Behind the Palace Doors (19 page)

“You are entirely right,” Nell shot back, “and I am whore enough to be a duchess.”

Louise was hated by the British people for being French, Catholic, and an excessive drain on the treasury. One time, Nell was mistaken for the despised duchess as she rode along in her carriage. As an angry mob circled and grew menacing, Nell popped her head out of the carriage and, with typical aplomb, declared, “Good people, this is the
Protestant
whore!”

It was just such a scene that demonstrated why Charles II was so devoted to this particular mistress, even if he never gave her the rank she wanted. On his deathbed the king was heard to plead with his brother, “Let not poor Nelly starve.”

Upon the death of Charles II in 1685, the throne passed to his brother James II, who would reign less than four years before being ousted by his daughter and son-in-law in 1688. James maintained a court-in-exile in France as a guest of his cousin Louis XIV until his death in 1701
.

James II suffered from a malady that proved fatal to his reign: He was, as Lord Montagu put it so succinctly, “a wilful fool”—an obstinate believer in his royal prerogative, without the intelligence to exercise it properly. “He has all the faults of the King his father [Charles I],” observed the French ambassador Paul Barrillon, “but he has less sense and behaves more haughtily in public.” Indeed, the only lesson James seemed to have gleaned from the fate of his father was to become even more unyielding when challenged. And though, unlike Charles I, he managed to keep his head, his political stupidity cost him his crown. Worse, it was his two daughters, Mary and Anne, along with his nephew William, who snatched it from him.

James ascended the throne peacefully after the death of Charles II in 1685, which was rather surprising given all the
controversy that surrounded him during his brother’s reign. He had converted to Catholicism—a mortal sin in the minds of most Englishmen—and, aggravating the fact, he made no effort to conceal it. (Curiously, though, James’s zealous embrace of his new faith did nothing to diminish his lusty appetite for ugly mistresses.
^*
) So outraged was the reaction to James’s undisguised Catholicism that King Charles was forced to exile his brother for a number of years. There were even several attempts in Parliament to have James excluded from the succession. Though these ultimately failed, Charles, always wise to political realities, as well as his brother’s foibles, predicted nothing but disaster when James inherited. “My brother will lose his throne for his [Catholic] principles,” the king declared, “and his soul for a bunch of ugly trollops.”

Charles had been remarkably prescient. Almost as soon as James came to the throne he began to squander the goodwill that accompanied his succession by pressing his pro-Catholic agenda. For example, he appointed Catholic officers to head regiments of an expanded standing army, which was against the law. Parliament objected and was prorogued, never to sit again during the king’s reign.

In an era of violent religious divides, James refused to recognize the deep antipathy toward his adopted faith that had developed in the English psyche since Henry VIII’s split from Rome a century and a half before. Almost every literate home contained a copy of John Foxe’s
Actes and Monuments
, which detailed the horrors of “Bloody” Mary Tudor’s efforts to stamp out heresy in England by burning Protestants alive. And every year people riotously celebrated Guy Fawkes Day, marking the
failure of a Catholic plot to blow up Parliament during the reign of James I.

Many Englishmen associated Catholicism with arbitrary rule—a belief reinforced by the persecution of Protestants in France by the absolute monarch Louis XIV, James II’s cousin and ally. Now their king was demonstrating the same tendencies by subverting the law to achieve what many believed was his ultimate aim: the destruction of the established Anglican Church and a reunification with Rome.

The tension between the king and his subjects was well illustrated in July 1687, when James—on his knees—welcomed the papal nuncio, Count d’Adda. Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset, had refused to present d’Adda at court because, he said, it was against the law to recognize the pope’s representative. “Do you not know I am above the law?” the king asked loftily, to which Seymour replied, “You may be, sire, but I am not.”

One factor did mitigate the fears about James’s Catholic despotism: His two daughters by his first wife, Anne Hyde, were his only heirs, and both were staunchly Protestant. “I must tell you that I abhor the principles of the Church of Rome as much as it is possible for any to do,” the younger daughter, Anne, wrote to her sister, Mary, “and I as much value the doctrine of the Church of England.”

Both women had been raised Protestant at Charles II’s insistence to counter the criticism arising from his brother’s avowed Catholicism. James had not been pleased. He wanted his daughters instructed in his own faith, but as he wrote in his memoirs, he did not attempt it because “they would have immediately been quite taken from [me].” That didn’t mean he didn’t try to convert them later, though, especially after he became king. His elder daughter and heir, Mary, had married her cousin William of Orange (the son of James’s sister Mary) and lived with him in the Netherlands. From across the English Channel, James bombarded her with religious tracts he hoped
would open her eyes to his faith. The princess of Orange was not persuaded by his proselytizing, however.

“I have found nothing in all of this reading but an effort to seduce feeble spirits,” she wrote, “no solid reasoning, and nothing that could disturb me in the least in the world, so much that the more I hear of this religion the more pleased I am with my own, and more and more thanks have I to render to my God for His mercy in preserving me in His true faith.”

The Protestant succession seemed secure, but the comfort that came from that was shattered in 1687 when it was announced that the king’s second wife, the Catholic queen Mary Beatrice of Modena, was pregnant. If she had a son, he would succeed James and a Catholic dynasty would be entrenched. This was too terrible to contemplate, and, wrote the Tuscan ambassador Terriesi, “it would be impossible to describe the passion of those who do not desire [the birth of a son].”

Few, it seemed, were more distraught than the king’s daughter Anne. “No words can express the rage of [Anne] at the Queen’s condition,” Terriesi reported. “She can dissimulate it to no one, and seeing that the Catholic religion has a prospect of advancement, she offers more than ever, both in public and in private to show herself hostile to it, and [to be] the most zealous of Protestants, with whom she is gaining the greatest power and credit at this conjunction.”

A concentrated and cynical campaign to discredit the queen’s pregnancy began almost as soon as it was announced. Anne led the charge. “It is strange to see how the Queen’s great belly is everywhere ridiculed, as if scarce anybody believed it to be true,” wrote Anne’s maternal uncle Henry Hyde, second Earl of Clarendon. “Good God, help us!”

Certainly Anne did not have to dig very deep to reach the venomous bile she unleashed in calling into question her stepmother’s pregnancy. She already loathed the queen, despite the
fact that Mary Beatrice had always treated her well. “She pretends to have a great deal of kindness to me,” Anne wrote to her sister, “but I doubt it is real, for I never see any proofs of it, but rather the contrary.”

Among the many faults Anne found with Mary Beatrice was her belief that the queen had pushed James toward his Catholic extremism. “She is a very great bigot in her own way,” Anne wrote, “and one may see by her that she hates all Protestants.” (This coming from the woman who declared, “The Church of Rome is wicked and dangerous, and directly contrary to Scriptures, and their ceremonies—most of them—plain, downright idolatry.”)

Poor Mary Beatrice probably had no idea just how much her stepdaughter hated her. Anne made certain of that. “I am resolved always to pay her a great deal of respect,” she wrote to her sister, “and make my court to her, that she may not have any just cause against me.” Now, with her great façade of friendliness, Anne was prepared to destroy the queen by cultivating the innuendo surrounding what she called Mary Beatrice’s “false belly.” She actively encouraged doubt with her sister, Mary, in the Netherlands:

Mary, who had always enjoyed a warmer relationship with her stepmother—just three and half years her senior
^†
—was at first rather complacent upon hearing the news of the queen’s pregnancy. “I rendered thanks to God that this news did not trouble me in any fashion,” she wrote in her journal. Although Mary would be supplanted as her father’s immediate heir if a son was born, she was perfectly content to be William’s wife, the princess of Orange, and really had no desire to be queen of England anyway. But then came Anne’s letter, which, Mary wrote, “gave me just reason to suspect there had been some deception.”

On June 10, 1688, Queen Mary Beatrice gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward Stuart, the prince who would one day be known as the Old Pretender (see
Chapter 19
). Rumors immediately shifted from a false pregnancy to a substitute child. And though King James had no way of knowing it at the time, the doubts aroused by the birth of his heir heralded the end of his reign.

The king’s daughter Anne, always ready to promote vicious tales, now spread the story that another child had been secretly brought into the birth chamber and presented as the newborn prince. She had not been present at the queen’s delivery (some historians believe she stayed away deliberately lest she be called to verify the birth) and shortly after wrote to Mary: “My dear sister can’t imagine the concern and vexation I have been in, that I should be so unfortunate to be out of town when the Queen was brought to bed, for I shall never now be satisfied whether the child be true or false. It may be it is our brother, but God only knows, for she never took care to satisfy the
world, or give people any demonstration of it.… After all this, ’tis possible it may be her child, but where one believes it, a thousand do not. For my part, except they do give very plain demonstrations, which is almost impossible now, I shall be of the number of unbelievers.”

Mary soon joined the ranks of the skeptics as well. “One hears every day things so strange that it is impossible to avoid having very strong suspicions,” she wrote. At first the princess of Orange had insisted that prayers be said for the baby in her chapel, but these gradually tapered off as Mary’s conviction grew that the child being called the Prince of Wales was in reality a changeling.

Queen Mary Beatrice certainly noticed a puzzling coolness coming from the stepdaughter she loved so much. “You have never once in your letters to me taken the least notice of my son,” she wrote to Mary. Several weeks later, after a stilted response, the queen wrote again: “Even in this last letter, by the way you speak of my son; and the formal name you call him by, I am further confirmed in the thought I had before, that you have for him the least indifference. The King has often told me, with a great deal of trouble, that often as he has mentioned his son in his letters to you, you never once answered anything concerning him.”