Ralegh, who, having for some time discarded the use of Manourie’s
ointment, had practically recovered his normal appearance, covering his
long white hair under a Spanish hat, and muffling the half of his face
in the folds of a cloak, came to Wapping Stairs—that ill-omened place
of execution of pirates and sea-rovers—accompanied by Cotterell, who
carried the knight’s cloak-bag, and by Sir Lewis and Sir Lewis’s son.
Out of solicitude for their dear friend and kinsman, the Stukeleys
could not part from him until he was safely launched upon his voyage.
At the head of the stairs they were met by Captain King; at the foot of
them a boat was waiting, as concerted, the boatswain at the tiller.
King greeted them with an air of obvious relief.
“You feared perhaps we should not come,” said Stukeley, with a sneer at
the Captain’s avowed mistrust of him. “Yet now, I trust, you’ll do me
the justice to admit that I have shown myself an honest man.”
The uncompromising King looked at him and frowned, misliking the words.
“I hope that you’ll continue so,” he answered stiffly.
They went down the slippery steps to the boat, and then the shore
glided slowly past them as they pushed off into the stream of the
ebbing tide.
A moment later, King, whose suspicious eyes kept a sharp look-out,
observed another boat put off some two hundred yards higher up the
river. At first he saw it breast the stream as if proceeding towards
London Bridge, then abruptly swing about and follow them. Instantly he
drew the attention of Sir Walter to that pursuing wherry.
“What’s this?” quoth Sir Walter harshly. “Are we betrayed?”
The watermen, taking fright at the words, hung now upon their oars.
“Put back,” Sir Walter bade them. “I’ll not betray my friends to no
purpose. Put back, and let us home again.”
“Nay, now,” said Stukeley gravely, himself watching the wherry. “We are
more than a match for them in oars, even if their purpose be such as
you suspect—for which suspicion, when all is said, there is no ground.
On then!” He addressed himself to the watermen, whipping out a pistol,
and growing truculent in mien and voice. “To your oars! Row, you dogs,
or I’ll pistol you where you sit.”
The men bent their backs forthwith, and the boat swept on. But Sir
Walter was still full of apprehensions, still questioning the wisdom of
keeping to their down-stream course if they were being followed.
“But are we followed?” cried the impatient Sir Lewis. “’Sdeath, cousin,
is not the river a highway for all the world to use, and must every
wherry that chances to go our way be in pursuit of us? If you are to
halt at every shadow, faith, you’ll never accomplish anything. I vow I
am unfortunate in having a friend whom I would save so full of doubts
and fears.”
Sir Walter gave him reason, and even King came to conclude that he had
suspected him unjustly, whilst the rowers, under Stukeley’s suasion,
now threw themselves heartily into their task, and onward sped the boat
through the deepening night, taking but little account of that other
wherry that hung ever in their wake. In this wise they came at length
to Greenwich on the last of the ebb. But here finding the water
beginning to grow against them, and wearied by the exertion into which
Stukeley’s enthusiasm had flogged them, the watermen paused again,
declaring that they could not reach Gravesend before morning.
Followed a brief discussion, at the end of which Sir Walter bade them
put him ashore at Purfleet.
“And that’s the soundest counsel,” quoth the boatswain. “For at
Purfleet we can get horses on to Tilbury.”
Stukeley was of the same opinion; but not so the more practical Captain
King.
“’Tis useless,” he declared to them. “At this hour how shall you get
horses to go by land?”
And now, Sir Walter, looking over his shoulder, saw the other wherry
bearing down upon them through the faintly opalescent mists of dawn. A
hail came to them across the water.
“Oh, ’Sdeath! We are betrayed!” cried Ralegh bitterly, and Stukeley
swore more fiercely still. Sir Walter turned to him. “Put ashore,” he
said shortly, “and let us home.”
“Ay, perhaps ’twere best. For to-night there’s an end to the
enterprise, and if I am taken in your company now, what shall be said
to me for this active assistance in your escape?” His voice was gloomy,
his face drawn and white.
“Could you not plead that you had but pretended to go with me to seize
on my private papers?” suggested the ingenious mind of Ralegh.
“I could. But shall I be believed? Shall I?” His loom was deepening to
despair.
Ralegh was stricken almost with remorse on his cousin’s account. His
generous heart was now more concerned with the harm to his friends than
with his own doom. He desired to make amends to Stukeley, but had no
means save such as lay in the power of that currency he used. Having
naught else to give, he must give that. He plunged his hand into an
inner pocket, and brought forth a handful of jewels, which he thrust
upon his kinsman.
“Courage,” he urged him. “Up now, and we may yet win out and home, so
that all will be well with you at least, and you shall not suffer for
your friendship to me.”
Stukeley embraced him then, protesting his love and desire to serve
him.
They came to land at last, just below Greenwich bridge, and almost at
the same moment the other wherry grounded immediately above them. Men
sprang from her, with the obvious intent of cutting off their retreat.
“Too late!” said Ralegh, and sighed, entirely without passion now that
the dice had fallen and showed that the game was lost. “You must act on
my suggestion to explain your presence, Lewis.”
“Indeed, there is no other course,” Sir Lewis agreed. “And you are in
the same case, Captain King. You must confess that you joined with me
but to betray Sir Walter. I’ll bear you out. Thus, each supporting the
other...”
“I’ll roast in Hell before I brand myself a traitor,” roared the
Captain furiously. “And were you an honest man, Sir Lewis, you’ld
understand my meaning.”
“So, so?” said Stukeley, in a quiet, wicked voice. And it was observed
that his son and one or two of the watermen had taken their stand
beside him as if in readiness for action. “Why, then, since you will
have it so, Captain, I arrest you, in the King’s name, on a charge of
abetting treason.”
The Captain fell back a step, stricken a moment by sheer amazement.
Then he groped for a pistol to do at last what he realized he should
have done long since. Instantly he was overpowered. It was only then
that Sir Walter understood the thing that had happened, and with
understanding came fury. The old adventurer flung back his cloak, and
snatched at his rapier to put it through the vitals of his dear friend
and kinsman. But he was too late. Hands seized upon him, and he found
himself held by the men from the wherry, confronted by a Mr. William
Herbert, whom he knew for Stukeley’s cousin, and he heard Mr. Herbert
formally asking him for the surrender of his sword.
Instantly he governed himself, repressed his fury. He looked coldly at
his kinsman, whose face showed white and evil in the growing light of
the early summer dawn “Sir Lewis,” was all he said, “these actions will
not turn out to your credit.”
He had no illusion left. His understanding was now a very full one. His
dear friend and kinsman had played him false throughout, intending
first to drain him of his resources before finally flinging the empty
husk to the executioner. Manourie had been in the plot; he had run with
the hare and hunted with the hounds; and Sir Walter’s own servant
Cotterell had done no less. Amongst them they had “cozened the great
cozener”—to use Stukeley’s own cynical expression. Even so, it was only
on his trial that Sir Walter plumbed the full depth of Stukeley’s
baseness; for it was only then he learnt that his kinsman had been
armed by a warrant of immunity to assist his projects of escape, so
that he might the more effectively incriminate and betray him; and Sir
Walter discovered also that the ship in which he had landed, and other
matters, were to provide additional Judas’ fees to this acquisitive
betrayer.
If to escape his enemies Sir Walter had had recourse to artifices
unworthy the great hero that he was, now that all hope was lost he
conducted himself with a dignity and cheerfulness beyond equal. So calm
and self-possessed and masterly was his defence from the charge of
piracy preferred at the request of Spain, and so shrewd in its
inflaming appeal to public opinion, that his judges were constrained to
abandon that line of prosecution, and could discover no way of giving
his head to King James save by falling back upon the thirteen-year old
sentence of death against him. Of this they now ordered execution.
Never a man who loved his life as dearly as Sir Walter loved it met
death as blithely. He dressed himself for the scaffold with that
elegance and richness which all his life he had observed. He wore a
ruff band and black velvet wrought nightgown over a doublet of
hair-coloured satin, a black wrought waistcoat, black cut taffety
breeches and ash-coloured silk stockings. Under his plumed hat he
covered his white locks with a wrought nightcap. This last he bestowed
on his way to the scaffold upon a bald-headed old man who had come to
take a last look of him, with the observation that he was more in need
of it than himself. When he had removed it, it was observed that his
hair was not curled as usual. This was a matter that had fretted his
barber Peter in the prison of the Gatehouse at Westminster that
morning. But Sir Walter had put him off with a laugh and a jest.
“Let them comb it that shall have it,” he had said of his own head.
Having taken his leave of the friends who had flocked about him with
the observation that he had a long journey before him, he called for
the axe, and, when presented to him, ran his fingers along the edge,
and smiled.
“Sharp medicine,” quoth he, “but a sound cure for all diseases.”
When presently the executioner bade him turn his head to the East:
“It is no great matter which way a man’s head stands, so that his heart
lies right,” he said.
Thus passed one of England’s greatest heroes, indeed one of the very
makers of this England, and than his death there is no more shameful
blot upon the shameful reign of that pusillanimous James, unclean of
body and of soul, who sacrificed him to the King of Spain.
A spectator of his death, who suffered for his words—as men must ever
suffer for the regardless utterance of Truth—declared that England had
not such another head to cut off.
As for Stukeley, the acquisitiveness which had made a Judas of him was
destined, by a poetic justice, ever desired but rarely forthcoming for
knaves, soon to be his ruin. He was caught diminishing the gold coin of
the realm by the operation known to-day as “clipping,” and with him was
taken his creature Manourie, who, to save himself, turned chief witness
against Stukeley. Sir Lewis was sentenced to death, but saved himself
by purchasing his pardon at the cost of every ill-gotten shilling he
possessed, and he lived thereafter as bankrupt of means as he was of
honour.
Yet before all this happened, Sir Lewis had for his part in Sir Walter
Ralegh’s death come to be an object of execration throughout the land,
and to be commonly known as “Sir Judas.” At Whitehall he suffered
rebuffs and insults that found a climax in the words addressed to him
by the Lord Admiral, to whom he went to give an account of his office.
“Base fellow, darest thou who art the contempt and scorn of men offer
thyself in my presence?”
For a man of honour there was but one course. Sir Judas was not a man
of honour. He carried his grievance to the King. James leered at him.
“What wouldst thou have me do? Wouldst thou have me hang him? On my
soul, if I should hang all that speak ill of thee, all the trees of the
country would not suffice, so great is the number.”
VIII. HIS INSOLENCE OF BUCKINGHAM
George Villier’s Courtship of Ann of Austria
He was Insolence incarnate.
Since the day when, a mere country lad, his singular good looks had
attracted the attention of King James—notoriously partial to
good-looking lads—and had earned him the office of cup-bearer to his
Majesty, the career of George Villiers is to be read in a series of
acts of violent and ever-increasing arrogance, expressing the vanity
and levity inherent in his nature. Scarcely was he established in the
royal favour than he distinguished himself by striking an offending
gentleman in the very presence of his sovereign—an act of such gross
disrespect to royalty that his hand would have paid forfeit, as by law
demanded, had not the maudlin king deemed him too lovely a fellow to be
so cruelly maimed.
Over the mind and will of King Charles his ascendancy became even
greater than it had been over that of King James; and it were easy to
show that the acts of George Villiers’ life supplied the main planks of
that scaffold in Whitehall whereupon Charles Stuart came to lose his
head. Charles was indeed a martyr; a martyr chiefly to the reckless,
insolent, irresponsible vanity of this Villiers, who, from a simple
country squire with nothing but personal beauty to recommend him, had
risen to be, as Duke of Buckingham, the first gentleman in England.
The heady wine of power had gone to his brain, and so addled it that,
as John Chamberlain tells us, there was presently a touch of craziness
in him—of the variety, no doubt, known to modern psychologists as
megalomania He lost the sense of proportion, and was without respect
for anybody or anything. The Commons of England and the immensely
dignified Court of Spain—during that disgraceful, pseudo-romantic
adventure at Madrid—were alike the butts of this parvenu’s unmeasured
arrogance But the crowning insolence of his career was that tragicomedy
the second act of which was played on a June evening in an Amiens
garden on the banks of the river Somme.
Three weeks ago—on the 14th May, 1625, to be precise—Buckingham had
arrived in Paris as Ambassador Extra-ordinary, charged with the task of
conducting to England the King of France’s sister, Henrietta Maria, who
three days earlier had been married by proxy to King Charles.
The occasion enabled Buckingham to fling the reins on to the neck of
his mad vanity, to indulge to the very fullest his crazy passion for
ostentation and magnificence. Because the Court of France was
proverbially renowned for splendour and luxury, Buckingham felt it due
to himself to extinguish its brilliance by his own. On his first coming
to the Louvre he literally blazed. He wore a suit of white satin velvet
with a short cloak in the Spanish fashion, the whole powdered over with
diamonds to the value of some ten thousand pounds. An enormous diamond
clasped the heron’s plume in his hat; diamonds flashed in the hilt of
his sword; diamonds studded his very spurs, which were of beaten gold;
the highest orders of England, Spain, and France flamed on his breast.
On the occasion of his second visit he wore a suit of purple satin, of
intent so lightly sewn with pearls that as he moved he shook them off
like raindrops, and left them to lie where they fell, as largesse for
pages and the lesser fry of the Court.
His equipages and retinue were of a kind to match his personal
effulgence. His coaches were lined with velvet and covered with cloth
of gold, and some seven hundred people made up his train. There were
musicians, watermen, grooms of the chamber, thirty chief yeomen, a
score of cooks, as many grooms, a dozen pages, two dozen footmen, six
outriders, and twenty gentlemen, each with his own attendants, all
arrayed as became the satellites of a star of such great magnitude.
Buckingham succeeded in his ambition. Paris, that hitherto had set the
fashion to the world, stared mouth-agape, dazzled by the splendour of
this superb and scintillating ambassador.
Another, by betraying consciousness of the figure that he cut, might
have made himself ridiculous. But Buckingham’s insolent assurance was
proof against that peril. Supremely self-satisfied, he was conscious
only that what he did could not be better done, and he ruffled it with
an air of easy insouciance, as if in all this costly display there was
nothing that was not normal. He treated with princes, and even with the
gloomy Louis XIII., as with equals; and, becoming more and more
intoxicated with his very obvious success, he condescended to observe
approvingly the fresh beauty of the young Queen.
Anne of Austria, then in her twenty-fourth year, was said to be one of
the most beautiful women in Europe. She was of a good height and
carriage, slight, and very gracefully built, of a ravishing fairness of
skin and hair, whilst a look of wistfulness had come to invest with an
indefinable tenderness her splendid eyes. Her childless marriage to the
young King of France, which had endured now for ten years, had hardly
been successful. Gloomy, taciturn, easily moved to suspicion, and
difficult to convince of error, Louis XIII. held his wife aloof,
throwing up between himself and her a wall of coldness, almost of
dislike.
There is a story—and Tallemant des Raux gives credit to it—that in the
early days of her reign as Queen of France, Richelieu had fallen deeply
in love with her, and that she, with the mischief of an irresponsible
young girl, had encouraged him, merely to betray him to a ridicule
which his proud spirit had never been able to forgive. Be that or
another the reason, the fact that Richelieu hated her, and subjected
her to his vindictive persecution, is beyond dispute. And it was he who
by a hundred suggestions poisoned against her the King’s mind, and thus
kept ever open the gulf between the two.
The eyes of that neglected young wife dilated a little, and admiration
kindled in them, when they rested upon the dazzling figure of my Lord
of Buckingham. He must have seemed to her a figure of romance, a prince
out of a fairy-tale.
That betraying glance he caught, and it inflamed at once his monstrous
arrogance. To the scalps already adorning the belt of his vanity he
would add that of the love of a beautiful young queen. Perhaps he was
thrilled in his madness by the thought of the peril that would spice
such an adventure. Into that adventure he plunged forthwith. He wooed
her during the eight days that he abode in Paris, flagrantly, openly,
contemptuous of courtiers and of the very King himself. At the Louvre,
at the Hotel de Chevreuse, at the Luxembourg, where the Queen-Mother
held her Court, at the Hotel de Guise, and elsewhere he was ever at the
Queen’s side.
Richelieu, whose hard pride and self-love had been wounded by the
Duke’s cavalier behaviour, who despised the fellow for an upstart, and
may even have resented that so shallow a man should have been sent to
treat with a statesman of his own caliber—for other business beside the
marriage had brought Buckingham to Paris—suggested to the King that the
Duke’s manner in approaching the Queen lacked a proper deference, and
the Queen’s manner of receiving him a proper circumspection. Therefore
the King’s long face became longer, his gloomy eyes gloomier, as he
looked on. Far, however, from acting as a deterrent, the royal scowl
was mere incense to the vanity of Buckingham, a spur to goad him on to
greater daring.
On the 2nd of June a splendid company of some four thousand French
nobles and ladies, besides Buckingham and his retinue, quitted Paris to
accompany Henrietta Maria, now Queen of England, on the first stage of
her journey to her new home. The King was not of the party. He had gone
with Richelieu to Fontainebieau, leaving it to the Queen and the
Queen-Mother to accompany his sister.
Buckingham missed no chance upon that journey of pressing his
attentions upon Anne of Austria. Duty dictated that his place should be
beside the carriage of Henrietta Maria. But duty did not apply to His
Insolence of Buckingham, so indifferent of whom he might slight or
offend. And then the devil took a hand in the game.
At Amiens, the Queen-Mother fell ill, so that the Court was compelled
to halt there for a few days to give her Majesty the repose she
required. Whilst Amiens was thus honoured by the presence of three
queens at one and the same time within its walls, the Duc de Chaulnes
gave an entertainment in the Citadel. Buckingham attended this, and in
the dance that followed the banquet it was Buckingham who led out the
Queen.
Thereafter the royal party had returned to the Bishop’s Palace, where
it was lodged, and a small company went out to take the evening cool in
the Bishop’s fragrant gardens on the Somme, Buckingham ever at the
Queen’s side. Anne of Austria was attended by her Mistress of the
Household, the beautiful, witty Marie de Rohan, Duchess of Chevreuse,
and by her equerry, Monsieur de Putange. Madame de Chevreuse had for
cavalier that handsome coxcomb, Lord Holland, who was one of
Buckingham’s creatures, between whom and herself a certain transient
tenderness had sprung up. M. de Putange was accompanied by Madame de
Vernet, with whom at the time he was over head and ears in love.
Elsewhere about the spacious gardens other courtiers sauntered.
Now either Madame de Chevreuse and M. de Putange were too deeply
engrossed in their respective companions, or else the state of their
own hearts and the tepid, languorous eventide disposed them
complacently towards the affair of gallantry upon which their mistress
almost seemed to wish to be embarked. They forgot, it would seem, that
she was a queen, and remembered sympathetically that she was a woman,
and that she had for companion the most splendid cavalier in all the
world. Thus they committed the unpardonable fault of lagging behind,
and allowing her to pass out of their sight round the bend of an avenue
by the water.
No sooner did Buckingham realize that he was alone with the Queen, that
the friendly dusk and a screen of trees secured them from observation,
than, piling audacity up on audacity, he determined to accomplish here
and now the conquest of this lovely lady who had used him so graciously
and received his advances with such manifest pleasure.
“How soft the night! How exquisite!” he sighed.
“Indeed,” she agreed. “And how still, but for the gentle murmur of the
river.”
“The river!” he cried, on a new note. “That is no gentle murmur. The
river laughs, maliciously mocking. The river is evil.”
“Evil?” quoth she. He had checked in his step, and they stood now side
by side.
“Evil,” he repeated. “Evil and cruel. It goes to swell the sea that
soon shall divide me from you, and it mocks me, rejoicing wickedly in
the pain that will presently be mine.”
It took her aback. She laughed, a little breathlessly, to hide her
discomposure, and scarce knew how to answer him, scarce knew whether
she took pleasure or offense in his daring encroachment upon that royal
aloofness in which she dwelt, and in which her Spanish rearing had
taught her she must ever dwell.
“Oh, but Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, you will be with us again, perhaps
before so very long.”
His answer came in a swift, throbbing question, his lips so near her
face that she could feel his breath hot upon her cheek.
“Do you wish it, madame? Do you wish it? I implore you, of your pity,
say but that you wish it, and I will come, though I tear down half a
world to reach you.”
She recoiled in fright and displeasure before a wooing so impetuous and
violently outspoken; though the displeasure was perhaps but a passing
emotion, the result of early training. Yet she contrived to answer him
with the proper icy dignity due to her position as a princess of Spain,
now Queen of France.
“Monsieur, you forget yourself. The Queen of France does not listen to
such words. You are mad, I think.”
“Yes, I am mad,” he flung back. “Mad with love—so mad that I have
forgot that you are a queen and I an ambassador. Under the ambassador
there is a man, under the queen a woman—our real selves, not the titles
with which Fate seeks to dissemble our true natures. And with the whole
strength of my true nature do I love you, so potently, so
overwhelmingly that I will not believe you sensible of no response.”
Thus torrentially he delivered himself, and swept her a little off her
feet. She was a woman, as he said; a queen, it is true; but also a
neglected, coldly-used wife; and no one had ever addressed her in
anything approaching this manner, no one had ever so much as suggested
that her existence could matter greatly, that in her woman’s nature
there was the magic power of awakening passion and devotion. He was so
splendidly magnificent, so masterful and unrivalled, and he came thus
to lay his being, as it were, in homage at her feet. It touched her a
little, who knew so little of the real man. It cost her an effort to
repulse him, and the effort was not very convincing.
“Hush, monsieur, for pity’s sake! You must not talk so to me. It ... it
hurts.”