His Last Mistress: The Duke of Monmouth and Lady Henrietta Wentworth Read online

  They placed his mutilated body into a coffin, which was then carted back into the Tower, and then interred in the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula, in the same area where Henry VIII’s wives Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard rested. They, of course, had been granted private executions upon Tower Green – a courtesy that he had been denied.

  Chapter 33

  Just by the look on the messenger’s face, she knew what they were coming to tell her. They told her how he had died, in that botched and terrible way; that he thought of her at the end.

  She fell to her knees, howled at sky before she crumpled to the ground in a faint, and her water burst.

  When she came to, she was back upon the bed, and in pain of the most acute kind. It was not only her heart that was bleeding; the baby was coming, earlier than expected.

  “Aaaggh!” she screamed as she pushed, the pain unbearable, but still she cried out, “Good, let me feel pain! I should feel pain, too! Jemmy, take me to you!” she cried, “Let me go to you!”

  She felt her body rip as the babe made his way into the world. At length, after hours of agony, the wailing newborn declared his entry into the world. The midwives congratulated her on the delivery of a healthy son, but she was not filled with joy.

  Her mind was once again full of thoughts and questions: “Why did I not die? Women die from childbirth often. I do not want to live anymore. I want to be where he is, even if that is Hell. I do not care any more – I want to be with him.”

  After the child had been born and had been cleaned and swaddled up tightly he was placed in his exhausted mother’s arms, and suckled upon her tender breast, for no wet nurse had yet been summoned.

  As her babe drank his mother’s milk, Henrietta sat and listened, crestfallen, as she was told what Monmouth had said upon the scaffold.

  “Oh God! Had that poor man nothing to think of but of me?” she said quietly, tears streaming down her face.

  “He thought of you as his wife. Now you must live for the child’s sake.”

  She shook her head, and a single teardrop fell from her eye. “Nay, I cannot. And now I know now that I cannot keep him, though I love him dearly already, for his father was the Duke of Monmouth and so he is in mortal danger should his existence become common knowledge.” She looked at the now-sleeping infant in her arms that lay so innocently; unaware of the tragedy he had been born into, of the cursed Stuart blood in his veins.

  “I cannot do that to our child. Our son. Our James.” She said the words as if she were speaking to Monmouth himself. “He must have a chance at this life, away from his disgraced parentage. I am unmarried, and we have no money. What kind of life could I possibly give him now?”

  “His only hope is to be away from any connection with me, for those who have murdered my love may wish to kill his child. No one must know. You must all swear that you shall not reveal my child.”

  The midwives and other servants were weeping, for they could empathise with the young woman’s plight.

  “Swear it!” she screamed, startling the babe into wailing.

  They all swore to keep the secret.

  She cursed herself for letting her Jemmy go towards his destruction. She should have forced him to stay – but how? Guilt consumed her, she became obsessed with it – perhaps she hadn’t found the right charms, which could have protected him. Perhaps she hadn’t prayed enough? Perhaps, by merely living in sin with Monmouth for several years, God had shut her away; perhaps he never listened to her prayers, for she was already damned. She tortured herself more: she should have paid attention to any omens or signs, or have been more adamant in disclosing her fears and presentiments.

  “If only I hadn’t given him my jewels – he would not have had the funds for the expedition and he would be here; all three of us would now be together.” But she knew it was futile to think on such things - for in the years she had known him, she had never been able to deny him anything.

  In helping Monmouth on his quest, she had lost a considerable amount of money, and was near ruin. One of the Dutch merchants to whom she had given her jewels to owed her money, and she went to him, and demanded the money was returned. The merchant gave her the funds he had taken, and when she left he told everyone how cold and unfeeling the Wentworth woman was – to have lost her lover, and only caring for money!

  But Henrietta took most of the money and gave it to her maid, whom she entrusted with the safe transfer of baby James into France to Colonel Smyth.

  She pressed her lips to his soft forehead and wept, “May you one day forgive me for parting with thee, my sweet boy. If you ever learn of our story, I hope you will understand.”

  And so the Baroness, her heart consumed with dolour of the most profound kind kissed her son goodbye and watched, half-mad, as the carriage took him away to France, where Colonel Smyth and his family raised him by the name of James Wentworth Smyth Stuart.

  Chapter 34

  The England that Henrietta returned to was much altered. Brutality and the iron hand of the law with the Bloody Assizes under Chief Justice Jeffreys were bloody and cruel. Those who had aided and supported Monmouth’s Rebellion were crushed. Over one thousand people –whether they were known rebels or if they were thought to have sympathised with them– were found guilty and either executed or transported to the West Indies of the New World – to a life of slavery and hardship upon the sugar plantations.

  Major Holmes, and other rebel leaders were hanged in chains – their corpses feasted upon by crows and ravens. Ford, Lord Grey was incarcerated in the Tower, and by confessing in writing to everything he had knowledge of – about those involved in both the Rye House Plot and Monmouth’s Rebellion – his life was spared.

  Those five hundred poor souls who had been imprisoned at the church in Westonzoyland had met grim ends. Some died in that makeshift prison, others were taken out and summarily executed. More still awaited the evil sentences of the Chief Justice at Taunton Castle and Wells. These souls waited upon their knees in prayer to the God they had tried to serve.

  Aye, Taunton, which once welcomed the Duke of Monmouth with jubilation and excitement, now fell foul under the wrath of the King’s displeasure. King James the Second soon visited the West Country and was contented that Jeffreys had reined in the rebellious vermin.

  Justice had been served.

  In a sickening display of his own power lust, James then had medals struck to commemorate the triumph. The figure of Victory stood over the beheaded corpses of Monmouth and Argyll, and held the scales of justice in one hand and a sword in the other. The words: ambitio malesuada ruit at her feet.

  Brave, proud men of the West Country had flocked to Monmouth’s cause because they fervently believed that he could save their way of life. Now all was ruin. Families were torn apart, husbands and sons were gone, never to return, and hope for a Protestant country lay dashed before them.

  Monmouth’s eldest daughter, the Lady Anne, who had so wished to follow her father into death, did just that but a month after her father had died. In the insalubrious cell in the Tower that she and her family had been imprisoned, she had sickened and died. She was only ten years old. Anna, Monmouth’s estranged widow, suffered both the loss of her husband and her daughter within the space of two months, and she grieved for them.

  For Henrietta, the pitiful suffering of so many others only exacerbated her own grief and melancholy could not be shaken from her. She was practically devoid of life, longing only to die. Malicious courtiers likened her to Lady Macbeth, her ambitious zeal actively pushing Monmouth towards his doom. She must have manipulated him into it; it was her fault that he was now dead. The dashing duke cut down in his prime because of a woman, they said.

  Autumn turned to winter, and she grew weaker as time went on, and Lady Philadelphia - still ignorant that she was now a grandmother - could not understand why her daughter would not overcome her heartache. Monmouth was a jolly fellow to be around, certainly, but her daughter could find another to love, and ma
rry.

  She could move on.

  The days turned to weeks, the weeks into months, but still the young Baroness’s heart did not mend.

  The physician spread his hands apart as if at a loss for words. “There is nothing more to be done. The Baroness has had too much black bile – melancholia – in her body, which we have treated. But now she has signs of consumption, and it has taken so strong a hold of her, for no other reason I can think of but this: she seems to have lost the will to live; therefore, I regret to say that it is only a matter of time.”

  Lady Philadelphia shook her head in sorrow. “What do you mean? How long does she have?”

  “I fear only a matter of days now – she cannot go on like this. She has barely touched her food in months, but now she refuses water, and so, death is eminent. Without sustenance, life cannot continue. I regret to say that I can do nothing for her.”

  The tears trickled down the older woman’s face – wrinkles nestling beside her green eyes; it was common to lose one’s children, but not like this. To have had to see her plucked and wither when she had been in the prime of her youth and beauty was too much for her. “This is not right – it cannot be, my poor daughter. I should never have let her form an attachment to the Duke, I should have forced her to marry another. It is my fault, my fault.”

  Henrietta, the sixth Baroness Wentworth, and Monmouth’s great love, lay, waif-like, upon her large stuff bed and she shivered feverishly in her once-plush bedchamber at her home in Toddington. Cheap rush candles took the place of her favourites made from beeswax, and most of the servants had been dismissed. The house was only a shell of a home, the happiness completely gone.

  In the months that had passed since Monmouth’s death she had given up hope and took no care in herself or her life. She had fallen into a bottomless pit of despair – despair so deep that no one could save her. Even the fleas had given up on her, for she barely ate a thing and her blood was most unappetising. Her eyes, whose irises were once the colour of leeks, which had so captivated the Duke, were now dead spheres of dull green surrounding the black pupils. Where once her face was as soft and as plump as a Rubens cherub, it was now emaciated. The pink roses in her cheeks had withered into hollow pits of malnutrition and disease.

  How happy she had been in this house with him! Here, away from the sycophancy of the court, away from the gossipmongers and the self-seeking courtiers, here they had found much felicity in each other’s company. Here they should have remained, but for his ambition, his desire to be what he could not be, and for so willingly believing in those who did not have his best interests at heart. Here they were strongest in love, their bond of body and soul fully enmeshed.

  “He used to lay his head here in my arms as he slept,” she thought, “and they took his dear head and cut it off!” His side of the bed lay cold, in much the same manner as many a rebel’s wife now experienced. His body now lay rotting beneath the stone floor of that chapel in the Tower, but many of the men who followed him that fateful July morning decayed beneath the fields of Sedgemoor.

  Her now feverish imagination conjured up his image before her, and she whispered to the illusion, the same words from Calisto which he had uttered to her as they parted, “Our loves shall be flaming, and lasting, and true.”

  She was too tired to cry; too tired to go on any longer; so she closed her eyes and willed herself into everlasting sleep.

  ***

  The bluebells of Toddington were beginning to bloom when Lady Henrietta Wentworth died on the twenty-third day of April, sixteen hundred eighty six, less than a year after her beloved Monmouth’s execution.

  She was twenty-five.

  Lady Philadelphia had her body interred in Church of St. George, Toddington. The few who remember her tale leave behind a little handful of bluebells or pink roses upon her grave.

  Philadelphia spent a fortune on an elaborate tomb for her tragic daughter, and Toddington Manor fell into ruin. In 1696, Lady Philadelphia herself died; a decade after Henrietta’s death, and all the contents of Toddington Manor had been sold. All those tables the lovers had played cards at, the china they had eaten off of, the linens upon which they had lain, the looking-glasses which Monmouth had used to preen himself, were sold…memories scattered to the winds of oblivion.

  But to this day there stands a tree in a forest near Toddington Manor in Bedfordshire, a tree like any other save for one thing: beneath its moss and the ivy there are initials. Initials which were lovingly etched into the bark by a Duke, a reformed rake and a would-be king, initials marking one of the greatest love affairs of the seventeenth century.

  Epilogue

  As for King James II, having the Duke of Monmouth executed in 1685 and the West Country cruelly purged of dissent, did nothing to secure his hold upon the throne.

  He who had shown no mercy to his nephew, grew increasingly more unpopular. James ultimately lost the crown only three years later in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, to his other nephew, William of Orange, and his wife, Mary. James, his wife, Maria Beatrice, and their children lived in exile in France, where they died.

  In spite of all his efforts, James was the last Catholic King.

  Bibliography

  Bevan, Bryan. James, Duke of Monmouth. Robert Hale & Company, London, 1973.

  Burnet, Gilbert (Bishop of Salisbury). History of My Own Time.

  Crowne, John. Calisto: Or the Chaste Nymph, 1675 as found in The Dramatic Works of John Crowne (This is excerpted in Chapter One).

  Earle, Peter. Monmouth’s Rebels: The Road to Sedgemoor 1685. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1977.

  Evelyn, John. Diary.

  Falkus, Christopher. The Life and Times of Charles II. George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Limited and Book Club Associates, 1972.

  Grey of Werke, Ford, Lord (Earl of Tankerville). The Secret History of the Rye-House Plot: and of Monmouth’s Rebellion 1685. First published 1754.

  Jenner, Lorna. The Monmouth Rebellion & The Battle of Sedgemoor 1685: The Last Battle on English Soil. Somerset County Council Heritage Service, 2007.

  Scott, James, Duke of Monmouth. Pocket Book, now in possession of the British Museum.

  Scott, James, Duke of Monmouth. Original Letters of the Duke of Monmouth, in the Bodleian Library. BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2009.

  Post Man and the Historical Account (London, England) for Tuesday, September 14, 1697, Issue 370.

  Watson, J.N.P. Captain-General and Rebel Chief: The life of James, Duke of Monmouth. George Allen & Unwin, London, 1979.

  Author’s Note

  This was a dramatisation of a true story. I have attempted to make this historical fiction as factually accurate as possible, and any omissions or changes to the timeline of the events have been made in order for the sake of clarity. All inaccuracies are my own. Most events, however, are in chronological order and are in accordance with the historical record. The poems that Monmouth writes in this story were indeed found in his pocket book; and lines from Calisto are really from the masque by John Crowne.

  There is debate, however, as to whether Henrietta Wentworth gave birth to Monmouth’s son, but I went along with Watson’s theory from his biography of the Duke, because I believe it seems plausible. Whether or not Lucy Walter was married to Charles II still courts controversy. As for Monmouth murdering the beadle, this is also unclear – some reports say it was Viscount Dunbar, others Monmouth. There are some things we may never know. The rest is left to conjecture. As for Monmouth’s widow, Anna Scott, she eventually married Charles Cornwallis, 3rd Baron Cornwallis, in 1688.

  I’d like to thank Richard Foreman of Endeavour Press for taking the chance with an unpublished writer and giving me this opportunity to publish this story.

  Many thanks to Adrian at St. Mary’s Church, Bridgwater, for taking me up the Monmouth Tower and giving me a unique view of the area as Monmouth himself would have seen it. To the amazing volunteers and staff at The Blake Museum in Bridgwater, the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Westonzo
yland, and the Museum of Somerset in Taunton, I thank you.

  This novella would not have been possible without the support of the following people:

  My family including my mother, Edelmira, my husband, Gavin, for his work on The Seventeenth Century Lady website and podcast, Yvonne, and sisters, Millie and Vivi. To my colleagues and friends, author Simon Kleinig – whose outstanding support has been much appreciated, and author Mark Gallard – thank you. A big thank you to Sarah Butterfield of Sarah’s History, Laura Powell, David Orland, and my husband Gavin, for their great support and for giving me much-needed initial proofreading. Thanks to everyone who supported my endeavours at Kensington Palace, especially: Clair Corbey, Rebecca Stephenson, Ben Revell, Chris Pawley, Julian Hick, Mark Calloo, Roz Thomas, and Alexandra Kim. And to my followers on Twitter, thank you for your enthusiasm for the 17th Century!

  If you enjoyed reading His Last Mistress: The Duke of Monmouth and Lady Henrietta Wentworth you may be interested in Love’s Will: The Marriage of Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare by Meredith Whitford.

  Extract from Love’s Will by Meredith Whitford

  1.

  The clock’s gilded hand jerked forward. Another minute gone. Another thirty and the bell would ring for end of market, eleven o’clock and home for dinner. The crowds were thinning; most people shopped earlier in the day, when it was cooler. Other stalls were closing up, packing away their goods. He dared not follow suit, for his father was strict and every penny counted, dare not miss a sale. But under the counter, propped open, Ovid took him far from Stratford’s Thursday market, took him, as he stroked the leather binding, back to Lancashire and earnings to buy books, then as he sank into the words, into the world he wanted to be his.