King Charles II (89 page)

A Capuchin monk, Padre Mansueti, one of the chaplains to the Duchess of York who came over to England with her, was also prompted to go to the Duke of York with the same message. He had been entertaining a Benedictine monk, Dom Gibbon, at dinner, when the news came that the King was sinking; Gibbon spurred on Mansueti to act.
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To Barrillon, James was said to have responded immediately with a characteristic declaration: ‘I would rather risk everything than not do my duty on this occasion.’ He told Barrillon he was aware that there was no time to lose. To Mansueti he was said to have been equally accommodating. It may be questioned whether these pleas were necessary: whether James the straightforward believer would really have let his brother die as a Protestant. The answer seems to be that it was not until he knew his brother to be dying that he dared countermand his known policy, and then only when encouraged by Barrillon and, on another level, one of his priestly entourage. So close and secret had Charles kept his inner soul.

The introduction of a Catholic priest into the royal chamber remained a challenging task. For one thing, there were the Protestant bishops, innocent vultures unaware of the embarrassment their presence was causing: how could they be politely ejected? Even if that were accomplished, the problem of discovering a Catholic priest at short notice and smuggling him into Whitehall was even more horrendous in the fierce light of publicity which shone down upon the whole palace.

First of all, the King’s consent still had to be gained. Only the Duke of York had the opportunity to do so. As discreetly as possible he bent down and whispered in his brother’s ear. The King answered. From time to time James had to repeat his words, so low did he speak. The King himself was barely audible,
except to those closest to him, who included Barrillon. But the King’s basic answer remained the same: ‘Yes, with all my heart.’

The King had agreed.

On Barrillon now devolved the duty of actually finding a priest. All parties concerned agreed that time was short. But there was an absurd complication. Those priests most readily available were the Queen’s chaplains; for they were in a room divided from the King’s only by the entrance to the Privy Stairs, used by Chiffinch and others to conduct visitors discreetly to him. The Queen’s priests were not in on the secret – there seems to have been a general, if unacknowledged, conspiracy to keep the Queen’s household clear of it for her own sake as well as the King’s. That was less serious than the fact that they only spoke Portuguese, a language the King had never mastered.

The chaplains of the Duchess of York, on the other hand, spoke Italian, a language in which he was comparatively fluent. But these priests were both well known and extremely unpopular: they would be immediately recognized for what they were if they attempted to enter the King’s chamber, with fatal results. And the Duke of York’s apartments lay on the wrong side of the King’s: entry from one to the other could be vetted by the watchful.

It was the Portuguese Count of Castelmelhor who pointed out the language barrier of the Queen’s household. Barrillon and James between them therefore decided to tackle the house of the Venetian Resident, where they would find an Italian priest. Before they set off, Castelmelhor did look into the Queen’s room. And there, by a merciful dispensation, he discovered Father Huddleston.

It had been a long road from Worcester for both parties. Mary Beatrice afterwards described Father Huddleston to the nuns at Chaillot as ‘
un homme très simple
’. She even regretted that a more suitable ‘subject’ could not have been found ‘to help this great Prince make a good death’. She had presumably managed to avoid taking in (language barrier again) her brother-in-law’s tales of escape and derring-do, which involved the good priest. Otherwise she must surely have realized that no more appropriate missionary could have been discovered.

Besides, if Father Huddleston had preserved a certain simplicity in the quarter of a century which had passed since Worcester, it was appropriate holy simplicity rather than something more rustic. Rewarded by the gratitude of the King after the Restoration, he had formed part of the household of two Queens, Henrietta Maria and Catharine; he was thus hardly a stranger to Court circles.

Disguised in a wig and a cassock, Father Huddleston was led from the Queen’s suite of rooms to a closet just off the King’s chamber which had a private communicating door. Here he waited. There was a further problem. Father Huddleston had not been bearing the Blessed Sacrament with him on his visit to the Queen’s rooms (although he did have a viaticum of holy oil). So one of the Portuguese priests, Father Bento de Lemoz, had to be despatched outside the palace on the vital mission to secure a Host. In the meantime, the Duke of York cleared the King’s room in soldierly fashion by simply announcing in a loud voice, ‘Gentlemen, the King wishes everybody to retire except the Earls of Bath and Feversham.’ The former, a fervent Royalist, was the Groom of the Stole; the latter, a Frenchman naturalized English, the Queen’s chamberlain. But both gentlemen were Protestants, which helped to pacify the Bishops. Their continued attendance, which was contrary to the King’s own wishes, was also due to James’ concern that his dying brother’s conversion should be seen to be voluntary; he did not want to be the sole witness to such a momentous event. When the room was ready, Chiffinch, who had brought so many clandestine night visitors to his master in the past, brought in one more, a man of God.

Charles
II
cried out with pleasure at the sight of Huddleston. The various accounts of the conversion scene vary in detail, but the King’s general reaction to Huddleston was clear: ‘You that saved my body are now come to save my soul.’ He was certainly well aware of the providential element in the presence so close at hand of ‘this good father, whom, I see, O good Lord, that Thou hast created for my good’.

Father Huddleston put a series of questions to the King. Did he wish to die in the Faith and the Communion of the Holy Roman Catholic Church? Did he wish to make a full confession
of all his sins? To all these questions, Charles answered firmly, in a low but distinct voice. His resolution was clear. Then he made his general confession. Amongst the things for which he declared himself ‘most heartily sorry’ was the fact that ‘he had deferr’d his Reconciliation so long’– these words on the lips of a dying man, reported by Father Huddleston without contradiction, being yet another proof, if proof were needed, that the King was not already a secret Catholic.
^fn6
The King’s confession ended in an act of contrition: ‘Into Thy Hands, Sweet Jesus, I commend my soul. Mercy, Sweet Jesus, Mercy.’ The priest gave him absolution.

Huddleston’s last question concerned the Blessed Sacrament: ‘Will you receive it?’

The King replied, ‘If I were worthy of it, Amen.’

But since the Host had not yet arrived, Father Huddleston asked the King’s leave to anoint him with the holy oil, in the Sacrament of Extreme Unction. To which the King agreed ‘with all my heart’. When the Portuguese priest returned with the Host – probably from the chapel at Somerset House – Huddleston went to the side door and received it. The King, with a touching flash of the old spirit, tried to rise. As he struggled, he said, ‘At least let me meet my heavenly Lord in a better posture than in my bed.’ Father Huddleston calmed him: Almighty God, who saw into his heart, would accept his good intention.

So the King received the Catholic Communion and afterwards Huddleston sat quietly by him, reading the Catholic prayers for the dying in a low voice. It was by Charles’ own request that Huddleston recited once again the Act of Contrition, ending ‘Mercy, Sweet Jesus, Mercy.’ Then the priest put a crucifix into the King’s hands, saying that it only remained to him to meditate on the death and passion of ‘Our dear Saviour Jesus Christ’. Father Huddleston recited more prayers as the King held the crucifix: ‘Beseech Him with all humility, that His most precious
Blood may not be shed in vain for you … and when it shall please Him to take you out of this transitory world, to grant you a joyful resurrection, and an eternal crown of glory in the next.’

Then Father Huddleston left as he had come, through the secret door. The whole momentous episode had lasted three-quarters of an hour.

The King’s progress out of the transitory world, although sure, was slow. The stubborn way his body clung to life even gave hope to those Catholics in the know that his conversion might have wrought a miraculous cure. The King himself summed it up with his ineffable politeness: he told the gentlemen surrounding his bed that he was sorry to trouble them by taking so long a-dying, and he asked their pardon.
^36
fn7

Throughout the long night of Thursday, 5 February, Charles remained conscious. The physicians, allowed back into the torture-chamber, set to work with their remedies again with even greater energy. At one point the King referred to his continuing ordeal. He told his attendants, ‘I have suffered very much and more than any of you can imagine.’ Once, listening to those innumerable palace clocks striking, he asked the time. They told him and he said, ‘My business will shortly be done.’ But his stoicism continued to excite the admiration of all those about him. It was an exemplary death-bed, as might have been expected of one who had learnt early to confront the unknown with courage and hope.

There were a series of farewells. Catharine came. Charles greeted her lovingly. But her distress, both at the King’s tenderness and at his suffering, was too great. Tears overcame her. She was carried back to her own apartments, half-fainting. She sent back a message to her husband to beg his pardon if she had ever offended him.

‘Alas! poor woman,’ said the King. ‘She beg my pardon! I beg hers with all my heart.’

To James too, linked to him by every shared memory of boyhood and now at last by Faith, the King showed much tenderness. James, kneeling, could not hold back his own tears. Charles begged his pardon too, for the hardships which he had inflicted upon him from time to time. At some point in the long midnight hours he handed him the keys of his cabinet and begged God to give him a prosperous reign. The Duchess of York remained openly weeping at her husband’s side.

The King also spoke of his children. He recommended his little family most touchingly to his brother, naming each one meticulously. When he stumbled on the name Burford – as Nelly’s handsome, spirited boy was still known, despite his new dukedom of St Albans – the King put the boy ‘into his [James’] hand’. He asked James to take particular care of Burford’s education, ‘for he will be spoiled else’.

But the King did not name Monmouth. And James, repeating the list back to him, did not mention the forbidden name either.

The ladies, those other members of his extended family circle, were not forgotten. In a phrase sometimes supposed to be apocryphal but in fact attested by three sources, the King adjured the Duke of York ‘to be well to Portsmouth’ and ‘not let poor Nelly starve’ – even in his last hours the vital social distinction between the two ladies was preserved.
³⁸

One by one his children came and knelt down by the King’s bed and received his blessing. At which the throng of people once more surrounding the royal bed, and crowding into the chamber, cried out that the King was their common father. So all present in fact knelt down for his blessing. It was of course an Anglican blessing. But when Bishop Ken repeatedly urged the King to take the Sacrament, Charles declined it. He would only say that he had thought of his approaching end, and hoped that he had made his peace with God. Ken was unaware what this characteristically courteous evasion meant.

At six o’clock in the morning the King asked for the curtains to be drawn back. He wanted, he said, to watch the dawn for the last time. He was still conscious enough to ask that the eight-day clock in his room should be wound up, because it was the appointed day. An hour later he became breathless and
struggled to sit up. Once again the doctors bled him, taking twelve ounces, and gave him heart tonics. At half-past eight his speech began to fail once more. This time it did not return. By ten o’clock he was in a coma.

The rising sun over the Thames was probably the last sight he took in. It was an appropriate one for this man who had so loved the early morning on its misty waters.

King Charles
II
died at noon. It was now high water on the river and the time of the full moon. The day was Friday, 6 February 1685, and he was in his fifty-fifth year.

1
These and various other sources for the King’s death-bed are considered and collated in Raymond Crawfurd,
The Last Days of Charles
II
, 1909. But Crawfurd’s list of sources is not exhaustive: amongst others an interesting account by Anne Margaret, wife of Sir Richard Mason, second Clerk Comptroller of the Household, printed in
Household Words
, 9 (1854), as by ‘a wife of a person about the Court at Whitehall’, is omitted by Crawfurd.

2
See Norman Chevers, M.D.,
An Enquiry into the Circumstances of the Death of King Charles the Second of England
, Calcutta 1861 (not mentioned in Crawfurd).

3
See M. L. Wolbarsht, Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, and D. S. Sax, Psychiatric Institute, University Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland: ‘Charles
II
, A Royal Martyr’, in
Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London
, vol. 16, no. 2, November 1961. As they themselves point out in an Appendix to the article, Pascal’s death ‘was almost certainly not due’ to mercury poisoning; as for Faraday’s death, ‘it would be difficult to say mercury was the specific cause. …’ Yet both Pascal and Faraday’s experiments far outstripped those of Charles
II
.

4
There is of course the mysterious matter of the two papers ‘containing about a quarter of a sheet on both sides’ shown by James, then King, to Pepys about six months after his brother’s death. These papers gave arguments in support of the Church of Rome. But it is not clear if they were in Charles
II
’s own handwriting, annotated by him, or merely copies certified by James. Nor is it clear if these arguments were supposed to be Charles
II
’s own composition or the arguments of others proposed by him. Most of the evidence concerning these papers is second if not third hand. (Pepys never wrote about the matter himself but reported it to Evelyn. Burnet heard about it from Thomas Tenison, but his account differs from that of Evelyn. Halifax would say no more than that the King ‘might do it’.)
³⁴
All one can reliably conclude is that Charles
II
continued to show an interest in the tenets of Catholicism.