THE RISING SUN
Very soon it became apparent that the fall in which Mr. Robert Carr had
broken his leg had flung him headlong into the lap of fortune.
The King had outstayed the show in the tilt-yard. So much he owed to the
gentlemen who were providing this entertainment. At its conclusion,
however, he had postponed his return to the palace, to turn aside and
visit Mr. Rider’s house in King Street, so that he might personally
ascertain the exact extent of Mr. Carr’s injuries. He went attended by a
group of gentlemen, among whom was Herbert, very sulky now at what he
accounted a fresh and excessive manifestation of royal caprice.
At Mr. Rider’s they found his majesty’s physician, who relieved
anxieties which could hardly have been greater had the patient been an
old and valued friend.
Mr. Carr, his leg set, and now out of pain and moderately comfortable,
lay in a pleasant room whose latticed windows stood open to the
September sunshine and Mr. Rider’s pleasant garden behind the house. As
the door opened, he turned his head with its tumbled mane of red-gold
hair, and from his pillow looked to see who came.
It startled him to behold under the lintel the figure of the King,
loutish and ungainly despite rich saffron-coloured velvet and gleam of
jewels. The corpulence to which his majesty’s body already tended was
aggravated in appearance by thickly bombasted breeches and a doublet
stuffed and quilted so as to render it dagger-proof and thus quiet his
congenital timorousness and abiding dread of cold steel. This affliction
of physical fear under which he was to labour all his days was perhaps
to be traced back to that night in Holyrood, two months before his
birth, when Rizzio was brutally stabbed to death at his mother’s feet.
He stood now upon that threshold, rolling his big wistful eyes in a face
whose lines bore the imprint of an age considerably beyond his forty
years. In repose his countenance ever wore that vacant quality of
melancholy that is to be seen in the brute creation. And it reflected,
no doubt accurately, a soul which was not to be beguiled from its
fundamental sadness and loneliness either by the free indulgence of the
man’s egregious vanity or the liberal pursuit of sensuous satisfactions.
Closely followed by the physician, who had met him in the outer room, he
shambled forward to the trundle-bed, leaving his gentlemen on the
threshold. He came, he announced, no more than to inquire of Mr. Carr,
himself, how he did.
Mr. Carr, flushing deeply, between awe and gratification of an honour so
far in excess of his poor deserts, answered in his broad Northern accent
that he did very well, which immediately opened the door to the King’s
ever-ready and usually trivial facetiousness.
‘Ud’s death!’ He spoke thickly and indistinctly, his tongue being too
thick for his mouth. In theory he condemned all blasphemy, and, indeed,
had written a treatise upon the evils of it; in practice he seldom
sought vehemence of expression without having recourse to its emphatic
aid. ‘If you account yourself very well with a broken leg what’ll ye
deem yourself when it’s whole again?’
The courtiers in the background offered the murmur of laughter that was
expected. But Mr. Carr did not even smile.
‘Your majesty’s gracious concern had been cheaply bought at the price of
both legs broken.’
If his accent was uncouth to English ears, his matter at least left
little to be desired in courtliness. The King pulled at his thin tuft of
sandy beard and smiled, nodding his head in approval.
‘Say you so? Faith, it’s a graceful enough answer. Ye’ll have been in
France, I doubt, with Sir James.’
Mr. Carr confessed it. He had spent two years at court there.
‘And ye’ll have learnt among those leeching loons to cast French
capriolles of speech. Nay, never look downcast. I bear no rancour for
civilities even when they’re but clavering.’
The handsome young face flushed again, and the bright eyes slid away
abashed under the benevolent gaze of royalty.
Not until the King had left him, which followed presently, did the
possible significance of that visit begin to break upon the dazzled wits
of Mr. Carr. Not until the visit was repeated on the following morning,
and again on the morning after that, did Mr. Carr permit himself to
believe that which until then appeared almost too daring a suspicion.
When three mornings later he was waited upon by a Gentleman of the
Household accompanied by a page bearing a basket of such rare exotic
fruits as peaches and musk melons, sent by the King from the royal
table, certainty was piled on certainty. Moreover, the bearer of these
gifts, a very splendid Scots gentleman who named himself to Mr. Carr as
Sir Alan Ochiltree, was very civil, very solicitous on the score of Mr.
Carr’s hurt and health, and very ready to profess himself at Mr. Carr’s
orders and eager to serve him.
The sudden change of fortune which all this seemed to presage for the
penniless young Scot bewildered him. It had happened so abruptly, had
been so utterly the fruit of chance, and was so far beyond any
calculation he would have dared embark upon, that, despite the abundance
of the confirmation and whilst already believing, he yet hesitated to
believe. It lent truth to the courtly speech he had used to the King,
for it was true enough that to penetrate so far into the royal esteem he
would willingly have suffered both his legs to have been broken.
The King’s visits continued daily, and daily became more protracted.
Soon there was scarcely an hour of the day but some great gentleman or
other, eager to follow his majesty’s example, came to wait upon Mr. Carr
to inquire into his state of health. By the end of the week, the outer
room of the house in King Street might have been mistaken from the
quality of its tenants for one of the antechambers of the Palace of
Whitehall.
Sir James Hay, who whilst Mr. Carr was in his service had paid but
indifferent attention to him, was now a daily visitor, and of such
assiduity that the erstwhile patron seemed almost to have become the
suitor. Even my Lord of Montgomery did not disdain to court the favour
of the young Scot, and then one day, as if to set a climax upon all, the
Lord Chamberlain, the great Earl of Suffolk, came in person to wait
upon Mr. Carr and to overwhelm him with civilities.
He had heard of Mr. Carr, he announced, and of Mr. Carr’s unfortunate
accident from his daughter, Lady Essex, who had been a distressed
witness of the event and had spoken of it daily since. Mr. Carr,
although he had never heard of the lady, was deeply flattered to have
drawn upon himself the eyes and thoughts of such exalted nobility. Her
ladyship, my lord continued, had, in common with his own countess, been
moved to deep concern on Mr. Carr’s behalf, and it was in the hope of
being able to allay their anxieties that his lordship now sought news of
the invalid in person.
Mr. Carr thanked him becomingly. After all, the young Scot was well
bred, he had profited by his courtly experience in France, and gathering
now confidence and self-assurance rapidly from the consequence with
which he found himself treated, he put forth an easy charm of manner of
the kind that rarely fails to win friends for a man.
My Lord of Suffolk was relieved. At least this youth, of whom men spoke
already as the new favourite, was no rowdy overbearing oaf like so many
of the royal pets, like, for instance, Montgomery, with whom his
lordship almost collided as he issued from Mr. Carr’s chamber.
Montgomery came in boisterously. ‘What brings the old sea-fox to your
bedside?’ For all that his lordship was not yet out of the house, young
Herbert made no attempt to subdue his vibrant voice. That was the rude
way of him: reckless ever of what offence he gave.
The demureness of Mr. Carr’s reply seemed almost a reproof. ‘No more
than the desire to be civil.’
‘Which is when most he is to be mistrusted, like all the Howards: a
greedy, self-seeking pack made up of wolves and foxes; and he the worst
of them. Beware of Howards! Avoid their embraces as ye would the
Devil’s. There’s as much profit to a man in the one as in the other.’
Mr. Carr made no answer beyond a pensive smile. A book was closed upon
his forefinger to mark the place where he had been reading before the
coming of the Lord Chamberlain had interrupted him. He smiled to think
how fully he was already accounted of the court that his choice of a
party was being guided for him, if, indeed, his suffrages were not being
sought.
Anon came the King in a blue velvet doublet which he had buttoned awry,
thereby increasing the ungainliness of his appearance. It was stained,
too, with gravy like all his suits, for clumsy and untidy in all things,
he was in nothing more so than in his eating, unless it was in his
drinking. To behold him at table was to understand why the impudent
Buckingham at a much later date entitled him ‘his sowship.’
The King drove out Montgomery and took the chair at the head of the bed,
as was now his daily custom. He mumbled inquiries as to how his dear lad
fared and what the physician had to report upon his progress, then asked
him what he read. Mr. Carr held up the book, and smiled. The King smiled
too; he put back his head a little with a certain jauntiness and his
eyes gleamed pride. For the volume was a copy of the ‘Basilicon Doron,’
that monument of pedantry which his majesty, like a new Machiavel, had
produced some years ago for the instruction of the Prince his son. Mr.
Rider, an experienced courtier, had, in Mr. Carr’s own interest,
procured him the copy.
The King grunted approvingly. ‘So, so! Ye take the trouble to become
acquainted with the best parts of me.’
He desired to have Mr. Carr’s opinion of the book. Mr. Carr considered
that it would be a presumption for one so rudely tutored as himself to
utter an opinion of a work so scholarly and profound.
‘Ye’re none so rudely tutored after all, since ye perceive the
scholarliness and profundity.’ Squirming with satisfaction he pressed
Mr. Carr to tell him what part he had liked best.
Mr. Carr, who had found the work of an intolerable, soporific tedium,
and could remember of it only that which he had last read, spoke of
necessity to this. In all this monument of erudition, said he, written
it was clear by one who was at once a philosopher and a theologian, he
would venture to select for his preference the part that dealt with
marriage.
The King’s satisfaction seemed diminished. He knew how far in this
matter his own performance had fallen short of his precepts. In public
he could be almost uxorious. But in private there was little in common
nowadays between himself and Danish Anne, for all that she had borne him
seven children. At Denmark House in the Strand she kept not only her own
establishment apart from him, but was assembling a court of her own; and
it began to look as if she would make of that court the foundations of a
party in the State that might yet come into conflict with the King’s
desires and policies. Yet, since this troubled him less than the
Queen’s constant company might have done, he was well content.
His majesty changed the subject. He talked of horses and horsemanship,
of dogs and hunting and falconry, matters these of a gentleman’s
education in which Mr. Carr showed intelligent knowledge. Then the talk
shifted to Scotland and to the days when young Robert Carr, by favour of
Esmé, Duke of Lennox, who had been his father’s close friend, had
entered the royal household as a page. Laughing now, the King alluded to
his annoyance at the lad’s incurable blundering over the Latin grace
when it was his duty to say it before meat, which had ultimately led to
his dismissal.
‘No doubt ye’ll have mended that lack of learning since?’
Mr. Carr in confusion confessed that he had neglected to do so. His
majesty was shocked into sudden incredulous gravity.
‘A gentleman without Latin! Ud’s death! It’s worse than a woman without
chastity. For whereas to the latter Nature herself may at times oppose
obstacles, as it becomes us to remember lest we judge too harshly of
their frailty, to the former there is no natural obstacle at all.’
Taking that for his text, he descanted at great length with a wealth of
recondite verbiage and classical allusion in one of those vain displays
of erudition in which this royal pedant delighted. The end of it all was
a declaration that he could not have Mr. Carr about his person as he
intended unless the shortcomings of the young man’s education were
repaired. He loved to have about him, he vowed, gentlemen of taste and
learning, which did not explain the favour he showed to Philip Herbert
and some others whose taste and learning did not go beyond the matter of
dogs and horses.
Mr. Carr abased himself in regrets for the neglect he had practised. It
should be repaired without delay.
‘I mean it so to be,’ the King assured him. Himself he would be the
lad’s preceptor. ‘I care not,’ he vowed, ‘if I fling away as much time
as shall teach you. It might be less profitably wasted, Robin.’ He
stroked the young man’s cheek with a finger, which, if thick, soft, and
jewelled, was none too scrupulously clean.
Thereafter, daily, during the mending of his limb, Mr. Carr struggled
bravely with a Latin grammar, whose intricacies were expounded to him by
the royal pedagogue. It was a form of torture to which he submitted with
great fortitude, for the sake of all that he now supposed to hang upon
it. If he was conscious of his own dullness, at least he was relieved
from anxiety by the patience of this King, who was born to play the
schoolmaster, a patience founded upon the satisfaction which his vanity
derived from the free display of his own learning.
Mr. Carr was still at declensions and conjugations when towards the end
of October the doctors at last permitted him to set foot to the ground
again, his leg now mended, and so soundly that its shapely symmetry was
nowise impaired.
King James was there to witness those first steps in convalescence as
gleefully as a fond father observing the first steps of his own
offspring, and he sharply commanded Philip Herbert to lend the lad an
arm for his support. My Lord of Montgomery complied, however deeply it
may have galled him to play the valet to this young upstart. If he was
rancorous, he did not suffer it to be perceived, and this not even when,
from being courted by those who sought the royal favour, he found it
prudent to do some courting in his turn and join the ever-growing stream
of those who wooed Mr. Robert Carr.
The throng of gentlemen of birth and quality to be met in the outer room
of Mr. Rider’s house in King Street, during the last two or three weeks
of Mr. Carr’s confinement there, was but an earnest of the crowds that
were to assemble in Mr. Carr’s own antechamber at Whitehall when
presently he was translated thither by the infatuated monarch. Had the
young Scot been acquainted with the Arabian Nights he must have
conceived that he lived in one of them, befriended by some benevolent
djin whose fiat had transmogrified his world. Sumptuous quarters were
allotted to him, indeed the best that Whitehall, now fallen into a
ramshackle state, could provide. His lodging overlooked the privy
gardens. It was a lodging that for some years had been tenanted by Sir
James Elphinstone, a gentleman of great lineage and greater pride who
had enjoyed the esteem of the late Queen. Sir James, when ordered to
vacate the premises, went vehemently protesting to the Lord Chamberlain,
who conveyed the protest in more temperate terms to his majesty. His
majesty would listen to no pleas, enter into no discussions.
‘I maun ha’ it for Carr,’ was all he said, and this with such grim
finality that my Lord of Suffolk went out backwards at once, to inform
Sir James that he must pack and quit.
By the King’s orders these new quarters were extravagantly refurnished
to receive their new tenant. Rich hangings and rare carpets were
procured to adorn them, and when installed there Mr. Carr found a
regiment of grooms and pages to minister to him, who hitherto had been
his own body-servant and whose highest consequence had been reached as
another man’s esquire. There were tailors to provide a sumptuous
wardrobe to replace the few threadbare garments that he owned,
pronounced by the King as fit only for a peasebogle; and there were
tiremen to array him in these glories under the supervision of the King
himself, who did not disdain to display himself as much an arbiter of
elegancies as he was proud to boast himself a theologian and a poet.
Jewellers from Goldsmith’s Row spread gaudy, glittering toys before
young Robin, of which the paternal monarch commanded him to make choice.
Barbers and hair-dressers combed and curled and scented his red-gold
locks and trimmed to a dagger-point the little auburn beard which he had
allowed to grow since his accident.
If the lad was allotted no preceptors, this was because the King himself
desired to continue in that office. He could trust no tutor in England
to give the boy’s Latin that genuine Roman pronunciation practised in
Scotland, upon which his majesty prided himself not a little. The wits
accounted it a pity that his majesty was not attracted by the same
purity of diction where English was concerned, both in his own case and
that of his pupil.
In those wintry days, if Mr. Carr was not closeted with the King at his
studies, he was at table with him, or riding with him, or lending him
his arm when he went to give audience; for such a hold had the young
Scot’s beauty of person and charm of manner taken upon King James that
he could no longer bear him out of his sight.
By Christmas the name of the new favourite, who had outstripped all
rivals and perched himself on a pinnacle of eminence such as none had
ever yet scaled, was on the lips of every man and woman in London. At
Denmark House, where the Queen held her court under the virtual
leadership of the elegant accomplished Pembroke, much frequented by the
austere young Prince Henry, and where it was the fashion to contemn the
minions by whom King James surrounded himself, lampoons were being
freely written with Mr. Robert Carr for their butt. Whilst naturally
enough there were many to sneer at the sudden exaltation of this
penniless Scots nobody, and many envious ones at court who hopefully
predicted that the upstart’s fall would follow soon and prove sharper
even than his rise, yet all who came in contact with him succumbed to
the charm of his engaging personality. Even amongst those who came
jaundiced by jealousy, there were some whom he converted at the first
meeting by his frank boyishness and the modesty with which he bore
himself in circumstances which must soon have begotten arrogance in a
nature less finely tempered. His breeding saved him there. For let men
sneer at him as they would for an upstart, the fact remained that, if
poor, he was gently born and of courtly rearing, to which his graceful
easy carriage bore constant witness, despite the uncouthness of his
Northern speech. His good looks, youthful eagerness, and the bright
joyousness that flowed from him, making him a creature of warmth and
sunshine, brought men easily to understand and even to approve the
royal infatuation.
His success remained still in his own eyes an unreal dream-business from
which he might at any moment awaken to his former precarious estate. It
continued so even when one day he found Sir James Hay, his former
patron, actually inviting his suffrages.
Sir James, whose ambitions were preëminently ambassadorial, desired to
be appointed envoy to the court of France. He had taken advantage of the
fact that the King used him intimately to solicit the office, and he now
begged of Carr that he would endorse the request for him. Mr. Carr
almost gasped. If anything could make him realise to the full the change
in his fortunes which a few months had wrought, this should do it.
He bowed very gravely, almost pale as he answered: ‘Sir James, it is not
for you to beg anything of me; but to command me. You may count upon me
in this. I will speak to his majesty to-day, since you require it;
though if you are granted the office, you will owe it rather to your own
deserts and influence than to any poor word of mine.’
Sir James had stared a moment; indeed, he had looked hard to see if he
was not perhaps being mocked, so unusual was such a tone as this in a
favourite. But perceiving the lad’s earnest sincerity, he had bowed in
his turn.
‘Sir,’ he said, smiling, ‘you make me proud to have been your friend.’
As in this, so in all. Mr. Carr’s purse, which the doting monarch kept
well supplied, was ever in those days at the disposal of the needy whom
he could not succour otherwise, and that he was free from the venality
which others in his place have seldom failed to manifest, he gave early
proof. Wooed by a place-seeker for a post in the customs, who came to
him recommended by no less a person than the Attorney-General, he lent
the usual ready ear to the man’s representations of his worth and
fitness for the office. He promised readily to lay the petition before
his majesty. Thereupon the man, instructed perhaps by Mr. Attorney
himself in the place-seeker’s sure way to a favourable patronage, made
it plain that he did not ask to be served for worth alone and that upon
his receiving the appointment there would be three hundred pounds for
Mr. Carr.
The young man stiffened and changed colour. A moment he paused, his
clear eyes hard as they measured this presumptuous trafficker.
‘Wait upon me again to-morrow, and you shall ken his majesty’s pleasure
in the matter.’ Coldly he inclined his head, and passed on to the next
suitor.
But there was no coldness in his manner when anon he came to tell the
King of this insult. The King’s cackling laugh cropped his indignation
in full flow.
‘God’s sake! If my faithful Commons would but insult me in such like
manner I’d greet for joy.’
Mr. Carr looked askance at him, which increased his mirth.
‘Did ye discern,’ quoth the King, ‘if the carle had qualities to fit him
for the office?’
‘He boasted of them; and there was a letter from Mr. Attorney to assert
it. But …’
‘Why, then he’ll serve as well as another, and it’s not every suitor for
the place will be as ready to part with so much silver. A God’s name,
take his three hundred, give him the office, and bid him go to the
devil. Customs, is it? Tell him his own customs commend him finely.’
His majesty laughed over the matter at the moment. But anon, when once
more alone, he became serious on a belated thought that suddenly
assailed him. Robert Carr was honest! It was a startling quality to
discover in a courtier. The fellow was a prodigy. To have singled him
out for trust and favour was an instance of the acuteness of his royal
wits in selecting servants. It confirmed him in the belief that he could
read a man’s worth at a glance. King James was pleased with himself, and
therefore the more pleased with Carr who had made him so. At last
amongst all these self-seeking flatterers, these leeching carles, who
fawned upon him for their own profit and who were ready to sell him
whenever occasion offered, he had found an honest man; one who had
desired nothing of him and was so little disposed to take advantage of
his favour that he denounced the first suitor who had sought to bribe
him.
This was a man to grapple to him with hoops of steel, to lean upon and
to trust.
Decidedly Robin must make better progress in Latinity.
The highest destinies awaited him.
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