The Countess and the King: A Novel of the Countess of Dorchester and King James II

by Holloway Scott, Susan

  “People will see what they wish to see, Katherine,” he said when I asked him his version of the tragedy. “You know that as well as I.”

  “Then tell me what you saw,” I said. “What did you make of His Highness’s demeanor?”

  “I saw the duke behave with authority and command and great personal bravery,” he said firmly. “He showed strength of character in a situation of enormous peril. He is everything we should want in a leader and a king.”

  “I am glad of it.” I nodded, yet frowned, too. “If I told you what I heard Colonel Churchill tell—”

  “I can guess too well,” he said, and lay his hand on my arm as if to caution me. “Recall what I said first, Katherine, that people will see what they wish. Recall what you already know of John Churchill. That should be answer enough.”

  And for now, though I remained uneasy, it was.

  THE MEMORY OF THE WRECK SOON subsided in people’s minds, as did the reasons that James had been sent away in the first place. In many ways, he was more a guest at Court, and an extremely well-behaved one at that. He was careful to keep his opinions to himself, and was as pleasant as possible to everyone. I knew he was trying to reassure his brother and make certain he’d not be sent away again, like some low house servant from the country, on approval before a new master. I could see the little cracks that the strain of maintaining so careful a front required, and when he came to my house, I made sure that everything was done to please and amuse him, by way of a respite.

  He’d find little of that in his own quarters. I’d been shocked by the change in Mary Beatrice when she’d returned. She was somber and ill, her cheeks pale and deep circles beneath her eyes. She was great with child again, yet because she already dreaded the outcome, she took no joy in her fecundity. She had suffered through at least one pregnancy for each of the ten years of her marriage, and several more besides, if miscarriages were counted as well, yet she’d no living children to show for so much suffering. The constant grief and travail had broken her health, and little remained of the beautiful young princess who had charmed us all as a bride. Always devout, she had withdrawn deeper and deeper into the murky solace of her priests and prayers, and I could only imagine how melancholy her household must now be.

  While she had been away, I had come to think of Mary Beatrice as my rival for James’s love, and I was fully prepared to defend myself against whatever attacks she might make against me. But after seeing her pitiful condition, I would have been mean and small indeed to consider her as a serious threat, or to plot against her in any way.

  Too close to her reckoning for travel, she remained in London while the rest of us retreated to Windsor, as was Charles’s habit in the late summer. Word came in the middle of August that she’d been safe delivered of a daughter, named Charlotte in honor of the king. James joined us soon after this daughter’s birth and scarce spoke of the child. Two months later, she, too, was dead, perishing of convulsions in her mother’s arms.

  But as sad as this was, few of us at Windsor spared so much as a tear for the death of one more royal princess. We were far too occupied by the latest mischief committed by Lord Monmouth. With Shaftesbury to light a fresh contentious fire beneath his spoiled bottom, His Grace had once again taken to making a royal progress about the countryside, encouraging supporters to flock to him as a younger, more charming, Protestant alternative to James for the Crown. He was even touching invalids for the King’s Evil, a right he most definitely did not possess. Making matters more ostentatious was the small legion of armed soldiers His Grace had with him as an escort, much the same sort of mercenary ruffians in gorgeous uniforms that Lord Shaftesbury had employed at Oxford. Indeed, they might even have been the same men, and no one would have been surprised if they were.

  On the morning after this news had reached us at Windsor, I had gone walking with several other ladies by the river, while James had been closeted with his brother. Of course we ladies spoke of Lord Monmouth, and I guessed James and Charles did the same. I was curious to learn what Charles’s reaction was going to be, and when I saw James coming up the staircase toward me I smiled, eager to hear what he’d learned from his brother.

  But James’s expression was as black as thunder, his face so ruddy with anger that I feared for him.

  “What is it, sir?” I asked with concern. “Is there anything that I—”

  “Come with me, Katherine,” he said, grabbing me by the arm. “If I do not speak to someone of this, I am sure I will burst.”

  He pulled me into the nearest room, a small parlor used for card playing. Two serving maids were within, tidying the room from the night before, and at once they lowered their eyes and curtsied.

  “Leave us,” James said curtly. “At once. At once!”

  The two maids fled, and James shoved the door shut after them.

  “My brother is blind, Katherine, absolutely blind where Monmouth is concerned,” he began, fair spitting the words at the door he’d just shut. “He refuses to see what is happening, what will happen, if Monmouth and Shaftesbury are not halted.”

  I took off the broad-brimmed hat I’d worn against the sun while walking. “Do you mean His Grace’s progresses, sir?”

  “Of course I mean the damned progresses!” he exclaimed, wheeling to face me. “Monmouth goes traipsing about the country like some costumed mountebank, kissing wenches and waving his sword and making a raree show of the monarchy as he pretends he has any true right to the throne!”

  I had never seen James so angry before, his cheeks mottled and his eyes afire like a madman’s, and the depth of his rage frightened me.

  “Be easy, sir, I beg you,” I urged, fearing he’d cause himself an apoplexy. “All his life, His Grace has been a spoiled, willful fool. You’ve seen it yourself, again and again. You must not let him vex you so.”

  “This is beyond vexation, Katherine,” he declared, shaking his head. “Vexation I could bear, but not this. This is rebellion, anarchy, treason! He will destroy us all without a care, and then who will be the fools, I ask you?”

  “But surely His Majesty—”

  “My brother refuses to see what’s before his face, even when the proof is there in front of him.” Unable to keep still, he stormed back and forth across the room, punctuating his words with sharp thrusts of his hands as if dueling with phantoms he could not see. “They plot in London and in the north, Katherine, planning our ruin. It will be worse than my father’s time, worse than anything that England has seen before, and all because my brother refused to stop his bastard son.”

  Absently I turned the brim of my hat around and around in my hands. I didn’t doubt that there were more plots, not with Shaftesbury behind them. James had spies everywhere, which was understandable when he had the most to lose.

  “What would you have His Majesty do, sir?” I asked. “Would you have him send Lord Monmouth away again?”

  “Why, when all he does is defy my brother’s orders and return?” James stopped his pacing to stand before the fireplace, striking both his fists on the mantelpiece as he stared into the fire. “No, the time for obliging Monmouth is long done. You cannot reason with a spoiled fool, and a spoiled fool with an army could destroy everything. Better to put him in the Tower now, where he can do no harm, and try him for treason and punish him as he deserves, as a lesson to others.”

  “But the punishment for treason is death, sir,” I said, appalled. It was impossible for me to think of a pretty, charming fool like Lord Monmouth as the same dangerous threat that James so clearly did. The real hazard lay in him being used as a pawn by a clever villain like Lord Shaftesbury, but even so, I saw no reason that Lord Monmouth should face execution for choosing false companions. “You cannot intend that, not for His Grace.”

  “It would have already been done long ago, if it had been any other man in the kingdom besides Monmouth.” James turned away from the fire and back to me. His anger was spent, but the chilly resolve that had replaced it was more frighten
ing still. “England must come first, Katherine, the strength of the kingdom and the peace of her people. How can one bastard duke matter more than that?”

  “Because he’s His Majesty’s son, sir,” I said, the truth that was obvious to everyone. “He loves His Grace, faults and all.”

  “Then what of me?” he demanded, his voice raw with a misery I’d never expected to see. “I’m his brother. I have always supported him and followed his wishes. Isn’t that enough for him to love me as well as his bastard?”

  “Oh, my dear sir,” I said softly, holding my arms out to him as I did to Lady Katherine, and wearily he came to me, holding me tight.

  “I have done everything he desired, Katherine,” he said over my shoulder. “Everything, and yet it has never been enough.”

  There was no answer to that, not that I could give. “His Majesty will do what is right, sir,” I said finally. “For you, and for England.”

  LATER THAT SAME DAY, WE LEARNED that Charles had in fact ordered Lord Monmouth arrested, as James had wished. The charge wasn’t treason, however, but disturbing the peace at Stafford with his false royal progress—his “raree show,” as James had called it—and His Grace was taken to London to be tried before the King’s Bench. He posted bail, but he was absolutely forbidden to make any more of his progresses or to appear at Court, and forbidden, too, from appealing to his royal father in person to try to weasel free from his misdeeds. Though in the end he was acquitted and discharged, he found no agreeable choice open to him but to leave England again and go wandering about France and Holland, where James heartily wished him to remain forever.

  While Lord Monmouth failed to heed his father’s warnings and his uncle’s wrath, Lord Shaftesbury understood exactly what it meant. His Lordship knew there’d be no paternal clemency for him as there had been for Monmouth, and fearing his own arrest, he fled in disguise to Holland. When word reached the Court in January that he had died, the sentiment was one not of rejoicing, but of a quiet relief.

  There were no bonfires in London to mark the Guy Fawkes Day of 1682, no pope burnings or flaming effigies of any kind. Instead there was a new law against them, and a new crop of Tory sheriffs, carefully put into their offices by royal interests earlier in the summer, who patrolled the streets to make certain no one disobeyed. I heard much grumbling about this in Bloomsbury Square among my father and his friends, protesting that this was only one more Tory limitation on our freedom as Englishmen. When I remembered the hatred and bigotry that I’d witnessed myself at the bonfires so long ago, I could only applaud this particular limitation as a wise and useful caution.

  By the beginning of 1683, London was outwardly a quieter place, and James, too, seemed more at peace with himself and his role within his brother’s reign. In a rush of generosity, James increased my income and that of our daughter’s as well. He’d gruffly said it was for the trouble he’d caused me and the devotion I’d offered him: dear, honest sentiments that made me love him more. A more visible proof was the large diamond ring he gave me for my twenty-fifth birthday, the stone sufficiently impressive to draw Louise’s covetous admiration, to my considerable amusement.

  The king, too, took care to look after those who had served him well. John Churchill was raised up to Lord Churchill of Eyemouth, Berwickshire, in the Scots peerage to acknowledge his loyalty to the Yorks in their exile. Colonel Grahme was likewise rewarded with a plum mission with Lord Ferversham to Versailles to present the English king’s compliments to the French. Charles also decided that Laurence Hyde had labored long and well enough as first minister without a title, and made him the new Earl of Rochester.

  While I didn’t begrudge Lory Hyde the well-earned honor, both Father and I regretted how swiftly Charles had turned over the peerage of our old friend John Wilmot. His young son had only that year died, sent to his own untimely grave by the same grievous pox that had infected and killed both his father and mother before him. It was as true a tragedy as any in our time, to see a family with so much promise destroyed by that loathsome disease. It was also sadly a measure of our time that they were so quickly forgotten and replaced—a humbling lesson in the futility of striving for the honors of Court, and how soon their empty joy is revealed.

  With such a lesson fresh before my conscience, my thoughts returned once again to what Dr. Burnet had said to me, and the path of righteousness he had seen set before my uncertain feet. I doubted that accepting diamond rings from James and acting the confidante of the Duchess of Portsmouth were exactly what that good gentleman had intended, but by now I’d grown so accustomed to my place at Court and so secure in James’s affections that I could not imagine my life otherwise—the excuse of all who consider reformation, but choose not to pursue it.

  In this fashion, I once again watched one year slip into the next, content to remain as I was, and happily ignorant of how much around me was due to change, and not for the better, either.

  THERE WAS NOTHING REMARKABLE ABOUT JAMES and Charles going to Newmarket at the end of February for the winter racing; it would have been more remarkable if they’d stayed away. They rode down with a small company of gentlemen and other attendants, making a merry party of it along the way, as was their habit. But one night not long after they’d settled comfortably into Palace House, a boy in a stable nearby left an open lantern too close to a measure of feed-straw, which soon took flame. A brisk breeze from the northeast did the rest, and before long not only that stable but a good deal of the rest of the town had burned to charred timbers. Grooms had been alerted soon enough to lead most of the horses clear, and there was little loss of either human or equine life.

  But the damage to Newmarket was so severe and all in such disarray that the difficult decision was made to cancel the winter racing. Dutifully Charles and James offered funds for repairs, and then, with nothing further to keep them there, they rode back to London. One of the sights along their way was an ancient stone home in Hoddesdown, Hertfordshire, called Rye House after an earlier occupant who had been a maltster. A large, sprawling affair, the house was a picturesque landmark to travelers, with a commanding view of the narrowing road and all who passed by.

  I welcomed James back to London, pleased to have him returned earlier than expected, and we all slipped back into our lives as before. But in June, a disgruntled Whig betrayed his comrades and revealed a treasonous plot to murder both royal brothers. It was simple enough: Rye House was to have been the point of ambush, when a cadre of rebels would have swept from the house onto the royal party and trapped it there on the narrowest part of the Newmarket Road. The king and the duke were both to have been murdered, and all others with them who resisted. The resulting chaos to the country would have been the spark to a general rebellion against both Stuarts and Tories, and have led to a new regime with sympathies to the Protestant Whigs. Everything had been in careful readiness, made easy by the king’s predictable routines and his famous lack of concern for his personal safety.

  But the fire in the Newmarket stables had changed everything, and when the king’s party left the town earlier than expected, they’d unwittingly saved themselves from certain assassination. The realization that the king and duke might well have died and another civil war begun if not for the fire sent chills of dread throughout the country and across the Continent, and Whitehall was swept with relief and congratulations on the fortuitous escape.

  James was horrified by how close he’d once again come to death, and for several weeks insisted on keeping a brace of loaded pistols beside my bed whenever he visited me. Louise told me that Charles, too, was much shaken.

  Among those named in this plot were Lord Shaftesbury, now dead and beyond mortal punishment, as well as several other gentlemen, promptly arrested, known for their Whiggish politics: William, Lord Russell, son to the Earl of Bedford; Lord Grey of Werke; and Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex. Lord Grey escaped to France, while Lord Russell and Lord Essex were sent to the Tower. Lord Essex escaped trial in his own way by committing sui
cide, perhaps even more shocking than his part of the plot. There were a great many other conspirators named, too, lesser men of little interest.

  But one conspirator’s name in particular stood out among many, as boldly as if it had been writ on the list in scarlet ink. It was a name that shocked some, and caused others to swear they could have predicted it all along. But most of all, this name racked Charles himself with fury and despair.

  That name was James Scott, His Grace the Duke of Monmouth.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON

  July 1683

  Most spectacles at Court were glorious affairs, meant to awe or entertain. Displays of fireworks and armory, masques and plays, mock battles, balls in honor of royal birthdays or noble visitors from foreign lands were all anticipated and discussed and reported as great events to the farthest reaches of the kingdom.

  One of these was the wedding of James’s remaining unmarried daughter, the Lady Anne, to Prince George of Denmark. It was a match made for politics, not love. Though the groom was Protestant, James gave his approval, since the prince had been suggested by the Catholic King Louis himself. The wedding took place on 28 July, St. Anne’s Day, in the Chapel Royal of St. James’s Palace. By Charles’s decree, the ceremony was a quiet one for royalty, with few guests beyond the family. But at the ball that followed, I saw the jewels the groom had given his bride, including the pearl and diamond necklace valued at more than six thousand pounds, a pretty show of affection indeed. The couple themselves seemed bland and dull, but content enough with their fate, and hopes were high that together they could produce a Protestant child, something that the Prince and Princess of Orange had yet to do.