The King's Favorite

by Susan Holloway Scott

  “Oh, what your sister-saint would-ez say!” I wailed in my best French manner toward the ceiling, my napkin-handkerchief pressed to the corner of my eye to catch my tears. “Oh, mon Dieu’s blood, what she would-ez do!”

  “Minette, Minette, Minette!” cried Buckingham, sobbing along with me. “Why don’t you gaze down from among the other saints in heaven, and tell this cursed teasing minx to grant me what I want?”

  I shook my head and wept all the harder, burying my face in my handkerchief to blow my nose with a goose’s trumpeting inelegance.

  “What’s your price, mademoiselle?” begged Buckingham. On his knees, he made his way clumsily toward me, holding a basket heaped with paste jewels and beads before me. “A carriage, jewels, a title, even my Protestant soul for Louis and the Pope. Tell me, mademoiselle, and it shall be yours, for I must be the first to claim your virgin quim for England.”

  He dumped the jewels in a tangled pile in my lap. I dropped my handkerchief to the floor, forgetting it in my greedy delight, and avariciously began to paw through the jewels. When Buckingham dared to walk his fingers over my knee, I remembered my pose, dropped the jewels, and began to sob again.

  Our audience roared with amusement, shouting the lewdest of suggestions and advice, as can well be imagined.

  “Me no bad woman!” I cried, even as I began stuffing the jewels down the front of my gown, between my breasts. “Me no whore!”

  “But Louis swore to me you were,” Buckingham exclaimed, still crawling about on his knees and weeping most pitifully, though now from thwarted lust. “He promised me upon his most Catholic soul and a whole pack of bloody relics that you’d do whatever I wanted, once we’d settled the fair market price.”

  “Non, non, non!” I wailed. “I would sooner cut-tez me throat before be your whore!”

  With my handkerchief on the floor, I reached down and pulled up the hem of my skirt to wipe my eyes, drumming the high heels of my yellow silk shoes on the floor and flailing my petticoats around my legs. It was so pretty a piece of business, and so perfectly captured Louise’s petulance, that Buckingham himself forgot he was playing the king and bent double with laughter, resting his cheek on my knee to support himself.

  But I never forgot my part, even as I gloried in the waves of uproarious laughter that flowed toward me. That laughter, that pleasure that I could give to others, returned to me tenfold. Was there any sweeter balm for my wounded heart and pride? Was there any better way to soothe the indignity I must suffer for the sin of being born no more than lowly Nelly Gwyn, and make myself forget that all the love I shared with the king would never be enough to make me a true lady?

  There was not, there was not; and the joy of it floated around me all through the night as I slept, and was with me still when I was awakened the next morning by Poll shaking my shoulder like a dog worrying a mutton bone.

  “Wake, ma’am, you must wake at once,” she exclaimed frantically. “His Majesty’s carriage is in the street below, before your door!”

  I struggled to rouse myself, my eyes heavy and my tongue thick from the excesses of last night. “Now, Poll? Th’ king’s here now?”

  “Oh yes, ma’am, yes, he’ll be at the door at any—”

  But he was here already, throwing open the door to my bedchamber as only a gentleman of his height and strength could do—especially a tall, strong gentleman full of displeasure.

  “Poll,” he said curtly. “Leave us.”

  My poor girl made a quivering curtsey and backed from the room, closing the door after her. Given the king’s humor, I guessed a curtsey might not be a bad way to begin for me, either. As swiftly as I could, I pushed my tangled hair from my face and began to slide from the bed.

  But Charles wasn’t going to wait for such niceties. Instead he crossed the room with quick, angry strides and yanked the window curtains open, flooding my bedchamber with bright, sunny light.

  “ ’Od’s blood, sir,” I exclaimed, squinting and turning my face away from the unexpected brightness. “That’s precious cruel.”

  He didn’t choose to reply, coming instead to stand beside the bed and gaze at me, his eyes hooded and his mouth turned down beneath the arc of his mustache. It was not an expression I favored, nor was my position at that moment an enjoyable one. Dressed in his usual dark, rich clothes, he seemed to loom over me in somber judgment, an effect I was certain he’d intended. I’d no doubt of how I’d drawn his ire, either. I could have drunk an entire tun of wine myself and still remembered the merry mockery that Buckingham and I had contrived between us.

  “I hear you offered a pretty entertainment last night,” he said. “The town is speaking of nothing else, and it’s not even noon.”

  “Who, sir?” I demanded, my heart racing. “Who told you?”

  “Why, I believe it could have been any one of a score.” He rested one arm against the far post of my bed, tapping his fingers lightly on the bulbous carving. “Surely you cannot expect either complicity or silence from the sorry pack of rogues we call our friends.”

  “They laughed, sir,” I said, blunt in the truth. “All of them.”

  He smiled, but not with any particular amusement. “I’ve a reason for everything I do, sweet. Surely you must know that of me by now. I leave nothing to chance or impulse.”

  I lowered my chin a fraction. “Including Louise? ”

  “It is useful to me,” he said with careful indifference, “and to England, to keep such a winsome gift from my cousin.”

  I had to look away from him, down to my fingers and the bed-sheet pinched tight between them. I knew that there was much more behind those simple words, that their very simplicity was deceptive. I reminded myself once again (oh, how many times must I do such reminding!) that my Charles was no ordinary man, but a king, and that with kings, nothing was ever easy.

  I tried to think of the complicated affairs that always seemed to attach themselves to this king like cockle burs to woolen stockings: how he’d taken money from Louis to free himself from begging to Parliament; his careful balance of the Dutch with one treaty and the French with another, while the ambassadors from both countries scrambled endlessly to undermine the other; his insistence on religious tolerance when both Papists and Protestants around him alike fought for his soul.

  I tried, aye, I tried, yet my stubborn head kept returning instead to Louise’s petulant face, her plump lips parted with fawning adoration as she gazed up at Charles, and I wondered sadly, sorrowfully, how that could be of any use to England.

  “Look at me, Nelly.”

  Steadfastly I did not. How could I, when I didn’t dare trust myself to look up and let him see what must surely be in my eyes?

  “Nelly.” He sat on the bed beside me, the rope springs creaking beneath him. Gently he turned my face toward his, so I’d no choice but to meet his gaze.

  “I’d expect as much from Buckingham,” he said, “for he cannot help himself. Or from that charming knave Rochester. But not you, Nelly. Not from you.”

  His disappointment hurt far more than if he’d struck me outright with his hand.

  “Maybe,” I began, “maybe I couldn’t help myself, either.”

  “Is that it?” he asked, surprised.

  “Maybe I’ve never been able to do otherwise, sir,” I bravely confessed. “Maybe that’s only me, and I’ll not be able to change, no matter how much I should.”

  “Oh, Nelly,” he said, more tenderly than I’d any right to expect. “Who said you must change? ”

  “I make people laugh, sir,” I said, my voice softening to match his. “I make you laugh. That’s my trade. It’s who I am. And if I am to stop—oh, I don’t believe I’d survive, sir. You could put me in the Tower, and I’d pull long faces and dance a jig to make my gaolers laugh.”

  “You would, too.” He sighed and smiled at me with such kind indulgence that I could have wept from it. “Nor would I ever wish you otherwise.”

  “No?” Full of fresh hope, I raised my gaze to m
eet his, and dared a wobbling smile.

  “No.” He ran his fingers lightly along my jaw. “Make them laugh, sweet. Just don’t make them laugh at me.”

  “Aye, sir,” I said. “I will.”

  Now, if I’d been born a wiser woman, I would have stopped there. I would have kissed him, and accepted that as the forgiveness I’d likely not deserved.

  But because I was who I was, I smiled and tipped my head to one side so my curls fell across my dimpled cheek, a beguiling trick he never could resist.

  “Tell me, sir,” I said, teasing. “Might I still make you laugh at yourself?”

  “You impudent little baggage,” he said, drawing me close. “No wonder you’re so dear to me.”

  And finally, he laughed.

  “Here, I’ll give you a kiss for luck, lamb.” James Nokes, my male counterpart among the comedians in the King’s Company, daintily lifted the brim of my ridiculous hat to kiss me on the cheek, making such a jest of it that everyone else backstage laughed, only to be crossly shushed by the prompter. I laid a coy finger across my lips to signify silence, but popped my eyes and aped such surprise when his lips touched my painted cheek that the smothered laughter began all over again. I scarce could wait to be back on the stage, and as soon as the opening music was done, I’d be there, all by myself, to deliver the prologue to Dryden’s new play.

  Eagerly I hopped from one leg to the other and took deep breaths to steady my nervousness, like a runner ready to take charge of the race. The play itself—The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards—was a tragic history of the sort that Dryden loved to write, and audiences loved to see, full of noble keening and bloodshed. Though I played the Queen of the Moors, I didn’t even have the best part, which belonged to the two actresses (my old companion Beck Marshall as Lyndaraxa, and Elizabeth Boutell, one of Lord Rochester’s past mistresses, as Benzayda) who specialized in tragic roles.

  But Dryden had contrived this prologue just for me, a rare bit of foolishness that had nothing whatsoever to do with the rest. A prologue’s entire reason for being was to coax the critics and the audience into a jolly, agreeable mood for what followed, like a sweet lemon ice prepares the tongue and belly for the rest of a weighty supper, and this one was the lightest and sweetest imaginable.

  To this pleasing end, I was dressed in a version of the same costume that James Nokes had worn in The Cautious Coxcomb, the play that had so entertained the king, his doomed sister Madame, and the rest of the party at Dover. With a huge cartwheel hat and wide waist belt over a short, flounced doublet, James had brilliantly mocked the fashions of the French gentlemen and diplomats.

  Now I’d taken his costume even further, crowned by a hat with such a monstrous brim it threatened to overwhelm me, much like some great mushroom cap swollen after a damp spring rain. Beneath it I wore a curling wig tied into a dozen beribboned lovelocks, full, short silk breeches, and black velvet patches daubed over my face. On my small self, the French fashions looked even more foolish, more preposterous—which was, of course, the entire point.

  But for me, the prologue, and my costume with it, was like a sputtering firecracker in my hand: either poised to make a most brilliant show or to explode in my very face to mark my demise. I was confident that the audience would laugh, laugh as it hadn’t since I’d left the stage earlier that year. But would Charles laugh as well, sitting there in the royal box with the queen on one side and his brother on the other? Would seeing me dressed like Nokes remind him too painfully of his sister, or would it recall only happier times? Would he applaud my mockery of the French styles of dress and farce, and cheer the honest English tastes that I represented instead? Would he embrace the amusement of my delivery and my jig, or would he take the side of Louise, sitting smugly somewhere among the other maids of honor, and watch, grim-faced and sober with royal disapproval?

  “On your way, Nelly,” James whispered, applying a friendly swat of encouragement to my silk-covered bum. “There’s your cue.”

  My cue; ah, are there any sweeter words to an actress? I raised my face, set my hands upon my hips, and pranced out onto the stage, the great hat flapping over my head. The laughter and applause began before the whole house had even spied me, waves and waves of boisterous amusement so loud that I had to stand a full fifteen minutes in the center of the stage before I’d quiet enough to begin to speak my piece. True, I coaxed them onward by making a show of peeking out from beneath the hat, feigning great surprise to find them on the other side, and then, once sure of their favor, posing and preening like the most foppish French gentlemen, taking the daintiest pinch of snuff from the back of my wrist only to have it knocked away by the outsized brim of my hat. And when I finally began to speak, the laughter started all over again, to be muffled only by giddy anticipation for my next words.

  This jest was first of t’other house’s making,

  And, five times tried, has never failed of taking;

  For ’twere a shame a poet should be killed

  Under the shelter of so broad a shield.

  This is that hat, whose very sight did win ye

  To laugh and clap as though the devil were in ye.

  As then, for Nokes, so now I hope you’ll be,

  So dull, to laugh, once more, for love of me.

  “I’ll write a play,” says one poet, “for I have got

  A broad-brimmed hat, and waist-belt towards a plot.”

  Says t’other, “I have one more large than that.”

  Thus they out-write each other with a hat!

  The brims still grew with every play they writ;

  And grew so large, they covered all the wit.

  Hat was the play; ’twas language, wit, and tale;

  Like them that find meat, drink, and cloth in ale.

  What dullness do these mongrel wits confess,

  When all their hope is acting of a dress!

  Thus we two, the best comedians of the age

  Must be worn out, with being blocks upon the stage:

  Like a young girl, who better things has known,

  Beneath their poet’s impotence they groan. . . .

  Henceforth, let poets ere allowed to write,

  Be searched, like duellists, before they fight,

  For wheel-broad hats, dull humour, all that chaff,

  Which makes you mourn, and makes the vulgar laugh.

  For these, in plays, are as unlawful arms,

  As, in a combat, are coats of mail and charms.

  It seemed as if I felt the laughter almost before I heard it, the rising swell of approval and appreciation washing over me as I took my Frenchman’s bow. But as I rose, I’d a mind for only one opinion in that entire full house: my Charles, there before me in the royal box. I sought him and found him, laughing so hard that he’d leaned upon the rail for support. I’d done it once again: I’d pleased him and I’d made him laugh. Across the crowd, our gazes met, and for that instant it was as if none others existed in all the world save the two of us.

  Filled with relief and joy, I could now unashamedly bask in my success, beaming and doting and blowing kisses on my fingertips to my favorite gallants in the pit. But my sweetest kisses, my warmest smiles, and all of my love were reserved as always for my king.

  All that Christmas season, Charles was in fine, jolly spirits, which meant the rest of us in his court were as well. Why shouldn’t we? In the last days before Christmas, the delicate negotiations with France that had begun before Madame’s death concluded with the signing of a new treaty cementing an alliance between France and England for a new war against the Dutch. Charles was to supply fifty ships and six thousand soldiers to this cause, while Louis would contribute thirty ships and whatever other soldiers were wanting.

  The timing of this war was unspecified, which struck me as a good thing, leaving open as it did the possibility that it might indeed never come to pass. I’d not forgotten the grief of the last disastrous war, and I wondered why God had fashioned men (and kings, too, being men)
in such a bellicose mold that they’d only remember the glory to be had from war, and none of the ruin or death—which musings, of course, I did keep to myself.

  For Charles, who always loved his navy above all else, the best part of this alliance was that English admirals and ministers would direct the war at sea. Though the precise amount of French gold that would come to England was not known beyond the ministers who signed the paper, rumor declared it to be a great sum indeed, many millions of French livres that were Charles’s to do with how he pleased, without the interference of Parliament. Because Charles himself told me, and proudly, too, I knew for a fact that most of this gold went straight to the building of those ships for war, as fine a Twelfth Night gift as Charles could ever wish. Everyone knew of this gold, which was of a great relief to me. I’d come to realize that I’d no real taste for the secrecy of diplomacy, or the constant fear of revelation or betrayal that came with it.

  Much of the detail of this new treaty I heard from Lord Buckingham, too, who’d led the group of English lords (a self-satisfied lot, if ever there was one, this Cabal—lords Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale—though I’d needed Rochester to explain the pretty conceit of their alphabetically designed name) signing the treaty. Buckingham’s vanity, a most prodigious thing, even among peers, had been stroked and petted to a fine glow by Louis. He claimed he’d been treated as well as a prince of royal blood at the French court, and showered with as many honors.

  I was not alone in suspecting that Louis had chosen the most malleable of the lords to flatter. Though Buckingham was once again in tenuous favor with Charles, he was still much at odds with the rest of the court over his bastard son by Lady Shrewsbury. It was not the babe’s birth that summer that had been so scandalous, for as I knew myself, there was precious little sting to bastardy in that court. No, what had caused such a furor of righteousness was the duke and the dowager countess bringing their ill-gotten son into Westminster Abbey for baptism as if he’d a rightful place among the peers and bishops there. Of course Louis heard of this (the scandal was so great, it was likely being discussed as far away as the moon, let alone Paris), and used it to his advantage. He’d generously acknowledged His Grace’s attachment to Lady Shrewsbury with a pension of ten thousand gold livres a year, just for her, and Buckingham had crowed as if he’d been the one to hatch the gilded egg himself. The rest of us, including the king, had merely sighed and thought of how accurately Louis had chosen his gullible pawn.