Most Secret (17 page)

“One treaty, fairly new and thought to be binding, already exists.”

“With France?”

“Body o’ Pilate, no! It was signed by England, Holland, and Sweden; it is called the Triple Alliance; it exists to promote ‘peace, trade, and prosperity’ among three Protestant nations. However!”

Bygones, oratorical finger lifted, turned round to address the figure of Cupid in the niche over the fireplace; then, becoming sensible of the incongruity, he swung back again.

“King Looey Catters of France, ’tis widely reported, would like well to see that treaty broken. He would have England again at sea war against the Dutch, allied to France in secret treaty if need be.”

“
Could
such a secret treaty be brought about?”

“It could, lad; it probably will. Ayagh!” snorted Bygones. “The Dutch have cut our throats on every trade route; you can’t beat a Dutchman at bargaining; there’s powerful companies in the City would have this altered. It may not be long ere we again hear ships’ guns off Lowestoft, as when the Duke of York blew up Opdam in his own two-decker. Moreover …”

“Well?”

“Should such an arrangement be one item in the secret treaty, then all five members of King Charles’s Cabal would sign it.
But
—”

“Hang me, what are all these ‘buts’? What are you gabbling of now?”

“Gabbling, am I?” roared Bygones. “Attend to me! Another item, the most secret and the most dangerous, could be told to two members of the Cabal alone. To Sir Thomas Clifford, he being a Papist; to my Lord Arlington—ay, Harker was wrong there—my Lord Arlington having Popish sympathies under his mask. The other three, Buckingham and Ashley and Lauderdale, must never learn it in this world. The terms of this most secret item shall be known only to the King of England, the King of France, and the King of England’s sister as negotiator.”

“Bygones, for God’s sake! Can’t you EVER speak plain?”

“I will do so,” said Bygones. “In return for the payment of an enormous subsidy, King Charles will promise France that he will introduce the Roman Catholic religion into this country: by persuasion if possible, by the use of a French army if necessary.”

“Stay a moment!” said Kinsmere. “Whatever else the king may be, is he stark mad?”

“Not so; far from it! He knows he can’t
do
this; he knows he dare not; nor would he ever see foreign troops on this soil. But he will promise it; he will play against time and the clock; he will forever put it off. Are these plain words now?”

“Then hark to some other plain words,” says Kinsmere. “If he would so much as promise this, even without will or intent to carry it out, then the King of England must be fully as great a rogue as any who …”

“Since when is statecraft honest? Or ever has been? Also, if we be loyal King’s men, which of us is to judge him?”

“I preach no sermons. And yet—”

“Well, nor do I debate or defend: I only tell you these things are true. Here are the terms of a treaty which Harker and I were this night to have carried to France in two halves of a divided document and which somebody else and I must still carry!

“D’ye see, lad? Great body o’ Pilate, here’s more gunpowder than Guy Fawkes ever dreamed of! And we three are sitting on it, because we know too much. Or put it that we’re between two sides: the king on one side, and on the other a band of malcontents led by a plotter-in-chief whose identity we can’t guess at. As for Harker in there—”

Abruptly Bygones Abraham paused. His eyes swung round towards the knothole in the wall, as though he had heard a noise from the next room. Then his eyes bulged.

“Harker! Oh, ecod! If … Wait here, both of you!”

He was across the room before either of them could speak. The door to the passage opened and closed behind him; they heard his footsteps move towards the Hebe Room.

“What is happening?” cried Dolly, and then lowered her voice. “Oh, so-and-so it all, what
can
be happening?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it’s no concern of ours, is it? (Hold me closer!) Sir—dear boy—it can’t in any case concern
us?”

“I can’t say that either. And yet, madam—sweet heart, that’s to say!—we are slap in the middle of whatever trouble there is.”

Bygones’s voice, speaking through the knothole, struck at them with muffled thunder.

“Lad!” he said. “Come in here at once. You, lass, remain where you are!”

Releasing himself from Dolly, who was frightened and had no wish to be released, Kinsmere hurried to the door. Then he ran. In the next room, not far from the partly open cupboard door, Bygones awaited him with a face of wrath and near-collapse.

“Harker!” he said.
“You
did him no hurt.
I
did him no hurt. And yet—” He pointed to the cupboard. “Who did this, lad? Who
is
the plotter-in-chief? God damn my soul.”

Kinsmere, conscious of flies buzzing near, threw the cupboard door wide open.

Pembroke Harker, trussed round with ropes which were no longer necessary, lay face down at full length. Also unnecessary was the plum-coloured satin sash wound twice round his mouth and tied at the back of the head. At the collar line below the sash’s knot, through the curls of the periwig and through a great flowing of blood, jutted up the yellow bone handle of a heavy knife.

As he lay trussed and helpless, someone had stabbed him to death through the back of the neck. Already a dozen flies were gathering and buzzing round the blood.

T
HE KING’S HOUSE, LITTLE
Russell Street, Drury Lane. Friday, May 20th, 1670. Four o’clock in the afternoon, and the performance about to begin.

Stand at the back of the pit, now, and look at it. It will be a gala afternoon, since today most of the court attend the play. Nowhere will you get a better view of so many of these people gathered together, with an edge of wax-light on their faces; and you will see representatives from half London too. Grandee and Grandee’s Lady in the side boxes; in the pit, Fop and Trollop and even respectable young Man of Affairs, with wife (Mr. Pepys of the Navy Office is a good example); Sedate Citizen in the middle gallery; Unnameable Public in the top gallery.

Never expect, as you enter, to see anything like our modern theatre of 1815. There’ll be no drop curtain, as you observe; no floats or footlights to shine on it; such things have not yet been invented. Merely a raised platform of a stage, with double doors at the back and a smaller door flanking them on either side; above the stage, on ropes so that they may be raised or lowered, two chandeliers with crowns of candles.

Nor is there any scenery, except such articles as are necessary for the action. You must use imagination, letting the scene be painted with words. And some costumes on the stage might startle the uninitiated. An actor—Mr. Hart, for instance—will play Macbeth in the periwig and red coat of a seventeenth-century Guardsman. However, since today the play is
Julius Caesar
and Roman dress well known from the number of London’s statues in toga or tunic, some attempt will be made to present this as it might have looked in Julius Caesar’s day.

Standing also at the back of the pit, so as to keep a wary eye out for riots at the door, is Tom Killigrew, the manager. He can look with pride on this theatre. It is a commodious place, capable of seating nearly two hundred people, and even has a glass cupola to protect the pit from rain. That cupola will be necessary soon. Despite a sunny morning, it has grown so dark and thunder-fraught that the wax candles have been lighted above the stage, throwing shaky illumination towards spectators too.

Killigrew’s French musicians—ten of them—are already in place below the stage, tuning their fiddles. There is a sharp tap for attention. Then the fiddles, aided by a horn or two, strike up a country dance as though to silence the buzz of the crowd.

It is a large crowd and a well-behaved one—barring, to be sure, those congenital brawlers who always make an uproar at the door, and say they’ll pay their money when they get inside. A shuffling from the pit is drowned by the tumult of the top gallery, where the crowd whoops and whistles and stamps like a cloudful of angels on a spree. There sit ’prentice from Eastcheap, jack-pudding from Ludgate Hill, bullyrock from the stews of Alsatia: critical, not-to-be-cozened public, with their wenches along.

Grave-faced and quiet is the middle gallery, showing no female company. Any respectable woman may go to the play, provided she wear a vizard mask. But the Sedate Citizens of the middle gallery hold different views, Here are government men of all but the highest rank, country gentlemen, bankers, trade princes from the City. They don’t bring their wives; they won’t bring their doxies. They wear five-guinea perukes above sober finery; or they wear skull caps, gold chains, and grave fur gowns. They may be raised to the peerage one day. Meanwhile they whisper to one another, bending forward in dim light. Yet they are none the less eagerly glancing towards the side boxes, left and right, upper tier and lower, not yet filled by the court.

The fiddles dance into a merrier tune; the clamour in the pit grows louder. Come, there’s your fashion! Camlet cloaks are jostling together; a bottle passes from hand to hand. On the stage itself, in Fops’ Corner—chairs or stools there, as in the side boxes; no benches as in the rest of the house—several furbelow’d gentlemen have raised gold quizzing glasses, and are ogling ladies in vizard masks who sit well to the front of the pit.

Above singing fiddles you can hear the cries of the orange girls.
“Oranges! Will you have any oranges?”
They are pretty, bare-armed wenches with roving eyes.
“Oranges! Who’ll buy my oranges?”
Standing with their backs to the stage, they swing baskets covered with vine leaves.
“Oranges!”

It has grown much darker now. A rumble of thunder shakes the glass cupola, setting candle flames atremble. The atmosphere is close, rather foul; dust rises; a lack of washing becomes evident. From the gloom of the pit you can hear scuffling noises, laughter, and the sound of a slap.
“Let be, you! Oranges!”

There is a burst of laughter at the door. Killigrew turns round; the top gallery cheers; Sedate Citizen cranes his neck. For the court parties are arriving. At the head of them, looking round complacently as he enters his side box. is a portly man with a light tread …

George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham: Master of the Horse, minister without portfolio, but a very powerful minister indeed. Complacent, vain, witty, persuasive, monstrously energetic: a large-nosed and light-footed conqueror, whose brain boils with a hundred interests at once. He thinks himself a great soldier, though of scant military experience, and a great statesman, though he is nicknamed Alderman George. One day he will be working with chemistry, swearing he has discovered a means of fixing mercury; the next he will sit down and write a play to ridicule Mr. Dryden, or a set of derisive verses against the king, whom he holds in some contempt.

In his youth this Bucks was a slender daredevil, adroit at disguise and at tweaking Puritan noses. Though brought up in the household of Charles the First, he had small liking for poverty and exile with the old king’s son. In ’57, still with a price on his head, he returned to England under Oliver’s Protectorate. To regain his confiscated estates, at least in part, he won and married the daughter of Black Tom Fairfax, that eminent Commonwealth general. Despite his father-in-law’s favour, after more escapades they clapped him into the Tower and would have executed him (he said) if Oliver had not died. But Parliament released him; and he had afterwards, or so he also declared, no small share in promoting the Restoration.

You see him now at forty-two, surveying the King’s House as he might have surveyed the king’s domain, and turning to joke with Sir Robert Howard. You see him padded with good living: the heavy reddish face, the double chin, the magnetic eye half shut under a great brown periwig. He wears claret-coloured silk with much lace, and he gesticulates. Who overthrew Clarendon? In whose bands is Parliament as wax? Who, as unofficial chief minister, in effect rules England and directs its policies? All the cheering from the top gallery—he is popular with the mob, and knows it—all this waving of handkerchiefs by masked ladies, might to his mind give answer in one mighty shout: “You!”

And why not? If there were any such fantastical vessel as a ship of state, then George Villiers might be pictured as captain with spyglass and master gunner too. It is the sort of double role he would enjoy. Though he hates Popery, and would allow liberty of conscience only to Protestant dissenters, he has vast admiration for the French king. He will be off to France soon. In his honour Versailles will bloom with fetes, and masques, and lighted fountains; he will be made the gift of a jewelled sword valued at twenty thousand crowns; even his mistress, Lady Shrewsbury, whom he won by killing her husband in the famous and scandalous duel at Barn Elms, will be awarded a pension of ten thousand
livres
a year by His Most Christian Majesty Louis the Fourteenth.

Thus Buckingham, whom the gods love. He glances once more round the house, and with a gusty laugh sits down to await the play. My Lord Rochester has called him the sort of man who, when he goes out of a room, always leaves the door open so that he can come back in again.

Young Rochester?
He
will be there, close behind in a noisy group, though at this hour he is customarily so drunk that he will be quite unable to remember it afterwards.

“I am at no pains or trouble, gentlemen,” says John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “to arrive at a given place. But ’tis awkward to recall whence I have just come.” And at first you may not see him amid the other wits and sparks thronging round.

There’s Etherege, for one: affable Mr. (not yet Sir George) Etherege, the playwright, who wrote
Love in a Tub
and will be an ambassador one day. In far future he is to have the glory of dying for gallantry. One night in Paris, aged fifty-six, he will be lighting a lady out of his bedchamber; walking backwards and holding up the taper, he will fall downstairs and break his neck. Which is a tolerably severe punishment for devotion to good form. But he also wrote
The Man of Mode,
and should have been satisfied.