The Shadow of Tyburn Tree

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘Cease this pretence!’ snapped the Count, ‘I know you for what you are! ’Tis fourteen years since I abolished torture in Sweden, but spies are without the law. Admit the reason for your being in my capital or I’ll have the public executioner use the rack upon you until you do.’

  Aghast Roger stared at him. The connection in which he had heard the name Count Haga before now flashed into his mind. It was the incognito under which the King of Sweden had made his long tour of Italy and France four years earlier. At the thought that his fist had already been tight-clenched for the purpose of knocking Gustavus III out by a straight right to the jaw, the blood drained from his face. As befitted the revelation he sank slowly on to one knee.

  ‘Rise, Monsieur,’ said the King abruptly. ‘Whilst in this house I prefer to be known as Count Haga. But remember; if you seek to deceive me further you do so at your peril.’

  ‘Sire!’ murmured Roger, remaining on bended knee. ‘I beg you to forgive my temerity. Your Majesty has been absent from your capital ever since my arrival in it, and I swear that I did not know your face. I am shamed beyond words that in your august presence I should have been guilty of such rudeness.’

  ‘That has the ring of honesty, at least,’ Gustavus remarked, a shade less angrily. ‘Rise now, and tell me of yourself. That you are not French, but an Englishman, I already know.’

  As Roger stood up his blue eyes were wide with amazement, and he gasped: ‘I pray you, Sire, at least enlighten me as to how you discovered that? I had believed my French near perfect.’

  ‘It is. In fact there’s little ’twixt it and my own. But when I carried you here unconscious in my coach you muttered certain English phrases. Then, on your coming round, as you were helped into the house, you changed to French and gave out that you were a Frenchman. My curiosity being aroused I told Prebendary Nordin to lock you up and take steps to ascertain the truth.’

  Roger had been long enough in Sweden to become familiar with the names of the King’s principal advisers. During his frequent absences abroad the country was virtually ruled by a secret council of four: Johan Kristoffer Toll, a great administrator who held the post of War Minister; General Baron Armfeldt, a handsome pervert, but a man of great courage and absolute devotion to his royal master; and two clergymen of widely differing characters. The first, Olaf Wallqvist, Bishop of Wexiö, was a masterful and eloquent prelate, whom Gustavus used to defend the royal measures in public; the second was Carl Gustaf Nordin, who at his own wish remained a simple Prebendary. The last was feared and hated by the others, since the King regarded his advice as indispensable, and always took it in secret before consulting his council.

  It seemed strange that Gustavus, whose attitude towards religion was so cynical, that while he played the part of a devout Lutheran in Stockholm, he had also acted as though he was a devout Catholic when in Rome, should confide so much of his most important business to two clerics; but it was rumoured that the deeply religious, self-effacing Nordin was the only man who had the power to put a check upon the rasher schemes of the impulsive King.

  It was clear to Roger now that this was Nordin’s house, and that he owed his rescue to the fact that Gustavus had been on his way to visit it in the middle of the night, no doubt for the purpose of discussing the present crisis with the man who acted to him in the role of a ‘Grey Eminence.’

  As these thoughts flashed through Roger’s mind the King began to speak again.

  ‘On learning the name by which you are passing here, the Prebendary had your baggage collected from the Vasa Inn. Hidden in a boot in the bottom of one of your trunks he found a letter, all ready for despatch, addressed to the British Minister in Copenhagen. I read it but ten minutes since, and it gives a most lucid account of your activities here; enough, at least, to land you in a dungeon.’

  ‘In that case, Sire, there remains little of interest that I can tell you,’ Roger said a shade nervously. ‘If I have in any way contravened your laws I can only cast myself upon your mercy.’

  As he spoke he was berating himself for a careless fool, and felt that he must have been quite crazy to leave such a document where any determined thief might have come upon it. He decided there and then that if he managed to get out of his present scrape the experience should prove a sharp lesson to him. Never again would he pen so damning a letter in advance; or, if he did, he would keep it nowhere but on his person.

  But was he going to get out of his present scrape? That was the now extremely perturbing question. The usual punishment for spies convicted during a war was death, and in peace to be locked up in a fortress for an indefinite period. The King was all-powerful and had caught him out red-handed. In the face of his own letter he could not possibly deny that he was Mr. Pitt’s secret emissary. At the thought he flushed with shame. This was indeed a sorry ending to his first mission; to have given himself away through his own crass carelessness before he had even reached the focal point of his inquiry.

  ‘As far as I am aware you have not contravened my laws,’ remarked Gustavus coldly. ‘But persons of your calling automatically make themselves outlaws when they adopt it; and, as a potential danger to any State in which they may be found, are liable to be dealt with summarily. As for your letter, it tells me much but not all that I wish to know. With what instructions did you set out from England?’

  Since the King knew so much already and Roger’s instructions had in no way been aimed at Sweden it seemed to him that he could do no harm by filling in the gap, so he replied: ‘May it please your Majesty, I was on my way to Petersburg. My visits to Copenhagen and Stockholm were for no other purpose than to provide myself with a background as to the personalities of the northern courts before appearing on the scene of my endeavours. Mr. Pitt’s dearest wish is to prevent, or at least limit, future wars; and to that end he is prepared to use all means within his power. He has great hopes for his pact with France and for the new Triple Alliance which has just been brought into being; but he does not consider that those treaties should exclude his making additional ones of a similar nature with other countries. My task in Petersburg was to discover if it is still possible to revive Russia’s ancient goodwill towards England, with a view to a new understanding by which the Empress Catherine would bind herself to assist in preserving the peace of northern and central Europe. And, if I found that she was adamant in her resolution to pursue her ambitious projects, to seek ways by which her aggressions might be forestalled, or the power of Russia curbed.’

  For the first time King Gustavus smiled. ‘I fear Mr. Pitt is somewhat of a visionary if he hopes to make an end to wars; and, for my part, I would not have it so, as ’twould also be the end of glory. But in this last endeavour that you speak of we are at one.’

  Swift to take advantage of his captor’s change of mood, Roger went down on one knee again, exclaiming: ‘Dare I hope then, Sire, for your Majesty’s clemency?’

  ‘About that we’ll see,’ was the non-committal reply. ‘Had you been of any other nationality I would have had you clapped in a dungeon ere this, and left you there to rot; but the contents of your letter and what you tell me now cause me to wonder if I cannot find a use for you.’

  Suddenly he swung round on the Prebendary, and asked: ‘What think you, Nordin?’

  ‘If you feel that you can trust him, Majesty,’ answered the cleric quietly.

  Gustavus looked at Roger. ‘Are you prepared to buy your freedom by taking service with me?’

  Roger felt little beads of perspiration breaking out on his forehead. He knew that his fate lay in the balance, and that to this impatient, impulsive monarch he must make an immediate answer. At any age the thought of being cast into a dungeon, with no guarantee of ever being released, holds all the horror of a nightmare, and at the age of twenty even a violent and painful death seemed preferable. Yet he knew that there were some things he could not do if he was ever to have any respect for himself again. Rallying all the firmness he could muster, and desperately seeking the m
ost tactful way to phrase his reply he said: ‘I could count it a high honour to serve so wise and gallant a King as your Majesty, were I not already committed to my own. I beg you to believe, Sire, that during my stay in Stockholm I have heard so much in praise of you from the common people, that in this I speak the honest truth.’

  ‘Well said, Monsieur!’ exclaimed the King; and with a pleased glance at Nordin, he added: ‘See you, he is trustworthy and I judged as much.’

  Turning swiftly back to Roger, he went on: ‘In the matter that I have in mind you can serve your own master and myself at the same time. But to start with you must disabuse yourself of the idea that you or anyone else can hope to change the rature of that she-devil Catherine. She is a born thief, and had she been bred in the gutter would have delighted even more in picking her clients’ pockets than practising the monstrous whoredoms that are her very breath. As it is she has become a robber on the grand scale. She covets land and subject peoples, and will grab them at every opportunity that offers until the day of her death. You may take my royal word for that, and I am in a far better position to judge her than Mr. Pitt can ever hope to be. I have talked to her for hours at a stretch, and after my last visit to her court, in ’83, I came away with the conviction that war between Sweden and Russia was inevitable. I have been planning for it and strengthening my forces ever since; by playing the part of David to Goliath is the only way we Swedes can hope to keep our independence.’

  There was something infectious in Gustavus’s obvious conviction that he must risk everything by going to war with a far greater power in order to save his people from a foreign yoke, and Roger, realising with immense relief that he was no longer threatened with life-long incarceration in a dungeon, caught it. Forgetting for a moment that he was addressing a King, and should have waited until his opinion was asked, he cried impulsively:

  ‘From all that I have learned while in the north I judge you right, Sire. But what of your nobility? I gravely doubt if one-tenth of them see the matter with the same clarity as yourself. They are blinded by their own petty interests, and I beg you not to count on their support.’

  ‘ ’Tis true enough,’ declared the King. Their mean and narrow outlook is the gravest danger that I have to face. For their own aggrandisement they would pull me down tomorrow if they had the chance. They prate of patriotism yet have not an ounce of it between the lot of them, and would rather see the Russians masters here than lift a finger to help me save the country. For nigh on seventy years of stiff-necked hide-bound aristocracy has been the curse of Sweden. Yet I made myself their master when little more than a boy and I am their master still.’

  Gustavus’s eyes were gleaming and in his excitement he began to pace up and down. Suddenly he swung round on Roger. ‘Did you ever hear tell, Monsieur, how I put a period to their rapacity which was bleeding the country to death, and brought them to heel?’

  Roger bowed. ‘I have heard, Sire, that with great courage you defied your Riksdag in 1772 and assumed the reins of Government yourself; but never the details of how you accomplished that great feat.’

  ‘I will tell you, then,’ said the King, evidently delighted to have a new audience for his favourite story. ‘You’d scarce credit the humiliation to which the monarchy was subjected when I was a boy. My father, Adolphus Frederick, was nearer to being a figurehead of the nobles while lacking the freedom they enjoyed, than a King. He had but two votes in the Senate, no power to make peace or war, levy taxes or raise recruits; and he could not even grant new patents of nobility except on the occasion of his Coronation. His ministers were chosen for him and he was not allowed a say in the filling of any of the principal appointments of the State. My tutors were selected by the Senate; not for their learning but on account of their subservience to it, and they were changed regardless of my education each time the Caps outed the Hats or vice versa. The Palace was so full of spies that we dared not talk of our private concerns above a whisper; and my father and mother were not even allowed a voice in the choice of a wife for me. Would you believe it, Monsieur, that odious oligarchy actually picked on the sister of the mad King of Denmark as my bride; and did so out of pure malice, well knowing the hatred the two royal houses had long borne one another.’

  Roger made an appropriately sympathetic face. He had not known the circumstances leading up to Gustavus’s marriage, and while they could not possibly excuse his abominable treatment of the unfortunate Sophia Magdalena, they certainly gave grounds for his initial prejudice against her.

  ‘Yet the protests of all my family were of no avail,’ Gustavus hurried on. ‘I was forced to marry her whether I would or no; and, year by year we became more obviously naught but prisoners in a gilded cage. The insolence of the Senate grew to be insupportable. They took to nominating their creatures as our chaplains, ordered our clothes and decided what we should have to eat. The final limit was reached when they announced that in future they meant to dispense with the King’s signature on documents of State and, instead, use a name-stamp.’

  Gustavus’s handsome but slightly foxy face had gone a bright pink, and his prominent eyes were popping with anger as he repeated indignantly, ‘A name-stamp! Just think of it; name-stamp!

  ‘But that was too much, even for my father. He was a studious and kindly man, but a poor weak creature. I doubt if he would have jibbed even then had it not been for myself and my mother. Louisa Ulrica was a worthy sister of Frederick the Great. For her wisdom, taste and learning she well deserved the appellation of “the Minerva of the North.” And she had courage, too; abundant courage. That rabble of a Senate feared her, and endeavoured to bring discredit on her by an accusation of sending to Berlin some of the jewels which had rightfully been presented to her from the Royal Treasury. She flung the lot back in their faces and told them to keep their trash. When the crisis arose she and I, between us, forced my father to threaten to abdicate unless they abandoned their project of the name-stamp. For a few days he feared that he would share the fate of your Charles the First; but we kept him firm, for once, and I made a personal tour of every department of State, forbidding them to act on any order that did not bear the King’s written signature. The Senate found that it could not govern without even the shadow of a King, and collapsed like a pricked bubble.’

  Abruptly the speaker relapsed into silence, evidently becoming absorbed in his memories; so Roger, thinking it to be the end of the tale and that some comment was called for, said: ‘That was indeed a most satisfactory outcome to your Majesty’s fine display of initiative.’

  ‘Nay, nay!’ cried the King, looking up. ‘That was but the beginning; the testing time which taught me that when called to book the Senate were no more than a pack of craven fools. The affair of the name-stamp occurred over two years before I came to the throne. While still Crown Prince I had to bide my time, but I began to make my preparations for a coup d’état in secret. When my father died I was in France. The Estates busied themselves against my return by wrangling over the terms of an even more stringent coronation oath than any that had been forced upon my predecessors; those stupid babblers little knew that I was already taking measures for their overthrow. For my project I needed an ample supply of money wherewith to bribe key-men and suborn my own troops. I managed to persuade old Louis XV to subsidise me to the tune of six million livres; though what that cost me by way of a pourboire to the Du Barry, I shudder to recall.’

  Gustavus gave a sudden laugh. ‘Still, ’twas worth it; even though the Comte de Vergennes arrived as the new French Ambassador to my Court having failed to bring the first instalment with him, and I had to borrow on the promise of it from the Dutch. But I anticipate. On my return I found the Four Estates at loggerheads among themselves. Those of the Peasants, Burgesses, and Clergy were entirely dominated by the Caps, and so controlled by my enemy Catherine, who was prepared to spend a fortune as long as by so doing she could keep me in chains. Only the First Estate still showed some spark of independence; yet even in that th
e nobles were thinking not of the monarchy, but of themselves. Things were in the very devil of a mess, and that firebrand Count Pechlin caused me endless trouble. He was an extraordinarily astute political intriguer; as dangerous, self-seeking and unscrupulous as your Charles James Fox. Do you know Mr. Fox?’

  ‘I know him slightly, Sire,’ Roger bowed in answer to the abrupt question. ‘He has great personal charm but I consider his political machinations utterly despicable. ’Tis clear that your Majesty had the most appalling difficulties to contend against.’

  ‘I had indeed. The people knew nothing then of the reforms I intended for their benefit; so the whole country was against me; except for a few nobles who had the sense to see that we were on the verge of a revolution. Yet even they thought me too young and inexperienced to handle the situation myself, and relegated me to a minor part in the coup d’etat we planned to save the situation. However, they soon learned their mistake.’

  The King was silent for a minute, then he ceased his excited pacing. ‘Johan Kristoffer Toll and Baron Sprengtporten, Colonel of the Nyland Dragoons, were the ringleaders. The first has since become my faithful Minister; the other has turned against me. He and Count Yagerhorn are the leaders of the Finnish nobility, who wish to hand their country over to Russia.’

  ‘ ’Twas Count Yagerhorn who set those rogues upon me, Sire,’ Roger interjected. ‘Despite his mask I recognised him plainly.’

  ‘That surprises me not at all, seeing that he is Russia’s best-paid lackey, and tied both by interest and love, if you can call it that, to Razumofsky’s daughter.’

  ‘I crave your pardon for interrupting,’ said Roger after a moment. ‘Your Majesty was saying….’

  ‘Ah, yes. The plan was that Sprengtporten should proceed to Finland, seize the fortress of Sveaborg and muster an army there. Meanwhile Toll was to secure Christianstadt as a rendezvous for our supporters in Sweden. When both had accomplished their tasks the two armies were to advance from east and south on Stockholm. Then, as Sprengtporten had the impudence to put it to his colleagues, “we must thrust a weapon into the young King’s hand and trust him to use it”.’