1635: A Parcel of Rogues - eARC (32 page)

Chapter 36

Whitehall Palace

London, England

Walking away from his latest meeting with King Charles—encounter would be a more accurate term—it was all Richard Boyle could do not to explode in open profanity. Doing so would probably improve the earl of Cork’s disposition, to be sure. Apparently, the Americans talked of something called “high blood pressure” which was bad for you, and Boyle didn’t have much doubt that if he could publicly proclaim England’s monarch to be the petulant, obstinate, stupid, infuriating jackass that he was, then whatever blood pressure was, his would improve immensely.

If he’d been in private, he’d have done so. But a man in Boyle’s position was rarely in private, and almost never when he was about his official business in Whitehall. At the moment he could see two guards in the corridor—no, three; there was another he’d initially missed—who’d certainly hear him. And there were bound to be at least as many courtiers and palace sycophants hanging about who’d either hear him directly or, if they couldn’t make out the words, would bribe the guards to find out what Boyle had said.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown
. That line was in one of Shakespeare’s plays. One of the Henry ones, if Boyle remembered correctly, although he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t paid much attention to the theatre even before his elevation to the equivalent—although he’d vehemently deny it—of France’s
premier ministre.

The same uneasiness was even more true for a head that
didn’t
wear the crown but was forced to implement policies and decisions made by the cretin upon whose head the crown did sit. Insofar as the terms “policies and decisions” could be applied to the king’s commands in the first place. “Childish whims and temper tantrums” would be more accurate.

Find Cromwell—at whatever cost! D’ye hear me, Boyle? No matter the consequences! The regicide must be brought to justice! I’ll hear no more excuses!

And never mind that King Charles had thrown Cromwell into the Tower—and killed the man’s wife and one of his sons in the bargain—and kept him there for more than a year. Upwards of four hundred days, he’d had him in a dungeon cell—on any one of which days he could have had Cromwell’s head removed. Which his chief minister at the time, Wentworth, had urged him to do.

But Charles Stuart hadn’t followed that simple, sage advice.

Why not? Who could say? What sane man of adult age and disposition could fathom the workings of the mind that rested in the king’s skull?

No help for it. Boyle would have to send Finnegan yet another letter urging the poor bastard to do better what the man was already trying to do as best he could. Not because the instruction was of any use beyond irritating Finnegan, but because some wretched fawning courtier was bound to bribe whatever clerk Boyle used to pen the missive to find out what it said. And if it said anything other than a pompous and puerile stream of useless commands to one of the most capable and accomplished agents in the British Isles, the king was sure to hear about it.

There were times Boyle regretted his actions in having Wentworth cast down from office so he could take his place. What he found most disturbing was that those times came more and more often.

Please catch the bastard, Finnegan. Before the king forces me to force you to end the silence north of the Tweed.

Government House

Magdeburg, capital of the United States of Europe

“And what about England,” asked Hermann of Hesse-Rotenburg, the USE’s secretary of state, “now that we’ve got a peace treaty with France? Did you discuss that with the emperor also, while you were in Copenhagen?”

“We spent a fair amount of time talking about it, in fact,” said Mike Stearns. “Gustav Adolf thinks we’d be better off leaving the situation with England unsettled, much the way we’re doing with Spain. Although his reasons are different.”

The prime minister, who’d been almost slouched in his chair, sat erect and placed his forearms on the desk in front of him, with his fingers laced together. From long experience working with the man, Francisco Nasi interpreted the stance as
Mike’s not sure he agrees with his sorta-boss but is willing to go along with him for the time being.

“In the case of Spain,” Mike continued, “trying to get a peace treaty would be pointless since it’d be bound to be broken quickly anyway.”

“By the Spanish? Or by us?” asked Hesse-Rotenburg.

“Take your pick, Hermann,” said Mike. “There are so many points and places over which we’ll clash with Spain that I figure open hostilities are bound to re-emerge within a year, at the outside. The emperor shares that assessment. So why waste time and energy trying to get a treaty? Gustav Adolf says he’d rather have his hands completely untied, and while I sometimes think he’s a little too bellicose, in this instance he’s probably right.”

By now, Hermann had become fairly familiar with the prime minister himself. “But you’re less sure about the emperor’s stance toward England?”

Mike’s relations with the Landgrave of Hesse-Rotenburg were not as relaxed and intimate as they were with Nasi—and probably never would be, given that Herman was also the half-brother of Wilhelm Wettin, who was sure to be Mike’s main opponent in the upcoming elections. But ever since Hesse-Rotenburg had been brought into the cabinet, partly as a measure to defuse political tensions, Mike had followed a policy of including him in all but a few of the trickiest issues. So he gave him an answer immediately and without any obvious diplomatic hedging.

“No, I’m not. There just aren’t the automatic flashpoints with England that there are with Spain. The truth is, given that our interests don’t really clash that much, it’d be easier for us to keep the peace with England that it will be with France. So why not just sign a formal treaty and be done with it?”

Playing the devil’s advocate for a moment, Herman said: “They
did
imprison our embassy, in gross violation of diplomatic norms.”

That was something of an overstatement. “Diplomatic norms” in the first half of the seventeenth century in Europe weren’t the well-established procedures they would become by the next century. Still, tossing an ambassador—who was the sister of her nation’s prime minister, to boot—and her entourage into the Tower of London and keeping them imprisoned for a year went far beyond normal practice except in the wooliest parts of the Balkans.

Mike shrugged. “Easy enough for all sides to place the blame for that on Wentworth. Who’s now in exile in Amsterdam and in no position to contest the issue except privately. No, that’s not really a sticking point.”

Nasi decided to draw Mike out a little further, suspecting that was what his boss wanted. “What is the sticking point, then?”

The expression that came to Mike’s face was half a grimace and half a smile. The sort of expression with which one recounts another exploit of a charming but often somewhat reckless cousin.

“You know what Gustav Adolf’s like,” he said. “There’s a man who likes to keep his options open. No, there aren’t any discernible flashpoints between us and England
now
. But who’s to say what things might look like in a few months, or a year or two? What with Cromwell still loose and the way King Charles is likely to stir up trouble trying to catch him.”

He broke off there, and leaned back in his chair. Nasi interpreted that motion as…

And let’s leave it there, Francisco. Hermann’s been told enough that he can’t complain in the future he wasn’t kept informed. There’s no reason to unsettle him with minor details.

Such as the fact that Cromwell had just married an American and had another American as perhaps his closest associate. At the moment, that knowledge was very tightly held. The only person beside Mike and Nasi who knew about it yet was Gustav Adolf. And whoever he might have told, which might be no one at all and certainly wouldn’t number more than two or three.

* * *

After Hermann left, Francisco went straight to the point. “So what is it really about, Michael?”

“You know what our emperor’s like, Francisco. That man does love acquiring new real estate. When I first proposed the name, Gustav Adolf understood right off that ‘United States of Europe’ has no inherent limits. Why he liked it.”

Francisco nodded. “He wants Scotland.”

“Parts of it, anyway. As an affiliated protectorate if he can’t get it as an outright province.”

“And what about you?”

Mike levered himself out of the chair and went over to the window in his office—the one he liked to gaze through when he was coming to a decision about something. Francisco had never been sure why Stearns found the view beyond to be a help in that process. All the window looked out over was the Elbe, which was one of the continent’s more slow-moving rivers and easily its murkiest, since the massive expansion of industry in Magdeburg.

“I haven’t decided yet,” he said. “On the one hand—as you know—I’m no fan of empires. The human race keeps making the cruddy things and most of them aren’t worth spit.”

“But not all.”

“But not all. The Roman Empire did a lot of good, as brutal as it often was. And I’m too honest and know too much history—now, at least, whatever the blithe innocence of my youth—not to know that the original United States—mine; the one I came from—could easily be described as an empire itself.”

“Yes—but one that spread across a continent, rather than conquering it.”

Mike chuckled. “Any American Indian would argue that point with you.”

Nasi shook his head. “Still not the same. None of the native tribes in North America today have the population of European states or their political solidity.”

“True enough, at least with regard to the first point. But nobody—not even Gustav Adolf is
that
ambitious—proposes to overrun Europe.” He held up his hand, with thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “We’re just talking about one peninsula on the world’s ninth largest island.”

With a thin smile, he added: “I looked it up in my almanac recently. Hell, there are a couple of islands in Canada that you never heard of—Baffin and Victoria—that’re bigger than Great Britain. Just a little nibble, you might say.”

Nasi chuckled. “And they even speak the same language you do, which is so thoroughly corrupting German here in the USE.”

Mike’s smile got even thinner. “Almost makes you believe in predestination, doesn’t it?”

Royal Palace

Magdeburg, capital of the United States of Europe

Not far away, just catty-corner to the Government House on Hans Richter Square, a similar conversation was being held between the emperor of the USE and the two men whom he’d told so far about Cromwell’s new “American relations.”

Told so far, and probably for some time to come. Gustav Adolf was no slouch himself when it came to playing his cards close to his chest, and he was a firm believer in the
need-to-know
principle. The only people he’d told were Alexander Leslie, earl of Leven and the top officer among the Scot troops serving the Swedish king—as well as the emperor of the USE, although that service was de facto and not formally acknowledged lest King Charles get his easily ruffled feathers disturbed. And a certain officer whom Leslie had introduced as Captain James Mitchell, which Gustav Adolf strongly suspected was a pseudonym. But he hadn’t pressed the issue because he thought Leslie was wise to keep everything as far distant from the emperor as possible. By now, certain American idioms had been adopted by those who found them useful, two of them being
cut-outs
and
plausible deniability.

The concepts were ancient, of course. But there was no denying the new terms were handy.

“There, you say? In the area around Manchester and Birmingham?” Gustav Adolf frowned, studying the large map of the British Isles spread out across the table in the small conference room. The palace was still unfinished, but enough had been done to enable the Swedish royals to live in the palace and to allow the emperor to use it as a functioning headquarters whenever he was resident in Magdeburg. “I would have thought he’d favor the area he came from.”

“I think he’ll decide it’s too obvious and the main place the king’s men will look for him, Your Majesty,” said Captain Mitchell. “And it’s too close to London. By all reports I’ve gotten, the king—Boyle, I should say—is having considerable difficulty keeping London under control, so he’s keeping most of the mercenary troops quartered there. He really doesn’t have that much to draw on in the Midlands. And there are a couple of other factors.”

“Which are?” asked the emperor. As they all were, he spoke in Amideutsch even though both Leslie and Mitchell were quite fluent in Swedish. But Gustav Adolf approved of the hybrid mostly-German-but-heavily-Americanized new tongue emerging in the USE and liked to encourage it. And he’d discovered that, for whatever reason, the Scotsmen’s accent in that language wasn’t as bad as it was in Swedish. Speaking outright English with Scotsmen was impossible, of course.

“The first factor is the simplest, Your Majesty. That’s where the English Civil War started in”—here the captain made the half-waving, half-rolling gesture that many people had adopted when referring to the bizarre other universe from which the Americans had emerged—“the up-timer history. The second factor has to do with the industry developing in the area, which is already the most concentrated in Britain.”

“And this would appeal to Cromwell because…?”

“I’m not thinking so much of Cromwell, Your Majesty, as his two American companions. Whenever that folk—at least the ones who came through the Ring of Fire—set themselves in opposition to authority, the first thing they do is organize unions. And there’s no better place in England for such activity than the Birmingham and Manchester area. The McCarthy fellow was himself a member of Stearns’ United Mine Workers union. And I believe Cromwell’s new wife was, as well.”

“Do you think they’d have that much influence on Cromwell?”

Mitchell glanced at the emperor, and then around the room. Gustav Adolf chuckled.

“Stupid question, I suppose—seeing that this very palace we’re standing in could be considered the product of American influence. Very far-reaching, it is.”