A Question of Loyalties

by Josephine Bell

  ‘That was our fault; she was overcharged,’ Sarah said as they left the howling Henrietta in the arms of her nurse.

  ‘She will have worse mishaps when they take away the silly chair,’ John answered. ‘And then learn to walk twice as fast.’

  ‘Heartless one!’ Sarah answered. ‘Would you train her, poor mite, as you do your soldiers?’

  He felt inclined to say ‘Less hardly than you do your servants,’ but refrained, for this was no day for quarrelling, even in jest.

  Much more important, he knew, was to find a new home suitable for his upward surge of fortune, his new social I standing. And here Sarah was able at last to contribute something material in addition to her already priceless moral and spiritual support. There was a Jennings property not far from St. Albans that had for some time lain unoccupied. It was made up of a pleasant smallish house standing in open grounds amid the rolling hills and farmland they both knew and liked. It was conveniently near to London; though neglected for several years the house was in sound condition and needed little in the way of renovation, nothing in repair.

  John had sufficient private funds from all his past careful saving and from those presents, considered by many to be nefarious immoral earnings, he had preserved from his youth with the help of Lord Halifax. Into Holywell House, therefore, the Churchills moved and stayed happily for many years – for at least the next three years in a peace and security they had never before enjoyed.

  Within a year Henrietta was joined by a little sister, named Anne after the princess whose friendship had not faded with her marriage, but only grew, on the royal side, more and more ardent. Even embarrassingly so, as the poor young woman’s yearly striving for an heir produced a lengthening string of miscarriages, stillbirths or infant deaths.

  Sarah was attached to the Princess Anne’s household on the latter’s return to England, where she settled with her husband, keeping a small personal Court that was not much more than a modest collection of friends and servants. Here Sarah, as the designated Woman of the Bedchamber, performed her duties at intervals when called upon to do so. The house they lived in was called ‘The Cockpit’ and formed part of the royal buildings near Whitehall Palace.

  The country in general was at peace. At last Charles had triumphed over his enemies, by dint of patience, quiet cunning, profound political skill, a certain amount of dishonest manipulation, graft and lying, and superb effrontery. His throne was secure, his brother was tolerated in the capital in spite of his blind tectlessness in the exercise of his alien religion.

  The conspirators in the Rye House plot were tracked down and eliminated with a ruthlessness that formed a kind of just revenge for the five year atrocities of the Popish Plot, now at an end. The Lord Churchill’s three prisoners had not survived, for they were hanged at Tyburn; but they had given enough names, in an effort to save themselves, to guide the exposure of most of the main body, at least of the principals. Some of the nobles involved fled abroad, to come back later greatly daring, in the train of the Duke of Monmouth. Others, more prudent, stayed away altogether, or later joined William of Orange. But many died, still declaring their loyalty to the Protestant faith, which they believed was put in jeopardy by the House of Stuart. The Earl of Essex, a prime conspirator, convicted and condemned, committed suicide in the Tower to avoid the axe.

  Titus Oates was now utterly discredited. A court of law found him guilty of fraud and condemned him to a session in the pillory. His still faithful followers among the common folk tore down the pillory and freed him, but the mob was driven off by the militia and order and the punishment restored. Later, convicted of perjury, Oates suffered a sterner sentence. On two successive days he was whipped through the City at the cart’s tail, an ordeal that many criminals would not have survived. But he lived and recovered, though his pension, his false robes, his false degrees, were all taken away. He had always lived by fraud; he continued, though miserably diminished, to do so into old age.

  But the King was safe, still a pensioner of France, still head of a brilliant Court, still a great patron of the arts and the rapidly expanding sciences, still ruler of a country at peace with the world outside, and of growing trade with colonies, mostly in the west. For nearly three years Charles lived in peace and security.

  And then, quite suddenly, he was dead. Of an apoplexy, between dawn and sunset of the next day.

  The news spread with speed. The veil of peace that had covered the country cracked and shrivelled. England was again grievously devided. Upon one side, though at first in a minority, was a hated Catholic, an untrustworthy Stuart, raised to the throne. Upon the other a true successor, seemingly of firm patriotic intention gave his loyal supporters a new promise to reward their attachment. The old issue at once revived, seizing upon men’s minds and hearts, though at first it was hidden behind a screen of quite unexpected public rejoicing.

  Old Sir Winston Churchill who had joined the shortlived last parliament of Charles’s reign as member for Lyme Regis, travelled to London to swear allegiance to the new king. He went to Holywell House to see his son.

  ‘Now we can establish in strength this new party of loyalists they call Tories. The Whigs will be utterly overthrown. With the support of the trained army James will reign as the monarch his father was until betrayed. And you, my son, will lead that army.’

  John looked at his father with love and pity. The old man lived again in the days of the Civil Wars. It was impossible to persuade him that they were over.

  ‘I am indeed colonel of the King’s Own Dragoons,’ he said, smiling gently. ‘But I am under the overall command of my Lord Feversham, appointed by his new Majesty.’

  ‘Feversham?’ Sir Winston was astonished. ‘But – but he is a Frenchman!’

  ‘Even so,’ Lord Churchill was no longer smiling. His face was grim. ‘But naturalised and Papist and very much in favour, God preserve us!’

  The old man soon after that returned to Mintern. He still did not fully grasp the change in the pattern of power, but he trusted his son. He went back to his books and his heraldry and the often querulous remarks of his ageing wife, who secretly resented being now lower in the social scale than her daughter-in-law, Lady Churchill of Aymouth.

  The pattern of power was certainly again changing fast, as old passions revived, stoked and puffed up by the first unfortunate, prevocative moves of the Catholic King.

  James rapidly proved that he had forgotten nothing, forgiven nothing, resented more than ever, the slights and embarrassments of the last five years. Against all probability, all reason, all Christian humanity, he still desired to force England to return to the Catholic faith. Where Charles had been secret, he was blatant. Where toleration was ordered he laid down a system of gross intolerance. Catholics returned to the posts from which they had been driven. Priests were given safety. Any attacks of whatever kind upon Catholics were condemned and punished severely.

  It was useless for James’s chief councillors to protest. The Treasury was in the hands of those men who had been his most intimate advisers when Duke of York, Laurence Hyde, now Lord Rochester, his elder brother, the second Earl of Clarendon, Lord Sunderland and Godolphin, now first earl of that name and made Chamberlain to the Queen. They had found James impossible to restrain during the exile in Scotland. As King the obstinacy, the bigoted religiosity, increased to the point of madness.

  ‘His Majesty is determined to ruin himself,’ Sidney complained. ‘Where can we find him even a pittance to live upon? True he hath expelled the Duchess of Portsmouth. He takes back those pensions and emoluments granted to Charles’s ladies. But they have all feathered their nests most skilfully. They retire to comfortable lives.’

  ‘Poor Danby!’ Lord Churchill said, ‘Freed but a year ago. His monetary skill should be available, I suppose?’

  ‘At this present time we dare suggest nothing that recalls the late reign. It would be dangerous.’

  ‘We wait, then, upon events?’

  They looke
d at one another with meaning.

  ‘That is so, John. Do you think they can be long delayed?’

  They were not. Almost at once Lord Churchill was ordered to Paris upon one last mission to Louis XIV. It was a hopeless task he had been given and he knew it before he reached the French Court. But to his great relief his orders were revoked almost as soon as he arrived, for Louis had, immediately upon hearing that his Catholic cousin had succeeded his brother and was accepted without trouble of any kind, sent his congratulations and a useful, but not excessive gift. Not by any means an instalment of the size of Charles’s regular subsidies, but not a mean gift all the same.

  Lord Churchill was bidden to express the King’s thanks for the good wishes and the gift. He was recalled home, his mission a dismal failure. Nevertheless at the coronation of James II he was given a barony in the English peerage; he became Lord Churchill of Sandridge.

  Meanwhile the other rulers in Europe took note of the new King, but with indifference. For too long England had been of little account in their struggles with either Turkey or one another. They were not concerned.

  Except for William of Orange. He had tolerated the presence of the Duke of Monmouth at the Hague, for the man had charm and wit and a most beautiful mistress. Also, there were in his entourage some embittered English and Scottish exiles who could perhaps be useful to him in the future. For was not his wife, the Princess Mary, now undisputed heir to the English crown? At least heir presumptive? The new Queen was still young, but her children had not survived. Only the Duke of Monmouth presented a problem. Illegitimate, but popular. An obvious Pretender. Prince William directed his English Ambassador to inform the Duke that he must remove himself and his followers from Holland.

  This move, noted in England, aroused a certain amount of anxiety. Even James himself was inclined to take it seriously.

  Our son-in-law of Orange hath acted with propriety and good sense,’ King James said to Churchill. ‘Do you not agree, my lord?’

  ‘I do, your Majesty,’ John answered. He had indeed given William’s gesture its full meaning in his own mind. The Prince, by standing aside altogether at this time, could only gain from anything that might come of it. If Monmouth stayed in Brussels, in exile, the throne of England would not be affected in any way. If Monmouth tried to take it by force, he would fail and fail miserably. For was not the new Lord Churchill at the head of the King’s army, or at least its true effective force, and well able to destroy any challenge Monmouth could mount?

  The Duke of Monmouth may well have agreed with William at first. He took his banishment from Holland in good part. Brussels was as familiar to him as the Hague and he had his friends about him, with more arriving every week as the new King’s ill-judged behaviour drove them into active rebellion.

  From English agents in Brussels report followed report of increasing visits from English friends to the Duke; some short, with the messengers returning to the waiting ships at the ports and their instant departure. Others stayed, increasing the number who began to form themselves into committees and after that into companies for actual physical training.

  But there was little money to buy arms or service of any kind. The Duke’s supporters were very full of good wishes. They even began to call him ‘King Monmouth’, but when they were approached for real material aid they often vanished overnight, to be heard of again in Paris, perhaps, or perhaps not at all until the end of the reign. Nevertheless the Duke continued to make plans and engage supporters to carry them out.

  James took all the proper steps to guard the kingdom from an attempted invasion. The royal army was already on its way back from Tangier, for the King had decided to put an end to that unprofitable colony, the dowager Queen’s dowry. Other English troops abroad had engagements in the Netherlands. Again Prince William was quite ready, most dutifully prepared, to release them and send them home. Scotland could not afford to go short, James decided.

  ‘The traitor Argyll will make trouble in the north if Monmouth moves across the Channel,’ James stated to his army council. ‘We must have force, not over-advertised, but sufficient to cut him off his Highland savages and take him for our justice, long delayed.’

  He spoke without suggesting any need for discussion, so there was none, only orders given and promptly obeyed.

  In all this Lord Churchill was given little part, since Feversham’s position as Commander-in-Chief was confirmed from the first meeting of the army officers. But Churchill’s Dragoons were detailed to prepare for the initial movements of defence, whenever danger should threaten.

  ‘I have the work to do,’ John explained to Sarah. ‘Feversham will take the honours.’

  Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis. He had avoided the English Navy ships off Dover, less by good seamanship than because the weather was at its most atrocious. For over a week his vessels had been driven back and forth in westerly gales until at last, still seeking a friendly port, he had sailed into the doubtful safety of Lyme Bay. Not on the Devon coast, where he would have found real protection, but in Dorset, all too close to the greatest danger of the English Channel, Portland Bill. His little fleet came to rest at Lyme Regis and disembarked shaken, weary, but still determined in their purpose.

  The town had been parliamentarian and Puritan in Charles I’s time and was so still. Or rather most of its citizens declared at once for Monmouth, though the Mayor remained loyal to the recently crowned King James. He saw the ships in the offing and immediately understood that this meant invasion. So he got off messengers to his member of Parliament in Westminster, who was none other than old Sir Winston Churchill. Also to the King’s Governor at Bristol. Thereafter he bowed to the incoming storm, neither aiding or resisting. In common with many of the landowners and well-to-do farmers in the neighbourhood, who had suffered persecution and sequestration under Cromwell, he had learned the art of self-preservation in his impressionable youth and had not forgotten it. But many others, the smaller men, the townsfolk, the peasants, small farmers, home craftsmen and so forth, joined the Duke’s standard with instant, touching enthusiasm.

  Their young leader was not well prepared for this instant support. In fact his willingness to undertake such an expedition showed only too clearly how little he knew about the kind of organisation he really needed. His companions were mostly untrained enthusiasts; only a few had real military knowledge. They had all, including Monmouth, imagined a population of native-born militia springing with the necessary arms to their immediate aid. They were totally wrong: there were no arms, except a few fowling pieces and such like, pikes, scythes, sticks and staves. After the first moves there was no mutiny in significant numbers; when the militia did appear the overall majority obeyed the King’s officers, not the Duke’s. Though a few companies took themselves and their weapons to Monmouth’s camp, which encouraged him to go forward.

  In a few days’ time, therefore, the slow rebellion grew until quite a formidable army gathered at Lyme and, sweeping all before it, gathering followers daily, marched across the peninsula towards Bridgwater on the Bristol Channel, arriving at Taunton with about three thousand men and four guns delivered by rebel militia.

  Meanwhile Churchill had been ordered to Salisbury with some of his Dragoons and some Life Guards. He had been given the rank of Brigadier-General, but as he expected, the Frenchman Feversham had been again confirmed as Commander-in-Chief. All the same, his father’s news from Lyme led Churchill to make his main objects an instant pursuit and the setting up of a barrier to the rebel’s further advance. He moved his small force rapidly to Bridport, then on by Axminster to Chard, where he learned that Monmouth had been proclaimed ‘King’ and was gaining recruits and rebel militia in great numbers. He was even invited by the Duke to join his ‘old comrades’. He sent the messenger away without an answer and wrote a dispatch to the King explaining the dangerous situation that existed and the need for trained army regiments.

  Monmouth had now reached Bridgwater and had eight thousand troops unde
r his command, still without adequate arms and guns, few horses and those untrained as cavalry. It was his lack of this arm that made him so vulnerable to Churchill’s constant, highly skilled skirmishing attacks on the rear and sides of his columns, cutting off stragglers, diverting bodies of men, who were understandably lost in country they did not know, into ambushes where they could be attacked and destroyed, dispersed or captured.

  The invader was fatally delayed, for when his continued march to Bristol brought him within a few miles of that city, he was already too late. He had been a fortnight in the country. It was absolutely necessary to secure at least one important city at once and he had not been able to do so. Feversham was at Bristol before him.

  Churchill joined his Commander-in-Chief at Bath, where he found his youngest brother Charles in charge of artillery he had brought up from Portsmouth. This young brother, now in his twenties, had developed the family martial ability. John was delighted to see him.

  ‘I have been riding through all our early haunts,’ he said, as they refreshed themselves with long draughts of the local cider. Each had been in the saddle for the most part of ten days and the season being late June and a fine one at that, were very thirsty.

  ‘Of which I have no recollection,’ Charles answered.

  ‘I suppose not. Nor of our local friends, our servants, your nurse?’

  Charles laughed. ‘Only old Trubb and that when we moved to Wootton Glanville before my father’s appointment in Ireland.’

  ‘So. It is an age since that time. Trubb. He did move to Mintern, I think.’

  ‘Indeed. I saw him there once. But he died soon after. He took it very sore that we left Wootton and for a more modest establishment.