Martin Stephen: The Desperate remedy

The climax had come with the Essex rebellion. Cecil had a habit of triumphing over those apparently better suited than he for survival. For years he had been locked in mortal combat with the dashing and handsome Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex. Essex had the ancient lineage, the charm and the body that had bowled over every woman at Court, including the Queen. It had done him no good. Cecil's wits, the animal and immoral way in which he fought, had overcome his rival, as they overcame all rivals. The idiotic, ill-fated Essex rebellion had sent Essex to the block, leaving Cecil in total power at Court. Essex's head was still there, picked bare, on London Bridge. There was only one Robert now. Robert Cecil.

The walls of London were ahead of him, and Gresham eased his pace as more and more people appeared on the roadway. He grinned inwardly as he remembered his own decisive part in the Essex rebellion — or, rather, the decisive role he had played in making sure that the so-called rebellion never even spluttered into danger, but fizzled out with hardly more noise than a musket shot. It had made interesting reading, when he had written it down and had it copied, and if Gresham's version had become known he felt it likely that Cecil's thin head might be joining Essex's on a pike. It had been one of his better moments when he had presented a copy, the true account of the Essex rebellion with proof of Cecil's treachery, to Cecil himself. He had trumped it, if it needed doing, by the casual mention of the fact that copies of that and numerous other papers, as well as being lodged in a variety of secret places dotted around England, could also be found in the Papal archive. They were to be held in secret until removed by Gresham himself, their early release authorised only, if Gresham were to die. Cecil blanched at that, showing emotion for almost the first time since Gresham had known him. The cellars below the Vatican were one of the very few areas Robert Cecil knew he would never penetrate, and there was a delicious touch of spice in the business by virtue of the fact both men knew that Gresham's access to this unique repository of documents had come through his having done some of Cecil's dirty work in Italy. It was poetic justice.

There was another reason for Gresham's hatred of Cecil, if another was needed. Two years ago Cecil had testified against and betrayed the friendship of the one man Henry Gresham had ever called master. Sir Walter Raleigh was the greatest man Gresham had ever known, a scholar poet, soldier, sailor, courtier and wit. He had saved Gresham's life. When the great wheel of fortune had seemed destined to plunge Raleigh down to the depths, and he had looked to his friends to rescue him from the sucking bog of Court politics, Cecil had betrayed him. Raleigh had been convicted on a trumped-up charge in a court hearing so biased it had shocked Europe. Now Raleigh, larger than life and leader of leaders, was languishing and ague-ridden in the Tower. Raleigh's wife had helped bring up Cecil's ailing child, taking him in alongside her own lusty, bawling brat and seeming to breathe life into his thin frame. This was how Cecil rewarded those who preserved his life blood, by imprisoning them in the Bloody Tower. Gresham could understand a man who betrayed his principles. He could never forgive a man who betrayed his friends.

The towers and roofs of Whitehall Palace were ahead of him now. Whitehall was Cecil's home, its labyrinthine passages an emblem for the devious and complex mind that dominated the Court more than any other. This was the moment of calm before the storm, the moment before a great venture when time froze and the last chance to turn away beckoned. Gresham's horse had come to a halt. Gently, he urged it forward. In an uncertain world, Gresham knew only two things. He despised Cecil, and whatever task Cecil had for him would bring grief and hardship in its trail. He also knew that he could not refuse the excitement of what Cecil might offer, or run too freely the risk of what he might reveal.

A surly groom took his horse, and Gresham stretched his muscles as he stood on the cobbled courtyard. Gresham was sure it was going to be Catholics this time round. He dreaded Catholics. They were what he did least well. The woman who had brought him up, raised the bastard son of Sir Thomas Gresham, was a Catholic. With her breast milk had come the rosary bouncing off his infant nose. He hated the Catholic business more than any other. The Marlowe business, the Essex rebellion, that tragic creature Mary and most of all his dealings with the Armada had seemed real. His dealings with the Catholics had seemed sad by comparison. Early on in his accidental career he had met a Catholic priest who had seemed to him the nearest thing to a saint on this earth that he would ever know. Months later he had watched that saint hung until near gasping dead, seen his heart cut out of his body and that long-suffering and frail body chopped into four pieces. To Gresham, who was no longer sure that there was a God, the shrieks a man uttered in his death throes were a single language, spoken alike among Roman or Protestant. The mutilation of human flesh in one cause or another seemed just another form of human sacrifice, the practice so widely condemned by Christianity.

Cecil was courteous, as ever. Grey-haired, the rich clothing he wore could only partially hide the deformity in his spine. His desk was littered with papers, and the paintings on the wall showed both his passion for art and his ability to pay for the best.

'Good morning to you, sir,' he had intoned, motioning Gresham to a stool.

The voice was flat, expressionless. The eyes were gimlet-hard, like a rat's. Cecil had a thin, mean figure, and a thin, mean face. His long cloak hid the ludicrously short legs that were such a joke in the marketplaces. There were many who saw a warped body as testimony to a warped mind. How right they were, thought Gresham, who had met many with both afflictions but never anyone who combined them to such effect as Robert Cecil. He moved in a manner that gave least cause to show the wrench in his neck, hidden by an exceptionally large collar on the cloak and an extravagant ruff. He seemed permanently cold, yet he met his network of spies in the largest and coldest room in his Palace. A huge, carved stone fireplace held the most meagre of fires, spluttering to cope with the cheapest of sea coal in the early morning and producing far more smoke than heat.

'How go your affairs in Cambridge?' enquired Cecil solicitously.

'Well, my Lord,' replied Gresham, outwardly deferential and inwardly impatient for the fencing to end. 'The College grows by the month.' Cecil was Chancellor of the University; another power base.

'So good to hear!' mused Cecil with total insincerity, pouring wine into a goblet and pushing it across the table to Gresham. The goblet was gold. It shone forth in this dreary room like sunshine after rain. The wine was cat's piss. Cecil only spent money on things that lasted, like the goblet or fine paintings. On something like the wine, that would be urine in a matter of hours, he spent as little as possible.

Gresham smiled, took the goblet and raised it in a toast. In doing so, he sniffed the wine, and without his smile shifting at all put the goblet down in front of him, its contents untasted. They would remain so throughout the meeting. Even a badly brought-up dose of the pox would have revolted had the liquid in the glass been poured over it.

Cecil's expression did not change, though he certainly noted the rejected goblet. He sat back in his splendid chair, gazing out through the narrow window with its view of the river. His guest sat on a bare, three-legged stool, with one leg shorter than the others. It was all there was to sit on, except the near-throne in which Cecil sat upright.