My two kings; a novel of the Stuart restoration

Front matter

Class

Book.

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CHAPTER XXVII To the Stuarts

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Charles II Frontispiece

From the miniature by Samuel Cooper at Goodwood House. By permission of the Duke of Richmond and Gordon. Specially photographed by Mr. Donald Macbeth.

FACING FAGE

Charlotte Stuart 1 44

From a picture after Sir Peter Lely. Specially photographed by Mr. Donald Macbeth.

James, Duke of Monmouth 272

From the portrait by Sir Peter Lely at Madresfleld Court. By permission of Earl Beauchamp. Specially photographed by Mr. Donald Macbeth.

Henrietta, Baroness Wentworth 368

From the engraving by Williams, from Sir Godfrey Kneller, in the British Museum. Specially photographed by Mr. Donald Macbeth.

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I

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PROLOGUE: IN WHICH MAUD NEPEAN IN- TRODUCES CHARLOTTE STUART

Chapter I Prologue : In Which Maud Nepean Introduces

CHARLOTTE STUART

These seventeenth-century Memoirs were written during the Great War, at a time when imagination was stimulated abnormally and circumstances led to the necessity for a safety-valve, also, as I believe, when the memory of my life at Charles IPs Court began to come back to me.

For a long time I had been conscious that I, or a woman resembling me, was present at Whitehall some time after the Restoration. Directly I began to put down stray scenes of my “recollections” on paper, I became all the more clearly aware that I (or she, my alter ego, Charlotte Stuart) was actually a witness of many things that occurred; but more and more certainly was I convinced that I (or she) was not in London on some occasions, notably the death of the King and the execution of his son the Duke of Monmouth. I can visualise these scenes, but I know that I reconstruct them entirely from what I have read; with others the sensation is a different one — apart from all other reasons I can simply say, M Z was there!”

I do not attribute it to race-memory, heredity will not serve in this case, though I have legitimate Royal Stuart blood as well as my descent from King Charles II and King James II. As will be seen in these pages, apart from the very strong feeling I possess that these people were my blood relations — and therefore this work differs in character from the usual Stuart book (“old stories tied together with string,” as a witty friend puts it!) — I borrow no help from a family tree. Plus Royaliste que le Roi, an abiding loyalty was the motive force behind all Madame Stuart’s actions remembered (or invented) ; so vivid is the sensation that I may be pardoned for likening it to the wearing thin of a veil between those times and these.

Also, loving both the King and his worshipped son Monmouth as Charlotte Stuart did, I have made it clear that her eyes were never entirely blind to their faults ; but X have the impression that, for once, there was an onlooker in the palace itself, though perhaps over-feminine in her estimates, who saw and understood much that mystified historians, and can now write frankly of what came under her immediate notice.

For it should be remembered that, among the contemporary memoirs most important in History’s eyes, Samuel Pepys wrote from the outside of the Court circle socially; John Evelyn (whose diary has only been given to the public in a sadly restricted form) from the point of view of an uncourtier-like and unsociable philosopher ; Thomas Bruce Lord Ailesbury, trusting entirely to memory and writing fifty years after; and Anthony Hamilton, for the Comte de Gramont, from a prejudiced point of view, and one wholly unreliable as to dates ! while Mme. d’Aulnoy’s description of her visit to London in 1675 is not absolutely authentic, though, if regarded as such, it is of great value, but it covers very little ground and is simply Court gossip. Bishop Burnet was never to be trusted where a Stuart was concerned! ■ — even that valuable document known as the Buccleuch MS. account of Monmouth’s last days is full of proved errors, if trivial ones. All the rest are riddied with mistakes, written though they were at first hand, therefore Madame Stuart’s many slips must be forgiven !

I wish particularly to emphasise this, and the fact that the dialogue has been tuned to a more modern hey, to avoid the irritation caused the general reader by what I may describe as “the Pepys manner,” and, as is only natural, the very free speech and behaviour of the times have been somewhat toned down. Much of what I write here owes nothing to History; for instance, nearly all contemporary works on Monmouth were either suppressed after his disgrace, purposely falsified, or compiled by those in ignorance of facts, or with an eye on possible favours to come at the hands of James II or William III.

The Duchess of Monmouth’s letters of that date were burnt at The Wemyss in 1700, though we have a large quantity of those written later, of far less public interest, alas ! The preserved correspondence of King Charles, to my present knowledge, contains not one single love-letter (I cannot call a hasty note to the Duchess of Portsmouth by that name) nor is there extant one solitary specimen of Monmouth’s amatory correspondence in any direction ; though the Record Office possesses a number of his letters when Captain-General, written in connection with the army we now know he loved so well and did his best to serve faithfully, a fact History never even mentions !

Lady Wentworth, Monmouth’s true love, left not a word known to be written by her; only one spoken sentence is recorded; and no portrait exists of which the identity is unquestioned; indeed, it seems almost impossible that any of the four — two paintings and two prints — can really represent her (though I publish the best), as the dates are so hopelessly “out.”

I have gone most carefully into this matter, and have consulted various experts, as also where Monmouth’s portraits, authentic and dubious, are concerned.

To my supreme regret, Madame Stuart certainly did not go to Court before 1670. Her memories might then have included the greatest feminine enchanttress among the Royal Stuarts, ‘Madame,’ Henriette d’Angleterre, “so-called because she was so much more of France,” who came to England in that year, and died a few weeks after her return. Had I been inventing a Stuart autobiography I should have undoubtedly made myself, or my prototype, younger, gayer, a beauty of Whitehall if not in the lively Gramont and Pepys sixties, yet certainly before Charles had reigned a decade. I should most surely not have placed my own debut in the middle seventies, at a time when History, contemporary memoirs, diaries, letters, and MSS. help very little, and one at which neither Charles nor Monmouth is so accessible in every-day life to the Stuart student as they were earlier, and later. I make a point of this, to show that 1674 was by no means the year I should have selected to begin my life at Court, had this been a fictional work !

I can give no logical reason for my recollections, and I am not psychic — never was a more impossible medium than I. But I believe that anything and everything can happen (and sometimes does), and that gives me a wide margin in life on which some power or powers jot down notes by no means written in the matter-of-fact Diary of Everyday.

Behind me, perchance, not all the doors were shut!

Let us omit a possible skill in mental vision, a certain trick of making friends with those of our dead and gone whose blood runs warmest in our veins to-day ' so little dead, and gone such a short distance, sometimes! — the practised glibness of the journalist, the enthusiasm of the hero-worshipper, the determination to travel in a fair past century as a relief from the miseries of the present 1 — none of these reasons (or excuses), however reasonable, suffices. This following book may prove something quite different from what I believe it will be ; but, again, it may read unconvincingly ; if so, it will be my fault for describing badly what I have seen.

And I am aware that I shall be told I have allowed myself too much license.

I have no authority, for example, for presenting Frances Stuart Duchess of Richmond, ten years or so after her lively youth in Pepys’s and Gramont’s pages, as I have done here; I can only say that this is la belle Stuart as a humbler, plainer, older Stuart cousin knew, admired, and loved her. She ran out of the end of my pen, as did Madame Stuart’s account of her own self, something of a surprise to the holder of that pen ! Charles II and Monmouth are much as I expected them to be; on the other hand, Lady Wentworth is not; and it never occurred to me that any sort of an understanding with Lord Rochester or the vilified Keeper of the King’s Closet would have been possible to a decent woman.

But, as I began to write, so came memory back.

In this life I am far more lenient towards James II, a cruelly misunderstood man, placed in a position so difficult that nobody has made half the allowances for him that mere justice demands. On the other hand,

1 1 write this book for that reason. I can only hope that it may help those who read it, as the writing of it helped me at a time of great distress and anxiety in 1916. If it does, I shall be amply repaid.

he was his own enemy to an even greater degree than were his brother Charles and his nephew James. The former I believe (and certainly seem to have believed) to have been a far more able King and diplomatist than History allows : shrewder, harder-working, hidden from his people behind his purposely assumed mask, and even from his nearest and dearest — why, he alone knew. The Madame Stuart of that day can state this fact, though she cannot altogether explain it, but she knows that her King thought his subjects fools, while never falling into the common error of behaving as if they were! — thus he paid them the subtle compliment of effectually concealing his methods from them.

She can and does emphasise her belief (which is mine) that his love for women was of his life a thing apart, that his mistresses were of far less importance than they appeared then and appear now, that his absorption in their society and extravagance for their sake were part of the mask he assumed. In the popular fancy, Charles II is, in fine, a picturesque figure whose illicit loves add to his picturesqueness! The average reader of History, at the first mention of this King, imagines him as the lounging owner of a seraglio of extremely pretty, rather witty, hopelessly bad “fair ladies.” That is the estimate of himself which, I think, the grandson of Henri IV wilfully handed down, and Clio, who seldom sees below the surface, takes him at his surface value.

I do not want to beatify Charles II. Heaven knows never was a man less of a saint!

But Fortune’s hand was heavy on that fated family, and never did she help them out of the pitfalls that lay in wait for every Stuart. Had it been his luck to build his house upon a rock, to love whole-heartedly one human being who never failed him, he would have left a different record. He loved the wrong people , he built upon sand. Lucy Walter, his wife for all I knew and all I know, Monmouth their son, Frances Stuart who would have none of him, Henriette his sister whom he mistakenly married into France and whom France took from him — these people he honestly loved, and each in turn failed him.

He came to his throne, not as Royal youth triumphant — as he would have done had he won Worcester fight — but after that fatal decade of exile, as the man of thirty, coarsened in fibre, hardened, disillusioned, deteriorated, true member of “the race that never wore well.”

So he came to his own again, and grasped life with both hands and squeezed it dry ; so he took his pleasure with such as Barbara Palmer; so he called upon Nell Gwyn, gay inconsequent Lady of Laughter, to be his plaything and distracting enfant terrible; so he made the Frenchwoman queen of the left hand.

His wife was outside the pale of his existence by reason of the gulf between their temperaments; it was neither his fault nor hers, cruelly as she suffered, soundly as he has been rated.

For the Duchess of Cleveland he had the passion of a young man rejoicing in his strength, and later, the patience of a good-natured male creature abhorrent of scenes ! — also, he was proud of her beautiful children, and there is no doubt that Charlotte Lady Litchfield was a daughter worth having, while he saw in Grafton considerable fighting promise. I wonder what he would have said of Grafton’s later record? I myself understand and excuse it, though History does not. He was Charles’s son by Barbara ! — I need say nothing further.

Of his relations with those women linked to him by blood or family ties I never had, and never shall have, anything but good to say.

His extreme patience (and humour) when dealing with that poor spoilt child his mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, from whom I saw Monmouth derive many traits unnoticed by History ! his management of his wayward, arrogant sister Mary of Orange, who vowed that her love for her only child, William III, was as nothing beside her love for her brother ; his justice in the matter of the first Duchess of York’s marriage; the unfailing affection between him and the second Duchess, who frankly confessed that at first she loved him and detested her husband, and who, though she came to worship James II, never varied in her affection for Charles, and took to her bed, ill with grief, when he died; his enduring kindness to his daughter-in-law Anna Monmouth, with whom he always sided; and his tenderness for and interest in his natural daughters, have never received proper acknowledgment.

His attitude towards his brother James was from start to finish a miracle of cleverness.

It was too clever for J ames ! — though I must do him the justice to say that, jealous as he always was of the King, tried beyond endurance as he was by Monmouth, he was obedient and loyal, but Heaven save us from having a brother and son like those two, as His Majesty had, to play off one against the other! Play them off he did, and kept a balance between them little short of marvellous till near the finish, but like Mary II his niece, who had to choose between husband and father, Charles had to decide between the brother he never cared for and the son he adored, and, I think, played a fairer part than she did, since after all James’s star remained in the ascendant till Charles’s death, and Monmouth had been in exile almost entirely abroad since the exposure of the Rye-house Plot.

King Charles kept the English crown secure for twenty-five years and King James threw it away in four, exactly as his brother had prophesied. Monmouth could not take it from him, and had he been able to do so, would not have held it any longer — I know Monmouth, and I know that.

As for my own personal relations with the King I can say this much :

There were things I confided to him that I never told any one else, there were jokes and secrets that we shared, and foolish times of overstrain or misunderstanding which his presence alone relieved, and the knowledge that he always understood meant everything to me. I have laughed with him till I could laugh no more! Once I fell on my knees by his chair in a time of sore trouble connected with Monmouth (his trouble too), and gave way altogether, my cheek on the hand laid along the arm of his chair, his other patiently patting my shaking shoulder. Do not think I often wept to Charles. It wearies a man — I know, who better? But there were days when he wearied more of laughter than of tears, the empty wicked laughter heard so often at his Court, and above all things, he wished me (without ever saying so) to be my natural self with him. For himself he could be what he pleased, he knew.

Yet Charles showed his best side to me, therefore it is of his best side that I write.

But I have encountered him in one of the blazing Stuart rages into which he fell not more than half a dozen times in the whole course of his life; I have known him desperately ill, unsuspected by the world in general; I have seen him in the deepest despondency, when I felt how the Pit seemed like to close over his head, the earth rocked under his feet, and there was no Heaven; I have been in his company when he was drunk and survived it ! — all the men got drunk in those days, and many of the women, but Charles very seldom and the Duke of York practically never; — I have heard him swear till the room went round with me, yet I kept a calm face; I have listened to jests too broad, but never views too narrow; bitter judgments passed, but never unjust sentences; I have seen him hurt to the quick and laugh cynically above the stab; I have longed with all my heart to sympathise, and have had to sit still, hold my tongue, and keep my eyes in my lap. I knew him for a marvellous actor and an expert liar — he was a diplomatist! I myself have thought him to be imposed upon more than once, and a fool under Monmouth’s beguiling, but never in all my dealings with “the best-bred man alive” did I find him anything but a gentleman.

Most of his courtiers had all his faults, not half his good heart, not a tithe of his shrewdness (he was shrewd and lightning-quick rather than clever), and they were frequently cads into the bargain. Therefore I can say when the world sneers at his use, for his own purposes, of the men and women about him, “Think, do you realise what those purposes were?” In all my summing up of Charles II’s career I look behind his acts and his apparent acts — screens behind screens — for his reasons, generally invisible even to me. Yet not only did my cousin understand all that I gave him, but all that I wished to give him; he took my deeds, so few and paltry, and my will, so unboundedly great and fine. He took my loyalty, aye, my sentimental loyalty, laughing me out of countenance at the sentiment, but valuing the loyalty as pure gold. I could listen, and I did, I could hold my tongue and my temper, I could give private service, some humour, some tact, I was — little as I expected him to think so — of his sort. I proved myself a Stuart !

Call us a shifty race if you will ; somebody has said the Royal branch of my family were a race of artists ruling a nation of shopkeepers. That is half the truth. But if you carry away the idea that the Royal Stuarts were artists with temperaments to match, knowing nothing of business, of the bringing of their goods to market, nor of the price to be paid — or, it may be, to pay — you will form a wrong estimate altogether. It is urged that the Stuarts nearly always failed. Yes, I know of only one really successful Stuart, King Charles II! and when you read History you will wonder whether Clio is blink or mad, or whether I was.

Why then, wonder. So long as The Abbey stands, there will rest under the flagstone in Henry VII’s Chapel the bones of one who, wherever he is now, can afford to smile in the intervals of that better occupation which, on his dreadful deathbed, he cheerfully hoped to be at presently.

So I say again, I understood him.

I say it over and over without apology. For without that gift I had never lived at Whitehall, and this book had not been written, nor had my King, my most dear cousin, been my comrade too. As it was, so it is. Stuarts change constantly, but in the end it will be found that no one changes fundamentally less than a Stuart. Charles II never changed to me, and he has not changed now. It is not blind love on my part; it is not the old sentimental loyalty at which he smiled; it is not the clannishness of the descendant of the Stewards of Scotland.

This is the story of a woman whose King was her friend.

The life at Whitehall as it met the eye of the habitual courtier was in mine but the shell that contained and concealed the reality.

It affected me very little; made, in fact, hardly any impression upon me. I am told that I lived in the centre of a cesspool of vice for over ten years ; I can only say that I came out of it as clean as I went in. I am not speaking of the question of feminine virtue — I was, and remained, one of the “good” women — but I wish to make it clear that my associations with scheming courtiers and frank courtesans left no mark whatever on my, perhaps, elastic character. To be served by the Keeper of the King’s Cabinet, as I was, to kiss Nelly, to be hand in glove with rackety Monmouth (puzzling to some, this last, and not at all puzzling to others !) to be in the King’s confidence and allotted lodgings not far from the Royal apartments, was enough to blacken any woman’s reputation. Either I had none to lose, or the world was clever enough for once to see that gallantry was not my affair. I could be of more use to Charles and Monmouth as a quiet middle-aged woman of decent repute, and as such I believe I was generally considered, though I played my own little part in the life of the Court. I never went out of my way to be friends with the sinners, in whom I generally found much good, but I could put Rochester in his place for a liberty as easily as I could share Nelly’s coach and company, and both thought the better of me! I am fully aware that Charles and I cannot be pardoned for the advice we gave Lady Wentworth, yet he died unrepentant of that crime, and so did Charlotte Stuart. Other times, other morals.

The world has disturbed itself terribly about Charles’s lack of religion — and I can tell the world it knew as little about his beliefs as it did about his son’s.

The King was a Roman Catholic at heart for many years before he died, Monmouth was what we should now call distinctly Low Church, my faith was what it is at the present day, and need concern no one more than the differences between our separate forms of religion mutually concerned us three then. I was very sorry for Charles that he could not be satisfied with the Church of England, Monmouth’s Protestantism was openly jeered at as an empty form (all the world who cares to know can be better informed now), and it was supposed to be merely the trump card he played against his uncle James of York. A great many truly good people were very unhappy about the King and his son, and the few interested in me either blamed me or disbelieved my sincerity. I could not possibly be such friends, they said, with the father on one side and the son on the other (myself disagreeing on many points with both) with any root of genuine faith. Did we not argue, and quarrel, and were we not always persuading each other to different views? I can answer for it that never did Charles or Monmouth attack me about my creed, nor I them. His Grace of York was minded to have me for a convert, and I was quite ready to hear all he had to say, and thanked him, and said I would think it over, and I did so, and met him, smiling and debonair, when next our paths crossed, shaking my head and saying I saw no reason to alter my views, much as I appreciated his Highness’s arguments. That I knew them all before was not for me to tell him, surely?

His poor Highness ! I think of him now and shake my head again — this time unsmiling. I never could make him like me: Monmouth’s friendliness for me from the very first sowed a seed of suspicion in his uncle’s mind that nothing ever uprooted. James II was my greatest failure — I may confess it! There was so much in him I admired, so much soundly valuable, he had qualities I would have given my right hand to see possessed by Charles and Monmouth, but he inherited his mother’s arrogance and his father’s obstinacy (and, may I say now, the stupidity of both?) ; he had a long and danger-fraught waiting for his crown; he was a man of hot blood for all his cold blue eyes, and by the time he came to his throne he was under the thumb of his priests, who held him in thrall by reason of his sins of the flesh. He was far less to be excused as an immoral man, in my eyes, than the King his brother, for he had a young, lovely, and (finally) devoted wife, who, though her first children died, ultimately bore him a son and daughter who lived — alas for them. She began by liking me, Mary of Modena his little Duchess, tall, thin, long-limbed, long-faced, yet beautiful Italian child, “snow, blood, and ebony,” “O Dea certe!” — a martyr Queen if ever there was one, doomed to suffer (to my mind) worse than Queen Henrietta Maria or Queen Catherine. Oh, these Queens, these Queens! — God pity them, as I know He must. It is cruel work being a King, but it was tragedy incarnate to be a Stuart Queen.

Charles, James, and Monmouth were all alike, their world was full of women — and “they were only women.” They all came to see the error of their ways and all too late; I think of the warning James II wrote his little son against the temptations of the love of “fair ladies,” and I sigh. He died a saint, and that means, whatsoever purgatory may be ahead of us in another world, we go through a terrible one in this. If James of York and likewise James of Monmouth performed no penance before they died, then all my beliefs are false. They suffered tortures, each in his own way, each at his own time. As for Charles, I am less sure. I was not in England for many months before his death, nor when he died.

History, so often at fault, insists on calling him The Merry Monarch. It may be therefore that he paid here as heavy a price for his pleasures as they did for theirs !

Of the men at Whitehall hardly one was worth the friendship the King bestowed on him, they all thought themselves cleverer than he, and he — he did not laugh at them even in his sleeve, he preserved a serious face, put on his mask as the Royal libertine, yawned, for all the world to see, over business, gave the town its fill of gossip over his women and the money they got out of him — and why?

I can tell you.

Charles II had a kink in him. I know that, never was a Stuart who had no kink! — but it was part of the game he played to appear godless, worthless, a forgetful friend, an impossible husband. It all wen! to the making of his mask. No man knew Ailesbury’s “most solitary sovereign,” very few women. I did not know him through and through, but I could guess then, and I can guess better now. That Charles would have been a greater King, have achieved a finer triumph for himself and England had he played the strong straight game from the very beginning, History is eager to assure us. But he was aware that he himself was neither strong nor straight ! and so he played the game as best he knew. I believe that only the line he took led him along the flowery paths — in the world’s eyes — of his quarter-century as King of England. I believe (I too may be wrong, for I also have my kink), remembering the temper of the English for the half-century following the Restoration, that England would have had none of him in a very few years had he laid down his mask, certainly over the vexed question of his religion. And subtract Charles — and we may be sure his brother James along with him ! — what would have become of England, any time in the sixties, for instance? Cromwell and his influence and work were as if they had never been, Monmouth was a child, William of Orange a year younger. England would have fallen, helplessly entangled into a republican net of her own devising, into the jaws of France.