The King's Favorite

by Susan Holloway Scott

  I stared out at the fires with new interest. “I don’t recall burning figures before.”

  “Not in your lifetime, no,” he said. “I remember how they burned my father in effigy, though, when I was a boy. Now my brother’s the most popular figure, but there are reports of straw Popes, too, and a few of the innocent new duchess herself.”

  I slipped my arm inside his coat around his waist to feel the warmth of his body. “It’s Shaftesbury’s doing, of course.”

  “Of course,” he agreed. “Most of the apprentices and sailors he’s paid to set the fires couldn’t name the Pope if they were held over the fire themselves, but that won’t stop them from carrying on like red savages with Shaftesbury’s coin in their pockets.”

  “I’d pay them more to burn Shaftesbury next.”

  “So would I,” he admitted, “as long as no one else would know of it.”

  “Then let me do it, sir,” I said eagerly. “Everyone expects such mischief from me. Imagine how Shaftesbury’s blond hair would sizzle in the flames!”

  “Nelly, Nelly.” He chuckled, drawing me closer. “I’d not want you for an enemy.”

  I kissed him then to prove my loyalty. Besides, by my reckoning, he’d already enemies enough without adding another.

  By the end of the year, he’d taken care that he’d one less. Before Christmas, he’d dismissed Shaftesbury as Lord Chancellor, effectively banishing him to the country. Next Charles prorogued Parliament again until January, too, making sure they’d cause no unpleasantness for the new Duchess of York’s arrival.

  At least there was no public unpleasantness. Charles told me that the duke’s two young daughters, the twelve-year-old Lady Mary and her sister, the eight-year-old Lady Anne, were mightily displeased by their new fifteen-year-old stepmother. Perhaps it was simply that their father’s introduction of Mary Beatrice as “a new playmate for them” did little to ease matters. Not that I didn’t feel sympathy for the duchess as well. Though the rest of the court judged her at once as beautiful and haughty, I could scarce imagine what she in turn must think of all of us wicked old English Protestants, with our incessant interest in whether she’d yet conceived.

  But just as the new year of 1674 was bound to come, so, too, returned Parliament. Still angry over the duke’s marriage, they chose to repay Charles by insisting on an end to the war. Both the House of Lords and the House of Commons voted for England to make a peace with the Dutch independently of the French—proof that, at last, all of William’s well-placed bribes had come to fruition. Charles was left with no choice but to agree, a sorry, shabby ending to a sorry, shabby war that, like so many wars, had accomplished worse than nothing.

  Only one last event marked the end of 1674 and the beginning of 1675, and this to me was perhaps the most tawdry of them all. With the Dutch peace progressing, the House of Lords turned its attention to muzzling my old friend Lord Buckingham and his mistress, Lady Shrewsbury. The trustees of Lady Shrewsbury’s son, the young earl, were so incensed by the pair’s recklessness that they appealed to the Lords to stop it. Buckingham and the countess were made to apologize to the House of Lords, and to pay a surety of ten thousand pounds to that body to guarantee that they ended their intrigue. Meanwhile, in the House of Commons, he was denounced for promoting French causes and popery, and a petition for his removal from all offices was sent to the king. Charles had finally tired of Buckingham’s inconstancy and sympathy with Louis, and seized the excuse for demanding Buckingham’s retirement. He was swiftly sent to live in the country with his wife, the greatest punishment imaginable for such a gentleman.

  It all seemed a low, false business, especially considering how many others had taken foreign bribes as well as keeping scandalous mistresses. Though unpredictable and changeable as the wind, Buckingham had always been a willing partner to my jests and amusements and every bit my equal in mimicry, and I was sorry, hugely sorry, to see him gone.

  But everything was changing, it seemed. Nothing was staying as it was, or had been, and even the new plays that I saw had none of the old spark and raillery that had been my specialty. The new-style prologues (such as this courtesans’ lament by that most excellent woman playwright, Aphra Behn) were reflections of their time, and not mine:

  The devil take this cursed plotting age,

  ’T has ruined all our plots upon the stage;

  Suspicions, new elections, jealousies,

  Fresh informations, new discoveries,

  Do so employ the busy fearful town,

  Our honest calling here is useless grown.

  I’d only just turned twenty-five in the spring of 1675, yet in many ways I felt as if I’d already lived too much of my life. “This cursed plotting age,” indeed. At least I’d my good health and humor, my boys, and most of all, my king.

  And what, I ask you, was plotting next to that?

  Chapter Twenty-two

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON May 1675

  “A pox on this veil,” I muttered, tugging at the heavy black veiling that shrouded my face. “I might as well be staring through a wall of stone as to try to see a blessed thing through it. Has the Weeping Willow come yet, my lord? I’ll not make my entrance until I know she’s there to see me.”

  “Portsmouth’s there, just as you expected, lurking about the queen in her full rig of mourning,” said Lord Rochester, my willing confederate in my latest jest against Louise. Not that I ever had trouble finding such partners in my mischief, for the odious Louise was so overproud and puffed so full of her own importance that she was disliked by nearly all the court, excepting the king, Lord Arlington, and (most wondrous strange) the queen. “And she is weeping, though more profusely than any mere willow tree could.”

  “Ah, I pity Her Majesty, to be sitting beneath those branches,” I said. “Pray that poor royal lady doesn’t drown in the great flood of tears.”

  “By now she’s learned how to save herself, I think,” he said dryly. “Even in the freshest grief, Portsmouth’s tears can ebb and flow at will, much like the Dutch flinging open their dykes to flood at opportune moments. She won’t squander her tears on the queen, not if there’s any chance the king will appear.”

  “I’ll make her tears flow,” I promised, chuckling with anticipation inside my costume. “She’ll have something to wail about when I’m done with her.”

  One of the annoying small ways that Louise employed to set herself above the rest of us mere English was to insist she was connected by blood to every royal duke and potentate on the Continent. Whenever any of them died, she’d swathe herself in tears and mourning as if they were her dearest relation, in the most tedious fashion imaginable. Only this week she’d learned of the death of the Chevalier de Rohan, a French prince of the blood, and ever since had wandered about the palace like a damned soul, wailing with grief—grief that I’d cheerfully now made my target.

  “Let me look at you one last time,” Rochester said, little more than a shadowy figure before me through my veiling. He’d recently suffered another bout of his old familiar affliction, and though he’d rallied enough to return to us here at court, he was markedly more frail.

  He gave one critical tweak to my skirts, and laughed. “There. You’re perfect. You’ll have the king rolling over this. But sweet Jesu, how Portsmouth will hate you!”

  “I should hope so, my lord,” I said, laughing with him. “Else there’s no reason, is there?”

  With the country at peace and the court as much at ease as it ever was, my jests, like this one, had become more and more elaborate. Charles often teased me about being his jester, promising to put a belled cap on my head like the merry fellows of old, but truth to tell, I did fill that role for him.

  There were few things that delighted him more than to see a pretentious lord deflated, or the manners of some cruelly overbearing foreign ambassador pricked by raillery, and with Buckingham gone and Rochester’s acid wit increasingly more slanderous, Charles looked to me for a simple bit of mockery or a clever tur
n of phrase to make him laugh.

  He was still telling anyone who’d listen how I’d served the Duchess of Cleveland, who’d ostentatiously taken to driving about the park in a coach and six, a mode of conveyance generally reserved for royalty.

  Secretly I’d had a close-fitting costume made in the colors of her livery, adding a copy of the blue velvet hat with white plumes that she so favored, then advised Charles to be at Berkshire House, Lady Cleveland’s grand residence near St. York’s palace, the next afternoon.

  He was, along with a small crowd of other courtiers, admitted to the jest. With the unwitting lady among them, they’d all crowded to the windows to watch me drive slowly before the house in a ricketing dray drawn by six of the most bedraggled oxen I could find. Wearing my version of her livery, I’d proudly cracked my whip over my lumbering team.

  “Here, here!” I’d cried with a costard-monger’s lusty bravado, for the king, his friends, and all of Her Grace’s fashionable neighbors to hear. “Brave whores to market, ho, brave whores here!”

  Cleveland had laughed heartily, for she appreciated a good jest, even at her expense. Portsmouth didn’t, which would make my performance today all the sweeter. What did I care for her pride? As Mrs. Gwyn, I’d license to say and do the sort of mischief that might land another in the Tower, but only brought great pleasure to my dear sovereign lord. Long ago, Killigrew had predicted that I’d never cease being a player, and he’d been right. All I’d done was trade the stage of the King’s Theatre for the larger one of Whitehall.

  Rochester cocked his arm for me. “Come now, madam,” he said. “If your grief can bear it, that is.”

  Of course I could cry at will, like any good actress (as well as the bad ones like Portsmouth). With tears streaming from my eyes, I instantly assumed a posture of crushing grief: I held a black-bordered handkerchief as large as a tablecloth to my eyes, I bent my back and head, and I leaned so heavily on Rochester’s arm for support that it was a wonder I didn’t drag him down with me.

  Thus we entered the Presence Chamber, taking our sweet time to make sure that every eye was on us. I sobbed, I wailed, I broke down to my knees, only to be raised by the touching condolence of Lord Rochester. A good entrance is a rare gift, and this was one of my best. Already I could hear the first tittered laughter, and I’d yet to speak a word.

  “ ’Od’s fish, Rochester,” Charles exclaimed. “Is that Nelly with you?”

  “It is, Your Majesty,” the earl answered solemnly. “She most humbly begs your indulgence, but her grief for her loss is a most tremendous burden for her to bear.”

  “Oh, oh, he hath gone to his reward, there among the angels!” I blubbered freshly, near drowning his words as I fell writhing to the floor again in paroxysms of grief. “He hath gooooone!”

  “Hah,” Charles said, and though I couldn’t see his face, I knew from his voice he was already enjoying my performance. “And what person, pray, has she lost?”

  “A noble gentleman most dear to her, sir,” Rochester said, watching me roll about and tear at my hair. “Witness the depths of her sorrow.”

  “Might we know the poor gentleman’s name, my lord?” asked an unwitting noble standing beside the king’s chair.

  In a frenzy of sorrow, I threw the veil back from my face, the better to show how I’d painted away the rosy color that was by nature there, and replaced it with the chalk white that Portsmouth favored, brightened only with crimson circles drawn round my eyes to signify my weeping.

  “What, sir?” I demanded in a bereft wail. “You have not heard of my loss in the death of the Cham of Tartary?”

  “Forgive me, ma’am, I’d not,” the bewildered gentleman begged. “If you please, what was your relation to the late cham?”

  “My relation to the cham, sir?” I blotted my eyes with the monstrous handkerchief, and noisily blew my nose, too. “Oh, sir, he was exactly the same relation to me as Rohan was to Portsmouth.”

  Charles guffawed, his laughter unmistakable to me, even among the others that joined him, and he clapped as well, to display his delight in my little performance.

  But the wail that rose from Portsmouth was one of indignation, not sorrow, and certainly not appreciation. As quickly as she could, she rose from her place near the laughing queen and swept from the chamber with her black skirts trailing after her. I’d won again, as surely as any other combatant can claim victory on the field of honor. I merrily accepted both congratulations and “condolences” for the cham.

  Better still was how Charles returned to Pall Mall with me, even taking his dinner with me and our sons, and finally spending the entire night with me in my silver bed. It reminded me of the comfortable old days in Newman’s Row, when we’d played more at being Darby and Joan than king and miss. So, too, it was now. Charles’s once-relentless ardor had faded with age, and though he could still muster a prime cockstand to please me, he now often seemed to prefer bantering with me in bed than the rigors of swiving. I didn’t care how I pleased him, so long as I could make him happy—and after a fashion that precious other women could, too.

  I woke the next morning to find him smiling down at me, his head resting on his hand as he watched me sleep.

  “My own little sprite,” he said fondly, and kissed me to prove it. “How glad I am to see you’ve overcome your grief.”

  I laughed, the joy bubbling up from within me as I stretched luxuriously across the pillows. “Will Her Grace ever forgive me?”

  “Her Grace will have already forced herself to forget such unpleasantness ever happened,” he said. “You vex her so, it’s the only way she can survive.”

  At once I began to weep and bawl all over again, tears flooding over my cheeks. “Oh, sir, oh, sir,” I cried, tossing myself this way and that over the pillows. “How dare you remind me this way of my sorrrrrrooowww and my loooosssss?”

  He laughed uproariously, catching me close into his arms to kiss me again and make me cease my antics.

  “Tell me, Nelly,” he said. “Why is it her tears make me cringe and wish to run from the room, while yours only make me laugh and long for more, eh?”

  “Because you love me, sir,” I answered promptly, laughing still myself. “That’s reason enough.”

  “Yes,” he said, his expression turning thoughtful. “I suppose that must be it.”

  “Yes,” I repeated softly. I arched up and kissed him, then slipped my hand between us to coax his interest. “I can show you, too.”

  “Another time, sweet.” With a sigh, he rolled away from me and pushed himself from the bed. “I’ve tarried here long enough. The Dutch ambassador is due to call, and I must at least pretend to be awake for him.”

  He bent to retrieve his breeches from the floor, and I reached out to caress his bare buttock. “Stay, sir,” I said softly. “You’ve kept ambassadors waiting before.”

  “Not William’s.” He took my wanton fingers and kissed my hand, then drew his breeches over his nakedness. “There are times when even kings have no choice.”

  I dropped back against the pillows to watch him dress. “Then what is the use of being a king?”

  “I’ve been one for more than twenty years, Nelly,” he said, thrusting his head through the neck of his shirt, “and I’ve yet to discover the answer to that. Ah, here’s my coat.”

  He shrugged his shoulders into the sleeves, and took up his wig from the back of the chair to settle it on his head. Each piece of clothing took him closer to leaving, and I hated to part with him.

  “Come back tonight, sir,” I said. “Please.”

  “I’ll try,” he said, no promise at all. Buttoning his coat, he turned back toward me. “Have you still that patent for Plymouth?”

  “For making me a countess?” I said eagerly. “Aye, I’d never lose that, sir. I’ve carried it in my pocket ever since I had it made, against the day when it is finally sealed and signed.”

  Before he could ask, I slid from the bed and hurried to my little desk, quickly finding the
patent. I was hugely proud of that patent and what it signified. It wasn’t only for my own sake, though of course it dazzled me to think I’d ever be raised to such a rank. No, what pleased me most was knowing that I’d earned such an honor for my sons, that one day my little Charles would become the Earl of Plymouth, and sit on a green cushion in the House of Lords.

  With great care, I drew the patent from the leather envelope I’d had made to protect it, unfolded the sheet, and handed it to Charles.

  “You know there are people who don’t believe you’d ever grant a title to me, sir, on account of being born so low,” I said shyly. “That’s why I carry this with me, to show them, to prove they’re wrong.”

  He glanced at the patent so swiftly that I doubted he’d read it before he began refolding the page. “You carry it with you always?”

  I nodded happily. “I know you said that patents and titles can take so much time to make real, so it’s a comfort to me until I’m truly the Countess of Plymouth.”

  “Time,” he said, and looked away from me to find his shoes. “Yes. There’s a small problem with this patent, Nelly. In fact, I don’t believe that Plymouth’s really the right title for you after all.”

  “Oh, sir, how can it not be right?” I asked, shocked, as I watched him tuck my precious warrant into his coat. “Plymouth was fine for me. Plymouth was perfect!”

  “I’m afraid it no longer is, sweet,” he said. “It’s so complicated to explain that I’d rather you trusted me in this. But I vow we’ll set it all to rights soon. You’ll see. I promise we’ll find a proper title for you, with a tidy income to support it.”

  “Oh, aye, of course,” I murmured, not believing a word of it. “Of course.”

  “Trust me, Nelly, and all this will be settled for the best.” Stuffing the tails of his shirt into his breeches, he leaned down to kiss me. “If I cannot come to you here tonight, you will come to me at the palace, yes?”