The Devlin Diary (44 page)

The Devlin Diary
is a work of fiction based on two real events: the signing, in May 1670, of a secret treaty between Charles II and Louis XIV, and the death of Henriette-Anne, Charles’s sister and Louis’s sister-in-law, a month later.

In May 1670, Charles and Henriette-Anne met at Dover for a long-anticipated reunion. Unbeknownst to the few hundred members of their courts, who were kept busy with feasts and fetes, the king’s ministers Lord Arlington and Sir Thomas Clifford and the French ambassador Colbert de Croissy worked behind the scenes to ratify the articles of a treaty between England and France that had been the subject of clandestine negotiation for more than a year. Because of her close relationships with both her brother and Louis XIV, Henriette-Anne had been instrumental in bringing about the rapprochement between the French and English kings. For months prior to their meeting, Charles and Henriette-Anne had exchanged coded letters (all the important participants were assigned three-digit numbers) in which they’d discussed the salient points of the agreement. In short, Charles and Louis agreed to wage war on the Dutch (breaking England’s existing treaty with Holland) in exchange for England’s receiving a subsidy from France of 3 million
livres tournois.
In addition, Charles agreed to publicly announce his conversion to Catholicism “as soon as the welfare of his kingdom will permit,” for which Louis would pay another 2 million
livres,
half to be paid three months after the exchange of ratifications and half three months later.

After ten days of festivities, Henriette-Anne returned to France, to her husband, and to her palace at Saint-Cloud. (Henriette-Anne had a dazzling variety of names: Henriette, Henriette-Anne, the Duchesse d’Orleans, Madame, as she was known in the French court, and Minette, as she was affectionately called by her brother; for clarity’s sake, I have chosen to refer to her only as Henriette-Anne or the princess). She was indeed trapped in an unhappy marriage to Philippe, Duc d’Orleans, Louis XIV’s brother. The duc was a homosexual who loved dressing up in women’s clothes and jewelry; unfortunately, these were his least objectionable traits. He was also childish, cruel, domineering, jealous, and vindictive; he enjoyed parading his lovers in front of his wife and seemed to be happiest when she was miserable.

Henriette-Anne had been ill during her time away, but when she was stricken with excruciating stomach pains on the morning of June 29, she was the first to believe she had been poisoned. She even believed she knew the instigator: her husband’s favorite, the Chevalier de Lorraine, whom Louis had banished from the court (the French king was fond of Henriette-Anne, and often dismayed by his brother’s treatment of her). Henriette-Anne’s agonized sufferings and the speed of her demise—she was dead less than twenty-four hours later—reinforced this belief. A postmortem was performed the next day by a group of English and French doctors, who attributed Henriette-Anne’s death to
cholera morbus;
but one onlooker declared that he did not approve of the way the autopsy was carried out, “as if the surgeon’s business were to hide the truth rather than reveal it.”

The results of the postmortem did little to squelch the rumors of poison, which spread quickly through the French court and then to London. Charles was reportedly so grief-stricken at the news of his sister’s death that he collapsed and spent the next few days in bed, an unusual event for such a vigorous man. The news of an English princess dying in suspicious circumstances in France was more than enough to inflame English sentiments, already volatile, against the French. This was hardly in keeping with Charles’s aims; he wanted instead to turn the people against Holland. Henriette-Anne’s death was a political liability, and it placed the newly minted agreement in jeopardy.

No one knows Charles’s true feelings on the subject, but within a few weeks he appeared reassured by Louis’s assertions that there had been no foul play. And there was simply too much at stake to make an issue of it (although his dislike of his brother-in-law never waned). Charles, Arlington, and Colbert de Croissy took the lead in quashing the rumors, and the loss of the closest link between Charles and Louis did not affect the pact they had made. But Charles soon realized that if he wanted to make war on Holland he needed the support of all his ministers, not just Arlington and Clifford. The Duke of Buckingham was sent to France on a fool’s errand. For the next few months he negotiated a treaty with France that he wrongly believed to be completely of his own doing, while Arlington and Colbert de Croissy laughed behind his back. It was nearly identical to the previous treaty, except that it did not include any references to Roman Catholicism. The new treaty became known as the
traité simulé.
It was signed by all five of Charles’s ministers—the infamous Cabal—three of whom were never aware of the earlier agreement. A few months later, in March 1672, Charles declared war on the Dutch, hostilities which cost England much but gained them little. As Charles never did announce his conversion (although, on his deathbed, he requested a Catholic priest, who performed last rites), the secret treaty remained a secret for one hundred and fifty years. In 1830, Dr. John Lingard published his
History of England,
which included the entire text of the secret treaty, generously provided by the sixth Lord Clifford of Chudleigh.

When Thomas Clifford resigned his office in 1673 in the wake of the Test Act, he took the most politically sensitive documents, including the secret treaty, to his estate at Ugbrooke. (Arlington, who also resigned following the Test Act, was apparently uncomfortable having such incriminating papers in his house.) In 1930, a century after Lingard, another historian, Keith Feiling, discovered a wealth of additional papers at Ugbrooke, which included correspondence between Louis XIV and Charles II, a letter from Henriette-Anne to Clifford, copies of the secret treaty in both English and French, and a signed copy of the secret article, which together make a fascinating narrative of seventeenth-century political intrigue. These documents are known collectively as
the Clifford Papers, and they are now in the possession of the British Library, not in the Trinity College archive, where I have placed them.

Even though most historians believe that Henriette-Anne died from acute peritonitis, suspicions about her untimely death have never been completely vanquished. (The Duc d’Orleans’s second wife, Elizabeth-Charlotte, Princess Palatine, was firm in her belief that her predecessor had been poisoned.) Certainly there’s enough mystery surrounding these events to allow generous room for speculation and invention.

The Devlin Diary
blends real and imagined situations along with real and fictitious characters. Hannah Devlin, Edward Strathern, Jeremy Maitland, Madame Severin, Theophilus Ravenscroft, and each of the murder victims are fictitious; Louise de Keroualle, Lord Arlington, Sir Thomas Clifford, and Ralph Montagu are real, as is Dr. Thomas Sydenham and, of course, Charles II, although most of the events in
The Devlin Diary
in which they are involved are entirely fictional. It is true, however, that Louise de Keroualle was stricken with gonorrhea passed to her by the king (although this happened in 1674, two years later than in the narrative), from which she suffered terribly. Eventually she was cured, or at any rate was no longer acutely ill from the disease. But Louise never conceived again, even though she remained the king’s mistress until he died in 1685. Dr. Sydenham was in reality a forward-thinking physician of the time who helped nudge the theory and practice of medicine toward a more enlightened age. Anyone familiar with seventeenth-century scientist and architect Robert Hooke will understand that Theophilus Ravenscroft, while a fictional character, is not only Hooke’s nemesis but also his doppelganger. Ralph Montagu was known to be a “ruthless gallant” who used women to get ahead. It’s true that after the death of his first wife, he courted the very wealthy but certifiably insane Duchess of Albemarle by posing as the emperor of China. With her money he rebuilt his Robert Hooke–designed house, which had been gutted by fire in 1686. Montagu House, which stood in what is now Bloomsbury, was bought by the British government in the 1750s and used as the first home of the British Museum.

I am indebted to numerous sources for assistance in replicating
the world of Restoration-era London and present-day Cambridge. For general English history and insights into seventeenth-century London, I found the following books to be most helpful:
1700: Scenes from London Life
by Maureen Waller (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000);
A History of London
by Stephen Inwood (Macmillan, 1998);
The Diary of John Evelyn
edited by John Bowle (Oxford University Press, 1985);
The English: A Social History 1066–1945
by Christopher Hibbert (W. W. Norton, 1987);
History of the Royal Society
by Thomas Sprat (London, 1667);
The Illustrated Pepys
edited by Robert Latham (University of California Press, 1978);
Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II, 1660–1685
by Alan Marshall (Cambridge University Press, 1994);
Ladies-in-Waiting: From the Tudors to the Present Day
by Anne Somerset (Knopf, 1984);
The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London
by Cynthia Wall (Cambridge University Press, 1999);
The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century
by Peter Linebaugh (Verso, 2006);
Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms
by Tim Harris (Penguin Books, 2005);
Restoration London
by Liza Picard (St. Martin’s Press, 1998);
The Shorter Pepys
edited by Robert Latham (University of California Press, 1985); and
The Weaker Vessel: Women in 17th Century England
by Antonia Fraser (Knopf, 1984).

The following biographies brought the people of the time to vivid life:
Aubrey’s Brief Lives
edited by Oliver Lawson Dick (David R. Godine, 1999);
The Cabal
by Maurice Lee, Jr. (University of Illinois Press, 1965);
Charles II and Madame
by Cyril Hughes Hartmann (William Heinemann, Ltd., 1934);
The Curious Life of Robert Hooke
by Lisa Jardine (HarperCollins, 2004);
Dr. Thomas Sydenham, 1624–1689
by Kenneth Dewhurst (University of California Press, 1966);
The Forgotten Genius: The Biography of Robert Hooke
by Stephen Inwood (MacAdam/ Cage, 2003);
The Lives & Times of the Duchess of Portsmouth
by Jeanine Delpech (Roy Publishers, 1953);
Lord Rochester’s Monkey: Being the Life of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester
by Graham Greene (The Viking Press, 1974);
Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth in the Court of Charles II
by H. Forneron (Scribner & Wellford, 1888);
Nell Gwyn: Mistress to a King
by Charles Beauclerk (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000);
Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration
by Antonia
Fraser (Knopf, 1979); and
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
by Claire Tomalin (Knopf, 2003).

The following books provided the sometimes comic and frequently gruesome details of seventeenth-century medicine:
The Admirable Secrets of Physick & Chyrurgery
by Thomas Palmer, edited by Thomas Rogers Forbes (Yale University Press, 1984);
Blood & Guts: A Short History of Medicine
by Roy Porter (W. W. Norton, 2003);
Culpeper’s Complete Herbal & English Physician Enlarged
by Nicholas Culpeper (Meyerbooks, 1990);
The Early History of Surgery
by W. J. Bishop (Barnes & Noble Books, 1995);
English Medicine in the Seventeenth Century
by A. W. Sloan (Durham Academic Press, 1996);
Heal Thyself: Nicholas Culpeper and the Seventeenth-Century Struggle to Bring Medicine to the People
by Benjamin Woolley (HarperCollins, 2004);
John Hall and His Patients: The Medical Practice of Shakespeare’s Son-in-Law
by Joan Lane (The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 1996);
Opium: A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon
by Barbara Hodgson (Greystone Books, 2004);
Opium: A History
by Martin Booth (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996);
Quacks: Fakers and Charlatans in English Medicine
by Roy Porter (Tempus, 2001);
Women as Healers: A History of Women and Medicine
by Hilary Bourdillon (Cambridge University Press, 1988); and
Women Healers: Portraits of Herbalists, Physicians and Midwives
by Elisabeth Brooke (Healing Arts Press, 1995).
Forensics and Fiction
by D. P. Lyle, MD, provided helpful answers to a few tricky medical and forensics questions.

My memories of present-day Cambridge were greatly enhanced by
A Concise History of the University of Cambridge
by Elisabeth Leedham-Green (Cambridge University Press, 1996);
Trinity College: A History and Guide
by G. M. Trevelyan (Trinity College, 1967);
Central Cambridge, A Guide to the University and Colleges
by Kevin Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 1994); and
The Making of the Wren Library
edited by David McKitterick (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

The Whitehall Palace Plan of 1670
by Simon Thurley (London Topographical Society, 1998) and
Whitehall Palace: An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments, 1240–1690
by Simon Thurley (Yale University Press, 1999) were indispensable guides to a place that no longer exists.