‘I. Your Highness? But I know nothing of the rigging of ships.’
‘You’ll learn,’ said Rupert simply. ‘I knew nothing of it myself four months ago.’
‘You learned to con your own flagship in less than a week, I’ve heard. You must have pity on us born landlubbers.’
‘Born landlubbers be damned! If they’ve got to have a bowlegged old trooper like me for admiral, surely the Chancellor of the Exchequer can be ship’s chandler?’
‘Well, well,’ observed Hyde more indulgently, ‘I suppose even a statesman may “suffer a sea change”.’
‘He must– now the royal cause is all at sea.’
Hyde chuckled, but discreetly. Even in making a mild joke, His Highness’ expression was not encouraging; it was, in fact, at this moment intent to the point of ferocity. He was staring at the table, at Montrose’s letter. From where he stood he could not read a word of it, but no doubt he recognized the handwriting, for he shot out:
‘When is Montrose coming here?’
‘He is not. We daren’t risk it. The Hague is full of his enemies.’
‘You might trust him to look after himself.’
‘The danger is to the cause as much as himself. Since the Scots lords are here who have changed sides and fought for the King last summer—’
‘—they are to be valued more, I suppose, than those who have always fought for him, instead of against him. Is that what you are telling him?’
Hyde’s round eyes and ruffled air made him look like an owl.
‘On the contrary, I am writing on behalf of the Prince of Wales to entreat his help. As I’ve told Prince Charles myself, Montrose is the clearest spirit of all his servants. And he is very impatient to be up and doing.’
‘He can’t do much if you tell him to go on kicking his heels at Brussels,’ muttered Rupert, but before Hyde’s indignation could swell up to bursting-point he went on, ‘He has been writing to me. He hopes to raise Scotland again for the King, and this time in conjunction with Ormonde and myself in Ireland, with my ships to bring over fresh troops from there. It might be done – what do you think?’
The question, flung suddenly over his shoulder as Rupert walked restlessly up and down, surprised and mollified Hyde into a most polite answer. To me, the only prospect that has any light or pleasure in it is that of Ireland, and Your Highness’ fleet.’ He paused, but as Rupert did not even bow his acknowledgements he transferred his compliments to Rupert’s ally. ‘Ormonde is the best Lord Lieutenant we could have in Ireland – if he can unite the country for the King and combine with Scotland—’
‘It needs close cooperation – not easy to work out at a distance—’ Rupert flung himself into a chair which squawked out a sharp creak in protest.
‘Is all your furniture broken?’ he demanded as he sprang up again and pulled out the leg which had cracked in its socket.
‘It soon will be, sir, if that is how you treat it.’
‘I? I’m treating it like a doctor.’
To Hyde’s amazement he had begun to mend it with a splinter of broken wood for splicing, the rusty nail he had extracted, and the heavy bronze paperweight on the writing table for hammer, sitting on the edge of the table and working with remarkable neatness and quickness as he talked.
‘Young Charles hopes to go to Ireland with me later. It might be a good plan.’
‘To have the Prince of Wales with you would certainly help the scheme. Your Highness, I beg you not to trouble with that chair—’
‘No trouble. It’s all but done. It’s something to have got him away from his mother in Paris. That woman has the morals of Machiavelli without the brains.’
The Chancellor’s eyes looked as if they would pop out of his head at Rupert’s opinion of Queen Henrietta Maria. For an instant he seemed about to share it, but swerved to matters less dangerous. ‘Prince Charles’ friends here do him no good. They are rotting under the continued disaster, the enforced idleness that they, and he, have to bear.’
‘Charles bears that last pretty well,’ said Rupert with a chuckle, giving his final blow to the chair and running his hand over the joint to make sure that it was sound.
‘As all his friends bear it. They are always hopeful of the future, not to say certain. They drink to it in company with every whore and blackguard in The Hague, they bet on it, roar out tipsy songs in honour of it, keep despair at bay by deafening it – but they can’t banish it. Misfortune is not ennobling in itself, and it is a very hard thing for people who have nothing to do, to keep from doing something they ought not to do.’
Rupert smiled at the portentous utterance.
‘So you want me to take the Prince to Ireland to keep him out of mischief. At eighteen that is found anywhere and is not serious.’
‘It is serious, sir, when it might endanger the succession. A young woman of no character is already claiming here that when her bastard by Prince Charles is born it will be his legitimate heir.’
‘Shall I kidnap her, then, instead of him and drop her overboard?’ He swung the chair round in his hand to the floor and tried sitting on it, but this time more carefully. ‘This plan of Montrose,’ he said, ‘I must see him about it before we sail. Since he can’t come here, I shall go to him.’
‘Your Highness, I beg of you, consider. If you do this, you give everything away to his enemies, you show them that he is in our councils, you frighten them away just as they are coming round entirely to our side. Lauderdale and Lanark—’
‘That red swine and his shadow! Look how they bungled their campaign in Scotland last summer. Their service won’t help us.’
‘Their money and influence in Scotland will. We can use it to help Montrose himself if we go about it carefully. I shall go into the whole matter with him with entire frankness—’
‘Letters, letters, letters,’ muttered Rupert, glancing dubiously at the paper that littered the table, as though in disbelief of their ever being read.
‘No, sir. I am going to him in person to Sevenbergen or some such place that will be free of the other Scots. This letter I am writing even now is to the Lord Montrose to ask him to appoint whatever time and place he thinks fit.’
‘But your foot, man, you’ve not got it into a boot for over a year!’
‘Nor had a boot to get it into,’ Hyde answered with a wry smile; ‘but Harry Jermyn’s sent me the price of a pair from Paris, and if I get them large enough to fit Gargantua’s foot, or Lauderdale’s head, I shall manage well enough on a quiet old nag.’
The rigid mouth of the Prince, shutting his face into its stern lines, relaxed into a friendly and admiring grin. The sympathy aroused by gout in the ungouty is usually small enough, yet Rupert could not but recognize an indomitable spirit in this stout little man with feet swaddled like babies and as tender. God! What a hideous infirmity to be unable to ride and stride at large over the springy earth!
He exaggerated, for Hyde had never much cared about riding and striding even in those days when he had come home for the holidays; even then those firm fat fingers, with the bulging round forehead hanging over them as they wrote, had been his best minister. A table, pen and paper, and the light on his lefthand side, that was Hyde’s field of action, but Rupert, not recognizing that it lay before him, started up from it, pushed back his chair and swung round to the high window that ran all along the top of the wall, and there looked out over low gabled roofs and flat fields beyond them, to a huge moving sky that swept forward like an advancing army of grey banners.
Seagulls were tumbling against those torn clouds like scraps of blown paper; a scrubby thornbush was tossing and stretching before the bitter wind; the windmills, three, four, five, were turning full tilt; and the straight line of water in the near canal, instead of showing a stripe of clear mirror, was dark and ruffled like broken iron. Here was the breeze he had been longing for these past weeks, an easterly gale to take his ships westward through the English Channel to Ireland.
If he did, he would
miss seeing Montrose. But how much would that really affect matters? Hyde here was a sound fellow for all his pomposity, he’d see to it that Montrose had a fair field.
He burst out laughing. ‘Look at that hat!’ he exclaimed, oblivious of the fact that only he could have looked at anything out of that window, which was placed above the height of an ordinary man. A high-crowned steeple hat, blowing along the path below in leaps and sudden pauses for reflection, was giving great sport to two or three little boys who were chasing it with whoops and yells of excitement. Its stout owner, a gentleman of some consequence, for he walked attended by a couple of servants who were now chasing the boys who were chasing the hat, was being blown along in its wake like a ship in full sail, his voluminous cloak bellying out in front of him and masses of shaggy red hair flying past his face like a tattered tawny flag.
Rupert’s laugh broke sharply into a curse; he flung round from the window, saying, ‘Lauderdale’s in the street. If he’s coming here, I’m off. Hyde, I’ll come with you to Sevenbergen. It’s a risk to leave the fleet for even that much time, but it may be a worse risk not to meet Montrose – the mere sight of that swine below has told me so. Come, shall we go together, or shall I be your ambassador and leave the price of those boots to pay for a keg of wine?’
He had noticed the empty cup. Hyde knew he would. There was nothing escaped him. Not that there was anything to be ashamed of in a cup emptied of thin ale. Because the Prince had shown an inhuman abstinence ever since he had taken over the fleet, that was no reason why he should make everyone else feel like a sot.
Rupert would have quite agreed. His chaff of Hyde had been intended in all good humour, but he had not allowed either for Hyde’s touchy sense of his moral integrity or for his own increasingly sardonic countenance. A joke was apt to sound grim from him these latter years.
‘If Your Highness imagines—’ began Hyde slowly, in a voice so stuffed with injury that it was scarcely audible – and then in sudden irritable inconsequence, ‘Do I get any pleasure here, is it self-indulgence to stay in this poor lodging? Once I could hear you’d got your ships safely to Ireland I’d get out of this crowd.’
‘Devil you would! And where would you get to?’
Hyde did not like to say ‘Spain’, for that plan was not nearly far enough matured. He hurled out petulantly, ‘I never lived any part of my life with less satisfaction to myself!’
‘And which of us is getting satisfaction I’d like to know? Come, man, all authors go gloomy over their cups and think they’re the only ones that suffered in the war. At least you’ll be able to write your book about it.’
‘Which reminds me – I have already asked you to—’
‘Well, you can’t again, for there’s the door banging below, and Lauderdale’s upon us. Shall I go with you or without you to Montrose?’
‘Not a word of that, I beg – don’t say his name even – it may have the most disastrous consequences – Your Highness, remember—’ was all that Hyde could finish in agonized entreaty as the door rattled open, and since the street door below had not yet shut, the Earl of Lauderdale most literally blew into the room.
II
Even the gust of air that blew in the Earl of Lauderdale was different from the sea-wind that had seemed to usher in the Prince. The exhalations of his recent dinner attended this man with the gross face and matted red hair. He breathed stuffed pork and brandy as strongly as he did fulsomeness to Rupert and friendliness to Hyde and eloquence directed mainly at the image he always held before him of himself.
For the Earl of Lauderdale had a reputation to keep up both as a wag and a scholar; in compensation for his uncouth looks and messy habits he felt that he resembled his late Sovereign, King James VI of Scotland and I of England, who had also been uncouth and messy and ate and drank far too much and none too pleasantly, but was a glutton for learning as well as dainties, could wield a pretty pen on any and every subject from tobacco-smoking to witchcraft, and theology to classic fable, and talked as much and with as shrewd and pawky a wit as Lauderdale fancied in himself.
He was only approaching his middle thirties, but debauchery, richly mixed with pedantry and assurance, had made him a much older man. He believed himself, not quite truly, to be as much at his ease in a foreign Court as in the warm ale-breathing reek of the ‘Black Bull’ in his little town of Lauder, not far from Edinburgh, where he liked to drop in from the seclusion of his castle, cloistered in deep woods, for the casual company of the farmers and travelling merchants who sat spellbound by the learned allusions, the gusto and coarseness of the great lord’s conversation.
Lauderdale and his kinsman Lord Lanark were here at The Hague in the same position, on the face of it, as all the Royalist exiles, for they had been banished from Scotland by the Marquis of Argyll, who was Chief Elder of the Kirk and head of the Scottish Government. They had held by him all through the war and fought against the King and Montrose, the King’s Lieutenant in Scotland; but once Argyll was firmly settled in power, they had found his tyranny and that of the Kirk more than they had bargained for. So they called themselves the Moderates as opposed to the extreme Covenanters, and last summer had joined in a rising of both Scots and English, whose main object was to free the King. Cromwell’s army had at once squashed it, and all the leaders who had been captured were either shot out of hand by a firing-squad or were now in the Tower awaiting trial for high treason, Lanark’s elder brother the Duke of Hamilton among them.
To hear Lauderdale talk, one would have thought this belated loyalty of his in the last few months had been the breath of his nostrils from babyhood; but then loyalty seemed a habit with him, and a complicated one, for he was also passionately loyal to the Solemn League and Covenant ordained by the Kirk – and there were those who said that he had by no means forgone his loyalty to the Chief Elder of that Kirk, the Marquis of Argyll, and that for all he was at present under sentence by him, he had a very good understanding with him and even kept up a secret correspondence.
His punishment, they said, had been mainly a gesture of Argyll’s to impress Cromwell, for there was a close alliance between the two dictators. Cromwell had come up to Scotland last autumn after crushing the rising; he had stayed in Edinburgh, dined constantly with Argyll, and held long private conclaves with him in Moray House. Cromwell had pronounced the Lords of the Covenant to be ‘Christians and men of honour’; the ministers were not so polite about Cromwell, they disliked his capacity for weeping on all occasions (‘And still he sat and still he grat’) and called him ‘a great liar and a greeting devil’. Lauderdale had heard of this last and told it with delight at The Hague; you couldn’t deceive a Scots minister, he said, bubbling and blowing his laughter.
He was bubbling now, but more solemnly and confusedly, slightly taken aback at finding Prince Rupert here, but determined not to show it. He had already given his opinion of the Prince, and it was a high one; report said that the Prince’s opinion of Lauderdale was not so high, but Lauderdale was not going to make himself uncomfortable by inquiring what it was. Prince Rupert had more influence over his young cousin, Charles the Prince of Wales, than any other man – that was the thing to remember; and what was more, he had built up a sound working fleet, which Lauderdale had already tried to commandeer for Scotland, until the sailors expressed their strong desire to throw him and his Covenant overboard together – but Lauderdale was not the man to remind himself of that.
‘Your Highness! this is chance indeed! “Think of the Devil” I had all but said, calling to mind Your Highness’ most famous nickname and most justly earned towards your enemies, for I had been thinking of you this moment, coming here, big with news as I am, news that concerns us all, glorious news, if we prepare to meet it rightly.’
‘Let me be your midwife, my lord, and deliver your news.’
But Lauderdale was not to be hurried, even by Prince Rupert. He laid a finger to his bulbous nose and demanded archly, ‘What does Virgil say?’
Rupert
had no notion what Virgil said.
‘ “Inconsulti abeunt sedemque odere Sibyllae”,’ replied Lauderdale, noting with satisfaction that, though Hyde at once recognized the tag, it was lost on Rupert, a mere illiterate soldier of fortune for all he was a prince, who had refused to learn Greek or any more Latin than what he might find useful in international parleys.
‘ “They go off”,’ he translated, ‘ “without waiting for counsel, hating the abode of the Sibyl.” Let that not be said of us. In this case the Sibyl is Caledonia, my unhappy country, Scotland. Finding you here together, the mailed fist with the arm of the law, I must snatch my chance to ensure that my country shall not be delivered into the hands of her unnatural enemies. I have heard a lying rumour – for I am sure both the Prince here and the Chancellor will give it the lie – that the Prince of Wales, led away by his youth amd mistaken counsel, has entered into negotiations with that traitor, that monster of cruelty, that devourer of his own country, the Marquis of Montrose.’
He stopped out of breath and drew his sleeve across his forehead like a ploughboy mopping his face. Hyde was ruffling his feathers, preparing a properly legal retort to the charge that should combine caution with rebuke, when Rupert struck in coolly:
‘What’s your news?’
It was Lauderdale’s turn to ruffle now, but under the Prince’s eye he abandoned the attempt to return to his charge, and gave out as reluctantly as a traveller handing his purse to a highwayman: ‘The Parliament have signed a treaty with His Most Sacred Majesty, King Charles. Both the Houses are agreed, and they are bringing him to London. The city is preparing an array for him.’
Hyde’s judicial bearing was actually shaken into a yap of excitement. He covered it by asking Lauderdale his authority, which proved to be a responsible Dutch merchant come direct from London. But it was plain that Hyde had swallowed the good news whole, as starving men do with their first dainty for weeks; he repeated, ‘A treaty! Both Houses! And the City preparing an array! Now we shall see!’
The Bride Page 2