Lady on the Coin

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  Lady on the Coin

  Margaret Campbell Barnes

  © Margaret Campbell Barnes 1963

  Margaret Campbell Barnes has asserted her right under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1963 by Macdonald & Co.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  One

  “I am related to the King of England,” boasted the fair girl Frances, who was practising her dance steps before a tall, tarnished mirror.

  “The one who had his head chopped off?” enquired her small sister Sophie, glancing up from her dolls.

  “Well, yes, Charles the First too, of course. But I meant his son.”

  “Then much good may it do you!” scoffed Lord Culpeper’s niece, pushing a needle rather viciously into her embroidery frame. “The last time I saw Charles Stuart he hadn’t the money to buy new shoes either for himself or for his horse.”

  As Dorothy Culpeper was older than the other girls in the room and had been in Paris when the unfortunate young Prince first came from Jersey to join his mother, twelve-year-old Frances Stuart was not in a position to deny it.

  “My mother says that royal blood is more important than money,” she retorted, holding out the sides of a shabby gown and sweeping a truly royal curtsey to her own reflection. Being even poorer than any of her exiled companions at the Château de Colombes, and pretty enough to evoke their snubs, Frances occasionally felt the need to find something to boast about.

  “Not these days,” said Dorothy, who was growing tired of a loyalist’s life of exile. “We all know that even Queen Henrietta-Maria was hard put to it to find nourishing food for her own daughter last time Princess Henrietta-Anne was ill.”

  In spite of her frivolity, real sickness or sorrow could always catch at Frances Stuart’s heart. She instantly stopped her pretty posturing and darted across the room to perch on a stool at the elder girl’s side.

  “It must be terrible for her after being Queen of England and having everyone jump to obey her lightest wish. Far worse for her than any of us. I have often wondered,” she added, picking up various coloured silks to try their effect against the faded gown, “why young King Louis doesn’t let her live at Court. After all, she is his aunt. Does he dislike her?”

  “Not that I know of. But I have heard milord Clarendon say that it would be very embarrassing for the French royal family to do so. You see, Cardinal Mazarin — who really rules France — still feels it necessary to keep on good terms with our country, even while this Cromwell monster is in power.” Dorothy firmly took back her disordered silks, but found it impossible to be angry for long with the Stuart girl. “But I do assure you, my dear, that any privations the Dowager Queen Henrietta-Maria suffers now are as nothing to what she has been through in the past. My mother and her other ladies were hunted across England, helping her to escape, and she carrying an unborn babe, which was delivered on the journey at Exeter. Imagine, the rest of her family imprisoned by the Roundheads or in exile, and then hearing that her beloved husband had been beheaded…”

  “No wonder she is…difficult…sometimes, and seems to quarrel with people,” put in plump fourteen-year-old Janton Lovelace, frowning down at a broken stringed lute which she was trying to mend.

  “It must be bad enough having a baby even with one’s own bed to have it on,” sympathized Frances, who was still rather hazy as to how such things happened. “Perhaps that is why poor Princess Henrietta is so delicate. Being jolted about mile after mile on a horse litter, I mean, before she was actually born.” After contemplating this interesting matter for a moment or two, she added inconsequently: “And so you have really seen him?”

  “Seen whom?” asked Dorothy Culpeper, with pardonable irritation.

  “Henrietta’s eldest brother. Charles. The one she is always talking about, who should be King. The one I said I was related to.”

  Giving up the intricate pattern she had been working on, Dorothy laid aside her silks.

  “How your mind does skitter from one subject to another, Frances! I cannot imagine what sort of future you can expect unless you try to concentrate more. Yes, I was there when he first arrived from Jersey.”

  “And what was he like?”

  Frances settled herself comfortably on the stool, elbows on knees and chin cupped in palms. She had a devastating way of delaying more sober people who wanted to work.

  Dorothy had not been very old herself, and cast her memory back with an effort.

  “Tall and lean as an undernourished maypole. But I don’t suppose you can even remember a merry English maypole.”

  “My family lived in Scotland, anyway.”

  “Where, I suppose, you are too strict to have maypoles. Though he was only sixteen, he tried to be sympathique with his mother, but he seemed to be most at home with his cousin Louis’ horses and dogs. His French was terrible.”

  “What did he look like — apart from this maypole thing?”

  “Dark and French-looking like his mother. The rest of the family are all Scots — fair like you, I believe.”

  “Was he handsome?” persisted Frances, thoroughly enjoying her gossip.

  Dorothy had to laugh. “Oh, mon dieu, non!” she answered decisively.

  Janton took the end of a lute string from between her excellent teeth, the better to join in the conversation.

  “Yet some of the girls seemed to go crazy about him,” she recalled. “I wasn’t much older than little Sophie there, but I do remember how annoyed they were because his mother kept prodding him on to pay court to that fat Mademoiselle de Montpensier, his heiress cousin. So there must have been something about him…”

  “What?” asked Frances.

  “Well, charm…”

  “Like his sister Henrietta?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Dorothy Culpeper rose with a sigh and crossed to a window. She stood for a moment or two looking out at the typically French landscape of grey-green vineyards and tall poplars bordering a bend of the Seine; and when she turned back it was to survey with a kind of compassionate anger the half-dozen English girls grouped listlessly about the room.

  “They all have it, haven’t they, these Stuarts?” she demanded. “Else why should our fathers have given their lives for them? And our brothers be fighting as mercenaries all over Europe sooner than live on French charity? Why are we all stuck here in dreary exile when we might have been enjoying life in our parents’ pleasant English manors or Scottish castles? Now, during the best years of our lives, when we ought to be wearing pretty clothes — waking up to womanhood — marrying our fellow countrymen?”

  They all looked up at her in rather shocked surprise, the older ones roused to a momentary longing for their own country by her impassioned words. But they had been refugees for so long, and some of them — like Frances — had been mere babes when they were hustled to safety in their nurses’ arms across the Channel. Frances, whose father had died only recently in France and who had somehow been born incapable of listlessness even in polite captivity, might have answered, but at t
hat moment the door opened quietly, and the girl who had most to lose by Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth came in.

  Fourteen-year-old Henrietta-Anne Stuart, whose royal father had seen her only once in infancy after her mother had escaped, and who had soon afterwards walked with dignity to the scaffold, could not have made a less regal appearance. She was painfully thin, dark and sallow-skinned. Because she had spent the morning painting she wore a black tablier, French fashion, over a simple woollen dress, and because there was no coiffeur to curl her chestnut-brown hair into fashionable ringlets, it hung wispily straight to her shoulders.

  Frances ran to her in her impulsive way. “Henrietta! Ma chère!”

  “Maman va descender,” warned the youngest Princess of Britain, who often saved them from her mother’s displeasure. And then more generally to the rest of them: “Her Majesty would have you accompany her to Mass. Better, for all of you, to have your heads ready covered and missals in hand.”

  Like the rest of them, she spoke in a mixture of two languages, but to her French came by far the easier.

  “More prayers!” pouted Frances irreverently.

  “My mother will soon be taking us all to the Convent at Chaillot for another — how do you say? — retreat. And that means chapel thrice daily, with no good-looking acolytes for your distraction.” And when Henrietta smiled teasingly at her young friend it transformed her plain delicacy to a promise of irresistible attractiveness.

  Because it was difficult for Frances to sit still, she brought a pile of missals from their shelf and distributed them among her companions, who were hastily putting away their various occupations.

  “Let’s talk of something more gay while we still have time,” she entreated, carelessly pinning a black lace veil over her golden head. “It is true, is it not, Henrietta, that I am related to you?”

  “Mais bien entendu — of course,” agreed the daughter of the late King of England, whose mother was a daughter of the renowned Henry of Navarre.

  “But there are many Stuarts. Her family live quite ordinarily, like some of the rest of us. Frances’ father was a doctor,” objected Janton. She picked up Frances’ worn but treasured missal and read aloud the inscription: “To the Hon. Walter Stuart, M.D., from his grateful patients.”

  “And a very clever one,” corroborated Henrietta with quiet finality. “He was enthralled when my father’s physician, William Harvey, discovered about the circulation of the blood, and his family risked everything for ours at Naseby. Frances and I are cousins.”

  “Distant cousins,” Frances had the grace to admit. “Through Lord Blantyre.”

  “Oh well, of course, with you Scots…” murmured Kentish-born Dorothy.

  “Blood is thicker than money.”

  It was inexcusable in anyone with royal pretensions, of course, but the pink tip of pretty Frances Stuart’s tongue shot out in the direction of milord’s daughter, and small Sophie, seeing it, giggled delightedly.

  “We are of the same clan,” explained Princess Henrietta as if explaining something elementary to a foreigner. But she spoke gently, pouring oil on the troubled waters of their mewed-up discontent, as she so often did.

  And then the door was thrown open with some poor attempt at ceremony and the sad, widowed Queen Dowager of England came in, followed by her friend, Madame de Motteville, and Lady Dalkeith, who had cared for the baby Princess in Exeter and so courageously smuggled her out of England, and Mistress Stuart, the mother of Frances and Sophie. Queen Henrietta had endured months of civil war and anxiety for a husband she adored. She had been stunned by the news of his execution, and not long afterwards learned that her daughter Elizabeth had died alone in Carisbrooke Castle. Tragic grief and subsequent ill-health had made her look far older than her age. She was kind to these young exiles who shared her fortunes, but all unaware that her deep mourning and religious devotion were an oppression to their pleasure-starved youth.

  But today there was a firmer purpose to her tread, and a gleam of triumph in her dark eyes, the illuminated missal in her left hand seemed to give momentary place to the importance of a letter which she waved triumphantly with her right.

  “I have news from England,” she told the girls dramatically. “Oliver Cromwell is dead.”

  “At last!” The involuntary whisper went up from all of them, as they formed a respectful circle about her.

  Henrietta-Anne ran to her. “Does that mean that Charles —?”

  The Queen’s arms went round her tenderly, missal, letter and all.

  “I fear, ma mie, that Charles will still have to wait a little while longer. It is too soon to risk another landing. Only le bon Dieu and his own resourceful courage brought him back safely to us after the Battle of Worcester.”

  “The good news was brought to him while he was playing tennis, by a trumpeter from Dunkirk,” Lady Dalkeith told them. “At Hoogstraeton, in Holland. The whole town seems to have gone delirious with relief.”

  “But will it make so much difference?” asked Madame de Motteville. “Ce brut Cromwell — has he not a son? Will he not become Protector in his place?”

  “Richard Cromwell is a weak waster, by all accounts,” explained Lady Dalkeith. “He would have little power over the army.”

  The Queen folded the momentous letter between thin fingers.

  “No. Regicide though he was, Cromwell was a strong figure-head. There is no one to replace him,” she agreed. “If only Charles will restrain his impatience and have the subtlety to let these Roundheads weaken their cause by a few months’ scuffling for power among themselves!”

  The chapel bell had ceased ringing. For the first time in memory they would be late, although of course Father Cyprien would dutifully await the Dowager Queen’s party. She rallied them round her with an almost happy smile.

  “Let us go and pray for Charles the Second,” said Mistress Stuart, guessing how much as a man he needed their prayers.

  “And for the restoration of his kingdom,” added his royal mother firmly.

  Before turning to follow, Princess Henrietta-Anne stretched back a hand to give Frances’ fingers a joyful squeeze. And Frances, keeping close behind the Dowager Queen’s ladies, hurried along the cloister to chapel more eagerly than usual. Perhaps her worldly little mind needed something more concrete than virtue to pray for. Or her heart was stirred to pity by the thought of a tall, plain prince who had lost his father as she had, and who had, like herself, endured years of boring exile, waiting for some new shoes and a good meal and the chance to enjoy a merry life.

  Two

  Queen Henrietta-Maria was right. Charles — and all his supporters — had still to wait the best part of two years. But they no longer waited without hope.

  The exiles at Colombes, hanging on every scrap of news from London, heard how that sincere man Oliver Cromwell had been taken for burial in Westminster Abbey with the crown of England laid upon his richly-clad effigy. But they hugged each other in relief when the indefatigable diarist John Evelyn wrote: “It was the joyfullest funeral that ever I saw.” Apparently the sombre procession had provided an opportunity for a people long oppressed by puritanical restrictions to give vent to an opposite extreme of feeling. Apprentices danced and shouted outside Whitehall, soldiers forgot all discipline and reeled drunkenly along the streets. These were crude reactions by the rowdiest elements, but in sober fact the temper of the whole nation was changing. It was not long before the town rabble tore down their Protector’s new monument in the Abbey, and serious plots and risings were afoot all over the country. The penniless King of England and his brother James tramped the dunes in Holland waiting for a propitious time to attempt a landing, or for the moment of their unanimous recall.

  It was wise old Lord John Culpeper who insisted that General Monk was the man to approach. George Monk had been a royalist before he joined the Parliamentarians, the army respected him and he was tolerant enough to realize that there might be worse things for his country than a good-natured, modern-
minded monarch who must by now have learned a long, hard lesson about the result of insistence upon the divine right of kings.

  Serious negotiations began between Monk, who was in Scotland, and the royalists across the water. Soon everyone was prophesying that August would be the month when all their fortunes would change. But summer dragged on into winter, local uprisings were quelled, and nothing definite was done. As usual, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, counselled caution. To make a landing now with a small army of supporters might be successful, he admitted, but to wait for official invitation, which was so nearly in sight, would be more dignified and decisive, and spare many lives.

  At the Château de Colombes no one talked of anything but the hoped-for Restoration, and, to cheer a bleak November, word actually came from Charles that he had definite hopes of landing at Dover in the spring, and would be riding to Paris to bid goodbye to his mother and sister.

  “Charles is coming!” cried young Henrietta, over-joyed. “He will be with us for Christmas.”

  Frances clapped her hands and broke into a twirling dance with flying skirts.

  “It will be our first real Christmas! We must arrange games and masks like King Louis has in Paris. Your brother has suffered so much, we must give him a right merry time.”

  In her generous innocence she had no idea what the hardened young king’s idea of a right merry time might be. Nor did it occur to her that a riverside village a few miles out from Paris would seem to him exceedingly dull. Far less did she stop to think that perhaps a visit to a sad, deeply religious mother who still tried to order him about might be no more than a kindly eldest son’s conception of duty.

  “But what in heaven’s name shall we be able to give him and his hungry gentlemen to eat?” wondered Mistress Stuart, preparing to bustle away to the ill-staffed kitchens.

  “Everything that we have. No matter about afterwards,” recommended her elder daughter characteristically.

  “We could go and fish in the Seine as the monks do,” suggested good-natured Janton Lovelace.