Free Traitor's Field by Robert Wilton

Stuart for the slipperiest man in his whole realm, and a slippery man was more likely to slip if not steadied by his counsellors.
    The King’s advisers were suffered to remain in an ante-room, behind a curtain. Through the heavy material they could hear the voices of debate: the high, wheeling flights of His Majesty’s arguments, his little erudite witticisms fluttering the curtain tassels, his occasional angry retorts buffeting at the folds; and the rumbling murmur of the negotiators of Parliament, implacable or entreating, frustrated or sure, and apparently endless.
    The ante-room got its light from a single, tiny recessed window, and from two candelabra. Six men slumped in its gloom, rich-coated shadows, watching the candlelight flickering in each other’s eyes, the strange alien glow from the window catching a bottle of wine. Intermittently one would lean forward to catch some particular point in the muffled debate; shortly he would slouch back. The room stank of cooked meat and of men.
    Furtive murmurs from their confinement:
    ‘His Majesty is in good fettle.’
    ‘His Majesty is not immune to blunders, but these London lawyers would do well to recall that they trifle with a most educated man.’
    ‘The most widely learned, surely.’
    ‘How long has it been now, today?’
    ‘His stutter is often much diminished now.’
    ‘Lord, how I loathe these cheap invocations of the people’s interest.’
    ‘What will it avail, this learning and debate of the King?’
    ‘Little village demagogues. Inns of Court mountebanks.’
    ‘We are advised to delay. To procrastinate. To work on the divisions of our enemies. The longer His Majesty may talk, the more time they will have to fall among themselves.’
    ‘Advised? Advised by whom?’
    ‘You have better counsel to offer us? His Majesty has other men working for his interest, and other channels of communication to London. We must play our part.’
    Charles Stuart, a small man exquisitely dressed, poised but comfortable in a large and ornate oaken chair, feet perched elegantly on a stool to disguise the fact that they would not reach the ground. A magician conjuring theories from a sphere of legitimacy beyond his audience, and spinning word tricks out of his lace cuffs.
    Thus Charles Stuart: 
    An old Jew in Madrid showed me a clockwork bird in a cage: a golden bird, tiny and exquisite, that danced in a ring and whistled and flapped its wings, all with the turning of a key.
    A shrivelled, obsequious man. But fastidious, I think, and proper in spite of his faith. In a world that despised him he had created another more perfect world, a world over which he had absolute control, a world of order and beauty, a world protected in a cage.
    I find that the Lord has set me to spin in this cage.
    How ugly you are. Your drab, heavy weeds and your pedantic hectoring, your uncomfortable courtesies, your common choleric English pudding-faces, your tiresome wrestling with words, your insistence on sharing my company.
    I do not have to listen to these men, do I? I am not like other men. I am not made for this bullying, this forced communion with other humans, this dirtiness.
    There will come a time, I think, when I must leave my perch and fly this cage.
    You will prove to me? Your entire error, Master Glynn, with your books and your precepts and proposals, your vile temporizing aristocratic friends beside you, your clumsy studied indignities of confinement, your fundamental error is to believe that we dabble in a matter that is susceptible of proof. You may prove to me the earth round or flat; you may prove to me triangles and spheres. Prove to me black white, if you will. But these things of faith and Kings, these are of a different cloth altogether. These are not given to us for debate or for consideration. They do not become true because we juggle numbers and compare theories and decide them true. 
    They may not be changed like an ill-fitting doublet; they may not be reformed like a