Charles the King (18 page)

They had been separated for three years, and none of them were prepared for the change they saw in the Lord Deputy of Ireland. Charles and the Queen stood close together, her hand was resting on his arm, and the little figure of the Archbishop, rounder than ever, waiting a few paces behind them. It was no longer just the King and Laud; now Henrietta joined their conferences, and at last when the force of popular hatred against the Bishop and the Queen expressed itself in lampoons and pamphlets and ribald scribblings on the very walls of Whitehall and Lambeth, Laud and Henrietta had become close friends, bound by their common care for the King.

For a few seconds, Henrietta did not recognize the man who walked so slowly across the polished floor towards them. Her fingers gripped Charles and she felt him stiffen. Then he began to walk towards the Minister. Thomas Wentworth met them half-way down the room, and with some difficulty he fell upon both knees in front of Charles. His dark hair was thickly streaked with white. He was thinner than before, but the spare, athletic frame was gone; the body of a tired, enfeebled man replaced it, and his strong face was hollow-cheeked with an unhealthy jaundiced colour. He looked twenty years older than his forty-nine years; only his eyes, so full of light and intelligence, blazed out in defiance of his physical decay.

“Thomas …” Charles was the first to speak. He gave his hand to Wentworth and when he had kissed it, helped him rise to his feet. “Thomas, my dear friend, how truly glad I am to see you …”

“This is a happy day for me,” Wentworth answered, and he smiled. Laud, who knew him so well, recognized the irony in the smile.

“You find me changed, Sire,” he continued; the King was looking at him with such alarm that Wentworth felt tempted to laugh. “I neglected to mention to you that in the last few months I've been unwell. It's taken a greater toll of me than I imagined.”

Henrietta came forward. She had never really liked Wentworth, and in all honesty she admitted that her only interest in him was his usefulness to Charles. But this sick, sallow wreck was hardly the mighty champion they had summoned home to put their troubles right. He looked as if he could hardly stand.

“Welcome home, my Lord. Sire, will you permit Lord Wentworth to sit down?”

Nobody would have dared suggest such licence except the Queen. Wentworth was given a chair.

“My humble thanks to your Majesties.” For a moment his eyes met Henrietta's with a message of gratitude. His right foot was bandaged, and the swelling had crept up his calf.

“Gout,” he explained. “An unfair affliction for an abstemious man. I crave your Majesties' pardon.”

“I had no idea you were in such poor health,” the King said gently. “You have lost much weight, Thomas. What have the Irish done to you…?”

“Given me new heart,” he answered quickly. “Shown that with justice and authority they can be faithful subjects. What their water has done, besides give me the gout, is another matter, Sire. I have been suffering with a stone for some months.”

“So you said in your letters,” Laud came forward and the two men shook hands. The Archbishop beamed and his bright little eyes filled with tears of emotion. “Welcome, welcome, Thomas.”

Wentworth released his hand and looked up at the King. Charles had changed very little; he was as slim and upright and handsome as the day Wentworth first came to see him at Whitehall. He would pass from youth to old age without the ugly transition of corpulence and greying hair which disfigured men in middle age.

“I should not sit in your presence, Sire. You did not send for me in your trouble to have an invalid lolling in a chair talking about his own ailments. Forgive me.”

“Stay where you are,” Charles commanded. “Come, I will sit with you.”

“We are in straits,” Henrietta said. “Our army ran away from the Scots, and the King was forced to concede everything. There is not one person who can turn that defeat into a victory except you.”

“Their army numbers twenty-five thousand men,” Charles said. “It is commanded by Rothes and Montrose and Argyle—Argyle is the most powerful of all, and he has taken the leadership from the rest. My Council in Scotland has no authority; my friends there have been forced to recant and sign this Covenant or else they are in prison. My Treasury is empty and my troops are scattered. My Crown is in contempt. That cannot be, Thomas, no matter what the cost. I must raise a new army and return to Scotland. I want you to command it.”

Wentworth did not answer for a moment. He had been in communication with Laud throughout that disastrous campaign; he had written urgent letters to the King himself, begging him to wait until he was sure of success before invading Scotland, offering him troops from Ireland, money, ships, anything he needed if he would only show a little patience. Charles had not listened; the voice of sound sense was overcome by the clamour of hotheads, and the King's own irritable pride. Wentworth had watched disaster come upon his master, and at last he had dragged himself out of his sick-bed and made the long, exhausting journey back to England to save what he could before it was too late. He was so ill that there were times when he suspected he was dying. His body was wracked with urinal attacks; the poison from his infected kidneys ravaged his system, and gout robbed him of sleep and appetite and exercise. Only his will remained, forcing him to ignore pain and weakness and offer his services to the King he loved, who had sent him to Ireland and then forgotten his advice: never go to war on any pretext whatsoever.

He should have felt resentment for Charles but Wentworth did not blame him. He blamed his own absence, and the ascendancy of his good old friend William Laud, who had pointed his nose in the direction of a united Church and fired his King with his own mistaken zeal.

“We will raise another army, Sire. You can leave the organization of it to me. On my way here I studied the situation and I have a plan ready for your consideration.”

Charles glanced triumphantly at his wife and she smiled at him.

Wentworth had not wasted time. The sound of his voice inspired confidence; sick or well, nothing changed the resolution or the ingenuity of his extraordinary character.

“What is your plan?” Charles asked him.

“We need a map, Sire.”

The King's Secretary brought maps of England and Scotland and a third of Ireland, and stayed long enough to hear the Lord Deputy mention a sea blockade of Scottish ports and a landing of Irish troops. He was able to tell an interested audience of courtiers in the second anteroom that the King and Queen and the Archbishop were in high spirits and planning the annihilation of their enemies. Lord Wentworth might have the gout and a kidney ailment, but he had lost nothing of his fighting spirit.

That evening, when the King and Queen retired early, the Countess of Carlisle hid herself in a hooded cloak and slipped out of a side entrance to her carriage. She drove to a small house at the back of Westminster Palace Yard. It was the private lodging of John Pym, the Puritan leader. They had first met at a reception given by the Earl of Warwick some months before; the Countess had begun to cultivate Warwick and other peers she knew to be unfriendly to the King and Queen, and in their company she modified her dress and her conversation as a sign of her political leanings. She had been bored for a long time. There was no one at Court with whom she had wished to have an affair after her quarrel with Wentworth. There was no one among the Hollands and Gorings and Newcastles strong enough or intelligent enough to replace him as a lover of consequence or to do him the injury she would like to inflict upon him. She spent her time amusing the Queen, whom she disliked and despised more and more for not suspecting her, and began investigating the strata of Puritan society out of a sense of mischief.

Warwick was a boor; so were Say and Essex and the Earl of Manchester's heir, Lord Mandeville; they were all disappointed men who were out of sympathy with the Court and she knew them all too well to be interested in any of them. But at Warwick's house she met John Pym.

She had never forgotten that evening. She had dressed very cleverly in black velvet, covering her magnificent shoulders with a modest lace collar, and deliberately emphasized her classic beauty with a severe hair style and no rouge. Struck by the searching eyes and powerful chin of the stout, plain man in his sober Puritan cloth suit and short-cropped hair, she had asked to be introduced to him. She had a genius for appraising talent, and talent was what she found in the person of the famous Parliamentary leader. This was not a discontented theorist like Warwick, or a religious fanatic like Mandeville who should have been a parson. This was something different and exciting, a man who spoke with fire and enthusiasm and confidence; who was not overawed by men of nobler birth and not afraid to talk on equal terms with a beautiful woman from the circle of his enemies. Here was a Puritan with a thirst for power; she knew because she shared it like an addiction to vice. They met and they challenged each other without words, and that was the first of many meetings. It ended as all such meetings did with her. Pym surrendered his immortal soul, and she found in the guilty tempest of his passion a satisfaction which had eluded her through a lifetime of sexual experience. She seduced him and in return he converted her. She was his mistress, and no one in her circle or his suspected it. By this time she was not only his mistress but his spy.

There were other women at the house in Palace Yard. The Countess of Warwick was there with Lady Essex, whose husband was an open partisan of the Scots Covenanters and the Puritans in England, and one or two other minor members of the Court. Pym came forward to greet the Countess of Carlisle and placed her in a chair with a glass of wine beside her. She spoke to Warwick's wife and to the Earl himself, and began to talk to John Hampden. They were all discussing Wentworth as if the devil himself had assumed human shape, and Hampden questioned her about his health.

He was a stern man, good-looking and extremely erudite, but unlike her lover, Pym, he lacked humour.

“He's certainly ill,” she said. “I haven't spoken to him, and God forbid that I should if I can help it, but I see a tremendous change in him. He's not the man who left England three years ago, whatever the King tries to make out.”

“But he's not sick to death,” Hampden pointed out bitterly. “God may have stricken him but the devil sustains him yet.”

“The devil always sustained him,” she said. Ireland had not destroyed him; her curse had turned into a veritable blessing in terms of success and prestige for the man who had rejected her.

“It's common talk that he has come back with a large grant of money from the Irish Parliament, and with the offer of a trained army. That is, if it's possible to train those savages to anything.”

“He is bent on war,” Hampden said. “He and the King between them will never rest until they shed the blood of honest men in order to pervert their souls and steal their liberty. From what you have seen of him, my Lady, how long can he live under the strain the King will put upon him? Even a man in his full health must falter under the task of gathering that scattered force and training it to fight against its principles. To say nothing of conjuring the money out of the empty air!”

“It will be conjured out of our pockets,” Pym interrupted. “By forced loans, by fines, by every illegal method he can devise.”

“It won't be enough,” Hampden said. “The whole country is against the King in this business. No one wants a second Scottish war; no one wants to fight it or pay for it. There is a war for Protestant freedom raging in Germany, and England has not contributed anything. If the King called for an army to fight for our brethren abroad, his coffers would be full and every man in England would enlist.”

“The King is not interested in the Protestant cause,” Lady Carlisle said. “The King is half a Papist already, thanks to his wife, and the Archbishop would rather persecute the members of our religion than stop the spread of Popery.”

She had gained the full attention of everyone in the room. She glanced around her audience and met the intense, and critical scrutiny of an ugly middle-aged man sitting with his back to the wall, a little apart from the rest. She recognized Cromwell; he was often at Pym's house, always wearing the same crumpled clothes and looking as if he had not washed for weeks. He was not an important person, or a prepossessing one, and she had never troubled to speak to him. But his was the only face in which she sensed hostility. He was the only man in the room who was not impressed by her; she saw in his calculating eyes that he despised her, and for a moment she felt as if he knew the truth of her relationship with Pym. But she was not a coward, and she stared back without flinching, expecting him to turn away. To her surprise he looked over her head and addressed himself to Hampden.

“Cousin, why are the Covenanters keeping an army on the English border?”

“Because they do not trust the King's word,” Hampden replied. “It is only a matter of months before he breaks the agreement reached at Berwick.”

“In that case,” Cromwell leaned forward, “why do they wait until Wentworth gathers his army and brings in his Irish mercenaries. You have friends among the Covenanters, Cousin. Put it to them that it is poor strategy to wait to be attacked, when at this moment they have all the strength.”

Pym came behind Lucy Carlisle's chair; she felt him brush against her. Once or twice he had expressed his resentment of Cromwell. He disliked his habit of interrupting and he thought his opinions irresponsible. He was also a little jealous.

“You are not suggesting that the Scots should invade us?”

“I cannot see a better way of making the King call a Parliament. And after all, sir, that has been the object of treating with them behind the King's back. What is the good of a treason half committed? If Lord Wentworth takes an army over the border and wins a victory for the King, we will never see the light of freedom or reform in our lifetime or even in our children's. If we sit here idling and wasting our time with a lot of Court gossip, we deserve to have our religion and our liberties extinguished—”