The French Mistress (52 page)

I understood. “Thank you, sir,” I said. “Thank you.”

And as 1678 began, the new French ambassador, Paul Barrillion (a man more like a bookkeeper’s clerk than a diplomat), could write to Louis that the duchess of Portsmouth had never been more greatly beloved by the king, nor more firmly in his favor. Considering what would befall us all that year, I was never more blessed by his affection.

Chapter Twenty-three

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON
August 1678

 

 

 

G
reat events, both good and ill, often rise from the most humble of roots. So it was with the great nightmare that darkened the autumn of 1678: an insignificant event lay at its beginning, so slight that Charles forgot to mention it to me until late that night.

“A most curious thing happened to me this morning in the park,” he said as we sat together to share a glass of sillery.

I’d kept the windows thrown open to welcome the evening air from the river, for this had been another hot day, so hot that Charles had decided to shift us all back to Windsor the day after tomorrow to escape it. “I’ve only now remembered it, else I would have told you earlier.”

“What manner of curious thing, sir?” I asked idly, for it was too warm to be anything else. “Did a giant sea serpent slither from the duck pond across the lawn to menace you?”

He smiled, but briskly, more intent on his own tale than my jests. “I’m serious, Louise. The hour was very early, as you know is my habit, and the mists still hung low on the grass. I’d scarce entered the park when this fellow came charging up to me.”

At once I sat upright, turning to face him. “You weren’t alone, sir, were you? You’d waited for your guardsmen to follow?”

“Well, no,” he admitted. “I was eager to be off, and the guardsmen can be slow old sticks.”

“Old sticks!” I exclaimed. “They’re supposed to be keeping you safe. What if this fellow had intended you harm?”

“That’s the curious part of it, Fubs,” he said. “He wasn’t entirely unknown to me. His name is Kirkby, a chemical scientist, but what he was so determined to tell me had nothing to do with science. He warned me of a plot to kill me, that I might even be attacked if I continued through the park.”

“Yet you went on, sir?” Fear swept over me, and blindly I reached for his hand. “You put yourself at risk because you’d no wish to be slowed by guards?”

“I did.” He linked his fingers into mine to reassure me. “I did, because of whom he blamed. The Jesuits.”

“Jesuits, sir?” More trouble for Roman Catholics and the French, I thought with dismay. “That makes no sense.”

“It made no sense to me, either.” He smiled wryly. “Every Jesuit I’ve known has seemed most intelligent, and no man with any sense would prefer my brother as king instead of me. I thought no more of it. But later today Kirkby returned, coming to Court this time with a vicar named Israel Tonge, who claimed to have uncovered the entire wretched plot.”

“What did he say, sir? Who did he fault?”

“To be honest, sweet, I’d no patience for his ramblings,” he said with a sigh. “I sent him off to see Danby. He’ll sort it out, if anyone can. What matters most is that I’m still here.”

Charles’s safety did matter the most, especially to me. Two days later, we left for Windsor on a river that shimmered with the heat, and I doubt he gave more than a passing thought to either Kirkby or Tonge.

But Danby did. Wrapped in the confident knowledge that he was only preserving the welfare of the king, he listened eagerly to Tonge’s tale. Surely there was no other minister who so hated the French, or so believed in the superiority of Anglicans over Catholics (as I knew myself all too well), and surely, too, there could have been none more receptive to the despicable hatred behind this plot.

The details, as Tonge explained them, were ludicrous. Under the command of Louis, the Jesuits and the English Catholics would murder Charles, then form a rebellious army to keep James from the throne and throw England into the disorder of another civil war. Finally, the French armies would invade, and Louis would claim England as another province of France.

Yet Danby’s bigotry let him believe this rubbish to the point that brought the matter to the council for further investigation, and Tonge produced his source: a former Anglican converted to Catholicism who claimed to have infiltrated the deepest of Jesuit circles. This man was called Titus Oates, and no more dangerous nor evil prevaricator has ever raised his despicable, piggish head to destroy the lives of others.

Under oath before the council, Oates did not waste time and, among many others, implicated two Catholic servants close to the royal family: Edward Coleman, secretary to the Duke of York, and Sir George Wakeman, Queen Catherine’s own personal physician. While Coleman was accused of corresponding with Louis, Dr. Wakeman, a most honorable gentleman, was charged with using his medical knowledge for a plan to poison the king.

Of course Danby informed Charles, who was outraged, but refused to believe that the accusations would be taken seriously. Still, we were a somber party when we returned to London at the end of September. This testimony, combined with the coming session of Parliament, did not bode for a pretty, easy autumn.

But days before the new session was to begin, the magistrate who’d been hearing Oates’s slanderous deposition was found murdered by the side of an empty road. This sad news struck perilously close to me: I’d known Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey myself, a good and honest man who’d never deserved such a death. Charles hoped that the new session of Parliament would see the irrational folly of the plot, but after Sir Edmund’s body had been found, the only talk was of how the Jesuits were bent on murdering every English Protestant. All London was on edge, and gentlemen went about their business armed, and ladies tucked pistols in their muffs. Coleman’s correspondence had been confiscated, and based on his letters, five Catholic lords, aged and revered gentlemen, had been sent to the Tower.

Waiting to turn the hysteria to his gain was Lord Shaftesbury, now relentlessly pursuing an entirely Protestant course. He had continued to link himself to Charles’s illegitimate son Lord Monmouth, and to embrace Monmouth’s claim as the Protestant heir to his father’s throne, doubtless for his own gain. For the first time, Shaftesbury attacked the Catholic Duke of York, demanding that he be barred from the privy council, and supporting a new bill that would disallow Catholics entirely from Parliament.

Worse was to come. In his next round of accusations, Oates dared to implicate the queen herself, claiming that she had been heard plotting with Dr. Wakeman to poison the king on account of his many infidelities to her over the years of their marriage.

That was too much, even for Charles, who at last ordered Oates imprisoned. The Commons demanded he be released, and in turn accused Charles of obstructing the truth and protecting the Catholics in Whitehall. Charles refused to give way; he was still king, and Catherine his queen, and he would stand fast to defend her. Cleverly he had the investigator ask Oates to describe the room in the palace where he’d overheard the queen, and the liar showed exactly how ignorant he was of her quarters, let alone of any wrongdoing by that good lady.

Yet still Oates continued to invent fresh accusations, and still the world listened as if he spoke the truth. The madness continued in Parliament, but at least for now the queen was safe.

Coleman, the Duke of York’s indiscreet secretary, was condemned by the judges without a trial. On the first of December, he was executed as befit a traitor: before a howling, vengeful crowd, he was cut open alive, his bowels torn out and burned under his eyes.

I appealed to the French ambassador, Barrillion, and with his assistance hurriedly arranged for passports for all of my French servants who wished to return to France. I had long been in the habit of sending money to my business agents in Paris against the distant time I would one day return. Now I sent far more, as well as some of my jewels, fearing that the distant day might come sooner than I’d expected.

Parliament voted to restrict all Catholics in the royal households and those employed within the palace. Even Charles had to beg special exemption for Father Huddleston, the elderly Benedictine who had helped him escape Cromwell’s men after the Battle of Worcester, and who now served as one of the Queen’s chaplains.

On a gray December afternoon, the queen called her ladies and other attendants to her presence chamber. All of us wept, including Catherine, and none of us hid our tears. While some of us were English, some Portuguese like the queen herself, and I the only Frenchwoman, we were each of us Catholics, bound together by our faith and the celebration of Mass each day in the queen’s chapel. Now our small circle was to be broken apart forever by the will of the Anglican gentlemen at Westminster.

“A sad day, my dear sisters, a sad day,” Catherine said, her hands clasped tightly at her waist. “You all know the will of Parliament. I’m only permitted ten Catholic ladies in this household, including myself, and the rest will be sent from Court. Only ten! Now I must submit a list of names of these ten to be spared. My name must needs be first on the list. I must ask you to draw lots to see who stays with me, and who must go, and may the Blessed Mother guide each of your hands.”

Solemnly the youngest maid of honor carried a basket from lady to lady so that each might draw a folded slip of paper with their fate written within. She stopped and curtsied before me, her tear-streaked face bent over the basket. Poor poppet, I thought sadly, though perhaps it would be far better for her if her career at Court ended now, before she found her way to some lord’s bed.

I reached my hand into the basket to take my lot.

“You needn’t draw, Lady Portsmouth,” the queen said softly. “I have already decided you will be one who will remain with me.”

Stunned, I swiftly looked her way. “Are you certain, ma’am?”

“You have always been kind to me, Lady Portsmouth. Now I can be kind to you.” Her uneven smile was gentle and full of sorrow. “His Majesty will save me, yes, and I will save you for him.”

“It was Catherine’s idea entirely, Louise, not mine,” Charles said when I told him later, much later, that night.

These days he met constantly with Danby and other ministers and members from both Houses, and personally interrogated Oates and the other, lesser witnesses for inconsistencies to prove their fabrications false. Not that it mattered. I’d only to look at Charles’s face to see that.

“When the queen learned she had to submit that infernal list to Parliament,” he continued, “yours was the first name she wished to mark down. She has always liked you, you know. You are the only one who has always shown respect to her person and rank.”

“She likes me well enough, yes,” I said softly. “But I believe she did it because she loves you more.”

“She is an extraordinarily kind and good woman, Fubs,” he said wearily, “which is why I hate to see her so harried and abused. She is my wife and my queen, and their queen as well, if only those jackals would cease their ravening long enough to remember it.”

“Here, sir, here, make yourself at ease,” I urged, slipping another cushion behind his shoulders as he sat before the fire. I guessed he’d gone for a last walk to try to put his thoughts at rest, for he still wore his boots and his gloves. At least now I knew he wouldn’t venture out unattended; even he realized the danger.

“They have arrested three more of her servants,” he said, staring into the fire. “They’re supposed to be accomplices of Wakefield’s, led by him in the plot to poison me. What can Shaftesbury hope to gain from all this, save a place for himself in the brightest flames of hell?”

“ ‘ Little Sincerity,’ indeed,” I said, bitterly using the old nickname that Charles had once coined to describe both Shaftesbury’s small stature and how little he was to be trusted. “He wants to bring down Danby.”

“He does, but I won’t let him. Danby’s too useful to me for that.” He sipped his wine, his thoughts turned inward. “Did you know your French ambassador deigned to see me today?”

“Monsieur Barrillion’s not been avoiding you, sir,” I protested in defense of the Frenchman. I crouched down at Charles’s feet, my dressing gown crumpling around me in a pile of quilted silk, as one by one, I pulled off his boots. “He knows you have much else that is more pressing to occupy you.”

He grunted with animal pleasure as I rubbed the soles of his stocking’d feet with my thumbs, the way I knew he liked.

“You needn’t cover for Louis, sweet,” he said. “My dear cousin hasn’t paid me a ha’penny since William wed my niece last year. He’s as spiteful as an old bitch in heat.”

“I’ve written him that you intended no harm to France by the Lady Mary’s wedding, sir.” By the fire’s light the lines on his face were carved deep, and with concern I could see how much these last weeks had affected him. “I’ve told him that you were forced to do it to please your Protestant subjects.”