Читать книгу Cromwell’s Blessing - Peter Ransley - Страница 12

Only in Queen Street, from where Lord Stonehouse ran the Committee of Acquisition and Intelligence, was it business as usual. The title was a euphemism for plunder, but since everything had been plundered, spying had become its main occupation. Lord Stonehouse looked much the same, although there were more medicines on his desk along with the wine he habitually drank while signing papers. The fire burned brightly; there was never any shortage of coal in Queen Street.

He did not ask me to sit, but waved me to the same spot on the carpet where I had stood as a bastard apprentice, long before he had declared me his heir. He wasted no time on preliminaries. I had been sent to that part of Essex to improve relations. They were now at their worst since the end of the war. I had made a most dangerous enemy in Challoner. Why had I not let him hang the wretch?

I winced inwardly, seeing again that raw, bleeding flesh. But I said nothing, determined to keep my promise to Anne. It was the price I paid for the house she loved, for the children, for my fine bucket boots, the fall of my exquisite lace collar, and the thought of more nights in a world upside down. I came out of my reverie as he brought his fist down on the desk.

‘Lost your voice? That’s new. That’s something, at least! You have lost that part of Essex to us as well.’ He banged his fist on a bundle of papers. ‘Nothing but petitions from the people there. Disband the army. Cromwell’s only bargaining point. Holles will do it. His Presbyterians are in control of Parliament. Or have you become such a fool you do not realise that?’

I hung my head, murmuring that I did. Denzil Holles, who led the Presbyterians in Parliament, hated Cromwell. He had sued for peace during the war, eager to reach a settlement with the King at almost any price.

‘Not only do you not hand the thief over to justice, he’s now deserted!’

He was flinging the Essex petitions into a tray as I came out of my torpor.

‘Scogman?’

‘What?’

‘He’s alive?’

‘Of course the wretch is alive. Very much alive, unfortunately. Why do you think I’ve sent for you?’

Lord Stonehouse pulled out a pamphlet from the jumble of petitions, and flung it at me. It had a neat play on the New Model Army in its headline, which I had to admire: New Model Thieves Let Robber Escape. The pamphleteer had had a field day. In his lurid prose, Scogman became the most wanted man in Essex, the silver spoon a priceless collection of plate. A woodblock depicted him with one tooth and a devil’s tail.

Scogman alive! I felt a lift of spirits that no lace collar could give me. The most wanted man in Essex! I could not keep a smile from my face when I thought of Challoner’s puce-faced reaction.

‘You find it amusing, sir, do you?’

I straightened my face hastily. ‘No, no, no, my lord. I am, er, concerned about the inaccuracy of the report.’

‘Standards were higher in your day as a pamphleteer, were they?’

Sometimes I could not make him out. Was there an edge of mockery in his voice, a sign that the worst of the storm was over? ‘It was a spoon, my lord, not plate. Not even silver.’

‘Thirty pieces of silver,’ he murmured, staring into space.

‘I beg your pardon, my lord?’

He gave me a baleful look and stared into the fire. There was a silence apart from the click of the coals and the drumming of his fingers on his old leather desk. He broke it abruptly.

‘For your ears only. We have the King.’

I went forward impulsively. ‘Congratulations, my lord.’

He waved me away, a frown forming. ‘Well, well, there’s more to it. Unfortunately. I’ll come to that.’ But he could not contain his exuberance, and his face lit up again.

‘D’you know how we got His Majesty? We bought him! As good as. He was going to do a deal with the Scots but had to accept their religion. Charles loves the warmth of his Anglican ritual, and they chilled him to the bloody marrow with their damp kirks and bored him senseless with their gloomy hairsplitting.’

He took up his wine and then – it was unheard of – poured me one. He sprang up, animated, almost young again.

‘Warwick sat there. Moneybags Bedford there – what are you standing like a loon for, boy? Sit down! Sit down! Oh, of course we were paying for the Scottish army to leave. On the face of it. For services rendered – coming to our aid. You don’t buy a King, do you?’

He put on a shocked look, then laughed. ‘The grasping Scottish tinkers wanted nearly a million and a half pounds! For a King. Beaten. We knocked them down to four hundred thousand. Four hundred thousand.’ Lord Stonehouse relished the figure, as he savoured the taste of wine on his tongue. ‘In two instalments.’

I had never seen him so lively. He finished his glass and stood over the fire. ‘Newcastle fishwives threw rotting herring at the Scots as they left, crying “Judas!”, and I bought a shipload of coal. Warmest coal I’ve ever burned.’

He kicked at the fire, oblivious of the smouldering coals which singed his boot. Flames lit his face, throwing into sharp relief his aquiline nose, which was reflected in the family symbol of the falcon. For a moment the shadows took his years away and he stood there, proud, full of belief in himself, as he must have been when he first built his great house, Highpoint. But as the fire burned higher, the lines returned to his face and the stoop to his back.

‘Now we’ve lost him.’

‘The King? The King has escaped?’

‘No, no, no. But almost as bad. Holles and his Presbyterians have him. He’s in the middle of England under house arrest. Holdenby House, Northamptonshire, guarded by one of Holles’s Presbyterian regiments.’

‘Any settlement with the King will have to be ratified by Parliament!’

He gave me a bleak look. ‘Who controls Parliament?’

I swallowed my wine. ‘We must win the debate. It’s what we fought for. Parliament.’

‘Majority opinion?’

‘Yes.’

‘All well and good.’ He went back to his desk. ‘When it’s on your side.’ He opened a drawer that was double-locked, the one I had nicknamed his dirty tricks drawer. ‘What matters is not the debate, but what you can dig out beforehand. I must find out what Holles is up to. I had an informant high up in his inner circle I was hoping to catch. Unfortunately, I’ve lost him. I think you are the man to reel him back in.’

This was going far better than I had feared. But I looked at him warily as he drew out a fat bundle of papers. What exactly did ‘reel him back in’ mean? The last thing I wanted was to be drawn into Lord Stonehouse’s shady network of spies and informers. I wanted to defeat, perhaps even convince Holles, but by argument, not dirty tricks.

‘I will do all I can to help, my lord, but …’ I groped for a diplomatic way of putting it.

‘But?’

‘After the battle of Naseby,’ I said, ‘I accepted the sword of the Royalist Jacob Astley.’

‘Lord Astley. Did you now.’

‘Astley said: “You have done your work, and may go and play, unless you fall out among yourselves.”’

He leaned back in his chair, rubbing his chin. ‘A good aphorism. I must remember it. Meaning we should not quarrel, but reach agreement?’

I beamed at him. The wine put a rosy glow on everything. The firelight gleamed on the old oak furniture that smelt of polish, and on the jewelled falcon perched on his signet ring. This was the moment. I was on the verge of suggesting he put me up as an MP to fight Holles in Parliament when he struck like the bird on the ring, his voice acid with contempt.

‘I would as soon reach agreement with Holles as I would with a poisonous snake. Don’t you understand? He has the King! The English Presbyterians are not like the dreary Scots! They hold him at a fine house, where Charles practises his religion, and holds his court. Holles will push through all the concessions the King wants, just to have him back on the throne. In a year or two the King will have his own army, dismiss Parliament –’

‘Cromwell will never agree to such concessions!’

‘Cromwell has given up.’

This was too much. Lord Stonehouse had sat here throughout the war, his arse warmed by his coals. He had no idea what Cromwell and his army had been through. ‘Cromwell is ill, my lord,’ I said coldly.

‘Ill? Cromwell ill? He should have my years. My bladder. My stone. Ill? A grateful Parliament has conferred on him £2,500 a year. From estates I confiscated from the Marquis of Winchester. Cromwell ill, sir? He has drawn his pension, that’s the only thing wrong with Cromwell. Meanwhile we are in danger of losing all we fought for.’

‘Holles has no soldiers to launch a coup.’

‘He has Poyntz’s northern army.’

That at least was true. Major-General Poyntz’s soldiers had been recruited from strict Presbyterians. ‘They are no match for the New Model.’

‘Yet.’ He pointed to the petitions heaped up on his desk. ‘Holles is seeking to disband half the New Model and send the rest to Ireland.’

‘Nobody wants to go to Ireland. Cromwell will never let him disband –’

‘Cromwell, Cromwell.’ The name seemed to stick in his throat and he began to cough. ‘Cromwell is counting his pension and waiting for God to tell him what to do. Until God speaks or someone puts a keg of gunpowder under his arse in the form of solid proof of what Holles is up to, he won’t budge. I was on the verge of getting that proof from my informant but –’

He burst into an explosion of coughing. I picked up his wine.

‘Not wine … Cupboard … Not that one! Cordial …’

I opened the cupboard. In it was a miniature of a strikingly beautiful woman with greenish eyes. With it was a partly folded letter in which I caught only the opening line: This is a true likeness of …

‘Quick!’

I pulled out a flask and poured him a greenish liquid which smelt pleasantly of cinnamon. He swallowed some, spurted it out, mopped his face and took another sip or two, until the coughing gradually stopped. I moved to return the flask, but he stopped me and did so himself. I had disturbed the miniature so it was on the edge of the cupboard shelf. When he moved away, the miniature was no longer there. It was a clumsy surreptitious movement, and for a moment he did not meet my eyes. He looked almost human for a moment. Surely, I thought, he’s not fallen in love. At his age! The idea brought a smile to my face. It was wiped off immediately when he rounded on me.

‘I don’t know what you have to smile about. You have no idea what you’ve done! The informant who was going to tell me what Holles is up to is Sir Lewis Challoner.’

It was a world upside down in this room too, where nothing was as it seemed.

‘You sent me there to keep the army under control,’ I protested. ‘How could I know there was anything else going on!’

‘Just so, just so,’ he conceded. ‘I should have told you. But I could not afford to trust you. You and your damned scruples. Your radical views. You might have told anybody! I thought that your desire to be an MP would keep you in check. But now – now, I can’t afford not to trust you.’

He began coughing again and drank more cordial before he told me that Challoner had been planning to meet him, until the incident with Scogman.

‘Challoner knows Holles’s plans. He should do. He’s part of them. Why do you think there is so much trouble between the people and the army in Essex? Challoner is fomenting it.’

‘Why should he tell you Holles’s plans? He hates Cromwell.’

‘He loves land more.’

Everything fell into place. I remembered Challoner’s sudden burst of friendliness, his winks and slaps on the back as he rhapsodised about the beauty of the countryside.

‘The farm, you mean.’

‘Oh, more than that. The estate Parliament seized. I was negotiating to sell it on favourable terms if he came over to us.’

I winced. ‘And I thought his friendliness was because of my diplomacy.’

‘Diplomacy?’ He laughed. He patted the bundle of papers he had taken from the drawer. ‘This is the real diplomacy, Tom. Forget all this nonsense about being an MP. MPs are rhetorical froth. I want you to actually do something. You must apologise.’

I did not think I was hearing him correctly. ‘Apologise?’

‘To Sir Lewis. You made him a laughing stock.’

‘You expect me to crawl to that man?’

‘It is a matter of honour to him.’

‘It is a matter of honour to me! Or do you think I have no honour because of where I come from?’

He locked his hands together, rested his chin on them and gave me a long stare before opening the file. Whether he got it by money or extortion I had no idea. A creeping sense of unease began to fill me as he read some reports and showed me others, concealing names. There were greasy scraps of paper about secret meetings between Holles and the Governor of the Tower, details of armouries and the strength of soldiers guarding them, which, Lord Stonehouse claimed, had been seized from a spy of Holles. How much was true, how much fabrication, and how much distorted by his own fears, I did not know. But, in a voice growing hoarse with speaking, it was what he said next, in a dead, tired, matter-of-fact tone, that chilled me.

‘If there is a coup, Cromwell will be removed. I will be in the Tower. So will you. At the right time there will probably be trumped-up charges. We will be lucky to escape execution. What would happen to your little son, Luke, my grandson, I do not know.’

His voice petered out. He looked as exhausted as he had been lively earlier, his eyes half-hooded. It was so quiet I could hear a distant hawker cry, and the crackling of the coals in the fireplace. He put the papers away, the keys rattling as he double-locked the drawer, a faint echo of the gloomy litany of sound in the corridors of the Tower where I had once visited a pamphleteer imprisoned for sedition. If there was any chance he was right, what did my honour matter? But then the rattle of those keys he always carried brought back Scogman, in chains, dragged by Stalker’s horse, stumbling, falling, dragged from lane to ditch and back again.

‘I will not apologise to that man.’

‘You will do as I say!’

I said nothing.

‘Get out.’

He began coughing again, knocking the glass of cordial over. I went to help him, but he reacted so violently and was so red in the face that, fearing I was doing more harm than good, I went for Mr Cole.