[Master Mercurius 03] - Dishonour and Obey

by Graham Brack

  As to my chamber, it was comfortable, and I would not have minded living there. It was not as extensive as my Leiden rooms, and there was no desk at which to work, but in compensation it was very warm and the bed was soft and well-furnished with fine curtains fringed in gold. Lest this be thought extravagant, allow me to add that they were gold in colour only, being of dyed wool, but the effect was very fine.

  The itinerary prepared for us stated that we were to be conducted into the presence of His Majesty King Charles at five o’clock, after which the majority of the party would retire to enjoy a meal in one of the galleries while the King, his brother the Duke of York, and a select group of close advisers were to have a more intimate meal with the Heer Van Langenburg and a small number of his party at which some of the arrangements would be confirmed or amended. Since this meant that dinner was only a couple of hours away, I was surprised when a servant brought me a platter of meat and bread and a small barrel of wine.

  ‘I’ll return for the empty in the morning, sir,’ he told me. If this was what went on throughout the palace, it was no wonder that the affairs of England were so chaotically handled, for much of the government must have been in the hands of sots.

  One of the great advantages of being a man of the cloth is that I never have to spend time debating what to wear on any occasion, since my black robe will always serve; indeed, if I showed up wearing anything else I should invite comment. I therefore took out a clean black gown and fixed the other on a peg to brush it, which I was doing when I was interrupted by a pretty maid who curtseyed.

  ‘I would do that for you, sir,’ she said, ‘or any other laundry that you might have.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’m used to doing it myself. What is your name?’

  ‘Why, sir, I’m Meg,’ she answered. ‘I am to serve you and the other young gentleman.’

  ‘The other gentleman?’

  ‘Him with the orange rosette on his hat, sir.’

  This was a fellow by the name of Constantijn Wevers, to whom I had not long been introduced myself. I was not at all sure what mijnheer Wevers’ role in the party was, for I took him for some type of military man. He was silent and solitary, but I had noticed him gazing about himself during the welcome as if committing the docks to memory.

  ‘Mijnheer Wevers?’ I said.

  ‘If that’s him with the fine yellow hair, sir,’ said Meg. ‘I hope if you have need of a girl for any purpose during your stay you’ll think of me.’

  Now, I was not as versed in the ways of the world as many of my age, but young Meg left me in no doubt of the kind of need she was willing to meet. I did not propose to make use of these services and, to be frank, was more than a little surprised to find the suggestion made to a clergyman, but perhaps the Church of England is more liberal than I had been led to suppose. There were several reasons why I should refuse Meg’s offer. These included very limited funds, a disinclination to avoidable sin, and a strong suspicion that women who were so free with their favours were likely to be poxed to the very armpits, and a clergyman who finds himself suffering from the distempers of Venus has some awkward explaining to do.

  On the other hand, it seemed impolite to say this to her face, so I thanked her for her offer and said that I expected to be very busy.

  As things turned out, I was going to be busier than I could have imagined.

  I left my room at the appointed hour and found Van Langenburg in the corridor outside.

  ‘Where’s your hat, man?’ he barked.

  ‘Hat? Are we going out?’

  He sighed a deep, exasperated sigh. ‘You are one of those who will sup with the King tonight. You’ll need a hat.’

  ‘Surely even the English do not wear a hat in the presence of their King,’ I replied.

  Van Langenburg sighed again. ‘No, but he’ll expect you to take it off as you bow to him. And you can’t take it off if you don’t have it on. So, don’t argue and get a hat!’

  I rummaged in my trunk for something suitable. In the normal run of things, I wear a small black cap, changing to a larger square cap when I am preaching. However, I had not brought that with me, and the only other hat I had was a broad brimmed hat designed to keep the rain from my face. Reasoning that I should appear ridiculous meeting the King wearing such an everyday garment, I decided to wear my small cap and carry the large one, completing my bow with it in my hand. The King would not expect a minister to remove his skullcap, I was sure.

  The discovery that I was one of the small number who would dine with the King had taken me so much by surprise that I had completely forgotten to ask why, nor did I have the opportunity to do so as the Heer Van Langenburg led our party through twisting corridors and up and down small flights of stairs in pursuit of a palace official.

  We were greeted at the final staircase by the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Arlington, a fussy and pompous man who wore a patch over his nose to disguise a large scar earned in battle. I had been told something about Arlington during the voyage across, because there existed some jealousy between him and Sir William Temple.

  Arlington had been sent to The Hague less than two years earlier on exactly the same mission as we were now undertaking, to procure the marriage of William and Mary, but had failed dismally. I could immediately see why that might have been, for William was a straightforward man who preferred plain speaking, and Arlington was a born schemer who had inserted one or two clauses of his own devising into the draft treaty, chiefly that William should disclose the names of any Englishman known to be disaffected to the King and should secretly co-operate in entrapping them; to which, if Van Langenburg were to be believed, William had replied that it was beneath the dignity of any King to proceed secretly in so dishonourable a manner, so that he could not believe that his uncle Charles should desire it of him.

  If William genuinely thought that, he was a bigger fool than I thought, but I suspect it was just a ruse to avoid discussions, for when Arlington raised the question of a marriage with the Princess Mary, William replied that he was not yet in a position to keep a wife as he would wish, causing Arlington to return home with his tail firmly between his legs. In fact, Van Langenburg suspected that if anyone wished his embassy to fail, it would be Arlington.

  On the other hand, Arlington was keen to avoid any entanglement with France, against the wishes of some of Charles’ circle who favoured such an alliance very much. Although they had been relegated to the fringes in recent months, largely because being an ally of France had proved ruinously expensive over the past few years, there were some — chiefly aligned behind the King’s brother, the Duke of York — who still pursued a marriage between Mary and some leading Frenchman, the difficulty here being the short list of available candidates.

  King Louis, while willing to bed anything that wore a skirt, was already married, and his brother, the Duke of Orleans, was a notorious sodomite who was one of the few in skirts whom Louis left alone. The Dauphin was already engaged to be married, and while the Duke of Orleans had a son, Philippe, he was not yet three years old. This circumstance did not seem to deter the French party in the least. I have attended very few marriages, but I think I should be uncomfortable in presiding at one where the groom cannot reach above the bride’s knee.

  King Louis had a substantial number of royal bastards whom he was keen to marry off, ideally to rich heiresses, but the problem here was that Charles thought it beneath his dignity to marry his daughter to an illegitimate man, and Louis thought it beneath his to accept a daughter-in-law as poor as Mary would be. This was an undoubted difficulty for the French party, but they might well try to break off any Dutch matchmaking in order to buy some time for a suitable Frenchman to appear.

  Arlington was making a little speech of welcome of his own. Being an English diplomat he was, of course, speaking French, so many there had no idea what he said. This, it seemed to Van Langenburg, was a deliberate slight, because Arlington could speak Dutch tolerably well, being married to a Dutchwoman.
In fact, his wife’s grandfather and William’s grandfather were brothers, but don’t ask me to tell you what relation they were to each other, because all this “once removed” stuff gets me in knots.

  Anyway, after a while Arlington concluded his welcome, and Van Langenburg replied (in Dutch), expressing our delight at being there and our regret that Arlington did not, apparently, speak Dutch, since this must deprive him of the pleasure of conversing with his wife in her native tongue. Arlington looked like he had swallowed a beggar’s spittle, but interestingly he did so before the translator told him in English what Van Langenburg had said, which rather made a point, I thought.

  We were conducted into the King’s presence. This was a source of great anxiety to me, because I had no idea what Charles looked like and I feared that I might make my obeisance to the wrong man. As it happened, there was a tall chap with an enormous black wig sitting on a gold throne on a dais at the end of a long crimson carpet, which was a pretty good hint that he might be the King.

  Each of us was introduced in turn by Van Langenburg, and then Charles said a few words. Having lived in the Low Countries for some years, Charles could manage a pretty speech in Dutch, though he must have learned it by heart because I never heard him speak the language again.

  At last we were invited to sit at table and shown to our places. The Bishop of London said Grace, and once the King had picked up his spoon we all tucked in. I have to admit that after our sea voyage I was not quite as hungry as I might have been, but I ate some bread. The English have a great love of sweet things, so there were any number of pies and pastries, many containing excellent fruit.

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see mijnheer Wevers. He ate heartily, spoke little, and caused some consternation when he asked for small beer rather than the jugs from which the rest of us were drinking.

  ‘You don’t like our beer?’ said a big, bluff Englishman opposite him.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Wevers, ‘I don’t like anyone’s beer.’

  ‘Wine, then?’

  ‘Forgive me, but I drink sparingly. It doesn’t agree with me.’

  The concept of moderation seems not to have taken hold in England, but our hosts appeared to assume Wevers suffered from some constitutional weakness and took no offence at his eccentricity. I wondered briefly whether the raven-haired Meg had offered herself to him yet and whether his abstemiousness ran in that direction too. I suspected it might. Wevers had the look of a man with a mission who was determined to keep his guard up until it was accomplished.

  There being no ladies present that evening, the party continued well into the night and I finally flopped into bed between two and three in the morning. I was not drunk, merely desperately tired, but protocol dictated that we could not retire until the King did so, and he showed every evidence of being committed to a long drinking session until that fellow Pepys informed him that Moll Davis was returned from the theatre and waiting in his chamber, at which point Charles rose from his chair, bowed solemnly to us and raced for the door as fast as his long legs would carry him. I caught a glimpse of his younger brother James, whose face was twisted with disgust. Whatever the outward appearance, I was sure that those two lacked much fraternal feeling.

  Van Langenburg suggested that the two parties should breakfast informally on the next morning — by which he really meant separately — to which our hosts were only too happy to agree.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I woke early and passed a pleasant hour forgetting all about our mission, immersed in a good book. In tribute to our hosts, I had brought a copy of Scala Perfectionis by the Englishman Walter Hilton, who lived nearly three hundred years earlier, and was a little ruffled when I was called to set it aside and come downstairs to breakfast. It did not take me long to see that there was a heated discussion going on between Van Langenburg and a man called Vlisser. I don’t think I’ve mentioned him before, so this may be the time to introduce him.

  Vlisser was an Amsterdam merchant, somehow important in the East India Company, and reputed to be one of the richest men in our country (and therefore the world). Vlisser was no fool when it came to money, and his job was to squeeze the English for a good dowry, managing the discreet sale of anything that could be converted quickly to ready cash. William was not an avaricious man, but like many who have been brought up short of money, he was determined not to be in that position again.

  Since I dislike confrontation, I paused before entering the room when I heard the raised voices. As is often the case, people who are arguing think that they have dropped their voices sufficiently to keep the dispute private, even when they can be clearly heard in the street outside. I did not deliberately eavesdrop, but I could not help overhearing the point at issue.

  They were clearly talking about an Englishman to whom they had been making regular payments. Van Langenburg was arguing that they should continue this practice to ensure the success of their mission, whereas Vlisser disagreed.

  ‘If he is going to be paid anyway, what reason does he have to conclude the matter quickly — or, indeed, at all?’ Vlisser demanded.

  ‘But if we stop the payments he may withdraw his support, and who knows whether we can bring this match about without him?’

  ‘Surely the advantages of the marriage are self-evident. It is in his own interest to promote it.’

  ‘But does he see that?’ Van Langenburg countered.

  ‘You’re the Ambassador,’ Vlisser remarked. ‘You’ll have to speak to him privately. Tell him there’ll be no more retainers, just a lump sum when the marriage is completed.’

  ‘I don’t have the authority for that.’

  ‘The payments are already in place, aren’t they? Just tell him from now on we’re holding them in trust, and he’ll receive them when Mary is married to William. You don’t need any permission for that.’

  Van Langenburg did not reply, so I took that as my cue to enter and bid them a cheery good morning. I received two grunts in answer.

  I sat at the table and helped myself to some warm bread and small beer. I suppose it was none of my business, but I could not help wondering about whom they had been speaking.

  King Charles was allegedly fully occupied that morning, though one of the servants informed me that His Majesty and mornings did not mix well, and he usually lay abed until noon recovering from the evening before.

  His brother James was up and about, but closeted with that man Pepys, discussing some pressing matter affecting the navy, of which James had previously been some kind of admiral. Although debarred now that he was a Roman Catholic, he retained a keen interest and Pepys made it his business to ensure that James was kept fully informed on naval matters. Prince Rupert, the King’s cousin, was now head of the navy, but since he had been heavily involved in the recent war against us it had been deemed politic to send him on a tour of ports on the south coast which would last exactly as long as we were in London.

  Having no prospect of any useful activity that morning, we determined upon making a tour of the city. Van Langenburg excused himself, saying that he had letters to write, but the rest of us strolled out of Whitehall Palace and went to gawp at the buildings there.

  It would be churlish not to admit that London is a very fair city; and even then, with much of the rebuilding not yet completed, there were some remarkable edifices and some particularly fine churches. These were, of course, wasted upon the English, who are an irreligious people, but we paused to marvel at the Cathedral of St Paul, which will be a grand and elegant affair, if it is ever finished. We met Sir Christopher Wren, who is charged with the construction of it, who told us that it will eventually require upwards of a million pounds for its completion. For a moment I thought Vlisser was about to offer to do the work at a cut rate, but he held his peace.

  We left the Cathedral to return to Whitehall for our dinner, and were walking along Fleet Street when there was a sudden rumpus. There were some stalls along the side of the road, and we had separated into smaller gro
ups to look at the wares on sale. My eye was drawn to a bookseller’s, and I was about to propose a diversion when two men grabbed Preuveneers and cried out that he was a thief, demanding that someone send for the watch. The old man appeared dumbfounded and protested volubly in Dutch that he had done nothing and was being molested without cause, but the men refused to let him go until the watch had him in charge.

  In a few minutes, a sergeant and two constables arrived and appeared intent on taking him before the magistrates without delay, while the stallkeeper demanded that the thief’s hand should be cut off. Judging by Preuveneers’ reaction, he must have had a better knowledge of English than I had given him credit for.

  Now, I will confess that I had done nothing to assist him at this point, largely because I could not think of anything useful to do, but Wevers took command, calling Bouwman to him to translate.

  ‘If this man is a thief,’ he said, ‘where is your proof? What has he stolen?’

  ‘He is a thieving foreigner,’ the stallkeeper explained, with rather more emphasis on the noun than on the adjective.

  ‘But what do you say he has stolen?’ Wevers persisted.

  ‘One of my pieces of silverwork.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘How should I know? I saw him take something from the front of the stall and slip it under his coat.’

  Wevers turned his attention to the sergeant. ‘Mijnheer Preuveneers will make no objection to being searched, if it is done decently and in good order.’

  The sergeant motioned his men forward and they duly stripped Preuveneers to his shirt and hose, patting him down to check for hidden jewellery and carefully examining all his clothes, but they found nothing there.

  ‘It’s not here,’ the sergeant concluded.

  ‘Nor should it be,’ Wevers continued, ‘for I never saw him reach out to the board. Mijnheer Preuveneers is an honest man and has been falsely, perhaps even maliciously, accused, as I shall make a point of saying to the King when we meet him this afternoon.’