The Loves of Charles II (102 page)
Read The Loves of Charles II Online
Authors: Jean Plaidy
So this was the end. Catherine sat like a statue, and beside her was the Count Castelmelhor, whose expression of blank misery made it clear that he believed there was nothing more that he could do for her.
There would be a trial, thought Catherine; and her judges would find her guilty because they had determined to do so.
And Charles?
She understood his case.
His position was an uneasy one. The people were crying out for the blood of Papists, and she was a Papist. Revolution trembled in the air; she was fully aware that there was one day which Charles would never forget—that was a bleak January day when his father had been led to execution.
If he showed any leniency towards the Catholics now, the country would be screaming for his blood too. He knew it, and he had sworn that, at whatever cost, he would never go travelling again.
The people of England were repudiating her. She was a barren Queen; she was a Queen whose dowry had never been paid in full; and she was a Papist.
The tall dark man with the melancholy face was no longer ruler of England; that role had fallen to a shuffling man with the most evil of countenances who went by the name of Titus Oates.
There seemed nothing to do but wait for her doom.
Castelmelhor had news for her.
“The King has questioned those who accuse Your Majesty. He has questioned them with the utmost severity, and it is clear to all those who hear him that he is greatly displeased with those who would destroy you.”
A gentle smile illumined Catherine’s face. “Yes, he would be unhappy. That is like him. But he will do nothing. How can he? It would be against the people’s wishes. And he must consider them now.”
“He has insisted on a minute description of the room of this Palace in which Oates swears he overheard you plan to poison him; he says a woman would have to shout, for Oates to have heard her say what he declares he heard you say; he has said that you are a low-voiced woman. He is doing everything to prove your accusers liars.”
Catherine smiled, and the tears started to flow gently down her cheeks.
“I shall remember that,” she said. “When they lead me to the block I shall remember it. He did not pass by on the other side of the road. He stopped to succor me.”
“Your Majesty must not despair. If the King is with you, others will follow. He is still the King. He is very angry that you should be so accused. They are saying now that Sir George Wakeman was to have brought the poison to you, and that you were to administer it to the King when he next visited you. The King has laughed the idea to scorn, and he says he will never suffer an innocent lady to be oppressed.”
“I shall never forget those words,” said Catherine. “I shall carry them with me to the grave. I know they have determined on my death, but he would have saved me, if he could.”
“You underestimate the power of the King, Madam.”
“My dear Castelmelhor, come to the window.”
She took his hand and drew him there, for he was reluctant to go with her. Already the crowds were gathering. She saw their hats with the bands about them on which were written “No Popery! No Slavery!” They carried sticks and knives; they were a vicious mob.
They had come to mock and curse her on her journey to the Tower.
A barge was on the river. The crowds hurried to its edge.
They have come to take me away, thought Catherine. I shall lie in my prison in the Tower as others have before me. I am guilty of the crime of Queens; I could not bear a son.
This was the end then—the end of that love story which was to have been so perfect, and of which she had dreamed long ago in the Lisbon Palace. She would sail down the river to the grim gray fortress into which she would enter by way of the Traitors’ Gate.
It might be that she would never again set eyes on Charles’ face. He would not wish to see her. It would distress him too much, for however much he wished to be rid of her, he would never believe her guilty of conspiring to poison him.
She heard the shouts of the people. She could not see the barge, for the crowds on the bank hid it; but now someone had stepped ashore. It was a tall figure, slender, black-clad, the dark curls of his wig falling over his shoulders, his broad-brimmed plumed hat on his head, while those about him were hatless.
Charles!
So he had come to see her. She felt dizzy with her emotion. He had come; and she had never thought he would come. He could have only one purpose in coming to her now.
With him were members of the Court, and his personal guards; he came from the landing stairs to the house with those so well-remembered quick strides of his.
“The King is here!” The words echoed through the house. It was as though the very walls and hangings were trembling with excitement—and hope.
He strode into the room; she tried to approach him, but her limbs trembled so that she could not move. She wanted to sink to her knees and kiss his hand. She merely stood mutely before him, looking up into that lined and well-loved face.
Then he put his hands upon her shoulders and, drawing her towards him, kissed her there before them all.
That kiss was the answer to all who saw it; it was the defiance of two people who were going to stand against all those who were the enemies of the Queen. They had not understood him. They had thought him too facile. They thought that he, being an unfaithful husband, was faithless throughout. They thought that he, finding it so easy to smile and make promises, could never stand firm.
“I have come to take you with me to Whitehall,” he said. “It is not meet that you and I should live apart in these times.”
Still she could find no words. She felt his hands gripping hers; she saw the tender smile which she remembered from the days of their honeymoon.
Come,” he said, “let us go now. I am eager to show them that, whatever comes, the King and Queen stand together.”
Then she could not suppress her emotion.
She threw herself against him and cried, half laughing, half in tears: “Charles, you do not believe these stories against me? Charles, I love you with all my heart.”
He said: “I know it.”
“They will seek to prove these terrible things against me. They will lie and … and the people listen to their lies.”
“You are returning with me to Whitehall,” he said, “whence we shall go to Windsor. We will ride through the countryside together, you and I; for I wish the people to know that in this turmoil there are two who stand side by side in trust and love and confidence: the King and his Queen in whom he puts his trust.”
The crowds were gathering about the house. She could hear their shouts.
“Come,” he said. “Let us go. Let us leave at once. Are you afraid?”
“No,” she said, putting her hand in his, no longer afraid.
They left the house; the people stood back in a hushed silence; they stepped into the barge; the King was smiling at the Queen, and he kept her hand in his.
They sailed along the river to Whitehall and it was seen that never had the King paid more attention to any woman than he did at that time to his Queen.
Catherine felt then that those dreams which had come to her in the Lisbon Palace had materialized. She knew that it was such moments as this which made all that she had suffered worthwhile.
All through the years to come she would treasure this moment; she would remember that when she was lonely and afraid, when she was in imminent peril, that man who had come to her and brought her to safety was the one whom she loved.
ome twenty-four years after the reign of Charles had ended, Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, lay in a house in the village of Chiswick; she was dying.
Sixty-eight years of age, an intriguante to the end, she had not ceased to look for lovers. So many of those who had witnessed the days of her glory were long since dead. Even Catherine the Queen, who had lived to an old age, had died four years before, just at the time when Barbara was contracting that most disastrous marriage with a man who had in his day been one of the most handsome rakes in London.
She lay on her bed, swollen to a great size by the dropsy which had attacked her. She felt too old and tired even to abuse her attendants; a sure sign, they felt, that the end was near.
She dozed a little and allowed her mind to slip back to events of the past. It was the only pleasure left to her. The greatest evil which could befall her had come upon her; she was old, no longer beautiful nor desirable; she remembered faintly that some member of the Court, with whom she had quarreled, had once declared that he hoped to see her come to such a state. Well, it was upon her now.
She had lost the King’s favor to her old enemy the Duchess of Portsmouth; she had had many lovers since then but she had never ceased to regret the loss of Charles. She had schemed to marry her children into the richest and most noble families of England; and only Barbara, her youngest and Churchill’s child, had become a nun.
She thought of coming back to England just before Charles’ death, with high hopes of returning to his favor. But he remembered too well the tantrums and furies of the past; he was happy with Louise de Kéroualle, his Duchess of Portsmouth, and Nelly the play-girl.
In place of the King she had found an actor lover, a gay adventurer, named Cardonell Goodman. Ah, he had been handsome, and what joy to see him strut across the stage as Alexas in Dryden’s
All for Love
, or Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. She had paid him well; and he had been grateful, for an actor’s pay of six and threepence a day had been inadequate for the needs of such a man. No wonder he had loved her. No wonder he had refused to allow the play to start until his Duchess was in her box, even though the Queen herself had come to see it! He had tried to poison her children. Oh, he was a rogue, but an exciting one, and she had his child to remember him by.
But she was growing old and her body had become over-heavy; and the worst calamity which had befallen her was the death of Roger, for then she had been foolish enough to go through a form of marriage with Robert Feilding, who was known as “Beau.”
The thought of that villain could rouse her from her torpor even now and bring the tumultuous blood rushing to her head. Be calm! she admonished herself. You do yourself harm by thinking of the rogue!
In Feilding she had found another such as she herself had been; but, being ten years her junior, he had the whip hand, and he used it. He had dared to dictate to her and, if she did not carry out his wishes, to lay about him with his heavy hands. He had dared to inflict bruises on the Duchess of Cleveland!
But Fate was kinder to her than perhaps she deserved; for she discovered that she was not after all his wife, since he had contracted a marriage with another woman some short while before he had gone through the ceremony with her.
And with Feilding had ended her matrimonial adventures. She had felt only one desire then—to live in seclusion.
So in the village of Chiswick she had come to end her days.
The room was growing dark; she could hear voices but she could no longer see the figures which moved about her.
She closed her eyes, and as her attendants bent over her bed, one murmured: “Was this then … this bloated creature … was she once the most beautiful of women?”
It was four years before the death of Barbara when, in the quiet Palace of Lisbon, in that chamber to which no man must be admitted, Catherine of Braganza lay dying.
She was an old woman now, having reached her sixty-seventh year, and it was twenty years since Charles had died.
Now, as she lay in her bed with only Donna Inez Antonia de Tavora to wait on her, she felt life slipping away from her and was not always conscious of the room in which she lay.
It seemed to her that sometimes she was back in the Palace of Whitehall, enduring agonies of jealousy as she saw her husband become deeply enamored of other women. It had not been the end of jealousy when he had come to Somerset House and saved her from her enemies. He had not changed towards her. He was the same Charles as he had ever been. She had still remained his plain wife who did not attract him, who must be perpetually jealous of the beautiful women with whom he surrounded himself; but
she had learned one thing: he would always be there when any dire peril threatened her.
He had saved her; it had been said, during the weeks which followed that journey from Somerset House to Whitehall: “The King has a new mistress—his wife.”
Yet he had been unable to save her servants; he had been against the bloody executions which had followed, but he had done all he dared in saving his wife.
She recalled those unhappy days when England was ruled by a cruel rogue and wicked perjurer. She remembered the exile of the unhappy Duke of York, and later his defeat by his daughter’s husband; she remembered the coming of William of Orange—and her own unhappy treatment at the hands of that sovereign and his wife Mary. She remembered returning to her native land and building this Palace of Bemposta; and she looked back on these last five years of her life as the peaceful years.
But there was one thing she remembered more vividly than anything, and that was the last time she had seen the man she had loved throughout her life. The pain he suffered could not disturb that wry smile; the agony of death could not quench the wit which came so readily to his lips.
She had wept and had begged that he would forgive her for failing him—for failing to bring him the dowry which he had so desired, for failing to bring him the beauty which he had so much admired, for failing to give him a son.
She would treasure his answer to the very end. “You beg my pardon? Do not, I pray you, for it is I who should beg yours, and this I do with all my heart.”
Now she murmured those words to herself.
“He begged my pardon with all his heart. What need had he to beg my pardon with all his heart, when I loved him with all mine?”
The end was near. The room was now crowded; she was vaguely conscious of the last ceremonies, for it seemed to her that at the last there was one who stood beside her—tall and very dark, with a jest on his lips—who took her hand to lead her; and she was smiling, for thus she was not afraid.