Charles the King by Evelyn Anthony Read Free Book Online Page B

cannot force myself upon a woman.”
    â€œBetter to use force than be made a laughing-stock and have those sniggering Frenchwomen writing back to Paris and saying that you are not man enough to make your wife submit to you. I tell you, Sire,” he said quickly, “you are too gentle with her. Take the advice of one who knows more women than is good for his soul, and do two things. Get rid of these women of hers, and tell her that if she deserts your bed and refuses you an heir, you will divorce her.”
    â€œShe knows I cannot divorce her,” Charles said. “It would mean a war with France as things are at the moment. And we have troubles enough if we’re going to fight Spain.”
    â€œIf not divorce,” Buckingham answered slowly,” then prison. Queens have been disciplined before without making a public show of it and sending them home. Try it, Sire.”
    Charles shook his head. His anger had gone; he felt oppressed with a sense of agonizing personal failure and despair. There were times when he closed his ears to Buckingham and admitted that the fault must also be on his side, the failure his responsibility. He had known nothing of women; he had spent his life in retirement avoiding his father’s worldly, dissolute Court in the hope that he could escape the mistakes without learning by experience. He had not learned and he had ruined his marriage after only a few months and half a dozen nights, each one more fruitless and unhappy than the last until his wife held the sheets to her chin and burst into tears if he came into her room. He came no more, but his longing gnawed at him like a worm of wounded pride and suffocated passion. He sometimes sat with her and looked at her slight, pretty face and body and felt afraid that the day would come when he would throw himself upon his knees and beg. And if he ever did and she refused him, he would probably kill her …
    He stood up suddenly.
    â€œSomething must be done. I can’t hurt her, Steenie, I can’t bring myself to do the things you talk about—I can’t take by force what I only want from love and I can’t threaten her with punishments I’ll never carry out. So what am I to do? Tell me, in God’s name?”
    Buckingham smiled. Charles was still sick with love, so soft at the core with his emotion for her that he couldn’t come to his senses and pummel the little brat until she shrieked for mercy. And this was just as well because the ways of women were inscrutable, and tougher shrews than this petulant minx had fawned on the men who tamed them. He did not want Henrietta to fawn. He wanted her to spit defiance and weep tears of homesickness and woe until she had killed her husband’s love completely and driven him to cool his physical thirst at a less dangerous well.
    â€œYou could always take a mistress, Sire. That is one alternative to suing at Her Majesty’s door. But before you do anything, dismiss her suite. There are over four hundred of these damned French parasites living at Whitehall alone. Without their support she might listen to reason, and I’ll be your spokesman if you like.”
    If Charles followed his advice, she would never forgive him. And he, Buckingham, would be safe; he would remain the favourite, privileged and inviolate in the King’s confidence. And with such a domestic life and such an experience behind him, Charles would be unlikely to remove that trust in favour of another woman. And if an embassy went to France to explain the King’s action, then he would be the leader. Having made his plans to blight Charles’s chance of happiness, he allowed his mind to stray to his unfinished courtship of the Queen of France, whom he had sworn to see again even at the cost of war. He actually laughed, he was in such a good humour at the neatness of the plot. From the humiliation and ruin of Henrietta Maria whom he hated and the destruction of her life