Read The King's Mistress Online
Authors: Gillian Bagwell
For much of the time I was working on this book I was fortunate to have the feedback of the members of my writing group, Willow Healy, Gil Roscoe, and Elizabeth Thurber. Elizabeth also gave me useful information about horses and riding in general.
Kirsten Shepard, one of my oldest and dearest friends, was in Paris with her mother, Margaret Shepard, while I was writing the part of the book that takes place in Paris, and they helped me immensely by providing information about and pictures of the Palais Royal, Louvre, Tuileries, Grand Gallery, and many others. Kirsten also translated a letter written in French by Anne Hyde describing Mary of Orange, which was wonderful to have.
My father, Dick Bagwell, provided information about popular songs of the day that would be appropriate for Charles and Jane to sing as they travelled, giving me the music and words to “The World Turned Upside Down/When The King Enjoys His Own Again”, “The Hunt is Up”, “Come O’er the Bourne Bessy”, “Jog on the Footpath Wa
y
”, and others.
Alan Stone, a local historian at Shepton Mallet, spent an hour or more with Alice and me, giving us very useful and entertaining information about Somerset, the Civil War, Roman roads, and more.
The staff of the Humanities and Manuscript reading rooms at the British Library were very good about helping me find much very useful material.
Pauline Gibson of Bentley, who writes the
Bentley Banter
, has been very helpful in providing information about the site of Bentley Hall and the surrounding area.
Anne Mello and the staff at the Pasadena Public Library filled my numerous requests for interlibrary loans.
Samuel Pepys invested a great deal of time and care to ensure that the story of Charles’s escape after the Battle of Worcester was preserved for posterity. Charles told Pepys the story in May 1660 aboard the
Royal Charles
as he was returning to England to take his throne. In the autumn of 1680, Pepys spent two three-hour sessions with Charles at Newmarket, using his famous shorthand to take down Charles’s account of his odyssey, which Pepys later edited with his characteristic skill and flair. He also collected all the other contemporary accounts and bound them together, giving us a very complete picture of an amazing piece of history from the point of view of the people who participated in it.
My quest for information about riding pillion lit up email lists and organisations all over England and the U.S. Alice Northgreaves did the initial digging. Many people in the equestrian and historical re-enactment communities, including the Society for Creative Anachronism, the Sidesaddle Association, and the American Sidesaddle Association, gallantly came to my aid. Natalie Wooldridge, known in the SCA as Lady Ariadne De Glevo, gave me lots of information about horse breeds, their gaits and speeds, how much ground a horse could travel in a day, etc., as well as riding pillion, and sent me a wonderful photo of Steve and Jean Emmit in beautiful period garb on a caparisoned horse, he astride and she riding pillion. Mike Glasson of the Walsall Leather Museum sent me some photos of pillions. Margie Beeson sent me information about and photos of pillions provided by Rhonda of the ASA. Others who helped along the way were archivist Sue Hurley of the Worshipful Company of Saddlers, Jeremy Smith at the Guildhall Library, Karol Kafka of California Aside, Stephanie Hutcherson at Georgia Ladies Aside, Melodee Spevak, VP Marti Friddle of the ASA, Jim Myers, Lynda Fjellman, Jane Pryor and Shirley Oultram of the SA, Jo Strange of Hazlemere in Surrey, Frances Dorrian, and King’s Saddlery in Walsall.
I was overjoyed to find Michael Shaw and Danny McAree’s article “The Rediscovery of Bentley Hall, Walsall”, originally published in
West Midlands Archaeology
Vol. 50 (2007), pages 2–5. I discovered it by using my iPhone to Google “Bentley Hall Staffordshire” when I was standing near that site but couldn’t find it, and was relieved to learn that I was more or less in the right place. You can find the article at http://www.localhistory.scit.wlv.ac.uk/articles/Hall/BentleyHall.htm. I was charmed by the article’s description of the Banqueting House at Bentley as being “built in the eccentric Flemish style with high chimneys and dormer windows—a fanciful edifice designed to surprise and delight”, and took the liberty of using that phrase in this book.
Thanks to the people who have posted videos on YouTube showing how to load and fire a flintlock pistol. And how not to do it!
Thanks to the staff and patrons of the Red Lion in Bromsgrove, the Crown in Cirencester, and the George in Castle Cary for their helpful information about Jane and Charles’s progress through those towns and how to find sites that Alice and I were looking for.
Jane Lane’s heroic part in helping Charles escape, putting herself in enormous danger to do so, made her famous after the Restoration. I was enthralled when I read Derek Wilson’s account of it, and was convinced by the evidence he presented for his belief that Jane and Charles became lovers during their travels. I was surprised and delighted to learn that no one had previously told the story in fiction.
After the Restoration, many people who had helped Charles wrote their stories, so that there is an almost hour-by-hour record of what he did, said, wore, and ate during parts of his odyssey. But Jane never told her story publicly, so I had very scant information to use in writing the parts of the book that took place after she left Charles in Trent. There are references to her learning that she had been discovered, walking with her brother to Yarmouth in disguise, being welcomed by Charles and his family and followers in Paris, joining the court of Mary of Orange, becoming a lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of York after the Restoration, receiving gifts and a pension from Parliament, and marrying Sir Clement Fisher. Some letters from Charles to Jane and from Jane to Elizabeth of Bohemia survive. I filled in the enormous blanks with as much fact as I could glean from research and then by surmise and invention. I don’t know if Jane was intimately involved in the events surrounding Anne Hyde and Lucy Walter, but she certainly knew them and could have been.
Three of the letters from Charles to Jane in this book are real letters from Charles to Jane. Some of the others contain excerpts of real letters from Charles to other people. Some of the letters are my own invention. I wasn’t able to find any letters from Jane to Charles, so I wrote all of her letters myself. Jane’s letters to Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia are her real letters, with a little cutting, clarification of who she’s talking about, and I think the addition of one sentence in her last letter. I found it very touching to learn of their friendship and overwhelming to hold Jane’s actual letters in my hands at the British Library and see her bold, very modern-looking handwriting.
Charles did visit Staffordshire and Shopshire for the tenth anniversary of the Battle of Worcester and his escape, and it seemed like a good opportunity for me to have him and Jane meet and come to a resolution.
I undertook my research trip somewhat on the fly immediately after my agent made the deal to sell the book, as Boscobel House and Moseley Old Hall would soon be closing for the winter, and travelling around England wasn’t going to get any easier as it got colder and wetter. It was not until I returned home that I learned that the Yarmouth Jane walked to was probably the one on the east coast rather than the smaller one on the Isle of Wight, as I had been led to believe from one book. There was no possibility of returning to England to retrace that part of Jane’s journey (much less going to Paris, The Hague, Breda, Spa, Aix-la-Chapelle, Düsseldorf, and other places). Fortunately I found a 1939 facsimile of John Ogilby’s 1685
Britannia
, an atlas of the roads between principal cities and towns in England, and using that and Google Maps and Google Earth (ain’t technology amazing?) I was able to determine Jane and John’s likely route and learn what the road and terrain were like, mile by mile, from Staffordshire to Yarmouth.
I used Charles’s own words, as recorded by Pepys, in the sections of the book in which he recounts his adventures, but had to cut much of the story, which is worth reading in full. His blundering through the inn yard full of soldiers actually happened at Bridport, after Jane had left him, and I moved it to Cirencester, so Jane could be there.
If you want to read more about the Royal Miracle, as Charles’s escape came to be called, I can recommend
Charles II’s Escape from Worcester
, edited by William Matthews, which presents Pepys’s transcription of Charles’s account and his edited version side by side, as well as other contemporary accounts;
The Escape of Charles II After the Battle of Worcester
by Richard Ollard; A. M. Broadley’s 1912
The Royal Miracle: A Collection of Rare Tracts, Broadsides, Letters, Prints, & Ballads Concerning the Wanderings of Charles II After the Battle of Worcester
, which also chronicles the delightfully daffy 1911 re-enactment of the events; both the 1897 and 1908 editions of
The Flight of the King
by Allan Fea, as well as his
After Worcester Fight; The Boscobel Tracts
, a collection of contemporary accounts edited by J. Hughes and published in 1857;
The Wanderings of Charles II in Staffordshire and Shropshire
by H. P. Kingston; and Jean Gordon Hughes’s
A King in the Oak Tree
. I’ll try to post a more complete bibliography on my website by the time this book is published!
I was intrigued by Derek Wilson’s discussion of the quote from
The Aeneid
, “
sic, sic iuvat ire sub umbra
,” which is on Jane’s portrait at the National Portrait Gallery in London. He translates the phrase as “Thus, thus it pleases me to go into the shadows” without saying whose translation it is, and argues that it is inconceivable that Jane didn’t know that Dido says that line just before she curses Aeneas for his faithlessness and kills herself. I looked up several translations of the relevant passage, and I don’t recall any more that I used or if I melded them, so yes, it’s possible I used a translation that didn’t exist in 1651!
Pretty much the same is true of the brief quote from Descartes.
Francis Yates was the only person executed for his role in helping Charles escape. He was hanged at Oxford, but I moved the event to Wolverhampton because I needed Jane to have a vivid experience of what could happen if she were discovered.
The next time you see a pub or anything else called the Royal Oak or Boscobel Oak, now you know where the name came from. I’ve been amused to discover a street in L.A. and a company in Canada called Royal Oak, as well as the numerous more likely namesakes.
Jane’s exact birthdate, year of birth, and where she stood in the order of her siblings isn’t known, but it seemed likely she was among the youngest, so that’s where I put her, and I liked the idea of her sharing a birthday with Juliet.
I believe that the Battle of Worcester was the last time a King of England led troops in battle on British soil.
The baby born to Sophie of Hanover in May 1660 was the future George I.
Jane married Clement Fisher in December 1663, though in the interest of the story I’ve made it seem as if they were married in 1661. I don’t know if they were engaged or involved before Charles interrupted her life, but it seems likely. They did not have any children. Clement died in 1683. Jane died on September 9, 1689, thirty-eight years to the day after Charles blew into Bentley.
Love Gillian Bagwell?
Read on for an extract from her first novel,
T
HE SUN SHONE HOT AND BRIGHT IN THE GLORIOUS
M
AY SKY, AND
the streets of London were rivers of joyous activity. Merchants and labourers, gentlemen and ladies, apprentices and servants, whores, thieves, and grimy urchins—all were out in their thousands. And all with the same thought shining in their minds and hearts and the same words on their tongues—the king comes back this day.
After ten years—nay, it was more—of England without a king. Ten years of the bleak and grey existence that life had been under the Protector—an odd title for one who had thrown the country into strife, had arrested and then beheaded King Charles. What a groan had gone up from the crowd that day at the final, fatal sound of the executioner’s axe; what horror and black despair had filled their hearts as the bleeding head of the king was held aloft in triumph. And all upon the order of the Protector, who had savaged life as it had been, and then, after all, had thought to take the throne for himself.
But now he was gone. Oliver Cromwell was dead, his son had fled after a halfhearted attempt at governing, his partisans were scattered, and the king’s son, Charles II, who had barely escaped with his life to years of impoverished exile, was approaching London to claim his crown, on this, his thirtieth birthday. And after so long a wait, such suffering and loss, what wrongs could there be that the return of the king could not put right?
T
EN-YEAR-OLD
N
ELL
G
WYNN AWOKE, THE WARMTH OF THE SUN ON
her back in contrast to the dank coolness of the straw on which she lay under the shelter of a rickety staircase. She rolled over, and the movement hurt. Her body ached from the beating her mother had given her the night before. Legs and backside remembered the blows of the broomstick, and her face was bruised and tender from the slaps. Tears had mingled on her cheeks with dust. She tried to wipe the dirt away, but her hands were just as bad, grimy and still smelling of oysters.
Oysters. That was the cause of all this pain. Yesterday evening, she’d stopped on her way home to watch as garlands of flowers were strung on one of the triumphal arches that had been erected in anticipation of the king’s arrival. Caught up in the excitement, she had forgotten to be vigilant, and her oyster barrow had been stolen. She’d crept home unwillingly, hoped that the night would be one of the many when her mother had been drinking so heavily that she was already unconscious, or one of the few when the drink made her buoyant and forgiving. But no. Not even the festive mood taking hold of London had leavened her reaction to the loss of the barrow. Replacing it would cost five shillings, as much as Nell earned in a week. And her mother had seemed determined to beat into Nell’s hide the understanding of that cost.