They walked out together, James still thoughtful and morose, Charles good-humoured as usual. He snapped his fingers at a pair of little spaniels asleep in a square of sunshine and they scrambled to their feet and tore yapping out of the room, scuttling between his legs, turning to prance on their hind legs to look up at him.
James’s marriage to Anne Hyde created a considerable excitement. The Chancellor was furious; Anne wept incessantly; and the Duke still thought he might find a way out. With the help of Sir Charles Berkeley he stole the blood-signed contract and burned it, and Berkeley offered to marry her himself and give the child his name. The courtiers were in a quandary, not knowing whether they should pay their respects to the new Duchess or avoid her altogether, and only Charles seemed perfectly at ease.
And then the Duke of Gloucester, who had fallen ill of small-pox but had been thought to be out of danger, died suddenly. Charles had loved him well, as he did all his family, and he had seemed a young man of great promise, eager and charming and intelligent. It was unbelievable that now he lay dead, still and solemn and never to move again. There had been nine children in the family. Two had died on the day of birth, two others had lived only a short while, and now there remained only Charles and James, Mary who was Princess of Orange, and Henrietta Anne, the youngest, still with her mother in France.
But even the death of Henry could not halt the festivities for long. And though the Court managed to show a decent face of sorrow in the presence of Charles or James, the balls and the suppers, the flirtations and the gambling went on as before, wildly, madly, as though it would never be possible to get enough of pleasure and excitement.
The great houses along the Strand, from Fleet Street to Charing Cross, were opened all day and far into the night. Their walls resounded with noisy laughter and the tinkle of glasses, music and chatter, the swish of silken skirts and the tap of high-heeled shoes. Great gilt coaches rattled down the streets, stood lined up outside theatres and taverns, went rambling through the woods of St. James’s Park and along Pall Mall. Duels were fought in Marrowbone Fields and at Knightsbridge over a lady’s dropped fan or a careless word spoken in jest. Across the card-tables thousands of pounds changed hands nightly, and lords and ladies sat on the floor, watching with breathless apprehension a pair of rolling dice.
The executions of the regicides, held at Charing Cross, were attended by thousands and all the quality went to watch. Those men who had been chiefly responsible for the death of Charles I now themselves died, jerking at the end of a rope until they were half-dead, and then they were cut down, disembowelled and beheaded and their dripping heads and hearts held up for the cheering crowds to see. After that their remains were flung into a cart and taken off to Newgate to be pickled and cured before being set up on pikes over the City gates.
A new way of life had come in full-blown on the crimson wings of the Restoration.
It was only a week after her brother’s death that Princess Mary arrived in London. She was twenty-eight, a widow and mother—though she had left her son in Holland—a pretty, graceful gay young woman with chestnut curls and sparkling hazel eyes. She had always hated Holland, that sombre strait-laced land, and now she intended to live in England with her favourite brother and have all the lovely gowns and extravagant jewels for which she longed.
She embraced Charles enthusiastically, but she was cooler with James and only waited until the three of them were alone to speak her mind to him:
“How could you do it, James? Marry that creature! Heavens, where’s your pride? Marrying your own sister’s Maid of Honour!” Anne and Mary had been close friends at one time, but that was over now.
James scowled. “I’m sick of hearing about it, Mary. God knows I didn’t marry her because I wanted to.”
“Didn’t marry her because you wanted to! Why, pray, did you marry her then?”
Charles interrupted, putting an arm about his sister’s waist. “I advised him to it, Mary. Under the circumstances it seemed the only honourable course to take.”
Mary cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “Mam won’t find it so honourable, I warrant you. Just wait until she gets here!”
“That,” said Charles, “is what we’re all waiting for.”
It was not long until the Queen Mother Henrietta Maria arrived—not more than a week, in fact, after Anne Hyde’s son was born. Most of the Court went to Dover to meet her and they stayed a day or two at the great old castle which for centuries had guarded the cliffs of England.
Henrietta Maria was forty-nine but she looked nearer seventy, a tiny hollow-cheeked haunted-eyed woman with no vestige of beauty left. What little she had possessed had gone early, lost in the bearing of her many children, in the hardships of the Civil Wars, in her grief for her husband whom she had loved devotedly.
