King's Evil by Edward Marston

Author:Edward Marston [Edward Marston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780749009632
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2010-12-20T05:00:00+00:00

The ceremony was held at the Banqueting House. Since it was his first visit there, Christopher Redmayne took the opportunity to study what was, architecturally, the most striking part of Whitehall Place. He found it pure joy to view the work of Inigo Jones at such close quarters. Faced with Portland stone and built at a cost of over fifteen thousand pounds, the Banqueting House was the first exclusively Renaissance building in the capital and, in the opinion of most observers, still by far the best. The scale of the interior filled Christopher with awe and his eyes took in every lush detail. He spent so much time gazing up at the ceiling, adorned by a Rubens painting in celebration of the benefits of wise rule, that his neck began to ache. Sheer scale once again hypnotised him.

‘Look at the size of those figures,’ he urged, pointing upwards.

‘I have seen them before,’ said his brother airily.

‘The cherubs must be almost ten feet high.’

‘I prefer my cherubs lying horizontally on a bed.’

‘Henry!’

‘Pay attention. I brought you here to watch the ceremony and not to goggle at the ceiling like some country bumpkin on his first visit to London.’ A loud murmur of interest went up. ‘Ah, here is the King.’

Preceded by two priests in their vestments, Charles II entered at the head of a stately procession and made his way up the steps of a small dais to take his seat on the throne. Christopher was at the rear of the hall but, even from that distance, he thought that the King cut an impressive figure. Charles was a tall, dignified man with long, black, curly, shining hair and a black moustache. A leader of fashion, he was dressed in the French style with a long scarlet vest beneath his coat and black shoes offset by scarlet bows. It was the first time that Christopher had ever seen him in person and he was irresistibly reminded of the reward placard which he saw on display after the Battle of Worcester in 1651 and which described the royal fugitive as ‘a tall, black man upwards of two yards high.’

There was a swarthiness about the kingly countenance which gave him a slightly foreign air but his bearing was that of a Stuart monarch with a firm belief in the Divine Right of his rule and in the importance of the ceremony in which he was to officiate. The face was striking rather than handsome and it wore such a grave expression that Christopher found it difficult to reconcile the man whom he saw before him with the rampant satyr of common report. A royalist by instinct, he felt a surge of pride in his monarch and admired the graceful ease with which he presided over the assembly.

When the priests had read from the Book of Common Prayer, the King’s surgeons brought in the diseased supplicants to present them to him. There were almost five hundred of them in all and they gave off a communal odour of sickness.

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