It was difficult to believe that it was the gentle, unconsidered Queen who was so berating him. “But he has always been proud —” he began ingenuously.
“Oh, I know. Proud of your good looks, your bearing — and now your military prowess. But had you been any other man’s son you would have swung for murder at Tyburn. And you would not have been here now to jeopardize the country’s peace.” With a finger across her throat Catherine mimicked the gamin gesture which he had once made in the King’s coach, and which had so imprinted itself upon her memory; and this time he did not find it so amusing. “I remind you but for your own good, because I care for you — I, who have least cause to,” she added more gently.
“He forgave me for that affair with the unfortunate beadle —” he muttered sullenly.
“Oh, yes, he forgave you, and that must suffice for us all,” allowed Catherine with dignity. “And he may forgive you yet again. But let me tell you this, Jemmie Crofts — -oh, James Scott, Duke of Buccleuch and Monmouth!” she conceded, at his angry gesture. “If you do aught to grieve so kind a father again I, the Queen, will neither forgive you nor receive you — ever!”
As the Duke of York had said, Jemmie was by no means heartless, and it shook him not a little that a woman who had been so consistently kind to him and who so seldom interfered should have spoken to him so. He realized — none better — that for all her unobtrusiveness, she was no nonentity; and that for all her husband’s frequent neglect, she was prepared to fight like a tigress for his happiness.
“I do not think you will ever hound her into a convent,” he told Buckingham, at the gaming tables that night.
“All she has and is is wrapped up in the value of her marriage lines!” scoffed the coarsening Duke.
“Marriage means more to her than the rest of us,” said Monmouth, more kindly.
“All the more reason why she may listen to me — for the King’s sake!” prophesied Buckingham, relieving him of stakes he could ill afford.
“If you mean to try to coerce her I should not let the King hear of it,” advised his eldest bastard, who had no reason to desire a more fertile royal marriage.
“I should imagine he will thank me for it,” said Buckingham. “And I should know, having been brought up with him.”
But, for all her devoutness, Catherine was no saint, and when her husband’s friend made so bold as to call upon her with that end in view, she would not listen at all. It was George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who did most of the listening.
“When you started all this before it was out of sheer jealousy, because you feared I might obtain some influence over Charles,” she said, keeping him standing before her. “I do not pretend to have any influence — any more than you have, or anyone else. But I showed you very clearly at the time that I had not a conventual life in view. I took to dancing and junketing and going abroad masked in the streets with Frances Stuart and other ladies —”
“And were recognized by the people and grew frightened and had to be rescued by some doddering old courtier, and brought home weeping in a cart!” interrupted Buckingham, brutally.
It was all too true. Catherine had not been brought up to that sort of light-hearted gaiety. “It would not be the first time I have returned to the Palace in tears through the cruelty and ill manners of your kind,” she told him. “But that was many years ago and I have learned much since then. Also it takes considerably more to intimidate me. And I would have you know that if I do not meddle in State affairs it is from the love I bear my husband. And it would prove more love in you, if you, too, ceased to meddle.”
“I am his friend,” bragged Buckingham. “In persuading you to retire to a convent I am thinking only of his good.”
“Loving him and witching him, I have come to understand him a little. Though you have known him all your life, you have — I should imagine — been watching out only for yourself,” hit back Catherine. “Are you really so stupid as to suppose that I could not hold my own Court by now if I chose, as Queen Henrietta Maria did?”
Buckingham found that he had met his match. “But, Madame, you are so devout,” he began, more persuasively. “I thought — we all thought —”
But Catherine was not interested in what any of them thought. “A woman can be devout without having a vocation to retire from the world,” she told him less heatedly. “And my vocation is marriage.”
“Childless marriage!”
“May God forgive you such brutality!”
“Madame, I should have thought that for the sake of England —”
“I am not English. I did not ask to be brought here!”
“Then for the sake of a sore beset husband and your vaunted love for him —”
“I doubt if you know anything about love, unless it be self-love. But, listen, milord Buckingham,” she went on quietly, rising to dismiss him. “On the day Charles himself asks me to go into a convent I shall know that he no longer needs me, and I shall go immediately without one word of protest. Thanking God for what I have had. Does that satisfy you?”
The flamboyant Duke who provided most of the hilarity at Court wilted like a pricked bubble before her. In the midst of his surprised confusion, he was even capable of the vague stirrings of pity and admiration. “Your marriage cannot have — amounted to much,” he stammered, without malice.
“Whatever I may have been called upon to suffer is my own affair,” she told him. “But at least I am the only woman who has been Charles Stuart’s wife.”
And with that Buckingham and his supporters had to be content.
Tired after so tumultuous an encounter, Catherine sent for her physician. She had not been sleeping well and would go to bed early and take some sedative. But Sir George Wakeman was nowhere to be found, and to her surprise John Huddleston came in his stead.
“Father Huddleston!” she exclaimed. “I am always glad to see you, and how you go about London unmolested in these troublous times amazes me. But it was Sir George Wakeman I sent for to give me something for my poor head.”
Huddleston came further into the room and his sympathy seemed to have nothing to do with her headache. “I so much regret that he cannot come, your Majesty,” he said gently.
“Cannot come! When I specially want him? Is he sick?”
“No, Madame. He has been arrested.”
Catherine sprang up, pressing desperate fingers to her throbbing temples. “Yet another of my people! This is more than I can bear,” she said. “What is he supposed to have done?”
“He was arrested only an hour ago on a charge of treason.”
“Since milord of Buckingham left me?” she asked grimly.
“I do not know, Madame. It might well be so. They say that Wakeman, being skilled in drugs, was in a plot to poison the King.”
“To poison — Oh, no, Father, this is monstrous! A loyal old royalist like Sir George — in my own household —”
“Nevertheless, it is true that he has been arrested.”
“No one is safe!”
“No, Madame, no one at all.” He stood there with hands folded in the wide sleeves of his habit, only his eyes alive and Christlike in their compassion. And something in his very immobility set Catherine’s heart racing with foreboding.
“Did — did he send you to tell me?” she asked in sudden terror.
“No. The poor gentleman was seized suddenly on his way to a meeting of the Royal Society. He had no opportunity to do anything at all.”
“Then how did you —”
“It was the King himself who sent me. He wanted me to tell you with my own lips before your women heard of it.”
“Then there is something more?”
“He wanted me to tell you,” repeated Father Huddleston, “and to stay with you.”
Catherine’s terrified eyes searched his face. Suddenly she put out her arms and clung to him. “It is nothing that has happened — to Charles?” she asked almost inaudibly.
“No, Madame.”
/> “Then I can bear it. Tell me quickly.”
With infinite tenderness he supported her. “Remember, dear daughter, how our Blessed Lord was scourged and buffeted. It will help you to bear it. For you, too, are accused — with Wakeman.”
It took some moments for the impossible words to sink into her reeling consciousness. Her clutching fingers bit into his arms. Then suddenly she began to laugh wildly, shrilly. “I — I accused of planning to poison Charles ... Minette would have laughed so! It is so f-funny ...”
For a man of God John Huddleston was, for once, violent. “The blasphemous liar stood up in Court and said in that damnable drawl of his, ‘Aye, Taitus Oates, accuse Catherine, Queen of England, of haigh treason!’ My child, you should have seen the amazement on the people’s faces! Why, even the judge —”
But Catherine saw and heard no more. She was slipping from the human comfort of his arms and, shouting to her women, he laid her, mercifully unconscious, upon her bed.
CHAPTER XXI
THE QUEEN had not long regained consciousness before her people gave her the sleeping draught she had been asking for. With frightened faces they listened to her uneasy muttering as, half drugged, she dozed and dreamed. By some confused association of ideas her mind was back at Hampton. “No, no, not the poor headless Howard girl!” she cried out when Dorothy touched her gently, rearranging her pillows. And then, wandering through the strange memories of dreams, she seemed to be sitting on the sunlit grass, trying to remember that it was Henry the Eighth who had divorced and beheaded two wives who could bear him no son, and pushing away the horrible thought that it might happen to her. “Charles! Charles!” she could feel herself crying, although no sound came. She could see him out on the sparkling river in a rocking skiff, looking like Jane Lane’s William Jackson with his white shirt sleeves and dark dishevelled hair. But he only grinned up at her and rocked the little boat more dangerously still. And then somehow it was she who was being drawn away from him by the racing tide. She was drowning, drowning ...
“Why cannot the King come to me?” she asked at dawn, pushing back the damp weight of her hair and remembering only how quickly he had come when she had been so ill.
“He must have many important things to do,” Lettice Ormonde reminded her gently, holding a cup of hot milk to her lips.
“Then where is Maria?” she demanded petulantly, pushing it away.
But as clarity returned she remembered that dear old Maria was dead. And how she needed the comfort of her gentle wisdom now! That last precious link with home. But at least Maria had been spared all knowledge of this last blow — this terrible ending to the marriage they had both striven so steadfastly to preserve.
“I will — I must think clearly,” muttered Catherine, trying to clear her head of the night’s troubled fantasies. “Naturally if Charles thinks that I intended to poison him, he will not come near me.” And when Father Huddleston would have prayed with her, she entreated him to go to Whitehall instead. “You alone have access to the King at all times,” she said. “Only bring me word whether he believes this monstrous thing of me or not.”
But as soon as he was gone her own commonsense asserted itself. Of course Charles could not believe it! However others panicked, he was always so reasonable. And what man could believe it who had seen the daily proofs of her love, both in the blinding light of public affairs and in the quiet needs of every day? But even so, believing her to be innocent, what could he do? Oppose Parliament and public opinion by trying to override this parody of justice with royal authority? Risk his very crown to defend her? Had he not told her that he would not go on his travels again to save any man’s skin? Not even for James, his own brother. So what hope could there be for her? Accustomed to regality as she was, crown, luxury, state meant nothing to her compared with the right to live with him. Willingly would she have gone into exile with him had their positions been reversed. But how could she expect him to take the risk of it, who had more than himself to consider? It was his dynasty, the whole monarchy ... Charles must put that first. And he was not passionately in love ...
“If only I had not been so obstinate, but had listened to Buckingham and gone into a Convent somewhere!” she thought desperately. “Perhaps, after all, he was right and that was the only safe solution.” Perhaps, even now — to safeguard her life and to save Charles all this dangerous embarrassment ... But it was too late, she decided. That man Oates had accused her of intended murder, and no one he accused escaped. He would bring false witnesses and swear her life away. Feverishly she fumbled for the jewelled watch Charles had given her. Even now, perhaps, they were trying her. Condemning her, unheard ... “I must go down to the Courts,” she said, throwing off the bedclothes. “Face these inhuman fiends, and make them see how ridiculous it is —”
“Madame, you cannot, unless you are called. The doors will be closed,” they told her.
She tried to behave sensibly. To tell herself that justice would take its course — that, since her conscience was clear, she had only to wait, and she and Sir George Wakeman would be proved innocent. But what justice was there when every Catholic was treated as an enemy? Her thoughts turned to poor Hill and Green and Berry, her faithful servants. They too had been innocent, and yet they were condemned to death. And as the heavy hours halted by, her fears rose. The man with the pale, magnetic eyes whose long face had frightened her in the galleries of Whitehall seemed to be invested with diabolical power.
She could stay in bed no longer. Although shaking in every limb, she insisted upon being dressed. Only when Dorothy would have fastened her necklace about her throat did she turn from the cold touch of it. Once again she recalled that grimace, with horrid protruding tongue, with which the boy Jemmie had once explained what happened to traitors, and how Charles, laughing beside her in his coach, had told her to “Confess and be hanged!” But, of course, Queens and people of quality were not hanged, she remembered, going restlessly to the window to look out upon the ever hurrying river. They were beheaded, like the poor old Lord Stafford, a few weeks ago — and that other helpless Queen Catherine. Like Charles’s own father. In this country they walked on to a high scaffold, with the hushed people watching all around, and kneeled down before a gruesome wooden block ...
In this country. Unseeingly, Catherine waved aside her people’s entreaties to her to eat. “But I am not of this country,” she reminded herself. “I am free born Portuguese. Even the King of England and all his Parliament would not dare do this to me. Our great ships would sail out from the Tagus, some of them mounting seventy guns and each manned by sailors every whit as good as Britain’s. Pedro would send them. Pedro, who loves me ... Pedro ...”
Catherine, who so seldom wrote a letter, called for pen and paper and with shaking fingers poured out her frightened heart to him, imploring his protection. He was all that she had left in the world, she said. But before she had finished the impassioned screed it was high noon and John Huddleston had returned. Springing up, she almost threw herself upon him, scattering the closely written sheets in all directions. “Did you see the King?” she cried. “For our Blessed Lady’s sake, tell me quickly!”
But first the white-haired priest put her gently back in her chair. “God has been very good to us, Madame,” he was swift to reassure her. “And — under God — so has His servant Charles.”
“You gave him my message, then?” she asked, relief surging like a Te Deum in her heart.
“There was no need, your Majesty. He had already left Whitehall and gone down to the Courts.”
“He went — himself?”
“And I, his humble servant, followed him.”
“Oh, John Huddleston! They might have killed you!”
But Huddleston only shook his head and smiled serenely. He was far more interested in his master’s doings. “All morning he has been fighting for you,” he told her.
Catherine could scarcely believe her ears. “Fighting for me!” she echoed. “In spite of all he sai
d? In the face of this wave of persecution and the powerful backing of the Commons?”
“He seemed to care nothing for any of them,” said Huddleston, looking like a human father trying to hide parental pride. “For no one, indeed — save you, his wife.”
Catherine sat there with ink stains on her fingers and bits of the frantic letter to her brother scattered all about her. There was a lovely colour in her cheeks and her eyes shone like stars. She might have been the Queen of Beauty sitting in a rose garlanded balcony at some mediaeval tournament with her lover jousting for her in the lists below. She felt pride and ecstasy and passion — and a crowning glory for all the sights of all the years. And her delighted household crowded round her, hanging upon the beloved priest’s graphic words.
“It seems that when I entered the Judge had just ordered Oates to substantiate his charge. ‘How could you, an Anglican, know of such a plot?’ some learned Counsel wanted to know. But the fellow is full of plausible words. For that express purpose, he said, he had attached himself to a party of Jesuits who were to wait upon your Majesty here at Grosvenor House.”
“But I invited no such party,” gasped Catherine, amazed at such effrontery.
“Yet there were many listening to him who willingly believed it,” said Huddleston; and went on with his tale. “ ‘I put it to you, Master Oates, that you are not a very easy individual to disguise,’ suggested a young advocate, less credulous than the rest.
“But Oates was in no wise out-faced. The Jesuits had never seen him, he explained, and his training in one of their seminaries helped him to seem one of them. And as he was waiting with them in an ante-room he chanced to find himself standing by the door leading into your Majesty’s private sitting room.”
“My private sitting room!”
“Where you were closeted with your physician, Sir George Wakeman. And presently Sir Richard Bellings arrived and as he passed through into the inner room he left the door ajar. ‘Sir Richard Beltings,’ repeated Oates significantly, looking round at his audience, ‘a wily man who is already known to have carried a letter from your Catholic Queen to Rome.’ ”
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