"King James does that already," answered Wilding with a quiet smile.
"D'ye mean the Duke of York?" rumbled Ferguson's Scottish accent with startling suddenness, and Monmouth nodded approval of the correction. "If ye mean that bloody papist and fratricide, it were well so to speak of him. Had ye read the Declaration..."
But Fletcher cropped his speech in mid-growth. He was ever a short-tempered man, intolerant of irrelevancies.
"It were well, perhaps," said he, his accent abundantly proclaiming him a fellow countryman of Ferguson's, "to keep to the matter before us. Mr. Wilding, no doubt, will state the reasons that exist, or that he fancies may exist, for giving advice which is hardly worthy of the cause to which he stands committed."
"Aye, Fletcher," said Monmouth, "there is sense in you. Tell us what is in your mind, Mr. Wilding."
"It is in my mind, Your Grace, that this invasion is rash, premature, and ill-advised."
"Odds life!" cried Grey, and he swung angrily round fully to face the Duke, the nostrils of his heavy nose dilating. "Are we to listen to this milksop prattle?"
Nick Trenchard, who had hitherto been silent, cleared his throat so noisily that he drew all eyes to himself.
"Your Grace," Mr. Wilding pursued, his air calm and dignified, and gathering more dignity from the circumstance that he proceeded as if there had been no interruption, "when I had the honour of conferring with you at The Hague two months ago, it was agreed that you should spend the summer in Sweden--away from politics and scheming, leaving the work of preparation to your accredited agents here. That work I have been slowly but surely pushing forward. It was not to be hurried; men of position are not to be won over in a day; men with anything to lose need some guarantee that they are not wantonly casting their possessions to the winds. By next spring, as was agreed, all would have been ready. Delay could not have hurt you. Indeed, with every day by which you delayed your coming you did good service to your cause, you strengthened its prospects of success; for every day the people's burden of oppression and persecution grows more heavy, and the people's temper more short; every day, by the methods that he is pursuing, King James brings himself into deeper hatred. This hatred is spreading. It was the business of myself and those others to help it on, until from the cottage of the ploughman the infection of anger should have spread to the mansion of the squire. Had Your Grace but given me time, as I entreated you, and as you promised me, you might have marched to Whitehall with scarce the shedding of a drop of blood; had Your Grace but waited until we were ready, England would have so trembled at your landing that your uncle's throne would have toppled over 'neath the shock. As it is..." He shrugged his shoulders, sighed and spread his hands, leaving his sentence uncompleted.