Royal Harlot (45 page)

After I left the palace on the night that Charles disavowed my nascent babe, I retreated not to my King Street house but to the house of a friend, Lady Harvey, in Covent Garden. Though not beautiful, Lady Harvey was quick-witted and clever, exactly the sort of company I needed after such a heated exchange with the king. She was a member of the Montagu family, a clan as ambitious as the Villiers were, and since I’d also had a brief intrigue long ago with her brother Edward, we were all tangled together in friendship—and now with my latest sorry quarrel with the king.

Lady Harvey was perfectly willing to send back Charles’s letters to me unread, as I’d requested, and she also was clever enough to deflect the equally clever Bab May when he came to try to orchestrate a reconciliation. But when after two weeks of this dance Charles himself appeared at her door for me, she and I both agreed the time had finally come for me to meet with him.

I sat waiting in Lady Harvey’s small garden, a pleasant, private place tucked behind her house. Pear trees had been pegged to grow flat against the tall garden walls, plump rounded fruit and glossy green leaves against the rosy red brick, and benches and tables were arranged beneath the single spreading elm.

“Your Majesty,” I murmured when Lady Harvey herself showed him into the garden and, with a wise understanding of how Charles and I ordinarily reconciled, promptly left us alone. “Good day to you, sir.”

Determined to begin better than I’d left off, I made him a graceful curtsey on the sun-dappled grass, then offered him one of the garden chairs.

Yet still he kept back, standing at the edge of the grass and restlessly jabbing his tall walking stick into the soil. Though dressed in his customary somber black, he wore the new Eastern, or Russian, style of gentlemen’s dress that he’d introduced to the court: a long, loose open coat over an equally long waistcoat, lined with dark red silk and pinked along the edges. It was a fashion that suited his height and frame well, and I wondered how many other shorter, stouter gentlemen would remain wedded instead to the French fashion of short doublets and cloaks that they’d worn all their lives.

“I’ve come to ask after your health, Lady Castlemaine,” he said with excruciating politeness. “Last time we spoke, I showed less than proper concern for your welfare, and I regret that.”

“Not at all, sir,” I demurred. “My health is excellent, and I thank you kindly for your inquiry.”

“Yes.” He glanced about the garden before finally coming to stand directly before me. “You are well, then?”

He glanced so pointedly at my belly that I colored. “I am, sir.”

He sighed, and shook his head. “Of course I’ll own the child is mine, Barbara,” he said. “With you—with us—I’d never do otherwise. Though how I’m to support another when Parliament won’t give me two farthings to strike together is beyond me.”

“I knew you would, sir, and I thank you for it,” I said softly, and sadly, too. “Your first refusal did not seem like you at all.”

“You surprised me before the others,” he said bluntly. “A man doesn’t like to learn that sort of news before an audience.”

“You hurt me,” I said, just as blunt. “Me, and our other children.”

“You offered to hurt them a good deal more,” he said. “I don’t like threats like that, Barbara.”

I bowed my head contritely. As with even the most humble of men, I needed to take care to let Charles believe he ruled supreme in all things. “I was distraught, sir.”

“You were fit for Bedlam,” he said, more pointedly. “You know that you’re being likened to Medea now.”

I winced, for what mother wishes to be compared to that horrifying example? “You know I’d never harm any of our children.”

“Love is a curious thing, isn’t it?” For the first time he smiled at me, and I realized again how sorely I’d missed him. “The palace is far too dull without you.”

I laid my hand on his chest, over his heart, with our old familiarity. “I was wrong in my reckoning, or perhaps I miscarried. I cannot say, so early. But there is no babe.”

I’d expected him to be relieved, but instead found only sadness in his face. Of course: he’d heard that same message from the queen so many times, it couldn’t help but bring him sorrow.

He cupped his hand around my jaw, turning my face up toward his. “Come back, Barbara. Don’t stay away from me any longer.”

“I won’t,” I said, brushing my lips over his. “I can’t, or survive without you.”

As was our custom after separations, he had me then, in the garden. Yet there was an unusual tenderness to our coupling, and as I sat astride him on the bench, my petticoats fluttered around us like the petals of some late-summer bloom.

And when he returned to Whitehall, I went with him: where he wanted me, and where, for now, I still belonged.

 
There were many advantages to being back in my lodgings at the palace. I was once again near my children, the king, my friends, and the general excitement and intrigue that life at court could bring. But the best that could be said of being in the palace in late August of 1667 was that I was in residence to see the end of Lord Clarendon.

Although the old chancellor had been against the Dutch war from the beginning, and had been the first to desire to sue for peace, he was ironically the one of Charles’s ministers who would be made to take the blame for the war’s miserable failure. There was more to it, of course: how Clarendon had continued to try to control Charles as if he were still a schoolboy instead of a man and king well grown; how he struggled to impose his intolerant will of how England should be; and his contemptuous hatred of me as a sinful, selfish, expensive influence upon the king.

I do not have to say which reason meant most to me. Suffice to say that I could scarcely wait for the morning when Charles called Clarendon to him to ask for his resignation. Being kind, Charles phrased his request as being for the old man’s own good by placing him outside the reach of the vengeful Parliament before they began the postwar inquests. But even Clarendon himself knew the queasy truth. The only way for Charles to appease the still-angry Parliament was to send Clarendon away in disgrace.

“My lady, wake, if you please!” Wilson shook my shoulder to rouse me. “It is done, and His Lord Chancellor is leaving Whitehall.”

“Now? What hour is it?” I asked, shoving my hair back from my face. “How?”

“Nearly noon, my lady,” Wilson said, her words tumbling over one another in her haste to spit them out. “Lord Clarendon has met all this morning with the king and Lord Arlington and the rest in the king’s offices, and they say he has resigned, and is leaving, and if you wish to watch him depart in disgrace, as you’ve said, you must rise at once.”

But I was already out of the bed, ignoring my slippers and the dressing gown that Wilson held out for me. I did not wish to miss this glorious sight, and in my smock I ran from my rooms into the gallery that overlooked the Privy Garden. If Clarendon had met with the king in his rooms, then he must cross the garden on his way from the palace to the street. To see better, I hurried through the aviary that faced the gardens, scattering the bright-feathered rare birds, gaudy parrots and macaws, sending them chattering and scolding to their perches.

Pulling my smock back over my bare shoulder, I peered down through the aviary bars just in time to see Clarendon. He’d always refused to follow the fashion for periwigs, and from where I stood above I could see his balding pate gleaming through his wispy hair in the noonday sun. His shoulders were bent with age and discouragement, his gait shuffling as he crossed the white-stone garden path. Most of all I noticed how his gnarled hands were empty now, without the purse and mace that had been the symbols of his office. So he had resigned; he was done, and I couldn’t help but clap my hands with glee. Vexing, confounding old man: he might have been a true friend to my father, but he’d done nothing but judge and cross me from the first moment we’d met.

“Your dressing gown, my lady, please!” Wilson said, trying to cover my near nakedness, but I shrugged her away, not wanting to be distracted from this glorious moment of an enemy in defeated retreat.

“Enjoy life in the country, my lord!” I called out to him in my triumph, unable to keep still. “Remember in the end who has won, and who has lost!”

He heard me, and to my surprise he stopped, and gazed balefully up to where I stood in the aviary. “My lady,” he called back, “pray remember that, if you live, you too will grow old.”

I laughed. I was only twenty-six, rich in my beauty and power. I had won, and he had lost, and that was all that mattered.

“My Lady Castlemaine! Here, my lady, here!”

I shifted my gaze away from Clarendon to where a group of young gallants had gathered to loll in the garden after playing a game of tennis on the palace courts nearby. In charming undress of white open shirts with the sleeves rolled high and plain black breeches, they glowed with ruddy health and vigor as they grinned up at me.

Most likely that same shining sun that had illuminated Clarendon’s disgrace was now revealing all my charms to them through the fine linen of my smock, explaining the sauciness of their salutes to me. But it was too late to be falsely modest, and so I did no more than toss my long unbound hair over my shoulders and wave in cheerful acknowledgment.

Squinting into the sun, the ringleader clasped his hands over his heart, much to the jeering delight of his compatriots.

“Ah, my lady, my lady,” he called up to me. “Surely to see you there is to view the beauty of the true bird of paradise.”

“A pretty speech, that, my proud young hawk,” I called back through the bars, laughing merrily, and glanced back for a final, rewarding glimpse of Clarendon’s disgrace.

But by now the old man was gone, from the walk and the palace and from my life forever, and gaily I turned back to the young bucks preening at my feet below.

Chapter Twenty

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON
January 1 6 6 8

 
Wisely Charles did not name a replacement for Clarendon at once, leaving the chancellorship vacant while he made a careful decision. Like a stone tossed in a pond, this single momentous event sent repercussions rippling outward throughout the court and beyond, and in ways no one could have predicted.

With Clarendon gone, the tension that had been growing between Charles and his brother the Duke of York—and Clarendon’s son-inlaw—now vanished. This pleased Charles no end; having endured a childhood where his siblings were scattered by war and misfortune, as a man he treasured all the more his surviving brother and sisters. Because it was becoming increasingly likely that either James or a son of his would be the next king, childless Charles became more interested and involved with his brother’s growing family.

Less commonly known but another link newly reinforced between the brothers was their involvement in the Catholic faith. Charles was delighted to have Clarendon’s overweening Anglican influence removed from his life. Though the nominal leader of the Anglicans, the king was drawn seductively toward beckoning Rome: among his closest family and circle, his mother, brother, wife, and I were all Catholics, as were many of his closest friends. Though he would never dare be seen attending a Roman mass or service, with James he could discuss and compare the merits of the two faiths with a freedom he’d never have elsewhere.

As a Catholic myself, one committed to the true church as founded by Our Savior, I took special note of this. I resolved to pay more court to the Yorks with an eye to my own future, and that of my children.

Unaware, or more likely choosing to be so, Arlington negotiated an agreement among the Protestant powers of Europe, united against the Catholic states. The Triple Alliance joined England to Holland and Sweden; what would their leaders say, I wondered, if they’d seen the private chapel for Catholic Mass that I visited with the Stuart brothers in St. James’s Palace?

Likewise Clarendon’s fall sent the other ministers and members scrambling to make what they could of it, reaching for fresh favors and places. In a way I was no different, for though as a woman I’d never have any actual effect in Parliament, through my favor with Charles I was perceived as having secured the chancellor’s resignation. With Frances Stuart gone now, too, the French ambassador lavished many more bribes and blandishments on me, and called me the true English queen.

Of course the jackass who brayed the loudest was my cousin Buckingham, who tried to claim he’d unseated the chancellor entirely by himself. But while no one could doubt Buckingham’s persuasive abilities, or how readily he could gather a collection of supporters by the sheer force of his personality and good looks—ah, how blessed we Villiers are in that regard!—he often had no notion of what to do with the power he amassed, and as surely as he gathered new followers, others would drop away, disillusioned. Though Charles valued his long-standing friendship and delighted in his amusing company, in the king’s eyes Buckingham was now repeatedly tripped by his own foolishness, and thence proved himself untrustworthy.

With his protégé Frances Stuart gone, Buckingham had returned to his old plan to replace the queen with a more fertile Protestant princess. Again and again he proposed a royal divorce, which inflamed the ever-loyal, if not faithful, king. His harebrained plots even included kidnapping the queen and sending her to some distant wilderness in New England, in the hopes of establishing abandonment as grounds for a divorce.

Nor did Buckingham’s private life encourage trust or support. It was known to all that the king hated the tragic waste of dueling, and always had. Yet still Buckingham indulged himself in this practice over every slight against his honor, imagined or otherwise. When in January he was prominent again in a sordid duel over his mistress the Countess of Shrewsbury, which ended in the death not only of that lady’s husband but his second as well, the king had had enough. Though I persuaded Charles to pardon Buckingham—rascal or not, he was my kin, and from my long-ago days with Chesterfield I’d not the same hatred of dueling—the king withdrew his trust, and Buckingham’s political star began to dim and fade.