The King's List

by Peter Ransley

  The third picture was a Titian, The Naked Venus. That, too, was one of the prize exhibits at Highpoint, albeit in a secluded room, away from Puritan eyes. Fans stopped fluttering and there were knowing looks as the King turned from the curves of Venus to Anne. Her final gift drew gasps from the crowd. It was a crystal-glass goblet which drew shafts of light from the clouded sun. It was exquisitely engraved with the royal standard and the letters CR.

  ‘It might work,’ she had said to Sam.

  She was returning what she had bought – I had bought – from the Royal Collection. It was her redemption. And that of the Stonehouse family. The crowd was like a vice round me. It was impossible to breathe. The muttering sea became a roar. Someone had put a noose round my neck. No. It was some kind of tray. With it I began to batter my way through the crowd. There was a knife in my hand. Was it my scream, or the ear-splitting screech of the gulls?

  Later, I was told, I managed to get within two feet of her. It took four men to hold me down. By the time they took me away she had gone, part of the King’s party, on their way to Canterbury. The last thing I saw at Dover was Mr Clarke talking earnestly to Richard. At last, it seemed, he had obtained his position.

  38

  London was itself again, doing what it did best: making money and enjoying itself. The cleverest thing Charles did was the same as when he took over the country: nothing. He let Parliament squabble over whose land had been taken over by whom. He was above all that. Of course it was all happening off-stage. Soon it became clear the King would have control over the army again: it was as if the revolution had never happened. The harvest was in. Bread was cheaper again and, naturally, that was due to the King. What London wanted now were circuses.

  It had been starved of theatre for eleven years. The Red Bull, often raided by Puritans, opened with All’s Lost by Lust, a strange choice for an age in which everything seemed to be gained by it. But the biggest free show in town was anticipated to be the execution of the regicides. There were about ten of us imprisoned in the Tower. It had been so long from the arrest through the tedium of the trials that when I was woken on the day of execution it felt like a blessed relief.

  Day after day Richard had questioned me. Partly it was about my soul. He did not believe I was his son. I must have been taken over by the Devil. If I confessed it might save my soul and, crucially for him, go some way to exonerate the Stonehouse name. But partly – mostly – his questioning was on a more secular plane.

  By slow degrees, Highpoint was crumbling into ruin. Alone of the great landed seats, there was no settlement or compromise found by Parliament for the lands Richard had lost. It was not only the poor hill farms I had sold; rich arable lands, meadows, forests and villages had been sold or were heavily in debt. The life-blood of Highpoint had been drained from it. I was dizzy as he placed document after legal document before me.

  ‘Is that your signature?’

  ‘No.’

  He struck me. ‘Is that your signature?’

  ‘It looks very like.’

  He thumb-screwed and racked me. ‘Is that your signature?’

  ‘Yes, yes!’

  But however much he had me beaten I could not tell him where the money was. I had no idea. The treasures of Highpoint were still missing. Lawyers, besieged with similar problems, said it would take years to untangle. I was overawed by what Anne had done. If anyone was in league with the Devil, she was.

  ‘Ask the King’s whore,’ I said.

  He struck me so violently I lost a tooth. She was a saint, he declared. Still in black, she prayed to the martyred King for forgiveness. It beggared belief, but he seemed to believe it.

  So, feeling nothing could be much worse than I had already been through, on a chill October morning I was glad to be taken from my bed to Charing Cross, where a special gibbet had been erected. Some took drink beforehand but I would have none of it. I was drunk on the occasion itself. It was as if I had been preparing for it all my life. Had I not sworn, when I had first come to London, that I would end the journey either with great treasure, or at Paddington Fair?

  The London mob – that great animal, of which I had once been part when it had brought down the King – met me with a deafening roll of sound, jeers, catcalls, cheers, spiced with a hail of rubbish and stones. Some sensitive souls believe that a man should not be executed like a cock, or a bear in a pit. I am not one of them. You have one last chance in life. How you die. The mob knows it. Among the screaming, distorted faces you glimpse the colder, calculating ones, descendants of the Roman crowd, ready to turn their thumbs up or down. I was a double bill. Not only was I a regicide, I had tried to murder my long-suffering wife, whose Royalist son I had killed.

  Major-General Harrison, who told me he was not afraid to meet his Maker, was the first course. Shackled in a cart, I was given a ringside seat. He was drawn to the gibbet in a hurdle, then helped up the steps, dazed and bleeding. He was as stubborn and irascible as he had been when I tried to get him to leave the country. The Ordinary asked if he confessed his sins.

  Harrison cuffed at his bad leg to stop it trembling and stared at the Ordinary as if he was a junior officer on a charge. ‘My sins, sir? Soon I will be at the side of Jesus to judge yours.’

  They hanged him. His voice croaked, his tongue protruded, blood seeped from his bulging eyeballs. Then, like a miracle, the rope snapped. The nubbing-men cut the noose from Harrison’s throat. I prayed he was dead. Mercifully, he made no movement.

  But when they pulled him up his eyes jerked open, wide and staring. He tried to speak but that irascible voice, at least, was dead. They put him on a bench and pulled down his britches. The executioner cut off his prick and balls. There was pandemonium as he held them up to the crowd. One wit cried they were too small for a Major-General. Another bet mine would be twice as big. Next the executioner cut out his bowels. A man with his hands locked into prayer yelled in terror that, among the green and yellow slime, he could see snakes, the regicide’s familiars, writhing to get away. The executioner hastily dumped the guts in a brazier on the scaffold, put there for that purpose.

  ‘Can you not hear them hissing?’ the man screamed.

  At this point, God took mercy on Harrison. His eyes were open, but he saw nothing.

  I was scarcely done with praying for Harrison’s soul before my cart began to roll forward and I had to take concern for my own. But, to my amazement, and the great disappointment of the crowd, I was taken back to the Tower. I was told the list was full that day but I soon discovered the real reason.

  In an age of cruelty my father was a master of it. He had refined his arts in Catholic France, where the Church blessed any form of torture designed to save the victim’s soul.

  It is an old adage among torturers that it is often just as effective, and certainly less wearisome, to show the irons instead of using them. Richard went one better. He showed their effect. He broke me. It was the dark night of my soul. I confessed the Devil from birth, a stray dog that wandered the Tower as my familiar. They slaughtered the dog and all but slaughtered me. I confessed everything except what he wanted to know. If I had had the answer to that question I would have told him, but it was as if the Devil himself had spirited away everything from Highpoint: land, money, treasures, leaving only the shell to crumble away and rot. I confessed that. That night I was crazy enough to believe it.

  At least they let me have visitors. Scogman came, full of his usual plans. There would be a regiment of former colleagues on the occasion. A rescue would be effected. I scarcely listened but when, with some diffidence, he brought out a crumpled piece of paper which he said was a message from Little Dick, I seized it. There was an incomprehensible scribble, followed by a U, then a very shaky D which collapsed into another scribble.

  ‘Why! He is getting along famously,’ I said.

  ‘Is he?’ said Scogman doubtfully.

  ‘There is a “B”,’ I hazarded, ‘an “L-E-S”, then “U”, followed by his name.’
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br />   ‘Well, now you point it out, sir, I see ’em.’ Scogman’s eyes shone with pride. ‘You think the little brat will be able to write?’

  ‘No doubt of it,’ I said, smoothing out the paper and folding it carefully. ‘This is treasure. These are words that will change the world.’

  He thought me mad then. So did Sam when he sidled through the doorway, apprehensive of his reception, surprised when I held him and kissed him, but I told him I understood. She was like a candle to a moth. He grew even more uncomfortable when I congratulated him on the goblet, mumbling that she had come to him with another commission from the King. It was she who told him he must go to see me.

  ‘She said that? Did she say anything about me?’ He shook his head. ‘Nothing? Nothing again?’

  His stammer, which success had controlled, came back in full force. ‘She was very … a-a-agitated.’

  ‘Agitated? Was she. Was she indeed. Agitated. Well, Sam, when you see her again, please be good enough to tell her that I share her agitation.’

  They picked me up from the hurdle on which I had been drawn to Charing Cross, all the bravura I had shown on my previous visit gone. I struggled to stand up, let alone walk to the scaffold. But I clutched tight hold of a small wad of paper, the first words of Little Dick, or thereabouts, words, I prayed, not that would change the world, but make it a little better. Deafened by the noise, half-blinded by blood trickling from a gash in my forehead, I would have confessed all my sins to the waiting Ordinary, but for a jeer from the crowd.

  ‘Where is your Good Old Cause now?’

  I looked at the child’s scribble in my hand. ‘Here!’ I yelled, putting my hand on my heart. ‘And here,’ putting my hand on my head.

  ‘And here!’ shouted Scogman, lifting his hand.

  ‘And here!’ John Wildman, who had written An Agreement of the People, raised his hand.

  ‘Here!’ A shaky stick went up from the old man who had fought street battles with me in the Trained Band.

  More hands went up. It was not the regiment Scogman had promised, but it was enough to make the officials nervous that the mob was turning.

  ‘What is that paper he is holding?’ screamed one.

  The Ordinary snatched the child’s scribble and dropped it as if it was hot. ‘It is the Devil’s writing. Burn it.’

  While it was being picked up with tongs and taken to the brazier, I slipped a sovereign I had hidden into the hand of the hangman. ‘Be a good fellow and do a proper job.’

  The coin was swallowed up in his hand, the rough hemp put round my neck as careful as if it was fitted by a tailor. Below me, the gaping, suddenly silent faces – Mr Pepys, of course, hand twitching as if he was already scribbling his neat shorthand, the Ordinary gabbling, then my stomach heaving, the clouds boiling like a raging sea roaring in my ears and lungs. Then sweet stillness, merciful blackness.

  39

  Unmerciful light, blinding as the pain. My soiled britches being ripped off. The hangman had cheated me. Just as carefully as he had put the hemp round my throat, he cupped my balls in his hand. They held me down. No need to stop my voice. It had gone. Every breath I took was a searing agony. The crowd erupted as he showed them the knife. I shut my eyes. Get on with it. Please get on with it.

  As quickly as it had swelled, the crowd’s roar died to a questioning, wondering murmur.

  ‘In the King’s name!’

  I could see nothing except the knife, the hangman still gripping me, until there was the rattle of boots on the scaffold. Richard stood above me, holding a piece of paper. Even at that moment my printer’s eye noted it as the best Dutch weave, with a seal swinging from it. With Richard were two men in the King’s livery. One of them was saying that release was to be effected immediately. When Richard demanded to see the King he was told he was in the country: at Greenwich, or Oatlands or Hampton Court.

  It was a trick, of course. Another of Richard’s tricks to get out of me what I could not tell him. I pleaded with them to finish it, but no sound came out of my throat. They put a sheet over me and carried me on a litter through the crowd. I struggled, hoping that the mob would put an end to me, but they watched in bewildered silence as I was put on the floor of a coach, thrown this way and that before I was pulled out. I was at the back of Whitehall, that great labyrinth of buildings where John Thurloe had ruled for ten years and which the King was using as his palace.

  She was standing there. Still in black. A half-mask and hood covered her face. It began to dawn on me then, but before I could open my mouth I caught the sickly sweet smell of laudanum as a rag was clamped over my face.

  The world came back gradually, in fits and starts, bits and pieces, the jogging of the coach, the creak of leather, a clean shirt, buttons in the wrong holes, the smell of rosemary.

  ‘How …’ It was meant to be ‘how did you get the pardon?’ but it came out as a strangulated croak. Still she understood it. I could see from the look in her face. We never needed words.

  ‘Not now. I thought the laudanum would let you sleep until …’

  She pointed out of the window. We were in the flat marsh country of the Thames, with dykes and, here and there, a few sheep lifting their heads, their bells ringing eerily in the evening mist. In the distance, where the widening mouth of the river met the sea, was the ghostly line of the masts and sails of Gravesend. She told me the pardon was conditional on me leaving the country immediately. She was horribly nervous. She kept glancing back down the road, as if the King might already have changed his mind.

  I had forgotten how vulnerable she could appear, the brittleness of her voice, the tiny shiver of her lips before she spoke. It was an act, of course. Designed to stop me asking any further questions.

  I tried again. ‘Why …’

  She stared out of the window as if she had not heard the word, or the noise from my throat. I leaned over to touch her. She shrank back with a shudder. I saw it then. She was getting rid of me. It was because of her I had signed the death warrant. This was to ease her conscience, salve her soul so she could go back to her King. I managed a word then. It tore at my raw throat.

  ‘Whore.’

  She hammered at the front of the coach. I only just managed to catch the strap to avoid being flung forward. ‘Use that word again and you can get out of the coach.’

  She was shaking, constantly twisting the ringlets framing her face, so agitated I could feel her breath. I opened the door. A startled sheep scuttered across the marsh. I would take a chance. I had always taken my chances. But my legs would not obey me, the marsh mist had an October clamminess and I could feel that hand on my balls. I shut the door.

  ‘I am sorry, Martin,’ she called to the coachman. ‘But please hurry. You must catch the tide.’

  Her voice became warm and considerate. The servants would do anything for her. She treated them like human beings. Richard had had no chance: I almost felt sorry for him. Martin lashed at the horses and for a while she was silent, holding on to the strap, staring out at the marsh and the leaden line of the river as it gradually fused into the lowering clouds. When she did speak she did not look at me. At first I thought she was speaking to herself.

  ‘Do you know what it has been like? Do you? Have you any idea? When I went to see Samuel and he told me that you had gone to exchange yourself for Luke, I knew it was true. Only a fool like you would do that.’

  Her voice choked in her throat. I put my arm out to her but she shook her head violently. The words, dammed up for months, poured out of her. Did I think she believed Richard’s lies? She did not need Samuel to tell her Richard killed Luke. She determined to continue what my mother had begun before I was born. Destroy the Stonehouses. The story had always fascinated her. How, after Lord Stonehouse had caused her father’s death by ruining his estate, my mother was determined to ruin him. It haunted her. She wore black, just like my mother did. Nothing attracted men more than black. And grief. For the first time she smiled. It was edged with bitterness, but it
was a smile.

  ‘In Holland your father could scarcely keep his hands off me.’

  The coach clattered over cobbles, down Gravesend High Street. She had been so deep in her story she came to with a start, her agitation returning. She glanced up and down the street, at every cart and carriage, as the coach made its way to the quay.

  ‘My father –’

  ‘He was too late.’

  ‘Too –’

  ‘The King saw me.’

  She still had not answered my first question about how she had got the pardon, but we were suddenly caught up in a rush of last-minute boarders, officials, papers being scrutinised, sailors shouting. Among the chaos her agitation vanished. She was an oasis of calm. As always, she had organised everything perfectly, from booking our passage to obtaining papers. We were Thomas Black, Esq., and his wife once more. Our papers were in order. It would not have mattered if they were not. She was charm itself, full of apologies at being so late, but Mr Black was ill and needed help. The fact that it was true only increased my bitterness about her evasions.

  As soon as we were on board her smiles went out like a snuffed candle. Her anxiety returned when there was a delay. Nobody knew the reason. It was the tide or the weather. Or they were waiting for someone. She moved restlessly among passengers waving goodbye to people standing on the quay. Her eyes kept returning to the entrance of the quay. By now my voice, or at least a hoarse ghost of it, was returning.

  ‘What is it? I am free to leave. What are you frightened of?’

  She turned on me with a sudden violence. ‘The King was easy. Much easier than I expected. I could look at him like this.’ She gave me a glance: a woman secretly observing a man, then, surprised, jerking away in confusion. ‘Or this.’ A longer, lingering look that made my heart beat faster. ‘Or this.’ She lifted her lowered face with a look of such intense suffering it would have pierced any man’s heart. ‘How can I when my husband is about to –’