A Column of Fire

by Ken Follett

  Bart had gone ahead, and when the Fitzgerald party arrived, about twenty servants were waiting for them in the courtyard. They clapped and cheered when Margery rode in, and she felt welcomed. Perhaps they disliked working for an all-male family, and looked forward to a woman’s touch. She hoped so.

  Swithin and Bart came out to greet them. Bart kissed her, then Swithin did the same, letting his lips linger on her cheek and pressing her body to his. Then Swithin introduced a voluptuous woman of about thirty. ‘Sal Brendon is my housekeeper, and she will help you with everything,’ he said. ‘Show the viscountess around, Sal. We men have a lot to talk about.’

  As he turned away to usher Reginald and Rollo into the house, he gave Sal a pat on her ample bottom. Sal did not seem surprised or displeased. Both Margery and Lady Jane noticed this and looked at one another. Sal was obviously more than a housekeeper.

  ‘I’ll take you to your quarters,’ Sal said. ‘This way.’

  Margery wanted more of a tour. She had been here before, most recently on the Twelfth Day of Christmas, but it was a big place and she needed to refamiliarize herself with the layout. She said: ‘We’ll look at the kitchen first.’

  Sal hesitated, looking annoyed, then said: ‘As you wish.’

  They entered the house and went to the kitchen. It was hot and steamy and not too clean. An older servant was sitting on a stool, watching the cook work and drinking from a tankard. When Margery entered, he got to his feet rather slowly.

  Sal said: ‘This is the cook, Mave Brown.’

  There was a cat sitting on the table picking delicately at the remains of a knuckle of ham. Margery lifted the cat up with a swift movement and dropped it on the floor.

  Mave Brown said resentfully: ‘She’s a good mouser, that cat.’

  Margery said: ‘She’ll be a better mouser if you don’t let her eat ham.’

  The older manservant began to prepare a tray with a plate of cold beef, a jug of wine and some bread. Margery took a slice of the beef and ate it.

  The man said: ‘That’s for the earl.’

  ‘And very good it is, too,’ Margery said. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Colly Knight,’ he said. ‘Worked for Earl Swithin forty years, man and boy.’ He said it with an air of superiority, as if to let Margery know that she was a mere latecomer.

  ‘I am the viscountess,’ Margery said. ‘You should say “my lady” when you speak to me.’

  There was a long pause, then at last Colly said: ‘Yes, my lady.’

  ‘Now we will go to the viscount’s quarters,’ Margery said.

  Sal Brendon led the way. They passed through the great hall, where a girl of ten or eleven was sweeping the floor in a desultory way, holding the brush with one hand. ‘Get both your hands on that broom handle,’ Margery snapped at her as they passed. The girl looked startled but did as she was told.

  They went up the stairs and along the corridor to the end. The bedchamber was a corner room with communicating doors to two side rooms. Margery immediately liked that arrangement: it meant that Bart could have a dressing room for his muddy boots, and Margery could have a boudoir where maids could help with her clothes and hair.

  But all the rooms were filthy. The windows seemed not to have been washed for a year. There were two big dogs lying on a blanket, an old one and a young one. Margery saw dog shit on the floor – Bart obviously let his pets do as they pleased in his rooms. On the wall was a painting of a naked woman, but the room contained no flowers or greenery, no plates of fruit or raisins, no fragrant bowls of dried herbs and petals to scent the air. On a chair was a tangle of laundry, including a bloodstained shirt, that seemed to have been there a long time.

  ‘This is disgusting,’ Margery said to Sal Brendon. ‘We’re going to clean the place up before I open my trunks. Go and fetch brooms and a shovel. The first thing you’ll do is clean up the dog shit.’

  Sal put her hand on her hip and looked mutinous. ‘Earl Swithin is my master,’ she said. ‘You’d better speak to him.’

  Something in Margery snapped. She had been deferring to people too long: her parents, Bishop Julius, Bart. She was not going to defer to Sal Brendon. All the bottled fury of the past year boiled over inside her. She drew back her arm and gave Sal a terrific slap across the face. The crack of palm on cheek was so loud that one of the dogs jumped. Sal fell back with a cry of shock.

  ‘Don’t ever speak to me like that again,’ Margery said. ‘I know your type. Just because the earl gives you a fuck when he’s drunk you think you’re the countess.’ Margery saw a flare of recognition in Sal’s eyes that confirmed the truth of the accusation. ‘I am mistress of this house now, and you’ll obey me. And if you give trouble, you’ll be out of here so fast your feet won’t touch the ground until you land in the Kingsbridge whorehouse, which is probably where you belong.’

  Sal was visibly tempted to defy her. Her face was suffused with rage and she might even have hit back. But she hesitated. She had to realize that if the earl’s new daughter-in-law were to ask him to get rid of an insolent servant, today of all days, he could not possibly refuse. Sal saw sense and her face changed. ‘I . . . I ask your pardon, my lady,’ she said humbly. ‘I’ll fetch the brooms right away.’

  She left the room. Lady Jane said quietly to Margery: ‘Well done.’

  Margery spotted a riding whip on a stool beside a pair of spurs, and picked it up. She crossed the room to where the dogs lay. ‘Get out, you filthy beasts,’ she said, and gave each of them a smart smack. More shocked than hurt, both dogs jumped up and scampered from the room, looking indignant.

  ‘And stay out,’ said Margery.

  *

  ROLLO REFUSED TO believe that the tide was turning against Mary Stuart. How could it, he asked himself indignantly, when England was a Catholic country and Mary had the support of the Pope? So that afternoon he wrote a letter for Earl Swithin to send to the archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Pole.

  The letter asked for the archbishop’s blessing on an armed insurrection against Elizabeth Tudor.

  Violence was now the only hope. King Felipe had turned against Mary Stuart and backed Elizabeth. That meant disaster for Rollo, the Fitzgerald family and the true Catholic Christian faith in England.

  ‘Is this treason?’ Swithin asked as he picked up the pen.

  ‘No,’ said Rollo. ‘Elizabeth is not queen yet, so no one is conspiring to rebel against the sovereign.’ Rollo knew that if they lost and Elizabeth won the crown, she would consider that a distinction without a difference. So they were all risking execution. But at moments such as this men had to take sides.

  Swithin signed it – not without difficulty, for he found it easier to break in a wild horse than to write his name.

  Pole was ill, but he could surely dictate a letter, Rollo thought. What would he say in reply to Swithin? Pole was the most hard-line Catholic of all the English bishops, and Rollo felt almost certain that he would support a revolt. Then the actions of Swithin and his supporters would be legitimized by the Church.

  Two of Swithin’s trusted men were given the letter to carry to Lambeth Palace, the archbishop’s residence near London.

  Meanwhile, Sir Reginald and Lady Jane returned to Kingsbridge. Rollo stayed with the earl. He wanted to make sure there was no backsliding.

  While waiting for the archbishop’s reply, Swithin and Bart set about mustering a force of armed men. Other Catholic earls must be doing the same thing all over England, Rollo reckoned, and their combined forces would be irresistible.

  In a hundred villages in the county of Shiring, Earl Swithin was lord and master with much of the same absolute authority that his ancestors had wielded in the Middle Ages. Swithin and Bart visited some of these places personally. The earl’s servants read a proclamation in others, and parish priests gave the same message in their sermons. Single men between eighteen and thirty were summoned to New Castle, and ordered to bring with them axes, scythes and iron chains.

  Rollo had no e
xperience of anything like this, and could not guess what would happen.

  The response thrilled him. Every village sent half a dozen lads. They were keen to go. The makeshift weapons, and the young men carrying them, were not much needed in the fields in November. And Protestantism was an urban movement: it had never taken hold in the conservative countryside. Besides, this was the most exciting thing that had happened in living memory. Everyone was talking about it. Beardless boys and old men wept that they were not wanted.

  The army could not remain many days at New Castle, and anyway it was a long march to Hatfield, so they set off, even though they had not heard back from Cardinal Pole. Their route would take them through Kingsbridge, where they would receive the blessing of Bishop Julius.

  Swithin rode at the head of the column, with Bart at his side and Rollo behind. They reached Kingsbridge on the third day. Entering the city, they were stopped at Merthin’s Bridge by Rollo’s father, Sir Reginald, who was the mayor. He was accompanied by the aldermen of the borough.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Reginald said to Swithin. ‘There’s a difficulty.’

  Rollo eased his horse forward so that he was at the front with Swithin and Bart. ‘What on earth is the matter?’ he said.

  His father seemed in despair. ‘If you will dismount and come with me, I’ll show you,’ he said.

  Swithin said irascibly: ‘This is a poor way to welcome a holy crusade!’

  ‘I know,’ said Reginald. ‘Believe me, I am mortified. But come and look.’

  The three leaders got off their horses. Swithin summoned the captains, gave them money, and told them to get barrels of beer sent over from the Slaughterhouse tavern to keep the men happy.

  Reginald led them across the double bridge into the city, and up the main street to the market square.

  There they saw an astonishing sight.

  The market stalls were closed, the temporary structures having been removed, and the square had been cleared. Forty or fifty stout tree trunks, all six or eight inches in diameter, had been firmly planted in the hard winter earth. Several hundred young men stood around the stakes, and Rollo saw, with increasing astonishment, that all of them had wooden swords and shields.

  It was an army in training.

  As they watched, a leader performed a demonstration on a raised stage, attacking the stake with wooden sword and shield, using right and left arms alternately in a rhythm that – Rollo could imagine – would have been effective on the battlefield. When the demonstration was over, all the others tried to imitate his actions, taking it in turns.

  Rollo recalled seeing similar exercises in Oxford, when Queen Mary Tudor had been preparing to send an English army to France to support the Spanish war. The stakes were called pells. They were firmly seated and difficult to knock over. At first, he remembered, untrained men’s swings were so wild that they sometimes missed the pell entirely. They quickly learned to aim carefully and hit harder. He had heard military men say that a few afternoons of pell practice could turn a hopeless yokel into a halfway dangerous soldier.

  Rollo saw Dan Cobley among the trainees, and the last piece of the puzzle fell into place.

  This was a Protestant army.

  They would not call themselves that, of course. They would claim to be preparing to resist a Spanish invasion, perhaps. Sir Reginald and Bishop Julius would not have believed them, but what could they do? The dozen or so men of the city watch could not arrest and jail several hundred, even if the trainees had been breaking the law, which they probably were not.

  Rollo watched in despair as the young men attacked the pells, rapidly becoming more focussed and effective. ‘This is not a coincidence,’ he said. ‘They heard of the approach of our army, and mustered their own to obstruct us.’

  Reginald said: ‘Earl Swithin, if your army enters the town, there will be a pitched battle in the streets.’

  ‘My strong-armed village lads will smash these puny city Protestants.’

  ‘The aldermen will not admit your men.’

  ‘Overrule the cowards,’ Swithin said.

  ‘I don’t have the right. And they have said they will arrest me if I try.’

  ‘Let them. We’ll get you out of jail.’

  Bart said: ‘We’ll have to fight our way across that damn bridge.’

  ‘We can do that,’ Swithin blustered.

  ‘We’d lose a lot of men.’

  ‘That’s what they’re for.’

  ‘But then who would we take to Hatfield?’

  Rollo watched Swithin’s face. It was not in his character to yield, even when the odds were against him. His expression showed furious indecision.

  Bart said: ‘I wonder if the same thing is happening elsewhere – Protestants getting ready to fight, I mean.’

  This had not occurred to Rollo. When he had proposed that Swithin raise a small army, he should have guessed that the Protestants would be thinking the same way. He had foreseen a neat coup d’état, but instead he was facing a bloody civil war. And instinct told him that the English people did not want a civil war – and might well turn on men who started one.

  It was beginning to look as if the peasant lads would have to be sent home.

  Two men emerged from the nearby Bell Inn and came hurrying over. Seeing them, Reginald remembered something. ‘There’s a message for you, earl,’ he said. ‘These two men got here an hour ago. I told them to wait rather than risk missing you on the road.’

  Rollo recognized the men Swithin had sent to Lambeth Palace. What had Archbishop Pole said? That could prove crucial. With his encouragement, perhaps Swithin’s army could continue to Hatfield. Without it, they might be wiser to disband.

  The older of the two couriers spoke. ‘There’s no reply from the cardinal,’ he said.

  Rollo’s heart sank.

  ‘What do you mean, no reply?’ Swithin said angrily. ‘He must have said something.’

  ‘We spoke to his clerk, Canon Robinson. He told us the cardinal was too ill to read your letter, let alone reply to it.’

  ‘Why, he must be at death’s door!’ said Swithin.

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  This was catastrophic, Rollo thought. England’s leading ultra-Catholic was dying at this turning point in the country’s history. The fact changed everything. The idea of kidnapping Elizabeth and sending for Mary Stuart had seemed, until now, like a hopeful enterprise with a great chance of success. Now it looked suicidal.

  Sometimes, Rollo reflected, fate seemed to be on the side of the devil.

  *

  NED MOVED TO London and haunted St James’s Palace, waiting for news of Queen Mary Tudor.

  She weakened dramatically on 16 November, a day that Protestants began to call Hope Wednesday even before the sun went down. Ned was in the shivering crowd outside the tall red-brick gatehouse the following morning, just before dawn, when a servant, hurrying out with a message, whispered: ‘She’s gone.’

  Ned ran across the road to the Coach and Horses tavern. He ordered a horse to be saddled, then woke his messenger, Peter Hopkins. While Hopkins was getting dressed and drinking a flagon of ale for breakfast, Ned wrote a note telling Elizabeth that Mary Tudor was dead. Then he saw the man off to Hatfield.

  He returned to the gatehouse and found the crowd grown larger.

  For the next two hours he watched important courtiers and less important messengers hurry in and out. But when he saw Nicholas Heath emerge, he followed him.

  Heath was probably the most powerful man in England. He was archbishop of York, Queen Mary’s Chancellor, and the holder of the Great Seal. Cecil had tried to win him to the cause of Elizabeth, but Heath had remained uncommitted. Now he would have to jump – one way or the other.

  Heath and his entourage rode the short distance to Westminster, where members of Parliament would be gathering for the morning session. Ned and others ran behind them. Another crowd was already forming at Westminster. Heath announced that he would address the lords and commons together
, and they assembled in the House of Lords.

  Ned tried to slip in with Heath’s entourage, but a guard stopped him. Ned pretended to be surprised, and said: ‘I represent the princess Elizabeth. She has ordered me to attend and report to her.’

  The guard was disposed to make trouble, but Heath heard the altercation and intervened. ‘I’ve met you, young man,’ he said to Ned. ‘With Sir William Cecil, I think.’

  ‘Yes, my lord archbishop.’ It was true, though Ned was surprised that Heath remembered.

  ‘Let him in,’ Heath said to the guard.

  The fact that Parliament was sitting meant that the succession could happen quickly, especially if Heath backed Elizabeth. She was popular, she was the sister of Queen Mary Tudor, and she was only twenty miles away. Mary Stuart, by contrast, was unknown to the English, she had a French husband, and she was in Paris. Expediency favoured Elizabeth.

  But the Church favoured Mary Stuart.

  The debating chamber resounded with animated conversation as everyone in the room discussed the same question. Then they fell silent when Heath stood up.

  ‘God this present morning called to his mercy our late sovereign lady, Queen Mary,’ he said.

  The assembly gave a collective sigh. All of them either knew this or had heard rumours, but the confirmation was heavy.

  ‘But we have cause to rejoice with praise to Almighty God for that he left us a true, lawful and right inheritress to the crown.’

  The chamber went dead silent. Heath was about to name the next queen. But which one would it be?

  ‘Lady Elizabeth,’ he said, ‘whose most lawful right and title we need not doubt!’

  The room exploded in uproar. Heath carried on speaking, but no one heard. The archbishop had endorsed Elizabeth, calling her title ‘lawful’ – in direct contradiction of the Pope’s ruling. It was all over.

  A few of the members of Parliament were shouting in protest, but Ned could see that most of them were cheering. Elizabeth was Parliament’s choice. Perhaps they had been afraid to reveal their feelings while the issue was in doubt, but now their inhibitions fell away. Cecil might even have underestimated Elizabeth’s popularity, Ned saw. Although there were some long faces in the chamber, men neither applauding nor cheering but sitting silent with folded arms, they were a minority. The rest were delighted. Civil war had been avoided, there would be no foreign king, the burnings would end. Ned realized that he was cheering, too.