Merivel: A Man of His Time

by Rose Tremain

  From this I understood that the News on the King’s condition was very bad.

  Lord Bruce confirmed to me that His Majesty had undergone another Fit at seven o’clock, and had since recovered Consciousness but could not speak.

  It was difficult to approach the Royal bed for the press of Doctors round it, but most of them knew me and knew my profession, and doubted not my loyalty, so at length I was able to come near the King.

  A most terrible scene then unfolded. James Pearse, the King’s Surgeon in Ordinary, had decided that blood should be let from His Majesty’s Jugular Vein. Now, holding up his sharpened Scalpel in readiness, he was attempting, with his left hand, to find the Jugular by pressing and pushing and squeezing the King’s neck this way and that, and seeming not to note that his patient was being slowly strangled, with his eyes beginning to burst out of his skull.

  ‘I cannot find it!’ Pearse cried out irritably, pressing and prodding yet harder. ‘There is no vein!’

  The other Doctors, working with Cantharides and Plasters, and laying Leeches into the Sore on the King’s leg and administering, yet again, the Enema tubes, stared helplessly at the Surgeon.

  ‘God’s fish!’ he shouted. ‘Do not stand there like cattle! One of you help me find the Jugular!’

  Nobody moved, so I, who was standing next to Pearse, said quietly: ‘You are choking the King, Sir. Will you not let be?’

  He then saw, as if for the first time, that the pressure of his left hand was indeed causing great distress and took it away, while swearing under his breath. The King began to retch and vomited up a little greenish slime onto the pillow. I took a handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped the King’s mouth, which was much inflamed, with his tongue swollen and coated yellow.

  I called for a servant to bring a clean pillow. The stench coming from the bed was noxious and I thought how, all his life, the King had had a very lovely and recognisable scent to his body, which was like honey mixed with summer fruit, and now he stank like a Polecat, and this made me very melancholy.

  But I had no leisure to dwell on it, for I found James Pearse’s Scalpel thrust into my hand and the terrible command given to me to ‘Find the Jugular, Merivel, or no longer consider yourself a Physician worthy to remain in this room!’

  Endeavouring to remain calm, I said to Pearse (the resemblance of whose name to my beloved friend John Pearce offended me much): ‘Could you not let blood from the arm? If the Jugular be pierced, then a great quantity of blood will come out – more than you intend, perhaps – and His Majesty will be made very weak.’

  ‘We have let from the arm,’ said Ordinary Pearse, ‘but it is not enough. The Distemper will not yield unless the Convulsive Blood be purged. So please go to it and make no more Fuss.’

  In all my years as Physician I had never heard the term ‘Convulsive Blood’, but with all the other Doctors now staring at me, I had no choice but to take up the Scalpel and obey the command.

  I leaned down towards the King, laying my hand gently upon his poor neck and talking to him very close. ‘Sir,’ I whispered, ‘it is Merivel. And I have not forgot the Matter we discussed in your coach. I am giving all my thought, now, as to how we may arrange it.’

  The King’s eyes blinked up at me and he opened his mouth to try to speak. No word came out, but I assumed from this that he had certainly heard me.

  I had, I shall admit, no idea how to clear the room of all the people in it and spirit a Catholic Priest to His Majesty’s side – no idea at all – but this I did not say.

  Meanwhile a more immediate and terrible task lay before me. To my relief, the Surgeon in Ordinary had left the bedside, giving me a little more space and air. Gently my hand felt round the King’s ear and down his neck. And I remembered how, at the Whittlesea Asylum, John Pearce had let blood from the Jugular Vein of a very choleric man named Piebald and how, as he felt for the vessel, he had said: ‘The Jugular is easy to find, Merivel. It speaks to you. It ticks like a clock. Feel here. There it is. There it is not. There is no need to pinch or press to find it. Only listen with your hand to get its voice.’

  Not for the first time, I asked the ghost of my departed friend to help me and in this way I was able to remain calm, with my hand steady and my fingers alert for the ‘tick’ of the vein.

  And then I got it. I pressed a little harder, just enough to give me sight of it, but endeavouring to cause the Patient no distress or choking. I called for a dish to be placed near my hand and with the Scalpel pierced the vessel. Bright blood immediately cascaded from the minute incision I had made, spilling over my hand and onto my sleeve. As this happened, so the King cried out and began to retch again. Now two other Doctors hurried to my side.

  ‘A few ounces,’ said one. ‘Do not let too much. See how fast it flows. Contain it now! It must be contained now!’

  A wad of Muslin was given to me and this I now had to press very firmly upon the vein to staunch the flow. The dish was taken away. I began talking to the King again, saying, ‘It is done now. It is over. The Convulsive Blood is out.’

  I stayed by his side. I wiped his mouth again and dribbled a little water onto his swollen tongue and saw him swallow it. At the other end of the bed the Enema tubes, having done their work of sluicing and voiding, were finally removed and it was not difficult to imagine that His Majesty’s poor body had now been deprived of all its vital moisture. I thus continued to give him water and he kept sucking it in, like a helpless babe straining after the mother’s breast. After some time I watched his eyes close and sleep come mercifully upon him.

  I did not recount this scene to Margaret and Fubbs. I myself was almost faint from the Agony of it. And to my great dismay, when I returned to Fubbsy’s apartments, I saw that all was disorder and hysteria there.

  The Duchess had decided, it appeared, that the King was not going to survive. In terror of finding herself thus abandoned, she was now gathering up all her clothes and jewels, and all the small objects of value that she owned, and packing them away in four Trunks. Margaret was helping her, flying about, concealing Necklaces and Bracelets inside little gold vases and boxes, wrapping furs in Linen, sorting stockings into pairs.

  ‘Where shall you send the Trunks, Your Grace?’ I asked.

  ‘Where?’ she yelped. ‘For Goodness sake, Sir Robert, where do you imagine? To the French Embassy, of course, where none of the King’s family can wrench them from me! For I see how it is going to be: His Majesty will barely be laid in the ground before the vultures come and tell me I am a Common French Whore and put me out into the street.’

  ‘I’m sure they will not do that,’ said I. ‘Everybody knows what a Consolation and comfort you have been to the King …’

  ‘Oh, indeed? And does the Queen know this?’

  ‘The Queen has always forgiven the King his Mistresses.’

  ‘While he breathes, yes. She has had no alternative. But when he has no more breath? Then she will take her revenge on us all and upon our children. She will enjoy seeing us ruined.’

  ‘It may be true, Papa,’ said Margaret. ‘The Duchess is wise to send her things into safety. Will you help us, for there is much to pack?’

  I looked around at the floor, strewn with every manner of thing, from combs to Coffee pots, from Candlesticks to Chinese lacquer vases, from Gold Cutlery to sets of decorated Playing Cards. How much of all this truly belonged to Fubbsy or had merely been on loan to her as part of the furniture of her fine apartments I had no means of telling.

  ‘What would you have me do?’ I asked weakly. ‘What task do you wish to give me?’

  ‘Shoes!’ said the Duchess. ‘I have been trying to assemble them in pairs, but many are missing and must be hiding around the rooms, under beds or chairs or I know not where.’

  ‘Shoes?’

  ‘Yes. You can see from this how slovenly are the Servants charged with dusting and sweeping, but that is another matter. Please, if you will, search for the missing shoes, Sir Robert. Many have diamond buck
les, or jewels sewn into the satin, and are of value, so I cannot leave without them.’

  Though I would willingly have sat down and been quiet and taken some Brandy, I had little choice but to do as she requested. I was thus to be observed crawling around the carpets on hands and knees, lifting the heavy hems of curtains, craning my neck to peer beneath chests of drawers and armoires and chaise longues, in a vain search for the Duchess of Portsmouth’s shoes.

  And I thought how Pearce would have mocked me for this and called me ‘the Lackey of a Slut’, but I did not really care, for I knew in my heart that my whole world was about to change and how I filled the time between now and the coming in of that terrible Transition was of little concern to me.

  I found one shoe. It was an object of beautiful Perfection, made of blue satin, with a high heel, waisted and elegant. The satin was cross-stitched with silver thread and set high on the bridge of the shoe was a flower, made of silver ribbon and having at its centre a little cluster of Seed Pearls.

  I held it in my hands and brushed some dirt from it. I noted its smallness and wondered at how petite the Duchess’s feet must be to fit into it. Then I thought about the Shoemaker who had toiled over it and striven to make a faultless thing and my mind returned to my Dutch friend, Jan Hollers, who had attempted perfection with his clocks, but yet had failed by so narrow a margin.

  Sorrow filled my heart. Sorrow for Hollers, sorrow for the Shoemaker and some kind of sentimental sorrow for the shoe itself, cast so carelessly off.

  Very loud in my mind was the clamour of the Promise I had made to the King in his coach, and I knew that I should not do nothing about it. Yet I was at some loss as to what I might do.

  I knew that it was to the Queen that I should relate my Pledge. But it was impossible, given my known association, through Margaret, with the King’s Mistress, for me to go to the Queen’s apartments and expect to gain entry there. There was only one other person who might help the King to the secret conversion that he wished for and that was the Duke of York.

  The Duke had little liking for me. He once told me that I brought out the King’s ‘idle and slothful disposition’ and so put in jeopardy the running of the nation. But I feared that Time was short now, and did not know what else I could do except to try to talk to the Duke and place the matter in his hands.

  After taking a little midday dinner with Fubbs and Margaret, and other of her Women brought in to help with the Duchess’s packing, I thus excused myself from the duty of searching for shoes and began to make my way back to the King’s apartments, where I hoped to find York and somehow get his private attention.

  The corridors at Whitehall, always thronging with People, were even more choked than usual. But it seemed to me that anxiety and sorrow at the King’s dying had somehow affected these poor souls’ ability to hold themselves up. Everybody I passed was either leaning against the wall or slumped down upon the stone benches, or else moving with infinite slowness, and I concluded that all their normal Purpose, which was to see the King and get from him some Favour or Preferment (and towards which they usually proceeded with sprightly alacrity), had been taken from them, so that now they knew not what they did nor where they were going, for they had no true aim, but were yet reluctant to leave.

  Trying not to be contaminated by this festering Slowness, I hastened on my way and only paused when I heard somebody call out my name and saw, coming towards me, Father John Huddleston, an old and trusted friend of the King’s, who had helped to conceal him during his great flight from Worcester in 1651 and who had been rewarded by being given a position in the Catholic Household of the Queen.

  I had known John Huddleston for many years, once saving his life with a powerful Emetic of Rock Salt and Syrup of Buckthorn, after he had imbibed a Porridge laced with poison. The Poisoner (suspected of being a Quaker) was never brought to Justice. But from that moment onwards Huddleston had kept by him a bottle of ‘Merivel’s Efficacious’ Emetic, in case the thing should ever be tried upon him again. He was thus disposed to see me as his rescuer and so to overlook my known debauches and my formerly disreputable Influence upon the King’s morals.

  We greeted each other plainly and warmly. Huddleston had always struck me as a man of great humanity, to whom I had once admitted that, after the deaths of my Parents in a cruel and terrible fire in 1662, I had lost my Faith in God altogether.

  Instead of berating me, or attempting to Convert me anew (which pious people are so fond of doing), he had asked me whether my Mother and Father had also ceased to believe in a Loving God, and when I told him that they had not, but remained steadfast in the Faith, he had sweetly conjured for me an image of the Paradise in which my Parents now resided.

  It was, as befitting my Father’s trade, a Haberdasher’s Paradise, with clouds made of wool and Feather Trees waving in the wind, and paths strewn with pearl buttons and fields of linen-weave and houses made of Buckram. And sometimes, when melancholy struck me down, I had tried to imagine this fanciful kingdom, with my Mother and Father in it, and my Mother exclaiming, ‘Oh, do look, dearest: a Ribbon Grove. Do you see how pretty it is!’

  ‘The news is bad, Merivel,’ said Huddleston. ‘Very bad. I am going to the Queen and we shall pray together.’

  ‘How is Her Majesty?’ I asked.

  ‘She is prostrated. She cannot eat nor sleep. She chides herself that she has not been “a good enough wife”.’

  ‘Ah. Yet, perhaps it might be the husband who has not been “good enough.”’

  ‘Quite so. But she scourges herself and she is tormented by another thing – that the King, for all his promises to her, has never been received into the Roman Catholic Church.’

  ‘This matter is on the Queen’s mind?’

  ‘Yes. She is most upset that it has not been done.’

  Here I took Father Huddleston’s arm and drew him aside into what I thought was an Ante-room, telling him that there was an urgent matter upon which I had to speak to him in private.

  We found ourselves not in an Ante-room, but in a broom cupboard.

  ‘Oh,’ said I, looking around at a quantity of Besoms and feather Dusters stacked into this small space, ‘this will not do …’

  I made to go out again but Huddleston said: ‘No, on the contrary, it is a fitting place for any Secret and you must know that Catholic Priests of my age were accustomed to making ourselves small to fit the Holes made for us. When Cromwell’s men came to search Moseley Hall, His Majesty and I slept the night in a space no larger than this. Of course, we did not have Brooms for company; we had Fear. Should I be fearful of what you are about to tell me?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not at all. I only ask your help with it.’

  The Father sat himself down on an upturned wooden bucket and I squashed my body in and clutched at the Besom handles to steady myself as I related to Huddleston all that the King had confided to me in the coach.

  When I had done, he gazed down at his hands, which were stiff and pale from many decades of Prayer, and said nothing for a moment. Then he looked up at me and said: ‘Thank you, Sir Robert. You could not have told me words that I would rather hear. But we must pray it is not too late …’

  ‘I still do not know how it is to be done.’

  ‘It shall be done through me. I shall consult with the Queen and the Duke of York, and we will find a time that is fitting, before His Majesty slips away from us. I know you do not believe in the Rewards of Heaven, but if you get there, perhaps you will.’

  34

  ON WEDNESDAY THE 4th of February, following a long sleep, the King seemed to rally. I urged that a Marrowbone broth, such as had kept Margaret alive during the Typhus, be made for him, and this was done, and after he had sat up to be shaved and washed, he was helped by me to drink some of this.

  The spooning of broth into His Majesty’s mouth enabled me to sit very close to him and to talk to him unheard by others in the room. I thus was able to tell him that, once the Duke of York had found the means t
o clear the Bedchamber of all the Bishops and assembled Privy Councillors, Father Huddleston would come to him, bearing the Host.

  ‘When will it be?’ he whispered.

  ‘I know not, Sir,’ I said. ‘But it will be. Trust me.’

  At this last injunction, something crossed His Majesty’s face that I had not seen in many a long hour, and that was a smile.

  ‘I know,’ I said, reading at once what lay behind the smile, ‘I once broke your trust, but that was long ago. And tell me, Sir, have I ever betrayed you since?’

  The King’s jaw worked painfully slowly upon the broth, as though it might have been a gobful of tough meat. Then he said softly and sadly: ‘… betrayed Clarendon.’

  ‘Ah,’ said I. ‘Clarendon. Yes. But I am atoning. I am endeavouring to compose a Treatise upon the subject of the Souls of Animals, and Clarendon is ever in the forefront of my mind.’

  I expected the King to laugh at this, or at least to smile, but he did not.

  ‘Souls of Animals … ’tis certain,’ he said, nodding as vigorously as his poor afflicted head would let him. ‘Animals have souls …’ Then, he suddenly began clawing at his sheet and asked: ‘Where is Bunting?’

  I sent a Servant to find where the dogs were being housed and to bring Bunting to His Majesty. I hoped that he would continue drinking the broth, but he pushed the spoon away and said again: ‘Where is Bunting? I must have her by me.’ Then he looked about him distractedly, at the faces in the crowded chamber and said: ‘Why is nobody by me? Where are my children? Where is Fubbs?’