Ex Libris

by Ross King

  'No, not Buckingham,' he whispered, leaning closer. 'He, like Monboddo, is only an intermediary, an agent for another party, someone even more powerful.'

  'Yes?' She too had leaned forward. Someone more powerful than the Lord High Admiral? The canvas awning stretched over their heads smelled of mildew and a glazing of salt. Outside, the cold wind was flapping its stiffened sides. 'Who, then?'

  For the wealthiest and most discriminating collector in all of England, that was who. Because Monboddo and Sir Ambrose had furnished not only the libraries of Frederick and Rudolf but also, Vilém explained, that of their own countryman, England's finest connoisseur, the Prince of Wales himself. Young Prince Charles was not an iconoclast like his sister Elizabeth with her Puritan pastors poised at the ready to sniff out any sign of popery or turpitude. No, Charles loved images and other relics as much as his sister despised them. It was well known that he hoped to purchase the great Mantua Collection from the impoverished Gonzagas, but less well known, according to Vilém, was the fact that he was equally determined to lay his hands on the treasures of both the Bibliotheca Palatina and the Spanish Rooms. For these thousands of books, manuscripts and assorted curiosities were not only valuable in themselves, prize additions to the Royal Library in St. James's Palace, but they were also the only means left of keeping the rampaging Spaniards at bay and thereby preserving religious toleration and freedom across half of Europe.

  'Oh?' Emilia saw rearing before her eyes the desiccated serpents, the mummified heads with their grotesque grins. 'How might that be?'

  Vilém had begun rubbing his palms slowly together. She could sense his excitement. The absence of Sir Ambrose seemed to have done him good: he had not spoken this much in weeks.

  'I need not tell you,' he whispered, 'that both collections are in danger of falling into the hands of either the Spaniards or Cardinal Baronius, if the soldiers don't destroy them first, I should say, or the looters in the marshes. But the Prince proposes to purchase the whole lot from his brother-in-law-the complete contents of both libraries, along with the treasures from the Spanish Rooms. At what price I have no idea, but his financier, Burlamaqui, has been raising funds for the past three months. Frederick will then use the money to equip armies and repel the invaders from both Bohemia and the Palatinate.'

  She was surprised by this plan, remembering Vilém's alarmed reaction to rumours about secret inventories, about deals struck with bishops and princes-'turkey buzzards', he called them-who had sent their agents and emissaries scuttling to Prague ahead of their armies so they might pick at the carcass of Bohemia while there was still something left of it.

  'So the rumours in Prague were true, then? Frederick was seeking to sell the collections after all?'

  'Yes, yes-but the strategy is more involved than that,' he replied quickly, 'more complicated than an exchange of books for musket-balls. The collection will remain intact, and the crates of books and manuscripts will themselves become the means by which the Catholics will be forced from both Bohemia and the Palatinate. Or that is the plan, one that Sir Ambrose worked out with Buckingham and the Prince of Wales. But the business must be carried out in the utmost secrecy,' he added solemnly.

  She drew the blanket, stolen from the De Quester coach, more tightly round their shoulders. 'Because of the Spaniards.'

  He nodded. 'Neither King Philip nor Gondomar must know of the plan, that much is obvious. Burlamaqui is raising the funds in secret because many of them come through his connections with bankers in Italy and Spain. Nor must the plans for the Prince's betrothal to the Infanta go astray. Such double-dealing is distasteful, true enough, but cheap at the price, I think, because the Infanta's hand is worth all of £600,000. Such a sum will buy many books and paintings, will it not? To say nothing of how it will keep a good many soldiers-the best mercenaries in Europe-in powder and shot for years to come. Ingenious, is it not, using the King of Spain's own money to snatch back Bohemia and the Palatinate? To secure the Bibliotheca Palatina as well as the treasures of the Spanish Rooms?'

  She followed his gaze as he squinted through the opening in the tilt. Were they alone on the water, or was that another barge in the distance, barely visible in the light of one of the guard-boats? So far the river had been empty except for the odd collier or a convoy of smacks heaped with their catches of mackerel. Each time one of them approached Emilia and Vilém leant back inside the tilt and averted their faces. But for the past ten minutes they had seen no one.

  'But there's more to the plan than that,' he resumed after a moment. 'The situation is complicated. Other interests must be considered.'

  The arrival in England of the books and other treasures also had to be kept secret from King James himself. The sale could not be completed through what Vilém called the 'normal channels'-a continent-wide network of brokers and financiers-because then it would have been discovered by the numerous agents of the Earl of Arundel, one of England's wealthiest collectors of statues and other artefacts, including books. Arundel was a Howard, a Roman Catholic, a member of the powerful family whose hatred for Buckingham was as well known, he said, as its close ties with the Spanish Ambassador. Neither was it a secret that for the past few years King James had been little more than Gondomar's creature, the plaything of the Spaniards. Did she need reminding that he received an annual pension of 5,000 felipes from the King of Spain? That he sided with Philip over the rebellion in Bohemia? That he lent no support to his daughter and her husband, his own flesh and blood? That he betrayed them to the Catholics just as he had betrayed Raleigh two years earlier? And so the King and most of his courtiers and ministers, including Arundel, were not made privy to the plot. Arundel would have reported it at once to Gondomar, Gondomar would have reported it to King James, and King James-'an old fool in his dotage'-would have regarded it as nothing more than an act of robbery.

  'Yes, yes,' he finished, 'and no doubt he would regard a man like Sir Ambrose as nothing more than a common pirate. No doubt Sir Ambrose would meet the same fate as Sir Walter Raleigh…'

  The barge nosed round the bend and into the waters of the Long Reach. At Greenhithe a few fishing smacks had left the dock and were heading downstream into the estuary. Emilia watched them riding against the tide with their fore-and-aft sails luminous as ghosts. Vilém had fallen silent. She shifted her weight on the hard thwart, wondering how much of what he said was true and how much an elaborate fiction.

  The boat was poled forward on the tide, a length at a time, round another bend and into the Erith Reach with its roadsteads on one side, the bell-foundries and anchorsmiths on the other. Daylight was still more than an hour away, but so too was London even though the wind had swung round to the west. She scented the first traces of its musk and smoke, what smelled like the foul hide of an ancient beast. Spires and the rhombic shapes of warehouses, dark and silent, loomed and fell away, as did the merchantmen against whose monstrous hulls the splashes of the pole were echoing. She turned her head and peered past the barge-master's dark form. Was someone behind them in the river, pulling a pair of oars?

  She turned to Vilém, but he seemed to have noticed nothing. He was bent almost double, eyes fixed on the casket.

  ***

  The casket contained a Hermetic text, fourteen pages of an ancient manuscript bound in arabesque-a text more valuable, he said, than all of the other crates of books put together. It was a copy made two hundred years earlier from an even more ancient document brought to Constantinople by a refugee, a Harranian scribe fleeing the persecutions of the caliph of Baghdad. When Constantinople was invaded by one of the caliph's descendants, Mehmet II, the Ottoman Sultan, it was saved by another scribe who smuggled it from the Monastery of Magnana before the library and scriptorium could be pillaged by the Turks. And now almost two centuries later the parchment was being smuggled to safety yet again, escaping another conflagration, another war of religion, this time in the Kingdom of Bohemia.

  Emilia knew nothing about the Corpus hermeticum. The na
me reminded her, though, of some of the books she stumbled across in the castle in Breslau on the night of the feast, those whose titles suggested impious pursuits. But Vilém swore there was nothing impious about the Hermetic texts. Indeed, parts of them were even thought to foretell the coming of Christ. Together they consisted, he explained, of some two dozen books, along with who knew how many others that had disappeared over the centuries following other invasions, other wars. Some of the books dealt with philosophical subjects, others with theology, still others-the ones that attracted the most readers and commentators-with the arts of alchemy and astrology.

  None of this made the least bit of sense to Emilia. How could a manuscript of fourteen pages-a few scraps of goatskin scribbled with a mixture of lampblack and vegetable gum-possibly be valuable enough for someone to kill for?

  Vilém was still talking as the boat wound its way along the edge of the Hornchurch Marshes, twisting and then righting itself in the currents that eddied dangerously at each bend. His words tumbled out of him so quickly she could barely follow them. The Corpus hermeticum described a whole universe, he said, a magical place whose every part, from the moons of Jupiter to the smallest mote of dust, formed the threads of an ever-radiating web in which each atom was connected to every other atom. The parts also attracted and otherwise influenced one another so that a subtle but intimate connection existed between, say, the flow of the blood in the body and the flight of the stars through the heavens. These amazing influences could be detected by means of secret signs inscribed across the surface or in the core of every living thing and, once detected, could be manipulated and exploited so that wounds would be healed, diseases cured, events foretold or forestalled-the destinies of entire kingdoms interpreted or even changed. The man able to read these bristling hieroglyphics, these secret scriptures, was therefore a magician possessed of stupendous powers, capable of turning the influences of the heavens to his own ends. And any book purporting to describe these secret marks, to catalogue and explain them… well, the value of any such volume would be past measure.

  'So the parchment is a magical book of some sort?' she managed to interrupt at last. 'And that is why Prince Charles wants it?'

  'So it would seem, yes. No doubt he wants it to ornament his library in St. James's Palace. But perhaps there is another reason as well.' Vilém raised his eyes from the casket. 'For the manuscript now possesses political as well as magical powers.'

  The place of the Corpus hermeticum in the pantheon of literature was now more complex, he explained. Rome had grown suspicious of the Hermetic texts. Some of the books may well have predicted the coming of Christ, if interpreted in a charitable light by the Vatican's consultors. But other Hermetic teachings were a threat to orthodoxy. Of special concern were those passages on the structure of the universe and the divinity of the sun. After all, Copernicus himself had quoted from the Asclepius at the outset of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, the heretical volume that dethroned the earth in favour of the sun. But even worse were the political dangers now coming from those who fingered the pages of the Hermetic texts, which were currently appearing in dozens of new editions and translations. Philosophers like Bruno and Duplessis-Mornay had dreamed of ending the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants by promoting the philosophy of Hermeticism as a substitute for Christianity. But to the authorities in Rome the Hermeticists were, like the Jews, supporters of the Protestant cause who wished to erode the powers of the Pope. The suspicion was not without foundation. By the year 1600, when Bruno was martyred, the books had become the lodestone for all manner of heretics and reformers. Dozens of sects and secret societies began burgeoning all over Europe, like mushrooms in nightsoil: occultists and revolutionaries, Navarrists and Rosicrucians, Cabalists and magicians, liberals, mystics, fanatics and false Messiahs of every hue, all demanding spiritual reform and prophesying the downfall of Rome, all quoting the ancient writings of Hermes Trismegistus as their authority for a universal reformation.

  'The Counter-Reformation is losing its footing,' Vilém explained, 'despite the armies of Maximilian and the bonfires of the Inquisition. A Pandora's box has been opened which Rome is trying to slam shut by whatever means. Sorcery and magic now rank with dogmatic heresy. Cabalist literature has been put on the Index and in 1592 Francesco Patrizzi, one of the translators of the Corpus hermeticum, was condemned by the Inquisition. The Jesuits at the Collegio Romano have begun an Index of their own, a list on which the works of Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa have been placed alongside those of Galileo. Johann Valentin Andreae, founder of the Rosicrucians, has been pronounced a heretic by the Cardinals of the Inquisition. Traiano Boccalini, Andreae's mentor, a supporter of Henry of Navarre, was murdered in Venice, while Navarre himself, the polestar of all of these hopes, was assassinated in Paris. But the movement is Hydra-headed and unstoppable. With Navarre's death came a new hope, a new axle round which everything else could gather and spin.'

  'The Elector Palatine,' murmured Emilia. 'King Frederick.'

  'Yes.' He gave another shrug. 'Another hope that proved a sad delusion.'

  A few lights along the shoreline wavered slowly past. The barge had shunted into Gallion's Reach, avoiding the landing piers that projected into the ink-black water. The boat's wake as it passed stirred to life the strings of moored lighters whose hulls bobbed in the swell. Beyond the jetties and mud banks lay nameless hamlets and tumbledown cottages. They had been in the barge for over two hours now, but the river had narrowed only slightly. At times the shore seemed to vanish.

  'So the parchment is a danger to orthodoxy.' She was beginning to understand the stakes involved, or thought she did. 'Rome hopes to suppress it, to stamp out its heresies before they can take hold.'

  'Very possibly. At the moment Rome is terrified of any threat to its dogma, of a split that would undermine its fight against Protestantism. Galileo with his moons was one such threat, but four years ago he was silenced by the Holy Office, warned by Cardinal Bellarmine not to write another word in defence of the heretic Copernicus. The appearance of another document in support of Copernicanism or any other heresy would, however, be a drastic blow, especially at this time.'

  'And especially if it came from an authority as great as Hermes Trismegistus.'

  'Yes. So the manuscript will be locked away in the secret archives of the Bibliotheca Vaticana if the cardinals and bishops lay their hands on it. Perhaps it will even be destroyed.' Once more he lowered his gaze to the cabinet between his feet. 'Except there is something else,' he said slowly, 'something I fail to understand. For in the past few years the authority of Hermes Trismegistus has been challenged, even destroyed. Not by the theologians of Rome, but by a Protestant, a Huguenot.'

  There had been a recent dispute, he said, between a Protestant scholar, Isaac Casaubon, and a Roman Catholic, Cardinal Baronius, Keeper of the Vatican Library-the man who, Vilém claimed, now wished to cart off to Rome both the Bibliotheca Palatina and the manuscripts in the Spanish Rooms. Years ago the Cardinal had published a massive study about the history of the Church, the Annales ecclesiastici, in which Hermes Trismegistus was described as one of the Gentile prophets along with Hydaspes and the Sibylline oracles. This treatise was much admired by Vilém's teachers, the Jesuits in the Clementinum, but since then it had been soundly refuted by Casaubon, a Switzer, a Huguenot who had come to England at the invitation of King James. And Casaubon's magnum opus, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI, published six years earlier in 1614, was said to prove beyond doubt that the whole of the Corpus hermeticum was a forgery composed not by some ancient Egyptian priest at Hermoupolis Magna but instead by a band of Greeks living in Alexandria in the century after Christ. These men had cobbled together a mishmash of Plato, the Gospels, the Jewish Cabala, together with a few scraps of Egyptian philosophy, and had managed to hoodwink scholars, priests and kings for more than a thousand years.

  Vilém was shaking his head morosely as they swayed from side to side w
ith the motions of the barge. It made no sense. Why should Sir Ambrose have been so intent on smuggling The Labyrinth of the World out of Prague? Sir Ambrose, a good Protestant, certainly knew the work of Casaubon. And why, too, if it was a fake, should the Cardinal wish to suppress it? Because that was who had pursued them from Prague, Vilém now told her: the agents of Cardinal Baronius.

  'Can it not be opened?' Emilia, too, had returned her gaze to the cabinet. 'Is there a key for the lock?'

  He shook his head again. 'Only the one kept by Sir Ambrose. I know of no other.'

  The barge had now reached the deep waters and rushing currents of Woolwich. The skeletal frames of the Navy's half-finished men-o'-war could be seen in the dry-docks slipping past on the larboard side. Emilia had shifted to the opposite side of the barge, from where she could watch the waters behind them. Figures with flares and lanterns were moving back and forth in the yard entrances and among the wooden cranes whose profiles reared against the sky. As they shunted astern she thought she caught sight of another barge in the brief funnels of light, or rather a glimpse of a canvas tilt beneath which other figures could be seen. About a hundred yards of water separated them. She thrust her head out from under the awning.

  'How much further before Billingsgate?'

  The barge-master plunged his pole into the water, leaned on it, then raised it hand over hand. 'Eight miles or so,' he grunted before plunging it again. The boat yawed to starboard and he very nearly lost his balance. 'Two more hours,' he added after a moment. 'And that's if the tide doesn't turn.'