1635: A Parcel of Rogues - eARC (26 page)

Chapter 30

Baron Mackay didn’t regard the pain as any great issue anymore. The new drugs from Grantville helped a great deal, of course, even in the limited quantities he allowed himself in the interests of keeping a clear head. He suspected he was shortening his life by keeping as active as he was, but the wheelchair that the young American McCarthy had designed for him—and doubtless some artisan in Edinburgh was looking forward to making a pretty penny from selling more of them—did much to make him feel more like he was merely crippled and less like a bedridden invalid.

And, now, Hannay. Dean of Saint Giles. Mackay had presumed, a few weeks prior, on an acquaintance with the man’s cousin, who’d been a figure of middling note up until a few years ago, when he’d vanished somewhere in the Germanies, or possibly on the sea voyage over. A poet, some political noise in Ireland, a soldier in the early days of the Protestant cause in Bohemia, and a vague friend of the Mackays. The man would be remembered chiefly for his poetry, if anything, but he was part of the general group of “Scotsmen serving abroad.” He wasn’t the only Hannay bearing arms in the Germanies and the USE, of course, simply the only one Baron Mackay had known well enough to invite a relative of his for a social visit.

The younger Hannay had proved surprisingly amenable to being Mackay’s man in the bishops’ party, albeit only with a reporting brief. Mackay hoped that would, when it came time to start working on Montrose, let him obtain an entree there. Montrose was, in Mackay’s view, the key to the whole matter. If the histories of his conduct in the other time’s civil war were to the point, he was a man loyal to his king but persuadable. He’d begun in clear adherence to the Covenanter cause for the sake of Scotland, but divided the Scots cause when he returned to his king.

Now, if the man could just be persuaded that that loyalty to Charles Stuart was a bad investment that ought be written off, they would have something. If the Campbells could be persuaded not to queer the deal by insisting on their primacy so that Scotland’s strength was united, deterring military action by a man Mackay thought of, more and more, as King of England only. If, if, if.

Uniting Scotland was a doubtful proposition at best, and far and away the Bruce’s greater achievement, when you looked at it, than merely liberating Scotland from English rule. At that he’d done it largely by smashing the Comyn to less than a tithe of their former power. The goal then: bring Scotland into a political unity without anyone having to be smashed. Let them bicker and snarl at each other all they wanted in private; when facing south it must needs be as a single front.

Baron Mackay felt he’d set himself to landing a muckle great fish with only a tiny hook and the slenderest of lines.

Fortunately, he had the future histories to give him an idea of how the fish would run, but they were no use in telling him how it would wriggle. He’d have to play the beast with every ounce of skill he had.

Hannay was looking uncommonly pleased with himself, preening almost. He was a shortish, thickset man with a ludicrous little mouse of a moustache that he fiddled with constantly. “Montrose was definitely uncomfortable, Laird Mackay,” he said, by way of opening after the pleasantries had been dealt with. “The man knows the matter he has in charge is near to impossible, if not actually so. And as you instructed I placed the blame for all of the misgivings about the future on the Reverend Doctor Green. It’s not so far from the truth as all that, as it happens. The fellow is most prolific with his letters.”

“The best deceptions are done with the truth,” Mackay observed. “Lead a man to place the wrong interpretation on what he sees and every new fact that comes to him leads him further astray. However, there’s no great amount of deception in this matter, Doctor Hannay. We truly are about the business of saving Scotland from civil war. If Montrose can be made to see the turmoil of civil unrest as greater than the turmoil of disestablishment, he will find it all the easier to break with the king.”

“Must we?” Discomfort replaced smugness in Hannay’s demeanor. “I can see, perhaps, that there is argument for His Majesty having a lighter hand in the government of the Church. Perhaps, even, for disestablishment, and His Majesty being a secular ruler on the model they are adopting in the United States. The Walther manual is most persuasive as a method of making doctrinal independence paramount over political expedience, but…”

Mackay held up a hand to stop the man in mid-whine. “It is devoutly to be hoped that His Majesty adopts that as his solution to the matter. It is certainly the case that those who encouraged him in his previous approaches are no longer counseling him.”

There; let him salve his conscience with the doctrine of evil counselors. If truth be told, that had never been other than the thinnest of fig leaves to cover naked rebellion. And, if Mackay read the future histories aright, nothing short of naked rebellion would get through to Charles Stuart. By grace of God he might be king of England and Scotland, but the man seemed bent on rejecting that which the grace of God had given him. Mackay suppressed a smile. That line had just occurred to him, and it was one he’d do well to remember for the future. It was the kind of pithy aphorism that put men’s discomforts into easy words.

“And if he does not?” Hannay had been willing to joke about having stools thrown at him. Not, apparently, about committing treason. Mackay had, at least, the comfort of knowing that he would be dead before he could be laid on a headsman’s block, with his sons either not complicit or gone abroad with roots put down in what sounded like good lands. And, of course, the amusement of knowing that he’d met the stool-hurling Jenny Geddes before she took the bloody flux and died. One day he’d tell Hannay just for the look on his face.

Not today, though. Mackay folded his hands carefully, deliberately, before him. “In that case, Reverend Doctor, it will be just as well that we have taken good care that every man who might have supported His Majesty has as his first concern the good of Scotland.”

“And if the good of Scotland be that His Majesty remains king?”

Mackay leveled his gaze hard at Hannay. “Let us pray, indeed, that that is indeed the Almighty’s plan for our nation, Reverend Doctor.” Not least because, even allowing for the youth of his daughter-in-law, Mr. McCarthy and Mistress Mason, the descriptions he’d had of presidential elections made them sound like a sore trial to the patience of any man of sense. “However, let us proceed on the assumption that, given no alternative, His Majesty will behave as does a man of sense, however little he may like it.”

Hannay chuckled. “A touch of
lése majesté
, Laird Mackay?”

Mackay snorted. “Perhaps. Or perhaps an honest assessment of the man under the crown? Tell me I am misguided in the matter.”

“Not…entirely. He is, perhaps, not the man his father was, nor the man he was before he was injured. There are some fellows who, perhaps, do not take well to such setbacks.”

Mackay nodded, acknowledging the compliment. “Charity bids me allow that, in the first days after my own injuries, I was much inclined to feel sorry for myself and be a nuisance to those around me. Which I mention as much in the spirit of confession being a tonic for the soul as anything else.” He took a deep breath, as if to indicate that he was much tonicked, and went on. “Now, and I appreciate this is on the basis of one meeting, do you think Montrose took to heart that the charge he has in hand is truly impossible?”

“We spoke at length after I put it to him the first time. He has hopes of making a compromise happen, I do know that. Even if it is only in the shape of insisting, at swordpoint, that every clerk and divine in Scotland hold his tongue on the subject of church governance.” Hannay shrugged. “He does not seem, I would say, much exercised by the prospect of popular revolt over the prayer book, should he try and introduce that.”

“I rather suspect that that will not be an issue for the time being. Did you follow the news from London? The escapes from the Tower of London?”

“If you’re referring to Laud’s departure, aye, I see what you’re driving at. No Laud, no great impetus for a book of prayer common to both kingdoms. The trouble is, His Majesty may yet regard it as his own project and Laud’s was not the only spoon stirring that particular pot. There’s not a bishop south of the border who doesn’t take Hooker as his first and last in all matters of doctrine and governance. Not that Hooker isn’t a fine authority in many matters, but far too many of our countrymen make an idol of the National Covenant to be readily accepting of a move to the Anglican ideal.”

Mackay winced. “I hope ye’re not minded to suggest the Covenant is an idol where anyone can hear you?”

Hannay chuckled again. “I’ve a fraction more than half my wits about me, sir, and that fraction’s all I need. The Covenant is what it is, a covenant and solemn league against the errors of Rome listed in it, and those not listed, and to preserve the true religion. The argument is regarding what it permits, and what it does not permit, and which pan of the scales we place bishops in, for they are not mentioned for good or ill in the whole document. And, for that matter, what weight upon the balance His Majesty’s conduct shall exert—”

Mackay held up his hand to stop what was promising to be a full theological flow. “The plain fact o’ the matter is that the Kirk of Scotland will tolerate bishops, but not the prayer book, am I right?”

“Aye. The one’s a matter of His Majesty exercising governance over the Kirk. The other goes to doctrine, and there’s a mort o’ the English common prayer’s too much like popery for any Scotsman’s taste. Hooker was a fine fellow, but willing to tolerate error and call it tradition and reason, when he ought to have insisted on the sufficiency of scripture and reached much of the same conclusion he did, why—”

Another warding hand. Mackay could sense that this was a man who might expound theology all the day and into the night. Keeping him attentive to the politics of the matter might prove a trial. “Can you counsel your masters and Montrose both that, perhaps, the present debate might be confined to the matter of bishops alone? We have the future histories to tell us that it was the book of common prayer that provoked the rioting and then the Bishops’ Wars. His Majesty thinks least when he feels that someone is trying to force his hand. Should he feel he has had something of a victory, he might choose magnanimity in other matters and we may keep the political situation from becoming a matter of blood.”

“I can counsel that, aye, my lord. I promise nothing in the matter of success. I’ve read the history of the Bishops’ Wars myself. The Kirk rejected everything, bishops included, when pressed by His Majesty, and sought to disestablish itself.”

“Aye, and that because His Majesty was of the opinion that the Kirk was intriguing with France,” Mackay said, pleased he’d got the fellow back on to more firmly political matters. “Since he is now in the pay of the king of France himself, he has not that suspicion to move him. Indeed, the fact of his paying his mercenaries with French coin is a very present scandal, Reverend Doctor, and would make a charge of popery all the more plausible to the common folk. If he’ll marry a Catholic and take the pay of a Catholic king, it will not be so hard to see popery in every line of the prayer book. Bishops, on the other hand, his father introduced, and that before he took the English crown. Before, even, the final form of the Covenant, so the presbyterians can hold their noise.”

Hannay nodded. “I shall try.”

“No more may be asked of any man,” Mackay said, knowing full well that Hannay was going to fail. The news from south of the Tweed was all of His Majesty having become even more of a holy fool than he’d ever been, and if it was the pain of his wounding that did it, Mackay knew from personal experience that they were in for months of the same yet. Probably more; he knew it was not the sin of pride telling him he had never been the petulant and wilful fool Charles Stuart had been. Mackay had been brought up to play the man and endure his hurts with dignity; that he had, temporarily, failed was a source of shame for which he hoped his actions now were adequate earthly contrition. It might be a guess, but it was a guess informed by observation and judgement, that Charles Stuart would not have that fundament to draw on when recovering from the shock of becoming a cripple.

He bid Hannay good evening, and, as he was being shown out, gently turned the crank that reclined his wheelchair. With Hannay gone, his favorite houseguest let himself into the room.

“I listened most carefully, as you bid me,” Cromwell said, as Gayle Mason followed him into the room.

“Gimme a minute, here, to get this turned off.” She reached under the table and took out the radio-box that had conveyed the whole conversation upstairs.

“It was admirably clear, Gayle,” Cromwell said, the usually bluff country-squire tones softening as they always did when he spoke to her. Mackay felt a small cramp of annoyance that they couldn’t have a proper wedding celebration for these two. He’d had an old friend, half-retired as pastor of a tiny village kirk in the wilds of West Lothian, stand witness to their marriage vows and make the necessary entries in his parish register so their marriage was lawful. Not any kind of secret, but certainly entirely without any publicity. That, and a hearty dinner and a good dig at his wine cellar, had been the limit of the hospitality he could offer without drawing attention. Hiring a few toughs was all it took to keep Finnegan’s men away from the house while the lawyers wrangled over young Alex’s captivity, but if the man got hold of the notion that Cromwell was a regular visitor and was staying not two miles away in Canongate, he’d be back with another warrant and no mind to back away when a houseful of baronial retainers stared him down. Alex’s arrest had had to go ahead because that warrant, at least, was lawful. More resistance than limiting him to the single named party and leaving behind “other persons found therein” would have been a move too far, too soon.

Even having Oliver here now was likely asking too much of dame fortune, really.