The King's Mistress

by Gillian Bagwell

  Jane ached to be with Charles again, and wore his letter inside her bosom and against her heart, with the little silk bundle holding his father’s watch.

  “Surely the Princess Royal would be happy to have him here?” she asked. “Can’t she help him with money for the journey?”

  “Perhaps,” Louise said. “But she’s already laid out vast amounts on his behalf, you know. Munitions, gold—she and poor William, God rest his soul, have done more than any of his other cousin kings to bring him back to his throne. And she is so much troubled just now with the Electors. Besides, with things as they are in France just now, his mother probably wants him at her side.”

  After a lull of some months, the burning embers of the Fronde had flared into flames once more. Young King Louis and his mother had fled Paris to St Germain, and now most of northern France was at war, her helpless towns flanked by the armies of the Royalist and anti-Royalist factions.

  “Don’t worry.” Louise smiled. “Mary hates it here. As soon as the weather is warmer and the roads are safe, no doubt she’ll pay Charles a visit, and I’m sure she’ll take you along.”

  Jane was surprised to find that she had met a kindred spirit in Charles’s aunt Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, whose tart wit and forthright speech left many a court popinjay goggling in astonishment.

  “I can well understand the terrors you must have faced when you were riding with Charles,” Queen Elizabeth told Jane, her slight Scottish accent reminding Jane that the lady had been born Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of King James VI of Scotland. “For I had to run for my life as well, you know. When my husband was deposed shortly after he accepted the crown of Bohemia, I had four little children and was eight months gone with child, and we fled from Prague in the dead of winter, given a scant few hours’ grace to escape with our lives. Poor little Rupert was left behind in the scramble, and his nurse ran after us and threw him into one of the carriages. Ten days’ ride it was to Breslau, sometimes at the gallop. That was thirty years ago, and I have been an exile and a pauper ever since.”

  She sat silent for a few moments, stroking the little monkey who fidgeted in her lap before she spoke again, and behind the dark eyes Jane could see the shadows of memories.

  “No one would have thought that my life would be thus, from where I began. Elizabeth of Scotland. That was what I was called when I was born, you know.” She smiled at Jane. “My father had not yet become King of England, but the winds were blowing that way. For Queen Elizabeth had no children, and my father, the son of Mary Queen of Scots, was the closest heir she had.”

  She picked up a small piece of cake and held it out to the monkey. He popped it into his mouth, licked his lips, and looked at her expectantly.

  “She was my godmother, you know. Gloriana, the Virgin Queen. And of course I was named for her.”

  “Do you remember her, Your Majesty?” Jane asked, fascinated.

  “Oh, yes. I was six when she died. I was rather frightened of her. She wore an enormous farthingale and a great standing ruff, and her face stood out so white beneath that bright red wig.” She laughed. “Of course now I see that she was just a lonely and vain old lady, like me, trying to hold off the ravages of time.”

  “Your Majesty is not old,” Jane said. “And you certainly have no need of paint and wigs.”

  The queen patted her hand. “Thank you, dear girl, for your kind little lies.”

  “No lie, Your Majesty.” Jane smiled. “I pray I may hold what beauty I have as well as you.”

  The monkey scrambled down from the queen’s lap and went to sit on a little hassock near the fireplace.

  “Such times I have seen,” Queen Elizabeth mused. “Did you know that Guy Fawkes and his accomplices intended to put me on the throne, had they succeeded in murdering my father as they intended, in the Gunpowder Plot?”

  “No, I didn’t know,” Jane said. “Thank God His Majesty your father was saved.”

  “Yes. Better that I kept my father than be Queen of England. I was Queen of Bohemia for only a year. We were so happy to begin with. But perhaps …”

  Her eyes were far away again, and then she came back to the present and looked intently at Jane.

  “I think sometimes, about the choices we make, not knowing how far-reaching the consequences may prove to be. Do not you?”

  “Yes,” Jane said, reflecting on how easily she had set off from Bentley with Charles. “Yes, I do.”

  AS IN PARIS, JANE FOUND HERSELF THE OBJECT OF CURIOSITY AND admiration because of her adventure with Charles, and speculation as to what their exact relationship might be. She wondered the same thing herself. His letters always protested that he missed her and looked forward to the time when he would see her again, but he offered no definite plans. He was busy, she reminded herself, and his mind and time were much taken up with the business of trying to find a way to get England back—nay, with the daily worry of cobbling together enough money to eat and trying to help his straggling little court.

  On this hot afternoon, Mary had retired to her bed with a headache, and her ladies, with neither duties to attend to nor leisure to do as they wished, fidgeted in the summer heat. Jane was restless and uncomfortably warm. She would go to her room, she decided, and bathe her face and chest in cool water. Halfway down the passage, she heard voices from outside. Glancing out the window, she saw Dorothy and Kate Killigrew sitting on a bench in the shade. Through some quirk of the air, their voices carried clearly.

  “His Majesty and Lady Byron?” Dorothy breathed. Her eyes were wide with naughty delight. “But didn’t her husband just die?”

  “Yes!” Kate laughed. “The poor man is barely cold and his widow is stripping off her mourning clothes to play the strumpet to King Charles!”

  Jane froze where she stood, her heart thudding in her chest.

  “But what about the Duchess de Châtillon? The Duke of Buckingham told me that His Majesty was sore in love with her.”

  “And so he was. The whisper is that he asked her to marry him, and though she likes him well enough, he has not money enough even to buy new shoes, so she turned him down, and now he’s drowning his broken heart in the lewd flesh of Lady Byron.”

  “Marry her?” Dorothy blew out a sceptical little puff of air. “He can’t marry her. He needs a princess, with wealth and an army. I thought he was to marry that French wench”—she wrinkled her nose in disdain—“the Grande Mademoiselle?”

  “He fair scuttled that ship.” Kate shook her head. “He told some of his cronies that once he had married her, he would cut down her household and sell her properties, and that remark made its way back to her.”

  “Oooh!”

  “Yes, quite. So that was the end of that. No, there’s no princess in the offing and now he’s tearing his way through the Paris beauties from what I hear.”

  “That’ll be a blow to you know who,” Dorothy mused. “She may fling her cap after him now.”

  Jane didn’t want to hear any more. She fled to the room she shared with Kate and locked the door. So that was why she hadn’t heard from Charles. What the eye ne’er sees the heart ne’er rues, as Nurse would say.

  She heard voices in the corridor and hastily blotted her eyes. She would put Charles out of her mind, and make the best out of her life here until she could go home. And she would surely not make herself look foolish and fodder for gossip by letting on that there had ever been anything between her and the king, or that she had allowed herself to hope there might be more than what had happened.

  Nurse’s voice once more spoke in her head.

  Hope is a good breakfast, but an ill supper.

  JANE’S SPIRITS ROSE WHEN SHE RECEIVED A LETTER FROM SIR CLEMENT Fisher later in the summer.

  “My dearest Jane: I scarcely know what to write, it seems so much has passed in the months since we walked together on that lovely summer evening at Bentley. When I heard that you had gone, I steeled myself to accept that you must have decided against accepting me. Very soon, however
, I learned that you had been forced to flee. You may imagine what torment it was to me to think of you, to wonder what dangers you might be facing, and know that I was not there to protect you. John has been to see me, and now I know the full story. My great relief at knowing that you are safe is shadowed by the knowledge of what a great distance lies between us, and the uncertainty of when I shall see you again.”

  Jane lifted the letter to her nose. She fancied she could catch a faint whiff of tobacco smoke and the scent of Clement himself, and it brought him to her mind vivid and real as he had not been for her in the months since their parting. No, he was not Charles, not a warrior king.

  He was a man. Take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.

  The line from Hamlet rose to her mind, and she smiled, and then tears came to her eyes. Yes, Clement was a good man. But far off, so very far off. And God knew when they would meet again. She took up her pen and at first she could get no further than “Dear Clement”. But soon she felt she could imagine him sitting at her side, and then she could write quite easily of her life as it was now and her hope that it would not be long before she saw him once more.

  IN LATE NOVEMBER, COLONEL O’NEILL RETURNED FROM A TRIP TO Paris.

  “A letter for you, Mistress Jane.”

  He smiled down at her, and Jane’s heart skipped to see Charles’s handwriting. Striving for the appearance of calm, she escaped to her room. Her fingers shook as she broke the seal and read.

  “My dear Jane: I have hitherto deferred writing to you in hope to be able to send you somewhat else besides a letter; and I believe it troubles me more that I cannot yet do it than it does you. The truth is, my necessities are greater than can be imagined. But I am promised they shall be shortly supplied. If they are, you shall be sure to receive a share, for it is impossible I can ever forget the great debt I owe you, which I hope I shall live to pay in a degree that is worthy of me. In the meantime, I am sure all who love me will be very kind to you, else I shall never think them so to your most affectionate friend, Charles R.”

  There were no protestations of desperately missing her, no promises that he should see her soon. But he was thinking of her. And that made all the difference.

  THE NEW YEAR OF 1653 BROUGHT EXCITEMENT AND HAPPINESS, FOR Henry, the twelve-year-old Duke of Gloucester, was at last released from Carisbrooke Castle and sent to join his sister Mary at The Hague. The young duke and his sister Elizabeth had been held by Cromwell since 1646, and poor Elizabeth had died two years earlier, at the age of fifteen, longing for her far-flung family. Jane recalled that young Harry had not seen his sister Mary since he was two years old, when his family scattered in the face of the coming war, and she saw in his eyes the struggle to make sense of the bewildering transition from prisoner to petted prince.

  The joy of Harry’s arrival was quickly overshadowed by the news that the fleet commanded by Charles’s cousin Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the dashing soldier son of Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, had been scattered by a hurricane in the Caribbean Sea. In March, Rupert limped into port in France with five ships, but the Defiance, with his brother Maurice on board, was missing. After a terrible period of uncertainty, word came that the Defiance had sunk with the loss of all on board.

  “This family is cursed,” a distraught Queen Elizabeth declared, clinging to her daughter Louise, and a shiver went up Jane’s spine. Could it be true? So much loss, so much grief.

  “And the loss of Prince Maurice is not even the worst of it,” Colonel O’Neill declared later, his eyes dark with grief. “Three years at sea Prince Rupert has been, privateering to raise gold for His Majesty’s cause. And now much of that gold is at the bottom of the sea, and surely what he has brought safe will not be near what the king needs to make an assault on England. So much travail, and so little gained by it.”

  Prince Rupert arrived at The Hague in April. Jane had heard much of him when he was commanding the king’s forces in Staffordshire during the war, and was curious to see how the man would measure up to the legend. Rupert had forced the surrender of Birmingham, Lichfield, and Leicester, and there had been shocked rumours of mayhem and plunder in the wake of his victories. Parliamentary broadsheets had even accused him of sorcery, claiming that his famous poodle, Boy, was his familiar, a demon hound that could catch bullets in his teeth.

  Jane thought that Rupert seemed to fill the room when he swept into Mary’s apartments.

  He was about thirty, even taller than Charles, and like most of the Stuarts, his eyes and cascading curls were dark. He was also very well set up, strikingly handsome, and with more than a trace of the rogue about him. Jane felt a tingle of arousal as he kissed her hand, and not only because he reminded her of Charles.

  Jane recalled Charles telling her about how he had worshipped his dashing cousin, ten years his senior, and she could well understand why. Rupert, then twenty-two and already a seasoned soldier and commander of the Royalist cavalry, had led the charge at Edgehill, the first real battle of the war, and had been with Charles during his wartime stay in Bristol.

  “Ah, the beautiful lady who helped my royal cousin.” Rupert grinned down at her. “I am longing to hear the tale.”

  “At Your Highness’s pleasure,” Jane murmured, blushing at the glint in his eyes.

  “I know your brother John very well, you know,” Rupert said. “He was one of the best men we had in Staffordshire.”

  “I thank you, Your Highness,” Jane said. “He always spoke most highly of you.”

  This was not strictly true. John had fought with Prince Rupert and regarded him as a brutally effective commander, but also mercurial and impetuous.

  The young Duke of Gloucester sidled up to his imposing cousin and offered a diffident bow. Rupert threw an arm around the boy’s shoulder and shook him affectionately.

  “I’m glad to see you, lad! I hear you’re to be invested as Knight of the Garter soon?”

  “Yes, sir, I am.” Harry flushed with pleasure at the notice from his cousin. “I was hoping that you might be here when I am so honoured. Especially as you have gone through it before.”

  He glanced down and Jane saw that Rupert wore a blue velvet garter that sparkled with diamonds just below his right knee.

  “I’d not miss it for the world, boy,” Rupert assured his young cousin, who seemed suddenly to stand several inches taller.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  PERHAPS IT WAS TRUE, AS LOUISE SAID, THAT MARY HATED THE Low Countries. Whatever the reason, she was restless, and moved her court from The Hague to Breda to Teyling to Antwerp and back, depending on her mood, the season, and what pleasures might be found at each of the palaces. In the autumn of 1653, her household embarked on the two-day journey to Breda, a pretty town built at the confluence of two rivers. Jane smiled as she recalled Charles describing it as “smelling with delight, gallantry, and wealth”.

  One afternoon Mary took Jane with her to pay a call on the Hyde family, and as the carriage deposited them at their destination Jane admired the neat brick house near the old centre of the city.

  “You met Sir Edward Hyde in Paris, I’m sure,” Mary said over her shoulder as they waited for the door to be opened to them. “He was chancellor of the exchequer to my father, you know, and during the war was guardian to my brother the king, and remains Charles’s closest adviser now. The family fled England shortly after my father’s murder and they have bounced from Antwerp to Brussels, never knowing how they are to live.”

  The door of the house opened, revealing the beaming face of a lady in her middle thirties who dropped into a deep curtsy.

  “Your Royal Highness!” she cried as Mary raised her and kissed her. “Welcome!”

  Lady Hyde’s brood of children gathered to be introduced and to look on wide-eyed as their mother visited with the Princess Royal and Jane. Lawrence and Henry were about twelve and fifteen years of age, and little Frances was surely not yet ten, Jane thought. The eldest daughter, Anne, was a pretty dark-haired girl
of about sixteen, old enough to sit with the ladies over chocolate and cakes.

  “We cannot thank you enough, Your Highness, for your kindness and generosity in providing this house,” Lady Hyde said, looking almost on the verge of tears.

  “Why, it’s the very least I could do, after the many years of loyal and wise service you have given us,” Mary smiled. “It must be very hard on you to have your husband so far away for so long. At least there will be a home for him to come to when my brother can do without him for a few weeks.”

  “Have you word of His Majesty?” Anne Hyde asked. “My father wrote this summer that the king had been ill and had been bled several times.”

  “He is better now, thanks be to God,” Mary said. “I’m sure the worry over money and what he is to do next affect his health.”

  “My husband’s letters are full of the dire poverty of the poor young king and his followers,” said Lady Hyde. “King Louis has granted His Majesty a pension, Edward writes, but is slow to pay it.”

  “Yes, poor Charles relies on money from Royalists at home for his very meals. And of course, if the French enter into an alliance with Cromwell, not only will the pension fail to come but Charles will have to leave Paris.” Mary shook her head. “He thinks of going back to Scotland, but …”

  She trailed off and Jane recalled the frustration and despair in Charles’s voice when he had told her of his stay in Scotland before marching to his defeat at Worcester.

  “Of course the right marriage would go a long way to helping him,” Lady Hyde said. “A princess who would give him the armies and the money he needs to take back his throne.”

  “Yes,” Mary sighed,”but it’s easier said than done, I’m afraid. Charles may be king, but when monarchs go to market looking for bridegrooms for their daughters, there are many candidates whose prospects are much more certain.”

  MARY’S COURT MOVED TO TEYLING FOR CHRISTMAS, AND JANE WAS happy to receive a long letter from Charles, delivered once more by Colonel O’Neill along with a small package, which proved to be a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets.