by Thomas Nashe
Oh Rome, if thou hast in thee such soul-exalting objects, what a thing is heaven in comparison of thee, of which Mercator’s globe272 is a perfecter model than thou art? Yet this I must say to the shame of us Protestants: if good works may merit heaven, they do them, we talk of them. Whether superstition or no makes them unprofitable servants, that let pulpits decide; but there you shall have the bravest ladies, in gowns of beaten gold, washing pilgrims’ and poor soldiers’ feet, and doing nothing, they and their waiting-maids, all the year long, but making shirts and bands for them against273 they come by in distress. Their hospitals are more like noblemen’s houses than otherwise; so richly furnished, clean kept and hot perfumed, that a soldier would think it a sufficient recompense for all his travel and his wounds, to have such a heavenly retiring place. For the Pope and his pontificalibus I will not deal with; only I will dilate unto you what happened whilst I was in Rome.
So it fell out that, it being a vehement hot summer when I was a sojourner there, there entered such a hotspurred274 plague as hath not been heard of. Why, it was but a word and a blow, ‘Lord have mercy upon us’, and he was gone. Within three quarters of a year in that one city there died of it a hundred thousand: look in Lanquet’s Chronicle275 and you shall find it. To smell of a nosegay that was poisoned, and turn your nose to a house that had the plague, it was all one. The clouds, like a number of cormorants that keep their corn till it stink and is musty, kept in their stinking exhalations till they had almost stifled all Rome’s inhabitants. Physicians’ greediness of gold made them greedy of their destiny. They would come to visit those with whose infirmity their art had no affinity; and even as a man with a fee should be hired to hang himself, so would they quietly go home and die presently after they had been with their patients. All day and all night long, car-men did nothing but go up and down the streets with their carts, and cry ‘Have you any dead bodies to bury?’ And had many times out of one house their whole loading. One grave was the sepulchre of seven score; one bed was the altar whereon whole families were offered.
The walls were hoared and furred with the moist scorching steam of their desolation. Even as, before a gun is shot off, a stinking smoke funnels out and prepares the way for him, so before any gave up the ghost, death arrayed in a stinking smoke stopped his nostrils and crammed itself full into his mouth that closed up his fellow’s eyes, to give him warning to prepare for his funeral. Some died sitting at their meat, others as they were asking counsel of the physician for their friends. I saw at the house where I was hosted, a maid bring her master warm broth for to comfort him, and she sink down dead herself ere he had half eat it up.
During this time of visitation, there was a Spaniard, one Esdras of Granado, a notable banditto, authorised by the Pope because he had assisted him in some murthers. This villain, colleagued with one Bartol, a desperate Italian, practised to break into those rich men’s houses in the night where the plague had most reigned, and if there were none but the mistress and maid left alive, to ravish them both and bring away all the wealth they could fasten on. In an hundred chief citizens’ houses where the hand of God had been, they put this outrage in ure.276 Though the women so ravished cried out, none durst come near them for fear of catching their deaths by them, and some thought they cried out only with the tyranny of the malady. Amongst the rest, the house where I lay he invaded, where all being snatched up by sickness but the good wife of the house, a noble and chaste matron called Heraclide, and her zany and I and my courtesan, he, knocking at the door late in the night, ran in to the matron and left me and my love to the mercy of his companion, who finding me in bed (as the time required) ran at me full with his rapier, thinking I would resist him, but, as good luck was, I escaped him and betook me to my pistol in the window uncharged. He, fearing it had been charged, threatened to run her through if I once offered but to aim at him. Forth the chamber he dragged her, holding his rapier at her heart, whilst I cried out ‘Save her, kill me! And I’ll ransom her with a thousand ducats.’ But lust prevailed; no prayers would be heard. Into my chamber I was locked, and watchmen charged (as he made semblance when there was none there) to knock me down with their halberds if I stirred but a foot down the stairs. Then threw I myself pensive again on my pallet,277 and dared all the devils in hell, now I was alone, to come and fight with me one after another in defence of that detestable rape. I beat my head against the walls and called them bawds, because they would see such a wrong committed and not fall upon him.
To return to Heraclide below, whom the ugliest of all blood-suckers, Esdras of Granado, had under shrift.278 First he assailed her with rough means, and slew her zany at her foot that stepped before her in rescue. Then when all armed resist was put to flight, he assayed279 her with honey speech, and promised her more jewels and gifts than he was able to pilfer in an hundred years after. He discoursed unto her how he was countenanced and borne out by the Pope, and how many execrable murthers with impunity he had executed on them that displeased him. ‘This is the eight-score house,’ quoth he, ‘that hath done homage unto me, and here I will prevail or I will be torn in pieces.’ ‘Ah,’ quoth Heraclide with a heart-renting sigh, ‘art thou ordained to be worse plague to me than the plague itself? Have I escaped the hands of God to fall into the hands of man? Hear me, Jehova, and be merciful in ending my misery! Dispatch me incontinent,280 dissolute homicide, death’s usurper! Here lies my husband stone cold on the dewy floor. If thou beest of more power than God to strike me speedily, strike home, strike deep, send me to heaven with my husband. Ay me, it is the spoil of my honour thou seekest in my soul’s troubled departure; thou art some devil sent to tempt me. Avoid from me, Satan! My soul is my saviour’s. To him I have bequeathed it; from him can no man take it. Jesu, Jesu, spare me indefiled for thy spouse! Jesu, Jesu, never fail those that put their trust in thee!’
With that, she fell in a swoon, and her eyes in their closing seemed to spawn forth in their outward sharp corners new-created seed pearl, which the world before never set eye on. Soon he rigorously revived her, and told her that he had a charter above scripture; she must yield, she should yield, see who durst remove her out of his hands. Twixt life and death thus she faintly replied:
‘How thinkest thou, is there a power above thy power? If there be, He is here present in punishment and on thee will take present punishment if thou persistest in thy enterprises. In the time of security, every man sinneth, but when death substitutes one friend his special bailie to arrest another by infection, and disperseth his quiver into ten thousand hands at once, who is it but looks about him? A man that hath an unevitable huge stone hanging only by a hair over his head, which he looks, every Pater-Nosterwhile,281 to fall and pash282 him in pieces, will not he be submissively sorrowful for his transgressions, refrain himself from the least thought of folly, and purify his spirit with contrition and penitence? God’s hand like a huge stone hangs inevitably over thy head. What is the plague but death playing the Provost Marshal, to execute all those that will not be called home by any other means? This my dear knight’s body is a quiver of his arrows, which already are shot into thee invisibly. Even as the age of goats is known by the knots on their horns, so think the anger of God apparently visioned or shown unto thee in the knitting of my brows. A hundred have I buried out of my house, at all whose departures I have been present. A hundred’s infection is mixed with my breath. Lo, now I breathe upon thee, a hundred deaths come upon thee. Repent betimes; imagine there is a hell though not a heaven. That hell thy conscience is thoroughly acquainted with, if thou hast murdered half so many as thou unblushingly braggest. As Mecoenas in the latter end of his days was seven years without sleep, so these seven weeks have I took no slumber. My eyes have kept continual watch against the devil, my enemy. Death I deemed my friend (friends fly from us in adversity); death, the devil, and all the ministering spirits of temptation are watching about thee to entrap thy soul, by my abuse, to eternal damnation. It is thy soul thou mayest save, only by saving mine honour. Death w
ill have thy body infallibly for breaking into my house, that he had selected for his private habitation. If thou ever earnest of a woman, or hopest to be saved by the seed of a woman, pity a woman. Deers oppressed with dogs, when they cannot take soil, run to men for succour: to whom should women in their disconsolate and desperate estate run but to men, like the deer, for succour and sanctuary? If thou be a man, thou wilt succour me; but if thou be a dog and a brute beast, thou wilt spoil me, defile me and tear me. Either renounce God’s image, or renounce the wicked mind thou bearest.’
These words might have moved a compound heart of iron and adamant, but in his heart they obtained no impression. For he sitting in his chair of state against the door all the while that she pleaded, leaning his overhanging gloomy eyebrows on the pommel of his unsheathed sword, he never looked up or gave her a word. But when he perceived she expected his answer of grace or utter perdition, he start up and took her currishly by the neck, asking how long he should stay for her Ladyship. ‘Thou tell’st me,’ quoth he, ‘of the plague and the heavy hand of God, and thy hundred infected breaths in one. I tell thee I have cast the dice an hundred times for the galleys in Spain and yet still missed the ill chance. Our order of casting is this: if there be a general or captain new come home from the wars, and hath some four or five hundred crowns overplus of the King’s in his hand, and his soldiers all paid, he makes proclamation that whatsoever two resolute men will go to dice for it and win the bridle or lose the saddle, to such a place let them repair, and it shall be ready for them. Thither go I, and find another such needy squire resident. The dice run, I win, he is undone. I winning have the crowns; he losing is carried to the galleys. This is our custom, which a hundred times and more hath paid me custom of crowns, when the poor fellows have gone to Gehenna,283 had coarse bread and whipping cheer all then–life after. Now thinkest thou that I, who so oft have escaped such a number of hellish dangers, only depending upon the turning of a few pricks, can be scare-bugged with the plague? What plague canst thou name worse than I have had? Whether diseases, imprisonment, poverty, banishment, I have passed through them all. My own mother gave I a box of the ear to, and brake her neck down a pair of stairs, because she would not go in to a gentleman when I bad her. My sister I sold to an old leno,284 to make his best of her. Any kinswoman that I have, knew I she were not a whore, myself would make her one. Thou art a whore; thou shalt be a whore, in spite of religion or precise a285 ceremonies.’
Therewith he flew upon her and threatened her with his sword, but it was not that he meant to wound her with. He grasped her by the ivory throat and shook her as a mastiff would shake a young bear, swearing and staring he would tear out her weasand if she refused. Not content with that savage constraint, he slipped his sacrilegious hand from her lily lawn-skinned neck and enscarfed it in her long silver locks which with struggling were unrolled. Backward he dragged her, even as a man backward would pluck a tree down by the twigs, and then, like a traitor that is drawn to execution on a hurdle, he traileth her up and down the chamber by those tender untwisted braids, and setting his barbarous foot on her bare snowy breast, bad her yield or have her wind stamped out. She cried ‘Stamp, stifle me in my hair, hang me up by it on a beam and so let me die, rather than I should go to heaven with a beam in my eye.’ ‘No,’ quoth he, ‘nor stamped nor stifled nor hanged, nor to heaven shalt thou go, till I have had my will of thee. Thy busy arms in these silken fetters I’ll enfold.’ Dismissing her hair from his fingers and pinioning her elbows therewithal, she struggled, she wrested, but all was in vain. So struggling and so resisting, her jewels did sweat, signifying there was poison coming towards her. On the hard boards he threw her, and used his knee as an iron ram to beat ope the two-leaved gate of her chastity. Her husband’s dead body he made a pillow to his abomination. Conjecture the rest, my words stick fast in the mire and are clean tired; would I had never undertook this tragical tale. Whatsoever is born, is born to have an end. Thus ends my tale: his whorish lust was glutted, his beastly desire satisfied. What in the house of any worth was carriageable, he put up, and went his way.
Let not your sorrow die, you that have read the proem and narration of this elegiacal history. Show you have quick wits in sharp conceit of compassion. A woman that hath viewed all her children sacrificed before her eyes, and after the first was slain wiped the sword with her apron to prepare it for the cleanly murther of the second, and so on forward till it came to the empiercing of the seventeenth of her loins, will you not give her great allowance of anguish? This woman, this matron, this forsaken Hera–clide, having buried fourteen children in five days, whose eyes she howlingly closed and caught many wrinkles with funeral kisses, besides having her husband within a day after laid forth as a comfortless corse, a carrionly block, that could neither eat with her, speak with her nor weep with her: is she not to be borne withal though her body swell with a timpany286 of tears, though her speech be as impatient as unhappy Hecuba’s, though her head rave and her brain dote? Devise with yourselves that you see a corse rising from his hearse after he is carried to church, and such another suppose Heraclide to be, rising from the couch of enforced adultery.
Her eyes were dim, her cheeks bloodless, her breath smelt earthy, her countenance was ghastly. Up she rose after she was deflowered, but loth she rose, as a reprobate soul rising to the Day of Judgment Looking on the t’one side as she rose, she spied her husband’s body lying under her head. Ah, then she bewailed as Cephalus when he had killed Procris unwittingly, or Oedipus when ignorantly he had slain his father and known his mother incestuously. This was her subdued reason’s discourse:
‘Have I lived to make my husband’s body the bier to carry me to hell? Had filthy pleasure no other pillow to lean upon but his spreaded limbs? On thy flesh my fault shall be imprinted at the day of resurrection. Oh beauty, the bait ordained to ensnare the irreligious! Rich men are robbed for their wealth; women are dishonested for being too fair. No blessing is beauty, but a curse. Cursed be the time that ever I was begotten. Cursed be the time that my mother brought me forth to tempt. The serpent in Paradise did no more. The serpent in Paradise is damned sempiternally: why should not I hold myself damned (if predestination’s opinions be true) that am predestinate to this horrible abuse? The hog dieth presently if he loseth an eye; with the hog have I wallowed in the mire, I have lost my eye of honesty, it is clean plucked out with a strong hand of unchastity. What remaineth but I die? Die I will, though life be unwilling. No recompense is there for me to redeem my compelled offence, but with a rigorous compelled death. Husband, I’ll be thy wife in heaven. Let not thy pure deceased spirit despise me when we meet, because I am tyrannously polluted. The devil, the belier of our frailty and common accuser of mankind, cannot accuse me, though he would, of unconstrained submitting. If any guilt be mine, this is my fault, that I did not deform my face, ere it should so impiously allure.’
Having passioned thus awhile, she hastily ran and looked herself in her glass, to see if her sin were not written on her forehead. With looking she blushed, though none looked upon her but her own reflected image.
Then began she again: ‘Heu quam difficile est crimen non prodere vultu.287 “How hard is it not to bewray a man’s fault by his forehead.” Myself do but behold myself, and yet I blush. Then, God beholding me, shall not I be ten times more ashamed? The angels shall hiss at me, the saints and martyrs fly from me. Yea, God Himself shall add to the devil’s damnation, because he suffered such a wicked creature to come before Him. Agamemnon, thou wert an infidel, yet when thou went’st to the Trojan War, thou left’ist a musician at home with thy wife, who by playing the foot Spondaeus288 till thy return might keep her in chastity. My husband going to war with the devil and his enticements, when he surrendered left no musician with me, but mourning and melancholy. Had he left any, as Aegisthus killed Agamemnon’s musician ere he could be successful, so surely would he have been killed ere this Aegisthus surceased My distressed heart, as the hart whenas he loseth his horns is astonied
and sorrowfully runneth to hide himself, so be thou afflicted and distressed. Hide thyself under the Almighty’s wings of mercy. Sue, plead, entreat: grace is never denied to them that ask. It may be denied; I may be a vessel ordained to dishonour.
‘The only repeal we have from God’s undefinite chastisement is to chastise ourselves in this world. And I will; nought but death be my penance, gracious and acceptable may it be. My hand and my knife shall manumit289 me out of the horror of mind I endure. Farewell, life that hast lent me nothing but sorrow. Farewell, sin-sowed flesh, that hast more, weeds than flowers, more woes than joys. Point, pierce, edge, enwiden, I patiently afford thee a sheath. Spur forth my soul to mount post to heaven. Jesu, forgive me; Jesu, receive me!’
So, throughly stabbed, fell she down and knocked her head against her husband’s body, wherewith he, not having been aired his full four-and-twenty hours, start as out of a dream; whiles I, thorough a cranny of my upper chamber unsealed, had beheld all this sad spectacle. Awaking, he rubbed his head to and fro, and wiping his eyes with his hand, began to look about him. Feeling something lie heavy on his breast, he turned it off, and getting upon his legs, lighted a candle.
Here beginneth my purgatory. For he, good man, coming into the hall with the candle, and spying his wife with her hair about her ears, defiled and massacred, and his simple zany Capestrano run through, took a halberd in his hand, and running from chamber to chamber to search who in his house was likely to do it, at length found me lying on my bed, the door locked to me on the outside, and my rapier unsheathed in the window. Wherewith he straight conjected it was I, and calling the neighbours hard by, said I had caused myself to be locked into my chamber after that sort, sent away my courtesan whom I called my wife, and made clean my rapier, because I would not be suspected.
