ANNE HYDE
DUCHESS OF YORK

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ANNE HYDE

ANNE HYDE

DUCHESS OF YORK

BY

J. R. HENSLOWE

AUTHOR OF “DUKE’S WINTON—A CHRONICLE OF SEDGMOOR,” ETC.

LONDON

T. WERNER LAURIE LTD.

8 ESSEX STREET, STRAND

INTRODUCTION

Among the records, few at best, left by time of her who was destined to be the mother of two queens regnant of England, there is one which bears its own pathetic significance.

It is a very small book, only about four inches long by three wide, bound in stamped leather from which the gilding is half worn away, with a broken silver clasp, and thick, stiff pages.[1]

1.  Additional MSS., 15,900 B. M.

Was this little book a gift from Edward Hyde to the young daughter whom he dearly loved? Who is to tell us now?

It is a girl’s tiny notebook, a treasure perhaps to her, in which she writes down occasional memoranda as they occur to her, but as we turn the leaves it seems to bridge with a familiar touch the centuries which lie between us and that vanished time. There is a page of figures, a little poetry (“The Contented Marter”), a list of household matters, “3 bras candlesticks, 4 bras kittles, driping pans,” and so on. An allusion to a servant—“Betty came to my Mother”—is on another leaf.

One fancies, somehow, that Anne kept this book by her bedside, jealously clasped, along with her little store of devotional reading. She filled it full of writing in pencil, quite easy to decipher, save that time has made it pale and dim.

Some of the sentences are in the French she came to know very perfectly in later days, and speak of a long dead romance.

“Je n’en vey mourir d’amour, mais ce n’est pas pour un infidèle comme vous.—Anne Hyde.”

“Adieu pour jamais, mais n’oubliez pas la plus misérable personne du monde.—Anne Hyde.”

Was the “infidèle” meant for Spencer Compton or Harry Jermyn? Do the plaintive words point to the bitterness of supposed desertion by one higher than either? When were they written? There is no date to guide us.

Elsewhere there is a mention of one, her aunt Barbara Aylesbury, greatly beloved:

“Je l’aime plus que moy-mesne mille fois.—Anne Hyde.”

But on another page (it must have been much earlier), the girl, as girls will, sets down gravely the short story of her young life, here transcribed:

“If I live till the 22 of March 1653, I am 16 yeare old. My dear Aunt Bab was when she died 24 yeare old and as much as from Aprell to August.”[2] (This is the Barbara Aylesbury of the other entry.) “I was borne the 12 day of March old stile in the yeare of our Lord 1637 at Cranbourne Lodge neer Windsor in Barkshire and lived in my owne country till I was 12 yeares old haveing in that time seen the ruin both of Church and State in the murtheringe of my Kinge. The first of May old stile 1649 I came out of England being then 12 yeares old 1 month and 15 days. I came to Antwerp 6 of May old stile the August following I went to Bruxells for 3 or 4 days and returned againe to Antwerp where I stayed 3 weekes being loged at the court of her Highness the Princess Royall. I returned to Antwerp in May where I have been ever since February 8 1653. I am now 15 years old.”

2.  Barbara, daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, died in September 1652. (Nicholas Papers.)

So abruptly the record ends. The writer has no more to say, for she is yet only on the threshold of life.

Turn the page. Over the leaf in another hand, large and straggling, someone has inscribed a final memorandum. The little book would never be wanted by its owner any more, but there was room for this.

“On the 3 day of March being fryday the Dutchess dyed at St James and was buried the wednesday following 1671.”

Between the two dates a little span of years, not a score; and yet how great a sum of the things which go to fill up life—of hope and love and splendour, of pain and grief and disappointment.

It is this story that we try now to construct out of the memorials of her time; the life story of the woman who, without any extraordinary beauty or charm, so far as we are able to judge, to balance the comparative obscurity from which she sprang, was fated in an age when the claims of high birth were jealously guarded to become the wife of a Prince of the Blood Royal of England.

Even in the seventeenth century, gilded as it was by the slowly dying radiance of romance, the “glory and the dream” of chivalry, the strange tale reads like a fable, and yet the life, short as it was, of Anne Hyde, had results for her age and country which even now can hardly be measured accurately and dispassionately, like the ever-widening circles on the surface of a pool into which a pebble has been cast.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER |  | PAGE
I. | Parentage | 1
II. | Youth | 18
III. | James Stuart | 73
IV. | The Marriage | 109
V. | The Duchess | 159
VI. | The Fall of Clarendon | 211
VII. | The Turning-Point | 239
VIII. | The End | 276

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Anne Hyde | Frontispiece
Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia | 26
James Duke of York | 102
Henry Duke of Gloucester | 136
Henrietta Maria, “Mother Queen” | 144
John Evelyn | 156
Prince Rupert | 168
Elizabeth Countess of Chesterfield | 178
Frances Jennings, Duchess of Tyrconnel | 192
Edward Earl of Clarendon | 234
Henrietta Duchess of Orleans | 286

ANNE HYDE, DUCHESS

OF YORK

CHAPTER I

PARENTAGE

There is, after all, something to be said for the birth of Anne Hyde.

Edward Hyde, the famous Chancellor and historian of the Great Rebellion, though the first peer of his name, could still, quite honestly, boast of long and honourable descent.

The Hydes of Norbury, in the county of Cheshire, celebrated by Camden in his “Britannia,” had handed down that possession from father to son since the far-back days before the Norman Conquest, but the first of the race with whom we need concern ourselves is the grandfather of the future Chancellor.[3]

3.  “Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, from his Birth to the Restoration of the Royal Family,” written by himself. (1759.)

Evelyn’s “Correspondence.” To Mr Sprat, Chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham, afterwards Bishop of Rochester.

Laurence, the seventh son of Robert Hyde of Norbury, could claim, naturally, but a small provision from the paternal resources, but his mother seems to have looked carefully to his education, as the best chance for his future, and he was placed as a clerk in one of the auditors’ offices of the Exchequer.

Thence he was employed in the affairs of Sir Thomas Thynne, who under Protector Somerset in a short time raised a great estate, and was the first of his name to possess Longleat.

Laurence Hyde, however, held the post little more than a year—and gained nothing by it—but soon afterwards he married Anne, widow of Matthew Colthurst of Claverton, near Bath, who brought him a fair fortune, and by this marriage he had four sons and four daughters, the sons being Robert, Laurence, Henry and Nicholas. He bought, at the time of his marriage, the manor of West Hatch in the county of Wilts, but at his death he left the greater part of his estate to his widow.

Of the four sons above mentioned, the second, named also Laurence, became eventually “a lawyer of great name and practice,” being attorney to Queen Anne of Denmark, and obtaining knighthood in due course. His next brother, by name Henry, was at the time of his father’s death already entered at the Middle Temple, being a good scholar and a Master of Arts of Oxford. He was supposed (probably by his brothers and sisters) to be his mother’s favourite, and perhaps it was because he was the “spoilt child,” that he stoutly announced that “he had no mind to the law” but wished to enlarge his mind by travel. Having with some difficulty, as may be conjectured, extracted his mother’s unwilling consent, he went joyfully off on the Grand Tour, going through Germany from Spa to Italy. There he visited Florence, Siena and Rome, which, by the way, was then inhibited to the subjects of Elizabeth, and he somehow managed to obtain the protection of Cardinal Allen, probably a very necessary precaution. However, in due time Henry Hyde came safely back from what was then, and for long afterwards, considered a perilous undertaking, and was of course on his return persuaded forthwith to marry.

The wife who was chosen was Mary, one of the daughters and heirs of Edward Longford of Trowbridge, and Henry Hyde appears from this time to have settled down peaceably in his native county. He served as burgess for some neighbouring boroughs in many parliaments, and moreover, like his father before him, had a numerous family of four sons and five daughters.

Of his sons, the third, Edward, lived to be the Lord Chancellor.

Edward Hyde was born at his father’s house of Dinton, Wilts, on 18th February 1609, and as a child was taught by a schoolmaster to whom his father presented the living.

After the fashion of those days, which peopled both the universities with mere children, the boy was sent at the age of thirteen to Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and thereafter entered at the Middle Temple by his uncle, Nicholas Hyde, afterwards Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench.[4]

4.  “Autobiography of Sir John Bramston.”

In his early youth there came to Edward Hyde an experience which seems to us to embody a brief and sad romance. He married in 1629 the daughter of Sir George Ayliffe of Gretenham in his own county of Wilts, but before six months were past, the poor young bride was smitten by smallpox, that scourge of the seventeenth century, and died. He says of himself that “he bore her Loss with so great Passion and Confusion of spirit that it shook all the frame of his Resolutions.”

However, in 1632, when he was but twenty-four, the young widower repaired his loss by a second marriage with Frances, daughter of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, a union which proved to be a very happy one. With reference to this marriage Sir Bernard Burke, in his “Romance of the Aristocracy,” gives a curious tradition respecting the descent of Frances Aylesbury.

Some time early in the seventeenth century, a barefooted and destitute girl arrived one day at a roadside tavern in the village of Chelsea, and being kindly welcomed there, told the landlord that she was tramping to London, hoping to take service there. As it happened, the situation of “pot-girl” was then vacant at the Blue Dragon, and “Anne” forthwith stepped into the place. A rich brewer was in the habit of coming every day for his evening draught, and being attracted by the girl’s manner and appearance, married her within three months. Before long he died, leaving “Anne” a wealthy widow, to whom came many suitors. From among these she chose Sir Thomas Aylesbury, Master of Requests and the Mint, who moreover possessed lands in Buckinghamshire.

After many years there arose a dispute as to the property of the late brewery, and Lady Aylesbury was recommended to employ a young barrister, by name Edward Hyde, who was destined thereafter to become her son-in-law.

From this tale was drawn the obvious conclusion that the two queens of England, Mary and Anne, were great-granddaughters of a beggar maid.

Fortunately Burke merely gives the romantic story for what it is worth, and suggests that very probably it was coined after the Restoration by some one of Hyde’s numerous enemies, who were envious of his steady ascent to rank and distinction, and found a theory of obscure connections very comforting to their own souls.

In February 1634 we find young Hyde appointed one of the managers of a masque presented before the King by the Inns of Court, as a protest against Prynne’s furious attack on the drama.

Thither came King Charles, stately and gracious, forgetting perhaps for a brief moment the heavy clouds now gathering low on his horizon to cover the sky as with a pall: with dreaming, melancholy eyes intent for a little space on the scene which the masquers unfolded before him; where, a little before, Ben Jonson had brought many beautiful and dainty fancies to such rare perfection—but on this occasion it was “The Triumph of Peace,” by James Shirley.

Here, on that winter evening, in that great and splendid hall, shone all the glitter and pageantry and poetic thought so soon to be for long years eclipsed, leaving a pathetic memory to be cherished through many weary seasons of strife and disaster by those who had seen it.[5]

5.  Dictionary of National Biography, E. Hyde, 1609-1674.

Whether young Hyde at this time attracted the King’s special attention or not, we have no record, but his progress was a steady one.

As to what manner of man he was, we have his own words. In the curious sententious method of introspection and self-analysis employed by the thinkers of that age, Hyde speaks of himself as “in his nature inclined to Pride and Passion, and to a humour between Wrangling and Disputing very troublesome”[6]; but he certainly possessed the art of attracting the friendship of some of the finest spirits of that stormy age, which, like all periods of stress, produced many such to shine like lamps in their time. There were the poets Carew and Cotton, the elder Godolphin, Evelyn, who extols Hyde’s “great and signal merits,” and greatest and noblest of all, Lucius Carey, Lord Falkland.

6.  “Life of the Earl of Clarendon,” by himself.

If, as has been said, a man is known by his friends, then it may surely be counted to Edward Hyde for righteousness that he had eyes to discern the shining of that “steadfast star” too early extinguished. There is nothing more inspiring in English literature than the words in which he chronicles the going out of that light, the death of his hero on the red field which gave that pure spirit the peace it craved so earnestly. “Thus,” says the historian, “fell that incomparable young man in the four and thirtieth year of his age, having so much despatched the business of life that the oldest rarely attain to that immense knowledge, and the youngest enters not into the world with more innocence, and whosoever leads such a life need not care upon how short warning it be taken from him.”[7]

7.  “History of the Rebellion.” Clarendon.

Edward Hyde’s link with the great Villiers family procured for him powerful interest, and prompted him to vindicate the detested memory of the first Duke of Buckingham. This Villiers connection was due partly to Hyde’s first marriage, as there seems to have been a relationship with the Ayliffes of Gretenham, and partly to his father-in-law, Sir Thomas Aylesbury. He, being a distinguished mathematician, had been secretary first to the Earl of Nottingham, Lord High Admiral of England, and then to the latter’s successor, Buckingham. To the influence of the powerful favourite he owed his posts of Master of Requests and of the Mint. Anthony Wood says that Sir Thomas sat for a short time in Parliament in the former capacity, and as a matter of form at Oxford in 1643 after the beginning of the Rebellion.

His Cavalier sympathies procured for him the sentence of banishment from England, and he died at Breda at the age of eighty-one. His son, who at the instance of Charles I. had translated Davila’s “History of the Civil Wars in France,” was for a time tutor to the second Duke of Buckingham and his young brother Lord Francis Villiers, who in his turn merits one word at least. Nothing in the history of the great strife has been chronicled more heroic nor more pathetic than the fate of that boy—for he was no more—at Kingston-on-Thames. A true Villiers, “prodigal of his person,” he fiercely rejected quarter, and with his back against a tree fought valiantly till he went down under the swords of the Roundheads, “nine wounds in his beautiful face and body.”[8] Yet it was better so—better to die in the flush of chivalrous, unstained youth, than to live out such a life as his brother’s, a life blackened by degrading vice, gasped out alone, in the “worst inn’s worst room,” as Pope declared (though this has been denied), the last male of his race.

8.  Brian Fairfax.

To return to the Aylesbury tutor of the Villiers brothers; he lived abroad in exile for a time, and having been obliged to return to England in 1650, he again left the country, and died six years later in Jamaica, being then secretary to Major-General Sedgwick.

Another of Edward Hyde’s friends was Sir Edmund Verney, “of great courage and generally beloved,”[9] that gallant standard-bearer who was destined to fall at Edgehill at the beginning of the war, but who as long as he lived, with Hyde and Falkland, might be considered to represent the moderate or constitutional loyalists. Having in 1634 been appointed keeper of writs and rolls of Common Pleas, we find Hyde later emerging into the arena of public life. In 1640 he organised the royal party in the Commons, and on the eve of the outbreak drew up the state papers for the Royalist press.[10] With Colepepper, afterwards famous as a general, and his friend Falkland, Hyde joined the King at York. At this time he was member for Wotton Basset in his own county of Wilts, having been also called to serve for Shaftesbury, which however he declined. At the dissolution of the Short Parliament in 1640 he was again, in the constitution of the Long Parliament, returned for his own constituency. At some time he also seems to have represented Saltash. At any rate, from the date above referred to, he gave up his practice at the Bar, and devoted himself to “public business.”

9.  “Life of the Earl of Clarendon,” by himself.

10.  “Short History of the English People.” Green.

We have it under his hand that as late as 1639 the “three kingdoms” were “flourishing in entire Peace and universal Plenty,” yet we cannot but think that any one so far-seeing and sagacious as Edward Hyde must have detected the first low mutterings of the gathering storm by that time. His personal enmity to Cromwell began early, and at the beginning of the Long Parliament he was attacked by the bitter Puritan Fiennes for his steady attachment to the Church.[11] It was then that he was first sent for by the King, who wished to thank him personally for his defence both of himself and of the Church, and from this date begins his close association with Charles. With Prince Rupert, loyal nephew and gallant soldier as he showed himself to be, Hyde was never on good terms, neither were his two colleagues,[12] and the trio before mentioned, whether for good or evil, steadily opposed the sometimes headlong counsels of the brilliant Prince Palatine.

11.  “Life of the Earl of Clarendon,” by himself.

12.  “A Royal Cavalier: The Romance of Rupert, Prince Palatine,” by Mrs Steuart Erskine.

One of Hyde’s first actions after his election was to secure the suppression of the Earl Marshal’s Court, while soon after his dispute with Fiennes, the King wished to appoint him Solicitor-General, though Hyde declined the post. The triumvirate, Colepepper, Falkland and Hyde himself, steadfast, upright and loyal, constantly met to consult on the King’s affairs, in the hope—a vain one as it proved—of stemming the incoming tide of misfortune. At the beginning of 1643, Hyde was sworn of the Privy Council, and made Chancellor of the Exchequer, but in common with many other of the King’s most faithful and wisest servants, we find him deploring the Queen’s unbounded influence over her husband, who, since Buckingham’s untimely and tragic death from the dagger of Felton, had had no supreme adviser. Before Henrietta left for Holland on her expedition to procure supplies with the jewels she pledged there, she exacted from the King two utterly preposterous promises: first, to receive no one who had ever “disserved him” into favour, and secondly, not to make peace without her consent. After the fatal loss of Falkland at Newbury fight in this year, the King was anxious to make Hyde Secretary of State, but the latter declined this office also, and it was conferred on Digby.[13] But early in the succeeding year the Chancellor received a proof of his master’s absolute confidence, as he was entrusted with the care of the Prince of Wales.

13.  “Life of the Earl of Clarendon,” by himself.

On the 4th March 1644, though neither master nor servant was to know it, Edward Hyde parted from King Charles for the last time on earth, and set out for the west of England with the boy whose life for the next sixteen years was to be one of weary and ceaseless wandering.

From Pendennis in Cornwall they went to Scilly and on to Jersey. Here Hyde himself stayed for two years with Sir George Carteret, remaining after the Prince left the island for Paris in 1646, both Capel and Hopton having gone before him.

The Queen’s mischievous jealousy of Hyde, which had begun early, had not abated, and she still wrote to the harassed and almost despairing King letters calculated to prejudice him still further against the former. Charles, in this case, does not seem to have been really influenced by them, for he wrote to the Chancellor that he wished him to join his son as soon as he left France, and even Henrietta herself must have been seized with some compunction, for she sent for Hyde in 1648. As soon as he received the summons the latter went to Caen, then to Rouen, and hearing the Prince was to go to Holland he went to Dieppe to wait, glad probably of an excuse to avoid the unwelcome interview with the Queen. Thence he joined Lord Cottington in a frigate going to Dunkirk, but they were taken by pirates, who, however, did no worse than convey them to Ostend, whence the Chancellor was able to join the Prince of Wales at the Hague.

It was at this time that Hyde came into contact with one of the greatest and noblest of his king’s servants, but one who was yet the object of bitter jealousy at the hands of many of his own party, no less than at those of his enemies.

Montrose was then in Holland, after the disaster of Philiphaugh, hoping, plotting, working, with the restless, passionate, indomitable energy which had achieved so much in the past, yet which was destined to fail so utterly in the future. At a village near The Hague the two met, the grave lawyer and the hot soldier, to confer on the state of Scotland and the prospects therein of the master whom they both served with whole-hearted and ungrudging devotion.

There they parted, and Montrose came back to his distracted country to raise anew the standard, to fight his last fight, to be betrayed by the basest of traitors, to die a dishonoured death, as his enemies called it, which was to earn for him, nevertheless, imperishable fame; and Hyde was to toil on steadfastly for long strenuous years, destined to bring him fame and place and wealth, and to bring him likewise fresh exile and bitter disillusion in his age.

After Hyde’s mission as ambassador to Spain with his friend Lord Cottington was accomplished, he was at last able to send for his wife and children to join him in the Low Countries, but before he met them at Antwerp he made a journey to Paris to see the widowed queen, for by this time the tragedy at Whitehall had been consummated, and Hyde’s young charge was king de jure if not de facto. Henrietta seems to have been still possessed with the idea that the Chancellor’s influence with her son was adverse to her interests, but she received him civilly on this occasion.

After the disastrous defeat of Worcester in 1651, and his own romantic escape, Charles II. bethought him of Hyde, and sent for him to Paris, keeping him chiefly with him in Flanders on their return there, until his own departure for Germany.[14]

14.  They were together for three years at this time. (“Life of the Earl of Clarendon,” by himself.)

During this time, Mary, Princess Royal of England, and Dowager of Orange, showed herself a firm friend to her father’s old servant, and evinced great kindness to his family, providing them with a house rent free at Breda some time during the autumn of 1653, Breda being then in Spanish territory, and not under the States General.[15]

15.  “Lives of Princesses of England.” M. A. Everett-Green.

Here, then, he lived, surrounded by those dearest to him, as far as one can judge a fairly contented life for the next few years. If, as we are told, his three principles were “a passionate attachment to the religion and polity of the Church of England, a determination to maintain what he considered the true ideal of the English constitution, and a desire for personal advancement,” this last attribute—ambition—could have had little to feed on during those years at Breda.

CHAPTER II

YOUTH

It was at Cranborne Lodge in Windsor Park, the official home of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, that his grandchild, Edward Hyde’s eldest daughter, was born on the 12th March 1637, and baptized by the name of Anne, that of her father’s first wife. It may be mentioned that there is a tradition, though one altogether disproved, that her birthplace was the College Farm at Purton, which is said to have belonged to her paternal grandfather, Henry Hyde.[16]

16.  “Life of Edward, Lord Clarendon,” by Sir Henry Craik.

Of her early childhood nothing has come down to us, but in May 1649 the mother with her five children set out for Antwerp. It was the dreary year when, immediately following the King’s execution, many of the broken and impoverished Cavaliers and their families saw no prospect for the future save in leaving their distracted country, and the Hydes did as their neighbours.

Hyde himself, as we have seen, had been despatched hither and thither in the service of the young King, and when at length he rejoined his family, it was at Breda.

The Princess of Orange was always as staunch a champion of her native country as she was a passionately loving sister to her exiled brothers, and she was ready at all times to extend a welcome to the forlorn and beggared English. Hyde, moreover, had been, as she knew, an absolutely trusted and faithful servant of the slaughtered father whose memory she cherished so fondly, and she lavished every possible attention on him and his family. She was upheld here by the good offices of Daniel O’Neill of the King’s bodyguard, a great friend of Hyde’s, who threw all his influence into the balance in his favour. Mary, we have seen, gave tangible proof of her attachment to the exiled Chancellor, as she generously provided a house at Breda, free of charge, for him and his family. Here then, Hyde, as we have said, set up his household gods. So many of the banished English were coming and going about the Princess Mary’s Court and the person of her brother during many years, that the Chancellor was by no means destitute of old friends.

Among these, not the least beloved and trusted was Morley, afterwards Bishop successively of Worcester and Winchester. He[17] had had a brilliant record as to learning. A king’s scholar of Westminster at fourteen, he had been elected to Christ Church at seventeen, and at Oxford had numbered among his friends Hammond, Sanderson, Sheldon, Chillingworth and also Falkland, who had often received him at Great Tew, where one can fancy the two musing together over books, and communing on all heaven and earth. He was, to some extent, tainted with Calvinism, but nevertheless, as a royal chaplain, gave his first year’s stipend for the help of the king in war, and later was deprived of his canonry and the rectory of Mildenhall by the Parliament. He was present with the chivalrous Arthur, Lord Capel, on the scaffold, aiding him with his prayers, and soon after went into exile, first in Paris, then at Breda where he took up his abode with the Hydes. We find his old friend the Chancellor, who called him “the best man alive,” recommending him as a spiritual adviser to Lady Morton, and much later we shall see how far his influence availed with his pupil, Hyde’s daughter.

17.  Dictionary of National Biography.

Another of her father’s friends and advisers, destined to be in close contact with him in later years, was Gilbert Sheldon, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury.[18] Belonging as he did to the school of Laud and Andrewes, his views on certain points differed widely from those of Morley, yet both were alike in their unswerving loyalty to the King. Both, too, enjoyed the friendship of Falkland as of Hyde, who indeed made Sheldon one of the trustees of his papers during his exile. Like the bulk of his fellows, the latter suffered imprisonment, being ejected from his College of All Souls, for his “malignancy.” After the Restoration he was high in the King’s favour, nevertheless he did not hesitate to refuse to admit Charles to Holy Communion, on the score of the latter’s evil life.

18.  Dictionary of National Biography.

In the house at Breda, sedulously cared for by her parents, Anne, the elder, and by her father at least the best beloved daughter, reached her seventeenth year. She was a clever, thoughtful girl, unusually well read for the period and circumstances of her life, a devout churchwoman under the guidance of Morley and her father, looking out on the life unfolding before her with a mind which then at least showed singular powers of balance and perception.

It may be stated in parenthesis, that the other daughter of the house was Frances, who subsequently married Sir Thomas Keighley of Hartingfordbury in Herts, but nothing beyond the bare fact is recorded of her, after childhood, though Evelyn mentions her as a guest at his house in 1673. The year 1654 was destined to bring about a change in the life of Anne which was to prove more momentous than anyone could foresee.

In the household of Mary, Princess of Orange, there was a maid of honour, one Mistress Kate Killigrew. An outbreak of smallpox at Spa drove the Court to take refuge at Aix-la-Chapelle, but Mistress Killigrew had already been smitten with the disease and died.

Without loss of time the Stuart princess nominated Chancellor Hyde’s young daughter to the vacant post. In this she was backed by her brother Charles, for whom she had hired a house in Aix, keeping also a table for him.

The proposed honour was, however, by no means so welcome as might be supposed.

For one thing, the queen-mother, always a woman of impulse and violent prejudice, had in no degree abated her dislike to Hyde, and everyone was aware of the fact. O’Neill, it seems, declaring that the Princess herself had so much kindness for the Chancellor’s daughter that she long resolved to have her upon the first vacancy, suggested to his friend to ask for the post for Anne, a proceeding to which Hyde strongly objected, no doubt smarting under the knowledge of Henrietta’s attitude towards him. He had, he said, “but one daughter, who was all the company and comfort her mother had in her melancholic retirement,”[19] and therefore he was resolved not to separate them, nor to dispose his daughter to a “Court life,” “which he did in truth perfectly detest.”[20]

19.  It is possible that the younger daughter, then an infant, might have been left in England under the charge of friends there.

20.  “Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon,” by himself. 1827.

In the old days when the dwindling Court had sojourned at Oxford, he had seen enough and more than enough of the turmoil of intrigues and jealousy, the incessant petty warfare between the rival factions of Henrietta and her husband, which the latter at any rate had been powerless to control, and naturally Hyde was sickened of it all, and unwilling to venture his “Nan” into a like atmosphere. About the same time we find him writing to Secretary Nicholas on the matter: “I presume you think my wife a fool for being so indulgent to her girl as to send her abroad on such a gadding journey. I am very glad she hath had the good fortune to be graciously received by her Royal Highness, but I think it would be too much vanity in me to take any notice of it.”[21]

21.  “Life of Henrietta Maria.” J. A. Taylor.

As before said, the King put his oar in, saying to the Chancellor “his sister having seen his daughter several times, liked her so well that she desired to have her about her person, and had spoken to him herself, to move it so as to prevent displeasure from the Queen, therefore he knew not why Hyde should neglect such an opportunity of providing for his daughter in so honourable a way.”[22]

22.  “Tudor and Stuart Princesses.” Agnes Strickland.

To this Hyde answered: “He could not dispute the reasons with him, only that He could not give himself Leave to deprive his Wife of her Daughter’s Company, nor believe that She could be more advantageously bred than under her Mother”—another shaft aimed at the influence of a Court.[23]

23.  “Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon,” by himself. Ed. 1759.

Finally Mary herself bore down all opposition. She had her full share of the family obstinacy, and was determined to carry her point. In the end, as might be supposed, she succeeded. Hyde himself went to her, and said candidly that “if it had not been for her bounty in assigning them a house where they might live rent free they could not have been able to subsist,” and he therefore “confessed it was not in his power to make his daughter such an allowance as would enable her to live in her Royal Highness’ Court conformably to the position that was offered to her.”[24]

24.  “The Royal House of Stuart.” Cowan.

The Princess promptly answered that she did not mean him to maintain his daughter in her service, as she took that upon herself, so the father reluctantly withdrew his opposition, saying “he left his daughter to be disposed by her mother.” On this point Lady Hyde had consulted Morley, and, probably to her husband’s surprise, that adviser counselled the acceptance of the Princess’s offer, on which the latter, recognising her triumph, remarked cheerfully: “I warrant you my Lady and I will agree on the matter.”

One cannot but wonder at Hyde’s backwardness, for he was then so poor that he was forced to borrow of Nicholas small sums to pay postage for King Charles. One member of the English royal family there was who heartily approved and upheld the appointment. The Queen of Bohemia, Elizabeth Stuart, that unlucky “Queen of Hearts” who attracted to herself through so many stormy years the chivalrous devotion, among others, of the gallant Lord Craven, was at all times accustomed to speak and write her mind. On 7th September 1654 she wrote to Sir Edward Nicholas: “I heare Mrs Hide is to come to my neece in Mrs Killigrew’s place which I am verie glad of. She is verie fitt for itt, and a great favorit of mine.”

One advantage Hyde himself reaped from his daughter’s advancement. He records that his wife, “when she had presented her Daughter to the Princess, came herself to reside with her Husband to his great Comfort and which he could not have enjoyed if the other Separation had not been made, and possibly that Consideration had the more easily disposed him to consent to the other.”[25]

25.  “Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon,” by himself. Ed. 1759.

ELIZABETH, QUEEN OF BOHEMIA

The girl’s own feeling in the matter is expressed in a letter to her father, dated 19th October, which, under the ceremonious address then alone admissible, breathes a spirit of strong family affection.

“I have received yours of the 13th and shall euer make it soe much my business strickly to observe all your commands in it that when euer I transgress any of them in the least degree it shall be out of ignorance and not willfullness soe that I hope you shall neuer have cause to repent of the good opinion you are pleased to have of me and which I shall dayly endeuour to increase, and since you thinke it fitt for me, shall very cheerfully submit to a life which I have not much desired but now looke upon not onely as the will of my Father, but of Almighty God and therefore doubtles will prove a blessing; but Sr. you must not wonder if being happy in soe excelent a Father and Mother I cannot part with them without trouble, for though as you say I have been soe unfortunate as allways to live from you yet I looke upon myself now as still more unlikely to be with you or see you, and though I shall often heare from my Mother and I hope see her, yet that will be but little in respect of being continually with her. I say not this that I repine at goeing to the Princess for I am confident that God that has made her soe gracious in desiring me will make me happy in her service, but I should be the worst of chilldren if I were not very sensible of leaving soe good a Mother and leaving her so much alone; but I hope you will be together this winter, and in the meane time I beseech you to perswad her to stay as long as shee can wth vs at the Hague, that shee may be as little as is possible alone heare; I humbly beg your blessing vpon

“Sr.

“Your most dutifull and obedient daughter,

“Anne Hyde.”[26]

26.  Clarendon MS., vol. xlix., folio 70 (Bodleian Library).

So she entered upon the duties of her new life, if with a certain shy reluctance, yet probably with a more or less eager curiosity and anticipation, feeling within herself a capacity to fulfil adequately the demands of this altered sphere.

As might be supposed, Queen Henrietta, on hearing of the appointment, flew into a passion and quarrelled hotly with her elder daughter, her constant appeals to whom to dismiss the obnoxious “Nan Hyde” almost seeming as though, if such a thing were possible, she had a sort of presentiment of the future.

Hyde himself had reminded Mary of her mother’s probable resentment, but the Princess answered simply: “I have always paid the duty to the Queen my Mother which was her due, but I am mistress of my own family, and can receive what servants I please, nay—I should wrong my Mother if I forebore to do a good and just action lest her Majesty should be offended at it. I know that some ill offices have been done you to my Mother, but I doubt not that in due time she will discern that she has been mistaken.”[27]

27.  “Lives of the Queens of England.” Agnes Strickland.

If the young maid of honour could write submissively to her father, she was not backward in admonishing her brothers, but in reading the following letter one must bear in mind that she was the eldest, and no doubt quite honestly believed that she was fulfilling a duty in giving a piece of advice.

“Breda, 6 Oct. 1654.

“Deare Brother,—This is to shew you that I will not allways be soe lasey as not to answer your letters, and indeed I will never be soe without a just cause for I am never better pleased than when I am walkeing with you as me thinks I am when I am writteing to you. I am sory to heare you doe not goe to Collogne with my Father for I wish you might see as much as is possible now you are abroad but our present condition will not permit us what we most desire but I doubt not of a happy change and then you will have all that is fitt for you which I most earnestly wish you and truely it is one of the things I beg dayly of Allmighty God to see you a very good and very happy man which I shall not doubt of if you make it your business (as I hope you ever will) to serve him and pleas my Father and Mother. My service to all my acquaintance with you. I will not send it to any of the Princesses Court becaus I belieue them all gone. My Brothers and all heare are your seruants and I am ever yours most affectionately,

“A. H.”[28]

28.  Clarendon State Papers (Bodleian).

Anne once established in her new post, the Queen of Bohemia did not forget her sentiments of friendship, for on the 16th November[29] we find her again writing to Secretary Nicholas from the “Hagh” (Elizabeth’s spelling was at any rate no worse than her neighbours’): “I pray remember me to Mr Chancellor and tell him his Ladie and my favorit his daughter came hither upon Saterday and are gone this day to Teiling. I finde my favourit growen euerie way to her advantage.” A little later, too, that is, on 11th January 1654-1655, she tells the same correspondent: “We had a Royaltie though not vpon twelf night at Teiling where my neece was a gipsie and became her dress extream well.” “Mrs Hide was a shepherdesse and I assure you was verie handsome in it, none but her Mistress looked better than she did. I beleeve my Lady Hide and Mr Chancellor will not be sorie to heare it which I pray tell them from me.” It was a kind little message from one mother to another. Elizabeth Stuart’s roving life had perhaps taught her sympathy, grafted on to the traditional good nature of her family. It is all the more surprising that her own large flock of children “got on,” as one says, so badly with their mother, though she did care more for her sons than for her daughters.[30] However, that she took a fancy to “Nan Hyde” was certain. Beauty, it is true, was lavishly distributed among those high-spirited, high-handed Princes and Princesses Palatine (among whom their cousin Charles II. so nearly found a bride), but it was probably Anne’s acute perception and strong intellect that appealed to their brilliant mother. Nevertheless she could, as we have seen, look with a keen and appreciative eye on the girl’s personal appearance. Anne at eighteen was at her best. The large frame had not yet thickened into the proportions which so early in life discounted her claims to beauty. She had the charm of expression, of good eyes, of vivacity, and then at least of exuberant spirits.

29.  Evelyn’s “Correspondence.”

30.  “A Royal Cavalier: The Romance of Rupert, Prince Palatine.” Mrs Steuart Erskine.

The “Royaltie” which the Queen describes was not unique. There were many such revels at the Court of The Hague. The Princess Mary, recovered from the shock of her early widowhood, and eager for enjoyment, loved these occasions, and shone at them with hereditary grace, while in every festive gathering her maids necessarily bore their part. The Queen writes to her nephew, Charles II., during the same January of another Royalty—she wrote to him very often, by the way:

“Though I believe you had more meat and drink at Hannibal Sestade’s, yet I am sure our fiddles were better and dancers; your sister was very well dressed like an amazon; the Princess Tarente like a shepherdess; Mademoiselle d’Orange, a nymph. They were all very well dressed, but I wished all the night your Majesty had seen Vanderdons. There never was seen the like; he was a gipsy, Nan Hyde was his wife; he had pantaloons close to him of red and yellow striped, with ruffled sleeves; he looked just like a Jock-a-lent. They were twenty-six in all, and came [not?] home till five o’clock in the morning.”[31]

31.  “Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia.” M. A. Green, revised by S. C. Lomas.

A little before this Elizabeth had written to the same correspondent of the amusements of his sister:

“My dear niece recovers her health and good looks extremely by her exercises, she twice dancing with the maskers; it has done her much good. We had it two nights, the first time it was deadly cold, but the last time the weather was a little better. The subject your Majesty will see was not extraordinary, but it was very well danced. Our Dutch minister said nothing against it, but a little French preacher, Carré, by his sermon set all the church a-laughing.”

An early allusion to the festivities in which Anne Hyde afterwards shared and shone.

In the year 1655, within a few months of her appointment in the Princess Mary’s service, Anne’s young charms of mind and body brought to her feet at least one lover worth the winning.

At The Hague, in those days, among the many exiled Cavaliers who were generally made welcome at the Court of their young King’s elder sister, was Sir Spencer Compton, not the least distinguished of his gallant race. He was the youngest son of the loyal Earl of Northampton, and when but a child wept bitterly because he could not go forth to battle with his chivalrous brothers, seeing his small fingers could not grasp one of the great wheel-lock pistols of that day.[32] With characteristic contempt of concealment, he made no secret of his passion for Mistress Anne. Charles II. himself with his usual love of mischief wrote to Henry Bennet, afterwards Lord Arlington: “I will try whether Sir Spencer Compton be so much in love as you say, for I will name Mrs Hyde before him so by chance except that he be very much smitten it shall not at all move him.”[33] We are not told how young Compton stood the test, but it was pretty enough, that love-idyll of youth presented among the sylvan shades of the wooded Hague, though whether from interference or the coldness of the young maid of honour it was destined to fade quickly and pass into the limbo of things forgotten. One would like to know the story, but nothing more remains to us. Another suitor was Lord Newburgh, of whom Sir George Radcliffe wrote from Paris in the spring: “Onely one tould me yesterday a pretty story of him yt he must marry Mr Chancellor’s daughter (who waites of ye Princesse Royale) and so by ye Chanc: meanes be engaged in all the Scots affaires. The Chanc: has much talke of him at ye Pallais Royale where he is thought to be a powerfull man at ye Court at Cologne. A person of honour would needs persuade me that ye Princesse Royall had provided for 3 of his children (which was 2 more than I had heard on).” Here there is a touch of the jealousy of Hyde’s influence and prosperity which was afterwards so widely spread.

32.  Sir Philip Warwick.

33.  Evelyn’s “Correspondence.”

We hear also of some sentimental passages with the conquering Harry Jermyn, who was said, on what authority it is now difficult to decide, to have been afterwards privately married to the Princess Mary. The same story, by the way, was told of his uncle, the elder Jermyn, and Queen Henrietta.

How far, however, the heart of the maid of honour was really concerned in these fleeting love affairs it is useless to conjecture. She was probably ready enough to be amused, and, conscious that she was not a beauty, to be flattered at such homage.

She was not idle, either; she was always fond of writing and ready with the pen, and at some time during her service—there is no date attached—Anne bethought her to set down in writing the character of her royal mistress. The manuscript is not in the girl’s own hand, but it is endorsed: “Pourtrait of ye Princess Royall drawne by Mrs Anne Hyde.”

“Ceux qui connoissent l’admirable Princesse dont j’entreprend le portrait trouveront bien étrange qu’une personne si peu capable que moy, de la bien representer oze l’hazarder a un si grand ouvrage et on m’accusera assurement de vanité ou de folie. Mais comme j’y suis toute preparée cela ne m’exonnera pas ni ne m’empêchera de commencer comme je ‘avois resolue, en vous disant qu’elle a la taille la plus belle et la plus libre du monde et qu’oy qu’Elle n’est pas des plus grandes il s’en voy beaucoup plus au dessous qu’au dessus de la Sienne elle a les cheveux d’un fort beau brun fort lustre et en grande quantité, les yeux grands et si beaux et brillans qu’on a de la peine a en supporter l’esclar. Son nes est un peu grand mais si bien fait que cela n’otte rien de la beauté de son visage. Sa bouche est fort belle, et les lèvres des plus vermeilles que l’on puisse voir, les dens belles, le tour du visage parfaitement beau, et le teint se uniet si beau qu’il ne se puisse rien voir au monde qui l’égalle, la gorge belle, les bras et les mains de mesme. Enfin on vois en toute sa personne quelque chose de si grande et de si relevée que sans la connoistre on verroit combien elle est au dessus du reste du monds. Elle a meilleure mine que personne, et quoy qu’Elle a asses de douceur pour luy gaigner le cœur de tous ceux qui la voyent. Elle a aussi une certaine fierte qui luy fait craindre et respecter de tous le monde et qui sied fort bien a une personne de sa condition. Pour son intérieur il est tellement impossible de la connoistre, qu’il est bien difficile pour moy d’y bien reussir; pour de l’esprit, Elle en a infiniment mais de l’esprit vif et penetrant et qui la rend de la meilleure humeur du monde, quand Elle veut obliger ceux avec qui Elle se trouve; mais quand Elle ne se plait pas, Elle est tout a fait retirée, ne pouvant se contraindre pour qui que se soit quoy qu’Elle est generallement civile, mais Elle regarde la contrainte comme une chose peu necessaire aux personnes de sa qualité, les croyans plus faits pour eux mesmes, que pour les autres; Et c’est ce qui est cause qu’Elle parle moins que personne quand Elle est dans des Compagnies ou Elle ne veut pas estre tout a fait familière; cela fait a croire a ceux qui ne la connoissent pas qu’Elle est plus glorieuse qu’Elle n’est en effet, il est vray qu’Elle l’est un peu mais il ne luy mésied point, car il y a asseurement une espèce de gloire qui est necessaire à toutes les femmes et sur toutes a celles de sa naissance: Elle est tout a fait genereuse, et oblige de bonne grace ceux pour qui Elle a de l’amitié, il est vray qu’Elle n’en a pas pour beaucoup, mais Elle est parfaitement bonne amie où elle en fait profession et ne change jamais, à moins que de luy donner grand sujet, mais quand Elle a une fois mauvaise opinion d’une personne pour qui Elle a eue de l’amitié, on ne se remet jamais bien avec Elle, quoy qu’en apparence Elle vit fort bien avec eux; ce qui marque qu’Elle est plus dissimulée qu’Elle ne croit. Elle est asses colere qu’oy qu’Elle ne le temoigne guere car en ses humeurs la Elle se renferme des apres diners entieres sans voir qui que se soit; Elle parait plus indifferente que personne, mais ceux qui ont l’honneur de la voir souvent, peuvent remarquer qu’Elle n’est pas incapable des sentimens de l’amitié et de la haine: Elle ne se mocque jamais de qui que se soit, ni ne rompe jamais en visière, mais Elle n’est pas faschée de faire de petites malices, qui peuvent mettre ses gens en peine mais c’est tousjours a ceux dont Elle connoit tout a fois les humeurs. Elle est fort constante en ses resolutions, un peu trop quelque fois, car il y a des temps on cela va jusques à l’opiniotreté; Elle ne se mele jamais des affaires d’autruy, si ce ne’est qu’on luy en parle le premier, et alors Elle est tout a fait secrete, et donne ses avis avec toute la franchise imaginable. En fin Elle a toutes les qualites requises pour rendre une personne parfaite; car outre ce que j’ay deja dit, Elle danse mieux que qui se soit, mais Elle est un peu paresseuse, ce qui est cause qu’Elle songe moins à se diverter que personne, et qu’Elle aime mieux passer son temps toute seule dans sa Chambre que de prendre la peine de s’ajuster pour une assemblée, quoy qu’Elle y reusset mieux que personne n’a jamais fait. Je n’aurois jamais fait si je voulois entreprendre à depeindre toutes les admirables qualités de cette grande Princesse. Je me contenteray donc de finir en la supliant tres humblement de pardonner toutes les fautes d’une Portrait, qu’il est impossible de rendre aussi parfait que son original, set qu’Elle aura la bonté de se souvenir, que celle qui l’a fait est tellement dediée à son service qu’Elle se croit seulement heureuse parcequ’Elle est sienne, et qu’elle ne plaint son faut d’esprit et de jugement que parcequ’ils l’empeschent de representer comme elle doit les admirables qualites de sa maitresse.”[34]

34.  MS. 276, Egerton, 2542.

If the flattery contained in this portrait may be termed excessive, yet something is due to the customs of the period, which almost enjoined language of the kind. At the same time, Mary’s pride of demeanour is insisted on in a way that betrays some sense of injury, though this is carefully veiled. Later we know Anne was to suffer from the wrath and indignation of her mistress, but there is no reason to suppose that when she wrote these words she did not feel a very real affection for the Princess, who had braved her own mother’s anger and surmounted various difficulties for the sake of the writer. And moreover Mary, Princess of Orange, was a Stuart. If she was haughty, imperious, at times wayward, yet she had her share of the haunting, ineffable charm of her doomed race, the charm which attracted the homage of heart and life of those round her, and bound them to her with an imperishable chain. On the same theme the maid of honour also ventured into poetry, at any rate into rhyme. The effusion may possibly be ascribed to the same date.

“Heroic nymph! in tempests the support,

In peace the glory of the British Court,

Into whose arms the Church, the State, and all

That precious is or sacred, here did fall.

Ages to come that shall your bounty hear

Shall think you mistress of the Indies were,

Though straiter bounds your fortune did confine

In your large heart was found a wealthy mine.

Like the blest oil, the widow’s lasting feast,

Your treasure as you poured it out increased.

While some your beauty, some your bounty sing

Your native isles does with your praises ring,

But above all, a nymph of your own train

Gives us your character in such a strain

As none but she who in that Court did dwell

Could know such world, or worth describe so well.”[35]

35.  “Tudor and Stuart Princesses.” Agnes Strickland.

Meanwhile Anne’s fate, all unsuspected, was advancing towards her with swift and unfaltering steps.

Queen Henrietta had never been able to reconcile to herself Princess Mary’s appointment of Hyde’s daughter about her person, and since its accomplishment had constantly appealed to her to dismiss Anne from her service.[36] Lord Hatton, in fact, writes: “The Queen’s last sickness was by the chamber confident said to be expressed by the Queen by reason of some late letters from the young Prsse Orange wherein she still contests for retaining with her Sir E. H. daughter which the Queen will not cease till she out her there. This I assure you comes from eare witnesses.”

36.  “Lives of Princesses of England.” M. A. Everett-Green.

Mary was, however, quite as resolute as her mother, and when in 1655 she formed the project of a visit to Paris, it was with the intention of taking her favourite in her train.

Hyde, who as we have seen was fully conscious of the queen-mother’s disapproval, wished to take this opportunity of withdrawing his daughter, but the Princess peremptorily refused, declaring that it would be only necessary for her mother to see Anne in order to abate her unreasonable prejudice. The Chancellor’s unwillingness in the matter can be gleaned from a letter he wrote at the time to Lady Stanhope, who had become the wife of John van der Kirckhove Heenvliet, the Dutch Ambassador despatched to England in 1641 to arrange the marriage of Mary with the late Prince of Orange.

“My very good Lady”—so wrote Hyde[37]—“Though the considerations and objections I presumed to offer this last year against the high grace and favour which your Royal Mistress was then inclined to vouchsafe to my poor Girl, were not thought reasonable or probable, yet you now see that I had too much ground for these apprehensions, and they who came last from Paris are not reserved in declaring that the Princess Royal’s receiving my Daughter into her service is almost the only cause of the Queen’s late reservation towards her Royal Highness which I hope you believe is a very great affliction to me. I most humbly beg your Ladyship if you find any disposition in her Royal Highness out of her goodness to me to give the girl leave to attend her in this journey, when it seems others who have more title to that honour must be left behind, that you will consider whether the preferring her to this new favour may not be an unhappy occasion of improving her Majesty’s old dislike, and if there be the least fear of that or appearance of any domestic inconvenience by leaving others unsatisfied I do beg you with all my heart, to use your credit in diverting that Gracious purpose in your Royal Mistress towards her, and let her instead of waiting this journey, have leave to spend a little time in the visitation of her friends at Breda, and upon my credit, whatsoever in your wisdom shall appear fittest in this particular shall be abundantly obliging to

“Madam, your Ladyship’s, etc.

“Cologne, this 16th March 1655.”

37.  Clarendon State Papers.

Whether this letter was laid before the Princess or not, the journey was undertaken, and she and her attendants began the long projected expedition which was to be fraught with such far-reaching results.

Mary set out in high spirits at the prospect of the change, of seeing her mother (in spite of their differences, which she probably considered to be trivial) and of making the acquaintance of the little sister who was yet a stranger to her, Henrietta Anne, the child born at Exeter during the siege, and brought to France through many dangers, with real heroism and devotion, by Lady Dalkeith.

According to our ideas, the journey from The Hague must have been a very long and tedious one, but it was no doubt full of interest to the Princess and her train. Each day furnished incidents to engross and be discussed as the long cavalcade of maids and men, of heavy baggage waggons, of lumbering coaches, of numerous pack-horses, of guards armed with dag and musket, accoutred in back and breast plate—for there was a body of sixty horse—flaunted along the heavy, muddy roads. Here a wheel would sink into the deep ruts, and the vehicle be released with immense noise and bustle; there an axle-tree would break and must be mended at the cost of an hour or two’s delay, while the shoeing smiths reaped a goodly harvest by their task of replacing cast shoes. The minister Heenvliet accompanied the Princess to Antwerp and Brussels, at which place he left her. At Mons ordnance was fired, torches were lighted, and the magistrates paid her the compliment, customary in the case of royalty, of asking from her the watchword for the night.[38]

38.  “Lives of the Princesses of England.” M. A. Everett-Green.

So the procession passed on through the level, dyke-protected tracts of Flanders, and came at last to the frontier and the fair land of France.

In the splendid days of Charles the Bold, he who had been Count of Flanders and the Netherlands had been also Duke of Burgundy, a most unwilling vassal to the French crown. Since his time, that province of his great inheritance had become part and parcel of the dominion of King Louis, and when the Princess of Orange halted at the ancient city of Peronne she was well within French territory.

Here, at the capital of the old Burgundian Duchy, she was met by her second brother, James, Duke of York, at this time—through no fault of his own—reduced to a life of inaction at Paris, and here possibly began the prologue of the romance which was to affect not only his own life, but the future of the far-off country of his birth. Of this more later. With the Duke, and attached to his person, were the Lord Gerard and Sir Charles Berkeley, besides M. Sanguin, maître d’hôtel to the French king.

So accompanied Mary pursued her journey, to be met by her mother and sister at Bourgel, six miles from Paris.

Of her stay in the French capital, though it extended over a period of some months, there are but scanty records, but that she entered fully into all the gaiety which surrounded the boy King is certain.

Anne Hyde appears to have caught smallpox during the visit, but it was a slight attack and she probably escaped without disfigurement.[39] She had not been well early in the year, as appears from Sir Alexander Hume’s letter from Teyling on 22nd February.

39.  Rawlinson MS. (Bodleian).

“I have acquainted your neece Mrs Hide with the tendernesse you expresse for her, who returns her humble service to you with many thanks for your care of her. But shee hath not been in any such euill disposition of health as it seemes you have been informed, only one day shee took a little physick since when shee hath euer been a great deal healthfuller and handsomer than before, and shee is indeed a very excellent person both for body and minde as any young gentlewoman that I know.”[40]

40.  Nicholas Papers.

Whether she won such golden opinions at Paris does not appear, but probably she held her own there as well as in Holland. She had always plenty of self-possession, which carried her through many anxious moments, and if any special admirers manifested themselves there, it must have been only to be flouted.

If the image of one too high in place to be acknowledged had already been imprinted on her mind, she at least made no sign, but it is evident that the young maid of honour was in no apparent haste to change her condition, and was capable of determination in the management of her affairs. She did not succeed in overcoming the prejudice of the English queen-mother, and this was no doubt a cause of keen disappointment and vexation to her own mistress. Mary had also other reasons for annoyance on her own account. Besides the fact of Frances Stanhope’s conversion to Rome, which was made as public as possible, she had to withstand her mother’s pertinacity in this direction. Henrietta, who never left a stone unturned to bring her children over to her own faith, insisted on taking her elder daughter with her to her beloved convent at Chaillot, in the hope of working on her feelings to the extent of securing her for the fold of Rome. These efforts were useless, but they made matters more or less uncomfortable for the Princess, who moreover strongly resented anything in the shape of coercion. Keenly, therefore, as she appreciated and admired the splendour and gaiety of the French Court, her visit was not altogether free from drawbacks. Nevertheless, she might have prolonged her stay but for the intelligence of her little son’s alarming illness. It turned out to be only measles, and the child made a good recovery, but his mother lost no time in starting on her journey, and it was not long before she and her train found themselves once more at home. It is certain that the Princess had at this time no suspicion of any understanding between her brother and Anne Hyde, for the latter remained in her service and high in her favour till the year before the Restoration. One glimpse we have of the English girl at this time from the facile and often extremely amusing pen of the Princess Palatine, Elizabeth Charlotte, afterwards Duchesse d’Orléans, but at that time a child. Her grandmother, the Queen of Bohemia, brought her to Mary’s Court, a wild, unruly little person, but she records gratefully the fact that Mistress Hyde was kind and good-natured.

“My aunt [Sophia, Electress of Hanover] did not visit the Princess Royal, but the Queen of Bohemia did, and took me with her. Before I set out, my aunt said to me: ‘Lisette, take care not to behave as you generally do. Follow the Queen step by step, that she may not have to wait for you.’ ‘Oh, aunt,’ I replied, ‘you shall hear how well I behave.’

“When we arrived at the Princess Royal’s, whom I did not know, I saw her son, whom I had often played with. After gazing for a long time at his mother, without knowing who she was, I went back to see if I could find any one who could tell me her name. Seeing only the Prince of Orange, I said: ‘Pray can you tell me who is that woman with so tremendous a nose?’ He laughed and answered: ‘That is my Mother, the Princess Royal.’

“I was quite stupefied at the blunder I had committed. Mdlle Hyde, perceiving my confusion, took me with the Prince into the Princess’s bed chamber, where we played at all sorts of games. I had told them to call me when the Queen was ready to go. We were both rolling on a Turkey carpet when I was summoned. I arose in great haste, and ran into the hall, but the Queen was already in the ante-chamber. Without losing a moment I seized the robe of the Princess Royal and, making her a courtesy at the same time, placed myself directly before her, and followed the Queen step by step into her coach. Every one was laughing at me, but I had no idea what it was for.

“When we came home, the Queen sought out my aunt, and seating herself on the bed, burst into a loud laugh. ‘Lisette,’ said she, ‘has made a delightful visit,’ and related all I had done, which made the Electress laugh more than her mother. ‘Lisette,’ said she, ‘you have done right, and revenged us well on the haughtiness of the Princess.’”

This episode throws another side-light on Mary’s reputation for pride, and her steady determination in exacting all the respect due to her rank—a determination which we see to be more or less resented among her German relations.[41]

41.  “Tudor and Stuart Princesses.” Agnes Strickland.

During the years that were yet to intervene before the Restoration, Hyde himself was to know little of peace. He was constantly on the move, now with the King at Bruges, now obeying a summons from the Princess Royal. His wife was writing in 1657 and 1658 to John Nicholas, on various domestic questions, yet always betraying her disappointment at her husband’s long absences and the uncertainty that attended his return to her. The long and steady friendship with the family of the Secretary extended over a long term of years, and never failed until death stepped in to close it.

These letters were all written from Breda, at the house where the Princess Dowager had established the Hyde family, and the first which now follows was addressed to Bruges.

“Sep. 20, 1657.

“I take it for a very perticuler favour to finde myselfe preserved in Master Secretaries and my Ladys remembrance, and you will very much oblige your servant in returning my most humble and most affectionat serv’ces to them, please to assure my Lady that I will be very carefull in obeying her commands, but I am afrade I shall not performe them, as I desire, lining Cloth being much deerer than ever I knew it, but Roberts and I will doe our best; the goode Company you speake of will not make me stay much the longer here, for as soone as my Husband hath performed his duty to the Princesse we shall make hast to you, my Husbands business not alowing him many play days, besids he is impatient, wch I am in my winter matter, though wee are now like to stay a little Longer then wee once intended. I hope our frinds will not conclude wth the rest that wee will come no more, but looke upon the trew cause wch depends upon our Master, thay say heare that the Princesse will be heare the later end of the weake, and my Husband in his last gives me hops that he shall be heare Saturday next, and he thretens me that he will stay but very few days at Breda; to tell you I wish to be at Bruges I know you will say is a compliment but I doe assure you from the munite I leave the place, I shall wish myselfe wth your excelent familey to every of which I am a most reall servant and very perticulerly

“Sr

“most affectionatly your

“faithfull servant

“Fran: Hyde.

“Pray my serv’ces to your Brother and if it will not importune you to much, lett the rest of my friends know I am there servant.”[42]

42.  2536, Nicholas Papers. Egerton MS.

The next letter is addressed to Brussels, to which place the Nicholas family had transferred itself. Lady Hyde here makes allusion to one of her children, Laurence, afterwards Earl of Rochester, who seems to have become on his own account a correspondent of John Nicholas.

“16 May 1658.

“I have many thankes to give you for your care to me, and though it be longe, doe not forgitt the civilitie of your letter to me wch the many indisposisons I have had sence my Lyeing in hath kepte me from. Lory hath given you many a scrouble of from me of wch I hope you will excuse wth the rest. I am sure I must relye one your goodnesse for it. Your last to Lory hath given me great sattisfactione in Mr Secretaries perfecte recoverey. I pray God continew his health to him, and make you and your hole familey as happy as I wishe you. I was in hopes to have bin wth you longe before this time but the unsertainty of the Kings being, keepes me still here, and now my Lord sends me word that he will come hether, so that I am not like to see you a great while, unlesse Mr Secretarey please to make his way to Bruges whether I here he intends to goe as soon as the Kinge is gon, pray tell him from me wth my humble serv’ces that it is but a Summers [day?] Journey and I know my Lady will dispense wh his absence for a few days more. If my Lady your Mother still want a waiteing woman, I can helpe her to a prety younge maid, I beleave you may know her mother, it is Mrs Gandye; now if my Lady will doe an acte of Charity, I beleave she will in a short time make her fitt for her serv’ces but she is holy to be tought. I can only commend her for a prety civil maid, and truly I beleave her capable to learne. She is about my haight and 16 yeares of age. I would not write to my Lady about it, because even you can tell better then I can, whether this is fit proposition, all wch I refere to you and desire only this from you, that you would not move it to my Lady, unlesse you like it very well, for I tell you againe she is to be maid a servant by those that take her. Excuse this trouble with the rest.”

Lady Hyde seems to have been as eager to supply her friends with servants as some of her sisters in modern life, but laudably anxious to be quite discreet in her recommendations.

In the next letter, dated 27th May 1658, there is an allusion to her eldest son Henry, who was to succeed his father as second Earl of Clarendon and who was at this time at Brussels under the care of the Nicholas family. There is also mention of little Frances, the younger daughter, who seems to have come back to her mother’s keeping recently from England (if she had been left there). The remark as to her English speaking points to this conclusion. But the chief anxiety in the writer’s mind is the condition of her father, Sir Thomas Aylesbury, who was an inmate of her house, and then in rapidly failing health.

“You are very much in the wright, I am not yet so raidy, and if I were, should not use it to my friends and perticulerly where I owe so much as to your familey, and wth our acomplement the blush would returne upon myselfe, if I should forgitt to returne my thankes to you. I am againe to thanke you for delivering my message to Mr Secretarey, and upon my word both he and you shd be very welcome if you make Breda your way to Bruges. Mrs Frances will be able to make you speaches in English, wh I am sure you will say is Language enough for a woman, and if this will not bringe you, I can say no more. I am glad my Husband hath refused to lend his House at Bruges, it Lookes, as you say, as if it shou’d returne, but of this I know nothing, but I assure you I should have great sattisfactione if it bringe me to my Lady. I beleave indeed it is not possible for you to guise at my Lord’s coming; I thinke from the first weeke of my being brought to bed, he hath promised to come to me, but now I will not so much as thinke of it till I see him, though he still says it will not be long before he come. I wish I could tell you that my Father were well but his sore mouth makes me much afraide of him and yett to-day at present I thinke him better than he was a week agoe; haveing latly hard from Monsieur Charles I cannot but tell you that he is well, and his dry Nurse assures me he grows apace. Pray present my afectionat and humble serve’s to Mr Secretarie, and when you write to Bruges lett my Lady know I am her most faithfull servant; though I am to make no complaints, you may tell my Hary I have not hard from his Father sence the 20. I wish it may prove a signe of your removing towards Breda.”

The succeeding letter, which is dated 3rd June 1658, contains an allusion to the siege of Dunkirk, which had been invested on the 25th May by the English and French forces under Turenne. The Spanish army marched from Brussels to relieve the town, and in this host were the Dukes of York and Gloucester and the famous Condé, who, however, was not allowed a free hand, for it was against his advice that the Spanish Ambassador, Don John of Austria, persisted in giving battle. It was then that the Prince said to the Duke of Gloucester: “Did you ever see a battle fought?” and on the boy answering that he had not, Condé[43] rejoined grimly, “Well, you will soon see a battle lost.”

43.  Knight’s “Popular History of England.”

“This is to acknowledge yours of the 27. of the last Month and to intreate you to returne my humble serv’es to my Lady wh my thankes for her willingness to receive a servant from me. Pray assure her Lasp I am very well sattisfied with her reason in not taking another servant at this time, and when I have the happiness to see my Lady shall speake wth her more at large of the person I would recomend to her. I am very sorry the plague is feared at Bruges, and much troubled for Dunquerque. I pray God preserve them from the French. I hope you will not be angry if I wish my Lady’s house at Breda this sumer, upon my word I should looke upon it as a great blessing to me. What the people wth you intend, God knows, and though I must submitt to my Lords businesse, I confesse I am troubled that he is not now heare, my Father being not like to recover, and wishing every day to see my Husband, this will I hope excuse my sad impatience. Pray my humble serv’es to Mr Secretary and tell him I doe still hope to see him here as I do our souter.”

The letter of 6th June makes another reference to Dunkirk.

“You are so great a courter that I could quarrell wth you for useing me so like a strainger, and you have forgotten my humor if you thinke I expect it from my freinds. I am very glad that you have some hopes of Mr Secretaries cominge hether, pray present my humble serv’es to him and be sure you doe all good offeces that may bringe him to Breda. If my Lady Steephens can helpe my Lady your Mother to a good waiteing woman and it be not inconvenent to my Lady to take her I hope nothing I have said shall hender her from it, for the Person I proposed is to be maid usefull to my Lady by her owne trouble in scatching and making her fitt for her Laps serv’es, and therefore is not to keepe her from a better. I only named this in case there were not a better to be had and so beseech you to lett my Lady know wth my most affectionat and humble serv’es to her. Thay say Dunquerque is releeved, but being but Breda’s news I feare it, how ever I wish my Lady a neerer neighbor and that it were in my power to doe anything towards it that I might inioye her Laps company. Sence I tould you that I thought my Father was better, I have bin in a great fright for him but I thanke God he is now better and was this week tooke to take the Ayre wch I thinke hath don him goode, but God knows he is brought very low, wch keepes me in continual fear for him though I am very confident my Lord will come to Breda, and beleave you thinke he will surprise me, yett the people he hath to Leave wth are so unsertane that it is imposible for me to beleave anything of his coming tell I see him: my Father’s illnesse makes me more impatient of his stay then otherways I should be but I must submitt to all.”

The next letter of 13th June lays further stress on Sir Thomas Aylesbury’s failing condition, and there is an allusion which looks as if little Frances Hyde were a special pet of the Secretary’s.

“You see how kind I am to myself in desiring so good a family as yours neere me and I wish wth all my heart it might be in my power to serve my Lady if she should be put to a remove I assure you none could wth greater alacrety serve her then myselfe in the meane time, so if my Lady have a mind to change the ayre I will make her as good a conveniency wth me as I can. I thanke you for the share you are pleased to beare with us in our afflictions for my Father. I am daly in great aprehensions of him yett at present wee thinke him somthing better then he was, pray give me your prayers for him; my Lord hath againe given me hopes of seeing him this weeke and by wt you say I should be confident of it, but the King’s irresolution makes me still in doubt. The sweete meate box wth out asking any questions, is most freely at your dispose. I will still hope to see Mr Secretarie here, and so pray tell him with my most humble serv’es and that his servant little Franke shall eate cold puding with him for a wager, my humble serv’es to my Lady your Mother when you write, if you will excuse the hast of this scribled paper. I shall not doubt of your charity to

“Sr your most faithfull servant.”

All the letters show how much the movements of the exiled King and his sister affected the Hyde household at Breda, and Lady Hyde’s comments betray a certain impatience and irritation at the fact. It is evident that to some extent she resented her husband’s constant periods of absence, and scarcely considered them necessary, though she saw nothing for it but submission.

“June 27.

“I am now doeing a thing I doe not love to doe wh is to acknowledge three of yours in owne and if I had bin alone at Breda would not have forgiven my selfe the neclicing it so long, my Lord’s coming alone would not have kepte me from it but in ernest sence the Kinge and Princesse came so neere Breda, I can safely say I have not had an houre in the day to my selfe, and this minit I have now gott in is by stealing out of a croude wch will not alow me tim enough to ensware every particular of yours. I hope I am wrightly understud by you that I would not impose anything upon my Lady your Mother in wch I writ about the waiteing-woman, it being meerely my owne thoughts, for the person knows nothing of it, and my businesse was only to serve my Lady, if she were willing to undertake the trouble of her. Sence my husband hath found out so easy a way for my Lady I hope she will alow us some time here where I can assure her a reall and harty welcome wch I wish might make up for wt will be wanting in the entertaine her according to my desire to a person I so truly love and honoure. Hary tells me of a third designe to borow our House at Bruges wch wth your timely notes I thinke I shall prevent. I thank you for your prayres wch I still aske from you, though I doubt my Father will not long inioye the benefitte of them here, he weareing every day a way, I may calle it like a lampe. I pray God it may be of no more paine to him then yett it hath bin; now I have tould you this I know you will pitty my conditione that must whether I will or now entertaine and put on a cheere looke. I would say more but Hary calles a waye wch must wth all other faults excuse this hast.”

Her eldest son had returned, and his mother in a letter of 5th August speaks as if his health had been a matter of some anxiety.

“By your last I was in hope you would have bin at Hoochstraet in a very short time but Mr Secretary’s last illnesse makes me doubt all thoughts of that journey are Laid aside and consequently that you will not come to Breda wch in ernest I am sory for. I hope I shall not faile in my next my Husband haveing promised me that I shall come to Bruxelles this winter where I promise my selfe great sattisfactione in your excelant family. I give you many thankes for your great care and kindnesse to Hary of home I will have all the care I can and doe not doubt but he will have much better health now he is like to have more liberty in order to wch his Father hath taken a Secretary wh I beleeve Hary hath allredy tould you, as I am confident he did that he and Lory were to goe into Holand for a weeke wth Mr Bealing. I would not have given you the trouble of this account, but that I know you are Hary’s friend.”

Three days later, on 8th August, Lady Hyde alludes to the great sorrow which has befallen her in the death of her father, Sir Thomas Aylesbury, who died as previously mentioned at the age of eighty-one, surrounded by all the care and affection his daughter could lavish on him.

“I doe acknowledge I am two Letters in your dett the former of wh I had answered longe before this but you know the sad conditione I was in at this time wch is so inst: an excuse and to tell you the truth I am yett unfit for anything else. I had sent you a chalinge while you were at Antwerp for not gitting one day to come to Miss Francesse, who is now al the merth of our house, but in ernest I was in hope then to have seene you, for I knew you were to returne to my Lady when the Kinge did, she being so newly come to a strange place which I have sent Mr Secretary word hath maid his pease for the present. From Hochstraet now is the place I looke for to see you, by wch time I hope my Lady will thinke it fitt to take the Ayre, I can say no more but assure you a harty wellcome.”

The last letter to be transcribed, written on 29th September, is a short one.

“I am a gaine two Letters in your dett but Downings’ disturbance was the cause wch hath kept me from acknowlideing my Lady’s favour and reioycing wth you for Mr Secretary’s recovery, for all wch I hope to make my peace when I come, my husband tells me that shall be so quickely there, that I will say no more tell I come, but intreate you to favour me wth my humble serv’es to Mr Secretarey and my Lady and your brother.”

These letters give a fairly close impression of the exiled Hyde household at the time when that expatriation was drawing to its close. The picture of Frances Hyde, the dutiful daughter, the devoted wife, the affectionate mother, the loyal friend, is a pleasant one, but one singular point must be noted. There is no allusion to the eldest daughter. And yet Anne, in attendance on the Princess, must have been in constant communication with her parents, both in person and by letter.

Indeed there are four letters from Anne to her father which, though undated as to the year, may probably be placed in 1658 or 1659, towards the end of her period of service.

“Hounslerdyke,

“July 24.

“My Lord,—I received yours of the 19 but yesterday, and am very glad you weare not displeased with me. I am sure I shall never willingly give you cause to be soe, and it would be the greatest trouble to me in the world if euer you are it, for the business of the play I assure you I shall never doe any such thing without her Highness command and when that is I am confident your Lordp will not be displeased with me for it and in that and all things els neuer have nor neuer will give anybody any just cause to say anything of me. Miss Culpeper is this day gone to her Brother’s wedding when shee returnes I hope your Lordsp will give me leave to see you somewheire in the meane time I humbly beg yours and my Mothers blessing upon

“My Lord, your Lordsps

“Most dutiful and obedient daughter

“Anne Hyde.”[44]

44.  Clarendon State Papers, MS. (Bodleian).

This seems to refer to some acting in which she was concerned, and which her father did not altogether approve. The following allusion in a letter from the Queen of Bohemia to Charles may refer to something of the sort:

“We have now gotten a new divertisement of little plays after supper. It was here the last week end, and now this week at your sister’s. I hope the godly will preach against it also.”[45]

45.  “Tudor and Stuart Princesses.” Agnes Strickland.

Anne’s next letter to Hyde contains a covert complaint of poverty. In the light of subsequent events it is easy to see how such a condition must have been irritating to the writer.

“Hage,

“August 22.

“My Lord,—I received yours of the 20 this minit when I cam hither with her Highness in our way to Hounslerdyke from Tyling wheire wee left my Lady Stanhope, it is true that her Highness went incognito, but for business shee had none at least that I could see, but to buy some thinges, it is a very fine place but very troublesome to see when one has noe more money to lay out then I had, but however I am very well satified to have been theire. I pray God you may quickely heare some good news from England, we are heare in great paine not hearing anything at all, the Princess euery post askes me what I heare therefore when theire is anything may be known, I shall be glad to have it to tell her, my humble duty I beseech you to my Mother and be pleased to give both your blessings to, my Lord, your Lordsps most dutifull and obedient daughter,

“Anne Hyde.”

The next two letters indicate that the maid of honour’s empty purse is replenished or to be so shortly.

“Hage,

“October 21.

“My Lord,—Though I heard noething from Bruxells this last post I hope you are by this time perfectly recouered of your cold which I heard troubled you soe much that I was afraid my letter then would but have been troublesome to your Lordsps which was the cause I have been soe long without writeing, but I can now give you some account of what you spoke to Monsieur D’Heenvliet, he told me that he has spoke to her Highness and that shee had promised I should very quickly have some money I am sure if he does what he can in it it may eassily be done, wee goe next weeke to Breda but the day is not yet named, but I suppose it will be the latter end of the weeke because her Highness is first to carry the Prince to Leyden. My humble duty I beseech you to my Mother, and be pleased to give both your blessings upon my Lord your Lordsps most dutifull and obedient daughter,

“Anne Hyde.”[46]

46.  Clarendon State Papers, MS. (Bodleian).

“Hage,

“November 3.

“My Lord,—I have received yours of the 13th and am very glad the King is at the Frontiers. I pray God this change in England may worke a good one for his Majesty, and give him cause quickly to come backe that wee might once againe hope to meett in England; her Highness carries the Prince to-morrow to Leyden which is the cause I write this to-day and by the Grace of God wee shall without faile goe sometime the next weeke to Breda where I shall expect your Lordsps and my Mother’s commands since you will have it soe, I will believe I am obliged to Monsieur d’Heenvliet though I confess I cannot see how he could avoyd speakeing after you desired him and the proffession he makes and I am sure he deed but barely speake and I must beleeve that more is in his power. I humbly beg my Mother’s and your blessing upon my Lord your Lordsps most dutifull and obedient daughter,

“Anne Hyde.”[47]

47.  Clarendon State Papers, MS. (Bodleian).

The prince mentioned in these two letters is of course Mary’s only son William, destined afterwards to be King of England, but at this time a little boy.

And through these years from 1656 to 1659 Anne was keeping her secret well. Whether the Duke of York had arranged any means of communication or not, enough had been said at Paris. Love can live on a very small modicum of hope, and Anne’s nature may well have been of the stuff which is “wax to receive and marble to retain.”[48]

48.  It is possible that her mother had some inkling of the state of affairs, and the uneasy consciousness of this may have prompted her silence as to her daughter in her own correspondence.

At this point it may be as well to see what manner of man the English prince, fated from childhood to a life of exile, appeared to his contemporaries at this period of his life.

CHAPTER III

JAMES STUART

James, the second son of Charles I. and Henrietta Maria, was born on the 15th of October 1633, being baptized by Laud on the 24th,[49] and like his elder brother was bandied about, hither and thither, during the progress of the great Civil War, in a manner and among associates unlikely to have a satisfactory effect on the character of a boy.

49.  “Adventures of King James II.,” by the author of the “Life of Sir Kenelm Digby,” introduction by F. A. Gasquet, D.D.

It can scarcely be a matter for surprise that it was so. The King, more and more harassed and preoccupied as time went on, could hardly be supposed to give adequate consideration to his sons’ surroundings, although, as we have seen, he did his best for the elder in committing him to the guardianship of Edward Hyde.

In 1648 James was named Lord High Admiral of England, a barren title in the state of affairs as they then were, but before this he had passed through some exciting adventures. He was in Oxford when that loyal city surrendered to Fairfax in 1646, two years earlier, and with his sister Elizabeth and their little brother Henry was taken to St James’s Palace, where they were detained as wards of the Parliament. Although the children’s intercourse with their father had of late been of necessity intermittent,[50] yet they loved him very dearly, as he had been always tender and indulgent to them. On this point there is a pathetic story of James, at that time but twelve years of age. For some time he had been kept in ignorance of the King’s imprisonment, but in January 1647 “one of his attendants, a servant of the Earl of Northumberland, told him of it, to which he replied, How durst any rogues to use his Father after that manner! and then fell a-weeping. The man told him he would inform his Lord of what had been said, whereupon the Duke took a long bow then in the place to have shot him, had not another behind him held his hand. For this it is reported the Earl of Northumberland will have the Duke whipped, but whether it hath been done I know not.”[51]

50.  “Anecdotal Memories of English Princes.” D. Adams.

51.  Clarendon State Papers, vol. ii., Appendix.

It is easy to picture the scene. The insolent serving-man, “armed with a little brief authority,” meanly rejoicing in the opportunity to sting a fallen prince; and the boy, the passionate tears still wet on his young, flushed face, wild with indignant wrath at the bitter news and his own helplessness. One cannot bear to think that such hot, impetuous affection and grief should have been so requited.

The King, meanwhile, was very anxious to effect the escape of his second son, whose life as heir presumptive was of great importance, and he confided the attempt to Colonel Charles Bampfylde, or Bamfield, an Irishman. The latter found a willing accomplice in Anne Murray, the daughter of the King’s old tutor and secretary, Thomas Murray, who afterwards became Lady Halkett, and the two conspirators laid their plans carefully, though it was May 1648 before the adventure could be accomplished.[52]

52.  “Autobiography of Anne Murray (Lady Halkett).” Charles II. thanked her for this service when they met at Dunfermline.

The three children thus under ward at St James’s were instructed to play at hide and seek in the then neglected and thickly wooded garden of the ancient palace, and the young Duke James proved himself quite sufficiently adroit in seconding the plans of his preservers. Under cover of the spring twilight he contrived to slip through a gate purposely left open, which led to the Tilt-yard—for Bampfylde had managed to interest other sympathisers in the plot. James had remembered also to lock the balcony through which he emerged, and to throw away the key, besides taking the precaution of locking up his little dog in his room.[53] By Tilt-yard end, as it was called, Bampfylde was waiting for him with a wig and patches, and they hurried forthwith to Spring Gardens, “as if to hear the nightingales,” a favourite expedition of the London citizens at that season. Thence a coach conveyed them to the river, where they took boat at Ivy Bridge, and reached the “Old Swan.” Here Mistress Anne Murray was waiting for them, and she arrayed the boy in girl’s clothes in all haste, while he, poor child, impatiently adjured her: “Quickly, quickly, dress me!” This done, Bampfylde took his charge to the Lion Key, where a Dutch Pink, cleared the day before by Gravesend searchers, was expecting “Mr Andrews and his sister,” the latter supposed to be on her way to join her husband in Holland.

53.  Clarendon State Papers, vol. ii., Appendix.

Here the Prince, waiting in the cabin, in a moment of forgetfulness nearly wrecked the whole situation by putting his leg on the table to pull up his stocking, seeing which the barge-master suspected the sex of the pretended girl. However, Bampfylde’s threats and James’ promises of future provision prevailed, and the voyage was safely accomplished.[54]

54.  Macpherson’s “Original Papers.”

The fugitives landed in due course at Middleburg, going thence to Dordrecht, and James, having despatched Bampfylde to The Hague to announce his successful escape, was met by his brother-in-law the Prince of Orange, and by him conducted to the Princess at Sluys. Bampfylde’s influence appears to have been bad from the beginning, as he tried to implicate the boy in an act of treason.[55] Six ships of the fleet then lying in the Downs deserted, and having secured Deal, Sandown and Walmer, sailed to Helvoetsluys, where James joined them, but Bampfylde worked on the sailors to declare for the young Duke without any mention of the King or the Prince of Wales. James, however, was wise enough to answer that he would be their admiral only with his father’s consent.

55.  “History of the Rebellion.” Clarendon.

At The Hague he joined his elder brother, and early in the succeeding year set out for Paris, starting on 6th January 1649, just when the war of the Fronde was beginning. On this account his mother sent letters to meet him at Cambrai, bidding him delay his journey, and the Archduke Leopold, Governor of the Netherlands, offered him quarters in the Abbey of St Amand. Here he stayed for about a month, a visit which is supposed, in spite of his youth, to have laid the foundation of his subsequent conversion to the Church of Rome. The religious of this community no doubt did their best in controversy to influence the young English prince who might one day prove a valuable asset. At some time, probably soon afterwards, a nun is said to have advised him to pray every day if he was not in the right way, that God would show it to him, and this seems to have made a deep and lasting impression on his mind, judging from his allusion to it many years later.[56]

56.  Burnet’s “History of His Own Time.”

In February he was able to prosecute his deferred journey, and on the 13th he made his appearance at the Louvre where his mother then was. She was sitting at dinner when the boy came hastily in and knelt for her blessing.[57] What kind of reception she gave him we do not know, but when all is said and done, Henrietta, capricious as she could be, was an affectionate if injudicious mother, and there must have been a keen sense of satisfaction in receiving her young son after their long separation and his adventurous travels.

For a time James settled down among his hitherto unknown relations. The famous princess, Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, the redoubtable heroine of the Fronde, “la grande Mademoiselle,” was very kind to her new cousin at a time when she was flouting his elder brother. The Duke of York, between thirteen and fourteen years of age, was then, she says, “very pretty, well made, with good features, who spoke French well, which gave him a much better air than had the King his brother,” who was at that time completely ignorant of the language, though he was eagerly put forward by his mother as a suitor for the hand of his imperious cousin, who could bestow such a magnificent dowry on any husband on whom her choice might fall.

57.  Nicholas Papers.

In the September of 1649 Charles determined to go to Jersey, the Channel Islands having remained steadily loyal to the royal cause, and he took his brother James with him, probably intending to detach him from their mother’s influence.[58] At Caen they visited Lady Ormonde, who was living there at that time in exile, and at Coutances, not far away, the bishop received the brothers with some distinction, giving a banquet in their honour at Cotainville on the following day. However, as the boats were waiting, they started at once, and reached Jersey on the 18th. Here they passed the winter, and the Duke of York won golden opinions from those who came in contact with him.

58.  “History of the Rebellion.” Clarendon.

He was by this time a tall slight boy, almost as tall as his brother, lively and gracious in manner, while his bright complexion and fair hair displayed a marked difference from the swarthy young King. The two were then in mourning for their martyred father, whose tragic death had taken place in the previous January, and James is described as dressed “in an entire suit of black without any other ornament or decoration than the silver star displayed upon his mantle, and a purple scarf across his shoulders.”[59]

59.  “Charles II. in the Channel Islands.” Hoskins.

The brothers were much together in those early days of exile, and it could not be for the advantage of the younger, seeing what manner of men Charles chose to encourage about him, though after all, considering his own youth and circumstances, the latter was scarcely a free agent in this respect.

The two quarrelled at times, and indeed somewhat later Charles manifested a certain jealousy of his brother which can scarcely be a matter for surprise.[60]

60.  “Travels of the King.” Eva Scott.

The Duke of York in due time took service in the army of France, under the great Turenne, and speedily distinguished himself by his courage and military genius,[61] while the unhappy King was forced to remain in obscure idleness and abject poverty, an object of more or less contempt in each country which he visited in his wanderings, especially after that disastrous attempt which ended in the crushing defeat of Worcester—Cromwell’s “crowning mercy”—and his own hairbreadth escape. James, on the other hand, before he was twenty-one had seen three victorious campaigns under his famous leader, and was drawing pay which placed him in easy circumstances, enabling him to support his rank suitably. Nevertheless whatever differences might arise between the brothers (and these were certainly fomented by those about them, not to speak of Cromwell, who from motives of policy wished to divide them), there was strong family affection among the children of Charles I., and in later days these two were certainly linked together by an unswerving attachment which grew with advancing years, and was dissolved only by death.

61.  “Memoirs of J. Evelyn,” edit. Wm. Bray, 1818. Edward Hyde (Paris) to Sir Richard Browne, 6th December 1653: “The Duke of York is returned hither, full of reputac’on and honour.”

Charles had left Jersey in February 1650, but his brother remained there, probably because of the latter’s opposition to the treaty with the Scots. Young as he was, he set himself passionately against it, and even dismissed Lord Byron and Sir John Berkeley from his bedchamber on this account.[62] However, the brothers parted affectionately at this time, and did not meet again for more than eighteen months, Charles having joined his mother at Beauvais, and then returned to Flanders. In 1650 Lord Taafe had proposed a match between the Duke of York and the little daughter of Duke Charles IV. of Lorraine, “a prince,” as James remarked afterwards, “not much accustomed to keep his word.”[63] However, the young Duke seems to have acquiesced in the plan, though the Queen was very angry with both Taafe and Lord Inchiquin for presuming to interfere, as she termed it. At this time her relations with her second son were certainly strained. She was very hard on him, and he hated Henry Jermyn, hotly resenting the latter’s powerful influence with his mother, who, he declared, “loved and valued Lord Jermyn more than all her children,” an instance of Henrietta’s headstrong disregard for appearances, which involved her in what was possibly an unmerited scandal.[64] The poor boy had also at this time the fret and strain of poverty, but just then there came a report of the King’s death, on which James set out for Brussels, where he stayed at the house of Sir Henry de Vic. He remained there for two months, frequenting, so we are told, various popular churches for the sake, he said, of the fine music he heard in them. At this time Sir George Radcliffe was controller of the Duke’s meagre household, and with Sir Edward Herbert appointed a new suite. His mother had forbidden him to join his sister Mary, but in December 1650 he was allowed to proceed to The Hague from Rheims, where he had gone from Brussels. At the christening of the baby William, born under such mournful circumstances, the Princess Dowager proposed that the young uncle should carry the child, but the mother interfered, considering such a proceeding highly insecure.[65] James was made chief mourner at the funeral of his brother-in-law, the Prince of Orange, at Delft, but soon afterwards the States General found him an inconvenient visitor, as they were anxious to establish a good understanding with the English Parliament: thus he was sent to Breda, and his mother was asked to recall him.

62.  Carte’s “Letters.”

63.  Nicholas Papers.

64.  “The King in Exile.” Eva Scott.

65.  “The King in Exile.” Eva Scott.

He was with her in France at the time of his brother’s absence in Scotland, and they went together to Moriceux, to meet the fugitive King on the accomplishment of his romantic escape after Worcester. James was soon to make his acquaintance with war on his own account, for it was at the age of nineteen,[66] and therefore in 1652, that he entered the army of his cousin Louis XIV., wherein he served four years with honour, becoming popular with all ranks. At the end of his fourth campaign, which included the sieges and taking of Landrecy, Condé and St Guislain, Turenne was sent for by Mazarin, and as all the other lieutenant-generals were on leave the young English prince was for a time in supreme command of the army of France.[67] Before this, however, and soon after he joined Turenne, the lad had received his baptism of fire at the first attack on Etampes, and it was there that Schomberg, the future famous marshal, was wounded at his side.[68] Forty years later at the Boyne Water, King James, in the desperate attempt to regain his lost crown, was defeated by the great Dutch general, who fell in the hour of victory. Time has his revenges. One wonders if the thoughts of the luckless, despairing King travelled back to that first fight, in the early flush of youth and hope, when the world was opening before him and everything seemed possible.[69]

66.  “Turenne,” by the author of “Life of Sir Kenelm Digby.”

67.  “Adventures of King James II.,” by the author of “Life of Sir Kenelm Digby.”

68.  “James II. and his Wives.” Allan Fea.

69.  “Turenne,” by the author of “Life of Sir Kenelm Digby.”

Soon after Turenne’s summons to attend the Cardinal the treaty which Cromwell concluded with France required the banishment of the Duke of York, and having thus perforce to leave the army, he came to Paris there to rejoin his mother. He was smarting under the treatment he had received, for Turenne was his ideal and moreover had treated him with marked kindness and consideration, giving “him a reception suitable to his birth, and endeavoured by all possible proofs of affection to soften the remembrance of his misfortunes.” This great leader had a high opinion of the Duke, saying of him that he “was the greatest prince and like to be the best general of his time.” We find Clarendon himself writing to Secretary Nicholas in 1653: “The Duke of York is this day gone towards the field, he is a gallant gentleman and hath the best general reputation of any young prince in Christendom and really will come to great matters.”

The Duke had not reached manhood without further plans on his mother’s part to negotiate a suitable alliance. We have seen that the Lorraine match fell through. In the succeeding year, when he was eighteen, Marie d’Orléans, Mademoiselle de Longueville, the daughter of the Duke de Longueville by his first wife, was suggested by Sir John Berkeley. She was ugly and deformed, though called a wise princess, but the greatest heiress in France, after Mademoiselle de Montpensier, and James made no objection.[70] Hyde, however, opposed the marriage, on the ground that the heir presumptive ought not to marry before the sovereign, in which axiom the queen-mother for once agreed with him, and Anne of Austria, Queen-regent of France, clinched the matter. The Duke of York, she decided, was too great, as the son of a king, to marry in France without the consent of his nation and brother.[71] Mademoiselle de Longueville married Henri, Duc de Nemours, in 1657. Madame de Motteville speaks of her good looks, which Hyde denies, and affirms attachment on James’ part.

70.  “Life of Henrietta Maria,” I. A. Taylor.

71.  “Memoirs for History of Anne of Austria,” Madame de Motteville, 1725; “James II. and his Wives,” Allan Fea.

James is reported to have been “very much displeased,” which seems a little unlikely, considering his youth and the unattractive appearance of the proposed bride. But four more years of strenuous life, as we know, were to pass over his head, and then at Peronne, in the train of his sister Mary, James, Duke of York, was fated to meet for the first time Anne Hyde. In his own memoirs, dictated long afterwards, he acknowledges that he learnt to love her at that time. The brilliant girl, for whom Spencer Compton and Harry Jermyn had sighed in vain, was, with her ready wit and hereditary talents, a conspicuous figure in the entourage of the Princess of Orange.[72] “Besides her person,” says the record just mentioned, “she had all the qualities proper to inflame a heart less apt to take fire than his.” “A very extraordinary woman” she is even called by Burnet (who, however, is not always to be trusted). But at any rate, clever, fearless, ready of tongue and broadly sympathetic, she stood for much that might be considered typically English at that time.[73] As for Anne’s own feelings, no one can wonder at her reciprocation of a passion which a prince like James laid at her feet. Fresh from the fields of his prowess, confessed by the greatest captain of the age to be of conspicuous gallantry, and surrounded with the halo of unmerited misfortune, there is no doubt that he must have seemed a very Paladin to the daughter of the loyal Cavalier to whom fealty to the exiled race was a religion, and for the rest, when one looks at the picture painted in his youth by Lely—the haughty, beautiful face, with its sensitive mouth and luminous eyes—one cannot choose but see, like poor Nan Hyde, in the Duke of York a veritable Prince Charming.

72.  “Memoirs of the Court of England during Reign of Stuarts.” J. H. Jesse.

73.  “Queen Anne and her Court.” P. F. Williams Ryan.

His own statement is simply made in few words,[74] and apparently if the lovers confessed their attachment to each other at that time no one else guessed their secret then nor for long afterwards.[75]

74.  “Life of James II.” Rev. J. S. Clarke, from original Stuart MSS. in Carlton House, 1816.

75.  “Original Papers containing Secret History of Great Britain,” arranged by James Macpherson, 1775. Extracts from writings of James II. himself.

The Princess Mary and her train remained for some months in France, as before mentioned, and it was during the stay in Paris that Frances Stanhope, one of her ladies, was converted to Rome, and Queen Henrietta was present at her profession in the Jesuit Noviciate Church. At this time the Queen’s capricious favour seems to have veered in the direction of her second son, probably on account of his service in the French army.

During this Paris visit Sir Richard Browne, father-in-law to John Evelyn, was writing to Hyde in the month of May: “I have as yett been onely once at our Court where by misfortune I could not kisse ye hande of yr faire daughter.” They were old friends, and the friendship lasted for years.[76]

76.  Evelyn’s “Correspondence.” Sir E. Hyde to Sir R. Browne, Bruges, 18th August 1656: “We expect the Duke of York here very speedily.”

Meanwhile the Duke of York, utterly weary of inglorious ease, again took up arms, though reluctantly, at this time in the Spanish army under the exiled Condé. He had received a sort of apology from Mazarin for the treaty with Cromwell, which however he frankly acknowledged to be unavoidable. It was, as has already been said, a prime object with the Protector to foment disagreements between the royal brothers, and he persuaded the Cardinal to offer James a command of troops in Italy.[77] Charles on this summoned his brother to Breda, and bade him take an oath of service to Spain and also dismiss his governor, Sir John Berkeley, who was secretly an agent of Cromwell. The Duke of York, however, probably resenting dictation of any kind, left Flanders hurriedly, to his brother’s great wrath; on which Hyde, justly apprehensive of a breach between the two, interfered on behalf of the younger brother, begging that at any cost he should be recalled, and Ormonde was sent after the truant. James listened to his persuasions so far as to consent to return, on condition that his household was not meddled with, and the offending Berkeley was given a peerage, it is hard to see why, being created Baron Berkeley of Stratton. On this occasion the Princess Mary went to Bruges to assist in bringing about the reconciliation between her brothers, and in the month of May the Duke of York was given the command of certain regiments newly raised, and in the succeeding month finally made up his difference with Charles. At the battle of the Dunes he displayed extraordinary valour, a quality which distinguished him throughout his career as a soldier. Condé, who might certainly be considered a judge of such matters, placed it on record that “if there was a man without fear, it was the Duke of York.”

77.  “Charles II.” Osmund Airy.

In this campaign James had now the company of his younger brother Henry, Duke of Gloucester. In that poor boy’s short and stormy life there was indeed little space for anything to be called happiness. He, contemptuously called “Master Harry” by his gaolers, had been released by the Parliament some years previously, and having landed at Dunkirk was first sent to Lady Hyde at Antwerp, but he arrived in Paris in 1653.[78] He had become—he was but ten years old—terribly spoilt by bad company, but he quickly improved in his new surroundings, and later, Morley at any rate thought highly of him.[79] No sooner, however, had he taken up his abode with his mother than she, regardless of the dying commands of his father, set to work with all her might to win him over to the Church of Rome, fancying no doubt that with a child of Gloucester’s tender years her task would prove an easy one.

78.  Sandford’s “Genealogical History.”

79.  Dictionary of National Biography.

Charles II., nevertheless, wrote the boy a stern letter of warning, and appealed passionately to James for aid, he being then at hand, bidding him even leave the service of France sooner than refrain from supporting his brother. Besides this the King despatched the faithful Ormonde to enforce his command, the latter moreover on arrival finding it necessary to sell his own George, the last jewel remaining to him, to help the young Duke in his destitution.

On this Henrietta flew into one of her tempests of rage and promptly turned her youngest son out of her house, believing she could thus coerce him into surrender. After a piteous scene with his little sister Henrietta, who seemed beside herself with terror, only gasping “Oh me! my mother!” amidst her sobs, the poor young Duke, forlorn and helpless, but unshaken in his resolve, fled to his brother James, who did his best to console him, and proved indeed always kind and affectionate. On this occasion, moreover, the Duke of York attempted in vain to soften his mother’s anger, but the only result was that she refused to communicate with either son, except through Walter Montague, who was much in her confidence as a messenger and go-between on many occasions. This favour he probably owed to the fact of his being a convert from the Anglican Church. He entered the religious life, and died as Abbot of Pontoise.

The two royal brothers during their Paris sojourn attended together regularly the English service which was held at the house of Sir Richard Browne and was frequented by many of the exiled Cavaliers. If at this time James had indeed begun to entertain doubts as to the Church of his baptism, they were not yet strong enough to lead him away from her worship. He appears to have been instructed early in the doctrines of the Church, especially in that of the Real Presence, by Dr Steward, who was successively Prebendary of Worcester and Provost of Eton. During the progress of the war, the latter became (nominally) Dean of St Paul’s and of Westminster, and while Clerk of the Closet to Charles I., was one of the commissioners at the Treaty of Uxbridge. He also taught the Prince of Wales, and became one of the Duke of York’s Cabinet Council, Sir George Radcliffe spitefully calling him “the heifer the queen plowes with.”[80] The support James gave to his younger brother testifies to his loyalty, at any rate for that time, and something also may be due to the ardent veneration which the memory of their father inspired in the children of Charles I. To him the offices of his Church had been his stay and consolation up to the supremest moment of the great tragedy, and his son could not but remember the fact. And moreover it must be recollected that among the many faults of James, Duke of York, dissimulation had no place. Even Burnet, though no friend to him, could not but acknowledge him to be “candid and sincere,” therefore we must conclude that whatever difficulties may have presented themselves to his mind, at the time when he and his brother Henry knelt side by side at Mattins and Evensong in Sir Richard Browne’s house, the Duke of York was still conscientiously an English churchman, and it is significant that in after years he never tried to turn his daughters from their faith.[81]

80.  Burnet’s “History of My Own Time.”

81.  Eva Scott, “The King in Exile.” Cosin, Dean of Peterborough, afterwards Bishop of Durham, was chaplain in Paris.

The Duke of Gloucester was afterwards for a time with his elder sister in the Low Countries, and, as we have seen, in 1657 took up arms with his brother.[82] Both were well known for their extreme and reckless courage, an attribute not, it must be confessed, shared by the leaders of the Spanish forces, who were their brothers in arms, for the latter for the most part took care to watch the battles in which they were engaged from the safe and distant harbourage of their coaches.[83]

82.  Madame—Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady). In June 1657 both were reported slain or prisoners, but reached Bruges safely.

83.  Thurloe State Papers.

At the end of the campaign James had, as in the case of the army of France, won the confidence of his men and the respect of Condé and of the Spanish leaders in general.[84]

84.  Clarendon State Papers. Marquess of Ormond to E. H. Brussels, 21st June 1657: “The Duke of York will take exceedingly in the army. He is as brave and as little troublesome as any prince can be.”

It may be that neither England nor France was in favour of the Princes taking service in the Spanish army, a circumstance which would have some force in determining James, who very probably was quite willing to fling a defiance in the teeth of Cromwell.

Nevertheless, it is strange to find Sir John Berkeley and Colonel Bampfylde, the plotter of some years back, seriously discussing about this time the question of a marriage for the Duke of York with one of the Protector’s daughters, a fact which goes to prove the despair of the Royalists of otherwise succeeding in England.[85] Still later, in 1659, a party among the exiles, choosing to believe a rumour which pronounced the King to have consumptive tendencies and to be in a precarious state of health, actually proposed to set him aside in favour of his second brother. There is not, however, a shadow of evidence that James himself was in any way a party to such a scheme. Indeed in August of that year he followed Charles to France, and later in the autumn the unlucky truce between France and Spain put an end to the military career of the Dukes of York and Gloucester, and as a consequence deprived them of their pay in the army of the latter country, throwing them once more on their elder brother’s meagre resources.

85.  Eva Scott, “Travels of the King,” “The King in Exile.”

In this connection a letter from Mr Jennings (Captain Titus) to Hyde seems to point to the increasing arrogance of the Protector’s family. Writing from Antwerp on 11th February 1656-1657, he says: “There was lately a wedding of a kinswoman of Laurence’s, whither all the grandees and their wives were invited, but most of the Major-Generals and their wives came not. The feast wanting much of its grace by the absence of those ladies, it was asked by one there, where they were? Mrs Claypole answered: ‘I’ll warrant you washing their dishes at home, as they use to do.’ This hath been extremely ill taken, and now the women do all they can with their husbands to hinder Mrs Claypole from being a Princess and her Highness” (Clarendon State Papers). It will be remembered that Elizabeth Claypole, Cromwell’s favourite daughter, predeceased him by a few weeks.

When Henry had been sent out of England by the Parliament, that body had promised the prince a small maintenance, provided he kept away from all and any of his relations, a proviso which obviously was unlikely to be observed. However, any such provision was forfeited, and he was in the same plight as his next brother.

Another effort at an English alliance was made during this year, Lord Mordaunt suggesting this time, as a bride to the Duke of York, Fatima Lambert, the only child of the famous Roundhead general, whose influence was for a time paramount with the army since the death of the Lord Protector in September of 1658.

James, however, now pledged secretly to Anne Hyde, at once refused the proposed match, alleging as a reason the want of the King’s consent, but still keeping his secret inviolate.

From Secretary Nicholas’ letter to Charles II., dated 8th October, it appears that in his communication with the Duke, Lord Mordaunt did not mention the name of the lady, but called her mysteriously “a daughter of a gentleman of power and good quality in England, but he was not to tell who it was,” which seems an unmeaning precaution, as sooner or later James must have been told, and could not be expected to pledge himself in ignorance of the lady’s parentage.[86]

86.  Carte’s “Letters.”

However, as we know, the negotiation, if it attained such a point, speedily fell to the ground, and events which soon followed removed it altogether out of the sphere of possibilities.

In that year, when hope and fear alternated almost daily, when events crowded on each other, Lambert’s restless figure holds the stage in one aspect or another.[87] In the autumn he is sent with a strong force to suppress the rising of Sir George Booth, who is taken in the endeavour to escape in a woman’s dress, and Lord Derby in the disguise of a servant. Lambert is to command the Parliament’s forces in the north in October. In March of the next year the pendulum has swung back, and the victorious general is committed to the Tower. He is released on parole, but once more he is stirring up strife and is made prisoner. Later, he narrowly escapes the block, to be a captive for his life in Guernsey. But now another figure dominates the arena, and it is Monk who gathers up all the threads into his strong hands, who takes the tide at the turn, who grasps the empty crown which a greater than he had longed but feared to wear, and lays it at the feet of the exile whose birthright it is.[88]

87.  Whitelocke’s “Memorials.”

88.  “State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq.” Copy of a letter from Brussels, of the 13/3 of March 1660/59.

In the early spring of 1660, the year which was to see the end of King Charles’ dreary, aimless wanderings, the Duke of York was made captain-general of all the Spanish forces at sea, and “admiral of his fleets commanding his cinque-ports,”[89] but he had not time to enjoy these dignities long, for in the month of May he came home once more with his brothers, and was forthwith made admiral of the English fleet. Hyde had been strongly opposed to the Spanish appointment as it was supposed to involve the profession of the faith of Rome, but at that moment the fortunes of the royal house were at their lowest ebb. Charles himself had gone incognito to Calais, James to Boulogne, hoping for the success of Booth’s attempt, but its failure already mentioned sent both the brothers back to Brussels.

89.  Whitelocke’s “Memorials.”

Only in March, came Bailey secretly to Ormonde with the tale that the King was toasted in the taverns of London. Only in March, and in May the Royal Charles was bringing him back to his inheritance, the Duke of York sailing in the London, the Duke of Gloucester in the Swiftsure.

The 29th of May—Oak-Apple Day—the day looked for through long years of suspense, the day almost despaired of, the day welcomed with a very agony of joy and exultation, had come at last.

To understand the fervour of welcome that greeted the restored King, we must consider the unhealed wounds suffered by the many, and the fact that the religious life of a great and representative class was inextricably bound up with the fortunes of the exiled race. In the eighteen years which had passed since the Standard was set up at Nottingham, castle and grange and manor—yes, and farmhouse too—had sent forth their sons, ungrudgingly for the most part, to fight under that banner, and the great Anglican Church, with her array of saintly doctors, never more conspicuous than in that age, had given her blessing on the enterprise. In either case the sacrifice had been exacted, the soldier had laid down his life, the priest had suffered for the cause, and above all the scaffold before Whitehall had for ever set the seal on both. It was nothing that England had known years of strong, heavy-handed government, that she had dictated terms to other nations. To many who cherished sorrowful memories, those years only represented a space of stern tyranny and repression, and the graves of the beloved slain at Edgehill and Newbury, Marston Moor and Naseby, were green for ever in their hearts. To such simple and devout souls, also, it was much that through that time the Liturgy had been forbidden, that the churches had been desecrated, that the whole land lay desolate, neither could she “enjoy her Sabbaths.” To them it was much that the end had come, and even with haunting memories of the past they could say it was worth while. If there was much that was short-sighted in this position, there was also much that was heroic.

JAMES, DUKE OF YORK

So in the sunshine of spring, an English spring with the laburnums and lilacs ablow, with the air scented with the breath of flowers, alive with the singing of birds, the King came “to his own again.” Thanksgivings had been offered in the glorious cathedral of Canterbury, Rochester had added to the welcome, and now on Restoration Day a gallant train rode slowly over Blackheath on its triumphant way to London. Blare of trumpet and ring of bridle-chains and a riot of colour were all combined, while the people who lined the way could, some of them, scarcely see, for their blinding tears, the dark-faced King, thirty years old to-day, glancing quickly around him, the saturnine mouth relaxed in a smile, as he bowed to right and left. No wonder that he could remark with easy cynicism that no doubt it must be his own fault that his coming had been so long delayed, since everyone was so glad to see him.

Just behind the King came his brothers, side by side.

As James, Duke of York, reined his fretting horse with practised skill, he looked in his costly attire a very comely prince in the eyes of his brother’s lieges. Yellow ribbons were fluttering from his shoulders, fleecy white plumes waved from his hat over the long brown curls which framed the proud and handsome face. He was now twenty-six, already a soldier of tried capacity, and as one of the Intelligencers of London had already said of him, “cried up for the most accomplished gentleman both in arms and courtesie that graces the French Court.”[90] So people wrote and thought, yet this reputation was for the most part left behind him when he crossed the Channel.

90.  “Queen Anne and her Court,” P. F. Williams Ryan. “The Duke of York, besides being an able Captain and successful administrator, was a man of many accomplishments, acquired by association with the most polished society of Western Europe.”

It was the fate of James Stuart, as it has often been the fate of obscure persons, just to miss the appreciation which in some measure he really deserved. His elder brother’s careless good humour and the grace of manner which concealed so much selfish indifference won for Charles II. from his people, weary of long repression and smarting under unwelcome conditions, an amount of real affection which was certainly both unreasonable and undeserved, but which nevertheless lasted for his lifetime, and made him one of the most popular sovereigns of his country.

James, on the other hand, because he lacked just those superficial attributes was, to the bitter end, mistrusted and misunderstood. He was not clever in any sense, possessing none of the brilliant gifts which Charles misused and flung away with absolute recklessness; but as Buckingham, with his rapid, mordant apprehension, once said of the brothers: “The King (Charles II.) could see things if he would, and the Duke would see things if he could.”[91]

91.  Bishop Burnet’s “History of My Own Time.”

If he could—there was the key of the whole position. When the supreme moment of his life arrived, James proved absolutely blind to the issues involved—he could not see.

As to his better qualities, Bishop Burnet, as already mentioned at no time a friend to the Duke of York, was forced to admit his personal courage. “He was very brave in youth, and so much magnified by Marshal Turenne, that till his marriage he really clouded the King, and passed for the superior genius.” Also it is acknowledged that he was “a firm friend till affairs and his religion wore out all his first principles and inclinations.”

That same grace of constancy in friendship is endorsed by all his biographers, and unhappily it was in many cases to prove his undoing. He could not withdraw his confidence once given, and he was utterly blind to the faults of his friends, clinging to them through good and evil report, and in this respect he must be cleared of the charge of fickleness.

Presently we shall see how this insensate belief in his friends, and misapprehension of their motives, was to operate in the drama of his marriage, which was nearly thereby shipwrecked.

He had no gifts as a letter writer (in which capacity Charles II. certainly excelled, judging from the correspondence which survives[92]) and in speech he even stammered slightly, for which reason he was habitually silent. But while Charles was incurably idle, letting life drift by on the surface of a jest, and unutterably bored whenever he was forced to work (though no man knew better how to apply when put to it), James was plodding, methodical, diligent, though he got little credit for it, then nor later.

92.  Granger’s “Biographical History of England.”

This difference, apart from diversity of temperament, may be partly accounted for by the circumstances of the brothers’ early life. Charles during his years of exile was for the most part condemned to inaction, while James gained in the arena of European warfare, under the eye of the greatest generals of his day, the habit of action and of eager disposal of his time.

One more contrast is to be noted.

Charles deliberately allowed himself to sink deeper and deeper into the mire of degrading vice, successfully stifling the voice of his conscience, till to all appearance it ceased to trouble him. James, on the other hand, greatly as he had shared in the prevailing sins of his age, never lost the uneasy sense of remorse, and certainly for the last fifteen years of his life tried to atone for his stained youth by fervent and real penitence. Moreover it is to be reckoned in his favour that he never tolerated any sneers at religion in his presence.

For the rest, he loved England with even passionate fervour. To his dying day he steadily and enthusiastically extolled his fellow-countrymen, banished though he was from the land that was so dear to him; nor could he refrain from sympathetic admiration of his English sailors for their daring gallantry at La Hogue, a gallantry displayed as it was against himself, when with the navy of France he made one more fruitless attempt to regain his lost kingdom.[93] Grammont, gay, careless, superficial, was yet able to sum up the character of the Duke with unusual gravity and deliberation. He bore the “reputation of undaunted courage, inviolable attachment for his word, great economy in his affairs, hauteur, application, arrogance, each in their turn, a scrupulous observer of the rules of duty and the laws of justice; he was accounted a faithful friend and an implacable enemy.”[94]

93.  Granger’s “Biographical History of England.”

94.  “Memoir of the Court of Charles II.,” by Count Grammont, ed. by Sir Walter Scott, revised ed. 1846.

Lastly, let it be said of James Stuart that he cannot be denied the courage of his opinions, mistaken though they were, and grievously as he erred in enforcing them.

CHAPTER IV

THE MARRIAGE

It is difficult, nay impossible, now to fix the exact date of the secret, but definite, understanding between the Duke of York and Anne Hyde.

Macpherson places it in 1657. James, he says, “had fallen in love with Anne when the Chancellor and he were on ill terms,”[95] but the probabilities point to the Paris visit already described. This would give a reason for the Prince’s lingering on in the French capital at that time, for he appears then to have been treated by the Court of France with very little consideration, a state of things which he was by no means the person to endure meekly, proud and punctilious as he could show himself to be.[96]

95.  Macpherson’s “Original Papers: Life of James II., by himself.”

96.  Thurloe Papers.

It was, by the way, then—if at all—that his sister Mary made the secret marriage with the younger Harry Jermyn, formerly a suitor of Nan herself, though the fact of such a union is more than doubtful.[97]

97.  “Life of Henrietta Maria.” J. A. Taylor.

However, James himself acknowledges that it was when the Princess and her train came to Paris that he was first attracted to the young maid of honour. He says that she brought “his passion to such an height as between the time he first saw her and the winter before the King’s restoration he resolved to marry none but her, and promised to do it, and though at first when the Duke asked the King his brother for his leave, he refused and diswaded him from it, yet at last he opposed it no more, and the Duke married her privately, owned it some time after, and was ever after a true friend to the Chancellor for several years.”[98]

98.  Macpherson’s “Original Papers: Life of James II., by himself.”

We are here given a period between the summer of 1656 and the winter of 1659-1660. As we know that the Duke’s campaigning had taken him away from Paris in the autumn of 1657, the assumption is that some sort of pledge passed between the lovers before this time, and that they had then parted for some years with the knowledge of their jealously guarded secret confined to themselves alone. No one seems really to have suspected the truth till long afterwards, though there is a despatch dated the 7th or 17th of August 1656 which has been supposed to refer to this love affair, though it is hard to say on what grounds the supposition is founded. The letter is from Ross to Secretary Nicholas.

“In England there is much bustle about choosing Parliament men. Some counties have chosen Bradshaw, Ludlow, Salloway, Harrison and Rich, at which Cromwell is so incensed that he has ordered them to give bail to the majors general of their counties. My wife is going to Dover to get a conveyance to go to the Duke of York. I hear from young Musgrove that Mrs Benson is become ward to a physician who lately applied to the Princess Royal to board with her and one Bronkard who is with her and they are to go with her on her next journey and be spies on the King’s deportment.”[99]

99.  “Calendar of Domestic State Papers,” edit. by M. A. Everett-Green.

It is said that “Benson” is cypher for the Duke of York. Query, is Mrs Benson intended for Anne Hyde? The date makes this supposition unlikely. Even had there been any inkling of the affair it could scarcely have been so soon, and such a storm of wrath was evoked by the discovery of the contract in 1660 that it is most improbable that any suspicion of it was afloat four years earlier.

Too many people were interested in so vital a question for the secret to have been quite closely kept in such a case. It would have leaked out somehow, a whisper here, a hint there, to ears only too ready to listen to so choice a morsel of scandal, from lips equally ready and eager to retail it. It is at least certain that for long after the Paris visit Anne retained the affection and confidence of the Princess of Orange, and we know that these were rudely shaken by the discovery when it was made.[100]

100.  “Lives of Princesses of England.” M. A. Everett-Green.

How the great secret was to be a secret no more, but the property of the world at large, has now to be told.[101]

101.  “Continuation of the Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon,” by himself, ed. 1759.

In some respects it is fairly easy to reconstruct the London of the earlier Stuarts. Here and there one can trace, by the help of main thoroughfares, the sites of buildings once famous, though now either substantially changed or altogether non-existent. The south side of the Strand in those days was lined with large and stately houses, mansions in the true sense, each with its façade facing the street; and to the rear its shady garden reaching to the river, where the water-gate with its elaborate ironwork and lofty flanking pillars gave access to a flight of steps, where a boat was commonly moored. The Thames was then the chief and favourite highway of the city. Its shining surface was for the most part alive with craft of every description, from the royal barge, gaudy with profuse gilding and silken hangings, to the small boat darting hither and thither, and holding perhaps but a single passenger. Heavy loads would be going slowly down to Greenwich or Gravesend, a boat full of cheerful citizens with violins on board rowing up to Chelsey Reach, a market woman or two with their baskets crossing over from the fields beyond the Tabard on the south side, a Templar embarking at Whitehall stairs to hurry down to Alsatia—it was all a feast of colour and life, such as, in one sense, has passed away from the scene for ever.

One of the great houses occupying such a position was that known as Worcester House.[102] It had been originally a residence of the bishops of Carlisle, and it stood on the site of the present Beaufort Buildings, between the Savoy and Durham Place. At the Reformation it became the property of the Crown, and was granted to the founder of the Bedford family, when it was known as Bedford House, till they removed to the present Southampton Street and built there another Bedford House.

102.  Besant, “Survey of London”; Wheatley, “London, Past and Present”; Walford, “Old and New London.”

The house in the Strand then passed to Edward, second Marquess of Worcester, the loyal Cavalier who held his strong castle of Raglan so stoutly for the King, and who is, as well, remembered for his “Century of Inventions” and his numerous scientific experiments. He died in 1667, and his son Henry being created Duke of Beaufort in 1682 gave that name to the block of houses now occupying the site. During the Commonwealth, the house had been used for committees and was furnished by the Parliament for the Scottish Commissioners. At one time Cromwell himself had lived there,[103] but in May 1657 a Bill was passed to settle it on Margaret, Lady Worcester. The Somersets having regained possession of their house, Lord Worcester, twelve days after the Restoration, offered it rent free to Edward Hyde, who, however, agreed to a lease at five hundred pounds a year, looking on it merely as a temporary house, intending to build for himself; an intention to be fulfilled before much time was past.

103.  Sir Henry Craik, “Life of Edward, Lord Clarendon.”

Here for the present, at any rate, the Chancellor, who had accompanied his master on his triumphant return, took up his abode.

The pageant of the Restoration was possessing fully the mind and temper of the people. The streets were daily thronged with eager, excited, jubilant crowds, demonstrating their noisy welcome to the long expatriated King. London was delirious for the time being with the revulsion, and those who had endured years of exile and poverty were not the least happy. Among these might be numbered the Hydes. The Chancellor might certainly be considered to deserve a season of rest and prosperity after so many strenuous years of service, and as soon as the King was at Whitehall, firmly established in the house of his fathers, Hyde had leisure to turn to his own affairs, and forthwith sent off for his daughter Anne. It has been said that the Princess Mary’s suspicions had been already aroused with regard to her brother James and her maid of honour, and that she had therefore dismissed the latter from her service, but if so it does not seem that she imparted such suspicions to any one at that time, for certainly Hyde himself was then completely ignorant of them. He was, as we have seen, a man of strong and tenacious family affections, and for his elder girl he had a deep and enduring love. “She being his eldest child he had more acquaintance with her than with any of his children.”[104] Besides, another question with regard to her was beginning to occupy his mind. Now that public affairs were settling down peaceably in England, he bethought him of finding an honourable establishment for his Nan, and it seems he had “an overture from a noble family.”

104.  “Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon: Continuation,” by himself.

Since the quickly extinguished love affairs at The Hague in 1654-1655 nothing of the kind is recorded, and the Chancellor was fully alive to the advisability of a suitable marriage for this his elder daughter, who was now twenty-three, a mature age according to the ideas of the time. Back, therefore, to England and to the new home in London, came Anne Hyde, a stranger to her native land since her childhood, to be received by her parents with exceeding joy.

It was, no doubt, to many of the long exiled Cavaliers a summer of hope, destined, in many cases, to be unfulfilled. They looked forward eagerly to the knitting together of ravelled skeins, to the renewal of old ties, of old friendships; to the building up of home in the dear familiar places so long laid waste and desolate.

So Edward Hyde and Frances his wife looked forward fondly to welcoming their Nan, and cherished happy visions of a blithe bridal, of a new relationship, new ties; of children’s children at their knees in God’s good time.

They were keeping open house like their neighbours with lavish hospitality, and perhaps Mistress Anne, in spite of the possession of her momentous secret, and the anxiety inextricable from it, was not averse to the intercourse now opened with the choicest spirits of that English society which was re-forming itself around her.

In the wainscotted rooms of Worcester House they were made welcome. Ormonde, tried and trusted, who had watched over the boyhood and shared the exile of his king with selfless devotion; and Southampton, whose memory could go back to the awful night, when he was keeping his vigil by the body of his dead king in St James’s, and the muffled figure of Cromwell stole into the dusky room to look at the calm face of his victim; and Edward Nicholas, the Secretary, of whom it could be said that there was “none more industrious, none more loyal, none less selfish than he.”[105] These with their host could talk over the days of strife and confusion, of rebellion and anarchy, wherein they had played their parts; days past, so all trusted, never to return. Together they could speak with hushed and saddened voices of lost friends and of the master whom they had served so faithfully, yet failed to save. There, too, often came John Evelyn, a friend true and loyal through long years. “This great person,” he says, speaking of Hyde, “had ever been my friend.” He would come by water from his house at Deptford—that Sayes Court near which he was afterwards to discover the young Gibbons at work on his great carving—and so, landing at the water-gate, would pass through the garden into Worcester House. And there likewise would be Morley, now Dean of Christ Church (who had come back before the Restoration, being sent by Hyde to contradict the report of the King’s apostacy), taking up once more the threads of the close friendship of many years. Perhaps, too, Gilbert Sheldon, who had gone joyfully to meet the returning king at Canterbury—now Dean of the Chapel Royal, but soon to be Bishop of London—was there also, ready for an argument or dispute with Morley, yet both of them united in virtue of long-standing affection for the Chancellor.[106] And among them would be other and younger guests: gallants scented and curled, in lace and satin, playing the courtier to the daughters of the house, Anne and even little Frances, or laughing with their young brothers, or, one of them, singing a dainty madrigal or so to the music of a lute or virginals.

105.  “Life of Edward, Lord Clarendon.” Sir Henry Craik.

106.  Dictionary of National Biography.

It was to all seeming a happy, sunny time, but suddenly into the midst of the cheerful trifling was flung an announcement which was to prove, with a vengeance, an apple of discord to all whom it could concern.

James, Duke of York, the King’s second brother, the heir presumptive to the Crown, and the Chancellor’s elder daughter, Mistress Anne Hyde, were married, and every one, whether remotely interested or no, stood aghast.

When the Duke first spoke to his brother on the subject is doubtful,[107] but according to his own memoir it seems to have been before the Restoration, possibly even at the time of the projected match with Fatima Lambert, though as we have seen he did not openly give it as a reason for his refusal.

107.  “Original Papers containing Hist. of Gt. Britain,” arranged by John Macpherson, 1775; extracts from “James II., by himself”: “The King at first refused the Duke of York’s marriage with Mrs Hyde.”

Easy-going as Charles II. was on some points, he was naturally strongly opposed to such a marriage for his brother as one with the Chancellor’s daughter, since no possible advantage could result from it, and later, when he did give his consent, he only reluctantly withdrew his opposition.[108]

108.  “Memoirs of the Court of Charles II.” Count Grammont, edit. Sir W. Scott, revised ed. 1846, note 42.

Nevertheless James disregarded the fraternal disapprobation, without at the time confessing the fact, for the marriage on which so much was to hang took place at Breda on 10th November 1659.

The Princess of Orange and her three brothers were there alternately with Brussels throughout that winter and the early part of the succeeding spring.

Thurloe writes in March 1659-1660: “To-morrow I am parting for Antwerp, whither the princess royal is going, being on her return from Breda. The King of Scots goes with her to Antwerp, and from thence returns specially hither, but both the dukes go through with her to Breda.”[109] It is certain that though Mary was ignorant of the marriage she suspected the existence of some understanding between her brother and the maid of honour before the end of 1659, and on this account made no difficulty of the latter’s retirement from her service.

109.  “State Papers of John Thurloe, Esq.”

There is a consensus of evidence as to the date of the marriage. Among others, Lady Fanshawe gives it.[110] She was certainly in Holland at the time and it is possible that she was at Breda itself.

110.  “Notes to the Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe” (Chalmers’ Biographical Dictionary).

Who the witnesses of this union were cannot now be ascertained, and it may be because of this fact that we are told that James could, if he chose, have had the contract annulled at the time when the storm broke.[111] It has indeed by some writers been termed a contract, only, of marriage, but we shall see later that the validity was fully established.

111.  “Royalty Restored.” J. F. Molloy.

At any rate James now went to the King, and on his knees made a clean breast of the affair, confessing the fact of his marriage in defiance of the prohibition of the previous year, and entreating permission for a public ceremony. Charles was, we are told, “greatly troubled with his Brother’s Passion,” “which was expressed in a very wonderful manner and with many tears, protesting that if his Majesty should not give his consent, he would immediately leave the Kingdom, and must spend his life in foreign parts.”[112]

112.  “Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon: Continuation,” by himself.

The King, as might be expected, was greatly dismayed and perplexed, as the situation offered serious complications. He does not appear to have shown then, nor later, much positive anger with his brother, but he was far-seeing enough to fear the difficulties that would probably arise from this unwelcome alliance, which might very well prove a terrible stumbling-block in his way.

James meanwhile was vehement and determined. As to his threat of self-expatriation, that was of course not to be thought of for a moment, and the King in his perturbation sent for the Chancellor.

Probably Charles’ first feelings with regard to Hyde were those of strong irritation, as it might easily transpire that the latter from motives of ambition had, if not assisted, at least countenanced the match.

However those old and tried friends, Ormonde, the new Lord Steward, and Southampton, now Lord High Treasurer, were deputed to see and confer with him first, before his interview with the King himself.

Hyde’s outburst of wrath and bitter grief on being told the news[113] satisfied all parties that there was no collusion on his part, and when Charles himself came into the room, he was softened by the father’s evident distress, and spoke gently and kindly to his old servant.

113.  “The Chancellor knew nothing of the Duke of York’s marrying his daughter” (Macpherson Papers).

“Nobody was so surprised and confounded as the Chancellor himself, who, being of a nature free from jealousy, and very confident of an entire affection and obedience from all his children, and particularly from that daughter whom he had always loved dearly, never had in the least degree suspected any such thing, though he knew afterwards that the Duke’s affection and kindness had been much spoken of beyond the seas, but without the least suspicion in anybody that it could ever tend to marriage” (“Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon: Continuation,” by himself).

The Duke of York himself next made his appearance, but possibly the King, wishing to avoid a scene, or not thinking the moment a propitious one for his brother to attempt any justification, took the latter away with him, leaving Hyde for the present with his friends, who for their part did their best to console him. They for one thing strenuously upheld the fact of the marriage, of which the Chancellor, in his pain and bewilderment, was at first doubtful, and indeed urged every ground of comfort. For the time being, however, the angry father would listen to no argument nor representation. Hurrying home he ordered his daughter into close confinement, in the high-handed fashion which parents in those days were in the habit of employing. He really seems, moreover—the grave, sedate, well-balanced Chancellor—to have taken leave of his senses, for he even seriously suggested sending the culprit to the Tower, not to mention the extreme measure of cutting off her head. Southampton, in his dismay at his old friend’s frenzy, had told the King that it must be madness in some form,[114] saying that “His Majesty must consult with soberer men, that He” (pointing to the Chancellor) “was mad, and had proposed such extravagant things that he was no more to be consulted.” However, without any question of Tower or block, Mistress Anne was locked up in her father’s house, and apparently was destined to remain in durance. Finding the rigorous treatment which, as it was, Hyde chose to adopt, the King again sent for him, and taking him to task for his harshness, interceded for the offending daughter. The Chancellor, however subservient he could be, was not to be coerced on such a point, and stood firm. He answered proudly, that “her not having discharged the duty of a daughter ought not to deprive him of the Authority of a Father, and therefore he must humbly beg His Majesty not to interpose his commands against his doing anything that his own dignity required; that He only expected what His Majesty would do upon the Advice He had humbly offered to him, and when He saw that He would himself proceed as He was sure would become him.” Charles, for his part, accepted this snub direct with perfect docility, but the plot was destined to thicken quickly, and neither of them could, as it turned out, prevent the march of events, nor sever the offending pair.

114.  “The behaviour of Lord Clarendon on this occasion was so extraordinary that no credit could have been given to any other account than his own” (Hallam’s “Constitutional History”).

In spite of her father’s vigilance, the Duke of York found means to visit his wife during her incarceration, by the connivance of her maid, Ellen Stroud, who had been a confidante from the beginning.[115] Clarendon in his own Memoir uses the words: “By the administration of those who were not suspected by him, and who had the excuse that they ‘knew that they were married.’” One other accomplice there seems to have been.[116] It is almost certain that the girl’s mother was in the plot, though how far must be a matter of conjecture, but before the esclandre Sir Astley Cooper, after dining at Worcester House, said to Lord Southampton, who was also present, that he was certain that Mistress Anne was the wife of either the King or the Duke of York, judging by her mother’s demeanour. This, it seemed, displayed the scarcely veiled consideration due to the new rank, and an eager expectation of the moment when concealment would be no longer necessary.

115.  “The Duke came unknown to him” (“Continuation of the Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon,” by himself, ed. 1759).

116.  “Soon after the Restoration the Earl of Southampton and Sir A. A. Cooper dined at the Chancellor’s. On the way home Sir Anthony said: ‘Yonder Mrs Anne is certainly married to one of the brothers: a concealed respect (however suppressed) showing itself so plainly in the looks, voice and manner wherewith her mother carved to her or offered her of every dish, that it is impossible but it must be so’” (“Samuel Pepys and the World he Lived In.” Wheatley).

“Lord Shaftesbury told Sir Richard Wharton, from whom I had it, that some time before the match was owned, he had observed a respect from Lord Clarendon and his lady to their daughter that was very unusual from parents to their children, which gave him a jealousy she was married to one of the brothers, but suspected the King most.” As far as one can judge, Clarendon himself was ignorant. (Burnet’s “History of His Own Time,” Lord Dartmouth’s Notes.)

It is scarcely to be wondered at. Frances Hyde may have been prompted by ambition, or simply by the desire to give her daughter her heart’s desire without counting the cost or considering the consequences. In either case it is hard to blame her, though her connivance places her on a lower plane than her husband, with his high ideals of what was due to the royal house, exaggerated as the feeling might be which made him say that sooner than see her wife of the Duke, “I had much rather see her dead, with all the infamy that is due to her presumption.”

Yet fate was too strong for him.

It was very likely easy enough for mother and bower-maid to arrange the stolen meetings of the two, when we recollect the position of Worcester House.

It was quite simple, in the velvet darkness of a summer night, for the prince to come down in a wherry from Whitehall stairs to the water-gate of the Chancellor’s house, which he would find unlocked, and so pass through the silent garden where only the whisper of the leaves stirred in the light wind fitfully, piloted by Ellen the maid, to the room where Mistress Nan herself was waiting to keep tryst. No one else need be the wiser—no one else knew, save Lady Hyde, and she would keep out of the way carefully.

It was no doubt a halcyon time, that summer of the Restoration, for many pairs of lovers, joined after long sundering to make reunion all the dearer; and to Anne Hyde it was gilded twofold. Love triumphant burnt in a clear and steady flame, and besides, there was the dazzling promise of splendour and royalty. The moments hurried by all too swiftly in the starlight. If his tongue was, as we are told, slow and halting, hers was ready and swift, and there was, at any rate, the eloquence of clasped hands, of eager eyes.

But matters were not to arrange themselves quite happily at present, and the threads of the puzzle would need a very careful disentangling before the cord would straighten out quite smooth and even.

Rumour had begun to be busy. Gossips talked of a contract. Pepys, who is never very accurate, and who moreover constantly and unaccountably betrays a prejudice against the lady, calls it a promise, only, of marriage.[117]

117.  “Diary of Samuel Pepys, 7th October 1660,” notes by Lord Braybrooke, 1906.

He gives the story that James, after the time-honoured manner of the hero of melodrama, had signed this promise with his blood, that Anne had carefully locked it up but that the Duke had found means to get this important paper “out of her cabinet,” that the King wanted his brother to marry her but that the latter “will not.” This remark about the King, by the way, puts the account out of court. Sir John Reresby, more good-natured but scarcely better informed, says the marriage or betrothal probably took place either in January or February 1660, soon after James returned to Flanders on the failure of Booth’s rising. We have, however, much more definite evidence. In the deposition on oath of the parties, to be noticed presently, the word contract is certainly used, and the expression had to be defined. We shall see in what manner this was done.

It is clear that the King very quickly made up his mind to countenance the marriage. He said to Hyde himself that his daughter “was a Woman of a great Wit and excellent parts, and would have a great power with his brother, and that he knew she had an entire obedience for him her Father, who he knew would always give her good counsel by which he was confident that naughty people which had too much credit with his brother and which had so often misled him, would be no more able to corrupt him, but that she would prevent all ill and unreasonable attempts, and therefore he again confessed that he was glad of it.”[118]

118.  “Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon: Continuation,” by himself.

This was, of course, a tribute to the Chancellor himself. Charles II. was fully conscious of how much he had owed for many years to the counsels and service of Hyde, and how important they were likely to prove in the future; therefore his chief anxiety, at that time at any rate, was to bind the latter’s interests to his own at all costs. He also in the daily conference with the Chancellor on which he insisted, used the common-sense argument that the latter “must behave himself wisely, for that the thing was remediless”—in other words, that what was done could not be undone, a highly characteristic attitude on the part of the speaker.

But if the King was prepared to be reconciled to the match, no other member of the royal family could be said to tolerate the idea, certainly not the queen-mother, who was almost beside herself with fury. Anne’s late mistress, the Princess Royal, was also deeply incensed, resenting the affront all the more from the favour she had lavished for so many years on her maid of honour. The storm so evoked raged with more or less violence through the autumn. The wrathful letters written by his mother, on the first intelligence, James had shown to Anne, and before he set out to meet his elder sister, who was on her way to England, he came openly to Worcester House, and taking the Chancellor aside, said to him in a whisper that “he knew that he had heard of the matter, that when he came back he would give full satisfaction, and that he was not to be offended with his daughter.”

What answer Hyde chose to make on this occasion we do not know, nor how much he suspected, but the “matter,” as the Duke called it, had already been made absolutely sure.

Worcester House had been the scene, not only of romance, of love-trysts, of secret meetings on summer nights, but it had witnessed a union which was to have far-reaching results for the realm of England.

On the night of 3rd September 1660, James, Duke of York, and Anne Hyde, did for the second time plight their faith either to other.[119]

119.  “Memoirs of the Court of England under the Reign of the Stuarts,” John Heneage Jesse; Macpherson’s “Original Papers”; “Memoirs for History of Anne of Austria,” Madame de Motteville, 1725.

The officiating priest was the Duke’s chaplain, Dr Crowther, Lord Ossory (the son of Ormonde) giving away the bride, and another witness was present in the person of the maid Ellen Stroud, who had so often connived at the Duke’s visits, and who now, with the ease of long practice, smuggled these persons into the house. Lady Hyde was certainly not there, though it is quite possible that she was aware of the transaction.[120]

120.  “Memoirs of the Court of England under the Reign of the Stuarts.” John Heneage Jesse.

As to the ceremony itself, we have the depositions, as before mentioned, of all present, solemnly and severally attested, which afterwards passed into the possession of John Evelyn.[121]

121.  Original Depositions formerly in the possession of John Evelyn. MS. 18,740. B. M.

The first of these may suffice.

“I, James Duke of York do testify and declare that after I had for many months sollicited Anne my wife in the way of marriage, I was contracted to her on the 24th November 1659, at Breda in Brabant and after that tyme and many months before I came into England I lived with her (though with all possible secrecy) as my Wife and after my coming into this Kingdome, And that we might observe all that is enjoyned by the Church of England I married her upon the third of September last in the night between 11 and 12 at Worcester House, my Chaplain, Dr Crowther performing that office according as is directed by the Book of Common Prayer the Lord Ossory being then present and giving her in marriage of the truth of all which I do take my corporall oath this 18 February 1660-61. James.”

The bride followed, and each of the witnesses deposed in much the same terms, appending their signatures with the exception of Ellen the maid, who, as was usual in a person of her class at that time, was unable to write, and therefore “made her marke.”

It is very important here to notice that the depositions were further endorsed thus:

“James Duke of York and Anne Hyde Duchess of York having been married at Breda.”

The Worcester House ceremony was therefore to be regarded as simply a re-marriage to guard against any possible doubts or difficulties that might subsequently arise. It was by no means unheard-of for a marriage to be repeated in form where there existed any suspicion as to complete regularity, but this did not render the previous solemnisation less binding on the parties. Considering the character of Anne, who showed herself from first to last a proud, resolute, as well as ambitious woman, the inference is that she had looked on the Breda ceremony as much more than a mere betrothal. Putting aside the strong, even stern, religious principles in which she, the pupil of Morley, had been educated and which she had evinced from childhood, one can arrive at but one conclusion as far as she was concerned.

But an event was to happen in the same month of September, which for the time being was to put aside the thought of everything else.

Smallpox, the terrible scourge of the age, busy at the dangerous season of the falling leaf, smote the youngest son of the royal house, and on the 22nd, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, was dead in the flush of his early youth.

He had abundantly proved himself, in the Spanish campaign, a gallant soldier at the side of his brother James, and if there were already signs manifested that he was not altogether untouched by some of the failings of his race, that question must be suffered to sleep with him. In 1659, when he had been created by letters patent Duke of Gloucester and Earl of Cambridge, he had also been invested with the Garter at The Hague by Sir Edward Walker, Garter King-at-Arms, but he was never installed.[122]

122.  Sandford’s “Genealogical History.”

In the anger and excitement consequent on the discovery of the Duke of York’s stolen marriage, the younger brother must needs put in his word.

He did not like Mistress Anne. He vowed with boyish petulance that he hated “to be in the room with her, she smelt so strong of her father’s green bag.”[123] And perhaps, who knows? the impatient words may have rankled in the mind of the latter, though it mattered little after all.

123.  “Memoirs of the Court of England under the Reign of the Stuarts.” John Heneage Jesse.

All too soon, alas! the grave closed over the fair young head, and one forgets all that is best forgotten. We only think tenderly of Henry Stuart, as the loving child who sat on his doomed father’s knee at that last piteous interview in St James’s Palace, the day before the fatal 30th January, and promised fealty to the brother who was next to claim it, with the unquestioning obedience of childhood.

HENRY, DUKE OF GLOUCESTER

Charles II., callous as he was steadily becoming to his better feelings, grieved bitterly at the loss of his young brother,[124] and this unexpected sorrow probably helped to soften him with regard to events which were soon to follow. Over in France, too, the little sister Henrietta, whose short intercourse with her brother had been marked by their mother’s unjust persecution of him, wept passionately for him, as she had been eagerly looking forward to seeing him again during the visit she and her mother were on the point of paying to England. At the boy’s funeral in Westminster Abbey his brother James was chief mourner.[125]

124.  Sandford’s “Genealogical History.”

125.  “Royalty Restored.” J. F. Molloy.

Meanwhile, immediately following the arrival of the Princess of Orange, a mysterious silence fell on everything concerned with the marriage of the Duke of York. To Anne, waiting in her seclusion at Worcester House for both the return of her husband and for the birth of their child, now near at hand, the suspense must have been little short of maddening. As we have seen, the queen-mother’s bitter letter to her son on the score of the marriage which she believed to be not yet accomplished, had been shown to his wife. The anger of the Princess Mary, too, deep as it was, could not account for the Duke’s non-appearance. Had he not made assurance doubly sure by the second ceremony? What then was brewing?

The clue to the mystery lay in the infamous conspiracy now to be related.

Sir Charles Berkeley, belonging at this time to the Duke of York’s household, and certain others, were destined to prove themselves with a vengeance, the “naughty people” whom Charles II. trenchantly denounced as having too much weight with his brother.

There is no evidence that the queen-mother had any knowledge whatever of the matter. Passionate, prejudiced, and headstrong as Henrietta Maria had often shown herself, it is impossible to attach to her any of the guilt of this abominable plot, although it is true that it played into her hands; but she was far too outspoken and impetuous to be concerned in it, or to be taken into the confidence of the conspirators.

The Berkeley above mentioned, who was nephew to John, Lord Berkeley of Stratton, James’ former tutor and bad adviser, had, it appears, himself fallen in love with Mistress Hyde, and his suit being rejected, made up his mind to gain her on any terms. It is to be supposed that he was ignorant of the Worcester House re-marriage, but at this moment he came forward and with devilish effrontery declared that the unhappy girl had been his mistress, succeeding, moreover, in convincing Jermyn, Arran, and Talbot of the truth of this assertion.[126]

126.  “Memoirs of the Court of Charles II.” Count Grammont, edit. Sir W. Scott, revised ed. 1846.

Besides his own ulterior views, Berkeley was influenced by an inveterate spite against the Chancellor, and being entirely unscrupulous he took this dastardly means of gratifying his enmity.

The curious point about this transaction is the ease with which the Duke of York fell into the trap; but we are here confronted with the most salient point of his character, which has been noticed previously. He possessed what might be called an obstinate fidelity to his friends, or those whom he chose to consider as such, and a singular obtuseness as to the nature of their motives. Long before, as we have seen, he had quarrelled with his elder brother because Charles had discovered the treason of the elder Berkeley in “trafficking” with Cromwell, and had refused to dismiss him from his service: now he clung stubbornly to the nephew, believing, in spite of his own deep anguish, the horrible slanders which the latter had coined with regard to his wife. It was just this trait in the character of James II. which was to prove his undoing at the close of his stormy reign. He trusted traitor after traitor, almost against the evidence of his senses, till the end came, and crown and kingdom had passed from him for ever.

On this occasion there is ample evidence of James’ misery and despair. He was, besides, in deep grief for the death of his brother the Duke of Gloucester, who had been so closely associated with him through the Spanish campaign, and whom he loved with a protecting and indulgent affection: and indeed at this time he had himself fallen ill, having refused food in his grief.

And now, just a month after Gloucester’s untimely death, in the midst of this web of deceit, of false witness, of distress and unbearable anxiety, an event occurred to which the persons most nearly concerned looked with mingled sentiments, but which was likely to prove of profound consequence to the kingdom. On 22nd October, Anne, Duchess of York, gave birth to her first-born son.

As matters then were, this child, it must be remembered, stood in the line of succession, the King not being yet married; and he, at any rate, fully recognised the importance of the occasion, for he despatched Lady Ormonde and Lady Sunderland (Waller’s “Sacharissa” of other days) to Worcester House to be present at the birth of the expected heir.[127] Dean Morley, Anne’s spiritual adviser since her childhood, was also summoned, and in view of the aspersions against her now current, the poor mother was solemnly exhorted in that extreme hour to make profession on oath of her innocence in respect of Berkeley’s hideous accusations, which she did with a vehement earnestness and passion in a degree which seems to have carried conviction to those present.

127.  “Life of Henrietta Maria.” J. A. Taylor.

It also appears that the King at this time laid the facts of the contract at Breda before “some Bishops and Judges,” and that they pronounced that “according to the doctrine of the Gospel and the law of England it was a good marriage.”[128] The second ceremony, that at Worcester House, which was thus rendered unnecessary, was kept for some time a secret, but John Evelyn was one of the first persons to have any accurate information on the subject. As early as the 7th October we find him entertaining at a farewell dinner a French count with Sir George Tuke, “being sent over by the Queen Mother to break the marriage of the Duke with the daughter of Chancellor Hyde. The Queen would fain have undone it, but it seems matters were reconciled on great offers of the Chancellor to befriend the Queen, who was much in debt, and was now to have the settlement of her affairs to go through his hands.”[129]

128.  Bishop Burnet’s “History of His Own Time.”

129.  “Diary of John Evelyn,” introduction by Austin Dobson.

Evelyn is too weighty and dispassionate as a chronicler for his evidence to be set aside, but this account reads a little strangely in the face of Hyde’s anger and dismay, which no one supposed other than sincere, when he was first made aware of the matter, even begging the King’s permission to give up office and go far from the Court. On this point Burnet further declares that all Clarendon’s enemies rejoiced at the marriage, “for they reckoned it would raise envy so high against him, and make the King jealous,” and so “end in his ruin.” One must arrive at the conclusion that finding how far things had gone, the Chancellor had for his own sake, his daughter’s, and indeed for that of the country, set himself to deprecate the wrath of Henrietta in the readiest manner possible to him. Most of her dower-lands had been parted among the regicides, and he was probably able to adjust some sort of restitution.

Pepys, inquisitive as he was, like all inveterate gossips, was entirely ignorant of the real facts of the case till much later. On 24th October he speaks of the Duke’s “amour,” though he knows of the birth of the child. Even as late as 16th December he writes: “To my Lady’s [Lady Sandwich] and staid with her an hour or two, talking of the Duke of York and his lady, the Chancellor’s daughter, between whom, she tells me, all is agreed, and he will marry her.” This, it must be remembered, is more than three months after the Worcester House ceremony.

But before this the principal enemy to the marriage had arrived in England.

On 2nd November King Charles came up by water from Gravesend,[130] escorting, with all due respect, “Mary the Queen Mother.” Henrietta, it must be remembered, was always known in England in her own time as Queen Mary.

130.  “Side-lights on the Stuarts.” Inderwick.

HENRIETTA MARIA, “MOTHER QUEEN”

In the grey November weather the banks of the Thames were not at their best, neither were the feelings of the exiled Queen, who was coming home at last. She too was changed. The short-lived beauty of expression and grace and vivacity had long fled, and it was a “little plain old woman” who sat on the deck of the royal barge, and gazed at scenes once familiar through a mist of tears. So she came back, an honoured guest indeed, but with all the wine of life drained to the lees, to a country which had dealt her the heaviest blows a woman could endure, in the past. She was coming, too, with a heart full of bitter wrath against the upstart who had forced herself, so she considered, into the circle of royalty. The Queen’s extreme anger, it may be noted, was, in her case, in some degree inconsistent, seeing that at one time she had contemplated a match between her elder son, the King of England (at that time if not de facto at least de jure), and one of Mazarin’s nieces, that bevy of lovely Mancini sisters, whose beauty was so famous in their day, for they, we are told, “sprang from the dregs of the people.”[131] Otherwise no one can wonder at the indignation of the haughty Bourbon princess, the daughter, on one side at any rate, of a line of kings (and even of the proud Hapsburg blood, through the once despised Medici ancestry); and she came now, as she said, “to prevent with her authority so great a stain and dishonour to the Crown,” by hindering her son James at all costs from publicly recognising his marriage.[132] Indeed her anger knew no bounds, and all her old prejudices against Anne’s father had awakened once more, adding fuel to the fire. At the moment, too, the Duke of York played into his mother’s hands, for he was then, as it were, reeling from the frightful blow of Berkeley’s base accusations, and only ready in his despair to repudiate alike his wife and child.

131.  “Lives of the Queens of England.” Agnes Strickland.

132.  “Life of Henrietta Maria,” J. A. Taylor; “Princesses and Court Ladies,” Arvède Barine.

There was also, it appears, a general opinion that the whole business spelt disaster to the Chancellor.

On 6th November, just after the Queen’s arrival therefore, Pepys notes that “Mr Chetwind told me that he did fear that the late business of the Duke of York’s would prove fatal to my Lord Chancellor,”[133] and the latter in his own History avers that he “looked upon himself as a ruined person,” and says bitterly that previous to this the Duke’s manner to him “had never anything of grace in it.”[134] Meanwhile Mary, Princess of Orange, had also come to England, and was adding her voice to the chorus of indignant reprobation. She could not for a moment think, so she said, “of yielding precedence to one whom she had honoured over much by admitting her into her service as maid of honour.”

133.  “Diary.” 6th Nov. 1660.

134.  “Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon: Continuation,” by himself. “Said to be helped on by enemies of Hyde, to bring disgrace upon him.”

So matters stood when suddenly a complete reversal, in one direction, occurred.

Whether Berkeley was touched by his master’s misery, which to say the least of it seems unlikely, or, which is more probable, he foresaw that his own ends were unlikely to be served as he expected by the slander he had coined, he made at this time a full confession, and a powerful auxiliary also came forward in the person of the King, always henceforth a kind and steady friend to his sister-in-law.

On escaping from the sea of intrigue which had almost fatally engulfed her, Anne did at least display great generosity and a lofty capacity for forgiving injuries, for she pardoned Berkeley the vile slanders with which he had loaded her name, and even suffered him to kiss her hand in token of amnesty, when with brazen effrontery he presented himself before her. Perhaps the revulsion was too great at the time to admit of anything but relief; perhaps she thought she could afford to be magnanimous, seeing that her enemy had found himself unable to drag her from her pride of place.

James, on his part, at once and joyfully acknowledged the marriage in defiance of his family, and sent an affectionate message to his wife, “bidding her to keep up her spirits for Providence had cleared her aspersed fame, and above all to have a care of his boy and that he should come and see them both very shortly.” It is evident that he had only been waiting for the chance, for Lady Ormonde, who with her husband was always a stanch friend to the Hydes, and had been steadily convinced of Anne’s innocence, said of the Duke that she “perceived in him a kind of tenderness that persuaded her he did not believe anything amiss.”

He had now to withstand anew his mother’s resentment, for when they first met, after his reconciliation with Anne, the Queen refused to speak to her son. She, however, adroitly turned the circumstances of the King’s acknowledgment of the match into a means of gaining his consent to his younger sister’s marriage, for she represented to him that he must consent to the Princess Henrietta becoming Duchess of Orleans, for “she could not suffer her to live at his Court to be insulted by Hyde’s daughter.” The fact of the case was that in England the Duchess of York would take precedence of the Princess. Whether this consideration weighed with Charles or not, he made then no opposition to the marriage of his favourite and “dearest sister” with the cousin for whom he entertained, with good reason, the strongest dislike and contempt.

On 26th November Lord Craven was writing to the Queen of Bohemia of Anne: “She is owned in her family to be Duchess of York, but not at Whitehall as yet, but it is very sure that the Duke has made her his wife. Your Majesty knows it is what I have feared long although you were not of that opinion. The Princess [Mary] is much discontented at it, as she has reason.”

He wrote again on the 28th: “I cannot tell what will become of your godson’s business: the child is not yet christened, but it is confidently reported that it shall be within a few days, and owned. The Princess is very much troubled about it; the queen is politic and says little of it. There is no question to be made but that they are married. They say my lord Chancellor shall be made a duke.”[135]

135.  “James II. and his Wives,” Allan Fea; “Life of Henrietta Maria,” J. A. Taylor.

The Duke of York was godson of his aunt Elizabeth, it must be noted here.

So things were, but before the year had ended death was to lay once more effacing fingers on discord and bitterness.

The Princess Royal, who had come, as we have seen, to rejoice with one brother on his long delayed Restoration, to resent hotly the other’s unwelcome marriage, was seized like Henry of Gloucester with smallpox on the 18th December.

It has been hinted that she was a party to Berkeley’s plot, though, in view of her character, this is very unlikely; and it is also said that on her uneasy deathbed in the grip of that ghastly and relentless pestilence, she declared herself repentant of the part she had taken against her brother’s wife and her own quondam maid of honour.[136]

136.  “Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia.” M. A. Green, revised by S. C. Lomas.

Be that as it may, Mary Stuart passed away at Somerset House on Christmas Eve 1660, just three months after her youngest brother.[137]

137.  Madame—Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady).

On the 29th December her body was brought by torchlight to Westminster Abbey, and laid in the Stuart vault by that of Gloucester, her brother James again officiating as chief mourner. On this occasion one can only contemplate with amazement what appears the entire callousness of the queen-mother. Whether her anger at the marriage of the Duke of York occupied her mind to the exclusion of all natural affection, it is hard to say, but there is no record of any great grief on her part for poor young Gloucester’s untimely end, and she certainly showed extraordinary indifference with regard to her elder daughter, according to most chroniclers; though one account certainly does credit her with the wish to remain with her till forbidden by the doctors. In terror for her youngest, the mother fled from Somerset House when the sickness declared itself, and betook herself with the Princess Henrietta to St James’s, leaving Mary to her fate. But it is to be remarked, that from the time her youngest child was restored to her by Lady Dalkeith after their escape, the Queen concentrated all the force of her affection on her. Possibly the fact of her being allowed to bring her up in her own religion undisturbed may have had something to do with it, but the fact remains that for the last few years of her life she showed comparatively little affection for her other children.

One of Mary’s oldest attendants was destined to make her home in England. The minister Van der Kirckhove Heenvliet died in March of this year, and his widow, Lady Stanhope, to whom Charles II. allowed the title of Lady Chesterfield, to which her first husband would have succeeded, married as her third husband the adventurous Daniel O’Neill of whom mention has already been made.[138]

138.  Lady Chesterfield was with the Princess at her death. (“Lives of the Princesses of England,” M. A. Everett-Green.)

“The Tower of London,” Richard Davey. Daniel O’Neill had been imprisoned in the Tower in 1643, but escaped and reached Holland in safety.

Immediately on the death of the Princess Royal, the queen-mother suddenly announced to her son James that she withdrew her opposition to his marriage. It is just possible that the loss of her daughter may have exercised a softening influence, but it is more probable that this change of front was owing to a warning from Mazarin, who sent her a peremptory message to keep on good terms alike with her sons and the English Ministers of State, and the impoverished Queen could not afford to disregard the powerful adviser of Anne of Austria.[139] Whatever the motive, the result was plain. Three days after the funeral of Mary, her mother so far did violence to her own strong and bitter prejudice as to consent to receive not only her son, but the hated daughter-in-law. On 1st January Pepys records the fact: “Mr Moore and I went to Mr Pierce’s, in our way seeing the Duke of York bring his lady to wait upon the Queen, the first time that ever she did since that business, and the Queen is said to receive her with much respect and love.”

139.  “Life of Henrietta Maria.” J. A. Taylor.

Hyde was informed of this communication by that industrious go-between Walter Montague, who was in England at this time.

This latter statement may be taken with a grain of salt, but Henrietta did control her feelings sufficiently to behave with dignity and self-restraint. As she passed to dinner, her ladies following her, through the corridor of St James’s Palace, Anne was waiting, white and trembling, with a thickly beating heart, and she fell on her knees as “Mary the Queen Mother” swept by in her mourning robes. With the stately gesture the latter could assume at will, she turned, and raising the girl, she kissed her, and leading her to the table placed her at her side.[140]

140.  “Calendar of Domestic State Papers.” 3rd January 1661.—Secretary Nicholas to Bennet: “The Duke and Duchess then came to Court. The Queen received them very affectionately.”

On the same day, the Queen made a still further concession. She consented to see Hyde himself, receiving him graciously and speaking at length of the matter in hand. “He could not,” she said, “wonder, much less take it ill, that she had been offended with the Duke, and had no inclination to give her consent to his marriage, and if she had in the Passion that could not be condemned in her, spoke anything of him that he had taken ill, he ought to impute it to the Provocation she had received though not from him. She was now informed by the King, and well-assured that he had no hand in contriving that Friendship, but was offended with that Passion that really was worthy of him. That she could not but confess that his Fidelity to the King her husband was very eminent and that he had served the King her son with equal fidelity and extraordinary success. And therefore she had received his daughter as her Daughter and heartily forgave the Duke and her and was resolved ever after to live with all the affection of a Mother towards them. So she resolved to make a Friendship with him, and hereafter to expect all the offices from him which her kindness should deserve.”[141]

141.  “Continuation of the Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon,” by himself.

Hyde, as might be expected, showed himself equal to the occasion, though he must have felt that the Queen did him no more than justice when she thus acknowledged his services to her husband and son.

“She could not,” answered the courtier, “show too much anger and aversion, and had too much forgotten her own honour and dignity if she had been less offended.”

But nevertheless the wounds which Henrietta’s unbridled tongue had inflicted in time past were not so easily healed. Clarendon himself remarks bitterly: “From that time there did never appear any want of kindness in the Queen towards him, whilst he stood in no need of it, nor until it might have done him some good.”[142]

142.  “Life of Henrietta Maria.” J. A. Taylor.

Yet a truce was signed as it were, and peace was in a fair way to be established. But still the Chancellor was never entirely reconciled to his daughter’s lofty alliance, on which he looked with doubt and misgiving to the end.

Some ten days before this momentous interview Evelyn speaks of the marriage as fully acknowledged. Under the date of 22nd December he writes:

“The marriage of the Chancellor’s daughter being now newly owned, I went to see her, she being Sir Richard Browne’s intimate acquaintance, when she waited on the Princess of Orange. She was now at her father’s at Worcester House in the Strand. We all kissed her hand as did also my Lord Chamberlain Manchester, and the Countess of Northumberland. This was a strange change. Can it succeed well?”[143]

143.  “Diary of John Evelyn,” ed. Edw. Bray, 1850.

Strange indeed, and no one can wonder that a mind so thoughtful, uplifted, and restrained as that of John Evelyn, who had known the father through good and evil days, who remembered from her childhood the girl, now a princess of England, should doubt the final issue of such a turn of fortune.

Two days after Anne’s reception at Court her child was baptized at Worcester House by the name of Charles, the King and Monk, now Duke of Albemarle, being godfathers, while the queen-mother sealed her reconciliation by undertaking the office of godmother, the other being Lady Ormonde, and the boy was created Duke of Cambridge.

During this same month of January, Henrietta closed her first visit to England after the Restoration. It had not been a happy one. It had been clouded with heavy grief and bereavement, besides reviving poignant recollections, and she had moreover sustained the vexation and disappointment which her second son’s marriage had inflicted on her, from which she had by no means recovered, in spite of her altered attitude towards the offenders.

JOHN EVELYN

She was impatient to escape, and eager besides for the marriage of her sole remaining daughter, the disastrous results of which it was impossible for her to foresee. She was also anxious, on account of her health, to visit the baths of Bourbon which then enjoyed a great reputation.

The King accompanied his mother and sister to Portsmouth, where they embarked, but the Duke of York remained in London. He was still ill and depressed. He had passed through a period of acute pain and anxiety; he had really felt deeply the death of the sister who had always been to him, at least, staunchly affectionate, at a time when he needed affection, and now he “being indisposed was at Whitehall with the Dutchess.”

At the time of the Restoration Hyde had refused a peerage, but now, for obvious reasons, he signified his acceptance of one, and on the 6th November he had taken his seat as Baron Hyde of Hindon in Wilts (near Hatch, where Laurence Hyde, his ancestor, had lived). Moreover the King made him a grant of twenty thousand pounds out of the amount (fifty thousand pounds) which Parliament had sent the latter at The Hague, at which time the Duke of York, by the way, had received ten thousand pounds and Gloucester five thousand pounds. Later, that is in April 1661, Hyde received his final honours, being created Earl of Clarendon and Viscount Cornbury.

A closing epilogue to the drama of the marriage comes from the pen of Lord Craven. Writing to the Queen of Bohemia on 11th January 1661 he says: “I have this morning been to wait upon the duchess; she lies here and the King very kind to her: she takes upon her as if she been duchess this seven years. She is very civil to me.”[144] And on 23rd February: “The greatest news we have here is that upon Monday last, the duke and duchess were called before the Council and were to declare when and where they were married and their answer was that they were married the 3rd of September last, in a chamber at Worcester House, Mr Crowther married them; nobody but my Lord of Ossory and her maid Nell by; but that they had been contracted long. That is all that I can hear of the business.”[145]

144.  “Lives of Princesses of England.” M. A. Everett-Green.

145.  “Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia.” M. A. Green, revised by S. C. Lomas.

CHAPTER V

THE DUCHESS

It is hard to survey quite dispassionately, or even thoroughly to understand, the attitude of Anne Hyde on safely attaining her new dignity, the dizzy height to which she had climbed by such a thorny path. She seems, unhappily, to have had enemies from the first, but whether they were due to her father’s steadily increasing unpopularity, to her own behaviour, or to envy of her success, easily comprehensible, it is difficult to determine. Probably each of these conditions had something to do with it.

As regards her conduct, James himself says of her: “Her want of birth was made up by endowments, and her carriage afterwards became her acquired dignity.”[146] Pepys, who, as has been already remarked, never lost an opportunity of a fleer at her, says, as early as 13th April 1661, of “Edward Pickering his discourse most about the pride of the Duchess of York.” This may or may not be true, for Pepys was nothing if not prejudiced, and the man who could, with his eyes open, write with foolish admiration of “my dear Lady Castlemaine,” cannot be considered an authority to be altogether respected. It is however certain, from other sources, that from the first, Duchess Anne was known unfavourably for her arrogance. Even Lord Craven, as we have seen, had noticed it, and he had no reason to be specially biassed. On this point also the French ambassador, the Comte de Cominges, remarks with some covert amusement: “She upholds with as much courage, cleverness and energy the dignity to which she has been called, as if she were of the blood of the kings or of Gusman at the least, or Mendoza.”[147]

146.  Macpherson’s “Original Papers.”

147.  “A French Ambassador at the Court of Charles II. (Comte de Cominges).” Jusserand.

Bishop Burnet, who evidently held her in great respect, and usually extols her, says: “She soon understood what belonged to a Princess, and took state upon her rather too much.”[148]

148.  Burnet’s “History of My Own Time.”

We have to piece together these stray scraps of evidence in the best manner possible, and in so doing come to the conclusion that Anne, on finding herself publicly acknowledged Duchess of York, and wife of the heir presumptive to the Crown, also found that she had set her foot on the first steps of a difficult and stony road, and that possibly she conceived her only chance in such a position was to assume and maintain a defensive attitude. A perpetual uneasy consciousness of her hardly acquired rank made her afraid of stepping for one moment off the pedestal to which she had been raised, and this of itself would serve to make her unpopular. It must be remembered also that the society which surrounded her, reckless, wild, unscrupulous as it was, was yet one which guarded jealously the traditions of high rank and lofty descent, and in the fervour of the Restoration was inclined to resent hotly the intrusion of a parvenue into the narrow circle of the blood royal of England and was only too ready to find fault whenever a loophole could be given. Poor Anne, it is to be feared, afforded many such.

Perhaps it may be as well to discuss in this place the vexed question of her personal appearance. On 20th April of this year 1661, Pepys writes acidly: “Saw the King and Duke of York and his Duchess, which is a plain woman, and like her mother my Lady Chancellor.”

In fact, if nearly all the pictures of her which exist may be trusted, they certainly dispose of Anne’s pretensions to beauty. They represent for the most part a large, heavy looking woman, with an abnormally wide mouth; and we know from contemporary evidence that she became very fat early in life.

It is true that Sir John Reresby, who is never ill natured, generously calls her “a very handsome woman,”[149] but only one other chronicler, Granger, in his Biographical History, ventures on such an opinion. Bronconi, in his Journal, declares without circumlocution: “La Duchesse de York est fort laide, la bouche extraordinairement fendue, et les yeux fort craillez, mais très courtoise.” The famous Grammont, a professed critic of beauty, alluding to the marriage, says: “The bride was no perfect beauty,” and elsewhere sums up the case judicially:

149.  “Memoirs of Sir John Reresby,” 1764.

“She had a majestic mien, a pretty good shape, not much beauty, a great deal of wit [this Reresby and others endorse] and so just a discernment of merit that whoever of either sex were possessed of it were sure to be distinguished by her, an air of grandeur in all her actions made her to be considered as if born to support the rank which placed her so near the throne.”[150]

150.  “Memoirs of the Court of Charles II.,” by Count Grammont, ed. by Sir Walter Scott, revised ed. 1846.

Considering the passion which Anne had certainly inspired in several men, and which in the Duke of York had now raised her to her lofty position, one is forced to the conclusion that, in spite of her lack of physical beauty, she must have been possessed of some conquering charm of manner which, joined to undoubted wit and certain brilliant endowments of mind, made up for the want of personal attractions in an age which, perhaps of all others, most prized such an attribute.

This too would partly account for the steady friendship which her brother-in-law the King always testified for her. He was, it is true, a connoisseur of beauty of all types, but he also greatly valued wit, and keenly appreciated any one who could and would amuse him. He had the strong sense of humour which is often allied to a saturnine disposition, and which we know never failed him to the end. His own wife, with all her good qualities, which were quite definite, with her adoring and pathetic devotion to himself, was nevertheless, we fear, not amusing, and he probably found in his plebeian sister-in-law a quickness of apprehension which appealed to his strain of cynicism and impatience of dullness; and which was not always allied to the radiant and undoubted beauty which he admired in other women.[151]

151.  In the year 1661 we find evidence of the King’s kind feeling towards his sister-in-law in a present made to her. The letter is to Sir Stephen Fox:

“Charles R.

“Our will and pleasure is yt you forthwith pay to Sir John Shaw ye sum of one thousand pounds in ys of a necklace of Pearls given by us to ye Dutchesse of Yorke and for yr soe doing this shal be yor warrt. Given at or Court at Whitehall this 19th of July 1661” (Egerton MS.).

Duchess Anne had for her part “wit and agreeable manners, but without personal charm,” and Jesse rather ponderously asserts: “In the character of Anne Hyde there seems to have been more to admire than to love. She was possessed rather of dignity than grace, rather of masculine sense than feminine gentleness.”[152] And Burnet further testifies that she was “a woman of great spirit,” “a very extraordinary woman,” who “had great knowledge and a lively sense of things.”

152.  “Memoirs of the Court of England during the Reign of the Stuarts.” John Heneage Jesse.

Thus equipped by nature, by education, by experience, Nan Hyde, the maid of honour in past years of the Mary who now slept hard by among her kindred in the Abbey, began her career as a princess, fully aware, there can be no doubt, of the many pitfalls which menaced her.

The arena into which she stepped was a brilliant one. The Court of England, after the long stormy interval during which such a thing did not exist, became “very magnificent,” and the fact is readily comprehensible.

Charles II. had so long lived an out-at-elbows life, from hand to mouth, as it were, that the inheritance to which he had at last succeeded and the fifty thousand “gold pieces” voted by Parliament must have seemed for the time being inexhaustible, and a character like his would set no bounds to his careless extravagance.[153] His ideas were naturally lavish and picturesque, and there were always plenty of people about him quite willing—and more than willing—to minister to these; many hands in his pockets, moreover, as well as his own.

153.  “Royalty Restored.” J. F. Molloy.

This state of things was, too, for a time at any rate, not unacceptable to the people at large. Through the grim years of the Civil War, and during the severe rule of the Commonwealth, they had been condemned to a lack of beauty in life, to sad-coloured raiment, to stern repression, to an absence of all the amusement and colour which had pervaded England in the joyous, if strenuous, Elizabethan age and the first years of the succeeding century.

It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that the commonalty, wearied and fretted by their Puritan taskmasters, should be dazzled by the vision of a gracious young king, easy of access, genial of speech, surrounded moreover by splendour, beauty and gaiety.

We know now what underlay the vision. We know what was destined to become a headlong race of folly—and worse, but it was all at first, at least, very seductive.

And in the midst of it all now moved the new Duchess of York, for a few months, at least, the first lady in the kingdom, until the King should find himself a bride.

We have seen that Anne’s father participated in some of the state which surrounded her; the dignities conferred on him, fully as his long-tried service had merited them, being as much for his daughter’s honour as for his own.

Pepys gives us a glimpse, now and then, of the doings at Court during the spring of 1661. Early in April he is in St James’s Park to watch the Duke of York play at “Pele-mele, the first time that ever I saw the sport.”[154] James, like all his family, was very active in body, loving sport and games of every kind. He was passionately devoted to hunting, and this continued to the end. Long afterwards, along the grassy rides of the forests of Saint Germain or Marly, the banished King of England would sweep down with his train, forgetting for a few exhilarating moments the pain of loss and exile and the green glades of Windsor which he would never see again. It may be remembered, moreover, that when Prince George of Denmark testified some alarm at his own tendency to fat, Charles II. gave him promptly the advice: “Walk with me, and hunt with my brother.”

154.  “Diary.” 1st April 1661.

The Duke was also very fond of tennis, but here he was excelled by his cousin Prince Rupert, the best player in England. The Prince Palatine had not accompanied the King at the time of the Restoration, but had arrived in England in September of the same year, after the death of the Duke of Gloucester, when he came armed with a commission to ask for the hand of the Princess Henrietta on behalf of the Emperor Leopold. We have seen that this overture was useless, the queen-mother being unwilling to consider anything which could clash with the claims of her nephew the Duke of Orleans.[155]

155.  “A Royal Cavalier: The Romance of Rupert, Prince Palatine.” Mrs Steuart Erskine.

The coronation of Charles II. took place on St George’s Day, 23rd April, the culmination of the Restoration rejoicings, but the month of May was to see the withering of the first flower of the royal stem.

PRINCE RUPERT

The little Duke of Cambridge, round whose cradle such a storm of passion had raged, died on the 5th. Pepys spitefully volunteers the opinion that the poor baby’s death, he believes, “will please everybody, and I hear that the Duke and his lady themselves are not much troubled at it”[156]; a conclusion which seems, on every ground, very unlikely. James was to prove himself a deeply affectionate father, and Anne’s strength and tenacity of feeling were not likely to fail in this direction, though it is quite possible that she made little demonstration outwardly of grief.

156.  “Diary of Samuel Pepys,” notes by Lord Braybrooke, 1906.

Worthington’s “Diary and Correspondence.” 14th May 1661.—S. Hartlieb to Dr Worthington: “I know not whether I told you before that the Duke of York’s only child is dead and buried.”

During this year the King’s aunt Elizabeth, the “Winter Queen,” was at last suffered to revisit her native country after so many stormy years. She had been passionately desirous to do so, though England could have been little more than a memory. But at one time she had been enshrined in the hearts and imaginations of the English, some of whom would have willingly set aside her brother’s children and accepted her son, Charles Louis, as king. No doubt the knowledge of this lingered in the Queen’s mind when she set sail once more for her early home, but as happens to many in like circumstances, it meant disillusion. The radiant Queen of Hearts, whom Christian of Anhalt and many another chivalrous warrior had adored, was no more the same, and she came back, we fear, to find herself forgotten.[157] Only Craven was left, to whom she had been the one and only star, a few—very few—faithful friends, and her gallant son Rupert. At first she stayed at Drury House, the guest of Lord Craven, but later she removed to a house of her own in Leicester Field. Here, only a few months after, she died, in February 1662.[158]

157.  Sir Henry Wotton’s famous lyric, “Ye Meaner Beauties of the Night,” was addressed to Elizabeth.

158.  “A Royal Cavalier: The Romance of Rupert, Prince Palatine.” Mrs Steuart Erskine.

In the old days at The Hague and Breda, as we have seen, Elizabeth had been good to Chancellor Hyde’s young daughter, and had strenuously backed the Princess Mary’s choice of the girl as maid of honour, little dreaming how nearly they were destined to be related.

Did the Duchess of York remember the many kindnesses shown to Nan Hyde, now when it had become possible to repay them? One must hope so, for there is no record to tell us.

The day of the Queen of Bohemia’s funeral, on 20th February, there was a terrible storm, a type indeed of the unquiet life now closed.[159]

159.  “Merry Monarch: England under Charles II.” Davenport Adams.

That spring of 1662 saw the expected change in the position and prospects of the Duchess of York, for the negotiations for the King’s marriage were now completed. One of the basest of the many slanders current against Clarendon was that he pushed on the match with Catherine of Bragança by every means in his power, knowing that she would never bear children, in order to ensure the succession to the Crown to his daughter’s offspring.

As a matter of fact, though the Queen was destined never to become the mother of a living child, it is yet certain that more than once she had the hope of maternity.

However, scandal of every sort and kind was never more rife than in the reckless, pleasure-loving, unscrupulous Court of Charles II. Every one seems to have said whatever he or she chose, without the slightest reference to truth, if that was likely to spoil a piquant story, and no one was more victimised in this respect than the Lord Chancellor, who thus paid the penalty of success. His friend Evelyn was among the few who never wavered in their loyal attachment, and who never said a bitter or ill-natured thing. This friendship, by the way, brought the diarist into closer relation with the Duke of York, for in January we find the latter announcing that he intended to visit the garden at Sayes Court, already famous for its rare and lovely plants, the care bestowed on it, and the culture of its gifted owner.[160] The next month, too, Evelyn records that he is present at a comedy acted before the Duchess at the Cockpit.

160.  Evelyn’s “Diary.” Wm. Bray. 1850. “1662, 16th January.—Having heard of the Duke of York’s intention to visit my poor habitation and garden this day I returned.”

But the new queen was soon to be expected. On the 23rd April, the anniversary of the coronation, she set sail for England, arriving at Portsmouth on 14th May.

The Duke of York, in virtue of his office of Lord High Admiral, was despatched to receive her as his brother’s representative, and she welcomed him in her cabin, sitting under a canopy on a chair of state, but displaying frank, if shy cordiality.[161] Charles himself was in no violent hurry to see his richly-dowered bride, for he did not leave London till the 19th, travelling in Lord Northumberland’s coach. However, when he did arrive, no further time was lost, for the pair were married by Sheldon on the 22nd, in the great hall or presence-chamber in the governor’s lodging (now swept away) at Portsmouth. The register is in the Parish Church of St Thomas. They finally reached Hampton Court, where the honeymoon was to be spent, on the 29th, the King professing himself perfectly satisfied with his new wife.

161.  “Royalty Restored.” J. F. Molloy.

On the same evening the Duchess of York arrived to pay her duty to the Queen. It must have cost her an effort, for her second child, Mary, destined in after days to be queen, had been born barely a month previously, on the 30th of April—Prince Rupert, by the way, being her godfather. The Duchess came by water, in her own beautiful barge, and as she landed at the steps the King was waiting at the garden gate near by, and taking her by the hand, he led her along the straight, smooth alleys into the ancient palace, and so into the new Queen’s bedroom. Anne would have knelt to kiss her hand, but Catherine prevented the act of homage, and raising her, kissed her affectionately.[162]

162.  “Life of Catherine of Bragança.” L. C. Davidson.

The poor little lonely bride, fresh from her convent and narrow upbringing, much younger than her actual years, bewildered by the racket in which she found herself, was perhaps already hungering for some one of her own sex to whom she could venture to unbend, and saw an augury for future friendship and confidence in the assured carriage, the fresh face, the steady, resolute eyes of English Nan. If so, she was not likely under present circumstances to be disappointed; even the King was perfectly willing to sanction such advances.

On the 15th August Evelyn mentions a visit paid to him by the Lord Chancellor. Hyde, as we know, had a year before received the earldom of Clarendon,[163] and though this occasion seemed to have been simply a friendly one, yet his purse and mace were borne before him when he came to Sayes Court. The diarist further notes: “They were likewise collationed with us, and were very merry. They had all been our old acquaintances in exile.”[164]

163.  He was created Lord Hindon in November 1660, and Viscount Cornbury and Earl of Clarendon in April 1661. (Kennet’s “Chronicle.”)

164.  Evelyn’s “Diary.” Wm. Bray. 1850.

Before the year was out the queen-mother came to pay her second visit, after the Restoration, to England. This time it was to welcome the new daughter-in-law who, besides her royal blood and rank, had brought such a splendid dower to the needy crown of England. The first meeting took place at the ancient palace of Greenwich, which had been little used for many years, its day having almost passed. Here Henrietta made the gentle Portuguese bride sit on one arm-chair on her right hand, while she herself occupied another. The King, waiving his precedence, of which, indeed, he was never very tenacious in such matters, took a stool, while the Duchess of York sat on one also, and the Duke stood by them.[165] It sounds very much as if they grouped themselves with an eye to portraiture, but it was really a matter of some importance, and thus Anne was, we see, accorded what in France was called the right of the “tabouret” by the dreaded queen, who less than two years back had declared that if the hated interloper were to enter the room by one door, she herself would leave by another. But time has its revenges, and on the return visit, which was paid at Hampton Court, which to the queen-mother must indeed have been full of bitter-sweet memories, when she, naturally, was placed on Catherine’s right hand, the Duchess of York was even provided with a chair a little to the left.[166]

165.  “Life of Catherine of Bragança.” L. C. Davidson.

166.  Ibid.

As far as the young Queen was concerned, the auspicious beginning with regard to Anne was justified. She always remained on friendly terms with her sister-in-law. Her yielding, placable nature deferred readily to one whose qualities provided the complement of her own, and later events knitted a closer bond of union between them.

Meanwhile the Duke and Duchess of York took up their quarters in St James’s Palace, the traditional residence of the heir presumptive—the ancient manor of Henry VIII.—of whose building little remains now but the brick gate-way.[167] It seems to have been furnished with great splendour, and under Anne’s resolute sway her Court was more stately and ceremonious than that at Whitehall, where the motto might have been that of Medmenham in later days: “Fais ce que voudras.” In an idle age, moreover, the Duchess was not idle. “She writ well,” says Burnet, “and had begun the Duke’s life, of which she showed me a volume. It was all drawn from his journal, and he intended to have employed me in carrying it on.”[168]

167.  “Old and New London.” Thornbury.

168.  Burnet’s “History of My Own Time,” ed. 1766. “She writ very correctly” (Appendix).

It was on account of this piece of literary work that Horace Walpole gave the writer a place in his catalogue of noble authors, although, it is true, he never saw the work in question. Anne also took a more or less intelligent interest in the art of her time and country, for it was she who projected the Series of Beauties to be painted by Lely, whose genius was employed for many years of this reign.[169] She could at least appreciate beauty in others, if she had but little herself, and for this scheme we certainly owe her a debt of gratitude.

169.  “Some Beauties of the Seventeenth Century.” Allan Fea.

The Christmas after the King’s marriage was marked by more than the usual festivities. Secretary Pepys, always on the watch to see and retail all that was to be seen, went eagerly to watch the royal party dancing at Whitehall. The Queen, it seems, did not dance, but the King, who “danced rarely,” took out the Duchess of York, and the Duke the Duchess of Buckingham, to dance the bransle, where hands were taken in turn. After this the King led a lady through a lively coranto, in which dance it appears he excelled; and another of the best performers was the little Duchess of Monmouth, Anne Scott, the greatest heiress of her day, who in her childhood had been given to the unlucky pretender who was to suffer so grim a fate in after days.

But happy and triumphant as one may picture her, the personal troubles of the Duchess had already begun. In the autumn just past there occurred the Duke’s ephemeral passion for Elizabeth Butler, Lady Chesterfield, the daughter of Ormonde, who on her part by no means reciprocated it, but to put an end to the situation, which she probably found embarrassing, promptly retired into the country from London.[170]

170.  “James II. and his Wives.” Allan Fea.

“January 19, 1663.—This day by Dr Clarke I was told the occasion of my Lord Chesterfield’s going and taking his lady (my Lord Ormond’s daughter) from Court. It seems he not only hath been long jealous of the Duke of York, but did find them two talking together, though there were others in the room, and the lady by all opinions a most good, virtuous woman. He the next day (of which the Duke was warned by somebody that saw the passion my Lord Chesterfield was in the night before) went and told the Duke how much he did apprehend himself wronged in his picking out his lady of the whole Court to be the subject of his dishonour, which the Duke did answer with great calmness not seeming to understand the reason of complaint; and that was all that passed, but my Lord did presently pack his lady into the country in Derbyshire near the Peake” (Samuel Pepys’ “Diary”).

ELIZABETH, COUNTESS OF CHESTERFIELD

Poor Duchess Anne, however, took it passionately to heart, and complained vehemently not only to the King, who was scarcely likely to give her much sympathy—though he did remove Lord Chesterfield from his office of Groom of the Stole to the Queen—but to Ormonde himself, who, it must be remembered, was her father’s old friend. It is also probable that she and Lady Chesterfield must have had some degree of intimacy.

Pepys, of all people, took it on himself to moralise on the subject. “At all which I am sorry,” he writes, “but it is the effect of idleness and having nothing else to employ their great spirits upon,” which seems an insufficient reason. Lady Chesterfield, who never returned to London, died two years later at Bretby, leaving a daughter who eventually married Lord Strathmore.[171]

171.  “Royalty Restored,” J. F. Molloy. Lord Chesterfield himself is said to have been in love with Lady Castlemaine, a fact which did not interfere with his jealousy of his wife.

By the month of January 1663 the Duke and Duchess appear to have made up their differences, for they appeared together at the Cockpit to see Claracilla done by the King’s players, and there scandalised the ubiquitous Secretary by “dalliance there before the whole world, such as kissing and leaning upon one another,” a very curious picture of the manners of the time.[172]

172.  “Diary.” 5th January 1662-1663.

In the autumn of the same year Charles II., wishing perhaps to familiarise the Queen with her new country, as well as to procure for himself the change and variety for which he was always restlessly seeking, set out on the first of his royal progresses, on which he was accompanied by his brother and the Duchess, with a brilliant train.[173] The party first visited Bath, which was recovering from the paralysing effect of the Civil War, and about to enter on the era of its fame, though its best period was not reached till the succeeding century; but its waters had been long known and valued, and had been sought by Queen Anne of Denmark fifty years earlier.

173.  “Calendar of Domestic State Papers.” News Letter, 21st September 1663: “The Duke and Duchess are leaving Portsmouth, and the Duke’s guards are to meet him on the way.” 17th September, Portsmouth.—Thomas Lancaster and Hugh Salisbury to the same (Navy Commissioners): “Arrived of the Foresight at Spithead, the Duke and Duchess of York being in Portsmouth on their way to Winchester, boats have been sent by Mr Coventry’s order to bring the Duke down to see the Dock,” etc.

On the 22nd September the King and his train left Bath and proceeded first to Badminton, where they dined, their host being Lord Herbert. They went thence to Cirencester, where they were received by Lord Newburgh, and remained for that night. The next day they went on to Oxford, and were met on the border of the county by Lord Cornbury (Duchess Anne’s elder brother) with the high sheriff and two troops of horse militia, besides volunteers. Further on they were met by Clarendon himself as Lord-Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, and he entertained them with great splendour and hospitality at his house of Cornbury. Then on the 28th the expedition passed on to Oxford itself, near to which they were received by the heads of houses, the vice-chancellor in a short speech giving the usual presents to the King and Queen.

Oxford, who had seen within her grey walls the dwindling Court of the martyred king, who had vindicated her loyalty so stoutly, who had suffered with such constancy, received now the recognition of her fealty. None could express gratitude with more consummate grace than Charles II., nor clothe appropriate sentiments with more fitting words, and if the hearers were forced to the conviction that they were words and nothing more, still they left their own impress behind them.

The King and Queen, the Duke and Duchess of York, and most of the train were on horseback, and the cavalcade as it swept up the High Street, past University, and Queen’s and St Mary’s Church made a very goodly show by means of colour and movement, waving plumes and fluttering ribbons, glitter of jewels and sheen of satin and velvet. Just so had the Cavaliers who had rallied to the royal standard twenty years back adorned the same streets with life and colour. For them, too, the bells had pealed out and the citizens stood to watch, and they were gone—and some of them forgotten.[174]

174.  News Letter, 28th September: “Entering the town, the Recorder made a speech, and the Mayor gave a present. The City militia guarded them to the North gate, the gownsmen to Christ Church, and the scholars of Christ Church made them a guard in the great quadrangle to their lodgings, where Dr Fell the Dean and the Canons received them with a short speech. On the 24th the University went in procession to Christ Church to know when they would visit the University, and the 28th was fixed upon. On the 25th the King and Duke went to Cornbury to see Woodstock Park and the places near, returning to Oxford to dinner. On the Sunday they all attended service at Christ Church, when Dean Fell preached a seasonable and excellent sermon” (“Calendar of Domestic State Papers”).

In 1665 there seems to have been another combined excursion westward.

The ambassador Van Gogh, writing to the States General from Chelsea, on 24th July records:

“The King and Duke of York go on Thursday from Hampton Court for three or four days and then to Salisbury, whither the Queen and Duchess are already gone.”[175]

175.  “Calendar of Domestic State Papers.”

Somewhere about this time an idea seems to have got about that the Duke of York was completely ruled by his wife, submissive to her will in all things.

An opinion to this effect was openly expressed by the King, whose tongue was never too scrupulous, and who nicknamed his brother “Tom Otter” after the henpecked husband in Ben Jonson’s “Epicene, or Silent Woman,” and elsewhere we are told that James “seemed in awe of his wife.”[176] If so, this state of things did not long continue, and in any case it is altogether foreign to the character of the Duke of York, as we know it. He was at no time a person to be easily overawed, whether by his wife or another. That she influenced him up to a certain point is very probable, but there were distinct limits to that. Even the amount of influence which Anne exercised in the early days of their marriage was destined to decrease before long, and that for a reason which must now be given. The grounds for this reason cannot be satisfactorily examined nor the evidence sifted, for that is no longer possible. There are, as almost always occurs, conflicting and contrary accounts; that is in the nature of things.

176.  “Charles II. and his Court,” A. G. A. Brett; “History of My Own Time,” Burnet, ed. 1766.

It is no happy nor welcome task to trace the progress of disillusionment, estrangement, coldness, following the ill-assorted union of the King’s brother and the Chancellor’s daughter. One can so easily picture the eager bystanders murmuring with unctuous satisfaction the time-honoured conclusion: “I told you so!” And yet—“The pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!” One would gladly omit from the record of that marriage the chapter which must now perforce be set down, if only for the sake of all that went before, of all that was to follow.

In the year 1640, when the Earl of Leicester—who was afterwards to be half guardian, half jailer, of Princess Elizabeth and her youngest brother at Penshurst—was ambassador at Paris, the youngest of his famous sons, Henry, was born there. When he was eighteen his mother, whose favourite he is said to have been, died, and in 1665 he was attached to the household of the Duke of York as Groom of the Bedchamber.[177]

177.  “Memoirs of the Court of England during the Reign of the Stuarts,” John Heneage Jesse. “She is said to have proposed the Duke’s journey to York in 1665 to be more with Sidney.”

“Diary of the Times of Charles II.,” by Henry Sidney, Earl of Romney. Edit. R. W. Blencowe (Introduction).

“History of My Own Time,” Burnet. “A very graceful young man of quality that belonged to her Court.” “The Duke took up a jealousy, put the person out of his Court.”

He had his full share of the hereditary beauty of his family, the beauty which distinguished his sister Dorothy, married three years after his birth to the gallant young Sunderland who fell at Newbury, and his brother Robert, believed by many of his contemporaries to be the father of Monmouth, and who was known in his day as the “handsome Sidney.”

Conscious or not of his personal advantages, Henry Sidney fell passionately in love with the Duchess, but that wild adoration was no secret. Such things never were at that time, and the Court speedily rang with the tale. Pepys licks his eager lips over the matter. “Pimm tells me,” he writes, “how great a difference hath been between the Duke and Duchess, he suspecting her to be naught with Mr Sidney. But some way or other the matter is made up, but he was banished the Court, and the Duke for many days did not speak to the Duchess at all.” Anthony Hamilton pronounced her guilty, but Reresby, always kind and never scandalous, says stoutly the Duchess “was kind to him and no more.” One thing is certain, James was hotly jealous of his servant. If there really was any truth in the aspersion on her, if Anne, in her lonely splendour, conscious of her husband’s waning affection, resenting his infidelity, turned to the love laid humbly and adoringly at her feet, then we can but say: God pity her! for she was destined to drink deep of sorrow.

But it is quite as easy and fully as reasonable to give her the benefit of the doubt. From what we have already seen, from what we have still to see, it can be argued that she was too resolute, too self-contained, too guarded, to succumb at this period of her life to mere personal attraction. She had risked too much, had won her honours too hardly, to venture them easily. That she was accused goes for nothing. Almost every one was accused sooner or later, and the particular accusation may very well have been an ill-natured tale invented to blacken an unpopular princess. The hero of the romance, Henry Sidney, “the handsomest youth of his time,” was destined to a brilliant career in after days.[178] The short-lived disgrace which was the immediate consequence of his passion for the Duchess, did him no harm. Much later, it is true, he was dismissed from office, but he was made envoy to the States of Holland, and remained there two years, having declined the embassy in Paris. It is said that he voted for the exclusion of the Duke of York from the succession, in the Parliament which met in 1680, when member for Bramber, and perhaps the recollection of that early, ill-starred love had more than a little to do with his action then. At the coronation of James, so the story goes, the crown nearly fell from its wearer’s head, a sinister omen, as many people considered it. Henry Sidney standing by, promptly averted the accident, and adjusted the diadem, remarking with happy audacity “it was not the first time that a Sidney had supported the crown.” He became, however, one of the stanchest upholders of the Revolution, and took with him to The Hague, in the fateful year of 1688, the invitation of the plotters to William of Orange. On the coronation of the latter, Sidney received the reward of a peerage, being created Viscount Sidney and Baron Milton, and a few years later, in 1693, he was made Earl of Romney and also became Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland and Warden of the Cinque Ports. Henry Sidney died in 1704, unmarried. It was, possibly, a tribute to the memory of a long dead romance—at least, one is free to think so.

178.  “Memoirs of Sir John Reresby.” “His Royal Highness and his duchess came down to York (Aug. 5) where it was observed that Mr Sydney, the handsomest youth of his time and of the Duke’s bedchamber was greatly in love with the duchess, and he might well be excused, for the Duchess, daughter to Chancellor Hyde, was a very handsome personage and a woman of Fine Wit. The Duchess on her part seemed kind to him, but very innocently.”

There was at one time a rumour coupling the name of the Duchess of York with Henry Savile, another of the Duke’s grooms of the bedchamber, and in reference to this report, Pepys piously ejaculates: “God knows what will be the end of it!” However, as in the case of Sidney, there is no positive evidence beyond rumour, and rumour was not likely to spare anyone who had so many enemies as Anne Hyde. Therefore here, too, a plea of innocence may be admitted on her behalf.

During the ten years from 1661 to 1671 the Duke and Duchess moved, it seems, little from London. Besides the progress already described, made in company with the King and Queen from Bath to Oxford, the pair were once at York in 1665, and this, according to Reresby, seems to have marked the beginning of Henry Sidney’s passion for the Duchess.[179] Another time they were at Oxford, and when, like the Court, they fled from the Plague, they took refuge at Rufford in Nottinghamshire, being there entertained by Sir George Savile.[180] In return for this piece of hospitality his uncle, William Coventry, begged the Duke to procure a peerage for the host. James referred the matter to his father-in-law, the Lord Chancellor Clarendon, backing, however, the appeal by saying that “Sir George had one of the best fortunes in England, and lived the most like a great man, that he had been very civil to him and his wife in the North, and treated them at his house in a very splendid manner.” Savile afterwards became Marquess of Halifax, having married Dorothy, eldest daughter of Henry, Earl of Sunderland (as already mentioned), who fell at Newbury, and also, of course, of “Sacharissa.” The Duke and Duchess were back at St James’s at the time of the Fire, when the former did yeoman’s service in the endeavour to check the ravages of the terrible conflagration, when old St Paul’s, with its splendid if ruined nave, its beautiful chantries and tombs, and its lofty spire, thundered down in a whirlwind of devouring flame, in company of eighty-nine City churches. No one worked harder in the face of this calamity than the King and his brother, nor showed greater contempt of danger and readiness of resource, and to the Duke we owe the preservation of the Temple Church by his order to blow up the neighbouring houses. To this Evelyn bears testimony, for he says: “It is not indeed imaginable how extraordinary the vigilance of the King and Duke was, even labouring in person, and being present to command, order, reward or encourage workmen.”

179.  “Calendar of Domestic Papers.” 7th August 1665, York.—Sir William Coventry to Lord Arlington: “The Lord Mayor and Aldermen on horseback, in their habits, who besides the speeches presented the Duke with 100 pieces, and the Duchess with 50.”

180.  “Court of William III.” E. and M. S. Grew.

A little before this we find Mrs Kate Philips, known in her own day as the “Matchless Orinda,” writing to Lady Temple (whom we know and love as Dorothy Osborne): “I am glad of the news of the Duchess’ recovery, and the other victory you mention at Court.” The recovery is probably from measles, from which Anne suffered about this time.[181] The victory is that of Frances Stewart, afterwards Duchess of Richmond, whom Charles II. loved so madly—for a time—over her unpopular rival, Lady Castlemaine. It was a very well known piece of gossip with which the Court was ringing at the moment, but one can hardly fancy it to be particularly welcome nor interesting to Dorothy Temple, being the manner of woman she was. A month later poor Orinda was dead of smallpox, and her poetry, “matchless” as it was thought, was very soon forgotten.[182]

181.  “Diary.” Samuel Pepys. 28th December 1663.

182.  “Martha, Lady Gifford: Life and Letters, 1664-1722,” edit. by Miss J. E. Longe. “Letter from Mrs Kate Philips under the name of Orinda to Sir Wm. Temple’s lady (Dorothy Osborne), 22nd January, 1664.”

As to Anne’s own household, it is significant that she was said to rule it with decision and vigilance. One of her ladies was lovely Frances Jennings, the elder sister of the famous Sarah, afterwards Duchess of Marlborough, and she, having married first one of the wild Hamiltons,[183] became Duchess of Tyrconnel, and was destined in her old age to suffer the stings of poverty and neglect. But early in her career there were love passages with the Marquis de Berni, son of Hugues de Lionne, Foreign Secretary to Louis XIV., and her mistress encouraged the affair, for it seems that “the Duchess, who is generally severe on such things, finds the two so well suited that she is the first to favour them.”[184]

183.  Brother of Anthony, Count Hamilton, the chronicler.

184.  “A French Ambassador at the Court of Charles II. (Comte de Cominges).” Jusserand.

Another of the ladies was Miss Temple, afterwards Lady Lyttelton, and yet another Lady Denham, whose story is a sad and dark one. She had been a Brooke, and had already attracted the Duke of York when she married Sir John Denham, who discovering the liaison, poisoned his wife, at least, so it was suspected.[185]

185.  Mary Kirke was another of Anne’s maids, according to Grammont.

FRANCES JENNINGS, DUCHESS OF TYRCONNEL

But attached likewise to the Duchess’ person was one who, one cannot but think, must have been to some extent a support and comfort in a life that became more and more lonely and difficult as time went on. Margaret, daughter of Colonel Thomas Blagge of Horningsheath in Suffolk, a loyal Cavalier through the Civil War, during which he was governor of Landguard Fort, became maid of honour to Anne, when a little girl, probably not more than twelve years of age. The story of her short life has been told by Evelyn, who watched over her with the care of a father, and to whom she seems to have been almost an inspiration.[186] As a little child she had been sent to France with the Duchess of Richmond (that wayward, beautiful Mary Villiers, so long and deeply beloved by Prince Rupert, and whose chivalrous lord had died broken-hearted for the loss of his master, Charles I.). The child was then confided to the care of Lady Guildford, Groom of the Stole to the queen-mother Henrietta, yet even then we are told that little Margaret resisted being taken to Mass. After her return to England she was confirmed by Gunning, Bishop of Ely, at the age of eleven, and admitted to Holy Communion at that early period. It was not long after this that the Duchess of York asked for her, and from that time she lived, outwardly, the beautiful, admired, lively maid of honour; inwardly, a life “hid with Christ.” Evelyn himself was long unwilling to know much of her, fancying her “some airy thing that had more wit than discretion”; and Pepys with much relish relates that he, in company with Sir John Smith, dined with her, Mrs Ogle and Mrs Anne Howard (another maid of honour, afterwards Lady Sylvius), and that it “did me good to have the honour to dine with them and look upon them.” In the whirl of the Court life Margaret Blagge moves like the “Lady” in Comus, with spotless garments unsmirched by the mire through which she treads, and leaving behind her the ineffable perfume of the “white flower of a blameless life.”[187] She was destined to die young, in the twenty-sixth year of her age, the passionately beloved wife of Sidney Godolphin, the best part of whose life and character was buried in that early grave. It is hard to think that he who was to know such a consecration could write verses to Moll Davis!

186.  “Life of Mrs Godolphin,” by John Evelyn, ed. by E. W. Harcourt.

187.  “Diary of John Evelyn,” introduction by Austin Dobson. “1667. June 30th.—My wife went a journey of pleasure down the river as far as the sea with Mrs Howard and her daughter the maid of honour (after Lady Sylvius) and others, amongst whom that excellent creature Mrs Blagge.” This is his first mention of her.

To Anne Hyde, whose almost stern character could appreciate honesty, the straightforward mind and transparent truth of Margaret Blagge must have appealed, in spite of the divergence of faith which came before the end. For we hear of the Duchess, that “her frankness was such that she could as little conceal her antipathies as she could disguise her affections.”[188] This candour was, it may very easily be seen, dangerous in her position and must have made for unpopularity.

188.  “Anecdotal Memoirs of English Princes.” Davenport Adams.

Meanwhile the Duke of York, whatever else he was, was by no means reconciled to a life of idleness. Pepys, in his character of Naval Secretary, affirms early in 1664: “The Duke of York do give himself up to business, and is likely to prove a noble prince, and so indeed I do from my heart think he will.”[189] The former had, indeed, every opportunity of judging, as his post brought him necessarily into constant communication with the Lord High Admiral, communication of the most intimate kind, for another time he remarks: “Up and carrying my wife to Whitehall to the Duke where he first put on a periwigg to-day, but methought his hair cut short in order did look very prettily of itself before he put on his periwigg.”[190] This is the last we see of James’ fair curls. King Charles was turning grey—it was said from anxiety on account of the Queen’s dangerous illness—and so assumed a black peruke; therefore his brother, no less than his whole Court, must needs do likewise. Another of the honest secretary’s remarks conveys a certain pathos: “To St James’s, and there did our business as usual with the Duke and saw him with great pleasure play with his little girle like an ordinary private father of a childe.”[191] If Pepys was what Thackeray calls a snob, he was at any rate a very candid one, and perhaps there was, besides, lurking in that commonplace mind a little envious pang at the sight, for he, we know, was childless. Yet could he have foreseen the future he had no need to envy James that pretty plaything, for twenty-four years later “Mary the daughter,”[192] as the bitter Jacobite rhyme calls her, was destined to grasp the crown torn from the head of the father who so loved her, the father driven into exile by his children.

189.  “Calendar of Domestic State Papers.” Ambassador Van Gogh to the States General. 1664-1665.—March: “The Duke of York is recovered, and will soon go to Deal, it is believed he will go out with the Fleet. The Duchess goes with him, and has taken a country house near so as to be at hand to receive news of him during the expedition.”

190.  “Diary.” 15th February 1664.

191.  Ibid. 12th September 1664.

192.  

There’s Geordie the drinker,

There’s Annie the eater,

There’s Mary the “daughter,”

There’s Willie the cheater.

The Duke of York’s work on behalf of the navy did not begin and end in St James’s or in the Admiralty buildings near the Tower. Later we shall see him on board his flagship at grips with the Dutch, but meanwhile he took care to visit many ships, and Anne was often with him on these expeditions. On 19th May 1665, Lord Peterborough, writing from Harwich, mentions that he is “going on board to compliment the Duchess.”[193] The ship on this occasion was the Royal Charles, and a few days later Sir William Coventry seems to be suffering acutely, for, addressing Arlington, he says: “The Duchess and her beautiful Maids are departing, therefore long letters must not be expected from me under such a calamity, would visit their desperation on the Dutch were not the victuallers as cruel as the ladies.”[194]

193.  “Calendar of Domestic State Papers,” ed. by M. A. Everett-Green. Earl of Peterboro’ to Williams.

194.  “Calendar of Domestic State Papers,” ed. by M. A. Everett-Green. Earl of Peterboro’ to Williams.

James was not the only prince of his house to supplement the laurels won on land by achievements on the high seas. His cousins, the Princes Palatine, Rupert and Maurice, had long ago made their names known as valiant mariners. A mystery always hung over the fate of Prince Maurice, who with his ship, the Defiance, vanished in a great storm.[195] Rupert himself barely escaped with his life in a small boat when the Constant Reformation was lost with three hundred and thirty-three men, and this year, 1665, he set out to attack the Dutch on the coast of Guinea. He was accompanied down the river by the King and the Duke of York, the latter longing to go with his cousin on this adventure, which, however, came to nothing, for in spite of the Prince’s efforts the fleet did not sail. The next year, however, the long smouldering rivalry with the States General came to a head, and war was declared. A fleet to proceed against the Dutch was assembled at Gunfleet, the Duke, as Lord High Admiral, being in supreme command, and Prince Rupert, Admiral Lawson and Lord Sandwich admirals under him. Charles, by the way, had given the settlement of New Amsterdam to his brother, and it was henceforth known as New York, the Dutch land settlement having been originally taken by James I.

195.  “A Royal Cavalier: The Romance of Rupert, Prince Palatine.” Mrs Steuart Erskine.

In April the fleet aforesaid began the blockade of the Zuyder Zee, but after a fortnight it was forced to return for provisions, though it had been supposed to be victualled for five months. Prince Rupert, who came to be known as the seaman’s friend, was highly indignant with Pepys and other Admiralty officials on this occasion, but the debts on the fleet had really begun under the Commonwealth and had mounted to such an extent that it was impossible to pay the pursers.[196] Finally, after the loss of Hamburg to the Dutch, the English fleet again set sail and headed for Southwold Bay, meeting the enemy on 1st June. For two more days they pursued them, till they succeeded in getting their wind-gauge, fourteen miles from Lowestoft, and the battle actually began at half-past three on the afternoon of 3rd June, Prince Rupert leading the van, the Duke of York the centre, and Sandwich the rear. To James it was probably as keen a satisfaction as it was to his cousin, to vindicate on the sea the reckless valour which in his early youth had distinguished him on land, and it was with the knowledge of his contempt for personal danger, that the Duchess contrived to convey a strict injunction to all his servants to do whatever lay in their power to restrain him on this occasion. It was during the action that the Dutch copied the English tactics of turning, but they found the latter ready for them, their rear and van changing positions. However, the English sustained some disaster by means of a mistake in the new signalling orders, and a false move on the part of Sandwich, who allowed his squadron to become mixed with the enemy. Nevertheless the victory remained with the English, for by seven o’clock the Dutch were in full flight, fourteen of their ships being taken and four thousand men slain. It was even said that they might have been annihilated but for conflicting counsels on the part of the English, and a mistake for which, guilty or innocent, the Duke had to suffer. A council had been held on board his flagship, when some of the captains asked him to discontinue the pursuit. This, however, James refused, giving, on the contrary, the order to press on all sail, and bidding his servants to call him when the Dutch should be sighted. He then went below, and during the night, Brouncker, who was Gentleman of his Bedchamber, going to the admiral, Sir William Penn, bade him shorten sail. Penn, believing this order to come from the Duke, obeyed it, but in the morning James came on deck, and at once questioned the admiral, who promptly accused Brouncker. The latter held his tongue, but his master, declaring he had given no such order, dismissed him from his service. It was at the time considered significant that the Duke did not further punish him, but on the other hand, it may be noticed that James’ own account of the matter is that he intended to punish Brouncker by martial law, but that the House of Commons took up the question, and by impeaching the culprit made any further action on his own part impossible. Lord Montague seems to have believed that the Duke did give the order, but Brouncker when before the House did not even pretend that his master had done so. Whatever were James’ faults, his character for courage and candour make his own account the more probable. In any case he was the ultimate victim, for he was withdrawn from the command of the navy on the ground that it exposed him, the heir presumptive, to too much danger.[197] The service thereby lost a valuable head, for he had worked hard to establish it on a permanent footing, and had already evolved some order out of chaos. Yet this department of duty was not, at least at this period of his life, what he most desired, or was most congenial to him. Again on this subject Pepys writes: “He [Mr Coventry] tells me above all of the Duke of York that he is more himself and more of judgment is at hand in him in the middle of a desperate service than at other times, as appeared in the business of Dunkirke, wherein no man ever did braver things or was in hotter service at the close of that day, being surrounded with enemies. And though he is a man naturally martial to the highest degree, yet a man that never in his life talks one word of himself or service of his own, but only that he saw such and such a thing and lays it down for a maxim that a Hector can have no courage.”[198]

196.  “A Royal Cavalier: The Romance of Rupert, Prince Palatine.” Mrs Steuart Erskine.

197.  “Anecdotal Memoirs of English Princes.” Davenport Adams.

198.  “Diary.” 4th June 1664.

It is no indifferent testimony, even in an age which produced many brilliant soldiers who left an inheritance of great names. It may be noted that Anne’s cruel enemy, Lord Falmouth, once Sir Charles Berkeley, fell at Southwold Bay.

There are two letters from the Duke of York to the Prince Palatine, which, although they are undated except as to the month, probably refer to this year’s campaign.

“For my deare Cousin,

Prince Rupert.

“July 17.

“I no sooner received yours of the 12 but that I sent for Sr G. Downing and gave him order about River so that I hope he will become exchanged, and in the meane tyme the Dutch Capne is put in chanes and told why he is so used. I hope that and your giving them a sound bange will teach them better manners; this bearer will tell them all the newes so that I have no more to say but to thank you for the scrole you sent me and to wish you a faire wind and good successe, and that God will preserve you in the midst of those dangers you are likly shortly to be in.

“James.”

“For my deare Cousin,

Prince Rupert.

“Nov. 7.

“I received yours by this bearer by the which I am very glad to find that things are in so good a readinesse where you are. I intend God willing to be at Portsmouth on Wensday, and to-morrow all the ships in the hope are to fall down except the Charles whose mainemast must be changed, which will be sone done. I shall ad no more hoping to see you so sone but that I am entirely yours

“James.”[199]

199.  Forster Collection MSS. V. and A. Museum.

It was in the succeeding year that Prince Rupert and the Duke of Albemarle achieved their great victory over the Dutch off the North Foreland on St James’s Day, 25th July.[200] In that terrible and stubborn fight the English had eighty-one ships of the line and eighteen fireships, while the enemy, under the command of the famous De Ruyter, had eighty-eight ships, ten yachts, and twenty fireships. After this engagement the Prince Palatine carried fire and sword from Scheveningen along the coast of Holland, but he was compelled to return for want of provisions, of which neglect he complained bitterly. Secretary Pepys, however, a second time the scapegoat, retorted that the fleet had been brought back in bad condition, the Prince protesting that he could have continued the campaign six months longer if his ships had been properly provisioned. The Dutch fleet was enabled by his evasion to refit, and were joined by the French in the Channel.

200.  “A Royal Cavalier: Romance of Rupert, Prince Palatine”; Green’s “Short History of the English People.”

All this while the Duke of York, detained at home, was chafing with impatience and trying to fill up his time with such matters as came to hand, and giving his attention to each. Once Pepys writes: “I to Whitehall to a Committee for Tangiers where the Duke of York was, and I acquitted myself well in what I had to do” (the worthy Samuel, in spite of occasional fits of self-accusation, had always an excellent opinion of himself). “After the Committee up I had occasion to follow the Duke into his lodgings into a chamber where the Duchess was sitting to have her picture drawn by Lilly, who was there at work. But I was well pleased to see that there was nothing near so much resemblance of her face in his work which is now the second if not the third time as there was of my wife’s at the very first time. Nor do I think at last it can be like, the lines not being in proportion to those of her face.” To the end, ill as he behaved to and by her, Pepys was proud of his wife’s beauty and really fond of her, and this naïve expression of his satisfaction is almost pathetic.[201]

201.  “Diary.” 24th March 1666.

Somewhere about this time Lady Fanshawe was returning from Spain, on the death of her chivalrous and deeply mourned husband, to make at last her home in England, and she was, as his merits entitled her, graciously received by the King, whom he had served so long and faithfully. On this occasion she presented two dozen “amber skins” and six dozen pairs of gloves to the King, the Queen, the Duke and his little son the Duke of Cambridge, who was, alas! destined soon to follow his brother.[202] The Duke of York lent Lady Fanshawe the Victory frigate to bring the rest of her goods and people from Bilbao at the end of March 1667.

202.  “Notes to the Memoirs of Anne, Lady Fanshawe.”

It was for that period, an age which set such store by signs and portents, a strange defiance of omens that impelled the parents to give what would seem a fatal title to three successive children, none of whom were fated to survive infancy. Through the ten years which succeeded her marriage, Anne’s nursery at St James’s Palace was filling only to be emptied. One after another of the sons so eagerly and fondly welcomed was destined to fade quickly out of this life, “to find the taste bitter and decline the rest”; the ducal coronets were to fall from the small heads too weak to bear so heavy a burden. Of the eight children born to James, Duke of York, and Anne his wife, only two daughters survived to play their parts thereafter on the great stage of history for good or for evil. The mother, however her heart was wrung, as it must have been, carried an undaunted front through those years of loss and bereavement, and held her place resolutely in the very forefront of Court and festival, a conspicuous and dominating figure always.

Her home throughout her married life, as before said, was St James’s Palace, a house which must have enshrined many memories for James himself. There he had been brought up as a child, there he had been in his boyhood a State prisoner with the brother and sister, now both passed away, there his father the martyr-king had spent the last night of his life before the winter morning walk across the Park to Whitehall and the block before the Banqueting House, and there his body had lain that night, watched by a little band of faithful servants, before the burial at Windsor. There also James and his wife always kept the anniversary of that day, the 30th January, year by year, as it came round, in sorrowful remembrance.

It was a goodly habitation, and indeed rivalled the great rambling palace near the river in splendour of furniture and decoration and the treasures it contained.[203]

203.  Knight’s “London.” It was long known as St James’s Manor-House.

Yet another picture from Secretary Pepys’ busy pen is shown us here.[204] One spring day, he tells us, he came thither to dine “with some of the maids of honour at the Treasurer’s House,” and thereafter he found “the Duke of York and the Dutchess with all the great ladies sitting upon a carpet on the ground, there being no chairs, playing at ‘I love my love with an A because he is so and so, and I hate him with an A because of this and that,’ and some of them but particularly the Dutchess herself and my Lady Castlemaine were very witty.” A childish game, it seems to us, yet the scene has a certain charm and grace, invested too with piquancy by the ladies’ readiness. In other days at The Hague and Breda, under the approving eyes of the “Winter Queen” and her own Princess Mary, with Spencer Compton and Harry Jermyn to applaud, Nan Hyde had learnt to hold her own in jest and repartee, and now that she too was a princess, she had not forgotten the trick, but still shone in swift retort and happy invention.

204.  “Diary.” 4th March 1668.

There, too, in the ancient palace, when night came the tables would be set for basset, the favourite game; and at them Duchess Anne, eager in her imperious way, would set down broad pieces on the hazard, staking on the cast now a thousand pounds, now fifteen hundred. One night she even lost twenty-five thousand pounds, and it became to her an absorbing passion, to be inherited by her second daughter.[205] Over and over again in later days did James II. pay the debts of the Princess Anne, himself the reverse of extravagant, being in this the antithesis of his elder brother.

205.  “Memorials of St James’s Palace.” E. Sheppard, D.D.

It is an unlovely side of Anne Hyde’s perplexing character, and one displays it with reluctance. Certainly it was a strange outcome of her narrow upbringing in her father’s careful household. Of her thirst for gain Pepys has a word to say: “Mr Povy do tell me how he is like to lose his £400 a year pension of the Duke of York which he took in consideration of his place that was taken from him. He tells me that the Duchess is a divil against him and do now come like Queen Elizabeth and sits with the Duke of York’s council and sees what they do, and she crosses out this man’s wages and prices as she sees fit for saving money, but yet he tells me she reserves £5000 a year for her own spending and my Lady Peterborough by and by tells me that the Duchess do lay up, mightily, jewels.”[206] This was written in 1668, and it may or may not be true. In a succeeding chapter a different and totally contrasting aspect of Anne Hyde must be unfolded, one to be dwelt upon, in one direction, with far greater satisfaction.

206.  “Diary.” 27th January 1667-1668.

CHAPTER VI

THE FALL OF CLARENDON

Whatever might be the consternation of the Chancellor at his elder and favourite daughter’s stolen match, however great his anger and disappointment at the failure of the duty and confidence which he felt she owed him—and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the feeling he manifested on the disclosure—it is nevertheless evident that the affectionate terms on which father and daughter lived, suffered but a very short eclipse.

The Duke of York himself treated his father-in-law with unvarying respect and consideration, and to Anne the latter was always a welcome visitor. For a time, at least, it would seem that Clarendon was on the crest of the wave. High, and deservedly so, in his King’s favour, reconciled to his once inveterate foe, the queen-mother, his daughter established on the steps of the throne, his position appeared altogether unassailable. Still, as in the days before the marriage, the Chancellor and his daughter spent much of their time together, and at some time during those happy days, before the breaking of the storm that was to overwhelm the wisest head in England, we find the record of a pretended wager between them, a piece of very innocent fooling which no doubt served its purpose of amusement for the moment:

“Hugh May, Esqre his award of arbitration in a jocular suit pending between Edward Earl of Clarendon and his daughter Anne Duchess of York relative to a wager between them.

“Where it was agreed between Anne Dutchess of York Plaintiffe and Edward Earl of Clarendon Defendant that the value of twenty pound lost in a wager between the parties aforesaid should be paid by that party to whom Hew May Esquire Judge of the Architects should adjudge it to be due. He the said Hew May having examined both parties and heard their severall witness doth hereby declare to all whom it may concern and doth order and decree that the said summe of twenty pound should be forth with paid by the right Honorable Edward Earl of Clarendon Defendant to the said Anne Dutchesse of York Plaintiffe and that it be paid within 8 daies after both parties shall have had a sight of this decree. It is further ordered by the said Hew May that forasmuch as the said Edward Earle of Clarendon Defendant hath put off and deferred the hearing of this cause term after term during the times of allmost 4 termes to the great dammage and cost of the said Anne Dutchesse of Yorke Plaintiffe it is therefore ordered that the said Earle of Clarendon Defendant shall pay defraye and discharge all the costs and charges whatsoever of this sute.

“Ordered that this decree be registered.”[207]

207.  Clarendon State Papers (Bodleian).

Before very long, however, the heart for such things was wanting, even if the time was available.

It is a hard task to gauge the inveterate and bitter malignity which pursued the Chancellor to his final exile from England. Whatever were the faults in his public service and administration, it could at least be said of Edward Hyde that “he was in the Court of Charles II. almost the only man who lived chastely, drank moderately, and swore not at all,”[208] and that with his lifelong friends, Ormonde and Southampton, he “projected into this reign” “the high-toned virtues of the old Cavalier stock.”[209] These, and the friendship already mentioned—just as long and steadfast—with John Evelyn, should stand the memory of Clarendon in good stead, putting aside those brilliant gifts which he used so unsparingly in the service of his sovereign. Of these, Horace Walpole, no mean critic, declares that “for his comprehensive knowledge of mankind he should be styled the Chancellor of human nature.”

208.  Encyclopædia Britannica. “Clarendon.”

209.  “Charles II.” Osmund Airy.

The dark clouds were beginning to gather about Hyde as early as 1662, though possibly only the few persons who were conversant with all State secrets were cognisant of the fact. In one of de Wiquefort’s despatches he says of the Chancellor: “He has a strong party against him who will make the King jealous, and will be favourable to the Queen in order to oppose the Duchess of York.” If the party against Clarendon was strong, it must have been a small one at that time, but it is instructive to see that already two factions were in the forming, trying to establish a rivalry between the two ladies, though they themselves were entirely innocent in the matter, but at any rate no one was so likely to suffer between the contending parties as Clarendon himself. In 1663, Digby, Earl of Bristol, whose character should not have secured any particular confidence, attacked the Chancellor, bringing against him a charge of high treason which, however, at that period fell to the ground.[210] But as time went on the deep-laid prejudice against him spread and spread like a canker. He had unhappily tried the unsuccessful experiment of hunting with the hounds and running with the hare, for he had endeavoured to reconcile the Presbyterian malcontents by the Act of Indemnity and the Romanists by the Act of Uniformity, thereby satisfying neither party. In this way he had unfortunately succeeded in making enemies in all directions. He was “steady for the Church against Dissenters and Papists alike,”[211] and consequently both parties hated him. His blameless life, too, was a tacit reproof of the vices of the Court, and his chief foe, Buckingham, took full advantage of the fact.[212] He and his boon companions were accustomed to say to the King, with a sneer: “There goes your school master!”[213] But it was above all the irrepressible Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine, beautiful, unscrupulous, evil in thought and deed, who joined with others no less guilty in hounding the Chancellor to his disgrace and so depriving the King of a minister who, if not perfect, had at any rate done him and the realm great and lasting service. Meanwhile, while all their discontent and malice were seething under the surface, but not yet openly active, Clarendon, in execution of the plan he had entertained from the time of the Restoration, set about building his new house in 1664. We have previously seen that he established himself temporarily at Worcester House in the Strand, and that it was there that both his daughter’s marriage and the birth of her elder son took place, but he had never intended to remain there, and it was not very long before he acquired a site which suited him. At the time of the public announcement of Anne’s marriage, York House at Twickenham, originally York Place, was given to her father, who was accustomed to stay there when the King was at Hampton Court, and the Duchess’ daughter Anne, afterwards queen, was born there.[214] But it was in London itself that the Chancellor proposed to build his new house, and he received a grant from the King of certain Crown property. It lay west of Burlington House, on the site of Bond Street, Stafford Street and Albemarle Street, extending eastwards to Swallow Street, its western boundary being, however, uncertain. There, then, was built Clarendon House,[215] facing the top of St James’s Street, and occupying the whole site of Stafford Street. It stood back from Piccadilly, then newly named, having projecting wings with a turret in the centre, and Evelyn calls it, with some probable exaggeration “the first palace in England.”[216] It is said that 74 Piccadilly was built of a portion of the materials.

210.  Chalmers’ Biographical Dictionary.

211.  Ibid.

212.  With reference to Lady Castlemaine it must be noted that Clarendon would allow nothing to pass the Great Seal in which she was named. He also opposed her appointment as Lady of the Bedchamber, and forbade his wife to visit her. (“Samuel Pepys and the World He Lived In.” Wheatley.)

213.  Chalmers’ Biographical Dictionary.

214.  “Reign of Queen Anne.” Justin McCarthy.

215.  Watford’s “Old and New London”; “The Ghosts of Piccadilly,” G. S. Street.

216.  He also calls it “without hyperbole the best contrived, the most useful, graceful and magnificent house in England, and I except not Audley End, which, though larger and full of gaudy and barbarous ornament, does not gratify judicious spectatore.”

Rather later than the erection of Clarendon House, the City of London gave the Chancellor a lease of the Conduit Mead, which is now covered by New Bond Street and Brook Street, and from which Conduit Street takes its name.

The building of this magnificent palace, no doubt intended by Clarendon to be a home for his children’s children, excited a positive storm of wrath. The sale of Dunkirk had lately been completed, and the mob chose to believe that the house was built with Dutch money, though there is no proof that Clarendon ever received a penny. Pennant asserts boldly that the stones used in its erection had been intended for the rebuilding of old St Paul’s, long in a half-ruinous state, which work had been set on foot some time before the Great Fire made all such intentions abortive for the moment. Nicknames were freely bestowed. Holland House, in allusion to supposed bribes from the Dutch; Dunkirk House for the same reason; Tangier House, because the Chancellor had obtained the town of Tangier for England, and no one wanted it. His employment, during the Plague, of three hundred workmen on his building operations, though done with the best intentions, only raised another outcry.

In 1667, the unlucky year when the Dutch sailed up to Gravesend, a mob proceeded to break the windows of Clarendon House with the usual fatuous want of reason on such occasions, and setting up a gibbet before the gates, inscribed on it the words:

“Three sights to be seen:

Dunkirk, Tangier, and a barren Queen.”

In fact the town was deluged with lampoons in the fashion of the day. Another couplet put it:

“God will avenge too for the stones he took

From aged Paul’s to build a nest for rooks.”

Andrew Marvell, too, chose to take up his parable on the subject, and dipped his mordant pen in bitterer gall than usual:

“Here lie the sacred bones

Of Paul beguiled of his stones.

Here lie golden briberies

The price of ruined families;

The Cavaliers’ debenture wall

Fixed on an eccentric basis.

Here’s Dunkirk Town and Tangier Hall,

The Queen’s marriage and all

The Dutchman’s templum pacis.”[217]

217.  “Poems and Satires of Andrew Marvell: ‘Upon his House’” [Clarendon].

Yet again, in his “Clarendon’s House-warming” are the words:

“He had read of Rhodope, a lady of Thrace,

Who was digged up so often ere she did marry,

And wished that his daughter had had so much grace

To erect him a pyramid out of her quarry.”

The stately house which from the first attracted so much unfriendly attention had but a short life, and its ill luck dogged it to the end. Evelyn, who saw the first stone laid, also saw the pulling down of the whole edifice. Clarendon’s sons, Lord Cornbury and his brother Laurence, afterwards Lord Rochester, leased it to their father’s friend the Duke of Ormonde, who, by the way, was driving up St James’s Street on his way to Clarendon House when the notorious Colonel Blood made his desperate attempt to kidnap and assassinate him. Later still, after the Chancellor’s death, the house was sold to Monk’s son, the second Duke of Albemarle, who called it after himself, but subsequently sold it again to a syndicate; and it was finally demolished in 1683 by a certain Sir Thomas Bond, “to build a street of tenements to his undoing.”[218] He, at least, vindicated his loyalty, for having been Controller of the Household to the queen-mother, he went into exile in after years in the train of King James II. His name, of course, survives in the present Bond Street, which occupies part of the site of Clarendon House, as Albemarle Street recalls the second appellation of the Chancellor’s house.

218.  Clarendon’s “Correspondence.”

With regard to the rebuilding of St Paul’s, we find Clarendon’s name as concerned in it in a letter from Henchman, Bishop of London, to Sancroft, then Dean.

“Mr Deane,—How this evening since five a clock Sr Philip Warwick sends me frô the Archbp of Canterburie that the Lord Chancelour hath appointed that his Grace and I should come to morrow to Worcester House at ten in the morning about St Paul’s first I doubt whether you may with safety come out, next whether Mr Webb on such a sodaine warning can be convened. If you may without prejudice to your health come and Mr Webb can be met with I hope Jo Tillison hath prepared all that we are to lay before them. I intend to be there, only I seuerely charge you that unless Jo Barwick[219] gives leave without scruple you appeare not.

219.  John Berwick was Prebendary of Durham and Chaplain to Bishop Morton. He was successively Dean of Durham and St Paul’s. (Walker’s “Sufferings of the Clergy.”)

“Your very affectionate friend,

“Humfr: London.”

“Fulham, March 26, 1666.”[220]

220.  Additional MSS. Harleian, 3785.

It will be seen that this letter is dated just six months before the Great Fire made all plans for restoration and repair abortive, and also that the Chancellor was still at Worcester House, his own not being ready for him. The Bishop wrote again a month later on the same subject.

“Deare Sr,—At Worcester Howse on Thursday morning about ten the L. Prest will be with some other Lords about the business of St Paul’s. I desire you to be there and the Deane of Canterburie. Let not Mr Tillison fayle to attend and give notice of it to Mr Hugh May and Mr Webb: and lett him be prepared concerning objections agaynst the Account. I shall be at K. Henry 7th Chappell to morrow at nine to prorogue the Convocation.

“Your affectionate friend,

“Humfr. London.”

“Fulham, Ap. 23, 1666.”[221]

221.  Additional MSS. Harleian.

It may be noted here that Sancroft’s appointment to the Deanery of St Paul’s coincided with the battle of Southwold, as when Edward Savage wrote his congratulations from the Cockpit on the 25th October 1664 he added: “We shall certainely have warre with the false Dutch, and the Duke of Yorke is presently going himselfe to sea with the gallantest ffleete that ever England set forth.”[222]

222.  Ibid.

Sancroft, as we know, was to see many startling changes in Church and State, and to experience in his own person many vicissitudes, but they were no greater than such as fell on Edward Hyde.[223]

223.  He had been Chaplain to Bishop Cosin, Prebendary of Durham, Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Dean of York and then of St Paul’s. He at once began to repair the cathedral, and after the fire he set to work to rebuild, giving £1400 for this purpose. He was Archbishop in 1677, deprived at the Revolution.

Several reasons, as previously stated, could be given for Clarendon’s steadily increasing unpopularity and for his final disgrace, but in 1667 he was for the second time impeached. Among the articles of this second accusation of high treason were “The taking money for the King’s marriage with Portugall,” “The marrying his daughter to the Duke of Yorke,” “The obstructing all other marriages for the King.”[224]

224.  Scudamore Papers.

As regards the second of the indictments we know that Hyde was entirely innocent from first to last. The third seems to point at the often suggested plan of a divorce from Catherine. The King himself wrote privately to Ormonde that his real reason for parting with his old servant was “the Chancellor’s intolerable temper,”[225] but it is also said that he deeply resented the latter’s action in counteracting a divorce by bringing about the stolen marriage of “La Belle Stuart” to the Duke of Richmond, seeing that he (Charles) at one time contemplated getting rid of his wife to marry the lovely, wild, childish girl who, for the moment, imprisoned his vagrant fancy.[226] His covert irritation and impatience were diligently fanned by those about him, headed by Buckingham, who used his great gifts and entire want of scruple, with deadly effect, to compass the undoing of his foe. It is possible that Clarendon had at first displayed his personal influence too openly, for though Charles from sheer indolence would allow himself to be governed with fatal facility, he was nevertheless, like many people of a like temperament, very unwilling that the fact should be known. As to the charge of bribery urged so often, and with such bitter pertinacity, there is absolutely no proof of any kind of its truth. Clarendon was accused of receiving bribes right and left, of knowing that the needy spendthrift King received them from his astute cousin Louis XIV. Of all this, it must be repeated, Hyde’s enemies could bring no proof, and at any rate his fall certainly heralded the worst period of the reign of Charles II. “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” followed fast upon each other. Clarendon’s old friend, Lord Southampton, one of the best and wisest of his generation, had died not long before. In August the King sent for the Seals to be delivered up, and a few days later the faithful Evelyn came to visit the disgraced minister, and “found him in his bedchamber very sad.” “He was my particular kind friend on all occasions,” adds the diarist loyally, and one can fancy that his presence may have brought a little momentary comfort to the bruised heart. There was a yet heavier blow to fall, and the cup of sorrow to be filled to the brim. On 8th December, some months later, Pepys records that he saw the Duchess of York at Whitehall “in a fine dress of second mourning for her mother, being black edged with ermine.” To Clarendon himself the loss of the faithful wife who had shared his poverty and exile beyond the sea, as well as his short-lived prosperity, came as a crushing misfortune among all the other burdens pressing upon him on every side. A few pathetic words written in July from Clarendon House allude to this sorrow as impending: “Being in noe good disposition the last weeke, by reason of my Wife’s great Sicknesse.”[227]

225.  Chalmers’ Biographical Dictionary.

226.  “Royalty Restored.” E. F. Molloy.

227.  Harleian MS.

We see Evelyn again visiting his friend about this time, and finding “him in his garden at his new-built palace, sitting in his gowt wheel chayre and seeing the gates setting up towards the north and the fields. He looked and spoke very disconsolately.” It was no wonder. Everything was crumbling round him like the wall of a falling house. The fortune he had built up through so many strenuous years was toppling over, honour and reputation were smitten, and he sat—alone. The “new-built palace” could yield him now but little solace, and forth from it he must go, like Wolsey, “naked to his enemies.” Truly he must have said to himself, as he looked round him in utter loneliness: “Vanity of vanities.”

Meanwhile in the ancient palace at the foot of the hill, not many hundred yards away, sorrow of another kind was brooding.

To the Duchess of York herself, this year was especially marked by grief and misfortune. In one direction there was the keen mortification caused by the Duke’s short-lived passion for Lady Denham, whose tragic and mysterious death has been already recorded; in another the blow inflicted by the disgrace and final exile of her father—and this of itself must have been a sore trouble, considering the close affection between them. Sadder still came the death of her mother and of her young children. Andrew Marvell’s unsparing pen was again busy, and surely no crueller couplet was ever written:

“Kendal is dead, and Cambridge riding post,

What fitter sacrifice for Denham’s ghost?”[228]

228.  “Poems and Satires.”

Among the many pictures of the time which its history unfolds before us, there is one which stands out here in sombre relief.[229]

229.  Knight’s “London.”

Across the Park, which he has already done much to improve, having laid out the Mall and planted avenues, comes King Charles at his usual swift pace. He has been, according to his custom, feeding the ducks, of which he is very fond. Two or three courtiers keep up with him as best they may, and a crowd of little dogs run and dance round him, snapping at each other. Now and then the King throws a careless word or two to his attendants, who laugh dutifully, or try to cap them, as the case may be. Down another path from the direction of Spring Gardens,[230] where he now lives—it used to be in the Barbican[231]—advances a tall figure carrying himself with a certain stately swing. Those keen quick eyes and high aquiline features can only belong to Prince Rupert, fresh perhaps from some of his experiments, the transmuting of silver, and the like. As he takes off his wide plumed hat in a sweeping salute and bows profoundly, the King nods cheerfully, glad of the meeting, glad of any distraction. A few desultory words—he has shot a duck, it seems, and one of the dogs retrieved it; then he seems suddenly to remember that his brother’s boys are ailing. “Let’s go and see Cambridge and Kendal,” he says with a stifled yawn, as he passes his arm through that of his cousin. It reads callously, but Charles is a man of strange and unexpected reserves, and he may feel more than he allows to be seen. So the pair walk on under the spreading trees, while the King’s attendants fall back to a more respectful distance. The Prince Palatine somehow always inspires something like awe. It is but a little way, and they come to the ancient grave palace, above which the standard with the leopards and lilies, and the crescent for difference, hangs its heavy folds in the still air.

230.  “Old Royal Palace of Whitehall.” E. Sheppard, D.D.

231.  “Diary of Dr Edward Lake.” (Camden Miscellany.)

Another and greater King is entering the door unseen—for two dying children lie under that goodly roof. Kendal and Cambridge are indeed “riding post” to the edge of the dark river into whose waters those small feet are already almost plunged, and over them, tearless for all her bleeding heart, hangs the mother. Is it for sin of hers—is it a judgment on ambition—that no living son of her blood may carry on the line of English royalty? Can she give nothing, do nothing, to avert the coming doom?[232]

232.  The poor Duchess was in doubt which would die first. (Pepys.)

Someone, no doubt, tells the King that his errand is vain. The frail little lives are passing out of sight, and he turns away silent. He is moved and sorry. He is good-natured, even kind-hearted, when he remembers to be, but Prince Rupert’s noble face is clouded and the luminous eyes are misty, for no sorrow appeals to him in vain.

But worse evils are coming on England than even the loss of the seed-royal. The Dutch fleet is in the river, and coming up to Gravesend, intent on vengeance.

Charles II. has been unsparingly blamed for this disaster, but he was not altogether guilty. After the terrible visitations of the Plague and the Fire, he greatly impoverished himself to help the many destitute sufferers, refusing to press the Parliament to pay the sums voted for supplies, when those disastrous years made them fall short.[233] This led to the necessity of laying up ships which should have been kept in commission, contrary to the advice of the Duke of York and the emphatic warnings of Prince Rupert. No doubt the King had also yielded to the persuasions of Louis XIV., backed by Henrietta Maria, whose advice was always unlucky, and France was at this time but too ready to pull the strings in the background. Meanwhile another division of the Dutch, advancing up the Medway, had forced the boom laid across it for protection, and had actually burnt three men-of-war.

233.  Green’s “Short History of the English People.”

In the great palace of Whitehall all is in uproar, and wild confusion is reigning.[234] Rumours of fire and sword lose nothing by transmission from one to another. Some of the maids of honour believe anything and everything, even an immediate sack of London. Beautiful, brazen Castlemaine, carefully dishevelled like a Bacchante, is bewailing herself and hysterically protesting that she will be the first to be torn in pieces. Probably the person most unmoved by the clamour and its cause is the King himself, looking on cynically from the outside, as it were, with the quality of aloofness which has always stood him in good stead. And now, as we know, the mob, always prejudiced, always fickle, just because the Dutch are in the Thames, streams off tumultuously to Clarendon House and breaks the windows with great enthusiasm. To the builder and owner of that ill-omened mansion such an incident was probably but a slight and momentary aggravation. Clarendon himself writes from Whitehall on 14th June: “I had writt this farr, the case is much altred by the Dutch Fleete entring into the Ryver and tryumphing there to our great damage and how farr it may extend farther we yett know not; the particulars I leave to others (but upon the whole) matters not though a peace may be bought deare and usually when an unreasonable price asked for it it is an infallible sign that it is not to be had yet a peace in this conjunction would be very reasonable.”[235] This letter was originally partly written in cypher. The Chancellor’s signature is very tremulous, testifying possibly to agitation of mind easily conceivable.

234.  “A Royal Cavalier: The Romance of Rupert, Prince Palatine.” Mrs Steuart Erskine.

235.  Harleian MS.

Thus for the Chancellor the end had truly come. A career of singular if varying brilliance was closing, alas! ingloriously. At his impeachment, his son-in-law, the Duke of York, who had never failed to stand by him since their connection, and who now wished to soften the blow, sent his old friend Bishop Morley to the fallen minister to say that the King wished him to leave the country. It needed only this. He over whose youth Edward Hyde had watched so faithfully, to the utmost of his power, had done with him. He did not want to see his face any more, and he never did see it. Clarendon bent his head to the storm, and submitted. Perhaps his strong heart broke then, and nothing else mattered very much. At any rate he obeyed the royal mandate, the last he was to receive, and before the year was out he had left England, as it proved, for ever.

He went first to Calais, then to Rouen, covering ground that must have been very familiar to him in earlier days. At Evreux, where he stayed for a time, his life was actually attempted by some English sailors, on the grounds that he had sold his country and robbed them of their pay.[236] This danger he escaped, and later, with the restlessness born of despondency and lack of occupation, he wandered south to Montpellier, proceeding thence to Moulins. Finally, however, he retraced his steps to Rouen. It was nearer, after all, to England; and there, at no great distance from the country he loved so well, he died in December 1673.[237]

236.  Chalmers’ Biographical Dictionary.

237.  He was buried in Westminster Abbey, on the north side of the Chapel of Henry VII.

EDWARD, EARL OF CLARENDON

It is a pitiful story. Whether Clarendon was entirely blameless of all the accusations against him, it is useless to speculate, but at least it must be conceded that from the first he had set before him high ideals, and if he fell short of these, it was no more than many—nay most—had done. It was an age, pre-eminently, when it was said that every man had his price. If so, then Edward Hyde’s was a very high one; but it is much pleasanter and indeed more reasonable to believe in his innocence, as such belief is far more consonant with his character as it is presented to us by his contemporaries. And at least he knew heavy griefs. Estranged more and more as time went on from the daughter he loved so deeply, severed altogether from her and from his sons, driven in disgrace from his country to spend in exile a lonely old age, the close of Clarendon’s story presents a very sorrowful picture, and if one were inclined to moralise, preaches an eloquent sermon on the vanity of human greatness. But it is not likely that the ex-Chancellor himself needed any such reminders. He had seen too much of the mutability of all things here, to be quite unprepared for vicissitudes, and he had at last learnt how to face with dignity the trials which he was destined to suffer. For one thing we certainly owe him a debt of gratitude, namely, for his “History of the Rebellion.” In that noble record he has painted for us, as no other hand could have done it, the actors in that great drama, perhaps the greatest ever presented on the stage of English history, and has made them live for all time to his readers.

This great and important work Clarendon wrote at a house in Swallowfield in Berkshire, which was the home of his eldest son’s second wife, Flower, the widow of Sir William Buckhouse. Lord Cornbury’s first wife had been Theodosia, the daughter of the gallant and hapless Arthur, Lord Capel, one of the most perfect heroes of a time which produced not a few such.[238]

238.  Evelyn’s “Correspondence.” To Mr Sprat, Chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham, afterwards Bishop of Rochester.

As before said, if Clarendon was indeed guilty of himself receiving bribes, or of the knowledge that the King’s hands were not clean in this respect, there exists no proof of either, and if he needed or desired any revenge for his disgrace and broken fortunes, he might have found it in the decadence of the government of his country which immediately followed. He had at least one satisfaction—that his royal son-in-law had voted against his sentence of banishment, but it was probably only an aggravation of his trials that Bishop Morley, whom he had been wont to call “the best man alive,” was involved in his disgrace. On this account the bishop was removed from his post of spiritual director to the Duchess of York, an office which he had filled with little intermission since the Flemish days when he had found a shelter under Hyde’s hospitable roof.[239] But such a reverse was inevitable. The great tree in its fall was destined to drag down with it the lesser ones whose roots were twisted with its own. “None of us liveth to himself,” are words which hold good of more than Clarendon and his friends.

239.  When Morley was translated to Winchester he took Izaak Walton and his son with him, and the former died there in 1683. Winchester House at Chelsea was bought by Morley, and belonged to the See until Bishop Tomlin’s day. (Dean Plumptre’s “Life of Ken.”)

So Edward Hyde passes out of the arena of his day and country, a conspicuous figure through many stormy years, and his place knows him no more. His rival, Buckingham, remains to hold the stage a little longer, and in some eyes he may be all-sufficient, since Reresby can call him “the finest gentleman of person and wit I think I ever saw”; and King Louis, against whose judgment there can surely be no appeal, pronounces him “the only English gentleman” he had ever seen. In the light of such shining attributes, the sombre colours wherein Chancellor Hyde is invested retire altogether into the shade; yet perhaps when the two figures are placed side by side in the estimation of a later age, opinions may be reversed as to which is after all the finer gentleman. The blood of the Hydes was to the full as ancient as that of the Villiers, and for the rest who can doubt which served with the stancher devotion God and the king, or lived the more blameless and unstained life? Many great names stand out from the record of the England of that day, names of which she has reason to be proud—Falkland, Hopton, Bevil Grenville, Southampton, Capel—yet to his honour it may be said that Edward Hyde is not unworthy of a place among them.

CHAPTER VII

THE TURNING-POINT

We come now, in the course of her story, to the most momentous epoch in the life of Anne Hyde, the period, namely, of her conversion to the Church of Rome. And here it must be noted that she was in no respect ignorant, nor uninstructed in the dogmas of her own Communion. It has been shown that in her early youth she was placed by her father under the teaching of Morley, during the time when he lived, an honoured guest, in Hyde’s household in the days of exile at Breda.[240]

240.  Burnet’s “History of His Own Time,” ed. 1766. “She was bred to great strictness in religion.”

He, as we know, had been in other days a friend of such great and noble souls as Hammond and Sanderson, Chillingworth and Falkland. He had ministered to Charles I. in his captivity at Newmarket, and had stood on the scaffold with Capel. At The Hague he became an honorary chaplain to the Queen of Bohemia, who knew merit when she saw it.

From the time when Morley assumed the spiritual directorship of the twelve-year-old daughter of his protector Hyde, he taught her to use regular confession, which she seems to have done unswervingly, and her confidence in him may be gauged from the fact that as soon as her position as Duchess of York was firmly established, she chose him to continue her guide “in those things that concerned her spiritual and everlasting condition.” It has been already noticed that at one time Morley had been suspected of Calvinism, on which account he was disliked by Laud; and the story is told of him, that when asked what Arminians held, he answered with some acerbity that they held but bishoprics and deaneries. But his later close friendship with the saintly Ken seems to establish his orthodoxy, and we find him preaching against Presbyterianism.[241] He, for his part, describes his pupil Anne as being “as devout and charitable as ever I knew any of her age and sex.” After her marriage she carefully kept the canonical hours of the “Public Service of God in her Chapel with those of her family.” Besides this, she was a regular and devout communicant. “And always,” says the bishop,[242] “the day before she received she made a voluntary confession of what she thought she had offended God in, either by omission or by commission, professing her sorrow for it, and promising amendment of it, and kneeling down she desired and received absolution in the form and words prescribed by our Church. This for her devotion. And as for Charity, she did every time she received the Sacrament, besides five pounds in gold she gave at the altar, she gave me twenty pounds to give to such as I thought had most need of it, and did best deserve it. This was her ordinary and constant way of expressing her charity. But that which she did at other Times and upon extraordinary Occasions I believe was very much more, especially in the Time of the Great Plague. To conclude I remember she told the late Archbishop of Canterbury (Sheldon) and me when we were both together with her that if she did not so much in point of Charity as it was fit for her to do, it should be his fault and mine, and not hers.”[243]

241.  Izaak Walton was also much with him, probably owing to his connection with Ken.

242.  “Register and Chronicle,” by Kennet, Bishop of Peterborough. (Morley.)

243.  Burnet was very bitter against Sheldon, who he declared “seemed to have no great sense of religion” (“History of His Own Times”). “He {Sheldon} belonged to the school of Andrewes and Laud, and at one time was almost the sole support of Jeremy Taylor. He, by the way, fearlessly remained at Lambeth throughout the Plague” (Dictionary of National Biography).

It is strange and perplexing to read this obviously honest testimony side by side with the dismal tales of light conduct, of avarice, of gluttony, of reckless gambling, which were freely told; and it is impossible to refrain from, at least, trying to discount some of these scandals, knowing as we do the age and state of society which gave birth to them. It may be objected that the King, whose way of life was so unhappily notorious, steadily communicated, himself, in the Chapel Royal on the great festivals; but from the account just quoted, it seems evident that Duchess Anne’s reception of the Divine Mysteries was no perfunctory act. For the rest, impossible as it is to reconcile apparent contradictions, one can only fall back on the truism of the contradictions of poor human nature itself.

With regard to the change of faith presently to be traced, as late as 1667, at the time therefore of her father’s banishment, Bishop Morley persists in describing Anne as still “a zealous Protestant,” “and zealous to make Protestants,” though this assertion may be coloured by the writer’s prepossessions. Her relations with Morley and also with Sheldon brought her into contact with the mysterious adventurer Ferdinand de Macedo.[244] Sir John Bramston, Clarendon’s old friend, had been accused by this person, prompted by Henry Mildmay, Bramston’s political enemy, of having changed his religion. Macedo himself (a Portuguese), who had declared himself a convert from the Roman Church, was recommended to the Duchess as an object of charity. She forthwith allowed him a yearly pension of thirty pounds, and spoke for him to her two advisers, who, in their turn, each made him an allowance of ten pounds, the Bishop of Winchester, moreover, placing him at Christ Church and even advancing a further sum of thirty pounds to buy necessaries. However, the man for whom so much was done was found to be utterly unworthy, for he drank and gambled, and even had a discreditable brawl with a Frenchman whom he threw downstairs. The Dean of Christ Church and Canon Lockey, at the end of their patience, very naturally appealed to Morley to remove him, as a cause of grave scandal. The latter, as well as Sheldon, promptly withdrew the allowance aforesaid, but out of good nature said little or nothing of the matter to the Duchess, who, however, hearing something of it from others, questioned the bishop closely, and being satisfied that her bounty was misapplied, took it away. Macedo, who probably traded on the fact that he was a Portuguese, and thus a fellow-countryman of the Queen, was quite unabashed at being unmasked, and with great effrontery announced that he had been turned out of the university for testifying against Popery and the Prayer Book. The exasperated Morley called him, with apparently only too much reason, “a counterfeit pretended convert” whom “Maimbourg magnifies so much, tho’ he knows he proved himself to be an arrant impostor and profligated wretch.”[245]

244.  “Autobiography of Sir John Bramston.”

245.  “Register and Chronicle,” by Kennet, Bishop of Peterborough.

A year or two earlier, a letter from Anne to the Bishop of Durham, dated 10th September 1665, expresses her attitude with regard to the Anglican Church at that period.

“Right Reverend Father in God,—Though you might assure yourselfe that you should alwaies find that reception with mee which is due to your quality and merits yet I should have been sorry that your respect to mee should have induced you to a journey injurious to your health the preservation of wh for the good of the Church I have great reason to wish and doe desire you to be perswaded that I should be glad of any occasion whereby I might show you that I am

“Your affectionate friend

“Anne.”[246]

246.  Rawlinson MS. (Bodleian).

This was written from York where the writer was with her husband on one of their “progresses,” and the prelate to whom it was addressed was no other than the saintly Cosin. During his exile at Charenton, near Paris, he had been much engaged in controversy, on one occasion, with the Prior of the English Benedictines, whom he had defeated by the force of “much learning and sound reasoning.”

At the Restoration he had returned to his deanery of Peterborough, where he was the first person to use the Restored Prayer Book in the cathedral, but the same year was consecrated Bishop of Durham, where he died in 1672,[247] in the seventy-eighth year of his age. He displayed extraordinary munificence throughout his episcopate, and one of his bequests recalls a very real need of that period, for he left a sum for the redemption of Christian slaves.

247.  “Sufferings of the Clergy.” Walker.

For some time after the incident of Macedo’s exposure, the Duchess of York seems to have been to all intents and purposes a loyal churchwoman, and indeed to Morley himself she never owned the change in her faith, even though she stayed at the episcopal palace at Farnham after she wrote the letter of recantation which will be noticed later.

Moreover Blandford, Bishop of Worcester, succeeded Bishop Morley in her household after the latter’s resignation when involved in Clarendon’s disgrace; therefore up to that time she had certainly not severed her connection with the Church of her baptism.

There now comes the difficult task of seeking the motive for so grave a resolution.

Burnet, who is never apt to attribute the best motives for any action, declares that Anne took the step in the desperate hope of winning back her husband’s affections, alienated from her by the affair with Henry Sidney. She, so says Burnet, “lost the power she had over him so entirely that no method she could think of was likely to recover it except one.”[248]

248.  Burnet’s “History of His Own Time.”

But to this assertion Anne’s own avowal, which carries the stamp of conviction, gives the lie; and besides, as the Duke of York had not then, nor did for some time after, openly abjure the Anglican Church, his wife’s strong common-sense must have told her that her own apostasy could only have a disastrous effect on the future fortunes of both. That she did not renounce her Church lightly is certain. She had read much on the subject, and among other books she was conversant with Heylin’s “History of the Reformation.”[249] There is no evidence that the Duke’s sister-in-law, the Queen, influenced her in any way. Indeed, poor Catherine was not a person to exercise such a quality, nor to bring pressure to bear on anyone, devout and conscientious though she was from first to last. Besides, Duchess Anne was too strong willed and resolute to bow to any one’s ruling, least of all to that of one so yielding, placable and self-effacing as the neglected wife of Charles II.

249.  “Adventures of King James II.,” by the author of “Life of Sir Kenelm Digby,” introduction by F. A. Gasquet, D.D.

It is impossible to lay a finger on the precise period when Anne first began to waver in her allegiance to the Church, but the falling off was first suspected in 1669, and not before. When her neglect of the Holy Eucharist was first noticed by him, Morley spoke to her plainly and faithfully on the point, when she gave him an evasive answer, alleging as deterrent reasons the state of her health and the claims of business, and at the same time declared that no Roman priest had ever spoken to her of these questions. She also voluntarily promised the bishop, that if any scruples should occur to her, she would at once tell him of them. This, however, so he afterwards told Burnet, she never did. It is strange and sad that, after so many years of complete confidence, Anne should shrink from consulting this faithful adviser, but there were reserves in her character which were manifested to the end. Possibly a certain pride had something to do with it, a reluctance to own herself capable of change in any direction, and she preferred to wrestle with her perplexities unaided and unthwarted. At last the King became conscious of his sister-in-law’s continued abstention from Holy Communion, and questioned his brother on the subject.[250] The Duke at once owned the fact of his wife’s conversion, and her intention of being received into the Roman Communion.[251] On this he was peremptorily charged to keep the momentous secret, at all hazards, for the King, always astute and, when he chose to be, far-seeing, was too well aware of the temper of the English people to run the risk of making public a matter of such importance. It was in August 1670 that Anne was formally reconciled to the Church of Rome by Father Hunt, a Franciscan, who with Lady Cranmer, her lady-in-waiting, and one Dupuy, a servant of the Duke, were for a time the sole depositaries of this matter; for it does not appear that even the Queen was at this time, at any rate, a party to the secret. It must be borne in mind as giving weight to the King’s prohibition, that Anne was the wife of the heir presumptive to the Crown, and the mother of his apparent successors, and this rendered her faith, in the eyes of the nation, of the last importance.

250.  “Life of James II.” Rev. J. S. Clarke, from original MSS. in Carlton House, 1816. “A suspicion the Duchess was inclined to be a Roman Catholic. She that had all her life been very regular in receiving once a month the Sacrament in the Church of England’s way, and upon all occasions had shown herself very zealous in her profession.”

251.  Macpherson’s “Original Papers,” 1775 ed.

In that same month of August[252] the Duchess of York wrote the confession now transcribed, which was published by James after his accession to the throne “for his Household and Chappel” in 1686.

252.  It is dated the 20th of the month.

“It is so reasonable to expect that a person always Bred up in the Church of England, and as well instructed in the Doctrine of it, as the best Divines, and her capacity could make her, should be liable to many censures for leaving That, and making herself a member of the Roman Catholic Church, to which, I confess, I was one of the greatest enemies it ever had; That I chose rather to endeavour to satisfy my friends by reading this Paper then to have the trouble to answer all the questions that may dayly be asked of me. And first, I do protest in the presence of Almighty God, That no Person, Man or Woman, Directly nor Indirectly, ever said anything to me (since I came into England) or used the least endeavour to make me change my Religion. It is a blessing I wholly owe to Almighty God, and I hope the hearing of a Prayer I dayly made Him, ever since I was in France and Flanders, Where seeing much of the Devotion of the Catholicks, (though I had very little myself) I made it my continual request to Almighty God: That if I were not, I might before I died be in the true Religion: I did not in the least doubt, but that I was so, and never had any manner of scruple till November last, when reading a book called the History of the Reformation, by Doctor Heylin which I had heard very much commended, and had been told, if ever I had any doubt in my Religion, that would settle me: Instead of which, I found it the description of the horridest Sacriledges in the World: and could find no reason why we left the Church, but for Three the most abominable ones that were ever heard of amongst Christians. First, Henry the Eighth Renounced the Pope’s Authority because he would not give him leave to part with his Wife and marry Another in her life time: Secondly Edward the Sixth was a Child and govern’d by his Uncle who made his Estate out of Church Lands: and then Queen Elizabeth, who being no Lawful Heiress to the Crown could have no way to keep it but by renouncing a Church that could never suffer so unlawful a thing to be done by one of Her Children. I confess, I cannot think the Holy Ghost could ever be in such Counsels and it is very strange that if the Bishops had no design but (as they say) the restoring us to the Doctrines of the Primitive Church, they should never think upon it how Henry the Eighth made the Breach upon so unlawful a Pretence. These scruples being raised, I began to consider of the difference between the Catholicks and Us, and Examin’d them as well as I could by the Holy Scriptures, which though I do not pretend to be able to understand, yet there are some things I found so easie that I cannot but wonder I had been so long without finding them out. As the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament, the Infallibility of the Church, Confession, and Praying for the Dead. After this I spoke severally to Two of the best Bishops we have in England, who both told me, there were many things in the Roman Church which (it were very much to be wished) we had kept. As Confession, which was no doubt commanded by God; That Praying for the Dead was one of the Ancient Things in Christianity. That for their parts they did it Daily, though they would not own it; but afterwards pressing one of them very much upon the other Points, he told me That if he had been bred a Catholick he would not change his Religion, but that being of another Church, wherein he was sure were all things necessary to Salvation, he thought it very ill to give that Scandal, as to leave that Church, wherein he had received his Baptism. All these Discourses did but add more to the desire I had to be a Catholick, and gave me the most terrible Agonies in the World, within myself. For all this, fearing to be rash in a matter of that Weight, I did all I could to satisfie myself, made it my Daily Prayer to God to settle me in the Right, and so went on Christmas Day to receive in the King’s Chappel, after which I was more troubled than ever, and could never be in quiet till I had told my desire to a Catholick who brought a Priest to me, and that was the First I ever did Converse with upon my Word. The more I spoke to him, the more I was Confirm’d in my design, and, as it is impossible for me to doubt of the words of our Blessed Saviour, who says the Holy Sacrament is his Body and Blood, so I cannot Believe, that He who is the author of all truth and who has promis’d to be with His Church to the End of the World would permit them to give that Holy Mystery to the Laiety but in one kind, if it were not Lawful so to do.

“I am not able, or, if I were, would I enter into Disputes with any Body, I only in short say this for the changing of my Religion, which I take God to Witness I would never have done if I had thought it possible to save my Soul otherwise. I think I need not say, it is any Interest in this World leads me to it; it will be plain enough to every body, that I must lose all the Friends and Credit I have here by it; and have very well weighed which I could best part with, my share in this world or the next; I thank God I found no difficulty in the Choice.

“My only Prayer is, that the poor Catholicks of this Nation may not suffer for my being of their Religion; That God would but give me Patience to bear them, and then, send me any affliction in this World, so I may enjoy a Blessed Eternity hereafter.”[253]

253.  Harleian MSS.; also “Copy of a paper written by the late Dutchess of York. Published by His Majesties command. Printed by Henry Hills, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Majesty for His Household and Chappel. 1686.”

The inherent weakness and insufficiency of the arguments put forward by the writer in this paper are manifest at once, but her sincerity can scarcely be impugned. Indeed, throughout her career this quality was always conspicuous in Anne Hyde, to an extent which often, in her relations with those about her, made for unpopularity.

It must be mentioned in this place that John Evelyn disbelieved the authorship of this letter. Writing to Bishop Morley as early as 1681, he says:

“Father Maimburg has had the impudence to publish at the end of his late Histoire du Calvinisme a pretended letter of the late Duchess of York intimating the motives of her deserting the Church of England, amongst other things to attribute it to the indifference, to call it no worse, of those two bishops upon whose advice she wholly depended as to the direction of her conscience and points of controversy. ’Tis the universal discourse that your Lordship is one of these bishops she mentions, if at least the letter be not suppositious, knowing you to have been the most domestic in the family, and one whom her Highness resorted to in all her doubts and spiritual concerns, not only during her former circumstances, but all the time of her greatness to the very last. It is therefore humbly and earnestly desired (as well as indeed expected) amongst all that are concerned for our religion and the great and worthy character which your Lordship bears, that your Lordship would do right to it, and publish to all the world how far you are concerned in this pretended charge and to vindicate yourself and our Church from what this bold man would have the world believe to the prejudice of both. I know your Lordship will be curious to read the passage yourself and do what becomes you upon this signal occasion, God having placed you in a station where you have no great one’s frowns to fear or flatter, and given you a zeal for the truth and for his Glory. With this assurance I humbly beg yr Lordship’s blessing.”[254]

254.  “Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn.”

We have already seen that Morley distinctly stated to Burnet that his pupil the Duchess had never asked his counsel in her difficulty, therefore he could not have been either of the bishops whom she cited, and a marginal note to Anne’s letter states, moreover, that the bishops referred to were Sheldon and Blandford. Evelyn, it is true, does not give the ground for his scepticism in the authenticity of the letter. He may or may not be right, but the fact of James’ order for its publication would seem to stamp it as genuine, even if the writer had been prejudiced, or mistaken, in her references to the bishops.

Anne’s dutiful and regular attendance on religious observances naturally drew attention to the neglect of them which she manifested in later years, but the secret was well kept, and though suspected in some quarters, did not leak out to the world in general in her lifetime.

We can, without much difficulty, picture the bitter heart-searchings, the doubt, the reluctance, intensified by failing health, which must have accompanied this momentous change; but we must at least give her credit for the absolute candour of her convictions.

There was one person who was deeply and specially affected by this departure on her part.

On her father, the exiled Chancellor, the news of his daughter’s change of religion inflicted a crushing blow, stanch as he had always shown himself to be to the Anglican Church.[255] His recollections of the great civil strife in which he had been so deeply involved were inextricably bound up with loyalty and devotion to that Church, as well as to the master who had undoubtedly suffered for her, and thus by that sacrifice secured her continuity. To Hyde, as to many others of his time and circumstances, the scaffold at Whitehall stood as a witness to the faith, invested with the glory of that most sacred memory. And now from the hand that was best beloved to him, came the wound that must rankle till the end.

255.  Burnet’s “History of His Own Time,” ed. 1766. “Her father was more troubled at her uncertainty than his own misfortunes.”

It is quite probable that the Chancellor had already suspicions of leanings towards Rome on the part of the Duke of York, and had to a great extent trusted in his daughter’s strength of character and influence as a deterrent; so that the unexpected defection on her part would be regarded by him as a disaster for the country no less than for herself.

At this unhappy juncture Clarendon therefore took up the pen, which in his hand was so trenchant a weapon, and addressed both husband and wife, separately, in words which deserve the strongest admiration and respect.

“Sr,—I have not p’sumed in any matter to approach yo’ Royall p’sence Since I have been marked with the Brand of Banishment, and I should still with the same awe forbear the p’sumption if I did not believe myselfe bound by all the Obligations of Duty to make this address to you. I have been acquainted to much with the p’sumption and impudence of the times in Raising false and scandalous Imputations and reproaches upon Innocent and worthy persons of all qualities to give any credit to those loud whispers which have been long scattered abroad concerning your Wives being shaken in her religion. But when those Whispers break out into noise most publick Persons begin to report that the Dutchess is become a Roman Catholick. When I heard that many worthy Persons of unquestionable Devotion to your Royall Highness, are not without some fear and apprehension of it, and many Reflections are made from them to the prejudice of your Royal Person, and even of the King’s Majesties, I hope it may not misbecome me at what distance soever to cast myself at your Feet, and beseech you to look to this matter, and to apply some Antidote to expel the Poyson of it. It is not possible your Royall Highness can be without zeal and Entire Devotion for that Church for the Purity and Preservation whereof your blessed Father made himself a Sacrifice and to the Restoration whereof You have contributed so much yourself, and which highly deserves the King’s Protection and Yours since there can be no possible defection in the hearts of the People whilst due Reverence is made to the Church. Your Wife is so generally believed to have so perfect Duty and Intire Resignation to the Will of your Highness, that any defection in Her from Her Religion will be imputed to want of Circumspection in you and not using your Authority, or to your connivance. I need not tell the ill consequences that such a mistake would be attended with, in reference to your Royale Highness, and even to the King himself whose greatest security (under God) is in the affection and Duty of his Protestant subjects, your Royall Highness well knows how far I have always been from wishing that the Roman Catholicks should be prosecuted with severity but I less wish it should ever be in their power to be able to prosecute those who differ from them since we well know how little moderation they would or could use. And if this which People so much talk of (I hope without ground) should fall out, it might very probably raise a greater storm against the Roman Catholicks in general than modest Men can wish, since after such a breach any Jealousies of their presumption would seem reasonable. I have written to the Dutchess with the freedom and affection of a troubled and perplexed Father. I do most humbly beseech your Royall Highness by your Authority to rescue Her from bringing a Mischief upon You and herself that can never be repaired; and to think it worthy your wisdom to remove and dispell those reproaches (how false soever) by better Evidence than Contempt, and hope you do believe that no severity I have or can undergo, shall in any degree lessen or diminish my most profound Duty to His Majesty or your Royall Highness, but that I do with all imaginable Obedience submit to your good Pleasure in all things.

“God preserve Your Royall Highness and keep me in your favour.

“Sir,

“Your R. H. most Humble and obedient Servant,

“Clarendon.”[256]

256.  Lansdown MSS.; also State Tracts, 1660 to 1689.

So much for the letter of remonstrance to his son-in-law. Through all the stately, measured, elaborate phraseology and studied deference the writer’s deep anxiety may be traced quite distinctly, but in the words addressed to Anne herself, sorrow, affection, warning, reproof speak, as is natural, with undisguised warmth. The father is yearning over the child who is passing beyond his ken, and from the place of his lonely exile he gathers up his utmost powers, to lead, if it may be, the wandering lamb home to the fold.

“You have much reason,” so run the words, “to believe that I have no mind to trouble you or displease you, especially in an argument that is so unpleasant and grievous to myself; but as no distance of place that is between us, in respect of our Residence or the greater distance in Respect of the high condition you are in, can make me less your Father or absolve me from performing those obligations which that Relation requires from me, So when I receive any Credible Advertisement of what reflects upon you, in point of Honour, Conscience or Discretion, I ought not to omit the informing You of it, or administering such advice to You as to my understanding seems reasonable, and which I must still hope will have some Credit with You, I will confess to You that what You wrote to me many Months since, upon those Reproaches which I told you were generally reported concerning your defection in Religion, gave me so much satisfaction that I believed them to proceed from that ill Spirit of the Times that delights in Slanders and Calumny, but I must tell you, the same report increases of late very much, and I myself saw a Letter the last week from Paris, from a person who said the English Embassador assured him the day before, that the Dutchess was become a Roman Catholick, and which makes great Impression upon me, I am assured that many good men in England who have great Affection for You and Me, and who have thought nothing more impossible than that there should be such a change in You, are at present under much affliction with the observation of a great change in your course of Life and that constant Exercise of the Devotion which was so notorious and do apprehend from your frequent Discourses that you have not the same Reverence and Devotion which You use to have for the Church of England, the Church in which You were Baptized, and the Church the best constituted and the most free from Errors of any Christian Church this day in the world, and that some persons by their insinuations have prevailed with You to have a better Opinion of that which is most opposite to it, the Church of Rome, than the integrity thereof deserves. It is not yet in my power to believe that your Wit and Understanding (with God’s blessing upon both) can suffer you to be shaken further than with Melancholick reflections upon the Iniquity and wickedness of the Age we live in, which discredits all Religion, and which with equal license breaks into the Professors of all, and prevails upon the Members of all Churches, and whose Manners will have no benefit from the Faith of any Church. I presume You do not intangle Yourself in the particular Controversies between the Romanists and us, or think Yourself a competent Judge of all difficulties which occur therein; and therefore it must be some fallacious Argument of Antiquity and Universality confidently urged by men who know less than many of those you are acquainted with, and ought less to be believed by you, that can raise any Doubts or Scruples in you, and if You will with equal temper hear those who are well able to inform You in all such particulars it is not possible for you to suck in that Poyson which can only corrupt and prevail over you by stopping Your own Ears and shutting Your own Eyes. There are but two persons in the World who have greater authority with You than I can pretend to, and am sure they both suffer more in the Rumour, and would suffer much more if there were ground for it, than I can do, and truly I am as likely to be deceived myself or to deceive you as a man who endeavours to pervert You in Your Religion; And therefore I beseech You to let me have so much Credit with You as to perswade You to Communicate any Doubts or Scruples which occur to you before You suffer them to make too deep an Impression upon You. The common Argument that there is no Salvation out of the Church and that the Church of Rome is the only true Church is both irrational and untrue; there are many Churches in which Salvation may be attained as well as in any one of them, and were many even in the Apostles time otherwise they would not have directed their epistles to so many Severall Churches in which there were different Opinions received and very different Doctrines taught. There is indeed but one Faith in which we can be saved; the stedfast belief of the Birth, Passion and Resurrection of our Saviour; and every Church that receives and embraces that Faith is in a state of Salvation, if the Apostles Preach true Doctrine, the reception and retention of many errors do’s not destroy the Essence of a Church, if it did, the Church of Rome would be in as ill, if not in a worse Condition than most other Christian Churches, because its Errors are of a greater Magnitude and more destructive to Religion. Let not the Canting Discourse of the Universality and Extent of that Church which has as little of Truth as the rest, prevail over You, they who will imitate the greatest part of the World, must turn Heathens, for it is generally believed that above half the World is possessed by them, and that the Mahometans possess more than half the remainder; There is as little question that of the rest which is inhabited by Christians, one part of four is not of the communion of the Church of Rome, and God knows that in that very Communion there is as great discord in Opinion, and in matters of as great moment, as is between the other Churches. I hear you do in publick discourses dislike some things in the Church of England, as the marriage of the Clergy, which is a point that no Roman Catholic will pretend to be of the Essence of Religion, and is in use in many places which are of the Communion of the Church of Rome, as in Bohemia, in those parts of the Greek Church which submit to the Roman; And all men know, that in the late Council of Trent, the Sacrament of both kinds, and liberty of the clergy to marry, was very passionately press’d both by the Emperor and King of France for their Dominions, and it was afterwards granted to Germany, though under such conditions as made it ineffectual; which however shows that it was not, nor ever can be look’d upon as matter of Religion. Christianity was many hundred years old, before such a restraint was ever heard of in the Church; and when it was endeavoured, it met with great opposition, and was never submitted to. And as the positive Inhibition seems absolutely unlawful so the Inconveniences which result from thence will upon a just disquisition be found superior to those which attend the liberty which Christian Religion permits. Those Arguments which are not strong enough to draw persons from the Roman Communion into that of the Church of England, when Custom and Education, and a long stupid resignation of all their faculties to their Teachers, usually shuts out all reason to the contrary, may yet be abundant to retain those who have been baptized, and Bred and Instructed in the Grounds and Principles of that Religion which are in truth not only founded upon the clear Authority of the Scriptures, but upon the consent of Antiquity and the practice of the Primitive Church, and men who look into Antiquity know well by what Corruption and Violence and with what constant and Continual Opposition, those Opinions which are contrary to ours, crept into the World, and how unwarrantably the Authority of the Bishop of Rome, which alone supports all the rest, came to prevail, who hath no more pretence of Authority and Power in England, than the Bishop of Paris and Toledo can as reasonably lay claim to, and is so far from being matter of Catholick Religion, that the Pope hath so much and no more to do in France or Spain or any other Catholick Dominion, than the Crown and Laws and Constitution of several Kingdoms gave him leave, which makes him so little (if at all) considered in France, and so much in Spain; And therefore the English Catholicks which attribute so much to him make themselves very unwarrantable of another Religion than the Catholick Church professeth and without doubt they who desert the Church of England, of which they are Members, and become thereby disobedient to the Ecclesiastical and Civil Laws of their Country and therein renounce their Subjection to the State as well as to the Church (which are grievous sins) had need to have a better excuse than the meeting with some doubts which they could not answer, and less than a manifest evidence that their Salvation is desperate in that Communion cannot serve their turn; and they who imagine they have such an evidence, ought rather to suspect that their Understanding hath forsaken them, and that they are become mad, than that the Church which is replenished with all Learning and Piety requisite, can betray them to Perdition. I beseech you to consider (which I hope will overrule those ordinary Doubts and Objections which may be infus’d into you) that if you change your Religion, you renounce all Obedience and Affection to your Father, who loves you so tenderly that such an odious Mutation would break his heart, you condemn your Father and your Mother (whose incomparable Virtue, Piety and Devotion hath plac’d her in Heaven) for having impiously Educated you; and you declare the Church and State, to both which you owe Reverence and Subjection, to be in your Judgment Antichristian; you bring irreparable dishonour, scandal and prejudice to the Duke your Husband to whom you ought to pay all imaginable Duty, and whom I presume is much more precious to you than your own life, and all possible ruine to your Children of whose company and conversation you must look to be depriv’d, for God forbid that after such an Apostacie, you should have any power in the Education of your Children. You have many Enemies, whom you herein would abundantly gratifie, and some Friends, whom you will thereby (at least as far as in you lies) perfectly destroy; and afflict many others who have deserved well of you. I know you are not inclined to any part of this mischief, and therefore offer those Considerations, as all those particulars would be the infallible Consequence of such a Conclusion. It is to me the saddest Circumstance of my Banishment that I may not be admitted in such a season as this, to confer with you, when I am confident I could satisfie you in all your Doubts, and make it appear to you that there are many Absurdities in the Roman Religion inconsistent with your Judgment and Understanding, and many Impieties inconsistent with your Conscience; so that before you can submit to the Obligations of Faith, you must divest yourself of your Natural Reason and Common Sense, and captivate the distastes of your own conscience to the Impositions of an Authority which hath not any pretence to oblige or advise you. If you will not with freedom communicate the Doubts which occur to you, to those near you of whose Learning and Piety you have had much experience, let me Conjure you to impart them to me, and to expect my answer before you suffer them to prevail over you. God bless you and yours.”[257]

257.  Lansdown MS.

It is a long, stilted, tedious letter, read under present-day conditions, and the methods used by the writer in argument hardly commend themselves, but, especially towards the end, the anxiety of the father’s heart is made quite evident. The great lawyer marshals all the force of controversy at his command in the vain hope of influencing his daughter and reversing the decision so dreaded by him. He appeals to her heart, no less than to her head.[258] Husband, children, friends—he places before her the possible loss of all, the harm that may accrue to them; he leaves, as far as may be, nothing unsaid, nothing untried. It is curious and significant that one sentence reveals the fact that Clarendon was aware of his daughter’s unpopularity in certain quarters. “You have many enemies,” he says, as he points to the triumph which her change of faith would afford them as one reason, if an unworthy one, against it. The pathetic significance of this last letter is driven home all the more forcibly for this reason—that she to whom these weighty words were addressed, doubtless with many prayers that they might prevail, was destined never to read them. Death stepped in, and for ever sealed the page.

258.  “It is well known that when Kings and Princesses of the Blood make an alliance with a subject, their arms are not put into the Royal Escutcheon, nor did ever the late Duchess of York call the Lord Chancellor father, nor did ever the late King James call the Earls of Clarendon and Rochester brothers, nor the Princesses Mary and Anne term them as uncles. Indeed the late Chancellor, when he wrote letters of advice to the late Duchess in relation to her changing her religion made use of the style of Daughter, which indeed he ought not to have done” (“Aylesbury Memoirs.” Roxburghe Club).

“At Queen Anne’s accession, the second Lord Clarendon, her uncle, came to see her, and simply said, ‘I wish to see my niece’—which meant that her brother was now King, and she but a usurper. He had also rebuked her for her flight to Nottingham at the time of her father’s reverses. On her part Anne would not receive her uncle without the oath of allegiance, and this he refused” (“Queen Anne and her Court.” P. F. Williams Ryan.)

As already mentioned, the fact of the Duchess of York’s conversion was not known for some time later, though suspicion was soon busy on the subject, and the Court, in high excitement, buzzed with the matter.

It was probably a trial to any one so outspoken and downright as Duchess Anne to conceal a fact of which she was certainly not ashamed, but the commands of the King conveyed to her through his brother, were peremptory and stringent, and she consented to hold her tongue for the present. As things turned out there was soon no reason for silence, except in so far as her change might have affected others. So the royal convert practised her new faith in silence. The chaplains shook their heads as Sunday after Sunday the Duchess turned away from “God’s Board.” Morley was no longer at her right hand, and the others spoke only aside to each other—not to her. Anne was never very approachable, and she had long learned the value of her position in checking inconvenient inquiries. Sweet-faced Margaret Blagge grieved silently, but she was very young, and dared not speak, even if the exigencies of her post would have allowed it.

The Duke of York, after his exercise of authority and the message he had transmitted from the King, said nothing. The time for confidence between those two was long past, and though he secretly sympathised with his wife in the step she had taken—his own subsequent action is warrant sufficient for that—estrangement had become a habit, and the party wall dividing husband and wife needed a stronger force still to throw it down. Perhaps a word or two may have passed between the new convert and Queen Catherine. It is more than likely, indeed, but the latter, timid and shrinking, was not constituted to uphold any one, and besides, she was far too much in awe of the King, too pathetically anxious to please him, to be capable of running counter to any commands he might choose to enforce. She could, and probably did, give approbation, sympathy, for what they were worth, but of these Anne stood in no need, then nor at any other time. Her position was one of “lonely splendour,” and she had long learnt to stand alone and carve out her own path. No doubt the lesson had been a bitter one, but she had learnt it once for all. During this year, moreover—1670—the Duke was seriously ill,[259] and this fact may have aided in the estrangement from his wife, or at any rate in the withholding of complete confidence from him.

259.  “Adventures of King James II.,” by the author of “Life of Sir Kenelm Digby.”

It was in other respects a momentous year for the whole royal house in England, and that in a way to be presently described. An unexpected and sinister development was to change in some degree the aspect of things.

CHAPTER VIII

THE END

As one writes these two simple words “The End” across the heading of this final chapter, one is reminded to pause and reflect upon them.

The end—of what? Of a brief but splendid pageant—of a heavy burden of sorrow—of a life of resolute, indomitable pride?

Respice finem—Consider the end. Surely, of all who have attained to high places, or have longed after them, Anne Hyde should have taken for her own this motto, should have read and marked and inwardly digested it.

And yet, would it have availed anything? Does it ever avail?

When our eyes are dazzled by the light that for the moment seems all-pervading, they cannot see the shadows that lie beyond, nor would they even if they could.

Here, then, we look on at the removal of a figure, concrete enough in her own time and to her own contemporaries, but to us curiously elusive, even visionary. It is strange, because for one occupying the position she did for ten years of English history, Anne, Duchess of York, had left personally a very slight impression on that position. The place that knew her was so soon content to know her no more, the gap she left was so quickly filled.

It is not to her but to her children that we must look for any consideration of her life as important. No doubt in the early days in Flanders Edward Hyde watched the unfolding of his daughter’s keen intelligence with hope and confidence as a factor in her future. It was afterwards that her “vaulting ambition” was destined to “o’erleap itself,” and so weigh her down under “the burthen of an honour into which she was not born.”

It does not need much reflection to point the moral here, it is obvious enough and sorrowful enough.

During the summer of the year 1670, the same year which saw the Duchess of York’s conversion to the Church of Rome, the King’s only remaining sister, the Duchesse d’Orléans, paid what proved to be her last and also her most momentous visit to her native country, a visit that might have been fraught with such disastrous consequences to England. It is not quite apparent whether Henrietta herself fully appreciated all that her mission entailed—the mission she accepted so light-heartedly at the hands of her magnificent brother-in-law, the French king. She had never displayed any great aptitude for diplomacy, nor indeed much interest in such questions, but had been content to float on the surface of life like an airy butterfly, a creature of sun and shower. This being so, it was a very easy task indeed for Louis to use her as his tool and complaisant go-between. Madame and her elder brother, we know, loved each other very deeply; he—Louis XIV.—probably loved nobody at all, at least this is the conclusion which seems forced upon us, therefore he stood in the far stronger position. Madame believed, as it was easy to make her believe, that in carrying out King Louis’ instructions she was doing great things for France; that for her sake Charles II. must agree to proposals of which possibly she did not fully grasp the magnitude, but which tended to place England under the heel of her neighbour. It must also be here borne in mind that Henrietta was to all intents and purposes a Frenchwoman. She had been brought up from infancy in France, and that country commanded all her sympathies and prejudices. Most likely she regarded England as an alien country, which had slain her father and driven her family into exile for years, and which would be all the better for drastic treatment, if it happened to be inflicted. Moreover, it was the excuse for a welcome excursion, a visit to her brothers, a short respite from the society of Monsieur, which was now always an infliction, a fact which can scarcely be wondered at. Therefore Madame started on her journey in high spirits, in consonance with the season of summer which was just now flinging its gifts over the earth and shedding beauty in its path, the beauty of serene skies, of waving grass, of radiant flowers.

This visit of Madame’s was, it is true, to be but a flying one. She was not even to come to London at all, and a plea was put forth for this marked abstention which carries us back to the year of the Restoration, and her mother’s bitter attitude towards the marriage of the Duke of York. It seemed very evident that even now, at the distance of ten years after that marriage, the haughty Stuart princess could not bring herself to meet her English sister-in-law on equal terms. It was clearly impossible, so we are told, that Madame should now come to London, “for she will not yeild ye place to ye Dutchesse of Yorke, nor can it be allowed that the Dutchesse of York should yeild it unto her.”[260] It was the question fought for years before, to be revived anew, it is hard to see why, on this occasion. However, on consideration a compromise was finally arranged by certain wise counsellors, the method adopted being that of transferring the place of meeting to Dover, where, fortunately, it seemed that matters of precedence might, in a measure, be conveniently waived, to the satisfaction of all parties therein concerned. It was furthermore settled for the nonce by the decision that the Duchess of York should yield the “pas” to Madame in “this Kingdome,” because it was remembered that the Duke of Orleans had always taken care to give it to his cousin the Duke of York when in France.

260.  “Verney Memoirs.”

So, this point being finally decided, the King and his brother set out for Dover, there to meet their sister, and they were followed thither later by the Queen and the Duchess of York.

All the town proceeded there as well; that is, everybody who was anybody. The wits and the beaux, the beauties of the Court, “the King’s musicke” and the Duke’s players, “all the bravery that could be got on such a sudden,”[261] grave statesmen and people who had nothing grave about them, besides those who went frankly for amusement and no more. The Dover road, the most famous road in the kingdom, which had known through the far-back centuries the possessors of the most honoured names passing in long procession to and fro, which had seen the victors and vanquished of the hundred years’ war, was alive with travellers of all conditions. Coaches, horsemen, pack-horses, waggons with provisions, waggons with fine clothes, tramping beggars, itinerant musicians, broken soldiers ready for any fray or wrangling for a groat. It was a seventeenth-century Canterbury pilgrimage which yet lacked a Chaucer for its worthy chronicler.

261.  “Verney Memoirs.”

Although Monsieur could not be said to display at this time any overweening attachment to his wife, he apparently entirely disapproved of this visit to England, the real object of which was concealed from him, as he could not be trusted with any matter of importance, and it was afterwards remembered that he said to some of his intimate friends that he did not think the Duchess would live very long. Moreover an astrologer is reported to have said that he (d’Orléans) would have several wives, which prophecy was probably highly agreeable to him. He accompanied Henrietta for part of her journey, however, joining her before Dunkirk, from which port she embarked on the 24th May.[262] It is pleasant to record that when Madame did meet the despised sister-in-law at Dover, she was kind to her, in spite of the difficulty as to precedence before noticed.[263]

262.  Madame—Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady).

263.  Ibid.

Many plans of pleasure were set on foot, possibly to divert attention from the political business which was the real reason for Madame’s visit.

One day King Charles took his sister for an expedition to Canterbury, where they saw a ballet and comedy, and were entertained at a collation in the hall of St Augustine’s Abbey. Other diversions followed in due course, helped by the radiant summer season which shed its own influence on such merry meetings.[264]

264.  Ibid.

To many it was, no doubt, a halcyon time. The pomp and splendour, the sparkle and gaiety of Whitehall were transferred to the ancient castle on the beetling white cliff for the moment, and the centre and core of everything, the chief luminary among many stars, was the fair princess whose short life, even now drawing swiftly to its close, had known such strange vicissitudes. Cradled in the very vortex of civil strife during Essex’s siege of Exeter; brought up as a child, for a time, at any rate, in grinding poverty, when she shared her mother’s dreary life of exile; then, in early youth, the supreme jewel of the most brilliant Court in Europe, its splendid king at her feet, she was now, though none could have foreseen it, at the very threshold of her mysterious doom. Only a few days in England, a few happy days to be remembered hereafter fondly and regretfully by those who saw her then, and, her mission fulfilled, the mission which, as has been said, she possibly did not fully comprehend, Madame set sail on her return.[265] For the last time, if either could have known it, she bade farewell to the brother whose affection for her was perhaps the strongest and purest feeling of his cynical, careless, insouciant nature. The letters he wrote to her testify to this fact, invested as they are with a charm all their own, and endorsed with a certain pathos, for “my deare, deare sister.” This final parting off Dover was a sorrowful one to both. The King and the Duke of York sailed for some distance with their sister before they could summon resolution to tear themselves away, and when the moment of farewell could no longer be delayed, the King held Henrietta long in his arms, embracing her again and again, while she clung to him, weeping passionately.[266] Alas for them! Only a week or two are to pass, and she, the beloved princess, the English rose, as she might well be termed, is cut down in her prime of beauty. The sombre picture of that scene unveils itself before us, dark and portentous. Out of the agonised death chamber at St Cloud comes the great Bossuet, who has borne the Last Sacraments to the dying girl, and exhorted her to the very end. As he sweeps past the shrinking, horror-struck crowd without, he surveys them with unsparing contempt, but his funeral sermon in the Chapel Royal rings down the centuries: “O nuit désastreuse, O nuit effroyable, où retentit tout-à-coup comme un éclat de tonnerre, cette étonnante nouvelle: Madame se meurt! Madame est morte!”[267] The suspicion of poison always raised in those days on the occasion of an unexpected death may be unfounded in this case; we cannot tell, but the attendant circumstances were sad and ominous enough without that. The crass stupidity of the doctors, the callous indifference of Monsieur, the decorous sorrow of King Louis—once it would have been something more—all make up the setting of a grim tragedy, only relieved by the courage and resignation of Henrietta herself.[268] Over in England there was deep and bitter grief at the news: Charles himself broke down into passionate tears, but after a while the memory of Madame remained only as a fair dream in the recollection of those who had known her. Nevertheless she had performed the work which King Louis had given her to do in England, and the secret treaty was concluded.[269]

265.  “Histoire de Madame Henriette d’Angleterre,” par Marie de la Vergne, Comtesse de la Fayette. “Madame étoit revenue d’Angleterre avec toute la gloire et le plaisir que peut donner un voyage causé par l’amitié et suivi d’un bon succés dans les affaires.”

266.  “Charles II. and his Court.” A. G. A. Brett.

267.  “Madame de Brinvilliers.” Hugh Stokes.

268.  “Histoire de Madame Henriette d’Angleterre,” par Dame Marie de la Vergne, Comtesse de la Fayette, 1742. “Dieu aveugloit les Médecins . . . on la voyoit dans des souffrances cruelles, sans néanmoins qu’elle parût agitée. . . . Le Roi voyant que selon les apparences il n’y avoit rien a esperer, lui dit adieu en pleurant.”

269.  “Histoire de Madame Henriette d’Angleterre,” par Marie de la Vergne, Comtesse de la Fayette. “Elle se voyoit à vingt-six ans le lien des deux plus grands Rois de ce siècle . . . . Le plaisir et la considération que donnent les affaires se joignent en elle aux agrémens que donnent la jeunesse et la beauté.”

Charles was, when expedient, to profess the Roman Communion; he was to join France, when so required, in a war against the United Provinces, and for these services he would receive two million livres, and six thousand men in case of any insurrection at home. Here, then, was the kernel of the matter. Money was always lacking, the hunger for it altogether unsated; even the portion of Zealand which was promised out of the future conquest of the Dutch was little in comparison, and the English King might have been induced to make further promises for a corresponding amount of hard cash.

The tragic death of the Duchess of Orleans was also destined at the time to affect the family of her brother the Duke of York in quite another direction.

HENRIETTA, DUCHESS OF ORLEANS

Duchess Anne has been accused, among other failings, of the unlovely propensity of eating too much, and this habit was certainly inherited by her younger daughter and namesake.[270] Whether from this, or from some other cause, the Lady Anne of York very early contracted a weakness of the eyes, a complaint, moreover, which lasted to the end of her life. For the cure of this disorder the parents had taken the precaution of sending the child to France, to the care of her grandmother the queen-mother, who was then at Colombes.

270.  “Lives of the Queens of England.” Agnes Strickland.

Henrietta Maria, however, died there on 10th September 1669,[271] to the deep grief of Madame her daughter, to whose family her young niece was next transferred; and she remained with her for many months. Anne was still at St Cloud at the time of her aunt’s sudden and tragic death, but the small English princess became, on this event, a somewhat inconvenient visitor in the disorganised household of Monsieur. She was therefore sent back to England, after spending a considerable time in France, a visit which was kept more or less a secret at home, on account of the strong prejudices which existed in England against all French influences. The experiment does not seem to have materially benefited the child’s health, but at any rate back she came. Her parents despatched Colonel Villiers and his wife to bring home their little daughter, and the pair accordingly embarked at Rye for Dieppe on 2nd July, thereafter reaching the former port on their return journey on the 23rd of the same month, but whether the weather was unfavourable or not, the party did not land on English shore till the 28th.[272] There is a piece of information which reads oddly in the light of subsequent events: “Lady Anne was presented on her departure from France with a pair of bracelets set with great diamonds, valued at ten thousand crowns, by the French King.” One can fancy the child bridling over her magnificent ornaments, and thinking how kind and splendid was the stately, gracious King, with the long, dark eyes and perfect manner, who clasped them on her chubby wrists as if she were a woman grown.

271.  Madame—Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady). Macpherson’s “Original Papers.”

272.  “Calendar of Domestic State Papers.” 27th June 1670: “Their Royal Highnesses have sent Col. Villiers and his lady to France to fetch their daughter.” Colonel Villiers was of the Duke’s bedchamber, and his wife governess to the children.

Neither he nor any one else could have foreseen the fierce struggle of forty years later, when the old feud would be revived, when the armies of each were to be face to face on many a stricken field, when Blenheim and Malplaquet and Ramilies were to bear a bitter significance in French ears, and when the splendid Roi Soleil of these early days of glory would perforce veil his lofty crest before the stubborn, invincible troops of the little stolid English cousin.

It was in the August following Madame’s aforesaid visit to England that the Duchess of York wrote the paper setting forth the reasons for her change of faith which has been previously given, but already it appears that her health was declining. She had never really recovered from the birth of her son Edgar,[273] as far back as 1667, and she gradually became the victim of a complication of disorders. Probably the unwieldy size of which her contemporaries speak was merely one symptom of failing health, as she was only thirty-three. But the malady to which she finally succumbed was the terrible scourge of cancer, which strangely enough was destined many years later to carry off her successor, Mary of Modena.[274]

273.  “Lives of Queens of England,” Agnes Strickland. “Royalty Restored,” J. F. Molloy. “She was ill for fifteen months.”

274.  Burnet’s “History of My Own Time,” edit. 1766. “A long decay of health came to a quicker crisis. All on a sudden she fell in agony of death.” Some time during this year James himself was seriously ill.

All through the autumn months of 1670 and the succeeding winter she was ailing, often seriously, but her indomitable will upheld her to the very end. She was, there is no doubt, brave and resolute, and through her “long decay of nature” she contained herself with silent courage, for she was never given to confide in those about her.

Early in the winter a general suspicion of her new religious opinions began to be circulated. She rejected the services of her chaplains[275] without, however, giving any explanation of this conduct, further than the state of her health “and business,” and it was in the month of December, some months, therefore, after her actual reception into the Roman communion, that the King spoke, as we have seen, on this subject to the Duke of York.

275.  “Life of James II.,” Rev. J. S. Clarke, from original Stuart MSS. in Carlton House, 1816. “During all her indisposition of which she dyed she had not prayers said to her by any of the chaplains.”

Burnet says that the latter had by this time himself seceded, though not formally, from the Anglican Church,[276] before his wife did so, and that she had “entered into discourse with his priests.” But who these could be is not apparent, and the story is improbable on that account.

276.  Burnet’s “History of My Own Time.” (Supplement.) “He [the Duke of York] was bred to believe a mysterious sort of Real Presence in the Sacrament so that he thought he made no great step when he believed Transubstantiation, and there was infused in him very early a great reverence for the Church and a great submission to it; this was done on design to possess him with prejudice against Presbytery.”

And so we come to the last act of a brief drama, when the curtain was to ring down for good. Much had been woven into that fabric, the warp of sorrow and the woof of joy, but the gilded strands were parting asunder now, and there would be no knitting together of them any more.

The autumn after Madame’s untimely death passed over, and in the midst of the growing rumours that the Duchess of York was tending towards Rome, there arose another whisper to the effect that her bodily state was daily growing more and more precarious. Margaret Blagge, as we know, waited on her with tender and unswerving devotion, sorrowfully recognising the lonely and forlorn condition of the proud princess who had achieved so much—and so little.[277] Still, to their chagrin, the chaplains were held at arm’s length by Morley’s once docile and obedient pupil, and the Court wondered and discussed the question with growing relish and excitement.[278] Christmas came and went, but for one at least there could have been little question of the revelry belonging to the season. The month of March drew on to its close, and Anne must have been feeling at any rate somewhat better, for on the 30th we find her dining at Lord Burlington’s house in Piccadilly and enjoying the good cheer there provided for her (poor Anne!), for she “dined heartily,” but after her return home she was taken suddenly and alarmingly ill. It is possible, from the contemporary evidence, that the immediate attack was some form of internal inflammation, but at any rate the gravity of the situation was at once realised.[279] She had spent, as was her custom, some three-quarters of an hour “att her own accustomed devotions,” but in this extremity it seems that she did call for her chaplain, Dr Turner. After a night of agony her director, Blandford, Bishop of Worcester, to whose spiritual care Morley on his own retirement had committed her, was also sent for, but of what really took place during the next few hours the accounts given present many discrepancies. Over from Whitehall came Queen Catherine, timid, gentle and compassionate, and Burnet declares that as she arrived before the bishop, and would not leave the sick room, the latter lacked sufficient courage and presence of mind to begin prayers, and only “spoke little and fearfully.”

277.  “Life of Mrs Godolphin.” John Evelyn, edit. by E. W. Harcourt, 1888.

278.  Macpherson’s “Original Papers,” 1772.

279.  Arlington, writing to the English Ambassador in Spain, said she was afflicted with a complication of disorders.

In the ante-room without, the Duke of York had awaited the bishop, and there alone with him confided to his ears the secret so long concealed. His wife, he said, had been reconciled to the Church of Rome, and had entreated of him, that if any bishops should come to her in her extremity, they would not disturb her with controversy.[280]

280.  “Memoirs of the Court of England during the Reign of the Stuarts,” John Heneage Jesse. “Life of James II.,” Rev. J. S. Clarke, from original Stuart MSS. in Carlton House, 1816. “During all her great indisposition of which she dyed, she had not prayers said to her by either of the chaplains.”

Blandford can scarcely have been surprised at the announcement, considering the surmises which had for so long been afloat, and the manner in which he himself and his colleagues had been kept at a distance, but he collected himself to answer gravely and compassionately. He said that he believed the Duchess, in spite of what had occurred, to be in the fair way of salvation, seeing she had not changed her religion for any hope of worldly gain nor advantage, but from honest conviction. After these words, with the Duke’s permission, the bishop passed quietly into the stately, beautiful room, where amid the pomp of royalty, with brocaded curtains round her bed, the flicker of wax lights in silver sconces only throwing the figures of the Gobelin hangings on the walls into darker relief, lay Duchess Anne. By her side sat Catherine the Queen, the golden beads of her rosary slipping one by one through her shaking fingers, tears slowly stealing down her cheeks.[281] Beyond stood Lady Cranmer, and leaning over the dying woman, ready with the draught for the fevered lips, was Margaret Blagge, her beautiful face alight with infinite love and pity. Bishop Blandford drew near, and stood for a moment silent. Then as Anne’s dark eyes, unclosing, met his, he said gently but distinctly:

“I hope you continue still in truth?”

281.  Burnet’s “History of His Own Time.”

Possibly only the one word reached her failing senses, but she answered brokenly with Pilate’s question:

“What is truth?”

“And then,” so the chronicle continues, “her agony increasing, she repeated the word ‘Truth, truth, truth’ often.”[282] In that wild March morning, when the wind beat and clamoured round the ancient palace of the kings, those hoarse whispers fell awfully on the ears of the watchers, though most likely she herself was unconscious of them. Of her own kindred only her younger brother, Lord Rochester, came to bid her his last farewell, refusing to believe in her change of faith, but the elder, Cornbury, unable to forgive her apostasy, remained away. Of her sister Frances there is at this time no record.

282.  Burnet further says that the Queen stayed in the room of the Duchess to prevent the prayers of the Church of England being read, but this is improbable.

But she who lay there was past all such things now, and the presence or absence of kinsfolk was alike of little matter.

Blandford “made her a short Christian exhortation suitable to the condition she was in, and so departed.”[283]

283.  “Memoirs of the Court of England under the Reign of the Stuarts.” J. H. Jesse.

Perhaps she received the last rites of Rome from Father Hunt, the Franciscan, who a few months back had admitted her into that fold, but even this is uncertain.[284] Another authority declares that there was “noe Preest,” but that Father Howard and Father Patrick, who had come to St James’s in attendance on the Queen,[285] were waiting in the ante-room without, and they were probably praying for the parting soul.

284.  James himself declares: “She died with great resignation, having received all the Sacraments of the Catholic Church.”

285.  “Verney Memoirs.” Sir William Denton to Sir Ralph Verney.

Out of consideration for the King’s wishes, and in deference to public opinion, the Duke of York, to whom it is impossible to deny some amount of sympathy in this supreme moment, and the difficult part he had to play, sent for the Bishop of Oxford, though by the time the latter arrived, the Duchess was already unconscious.

But in the interval there had been a last appeal, not indeed of controversy, but of human affection, a spark from the fading embers of the old, half extinguished fire, the love which had dared and risked so much in other days. From the ante-room where throughout those dark hours he had perforce to interview one and another, English bishop and Roman priest, courtier and emissary of state, to answer inquiry, to dictate fitting replies, James came quietly in once more, and mounting the dais, stood looking down on the face which had once—yes, once—been so dear to him, the face for which he had braved his mother’s wrath, his brother’s arguments, the scorn of his followers. Anne’s eyes were closed, the long dark tresses tangled over the laced pillow. The world was slipping silently away, or rather it was she who was drifting out upon the waves of death. The long-drawn breaths were growing fainter. A great longing came over him, a longing for at least a final recognition—a word, a look. He stooped over her, and spoke in hushed, unsteady accents from dry lips.

“Dame, doe ye knowe me?”

There was no reply at once, and he repeated the appeal more than once before, seemingly, it reached the deafened ears and failing comprehension. At last she collected herself.

With much strivings she said faintly “Aye.” After a little respite she took a little courage, and with what vehemency and tenderness she could, she said: “Duke, Duke, death is terrible—death is very terrible!”[286]

286.  “Verney Memoirs.” Dr Denton to Sir Ralph Verney: “By ye best and truest intelligence she did not dy a Papalina, but she made no profession or confession either way.” Cf. “Sir John Reresby: Memoirs,” ed. 1734: “This day dyed Anne, Duchess of York, with her last breath declaring herself a Papist.”

The voice, so greatly beloved in the past, if not in the present, had for the moment summoned her back, but if it was only to utter those last most pitiful words, it surely had been better speechless. The breathing grew shorter—stopped.

Then silence—and so vanished away Anne Hyde.

Margaret Blagge, who as we know had nursed her “with extraordinary sedulity” and had stood by her to the last, has set down this sorrowful, awestruck record: “The Duchess dead, a princess honoured in power, had much witt, much money, much esteeme. She was full of unspeakable torture, and died (poore creature) in doubt of her religion, without the Sacrament or divine by her side, like a poore wretch. None remembered her after one weeke, none sorry for her; she was tost and flung about and every one did what they would with that stately carcase.”[287]

287.  “Life of Mrs Godolphin,” by John Evelyn, edit, by E. W. Harcourt, 1888.

This irreverent and revolting neglect must be ascribed to the ill conduct of the servants and apothecaries, who according to custom were responsible. Neither the Duke himself nor the ladies of the Duchess can be blamed, for they would at once have left the room.

The foregoing testimony, by the way, would seem to establish the fact that Anne did not receive the consolations of religion from any priest; and for the rest, Margaret’s words “none sorry for her” are borne out by those of Burnet, who says she “died little beloved. Haughtiness gained many enemies” and her “change of religion made her friends think her death a blessing at that time.”

It is a dreary epitaph to place on the tomb of Anne, Duchess of York. Alas for her! The goodly fruit which her aspiring hand had plucked so eagerly had long ago turned to ashes in her very grasp, and she had drained to the utmost dregs the cup of disillusion. And thus we leave her, as all must be left, to the infinite mercy of God.

She died on Friday, 31st March 1671, in the thirty-fourth year of her age. On the Sunday following, her body, being embalmed, was privately buried in the vault of Mary Queen of Scots, in Henry the Seventh’s Chapel of Westminster Abbey.[288]

288.  “Memoirs of the Court of England during the Reign of the Stuarts.” John Heneage Jesse.

Her little son Edgar, Duke of Cambridge, the last of her boys, followed her on the 8th of June succeeding, and thus of her eight children only Mary and Anne, both destined to be successively Queens of England, survived their childhood.

In the memoirs of his own life, written years subsequently, James II. paid a full and generous tribute of respect to the memory of his first wife, though, as we have seen, the early, passionate, imperious love had so soon died out.

Long afterwards, in the grey, weary days of exile at St Germain, when there remained to him only the luckless heir to a vanished inheritance and the winsome child Louisa, whom he called with such sad significance his “douce consolatrice,” the thoughts of the banished King must sometimes at least have travelled back to the storied past, to the days of his strenuous if stormy youth, to his English wife, to the fair little brood of children, of whom but two lived on to become the Goneril and Regan of this later Lear.

When his time came, and he, too, lay down to die in the hunting palace of King Louis, the last Stuart king was laid to his rest, unburied, in the Church of the English Benedictines in Paris, in the vain, pathetic hope that some day he might yet repose among his kindred in the England he loved so well.

In the mad upheaval of the French Revolution ninety years later, his bones, like those of the great lines of Valois and Bourbon, were cast out in dishonour, and no man knows the place of his sepulture; but Nan Hyde sleeps undisturbed in Westminster, among the kings to whose company the passion of a prince had raised her.

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Transcriber’s Notes:

Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.

Typographical errors were silently corrected.

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book.