‘Oh dear ladies, if you do not stop your crying, I think I must have no recourse but to find whichever quack it was said the Greenwich air was physic for melancholy and have him whipped!’
The King has his usual pack of gentlemen with him, and they laugh heartily at this; so do Sarah Churchill and Barbara Berkeley (nee Villiers), but then they were neither of them crying in the first place. Lady Harriet, ever the good courtier, says ‘Huh!’, and obliges the King with a glimpse of her still-lovely throat. But Anne, who is standing next to her governess, and little Isabella, who squirms in her arms, go on weeping without the slightest interruption.
Anne cannot see how she is supposed to hinder herself from shedding tears – no, not even at the King’s command – on such an evil day as this; when only moments earlier, she has watched the Duke hand the Duchess into a tender, which is now conveying them to the King’s best yacht, which vessel will take them first to visit the Princess of Orange and then on to Flanders, where they are to make an indefinite stay. Until three days ago, Anne was supposed to be travelling with them, but at the last minute, the King, as he so often does, has exercised his infinite prerogative and changed his mind: the princesses must be kept safely in the bosom of the English Court and the English Church.
The King sees at once that his wit has failed, and tries reason.
‘Anne, child, you are fourteen – you are so nearly a woman, and surely your understanding is not so mean that you cannot perceive the wisdom of this? How am I to bring my more . . . tendentious subjects round when every time they get a sniff of your father they bark and snarl like hounds at a covert?’
Reason also fails. The King sticks his bottom lip forward and sighs into his moustache. Then he gives orders for the Ladies Anne and Isabella to be taken back to London in the barge. Immediately, lest they flood his Park and drown his observatory.
Anne is settled into the seat nearest the stern, but firmly facing the prow, so there is no possibility of any last wistful glance backwards, that could goad her into further tears; to make quite sure, Mrs Berkeley sits on her left side, and Mrs Churchill on her right, and the two of them begin talking as soon as the barge has pulled away.
‘What a poppet the Lady Isabella is become,’ says Mrs Berkeley, cooing at the pretty dark child, who has fallen asleep on Lady Harriet’s lap, the tears still drying on her cheeks. ‘She has such a look of the Princess of Orange about her, I think, when she was this age – Lady Harriet, do you not remember?’
‘Indeed I do: Her Highness was from the first a most ravishing child.’
‘I did not know their Highnesses then,’ says Mrs Churchill, ‘but I would agree that Lady Isabella might well grow to be a beauty, and after the Princess’s style.’
‘Oh, look how she smiles in her sleep!’ cries Mrs Berkeley. ‘I do think, Your Highness, that she will be quite happy again once we reach London – and you must take some comfort from that, yes?’
‘Certainly,’ says Anne, dabbing at her eyes with her last dry handkerchief, ‘it is always a delight to me to see her happy and smiling, and I shall be glad of her dear company, but if the King only knew what trouble this was to both of us—’
Lady Harriet interrupts her. ‘Your Highness, he can hardly fail to, but he must weigh your distress against many other concerns – and so must you.’
Nobody has anything to say to this, and for a few long moments there is nothing to be heard but the slapping of the oars on the water and Isabella’s subdued, babyish snuffling. Then, just as it seems that Anne is about to succumb to tears again, a waterman on a nearby wherry misses a stroke, falls backwards, and lets forth a burst of profanity so ripe and so colourful that there is nothing to do but laugh instead.
‘The invention of the man!’ cries Mrs Berkeley. ‘I do not think Rochester himself could have afforded better.’
‘For all we know, he did,’ says Mrs Churchill. ‘Perhaps his debts are such that he must pen wit by the line, and sell it to wherrymen to pay his physician.’
The other ladies scream with laughter again, so Mrs Churchill continues on her tale of the pox-ridden Earl who must bring his verse to market, while Mrs Berkeley assists her, all the way to Whitehall.