The Coming of the King: Henry Gresham and James I (The Henry Gresham Series Book 3)

by Martin Stephen

  ‘Jane?’ asked Gresham.

  ‘She’ll be there before we are. And safely guarded.’

  Would he ever see The House again? Or the Merchant’s House? Or London and Cambridge for that matter? He was surprised how little he cared. Institutions, countries, faiths all used a man, chewed him for what he was worth and then spat him out. The only thing that mattered was oneself and one’s sense of honour and dignity, and the handful of people who broke through to one’s inner self. Gresham had only ever truly cared for four people. Anna, his first love, was producing children for her husband in France as if there was no tomorrow, and George had died two years earlier in the farce that was the Essex rebellion. Only two people left now. Mannion and Jane. He thought they would come with him.

  Italy, or France?

  Italy, he thought. Further away, and more lively. Yet first Gresham had to get safely out of England. With all the world wanting to please the man who would be King, there would be no better way to do it than find and return his prisoner. They moved camp, walking and shooshing the horses, alert for every snap of a twig or flutter of panicking wings. Once a strange silence settled over the forest, but it must have been in response to a bird of prey circling overhead rather than any human intervention.

  Hours passed. It was well into mid-morning.

  ‘Oh shit!’ Mannion said. He and Gresham heard the faint but growing noise at the same time. Horns. Hounds barking,

  ‘Sod’s law,’ said Gresham. ‘They’ve thousands of acres to hunt in, out of all of them they choose this tiny part.’

  James was obsessed with hunting, and had made it clear that he intended to make the most of England’s rich terrain on his progress to London.

  Quickly they broke off into undergrowth, vegetation high enough to hide the horses. Yet it was fragile, new growth stuff. The forest was deliberately thinned to allow for the free passage of horses in pursuit of game. The hunt could only have been a few hundred yards away. For a moment it looked good. There was a flurry of noise and shouting. Some poor beast had been raised, and the hunt veered off on the new track. Then, as if from nowhere, a demented hound, white froth at its lips, crashed though the undergrowth, feet away from Gresham, ignored him and ran on. Immediately behind came an equally demented rider, eyes glazed, fixed on the hound. For a brief moment Gresham’s eyes locked with those of King James VI of Scotland. A flash of fear flickered across the King’s face, and in that tiny moment of loss of concentration the rampaging horse turned aside a thin branch whipped the King neatly off his saddle. He felt heavily and awkwardly, with an ominous crack as he hit the ground.

  Gresham started forward. Only later did he realise how terrifying he must have looked. He had scrubbed as much muck off as the thin waters of the brook allowed, but there was a fresh layer of blood on his hands where the sores his wrist manacles had caused had opened up. His face had the ragged, untrimmed growth of over a week in prison, and he had instinctively drawn the sword Mannion had given him when the horse had seemed to lunge at him.

  Gresham stood over the King, a slight figure in grubby, smeared hunting garb. He was face up, one arm and hand grasping his shoulder.

  ‘You!’ said the King. ‘Well, get it over with, man.’ Except he said ‘Mon’, not ‘Man’. ‘Do what you came to do, have done and may you rot in hell for it!’

  Gresham gazed down at the future King. He knew by some strange instinct that what Elizabeth had said would come true. This slight figure carried a terrible illness, a malaise within him, that same devil that had meant that everything and person his mother touched self-destructed.

  ‘Get what over with what, Your Majesty?’ enquired Gresham politely. Actually, your almost majesty would have been more correct – James had not actually been crowned yet – but it seemed at best an academic distinction.

  James’ eyes, screwed up with the pain of his fall, opened a little wider.

  ‘With killing your lawful monarch!’ the King hissed, ‘as I know you were sent to do!’

  ‘No, sire. I was not. And the proof is this. I could break your neck as easily as a twig.’

  As if to prove it, Gresham placed his foot on James’ scrawny and none-too clean neck. ‘Riding accident. Myself long gone, tragedy in the woods, no-one’s fault. And no humiliating journey chained to a wagon to be turned at best into a cripple in the Tower, at worst flung out with the rubbish and my body found on a heap of filth.’

  Inwardly Gresham drew a deep breath. Why was living with Kings and Queens always so much of an exercise in risk? He knew what common sense dictated. Kill James and clear off. There would be nothing to link Gresham to the death, and with James gone he had no persecutor. Whoever took over from James would have more on their plate than worrying about a man who might have been sent to kill James. Indeed, James’ successor might even be grateful if that had indeed been Gresham’s aim. So the sensible thing was to break the King’s neck and vanish, turning up in London three or six months later by which time James would have ceased to matter and simply become a what-might-have-been story of English and Scottish history.

  Or he could just leave James alive, leave him to be found by his own men. Even less risk, except that it would provoke a massive man-hunt then and there, a hunt he, Mannion, Tom and Will would be lucky to survive.

  No, killing James was the safer option.

  So he took his foot off James’s neck, and helped him to his feet. The man had guts. Broken collar bone, Gresham guessed. He knew all too well what the pain of that was like, but James bore it in silence. He half-lifted him on to his horse, which had stopped a few yards away.

  He could, of course, make the point that he rather expected James not to lock him up again in return for this proof of loyalty, but he decided no. James had intelligence when he cared to use it. He could work out that the easiest thing was for Gresham to do was kill, and the risk Gresham was taking in not doing so.

  ‘Your party will be in a panic at your absence, Your Majesty. You are already injured from your fall. You cannot risk another. I will lead you back to them.’

  ‘And hope I will let you free?’ asked James, who looked as if he was about to faint.

  ‘And hope that the King of England can distinguish a true heart from a knave.’

  James grunted, and allowed Gresham to lead him off, crunching through the undergrowth. James was probably not able to believe his luck, expecting a killing blow once they had gone deeper into the woods. It was not difficult to know where the rest of the hunting party was. It had streamed on for half a mile before realising it had lost the King, and was now milling around in a noisy frenzy, trying to decide what to do. Any beast that hung around within a mile of that noise deserved to die. Behind Gresham, Mannion, Tom and Will emerged from the woods into which they had melted, leading their own and Gresham’s horses on foot, a discrete way behind. Mannion handed the reins of his horse over to Will, and surreptitiously caught up with Gresham. He spoke in a low whisper.

  ‘I ’ope,’ said Mannion, ‘I ’aven’t wasted my time springing you back there. Or perhaps you’d just like me to take you back? Save time for those Scottish bastards, doin’ it for them...’

  Gresham ignored him. A true heart? Was that what Gresham was? Or was it rather that however malign an influence this King might prove to be, he was better than the anarchy that would be unleashed on England were he to die? The Scots Lords would not easily give up their chance to feed at England’s trough. Were James to die they would immediately declare a regency on behalf of James’s young son. Gresham shuddered at the thought of who would take power were English Lords to run the country on behalf of a child-King.

  They emerged into a large clearing. There were fifty or so horsemen, and as many servants. The English hangers-on had quickly assumed that the way into James’s pockets and his favour was to accompany him on his obsessive hunting. Not
all had worked out that James gave short shrift to those who seemed to be better huntsmen than he.

  It was a few seconds before they were recognised. A cry went up, and there was a mass rush towards them, many of the men drawing weapons as they rode.

  So this was the moment of truth.

  James raised a hand.

  ‘This man is my rescuer. You’ll leave him be.’

  ‘Rescuer’? Well, it sounded better than ‘This man could have killed me, but didn’t’.

  The horsemen reined in, puffing and snorting almost as much as their mounts.

  ‘You’ll accompany me back to the big hoose,’ said James in his thick accent. It was a command, not a request.

  The jarring ride must have been agony on James’ collar bone, but he made neither cry nor conversation. Was Cecil at Burghley House? Or had he stayed on in London to keep things calm there and prepare a welcome for his new Master? As if reading his mind, James spoke.

  ‘I am warned of you, Sir Henry, most perilously. Is that warning wrong, then?’

  ‘Sire, I have offended many men in my lifetime. I can only guess who is speaking against me, but that guess would be Robert Cecil.’

  James said nothing. Silence said it all. So it was Cecil who had poisoned James against Gresham, as presumably he had poisoned him against Raleigh. Except Raleigh had had no chance to right the wrong.

  ‘And does that mean he is a man I should not trust?’ asked James, staring straight ahead as the beautiful mass of Burghley House appeared beyond the trees.

  Oh to hell with it.

  ‘It means he is a man I should not trust, Your Majesty. As for you, he has done more than anyone to bring you to the throne. If I advise against him you will detect my personal hatred, not the truth. I hear your Majesty has survived turbulent times by fully trusting no-one. I cannot see that should change for England.’

  ‘And should I trust you, Henry Gresham?’

  Despite himself, Gresham laughed.

  ‘You trusted me before, Your Majesty, when in the heat of what was to become the Essex rebellion I acted as postmaster. Did I let you down then?’

  No, was the answer both of them knew.

  ‘Your Majesty, you can trust me to be honest, which is more than you can safely assume of most of the people who will fawn over you here and at Court. And in that honesty, I tell you I know Scotland, and I fear the turmoil and the violence of that country being transferred to England. Yet I know of no alternative. Nor would I ever knowingly seek the death of a King or Queen.’

  ‘And why so?’ James was speaking through gritted teeth. Gresham hoped it was the pain of his body, not a reaction to what he was hearing.

  ‘Because in my years I have never seen any good come from the forced death of a monarch, only suffering and war. So can you trust me not to be a threat to you? Yes, you can, though Cecil will say differently. And he will rightly see me as a threat to him, but only because he has made himself so.’

  A group of servants, Scots by their dress, rushed out to take James from his horse. Before they could take him into the house, he turned to Gresham.

  ‘I do not thank men for doing their duty. Yet I am ... grateful. You may go in peace. But understand one thing. For me to disagree with my chief advisor ...’ it was Cecil he meant... ‘on one thing alone is no great matter. To have him found dead would be a great matter indeed. Were it to happen I would hunt you down with no more feeling than I would feel hunting the beast that is in the forest. Have I made myself clear, Sir Henry Gresham?’

  ‘Abundantly so, Sire,’ said Gresham and bowed as James was led away.

  ‘What did ’e say?’ asked Mannion.

  ‘We’re free to go. He’s willing to admit Cecil’s a lying bastard about me, but he needs Cecil too much to let me kill him. If Cecil dies, so do I.’

  ‘That’s a right bugger,’ said Mannion. ‘There’s enough people who want to kill Cecil. Even if you lay off, you could get done if one o’ the others does for ’im.’

  ‘Who said life wasn’t risky?’ said Gresham. Suddenly, he felt cheerful again. He had his limbs, his faculties and his freedom. At long last the key to what else he might get lay in his own hands. Yet at the back of his mind lay the old question, and the old doubt. Had he just preserved the life of the man who would bring civil war to England?

  Chapter Seven

  April to May 1603

  Mannion had brought enough coin with him to buy essential supplies for their journey, and even a ludicrous suit of clothes from the flustered tailor in Stamford.

  ‘Good God!’ said Gresham, looking at himself dressed as a country squire.

  Mannion grinned.

  ‘Two minutes in St Paul’s before they have your purse,’ he said. ‘Two minutes at the outside.’

  St Paul’s Cathedral was a prime site for any yokel visiting London, which many did if only to visit the lawyers. Every cut purse in London congregated in the vast nave of the dark Norman building, on the lookout for the clumsy cut of a rural tailor, at least ten years behind the fashion in London. The wearers of such clothing were easy meat.

  Feeling very rustic, Gresham set off to pick up Jane, still waiting on the north Norfolk coast to flee England. God knows what hell she must have gone through, Gresham could not hold himself back. He forced his tired horse into a slow gallop as they reached Stiffquay, flung himself off his mount and near battered the door down. Jane was dressed in little more than a country smock, and as she saw her man her face lit up as if every charcoal burner in England had leant on the bellows at the same time. She started to run towards him, then remembered herself and came to a demure halt, only to have it ruined as he collided with her and swept her up in his arms, grinning like a lunatic. Then he remembered himself, dropped Jane unceremoniously and bowed unconvincingly to her. The two lovers stood back from each other, flushed.

  ‘God help us,’ said Mannion under his breath. ‘You’d think they’d get to the point, wouldn’t you?’ he added to himself.

  Next morning, when it was clear they had both got to the point, Gresham announced, ‘We go to Cambridge.’

  ‘Why?’ Jane was the only one bold enough to ask. It was as if a small part of the sun had detached itself and lodged in her brain. She glowed.

  ‘Firstly,’ said a patient Gresham, staring stolidly ahead as they rode, ‘London is riddled with plague. Even the Coronation has had to be postponed. Secondly, London is not a good place to be in as a new King arrives. Too much plotting.’

  ‘Do you mean Raleigh?’ Jane had disclosed to Gresham that Raleigh had propositioned her in the most lewd of terms, early in her relationship with Gresham. She had met such men before, many times, but none who had saved the life of the man she loved, and who was treated by him as the father he had never had.

  ‘I mean Raleigh,’ Gresham replied. ‘Plotting is in his nature, I don’t believe he can stop. He’s lost it all, but he can’t see it. He’s got too used to being in power, at the heart of things. He can’t give it up. He’ll plot until he dies. The only problem is that he does it so badly.’

  On that much at least they agreed, thought Jane.

  *

  The College seemed in better form than it had been for some while, with a growing air of cheerfulness and even the occasional laughter heard in the Quad. Gresham was not reassured.

  ‘I want a list of everything that’s planned to take place in College in the next six months. Feasts. Big disputations. Hearings. Plays. Special services. And unofficial things too. Pay more attention and more money if you have to, to the students. Find out if there’s a football match with the locals, anything like that.’

  Jane shuddered. Football matches, where opposing teams of any side had to get a rough ball to a designated piece of ground in their opponent’s territory, were a bloodbath. Ther
e were no rules …

  ‘S’not really true,’ said Mannion, challenged about the absence of rules in football. ‘You’d get complained at if you used a knife or sword, or a firearm.’

  ‘Complained at? Complained at?’ said Jane.

  ‘Well, the others most like wouldn’t let you play.’

  ‘Before or after you’d killed someone?’

  Mannion grinned, wiping his mouth.

  ‘It’s man’s stuff, in’t it? Teaches people how to fight. Good training, stops ’em getting soft.’

  Jane gave Mannion a look that would have curdled milk at 500 paces. She turned her attention to Gresham.

  ‘Why are you so worried? Disputations. Plays. All normal events. Most of them normal in Cambridge for hundreds of years.’

  ‘I’m starting to see a pattern in all of this, the attacks on me, and the attempt to discredit the College.’

  ‘Can we know what the pattern is?’

  He looked at her. ‘No. Not yet. I need to be certain. What I do know is that the present calm is temporary. Someone’s invested a lot of time, money and effort in getting rid of me and damaging this College. Whoever it is, they’re regrouping. And when the next wave comes, that’s what it’ll be. Wave. Or Waves. Attack after attack until we’re beaten. Attacks on the College. And on me.’

  And on me, thought Jane. If only as collateral damage or, more likely, blackmail point with Gresham. There were twelve extra men now, all former soldiers, guarding The Merchant’s House, racks of muskets in hallways, water buckets filled by every window, a permanent guard all night, new hounds … The high, thick wooden gates were closed at all times, and a thick iron grate with a door just big enough to let a horse and cart through newly-forged behind it. Visitors had to shout up to the wall, and if accepted the wooden gates swung open but the visitor had to present credentials before the iron gate was opened. A long thin spike was jabbed into any heavy loads, or sacks that might contain gunpowder. Wagons with sacks were halted on the far side of the moat, the newly-mended drawbridge swung up and two men rowed over to check the sacks before they came close enough to blow up the gatehouse. Jane was allowed to ride every day, but never at the same time, and never without Mannion and a heavy escort. Nor could she ride through the woods which she so loved, woods that had too much cover and tracks across which it was all to easy to drop down pre-sawn trees. At times she felt she could hardly breathe. Yet she had known what it was she was taking on when she had chosen Gresham as her man. Under pressure her mind raced, as trapped as her body.