The King's Favorite

by Susan Holloway Scott

  The young actor stepped forward and gallantly helped me hop down from the footstool. As I gave over the applause to him and retreated to join Charles, one of my footmen hurried forward to draw me aside.

  “His Lordship the Earl of Rochester is here, Mrs. Gwyn,” he whispered, “and he wishes to speak with you.”

  “Then pray show His Lordship in,” I exclaimed. “Of anyone, he needs no invitation from me.”

  The footman’s mouth puckered dolefully. “Forgive me, but His Lordship says he must see you alone, in private. I’ve put him in the green chamber.”

  “Very well.” I sighed, wondering what manner of mischief Rochester was bent upon now. I returned to Charles’s tall-backed chair, and he glanced up at me and smiled fondly, patting his knee for me to sit upon it once again.

  “Pray excuse me, sir,” I whispered, waving my hand vaguely towards the door. “A question with the servants.”

  Sympathetically Charles lifted his gaze upward, appealing to the heavens for deliverance from the unending trials of servants, then nodded to dismiss me. I curtseyed, backed away, and hurried away with the footman. I hoped Rochester had a good explanation for this secretive behavior; it was a poor hostess who was called from her guests so early in the evening, nor did Charles like to be abandoned, either.

  Yet as soon as the footman opened the door to the green chamber for me and I saw His Lordship myself, I realized his reason needed no more explanation. Though he was as always beautifully dressed, his wig extravagantly curled and combed and his linen just so, he was so pale as to be almost green, his eyes red rimmed and circled by shadow, his hands again a-trembling in the way I’d sadly come to expect, a sorry condition indeed by anyone’s measure.

  “Faith, Rochester, you look like death,” I exclaimed with concern, hurrying forward to take his shaking hand in mine in greeting and in solicitude. “What is wrong? What has happened? ”

  His attempt at a smile was faded and wan, his fingers chill in mine. “A last visit to Madame Fourcard’s, my dear. I’ve come to say good-bye to you, before I leave for Enmore, and the country.”

  That would explain much. Madame Fourcard’s was an establishment of lowest resort for gentlemen, an unmarked bathing house in Leather Lane, near Hatton Garden, that purported to treat those riddled with the pox with noxious purges and rigorous clysters. I’d heard that this cure had fair killed as many as it had saved, it was so strong a physicking, and with no guarantees of success, either. I’d long suspected that my old friend might be thus afflicted, given his habits. Truly, there were few among my acquaintance who’d never experienced a bout of Venus fever one time or another; even Charles grumbled about taking a strong dose of mercury after dallying with a particularly unclean whore. But if ever there were a lord cursed to be born under a halfpenny planet in such matters, it was my poor friend Rochester.

  “I’m sorry, my lord,” I said, and I was. “I’ll pray that for once the old witch Fourcard’s cures will work.”

  “As do I.” He reached again for the glass and the bottle that my servant had doubtless brought to him without bidding. He filled it and drank it down like a draught, and morosely filled his glass once again as if by grim duty. The pox alone hadn’t ruined his health; strong drink had done its share, too. While wine ran like the Thames itself through the lives of us at court, there were unhappily some, like the earl, for whom wine was more a poison than a pleasure. It was sad indeed to recall the beautiful, brilliant youth he’d once been, when first we’d met.

  “Once”: hah, what a cruel word, when I was only twenty-two, and His Lordship but twenty-five!

  “Come, my lord,” I said gently, taking him by the arm. “Before you go, you should bid farewell to the king and the others.”

  His smile was ghastly, full of mingled disease and bitterness. “I can’t, Nell. I’ve been banished.”

  “Banished?” I repeated, surprised rather than shocked. “From the court?”

  “From the court, by the king, for the grievous sin of failing to amuse.” He reached for the bottle again. “It has happened to me before, and likely it shall happen once or twice more.”

  “Oh, my lord, what did you do this time?”

  He shrugged, searching through his pockets. “A poem, a satire, a scrap of wit that proved too sharp. Here it is.”

  He held a crumpled sheet out to me, and impatiently I pushed it back toward him. “Read it to me, my lord.”

  “You’ll wish only the pertinent parts.” Bleary-eyed, he squinted at the page. “I was inspired again by our royal master. You’ll recognize him, I’m sure.

  There reigns, and oh! Long may he reign and thrive,

  The easiest King and best-bred man alive.

  Him no ambition moves to get renown

  Like the French fool, that wanders up and down

  Starving his people, hazarding his crown.

  Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such,

  And love he loves, for he loves fucking much.

  “Oh, my lord,” I said sadly, sorrowfully. Even I, who’d often dared too far with Charles, could see that this was more than his good nature would bear. “What would make you speak such wicked poesy to His Majesty?”

  “I didn’t, not by intention.” He tipped his head to one side, falling back on his old charm. “I was fuddled, and handed the king the wrong paper from my pocket.”

  “Then take your coats to your tailor and order your pockets stitched shut, to save yourself,” I scolded. “You know the next time you’re in the king’s company, you’ll be drunk as a herring again.”

  “Most likely,” he agreed, smiling slyly. “And most likely I’ll put the same page before him again, too.”

  “But why, my lord?” I asked, exasperated. “Why ruin yourself in his esteem like this?”

  His smile faded. “Because there’s things he needs to hear, Nell, and why not from me? God knows Arlington won’t tell him, or Clifford,” he said, naming two of Charles’s closest ministers, chosen more for their crafty willingness to agree with his every wish than for any diplomatic perspicacity or integrity. “Charles would rather smile and pretend all is well, until we find ourselves one morning saying bonjour on our way to Mass. You saw how he treated Parliament when they asked too many questions.”

  I nodded, for my concern was as genuine as Rochester’s. In March, Charles and Louis had finally declared war on the Dutch. By every count, their combined forces far exceeded those of the Dutch on land and at sea, with a swift victory all but assured. Yet still there was so much ill will and suspicion connected to this war that it remained unpopular with Parliament and the people alike.

  Soon after, Charles had taken another woeful step, and issued a Declaration of Indulgence. A longtime ambition for him, this act ended the laws against religious nonconformists and permitted them to worship as they pleased, without risk of persecution. Truly, it was an admirable notion, as Christian and tolerant as can be. By nonconformists, Charles meant any faith other than Anglicans, from Presbyterians to Jews. But to most Englishmen, it seemed the primary beneficiaries (and the ones the king most favored) were Roman Catholics.

  Thus all of Charles’s honorable intents were faulted, his motives dissected and ridiculed. More damning still was how he’d done it, employing the power of the throne to issue the act rather than offering it for passage through Parliament.

  As can be imagined, both houses were outraged. Charles in turn was outraged by their outrage, and in early April, he’d prorogued Parliament. Which is to say, he ended their session abruptly and without warning, and scattered all the members back to their homes in the country, where they’d cause him no more mischief. He might have declared war upon the Dutch, but with this single wretched move, he’d convinced too many of his people that he’d declared war on them, as well, and their will with it. Was it any wonder, then, that those close to the king, like Lord Rochester and me, worried for him?

  “Is it worth your own destruction to write such slander?” I aske
d. “Do you believe you’ll instruct him like that?”

  “For the sake of England,” he declared gallantly, “I’d write a thousand such poems.”

  “Pish,” I scoffed. “That’s rubbish. As fine as your words might be, my lord, he’ll no more listen to you than to anyone else.”

  “He listens to you, Nell,” he said. “You’re one of the few he trusts to tell him the truth.”

  I shrugged. “He’s the same as any man, and heeds a woman only when he has a cockstand.”

  “Oh, would that the royal cock could be persuaded to reason!” Rochester cried, turning droll before he lapsed once again into more of the verse that had tripped him. “Then he might listen:

  Poor Prince! Thy prick, like thy buffoons at court,

  Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.

  ’Tis sure the sauciest prick that e’er did swive,

  The proudest, premptoriest prick alive . . .

  Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,

  A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.

  “You’re fortunate the king didn’t send you to the Tower for that, my lord,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s had Buckingham arrested for less.”

  “Buckingham was sent to the Tower for dueling,” he reasoned, as if he’d never issued a challenge himsef. “No one’s been killed by my little truths.”

  “No one but your own foolish self, you empty-headed ninny.”

  “But I skewered you, too, Nell.” He made me an off-balance bow over one leg as he began to recite.

  This you’d believe, had I but time to tell ye

  The pains it costs to poor, laborious Nelly,

  Whilst she employs hands, fingers, mouth, and thighs,

  Ere she can raise the member she enjoys.

  I sighed, my hands at my waist. “That’s wicked cruel, my lord. Not to me, for I’ve borne far worse, but to the king.”

  “Then he’s returned the favor by packing me off to my lady wife in Somerset, hasn’t he?” Pointedly he turned away from me to his own reflection in the glass over the fireplace, setting his hat on his head and adjusting the brim to an artful angle over one eye. “But my petty exiles in the wilderness seldom last too long. He soon misses me, and forgets my sins. I expect he’ll forgive me in time for the fall races at Newmarket.”

  “He will, my lord,” I said, “if you keep your satires to yourself.”

  He smiled wanly over his shoulder. “He can no more live without his clowns than his cunts, Nell. Not that I need explain that to you. You combine both his pleasures, you clever hussy, and most admirably, too. Now you must do your part for England, and demonstrate to the king the superiority of your sweet English notch over Kéroualle’s sour French article.”

  It was a jest, aye, but not really, and we both knew it, too.

  “Take care, you foulmouthed bastard,” I said softly, “and come back to us restored both in health and in spirit.”

  He grunted, though with disgust or dismay or simply the effects of Madame Fourcard’s cure, I could not say. He stared morosely at the last of the canary in his glass, tipping it this way and that to catch the light of the fire in the grate before him.

  “ ‘All monarchs I hate,’ ” he recited bitterly, “ ‘and the thrones they sit on,/ From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.’ ”

  He finished the wine, then opened his fingers to let the glass slip free. It dropped to the brick-lined grate, and the fragile glass shattered. But Rochester did not move, nor did I, the two of us watching the shards scatter and hiss into the sputtering flames like ice that would never melt.

  As was always the case with wars, this latest assault upon the Dutch had not gone the way that the admirals and ministers had promised it would.

  It didn’t matter that the Dutch were outnumbered in every way, or that their leader in both military and civilian affairs was a callow, sickly young man of twenty-two, William of Orange. That William was also yet another member of Charles’s vast royal family (Charles’s oldest sister, Mary, had been William’s mother) had only served further to convince the king and his ministers that the war would be easily won.

  They were wrong.

  In early June, the combined French and English forces were surprised by the Dutch Admiral De Ruyter as the ships lay at Southwold Bay, off the coast of East Anglia not far from Yarmouth. The battle that followed was disastrous; the losses staggering. Under the command of the Duke of York, two successive flagships were lost, a costly blow not only to the navy, but to Charles’s pride. The long list of the dead included Edward Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, whose drowned and mangled body was found much later floating in the sea, and could be identified only by the insignia of the Garter embroidered on the breast of his coat.

  The Duke of York was blamed by the public as much for his blatant conversion to Catholicism as he was for the loss at Southwold Bay, as if the fact that he’d ceased taking Anglican communion with the rest of the royal family was somehow inextricably bound with the long list of dead sailors’ names. The influence of the Pope and the French king seemed everywhere, and few forgot that the duke still stood in line to become King James II, either.

  By July, the talk was no longer of a speedy victory, but of the rising desertions among the discouraged English fleet, and how quickly an agreeable peace could be resolved between the English and the Dutch. There’d be no jolly retreat to Windsor for Charles and me this summer, no strolling with our sons in the forest or paddling in the river beneath the willows. Instead, Charles came to me in Pall Mall as often as he could, where we’d sit in my garden and pretend to count every one of the stars in the summer night sky. I’d sing and dance for him, and make him laugh until he could forget the ugly war he’d insisted upon waging. For now, this was enough between us, the unspoken bargain that pleased us both, even if I tried not to remember how Rochester had charged me to greater things for England’s sake.

  At the end of July, Louise gave birth to a child, a son, whom she promptly named Charles. For this, she expected the very heavens (or leastwise the royal coffers) to open and shower down gold and honors upon her. Instead, the king maintained he was pleased, but failed to so much as acknowledge the boy as his own. Those ladies close to Louise said she was devastated and wept for days.

  But I—I danced a jig and laughed in the moonlight.

  It was the middle of September when I sat in Tom Killigrew’s little office behind the scenes at the playhouse, all eagerness for him to join me. I’d come back here after I’d attended the day’s play, Marriage à la Mode by John Dryden, with my old friends Elizabeth Boutell and Beck Marshall in the principal female roles. Sitting in one of the most expensive boxes, I’d worn a splendid new gown of ruby velvet with pinked sleeves, three yellow plumes in my wide-brimmed lace hat, the heavy pearl drops that Charles had given me in my ears, and a diamond ring on my finger.

  Yet over this finery I was still proud to wear my old red wool cloak, my well-earned livery for being a player in the King’s Company. As I perched on the unstable little chair (for Killigrew still seemed to furnish his chamber with the leavings of stage properties and scenes), I marveled at how far I’d come in so short a time. In ten years, I’d risen from selling oranges in the pit to my place at the king’s side and my house in Pall Mall; a grand journey, indeed, and one that, God willing, was far from done.

  “So it is you, Nell!” Killigrew beamed as he entered, his smile so broad his eyes were nigh swallowed up in the merry wrinkles around them. “When the boy told me Mrs. Gwyn was here, I could not believe it.”

  “More likely you damned his sorry eyes and kicked him in the arse for being a bold-faced, impertinent liar,” I said cheerfully, wagging my finger at him. “Don’t say you’ll do otherwise, Killigrew, for I know you far better than that.”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” he said, laughing with me as he dropped into the old armchair that was as good as his throne here in the playhouse. We’d always gotten on famously, and no wonder, for l
ike Buckingham and Rochester, he loved to play the jester with Charles every bit as much as did I. The king had rewarded him for it, too, not just with this company and playhouse, but by newly naming Killigrew his Master of the Revels at Court, with the handsome pension that came with it.

  “Did you like the performance, eh?” he asked me, teasing as was his wont. “Is that why you’ve come here, Mistress Gwyn, to play the critic for me and my poor band of players?”

  “ ’Od’s blood, no.” I leaned forward toward him, smoothing my petticoats over my knees. “You’ve critics enough without adding me, too. No, Killigrew, I’ve come here for more gainful purpose than that. I’ve come for a part.”

  “A part, you say?” He stroked his mustache with his fingers, stalling in a way that did not please me. “But why should you wish that, my girl?”

  “Why?” I repeated, astounded he’d even ask. “Faith, I’d believe you’d forgotten me, to hear you speak so! Now pray tell me what you have planned for the coming season. Surely there’s a place for me, a ripe prologue to help fill the house again.”

  He sighed and studied my face. “How old are you now, Nell?”

  “Twenty-two,” I said, unashamed, for I was pleased by how well I’d kept my looks.

  “Twenty-two! Where did the years go, eh?” he asked. “I recall when you first came to me, you were only a bold a little creature of fifteen. You’ve borne a pair of children, too, haven’t you?”

  “Two strong, handsome sons to the king,” I said proudly, “as you know perfectly well, you dog.”

  “Then you’ll forgive this dog for being blunt.” He smiled absently, concentrating more on what he’d say next. “As happy as I’d be to have you back, it wouldn’t be right. You’ve moved beyond us, Nell. Look at you! You’re as grand a miss as there is at court.”