Royal Harlot (24 page)

The Duke of York did finally honor his vows to Anne Hyde, and though the new duchess soon after presented him with a son, there were many whispers about how the Stuarts had lowered themselves by such a marriage. Most vehement in her criticism was the Queen Mother herself, who vowed that if the slatternly Duchess of York dared enter the front gate of the palace, she would be sure to leave by the back, to avoid having to be civil to such a daughter-in-law. Charles attempted to calm this talk by making old Sir Edward a baron and thus improving the family enough that Anne was now a lady in her own right, but no one believed she was any better than she’d been born.

My mother the Countess of Anglesea died in September, after a long wasting condition of the lungs that served neither to sweeten her temperament nor increase her kindness toward me, her only child. She chose not to summon me to her deathbed, and I in turn did not grieve for her. But I did attend her funeral and burial at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. I knew what was proper, even if she never had.

In her will, she left me nothing.

Death was present in other ways, too. One of the most popular conditions of the Declaration of Breda had been the general pardon it offered to all those who’d supported Cromwell and the Commonwealth. Charles had shrewdly realized that people turned with political winds, and it would be both more providential and more popular to welcome the return of those who’d wandered from the Royalist cause for one reason or another. Though the sternest Royalists did not like to admit it, there were many aspects of the Commonwealth government that had run far more efficiently than under either of the two previous Stuart kings, and Charles needed the experience that these ministers and other officials could bring. Reconciliation was the only way to restore England as a whole, and in August, at Charles’s urging, Parliament passed the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion to make official the pardon that the Declaration of Breda had promised.

Yet as encompassing as the pardon was, there was one group of individuals that Charles refused to include: the regicides, the fifty-nine men who’d signed his father’s death warrant, as well as the officials of the High Court of Justice who’d served at the trial, and the army officers who’d overseen the execution.

On this Charles and his brothers were inflexible, and were determined on vengeance in their father’s name. Already the surviving members of this shameful group had been arrested and brought to the Tower to stand trial, with the special court ready to convene in October. There was no doubt what verdict Charles expected the court to hand down, nor any doubt that they would do it, either. The sentence of death would be equally inflexible: to be hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, with the gruesome remains publicly displayed on pikes to rot and be picked clean by the crows. Those others, like Cromwell himself, who’d already escaped into death, would not be spared the punishment, for their bodies were to be exhumed and hanged in chains at Tyburn.

It was no more than what those heinous villains deserved, and there were few in London who disputed the king’s right to so serve his father’s memory. Yet the coming trials and executions darkened the city like a noxious black cloud, tainting the merriment and good humor of the Restoration and bringing back ugly memories that were, in many ways, better forgotten.

There was other unhappiness, too. The first giddiness over the king’s return—the constant “feast days without fasts,” as one wag phrased it—had passed. All the best rewards and places had finally been given out, and as was only natural, those who’d been neglected or denied began to grumble and complain and find empty fault with the king. It was still slight, to be sure, but it was there, a ruffle of uneasy discontent beneath the surface of content.

But worst of all came in the middle of September. The usual group of us was playing at cards at the palace; the wine and laughter were easy and the spirits high. Though Charles himself never drank to excess, and seldom made serious wagers, he liked for others to enjoy themselves however they pleased. Often he’d sit beside me at the gaming table, his arm draped casually over my shoulders as he offered wry comments about the play.

This night was no different, save that I was winning handsomely, nearly fifty guineas and the evening still young. This may not seem so vast a sum, I know, but in those days the captain of a ship of war earned but twenty pounds a year, and my own maidservant Wilson subsisted nicely on her four pounds for the same twelve-month.

Suddenly, after playing his hand, the Duke of Gloucester tossed down his cards, pushed his chair away from the table, and stood, holding to the back for support. This was not like him: he drank even less than his brother, and he was so fervent a gamester that he’d never willingly leave the table.

“What’s amiss, Henry?” Charles asked cheerfully. “You can’t leave with Mrs. Palmer winning like this. It’s bad luck for the rest of us.”

But Henry only shook his head, his color poor and his eyes dull. “Forgive me, sir, but I must withdraw,” he said. “I’m not well.”

“Then take to your bed, Henry,” Charles said. “Go on, that’s the best thing in the world for you, so long as you take your lady for companionship.”

While the others laughed, Henry retreated, his current mistress darting after him as if fearing to disobey the king. She was a small gold-haired girl, very young, whose name I no longer recall, nor did it matter, considering what we all learned the next day.

The Duke of Gloucester was suffering from the smallpox.

Because I’d had this foul pox and could come to no further harm, Charles asked me to call with him upon his brother, thinking to cheer him. But with Henry the disease had moved with astonishing haste, and by the time I came with Charles the next afternoon, the physicians were already despairing of his recovery.

The room was stifling, the walls draped with red cloth and the fire blazing hot, as was the recommended practice to help draw out the pox’s fever. Henry’s handsome face was covered with sores, fever racked his body and slicked his hair with sweat, and he knew none of us gathered around his bed. At one side sat the Queen Mother, Henrietta Marie, small and wizened as a French monkey, along with James, and their sisters Mary, the Princess Royal from Holland, and Princess Henriette Anne. It was a melancholy family group, made more distraught by the squabbling between the Queen Mother’s Roman priests and the Anglican bishops over which should administer the final rites. I saw at once I’d no place among them, and with a sad heart I murmured my farewell to the prince and left.

The next day, Henry was dead.

The stunned court was swathed in the deep purple mourning required for a royal prince. Grieving put a temporary halt to our parties and gaming, and the theatres that Henry had loved so well were ordered closed for six weeks. I’d never seen Charles so distraught with sorrow, nor seen him use his work for the new government as a way to ease his loss. Swallowed up in his grief, Charles could not bring himself to attend the funeral at Henry VII’s chapel, and sent James in his place to act as the family’s principal mourner.

Much of the court pretended to be scandalized by this imagined slight, but I knew better. Henry’s death had left a tattered hole in our little circle that could never be mended or filled. But the question of another Stuart heir was a different matter entirely.

Whether I liked it or not, wished it or not, for the sake of England it was time for Charles to take a queen.

KING STREET, LONDON
February 1 6 6 1

 
“A girl, mistress, a lovely girl!” exclaimed the midwife. “Well done, mistress, well done!”

“A girl?” I raised my exhausted head from the pillow to look. In her hands, the midwife was cradling a squirming, muck-covered creature, still bound to me by the snakelike cord.

“Yes, mistress, a girl, a beautiful, perfect girl.” I heard the first mewling cry, and then the babe was deposited upon my poor ravaged belly. “Your daughter, mistress.”

Without thinking, I reached down to steady the baby, not wanting her to topple off after so much toil and labor to bring her forth. She was sticky with my blood and twisting in my arms, and as the midwife tied off the cord, my new daughter began to wail as if her tiny heart would break.

“Hush, enough of that,” I whispered, my eyes filling with tears. I’d no idea what to do with an infant, not even my own flesh and blood.

“Here now, madam, let me tidy her for you.” Wilson swept the babe away while the midwife finished tending to me.

With dismay I surveyed the wreckage of my once-beautiful body, stretched and flaccid and worn beyond all recognition, and when I thought of how my pitiful seat of delight had been forced to stretch and tear to accommodate the babe, I wept anew. Once Charles had likened me to Venus herself, but now—what man, let alone a king, could ever find pleasure in me again after this?

“Will I ever be as I was?” I begged the midwife through my tears. “How, oh, how?”

But the midwife only chuckled, wiping me clean. “Oh, it’s always the same with new mothers,” she said. “You scarce finish birthing one child, and already you’re planning how to entice your husband to give you another.”

“Not at all,” I whimpered, horrified. If I’d my way, I never wished to endure such a trial again. “I wish to be restored for myself.”

Mistress Quinn clucked her tongue. I was certain she knew the truth, either from gossip or from Wilson. Even though I’d retired from the court and the palace before Christmas, when I’d grown too ungainly to pretend to grace, Charles had continued to attend to me with letters, small gifts, even visits to King Street when he could.

Yet I was not so foolish as to have demanded he remain faithful to me in my absence. I’d not heard of any other ladies having taken my place, but Charles was a man of such voracious appetites that for him to have abstained for so long would have been an unthinkable fast.

“You’re a young woman, madam,” the midwife said finally, propping a fresh pillow behind my head, “and in fine health. You did not grow overfat with the child, nor was your labor long. I should expect you to recover, yes, but with an added glow to your beauty that only motherhood can grant.”

“How long?” I demanded. “I cannot lie here idle forever.”

She shrugged with maddening imprecision. “Some women need a full year to heal, madam. But for a lady of your vigor, I’d venture three months, perhaps four.”

“One,” I said succinctly, and I meant it, too. I’d stayed away from court and from Charles for too long as it was to make my absence any longer than that. As soon as my lying-in was done, I would return.

“Here you are, madam,” Wilson said, presenting me once again with the baby, now more agreeably swaddled in a soft woolen cloth, with a worked linen cap tied over her head. “Your beautiful daughter. She favors you, surely.”

She set the bundled babe into the crook of my arm, and for the first time I gazed into her tiny wrinkled face. For her part, she stared back at me so boldly that I laughed through my tears.

“Mark that, the saucy little baggage,” I said. “She’s my daughter, no doubt of that.”

“Yes, madam,” said Wilson. “She has your mouth, and your lips, too.”

“That fine black hair’s from her father,” Mistress Quinn said, as politic an observation as I’d ever heard, considering how both Charles and Roger had dark hair. “She’ll break her share of hearts. Have you chosen a name for her?”

“Anne,” I said softly, a name common among the Villiers. I knew most women—and their husbands—longed for sons, but I was glad for a girl. There’d be no difficult question of naming her after either Charles or Roger, and besides, I’d know what to do with a beautiful daughter. I touched my finger to her cheek, marveling at the softness of her skin. “Her name is Anne.”

But abruptly her tiny face crumpled and her eyes squeezed shut, her toothless mouth springing open to wail again.

“What have I done?” I asked, startled and worried. “How have I hurt her?”

“She’s not hurt, madam, but hungry,” Mistress Quinn observed. “You must put her to suck.”

“To suck?” I asked incredulously over the baby’s growing cries. “But that is why I hired a wet nurse, to spare me that.”

“The girl won’t come from the country until tomorrow, madam,” Wilson said firmly. “You won’t wish Miss Anne to starve until then, will you?”

“She’ll not stop crying until you feed her,” Mistress Quinn advised, speaking plain. “You can suckle her for this day or the next, and not harm your breasts, if that is what worries you. There’s plenty of time to bind them and dry your milk.”

“Very well, then,” I said, steeling myself. “If I must.”

With trepidation I looked down at that small, demanding mouth. I knew a score of clever ways to suck a man’s cock, but not one for suckling my own daughter.

“If you please, madam, like this.” The midwife arranged the baby in my arms, and guided my nipple to her mouth. “She’ll know what’s proper.”

The sensation of Anne latching on to my breast and drawing my milk was astonishing, pulling as it did clear to my womb, and, in a way, tugging at my heart as well. I smiled down at my new daughter, her eyes now closed with contentment as she fed. I’d do everything in my power to see that her father recognized her royal blood and made her a lady in her own right. I’d lavish whatever I could upon her—gowns and jewels, pretty toys and dolls—all the trinkets and amusements that had been absent from my own dismal childhood. I’d make certain that she’d a dowry fit for a princess, and a noble, titled husband worthy of her heritage.

A king for a father, and I for her mother: what babe could ever ask for a more splendid, more glorious birthright than that?

“Barbara, my dear wife!” Roger hurried to my bedside and kissed me on the forehead. “I came as soon as I received Wilson’s summons. Oh, Barbara, who is this fine little person? Our son?”