Margaret the First (4 page)

One especially spirited night, William himself proposed that each star we see is a sun, with planets above and below. “It stands to reason,” he explained, “that the universe is filled with planets we cannot perceive, due to the strength of their suns. Invisible, you see, yet teeming with life.” “Yes, if—” someone started; “No, but—” another broke in. Lively debate ensued, and a newcomer, seeing me listen, asked me for my thoughts. I demurred, claiming my sex as reason. A second man then sportingly suggested they debate the nature of woman. “You will find, sir,” I abruptly spoke, “women as difficult to be known and understood as the universe.” The room fell silent. I was surprised as any man. Madame de La Fayette called the following week.

Indeed I was, for the very first time, totally
à la mode
. Talk of the place and role of women had been circulating through fashionable salons in each district of the city. Sex a physical distinction, not a quality of mind? A writer, they insisted, must be totally unique. What shape are the atoms at the bottom of the sea? The language of the universe is music. No, math! Hobbes insisted he’d been first to attain a theory of light. Descartes rejected any bodily perception. Someone claimed the right kind of ship might as easily sail
up
as east. You cannot move from “I am thinking” to “I am thought.” Passions flared. William stood in the middle, attempting to keep peace. I listened from my chair or upstairs in my room. As quickly as I’d entered their conversation, I slipped out of it again. My mind, I often felt, was like a little cave of mud. I never spoke to Master Hobbes, said nothing to Descartes. In fact—William couldn’t fail to notice—his wife spoke less and less.

In March, in London, my niece died from consumption. In April, my sister Mary. In Ireland that summer my brother Tom was crushed by his horse. The following autumn, our mother was taken.

Alone in my room in Paris, I felt oblivion creep near.

I wrote: “Mother liv’d to see the ruin of her Childrin in which was her ruin and then died.”

I wrote: “I did a silent mourning Beautie spy.”

TWO YEARS OF MARRIAGE PASSED AND STILL I WAS NOT PREGNANT
. Remedies were prescribed, everything from more rest to the excrement of a virile ram rubbed across my belly. The king’s own doctor, Sir Theodore Mayerne, wrote to William from London: Was the marquess aware that a woman could not conceive without an excited swelling, a heat? Of what frequency and duration was my ardor? A French doctor insisted that William need only lift my spirits, for a woman cannot get pregnant if she is always sad. I had taken to regular vomits, refused to come out of mourning, refused the doctor’s tinctures, which gave me terrible gas. Yes, I was often quiet, as the doctor had observed. But my husband chose not to worry. That summer I turned twenty-four.

Then William’s son Henry died. Or, he nearly died. He lay near death in England. Letters rushed to Paris, each contradicting the others. His doctors flushed him with gold and mercury. They dusted powdered frog on his meat at every meal. Still, he worsened.

William troubled in the garden. He troubled atop his horse.

And though Henry was only a second son, I was under an ever-increasing pressure to produce. Each night we tried again. Each morning I asked for the carriage and made the daily tour: down the expansive Cour de la Reine, seeing all of fashionable Paris without, myself, being seen.

Bien sûr
, they knew I was in there. I was Margaret Cavendish, marchioness, hiding in her carriage.

Yet as Paris whispered of my failure, my husband, over fifty, was buying tonic on the sly: one for
elevating
, made of the backbones of vipers, to be taken half-a-dram each day dissolved in broth. That same French doctor urged mutton dressed with new-laid eggs and a little nutmeg or amber. He advised my husband to anoint his big toes in Spanish oil each night.

On top of all this, our money was gone. Parisian creditors were anxious and would not provide: no meat, no wine, no wax. I was tormented by worries William would be thrown in debtor’s jail. Fortunately, the queen, conscious of an obligation, finally repaid a sizable loan that William had made her in Yorkshire. He promptly bought two Barbary horses, one telescope from Torricelli, and four from Divini’s shop. “More important than baguette,” he said, “is to maintain the
appearance
of means.” In the mornings I stood in a nearby grove, thinking of my dead mother, transfixed by the peeling bark. Each night we tried again. Each day I called for the carriage. The crowds. The doctor came. Then a letter arrived from London with news that Henry had recovered, was up out of his bed. Still, I felt more suited to sitting on graves than dancing at Christmas balls. Invitations came, but I turned them down. At New Year’s William’s telescopes reached us in boxes packed with straw. There was even one for me, in fine marbled paper, a gift. “My Lady’s Multiplying Glass,” he said, and taught me how to hold it up a breath away from my eye.

Thus as a family—frustrated, gassy, impotent, poor—we wondered together at the turning of the stars.

PALE YELLOW SPIDERS SPECKED OUR TINY PARISIAN GARDEN
—
LIKE
Cassiopeia on a leaf
, I thought,
and there is the Harp, the Crab
—when one mild afternoon the ambassador came to call. The Scots, he explained, had raised a regiment for the king. Now Prince Charles was off to Rotterdam, to better prepare to return, and the queen wanted William to follow, to help keep her boy secure.

Packing, packing, servants, horses.

I swear, I nearly floated out of town.

Four long years, now free. Free of Paris’s piss-stink alleys and constant doctor visits, its mindless idle gossip and endless gray construction. True, it wasn’t a return to the grassy fields of home, yet travel through the Low Countries afforded golden views: huge sky meeting flattest land, windmills in sunbeams, cows! Each time we approached a town I’d marvel again at the streets—so wide and clean—and masts of boats peeking above a rainbow of Dutch houses.

As our carriages trundled north, and barking dogs and children ran into the lane to watch, I tried to imagine what life would be now: Rotterdam on the Rotte, a port. Beyond that: an empty room. I pulled my cloak around myself. The houses were lit like lanterns. The farmers heading in. I felt a hopeful kind of sadness, driving down that road. I prayed the war would end—in a day, a month, a week—so that we could live at Welbeck Abbey, where I knew he longed to be. I could be a proper wife. Have my sisters to visit. The children in their beds, I thought. Peacocks on the lawn.

But by the time we reached Rotterdam, Prince Charles had disappeared. With money from his brother-in-law he’d put together a fleet. Sail north! Save the king! There was trouble, though: his ship was late, and troops in Scotland refused to march south without him; the battle at Preston easily went to Cromwell.

Yet another battle, in Colchester, my home, was not so simply won. The city was surrounded, the struggle protracted, until one night with roaring drums Parliamentarian forces broke through a Royalist blockade. Fighting ensued at St. John’s Green. The house was destroyed, flattened. Our family vaults were again invaded, but this time it was my sister’s and mother’s coffins the mob defiled. Rings from their fingers stolen, their arms flung into gardens, their legs splashed into the pond. One Royalist report swore Parliamentarian soldiers rode off with the dead ladies’ hair in their hats. Still, the siege lasted another two months. My youngest brother, Charlie, commanded the Royalist forces. The townspeople ate cats and horses. A beggar woman tried to flee and was stabbed at the gates. No one could come out as long as the traitors were in. At last, the Royalists surrendered. Rank-and-file were drawn and quartered. The officers placed themselves at Parliament’s mercy. Charlie was shot in the head.

When word reached Rotterdam, I collapsed on the floor. Since leaving England, I’d lost two brothers, one sister, a niece, and a much-loved mother. My childhood home, the place I’d been happiest—for I was happy then, wandering pastures, picking plums, writing my childish poems, I was happy, I was sure—was gone, my mother’s body strewn across its park. The Lucas clan, once so close-knit, was now completely unraveled, and I had come to believe myself incapable of procreation, of mending those gaping holes with tiny people of my producing. In bed at night I cried out that I was drowning. In that city of water and dams I dreamt of shipwreck every night.

“A damp sponge,” I mumbled.

“All rubble,” I said. “All rubble.”

A doctor came and bled me till I calmed.

HE’D BEEN THERE BEFORE—TO VISIT THE RYKERS, HARPSICHORD
makers, renowned for the lifelike insects painted on their soundboards—and liked what he had seen: large houses, country estates, superior art collections. Provincial, yes, but affordable, quiet,
and she needs to be somewhere quiet
, so leaving his wife in the housekeeper’s care, William rode south to Antwerp—fast through browns, through greens, the horizon and the distant city fading into white. All this he later described: how at sundown he stabled his horse, and that night at the inn, over drumsticks with sage, heard the widow of Peter Paul Rubens was looking to let the late painter’s house.

IN BLACK BENEATH THE POTTED LIME TREES, AN ARBOR HEAVY WITH
roses, I listened as the cathedral with its lacy spire chimed at every hour, south to the reedy countryside, north to the sea, over monasteries with stained glass, over Antwerp’s clean broad streets and the leading publishing house in Europe—printing in Syriac, Hebrew, even musical notes—over lindens and canals and savage-looking orchids. It could have easily fit inside one wing of William’s estate at Welbeck, yet all who saw the Rubens House agreed it was a gem: vaulted windows, colorful frescoes, rooms half-paneled and hung with Flemish leather. He gave me a tortoiseshell cabinet bound with gold, an ebony comb for my hair. He stood in the riotous Renaissance courtyard waving his hat and smiling. I waved back from two floors up, my chamber domed in blue, windows to a columned pavilion, tulips and low hedges.

Eventually, I took to the carriage and established a daily tour: past the East India Company, the Palace of Oosterhuis, boats upon the Scheldt. With fewer people to look at than in Paris, also fewer by whom to be seen, I took pleasure in the rows of tiny shops, the salty air. Here were ladies wearing feathered hats, children eating fried potato in the street. I stopped to watch an Italian troupe perform in the market square. I’d never seen a woman play a man before. How beautiful that lady-husband in her vest and red silk tights, how graceful when she swung her sword and plunged.

Yet some nights I woke with William beside me and thought for a moment he was my dead brother Tom. “Is this me?” I whispered. How did I come to be here? I remembered the tiny shops, the children in the street. All this, I thought in darkness, is temporary. The sun. The salty air. Everything will stop, for me, except myself. I, Margaret, singular, alone. And on he slept.

THE KING OF ENGLAND WAS CONVICTED OF TREASON. THEN THE
King of England was dead. It was Tuesday. It was 1649. Parliament hacked off Charles I’s head outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall. The mob, previously sick for it, drew quiet after the blow. The people were burdened with heavy taxes. May Day had been replaced by zealous sermons. Was the Civil War now over? Stunned, no one was sure.

DAYS LATER THE DEAD KING’S SON—NOW CHARLES II—WAS
crowned King of England at The Hague. William stood by him for the oath, then limped south to Antwerp, which I described in a letter to my sister as “the most pleasantest and quietest place to retyre himself and ruin’d fortunes inn.”

AFTER WINTER CAME SPRING, AFTER SPRING THE HEAT OF SUMMER
. William was officially banished, his estates officially seized, and I, officially, was not pregnant. This time they tried, for him, crystals taken from wood ash and dissolved in wine each morning; for me, a tincture of herbs put into my womb at night with a long syringe. I submitted silently, William out in the hall. Come autumn I was to be injected in my rectum with a decoction of flowers one morning, followed by a day-long purge, using rhubarb and pepper, then a day of bleeding, then two days where I took nothing but a julep of ivory, hartshorn, and apple, followed by another purge—and on the seventh day I rested. After this came a week of the steel medicine (steel shavings steeped in wine with fern roots, nephritic wood, apples, and more ivory), described by a maid as “a drench that would poison a horse.” Then summer again: all fizzy spa water and aniseed candies, and motion and rest, in prescribed degrees, and partridge for dinner, or mutton—but never lettuce!—and once a week a bath perfumed with mallows before I slept. If I developed hemorrhoids, I should place leeches on them or be bled from the thigh. And above all else, the doctor said, I must try to be cheerful. No one conceives when sad, he reminded. But I wasn’t sad, exactly, not sad only; I was busy.

Sick of filling days with treatments and reproaches, William and I were finding a way that suited us. Rather than apply leeches to my hemorrhoids, in the afternoons I sat under the roses, listening as if I had no other thoughts as he talked or joked or lectured on generals or laws or war, spoke of anatomy, trade, architecture, and colonization, famous statesmen, the rise of nations, the tyranny of kings, the righteousness of kings, the pastimes of kings, of religion, famous poets and their merits, the shapes of atoms, the diets of peoples around the world. We spoke of music. He took me to hear a master violist. It seemed I could remember every word he spoke. “It is,” I said, “as if a misty stupor lifts.”

Meanwhile, though pleased by my progress, William grew restless for himself. He wrote two plays in quick succession, then decided to transform the late painter’s studio into a riding school. Indeed, he was a clever horseman. Ben Jonson, seeing him at manège, once said: “I begin to wish myself a horse!” Naturally the school was a sensation, William in high demand. More and more, therefore, I found myself alone. Yet before I could begin to drift into the reeds, William’s brother, Sir Charles, returned from southern travels, and I found I had two dazzling masters instead of one.