Lord Burghley had been one of the main architects of Elizabeth’s power. His son, Robert Cecil, was now the Queen’s Chief Secretary and Henry Gresham’s bitter enemy.
Mannion’s brain could work very fast when he wanted it wanted to.
‘So those bastards turned something the College owned into something that brought them money personally? And Burghley even got some of his money back ‘cos he could put some time-serving shit into the Master’s Lodge on one of these annuities.’
At one time Mannion had apologised to Jane every time he used a swear word. She was thinking of asking him to reinstate the habit.
‘Exactly,’ said Gresham.
‘Christ!’ said Mannion. ‘Who said the working classes were the criminals?’
‘But it’s more than that, isn’t it?’ said Jane, her miserable sewing now forgotten on her lap.
‘Of course it is,’ said Gresham. ‘The Queen’s dying. Something broke in her when Essex rebelled.’ Something had broken in Gresham as well, he might have added. ‘And then when her closest friend died, it was the last straw. The flies are already gathering round her.’
He stood up, kicked a log back into place. Fiery sparks shot up the chimney, and a flare of light underlit his face, making it look demonic.
‘If you want the honest truth, I do fear we’re heading for civil war. Too many people want the power. And I have this ... awful sense that our nation carries the curse of Mary Queen of Scots, with her son a main contender to succeed Elizabeth.’
‘Cecil won’t want civil war,’ said Jane. ‘He knows he’d lose control if it happened, and control is the one thing he craves. Surely he needs you – or at least your network – more than ever?’
Queen Elizabeth had maintained her power not through a standing army – the forces that might have opposed the Duke of Parma in 1588 if only the Armada had been allowed to do its job were a joke – but through an extraordinary network of spies, informers and assassins masterminded by Walsingham, her eminence noire. Walsingham had wreaked more damage on the crowned heads of Europe and the English-born who threatened Elizabeth’s throne than several armies. Originally a raw recruit, Gresham had found himself the inheritor of Walsingham’s extraordinary network. Knowing he was dying, Walsingham had summoned Gresham.
‘I thought all that was required to run an intelligence service was intelligence greater than those one employed or worked against. Well, you certainly have intelligence, Henry Gresham – probably more than is good for you. Now I know the prime need is money. Money above all. You have money, Henry Gresham. Again, probably more than is good for you. I bequeath you the name and details of every agent in my pay.’
Gresham had stuttered, for the first and, he hoped, the last time in his chequered life.
‘I ... I don’t ...’
‘I am giving you the best network of spies in the world. It is not a gift you can refuse.’
And that had been that. What had bankrupted Walsingham was comfortably affordable from the fortune Gresham’s father had left to him, the bastard. And, if the truth be known, Gresham was intoxicated by intrigue addicted to its dark power. He had fed a string of information to Elizabeth. Instead of recommending him to Cecil, it had inflamed him even more, sensing as he did the power it gave Gresham. Cecil was all for power, but only as long as it was his.
‘Cecil will do anything to preserve his power,’ Gresham answered Jane, ‘as he sees it. But the question is whether he can control things. He’s like all plotters. He believes too much in his plans. Layer upon layer of deception, fog and mist shrouding everything. Sometimes people like Cecil can’t see the obvious coming. I could help him, hugely, but he is too proud and too scared that he will add to my power to ask for my help.’
Gresham had become accustomed to sharing his thoughts with Jane, an idea that would have reduced Sir Walter Raleigh and his kind to scornful splutterings. Raleigh loved his Bess as much as any man loved a wife, but that love allowed no conversations with any hint of business to them.
‘It’s got to be that Scottish sodomite, hasn’t it?’ asked Mannion, who was now on his third glass. The only place Mannion disliked more than Cambridge was Scotland. There was no hatred in his disparagement of King James VI of Scotland, the person most likely to become the next King of England and widely believed to be a sodomite. In Mannion’s eyes, such people were rather to be pitied for the pleasure they denied themselves.
Gresham sighed. ‘If only it was that easy,’ he said.
Jane turned to Mannion, like a schoolmistress.
‘James has the best blood link, but he’s Scottish and we executed his mother, Mary Queen of Scots.’
Gresham interrupted. ‘The Scots are our oldest enemies. I don’t know ... I just can’t rid myself of the idea that there’s some inherited evil passed down through James. It’s fanciful, ridiculous ...’
‘You’ve met James, haven’t you?’ said Jane.
‘Yes,’ Gresham replied, ‘briefly.’
‘And?’
‘And ... I realised he was gently drunk when we met. I delivered him two messages, one from Elizabeth, one from Cecil. I passed a test when I didn’t dump on Cecil, and we parted. That was all.’
The two of them, Jane and Mannion, reflected on this for a moment. Gresham ended the silence.
‘Then there’s Arbella Stuart. She has a good blood claim. There are plenty who want her as Queen so they can control the poor girl and run the country by proxy. The Spanish have been bribing the Court for years, and there’s a fair few who’d happily sell out to Spain. Then there’s those making a fortune out of piracy against the Spaniards who’d do anything not to have the Spaniards in control and want to sell out to the King of France.’
‘Right little dog fight, isn’t it?’ said Mannion, easily bored by anything not immediate. ‘And where’s Raleigh in all this?’
Left out of her conversation, Jane might have said, for fear of Gresham’s response.
‘Raleigh,’ said Gresham ‘is an arrogant, pig-headed idiot who’s gunning for Arbella Stuart and is so stupid that he thinks Cecil’s on his side. And he saved my life. I owe him everything. And he’s plotting with all the fervour of the Inquisition hunting heretics.’
The sound of a door being hammered percolated through to the Library. The one that had been shut after Gresham and Mannion had ridden in. Very few people knocked that loudly, and they were always the Queen’s messengers, or a messenger from Cecil. Jane’s heart skipped a beat. Messages such as these rarely brought a peaceful life.
The messenger was huge, sweat-stained and stank of horse. As with all servants, he perceived his status as a by-blow of his master’s. Even though the Queen’s authority was ebbing with every day that passed her messenger swaggered through the kitchens as if he was Elizabeth’s husband rather than one of her menials.
But this message was from the Queen. It was unequivocal, a summons to report to Richmond Palace at all costs the next day ‘or suffer the consequences’.
‘Is it genuine?’
‘Well,’ said Gresham, ‘it threatens to kill me, more or less, if I don’t obey, makes an impossible demand without any awareness of my own circumstances and demands I grant the Queen her wishes instantly, without a thought being spared for any needs I may have. That more or less proves it’s from Elizabeth. And yes again, unless someone’s been to an awful lot of trouble, it’s genuine.’
The messenger’s livery was correct and fitted him, which suggested it had not been ripped off a body and put on the murderer’s back. What clinched it was the fact that the letter, a scrawled two lines, was in the Queen’s own hand. That in itself was quite extraordinary. An army of clerks existed to allow the Queen to rest her arthritic hands. Wavering, thin as it was, that message had actually been written by the Queen. Gresham had cause to know her hand. And
her tone of voice. The daughter of Henry VIII was accustomed to being obeyed.
‘Never does know how to say please, does she?’ was Mannion’s comment as he read the summons over Jane’s shoulder. Mannion could read and write, but was careful who he let know.
It’s starting again, thought Jane. And a tiny little voice whispered that it was pointless to pretend that she could have this man and anything like normality. She knew what she had done when she committed to him. She hoped she was brave enough to cope. What mattered more was that her man never knew how feeble her heart was.
Chapter Three
February 1603
‘Can Granville College spare its greatest mind then?’ enquired Robert Cecil politely, as he and Gresham met ‘accidentally’ in a corridor of Richmond Palace, some few miles upstream from London on the Thames.
Up until that moment Gresham had been thoroughly enjoying being back at Court, and Richmond Palace in particular. The Queen had moved there on medical advice when she first fell ill, it being the least draughty of her palaces and the river not full of the sludge of London’s filth. The river was clean there. A freak of tide and shore meant that corpses washed up slightly downstream at Mortlake, bastardised Norman for ‘Lake of the Dead’. The company was stimulating, the atmosphere sober but still heady with power and the Palace as pleasant as any place could be that was filled with so many of the human equivalent of turds. The Palace was high, imposingly turreted. It had become one of Elizabeth’s favourites.
A host of scribes and secretaries were following Cecil, who was coming from a meeting with the Queen. He was heavily wrapped up, in a long robe rather than doublet and hose, an old man’s dress. Physically he was frail. As her Chief Minister his vast power and influence were enhanced by the fact that nowadays the pining Queen saw only him of all her Privy Council.
Gresham gave a minimal, formal bow.
‘It would appear so,’ he answered. ‘As indeed your office seems to be able to survive some distance from the intellect that gives it its light and purpose.’
It was clumsy, but it made the point that Cecil’s rooms and the Queen’s were about as far away from the remote corridor where they had met as could be in the straggling mass of Richmond. This was no chance meeting. Cecil had gone out of his way to intercept Gresham. Why?
‘You may see The Queen now,’ said Cecil, a small man with gimlet eyes and a thin, bony frame.
One-nil to Cecil. In six words he had made it clear that he controlled access to the monarch, and implied that he knew the reason for the meeting, which was more than Gresham did. But was he telling the truth?
‘Knowing as you do the reason for Her Majesty commanding we meet, I’m sure my lord you are reassured it contains no threat to yourself.’
Cecil one, Gresham two. Gresham had made it clear that it was Her Majesty who had commanded he meet her, not Cecil. Gresham was damned if he knew whether or not the reason for the meeting could pose a threat to Cecil, but by denying that it did he had made it one.
Did Cecil flinch ever so slightly? Given that he was the prime suspect for three attempts on Gresham’s life, it was to be hoped.
‘Our realm faces many threats, Sir Henry. I was not aware you were still among its number.’
Ouch. What Cecil had actually said in front of a gawping crowd of servants, was doubly insulting. Gresham had once been a threat to England. He was now a spent force.
‘You, my Lord, are of course as a god and stride all-knowing among us lesser men,’ said Gresham with a straight face, something he considered his greatest achievement of the day. ‘However, in my experience it is the evil that conceals itself behind a cloak of goodness that both does and is the greatest evil. You will share my horror at the number of people who use high office as a cloak for such evil.’
Cecil’s lip curled slightly.
‘I share ... very little with you, Sir Henry. And I am very busy. As I said, the Queen is prepared to see you now. Good day to you.’
And with that, Cecil drew the rather old-fashioned, heavy robe he wore round him, and swept off with his fawning entourage in tow.
And what the Hell was all that about, thought Gresham?
‘Nice of him to pass the time of day with you,’ said Mannion innocently. He had been briefing Gresham on the gossip he had gleaned in the servants’ hall, much of it about which of Gresham’s friends was sleeping with who. He also learnt that the Queen was seen less and less, looked older, iller and more unkempt than ever before when she did and returned most of her food untouched.
They had journeyed back to London and its pall of black coal smoke with their two men, Jane and Mannion, and four of the burliest College servants Mannion could find in a hurry. It had taken them two days longer than Gresham would have managed on his own, but the delay and the anger it might cause in the Queen were simply a price that had to be paid. As it was, Elizabeth seemed in no hurry to see him. It was his third day in attendance, and still had only Cecil’s word that she wanted to see him. Was it an unsubtle plot to make him burst in on Elizabeth, as the Earl of Essex had famously done, to find her in her night dress and devoid of both make-up and wig? That was surely too unsubtle and obvious for someone as devious as Cecil.
He went to the Presence Chamber, which was deserted other than for two fat guards. A clash of steel made him reach for his sword, until he realised it was the two ludicrously-uniformed pikemen guarding the entrance to the Privy Chamber who had drawn apart their crossed pikes to allow him to enter. Bizarre, with not a word spoken. He made his way up across the deserted room. In King Henry’s days access to the King had been in three stages. The Privy Chamber was intimate, the Privy Lodgings where the King lived and the King’s Bedchamber the absolute holy of holies, reserved for only the most favoured. A woman on the throne had meant banishing men from the Bedchamber, and the most intimate access now was through the Privy Lodgings to the Withdrawing Chamber. As he reached it the twin doors opened before him. Their motive power turned out to be two portly ladies-in-waiting, who shut the doors, plunged the chamber into gloom and swept silently away. Gresham dimly made out the figure of the Queen, lit by a dying fire and some candles, buried in a pile of cushions. There was no chair or stool. It was an exceptional favour, granted only to the severely injured or infirm, to sit in the presence of the monarch.
He was shocked at what he saw.
Elizabeth had been born with a passable body but a face that erred just the wrong side of shrewish – small eyes, small features. At the same time she had a native instinct and a lot of money to improve on nature, and she had done so with considerable success. Yet the woman before Gresham was a wreck, shrunken, diminished. Her wig was askew, her dress loose on her and stained on its hem. She looked, inasmuch as the pervading gloom would allow him to see, exactly what she was: an old woman approaching death.
‘Have you recovered sufficiently from your shock to greet your Queen, Sir Henry?’
Damn! He more than most knew the dangers of underestimating the daughter of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. She had the scheming skills of her mother, even if she had not inherited her looks, the intelligence of her father and the sheer ruthlessness of them both.
‘Your Majesty.’ Gresham bowed, far more deeply than he had to Cecil. Elizabeth was a survivor, albeit not for much longer by the look of things, and survivors had to club together. ‘I hope you are well.’
The Queen gave a grunt that might at some stage have been a laugh.
‘Other men would have offered extravagant praise of my appearance, emphasised their undying respect and affection whilst I still hold some purse strings. You, Henry Gresham, on the other hand refuse to flatter, but refuse also to be rude.’
She laughed then, a harsh, grating noise that cut into bone. There was no trace of humour in it.
‘The answer to your question is no. I am not
well.’ She paused. Gresham did not speak. He had learnt long ago the value of not filling silence with meaningless noise.
‘I have not been well since the death of my Lord of Essex.’
Death? That was rich. Essex had rebelled against Elizabeth, unaware he was being used as a pawn by Cecil among others, but only after Elizabeth had teased and taunted him beyond endurance. Faced with his entirely predictable response, Elizabeth’s response had been to execute him.
And here she now was. Her power waning by the minute, those around her increasingly giving lip service only, looking over her should even as they greeted her for the person who would take over power, become ticket-master for the trough that was the Court.
‘I think you tried to stop that death, Henry Gresham, without giving so much loyalty to your friend that you forgot your loyalty to your Queen.’
True enough, he supposed. Had Essex been a friend? He had been great fun to be with, a charismatic fool, and Gresham had tried hard enough to stop him killing himself. The price of Essex’s death had been high. A true friend of his, one of his very few, had been burned up in the fires of ambition that flared up round Essex.
‘I have never forgotten my loyalty to you, your Majesty,’ said Gresham. Even when I was on the Rack in the Tower of London, and your face swam into view, he thought.
‘Loyalty to me, or to my office?’ asked Elizabeth. She shifted slightly, and with his eyes adjusting Gresham saw that her make-up was only half-applied, swathes of neck revealed, wrinkled, sagging, like a chicken’s foot. She looked like an old, peeled wall. Why was he surprised? Elizabeth was an incredible fifty-nine years old.
Dear God! Why was a conversation with this infuriating woman always like a trial? He answered carefully.
The Coming of the King: Henry Gresham and James I (The Henry Gresham Series Book 3) Page 4