The King's Mistress (39 page)

“One night at the theatre there was a scene that did not take place upon the stage. We entered only to see that my cousin Charles Louis, the Elector Palatine, was there. He and his brother Rupert spent much time at my father’s court when I was a boy, and he was with us early in the difficulties with Parliament, but he soon turned his back on our cause. Worse yet, he made peace with the rebels, and took up residence at Whitehall, hoping that Cromwell would make him king in place of my father. Most shameful, especially as he had often importuned my father to help him regain the Palatinate.

“As you can imagine, I cannot stomach him now, and we turned on our heels and strode from the theatre, leaving him stammering and red-faced in our wake.

“Cologne is not a little altered, for from having very little company, and some of those worse than none, we have now as good as can be, and pass our time as well as people can do that have no more money, for we dance and play as if we had taken the Plate Fleet, though I am confident our losses are not so great as Cromwell’s are, who for certain has received a very considerable one at Hispaniola, and we are in great hopes of the breach between Spain and England.

“We have here a very great intrigue between Sir A.H. and Mrs. P., which I believe will end in matrimony, and I conclude it the rather, because I have observed a cloud in his face at any time these two months, which Giov. Battista della Porta in his
Physonomia
says foretells misfortune. Ever your loving friend, Charles R.”

M
ARY WAS BACK AT
T
HE
H
AGUE IN
O
CTOBER, BEARING GIFTS FOR
Jane from herself and Charles.

“I fear my poor brother is losing hope of being restored,” she told Jane. “And his penury gnaws at him, at his pride and his sense of himself. He told me he was so poor he had not eaten meat for ten days together in July, and of course his followers are in the same state.”

Jane heard little from Charles over the next months, and her heart bled to think of him dispirited and sad.

Soon after the New Year, Jane was cheered by a visit from Henry Lascelles, but dismayed at his news.

“Do you recall Henry Manning?” Henry asked, grim-faced.

“That convivial young man who joined us in Cologne? Yes, why?” Jane wondered.

“That convivial young man proved to be a spy,” Henry growled. “He followed His Majesty to Middleburg last spring and reported on his movements to the rebels, as well as betraying the much he knew of loyalists at home. The failure of the risings owed somewhat to his intelligence, and there were many died in England because of him.”

“What happened to him?” Jane asked, afraid to hear the answer.

“We took him in the act of writing to Cromwell’s man Thurloe. He attempted to tear up the papers but we prevented him, and he had about him plenty more that damned him. The king and others questioned him. He denied and equivocated, the cowardly dog, but at last he admitted all, and we shot him in the woods outside Cologne.”

Jane could imagine only too well how such betrayal must eat at Charles’s heart, make him wary of trusting anyone, and how he must despair at ever returning to his kingdom.

“I hope you will remember,” she wrote to him, “the constancy and love shown to you by so many of your subjects during those weeks we were together and afterwards. Poor people, to whom the reward of a thousand pounds for betraying you would mean the ability to keep them and their families in comfort for the rest of their lives, yet they kept their silence and did for you whatever they could, though to do so put them in great peril. Pray do not let the treachery of one man blind you to the loyalty of many more.”

She read the letter over, feeling once more the excitement of the days and nights they had shared.

“My darling, it breaks my heart to think that one you thought your friend should prove so false. I wish I could hold you to me, give you the comfort of my arms as I did in those nights we were together. I would smooth your brow with my hand and kiss away the sting of treachery. If I could march on England alone and vanquish the rebels, you know I would do it, and gladly, too. Take heart, my love, for I am sure in my soul that the day will come that the king will enjoy his own again. With love always, your Jane.”

Some weeks later Mr Boswell, a hanger-on at Mary’s court, came to The Hague from Cologne. Jane hated his leering insinuations, his constant preening and boasting, and her heart sank as he approached her, a smirk on his fat red face.

“Mistress Lane! The sage who counsels the king!”

“What do you mean, sir?” He had the look of a cat stalking a mouse, and she struggled to keep her voice calm.

“Why,” Boswell cried, pouncing once she had taken the hook, “I was in His Majesty’s bedchamber t’other day”—he drawled with elaborate carelessness—“and His Majesty read out your letter to him.”

Jane felt her face burn. Surely Charles had not read out her letter, such private thoughts and memories meant only for him, to a crowd of strangers? All that day the thought lay heavy in her mind. She pictured Charles in the midst of his friends, laughing at her care and advice. Throughout the week she teetered between thinking it would not be like him to do so, and fearing that perhaps she had so fallen in his esteem that he would mock her. That notion infuriated her, and she sat down to write another letter.

“Mr Boswell says that you read my letter to your friends. It was meant for your eyes alone, and I would not have written in such unguarded terms had I known that it should be made public. I regret it much if my writing is unwelcome or my love to you is troublesome. I would not for the world thrust myself where I am not wanted.”

She folded the letter, stamped the seal into the hot wax, and handed it off to the messenger who would leave shortly for Cologne before she could change her mind.

Once more, Charles’s response was swift, accompanying Henry Lascelles to The Hague.

“My dearest Jane, I hope you do not believe that hearing from a person I am so much beholding to can be in the least degree troublesome to me, that am so sensible of the obligations I have to you, but on the contrary, ’tis a very great satisfaction to me to hear from you; and for that which Mr Boswell is pleased to tell you concerning your giving me good counsel in a letter, and my making it public in my bedchamber, is not the first lie that he has made, nor will it be the last, for I am certain there was never anything spoken in the bedchamber in my hearing to any such purpose, nor, I am confident, when I am not there, for I believe Mr Boswell’s end is to show his frequent being in my bedchamber, which is as true as the other. Your cousin will let you know that I have given orders for my picture for you, and if in this or in anything else I can show the sense I have of that which I owe you, pray let me know it, and it shall be done by your most assured and constant friend, Charles R.”

S
OON AFTER THE
N
EW
Y
EAR OF
1656
HAD BEGUN
, J
ANE HEARD
that Charles’s once-love Lucy Walter had arrived at The Hague.

“She’s living with Thomas Howard!” Nan Hyde whispered. “With the king’s bastard and that of Lord Taaffe!” Howard, the brother of the Duke of Suffolk, was one of Mary’s household, with apartments in the Stadtholder’s Palace. “Mary’s in a mighty rage about it, but what’s the poor girl to do? Taaffe has done with her, and the king has no money to keep her.”

A few days later, Jane came upon Lucy and her two children in one of the long galleries of the palace. Lucy smiled at her tentatively.

“Mistress Lane! What a pleasure to see you here.”

“And you.” Jane’s eyes went to the young boy seated on the floor before the fireplace, engrossed in laying out toy soldiers in ranks. He was about seven, cherub-cheeked and rosy-lipped, but the eyes he turned on her were sombre and purposeful.

“I am going to invade England,” he explained solemnly, pointing at his wooden soldiers. “And then the king my father will have his crown again.”

“His Majesty is lucky to have such a general as you,” Jane said, kneeling next to the boy. He nodded and straightened a soldier’s position. He was as like Charles as if he had been spat out of his mouth, she thought. Lucy was sitting in a chair nearby, her little daughter on her lap asleep, her thumb tucked into her mouth. The girl was about five, and angelic looking in her sleep, but Jane could tell at a glance that she lacked the Stuart blood.

“May I ask your counsel, Mistress Lane?” Lucy asked. The question took Jane off guard, but she nodded and drew up a stool next to Lucy’s chair.

“I think of going home to England,” Lucy said. “It is hard here, with the children. Charles has promised me a pension of five thousand pounds, but it never comes.”

Five thousand pounds, Jane thought. In a recent letter Charles had told her he ate but one meal a day, so dire was his poverty, and that the well-meant gift of a pack of hounds had mortified him extremely, as he could not possibly afford to feed them. Without a miracle he wouldn’t be able to send Lucy five shillings.

“He sends me cheerful notes and little gifts.” Lucy shrugged her shoulders hopelessly. “I fear he thinks to fob me off with empty words because I am a trouble to him. My lord Taaffe and Colonel O’Neill both tell me that the king desires me to be gone from here. Indeed, I think he wishes I would simply disappear. I know you know him well. Perhaps you know his heart better than I these days.”

Lucy’s stark pain and honesty were unsettling, and Jane’s heart went out to the girl, who looked at her so wretchedly and with such trust.

“I know he cares for you,” she said. “And of course for your boy.”

Lucy nodded uncertainly, as if weighing the truth of the statement.

“I would go home at once if I could,” Jane said. “You have family there who would help you?”

“I have family. What they could or would do for me I know not, but at least I would be in England. It’s warmer there.” She shivered, and Jane glanced at the snow falling outside the window.

“I will write to His Majesty,” Jane said. “And urge him to find a way to do more for you.”

“Thank you,” Lucy murmured. “Perhaps he’ll listen to you.”

T
HAT NIGHT
J
ANE REREAD
C
HARLES’S MOST RECENT LETTER
.

“February 5, 1656. My dearest Jane: In my affairs I am able to send you some better hopes than I could ever yet do. In Spain the war is declared against Cromwell, and I look every day it should be so in Flanders, and I believe I shall find my account very well in this change. If the things I look for fall out, our ill fortune will forsake us, and then we shall be happy together. Your most affectionate and constant friend, Charles R. P.S. I have given O’Neill a note for you to keep the mill going; it should have been more if I had had it.”

“My dear Charles,” Jane wrote to him. “I share your joy and hopes for happier times than you have seen of late. I hope that perhaps your better prospects will mean that you might find a way to provide more for the care of Lucy and your son. She is most sad and fearful, looking like a dog that expects to be whipped. Money would help her greatly, but I think it would lighten her soul just to know that you are thinking of her.”

Charles wrote back, sending money for Lucy, and exultant at the promises he had recently received from the Spanish officials in Brussels.

“At first I found them dry, yet at last they began to be very free with me and have promised a monthly allowance of three thousand crowns for me and fifteen hundred for my brother James. The Spanish ports will welcome my cousin Rupert and other English privateers, and best of all, Spain will provide arms and men in the cause of restoring me to my throne.”

Mary was displeased, though, by Charles’s alliance with Spain, the hereditary enemy of the United Provinces.

“He has promised not only that all Royalists in foreign armies shall now join the Spanish army, but that he will withdraw his Irish soldiers from their service in France and give them to Spain, who shall use them to fight against France,” she stormed. “The Duke of York is furious.”

Well he might be, Jane thought, as he had prospered and flourished by serving in Louis’s army, and he now must resign from that service or find himself allied against his brother. Moreover, Charles’s mother and sister Minette still made their home at the Palais Royal. What a tangle of royal cousins ruled Europe, and what complications arose from their disputes and alliances.

The Duke of York arrived at The Hague a few weeks later in a cold fury.

“The Duke of Gloucester has gone to join the Spanish army already!” Nan whispered to Jane, happy to have her lover nearby and enjoying the drama unfolding around her. “But James says he won’t go to the king, no matter what!”

Jane noted Nan’s casual use of the duke’s name. Things must be moving along apace in their secret romance. Close though she was to Charles, she would never refer to him to another person as anything other than “His Majesty” or “the king”.

By May Mary’s temper had cooled, she had repaired the breach between her brothers, and the Duke of York accepted a command with the Spanish forces. But, almost as if to assert that she would not be limited by Charles’s alliances, Mary journeyed to Paris to visit her mother. Of course Jane and Nan were with her, and so was the Duke of York.

In private with Jane, Nan spoke of practically nothing but the duke, her descriptions of their secret meetings growing more rapturous by the day.

“I think he will marry me,” she confided to Jane one night, looking out over the moonlit Seine and breathing in the sweet scent of blossoms on the summer air.

“Nan, he can’t!” Jane cried. “The king will make him marry some princess. I beg you keep hold of yourself. You wade so blithely into very deep waters, and I fear the waves will close above your head.”

But Nan only shrugged, and Jane knew that further words would be wasted.

Jane visited her old friend Mademoiselle d’Épernon, and their stroll in the gardens of the Tuileries brought back memories of her walks with Charles when she and John had first arrived in Paris, now almost five years earlier.