The King's Mistress

by Gillian Bagwell

  “He told me he loves me!” Nan told Jane that night as they undressed for bed. “Oh, Jane, I have never been so happy in my life.”

  “I’m glad for you, sweetheart,” Jane said, taking in the glow that suffused Nan’s face. “But have a care.”

  “What do you mean?” Nan demanded, her forehead puckered with sudden worry.

  Tread carefully, Jane told herself. She recalled her pain when Mademoiselle d’Épernon had warned her against giving her whole heart to Charles.

  “I mean that though no doubt he loves you, if he says so, it does not mean that he can marry you. Should something happen to the king, the duke would succeed him. The choice of his bride will not be his alone.”

  “Oh, pooh,” Nan scoffed. “I’ll not worry about that now. It scarce seems likely that His Majesty will ever sit on the throne, let alone that his brother will, does it?”

  Jane thought of her last letter from Charles, and his hopes for the risings at home.

  “Perhaps it doesn’t seem likely now. But we cannot tell what may come.”

  Her heart ached to see Nan looking sad now, and she went to the girl and stroked her cheek and smiled. “Take pleasure in his company, by all means. But keep your mind open to other possibilities if you can.”

  The following week, Nan fell ill, and the doctors gave the dreaded news that it was smallpox. Jane sat with Nan in the evening, reading to her and coaxing her to drink some broth to keep up her strength. When Nan had at length fallen asleep, Jane left the room to find the Duke of York lurking outside the door.

  “How is she?” he asked anxiously. “Can I see her?”

  “She’s sleeping now, Your Highness,” Jane said, looking up into his grey eyes, clouded with worry. “I’ll tell her in the morning that you were here. But surely it would be more wise not to endanger yourself by visiting her until she’s better?”

  She was surprised to see tears in his eyes.

  “I don’t care what happens to me,” he whispered. “If she should—if she should not recover, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “I’ll come to you in the morning,” Jane promised, “and tell you how she does. But I pray you have a care for yourself, Your Highness. Sleep, and hope for the best.”

  Against all odds, Nan’s condition improved over the next few days, and soon the doctors pronounced her out of danger.

  “Thank God,” Nan said, examining her reflection anxiously in a hand mirror as she lay in bed. “My face is not scarred. I don’t think I could have borne that. How could I have faced His Highness with a pockmarked face?”

  “You are most fortunate indeed,” Jane agreed. “But if he loves you, surely it would not have made any difference in his feelings.”

  THE SPIRITS OF THE ENGLISH IN PARIS WERE DOWNCAST BY THE news that the uprisings at home had been found out and put down, and that Charles had returned to Cologne, seemingly further than ever from being restored to his throne. Jane received a letter from him, and hurried to read it in private.

  “My dearest Jane: As you will hear by others, my great hopes were disappointed. Of course many lay the failure at my door, and I am sure the talk is even more blameful where you are, but I pray do not give credit to those people who take upon them to censure whatever I do, and have no way to appear wise but to find fault with whatever is done. They who will not believe anything to be reasonably designed except it be successfully executed had need of a less difficult game to play than mine is. I hope we shall shortly see a turn, and (though it be deferred longer than I expected), I shall live to bid you welcome to Whitehall. Your most affectionate friend, Charles R.”

  Hard on the heels of the discouraging news from England, a mud-spattered messenger arrived from The Hague with word that Mary’s little son William was ill with the measles, and within hours, Mary’s carriage was clattering away from Paris and towards home as Jane and Lady Stanhope tried to comfort the weeping Princess Royal. Nan was tearful, too, and Jane knew it was because she had been parted from the Duke of York.

  Little William was out of danger by the time his mother reached him, but the hurried trip had been wearing, and Jane sank exhausted into bed, glad to be done with travelling.

  MARY WAS STILL PLANNING TO SPEND THE SUMMER WITH CHARLES in Cologne, and Jane was eagerly counting the days until she would see him again. In June, less than a week before they were to leave, she received a letter from her mother. She opened it eagerly, always glad of news from home. But her face fell as she read, and Nan looked up in alarm at Jane’s little cry of dismay.

  “What is it?”

  “My brother and my father have been arrested,” Jane said, the blood draining from her face. “And my uncle. They were not told the cause, my mother writes, but she is in great fear that it is to do with our helping the king.”

  Her mind raced with helpless anxiety. Her poor father was sixty-five years old, and his health would surely suffer if he were imprisoned for long. And if it were proved that John had helped the king to escape, and had then helped her, it would mean his death, and his large family would be left to struggle without him. The thought that her father, brother, and uncle could already be dead overwhelmed her.

  She could not go to see Charles now, she realised with a pang. She must stay and wait for further news, for she would not be able to live with herself if she had gone gadding to Cologne, losing herself in carnal ecstasy in Charles’s arms, while her brave old father and uncle and John met their deaths.

  Jane retreated to her room and wept. Waves of homesickness washed over her. Particulars of Bentley and the family sprang to her mind in vivid detail. Nurse’s faint fragrance of the lavender in which she kept her clothes, the clouds of blossoms when the orchard was in bloom, the old mark in the dark panelling of the great hall to record the height of Walter Parsons, the Staffordshire giant. The raven with the crooked beak that lurked near the banqueting house. And her cat, Jack. She could see his tranquil pale green eyes and stumping gait, and wished desperately she could clasp him to her and feel the rumble of his purr against her. The thought of him was more than she could bear, and she clung to her pillow and sobbed.

  The terrifying news from home reawakened Jane’s anxiety about her place in Charles’s heart. She wrote to tell him that she would not be able to accompany Mary on the summer’s visit, and added, striving to keep her tone light, that he must surely forget her after such a long absence. Charles’s letter was reassuring in its promptness and bluntness.

  “My dear Jane: I did not think I should ever have begun a letter to you with chiding, but you give so just cause by telling me you fear you are wearing out of my memory, that I cannot choose but tell you I take it very unkindly, after the obligations I have to you, that ’tis possible for you to suspect that I can ever be so wanting to myself as not to remember them on all occasions to your advantage. Which I assure you I shall, and hope before it be long I shall have it in power to give you those testimonies of my kindness to you which I desire.

  “I am very sorry to hear that your father and brother are in prison, but I hope it is upon no other score than the general clapping up of all persons who wish me well. And I am the more sorry for it since it hath hindered you from coming along with my sister, that I might have assured you myself how truly I am your most affectionate friend, Charles R.”

  Jane read the letter over again, smiling at the thought of how he would have assured her how truly he was her most affectionate friend if they were together. So he did miss her.

  MARY DEPARTED FOR COLOGNE IN JULY, AND JANE CONSOLED HERSELF with the company of Queen Elizabeth and Princess Louise, and awaited further news from home.

  Clement Fisher wrote, assuring Jane that he had been to Bentley to offer any assistance that her mother and family might need while John and Thomas Lane were in prison.

  “It is a troubling time,” he wrote. “There are rumours that Cromwell might be crowned king, a sad and ironic thing, if it should come to pass. There are even wild whispers that the king mig
ht marry one of Cromwell’s daughters, and so find his way back to some kind of rule, though it seems to me that such a beast, half monarchy and half republic, would not live long, and from what I have heard of the king it scarcely seems a thing to be believed.”

  No, Jane thought. She couldn’t imagine Charles meekly accepting joint rule with Cromwell, and sitting down at a council table with the men who had been responsible for his father’s murder.

  She received a letter from Charles a few weeks later. “My sister and I have made a jolly journey to Frankfurt. We have come incognito, but ’tis so great a secret that not above half the town knows it. There is a company of English players here, and I thought of you, Jane, and how you would have enjoyed their show, perhaps especially because there were women among the players—actresses! What a novel idea it is—it improves the playing, I think, to have real women. And not only for the reason you may suppose I think of!

  “One night at the theatre there was a scene that did not take place upon the stage. We entered only to see that my cousin Charles Louis, the Elector Palatine, was there. He and his brother Rupert spent much time at my father’s court when I was a boy, and he was with us early in the difficulties with Parliament, but he soon turned his back on our cause. Worse yet, he made peace with the rebels, and took up residence at Whitehall, hoping that Cromwell would make him king in place of my father. Most shameful, especially as he had often importuned my father to help him regain the Palatinate.

  “As you can imagine, I cannot stomach him now, and we turned on our heels and strode from the theatre, leaving him stammering and red-faced in our wake.

  “Cologne is not a little altered, for from having very little company, and some of those worse than none, we have now as good as can be, and pass our time as well as people can do that have no more money, for we dance and play as if we had taken the Plate Fleet, though I am confident our losses are not so great as Cromwell’s are, who for certain has received a very considerable one at Hispaniola, and we are in great hopes of the breach between Spain and England.

  “We have here a very great intrigue between Sir A.H. and Mrs. P., which I believe will end in matrimony, and I conclude it the rather, because I have observed a cloud in his face at any time these two months, which Giov. Battista della Porta in his Physonomia says foretells misfortune. Ever your loving friend, Charles R.”

  MARY WAS BACK AT THE HAGUE IN OCTOBER, BEARING GIFTS FOR Jane from herself and Charles.

  “I fear my poor brother is losing hope of being restored,” she told Jane. “And his penury gnaws at him, at his pride and his sense of himself. He told me he was so poor he had not eaten meat for ten days together in July, and of course his followers are in the same state.”

  Jane heard little from Charles over the next months, and her heart bled to think of him dispirited and sad.

  Soon after the New Year, Jane was cheered by a visit from Henry Lascelles, but dismayed at his news.

  “Do you recall Henry Manning?” Henry asked, grim-faced.

  “That convivial young man who joined us in Cologne? Yes, why?” Jane wondered.

  “That convivial young man proved to be a spy,” Henry growled. “He followed His Majesty to Middleburg last spring and reported on his movements to the rebels, as well as betraying the much he knew of loyalists at home. The failure of the risings owed somewhat to his intelligence, and there were many died in England because of him.”

  “What happened to him?” Jane asked, afraid to hear the answer.

  “We took him in the act of writing to Cromwell’s man Thurloe. He attempted to tear up the papers but we prevented him, and he had about him plenty more that damned him. The king and others questioned him. He denied and equivocated, the cowardly dog, but at last he admitted all, and we shot him in the woods outside Cologne.”

  Jane could imagine only too well how such betrayal must eat at Charles’s heart, make him wary of trusting anyone, and how he must despair at ever returning to his kingdom.

  “I hope you will remember,” she wrote to him, “the constancy and love shown to you by so many of your subjects during those weeks we were together and afterwards. Poor people, to whom the reward of a thousand pounds for betraying you would mean the ability to keep them and their families in comfort for the rest of their lives, yet they kept their silence and did for you whatever they could, though to do so put them in great peril. Pray do not let the treachery of one man blind you to the loyalty of many more.”

  She read the letter over, feeling once more the excitement of the days and nights they had shared.

  “My darling, it breaks my heart to think that one you thought your friend should prove so false. I wish I could hold you to me, give you the comfort of my arms as I did in those nights we were together. I would smooth your brow with my hand and kiss away the sting of treachery. If I could march on England alone and vanquish the rebels, you know I would do it, and gladly, too. Take heart, my love, for I am sure in my soul that the day will come that the king will enjoy his own again. With love always, your Jane.”

  Some weeks later Mr Boswell, a hanger-on at Mary’s court, came to The Hague from Cologne. Jane hated his leering insinuations, his constant preening and boasting, and her heart sank as he approached her, a smirk on his fat red face.

  “Mistress Lane! The sage who counsels the king!”

  “What do you mean, sir?” He had the look of a cat stalking a mouse, and she struggled to keep her voice calm.

  “Why,” Boswell cried, pouncing once she had taken the hook, “I was in His Majesty’s bedchamber t’other day”—he drawled with elaborate carelessness—“and His Majesty read out your letter to him.”

  Jane felt her face burn. Surely Charles had not read out her letter, such private thoughts and memories meant only for him, to a crowd of strangers? All that day the thought lay heavy in her mind. She pictured Charles in the midst of his friends, laughing at her care and advice. Throughout the week she teetered between thinking it would not be like him to do so, and fearing that perhaps she had so fallen in his esteem that he would mock her. That notion infuriated her, and she sat down to write another letter.

  “Mr Boswell says that you read my letter to your friends. It was meant for your eyes alone, and I would not have written in such unguarded terms had I known that it should be made public. I regret it much if my writing is unwelcome or my love to you is troublesome. I would not for the world thrust myself where I am not wanted.”

  She folded the letter, stamped the seal into the hot wax, and handed it off to the messenger who would leave shortly for Cologne before she could change her mind.

  Once more, Charles’s response was swift, accompanying Henry Lascelles to The Hague.

  “My dearest Jane, I hope you do not believe that hearing from a person I am so much beholding to can be in the least degree troublesome to me, that am so sensible of the obligations I have to you, but on the contrary, ’tis a very great satisfaction to me to hear from you; and for that which Mr Boswell is pleased to tell you concerning your giving me good counsel in a letter, and my making it public in my bedchamber, is not the first lie that he has made, nor will it be the last, for I am certain there was never anything spoken in the bedchamber in my hearing to any such purpose, nor, I am confident, when I am not there, for I believe Mr Boswell’s end is to show his frequent being in my bedchamber, which is as true as the other. Your cousin will let you know that I have given orders for my picture for you, and if in this or in anything else I can show the sense I have of that which I owe you, pray let me know it, and it shall be done by your most assured and constant friend, Charles R.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SOON AFTER THE NEW YEAR OF 1656 HAD BEGUN, JANE HEARD that Charles’s once-love Lucy Walter had arrived at The Hague.

  “She’s living with Thomas Howard!” Nan Hyde whispered. “With the king’s bastard and that of Lord Taaffe!” Howard, the brother of the Duke of Suffolk, was one of Mary’s household, with apartments in the Stadtholder�
��s Palace. “Mary’s in a mighty rage about it, but what’s the poor girl to do? Taaffe has done with her, and the king has no money to keep her.”

  A few days later, Jane came upon Lucy and her two children in one of the long galleries of the palace. Lucy smiled at her tentatively.

  “Mistress Lane! What a pleasure to see you here.”

  “And you.” Jane’s eyes went to the young boy seated on the floor before the fireplace, engrossed in laying out toy soldiers in ranks. He was about seven, cherub-cheeked and rosy-lipped, but the eyes he turned on her were sombre and purposeful.

  “I am going to invade England,” he explained solemnly, pointing at his wooden soldiers. “And then the king my father will have his crown again.”

  “His Majesty is lucky to have such a general as you,” Jane said, kneeling next to the boy. He nodded and straightened a soldier’s position. He was as like Charles as if he had been spat out of his mouth, she thought. Lucy was sitting in a chair nearby, her little daughter on her lap asleep, her thumb tucked into her mouth. The girl was about five, and angelic looking in her sleep, but Jane could tell at a glance that she lacked the Stuart blood.

  “May I ask your counsel, Mistress Lane?” Lucy asked. The question took Jane off guard, but she nodded and drew up a stool next to Lucy’s chair.

  “I think of going home to England,” Lucy said. “It is hard here, with the children. Charles has promised me a pension of five thousand pounds, but it never comes.”

  Five thousand pounds, Jane thought. In a recent letter Charles had told her he ate but one meal a day, so dire was his poverty, and that the well-meant gift of a pack of hounds had mortified him extremely, as he could not possibly afford to feed them. Without a miracle he wouldn’t be able to send Lucy five shillings.

  “He sends me cheerful notes and little gifts.” Lucy shrugged her shoulders hopelessly. “I fear he thinks to fob me off with empty words because I am a trouble to him. My lord Taaffe and Colonel O’Neill both tell me that the king desires me to be gone from here. Indeed, I think he wishes I would simply disappear. I know you know him well. Perhaps you know his heart better than I these days.”