As shocking as this scrap of wit might seem, it did succeed where all the other pleas and polite suggestions had failed. Two days after Christmas, 1676, the patent was signed to ennoble my two boys: the elder as Charles Beauclerk, Baron Heddington, Earl of Burford, and his brother as Lord James Beauclerk. The king chose “Beauclerk” as their surname in a clever, personal pun upon his own. As he explained it proudly himself, a Frenchman who is a beau clerk is one who is a man of learning and responsibility, a steward of property. That “steward” was likewise a tidy play on the royal name of “Stuart,” which pleased and touched me no end.
I had my boys painted then, too, a double portrait of my two darlings that would ever after hang in my bedchamber to remind me of that happy day, and to show their undeniable resemblance to their father. The black, curling hair, the dark eyes, the shapes of their little faces, all reflected Charles as surely as any looking-glass, and were, I think, part of his great fondness for them. But I’d impishly instructed the painter (a Frenchman, Henri Gascar, whom I’d chosen over Master Sir Peter for his greater sympathy with children) to add a touch of me to the painting as well; side by side, my boys are draping a flowery garland around the neck of a snowy young lamb, the perfect match to the sheep in my own portrait as a shepherdess.
But there was more. I was at last granted the house in Pall Mall as my own, the leasehold converted to a freehold to be passed down to my sons. I was also given a plum of a hereditary post, the Registrarship of the High Court of Chancery, an honor that would bring a rich annual income with it.
I was twenty-six, the mother of a peer and a lord, and the proud possessor of both fine properties and incomes to match. Aye, I’d no title of my own as yet, but I’d taken care of my sons. Most of all, I’d ready proof of the king’s continued friendship and favor, and that—that meant everything.
Was it any wonder, then, that I often caught myself singing the bawdy words that Rochester had written for me to an old country tune, “When First I Bid My Love Goodmorrow”:
When to the King I bid good Morrow,
With Tongue in Mouth, and Hand on Tarse,
Portsmouth may rend her Breast for Sorrow,
And Mazarin may kiss myne Arse.
But Fate seldom rewards such cockiness, even in a song writ and sung for the sake of amusement. Before long, my life with Charles took a precipitous turn, and all such merry songs turned to ashes in my mouth.
Chapter Twenty-four
PALL MALL, LONDON November 1677
“Oh, I do love a good wedding!” I exclaimed, hurrying to take my place in my chair beside the king’s. “Tell me all, sir, tell me all.”
“There’s not so very much to tell, Nelly,” Charles said, stretching his legs out closer to the fire. “You knew the ceremony was small, the way William wished it. There’s nothing more parsimonious than a Dutchman, especially when it comes to making a proper show for the people.”
Charles sighed happily, enjoying the warmth of the fire. As he’d promised, he’d come to me here in my house as soon as he could get away from the palace, full of news of the royal wedding earlier that day. Finally, after months of negotiations between Lord Danby and the Dutch, William of Orange had accepted Charles’s offer of the hand of the Lady Mary of York, daughter of the Duke of York, or, as Charles liked to call her to remind everyone that she was the first Protestant in the succession, the eldest daughter of the Crown. (To everyone’s amazement, Mary had remained next in line after her father, York, for her stepmother Mary Beatrice had proved another poor breeder, with none of her children surviving infancy.) Like most royal matches, this one was much more a political transaction than a sentimental one, a careful union of the two most powerful Protestant countries. The bride’s father had hoped to see her wedded to a French prince and made a Catholic, and was furious with Charles for agreeing to William.
Charles, in turn, had been ecstatic. Was there any greater proof of his commitment to the Anglican church than this, or of his loyalty to the Dutch, either? While the Dutch clamored for Charles to once again enter their war with France, he could point to this wedding as a sign of his intentions, however false an indication it might truthfully be.
And though outwardly Louis purported to be furious, he must have been secretly pleased that Charles had chosen a wedding instead of a declaration of war as a way to ally himself with the other country. It was more of the same juggling that Charles had done as long as I’d known him, more conjurer’s trick than diplomacy, tossing one half-truth in the air against another uncertain loyalty, and praying it all was enough to keep England from crashing down for another day. And that, of course, was only the intrigue that I knew.
Yet even so important a negotiation remained at heart a wedding, and a joyful event. There’d been a great banquet in the City, bonfires to light the night sky, and toasts drunk from dawn until far past nightfall in every tavern, inn, and alehouse to honor the newlywed couple—toasts that clearly Charles had enjoyed, too, from the rosiness in his cheeks and the cheeriness in his voice.
“But Lady Mary’s no parsimonious Dutchman, sir,” I said, determined that he tell me more. Of course I’d not been invited. The ceremony had been only for the family and a handful of favorite attendants, and no proper place for mistresses. “Tell me of her gown, and how she dressed her hair, and behaved with her bridegroom.”
“My niece was gotten up most handsomely, a proper bride,” Charles said vaguely. “The queen and Mary Beatrice saw to her dress, though you shouldn’t depend on me for the details, Nelly. You know I’m not much for that.”
“Did the Lady Mary grow happier once she was wed?” I asked, hoping the best for the fifteen-year-old bride.
Charles sighed. “I’d lie if I say she did,” he admitted. “She wept throughout, and would scarce look at her husband at all. To be fair, he’s nothing to bring a girl delight. You’ve seen him, Nelly. He’s short and bent with that huge Dutch nose, and he wheezes like a broken-down dray.”
I wrinkled my nose with disgust, my sympathy lying with the tall, beautiful princess. “Were you there for the bedding?”
“A sorry show, that bedding,” he said. “She wept, he sneezed, and neither wished to drink the posset. But worse than that, Nelly, was how my nephew insisted on keeping on his old woolen hose, even though I told him he’d never do his duty to his bride that way.”
“Oh, sir,” I said, horrified. “Woolen hose!”
Charles shook his head. “It was as grim as can be reckoned. I urged him to recall St. George and England for inspiration, but I’d not be surprised to learn that poor, sweet Mary’s a maid still.”
“You said St. George, sir?” I asked incredulously, laughing as I did. In brothel-cant, a St. George was the position with a woman astride a man, vanquishing his snorting dragon. “To a pair of innocents such as that?”
“I meant it for England,” he said, then grinned and shrugged. “That’s how they’ll think it, anyway. It’s only a wild little creature like you who’d see it otherwise.”
“And a wild old rogue like you who’d mean it,” I teased, reaching across from my chair to his to shove his arm. “St. George, hah. How splendid for you to play the role of the leering uncle at the wedding!”
He laughed with me, and pulled me from my chair onto his lap, where I curled against his chest like a warm little cat. “I’ll vow that Mary will become the happiest bride imaginable tomorrow when she sees the pearls William’s giving her as a wedding present. That’s the way to please a woman.”
“Oh, pish, sir,” I said, slipping my hand inside his coat and his shirt to feel the comforting warmth of his skin. “You’ve better ways than that of pleasing a woman.”
“I do, yes, but it’s clumsy little William who worries me.” He drew me closer, cradling my bottom familiarly against the crook of his arm. I could sense his humor shifting, and the melancholy that plagued him more as he’d grown older slowly beginning to claim him again. “So much to depend upon so young a pair.”<
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“Not so young, sir,” I said. “William is twenty-six, isn’t he?”
“And Mary is but fifteen.”
“A woman’s fifteen is a man’s thirty,” I said, with more regret than I’d intended. “By that age, I’d already been in keeping, an orange girl, and Charles Hart’s mistress.”
He grunted. “And at that same age, sweet, I’d bid my father farewell for the final time and gone into exile,” he said, the old sadness there that he never could shed. “What cosseted lives these children have led by comparison, eh?”
Ah, ah, how much alike at heart we were, my king and I! “If the Lady Mary finds even half the love I have with you, sir,” I said fervently, “then everything will be well.”
He smiled and kissed me atop my head. “I never ask for ‘well,’ sweet,” he said wearily, “only ‘well enough.’ ”
“You always do what’s best for England, sir,” I said loyally. “This wedding, too.”
“I’ll pray you’re right, Nelly,” he said. “And pray that Venus can achieve what Mars has not, and keep England from another war.”
I’d reason to remember how Charles and I had spoken of cossetted youth soon after Twelfth Night 1678, as I made the final prepartions for seeing my younger son, Jemmy, launched on his schooling. He had just turned seven on Christmas Day, and had done so well with his studies with his tutors that he’d already surpassed his older brother. Proudly Charles had declared him ready to go away to learn among other boys, though I’d panicked and protested because of his youth and tenderness.
As clever as Jemmy might be with books, he was also shy, and too sensitive to the teasing and jibes of more boisterous boys. I couldn’t imagine him tossed into that rowdy stew at Cambridge, where his brother was so flourishing, so Charles had suggested sending him to an English school in Paris instead. There the program was more refined, he assured me, more fit for Jemmy’s temperament, and no one in Paris would taunt him about being a royal bastard. Besides, Charles’s sons by Lady Cleveland had followed the same regimen with success. At last I’d agreed, and with a heart at once heavy and proud, I’d seen my boy Lord James Beauclerk off from Dover, standing brave beside his tutor on the deck of the packet.
For seven days afterward, I kept to my house and wept whenever I thought of how small he’d looked as he’d sailed away from me. As Charles had reminded me, it would have been much the same if he’d been a common boy and I’d had to sign indenture papers that would bind him to a faraway master to learn a trade. It was, he said, the lot of all mothers who must part with their sons.
It was also, I realized, the lot of mistresses who must always be cheery and bright to the men who keep them. So I put aside being a mother, wiped my eyes, and as brave as little Jemmy had been, I returned to court and to Charles.
From the first day of Charles’s reign, when he’d ridden through the streets of London on horseback and not hidden away for safekeeping in a carriage, he’d believed in going freely among his people. Regardless of the weather, he strolled every morning through St. James’s Park, where he’d salute anyone of any rank who would approach him. He walked beneath trees and across open fields, heedless of any warnings to guard himself against attack or assassins. He jested that he’d never come to harm so long as his brother was his heir, for no sane man would willingly do anything to put York on the throne. In truth I believe he trusted in the goodness of his own people, and his own considerable strength and size, to remain safe.
Thus when Charles began his daily walk one morning in August 1678, his thoughts were more upon the uncharacteristic heat of the day and the mists that still clung low to the grass than on any phantom attackers. Nor was he much perturbed by the man (a scientific gentleman he’d recognized) who came rushing up to him at the gates of the park, informing him of a plot to kill him. In his usual cordial manner, Charles thanked him for his warning and continued on his walk, leaving the details of the plot to be discovered by his guards and attendants.
He then left London for Windsor with me and others of the court, and gave the plot and the warning no further thought—so little, in fact, that he did not think to tell me of it, through all the time we spent at my house and in the castle, fishing in the river for carp and perch, hawking in the open fields, and strolling in the forest. We went to the races at Newmarket, as well, where Charles, though now above forty-eight years, still rode with the skill and abandon of a wild young man. He even beat his son Lord Monmouth and several other blades half his age for the prize of a silver flacon.
But in London, Lord Danby did not share the king’s lack of concern. Never a lover of things French or Catholic, Danby seized on every salient detail of the plot. The papers he was given as proof accused a gang of prominent Jesuits in England of acting on orders from Louis to murder Charles by poison or sword, then raise a Catholic rebellion to seize the army and the English throne for the French. While the court dallied in Windsor, Danby and the council busily led an official investigation in London, listening, in particular, to the testimony of a low, skulking rascal named Titus Oates. This Oates had converted to Catholicism, then converted back to the Anglican Church, which, though a turncoat to his faith, had made him privy to the plot. He freely volunteered names, too, including that of both the queen’s physician and the secretary of the Duchess of York.
Now, in those days, plots of every sort were as common in London as they were upon the stage, and as credible, too. If this particular plot had been like all the others, then it would have been swallowed up by another that was newer or more scandalous. Both it and Oates would have been forgotten by the time we’d returned to London from Windsor.
But in early October, a Protestant magistrate much involved with taking testimony for the council, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, was discovered dead, beaten and run through by swords and discarded in a ditch on Primrose Hill. Godfrey had not only been a friend of Lord Danby’s, but he’d only that day sworn fresh testimony from Oates, testimony that was suspected of being especially damning to the plotters. At once it was concluded that Jesuits had murdered Godfrey, and the entire country pitched into turmoil.
Though Charles tried his best to preach reason and tolerance, the newly recalled Parliament was determined for Catholic blood. Romish infiltrators were rumored to be everywhere in London, ready to take over the city at the word from Louis. Even I became as skittish as everyone else, carrying a small lady’s pistol in my muff and adding extra guards to my household, for I’d no wish for Charles to be assassinated beneath my roof, either. Charles chided me for panicking like all the other geese, but I told him it was far better to be vigilant now than to be caught unawares.
On the fifth of November, I made sure my house held the grandest of the displays for Guy Fawkes Day, and a party to match. My whole household had labored for days on our figure of the Pope (to our considerable entertainment, too, I must say), making him of a splendid size with a bulbous scarlet nose fully half a yard in length. I invited all who’d come to join in his burning, from courtiers to my friends at the playhouses, and let my servants invite whomever they pleased, as well. Hundreds of people filled the street before my house, and I gaily led the spectacle, holding the torch to light the effigy myself. I gave out ale to the men to drink toasts of “No popery” and “To the king” by the firelight, and squibs to all the boys to toss at the burning figure, making for as fine and merry a showing as I could recall.
Charles, however, did not attend, nor, I suppose, could I have expected him to. As can be imagined, Lord Shaftesbury seized on the plot, employing it against the Duke of York. He demanded that the duke’s faith made him too untrustworthy to sit on the King’s Privy Council, a prelude to excluding him altogether from the succession. While Danby fought on his behalf in Parliament, Charles persuaded his brother not to attend the council, and in general to remove himself until the plot had run its course.
But Oates and Shaftesbury were determined to keep the fires burning in Parliament just as brightly as had my e
ffigy of the Pope. Several Catholic nobles were arrested and sent to the Tower on Oates’ testimony. As the accusations became more and more outlandish, Charles was forced to defend not only his brother, but this queen. Further, when papers showing Danby’s negotiations with Louis over secret subsidies (many of the same subsidies that Charles had likely been receiving for years) were intercepted and revealed, demands rose for his resignation and impeachment.
It was a most difficult time for Charles, and when he came now to my house, he preferred there to be no others in attendance, no riotous wits or clamorous politicians from this side or that. Instead, he came to me for peace and quiet amusement—a supper before the fire in my bedchamber, a game of whist or ombre—which I happily offered.
Not, however, that matters between us were always at ease. As much as I loved the king, there were certain things I would not (or could not) concede.
“A favor, Nelly,” he began, and I quickly learned to hear the peculiar timbre to these three words, a subtle warning that his request would have nothing to do with our agreeable posture there in my silver bed. I’d heard it first after my Guy Fawkes Day celebration, how it had disappointed him, and I’d heard it again several times since. “A small favor to me.”
“Aye, sir,” I said, rolling over on my belly to face him, my guard firmly in place for all that I was naked. “What e’er you please.”
He grunted, disinclined to believe such cheerful consent from me. “I’ve heard that you and Buckingham have again been entertaining your guests in your old fashion.”
“Oh, Buckingham,” I said, striving to divert what I knew would surely come next. Unable to resist the exciting times in London, he’d finally been lured from his country retirement to appear in the House of Lords alongside Shaftesbury. But we all noticed how much he’d changed. Though I do not know whether being forced to live with his tedious wife or simply that his old vices had finally taken their toll, he was much diminished from his former glory and grown lazy of his appearance—I’d had to insist he clean his wig of vermin before I’d let him enter my house, and wear his false teeth, too, so I could understand his speech, little neglects that I blamed upon his wife’s negligence—but his wit was still as sharp as ever. “What have you to fear from His Grace? He’s but another toothless old lion, like those in the menagerie at the Tower.”
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