Peter Ransley: The King’s List

He roared with laughter and I ordered another bottle of claret to launch his new enterprise. By the time I stumbled out of the Hackney in Queen Street I was only too glad for James in reception – I remembered his name and used it several times – to help me out of my Brandenburg coat.

Two or three times a week I found my way to the offices of the Secretary of State in Whitehall. I say ‘found’ because the old palace in which Cromwell had installed government offices was a labyrinth in which even servants got lost. After going through the Elizabethan Great Gate, past buildings with crumbling timbered gables, I snaked through a warren of twisting corridors which seemed to get narrower and narrower, taking me past room after room of state papers before reaching John Thurloe’s apartment overlooking the river.

He never wasted time and greeted me with no more than a nod. I gave him the figures Lucy had sent me.

‘How sound are they?’

‘I don’t know. But Richard Stonehouse is at the heart of it.’ In Thurloe’s presence, I never referred to him as my father.

He shrugged. He had trained as a lawyer and counted his words. Words cost money. He had said all he had to say about my father, and the ball was in my court. Although I expected nothing, it was always worthwhile, when making a concession, seeking a quid pro quo.

‘I wonder if it’s wise to send Montague to the Tower?’

He stared at me coldly and I thought I had gone too far. With his dark eyes set rather too close together in a thin, cadaverous face, it was like being observed by a surgeon planning to operate. At last he spoke.

‘As it happens, I’ve been reflecting on what you said. I’ll send him to the country instead.’

‘I’ll write to Amsterdam about Richard Stonehouse.’

Another nod and he returned to the papers he was working on. The interview was over. I was surprised and gratified about Montague. I was almost out of the room when he spoke again.

‘Tom.’

He never called me Tom. Perhaps Sir Thomas; usually he dispensed with names altogether. When I returned he was gazing out of the window at the hazy line of the river, watching the press of boats going under London Bridge. Two boats had collided and an argument had erupted.

‘If you’re going to do it, you’d better get on with it. I expect I shall be out of office next week. Or shortly after.’

I thought I had misheard him. He continued to stare down the river as if the accident absorbed all his attention. Oars were pushing the quarrelling boatmen to one side and the other boats resumed their steady flow.

‘Out of the office?’

He turned his full gaze on me. There may even have been a hint of amusement on his face at my bewilderment. ‘Out of office. The Committee of Safety is yesterday’s story. They have caved in to General Monck. The Rump Parliament is to be assembled to er … run the country, led by Arthur Haselrig.’ There was a wealth of dry scepticism in the hesitation. ‘Arthur has been good enough to inform me that I will not be invited to join the State Council.’

I still did not take it in.

I could find nothing to say. If he was out of office, so was I. The boatmen had settled their difference and were steering back into the stream of traffic.

‘I suspect we shall be wanted again,’ he said. ‘I suggest we meet once a week at my chambers in Lincoln’s Inn.’

I stammered something, which he interrupted with a final nod before returning to his papers.

I got lost on the way out in the web of alleys that linked small courts and gardens, where the first piles of fallen leaves were being swept away. I had to be directed by the gardener to the Great Gate. It was a bright, unseasonal day. I walked aimlessly back to Queen Street. I badly needed a drink, but dare not. Everyone seemed busy but me, from hawkers crying to gentlemen in coaches on their way to the City. I did not have the heart to raise two fingers to the falcon over the door, but hurried up the steps, suddenly realising how much there was to do.

Everything that I had put off I did that day, coming to a decision on problems that had seemed intractable yesterday, dictating to my secretary, Mr Cole, until the servant came to light the candles. I left my father till last.

‘There is one more.’

I had coded the letter a year ago, after a particularly vitriolic letter from my father when Cromwell died. The code was embedded in a letter ordering some diamonds from a jeweller in Amsterdam, one of our agents. As proof that the job had been done, I requested him to send Richard’s ring. If Mr Cole did not know what it meant, he knew what it signified. He had done enough such letters for Richard’s father, Lord Stonehouse, including one ingeniously condemning me as a plague child, which should have resulted in my death. His only reaction was to push back his long white hair and rub his wrist with a sigh of relief.

‘Mr Thurloe has kept us busy today, sir.’

‘He has indeed, Mr Cole.’

I said no more. He would know soon enough. I poured myself a large sack and raised it to the portrait of Lord Stonehouse over the flickering fire. Anne thought it dreadful – ‘even worse than he looked in real life, if that were possible’ – but, for me, it was an old companion. In the shifting light of the candles and the fire, my grandfather’s smoke-blackened face with the beaked Stonehouse nose seemed to come alive. That evening I thought he looked disapproving. No Stonehouse had been out of office since before the reign of James the First.

I finished the sack. I considered going to the club but, with my sudden loss of influence, felt disinclined to, and found, for the first time in years, I had nothing more to do than go down to supper.

The first sign of unrest in the City is always when apprentices, egged on by their masters, begin to riot. They were roaming the streets, hunting down Quakers, a sectarian group which the City saw as a serious threat to order. Church ministers hated them because they were against tithes and interrupted services. I came across a group of them when I rode through Covent Garden on my way to my weekly meeting with John Thurloe.

It had been raining since early morning. Some of the Quakers had no outdoor coats and the feet of their children were bare, but their eyes shone exultantly as they chanted. A growing group of apprentices jeered at them, but their singing only grew louder. I tried to force my horse through. The apprentices tipped or drew off their hats at me.

‘Remove your hats for the gentleman,’ yelled an apprentice at the Quakers.

He was provoking them. They acknowledged no social betters and whatever tattered scraps they wore remained firmly on their heads. The rumble of an approaching carriage caused the apprentices to cry out in increased fervour.

‘Off with their hats!’

One caught a woman a stinging blow on the head. Her bonnet flew off. The blow scarcely interrupted her singing but the child with her flinched and darted away, stopping when she saw the carriage. There was no danger. The coachman saw her, slowed and turned away the horses. But the occupant of the carriage, no doubt in a hurry, rapped loudly with his stick. The coachman jumped, lost the reins for a moment and the horses panicked, heading straight for the child. There was an innocence in her mud-stained face, a curiosity in her widening eyes as she stared towards the tossing heads, the shafts that were about to impale her.

There are some instincts that, however rusty, spring back into life. It was the cavalryman I had once been who drove his horse between the carriage and the child, diverting the horses towards the street posts and helping the coachman bring them back under control.