[200]. “A Royal Cavalier: Romance of Rupert, Prince Palatine”; Green’s “Short History of the English People.”
All this while the Duke of York, detained at home, was chafing with impatience and trying to fill up his time with such matters as came to hand, and giving his attention to each. Once Pepys writes: “I to Whitehall to a Committee for Tangiers where the Duke of York was, and I acquitted myself well in what I had to do” (the worthy Samuel, in spite of occasional fits of self-accusation, had always an excellent opinion of himself). “After the Committee up I had occasion to follow the Duke into his lodgings into a chamber where the Duchess was sitting to have her picture drawn by Lilly, who was there at work. But I was well pleased to see that there was nothing near so much resemblance of her face in his work which is now the second if not the third time as there was of my wife’s at the very first time. Nor do I think at last it can be like, the lines not being in proportion to those of her face.” To the end, ill as he behaved to and by her, Pepys was proud of his wife’s beauty and really fond of her, and this naïve expression of his satisfaction is almost pathetic.[[201]]
[201]. “Diary.” 24th March 1666.
Somewhere about this time Lady Fanshawe was returning from Spain, on the death of her chivalrous and deeply mourned husband, to make at last her home in England, and she was, as his merits entitled her, graciously received by the King, whom he had served so long and faithfully. On this occasion she presented two dozen “amber skins” and six dozen pairs of gloves to the King, the Queen, the Duke and his little son the Duke of Cambridge, who was, alas! destined soon to follow his brother.[[202]] The Duke of York lent Lady Fanshawe the Victory frigate to bring the rest of her goods and people from Bilbao at the end of March 1667.
[202]. “Notes to the Memoirs of Anne, Lady Fanshawe.”
It was for that period, an age which set such store by signs and portents, a strange defiance of omens that impelled the parents to give what would seem a fatal title to three successive children, none of whom were fated to survive infancy. Through the ten years which succeeded her marriage, Anne’s nursery at St James’s Palace was filling only to be emptied. One after another of the sons so eagerly and fondly welcomed was destined to fade quickly out of this life, “to find the taste bitter and decline the rest”; the ducal coronets were to fall from the small heads too weak to bear so heavy a burden. Of the eight children born to James, Duke of York, and Anne his wife, only two daughters survived to play their parts thereafter on the great stage of history for good or for evil. The mother, however her heart was wrung, as it must have been, carried an undaunted front through those years of loss and bereavement, and held her place resolutely in the very forefront of Court and festival, a conspicuous and dominating figure always.
Her home throughout her married life, as before said, was St James’s Palace, a house which must have enshrined many memories for James himself. There he had been brought up as a child, there he had been in his boyhood a State prisoner with the brother and sister, now both passed away, there his father the martyr-king had spent the last night of his life before the winter morning walk across the Park to Whitehall and the block before the Banqueting House, and there his body had lain that night, watched by a little band of faithful servants, before the burial at Windsor. There also James and his wife always kept the anniversary of that day, the 30th January, year by year, as it came round, in sorrowful remembrance.
It was a goodly habitation, and indeed rivalled the great rambling palace near the river in splendour of furniture and decoration and the treasures it contained.[[203]]
[203]. Knight’s “London.” It was long known as St James’s Manor-House.
Yet another picture from Secretary Pepys’ busy pen is shown us here.[[204]] One spring day, he tells us, he came thither to dine “with some of the maids of honour at the Treasurer’s House,” and thereafter he found “the Duke of York and the Dutchess with all the great ladies sitting upon a carpet on the ground, there being no chairs, playing at ‘I love my love with an A because he is so and so, and I hate him with an A because of this and that,’ and some of them but particularly the Dutchess herself and my Lady Castlemaine were very witty.” A childish game, it seems to us, yet the scene has a certain charm and grace, invested too with piquancy by the ladies’ readiness. In other days at The Hague and Breda, under the approving eyes of the “Winter Queen” and her own Princess Mary, with Spencer Compton and Harry Jermyn to applaud, Nan Hyde had learnt to hold her own in jest and repartee, and now that she too was a princess, she had not forgotten the trick, but still shone in swift retort and happy invention.