The Countess and the King: A Novel of the Countess of Dorchester and King James II

by Holloway Scott, Susan

  “But what you ask, sir,” I said. I’d heard that James had called more than a hundred Catholic officers—a sizable number—during the emergency of the rebellion, but I’d no notion that they remained with the army still, without having sworn the Test Act oath, nearly two months after Lord Monmouth’s execution. “A standing army increased to twice its size, and led by Papists! No English Parliament will ever agree to that, nor should they.”

  “And why not, Katherine, when it clearly is God’s will that they do so?” he asked, sweeping his hand up toward the heavens. “How else would I have been granted such a magnificent victory over those who threatened me, if not through the steadying hand of Divine Providence?”

  “I’d rather believe it was the leadership of Colonel Churchill, sir,” I said, always wary of James when he began to spout like a Papist preacher.

  “Yes, yes, but the true leader was Feversham,” he said doggedly, “a French gentleman, guided to victory by his true Lord.”

  I swung my feet from his leg, unwilling to continue in so affectionate a posture when he was so wrongly stubborn.

  “Lord Feversham is not only a Frenchman by birth, sir,” I said, “but he is also more an empty-headed courtier than a true soldier. Everyone knows he was still lying abed when Colonel Churchill was leading your troops into battle at Sedgemoor. If Feversham is the sort of officer you wish to employ in your army, then you will receive a cold reception indeed from Parliament.”

  He scowled at my now-covered legs. “Sunderland says otherwise.”

  “Then Lord Sunderland is kissing your ass, sir,” I said bluntly, “for there is no other way to explain it.”

  Restlessly he tapped his hand on the edge of the table. “You speak to me as a Protestant, Katherine.”

  “I speak to you as a dear friend, sir, and one who loves you too well to see you falter.” I pushed free of my chair and sank to my knees on the grass beside him, taking his hands in my own to beseech him. “You are the King of England, sir, and the men you rule are Englishmen. They are the best people in the world, but they are also firm in their convictions and their beliefs, and they will not follow you in this rash plan. No matter what Lord Sunderland, or your confessor, or Her Majesty, or even the Pope in Rome may tell you, I will tell you the truth: your people will not accept this from you, or any other English king who has sworn to uphold the Anglican Church.”

  As desperate as I’d made my plea, he did not answer. Instead he looked at me in a silence that was almost pitying, as if I were the one who did not understand.

  Finally he smiled and raised my hand to his lips to kiss it. “My own Katherine,” he said gruffly. “Time we returned to the others, eh?”

  He smiled, and to my sorrow I realized that he’d not listened to a word that I’d said.

  I WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE who worried over James and his determination regarding the Catholics officers. By the time the Court left Windsor and returned to London in early October, 1685, the three months’ allowance permitted to Papists had expired, yet none had been forced either to swear that they were Anglicans, or to leave their commissions. The army remained as it had been in the summer, twice its ordinary size, with James refusing so much as to discuss disbanding. It was an ill-kept secret, too, if indeed James was inclined to keep it a secret at all, and every tavern and coffeehouse in London rumbled with anxious unhappiness over the king’s imperious actions.

  Nor was I the only one to caution James over his decisions. Lord Halifax, never a reticent gentleman, spoke with such vehemence that James dismissed him not only from his office, but from the council as well, sharply warning all others that he’d not tolerate any advisers whose opinions and beliefs differed from his own.

  “Halifax is with us now,” Father said with unabashed jubilation. Though holding no seat in the House, Father remained as busy as could be behind the scenes, and could scarce wait for the new session to begin in November. “You’ll see, Katherine. You’ve heard Halifax before. Now that he’s clear of that wretched office, he’ll be free to address the king exactly as His Majesty deserves.”

  “What then, Father?” I asked with concern. While I’d no wish to see James hounded and harangued by Parliament, I didn’t want my father to end in the Tower for speaking treason, either. “The king is not obligated to obey you or your friends. What will you do if he doesn’t?”

  “He will, Katherine, he will,” Father said sagely. “Halifax will make him understand, and bring him round to a more moderate course.”

  But I knew James far too well to share Father’s confidence. If James hadn’t listened to Lord Halifax while he’d been one of the royal counselors, why should he heed him now, when the marquis would be no more than an articulate gadfly? Increasingly James was surrounding himself only with gentlemen who shared his faith, rather than ones who showed any gift for statesmanship or even common sense.

  Instead of Lord Halifax’s shrewd intelligence, James now preferred ranting zealots like the Irishman Richard Talbot, who had already been rewarded with the Earldom of Tyrconnel for filling the Irish army with Catholic officers in place of Protestants. Another who’d claimed his ear was Father Petre, an English-born Jesuit and the dean of James’s Chapel Royal, who was constantly promoting ever-closer connections to Rome. Foremost, of course, was the duplicitous Lord Sunderland, whose influence only grew stronger the more he conveniently professed to turn Papist himself. The only Protestant ministers who still remained with any power were Lord Rochester and his older brother Lord Clarendon, and they only on account of being James’s brothers-in-law from his first marriage.

  In such an atmosphere, the new session of Parliament in early November was bound to be difficult. James wasted little time in declaring, even dictating, his intentions, using his first speech to the Commons to praise his army, briskly requesting both funds for its maintenance at its full size and to keep the Catholic officers for their merit. Even more disturbing was that, for the first time, James failed to make any mention of his role as defender of the Church of England, a most ominous sign to every Anglican member in the House. They responded by refusing to vote the full funds for a standing army, and more infuriating to James, they let him know, politely, respectfully, but firmly, that they believed the employment of Papist officers was against English law.

  The House of Lords was even less pleasing. James himself attended their sessions, and was compelled to listen as, one by one, nearly every great peer of the realm bravely rose to defend the current laws against popery in every form, and to reinforce their belief in the Church of England.

  James was still furious when I came to his bedchamber later that night, so angry that as soon as I joined him, I realized he wished a sympathetic ear more than any coaxing diversion I could offer in his bed. He still wore the same richly embroidered suit of clothes that he’d chosen to impress the Lords, magnificent dress of dark blue velvet and gold lacing with a formal, military air that should have reminded the peers that the king also commanded the army and navy as well as the country. But he’d also begun wearing a Romish crucifix publicly, there around his neck beside the Garter-star on his breast, an uneasy juxtaposition, and one that, however subtle, every peer in the Lords had noted at once.

  “I’ve known many of those men all our lives, Katherine,” James said, pacing before me, “and some so long that we were all in exile together as boys, thirty years ago. Yet this is how they humiliate me!”

  “How, sir?” I asked cautiously. I drew my castor-lined cloak more closely around my shoulders, twisting my hands into the soft fur. The room seemed chill to me, the fire burned so low that I could only guess that James’s raging fury had inflamed him so much that he didn’t notice. “How could those worthy gentlemen humiliate you?”

  “If you had been there, Katherine, you would have heard it for yourself,” he said, slashing his arm through the air as if to smite his enemies there before the fireplace. “They doubted my motives; they questioned my very honor!”

  “W
as it the army question that plagued them most, sir?”

  “My army, and my officers, and my own faith as well,” he said, biting off each word with furious distaste. “I could not believe they would dare oppose their king in such strong language.”

  I sighed. Clearly matters had gone worse in the Lords than they had in the Commons, even worse than I’d feared, at least by James’s reckoning. “I am sorry, sir. I’d suspected they’d show their unhappiness—”

  “The unhappiness was the least of it,” he continued. “Their disrespect, their contempt, their unbridled bigotry!”

  “They are frightened and uncertain, sir,” I said. “They do not see these things in the same manner as you do. If perhaps you were to explain with less forcefulness, or offer a few concessions—”

  “It is not my place to concede to anything,” he said sharply. “I am their king, not their puppet. It is by the hand of Divine Providence that I rule, and I will rule, and do what is right and proper for my people. I will be strong, Katherine, and I will survive this test as I have all the others intended to stop me.”

  Suddenly he stopped his pacing before me. His stern face crumpled and his shoulders bowed, as if the full weight of the day’s events had crushed down upon him all at once.

  “Before God, I will do my best for them, Katherine,” he said, weary and bitter and sadly bewildered as well. “If they will but let me, I will lead them to salvation and glory.”

  “Oh, sir,” I said softly, and when I opened my arms to him, he came to me with an exhausted sigh. “You will do what is right, and find a way to make peace with them in your fashion. You will, I am sure of it.”

  But by the following day, James had decided he’d had enough of the hostility he perceived so rampant in both Houses. Instead of offering reconciliation, he chose to demonstrate his power and authority. Though the session had scarcely begun, he prorogued Parliament and sent the members home. He never again called them back.

  AMIDST SUCH MOMENTOUS TIMES, it is easy to forget that most of life continued at its usual pace. While the peers raged like tigers at the king’s actions and my father’s house in Bloomsbury Square was filled with angry, indignant conversations, farmers still brought their turnips and corn to market in Covent Garden, watermen still rowed their passengers along the Thames, and the goldsmiths’ shops along the Strand still opened their shutters to customers each day.

  My own ordinary life continued as well in my new house in St. James’s Square, and it was on such a morning that I sat in my back parlor, listening as Lady Katherine recited her French. Because my daughter had royal blood and would someday be a lady of consequence (and, in truth, because my own education had been so haphazard), I took great care with her learning. I employed a Frenchwoman to speak that language to her in the best Parisian manner, and though Lady Katherine was only five years in age, she already could prattle on as prettily in that tongue as any child born to Versailles. Her skill delighted James no end, and it pleased him mightily to hear her converse in the language of his mother, the late Dowager Queen Henrietta Marie. Lady Katherine’s task today was to learn three more verses of a fable by the French poet La Fontaine, and as I listened contentedly to her sweet, babyish voice, I did not realized I’d a visitor until the footman came to whisper the name in my ear.

  “The Earl of Rochester?” I repeated with surprise. The lord treasurer had never once been a guest in my house. “His Lordship’s here?”

  I swiftly ushered Lady Katherine and her mademoiselle from the room and prepared to receive Lord Rochester, who was smiling still after passing my daughter in the hallway as she left the room.

  “Lady Katherine is a lovely small lady,” he said with approval as he took the chair I offered. “She favors you, madam.”

  “I should hope not, my lord!” I exclaimed, laughing at his having so shamelessly chosen politeness over truth. “She is far more beautiful than I have ever been, doubtless due to the Stuart half of her prevailing over the Sedley.”

  “I find that impossible to believe,” he said with a doleful sigh. “But that is not why I have come to you, Mrs. Sedley. Instead I come in confidence, on an errand of considerable delicacy.”

  He cleared his throat, rubbing his open palm across the polished cherry arm of the chair. As ministers went, he was better known for his skill with the country’s finances than with diplomatic words, as his uneasiness now proved.

  “Mrs. Sedley,” he began at last. “Mrs. Sedley, I am here to ask most humbly for a great favor, on behalf of England, her people, and even, in a way, of His Majesty himself. It’s no secret that the king is mightily devoted to you, and turns to you even as he has abandoned his other Anglican advisers.”

  “Excepting you, my lord, of course,” I said. “The last two Anglicans! That must make us like Noah and his consort, I suppose, the two of us the final pair of honest souls cast adrift in the whole rotten Romish Court.”

  “Madam, please, I beg you to be serious,” he said so earnestly that I was forced to comply. “If you have any regard for the church of your fathers, for the Church of England, you will employ your influence over the king now.”

  “I, my lord?” I asked, incredulous. “Your confidence in me and my influence is most flattering, my lord.”

  “It’s not flattery, Mrs. Sedley,” he said solemnly, “but the fair observation of many.”

  I tried to be solemn, too, and not to think of how peculiar this all was: to have the most senior minister of the land telling me what to whisper across my pillow to the king when I lay with him. Yet still Lord Rochester regarded me with his long face stretched as somber as if for a funeral.

  “You speak in perfect earnest, my lord, don’t you?” I said slowly. “You would ask this of me?”

  “I am as earnest as I can be, Mrs. Sedley,” he said, and I did not doubt him. “The king regards the recent rebellion as a conquest of his might over wrongful forces. But most in England saw many men who would willingly fight and die to protect their church against popery, and how many, too, that would do the same for a Protestant king. His Majesty continues to gaze only toward Rome, and is blind to what is happening in England. Yet he must be made to see before it is too late, else all he and his brother suffered for will be lost.”

  No wonder he looked so somber, for this was a somber, serious conversation indeed, so serious that I’d no real notion of how to reply. It was one thing to overhear wild talk among Father’s friends and their longing for the Prince of Orange as the future savior of the Church of England, but it was quite another to have Lord Rochester himself speaking thus in my own parlor.

  “You speak frankly, my lord, and thus I must be frank in turn with you,” I began at last, troubled beyond measure. “I have always spoken plain to His Majesty about our church and how he has put his crown at risk by his stubborn adherence to popery. Even in our most intimate exchanges, I have never varied from honesty or truth. Yet though he listens—hah, because I give him no choice!—he will never heed me, my lord. Never.”

  He listened, his expression unchanged. “He might if you were more in his company. If you once again attended your lodgings at Whitehall each night—”

  “No, my lord,” I said, shaking my head. “I like my own house and my bed here too well to return.”

  “Better than Lady Portsmouth’s rooms?” he asked, a luxurious temptation. “They could be yours, if you wish it.”

  “The queen would never permit that,” I said firmly, “nor do I wish to put myself in her path again.”

  “Her Majesty could be distracted,” he said. “That, too, could be arranged with ease.”

  I shook my head again. It wasn’t as easy to distract the queen as it once had been. As the Court had become more Catholic, Mary Beatrice had become more powerful, too, growing bolder with the flattering encouragement of Lord Sunderland.

  “There would be other enticements,” Lord Rochester continued. “Many things are possible.”

  “Pray recall that I’ve spen
t most of my life at Court, my lord,” I said. “I’m far too old to be lured by a new bauble.”

  Lord Rochester frowned. “Then perhaps, madam, I should describe what will happen if His Majesty continues on his present course. Lord Monmouth could be only the first Protestant to lose his head. To be sure, there are risks. Nothing is assured. No matter what we do, Lord Sunderland may still have his way, and the Papists may still win, and we may all end in the Tower on false charges of treason.”

  “And if I push the king too hard, then I could lose his devotion forever.” My smile was tight. “You see I am aware of the risks, my lord.”

  “Those are the risks if you agree, madam,” he said, rising from his chair to take his leave. “But can any of us afford what will happen if we do nothing?”

  He didn’t need to say more. The next rebellion would not be so easy to suppress, and James could well find himself facing the same grim fate as his late father, the same that he’d ordered for Lord Monmouth. And what then would become of me and my darling Lady Katherine? There would be precious little mercy for the mistress of a fallen king, or for their natural daughter, either.

  “It’s your choice entirely, Mrs. Sedley,” Lord Rochester said, taking his cloak and hat from my servant. “You must decide for yourself.”

  Yet in truth, what choice did I have?

  BY THE CHRISTMAS SEASON OF 1685, I’d assumed a brave, brash place at Court. Through Lord Rochester’s intervention, I was included in every entertainment, ball, and dinner at the palace, and he made so many requests on my behalf that there were a few foolish whispers that he shared my favors, too, though I couldn’t guess when exactly these whisperers believed I’d find the time to dally with His Lordship, too.

  The new role that had been urged upon me was no challenge, for it was much the same one I’d been playing all along. It was easy enough for me to aim my jibes at the various priests and Jesuits surrounding James and Mary Beatrice; there were so many black-clad figures in the palace now that it would be nigh impossible to avoid striking one even if I’d wished to. The jests themselves were easy, too. For a steadfast Anglican like me, there was much to mock about the convoluted practices and beliefs connected to popery.