God and The King by Marjorie Bowen

Author:Marjorie Bowen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620134382
Publisher: Duke Classics

Chapter IV - The Secret Anguish

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In that ancient palace called Hampton Court, on the banks of the Thames, the Queen of England walked through the rooms that were rebuilding, and tried to subdue her soul to peace.

The King was at the war in Ireland, and she, with the aid of the nine councillors—men divided by personal spites and party differences—was ruling England through a bitter and desperate crisis.

Mary, a woman and utterly unused to business (though she had always taken an intelligent interest in politics), yet found all these men, on whose wisdom she was supposed to rely, peevish and silly. Marlborough was using her sister to stir up opposition against the Government,—she strongly suspected him, Godolphin, and Russell of having made their peace with King James; Caermarthen she personally disliked; the Crone and Fuller plot had proved to be a widespreading affair, in which there appeared every possibility of her uncles being involved; the country was denuded of troops, and the fleet in disorder; the treasury empty, and the French threatening the Channel.

These were the first few moments of leisure the Queen had known since her husband's departure; she was eager to have Hampton Court ready for his return, and so had come eagerly to see the progress of the rebuilding and alterations.

Here again she was met with difficulties and humiliations. Sir Christopher Wren, the architect, was in want of money, the workmen were unpaid, the contractors refused to deliver any more Portland stone on credit.

Mary had no money, and knew not where to get it; she soothed Sir Christopher as best she could, and desperately resolved that these debts should be paid; the thought of them was an added vexation. She felt there was a kind of meanness in so lacking money, and that the rebuilding of Hampton Court, which had been her one pleasure, was a reproach and a mistake.

M. de Ginckle had written to her from Ireland that they were so straitened in the camp that the King had refused to sign for wine for his own table, and was drinking water with the men.

Mary thought of this passionately as she surveyed the unfinished building the grumblers declared such an unwarranted luxury, and remembered the noble fortune William had lavished on the public cause.

Under some pretence, she slipped away from her ladies and Sir Christopher, and, with a wild longing to be alone, made her way to some of the old deserted Tudor rooms of the palace, opened now for the first time for perhaps fifty years.

In the wing in which Mary found herself there were near a hundred chambers, and she, new to the palace, was soon lost in the maze of apartments.

She was wildly glad to be alone, to drop, for a moment, the mask of composed gaiety that she ever kept over her anxiety.

Door after door she opened, and room after room she traversed, until she reached a little winding stairway that led to a chamber in one of the fine red turrets with the graceful decorated chimney-stacks that Sir Christopher was so calmly destroying.

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