The King's Favorite

by Susan Holloway Scott

  “He may be toothless, Nelly, but in your company he still knows how to roar,” Charles said. “I’ve heard the pair of you are offering a wicked satire of Lord Danby and his wife.”

  “In sport, sir, only in sport.” I pursed my lips, striving to look both contrite and winsome. “Besides, Lord Danby has over time shown me so little favor and regard that I thought it only fair to return his treatment to him.”

  More specifically, Danby had always been one of Portsmouth’s creatures, and he’d told me to my face that if the king had ever dared to present a petition to him as Lord Chancellor to grant me a peerage, he would refuse to add his seal, even if it cost him his post. Not, of course, that I’d dare repeat this to Charles; I knew my limits, and besides, impish teasing generally worked better for me with the king.

  At least it had in the past, but not now.

  “Then consider your sport done, Nelly,” he said firmly. “Poor Danby’s beleaguered enough without having you and Buckingham for gadflies.”

  I sighed mightily. “Very well, sir,” I said, conceding. “I’ll cease, and tell His Grace, too.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “And I’ll ask you to do the same favor for Lady Portsmouth.”

  “For Portsmouth?” I asked indignantly. “ ’Od’s blood, sir, I’ll grant you Danby, but not Portsmouth, too!”

  “Yes, Portsmouth,” he said firmly. “Your jibes have put the lady in danger of her life.”

  I frowned, looking down as I toyed with the curling hair upon his chest. With the torrent of feeling against the French and the Catholics running so strongly, I’d been unable to resist taking my imitation of Portsmouth to the two playhouses. Before the play would begin on the stage, I’d put on a small entertainment of my own in my box, mimicking her speech and mannerisms with such a nice precision that the entire house would roar and cheer to watch me, and shout endearments and praise that were passing sweet to hear.

  “You would have laughed, sir, I do her so well,” I protested. “You have laughed when I’ve done her before.”

  “But not in so public a place as the playhouse.”

  “That’s why they call me the darling strumpet of the people.” I grinned, and winked. “I am your Protestant whore, and mightily pleased to be so, too.”

  But he didn’t laugh at that, as he usually did. “You forget the power that popularity has given you, Nelly.”

  “But I don’t, sir, not at all. Recall my visit to Cambridge, and the good I did for you there.” I’d been endlessly proud of that visit. Not only had I seen our son Charles—my son, among all the other little lordlings!—but the vice-chancellor himself welcomed me, and a group of the best scholars presented me with some pretty verses. I was cheered in the streets, too, as the lone Protestant woman in Charles’s bed, recognized for my longstanding (or rather, long-lying) place there, and my fidelity to him. “I’d folk telling me what a comfort it was to see me with you, knowing I was Anglican, same as them.”

  “I know that, sweet, and I thank you for it,” he said. “But last night at the Duke’s Theatre, Lady Portsmouth was so threatened by the crowd who recalled your impression—apprentices and sailors hurling oranges and apples at her box, and ripping up the benches in the pit to do battle with one another—that she was forced to flee for her life, and the playhouse closed afterward. I thought you, of anyone, would have heard of it.”

  Wide-eyed, I shook my head, surprised, as well, that I hadn’t. How could my friends among the players have failed to relay such a ripe tale as that?

  He sighed heavily, a shudder I felt beneath my hand. “This is no cheery scrape, Nelly, no idle farce,” he said with real weariness. “If I let them, Danby and Shaftesbury will use Oates to tear down the entire country. I’ve only just saved the queen from their ravening, and they’ve eyes on my brother next. After that, who knows what they’ll dare?”

  “Oh, sir,” I said, coming closer to lie touching. How could I not feel remorse, when he was so bowed with his troubles as this? “I am sorry, truly. Not just for my own actions, but for everything.”

  He slipped his fingers into my curls, toying with them. “My dear, sweet sprite,” he said softly. “I know how it must go against your very nature, this favor of mine, and any other time I’d never ask it.”

  “But, sir, for you, I’ll do it, and anything else you ever might ask,” I whispered, tears blurring my eyes. “For you, sir.”

  “Not for me, Nelly,” he said. “For England.”

  Three momentous events occurred in February 1679.

  The first of these was, I suppose, of the greatest import to the country. With so much hostility being shown toward the Duke of York, Charles judged it wisest to remove his brother and sister-in-law away from the eyes of the English public, and sent them abroad to live in Brussels until matters grew more calm at home. The duke was much displeased by this, nor was his anger lessened by Charles’s decision to keep the two unwed Protestant princesses (the Lady Anne, now fourteen, and the Lady Isabella, three) from their parents and here in England as a kind of surety against the duke’s behavior.

  Secondly, because Parliament’s hysterical persecution of the Catholics and the so-called Popish Plot, he’d decided to end the last session of Parliament, and not merely prorogue it as he’d always done before. The General Election of February was the first in more than eighteen years’ time, and only the second in his entire reign. Charles had hoped for a more sympathetic group to be elected, one that showed more tolerance and common sense: a fresh start for him with Parliament and the country.

  From their first gathering, however, it was clear that he’d be sadly disappointed. If anything, this new Parliament seemed even more vexing and more determined to act as if they were ruling over him, and not the other way around. Two distinct factions, or parties, as they were being called, had emerged. Lord Shaftesbury’s supporters, formerly known as the Country Party for representing the opinions of all of England beyond London, was now the Whiggamores or Whigs, a curious term that had once applied to a band of Scottish outlaws, extreme in their grim Presbyterian beliefs. Lord Danby’s old Court Party, which had been the greatest supporters of the Crown, was now called the Tories, for Irish Papist bandits who had once plundered Protestant English estates in Ireland.

  How these silly terms came to be accepted with perfect seriousness, I do not know, for they’d begun as slanders cast by one party against the other. I suppose it was merely more of the kind of nonsensical insults that men have always flung at one another.

  No matter. Of far greater consequence to the king was the fact that in this new-elected House of Commons, the Whigs far outnumbered the Tories, with a devastating loss of supporters. Now only thirty seats were filled with Danby’s Tories, and more than a hundred and fifty with Shaftesbury’s Whigs. These new members were shamelessly hostile toward the king and Danby, in particular, accusing Danby of every sort of misconduct in his relations with France. Both houses voted for his arrest, and with no choice left, Danby finally resigned his post in March, and was sent at once to the Tower.

  Soon after, the first Exclusion Bill was introduced, the goal of which was to exclude the Duke of York from succeeding Charles to the throne. This was a possibility that Charles refused so much as to consider, nor did any of the exclusionists seem to agree on who would replace York as heir. Shaftesbury still clung to the antiquated idea that Charles should divorce the queen, remarry, and sire an entirely new Protestant family. Other notions included the Lady Mary, now Mary of Orange, and her husband, William, or the young Lady Anne. Most risky, but most beguiling to many was Charles’s oldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth.

  But none of these were agreeable to Charles, as I could have told every last one of those blaggards in Parliament, nor would he ever agree to any of them. In July, he dissolved this new session, too, and was rewarded by an election that returned even fewer Tories than before. Nothing was resolved, except that the ill will grew between all parties involved. Again and again i
n the past, Charles had proved himself the wily master when dealing with Parliament, but this time he’d clearly lost, and lost badly.

  He’d not give in, of course. He was too strong, too determined, and besides, he was the king. I never lost faith in him, nor, I felt sure, did the majority of his people. But in many ways, this, the twentieth year of Charles’s reign and the fiftieth of his life, was his most challenging and his most hazardous.

  And the third momentous event in that February? Why, my twenty-ninth birthday. I marveled that I’d reached so great an age, with more than ten years of it spent as mistress to the king. I hosted a fine party for myself at my house in Pall Mall by way of celebration, the one bright note in an otherwise grim and gloomy season. Later, when we were alone, Charles gave me a diamond ring with a glittering center stone as large as a pea.

  It was a luscious bauble, to be sure, one to be treasured, but it could not compare to the lasting joy I’d received from the king in the decade we’d shared. I’d only one wish for my birthday that night, and that was for another such decade of his devotion, and if I were greedy, another after that.

  Only one wish, only one wish.

  One afternoon soon after my birthday, I was in the Duke’s Playhouse, in the box I always kept for my own use. With me was my sister, Rose, the two of us there to see the new play by Mr. Etherege, and nothing more taxing (or political) than that. Scattered through the other boxes around me were friends both from the theatre and the court, ladies with gallants and gentlemen with mistresses, and every other sort of rascal and whore in between, which made for another kind of play to watch besides the one on the stage.

  I’d only to look to the box to my left to see one such folly. There sat the Duke of Monmouth with his mistress and great love Lady Henrietta Wentworth, both duke and lady beauties, and neither of them with a brain worth sharing between them. Prince Perkin, I’d dubbed the duke on account of that other old pretender to Henry VII’s throne, Perkin Warbeck, a foolish name for a foolish young man. Like the swain in some ill-written play, Monmouth wished the world to consider his empty-headed mistress his wife, simply on the grounds that he’d been too young to choose for himself at the time he’d been wed to Anne, Duchess of Buccleuch and Monmouth. But without the vast Scottish fortune of Her Grace, his rightful wife, to fund the duke’s extravagances, I doubted that Lady Henrietta would have found the baseborn Monmouth half so attractive. Thus round and round they all went, like mongrel dogs that chase their own tails because they know no better.

  The first musical interlude had just ended and the prologue was soon to begin when some fool in the pit stood on his bench, turned toward the boxes, and bawled as loudly as he could, “God preserve the Protestant prince, His Grace the Duke of Monmouth!”

  Doubtless this outburst was fueled by strong drink or the dare of a companion, and in the past the shouter would simply have been hauled down from his perch and cuffed into silence by those around him there for the play. But times had changed. Now quick as a puppet pulled by strings, another ninny hopped onto the bench as well, whipping off his hat as he stared up at His Grace’s box. “God preserve the rightful Protestant prince, and deliver us from Papist devils!”

  A rumble of agreement filled the house, and a few ragged cheers followed. Because I recalled Charles’s wise admonition to me about mocking Lady Portsmouth in the playhouse, I expected Monmouth likewise to put these dangerous supporters in their rightful place, or at the very least to ignore them. But instead the duke rose to his feet and acknowledged the cheers, even raising them, as if they were his due, or worse, as if he were in fact the rightful heir to the throne.

  I waited until the racket had finally died away and the prologue fairly begun, then made my way into their box. I pulled the pretty fool from his chair to the back to speak to me, or more properly, to listen.

  “What demon has possessed you, Your Grace?” I demanded hotly, with no preamble or greeting. “Are you daft? To stir a crowd like that against your father!”

  But instead of being contrite or even sheepish, he seemed to straighten and preen all the more before me. “You saw how they love me, then,” he said proudly. “A fine display of Protestant loyalty, Nelly, wasn’t it?”

  “It was a fine display of your perfect idiocy, Your Grace, and your disregard for your father’s wishes!” I declared in a fierce whisper, not wanting to cause any more of a fuss in the playhouse than he’d already done. “Hasn’t your father made it clear enough that he wishes your uncle to follow him?”

  “He’s said he wishes to follow the natural order of succession, Nelly, which is altogether different.” He leaned closer, as if telling me an enormous secret. “He means me, sweetheart. I can’t explain it here, but I’ve proof, hard proof, that he first wed my mother before the queen, and that I’m his legitimate son and heir.”

  What kind of proof could he possibly have to bolster such a tale? I’d be the last one to fault his mother for being a Welsh whore, but I knew Charles, and even as a very young prince he would never have tossed away his future and that of his country with such a wrongful marriage. Once I’d been among those who’d championed Monmouth’s hopes on account of him being Protestant as well as Charles’s son, but lately he’d demonstrated such lack of sense and wit that I’d changed my mind, and this—this was only one more reason why.

  “Oh, you are daft, if you expect me to believe that,” I said, “and worse than daft, if you believe it yourself.”

  “Doubt me if you will, Nelly,” he said earnestly, “but in time, you’ll see I’m right.”

  “Who is telling these lies?” I demanded. To his father’s despair, Monmouth could be (and often was) easily led and misled by false companions. Those I suspected of guiding him this time included Shaftesbury and Buckingham, a dangerous, duplicitous pair if ever there was one. “Who is giving you such idle hopes?”

  He shook his head, his expression so witlessly confident it broke my heart for Charles’s sake, or would have if I weren’t so cross with him. “I can’t tell you that, either, not without betraying the trust of those excellent gentlemen.”

  “What of your father, the king?” I asked, one last attempt. “What of betraying his trust by encouraging low, noisy rascals like that one in the pit to challenge his will and authority?”

  “Nelly, dear Nelly,” he said, striving to be indulgent in Charles’s manner and instead sounding merely patronizing. “No wonder my father loves you so. But you must trust me in this. In time you’ll see I was right, and that I acted only for the good of England and the Protestant cause.”

  “The good of England”: how it chilled me to hear Charles’s most treasured words turned back against him this way, and by one who shared his very blood!

  Yet when, still in my righteous fever, I’d described this sorry scene to Charles, he’d only shaken his head sadly and begged me to be at ease. He’d promised that Monmouth meant no harm, and that in turn he’d not take any action against his son. Monmouth’s misconceptions were irritating, he argued like any doting father, but no real trouble could come from them or him.

  But real trouble was coming, coming faster than any of us could guess, and by the end of the summer, even Charles could no longer deny it.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  PALL MALL, LONDON July 1679

  Some events in my life were grand indeed, deserving of fanfares and voluntaries and mighty flourishes in the telling. Others were not so delightsome, and are better described as plainly as I can.

  Thus was my mother’s death on the twentieth of July. Drunk on the same French brandy with which I’d kept her happy for many years, she’d toppled into a water-swollen ditch after a thunderstorm and drowned. She was fifty-five years of age, most of it spent as deep in drink as how she’d died. Because of that, she’d not been the best or kindest of mothers to me, but she was my mother still, and her death shocked me by its suddenness.

  I resolved to give her as splendid a funeral as could be had, glory in death that s
he’d never found in life, and to treat her memory to the best jest I could ever contrive. Lord Buckingham, who’d a gift for spectacles, helped me plan the details of the procession: a hearse and carriages with blue Welsh lions and hangings of gold and silver, drawn by plumed horses. I mustered out my entire household in their full livery to march in the procession, carrying flowers or torches of burning brandy, a droll touch.

  Of course Rose and I were the chief mourners, dressed in lavish mourning and riding in high state in my carriage, and legions of my friends swelled our ranks to glorious numbers. Dressed in bishop’s costumes to walk in the front of the procession were the merry gang of rogues who were among my fondest friends, among them Buckingham, Rochester, Dorset, Sedley, and Killigrew, and, ah, how I laughed to see those wicked lords mimic solemn clerics!

  But my old companions from the playhouse weren’t to be left behind. As the procession made its way along Drury Lane, we were joined by Hart and Lacy and others from the King’s Company, as well as a flock of boisterous orange girls led by Mrs. Meggs. As we made our way through the streets around Covent Garden, our ranks were swelled even more by great bawds and low whores come to show their respects in their best finery. I made sure that beer flowed freely not only to those in the procession, but also in the cheering crowds who followed us clear to the church. And if they drank to my health as often as they did my poor mother’s memory, then so it was. The show was for us both, and in its way, for all London as well.