for she clung to that as to the anchor of salvation. But he in his
egregious vanity must of course misunderstand.
“Hurts!” he cried, and the rapture in his accents should have warned
her. “Because you resist it, because you fight against the commands of
your true self. Anne!” He seized her, and crushed her to him. “Anne!”
Wild terror gripped her at that almost brutal contact, and anger, too,
her dignity surging up in violent outraged rebellion. A scream, loud
and piercing, broke from her and rang through the still garden. It
brought him to his senses. It was as if he had been lifted up into the
air, and then suddenly allowed to fall.
He sprang away from her, an incoherent exclamation on his lips, and
when an instant later Monsieur de Putange came running up in alarm, his
hand upon his sword, those two stood with the width of the avenue
between them, Buckingham erect and defiant, the Queen breathing hard
and trembling, a hand upon her heaving breast as if to repress its
tumult.
“Madame! Madame!” had been Putange’s cry, as he sprang forward in alarm
and self-reproach.
He stood now almost between them, looking from one to the other in
bewilderment. Neither spoke.
“You cried out, Madame,” M. de Putange reminded her, and Buckingham may
well have wondered whether presently he would be receiving M. de
Putange’s sword in his vitals. He must have known that his life now
hung upon her answer.
“I called you, that was all,” said the Queen, in a voice that she
strove to render calm. “I confess that I was startled to find myself
alone with M. L’Ambassadeur. Do not let it occur again, M. de Putange!”
The equerry bowed in silence. His itching fingers fell away from his
sword-hilt, and he breathed more freely. He had no illusions as to what
must have happened. But he was relieved there were to be no
complications. The others now coming up with them, the party thereafter
kept together until presently Buckingham and Lord Holland took their
leave.
On the morrow the last stage of the escorting journey was accomplished.
A little way beyond Amiens the Court took its leave of Henrietta Maria,
entrusting her now to Buckingham and his followers, who were to convey
her safely to Charles.
It was a very contrite and downcast Buckingham who came now to Anne of
Austria as she sat in her coach with the Princesse de Conti for only
companion.
“Madame,” he said, “I am come to take my leave.”
“Fare you well, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur,” she said, and her voice was
warm and gentle, as if to show him that she bore no malice.
“I am come to ask your pardon, madame,” he said, in a low voice.
“Oh, monsieur—no more, I beg you.” She looked down; her hands were
trembling, her cheeks going red and white by turns.
He put his head behind the curtains of the coach, so that none might
see him from outside, and looking at him now, she beheld tears in his
eyes.
“Do not misunderstand me, madame. I ask your pardon only for having
discomposed you, startled you. As for what I said, it were idle to ask
pardon, since I could no more help saying it than I can help drawing
breath. I obeyed an instinct stronger than the will to live. I gave
expression to something that dominates my whole being, and will ever
dominate it as long as I have life. Adieu, madame! At need you know
where a servant who will gladly die for you is to be found.” He kissed
the hem of her robe, dashed the back of his hand across his eyes, and
was gone before she could say a word in answer.
She sat pale, and very thoughtful, and the Princesse de Conti, watching
her furtively, observed that her eyes were moist.
“I will answer for the Queen’s virtue,” she stated afterwards, “but I
cannot speak so positively for the hardness of her heart, since without
doubt the Duke’s tears affected her spirits.”
But it was not yet the end. As Buckingham was nearing Calais, he was
met by a courier from Whitehall, with instructions for him regarding
the negotiations he had been empowered to carry out with France in the
matter of an alliance against Spain—negotiations which had not thriven
with Louis and Richelieu, possibly because the ambassador was
ill-chosen. The instructions came too late to be of use, but in time to
serve as a pretext for Buckingham’s return to Amiens. There he sought
an audience of the Queen-Mother, and delivered himself to her of a
futile message for the King. This chimerical business—as Madame de
Motteville shrewdly calls it—being accomplished, he came to the real
matter which had prompted him to use that pretext for his return, and
sought audience of Anne of Austria.
It was early morning, and the Queen was not yet risen. But the levées
at the Court of France were precisely what the word implies, and they
were held by royalty whilst still abed. It was not, therefore, amazing
that he should have been admitted to her presence. She was alone save
for her lady-in-waiting, Madame de Lannoi, who was, we are told, aged,
prudent and virtuous. Conceive, therefore, the outraged feelings of
this lady upon seeing the English duke precipitate himself wildly into
the room, and on his knees at the royal bedside seize the coverlet and
bear it to his lips.
Whilst the young Queen looked confused and agitated, Madame de Lannoi
became a pillar of icy dignity.
“M. le Duc,” says she, “it is not customary in France to kneel when
speaking to the Queen.”
“I care nothing for the customs of France, madame,” he answered rudely.
“I am not a Frenchman.”
“That is too obvious, monsieur,” snapped the elderly, prudent and
virtuous countess. “Nevertheless, whilst in France perhaps monsieur
will perceive the convenience of conforming to French customs. Let me
call for a chair for Monsieur le Duc.”
“I do not want a chair, madame.”
The countess cast her eyes to Heaven, as if to say, “I suppose one
cannot expect anything else in a foreigner,” and let him kneel as he
insisted, placing herself, however, protectingly at the Queen’s pillow.
Nevertheless, entirely unabashed, heeding Madame de Lannoi’s presence
no more than if she had been part of the room’s furniture, the Duke
delivered himself freely of what was in his mind. He had been obliged
to return to Amiens on a matter of State. It was unthinkable that he
should be so near to her Majesty and not hasten to cast himself at her
feet; and whilst gladdening the eyes of his body with the sight of her
matchless perfection, the image of which was ever before the eyes of
his soul, allow himself the only felicity life now held for him—that of
protesting himself her utter slave. This, and much more of the kind,
did he pour out, what time the Queen, embarrassed and annoyed beyond
utterance, could only stare at him in silence.
Apart from the matchless impudence of it, it was also of a rashness
beyond pardon. Unless Madame de Lannoi were the most circumspect of
women, here was a fine tale for Court gossips, and for the King’s ears,
a tale that must hopelessly compromise the Queen. For that, Buckingham,
in his self-sufficiency and arrogance, appears to have cared nothing.
One suspects that it would have pleased his vanity to have his name
linked with the Queen’s by the lips of scandal.
She found her tongue at last.
“Monsieur le Duc,” she said in her confusion, “it was not necessary, it
was not worth while, to have asked audience of me for this. You have
leave to go.”
He looked up in doubt, and saw only confusion; attributed it perhaps to
the presence of that third party to which himself he had been so
indifferent. He kissed the coverlet again, stumbled to his feet, and
reached the door. Thence he sent her a flaming glance of his bold eyes,
and hand on heart—
“Adieu, madame!” said he in tragic tones, and so departed.
Madame de Lannoi was discreet, and related at the time nothing of what
had passed at that interview. But that the interview itself had taken
place under such conditions was enough to set the tongue of gossip
wagging. An echo of it reached the King, together with the story of
that other business in the garden, and he was glad to know that the
Duke of Buckingham was back in London. Richelieu, to vent his own
malice against the Queen, sought to feed the King’s suspicions.
“Why did she cry out, sire?” he will have asked. “What did M. de
Buckingham do to make her cry out?”
“I don’t know. But whatever it was, she was no party to it since she
did cry out.”
Richelieu did not pursue the matter just then. But neither did he
abandon it. He had his agents in London and elsewhere, and he desired
of them a close report upon the Duke of Buckingham’s movements, and the
fullest particulars of his private life.
Meanwhile, Buckingham had left behind him in France two faithful agents
of his own, with instructions to keep his memory green with the Queen.
For he intended to return upon one pretext or another before very long,
and complete the conquest. Those agents of his were Lord Holland and
the artist Balthazar Gerbier. It is to be presumed that they served the
Duke’s interests well, and it is no less to be presumed from that which
followed that they found her Majesty willing enough to hear news of
that amazingly romantic fellow who had flashed across the path of her
grey life, touching it for a moment with his own flaming radiance. In
her loneliness she came to think of him with tenderness and pity, in
which pity for herself and her dull lot was also blent. He was away,
overseas; she might never see him again; therefore there could be
little harm in indulging the romantic tenderness he had inspired.
So one day, many months after his departure, she begged Gerbier—as La
Rochefoucauld tells us—to journey to London and bear the Duke a
trifling memento of her—a set of diamond studs. That love-token—for it
amounted to no less—Gerbier conveyed to England, and delivered to the
Duke.
Buckingham’s head was so completely turned by the event, and his desire
to see Anne of Austria again became thereupon so overmastering, that he
at once communicated to France that he was coming over as the
ambassador of the King of England to treat of certain matters connected
with Spain. But Richelieu had heard from the French ambassador in
London that portraits of the Queen of France were excessively abundant
at York House, the Duke’s residence, and he had considered it his duty
to inform the King. Louis was angry, but not with the Queen. To have
believed her guilty of any indiscretion would have hurt his gloomy
pride too deeply. All that he believed was that this was merely an
expression of Buckingham’s fanfaronading, thrasonical disposition, a
form of vain, empty boasting peculiar to megalomaniacs.
As a consequence, the King of England was informed that the Duke of
Buckingham, for reasons well known to himself, would not be agreeable
as Charles’s ambassador to his Most Christian Majesty. Upon learning
this, the vainglorious Buckingham was loud in proclaiming the reason
(“well known to himself”) and in protesting that he would go to France
to see the Queen with the French King’s consent or without it. This was
duly reported to Richelieu, and by Richelieu to King Louis. But his
Most Christian Majesty merely sneered, accounted it more empty boasting
on the part of the parvenu, and dismissed it from his mind.
Richelieu found this attitude singularly exasperating in a King who was
temperamentally suspicious. It so piqued and annoyed him, that when
considered in addition to his undying rancour against Anne of Austria,
it is easily believed he spared no pains to obtain something in the
nature of a proof that the Queen was not as innocent as Louis insisted
upon believing.
Now it happened that one of his London agents informed him, among other
matters connected with the Duke’s private life, that he had a bitter
and secret enemy in the Countess of Carlisle, between whom and himself
there had been a passage of some tenderness too abruptly ended by the
Duke. Richelieu, acting upon this information, contrived to enter into
correspondence with Lady Carlisle, and in the course of this
correspondence he managed her so craftily—says La Rochefoucauld—that
very soon she was, whilst hardly realizing it, his Eminence’s most
valuable spy near Buckingham. Richelieu informed her that he was mainly
concerned with information that would throw light upon the real
relations of Buckingharn and the Queen of France, and he persuaded her
that nothing was too insignificant to be communicated. Her resentment
of the treatment she had received from Buckingham, a resentment the
more bitter for being stifled—since for her reputation’s sake she dared
not have given it expression—made her a very ready instrument in
Richelieu’s hands, and there was no scrap of gossip she did not
carefully gather up and dispatch to him. But all was naught until one
day at last she was able to tell him something that set his pulses
beating more quickly than their habit.
She had it upon the best authority that a set of diamond studs
constantly worn of late by the Duke was a love-token from the Queen of
France sent over to Buckingham by a messenger of her own. Here, indeed,
was news. Here was a weapon by which the Queen might be destroyed.
Richelieu considered. If he could but obtain possession of the studs,
the rest would be easy. There would be an end—and such an end!—to the
King’s obstinate, indolent faith in his wife’s indifference to that
boastful, flamboyant English upstart. Richelieu held his peace for the
time being, and wrote to the Countess.
Some little time thereafter there was a sumptuous ball given at York
House, graced by the presence of King Charles and his young French
Queen. Lady Carlisle was present, and in the course of the evening
Buckingham danced with her. She was a very beautiful, accomplished and
ready-witted woman, and to-night his Grace found her charms so alluring
that he was almost disposed to blame himself for having perhaps treated
her too lightly. Yet she seemed at pains to show him that it was his to
take up again the affair at the point at which it had been dropped. She
was gay, arch, provoking and irresistible. So irresistible that
presently, yielding to the lure of her, the Duke slipped away from his
guests with the lady on his arm, and they found themselves at the foot
of the garden in the shadow of the water-gate that Inigo Jones had just
completed for him. My lady languished at his side, permitted him to
encircle her with a protecting arm, and for a moment lay heavily
against him. He caught her violently to him, and now her ladyship,
hitherto so yielding, with true feminine contrariness set herself to
resist him. A scuffle ensued between them. She broke from him at last,
and sped swift as a doe across the lawn towards the lights of the great
house, his Grace in pursuit between vexation and amusement.
But he did not overtake her, and it was with a sense of having been
fooled that he rejoined his guests. His questing eyes could discern her
nowhere. Presently he made inquiries, to be told that she had desired
her carriage to be called, and had left York House immediately upon
coming in from the garden.
He concluded that she was gone off in a pet. It was very odd. It was,
in fact, most flagrantly contradictory that she should have taken
offense at that which she had so obviously invited. But then she always
had been a perverse and provoking jade. With that reflection he put her
from his mind.
But anon, when his guests had departed, and the lights in the great
house were extinguished, Buckingham thought of the incident again.
Cogitating it, he sat in his room, his fingers combing his fine,
pointed, auburn beard. At last, with a shrug and a half-laugh, he rose
to undress for bed. And then a cry escaped him, and brought in his
valet from an adjoining room. The riband of diamond studs was gone.
Reckless and indifferent as he was, a sense of evil took him in the
moment of his discovery of that loss, so that he stood there pale,
staring, and moist of brow. It was no ordinary theft. There were upon
his person a dozen ornaments of greater value, any one of which could
have been more easily detached. This was the work of some French agent.
He had made no secret of whence those studs had come to him.
There his thoughts checked on a sudden. As in a flash of revelation, he
saw the meaning of Lady Carlisle’s oddly contradictory behaviour. The
jade had fooled him. It was she who had stolen the riband. He sat down
again, his head in his hands, and swiftly, link by link, he pieced
together a complete chain.
Almost as swiftly he decided upon the course of action which he must
adopt so as to protect the Queen of France’s honour. He was virtually
the ruler of England, master in these islands of an almost boundless
power. That power he would exert to the full this very night to thwart
those enemies of his own and of the Queen’s, who worked so subtly in
concert. Many would be wronged, much harm would be done, the liberties
of some thousands of freeborn Englishmen would be trampled underfoot.
What did it matter? It was necessary that his Grace of Buckingham
should cover up an indiscretion.
“Set ink and paper yonder,” he bade his gaping valet. “Then go call M.
Gerbier. Rouse Lacy and Thom, and send them to me at once, and leave
word that I shall require a score of couriers to be in the saddle and
ready to set out in half an hour.”
Bewildered, the valet went off upon his errand. The Duke sat down to
write. And next morning English merchants learnt that the ports of
England were closed by the King’s express command—delivered by his
minister, the Duke of Buckingham—that measures were being taken—were
already taken in all southern ports—so that no vessel of any kind
should leave the island until the King’s further pleasure were made
known. Startled, the people wondered was this enactment the forerunner
of war. Had they known the truth, they might have been more startled
still, though in a different manner. As swiftly as couriers could
travel—and certainly well ahead of any messenger seeking escape
overseas—did this blockade spread, until the gates of England were
tight locked against the outgoing of those diamond studs which meant
the honour of the Queen of France.
And meanwhile a diamond-cutter was replacing the purloined stones by
others, matching them so closely that no man should be able to say
which were the originals and which the copies. Buckingham and Gerbier
between them guided the work. Soon it was accomplished, and a vessel
slipped down the Thames, allowed to pass by those who kept close watch
to enforce the royal decree, and made sail for Calais, which was
beginning to manifest surprise at this entire cessation of traffic from
England. From that vessel landed Gerbier, and rode straight to Paris,
carrying the Queen of France the duplicate studs, which were to replace
those which she had sent to Buckingham.
Twenty-four hours later the ports of England were unsealed, and
commerce was free and unhampered once more. But it was twenty-four
hours too late for Richelieu and his agent, the Countess of Carlisle.
His Eminence deplored a fine chance lost through the excessive power
that was wielded in England by the parvenu.
Yet that is not quite the end of the story. Buckingham’s inflamed and
reckless mind would stop at nothing now to achieve the object of his
desires—go to France and see the Queen. Since the country was closed to
him, he would force a way into it, the red way of war. Blood should
flow, ruin and misery desolate the land, but in the end he would go to
Paris to negotiate a peace, and that should be his opportunity. Other
reasons there may have been, but none so dominant, none that could not
have been removed by negotiation. The pretexted _casus belli_ was the
matter of the Protestants of La Rochelle, who were in rebellion against
their king.
To their aid sailed Buckingham with an English expedition. Disaster and
defeat awaited it. Its shattered remnant crept back in disgrace to
England, and the Duke found himself more detested by the people than he
had been already—which is saying much. He went off to seek comfort at
the hands of the two persons who really loved him—his doting King and
his splendid wife.
But the defeat had neither lessened his resolve nor chastened his
insolence. He prepared a second expedition in the very teeth of a
long-suffering nation’s hostility, indifferent to the mutinies and
mutterings about him. What signified to him the will of a nation? He
desired to win to the woman whom he loved, and to accomplish that he
nothing recked that he should set Europe in a blaze, nothing recked
what blood should be poured out, what treasure dissipated.
Hatred of him by now was so widespread and vocal, that his friends,
fearing that soon it would pass from words to deeds, urged him to take
precautions, advised the wearing of a shirt of mail for greater safety.
But he laughed sneeringly, ever arrogant and scornful.
“It needs not. There are no Roman spirits left,” was his contemptuous
answer.
He was mistaken. One morning after breakfast, as he was leaving the
house in the High Street, Portsmouth, where he lodged whilst
superintending the final preparations for that unpopular expedition,
John Felton, a self-appointed instrument of national vengeance, drove a
knife to the hilt into the Duke’s breast.
“May the Lord have mercy on your soul!” was the pious exclamation with
which the slayer struck home. And, in all the circumstances, there
seems to have been occasion for the prayer.
IX. THE PATH OF EXILE
The Fall of Lord Clarendon
Tight-wrapped in his cloak against the icy whips of the black winter’s
night, a portly gentleman, well advanced in years, picked his way
carefully down the wet, slippery steps of the jetty by the light of a
lanthorn, whose rays gleamed lividly on crushed brown seaweed and
trailing green sea slime. Leaning heavily upon the arm which a sailor
held out to his assistance, he stepped into the waiting boat that rose
and fell on the heaving black waters. A boathook scraped against the
stones, and the frail craft was pushed off.
The oars dipped, and the boat slipped away through the darkness,
steering a course for the two great poop lanterns that were swinging
rhythmically high up against the black background of the night. The
elderly gentleman, huddled now in the stern-sheets, looked behind
him—to look his last upon the England he had loved and served and
ruled. The lanthorn, shedding its wheel of yellow light upon the jetty
steps, was all of it that he could now see.
He sighed, and settled down again to face the poop lights, dancing
there above the invisible hull of the ship that was to carry Edward
Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, lately Lord Chancellor of England, into exile.
As a dying man looks down the foreshortened vista of his active life,
so may Edward Hyde—whose career had reached a finality but one degree
removed from the finality of death—have reviewed in that moment those
thirty years of sincere endeavour and high achievement since he had
been a law student in the Temple when Charles I. was King.
That King he had served faithfully, so faithfully that when the
desperate fortunes of the Royalist party made it necessary to place the
Prince of Wales beyond the reach of Cromwell, it was in Sir Edward
Hyde’s care that the boy was sent upon his travels. The present was not
to be Hyde’s first experience of exile. He had known it, and of a
bitter sort, in those impecunious days when the Second Charles, whose
steps he guided, was a needy, homeless outcast. A man less staunch and
loyal might have thrown over so profitless a service. He had talents
that would have commanded a price in the Roundhead market. Yet
staunchly adhering to the Stuart fortunes, labouring ceaselessly and
shrewdly in the Stuart interest, employing his great ability and
statecraft, he achieved at long length the restoration of the Stuarts
to the Throne of England. And for all those loyal, self-denying labours
in exile on the Stuart behalf, all the reward he had at the time was
that James Stuart, Duke of York, debauched his daughter.