With All My Heart (25 page)

“To the Tower!” echoed the Queen’s women, clapping their hands.

“And so strange is human nature,” Huddleston told them, “that the people waiting outside, who only yesterday seemed to venerate him as the saviour of the nation, booed him thither through the streets.”

Catherine sat in a happy daze, murmuring heartfelt thanksgiving. “And Sir Richard?” she asked presently, feeling that she would never forgive herself about that ill-advised letter.

“I left him with the King, Madame.”

But almost immediately Richard Bellings himself appeared. Too moved for speech, he knelt at the Queen’s feet and pressed her hand to his lips while she, with an arm about his shoulder, kissed his forehead. He had been her friend and Secretary since the first days of her marriage and it would have been terrible to have lost him.

“Father Huddleston tells me you have just parted from the King,” she said, as soon as either of them could speak.

Bellings rose to his feet and the two men smiled at each other with quiet understanding. “His Majesty was charging me with a very happy duty,” he said. “He has sent me to fetch you home.” And when Catherine stared uncomprehendingly, he added, “He entreats your Majesty to come back to your old apartments in the Palace, beside his own.”

To go back. To be near him and sec him every day. Until that moment Catherine had not known how hard her self-imposed exile from him had been. “When?” she asked faintly.

“This very day, Madame. In order that all the world may see you live beneath his protection. That who touches you touches him, he said. He blames himself in this matter because, seeing your Majesties parted, evilly disposed persons supposed it safe to attack you.”

“But it was I — You and Father Huddleston both know that I had good reason —”

“The King only waits to welcome you. For the rest — can you not trust him to put no further humiliation upon you?” urged Father Huddleston gently.

“He is sending men and carts for the transport of your goods,” Richard Bellings told her. And when her ladies had dispersed joyfully to their preparations, and only Father Huddleston remained, he knelt on a stool beside her. “Madame, it is not easy to speak of these things, but you should know that when these extremists, despairing of a Protestant heir, pretended to have found the marriage lines of Mistress Lucy Walters, the King denied it. ‘I have never in my life been married to any woman but the Queen,’ he vowed, and because of the persistent rumours to that effect which Monmouth’s boasting has stirred up, he intends to repeat it in a kind of public manifesto. And when Shaftesbury and some of the bolder spirits urged him, in spite of it, to take advantage of his brother’s exile and proclaim the Duke of Monmouth his heir, he was furious. ‘Even loving my son James as I do,’ he declared, ‘I would see him hanged at Tyburn first!’ ”

“Oh, Richard, perhaps these trials were sent to force his hand,” murmured Catherine. “It is wonderful to see him — cease to let things slide. But how do you think? Would it not, perhaps, ease things for him if, after all, I were to go into some convent? For his sake, I would do it even now.”

“Of what use would it be since he has already refused to divorce you?”

“They wanted that? And he would not do it?”

“They urged him in Parliament. They thought that for the sake of a son he would be only too glad.”

“And milady of Portsmouth hoped it!”

“If she did, Madame, she must have been grievously disappointed. ‘If my conscience would allow me to divorce a virtuous woman, it would also allow me to put her to death,’ he told the Commons. ‘And if you think I have a mind for a new wife, all I have to tell you is that I will not suffer an innocent woman to be wronged!’ ”

“Oh, Charles! Charles! How often you have wronged me in the flesh, who will risk so much to keep faith with me in the spirit!” thought Catherine, after they were both gone. Was this, then, the “whole of marriage,” of which Maria had spoken? The ending which was worth so much bitterness and striving at the beginning?

In a shining cloud of happiness, while chattering women packed her clothes and menservants moved to and fro with her furniture, Catherine finished the letter to her brother. “The King releases me from all trouble by the care which he takes to defend my innocence,” she wrote. “Every day he shows more clearly his goodwill towards me, and thus baffles the hate of my enemies. I cannot cease telling you, dear Pedro, what I owe to his benevolence, of which each day he gives better proofs, either from generosity or from compassion.”

Even then Catherine could not bring herself to believe that it was simply from love.

But once she was back at Whitehall, her husband treated her with such tender affection that many a wit laughed and said she might well have been his mistress. He took her everywhere with him. To Newmarket, to Windsor, to Oxford. And while at Oxford, where a new Parliament was sitting, he finally outwitted the trouble makers.

“The Commons are trying to follow up the Test Act with an Exclusion Bill which will debar James from the succession,” he told her. “But before I see that done I will dissolve them.”

“But without Parliament to vote supplies what will you live on?” she asked, ever practical.

“We must economize,” shrugged Charles; at which she smiled, knowing only too well his efforts at economy, but feeling certain in her own mind, that because of that secret agreement made at Dover, he had other resources to draw upon and so preserve his independence.

And going into her bedroom a week later she found the King’s valet standing like a sentinel at the foot of her bed, and no one else present but Charles.

“Whatever is Toby doing here?” she asked in amazement.

“Looking after my clothes as usual,” said Charles, looking both amused and elated.

And noticing that both of them seemed as pleased as schoolboys perpetrating some practical joke, she crossed briskly to the bed and jerked back the closely drawn curtains. And there on her pillow was the Crown of England with all her husband’s State robes spread across the coverlet. “Charles, are you crazy?” she exclaimed. “Or has your friend Colonel Blood been busy again?”

With a hand still on a fold of the tapestry, she turned to him for some explanation; but before answering her he strode to the door and locked it. “My dear,” he said, with comical diffidence, “loath as I am to inflict yet more hardships upon you, I could find it in my heart to wash you a very severe headache this afternoon. So severe that no one — not even Lettice Ormonde — will be allowed in here. Everyone knows that you do have such
migraines
, do they not?”

Catherine nodded. She would do anything for him, within reason. “But why?” she asked.

“Because today I am going to dissolve Parliament and, as you know, I cannot do so except in full robes and regalia.”

And then, seeing how mystified she still looked, he drew her gently to the window seat beside him. “Listen, sweet, for I have very little time in which to explain,” he said. “I have been in consultation with my ministers this morning here in Merton College and they are in full agreement with me that it is the only thing to do in order to save any semblance of power to the Monarchy. For today the Commons are hoping to pass this Exclusion Bill; and if they should succeed then — goodbye James!”

And so you will go down to them in your robes?”

“Oh, no, my dear. Forewarned is forearmed. That would give them just the advantage which they had over my father when, hard pushed, he tried to do the same thing. I shall walk down to Christchurch in the pleasant sunshine, as usual. Lest there be any tattle, a sedan chair has been ordered to your backstairs to take some of your dresses to the fullers. And after dinner Toby will fold all this sumptuous velvet and ermine into an inconspicuous bundle and take it through the side streets with drawn blinds. After all, my dear, it is our
turn
to hatch a plot!”

“But the Crown?” asked Catherine, looking at its jewels scintillating in the sunlight.-

“I will baud the braw thing richt warily upon my twa knees, Madame,” promised Toby, as imperturbably as though he were accustomed to carrying it about in hackney vehicles.

“And when he has dressed me I will take my seat in the House of Lords and send Black Rod to summon the Commons,” said Charles. “And they will come crowding eagerly to the bar assured that I have sent for them to say I have given in at last, having so poor an opinion of me that they cannot believe I would ever face poverty sooner than not be master in my own house!”

“And then?” asked Catherine.

“Then I shall make a brisk little speech which will be reported in all the news sheets. About the necessity of unity to restore the vigour of the country, and so forth. About how the eyes of all Europe are upon us and these disputes only gratify our enemies and discourage our friends. I shall finish up by pointing out that I have always done everything possible to keep my people in peace and religious toleration and that, by taking this unexpected action, I hope to leave them so when I die. And, having said my say, I shall send them about their business, wishing with all my heart that you could see their faces!”

“And after that?”

Charles rose from her side and walked to the window, looking out at the lanes and spires of Oxford, but seeing with his mind’s eye the whole realm. “After that,” he said on a satisfied sigh, “though it will have taken me twenty years and more — I shall be King.”

Catherine could not see his face, but after a few moments he roused himself from his long, deep thoughts and turned to her with all the cheerfulness imaginable. “But I must be going — to dine pleasantly in hall, while you mope here with a migraine. I pray you tell your women not to disturb you; and Toby, who will hide behind the hangings, knows just what to do with those gee-gaws. Like the solicitous husband I am, I will send you some special dish from my table, and because you are an angel of complaisance I shall regret that you cannot be with me this day.”

But Catherine had no regrets. Pleasantly, it passed through her mind that even Jane Lane had had no adventure with him that she need now envy. Jane, in whose capable little hands the Crown of England had once rested ... “And you are stupid and doting enough to tell me all this?” she teased softly.

It was Charles’s turn to look puzzled.

“After what happened — when your father shared the same secret with
his
wife.”

Remembering what he himself had told her, Charles chuckled. He put a finger beneath her chin and tilted up her laughing face towards his. Because of Toby’s presence he did not kiss her. Only his dark eyes, between their smoky lashes, grew grave and tender. “God knows I am a sinner,” he said, “but at least I have the grace to value aright the gifts he vouchsafes me!”

CHAPTER XXII

WITH THE removal of Titus Oates and the suppression of his supporters, sanity and tolerance gradually returned. Shaftesbury, knowing his day was done, betook himself abroad; and young Monmouth for once had the sense to keep in the background, enjoying the popularity he always enjoyed in the West of England. The tide of public opinion had turned, and people ran beside the King’s coach, cheering him wildly in the streets. Peace and prosperity, with something of the good-humoured May Day spirit of the first days of his Restoration, took possession of the country.

But this time it was a quieter, more settled sense of well being. Having suffered much and lived in fear, men thought more soberly. There were none of the extravagant excesses that had been the natural outcome of Puritanical suppression during the Commonwealth. In this a less scandalous Court set better example than before. Besides which, people were heartily tired of persecution, so that Anglican and Anabaptist, Catholic and Quaker made shift to live amicably side by side — which was what Charles had always hoped that he would live to see. And it was entirely with his blessing that the Nonconformist son of James’s friend, Admiral Sir William Penn, set out with a staunch following of Quakers to found a new colony along the shores of the Delaware river, just as the thriving settlement of New York had grown up beside the Hudson.

A new London — so recently but a dream on paper — had risen phoenix-wise from the ashes of the old, to be the wonder of all foreign visitors. Below bridge, beneath the shadow of a domed St. Paul’s, foreign shipping and the King’s fine merchant Navy thronged the Pool. When Dutch William would have drawn England into war, Charles would have none of it; and instead of being used for military embarkations, the busy wharves of London were a link with America, Bombay, Guinea, the East Indies and a score of other places, while merchant adventurers sailed out to explore the Northern regions and the South Seas.

At long last Charles was free from political worry and had leisure in which to indulge the varied interests which had always made his life so full. Often that summer he was at sea, navigating his own ship as he loved to do, scudding over a choppy Channel or visiting Sir Robert Holmes who, as Governor of the Wight, had built himself a fine house within the walls of Yarmouth castle; and, while there, riding to Carisbrook to see the place in which his father had been imprisoned and where his lonely little sister Elizabeth had afterwards pined to death.

For the Queen it was a happy year, because Charles had suggested to Louise de Keroualle that she might benefit from a holiday at home in France. And on his return to the mainland he took Catherine to the races, to visit the hospital at Greenwich for his wounded soldiers and to Winchester; journeying leisurely through the hot summer weather to see the fine house Wren was building for him upon the hills. “This County of Hampshire begins to grip my heart,” he told her, standing upon the thyme-sweet turf.

“Or is it only because through your telescope you will be able to see your shipping in the Solent?” she laughed.

“You may be right,” he admitted, tweaking her ear. “But the place will have other charms. John Evelyn is advising me about the gardens, and though we cannot aspire to anything like Louis’s fountains and parterres, here, between a long avenue of English trees, we will look down upon the lovely cathedral city where once our Saxon Kings were crowned.”

Once more he was sauntering through life, talking to the people who interested him and passing the day in the country pursuits which he loved. At a year or two past fifty he was as lean and athletic as when he had outwitted the Roundheads after Worcester, searching for an unwatched ship.

“You should walk miles a day like me, George,” he would say, poking the Duke of Buckingham in his thickening stomach.

“But what would be the use of it if he came in with the wolfish appetite that you acquire?” pointed out Catherine, who often worried lest her husband overdid such strenuous exercise.

And time proved that her anxiety was not without cause; for there came a day at Windsor when he insisted upon playing singles against John Churchill — that same John Churchill whom he had caught in Barbara Castlemaine’s bedroom and who had justified his indulgence by a meteoric rise from beardless ensign to full blooded Colonel. Besides being the acknowledged tennis champion, Churchill was many years his junior. Catherine watched Charles put up a magnificent fight and take a beating with his habitual good grace; but she knew that, much as he had enjoyed the game, it had been a strain, and she wished that he had not got so hot. All the more so as he was obliged to return to London immediately to meet the Commissioners of Accounts to enquire into alleged evasions of the Hearth Tax.

After a rub down and a too hasty meal he went aboard his barge and Catherine, accompanying him. to the water’s edge, through the airless afternoon, called after him, “Be careful not to catch a chill!” Charles waved and nodded; but she knew as well as he did that the moment he was round the bend of the reach he would throw off wig and coat and order all the cabin windows to be opened. And, of course, the next day he was down with a raging fever. However lightly he weathered them, past anxieties must have taken their toll, and by the time his Ministers had sent for her he had had some kind of fit, so alarming that he had gasped out orders for James to come home from Brussels and in the general consternation no one had raised the least objection. Mercifully for Catherine, by the time she reached Whitehall Charles was already partially recovered, his life having been saved, the doctors said, by the new remedy of Jesuit’s bark which caused high fevers to abate. She found him scarcely able to breathe for the press of anxious surgeons and apothecaries, and the surge of curious people about him and, remembering what he had done for her when she had been so ill, she tried her utmost to have most of them turned out and to give him some peace and privacy. But so patient and sweet tempered was he with them all that she began to think it was more the calmness of his disposition than the Jesuit’s bark which had restored him to her. And by the time James arrived, hurrying breathless and unannounced into the room, Charles, in spite of all medical warnings, was up and about again.

But his short, sharp illness had been dangerous enough to teach his people how much they loved him — how much they depended upon his wisdom and lack of all vindictiveness for their untroubled way of life.

“Now indeed,
caro
mio
, you will have to take life more easily,” Catherine insisted; and for several happy weeks he heeded her, convalescing at Windsor, going to bed at sunset and indulging in only the gentler sports. She would sit beside him quietly while he fished, play basset with him after supper or join him in archery contests at the butts, becoming so proficient with a bow herself that, to the equal delight of both of them, the Fraternity of Bowmen of London invited her to become their Patroness.

But as the pleasant months slipped by Charles, with his amazing constitution, seemed to be as well as ever. And soon he was off to Newmarket with James, where he watched the hawking and the cock fighting, and rode again upon the heath. Catherine was glad for him to be there, with a chance to forget all the ugly things which had happened in London. But gladder still to receive his letter telling her that he was coming home again. “James and I think to leave here on the twenty-fourth, lodging the last night of our journey at the Rye House in Hertfordshire, so hope to be with you by the end of the week,” he wrote.

But the messenger had scarcely gone when she was amazed to hear him at her door, laughing with James at the surprise they would be springing upon her. “Whatever has happened?” she cried, the letter still in her hand.

“Yet another fire!” grinned Charles, shaking the rain from his hat and coming to greet her.

“Not here in our newly built London?”

“Oh, no, my dear. Only my poor tumbledown racing place at Newmarket which I have been intending to rebuild these years past. And the weather turned so atrocious ’twas not much loss of sport.”

“But what caused it?”

“A stable boy lying in the hay with a borrowed pipe smoking some of Admiral Penn’s pernicious Virginia tobacco!” James told her.

“But we saved all the horses,” said Charles.

“And the rest of you? No one was hurt?”

“No, my dear; though we lost some of the coaches that could not be pulled out in time. But I assure you ’twas a great deal of panic and pother about nothing. They forgot they had two experts from the Fire of London on the spot! James rescued two shrieking chamber maids from a top window and I contented myself with the head groom’s fat wife.”

They were still laughing and telling her all about it when, from her vantage point by the fireplace, she saw the Earl of Ailesbury’s young son, whom her husband had just taken into his personal service, come running into the room through the open door behind them. The young man’s face was white with agitation; but at sight of them he stopped still in his tracks and stared as if he had seen a couple of ghosts. His behaviour was so odd that although they were still talking to her Catherine could not help watching him. But as soon as the King and his brother became aware of him he seemed to make a great effort to pull himself together.

“You did not expect us for a couple of days?” said Charles kindly, noticing how strained he looked and putting it down, no doubt, to some neglected new duty.

“Why, no, Sir. I — I certainly did not. But I thank God you have come!” And quite inexplicably the agitated young man went down on his knees and began fervently kissing the King’s hand.

“Why, Bruce, you are a bundle of nerves, man! Get up!” Charles ordered him testily. “You cannot be fully recovered from that ridiculous duel wound yet. We must feed my good friend’s cub up, Kate.”

But after the King had taken himself off to change and James had gone to his now adoring Mary, the young man just slumped down on to the nearest window seat. “What is really the matter, Bruce?” asked Catherine, going quietly to him.

Feeling her hand on his shoulder, he managed to spring to his feet. “I beg your Majesty’s pardon —” he began evasively.

“I think you came to tell me something and would have done so had they not been here,” she insisted.

Bruce began to laugh at himself with boyish awkwardness. “The most absurd thing, I suppose, Madame! But I had not heard the King and the Duke arrive, and when I was over at milord Chamberlain’s lodgings awhile since a man rode in from Scotland. A servant of milord Provost’s. For days he had been in the saddle. He had been sent to find out if it were true ... And when I saw them here I thanked God and could not bring myself to speak of it ...”

“Speak of what?” asked Catherine, touched by the young man’s obvious devotion.

“It seems it is rumoured all over Edinburgh that —” he gulped and nodded his head towards the door through which his master had just departed — “that both of them are dead.”

“Dead?” Catherine recoiled in horror. Then — since only a moment ago she had both touched and seen them — she began to laugh with relief, “Oh, I see. Just another of these absurd plots!” she chided.

“Of course, you must be right, Madame,” he admitted, reddening. “It was foolish of me to think of alarming you.”

“No, no, Bruce. We have all lived through such alarming times of late that ’tis but natural. I suppose they said it was a Popish plot?”

“Why, no, Madame. Not this time. It was thought to be the work of a remnant of political malcontents. They were supposed to have set an ambush — near a place called the Rye House — by supporters of his Grace of Monmouth.”

Catherine’s whole demeanour changed. “The Rye House?” she repeated, unfolding the King’s letter again.

“Is there such a place, Madame?”

“Yes. Although I never heard of it until this day.” In silence she offered him the King’s brief note to read. “It is strange,” she murmured, searching his intelligent young face as he handed it back to her.

“So strange,” agreed the young man gravely, “that it almost looks as if some impatient person with foreknowledge of what was
going
to happen sent to rouse Scotland —
some
hours
too
soon
.”

It was decided that the King must be told of it, but in his comfortable frame of mind, and lulled by the love his subjects showed him, he dismissed the matter lightly. It was like the old fable of the shepherd boy calling “Wolf! Wolf!” so often that when the wolf really descended upon his flock nobody heeded. When a wild eyed Anabaptist named Keeling came to the Palace to pour out the same ambush story to one of the upper servants, he was laughed at for his pains. But fortunately the man had the pertinacity to return. And this time he brought with him solid witnesses, one of whom openly acknowledged his own intended guilt, so that the corroboration of the affair reached higher levels. Charles himself interrogated the men, and was convinced that but for the last minute alteration of their plans he and his brother would both have been dead by now. This time the intended plot had been all too real.

A haycart was to have been pulled across the road just outside Ware, and a dozen or so conspirators were to have been lying in a wayside ditch with loaded muskets, waiting for the hold-up of the royal coach which so invariably outdistanced the rest of the cavalcade. There was no doubt at all that milords Russell, Howard and Essex, together with Algernon Sydney and a handful of others, had intended to murder them and had made grandiose plans for seizing Whitehall, rousing Scotland and the West of England and setting up Monmouth as a puppet king, with the real power in their own hands.