Treason's Gift by Pamela Belle

Author:Pamela Belle [Belle, Pamela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2016-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

‘Innate antipathy to kings’

Maria Beatrice, Queen of England, left Bath in the first week of October, to rejoin the King at Windsor. Many people in and around the city, had been charmed by her stately Italian beauty, and her gracious manner. More, alas, were still deeply suspicious of her husband.

Despite the well-organised flood of loyal addresses to the King, from the Dissenters and Quakers of Bath, Taunton, Somerset, Wiltshire and other places throughout the kingdom, thanking him for his recent Declaration of Indulgence towards their religions, there was a low, sullen murmur of displeasure from those who did not trust James, and those, the vast majority, who did not trust Dissenters, Quakers and Papists either, and resented the King’s attempt to woo them. Everyone knew that His Majesty wanted a parliament that would obey his wish to repeal the Test Act and the penal laws, so that Papists, and Dissenters could take a full part in the government of the country, in the parish as well as in Whitehall. And if the solid Anglican, Tory squires and burgesses would not oblige him, then King James was, it seemed, prepared to alter the charters and corporations of every town and city in the land, so that grateful and obedient men would be elected to do as he wished.

And then, compounding the deep sense of unease, as the year began to draw to its end in cold rain and shortening days, rumour began to circulate in Whitehall. The whisper spilt outwards into the country, and was received with shock, astonishment, and disbelief.

The Queen’s visit to Bath, and her husband’s pilgrimage to the well of St Winifred, had borne fruit. Their prayers had been answered, and the miracle had happened. After four miscarriages and four dead children, and three years since her last pregnancy, Maria Beatrice was once more with child.

Soon rumour was confirmed, although not yet officially. The Queen became unwell, and the doctors, desperate to avert another miscarriage, bled her. The danger retreated, and just before Christmas, the King wrote joyfully to his daughter Mary in Holland to tell her the good news.

All over England and in Holland, and further afield, the participants paused in their subtle, shifting game of politics and alliances, to assess this new and unexpected development. If — if — the child was male, and carried to full term, and lived, then the position of the Princess of Orange as her father’s heir was overturned. And the men who had too readily assumed that James would have no Papist successor to continue his policies realised that the Queen’s pregnancy changed the situation entirely. The King was not young, was not expected to live very much longer, and they had confidently looked forward to the reign of the Protestant Princess in a few years’ time.

Now, it seemed that England might be doomed to a Papist dynasty.

That supremely subtle, clever and determined man, William of Orange, was also by nature surpassingly cautious. For some time now, the English

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