A Health Unto His Majesty

EPILOGUE

Some twenty-four years after the reign of Charles had ended, Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, lay in a house in the village of Chiswick; she was dying.

Sixty-eight years of age, an intriguante to the end, she had not ceased to look for lovers. So many of those who had witnessed the days of her glory were long since dead. Even Catherine the Queen, who had lived to an old age, had died four years before, just at the time when Barbara was contracting that most disastrous marriage with a man who had in his day been one of the most handsome rakes in London.

She lay on her bed, swollen to a great size by the dropsy which had attacked her. She felt too old and tired even to abuse her attendants; a sure sign, they felt, that the end was near.

She dozed a little and allowed her mind to slip back to events of the past. It was the only pleasure left to her. The greatest evil which could befall her had come upon her; she was old, no longer beautiful nor desirable; she remembered faintly that some member of the Court, with whom she had quarreled, had once declared that he hoped to see her come to such a state. Well, it was upon her now.

She had lost the King’s favor to her old enemy the Duchess of Portsmouth; she had had many lovers since then but she had never ceased to regret the loss of Charles. She had schemed to marry her children into the richest and most noble families of England; and only Barbara, her youngest and Churchill’s child, had become a nun.

She thought of coming back to England just before Charles’ death, with high hopes of returning to his favor. But he remembered too well the tantrums and furies of the past; he was happy with Louise de Kéroualle, his Duchess of Portsmouth, and Nelly the play-girl.

In place of the King she had found an actor lover, a gay adventurer, named Cardonell Goodman. Ah, he had been handsome, and what joy to see him strut across the stage as Alexas in Dryden’s All for Love, or Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. She had paid him well; and he had been grateful, for an actor’s pay of six and threepence a day had been inadequate for the needs of such a man. No wonder he had loved her. No wonder he had refused to allow the play to start until his Duchess was in her box, even though the Queen herself had come to see it! He had tried to poison her children. Oh, he was a rogue, but an exciting one, and she had his child to remember him by.

But she was growing old and her body had become over-heavy; and the worst calamity which had befallen her was the death of Roger, for then she had been foolish enough to go through a form of marriage with Robert Feilding, who was known as “Beau.”

The thought of that villain could rouse her from her torpor even now and bring the tumultuous blood rushing to her head. Be calm! she admonished herself. You do yourself harm by thinking of the rogue!

In Feilding she had found another such as she herself had been; but, being ten years her junior, he had the whip hand, and he used it. He had dared to dictate to her and, if she did not carry out his wishes, to lay about him with his heavy hands. He had dared to inflict bruises on the Duchess of Cleveland!

But Fate was kinder to her than perhaps she deserved; for she discovered that she was not after all his wife, since he had contracted a marriage with another woman some short while before he had gone through the ceremony with her.

And with Feilding had ended her matrimonial adventures. She had felt only one desire then—to live in seclusion.

So in the village of Chiswick she had come to end her days.

The room was growing dark; she could hear voices but she could no longer see the figures which moved about her.

She closed her eyes, and as her attendants bent over her bed, one murmured: “Was this then … this bloated creature … was she once the most beautiful of women?”

It was four years before the death of Barbara when, in the quiet Palace of Lisbon, in that chamber to which no man must be admitted, Catherine of Braganza lay dying.

She was an old woman now, having reached her sixty-seventh year, and it was twenty years since Charles had died.

Now, as she lay in her bed with only Donna Inez Antonia de Tavora to wait on her, she felt life slipping away from her and was not always conscious of the room in which she lay.

It seemed to her that sometimes she was back in the Palace of Whitehall, enduring agonies of jealousy as she saw her husband become deeply enamored of other women. It had not been the end of jealousy when he had come to Somerset House and saved her from her enemies. He had not changed towards her. He was the same Charles as he had ever been. She had still remained his plain wife who did not attract him, who must be perpetually jealous of the beautiful women with whom he surrounded himself; but she had learned one thing: he would always be there when any dire peril threatened her.

He had saved her; it had been said, during the weeks which followed that journey from Somerset House to Whitehall: “The King has a new mistress—his wife.”

Yet he had been unable to save her servants; he had been against the bloody executions which had followed, but he had done all he dared in saving his wife.

She recalled those unhappy days when England was ruled by a cruel rogue and wicked perjurer. She remembered the exile of the unhappy Duke of York, and later his defeat by his daughter’s husband; she remembered the coming of William of Orange—and her own unhappy treatment at the hands of that sovereign and his wife Mary. She remembered returning to her native land and building this Palace of Bemposta; and she looked back on these last five years of her life as the peaceful years.

But there was one thing she remembered more vividly than anything, and that was the last time she had seen the man she had loved throughout her life. The pain he suffered could not disturb that wry smile; the agony of death could not quench the wit which came so readily to his lips.

She had wept and had begged that he would forgive her for failing him—for failing to bring him the dowry which he had so desired, for failing to bring him the beauty which he had so much admired, for failing to give him a son.

She would treasure his answer to the very end. “You beg my pardon? Do not, I pray you, for it is I who should beg yours, and this I do with all my heart.”

Now she murmured those words to herself.

“He begged my pardon with all his heart. What need had he to beg my pardon with all his heart, when I loved him with all mine?”

The end was near. The room was now crowded; she was vaguely conscious of the last ceremonies, for it seemed to her that at the last there was one who stood beside her—tall and very dark, with a jest on his lips—who took her hand to lead her; and she was smiling, for thus she was not afraid.