The forgery was beautiful: there it was, “Writ by Sr. Walt. R. in the Tower & preserv’d by Lady Ralegh his Wife after his martyrdom. Called by him Foolscap, A Short Comedie.” In crabbed italic script, in ink that (according to Mole, who appeared to have reason to know) was proof against the microchemical tests to which it would be subjected, the play was written on the blank folio sheets of a genuine hand-stitched, vellum-bound, slender Jacobean commonplace book—a miscellany of a few favorite poems and homiletic apothegms collected by some early seventeenth-century admirer who’d luckily lost interest in the hobby early on and left a good two-thirds of the pages just waiting for something to be written on them. Fontwell’s grandpa (himself a collector “ignorant and indiscriminate, I must admit,” said Mole) had picked up the book in a Brighton junk shop for a few guineas back in 1904, and it had sat in the Fontwell attic until Mole had found it there (luckily after he’d left Oxford, or he might have “shown it off, don’t you know, to Dame Winifred”). If they’d had to buy the volume from a current dealer, or steal one, or fake one, they probably would have been caught. Even the great Thomas Wise had been caught, after years of excising the blank end papers from manuscripts in the British Museum and forging things on them. But this book was safe. And Fontwell was donating it “to the cause.” When Theo protested at his generosity, Marsh explained that, (A) they were enjoying themselves, and (B) they could sell for “you’d be surprised how much,” the front pages scribbled with Jacobean ditties and wise sayings that had been undetectably removed from the folio.
The question was where to put the book. From the start, they’d agreed that the earl’s library was out; had such a volume been in the Newbolt collection, someone would have found it. Indeed, hiding it anywhere in Bourne House was not only risky, but problematic. For centuries, the occupants themselves had combed the place for treasures and had had plenty of opportunities to do so. Moreover, the Stanlows had always been regrettably neat and given to home improvements; they’d kept Bourne in excellent repair. From 1660 on, they had been the first in the county with the newest modern conveniences. So their walls had been continually opened for ducts and pipes, pulleys and wires; their floors restored, their ceilings renovated, their attics tidied. Besides, what rationale could the forgers offer for their simply wandering around and immediately stumbling over the manuscript? They needed instead for Dame Winifred to discover it in a particular place because there was an historical reason for it to be there. Theo had promised her he would research the matter. Let’s say he had—actually, Marsh and Fontwell had done most of it—and had found out just what they’d concocted: a plausible provenance for when and why and how the book might have been separated from its owner Francis Stanlow, first Earl of Newbolt, and left by one Robert Dawbney, who hated him, in the small stone chapel of Saint Michael’s on the banks of the Urswick on the grounds of Bourne. Left there unnoticed for more than three hundred years, tossed with some old prayer books in a little discarded chest. The chest wedged behind a choir stall where Mole Fontwell (on the last of his three reconnoitering expeditions) had discovered it when squirming his small body into the (unrestored, unrenovated, and untidy) nooks and crannies of the old church.
“Well, it sounds a little complicated,” Theo had told them.
“It’s simple, really,” Mole had claimed, seated on the Turkish carpet in his suite at Brown’s with books piled high around him like a child’s fort. “With the useful advantage of being true, and of Dame Winifred’s knowing that it’s true. It’s a question of, well, fortune. The Stanlows have always backed the right horse. The poor Dawbneys of Urswick have always backed the wrong, and always despised the Stanlows for never noticing how everything they had, all they were, they owed to the Dawbney curse. It goes quite back to that.” And the private scholar proceeded in his affable, long-winded way to pull Theo forward from the beginning of this great rivalry to the moment when a Dawbney ransacked a Stanlow’s home, pocketed a number of his valuables, and then hid one of them, Raleigh’s play, in Saint Michael’s chapel—or so the forgers planned to propose, and indeed had almost come to believe it themselves.
Mole began, “The Dawbneys tried to be kingmakers. The Stanlows let themselves be made by kings. They were lucky from the start.”
•••
When Henry Tudor landed in Wales, a sheriff named Stanlow had been waiting in the surf to welcome him. Soon after, at Bosworth Field, young Stanlow happened to wrap his chain-and-ball around the raised mace of a Yorkist about to knock off Henry’s head. In that chain was twined the family’s fortunate future. Henry VIII gave Squire Stanlow’s son a Devonshire convent after shooing the nuns out. It was three kilometers from Bourne Manor, a property of the ancient Dawbney dukes of Urswick (one of the nuns was a Dawbney herself), and that proximity gave to the first Stanlow the fantasy of someday living at Bourne.
The next Stanlow, a fervent Protestant, happened to be smuggling wool to the Netherlands when Bloody Mary’s officials went to Devon to arrest him. His good-looking son Sir Thomas happened to be winning a superb game of tennis when Queen Elizabeth (who admired looks and talent) dropped by the courts one day. Thomas happened to be still extremely good looking (and quite a bit wealthier) when James the first came to the throne. James dubbed him a baron after groping briefly at his breeches at a crowded Whitehall masque, while Stanlow was under the happy misimpression that he was being fondled by the infamous beauty Frances Howard. Time after time, it was as if Hamlet had been thinking of Stanlows when he said, “Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well, / When our deep plots do pall.”
Sir Thomas had one son, Francis, whose mother happened to be friends with the hemophilic James’s neglected queen. And so the boy had fallen into the company of little Charles Stuart. While everyone else (including, from the Tower, Sir Walter Raleigh) was fawning over Charles’s older brother, the Prince of Wales, Sir Francis Stanlow and the shy stammering Charles were becoming bosom buddies. When to everyone else’s horror the Prince of Wales suddenly dropped dead, the two boys were still bosom buddies, and Sir Francis was soon to be really rich. After James dropped dead as well and his son took the throne, Francis became the second richest man in east Devon. Not as rich as the great lord of both Urswick Castle and Bourne Manor, but richer than any Stanlow before him had ever been. And now a baron.
Having added a forecourt to Stanlow Lodge and a coat of arms to its ceilings, the new baron rode off on his new horse to the Short Parliament, arriving a day after Charles the first had put an end to it. When the Long Parliament decided to put an end to Charles the first, Lord Francis rallied to the king’s cause, and at Naseby bent over to fiddle with his spurs just as a Roundhead musket ball shot past him and killed the man behind. At Langport, he distinguished himself against the New Model Army by getting flattened by a flying horse (a cannonball had exploded under it), thereby becoming the very last Royalist to retreat the field. While Fairfax and Cromwell burned Bridgewater, besieged Sherborne, and ransacked Stanlow Lodge, Baron Stanlow was up north at his uncle’s house, recovering from his broken leg, and thumbing through the books he’d just bought from Sir Walter Raleigh’s son, Carew.
The Royal tide quickly ebbed, leaving many high and dry. But as Charles the first stepped onto the scaffold in London, Francis Stanlow stepped onto a boat to France, where the future Charles the Second embraced him warmly, read the letters he’d brought, and vowed that if ever he should reign in England, his poor father’s faithful friend would receive his just reward. Eleven years later, this genuine gratitude was not to stop the Merry Monarch (and a considerable number of his Cavalier pals) from sleeping with Francis’s wife, the alluring Countess Charlotte, but it was to bestow on the unsuspecting cuckold the earldom of Newbolt and the magnificent manor of Bourne. There, Francis lived to a peaceful old age, happily adding to the books he’d retrieved from the ramshackle Stanlow Lodge and so lucky a man that he never once noticed his wife’s infidelity, not even when he saw a play ab
out it on the London stage.
Now, contrast this happy Stanlow rise out of the Welsh surf—said Mole Fontwell from his pile of books—with the churning sea in which the unlucky Dawbneys had flailed since a Norman D’Aubiney came over with William the Conqueror and was promptly killed by a Saxon arrow at the battle of Hastings. That man’s son fell off the top of the round tower before finishing Urswick Castle; his granddaughter was murdered by her lover, and his great grandson was butchered in Cyprus on the Third Crusade. If there was a black plague, a Dawbney was sure to catch it. If there was a rebellion, a Dawbney was certain to be on the losing side. They backed Matilda against Stephen, and Simon de Montfort against Edward I. Made dukes by Edward the III, they were attainted by Henry IV. They went down to defeat with the Lancastrians at Tewksbury, and with the Yorkists at Bosworth Field. A Dawbney told Henry VIII to his face that he’d go to hell if he divorced Catherine of Aragon, and a Dawbney helped try to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne. Dawbneys supported Mary under Edward, and Elizabeth under Mary, and under Elizabeth, one of them became so besotted with the imprisoned Queen of Scots that he carried her miniature about with him in a silk purse; it was confiscated, and so was Urswick Castle, although the temperate Elizabeth gave the latter back to him when he got out of the Tower.
Dawbneys had lost and regained their titles and lands so many times they took pride in the fact that not a single generation had escaped the block since John of Bourne, duke of Urswick, had attempted to rescue Richard II from his Pomfret prison. The family had spent so much time in the Tower, they almost thought of it as a town house. In fact, Robert Dawbney had been in there for annoying King James at the same time that Sir Walter Raleigh used to hoe in his prison herb garden in the mornings and write in his cell at night. Might it not be assumed (why not? said Mole) that Raleigh had even mentioned to this teenaged nobleman that he was writing a play?
Now, to their other natural instincts for disaster, Mole explained, the odd Dawbney added a self-flagellating penchant for religiosity either so devout or so mule-headed that four of them had been exiled, several assassinated, and two burned at the stake, while not a single one had ever recanted. They were always rushing off into crusades, convents, mysticism, and heresies; inevitably Catholic when it was better to be Protestant, and of course, vice versa. It should therefore come as no surprise that during the reign of Charles I, this Robert Dawbney, Earl of Bourne (they’d been demoted from the dukedom again) converted to radical Protestantism at the height of the High Church days of Laud. He’d seen the light while in the Tower, which was at the time full of aristocratic radical Protestants. All too publicly denouncing the “hellish popery” of archbishop and king, Dawbney removed the stained-glass windows from the family chapel of Saint Michael’s, installed a plain pulpit, and a radical minister. The Parliamentarian earl was soon warned for refusing to bow at the name of Jesus, and his minister was soon arrested for refusing to move the communion table to the east side of the chancel and rail it off. Next, carrying even Dawbneyism to an extreme, “Mad Rob” (as he was understandably called) read out in the House of Lords an attack on king and bishop by the puritan William Prynne, for which the author himself had already had first the tips, then the stumps of his ears cut off, and both his cheeks branded. When Mad Rob had a £3000 fine slapped on him, naturally he refused to pay it. He was escorted to the Tower by none other than his Devonshire neighbor, that “popish toad,” Francis Stanlow.
Then suddenly, the tide turned again. The Earl of Bourne was out of the Tower, the Archbishop of Canterbury was in, and the king was on the run. It looked as if, in Oliver Cromwell, the Dawbneys had backed a winner at last. Robert went to war for the right to see God as he chose and stop other people from doing the same. And despite the bad luck of being “shot in the cods” at Langport and losing an eye at Tiverton, the rebellious earl did indeed live to squint at a flag of victory flying from the round tower of Urswick Castle. He had the further satisfaction of looting that Royalist stronghold, Stanlow Lodge, and removing from it a number of morally lax artifacts, among them a particular book with a play in it. (Everything up to and including the sacking of Stanlow Lodge by Robert Dawbney was recorded in history. Anything about a book with a play in it was not.)
In general, the Puritan earl considered plays the evil weapons of Satan (he had Prynne’s diatribe against the theater, “The Players’ Scourge, or Actor’s Tragedie,” read from the plain wood pulpit of Saint Michael’s), but this play not only talked about how the rotten Stuarts were ruining England, this play was written by that Great Parliament Man, that Noble Martyr to Stuart tyranny, Sir Walter Raleigh himself, whom Mad Rob had actually met in the Tower and whom he had idolized ever since. Even the lewdness of a few scenes of this play (one of them shockingly insinuating that the author might have had carnal knowledge of the Virgin Queen) could not shake Rob’s hero-worship of Raleigh, nor his determination that a Stuart-loving Stanlow had no right to such a relic.
For eleven years, a patch on his eye and a truss on his groin, the earl enjoyed the stern pleasures of life in the Commonwealth.
He harassed closet Catholics; he went to Ireland and killed a lot of the natives; he read the Bible out loud to his sons every day, hour after unappreciated hour; toward the end, he even met Milton (who’d written so much propaganda for the Commonwealth by then that he couldn’t even see out of one eye).
Of course, Mad Rob should have known it couldn’t last. Of course, being a Dawbney, he didn’t. The Commonwealth fell, and with it, radical purity. Those who had been all for Levelling when they were on the rise, became all for the Status Quo after they’d gotten there. In the end, the rich did not much care for the notion of common wealth, and the poor never did get to vote. The net result of the Revolution was to privilege wealth as well as title (“Hear, hear! for Grandpa’s tea biscuits,” said Mole), and as often as possible to see that wealth and title were the same (“Grandma’s pa was a viscount,” said Mole).
So Charles II came home to cheers and revelry, and the officers of the New Model Army went back to being alehouse keepers. The body of Cromwell was dug up, hanged at Tyburn, and his warty head stuck on a pike atop Westminster Hall, where it remained for twenty-five years to remind the people of England that the “Late Troubles” were over.
Actually, Mad Rob was not as unlucky as he felt, hiding out in Saint Michael’s and expecting the worst. His minister had fled to America, his sons had become Cavaliers (just to get away from him). Some of his friends had recently had their bowels and sex organs cut off and burned in front of their eyes (if they were looking), after being briefly hanged and permanently quartered. But thanks to the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, all that Dawbney got was the latter. He might have endured the oblivion, too, had it not been coupled with the unbearable news that the parvenu (and undoubtedly closet Catholic) Francis Stanlow, now Earl of Newbolt, was from this day forth the owner of Bourne Manor, where some Dawbney or other had lived since cranky Duke Mortimer had thrown his entire family out of the main castle in 1395. Bourne! Where Dawbneys had lived when Stanlows were herding pigs through the marshes of Wales! It was literally unbearable news; the old limping, squinting descendant of Norman nobility, of Plantagenet diehards, of five hundred years of Royal disfavor, died of apoplectic chagrin the minute he heard it.
(That Robert Dawbney had hidden himself in Saint Michael’s and had expired there were historic facts; it was also a fact that he’d hidden looted property of the Stanlows in the church, presumably out of jealous spite. That the Stanlows had failed to recover a particular piece of that property was another piece of Fontwellian fiction, or as he preferred to call it, an hypothesis.)
The Dawbneys were never to get Bourne House back, nor were they ever to regain the title of duke. Still, even under the handicap of their congenital lucklessness, they managed to keep Urswick Castle, and eventually Queen Anne reelevated one as far as a marquess. And Marquess of Urswick a Dawbney remained (despite their i
nability to get along with any of the Hanoverans and few of the Windsors) until the present day. For a while—with monarchs unable to turn to the scaffold to solve their political quarrels—the family even grew quite populous; but World War I took care of that.
During the Restoration, the Stanlows restored Saint Michael’s to High Anglicanism, installing lovely stained-glass windows, a handsome choir screen, and a pulpit ornately carved with Saint Michael slaying the dragon (of radical Protestantism). They had Bourne House completely redesigned by Inigo Jones to the Caroline perfection it still enjoyed. The Dawbney arms were chiseled off every surface on which they could be found, and replaced by the Newbolt crest with its motto, Gratius Rege (Thanks to the king). “Simply put,” said Jonas Marsh, “and damnably true.” The Dawbney motto, Meo Volente (By my will), was equally accurate; they’d self-destructed at every conceivable opportunity.
And so to the present day, when Gordon Dawbney, rowing for Cambridge, slipped his oarlock and was defeated by Horry Stanlow, rowing for Oxford, when that same Dawbney, spying from his round tower saw the first tourist bus pull into Bourne, the House of Urswick continued to believe that every ill-gotten gain of the House of Newbolt was rightfully theirs. Not that they could get hold of them. Centuries ago now, the popish toad Francis Stanlow had even taken back all the valuables that Mad Rob had once looted from his lodge. Or so both families believed. But then they didn’t know about the Raleigh manuscript. Yet.
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