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

by Martin Stephen

  ‘Why not ask Travis to change sides?’ asked Jane simply. ‘He likes you. He fights for money. Offer him more.’

  It was so simple, Gresham realised. The girl, with her ability not to over-complicate things, had seen the simple truth that had evaded him.

  He met Travis in the library, without Jane there, and with Mannion posted outside to ensure no servant ear was pressed to the door.

  ‘You’re being paid to support a Spanish force embarking opposite the Tower in April, whenever the tides are right.’

  The ships would be beached at low tide, and the attack would need high tide to be around midnight, so the soldiers could be rowed ashore. A thousand heavily-armed Spanish troops could not tramp through Thames mud. These facts would narrow down the available dates, and Gresham would identify available times as his next task.

  Travers was a swaggerer, a young man who knew how sexually attractive the arrogant, adventurer-soldier could be. Travis carried the whiff of danger, and Gresham knew what an aphrodisiac that could be. He had been supplied with a tankard of small beer, his favourite tipple, and sat back, looking at Gresham with raised eyebrows.

  ‘I’ll pay you more to drive off the Spanish,’ said Gresham.

  Travis laughed. ‘I’m sure you will,’ he said, ‘but it’s not quite as simple as that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Firstly, we mercenaries may be a pretty rotten lot, but we do have certain codes. One of them is that once we’ve taken a customer’s money we don’t sell out to the highest bidder. It’s bad business. We may make a double strike in terms of getting paid twice over, but the other customer’s don’t like it. Once word gets round, you’re unemployable.’

  ‘What if you’re paid enough so you never have to work again? What if you in particular, as well as cash, got a couple of manors I own made over to you?’

  Travis leant forward, his attention engaged. Land was the ultimate, the lasting wealth. Half the mercenary armies in Europe were manned by second, third or fourth sons condemned by primogeniture to a cursory allowance, and the sight of the eldest son inheriting the estate. Henry VIII’s closure of the monasteries and his takeover of the Church had released vast tracts of land on to the market – one way or another, the Church had been reckoned to own over half the land in London at the start of Henry’s reign. But that land had gone to the existing great families, the existing landowners, not the second, third and fourth sons, for whom land was the ultimate aim.

  ‘You would do that? Really do it?’

  ‘Yes, I would,’ said Gresham. ‘And I’m not sure your business model is quite as sound as you make out?’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Firstly, most of your work is fighting for the Protestants in the Low Countries. You’re not going to recommend yourselves to them if you help the Catholic Spanish rule England. It’d be a massive blow to the Protestant rebellion, strategically and in terms of the help they receive from England at present. You may put yourself out of business if you change to the highest bidder in mid-stream. But you put yourself out of business if you accept the contract from the first bidder, Spain. They won’t employ you afterwards. They’ve got their own army. And we both know once the Tower is secured it’ll be days only before there’s thousands of Spanish troops in it, not a thousand.’

  ‘It’s a viewpoint,’ said Travis non-commitedly. ‘But I’ve got a horrible feeling there’s more.’

  ‘There is,’ said Gresham, ‘most of it that despite what you might think it’s not a guaranteed win.’

  ‘Two thousand trained men?’ said Travis. ‘Given the other forces in London in April it seems pretty guaranteed to me.’

  ‘Two thousand men under two different commands, one Spanish and one English – I’m assuming a released Raleigh giving you and your lot orders.’

  ‘Raleigh’s an experienced, respected commander,’ said Travis.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gresham, ‘respected by those who haven’t served with him. I have. He’s a nightmare. He insists on instant obedience, and roars at people. He hates the Spanish, and the thought of him trying to work with a Spanish commander would be farcical if it weren’t tragic. And even if you do take Whitehall, there’s a long way between it and your military power base at the Tower. A route that’s likely to be cut by Londoners. Remember, London is the Protestant capital of England. It rebelled against Mary because of her Catholicism, and it’ll rebel against a Spanish invasion.’

  Travis stirred himself.

  ‘No, hold on,’ said Gresham. ‘I know what you’re going to say. What chance do Londoners have against your trained men? Answer, none, in open combat. But how about if you and your men march backwards and forwards between here, Whitehall and Westminster, and every hundred yards there’s a shot from a tenement and one of your men falls? So you send off a detachment into the stinking alleys that form most of London, and even if they find the tenement the shot came from it’s long since empty of the marksman. So what do you do? Your men are worried, restive, scared they’ll be split off from the main force, picked off. So you decide to make an example of the other people in the tenement, for housing the marksman, and you string up two or three of them. And their old women start to howl, so you string them up for good measure. And the word spreads that’s what you do, and suddenly there’s a marksman every ten yards, and if your men so much as step off the main road hundreds of outraged locals descend on them. And you find your men not just shot, but delivered back to you with their severed testicles stuffed into their mouth, and signs that they were made to taste their own prick and balls before they died!”

  ‘Very dramatic,’ said Travis, but he had gone slightly pale.

  ‘Dramatic?’ said Gresham, ‘I suppose it is. But I’m only reporting what I’ve seen with my own eyes. I was fighting when your highest aim of the day was to build a mud pie. You’re a baby, Travis. A big, swaggering, proud baby who probably counts and remembers as trophies all the women he’s fucked, but a baby all the same. You and your Spanish troops might well win London, I’ll give you that. In fact I’m sure you will. But you won’t hold London. And let’s say you’ve got two, even three thousand men left. You’ll need every one of them to hold London. So what will you do when the Scottish march an army of their wild bastards through Berwick to restore the Scottish succession, or revenge James if you’ve been stupid enough to kill him? What spare troops have you got?’

  Travis was even paler now. But he rallied.

  ‘Spanish reinforcements?’

  ‘Spanish reinforcements indeed,’ said Gresham. ‘But remember that your Spanish troops were delivered in secret in hulls that were already sold to Spanish masters. Have you seen how many English ships there are moored in London Pool? And believe you me, most of those will have been pounding the walls of The Tower with every cannon they have, once they know a Spanish invasion force is in there. There’ll be queuing up to take turns! And how successful has the Spanish navy been in 1588 and thereafter in landing Spanish troops on English soil? When the English will be expecting them, and have every ship that can bear sail and carry cannon waiting for them?’’

  Gresham was boring in, like the swordsman he was, beating off his opponent’s every riposte, all the time getting closer to his opponent’s vital organs.

  ‘And if you lose, Travis if you lose ...’ Gresham let the thought hang in the air for a while. ‘Forget the swagger. The Rack will take that out of you. You’ll never walk again. They won’t rack you for a confession. They’ll do it as a punishment. Forget the pretty girls. They may love the sight of your prick now. In my experience, very few girls are excited by the sight of a screaming man contemplating the sight of his own guts, as dragged out before him by his executioner.’

  Gresham rather hoped Travis would be sick at that point, but to his credit, he was not. Instead he gagged on his vomit, swallowed it. Gresham
could sense the hot, acrid feel of it in Travis’s throat.

  ‘And if you turn your coat and fight for England?’ Gresham said softly. ‘Why, even if you’re not knighted, Lord of Salthouse Manor Travis will be able to walk into The Dun Cow, and they’ll fall silent. If there’s a visitor there...’

  God help him, was Gresham laying it on too thick? Why on earth would there be a visitor in Gresham’s Manor at Salthouse, arguably the most isolated spot in North Norfolk?

  ‘.. they’ll say to that visitor, ‘There’s the man who saved England from Spain.’ So I’m asking you and your men to fire on those Spanish troops as they disembark, not help them take over England.

  Sometimes history hinges on the tiniest of moments. Great, earth-moving events are not just a monumental tsunami, sweeping all before. They start as a tiny ripple on the surface.

  Travis smiled, fleetingly. Alarum bells rang immediately in Gresham’s head. In some strange way it was the wrong smile. It was a strange, almost triumphant smile, as if he had at long last won something. But it was the wrong smile for that particular moment. Travis had not won something. He had conceded something. Yet Travis had smiled. Had he got what he was after all along?

  The smile lasted for less than a second. Was the history of England decided by a man who smiled the wrong sort of smile? History dictates no. Such things cannot be so. It is the broad sweep, the tide in the affairs of men, that decides history. Gresham begged to differ.

  ‘I think you’ve bought me anew,’ said Travis, the smile gone now. It had only been there for the briefest of moments. Had Gresham seen it? And, famously, what’s in a smile?

  ‘And, if you are indeed bought,’ said Gresham.

  ‘I think ‘sold on’ is a better word. You realise this brings my career to an end?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gresham. ‘But forgive me for thinking the fate of a nation is more important, and if I appear less than sympathetic, it’s because I know this little escapade will earn you as much as you would have earned in the rest of your career, and leave you with not only your life, but several of the limbs that you’re probably quite attached to, in every sense of the word.’

  ‘I’m even more convinced,’ said Travis. He was incapable of keeping irony out of his voice.

  ‘So now,’ said Gresham, ‘convince me. Convince me you’re my man, and won’t go straight to your present employer and agree to be ‘sold on’ for just a little more money, and the offer of a manor from Robert Cecil. It’s not as if he is short of them.’

  Travis stood up. He looked straight into Gresham’s eyes, their blue in stark contrast to his black hair, as yet unmarked by grey.

  ‘I give you my word, as a gentleman and as a soldier. I and my men will open fire on those Spanish soldiers, fight to our deaths to stop them.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Gresham. And then Travis surprised him.

  ‘You have money,’ said Travis, ‘and money buys power. That’s why men, and women, yearn for it, prostitute themselves for it, sell their souls as well as their bodies for it. You have money – and forgive me for saying it, but money you gained solely because of your birth, not because of the talents you were born with. Oh, I know you lived life as a normal human for a while, but I bet as the years have gone on you’ve accepted your wealth more and more not as a stroke of luck, but as a birthright. You’ve got used to being rich. Me and my kind, we don’t have that luxury. So forgive me if I don’t slobber all over you because you’ve bought me. I’ve never had the luxury of being able to fight for a cause I believed in, only for the cause that paid me. I’m a prostitute. I fuck the man who buys me, not the one I love.’

  ‘So?’ said Gresham quietly.

  ‘So you’ve bought my services,’ said Travis, ‘and I’ll deliver what you’ve paid for. Just don’t think you’ve bought my soul as well.’

  Gresham said, ‘What use would I have for a bought soul?

  ’As much as has the Devil,’ laughed Travis.

  ‘I’ll assume that’s more your area of expertise. To business. How are you to be notified that the Spanish troops have arrived?’

  ‘A fast pinnace – two, actually, in case something happens to one – are sailing with the troopships. When it looks like there’s a settled wind, a pinnace will come ahead and a messenger landed. All we know is that the troops will disembark at night.’

  ‘That means they’ll need to land when there’s a high tide between, say, eight at night and perhaps four in the morning?’ said Gresham. ‘All right, that gives quite a few available nights, but the Spanish must be hellish confident they can predict the winds in April to set out from Spain with what’s still a narrow target. If they’re to land, those soldiers can’t wade through mud, not fitted out for battle. I don’t see it. I don’t see how even a Spanish commander, who knows God is on his side, can feel confident about his ships being at the entry to the Thames estuary for one of … what? A maximum of seven nights in April?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Travis.

  ‘Ah?’ asked Gresham.

  ‘Ah,’ said Travis, ‘as in ‘Ah! Well spotted!’ But it’s not quite like that.’

  ‘So what isn’t it quite like?’ asked Gresham

  ‘The Spanish troops won’t be setting sail from Spain, gambling on fair winds and an absence of gales to deliver them at the right place at the right time.’

  ‘So what will they be doing?’ asked Gresham.

  ‘It’s not so much what will they be doing,’ answered Travis. ‘It’s more what are they doing. You see, they’ve just landed in the Channel Islands.’

  Of course! The Channel Islands! Raleigh might no longer be ruler there, but he had been so long enough to have a new work of spies, and knowledge of safe and secluded anchorages. The journey over from there was infinitely easier and more predictable than the journey from Spain, meaning that the right combination of time and tide was far more likely to be achievable.

  ‘Can you keep them hidden for that long?’

  ‘Apparently so. It’s not my part of the operation, but I understand there’s a secluded anchorage where no-one asks any questions and there are caves on shore that can be made quite habitable.’

  A smuggler’s den. Significant amounts of French wine were smuggled over from France, with the Channel Islands as a convenient staging post.

  ‘So the transport to London is by smugglers?’

  ‘You guessed it.’

  It all made sense. The smugglers were of necessity superb seamen, and their livelihood often depended on their ability to predict the weather and avoid being seen. They owed allegiance to no-one and, like Travis’ mercenaries, would serve the man who paid them most. The villainous crew they had met with had not been pirates, but smugglers. Same level of villainy. Same lack of any moral code.

  ‘I think,’ said Gresham, ‘I’d better find some tidetables for April.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  March to April 1604

  It was an extraordinary situation. Gresham knew of a plot to unseat the King of England. And he could not report it.

  ‘You’re taking a terrible gamble,’ said Jane. ‘Why can’t you just tell James?’ asked Jane.

  ‘I wouldn’t get near him. It’s Cecil’s plot, remember. He’ll have James closed off. I haven’t asked to see James, and he hasn’t asked to see me. So it’s going to look mighty odd if I suddenly turn up out of nowhere.’

  ‘Can’t you send someone else?’

  ‘And risk telling someone else of the plot? And who that I could send would be believed? I’m only alive now because no-one knows that I’ve penetrated the plot.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gresham. ‘I think Captain Billy only told me what he did in a panic, when he needed to keep me there because the smugglers were late. He died before anyone else cou
ld find out that he’d told me.’

  ‘Is there no-one else you can tell?’ Jane was fretting.

  ‘For all I know the other leading nobles are in the plot. Howard and the rest of them are in Cecil’s pocket. And even if I hit lucky, whoever believes me will go straight to Cecil. He’ll deny everything, I’ll be locked in The Tower pending investigation …’

  ‘… and you’d die of food poisoning,’ said Mannion, who had been glumly swirling dregs round the bottom of a tankard. There was a jug half full on the table, Gresham noticed, but Mannion had not refilled the tankard. He must be worried. ‘Cecil’s got this one all wrapped up. Minute someone tries to blow it, Cecil blames Raleigh. Since Raleigh’s in it up to ’is neck and he ’appens to already be in The Tower for plotting to chuck out James, people won’t take much convincing, will they? Raleigh’ll get the chop pronto, and Cecil come out of it squeaky clean, like what he always does. Bet there ain’t no evidence linking Cecil to all this.’

  It was not difficult to work out which nights in April would allow a force of Spanish troops to be rowed ashore in the hours of darkness opposite the Tower of London. Fighting every instinct he had, Gresham finished some business in London, determined to spend February and March in Cambridge. His every instinct demanded that he be in London, at the centre of power, at the heart of any rebellion. Yet he had to allay suspicion, put himself above it. As far as the power brokers in England were concerned, Cambridge was a backwater. No-one hoping to unseat a King, or to stop one being unseated, would choose to do so from Cambridge.

  Gresham’s reception in College was frosty. His numerous enemies could not challenge an edict from the Privy Council; they did not have to pretend they liked it. Much as Gresham enjoyed his contact with the students – what a bright new lot they were attracting to Granville! – it was with a sense of relief that he arrived back in London a week before the first possible date.