When Henrietta Maria left England in the summer of the plague year she regarded it as her main responsibility to ease relations between her son and her nephew. In August, Louis XIV was driven to her residence at Colombes, ostensibly to bid her farewell before she left to take the waters at Bourbon but, in reality, to discuss possible means of bringing England and Holland to the conference table so that France would not be obliged to enter the conflict on the side of her northern ally. For an hour or more they were closeted alone in the queen mother’s bedchamber. Then, they were joined by Minette and more time passed before the trusted Lord St Albans and the abbé Montagu (of whom more anon) were admitted to their deliberations. No one outside this intimate group knew what was discussed, and Lord Holies, Charles’ ambassador, was particularly incensed about being kept in the dark. Afterwards, he pestered Henrietta Maria to know what had transpired but she would tell him nothing and he immediately wrote an angry report to his master complaining that he was snubbed by Louis, mistrusted by the English king’s own mother and abused by French royal servants. Over the following years there would be several diplomats and politicians who believed, with very good reason, that the Stuart family made their own international policy with scant reference to their advisers and representatives.
In France Minette and her mother (often referred to as ‘Mam’ in the correspondence between brother and sister) monitored the changing situation closely. Henrietta Maria often visited her daughter at Saint-Cloud and Minette as frequently had herself driven over to Colombe, the palace where she had grown up and where Henrietta Maria still lived. Although Louis only went to war reluctantly and half-heartedly with his cousin in January 1666, life was, nevertheless, uncomfortable for the ladies. Minette was eager to go to the French king to patch up relations but Henrietta Maria, who had many years’ experience of the Bourbon court, concluded that the time was not yet right. ‘I found by the letter the queen writ me … that mediations of that kind were not seasonable at this time,’ Charles told his sister.41 But the queen mother did not abandon her role as mediator. In April it was she who took the initiative, organising a conference at Saint-Germain to free France from embarrassment by negotiating peace between England and the Dutch Republic. This came to nothing, the Dutch knowing themselves to have the upper hand, but Henrietta Maria and her intimate adviser, Lord St Albans, did not cease their endeavours. In October they persuaded Charles to seek an armistice and when the Dutch again proved obdurate Louis regarded this as releasing him from his treaty obligations to them. He was now prepared to discuss peace terms with England – but only in secret.
In 1667 the Earl of Essex, a member of Charles’ council, was travelling through France and paid a courtesy call on the aged queen mother. He found her involved in some pretty unscrupulous dealing with some Irish papists who were seeking military and financial aid from King Louis and offering to deliver their land into his hands. Essex was appalled:
… he found the queen was in her inclination and advices true to her son’s interest but he was amazed to see that a woman who, in a drawing room was the liveliest woman of the age and had a vivacity of imagination that surpassed all who came near her, yet, after all her practice in affairs, had so little either of judgement or conduct and he did not wonder at the miscarriage of the late king’s councils, since she had such a share in them.42
Once again affairs of state became family affairs. The only people who knew anything about the negotiations were Charles, Louis, Henrietta Maria, Henrietta, St Albans, the French foreign minister and the ambassador, Ravigny. All Charles’ councillors were kept in the dark until they could be presented with a fait accompli. This did not mean that those who felt they were being bypassed did not have their suspicions. The fact that private emissaries went back and forth across the Channel and that the visits to Colombes of King Louis and Madame often coincided were marked by those who were prone to jealousy and could be dangerous: the duc d’Orléans and the Duke of Buckingham.
By 1669 the political landscape of Europe had changed again. The Sun King had embarked upon his long career of military conquest and the first country over which he had cast a shadow was the Spanish Netherlands, to which he laid dubious claim in the name of his wife, daughter of the late king of Spain. In alarm, the Dutch had hastened to form a defensive alliance with England and Sweden – a Protestant league against the aggressive forces of Catholicism. It was Louis’ intention to break this compact and teach the Calvinist republic a lesson. For that he would need the help of the English navy. He knew that Charles was eager for a return match against the Dutch and thirsting to avenge the humiliation of 1667, and he also knew that Charles was readily bribable.
Charles was very good at spending money – on his own pleasures, on enhancing the monarchy (he had grandiose plans for Whitehall and subsequently abandoned them in favour of a brand new palace at Winchester), on national development (for example by enlarging and improving the navy). What he was not very good at was inspiring his subjects to share his dreams and ambitions. In his basic understanding of his role Charles differed little from his father: as divinely ordained head of state he knew what was best for his people and he resented the interference of parliament and the power it exerted through the granting or withholding of taxation. The words Dryden put into the mouth of King Boabdelin in The Conquest of Granada were an obvious statement of Charles’ views, though he would have been careful, whatever he thought, not to refer to his subjects as bestial:
See what the many-headed beast demands.
Cursed is that king whose honour’s in their hands.
In senates, either they too slowly grant
Or saucily refuse to aid my want.
He blamed parliamentary parsimony and delays for the failure of the war effort and he resented having his determination to exercise religious toleration blocked. But because he was not, like his father, a man who held fast to principles, he resorted to gaining his objectives by devious methods. It is precisely because he told lies and half-truths and said different things to different people that it is difficult, now, to discover what convictions, if any, lay beneath his actions.
In no area is this more true than that of religion. Theological and spiritual issues held no interest for him and he was impatient with piety and moral earnestness. He certainly respected men who stood by their beliefs, as he showed in his well-known relations with the Reverend Thomas Ken. On a visit to Winchester Charles demanded that the clergyman’s house be made available to Nell Gwynn but Ken staunchly refused to receive a woman of ill repute beneath his roof. The following year Charles appointed him Bishop of Bath and Wells, saying that no one should have the post but ‘the little black fellow that refused his lodging to poor Nelly’. However, he never felt under any compulsion to follow such examples of godly living and he prided himself on his ability to sleep through sermons. Inasmuch as any religion appealed to him it was the easygoing, undemanding Catholicism of the French court which was a close ally of absolutist monarchy.
His mother was as passionate as ever to see her elder son embrace the true faith, and for the most pressing of reasons: she believed Charles’ immortal soul was in peril as long as he persisted in adhering to Protestant heresy. She had failed with two of her children and she was tireless in embracing those remaining with her possessive piety. Henrietta, the only one to whom she was close, had been devoutly Catholic from childhood. James was not far from the fold and she did, in fact, live long enough to receive word of his conversion. But Charles was almost as stubborn as his father in his public adherence to the Church of England – though for different reasons. He knew how ingrained hatred of Catholicism was among a people who still celebrated their deliverance from the Armada and the Gunpowder Plotters and who regularly burned the pope in effigy. Nor could he be ignorant of the suspicions they entertained about the Stuarts’ attitude towards those issues which had torn the country apart in the 1640s. A satirical poem in circulation in the 1670s declared how provoking it was:
To see ‘Dei gratia’ written on the throne
And the king’s wicked life say God there is none;
That he should be styled ‘Defender o’ the Faith’,
Who believes not a word the word of God saith;
That the duke should turn papist and that church defy
For which his own father a martyr did die.
Though he changed his religion I hope he’s so civil
Not to think his own father is gone to the devil.43
It would have been political suicide openly to embrace the hated religion of Rome.
However, that did not mean that the possibility of his doing so was bereft of political advantage. Louis XIV was intent on becoming the temporal leader of Catholic Europe, the crusader whose endeavours were blessed by God because he extirpated heresy from his own dominions and sought to do the same in those counties he conquered or with which he was allied. The potential reconversion of England was, thus, important to him and that gave Charles the only real advantage he had in his dealings with the French king. He played the religious card with cynical skill. In so doing he left his advisers, his family and later historians with complete uncertainty about what, if anything, he did really believe.
Minette was as eager as her mother for her brother’s spiritual wellbeing and the return of his realm to papal obedience. By now Henrietta Maria’s health was failing and Minette took the maintenance of contact between the kings entirely on her own shoulders. She worked tirelessly at the super-diplomatic role allotted to her. In truth, she had little else to which she could devote herself with equal enthusiasm. Hers was a wretched life. Her health was always delicate and her three pregnancies between 1661 and 1669 were considerable ordeals for her, the more so since she felt nothing but contempt for her husband. While Monsieur regarded himself as free to carry on his affairs, he was passionately jealous of Henrietta’s indulgence in the flirtations which were an inevitable part of the life of the French court. Among the young bucks of Versailles and the Louvre amorous rivalries made Minette’s life a misery. Armand, comte de Guiche, was a handsome devil and a considerable wit, the flower of French chivalry and a courtier extraordinaire, over whom many a maiden swooned. Mme de Sévigné, whose letters give such fascinating insight into the life of the Bourbon court, wrote, of him, ‘I would have loved him passionately if he had loved me but a little.’44 The young man did declare himself to be more than a little in love with Madame and she was ill advised enough to encourage him. This provoked the fury, not only of her husband, but also of another aspirant, the marquis de Vardes, and it was he who drew the king’s attention to the ‘affair’ and had Guiche despatched to the garrison at distant Nancy.
Not unnaturally, Henrietta turned against Vardes and he responded by launching a vendetta against her. She suffered in silence for several months but eventually the jealous aristocrat went too far. Speaking loudly among a group of people in the queen’s chambers, he remarked to his friend Philippe, chevalier de Lorraine, who pointed out the charms of one of Madame’s ladies, ‘I wonder you bother about her when you can easily have the mistress.’ Henrietta went straight to the king, demanding that Vardes be punished for his insolence. She also wrote to her mother and brother. Her letter to Charles was quite peremptory in its tone:
… it is a thing of such importance to me that the whole of the rest of my life may be affected by it. If it is not settled as I wish it to be, it will be a scandal that any private citizen should have been able to defy me and have the king’s support; but if it is, it will be a warning to everyone in future not to dare to attack me … this now makes me request you to send a letter to the king in which you tell him that although you do not doubt that he will give me all the satisfaction possible in this affair … yet you interest yourself in it so much on account of the affection you have for me that you cannot prevent yourself from asking him to do me justice …45
To a king accustomed to receiving frequent abuse this may well have seemed like a storm in a teacup but he probably did do as his sister had asked. Louis, however, did not need his brother monarch’s intervention to persuade him to oblige his beloved sister-in-law. His treatment of Vardes was cruel in the extreme and vividly displayed the regard he held for Minette. He dismissed the miscreant into distant obscurity in the Camargue for nineteen years, two of which the marquis spent in prison. But Minette’s triumph was a shallow one; every display of the king’s favour deepened the duc d’Orléans’ resentment of his wife’s popularity.
Vardes’ cronies were not disposed to let the matter rest. In 1667, the chevalier de Lorraine played upon Orléans’ all-embracing sexuality to strike up an affair with him and the duke became totally besotted with the beautiful and vicious young man. One summer’s day Monsieur turned up at the château of Villers-Cotterets, near Soissons, where Henrietta was recuperating from her latest illness under the watchful eye of her mother. His first activity was to rearrange the furniture in preparation for the arrival of his new ‘friend’. This act was annoying in itself but even more distressing for what it symbolised. Lorraine moved in and immediately set about making himself master of the household. Under this malign influence husband and wife became even more thoroughly estranged. Henrietta enjoyed some relief at the end of the year when the Duke of Monmouth, Charles’ eldest son, arrived at the French court to be ‘polished’. She took her nephew under her wing and rapidly established a pleasant rapport with him. But this only made matrimonial relations worse. The duke’s jealousy, fanned by Lorraine, had by now reached paranoid proportions. He whisked his wife off to Villers-Cotterets in the middle of winter where the old château, unprepared for their visit, was freezing and quite unsuitable for anyone of a delicate constitution. Six months later a further twist in this sordid domestic saga revealed just how completely Monsieur was under Lorraine’s spell. When an affair came to light between the chevalier and one of Henrietta’s maids of honour the duke flew into a rage – but not with Lorraine. It was Henrietta who felt the force of her husband’s fury and her attendant who was summarily dismissed, while Monsieur’s lover was more firmly entrenched than ever. And when the duke’s own almoner, Daniel de Cosnac, Bishop of Valence, produced incontrovertible evidence of Lorraine’s guilt in the form of letters, which not only declared ardent love but poured scorn on Monsieur, he too was angrily dismissed and ordered to return to his diocese.
This was the appalling situation from which Minette sought diversion by immersing herself in the high politics of the Louvre and Whitehall. In January 1669 Charles decided the time was right to introduce the religious issue into the negotiations. He went to his brother’s quarters and there, according to James’ later recollection, with tears in his eyes he announced his earnest desire to be reconciled to Rome and to declare his allegiance openly. The only other people present were Arlington, Lord Arundell and Sir Thomas Clifford (a client of Arlington and a recent addition to the council), Catholics all. They were, of course, sworn to secrecy. Buckingham, who would have been furious at any suggestion of a Catholic plot, realised that something was afoot and, through an intermediary, remonstrated with Madame. She professed herself shocked that he should believe that King Louis would contemplate not involving the duke fully in any important business between the two countries. Meanwhile, Charles made his correspondence with his sister more secure by writing in cipher and, in April, he enjoined her,
It will be good that you write sometimes to Buckingham in general terms [so] that he may not suspect that there is farther negotiations than what he knows of, but pray have a care you do not say anything to him which may make him think that I have employed anybody to Louis, which he is to know nothing of, because by the messenger he may suspect that there is something of Catholic interest in the case, which is a matter he must not be acquainted with. Therefore, you must have a great care not to say the least thing that may make him suspect anything of it.46
It is very revealing of the king’s character that this was written at the same time that he was appeasing Buckingham by proceeding against those remaining councillors of the ‘old school’, Ormonde and Coventry. After his brush with the minister Sir William was relieved of all his posts, and the earl was summoned back from Ireland to be dismissed from his position as lord-lieutenant. Nor was it only Buckingham whom Charles was deceiving; he could be just as furtive with his sister. When she expressed concern over the removal of the two councillors (perhaps agreeing with Pepys that ‘the Duke of Buckingham will be so flushed that he will not stop at anything’),47 Charles fobbed her off with vague excuses: Ormonde had not fallen from favour; there were ‘other considerations … too long for a letter’ for replacing him; and Coventry had been a ‘troublesome man’.
The negotiations during the next few months which culminated in the Secret Treaty of Dover comprehensively covered a range of sensitive topics: a combined invasion of the Dutch Republic; the return of Charles’ dominions to the Roman faith; the provision of French money and, if necessary, troops to enforce the change of national religion. Carried through, they would have either created a Catholic Stuart dynasty with autocratic powers such as Charles I had dreamed of or they would have plunged the kingdoms back into civil war. The question that has plagued historians is how sincere Charles was over the religious issue. He may have revelled in the vision of a realm forcefully united in religion under the control of a parliament-free sovereign but he knew his people well enough to be aware that that vision could never become reality. He would love to have been an autocrat after the model of Louis, commanding his subjects in everything, including matters of belief, but he knew, as he told the French ambassador in 1665, ‘I have to humour my people and my parliament. They have made great efforts to help me and I am bound to consider them and not to do anything that might give them cause for complaint.’ Only one thing is certain: Charles wanted Louis to believe that he was serious and that meant ensuring that his mother and sister entertained no doubts.
The principal couriers chosen for this highly sensitive correspondence were men known and trusted by the family. Henry, Lord Arundell of Wardour was an elderly courtier and diplomat who also happened to be Henrietta Maria’s master of the horse. His companion was Walter Montagu, the equally venerable abbot of St Martin de Pontoise and almoner to Henrietta Maria. He was reared on intrigue, having been an agent for Buckingham’s father and later for Charles II during the years of exile; a man as practised at slipping in and out of countries as he was at passing, unannounced, through palace offices and bedchambers. These aged servants were of Henrietta Maria’s generation and shared a devotion to her as fervent as their adherence to Catholicism.
It was a comfort to the queen mother and her daughter to have such trusted men as their go-betweens in the vital mission on which they were now engaged. For that is what it must have seemed to them to be. At long last, after all the tragic years, they were helping to bring to pass God’s vindication of his holy cause. The rising up of heretics and traitors against the Lord’s anointed, the martyrdom of a sainted husband and father, the wilderness time of lonely vigil when they had had nothing to sustain them but their faith – all these things were now behind them and they had lived to witness the imminent return of the British kingdoms to Catholic Christendom under Stuart rule. Such reflections will have done much to brighten days that were otherwise drear and nerve-racked. At Saint-Cloud the chevalier de Lorraine was more insufferable than ever and Henrietta was having to cope with another pregnancy. During the last stages she was bedridden for weeks at a time. Her mother came over from Colombes as often as she could but her health, too, was failing. Mother and daughter spent several hours together on 13 August and four days later Henrietta was delivered of a daughter. The queen mother was too pain-racked to make the effort to visit her latest grandchild. On the last night of the month she took a large dose of the opiate prescribed by her physicians. She went to sleep and never woke. The great matriarch of the Stuart family was dead.
The queen mother was laid to rest alongside her Bourbon ancestors in the church of St Denis, near Paris, and the funeral oration was, appropriately, given by her friend, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet. Bossuet was the leading French preacher of the day, a staunch upholder of autocracy and, more significantly in the particular circumstances, an ardent anti-Protestant polemicist. In England the court went into mourning but life – and politics – had to go on and there was no slackening of pace in the progress towards a clandestine understanding with the French king. For her part, Henrietta worked even more zealously to achieve what she knew had been her mother’s dearest wish. She mastered all the intricacies of European diplomacy and she also, throughout the autumn, summoned Bossuet to Saint-Cloud to seek his advice on their religious implications. Nine days after Henrietta Maria’s funeral, Minette wrote a long, well-reasoned letter to her brother, ‘to let you know my opinion and what I have been able to see in this business’.
It is a piece of realpolitik based on the glorification of her brother’s reign and the restitution of the Catholic faith throughout his dominions. First of all she disposes of the argument that England’s best interests lie in maintaining friendship with the Dutch to prevent France becoming too powerful:
But the matter takes on a different aspect, firstly because you have need of France to ensure the success of the design about R[eligion] and there is very little likelihood of your obtaining what you desire from the king except on condition that you enter into a league with him against Holland. I think you must take this resolution and when you have thought it well over you will find that, besides the intention of R, your glory and your profit will coincide in this design. Indeed, what is there more glorious and more profitable than to extend the confines of your kingdom beyond the sea and to become supreme in commerce, which is what your people most passionately desire and what will probably never occur so long as the Republic of Holland exists?
What is proposed is nothing less than the redrawing of the world map. The little Protestant republic is to be demolished and its land, ports and overseas possessions distributed between the usurpers.
There is, of course, a potential canker in this radiant and fragrant blossom and one which the writer knows her streetwise brother to be well aware of: once Louis’ power, territory and maritime opportunities have been dramatically enhanced, what is to prevent him turning his hostile attentions on his former ally? Henrietta disposes of this fear by pointing out that Charles will have enhanced naval supremacy and the use of continental ports from which to keep a close eye on French ambitions. Furthermore, France’s neighbour states will be very wary of her expansion and ever ready to league with England to contain her. What is interesting here is not the somewhat shaky arguments advanced to bolster a policy of naked aggression but the absence of the religious argument. Henrietta does not suggest that, once England had been reconciled to Rome, Louis would be obliged to maintain his friendship with her.
The reason for this omission is that the crucial issue in the negotiations had come to be the timing of Charles’ declaration of his conversion. That brings us back to the question of his sincerity. First and foremost for him religion was a lever for prising from Louis the support he wanted. He would not make a public declaration before he had received that support. And afterwards? Well, he would wait and see. His display of eagerness for the principle coupled with caution about the means had already succeeded in putting Louis in an ambiguous position. If he was being expected to fund the reconversion of Britain he wanted to be sure of achieving the objective. It would not at all suit his foreign policy designs to tie up men and gold across the Channel in a long and costly war. Thus he, too, appreciated the necessity of waiting for the psychological moment.
In her letter Henrietta tacitly accepts her brother’s timetable: the best opportunity for carrying out the religious programme will come after the war:
This war is not likely to be of long duration if the right measures are taken and, far from injuring the design you have touching R, it will, perhaps, give you the means of executing it with greater certainty and ease … having a pretext for keeping up troops outside your kingdom to protect your conquests, the thought alone of these troops, which for greater safety could be composed of foreigners and would be practically in sight of England, could keep [your country] in check and render parliament more amenable than it has been accustomed to be.
Here we have Henrietta Maria’s daughter writing. During the Civil War the old queen had raised men and materiel abroad to help her husband bring to heel the traitorous, heretical rabble of parliament. Now Minette was calmly advising her brother to employ mercenaries against his own people in order to impose his religion upon them. She has a further cunning suggestion to make: when Charles sends an army across the Channel to participate in the invasion of Holland why does he not ensure that he distributes military command to men who, if they stayed at home, might oppose him on the religious issue? Thus, ‘the two designs, that is to say that of R and that of the Dutch war, could be executed at the same time’.48 It was as well for Charles that the glorious vision of a swift and brilliant victory assumed in this letter never became reality. Had it done so and had he then attempted to turn back the clock to the days before Henry VIII, Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, he might have ended up sharing his father’s fate or, at least, being harried back into exile.
The events of the next few months have many of the characteristics of a Cold War spy movie – sex, bribery, intercepted messages, interrogation, clandestine meetings and the knock on the door in the middle of the night. Henrietta’s private life became tautly interwoven with affairs of state as the time for finalising a treaty drew nearer, and the complications of her domestic situation almost scuppered that treaty altogether. At the diplomatic level hard bargaining stumbled forward throughout the autumn and winter of 1669–70, dragging heavy chains of mutual suspicion, deliberate procrastination and irreconcilable interests. One matter which did become clear was that if the treaty was to remain secret it would be necessary for Madame to carry out the final negotiations. If English and French plenipotentiaries were locked together in earnest debate for several days it would be obvious that something important was afoot but what could be more natural than that Charles and his sister, who had not met for nine years, should spend some quality time together? This accorded with the royal siblings’ dearest wishes. In their correspondence they had often made plans to meet but those plans had always been frustrated either by Henrietta’s health or the pressures of national and international politics. Now that her two brothers were all that remained of her family Minette was even more desperate to see them both. Yet it was precisely the possibility of this reunion that was called in doubt by the sordid complications of Monsieur and Madame’s relationships.
The sequence of violence, retaliation and revenge began in October when Minette wrote to Cosnac, still confined to his bishopric at Valence. Lorraine’s arrogant and domineering behaviour had at last become intolerable and she asked her old friend to bring her certain letters in his possession which would discredit the chevalier and with which she hoped to encompass his downfall. Cosnac knew that he was under surveillance and it was with considerable trepidation that he donned a disguise and made the forbidden journey to Paris. Unfortunately he fell ill in some cheap lodging in the quartier Saint-Denis. A doctor was called to his bedside, recognised him and betrayed him to the authorities. Suspecting that his cover was blown, Cosnac dragged himself into an adjacent closet and got rid of all incriminating documents in the privy. Scarcely had he done so when the police burst in and carried him off to the nearest jail clad only in his dressing gown and underwear. Their excuse was that they believed him to be a forger who was on the wanted list. They ransacked his room and found one tiny piece of paper he had overlooked. It was a note from Suzanne-Charlotte de St-Chaumont, governess to the Orléans’ children, whom Henrietta had used as an intermediary. While the bishop was despatched once more into exile, Monsieur gleefully dismissed Mme de St-Chaumont. A tearful Henrietta, seconded by the English ambassador, complained bitterly to Charles and he made representations to Louis about the disgraceful treatment being meted out to his sister and her suite at the instigation of the chevalier de Lorraine.
The French king, in the middle of delicate negotiations with his cousin, was put in the difficult position of intervening in a domestic fracas between his brother and his wife. Furthermore, the complaint arrived at the same time as the latest proposals from England – proposals which were so extreme as to make Louis wonder just how serious his brother monarch was. He watched for an excuse to take action against the chevalier de Lorraine and thus please Charles. The arrogant young man was not long in offering an opportunity. Cheated, as he thought, out of some revenues he believed should have come to him, he made some injudicious remarks about the king and was immediately arrested. The duc d’Orléans flew into a frenzy, grovelling before the king and even begging Madame to intercede on the chevalier’s behalf. When his brother proved inflexible the duke flounced off to Villers-Cotterets taking his wife with him and vowing that he would never set foot in the court again. That scarcely bothered Louis but he was annoyed when letters to Orléans from his haughty Adonis were intercepted urging the duke to remain steadfast in his opposition to the king. That earned the chevalier an immediate transfer to the Château d’lf, the awesome island prison off Marseilles which would later be given worldwide notoriety by Dumas in The Count of Monte Cristo. The gauge needle of Monsieur’s wrath swung into the red and, as always, his wife felt the force of it.
All this happened at the very time that Louis and Charles wanted to make arrangements for Henrietta’s visit to England. Most of the log jams impeding agreement had, by dint of long days of discussion among the ministers and ambassadors party to the secret and even longer nights spent in drafting and redrafting sections of the treaty, been shifted. Both sides were eager to get everything signed, sealed and settled. The longer the final steps were delayed, the more chance there was of the secret getting out. But everything was dependent on Henrietta being able to make the journey, and that was dependent on Monsieur giving his consent, for even King Louis was not prepared to override the rights a husband had over his wife. It was not just the treatment of his boyfriend that stuck in Orléans’ throat. The chevalier had his own espionage system and had learned something of the reason behind Henrietta’s proposed trip to England. This intelligence he, of course, passed to the duke, who was furious that, yet again, he had been left out of the king’s counsels and treated as a mere cipher. As well as requests travelling through official, diplomatic channels, Charles, James and Lord St Albans all wrote directly to the duke asking him to allow the duchess to visit her brother. These messages duly arrived at Villers-Cotterets but for several days Henrietta dared not pass them on to her husband. It was mid-February before Monsieur had sufficiently cooled down to make an approach possible. His brother urged him to return to court and as an inducement eased the chevalier’s conditions of detention. The duke and duchess drove back to Paris – Monsieur was bored with his frozen country estate anyway – but he absolutely refused to allow Madame to cross the Channel unless his lover was restored to him. Since Louis was not prepared to humiliate himself by making that concession there was a state of stalemate.
If anything, Orléans’ resolve was strengthened by the return to court. Everyone made a great fuss of Henrietta and sympathised with her over her husband’s brutish treatment. Every afternoon the king spent time with her in private discussing affairs of national importance to which he – the king’s brother and the man who would have to act as regent in the event of anything happening to Louis – was not privy. Everywhere he looked he was confronted by his wife’s popularity and his own inadequacy. It is scarcely surprising that he focused his resentment on Henrietta by openly insulting her at every opportunity and refusing her the thing she most ardently desired – reunion with what was left of her own family. The programme Louis was working to entailed the conclusion of the treaty in April. He was taking the court on progress into the Netherlands to inspect the territory he had conquered in the recent campaign and the plan was for Madame and her train to slip across the Channel from Dunkirk. Monsieur put every possible obstacle in the way of his brother’s designs.
He declined to join the northern progress. Then he said that he and his wife would go but that she was to stay in French territory. Days later he yielded so far as to agree to accompany Madame on a brief visit to Dover. Every ounce of Charles’ diplomatic tact was needed to suggest that the duke’s presence would not be appropriate. Orléans eventually swallowed that and consented to his wife paying a short visit to Dover. Charles pointed out that a tiny fishing village was hardly the most suitable rendezvous for so exalted a personage as the sister-in-law of the King of France and that it was essential that Madame be received with all honours at Whitehall. At that Orléans dug his heels in: it was Dover or nothing – and only for three days. With that Charles and Louis had to be content. Even then, if one source ‘close to the throne’ is to be believed, Monsieur tried to scupper the plan by forcing himself on his wife every night in the hope that she would become pregnant and, therefore, unfit to travel.
Louis and his court, packed into scores of coaches and accompanied by an army of 30,000 to impress his new subjects, left Paris on 18 April. The journey turned into an ordeal for everyone concerned, though the accounts of it make humorous reading now. The weather was vile and the roads in places almost unusable. When they reached the Sambre the elegant lords and ladies in their fine coaches found that the river had burst its banks and that the only bridge had been swept away. Flood water swirled around them and all was confusion. The queen squealed hysterically that they were all going to be drowned. When equerries discovered a very modest farmhouse that would afford the royal party some shelter her majesty flatly refused to be lodged in such a hovel. When she had been persuaded that a night on bare boards was preferable to one spent cooped up in her carriage she almost stuck in the mud on her way to the building. Then, when a very basic meal was served, she turned her nose up at it, changing her mind only when the king and the rest of the party had heartily attacked the humble fare and there was nothing left. She might have imagined that, after this, things could only get better but she had not reckoned on trying to sleep with other women – and men – round a smoky fire with the sounds and smells of animals in adjacent accommodation filling the air. The news, brought to the king at four in the morning, that the bridge had been repaired at last put an end to a night of torment.
Unpleasant though the journey was for ladies not accustomed to such hardship, to a semi-invalid such as Henrietta it was truly purgatorial. The jolting, slithering progress of her coach used up all her strength and each night she retired, often able to take no more than a little milk. As for Monsieur, he positively gloated at her discomfort, observing on one occasion that the trip would probably be the death of her. When news arrived that all was ready aboard the English fleet to carry her across the Channel, he made a last-ditch effort to prevent her departure. This time Louis ordered him to stop his obstruction; Madame was going to England at his specific request and he would brook no opposition. Charles, meanwhile, had rushed to sea at the earliest opportunity, eager to meet his sister in mid-Channel, but contrary winds had forced him back to Gravesend, from where he rode to Dover. On 16 May 1670 brother and sister were at long last emotionally reunited aboard the English flagship as it glided into the harbour. As Charles escorted Henrietta to the rooms that had been prepared for her in the old castle overlooking the port, he can scarcely have failed to notice with alarm how much she had changed. The sixteen-year-old girl he had said goodbye to in 1661 had not been robust but her liveliness had well concealed her essential frailty. Now he was confronted by a prematurely aged woman of twenty-five.
Monsieur was persuaded to grant his wife an extension of her leave of absence and she was able to spend seventeen days with her brothers and their closest attendants, including Queen Catherine, whom she had never met but about whom Charles had often written, and her own erstwhile lady of the bedcamber, Frances, Duchess of Richmond. Although the resources of the capital were not available, Charles went to considerable lengths to entertain his sister. The Duke’s Men were brought down to act for her; there was a banquet to mark the king’s birthday; and further amusements were offered aboard Charles’ flagship when he proudly took her to sea to show off his navy. The king’s affection for his sole remaining female relative was genuine and obvious. The French ambassador, Colbert, declared, ‘she has much more power over the king, her brother, than any other person in the world’,49 and included in that all-embracing statement were Charles’ current mistresses.
But the main purpose of the visit was the treaty and this occupied brother and sister for the first few days of Henrietta’s stay. The central clauses concerned the details about the coming conflict and the means by which Charles (and, hopefully, in time Britain) was to return to papal allegiance. Command in the war was divided between the two sovereigns: Charles would contribute 6,000 men to Louis’ land force and have charge of the naval expedition comprising fifty English and forty French capital ships. In order to enable Charles to make his religious declaration the French king would provide 2 million livres (£1 = approx. 13 livres) in two instalments and, if necessary, 6,000 troops. What the treaty did not establish was when these events would take place. The opening of hostilities was left to Louis to decide, after Charles had made his declaration, and Charles was to make his declaration ‘as soon as the welfare of his kingdom will permit’, a deliciously slippery phrase. What Charles had succeeded in securing from his cousin was an open cheque, not only in cash terms but also in terms of diplomatic support. He had tied the greatest power in Europe to his regime and if at any time Louis should turn against him Charles could invoke their secret religious agreement. As to his declaration being a prelude to his entering the Dutch war, he very neatly got round that some months later. He had Buckingham conclude an official treaty with France. Its terms were almost exactly the same as those of the secret treaty but, since they were for public consumption, they made no mention of religion. Thus, Charles ended up committing himself to a combined war against the Dutch Republic with no religious strings attached. Before Minette’s departure the secret treaty had been ratified by both sides.
All too soon the day of her return to France arrived. Charles and James accompanied her aboard her ship on 2 June and sailed some distance with her. The king showered his sister with presents, including 2,000 crowns for her to have a memorial chapel built for their mother at her favourite convent at Chaillot. According to the oft-reprinted romantic story, Henrietta, wanting to give something in return, called for her jewel box. It was brought by one of her ladies, a young, dark-haired, green-eyed Breton girl by the name of Louise de Keroualle. Minette invited her brother to select any jewel of his choice. Smiling on the young woman he said that she was the only precious object he desired. Perhaps Minette would leave her as a going-away present. Was it a jest to lighten the time of parting or was Charles’ libido active even at such a sad moment? The anecdote, if true, might lead us to imagine that Charles was noticing Louise for the first time, which was certainly not the case. Anyone with the king’s eye for a pretty face would have been struck by this lively and intelligent twenty-year-old daughter of an impoverished Breton aristocrat. The young woman may have had a special attraction for him precisely because she was a great favourite of Minette’s. The Frances Stuart incident suggests that brother and sister had similar tastes in people. In whatever tone the request was made, Henrietta laughingly refused it, saying that she was responsible to the girl’s parents for her safety. When the time for goodbyes arrived many tears were shed on both sides. Three times Charles walked across the deck to descend to the boat which was to take him to his yacht. Three times he ran back to embrace his sister. But, at last, he left.
With this brief interlude of happiness and the sense of something achieved behind her, Henrietta returned to her Bourbon relatives. Back at the French court nothing had changed; everyone loved Madame except her husband. The widespread adulation she received and the expressions of the king’s gratitude heaped fresh coals on Monsieur’s jealousy. He took his wife back to Saint-Cloud at the first opportunity and the old domestic misery resumed. She had one more task to perform for her English friends, and that was to inform Sir Thomas Clifford that she had urged her brother to grant him and Arlington fresh honours for their part in the treaty making. Then she bent all her concentration on coping with her physical and psychological distress.
The afternoon of 29 June was very hot and she drank some iced water flavoured with chicory. Immediately she collapsed in excruciating pain and, much to the consternation of her attendants, cried out that she had been poisoned. Doctors were summoned and she was prescribed an emetic. To calm her fears of foul play, Monsieur ordered some of her women to drink from his wife’s cup, which they did without suffering ill effects, but this did nothing to remove Henrietta’s conviction that she was about to die at the hands of a murderer. Given all that she had suffered in recent years, her suspicions were understandable. In fact, it was the ulcer which had long plagued her that had brought on this attack. After hours of useless ministrations by the physicians, Orléans was sufficiently alarmed to send word to his brother, and the king and queen immediately came from Versailles. They were joined by other court notables until Madame’s chamber was thronged with the cream of French society.
One of those who attended Madame was the remarkable Marie-Madeleine, comtesse de Lafayette. A friend of Racine and Corneille, she was a leading figure in the Parisian literary scene and one of the first French lady novelists. She wrote a first-hand account of the moving events of the next few hours. As we read her words we need to keep in mind the fact that she was a mistress of the affecting story.
The king, seeing that all the signs indicated that there was no hope, said his farewells with tears in his eyes. She implored him not to weep, for that was moving her [to tears] also and she told him that the first news he would receive the next day would be of her death … The English ambassador [Ralph Montagu] arrived … As soon as she saw him she spoke to him about the king her brother and the sorrow that her death would bring him. She had spoken of this often in the early stages of her illness and she [now] begged him to assure the king that he was losing the one who loved him best in all the world. Then the ambassador asked her if she had been poisoned (or if she had earlier claimed to be poisoned; I am not sure which). [The conversation was in English which explains why the writer could not be certain on this crucial point.] But I do know that she insisted that he say nothing of this to the king her brother, for it would only deepen his grief and he must not even contemplate revenge. King Louis was in no way involved and her brother must under no circumstances blame him.
Later that night she asked to see her husband. He came and embraced her and now seemed genuinely moved but she sent him away, saying that his presence disturbed her and that she wished only to think of God. Soon after midnight Bossuet arrived and it was he who comforted her and, as far as possible, eased her passage into the next world.
… she responded to him clearly, as though she were not ill, all the time holding the crucifix to her lips. Only death made her abandon it. Her strength ebbed and she let it fall. Her speech faded at almost the same instant that life itself fled. Her agony lasted but a moment and, after two or three convulsive movements of her mouth, she died at half past two in the morning and nine hours after her final affliction had begun.50
Henrietta, duchesse d’Orléans, had just passed her twenty-sixth birthday.
Charles was distraught. As Burnet observed, ‘few things ever went near his heart’ but Henrietta’s death afflicted him even more than his brother Henry’s almost a decade before. He shut himself up in his bedchamber to grieve in solitude and did not emerge for several days. The depth of his feelings surprised many at court but the king recognised the truth of little Minette’s words that he had lost someone who loved him deeply and had dedicated herself to his welfare.
The messenger who brought the ambassador’s report on the events at Saint-Cloud and who travelled non-stop to break the sad news in person was Sir Thomas Armstrong, a royal servant high in the king’s favour whose fortunes were destined to change tragically. Throughout the exile Armstong had been one of the many royalists who suffered much in person and fortune for the Stuarts. He had travelled back and forth carrying intelligence and cash for Charles and been thrice imprisoned. At the Restoration he had been knighted by a grateful sovereign and given a captaincy in the king’s guards. Yet, some time in the 1670s he was deprived of his offices, became a close supporter of the Duke of Monmouth (seen by many as a Protestant rival to the Duke of York as heir to the throne), was involved in intrigues against the king and his brother and suffered a traitor’s death after a travesty of a trial during which Charles insisted, with breathtaking dishonesty, that years before Armstrong had attempted to assassinate him on Cromwell’s orders.
We can only speculate about what turned a devoted subject against the king and what caused Charles’ trust in Armstrong to turn to bitter hatred. However, a few facts may point us in the right direction and certainly help us to understand the thickening clouds of disaffection and contempt which gathered round Charles in the second half of his reign. Thomas was bora in 1624, in the Netherlands. His father was a serving officer in the army sent over by James I to fight for his Protestant son-in-law, the Elector Palatine, against Catholic forces. His mother may have been Dutch. Armstrong grew up with profound anti-Catholic convictions. On Henrietta’s death he waited upon the ambassador, Ralph Montagu, and discussed with him the latest distressing events. Montagu is unlikely to have revealed to Armstrong the news he had recently received from Madame (and of which he strongly disapproved) of the secret Anglo-French agreement to wage war on the Dutch but he certainly shared his conviction that the king’s sister had been murdered. On leaving Paris, Armstrong only broke his urgent journey to stop briefly at Saint-Cloud in order to gaze for a last time upon Madame, whose demise had much affected him. Arrived at Whitehall, did he add his own accusations of French perfidy to the official report from the ambassador? In the next few emotionally charged days he must have watched for the king’s reaction and been disappointed – perhaps even disgusted – by it.
All manner of rumours were soon circulating in both Paris and London about the death of the Stuart princess. Orléans’ enemies suggested that he had smeared the rim of his wife’s cup with a toxic potion sent him for the purpose by the chevalier de Lorraine. They drew attention to the fact that, in recent weeks, Monsieur had been heard prophesying Henrietta’s imminent demise. All this was very alarming for Louis – and Charles. It threatened the treaty they had spent so much time concluding, and, therefore, all their foreign ambitions. Louis wrote immediately to offer Charles his condolences and to assure him that the most thorough investigation into his sister’s death would be set in motion and that if poison was as much as suspected no effort would be spared to track down and punish the perpetrator. He ordered a thorough post-mortem and this was carried out by several leading physicians in a specially prepared auditorium where more than a hundred interested (or just morbid) spectators could be accommodated. The verdict was that death was due to a choleric disorder. (Modern medical analysis based on the available evidence has suggested that Minette died of peritonitis following the perforation of an ulcer.) Inevitably, not everyone believed the official line and Montagu was among those who suspected a cover-up. Charles, however, declared himself fully satisfied with the report brought to him from Paris and assured Louis that the tragedy had not impaired their friendship. Those close to him noticed that he seemed much more concerned about recovering the letters he had written to Henrietta before they could fall into the hands of her un-grief-stricken widower. As for Armstrong, Charles ordered him not to mention his suspicions to anyone. To someone already disposed to Francophobia and anti-Catholicism such a ‘weak’ and cynical response can have done little to undergird respect for the king. A few years later Montagu was openly contemptuous of Charles, a circumstance Barbara Villiers tried to use to her advantage (see here). He and Armstrong both committed themselves to the cause of the Protestant Duke of Monmouth.
In the short term, all the frenzied clandestine diplomacy, the hard bargaining and the deception of ministers and diplomats – everything that had helped to shorten Minette’s life – produced for Charles nothing but fresh humiliations. The war which was confidently expected to bring the conspirator-kings swift and glorious triumph began in March 1672. Less than two years later Charles was obliged to sue for an ignominious peace. Louis had made some territorial gains but the Dutch had protected Amsterdam by opening the sluices and flooding the surrounding land. Neighbouring states, alarmed at France’s spreading boundaries, had joined in the war and Charles’ critics could, with some justification, claim that he had been dragged into an expensive conflict merely to further the aggrandisement of the Bourbon monarchy. Meanwhile at sea the only major engagement had been the battle of Southwold Bay, technically a draw but in effect a Dutch victory since it prevented the allies gaining control of the Narrow Seas and demonstrated that the two navies could not work together. Another unforeseen result was the emergence of Charles’ nephew, William of Orange, as the saviour of his beleaguered nation and a formidable player in the European political game. The young man to whom Charles had always behaved as a patronising uncle became his country’s military leader and was voted hereditary stadtholder.
At home matters went just as badly. As a first step – or, at least, a perceived first step – towards the revelation of his conversion Charles issued a Declaration of Indulgence which lifted all penal laws against Catholics and Nonconformists. This coincided with the opening of hostilities and lasted much less time than the conflict. When there was no quick victory and, therefore, no spoils of war to offset the cost of military action the king had to call parliament. The heir to the throne had, by now, openly declared his conversion and anti-popery was stronger than ever. It was obvious to the government and their supporters that the staunch Anglican majority in both houses would demand the rescinding of the declaration. In the event they went further: they passed a Test Act which provided that every person holding office in government or the armed forces was to take an oath to the king as head of the Church in England, to receive Holy Communion according to the Church of England rite, and specifically to abjure the doctrine of transubstantiation. If Charles had ever toyed with the idea of offering his allegiance to Rome this decisive action by the national assembly banished it from his mind for ever. In a later session of parliament in 1675 he affirmed ‘hand on heart’ his commitment to the national Church, from which, as he promised, ‘I will never depart’.
Even as he spoke the words the secret Treaty of Dover was still in force, committing him to a diametrically opposed course of action and Louis still intended to hold him to his obligation. Charles might have been forced to make peace with the Dutch but the French king knew that, behind the façade of international diplomacy, his brother monarch was eager to maintain the amity between them. Unfortunately they had lost their private go-between. However, a replacement for Minette was not long in appearing. The death of the duchesse d’Orléans put little Louise de Keroualle out of a job. Charles and Louis managed to find her fresh employment.