Cromwell’s Blessing. Peter Ransley

I am, er, concerned about the inaccuracy of the report.’

      ‘Standards were higher in your day as a pamphleteer, were they?’

      Sometimes I could not make him out. Was there an edge of mockery in his voice, a sign that the worst of the storm was over? ‘It was a spoon, my lord, not plate. Not even silver.’

      ‘Thirty pieces of silver,’ he murmured, staring into space.

      ‘I beg your pardon, my lord?’

      He gave me a baleful look and stared into the fire. There was a silence apart from the click of the coals and the drumming of his fingers on his old leather desk. He broke it abruptly.

      ‘For your ears only. We have the King.’

      I went forward impulsively. ‘Congratulations, my lord.’

      He waved me away, a frown forming. ‘Well, well, there’s more to it. Unfortunately. I’ll come to that.’ But he could not contain his exuberance, and his face lit up again.

      ‘D’you know how we got His Majesty? We bought him! As good as. He was going to do a deal with the Scots but had to accept their religion. Charles loves the warmth of his Anglican ritual, and they chilled him to the bloody marrow with their damp kirks and bored him senseless with their gloomy hairsplitting.’

      He took up his wine and then – it was unheard of – poured me one. He sprang up, animated, almost young again.

      ‘Warwick sat there. Moneybags Bedford there – what are you standing like a loon for, boy? Sit down! Sit down! Oh, of course we were paying for the Scottish army to leave. On the face of it. For services rendered – coming to our aid. You don’t buy a King, do you?’

      He put on a shocked look, then laughed. ‘The grasping Scottish tinkers wanted nearly a million and a half pounds! For a King. Beaten. We knocked them down to four hundred thousand. Four hundred thousand.’ Lord Stonehouse relished the figure, as he savoured the taste of wine on his tongue. ‘In two instalments.’

      I had never seen him so lively. He finished his glass and stood over the fire. ‘Newcastle fishwives threw rotting herring at the Scots as they left, crying “Judas!”, and I bought a shipload of coal. Warmest coal I’ve ever burned.’

      He kicked at the fire, oblivious of the smouldering coals which singed his boot. Flames lit his face, throwing into sharp relief his aquiline nose, which was reflected in the family symbol of the falcon. For a moment the shadows took his years away and he stood there, proud, full of belief in himself, as he must have been when he first built his great house, Highpoint. But as the fire burned higher, the lines returned to his face and the stoop to his back.

      ‘Now we’ve lost him.’

      ‘The King? The King has escaped?’

      ‘No, no, no. But almost as bad. Holles and his Presbyterians have him. He’s in the middle of England under house arrest. Holdenby House, Northamptonshire, guarded by one of Holles’s Presbyterian regiments.’

      ‘Any settlement with the King will have to be ratified by Parliament!’

      He gave me a bleak look. ‘Who controls Parliament?’

      I swallowed my wine. ‘We must win the debate. It’s what we fought for. Parliament.’

      ‘Majority opinion?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘All well and good.’ He went back to his desk. ‘When it’s on your side.’ He opened a drawer that was double-locked, the one I had nicknamed his dirty tricks drawer. ‘What matters is not the debate, but what you can dig out beforehand. I must find out what Holles is up to. I had an informant high up in his inner circle I was hoping to catch. Unfortunately, I’ve lost him. I think you are the man to reel him back in.’

      This was going far better than I had feared. But I looked at him warily as he drew out a fat bundle of papers. What exactly did ‘reel him back in’ mean? The last thing I wanted was to be drawn into Lord Stonehouse’s shady network of spies and informers. I wanted to defeat, perhaps even convince Holles, but by argument, not dirty tricks.

      ‘I will do all I can to help, my lord, but …’ I groped for a diplomatic way of putting it.

      ‘But?’

      ‘After the battle of Naseby,’ I said, ‘I accepted the sword of the Royalist Jacob Astley.’

      ‘Lord Astley. Did you now.’

      ‘Astley said: “You have done your work, and may go and play, unless you fall out among yourselves.”’

      He leaned back in his chair, rubbing his chin. ‘A good aphorism. I must remember it. Meaning we should not quarrel, but reach agreement?’

      I beamed at him. The wine put a rosy glow on everything. The firelight gleamed on the old oak furniture that smelt of polish, and on the jewelled falcon perched on his signet ring. This was the moment. I was on the verge of suggesting he put me up as an MP to fight Holles in Parliament when he struck like the bird on the ring, his voice acid with contempt.

      ‘I would as soon reach agreement with Holles as I would with a poisonous snake. Don’t you understand? He has the King! The English Presbyterians are not like the dreary Scots! They hold him at a fine house, where Charles practises his religion, and holds his court. Holles will push through all the concessions the King wants, just to have him back on the throne. In a year or two the King will have his own army, dismiss Parliament –’

      ‘Cromwell will never agree to such concessions!’

      ‘Cromwell has given up.’

      This was too much. Lord Stonehouse had sat here throughout the war, his arse warmed by his coals. He had no idea what Cromwell and his army had been through. ‘Cromwell is ill, my lord,’ I said coldly.

      ‘Ill? Cromwell ill? He should have my years. My bladder. My stone. Ill? A grateful Parliament has conferred on him £2,500 a year. From estates I confiscated from the Marquis of Winchester. Cromwell ill, sir? He has drawn his pension, that’s the only thing wrong with Cromwell. Meanwhile we are in danger of losing all we fought for.’

      ‘Holles has no soldiers to launch a coup.’

      ‘He has Poyntz’s northern army.’

      That at least was true. Major-General Poyntz’s soldiers had been recruited from strict Presbyterians. ‘They are no match for the New Model.’

      ‘Yet.’ He pointed to the petitions heaped up on his desk. ‘Holles is seeking to disband half the New Model and send the rest to Ireland.’

      ‘Nobody wants to go to Ireland. Cromwell will never let him disband –’

      ‘Cromwell, Cromwell.’ The name seemed to stick in his throat and he began to cough. ‘Cromwell is counting his pension and waiting for God to tell him what to do. Until God speaks or someone puts a keg of gunpowder under his arse in the form of solid proof of what Holles is up to, he won’t budge. I was on the verge of getting that proof from my informant but –’

      He burst into an explosion of coughing. I picked up his wine.

      ‘Not wine … Cupboard … Not that one! Cordial …’

      I opened the cupboard. In it was a miniature of a strikingly beautiful woman with greenish eyes. With it was a partly folded letter in which I caught only the opening line: This is a true likeness of …

      ‘Quick!’

      I pulled out a flask and poured him a greenish liquid which smelt pleasantly of cinnamon. He swallowed some, spurted it out, mopped his face and took another sip or two, until the coughing gradually stopped. I moved to return the flask, but he stopped me and did so himself. I had disturbed the miniature so it was on the edge of the cupboard shelf. When he moved away, the miniature was no longer there. It was a clumsy surreptitious movement, and for a moment he did not meet my eyes. He looked almost human