A Health Unto His Majesty

by Jean Plaidy

  Barbara had, after the installation of Louise de Kéroualle as the King’s favourite, continued to amuse London with her many love affairs. She had turned again to the theatre and had found one of the handsomest men in London, William Wycherley, the playwright, who dedicated his Love in a Wood to her.

  But in spite of her numerous lovers she had found it insupportable to see another take her place with the King. The play-actress she accepted, but she could not tolerate the French woman. In vain did she call the woman a spy, and the King a fool. No one stopped her; they merely ignored her. That was why she had gone to France.

  So, as Catherine looked out on the river from her apartments in Somerset House and her wistful gaze wandered in the direction of Whitehall, she told herself that she must be resigned to her position as wife of the King, the wife to whom he was so kind because he could not love her.

  *

  It was a hot August day, and the King was shortly to ride to Windsor. He was pleased at the prospect. Windsor was a favourite resort of his, and he was looking forward to a little holiday from state affairs. He had decided to take Louise and Nelly – those two whom he never greatly cared to be without – and set off as early as this could be arranged. He was eager to assure himself that his instructions were being carried out regarding the alterations he was having made there, and to see how Verrio’s work on the fresco paintings was progressing.

  He was about to take his quick morning walk through St James’s Park, with which he always liked to begin the day. With him were a few of his friends, and his dogs followed at his heels, barking their delight at the prospect of the walk.

  But before he had taken more than a dozen steps a young man, whom he recognized as one who worked in his laboratories, came running towards him.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ he cried, falling to his knees, ‘I beg of you, allow me to speak a few words to you.’

  ‘Do so,’ said the King in some astonishment.

  ‘It would be well if, when walking in the Park, Your Majesty did not stray from your companions.’

  ‘Why so?’ said Charles. He was faintly amused by the man’s earnest looks. It was rarely that the King walked abroad and was not asked for something. That he should be asked to keep with his companions was a strange request.

  ‘Your Majesty’s life is in danger,’ whispered the young man.

  Charles was not easily alarmed. He stood surveying the young man, who he now remembered was Christopher Kirby, a merchant who had failed in business and had begged the Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Danby, to employ him as a tax collector; as he had some skill as a chemist, he had been given work to do in Charles’s laboratory; and it was in that capacity that the King on one or two occasions had come into contact with him.

  ‘What is this talk?’ asked Charles.

  ‘Your Majesty may at any moment be shot at.’

  ‘You had better tell me all you know,’ said the King.

  ‘Your Majesty, I can give you a full account . . . I can give you many details, but to do so I must ask for a private interview.’

  ‘Go back to the Palace,’ said Charles, ‘and wait there in my private closet for my return. If any ask why you do so, tell them it is at my command.’

  The man came closer to the King. ‘Your Majesty, on no account leave your companions. Remember . . . men may at this moment be lurking among the trees.’

  With that, Kirby bowed and retired.

  The King turned to his companions.

  ‘Will Your Majesty continue the walk?’ asked one.

  The King laughed. ‘Ever since the gunpowder plot, in my grandfather’s reign, there have always been plots which are purported to threaten the life of the King. Come! Let us enjoy the morning air and forget our chemist. I’ll warrant this is nothing more than a dream he has had. He had an air of madness, to my mind.’

  The King called to his dogs who came running round him joyfully. He threw a stone and watched them race for it, each striving for the honour of bringing it back to him.

  Then he continued his walk, and it was an hour later before he again saw Kirby.

  *

  When the King returned to his closet, the chemist was waiting for him there.

  The King listened to his story as patiently as he could, without believing a word of it.

  Two men, according to Kirby, were lurking in the Park waiting for an opportunity of shooting the King.

  ‘Why should they do this?’ asked Charles.

  ‘It is for the Jesuits, Your Majesty,’ replied Kirby. ‘Their plan is to murder you and set your brother on the throne.’

  Poor James! thought Charles. He has many enemies. Now these people would seek to add me to their number.

  ‘How did you learn of these matters?’ he asked, scarcely able to suppress a yawn.

  ‘It was through a Dr Tonge, Your Majesty. He is the rector of St Michael’s in Wood Street, and he has discovered much in the interests of Your Majesty. If Your Majesty would but grant him an interview he could tell you more than I can.’

  ‘Then I dare say we should see your Dr Tonge.’

  ‘Have I Your Majesty’s permission to bring him to the Palace?’

  ‘You may bring him here between nine and ten this evening,’ said the King.

  When Kirby had left, the King summoned the Earl of Danby and told him of all that had passed.

  They laughed together. ‘The fellow is clearly deranged,’ said the King. ‘Let us hope this fellow Tonge is not equally so. Yet he was so earnest I had not the heart to deny him the interview. In the meantime keep the matter secret. I would not have the idea of murdering me put into the heads of people who previously have not given the matter a thought.’

  *

  At the appointed time Kirby arrived with Dr Tonge, a clergyman and schoolmaster of Yorkshire; he was, he told the King, rector of the parishes of St Mary Stayning and St Michael’s Wood, and because he had long known the wickedness to which the Jesuits would stoop – even to the murder of their King – he had made it his business to study their ways.

  He then began to enumerate the many crimes he had uncovered, until the King, growing weary, bade him proceed with the business which had brought him there.

  There were, said Dr Tonge, Jesuits living close to the King, who had plotted his murder.

  ‘Who are these men?’ demanded the King.

  Dr Tonge thereupon produced a wad of papers and told the King that if he would read these he would find therein that which would shock and enrage him.

  ‘How came you by these papers?’ asked the King.

  ‘Sire, they were pushed under my door.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘By one who doubtless wished Your Majesty well and trusted that I would be the man to save Your Majesty’s life and see justice done.’

  The King handed the papers to Danby.

  ‘So you do not know the man who thrust these papers beneath your door?’

  ‘I have a suspicion, Your Majesty, that he is one who has spoken to me of such matters.’

  ‘We may need to see him. Can he be found?’

  ‘I have seen him lately, Your Majesty, walking in the streets.’

  The King turned to Danby. He was wishing to be done with the tiresome business, and had no intention of postponing the trip to Windsor because of another Papist scare.

  ‘You will look into these matters, my lord,’ he said.

  And with that he left.

  *

  The Earl of Danby was a most unhappy man. He had many enemies, and he knew that a fate similar to that which had befallen Clarendon was being prepared for him. He was in danger of being impeached for high treason when Parliament met, and he was terrified that if there were an investigation of his conduct of affairs he might even lose his life.

  He was fully aware that powerful men such as Buckingham and Shaftesbury would welcome a Popish plot. Since the Duke of York had openly avowed his conversion to the Catholic Faith there had been an almost fanatical resentme
nt towards Catholics throughout the country. The Duke of York was heir to the throne, and there was a great body of Englishmen who had vowed never to allow a Catholic monarch to sit again on the throne of England.

  Already the slogan ‘No Popery’ had come into being; and it seemed to Danby that, by creating a great scare at this time, he could turn attention from himself to the instigators of the plot. The people were ready to be roused to fury at the thought of Catholic schemes to overthrow the King; some of the most important of the King’s ministers would be ready to devote their great energy exclusively to discrediting the Duke of York and arranging a divorce for the King; and mayhap arranging for the legitimization of the Duke of Monmouth, thus providing a Protestant King to follow Charles.

  The papers which he studied seemed to contain highly improbable accusations; but Danby was a desperate man.

  He sent for Tonge.

  ‘It is very necessary,’ he told him, ‘for you to produce the man who thrust these papers under your door. Can you do that?’

  ‘I believe I can, my lord.’

  ‘Then do so; and bring him here that he may state his case before the King.’

  ‘I will do my utmost, sir.’

  ‘What is his name?’

  ‘My lord, it is Titus Oates.’

  *

  Titus Oates was a man of purpose. When he heard that he was to appear before the King he was delighted. He saw immense possibilities before him, and he began to bless the day when Fate threw him in the way of Dr Tonge.

  Titus was the son of Samuel Oates, rector of Markham in Norfolk. Titus had been an extremely unprepossessing child, and it had seemed to him from his earliest days that he had been born to misfortune. As a child he had been subject to convulsive fits, and his father had hated the shuffling, delicate child with a face so ugly that it was almost grotesque. His neck was so short that his head seemed to rest on his shoulders; he was ungainly in body, one leg being shorter than the other; but his face, which was purple in colour, was quite repulsive, for his chin was so large that his mouth was in the centre of his face; he suffered from a continuous cold so that he snuffled perpetually; he had an unsightly wart over one eyebrow; and his eyes were small and cunning from the days when he had found it necessary to dodge his father’s blows. His mother, though, had lavished great affection on him. He had none for her. Rather he admired his father whose career he soon discovered to have been quite extraordinary. Samuel, feigning to be a very pious man, had, before he settled in Norfolk, wandered the country preaching his own particular brand of the gospels which entailed baptism by immersion of the naked body in lakes and rivers of the districts he visited. Samuel went from village to village; he liked best to dip young women, the more comely the better; and for this purpose he advised them to leave their homes at midnight, without the knowledge of their parents, that they might be baptized and saved. The ceremony of baptism was so complicated that many of the girls found that they gave birth to children as a result of it. But, in view of these results, dipping had eventually become too dangerous a procedure, and Samuel, after some vicissitudes, had settled down as rector of Hastings.

  Meanwhile Titus pursued his own not unexciting career.

  He went to the Merchant Taylors’ School, where he was found to be such a liar and cheat that he was expelled during his first year there; afterwards he was sent as a poor scholar to a school near Hastings where he managed to hide his greater villainies; and eventually, having taken Holy Orders, he became a curate to his father.

  The curate of All Saints, Hastings, quickly became the most unpopular man in the district. The rector was heartily disliked, and the people of Hastings would not have believed it was possible to find a man more detestable until they met his son. Titus seemed to delight in circulating scandal concerning those who lived about him. If he could discover some little peccadillo which might be magnified, he was greatly delighted; if he could discover nothing, he used his amazing imagination and an invention which amounted almost to genius.

  Samuel hated his son more than ever and wished he had never allowed him to become his curate; therefore, there arose the problem of how to remove Titus. Titus had his living to earn; and it seemed that, if he remained in Hastings, not only the curate but the rector would be asked to leave. A schoolmaster’s post would be ideal, decided Samuel; there was one in a local school, but unfortunately it was filled by a certain William Parker, so popular and of such good reputation that it seemed unlikely he could be dismissed to make way for Titus.

  Father and son were not the sort to allow any man’s virtues to stand in their way.

  Titus therefore presented himself to the Mayor and told him that he had seen William Parker in the church porch committing an unnatural offence with a very young boy.

  The Mayor was horrified. He declared he could not believe this of William Parker, who had always seemed to him such an honest and honourable man; but Titus, who was a lover of details and had worked on the plan with great thoroughness, managed to convince him that there was truth in the story.

  William Parker was sent to jail and Titus, swearing on oath that he was speaking the truth, gave in detail all he alleged he had seen in the church porch.

  Titus was eloquent and would have been completely convincing; but he was not yet an adept at the art of perjury, and he had forgotten that truth has an uncomfortable way of tripping up the liar.

  Parker was able to prove that he was nowhere near the porch when the offence was alleged to have taken place; the tables were turned; Titus was in danger of imprisonment, and so he ran away to sea.

  It was not difficult to get to sea, for His Majesty’s Navy was in constant need of men and did not ask many questions. Titus became ship’s chaplain, in which role he had opportunities of practising that very offence of which he had accused Parker, and became loathed by all who came into contact with him; and after a while the Navy refused to employ him.

  Samuel had been forced to leave Hastings after the Parker affair and was in London, where Titus joined him; but it was soon discovered that Titus was wanted by the law; he was captured and sent to prison, from which he escaped, only to find himself penniless once more. He joined a club in Holborn, where he made the acquaintance of several Catholics, and it was through their influence that he obtained a post of Protestant chaplain in the household of that staunch Catholic, the Duke of Norfolk.

  It was at this time that the Catholic scare was beginning to be felt in England, and it had occurred to Titus that there might be some profit in exposing, in the right quarters, the secrets of Catholics. He thereupon set himself out to be as pleasant as he could to Catholics, in the hope of learning their secrets, and obtaining an authentic background for his imagination.

  Dismissed from the service of the Duke of Norfolk, he was again in London where he made the acquaintance of Dr Israel Tonge.

  Dr Tonge was a fanatic who was prepared to dedicate his life to the persecution of Jesuits. He had written tracts and pamphlets about their wickedness but, as so many had done the like since the conversion of the Duke of York, there was no sale for those of Dr Tonge. This made him bitter; not against those who refused to buy them, but against the Papists. He was more determined than ever to destroy them; and when he renewed his acquaintance with Oates, he saw in him a man who could be made to work for him in the cause so near his heart.

  Titus was at the point of starvation and ready enough to do all that was required of him.

  The two men met often and began to plot.

  Oates was to mingle with the Catholics who congregated in the Pheasant Coffee House in Holborn; Tonge had heard that certain Catholic servants of the Queen frequented the place. There Titus would meet Whitbread and Pickering, and other priests who came from Somerset House, where Catherine worshipped, in accordance with her Faith, in her private chapel.

  There was one person whom those two plotters mentioned often; the condemnation of that person could bring them greater satisfaction than that of any othe
r, for to prove the Queen of England a Papist murderer would enrage the country beyond all their hopes. If they could prove that the Queen was plotting to murder the King, then surely there was not a Jesuit in England who would not be brought to torture and death.

  ‘The King is a lecher,’ said Oates, licking his lips. ‘He will wish to be rid of the Queen.’

  Dr Tonge listened to the affected voice of his accomplice and laid a hand on his shoulder. He knew the story of William Parker and Titus’s tendency to be carried away by his imagination.

  He warned him: ‘This is no plot against a village schoolmaster. This is a charge of High Treason against the Queen. ’Tis true the King is a lecher, but he is soft with women, including his wife. We shall have to build up our case carefully. This is not a matter over which we can hurry. It may take us years to collect the information we need, and we shall accuse and prove guilty many before we reach the climax of our discovery which shall be the villainy of the Queen.’

  Tonge’s eyes burned with fanaticism. He believed that the Queen must wish to murder the King; he believed in the villainy of all Catholics, and the Queen was devoutly Catholic.

  Titus’s sunken eyes were almost dosed. He was not concerned with the truth of any accusations they would bring. All he cared for was that he should have bread to eat, a roof to shelter him and a chance to indulge that imagination of his which was never content unless it was building up a case against others.

  Dr Tonge’s plan was long and involved. Titus should mix with Catholics; he should become a Catholic, for only thus could he discover all they would need to build the plot which should bring fame and fortune to them both, and win the eternal gratitude of the King and those ministers of his who desired above all things to see the Queen and the Duke of York dismissed from the Court.

  Titus ‘became’ a Catholic and went to study at a college in Valladolid. When he returned, expelled from the college, he brought with him little knowledge, but a fair understanding of the life lived by Jesuit priests; and he and Dr Tonge, impatient to get on with their work, set about fabricating the great Popish plot.

  They would begin by warning the King that two Jesuits, Grove and Pickering – men whom Titus had met at the coffee house in Fleet Street – were to be paid £1,500 to shoot the King while he walked in the park. The death of the King was to be followed by that of certain of his ministers; the French would then invade Ireland and a new King would be set up. This was to be the Duke of York, who would then establish a Jesuit Parliament.