Death in St James's Park: 8 (Exploits of Thomas Chaloner)

by Gregory, Susanna

  Chaloner frowned. ‘He has married Widow Smith already?’

  The Earl chortled. ‘He cannot do that as long as he is wed to his French lass. I cannot imagine Widow Smith will be pleased when she learns she has been tricked out of her fortune, because I think she fancies herself in love.’

  ‘Christ!’ muttered Chaloner, stunned yet again by the secretary’s nerve.

  ‘Are you ready to leave for Archangel?’ asked the Earl, changing the subject abruptly. ‘I received word earlier that the ship I chartered will be ready to sail on tonight’s tide. But do not look so glum. I have heard the Russians are very cultured.’

  One of the ducks released a raucous laugh, and Chaloner felt no more needed to be said. He had finished reading Olearius’s Voyages, and was dreading the ordeal that lay ahead of him.

  ‘They have music,’ said the Earl encouragingly. ‘And I am sure they eat a more varied diet than salted fish and black bread. Besides, my despatches are important. I could not trust them to anyone else.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Chaloner flatly.

  ‘It is true.’ The Earl lowered his voice. ‘They ask for the Tsar’s assistance in the event that we lose the war with the Dutch, and may mean the difference between survival and oblivion. Needless to say, no one at Court knows what I am doing. To entertain the possibility of defeat is treason, and these letters will see me executed if they fall into the wrong hands.’

  Chaloner was slightly mollified. The Earl was not obliged to appraise him of what the documents contained, and he appreciated being taken into his confidence.

  ‘I am sending a case of valuable jewels, too,’ the Earl went on. ‘As a bribe. And to be frank, you are the only man I know who will not make off with it. It represents a fortune, and will be a great temptation to anyone who is less than scrupulous.’

  Chaloner supposed he would have to develop a dishonest streak in the future, if integrity was to be rewarded with treks to the frozen north.

  * * *

  The ship bound for Archangel slipped her moorings, and slid soundlessly down the river on the evening tide, her masts and spars stark against the darkening sky. Two men stood side by side and watched her disappear. It was a cloudless evening, so the temperature was already beginning to plummet, and their breath plumed in front of them as they spoke.

  ‘Chaloner will not have a comfortable time of it,’ said Morland, his small face pinched with cold and spite. ‘The Earl could not have picked a worse month to send him.’

  ‘Was an alliance with Russia Clarendon’s idea?’ asked Dorislaus. ‘Or yours?’

  Morland smirked. ‘I may have suggested that the Tsar might help in the event of a catastrophe, and that it would be wise to secure his good graces in advance. But it is actually sound advice.’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ acknowledged Dorislaus. ‘However, I cannot imagine what “good authority” told him that Archangel will be ice-free this winter. Any fool will know it is not.’

  ‘Really?’ asked Morland innocently. ‘Perhaps I should not have introduced him to a certain sea-captain with a novel theory about tides, sea temperatures and the moon, then. At least, not one who has resided in Bedlam for the last twenty years.’

  Dorislaus laughed. ‘But your vitriol against Chaloner is misplaced. He did not burgle your house or put you in that invidious position with Widow Smith. He would not have dared.’

  ‘Yes, he would, and he does not like me. However, the Archangel jaunt has nothing to do with them – it is in revenge for him being suspicious of me at the end of the Commonwealth.’

  ‘But he was right: you had changed sides.’

  ‘Yes, but I did not appreciate him telling Thurloe so. It might have seen me killed.’

  ‘True, and I am glad he did not voice the similar doubts he held about me. I did “lose” his reports, of course, but I would not have wanted Thurloe to know.’

  ‘You were a Dutch agent?’ asked Morland in surprise.

  ‘I still am. My father was murdered by Englishmen, and I have never liked this country.’

  ‘Lord!’ breathed Morland. ‘I am all admiration for your skills. Thurloe has never guessed, and it is not easy to deceive him, as I can attest from personal experience. He thinks of you as a friend.’

  Dorislaus nodded. ‘But it was harder to convince Chaloner – he even doubted my loyalty when I helped him escape from Harper, spending a horribly uncomfortable day crushed inside a priest’s hole with him in order to do so.’

  ‘Why did you not let Harper catch him?’

  ‘At the time, I thought he would be more useful alive.’

  ‘You should not have sacrificed Oxenbridge to save him from being speared, either,’ admonished Morland. ‘It eliminated the last of his doubts about you, but it was a high price to pay.’

  ‘Oxenbridge was dying anyway, and Thurloe was watching. It would not have been necessary if Gardner, Freer and Rea had been halfway competent – I sent Chaloner to the Letter Hall so they could kill him. Perhaps I should not have encouraged him to investigate the Post Office in the first place.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Morland. ‘I know you thought his meddling would distract Gery, and they would keep each other in check, but his enquiries almost led to my arrest with Harper and the other corrupt clerks. It was only my clever tongue that saved me – along with a hefty purse and the fact that he was too hoarse to speak.’

  Dorislaus gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Chaloner, Gery, Clarendon, Williamson, even Thurloe. None are a match for you, and I was never concerned for your safety.’

  Morland inclined his head. ‘I shall take that as a compliment.’

  ‘Do you know who killed O’Neill, by the way? It was not the Major – his yeomen were too angry about the murder of their two fellows to give him any concessions.’

  Morland’s face went dark with malice. ‘He should not have told Williamson that I tried to sell him my letter-opening machine before I hawked it to Bishop. Well, perhaps I did make an offer, but it was ungentlemanly of him to mention it to a Spymaster.’

  ‘How did you do it?’

  ‘Oxenbridge had some of the toxin left over, and I managed to lay hold of it before Thurloe raided his home. I put it in a gift of dried fruits with a message saying it was from the brothel in Hercules’ Pillars Alley. Unfortunately, he must have destroyed the note – probably out of fear of his wife – because there have been no reprisals against the place.’

  ‘What has the club done to earn your bile?’

  ‘Temperance would not let me in,’ said Morland sulkily. ‘She called me slippery.’

  ‘It is a pity the Major failed,’ said Dorislaus, changing the subject before he was asked to disagree. ‘I had hoped that the letter I wrote him – in cipher, but right under Chaloner’s nose – would save the day, but he was arrogant and did not bother to read it. Thus it was the right time to change my allegiance.’

  ‘I suspect you changed it rather sooner than that,’ remarked Morland wryly. ‘Or you would not have made such a fuss about Mary Wood.’

  Dorislaus’s expression was grim. ‘The Woods were my friends, and there was no need to have killed her. Oxenbridge should not have given Gardner that order. In fact, Gardner should not have been hired at all. He was a fool. Did you know he offered me a substantial bribe to join the Major? Me, the man who gave the Major most of his ideas in the first place!’

  ‘Your indignant refusal made him think you were incorruptible,’ said Morland, laughing.

  ‘So the idiot left clues to make Chaloner think that I was part of the plot,’ said Dorislaus crossly. ‘He thought he was protecting the Major by leaving a “false” trail, but the reality was that I was one of the rebellion’s most vital components. It is as well he died in the fire, or I would have to shoot him, too.’

  ‘I should have liked being Secretary of State in the Major’s new government,’ said Morland with a wistful smile. ‘And you would have made a splendid Spymaster – as I am sure the Dutch would agree.’
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br />   ‘We shall try again,’ vowed Dorislaus. ‘The comet is a sign that we must.’

  ‘Well, we will not need to worry about Chaloner,’ said Morland, turning to look at the ship as it disappeared into the dusk. ‘He will not survive his journey.’

  ‘Yes – because Archangel will be ice-bound, and the boat will founder and sink.’

  ‘And because he is not carrying the letters that Clarendon wrote to the Tsar. They are powerful evidence of treason, so I stole them. That will teach him to dismiss me.’

  Dorislaus stared at him. ‘If you have the originals, then what is Chaloner carrying?’

  ‘Oh, documents asking for much the same thing, but with certain adjustments. The Tsar is a proud, prickly man, and it takes very little to offend him, so Clarendon’s letters have been reworded. The Tsar will certainly take umbrage when he reads them, and he executes messengers who bring him insulting communiqués.’

  Dorislaus smiled slowly. ‘You have been very clever.’

  Morland hefted a small sack. ‘More than you think. Clarendon enclosed certain jewels with his greetings to the Tsar, but I do not think they should leave the country. I replaced them with coloured glass, and Chaloner does not know enough about such matters to tell the difference.’

  ‘But the Tsar does?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Morland. ‘He is quite an expert.’

  Historical Note

  The General Letter Office was a large building, taxed on thirty-three hearths, although its location before 1666 is contentious. One theory is that it stood in a square known as Post House Yard, just off Dowgate Hill. Regardless, it and all its neighbours were lost in the Great Fire, after which the General Letter Office moved to Cornhill.

  Secretary of State John Thurloe was Postmaster General during Cromwell’s reign, a position that went well with his other occupation as Spymaster. The skill and efficiency with which he used the Post Office to gather intelligence was admired even by Royalists. However, being Postmaster was not only convenient for reading the letters of enemies, it was also extremely lucrative. A series of charters had established it as a monopoly, so the general populace had no choice but to use it.

  After the Restoration in 1660, Henry Bishop obtained the office, paying some £21,500 for the privilege. Bishop was not particularly wealthy, and it is possible that the money had come from his friend John Wildman, known to his contemporaries simply as ‘the Major’.

  The Major was a curious character – an unremarkable lawyer and political thinker who spent almost his entire adult life involved in conspiracies, many of them to dispatch various heads of state. No one seemed to please him, and he happily plotted the murders of Cromwell and Charles II alike. There was even a rumour that he was Charles I’s executioner. When not arranging assassinations, he spent his time devising plans for rebellion, and owns the dubious distinction of trying to organise the downfall of five successive regimes.

  When Bishop first inherited the Post Office, he kept most of the old staff, on the grounds that they knew what they were doing, and he managed an efficient service. He dismissed Thomas Ibson, though, whom he claimed was Thurloe’s ‘jackal’. Ibson promptly avenged himself by declaring that several Post Office personnel were traitors to the Crown: these included Bishop himself, the Major, Isaac Dorislaus (the son of an Anglo-Dutchman of the same name who had been murdered by Royalists for his attachment to the Cromwellian regime), and one Mr Vanderhuyden, said to be a spy for Holland. The letter-carrier Smartfoot was also condemned as corrupt.

  Bishop vigorously denied the accusations, but his association with the Major was his undoing, especially when coupled with the testimony of one Widow Smith. In 1658, her husband had been involved in a failed Royalist uprising. Bishop and the Major had also taken part, but someone had betrayed them, and Smith was arrested. Smith died shortly afterwards, convinced that the traitors were Bishop and the Major. Bishop was almost certainly innocent, but the Major’s role is less clear.

  Widow Smith took up her husband’s cause with a passion. She owned a tavern named the Catherine Wheel, and when she witnessed two postal clerks illegally opening letters, she seized her chance for revenge. Bishop was dismissed and the Major arrested and taken to the Tower, where the Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon, quickly saw that here was a very dangerous man. When the Major continued to plot from his cell, Clarendon bundled him off to the Scilly Isles. His incarceration was certainly illegal, which was probably why he was never given a trial.

  The Major remained in gaol until 1667, when Clarendon fell from power. Released, he immediately joined forces with the colourful Duke of Buckingham, and was involved in all the major political turmoils that marked the last third of the seventeenth century, merrily plotting against Charles II, James II and William III. He became Postmaster himself in 1689, but was dismissed two years later amid accusations of conspiracy and corruption. By now, he was an extremely wealthy man. He died peacefully in 1693, aged seventy.

  During his brief tenure, Bishop is said to have invented the Bishop-Mark, a date-stamp that made it more difficult for the Post Office to delay the mail to suit itself; a similar system is still in use today. After Bishop’s dismissal, the position passed to Daniel O’Neill, the King’s harbinger and Groom of the Bedchamber. O’Neill did not keep it long. He died in 1664, and it passed to his wife Catherine. She held it until 1667, when it passed to Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, who was Spymaster Williamson’s boss.

  Most of the other characters in Death in St James’s Park were also real people. Andrew Leak, Benjamin Lamb, John Rea, Thomas Harper, and Samuel and Job Alibond were Post Office clerks in the 1660s, as was Jeremiah Copping of the Foreign Office, who was known to pass intelligence to Williamson. ‘Mr Bankes’ was one of Williamson’s aliases at this time.

  The outspoken pamphleteer William Prynne was a bencher in Lincoln’s Inn, and was made Keeper of Records in the Tower after the Restoration, a clever stroke that turned him into one of the King’s most fervent supporters. William Freer was a spy in 1660s London, and Clement Oxenbridge, a sly and villainous character, was a fervent opponent of the Post Office in the 1650s, apparently believing that the state should not have a monopoly on letter carrying, and that it should be open to competition. He would doubtless be delighted by the fate of the Post Office in the twenty-first century.

  André le Notre was France’s foremost landscape architect, in charge of all royal gardens, and most famously designing the ones at Versailles. He also submitted plans for Greenwich, although it is not known for certain whether they were implemented. Seth Eliot was a gardener at the Inner Temple from the 1640s until the 1680s.

  Sir Henry Wood, Clerk of the Green Cloth at White Hall, was a Restoration oddity, with a reputation for saying and doing eccentric things. He was married to Mary, who died in January 1665 of smallpox. She was Dresser to the Queen. Major John Stokes was one of Cromwell’s old commanders, who died in 1665, while James Cliffe killed George Gery in a street fight in January 1665.

  There was indeed a notice in a January 1665 edition of The Intelligencer offering a £50 reward for the arrest of Lewis Gardner for Post Office abuses, along with a physical description; his accomplice Knight was already in custody in Newgate Gaol. There was also an account of the funeral of Clarendon’s son Edward, who had died of smallpox, aged nineteen. The January issues of The Newes and The Intelligencer also carried items that included the King’s decision not to enforce the strictures of Lent; advertisements for Goddard’s Drops and Mr Thomas Grey’s Lozenges (sold by Samuel Speed at the Rainbow); reports about the comet; a list of imports at Portsmouth; and the mass arrest of Quakers in various parts of the country.

  There were exotic fowl and other birds in St James’s Park, and an entry in John Evelyn’s diary for February 1665 mentions a pelican, a crane with a wooden leg, a ‘milk-white raven’ and a number of swans, ducks and geese. ‘Penguins’ at this time referred to great auks, now sadly extinct. William Storey was appointed to look after them, and
Storey’s Gate may be named after the house he occupied.

  Roger Palmer married Barbara Villiers in 1659, against the advice of his family. She became the King’s mistress a year later, at which point Palmer was made the Earl of Castlemaine. The title came with a stipulation: that it should pass to any children she might bear, as opposed to any he might have. It was a brazen insult, and Palmer left the country shortly afterwards to join the Venetian fleet. He returned to London at the end of 1664 to offer his services in the looming Second Anglo-Dutch War, by which time his wife was the mother of four children, probably none of them his. His first book, A Catholique Apology, was published in 1666, and explained why Roman Catholics should not be blamed for the Great Fire.

  Perhaps one of the least likeable characters of the mid-seventeenth century was the ruthlessly self-serving Samuel Morland. He worked for Thurloe, and started to betray his master when the regime began to waver, later claiming he had been a Royalist all along. Thurloe was generally an excellent judge of character, but he was wrong about Morland.

  Morland was rewarded with a knighthood at the Restoration, although he was never fully trusted, and limped from post to post, barely making ends meet. He was married five times, and tried to earn a living from his inventions, among which were a speaking trumpet, a fire engine, and fountains for Versailles. He also devised machines for opening, copying and resealing letters. It is unclear how these worked, and they were destroyed in the Great Fire. He resurrected them many years later, and sold them to the Major, then Postmaster General.