The mob rushed to the stairs. A sudden silence fell. Across the wide central stair, before it split to left and right, a line of men had just appeared. Not just a line of men. A line of men three deep with the thick padded jackets soldiers wore, and gleaming helmets. Worst of all, the men held shining, business-like pikes out in front of them, had short sword and dagger in their belts, and pistols that looked as if they were not for mere decoration stashed securely on the other side of the belt. Professionals. These men reeked that they were professionals. In the sudden silence, a man stepped forward, a man with a breastplate and no pike, but with a gilded long sword. He took off his helmet to reveal a mane of black hair, and a stunning aquiline face with a long scar running from just under his left eye and across to his mouth. In the sudden silence he said,
‘My apologies for invading your territory. My name is Captain Travis. Captain Stephen Travis lately returned from the Low Countries.’
No lecturer had ever been listened to with such concentration.
‘I am here at the request of a man I served with years ago. I knew him as Henry. You know him as Sir Henry Gresham, Fellow of this College.’
There was a collective exhalation, a few muttered words. Gresham! The Queen’s spy! The man who they said had sailed on the Armada, the man who had planned the Essex rebellion but who was rumoured to have betrayed Essex to save his own life.
‘This is not what it seems. Sir Henry is out in the street at this very moment. Your presence there is exactly what enemies of this College desire, enemies who have hatched a foul plot to blame you, students of this College, for a crime they intend to commit and which would raise all England against you. Please; a few minutes is all we ask to confound your enemies.
‘Why should we trust you?’ a voice shouted.
‘Because I have three dozen trained and experienced soldiers with pike, sword and musket whose one faith is to obey my orders. And my orders are that no-one leaves this place for the moment.’
It was difficult to argue with the logic.
Outside, there was growing confusion among the Johnians. It was raining heavily now, a cold and driving spring rain, dousing the ardour of the students. Why had no Granville’s sallied forth to repulse them? Thirty or forty of them, most of them at least half cut and most of them noblemen’s sons by the look of their dress, milled around, facing the huge and firmly shut oak doors of Granville College. Some looked up to the top of Henry’s Tower, named after Henry V in a fit of patriotic fervour, fearing the rain of stones and rubble that would surely fall on them, but the battlemented tower stayed silent, apparently unmanned. There was a further noise, and a flickering of lights from the direction of Magdalene. A group of people, mainly in undergraduate dress of the poorer sort, appeared, each with a burning torch in his hand, perhaps forty of them.
With a massive creak the doors of Granville College swung back. The Johnians cheered, lurched forward and then fell back as figures jumped smartly from the Gate. Soldiers. Real soldiers. Men with helmets gleaming in the torchlight, wicked pikes with glinting points. The men performed as if on manoeuvre. A half dozen stayed back, fanned across the gate and shouldered muskets with a barrel like a hunting horn. A blunderbuss! Filled with any old metal, the most effective crowd control known to man outside of cannon filled with grape shot. The remaining men, equal in number to the other group with torches, formed up in three ranks and moved forward. One or two of the students squealed in fear, but before the Johnians could really take things in the three ranks, on some unspoken order, fanned to the left and right, and took up station behind them. Behind them? The mysterious soldiers had drawn up as if to defend St John’s.
A figure emerged from the Granville gate. Tall, lithe, he was dressed in academic dress of the finest cloth, belied somewhat by the fine sword in his hand, and the two pistols stuffed into a fine leather belt with silver inlay.
Gresham! Henry Gresham! Not since Christopher Marlowe had any one person in Cambridge been the source of so much gossip. Never beaten in a disputation, scholars fought a path to his door because of his dark reputation (did he really have a mistress as beautiful as Helen of Troy?) but often stayed because of the quality of his mind. What was he doing here?
Gresham strode through the mud, and stopped, facing the crowd with torches. They were dressed like undergraduates, but drew heavy clubs and the occasional dagger out from under the robes.
‘Stop there!’ Gresham demanded. ‘You’ll not be burning down St John’s College tonight, and blaming the students of Granville College.’
The Johnians let out a collective gasp. Had that been the plan?
A burly, thick-set man in the centre of the torches flung back his hood. A bald patch on his crown made him look like a Monk. He glanced up to the top of Henry’s Tower.
‘No help from there,’ said Gresham. ‘The six men you sent up there are trussed like chickens. You might want their torches back, the torches they meant to throw on to the John’s roof, the torches the Johnians would have sworn came from Granville.
Six lit torches came down from the roof, landing not on the roofs of St John’s College, but on the heads of the men already holding flaring beacons. There were cries, turmoil, feet stamping the torches out in the rain water that gutted the street. There was much sizzling. It took a long time to put them out. They had been well-soaked in oil.
The leader kept his ground raised his chin. Was it rain making his face glisten, or sweat?
‘Time enough to do burning still!’ the man said. Irish? Not quite. ‘Your fine muskets will have lost some of their glamour in this rain.’
True. Even the best soldier could not always stop damp getting to the powder in the priming pan. Travis’s men were armed with the best wheel-lock or snaphaunce weapons, but no machinery was perfect. That had not stopped Gresham’s father, the saintly Sir Thomas Gresham, amassing a considerable part of the fortune Gresham now enjoyed from importing, entirely illegally, such weapons. Gresham would only know how many had succeeded in keeping their powder dry when the triggers were pulled. It was not a challenge Sir Thomas Gresham had faced. He had never had to look down the barrel of a gun his money had bought.
Sensing an advantage, the man spoke again. ‘And perhaps it should be Granville College that needs a little warming?’ Irish? A hint of French? Perhaps Irish-born, adult life spent in France. ‘It seems your innocent students do not shut their windows even in the rain.’
The chambers at ground floor level on either side of Henry’s Tower were barred with thick-lattice iron. There were none such over the second floor windows, most of which seemed open, inviting a torch through them.
‘I think not,’ said Gresham, icy in his calm. ‘Whoever is paying you does not want Granville College to burn down or it would have been done before now. And clearly you and your crew are not students of Granville College. Were you to burn down John’s, no blame could come to Granville.’
Gresham realised his mistake, or rather his two mistakes, immediately. He had not reckoned on the man being one of a type Gresham had met in the Low Countries. They were people who, once wound up for action, simply could not stop. They would have their fight, even if all reason demanded a sane retreat to fight another day. Secondly, Gresham realised that someone wanted him dead, very very much, and if the man could not have John’s College they could at least have Gresham’s life as consolation.
The leader flung his arm up, turned to his men and yelled,
‘FOR …’
Before he could add ‘WARD’ a spitting line of fire erupted from the second floor windows, and twelve muskets spat out their load. A neat hole appeared in the forehead of the leader, a bloody and grey mass on the face of the man behind him as the musket ball blew out the back of his head and sprayed blood and brains on those following. He fell soundlessly. Six others fell, some with the instant limpness of the in
stantly dead, others screaming in shock and pain, clutching broken or smashed limbs. Amid all the noise, all those present wondered how it was they heard Gresham say to the corpse of the leader, almost conversationally,
‘No rain to damp the powder for the marksmen inside my College.’
The remaining men had lost their leader, and with him their spirit. Pausing only to pick up their wounded and dead with practiced ease, they dropped their torches into the mud and turned tail into the night.
One of the soldiers looked enquiringly at Gresham.
‘No, Corporal, let them go. Irish, I guess. One of Tyrone’s guerrilla bands, hiring themselves out now there’s peace in Ireland. Hunting them through the streets of Cambridge will be like feeling for vicious rats in the dark.’
It seemed at long last as if Ireland had been pacified, the charismatic Earl of Tyrone heading over to meet with King James following the collapse of his long military campaign.
Gresham spoke again to the Corporal. The soldiers were silent, as were the students, most of whom were thinking that this was better entertainment than any play.
There were many things remembered about that night, but years later they were still talking in the taverns about what happened next.
‘Your men will stand guard for the rest of the night, Corporal? I’ll have a brassiere, food and awnings brought out. I suggest half your men are enough, the other half in the Hall. I’ll have the fire stoked up, so they can take turns to warm up and dry off. Suffer me one favour?’
‘Sir Henry?’ The corporal, a cheerful little man, seemed to know Gresham well.
‘Let the men fire off their blunderbusses, into the air. I’d like to know just how many would have fired tonight, in this rain.
‘You heard!’ the Corporal shouted. He held out his arm. ‘Up in the air! FIRE!’
There was silence.
‘Well, there’s a thing now,’ said the Corporal. He looked solemnly at Gresham. ‘Glad we didn’t call their bluff.’ Suddenly, he grinned. ‘Only jokin’!’ he said. And dropped his arm. His men had been trained to fire only on the dropping of the arm.
There were a few clicks, for sure, but the cannonade that went off suggested over half the men had kept their powder dry. The noise was deafening, night vision gone with massed flash and bits of spent metal tinkling on the roof tiles for seconds afterwards. A trained soldier would wait for the visual signal, the arm dropped. A shouted command could be lost on the noise of battle, or yelled out by an enemy.
It was like a victory salute, and a host of candles and lanterns were flaring into life from locals and students wondering what the tumult was about.
It was very late before they got back to The Merchant’s House. Gresham was in high spirits, and pretended that all he wanted was to tell Jane about the play. She was having none of it.
‘What made you realise the plan was to burn down John’s?‘
‘It was obvious,’ said Gresham, using the tone and words he used when he meant that it had been obvious to him alone. ‘Start from the end.’
‘What?’ said Mannion. He had waited in the roof for the arsonists to arrive, caught and bound them, thrown down their torches.
‘You have to start thinking from the end. What do you need to do to close a College down? Once you accept that in some way it’s simply not enough to destroy it – if it was that simple they could have done it ages ago – it’s a surprisingly short list. Witchcraft and heresy might do it, and they tried that. If Granville was so out of control as to allow its students to burn down one of the great colleges of Cambridge – now that might do it.’
‘How did you manage to find an army at such short notice?’ asked Jane.
‘Pure chance,’ he answered. ‘Stephen and I served together when I fought in the Low Countries.’ A shadow crossed his face. ‘We went through a lot together. I came back to England. He stayed there. Made Captain, got his own soldiers together, fought for the highest bidder. Then there were five months when no-one paid them, and it hit Stephen and some of his men that they hadn’t seen home for five years. Something snapped in him. He wrote to me, that very day Mannion told me about the performance of Agamemnon. I re-equipped him and his men, paid them for their past five months and three months to come, and housed them round the county until the time came. And Stephen did us proud, even being willing to take the less glamorous role inside.’
‘Why so? I’d have thought you’d have wanted him with you.’
‘If it was going to go wrong, it was going to happen inside. A mob of over-excited students locked into their own College … it was explosive, and if Stephen had had to use force all hell would have been let use. Never mind the law. Cambridge and the College would never have forgiven me if student blood had been shed inside the College by people they would see simply as mercenaries. But if those students had broken out, the plan to rescue Granville would have been ruined. My men wouldn’t have had a clear field of fire. Even that many men couldn’t have kept the students apart, and in that melee it would have been easy for the Irish to light their fires and melt away, with no-one able to prove they weren’t Granvilles. My whole plan assumed we could pen in the Granvilles. If we did, then a host of Johnians would see a separate bunch of men with torches come from the north. And I made sure to tell the Johnians what it was they were seeing. Stephen has faced more mobs than anyone I know, and usually mobs with musket or cannon. He has a presence, doesn’t panic and he’s articulate.’
‘And a lady killer,’ said Jane. Queen Elizabeth had said she did not seek a window into people’s souls. Had she known it, she had a young female subject who needed no window to see inside people’s heads.
‘Undoubtedly,’ said Gresham. ‘Did he kill you?’
‘Stone dead,’ said Jane. ‘But he’s obviously a clever, even a good man. Why is he a mercenary?’
‘Third son of a family that didn’t have any money to give to the first son, never mind the third. That’s my guess. He’s never told me and I haven’t asked. He’s too good a Christian to join the Church, so he kills people for money. It’s an old story.’
Relaxed, they talked into the small hours, feeling the tension ease out.
‘Henry,’ said Jane, ‘there’s a third thing that could close the College, isn‘t there? Treason.’
‘Yes,’ said Gresham. ‘Treason would do it. For the College and for me. And as yet, I don’t have a plan against that. Not yet.’
Chapter Eight
June to August 1603
James’s much delayed Coronation finally took place in July. If the monarch was to retain credibility, he had to be crowned, even though the plague was still rife in London. It was rather a sorry affair, in Westminster Abbey and poorly attended.
If the men who crowded out the tavern knew that the new King James I detested smoking, they showed no sign of being willing to change their behaviour. Crouched in a dark corner, smoke swirled round Gresham, Mannion and their informant. It mingled with the stink of working men and the stale smell of drink, a sickening-sweet and cloying compound.
‘How sure are you?’ said Gresham.
‘Very sure,’ said the informant. He was a very young man, huddled into his cloak despite the heat of the place, and kept looking behind him at the door. Another younger son, his insurance value gone from the moment when his elder brother married and produced an heir, attached to Lord Cobham’s household. He had sufficient honour to be ashamed of what he was doing in giving away information for money to Gresham, but not enough to stop him doing it. It would be gambling debts, of course; or a whore.
‘It was after the evening meal. I’d gone into empty the chamber pots, but just stepped through the curtain so it closed behind me, in the first window.
Sent to experience life in a noble household, young men such as this were little more than servants. Allowed to
attend the last meal of the day as a guest, he had been sent to do the most menial of tasks after it. Each window alcove would be curtained off, a chamber pot left there for use during the meal. In a well-run household, nothing would be wasted – solid matter for the kitchen garden as manure, urine destined for the gunpowder manufacturer.
‘Lord Cobham and Sir Walter burst into the room. They’d been arguing. Didn’t see me. I think they were both a bit drunk.’
Or maybe Raleigh was simply being overbearing, arrogant and aggressive, which he didn’t need drink to do, Gresham thought.
‘So tell us again what was said,’ Gresham urged. He felt sorry for the boy, who was out of his depth and almost certainly did not realise how dangerous was the game he was playing,
‘Lord Cobham was angry that he had to go to Spain to collect ‘the money’, couldn’t see why someone else couldn’t go. Raleigh said it was too important a job to trust to anyone else. The money was crucial, Raleigh said. When they …’ the boy looked over his shoulder. ‘When they kidnapped … kidnapped the King a crowd of hot-head Catholics might well kill him. With the money they could get mercenaries, proper trained men, who could keep control of things, wouldn’t let emotion rule. Lord Cobham got angrier, said if even that were true why did he have to bring the money to Jersey? Why not England? I couldn’t make out what Raleigh said. There was silence for a bit. I was terrified, terrified I might make a noise and they’d find me. Then I heard Raleigh say, clear as a bell, ‘Arbella Stuart must be Queen of England.’. ‘Amen to that,’ Lord Cobham said, much quieter, and then they both left.’
The Coming of the King: Henry Gresham and James I (The Henry Gresham Series Book 3) Page 15