Carr hesitated, then lowered his head for the first time, to a rustle of disappointment. ‘I am finished,’ he announced. ‘God be with me.’
Given the strength, he could have spoke all night and invoked the name of God a hundred times, but there would still have been no escaping the verdict against him. When the twenty-two lords had pronounced it one by one, it was heard to be unanimous. All his bravery and passion had won him not a vote.
On this occasion Ellesmere delivered the death sentence without mention of the King’s mercy. The blade of the axe was turned towards the condemned man, the Lord Steward broke his staff, and the court rose. Carey strode stiff-limbed and sour-mouthed from the hall, convinced that he had witnessed an act of injustice. Frances Howard and Northampton had murdered Overbury. Carr was foolish but innocent. He would never have stood trial if Villiers had not filched the King’s affection from him. It was Carey himself - the discoverer of Villiers - who experienced the pangs of guilt.
In this he was not alone. The next morning it became common gossip that the King had spent the entire day and half the night in suspense. Refusing all food and rest, he had paced backwards and forwards between his privy apartments and the river stairs at Greenwich to receive the latest news of the trial from a relay of messengers. As he seized each fresh despatch his fingers shook, their nails bitten to the quick. As he read the words to himself, the saliva dribbled from his mouth and fell glistening on his beard.
The verdict did not put an end to his fretting. The country was crying out for Carr’s blood and for several days, on a false rumour, a hopeful crowd gathered on Tower Hill to see him hanged. They reckoned without the King’s squeamishness. He was not a Tudor and could not bring himself, like Henry and Elizabeth, to kill those whom he had loved. With Scottish dourness, he persisted in his determination to grant his Robin a pardon if only his Robin would beg for it.
This his Robin with equal determination refused to do. The sequence of disasters - arrest, imprisonment, trial and sentence - had hardened him. Nothing was left to him but the consciousness of his own innocence and that he would not compromise with on any terms. Mercy was for the guilty. All he would solicit was the favour of being beheaded instead of hanged and the return of his confiscated lands to his infant child - not the son he had prayed for, but a daughter, born in sorrow and facing a life of penury.
The obstinacy of the two men led inevitably to stalemate. The penitent Countess who had thrown herself so readily on the King’s mercy was pardoned, but the stubborn Earl lived on in limbo. He was neither pardoned nor executed. The royal leniency undammed another flood of rumours about undiscovered truths. Weston’s words were remembered - that the little birds would be snared and the great ones let go.
While public interest lasted, the Somersets were not released. They had to be seen to be punished, and the Earl kept where he could no longer interfere with James’s idyll with his George. They inhabited adjoining apartments in the Tower, sufficient of their possessions being restored to them to provide a life of comfort. The Countess amused herself, without descending below her rank, by dividing her favours between her husband and the imprisoned Earl of Northumberland; and Carr could be seen walking in the garden which had been Ralegh’s, continuing to flaunt across his breast the ribbon and emblem of his Majesty’s most noble order of chivalry.
2
Carr’s ruin brought Carey a prize. When the time came for the Prince to be created Prince of Wales, Villiers rewarded him with the post of chamberlain despite the aspirations of his old enemy, Sir Robert Kerr, Lord Roxburgh.
As one of the King’s favoured Scotsmen, Kerr had believed the appointment to be his for the asking, and to clinch the matter his wife, the former Mistress Drummond, had returned to Denmark House to wrest the Queen’s support from Lady Carey. Thwarted, they retired in dudgeon to Cessford, consoled but unappeased by the elevation of the barony of Roxburgh to an earldom. The honour was a mark of the King’s continuing goodwill and underlined the power of the new favourite in depriving them of a post which they prized so highly. Their ill-tempered departure from court Villiers gaily acclaimed as good riddance, swearing that none from the clan of Kerr should ever again be permitted so near the throne of England.
To his vexation Carey found no pleasure in his new place. With Overbury dead, Carr disgraced and Kerr defeated and skulking in his Border fortress, his triumph over them should have overwhelmed him with joy. Instead, Carr’s protests of innocence rang in his ears and he felt a strange envy of Kerr’s return to the Border. His ambitions were being achieved by fawning on a King, a Prince and a favourite all of whom he despised. He remembered young Essex’s words, looked at himself with the eyes of his youth, and did not like what he saw.
The time was one of death, but not of that most awaited - the senile King’s. Ellesmere died and the crooked Coke secured the Lord Chancellorship, with Bacon succeeding him as Lord Chief Justice. In setting aside their scruples in what had become famous as the Great Oyer of Poisoning, they had pandered, grovelled and earned their promotion. Winwood’s death following Ellesmere’s was of no account, the Protestant ascendancy now being firmly rooted. Next into the grave went Carey’s brother John, the third Lord Hunsdon. He had prudently provided himself with sons, so that the family barony stayed as far as ever out of Carey’s reach.
The death which overshadowed all others was Ralegh’s. He had been released on the promise that he would sail to Guiana and, without fighting the Spaniards, whom James was too timid to offend, bring back gold to enrich the King. He sailed, fought the Spaniards, lost his only son in the engagement and returned without gold. Faced with the fury of Spain, the strongest power in Europe, James trembled and not even Villiers could save Ralegh’s life. Like a star Ralegh had lived, and like a star he must fall when it troubled the firmament. That was the judgment of the King’s court.
The execution took place in the Old Palace Yard at Westminster, between the abbey church where the King had been crowned and the Parliament house where his Commons had defied him. Ralegh’s demeanour on his last day on earth won him admiration such as he had never enjoyed before. To his lasting regret Carey did not witness it. He was at Royston with a letter in his hand from the Queen, begging the King to spare Ralegh’s life for the sake of Prince Henry’s memory. But the King, made aware of Carey’s business, refused to recognize his presence, brushing him aside in the ante-chamber on the way to mount his horse and ride away for the day’s chase.
Ralegh had spent his last evening composing his own funeral song. The discourse which he delivered from the scaffold was an elegant essay in Christian humility. It was the apologia for his life, and he asked the crowd to come nearer because he wanted the whole world to take notice.
First, he denied the charge of atheism and professed his Christian faith, at the same time confessing himself the greatest sinner he knew, although this was no marvel since he had been soldier, seaman and courtier. Secondly, he denied procuring the ruin of Essex’s father and insulting him at his death by puffing tobacco smoke in his face, as had been reported. Thirdly, he solemnly protested that he had had no disloyal intentions in his last voyage and had never said nor thought any ill towards his Majesty.
His speech done, he embraced his friends and heartily forgave the headsman. He ran his finger along the edge of the axe’s blade and remarked that this was a sharp medicine which would cure him of all his diseases and miseries. When his head lay on the block facing west and some of the crowd shouted that he should turn it to the east, he rose and coolly told them that it mattered not which way a man’s head lay if his heart lay right. When he knelt again the executioner could not bring himself to do his work until the victim himself commanded him to strike.
Within the day all London knew of the fearless end of the bold Elizabethan and accounted the King a murderer and a traitor to his fellow countrymen. A man who could spare a Carr and kill a Ralegh was not fit to rule England. Carey felt it his duty to warn the Prince of Wales of
the consequences of such an action, but Charles was proud of his father for showing that he was capable of exercising his authority. How differently, thought Carey, would Prince Henry have judged the King! For Carey himself, the judicial murder of Ralegh constituted a final disenchantment.
After Ralegh followed the Queen, who had tried to save him. Death was her last extravagance. She died in her bed, racked with gout and swollen with dropsy, and her body lay in state for ten weeks while a despairing search was made for sufficient money to bury her in a manner befitting the daughter, wife and sister of kings.
Among the other ladies of the court, Lady Carey sat hour in and hour out beside the remains of her royal mistress, where they lay behind black-curtained windows, surrounded by black-draped walls, in the palace on the Strand. She felt herself to be the only mourner from the heart. The Countess of Roxburgh did not return from the Border. The King attended neither the death-bed, nor the long lying-in-state (although assured that the entrails had been removed and he would not find the body nauseous), nor, when it at last took place, the funeral. Death and his wife both repelled him, and he could not understand why the cost of burying her should not be borne by her own estate. Since she was past demanding money from him in person, he was able to declare that he could not and would not pay.
When all hope of moving him had to be abandoned, it was decided to pawn the Queen’s most precious jewels and melt down her gold plate. The discovery was then made that these had disappeared, together with her French valet and Danish maid. The Prince was incensed at the loss and at the prolonged insult of his mother’s unburied corpse, but, as always, was too weak to act for himself. The Careys therefore jointly solicited an audience with Villiers, who had been raised from an earldom to the rare dignity of marquis, the first ever created by the King. The years of growing power had left him unmarked and Carey thought that, if beauty were the qualification, he most certainly deserved a higher rank than Carr. He received them, resplendent in white satin, the dazzling sheen contrasting with his black locks and the redness of his lips in a picture of perfection both natural and contrived.
‘Lady Carey! Sir Robert!’ He unbent graciously, like a monarch himself, as he could almost claim to be.
It was deep love for him and his constant companionship which kept the doting King alive. Villiers had risen above being James’s simple George and was now drooled over under a succession of pet names: ‘sweet Steenie’, ‘my only dear child and wife’. The Howards had struggled against him in vain. In an endeavour to trump their enemies’ trick, they dressed up a succession of pretty boys and thrust them ogling into the royal presence, but James was too old and idle and timorous to make a change and Villiers struck back savagely. Lord Treasurer Suffolk was forced to resign, accused of embezzlement. After ten days in the Tower to teach him a lesson, he was released with the punishment of a crippling fine. Nottingham’s resignation was demanded too and Villiers himself became Lord Admiral in place of the hero of the Armada’s defeat. Nothing now stood in his way. No state business could be conducted, no appointment made, no benefit bestowed, without his consent. There was one flaw and one alone: his power hung on the life of a sick man. The heir, Prince Charles, hated him as Prince Henry had once hated Carr.
‘How are we to bury the poor Queen?’ Villiers continued. ‘That is the question you have come to ask. The Exchequer is empty and the court weary of wearing mourning.’ He smiled at his own finery as he spoke. ‘The ladies tell me they are exhausted from sitting by the body day and night. The theatres are crying out to be allowed to re-open, to save themselves from ruin. But how can her Majesty’s last masque be mounted without money?’
‘If only your lordship would speak with the King,’ said Carey, ‘assuredly means would be found. The Prince is distressed at the delay and has commanded me to say that he would esteem your lordship’s intercession with his father a favour.’
‘Will the Prince not speak himself with his own father?’ Villiers affected surprise.
‘He has spoken, but to no effect.’
‘Then the favour will be no light one. I owe you much, Sir Robert, and it is a pleasure to converse with you, but I would have expected the Prince to come to me himself.’
Carey risked a frown. ‘As his father’s heir,’ he said, ‘the Prince has been advised that he should not attend on others in person. It would be customary for them to attend on him. On this occasion, however, he believed it more polite to send me to your lordship than to summon your lordship to him.’
‘Believed? Or was he so advised on that too? It may be you warned him that I would not come.’
‘He would regard it as a signal honour to receive the Marquis of Buckingham at St James’s.’
‘Have I your word on that? It has seemed to me that he loves me not. Yet I would be friends with him. Let me intercede with you in turn, and with Lady Carey too. Do me the favour of directing the Prince of Wales’s affections towards me and I shall not be backward in paying my debt. You have done the state much service, Sir Robert, and been a knight for many years.’
‘If the Prince receives your lordship gently,’ Lady Carey intervened, ‘will money be provided to honour the Queen with a decent burial? That, not advancement, is our concern.’
‘Mine is the Prince’s friendship,’ Villiers replied and bowed them graciously from his splendid presence.
‘What did you pick up at Newmarket, Robin!’ Lady Carey sighed when they were sitting in their carriage.
The Prince’s grudging agreement was obtained after two days of tantrums, and the Careys awaited the encounter with foreboding. But the Marquis, when he came, drowned the Prince in charm and flattery until Baby Charles’s head was turned completely and a friendship was formed which lasted for life. So the Queen was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey with all the extravagance she could have wished for, and Carey became a baron.
The honour, like his appointment as chamberlain, grated. It did not match his ambition. It came too late, and for a reason which gave him no satisfaction. During the following years, while the King groaned and bawled over his gout and his gallstones, Steenie and Gharles governed the country like a pair of schoolboys and Lady Carey, who did not rejoice in her new title of Baroness Leppington, told her husband roundly that he was to blame. He had even to pursue them to Spain and fetch them home in disgrace from an escapade in which they shocked the Spanish court by appearing in Madrid incognito, in a vain, madcap wooing of the Infanta.
After the Queen’s death Carey’s wife was again able to devote her days and nights to him. Down the years she had been his conscience and consolation, but latterly religion had come between them. He hoped that she would forgo her secret Popish practices once the Queen’s Jesuits had been sent packing, but she would make him no promise and disappeared mysteriously every Sunday with her maid.
One week he had followed and learned that she went to Blackfriars, into a building hidden down a passage and across a close, adjoining the house of the French ambassador. Here, in a garret, as he discovered, a former Protestant priest turned Jesuit, and calling himself Father Drury, held Romish services in the English tongue.
Afterwards Carey long regretted that he did not report his discovery to the Archbishop. For his wife’s sake he said nothing, and was duly punished from Above. One Sunday, the fifth day of November, the maid returned alone, dishevelled and scarcely capable of speech. Father Drury had been preaching, reviling the Protestant heretics whom God would assuredly punish, when the floor-beams broke beneath the weight of the congregation and plunged them without warning into a room below. The maid had lost her mistress among the injured and dying, and had come wailing for help.
Carey ran all the way from St James’s to Blackfriars, praying at every step. It was no time for caution or dignity and he sped with all the strength of body and will he had once expended in his walk to Berwick and his ride to Edinburgh.
The carnage was worse than he could have imagined. Four hundred people had been crowded i
nto one small attic, and the drop to the floor below he measured as no fewer than twenty feet. Nearly a hundred were dead, eight priests among them. Some were suffocated in the press, but the preacher’s brain had been crushed from his skull and the bowels from his body. It took Carey nearly two hours of desperate search among the lifeless and groaning to uncover his wife’s body. She lay at peace beneath the others, battered into the next world by a blow on the crown of the head. At least her sweet face was not disfigured, her expression calm and unafraid.
Other notables and ladies of quality were among the victims. To avoid a scandal, a great pit was hastily dug in the French ambassador’s courtyard and the common bodies dragged there by their feet or hands and tumbled in all together without coffins or shrouds. Before the earth closed over them, one of the surviving priests sprinkled holy water and pronounced them saints and martyrs. Before God, he accused the Puritans of unpinning the main beam. Yet when the calamity became known and the cause investigated, it was reported that the beam had been of oak in sound condition and could only have broken as a manifest sign of God’s wrath at the preacher’s words. For further proof no one needed to look beyond the date. It was the very anniversary of Popish infamy in the Gunpowder Plot, when those faithful to Rome had attempted to blow up King and Parliament in the name of their religion.
Carey could not stomach a common burial for the body in which he had found such delight and the woman for whose love he had once counted the world well lost. Yet, as a known Papist, she would be refused interment in any consecrated ground. Only one course was open to him. Although now past sixty and exhausted by his exertions, he hoisted her over his shoulder and carried her away as Aeneas had once borne his father from burning Troy. Hunsdon House was near, and despite the injury to his pride he decided to beg a favour of his nephew.
Irresolute like his father, Lord Hunsdon vacillated until his wife ordered him to give his consent for the family’s sake. Beyond that he would offer no assistance and his chaplain declined to administer the last rites of the established Church. Undeterred, Carey sent for his own most trusted servant, and between them they dug a grave in a secluded corner of the garden. There he knelt in prayer for her soul and kissed his wife’s lips for the last time.
Disgrace And Favour Page 24
