Queen Elizabeth
“What was that?”
“Madam, it was the snow falling from the roof.”
“Methought it was a footstep.”
“No, madam.”
“There, heard you it not—the sound of someone running?”
“But a rat behind the wainscot. Your Grace’s ears deceive you.”
“What, for ever? Poor ears, so curst to lies and flattery!”
“Your Highness is overwrought.”
“Will someone speak the truth to me before I die? God, how my bones ache! No step? Go look in the gallery, child.”
The girl to whom she spoke, leaving her embroidery-frame, stepped lightly to the door, glanced this way and that, and returned. Her young eyes shone humid between pity and awe.
“No, indeed, madam,” she said low. “The corridor is empty.”
The Queen, without answering, crossed to the window and stood staring from it. It looked upon the privy garden of Whitehall, now one carpet of quiet, sad-coloured snow with the river ruled across its far end like an inky mourning border. A motionless fog brooded over the trees and over the Palace buildings trooped to right and left. There seemed no sign of life anywhere.
Within, a glare of fire burning on a great stone-hooded hearth dashed the wainscoting with red, and crimsoned the hands and faces of the figures in the panels of tapestry, and touched the gold groining of the ceiling and the fresh rushes on the floor with smears like blood. The old eyes, gazing so fixedly across the snow, seemed streaked with the same ruddy hue, but reflected from another and an inward fire. As to the first, she was ever disdainfully insensible to cold, this gaunt, strong old Tudor woman.
Two ladies-in-waiting, a mother and her daughter, had their places by the hearth, where they embroidered together, the former seated, the child bending over. They were the Queen’s only attendants for the moment, since her Majesty was in that tortured frame of mind when her own sole company was but less terrible to her than the thought of an officious suite, veiling curiosity under devotion. Human neighbourhood, silent, tactful, unobtrusive, was the balm her torn soul most needed; any ostentatious sympathy would have maddened her. She could abandon herself to herself beside this gentle pair, as if they were no more than inarticulate animals—wistful dumb affections on which she could lean her voluble heart, certain of their unconscious understanding.
Now the younger lady, returning to her place, stood awestruck a moment, then bent and whispered to her mother, “O, madam, the Tower gun! How shall we close her Grace’s ears to it?”
The Queen, hearing the whisper but not its import, started, and, with a deep flurried sigh, turned round. The wild tumult of thoughts in her mind found expression in detached and broken questions, abstractions, self-communings.
“‘All wounds have scars but that of fantasy, all affections their relenting but that of womankind.’ Who writ those words? Not the mutinous boy. ’Twas Raleigh—he that saw us like Dian, the gentle wind blowing the hair from our face. Essex never spoke such balm. He was no courtier—the worse for him. Am I like Dian?”
The elder lady had arisen hurriedly, and stood, her daughter clinging to her arm, to answer to the voice, which appeared to have addressed her.
“Yes, madam,” she whispered low.
“He never flattered, I say,” went on the Queen. “He was too honest—the devil damn honesty! What day is it?”
“Your Highness,” was the tremulous answer, “it is the twenty-fifth day of February.”
She had known it well enough. All night within her haunted brain the horror of this coming day had brooded—this ghastly morning when on Tower Hill the young Earl of Essex—he was but thirty-four—was to pay the penalty of his madness. She stood staring before her, like one tranced.
“Never flattered,” she repeated—“a bad policy where a woman reigns. The twenty-fifth, is it? Let us know if my Lord of Essex sends or writes.”
“Yes, madam—O yes, indeed!”
The girl, leaning to her mother, buried her pale face in her shoulder.
“Hush!” whispered the Queen; “was not that a step?”
“Indeed, madam, I cannot hear a sound.”
“A stubborn, relentless dog!” muttered the Queen hoarsely. “Let the axe convince him. He will see clearer being dead—no longer dub my mind as crooked as my body; learn that the soul’s glory waxeth with the years, striving to slough its vesture like a snake. A fool, that cannot penetrate that crackling veil, and see, other than a boy, how Truth abhors externals. Raleigh is older; Raleigh can look deeper. Shall I not be Dian still to him?”
She faced her frightened witnesses with the enormous challenge—an old, arid, charmless woman of sixty-eight. Her withered, clay-white face was latticed with countless wrinkles; her nose was high and pinched; her thin, bloodless lips parted to show a ruin of blackened teeth—little spoiled and broken gravestones recording dead memories. Her gullet pursed; her eyes were bloodshot; the red periwig on her poll glowed like a dull flame over expiring ashes. Even her sloven dress betrayed the sickness of her spirit.
“Yes, indeed, madam,” said the mother.
“You lie!” cried Elizabeth fiercely. “He is false like the rest. His eyes betray his lips. Their love-light is the gilding on my crown. When he looks beneath I see mine image in them, an old and loveless woman—barren, and old, and loveless. Do you not hear my heart cry? It turns on a dry axle. O, I would give my queenhood to weep! So utterly alone—no child, no heir, no hope. They say that Charles of Valois wasted and died of poison. What could he expect? Was he not a prince and curst to flattery?”
She strode up and down once or twice in intolerable anguish.
“Truth!” she cried—“truth! And yet when it was mine at last, I turned and struck it down.”
“Not truth, your Grace, but jealousy,” ventured the trembling lady.
“Jealousy!” exclaimed the Queen, stopping suddenly. She stared at the speaker, her breath falling from hard to soft. “Was he jealous, think you?”
“O! madam,” said the other, “is it not thy player, Master Shakespeare, that calleth jealousy ‘green-eyed,’ like as with sour bile that clouds the vision. The distempered speak distempered thoughts, and often turn the most against their most-beloved. I count it green-eyed jealousy with him because he saw your Highness so distorted—not to extenuate the grievous crimes upon which his passions launched him. O, pardon me, madam!”
The Queen stood with her eyes still fixed upon the speaker, but it was evident that their vision took no heed of her, though her ears regarded the import of her speech.
“Jealous!” she said, with a tremulous sigh. “Mayhap like a silly quean I gave him cause, sporting with my troth-ring till it rolled into the well. He was too sure and bold, forgetting who had lifted him, and who could cast him down. But, jealous? Does not his hair curl sweetly on his forehead, child?”
“O, madam! Your Grace!”
“And his eyes so frank and fearless. Fear! He knows it not, the rash and head-strong fool! To think to overbear us!—teach our displeasure a lesson! O, a venture once too often! Because he can boast a strain of royal blood in his veins to dare to lift his head at us! to stamp, and cry: ‘Now, madam, do you hear me?’ or ‘I would have it thus, or thus and thus.’ Such presumption! And yet to see the pretty lord—his lip thrust out in scorn of sycophancy—a man of men, brave, honest, generous, and a fool.”
“Rash and foolish indeed, your Highness.”
“Those are but virtues in reverse. Had he no cause to doubt the love that made him but to ruin?”
“I cry your Grace’s mercy.”
“What for?”
“The ruin followed on the treachery.”
“Was he a traitor?”
“O, madam! did he not curry favour with the King of Scotland, and plot and league to win him the succession?”
“Yes, he’s a traitor.”
“Your Grace forgive me.”
“And I’m a woman.”
“Madam!”
“At the last I yield him all my pride and self-will. He hath so much of me, ’twere idle to reserve that little. Who is that coming?”
“’Twas but the wind in the corridor, madam.”
“I swear I heard him.”
“No, madam.”
“Pride! Will he not meet us so far—but to crave our clemency? He knows the way, and, not taking it, must die! What o’clock is it? O God, he shall not die! Send for my lord Keeper; have horses ready. Hush! he’s coming! Should I not know his footfall?”
She drew herself erect and away; a flush came to her withered cheek; she was the Queen again, aloof, haughty, self-contained. The two terrified women, shrunk together into the shadows by the hearth, saw her eyes gaze into vacancy, heard her lips address some apparition beyond their ken:
“What imports this visit, my Lord of Essex? Who gave you leave to come? Our Constable of the Tower shall be roundly questioned, trust to us. What! are you so pale at last to meet offended majesty? Will you not speak? Will you not pray the mercy you have abused in us too long? A viper in our bosom—O, my lord, that loved and trusted you! What can we think or say, God help us! But we will hear what is to hear. So pale?—the sickness of the stones hath chilled thy fiery blood. Why, I would have come to you, you know well, if you had sent it. Why did you not send it—prouder than thy Queen? Where is the ring? Give it me. O, I have waited, dear my love—have waited dying for this token. Speak—utter one word of sorrow, and I will forgive thee. Aye, kneel so and bow thy comely head——”
A burning log on the hearth fell with a crash and a spurt of flame; a shrill agonised cry broke from the lips of the Queen; she flung her hands before her eyes:
“O God in heaven! The falling head! They are killing my love!”
Weeping and trembling, the two women crept from their corner. At that instant a dull boom, coming from down the river, shook the glass of the casement. The Queen dropped her hands.
“What was that?” she crowed. Her face was all distorted.
“Your Majesty!”
“What was that, I say? My Lord of Essex! He was here but now! Where is he?”
“In heaven, by God’s mercy, madam. It was the Tower gun.”
The Queen sank down moaning where she stood.
Drake’s Chaplain
Looking like a man who had fallen from a roof, a pulp of red and grey, with joints heaved out of all relation to anatomy, the prisoner of the Inquisition was haled before his most Catholic Majesty, who sat in a closet of the Escurial eating rich pastry from a salver, and licking his fingers between. A swarthy guard on either side held up the poor wretch, else he would have weltered to the stones, for he had no limbs capable of supporting him. Yet he swaggered in grotesque suggestion, and gave a twisted parody of a laugh. The pitiful, it seemed, where such existed, could endure the sight of his mutilation less than he himself the fact. He was one of those endowed with a constitutional insensibility to pain. That such human anomalies occur, witness the contemporary examples of Gérard, who murdered William the Silent, and Ravaillac, who stabbed Henry of Navarre. Each endured, jesting and unflinching, the most exquisite tortures, the least of which, one cannot but think, would have killed any man of normal nerves.
Like Gérard, like Ravaillac, was William Donne—Drake’s Chaplain, as he was called, being trebly damned in the title. He had been captured in that final descent of his master on Cadiz, and had thereafter, of course, nothing but the worst to expect. Not short shrift, but particular torments was the ruling for the “sea-dogs,” whom Philip had especial cause to hate. The appeal of their odd buccaneering divinity was largely to humour, of which he was utterly devoid. He had been offended by nothing so much as Drake’s boast of singeing his Spanish Majesty’s beard, and he retorted, wherever he got the chance, with flame and molten lead.
But now he was, for him, in a rare good temper—which might continue until the pastry, to which he was gluttonously addicted, began to assert its effects on an enfeebled digestion. Gleeful in the triumphant maturation of his long-elaborated schemes, he played in fancy at baiting and pricking the English bull, to which he was about to deliver the Spanish quietus, and William Donne offered himself as well as any to symbolise the fated victim.
It was the 1st of August, 1588; the invincible Armada, after a mishap or two, had sailed for Flanders, where the Prince of Parma awaited it with a force of seventeen thousand veterans and a fleet of flat-bottomed transports; Portugal was annexed, William of Orange dead, and, to crown all, the Leaguers, under Henry of Guise, held France and Paris. The Catholic nobility in England only awaited, according to the King’s Jesuit advisers, the landing of the Spanish troops to join forces with the invaders; there was nothing to fear at last and everything to gain. No wonder his Majesty, for ever cold, calculating, patient, had relaxed a little in the near prospect of this unprecedented harvest of his sowing.
He swallowed a last scrap of pastry, and dusted his fingers delicately. An emaciated little man of sixty, with over-blown forehead, small-pupilled ice-blue eyes, and pinched aquiline nose, not all his power nor all his dominions could redeem him from the charge of personal insignificance. His mouth was repulsively wide; his lower jaw, from which bristled a point of grizzled beard, once dusty yellow, was so protruded as to thrust into prominence a disorder of broken teeth like an old bulldog’s. He was dressed unostentatiously in velvet doublet, trunk-hose and curt-manteau, all black, and the collar of the Golden Fleece hung round his neck under a small ruff. Such was Philip, as he sat regarding, without one spasm of emotion, the human wreck before him. Illiterate, infinitesimal-minded, pusillanimous, a disgusting debauchee, he had no one virtue in all the world but sincerity, and with that he endowed a thousand crimes. The monstrous idolatry, through him, of the hereditary principle he embodied, had long supplied its own moral in the torture and immolation of countless hosts of guiltless, happy human beings, in scores of midnight assassinations, in the poisoning of the very springs of nature. Let it be said of him that the murder of his own son was his greatest act of grace, and there is the man summarised.
An English Jesuit, Father Allen, the King’s principal authority for the statement about the Catholic nobility, hung confidentially over his Majesty’s chair, his chill grey eyes scanning the figure of that mutilated fellow-countryman. A second, a Spaniard, but of the like black cloth and inhuman aspect, stood motionless near the prisoner. The King, having cleansed his fingers, glanced up covertly (to the day of his own agonised death he could never look any man, not even the meanest, in the face) and spoke suddenly, in the rapid voice that always seemed to grudge its own utterance:
“The gnat will kill the King! Were those the man’s words?”
Allen looked towards his colleague, who answered in a passionless voice:
“Those and little else—the constant burden of his blasphemy. On the pulley, on the rack, wrenched in the ‘Escalero,’ or with the greased soles of his feet frying at the brazier, always that cry or song. He utters it as it were a charm against pain, jubilant, triumphant.”
His Majesty’s eyes frowned.
“Methinks the Holy Office lacks a counter-charm. Has it no hooks to root up speech, no blistering gags to choke it? Bid him construe his words, or suffer worse.”
“It seems that feeling is dead in him,” said the Father adviser, “killed like a bird in the hand. He is own brother to Balthazar Gérard, who, after all, was a martyr. But it is just a trick of the spirit, detaching itself from the matter it makes sensitive. Shall I question the man?”
Philip waved his hand, and Allen crossed the closet and stood before William Donne, an ingratiatory smile on his lips.
“Good seaman,” he said, “what is this same regicidal gnat you chaunt of?”
The prisoner jerked up his battered face, hearing a question in his own tongue.
“The gnat,” he said in a thick voice, faintly rollicking, “that killed the King.”
“Why and how did he kill him?”
An expression of slyness evolved itself from the wrecked features. A parable was quite in keeping with the regenerate privateering of the time.
“The King,” said William Donne, “had conquered all the blessed world, from the Orcades to Cape Horn, and then, being puffed-up like, he thought he’d sail for the land of God and conquer that. So he fitted up a fleet of winged carracks and steered for heaven. But was the Almighty disturbed to see the countless host approaching? Not He. He just sent out a single gnat, that flew and crept into the King’s ear and stung his brain, burning it to madness, so that there was an end of the expedition; and the fleet went about, crashing together in its confusion, and returned, what was left of it, to the Spanish Main.”
A short pause succeeded, and then Allen smiled and nodded.
“To the Spanish Main,” he said, “exactly. And the land of God, my friend?”
“What but little England,” cried William Donne, “and Drake the jolly gnat?”
The Jesuit turned and interpreted to the King, who, for all his world-dominion, spoke no tongue but his own. His Majesty, caressing his thin beard, answered without emotion: “Well, he hath betrayed his charm. Let the Holy Office get at him at last.”
He dismissed the man and the subject with a gesture, and, rising, put a hand upon the priest’s shoulder. His eyes glistened with a cold, remote look, as if their pupils contracted to a distant vision.
“It comes, Allen,” he said, “it comes—the fruition of our long desire. These news—how spiteful Fate delays them; and yet it can be but a day or so. To grasp that little stronghold of heresy in our hand at last, and dust the tares into the fire. Woe on them that have baulked us in the hour of their triumph! They shall burn, Allen, they shall burn. We will sweep the land with flame, that the after-crop may be rich and virgin. The world surrenders piecemeal to our Christ, the Prince of love and justice. A land of God we’ll make it——”
He paused abruptly on the word, and stood staring, his jaw loose. Then rallied, and, breathing out a deep sigh, whispered: “That dog! A blasphemous appropriation! We’ll show his God of gnats the warrant of the Cross; we’ll dispute his claim, I think. His God!—a Jezebel, a false idol, who sends her ships to poison my new world—mine, decreed of Rome! A curse upon the gnat!”
He appeared of a sudden strangely moved. The gnat’s particular humour, indeed, was the sting he most abhorred; the virus of its memory for ever rankled in his veins. Not eight years was it since this gnat, this Drake, this bold heretic fanatic, had, daring his edict, swept the Spanish Indies and plundered a Spanish galleon of their treasures, loaded with which he had returned to England, to be applauded and knighted by its Queen. Not one year was it since, descending upon Cadiz and the ports of the Faro, this same freebooter had inflicted an almost irreparable blow upon the preparations ripening for the great attack.
The land of God! The land of the foul fiend rather. But it was all decided at last; the hour of reckoning was come, and he, Philip, only awaited the news confirmatory to exact his bitter toll for every abuse, for every humiliation, for every insult so long heaped upon him.
Standing there, he recalled a certain letter, in which this Jezebel, this Queen of heretics, had finally, soon after her accession, rejected the offer of his hand. That had been thirty years ago, but the memory remained, an open wound. She was to answer for it in her “land of God.” And Drake! With the venom of a mean nature he lusted to wreak the first of his triumphant hate on the body of the “sea-dog’s” chaplain. The wretch’s nerves of feeling must be got at somehow; he, Philip, must think of some harrowing method; and in the meantime it would be richly gratifying to disinter that old letter of rejection, and gloat over the reprisals to be exacted for it.
His face transfigured, he released his hold of the priest, and was on the point of moving from the room, when a sudden soft hubbub arising outside arrested him. Always fearful of violence, he hesitated an instant, then, in a spasm of panic, tore aside the hangings. A throng of ashy faces greeted him. Instinctively he read the truth.
“My fleet!” he gasped.
A cowering courtier fell upon his knees before him.
“Destroyed, dispersed, great lord.”
“By what—by whom?”
“By shot, by fire, by tempest. The English captains in their privateers swarmed like gnats about the rolling hulks.”
“Like gnats? Was Drake among them?”
“The first and worst.”
The King staggered, recovered himself, stiffened, and turned towards his oratory.
“No more,” he said. “I take it kneeling.”
He moved away stupidly, stopped, turned again, and addressed himself, as if groping, towards the Jesuit:
“I take it kneeling, I say. The land of God—England—can it be—and I——?”
Some insect droned in the dead silence; the King was seen to start, to stoop, to block his ears with his hands.
“Tell them,” he said thickly, “to let the seaman go, in God’s name and the King’s. It is our will.”
George Buchanan
Two boys were quarrelling in the privy garden of Stirling Castle on the Forth. Their shrill little passions rose ludicrously inconsonant with the majestic gravity of the old historic pile. That had its roots deep-striking into the mighty rock from which it had sprung; and, above, every lusty tower, every folded roof, every soaring pinnacle of the massed congeries of hall and chapel and battlement which comprised the royal rookery was a living testimony to the fecundity of the source from which those roots had drunk. Stirling Castle, in common with other impregnable fortresses of its kind, had grown fat and strong, like a strapping vine, on the blood which soaked its bases—so strong that, in this year of stormy grace 1576, it was still the residence confidently appropriated to a regal minor.
The Castle, massive and somnolent, commanded imperturbably from its height the beautiful open champaign—with its meandering river like a silver uncoiled spring—in the midst of which it was set; the angry small voices vexed its serenity about as much as a buzzing fly might vex a mammoth. Yet they had this right in common with the great voices of the past; one of them came from the lungs of a nestling of the right eagle breed.
He, this nestling—the one destined to be our first Stuart monarch—was a stubby, commonplace boy of ten. His face was pale and somewhat meaty, his features were undistinguished in a pawky good-humoured way, his hair was longish and of a bright auburn, which was to deepen later on. Now, under the influence of anger, its roots were flushed red, which gave it an inflamed look, and the young gentleman’s close-buttoned doublet was sadly disordered, and its lace torn at the wrists.
And what was the subject of dispute, meet to environments so stern and so imposing? Why just a tame sparrow, which King Jamie was bent on appropriating from his young playmate, the Master of Mar, to whom it had been presented by a diplomatic gardener.
“Gie it me, Geordie,” cried his Majesty, snatching and struggling. “I wull hae it. Saul of my body, man, dinna ye ken the voice of royalty?”
The other, a ferrety, pink-lidded and ginger-headed boy, lithe but no match in avoirdupois for his thicker-set antagonist, answered only by cries and contortions. In the result, the sparrow changed hands, a crushed and lifeless little body. Geordie broke away, and made, howling, for a certain room in the Castle.
It was a room well known to him, sombre, rude in its scholastic appointments, but with the stony acerbities of its walls somewhat softened by a good lining of books. An old man of seventy, sitting reading by the bare strong table, raised his head as the intruder entered.
“Ye’ll be comin’ to tell me of some new act of tyranny, Geordie man?” he said.
He looked a very shrewd, observant old fellow, in the falling collar and long black tunic and gown of a grammarian. He had a high, bald forehead backing into a sparse crop of hair, like a track losing itself on a hill; a rough, bulbous nose, and rugged cheeks shaven down to where a thick moustache lost itself in a thicker chin-beard. There were plentiful bags and crow’s-feet about his eyes, which were like bright buttons in soft wrinkled leather.
The boy, thus encouraged, made the utmost of his wrong. In the midst his Majesty entered, a little shamefaced, but defiant. He condescended to avow his act and to justify it, and he exclaimed on his playfellow for a “snoovin’ taed,” which was the Scots for sneaking toad.
Papa Buchanan—Majesty’s preceptor—listened very serenely, slipping in a word here and there where the angry brabble permitted it. Probably in the end he would have summed up and dismissed the squabble with a warning, had not Master Jamie, incensed by some hint of correction, muttered just audibly an invitation to anyone to whom the peril of the essay might appeal “to come and bell the cat”—a challenge to which authority, in its own interests, was bound to respond. It did, in fact, respond promptly, with an amazing vigour for its years, and with the pliant persuasion of a leathern “tawse” kept for the purpose; and, when it had done with Majesty, it administered a similar dose to the other disputant, as the shortest way to restoring amity through fellow-suffering.
“Haud your rowt, Geordie, like a gude mannie, and rin awa,” said the breathed pedagogue, as he prepared to sit down and resume his reading. But it was not to be. Attracted by the uproar, the Countess of Mar—widowed sister-in-law to Mr. Alexander Erskine, the King’s present guardian—came hurrying into the room, and gathering, from the position of the royal hand, the true state of the case, caught the vociferous victim into her arms, and, rounding on the grammarian, demanded passionately of him how he dared lay his hands on the Lord’s anointed.
“The end justifies the means,” responded the pedagogue coolly. “I marle your ladyship’s confusion of pairts. The Lord shall keep to his ain and I to mine.”
“Yours, ye presumptuous fool!” cried the angry woman. “But ’tis time this arrogance ended.”
Master Buchanan, a practised psychologist, decided, in the words of the proverb, to “jouk and let the jaw gae by.” He withdrew.
The King forgot all about his chastisement, and its indignity, in a day or two. But not so the Countess. The act had brought to a head in her a long-swelling process of exasperation. That this audacious pedagogue should dare to claim a privilege denied to his colleagues, when a whipping-boy, common to all of them, was provided in the person of the young Sir Mungo Malagrowther, was simply intolerable. Her smouldering resentment took fire in a determination to bring this domineering will to its knees. And, as luck would have it, an opportunity seemed quickly given her.
One day her son, the young Master of Mar (who had by no means forgotten, or forgotten to resent, his clouting), came to her, triumphant, with some notes which he had picked up while spying about in his absent preceptor’s room. These notes were incriminating, they positively smelt of treason, and the Countess was fiercely jubilant. She abode her time.
But Buchanan had in the meanwhile discovered his loss for himself, and, putting this and that together—Geordie’s new air of defiance, and his lady mother’s conscious looks—had formed a shrewd guess as to the state of affairs.
That day he appeared before the King with a sifflication, or petition, which he desired his young pupil to sign, convinced that the thoughtless, good-natured boy would never trouble to examine into more than its purport. And his surmise was justified.
“What is it a’ aboot?” was the indifferent demand.
“Just a bit place at Court, Jamie, my man,” answered the pedagogue, “for a worthy chield, more fitted than mony to adorn his office.”
The King signed, and the strategist retired with his spoil.
That night the storm burst. A message reached Buchanan, desiring his immediate attendance in the royal cabinet. He obeyed the summons without hurry, an odd smile on his dry old lips. He found Erskine, the Countess, and the young Master of Mar gathered about the King’s chair. Her ladyship lost no time in opening the proceedings.
“D’ye ken those papers, Maister Buchanan?” she cried, flinging the notes down on the table under the pedagogue’s nose.
“Vera weel,” he answered—“and who stole them from my room?”
“The Lord shall justify the theft,” she cried, “since it hath revealed a treason to His anointed.”
Erskine, half bored, half amused, bade the pedagogue take up the notes and explain them as he could.
“They are for a work I am projecting,” said Buchanan—“De Jure Regni apud Scotos—which is just a compendium of poleetical philosophy.”
“Read,” cried the Countess; and, without hesitation, Buchanan obeyed, giving the whole of what is here only the gist:
“If a King should do things tending to the dissolution of human society, for the preservation of which he has been made, he is a tyrant, ergo an enemy of all mankind. Is there not a just cause of war against such an enemy, and is it not lawful in such war for the whole people, or one, or any, to kill that enemy? May not any out of all mankind lawfully kill a tyrant, as one who has broken the bond made between himself and mankind?”
“Haud!” cried her ladyship, rabid to seize her point. “What ca’ ye that, brother, but a direct incitement to treason? Heard ye aye such sedeetious blether! A bond, the deil hae’t! I tell ye, ye misleared pedant, there’s na bond save between the Lord and His anointed, and whosoever thinks otherwise, or designs in ony way to injure the King, is guilty of treason to the Lord.”
“I submit,” said Buchanan. “It is treason to design in ony way to injure the King. Oot of your ain mouth, woman, do you stand convict.”
He took a paper from his pocket and threw it on the table.
“Read!” he commanded, in his turn.
Dumbfounded, but somehow impelled, the Countess lifted the paper, glanced at it, and, uttering a shriek, threw it down before Erskine, who, also perusing it, gave a sudden snort, and handed it, with an amused ironic bow, to the King.
It was a document, signed by his own Majesty, vesting his title and authority for the space of fifteen days in the person of his faithful servant George Buchanan.
The pedagogue, with a stern aspect, advanced, and, motioning the King out of his chair—a dictate which the pupil instinctively obeyed—assumed the vacant place.
“D’ye deny your ain sign-manual, James Stuart?” he asked.
The boy, looking very sheepish, shook his head.
“It shall be a lesson and a warning to ye, Jamie,” said Buchanan. “How aften have I rebuked, and vainly, your complying good-nature! And now that easy concession has dethroned ye for the nonce, as ane day it may for gude and a’. For the future, read your sifflications before signing them.” He whipped round suddenly on the small Master of Mar. “As for this young traitor and his mither,” he bawled, “that have conspired to injure their King——”
The Countess cried out, as Geordie ran screaming into her arms, “No treason, gudeman, no treason! I allow the truth of your contention. It is maist lawful, under just provocation, to dethrone and kill a tyrant.”
“Humph!” said Buchanan, twisting into place again. “I am nane, maybe, so convinced of that as I was, and we will e’en leave the point for future discussion. In the meanwhile, as King I decree that the person of ane George Buchanan, homo multarum literarum, is sacred from this hour and for ever, and that onyone at ony time conspiring to injure it, shall be adjudged guilty of treason against the King’s Majesty.”
Alexander Erskine lay back in his chair and went into a roar of laughter.
The Lord Treasurer
“Phineas,” said the Lord Treasurer—“my breeches!”
The attendant, stooping to the august legs, reverentially relieved them of their small-clothes, and his lordship stood up in his shirt with his back to the fire. Even so denuded, he could never have conceived himself as anything less than a hero to his valet—no, not when, with a comfortable rearward shrug of his shoulders, he lifted the veil of his unspeakableness to the gratifying warmth.
“Let me see, Phineas,” said the Lord Treasurer. “To-morrow is Wednesday—the black velvet with the plain falling band, is it not? Very well. Empty that pocket of its papers, Phineas.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Sir Richard Weston, Baron of Exchequer and Lord High Treasurer to his Majesty King Charles I, was disrobing for the night in his official residence off Chancellor’s or Chancery Lane. He was a man of inflexible routine, who changed his raiment, parcelled out his duties, and pigeon-holed his correspondence with an unswerving regularity from which nothing could ever make him deviate but a bribe. He had a suit of clothes for Monday, a suit for Wednesday, another for Friday, and so on—a change on every third day; and in the doublet of each suit was a little pocket below the waist, into which it was his custom to slip all memoranda of affairs requiring his early attention. This pocket it was the valet’s duty to explore upon every occasion of exchange into fresh habiliments.
Now, system has this drawback, that it entices those who practise it into a confidence in their inability to err, which is in itself an error. Pigeon-holes are useful things, if one is convinced that every article in them is docketed under its obvious letter. But, alas! in actual fact the short cut too often proves itself the longest way round, and the pigeon has an amazing way of hiding in the unexpected compartment. He may fail to answer to his own name or his firm’s, and leave one in the last resort only his subject or his business by which to trace him—if, indeed, one can identify either under a capital letter. We have known an orderly man to tear the heart out of a nest of pigeon-holes from “B” to “Z,” only at length to find what he sought under “Anonymous.” Yet he remained no less convinced than the Treasurer that he had eliminated confusion from his category of affairs. System, in short, may provide against everything but the bad memory which most trusts to it.
Sir Richard, pleasantly conscious of his calves and upwards, reared himself on his toes and yawned and sank down again.
“Is aught there, varlet?” he demanded. “Bring me whatsoever it containeth.”
The man laid down the discarded doublet.
“Naught, my lord,” he said, “but a single scrap of paper.”
“Give it me.”
The servant crossed the room, and presented the memorandum with an obeisance. The master accepted it, glanced down, and stood suddenly rigid.
“Remember Cæsar!”
That was all—just those two words, written bold in ink in an unknown hand. “Remember Cæsar!”
Sir Richard was holding the paper in his right hand; dropping the veil, he brought his left to the front and stood staring in a sort of stupor. A consciousness as of chill, as of a sense of warmth and security suddenly and shockingly withdrawn, tingled through his veins. It was succeeded by a faint thrill of grievance or self-pity. He had been so exceedingly comfortable and happy a moment ago.
“Remember Cæsar!”—just those two words, no more, but how voluminous in terrific import! “Remember Cæsar!” Remember the retribution that always waited on “vaulting ambition.” A vision of a vast Senate Hall, of a throng of passionate figures holding aloft blood-stained daggers, of a silent, prostrate form in their midst, rose before him. “Remember Cæsar!” Remember Cæsar’s fate: remember what came to befall the greatest soldier, statesman, jurist of his time—possibly of all time.
A certain flattery in the analogy for an instant restored the colour to Sir Richard’s cheek. Perhaps the comparison was not so extravagant a one after all. The position of Lord Treasurer was so exalted, that, looking down from it, all lesser offices and all lesser men appeared dwarfed. It needed surely a stupendous intellect to preserve its equilibrium at that altitude. And yet, such the height, such the fall. The Treasurer’s momentary heroics came down with an anticipatory thwack which left him gasping.
If he could only avoid Cæsar’s fate while admitting the soft analogy! The illustrious Imperator had also, if he remembered rightly, received his warning, and had ignored it. To ape the foolhardinesses of the great was surely not to justify one’s relation to them in the best sense.
A shrill wind blew upon the casement. Its voice had but now awakened a snug response in the Treasurer’s breast. All in a moment it spoke to him of the near approach of the Ides of March, and he shivered and dropped the paper to the floor.
“Phineas,” he said in an agitated voice, “Phineas! How came that into my pocket?”
The valet, busy about his affairs, approached deferentially but curiously, and, at a sign from his master, lifted and examined the billet, and shook his head.
“You don’t know?”
“No, indeed, my lord.”
“How do you read it, man? How do you read it?”
Phineas scratched his poll and grinned and was silent.
“You are just an intolerable ass,” cried his master. He danced in his excitement. His dignity was all gone; he was simply a man in a shirt. “Fetch master secretary!” he cried. “Fetch master comptroller! Rouse the household, and warn the porter at the gate! Send everyone in to me, here and at once.”
The valet hesitated.
“Do you hear?” shouted Sir Richard. “Why do you wait?”
“It doesn’t come down to your knees, my lord,” said Phineas.
The Treasurer leaped to a press and tore out a robe. “Go!” he screamed over his shoulder.
In a minute they all came hurrying in—comptroller, secretary, clerks, grooms, and underlings—in dress or in undress, a motley crew, as the occasion had found them.
“What is it, my lord?” asked the first in an astonished voice. He was a tall, pallid man, so inured to method and routine that a rat behind the wainscot was enough to throw him into a flutter.
“Master Hugh,” cried the Treasurer—“Master Hugh! I found that in my pocket when I came to strip—a thing that I had never put there, or put unconsciously. What do you make of it, my friend? What does it import?”
They all gathered round the comptroller to read the billet, and, having examined it, fell apart with grave, inquiring faces.
The comptroller looked up, his lips trembling.
“My lord,” he said, “it can signify but one thing.”
“My assassination?”
“Without doubt, my lord.”
The Treasurer turned pale to the bare dome of his head. He had to the last hoped to have his worst apprehensions refuted; but it was plain that only one construction could be put upon the missive.
“How did it reach me?” he said dismally. “How did it get there?”
“Probably, my lord,” ventured the secretary, a sleek, apologetic man, “it was slipped into your lordship’s hand by one whom your lordship mistook for a chance importunate suitor, and your lordship accepted and pouched and forgot it.”
“It may have represented a threat or a friendly warning,” said the comptroller.
“Your lordship hath many and mighty enemies,” said the secretary, “as who hath not among the great and influential?”
“Your power, your imperious will, your favour in high places, my lord,” said the comptroller—“these be all incitements to the envious and unscrupulous. Without question there is some conspiracy formed against your life.”
“I could almost suspect you all of collusion in it,” cried the Treasurer bitterly, “for the relish with which you dispose of me.”
The comptroller murmured distressfully, “O, my lord, my lord!”
Sir Richard broke out, moved beyond endurance:
“What the devil do you all, moaning and croaking? I am not food yet for your commiseration. The plot may be already forward while you babble. Look under the bed, Phineas.”
The valet dived, rose, scoured the room, examined into every possible lurking-place.
“Shall I set a guard, my lord?” inquired the comptroller.
The Treasurer exploded:
“Set a guard when the thief is in! A household of braying jackasses! Go, dolt, and remedy your oversight. Shut the gates and warn the porter; beat up every hole and corner first. See that not a soul is allowed entrance on any pretext whatever. And, hark ye, Master Hugh, no eye to-night shall be shut on penalty of my high displeasure. An unwinking vigil, an unwinking vigil, Master Hugh, on the part of all. See to it. And if anyone asks an audience, save of the first consequence and character, I am indisposed, Master Hugh—I am indisposed, do you hear?”
He was so, in very truth, as he drove them all out, and locked the door upon himself, and sank into a seat before the fire. A sickness of apprehension stirred in his bile and made his face like yellow wax. This business had given him such a shock as he had never before experienced. What did it mean?—what could it mean? No doubt the secretary’s theory was the right one: he was incessantly being importuned by petitioners, and often, to get rid of them, he would accept their memorials, and pocket and forget all about them. So must it have been with this paper, thrust into his hand amidst a crowd. It was merciful chance alone that had restored it to his notice before too late. But, accepting all that, why was his life threatened? His heart was full of an emotional complaint and protest against destiny. He was not an unjust man as things went—certainly not so signally as to merit this fatal distinction.
He passed a terrible night, shrinking from every shadow, starting at every sound. Morning when it came only added to his sick perplexity. What course was he to pursue, fearful of the lurking terror, to preserve his dignity and his life at once? He dressed in a sort of mental palsy, crept breakfastless to his library, and sent for the comptroller’s report. So far, it appeared, the night had passed without event. No doubt the deed was destined for the open air.
As he stood, trying to deliberate his policy, a visitor, the Earl of Tullibardine, was announced as craving an audience. His lordship was a personal friend of his, and beyond suspicion. Reluctantly Sir Richard gave the order for his admittance.
The nobleman came in breezily, and with much concern expressed over the report of the Treasurer’s indisposition. “Which,” said he, “maketh me loth to trouble your lordship on a personal matter, which, saving the pressure of the occasion, I would forbear. But the business calls for dispatch, and your lordship had promised me an answer.”
Sir Richard put a hand to his forehead.
“Not well,” he murmured, “and overtaxed. You must pardon me, my lord. What business?”
“Why,” cried the Earl, “have you forgot how you promised me three days ago to speak to the King about appointing my kinsman, Robert Cæsar, to a vacant clerkship of the Rolls, and how, asking me for a memorandum of the matter, I writ ‘Remember Cæsar’ on a slip of paper and gave it you?”
Sir Richard stood staring a moment, then burst into an uproarious laugh.
The Princess Elizabeth
She was really the most affectionate and harmless of little princesses, though, in the cruelty of her fate, one of the most tragic figures of her sad time. Destiny, the great bully, in the absence of any celestial S.P.C.C., often delights in torturing good children, and surely he had never vented his spite on a prettier innocence than this. She was born on the Holy Innocents’ day, actually; and that may have prejudiced the odious tyrant. A counterpane of snow covered the earth at the time, and when the sun of the New Year withdrew it, there was this smiling snowdrop underneath.
We pass over the little Princess’s first reception, the splendour and hyperbole of it all. To insist on such in such connection is like breaking a butterfly on a wheel. She was for all human purposes just a desirable baby, most precious in her lovable disposition; and if the States of Holland thought fit, for political purposes, to signalise her minute advent by a congratulatory present to King Charles I, her father, of ambergris, incomparable china, a cunning clock, and several Titians and Tintorettos, those gifts were not to be considered representative of anything but her material values. Her real dearness was moral and inestimable. Only the ambergris, perhaps, symbolised the sweetness of her nature.
We dwell on her sweetness, the kind little soul, more fondly than on her reputed learning and her piety. At eight years old she was said, on the authority of Mrs. Makin, her parliamentary governess, to be suitably proficient, Angelica-like, in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish, all of which languages she could read and write. Well, we don’t believe a word of it, any more than we believe in the precocious pietism allowed her by godly Mr. Stephen Marshall and other long-winded Fifth-Monarchists appointed by the Parliament to preach her and her brothers into a state of dead-with-sleepiness grace. Like a sweet-natured child she struggled dutifully to please her tutors, and the very love in her disarmed and moved them to the utterance of those fond fictions. No doubt she could stammer without a solecism of Balbus and his wall-building, or, in childish cacography, indite her Déme un beso with little rosy fist cramped tight and her lips pursed to the message. But that any tongue but her own spoke naturally in or to her we will not believe.
The most prettily pathetic letter ever written by a child she addressed to the Lords of the Parliament, and that was in 1642, when she was really eight years old. It was at the time when King father and Queen mother were gone, launched on the flood of that long disaster, and Elizabeth and her baby brother, the little Duke of Gloucester, had been left together in the great empty Palace of St. James’s under the guardianship of the Houses. It was a period of tense national emotion—the opening of the great Civil War. The two children, who figured more or less as hostages, were a source of perpetual anxiety and embarrassment to the revolted Commons, who could not forbear, nevertheless, imposing upon the twain their own loveless ruling. The infants were stripped of all privileges of State, were maintained meagrely, and were delivered to the dronings of orthodox divines for their spiritual sustenance. It being decreed that none, unless he were a subscriber to the Solemn League and Covenant, should be permitted to hold any office about them, the cashiering of most of the household followed of necessity. And it was this, the dismissal of her few loved familiars, which produced the letter. The child, in a burst of passionate grief, appealed from the Lower to the Upper House:
“My Lords,
“I account myself very miserable that I must have my servants taken from me, and strangers put to me. You promised me that you would have a care of me, and I hope you will show it, in preventing so great a grief as this would be to me. I pray, my Lords, consider of it, and give me cause to thank you, and to rest,
“Your loving friend,
“Elizabeth.”
Your loving friend! No polyglot precocity there, but just the stumbling iterative language of a child’s swelling heart. Cannot you picture her, in her plain black frock and falling collar, her slim arms bare from the elbow, the shining golden curls dropping over her cheeks and the shining tears dropping from her eyes, as she sits at the long table in the bare panelled room carefully shaping the characters of her desperate little plea. Her throat has a lump in it; her breath catches from time to time; so almost does ours, when we think of her, as of any other imprisoned child, so lonely, so non-understanding, deprived in one amazed moment of all love and luxury, conscious of vague frightening things around, awake, as if in the night, from a terror of dreams, and no one, no least footstep in the dark house, hurrying to her with reassurance of comfort and soothing words.
But we would not overpaint the picture; and indeed this little girl had the compensations of her nature. Few could be harsh with her or help loving her—not Mrs. Makin, nor Mr. Obadiah Sedgewick, who knew so much about the Bible that he might have written it, especially its wrathful passages, nor certainly the Earl of Northumberland, who was the guardian appointed by the Houses. Moreover, being of the stuff maternal, she had natural duties to occupy her. She had mothered her dolls, very lovingly and intimately, in the times of absorbing unreality; now, awakened to the tremendous responsibilities of fact, her solicitude was transferred to their living substitute, the little baby Duke Henry of Gloucester. In her pretty, faithful stewardship of this small charge she forgot the worst of her own grief and loneliness.
We would dilate upon her maternal resourcefulness, for in that was her natural development. It came to embrace in time the fortunes of her elder brother, the Duke of York, who, when he was thirteen and she eleven, was added to the party at St. James’s. In the interval Elizabeth had had a fall and broken one of her legs, an accident which, though surmounted, had further weakened an already delicate constitution. And then events came fast, culminating, after many disastrous defeats, in the virtual imprisonment of the King father at Hampton Court. There was a day which the little Princess never forgot, when all three were taken to visit the captive in his prison-palace. They slept the night there, and the tramp of the sentries in the long corridor got upon her nerves and haunted them for weeks afterwards. It seemed so dreadful that a king should have a gaoler.
But now affairs were rushing to a crisis, and the alarmed heart of the child-mother inspired her to action. In this threatening of a dynasty it was imperative to secure the escape of her elder boy brother, and she set herself, the little courageous thing, to devise the means. Love made of her a very Machiavellian plotter, made of her small wits a counter-force against all the watchfulness and caution of great Ministers and their servants. Very innocently—in seeming—she prepared her ground: the three children, to beguile the tedium of their long confinement, took to playing hide-and-seek in the great empty Palace every evening after dark. And on the 21st of April, in the year 1648, the plot was ripe.
“I will not hide to-night, Harry.”
“Yes, Jamie, do, do.”
“Will you not, Jamie dear, to please him?”
“Why not you, sister? With your sad raiment, toning into the hangings and the shadows, you have always the advantage over us.”
“But you have the better ideas. You shall wear one of my gowns if you like.”
“Shall I? Then I shall be doubly equipped. Very well, send for a gown.”
Amid the laughter of all, governess and attendants, assembled in the room, the young Prince became a girl. Little Harry was delighted, and clapped his hands.
“Find me to-night, Harry, if you can,” cried the Duke of York as, holding up his skirts, he danced out of the room. “I will take ten minutes’ law, and then give you two hours for the task.”
He disappeared; Elizabeth had hard ado to hold in the child the stipulated time; but punctually on the tick of the eleventh minute she rose, and took his hand, and the hunt began.
There was always a fearful joy in this sport for the little boy. The vast glooms; the imagined crouching shapes; the starts and shrieks of discovery over some object which would reveal itself when approached—no dim, half-shrouded face, but just a ghostly bowl or ornament; the crawling silences and puckered shadows—the appalling venture of it all was just endurable if one kept the prize in view. And then this elder brother did such things. Once, actually, standing on a mantelpiece, he had become the figure of a pale-faced Moroni Cavalier, whose picture hung convenient; and Elizabeth and little Hal had passed and repassed hand in hand without ever discovering the imposition. And to-night again, it seemed, was to record one of his inspirations.
Long before the two hours were passed in fruitless search Harry was so tired that he could scarce drag one foot after the other. But he was still trailing his weary toes undaunted when the Earl came home. Prepared to attend the Princes to bed, Elizabeth, by then worn out, had transferred her place in the hunt to a couple of menservants, who, amused and unsuspecting, accompanied the little boy.
Northumberland, being informed that the Duke was hiding, tarried impatiently awhile, until, seeing his growing irritation, one of the servants whispered to his charge. The child, brightening and clapping his hands, shrieked out, “O, Jamie! In the gardener’s house!” The Earl turned on the speaker.
“What is that?”
“His Highness,” answered the man, “ran into the servants’ hall, demanding of Job his key to hide withal. He’s been there, my lord, these two hours.”
“There? Where?”
“In Job’s lodge in the garden, my lord.”
The Earl, hastily calling his attendants, hurried, the little boy trotting beside him, to the house—only to find it empty and the bird flown. Undetected in his disguise, the young Duke, after slipping from the window of the lodge into the darkness without, had made his way down to the river, where, at a certain spot, by preconcerted arrangement, a boat awaited to convey him to a Dutch vessel. And the demure deviser of all this pretty scheme had been from first to last the little good Princess.
She looked up when the Earl came to acquaint her of the result of their evening’s play. Her eyes filled; her lips quivered; but she was too long inured to shocks to express surprise.
“He hath fled, then,” she said. “I can only pray, sir, for his preservation. Yet be sure you have left no corner unexplored.”
Northumberland convinced her, even as he turned away. There was a puzzled frown in his eyes.
“No, it is impossible,” he whispered to himself. “Was she not born on the feast of the Holy Innocents?”
A big heart in a frail body. She came to die, this tired little lamb, really of neglect and loneliness, when she was no more than fifteen. Emotional pietists have declared that she was found dead with her head resting on the Bible. So short-sighted people can mistake for a book the Good Shepherd’s knee.
James II
The City clocks were chiming four in the starry chill of a December morning as the King and his two attendants hurried down Whitehall stairs to the river. A boat, bespoken hours earlier by his valet Abbadie, who was in waiting for the party, lay ready off the public steps. These, for an obvious reason, had been chosen in preference to the privy stairs, and the result seemed to justify the precaution. The fugitives were not observed or followed, it appeared—unless any significance attached to the form of a sleeping loafer, sprawled heavily over a baulk of timber hard by—and in any case they were all prepared, if challenged, to assume the rôle of belated citizens taking boat after a frolic.
The two oars, proved men, were, if not in the actual secret of the escape, sufficiently near it to act in all things with quiet and dispatch. The embarkation proceeded noiselessly, and Sir Edward Hales, the last of the party, was about to step on board, when a remark, sotto voce, from one fellow to the other arrested his attention. He paused, his foot on the gunnel, and quickly demanded an explanation.
“Why, see, your honour,” said the man in a low voice, “you’re over-late, and the tide’s at the slack. With a pull of thirty miles before us and a heavy boat, it’s odds but we meet the flow this side Greenwich.”
“What, then, waterman?”
“We shan’t fetch Gravesend before daylight, that’s all.”
Sir Edward, being a faithful Papist and Jacobite, cursed ecumenically. Ex-Lieutenant of the Tower, he had only just been dispossessed of his post, a significant one, by dictate of the usurper, and Fate, he felt, might have spared him these lesser vexations. It was important above all things at this pass to get the King bestowed under cover of darkness in the vessel that awaited him at the river-mouth.
“Where two failed, three might succeed, eh?” he said sharply.
The man acquiesced. “Pulling randan we might do it,” he said—“two oars and the sculls.”
Abbadie, the valet, was a loyal but fibreless French dandyprat; Mr. Sheldon, the fourth of the party, was old and infirm; was it to be left to him, Sir Edward, a man of a large and weighty dignity, to set his back to a task about which he knew perhaps just enough to confound the efforts of the others? He hesitated; and, as he stood, a voice sounded behind him:
“Here’s at your service, master.”
Sir Edward started and turned round. It was the sleeper, it seemed, who had risen and come behind him unobserved—an immense shambling figure of a man, ragged and hoary. Power no less than age spoke in his massive frame, in his hands like roots, in his sinewy neck. Even the few teeth that remained to him were like bones of contention in a resolute jaw. Shadowy, a dim giant, he stood up in his mouldy duds in the starlight.
An opportune phantom, too foul and solitary for a spy. Sir Edward, under stress of urgency, took what the Fates had sent him.
“Can you pull?” he asked only.
The great creature jeered hoarsely.
“Aye,” he said, “though it were the house of Dagon about the ears of the Philistines.”
Sir Edward made a wry mouth; there was a tang in this of the pietistic cant he was old enough to remember. But the occasion was urgent.
“We desire to light at Gravesend before dawn,” he said. “You shall be well paid if you enable us.”
He entered the boat, and the man followed, the latter signifying in a determined manner that he would pull stroke. The concession being made to a certain arrogance of will in the fellow as much as to his physical strength, they took their seats and the craft put off.
The four passengers were all in cloaks and unfeathered hats. The King, unconscious, it seemed, of the addition to their number, or of the brief parley which had led to it, sat next the water, dark, silent, preoccupied. They had hardly reached midstream when he put his hand over the side, and something slid from it into the flood without splash or sound. As he recovered his position with a sigh, his eyes encountered those of the new-comer, and he started slightly and spoke under his breath:
“Who is this?”
“A figure of exigency, sir,” whispered Sheldon, “hired to speed us the quicker to an end. A supplementary hand and a strong one was needed, it seems, to bring us under night to our goal.”
His Majesty said no more, but his eyes, hollow and tragic, continued to con the stranger. He seemed to him to have arisen, like a sudden cloud, huge and menacing, against the dim horizon of his hopes. That had not ceased to glimmer faintly, to his mind’s strained vision, through all the gloom of this long bitter night. A haunting sense of unreality pursued and half stupefied him. He felt like one in an enchanted wood, always sighting deliverance and always mistaken, yet drawn on by perpetual expectation. There had been something fantastic and illusory in this rapid vanishing of a kingdom; it seemed even now a myth, a jest. He would wake presently and laugh over the strangeness of that very vivid dream. It had been the oddest experience to feel State, authority, service, friendship, a throne, a people, all suddenly slipping from him, as if the bottom, in one unexpected moment, had come out of his universe; to feel himself, when in a condition of normal security, all at once, as in a nightmare, standing exposed and reviled, an alien not only in his own Court, but in his own country. The thing seemed too preposterous for belief, like the fantasy of a dead man witnessing in substance his own funeral, and he existed and moved in the constant expectation of the strange cloud’s dispelling. These shadows of the few faithful who remained to him would explain themselves and their insignificance; the flight by icy starlight would merge itself into the confused flow of a dream; the very curdling of the water would become the ropy web of moisture over sleeping eyeballs. Steadily he had kept his vision concentrated on that line of dawn which was to end the long delusion, and when the new shape rose to block it he felt suddenly as if his hope were overcast, and he awake at length to full consciousness of the truth. From that moment, for some unknown reason, he despaired.
The boat was sped on its course by muscular arms. The regular pump of the oars, churning up liquid gold, the flight of house and palace, vast hilly hulks of shadow that fled behind them into vaster glooms, the silence and the stress seemed to hypnotise the party, so that none spoke or moved. But the eyes of the King, fixed and haggard, never left the face of the nearest oarsman. Even when, with a dive and rush, they shot into the stream that thundered under London Bridge, his gaze did not falter or withdraw itself for a moment. But presently, when they hove into the weltering shadow of the Tower, as if in an uncontrollable impulse he leaned forward, and, touching the stranger on the knee, spoke: “You guess what destinies you carry, my friend?”
Sir Edward Hales started and put out an expostulatory hand; but the great thing, never ceasing in his labours, only mowed and nodded.
“Aye,” he said, “I knew you from the first, James Stuart.”
The King sat back, stiff and motionless.
“No traitor?” he demanded rigidly.
The man gave a short laugh.
“No traitor to my own principles,” he said, “which are to free Judea of the last of thy house and dynasty.”
Sir Edward ground out a killing oath; but the King silenced him. Here was evidently a survival of the fierce fanaticism of the ’forties, and still unappeased by the blood of an ancient holocaust. It seemed a significant, an ominous chance to have encountered him at this pass. A profounder dejection settled upon James’s heart. He spoke as if appealing:
“You wish us gone, my friend?”
“Aye,” said the creature, “I wish you gone.”
“For what reason?”
“So that I may live again.”
“Live?”
“Other than as the scapegoat that bore upon his head the iniquities of the unclean. For twenty-eight years have I sojourned in the desert, nameless, hungry, and abhorred—I, that delivered Judah of her sins. Yet the hour is mine at last. The elect shall receive and justify me. Thy deposition is my restoration, James Stuart. Judge if I rejoice to speed thee on thy way.”
“Mad,” snapped Sir Edward shortly.
The midmost sculler, without stopping pulling, put in his oar, so to speak:
“Let the ranter mouth, master, so he keeps his fists shut on his task and swings to ’t.”
“Not so mad, either,” retorted the giant. Continuing to pull with his left hand, he flung out his right towards the dark blot of the Tower shrinking behind them. “It fades, King,” he cried—“the symbol of thy sovereignty, the shambles sanctified by the blood of Freedom’s martyrs. Harrison, Coke, Peters, and the rest—remember them in the day of thy tribulation, since the Lord hath made of their servant and right hand the instrument of His retribution. They died to testify; but the instrument remains to extirpate. It shall be acclaimed and honoured henceforth in the temples of the Lord.”
The prospect seemed somehow to goad him to more furious exertions; the boat groaned under his strokes. A madman, no doubt, and best humoured and disregarded. He did not speak again, and in silence the journey was continued. Only an oppression as of death sat upon the heart of the King, and his eyes for ever sought behind the great rocking figure some sign of the dawn that his soul so desired and his interests so feared.
But they drove, unpursued and unmolested, down the starry flood; and presently the waters broadened and there blew a little sea-breeze among the scattered shipping. And suddenly Sir Edward Hales, intently alert, gave a sharp low order, and they ran under the counter of a small unobtrusive vessel lying at anchor in the midstream. There were white faces here looking over the bulwarks, and, down in the chains, hands ready to support the fugitives aboard. Then his Majesty, having mounted, and before he turned to withdraw, bade Sir Edward reward his boatmen with a liberal vail, which duty the knight performed. But, even as he received his tribute, and the boat drifted away, the hoary giant rose in his place and cast the money into the water.
“I am paid a thousandfold,” he roared, “in the extirpation of thy race.”
The King, with a ghastly face, leaned forward.
“In God’s name, who are you?” he cried.
The answer came back, mad and jubilant, across the widening interval:
“Ask me who I was, and I reply, Lieutenant-Colonel Joyce, who cut off the King your father’s head upon the scaffold.”