ambassador for our king. Soon I was a regular at their home.

  AT THE EMBASSY FOR SUPPER—QUAIL IN BROTH AND OYSTERS—LADY Browne remembered my father, whom she’d met at Queen Elizabeth’s court. Yet one name only was on the tongue of Sir Richard: William Cavendish, newly made marquess. This gentleman, he reported between oysters, had recently fled to Hamburg after losing badly with a regiment raised near York. A master horseman and fencer, and one of the richest men in England, he wrote plays—oyster—collected viols—oyster—“his particular love in music”—and was by all accounts—oyster—affable and quick. As for official news, the post arrived on Tuesdays. I was sometimes sent to retrieve it from a sympathetic banker in
the Rue de Quiquempoit. The queen employed secret couriers for her letters to the king, transported to Oxford in wigs or hollow canes. If apprehended, well, the agents risked death. By now it was clear: the Royalists were losing.

  AND THOUGH AWKWARD STILL IN THE PRESENCE OF ANY MAN WHO wasn’t a brother, yet I appear in a painting from around this time—of the queen and her exiled ladies—with my neckline plunging deep, as was the mode: I wear a cherry cap, have good plump breasts, fair skin, precise little curls.

  IN 1645 WILLIAM CAVENDISH ARRIVED IN PARIS IN A COACH PULLED BY nine Holsteiner horses. In truth, the marquess had run out of funds but rightly assumed he’d get better credit if he seemed a less risky investment, so presented himself to the queen and gave her a gift of six of his steeds. Henrietta Maria accepted on the panoramic steps of the Louvre. Ladies-in-waiting in springtime flounces flanked her. William’s seasoned eye lighted on one whose own, this once, looked back. What was that shy girl thinking? That standing in velvet on freshly raked gravel was a version of Shakespeare or Caesar? Here indeed was manly fame and fortune: a playwright and poet, a horseman and soldier, a handsome widower and infamous flirt. But would he ask to meet her, the girl with the quiet stare, sister of one of his captured commanders? There were many unmarried ladies at court: some of them rich, quite a few pretty, each hoping to make a good match. William Cavendish had his pick. He picked me, to wide surprise.

  Firstly, he existed in a social sphere far above my own. And I, who rarely spoke, almost never spoke to men. But at thirty years my senior, William knew—unlike noisy young courtiers—how to seduce a strange bright virgin. He watched me in my silence. My reserve? He thought it charming. His attentions made me blush. I could feel his stare as I snuck off with Cymbeline to a corner. “You enjoy reading?” he asked. We walked the courtyard under jealous eyes. He spoke of things that mattered—my brother, books, my home—and had a way of standing, feet spread, so that his brown eyes met my green ones at one level. Then, and wisely, he began to frequent the embassy, where we often met on Sundays, he kneeling beside me, watching my lips move as I prayed. I was to him a new-come bud, so slender and pale. I smelled of roses, or so he said. I turned pink and asked about my brother.

  But just as I began to soften, Henrietta Maria up and quit Paris, taking herself and her court to St. Germain-en-Laye. Her summer château boasted grand suites with painted windows and formal gardens descending to the Seine, with canals and cascading fountains and a cove of faux-grottoes home to clacking metal birds, a bejeweled caterpillar, a golden duck that shook its head and quacked. We smuggled letters. Like clockwork, William composed one poem every other day. I was a “spotless virgin, full of love and truth.” My breasts so plump and young. “If living cannot meet,” wrote he,

  then let us try

  If after death we can; oh let us die!

  And I: “I look apon this world as on a deths head for mortificashun, for I see all things subject to allteration and change, and our hopes as if they had takin opium.”

  And he:

  Sweetest of nature, virtue, you are it;

  Serenest judgement, fancy for a wit;

  So confidently modest, so discreet,

  As lust turns into love, love homage at your feet.

  Summer scorched. Fires burned in surrounding fields posting towers of smoke between the château and Paris. But poetry toils, even in such heat. By the end of the summer, William and I were secretly engaged. Unaccustomed, I troubled. William, brave in secrecy, pressed me against a wall, hands working to get under all those skirts. I hurried down the corridor, locked myself in my room. Alone on the bed, I wished my mother borne across the sea, in through the open painted window, standing on the cold stone floor in France, as if by magic. As others lunched in a tent on the grass, I wrote another note, begging he be patient: “If you shod repent sir how unfortunat a woman I shod be; pray consider I have enemyes.”

  It was true! A swelling noise arose at court, the ladies in a rage. Some said coy Miss Lucas had played the marquess like a song. Others whispered loudly about his numerous past lovers and a rumored decline in stamina. His closest friends opposed the match. I had no dower, the war having taken my family’s wealth. I was of gentle but unremarkable birth. I was odd, that much was obvious, even to idle courtiers. They made no attempt to hide what they said, and soon a different rumor reached me: that the marquess courted another. Naturally, I panicked. I even began to admire Paris because William was in it: “Shurly, my lord,” I wrote in haste, “I shall be content to be any thing you would have me to be, so I am yours; I rejoyce at nothing mor than your leters.”

  I needn’t have despaired.

  One day by the river’s edge he stuck his tongue in my mouth. Unsure, I tugged it with my lips and nearly choked him. An afternoon while others played boules on the grass, he took me for a ride and pinched my nipples. Then it happened: someone leaked our secret to the queen. Her own maid-in-waiting? A nobody in her house? Henrietta Maria swore she’d faint. She called for a glass of wine, declared the chapel hot. And I, immediately struck by another summer fever, kept to my chamber the remainder of the season.

  WHEN PRINCESS MARIE OF MANTUA MARRIED THE ANCIENT KING OF Poland (incontinent and crippled by gout), all Paris lined the streets to watch: mounted soldiers in Turkish jackets, their horses’ skin dyed red; footguards in yellow regalia; Polish seigneurs in a wealth of jewels, despite a lack of taste. Madame de Motteville reported that the foreigners slept in animal skins and wore no underclothes, but how she knew was what got everybody talking.

  Amid this din, Margaret Lucas became Margaret Cavendish in the ambassador’s private Parisian chapel. It was autumn. I wore gray. My hair in waves around my face and braided up at back. No other Lucas could be present, but Lady Browne fondly shed a sister’s worth of tears, and her daughter Mary carried a myrtle bouquet. Then out to the waiting carriage—horses stamping slick with rain—where William swiftly handed me up and sat down beside me, his wife.

  So began our journey, our life. But what does one say? What do? William sat in silence. I watched him warily from the edges of my sight. Had I erred? My thoughts slid over the morning as the embassy raced from view: my arrival, the vows, the giving of rings, the proclamation, the blessings. But no, I’d hardly said three words. And with another glance—his salt-and-pepper beard, his broad-brimmed hat—I clicked through stories I’d read or heard, of husbands, cruel and cold, who changed after the wooing. One who was handsome but mean. One who never listened. One who threatened to boil his lady’s pug in a pot. Then William turned to face me. He took my hands from my lap. “My circumstances in exile,” he began, “my situation, you see, is not what it is back home.” And my fingers relaxed in his. I was far more worried about causing offense than being offended myself.

  In England, as I surely knew—“Damned awkward to speak of money, and yet”—in England he could boast two noble estates. There was Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire—with its avenue of fir trees and swans upon the lake—where he was Marquess of Newcastle and I now Marchioness. And not a day’s ride to the west sat the ancient castle of Bolsover, on a gentle slope, turreted and thick with scented vines. “Once,” he said, “I spent £20,000 entertaining the king for a week. What quantities of wine we drank and game we shot!” But now, well. In France, you see. “In short,” William said, “I’m poor.” Poorish.

  Too, in certain circles, in certain courtly circles, among certain younger courtiers, “I’m thought of these days as a bit of an also-ran, a nit.” The troops he’d commanded so thoroughly routed at Marston Moor, where my brother had been captured. “Damn Scots!” William spat, and I diverted my gaze to low-hanging wooden signboards swinging over shops. It had not been any error of his. Details would emerge. History would know his worth. “To come to the matter,” he said, “our situation will improve.” There was no point at all on which I should trouble myself. Only steel my ears against gossip. This war would soon be over.

  Then a bang of
thunder upset the horses and the carriage began to tip—around a corner with two wheels on the ground, water creeping in through seams—a dive! a plunge! a sag! a wreck!—but all was right in seconds, all four wheels on the ground. A current of wet Parisians passed outside the glass. “For now,” he said, replacing his fallen hat, “we will live in the rented wing of a house, yet a graceful château and just beyond the city gate.”

  As if on cue, that gate appeared, damp and gray as all Paris, my dress. A regiment of birds strutted blackly at its base. Rain, rain, as far as the eye could see. A drop fell into my lap.

  It was: the gate, those crows, some soggy lindens, a fountain, and I was home.

  NEXT, A WHIRLWIND OF DETAIL: SERVANTS IN A LINE, EACH WITH A name and position to remember. I curtsied one by one, and William had to wait. Now came faces of his family and friends, to whom I gave shy greeting. He led me by the hand. I saw high-backed chairs with lion’s-paw feet, exposed beams in the hall, then lifted my skirts and mounted the staircase to a long and narrow corridor, where he kissed me with my back against a door. Satisfied, he turned, the tip of his sheathed sword sliding down the wall, off to join the others in a toast.

  The room was smaller than the one I’d been used to at the Louvre, yet all my own, and neat and clean, with bright white walls and two tall windows that watched a narrow street. Should I sit? Take off my cap? Margaret Cavendish, I thought, will now take off her cap.

  Then, like a ghost, a little maid appeared. A little maid in bright white muslin who didn’t say a word, only stripped away the bridal gown and washed my new-wife’s skin—with rough French hands, French soap—and touched my breasts and thighs with tuberose perfume.