The kings bed, p.28
The King's Bed, page 28
The hugely contentious measure would have confined political power to Anglican royalists and it was fiercely contested. A highly charged debate in the House of Lords lasted seventeen days. Untypically the King curtailed his usual round of pleasures in order to watch. He saw the Bill finally squeeze through the Lords by a few votes, only to be killed off by a piece of procedural sabotage in the Commons. A furious Charles, whose charm usually masked any irritation he felt, prorogued the House and didn’t recall it for eighteen months.
In the interim, talk in the salons and the political clubs had been dominated by speculation about James. How to contain the Papists if he succeeded his brother? Should he be allowed to succeed? Who might replace him?
Now, in October 1678, came the time for answers, when lack of money forced Charles to reconvene the Parliament he had prorogued eighteen months earlier. In his formal speech from the throne, the King revealed the Popish Plot, which he called ‘a design against my person by the Jesuits’. He delivered the news almost as a throwaway line, giving no details of the plot at this time but speaking of ‘foreigners contriving to introduce popery amongst us’.
Charles, as we have seen, didn’t believe in the plot, and he didn’t want it investigated by Parliament. If members of the Commons started probing they might turn up ‘many things that were yet to be concealed’.11 His prime concern was keeping a lid on the secret payments from Louis of France. So Lord Treasurer Danby had been instructed to bypass Parliament and leave the allegations for the judges to pursue. Danby, always a hardliner on Catholic issues, and the most devious of men, disobeyed his master, making details of the allegations available to the Commons. The King, though furious with Danby, had no option but to go along with him.
The effect was immediate. In the words of Sir John Reresby, the country ‘took fire’. In his memoirs, Reresby recalled, ‘It is not possible to describe the ferment which the artifices of some and the real fear and belief of others concerning his plot put the two Houses of Parliament and the greatest part of the nation in.’ Over the coming weeks even the most level-headed were persuaded that the King was in imminent danger from Papist assassins and the very future of Protestantism was in the balance.
The furore developed into a threat to the throne itself, with the Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, playing a major part. Probably the ablest politician of the reign, Shaftesbury had helped restore Charles to the throne, but he had become increasingly alienated from the King because of his absolutism. He was the dominant figure among the loose grouping of constitutional monarchists, Presbyterians and radicals who would come to be known as the Whigs. Few historians think he ever believed in Oates’s plot but he found it a useful weapon. He orchestrated an anti-Catholic campaign that had the crown trembling on Charles’s head.
Shaftesbury showed his hand a week after Charles’s speech. In the Commons, the Earl’s ally Lord Russell tabled an address calling for the removal of the Duke ofYork ‘from His Majesty’s presence’. In the days that followed a similar address demanded the banishment from Whitehall of the Queen and all her retinue. Then came a Bill to ban Roman Catholics from sitting in either house. The Lords voted by the narrowest of margins to exempt York from the ban. But that was a limited reprieve in a darkening situation. Orders went out to arrest priests and Jesuits, while Catholics were barred from the court, the army and then from London. Search parties were sent to arrest those who had failed to leave and London’s prison population bulged. Towards the turn of the year, some two thousand were held in Newgate, the Fleet, the Marshalsea and other gaols.
In the meantime Ralph Montagu was pursuing his vengeance against Danby. He had been promised 100,000 crowns from the French if he could ruin the minister inside six months. He relished the prospect and planned to do it through Parliament. On 18 December his moment came. During a series of tit-for-tat accusations in the Commons, Montagu produced a letter from Danby about the latest bribe Charles had asked of France. In return for staying neutral and not recalling Parliament, the King wanted a phenomenal six million livres a year for three years. The letter stressed the need for secrecy: ‘all possible care must be taken to have this whole negotiation as private as possible,’ Danby had written. ‘I must again repeat it to you that . . . you must not mention a syllable of the money.’12
Louise de Kérouaille undoubtedly played a key part in this most sensitive deal, just as she had in other transactions with Louis, and she was concerned at what Danby might now reveal. Though she and Danby had been lovers, in a letter evidently written before Parliament quizzed him, Danby made clear that they were lovers no longer. He wrote complaining of ‘her ill usage of me’ and indicated that he could do her damage. ‘I dare not trust what I may do if I be hard pressed by the Parliament to speak things that may not please her Grace.’13
To her undoubted relief, nothing about her appeared publicly at this juncture. Danby had to shoulder the whole blame for the sellout to the French. In Francophobe England this inevitably meant his ruin. In April he was impeached and dragged through a baying crowd to be lodged in the Tower, where he passed five years without trial. One of the King’s old boon companions, Silius Titus, sneered: ‘By the trouble this great person has given us, we may plainly see how much easier a favourite undoes a Kingdom, than serves a Kingdom.’14
Having already lost Danby as a lover, the Duchess had now lost her greatest political ally. But her sexual antennae invariably homed in on the powerful, and she now established a similarly intimate relationship with Robert Spencer, Earl of Sunderland, who was made Secretary of State in April 1679. They were old friends. Eight years earlier, during those frolics in Euston Hall, the Earl’s wife had happily played a part in the mock marriage ceremony that climaxed in the King’s first bedding of Louise. Now, as her husband became enmeshed in the Frenchwoman’s manoeuvres, and tongues wagged about their relationship, Lady Sunderland radiated the air of an embittered and wronged wife. In letters to Henry Sydney she called Louise ‘a jade’, ‘that abominable jade’, ‘more of a jade than ever . . . to everybody and in every particular’. She warned against relying on the Duchess’s good offices to help the Prince of Orange, ‘for she will certainly sell us, whenever she can, for £500.’15
Before Danby’s fall, the King had dissolved Parliament and ordered a new election, hoping for a less fractious House. At the same time Danby had persuaded the King to exile his brother James before the new Parliament convened. According to a footnote in the House of Commons Journal, he convinced the King to ‘send the Duke beyond the seas so there might be no colour for suspecting that the councels [sic] were influenced by him. He was sent away upon very short warning.’16
The crisis over the succession focused attention on the King’s earliest love, the long dead, much vilified Lucy Walter. Her son with Charles had grown up to be the dashing if not too bright Duke of Monmouth, Charles’s favourite child. As the Exclusion Crisis developed, Monmouth emerged as the popular favourite to displace James. His supporters dredged up the old stories of a secret marriage between his parents and of a ‘black box’ supposedly containing documents that confirmed it. The contents would legitimise Monmouth and give him a better title to be heir than York. Orchestrated by Shaftesbury, a bandwagon began to roll for the young man.
Charles rebutted the marriage claim in a move that must have been humiliating for a king. He provided James with a written declaration stating:
I do here declare, in the presence of Almighty God, that I never was married nor gave contract to any woman whatsoever, but to my wife, Queen Catherine, to whom I am now married. In witness whereof I set my hand, at Whitehall, the sixth of January 1679.17
When York saw an announcement of Monmouth’s latest appointment, as Captain General of the Army, describing him as the King’s ‘son’, he asked his brother to reaffirm Monmouth’s illegitimacy. Charles testily had the wording changed to ‘natural son’. Following this, uncle and nephew, who had once hunted and raced happily together, were no longer companions.
In the Palace of Whitehall, Catholic Louise and Protestant Nell continued to contest for the King’s bed, and Chiffinch continued to shoo gaggles of young women up the back stairs. While these girls remain anonymous, we know something of those who came in through the front door. One of them was Jenny Myddleton, the tall, voluptuous and auburn-haired daughter of Jane Myddleton, the court beauty of the 1660s. Jane, together with one of the most practised intriguers of the court, Elizabeth Lady Harvey, waved Jenny under the King’s nose.
They chose their moment when Louise was off the scene in 1678 due to illness. Lady Harvey persuaded Nell to have Jenny accompany her on soirées with the King in Chiffinch’s rooms. There is a suggestion that Hortense Mancini was also brought in on the plotting and took the girl along on visits to the King. Gossiping about it in a letter to Rochester, Halifax reported:
My Lady Hervey who always loves one civil plot more, is working body and soul to bring Mrs Jenny Middleton into play. How dangerous a new one is to the old ones I need not tell you, but her ladyship having little opportunity of seeing [the King] upon her own account, weedles poor Mrs Nelly into supping twice or thrice a week at W.C’s [Chiffinch’s] and carrying her with her; so that in good earnest this poor creature is betrayed by her ladyship to pimp against herself.
The ploy worked in so far as the girl was thereafter numbered among the long list of the King’s minor mistresses, but any affair was fleeting. Louise returned to send the challenger and sponsor packing by ordering them to be barred from the royal chambers.
Despite Charles issuing two further rebuttals of the Lucy Walter marriage story, the Monmouth bandwagon rolled on. It was given added force in June when Charles charged Monmouth with putting down a Covenanter uprising in Scotland and the Duke returned in triumph. Bonfires burned in London, bells rang to mark his triumphant return and Monmouth was celebrated pointedly as ‘the Protestant prince’.
Another, quieter bandwagon was rolling too – for the involvement of another Protestant hero in English affairs. A triumvirate of Whig earls – Essex, Halifax and Sunderland – favoured the candidacy of William of Orange, whose resistance to French aggression in Flanders had made him a darling of English Protestants. Publicly, the earls proposed a system of ‘limitations’ to restrict James’s freedom of action were he to become king. Privately, they discussed replacing him altogether with his eldest daughter Mary or her husband William. In debating the role William might play if his wife succeeded, the word ‘Protector’ was used – which, one might have thought, would have sent shivers down royalist spines.
Between 1679 and 1681 Charles was to deploy the royal prerogative ten times to defeat exclusion bills and other Parliamentary threats by proroguing or dissolving Parliament. In one case he disguised his intention until the last minute, arriving at Parliament with robes and orb conveyed there secretly in a second coach. According to one unlikely story, he hid the crown in his codpiece.
He also tried to reduce the temperature by exiling Monmouth as well as James. With the main contenders for the succession abroad at least some of the time, others fought their corners for them. Halifax described London at this time as buzzing with so much politicking that ‘a wasps nest is a quieter place to sleep in than this town is to live in’.18
All manner of options were canvassed. The most straightforward in theory would have been for James to announce his reconversion to the Anglican church. It was put to James. ‘I will never be brought to do it,’ he told an MP supporter. They would say it was only a trick, and ‘that I had a dispensation and I was still a Catholic in my heart . . . and that was more reason to be afraid of popery than ever.’19
Inevitably, the divorce option was mooted again. This time it was raised by Shaftesbury, and once again the King turned it down. Charles was equally against legitimising Monmouth, though that might have solved everything.
The Duchess of Portsmouth, still an alluring young woman who delighted in flaunting her influence with the King, flitted between the different camps, trying to keep in with each but ultimately plumping heavily – and surprisingly, perhaps – for Monmouth and his backer the Earl of Shaftesbury. York had counted on her support against exclusion and was livid at her defection. He later grumbled that she had played ‘a dog trick’ on him.
Two factors probably determined Louise’s support of exclusion. One was ambition for her son. According to Bishop Burnet, the Duchess was told that the exclusion of James might be followed by an Act of Parliament enabling the King to choose his successor. Why shouldn’t he pick her son, the Duke of Richmond, rather than Monmouth? The possibility was said to have been planted in her mind by the ever-resourceful Shaftesbury to bring her into the exclusionist camp. If so, it succeeded.20
The other factor for her was fear. On the day in April 1679 that the Commons finished with Danby, Sir John Reresby noted that ‘both houses began to reflect’ on the Duchess of Portsmouth. In August, Barillon reported that Sunderland and Portsmouth ‘are very worried about being attacked in the next session of Parliament’. The following January he warned that, if Parliament was recalled, ‘Madame Portsmouth would certainly be attacked and perhaps chased out of England.’21
Defending herself privately, she coolly denied that she was a French dupe, letting it drop that pure self-interest dictated her loyalty. She told Henry Sydney that while she loved her country, when it came to France versus England ‘she would show that she thought her stake here was much greater than there.’
Louise was not one to ignore personal attacks. She possessed a temperament as vindictive as Barbara’s, if not as loud, and she was blamed when the suspected author of one attack on her was beaten up. This was the poet John Dryden, a friend and pensioner of Shaftesbury. He was set on by three men in Rose Alley in December 1679, after circulation of a verse labelling Louise a prostitute. The attack prompted this riposte:
Though Portsmouth have strong ruffians she can trust
As well to serve her malice as her lust
Yet still she’s slavish, prostate, false and foul
Destroy our prince’s honour, health and soul.22
Hard on the heels of the signs that Parliament would be gunning for her, a newsletter reported that twenty-two charges had been drawn up against the Duchess, possibly by the Duke of York. Louise’s enemies circulated the charges in pamphlet form.23 Some were ludicrous, others deadly accurate. They ranged from ‘labouring to subvert the government of church and state’ and fomenting that ‘fatal’ alliance between England and France, to trying to poison Charles and siphoning off ‘prodigious sums’ of money from the public purse.
For a proud and haughty woman, the most mortifying allegation in the list was that she was infected with the pox and thus a danger to the King. The accusation read:
The said Duchess hath and still doth cohabit and keep company of the King, having a foul, nauseous and contagious distemper which once possessing her blood can never admit a perfect cure; to the manifest hazard and danger to the King’s person in whose preservation is bound up the weal and happiness of the Protestant religion, our lives, liberties and properties and those of our prosperity for ever.
Of course, it was true. She had been infected – and by the King.
The treason charges, however, were never aired in court. Shaftesbury attempted to indict Louise as a common prostitute before a Middlesex jury packed with his fellow Whigs, but the King’s loyal Chief Justice, Lord Scroggs, closed proceedings before the case could be made.
Behind the scenes, Louise continued her role as link between the two kings. This involved her trying to nursemaid the most breath-taking royal deal yet. It got off the ground in early July 1679, when Louise set up a discreet meeting between the French ambassador Barillon and Charles in her apartments. It was late at night, and judging from reports of their conversation, the atmosphere in those lavishly appointed rooms was charged with melodrama.24 Charles told the ambassador that it was up to his master, Louis XIV, whether England continued as a monarchy or became a republic. In what was obviously going to lead to a bid for a great deal of money, Charles asked the ambassador to warn Louis that nothing could stop the English Parliament taking control of foreign affairs, the making of treaties and indeed war and peace if Louis didn’t support him. It was the opening round in a series of negotiations that would end with Louis agreeing to pay to become, in effect, the secret ruler of England, while the notional ruler was left with his women.
During the haggling, Charles faced the humiliating experience of being asked if he could be trusted. The French ambassador recalled broken English promises from the past and quizzed Charles on why he was allowing so many innocent Catholics to be executed without intervening. Charles blamed his ministers, his brother and ‘circumstances’ – everyone but himself. The price for saving Charles was that Louis should sanction when England’s Parliament would meet.25 At a subsequent meeting in Louise’s apartments, Charles told Barillon that ‘he was prepared to bind himself not to summon a Parliament for several years, and only then if the King of France himself should consider that there was no danger in doing so.’26
Louise was directed by Charles to squeeze as much money as possible from the Sun King. However, this extraordinary deal did not go ahead. Before it could be sealed, Charles was taken seriously ill and it looked as if he were on his deathbed. In Westminster, there was panic, and in ‘swift secrecy’ James was summoned home from his exile in Brussels, preparatory to being proclaimed King. Opposition Whigs in the meantime discussed plans to raise an army against James under Monmouth’s banner. Guards were posted at Temple Bar and ordnance ringed Whitehall. Charles’s womenfolk wept at his bedside. All of it was premature. His doctors dosed him with quinine and he recovered remarkably quickly.27
