Master Wright is remarkably quick and has my likeness after only three sittings. He tells me he will paint an autumn evening scene behind me – some wispy trees and a moonlit sky – the whole effect one of wistful reflection at the end of life. Resting under my fingers will be a white turtle dove; that common staple of widows, symbolising the constancy of my love for my dead husband. I cannot object, though I fear it will seem trite. If only I could have posed with a real bird, I think, imagining the softness of downy feathers under my fingertips, feeling the buttery lightness of the creature in my hands before I lift them to the sky and set it free.
When it is finished, Master Wright’s portrait is displayed in the Banqueting House for all the court and London society to admire his skill and my grief. I do not go but keep to my rooms where, eventually, the painting is delivered to my care, wrapped in cloth. I do not even look at it before the Earl of Warwick comes to take it back to his family. Mary, seated beside me, offers the earl a glass of claret and, taking it, he lowers himself slowly into a chair by the fire. He takes a sip of wine and once again his eyes shift onto my stomach. I can bear it no longer.
‘I am not with child, my lord,’ I say, the words tumbling out of me, ‘much though I wish I were.’
Mary glances quickly at me, her expression half in sympathy, half reproof. I realise I have spoken bluntly and for the first time since Robert’s death I recognise the pain of another mourner in the sudden crumpling of the earl’s face.
‘I am sorry,’ I rush on. ‘I did not mean to speak so bluntly, but I could not have you continuing to hope now all my hope has gone.’
With a great effort, the earl brings his disintegrating face under control. He meets my eyes then, his own glazed and shining. ‘I understand, my dear, you have no need to apologise.’
Within a few minutes he has gone, his manservant carrying the portrait behind his shuffling steps. A week later I receive another letter from Lord Rich who thanks me for the painting and reports that his father, the legendary Earl of Warwick, parliamentarian and privateer, died in his sleep on the night he brought my picture home.
Weeks pass and bit by bit I venture a little further from the womb of my rooms, first into the family’s private apartments and then, when we travel down to my beloved Hampton Court again, drawn out into the gardens by the slipping of spring into summer. Beyond unavoidable travel where I have kept myself huddled into the corner of the carriage or barge, I have not been out of doors properly since February and the gardens embrace me like a long-lost friend, the warm May sunlight beating against my closed eyes soothing me as I listen to Robert’s voice on the wind. I keep to the private parts of the gardens and in the palace I hug the edges of rooms. The sound of laughter makes me wince and so I avoid crowds, will not dine in public nor attend chapel; the company of one of my sisters and the little puppy Elizabeth and John have given me is all I want and I have no desire to speak to God who, if He even exists, is proved the cruel God of the Old Testament, not the loving Lord of the New.
And so it is that I pay little attention to what is passing at court, only noticing those incidents that preoccupy my family. For Dick they are the final preparations for his and Dorothy’s forthcoming tour of the West Country: something I gather Father has had Thurloe plan to raise Dick’s profile among the people over whom he may one day rule. It is to be an extravagant affair, Doll tells me when she comes to bid me farewell, and I shudder to think of the many miles of smiling and waving that await them. Father, meanwhile, is consumed by the ruination of his plan for Protestant peace in Europe as the Swedish king abandons the treaty to resume his war against Denmark. Father kicks the logs in the grate when he hears the news, leaning his broad shoulders against the mantel, head bowed low so only the flames can see his face.
While he broods, my sisters are preoccupied with the trials and executions of the men who plotted the Spanish invasion, as one of them, Dr John Hewitt, is none other than the clergyman who officiated at Mary’s wedding. He had been a great favourite of Mary and Elizabeth, who had often gone to hear him preach in the City, and Hewitt’s fate grieves them both bitterly. Night after night I listen as they plead for him with Father. But there is nothing to be done, even by Betty whom Father dotes on above all and who has so often shaped his thoughts towards the forgiveness of others. ‘I cannot save him,’ he tells them as his hands thread through Betty’s chestnut curls. ‘There can be only one end for those who conspire with a foreign power.’
Though I now reside in perpetual gloom, my only ambition for each day simply to survive it, I am sorry that my family must face such disappointments. So it brings me a detached pleasure when Father shares the brighter news with us that our allied Anglo-French army has defeated the Spanish to liberate the great coastal fortress of Dunkirk. This ‘Battle of the Dunes’, as the men at court begin to call it, is a great triumph for Father’s government: King Louis XIV himself handing the keys of the city to our ambassador, Sir William Lockhart. It is the glittering prize England has longed for; once again we have a foothold on the Continent. I cannot share the joy that radiates from the faces of Thurloe and the other Councillors and pours out of the printing presses but I do feel the slightest pinprick of pride in my slumbering heart as I think of the honour we have finally regained from Bloody Mary Tudor’s catastrophic loss of the port of Calais almost exactly a century ago – although, of course, our enemy then was the French rather than the Spanish. What a jig we have danced between those two great powers all these years.
I mention this to my own Mary, who smiles and takes up a conversation designed to interest me more than her – happy, I can tell, to see me begin to engage again with the wider world. I manage a thin smile in return, thankful beyond words that Mary is still with me and grateful to her new husband for loaning her to me. Mary herself does not seem to miss him as she lives and sleeps by my side. Nevertheless, I still catch the questioning look that flits across her face when others speak of Thomas’s political affairs. Has he really abandoned his former loyalty to the exiled Charles Stuart? Will he be in touch with him again once he travels to the Continent as Father’s newly appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to Paris? I wonder how Mary will fare then if Thomas leaves her alone with his recalcitrant royalist family in Yorkshire. Mary does not speak of her new family but has instead slipped quietly into her old life as a puritan princess. I am thankful for it, even as I know it cannot last.
And then, just as the summer days are lengthening and Father’s government basks in the sunshine of a rebellion quashed, an invasion thwarted and an enemy defeated, God strikes at us again for the sin of pride. Once more Mary’s strength is needed, and now by more than me, for little Oliver, Elizabeth and John Claypole’s baby, falls into a fever and dies – snatched from his parents so quickly it is as if a demon is at work. He was a year old and transforming into a little boy before our eyes, crawling busily around the palace, panting and pulling himself up into our laps like a restless puppy. Betty is stricken, John too. And Mary, who had doted on Ollie, as she does on all babies, pushes her grief deep down inside to take their care upon herself, just as she has been doing with me. For myself, I am shocked, stirred from my foggy inertia into practical tasks, chief among them looking after my other nieces and nephews while Elizabeth and John howl their pain out of earshot. Mother moves between the nursery and Elizabeth’s bedside and Father – himself ill and weakened of late – retreats into his work, his great faith as well as his body shaken by God’s taking his namesake grandson.
‘I am reminded of little James,’ he says to me as we sit together late one night once the Claypole children are asleep, the candles guttering around us, the air thick with summer heat. ‘Your older brother died in my arms, did you know that? Just a babe he was. His hand fitted around my thumb like this.’ He shows me how their hands held each other for that brief time and I think how strange it is that he calls a baby my older brother. ‘But we must remember that children belong to God,’ Father says quietly. ‘He
only entrusts them to us to steward on His behalf. If He wishes to call them home, we must accept it, however much it grieves us.’
I search Father’s face for evidence of this acceptance but find instead the deep lines etched there from the deaths of the three sons he lost: first James as a baby and then, even more cruelly, his oldest boy Robert from illness when he was on the cusp of manhood, and his second son Oliver during the war. How I would love to have my three lost brothers here with us today. I lean my head on Father’s bulky shoulder and sigh for all the children taken and for those who will never be.
It is a devastating blow for Elizabeth, of course, but both Mother and Bridget reassure me that Betty will recover her spirits in time; not like you, Frances, their words imply, and I understand their meaning – most women lose at least one child in infancy, few lose a young husband of their heart when they are still honeymooning. I chide myself for these unworthy thoughts, competing with my big sister even in our different griefs. How can I know the unspeakable pain of losing a child? I grieved deeply even for the loss of a phantom baby. But I console myself with these thoughts too, hoping that Elizabeth will come back to us and resume her life much as before, just as my parents managed to do after the loss of baby James. Bridget had done so too, in time, after the death of her and Charles’s little girl Anne, now buried in Westminster Abbey.
In the weeks that follow, John emerges from his grief, coming to dine with the family, moving around the court in his fine clothes, albeit with a stooping gait and a few days’ growth on his chin that he did not have before. But Betty keeps to her bed. I sit with her frequently, and on the national day of thanksgiving for our victory at the Dunes, spend the whole day at her side – my puppy on her bed – grateful to hide away with her, our parallel sadness safe from the gaiety of the court. And it is on that day, as I sit beside Betty, my fingers tracing the frame of Robert’s portrait in my lap, that her grief for baby Oliver turns to sickness. She stops talking, beads of sweat appearing on her forehead before she vomits the glass of watered ale I have just given her. I send for the physicians – my heart pounding as my body travels back in time to Robert’s own illness five months before. Mother is there in a few minutes, her ceremonial duties for the public holiday abandoned with her high-heeled shoes. John arrives next, breathless and wide-eyed, his dog Badger snapping at his offspring puppy, who scampers off the bed with a yelp.
Father comes a few hours later, breathing heavily from the effort of rushing, and from then on, he hardly leaves Elizabeth’s bedside, often indeed sitting with her all night long. Slowly, as the days pass, government business grinds to a halt, though Master Thurloe still creeps into the room at intervals to place a paper before Father for signing or to whisper him a message. The court respects our private crisis, shares in it even – for Elizabeth Claypole is widely loved. Even our state visitors show restraint: the Dutch ambassador, Master Thurloe tells me one evening as we meet outside the door to Betty’s chamber, has kindly refused the usual pomp of a state visit, knowing Father and his family to be in such distress. A personal meeting with him is one of the only responsibilities Father cannot avoid, however, but he travels up to Whitehall to see the ambassador as quickly as possible, rushing back to Hampton Court only a few hours later; his best carriage horses steaming with the effort in the August heat. In all this, I watch Elizabeth and Father closely, observing the duelling kindness between them – her trying to hide her pain, him his grief. Elizabeth rises to the occasion as she does always, however: a model of graceful, feminine stoicism, beauty in her every movement.
Day after day the physicians bicker at the end of Betty’s bed, but they all agree she has been struck by the same illness she has suffered at intervals before. She has always recovered in the past and the roses that return to her cheeks every few days bring hope that she will do so again. But I know what is to come. I alone recognise the descent into hell, having travelled it so recently. As I watch, the Claypoles’ rooms become the stage for Southwark theatrics: Mary’s false cheerfulness as she plays with the children; John’s borrowed bravado as he refuses to accept that he could lose the woman who is so much his partner in all things; Father’s all-consuming despair that shuts everyone out. Mother subsumes herself once more in the practical, conferring with Bridget, dispatching her and Charles on errands and dispensing instructions while Richard, now thankfully returned from his regal progress into the West Country, takes on what he can of the burden of official business. In all this activity, I flit between them like a moth among lanterns, floating above the scenes as they play them out.
It is perhaps this detachment, this clarity that comes from my own raw loss of Robert, that is the reason I know I am about to lose my big sister too. The old Frances – the girl that danced as Venus – would have fought for my beloved Betty, struggled tooth and nail to wrench her from the reaper. But instead I lay my cheek against hers and let my memories and my love pass through our skin from my mind to hers. I tell her how I have worshipped her since I was a small child. How I grew up emulating her glamour and easy style, envying her small waist and watching and copying her manners; how she flirted with the officers who were always in and out of our house, how she wrapped Father around her little finger. How I loved her in a wholly different way from my other sisters – Bridget, so much the eldest, whose stern ways used to frighten me a little; and Mary, so close to me in age and so gentle I always felt the older, protective sister in our pair.
Running my finger along the lace neckline of Elizabeth’s nightgown, breathing in her rosewater scent, I acknowledge to us both how I have envied her closeness to Father and longed for him to talk to me with the same adult intimacy they shared. But it was ever out of reach – I would always be nine years and five months younger than Betty. And it seemed to me there was some mystery, some magic in those nine years of our family life that she had lived before me. In those years she had witnessed Father’s darkest time and watched his extraordinary flight into greatness through the war, where Mary and I had just caught the tailwinds. This seemed to matter, as if Father valued her love all the more because she had been his companion in his frustrated obscurity and loved him nonetheless.
But I was always the baby. Would always be the baby; even baby James who died before I was born is counted my older brother. It is horrible, perverse the way death can muddle us all out of order with our siblings. And now Betty. I have spent my life running to catch up with her and now I will. Slowly, day on day, year upon year, I will grow towards her until there comes a day in nine years and five months’ time when I will overtake my older sister in age. I hate this thought more than any other because I am finally being granted what I always wanted but at such a terrible cost. And who will I model myself on with Betty gone? Who will show me how to grow into full womanhood with grace and beauty, how to raise children without losing myself, how to navigate the middle years of life with dignity? Who will show me how to do these things?
Lying there listening to Betty’s shallow breaths, I realise that I have always measured my life against hers even to this last moment. Perhaps I always will. I close my eyes to remember her as she was and cherish her vivacity, her lively wit and deep store of kindness.
I ask her not to leave me behind, not to die when she is at her most perfect.
And I say goodbye.
Elizabeth dies in the early hours of that night, the sixth of August, her departure from our midst cracking us apart like a thunderbolt cleaving through an ancient oak.
This is a new grief; a sadness not centred within me but shared by us all. A public loss. The whole court indeed seems to have lost its sheen: if any one woman could have laid claim to being the darling of the court, its beating heart, it was Elizabeth. She and John were always the shining, smiling centre of palace life, and without them, our painted world fades to printers’ grey.
I accept the pain with a heart already opened to sorrow. But it is not so easy for the rest of the family. Betty’s older boys cry into the
ir pillows and little Martha frowns in confusion. John goes into shock much as I believe I did after Robert died. Mother and Mary seek comfort in the arms of one another and in prayer while Bridget is devastated, her usual strength and stoicism melted away. ‘We were always so different,’ she sobs to me, a sodden handkerchief pressed to her eyes. ‘But she was my only sister for so long. My bedfellow, my companion. It was her I talked to of my feelings for Henry Ireton, she who listened to my hopes and fears, she who laced me into my wedding gown. And now she is gone. Gone to God before me when it was always I who longed for Him, not her. Betty would see the irony in that.’
But though we are all heartsore, there is one among us who is wrenched apart at the seams, who disintegrates in body and mind before our eyes: Father, poor Father, crawls away into the darkness, half-crazed with grief for his most darling girl. The effect of Betty’s death upon him is so immediate, so profound that even Mother, even John who has lost his beloved wife, make room in their grief to tend to his. He shuts himself in his privy bedchamber and will see no one save ourselves. Even Thurloe, Father’s shadow and confidant in all things, is barred from his presence and forced to turn to Richard as Father’s eldest son and member of the council.
The Puritan Princess Page 26