Royal Harlot (40 page)

“I’m the king,” he said, and there was no mistaking the melancholy that showed on his face. “I must be confident, or we will all perish.”

 
To no one’s surprise, England declared war on the Dutch on the fourth of March. War fever filled London, and Charles’s optimism about the ease and swiftness of victory was a giddy fever in the streets. From Cheapside to Portsmouth, in every tavern and rum shop, sailors were toasted and told to drink their fill before they sailed off with the pride of England beneath their flying banners. Only Clarendon remained as a kind of potbellied Cassandra, predicting a long, ruinous war and disaster to the fleet.

Nor was the Queen Mother happy when her second son assumed his naval command and set sail with the rest of the fleet in late May. Charles ignored her pleas to stop James; it was good for the royal family to have a representative in such a highly visible place of authority, and at the same time to be seen sharing the same risks and dangers as the common sailors. Also on board and eager for glory were the king’s cousin, Prince Rupert, and our friend Charles Berkeley, the Earl of Falmouth.

Fitzhardinge—or, rather, Falmouth—had recently wed Mary Bagot, one of my favorites among the other Ladies of the Bedchamber, and together the new countess and I waved as he left, and wept in each other’s arms when he disappeared from sight. We were both of us with child, too, though this was her first babe with her husband, and my fifth with the king.

Thus we were not only bound together by our affection for Falmouth but also by our condition. When it came time for the queen to make her annual fruitless visit to the waters of Tunbridge Wells that summer, like convicted murderesses in Newgate we could plead our bellies and be spared the particular dull punishment of accompanying Her Majesty.

Yet because of that circumstance, we were together at supper on June second, in my lodgings with the king and several others, when Mr. Pepys, secretary to Admiral Lord Sandwich, was brought to us to deliver momentous news fresh arrived. The English fleet had sailed from Sole Bay and sighted the Dutch almost at once. A battle between the two forces was imminent; it might even be happening as we nibbled at our roast pigeons.

By dawn we could hear the sounds of the great guns firing clear in London, echoing and ominous in the distance, perhaps thirty miles away. The next three days were long, it being June, and extraordinarily hot and still, which likely made the sounds of the gunfire travel so, like a thunderstorm that never arrived. We went for walks, attended chapel, bowled on the lawn, and fed the tame ducks on the canal in the park. Everyone tried to go about their lives as if the sounds meant nothing.

Everyone failed.

Rumors raced through the countryside, along the river, the city, and the palace. Not even Charles knew anything for certain. The Dutch had been routed; they’d retreated; they’d disappeared in a great bank of fog. The stories changed by the hour, with little substance or reason. The Duchess of York locked herself away in the dark of her closet at St. James’s Palace and prayed fervently for her husband’s safe return. The Queen Mother did likewise, setting her ladies and priests to lighting candles and keeping a vigil for her son’s deliverance.

Once so insistent, the echo of the great guns faded, then stopped.

Finally disjointed scraps of news came straggling through, confirming that the Dutch had in fact fled in disarray. Bonfires were lit, church bells rang, and people laughed and danced and drank in the streets, with relief and joy. Of course this must mean victory: we were the English, and we’d expected nothing less.

But later reports were more revealing, and far less delightsome. The Dutch ships had in fact fallen back in confusion, but instead of pressing their advantage, the English captains had also withdrawn. Even their enemies at the Hague wondered and remarked it incredulously. Instead of capitalizing and winning a monumental victory that would have ended the war with a single battle, they appeared to have behaved with a cowardly lack of resolve. Oh, these same captains and masters bragged and boasted and paraded their prisoners and smallish captures as if they’d won, but gradually the sorry truth came limping to light with the sorry procession of English wounded and their damaged vessels.

And the horror of war, not the glory, was soon to come crashing into our lives.

 
The unbearable heat had continued, as dry and constant as if all of London had been set within a monstrous grate, with glowing coals to roast the city to a well-browned turn. In any other summer, the court would already have retreated to one of the cooler palaces in the country, but because of the war, Charles had decided it best to remain in town. Every window in Whitehall was thrown open in hopes of capturing a breeze. Gentlemen left off their periwigs and ladies their stays, and both alike were excused from full dress. Like nocturnal creatures, many kept to their rooms throughout the worst heat of the day, emerging only in the relative cool of evening to learn the freshest advices from the war.

One afternoon I’d joined the king and several other gentlemen and ladies in his rooms overlooking the river. We’d begun a desultory game of basset, when of a sudden we heard a great commotion and raised voices in the hall. At the door, the guards started in readiness, but instead of any intruder, James, Charles’s younger brother the Duke of York, himself came striding into the chamber, newly returned from the fleet.

He looked bluff and hearty from his time at sea, and burned brown as a farmer after harvest. Though we’d already known the duke was safe, Charles cried out with joy when he saw him and clasped him in his arms as if they’d been parted for years, not weeks, while his dogs leapt and yipped about his feet with excitement.

“Let me look at you, James!” Charles exclaimed, laughing and thumping his brother on the shoulders with genuine pride while we all clapped and cheered for him as our returning hero. “How the sea agrees with you, you rascally dog! Come, here, sit with me, and tell me all.”

But the duke’s smile vanished from his newly browned face, and his bright eyes clouded. “Forgive me, brother, but I must tell you sad tidings before the happy. Is Lady Falmouth here?”

“Lady Falmouth is in her rooms resting, Your Grace,” I said, already feeling the first sick dread of what would come. Not Falmouth, not that fine, handsome gentleman! “Should I fetch her?”

“Falmouth?” Charles asked slowly, that same dread now showing in his face. No one else in the room dared speak, for they’d felt it, too, while the foolish small spaniels continued their cheerful barking. “Quiet, dogs, be still. Quiet! What has happened, James? Tell me. What has happened?”

The duke took a deep breath. “Lord Falmouth was standing by my side on the quarterdeck in the fiercest heat of the battle. One moment he was there, and the next he—he was gone, taken by a cannon’s shot. He’d no time to suffer or regret, may God rest his soul with the angels. He died a hero of England.”

“Dead.”
Charles’s shoulders bowed and his head fell forward as if he’d been struck, and if he’d not still held fast to his brother, I felt sure he’d have dropped to the floor. As it was, the tears spilled from his eyes and down his cheeks, tears I’d never seen him shed before, no matter how many other sorrows had cursed him: tears for Falmouth, for the past they’d shared for so many years, tears for England’s disgrace, and also, I should guess, for his own endless optimism turned so sorrowfully wrong.

But while we at court grieved mightily for Falmouth, snatched from us so cruelly in his prime, Death was intent on cutting a far wider swath through London that summer. The heat continued unabated, and with it came the usual cases of illness and summer fevers, especially among those nearest the river and docks.

Yet soon another kind of sickness had appeared, one that began with chills and trembling, then swiftly progressed to boils on the neck or groin, unbearable headaches, delirium, and an inevitable, painful death. The plague was nothing new to us at that time—it ran its course through the poor every decade or so—but this particular year it seemed to strike with more virulence than any of us could remember.

The first cases in the late spring had hardly been noted, but by the end of that same awful June, plague was already claiming hundreds of Londoners each week. The gravediggers could not keep pace with the demand, and from the roof of the palace the wavering light from nighttime burials could be seen across the city like earthbound stars. The houses where the plague struck were marked with red crosses to warn others away, with an extra scrawled warning or prayer on the door for God to be merciful to those remaining inside. By the end of the summer, the deaths would be too great for proper burials in consecrated ground, with corpses dumped willy-nilly into open pits.

From fear of contamination, the court barricaded ourselves fearfully in the palace, and no others were permitted inside. The markets and shops were shut and the streets were empty, save the occasional nameless corpse abandoned to bloat and decay in the summer heat. Grass grew high in the middle of King Street and in the other streets surrounding the palace. Even the river was empty, devoid of the boats and watermen that usually plied their courses and trades across the shining water.

Terrified for my children as well as the babe within my womb, I pleaded to Charles for us to leave the town. By early July, he agreed, and the court joined the thousands of others fleeing the sickness. Highborn or low, no one wished to remain in such an unhealthy place—even, it was said, the very president of the Royal College of Physicians.

Like restless gypsies, we followed Charles from Whitehall to Hampton Court, to Salisbury and Portsmouth, and finally to familiar Oxford. It was almost as if he believed that by never settling too long in one place he would outpace his kingdom’s woes; for in addition to the plague, the war continued to founder without purpose, while prices for all crops and goods were driven beyond bearing.

Likewise, to avoid the plague, Parliament assembled in Oxford, with Charles nearby, but the members had lost the pleasing good humor they’d shown earlier in the year. They questioned his requests for more money for the war and the navy. They challenged the incompetence of the war’s leaders, looking for scapegoats for their own impulsiveness. My old friend and neighbor Lord Sandwich was dismissed from his admiralty post, and retreated in disgust to a distant embassy in Spain.

Worst of all, Charles himself was openly, and unfairly, faulted for spending too much time on his own pleasures and not enough care on affairs of state. I found myself blamed again for corrupting the king and cursed as a grasping, avaricious strumpet. The wit and cleverness for which I’d once been praised was now transformed into sharp-tongued shrewishness, and I a scold who bedeviled the king. When the pulpits of Anglican ministers in London had been emptied by the plague, nonconformist preachers had appeared to claim the leaderless congregations with the most evil of messages: that the plague had been sent by God to punish the debauchery and corruption of the king and his court.

Mindful of the earlier warning I’d received from the disguised gentlemen in the park, I no longer went into the street alone, but only when attended by a pair of brawny guards with pistols as part of their livery. There were more guards near the nursery, too, for folks as evilly righteous as these might not pause at wreaking their vengeance on me through my little innocents.

Nor were risks to my person the only attacks I feared. One night when I returned to my Oxford lodgings after supping with the king, I discovered a hand-drawn note attached to my door:

Stunned, I tore the note down at once. To suggest that I deserved a session in the ducking chair, a barbaric and watery punishment reserved for the worst scolds in backward country villages, and that only my place with Charles protected me—oh, it was not to be believed.

I called once again for my carriage and raced back to the king’s lodgings in Merton College. I found him in his dressing room, preparing himself for a visit to the queen’s bedchamber down the hall.

“Barbara,” he said, his smile puzzled. His Gentlemen of the Bedchamber had already been dismissed for the night, and one of his two manservants had just taken away his periwig to place on its block for combing and curling. Though he was but thirty-five, his short, cropped hair was mostly gray now, as was the curling hair on his chest that showed at the opening of his scarlet silk dressing gown. “I’d not expected to see you again so soon, my dear.”

Impatiently I waved away his servants, waiting for them to leave us alone before I spoke. Yet the man with the periwig still hovered, smoothing the carefully arranged curls back into place, wanting more to finish his task than to heed me.

“You, there,” I said, glowering, for I’d no notion of his name. I pointed at the door. “Leave us at once. At
once.
”

The man glanced at the king first for confirmation, unwise in my present humor, then finally, as I raised my fist to strike him, he scurried from the room, the periwig still in his hand like the trophy scalp of an Indian savage in the wilderness.

“You’re shaking,” Charles said. “Are you that angry with me, or another?”

I thrust the scurrilous note into his hand. “Read that,” I ordered, “and tell me I’ve not reason to be angry.”

He read it, and let out his breath in a long sigh. “Where was this?”

“On the door to my rooms, for all of Oxford to see,” I said, not bothering to hide my bitterness. “Likely the rest of this dreadful country town was already party to the jest.”

“And likely the work of students who fancy themselves wits,” he said, understanding my anger. “They’ve no right to write such libel about any lady, least of all you.”

“Fah.” I snatched up the sheet again, crumpled it into a tight ball, and hurled it into the grate to burn as it deserved. “
That
is what I think of them! Now what shall you do about it, my fine Caesar?”