Cecil attended the meal. The babble of talk dropped in volume as he appeared, then picked up again. There were a few derisory cheers and groans. Cecil was impervious. He nodded courteously enough to Essex, but seated himself as far away as the table arrangement allowed. Soon he was joined by Raleigh, Grey, Cobham, Howard and Shrewsbury.
And then the Queen asked for a second audience, later that afternoon.
‘We got a new neighbour.' Mannion had burst into where Gresham was seeing if stretching his limbs increased or decreased the pain of his recent ride. It had seemed to leave Mannion unaffected.
'And who might that be?'
'The Earl of Essex. 'E comes out of his meeting with the Queen, the one in the afternoon, looking like thunder. Before anyone can think, the order comes out that 'e's confined to his chamber. Then the Queen calls the whole of the Privy Council to Nonsuch. They 'old an 'earing. Six charges against 'im, from busting into the Queen's bedchamber to makin' a right mess o' things in Ireland. Next thing is 'e's banished from Court and 'e's in the custody of the Lord Keeper — kept in the Lord Keeper's house, in fact, right 'ere in the Strand. Two servants, that's all 'e's allowed. No visitors, not even his wife. Can't even walk in the garden. I reckon 'e's done for this time.'
'I've got an awful feeling,' said Gresham, 'that this isn't the end of anything. In fact, I wonder if things aren't just starting.'
Chapter 11
December, 1599 to January, 1601 London
London was in uproar. Huge, exaggerated versions of Essex's ride from Ireland, of his meeting with a naked Queen circulated and grew even more outrageous in the telling. Essex was banished, imprisoned in the Lord Keeper's house on the Strand, allowed only a handful of servants. No visitors were permitted. But the strain of keeping a tight rein on a man such as Essex defeated Sir Thomas Egerton, the kindly old Lord Keeper. Passers-by hurled abuse against the Queen, cries of support for Essex, then ran on, their faces hidden.
'Yet there's a strange load o' people still goin' in there,' said Mannion. 'All 'is old cronies, the ones with no money and even less sense.'
Gresham tried to visit. He was turned away. He resisted the urge to break the guard's head for him. The last thing Essex needed was a brawl on his doorstep. He smuggled a letter in. The reply was depressing.
'He's got religion again.' In courteous yet formal terms Essex's letter rejected Gresham's request for a visit. It suggested that in their wilder days they had forgotten God and Jesus, and that Gresham would need to refer to both before they could properly meet again. Even more worryingly, it was in the Earl's own hand, and sermonised Gresham for two close-written sides. It was as if the child had never existed. Perhaps Essex had made himself forget that it had.
The inns were rife with rebel talk. Essex could do no wrong. Hundreds of men from Ireland had returned to London, were swaggering and fighting in its streets and taverns, all the time professing their loyalty for the Earl, whipping up the already frothing sense of resentment and fear. Gresham had known nothing like it before, this unreasoning sense of anger centred on Essex and the perceived wrong done to him.
No call from Cecil. No call from the Queen. No ghosts from his past rising up to haunt him. Nothing to do, except try to stop Granville College, Cambridge, from self-destructing, manage his finances and do the minimum to keep in at Court. The Christmas festivities were dire, the light gone from them, the Queen surly and flat. Gresham was haunted by the image of the gilded Earl, once the life and soul of these celebrations, banished with a handful of servants to a cold house on the Strand. So near and yet so very far away. What must it be like for the life and soul of the party suddenly to find himself banned from it, reduced to imagining the pleasures of others more privileged, left with only the anger and resentment of his servants and so-called friends?
Gresham felt the black waves of depression starting to advance again on the shifting sands of his brain.
'You're too used to being at the centre of things, my Lord,' said Jane at supper. 'You only know how to run at full speed, and you falter if you're asked to walk.'
He had invited Jane to their first supper together in The House on his return from Ireland. She had asked for the story of the Ride from Ireland, and for some reason he had not finished it until long after the food was cold. It had only been courteous to ask her to attend the next evening, to finish his story. She had asked him to elaborate on some of the opinions he had voiced, and so she had been asked back a third time. So it had gone on, and now she was a regular attender at supper, voicing an opinion occasionally, but for the most part just listening. He was becoming accustomed to her and he was alone in failing to notice how, in the face of his goodwill, more and more power over the running of The House passed to her. And she was very beautiful.
'She's at her worst with Essex,' said Gresham, talking about the Queen. 'You stick the knife in, or you take it out. You don't leave it half in and half out unless you want to enrage the victim.'
'What's she done, my Lord?' asked Jane.
'Dismissed all his servants from Essex House — including those who served him and his father all their lives — and let him go back there with a handful of new servants. He's a prisoner in his old house, reminded every time he opens his eyes of past glories. And she won't try him, just keeps holding these inconclusive hearings.'
'They was 'avin' fun down the road this morning,' said Mannion, helping himself to a third plate of meat and fish.
There had been a near-riot in Cheapside, when an Irish adventurer had sought to stir up the apprentice boys on Essex's behalf. The man had been whipped soundly enough to make him regret his rashness, but the populace took note.
Essex still refused to receive Gresham although he wrote once a week.
Gresham was deeply in need of a visit from George. Letters to him had received an altogether warmer response than their equivalent to Essex, but the answer was the same. Lord Willoughby, for whatever reason, was keeping to his country estates.
Cecil, on the other hand, was charming to him. It worried Gresham more than anything else. A charming Cecil was a Cecil who thought Gresham no longer mattered. And had Cecil been behind the attempt to kill him in Ireland?
Though Gresham would have fiercely denied it, campaigning in Ireland had wakened instincts in him that he was finding it hard to douse down. He had left parts of both his soul and his body in the
Low Countries, had grown up there, received his real education in life there despite everything St Paul's and Cambridge could offer. The bleak risks of soldiering, the stark simplicity and the simple pleasures of a fighting man and above all the comradeship, the sense of a clear and shared danger, were a heady mix that once inserted into a man's brain never left him. It was a restless, almost hunted figure that attended the minimum of Court functions, and joined high table at Cambridge. He was made even more restless by the news of success in Ireland. Forced to be parsimonious in their use of men, the English commanders had reinforced their strongholds, made Tyrone come to them. There had been no more defeats and growing signs of fatigue among those who supplied Tyrone with troops.
And then the world changed disastrously for the Earl of Essex, and also for Henry Gresham.
In June there was a hearing by the Privy Council, of which Essex had once been so proud a member, confirming that he had offended the Queen and failed in Ireland despite every possible advantage. In August Essex was banished from Court. The highest nobleman in the land was now little more than a country squire, permanently separated from the gold mine that was the Court, savagely separated from all patronage.
In October the Queen dealt the most crushing blow of all, deciding not to renew the ten-year lease the Earl of Essex held on the import of sweet wines, but rather to reserve the income to herself. It was one of the richest monopolies in her power. It had funded all Essex's ambition, most of his excesses and the lifestyle of an aristocrat whose parents had left him so little. Its withdrawal did not mean only that he was now yesterday's man. It meant he was bankrupt. The creditors for the thousands of pounds he owed who had held off for fear of offending someone in the Queen's favour or because the grand Earl had a guarantee to fund his debts, all those would now descend on him like vultures determined to be the first to pick the flesh off his bones.
'Is she trying to force him to rebellion?' whispered Gresham, almost to himself. 'Is this her final challenge to him?'
