With All My Heart

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “But we are not as yet officially at war there,” warned Clarendon, who, what with the gout and a long habit of domineering, grew daily more difficult.

  “Take no heed of his croaking, Holmes,” grinned Charles. “What it amounts to is that I can give you no official backing nor protect you from the claws of Parliament should you fail.”

  “I am well content to take a risk on that, Sir,” grinned back Holmes, whose daring seamanship had already endeared him to the King.

  All that Rupert and James could talk about these days, whether at meals or down at the dockyards, was the galaxy of fine new countries to be explored and colonized beyond the mighty Atlantic Ocean, and of Great Britain’s rivalry there with the Dutch. Although they had received the hospitality of Holland, it was natural enough for the Stuarts to hate the new Lowland republic which had repudiated their dead sister and young William of Orange, her son. So when the intrepid Dutch seized the ships of the African and East Indian Company, the British retaliated by wresting from them the thriving trade post, New Amsterdam, which they had built along the banks of the Hudson River.

  “And what shall we call it?” clamoured the explorers and politicians at Whitehall, when the tremendous excitement of the news had died down a little.

  And Charles, after considering a while, waved aside all suggestions incorporating his own name and gave honour where honour was due. “Now that, under the grace of God, this thriving city is ours, let us call it — New York,” he said.

  And marking the far-off spot on his globe, he hurried off to the Queen’s apartments. For ever since he had found her poring over the Lusiads, in which Portugal’s national poet had immortalized the exploits of her seamen, Charles had begun to talk with her about such things, recognizing the fact that almost everywhere his own ships went the courageous Portuguese explorers had been before them. Men like Bartholomew Diaz, who first rounded the Cape of Good Hope, establishing maritime routes to the Indies and actually landing on the unknown Continent of America; and the great Vasco da Gama, whose tiny fleet had years ago reached Calcutta and torn the valuable spice trade from the rich hands of Venice. It was a bond between Charles and Catherine at which few people ever guessed.

  But although only the passage to the privy landing stairs and Chiffinch’s room separated their apartments, Catherine saw comparatively little of her husband. He was a man who must always live his own life, and interests within her own household often had to suffice her. There was, for instance, the training of flighty, foolish Frances Stuart. The girl was so pretty and so much a tomboy that her goings-on began to weigh on Catherine’s conscientious mind. Instead of attending to her duties she would sit on the floor building card castles like a child, or escape with other wild youngsters, dressed up and masked, to mingle with the crowds and to cry sweet lavender or oranges in the streets, or run with flying curls through the galleries playing hide-and-seek with all the susceptible young men who shadowed her.

  “She is only a child,” Henrietta Maria would say indulgently when Catherine tried to hold a family consultation.

  “But a cousin of sorts, and so our dear Catherine feels herself to be responsible,” pointed out James, mindful of her kindness to his wife.

  “I take no exception to her romping with these young gallants. There is safety, I suppose, in their numbers,” Catherine excused herself, with that engaging air of innocence which so intrigued the Stuarts. “But when it comes to hiding in the linen room with the Duke of Buckingham — for you know, Charles, although George Villiers is your friend, he has a horrible reputation among my women!”

  Whereat her unregenerate husband burst out laughing. “No worse than mine, little Puritan!” he confessed.

  But to the Queen Mother, who hated all the Villlers, the linen cupboard episode gave the affair a more serious aspect.

  “In this instance, even Buckingham would not dare —” blundered James tactlessly.

  “And for all her innocent looks,” Charles assured them, hastening to silence him, “the girl is quite capable of looking after herself.”

  “She needs occupation,” snapped Catherine, wondering how he had discovered whether she were or not.

  “Then I will tell you of a notion I have in mind,” he offered obligingly. “Sir Peter Lely needs a model for a painting to be engraved upon the new pieces I intend to have struck from this Guinea gold, if and when our invaluable brigand Holmes brings it. Some allegorical female figure representing the might of Britain, I thought; for which our Frances, with her little Roman nose, has just the right slenderness and curves.”

  “A happy thought! And you could call the figure Britannia,” agreed James, with unwonted imagination.

  But that was scarcely the kind of occupation Catherine had been looking for. And after the family were gone donna Penalva, who alone had been permitted to remain in England, complained with reason that it would only make the little nitwit more vain than ever.

  All the same it passed away the dull autumnal evenings to watch Frances dress up in a white classic robe clasped about her youthful breasts with gold, hide her curls in a great martial helmet, and then, armed with shield and trident, pose in an attitude of graceful defiance — actually towards Catherine’s largest mirror, but supposedly towards all the real and imaginary enemies of Britain. All the gentlemen of the Court would gather round — to watch the famous painter at work, they said — and Charles himself was delighted when the first newly embossed coin was brought him from the royal mint.

  “How apt to have a Stuart face on either side!” observed florid, modish Buckingham, turning the coin on his lace befrilled palm so that the candlelight gleamed first on the fair Britannia and then on the bewigged profile of the King.

  “La Belle et Le Bete!” laughed Charles, flicking the gleaming thing from his friend’s hand into his pretty cousin’s lap.

  But that evening, while her devotional books were being laid out, Catherine was still wondering uncomfortably about the sly, malevolent way in which Buckingham had looked at her whilst he spoke.

  “It is a pity that Frances’s father, Lord Blantyre, allows her to spend so much time with the fast set in Lady Castlemaine’s house,” sighed Maria Penalva, settling on her nose the strong spectacles which Charles had had specially made for her.

  “Yet, in spite of her flightiness, I am sure that she is chaste,” insisted Catherine.

  But a few weeks later all thought of la Belle Stuart was put out of her head by news that Jane Lane was coming to Court. Jane Lane, whose name was so easy to remember — and whose intimate role of gallantry so difficult to forget! The girl for whom a penniless Charles had once borrowed the French King’s best horses, for whom he provided a generous pension and to whom he still occasionally wrote. The woman, it seemed to Catherine, of all others to be envied.

  “Jane’s husband is bringing her at last,” Charles told her, “and I shall be obliged if you and your ladies will be present to greet her.”

  “Will they be staying with us awhile?” asked Catherine, although her heart sank fearfully at the thought.

  But Charles said it would be only a short visit although, for his part, he would willingly find them permanent lodgings in the Palace. It seemed that the husband — quite understandably, Catherine thought — had needed practically a royal command to bring Jane at all.

  Jane’s dress, when she was presented, was that of a country squire’s wife and she wore but one of the jewels which the King had sent her; but there was a nobility about her sweet, clear-cut face which needed none at all. Catherine, although Queen of England, found herself the more nervous of the two. “For days she held his life steadfastly in the hollow of her hands,” she thought, glad that — with no will to out-shine — she had chosen to wear her quietest grey satin.

  Withdrawing herself a little from Charles’s side, she watched him raise Jane from her profound curtsy and kiss her, calling her his deliverer and his ‘sweet life’, before them all. He spoke with that deep inflection which
betokened affectionate gratitude; but, seeing the colour flood into Jane’s pale cheeks, Catherine knew that however good a wife and mother she might now be in Northamptonshire, she would love Charles Stuart until she died.

  “You must find his Majesty very different from the cropped and leather jacketed William Jackson you served so well,” Catherine said kindly.

  “It was I who served Jane,” teased Charles.

  And then for the first time country bred Jane dared to look at him properly. At the tall, dignified figure with the glitter of Orders across a black velvet coat, the curled and perfumed wig, at the grave lined face and full, licentious, smiling lips and — last of all — at the fine ringed hands that once had watered and stabled her horse. “His eyes are just the same,” she said, her own full of tears for the fresh youth of him that was gone.

  Charles led her to a chair and began telling her quietly any small anecdotes he could remember of her father, Sir Richard Lane, who had died in exile with him in Jersey; and Catherine noticed how even in that lovely moment Barbara Castlemaine must needs push her proprietary way towards him. Judging by the splendour of her toilette, it would appear that she, too, had feared a rival from the past. “Though, wife or mistress, neither of us need fear; for women made in Jane’s mould keep their vows!” thought Catherine, gladly watching Charles’s happiness as he gathered about him Jane’s brother, Father Huddleston and old Cavalier campaigners like stout Lord Wilmot, Carless and the rest; and then the gradual thawing of Lady Jane’s shyness and the breathless out-pouring of reminiscences where every other sentence began with “Do you remember?” Within that charmed circle, warmed with camaraderie, bursts of laughter and the King’s own racy yarns, Jane and the men who had escaped from the carnage of Worcester were living over again what each must have counted his highest hours. Young unfledged fighters of the future hung on the fringe of their fascinating adventure, and while the notorious Castlemaine sulked unnoticed, the Queen graciously drew Jane’s forgotten husband to her side, entertaining him as best she could in her still broken English so as to leave the spell of reunion unbroken.

  It was not until the King and James left and the rest of the men were raising their glasses again in boisterous sport to the old, dangerous toast “The Black Boy over the water!” that Catherine, lingering purposely, bade Jane Lane “Good bye”. “I want you to wear this, too, in token of my gratitude,” she said, unfastening from her breast a brooch of exquisite Bahia workmanship.

  “Oh, Madame!” exclaimed Jane. “From you, whom I have so envied!”

  “I had thought rather that people pitied me,” said Catherine, lowering her voice and speaking spontaneously as she was wont to do with those whom she instinctively trusted. “But you are not of the kind who would want to be a queen?”

  “No, Madame. And it is not for that I envy you.”

  “Then our envy is mutual,” sighed Catherine. “You see, there is so little that I can ever do for him.”

  “Yet always, whenever he is disheartened, sick — or dying — you will have the right to be there — in his room.” For a brief moment the two women whose lives had been so different clasped hands, and Catherine, crossing herself at the thought of Charles’s death, knew that Jane was right. Even now, it was she alone who could bear him a legitimate son — and there was nothing in the world, she knew, that he wanted more. So she bade her guests good night and went early to her room to rest. To rest and to thank God that, after all, one good woman whom she had feared was no menace to her happiness.

  And to her annoyance she found it was the turn of careless, chattering Frances to attend upon her. “The King and the Duke have gone on to the Playhouse,” she said brightly, collecting the Queen’s jewels one by one on a small velvet cushion. Adding, with the licence of a relative, “It seems odd, does it not, that they should go there when that nice woman who helped to save Charles comes at last to Court?”

  “Perhaps there is a particularly good play tonight,” yawned Catherine.

  “It is not a real play by Mr. Wycherley or anybody. But Moll Davis is to dance a jig, dressed as a boy, at the Duke’s playhouse,” obliged the little chatterbox, who always had all the tattle of the town at her tongue’s tip. “And milady Castlemaine says there is a new, red-haired actress called Nell Gwynn or some such name, whose impudent songs amuse the King.”

  “And milady Castlemaine hoped that you would repeat her choice morsel of gossip to me.”

  “Oh, Madame!” pouted Frances. “I do but try to liven what must have been a very dull evening for you.”

  Catherine rose wearily from her dressing stool. “You have yet to learn, my dear Frances, that there are some women to whom an evening is not necessarily dull just because they themselves are not the centre of it,” she said.

  But afterwards, lying quiet within the drawn curtains of her bed, Catherine was so unfortunate as to overhear kind Lettice Ormonde say reprovingly, “You should not have told her Majesty about that Gwynn woman, Frances. After all, she is but a jumped up orange wench with a drunken prostitute of a mother. The king might have laughed — he laughs at all sorts of things — but it is incredible that he would ever look at her.”

  And then the young Stuart girl’s pert retort. “Well, he looks at her often enough at the playhouse. They say he often goes when she is billed to play. And milady Castlemaine told me that several times the sentries have seen him before it is properly light hurrying across the gardens in that quick, quiet way of his, and along this gallery to his room —”

  Naturally Catherine did not sleep much that night, and she was still wide awake when the palace servants began raking out the fires and the river beneath her windows came to life again with the raucous shouts of ferrymen. Of course, there was no truth in the squalid story ... It was just something unkind which Barbara had invented out of spite because she and Charles had been so content with each other of late. But presently, while her ladies still slept, she heard footsteps coming quickly along the stone cloister on the garden side of the palace — footsteps which she would have known anywhere. She sat up abruptly. So it was true after all — that Charles was faithless — even now while she carried his unborn babe ... Was it always to be like this? From whose bed did he come now, hurrying to beat the dawn? Surely, surely he was not sneaking from some tousled, red-headed slut of an actress?

  Indignation boiled within her. She had to know, to see for herself — although, seeing him, she would still be in a world of wretched conjecture. In the anteroom where two of her women slept there was a small window overlooking the cloister. Swiftly, in spite of the vertigo that assailed her, Catherine rose from her bed. Without pausing to put on a wrap she slipped past the sleeping women and silently pushed open a casement. And, sure enough, there in the cold light of autumnal early morning, was her husband hurrying along the flagged pavement below. “Then it is true! Somehow I must get used to it,” she told herself, with a shaking hand pressed to her heart.

  But although Charles hurried, there seemed nothing particularly furtive about him. The sentry at the garden gate looked as stolidly impersonal as usual, and suddenly Catherine espied two other men rounding the bedewed garth close at the King’s heels. Sandwich, the admiral, to her amazement, was one of them, and he was discussing something with a shortish little man carrying a great sheaf of documents. And almost beneath her window Charles stopped suddenly, as if he had just remembered something, so that the other two almost bumped into him. Clearly, from their conversation, they had just come from some sort of committee meeting, — Catherine had had no idea that these men were in the habit of conducting State business before she had even drunk her foreign brew of tea; and all her heart was abased to Charles in shame.

  “How much gunpowder and cordage was I embezzled out of when the ‘Royal Duke’ came in to refit at Chatham?” he was asking crisply of Montagu of Sandwich. But it was the little man in the large brown wig who answered, promptly and concisely. With his sensible clothes and expert knowledge of figures h
e brought a breath of outside commerce into the more rarefied atmosphere of the Palace. He appeared to have put a stop to whatever leakage there had been, but seemed to have something else on his mind — something which it had not been his place to speak of in Council, perhaps; and although his manner was pleasantly respectful he was obviously accustomed to discussing business with the King. “About the drunken master of the ‘Kestrel’,” he said. “If Your Majesty will graciously pass the punishment suggested by the Board, the matter need not be left outstanding.”

  Far from any of them being caught philandering, they were just three hungry men standing in a draughty passage, each wanting his breakfast but with the same unromantic issues conscientiously in mind. “He was four points off his course with the Dogger bank close on his starboard,” recalled Charles consideringly.

  “That was not the only charge, Sir,” the Secretary of his Navy Board reminded him. And Sandwich shook his bared head in friendly exasperation. “It is a question of discipline, Sir,” he urged. “If Your Majesty is as lenient with all officers who insult him in their cups —”

  “What exactly did he say of me?” asked Charles. “My life is not so blameless that I could afford to enquire across a boardroom table.”

  There was an embarrassed pause during which Catherine noticed that the rising sun was beginning to glorify the dew spangled garth with misty shafts of gold. She saw her husband lay a friendly hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. “Come, Pepys, out with it!” he encouraged. “I’ll wager, for all you have a pretty wife, you sometimes stray.”