But if we are sorry to see Lambert’s discomfort, John Claypole, Bulstrode and the other promoters of the crown are less charitable.
‘I have little sympathy to spare for the great Major-General,’ Bulstrode says haughtily. ‘Not after the hours we spent in that committee with your father.’
And I can see his point, when the defeated MPs have been wandering the court like bedraggled hounds ever since Father refused the crown. Some of their number have even left London, retreating to lick their wounds in the seclusion of their country estates. Lord Broghill, Richard tells me quietly, even threatens to return to Ireland and quit public life entirely, such is his bitter disappointment at Father’s betrayal.
Now that the dust has settled on the issue of Father becoming king, I resolve that it is time to question Mother on the latest plans for our marriages. Mary agrees and so, one morning when we are at Hampton Court, we swoop on Mother and steer her out into the courtyard where the heat is less oppressive and our ladies-in-waiting cannot listen so easily to our conversation. Mary and I take an arm of Mother’s each and, linked together like a silver bracelet, we orbit the fountain, the water tinkling as above us swifts whirl around the square, dipping and diving into their nests in the eaves.
‘What news of Viscount Fauconberg, Mother?’ Mary begins. ‘Does he still press his suit to William Lockhart in Paris?’
‘I have little news, I’m afraid, dearest. Ambassador Lockhart writes to Secretary Thurloe that conversations with the viscount have stalled in recent weeks.’
Mary peers past Mother to me half in puzzlement, half in relief, while I cannot help a fishwife tut escaping my lips.
‘He was waiting on Father’s decision on the kingship, I imagine,’ I say, irritation at the man’s evidently calculating self-interest overriding my usual care with Mary’s feelings. ‘Not willing to commit himself to our family while the issue hung in the balance, before he knew if he was bargaining for a lady or a princess,’ I continue, watching a swift looking quickly to left and right before it whips out and up away from its nest.
Mother nudges me in rebuke and I hang my head in silent apology.
‘If that is the case, Mother,’ Mary chooses her words carefully, ‘ought we to look for another? A man nearer to home perhaps and more closely bound to Father and to the Good Old Cause?’
I cannot imagine Mother misses the hopeful edge to her voice. I examine Mary closely, wondering if she is thinking again of Nicholas Baxter, or if someone else has caught her eye while I was too busy looking at Robert to notice.
‘I am sure that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for the delay, darling. But I do also know that your father and Secretary Thurloe are considering some other prospective suitors, though I think they are set on a conciliatory marriage into a noble royalist family.’
‘Do you know who?’
Mother slips her arm from mine and adjusts the pearls at her neck. ‘I have heard the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Chesterfield mentioned.’
‘The Duke of Buckingham,’ Mary repeats in surprise.
‘Surely not?’ I counter, for he is the son of the notorious Buckingham who was assassinated for being too much the favourite of old King James.
‘Even he,’ Mother nods.
‘But he is at the exiled court with the young ‘King’ Charles, is he not? How could he marry Mary?’
‘There has been a falling out between them, I believe, dearest, though I know no more than that. We must all wait and see,’ she says, her soft eyes fixed on mine but power in her tone.
Mary stops walking, her eyes sunk to the flagstones. We all loose arms then and I turn to face Mother. ‘As we speak of the exiled king, Mother, what of me?’ I meet her gaze squarely. ‘I know Father is against the royal match. Is it abandoned?’
‘He tells me there are still a few voices in favour of it – Master Thurloe, Lord Broghill, as you know – but he himself sees no blessings in it.’
I nod, thinking back frantically to what Thurloe had said to me when I went to his office. Clearly, he still thinks to use me as a means to an alliance, however honeyed his words. I must be careful in my dealings with him. I lift my eyes to the swifts at their nests.
‘And Robert?’ I ask, my voice barely above a whisper. ‘What of Robert?’
Mother pauses for a moment and I fancy, for the first time, that she may truly see the depth of my love for him.
‘I understand, dearest, that the Earl of Warwick has offered a substantial sum in support of his grandson’s offer for your hand …’
I turn back to her in an instant, my face alight with hope.
‘But, but …’ She holds a hand up to stop my thoughts. ‘I am afraid your father remains immovable on the idea.’
‘How can he?’ I shake my head in frustration. ‘The earl is his great friend. Robert has a noble name and a true heart and, by your account, there is even now a substantial offer of money. And, more than all this, I love him! Does that count for so little with Father?’
‘Hush, dearest,’ Mother says quickly, her eyes darting to the colonnades where knots of our ladies hover.
But I feel the anger working up inside me until it sends me to pace around the fountain alone, Mother and Mary’s eyes following me as I circle the water ordering my thoughts. ‘How can Father choose to be the author of all my unhappiness?’ I ask plaintively when I return to them.
‘I know, my darling, I know,’ Mother says, her words catching in her throat. ‘And I am more sorry than I can say. But your father has never been wrong about a match before and I know, I know that he has your best interests at heart. You must try to distance yourself from Robert; try to open your heart to the idea of another.’
‘Frances …’ Mary reaches out to me but I can listen to no more and shaking my head, wordless with anger, I whisk away from them as swiftly as the swifts.
I nurse my feelings for the rest of the day and insist on a supper tray in my room. As the evening wears on, I wait anxiously for Mary to return from supper so we can discuss our conversation with Mother. But we never have the chance as around ten o’clock Elizabeth goes into labour. Though this is her fourth pregnancy, it is a long and complicated birth and more than once my brother-in-law John lets tears fall on my shoulder as he clings to us in his fear. But the terrifying night passes and the next day too and at the end of that all I can feel is relief that my beautiful sister has survived and that her baby boy – Oliver – appears to have done so as well.
The bells ring out across London and Father, who had been almost as frantic with worry as John, grins from ear to ear. Gifts and messages flow into the Claypoles’ rooms, visitors too once Elizabeth can bear them. Bridget comes with flowers and soothing ointments and, as we four sisters sit together in our two pairs, she and Betty swap horror stories of their childbeds while Mary and I can only listen, shut out of the conversation in an insurmountable way. Once or twice, I catch Biddy wiping away a tear and I remember that, for all their differences, before Mary and I were born and the events of the war drove them apart, my older sisters would have been all in all to each other.
Mary herself is utterly besotted with the infant and spends every possible moment at Elizabeth’s bedside, cradling little Oliver and helping the midwives to clean and change him. She has endless opinions on his looks, his movements and gestures: so like John in this way, so like Elizabeth and even his namesake grandfather in others. While I – I confess only to myself – see little to distinguish him from any other baby and cannot help an uncharitable annoyance that Elizabeth should have honoured Father with his name, particularly when she called her firstborn Cromwell; both gestures bound to make her even more his favourite daughter as I have always secretly feared she is.
Faced with Mary’s almost audible ache for a child of her own in a refracted mirror of my own indifference, I wonder as so often before how she and I can have been moulded so differently from the same clay. While her heart is filled with the longing for a baby, my bo
dy craves only the means to the end as the darkly carnal, rumpled-sheets atmosphere of the childbirth rooms stirs my passion for Robert. Leaving them later that week for a dress fitting for Father’s grand investiture, I am fired as never before by my love. And as Master Hornlock moves his hands lightly over me, a measure of tape in one hand, his lips pressed taut over dress pins, my body burns with the furious conviction that none will prevent Robert and me from reaching our marriage bed. If I must, I will take my future in my own hands.
The day of Father’s great ceremony on 26 June dawns bright and beautiful as if God is indeed happy with the outcome of the long weeks He and Father spent wrestling with the issue of kingship together. The midsummer sunlight sparkles on the river as we come by barge from Whitehall and, leaving Father at Parliament Steps, process straight to the Great Hall in the Palace of Westminster while he goes to meet the Speaker of the Commons and MPs in the Painted Chamber.
The great hammer-beamed hall before us is breathtaking. Huge banners and ribbons – twenty, thirty feet high in red, white, blue and black, the colours of our Cromwell coat of arms – hang from the five-hundred-year-old rafters with the rampant lion seeming to scale each one, its red claws and tongue like spots of blood. At the far end, beneath the huge window, a beautiful gold canopy has been erected over a raised platform with banks of covered seating on each side. I am so overwhelmed I have stopped quite still. But Sir Oliver Flemyng ushers me and the other women of our family forward – first Mother, then Bridget, Mary and me, Aunt Liz and cousin Lavinia, our ladies trailing in our wake. Carefully, we climb into the stands. When we have each reached our appointed place, we settle together like nesting birds, our vivid satin skirts folding and rustling into one great multicoloured sea of shining fabric. Around us the hall is buzzing with voices and, as I glance upwards, a white dove flaps between the hammer beams where the streamers flutter in the breeze.
Mary’s hand steals softly into mine and I take a deep breath as I survey the scene. As I watch, MPs, judges and civic officials follow our lead and climb into the stands, pushing past knees and greeting each other with handshakes and tipped hats. The ambassadors are there too and I see Signor Giavarina taking his seat, arranging his velvet cloak neatly around him and granting me a little wave when he catches my eye. Watching him, I wonder absently if he is still waiting for his promised audience with Father.
Now that I am here in the room, I have lost any lingering doubt that we are to witness a ceremony as splendid as any of the coronations that have come before it. There is no crown on the pink and gold cloth-covered table that stands close by on the platform, but all the other symbols of a monarch’s investiture are there: the robe of purple ermine-lined velvet, the shining sword and heavy gold sceptre and the great gilded Bible. And the chair of state waiting under the canopy, Mary whispers to me and Bridget, is none other than the ancient coronation chair carved for Edward I to accommodate the Stone of Scone on which kings had been crowned since time immemorial: the same stone on which Jacob had laid his head to dream of the angels climbing up and down the ladder to heaven.
Gazing at it now, as we wait for Father to make his entrance, I can almost feel the kings and queens of the past hovering in the hall. Though, wondrous as I find this, I cannot escape the chill of the last king’s presence; he who had been sentenced to death in this very room. This is in my mind, and in no doubt many others’, when the procession enters the hall, though the rich sight before me soon drives away the melancholy thoughts.
Every man of any standing or office in the court walks with Father: all of his household officers, the Council and Secretary Thurloe, ranks of the nobility and the Mayor of London carrying the sword of the City. Dick is there, self-conscious under his soft smile; John has a prominent place of course, sparkling and smiling in his brilliant livery; and Charles too, serious and stately as he walks beside Uncle Desborough. But it is not they, nor even Father who brings the wide smile to my lips. It is Robert, who I had feared would not return from Essex in time, whose every step, every turn of his head, every smile stops my heart and whose inclusion in Father’s entourage fills me with hope. He is wearing a new coat in his favourite green, gold buttons flashing as they catch the sunlight streaming through the high windows. My heart calls to his so loudly that I think the whole room will hear, but he does not catch my eye. Nonetheless I am content with the rare pleasure of being able to watch Robert without him, or anyone else, seeing how I feast my eyes.
My hopes are boosted still further when I see the special honour accorded to his grandfather, the Earl of Warwick. Tall and graceful, it is he who bears the sword of state before Father – the same part played by Major-General John Lambert three years ago in Father’s first, more muted, investiture as Lord Protector under the Instrument of Government constitution he had drafted. Lambert himself is there, walking with his fellow members of the Council, but the message is clear: notwithstanding Father’s rejection of the crown, this is a new Protectorate based on a traditional civilian footing with the whole of the legislature, judiciary and nobility of these nations – at least in appearances – behind it.
No one, I think with a degree of comfort, could see this array of power and influence, of old families and new, of Parliament and army, and deny that Father – that our family – is now supported by the whole establishment. Scanning the crowd, I hope that the agents of Charles Stuart, who are no doubt among us, report that same view back to him. Surely none would suggest I marry him now?
The ceremony itself is a sober affair with the Speaker of the Commons, Sir Thomas Widdrington, proclaiming Father’s title as Lord Protector, now settled by the full and unanimous consent of the people of the three nations assembled in Parliament. Distracted by Robert’s three-quarters profile on the far side of the hall and remembering the feel of the sharp angle of his jaw under my hands as we kissed, I do not follow all the speaker’s words, though I regain my concentration when Robert’s grandfather and Bulstrode Whitelocke together lift the ermine robe onto Father’s shoulders. Once he has this, the great Bible, sword and sceptre, Father swears his oath of government, is blessed by the chaplain and then moves to lower himself onto the great coronation chair.
‘They say if it groans then the ruler is royal,’ Mary whispers to Bridget and me. ‘If the chair stays silent, then he is a usurper.’
I stare at her. ‘But Father’s neither!’ She shrugs and we all strain forward to hear. It is hard with so many hundreds in the room to make out the exact noise as Father sits but I think I hear a creak. ‘It groaned!’ I whisper.
‘I heard nothing,’ Bridget counters and I look at her in horror.
But the ceremony continues regardless and I soon forget the legend when a trumpet fanfare heralds the loud proclamation of Father as ‘His Highness Lord Protector’ with great shouts of ‘God save the Lord Protector’ ringing around the hall with echoing cheers. I glance back at Father, wishing I could read his thoughts in this moment, but his face is an inscrutable mask. Those about him smile with relief, however, and I notice Bulstrode Whitelocke and Edward Montagu glance at each other as they stand before Father’s chair with their swords held aloft. The Dutch and French ambassadors who sit either side of Father nod and clap; the symbolism of the endorsement of the great Catholic and Protestant powers for Father’s elevation lost on no one.
And then my heart leaps into my mouth as Father rises and bows to the ambassadors and dignitaries who surround him, and Robert moves forward with a couple of other young nobles to take up the corners of Father’s train. As Father steps off the dais and begins to move through the crowds I catch Robert’s eye for the briefest moment and he twitches the corner of his mouth before his face settles into solemnity for the procession. Watching Robert and Father sweep past me together I lift a fan to my face to shield the two tears that carve down my cheeks to meet the smile beneath.
The ceremony at Westminster Hall is followed by a magnificent procession along Whitehall. Father travels in his state coach w
ith Richard, the Earl of Warwick, John Lisle, Edward Montagu and Bulstrode Whitelocke, with John riding immediately behind them leading the pride of Father’s stables. All through the cities of London and Westminster bells ring and later bonfires blaze while cakes are handed out and French wine flows through the streets like the great River Thames itself.
We girls do not take part in the procession but make our way quietly back to the palace by river to change into our evening gowns. When Father and his procession return the feasting and celebrations begin and our family takes centre stage. The atmosphere in the palace is heady, with all sides of the recent disputes feeling a measure of tension relieved at the temporary resolution of their quarrels. The army generals who have little taste for such opulent display nonetheless bring themselves to drink Father’s health and break bread with the politicians of the kingship party, who smile in spite of the hollowness they see in the day’s compromise; past and future both brushed under the wine-splattered carpet for now as we celebrate today for its own sake.
Such is the merriment and the crush of people that I feel sure Robert and I would not be missed if – somehow – I can find a way to escape with him. But though I am always aware of where Robert stands in the room, as if he is picked out in flames in the corner of my eye, I am never alone to go to him, always surrounded by my parents or siblings. Eventually and miraculously, I find myself momentarily overlooked as John and Dick share some gentleman’s joke behind gloved hands. Immediately I feel Robert as he brushes past me, smell the orange spice of his neck as he leans in to whisper.
‘Outside. The stairs behind the pantry in the corner of the Great Court.’
I do not have time to reply before he is gone, his green back swallowed into the crowd. Hastily, I look around me. Katherine is speaking to her husband, Richard and John have quite forgotten me in their joke. Only Mary catches my eye as she looks my way while a servant hands her a glass of wine. Quickly I move over to her.
The Puritan Princess Page 18