About the Author
The Coming of the King
Praise for the Henry Gresham Series
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Aftermath
Historical Note
About the Author
Martin Stephen has a PhD from the University of Sheffield and is the former High Master of St Paul’s School in London. Prior to that, he was High Master of The Manchester Grammar School and Headmaster of The Perse School, Cambridge. He was described as ‘the most influential Head in the independent sector’ by the Times Educational Supplement and the Daily Telegraph. He is apparently the inspiration behind the private school head in Jilly Cooper’s Wicked!, a character described as ‘a great teacher because he was a great communicator’.
Martin is a regular contributor to television and radio and writes for leading newspapers in the UK. He is Director of Education for GEMS (Global Educational Management Systems) in the UK and writes a personal blog for the Daily Telegraph. He is widely in demand as a naval historian and is an expert on the poetry of the First World War.
He once suffered from an appalling stammer and was rejected when he first applied to do a DipEd at Leeds University; they said he’d be a laughing stock in the classroom and could never enter any career that involved public speaking. He got rid of the stammer, he says, ‘by getting angry’. He adds: ‘It never leaves you. It’s like a rather nasty raven perched on your shoulder. Every time I stand up to speak, I have a fear.’
About a year after Martin started at St Paul’s in 2004, he suffered a stroke – and got angry again. ‘I found myself in a hospital bed, hardly any feeling in my left side, no control over my hands, couldn’t talk properly. Got no help from the hospital at all. All they wanted me to do was lie there. For about an hour, I was in complete despair. Then I got angry.’ When he got home, he designed his own rehabilitation programme, drawing on the experiences of his father-in-law, who’d also had a stroke. Each day included bouncing and catching a tennis ball 2,000 times, two hours of Victorian copybook handwriting, two hours of reciting poems with a cork between his teeth, and two hours of walking up and down the stripes on the lawn. He also – ‘this was the only fun bit’ – played computer games, crashing an onscreen jet 4,796 times before he finally landed it. Martin, now fully recovered, returned to St Paul’s and wrote The Diary of a Stroke, which has been an inspiration to many finding themselves or their family in a similar situation.
He is the author or editor of eighteen books on English literature and military history, including war poetry. His five novels are historical thrillers set in the time of Elizabeth I and James I. Most of the characters are real historical figures and the events took place as described. The hero throughout the series is Henry Gresham, a seventeenth-century James Bond. Wealthy and principled, he has political savvy and sway, and is prepared to kill where necessary.
Martin has recently reworked the Henry Gresham series, and with the addition of a new novel, The Coming of the King, it now forms a historically chronological sequence:
Book 1: THE GALLEONS’ GRAVE: Henry Gresham and the Spanish Armada
Book 2: THE REBEL HEART: Henry Gresham and the Earl of Essex
Book 3: THE COMING OF THE KING: Henry Gresham and James I
Book 4: THE DESPERATE REMEDY: Henry Gresham and the Gunpowder Plot
Book 5: THE CONSCIENCE OF THE KING: Henry Gresham and the Shakespeare Conspiracy
Martin Stephen is now retired from St Paul’s and pursues the many interests he did not have time for previously. However, he continues to write books, which remains one of his lifelong passions. Martin is married to Jenny, Headmistress of South Hampstead High School.
The Coming of the King
Queen Elizabeth I is dying, and the King of England’s oldest and bitterest enemy, Scotland, is poised to take the throne. Lonely, her power fading, Elizabeth fears she is being poisoned. With all her old allies and advisors dead, she turns to the only man she can trust to tell her the truth, Henry Gresham. A reluctant recruit, Gresham finds himself unwillingly dragged into the vicious political manoeuvring that will decide who is England’s next ruler.
Involved in the mad-cap race to be the first to tell James VI of Scotland that Elizabeth has chosen him as her successor, Gresham faces savage attacks on his home and those he loves, imprisonment, attempts to destroy not only him but the College he loves in Cambridge. He is even accused of witchcraft and is faced with the loss of all he holds dear and the prospect of a civil war with terrifying consequences.
Gresham finds himself one of the few people who knows about plots emanating from England’s oldest European rivals and enemies – plots that could change England into an unrecognizable country. Fighting harder than he has ever had to before, Gresham must struggle to survive and to defeat his enemies at home, and with no army except his wits, fight for the survival of his country as England enters a time that could see it tear itself apart.’
This completely new and previously unpublished third book in the Henry Gresham series is another intricate page-turner of a novel. Once again, Martin Stephen has produced a tale of treachery, intrigue and passion which displays a staggeringly intimate knowledge of history.
Praise for the Henry Gresham Series
‘Henry Gresham is a hero for all seasons.’
Val McDermid
‘Considerable effort has gone into the mucky detail of early seventeenth century London, and the tale is moved on at high speed by Gresham’s well-timed revelations. Stephen has a good feel for the momentary decisions that can help to shape the course of history – as well, of course, as the cowardice, vainglory and greed.’
The Times
‘Breathtaking plotting and delightful characterization in a Jacobean tale of murder and political intrigue – a pyrotechnic, explosive rocket of a book.’
Jenni Murray
‘Intrigue, high-life and low-life are brilliantly interwoven in a thriller which has a compelling vividness and pungency. The historical details are utterly convincing; one can see and smell Jacobean England and hear its inhabitants speaking.’
Lawrence James
‘Martin Stephen takes a refreshingly different approach in his Jacobean thriller…dastardly political and religious manoeuvrings, footpads, trollops and demented Catholics, all add up to a terrific book, the first of a long series, we must hope.’
Spectator
‘Here is a thriller that is just exploding with action and double-dealing and which paints Jacobean London in vivid and dramatic detail.’
Northern Echo
THE COMING OF THE KING
Henry Gresham and James I
Martin Stephen
Copyright © Martin Stephen 2012
The right of Martin Stephen to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyrigh
t, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is sold subject to the condition it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form.
ISBN 978-1-78036-157-4
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described, all situations in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
Published by
Peach Publishing
Author’s Note
No attempt has been made to imitate Elizabethan patterns of speech. Just as Elizabethan dramatists dressed all characters in their plays in contemporary dress, even if they were Romans or Ancient Britons, so I have attempted to make characters speak as they might do were they alive today.
Nothing in the work of any historian with whom I am familiar contradicts the story told in this work of fiction. The historical events took place as and when described.
The three fictional characters in this novel, Sir Henry Gresham, Jane and Mannion, are firmly based on specific people, some living, some dead. As well as living people and Sir Thomas Wyatt of Allington Castle, the character of Henry Gresham is based on what Hamlet might have been, had Shakespeare and history allowed Hamlet to live.
Martin Stephen
Prologue
January 1603
He was tossing and turning in his sleep, muttering, complaining. Sir Henry Gresham, master of self-control when awake, could not control his mind when asleep. The beautiful girl who lay beside him in the deep bed debated whether to wake and seek to sooth him, but discarded the idea. Henry Gresham was not a babe-in-arms. Jane realised that the wound to his pride would do more damage than any of her soothing cradling could heal.
And in Gresham’s mind? The image was always the same. The grotesque, severed head of Mary, Queen of Scots, rolling like a ball over the planks of the hastily-erected scaffold at Fotheringay Castle. Sixteen years ago it had been, yet in his dreams it was as if it was happening now, for the first time. The executioner had bungled his job, needed to hack at the head like a bad butcher hacking at a joint. He had finally picked up the Queen’s head, only to find that what he held in his hand was a red wig, the shaved head to which it had been attached rolling away from him over the stained planks. Mary, that woman whose only skill was to make trouble for others and who longed throughout her life to dominate, had determined to dominate in her death as she had been unable to do in her life.
And Henry Gresham, who more than anyone else was responsible for bringing this idiot Queen to the scaffold, could only see one thing in his dreams. That bald, horrible head was cackling, a grin drawn across its obscene lips. ‘You think you have won!’ those lips, meant to be dead, were mouthing. ‘But I will have my revenge!’ And then the face on that grotesque head changed. It was no longer the face of Mary Queen of Scots. It sprouted a beard, and hair. It was the face of her son, James VI of Scotland, rumoured soon to be James I of England. And always in the dream he woke up, covered in sweat, just as the disembodied head moved its lips and seemed about to say something.
Gresham rode to Cambridge that morning with a heavy heart and a thick head, unable to get the image out of his head. The day which had got off to such a bad start got worse as a thin drizzle started to turn into seriously heavy rain.
Yet the rain saved Gresham’s life. He had stabled his horse, and started to walk to the College in which the disputation he was leading was due to happen.
The sudden downpour turned the hard earth of the Cambridge back-alley into thick mud, which had not yet had time to freeze in the biting East Anglian wind. Gresham’s attacker must have waited some while, feet sinking as he did so. Instinctively the attacker had tensed a leg, lifted it, as he prepared to strike. A tiny, sucking sound. It was enough.
Gresham was already instinctively turning as the man leapt from behind the leaning, timber-framed building. His huge bludgeon was already descending towards Gresham’s head for a death blow. Gresham yanked his head back. The great lump of wood gave the tiniest brush to his nose and chin before glancing off the front of his rib cage. The sheer weight of the weapon dragged the assailant along with it.
Gresham was in academic dress, heavy cloak. No sword. A disputation was a battle of words, not of swords. He had no time to think.
Frightened men turned away from danger. Gresham turned towards the attacker. He rammed his knee into the man’s balls. The man screamed, dropped the cudgel, hands instinctively cupping his crotch. Gresham smelt his foul breath, rotting teeth, in the white vapour from his mouth and nostrils.
A second man stumbled into the first in the narrow alley. It had been too narrow for both men to come at Gresham side by side. The vagabond’s noise turned into a gurgle as Gresham’s dagger, hoisted from his boot, sank into his neck. A startled expression, more of puzzlement than pain, hit his face as his hands scrabbled round his neck. His body collapsed into the mud. Gresham yanked the dagger out. A different sucking noise this time. The withdrawal of the blade speeded death. A stream of blood ran red down the man’s scabbed neck into the mud. It steamed ever so slightly for half a second, then stopped, an emblem for the man’s life.
Gresham leant forward, picked up one of the discarded cudgels. He was breathing heavily. He turned to the man groaning on the floor. He kicked one of his legs, hard, so it stuck out an angle. The man looked up at Gresham, pleading, terrified. With all the force he could muster, Gresham bought the tree trunk down. Not on the man’s head. On his leg, the upper part. The crack of breaking bone was like a pistol shot, the man’s scream like a demented animal.
Gresham took a deep breath. The man had been kept alive, which would look good to the magistrates. But now there was no way he would leap up and attack Gresham. The pain behind Gresham’s eyes was already starting, the pain that he knew in a few hours would be sending needles of agony through his exploding head. The blood lust had told him to smash his attacker’s pate like a ripe fruit. But there was some law in Cambridge. He could risk leaving two corpses, but the odds on someone in that silent alley having seen the episode were high, and Gresham was hardy an unknown figure in Cambridge. No, better to report the attack and go through whatever hearing magistrates demanded. They would not challenge him, a wealthy man attacked in a narrow alley by two cut-purses, desperate by the look of their filthy, ragged clothes and starved bodies. One of them had lost an ear, a sure sign of a criminal past. It would add to Gresham’s dark reputation.
Sir Henry Gresham, a key player in Essex’s rebellion against Queen Elizabeth that had taken place some two years earlier. But what side had Henry Gresham really been on? And was it true that he had not just been on a Spanish ship when the great Armada had been scattered by the wind, but actually fighting for the Spanish? And was it true that thousands of pounds of treasure were stored in the house Gresham owned, against all the rules for Fellows, just outside Cambridge? Was it true that he and the Earl of Essex had worshipped Satan?
That was what Cambridge asked. Gresham needed answers to some more real and pressing questions. Gresham’s life had been the calmest he had ever experienced since that awful day when he had stood and watched the execution of his friend, the friend he had betrayed, the Earl of Essex. And now, out of nowhere, a threat to his life. Was it all starting again? The sense of continual threat, the need never to let one’s guard down? Or was he reading far too much into what had happened?
But why had two vagabonds tried to kill him? An opportunist attack? Or had someone paid them to do it?
Chapter One
January 1603
It took 27 minutes for the Master of Granville College to die. It was an extraordinarily painful death. It was also embarrassingly public.
28 minutes earlier the Master had been seated at High Table, surveying with what was almost a sense of contentment the Fellows and students of Granville
College partaking of the main meal of the day at noon. A huge fire blazed behind High Table, a lesser one at the far end of the Hall. For all its crackling and spitting, it was cold, and Gresham knew many of the students would be wearing every stitch of cloth they owned. Yet the winter sun streamed in through the high windows, picking out a scene of vibrant, almost raucous life.
The Master was usually more somnolent than raucous. He had a dull brain. Family connections had been enough to secure him the consolation prize of the Mastership, at a time when Government was increasingly concerned about the capacity of Oxford and Cambridge to make mischief. His stupidity was a guarantee that at the merest sign of trouble he would come running to tell tales to his distant kinsman, Robert Cecil, the Queen’s Chief Minister.
The Master was mildly drunk. The last barrel they had broached had been exceptionally good, and he had felt it his duty to show his appreciation, to the extent of accepting two full cups from Fellows. He had not realised that it was a standing joke among the more intelligent Fellows to offer the Master their dregs, in the certainty that in his cups he would appear even more stupid than he did when sober. They were collecting a book of his sayings, the best of which was, ‘The Church would be nothing without God’.
The pain in him started like little more than trapped wind, but within seconds had flared into someone dragging an iron-spiked ball through his gut. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before, so sharp and agonising in its intensity that he could no longer breathe, nor give vent to the scream that was consuming his soul. He jerked forward on to the table, scattering utensils and the remnants of food, then was flung by the power of his pain backwards off the bench in a paroxysm of agony. The double crash dragged the attention of the diners to that end of the Hall. Standing up and crashing their benches to the ground, they gathered round the writhing, panting figure trying to curl into the foetal position on the floor.
The Coming of the King: Henry Gresham and James I (The Henry Gresham Series Book 3) Page 1
