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The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series

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




"Yet I tell you, my lord, that it is a decision that shall be
revoked."

"By whom, sire?" the Chancellor asked him gravely.

"By her Majesty, of course."

"Under coercion, of which you ask me to be the instrument," said
Clarendon, in the tutorly manner he had used with the King from
the latter's boyhood. "Yourself, sire, at a time when your own
wishes did not warp your judgment, have condemned the very thing
that now you are urging. Yourself, sire, hotly blamed your
cousin, King Louis, for thrusting Mademoiselle de Valliere upon
his queen. You will not have forgotten the things you said then
of King Louis."

Charles remembered those unflattering criticisms which he was now
invited to apply to his own case. He bit his lip, admitting
himself in check.

But anon--no doubt in obedience to the overbearing suasion of my
Lady Castlemaine--he returned to the attack, and sent the
Chancellor his orders in a letter demanding unquestioning
obedience.

"Use your best endeavours," wrote Charles, "to facilitate what I
am sure my honour is so much concerned in. And whosoever I find
to be my Lady Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do promise
upon my word to be his enemy so long as I live."

My Lord Clarendon had few illusions on the score of mankind. He
knew his world from froth to dregs--having studied it under a
variety of conditions. Yet that letter from his King was a bitter
draught. All that Charles possessed and was he owed to Clarendon.
Yet in such a contest as this, Charles did not hesitate to pen
that bitter, threatening line: "Whosoever I find to be my Lady
Castlemaine's enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to
be his enemy so long as I live."

All that Clarendon had done in the past was to count for nothing
unless he also did the unworthy thing that Charles now demanded.
All that he had accomplished in the service of his King was to be
swept into oblivion by the breath of a spiteful wanton.

Clarendon swallowed the draught and sought the Queen, upon that
odious embassy with whose ends he was so entirely out of
sympathy. He used arguments whose hollowness was not more obvious
to the Queen than to himself.

That industrious and entertaining chronicler of trifles, Mr.
Pepys, tells us, scandalized, in his diary that on the following
day the talk of the Court was all upon a midnight scene between
the royal couple in the privacy of their own apartments, so
stormy that the sounds of it were plainly to be heard in the
neighbouring chambers.

You conceive the poor little woman, smarting under the insult of
Charles's proposal by the mouth of Clarendon, assailing her royal
husband, and fiercely upbraiding him with his lack not merely of
affection but even of the respect that was her absolute due. And
Charles, his purpose set, urged to it by the handsome termagant
whom he dared not refuse, stirred out of his indolent good-
nature, turning upon her, storming back, and finally threatening
her with the greater disgrace of seeing herself pack ed home to
Portugal, unless she would submit to the lesser disgrace he
thrust upon her here.

Whether by these or by other arguments he made his will prevail,
prevail it did. Catherine of Braganza swallowed her pride and
submitted. And a very complete submission it was. Lady Castlemaine
was not only installed as a Lady of the Bedchamber, but very soon
we find the Queen treating her with a friendliness that provoked
comment and amazement.

The favourite's triumph was complete, and marked by an increasing
insolence, most marked in her demeanour towards the Chancellor,
of whose views on the subject, as expressed to the King, she was
aware. Consequently she hated him with all the spiteful
bitterness that is inseparable from the nature of such women. And
she hated him the more because, wrapped in his cold contempt, he
moved in utter unconcern of her hostility. In this hatred she
certainly did not lack for allies, members of that licentious
court whose hostility towards the austere Chancellor was begotten
of his own scorn of them. Among them they worked to pull him
down.

The attempt to undermine his influence with the King proving
vain--for Charles was as well aware of its inspiration as of the
Chancellor's value to him--that crew of rakes went laboriously
and insidiously to work upon the public mind, which is to say the
public ignorance--most fruitful soil for scandal against the
great. Who shall say how far my lady and the Court were
responsible for the lampoon affixed one day to my Lord
Clarendon's gatepost:

Three sights to be seen:
Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren queen.

Her ladyship might well have considered the unpopularity of the
Chancellor as the crown of her triumph, had this triumph been as
stable as she could have wished. But, Charles being what he was,
it follows that her ladyship had frequent, if transient, anxious
jealousies to mar the perfection of her existence, to remind her
how insecure is the tenure of positions such as hers, ever at the
mercy of the very caprice to existence.

And then, at long length, there came a day of horrid dread for
her, a day when she found herself bereft of her influence with
her royal lover, when pleadings and railings failed alike to sway
him. In part she owed it to an indiscretion of her own, but in
far greater measure to a child of sixteen, of a golden-headed,
fresh, youthful loveliness, and a nature that still found
pleasure in dolls and kindred childish things, yet of a quick and
lively wit, and a clear, intelligent mind, untroubled either by
the assiduity of the royal attentions or the fact that she was
become the toast of the day.

This was Miss Frances Stewart, the daughter of Lord Blantyre,
newly come to Court as a Lady-in-Waiting to her Majesty. How
profound an impression her beauty made upon the admittedly
impressionable old Pepys you may study in his diary. He had a
glimpse of her one day riding in the Park with the King, and a
troop of ladies, among whom my Lady Castlemaine, looking, as he
tells us, "mighty out of humour." There was a moment when Miss
Stewart came very near to becoming Queen of England, and although
she never reached that eminence, yet her effigy not only found
its way into the coinage, but abides there to this day (more
perdurable than that of any actual queen) in the figure of
Britannia, for which she was the model.

Charles wooed her openly. It was never his way to study
appearances in these matters. He was so assiduous that it became
customary in that winter of 1666 for those seeking the King at
Whitehall to inquire whether he were above or below--"below"
meaning Miss Stewart's apartments on the ground-floor of the
palace, in which apartments his Majesty was a constant visitor.
And since where the King goes the Court follows, and where the
King smiles there the Court fawns, it resulted that this child
now found herself queering it over a court that flocked to her
apartments. Gallants and ladies came there to flirt and to
gossip, to gamble and to pay homage.

About a great table in her splendid salon, a company of rustling,
iridescent fops in satin and heavy periwigs, and of ladies with
curled head-dresses and bare shoulders, played at basset one
night in January. Conversation rippled, breaking here and there
into laughter, white, jewelled hands reached out for cards, or
for a share of the heaps of gold that swept this way and that
with the varying fortunes of the game.

My Lady Castlemaine, seated between Etheredge and Rochester,
played in silence, with lips tight-set and brooding eyes. She had
lost, it is true, some L1500 that night; yet, a prodigal
gamester, and one who came easily by money, she had been known to
lose ten times that sum and yet preserve her smile. The source of
her ill-humour was not the game. She played recklessly, her
attention wandering; those handsome, brooding eyes of hers were
intent upon watching what went on at the other end of the long
room. There, at a smaller table, sat Miss Stewart, half a dozen
gallants hovering near her, engaged upon a game of cards of a
vastly different sort. Miss Stewart did not gamble. The only
purpose she could find for cards was to build castles; and
here she was building one with the assistance of her gallants,
and under the superintendence of his Grace of Buckingham, who
was as skilled in this as in other equally unstable forms of
architecture.

Apart, over by the fire, in a great chair of gilt leather,
lounged the King, languidly observing this smaller party, a
faint, indolent smile o n his swarthy, saturnine countenance.
Absently, with one hand he stroked a little spaniel that was
curled in his lap. A black boy in a gorgeous, plumed turban and a
long, crimson surcoat arabesqued in gold--there were three or
four such attendants about the room--proffered him a cup of
posses on a golden salver.

The King rose, thrust aside the little blackamoor, and with his
spaniel under his arm, sauntered across to Miss Stewart's table.
Soon he found himself alone with her--the others having removed
themselves on his approach, as jackals fall back before the
coming of the lion. The last to go, and with signs of obvious
reluctance, was his Grace of Richmond, a delicately-built,
uncomely, but very glittering gentleman.

Charles faced her across the table, the tall house of cards
standing between them.

Miss invited his Majesty's admiration for my Lord of Buckingham's
architecture. Pouf! His Majesty blew, and the edifice rustled
down to a mere heap of cards again.

"Symbol of kingly power," said Miss, pertly. "You demolish better
than you build, sire."

"Oddsfish! If you challenge me, it were easy to prove you wrong,"
quoth he.

"Pray do. The cards are here."

"Cards! Pooh! Card castles are well enough for Buckingham. But
such is not the castle I'll build you if you command me."

"I command the King's Majesty? Mon Dieu! But it would be treason
surely."

"Not greater treason than to have enslaved me." His fine eyes
were oddly ardent. "Shall I build you this castle, child?"

Miss looked at him, and looked away. Her eyelids fluttered
distractingly. She fetched a sigh.

"The castle that your Majesty would build for any but your Queen
must prove a prison."

She rose, and, looking across the room, she met the handsome,
scowling eyes of the neglected favourite. "My Lady Castlemaine
looks as if she feared that fortune were not favouring her." She
was so artless that Charles could not be sure there was a double
meaning to her speech. "Shall we go see how she is faring?" she
added, with a disregard for etiquette, whose artlessness he also
doubted.

He yielded, of course. That was his way with beauty, especially
with beauty not yet reduced into possession. But the characteristic
urbanity with which he sauntered beside her across the room was
no more than a mask upon his chagrin. It was always thus that
pretty Frances Stewart used him. She always knew how to elude him
and, always with that cursed air of artlessness, uttered seemingly
simple sentences that clung to his mind to tantalize him.

"The castle your Majesty would build for any but your Queen must
prove a prison." What had she meant by that? Must he take her to
queen before she would allow him to build a castle for her?

It was an insistent, haunting thought, wracking his mind. He knew
there was a party hostile to the Duke of York and Clarendon,
which, fearing the succession of the former, and, so, of the
grandchildren of the latter, as a result of Catherine of
Braganza's childlessness, strongly favoured the King's divorce.

It was a singular irony that my Lady Castlemaine should be
largely responsible for the existence of that party. In her
hatred for Clarendon, and her blind search for weapons that would
slay the Chancellor, she had, if not actually invented, at least
helped to give currency to the silly slander that Clarendon had
deliberately chosen for Charles a barren queen, so as to ensure
the ultimate succession of his own daughter's children. But she
had never thought to see that slander recoil upon her as it now
did; she had never thought that a party would come to rise up in
consequence that would urge divorce upon the King at the very
moment when he was consumed by passion for the unattainable,
artlessly artful Frances Stewart.

It was Buckingham, greatly daring, who slyly made himself that
party's mouthpiece. The suggestion startled Charles, voicing, as
perhaps it did, the temptation by which he was secretly assailed.
He looked at Buckingham, frowning.

"I verily believe you are the wickedest dog in England."

The impudent gallant made a leg. "For a subject, sire, I believe
I am."

Charles--with whom the amusing word seems ever to have been more
compelling than the serious--laughed his soft, mellow laugh. Then
he sighed, and the frown of thought returned.

"It would be a wicked thing to make a poor lady miserable only
because she is my wife, and has no children by me, which is no
fault of hers."

He was a thoroughly bad husband, but his indolent good-nature
shrank from purchasing his desires at the price of so much
ignominy to the Queen. Before that could come to pass it would be
necessary to give the screw of temptation another turn or two.
And it was Miss Stewart herself who--in all innocence--supplied
what was required in that direction. Driven to bay by the
importunities of Charles, she announced at last that it was her
intention to retire from Court, so as to preserve herself from
the temptations by which she was beset, and to determine the
uneasiness which, through no fault of her own, her presence was
occasioning the Queen; and she announced further, that, so
desperate had she been rendered that she would marry any
gentleman of fifteen hundred pounds a year who would have her in
honour.

You behold Charles reduced to a state of panic. He sought to
bribe her with offers of any settlements she chose to name, or
any title she coveted, offering her these things at the nation's
expense as freely and lightly as the jewels he had tossed into
her lap, or the collar of pearls worth sixteen hundred pounds he
had put about her neck. The offers were ineffectual, and Charles,
driven almost to distraction by such invulnerable virtue, might
now have yielded to the insidious whispers of divorce and re-
marriage had not my Lady Castlemaine taken a hand in the game.

Her ladyship, dwelling already, as a consequence of that royal
infatuation for Miss Stewart, in the cold, rarefied atmosphere of
a neglect that amounted almost to disgrace, may have considered
with bitterness how her attempt to exploit her hatred of the
Chancellor had recoiled upon herself.

In the blackest hour of her despair, when hope seemed almost
dead, she made a discovery--or, rather, the King's page, the
ineffable Chiffinch, Lord Keeper of the Back Stairs and Grand-
Eunuch of the Royal Seraglio, who was her ladyship's friend, made
it and communicated it to her There had been one ardent
respondent in the Duke of Richmond to that proclamation of Miss
Stewart's that she would marry any gentleman of fifteen hundred
pounds a year. Long enamoured of her, his Grace saw here his
opportunity, and he seized it. Consequently he was now in
constant attendance upon her, but very secretly, since he feared
the King's displeasure.

My Lady Castlemaine, having discovered this, and being well
served in the matter by Chiffinch, spied her opportunity. It came
one cold night towards the end of February of that year 1667.
Charles, going below at a late hour to visit Miss Stewart, when
he judged that she would be alone, was informed by her maid that
Miss was not receiving, a headache compelling her to keep her
room.

His Majesty returned above in a very ill-humour, to find himself
confronted in his own apartments by my Lady Castlemaine.
Chiffinch had introduced her by the back-stairs entrance. Charles
stiffened at sight of her.

"I hope I may be allowed to pay my homage," says she, on a note
of irony, "although the angelic Stewart has forbid you to see me
at my own house. I come to condole with you upon the affliction
and grief into which the new-fashioned chastity of the inhuman
Stewart has reduced your Majesty."

"You are pleased to be amused, ma'am," says Charles frostily.

"I will not," she returned him, "make use of reproaches which
would disgrace myself; still less will I endeavour to excuse
frailties in myself which nothing can justify, since your
constancy for me deprives me of all defence." Her ladyship, you
see, had a considerable gift of sarcasm.

"In that case, may I ask you why you have come?"

"To open your eyes. Because I cannot bear that you should be made
the jest of your own Court."

"Madam!"

"Ah! You didn't know, of course, that you are being laughed at
for the gross manner in which you are being imposed upon by the
Stewart's affectations, any more than you know that whilst you
are denied admittance to her apartments, under the presence of
some indisposition, the Duke of Richmond is with her now."

"That is false," he was beginning, very indignantly.

"I do not desire you to take my word for it. If you will follow
me, you will no longer be the dupe of a false prude, who makes
you act so ridiculous a part."

She took him, still half-resisting, by the hand, and in silence
led him, despite his reluctance, back by the way he had so lately
come. Outside her rival's door she left him, but she paused at
the end of the gallery to make sure that he had entered.

Within he found himself confronted by several of Miss Stewart's
chambermaids, who respectfully barred his way, one of them
informing him scarcely above a whisper that her mistress had been
very ill since his Majesty left, but that, being gone to bed, she
was, God be thanked, in a very fine sleep.

"That I must see," said the King. And, since one of the women
placed herself before the door of the inner room, his Majesty
unceremoniously took her by the shoulders and put her aside.

He thrust open the door, and stepped without further ceremony
into the well-lighted bedroom. Miss Stewart occupied the
handsome, canopied bed. But far from being as he had been told,
in "a very fine sleep," she was sitting up; and far from
presenting an ailing appearance, she looked radiantly well and
very lovely in her diaphanous sleeping toilet, with golden
ringlets in distracting disarray Nor was she alone. By her pillow
sat one who, if at first to be presumed her physician, proved
upon scrutiny to be the Duke of Richmond.

The King's swarthy face turned a variety of colours, his languid
eyes lost all trace of languor. Those who knew his nature might
have expected that he would now deliver himself with that
sneering sarcasm, that indolent cynicism, which he used upon
occasion. But he was too deeply stirred for acting. His self-
control deserted him entirely. Exactly what he said has not been
preserved for us. All that we are told is that he signified his
resentment in such terms as he had never before used; and that
his Grace, almost petrified by the King's most royal rage,
uttered never a word in answer. The windows of the room
overlooked the Thames. The King's eyes strayed towards them.
Richmond was slight of build, Charles vigorous and athletic. His
Grace took the door betimes lest the window should occur to his
Majesty, and so he left the lady alone with the outraged monarch.

Thereafter Charles did not have it all quite his own way. Miss
Stewart faced him in an indignation nothing less than his own,
and she was very far from attempting any such justification of
herself, or her conduct, as he may have expected.

"Will your Majesty be more precise as to the grounds of your
complaint?" she invited him challengingly.

That checked his wildness. It brought him up with a round turn.
His jaw fell, and he stared at her, lost now for words. Of this
she took the fullest advantage.

"If I am not allowed to receive visits from a man of the Duke of
Richmond's rank, who comes with honourable intentions, then I am
a slave in a free country. I know of no engagement that should
prevent me from disposing of my hand as I think fit. But if this
is not permitted me in your Majesty's dominions, I do not believe
there is any power on earth can prevent me going back to France,
and throwing myself into a convent, there to enjoy the peace
denied me at this Court."

With that she melted into tears, and his discomfiture was
complete. On his knees he begged her forgiveness for the injury
he had done her. But Miss was not in a forgiving humour.

"If your Majesty would graciously consent to leave me now in
peace," said she, "you would avoid offending by a longer visit
those who accompanied or conducted you to my apartments."

She had drawn a bow at a venture but shrewdly, and the shaft went
home Charles rose, red in the face. Swearing he would never speak
to her again, he stalked out.

Later, however, he considered. If he felt bitterly aggrieved, he
must also have realized that he had no just grounds for this, and
that in his conduct in Miss Stewart's room he had been entirely
ridiculous. She was rightly resolved against being lightly worn
by any man. If anything, the reflection must have fanned his
passion. It was impossible, he thought, that she should love that
knock-kneed fellow, Richmond, who had no graces either of body or
of mind, and if she suffered the man's suit, it must be, as she
had all but said, so that she might be delivered from the
persecution to which his Majesty had submitted her. The thought
of her marrying Richmond, or, indeed, anybody, was unbearable to
Charles, and it may have stifled his last scruple in the matter
of the divorce.

His first measure next morning was to banish Richmond from the
Court. But Richmond had not stayed for the order to quit. The
King's messenger found him gone already.

Then Charles took counsel in the matter with the Chancellor.
Clarendon's habitual gravity was increased to sternness. He spoke
to the King--taking the fullest advantage of the tutelary
position in which for the last twenty-five years he had stood to
him--much as he had spoken when Charles had proposed to make
Barbara Palmer a Lady of the Queen's Bedchamber, saving that he
was now even more uncompromising. The King was not pleased with
him. But just as he had had his way, despite the Chancellor, in
that other matter, so he would have his way despite him now.
This time, however, the Chancellor took no risks. He feared too
much the consequences for Charles, and he determined to spare no
effort to avoid a scandal, and to save the already deeply-injured
Queen. So he went secretly to work to outwit the King. He made
himself the protector of those lovers, the Duke of Richmond and
Miss Stewart, with the result that one dark night, a week or two
later, the lady stole away from the Palace of White-hall, and
made her way to the Bear Tavern, at the Bridge-foot, Westminster,
where Richmond awaited her with a coach. And so, by the secret
favour of the Lord Chancellor, they stole away to Kent and
matrimony.

That was checkmate indeed to Charles who swore all manner of
things in his mortification. But it was not until some six weeks
later that he learnt by whose agency the thing had been
accomplished. He learnt it, not a doubt, from my Lady
Castlemaine.

The estrangement between her ladyship and the King, which dated
back to the time of his desperate courtship of Miss Stewart, was
at last made up; and once again we see her ladyship triumphant,
and firmly established in the amorous King's affections. She had
cause to be grateful to the Chancellor for this. But her
vindictive nature remembered only the earlier injury still
unavenged. Here at last was her chance to pay off that score.
Clarendon, beset by enemies on every hand, yet trusting in the
King whom he had served so well, stood his ground unintimidated
and unmoved--an oak that had weathered mightier storms than this.
He did not dream that he was in the power of an evil woman. And
that woman used her power. When all else failed, she told the
King of Clarendon's part in the flight of Miss Stewart, and lest
the King should be disposed to pardon the Chancellor out of
consideration for his motives, represented him as a self-seeker,
and charged him with having acted thus so as to make sure of
keeping his daughter's children by the Duke of York in the
succession.

That was the end. Charles withdrew his protection, threw
Clarendon to the wolves. He sent the Duke of Albemarle to him
with a command that he should surrender his seals of office. The
proud old man refused to yield his seals to any but the King
himself. He may have hoped that the memory of all that lay
between them would rise up once more when they were face to face.
So he came in person to Whitehall to make surrender. He walked
deliberately, firmly, and with head erect, through the hostile
throng of courtiers--"especially the buffoones and ladys of
pleasure," as Evelyn says.

Of his departure thence, his disgrace now consummated, Pepys has
left us a vivid picture:

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