Читать книгу The King's Minion - Рафаэль Сабатини - Страница 4

Table of Contents

King James, fully recovered from the terrible fright occasioned him by the Gunpowder Plot, had returned to his norm of pusillanimity. Guy Fawkes, unbroken in spirit, however broken in body by torture, had expiated on the gallows in Paul's Yard the attempt—in his own bold words—to blow the Scots beggars back to their mountains.

The beggars remained and profited by the distribution amongst them of the acres and possessions of the conspirators, most of whom were gentlemen of substance.

For the King, too, the matter had not been without ultimate profit, of a more spiritual kind. It had enabled him by an exercise of the arts of kingcraft—a term signifying little more than the shameless use of falsehood and dissimulation—to parade before the world the divine inspiration vouchsafed to monarchs. It was, he pretended, the acuteness with which kings are supernaturally endowed which had enabled him to enucleate from obscurest utterances the true aim and nature of the plot, and thus, almost miraculously, to avert a national catastrophe.

Some material profit, too, was to be extracted from it, in the course of a further display of the spiritual graces and accomplishments of this astounding prince. He was enabled to argue, cogently enough, that people themselves so intolerant as the Papists, on whose behalf it had been sought to blow him and his Parliament into a better world, deserved no toleration; that the Scarlet Woman on her seven hills propounded, indeed, the mystery of iniquity. Hence he was justified in proceeding against Papists and at the same time against Puritans—so as to be perfectly consistent in his exclusive upholding of the Established Church—by means of heavy fines and confiscations. Thus he replenished his sadly depleted treasury and was enabled further to relieve the necessities of those Scots beggars—and some English ones, too—who clustered about him.

It did not trouble his elastic royal conscience that the plot of a few desperate men, for which he now punished an entire community, was directly sprung from his own bad faith in an earlier exercise of his art of kingcraft. Readily enough had he promised toleration alike to the co-religionaries of his mother and to the Puritans, when they had approached him on the subject in Scotland in the days of his own anxieties touching his succession to the throne of England. They were foolish to have trusted him. They should have perceived that a man who would not raise a finger to save his own mother from the block, lest by doing so he should jeopardise his inheritance of the English crown, would never scruple about a false promise or two that would help to ensure the unanimity of all classes of Englishmen in his favour. By breaking faith when he discovered that the Episcopalian religion, which made him head of the Church as well as of the State, was the only religion fit for kings, he provoked not only the Gunpowder Plot, but that earlier conspiracy in which Catholics and Puritans were united, the strangest bedfellows adversity ever made.

All this, however, was now happily overpast. The heel of authority was firmly planted on the neck of Papist and Puritan, and their recusancy was being sweated out of them in the gold that was so urgently required to maintain the prodigal splendours of the court of this new kingdom of Great Britain. For now, in the year 1607 of the coming of Our Lord and fourth of the coming of King James, his majesty was in dire straits for ready money.

Never before in the history of the country had there been, and never since has there been, such reckless extravagance as that which distinguished the descent of the Scots from their Northern fastnesses in the train of a king who was a veritable beggar on horseback.

Out of the stern and arid North he had come into the promised land of plenty, a land that flowed, and flowed richly, with milk and honey at his command. His commands, however, had been so free and frequent that at last the springs were showing signs of exhaustion. Fortunes lavished upon favourites by a prince who had never learnt and never did learn the value of money were draining the resources of the nation. Finding his hands, which hitherto had been ever empty, to be suddenly filled with gold, he had scattered it in almost childish recklessness, spending for the mere love of spending, who in thirty-seven years of life had never had anything to spend. Similarly, finding himself a free and uncontrolled fount of honour, who hitherto had been overborne and brow-beaten by rude nobles and ruder clerics, he spouted honours so freely that in the first three months of his reign, apart from the new earls and barons he created, he distributed no less than seven hundred knighthoods, so that to be a knight became so common as to be almost disreputable. There was no lack of point in the announcement nailed by a satirist on the door of Saint Paul's, offering to train weak memories in the titles of nobility.

When at last he began to feel himself hard-pressed for money, he had summoned Parliament so that it might provide, only to make the discovery, next in horror to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, that the Commons, far from acknowledging his divinity, would scarcely acknowledge his majesty. His own views and Parliament's on the function of the Commons were found to be widely divergent. The session resolved itself into a battle between absolutism and constitutionalism; and it was in vain that, with the polemical skill in which he took such pride, he argued that kings are in the Word of God called gods, as being His lieutenants and vicegerents on earth and therefore adorned and furnished with some sparks of Divinity. The Commons, perceiving no spark of divinity in his majesty's very human if excessive need of money, were so impudent as to treat him as a man, and to vote him certain subsidies which would not even pay the monstrous debts he had piled up.

If this annoyed him, it nowise served to curtail his extravagance or the munificence in which he delighted, largely no doubt because in its indulgence he gratified his desire to feel a god. So he went his ways, junketing and banqueting in this land of milk and honey, with revels and maskings, tournaments and mummeries. He discovered that the exercise of hunting was not merely pleasant in itself, but an absolute necessity to the preservation of his health, whilst cock-fighting was so important a relaxation to his mind, so that its vigour might subsequently be renewed, that he paid the master of the cocks as much as any two Secretaries of State. And for the rest, as Sir John Harrington wrote from court, 'Now that the gunpowder fight is got out of our heads, we are going on hereabouts as if the Devil was contriving that every man should blow himself up by wild riot, excess, and devastation of time and temperance.'

Being at heart a woman, his majesty loved to look upon fine men, and he saw to it that those immediately about him were fine, not only in person, but also in apparel and equipment, and he showered upon them honours and riches at the expense of his new kingdom. There was Philip Herbert, whom he had made Earl of Montgomery, the handsome, oafish, rowdy, and unworthy brother of the splendid Pembroke; there was Sir John Ramsay, whom he had created Viscount Haddington, between whom and himself lay perhaps the truth of the dark Gowrie business; there was the magnificent Sir James Hay, who eventually became Earl of Carlisle, a courtier trained in France, where he had served in the Scots Guards; and there was a host of lesser handsome satellites, mostly Scots, who sunned themselves in the royal favour, had their will of the weak prodigal king, and preyed upon him much as light wanton women will prey upon a man who delights in feminine companionship. His want of dignity in his relations with his minions was as ludicrous as his excess of it in his relations with the Commons.

Surrounded by a cloud of these lively, gorgeous fritillaries, you behold him on a fair September morning in his pavilion in the tilt-yard at Whitehall. There was to be riding at the ring and there were to be other joustings of a mild order, in the nature of pageants rather than of tourneys, so as to display fine horsemanship and athletic beauty without danger to life or limb, for his majesty did not relish shows that were too warlike.

Dazzling as Phœbus himself rode forth the magnificent James Hay in a doublet of cloth of gold, a short cloak of white beaver trailing from his shoulders, a white-plumed white beaver hat above his golden curls. He was attended, as became so magnificent a paladin, by close upon a score of esquires, who again were followed by as many pages in his cerulean livery, with his arms embroidered on each breast. To be his shield-bearer Sir James had chosen the handsomest of his esquires, a youth of twenty, who for beauty of face and straight shapeliness of limb must draw the eye in any assembly. He drew now the eyes of all in the ladies' gallery as he rode forward alone in advance of the others, mounted on a mettlesome white horse, to do his appointed office and present his lord's escutcheon to the King.

The King rolled his big liquid eyes, and under the veil of his thin sandy beard, the heavy lips of his loose mouth smiled approval. His majesty loved good horses and admired good horsemanship, an art he was never to master for himself, although more than half his days were spent in the saddle. He was lost now in admiring wonder of the superb mastery of the advancing rider.

'Like a centaur. Ay, and a bonnie,' he muttered thickly in his singsong Scots voice.

A final curvet at the very steps of the royal gallery, and the horse was pulled up, so sharply that it almost sat down on its haunches like a cat. Yet all would have been well with the horseman if he had not already disengaged one foot from the stirrup intending to complete his display by a leap to the ground which should bring horse and man to a simultaneous standstill. The result was that he lost his balance at the very moment of gathering himself for his leap, and, cumbered as he was by the shield, he came heavily to the ground.

Philip Herbert at the King's elbow advertised his inherent boorishness by a loud guffaw.

'Your centaur's come in pieces, Sire.'

But the King never heard him, which was perhaps as well for him. The royal eyes were upon the young man, who sprawled in a curiously helpless attitude upon the dusty ground after an instant's aborted effort to rise.

'God's sake!' the King muttered. 'The lad's hurt.' And he heaved himself out of his crimson chair and stood forth, a man a little above the middle height, whose thick ungainly body was carried upon thin rachitic shanks. He had been suckled by a drunkard, and to this it was attributed that he had not been able to stand until his seventh year; nor did his legs thereafter ever grow to normal strength.

Already esquires and pages were on foot and hastening to the fallen young man's assistance, Sir James Hay, on horseback close at hand, directing them. There was silence in the assembly of spectators, all of whom had risen. In the ladies' gallery, the Countess of Essex, a fair-headed child of fifteen of an extraordinary loveliness, leaning forward, clutching the wooden rail before her with a slim gloved hand, drew attention to herself by the anxious note of her outcry and the insistence with which she demanded to know the extent of the young man's hurt, which none yet could tell her. Her mother, the Countess of Suffolk, that ample-bosomed, sneering-mouthed, pock-marked woman, restrained her, whilst smiling upon the tenderness of her solicitude for an unknown youth.

Then the King became the centre of interest. Leaning heavily upon Herbert's shoulder, he shambled down the steps. He bent over the young man, who lay supine and helpless, his right leg at an odd angle. This leg, they informed his majesty, was broken. A page had already gone to summon bearers and a hand-litter.

'Poor lad! Poor lad!' mumbled the King on an almost maudlin note. Small ills observed could singularly move this man to tenderness, who could yet perpetrate great and bloody cruelties which he was not called upon to witness.

The youth shifted his head upon the pillow it had found on the knee of another esquire, and his fine eyes looked up in awe at compassionate majesty. Though livid and drawn by pain, the beauty of his face remained singularly arresting. Not more than twenty years of age, he was still beardless, and only a little auburn moustache shaded the shapely mouth, at once firm and sensuous. He pushed back the tumbled red-gold hair from his moist brow and made as if to speak, then checked, not knowing what might be required of him by etiquette in such a case.

But the King had little thought for etiquette. Goggle-eyed he considered this long slim lad, and he was so overcome at the thought of so much physical perfection being perhaps permanently marred that a tear rolled down his prematurely furrowed yet florid cheek.

'Who is he? How's he called?' he gruffly questioned.

Sir James, who had dismounted, pushed forward, hat in hand, to answer him.

'His name is Carr, may it please your majesty; Robert Carr of Ferniehurst.'

'Carr o' Ferniehurst!' The King seemed taken aback. 'The son of Tom Carr! God's sake!'

He bent lower to scan more closely the handsome man grown out of one who some years ago had served him as a page in Edinburgh, but who had been dismissed for his persistent bad Latin at grace, which to the King had smacked of irreverence.

Young Carr's white mask of pain was irradiated by a smile to behold himself remembered.

'God save your majesty,' he said in an accent even more broadly Scots than the King's own.

'It's thyself needs saving now, lad,' the King mumbled. He stood upright again and became brisk in the issuing of orders, and more indistinct in speech than usual in this briskness.

Mr. Carr was to be conveyed no farther than Mr. Rider's house in King Street, near at hand. Let word be sent ahead at once that a room be prepared for him. At the royal nod one of his gentlemen sped upon the errand, whilst another departed in quest of his majesty's own physician. The repairs to the lad's leg were to be carried out by the most skilful hands available, so as to ensure that so lovely a body should suffer no permanent impairment.

Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, holding premier place among the favourites, looked down his handsome nose in disdain. Why did his old dad and gossip, as he familiarly called his sovereign, make all this bother about a raw Scots esquire of no account?

Dull fellow that Herbert was, he lacked the wit to perceive that another of Guy Fawkes's beggars was come to court.