J. R. Henslowe

“ Fresh from 89the fields of his prowess, confessed by the greatest captain of the age to be of conspicuous gallantry, and surrounded with the halo of unmerited misfortune, there is no doubt that he must have seemed a very Paladin to the daughter of the loyal Cavalier to whom fealty to the exiled race was a religion, and for the rest, when one looks at the picture painted in his youth by Lely—the haughty, beautiful face, with its sensitive mouth and luminous eyes—one cannot choose but see, like poor Nan Hyde, in the Duke of York a veritable Prince Charming. ”

“ In either case the sacrifice had been exacted, the soldier had laid down his life, the priest had suffered for the cause, and above all the scaffold before Whitehall had for ever set the seal on both. It was nothing that England had known years of strong, heavy-handed government, that she had dictated terms to other nations. To many who cherished sorrowful memories, those years only represented a space of stern tyranny and repression, and the graves of the beloved slain at Edgehill and Newbury, Marston Moor and Naseby, were green for ever in their hearts. ”

“ But if the King was prepared to be reconciled to the match, no other member of the royal family could be said to tolerate the idea, certainly not the queen-mother, who was almost beside herself with fury. Anne’s late mistress, the Princess Royal, was also deeply incensed, resenting the affront all the more from the favour she had lavished for so many years on her maid of honour. The storm so evoked raged with more or less violence through the autumn. ”

“ No one else need be the wiser—no one else knew, save Lady Hyde, and she would keep out of the way carefully.
It was no doubt a halcyon time, that summer of the Restoration, for many pairs of lovers, joined after long sundering to make reunion all the dearer; and to Anne Hyde it was gilded twofold. Love triumphant burnt in a clear 129and steady flame, and besides, there was the dazzling promise of splendour and royalty. The moments hurried by all too swiftly in the starlight. ”

“ Considering the passion which Anne had certainly inspired in several men, and which in the Duke of York had now raised her to her lofty position, one is forced to the conclusion that, in spite of her lack of physical beauty, she must have been possessed of some conquering charm of manner which, joined to undoubted wit and certain brilliant endowments of mind, made up for the want of personal attractions in an age which, perhaps of all others, most prized such an attribute. ”

“ Probably the person most unmoved by the clamour and its cause is the King himself, looking on cynically from the outside, as it were, with the quality of aloofness which has always stood him in good stead. And now, as we know, the mob, always prejudiced, always fickle, just because the Dutch are in the Thames, streams off tumultuously to Clarendon House and breaks the windows with great enthusiasm. ”

“ Early in April he is in St James’s Park to watch the Duke of York play at “Pele-mele, the first time that ever I saw the sport.” [154] James, like all his family, was very active in body, loving sport and games of every kind. He was passionately devoted to hunting, and this continued to the end. Long afterwards, along the grassy rides of the forests of Saint Germain or Marly, the banished King of England would sweep down with his train, forgetting for a few exhilarating moments the pain of loss and exile and the green glades of Windsor which he would never see again. ”

“ The Dover road, the most famous road in the kingdom, which had known through the far-back centuries the possessors of the most honoured names passing in long procession to and fro, which had seen the victors and vanquished of the hundred years’ war, was alive with travellers of all conditions. Coaches, horsemen, pack-horses, waggons with provisions, waggons with fine clothes, tramping beggars, itinerant musicians, broken soldiers ready for any fray or wrangling for a groat. It was a seventeenth-century Canterbury pilgrimage which yet lacked a Chaucer for its worthy chronicler. ”

“ It is strange, because 277for one occupying the position she did for ten years of English history, Anne, Duchess of York, had left personally a very slight impression on that position. The place that knew her was so soon content to know her no more, the gap she left was so quickly filled.
It is not to her but to her children that we must look for any consideration of her life as important. No doubt in the early days in Flanders Edward Hyde watched the unfolding of his daughter’s keen intelligence with hope and confidence as a factor in her future. ”

“ Through the grim years of the Civil War, and during the severe rule of the Commonwealth, they had been condemned to a lack of beauty in life, to sad-coloured raiment, to stern repression, to an absence of all the amusement and colour which had pervaded England in the joyous, if strenuous, Elizabethan age and the first years of the succeeding century. ”

“ Thus equipped by nature, by education, by experience, Nan Hyde, the maid of honour in past years of the Mary who now slept hard by among her kindred in the Abbey, began her career as a princess, fully aware, there can be no doubt, of the many pitfalls which menaced her. ”

“ But four more years of strenuous life, as we know, were to pass over his head, and then at Peronne, in the train of his sister Mary, James, Duke of York, was fated to meet for the first time Anne Hyde. In his own memoirs, dictated long afterwards, he acknowledges that he learnt to love her at that time. The brilliant girl, for whom Spencer Compton and Harry Jermyn had sighed in vain, was, with her ready wit and hereditary talents, a conspicuous figure in the entourage of the Princess of Orange. ”

“ The blood of the Hydes was to the full as ancient as that of the Villiers, and for the rest who can doubt which served with the stancher devotion God and the king, or lived the more blameless and unstained life? Many 238great names stand out from the record of the England of that day, names of which she has reason to be proud—Falkland, Hopton, Bevil Grenville, Southampton, Capel—yet to his honour it may be said that Edward Hyde is not unworthy of a place among them. ”

“ In the house at Breda, sedulously cared for by her parents, Anne, the elder, and by her father at least the best beloved daughter, reached her seventeenth year. She was a clever, thoughtful girl, unusually well read for the period and circumstances of her life, a devout churchwoman under the guidance of Morley and her father, looking out on the life unfolding before her with a mind which then at least showed singular powers of balance and perception. ”

“ To James it was probably as keen a satisfaction as it was to his cousin, to vindicate on the sea the reckless valour which in his early youth had distinguished him on land, and it was with the knowledge of his contempt for personal danger, that the Duchess contrived to convey a strict injunction to all his servants to do whatever lay in their power to restrain him on this occasion. It was during the action that the Dutch copied the English tactics of turning, but they found the latter ready for them, their rear and van changing positions. ”

“ Sa bouche est fort belle, et les lèvres des plus vermeilles que l’on puisse voir, les dens belles, le tour du visage parfaitement beau, et le teint se uniet si beau qu’il ne se puisse rien voir au monde qui l’égalle, la gorge belle, les bras et les mains de mesme. Enfin on vois en toute sa personne quelque chose de si grande et de si relevée que sans la connoistre on verroit combien elle est au dessus du reste du monds. ”

“ He had his full share of the hereditary beauty of his family, the beauty which distinguished his sister Dorothy, married three years after his birth to the gallant young Sunderland who fell at Newbury, and his brother Robert, believed by many of his contemporaries to be the father of Monmouth, and who was known in his day as the “handsome Sidney.”
Conscious or not of his personal advantages, Henry Sidney fell passionately in love with the Duchess, but that wild adoration was no secret. Such things never were at that time, and the Court speedily rang with the tale. ”

“ The letters he wrote to her testify to this fact, invested as they are with a charm all their own, and endorsed with a certain pathos, for “my deare, deare sister.” This final parting off Dover was a sorrowful one to both. The King and the Duke of York sailed for some distance with their sister before they could summon resolution to tear themselves away, and when the moment of farewell could no longer be delayed, the King held Henrietta long in his arms, embracing her again and again, while she clung to him, weeping passionately. ”

“ Whether Clarendon was entirely blameless of all the accusations against him, it is useless to speculate, but at least it must be conceded that from the first he had set before him high ideals, and if he fell short of these, it was no more than many—nay most—had done. It was an age, pre-eminently, when it was said that every man had his price. If so, then Edward Hyde’s was a very high one ”

“ If the image of one too high in place to be acknowledged had already been imprinted on her mind, she at least made no sign, but it is evident that the young maid of honour was in no apparent haste to change her condition, and was capable of determination in the management of her affairs. She did not succeed in overcoming the prejudice of the English queen-mother, and this was no doubt a cause of keen disappointment and vexation to her own mistress. Mary had also other reasons for annoyance on her own account. ”

“ Neither the Duke himself nor the ladies of the Duchess can be blamed, for they would at once have left the room.
The foregoing testimony, by the way, would seem to establish the fact that Anne did not receive the consolations of religion from any priest; and for the rest, Margaret’s words “none sorry for her” are borne out by those of Burnet, who says she “died little beloved. Haughtiness gained many enemies” and her “change of religion made her friends think her death a blessing at that time.” ”

“ Before Henrietta left for Holland on her expedition to procure supplies with the jewels she pledged there, she exacted from the King two utterly preposterous promises: first, to receive no one who had ever “disserved him” into favour, and secondly, not to make peace without her consent. After the fatal loss of Falkland at Newbury fight in this year, the King was anxious to make Hyde Secretary of State, but the latter declined this office also, and it was conferred on Digby. ”

“ It is well known that when Kings and Princesses of the Blood make an alliance with a subject, their arms are not put into the Royal Escutcheon, nor did ever the late Duchess of York call the Lord Chancellor father, nor did ever the late King James call the Earls of Clarendon and Rochester brothers, nor the Princesses Mary and Anne term them as uncles. ”

“ The Queen, it seems, did not dance, but the King, who “danced rarely,” took out the Duchess of York, and the Duke the Duchess of Buckingham, to dance the bransle, where hands were taken in turn. After this the King led a lady through a lively coranto, in which dance it appears he excelled; and another of the best performers was the little Duchess of Monmouth, Anne Scott, the greatest heiress of her day, who in her childhood had been given 178to the unlucky pretender who was to suffer so grim a fate in after days. ”

“ There is indeed but one Faith in which we can be saved; the stedfast belief of the Birth, Passion and Resurrection of our Saviour; and every Church that receives and embraces that Faith is in a state 266of Salvation, if the Apostles Preach true Doctrine, the reception and retention of many errors do’s not destroy the Essence of a Church, if it did, the Church of Rome would be in as ill, if not in a worse Condition than most other Christian Churches, because its Errors are of a greater Magnitude and more destructive to Religion. ”

“ It is scarcely to be wondered at. Frances Hyde may have been prompted by ambition, or simply by the desire to give her daughter her heart’s desire without counting the cost or considering the consequences. In either case it is hard to blame her, though her connivance places 128her on a lower plane than her husband, with his high ideals of what was due to the royal house, exaggerated as the feeling might be which made him say that sooner than see her wife of the Duke, “I had much rather see her dead, with all the infamy that is due to her presumption.” ”

“ In the wainscotted rooms of Worcester House 118they were made welcome. Ormonde, tried and trusted, who had watched over the boyhood and shared the exile of his king with selfless devotion; and Southampton, whose memory could go back to the awful night, when he was keeping his vigil by the body of his dead king in St James’s, and the muffled figure of Cromwell stole into the dusky room to look at the calm face of his victim; and Edward Nicholas, the Secretary, of whom it could be said that there was “none more industrious, none more loyal, none less selfish than he.” ”

“ It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that the commonalty, wearied and fretted by their Puritan taskmasters, should be dazzled by the vision of a gracious young king, easy of access, genial of speech, surrounded moreover by splendour, beauty and gaiety. ”

“ The little Duke of Cambridge, round whose cradle such a storm of passion had raged, died on the 5th. Pepys spitefully volunteers the opinion that the poor baby’s death, he believes, “will please everybody, and I hear that the Duke and his lady themselves are not much troubled at it” [156] ; a conclusion which seems, on 169every ground, very unlikely. James was to prove himself a deeply affectionate father, and Anne’s strength and tenacity of feeling were not likely to fail in this direction, though it is quite possible that she made little demonstration outwardly of grief. ”