The King's Mistress (45 page)

“Yes. You’re right. Oh, my poor Nan.”

Jane was alarmed to see that his eyes were filling with tears, and threw up her arms in frustration.

“’Fore God, sir, don’t weep. Just go and put things right.”

I
N THE MORNING
N
ELL
S
TROUD WAS BACK AT
S
OMERSET
H
OUSE ONCE
more.

“My mistress is in labour, Mistress Lane! And the king has ordered her father to admit to her chamber a delegation to get to the truth of the matter.”

“To her chamber? Now, while she is abed?”

“Yes, Mistress, and she needs you!”

At Worcester House Lady Hyde greeted Jane with a haunted expression on her face.

“Oh, Mistress Lane, I can scarce believe what’s occurring, but my poor girl is as good as on trial, it seems.”

Gathered outside Nan’s bedchamber were Ormonde and his wife, Sir Edward Nicholas, the Earl of Manchester, the Countess of Sunderland and Cork, and the Bishop of Winchester. The bishop nodded a silent greeting.

“Good. Now Mistress Lane is here, we can begin.”

The crowd filed into Nan’s room and took their places around the bed. Poor Nan was doing her best to look dignified, which was not easy, Jane thought, as her great belly rose in a hill before her, its quakes and rollings visible even under the bedcovers. A midwife stood by, glowering at the intruders.

“Mistress Anne,” the bishop intoned gravely. “We are come at His Majesty’s behest to settle the truth of this matter. You have nothing to fear, just tell the truth before these witnesses.”

Nan swallowed and clutched her mother’s hand, but nodded.

“Who is the father of your child?” the bishop demanded.

“His Highness James, the Duke of York,” Nan said, her voice steady, sticking out her chin in that way Jane knew so well.

“And have you ever known any other man but the duke?”

“No!” Nan cried, her face flushing. “Before my mother and my God and all that is holy, I have not!”

She was seized by a pain, and cried out. Her eyes went to Jane, imploring, and Jane hastened to the opposite side of the bed from where Lady Hyde stood, displacing the bishop with her glare, and took Nan’s other hand in hers. Nan writhed with the pain, crushing Jane’s hand in hers. The inquisitors shuffled and muttered in embarrassed uncertainty.

Jesu,
Jane thought.
That it should come to this. Can they not leave the poor girl in peace?

Nan panted as the wave of pain crested and passed. The bishop cleared his throat, and with a wary glance at Jane, once more took up his position close to the side of the bed.

“And are you and the duke married?” he asked, peering solemnly at Nan’s face.

“Indeed we are. Twice over we are,” Nan said, her eyes blazing. “We were wed first at Breda last autumn, and then once more at about midnight on the evening of the third of September of this year.”

The third of September, Jane thought. The anniversary of the Battle of Worcester and of the death of Oliver Cromwell. Surely Charles would hold his breath when that date rolled around for the rest of his life, wondering what new cataclysmic event was about to unfold.

Nan was seized once more in the grip of her pain, and the midwife pushed her way through the observers and put her hand beneath the bedclothes.

“The babe is coming!” she snapped at the bishop, and then turned her eyes on the committee. “For pity’s sake, get out!”

The bishop scurried a few feet away, to the side of Lord Ormonde. The other observers seemed frozen where they stood. Nan made no attempt to suppress her cries this time, and gave a great roaring groan that echoed off the walls before subsiding into heavy panting breaths. The midwife’s hands were busy between Nan’s thighs and she glared across Nan’s belly at the bishop. He struggled to retain his composure and once more took up his examination.

“Mistress Lane. Mistress Hyde has averred that you were a witness to the marriage in Breda. Will you confirm that this is true?”

Nan’s whimpers were rising again, and the members of the royal delegation looked as if they would like to sink into the earth.

“I will, sir,” Jane said. “And so was Sir Charles Berkeley, as I will take any oath you like.”

There was a murmur from the witnesses around Nan’s bed, and she squeezed Jane’s hand and gave her a damp little smile.

“Thank you,” the bishop said, backing away from the bed. “I will report what you say to His Majesty, and pray that this matter is now at rest.”

Nan broke into tears of relief as the committee fled from her room, and then gave a groan as a pain took her once more.

“Thank you, Jane,” she gasped out. “Thank you. Pray for me, will you, that my child and I may come through this night in safety?”

“I will,” Jane said, bending to kiss Nan’s forehead. “But I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

N
AN’S SON WAS BORN ON THE TWENTY
-
SECOND OF
O
CTOBER
. T
HE
D
UKE
of York had publicly declared that Nan was indeed his wife. Sir Charles Berkeley had recanted his lies. Sir Edward Hyde had accepted that he had no power to change what was already done. But no one but Nan, and possibly the Duke of York, was happy about the situation.

Mary of Orange was furious.

“I’ll not have the baggage taking precedence over me,” she vowed, her lips compressed in fury, as Jane helped her to dress for bed that night. “The queen my mother is on her way from Paris, and when she gets here she’ll soon put a stop to any talk of Nan Hyde being made the Duchess of York.”

It would be a bitter pill indeed, Jane thought, to one as prideful as Mary, to have her lady-in-waiting suddenly her superior. Nan had stepped into a hornets’ nest indeed when she had given her heart to the duke.

T
HE RUMOURS ABOUT
N
AN’S PREGNANCY AND HER MARRIAGE TO
the duke had reached The Hague, and Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia wrote to Jane, anxious to know the truth of what was happening. She liked Nan well enough, she said, but surely the wench was not really married to the Duke of York? Jane sighed in shame at the lies she had told, by omission or commission, to keep the marriage secret. She could not bring herself to admit that she had witnessed the marriage, and struggled to write a reply that would not deny the queen’s sense of outrage, but would tell her truly that there was no point in wishing that the rumours were false.

“I have little encouragement to write of to Your Majesty,” she wrote. “For the present news is that Mistress Hyde is brought to bed of a boy, which she vows to be the duke’s and he married to her. She is owned in her father’s family to be Duchess of York, but not at Whitehall as yet, but ’tis very sure that the duke has made her his wife. The Princess Mary is much discontented at it, as she has great reason. When Queen Mary comes we shall see what will be done about it. The duke and princess are gone to Dover to meet her. The king and Prince Rupert are to follow on Saturday. Your Majesty desired to know when the court goes out of mourning. As yet, everybody is in mourning clothes, and ’tis thought will continue so till after Christmas. I pray God bless Your Majesty. That prayer I must ever end with.”

The arrival of Queen Mary did nothing to still the storm at Whitehall over Nan Hyde and the Duke of York. The queen refused to see her daughter-in-law, to acknowledge the child, or meet with Nan’s father, recently created Baron Hyde. Jane heard that a weary and angry Charles had brokered a meeting between the reluctant grandparents, enforcing his mother’s bending to his wishes only by the threat of withholding the pensions she needed so badly.

S
INCE HIS RETURN TO
L
ONDON
, C
HARLES HAD TOLD OVER AND
over again the story of his escape from Worcester and his subsequent travels, and it was both astonishing and pleasant to Jane to discover that she was famous. She had been shown at least eight broadsheets and ballads, with crude woodcut depictions of her riding behind the king. “The Memorable Tragedy of Mrs. Jane Lane,” “His Majesty’s Miraculous Preservation by the Oak, the Maid and Ship,” “The Five Faithful Brothers, a True Discourse Between Charles II and the Five Brothers at His Escape from Worcester, with Mrs. Lane’s Conveying His Majesty Through All His Difficulties,” “The Royal Oak, or the Wonderful Travels, Miraculous Escapes, Strange Accidents of King Charles the Second,” “The Wonderful and Miraculous Escape of our Gracious King from that Dismal, Black, and Gloomie Defeat at Worcester.”

Already a book had been published entitled
Boscobel
,
or the History of His Majesty’s Preservation After the Battle of Worcester,
and another called
Monarchy Revived
was in the works, and would have a dedication to Jane.

At the end of October Jane learned that the Right Worshipful Company of Merchant-Tailors were to preside over celebrations, which, according to the handbills papering London, would feature a pageant,
The Royal Oak, with Other Various and Delightful Scenes Presented on the Water and the Land.

Jane and several of Mary’s ladies took a coach to Cheapside, and watched the festivities from the upper windows of the Key Tavern. A huge wagon served as a movable stage, with an elaborately painted backdrop depicting the woods of Shropshire and Staffordshire, and one noble tree in particular helpfully labelled “The Royal Oak”.

First came three or four tumblers, who delighted the crowd with their rolls, handstands, flips, and other feats of agility. There followed members of the Merchant-Tailors company presenting the king’s miraculous escape. Jane watched with a sense of disbelief to see herself personified by a boy of about fourteen, an apprentice with the company, mounted on a hobbyhorse behind the player-Charles.

“It’s you!” Dorothy squealed. As word spread to the folk gathered nearby that Jane herself, the heroine of the play and the king’s saviour, was among them, there were cheers and toasts in her honour, and after the pageant was done, she found herself at the centre of an admiring knot of people wanting to hear firsthand about her travels with the king.

Life at Charles’s court was vastly different from the impoverished existence his followers had endured in France and Holland, and far grander, too, than Mary’s court. Charles was tearing through the fifty-thousand-pound grant from Parliament, rewarding his faithful friends, adorning himself and Barbara Palmer with clothes and jewels, hiring musicians and acrobats, pastry cooks and confectioners, goldsmiths and upholsterers, and setting to rights the Palace of Whitehall, much of which had fallen into sad disrepair during England’s years without a king. One of the first areas to get attention was the small private theatre known as the Cockpit. Carpenters, plasterers, and painters laboured by day and by night, and Jane was thrilled when she heard that on the nineteenth of November, the newly re-formed King’s Company, under the management of Thomas Killigrew, would present Ben Jonson’s play
The Silent Woman
.

That night Charles and his court shoehorned themselves into the little theatre, still smelling of paint and sawdust, the light of the hundreds of candles in wall brackets and on great cartwheel chandeliers above dancing and glinting off the jewelled crowd. Jane, seated with the royal family and their attendants on the dais facing the stage, had a perfect view of the actors as well as the rest of the audience. Her heart leaped as the curtain rose, and the actors swept onto the stage. She laughed in delight to hear spoken aloud the scenes she knew from her father’s book of Ben Jonson’s plays. Jests that had seemed dull and inexplicable on the page brought the house to tears of laughter.

After that, she saw plays as often as she was able. The King’s Company returned to the palace on several nights, but Jane also accompanied Charles and others when they went to the Vere Street Theatre, the converted tennis court that had just opened as the new home of Killigrew’s company.

Her pleasure in the theatre made Jane think of Queen Elizabeth’s stories of the grand masques at the court of her father, King James I, and of the elderly queen’s enjoyment of the Christmas masques at Mary’s court. Jane missed Queen Elizabeth, fretted at her being left alone at The Hague, and wrote to encourage her to come to London with or without Charles’s invitation. There was plenty of room at Whitehall, and after all, the king could hardly send his aunt away once she was there. In early December she was touched to receive a letter from Queen Elizabeth informing her that the queen had written to Charles to tell him in no uncertain terms that he must reward Jane richly for her help to him.

“I am so infinitely obliged to Your Majesty for your gracious favour towards me,” she wrote, “that I am not able to express the great sense I have of it. All that I can say is that whilst I have breath I shall pray for Your Majesty’s prosperity. I wish I could send Your Majesty the good news that the king had settled something upon me, but as yet it is not done. But Queen Mary promises me she will see it done before she returns. Her journey is deferred for some time longer.”

Queen Elizabeth had demanded to know the latest turns of events in the saga of Nan Hyde and her baby, wondering once more if it could really be true that the duke had married her.

“The child is not yet christened,” Jane wrote, “but it is confidently reported that it shall be within a few days, and owned. The Princess Mary is very much troubled about it. Queen Mary is politic and says little of it. There is no question to be made but that they are married. I do not think that Princess Mary will stay long here after the queen is gone.”

Jane could picture Queen Elizabeth, hungry to know every detail of how things stood at Whitehall.

“Queen Mary is very obliging to all people,” she wrote, “and she is much more liked than the Princess Royal. The young Princess Minette is indeed very handsome. They have not yet left off mourning, and be in black still. I most humbly thank Your Majesty for my wine.”