The Wondering Prince

by Jean Plaidy

  “The Queen would make us all Catholic if she could,” he was declaring. “You, Sir, and you, Madam, and you, my comely wench. Aye, and you who have just come in … the hunchback woman and the boy there … she’d make us all Catholic if she dared.”

  “We’d die rather,” said another man.

  “Why,” went on the first, “on St. James’ day this Queen of ours walked afoot to Tyburn to honor Catholics who had died there. And I tell you, friends, by the gleam in her eyes it was clear she’d like to see done to some of us good Christians what was done to idolators at Tyburn gallows. If I’d been at Exeter I’d not have let her give me the slip. I’d have found her. I’d have carried her to London … aye, that I would. I’d have made her walk to Tyburn gallows … and it wouldn’t have been to honor idolators!”

  “She’s a very wicked woman,” volunteered one of the women. “They say the French are all wicked.”

  “It won’t be long,” said the large talkative man, “before we’ve done with kings and queens in England. Kings and queens have no place in England today.”

  “If the King was to be killed in battle … or after,” said a short fat man, “there’d still be his children to make trouble.”

  “I saw the Prince of Wales once,” said the beribboned woman. “An ugly fellow!”

  “Well, that’s as may be,” said the woman with a smile.

  “And what would you mean by that?”

  “Oh … he was dark … dark to swarthiness … He had a big nose and a big mouth … He was a boy and yet …”

  “Sounds as if you’re a Royalist, madam,” said the large man accusingly.

  “Oh no, I wouldn’t say that. He was naught but a boy … Prince Charles … and he was riding through our town with his brother, young James. It would have been just before Edgehill, I reckon.”

  “We nearly got those boys at Edgehill,” grumbled the man. “If I’d have been there …”

  The woman was wistful. “No, he wasn’t really ugly … not when he smiled. And he smiled at me … straight at me and doffed his hat as though I were a lady of the Court. There was a woman with me who declared the smile and the hat-doffing was for her …”

  “You’re bedazzled by royalty!” sneered the man.

  “Not me! It was only the Prince himself. There were others there. Gentlemen … dukes … lords … Handsome they might be called, but it was the Prince … that boy … that dark and ugly boy … Mayhap it was because he was just a boy …”

  “Tush!” said the man. “His Royal Highness! He’ll not be Highness much longer. It won’t be long before he’ll want to forget he was Prince of Wales and once heir to a kingdom that will have none of him. People will be ashamed to talk of kings and queens, I tell you. We’ll choose our Lord Protector and if he doesn’t please us we’ll rid ourselves of him and choose another. Royalty! I’d have the heads off the lot of them!”

  “Except the prince of Wales …” murmured the woman.

  Tom looked in at the door and beckoned to his party; gladly they followed him out of the parlor.

  He whispered as the door shut on them: “We’re to have an attic to ourselves to sleep in. The landlord is having straw put up there now. Food is being prepared for us, and that we can have by ourselves in one of the small rooms. I have paid him well. I think he is a little suspicious of how we can pay for what we want; but his eyes glistened at the sight of the money.”

  “Then let us eat quickly and retire to our attic,” said the hunchback.

  As they walked across the hall they heard a man’s voice, shouting to a groom. It was a loud and arrogant voice. They were all straining their ears to listen.

  “Come, boy! Where’s mine host? I’m famished. And I want a room … the best room you have …”

  The innkeeper was bustling into the yard; they could hear the rise and fall of his voice as he obsequiously placated the newcomer.

  “Come along,” said the hunchback; and they went into a small room where a meal of duck and boar was laid out for them, with ale to drink. The child awakened and sleepily partook of the meal. They spoke little while they ate, and before the others had finished—as the child had fallen asleep again—the hunchback said she would go up to the attic room with him and there she would stay till morning; for the two of them must not be separated.

  “I’ll show you the way,” said Tom. “’Tis right at the top under the eaves.”

  As they came out into the hall the arrogant newcomer was leaning against the wall shouting instructions and looking with distaste at his surroundings. His eyes flickered over the hunchback and the child; he paused for a second and then gave them a look of distaste. The hunchback hastily followed Tom up the stairs and, as she did so, she heard the drawling voice: “God’s Body! This is no inn! ’Tis an ale house. This is no place for the quality. Hunchback beggars and their brats stay here. Plague take you! Why did you not tell me, man?”

  The hunchback did not look round as she followed Tom up the narrow staircase. Tom indicated a door and they went in. It was a long, low-ceilinged room; a dark room, and the thatch showed through a small unglazed window. On the floor were two piles of straw which would serve as beds. It was rough but it would do for a night.

  “Go back to your food,” said the hunchback. “I will stay here with the child. All of you join me when you have finished, but first eat your fill.”

  Tom bowed and when he had left her she laid the child on one of the heaps of straw and gently put her lips to the small forehead. Then she threw herself down beside the child. She was worn out with the day’s exertion. She laid her hand over her fast-beating heart. It should beat more peacefully now; here they would be safe until morning, and there were only a few more miles to Dover. Here they could sleep and refresh themselves, and at daybreak they would be on their journey again.

  Suddenly the door opened and a groom came in. He hesitated. “Ah … I did not know there was anyone here. I have brought more straw.”

  “I thank you.”

  “There are four of you and the little girl?”

  “Little boy,” she corrected him.

  As she spoke she had laid her hand on the child; it was as though when anyone spoke of it she had to touch it, fearing that someone might try to snatch it from her. The man came over and looked down at the sleeping child. He stared, and she remembered how the woman on the bank had noticed her finely shaped hands.

  “A little boy,” said the groom, “with the looks of a girl.”

  “He is young yet, and I am told that he resembles his mother rather than his father.”

  “He has an air,” said the groom. “He might be the child of someone of high degree.”

  He was watching the hunchback in a manner which brought the flush to her cheeks, and in that instant, as the rich blood showed beneath the dirt, she was young and comely.

  He lowered his voice. “Lady,” he said, “there are some hereabouts who would be loyal to His Majesty.”

  She did not answer; her grip tightened on the child.

  “Your hands are too fine, madam,” he said. “They betray you. You should keep them hidden.”

  “My hands? I am a lady’s maid.”

  “That would account for it, mayhap.”

  “Mayhap! It does account for it!”

  “Your hump has slipped a little, lady. If you’ll forgive my saying so, it is a bit too high. And you should bend over more.”

  The hunchback tried to speak, but she could not; her mouth was dry and she was trembling.

  “I was with the King’s army at Edgehill,” went on the groom. “I was with the little Prince Charles and his brother James. There was that about him—Charles, I mean—which made me want to serve him. Boy as he was, I’ll never forget him. Tall for his age and dark for an Englishman, and so ready to give a smile to a man that he didn’t seem like a king’s son. Just one of ourselves … and yet with a difference … He came near to capture at Edgehill … God bless him! God bless the Prince of Wales!”
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  “You’re a bold man to speak thus before a stranger.”

  “These are days for bold deeds, madam. But you may trust me. I wish you Godspeed and a safe trip across the water.”

  “Across the water?”

  “You go to Dover, madam. You will cross the water with the child and join the Queen.”

  “I have said nothing that should make you think this.”

  “They say the Queen is the cause of the King’s troubles, madam. That may be so, but the Queen is devoted to the King’s cause. Poor lady! It must be two years since she fled from England. It was a few weeks after the birth of her youngest, the little Princess Henrietta.”

  “This makes uneasy talk,” said the hunchback.

  “You may trust me, madam. And if there is anything I can do to serve you …”

  “Thank you, but I am only a poor woman who, with her husband and fellow-servants, goes to join her master’s household.”

  He bowed and went from the room; and when he had gone she was still unable to move, for a numbness had seized her limbs. On the road, passing the soldiers of the King’s enemies, she had been less frightened than now. The walls of the attic became to her like prison walls.

  When the others joined her, they found her sitting on the straw holding the child in her arms.

  She said: “I am afraid. One of the grooms came to bring straw, and I am sure he knows who we are. And I … I cannot be sure whether or not we can trust him.”

  The night was full of terrors. She shifted from side to side on her straw. The hump of linen hurt her back, but she dared not unstrap it. What if the hunchback were surprised without her hump! Had she been foolish in attempting this great adventure? What if she failed now? That virago, Queen Henrietta Maria, would never forgive her for exposing her youngest child to such dangers of the road. And yet there were times when it was necessary to take a bold action. The Queen herself had acted boldly, and because of that was at this moment in her native country where she might work for the King, her husband, instead of being—as she most certainly would have been, had she been less bold—the prisoner of the King’s enemies.

  Anne Douglas, Lady Dalkeith, had had to find some way of disguising her tall and graceful figure, and the hump had seemed as good a way as any; and to assume French nationality had seemed imperative since the little Princess could prattle and her lisping “Princess” sounded more like Pierre than any other name. If it had only been possible to make the child understand the danger she was in, how much easier would this task have been! But she was too young to realize why she must be hurried from her comfortable palace, why she must be dressed as a beggar’s child, and that she must be called Pierre. If she had been younger—or older—the journey might have been less dangerous.

  Anne Douglas had scarcely slept since she had left the Palace of Oat-lands; she was exhausted now, but even with the others at hand, she dared not sleep. The groom had made her very uneasy. He had said she could trust him, but whom could one trust in a country engaged in a great civil war?

  It would have seemed incredible a few years ago that she, Anne Villiers, wife of Robert Douglas who was the heir of the Earl of Morton, should be lying in such a place as this. But times had changed; and it occurred to her to wonder where the King slept this night or where the Prince of Wales had his lodging.

  She had made the decision suddenly.

  It was two years since the little Princess had been born. The Queen had been very weak at the time, and before she had risen from her bed news had come that Lord Essex—who was on the side of the Parliament—was marching to Exeter with the intention of besieging the city. Henrietta Maria had written to him asking for permission to leave for Bath with her child; Essex’s reply had been that if the Queen went anywhere with his consent it would be to London, where she would be called before the Parliament to answer a charge of making civil war in England.

  There had been only one course open to her—flight to France. How she had wept, that emotional woman! She had cried to Anne: “I must leave this country. If the Parliament make me their prisoner, my husband will come to my aid; he will risk all for my sake. It is better that my miserable life should be risked than that he should be in peril through me. I have written to him telling him this; and by the time he receives my letter I hope to be in France. The Queen of France is my own sister-in-law, and she will not turn me away.”

  She was all emotion; her heart was ever ready to govern her head, and this, Anne knew, was in a large measure to be blamed for the King’s disasters; for, oddly enough, although the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria had begun stormily, they had quickly understood each other, and with understanding had come passionate affection. The Queen was passionate by nature; frivolous she seemed at times, yet how singlemindedly she could cling to a cause; and the cause to which she now gave her passionate energy was that of her husband.

  “Take care of my little one, Anne,” she had said. “Guard her with your life. If ill befall her, Anne Douglas, you shall suffer a thousand times more than she does.” Those black eyes had snapped with fury as she had railed against a fate which demanded she leave her child; they softened with love for the baby and gratitude to Anne Douglas, even while she threatened her. Then, having made these threats, she had taken Anne in her arms and kissed her. “I know you will take care of my child … Protestant though you are. And if you should ever see the light, foolish woman, and come to the true religion, you must instruct my daughter as I would have her instructed. Oh, but you are a Protestant, you say! And the King will have his children brought up in the religion of their own country! And I am a poor desolate mother who must give up her newborn babe to a Protestant! A Protestant!” She had become incoherent, for she had never bothered to learn the English language properly. Anne knelt to her and swore that, apart from her religion, she would serve the Queen and obey her in all things.

  Poor sad Henrietta Maria, who had come to England as a girl of sixteen, very lovely and determined to have her own way, was now an exile, parted from her husband and children. But with God’s help, there should be one child restored to her.

  To Exeter the King had come, for he had not received his wife’s letter and believed her to be still there in childbed; he had fought his way through the Parliamentary forces to reach her. It had been Anne’s unhappy task to tell him that he was too late. Her eyes filled with tears now as she remembered him—handsome, even with the stains of battle on him, noble of countenance as he always would be, for he was a man of ideals; and if there was a weakness in that face, it but endeared him to a woman such as Anne Douglas. He was too ready to listen to the wrong advice; he was weak when he should have been strong, and obstinate when to give way would have been wise. He believed too firmly in that Divine Right of Kings which had grown out of date since the reign of Henry VIII; he lacked the common touch of Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth, who had been able to adjust her rule to meet a more modern way of life. Weak though he might have been, a ruler unfit to rule, he was a man of handsome presence and of great personal charm; and it was moving to see his devotion to his family.

  With him to Exeter had come the young Prince of Wales, a boy of fourteen then, who had none of his father’s good looks, but already more than his father’s charm. He was rather shy and sweet-tempered. It had been moving to see him take the baby in his arms and marvel at the smallness of her.

  Anne wept afresh; she wept for the handsome King who was losing his kingdom, for the Prince, who would be heir to his father’s lost throne, for the baby—the youngest of a tragic family.

  “Poor little daughter,” the King had said, “you have been born into a sorry world. You must be baptized at once.”

  “What name shall she be given, Your Majesty?”

  “Let us call her Henrietta after my wife. But she must be baptized according to the rites of the Church of England.”

  And so the ceremony had taken place in the Cathedral of Exeter on a warm July day two years ago; then the King h
ad left for Cornwall where he pursued the war with some success.

  Later, when the baby was three months old, he returned to Bedford House in the city of Exeter where she was caring for the child, but only for a brief visit, and Anne had not seen him since. The Prince came to see his little sister a year later. The child, fifteen months old, was not too young to notice the tall dark boy who made so much of her; she was old enough to crow with pleasure when she saw him, and weep bitterly when he went away. The Prince had had to leave in a hurry because once more the Roundheads were marching on Exeter. Remembering Henrietta Maria’s words, Anne had done her utmost to escape with the child to Cornwall, but her attempt to do so had been foiled. She had been surrounded by spies, and there had been nothing she could do on that occasion but shut herself and her servants up in the security of Bedford House and remain at the side of the Princess day and night.

  From her exile in France an angry Queen, knowing that her precious child was in Exeter and that the town was being besieged by her enemies, had raved with fury against fate, the Parliament and that slothful traitress, Anne Douglas.

  That was a cruel charge and Anne had suffered deeply. In vain did those about her tell her that she was foolish to attach such importance to the Queen’s reproaches. Did she not know the Queen!

  It was said of Henrietta Maria that she regarded unfortunate friends blameworthy, even as traitors were. Anne tried to understand. Henrietta Maria was beside herself with grief, wondering what was happening to her child in a besieged city where there would be little to eat, where death stalked the streets and there would be constant dangers. Henrietta Maria was like a child; when she was hurt she stamped her foot and struck out at those nearest.

  Anne had told herself she must remember the Queen’s grief and bear with her.

  Sir John Berkeley, who had held the city for the Royalists, deciding they could hold out no longer, had surrendered the city on the condition that the little Princess and certain of her household should be allowed to leave Exeter; so they went, by the Parliament’s order, to the Palace of Oat-lands, and there they had been living for the last months at Anne’s expense as the Parliament refused to grant money for the Princess’s upkeep.