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

by Holloway Scott, Susan

“That letter, sir,” I said, bitterness welling up within me. “That was not your work, was it?”

  He swallowed, his pale eyes full of sadness. “It would have been better if you’d not come. It would have been better if you’d kept away.”

  “Better for whom, sir?” I asked, my voice brittle. “Better for your priests? Her Highness? Your dogs?”

  “Better for England,” he said heavily. “I wish to lead my life as an example for my people.”

  “What, sir, as a man who turns away from the one who has loved him so loyally and so well?” I cried. “As a man who scorns his son, his daughter?”

  He cleared his throat, and I realized he was no longer meeting my eye, but gazing somewhere above my face. “You’ll be well provided for. I know my duty toward you. You’ll be rewarded for your service.”

  “Faith, my service?” I felt the tears sting my eyes and fought them, too proud to weep before him. “Is that all I’ve been to you, sir, a servant, like one more damned laundress in your employ? Is that reason enough to send me into exile?”

  “It’s not exile, Katherine,” he said quickly. “It’s—it’s a reward, a remembrance.”

  “Then why not reward me here in London, sir?” I asked. “Why send me out of the country?”

  “If that is what you wish,” he said, seizing on the notion. “A grand house here in London, with everything exactly to your tastes and wishes. If you will only promise to keep away—”

  “But I don’t want a house, sir, however grand.” My voice dropped to a plaintive whisper. “I want you.”

  He looked at me again, his expression bleak. “Before God Almighty, I have made a solemn vow to Her Majesty that I will give you up.”

  I drew in my breath sharply. How could I answer that? Yet for him to take such a severe measure could only mean he remained thoroughly attached to me. I saw it in his eyes, his face, his entire posture. No matter what he’d said, he loved and desired me still. It was a small comfort, but for now, it was all I had.

  “A grand house in London, for as long as you live,” he repeated. “I will order the arrangements this very day.”

  “As you wish, sir,” I said forlornly. For now I must retreat, but I would take the offered house. I’d be an idealistic fool not to.

  Especially, I realized, when I’d yet to agree to anything in return.

  FOR THE NEXT THREE MONTHS, James kept to his vow. Oh, he saw me at Court, there among the crowds of others, but he never singled me out for any conversation alone or in confidence. He did not visit me or our children in King Street; his neglect of Lady Katherine and jolly little James perhaps wounded me the most. At Court it was assumed my days of power and place were done, and though I held my head high, I was scorned by many who’d once curried my favor.

  There was no doubt that James had much to occupy him in those first months of his reign. In addition to the plans for his coming coronation, he’d also decided to call the first Parliamentary elections in years, and was rewarded with a staunchly Tory Commons. In return, he made his staunchly Tory brother-in-law Laurence Hyde, Lord Rochester, his lord treasurer and chief minister, choosing him over the Whig Lord Sunderland.

  I watched it all, and waited, confident my turn would come again. James had kept his vow to his wife, but he’d also kept his word to me. He had bought me an extremely fine house in St. James’s Square at the cost of more than ten thousand pounds, and granted me the indulgent freedom to refurbish it however I pleased. I hadn’t forgotten my friend Louise’s advice: that the more a gentleman is willing to invest in a lady, then the more he values her, and the more he will be inclined to invest again. To be sure, this was more a practical sentiment than a romantic one, but to see its truth, I’d only to look again at Louise, the dearest of Charles’s mistresses, and all that he had given her—three merchant ships had been required to carry everything back to France with her—as commensurate to his great affection for her.

  “I’ll credit you with much grandeur, Katherine,” Father said as I showed him the newest improvements in my house. “Surely everything that could have been carved has been so, and gilded besides.”

  I smiled proudly. “I’ve hired the same Italians that worked on Windsor. You can see their artistry everywhere, can’t you?”

  “Most likely the king sees it in his pocketbook,” Father said, running his hand lightly over the polished marble top of a new sideboy. “Or rather, we miserable Englishmen do, since we’re the ones who pay for all this in the end.”

  “It’s paid for by the Privy Purse,” I said in quick defense. “That’s the king’s money.”

  “And who do you think puts the money into that purse, Daughter?” he asked. “Your royal lover would do well to keep extravagance like this quiet until after Parliament meets and votes his new revenues, else he’ll be sorely disappointed.”

  I folded my arms over my chest. Father was far too strong a Whig to have been reelected to James’s new Tory Parliament—the first time in my memory that he’d been without a seat in the Commons—but I knew better than to believe that he’d be keeping his voice entirely silent in political circles.

  “I trust you won’t be the one who shares news of my ‘extravagance,’ ” I warned. “There’s no reason why Lord Dorset or any of your other cronies should be told.”

  “No, no, I won’t betray you, though God knows I should.” He sighed, gazing up at the new likeness of me in a golden gown that had just been delivered from Godfrey Kneller’s studio. “Yet you say the king has yet to visit and view what he’s paid for.”

  “He will in time,” I said, certain beyond question. “I don’t doubt him.”

  Father turned from my painted image back toward me. “Most believe the queen has won, and you have lost,” he said gently. “Kings are notoriously inconstant, Kattypillar. You’ve done very well for yourself, with two handsome children and this house to show for it. If you were to follow the path of Arabella Churchill and marry—”

  “Why do you always wish to see me saddled with a husband?” I asked, more bemused than irritated. Arabella had recently wed Colonel Charles Godfrey, one of her brother’s fellow officers, and though she was said to be thoroughly content, that was not yet the future for me.

  “It’s the security of marriage I wish for you, Katherine,” Father said firmly. “You’re only twenty-seven, with an excellent fortune. No gentleman will find you less agreeable if His Majesty decides his time with you is done.”

  I smiled, serene in my confidence. “But it’s not, Father. He’s not done with me, not by half. He will come back, and when he does, not even the queen will be able to stop it. You will see. He will come back, and I will welcome him when he does.”

  But to my surprise, Father only shook his head, his expression grimmer still. “Then take care, Katherine. That is the best advice I can offer you. If he returns to you, take care, and pray, pray be wary.”

  THE CORONATION OF KING JAMES II and Queen Mary Beatrice of Modena was planned for the 23 April 1685. It was to be a celebration unrivaled by any that had preceded it for splendor and spectacle, and dignitaries and representatives from foreign courts had been streaming into London since the beginning of April. The actual crowning would take place in Westminster Abbey, and be performed by William Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as solemn a rite as any in the Anglican Church, even though James, being a Catholic, was no longer a communicant in the Church of England. To avoid embarrassment, Holy Communion was omitted from the liturgy, an ominous change from long tradition that already had earned the disapproval of many Englishmen. Competition to attend the ceremony was keen. Those who’d been invited to participate or to be among the hundreds crowded into the Abbey boasted of it, while those who hadn’t tried desperately to bribe their way into a place.

  For obvious reasons, I was not among those invited. As the day drew closer, I learned it was just as well I wasn’t. My infant son, Jamie, now eight months, was suffering mightily whilst cutting his milk teeth. His nurs
e had tried every remedy she knew to bring him ease, with no result, and when he became feverish, I summoned a physician for a bleeding, which brought no relief, either. Instead his fever rose higher and higher, his skin as hot as the desert and his lovely blue eyes dull and lost. I held him myself as the doctor bled him again, his poor little body quaking in my arms.

  It did not help; nothing did. And on the same day as his father was crowned King of England, my little Jamie died, there in my arms.

  I had never known what pain was until that moment, never understood the truth of the word “loss” until then. I wept over my son’s tiny, still body as if my tears alone could carry his innocent soul to heaven. I buried him alone without James at my side to share my grief, for though he was my child’s father, he was first a new-crowned king. Father was there to support me, and to my grateful surprise, so was Nelly Gwyn, who had likewise felt the anguish of having lost a tender son.

  But on that same day I was brought a message from Whitehall: while only a few hastily written lines, it was enough to show that James shared my grief along with considerable remorse of his own. He begged me to come to him that night, and I did not hesitate to accept.

  Yet because of that wicked oath he’d sworn to his wife, I was forced to travel to the palace in a plain carriage and wrapped in a dark cloak, so as not to be recognized. Worse, I was led up the back stairs to James’s rooms by William Chiffinch, Page to His Majesty’s Bedchamber and the man more commonly referred to as the royal pimp to the late king. On this night I was coming to James not as his mistress, but as one bereft parent to another, and I didn’t deserve to be treated so shamefully.

  But all that was forgotten as soon as I entered James’s bedchamber and saw at once that his sorrow was a match to my own. He took me in his arms and embraced me with great love and regard, and bid me tell him every detail of our son’s last days. When I could not keep back my tears in the telling, he wept freely with me, as any true father would. In time we did repair to his bed, but more from a need to comfort each other than from base desires, and afterward we lay together in each other’s arms and conversed more, as we had done so many times in the past. Since we’d last been together, James’s life had been tumultuous, and he’d so much to tell me now that it ran together into a disorganized jumble, great events mingling with small ones.

  I heard of his brother’s sad last hours and how strange it felt to be here now, in the same enormous black-oak bed that belonged to the king. I learned of his hopes for his own new reign, and how he feared he, too, might be stricken before his time like his brother had been. I listened to how he still suspected the Dutch and his nephew William of Orange, and how the Whitehall cooks insisted on making dishes that were too rich for his constitution, and how impatient he was with the French and King Louis, and how his brother’s many dogs had grieved and whined so for their deceased master that James had been forced to send them away in a pack from Whitehall to live at Windsor.

  I listened to it all, letting the torrent of words flow over me, soothing me with their very ordinariness. I was too exhausted and spent from our son’s death to offer much in return, but James’s wandering, one-sided conversation comforted me so much that I found myself drifting in and out of sleep, there with my head pillowed against his shoulder. He’d missed me, that was clear enough, and I’d missed him far more than I’d realized, and now—now the missing was done.

  “It was Bancroft who turned clumsy with the crown,” he was saying, having shifted to the coronation as his next subject. “How difficult could it have been to settle it upon my head? But Bancroft’s hand slipped, and the crown slipped—just for a moment, mind you, yet quite sufficient for those who wished me foul luck, and now claim to see an auger for the future.”

  “That’s foolish, sir,” I said drowsily, drawing the purple velvet coverlet closer over my bare shoulders. “Surely the archbishop was anxious before the magnitude of the audience, and his hand shook from it. Such petty accidents are bound to happen in the course of any momentous event, and signify nothing.”

  “Not to you, Katherine, being a sensible lady,” he said with a sigh. “But there are plenty of others who let themselves be guided by superstition and black thoughts. They’ll see my downfall in a piece of burned toast, and tell the world as if they’re a born oracle.”

  “You must pay them no heed, sir,” I cautioned gently, resting my palm on his chest to calm him. I could feel his heart racing beneath my fingers, agitated with no real reason. Still, I understood. There was one far more ominous prediction that had been whispered about since the old king’s death. Long ago, in the time of the Exclusion Bill, Charles himself had predicted that if James were to succeed him on the throne, he’d last only three years before England would have had its fill of him. Charles had said it in a teasing, jovial manner, but after his death, the prediction had taken on fresh significance, especially with my father and other Whigs.

  “How can I not heed such warnings?” he said with resignation. “My father did not, and look how his people served him. I must be aware, and guard against those who would tear down the throne.”

  “The predictions of fools won’t do that, sir,” I said. “How can they hurt you or your throne?”

  He sighed again, almost a groan. “Do you know the latest one that Sunderland told me this very day? That the death of our son on coronation day was a sign that my reign was blighted before it began.”

  “Someone said that?” I asked, stunned, and fresh tears at once filled my eyes. “Oh, sir, that’s—that’s damnably cruel.”

  “It is,” he said. “Likely I shouldn’t even have told you.”

  “I wish you hadn’t, sir.” I was more wounded by his thoughtlessness for my suffering than by the tattle. “To speak of my poor little Jamie like that!”

  “It is better that you see what I must endure every day, Katherine,” he said firmly, drawing me closer. “Everything in this life is the work of Divine Providence, even the tests of villainous tongues like that. God has brought me to the throne for His reasons, and I will not fail Him, no matter how I am challenged or tried. Though the reasons for His workings aren’t always apparent to us, they are never without purpose in His Divine Plan. Even having you here now is part of His greater scheme. And as painful as our son’s death might be, I am sure there was a purpose to it.”

  “What possible purpose could there be in the death of an innocent?” I cried miserably. James was a devout man, but I’d never heard him speak of it to this extravagant extent, leastwise not to me. “What good could come from it?”

  “I do not know,” he admitted heavily. “But it is through God’s grace that I am king. With His guidance I will rule and follow His will for the betterment of England. If I am made to suffer, then I will bear it without complaint, as part of His Divine Providence. You’ll see, Katherine. In time we all will understand His wisdom, and rejoice in it.”

  I was too exhausted to offer any argument. These notions weren’t James’s own; they smacked instead of the Jesuits, whispering every word into his too-willing ears. Even the most divine plan imaginable must rely on mortal men for its execution, and the duplicitous and conniving examples about the Court were scarce likely to serve any providence save their own, no matter how much James might trust them. But for England’s sake, I’d pray that James was right, and that in time I’d be made to understand, too.

  Because now, to me, it made no sense at all.

  THOUGH MY VISITS UP THE BACK STAIRS at Whitehall were supposed to be secret, it wasn’t long before much of the Court (excepting the queen) came to know of them, and of my renewed place in James’s affections and passions. Likewise, they all knew he’d failed to keep his vow to his wife, and while many were amazed, even shocked, by my sudden resurgence, I wasn’t. I’d known all along he’d choose me over Mary Beatrice. I won’t say my return was a part of James’s favorite divine plan, but I won’t say it wasn’t, either. I still loved him too well for it to be otherwise.

/>   But the old wanton days of Charles’s Court were already long past. James would never openly loll in lascivious indolence with me as Charles had with his mistresses. He’d made too public a show of sweeping Whitehall clean of sin, blasphemy, idle pleasure, and indulgence for that, and in their place he’d filled the elegant halls with excruciatingly proper Tories and Catholics and their grim, dull piety. The bawdy raillery of Nelly and the previous Lord Rochester had tumbled from fashion. Cromwell himself would have been proud—if Cromwell had been a Jesuit.

  Sometimes it seemed as if I were the only spark of levity in that whole gloomy palace. I did not claim Louise’s grand suite, still empty (and to me, haunted), nor did I wish it, preferring to keep my old lodgings and my fine new house, and a bit of distance from this gloomy Court instead. Nor did I crave the political power that Louise had wielded, either, entertaining foreign ambassadors and overseeing treaties. I would be twenty-eight by next Christmas, and my ambitions were much smaller. James granted me so many little favors, always seeking my company whenever he could, that I was content. I made him happy, and he in turn did the same for me. What more could either of us want?

  But even if James were happy with me au plus profond de son coeur (as Louise would have said it), there was still much else in his life as king that remained unsettled. While he had a Parliament that smiled upon him, he had unwisely provoked them by reminding him that he was the king, and while he would consider their wishes, he was under no obligation to heed them. Perhaps this would have sat well with a party of Frenchmen, accustomed to absolute monarchs, but not with an English Commons, who bristled like a fox taken by surprise. When advised to heed their concerns, James refused, brushing aside the warnings as unnecessary.

  In James’s defense, he did have other more pressing concerns: at the end of his speech advising the House to take action on his income, James announced that the Duke of Argyll, a notorious plotter in exile in Holland, had landed an armed force in Scotland with the intent of launching a rebellion against James. Roused to patriotic action, Parliament immediately voted him the living he’d requested, plus several other bills for the funds to put down the rebellions and to refurbish the navy as well. Lord Argyll’s force proved a puny, ill-formed affair, and the haste with which it was suppressed by the end of May 1685 only added to the luster of James’s glory.