by Ross King
***
Ten minutes later I was seated at an enormous dining-table, listening to Alethea apologise for the dire condition of Pulteney House. She had appeared in the library doorway looking like what Horace calls mentis gratissimus error, 'a most delightful hallucination'. She was dressed exactly as she had been at Pontifex Hall-the leather buskins, the dark calash-despite the warm weather. I had already decided she must have purchased Pulteney House only recently, hence the massive tomes on the table downstairs. After all, as a widow she was now a 'feme sole' according to our laws, no longer a 'feme covert'. She was therefore able to buy and sell property, even to conduct a suit in the Court of Chancery if she wished. But in fact my first suspicions proved correct, because as we climbed the stairs to the dining-room she explained how Pulteney House belonged to her 'neighbour' (as she called him) Sir Richard Overstreet, who had 'kindly' lent it to her. Pontifex Hall was no longer safe, so she had come to London for the time being: for how long she could not say. But she thought that, despite the risks, the two of us should meet to 'exchange information'.
Pontifex Hall no longer safe? I was puzzled by her claim. Why on earth not? Because of the torrents of water from the spring that were supposedly eroding its foundations? Or was there some more menacing reason?
'Of course, no one has inhabited Pulteney House for almost ten years,' she was now saying, 'so it's hardly comfortable. The pipes from the conduit have been plugged or broken, therefore we have no water. Even more inhospitable conditions, I fear, than Pontifex Hall.' She smiled briefly, then her eyes flickered for the dozenth time to the copy of Agrippa's Magische Werke, which was still clutched in my hand. 'Please, Mr. Inchbold.' She was gesturing at the plates of food-venison from one of Sir Richard's deer parks-which Bridget had served a minute earlier. 'Shall we begin? I believe we have much to talk about.'
And so as the candle flame did its fairy-dance between us I told her everything I had learned in the past couple of days; or very nearly everything. I was wondering how much I should reveal. I decided to say nothing of the cipher or my suspicions about being followed. But I told her about the Golden Horn, about the bizarre auction, about Dr. Pickvance, and finally about the enormous pile of catalogues that I had finished inspecting only two hours earlier. Yet she was not as baffled by the name Henry Monboddo, I discovered, as I had been. We were eating our pudding, a syllabub, by this point. I paused for a moment and then asked whether she knew the name.
'Indeed I do,' she replied simply, then fell silent for a spell, contemplating her reflection in the silver cheek of the soup tureen. I could see the reflections of the candle, two perfect flames, in her dilated pupils. At length she set aside her spoon and picked up her napkin to dab carefully at her lips. 'In fact,' she said at last, 'Henry Monboddo is my reason for inviting you to Pulteney House tonight.'
'Oh?'
'Yes.' She was rising from the table, and so I did the same-a little too quickly. My head felt giddy because of the wine. 'Come with me, Mr. Inchbold. There is something I must show you. You see, I too have made a discovery about Henry Monboddo.'
I was led along the corridor, then through a small rotunda and into a bedchamber. It appeared that Sir Richard had at least attempted to make this part of Pulteney House hospitable for his guest, because the walls were newly papered and the room had been furnished with a four-post bed, a chair and a looking-glass whose foxed surface gave back my freakishly foreshortened and hunchbacked reflection as I stumbled into the room. There was also a portmanteau on the floor beside the bed with several garments protruding untidily from its top. I stood inside the door as if frozen, like a tobacconist's wooden Indian.
'Please, Mr. Inchbold.' She pointed to the chair before bending over the portmanteau. The window had been pushed open, and I caught the gentle susurrus of velvet curtains. 'Won't you take a seat?'
I moved to the chair and watched, anxious and alert, as she rummaged in the trunk, first through a layer of the clothing-I caught sight of a series of shifts and smocks writhing beneath her touch-and then in a deeper sediment. At last she found what she was looking for, a sheaf of papers, which she extracted and then handed to me.
'Another inventory,' she explained, seating herself on the edge of the bed.
'Like that at Pontifex Hall?' I remembered the document well: those six wondrous pages, each signed by the four bailies.
'No, not quite the same. This one was compiled almost thirty years later. It includes only books, as you can see. The contents of the library at Pontifex Hall in the year 1651.'
'Immediately before the estate was seized.'
'Yes. Lord Marchamont had the contents of the library valued before we went into exile. He was planning to sell the entire collection. We were… embarrassed for funds. But no buyer could be found. Not in those days. No one, that is, to whom Lord Marchamont had any wish to sell the collection. So he next considered removing the library to France. He had even arranged for its passage across the Channel from Portsmouth on the Belphoebe, one of the few men-o'-war that hadn't deserted to Cromwell in 1642. But the plan fell through, of course. The Belphoebe went down off the Isle of Wight less than a fortnight before the books were due to be sent from Pontifex Hall. A freak storm. But the shipwreck was fortunate for the collection, as it turns out. I need not tell you what would have happened otherwise.'
Indeed not. A number of libraries that had been transferred to France for safekeeping during the Civil War had become the property of the French Crown, by Droit d'Aubain, upon the deaths of their owners. A fate that Sir Ambrose's books would no doubt have shared when Lord Marchamont died.
'I discovered the inventory in the muniment room,' she was continuing, 'in the bottom of the coffin, one day after you left Pontifex Hall. Otherwise I would most certainly have given it to you then.' She was leaning forward from the bed. 'Quite detailed, as you will see.'
'It mentions the parchment?'
'Of course. But that detail is not the most interesting piece of intelligence. Please, the last page, if you will. There you will see how the collection was inventoried and valued by the person whom Lord Marchamont had engaged to sell it.'
The document was at least fifty pages long, an endless swarm of authors, titles, editions, prices. My head swam. I had already read too many catalogues that day. But the last page was blank, I saw, except for a few words inscribed at the bottom: 'This entire Collection valued at the sum of 47,000 pounds sterling, on this day, the 15th of February 1651, by Henry Monboddo of Wembish Park, Huntingdonshire.'
I felt a tightening in my belly and looked up to find Alethea studying me closely.
'Henry Monboddo,' she murmured thoughtfully. 'A man well known among the Royalist exiles in Holland and France.'
'You knew him, then?'
'I did indeed.' She reached for the inventory and carefully returned it to the portmanteau. 'Or, rather, I met him on one or two occasions. He worked out of Antwerp in those days,' she continued, the bedposts gently creaking as she resumed her seat. 'He was a picture-monger, an art-broker. He sold the contents of many libraries and galleries, including those from York House. You know of the collection?'
I nodded, remembering Pickvance's catalogue for the year 1654, with its description of the items from the 'admirable collection' of the second Duke of Buckingham.
'Those were difficult times for all of us. Buckingham was also embarrassed for funds. York House had been confiscated and many of its treasures, those collected by his father, were pillaged by Cromwell's men. So in 1648, in order to relieve the Duke's finances, Monboddo sold some two hundred of the paintings. He got him a fair price, because the Peace of Westphalia had recently been signed and therefore the supply of plunder was threatening to dry up. Indeed, after Westphalia the stream might well have disappeared altogether had it not been for our commotions here in England.'
'So Monboddo disposed of collections of books and paintings for insolvent exiles? For anyone whose estate was being sequestrated?'
She
nodded. 'He found the buyers for their art collections. Dukes and princes who wished to stock their libraries and cabinets. He had connections in courts throughout Christendom. My father dealt with him on a number of occasions when he made purchases for the Emperor Rudolf.'
'You mean to say that Monboddo was known to Sir Ambrose?'
'Yes. Many years earlier, of course. He conducted the negotiations with agents such as my father and took a handsome commission in return.' Her gaze dropped to the copy of Agrippa clutched in my hand. 'I believe he even negotiated with my father over the purchase of the von Steiner collection in Vienna. But there were also rumours about Monboddo's work,' she added. 'He was said to have clients other than Royalists unable to pay the taxes imposed on their estates.'
She paused to withdraw from the folds of her skirts an object that in the poor light I took a moment to recognise as a tobacco-pipe, which she then proceeded to fill, expertly, with tobacco. I expected her to hand it to me but was surprised to see her fit it with equal expertise between her molars. Her face flashed orange as she lit a taper and coaxed the bowl to life.
'Forgive me,' she said, gusting smoke and waving the taper through the air to extinguish its flame. 'Virginia tobacco. The fire-cured leaf of the Nicotiana trigonophylla, a particularly delicious species. Sir Walter Raleigh claims harmful effects for it, but I have always found a postprandial bowl an excellent aid to digestion, especially if smoked in a clay pipe. My father once owned a calumet,' she continued as a cloud of smoke unfurled into the space between us. 'It had a clay bowl and a stem made from a reed plucked from the shore of Chesapeake Bay. It was made a present to him by a Nanticoke chieftain in Virginia.'
'Virginia?' Sir Ambrose Plessington, that Proteus, that decagon with all of his mysterious side-facets, assumed yet another guise. But I was here on other business. 'You were mentioning that Monboddo-'
'Yes, yes, we were speaking of Monboddo, not of my father. Nor of Raleigh.' She had leaned back and was reclining on the bed now, on its half-dozen scattered cushions, her great tangled mane against the headboard. 'Yes, there were stories, I should almost say legends, about Henry Monboddo.'
'Legends of what sort?'
'Well… where shall we begin?' She cupped the bowl in her palm and for a few seconds studied the canopy above her head as if for inspiration. 'For one thing,' she resumed, 'it was said that he negotiated the purchase of the Mantua Collection in the year 1627. In those days he was the artistic agent for King Charles. That much was common knowledge. He was also the agent for the Duke of Buckingham. The first Duke, I mean-Sir George Villiers, the Lord High Admiral. Monboddo scoured the courts and studios of Europe on behalf of the pair of them, bringing back to England all sorts of items. Books, paintings, statues… whatever might have struck the fancy of those two great connoisseurs.' The clay pipe wavered and glowed before me as she took another slow draught of smoke. 'You have heard of the Mantua Collection?'
I nodded. 'Of course.' Who had not? Dozens of paintings by Titian, Raphael, Correggio, Caravaggio, Rubens, Giulio Romano, all purchased by King Charles for the sum of £15,000-a bargain even at that price. The canvases hung in the galleries of Whitehall Palace until Cromwell and his band of philistines sold them off to pay their debts. It was the greatest disgrace, in my opinion, of Cromwell's reign-a despoliation of our entire nation.
'The silk industry in Mantua had collapsed in the 1620s,' she continued, 'and so the Gonzagas were starved for funds. King Charles was also starved for funds, but a detail such as that hardly troubled him where paintings were concerned, especially ones as marvellous and valuable as those in the Mantua Collection. He could scarcely believe his ears when he first heard the report from Mantua. A special tax was levied and Monboddo raised the remainder of the funds along with Sir Philip Burlamaqui, the King's financier. At the same time, of course, Burlamaqui was raising funds to equip a fleet of a hundred ships for Buckingham's expedition to the Île de Ré, where the Protestants of La Rochelle were besieged by the armies of Cardinal Richelieu. An unfortunate coincidence of events,' she murmured. 'The King was forced to choose between his ships and his paintings.'
But he chose the paintings. I knew the story well. He chose the paintings over the lives of his mariners and the Huguenots, beggaring the fleet in order to pay the Mantuans. Five thousand English sailors in their rotting ships starved to death or were slaughtered by French troops, and who knows how many Huguenots died at La Rochelle. The expedition was a disaster, even worse than Buckingham's raid on Cádiz two years earlier. So the paintings from the Mantua Collection-all of those images of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Family-were steeped in Protestant blood, paid for by the lives of Englishmen and the Rochellois.
'This most wonderful collection became the shame of Protestant Europe,' she said, 'as did the treasures assembled by Buckingham at York House. For Buckingham had not only led the failed expedition, he had also arranged King Charles's marriage to the sister of Louis XIII and then loaned to the French navy the ships with which Richelieu proceeded to batter La Rochelle and later the half-starved English fleet. And so is it any wonder that Cromwell should have wished to sell both collections, York House as well as Whitehall Palace?' She paused to draw thoughtfully on the pipe. 'And that, Mr. Inchbold, is where the other rumours begin.'
I was frowning in the darkness, trying to catch the twisted thread, to assemble in my head the cast of characters: Buckingham, Monboddo, King Charles, Richelieu. 'Are you saying that Monboddo was involved in the sale of the Mantua Collection as well as the paintings from York House?'
'So I believe.'
'He was in league with Cromwell, then?'
'No, he was in league with someone else. The rumours claimed that Monboddo was secretly acting as the agent for Cardinal Mazarin, the Chief Minister of France, Richelieu's protégé. It was well known that Mazarin hoped to lay his hands on the treasures that Cromwell was selling. Monboddo covered his tracks very well, of course, as did Mazarin, but my husband came to believe the rumours. For that reason he dismissed Monboddo as his agent and refused to part with a single volume even though in those years we were as poor as tinkers.'
'But why should Lord Marchamont have been so opposed to the sale? The collection would have been lost to England, it's true. It would have been a great pity. But we were no longer at war with the French. In those days they were supposed to be our allies in Cromwell's war against Spain.'
'Yes, but there were principles involved. Other concerns.'
She hesitated as if uncertain whether to continue. But at length, as another cloud of smoke twisted between us, she explained how any such transaction would have violated the letter of her father's will, which stipulated that the collection should be neither broken up nor sold, either whole or in part, to anyone of the Roman faith. Rome with its Index librorum prohibitorum was the enemy of all true knowledge. Sir Ambrose believed that Rome stood not for the dissemination of thought but, rather, its suppression. The works of both Copernicus and Galileo had been proscribed, as had the Cabala and other magical Jewish writings studied by writers like Marsilio Ficino. In 1558 the penalty of death was decreed against anyone who printed or sold condemned books. Hundreds of booksellers fled Rome after the publication of the Index in 1564, followed by thousands of Jews expelled by Pius V, who suspected them of abetting Protestantism. The Hermeticists soon found themselves under the same cloud as the Jews. The editor and translator of the polyglot edition of the Corpus hermeticum was condemned by the Inquisition as a heretic, while the greatest Hermeticist of all, Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake. His crime had been championing the doctrines of Copernicus.
'Oh, I know all of this must sound peculiar to you, Mr. Inchbold, like the ravings of a zealot. But my father was most determined on these points. He believed in the Reformation and the spread of knowledge, in a worldwide community of scholars, a Utopia of learning like the one described by Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis. So it would have been a disaster, in his opinion, for a single book to
fall into the hands of someone such as Cardinal Mazarin, a pupil of the Jesuits.' She paused again, then dropped her voice as if fearful of being overheard. 'You see, my father had rescued the books from the bonfires of the Jesuits once already.'
'What do you mean?' I was leaning forward in the chair. 'Rescued how?' I remembered her description of the books, that evening in Pontifex Hall, as 'refugees', along with her claim that some of them had survived a shipwreck. I wondered if she was about to say something about the 'interests' and 'enemies' of which she had spoken.
'From Cardinal Baronius.' The pipe stem clacked quietly between her teeth. 'The keeper of the Vatican Library. Perhaps you know his work? He wrote at length on the Corpus hermeticum. You may read about it in his history of the Roman Church, the Annales ecclesiastici, published in twelve volumes. In his time Cardinal Baronius was one of the world's foremost authorities on the writings of Hermes Trismegistus. He took up his pen in order to refute the work of the Huguenot theologian Duplessis-Mornay. In 1581 Duplessis-Mornay had published a Hermetic treatise entitled De la vérité de la religion chrétienne. He dedicated it to the Protestant champion of Europe, Henry of Navarre, whose counsellor he later became. The work was translated into English by Sir Philip Sidney.'
'Another Protestant champion,' I murmured, remembering how Sidney-that great Elizabethan courtier who died fighting the Spaniards-had been the namesake of the ship built for Sir Ambrose, according to the patent, in 1616.
I closed my eyes and tried to think. The name Baronius was familiar, though not because of either Duplessis-Mornay or the Corpus hermeticum. No: a cardinal of that name was the man responsible for the transportation-the theft-of the Bibliotheca Palatina in 1623, after the Catholic armies invaded the Palatinate. It was one of the most outrageous scandals of the Thirty Years War. Some 196 crates of books from Germany's greatest library, the centre of Protestant learning in Europe, were carted across the Alps by mule-train, with each mule wearing round its neck, on a silver label, the same inscription: fero bibliothecam Principis Palatini. The books and manuscripts had disappeared, one and all, into the Bibliotheca Vaticana.