The King's Favorite

by Susan Holloway Scott

  When that would happen, however, was anyone’s guess, or more properly, Charles’s decision. After the election in the fall, Parliament had met only long enough to be prorogued and sent home again by the king, who swore he’d continue to do so until they could be more agreeable to him and his desires. As can be imagined, this did not sit well, and only served to add to the unease that had settled over London.

  In November, too, came the most spectacularly lurid Pope-burning procession yet, complete with a effigy of the corpse of murdured magistrate Edmund Berry Godfrey, and marchers dressed as Jesuits and cardinals wielding bloody knives. But this year the procession was staged not on Guy Fawkes Day, but the Accession Day of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth over the Catholic Queen Mary of Scotland. With Monmouth still parading himself through the countryside as the Protestant Duke, the significance was unmistakable.

  In response, our Christmas season at Whitehall was more subdued than I could ever recall. There was also a subtle change in Charles himself, a new somberness that had appeared after his recovery from the fever. This seriousness of purpose had drifted down upon the rest of us like a fine muffling of new snow. Our balls were smaller and the banquets less lavish, the ladies’ gowns less opulent and the gentlemen’s wigs shrunk smaller, as if we all were hesitant to celebrate too loudly, for fear of being challenged for our extravagance.

  Surely I felt this myself, though for me I blamed it upon the lingering pall of my mother’s death. Charles understood, having so little of his own family left to him. Now as often as not, when we lay together in my silver bed, he’d rest with his head upon my breast and his eyes closed, my arms looped in fond protectiveness about his long body, than tussling in more agile pursuits of pleasure: a rare contentment that few would believe of us. It was strange to think how merriment had first brought us together, but now how sorrow made us closer, another layer of sympathy shared between us.

  Thus I was not surprised when, one morning in March, he called me briskly from a group of other ladies at the palace.

  “Walk with me, Nelly,” Charles said, claiming my hand to draw me along with him. “I can’t keep still any longer.”

  We passed the two guards who kept random visitors from the Privy Gallery, and through the doors that separated it from the rest of the palace. This passageway was private to the king and his closest attendants, as its very name implied, and here he knew we’d be as much alone as in any part of the palace. The gallery was long and narrow, the length of one side of the palace. Diamond-paned windows lined one side, and old-fashioned portraits in black frames hung along the other, silent witnesses to God only knew how much folly over time; and how much more today, I could not yet guess.

  “Is anything amiss, sir?” I asked, already breathless from the fierce pace he was intent on setting. “Has anything happened that—”

  “No,” he said, a single word that brooked no further question. “I would walk with you, that is all, and there’s no time for the park. This must do.”

  With my hand tight clasped in his, he led me up and down the length of the gallery, up and down without a word spoken. His expression was set and determined, his gaze straight ahead, until my shorter legs could not bear another turn.

  “ ’Od’s blood, sir,” I said, winded, drawing to such a sudden halt that he must needs stop with me. “If you are to race me over this course like one of your nags at Newmarket, then at least tell me the name of the prize at the finish!”

  He looked down at me, almost surprised, I think, to find me there at his side. Slowly, he raised my hand to his lips with the old gallantry.

  “Nelly,” he said softly. “You’ve no notion of what your presence alone brings to me.”

  I raised my brows, skeptical. “My presence, sir? Standing here as useful as a wart on the back of a toad?”

  “A very comely wart, however,” he said solemnly, not smiling as I’d expected. Instead he took my hand and led me once again, this time from the gallery to the Council Chamber. I hung back at the doorway, for this was not a place for women, but Charles insisted I enter with him. Waiting at the table were Lord Sunderland, his secretary, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and two lesser bishops. As they bowed in turn to the king, I didn’t miss the surprise and contempt flicker across their faces as they saw me with Charles. It never changed with gentlemen like that.

  “Stand here beside me,” he said softly, “so you might see.”

  Then he sat, too, in the tall-backed armchair at the end of the table. Without prelude, he took up the pen that was waiting for him and began to write, the pen slashing boldly over the page. He didn’t pause or consider, and when he was done, he held the sheet up and read it aloud, so there’d be no doubt before the witnesses.

  For the voiding of any dispute which many happen in time to come concerning the succession to the Crown, I do here declare in the presence of Almighty God, that I never gave nor made any contract of marriage, nor was married to any woman whatsoever, but to my present wife Queen Catherine now living.

  “I trust that will do what is necessary,” Charles said, signing the bottom with his familiar “Charles R.” As he rose, he pushed the paper across the table to Sunderland, and the thing was done. No mystical black box could ever put Monmouth on the throne now, and not even Shaftesbury could alter what Charles had sworn against his eldest son with this simple sentence.

  When he and I were alone again in the Privy Gallery, he looked down at me.

  “Only you know what that cost me, Nelly,” he said, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear him. “He’ll never forgive me, and how can I fault him?”

  “Oh, sir,” I murmured gently. “What else could you do, when he’s left you no choice?”

  “For England,” he said. “For England.”

  I understood.

  Eager to escape the racket of the dinner, I slipped through one of the side doors and into the garden, gladly leaving the laughter and chatter and too-warm room for the cool, sweet air of the early spring evening. Charles and I and scores of other fine folk from the court had ridden out here this morning to Copt Hall to dine, and to see the Middlesex estate of my old friend (and my Charles the Second) Lord Dorset. Ordinarily, I’d not be included in such grand company, but Dorset had insisted, for the sake of old memories. It was a fine thing to leave London on such a day, and finer still to leave the politics and plots behind, even if for a single day.

  “Stargazing, Nelly?” Lord Rochester had found the same door, coming to stand beside me. Unable to trust the fading strength in his legs any longer, he always kept a walking stick with him now, pretending it was for fashion, not necessity. But I saw how heavily he was leaning on it, and how he’d used it to gauge the stone walk that his eyes could no longer see. Yet his smile was as unchanged as I’d remembered from the old days, as sly and charming as if he still were the handsomest young coxcomb at Whitehall.

  “What, because I look upward to the sky, now I must be stargazing?” I replied, laughing. “Faith, as if I’d know a star from a moon from a bottle of ale.”

  “Oh, I do believe you would,” he said. “Galieo, Copernicus, and wise old Nelly.”

  “Not wise, my lord.” I sighed, contented and pleased by the elegant view spread before me. “Not I.”

  “You’re a good deal more wise than the ninnies in Parliament,” he said, tapping his stick for emphasis. “I’m giving up dancing on their pleasure, and waiting for them to stop squabbling so the king will let them meet. They’re welcome to London, the lot of them. I’m from here to Adderbury in the morning.”

  “That’s good,” I said, nodding. “The country always restores you.”

  “See, now, wise Nelly again,” he said, teasing, “and of the physicking variety, too.”

  “But you do improve after you’ve visited Adderbury, you dissembling rascal,” I scoffed. “You say so yourself.”

  “I say a great many things,” he said wearily, that charming smile shifting to a ghastly grimace. “Do not delude yoursel
f, Nelly. I doubt that even all the trees and flowers at Adderbury—and there are a great many trees and flowers to the place—could ease me now. Nothing will.”

  “I’m not giving you up yet, my lord,” I said, “nor will I say farewell. We’ve too many wagers still to make at the spring races at Newmarket. The king has some new horse he can’t wait to put against your gray, and—and—oh, damn you, you’ve made me cry.”

  Impulsively I threw my arms about him to embrace him, shocked by how sharply his ribs and spine jutted through the heavy brocade of his coat.

  “I will not say farewell to you, Rochester,” I said fiercely. “You lying, cheating scoundrel, I will not let you go yet.”

  “Then don’t,” he said, and winked his near-blind eye. “I’ll still take all your money if you dare bet against my gray.”

  But Rochester, the lying, cheating, charming scoundrel, never gave me the chance.

  May came, and as usual I made preparations to shift my little household from Pall Mall to Windsor for the spring races at Newmarket. This was always one of my favorite times of the year, for I loved not only the excitement of the racing, but also how much more at ease Charles was here than in London. The events of the last year had badly buffeted us both, and I was anticipating our usual respite here more than usual.

  But before I could go open my Windsor house, I began to feel ill. My health had always been so robust that at first I shrugged it away, determining it to be nothing worth noting. Yet each day, it seemed I worsened. I was feverish and my head ached, my stomach plagued me so I could not eat, and though I suffered from such weakness in my limbs that I could scarce rouse myself from my bed, I likewise could find no solace in sleep, tossing so through the night that I wept from frustration and exhaustion.

  Alarmed, Charles first feared I’d the same illness that had nearly claimed him the summer before, a kind of river fever brought on by living near the Thames. Against the warnings of his panicking advisors, he insisted on coming to visit me, ignoring the risks to his own health from concern for mine in a way that made me weep fresh love for him.

  But the doctors said my symptoms differed from what had afflicted him, that I’d some other complaint that they were unable to put a name to. That worried me more, and when the usual round of treatments they prescribed (bleeding, cupping, and purging, plus many noxious potions) brought no improvement, I began to fear in earnest.

  My greatest dread, of course, was that after so many years, I’d finally somehow been poxed. It would have seemed the bitterest irony imaginable to me to have been struck now, as an older woman of thirty. I’d been as constant as the day to Charles, and for all that I jested about being a whore, I’d never kept whorish ways, and prided myself on my cleanliness. Unlike nearly every other woman I knew, I could count the number of men who’d shared my favors on one hand, and not even use my thumb at that. How many others at court in that time could make such a claim?

  I tried to take heart in the fact that my symptoms were not the same as others I’d known who’d suffered from the curse of Venus, that my case was more peculiar than that. I tried not to recall the terrible suffering I’d seen, from the sad, decaying whores I remembered from the streets of my childhood, to the tragic specter of Lord Rochester. Yet when I received the kindest letter imaginable from His Lordship’s own mother, the dowager countess, with her own recipe for the special milk diet that she promised relieved her son’s sufferings, I broke down in fresh torrents of despair.

  I was too sick to go with the others to Newmarket for the races, too sick to care that I hadn’t, but not so sick that my life was ever in despair. I lay alone, curled in my bed, with the curtains drawn against the cheery spring and summer days, and felt one glide into the next without any change.

  Thus I was ill prepared for the horrible news that Charles himself brought to me one June morning, news that was so grim that he told me later he’d considered not telling me at all, from fear it would be beyond my bearing.

  “Nelly,” he said, his face somber and sorrowful as he sat on the edge of my bed. “My dearest Nelly, there is no easy way for me to tell you this. I’ve news this morning from Paris, the worst news imaginable. Our little James is dead.”

  I stared at him, too stricken to comprehend, let alone accept. “Little James? My Jemmy? Dead? Dead?”

  “They say he’d cut his leg climbing a tree after apples with other boys. The wound itself was so inconsequential that he didn’t show his tutors, fearing he’d be punished for taking the apples. Untended, it had festered and went putrid, and by the time the surgeons were summoned, it was too late.” He pressed his hand over his mouth, stopping his own emotions. “Oh, Nelly, he was such a fine lad!”

  “Why weren’t we told when he was hurt?” I demanded, my voice turning shrill with my grief. “I could have gone to him, sir, I could have saved him with English doctors, I know it. I could—”

  “Everything that could have been done was, Nelly,” he said heavily. “He was my son, and everyone at the school knew it. They say he died swiftly, without suffering overmuch. There was no time for us to be summoned.”

  “But to let him die, to perish without us!” I wailed, my voice breaking with my heart. “He was such a little boy, my own little darling. Oh, Jemmy, Jemmy!”

  “I am sorry, sweet,” Charles said, his shoulders so bowed beneath his own grief that at last I fell into his arms, and we comforted one another as only grieving parents can do. Only we understood what we’d lost; only we could share the guilt over having trusted others to look after our child. My mother had perished but a few months earlier, and now my young son, and the weight of those losses crushed heavily on my poor fragile self.

  Yet more ill news was to come, no less painful for being long expected. After leaving Middlesex, Lord Rochester had returned to his home at Adderbury. He had, in fact, felt so much improved that he’d set out by post to others of his properties in Somerset. But though once he’d ridden his own horses in breakneck races at Epsom, now a country road was beyond his wasted constitution, and broke it. In an agony of relapse, he was carried by coach to his old home at Wood-stock Lodge and put to bed, and never rose again. There he died in great pain in July, aged but thirty-three. There was much talk of how he’d died in a frenzy of salvation and repentance, but I doubted it, knowing him as I had, and credited any such talk to the laudanum.

  It was a bleak, cheerless time for me, that summer, and yet, with the oddities of the frail human heart, when I felt my spirit bent near to breaking with sorrow, my body began to improve and grow stronger. Relieved, and to take my thoughts from my grief, Charles gave me Burford House, a splendid estate of forty acres not far from the castle in Windsor. He had me brought there, urging me to make whatever improvements I chose at his expense.

  At first I’d little strength for such worldly work, but as the summer progressed, I began to see Burford as a legacy for my remaining son, a rare gift to grant him and his heirs, and I threw myself into the work for his sake. I’d no wish yet to return to London, or even the gay life at Newmarket. I was instead content to remain hidden away in the country, finding some semblance of peace among the gardens, and letting myself heal in body and heart.

  And considering what would come next, for me, for Charles, and for England—then faith, how fortunate it was that I did.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  PALL MALL, LONDON October 1680

  “They will not see reason, Nelly,” Charles declared, his frustration with this newly called session of Parliament still sputtering even as he sat in my parlor. “All that time away from one another, and they have learned nothing, and done nothing, except what their master Shaftesbury dictates.”

  Swiftly I moved to refill the glass in his hand. I had been in the visitors’ gallery earlier to hear his speech as he opened the session. (My presence was much noted, as Charles and I had intended: the Protestant whore, supporting the Protestant king; I was as good as a signboard outside an innkeeper’s door.) Charles
had labored hard upon that speech, I knew, writing most of it himself instead of relying on royal scribes, because he’d felt the message of it that strongly. I’d listened to him practice it, and offered a few old hints from the playhouse to help him better deliver his lines, for they were worth hearing. He’d called for unity between the warring Whigs and Tories, and he’d reminded them that England, as she stood, remained the envy of the rest of Europe—unless these two factions let their bickering tear apart the fiber of the country. It had been a good message, a sound message, the exact note for a land so ill at ease with itself; yet the members would not listen, let alone heed it.

  “They’re like wicked children, sir,” I said, “determined only on having their way, and no other.”

  He sighed mightily, rubbing his hand across his forehead. As was his habit, he’d tossed aside his wig as soon as he’d entered the privacy of my room, and the firelight glowed across his clean-shaven skull, as if reflecting all the furious thoughts that were doubtless fermenting within.

  “Would that I could thrash them like wicked children,” he said, “and send them to bed without their suppers.”

  “You tried that, sir, by not letting them meet for a year after they were elected,” I said, settling on a small cushioned stool before him. “It seems they did not care for the punishment.”

  “Not at all.” He sipped at the wine, his expression melancholy. “Why is it they cannot recall what befell them in my father’s time? Why must they be so hell-bent on repeating the folly of the last generation?”

  “ ‘That which I value above all the treasure in the world is a perfect union among ourselves,’ ” I said softly, reciting his speech from memory. “ ‘Nothing but this can restore the kingdom to that strength and vigor which it seems to have lost, and raise us again to that consideration which England hath usually had.’ ”