FEBRUARY 1685
LIKE A HORSEMAN WHO REINS in a wild stallion that has borne him, will he, nill he, across several counties; or a ship’s captain who, after scudding before a gale through a bad night, hoists sail, and gets underway once more, navigating through unfamiliar seas—thus Dr. Daniel Waterhouse, anno domini 1685, watching King Charles II die at Whitehall Palace.
Much had happened in the previous twelve years, but nothing was really different. Daniel’s world had been like a piece of caoutchouc that stretched but did not rupture, and never changed its true shape. After he’d gotten his Doctorate, there’d been nothing for him at Cambridge save lecturing to empty rooms, tutoring dull courtiers’ sons, and watching Isaac recede further into the murk, pursuing his quest for the Philosophic Mercury and his occult studies of the Book of Revelation and the Temple of Solomon. So Daniel had moved to London, where events went by him like musket-balls.
John Comstock’s ruin, his moving out of his house, and his withdrawal from the Presidency of the Royal Society had seemed epochal at the time. Yet within weeks Thomas More Anglesey had not only been elected President of the Royal Society but also bought and moved into Comstock’s house—the finest in London, royal palaces included. The upright, conservative arch-Anglican had been replaced with a florid Papist, but nothing was really different—which taught Daniel that the world was full of powerful men but as long as they played the same roles, they were as interchangeable as second-rate players speaking the same lines in the same theatre on different nights.
All of the things that had been seeded in 1672 and 1673 had spent the next dozen years growing up into trees: some noble and well-formed, some curiously gnarled, and some struck down by lightning. Knott Bolstrood had died in exile. His son Gomer now lived in Holland. Other Bolstroods had gone over the sea to New England. This was all because Knott had attempted to indict Nell Gwyn as a prostitute in 1679, which had seemed sensational at the time. The older King Charles II had grown, the more frightened London had become of a return to Popery when his brother James ascended to the throne, and the more the King had needed to keep a nasty bleak Protestant—a Bolstrood—around to reassure them. But the more power Bolstrood acquired, the more he was able to whip people up against the Duke of York and Popery. Late in 1678, they’d gotten so whipped up that they’d commenced hanging Catholics for being part of a supposed Popish Plot. When they’d begun running low on Catholics, they had hanged Protestants for doubting that such a Plot existed.
By this point Anglesey’s sons Louis, the Earl of Upnor, and Philip, Count Sheerness, had gambled away most of the family’s capital anyway, and had little to lose except their creditors, so they had fled to France. Roger Comstock—who had been ennobled, and was now the Marquis of Ravenscar—had bought Anglesey (formerly Comstock) House. Instead of moving in, he had torn it down, plowed its gardens under, and begun turning it into “the finest piazza in Europe.” But this was merely Waterhouse Square done bigger and better. Raleigh had died in 1678, but Sterling had stepped into his place just as easily as Anglesey had stepped into John Comstock’s, and he and the Marquis of Ravenscar had set about doing the same old things with more capital and fewer mistakes.
The King had dissolved Parliament so that it could not murder any more of his Catholic friends, and had sent James off to the Spanish Netherlands on the “out of sight, out of mind” principle, and, for good measure, had gotten James’s daughter Mary wedded to the Protestant Defender himself: William of Orange. And in case none of that sufficed, the Duke of Monmouth (who was Protestant) had been encouraged to parade around the country, tantalizing England with the possibility that he might be de-bastardized through some genealogical sleight-of-hand, and become heir to the throne.
King Charles II could still dazzle, entertain, and confuse, in other words. But his alchemical researches beneath the Privy Gallery had come to naught; he could not make gold out of lead. And he could not levy taxes without a Parliament. The surviving goldsmiths in Threadneedle Street, and Sir Richard Apthorp in his new Bank, had been in no mood to lend him anything. Louis XIV had given Charles a lot of gold, but in the end the Sun King turned out to be no different from any other exasperated rich in-law: he had begun finding ways to make Charles suffer in lieu of paying interest. So the King had been forced to convene Parliament. When he had, he had found that it was controlled by a City of London/friends of Bolstrood alliance (Foes of Arbitrary Government, as they styled themselves) and that the first item on their list had been, not to raise taxes, but rather to exclude James (and every other Catholic) from the throne. This Parliament had instantly become so unpopular with those who loved the King that the whole assembly—wigs, wool-sacks, and all—had had to move up to Oxford to be safe from London mobs whipped up by Sir Roger L’Estrange—who’d given up trying to suppress others’ libels, and begun printing up his own. Safe (or so they imagined) at Oxford, these Whigs (as L’Estrange libelled them) had voted for Exclusion, and cheered for Knott Bolstrood as he proclaimed Nellie a whore.
A crier marching up Piccadilly had related this news to Daniel as he and Robert Hooke had stood in what had once been Comstock’s and then Anglesey’s ballroom and was by that point a field of Italian marble rubble open to a fine blue October sky. As a work table they had been using the capital of a Corinthian column that had plunged to earth when the column had been jerked out from under it by Ravenscar’s merry Irish demolition men. The capital had half-embedded itself in the soil and now rested at a convenient angle; Hooke and Waterhouse had unrolled large sheets and weighed down the corners with stray bits of marble: tips of angels’ wings and shards of acanthus leaves. These were surveyor’s plats laying out Ravenscar’s scheme to embed a few square blocks of Cartesian rationality on the pot-bound root-ball that was the London street system. Surveyors and their apprentices had stretched cords and hammered in stakes plotting the axes of three short parallel streets that, according to Roger, would sport the finest shops in London: one was labeled Anglesey, one Comstock, and one Ravenscar. But that afternoon, Roger had showed up, armed with an inky quill, and scratched out those names and written in their stead Northumbria,* Richmond,† and St. Alban’s.‡
A month after that there’d been no Parliament and no more Bolstroods in Britain. James had come home from exile, Monmouth had been removed from the King’s service, and England had become, effectively, a department of France, with King Charles openly accepting a hundred thousand pounds a year, and most of the politicians in London—Whigs and Tories alike—receiving bribes from the Sun King as well. Quite a few Catholics who’d been tossed into the Tower for supposed involvement in the Popish Plot had been released, making room for as many Protestants who had supposedly been involved in a Rye House Plot to put Monmouth on the throne. Just like many Popish Plotters before them, these had promptly begun to “commit suicide” in the Tower. One had even managed the heroic feat of cutting his own throat all the way to the vertebrae!
So Wilkins’s work had been undone, at least for a while. Thirteen hundred Quakers, Barkers, and other Dissenters had been clapped into prison. Thus had Daniel spent a few months in a smelly place listening to angry men sing the same hymns he’d been taught as a boy by Drake.
It had been—in other words—a reign. Charles II’s reign. He was the King, he loved
France and hated Puritans and was always long on mistresses and short on money, and
nothing ever really changed.
NOW DR. WATERHOUSE WAS STANDING on the King’s Privy Stairs: a rude wooden platform clinging to a sheer vertical wall of limestone blocks that plunged straight into the Thames. All of the Palace buildings that fronted on the river were built this way, so as he gazed downriver, keeping watch for the boat that carried the chirurgeons, he found himself sighting down a long, continuous, if somewhat motley wall, interrupted by the occasional window or mock bastion. Three hundred feet downstream, a dock was thrust out into the river, and several intrepid watermen were walking to and fro on it in the lock-kneed gait of men trying to avoid freezing to death. Their boats were tied up alongside, awaiting passengers, but the hour was late, the weather cold, the King was dying, and no Londoners were availing themselves of the old right-of-way that ran through the Palace.
Beyond that dock, the river curved slowly around to the right, towards London Bridge. As the midday twilight had faded to an ashy afternoon, Daniel had seen a boat shove off from the Old Swan: a tavern at the northern end of the bridge that drew its clientele from those who did not like to gamble their lives by penetrating its turbulent arches. The boat had been struggling upstream ever since, and it was close enough now that, with the aid of the spyglass in Daniel’s pocket, he could see it carried only two passengers.
Daniel had been remembering the night in 1670 when he’d come to Whitehall in Pepys’s carriage, and wandered around the Privy Garden trying to act natural. At the time he’d thought it was cheeky and romantic, but now, remembering that he had ever been that fatuous made him grind his teeth, and thank God that the only witness had been Cromwell’s severed head.
Recently he had spent a lot of time at Whitehall. The King had decided to relax his grip just a bit, and had begun letting a few Barkers and Quakers out of prison, and had decided to nominate Daniel as a sort of unofficial secretary for all matters having to do with mad Puritans: Knott Bolstrood’s successor, that is, with all the same burdens, but much less power. Of Whitehall’s two thousand or so rooms, Daniel had probably set foot in a few hundred—enough to know that it was a dirty, mildewed jumble, like the map of the inside of a courtier’s mind, a slum in all but name. Whole sections had been taken over by the King’s pack of semi-feral spaniels, who’d become inbred even by Royal standards and thus hare-brained even by Spaniel standards. Whitehall Palace was, in the end, a House: the house of a Family. It was a very strange old family. As of one week ago Daniel had already been somewhat better acquainted with that Family than anyone in his right mind would want to be. And now, Daniel was waiting here on the Privy Stairs only as an excuse to get out of the King’s bedchamber—nay, his very bed—and to breathe some air that did not smell like the royal body fluids.
After a while the Marquis of Ravenscar came out and joined him. Roger Comstock—the least promising, and so far the most successful, of the men Daniel had gone to Cambridge with—had been in the north when the King had fallen ill on Monday. He was overseeing the construction of his manor house, which Daniel had designed for him. The news must’ve taken a day or two to reach him, and he must’ve set out immediately: it was now Thursday evening. Roger was still in his traveling-clothes, looking more drab than Daniel had ever seen him—almost Puritanical.
“My lord.”
“Dr. Waterhouse.”
From the expression on Roger’s face, Daniel knew that he had stopped by the King’s bedchamber first. In case there was any doubt of that, Roger tucked the long skirts of his coat behind him, clambered down onto both knees, bent forward, and threw up into the Thames.
“Will you please excuse me.”
“I didn’t imagine that a man could contain so many fluids and whatnot in his entire body!”
Daniel nodded toward the approaching boat. “Soon you’ll witness fresh marvels.”
“I could see from looking at His Majesty that the physicians have been quite busy?”
“They have done their utmost to hasten the King’s departure from this world.”
“Daniel! Lower your voice, I say,” Roger huffed. “Some may not understand your sense of humor—if that is the correct word for it.”
“Funny you should bring up the subject of Humours. It all began with an apoplectical fit on Monday. The King, hardy creature that he is, might’ve recovered—save that a Doctor happened to be in the very room, armed with a full complement of lancets!”
“Ugh! Worse luck!”
“Out came a blade—the Doctor found a vein—the King bade farewell to a pint or two of the Humour of Passion. But of course, he’s always had plenty of that to go round—so he lived on through Tuesday, and had the strength to fend off the gathering swarm of Doctors on into yesterday. Then, alas, he fell into an epileptical fit, and all of the Doctors burst in at once. They’d been camped in his anterooms, arguing as to which humours, and how much of ’em, needed to be removed. After going for a whole night and a day without sleep, a sort of competition had arisen among them as to who advocated the most heroic measures. When the King—after a valorous struggle—finally lost his senses, and could no longer keep ’em at bay, they fell on him like hounds. The Doctor who had been insisting that the King suffered from an excess of blood, had his lancet buried in the King’s left jugular before the others had even unpacked their bags. A prodigious quantity of blood spewed forth—”
“I believe I saw it.”
“Stay, I’m only beginning. The Doctor who had diagnosed an excess of bile, now pointed out that said imbalance had only been worsened by the loss of so much blood, and so he and a pair of bulky assistants sat the King up in bed, hauled his mouth open, and began tickling his gorge with diverse feathers, scraps of whalebone, et cetera. Vomiting ensued. Now, a third Doctor, who had been insisting, most tiresomely, that all the King’s problems were owed to an accumulation of colonic humours, rolled his Majesty over and shoved a prodigious long-necked calabash up the Royal Anus. In went a mysterious, very expensive fluid—out came—”
“Now a fourth Doctor set to work cupping him all over to draw out other poisons through the skin—hence those gargantuan hickeys, ringed by circular burns. The first doctor was now in a panic, seeing that the adjustments made by the other three had led to an excess of blood—it being all relative, you know. So he opened the other jugular, promising to let out just a little. But he let out quite a bit. The other doctors became indignant now, and demanded the right to repeat all of their treatments. But here’s where I stepped in, and, exercising—some would say, abusing—my full authority as Secretary of the Royal Society, recommended a purging of Doctors rather than humours and kicked them out of the bedchamber. Threats were made against my reputation and my life, but I ejected them anon.”
“But I heard news, as I came into London, that he was on the mend.”
“After the Sons of Asclepius were finished with him, he did not really move for a full twenty-four hours. Some might’ve construed this as sleeping. He lacked the strength to pitch a fit—some might call it recovery. Occasionally I’d hold an ice-cold mirror in front of his lips and the reflection of the King’s face would haze. In the middle of the day today, he began to stir and groan.”
“His Majesty can scarcely be blamed for that!” Roger said indignantly.
“Nevertheless, more physicians got to him, and diagnosed a fever. They gave him a royal dose of the Elixir Proprietalis LeFebure.”
“Now that must’ve improved the King’s mood to no end!”
“We can only speculate. He has gotten worse. The sorts of Doctors who prescribe powders and elixirs have, consequently, fallen from favor, and the bleeders and purgers are upon us!”
“Then I’ll add my weight as President, to yours as Secretary, of the Royal Society, and we’ll see how long we can keep the lancets in their sheathes.”
“Interesting point you raise there, Roger…”
“Oh, Daniel, you have got that Waterhousian brooding look about you now, and so I fear you do not mean a literal point, as in lancets—”
“I was thinking—”
“Help!” Roger cried, waving his arms. But the watermen on yonder dock had all turned their backs on the Privy Stairs to watch the approach of the boat carrying those chirurgeons.
“D’you recall when Enoch Root made phosphorus from horse urine? And the Earl of Upnor made a fool of himself supposing that it must have come from royal piss?”
“I’m terrified that you’re about to say something banal, Daniel, about how the King’s blood, bile, et cetera are no different from yours. So is it all right with you if I just stipulate that Republicanism makes perfect sense, seems to work well in Holland, and thereby exempt myself from this part of the conversation?”
“That is not precisely where I was going,” Daniel demurred. “I was thinking about how easily your cousin was replaced with Anglesey—how disappointingly little difference it made.”
“Before you corner yourself, Daniel, and force me to drag you out as usual, I would discourage any further usage of this similitude.”
“Which similitude?”
“You are about to say that Charles is like Comstock and James is like Anglesey and that it will make no difference, in the end, which one is king. Which would be a dangerous thing for you to say—because the House where Comstock and Anglesey lived has been razed and paved over.” Roger jerked his head upwards towards Whitehall. “Which is not a fate we would wish on yonder house.”
“But that is not what I was saying!”
“What were you saying, then? Something not obvious?”
“As Anglesey replaced Comstock, and Sterling replaced Raleigh, I replaced Bolstrood, in a way…”
“Yes, Dr. Waterhouse, we live in an orderly society and men replace each other.”
“Sometimes. But some can’t be replaced.”
“I don’t know that I agree.”
“Suppose that, God forbid, Newton died. Who would replace him?”
“Hooke, or maybe Leibniz.”
“But Hooke and Leibniz are different. I put it to you that some men really have unique qualities and cannot be replaced.”
“Newtons come along so rarely. He is an exception to any rule you might care to name—really a very cheap rhetorical tactic on your part, Daniel. Have you considered running for Parliament?”
“Then I should have used a different example, for the point I’m wanting to make is that all round us, in markets and smithys, in Parliament, in the City, in churches and coal-mines, there are persons whose departure really would change things.”
“Why? What makes these persons different?”
“It is a very profound question. Recently Leibniz has been refining his system of metaphysics—”
“Wake me up when you are finished.”
“When I first saw him at Lion Quay these many years ago, he was showing off his knowledge of London, though he’d never been here before. He’d been studying views of the city drawn by diverse artists from differing points of view. He went off on a rant about how the city itself has one form but it is perceived in different ways by each person in it, depending on their unique situation.”
“Every sophomore thinks this.”
“That was more than a dozen years ago. In his latest letter to me he seems to be leaning towards the view that the city does not have one absolute form at all…”
“Obvious nonsense.”
“…that the city is, in some sense, the result of the sum total of the perceptions of it by all of its constituents.”
“I knew we never should have let him into the Royal Society!”
“I am not explaining it very well,” Daniel admitted, “because I do not quite understand it, yet.”
“Then why are you belaboring me with it now of all times?”
“The salient point has to do with perceptions, and how different parts of the world—different souls—perceive all of the other parts—the other souls. Some souls have perceptions that are confused and indistinct, as if they are peering through poorly ground lenses. Whereas others are like Hooke peering through his Microscope or Newton through his Reflecting Telescope. They have superior perceptions.”
“Because they have better opticks!”
“No, even without lenses and parabolic mirrors, Newton and Hooke see things that you and I don’t. Leibniz is proposing a strange inversion of what we normally mean when we describe a man as distinguished, or unique. Normally when we say these things, we mean that the man himself stands out from a crowd in some way. But Leibniz is saying that such a man’s uniqueness is rooted in his ability to perceive the rest of the universe with unusual clarity—to distinguish one thing from another more effectively than ordinary souls.”
Roger sighed. “All I know is that Dr. Leibniz has been saying some very rude things about Descartes lately—”
“Yes, in his Brevis Demonstratio Erroris Memorabilis Cartesii et Alio-rum Circa Legem Naturalem—”
“And the French are up in arms.”
“You said, Roger, that you would add your weight as President, to mine as Secretary, of the Royal Society.”
“And I shall.”
“But you flatter me by saying so. Some men are interchangeable, yes. Those two chirurgeons could be replaced with any other two, and the King would still die this evening. But could I—could anyone—fill your shoes so easily, Roger?”
“Why, Daniel, I do believe this is the first time in your life you’ve actually exhibited something akin to respect for me!”
“You are a man of parts, Roger.”
“I am touched and of course I agree with the point you were trying to make—whatever the hell it might have been.”
“Good—I am pleased to hear you agree with me in believing that James is no replacement for Charles.”
Before Roger could recover—but after he mastered his anger—the boat was in earshot and the conversation, therefore, over.
“Long live the King, m’Lord, and Doctor Waterhouse,” said one Dr. Hammond, clambering over the boat’s gunwale onto the Privy Stairs. Then they all had to say it.
Hammond was followed by Dr. Griffin, who also greeted them with “Long live the King!” which meant that they all had to say it again.
Daniel must have said it with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, for Dr. Hammond gave him a sharp look—then turned toward Dr. Griffin as if trolling for eyewitnesses. “It is very good that you have come in time, m’Lord,” said Hammond to Roger Comstock, “as, between Jesuits on the one hand, and Puritans on t’other” (squirting long jets of glowing vitriol out of the pupils of his eyes, here, at Daniel), “some would say the King has had enough of bad advice.”
Now Roger tended to say things after long pauses. When he’d been a clownish sizar at Trinity, this had made him seem not very intelligent; but now that he was a Marquis, and President of the Royal Society, it made him seem exceedingly sober and grave. So after they’d all climbed up the steps to the balcony that led into the part of Whitehall called the King’s Apartments, he said: “A King’s mind should never want for the counsel of learned or pious men, just as his body should never want for a bountiful supply of the diverse humours that sustain life and health.”
Waving an arm at the shambling Palace above them, Dr. Hammond said to Roger, “This place is such a bazaar of rumor and intrigue, that your presence, m’Lord, will go far towards quelling any whisperings should the worst happen which Almighty God forbid.” Favoring Daniel with another fearsome over-the-shoulder glare, as he followed the Marquis of Ravenscar into the King’s Apartments.
“It sounds as if some have already gone far beyond whispering,” Daniel said.
“I’m certain that Dr. Hammond is solely concerned with preserving your reputation, Dr. Waterhouse,” Roger said.
“What—it’s been nigh on twenty years since His Majesty blew up my father—do people suppose I am still nursing a grudge?”
“That’s not it, Daniel—”
“On the contrary! Father’s departure from this plane was so brisk, so hot—leaving behind no physical remains—that it has been a sort of balm to my spirit to sit up with the King, night after night, imbrued in the royal gore, breathing it into my lungs, sopping it up with my flesh, and many other enjoyments besides, that
I missed out on when my Father ascended…”
The Marquis of Ravenscar and the two other Doctors had slowed almost to a standstill and were now exchanging deeply significant looks. “Yes,” Roger finally said, after another grand pause, “too much sitting up, in such a fœtid atmosphere, is not healthful for one’s body, mind, or spirit…perhaps an evening’s rest is in order, Daniel, so that when these two good Doctors have restored the King to health, you’ll be ready to offer his Majesty your congratulations, as well as to re-affirm the profound loyalty you harbor, and have always harbored, in your breast, notwithstanding those events of two decades hence, which some would say have already been alluded to more than enough…”
He did not finish this sentence for a quarter of an hour. Before putting it to a merciful death, he’d managed to work in several enconiums for both Drs. Hammond and Griffin, likening one to Asclepius and the other to Hippocrates, while not failing to make any number of cautiously favorable remarks about every other Doctor who had come within a hundred yards of the King during the last month. He also (as Daniel noted, with a kind of admiration) was able to make it clear, to all present, just what a morbid catastrophe it would be if the King died and turned England over into the hands of that mad Papist the Duke of York whilst, practically in the same phrases—with the same words—asserting that York was really such a splendid fellow that it was almost imperative that all of them rush straight-away to the King’s Bedchamber and smother Charles II under a mattress. In a sort of recursive fugue of dependent clauses he was, similarly, able to proclaim Drake Waterhouse to’ve been the finest Englishman who’d ever boiled beef whilst affirming that blowing him up with a ton of gunpowder had been an absolute touchstone of (depending on how you looked at it) monarchical genius that made Charles II such a colossal figure, (or) rampant despotism that augured so favorably for his brother’s reign.
All of this as Daniel and the physicians trailed behind Roger through the leads, halls, galleries, antechambers, and chapels of Whitehall, rupturing stuck doors with shoulder-thrusts and beating back tons of dusty hangings. The Palace must have been but a single building at some point, but no one knew which bit had been put up first; anyway, other buildings had been scabbed onto that first one as fast as stones and mortar could be ferried in, and galleries strung like clothes-lines between wings of it that were deemed too far apart; this created courtyards that were, in time, subdivided, and encroached upon by new additions, and filled in. Then the builders had turned their ingenuity to bricking up old openings, and chipping out new ones, then bricking up the new ones and re-opening the old, or making newer ones yet. In any event, every closet, hall, and room was claimed by one nest or sect of courtiers, just as every snatch of Germany had its own Baron. Their journey from the Privy Stairs to the King’s Bedchamber would, therefore, have been fraught with difficult border-crossings and protocol disputes if they’d made it in silence. But as the Marquis of Ravenscar was leading them surely through the maze, he went on, and on, with his Oration, a feat akin to threading needles while galloping on horseback through a wine cellar. Daniel lost track of the number of claques and cabals they burst in on, greeted, and left behind; but he did notice a lot of Catholics about, and more than a few Jesuits. Their route took them in a sort of jagged arc circumventing the Queen’s Apartments, which had been turned into a sort of Portuguese nunnery quite a long time ago, furnished with prayer-books and ghastly devotional objects; yet it buzzed with its own conspiracies. Whenever they spied a door ajar, they heard brisk steps approaching it from the opposite side and saw it slammed and locked in their faces. They passed by the King’s little chapel, which had been turned into a base-camp for this Catholic invasion, which didn’t really surprise Daniel but would have ignited riots over nine-tenths of England had it been widely known.
Finally they arrived at the door to the King’s Bedchamber, and Roger startled them all by finishing his sentence. He somehow contrived to separate Daniel from the physicians, and spoke briefly to the latter before showing them in to see the patient.
“What’d you tell them?” Daniel asked, when the Marquis came back.
“That if they unsheathed their lancets, I’d have their testicles for tennis-balls,” Roger said. “I have an errand for you, Daniel: go to the Duke of York and report on his brother’s condition.”
Daniel took a breath, and held it. He could scarcely believe, all of a sudden, how tired he was. “I could say something obvious here, such as that anyone could do that, and most would do it better than I, and then you’d answer with something that’d make me feel a bit dim, such as—”
“In our concern for the previous king we must not forget to maintain good relations with the next.”
“ ‘We’ meaning—in this case—?”
“Why, the Royal Society!” said Roger, miffed to have been asked.
“Righto. What shall I tell him?”
“That London’s finest physicians have arrived—so it shouldn’t be much longer.”
HE MIGHT HAVE SHIELDED HIMSELF from the cold and the wind by walking up the length of the Privy Gallery, but he’d had quite enough of Whitehall, so instead he went outside, crossed a couple of courts, and emerged at the front of the Banqueting House, directly beneath where Charles I had had his head lopped off, lo these many years ago. Cromwell’s men had kept him prisoner in St. James’s and then walked him across the Park for his decapitation. Four-year-old Daniel, sitting on Drake’s shoulders in the plaza, had watched every one of the King’s steps.
This evening, thirty-nine-year-old Daniel would be retracing that King’s final walk—except backwards.
Now, Drake, twenty years ago, would have been the first to admit that most of Cromwell’s work had been rolled back by the Restoration. But at least Charles II was a Protestant—or had the decency to pretend to be one. So Daniel oughtn’t to make too much of an omen out of this walk—God forbid he should start thinking like Isaac, and find occult symbols in every little thing. But he couldn’t help imagining that time was being rolled back even farther now, even past the reign of Elizabeth, all the way back to the days of Bloody Mary. In those days John Waterhouse, Drake’s grandfather, had fled over the sea to Geneva, which was a hornets’ nest of Calvinists. Only after Elizabeth was on the throne had he returned, accompanied by his son Calvin—Drake’s father—and many other English and Scottish men who thought the way he did about religion.
In any event, now here was Daniel crossing the old Tilt Yard and descending the stairs into St. James’s Park, going to fetch the man who had all the earmarks of the next Bloody Mary. James, the Duke of York, had lived at Whitehall Palace with the King and Queen until the tendency of Englishmen to riot and burn large objects in the streets at the least mention of his name had given the King the idea to pack him off to places like Brussels and Edinburgh. Since then he’d been a political comet, spending almost all of his time patrolling the liminal dusk, occasionally swooping back to London and scaring the hell out of everyone until the blaze of bonfires and burning Catholic churches drove him off into the darkness. After the King had finally lost patience, suspended Parliament, kicked out all the Bolstroods, and thrown the remaining Dissenters into jail, James had been suffered to come back and settle his household—but at St. James’s Palace.
From Whitehall it was five minutes’ walk across several gardens, parks, and malls. Most of the big old trees had been uprooted by the Devil’s Wind that had swept over England on the day Cromwell had died. As a lad wandering up and down Pall Mall handing out libels, Daniel had watched new saplings being planted. He was dismayed, now, to see how large some of them had grown.
In spring and summer, royals and courtiers wore ruts in the paths that wound between these trees, going out for strolls that had become ritualized into processions. Now the terrain was empty, an unreadable clutter of brown and gray: a crust of frozen mud floating on a deep miasma of bog and horse-manure. Daniel’s boots kept breaking through and plunging him into the muck. He learned to avoid stepping near the crescent-shaped indentations that had been made a few hours ago by the hooves of John Churchill’s regiment of Guards drilling and parading on this ground, galloping hither and yon and cutting the heads off of straw men with sabers. Those straw men had not been dressed up as Whigs and Dissenters, but even so the message had been clear enough, for Daniel and for the crowds of Londoners gathered along the limit of Charing Cross burning bonfires for their King.
One Nahum Tate had recently translated into English a hundred-and-fifty-year-old poem by the Veronese astronomer Hieronymus Fracastorius, entitled (in the original) Syphilis, Sive Morbvs Gallicvs or (as Tate had it) “Syphilis: or, a poetical history of the French Disease.” Either way, the poem told the tale of a shepherd named Syphilus who (like all shepherds in old myths) suffered a miserable and perfectly undeserved fate: he was the first person to be struck down by the disease that now bore his name. Inquiring minds might wonder why Mr. Tate had troubled himself to translate, at this moment, a poem about a poxy shepherd that had languished in Latin for a century and a half without any Englishman’s feeling its lack: a poem about a disease, by an astronomer! Certain Londoners of a cynical turn of mind believed that the answer to this riddle might be found in certain uncanny similarities between the eponymous shepherd and James, the Duke of York. Viz. that all of said Duke’s lovers, mistresses, and wives ended up with the said pestilence; that his first wife, Anne Hyde, had apparently died of it; that Anne Hyde’s daughters, Mary and Anne, both had difficulties with their eyes, and with their wombs; that the Duke had obvious sores on his face and that he was either unbelievably stupid or out of his fucking mind.
Now (as Daniel the Natural Philosopher understood only too well) people had a habit of over-burdening explanations, and to do so was a bad habit—a kind of superstition. And yet the parallels between Syphilus the Shepherd and James the Heir to the English Throne were hard to ignore—and as if that weren’t enough, Sir Roger L’Estrange had recently been leaning on Nahum Tate, asking him to perhaps find some other mildewy old Latin poems to translate. And everyone knew that L’Estrange was doing so, and understood why.
James was Catholic, and wanted to be a Saint, and that all fit together because he had been born in the Palace of St. James’s some fifty-two years ago. It had always been his true home. In his tender years he’d been taught princely rudiments in this yard: fencing and French. He had been spirited up to Oxford during the Civil War, and more or less raised himself from that point on. Occasionally Dad would swing by and swoop him up and take him off to some battle-front to get creamed by Oliver Cromwell.
James had spent quite a bit of time hanging about with his cousins, the offspring
of his aunt Elizabeth (the Winter Queen), a fecund but hapless alternate branch of
the family. When the Civil War had been lost, he’d gone back to St. James’s and lived
there as a pampered hostage, wandering about this park and mounting the occasional
boyish escape attempt, complete with encyphered letters spirited out to loyal confederates.
One of those letters had been intercepted, and John Wilkins had been called in to
decypher it, and Parliament had threatened to send James off to live in the decidedly
less hospitable Tower. Eventually he’d slipped out across this park, disguised himself
as a girl, and fled down the river and across the sea to Holland. Therefore he’d been
out of the country when his father had been marched across this park to have his head
lopped off. As the English Civil War had slowly ground to a halt, James had grown
into a man, bouncing around between Holland, the Island of Jersey, and St. Germain
(a royal suburb of Paris) and busying himself with the princely pastimes of riding,
shooting, and screwing high-born Frenchwomen. But as Cromwell had continued to crush
the Royalists at every turn, not only in England but Ireland and France as well, James had finally run out of money and become
a soldier—a rather good one—under Marshal Turenne, the incomparable French general.
AS HE TRUDGED ALONG Daniel occasionally swiveled his head to gaze north across Pall Mall. The view was different every time, as per the observations of Dr. Leibniz. But when the parallax of the streets was just right, he could see between the bonfires built there by nervous Protestants, up the lengths of the streets-named-after-royal-bastards, and all the way up to the squares where Roger Comstock and Sterling Waterhouse were putting up new houses and shops. Some of the larger ones were being made with great blocks of stone taken from the rubble of John Comstock’s house—blocks that Comstock, in turn, had salvaged from the collapsed south transept of Old St. Paul’s. Lights were burning in windows up there, and smoke drifting from chimneys. Mostly it was the mineral smoke of coal, but on the north wind Daniel caught the occasional whiff of roasting meat. Crunching and squelching across this wasted park, stepping over stuffed heads that had been lopped from straw men a few hours before, had given Daniel his appetite back. He wanted to be up there with a tankard in one hand and a drumstick in the other—but here he was, doing the sort of thing that he did. Which was what, exactly?
St. James’s Palace was getting close, and he really ought to have an answer before
he got there.
AT SOME POINT CROMWELL HAD, improbably, formed an alliance with the French, and then young James had had to go north to an impoverished, lonely, boring existence in the Spanish Netherlands. In the final years before the Restoration he’d knocked about Flanders with a motley army of exiled Irish, Scottish, and English regiments, picking fights with Cromwell’s forces around Dunkirk. After the Restoration he’d come into his hereditary title of Lord High Admiral, and taken part in some rousing and bloody naval engagements against the Dutch.
However: the tendency of his siblings to die young, and the failure of his brother Charles to produce a legitimate heir, had made James the only hope for continuance of his mother’s bloodline. While Mother had been living a good life in France, her sister-in-law, the Winter Queen, had been kicked around Europe like a stuffed pig’s bladder at a county fair. Yet Elizabeth had pumped out babies with inhuman efficiency and Europe was bestrewn with her offspring. Many had come to naught, but her daughter Sophie seemed to have bred true, and was carrying on the tradition with seven surviving children. So, in the royal propagation sweepstakes, Henrietta Maria of France, the mother of James and Charles, seemed to be losing, in the long run, to the miserable Winter Queen. James was her only hope. And consequently, during James’s various adventures she had used all of her wiles and connexions to keep him out of danger—leaving James with a simmering feeling of never having destroyed as many armies or sunk as many fleets as he could have.
Stymied, he’d spent much of the time since about 1670 doing—what, exactly? Mining Africa for gold, and, when that failed, Negroes. Trying to persuade English noblemen to convert to Catholicism. Sojourning in Brussels, and then in Edinburgh, where he had made himself useful by riding out to wild parts of Scotland to suppress feral Presbyterians in their rustic conventicles. Really he had been wasting his time, just waiting.
Just like Daniel.
A dozen years had flown by, dragging him along like a rider with one foot caught in the stirrup.
What did it mean? That he had best take matters in hand and get his life in order. Find something to do with his allotted years. He had been too much like Drake, waiting for some Apocalypse that would never come.
The prospect of James on the throne, working hand-in-glove with Louis XIV, was just sickening. This was an emergency, every bit as pressing as when London had burnt.
The realizations just kept coming—or rather they’d all appeared in his mind at once, like Athena jumping out of his skull in full armor, and he was merely trying to sort them out.
Emergencies called for stern, even desperate measures, such as blowing up houses with kegs of gunpowder (as King Charles II had personally done) or flooding half of Holland to keep the French out (as William of Orange had done). Or—dare he think it—overthrowing Kings and chopping their heads off as Drake had helped to. Men such as Charles and William and Drake seemed to take such measures without hesitation, while Daniel was either (a) a miserably pusillanimous wretch or (b) wisely biding his time.
Maybe this was why God and Drake had brought him into this world: to play some pivotal role in this, the final struggle between the Whore of Babylon, a.k.a. the Roman Catholic Church, and Free Trade, Freedom of Conscience, Limited Government, and diverse other good Anglo-Saxon virtues, which was going to commence in about ten minutes.
Romanists now swarming at Court with greater confidence than had ever been seen since the Reformation.
—John Evelyn’s Diary
ALL OF THESE THOUGHTS terrified him so profoundly as to nearly bring him to his knees before the entrance of St. James’s Palace. This wouldn’t have been as embarrassing as it sounded; the courtiers circulating in and out of the doors, and the Grenadier Guards washing their hands in the blue, wind-whipped flames of torchières, probably would have pegged him as another mad Puritan taken in a Pentecostal fit. However, Daniel remained on his feet and slogged up stairs and into the Palace. He made muddy footprints on the polished stone: making a mess of things as he went and leaving abundant evidence, which seemed a poor beginning for a conspirator.
St. James’s was roomier than the suite in Whitehall where James had formerly dwelt, and (as Daniel only now apprehended) this had given him the space and privacy to gather his own personal Court, which could simply be marched across the Park and swapped for Charles’s at the drop of a crown. They’d seemed a queer swarm of religious cultists and second-raters. Daniel now cursed himself for not having paid closer attention to them. Some of them were players who’d end up performing the same roles and prattling the same dialogue as the ones they were about to replace, but (if Daniel’s ruminations on the Privy Stairs were not completely baseless) others had unique perceptions. It would be wise for Daniel to identify these.
As he worked his way into the Palace he began to see fewer Grenadier Guards and more shapely green ankles scissoring back and forth beneath flouncing skirts. James had five principal mistresses, including a Countess and a Duchess, and seven secondary mistresses, typically Merry Widows of Important Dead Men. Most of them were Maids of Honour, i.e., members of the ducal household, therefore entitled to loiter around St. James’s all they wanted. Daniel, who made a sporting effort to keep track of these things, and who could easily list the King’s mistresses from memory, had entirely lost track of the Duke’s. But it was known empirically that the Duke would pursue any young woman who wore green stockings, which made it much easier to sort things out around St. James’s, just by staring at ankles.
From the mistresses he could learn nothing, at least, until he learned their names and gave them further study. What of the courtiers? Some could be described exhaustively by saying “courtier” or “senseless fop,” but others had to be known and understood in the full variety of their perceptions. Daniel recoiled from the sight of a fellow who, if he had not been clad in the raiments of a French nobleman, might have been taken for a shake-rag. His head seemed to have been made in some ghastly Royal Society experiment by taking two different men’s heads and dividing them along the centerline and grafting the mismatched halves together. He jerked frequently to one side as if the head-halves were fighting a dispute over what they should be looking at. From time to time the argument would reach some impasse and he’d stand frozen and mute for a few seconds, mouth open and tongue exploring the room. Then he’d blink and resume speaking again, rambling in accented English to a younger officer—John Churchill.
The better half of this strange Frenchman’s head looked to be between forty and fifty years of age. He was Louis de Duras, a nephew of Marshal Turenne but a naturalized Englishman. He had, by marrying the right Englishwoman and raising a lot of revenue for Charles, acquired the titles Baron Throwley, Viscount Sondes, and the Earl of Feversham. Feversham (as he was generally called) was Lord of the Bedchamber to King Charles II, which meant that he really ought to have been over in Whitehall just now. His failure to be there might be seen as proof that he was grossly incompetent. But he was also a Commander of Horse Guards. This gave him an excuse for being here, since James, as a highly unpopular but healthy king-to-be, needed a lot more guarding than Charles, a generally popular king at death’s door.
Around a corner and into another hall, this one so chilly that steam was coming from people’s mouths as they talked. Daniel caught sight of Pepys and veered towards him. But then a wind-gust, leaking through an ill-fitting window-frame, blew a cloud of vapor away from the face of the man Pepys was talking to. It was Jeffreys. His beautiful eyes, now trapped in a bloated and ruddy face, fixed upon Daniel, who felt for a moment like a small mammal paralyzed by a serpent’s hypnotic glare. But Daniel had the good sense to look the other way and duck through an opportune doorway into a gallery that connected several of the Duke’s private chambers.
Mary Beatrice d’Este, a.k.a. Mary of Modena—James’s second wife—would be sequestered back in these depths somewhere, presumably half out of her mind with misery. Daniel tried not to think of what it would be like for her: an Italian princess raised midway between Florence, Venice, and Genoa, and now stuck here, forever, surrounded by the mistresses of her syphilitic husband, surrounded in turn by Protestants, surrounded in turn by cold water, her only purpose in life to generate a male child so that a Catholic could succeed to the throne, but her womb barren so far.
Looking quite a bit more cheerful than that was Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, who’d been rich to begin with and had now secured her pension by producing two of James’s innumerable bastard sons. She was not an attractive woman, she was not Catholic, and she hadn’t even bothered to pull on green stockings—yet she had some mysterious unspecified hold over James exceeding that of any of his other mistresses. She was strolling down the gallery tête-à-tête with a Jesuit: Father Petre, who among other duties was responsible for bringing up all of James’s bastards to be good Catholics. Daniel caught a moment of genuine amusement on Miss Sedley’s face and guessed that the Jesuit was relating some story about her boys’ antics. In this windowless gallery, lit feebly by some candles, Daniel could not have been more than a dim apparition to them—a pale face and a lot of dark clothing—a Puritan Will-o’-the-wisp, the sort of bad memory that forever haunted the jumpy Royals who’d survived the Civil War. The affectionate smiles were replaced by alert looks in his direction: was this an invited guest, or a Phanatique, a hashishin? Daniel was grotesquely out of place. But his years at Trinity had made him accustomed to it. He bowed to the Countess of Dorchester and exchanged some sort of acrid greeting with Father Petre. These people did not like him, did not want him here, would never be friendly to him in any sense that counted. And yet there was a symmetry here that unnerved him. He’d seen wary curiosity on their faces, then recognition, and now polite masks had fallen over their covert thoughts as they wondered why he was here, and tried to fit Daniel Waterhouse into some larger picture.
But if Daniel had held a mirror up to his own face he’d have seen just the same evolution.
He was one of them. Not as powerful, not as highly ranked—in fact, completely unranked—but he was here, now, and for these people that was the only sort of rank that amounted to anything. To be here, to smell the place, to bow to the mistresses, was a sort of initiation. Drake would have said that merely to set foot in such people’s houses and show them common courtesy was to be complicit in their whole system of power. Daniel and most others had scoffed at such rantings. But now he knew it was true, for when the Countess had acknowledged his presence and known his name, Daniel had felt important. Drake—if he’d had a grave—would have rolled over in it. But Drake’s grave was the air above London.
An ancient ceiling beam popped as the Palace was hit by another gust.
The Countess was favoring Daniel with a knowing smile. Daniel had had a mistress, and Miss Sedley knew it: the incomparable Tess Charter, who had died of smallpox five years ago. Now he didn’t have a mistress, and Catherine Sedley probably knew that, too.
He had slowed almost to a stop. Steps rushed toward him from behind and he cringed, expecting a hand on his shoulder, but two courtiers, then two more—including Pepys—divided around him as if he were a stone in a stream, then converged on a large Gothic door whose wood had turned as gray as the sky. Some protocol of knocking, throat-clearing, and doorknob-rattling got underway. The door was opened from inside, its hinges groaning like a sick man.
St. James’s was in better upkeep than Whitehall, but still just a big old house. It was quite a bit shabbier than Comstock/Anglesey House. But that House had been brought down. And what had brought it down had not been revolution, but the movings of markets. The Comstocks and Angleseys had been ruined, not by lead balls, but by golden coins. The neighborhood that had been built upon the ruins of their great House was now crowded with men whose vaults were well-stocked with that kind of ammunition.
To mobilize those forces, all that was needed was some of that kingly ability to decide, and to act.
He was being beckoned forward. Pepys stepped toward him, holding out one hand as if to take Daniel’s elbow. If Daniel were a Duke, Pepys would be offering sage advice to him right now.
“What should I say?” Daniel asked.
Pepys answered immediately, as if he’d been practicing the answer for three weeks in front of a mirror. “Don’t fret so much over the fact that the Duke loathes and fears Puritans, Daniel. Think instead of those men that the Duke loves: Generals and Popes.”
“All right, Mr. Pepys, I am thinking of them…and it is doing me no good.”
“True, Roger may have sent you here as a sacrificial lamb, and the Duke may see you as an assassin. If he does, then any attempt you make to sweeten and dissemble will be taken the wrong way. Besides, you’re no good at it.”
“So…if my head’s to be removed, I should go lay my head on the chopping-block like a man…”
“Belt out a hymn or two! Kiss Jack Ketch and forgive him in advance. Show these fops what you’re made of.”
“Do you really think Roger sent me here to…”
“Of course not, Daniel! I was being jocular.”
“But there is a certain tradition of killing the messenger.”
“Hard as it might be for you to believe, the Duke admires certain things about Puritans: their sobriety, their reserve, their flinty toughness. He saw Cromwell fight, Daniel! He saw Cromwell mow down a generation of Court fops. He has not forgotten it.”
“What, you’re suggesting I’m to emulate Cromwell now!?”
“Emulate anything but a courtier,” said Samuel Pepys, now gripping Daniel’s arm and practically shoving him through the doorway.
Daniel Waterhouse was now in the Presence of James, the Duke of York.
The Duke was wearing a blond wig. He had always been pale-skinned and doe-eyed, which had made him a bonny youth, but a somewhat misshapen and ghastly adult. A dim circle of courtiers ringed them, hemming into their expensive sleeves and shuffling their feet. The occasional spur jingled.
Daniel bowed. James seemed not to notice. They looked at each other for a few moments. Charles would already have made some witty remark by this point, broken the ice, let Daniel know where he stood, but James only looked at Daniel expectantly.
“How is my brother, Dr. Waterhouse?” James asked.
Daniel realized, from the way he asked it, that James had no idea just how sick his brother really was. James had a temper; everyone knew it; no one had the courage to tell him the truth.
“Your brother will be dead in an hour,” Daniel announced.
Like a barrel’s staves being drawn together in a cooper’s shop, the ring of courtiers tensed and drew inwards.
“He has taken a turn for the worse, then!?” James exclaimed.
“He has been at death’s door the whole time.”
“Why was this never said plainly to me until this instant?”
The correct answer, most likely, was that it had been, and he simply hadn’t gotten it; but no one could say this.
“I have no idea,” Daniel answered.
ROGER COMSTOCK, SAMUEL PEPYS, AND Daniel Waterhouse were in the antechamber at Whitehall.
“He said, ‘I am surrounded by men who are afraid to speak truth to my face.’ He said, ‘I am not as complicated as my brother—not complicated enough to be a king.’ He said, ‘I need your help and I know it.’”
“He said all of that!?” Roger blurted.
“Of course not,” Pepys scoffed, “but he meant it.”
The antechamber had two doors. One led to London, and half of London seemed to be gathered on the other side of it. The other door led to the King’s bedchamber, where, surrounding the bed of the dying monarch, were James, Duke of York; the Duchess of Portsmouth, who was Charles’s primary mistress; Father Huddle-stone, a Catholic priest; and Louis de Duras, the Earl of Feversham.
“What else did he say?” Roger demanded. “Or more to the point, what else did he mean?”
“He is dim and stiff, and so he needs someone clever and flexible. Apparently I have a reputation for being both.”
“Splendid!” Roger exclaimed, showing a bit more merriment than was really appropriate in these circumstances. “You have Mr. Pepys to thank for it—the Duke trusts Mr. Pepys, and Mr. Pepys has been saying good things about you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Pepys…”
“You’re welcome, Dr. Waterhouse!”
“…for telling the Duke that I have a cowardly willingness to bend my principles.”
“As much as it offends me to tell such beastly lies about you, Daniel, I’m willing to do it, as a personal favor to a good friend,” Pepys answered instantly.
Roger ignored this exchange, and said: “Did his royal highness ask you for any advice?”
“I told him, as we trudged across the park, that this is a Protestant country, and that he belongs to a religious minority. He was astounded.”
“It must have come as a grievous shock to him.”
“I suggested that he turn his syphilitic dementia into an asset—it shows off his humane side while providing an excuse for some of his behavior.”
“You didn’t really say that!”
“Dr. Waterhouse was just seeing if you were paying attention, m’Lord,” Pepys explained.
“He told me he had syphilis twenty years ago at Epsom,” Daniel said, “and the secret—it was a secret in those days—did not get out immediately. Perhaps this is why he trusts me.”
Roger had no interest whatever in such old news. His eyes were trained to the opposite corner of the room, where Father Petre was shoulder-to-shoulder with Barrillon, the French Ambassador.
One of the doors opened. Beyond it, a dead man was lying in a stained bed. Father Huddlestone was making the sign of the cross, working his way through the closing stanzas of the rite of extreme unction. The Duchess of Portsmouth was weeping into a hanky and the Duke of York—no, the King of England—was praying into clasped hands.
The Earl of Feversham tottered out and steadied himself against the doorjamb. He looked neither happy nor sad, but vaguely lost. This man was now Commander in Chief of the Army. Paul Barrillon had a look on his face as if he were sucking on a chocolate truffle and didn’t want anyone to know. Samuel Pepys, Roger Com-stock, and Daniel Waterhouse shared an uneasy look.
“M’Lord? What news?” Pepys said.
“What? Oh! The King is dead,” Feversham announced. His eyes closed and he leaned his head on his upraised arm for a moment, as if taking a brief nap.
“Long live…” Pepys prompted him.
Feversham awoke. “Long live the King!”
“Long live the King!” everyone said.
Father Huddlestone finished the rite and turned towards the door. Roger Comstock chose that moment to cross himself.
“Didn’t know you were Catholic, m’lord,” Daniel said.
“Shut up, Daniel! You know I’m a Freedom of Conscience man—have I ever troubled you about your religion?” said the Marquis of Ravenscar.