Part 16

The Chairman checked the warmth of the Puritan, and began to question Inglesant concerning the plot, endeavouring to throw him off his guard by mentioning facts which had come to their knowledge through the recent discoveries. But Inglesant was prepared with his story. Though he was surprised at the amount of knowledge the Committee possessed, yet he stood to his assertion that he knew nothing of any instructions except those which he had himself received, and that the whole plot originated with the Jesuits, as far as he knew, and had every reason to believe. When he was asked how he, a Protestant and a Churchman, could lend himself to such a plot, he replied that he was very much inclined to the Romish Church, and that he thought the King's affairs so desperate that the plan of obtaining help from the Irish rebels appeared to him and to Father St. Clare as almost the only resource left to them. The Committee, finding gentle means fail, adopted a sterner tone, telling him he was guilty of high treason, without benefit, and that he might certainly, on his own confession, be condemned to the gallows without further trial. They then offered him a statement to sign, which, they said, they had sure information contained nothing but the truth. Inglesant looked at it, and saw that in truth it did contain a very fair statement of what had really taken place.

He replied that it was impossible for him to sign anything so opposite to what he had himself confessed; and that even if he did, no one would believe so monstrous a statement, and one so contrary to the known opinions and professions of the King. The Committee then asked him why, if the King's commission was forged, it was kept back, and where it was?

Inglesant said that "the Lord Biron had it, having forcibly taken it from him, and refused to return it, telling him plainly that he should keep it as evidence against him."

He observed that this impressed the Committee, and he was soon after dismissed. He returned to St. James's the same way that he came, but found a strong guard summoned to attend him; for, the news of his examination having got wind, the crowd assembled at the Parliament House, and accompanied him, with hootings and insults of every kind, across the Park.

As one result of his examination, Inglesant was removed from St. James's, and sent by water to the Tower, where a close confinement in a small cell, and insufficient diet, again affected his health. He formed the idea that the Parliament intended to weaken him with long imprisonment, and so cause him to confess what they wished; he feared that the state of his health, and especially the extent to which his brain was affected, would assist this purpose; and this fear preyed upon him, and made him nervous and miserable--dreading above everything that, his mind being clouded, he might say something inadvertently which might discover the truth. His health rapidly declined, and he became again thin and worn. The Parliament Committee now spread a report that the royal party, who pretended to indicate the offenders in this plot, did not really do so; and that in particular they kept back the originals of the King's warrants and commissions, which they asserted to be forgeries, and refused to bring them forward and submit them to proof, which would be the surest way of making the fact of the King's ignorance of them certain. They did this because they knew Lord Biron's character as a man of unstained and unsuspicious honour, and they calculated that such a taunt as this would be certain to bring him forward with the commission, which he had in his keeping, and which they trusted to be able to prove was a genuine document. Their policy had the desired effect. Lord Biron, who was at Newstead, without consulting any one, sent up a special messenger to the Speaker to say that, a safe-conduct being granted him, he would come up to London, and appear before the Committee of Parliament, bringing the commission, which he asserted was a palpable forgery, with him. The safe-conduct was immediately sent him, and he came up. The Committee were rejoiced at the success of their policy, and fixed a day for him to appear before them, and at the same time ordered Inglesant to be fetched up from the Tower to be confronted with his lordship. The affair caused the greatest interest, and the Committee Room was thronged with all who could command sufficient influence to obtain entrance, and crowds filled the corridors and the precincts of the House. Lord Biron was introduced, and gave his evidence with great clearness, describing the arrest of Inglesant, his suspicious conduct, and his attempt to induce Lord Biron to destroy the warrant; and finally produced the paper, and handed it to the clerk of the Committee. The Chairman then ordered Inglesant to be brought in through a side door; and he came up to the bar.

His appearance was so altered, and his manner so cowed and embarrassed, that a murmur ran through the room, and Lord Biron could not restrain an exclamation of pity. Inglesant started when he saw him, for he had been kept in complete ignorance of what had occurred, and his mind immediately recurred to the commission. He was evidently making the greatest efforts to collect himself, and keep himself calm. Nothing could have told more against himself, or in favour of the part he was playing, than his whole demeanour.

He was examined minutely on the circumstances of his arrest, and related everything exactly as it occurred, which, indeed, he had done before--both his relations tallying exactly with Lord Biron's.

When asked what his business was in Chester, he said--to prepare the Cavaliers to receive the Irish help; and added that he had been obliged to communicate a great deal more to Lord Biron than he had wished or intended, and that Lord Biron had always manifested the greatest suspicion of him and of his mission.

He gave his evidence steadily, but without looking at Lord Biron, or indeed at any one.

When asked why he wished to recover possession of the commission, or at least to induce Lord Biron to burn it, he replied,--

"Lest it should serve as evidence against myself."

This seemed to most present a very natural answer; yet it caused Lord Biron to start, and to fix a searching glance on Inglesant.

As a gentleman of high breeding and instinctive honour, it jarred upon his instinct, and conveyed a sudden suspicion that Inglesant was acting. That the latter might be so utterly perverted by his Jesuit teaching as to be lost to all sense of right and truth, he was prepared to believe; that he might have been led into treason knowingly or inadvertently, he was willing to think; but the low and pitiful motive that he gave was so opposed to his previous character, notorious for a fantastic elevation and refinement of sentiment, that it supposed him a monster, or that some miracle had been wrought upon him. A terrible doubt--a doubt which Biron had once or twice already seen faintly in the distance--approached nearer and looked him in the face.

The Committee had examined the commission one by one, comparing it with some of the King's writing which they had before them; finally it passed into the hands of a Mr. Greenway, a lawyer, and skilled in questions of evidence and of writing, who examined it attentively.

It was curious to see the behaviour of the two men under examination while this was going on; Lord Biron, as a noble gentleman, from whose mind the doubt of a few minutes ago had passed, standing erect and confident, looking haughtily and freely at the expert, secure in his own honour and in that of his King; Inglesant, cowed and anxious, leaning forward over the bar, his eyes fixed also on the lawyer--pale, his lips twitching,--the very picture of the guilty prisoner in the dock.

The expert looked at both the men curiously, then threw down the paper contemptuously.

"It is a palpable forgery," he said; "and not even a clever imitation of the King's hand."

And indeed, from some accident or other, the letters were, some of them, formed in a manner unusual to the King.

Inglesant, weakened with illness and anxiety, could not restrain a movement of intense relief. He drew a long breath and stood erect, as if relieved from an oppressive weight. He raised his eyes, and they caught those of Lord Biron, which had been attracted towards him, and were fixed full on his face.

Biron started again; there was not the least doubt that Inglesant rejoiced in the proof of the forgery of the warrant. That terrible doubt stood close now before his lordship and grasped him by the throat.

Suppose, after all, this man whom he had imprisoned and despised, whose mission he had thwarted--this man whom all the royal party were calling by every contemptuous name, who stood there pale, cowed, beaten down;--suppose, after all, that this man, alone against these terrible odds, was all the time fighting a desperate battle for the King's honour, forsaken by God and men! But the consequences which would follow, if this view of the matter were the true one, were, in Lord Biron's estimation, too terrible to be thought of.

"I wish to say," said Inglesant, looking straight before him, "that the Lord Biron obtained possession of that paper when he was in possession of information of which I was ignorant. His lordship would probably have behaved differently, but he thought he was speaking to a thief."

There was something in this covert reproach, so worded, which so exactly accorded with what was passing in Lord Biron's mind that it cut him to the quick.

"I assure you, Mr. Inglesant," he said eagerly, "you are mistaken. Whatever I may think of the cause in which you are engaged, I have always wished to behave to you as to a gentleman. If you consider that you have cause of complaint against me, I shall be ready, when these unhappy complications are well over, as I trust they may be, to give you satisfaction and to beg your pardon afterwards."

He said these last words so pointedly that Inglesant started, and saw at once that his fear had been well founded, and that, thrown off his guard by the success of the examination of the warrant, he had made a mistake. He looked up quickly at Biron--a strange terror in his face--and their eyes met.

That they understood each other is probable; at any rate Inglesant's look was so full of warning that Biron understood that if nothing more, and restrained himself at once. All this had passed almost unnoticed by the Committee, who were consulting together.

Lord Biron left the room, and Inglesant was taken back to the Tower as he had come. Mr. Secretary Milton, who had been present as a spectator, left the Parliament House and proceeded at once to Clerkenwell Green to the house of General Cromwell, and related to him and to General Ireton, who was with him, what had occurred.

"They have gained nothing by getting this warrant," he said; "nay, you have lost rather. You have brought up Lord Biron, who comes forward in the light of day and with the utmost confidence, and challenges this paper to be a forgery, and your own lawyers bear him out in it. I have not the least doubt it is the King's; but some of the letters, either purposely or more probably by accident, are not in his usual hand, and the best judges cannot agree on these matters. Out of Inglesant you will get nothing. He is a consummate actor, as I have known of old. He is prepared at every point, and carefully trained by his masters the Jesuits. I know these men, and have seen them both here and abroad. Acting on select natures the training is perfect. They will go to death more indifferently than to a Court ball. You may rack them to the extremity of anguish, and in the delirium of pain they will say what they have been trained to say, and not the truth. You may wear him out with fasting and anxiety until he makes some mistake; he made two to-day, besides one which was a necessity of the case,--for I do not see what else he could have said,--that was so slight that no one saw it but Biron. Weakened by anxiety, doubtless, he could not restrain a movement of relief when the expert declared the warrant a forgery; Biron saw that too, for I watched him. Last, which was the greatest mistake of all, and would show that his training is not entirely perfect, were we not to make allowance for his broken health, he forgot his part, and suffered his passion to get the better of him, and to taunt Lord Biron in such a way that Biron, who I think till then honestly believed the King's word, very nearly let out the truth in his astonishment. But what do you gain by all this? It rather adds to the apparent truth of the man's story, and gives life to his evidence. Nothing but his written testimony will be of any use, and this you will never get."

"He shall be tried for his life at any rate," said Cromwell.

"You have threatened him with that already."

"Threatening is one thing," replied the General; "to stand beneath the gallows condemned to death another."

* * * * *

News of the taking of Chester and of the arrest of John Inglesant on such a terrible charge--a charge at once of treason against the King, his country, and his religion--as it travelled at once over England, reached Gidding in due course. It caused the greatest dismay and distress in that quiet household. About the middle of April a gentleman of Huntingdon, a Parliament man, who had lately come from London, dined with the family. He told them during dinner that he had been present in the Committee room when Mr. Inglesant had been examined. When dinner was over Mr. John Ferrar, who was now at the head of the family, remained at table with this gentleman, being anxious to hear more, and Mary Collet also stayed to hear what she could of her friend, watching every word with eager eyes. In that family, where there was nothing but love and kindliness and entire sympathy, it was thought only natural that she should do so, and no ill-natured thought occurred to any member of it. The Parliament man described more at full the examination before the Committee, and Inglesant's worn and guilty appearance,--sad news, indeed, to both his hearers. He described Lord Biron's examination and the production of the forged warrant.

"And did John Inglesant admit that it was forged?" said Mr. Ferrar.

"Yes, he said from his own knowledge that it was prepared by Father St. Clare the Jesuit."

"It is a strange world," said Mr. Ferrar dreamily, "and the Divine call seems to lead some of us into slippery places--scarcely the heavenly places in Christ of which the Apostle dreamt."

The gentleman did not understand him, nor did Mary Collet altogether until afterwards.

Presently Mr. Ferrar said,--

"And what do you think of it all? Was the warrant forged or not?"

"I am somewhat at a loss what to think," said the other, "I am not, as you know, Mr. Ferrar, and without wishing to offend you, an admirer of the King, but I do not believe him to be a fool and mad. There is no doubt that he has tampered with the Papists throughout, yet I cannot think, unless he is in greater extremities than we suppose, that he would have practised so wild and mad a scheme as this one of the Irish rebels and murderers. On the other hand, I can conceive nothing too bad for the Jesuits to attempt; and it seems to me that I can discern something of their hand in this--an introduction of an armed Papist force into the country, to be joined, doubtless, by all the English Papists; only I should have thought they could have procured this without bringing in the King's name, but doubtless they had some reason for this also. The general opinion among the Parliament men is that the warrant is the King's, and that he has planned the whole thing. On the other hand, it is plain the Cavaliers do not believe it, or Lord Biron would never have come boldly up of his own accord, and brought up the warrant so confidently."

"But does not the warrant itself prove something one way or the other?" said Mr. Ferrar.

"These things are very difficult to judge upon," said the gentleman. "The expert to whom the Committee gave it pronounced it a forgery upon the spot, but he has been greatly blamed for precipitancy; and others to whom it has been shown pronounce it genuine. Some of the letters certainly are not like the King's, but the style of the hand is the King's, they say, even in these unusual letters. By the way, if you had seen Inglesant's guilty look when the expert took the paper in his hand, you would say with me it was a forgery. You could not, to my mind, have a stronger proof."

"But if the King had ordered this, would not he help Mr. Inglesant?" Mary Collet ventured to say.

"Help? madam," said the gentleman warmly, "when did the King help any of his friends?"

"Whichever way it is," said Mr. Ferrar mildly, "he cannot help. To help would be to condemn himself in public opinion, which in these unhappy distractions he dare not do. Did Lord Biron speak to Mr. Inglesant, sir?"

"Very little. They taunted each other once, and seemed about to come to blows. All the evidence went to show that Lord Biron suspected him from the first."

The gentleman soon after left. Mr. Ferrar returned to the dining-room after seeing him to his horse, and found Mary Collet sitting where they had left her, lost in sad and humiliating thought.

He sat down near her and said kindly,--

"My dear Mrs. Mary, I hardly know which of the two alternatives is the best for your friend--for my friend; but it is better at least for you to know the truth, and I think I can now pretty much tell which is the true one. If this plot were altogether the Jesuits', John Inglesant would not say it. If the King had no hand in it, proof would be given a thousand ways without having recourse to this. There are other facts which to my mind are conclusive that this way of thinking is the right one, but I need not tell them all to you. What I have said I should say to none but you. You will see that it is of the utmost importance that you say nothing of it to any. I believe you may comfort yourself in thinking that, according to the light which is given him, John Inglesant is following what he believes to be his duty, and none can say at any rate that it is a smooth and easy path he has chosen to walk in."

Mary Collet thanked him, her beautiful eyes full of tears, and left the room.

A few days afterwards the news ran like wildfire over England that the King had left Oxford secretly, and that no one knew where he was; and a night or two afterwards Mr. John Ferrar was called up by a gentleman who said he was Dr. Hudson, the King's Chaplain, and that the King was alone, a few paces from the door, and that he would immediately fetch him in.

Mr. Ferrar received His Majesty with all possible respect. But fearing that Gidding, from the known loyalty of the family, might be a suspected place, for better concealment he conducted the King to a private house at Coppingford, an obscure village at a small distance from Gidding, and not far from Stilton. It was a very dark night, and but for the lantern Mr. Ferrar carried, they could not have known the way. As it was, they lost their way once, and wandered for some time in a ploughed field. Mr. Ferrar always spoke with the utmost passionate distress of this night, as of a night the incidents of which must have awakened the compassion of every feeling heart, however biassed against the King. As a proof of the most affecting distress, the King, he said, was serene and even cheerful, and said he was protected by the King of kings. His Majesty slept at Coppingford, but early in the May morning he was up, and parted from Mr. Ferrar, going towards Stamford. Mr. Ferrar returned to his house, and two days after it was known that the King had given himself up to the Scottish army.

*CHAPTER XIV.*

Inglesant remained in prison, and would have thought that he had been forgotten, but that every few weeks he was sent for by the Committee and examined. The Committee got no new facts from him, and indeed probably did not expect to get any; but it was very useful to the Parliament party to keep him before the public gaze as a Royalist and a Jesuit. It was a common imputation upon the Cavaliers that they were Papists, and anything that strengthened this belief made the King's party odious to the nation. Here was a servant of the King's, an avowed Jesuit, and one self-condemned in the most terrible crimes. It is true he was disowned by the royal party, apparently sincerely; but the general impression conveyed by his case was favourable to the Parliament, and they therefore took care to keep it before the world. These examinations were looked forward to by Inglesant with great pleasure, the row up the river and the sight of fresh faces being such a delight to him. He was not confined to his room, being allowed to walk at certain hours in the court of the Tower, and he found a box containing a few books, a Lucretius, and a few other Latin books, probably left by some former occupant of the cell. These were not taken from him, and he read and re-read them, especially the Lucretius, many times. They saved him from utter prostration and despair,--they, and a secret help which he acknowledged afterwards,--a help, which to men of his nature certainly does come upon prayer to God, to whatever source it may be ascribed;--a help which in terrible sleepless hours, in hours of dread weariness of life, in hours of nervous pain more terrible than all, calms the heart and soothes the brain, and leaves peace and cheerfulness and content in the place of restlessness and despair. Inglesant said that repeating the name of Jesus simply in the lonely nights kept his brain quiet when it was on the point of distraction, being of the same mind as Sir Charles Lucas, when, "many times calling upon the sacred name of Jesus," he was shot dead at Colchester.

More than a year passed over him. From the scraps of news he could gather from his jailer, and from the soldiers in the court during his walks, he learnt that the King had been given up by the Scots, had escaped from Hampton Court, had been retaken and sent to Carisbrooke, and was soon to come to London, the man said, for his trial.

It was soon after he had learnt this last news that his jailer suddenly informed him that he was to be tried for his life.

Accordingly, soon after, a warrant arrived from Bradshaw, the President of the Council of State, to bring him before that body.