Royal Harlot (36 page)

But though Buckingham fumed and stewed at my audacity, while Miss Stuart continued to be oblivious, it was the queen who proved most vindictive, though I do not believe her actions served to place her in a better light with the king.

In late September of that year of 1663, shortly before my twenty-third birthday, I was brought to bed of another fine son, my second boy and my third child with the king. I named him Henry, to honor Charles’s much-lamented youngest brother, the Duke of Gloucester. Those of mean intent crowed that it was the name of the babe’s true father, Harry Jermyn, which was laughable indeed; I did enjoy Harry’s company, but given his modest constitution, I doubt very much his seed could ever have muscled aside that of the king’s in planting a child. Charles knew that Henry was his, and anyone who saw the babe at once remarked on his likeness.

He wrote to congratulate me immediately, and promised to come to me in London as soon as he could. As was his habit, he was away with a select group of courtiers on his summer progress through the countryside, traveling through Badminton, Cirencester, Cornbury— the country home of Clarendon, who’d invited the progress as his guests, the wily old rascal—and finally Oxford, where the king was meeting with the various scholars and students. Ordinarily I would have been with Charles on this progress, but he’d forbidden it this year for the sake of my safety and the coming babe’s.

Of course the queen had refused to acknowledge that I’d been with child even as I’d attended her, let alone that I’d given birth to another lusty, bawling son by the king. I’d laughed over her willful, stubborn ignorance with the other Ladies of the Bedchamber, wondering aloud how she could overlook my enormous girth, as in the last days I’d had to squeeze myself sideways into the pew of her chapel.

Yet two days after I’d given birth, I was forced to realize the depth of the queen’s Iberian cruelty. Her order came to me while I still lay abed. She wished to journey to Oxford that day to join the king, and she wished me to attend her. Because the weather was still so mild, she would ride not in a carriage but on horseback. She expected all her ladies—including me—to do likewise. Were I to refuse her order, I could consider myself dismissed from her household.

I knew she planned to be rid of me this way. I refused to give her that satisfaction. Against the protests of Wilson and my midwife, I rose and had myself laced in tight enough to wear a riding habit, and joined the queen’s party as I’d been ordered. She was stunned to see me, her small, dark face sour with displeasure at once again being so outplayed by me.

The ride was an agony far worse than little Henry’s birth had been, and there were times when I feared I’d fall from my horse, from dizziness and weakness and pain. But my determination and resolve to confound the queen gave me strength, and I was able to ride the entire distance, joining the rest of the royal party in Oxford.

When Charles learned of what his queen had ordered, he was furious with her for treating me so. He came at once to my bed, and stayed with me instead of his wife. As compensation for my suffering, as well as in honor of the new babe, he gave me a splendid set of pearl cuffs.

The unhappy queen was sent back to Tunbridge Wells, in the ever-dwindling hope that the waters there would assist her in conceiving a child.

With the king at my side, I returned with great cheer to London.

 
“You’ve done it, then, Barbara?” Sir Charles Berkeley, newly made Viscount Fitzhardinge by the king, lowered his voice to a careful whisper as if he suspected spies in my own bedchamber. “This is no teasing jest, but truth?”

“I’d not jest of such a matter,” I said, critically considering my reflection in the glass on my dressing table. On the tip of my finger was poised a tiny black taffeta patch in the shape of a crescent moon, ready with a dot of sticking gum to apply wherever I chose on my face. “I’d thought you’d wish to hear it from me first.”

“Thank God for that,” he said, swirling the sweet canary in his glass. “Have you told His Majesty?”

“Of course.” I puffed out my cheeks to smooth my skin and placed the little moon to the left corner of my lips: a witty small accent, I thought. Perhaps another—a sun, a diamond, or a heart—beside my eye?

“Well, then, what did he say?” he prompted. “You can’t drop such a declaration upon me without any explanation!”

“Oh, my lord, don’t turn tedious.” In truth, he already was, and I was beginning to question why I’d asked him here in the first place. Lord Fitzhardinge was escorting me to tonight’s ball, one of many for the Christmas season, and if he’d come here to King Street earlier than was necessary, what of it? We’d been friends long enough for that, and he was a friend of the king’s since the dark days in Brussels. He’d always supported me against Clarendon, and indulged me considerably as the Keeper of the King’s Privy Purse. Besides, I’d always judged him a handsome gentleman with a sharp, appealing cleverness to him, and we’d found a convenient way to pass the idle hour, drinking canary, plotting politics, and swiving in the genial way of old acquaintances.

“I’m not being tedious, Barbara, only practical,” he said. “I cannot fathom what His Majesty said when you told him you’d converted to the papists.”

“Oh, yes, you can,” I said, turning in my chair to look at him more squarely. “He said I should do whatever pleased me. He said he didn’t care what I did with my soul, so long as he could still have sway over my body.”

I thought Fitzhardinge would laugh, but he didn’t. “That is all?” he asked earnestly. “Not a word for the consequences?”

“Not a breath,” I said. “Though he has already promised me a small oratory of my own, decorated as I please, for my reflections and worship. Should I add another patch?”

“No, no, you’re perfectly lovely as you are,” he said, not wanting to be distracted. “Don’t you realize how much talk this will cause? The queen will believe you’re mocking her own piety, Clarendon will fear you’ll win His Majesty over to the pope, and the whole of Parliament will heartily wish you away from London and to Rome.”

“I think a tiny patch, a heart, beside my eye.” I turned back to the glass, sorting through the little box of patches before me. “I chose to convert because I knew it would please the king, and his is the only opinion that matters to me.”

“But you just said he didn’t—”

“Oh, he cares,” I said with great confidence, for I’d considered this well. I knew Charles, perhaps better than anyone else. “He cares very much. He just can’t say so, not as head of the Anglicans. He’s not about to toss over his crown just to be able to hear a Latin Mass, the way the Duke of York has done. Why else do you think he was so pleased that I’d had myself painted as the Virgin Mother last summer?”

“I believed it simply to be another way you sought attention,” he said, “just as in this.”

“Cynic,” I said mildly. The portrait of me in the virginal pose with my son had caused an enormous outcry that had been most gratifying. “But you’ll see. When the king is on his deathbed, he’ll take last rites from a Romish priest, and I mean to go to heaven with him.”

“More likely Romish hell,” he scoffed, emptying his glass.

“Perhaps,” I said, carefully placing the second patch. “But at least he’ll know I’ll be with him. And if with one simple act I can please the king and anger Clarendon, why, what is better than that?”

I shrugged out of the short bed-gown I’d used to protect my gold silk gown while I’d finished painting my face, and as I rose, I tossed it onto the rumpled bed behind me. “Shall we go, my lord?”

Swiftly he came to stand behind me, one hand at my waist while with the other he drew aside my carefully arranged curls to kiss the side of my throat.

“What’s your haste, Barbara?” he whispered eagerly, striving to pull me close. “We could tarry here another hour or so, and none would be the wiser.”

“None but I,” I said, easing free. I’d been right before: he
had
grown tedious. “Now come. I don’t like to keep His Majesty waiting any longer than I must.”

 
My conversion to the Roman Catholic faith did in fact cause much talk and more consternation among the court, and the country, through Christmas and Twelfth Night and well beyond. The queen and her priests were shocked, even appalled. The French and Spanish ambassadors began to woo me in earnest, considering me more sympathetic to their countries, and willing to use my influence with the king on their behalf. Clarendon despised me even more. Charles judged it all to be a most amusing fuss, and brushed away earnest requests for him to persuade me to return to the Anglican fold. Yet it was the honest response of Bishop Stillingfleet that made me laugh outright: that if the Church of Rome had got by me no more than the Church of England had lost, then the matter was not much.

In perfect honesty, I would have to agree with him—something I seldom do with any cleric. But considering other things I’d done or said, this seemed to me a mild matter that should most interest me, and Charles, and few others. I refused to regret my choice, or wish it undone. That was not how I’d lived my life. But when later I saw the consequences of it, I did wonder, and couldn’t help but think of how the cards would have fallen if I’d not chosen to wager that particular stake.

Chapter Sixteen

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON
March 1 6 6 4

 
When spring rains first begin to fall, most Englishmen will turn their heads to the skies and thank their maker for these gentle, warm drops that will nurture new crops and flowers and soften the frost-hardened earth for summer’s bounty. But when those same gentle drops are magnified a millionfold, when they fail to cease, but continue day after day after day, swelling rivers and creeks and washing aside boats and houses in a torrential flood of cruel reality, why, then that same rain that was once considered so nurturing and restorative is cursed as a damaging evil, without merit or kindness.

So it was with Charles’s monarchy. When first he returned to his throne, Englishmen welcomed him with cheers and flowers strewn in his path, sure that all the evils of the world would now be solved. They expected all the wrongs of the Protectorate to be righted, and further that they’d magically be granted reparation and rewards simply for agreeing to have their rightful king restored to them. They were worse than children, imagining the very streets of London would be paved with golden coins as soon as Charles returned.

Alas, such hopes were grounded not in genuine possibility but in fantastical, idle dreams that paid no heed to how matters
were.
No king could ever oblige such enormous expectations with a happy result, not even if he had the greatest treasury in the world at his disposal. My Charles was a good man, an honorable king who listened and was touched by his people’s woes.

But he was also a very poor king as kings went, his throne supported by a wobbly assortment of loans from other rulers and debts he could never hope to repay, balanced atop a country that had been ravaged by civil war for an entire generation. Anyone who was dissatisfied with what they’d received, whether a farmer who’d lost his rooster to a parliamentary cavalryman or a Royalist grandee who’d sacrificed many thousands of pounds in support of the king, now grumbled at the iniquity of Charles’s reign, and at him. Parliament was full of such disgruntled gentlemen, blocking his every effort to rule for the good of all. Nor could I help but see Clarendon at work, lurking and lobbying on his gout-ridden feet to pry Charles’s hand from England’s rudder, and steer it to his own intolerant course.

And unlike most other rulers, Charles was forced to struggle with the untidy balance of religion among his people. No matter that overbearing religious zealots had torn the country asunder before; there were plenty of others of every faith who’d learned nothing from that, except that they wished to promote their particular God to the oppression of all others.

Most frustrating to me, of course, was how the people wished the spectacle of a king and court but were loath to support the cost. They wanted England to be superior in every way to France or Spain, yet compared to the grandeur of King Louis’s Versailles, Whitehall was a poor, crumbling excuse for a palace bereft of ceremony or delights. Charles could ill afford any of the outward displays of royalty, so necessary to maintain his stature with foreign countries, whether by supporting composers or artists, hosting banquets, masques, and other celebrations, maintaining a sufficient stable of blood-horses, or even by making sure that I was splendidly dressed at his side, reflecting his glory in the jewels on my person. Instead Charles was forced to grovel and beg for every farthing from Clarendon, with no relief from a tightfisted Parliament, who encouraged the people in calling their king an idle spendthrift.

They would even deny him the pleasures and comforts he found with me and our children together, and call out for him to restrict himself to the bed of the barren queen, a woman he’d wed from duty to England, not from desire or love. I gave no care to the evil slanders said or published of me—my skin was too tough for such barbs to penetrate—but I resented the sorrow it brought to Charles on my behalf and the spleen he felt toward those who’d call me whore, traitor, or even evil incarnate.

All of which is to say that by the spring of 1664, the sweet optimism that had greeted Charles at his return four years before had soured and grown darker. And though by my nature I would never turn away from a risk or a hazard, the growing discontent of the country was an uneasy burden for all of us at court and a rising challenge for my king, my lover, and me.

 
“Oh, come, Miss Stuart, it will be but a frolic.” I took the girl’s hands, intent on leading her back to my rooms. “You’ve been party to weddings before, and the beddings afterward. You know what sport it can be.”

“I cannot say, my lady,” she said with her usual prim reluctance, hanging back on my hands. “This does not seem right, to make sport of a sacrament.”