CHAPTER I

IN THE TILT-YARD

King James, fully recovered from the terrible fright occasioned him by
the Gunpowder Plot, had returned to his norm of pusillanimity. Guy
Fawkes, unbroken in spirit, however broken in body by torture, had
expiated on the gallows in Paul’s Yard the attempt–in his own bold
words–to blow the Scots beggars back to their mountains.

The beggars remained and profited by the distribution amongst them of
the acres and possessions of the conspirators, most of whom were
gentlemen of substance.

For the King, too, the matter had not been without ultimate profit, of a
more spiritual kind. It had enabled him by an exercise of the arts of
kingcraft–a term signifying little more than the shameless use of
falsehood and dissimulation–to parade before the world the divine
inspiration vouchsafed to monarchs. It was, he pretended, the acuteness
with which kings are supernaturally endowed which had enabled him to
enucleate from obscurest utterances the true aim and nature of the plot,
and thus, almost miraculously, to avert a national catastrophe.

Some material profit, too, was to be extracted from it, in the course of
a further display of the spiritual graces and accomplishments of this
astounding prince. He was enabled to argue, cogently enough, that people
themselves so intolerant as the Papists, on whose behalf it had been
sought to blow him and his Parliament into a better world, deserved no
toleration; that the Scarlet Woman on her seven hills propounded,
indeed, the mystery of iniquity. Hence he was justified in proceeding
against Papists and at the same time against Puritans–so as to be
perfectly consistent in his exclusive upholding of the Established
Church–by means of heavy fines and confiscations. Thus he replenished
his sadly depleted treasury and was enabled further to relieve the
necessities of those Scots beggars–and some English ones, too–who
clustered about him.

It did not trouble his elastic royal conscience that the plot of a few
desperate men, for which he now punished an entire community, was
directly sprung from his own bad faith in an earlier exercise of his art
of kingcraft. Readily enough had he promised toleration alike to the
co-religionaries of his mother and to the Puritans, when they had
approached him on the subject in Scotland in the days of his own
anxieties touching his succession to the throne of England. They were
foolish to have trusted him. They should have perceived that a man who
would not raise a finger to save his own mother from the block, lest by
doing so he should jeopardise his inheritance of the English crown,
would never scruple about a false promise or two that would help to
ensure the unanimity of all classes of Englishmen in his favour. By
breaking faith when he discovered that the Episcopalian religion, which
made him head of the Church as well as of the State, was the only
religion fit for kings, he provoked not only the Gunpowder Plot, but
that earlier conspiracy in which Catholics and Puritans were united, the
strangest bedfellows adversity ever made.

All this, however, was now happily overpast. The heel of authority was
firmly planted on the neck of Papist and Puritan, and their recusancy
was being sweated out of them in the gold that was so urgently required
to maintain the prodigal splendours of the court of this new kingdom of
Great Britain. For now, in the year 1607 of the coming of Our Lord and
fourth of the coming of King James, his majesty was in dire straits for
ready money.

Never before in the history of the country had there been, and never
since has there been, such reckless extravagance as that which
distinguished the descent of the Scots from their Northern fastnesses in
the train of a king who was a veritable beggar on horseback.

Out of the stern and arid North he had come into the promised land of
plenty, a land that flowed, and flowed richly, with milk and honey at
his command. His commands, however, had been so free and frequent that
at last the springs were showing signs of exhaustion. Fortunes lavished
upon favourites by a prince who had never learnt and never did learn the
value of money were draining the resources of the nation. Finding his
hands, which hitherto had been ever empty, to be suddenly filled with
gold, he had scattered it in almost childish recklessness, spending for
the mere love of spending, who in thirty-seven years of life had never
had anything to spend. Similarly, finding himself a free and
uncontrolled fount of honour, who hitherto had been overborne and
brow-beaten by rude nobles and ruder clerics, he spouted honours so
freely that in the first three months of his reign, apart from the new
earls and barons he created, he distributed no less than seven hundred
knighthoods, so that to be a knight became so common as to be almost
disreputable. There was no lack of point in the announcement nailed by a
satirist on the door of Saint Paul’s, offering to train weak memories in
the titles of nobility.

When at last he began to feel himself hard-pressed for money, he had
summoned Parliament so that it might provide, only to make the
discovery, next in horror to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, that
the Commons, far from acknowledging his divinity, would scarcely
acknowledge his majesty. His own views and Parliament’s on the function
of the Commons were found to be widely divergent. The session resolved
itself into a battle between absolutism and constitutionalism; and it
was in vain that, with the polemical skill in which he took such pride,
he argued that kings are in the Word of God called gods, as being His
lieutenants and vicegerents on earth and therefore adorned and furnished
with some sparks of Divinity. The Commons, perceiving no spark of
divinity in his majesty’s very human if excessive need of money, were so
impudent as to treat him as a man, and to vote him certain subsidies
which would not even pay the monstrous debts he had piled up.

If this annoyed him, it nowise served to curtail his extravagance or the
munificence in which he delighted, largely no doubt because in its
indulgence he gratified his desire to feel a god. So he went his ways,
junketing and banqueting in this land of milk and honey, with revels and
maskings, tournaments and mummeries. He discovered that the exercise of
hunting was not merely pleasant in itself, but an absolute necessity to
the preservation of his health, whilst cock-fighting was so important a
relaxation to his mind, so that its vigour might subsequently be
renewed, that he paid the master of the cocks as much as any two
Secretaries of State. And for the rest, as Sir John Harrington wrote
from court, ‘Now that the gunpowder fight is got out of our heads, we
are going on hereabouts as if the Devil was contriving that every man
should blow himself up by wild riot, excess, and devastation of time and
temperance.’

Being at heart a woman, his majesty loved to look upon fine men, and he
saw to it that those immediately about him were fine, not only in
person, but also in apparel and equipment, and he showered upon them
honours and riches at the expense of his new kingdom. There was Philip
Herbert, whom he had made Earl of Montgomery, the handsome, oafish,
rowdy, and unworthy brother of the splendid Pembroke; there was Sir John
Ramsay, whom he had created Viscount Haddington, between whom and
himself lay perhaps the truth of the dark Gowrie business; there was the
magnificent Sir James Hay, who eventually became Earl of Carlisle, a
courtier trained in France, where he had served in the Scots Guards; and
there was a host of lesser handsome satellites, mostly Scots, who sunned
themselves in the royal favour, had their will of the weak prodigal
king, and preyed upon him much as light wanton women will prey upon a
man who delights in feminine companionship. His want of dignity in his
relations with his minions was as ludicrous as his excess of it in his
relations with the Commons.

Surrounded by a cloud of these lively, gorgeous fritillaries, you behold
him on a fair September morning in his pavilion in the tilt-yard at
Whitehall. There was to be riding at the ring and there were to be other
joustings of a mild order, in the nature of pageants rather than of
tourneys, so as to display fine horsemanship and athletic beauty without
danger to life or limb, for his majesty did not relish shows that were
too warlike.

Dazzling as Phœbus himself rode forth the magnificent James Hay in a
doublet of cloth of gold, a short cloak of white beaver trailing from
his shoulders, a white-plumed white beaver hat above his golden curls.
He was attended, as became so magnificent a paladin, by close upon a
score of esquires, who again were followed by as many pages in his
cerulean livery, with his arms embroidered on each breast. To be his
shield-bearer Sir James had chosen the handsomest of his esquires, a
youth of twenty, who for beauty of face and straight shapeliness of limb
must draw the eye in any assembly. He drew now the eyes of all in the
ladies’ gallery as he rode forward alone in advance of the others,
mounted on a mettlesome white horse, to do his appointed office and
present his lord’s escutcheon to the King.

The King rolled his big liquid eyes, and under the veil of his thin
sandy beard, the heavy lips of his loose mouth smiled approval. His
majesty loved good horses and admired good horsemanship, an art he was
never to master for himself, although more than half his days were spent
in the saddle. He was lost now in admiring wonder of the superb mastery
of the advancing rider.

‘Like a centaur. Ay, and a bonnie,’ he muttered thickly in his singsong
Scots voice.

A final curvet at the very steps of the royal gallery, and the horse was
pulled up, so sharply that it almost sat down on its haunches like a
cat. Yet all would have been well with the horseman if he had not
already disengaged one foot from the stirrup intending to complete his
display by a leap to the ground which should bring horse and man to a
simultaneous standstill. The result was that he lost his balance at the
very moment of gathering himself for his leap, and, cumbered as he was
by the shield, he came heavily to the ground.

Philip Herbert at the King’s elbow advertised his inherent boorishness
by a loud guffaw.

‘Your centaur’s come in pieces, Sire.’

But the King never heard him, which was perhaps as well for him. The
royal eyes were upon the young man, who sprawled in a curiously helpless
attitude upon the dusty ground after an instant’s aborted effort to
rise.

‘God’s sake!’ the King muttered. ‘The lad’s hurt.’ And he heaved himself
out of his crimson chair and stood forth, a man a little above the
middle height, whose thick ungainly body was carried upon thin rachitic
shanks. He had been suckled by a drunkard, and to this it was attributed
that he had not been able to stand until his seventh year; nor did his
legs thereafter ever grow to normal strength.

Already esquires and pages were on foot and hastening to the fallen
young man’s assistance, Sir James Hay, on horseback close at hand,
directing them. There was silence in the assembly of spectators, all of
whom had risen. In the ladies’ gallery, the Countess of Essex, a
fair-headed child of fifteen of an extraordinary loveliness, leaning
forward, clutching the wooden rail before her with a slim gloved hand,
drew attention to herself by the anxious note of her outcry and the
insistence with which she demanded to know the extent of the young man’s
hurt, which none yet could tell her. Her mother, the Countess of
Suffolk, that ample-bosomed, sneering-mouthed, pock-marked woman,
restrained her, whilst smiling upon the tenderness of her solicitude for
an unknown youth.

Then the King became the centre of interest. Leaning heavily upon
Herbert’s shoulder, he shambled down the steps. He bent over the young
man, who lay supine and helpless, his right leg at an odd angle. This
leg, they informed his majesty, was broken. A page had already gone to
summon bearers and a hand-litter.

‘Poor lad! Poor lad!’ mumbled the King on an almost maudlin note. Small
ills observed could singularly move this man to tenderness, who could
yet perpetrate great and bloody cruelties which he was not called upon
to witness.

The youth shifted his head upon the pillow it had found on the knee of
another esquire, and his fine eyes looked up in awe at compassionate
majesty. Though livid and drawn by pain, the beauty of his face remained
singularly arresting. Not more than twenty years of age, he was still
beardless, and only a little auburn moustache shaded the shapely mouth,
at once firm and sensuous. He pushed back the tumbled red-gold hair from
his moist brow and made as if to speak, then checked, not knowing what
might be required of him by etiquette in such a case.

But the King had little thought for etiquette. Goggle-eyed he considered
this long slim lad, and he was so overcome at the thought of so much
physical perfection being perhaps permanently marred that a tear rolled
down his prematurely furrowed yet florid cheek.

‘Who is he? How’s he called?’ he gruffly questioned.

Sir James, who had dismounted, pushed forward, hat in hand, to answer
him.

‘His name is Carr, may it please your majesty; Robert Carr of
Ferniehurst.’

‘Carr o’ Ferniehurst!’ The King seemed taken aback. ‘The son of Tom
Carr! God’s sake!’

He bent lower to scan more closely the handsome man grown out of one who
some years ago had served him as a page in Edinburgh, but who had been
dismissed for his persistent bad Latin at grace, which to the King had
smacked of irreverence.

Young Carr’s white mask of pain was irradiated by a smile to behold
himself remembered.

‘God save your majesty,’ he said in an accent even more broadly Scots
than the King’s own.

‘It’s thyself needs saving now, lad,’ the King mumbled. He stood upright
again and became brisk in the issuing of orders, and more indistinct in
speech than usual in this briskness.

Mr. Carr was to be conveyed no farther than Mr. Rider’s house in King
Street, near at hand. Let word be sent ahead at once that a room be
prepared for him. At the royal nod one of his gentlemen sped upon the
errand, whilst another departed in quest of his majesty’s own physician.
The repairs to the lad’s leg were to be carried out by the most skilful
hands available, so as to ensure that so lovely a body should suffer no
permanent impairment.

Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, holding premier place among the
favourites, looked down his handsome nose in disdain. Why did his old
dad and gossip, as he familiarly called his sovereign, make all this
bother about a raw Scots esquire of no account?

Dull fellow that Herbert was, he lacked the wit to perceive that another
of Guy Fawkes’s beggars was come to court.