it was Hyde who, when that Restoration was accomplished, took in hand
and carried out the difficult task of welding together the old and the
new conditions of political affairs. And it was Hyde who was the
scapegoat when things did not run the course that Englishmen desired.
As the head of the administration he was held responsible even for
those acts which he had strongly but vainly reprobated in Council. It
was Hyde who was blamed when Charles sold Dunkirk to the French, and
spent the money in harlotry; it was Hyde who was blamed because the
Queen was childless.
The reason for this last lay in the fact that the wrong done to Hyde’s
daughter Anne had now been righted by marriage with the Duke of York.
Now the Duke of York was the heir-apparent, and the people, ever ready
to attach most credit to that which is most incredible and fantastic,
believed that to ensure the succession of his own grandchildren Hyde
had deliberately provided Charles with a barren wife.
When the Dutch, sailing up the Thames, had burnt the ships of war at
Chatham, and Londoners heard the thunder of enemy guns, Hyde was openly
denounced as a traitor by a people stricken with terror and seeking a
victim in the blind, unreasoning way of public feeling. They broke his
windows, ravaged his garden, and erected a gibbet before the gates of
his superb mansion on the north side of Piccadilly.
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and Lord Chancellor of England,
commanded the love of his intimates, but did not possess those
qualities of cheap glitter that make for popularity with the masses.
Nor did he court popularity elsewhere. Because he was austere in his
morals, grave and sober in his conduct, he was hated by those who made
up the debauched court of his prince. Because he was deeply religious
in his principles, the Puritans mistrusted him for a bigot. Because he
was autocratic in his policy he was detested by the Commons, the day of
autocracy being done.
Yet might he have weathered the general hostility had Charles been half
as loyal to him as he had ever been loyal to Charles. For a time, it is
true, the King stood his friend, and might so have continued to the end
had not the women become mixed up in the business. As Evelyn, the
diarist, puts it, this great man’s fall was the work of “the buffoones
and ladys of pleasure.”
It really is a very tangled story—this inner history of the fall of
Clarendon, with which the school-books are not concerned. In a sense,
it is also the story of the King’s marriage and of Catherine of
Braganza, his unfortunate little ugly Queen, who must have suffered as
much as any woman wedded to a sultan in any country where the seraglio
is not a natural and proper institution.
If Clarendon could not be said to have brought about the marriage, at
least he had given it his suffrages when proposed by Portugal, which
was anxious to establish an alliance with England as some protection
against the predatory designs of Spain. He had been influenced by the
dowry offered—five hundred thousand pounds in money, Tangier, which
would give England a commanding position on the Mediterranean, and the
Island of Bombay. Without yet foreseeing that the possession of Bombay,
and the freedom to trade in the East Indies—which Portugal had hitherto
kept jealously to herself—were to enable England to build up her great
Indian Empire, yet the commercial advantages alone were obvious enough
to make the match desirable.
Catherine of Braganza sailed for England, and on the lath of May, 1662,
Charles, attended by a splendid following, went to meet his bride at
Portsmouth. He was himself a very personable man, tall—he stood a full
six feet high—lean and elegantly vigorous. The ugliness of his drawn,
harsh-featured face was mitigated by the glory of full, low-lidded,
dark eyes, and his smile could be irresistibly captivating. He was as
graceful in manner as in person, felicitous of speech, and of an
indolent good temper that found expression in a charming urbanity.
Good temper and urbanity alike suffered rudely when he beheld the wife
they brought him. Catherine, who was in her twenty-fifth year, was of
an absurdly low stature, so long in the body and short in the legs
that, dressed as she was in an outlandish, full-skirted farthingale,
she had the appearance of being on her knees when she stood before him.
Her complexion was sallow, and though her eyes, like his own, were
fine, they were not fine enough to redeem the dull plainness of her
face. Her black hair was grotesquely dressed, with a long fore-top and
two great ribbon bows standing out, one on each side of her head, like
a pair of miniature wings.
It is little wonder that the Merry Monarch, the fastidious voluptuary,
with his nice discernment in women, should have checked in his long
stride, and halted a moment in consternation.
“Lord!” was his wry comment to Etheredge, who was beside him. “They’ve
brought me a bat, not a woman.”
But if she lacked beauty, she was well dowered, and Charles was in
desperate need of money.
“I suppose,” he told Clarendon anon, “I must swallow this black draught
to get the jam that goes with it.”
The Chancellor’s grave eyes considered him almost sternly what time he
coldly recited the advantages of this marriage. If he did not presume
to rebuke the ribaldry of his master, neither would he condescend to
smile at it. He was too honest ever to be a sycophant.
Catherine was immediately attended—in the words of Grammont—by six
frights who called themselves maids-of-honour, and a governess who was
a monster. With this retinue she repaired to Hampton Court, where the
honeymoon was spent, and where for a brief season the poor
woman—entirely enamoured of the graceful, long-legged rake she had
married—lived in a fool’s paradise.
Disillusion was to follow soon enough. She might be, by he grace of her
dowry, Queen of England, but she was soon to discover that to King
Charles she was no more than a wife _de jure_. With wives _de facto_
Charles would people his seraglio as fancy moved him; and the present
wife _de facto_, the mistress of his heart, the first lady of his
harem, was that beautiful termagant, Barbara Villiers, wife of the
accommodating Roger Palmer, Earl of Castle-maine.
There was no lack—there never is in such cases—of those who out of
concern and love for the happily deluded wife lifted the veil for her,
and made her aware of the facts of his Majesty’s association with my
Lady Castle-maine—an association dating back to the time when he was
still a homeless wanderer. The knowledge would appear to have troubled
the poor soul profoundly; but the climax of her distress was reached
when, on her coming to Whitehall, she found at the head of the list of
ladies-in-waiting assigned to her the name of my Lady Castlemaine. The
forlorn little woman’s pride rose up before this outrage. She struck
out that offending name, and gave orders that the favourite was not to
be admitted to her presence.
But she reckoned without Charles. For all his urbane, good-tempered,
debonair ways, there was an ugly cynical streak in his nature,
manifested now in the manner in which he dealt with this situation.
Himself he led his boldly handsome favourite by the hand into his
wife’s presence, before the whole Court assembled, and himself
presented her to Catherine, what time that Court, dissolute and
profligate as it was, looked on in amazement at so outrageous a slight
to the dignity of a queen.
What followed may well have exceeded all expectations. Catherine
stiffened as if the blow dealt her had been physical. Gradually her
face paled until it was grey and drawn; tears of outraged pride and
mortification flooded her eyes. And then, as if something snapped
within her brain under this stress of bitter emotion, blood gushed from
her nostrils, and she sank back in a swoon into the arms of her
Portuguese ladies.
Confusion followed, and under cover of it Charles and his light of love
withdrew, realizing that if he lingered not all his easy skill in
handling delicate situations could avail him to save his royal dignity.
Naturally the experiment was not to be repeated. But since it was his
wish that the Countess of Castlemaine should be established as one of
the Queen’s ladies—or, rather, since it was her ladyship’s wish, and
since Charles was as wax in her ladyship’s hands—it became necessary to
have the Queen instructed in what was, in her husband’s view, fitting.
For this task he selected Clarendon. But the Chancellor, who had so
long and loyally played Mentor to Charles’s Telemachus, sought now to
guide him in matters moral as he had hitherto guided him in matters
political.
Clarendon declined the office of mediator, and even expostulated with
Charles upon the unseemliness of the course upon which his Majesty was
bent.
“Surely, sire, it is for her Majesty to say who shall and who shall not
be the ladies of her bedchamber. And I nothing marvel at her decision
in this instance.”
“Yet I tell you, my lord, that it is a decision that shall be revoked.”
“By whom, sire?” the Chancellor asked him gravely.
“By her Majesty, of course.”
“Under coercion, of which you ask me to be the instrument,” said
Clarendon, in the tutorly manner he had used with the King from the
latter’s boyhood. “Yourself, sire, at a time when your own wishes did
not warp your judgment, have condemned the very thing that now you are
urging. Yourself, sire, hotly blamed your cousin, King Louis, for
thrusting Mademoiselle de Valliere upon his queen. You will not have
forgotten the things you said then of King Louis.”
Charles remembered those unflattering criticisms which he was now
invited to apply to his own case. He bit his lip, admitting himself in
check.
But anon—no doubt in obedience to the overbearing suasion of my Lady
Castlemaine—he returned to the attack, and sent the Chancellor his
orders in a letter demanding unquestioning obedience.
“Use your best endeavours,” wrote Charles, “to facilitate what I am
sure my honour is so much concerned in. And whosoever I find to be my
Lady Castlemaine’s enemy in this matter, I do promise upon my word to
be his enemy so long as I live.”
My Lord Clarendon had few illusions on the score of mankind. He knew
his world from froth to dregs—having studied it under a variety of
conditions. Yet that letter from his King was a bitter draught. All
that Charles possessed and was he owed to Clarendon. Yet in such a
contest as this, Charles did not hesitate to pen that bitter,
threatening line: “Whosoever I find to be my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy
in this matter, I do promise upon my word to be his enemy so long as I
live.”
All that Clarendon had done in the past was to count for nothing unless
he also did the unworthy thing that Charles now demanded. All that he
had accomplished in the service of his King was to be swept into
oblivion by the breath of a spiteful wanton.
Clarendon swallowed the draught and sought the Queen, upon that odious
embassy with whose ends he was so entirely out of sympathy. He used
arguments whose hollowness was not more obvious to the Queen than to
himself.
That industrious and entertaining chronicler of trifles, Mr. Pepys,
tells us, scandalized, in his diary that on the following day the talk
of the Court was all upon a midnight scene between the royal couple in
the privacy of their own apartments, so stormy that the sounds of it
were plainly to be heard in the neighbouring chambers.
You conceive the poor little woman, smarting under the insult of
Charles’s proposal by the mouth of Clarendon, assailing her royal
husband, and fiercely upbraiding him with his lack not merely of
affection but even of the respect that was her absolute due. And
Charles, his purpose set, urged to it by the handsome termagant whom he
dared not refuse, stirred out of his indolent good-nature, turning upon
her, storming back, and finally threatening her with the greater
disgrace of seeing herself pack ed home to Portugal, unless she would
submit to the lesser disgrace he thrust upon her here.
Whether by these or by other arguments he made his will prevail,
prevail it did. Catherine of Braganza swallowed her pride and
submitted. And a very complete submission it was. Lady Castlemaine was
not only installed as a Lady of the Bedchamber, but very soon we find
the Queen treating her with a friendliness that provoked comment and
amazement.
The favourite’s triumph was complete, and marked by an increasing
insolence, most marked in her demeanour towards the Chancellor, of
whose views on the subject, as expressed to the King, she was aware.
Consequently she hated him with all the spiteful bitterness that is
inseparable from the nature of such women. And she hated him the more
because, wrapped in his cold contempt, he moved in utter unconcern of
her hostility. In this hatred she certainly did not lack for allies,
members of that licentious court whose hostility towards the austere
Chancellor was begotten of his own scorn of them. Among them they
worked to pull him down.
The attempt to undermine his influence with the King proving vain—for
Charles was as well aware of its inspiration as of the Chancellor’s
value to him—that crew of rakes went laboriously and insidiously to
work upon the public mind, which is to say the public ignorance—most
fruitful soil for scandal against the great. Who shall say how far my
lady and the Court were responsible for the lampoon affixed one day to
my Lord Clarendon’s gatepost:
Three sights to be seen:
Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren queen.
Her ladyship might well have considered the unpopularity of the
Chancellor as the crown of her triumph, had this triumph been as stable
as she could have wished. But, Charles being what he was, it follows
that her ladyship had frequent, if transient, anxious jealousies to mar
the perfection of her existence, to remind her how insecure is the
tenure of positions such as hers, ever at the mercy of the very caprice
to existence.
And then, at long length, there came a day of horrid dread for her, a
day when she found herself bereft of her influence with her royal
lover, when pleadings and railings failed alike to sway him. In part
she owed it to an indiscretion of her own, but in far greater measure
to a child of sixteen, of a golden-headed, fresh, youthful loveliness,
and a nature that still found pleasure in dolls and kindred childish
things, yet of a quick and lively wit, and a clear, intelligent mind,
untroubled either by the assiduity of the royal attentions or the fact
that she was become the toast of the day.
This was Miss Frances Stewart, the daughter of Lord Blantyre, newly
come to Court as a Lady-in-Waiting to her Majesty. How profound an
impression her beauty made upon the admittedly impressionable old Pepys
you may study in his diary. He had a glimpse of her one day riding in
the Park with the King, and a troop of ladies, among whom my Lady
Castlemaine, looking, as he tells us, “mighty out of humour.” There was
a moment when Miss Stewart came very near to becoming Queen of England,
and although she never reached that eminence, yet her effigy not only
found its way into the coinage, but abides there to this day (more
perdurable than that of any actual queen) in the figure of Britannia,
for which she was the model.
Charles wooed her openly. It was never his way to study appearances in
these matters. He was so assiduous that it became customary in that
winter of 1666 for those seeking the King at Whitehall to inquire
whether he were above or below—“below” meaning Miss Stewart’s
apartments on the ground-floor of the palace, in which apartments his
Majesty was a constant visitor. And since where the King goes the Court
follows, and where the King smiles there the Court fawns, it resulted
that this child now found herself queening it over a court that flocked
to her apartments. Gallants and ladies came there to flirt and to
gossip, to gamble and to pay homage.
About a great table in her splendid salon, a company of rustling,
iridescent fops in satin and heavy periwigs, and of ladies with curled
head-dresses and bare shoulders, played at basset one night in January.
Conversation rippled, breaking here and there into laughter, white,
jewelled hands reached out for cards, or for a share of the heaps of
gold that swept this way and that with the varying fortunes of the
game.
My Lady Castlemaine, seated between Etheredge and Rochester, played in
silence, with lips tight-set and brooding eyes. She had lost, it is
true, some £1500 that night; yet, a prodigal gamester, and one who came
easily by money, she had been known to lose ten times that sum and yet
preserve her smile. The source of her ill-humour was not the game. She
played recklessly, her attention wandering; those handsome, brooding
eyes of hers were intent upon watching what went on at the other end of
the long room. There, at a smaller table, sat Miss Stewart, half a
dozen gallants hovering near her, engaged upon a game of cards of a
vastly different sort. Miss Stewart did not gamble. The only purpose
she could find for cards was to build castles; and here she was
building one with the assistance of her gallants, and under the
superintendence of his Grace of Buckingham, who was as skilled in this
as in other equally unstable forms of architecture.
Apart, over by the fire, in a great chair of gilt leather, lounged the
King, languidly observing this smaller party, a faint, indolent smile
on his swarthy, saturnine countenance. Absently, with one hand he
stroked a little spaniel that was curled in his lap. A black boy in a
gorgeous, plumed turban and a long, crimson surcoat arabesqued in
gold—there were three or four such attendants about the room—proffered
him a cup of posset on a golden salver.
The King rose, thrust aside the little blackamoor, and with his spaniel
under his arm, sauntered across to Miss Stewart’s table. Soon he found
himself alone with her—the others having removed themselves on his
approach, as jackals fall back before the coming of the lion. The last
to go, and with signs of obvious reluctance, was his Grace of Richmond,
a delicately-built, uncomely, but very glittering gentleman.
Charles faced her across the table, the tall house of cards standing
between them.
Miss invited his Majesty’s admiration for my Lord of Buckingham’s
architecture. Pouf! His Majesty blew, and the edifice rustled down to a
mere heap of cards again.
“Symbol of kingly power,” said Miss, pertly. “You demolish better than
you build, sire.”
“Oddsfish! If you challenge me, it were easy to prove you wrong,” quoth
he.
“Pray do. The cards are here.”
“Cards! Pooh! Card castles are well enough for Buckingham. But such is
not the castle I’ll build you if you command me.”
“I command the King’s Majesty? Mon Dieu! But it would be treason
surely.”
“Not greater treason than to have enslaved me.” His fine eyes were
oddly ardent. “Shall I build you this castle, child?”
Miss looked at him, and looked away. Her eyelids fluttered
distractingly. She fetched a sigh.
“The castle that your Majesty would build for any but your Queen must
prove a prison.”
She rose, and, looking across the room, she met the handsome, scowling
eyes of the neglected favourite. “My Lady Castlemaine looks as if she
feared that fortune were not favouring her.” She was so artless that
Charles could not be sure there was a double meaning to her speech.
“Shall we go see how she is faring?” she added, with a disregard for
etiquette, whose artlessness he also doubted.
He yielded, of course. That was his way with beauty, especially with
beauty not yet reduced into possession. But the characteristic urbanity
with which he sauntered beside her across the room was no more than a
mask upon his chagrin. It was always thus that pretty Frances Stewart
used him. She always knew how to elude him and, always with that cursed
air of artlessness, uttered seemingly simple sentences that clung to
his mind to tantalize him.
“The castle your Majesty would build for any but your Queen must prove
a prison.” What had she meant by that? Must he take her to queen before
she would allow him to build a castle for her?
It was an insistent, haunting thought, wracking his mind. He knew there
was a party hostile to the Duke of York and Clarendon, which, fearing
the succession of the former, and, so, of the grandchildren of the
latter, as a result of Catherine of Braganza’s childlessness, strongly
favoured the King’s divorce.
It was a singular irony that my Lady Castlemaine should be largely
responsible for the existence of that party. In her hatred for
Clarendon, and her blind search for weapons that would slay the
Chancellor, she had, if not actually invented, at least helped to give
currency to the silly slander that Clarendon had deliberately chosen
for Charles a barren queen, so as to ensure the ultimate succession of
his own daughter’s children. But she had never thought to see that
slander recoil upon her as it now did; she had never thought that a
party would come to rise up in consequence that would urge divorce upon
the King at the very moment when he was consumed by passion for the
unattainable, artlessly artful Frances Stewart.
It was Buckingham, greatly daring, who slyly made himself that party’s
mouthpiece. The suggestion startled Charles, voicing, as perhaps it
did, the temptation by which he was secretly assailed. He looked at
Buckingham, frowning.
“I verily believe you are the wickedest dog in England.”
The impudent gallant made a leg. “For a subject, sire, I believe I am.”
Charles—with whom the amusing word seems ever to have been more
compelling than the serious—laughed his soft, mellow laugh. Then he
sighed, and the frown of thought returned.
“It would be a wicked thing to make a poor lady miserable only because
she is my wife, and has no children by me, which is no fault of hers.”
He was a thoroughly bad husband, but his indolent good-nature shrank
from purchasing his desires at the price of so much ignominy to the
Queen. Before that could come to pass it would be necessary to give the
screw of temptation another turn or two. And it was Miss Stewart
herself who—in all innocence—supplied what was required in that
direction. Driven to bay by the importunities of Charles, she announced
at last that it was her intention to retire from Court, so as to
preserve herself from the temptations by which she was beset, and to
determine the uneasiness which, through no fault of her own, her
presence was occasioning the Queen; and she announced further, that, so
desperate had she been rendered that she would marry any gentleman of
fifteen hundred pounds a year who would have her in honour.
You behold Charles reduced to a state of panic. He sought to bribe her
with offers of any settlements she chose to name, or any title she
coveted, offering her these things at the nation’s expense as freely
and lightly as the jewels he had tossed into her lap, or the collar of
pearls worth sixteen hundred pounds he had put about her neck. The
offers were ineffectual, and Charles, driven almost to distraction by
such invulnerable virtue, might now have yielded to the insidious
whispers of divorce and re-marriage had not my Lady Castlemaine taken a
hand in the game.
Her ladyship, dwelling already, as a consequence of that royal
infatuation for Miss Stewart, in the cold, rarefied atmosphere of a
neglect that amounted almost to disgrace, may have considered with
bitterness how her attempt to exploit her hatred of the Chancellor had
recoiled upon herself.
In the blackest hour of her despair, when hope seemed almost dead, she
made a discovery—or, rather, the King’s page, the ineffable Chiffinch,
Lord Keeper of the Back Stairs and Grand-Eunuch of the Royal Seraglio,
who was her ladyship’s friend, made it and communicated it to her There
had been one ardent respondent in the Duke of Richmond to that
proclamation of Miss Stewart’s that she would marry any gentleman of
fifteen hundred pounds a year. Long enamoured of her, his Grace saw
here his opportunity, and he seized it. Consequently he was now in
constant attendance upon her, but very secretly, since he feared the
King’s displeasure.