A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (54 page)

In this mood Monsieur was adamant that Minette should not leave France. To appease him, Louis released the chevalier from prison and sent him to Italy, granting the two men permission to correspond. But even so, Monsieur raged violently about Minette’s visit, threatening to come with her and demanding a reciprocal trip by the Duke of York to Paris. This was averted by Louis’s stern words and Charles’s insistence that James could not leave the country. Grudgingly, Monsieur gave in. By the end of March, Minette was back at court, in intense talks with Louis. A month later they set off to Flanders.

This was a progress in the old style, on a grand scale, ostensibly designed to show Maria Teresa ‘her’ new territories, but really to show the people the grandeur and might of the French King.
²²
Most of the court accompanied them, including Mademoiselle de Montpensier (the ‘Grand Mademoiselle’ who had rejected Charles during his exile) and Louis’s current
maîtresse en titre
, Madame de Montespan. With them rode thirty thousand troops, while dozens of carts carried gold and silver plate, hangings and carpets, paintings and provisions. But the food they ate off their gold plate was appalling and Minette, weak after the trials of recent months, could drink nothing but milk. Every day the rain poured down, and they were stopped on their route by the flooded river Sambre.
²³
According to Madame de Montpensier, the courtiers huddled in their coaches, and when Louis arranged for them to move to a two-room farmhouse nearby, Maria Teresa had hysterics and refused to abandon her coach. At last, the grandees trudged through the mud into the farm, sleeping together on the floor on hard mattresses, in the freezing damp.

After these uncomfortable adventures, Minette left the party at Courtray, accompanied by the French and British envoys, and escorted by six hundred horsemen. At dawn on 25 May she set off in her coach, riding west to Lille and Dunkirk, where Sandwich was waiting with his fleet, just as he had waited for Charles at Scheveningen, almost exactly ten years before. She arrived at the port after sunset and her entourage boarded their ships during the night, ready to sail with the tide in the early morning.
²⁴

A political pack, produced
c
. 1690

IN DOVER
, Charles, James, Monmouth and Rupert were waiting for Minette to arrive. Charles had planned to sail down the Thames and round the coast, but slack winds forced him to land at Gravesend and dash by coach across the downs of Kent. Early on 16 May he saw sails in the distance and set off in the royal barge to meet his sister when her ship anchored. When they landed, he escorted Minette up the steep hill to the castle, the old Norman bastion with its Roman lighthouse, glaring across the Channel at France. The royal apartments were in the upper storeys of the inner keep, and on the lead-covered roof above were scratched ‘footprints of some people inscribed with their names, amongst them those of Charles II, which he had marked there when he landed at Dover’.
¹

Minette had not travelled alone. Although Charles had advised her to bring a small retinue, this amounted to 237 people, including cooks and hairdressers, musicians and doctors.
²
Her intimate
suite d’honneur
included the maréchal du Plessis, the Bishop of Tournai and the Count and Countess of Gramont – Elizabeth Hamilton of old. Sandwich had taken Sir Winston Churchill with him, from the royal household, to arrange provisions on the short voyage, and Lord St Albans to escort the French nobles, whom he knew well. The English court had descended from London to greet them. Catherine and the Duchess of York arrived, ‘with a numerous train of ladies’. Charles’s ministers came too, complaining that they hardly had time to pack their bags, and the French and Dutch ambassadors brought their own retinue. The Venetian ambassador, who stayed in London, puzzled over the sudden flurry. He was, he reported at first, unable to penetrate deeper into the motives for the visit, since everyone had left town and no one had yet returned. A week later he decided that Madame’s arrival was prompted only by family affection, although he continued, shrewdly, to suspect ‘secret transactions’.
³

Dover was a small port, where the chalk cliffs fell ‘horribly into the sea’, or so visitors thought. Fishing boats went out every day, and the fires along the beach were not bonfires of welcome, but local people burning seaweed to get ashes for their fields. The followers of both courts were billeted through the town, in small houses in the winding streets. It was a place full of emotion for the king and his sister.

The main business was indeed the secret treaty. Minette’s final contribution to this was to cajole Charles into agreeing to support the French in war with the Dutch whenever Louis was ready, and not insist on them waiting until he had made his dangerous declaration of faith. She won the support of Clifford and Arlington for this move, helped, in Arlington’s case, by her persuading Charles to agree to the betrothal of Arlington’s three-year-old daughter ‘Tata’ to Henry Fitzroy, his second son by Barbara.
⁴
On 22 May, Arlington, Clifford, Arundell and Belling signed the treaty for England, ready for Minette to carry it back to be ratified in France.
⁵

The treaty seemed a coup for Charles, but better was to come. Buckingham and most members of the Privy Council had no idea of the signing of the agreement. At Dover, keen to keep Buckingham as a friend, Minette was always completely charming towards him, and his enthusiasm for a French alliance increased still more. He was backed in this by Lauderdale and by Ashley, who had harboured considerable doubts about any rapprochement with France, until he realised that concessions on trade could only be won from the Dutch by force. Two months later, in July, Buckingham proposed that when he visited Paris he should suggest a secret alliance to Louis. With some amusement, Charles, James and Arlington agreed at once. Buckingham set off, taking with him as a ‘proposal’ the exact terms of the Treaty of Dover, but without the conversion clause. Charles had no great hopes of this hoax, but back Buckingham came, triumphantly bearing a draft treaty.

With a serious face, Charles promptly renegotiated the terms to his advantage, much to Louis’s irritation. The money secretly designated for Charles’s declaration of faith was now written in as a general ‘subsidy’, which would be paid whether there was a war or not, and at Ashley’s and Lauderdale’s insistence two more islands at the mouth of the Scheldt and Rhine were added to English claims if the war was won.
⁶
With a flourish, Buckingham and the other members of the Cabal – Clifford, Arlington, Ashley and Lauderdale – signed the ‘Secret Treaty of London’ on 21 December 1670. The bluff had worked. If any news leaked out about a secret treaty – as it eventually did – this would be the one that was discovered. The Dover pact that lay behind it was not known until its terms were published in the
History of England
by the Catholic historian John Lingard in 1826. Details were still coming to light in Clifford’s papers in the 1930s.
⁷

Louis had followed Minette to Dunkirk, where he stayed three days, inspecting the fortifications, as if he could influence events by beaming his will across the channel. Messengers sailed back and forth, and to her surprise and delight, Louis gave Minette permission to stay an extra ten or twelve days, in defiance of Monsieur’s wishes. The treaty signed, she and Charles enjoyed themselves. Charles had ordered the leading officers of the court to attend him to entertain Minette, a newsletter reported, ‘and the Duke’s Company and the King’s private music are ordered thither for her “divertissement”’.
⁸
Since Monsieur had adamantly refused to let her go to London – although several of her entourage went up to see the sights – the royal party rode over the downs to Canterbury. It was May, and the tall hedges were once again white with hawthorn. Kent’s labourers were the best paid in England, and between Dover and Canterbury, in the deep valleys that cut into the downs, lay orchards and hop gardens, and pastures full of sheep. As they came down the hill towards the gates the bells pealed from the city’s sixteen churches. The small cathedral city was a busy, prosperous place, its timbered houses crammed within encircling walls, its gardens watered by branches of the Stour, ‘the sweetest river’, as Cosimo of Tuscany had called it the year before. At its heart was the cathedral, beautifully restored since Charles had held his first Privy Council there, encircled by the houses of the close like a jewel in a box.

In Canterbury Charles and Minette attended a great banquet in the hall of St Augustine’s Abbey. During her stay in England, they also watched a comedy performed by the company of the Duke’s Theatre, and a ballet. The English court were on holiday, and some even took the chance to go over to Calais ‘to satisfy their curiosities and see a glimpse of that country’.
⁹
On Whitsunday, the king and all the Garter knights, in their full robes and regalia, attended Dover parish church. Only the Duke of York was missing as he had dashed to London to help the Lord Mayor, since there was fear of trouble from the ‘fanatics’. Charles himself sent firm instructions to the Lord Mayor and the Earl of Craven, as Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex and Southwark, to contain all trouble.
¹⁰
But the day passed without uproar in London, and the court celebrated without anxiety on 29 May, Charles’s fortieth birthday and the tenth anniversary of his arrival in London. Though pale and thin, Minette was radiant, her happiness giving her energy. She went to all the feasts and balls and enchanted all who met her. The cold May rain stopped, and they sailed out into the Channel in the royal yachts, with three men-of-war standing by.
¹¹

Before she left, Charles gave Minette money for her expenses and two thousand crowns to build a chapel to their mother’s memory at Chaillot. In return, so the legend goes, she opened her mother’s jewel box and asked him to choose the jewel he liked best. Jokingly, he said that there was only one he would really like, the young woman standing nearby, her Breton maid of honour, Louise de Kéroualle. Minette, who was responsible to Louise’s parents, firmly refused. But Charles did not have to wait long. When Buckingham went to France in July he was charged with bringing Louise back with him. They set out together, but for some reason, never explained, he left her behind at the port, for which she never forgave him: Arlington instead arranged her voyage. With her round face and curls (Charles called her ‘Fubbs’, for her chubby cheeks), Louise brought a new vitality to court, instead of worldly languor. Since Nell was regarded as Buckingham’s protégé, Arlington was particularly glad to see Louise installed. Colbert de Croissy breathlessly reported his views:

For although his Majesty is not disposed to communicate his affairs to women, nevertheless as they can on occasion injure those whom they hate, and in that way ruin many affairs, it was much better for all good servants of the King that he was attracted to her, whose humor is not mischievous, and who is a lady, rather than to comediennes and the like, on whom no honest man could rely, by whose means the duke of Buckingham was always trying to entice the King, in order to draw him away from all his Court and monopolize him.
¹²

Louise must learn to manage Charles well, Colbert added, ‘not to speak to him of affairs, and not to show any aversion to those who are near him, and, in short, to let him find only pleasure and joy in her company’. She became Charles’s mistress in late 1671, and gave birth to their only son nine months later – the new Duke of Richmond, last of the acknowledged royal bastards. ‘She studied to please and observe him in every thing,’ wrote Burnet, ‘so that he passed away the rest of his life in a great fondness for her.’
¹³

No one really wants to know the future, Charles warned Minette, joking about her interest in astrology. He had no patience with prophets; ‘I give little credit to such kind of cattle and the lesse you do it the better, for if they could tell any thing tis inconvenient to know ones fortune before hand whether good or bad.’
¹⁴
Despite his Catholic protestations he may, like Rochester, have agreed with Hobbes: ‘The present only has a being in nature. Things past have a being in the memory, only. But things to come have no being at all, the future being but a fiction of the mind, applying the sequels of actions past to the actions that are present.’
¹⁵
Hobbes had also declared that experience of things past could endow a man with foresight. But in May 1670, with the future, at least in Charles’s mind, settled by the Treaty of Dover, the present was all that counted.