Traitor's Field (22 page)

Tyrant, traitor, murderer, and a public and implacable enemy of the Commonwealth of England. Thus the King of that country, brought to trial by his people.

Every day now the Court must make some further innovation, of administration, of religion, or of law. The Court must move fast, to stay one day ahead of the implications of yesterday’s innovation. If you stop moving you lose your balance and fall. Today the Committee is trying the King – for treason, until someone unhelpfully points out that since treason is an act against the King you can hardly charge a King with it, can you? It is an age of elaborate theatrical, and an appropriate setting has been designed for this unprecedented spectacle.

Westminster Hall: the stones and timbers of oldest England, a grand and solemn and austere stage. A raised platform at one end for the judges – magisterial, superior, all-seeing. A wooden bar across the Hall, to distinguish between judge and judged, right and wrong. Soldiers, because pikes and uniforms give an unchallengeable legitimacy to a proceeding, and because – well, because you never know. At the far end of the Hall two tiered wooden galleries, thirty-six hours of unbroken work for the carpenters, just pay them whatever they ask, because a spectacle must have spectators. Justice must be
seen
to be done.

Unfortunately, the actors keep forgetting their lines: members of the Court disagree with each other, say the wrong thing, absent themselves; sessions are cancelled; the soldiers have to be prompted to give their cries of support to the proceeding; their Colonel threatens to fire into the crowd; members of the audience will insist on heckling.

And in the middle of them all, tiny in his loneliness, the King. Another overweening oak chair –
Have they not the wit to make a throne of becoming smallness, rather than these oppressive giants?
– placed on a platform of rich ochre carpeting. From above, the highest points in the galleries, the King resembles a peculiar insect trapped in amber.

Held as if by some aura, none of the King’s subjects may come nearer than ten feet. The carpet, the distance, the distinction: now that the King’s majesty has finally come under open challenge, those who no longer recognize it seem to be according it proper recognition at last.

But who would wish to stand too close to this strange man, accused of all possible crimes against the state? For lifetimes the touch of a King has cured infection; now it seems that the King’s touch has become infectious, bringing defeat and chaos and guilt.

There was a King in this realm sat in his throne and tried to hold back the sea. Perhaps I have that gift, that you hold yourselves so far from me. But your endless staring faces overwhelm me, your curiosity, your scrutiny, your scorn, and I know I cannot hold you back. Rather I would disappear, slip these heavy clothes and vanish as a spirit, become one with the yellow light that burns through the windows.

Has any King – has any man in his station and time – had to suffer such affront to his dignity? Such insults, such unbecoming aggression, such masquerade? I am become a mummery show to the whole people, a fighting cock. I am become the jester to my own Court.

This is unbelievable. This is unthinkable. This is not real. You speak a language of law that I do not recognize. You refuse to recognize my status or my arguments. I am merely a distant spectator of these bastard proceedings, which appear to me but dimly: an argument observed through a window; a conversation heard from another room. How far away these people are, how far England as I perceived it. This is no longer a world that I understand. I fly above it. I am a sparrow fluttering among the hammer-beams, looking down on this strangeness. I am gone, through the keyhole.

Behind the scenes, the arguments, the persuasion, the intimidation continue.

The Crown Inn, in Uxbridge, and Shay was sitting in a corner away from the fire when his visitor arrived. The man stepped in uneasily, looking around, saw him, looked a little sick, looked around again and approached uncomfortably, as if his clothes were wet or pinched him.

Shay said pleasantly, ‘Sit down! Sit down!’ and when his visitor was sitting down leaned forward and murmured through a smile, ‘A discussion between companions over a drink in a good inn attracts no attention; trying to disguise your approach to a man with whom you’re about to have an intimate conversation does attract attention. Relax yourself. Smile.’

His visitor did neither. He sat back in his chair, and then plunged forward. ‘It is signed.’

Shay breathed in heavily, holding his expression even.

‘It is signed. Death. The King is to lose his head. At the last, they insisted that the charge of treason be on the warrant.’

Shay merely nodded. Then: ‘How many? Who?’

Another flash of nausea in the face. ‘Fifty-nine. Bradshaw first, of course. Then Grey, and Cromwell.’ A shrug. ‘Those you would expect. Ireton, Marten and Lilburne. Hutchinson. Pride. Scot.’

‘Hutchinson?’

‘On the first day. He still smarts, that he let General Langdale escape from inside his very hands at Nottingham, and so brazen. Since that day he has burned for a revenge on Royalism.’

Shay’s eyes had narrowed. His visitor waited – and then leaned in again. ‘This is the headquarters of the Army itself! Why do we meet here?’

‘That is why. The most trusted, the most sure men in the realm meet in this town.’

‘You’re – I was here negotiating with the King in ’45, did you know that?’

Shay said nothing. He’d known. A man had few enough opportunities to exercise his humour.

Again his visitor’s face was thrust forward. ‘I want indemnity.’

‘You want what?’

‘Indemnity. Who can know how this will go now? No one has killed a King before. The preachers say the whole world could end. The millennium itself. We may yet see civil war worse than ever we have imagined it.’ Shay seemed to be considering the notion. ‘Who can know? But you must indemnify me – protect me if the country turns again. You must sign – or the Prince. The Prince must sign for me.’

Shay’s mouth twisted, chewing the idea. ‘One would tend to try for such a bargain before offering one’s information.’

A flicker of panic across his visitor’s eyes. ‘But. . . I have. . . You must!’

Shay’s old head was stone. ‘I will speak for you when I can. For the meanwhile, I will have need of your service – from time to time. Forget us not, and perhaps you will be not forgotten.’

A sick nod. Then, eventually, with emptiness: ‘What happens now? What will you do –afterwards?’

Shay’s expression was open, the tone mild – the answer obvious. ‘I will create such a chaos in these lands as will make these Godly men think their world upturned, and all the torments of hell upon them.’

His visitor stared at him, pleading for the reassurance or the joke, and then the strained face collapsed and the shoulders slumped. A breath, and then he flung himself up from the table and turned to go.

A moment later he was there again, hands gripping the chair back and head bent low.

‘Thank you for not asking.’ Shay looked up. His visitor was not looking at him, head offered low for blessing or execution. Shay saw tiny droplets of water on the swaying strands of hair; it must have come on to drizzle after his own arrival. ‘Whether I signed. Thank you for not asking.’

Shay took his hand. ‘You forgot to shake hands.’ He smiled heavily. ‘It’s getting harder to stay alive. A man must shift as best he can.’

The Palace of St James, in London. Early in his reign, His Majesty, being a less convivial man than his father, had decreed that he would be accompanied at his most intimate proceeding by only one of his attendants. Now he crouches crimson over the pot, watched by two soldiers who are dutied to monitor him night and day, and who shuffle and flinch in their discomfort. The bringing down of majesty was not supposed to be like this.

Below, in a kitchen storeroom, murmuring through a gloom gusting with nutmeg and cinnamon and grain of paradise, two men:

‘Shay, is there no chance of —’

‘None. Do you have what I asked?’

A scrambling in a pocket. ‘Yes, but—’ A paper is taken firmly – scrutinized intently in the musty light and thrust into an inner pocket – and a ring.

‘My duty and my respect to His Majesty. The new King will wear this, and will remember his father when he does so.’ Two pairs of eyes stare at each other through the impossible. ‘You will be safe, Seymour. I have seen to that. Are there other papers?’

‘Some, of course.’

‘Burn them, Seymour. Burn it all.’

Whitehall is the great theatre of the British Empire, the stage for a thousand years of history. Every significant actor in British history has entered or exited through its arches. In the warren of rooms and passages behind its grand façades, anonymous and gloomy grinds and spins the machinery of state. Behind the windows – blank, reflecting other façades, and the faces of the passing spectators – as much treason is talked as government.

What shall I say to them? 

I believe that I have a good mind, a loyal heart, and a true soul – oh God, make my soul pure, grant me but this mercy that my soul be pure – but I have no good tongue. My tongue is the traitor in this house, the Judas in this garden. My mind and heart and soul would sustain me, but I know that at the last I must turn to my tongue and that it will betray me.

Grant that the betrayal be quick, oh Lord, grant me some last dignity. Let the kiss have something not unsweet in it.

Today England is killing her King.

He waits for his entrance, in the newest and finest among this complex of buildings. In this banqueting house, the King’s subjects would come to see him dine, watch him eating beasts that it was death for them to touch, birds that they had never heard of, all from platters worth more than their whole lives. This lavish chamber, now the King’s waiting room, his purgatory, had been his own creation: a light soaring escape from the mediæval that clustered around it, a defiant statement of modernity, of privilege, of divine possibility. Fate is this: that a man is instrumental in his own death; may he not at least create the scene himself? Above him the ceiling panels show his father’s ascent to heaven. Allegory is everything.

The window burns in the sun. Such light; so bright. . . I shall vomit. Let me not vomit, grant me some dignity, my stomach revolts at this life. Grant that the pain be little, oh God, grant that the pain be little. How much pain can there be in this world? What is the worst pain that I have felt? What is the worst pain that I could imagine? What will I feel? Will it be a burning? Will there be a great light or a great darkness? They say that even once the head is cut that still – oh God, I am about to – I must not – please grant me at this last some little piece of dignity. Even the vilest of my people have more dignity than I. My whole existence has been a humiliation. My life has been an embarrassment of excrements, of insufficiency, of indignity. Oh God, my body is vile, you know, oh God, that I loathe it and would escape it, but grant me that at this last instant I might not suffer worse. Oh God, am I to die surrounded by laughter? Must my eternity be a soaken sheet, and shall my devils be cackling children?