supposing we can muster any, shall consist of deeds not words, and it shall be delivered…outside…of…this…Chamber!” Roger timed it so that he stepped over the threshold at the moment he uttered the last word. Newton dared not respond, for the Chamber was crowded with Lords Spiritual and Temporal, Knights, Courtiers, and Clerks. And it was as silent as a parish-church when the vicar has lost his place in the middle of the sermon.
“SOMETHING MONSTROUS WAS MADE to happen in the Tower of London a month and a half ago.”
It was terribly unkind for Roger to have dubbed one of his fellow-men “The Eel.” And yet a visitor from another place and time, blundering into Star Chamber, not knowing any of the men in the place, would have been able to pick out the one Roger meant. Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and Secretary of State to Her Britannic Majesty, was strolling about the open center of the chamber as he talked. All others were backed up against the walls, like so many small fry sharing a tank with something toothy and sinuous.
“London’s Persons of Quality—members of the Party and of the Faction alike—have done what they could to draw a curtain over the late events in the Tower, and to promulgate the sham that it was a momentary up-welling of the Mobb, quickly suppressed by the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guard. A stable-fire on Tower Hill distracted the locals, and laid a smoke-pall over all—fortunate, that. It shall be writ down in history-books as a civil disturbance, if it is noted at all. But it would be a moral as well as an intellectual sin to mistake the events of April 23rd for anything other than a whited sepulchre. The matter must be investigated. Those responsible must be held to accompt. My lord Oxford, in his capacity as Lord Treasurer, has disappointed me by failing to do anything about it.”
This frank and frontal assault on his fellow Tory Lord was new. It created a buzz in the room. Bolingbroke held his tongue for a few moments, and let his gaze stray over the heads of some of the wallflowers. These reacted as if they’d been switched across the face by a horse-tail. Bolingbroke was not looking at them, however, but simply gazing in the general direction of the various offices, courts, and receipts of the Exchequer.
After that, Bolingbroke’s words poured out into a carefully maintained silence. Even men who were under attack (several of Oxford’s lieutenants had been shouldered to the front rank) said nothing. This was, in other words, no kind of Parliamentary proceeding. Depending on the diurnal velleities of Queen Anne, Bolingbroke was either the first man in England, or the second, after Oxford. Today he certainly believed he was first; he might have come here direct from the right hand of the Sovereign herself. Though Star Chamber was, like Commons and like Lords, an appendage of Westminster Hall, it had nothing to do with Parliament—which was a place to discuss things—and everything to do with Monarchy of the ancient, off-with-their-heads school. The murderous Court of Star Chamber had been abolished during Cromwell days, but this room still did service as a venue for the Privy Council to effect their plans and resolves—some dictated by primordial ceremonies and others improvised moment-by-
moment. This seemed to be one of the latter. In any case, no one spoke unless Bolingbroke asked him to; and he hadn’t asked.
“In the Tower of London is a place called the Mint,” Bolingbroke continued, allowing his gaze to slide over Newton’s face. Newton did not glance away—a detail, but a noteworthy one. Roger Comstock, or any other worldly man, would have advised Sir Isaac to lower his gaze, as this was thought to have a calming effect on mad dogs and Lords of the Council alike. But Newton spent most of his time in other worlds. Those aspects of this world considered most important by men like Ravenscar and Bolingbroke, Sir Isaac was most apt to find trivial and annoying.
Bolingbroke did not know Isaac Newton. Newton was a Puritan and a Whig, Bolingbroke a man of no fixed principles, but with the brainstem reflexes of a Jacobite Tory. Bolingbroke was one of those hommes d’affaires who had sought and obtained entry to the Royal Society because it was the done thing. Out of its recondite deliberations, certain Whigs such as Pepys and Ravenscar had summoned forth magic: Banks, Annuities, Lotteries, National Debt, and other eldritch practices