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

by Holloway Scott, Susan

  Yet three weeks later came word of another nascent rebellion, one of far more consequence and danger. Lord Monmouth was challenging his uncle’s claim to the throne, and with a small army of supporters had sailed from Amsterdam to lead an invasion of England. He landed in Lyme Regis on 11 June, and at once he began gathering more sympathizers from the countryside. The news shocked London and sent James into paroxysms of anger and fear.

  I wasn’t surprised when he kept me waiting in his bedchamber. When he finally did join me, after one more meeting with his advisers, he remained so distraught that he could not sit still, but paced back and forth before the fire, his face contorted with angry distress.

  “If only my brother had punished him when he’d the chance, then it never would have come to this,” he fumed. “Monmouth shows his blood by this, behaving like the low bastard he was born.”

  “He will not succeed, sir.” I sat curled in an armchair, in a dressing gown of pink linen shot through with silver. The evening was warm enough that the windows overlooking the river had been kept open to catch the sweet breezes of June. “Lord Monmouth has charm to win some supporters, true, but he’ll be no match for your soldiers.”

  But it was as if I’d not spoken at all. “Do you know what Monmouth says, Katherine? What he claims? Not only that he is my brother’s lawful son and his true Protestant heir, but that I am a murderer who poisoned my brother!”

  I sighed. That sounded much like the Lord Monmouth of old, ready to believe any fabulous tale that was presented to him. “You must not take it so strongly, sir. You have been crowned king, whilst he has not.”

  “He is not king, no. But he is a soldier at heart, Katherine, a soldier I helped train, more fool I,” he said bitterly. “And I’ll stop him now, and do what my brother could not. I’ve chosen an officer to lead my troops who knows Monmouth as well as any other man and who’ll hunt down every traitor in the countryside. I’ve sent Colonel Churchill.”

  “Colonel Churchill!” I exclaimed, shocked. With his experience, John was an excellent choice to put down the rebellion, but it was a cruel one as well. John and Lord Monmouth had served as young officers together, and once in battle John had risked his own life to save the duke’s. If that were not enough, the Churchills were from Devon, near to where Monmouth had landed, and John would likely recognize all the other, lesser rebels he might capture. “What a trial that will be to him, sir!”

  He stopped his pacing to stare at me, his expression frighteningly hard. “Colonel Churchill is a soldier, Katherine. He has sworn to serve his God, his king, and his country.”

  “But he and His Lordship have been friends for so long, sir,” I protested, remembering the two so close as younger men. “To ask the colonel to now pursue him—”

  “Colonel Churchill knows his duty, Katherine,” he said sharply. “If he wavers in it, why, then I shall account him a rebel, too, and see that he meets the same fate as his traitorous ‘friend.’ ”

  “Your nephew, sir,” I insisted. “Your brother’s first son.”

  “My brother’s bastard,” he said. “Recall the difference, my dear. It is one I do not forget.”

  That was clear enough. At James’s insistence, an Act of Attainder was passed against Lord Monmouth, authorizing his execution for treason without trial. Because James wisely did not trust local militias to put down the rebellion, the House immediately voted funds for increasing the army by twenty thousand men. As if to apologize for having harbored Lord Monmouth at the Dutch Court, William of Orange promptly returned the English regiments who had been serving in Holland.

  But Lord Monmouth had not forgotten old friends, either. When Colonel Churchill approached with his by-now-superior force, the duke sent a message reminding the colonel of their long friendship and begging his assistance with the Protestant cause. John proved worthy of James’s trust, leaving his former friend’s appeal unanswered, and further, forwarding it to his king as a show of his loyalty. But even that wasn’t enough for James. With an insulting lack of trust in John, James put a French officer, Colonel Feversham, over him and his English troops.

  Whether insulted or not, it was John who relentlessly stalked and pursued the rebels across the West Country and oversaw the final, bloody rout at Sedgemoor of “King Monmouth” and his ill-equipped, makeshift army in early July. Feversham followed the less glorious route, hanging most every man he could find whether rebel or not. The duke himself was finally captured hiding in a ditch, dirty and disguised meanly as a shepherd. Hauled in irons back to London, James remained unmoved as his disgraced nephew groveled one last time for his life, pleading for mercy and forgiveness, and even offering to convert to Catholicism if it would save him. It would not. Thoroughly disgusted, the only mercy James granted to him was to be beheaded as a nobleman rather than hanged as a commoner.

  For once Mary Beatrice and I were of a mind, each of us pleading separately with James to relent and preserve Lord Monmouth’s life. We were hardly alone; there were many of us at Court who recalled the great love that Charles had showed his handsome, feckless son, and could not stomach the vengeance that James now demanded. But James held fast, and the execution was set for the fifteenth of July.

  Though James asked me to attend and watch, I refused to go to Tower Hill, as did most every lady from respect for the duke. I was ever after grateful I hadn’t; for though Lord Monmouth climbed the scaffold calmly, with the presence and composure that he’d never demonstrated before, his executioner, an inexperienced hangman unfamiliar with his ax, was anxious and unsure. Instead of a single merciful stroke, this butcher ineptly required a half dozen hacking blows to slaughter the duke in agony, finally resorting to his knife to sever his victim’s head from his shoulders. It was so gruesome an end that many spectators fainted from the sight. Others watched James, who did not so much as flinch at the carnage, coldly observing every bloody moment of his enemy’s demise. Near James was Lord Sunderland, that changeable chameleon, who had once encouraged Lord Monmouth’s unreasonable hopes, now turned into his enemy to please the king.

  By rarest chance I passed John Churchill, gorgeous in his uniform, on a palace staircase later that same day. Though as a soldier he’d been well trained to mask his true feelings, still I could see the pallor behind his sun-browned cheeks and a fresh grief in his eyes.

  As we passed, I reached out to lay my hand on his arm on impulse, and in sympathy. “I am sorry for you, John,” I said softly, “and for all you must have endured by way of your duty.”

  He nodded curtly in polite acknowledgment. “Thank you, madam,” he said, deftly easing his arm free of my hand. “But I feel far more sorry for you, to be in His Majesty’s company this night.”

  I understood. When I learned at supper that the queen had retired early to weep and mourn over the poor duke, I understood her grief, and when I overheard others discussing in horrified whispers the king’s seeming heartlessness at the execution of his nephew, I understood that, too. We each of us had chosen loyalty to the king over our own sense of right, and there were many uneasy consciences in Whitehall that sorrowful day.

  But though James requested my company that night, his mood was somber and melancholy, and as I lay beside him, he made no move to touch me. When I reached for him in the dark, lightly touching his cheek as was my habit, his face was wet with silent tears.

  “It was divine vengeance, Katherine,” he said. “It could not be helped. It was God’s will for England, not mine.”

  And sadly, sorrowfully, I understood that, too.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  WINDSOR CASTLE, BERKSHIRE

  August 1685

  After Monmouth’s defeat and Parliament’s late-summer recess, James led the Court to Windsor Castle as his brother had always done before him. The castle itself was as humblingly grand as ever, the surrounding fields and trees of Windsor Great Park remained lusciously green, the airs from the river as cool and refreshing and skies overhead as brilliant a blue. Yet because t
he nature of James’s Court was so very different from his brother’s, this retreat failed to have the same easy cheeriness to it. Instead of Charles’s packs of lighthearted actors and actresses, jugglers and musicians to entertain us, James had somber flocks of priests, whose very presence as they walked along the parapets seemed to cast the old stone walls with monastic shadows. Catholic mass was said each morning in the chapel, and those dwindling few of us who preferred an Anglican service were forced to worship in the small church in the town below the castle. Even the nearby races at Newmarket felt changed, haunted as they were by the absence of Lord Monmouth, whose superior horsemanship was much missed.

  Because the castle was smaller than Whitehall and lacked Chiffinch’s convenient back stairs—and because, too, the queen and her servants had become more vigilant in spying on my whereabouts—I lodged instead at a house in town. James and I met away from the others, in one of the small hunting lodges in the old deer park. Our assignations were arranged by my old lover Colonel James Grahme as Master of the Buckhounds. Colonel Grahme met me in the castle’s stables, and escorted me to the lodge, where James would soon appear under the guise of “hunting,” all of which amused me no end.

  “I’ve never forgotten how we first met, waiting for Mary Beatrice to acknowledge us,” I said to the colonel on one of these rides. Like a child freed from a grim governess, my humor always rose when I left the castle, especially knowing that James awaited me. “Faith, who would have guessed we’d end like this?”

  “Riding through the park together, madam?” He smiled blandly, but his eyes were full of the old laughter. “There’s scarce anything surprising about that.”

  “Oh, no,” I said drolly. “Nothing at all. The master of the buckhounds, taking one more bitch to his master.”

  He couldn’t keep from laughing at that. “You haven’t changed a whit, Katherine, have you?”

  “I’m as wicked as ever,” I replied cheerfully. “Though it’s not so easy as it once was, not at this dreary Court.”

  His smile grew more questioning. “Are you happy, then? I think of my Dorothy at our home in Westmorland, her petticoats always rumpled from our little flock of children hanging on them, and filled with contentment. Then I see you, covered with pearls and rubies and His Majesty on your arm, as grand a lady as can be at Court.”

  “As grand a lady as a whore can be, you mean.” I smiled, too, but with more bittersweetness than my raillery intended. “Am I happy? I am, I am. Nor could I imagine myself with your wife’s grubby flock. My little Lady Katherine’s enough for me.”

  “I’m sure she is, if she’s in your image.” But he was clearly now thinking of his own wife and children, and not of me: it showed in his eyes. “We each of us serve His Majesty however we can, don’t we?”

  “That we do,” I said softly, thinking how far our fates had diverged. “That we do.”

  We’d come through the last of the woods and into the clearing where the lodge stood. To my surprise, James was already there and waiting, standing not far from his horse and impatiently flicking at weeds with his whip. His usual escort of soldiers must be watching nearby, shielded by the shadows of the trees; after the Rye House Plot, he never went anywhere without them. He heard us coming, and turned, his smile so wide and happy to see me that I felt the unbridled joy of it. Dorothy Grahme was welcome to her brood of grasping brats; I had a king.

  The colonel dismounted and bowed before James, then came to play groom to me and help me down from my saddle. I thanked him formally, and he touched his hat in deference, all that was proper before the king. James took my hand to lead me into the house, and I heard the colonel ride away behind us.

  “How well do you know Grahme?” James asked as we stepped inside. “You two seemed warm enough.”

  “We were friends long ago, sir.” I paused to draw off my gloves and unpin my hat. “Long before I began with you.”

  He grunted and stamped his feet with male suspicion. “Friends, you say. Did you take him to your bed?”

  “No, sir, not at all,” I said in perfect truth; we’d lain together in the grass, never a bed. “He loved another lady too well for me to win him.”

  “He wants to fuck you still,” James said bluntly. “I saw it in his face.”

  “What, sir, a brittle old stick like me?” I asked, bemused. Jealousy was not something I’d much experienced.

  “Don’t jest, Katherine,” James said, his voice rough with the longing I recognized so well. “You have a way about you that makes men want you. I cannot explain it, but you do. Why else do I find it so impossible to break with you as I should?”

  “Because, sir, you shouldn’t.” I turned to face him, smiling, and looped my arms around his shoulders. “Because if you truly wished to break with me, you would. But you don’t, so you can’t, and I thank every one of your Romish saints in heaven for it.”

  “You’re a sinful, blasphemous creature, Katherine,” he muttered as he pushed me back against the wall to kiss me. “But I cannot give you up. I cannot.”

  I closed my eyes, delighting in the rawness of his desire as he sought to claim me. So this was how it would be today: jealousy as a spice to his cock, with my petticoats rucked up around my waist and a swift possession like some sailor’s wench against the wall. Yet by James’s own beliefs, he was willing to risk his very soul to have me, and I would not trade that for anything, not for every last one of Colonel Grahme’s children in Westmorland.

  Later, we ate a lazy dinner at a small table on the grass behind the lodge, under an arbor of gnarled vines. The day was warm, and we were still half undressed, I in my smock and petticoat and no more, my ankles crossed comfortably on James’s thigh, while he’d yet to resume his coat or waistcoat, with his shirt open at the throat and the sleeves shoved to his elbows. A single ancient servingwoman looked after us, while James spoke of how he planned to address the new session of Parliament.

  “Now that the Sedgemoor Campaign is done, we can address other matters,” he explained earnestly, leaning forward in his chair with his elbows on the table, the better to see my reaction. What he likely saw first was how distasteful I found this term for poor Lord Monmouth’s last efforts—the Sedgemoor Campaign!—but I knew well enough that he considered the rebellion well in the past and of no concern to his plans for England’s future.

  “The members proved themselves mightily agreeable in the last session,” he continued. “God willing, I should guide them through this one as well.”

  “It won’t be the same, sir,” I said, sipping the wine that I drank, and he, being righteously abstemious, did not. “They obliged you last session because you were new to your throne, and they obliged you with more soldiers because there was a genuine need. They won’t oblige you again simply to be obliging.”

  “They’ll oblige me in this,” he said, leaning closer with eager enthusiasm. “Sunderland says they will, that it’s the proper time for change.”

  “Oh, Sunderland,” I said with disgust. “I don’t know why you trust a word that spills from his mouth, sir.”

  “He’s a very clever and ingenious gentleman, that’s why,” James said. “He is also receiving instruction in the True Church as a most earnest inquirer after God’s truth, which makes him eminently worthy of my trust.”

  “Sunderland intends to convert?” I asked, astonished. “And you would trust him for it, sir? Why, that rascal would swear on the Scriptures that his own mother had been a whore in Tangiers if he thought it would raise him further in your eyes.”

  He sighed. “You are harsh, Katherine.”

  “I am truthful, sir, which Sunderland could not be if his life depended upon it.” I smiled and winked and rubbed my bare foot lightly along his leg—something else that Lord Sunderland would never do. “But please proceed, sir, proceed. Tell me what manner of nonsense His Lordship is encouraging this time.”

  “It’s not nonsense,” he insisted, “and it’s my idea, not his. The rebellion proved the need
of a larger army to safeguard England. We cannot afford to go backward and dismiss the troops that have spent this summer in exercise and training. They must be kept, with their officers in place, to preserve the country against future disturbances.”

  I frowned, for this was not a subject for humor. “Parliament will not allow that, sir, nor will the rest of the country. No good can come from so large a standing army. Thousands of idle, armed men, trained for fighting yet with no enemy—hah, there lies the true danger, no matter what Sunderland tells you.”

  “There is no danger in a strong defense, Katherine,” he said, his brows drawn sternly together. “You must trust me in this, as an old soldier myself.”

  “You may order me to trust all you wish, sir,” I said, “but I won’t, and neither will Parliament. Recall what became of your own lamented father when Cromwell’s army grew too fat with their own power, and the civil war that followed. No one wishes that again.”

  But James only shook his head, refusing to see my logic. “Cromwell’s army was led by Protestant fanatics,” he said. “Wise Providence will not permit that to happen again, nor will I.”

  In a single horrified instant I realized all he wasn’t saying outright. “You’re going to try to make Parliament repeal the Test Act, aren’t you, sir? You not only wish to keep the standing army, but you wish it with Catholic officers, too, don’t you?”

  “There is no useful reason why Catholic officers cannot be employed alongside Protestant ones,” he insisted. “The Test Act is a vile, false creation, designed to make persecution lawful. These men served England well when the country had great need of their skill, and I will not shame them by casting them out now that the crisis is done.”