Iain Pears - An Instance of the Fingerpost

Boyle was wrong, but I admit it was with the best of reasons, and this dispute between us never produced a breach in our friendship which, if never warm, was of great duration.

He was of the best family, and had a balanced (though weak) constitution and sound education; all these produced an excellent judgment which was never swayed by considerations of gain. When I discovered him at his sister’s house in London, I asked him to visit and gave him a fine meal of oysters, lamb, partridge and pudding and then persuaded him to treat the conversation in the utmost confidence.

He listened silently as I laid out—in greater detail than I originally planned—the whole pattern of hint and suspicion which concerned me so greatly.

“I am greatly flattered,” he said when I had done, “that you choose me for such confidence; but I am not certain what you want of me.”

“I want your opinion,” I said. “I have certain evidence, and I have a partial hypothesis which is in no way contradicted by any of it. Yet it is not confirmed either. Can you think of an alternative which fits as well, if not better?”

“Let me be clear. You know this Italian gentleman is connected both to radicals and to the Spanish; you know that he is coming to our shores next month; those are your essential, though not your only, facts. You believe that he is coming here to cause us harm; that is your hypothesis. You do not know what that harm might be.”

I nodded.

“So let us see if indeed there is an alternative which might supplant your main hypothesis. Let us start by proposing that Cola is what he says—a young gentleman touring the world, with no interest in politics. He falls in with English radicals because he meets them by chance. He knows high Spaniards because he is a gentleman of quality from a wealthy Venetian family. He plans to come to England because he wishes to gain some knowledge of us. He is, in fact, entirely harmless.”

“You leave out the secondary facts,” I said, “which bolster one proposal but weaken the other. Cola is the senior son of a trader in considerable difficulties, his first obligation should be his family, yet he is in the Low Countries spending money in idle amusements. You need a good reason for such behavior, which my thesis can absorb, while yours cannot. He had little or no reputation for curiosity until the moment he arrived in Leiden, but was known for his courage and bravado with arms. In your thesis we must account for a remarkable change in character; in mine we do not. And you do not take account of the central matter, which is that he was the recipient of a letter disguised in a code previously used by a traitor against the king. Innocent tourists of curiosity, I think, rarely receive such missives.”

Boyle nodded, and accepted the counter-argument. “Very well,” he said, “I concede your hypothesis is the stronger, and must take priority. So I will attack your conclusion; we grant that Cola is in potential an imminent danger; does that lead inevitably to the conclusion that this danger will be realized? If I understand it rightly, you have no idea or notion of what this man might do when he comes here. What could one solitary individual accomplish that would pose such a danger?”

“He can say something, do something or be a means of transmission,” I replied. “These are the only types of action which are possible. Any danger he poses must be contained in one of these three categories. By transmission, I mean he could bring a message, or money, or take either of these away; I cannot think this is the case, both the radicals and the Spaniards have more than enough means of transporting anything they choose without making use of a man such as he. Similarly, I cannot see what he might say that could pose any form of threat, and which would require his presence in this country. So that leaves deeds. I ask you, sir, what deed can a single, solitary man accomplish that would pose a danger to this kingdom if, as seems reasonable, his profession is of significance in determining his movements?”

Boyle looked at me, but did not venture an answer.

“You know as well as I,” I continued, “that the one thing a soldier does which others do not do is kill people. And one man cannot kill many. The fewer who die, the more important they must be to make an impact.”

I lay out this conversation—in abridged form, for we talked many hours on the matter—to demonstrate that my fears were not the product of a mind suspicious of everyone and seeing dangers in mere shadows. No other hypothesis fitted the case as exactly, and so no other should be considered until it was discredited. This is the rule of experiment, and applies to politics as much as it does to mathematics or medicine. I presented my argument to Boyle and not only did he fail to come up with an alternative explanation, he was forced to concede that my own hypothesis was by far the one which best fitted the available facts. I did not believe I had reached certainty; only a scholastic would claim such prowess. But I could claim a probability more than strong enough to justify my concern.

Strike at the body, and the wound soon heals even though it may be a great gash. Strike only one small blow at the heart, and the effect is catastrophic. And the living, breathing heart of the kingdom was the king. One man, indeed, could bring all to ruin where an entire army would be ineffective.

Lest this seem incredible, and my fears fantastic, I beg you consider the number of such murders in recent history. Only half a century before, that great man Henry IV of France was stabbed to death, as were the Prince of Orange and Henry II before him. Under forty years ago the Duke of Buckingham was murdered by his own servant; judicial murder had ended the lives of the Earl of Strafford, Archbishop Laud and the blessed martyr Charles. I myself had encountered many plots to murder Cromwell, and even the Lord Chancellor in exile condoned the murder of the Commonwealth’s ambassadors at The Hague and Madrid. Public life was steeped in blood, and the murder of a king aroused no more repugnance in the breasts of many than did the slaughter of a domestic beast. We had become inured to the most horrendous of sins, and thought of them as instruments of policy.

I knew now that this plot I had detected was not the work of the fanatics, whose role, I suspected, would be merely to take the blame for any atrocity committed for the benefit of others. Those others had to be the Spanish, and the ultimate aim would be to detach England from its freedoms and bring our country back into Romish subjection. Kill the king, and his brother, an avowed Catholic, succeeds to the throne. His first act is to swear vengeance on the assassins of his beloved Charles. He blames the fanatics and swears to extirpate them all. Moderation is thrown to the winds, and the men of extremes take power once more. The result would be war, of course, in which Englishman would be pitted against Englishman once more. This time, though, it would be more terrible still, for the Catholics would call on their Spanish masters for aid, and the French would be bound to intervene. The nightmare of all princes since Elizabeth, that this land should become the cockpit of Europe, was fearsomely close.

For this last speculation I had no direct evidence, yet it was a reasonable projection from the evidence to hand; for logic allows us to see the future, or at least its likely development. Just as in mathematics when we can imagine a line, and then imagine it projected out farther, even to infinity, through the exercise of rational thought, so in politics we can consider actions and calculate consequences. If my fundamental hypothesis was granted—and it stood up to Boyle’s criticism as well as to my own dispassionate querying—then certain results would follow. I have laid out those possibilities to ensure my fears are understood. I admit that I was wrong in detail and will, at the appropriate moment, lay out my errors pitilessly; but nonetheless I claim the overall structure of my hypothesis was sound, in that it was capable of accepting modification without having to be abandoned.