Two years later King James died in his bed, but with all the long-drawn agony and terror which God had spared Elizabeth Carey. He died as he had lived - without dignity, although a king for fifty-seven of his fifty-eight years. Carey viewed the corpse without compassion. The jaw hung loose and the great slobbering tongue protruded from the open mouth. It was dysentery which had finally driven breath from the body, and the odour of departed royalty, soaked in its own excreta, drove all but the strongest stomachs from the room.
3
When the new king appointed another Lord Chamberlain, Carey found his disappointment a relief. His ambition had died with his wife and he had no wish to serve the house of Stuart longer.
In the coronation honours King Charles was graciously pleased to raise Sir Robert Carey, Baron Leppington to the higher dignity of Earl of Monmouth. Carey received it wryly. How he would have grasped at the honour in his youth, and from the hand of the old Queen, who had commanded his respect! At long last he was the peer of the proud Essexes, the General who had knighted him and his truculent son; of the great lords, Southampton and Pembroke and Montgomery; of the disgraced Howards, Northampton, Nottingham, Suffolk and Arundel; of the old Kerr, become Roxburgh, and the young Carr, still Somerset and quietly set at liberty after six years’ imprisonment. Yet all this meant nothing to him now. He was old and widowed, his race run.
The years of favour, he now realized, had been time-misspent. The Border called him back and he answered the summons, bearing with him the trophies of life at court: his earldom and his pension. Indulging a whim of sentiment, he had his carriage driven to Richmond so that he could begin his journey from there and re-live, mile by mile, the adventure of his ill-judged ride to Scotland - the ride which had lowered the curtain on an age of greatness and raised it on one of shame and corruption. He had ridden too far, he thought as he passed near Hardwick. Ralegh had been right. Another Queen should have succeeded Elizabeth. Better Arabella than James.
From Edinburgh he returned to Berwick, no longer a frontier town, where the governor told him that, with the Border at peace, Norham stood ungarrisoned and empty. He rode out the same day to view the castle and became bewitched by the spell of its remoteness and the memories its gaunt, deserted walls inspired. How could a man worthy of the name have lived here and yearned for London?
The lease was his for the asking and he settled with the ease of homecoming into the leisured life of a country nobleman. He rode, he hunted. He renewed old acquaintances and set himself the task of writing for posterity the story of his life.
One noon, raising his eyes from his desk, he spied through the donjon’s narrow window horsemen approaching from Scotland. With an old soldier’s instinct he jumped to his feet to sound the alarm, the union of the two kingdoms forgotten. His mind was on the words he was writing: a record of the hanging of the infamous Geordie Bourne. Then he recognized the strangers with amazement, hurried to the turret in the corner and ran down the broken stone stairs to receive them.
The Earl of Roxburgh’s grey hair had whitened and the Earl of Somerset’s face was lined and coarsened by adversity. Otherwise little had changed. Yet they showed no uncertainty how he would greet them and leaped from the saddle to embrace him like a friend. For them, too, the struggle was over and old scores were to be buried before their lease on life expired.
‘In the name of every Borderer,’ said Kerr, ‘I welcome your return with all my heart.’
Carey responded in kind and Kerr took him aside to explain that his kinsman had come north because his wife had died. News of Frances Howard’s death had already reached Norham, but not its cause. She had, Kerr whispered, suffered long and painfully from an affliction in her privy member or, as he poetically described it, that sweet dark tunnel of ecstasy which had become more talked about than any other in all the history of the two realms.
‘She never loved me,’ Carr confessed, when in the evening the three Earls sat around a jug of wine in the great chamber. They had feasted on the best which the castle could supply and were mellow. ‘She was wilful like a child and desired only what was forbidden. Northampton saw her beauty as a weapon to enrich their family. The greatest catch would have been Prince Henry, but him she lost by your interference. At most, I was never more than second best.’
‘You did well enough, Robbie.’ Kerr toasted him with pride, convicted murderer or no. ‘If the King had not betrayed you, you would be a duke by now, like Lennox and that serpent Villiers.’
‘The responsibility for Villiers was mine,’ Carey admitted to Carr. ‘I do not deny it. But first I offered my humble services to you. You chose the Howards. Had you preferred me, Villiers would never have been heard of and - who knows? - we might even now be governing the country, the pair of us, in the name of Baby Charles.’
‘Do not blame yourselves,’ Kerr told them. ‘Stuarts lie at the root of all our ills. James played false with all three of us, even as he betrayed Ralegh’s plans to Spain; and I would trust God’s new Vice-regent on earth as I would the devil. They have ever been a bad lot, but when they lived in Scotland we restrained them by force. Scotsmen knew better than to treat Stuarts with respect.’
A bad lot to a Kerr must be a bad lot indeed, Carey mused, remembering the treachery of the Scottish warden and his methods of keeping others from misbehaving on the Border. But the time was past for voicing such thoughts. He filled their beakers and addressed himself again to Carr.
‘I have many times wondered, since your trial, what misdeed King James was fearful of your uncovering to the world in your defence.’
‘That is a secret which I swore to keep until my feet were on the scaffold. Without it, I should not be alive.’
‘You can tell it now,’ Kerr urged him. ‘It will make no difference to the wretched state of Jamie’s black soul.’
‘I gave my word.’
‘Away with oaths! Others have learned the secret since. That lying knave of a king slew the young Earl of Gowrie and his brother in cold blood.’
‘Murdered them?’ Carey exclaimed in surprise. Was this what Overbury had been about to tell him through his prison window?
James’s story of their death was well known. The Gowrie brothers had plotted to seize and kill him. They died in the attempt. The anniversary of his miraculous escape had been celebrated, like that of the Gunpowder Plot, with commemoration services and peals of bells every year for the remainder of his reign.
‘Aye,’ said Kerr, ‘there was no plot. It was plain murder, and the men who killed them had their mouths stuffed with fat annuities to stop them blabbing.’
‘It is true,’ Carr acknowledged. ‘Jamie once let it slip in his cups when we were alone. I heard it from his own lips and would have made his confession public before I died.’
‘Did Overbury know?’
‘He knew - and Jamie was aware of it.’
Carey poured more wine and waited patiently for it to be drunk before he dared ask his next question, the one whose answer he had sought for years.
‘And the death of Prince Henry?’ he inquired. ‘Was James to blame for that?’
‘He sent his own physician to attend the Prince,’ said Carr, ‘and the Prince’s death did not grieve him. I know no more - only that I was found guilty of a felony on evidence as meagre.’
‘Mayerne prescribed mercury,’ Carey reminded him.
Carr shrugged his shoulders. ‘Some poisons cure as well as kill. Mayerne came from the French court. He is cleverer than any other physician in England, but others attended the Prince and witnessed the post-mortem.’
‘A royal post-mortem is rare. Surely it is designed to disarm suspicion and may therefore be a sign of guilt.’
‘No one can tell what instructions Jamie gave. Certainly Mayerne never will. He and Jamie were secret together, even from me. If you want my verdict, it is non proven.’ Carr showed little concern. It seemed that James was not the only person who did not mourn the Prince’s death.
Th
e three of them talked on, their enmity at rest and their tongues running loose over the events of James Stuart’s two reigns, until in the hour before dawn the Earl of Roxburgh, stupefied, slid peacefully from his stool. While he lay snoring on the rushes and the Earl of Somerset’s eyes were glazed but still open, Carey broached the subject they had skirted all night.
‘There was a fourth in our company when we were last together in this hall,’ he ventured. ‘I never believed you guilty of his murder.’
‘You are kind, my lord.’ Carr’s mockery was unresentful. ‘Indeed I had no part in the affair except to become a victim - and to reproach myself ever since for not discerning the intent of others and frustrating it. Overbury was my friend and I could have saved his life. I stand condemned for that.’
‘And the Countess - did she act alone?’
‘Northampton was the prime mover. He persuaded her to it, and -’
‘And?’ Carr had snapped the sentence abruptly in two and Carey leaned forward encouraging him to complete it. ‘And?’ he repeated.
‘And the King too.’ The words were low but clear.
‘Jamie desired Overbury,’ Carr continued just as Carey was giving up hope of his saying more. ‘He made advances and was spurned. That Jamie could never forgive. The Gowries were killed because the younger brother resisted him. He came to hate Overbury because Overbury would not bend to him and because -’
This time, after another long pause, he finished the sentence unprompted. ‘Because Thomas loved me and me alone. He has been the only true love of my life.’
Disburdened of the truth, Carr wept. Without shame or embarrassment. Carey buried his face in his beaker to hide his distaste.
‘That apothecary who made up the poisoned enema,’ Carr continued, drying his tears, ‘was a crony of Mayerne from France. Mayerne had sent him other prescriptions for Overbury. Why was the apothecary called as a witness, but not the doctor at any of the trials? All the blame was laid on an apprentice, who was never so much as brought back to England. Only under torture did Weston confess to bribing him and Franklin to supplying the poison.’
‘If Mayerne was implicated in this,’ said Carey, ‘there must be a greater likelihood of his involvement in Prince Henry’s dying. Would he have acted in either case except as the King’s agent?’
‘Do not be too hard on Jamie,’ Carr replied, recovering some of his spirit. ‘At least he had a tender heart and did not spill other men’s blood in wars. You cannot say that of your Tudors.’
‘Elizabeth killed few men and openly,’ Carey answered, quick still to defend his cousin against attack. ‘They died for reasons of state. She was never a secret murderer, inspired by her own hatreds.’
‘Tell that to your friend, the Earl of Essex. She killed his father, who was her lover, just as her own father was monster enough to butcher his wives.’
‘She may have been cruel,’ Carey conceded. ‘I came to hate her but, unlike your Stuarts, she was fit to rule. I except our lost lord, Prince Henry. As for Charles, he will be no better than his father. My wife would have performed a better service to our countries if she had let the poor wretch perish as a boy.’
‘Your creature Villiers will govern well enough for Baby Charles,’ said Carr with the magnanimity of one suddenly past caring. With a sweep of his hand he spilled the wine and, while it dripped from the table on to his cousin’s cheek, he laid his face on his arms and fell asleep. All passion spent.
Carey surveyed his slumbering erstwhile enemies and felt amazement at the feeble forgivingness of age, which had allowed the hospitality of his hearth to two such Border brigands. In them the dignity of earldoms was sullied and disgraced for ever. Night riders both, the elder with outlaws like Geordie Bourne and the younger in the arms of a false, perverted king.
4
At the opposite end of England early that same morning, while the three drunken lords still slept at Norham, Lieutenant John Felton had taken up his position in the passage of a house in Portsmouth. It was St Bartholomew’s Day, the anniversary of the massacre of French Protestants, in whose cause he had recently fought at the siege of La Rochelle. He was a victim of madness, obsessed both by his own grievances and by the sin of sodomy openly committed by the royal favourite, George, Duke of Buckingham. When the Duke came down to breakfast, the lieutenant drove the blade of a knife into his heart. Blood from a severed artery spurted from the handsome mouth and nose and would not be staunched. Villiers was to govern no more.
Baby Charles proved unable to rule without the guidance of his father’s George. When his infuriated subjects rose in rebellion, mourning Prince Henry anew, they were led by those who remembered the scandal of Overbury’s poisoning and had witnessed Ralegh’s execution. It was recalled how King James had once knelt before his Council and had called on God to lay a curse on him and his posterity for ever if he had consented to Overbury’s death. At the battle of Edgehill the general commanding the people’s army achieved a triumph. It was the vengeance of Nemesis for humiliation suffered in his youth. He was the Earl of Essex, one of the first captains of the great revolt which ended with Charles condemned to Ralegh’s fate.
All this Carey did not live to see, but after that St Bartholomew’s Day God rewarded him with eleven more years on earth. In his eightieth year he still rambled carefree every day beside the idle and now peaceful Tweed, along its banks and among the trees, marvelling at his youthful folly in preferring court to country. The barbarous parts of the kingdom, he had learned, were those inhabited by the King.
When at last he lay on his death-bed, the Gountess of Roxburgh crossed the Border from Cessford with one of Queen Anne’s Jesuits who lived secretly in her household. They came to persuade him to die in the same faith as his wife and thus be assured of the reunion of their souls.
He refused, telling them with a flicker of his old resolution that, if God were a Christian God as he believed, he would be judged by faith and works and not by rites. Popery meant Spain and Spain meant the Inquisition, and how did that accord with the teaching of Christ?
Robin Carr had turned to Rome for salvation, the Countess told him, as had her husband. Would that not make him think again, she urged.
He smiled at the inducement of joining his soul with theirs for all eternity and maintained his refusal until she departed with her confessor, leaving him to die in peace unshriven.
With his last breath of Border air he comforted himself that he had made a mark on the history of his time and, all in all, a mark for good. But how much better it would have been if he had learned as a youth to scorn favour and esteem disgrace!
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © 1975 by Jeremy Potter
First published by Constable and Company Ltd
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Disgrace And Favour Page 25
