In the King's Absence

by Josephine Bell

  ‘Liar! Traitor!’ Susan cried. ‘Madam, you must not hear him! He has destroyed us! We want none of him! Will no man in this house bring his sword against the monster?’

  She was white-faced, furious, but not afraid. Alan saw Mistress Cynthia appear behind the girl and two men, with pistols in their hands, clearly unwilling to act, but determined to do so should he leave his position just inside the door to attack them.

  He gave in. He raised his hands to show he had not drawn his sword nor offered fight. He bowed to Mistress Ritter and opening the door again himself, went out and down the steps. As before he heard the lock turn and the chain rattle into place behind him.

  His guess, far-fetched as it had seemed, had been right. They were in hiding, they were safe at present, they would undoubtedly escape to Holland very soon. But as for himself, his lovely Susan, more beautiful than ever in her passion of rage, more desirable than ever in her fearless if absurd abuse, was lost now for ever. He felt his heart was broken, his despair had no bounds.

  Chapter Eighteen

  When Lord Rochester next came upon his young secretary he was so shocked by the change in Alan’s face and bearing that he at once demanded a full and truthful explanation of it.

  ‘You are ill, boy!’ he exclaimed, taking the young man’s arm and drawing him into the room that he used to entertain his frequent visitors. ‘What have you been up to? The price of gallantry, eh, my lad?’

  This was so utterly the opposite cause of Alan’s agony of spirit and so typical of the former Lord Wilmot’s principles of living, that his heart overflowed and he burst into tears. The old adventurer looked at him in astonishment, but had the good sense and long experience to wait until the other had recovered himself.

  ‘You had best let me have the root of the trouble,’ he then said, very seriously.

  So Alan gave it him, withholding nothing, not even his small adventure with the young couple caught in the mob at Tower Hill, nor his discovery of the Phillips family at Master Ritter’s house.

  ‘You went there because you remembered the Dutch connection and the present whereabouts of Master Phillips?’

  ‘Yes, my lord. I see now that the reluctance of Mistress Ritter to entertain me upon the first occasion was not because they were Jews in that household but because my kinsfolk were hiding there.’

  Lord Rochester smiled.

  ‘Your kinsfolk would not be likely to take refuge with people of the Israelite belief and practice,’ he said. ‘Strict Calvinists, are they not?’

  Alan had not considered this. His own parents had brought him up on Christian principles and beliefs according to the episcopalian practice of the Church of England, which his mother followed. His father as a child had been schooled in Presbyterian rules in Scotland, which he had found useful in his long stay in the Low Countries. Later he had adopted his wife’s views. As for himself, he was debarred in Oxford from church practices and considered the type of Protestant religion at Charles the Second’s Court perfunctory, largely insincere Charles proclaimed it, but Alan was not alone in suspecting a leaning here towards the Roman persuasion for all the King was quarrelling with his mother over his youngest brother Henry, now living with her in Paris.

  ‘Mistress Cynthia would follow her husband in this matter as in all others,’ Alan answered after a long pause. ‘So they must be Dutch immigrants, just foreigners, come to set up a business here in London.’

  ‘We will discover the truth of that for you,’ Lord Rochester promised. ‘In the meantime you must turn your mind to matters of more general importance. I have neglected you, my poor secretary. I must find a means to employ you.’

  But he sent Alan away a few minutes later, still heartbroken but less self-pitying. He could reflect that his beloved Susan was with family friends and though not completely safe until out of the country, would probably achieve that object very soon.

  His thoughts turned to George, whose success the vile rogue was flourishing with such vulgarity. The scholar’s son! How grieved Sir Francis would be if he should hear of it. He thought of Luscombe, giving thanks to God that Lady Leslie had her mother there now, safe surely in that protected and favoured home. He hoped that Doctor Richard Ogilvy, in his far from safe establishment, had received regular news of his surviving children, poor old pugnacious faithful royalist that he was!

  He did not know that Sarah had gone back to her father or he would have felt compelled to return to Oxford himself, in spite of his grave danger if he attempted such a move. Susan had given him many hints in the past, but without much real evidence, of her weak-minded aunt’s attachment to her wicked cousin. He would have seen the awful possibility of her final betrayal of her own father to the villain’s hatred.

  But this knowledge came to him too late for any action on his part, rash or otherwise. For Lord Rochester’s illness progressed until it reached a point where even his sanguine temper and great physical powers of resilience were overcome and he knew that he must return to Flanders and his King at once if he was ever to see either again.

  Before that time, however, a month after the unfortunate but guilty Sindercombe had managed to avoid the Law’s ghastly penalty by the added sin of suicide, the Lord Cromwell was again urged to accept kingship. Again he refused the Crown: instead the ‘Instrument of Government’ was repeated in a solemn ceremony, for which he wore an elaborate robe and was formally given the sceptre and the orb. In fact he was acknowledged king though he would have nothing to do with either crown or title. But more significant still, he agreed to the setting up of a Second Chamber in Parliament, an Upper House, to aid and balance the always obstreperous and argumentative and obstinate Commons.

  Cromwell needed this creation to help him raise a sufficient revenue. For want of an aristocracy to serve in it he introduced several of his own family and such was the poverty in numbers of his truly faithful adherents, apart from his army, the question of nepotism did not at first arise.

  This Second Chamber was set up in the first month of 1658 and disgust, anger and a new feeling of hopelessness, added to his growing weakness, brought forward Lord Rochester’s departure. He and Alan, with two servants who had joined their old master upon his arrival in London, managed to secure a quiet passage from Tilbury in an English ship bound for Flanders. They arrived at Sluys, the small seaport connected with the ancient town of Bruges by canal. And here the earl took to his bed.

  King Charles was still in Brussels, they learned. Very busy with all possible preparations for the future. Rochester wanted Alan to carry a message for him to the Master he had served so long and so faithfully.

  ‘I am on my death-bed Alan,’ he said, ‘I cannot go to him but I would dearly like to see him once more. We should not have lingered so long in England. We did no good there to our Cause and found only ill for ourselves, heartbreak for you and this pestilence for me, that no physician is able to understand, far less cure. Their purgings and bloodlettings weaken without improving. So go you to His Majesty, boy, and ask him in God’s name to let me see his face once more.’

  Alan, very distressed now for his lordship, made preparations to go next day to Brussels, though he did not expect the King would be able to leave his Court on such an immediate errand. Though Rochester was too impetuous always to make wise decisions and had indeed done a number of foolish and dangerous things in his time, he had been a kind and considerate master to him during their rather pointless visit to London.

  But his journey was postponed and there was no haste needed when he did leave. For Lord Rochester lapsed into a coma that same evening, from which he did not recover consciousness, but died quite peacefully before daybreak the next morning.

  Alan made what arrangements he could and leaving the two servants to carry them out, rode off to Brussels, where he inquired first for his father and finding he was again at The Hague with the Lady Anne and his daughters, asked if his brother Gordon was with the King’s new army.

  Would that be young Ensign Og
ilvy?’ he was asked,

  ‘It would.’

  ‘Then you will find him with Captain James Ogilvy,’ he was told and was directed how to find them both, billeted in the town.

  They were delighted to see him, but he refused to give them any long account of his recent fortunes. Lord Rochester was dead, but Charles must have this news just as soon as he could convey it to him. So he found his way at once to Lord Clarendon’s establishment and being admitted very quickly to the Chancellor himself, made a full and detailed report of the position of the Royalist Cause as Rochester had found it, the state of London and its people as he had himself observed it, the onset of Lord Rochester’s last illness and its rapidly fatal outcome.

  ‘So the noble lord is dead?’ Lord Clarendon said thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes, my lord. Very early in the morning, yesterday. He will be buried at Bruges, the authorities say. But should we not consult his family? There is a son, is there not, my lord?’

  ‘There is indeed.’ Lord Clarendon’s pursed lips showed great disapproval.

  ‘My Lord Rochester did hope to see His Majesty once more,’ Alan went on. ‘He sent a message I was to bring, but he died when I was about to set out, so I felt I must arrange matters before I left. There are two of his former servants with the body, my lord.’

  ‘You did rightly,’ Lord Clarendon said. ‘I think His Majesty may wish to receive your message. Hold yourself in readiness for an audience.’

  Alan went back to his brother and cousin, having told Lord Clarendon’s secretary where to find him. This time he was quite willing to satisfy their curiosity about his recent adventures. They had been joined by Thomas, whom he was pleased to see had continued to improve in health, at least as far as his shoulder was concerned. The wound was now completely healed and though the arm did not move much in any direction at the shoulder, the elbow was much freer and the whole limb far less shrunken man it had been.

  ‘I have the use of my hand again,’ Thomas said.

  ‘You were lucky to avoid surgeons earlier,’ Alan told him. ‘They would have had it off and killed you most like.’

  ‘My cough remains,’ Thomas said, sadly. ‘But seeing I shall never be fit for more soldiering, that is no matter.’ He added with a smile of great sweetness that would have reminded anyone who had known her of his mother Celia, ‘The soldiers call me Captain, though I hold no commission. James hath that rank by right now.’

  ‘The regiment is part of the late Lord Rochester’s command, is it not?’ Alan asked.

  Thomas nodded,

  ‘So we understood when we came here. But his lordship, was for ever travelling away to raise money for the King among the Protestant States. And recently with you, cousin, to observe the lie of the land in England.’

  Alan continued to stay with Captain James and his brother until Charles sent for him two days later. Lord Clarendon, who had given his Master a full account of Alan’s report presented the young man and then retired to a little distance in order to make the occasion less formal, less embarrassing for them all.

  But Charles chose to put on his most regal manner.

  ‘We are grieved indeed, sir,’ he began, ‘to hear our sometime friend and early adviser in military matters, hath passed, to his Maker. We will have a – We will have prayers offered for his soul and his well-earned rest.’

  Though the King’s face did not lose its dignified and distant expression, the dark eyes caught and held Alan’s grey ones with a sparkling challenge. Had the young man noticed his near slip? He had almost suggested a Mass for Henry Wilmot’s soul. Almost, but not quite. Prayers, yes prayers.

  Alan had noticed. He had been amused, even at that solemn moment, by the boyish challenge in His Majesty’s glance. But he had learned by now to express nothing unless asked to do so. He did, however, venture to murmur ‘Amen’, and then stood silent, waiting to be invited to deliver Lord Rochester’s last message.

  After a long pause Charles said, still formal, very cold, ‘Proceed, sir. Proceed. Our Lord Clarendon tells us you carry a message.’

  Alan gave it word for word as he remembered it. And the hopeful, muddled, reckless, loving words brought his lost servant and friend so perfectly before the King’s eyes that his kingly bearing crumbled, and the sensitive child of misfortune, the increasingly cynical man of unwilling compromise, took its place. He struck the arm of his chair with a swift gesture of helpless rage.

  ‘I could not have reached him in time,’ he said, brokenly.

  ‘No, sire. He was never to know that. He passed into a coma believing Your Majesty would soon be there to take farewell of him in person. He had left his return until too late. He would not regard his illness seriously, sire,’

  ‘He regarded few things seriously,’ Charles said with some bitterness, ‘But I could not have left here to visit him even had he lingered on.’ Returning to his regal manner as suddenly and surprisingly as he had abandoned it, he said, ‘We have heard of the usurper’s present confusion from other sources than those of Lord Rochester and his friends at home. We are aware of plots against him, his own army leaders thought to be corruptible. Without them he would be rendered helpless and easily overthrown. We must take the leadership against him. We must follow every move from our headquarters here, to encourage or to restrain.’

  The silence that followed was so prolonged that Lord Clarendon approached nearer to assist Alan’s dismissal. This came with a wave of the hand, but as he began to retreat backwards after a very low bow, Charles said, ‘You have done well, Master Ogilvy. You shall be rewarded.’

  Alan could only bow again and remove himself from the presence and from Lord Clarendon as quickly as he could.

  On his way back to the captains’ quarters he thought over this audience and what it meant regarding King Charles. Was it grief he had seen, natural human grief, a warm distress at the loss of a long-standing friendship? Surely not, unless His Majesty had a greater power of hiding his true feelings than he had hitherto seen in him? There had been regret indeed, one more useful servant gone for whom replacement must be found. Was that the sum of it? Alan thought of the succession of the King’s mistresses, most of whom came and went like butterflies in a garden, while a very few continued as favourites of a seemingly permanent kind, and all the time rumours of an imminent marriage with this or that princess blew up and blew away, again as readily.

  It would seem then that Charles Stuart had great capacity for passion but none for true love. Was he himself any judge of this? Indeed, no. For he had taken to telling himself now that his love for Susan Phillips had been simply a boyish infatuation and the sooner he buried it finally the better. Forcing this conclusion upon himself in direct contradiction of his former belief he managed to recover his spirits in his cousins’ company during the next week. He then begged leave from the King’s Controller of the Household, upon whose lists he still appeared as ‘page to the Bedchamber’, to travel to The Hague. He wished to acquaint his mother of Lord Aldborough’s present incarceration in the Tower of London, he said, and also tell his father of George Leslie’s seizure of the house in Paternoster Row.

  Meanwhile affairs in England followed the course they had been developing all that year. Cromwell’s army continued to split away from their allegiance to him. Even his own Ironsides were becoming disillusioned. He found it necessary to revoke the power of the eleven major-generals, because their harsh mis-rule was clearly driving fresh bodies of citizens to the revolt of despair.

  The plot that Lord Rochester had found mis-planned was laid bare and its inventors, Sir Henry Slingsby and a Doctor Hewitt, were arrested, tried, convicted and executed for trying to subvert officers in the army, though no treasonable action had actually been made.

  Cromwell’s popularity, except among his immediate close supporters, sank still lower. The Presbyterians hated him for his tolerance towards all the sects, except tile Roman Catholics and the Anglicans. He favoured the independents in religion, so that the growing b
and of Quakers began to prosper at last, few being cast into prison, though most of those already there continued to be left inside.

  The Second House was found to be a failure by the restored Commons, so Cromwell dissolved it, in much the same way and for the same basic reason as the Stuart monarchs had done from the beginning of their rule.

  In August the Lord Protector’s much-loved daughter died of a cancer. By that time he was himself ailing with a fever very prevalent in the capital that summer. Her death was a final blow. Cromwell’s health, undermined for years by the revolution, his military campaigns, and his less successful political battles to rule the country, gave way. He sank steadily and on the third of September, accepting his death with pious conviction still of God’s special regard for him, he died.

  At Brussels Charles received the news with joy. The tyrant had not been a truly old man. He had expected to have to wait many more years before the usurper was swept away by death, since he was no longer risking that fate on the field of battle. He had feared having to wait until he himself was too old to have any romantic appeal to a populace starved of all such for so long that they could not rise to it. Now all was changed. That longing for the Crown! Surely –

  ‘The Protector took the right to name his successor,’ Lord Clarendon reminded Charles. ‘He hath named his son Richard, young, beloved by the populace I am told –’

  ‘A weakling,’ Charles said, standing his full height, his eyes shining, his cheeks flushed with a growing sense, of his own potential, his own hardened, disciplined, proved strength. ‘We must begin to move, my lord.’

  ‘But first discover if their army accepts Master Richard, if not as a leader, then as their puppet. We must move with caution sire, with patience.’

  ‘Have you ever known us to act otherwise, my lord?’ the King asked, smiling broadly now.

  Chapter Nineteen