Martin Stephen: The rebel heart

'And James will believe it?' he said.

'The King of Scotland is most likely to succeed our present Queen. I have told him for years past to beware of Raleigh. I warned him of the wrong man.'

Well! That was a message for Gresham to bear to the man who had saved his life, to Sir Walter Raleigh.

'I underestimated Essex, saw him as a popinjay, a plaything for the Queen. He has stolen a march on me, poisoned the likely heir to the throne against me. Unless I can reach James in time, the poison will bite. Instead of simply reading what he has been sent, the King of Scotland will start to believe it.'

'So you wish me to betray Essex?' asked Gresham.

'No,' said Cecil. 'I wish you to protect those you care for most, and put right a wrong. I also expect you to see that the greatest disaster that could befall this country would be to have the Earl of Essex as its King, or in a position of real power in its governance.'

'You're at your weakest with a man such as Essex. You are correct: he would make an appalling King. But Essex thinks with his heart. Much of the time he thinks wrongly. But at least his decisions are based on blood flowing through his veins.' 'Essex will not defeat me,' said Cecil.

'No?' said Gresham. 'Yet you don't see what Essex has. You are the cold intellect who is never wrong. You command through fear. Essex is the passionate fool, who is usually wrong — but who commands through love.'

'Love does not decide the fate of nations. Love creates scandals, not power. It is fear that rules.' Cecil was now fully back in control of himself.

'To a point, my Lord. Yet you forget one thing. Any prison only operates because the inmates cooperate with the jailers. There are always fewer jailers than there are prisoners. True, there are locked doors. But those doors have to be opened sometimes: food has to be given; access with lawyers has to be afforded. If every prisoner decides to rise up against his jailers, the jailers die. You rule by fear. The prisoners cooperate through fear. But give them a leader they love, and they have an antidote to their fear.'

'Sentimental nonsense!' spluttered Cecil.

'Is it?' said Gresham. 'This country is ruled by fear. London Bridge displays the heads of traitors on pikes over its main gateway. The people are invited to see traitors hung, drawn and quartered. But what if they find someone they love as they love Essex? At what stage does love conquer fear? They cheer Essex in the streets. They scrawl 'Toad" on your walls. You don't understand popularity, because you've never experienced it. Indeed, you scorn it because you don't understand it. But rebellion happens, and it happens in the moments when love and passion break through fear and repression.'

'So you tell me that you love the Earl of Essex?' Gresham heard the scorn and fear that Cecil put into the naming of his enemy and his title. 'That you will betray me and my message to Essex, and the power of love will triumph?' *No,' said Gresham, 'and your question reveals not only how little you understand men such as Essex, but how little you understand men such as myself. Essex can command the mob. He has the power of love — blind, unthinking, living only for the moment Yet he's a fool, for all his intelligence. A rather special fool. A brave, handsome, rather dashing and rather glorious and all-too-human fool, but a fool nevertheless. Essex is passion, romance and glamour. Essex is in love with himself. And he yearns for the simplicity, as he sees it, of a soldier's life. All this means he is bound for destruction, because nations do not run on passion, romance and glamour. I could love Essex as I hate you. That doesn't mean to say I could ever serve him.'

4I do not care how you justify taking my message to King James. I care only that you do so.'

Gresham's mind was churning. Cecil's wife was probably the only person who had loved him, and she had died eighteen months earlier, leaving his two children motherless. It would be simplicity itself to have them killed. There were men in every tavern in Southwark who would jump at the chance. Should he threaten Cecil with this?

No!

He had been out-thought by his old enemy, and such a threat would be simple vainglory. He could have killed Cecil tonight and got away with it. He knew it and Cecil knew it. That was the important thing: Cecil knew it. The advantage Cecil had over Gresham had been ripped away from him for a moment, a moment that Cecil had not planned for. That was enough. The seed had been sown: the idea that Gresham could never be entirely controlled. No harm in leaving a seed of doubt, though. As for Gresham, those who struggled frantically in the net caught it even more firmly around them. The man who got out was the man who took his time, found his knife and ever so gently made his escape.

And Essex? Gresham had always refused to be drawn into Essex's political ambition. Affording Cecil a right of reply would not kill Essex.

'My best regards to your dear children,' said Gresham. 'I'm delighted you've two friends at least.'

No more. No less. It was enough. Was there a brief flicker of alarm in Cecil's eyes?

Gresham moved forward. How satisfying to note Cecil drawing back, as if in fear. Gresham drew out his handkerchief, a fashion' able linen flag so vast as to substitute for a tent on campaign. Carefully, he wiped Cecil's vomit from the table, and threw the cloth into the fire, where it sizzled and spat before turning to black ash.

'Send me your instructions,' said Gresham. 'You're right, of course. I'll do what I can to avoid hurting my friends, not least of all because of what happened to another young man who claimed that dubious privilege of me. But pray I survive your mission. I'm also quite good at laying traps.'

And with that, he left.

First Week of June, 1598 London

It was the simplest question of all, and for months it had been sounding like a death knell inside Henry Gresham's head.

Why create this wondrous piece of work, this extraordinary triumph of a creature called man, and bless it with sensitivity, creativity and imagination? Why go to all this trouble, and then allow that sensitivity to be corrupted and turn into a beast who could enjoy the screams of the man on the rack? Why plant creativity when all too often it soured into the creativity of murkier, ambition and politics? Why bless man with imagination and the capacity to learn so much when, in a few brief years, it all ended up as rotting matter — the flesh of the dead pig as indistinguishable on the spoil heap as the flesh of sensitive, creative and imaginative man?

Many less fortunate than Gresham might have commented, had they been privy to his thoughts, that to be one of the richest men in the kingdom, to be still young and handsome and to be acknowledged as one of the best swordsmen in the country, was not a bad position from which to be unhappy. Yet even that, the reprimand Gresham was honest enough to administer to himself, was having less and less effect on the black melancholia of his mood.

Cecil's summons had lifted his mood, but the sudden realisation that, through his own stupidity, he was now fighting for other lives than his own had plunged him even further down a black pit of depression. A strange melancholy, a sapping misery that rose like a fog over a fenland field, drained away all happiness, light and — colour. He fought it, as he had fought any threat to his survival all his life. Yet each day the grey mist advanced a little further into his soul, like a tide that would not be held back. And what would happen when it reached the core of his soul?

It was early morning in the Library of The House, the great mansion in the Strand erected by Sir Thomas Gresham and largely neglected by his bastard son. The day looked to be set fair, a brisk wind whipping up the Thames, but only the occasional, scudding white cloud marking the deep blue of the sky. Outside, most of London seemed to be thronging the street, wasps around the jam pot of the rich houses lying conveniently between the City and Whitehall, all with easy access to the river. With the return of the warm weather, the flies had returned. There seemed to be a plague of them this year, and their angry buzzing filled the houses of the great noblemen and the hovels of lesser men with impartial infestation.