Yet when later I described every outrageous detail to Charles, already at Windsor for the summer, the tears in my eyes were genuine, as much for myself as for my poor mother. How could it not be so? Her death had reminded me keenly of my own mortality, and of how swiftly the joys of life must pass, no matter how hard I tried to tug them back.
The Whiggish slanderers were quick to toss their filth at me after my mother’s funeral. Though their attacks fair stank with venom against me, I knew that they mainly meant to attack Charles, and the rest of his supporters, too:
O Sacred Sir, protect this Drab no more,
If you must have one, use a handsome Whore.
Of such foul Hags there ne’re can be a Dearth,
O send her to her Dunghill, Mother Earth!
In former days, I would have jeered at such cruel jibes in news-sheets and pamphlets, and shrugged them away as nothing. Now I paused, plagued by my own doubts. My mother’s bloated visage was too fresh in my thoughts, and the face I saw in my own looking-glass seemed to show every care I’d ever felt. Charles swore I was every bit as lovely to him now as I’d been when I’d first caught his eye, maybe even more lovely, with the added burnish of our longstanding attachment. I was not convinced. In my world of the playhouse and the court, where fifteen was considered the most beguiling age for a woman, to be nearly double that was to be invisible, and no longer worth the notice of any gentleman.
But even more somber reminders would come. Soon after I’d returned to Windsor, the king played tennis on his court near the river, as was his habit. The day was warm, the game more so, and afterward, as he dried himself, he was seized with a violent, quaking fever. Because he asked for me, I was allowed to his bedside early. But as his condition grew more grave, my place there was given over to a crowd of physicians, advisors, clerics, and other important men. Terrified for his health, I could only pray and beg for word. When it was decided to summon the Duke of York from abroad, I was devastated, and feared for the worst.
But Charles was more clever than all the physicians combined. One of the scientific gentlemen whom he’d patronized had told him a new cure against fevers, and against the advice of the royal physicians (and not a few Anglican bishops), he’d insisted on taking this so-called Jesuit’s bark. At once his fever was reduced and the danger passed, and by the time his brother arrived from Brussels, he was sitting up in his bed, dining on partridge and mutton, and demanding to go to the races at Newmarket.
“You cannot know how I feared for you, my love,” I told him fervently as soon as I was permitted alone in his company. “To think how near I came to losing you, sir!”
“No, you didn’t,” he said, laughing at my worries. “It will take a good deal more than a little river fever to kill me, Nelly. You won’t be rid of me so easy as that.”
But while he might have believed in his own invincibility (and truly, I think he did), the rest of the court and the country was shocked by this reminder that their tall, lean, virile monarch was in fact mortal. Suddenly the need to settle on his successor seemed much more urgent, and not a mere political exercise.
It was grimly noted how the Duke of York had been summoned home, as much to take the crown if his brother had faltered as to bid him comfort on his sickbed. Likewise was it noted how Monmouth had not been called to come, and was reported to be in a furious sulk because of it. In Parliament, the Exclusionists began framing another bill. In France, Louis was said to be considering new attacks upon the Dutch, while William of Orange worried over how a Romish English king would affect his Protestant alliance.
And I—all I could think of was how close I’d come to losing my best and dearest friend.
“You must think ahead, Nelly,” counseled Rochester, who’d been on duty at Windsor as Gentleman of the Bedchamber with Lord Dorset when the king had been taken ill, and had seen the severity of the situation for himself. “Look at me. Do you believe I’d squander my time in all those tedious sessions if I didn’t fear what could come next?”
This was true. In all the time of our acquaintance, I’d never known him to take his seat in the House of Lords so assiduously, attending almost every session and meeting pertaining to succession and exclusion.
“It’s not only ourselves, my dear,” he said, more kindly. “We’ve others dependent on us for their futures. Both Cleveland and Portsmouth have feathered their nests with golden down, and you should, too, before it’s too late.”
Still I shook my head, too frightened and unwilling to confront the unhappy future he was predicting. Charles had swiftly regained his health, and was once again the picture of a gentleman in his prime. He could, and would, live for many more years. I was sure of it.
Alas, the same could not be said of Lord Rochester. Each time I saw him, I was shocked anew by his obvious decline, even in the times when he swore to me he was improved. The pox, the stone, fevers, drink, and a score of other ailments he’d hinted at but not deigned to describe: any could claim him at any time.
He smiled sadly at me, as if reading my thoughts with uncanny ease. “ ‘But he who lives not wise and sober’ ” he said, half singing a morose old ballad, “ ‘Falls with the leaf still in October. ’ ”
“Hush, hush, don’t,” I said swiftly. “There’s no amusement in that.”
“I didn’t intend there to be, my dear,” he said. “Do you recall Jane Roberts, Nelly? She kept my company while you were still a player, I think, and I’ve seen her more often since in Hatton Garden. A sweet-faced minister’s daughter, with more taste for sin than psalms.”
I nodded. I did remember her, barely, a chit somewhat younger than I, giggling as she’d hung on Rochester’s arm. If he’d seen her now in his visits to Hatton Garden, then she must be sadly poxed, indeed, to have sunk to that.
“Savile said she died last week, the poor creature,” Rochester said. “You might tell the king, if you think of it.”
Now I recalled Janey Roberts in sharply focused memory. A yellow-haired girl being called from the pit to the king’s box one night at the playhouse, and leaving alone with him in his carriage afterward. Another whore who’d shared the royal bed, another who’d tickled my Charles’s cods, if only for a night or two, another dead of the pox and younger than I.
Charles was scarce restored from his illness before the buzzing wasps of politics returned to plague him. With monstrous presumption, Shaftesbury on his own will called a session of the Privy Council, with the topic to be the unlawfulness of the Duke of York’s sudden return to England. Furious, Charles declared Shaftesbury had gone too far, and demanded—and received—his resignation, to be replaced by the Earl of Sunderland.
But Shaftesbury out of office was little different from Shaftesbury in it, and he continued to manage his Whigs in Parliament from behind the curtain of his disgrace, hidden in his lodgings in the City. (Though I will say that one audacious action of his—to attempt to have the Romish Duchess of Portsmouth tried as a common whore before a Whig jury in a Middlesex court, to be put into the stocks if convicted—made me laugh aloud to imagine.)
For his part, Charles was perfectly aware of the trouble that his brother’s visit had caused. As soon as it could be arranged, he’d packed York back to Brussels.
Next, Charles turned to his other trial, the Duke of Monmouth, who’d persisted in continuing the kind of blatant plays for popular support that I’d witnessed at the theatre.
“Doesn’t he see what he’s doing, Nelly?” Charles asked of me, despairing as he described yet one more incident of Monmouth declaring himself the rightful Protestant heir. “You’ve spoken with him. You know what’s in his thoughts. Does he truly believe he’ll change my mind if he behaves like this?”
I sighed, unhappy to see father and son so much at odds. “I believe he’s misled, sir. There’s plenty of rascals ready to jump upon his coattails, if only he’ll agree to pull them along.”
“But why does he listen to them?” demanded Charles. “Doesn’t my word account f
or anything? You know me, Nelly. I’ve been nothing but generous to him from the day he was born.”
“Aye, sir, you have,” I agreed. The truth was, of course, that he’d been far too generous, and that Monmouth had been as thoroughly spoiled as anyone could be. “No one could say otherwise. But it’s high time His Grace returned your favors, and supported you as he should. High time, too, that he began to act like a grown man of thirty, not some prankish lad sent down from school.”
“Impudent whelp,” he grumbled. He shook his head and sighed like every other concerned father since the beginning of time, and how I loved him all the more for it. “I should have given him over long ago to you, Nelly, to thrash some sense into his thick-witted skull.”
I would have, too, if Charles had truly wished it of me. But as king he’d other, sterner ways of showing his disapproval. Soon after, Charles ordered Monmouth stripped of his rank as commander-in-chief of the army, and banished him to The Hague, much as York had been sent back to Brussels. Even cast out in the brackish Netherlands, he still refused to show he’d learned anything at all, and instead was said to be intriguing with William of Orange against the French.
These banishments combined with Shaftesbury’s disgrace put both Tories and Whigs off balance, pleasing as they did neither party—which was exactly Charles’s goal. Another hostile House of Commons had been elected earlier in the summer, and Titus Oates and his compatriots continued to belch forth more ugly, preposterous revelations about Popish Plots. Distrust and suspicion seemed to cloud the air, the way that old smoke will on a damp day.
Yet still Charles and I and our older son, Charles, went down to the races at Newmarket, as we always did in September, and tried to pretend that everything else was as it had always been, as well.
It was more night than day when I woke to the voices in the yard before my house, men’s voices, thick with excitement and drink and not caring who heard them. One of them was thumping on my door, demanding to be let in, and when I heard my servants running to attend, I reached for my dressing gown and ran downstairs in my bare feet to join them. I wasn’t particularly alarmed or frightened, for drunken men at my door in Pall Mall were not that uncommon, though I was curious to see who’d show himself at this hour, on such a chill November morning.
But I was scarce prepared for who I found there, grinning like a bedlamite in my front hall.
“Monmouth!” I exclaimed, for in truth it was he, with several companions. “ ’Od’s blood, Your Grace, you surprise me! How do you come to be here? Has the king pardoned you and not told me?”
“Dear Nelly, how good to see you!” He kissed me on both cheeks, pointedly not answering my questions. His lips were cold, his jaw unshaven, and he stank mightily of brandy. “Ah, what a glorious welcome home! Can you hear the church bells tolling? That’s for me, Nelly, for me, welcoming back the Protestant duke.”
Now that I listened, I did hear tolling bells, and more raucous voices in the streets nearby and farther away, as well. But instead of sounding glorious, to me it all sounded suspiciously like Monmouth’s old mischief, back in a new guise.
“What are you about, Your Grace?” I demanded. “What are you doing?”
“Might I beg a night or two beneath your roof, Nelly?” he asked, wheedling and slipping his arm familiarly over my shoulders. “If anyone has place for a weary friend, then I know it’s you.”
Briskly I shoved his arm away. “You’re here without your father’s permission, aren’t you? You’ve disobeyed him and come back against his will, and now you’ve rung these great alarums that will only vex him further.”
“They’re not alarums,” he said, disappointed that I’d not share his rejoicing. “They’re the good English people, clamoring for the assurance of an Anglican king, and the exclusion of the Romish Catholic heir from the throne.”
“Well, then, they don’t need to clamor for an Anglican king,” I said tartly, “because they already have a perfectly good one in your father.”
“Nelly, please,” he begged. “As a rare favor to me.”
I shook my head. “Go sleep in Shaftesbury’s bed,” I said with a disdainful wave of my hand. “He’s the one who’s put you up to this mischief. He can put you to bed in it now, too.”
I turned away, intending to leave him to his fate.
“Please, Nelly,” he said, one final appeal. “I know my father’s displeased with me, but if anyone can make things right between us again, it will be you.”
I paused on the stairs, my back still to him. I do not know exactly what made me turn around to him again—the wish to ease the tension between father and son, as he’d said, or perhaps it was some coaxing flavor of Charles’s own voice in his son’s plea that won me.
“Very well, Prince Perkin,” I said with a sigh of resignation. “Tonight, and no more.”
But one night stretched to another, and another after that, and none of it the way I’d wished it.
When Charles came to my house the next evening to dine, as he did most every evening, I learned far more of what Monmouth had done: how he and his supporters, spurred on by Shaftesbury’s men, had rallied mobs from Dover to London to cheer for him. They’d bribed others to pull the bells in Protestant churches as if for great rejoicing, and set bonfires in villages and London streets alike. They’d made sure that ale ran freely in taverns, too, so that every man could drink a health to the Protestant duke if they pleased, which, of course, most everyone did. Who would wish to stand firm for York and popery before a drunken mob of Protestants?
By the time Monmouth had reached my house, the celebrations were completely beyond control, with all manner of public excess being condoned. It was exactly what Charles had always feared would happen, and what he’d predicted if his hapless son let himself be used by the Whigs. I’d never seen him so furious, raging at every name that might have had a part, and his anger was so overwrought that I feared he’d have another attack of the fever that had nearly claimed his life in August.
It was hardly the proper setting for playing peacemaker, but I felt I owed it to them both to try.
“I’ve told him again and again that I never wed his mother, Nelly,” he said, returning (again and again, in his own way) to one of his most familiar arguments, “yet he refuses to believe me. He’d rather trust Shaftesbury’s infernal black box than the truth.”
“Oh, aye, the black box.” I’ll grant that this infamous box was a splendid bit of Whiggish showmanship, the supposed receptacle for the signed marriage papers between Charles, long-dead Lucy Walters, and the equally long-dead priest who’d wed them; indisputable proof that no one ever saw because it did not exist. Yet that did not keep the mysterious box from making more appearances before the public than Jacob Hall had done upon his rope, and with as much judicious balancing, too. “I’m not sure the box can be blamed on Monmouth, sir. I believe that’s rather the work of another.”
Charles looked up at me sharply, setting down his glass with a thump upon the table. “How do you know, Nelly? Have you seen him? He’s always been partial to you, and you to him, so I’d not doubt that he has. What has he said?”
This was precarious ground for me, for the king still hadn’t learned that his wayward son had taken shelter in this same house, and was even now snoring away in one of my farther bedchambers, with Lady Wentworth curled at his side.
“He’s most grievous sad to have caused you suffering, sir,” I said with the greatest care. “He seemed to me to be thin, drawn with remorse, and—”
“If he no longer wished to be drawn and grevious sad, Nelly, then he knows what he must do,” he said, cutting off my appeal with a single sweep of his arm. His face was livid, his eyes black with fury. “You tell him that if he’ll take himself back to the Hague, where he belongs, and grovels sufficiently for my forgiveness, in time I may grant it. But so long as he continues to play at anarchy, why, then he’ll have not a single word of grace from me. Not one, mind?”
His vehemen
ce shocked me. Pleasing manners meant the world to Charles, and in all the time I’d known him, I’d never seen him rage like this.
“If you please, sir,” I began, but again he cut me off as deftly as if he’d sliced through my words with a sword.
“It does not please me, Nelly, and it never will,” he said, striking his fist on the table hard enough to rattle my silver bowls and spoons. “If he wishes to put his hands into the coals, then he’ll be the one who gets burned by the fire.”
“Sir, I—”
“Nelly.” He seized my hand in his, pulling me from my chair to stand close before him.
“I know you’ll listen to me, even if he won’t,” he said, his voice turning hoarse with urgency and emotion. “You’re far too dear to me to risk over my son’s foolishness. I won’t do it, and I won’t risk it, and I pray to God you won’t, either.”
I wouldn’t. To make peace between a father and son would have been sweet, especially the Protestant whore coming to the aid of the Protestant duke. But it would never be worth risking my place with Charles. Within the week, I’d sent Prince Perkin from my house, but still I feared that by trying to reconcile father and son, the damage had been done between the king and me.
Nor did Monmouth’s actions help my case, or his own, either. Instead, with Shaftsbury’s poisonous whispers still buzzing in his ears, he embarked on a tour of the countryside, relying on his innate charm and handsome face to win doubters to his side. Traveling with him was the infamous black box, as important to him as a magic cloak is to a market-fair conjurer, and with as much real substance, too. But because there remained so much fervor against Papists in general and York in particular, Monmouth found plenty of followers. As 1679 slipped into 1680, there was much talk among the gleeful Whigs about introducing another possible Act of Exclusion as soon as Parliament again met.
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