The Historical Nights' Entertainment. Second Series

by Rafael Sabatini

  Stukeley broke forth into imprecations. He was, he vowed, the most accursed and miserable of men that such a task as this should have fallen to his lot. And he was a poor man, too, he would have his cousin remember. It was unthinkable that he should use the knowledge he had gained to attempt to frustrate Sir Walter's plans of escape to France. And this notwithstanding that if Sir Walter escaped, it is certain he would lose his office of Vice-Admiral and the six hundred pounds he had paid for it.

  "As to that, you shall be at no loss," Sir Walter assured him. "I could not suffer it. I pledge you my honour, Lewis, that you shall have a thousand pounds from my wife on the day that I am safely landed in France or Holland. Meanwhile, in earnest of what is to come, here is a toy of value for you." And he presented Sir Lewis with a jewel of price, a great ruby encrusted in diamonds.

  Thus reassured that he would be immune from pecuniary loss, Sir Lewis was ready to throw himself whole-heartedly into Sir Walter's plans, and to render him all possible assistance. True, this assistance was a costly matter; there was this person to be bought and that one; there were expenses here and expenses there, incurred by Sir Lewis on his kinsman's behalf; and there were odd presents, too, which Stukeley seemed to expect and which Sir Walter could not deny him. He had no illusions now that King had been right; that here he was dealing with a rogue who would exact the uttermost farthing for his services, but he was gratified at the shrewdness with which he had taken his cousin's measure, and did not grudge the bribes by which he was to escape the scaffold.

  De Chesne came again to the house in London, to renew his master's offer of a ship to carry Sir Walter overseas, and such other assistance as Sir Walter might require But by now the knight's arrangements were complete. His servant Cotterell had come to inform him that his own boatswain, now in London, was the owner of a ketch, at present lying at Tilbury, admirably suited for the enterprise and entirely at Sir Walter's disposal. It had been decided, then, with the agreement of Captain King, that they should avail themselves of this; and accordingly Cotterell was bidden desire the boatswain to have the craft made ready for sea at once. In view of this, and anxious to avoid unnecessarily compromising the French envoy, Sir Walter gratefully declined the latter's offer.

  And so we come at last to that July evening appointed for the flight. Ralegh, who, having for some time discarded the use of Manourie's ointment, had practically recovered his normal appearance, covering his long white hair under a Spanish hat, and muffling the half of his face in the folds of a cloak, came to Wapping Stairs—that ill-omened place of execution of pirates and sea-rovers—accompanied by Cotterell, who carried the knight's cloak-bag, and by Sir Lewis and Sir Lewis's son. Out of solicitude for their dear friend and kinsman, the Stukeleys could not part from him until he was safely launched upon his voyage. At the head of the stairs they were met by Captain King; at the foot of them a boat was waiting, as concerted, the boatswain at the tiller.

  King greeted them with an air of obvious relief.

  "You feared perhaps we should not come," said Stukeley, with a sneer at the Captain's avowed mistrust of him. "Yet now, I trust, you'll do me the justice to admit that I have shown myself an honest man."

  The uncompromising King looked at him and frowned, misliking the words.

  "I hope that you'll continue so," he answered stiffly.

  They went down the slippery steps to the boat, and then the shore glided slowly past them as they pushed off into the stream of the ebbing tide.

  A moment later, King, whose suspicious eyes kept a sharp look-out, observed another boat put off some two hundred yards higher up the river. At first he saw it breast the stream as if proceeding towards London Bridge, then abruptly swing about and follow them. Instantly he drew the attention of Sir Walter to that pursuing wherry.

  "What's this?" quoth Sir Walter harshly. "Are we betrayed?"

  The watermen, taking fright at the words, hung now upon their oars.

  "Put back," Sir Walter bade them. "I'll not betray my friends to no purpose. Put back, and let us home again."

  "Nay, now," said Stukeley gravely, himself watching the wherry. "We are more than a match for them in oars, even if their purpose be such as you suspect—for which suspicion, when all is said, there is no ground. On then!" He addressed himself to the watermen, whipping out a pistol, and growing truculent in mien and voice. "To your oars! Row, you dogs, or I'll pistol you where you sit."

  The men bent their backs forthwith, and the boat swept on. But Sir Walter was still full of apprehensions, still questioning the wisdom of keeping to their down-stream course if they were being followed.

  "But are we followed?" cried the impatient Sir Lewis. "'Sdeath, cousin, is not the river a highway for all the world to use, and must every wherry that chances to go our way be in pursuit of us? If you are to halt at every shadow, faith, you'll never accomplish anything. I vow I am unfortunate in having a friend whom I would save so full of doubts and fears."

  Sir Walter gave him reason, and even King came to conclude that he had suspected him unjustly, whilst the rowers, under Stukeley's suasion, now threw themselves heartily into their task, and onward sped the boat through the deepening night, taking but little account of that other wherry that hung ever in their wake. In this wise they came at length to Greenwich on the last of the ebb. But here finding the water beginning to grow against them, and wearied by the exertion into which Stukeley's enthusiasm had flogged them, the watermen paused again, declaring that they could not reach Gravesend before morning.

  Followed a brief discussion, at the end of which Sir Walter bade them put him ashore at Purfleet.

  "And that's the soundest counsel," quoth the boatswain. "For at Purfleet we can get horses on to Tilbury."

  Stukeley was of the same opinion; but not so the more practical Captain King.

  "'Tis useless," he declared to them. "At this hour how shall you get horses to go by land?"

  And now, Sir Walter, looking over his shoulder, saw the other wherry bearing down upon them through the faintly opalescent mists of dawn. A hail came to them across the water.

  "Oh, 'Sdeath! We are betrayed!" cried Ralegh bitterly, and Stukeley swore more fiercely still. Sir Walter turned to him. "Put ashore," he said shortly, "and let us home."

  "Ay, perhaps 'twere best. For to-night there's an end to the enterprise, and if I am taken in your company now, what shall be said to me for this active assistance in your escape?" His voice was gloomy, his face drawn and white.

  "Could you not plead that you had but pretended to go with me to seize on my private papers?" suggested the ingenious mind of Ralegh.

  "I could. But shall I be believed? Shall I?" His loom was deepening to despair.

  Ralegh was stricken almost with remorse on his cousin's account. His generous heart was now more concerned with the harm to his friends than with his own doom. He desired to make amends to Stukeley, but had no means save such as lay in the power of that currency he used. Having naught else to give, he must give that. He plunged his hand into an inner pocket, and brought forth a handful of jewels, which he thrust upon his kinsman.

  "Courage," he urged him. "Up now, and we may yet win out and home, so that all will be well with you at least, and you shall not suffer for your friendship to me."

  Stukeley embraced him then, protesting his love and desire to serve him.

  They came to land at last, just below Greenwich bridge, and almost at the same moment the other wherry grounded immediately above them. Men sprang from her, with the obvious intent of cutting off their retreat.

  "Too late!" said Ralegh, and sighed, entirely without passion now that the dice had fallen and showed that the game was lost. "You must act on my suggestion to explain your presence, Lewis."

  "Indeed, there is no other course," Sir Lewis agreed. "And you are in the same case, Captain King. You must confess that you joined with me but to betray Sir Walter. I'll bear you out. Thus, each supporting the other..."

  "I'll roast in Hell
before I brand myself a traitor," roared the Captain furiously. "And were you an honest man, Sir Lewis, you'ld understand my meaning."

  "So, so?" said Stukeley, in a quiet, wicked voice. And it was observed that his son and one or two of the watermen had taken their stand beside him as if in readiness for action. "Why, then, since you will have it so, Captain, I arrest you, in the King's name, on a charge of abetting treason."

  The Captain fell back a step, stricken a moment by sheer amazement. Then he groped for a pistol to do at last what he realized he should have done long since. Instantly he was overpowered. It was only then that Sir Walter understood the thing that had happened, and with understanding came fury. The old adventurer flung back his cloak, and snatched at his rapier to put it through the vitals of his dear friend and kinsman. But he was too late. Hands seized upon him, and he found himself held by the men from the wherry, confronted by a Mr. William Herbert, whom he knew for Stukeley's cousin, and he heard Mr. Herbert formally asking him for the surrender of his sword.

  Instantly he governed himself, repressed his fury. He looked coldly at his kinsman, whose face showed white and evil in the growing light of the early summer dawn "Sir Lewis," was all he said, "these actions will not turn out to your credit."

  He had no illusion left. His understanding was now a very full one. His dear friend and kinsman had played him false throughout, intending first to drain him of his resources before finally flinging the empty husk to the executioner. Manourie had been in the plot; he had run with the hare and hunted with the hounds; and Sir Walter's own servant Cotterell had done no less. Amongst them they had "cozened the great cozener"—to use Stukeley's own cynical expression. Even so, it was only on his trial that Sir Walter plumbed the full depth of Stukeley's baseness; for it was only then he learnt that his kinsman had been armed by a warrant of immunity to assist his projects of escape, so that he might the more effectively incriminate and betray him; and Sir Walter discovered also that the ship in which he had landed, and other matters, were to provide additional Judas' fees to this acquisitive betrayer.

  If to escape his enemies Sir Walter had had recourse to artifices unworthy the great hero that he was, now that all hope was lost he conducted himself with a dignity and cheerfulness beyond equal. So calm and self-possessed and masterly was his defence from the charge of piracy preferred at the request of Spain, and so shrewd in its inflaming appeal to public opinion, that his judges were constrained to abandon that line of prosecution, and could discover no way of giving his head to King James save by falling back upon the thirteen-year old sentence of death against him. Of this they now ordered execution.

  Never a man who loved his life as dearly as Sir Walter loved it met death as blithely. He dressed himself for the scaffold with that elegance and richness which all his life he had observed. He wore a ruff band and black velvet wrought nightgown over a doublet of hair-coloured satin, a black wrought waistcoat, black cut taffety breeches and ash-coloured silk stockings. Under his plumed hat he covered his white locks with a wrought nightcap. This last he bestowed on his way to the scaffold upon a bald-headed old man who had come to take a last look of him, with the observation that he was more in need of it than himself. When he had removed it, it was observed that his hair was not curled as usual. This was a matter that had fretted his barber Peter in the prison of the Gatehouse at Westminster that morning. But Sir Walter had put him off with a laugh and a jest.

  "Let them comb it that shall have it," he had said of his own head.

  Having taken his leave of the friends who had flocked about him with the observation that he had a long journey before him, he called for the axe, and, when presented to him, ran his fingers along the edge, and smiled.

  "Sharp medicine," quoth he, "but a sound cure for all diseases."

  When presently the executioner bade him turn his head to the East:

  "It is no great matter which way a man's head stands, so that his heart lies right," he said.

  Thus passed one of England's greatest heroes, indeed one of the very makers of this England, and than his death there is no more shameful blot upon the shameful reign of that pusillanimous James, unclean of body and of soul, who sacrificed him to the King of Spain.

  A spectator of his death, who suffered for his words—as men must ever suffer for the regardless utterance of Truth—declared that England had not such another head to cut off.

  As for Stukeley, the acquisitiveness which had made a Judas of him was destined, by a poetic justice, ever desired but rarely forthcoming for knaves, soon to be his ruin. He was caught diminishing the gold coin of the realm by the operation known to-day as "clipping," and with him was taken his creature Manourie, who, to save himself, turned chief witness against Stukeley. Sir Lewis was sentenced to death, but saved himself by purchasing his pardon at the cost of every ill-gotten shilling he possessed, and he lived thereafter as bankrupt of means as he was of honour.

  Yet before all this happened, Sir Lewis had for his part in Sir Walter Ralegh's death come to be an object of execration throughout the land, and to be commonly known as "Sir Judas." At Whitehall he suffered rebuffs and insults that found a climax in the words addressed to him by the Lord Admiral, to whom he went to give an account of his office.

  "Base fellow, darest thou who art the contempt and scorn of men offer thyself in my presence?"

  For a man of honour there was but one course. Sir Judas was not a man of honour. He carried his grievance to the King. James leered at him.

  "What wouldst thou have me do? Wouldst thou have me hang him? On my soul, if I should hang all that speak ill of thee, all the trees of the country would not suffice, so great is the number."

  VIII. HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM

  George Villier's Courtship of Ann of Austria

  He was Insolence incarnate.

  Since the day when, a mere country lad, his singular good looks had attracted the attention of King James—notoriously partial to good-looking lads—and had earned him the office of cup-bearer to his Majesty, the career of George Villiers is to be read in a series of acts of violent and ever-increasing arrogance, expressing the vanity and levity inherent in his nature. Scarcely was he established in the royal favour than he distinguished himself by striking an offending gentleman in the very presence of his sovereign—an act of such gross disrespect to royalty that his hand would have paid forfeit, as by law demanded, had not the maudlin king deemed him too lovely a fellow to be so cruelly maimed.

  Over the mind and will of King Charles his ascendancy became even greater than it had been over that of King James; and it were easy to show that the acts of George Villiers' life supplied the main planks of that scaffold in Whitehall whereupon Charles Stuart came to lose his head. Charles was indeed a martyr; a martyr chiefly to the reckless, insolent, irresponsible vanity of this Villiers, who, from a simple country squire with nothing but personal beauty to recommend him, had risen to be, as Duke of Buckingham, the first gentleman in England.

  The heady wine of power had gone to his brain, and so addled it that, as John Chamberlain tells us, there was presently a touch of craziness in him—of the variety, no doubt, known to modern psychologists as megalomania He lost the sense of proportion, and was without respect for anybody or anything. The Commons of England and the immensely dignified Court of Spain—during that disgraceful, pseudo-romantic adventure at Madrid—were alike the butts of this parvenu's unmeasured arrogance But the crowning insolence of his career was that tragicomedy the second act of which was played on a June evening in an Amiens garden on the banks of the river Somme.

  Three weeks ago—on the 14th May, 1625, to be precise—Buckingham had arrived in Paris as Ambassador Extra-ordinary, charged with the task of conducting to England the King of France's sister, Henrietta Maria, who three days earlier had been married by proxy to King Charles.

  The occasion enabled Buckingham to fling the reins on to the neck of his mad vanity, to indulge to the very fullest his crazy passion for oste
ntation and magnificence. Because the Court of France was proverbially renowned for splendour and luxury, Buckingham felt it due to himself to extinguish its brilliance by his own. On his first coming to the Louvre he literally blazed. He wore a suit of white satin velvet with a short cloak in the Spanish fashion, the whole powdered over with diamonds to the value of some ten thousand pounds. An enormous diamond clasped the heron's plume in his hat; diamonds flashed in the hilt of his sword; diamonds studded his very spurs, which were of beaten gold; the highest orders of England, Spain, and France flamed on his breast. On the occasion of his second visit he wore a suit of purple satin, of intent so lightly sewn with pearls that as he moved he shook them off like raindrops, and left them to lie where they fell, as largesse for pages and the lesser fry of the Court.

  His equipages and retinue were of a kind to match his personal effulgence. His coaches were lined with velvet and covered with cloth of gold, and some seven hundred people made up his train. There were musicians, watermen, grooms of the chamber, thirty chief yeomen, a score of cooks, as many grooms, a dozen pages, two dozen footmen, six outriders, and twenty gentlemen, each with his own attendants, all arrayed as became the satellites of a star of such great magnitude.

  Buckingham succeeded in his ambition. Paris, that hitherto had set the fashion to the world, stared mouth-agape, dazzled by the splendour of this superb and scintillating ambassador.

  Another, by betraying consciousness of the figure that he cut, might have made himself ridiculous. But Buckingham's insolent assurance was proof against that peril. Supremely self-satisfied, he was conscious only that what he did could not be better done, and he ruffled it with an air of easy insouciance, as if in all this costly display there was nothing that was not normal. He treated with princes, and even with the gloomy Louis XIII., as with equals; and, becoming more and more intoxicated with his very obvious success, he condescended to observe approvingly the fresh beauty of the young Queen.