“They ask, my lord—as men who have seen the darkest and worst of Catholic crimes and have loyally protected Her Majesty from invasions and intrigues—whether the claimant to the throne can bring peace and be relied upon not to burn his subjects alive in the streets. It seems a small matter to be certain of this. They demand an answer, definitive: Is he Protestant or not?”
“Ah.” Cecil waved distractedly as if at a fly, and his body began already to lose the illusion of size he had strained to create. “Who has ever thought he wasn’t? He says he is. He goes to Protestant church every week. If that’s all that worries them—”
“If he is a Catholic, they won’t let him in. If they believe he’s a Catholic, my lord, it will be war or civil war, sooner or later. It will be slaughter again. The Catholics will rise up to greet him, and they will murder. I was in Paris with Mr. Walsingham during the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.”
“I saw the play.”
“It was worse than the play.”
“That’s saying something.” But the topic seemed to exhaust Cecil. His pride and bluster were thin. He rubbed his shoulder again and poured himself some wine, offered none to his tormentor.
Belloc pressed on: “James has a Spanish boy who gives him counsel in bed.”
“Oh, James has always had favorites. They never last long.”
“They are always Catholic.”
“Do you still have webs of intelligencers in Scotland, Geoff?”
Instead of answering, Belloc opened the leather case he had held at his side throughout. “We have prepared something for you. An abstract.”
“This we again?” Cecil couldn’t long maintain an air of calm. “How many dare?”
Belloc unfolded the sheets and placed them on Cecil’s table. They were headed, in fine secretary hand, “Chronology of Certainties. Of His Acts.”
If Cecil was impressed or surprised by the dossier, Geoffrey Belloc couldn’t perceive it. Instead, when he saw Geoff wasn’t going to answer who had sent him, the smaller man grunted and condescended to lower his eyes to read. He asked questions without looking up. When had Belloc received this entry? And how much later until he had written it down? And whom else had he told of this or that? Did he keep similar abstracts for other questions of intelligence? Who was the pseudonymous Ursinus? And why, if Belloc—“sorry, if your anonymous gentlemen”—had all of this information, why were they still not able to settle this largest of all questions but rather came to pester Cecil about it: Was King James VI of Scotland, likely heir to the English throne, secretly Catholic or not?
The information was all ambiguous, almost intentionally teasing, as if the answer were always held in balance with its opposite. By way of example: A chandler in Edinburgh won a contract to supply Holyroodhouse Palace itself with a certain number of candles each week. This was a significant opportunity to place eyes and ears inside King James VI’s royal residence at last. But, after the chandler had increased his prices to what he thought the royal household would pay, he no longer cared about the small money he had been earning by selling information to London. The closer he crept to James’s world, the less interested he was in answering coded letters. What little he did write, though, tantalized: In his final report of 1590, he wrote that of those candles being ordered for the palace, a certain number were fit, by the chandler himself, into silver sticks with crucifixes on them, kept in a small chapel separate from the main chapel of the palace. “And when I was to fit them, sir, to these sticks, I was allowed to enter only the front-most alcove of this chapel, the rest of which was covered away from my eye by a long black curtain, through which I could not see a peep, nor dared to, as this was sure enforced by the guard. He did follow me throughout the palace as I made my delivery and set my wares, allowing me to enter this room but not that, this far but no farther, to turn away and face a wall whensoever someone was coming or when a horn or bell or voice was heard.”
London had pressed the chandler to recruit servants within the palace, but he replied with silence. Asked if the chandler had tried to converse with his guard about minor matters first and major matters later, the chandler returned again silence. By the time Belloc had planned to travel to Scotland to enforce his will upon the reluctant intelligencer, Belloc’s master, Walsingham, had died, and plotting had been reorganized. From that moment on, intelligence reports were to be handled by Mr. Cecil or the Earl of Essex only, and Belloc began his retirement from secret matters, entering his years on the stage, years as a Queen’s Messenger, years of worry, boredom.
Chronology of Certainties. Of His Acts.
1566—Born and baptized Catholic. HIS mother having been queen of enemy France.
Cecil looked up. “Shocking, Geoff. Whoever knew such fine secrets as this? Come now. James was raised up properly by the Calvinists. No one thought him Catholic as a boy.”
Belloc answered with the same words that he and the gentlemen who had sent him today had so many times used: “The pope excommunicates Elizabeth and tells her subjects to rise up and murder her, but he does no such thing to James, who equally claims to be a Protestant.”
Cecil shrugged and went back to reading.
1579—HE begins to welcome into HIS bed HIS French and Catholic cousin, Esmé d’Aubigny. Saith the spy Prideaux, they do count the rosary together in private.
“Yes, yes, and when he married, he married a Protestant princess.”
Came back Belloc: “Who, in ’93…”
1593—Queen Anna turns Catholic and is allowed to keep Romish priests in the palace for her use.
“And, my lord, some believe that marrying a Protestant might be done with the pope’s blessing to make us believe he is not an idolater.”
“Ah. So behaving like a Protestant is proof of his Catholicism?”
“In some cases, as you well know, my lord, yes.”
1587—The year HIS mother’s head rolls off the scaffold for her treachery against Elizabeth. In Glasgow, HE—
“Where were you in all that?” Cecil interrupted himself. “When Mary was held in Chartley?”
“I was there,” said Geoff.
“I thought I remembered that.” Cecil considered him.
“She spoke to me of him. Of James.”
“You were as close to Mary as that?”
“I was. She spoke of her son as a Catholic.”
“She spoke to you? Of him? You were there at the very end, too?”