Martin Stephen: The rebel heart

Power. That was Cecil's game, his lust, his love and his meaning of life. The Queen was dying childless, and lasting power would go to the person who gambled correctly on her successor. The dark, swirling, treacherous currents of Court were more and more hurling Cecil against the Earl of Essex; a power struggle threatening to explode at any moment.

When Gresham appeared Cecil had made a vague gesture as if he might stand up, but had failed to do so. He raised his chin and looked down his nose at Gresham, but before he could speak Gresham cut in.

'Well, my Lord,' he said, 'who are you seeking to make the next King or Queen of England?'

There was a distinct colour change on Cecil's face. Good. The advantage would not last; Cecil always recovered well. And Gresham had caught him this glancing blow right at the start of the fight. It meant nothing, but he might as well enjoy the moment while it lasted. Gresham had toyed with asking how the mission to King Henry of France had gone, knowing that its failure would rankle with Cecil, but had decided being outrageous was the better hit.

'It's all the talk of the town, actually,' Gresham said, as if he were discussing the result of a cock fight rather than speaking pure treason. 'Some people believe the King of Scotland is your choice, others the Spanish Infanta. But perhaps you have another favourite up your sleeve? Perhaps you intend to bury your feud with the Earl of Essex and acknowledge him as your master? Or will you use your undoubted charms on the ravishing Arbella?'

There may have been no child born to Elizabeth, but there were enough people with enough royal blood in them to allow the French ambassador to draw up a list of twenty-seven possible contenders for the Crown when Elizabeth died.

'You are aware that the statements you have just made could lose you your head? Perhaps as you appear to have lost your senses the difference would not be noted,' said Cecil. The voice was cold, hard as frost on gravel.

'But who is there to hear us, my Lord?' asked Gresham innocently. 'I know your honour would not permit you to have us overheard.' Well, there was no sideways glance to the hangings, at least. They probably were alone.

'If things are said often enough,' said Cecil through lips that seemed to get thinner with every word, 'they are overheard. And reported. And luck mixed with an over measure of bravado are likely to prove false gods.'

'I bow to your knowledge of falsity,' said Gresham. 'In that area you're certainly my better.'

'This is nonsense,' said Cecil, implying boredom with the exchange. 'The plain truth is that it is you who are the fool. You come here at my bidding, despite the several and various dangers that you know such a summons involves, of your own free will. Only a foolish man would come.'

'Even the Devil can speak true at times,' sighed Gresham. 'And does your Lordship, who knows all things, know why this should be so.

'You think,' said Cecil, with a voice like a surgeon's knife, 'that you come driven by a thirst for danger, a craving for excitement.'

'And isn't that true?' asked Gresham more idly than he felt. The conversation was taking a strange turn, like so many of those he had had with this spider of a man.

'Perhaps in part,' said Cecil. 'But I think there is a greater reason. I think it is because you want to die.'

Damn the man! Damn him to hell! Gresham fought to keep his heart steady, to stop the colour rising in his face.

'I am quite used to your acting as my executioner, at least at one or more remove, my Lord,' said Gresham, no trace of his feelings in his voice. 'I think I prefer your unbridled malice to your concern. At least the former is more familiar.'

'Concern?' For the first time something approaching a laugh came into Cecil's tone. A laugh an undertaker might give at being overpaid for the funeral. 'I have no concern for you. I despise you and all you stand for, you and the other overgrown children who gallivant fecklessly through life. Yet I note and understand you, so I may use you for the betterment of this nation. You are too proud to take your own life, Henry Gresham. Yet you are ashamed of that life, and push yourself nearer to death on every mission you undertake in the hope that some other will do what you are too much of a coward to do and take the life which you increasingly despise.'

Gresham gazed into the malevolent glare of Cecil's eyes and did not flinch.

'I do have one advantage over you, my Lord,' he said. 'I know myself. You may indeed know more of me than I might wish. But of yourself, you know too little.'

Cecil was almost mocking now, sure of his advantage.

'I know the death of a young man, the rather foul death, was your responsibility. And that the burden of guilt you quite rightly bear is dissolving into your soul like acid.'

It had to come to that, of course. Gresham could feel hot, biting tears trying to rise up in his eyes, to scour them. He must resist.

'I'll make my own peace with the world, and with my soul,' he said, 'and if I do it by fighting that same world and fighting my own soul, it's really no concern of yours. It's a battle that a mind like yours can never comprehend. But you, my Lord, you'll truly go to hell, unlike those of us who already think ourselves in it.'

'You have taken on spiritual duties now?' sneered Cecil. 'How odd, for someone who attends church so rarely.' Another, minor dig, of course. Failure to attend Protestant worship was a punishable offence. Ironically, the taint of closet Catholicism had clung to Gresham ever since the Armada episode. That was despite his nearly losing his life fighting for the Protestants in the Low Countries. 'And why should I prepare for hell? I who have murdered no man, and have no young man — or should I say lover — on my conscience?'

'Because you are in love with power,' said Gresham. 'And the lust after power is the greatest evil of humankind. You cloak your lust with words such as "duty" or "loyalty", yet it is all a hypocritical fraud. You are consumed by your lust, your need to control, your need to dominate. You will plot, lie, deceive and kill — though never by your own hand, of course, always through others — all to keep the power that increasingly replaces the blood in your veins. And you do it for self. Not for God, Queen, nor King. For you.'

It was Cecil who could find no instant answer this time. Finally he spoke, 'And do you not enjoy the power you have, Henry Gresham?' he asked quietly. 'The power of your physical strength, the power of your mind, the power money gives you to ignore the fashion or to follow it as you will, and to be yourself?'

'I'm sure I do,' said Gresham, 'but unlike you, I don't actually enjoy myself much, or even really approve of myself. Or of life, as it happens. I survive. That's all. In our world, survival is the only virtue of which I can be certain.'

Cecil allowed another pause.

'Even if this fallacy of my… obsession with power was true, do you not contribute to it by doing what I ask? How can you criticise my supposed wielding of power when you help me, albeit in a minor way, to preserve it?'

'Because Machiavelli was right,' said Gresham. 'Rulers need to be evil. We need the power-mad, such as yourself. How often in this country has a good King led his people to defeat and suffering? The saintly Edward the Confessor? While he was confessing, I wonder how many of his subjects he condemned to death, rape and pillage through his innocence, his lack of worldly wisdom? The by-product of your lust for power and the way it has perverted your soul is that you work for stability, for peace, because stability and peace preserve your power. You do the right things for completely the wrong reasons.'

'The wrong reasons? The Spanish have no cause to love you, Henry Gresham. Would you wish to serve under a Spanish monarch? You know of course that only last month thirty-eight fly-boats and five thousand Spanish troops sailed up the Channel, and were only stopped when my Lord of Cumberland sank eighteen of them in Calais?'