Blood Royal Read online

  Blood Royal

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Publisher’s note

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Author’s Notes

  Copyright

  This book contains views and language on nationality, ethnicity, and society which are a product of the time in which the book is set. The publisher does not endorse or support these views. They have been retained in order to preserve the integrity of the text.

  To Charlie Clifford

  Chapter One

  There are two portraits of Lady Cecily Fitzhenry, both in private collections. The first is by van der Myn and was done in 1733, the same year in which she altered the course of history.

  The painter, of course, was unaware that his subject belonged in the category of Helen of Troy and Joan of Arc, women who, for a moment, held the destiny of their country in their hands – or, in the case of Helen of Troy, somewhat lower down. Unlike Helen and Joan, Lady Cecily kept her nation out of war. She also kept the fact that she’d done so under her hat.

  Had he known Lady Cecily’s national significance, van der Myn would have disposed of the hat and asked her to sit for him with a helmet on her head and a trident in her fist against a background of putti, victory swags and grapes. He was that sort of artist, one of those who came to England in the first quarter of the eighteenth century and flourished by painting the rich as they wanted posterity to see them.

  As it is, the portrait’s in his usual blandly flattering style, showing a pretty woman in pretty clothes. What’s rare in it is the black child included in the picture: it has no slave collar and, instead of standing behind her chair, sits on her knee…

  The other portrait of Lady Cecily is by Hogarth and was executed seventeen years earlier without her knowledge, while Hogarth himself was in his apprenticeship as an engraver. A stolen, rapid and charming charcoal sketch, perhaps a cartoon for an intended engraving, it shows a slim young woman running through a wintry St James’s Park – the Palace is in the background – with a pair of skates in her hand.

  Had she known that she was being sketched by a common or garden apprentice, the Lady Cecily of those days would have bewailed the laxity of Charles II, under whose reign commoners like Hogarth had been, and still were, allowed to walk the Park and gape at the sport of their betters.

  The sketch shows that Lady Cecily is setting the fashion with a skirt that scandalously displays her ankles. It is naughtily entitled Maid of Honour?– this at a time when it was generally assumed that female courtiers had no honour – probably an early example of the cynicism that caused Hogarth to be ignored by the aristocracy.

  The date on the sketch is fortuitous and poignant: 23 February 1716. That afternoon Lady Cecily was kindly to accede to her cousin Anne’s request to accompany her to Scotland – and thereby begin the process that was to lead to her downfall. We now know that the young woman in Hogarth’s drawing was running towards a future containing an unwelcoming marriage, highway robbery, espionage, dark inns and, eventually, the country’s salvation. Her own, too.

  We also know, from the discovery of her scanty and intermittent diary for 1716, that as she ran through St James’s Park that morning, Lady Cecily’s thoughts were occupied by nothing more weighty than the Countess of Crakanthorpe’s claim that her (the countess’s) waist was so small it could span a space occupied by only an orange and a half.

  ‘Tiny,’ the diary says. ‘If lumpy. And if true.’

  Hogarth’s sketch is in monochrome, like the Park where white trees were crystallized against a military grey sky. In life, the young Lady Cecily was in sapphire, skates dangling from one hand, the other tucked in her swansdown muff, which matched the edging of her hood.

  Hurrying towards the lake with her nonsense, Lady Cecily was as old as the century, prettier than the average, richer than most and bluer-blooded than practically anybody, certainly more so than Caroline, Princess of Wales, whom she served as maid of honour and who was German, poor thing.

  On the lake kingfisher colours dipped and swooped around the majestic scarlet of Princess Caroline, but not too closely – out of respect and a soupçon of doubt as to whether the ice would hold Her Highness’s weight. The freezing air was shot with aromatic currents, the steam of fresh horse manure, the smell of coffee, chocolate and charcoal from the lake edge where lesser-hued servants prepared hot beverages, tending braziers and warming-pans for the comfort of the courtiers.

  Before she could reach it, snow was sliced from the nearest tree by the notes of a trumpet and Cecily had to stand still. The king was returning from his morning ride.

  Lady Cecily dropped into a curtsy. His Majesty was dismounting. Now for those embarrassing pauses while he searched for English sentences.

  ‘You are Fitzhenry.’ Pause. ‘Zezily.’ A thick forefinger under her chin raised her.

  ‘I am, Your Majesty.’

  ‘Bretty.’

  ‘Thank you, Majesty.’

  ‘Vere are you going? Vat are you doing?’

  ‘To the lake, Majesty. Her Royal Highness is skating this morning. The ground’s too hard to hunt. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s there and Lord Hervey, and Mr Pope…’ She chattered inanely to ward off the inevitable; he hadn’t caught her alone before.

  ‘Bope? The boet? I hate boets. And bainters.’

  And his skating daughter-in-law and his son. Not too fond of England either. Should have stayed in Hanover and made everybody happy. But Cecily smiled at him; for all his brocade and velvet, he looked like one’s friendly local butcher.

  The beefy face stared glumly down at hers. ‘Veux-toi monter à cheval avec moi, ma chérie?’

  It was his regular euphemism: they’d told her he’d use it – and she had her answer ready. ‘Such an honour, sire, but you have been too occupied perhaps to remember that I am a royal ward. My devotion to you is as to a father by law.’ She gave him time to catch up and grinned at him. ‘It would be incest.’

  (As Hervey said later on, when she told him about it, ‘Such subtlety, my love,’ and Cecily said, ‘He doesn’t understand subtlety,’ and Hervey said, ‘And you, my dear, are no Machiavelli.’)

  The king became glummer. ‘Farder.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Incest.’

  ‘Yes, sire.’

  He grunted and crunched off like a depressed farmer whose yield is down, his horse and entourage plodding after him.

  Tsk, tsk, the Hanoverians. Uniformly vulgar. Amiable peasants. There’d be no percentage in broadcasting the fact that she’d been asked to be a royal mistress when the two trollops he’d brought with him from Germany had all the beauty of ale vats without the charm.

  The old chap was lonely more than anything: Mary Lepel had once entered von der Schulenburg’s apartment to discover him and the Hop-pole occupied in nothing more lascivious than cutting out paper dolls.

  Cecily joined the company on the lake, apologizing to Princess Caroline, ‘…but I was delayed by Sir Hubert who has had a letter from the Countess of Crakanthorpe which mentions that…’ she rolled her eyes for maximum effect as the skaters teetered round her ‘…her waist encompasses no more space than that occupied by an orange and a half.’

  At once it was the rage, the men as caught as the women whose hands fluttered a pr
ojection of the size. Lord Hervey cried for a tape measure, a tape measure, his kingdom for a tape measure. Poor Pope began to compose ‘The Waste of a Waist’. Princess Caroline beamed upon the to-do with the patronage of one whose figure had been expanded by German sausage and four babies in eight years.

  Eventually she said, ‘I am gold,’ so they rugged her and tugged her back to the Palace. Footmen divested them of their cloaks in the Great Hall and they danced into what were once Anne Boleyn’s lodgings, where a fire burned in the two enormous grates of the Gallery. Oranges were sent for, and a sempstress with tape measure.

  It’s a pity the early Hogarth didn’t catch them on canvas then. Living, pastel architecture. We should see nothing loose about them, except their morals. The boned, skirted brocade of the men’s coats stiff. The women’s heads mere pin-tops in round-eared caps, their upper bodies from the breasts down flattened by boards in order that no wrinkle interrupt the line of satin until it reaches the giant skirt, which itself is smoothed over hoops so strong that if their owner should fall over she becomes an upended bell, her kicking legs double-clappers.

  They are a generation despaired of by the one that fought Queen Anne’s wars and which now sees its sons such as Lord Hervey fondle lap-dogs, step like pee-wits as if the floor is slippery, parget their face with rouge and powder their wigs blue. In the absence of war, they expend their courage in duels or the hunting field or at the card table, stoically languid as they are pinked, break a leg so that the bone sticks through the boot, or lose a fortune.

  The young women are rebellious, prepared, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to run away from an arranged marriage and take the man of their choice.

  Male and female, they chatter through church services because their religion is unbelief, political, merely a design to keep the lower classes – ‘the mob’ – in order.

  Lord Douglas slices an orange with his sword. Should the half be laid face down next to the whole one, or on its side? Cecily bets one hundred guineas that her waist will prove equal to the comparison. Thin Lord Hervey lays two hundred on his. The Hon. Sophie Breffny, Cecily’s plumper cousin, takes them on.

  The tape measure defeats them both: Lord Hervey loses by another whole orange, Cecily by only a few segments.

  Looking back on that, the last of her careless days at court, Cecily was to see herself and the others as spun in glass; fragile, comic figurines lit against the advancing dark of a winter’s afternoon, the afternoon when Anne asked for her company to Scotland.

  For a long time Cecily relived those few hours over and over, as if by doing so she could alter her reply to Anne’s request, say, ‘No, cousin, I am otherwise engaged.’ It was difficult to believe that an invitation so lightly accepted would result in what it had. One butterfly action could not, surely, have set off an avalanche of such proportions. By concentrating hard, she might change it, force her past self to remain in King George I’s court and live out the future her upbringing had led her to expect.

  Later still, of course, she understood that her country had needed her and by a tortuous route had led her to the saving of it.

  It had been Meant.

  In any case, her ties of kinship and affection to Anne had been too strong to countenance refusal. If the past were to be changed it would entail Anne not asking in the first place, which would necessitate going further backwards in time and preventing the Jacobite Rising of the previous year which, in turn, would involve…

  It may be that the spark fizzing along the trail of powder leading to the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 had been touched off in 1642 when Charles I, still believing he had a divine right to rule as he pleased, clashed with those who didn’t and civil war broke out between the two.

  Or in 1688, the Glorious Revolution, when Charles’s stubborn and Catholic son, King James II, showing every sign that he held his father’s beliefs, was dismissed from his throne and country by his Protestant people, afraid he would force them back into popery.

  Or in 1708 when his son, another James, made a bungled attempt to land in Scotland from France and raise an army.

  Or in 1714 when Queen Anne, last of the Stuart monarchs, died. Strictly speaking, she should have been succeeded by James III, her half-brother, but as the exiled lad appeared to be as stubborn as his father in matters of religion, the British invited his nearest Protestant relative, George of Hanover, to rule them instead. At least, the Whigs did, being the natural descendants of the civil war’s Parliamentarians. The Tories, sitting lethargically in their shires, were reluctantly prepared to put up with the German as long as he protected the Church of England. The Jacobites, James’s supporters, even the few who were Protestant, were not.

  But the explosion point, the moment when spark touched barrel, came on 1 August 1715, as the Earl of Mar, a Tory and known associate of James Stuart – now merely Pretender to the throne – appeared at a royal levée in London and approached the new king in order to inform His Majesty of his loyalty and his hope of being confirmed in the post of Secretary of State for Scotland, which he had held under Queen Anne.

  The king turned his back on him.

  The gesture was a mistake if George hoped for a quiet period in which to settle into his reign. At once, the Earl of Mar left the levée and galloped to his home in the eastern Highlands of Scotland where he raised in rebellion the clans favourable to the Stuart cause.

  That also, as it turned out, was a mistake. The earl had been too hasty. Nobody was ready. The Pretender himself was still in France. Jacobites in England were taken by surprise and failed to cohere.

  Nevertheless, Britain was alarmed as rebel forces won Sheriffmuir, forced a crossing of the Firth of Forth to spread terror among the Lowlands and the Presbyterian Scots loyal to King George, and penetrated the Border into Lancashire before being defeated at the Battle of Preston.

  The Pretender, having only just arrived, had to turn round and go back to France.

  The Earl of Mar was able to join him, but most rebels were not. Some were taken to London where two of their leaders, the Earl of Derwentwater and Viscount Kenmuir, were tried and executed along with four others.

  Some 1,500 were tried in Lancashire, where they’d been captured, a large proportion being transported to the colonies. Other rebels were awaiting trial at Edinburgh Castle, among them Viscount Strathallan, Lord Rollo and Viscount Stormont.

  But the main concern of the women gathered in Cecily’s apartments at St James’s Palace in London that February afternoon was for another of the Edinburgh prisoners, Lord Keltie of Portsoy, the father of Anne Insh, first cousin to Lady Cecily Fitzhenry…

  ‘Apartments’ was a generous term for two small rooms in St James’s Tudor gatehouse, but they indicated Cecily’s standing with the royal family that she had them at all. Nearly all the other maids of honour shared bedrooms and used a communal drawing room.

  Exertion on the ice had given the Princess of Wales a cold and she remained in her apartments with only Lepel and Bellenden in attendance. The Prince of Wales was in his, undoubtedly with Mrs Howard – he kept to such an orderly rotation in servicing his wife and mistresses you could set your clock by it. The Palace was quiet. Outside, snow muffled footsteps and carriage wheels and bowed the branches of the Park’s trees.

  It was Mary Astell’s fifty-eighth birthday and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had fetched her from Chelsea to take tea with the three maids of honour who were her former pupils: Cecily, the Hon. Sophia Breffny and Miss Anne Insh, who had not yet put in an appearance.

  On their way the two older women had called in to see Lady Cowper, the Lord Chancellor’s wife, and it was her account of the execution of Lords Derwentwater and Kenmuir in the Tower of London that dominated the conversation. They needed to tell the tale quickly, before Anne arrived, as it would be tasteless to recount it to someone whose father was facing the same fate in Edinburgh. They were all worried about Anne: since her plea to go to her father in his prison had been refused by the king, the girl had kept
withdrawn into herself. Cecily hoped that the occasion of Mrs Astell’s birthday party would tempt her into attending it.

  ‘Did Lady Cowper actually see it?’ asked Sophie.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Lady Mary. ‘She had it from her husband. Poor man, he must be there, having passed sentence. So dreary for him, his wife being Lord Widdrington’s cousin and all.’

  Lord Widdrington had lent his troop to the rebel forces.

  ‘Will they chop Widdrington too?’ Sophie was still young enough to be ghoulish.

  ‘Sophie. Please,’ warned Mary Astell.

  ‘Possibly not,’ Lady Mary said. ‘It would be expedient to show clemency now. The mob that bayed for every Scotsman’s blood last week is turned sentimental. We passed it, did we not, Mrs Astell?’

  ‘Near a thousand, I swear,’ said Mary Astell. ‘All in sympathy for the rebels. Shouts up for King James, shouts down for German George, white cockades everywhere.’

  Lady Mary nodded. ‘One nearly stuck one’s handkerchief in one’s own hat for very fear.’

  Everyone dutifully smiled: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had never been afraid in her life. Her very dress fearless, drapery flowing, crowned by a jewelled turban she’d brought back from Turkey, her curled, mirror-work slippers reflecting the fire, she lounged on Cecily’s settle, a brilliant parrot against the dark panel. The day she turned Jacobite would be the day King George must tremble. So far he was safe: Lady Mary was a staunch Whig, something Cecily found incongruous in her – she was so… Jacobean.

  Yet all in the room were touched by the executions: Mrs Astell because she was a High Tory who, though she did not condone rebellion, believed the succession should rightfully have been James’s, the other women because so many of the rebel leaders were men to whom, through the maze of aristocratic marriages, they were related.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mrs Astell finished the account like the good teacher she was, ‘dear Lord Derwentwater made a noble end. Perhaps that swayed the crowd. Poor boy, so young and his dear wife pregnant, he was dismayed at first but recovered and made a speech. He said he died for King James and was sorry he’d pleaded guilty because by that he had credited with the title of king a person who had no right to it.’