The Wolves of Andover

CHAPTER 23

ONCE THE HEAD, as it came to be known, had been presented to Charles Stuart in his private chambers, accompanied only by an examining audience of the Earl of Arlington, the Duke of Buckingham, and Sir Joseph Williamson, nothing was ever again right for the sovereign.

The viewing of the barrel’s contents had begun before it had even left the dock. Advance news spread across the city that the remains of the executioner that took the head of the first Charles had landed aboard the ship The Swallow, and carriages of nobles, titled ladies, and serving orderlies mingled with curious, rude ’prentices and common people, who all gawked, for a fee, inside the barrel. After all, the dock courier reasoned, its lid had not been secured, there being no royal seal, and the captain of the escorting guard was amenable to retaining an accommodation fee for himself. Very quickly, the joke had been had; the shrunken, tarred head with its ridiculous topknot and the scribbling on the barrel itself, alluding to the inevitable fate of kings, brought first knowing smiles and then waterfalls of derisive laughter. Tiernan Blood, cloaked and hooded within the crowd, drew near for a peek and, recognizing the cross-hatching scars, laughed the loudest.

An old poem by a court wit was resurrected and circulated:

Artists made sketches of the relic to be engraved onto pamphlets, which were circulated within hours to a wider populace whose dissatisfaction grew daily, pinched as they were by the taxes for the third Dutch war and the outrageous expenses of keeping the king’s whores and bastards fed and housed. The secret, dishonorable pacts by the second Charles Stuart with the Catholic French, the betrayal of a morally upright Protestant Dutch king, and the lack of legitimate successors to the throne had all brought disenchantment to the English people for their bonny wayward boy-king who was now an aging reprobate: a cynic and a secret heretic to the Anglican Church.

Charles replaced the lid on the barrel, his lips curled into the public show of insouciance. Throwing the accompanying scroll of parchment, along with the little wooden stake, into the fire grate, he gestured for Arlington to dispose of the barrel. The king would now visit his mistress Louise de Keroualle and their infant son. As he left, the dozens of timepieces in his chamber struck to twelve, the sound of their gongings and tinklings following the king’s footsteps, along with the clattering of the royal spaniels, roused to partner his stride. Arlington bowed as the king departed and then directed Williamson, who in turn directed Chiffinch, to remove the offending object. Buckingham had left the chamber even before the parchment had finished burning.

Chiffinch, Keeper of the Privy Closet, gestured for a guard, who in response clambered down the stairs, calling to a passing chamber orderly. The orderly opened the outward privy stairs door and called to a porter to come right quick. The porter and his mate retrieved the barrel, bumping it down the stairs, and boarded it onto a wherry, where it was directed to be thrown into the Thames farther downstream. The wherryman rowed with the current towards the docklands, discharging his cargo into the dark waters there.

After days and weeks, the rotting wood of the barrel expanded and broke apart, expelling the head like a birth into the tidal wash. By measures the skull, its prominences of brow and jawbone catching in the tumultuous mud, came to rest on the shores near Wapping, where it lay until at length it came to be found by a boy scouring the shores for eels.