A Health Unto His Majesty

by Jean Plaidy

  ‘Yes,’ said Frances, ‘if it were possible. I would marry the Duke.’

  ‘Can you keep a secret?’

  ‘But of course, Madam.’

  ‘Then say nothing of this, but be ready to leave the Palace should the summons come.’

  ‘Whither should I go?’

  ‘To marriage with the Duke.’

  ‘He has gone away. I do not know where he is.’

  ‘Others will have means of knowing,’ said the Queen. ‘Now go to your room and rest. Be ready to leave the Palace if need be.’

  When Frances had gone, Catherine marvelled at herself. I have come alive, she mused. I am fighting for what I desire more than anything on Earth. I have ceased to sit placidly waiting for what I want. Like others, I go out to get it.

  Then she summoned one of her women and bade her bring the Chancellor to her.

  Clarendon came, and they talked long and secretly together.

  *

  The King’s fury and sorrow, when he learned that Frances had eloped, was boundless.

  He could not bear to think of Frances and her Duke together. He knew the young husband to be a worthless person, a devotee of the bottle, and he did not believe that Frances was in love with him. That she should have chosen such a man increased his rage. He declared he would never see Frances again. He blamed himself for having caused that scene in her apartments; he suspected several people of being concerned in helping the lovers to elope, and he vowed that he would never forgive them. The only person he did not suspect was the Queen.

  He believed Clarendon to be the prime mover in the affair, and both Buckingham and Barbara confirmed this belief.

  Barbara was delighted. Not only was she rid of her most dangerous rival, but Clarendon was in disgrace because of it.

  The King’s natural easy temper deserted him on this occasion. He accused Clarendon and his son, Lord Cornbury, of conspiring to bring about the elopement, and for once would not let them speak in their defence. He was unable to hide his grief. All the Court now understood the depth of his feeling for Frances and that it was very different from the light emotions he felt for his mistresses.

  This was the most unhappy time of his life. He dreaded the coming of the spring when his ships, still laid up and in need of repairs, would be required to set out to face their enemies; he did not know how he was going to make good the country’s losses which were a direct result of the plague and the fire.

  His position was wretched, and there was only one person at that time who could have made him feel that life was worth while. Now he had to think of her – for he could not stop thinking of her – in the arms of another man.

  His rage and grief stayed with him; and at length he turned to one whose very outspoken vulgarity seemed to soothe him.

  Barbara was in the ascendant again, and it seemed that the King was spending as much time with her as he had in the first days of his infatuation.

  Barbara was determined that Buckingham should not go unpunished for his support of Frances Stuart, which was blatantly inimical to her interests.

  Buckingham had become involved with a woman, notorious for her love affairs. This was Lady Shrewsbury, a plump, languorous beauty whose lovers were said to be as numerous as those of Barbara herself. She was a woman who seemed to incite men to violence, and several duels had been fought on her account. When he fell under her spell, Buckingham appeared to become more reckless than even he had been before, and was continually engaged in quarrelling with almost everyone with whom he came into contact. His passion for Lady Shrewsbury increased as the months passed. He followed her wherever she went; and she was by no means loth to add the brilliant and witty, as well as rich and handsome, Duke to her list of lovers. On their first meeting, the Earl of Shrewsbury had quarrelled with Buckingham, but neither Lady Shrewsbury nor Buckingham took the slightest notice of their marriage vows; and both the Earl and Lady Buckingham should, from their long experience, not have expected them to take such notice. Buckingham could not tear himself away from his new love; he was drinking heavily; he quarrelled with Lord Falconbridge, and the quarrel threatened to end in a duel. He tried to quarrel with Clarendon; he attacked the Duke of Ormond; at a committee meeting he pulled the nose of the Marquess of Worcester; he insulted Prince Rupert in the street, whereupon the Prince pulled him off his horse and challenged him on the spot. Only the King could pacify his infuriated cousin. There was a quarrel at the theatre whither he had gone with Lady Shrewsbury. Harry Killigrew, who was in the next box and was one of Lady Shrewsbury’s discarded lovers, began attacking them both and shouting to all in the theatre that Lady Shrewsbury had been his mistress – and declaring indeed there was not a man in the theatre who might not aspire to the lady’s favours, for she was insatiable in her demand for lovers – and that if the Duke believed he was her sole lover they could wager the very shirts on their backs that he was wrong.

  The audience watched with great interest while the Duke ordered Killigrew to be quiet, and Lady Shrewsbury leaned forward in her box, sleepy-eyed, half smiling; for, next to getting men to make love to her, she liked setting them to fight each other; nor did she in the least mind being stared at.

  Killigrew drew his sword and struck the Duke with the flat side of it. Buckingham thereupon sprang out of his own box and into Killigrew’s, but Killigrew had already leaped out of his and was scuttling across the theatre. The Duke flew after him, to the delight of the audience who found this far more entertaining than the play which was being performed on the stage. The Duke caught Killigrew, snatched off his periwig and threw it high in the air; then he set upon the man until he begged for mercy.

  Killigrew was given a short term of imprisonment for the offence, and banished; and Barbara persuaded the King that her relative should also be banished until he learned to be less quarrelsome.

  So Buckingham departed for the country, taking with him his wife and Lady Shrewsbury. There, he declared, he was content to stay. He had his music and his mistress, his chemists and his uncomplaining wife.

  He knew though that Barbara was responsible for his banishment, and he promised himself that he would not let her escape punishment altogether, although he agreed that in trying to promote a marriage between Frances and the King he had not acted in the interest of his fiery cousin.

  In his pastoral retreat he would have stayed, had not one of those men, who had professed to be his friends, made an accusation of high treason against him; the charge was of forecasting the King’s death by horoscope.

  He was ordered to return to London and sent to the Tower.

  Barbara was now furious that a member of her family should be so imprisoned. She had merely wished that he should receive a light rap over the knuckles for having supported Frances’s interest against hers.

  She had forgotten that the King was no longer in love with her, and that it was only his acute sorrow in the loss of Frances which had made him turn to her. She believed her power to be as great as it had ever been, and she strode into his apartments, as soon as she heard the news, and cried aloud: ‘What means this? You would imprison your best servant on the false testimony of rogues!’

  The King cried in exasperation: ‘You are a meddling jade who dabbles in things of which she knows nothing.’

  Barbara was furious. ‘You are a fool!’ she shouted, not caring who heard her.

  ‘Be careful!’ he warned.

  ‘Fool! Fool! Fool!’ was Barbara’s retort. ‘If you were not one, you would not suffer your business to be carried on by fools that do not understand it, and cause your best subjects and those best able to serve you to be imprisoned.’

  ‘Have done, you evil woman,’ cried the King.

  He strode away and left her; she fumed up and down the apartment, declaring that ere long she would have her cousin free. It should be learned that any who dared imprison a noble Villiers was the enemy of the entire family.

  By that she meant Clarendon.

  And it was not long
before Barbara had her way. No case could be proved against Buckingham. The paper on which he was supposed to have drawn up the horoscope was given to the King, who confronted Buckingham with it; but the Duke declared he had never before seen it, and asked the King if he did not recognize his (Buckingham’s) sister’s writing upon it.

  ‘Why, ’tis the result of some frolic of hers about another person whose birthday happens to be the same as Your Majesty’s. Your Majesty’s name does not appear on the paper.’

  The King studied the paper afresh; he considered the whole matter to be too trivial for his attention, and he said so.

  ‘Have done with this business,’ he cried. ‘There is no need to press the matter further.’

  Buckingham was released, though he was wise enough to know that he must not yet appear at Court.

  Clarendon had imprisoned him. He decided, and Barbara agreed, that Clarendon’s day must soon be over.

  *

  The Fleet was crippled; the navy in debt to the extent of over a million pounds. There were two alternatives: not to repair the ships but to keep them laid up, and sue for peace; or bankruptcy.

  Charles, with his brother, their cousin Rupert, and Albemarle passionately declared that the ships should be refitted at whatever cost to the nation; but the will of the Council prevailed.

  The Dutch, however, were not prepared to make an easy peace. Why should they? They had had peaceful months in which to refit their ships; they had spent three times as much on the war as the English had. They believed that action was better than words at a conference table; and they were not going to lay up their ships merely because their enemy had been forced to do so.

  It seemed to all Englishmen in the years to come that in June of the year 1667 there fell upon their land the greatest calamity which had ever touched its pride and honour.

  On that warm summer’s day some nine months after the Fire of London, the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway as far as Chatham. They burnt the Royal Oak, the Royal James and the Loyal London, together with other men-of-war; they blew up the fortifications, and, towing the Royal Charles, they returned the way they had come, while their trumpeters impudently played the old English song ‘Joan’s Placket is Torn’; and on either side of the river Englishmen looked on, powerless to prevent them.

  Crippled by the great plague and the great Fire of London, England suffered the most shameful defeat of her history.

  *

  The people were numb with shame and anger.

  They could not understand how such an insult could be aimed at them. They had believed they were winning the war against Holland. They had shown themselves to be seamen equal to – nay, better than – the Dutchmen. They had not been defeated in action. It was plague and fire which had defeated them, together with the threat of bankruptcy.

  Revolution was again in the air. Much money had been raised for the conduct of the war; why had it come to such a shameful end?

  Someone was wrong. Someone must be blamed. And it was the custom to look to the most unpopular man in the kingdom on whom to fix blame.

  Mobs pulled up the trees in front of Clarendon’s Piccadilly house. It was true, shouted the people, that he had betrayed them. Was he not the friend of the French, and were the French not siding with the Dutch enemies of England? Who had sold Dunkirk? Who had married the King to a barren Queen that his own grandchildren might inherit the throne of England?

  The people needed a scapegoat and, as Charles studied their mood, he knew that they must have him before Parliament reassembled.

  Clarendon had been universally disliked since the early days of the Restoration; never had a man possessed more enemies. But for Charles’s protection over the last years he would have long ago been set down from his high post.

  Now Charles himself no longer desired his services. He had grown tired of the man’s continual reproaches. No Chancellor should speak to a King as Clarendon talked to his. Charles had always been ready to listen to reproaches from men of virtue, because he knew that he himself was far from virtuous. He had always maintained that every man had a right to his opinion and to the expression of that opinion. It was a view with which Clarendon had not approved. But, thought Charles, while those virtuous people, who spoke their minds freely concerning the faults of others, might in many cases have right on their side, they became increasingly unattractive; moreover it was other people’s faults which they surveyed with such contempt, while they were apt to turn a blind eye to their own. Such as Clarendon believed that if a man lived a pious life and was faithful to one woman – and she his wife – intolerance, cruelty and carelessness of the feelings of others were no sins. That is where I differ, thought Charles; for I hold malice to be the greatest of sins; and I cannot believe that God would wish to make a man miserable for the sake of taking a little pleasure out of his way.

  But Clarendon must go. The country was demanding it; and if he stayed, the people might be incited to revolution. Moreover, Charles did not feel inclined to protect a man who, he was sure, had done everything in his power to rob him of Frances Stuart.

  But he did not wish Clarendon to suffer more than need be. He remembered the good advice the old man had given him when he was a wandering prince.

  So he called the Duke of York to him – for, after all, James was Clarendon’s son-in-law – and they talked together concerning the Chancellor.

  ‘He has to go,’ said Charles.

  James did not think so. James was a fool, alas. Charles wondered what would happen to him if he lived to wear the crown, which might easily come to pass, as he, Charles, was possessed, it would seem, of a barren wife.

  ‘He is blamed for the conduct of the war,’ said Charles. ‘Did you not know that on the day the Dutch sailed up the Medway the mob broke his windows and pulled down the trees before his house?’

  ‘He is not to blame. He took little part in the conduct of the war and only agreed to the suggestions of the experts.’

  ‘People rage against him. They say he has excluded the right men from ministerial posts and given those posts to those whom he considered to be of the nobility. Since you made his daughter a possible queen, he has, you will admit, been inclined to be haughty to the more lowly.’

  James’s mouth was stubborn. Charles knew that in supporting his father-in-law he was obeying his wife, for James was known to be under Anne Hyde’s control. Only a short while ago, Charles remembered, he had likened his brother to the henpecked husband in Epicene, or The Silent Woman, a play which had afforded him much amusement. Charles remembered ruefully that when he had mentioned this, one of the wits who surrounded him – and whom he had ordered to forget ‘His Majesty’ in the cause of wit – had wanted to know whether it was better to be henpecked by a mistress than a wife.

  That made him think momentarily of Barbara. He was wishing that he could rid himself of her. Her rages were becoming more and more unbearable; they ceased to amuse as they had once done. If only Frances were at Court, and amenable!

  The memory of Frances turned his thoughts back to Clarendon who, he was sure, had done his best to arrange Frances’s marriage.

  He said: ‘The people accuse him of advising me to rule without a Parliament.’

  ‘That,’ said James, ‘was what our father tried to do.’

  ‘I have no intention of doing it. James, face the truth. The peace we have concluded with the French and Dutch at Breda is a shameful one. The people must have a scapegoat. They demand a scapegoat, and none will do but Clarendon. Do you know that I have been threatened with the same fate which befell our father if I do not part with him? As for myself, his behaviour and humours are insupportable to me and all the world else. I can no longer live with it. I must do those things which must be done with the Parliament, or the Government will be lost. James, do you want to set out on your wanderings once more? Have you forgotten The Hague and Paris? Have you forgotten what it means to be an exile? But mayhap we were lucky to be exiles. Our father was less fortunat
e. Be practical, brother. Be reasonable. He is your father-in-law. He was my old friend. I forget not his services to me. Do not let his enemies seize him and make a prisoner of him. God knows what would be his fate if he were taken to the Tower. Go to him now. Urge him to retire of his own free will. I doubt not that then he will be saved much trouble.’

  The Duke at length saw the wisdom of his brother’s plan and agreed to do this.

  *

  After his interview with the Duke of York, Clarendon came to see the King. He still spoke in the manner of a schoolmaster. ‘And have you forgotten the days of your exile so soon then?’ he asked. ‘Can you be so ungrateful as to cast off an old and faithful servant?’

  Charles was moved to pity. He said: ‘I warn you. I am sure that you will be impeached when the next Parliament sits. Too many are your enemies. If you value your own safety, resign now. Avoid the indignity of being forced to do so.’

  ‘Resign! I have been your chief minister ever since you were a King in fact – and indeed before that. Resign because my enemies blame me for the Dutch disaster! Your Majesty knows that my policy was not responsible for that defeat.’

  Charles said: ‘The plague, the fire, our lack of money – they are responsible for our disasters. I know that, my friend. I know it. But you have many enemies, many who have determined on your ruin. You are growing old. Why should you not spend your remaining days in comfortable retirement? That is what I should wish for you. I implore you, give up the Seal on your own account, before they take it from you and inflict God knows what. They are in an ugly mood.’

  ‘I shall never give up the Seal unless forced to do so,’ said Clarendon.

  Charles lifted his shoulders and left the apartment.

  *

  Barbara knew that Clarendon was with the King; she knew that the old man was receiving his dismissal. She was hilarious in her delight. For years she had worked for this – ever since the day he had refused to allow his wife to visit her.