The Licence of War (77 page)

“I am no longer her ladyship, Doctor,” she said. “You see before you plain Mistress Isabella Savage.”

“Pray you come in.” He shut the door and waved her to his other chair, which she accepted without removing her cloak. “Governor Aston told me of Sir Montague’s illness, and how you were with him in The Hague.”

“I arrived to find him on his deathbed. He begged me for wine, to ease his passage, so I supplied it. Afterwards his children called me unworthy of his name and title, both of which I happily renounced in exchange for my widow’s stipend.” Mistress Savage placed a hand upon her throat. “I was also immensely pleased to get back from one of his daughters the necklace Beaumont gave me.” She looked towards the fireplace and shivered. “Have you news of him?”

“Not since the end of October.” Taking her hint, Seward went to
the hearth and threw some bits of wood into the grate. “He is a poor correspondent.”

“As he admitted to me, he has no talent for expressing himself on paper. How was he?”

“Delighted by the broadsheet I’d sent him relating his fantastical revelations to Parliament, and his mysterious escape from royal justice.”

“I wonder if he’s heard yet that most of those revelations were exposed as lies and the rest as stale intelligence. Such a laughingstock he made of St. John and the Committee of Both Kingdoms, not to mention the late Mr. Veech. What else did he say?”

“He’d grown fed to the teeth of Lord Wilmot’s vituperations about Lord Digby and Prince Rupert, and preferred to avoid Her Majesty’s Court,” said Seward, resuming his seat. “He was spending his days reading the modern French authors, and occupying his nights at the playhouse.”

She smiled sardonically. “I’ve always thought the French commendable, in letting women on the stage. Had his wife not joined him?”

“No, nor will she. Lord and Lady Beaumont considered it safer that she bide at Chipping Campden, as the period of his exile is so short.”

“What a mistake,” declared Mistress Savage. “It is far from
safe
to leave a man of his nature alone in a city full of temptations.” Privately Seward agreed, though he kept quiet. “Were they worried about her falling sickness?”

“Ah, Beaumont told you,” said Seward, surprised. “She has had no recurrence of it, to my knowledge.”

“Then is she perchance with child?”

“If she is, I have not been informed.”

“Doctor,” said Mistress Savage, “you are the first to hear
my
news:
I
am carrying his child.”

“Great heavens!” muttered Seward.

“You cannot be more astonished than I was. It’s the issue of a night we spent together in London, after my flight from the Tower. We were weak in resolve, and I was weak in body – truly, it’s a miracle
I conceived. Destiny is cruel: had I become pregnant a year ago when he and I were living here in Oxford, I’d have married him, over the objections of the whole world. ‘Are you afraid to fight?’ he asked me, at the time, and I
was
, foolishly afraid.” She lowered her eyes. “He was certain I could have his child.”

“Were you aware of your state before he sailed for France?”

“Oh yes – even as you were plotting the murder of Veech.” Beaumont had thought her unwell, Seward remembered. “I had to keep it from him,” she added. “Why spoil his future with Catherine?”

“He should know. It will be his duty to provide for you, and for the child.”

She looked up sharply. “
You
know what happened to me as a young girl. I was badly damaged, as a consequence. In the unlikely event that I do not miscarry, the child and I may be in danger of our lives when I am brought to bed.”

“God willing, you and the babe shall prosper.”

“Lest I don’t, I’d rather Beaumont think I had died of some other cause. I intend soon to leave Oxford, anyway, for a place where my belly won’t be the subject of gossip.”

“When is the child due?”

“In April. Can I count on your discretion?”

“You can, Mistress Savage. But … why did you confide in me?”

“Because I have the highest esteem for you, Doctor, and I trust you as his dear friend. And should the child survive, I want my son or daughter to have what I did not: a loving family. If I can’t arrange this before the birth, I was hoping that for his sake you might help.”

“Gladly, madam, for his sake and yours, yet I am an old bachelor, in the wane of my days.” Seward pondered a moment. “You should consult someone else whose confidence you can depend on: Walter Ingram. He has an aunt in Faringdon, Madam Musgrave, who is devoted to him and to Beaumont. From their report of her, she is a wise and resourceful lady. I suspect Beaumont might have consulted her about matters of the heart. He talked to me of her … 
motherly qualities. She may be exactly the person to address, in your situation.”

“Thank you very much, Doctor – I’ll write to Mr. Ingram.” Mistress Savage rose and approached Seward as if she might embrace him. Out of instinct, he shrank away. “You
are
an old bachelor,” she teased, with a knowing glint in her eyes, as if she could have used a different term to describe him.

They were saying goodbye on the threshold when Pusskins slinked up, to sniff at her skirts. “He scents his rival,” she observed.

Seward bowed to her respectfully; he had once thought her his. “Whatever I am, you must not be a stranger to my door.”

“I won’t,” she said. “And do please advise Lord and Lady Beaumont that Catherine should be reunited with her husband.”

After Mistress Savage had gone, he felt a profound sadness. “While I recognised her spirit and intellect early on,” he told Pusskins, “her glamour and my stubborn prejudice blinded me to her other virtues. That Beaumont should be loved by two such exceptional women! What will become of her?”

Pusskins peered at the shelf where Seward had stored his scrying bowl, and uttered a silent miaow. His cat never did anything without a reason, so he brought his chair to his desk, fetched the bowl, filled it with dark liquid, and settled down to concentrate. He had scant expectation of success, as he invoked the angels’ guidance.

Then his nerves began to tingle. On the surface of the liquid, he beheld with unusual clarity a magnificent Palladian house, against a bleak, grey winter sky. A scaffold had been erected in front of the sole upper window not blocked by boards or masonry; it was draped in black and crowded with people, many weeping, some praying, and soldiers in livery; and two in leather masks. They were gathered around a small, bearded gentleman who seemed to be delivering a speech. Below the scaffold, mounted troops were lined up to contain a larger crowd: more soldiers, commoners, and the wealthy in their carriages or on horseback, all in awe, craning for a glimpse of him. When he had
finished his speech, he spoke a few words to the masked men. Assisted by an older figure in bishop’s robes, he put on a white cap and tucked his hair carefully into it. He removed a jewelled badge that had been hanging from a blue ribbon about his neck and gave it to the bishop; and next his cloak and doublet. He must have felt cold, however, for he motioned to have back the cloak. He lifted hands and eyes to the heavens, and after a while slipped the cloak again from his shoulders and knelt low. There came a flash of steel, and Seward saw no more.

“Impossible,” he whispered. Death in the field or by the stab of a conspirator’s blade he might understand. Yet how could the King go meekly to execution by the stroke of an axe, in public view? And could this signify an end to the House of Stuart? An end, even, to the rule of kings and queens in England? For Seward knew that the bowl did not lie, though it showed only what it chose; and the royal horoscope had foretold that His Majesty would die by violence, in the month of January.

The End

A
s in
The Best of Men
, I tried to remain true to written accounts from and about the period. I owe a huge debt to Sir Edward Walker’s
His Majesty’s Happy Progress and Success from the 30th of March to the 23rd of November, 1644
. Walker does not feature in
The Licence of War
, but he was appointed Secretary to the Council of War in 1642, and Clerk Extraordinary of the Privy Council in 1644. He accompanied the King throughout this stage of the conflict, and while admittedly biased as a Royalist, he witnessed many of the events in this book.

The affair of Major Ogle (sometimes referred to as Captain Ogle) and the King’s false friends, Keeper Devenish and Lieutenant-Colonel Mosely, is on record, as is the so-called Brooke’s Plot in which Thomas Violet was a player. In the first case, I slightly changed the chronology of their communications with the Earl of Bristol and the King. When Prince Rupert arrived at Aylesbury expecting it to be delivered to him, contemporary reports state that he grew suspicious and withdrew solely because the Lieutenant-Colonel’s brother did not come out to escort him into the garrison, as Mosely had promised; a young servant was sent instead.

I chose Oliver St. John for the role of espionage master in the Committee of Safety (later the Committee of Both Kingdoms) because, from the end of 1643, he was a major force within the war party in the House of Commons. He discovered and revealed Brooke’s plot, publicised as
A Cunning Plot to divide and destroy the Parliament and the City of London
. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, in his
History of the Rebellion
, described St. John as “a man reserved, and of a dark
and clouded countenance, very proud, and conversing with very few, and those men of his own humour and inclinations.” He was “very seldom known to smile.”

One major historian of the period, C.V. Wedgwood, places Wilmot at the battle of Cheriton; but as her reference, she cites Walker, who does not name him as part of the army sent from Oxford to join Hopton’s forces. I therefore invented Wilmot’s ambitious desire to rout Waller in the field without permission of His Majesty’s Council, and his charge of incompetence against the defeated Royalist generals. The King’s and Digby’s letters are quoted verbatim from the originals, so clearly there was a conspiracy to remove Wilmot from command well before his overtures to Essex came to light. The reasons provided by the King for the accusation of treachery that led to Wilmot’s dismissal are true to record, but no letter from him to Essex was found, to my knowledge. Goring was apparently reluctant to replace Wilmot as Lieutenant General, and would have preferred to stay with Rupert. The army’s petition for peace was sent to Essex a bit later than I suggest, after Essex had rebuffed the King’s terms.

King Charles really did go hunting in Woodstock while Oxford was in extreme peril; either an instance of astonishing sangfroid on his part, or outrageous carelessness. Accounts vary as to where exactly Essex and Waller met before they made their fateful decision to split up their armies, leaving Waller to pursue the King. Again I followed Walker, who named the location as Burford. This strategic error was the most amazing luck for the Royalists. I would argue that it had a greater impact on the future course and aftermath of the Civil War than Rupert’s defeat at Marston Moor. If the two Parliamentary generals had stayed together and captured the King and Prince Charles, as was imminently possible, hostilities might have ended sooner, saving much bloodshed. And since the radical elements in Westminster and in the Parliamentary armies were then far less powerful than they afterwards became, Charles might have avoided the scaffold. It is
interesting to note that Colonel William Purefoy was a signatory on the King’s death warrant.

In
The Best of Men
, I took considerable liberties with the Earl of Pembroke, who I hope is redeemed in
The Licence of War
. In this book, I gave myself free rein with George Digby’s sexuality. I cribbed my title,
Lord Digby’s Closet Opened –
an anachronistic
double entendre –
from two sources: his cousin’s recipe book,
The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby, Knight, Opened
, written during the days of Queen Henrietta’s penurious Court in France and published in 1668, and a highly compromising cache of the King’s letters seized by Parliament and published as
The King’s Cabinet Opened
in 1645. The virulent animosity between Digby and Wilmot continued abroad, and in 1647 they fought their duel, in Paris. Digby won, wounding his adversary in the hand.

King Charles apparently regarded Don Alonso de Cárdenas as “a silly, ignorant, odd fellow”; and he spoke little English, but he was cleverer than the King realised. As the war unfolded, he shifted towards an alliance with Parliament, despite the unfortunate incident of Father Bell, and recognised its authority in spring 1644. When the magnificent royal art collection came up for sale in 1649, he acquired many fine pieces, for and on the secret instruction of King Philip. Readers curious about these dealings can consult Jerry Brotton’s wonderful
The Sale of the Late King’s Goods
.

Finally, Sir Arthur Aston deserves a note here because of the unique manner of his death. He had fought as a mercenary abroad and in the opening stages of the Civil War, and was appointed Governor of Oxford in 1643 on the Queen’s request. She felt herself safer with a Catholic in charge of the city, but he was disliked by both soldiers and citizens. The near contemporary historian Antony Wood described him as “very cruel and imperious,” and Clarendon called him “a man of rough nature, and so given up to an immoderate love of money that he cared not by what unrighteous ways he exacted it.” His term as Governor ended in September 1644, when he broke his leg in a riding accident.
He survived an amputation, and by 1649 was serving in Ireland. At the infamous siege of Drogheda by Cromwell’s troops, he repelled a number of enemy assaults. Cromwell prevailed, and the town was brutally stormed without quarter. Aston himself was bludgeoned to death with his own wooden leg, which, it is said, Parliamentary soldiers believed to be full of gold coins.

Charles Stuart
, King of England, 1600–49

Henrietta Maria
, his wife, 1609–69