Lady on the Coin

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  The last piteous question was almost inaudible, and it was far from Frances’ desire that it should be answered. Lennox rose hastily, but as hastily she left him. Down the long room she went, not trying to conceal her agitation, and to those who glanced up as she passed, the men rising to their feet, this agitation seemed natural. She had spoken with the King but recently, probably she had been told that the Queen’s condition was desperate, and even though this might well mean her own glittering triumph, a superficial grief was to be expected from her. There were those who would have approached her, but Frances made a blind gesture of dismissal, and they fell back.

  To her it seemed an eternity before she reached her own room, dismissed her maid, and threw herself upon her bed in a passion of tears.

  Although she knew she would never utter a word of what had passed she longed to punish Lennox and was furiously frustrated because she was powerless. How dare he! How dare he! The futile question beat upon her brain. He had suggested — what had he suggested? The vilest of all vile things!

  Drunk though Lennox was, what could have put this into his head? Could it also have seemed a possibility to the King? Oh no, she did not believe it, could not believe that he had made any such squalid plan for her. If she had surrendered herself to him, yes — perhaps, but at this stage he was too romantically in love with her. It was chiefly through this strain of romance, because she represented youth and laughter to him, that their relationship was still an innocent one. There was that in Charles, unacknowledged though it might be, that hesitated to tarnish what was almost if not quite an innocuous passion. Frances had allowed him more licence than she had allowed any man — kisses and caresses, a fondling that had given her no pleasure, though she had acted pleasure. Time and again she had drawn away with feigned reluctance, and had put him off with promises that were as vague as she dared to make them.

  Various factors had helped her. There had been Barbara’s pregnancy which she had pleaded was a barrier between them. That had tided her over months; and then when Barbara’s son was born, and Charles had sworn that if Frances would be kind, he for his part would finish with her, she, sore beset, had contemplated a visit to the cousins in Scotland. It had not been necessary, for the Queen had told her in confidence that she, once more, had hope of bearing a child.

  Frances had not dared to reproach the King. Not all the love he professed for her was sufficient to prevent him from begetting a legitimate son or daughter were this possible. But it had enabled Frances to say steadfastly that she was far too attached to the Queen to betray her while she was enceinte, and surely the King could not desire it, since even the merest suspicion of such perfidy would, if it came to the Queen’s ears, be sufficient to cause disaster.

  Charles had seen the possibility of this and he had grudgingly acquiesced. Frances had breathed freely again, and she had been happy during the Queen’s expectancy, and once more disinclined to look too far into the future. The King’s favour and the King’s love were both desirable while they remained on their present plane. Everyone smiled upon her and she was free to devote herself to an endless succession of gaieties. There were balls and masques and river picnics. She could go riding with the King and a train of attendant courtiers in Windsor Park. There were archery parties and hawking, and of late the diversion of sitting for Jan Roettier, whose handsome brothers crowded round to admire her.

  In spite of Charles’ veniality, there was an honesty about him. Frances liked him for this quality as she liked him for many others, though she had known from the first that she would never fall in love with him. But he had certainly fallen in love with her, and should the Queen die it was probable that he would marry her. In that case her connection with the Blantyre Stuarts, who were of the Royal House would be exaggerated and exploited. But if the Queen lived, the pursuit, the persuasion, and her own efforts to evade the King would start all over again. Outright rejection would mean that she lost his favour for ever, and heaven only knew what would become of her. It would be impossible for her to remain at Court, and as she would then be regarded by many as the King’s discarded mistress, her prestige would be low indeed. How endlessly her mother would reproach her.

  Against her will, for she hated to dwell on suffering, Frances’ thoughts turned to the Queen who must have suffered tortures, both physical and mental, during the last few weeks. Now, she might be actually dying, and if she did die, in one sense Frances’ troubles would be over. But not in every sense, for, although the thought of being Queen was so dazzling it set her brain awhirl, the thought of Charles as a husband and especially of Charles as an adoring, demanding and faithful husband, was far from dazzling.

  “Oh, pray God she lives,” murmured Frances, and found herself praying with a fervour that was new to her. “She loves him and even without a child she can be happy, for he does care about her in his way.”

  There came a light tap at the door, and Frances dragged herself up and crossed the room. She opened the door and saw Julia La Garde, who surveyed her tear-marked face with some surprise.

  “Are you really so grieved about her?” she asked. “Everyone supposes…”

  “Of course I am grieved. I love her dearly,” Frances cried. “I came from France to be with her — I was with her while she and the King were honeymooning. There has been nothing but kindness. You are new here. You scarcely know her.”

  “Not so well as you,” Miss La Garde agreed, “though I agree the Queen is amiable and this is a sad end for her.”

  “An end? Do you mean…?”

  “There has been no further news, except that the priests are seen going in and out of her chamber, and someone said just now she was to receive Extreme Unction. That means the end of hope, does it not?” enquired Protestant Julia, to whom all such Catholic practices were mummery.

  “No. It does not,” cried Frances in a passion she scarcely understood. “It means that God is being implored to save her. And you…I…all of us, of whatever faith, should join in that entreaty.”

  “Certainly I shall pray for her to be spared,” Julia La Garde said, jealous of Frances, disliking her, but since she might soon be in tremendous power unwilling to offend her. “But it is not on the Queen’s account that I am here. When you left the Duke of Lennox and Richmond — though I vow I did not know who he was until he told me — his looks were so despondent I spoke to him and tried to cheer him.”

  “Another bottle of wine will do that,” Frances said callously.

  “More like it would send him into a coma. He had taken enough. He told me he had offended you in the most dire way, and of course nobody wishes to offend you, least of all at present.”

  “At present?” Frances snapped, angry eyes fixed on her.

  “I mean because you are already so unhappy,” explained the diplomatic Julia. “He wrote me a note and asked me as a favour to see that it reached you.”

  The girl’s eyes were bolting from her head with a curiosity which was to receive no satisfaction. Frances took the folded slip of paper from her, wondering if she had had the impudence to read what was written. “Thank you,” she said, “that was kind of you. It could have waited until tomorrow, as it is so late. I was about to retire.”

  This was sufficiently pointed, especially as Julia had not been invited to seat herself. Evidently there was no hope of a cosy gossip, in which she would be given the chance to make headway with one who before many months passed might be the Queen of England.

  She left — regretfully — and Frances stood with the twist of paper in her hand, half minded not to read it but to tear it into fragments. But at last, and reluctantly, she unfolded it. Five words only had been written. “Forgive me. I was mad.”

  Well, at least, thought Frances as she put the paper to the flame of a candle and watched it as a black cobweb fell to the ground, even if Julia had read the message it could not have enlightened her.

  Wearily Frances got into bed and slept the sleep of profound exhaustion. When she awoke h
ours later it was to hear that the Queen had taken a turn for the better. Her physicians had announced that the crisis was past and that she would live. Frances felt nothing but thanksgiving, and those who eyed her slyly, expecting to see signs of chagrin, were disappointed. Her own anxiety could be shelved, thought Frances optimistically. There was time enough.

  To some extent she was right. Catherine made a slow recovery and Charles was kind and attentive. He had been aghast at the possibility of losing her, and her love for him had in her delirium been so pitifully clear that for the first time he felt an acute responsibility for her happiness.

  Now it was easy to reassure her and to make her believe in his answering love. For a short while at least Charles, when he considered Frances, did so with embarrassment. He was still in love with her, but during the Queen’s illness he had revealed his soul to her, which was something he had never done before, however much involved with a woman. As he was to say later when Barbara Castlemaine dramatically announced her conversion to Catholicism, he was not interested in ladies’ souls; nevertheless in his grief and suspense, and in Frances’ sympathetic understanding, there had been a communication between souls, and he could not immediately forget it.

  It was as though they, who were unacknowledged antagonists in the game of love, had signed a truce.

  The Queen, starting on her lengthy convalescence, wanted to have Frances with her, to read to her, to talk to her. Frances could make her laugh as readily as she could make the King laugh, and they were thus equally concerned in steering the Queen towards normal health.

  Beyond his absorption in his women-folk, Charles at this time was precariously involved with Louis XIV, whose unofficial mouthpiece was Henrietta-Anne.

  The young Duchess of Orleans wanted nothing more fervently than a close alliance between the two countries, and all her letters to Charles at this period were aimed to forward it. But it is doubtful if she fully understood the devious character of her brother-in-law.

  Louis’ last wish was to see an alliance brought about between the Dutch and the English, thus strengthening the two maritime powers, but his policy was one of pretended meditation, and this was pressed by the arrival of two additional ambassadors from France, in the persons of Henri de Bourbon and the Duc de Verneuil.

  Occupied with these two illustrious personages, with Catherine’s still precarious health and with the naval campaign, Charles ignored a worse enemy than the Dutch which was making stealthy inroads upon congested London.

  Each year the dreaded plague caused a percentage of deaths, but hitherto it had not become an epidemic. This year there was to be a far more serious outbreak. Soon there was a deepening sense of horror as the weekly death list mounted.

  The Court hastily withdrew to Hampton Court, where the more frivolous-minded did their best to forget the frightful conditions prevailing in London. But the Queen was unable to forget, for the King, though he acquiesced in the removal of the Court, and arrangements were made to quarter the French Ambassadors at Kingston, himself stayed on at Whitehall, braving the risk of infection.

  “He is too courageous. He never thinks of himself, except inasmuch as he would despise himself if he sought comparative safety while his people are in danger,” Catherine lamented.

  “He is not alone,” Frances sought to comfort. “Many of whom he thinks most highly share the same peril.”

  “Oh, I know — the chiefs at the Admiralty, and that really admirable young Pepys and John Evelyn and others. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, who, residing at Lambeth Palace, sets an example to some members of our own priesthood.” Catherine, who was always just to those whom she considered heretics, added punctiliously: “They put their faith in God, and so should we, Frances, who are of the true Church. But it is so hard, so hard when one loves. It is your good fortune that as yet you are heart-whole.”

  Frances dutifully agreed, though her thoughts had flown to an angry, glowering young man who had flayed her with cruel words. She had no information as to Lennox’s whereabouts. He might be safe at Cobham Hall, but it was equally likely that he was on the high seas, commanding a fleet of privateers, making sorties on the Dutch merchant ships. Risking his life as surely as though he was living in the midst of the plague-stricken capital.

  Sixteen

  Throughout the summer the plague raged, and horrifying accounts of it reached those who were in comparative safety at Hampton Court — not from the King when he paid brief and rare visits to this refuge, but from those who had at first been valiantly determined to withstand the appalling danger, but had finally panicked.

  The Queen spent hours each day on her knees in her private oratory, and had no heart for the diversions in which the others sought relief. Frances, thankful to be relieved of the King’s attentions, was gay enough. It was also a relief that Mistress Stuart was in Scotland. When the Queen was reported to be out of danger she had sent Frances a letter which mingled feigned and diplomatic thanksgiving with lamentations over her daughter’s lost chance of a royal marriage, and this was followed by close-written pages of ambiguous advice. Frances could be forgiven for wondering if her mother was secretly advocating her to accede to the King’s desire.

  The Chevalier de Gramont, who rented a house at Salisbury when the Court moved from Hampton, this being now considered too near London for safety, inaugurated card-parties, which started as early as midday and with intervals for refreshments continued until the small hours of the following morning. John Hamilton, who had recently fled from London and whose sister, once coveted by Lennox, de Gramont had married, gave a vivid description of his sojourn there, to an appalled but morbidly fascinated audience.

  “It became beyond my bearing,” he said, “and had I not left, I vow I should have thrown myself into the Thames out of wretchedness of spirit. I was doing no good there, and the Admiralty would do better to operate from a safer locality, for there will soon be none left to conduct the naval manoeuvres. You cannot conceive of the desolation. Grass is growing in the streets, the shops are closed, nearly every other house has the cross upon it with a prayer for mercy, which denotes that those within are stricken down. At nights there is no sound other than the plague-carts as they go upon their way, and the cries to the people that they must deliver up their dead.”

  “There cannot be sufficient priests left in London to deliver the Last Rites,” Frances said in horror-struck tones.

  Hamilton’s melancholy expression and shrugged shoulders denoted that she had wholly failed to grasp the extent of the disaster.

  “There is little or any attempt at religious rites,” he stated. “There may be a few devoted souls who give General Absolution at the pit-heads, but I have heard of none. They die in too great numbers for graves or gravediggers or even for coffins. The Lord Mayor has said that the death-carts may now go their rounds by day as well as by night, for the hours of dark are not long enough.”

  “But is nothing being done for the people in the way of medicines and treatment?” Lady Denham asked.

  “What can be done,” Hamilton countered, “when physicians die off with as great a rapidity as their patients? Oh yes, there are ministering angels, as in all such times of distress. Those who are seemingly fearless and selfless and go from one stricken house to another with nourishing foods for those who can take them, and giving such comfort as they can. Some do recover against all expectation, and it is said that few of these self-constituted nurses have sickened and died. It is as though their courage acts as a talisman.”

  Catherine sighed when these stories were brought to her ears.

  “It would be a terrible disaster for the country if the King were to sacrifice his life,” she said wretchedly. “But when I do see him and tell him this, he pays no attention to me. He believes that cleanliness is the answer to the sickness. That scrubbed boards and scrubbed bodies are of equal importance.”

  “Many people think that the reed-strewn floors are partly responsible,” Lady Suffolk said, “but for
myself I believe that the infection comes from those wretched Dutch merchant-men. That in peace-time the goods they trade are poisoned, and that now by spreading the disease they hope to conquer us as a nation.”

  “Nobody will conquer England while the King lives,” Catherine said with pride.

  “Men think only of wars. To them they are exhilarating,” Lady Suffolk lamented. “Now that King Louis has dropped all this pretence of friendship, and is said to be ready to come in on the side of the Dutch, heaven only knows how long there may be hostilities.”

  “It must be a great grief to the Queen Dowager,” Frances said. “When she packed up and left Somerset House for Paris she had no suspicion of it.”

  “But she will be glad that she is there,” the Queen said, “for she is constantly worried about her daughter.”

  Now that the Court was at Salisbury, the Duke and Duchess of York took the opportunity to make a tour in the north, and Charles himself went off to pay a visit of inspection to the fortifications at Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. From thence he proceeded to make a tour of Dorset and the neighbouring counties, and was then at Oxford, where, because of the persistence of the plague, it was decided Parliament must meet that autumn.

  Louis XIV informed Charles that, unless he would allow him to intervene and to mediate, France, because of treaty obligations, would be forced to support the Dutch. The challenge thus flung at him, Charles, after consultation with Parliament, who had no more mind than he to make peace at the command of the French King when all was going their way, took it up, and within days, Parliament having granted a million and a quarter, the country was at war with France as well as with the Dutch.

  Frances’ relationship with the King throughout these months had presented few problems. The King was harassed, depressed over the fate of plague-stricken London, worried by letters from his beloved Minette, who was heartbroken at the prospect of their two countries at war, pestered by the Queen Dowager, and with one worry on top of another, was far from well.