A Verse to Murder

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘The Life of Julius Caesar, you mean?’

  ‘I had more in mind the death of Julius Caesar.’

  ‘They would make a fine Brutus and an excellent Cassius,’ she agreed with a chuckle. ‘The one all bluff honesty, full of family pride in spite of the fact that he dirties his hands with spycraft, the other the very personification of that devious profession. Heart one might say, versus head.’

  ‘And who would you play if Will ever finishes his play of Caesar?’ he whispered.

  ‘Why, Portia, Brutus’ faithful if not very clever wife. To stab yourself in the thigh as a way of proving fortitude and reliability! That was almost as mad as eating hot coals to kill herself.’

  ‘So, your thighs would remain inviolate?’

  ‘As columns of alabaster, sir,’ she said. ‘And any time you wish to satisfy yourself that this is so...’

  ‘Tom,’ interrupted Will, his voice full of excitement. ‘Have you seen what they’ve done to the tomb of Henry Vth?’

  *

  Tom’s answer was forestalled by the commotion made as the poets finally entered through the Great West Gate.

  ‘Mournfull Muses, sorrowes minions,’ bellowed a great voice that echoed the length of the Abbey effectively reducing everyone there to silence. ‘Dwelling in despaires opinions,’ it continued.

  Looking to his right and craning to see over the heads of the crowd, Tom saw the great mass of bodies part like the Red Sea before Moses and the Children of Israel as they escaped Egypt. The six pall-bearers and their load moved forward with slow and stately tread. And, judging by the number of poets following Spenser’s coffin the comparison with the Children of Israel was pretty accurate.

  ‘Yee that never thought invented,’ continued that ringing voice. ‘How a heart may be contented, But in torments alle distressed, Hopelesse how to be redressed, All with howling and with crying, Live in a continuall dying Sing a Dirge on Spencers death,Till your soules be out of breath.’

  ‘Dear Lord, who wrote this drivel?’ demanded Kate. ‘Til your souls be out of breath! Since when do souls breathe?’

  ‘I take it he means it metaphoric,’ said Will.

  ‘Don’t defend it Will,’ snapped Kate. ‘Someone selected this buffoon to pen this stuff - which deserves to lie in a midden with all the other excrement or go floating down the open sewer of the Fleet River! And think, they did not ask you, Ben Jonson, Master Watson or Master Donne over there whose least word is worth a volume of garbage such as this!’

  ‘Bidde the Dunces keepe their dennes,’ the voice continued.

  ‘Dear God, there’s more!’ whispered Kate.

  ‘Hours more I should guess,’ said Tom.

  ‘And the Poets breake their pennes.’

  ‘If only this one had - and before he wrote this!’ said Kate. ‘Will, do you know whose excrement this is?’

  ‘Nicholas Breton, if I had to guess.’

  ‘Remind me to visit Simon Forman for a good strong curse against this man Breton. May his teeth fall out! May his fingers wither! May his stones...’

  ‘Kate,’ spat Tom. ‘You visit Simon Forman?’

  ‘On occasion! Hush now, I want to hear more of this deathless dirge.’ Tom knew Kate realised that she had revealed much more than she meant to and felt guilty about it. He gave an inward shrug and acquiesced. But his mind continued to test what she had said, like a child pushing at a bruise to see how much it hurt.

  ‘Bidde the Sheepheards shed their teares,’ the voice continued, slowly coming closer. ‘And the Nymphes go teare their haires...’

  ‘Tear their hairs,’ echoed Kate - to prove, no doubt, that she was actually listening.

  Tom, however, was no longer paying attention. He could not just forget what Kate had said. That Kate should visit Forman! Why? When? What had he cast for her? Drawn for her? Sold to her in the way of charms or philtres? What in God’s name might he have done to her? Visions of that bedroom rose unbidden to his mind’s eye, his imagination adding her naked body to the Venuses carved in marble there. The reference to her alabaster thighs did not help.

  But he was drawn back out of one element of his speculation and thrust into another almost at once. ‘Fairy Queene, shew fairest Queene, How her faire in thee is seene,’ bellowed the approaching voice. ‘Sheepheards Calender set downe, How to figure best a clowne. As for Mother Hubberts Tale, Cracke the nut, and take the shale...’

  iv

  The mention of Mother Hubberd’s Tale brought Tom up short so that he hardly heard the lines that followed, let alone try to make sense of them.

  ‘Jesu!’ whispered Donne, also shocked and surprised.

  ‘We should have expected it,’ whispered Tom. ‘With The Fairy Queen and The Shepherd’s Calendar it was one of Spenser’s most popular publications.’ But if his discussions about it so far were anything to go by - if Donne’s summation of the piece was in any way accurate, he thought - then it came dangerously close to treason with its attacks on Her Majesty and her closest advisers. Ten years away from their original targets perhaps, but focused now with disturbing accuracy on the generation that followed those originals.

  Tom looked over his shoulder down the packed nave towards Spenser’s shoulder-borne coffin as it came on as inevitably as death itself. The black casket and the mourning-suited poets carrying it were suddenly laden with a disturbing weight of threat and danger. Even the lines being so loudly recited began to sound like a challenge to a duel, perhaps even a declaration of war.

  ‘Farewell Arte of Poetry,’ continued that abruptly disturbing recitation. ‘Scorning idle foolery, Farewell true conceited reason, Where was never thought of treason: Farewell all in one together, And, with Spencer’s garland, wither.’

  Tom found himself short of breath as things plunged from bad to worse. What did Nicholas Breton - if this indeed was his work - mean? Where was never thought of treason and yet the satire in Mother Hubberd’s Tale did indeed seem to show thought of treason. Perhaps more than mere thought of treason. Tom suddenly began to see Spenser in an entirely new light. So far he had thought of the diminutive poet as a desperate suitor to the Council, willing to sit seemingly hopelessly and endlessly in draughty White Hall corridors with his proposal for the subjugation of Ireland- largely through the calculated use of starvation, an idea he modestly proposed with Classical support - as it was said of the Roman Empire by Tacitus: ‘They make a desert and call it peace’, which was very much Spenser’s plan. He seemed such an unworldly, ultimately powerless creature, apparently helplessly adrift in this ocean of bureaucracy in spite of his brutal proposals. Running dangerously short of money in spite of the Queen’s bountiful pension of £50 so recently awarded. Far removed from his responsibilities as Sheriff of the County of Cork; far removed also from his beloved wife and what remained of his young family. To top it all, Spenser had been the victim of a seemingly random attack which resulted in his burst ear-drum - all in all, a figure worthy of a great deal of pity. So desperate in the end that he was willing to reprint any or all of his earlier work in the hope of turning a penny to keep him from starving as he waited seemingly eternally for the Council to make up their minds.

  But now Tom was abruptly presented with Spenser as a creature more akin to Poley or one of his spies. Like Marlowe and all the rest, a Cambridge man - who worked as Sizar at Pembroke College while Poley was Sizar at Clare College and Marlowe was at Corpus Christie. A dangerous man whose patience with these irresolute and dawdling old men had run out, as Essex’ had with his inconsistent Queen. Who saw the potential of Mother Hubberd’s Tale to embarrass and motivate the men who were so slowly deciding to answer his pleas. To show the two most influential courtiers Raleigh and Cecil - the Fox and the Ape - and any other men of power who might see themselves lampooned in the apparently innocent fable that he was not toothless after all. That he needed to be respected and, most of all, answered. Answered swiftly or else...

  The only risk being, of course, that he might be answered in a
manner he clearly did not expect. The way he had actually been answered in the end: with a lethal dose of hemlock poured into his wounded ear as he slept.

  *

  The mournful procession was close at hand now. The echoing voice louder than ever: ‘And, if any Graces live, That will vertue honour give, Let them shewe their true affection, In the depth of griefes perfection,’

  Tom and his companions, which numbered Sir Thomas Walsingham’s party now, drew back as the coffin approached. Between Tom, Will, Donne, Ben Jonson and Thomas Watson, they could see the faces of all of the pall-bearers and put names to them as they bore the coffin, feet-first, through the open area where the transepts met the nave. There was a muted flurry of whispering as they told Rosalind who they could see. George Chapman was one of the leading pair, beneath Spenser’s coffined left foot. Breton was his opposite, bellowing the words of his elegy as they all moved. Behind Chapman and Breton came Francis Thynne and Charles Fitzgeoffrey, then William Alabaster and John Weever brought up the rear, their shoulders beneath Spenser’s. The first pair of mourners behind them were Richard Harvey and Hugh Holland.

  ‘In describing forth her glory, When she is all most deepely sory;’ shouted Breton. ‘That they all may wish to heere, Such a song, and such a quier...’

  ‘That at least was well done,’ whispered Kate. For as Breton said the word ‘quier’ - a most lamantable rhyme for ‘heere’, thought Tom - the coffin had actually just come past the choir, so that last couplet and a little silence took the melancholy burden to its destination: the bier and the priest beside it. ‘As, with all the woes they have, Follow Spencer to his grave.’

  The coffin was placed on the bier. The poets all stood back - the pall bearers forming the front rank.

  Abdias Assheton stepped forward until he stood beside the bier. He rested his right hand gently on the top of the coffin, drew in a deep breath and waited for absolute silence. ‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not,’ he began, his tones deep and resonant. He took another breath and continued, ‘I am the resurrection and the life: saith the Lord. He that believeth on me yea though he were dead yet shall he live...’

  Tom’s mind began to wander at once, for he was all too familiar with the Service for the Burial of the Dead, though Essex’ chaplain had rearranged this one slightly to suit himself. He scanned the black-garbed regiment of poets, then let his gaze wander wider. He saw Sir Walter Raleigh almost immediately, standing with his russet head bowed as Assheton’s mellifluous voice carried down the nave. Beside him, visible in the crush only because he was Raleigh’s companion, stood Simon Forman. Thomas Hariot, having scientific rather than poetic pretentions stood beside Forman. Raleigh, however seemed to be on the edge of Chapman’s group, with Matthew Roydon close by. Tom strained to see whether Raleigh was holding a written elegy and a black quill.

  ‘We brought nothing into the world and it is a plain case that we can carry nothing out...’ There was no point in telling Rosalind who Raleigh was - she already knew. He looked at Will with raised eyebrows - neither of them had any intention of identifying Forman, especially not to an attractive, independent spirited woman with an enquiring mind. Roydon and Hariot hardly merited Rosalind’s attention.

  So Tom continued to search as much of the congregation as he could see from, where he was. Having found the Fox, he was now looking for the Ape - though he was well aware that, unlike Raleigh, Cecil would not be towering over those closest to him. But it seemed that, other than Raleigh and Essex who each had their own reasons for being here, Her Majesty’s Council was unrepresented.

  Was that because of more powerful priorities? Work-load? Politics? Guilt at dragging their feet until the poor supplicant died? Or something more sinister altogether, he wondered.

  v

  Nicholas Breton, mercifully silent, stepped to the edge of the grave as soon as Assheton completed the burial service and the gravedigger’s men went through the ritual of lowering the coffin. He waited for an instant then allowed his poem to flutter down onto the coffin top like the first leaf of Autumn. He threw his quill onto it and stepped back. George Chapman pushed forward once more and stood at the edge of the grave, looking down at the coffin lid, the other poets in a disorderly crowd behind him.

  ‘Told you,’ whispered Will. ‘Much bigger audience this time. Let’s hope for a better poem.’

  Chapman began to recite:

  ‘Now to the nestful woods the broode of flight

  Have on their black wings brought the Night,

  When Fame’s friends ope the windows they shut in

  To bar day’s worldly light and Men’s rude din.

  Now let us whisper that our Colin Clout is gone

  That was of English poets the pinnacle alone.

  Though all Fame’s brazen gates and windows stood

  Ope day and night, now should her wild notes rude

  Hold still and breathless - all darkness, all forlorn.

  Silence and night do best fit how we mourn.’

  Having delivered his second epitaph, he too threw into the grave the papers on which the poems were written and the black quill that had penned them. He stood back and was replaced by Hugh Holland, who recited his couplet quickly, then threw the paper and the black quill into the open grave.

  ‘He was and is, see then where lies the odds

  Once god of poets now poet to the gods.’

  As Holland stepped back, he was replaced by William Alabaster who surveyed his audience with lofty disdain, his eyes resting on Assheton for a heartbeat longer than was necessary, then began to recite in Latin:

  ‘Fors qui sepulchre conditur siquis fuit...’

  Tom automatically translated in his head as the pompous quatrain echoed:

  ‘If who is buried here you ask, Oh passerby, you deserve to hear that Spenser is buried here. If who is Spenser you then enquire, you do not deserve to know!’

  Tom’s attention was beginning to waver once again when John Weever stepped forward, drew himself importantly upward, ‘Like a cock,’ whispered Kate, ‘getting ready to crow…’

  ‘Colin's gone home, the glorie of his clime,’ Weever read.

  ‘The Muses Mirrour, and the Shepheards Saint;

  Spencer is ruin'd, of our latter time

  The fairest ruine, Faeries foulest want:

  Then his Time ruines did our ruine show,

  Which by his ruine we untimely know:

  Spencer therfore thy Ruines were cal'd in,

  Too soone to sorrow least we should begin.’

  The way Weever started with ‘home’ and then repeated the word ‘ruin’ sparked off further uneasiness in Tom’s mind. For the central cause of Spenser’s misery and - as far as was common knowledge, death - arose from the ruin of his castle at Kilcolman in the County of Cork; the burning of his home, the murder of at least one of his children, the near-death of his wife and the rest of his family and the ruination of his great estate. Weever was clearly speaking for the common people, then. But just because he put the blame on Spenser’s ruin by Irish insurgents rather than on hemlock did not make him entirely wrong. And, as Tom had already considered, that fact also added to Essex’ potent motivation to take his army over there and avenge yet another friend - while also prompting the capricious Queen, who loved Spenser’s poetry, to give Essex her formal permission to do so as soon as possible.

  *

  Then that thought led onto another. Breton’s poem contained scarcely-veiled references to Spenser’s satire Mother Hubberd’s Tale as discussed with Donne, and its potential to be seen as treason. How neat might it seem to the Fox and the Ape to rid themselves of the satirist in the knowledge that in doing so they would also rid themselves of Essex - released from the court and all ability to influence the Queen at any rate; and likely to destroy himself in Ireland into the bargain. Now here was John Weever examining how the destruction of
Spenser’s Irish land holdings might have affected him. Fair enough, Alabaster’s Latin tag was utterly unoriginal in terms of language and presentation, but what about George Chapman’s? The proper manner of mourning Spenser would involve silence and night! What was going on here? Perhaps there were sins - committed by Spenser and committed against him - that the Sin Eater had not managed to consume after all, which might better be examined in silence and at night. Say, for instance, by reading rather than reciting the elegies - and retrieving them as soon as possible after dark.

  He began to pay closer attention to what was going on, wondering whether there was, perhaps, more about Spenser, his doings and his motivations to be revealed in the writing of his artistic friends.

  As poet after poet - many of them flattering themselves that they deserved the name - read out their badly-rhymed doggerel with its limping scansion and pathetic content, Tom began to formulate a plan. Because of the over-enthusiastic input of the poetasters and their interminable verse, the service was running badly over time. Tom observed that the Earl of Essex, Poley and Sir Thomas were getting restless, and suspected that this was not just a reaction to the tedium. All of them, after all, were used to interminably boring sermons of similar length to the poetic input. But the afternoon was drawing on. Evening threatened and then night. He suspected that Essex would have filled the space where the Sin Eater began the formal ritual of the funeral by consuming Spenser’s sins with comestibles for more general consumption at the wake that would equally formally end it. If they didn’t hurry up, the food would be wasted and the rituals of burial left uncompleted.

  But then the inevitable march of time became the saviour of the wake Essex planned and so of Tom’s plans as well. The Earl stepped forward just as Charles Fitzgeoffrey was about to begin on several pages of closely-scripted eulogy. ‘The poetical offerings have been unrivalled in their number and effect,’ he said, his voice ringing down the Nave. ‘Those poets with yet more eulogies to read may remain and read them. Those of the congregation who wish to remain and hear them may also remain. I will arrange for the Abbey to stay open until all is done. For the rest, there is ample provision of funereal baked meats at Essex House which must be consumed before nightfall and those who wish to partake will be made welcome.’