‘Yes,’ said Charles pensively, ‘that was when it all began, first Scotland and then down into England.’
‘And mighty well did Sandy do out of it.’ Hurry’s attention was still on the really important matter. ‘God himself made Earl of Leven in no time – and all I ever got out of it was a barren knighthood, won when I could stand those smug English gentlemen-amateurs no longer, for I’d had the bad luck to be quartered with the Parliament armies in England. They were always sneering at their Scottish allies, particularly those from Aberdeen.’
‘I’m supposed to have some faint appreciation of wit myself,’ said Charles gravel, ‘but I have never understood the intense amusement given by the name of Aberdeen.’
‘May God of His goodness keep Your Majesty in that blessed state of mind! Those sanctimonious hypocritical English gentry’s one idea of good fellowship was to tell a funny story about a man from Aberdeen, and always to show his meanness about money. That came well from Mr John Hampden, rich enough to buy all Aberdeen, and too mean to pay a trifling tax towards the King’s navy! Objected “for conscience sake” – pah! As if the rest of us hadn’t worse objections than conscience to paying money! But here was this damned conscientious objector, who’d never seen active service in his life, as my commanding officer. With a fellow like that, what chance could I get for promotion?’
‘Or for a woman and a bottle or two, either, hey, Sir John? You’ve finished your wine?’
‘Too fast to notice it, sir. May I double the reckoning before I pay it, for the honour of Aberdeen?’
Charles graciously accepted, and he and Hurry took two cups more each to compensate for Sophie’s refusal to have any more. She was disgusted by Charles’ manners towards ladies. She might freeze sitting here on the bank for all he’d care. Yet she dared not complain nor even call attention to herself; the training of her many elder brothers had been too severe, and she dreaded lest Charles should think her ‘that nuisance of a girl’. And only a moment since he had been talking to her, looking at her, as though she were the most delightful woman in the world! This turncoat soldier had spoilt it all.
She silently endured her chilling toes and fingers and tip of her nose as the warmth of the wine died down and her pride would not let her renew it, and the air got colder and colder and that glorious moment just now when she had been sure that Charles wanted her for his queen, the Queen of Great Britain, got colder too, so cold it must be quite dead by now, and the two men talked and talked, Hurry telling how from the first he had longed to serve under the leaders on the other side, ‘nobles who’d fought in the German wars, George Goring and Wilmot, above all that Prince of cavalry leaders, Rupert of the Rhine! It was more than flesh and blood could stand, and so one night in June I rode for it instead, to the King’s camp at Oxford, to the Prince himself.
‘God, what a ride we had with Rupert! I was beside him as we rode over Magdalen Bridge, he on that black horse of his, and all the townsfolk running out to gape at him. Fifty miles all through the enemy’s own country, and soundly beating them three times over in less than two days, and leaving Mr Conscientious Hampden with his deat’n-wound at Chalgrove Field – while we trotted back to Oxford with a loss of only twelve men in all, and I got my spurs and promotion and saw myself, poor fool, as the coming man on the King’s side!’
He gave a short laugh like a bark, and a tug at his scrubby moustache as he glanced sideways to see how the young man beside him was taking it.
Charles was taking it well, for he much preferred impudence to professions of disinterested loyalty, a sentiment he had begun to distrust, having found how far from disinterested were many of his immediate followers. This hard-bitten rough rider was being frank on purpose, no doubt, to produce a right impression, but it was something to have such impressions tried out on him with laughter rather than with tears of devotion.
‘I had good reason to be grateful to you,’ he said, ‘for I remember getting a half-holiday from my tutor at Merton on the strength of Chalgrove Field.’
A hot June day it had been, and he had spent it fishing in the Cherwell with the new rod his father had just given him for his thirteenth birthday – but it hadn’t made up (nothing could do that) for not being allowed to ride out with Rupert, his tall, arrogant, superbly adventurous cousin, ten years his senior and Commander of all the King’s cavalry, on that lightning foray into the surrounding hills.
In that strange Oxford, transformed into court and camp, young Charles had lodged with his mother at Merton and done lessons in the little rooms over the gateway, watched the gun- park at Magdalen and the undergraduates drilling in Christ Church meadow, and wished passionately he were a few years older. How this tall fellow was bringing it all back to him!
‘So that’s how you came over to us,’ he said. ‘But what prevented your coming further with us? Was Rupert the Devil himself too slow to keep pace with Colonel Hurry?’
Hurry’s debonair ease had darkened on him and he did not at once answer.
‘I fell out with the Prince at Marston Moor,’ he blurted out at last. ‘I had interspersed the cavalry with musketeers in the Swedish manner; it was what Gustavus would have done, but—’
‘But Gustavus had been dead more than a dozen years, and Rupert was alive,’ Charles insinuated ironically.
‘Alive and kicking, Your Majesty, and I got kicked for it. There was no hope of advancement for me after that. Besides, the whole of the North was lost by Marston Moor, and all Scotland held by the Covenanters against the King; and what was to happen to my little place of Pitfichie in Aberdeenshire and my wife, honest decent body that she is, installed there with a fresh brat every year or so, though all girls, worse luck, five of them now and not a single boy yet to carry on the name I mean to make so proud for him, – was she to pay fines on my account to the Covenanters when she’d barely enough to get porridge for her brats?’
‘So you heard the bells ringing, “Turn again, Sir John Hurry”?’
There was a saturnine note in Charles’ voice which Hurry recklessly ignored, now well away on hot wine and the headier fumes of egoism.
‘Yes, sir, and turn I did, a Covenanter all over again, and swore allegiance to Archibald Campbell, Marquis of Argyll, as head of the Scots Government, and was given a new cavalry command with a brand-new hope of getting reward at last. How the Devil who tempted me must have laughed! For this was my reward – that at that very moment, when all was lost for the King in Scotland, Montrose pushed north alone into the land, collected a handful of Highlanders together, swung them here, there and everywhere, now east, now west, smashed the Covenanters at Tippermuir, at Aberdeen, at Fyvie, at Alford and Auldearn, swooped down over the winter mountains where no army had ever passed before, and routed Argyll himself, the old Campbell fox, out of his lair at Inveraray, drove the best part of the Campbell clan into the sea at Inverlochy, and – Christ! what wouldn’t I have given to be with the man who outwitted and out-marched myself when I’d all but got him at Dundee!’
There was no ‘playing up’ now in Hurry’s tones; here if ever was the real man, the born adventurer who could forgive himself for the most unscrupulous desertion in search of luck, but not for the ill luck that had landed him against instead of with Montrose.
‘There was he doing all the things I had longed to do myself ever since I was a schoolboy!’
And that Charles too had longed to do as a schoolboy, sitting disconsolate over his books in that sleepy western air of Oxford while news came crashing into the little university town of one furious battle after another fought up in those mountains of the north and won against incredible odds by Montrose and his small band of Highlanders.
‘All this must be God’s work, for it is above the power of man,’ Lord Digby, his father’s handsome secretary, had exclaimed, his blue eyes blazing with excitement so that he looked like the warrior Archangel Michael himself.
But Digby had not behaved like him; it had been mainly his doing, Rupert said, tha
t Montrose had never got the backing from the English Royalists that would have helped him to defeat the Parliament armies as well as the Covenanters. What a fool Digby had been – and this turncoat swashbuckler too, belatedly bemoaning his ‘luck’!
‘There was I,’ he was saying, staring like a sick dog into his empty cup, ‘with Argyll, a Commander-in-Chief like an old woman in his skull-cap and black robes, a limping lawyer-brained coward, a Campbell! Baillie at least was a soldier, though a stout stodgy old slow-coach, and Argyll carted about on all the campaigns a flock of hen-witted civilians as a pocket committee of the Government – I could vomit at the thought of them, and of his bilious face squinting in through the flap of Baillie’s tent at dawn on the morning of Kilsyth, insisting on calling his precious Committee together and botching the whole battle with his chop-logical civilian notions before ever it began.
‘I swear it was the beginning of that battle that made me change sides again – not its ending, with Argyll flying headlong into England and Baillie across the sea, and Montrose the acknowledged conqueror of Scotland, the King’s Lieutenant-Governor, with his camp a royal Court, and all the statesmen and poets acclaiming him as the man who had worked a year of miracles, and brought the Golden Age.’
‘Alas, Sir John Jonah! Was it your second advent to our side that tipped down the ship of state when it was so fairly launched? Wasn’t it within one month of the victory of Kilsyth that Montrose’s small remnant of an army was surprised and massacred at Philiphaugh?’
Charles’ urbanity was not able to resist making this thrust. He had played the affable young prince long enough, and was sick of the role; was he never to show anybody what he felt?
He showed it now; his smile was as sardonic as his cousin Rupert’s could be.
For one instant the two men looked at each other with their eyes bared. Hurry could have killed Charles for calling him Jonah.
‘Your Majesty is right to condemn me,’ he said slowly, ‘for to be unlucky is the greatest of all crimes. Call a man a scoundrel and he can shake it off with a smile or a blow, but call him unlucky and you poison the sap in his veins, you destroy all hope and belief in his life, for he knows then it would be better for him if he had never been born. Failure is shabby, shameful, dreary beyond words. Who does not shun the man who has failed? My crime was not in joining the winning side, but that never did I join it in time to share any of its gay triumphs. Just as I missed Rupert’s great charge at Edgehill, to be with him at the breaking of his power and prestige at Marston Moor, so I missed every one of Montrose’s six astounding victories, missed all the night rides, the forced marches over the mountains, the jolly forays upon fat purse-proud psalm-singing towns snugly locking up their stores in the security of the Covenant troops (and finding what that security was worth!) – missed all of it, all, – to share only his last fight, his only defeat.’
He was mad to be saying this, to be rubbing in the very impression of ill luck which he longed to avoid. His hasty temper had run away with him again, and now he found it impossible to say what he had been leading up to all this time – that he had disliked Hampden, quarrelled with Rupert, despised Baillie, and loathed Argyll, but that now at last he had found his leader in Montrose. ‘I’ve fought against him and I’ve fought with him, and I ask nothing better than to go on doing the latter for the rest of my life.’ Those were the words he had wanted to say, but now they stuck in his throat. They were true, but he was angry, and they would not sound true.
He was not the only one to be angry. Charles was already smiling good-humouredly at him again, thinking this was an honest rascal as rascals go, and telling him that the luck would surely turn for them all novv. But Sophie was speechless from rage as well as from necessity. They had never once noticed her – and she had never heard anything so shamelessly abandoned as the sentiments of this low adventurer, which Charles so obviously approved.
Thank heaven she had had her eyes opened to her cousin’s true character in time. In time for what? Well, that was not quite clear, but no doubt God would punish such scheming selfishness, ‘and then they will find themselves on the wrong side,’ she told herself, then they would know that God was on the side of the right and would not permit it to fail.
But was He? Was there not some inkling of truth in those dreadful opinions – that to be unlucky, to be a failure, was worse than the worst crime; that men might hate you for being wicked, but would only despise you for being defeated? They would do worse than despise you, they would forget all about you, as these two men were forgetting her now, a princess and pretty, but nobody who mattered, the youngest brat of twelve, whose fortune was £40 a year.
She had often told herself these unpalatable truths, wondering how the chance would come to her to change them, for it must be that she would change them. She could not be herself, she, Sophie, the youngest but also the cleverest in the family, – well, no, not quite that, for there was always Eliza (though what use were her ‘heavy guns of learning’ as Rupert called them?) – but at any rate the most aware and the most determined, and, what was better, growing prettier every day, – she could not be all this and not, at last, become Somebody,
But now all that she had thought and hoped had suffered this harsh travesty from a crude Scots adventurer.
She had been longing to meet Montrose, and now she did not want to, for she might feel him superior not only to Hurry but to herself. And it would not be very satisfactory to see him for the first time at the meeting between him and his new King; she had a notion that at such a moment he might not have much attention to spare for herseif.
VI
Charles had met Montrose briefly last year in Paris, where Charles had been staying with his mother. She had not approved of the Marquis’ plans, since they were a stumbling-block in the way of reconcilement with the ‘Moderate Covenanters’ who were then beginning to come round to the Royalist side. So she had discouraged Charles’ friendship with him, though she tried to conciliate the great soldier by offering his niece Lilias Napier a place at the little Court of exiles, but this the proud Scot had forbidden Lilias to accept, for in his blunt opinion ’so lewd and worthless a place’ was no fit training for a girl still in her teens.
In this he showed himself a wise uncle but, as Henrietta Maria had already complained, no diplomat, for her ardent angry busy little brain became fixed in the notion that he was her enemy and working against her influence over her son.
That influence was strong; Charles had not seen his father since he was fifteen, his brothers and sisters were scattered, three of them in an English prison as his father had been, and his mother was the only firm relic of the intensely happy and tender home he had known in childhood. She was very apt to scold him as though he were a naughty little boy, and, what he minded much worse, to burst into tears, but she was passionately devoted to him. With their family life wrecked round them, he felt tenderly responsible for her. He greatly admired her amusing brilliance, had generally found it saved trouble to follow her advice, and his father’s last commands had been that he should be ‘totally directed by his mother’.
But it was something of a relief to have been at The Hague all this winter staying with his brother-in-law, Prince William, only four years or so older than himself, while she remained in Paris. It was also a relief to Hyde and others of his counsellors.
In his mother’s absence, but with Lauderdale at head of the new Moderate Covenanters dogging his every step, Charles had ordered Hyde to write to Montrose at Brussels to ask his help and arrange a secret meeting with him.
This was the letter that Rupert had found Hyde writing when he called on him at The Hague on the afternoon of his ride to Helvoetsluys for his departure to Ireland. With it, Charles had also written in person to Montrose as ‘your affectionate friend’, urging that ‘there must be great secrecy in this business’.
In answer Montrose warned Prince Charles plainly to ‘vouchsafe a little faith unto your loyal servants and stand at gua
rd with others’; he also declared his wish to serve him as he had done his father: ‘I never had passion upon earth so strong as to do the King, your father, service.’
That simple expression of loyalty together with his advice, indeed rebuke, fell on Charles at a moment when he was not likely to forget it. For the letter was dated January 28th, 1649, and two days later the King his father was executed.
Now Montrose was here himself; Charles must deal with him direct, and felt uneasily that, when it came to direct dealing, Montrose would quickly prove the master.
But he was King, wasn’t he? King Charles II – how strange it sounded! He remembered his mother’s little quick brown hands thumping on his father’s chest as she urged him to remember he was King and to ‘pull out these rogues by the ears’. It was all very well when it was a question of rogues, but his father had never had to stand up to Montrose.
In escorting Sophie back to her home together with Hurry he was precipitating his interview, but he had best get it over quickly he thought as he tried to disguise his anxiety from himself, squaring his shoulders as he went up the stairs in that pleasant, shabby, familiar house of his aunt’s; silently cursing this swaggering Scots knight who was so complacently dogging his heels (Sophie had had the sense to vanish on entering the house); saying to himself, ‘Now for it, now I’ve got to show Montrose he can’t come marching in on me with all his men like this against my orders – I’m not going to let him wreck all my other plans as though his were the only one – and I’ve got to do it without offending him; I’ll flatter him, show him I know damned well he’s the biggest man we’ve got.’
That last should be easy, for Charles was particularly good at showing this even when he did not, as now, believe it.
The Bride Page 12
