Royal Sisters: The Story of the Daughters of James II (63 page)

The next morning
when Gloucester’s attendants went to awaken him they found him feeling sick. He said he had a sore throat and did not want to get up.

This news brought his mother to his bedside immediately, and when she saw his flushed face she was terrified.

“Send for the physicians!” she cried. They came; but they did not know what ailed the boy. They bled him, but his condition did not improve. Before the day was out he was in a high fever and delirious.

“Dr. Radcliffe must come,” said Anne. “Go and bring him.”

“Your Highness, you have dismissed him.”

“Go and bring him. Tell him I order him to come.”

Dr. Radcliffe arrived at Windsor in due course but he clearly came reluctantly.

“Your Highness,” he said, “I am no longer one of your physicians, and I cannot understand why you should summon me here.”

Anne’s face was pale with fear; he had never seen her so frightened for herself as she was for her son.

“My boy is ill,” she said. “If anyone can save him, it is you.”

Radcliffe went and examined the boy.

“He has scarlet fever,” he said. “Good God, who bled him?”

The doctor who had done so admitted that he had.

“Then,” said Radcliffe, “you may well have finished him. I can do nothing. You have destroyed him.”

Anne listened as though in a trance. She let Radcliffe go and made no attempt to detain him.

She only muttered: “He is the best doctor in England and he says my boy is destroyed.”

A future without this boy was something she could not face. She was numb with terror, yet bemused. Only a day or so ago he had stood before her bowing in his beautiful blue suit. It was not possible that he could be so ill.

She would nurse him. Dr. Radcliffe might say that they had destroyed him with the wrong treatment, but she would give him all that a mother could—perhaps what only a mother could.

She forgot her own maladies; there was only one thing that mattered to her. Her boy must live. She herself waited on him, nursed him, prepared the food which he could not eat. As she moved about the sick room, her lips moved in prayer.

“Oh, God, leave me my boy. You have taken all the others and this I accept. But this one is my own, my joy, my life. For eleven years I have cherished him, loved him, feared for him. You have taken the others; leave me this one.”

He must improve. Such loving care must make him well.

“My boy … my boy …” she whispered as she looked at the hot little face that seemed so vulnerable without that white periwig, so childish and yet at times like that of an old man. “Do not leave me. I will give anything … anything in the world to keep you. My hopes of the crown … anything.…”

A fearful thought had struck her. Why did she suffer constant miscarriages? Why was she in danger of losing her best beloved boy?

Had her father once loved her and Mary as she loved this boy? Had he suffered through his children as she had been made to suffer through hers? Death and treachery … which was the harder to bear?

She shut out such thoughts. She called to her boy and to her God.

“Have pity on me. Have pity on this suffering mother.”

But there was to be no pity. Five days after his birthday, William, Duke of Gloucester was dead.

THE LITTLE GENTLEMAN IN BLACK VELVET

he Princess Anne remained in her apartments
. She spoke to no one and no one could comfort her. She did not wish to see Mrs. Freeman, not that Sarah cared. She herself had suffered the loss of a son and she did not want to be reminded of that tragic time.

As Sarah said to Marlborough: “The death of Gloucester changes the position of Anne. That poor lump of woman … how long will she last? And without an heir she is scarcely of any importance. You see how wise I was to link us with Godolphin, and it will be Sunderland before long.”

Anne had not thought of her changed status. There was only her loss.

George came to her; they held hands and tried to speak of their lost child and then could not bear to.

They sat in silence crying quietly.

Anne said at length: “I keep seeing him, George, reviewing his soldiers, regarding us in his grave way. Do you remember his greeting to us? He wished us peace, unity, and concord. Peace … how shall we ever know that again without him? I cannot believe it, George. Our little one. Never to see him again.”

“Est-il possible?” murmured George brokenheartedly.

Anne wrote to
her father. She wanted him to forgive her. She had been a wicked daughter to him and now she suffered a bitter penitence. Her great sorrow, she believed, was a punishment from heaven. Her heart was broken, but if he would forgive her she believed she could go on living.

When she had sent off that letter she felt a little happier; and when James replied forgiving her, asking her to use her utmost power to restore her brother to the throne if ever she came to it, and to accept it only in trust for him; she wept and said that her father’s letter had comforted her as nothing else would.

William was growing
weaker and Anne was the heir to the throne who could not shut herself away forever.

Sarah had become a little more insolent than before. She was determined to stress Anne’s less powerful position even if Anne was unaware of it. She had succeeded in marrying her daughter Anne to Charles, Lord Spencer, and that little project had been carried through victoriously.

Sunderland, Godolphin, Marlborough. What a combination! In certain circumstances unbeatable. All that would be necessary for them to rule would be for Sarah to keep the flaccid Queen in leading strings; and that she could adequately do.

The death of one small boy had turned thousands of eyes toward the throne. The Whigs and the Tories were drawn closer together. The Tories wanted the old regime—a King such as they had been accustomed to; the Whigs preferred the Sovereigns they had made of William and Mary, whose power was governed by the Parliament. But they stood together on one point and passed the Act of Settlement which stipulated that the sovereign must be a member of the Anglican Church, must not leave the country without the consent of Parliament and must be advised by the entire Privy Council and not by counsellors who were secret.

This meant two things; there should be no return to that old Stuart love: The Divine Right of Kings; and James’s son by his Catholic wife should be kept from the throne as long as he adhered to the Catholic faith. A constitutional Monarchy and a Protestant King.

William could not live long; Anne was not a healthy woman; in view of the Act of Settlement eyes were turned to the House of Hanover in which James I’s granddaughter Sophia was Electress.

But William still lived and there was Anne, who was a young woman still. She was almost certain to become pregnant again soon and who knew what would happen? She had produced one child. Why should she not produce another?

It was hoped she would. What a lot of trouble that would save!

Death did not
come singly to the royal family.

It had not been generally known that, early that year, James had had a stroke which left him partially paralysed. He lived on for a while but by September his condition had weakened and after a short illness he died at St. Germains.

In his last hours he reiterated that he forgave all his enemies and he mentioned specially his daughter Anne. He lovingly took farewell of Mary Beatrice, but he was not sorry to go; sickness and defeat had darkened his life, but what had hurt him most was the treachery of the daughters he had loved so dearly; that was something he would never forget. But the letter of Anne’s, who herself was suffering through a beloved child, had given him some comfort. He was glad that she had asked forgiveness and he had given it before leaving the world.

Louis came to his deathbed and James made a dying request of him.

“Here is my son,” he said. “In a few hours’ time he will be King of England. Will you, my good friend, promise me that you will recognize him as such.”

“I promise,” answered Louis.

William knew that
war was inevitable. Louis of France had proclaimed the son of James II and Mary Beatrice, King James III of England.