Charles the King (19 page)

“By God, he's right!” the Earl of Essex burst out. “The King must be stopped; Mr. Cromwell uses the word ‘treason', and I beg leave to quarrel with it, however much I agree with everything else he's said tonight. I call it treason to leave the King at the mercy of advisers like Wentworth and Archbishop Laud. If the Covenanters cross into England, they will be welcomed by most of us as liberators, protecting the King against himself. And no sovereign can face an invasion without calling Parliament. It is the only possible solution. I salute you, Sir,” he said to Cromwell. “You are a man of excellent sense.”

Cromwell stood up and bowed and then sat down again. His heavy face had flushed; he looked almost embarrassed.

“I cannot offer more than the suggestion,” he said. “I have no friends across the Scottish border. I and many like me can do nothing to remedy what is wrong with England until we sit in Parliament again. But when we do, my Lords and gentlemen, we will know how to rid the King of Wentworth and of the Archbishop.”

He looked at the pale, beautiful woman sitting close to Pym and ignored the smile she gave him. He knew who she was and he had taken the trouble to find out about her reputation; her conversion to the Puritan belief made no difference to his dislike and contempt for her or to his disgust with Pym. He had no sympathy with her or with the nobles, Essex included, who hung round Whitehall as servants of the King, and sneaked into the houses of his enemies behind his back. He and his family ate and drank and dressed like the common people, and worshipped in their bare little church where a lay lecturer read the lessons and preached God's word. He did not belong to the class which was so strongly represented in that room, and if he had, he felt sure he would have served the interests of the King more loyally than they did.

Cromwell did not speak again but sat back in his chair and listened, controlling the rising impatience which resulted from these meetings when he saw the simple issues being confused in a torrent of talk. He considered himself a plain man; indeed his simplicity was his boast. His country was being badly governed by a King who had rejected the ancient laws of the Constitution and had nothing to show for his eleven years of single rule except alliances with Catholic Spain and France, a corrupt financial system and a ruinous religious policy leading in the unmistakable direction of re-union with Rome.

Cromwell had been brought up with a superstitious horror of the religion which had rent England with persecution and culminated in the Spanish Armada, long before he himself was born. For his toleration of it, if for nothing else, Cromwell abhorred and suspected the King, and he reserved his most bitter hatred for the treacherous little priest at Lambeth who was using his ecclesiastical powers to impose an English Inquisition. Cromwell had no patience for the moderates in his party, or for those like the nobles who stood with a foot in both camps. His God was Jehovah, the God of Wrath, who sent his servants into battle, and the people of God needed a Joshua to lead them. He had yet to see the prophet chosen by the Lord, but in his prayers and mediations and his reading of the fiery passages in Scripture, the call was already coming faintly through to him that the Joshua of Puritan England might turn out to be himself.

Lucy Carlisle was whispering to Pym.

“The King has appointed Sir Henry Vane as his secretary,” she said. “I thought that might interest you.”

“Vane?” Pym was astonished. “But his son is one of us; he defied the King in the Parliament of '29. How can he give such a confidential post to any member of that family?”

“Because the Lord always blinds those who lose his grace,” she said. She had easily adopted the Biblical vernacular; it was not uncommon for her lover to express the climax of his passion with a cry of ‘Hallelujah', and she had long ceased to see anything funny in it. She could not find anything to mock in Pym, because Pym had succeeded where so many other men of wit and birth and elegance had failed in the primitive essential. For the first time in her life, Lucy Carlisle was genuinely dominated, and genuinely, fiercely happy.

“The Secretary is loyal to the King,” she said. “And that is all that matters to him. He punishes the son and exalts the father and sees nothing contrary to nature in it. Vane is a fool; he leaves his papers loose and talks like an old woman. He writes down the business at the Council meetings. Would it be useful to you if the younger Vane arranged to copy them? I can find some way to help him.”

“It would be invaluable! We should know everything Wentworth is planning as soon as he discloses it in Council … But the risk, my dear, the risk to yourself …”

“I take it gladly,” she said. “And you needn't trouble yourself; you shall have the transcripts and Vane shall bring them to you. No one will suspect me. Shall I stay on tonight?”

He hesitated and then shook his head. He was a very logical and rather worldly man, and he had managed to manipulate his code of morals to include their relationship; he had no alternative once the first sin was committed. He had excused it to himself but he was careful to conceal it from his friends.

“It is too dangerous; it would not look well for you to linger when the rest have gone. Tomorrow. Tomorrow evening, when I will be sure to be alone.”

He escorted her down to the door and helped her into her coach. She leant forward and kissed him on the mouth. The coach moved forward, rocking uncomfortably on the rough cobbled street and turned down past the river towards Whitehall. She shared the second ante-room with Lady Newport who turned over sleepily supposing that the Countess had been with a lover. Both women were roused at six o'clock the next morning to bring the Queen's chocolate and dress her for her daily Mass.

There had been a riot in the City of London. It began on May Day, the traditional feast of Spring, when the people wore their best clothes and musicians appeared in the streets and there was dancing and a good deal of horseplay and a contest of sports. The apprentices began it; they came out at Blackfriars and began streaming down towards Southwark. They were shouting and jostling and in a strangely quarrelsome mood. Many carried sticks and more were picking up stones as they went. They were soon joined by the dock workers and seamen whose ships were standing idle in the Port of London because of the disputes between the King and the City of London over a grant he demanded to finance his new army. Someone had found a drum, and the steady beat brought more and more apprentices and youths out of the shops and toolyards, and the crowd became a mob and broke out suddenly in the direction of Lambeth, yelling for the blood of the Papist Laud.

The discontent and the rumours had been growing for weeks; more and more Puritan preachers spoke out against the King and the army gathering to march on Scotland, and were sent to prison. There were rumours and counter-rumours; Wentworth, now created Earl of Strafford, was throwing men into prison for refusing to join the King's army; troops were being sent by Spain to help subdue the Protestant Scots. The King had become a Catholic in return for a huge grant of money from the Pope.

The Archbishop had fled for his life through a back entrance, and eventually the mob was dispersed at the King's orders. The rioting spread to the prisons, where crowds forced the doors of Newgate and the Marshalsea and released the prisoners. By the evening the outbreak of violence had spent itself and numbers of the ringleaders were in jail; the city of London was quiet, but it was an uneasy truce rather than a victory for the authorities. The Council met hurriedly and Holland advised the King to remove the Queen and her children from Whitehall. The next demonstration might be directed against her and he was about to leave for the army headquarters at York. It was not safe, Holland said nervously, to leave her in London unprotected.

Charles took her to Oatlands the following day and wrote to Strafford that his departure for York was delayed. Nothing mattered to him at that moment except Henrietta's safety; he ordered the apprentices to be severely punished and placed a guard round Laud who had returned to Lambeth. In the peace of the country which they both loved, in the house which held such a mixture of memories, where he had taken her as the prisoner of his love when they were both in bitter conflict, Charles and Henrietta stole a few days solitude and happiness together.

They went hunting and they were defiantly gay in front of their household; when they were alone, they shared a tenderness and feverish passion which surpassed anything they had ever known in all the years of their marriage. The days fled, bringing the separation they dreaded, until he wrote to Strafford yet again, postponing the date. She looked so pale and delicate, and he could not tear himself away from her until he felt sure that the memory of that frightful May day and the sound of the screaming mobs racing past Whitehall had left her mind.

On the morning of their last day at Oatlands, he woke soon after dawn. The curtains were open, and the soft light was turning gold and pink in the spacious bedroom which was full of late spring flowers.

He looked at his wife, lying like a child curled up in the enormous ornate bed, her dark hair curling over the silk pillows, one hand under her cheek, and he bent down and kissed her. She moved and smiled, and he woke her gently with caresses on her bare arms and breasts which brought her eagerly into his arms. They did not speak; their bodies fused in the enactment of their passion, and for an instant of stolen time, they rose to the peak of ecstatic oblivion and then slowly, reluctantly, they came back to consciousness.

The room was full of sunshine and they could hear the members of the household moving in the rooms beyond.

Henrietta looked up into his face; her head was against his shoulder and her arms were round him.

“You leave today, my love.” They were the first words she had spoken.

“I must,” he said. “I would stay for ever but today is our last. I cannot refuse Strafford any longer.”

“Why did this have to happen?” she asked. “Why has everything gone wrong when we were so happy … What have we done to offend God and bring this trouble on us?”

“We haven't offended, sweetheart,” Charles said gently. “And you must be a good wife and not weaken now. I have my army and I have Strafford, and I thank God for both. You would not be happy with me if I were a coward. And I shouldn't love you as I do if you hadn't got a heart as brave as any man's. I am leaving, but it will not be for long. We have our troubles, my beloved, but they will be over for the rest of our lives when I come back to you again.”

“You're very confident,” she said slowly. She sat up, drawing the sheet round her. “Charles, how can you be so sure of victory? Strafford is a sick man—sometimes I think he's dying! How can you take an army into Scotland with all your people set against you and a commander leading his troops from a litter! Supposing he dies on the campaign … Supposing you are defeated!”

“If I am defeated,” he said, “then I will no longer be King. And I am only a King in name while one half of my kingdom is in rebellion against me. You must not be afraid, my darling. All you must do is wait quietly here and trust in me. When this is over, we will have our old life again and it will seem like some ugly dream.” He lifted her hand and kissed it.

“I make you a promise,” he said. “When the war is over, I will pull down this old house and build a new Palace at Oatlands, and we will spend as many weeks here as you wish. And they will be as sweet as these few days, without any parting at the end of them.”

They were silent for a moment; the King's expression was serene. She could see that he had forgotten his difficulties and was happily imagining the kind of building he would have designed at Oatlands. He had an extraordinary facility for banishing anything unpleasant in favour of some dream, whether the subject was a united Church and Kingdom on which the sun of his benevolent despotic government cast a glorious light, or a splendid Palace to commemorate his love for his wife. Or the possibility of a sweeping victory being won by a man in the throes of mortal illness. It was the romantic unrealism of his race; all the Stuarts had been visionaries, many of them poets and patrons of the arts; all had combined a fiercely material love of their power with the fantasy of the dreamer. Henrietta was half Italian and half French, but in spite of a fiery temperament, she was essentially practical. She could not share his escape into the future and talk about building a shrine to themselves at Oatlands when he was leaving that day to lead an army against the Covenanters.

“Charles,” she said suddenly, “you must not leave everything to Strafford. He has performed miracles for you, but his strength is not inhuman.”

“I have no intention of going to York and interfering with him.” Charles said calmly. “I led one expedition alone and I haven't forgotten how it ended. As long as Strafford can direct the army, he must remain its commander. I am content to follow him into battle and to fight with him, but I am not a strategist. Nor are you,” he added gently. “Leave the anxieties to Strafford and to me.”

She got up and wrapped her satin dressing robe round her.

“It is a perfect day,” she said. He was up and dressing behind her. She turned and sat on the side of the bed and watched him; he looked as calm and untroubled as if there was no parting before him, no danger and no strife. He was not afraid for himself; she knew that he had never been afraid of anything in his life. She also knew that even his loyalist supporters thought the Scottish war a dangerous enterprize which could have been settled by compromising with his principles. But Charles would never compromise. Twelve years of autocracy had divorced him from reality. His subjects were ungrateful and misguided and he was deaf to criticism and impatient of advice which was not an obedient echo.

He came and took her in his arms, and suddenly her eyes filled with tears. This was their real farewell, not the parting which would be made later that day in front of their household.