Loyal in Love: Henrietta Maria, Queen of Charles I
Page 15
We all became very excited thinking of the revelations to come and when the lady was presented I was greatly impressed by her. She was a big woman, dark-haired with enormous luminous eyes—just the sort, I said to Lucy afterward, which a seer ought to have.
She was not in the least overawed by me. I supposed as a prophetess a queen did not seem so very important in her eyes.
She told us that she had a mission; she was in touch with powers. She could not explain them; she merely knew that she had been selected by some great force to be able to look at that which was not revealed to ordinary people.
I made her sit down and I told her that I had heard of her miraculous powers and there was a question I wanted to ask her. She folded her arms and looked at me steadily while I asked about the child I was to bear. There was a breathless silence round the table while we all waited for her words. She did not hurry. She sat back for a while and closed her eyes. When she opened them she gazed steadily at me and said: “You will have a son.”
There was a gasp of delight round the table.
“And,” I cried, “shall I be happy?”
She said, speaking very slowly: “You will be happy for a while.”
“Only for a while? How long?”
“For sixteen years,” she replied.
“And then what will happen?”
She closed her eyes and at that moment the door opened and the King came in.
Although I was so much fonder of him now I was irritated by the interruption, particularly as he assumed one of his most serious looks. I thought then what fun it would have been if he had joined us and listened with us and giggled and enjoyed the excitement of prophecy. But that was not Charles’s way.
He stood by the table and my ladies all rose and curtsied.
He was looking straight at our soothsayer and he said almost accusingly: “You are Lady Davys.”
“That is so, Your Majesty,” she answered with pride, and I must admit showing very little deference to the King.
“You are the lady who foretold her husband’s death.”
“Yes, Sire. I did that. I have the powers….”
“I can scarcely believe that he welcomed the news,” said Charles coldly. “Indeed it might well have done much to hasten his end.” He turned to me and offered me his arm.
There was nothing I could do but rise and leave with him, though I was fuming with irritation at having that interesting session cut short.
When we were outside the door he said: “I do not wish you to consult that woman.”
“Why not?” I cried. “She is clever. She told me that I would have a son and be happy.”
He was a little uplifted but persisted in his condemnation of her.
“She probably hastened her husband’s death.”
“How could she? He did not die of poison. He just died…as she said he would.”
“It is dabbling in the black arts.”
I was afraid that he was going to forbid me to see her and I knew that if he did my temper would flare up and I should disobey him. It was a pity. We had been getting on so happily until now.
Perhaps he was thinking the same for he said no more. But there was an outcome. Left alone with the ladies, Eleanor Davys talked a little more and what she said was not nearly as pleasant as that which she had told me. When I returned to my women I noticed that they looked very grave.
I said: “Did Lady Davys stay long after I left?”
“A little while,” Lucy replied, not looking at me.
“I was so annoyed to be taken away like that. I felt quite angry with the King.”
“He certainly did not like her,” said Susan.
“Did he forbid you to see her?” asked Katherine.
“He did not. And I would forbid him to forbid me. I will not be told, you must not do this and you must not do that.”
“Yet it would be awkward for her, I suppose,” suggested Susan, “for he could forbid her to come to Court, and of course there is her husband to be considered.”
“Do you think Lady Davys is a woman to be told by her husband what to do?”
“No,” said Susan. “She would probably tell him he had three days to live if he offended her.”
“That isn’t fair,” I protested. “I think her prophecies are true ones. She promised me a son.”
There was a strange and ominous silence round the table which immediately aroused my suspicions.
“What’s the matter?” I cried. “Why are you looking like that?”
They remained silent and I went to Lucy and shook her. “Tell me,” I said. “You know something. What is it?”
Lucy looked appealingly at Susan, and Katherine shook her head.
“No,” I cried stamping my foot. “You had better tell me what is wrong. Is it something Lady Davys said…eh? Was it about me?”
“She er…” began Katherine. “She…er…said nothing of importance.”
“And that is why you look as though the heavens are about to fall in? Come on…I command you…all of you…tell me.”
Susan lifted her shoulders and after a few seconds of silence Lucy nodded and said resignedly: “Well, it is just talk, you know. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“What?” I cried. “What?”
“It is better to tell the Queen,” said Lucy. “If it should come true…and I do not believe for a moment that it will…it is better for her to know.”
“Know what?” I screamed, my patience at an end; and now a certain fear was creeping into my mind.
“I think she made it up because she was angry about the King’s interruption,” said Susan.
“If you don’t tell me soon I’ll have you all arrested for…conspiracy,” I shouted.
Lucy said quietly: “She told us that you would indeed have a boy.”
“Well, go on. That’s what she told me. There is nothing new in that.”
“But that he would be born, christened and buried all in one day.”
I stared at them in horror. “It can’t be true.”
“Of course it can’t,” soothed Lucy. “It is just that she was angry. She was so annoyed that the King came in and showed he did not approve of her.”
I stared ahead of me. I was seeing a little body wrapped in a shroud.
Susan said: “Don’t tell the King what she said or that we told you.”
I shook my head. “It is such nonsense,” I cried. “She is a madwoman.”
“That is what so many people say,” said Lucy quickly. “Your son will be a beautiful child. How could he be otherwise? You and the King are both handsome.”
“My son!” I murmured. “There will be a son.”
I had so firmly believed her when she said I was to have a son but if the first prophecy was correct, why should the second not be?
Now I began to be haunted by fears.
I don’t know whether that prophecy preyed on my mind but whenever I thought of my baby, instead of seeing a laughing lively child I saw a little white one in a coffin. I could not eat much and at night my dreams were disturbed. The King was very anxious about me.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you are too young to have a child.”
Too young! I was eighteen and would be nineteen in November. That was not so young to have a child. I did not tell the King about the prophecy. He would have been very angry with Lady Davys and I am sure he would have made some complaint to her husband. I tried to disbelieve her. After all, how could she possibly know? It had been a coincidence about her first husband. Perhaps he had been very ill and she, as his wife, knew exactly how ill.
The King was most attentive to me. In fact I think he was far more interested in me and my baby than he was in state affairs and was bitterly resentful when they took him away from us.
I hoped that we should have many children. I could see us in the years ahead with them all around us—beautiful children, the boys looking like Charles and the girls like me. They would certainly be a handsome family.
I was very glad to get out of the chapel and to my chamber. I told Susan and Lucy that I was not feeling well and that I thought I should retire to bed.
“You are certain to feel tired,” they said. “You are getting close to your confinement.”
“Oh, it is a month away,” I reminded them.
But during the night I began to feel pain. I shouted and very soon people were crowding round my bed. I was in agony and I knew that my child was about to be born.
I cannot remember much of that night. I think it was rather fortunate for me that during much of it I was unconscious. In the evening of the next day my child was born…prematurely. It was weak, not having reached its full time and I heard afterward how Charles and my confessor argued together over its baptism which had to take place immediately as it was ominously clear that speed was necessary. My confessor said that as I was to have charge of my children’s religious upbringing until they were thirteen, the baby should be baptized according to the rites of the Church of Rome. Charles retorted that this was a Prince of Wales and the people of England would never allow a child who was destined to become King of England to be baptized as a Catholic.
The King, of course, had to be obeyed, and the little boy was baptized according to the Church of England and named Charles James.
Scarcely had those rites been performed when he died.
I remember waking from my sleep of exhaustion to find the King at my bedside.
“Charles,” I whispered.
He knelt by the bed and taking my hand kissed it.
“We have a son?” I asked.
He was silent for a second and then he said: “We had a son.”
I felt the desolation sweep over me; the waiting months, the discomfort…the dreams…they had all come to nothing.
“We are young yet,” said the King. “You must not despair.”
“I so wanted this child.”
“We both did.”
“Did he live at all?”
“For two hours. He was baptized and we christened him Charles James.”
“Poor little Charles James! Are you very sad, Charles?”
“I tell myself that I have you and you are going to be well soon. You are young and healthy and the doctors tell me that in spite of your ordeal you will soon be well again. That is the most important news for me.”
That was my first real experience of Charles in misfortune. He was always able to bear disappointments nobly and with few complaints. These qualities were to stand him in good stead later.
I soon recovered, though I learned that I had been very near to death. There had been one point where they could have saved the child at a cost to my life and the doctors had actually asked the King whom they should consider first…me or the child. I was told that he had answered immediately and vehemently: “Let the child die but save the Queen.”
Perhaps I started to love him then. There was something so good about him; and if there was a vulnerability, a certain weakness, that only endeared him to me the more. Young, frivolous and impetuous as I was, there was a certain maternal feeling in my emotions regarding him. Perhaps it was born at that time.
As I lay in bed I remembered the prophecy. What had she said? I should have a son and he would be born, baptized and die all in a day.
The prophecy had come true.
It is amazing how news like that is circulated. Everywhere people were talking about Lady Davys’s prophecy. She was indeed a seer. The King was very angry, particularly when it was suggested that the prophecy had so upset me that it was due to it that I had given birth prematurely.
It was nonsense. I was sure that Lady Davys really had the powers of prophecy.
Charles wanted her to be dismissed from Court.
“You can’t do that,” I said. “You are being like a petulant King who punishes the messengers for the message.”
He did see that. “But I want no more of these prophecies. They are evil.”
“She promises good things sometimes.”
“First her husband. Then our child.”
“It was ordained that they should die. She just had preknowledge of it.”
“I want her out of the way.”
“You would never get a woman like that out of the way. You could burn her at the stake for a witch but she would curse you or prophesy something evil on the very scaffold.”
Charles was a little superstitious. I think that was why he was so angry.
He did not dismiss her from Court, but he did send for her husband Sir John Davys and asked him to put an end to his wife’s prophecies. But Sir John explained to the King that his wife was a forceful woman and could not be forbidden to do anything. “She believes she has a mission, Your Majesty. She says she will fulfill it no matter what humiliations and punishments the ignorant press upon her.”
Charles was a very understanding man. He knew what Sir John meant and he thought he was very brave to have married Eleanor Davys after what had happened to her first husband. Sir John, however, did burn some of her papers for she had been a collector of ancient manuscripts.
I was against this and argued with Charles about it. I said that if anything was going wrong it was better to know about it. I was sure that having heard the prophecy about my son I was more able to face the bitter disappointment because it was not entirely a surprise to me.
We argued and came near to quarreling as we used to in the old days, but I remembered his tenderness toward me at the bedside and he thought of all I had gone through so we did not actually use harsh words against each other.
He looked at me pleadingly and said: “It would please me if you did not see this woman again.”
I hesitated. I wanted to say: But it pleases me to see her. I want to know. I don’t want to live in ignorance.
But we both compromised.
He said he was sending Mr. Kirke—one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber—with a message to Lady Davys. He was to tell her that the Queen did not wish to see her again.
“It would be more truthful to say the King does not wish the Queen to see her again,” I said with a flash of my old temper.
He kissed me lightly on the forehead.
“My dearest,” he said, “everything I ever do is with your good in mind.”
I knew that was true and I relented. I took an opportunity of waylaying Mr. Kirke before he left with the message. One of the attendants brought him to my chamber.
I said to him: “Mr. Kirke, you are going with a message to Lady Davys?”
“That is so, Your Majesty,” he replied.
“When you hand it to her give her the Queen’s compliments and ask her if my next child will be a boy and will he live.”
Mr. Kirke bowed and went off.
I could scarcely wait for his return.
I set someone to wait at the gates for him and when he arrived back to bring him straight to me. When he came he was smiling happily so I knew that it was good news.
I said: “Did you ask Lady Davys my question?”
He replied that he had done so. “She said, my lady, that your next child would be a lusty son who will live, and that you will have a happy life for sixteen years.”
“Sixteen years! How strange! But a son, you said…a son who will live.”
“Those were her words, my lady.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kirke,” I said.
And he went away to the King to report that he had carried out his mission.
Sixteen years, I thought. That would take us up to 1644 or thereabouts. Sixteen years…that was a long way into the future; and in the meantime I was to have my son and my happy years.
I went to the King. Mr. Kirke had left him and I was sure he thought the matter was satisfactorily settled.
/>
I embraced him and said: “Our next son will be lusty and live.”
He looked at me in astonishment.
“You are with child?” he asked.
“Not yet. But Lady Davys says that my next son will live and be strong.”
I saw the joy in his face. He held me close to him and I laughed exultantly.
It was illogical of him. He was not supposed to believe in prophecy.
But he believed in this one though.
I said: “It is not such a bad thing to believe in prophecies when they are good. It is only when they are bad that one does not want to know.”
Then he laughed and we were very happy. We were both thinking about the strong and lusty sons we would have.
THE HAPPIEST OF QUEENS
It was nearly two years later before the promised boy was born. They had been two happy years, with the affection between my husband and myself growing with every passing week. It seemed so strange that out of those stormy beginnings this deep and glowing love had come. Charles seemed to have grown more handsome than when I first saw him. He smiled now more frequently. He had completely forgotten his obsession with Buckingham and I had been quite content with the letters Mamie and I exchanged. She was married now and had become Madame St. George. Her husband was of the noble house of Clermont-Amboise so it was a very worthy match. I knew she was happy and had found consolation for our parting and I was glad of that. She had become governess to my brother Gaston’s daughter, who was known as Mademoiselle de Montpensier, and I believe she was quite a handful. Mamie wrote often of her enduring love for me and assured me that she would never forget those happy years when as Mademoiselle de Montglat she had been my governess and friend. But we both realized now that it was no use grieving and my letters, I know, were just as much a joy to her as hers were to me.
I was happy. I had learned to speak English now, and although I should never be exactly fluent in the language I could converse adequately. It pleased Charles so much and I was always happy pleasing him.
We rarely ever quarreled nowadays. Occasionally my temper would burst out and he would shake his finger at me but there would always be a smile and I would cry out: “Oh, you can’t expect me to change all at once. My temper has been with me from the cradle. I doubt it will ever leave me altogether.”