The King’s List. Peter Ransley

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СКАЧАТЬ generals who were in control would eventually stop arguing and a new leader to replace Cromwell would be found. Then it would be business as usual.

      He stood on the worn patch of the carpet in my study, where I had once stood as a rebellious bastard before Lord Stonehouse, and said nothing.

      I tried reason. It was not his beliefs, I said. He was as entitled to them as I was to mine. If more people wanted a monarchy, it would return. But too many people had gained too much land during Cromwell’s reign to want the King back. That was why all the Oxfordshire gentry who had made promises before the rebellion had not lifted a finger to help him and his friends when they were in prison.

      He stood fidgeting in his bucket boots and floppy linen, staring straight in front of him, rigid in silence.

      I tried diversion and flattery. He was mad about horses and had a very good eye for them. Would he go with the ostler to a horse fair and buy a pair?

      His eyes gleamed for a moment, then he bit his lip and said nothing. Finally, I gave him an ultimatum. He could have his complete freedom and go into the City alone if he promised to have nothing more to do with the Sealed Knot and took no part in any further plots.

      He stood rigidly to attention. He may even have clicked his heels. ‘I am sorry, sir,’ he said, in his beautiful, clipped voice, a real Stonehouse voice which Anne had made sure he acquired, unlike mine which slipped, sometimes intentionally, into the sound of the London streets where I was brought up. ‘I am sorry. I cannot do that.’

      I almost ordered Luke to dismiss, but that was part of the problem. He wanted to be a soldier. He had missed the war. Perhaps he believed that if he and his friends had fought, the Royalists would have won.

      I sighed. ‘Go away and think about it, Luke.’

      ‘I suppose it’s too late to beat the French dog,’ said Scogman hopefully. He called him that because, in the manner of the man he declared to be his King, he dressed in French fashions: short doublets and increasingly wide-legged breeches which seemed about to fall from his hips. ‘You could cut his allowance.’

      I would not do that. Beatings and other punishments had never worked on me. Nor would I let him be cooped up, although I insisted that Scogman went with him into the City. Anne agreed with that, at least. She wanted no more trouble.

      People believed we had a perfect marriage. It certainly was a perfect relationship, but only because we rarely saw one another. Love had gone. It went for me when I became convinced Anne was taking potions to prevent having another child.

      The child might have been another little Liz, who had died in infancy. Or another son, giving me the chance to be a better father. Once or twice I even unlocked the left-hand bottom drawer of my desk, and took out the papers on my bastard son.

      It had happened when I was a Leveller, struggling after the rebellion for rights for the people. I had broken up with Anne and lived with a girl called Ellie. But then I had returned to Anne, and it was only by chance, years later, that I discovered I’d had a son with Ellie. I paid to have him brought up at Half Moon Court, in the house where I was raised, and still owned. I gave him a rudimentary education. Nothing fancy. He had no idea of my existence, believing the man Ellie lived with, a candle-maker to whom he was apprenticed, was his father. The file I took out of my drawer was marked: Samuel Reeves. Closed. Payments had stopped when he was indentured. Each time I took it out with the intention of throwing it away. It was pointless, stupid to keep it. Anne had no idea of his existence. But each time I put it back.

      Apart from Luke, Anne’s child was Highpoint, our great estate in Oxfordshire. Estates were in decline. The extravagant years, when noblemen were expected to bankrupt themselves on the chance that the King might visit, went with his execution. The mood was, as one churchman put it, that ‘a house had better be too little for a day than too great for a year’. Even so, Anne improved the classical facade and opened up the lofty hall to the great sweep of the imposing staircase. She had an eye for paintings which lived, as she put it, rather than just hung. Many were bought cheap at Parliament’s ‘Sale of the Late King’s Goods’, a chaotic affair in Somerset House where dusty masterpieces were crammed amongst tapestries and chipped statues. She spotted dirty Titians and neglected Van Dycks, and had them restored and reframed to their original beauty. Her gardens were marvelled at. I admired Highpoint, but could not live there. Its builders, staff, stables, brew houses, granaries and farms drained most of our money. While she spent it in the country, I economised in town. It suited us both.

      It gave her the pleasure of creating it and me the power it emanated. We saw one another at glittering occasions there where I was Sir Thomas Stonehouse, charming to the county, most of whom were covert Royalists. Lady Stonehouse – I called her that at first, in a slightly mocking way, until, as the house gained in eminence, it became impossible to call her anything else – put on her sober dress and mien when she came to town to entertain Cromwell and the other old generals who ruled the country. Cromwell would call me Tom, but he would never dream of calling Anne anything other than Lady Stonehouse.

      So we believed it would continue until the family grave at Highpoint (she had already planned it) bore not one of those stiff, heraldic memorials that were going out of fashion, but a personal portrait that recorded our enduring love and affection for one another.

2

      Like a pebble in a pool, the summer rebellion made a small impact but caused wide ripples. There was unrest in the City. Mutterings that there would be a tax strike if a successor to Cromwell was not found soon. I had the usual vitriolic letter from my father, Richard Stonehouse, threatening what would happen to me when the King returned.

      Cromwell had given me Richard’s estates and made me Sir Thomas Stonehouse, in return for supporting him and signing the King’s death warrant. I had done it for Anne, who had become so obsessed with the place she had fallen into an illness from which I was afraid she would die. It was also true that Richard’s father, Lord Stonehouse, finally intended me to have it. He feared Richard’s profligacy would destroy the estate, but had died before he could complete a new will. Richard saw it much more simply: I had seized Highpoint by signing away the King’s life. The estate was blood money. To my father, I was what I had always been: Tom Neave, bastard, scurrilous pamphleteer, usurper and, worst of all, regicide – King killer.

      At erratic intervals, from different parts of Europe, my father sent me such letters. Under Cromwell, who had built up a powerful navy as well as a full-time army, Britain had become the most feared nation in Europe. In those years I could afford to throw Richard’s incoherent letters into the night soil without reading them. Now the armies – there was not one but several – were beginning to disintegrate. Soldiers had not been paid. Their generals quarrelled. Montague, who headed the navy, was suspected of being involved in the rebellion and there were moves to put him in the Tower. I read my father’s letter with more than usual care.

      He praised Luke for his courage and part in the rebellion. With all my father’s old contacts in Oxfordshire, I wondered if he had deliberately involved Luke in it. In the same post was a letter for Anne from her old friend and mentor, Lucy, the Countess of Carlisle, who was in Brussels with the makeshift court of Charles Stuart. I had rescued her from the Tower, but Cromwell had exiled her for spying for the King. Now she was spying for me. Her letter was full of gossip about penniless dukes and duelling courtiers and – principally – about Mrs Palmer, Charles’s new mistress.

      ‘She has enslaved him,’ Lucy wrote. ‘When she is in the room he cannot take his eyes from her. She is planted of course, by the Villiers family – she was Barbara Villiers – for their benefit, if the King ever СКАЧАТЬ