And Lucy Hay, too, had to instruct her maids to get the coal dust off the new upholstery. The first years of Lucy’s marriage were difficult. She fell ill, so seriously that she nearly died, and perhaps as a result of this illness, she suffered the tragic stillbirth of the only baby she would ever carry. Having married a man with no money of his own, dependent on the king for favours, Lucy was in an oddly vulnerable position. She and her husband needed her efforts to survive James I’s death in 1625 without loss of position. And they had a tremendous stroke of luck early in the new reign. Exasperated with Henrietta Maria’s French ladies-in-waiting, Charles literally threw them out on 7 August 1626. James Hay may have been among those who urged this; Buckingham certainly was. The list of replacements included Lucy. But Henrietta didn’t want her – hers was the name which made the young queen balk.
It is easy to understand the queen’s difficulties. Henrietta was young, and rather daunted by England and the English court. Lucy was beautiful and clever and seems to have struck every man who met her as a kind of goddess. What queen consort in her senses would want her footsteps dogged day and night by somebody so very desirable, so charismatic? Henrietta wanted to lead; she didn’t want to follow. And Lucy’s sexual reputation had begun its nosedive. It was widely assumed that she was the mistress of that most glittering, most hated upstart of all, the Duke of Buckingham, and that Hay and Buckingham both hoped to use her to gain power over the young queen. Henrietta was quite intelligent enough to resent this. And she hated Buckingham, and detested his power over her husband.
Her mixed feelings about Lucy might have had another, darker cause. It may be that James Hay and Buckingham were both hoping that Charles might become infatuated with Lucy, that they might be able to control the king through his mistresses. This was not a stupid idea: the strategy was to pay rich dividends with Charles’s son, after all. And even the rumour cannot have endeared Lucy to the young, insecure queen, who believed passionately in marital fidelity.
And how might Lucy have felt about these plans? The self-willed girl, who chose her own husband? Perhaps the sense of being used and ordered in and out of bed bred a curious solidarity between Lucy and the queen, since in these unpromising circumstances Lucy somehow triumphed. By the summer of 1628, she had become Henrietta’s best friend and closest lady-in-waiting. As James Hay had taught her, she used dinners and entertainments: Bassompierre, the French ambassador, reported on Lucy’s cosy supper parties ‘in extreme privacy, rarely used in England, and caused a great stir, since the Queen rarely associates with her subjects at small supper gatherings’. This was high fashion, exciting, vivid, very faintly transgressive. It was women-only, too. Bassompierre noted that the king ‘once found himself in these little festivities … but behaved with a gravity which spoiled the conversation, because his humour is not inclined to this sort of debauche’. The kind of games which may have been played are exemplified by Lucy’s doglike and ambitious follower Sir Tobie Mathew, who wrote a character of her; it can be read as nauseatingly fulsome or very double-tongued indeed. Those who saw it as flattery agreed that it was ‘a ridiculous piece’. In his character, Mathew praises her ability to turn aside her followers’ wooing by seeming not to understand them. What Lucy liked was the idea of love, love as a game: a solemn Platonic game, yes, but one that could at any moment be deflated by sharp satire.
It was typical of Lucy that she could bring triumph even out of the disaster of serious and disfiguring illness. When she developed smallpox in the hot summer of 1628, it coincided very neatly with the death of the Duke of Buckingham, who had come to be James Hay’s rival and enemy. Buckingham’s death left an enormous gap at the very centre of power, a gap which James and Lucy Hay raced to fill. Everyone wrote to James, who was in Venice, urging him to return to England at once, even urging Lucy’s illness as a good excuse. In fact, though, James was both too late and not needed. The person who stepped into Buckingham’s position of power and influence over Charles was in fact his queen, Henrietta. And Lucy had assiduously cultivated her. Henrietta loved Lucy so much that she could hardly be restrained from nursing her personally. When Lucy began to recover, Henrietta rushed to her side.
But despite these glowing moments, the relationship had its ups and downs. Tobie Mathew could report in March 1630 that Lucy and Henrietta were not as close as before, and by November William, Lord Powys could inform Henry Vane that Lucy was back in full favour again. The problem sometimes seemed to be that Lucy was not very good at being a courtier: her natural dominance sometimes overpowered her political instincts. Powys remarked that ‘she is become a pretty diligent waiter, but how long the humour will last in that course I know not’. And although she and Henrietta had much in common, they were very different in inclination and temperament. Lucy’s rather Jacobean liking for fun, frivolity and parties was not altogether shared by Henrietta, who liked her parties too, but preferred them to have serious moral themes. When another of Henrietta’s advisers lamented that the wicked Lucy was teaching the queen to use makeup, he was complaining that she brought some Jacobean dissoluteness to the primness of the new court. Henrietta had moods in which she found this fun, and moods in which it made her feel shamed and guilty, particularly since Lucy could not share the great passion of her life, her Roman Catholic religious zeal. Finally, as Tobie Mathew remarked, Lucy was really a man’s woman: ‘She more willingly allows of the conversation of men, than of Women; yet, when she is amongst those of her own sex, her discourse is of Fashions and Dressings, which she hath ever so perfect upon herself, as she likewise teaches it by seeing her.’
She liked admiration and she also liked politics and intrigue. Her main interest in Henrietta was almost certainly centred on the access the queen gave her to her own powerful court faction, and Henrietta, like anyone, may sometimes have resented the fact that she was never liked for herself. And both women were locked in the competition that court society imposed on them, an unspoken, deadly scramble for notice, importance, power, access, which neither could ever truly win. Henrietta was always ahead because of her position, but like most people, wanted to be loved for her own qualities, and there Lucy could outdo her in wit, charm and beauty. It was easier for Henrietta to blame Lucy for her occasional eclipse than to question why her husband’s nobles so resented her influence; it was easier for Lucy to triumph over and rival Henrietta than to ask herself why her role in affairs always had to be a minor one.
Lucy and Henrietta were also frustrated because no one really took them seriously. They were both encased in a role which compelled them to be sweet and wise and self-controlled in public. Though women were often seen as emotionally and sexually uncontrolled, behaving that way led to social ostracism. They were not allowed to display or even to have feelings of competitiveness, anger, and frustration, which meant that those feelings raged unexpressed and unchecked. Composing bons mots of detraction, laughing at adorers, and slighting each other gave those feelings temporary release. What they both truly wanted was to have an impact on policy.
So, late in the 1620s, Lucy was a trifle bored. It all seemed so easy. At first the new monarchy of Charles I appeared a little dull and straitlaced: ‘If you saw how little gallantry there is at court,’ Lucy complained, ‘you would believe that it were no great adventure to come thither after having the small pox, for it is most desolate and I have no great desire to return.’ But this is the carelessness of success. A 1628 painting shows her translated to the centre of feminine power at court, transformed by masque costume into a goddess. The Duke of Buckingham, as Mercury, leads a procession of the arts to the king and queen, Apollo and Diana; the countess can be seen directly behind the queen’s shoulder, handily placed for whispering in her ear. Such allegorical names could be codewords, too; the countess’s brother-in-law referred to himself as Apollo, Walter Montagu as Leicester (a name that hinted at his role as the queen’s favourite, and perhaps implied something about their relationship). Lucy sponsored a performance called The Masque of Amazons, and danced in other masques. She was on top of her own small world.
But then it all fell apart. For reasons about which we can only speculate, Lucy declined a personal invitation to dance in William Davenant’s The Temple of Love, in 1634. And she never danced again in a court masque. Her absence from court was also noted by Viscount Conway in 1634: ‘now and a long time she hath not been at Whitehall, as she was wont to be, which is as when you left her: But she is not now in