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The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series

R >> Rafael Sabatini >> The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series




"Why did she cry out, sire?" he will have asked. "What did M. de
Buckingham do to make her cry out?"

"I don't know. But whatever it was, she was no party to it since
she did cry out."

Richelieu did not pursue the matter just then. But neither did he
abandon it. He had his agents in London and elsewhere, and he
desired of them a close report upon the Duke of Buckingham's
movements, and the fullest particulars of his private life.

Meanwhile, Buckingham had left behind him in France two faithful
agents of his own, with instructions to keep his memory green
with the Queen. For he intended to return upon one pretext or
another before very long, and complete the conquest. Those agents
of his were Lord Holland and the artist Balthazar Gerbier. It is
to be presumed that they served the Duke's interests well, and it
is no less to be presumed from that which followed that they
found her Majesty willing enough to hear news of that amazingly
romantic fellow who had flashed across the path of her grey life,
touching it for a moment with his own flaming radiance. In her
loneliness she came to think of him with tenderness and pity, in
which pity for herself and her dull lot was also blent. He was
away, overseas; she might never see him again; therefore there
could be little harm in indulging the romantic tenderness he had
inspired.

So one day, many months after his departure, she begged Gerbier--
as La Rochefoucauld tells us--to journey to London and bear the
Duke a trifling memento of her--a set of diamond studs. That
love-token--for it amounted to no less--Gerbier conveyed to
England, and delivered to the Duke.

Buckingham's head was so completely turned by the event, and his
desire to see Anne of Austria again became thereupon so
overmastering, that he at once communicated to France that he was
coming over as the ambassador of the King of England to treat of
certain masters connected with Spain. But Richelieu had heard
from the French ambassador in London that portraits of the Queen
of France were excessively abundant at York House, the Duke's
residence, and he had considered it his duty to inform the King.
Louis was angry, but not with the Queen. To have believed her
guilty of any indiscretion would have hurt his gloomy pride
too deeply. All that he believed was that this was merely an
expression of Buckingham's fanfaronading, thrasonical disposition,
a form of vain, empty boasting peculiar to megalomaniacs.

As a consequence, the King of England was informed that the Duke
of Buckingham, for reasons well known to himself, would not be
agreeable as Charles's ambassador to his Most Christian Majesty.
Upon learning this, the vainglorious Buckingham was loud in
proclaiming the reason ("well known to himself") and in
protesting that he would go to France to see the Queen with the
French King's consent or without it. This was duly reported to
Richelieu, and by Richelieu to King Louis. But his Most Christian
Majesty merely sneered, accounted it more empty boasting on the
part of the parvenu, and dismissed it from his mind.

Richelieu found this attitude singularly exasperating in a King
who was temperamentally suspicious. It so piqued and annoyed him,
that when considered in addition to his undying rancour against
Anne of Austria, it is easily believed he spared no pains to
obtain something in the nature of a proof that the Queen was not
as innocent as Louis insisted upon believing.

Now it happened that one of his London agents informed him, among
other matters connected with the Duke's private life, that he had
a bitter and secret enemy in the Countess of Carlisle, between
whom and himself there had been a passage of some tenderness too
abruptly ended by the Duke. Richelieu, acting upon this
information, contrived to enter into correspondence with Lady
Carlisle, and in the course of this correspondence he managed her
so craftily--says La Rochefoucauld--that very soon she was,
whilst hardly realizing it, his Eminence's most valuable spy near
Buckingham. Richelieu informed her that he was mainly concerned
with information that would throw light upon the real relations
of Buckingharn and the Queen of France, and he persuaded her that
nothing was too insignificant to be communicated. Her resentment
of the treatment she had received from Buckingham, a resentment
the more bitter for being stifled--since for her reputation's
sake she dared not have given it expression--made her a very
ready instrument in Richelieu's hands, and there was no scrap of
gossip she did not carefully gather up and dispatch to him. But
all was naught until one day at last she was able to tell him
something that set his pulses beating more quickly than their
habit.

She had it upon the best authority that a set of diamond studs
constantly worn of late by the Duke was a love-token from the
Queen of France sent over to Buckingham by a messenger of her
own. Here, indeed, was news. Here was a weapon by which the Queen
might be destroyed. Richelieu considered. If he could but obtain
possession of the studs, the rest would be easy. There would be
an end--and such an end!--to the King's obstinate, indolent faith
in his wife's indifference to that boastful, flamboyant English
upstart. Richelieu held his peace for the time being, and wrote
to the Countess.

Some little time thereafter there was a sumptuous ball given at
York House, graced by the presence of King Charles and his young
French Queen. Lady Carlisle was present, and in the course of the
evening Buckingham danced with her. She was a very beautiful,
accomplished and ready-witted woman, and to-night his Grace found
her charms so alluring that he was almost disposed to blame
himself for having perhaps treated her too lightly. Yet she
seemed at pains to show him that it was his to take up again the
affair at the point at which it had been dropped. She was gay,
arch, provoking and irresistible. So irresistible that presently,
yielding to the lure of her, the Duke slipped away from his
guests with the lady on his arm, and they found themselves at the
foot of the garden in the shadow of the water-gate that Inigo
Jones had just completed for him. My lady languished at his side,
permitted him to encircle her with a protecting arm, and for a
moment lay heavily against him. He caught her violently to him,
and now her ladyship, hitherto so yielding, with true feminine
contrariness set herself to resist him. A scuffle ensued between
them. She broke from him at last, and sped swift as a doe across
the lawn towards the lights of the great house, his Grace in
pursuit between vexation and amusement.

But he did not overtake her, and it was with a sense of having
been fooled that he rejoined his guests. His questing eyes could
discern her nowhere. Presently he made inquiries, to be told that
she had desired her carriage to be called, and had left York
House immediately upon coming in from the garden.

He concluded that she was gone off in a pet. It was very odd. It
was, in fact, most flagrantly contradictory that she should have
taken offense at that which she had so obviously invited. But
then she always had been a perverse and provoking jade. With that
reflection he put her from his mind.

But anon, when his guests had departed, and the lights in the
great house were extinguished, Buckingham thought of the incident
again. Cogitating it, he sat in his room, his fingers combing his
fine, pointed, auburn beard. At last, with a shrug and a half-
laugh, he rose to undress for bed. And then a cry escaped him,
and brought in his valet from an adjoining room. The riband of
diamond studs was gone.

Reckless and indifferent as he was, a sense of evil took him in
the moment of his discovery of that loss, so that he stood there
pale, staring, and moist of brow. It was no ordinary theft. There
were upon his person a dozen ornaments of greater value, any one
of which could have been more easily detached. This was the work
of some French agent. He had made no secret of whence those studs
had come to him.

There his thoughts checked on a sudden. As in a flash of
revelation, he saw the meaning of Lady Carlisle's oddly
contradictory behaviour. The jade had fooled him. It was she who
had stolen the riband. He sat down again, his head in his hands,
and swiftly, link by link, he pieced together a complete chain.

Almost as swiftly he decided upon the course of action which he
must adopt so as to protect the Queen of France's honour. He was
virtually the ruler of England, master in these islands of an
almost boundless power. That power he would exert to the full
this very night to thwart those enemies of his own and of the
Queen's, who worked so subtly in concert. Many would be wronged,
much harm would be done, the liberties of some thousands of
freeborn Englishmen would be trampled underfoot. What did it
matter? It was necessary that his Grace of Buckingham should
cover up an indiscretion.

"Set ink and paper yonder," he bade his gaping valet. "Then go
call M. Gerbier. Rouse Lacy and Thom, and send them to me at
once, and leave word that I shall require a score of couriers to
be in the saddle and ready to set out in half an hour."

Bewildered, the valet went off upon his errand. The Duke sat down
to write. And next morning English merchants learnt that the
ports of England were closed by the King's express command--
delivered by his minister, the Duke of Buckingham--that measures
were being taken--were already taken in all southern ports--so
that no vessel of any kind should leave the island until the
King's further pleasure were made known. Startled, the people
wondered was this enactment the forerunner of war. Had they known
the truth, they might have been more startled still, though in a
different manner. As swiftly as couriers could travel--and
certainly well ahead of any messenger seeking escape overseas--
did this blockade spread, until the gates of England were tight
locked against the outgoing of those diamond studs whirls meant
the honour of the Queen of France.

And meanwhile a diamond-cutter was replacing the purloined stones
by others, matching them so closely that no man should be able to
say which were the originals and which the copies. Buckingham and
Gerbier between them guided the work. Soon it was accomplished,
and a vessel slipped down the Thames, allowed to pass by those
who kept close watch to enforce the royal decree, and made sail
for Calais, which was beginning to manifest surprise at this
entire cessation of traffic from England. From that vessel landed
Gerbier, and rode straight to Paris, carrying the Queen of France
the duplicate studs, which were to replace those which she had
sent to Buckingham.

Twenty-four hours later the ports of England were unsealed, and
commerce was free and unhampered once more. But it was twenty-
four hours too late for Richelieu and his agent, the Countess of
Carlisle. His Eminence deplored a fine chance lost through the
excessive power that was wielded in England by the parvenu.

Yet that is not quite the end of the story. Buckingham's inflamed
and reckless mind would stop at nothing now to achieve the object
of his desires--go to France and see the Queen. Since the country
was closed to him, he would force a way into it, the red way of
war. Blood should flow, ruin and misery desolate the land, but in
the end he would go to Paris to negotiate a peace, and that
should be his opportunity. Other reasons there may have been, but
none so dominant, none that could not have been remved by
negotiation. The pretexted casus belli was the matter of the
Protestants of La Rochelle, who were in rebellion against their
king.

To their aid sailed Buckingham with an English expedition.
Disaster and defeat awaited it. Its shattered remnant crept back
in disgrace to England, and the Duke found himself more detested
by the people than he had been already--which is saying much. He
went off to seek comfort at the hands of the two persons who
really loved him--his doting King and his splendid wife.

But the defeat had neither lessened his resolve nor chastened his
insolence. He prepared a second expedition in the very teeth of a
long-suffering nation's hostility, indifferent to the mutinies
and mutterings about him. What signified to him the will of a
nation? He desired to win to the woman whom he loved, and to
accomplish that he nothing recked that he should set Europe in a
blaze, nothing recked what blood should be poured out, what
treasure dissipated.

Hatred of him by now was so widespread and vocal, that his
friends, fearing that soon it would pass from words to deeds,
urged him to take precautions, advised the wearing of a shirt of
mail for greater safety.

But he laughed sneeringly, ever arrogant and scornful.

"It needs not. There are no Roman spirits left," was his
contemptuous answer.

He was mistaken. One morning after breakfast, as he was leaving
the house in the High Street, Portsmouth, where he lodged whilst
superintending the final preparations for that unpopular
expedition, John Felton, a self-appointed instrument of national
vengeance, drove a knife to the hilt into the Duke's breast.

"May the Lord have mercy on your soul!" was the pious exclamation
with which the slayer struck home. And, in all the circumstances,
there seems to have been occasion for the prayer.






IX. THE PATH OF EXILE

The Fall of Lord Clarendon



Tight-wrapped in his cloak against the icy whips of the black
winter's night, a portly gentleman, well advanced in years,
picked his way carefully down the wet, slippery steps of the
jetty by the light of a lanthorn, whose rays gleamed lividly on
crushed brown seaweed and trailing green sea slime. Leaning
heavily upon the arm which a sailor held out to his assistance,
he stepped into the waiting boat that rose and fell on the
heaving black waters. A boathook scraped against the stones, and
the frail craft was pushed off.

The oars dipped, and the boat slipped away through the darkness,
steering a course for the two great poop lanterns that were
swinging rhythmically high up against the black background of the
night. The elderly gentleman, huddled now in the stern-sheets,
looked behind him--to look his last upon the England he had loved
and served and ruled. The lanthorn, shedding its wheel of yellow
light upon the jetty steps, was all of it that he could now see.

He sighed, and settled down again to face the poop lights,
dancing there above the invisible hull of the ship that was to
carry Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, lately Lord Chancellor of
England, into exile. As a dying man looks down the foreshortened
vista of his active life, so may Edward Hyde--whose career had
reached a finality but one degree removed from the finality of
death--have reviewed in that moment those thirty years of sincere
endeavour and high achievement since he had been a law student in
the Temple when Charles I. was King.

That King he had served faithfully, so faithfully that when the
desperate fortunes of the Royalist party made it necessary to
place the Prince of Wales beyond the reach of Cromwell, it was in
Sir Edward Hyde's care that the boy was sent upon his travels.
The present was not to be Hyde's first experience of exile. He
had known it, and of a bitter sort, in those impecunious days
when the Second Charles, whose steps he guided, was a needy,
homeless outcast. A man less staunch and loyal might have thrown
over so profitless a service. He had talents that would have
commanded a price in the Roundhead market. Yet staunchly adhering
to the Stuart fortunes, labouring ceaselessly and shrewdly in the
Stuart interest, employing his great ability and statecraft, he
achieved at long length the restoration of the Stuarts to the
Throne of England. And for all those loyal, self-denying labours
in exile on the Stuart behalf, all the reward he had at the time
was that James Stuart, Duke of York, debauched his daughter.

Nor did Hyde's labours cease when he had made possible the
Restoration; it was Hyde who, when that Restoration was
accomplished, took in hand and carried out the difficult task of
welding together the old and the new conditions of political
affairs. And it was Hyde who was the scapegoat when things did
not run the course that Englishmen desired. As the head of the
administration he was held responsible even for those acts which
he had strongly but vainly reprobated in Council. It was Hyde who
was blamed when Charles sold Dunkirk to the French, and spent the
money in harlotry; it was Hyde who was blamed because the Queen
was childless.

The reason for this last lay in the fact that the wrong done to
Hyde's daughter Anne had now been righted by marri age with the
Duke of York. Now the Duke of York was the heir-apparent, and the
people, ever ready to attach most credit to that which is most
incredible and fantastic, believed that to ensure the succession
of his own grandchildren Hyde had deliberately provided Charles
with a barren wife.

When the Dutch, sailing up the Thames, had burnt the ships of war
at Chatham, and Londoners heard the thunder of enemy guns, Hyde
was openly denounced as a traitor by a people stricken with
terror and seeking a victim in the blind, unreasoning way of
public feeling. They broke his windows, ravaged his garden, and
erected a gibbet before the gates of his superb mansion on the
north side of Piccadilly.

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and Lord Chancellor of England,
commanded the love of his intimates, but did not possess those
qualities of cheap glitter that make for popularity with the
masses. Nor did he court popularity elsewhere. Because he was
austere in his morals, grave and sober in his conduct, he was
hated by those who made up the debauched court of his prince.
Because he was deeply religious in his principles, the Puritans
mistrusted him for a bigot. Because he was autocratic in his
policy he was detested by the Commons, the day of autocracy being
done.

Yet might he have weathered the general hostility had Charles
been half as loyal to him as he had ever been loyal to Charles.
For a time, it is true, the King stood his friend, and might so
have continued to the end had not the women become mixed up in
the business. As Evelyn, the diarist, puts it, this great man's
fall was the work of "the buffoones and ladys of pleasure."

It really is a very tangled story--this inner history of the fall
of Clarendon, with which the school-books are not concerned. In a
sense, it is also the story of the King's marriage and of Catherine
of Braganza, his unfortunate little ugly Queen, who must have
suffered as much as any woman wedded to a sultan in any country
where the seraglio is not a natural and proper institution.

If Clarendon could not be said to have brought about the
marriage, at least he had given it his suffrages when proposed by
Portugal, which was anxious to establish an alliance with England
as some protection against the predatory designs of Spain. He had
been influenced by the dowry offered--five hundred thousand
pounds in money, Tangier, which would give England a commanding
position on the Mediterranean, and the Island of Bombay. Without
yet foreseeing that the possession of Bombay, and the freedom to
trade in the East Indies--which Portugal had hitherto kept
jealously to herself--were to enable England to build up her
great Indian Empire, yet the commercial advantages alone were
obvious enough to make the match desirable.

Catherine of Braganza sailed for England, and on the lath of May,
1662, Charles, attended by a splendid following, went to meet his
bride at Portsmouth. He was himself a very personable man, tall--
he stood a full six feet high--lean and elegantly vigorous. The
ugliness of his drawn, harsh-featured face was mitigated by the
glory of full, low-ridded, dark eyes, and his smile could be
irresistibly captivating. He was as graceful in manner as in
person, felicitous of speech, and of an indolent good temper that
found expression in a charming urbanity.

Good temper and urbanity alike suffered rudely when he beheld the
wife they brought him. Catherine, who was in her twenty-fifth
year, was of an absurdly low stature, so long in the body and
short in the legs that, dressed as she was in an outlandish,
full-skirted farthingale, she had the appearance of being on her
knees when she stood before him. Her complexion was sallow, and
though her eyes, like his own, were fine, they were not fine
enough to redeem the dull plainness of her face. Her black hair
was grotesquely dressed, with a long fore-top and two great
ribbon bows standing out, one on each side of her head, like a
pair of miniature wings.

It is little wonder that the Merry Monarch, the fastidious
voluptuary, with his nice discernment in women, should have
checked in his long stride, and halted a moment in consternation.

"Lord!" was his wry comment to Etheredge, who was beside him.
"They've brought me a bat, not a woman."

But if she lacked beauty, she was well cowered, and Charles was
in desperate need of money.

"I suppose," he told Clarendon anon, "I must swallow this black
draught to get the jam that goes with it."

The Chancellor's grave eyes considered him almost sternly what
time he coldly recited the advantages of this marriage. If he did
riot presume to rebuke the ribaldry of his master, neither would
he condescend to smile at it. He was too honest ever to be a
sycophant.

Catherine was immediately attended--in the words of Grammont--by
six frights who called themselves maids-of-honour, and a
governess who was a monster. With this retinue she repaired to
Hampton Court, where the honeymoon was spent, and where for a
brief season the poor woman--entirely enamoured of the graceful,
long-legged rake she had married--lived in a fool's paradise.

Disillusion was to follow soon enough. She might be, by he grace
of her dowry, Queen of England, but she was soon to discover that
to King Charles she was no more than a wife de jure. With wives
de facto Charles would people his seraglio as fancy moved him;
and the present wife defacto, the mistress of his heart, the
first lady of his harem, was that beautiful termagant, Barbara
Villiers, wife of the accommodating Roger Palmer, Earl of Castle-
maine.

There was no lack--there never is in such cases--of those who out
of concern and love for the happily deluded wife lifted the veil
for her, and made her aware of the facts of his Majesty's
association with my Lady Castle-maine--an association dating back
to the time when he was still a homeless wanderer. The knowledge
would appear to have troubled the poor soul profoundly; but the
climax of her distress was reached when, on her coming to
Whitehall, she found at the head of the list of ladies-in-waiting
assigned to her the name of my Lady Castlemaine. The forlorn
little woman's pride rose up before this outrage. She struck out
that offending name, and gave orders that the favourite was not
to be admitted to her presence.

But she reckoned without Charles. For all his urbane, good-
tempered, debonair ways, there was an ugly cynical streak in his
nature, manifested now in the manner in which he dealt with this
situation. Himself he led his boldly handsome favourite by the
hand into his wife's presence, before the whole Court assembled,
and himself presented her to Catherine, what time that Court,
dissolute and profligate as it was, looked on in amazement at so
outrageous a slight to the dignity of a queen.

What followed may well have exceeded all expectations. Catherine
stiffened as if the blow dealt her had been physical. Gradually
her face paled until it was grey and drawn; tears of outraged
pride and mortification flooded her eyes. And then, as if
something snapped within her brain under this stress of bitter
emotion, blood gushed from her nostrils, and she sank back in a
swoon into the arms of her Portuguese ladies.

Confusion followed, and under cover of it Charles and his light
of love withdrew, realizing that if he lingered not all his easy
skill in handling delicate situations could avail him to save his
royal dignity.

Naturally the experiment was not to be repeated. But since it was
his wish that the Countess of Castlemaine should be established
as one of the Queen's ladies--or, rather, since it was her
ladyship's wish, and since Charles was as wax in her ladyship's
hands--it became necessary to have the Queen instructed in what
was, in her husband's view, fitting. For this task he selected
Clarendon. But the Chancellor, who had so long and loyally played
Mentor to Charles's Telemachus, sought now to guide him in
matters moral as he had hitherto guided him in matters political.

Clarendon declined the office of mediator, and even expostulated
with Charles upon the unseemliness of the course upon which his
Majesty was bent.

"Surely, sire, it is for her Majesty to say who shall and who
shall not be the ladies of her bedchamber. And I nothing marvel
at her decision in this instance."

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