‘That is wonderful indeed,’ said old Lady Drake. ‘Nevertheless, stone-built Ashe burned when those wicked men attacked me, calling themselves loyal and daring to call me traitor.’
‘You have had an ample revenge, my lady,’ her grandson told her. ‘I remember well that sad pile of ruins, grassed over like any ancient castle of the old knights in armour. Now all is well preserved, most splendid to see on the approach.’
It was indeed. John wished his friend Hugh had stayed to meet the old lady before riding on to Musbery to find his family at the rectory there.
For the old wing where the Churchills had lived was now the main part of the house, with new, much smaller wings on either side. All the ruins had been dug out and removed, though much of the stone had been used in the restoration and rebuilding. Formal gardens had been laid out and cultivated with paths and topiary and smooth lawns. A walled garden, using the stone sides of the old stable yard, was laid out with fruit trees and beds of all the culinary herbs, neatly marked by small box borders. The large windows of the house were mullioned, the chimneys tall and twisted in the earlier Jacobean style.
John’s admiration was deep and genuine, but he could not help feeling some nostalgic pangs as he tried to identify the scenes of his earliest martial efforts. The task was beyond him, the changes and improvements far too great.
‘I walked my grandmother’s grounds for a whole hour last evening,’ he told Hugh when he visited the rectory next day. ‘But I could not find even a trace of that old underground passage we used so successfully.’
‘It was filled in,’ Hugh told him, ‘after they had taken the walls for the new kitchens and dairy. But you must ask my father. He watched the work being done.’
John not only listened to the Reverend Offord’s very long lecture on the subject, but he searched Musbery for news of those other companions of his childhood with whom he had played and fought in the years before the Restoration. Hugh Offord had always been his second in command, but there was a cousin of some sort, Matthew Stone, and a lad about the house, strong but slow in the mind, Tom Smith. He was surprised to find the names coming back to him so readily and said so to Hugh.
‘Not so very surprising,’ his friend suggested. ‘They all stayed on at Ashe for the years my Lady Drake was in London and until she gained her compensation and began to re-build. You must have heard her speak of them and their fidelity.’
‘I suppose so. Hard to recollect now. We thought forward not backward in the school years. I may have heard their names, I may not. Now that I am of an age to think back in time, they have come to me without effort and I am astonished.’
‘What of the enemy, as we called them? Can you remember their names, too?’
John laughed. ‘You win. I have not the faintest recollection.’
‘Not even of Will Hayden, Farmer Hayden’s boy, who now runs that prosperous farm, since the old man was gored by his bull last summer and is lame since.’
‘Only lame?’
‘By good chance the bull caught him in the upper thigh and threw him over the hedge and out of the field or it would have killed him.’
‘I must go see them both,’ John said very seriously. ‘Will can tell me how the people feel in these parts.’
Hugh nodded, though he did not fully understand his friend’s meaning. However it was time to go in to the rectory dinner, where Hugh’s mother and two unmarried sisters presented a meal of solid worth, local beef and vegetables and fruit and fresh trout from a stream nearby that flowed into the river Axe.
Hugh had to go on to Bristol the next day to rejoin his regiment which formed the garrisons of all the principal strong points across the western peninsula of Devon and Cornwall. John stayed on for a few days at Ashe, mainly in order to seek out and question those early friends of his. For he realised, he could not fail to realise, that the climate of opinion here, so far away from Westminster, was as unlike that of Whitehall as the burning suns and deserts of Tangier were to a Scottish winter.
Scottish in the sense of being Presbyterian by religion, or at least that way inclined. Though the rector was a conventional Anglican of the Church of England and used the prescribed ritual in his church, which everyone was by law obliged to attend, many of the local community leaned towards a more Puritan approach to worship, particularly the farmers and small traders, the weavers, cloth-makers and other skilled craftsmen.
On one subject, however, they were all firmly agreed. They hated Popery and the Papists with a deep and bitter hatred. Their memory of the old Queen Mary with her Spanish Catholic husband and the later attack by the Spanish Armada, had never faded from their songs and sayings. The evil Spanish, with their fires and their galleys, lived again in the recent confusion of foreign wars afflicting the country. Would they never be rid of Papists? Was it true that his Highness, the Duke of York, had followed his late Duchess in a sinful conversion?
John found his old companions and adversaries very interested in this question. It was true, he had to agree, that he had fought with the French under the Duke of Monmouth and against the Dutch. The great French Marshal Turenne was in overall command. With the conclusion of the Dutch war the English troops had left, or were leaving France. Will Hayden pursued the subject.
‘But France is our enemy! Was it not the French that fired London?’
‘There was no proof of it,’ John answered stoutly. ‘I have never believed it. Moreover our King has had close ties with France all his life. His mother, his much-loved sister—’
‘She that earned a swift death for visiting her brother at Dover, we are told.’
‘No one knows the truth of that sudden tragedy. But I have heard his Majesty kept his grief in silence and privacy when the news came to him. He loved that youngest sister more than any other being on earth, it is said. And the visit had been merry above the ordinary of State occasions.’
‘With a great exchange of promises, backed by money,’ suggested Will. ‘We may be far from London, but we have our sources of information,’
When John left Ashe he rode to Wootton Glanville, where he found all well, the estate in capable hands, his father’s old manservant, Trubb, retired some years since, still active and alive about his small garden behind one of the large gate cottages.
‘So you still serve the Duke of York, Master John?’ he said, severely. ‘In spite of your honour’s high place in the army of his Grace of Monmouth?’
‘Is that what my father tells you?’ John asked. ‘Well, I suppose I do still call his Highness patron.’
‘Papist though he be?’ asked Trubb, with even more severity. ‘And with a new Papist wife from Italy? I wonder you be not ashamed to acknowledge it!’
‘Why? The Duke of Monmouth is my superior officer and he is no Papist.’
‘No, indeed. God bless him!’ the old man said vigorously. ‘The neighbours here would have the King acknowledge him as heir.’
‘Be careful how you speak,’ John warned. ‘In London such talk spoke so freely could be counted treason fit for the gallows.’
Trubb laughed at such a piece of nonsense, but John rode back to Whitehall in a state of confused anxiety.
And so he should be, in common with most thinking men and particularly all those in any way concerned with public affairs and events. The matter of the succession was keeping the whole country divided, for with it went the great question of the position and power of the Crown. In Parliament the Earl of Shaftesbury was attempting to bring forward a law to limit the Royal power. Charles had nicknamed him ‘Little Sincerity’ for his short stature and his ability to change his views to suit his own ambitions. He had formed the foundation of the great Whig party of reform which was to grow mightily in the future. But at this time Charles’s only recourse was to prorogue or even dissolve the House of Commons. Those spreading cries ‘No Popery!’ ‘Down with the French!’ spelled ruin unless he could counteract them. Even the Earl of Danby, formerly Sir Thomas Osborne, a highly successful
Treasurer, could not solve this problem, which was very far from being mathematical.
It was not enough that Charles dismissed his brother from the post of Lord High Admiral. That he sent him to Scotland to ease the Court and the Navy and the citizens of London of his unwelcome presence. His new Duchess, the Italian Papist, remained and though her first two babies by the Duke died in infancy, following the unhappy rule of the times and particularly of the Stuart dynasty, still she was with her husband, she was young, there would be more little Catholics brought into the world, each boy among them a threat to the Throne.
With the Duke’s going, Churchill waited unhappily for further employment. The wars abroad had died down for the moment, though they were not over, for King Louis’s appetite for conquest was by no means satisfied. In one more campaign John Churchill served under Turenne, again distinguishing himself. But now the great Marshall was dead and this, more than any political move, any religious scruple, broke John’s allegiance to France. Moreover, as he had explained to Will Hayden, he knew that Charles was being pressed to remove all Englishmen from the French armies, while at the same time that traditional English force in the service of the Prince of Orange was being encouraged, if not enlarged.
‘Now that his Grace is made Captain-General of the King’s Army and is become so favoured for his Anglican belief, I trust we shall not be ordered away to Holland,’ Churchill grumbled, as he and Godolphin rode in the King’s train to the races at Newmarket.
‘It is possible’ Sidney answered in a low voice, for the Prince of Orange was daily expected to arrive at Harwich upon a state visit to his uncle.
Seeing his friend’s gloomy looks Godolphin went on, ‘I think his real object is to discuss a possible marriage with the Princess Mary.’
John exclaimed in horror. ‘Marriage! The Princess is a mere child!’
‘A growing, healthy child. Soon to be fifteen. Not so unusual. A contract for the alliance would be a greatly soothing event throughout the realm. The Princess is still next in line after her father.’
‘She may have a brother.’
‘All things are possible. Is not the Prince Rupert also in the line of succession?’
‘God forbid!’
‘Amen to that.’
So speculations and hopes grew and sank again when the Prince of Orange went home with no announcement made of any plans he might have, leaving Churchill and many other eager young officers still unemployed and uncertain of their future.
Not that they were unoccupied. Or at least those who frequented the King’s Court, where the pursuit of pleasure never slackened, where money flowed all too freely at the tables, where plays and masques and balls continued to bring patronage to the arts and delight to the sovereign. Where Louise de Kéroualle, now Duchess of Portsmouth, reigned as chief favourite, transmitting her master’s secrets to her French lord through the latter’s ambassador. That her news was only-such as Charles considered negligible mattered little to either. He was as fond of her as his nature allowed and even had a warship built and named ‘Fubbs’ which was his pet name for her and really most appropriate.
So young Churchill’s life, though aimless for the time being, was far from dull and before long brought a particular occasion that was to set him upon a course he was never to forsake. But before this event he was taken into Sidney Godolphin’s confidence in a way that surprised him.
John had remarked upon Sidney’s preoccupation in all their recent discussions, his lack of the accustomed grasp of a situation, the wise comment on it.
Sidney said, ‘It should be no surprise to you. You of all people should recognise my symptoms and allow for them.’
John stared at him. ‘You are telling me you are in love?’
‘And why not? I am older than you, but not yet senile.’
‘Barely thirty. No, Sidney. I am only astonished you have said nothing before. I have heard nothing.’
‘Hitherto I had cause to be secret. Now I would have you know I would marry Miss Blagge. Margaret Blagge. My lovely Meg. So faithful to her poor Mistress up to the day of her Highness’s death.’
John murmured his agreement, his congratulations. Of course he recognised the name. A fellow maid of honour of Arabella’s at the beginning of her service with the Duchess of York. He had always refrained from echoing the coarser interpretations of the fair one’s marked friendship with Mr. John Evelyn. He had never listened to them, preferring to believe that this lady from goodness and piety as well as Frances Jennings from prudence and self-interest, had repelled all dishonourable advances.
‘My suit will be widely known,’ Godolphin said, with an unexpected note of pleading in his voice.
‘You will have my heartfelt support,’ his friend told him.
Perhaps this knowledge of Godolphin’s state accounted in part for John’s subsequent behaviour. The occasion of it was a state ball to which Sidney was able to find an invitation for Captain Churchill. Sidney almost at once saw Margaret Blagge standing with some of her friends. He drew John’s attention to her, whereupon the latter exclaimed, ‘I leave you then, Sidney. I have seen the beauty I rescued when she had disguised herself as an orange girl and—’
‘That old tale! Miss Frances Jennings! Yes, I see her too, with Miss Hamilton and that simpering French Count, de Grammont, they call him, a prime gossip—’
But John was gone, weaving his way through the crowd, bent upon renewing his acquaintance with the sometime maid of honour to the late Duchess of York and now in the employ of her successor, Mary Beatrice of Modena.
Miss Jennings recognised him, inwardly admiring the splendid appearance he presented, even more handsome than before in face and figure, with the assured manners and self-confidence the years of military success in the company of the great had bestowed upon him.
She accepted his bow of recognition and introduced him to her friends, the Count de Grammont, Sir George Hamilton his younger brother, Anthony Hamilton, their sister Miss Hamilton. The latter had been staying in the country and had come to London with a country couple, a Mrs. Wetenhall and her husband. The visiting lady was in a state of great excitement.
‘As you see, sir,’ Miss Jennings whispered to John. ‘Madam is expecting very shortly. I am sure she should not have graced this occasion, for she hath declared she will dance at it.’
John nodded, attempting a seriousness he did not feel. But at that moment Miss Hamilton joined them, whispering something to Miss Jennings that John did not catch. So he turned away to find yet another member of the group he had not been presented to. This was a younger version of the Frances Jennings he had just left. A younger, brighter, more beautiful, far more beautiful, more attractive
‘Allow me,’ Count de Grammont was at his elbow, sharp eyes flickering from one to the other. ‘Miss Sarah Jennings, may I present the Captain Churchill, at your service—’
‘Madam,’ John said, hiding his unexpected, total confusion in a very deep bow. ‘I am acquainted with Miss Frances, your sister, I believe. I did not realise you were with her until this moment.’
‘I am not truly with her,’ Sarah told him at once, her eyes sparkling. ‘We do both serve her Highness, the Princess Mary Beatrice, but I am maid of honour to the Princess Anne.’
John looked about him but did not see the two young daughters of the Duke of York. However his interest was not with them, but with the girl beside him. He had freed Godolphin to pursue his intended. He now felt grateful to his friend for this unlooked for opportunity. He recognised his inward excitement, his sudden joy, his swift leaping hope, for what they truly were. Love, that jaded, mis-used word. Love all embracing, body mind and spirit, no mere lust. His certainty made him draw in a quick breath, so that Miss Jennings asked, ‘Do you find my explanation strange, sir? I swear to you it is a true one.’
‘Strange? Why no, madam. I am not so ill-mannered I would dispute any explanation put forward by a lady.’
‘You protest very strongly, sir. I do assure
you. I was a child when I first came to Court. I played with the Princess Anne, a younger child than myself.’
‘Indeed you mistake me. I feared your displeasure. I would not for the world displease you.’
Taking a firm grip on himself, John bowed to her deeply and turned away. His mind and heart were so confused by Miss Jennings’s forceful personality and his immediate response to it that he hardly knew where he was until Sir George Hamilton caught him by the sleeve as he was marching forward on to the dance floor.
John laughed, apologised and stood back. Sir George said, ‘You have met my sister. I think. She that so ill-advisedly hath brought the woman Wetenhall hither. And now cannot persuade the baggage to sit down and rest.’
Miss Hamilton had come up on John’s other side. ‘I have done my best!’ she cried. ‘George will not help me. It hath all gone to Mistress Wetenhall’s head and she more than eight months gone. She swears she will not, need not rest. If you knew—’
She blushed deeply and moved away.
‘What more could I know that gives your sister such embarrassment?’ John asked.
The Count Hamilton, as he sometimes called himself, laughed loudly. ‘The country cousin herself confided in me what my sister was ashamed to tell you, a stranger,’ he said smiling. ‘She carries the child very much to one side, which makes any gown look ill-shapen. So she had a cushion strapped to the opposite side of her belly to render the whole symmetrical.’
‘While seeming to promise twins at least,’ John said, smiling in his turn.
The King and Queen came in with their attendants. John stayed where he was with the group about the Hamiltons and the Jennings sisters.
The royal pair danced, then sat in raised dignity to watch. When presently the Queen retired with her ladies, the King was joined by the Duchess of Portsmouth, who had arrived with the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Arlington. By now the formal dances had been followed by more lively measures, country dances in the round and jigs in long lines.
A Question of Loyalties Page 12
