Doctor Who_ The Roundheads - Mark Gatiss [36]
Of course, they were a necessary evil. After all, he had to raise taxes and get his money from somewhere. But they refused to accept that only the King could summon such an assembly into being and dissolve it just as easily. He had done without the rabble for eleven whole years before those bothersome, uncontrollable Scots had forced him to raise an army against them.
But Parliament had struck, struck like a viper to his heart, suddenly demanding all kinds of reforms. They wanted to take control of the Army away from him. Away from the King!
Charles remembered his own words, thundering through the Palace of Whitehall that far-off day. ‘By God, not for an hour!
You ask of me what was never asked of any king!’
And they were not content with that, oh no. Now they wanted religious reform. They objected to the beautification of his country’s lovely churches undertaken by Archbishop Laud.
Should worship really be as plain as a milkmaid’s face?
Aye, the Puritans demanded and Charles had lost Laud to them. Lost him to charges of crypto-papistry, and they had cut off his head to prove their point.
And then there was Strafford, who had fought so loyally for the King in Ireland and urged him to take on his rebellious Parliament, else he be no King at all.
Charles laid a trembling hand across his brow. They had taken Strafford’s head too and Charles had felt the death almost as though it were his own. It was too cruel a blow. Too cruel.
And so the wars had come. There was no way to avoid them. It was either King, with a mandate to rule which came from God himself, or Parliament, with a much more parochial mandate altogether.
Charles rose from his chair and crossed to the great window. His rooms were small but comfortable. Thickly carpeted with rugs which had been a present to his late father from some exotic potentate and hung with tapestries from the royal collection.
Through the thick glass, the dreary course of the Solent could be seen, winding past the castle like a gigantic grey snake.
Charles watched the water in silence, the December light bleaching the colour from his grave, noble face, creating dark hollows in his cheeks and making him look far older than his forty-eight years.
Well, well, he thought. It seemed that God had made up His mind. The Royalist armies had been roundly defeated and now he, the King, was a prisoner. He didn’t doubt that soon the Roundheads would be calling for his head.
Execute.
Charles felt a pang of terror grip at his bowels. He sank down to the floor and clasped his hands together in prayer.
There was little else left for him to do.
Polly stood by the banks of the Thames, enjoying the feel of the cold drizzle on her face. She breathed in and the air felt crisp and good. What would a lungful of air be like inhaled in the same spot three hundred or so years from now? she thought absently. Filthy, acrid, polluted.
Yet there was terrible degradation here, too. She had seen it as she made her way through the city – the squalor, the filth and the back-breaking labour that seemed to be the common lot of most of the inhabitants of Stuart England.
Polly rubbed her face and eyes and shook her head as though to clear it. Her fine, straight hair was becoming matted and rather greasy and she longed for a hot bath. But the TARDIS and the Doctor seemed a long way off. She was no nearer to finding anyone or anything she knew.
A wheezing splutter close by made her turn and she stepped back as two men struggled by at each end of an ornate sedan chair. Their faces were almost purple with effort, sweat streaming into their eyes. Polly caught a brief glimpse of an exquisitely dressed man, all burnt-orange velvet and frills, gazing absently out of the chair’s little window. He seemed bored and completely unaware of the efforts being made to keep him out of the mud.
Polly scowled but then checked herself. Was it any different from someone of her own time having a chauffeur?
Perhaps it was just a shock to her twentieth-century