The King’s List. Peter Ransley

convinced Anne was taking potions to prevent having another child.

      The child might have been another little Liz, who had died in infancy. Or another son, giving me the chance to be a better father. Once or twice I even unlocked the left-hand bottom drawer of my desk, and took out the papers on my bastard son.

      It had happened when I was a Leveller, struggling after the rebellion for rights for the people. I had broken up with Anne and lived with a girl called Ellie. But then I had returned to Anne, and it was only by chance, years later, that I discovered I’d had a son with Ellie. I paid to have him brought up at Half Moon Court, in the house where I was raised, and still owned. I gave him a rudimentary education. Nothing fancy. He had no idea of my existence, believing the man Ellie lived with, a candle-maker to whom he was apprenticed, was his father. The file I took out of my drawer was marked: Samuel Reeves. Closed. Payments had stopped when he was indentured. Each time I took it out with the intention of throwing it away. It was pointless, stupid to keep it. Anne had no idea of his existence. But each time I put it back.

      Apart from Luke, Anne’s child was Highpoint, our great estate in Oxfordshire. Estates were in decline. The extravagant years, when noblemen were expected to bankrupt themselves on the chance that the King might visit, went with his execution. The mood was, as one churchman put it, that ‘a house had better be too little for a day than too great for a year’. Even so, Anne improved the classical facade and opened up the lofty hall to the great sweep of the imposing staircase. She had an eye for paintings which lived, as she put it, rather than just hung. Many were bought cheap at Parliament’s ‘Sale of the Late King’s Goods’, a chaotic affair in Somerset House where dusty masterpieces were crammed amongst tapestries and chipped statues. She spotted dirty Titians and neglected Van Dycks, and had them restored and reframed to their original beauty. Her gardens were marvelled at. I admired Highpoint, but could not live there. Its builders, staff, stables, brew houses, granaries and farms drained most of our money. While she spent it in the country, I economised in town. It suited us both.

      It gave her the pleasure of creating it and me the power it emanated. We saw one another at glittering occasions there where I was Sir Thomas Stonehouse, charming to the county, most of whom were covert Royalists. Lady Stonehouse – I called her that at first, in a slightly mocking way, until, as the house gained in eminence, it became impossible to call her anything else – put on her sober dress and mien when she came to town to entertain Cromwell and the other old generals who ruled the country. Cromwell would call me Tom, but he would never dream of calling Anne anything other than Lady Stonehouse.

      So we believed it would continue until the family grave at Highpoint (she had already planned it) bore not one of those stiff, heraldic memorials that were going out of fashion, but a personal portrait that recorded our enduring love and affection for one another.

2

      Like a pebble in a pool, the summer rebellion made a small impact but caused wide ripples. There was unrest in the City. Mutterings that there would be a tax strike if a successor to Cromwell was not found soon. I had the usual vitriolic letter from my father, Richard Stonehouse, threatening what would happen to me when the King returned.

      Cromwell had given me Richard’s estates and made me Sir Thomas Stonehouse, in return for supporting him and signing the King’s death warrant. I had done it for Anne, who had become so obsessed with the place she had fallen into an illness from which I was afraid she would die. It was also true that Richard’s father, Lord Stonehouse, finally intended me to have it. He feared Richard’s profligacy would destroy the estate, but had died before he could complete a new will. Richard saw it much more simply: I had seized Highpoint by signing away the King’s life. The estate was blood money. To my father, I was what I had always been: Tom Neave, bastard, scurrilous pamphleteer, usurper and, worst of all, regicide – King killer.

      At erratic intervals, from different parts of Europe, my father sent me such letters. Under Cromwell, who had built up a powerful navy as well as a full-time army, Britain had become the most feared nation in Europe. In those years I could afford to throw Richard’s incoherent letters into the night soil without reading them. Now the armies – there was not one but several – were beginning to disintegrate. Soldiers had not been paid. Their generals quarrelled. Montague, who headed the navy, was suspected of being involved in the rebellion and there were moves to put him in the Tower. I read my father’s letter with more than usual care.

      He praised Luke for his courage and part in the rebellion. With all my father’s old contacts in Oxfordshire, I wondered if he had deliberately involved Luke in it. In the same post was a letter for Anne from her old friend and mentor, Lucy, the Countess of Carlisle, who was in Brussels with the makeshift court of Charles Stuart. I had rescued her from the Tower, but Cromwell had exiled her for spying for the King. Now she was spying for me. Her letter was full of gossip about penniless dukes and duelling courtiers and – principally – about Mrs Palmer, Charles’s new mistress.

      ‘She has enslaved him,’ Lucy wrote. ‘When she is in the room he cannot take his eyes from her. She is planted of course, by the Villiers family – she was Barbara Villiers – for their benefit, if the King ever crosses the water. The whole place is alive with the feeling that it is going to happen but I am afraid we have all heard it so many times before & everyone is as poor as ever & the food just as vile.’

      Anne, as usual, gave the letter to me for my amusement and, as usual, I took down my Bible to decode it. It made disturbing reading. Far from discouraging the Royalists, the failed rebellion had made them even more determined. Lucy gave figures for a large number of troops from Ireland. There was money from Europe and the West Country. Richard was heavily involved. He had played a major part in the summer rebellion.

      It was late evening when I decoded the letter. I went from my study to return it to Anne. The door of Luke’s room was open as was that of the anteroom of Anne’s apartment. He often slipped in to see her, to agonise over the width of a pair of breeches, or the colour of a cloth. I could hear the murmur of her voice from the corridor and was raising my hand to knock when Luke spoke.

      ‘When I have the estate I will have a proper steward, not that rogue Scogman.’

      Her reply was inaudible but I could guess she agreed with the sentiment. She had her own house steward at Highpoint, a correct and punctilious man. I went into the anteroom. Unlike the rest of the house, which was dark and gloomy, she had, in a short space of time, made her rooms bright with fresh paper and a few of her favourite pictures. There was no sign of her maid and I raised my hand to knock again.

      ‘Of course, Grandfather will have Highpoint first,’ Luke said.

      She loathed Richard much more wholeheartedly than I did and once would have had him killed by Cromwell if I had not interceded, but her reply was chiding, indulgent. ‘Oh. Will he. Then what will happen to your father and me?’

      ‘Oh … don’t worry. I will protect you, Mother.’

      It was banter. She did not take him seriously, but still I could not trust myself to speak. If I had gone in he would have thought I was spying on him, which, by that time, it was impossible to deny.

      I returned to my study and picked up my father’s letter. Luke’s grandfather would have Highpoint first, would he? Again I wondered if my father was in contact with Luke, and picked up his letter.

      Richard Stonehouse was a threat to the state. That was how John Thurloe, the Secretary of State, for whom I worked, regarded him. Throughout fifteen years of turmoil and change, whatever people thought of his methods, John Thurloe had kept a steady hand on the affairs of state. He had built an admired and feared network of contacts, spies and informers that made one ambassador say: ‘He has the secrets of Princes in his pocket.’ Not just princes. Nobles, gentlemen, politicians, merchants, lawyers, ministers: anyone of any consequence was recorded in papers at his offices in Whitehall. He was one of the few people with Cromwell when he died. Cromwell trusted him implicitly. So did I. I knew what he would say about my father – he had said it often enough.

      ‘Write