A Fine Madness by Alan Judd (best classic books TXT) 📕

merriment at their expense. We could only just see them above the heads of the crowd, bent and weary on their horses. More than once Campion almost toppled and had to be pushed upright by the soldiers.

‘No more preaching for him now,’ I said to Christopher.

‘I’d give my thirty pieces to hear him again. He speaks so well.’

‘Just as well you won’t, then. He might have persuaded you.’

‘He wouldn’t do that, but will he live? Might he be spared?’

‘No. He preached sedition. He would have had Her Majesty murdered.’

‘All in the name of God.’ He nodded as if agreeing with something I had said. ‘Yet not evil. Just wrong, almost admirably wrong.’

‘You don’t regret what you did?’

He shrugged. ‘Not yet.’

Christopher was in Cambridge during the months of Campion’s confinement and racking. Thus he did not hear the public debates Campion was permitted with the deans of Westminster and St Paul’s. Some said afterwards that if he had repented on those occasions he might yet have saved himself, though I doubt it. Anyway, he preferred a martyr’s death. I saw him hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on the first of December that year. He died as well as a man may in that manner. When the executioner burned the offal I saw his kidney sizzling in the ashes and gave a boy a penny to pluck it out. I have it still on my desk at home, as hard as a nut.

C

HAPTER

F

OUR

I cannot tell you much about Christopher’s life during the next few years. I saw little of him. He was in Cambridge and I in London or France. He was one of what Mr Secretary called our pigeons, occasional couriers whom we trusted with confidential letters. They had no idea of the contents nor sometimes of the identities of recipients unless they were well-known gentlemen such as ambassadors. Christopher travelled to Antwerp for us at least once, as well as to Paris. It was one of the letters he brought from Paris in 1586 that ignited the powder train culminating in the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, though he had no idea of it at the time. Nor later, I suspect. Agents often never know the parts they play.

Our quarry then was Thomas Morgan, Mary’s chief intelligencer, a Welshman living and plotting in Paris. He was determined to put Mary on the throne of England. Mary, of course, had been held here for many years following her flight from Scotland amid mayhem and tales of murder. But surely, sir, King James must know his mother’s history as well as any man can? He would not wish me to rehearse for him the details of her end?

Very well, in outline. Morgan and Mary maintained a secret correspondence which it was our daily endeavour to intercept. But we were having little luck laying our hands on any of it. Her living and breathing here was as a stone in the national bladder, as Mr Secretary put it, a rival who threatened not only our Queen but our Protestant settlement. As a Catholic who had been nourished in the French Court she had no love for England. Nor was she wanted in Scotland, which was rightfully hers, but men like Morgan worked to persuade her that England too was rightfully hers if only her usurping cousin Elizabeth could be removed. Whether she willed it or no – and, to be frank with you, I suspect she did not at first will it as she did later, when tossed upon the seas of misfortune – she became the standard-bearer for Catholic discontent, the focus of hopes and plots. Not all of which she knew about. It was a constant fear of the Privy Council that Queen Elizabeth would be murdered as the Pope had urged, or would sicken and die, for then Mary would take the throne, the French or Spanish would invade and England and the true Godly religion would be done for.

But Thomas Morgan was our immediate quarry, the key to any serious threats. He came from Llantarnam and was very Welsh in speech – in those days I could take him off to the life and was sometimes asked to do so when Mr Secretary was entertaining. Although a Catholic he was made secretary to the Archbishop of York but, not content with privately confessing his creed, he schemed to force it upon the nation and so was removed to the Tower for some years. After release he removed himself to Paris where he continued to plot against Her Majesty. William Parry, the would-be regicide whose trial and execution we had wrought the year before, confessed that Morgan persuaded him to it.

Morgan’s secret correspondence with Mary comprised packets of letters delivered to the house of the French ambassador in Salisbury Court, off Fleet Street. They were conveyed thence to Staffordshire where Mary was kept under guard by Sir Amias Paulet, who had been ambassador to Paris. We knew of this traffic but not of what it consisted nor the identities of couriers. Then, towards the end of 1585, Christopher returned to London with letters from Paris, among which was one from an agent of ours, Nicholas Berden. He was one of our best, the son of a London merchant who became a merchant in France and traded in all manner of goods. He was a Catholic but a loyal one, without political or religious ambitions and content to serve Queen Elizabeth as our lawful monarch. He did not wish to see England under foreign rule and reported frequently to me by letter, under various of my cover names, telling us of the aspirations of English Catholics in France who strove to put Mary on the throne. He was a diligent and productive reporter and we saw to it that plentiful trade was sent his way.

The letter delivered by Christopher in early December 1585 was in one of several packets bringing news that Pope Sixtus