[116]. “Soon after the Restoration the Earl of Southampton and Sir A. A. Cooper dined at the Chancellor’s. On the way home Sir Anthony said: ‘Yonder Mrs Anne is certainly married to one of the brothers: a concealed respect (however suppressed) showing itself so plainly in the looks, voice and manner wherewith her mother carved to her or offered her of every dish, that it is impossible but it must be so’” (“Samuel Pepys and the World he Lived In.” Wheatley).
“Lord Shaftesbury told Sir Richard Wharton, from whom I had it, that some time before the match was owned, he had observed a respect from Lord Clarendon and his lady to their daughter that was very unusual from parents to their children, which gave him a jealousy she was married to one of the brothers, but suspected the King most.” As far as one can judge, Clarendon himself was ignorant. (Burnet’s “History of His Own Time,” Lord Dartmouth’s Notes.)
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 her 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.”
Yet fate was too strong for him.
It was very likely easy enough for mother and bower-maid to arrange the stolen meetings of the two, when we recollect the position of Worcester House.
It was quite simple, in the velvet darkness of a summer night, for the prince to come down in a wherry from Whitehall stairs to the water-gate of the Chancellor’s house, which he would find unlocked, and so pass through the silent garden where only the whisper of the leaves stirred in the light wind fitfully, piloted by Ellen the maid, to the room where Mistress Nan herself was waiting to keep tryst. 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 and steady flame, and besides, there was the dazzling promise of splendour and royalty. The moments hurried by all too swiftly in the starlight. If his tongue was, as we are told, slow and halting, hers was ready and swift, and there was, at any rate, the eloquence of clasped hands, of eager eyes.
But matters were not to arrange themselves quite happily at present, and the threads of the puzzle would need a very careful disentangling before the cord would straighten out quite smooth and even.
Rumour had begun to be busy. Gossips talked of a contract. Pepys, who is never very accurate, and who moreover constantly and unaccountably betrays a prejudice against the lady, calls it a promise, only, of marriage.[[117]]
[117]. “Diary of Samuel Pepys, 7th October 1660,” notes by Lord Braybrooke, 1906.