The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works

by Thomas Nashe

  So said, so done. Thither he flew as swift as Mercury, and threw him his two hundred ducats as before demanded. It would not fadge,426 for then the market was raised to three hundred, and the caterer grumbling thereat, the fisher swain was forward to fettle him to his tools, and tire upon it, as on the other two, had not he held his hands and desired him to keep the peace, for no money should part them. With that speech he was qualified, and pursed the three hundred ducats, and delivered him the King of Fishes, teaching him how to geremumble427 it, sauce it, and dress it, and so sent him away a glad man. All the Pope’s cooks in their white sleeves and linen aprons met him middle way, to entertain and receive the King of Fishes, and together by the ears they went, who should first handle him or touch him. But the clerk of the kitchen appeased that strife, and would admit none but himself to have the scorching and carbonadoing of it, and he kissed his hand thrice, and made as many humblessos ere he would finger it; and such obeisances performed, he dressed it as he was enjoined, kneeling on his knees and mumbling twenty Ave Mary’s to himself in the sacrificing of it on the coals, that his diligent service in the broiling and combustion of it, both to his Kingship and to his Fatherhood, might not seem unmeritorious. The fire had not pierced it, but it being a sweaty loggerhead greasy sowter,428 endungeoned in his pocket a twelvemonth, stunk so over the Pope’s palace, that not a scullion but cried ‘Foh!’, and those which at the first flocked the fastest about it now fled the most from it, and sought more to rid their hands of it than before they sought to bless their hands with it. With much stopping of their noses, between two dishes they stewed it and served it up. It was not come within three chambers of the Pope but he smelt it, and upon smelling of it enquiring what it should be that sent forth such a puissant perfume, the standers-by declared that it was the King of Fishes. ‘I conceited no less,’ said the Pope, ‘for less than a king he could not be that had so strong a scent. And if his breath be so strong, what is he himself? Like a great king, like a strong king, I will use him. Let him be carried back, I say, and my Cardinals shall fetch him in with dirge and processions under my canopy.’

  Though they were double and double weary of him, yet his edict being a law, to the kitchen they returned him, whither by and by the whole College of scarlet Cardinals, with their crosiers, their censers, their hostes, their Agnus Dei’s and crucifixes, flocked together in heaps as it had been to the conclave or a general council, and the senior Cardinal that stood next in election to be Pope, heaved him up from the dresser with a dirge of De profundis natus est fex;429 rex he should have said, and so have made true Latin, but the spirable430 odour and pestilent steam ascending from it put him out of his bias of congruity, and, as true as the truest Latin of Priscian, would have queazened431 him like the damp that ‘took both Bell and Baram432 away, and many a worthy man that day’, if he had not been protected under the Pope’s canopy, and the other Cardinals, with their holy-water sprinkles, quenched his foggy fume and evaporating. About and about the inward and base court they circumducted him, with Kyrie Eleison and Halleluiah, and the chanters in their golden copes and white surplices chanted it out above gloria patri in praising of him. The organs played, the ordnance at the Castle of Saint Angelo’s went off, and all wind instruments blew as loud as the wind in winter in his passado433 to the Pope’s ordinary or dining chamber, where having set him down, upon their faces they fell flat, and licked every one his ell of dust, in ducking on all four unto him.

  The busy epitasis434 of the comedy was when the dishes were uncovered and the swarthrutter sour435 took air. For then he made such an air, as Alcides himself that cleansed the stables of Augaeus nor any hostler was able to endure.

  This at once, the Pope it popped under-board, and out of his palace worse it scared him than Neptune’s Phocases,436 that scared the horses of Hippolytus, or the harpies, Jupiter’s dogs, sent to vex Phineus.437 The Cardinals were at their ora pro nobis, and held this suffocation a meet sufferance for so contemning the King of Fishes and his subjects, and fleshly surfeiting in their carnivals. ‘Negromantick sorcery, negromantick sorcery, some evil spirit of an heretic it is which thus molesteth his Apostolicship!’ The friars and monks caterwauled, from the abbots and priors to the novices, ‘wherefore tanquam in circo,438 we will trounce him in a circle, and make him tell what lanternman or groom of Hecate’s close-stool439 he is that thus nefariously and proditoriously440 prophanes and penetrates our holy father’s nostrils’. What needs there any more embages?441 The ring-roll442 or ringed circle was compassed and chalked out, and the King of Fishes, by the name of the King of Fishes, conjured to appear in the centre of it. But surdo cantant absurdi, sive surdum incantant fratres sordidi:443 he was a king absolute, would not be at every man’s call, and if Friar Pendela444 and his fellows had anything to say to him, in his admiral court of the sea let them seek him, and neither in Hull, Hell nor Halifax.

  They, seeing that by their charms and spells they could spell nothing of him, fell to a more charitable purpose, that it might be the distressed soul of some king that was drowned, who, being long in Purgatory, and not relieved by the prayers of the Church, had leave in that disguised form to have egress and regress to Rome, to crave their benevolences of dirges, trentals445 and so forth, to help him onward on his journey to Limbo patrum446 or Elisium, and because they would not easily believe what tortures in Purgatory he had sustained unless they were eye-witnesses of them, he thought to represent to all their senses the image and idea of his combustion and broiling there, and the horrible stench of his sins accompanying, both under his frying and broiling on the coals in the Pope’s kitchen, and the intolerable smell or stink he sent forth under either. Una voce447 in this spleen to Pope Vigilius they ran, and craved that this King of Fishes might first have Christian burial; next, that he might have masses sung for him; and last, that for a saint he would canonize him. All these he granted, to be rid of his filthy redolence, and his chief casket wherein he put all his jewels he made the coffin of his enclosure, and for his ensainting, look the almanac in the beginning of April, and see if you can find out such a saint as Saint Gildarde, which in honour of this gilded fish the Pope so ensainted. Nor there he rested and stopped, but in the mitigation of the very embers whereupon he was singed (that after he was taken off them, fumed most fulsomely of his fatty droppings) he ordained ember weeks in their memory to be fasted everlastingly.

  I had well nigh forgot a special point of my Romish history, and that is how Madame Celina Cornficia, one of the curiosest courtesans of Rome, when the fame of the king of fishes was canon-roared in her ears, she sent all her jewels to the Jewish lombard to pawn, to buy and encaptive him to her trencher, but her purveyor came a day after the fair, and as he came so he fared, for not a scrap of him but the cobs448 of the two herrings the fisherman had eaten remained of him, and those cobs, rather than he would go home with a sleeveless449 answer, he bought at the rate of fourscore ducats – they were rich cobs450 you must rate them, and of them all cobbing country chuffs which make their bellies and their bags their gods are called rich cobs. Every man will not clap hands to this tale; the Norwichers imprimis, who say the first gilding of herrings was deducted from them, and after this guise they tune the accent of their speech, how that when Castor was Norwich (a town two mile beyond this Norwich, that is termed to this day Norwich Castor, and having monuments of a castle in it environing fifty acres of ground, and ringbolts in the walls whereto ships were fastened) our Norwich now upon her legs was a poor fisher town, and the sea sprawled and springed up to her common stairs in Confur Street.

  All this may pass in the Queen’s peace, and no man say bo to it. But bawwaw, quoth Bagshaw,451 to that which drawlatcheth452 behind, of the first taking of herrings there, and currying and gilding them amongst them whereof, if they could whisper to us any simple likelihood, or rawboned carcass of reason, more than their imaginary dream of Guilding Cross in their parish of St Saviour’s (now stumped up by the roots) so named, as they would have it, of the smo
ky gilding of herrings there first invented, I could well have allowed of, but they must bring better cards ere they win it from Yarmouth.

  As good a toy to mock an ape was it of him that showed a country fellow the Red Sea, where all the red herrings were made (as some places in the sea, where the sun is most transpiercing and beats with his rays ferventest, will look as red as blood), and the jest of a scholar in Cambridge, that standing angling on the town bridge there, as the country people on the market day passed by, secretly baited his hook with a red herring with a bell about the neck, and so conveying it into the water that no man perceived it, all on the sudden, when he had a competent throng gathered about him, up he twitched it again and laid it openly before them; whereat the gaping rural fools, driven into no less admiration than the common people about London some few years since were at the bubbling of Moorditch,453 sware by their christendoms that, as many days and years as they had lived, they never saw such a miracle of a red herring taken in the fresh-water before. That greedy seagull Ignorance is apt to devour anything. For a new Messias they are ready to expect of the bedlam hatmaker’s wife by London Bridge, he that proclaims himself Elias,454 and saith he is inspired with mutton and porridge. And with them it is current that Don Sebastian, King of Portugal (slain twenty years since with Stukeley at the Battle of Alcazar), is raised from the dead like Lazarus, and alive to be seen at Venice.455 Let them look to themselves as they will, for I am theirs to gull them better than ever I have done. And this I am sure: I have distributed gudgeon dole456 amongst them, as God’s plenty as any stripling of my slender portion of wit, far or near. They needs will have it so, much good do it them, I cannot do withal. For if but carelessly betwixt sleeping and waking I write I know not what against plebeian publicans and sinners (no better than the sworn brothers of candlestick turners and tinkers) and leave some terms in suspense that my post-haste want of argent will not give me elbow-room enough to explain or examine as I would, out steps me an infant squib of the Inns of Court, that hath not half greased his dining cap or scarce warmed his lawyer’s cushion, and he, to approve himself an extravagant statesman, catcheth hold of a rush, and absolutely concludeth it is meant of the Emperor of Russia and that it will utterly mar the traffic into that country if all the pamphlets be not called in and suppressed, wherein that libelling word is mentioned. Another, if but a head or a tail of any beast he boasts of in his crest or his scutcheon to be reckoned up by chance in a volume where a man hath just occasion to reckon up all beasts in armory,457 he straight engageth himself by the honour of his house and his never reculed458 sword, to thresh down the hairy roof of that brain that so seditiously mutinied against him, with the mortiferous bastinado, or cast such an uncurable Italian trench in his face, as not the basest creeper upon pattens by the highway side but shall abhor him worse than the carrion of a dead corse, or a max hanged up in gibbets.

  I will deal more boldly, and yet it shall be securely and in the way of honesty, to a number of God’s fools that for their wealth might be deep wise men and so forth (as nowadays in the opinion of the best lawyers of England there is no wisdom without wealth, allege what you can to the contrary of all the beggarly sages of Greece), these, I say, out of some discourses of mine, which were a mingle-mangle cum purre459 and I know not what to make of myself, have fished out such a deep politic state meaning as if I had all the secrets of court or commonwealth at my fingers’ ends Talk I of a bear, ‘Oh it is such a man that emblazons him in his arms’; or of a wolf, a fox, a chamelion, any lording whom they do not affect460 it is meant by. The great potentate, stirred up with those perverse applications, not looking into the text itself, but the ridiculous comment, or if he looks into it follows no other more charitable comment than that straight thunders out his displeasure and showers down the whole tempest of his indignation upon me, and to amend the matter, and fully absolve himself of this rash error of misconstruing, he commits it over to be prosecuted by a worse misconstruer than himself, videlicet his learned counsel (God forgive me if I slander them with that title of learned, for generally they are not), and they, being compounded of nothing but vociferation and clamour, rage and fly out they care not how against a man’s life, his person, his parentage, two hours before they come to the point, little remembering their own privy scrapes with their laundresses or their night walks to Pancredge,461 together with the hobnailed houses of their carterly ancestry from whence they are sprung, that have cold plough-jade’s buttocks time out of mind with the breath of their whistling, and with retailing their dung to manure lands and selling straw and chaff scratched up the pence to make them gentlemen. But, Lord, how miserably do these ethnics,462 when they once march to the purpose, set words on the tenters,463 never reading to a period (which you shall scarce find in thirty sheets of a lawyer’s declaration) whereby they might comprehend the entire sense of the writer together, but disjoint and tear every syllable betwixt their teeth severally. And if by no means they can make it odious, they will be sure to bring it in disgrace by ill-favoured mouthing and missounding it. These be those that use men’s writings like brute beasts, to make them draw which way they list, as a principal agent in church controversies of this our time complaineth. I have read a tale of a poor man and an advocate, which poor man complained to the King of wrong that the advocate had done him in taking away his cow. The King made him no answer but this, that he would send for the advocate and hear what he could say. ‘Nay,’ quoth the poor man, ‘if you be at that pass that you will pause to hear what he will say, I have utterly lost my cow, for he hath words enough to make fools of ten thousand.’ So he that shall have his lines bandied by our usual plodders in Fitzherbert,464 let him not care whether they be right or wrong, for they will writhe and turn them as they list, and make the author believe he meant that which he never did mean; and, for a knitting-up conclusion his credit is unreprievably lost, that on bare suspicion in such cases shall but have his name controverted amongst them. And if I should fall into their hands, I would be pressed to death for obstinate silence, and never seek to clear myself, for it is in vain, since both they will confound a man’s memory with their tedious babbling, and in the first three words of his Apology, with impudent exclamations interrupt him, whenas their mercenary tongues (lie they never so loudly) without check or control must have their free passage for five hours together.

  I speak of the worser sort, not of the best, whom I hold in high admiration, as well for their singular gifts of art and nature as their untainted consciences with corruption. And from some of them I avow I have heard as excellent things flow as ever I observed in Tully or Demosthenes. Those that were present at the arraignment of Lopus465 (to insist in no other particular) hereof I am sure will bear me record. Latinless dolts, saturnine heavy-headed blunderers, my invective hath relation to, such as count all arts puppet-plays and pretty rattles to please children in comparison of their confused barbarous law, which if it were set down in any Christian language but the Gretan tongue, it would never grieve a man to study it.

  Neither Ovid nor Ariosto could by any persuasions of their parents be induced to study civil law, for the harshness of it. How much more, had they been alive at this day and born in our nation, would they have consented to study this uncivil Norman hotchpotch, this sow of lead, that hath never a ring at the end to lift it up by, is without head or foot, the deformest monster that may be? I stand lawing466 here, what with these lawyers and self-conceited misinter-preters, so long that my red herring, which was hot broiling on the coals, is waxed stark cold for want of blowing. Have with them for a riddle or two, only to set their wits a-nibbling and their jobbernowls467 a-working, and so goodnight to their signories, but with this indictment and caution: that, though there be neither rhyme nor reason in it (as by my good will there shall not), they, according to their accustomed gentle favours, whether I will or no, shall supply it with either, and run over all the peers of the land in peevish moralizing and anatomizing of it.

  There was a herring, or
there was not, for it was but a cropshin468 one of the refuse sort of herrings, and this her ring or this cropshin was censed and thurified469 in the smoke and had got him a suit of durance that would last longer than one of Erra Pater’s almanacs470 or a constable’s brown bill, only his head was in his tail and that made his breath so strong that no man could abide him. Well, he was a Triton of his time, and a sweet singing calendar to the state, yet not beloved of the showery Pleiades or the Colossus of the sun, however he thought himself another tumidus Antimachus,471 as complete an Adelantado472 as he that is known by wearing a cloak of tuftaffatie473 eighteen year. And to Lady Turbot there is no demur but he would needs go a-wooing, and offered her for a dower whole hecatombs474 and a two-hand-sword. She stared upon him with Megaera’s475 eyes, like Iris the messenger of Juno, and bad him go eat a fool’s head and garlic, for she would none of him. Thereupon particularly strictly and usually he replied that though thunder ne’er lights on Phoebus’ tree,476 and Amphion, that worthy musician, was husband to Niobe, and there was no such acceptable incense to the heavens as the blood of a traitor, revenged he would be by one Chimera of imagination or other, and hamper and embrake477 her in those mortal straits for her disdain, that, in spite of divine symmetry and miniature, into her busky grove she should let him enter, and bid adieu, sweet lord, or the cramp of death should vrest her heart-strings.