The King’s Spaniel

‘Think of Einstein,’ my father would say. He worked for the Bank of England and all too easily confounded any feeble assertions of mine, on economics or monetary policy, with a barrage of hard facts, dates and quotes. ‘Einstein’, he used to say, ‘didn’t care for facts either. Like you, he preferred to keep clear of them. In his case, however, it was to free his brain for thinking.’

I have no idea on what my father based this and I’m sure he was genuinely trying to console, but for years afterwards I avoided novels that mixed politics and facts, particularly historical novels. Writers should just make it up, I thought. Feelings were what counted: feelings, ideas, characters and story. But then, thankfully, I was given Rose Tremain’s best-selling and Booker short-listed novel Restoration, and, plunging in against my better judgement, was immediately hooked. The novel is set during a period of great upheaval and terrible disasters – the Restoration, the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London. The extravagantly sensuous and painfully honest narrator, Robert Merivel, struggles to achieve spiritual restoration while Charles II, his charismatic monarch and patron, is ultimately found to be decadent, fickle and scheming. Wonderfully drawn as these two main characters are, for me it is the animals that steal the show. Whether singing in captivity or galloping off to forage independently, the animals – portrayed without a scrap of sentimentality – pose a range of philosophical and moral questions. The novel opens in London in 1664 with Merivel presenting us with a few key highlights of his early years, the first being a dissection of a starling, carried out when he was 9 years old.

As I cut into the thorax, a well of excitement began to fill and glimmer within me. It rose as I worked until, with the body of the starling opened and displayed before me, I had, I suddenly recognised, caught a glimpse of my own future.

Who hasn’t poked at a dead bird with a stick or the toe of a shoe, or conducted childhood funerals for butterflies and mice? Over and over again, Tremain uses animals to point up the connections between the historical past and ourselves. Merivel is 37 years old and at the Royal College of Physicians, having studied anatomy at Caius College, Cambridge, and in Padua under ‘the great anatomist, Fabricus’. His father, glove-maker to the King, arranges an introduction, hoping that his son might be appointed a ‘physician for the People of the Bedchamber, perhaps’. A hung-over Merivel arrives late and behaves like a ‘dumbcluck’ in the Great Presence. All he remembers of the encounter afterwards is a dog snuffling at his hastily polished shoes. He is summoned back a few days later, and the King tells him that one of his dogs, Bibillou, Lou-Lou for short, a brown and white spaniel, is dying. ‘If you can cure him, Merivel, I will offer you a place here as Court Physician.’ The little dog has been bled repeatedly and subjected, without success, to lesions, emetics and purges. Merivel is left alone with his patient, a nightshirt, a matching nightcap and a decanter of claret. In the morning he wakes, hung-over again, to find the dog miraculously improved. ‘Four days later, I carried him to the King’s bedchamber and set him on the Royal lap, where he stood entranced and wagged his tail.’ Neglect, it seems, is sometimes the most effective cure. As a reward, Merivel is made responsible for the health of eighteen Royal dogs. But soon, having revealed himself to be not only a ‘dumbcluck’ but also a man who believes the heart to be merely a physical organ and without feeling, he is given an even greater charge – the King’s youngest mistress, Celia. In a grotesque marriage ceremony, Merivel becomes her ‘paper groom’ – a hollow but legally binding position that comes with compensation: Bidnold, a moated Jacobean manor house in Norfolk, surrounded by parkland and grazing red deer. He takes with him additional gifts from his King: a set of voluminous table napkins – a sly dig at his rapidly increasing girth and the food stains that decorate his gaudy waistcoats – a dog, another spaniel named Minette after the King’s sister, and a horse, Danseuse. His bride, Celia, spends most of her time in a secluded house at Kew, a short scull up river from Whitehall. Bored and lonely, Merivel decides to take up painting. Clad in an artist’s smock and floppy hat, he begins this project with great enthusiasm but soon discovers that he has no skill (or talent). Enter a real artist, one Elias Finn, brought in to teach Merivel the basics. Finn, who leads an impoverished life as an itinerant portrait painter, has a much clearer grasp than Merivel of what is needed to achieve life’s ambitions. Believing his pupil to possess the King’s ‘ear’, he presents Merivel with a bribe.

Before me stood a birdcage of great delicacy, painted a deep Prussian blue and gilded with gold leaf. Inside it, on a swing perch, was a bird, which at first I took to be a stuffed thing, so still and staring did it remain. Then it turned its yellow eye on me and opened its beak and let out a sweet trill. ‘My word, Finn,’ I said. ‘It’s alive!’

Finn nodded. ‘It’s an Indian Nightingale,’ he announced proudly. ‘It has travelled the seas.’

India in those times must have been a place of great mystery to a Londoner. The bird’s song, however, strikes a note that Merivel seems to have heard before, in his mind perhaps, if not in nature. He sings to the bird, even struggles to play the oboe to accompany it, but has no musicality. It is Celia who possesses a beautiful voice, and it is she who discovers, late one night, that the bird has fallen sick. Armed with a potion called Pill Fortis made from senna and rhubarb, some clean linen bandages and his surgical instruments, Merivel purges the unfortunate bird and performs a phlebotomy on its thigh. The candle-lit operation is carried out on top of a walnut card table. Then Celia and Merivel conduct a vigil over the bird, and the operating-table becomes a supper table. Merivel falls asleep among the chicken bones (the novel is full of little ironies) only to wake at dawn to discover his Indian nightingale ‘lying in a pool of greenish slime, its terminal evacuation caused by the Fortis’. Tremain is very good at grisly detail, both physical and emotional. Soon a love-sick Merivel is moping about having made the mistake of falling in love with his bride. Clumsily, he embraces her and attempts a kiss, a fatal violation of the rules. A repulsed Celia spits in his eyes and Merivel is summoned back to Court. After a salutary meeting with his monarch, he takes a tour through the ‘damp bowels of the Tower’. There he sees the King’s leopards and four mangy lions, named after other English Kings: Henry, Edward, Charles and James.

I watched the lions but they never once regarded me, not even to growl or snarl at the torchlight. I thought: You have no memory of Africa or sunlight or a Time Before. So I would rather be you.

And now Merivel falls spectacularly from grace. Bidnold is repossessed by the King to help pay for a war with the Dutch and Merivel finds himself cast out with only a few small personal  possessions and his horse, Danseuse, to keep him company. Trial after trial follows, some comic, some tragic, while Danseuse is both a delight and a liability, always bolting and unseating her master, tumbling him into ditches, cantering off, even disappearing altogether and then returning much later having found her own way back, as animals so often do. Pondering her behaviour, Merivel says:

I am most fond of animals. I enjoy about them, in equal measure, that which is graceful and that which is gross. And they do not scheme. No man, woman or child exists in this  boisterous Kingdom who is not full of plotting, yet the animals and the birds have not one good ploy between them.

Plotting is Rose Tremain’s forte, the novel bursting with incident and drama, the historic events deeply researched then vividly re-imagined. Arguably, historical novels are really about the writer’s present and Tremain has said that, in Restoration, she wanted to write about Thatcher’s Britain (the novel was first published in 1989), the lure of money and power, and the corruption that often shadows their pursuit. The novel is also a comment on consumerism and the folly of material aspirations. And now there is to be a sequel: A Man of His Time is to be published next year. I used to hate the idea of sequels, thinking that a single book should do it. But some characters refuse to lie down. Despite his foolish excesses, pretensions and aspirations, Merivel is a deeply sympathetic character, the reader occupying that interesting position of seeing what is really going on so much more clearly than he does. Merivel may be older and wiser, but Tremain is determined that there will still be dumbcluckery, escapades and frolics. Her publishers are delighted. Restoration is often seen as her breakthrough novel, the one in which ‘literary’ and ‘best-selling’ came together with great effect. The sequel begins twenty-two years later when everything at the Court of Charles II has collapsed. Then, as today, it’s credit-crunch time. What better moment for a new story? And one that, with luck, even a factually purged Einstein might enjoy.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 31 © Linda Leatherbarrow 2011