Death of Kings

by Philip Gooden

  Motioning to me, my companion made his way round the edge of the hall. The others with him were absorbed into the crowd. I kept faithfully at his heels. I was, in truth, a little alarmed at the possibility of losing sight of him. There was small sign here of the privacy which he had promised. Those who saw us cleared a small passage, sometimes urging others to get out of the way, but frequently we had to tug at sleeves or push shoulders to pass through. Consequently, it took several minutes to travel a matter of yards. We were further delayed because the crowd was distracted. Moments after we’d started, a hush fell over the hall which, for an instant, I attributed to our arrival. But then a figure seemed to rise up out of the crush, swaying unsteadily at the far end of the hall. At first I thought he was being hoist aloft by the arms and shoulders of the crowd. But as he found his footing it was evident that he had been placed on some sort of dais. He was dressed in the black-and-white of the Puritan preacher. He stood there, a thin dark candle of a man topped by a thin white face which was lit up with zeal. His mouth gaped. He was all a-fire to speak.

  My late father was a preacher. I am well disposed towards them as a species. The best of them have few equals . . . and as for the rest, well, they are mostly no worse than our fallen fellows. But the Puritans or square-toes are different. If we theatre folk are cats, then the Puritans are dogs to us; we instinctively arch our backs and spit, or experience a sudden sharp desire to flee from their fluting tones and narrow condemnation. They loathe the playhouse and all its works, and many other things as well, with a passion that far exceeds their love for God and His saints. It is true that my father also hated plays and players but I ascribed this to his ignorance and his innocence, for he had never attended a playhouse in his life. In himself, away from the church, he was a mild man. Were he alive, he would long ago have forgiven me for my disreputable way of life. Or so I choose to believe.

  I wondered again what this being, this Puritan spouter, was doing in such motley company. Among gallants who whored and gambled and captains who drank and swore, as well as, most probably, ruffians who stole and did worse. Necessity makes strange bedfellows. When the crowd was properly quiet, this individual started to orate in a reedy but powerful voice. I listened, I had no choice but to listen, even as we pushed and shoved our path through the crush. The gentleman who had intervened to help me by the gate was still leading the way.

  “My brothers in Christ,” the speaker began, “oh, dear brothers in Christ, I am moved in spirit to be here this day and to speak before you, to raise my voice in protest against the foul face of these times. The houses of the unholy – the settlements of Satan – the tents of the wicked – we see that they are pitched not a quarter of a mile from where we stand. There sits a woman and her crooked councillors—”

  There were murmurs at this, not of anger or shock but, as it seemed, of assent. If I could have clapped my hands over my ears without drawing attention to the gesture, I would have done it, so alarmed was I at the preacher’s words. To hear treason uttered, even against one’s wishes, is to feel contaminated by it. I was conscious too of the dreadful risk this preacher man was running, and wondered at his impudence and daring. If caught and tried, he might well have lost his ears for abusing those of others by speaking ill of her majesty. Yet this evidently did not weigh with him for, pleased with the reception of his treasonous words, he repeated them with yet more force.

  “—a woman and her crooked councillors, I say. One in particular has a body which is as twisted as his mind and spirit and so all may see that he bears the mark of the beast [I supposed it was Sir Robert Cecil, with his hunch-back, whom he meant]. And what do these profane councillors of corruption – these Satanic suggesters who crawl on their bellies the better to raise their heads in pride – what is it that they seek? What is their infernal quest? Why, to persuade our sovereign lady [but the sneering way that he uttered the phrase indicated that he considered our Queen to be neither sovereign nor a lady] that the safety of the realm lies across the water. With a foreign bastard wrapped in the robes of Rome. We shall be sold to the whore of Babylon, I tell you. We shall be strangled in the bands of the Antichrist.”

  At this, the murmurs rose to groans and oaths and shrieks of – of outrage, approval, indignation, I could not tell. From the point of view of a player, I could not but admire the skill with which this preacher was working on his congregation. In fact, I was a little affected by his words myself and with difficulty stopped myself mouthing quiet assent, despite my abhorrence of treason.

  All this time I continued to squeeze my way though the press of men round the perimeter of the hall of Essex House, dogging my protector’s heels, and presuming we should soon arrive at some place of privacy. So it proved, for a moment later he ducked through a doorway to his left, glancing over his shoulder to ensure that I was still behind him. Before we got safely shut away from the hall and the ranting, however, I heard the speaker’s voice rising and strengthening as he reached some kind of peroration.

  “Brothers in Christ, there comes a time in the affairs of this vale of tears when it is needful for men to follow the dictates of their consciences. This tells us that compulsion is lawful, yes, compulsion even against the highest in the land.”

  Cries of agreement, gestures of assent.

  “Oh compulsion, my brothers. Sweet word, compulsion. On such occasions it is God Himself thrusts the arms into our hands and bids us use them.”

  Then the door was shut behind us.

  We were in a small closet. From beyond the walls came the preacher’s urging, but muffled, together with the sussuration of the crowd, like the wind playing through a stand of tall trees.

  There was a table in the room and a couple of chairs. It was dark-panelled, with only a modicum of light coming through a small high window. The room might have been designed for close conversation. I attempted to study my companion, who took up his station on the far side of the table, but the gloom made this difficult. Even so, it seemed to me that a slight smile hovered about his face. His broad brow glimmered. He motioned towards a chair on one side of the table and reclined gracefully in the other. I dabbed at the underside of my chin with the door-keeper’s silken scrap. The blood no longer trickled. My ruff would require laundering.

  “Master Busy is in his element. He is good for another hour yet.”

  He gestured slightly towards the hall in which the reedy voice still sounded. I was glad I didn’t have to listen to such seditious material for an hour.

  “The smoke and the oaths remind me of the playhouse,” I said, “and that is one place where you would not expect to find a Puritan divine. He is not really Master Busy?”

  “That is what I call him,” said the other.

  “And what is his element?”

  “Dissent is his element. That is what he is drawn to.”

  “He is a Thunderer,” I said.

  “Is that a sect?”

  “Oh no. I mean that he is a Thunderer to my mind. I catalogue preachers as Thunderers, Reasoners or Shepherds.”

  “And whiners and pedants,” said the man on the other side of the table. “Or rabble-rousers.” His eyes moved door-wards.

  I was puzzled by the detached nature of these remarks, as if the speaker was removing himself from the words and activities on the far side of the closet wall.

  “And what is your element, Master Revill?”

  “I’m just a poor player, sir, entrusted with a message.”

  “The defence of ignorance and simplicity, eh? You’ll be telling me next you didn’t understand what Busy was saying, about the crooked councillors and the foreign bastard in Roman garb.”

  “I – don’t – well, not—”

  It is strange how reluctant one is to own up to ignorance, even about disreputable matters.

  “Come. It is well known, is it not, that there is a plot?”

  “A plot? Yes, there is always a plot.” (This seemed the safest thing to say. And true too.)

 
“A plot involving Cecil and Cobham and Raleigh.”

  “Oh their plot, yes.”

  “You may pretend not to know, Master Revill, but I tell you that your playing does not convince me.”

  In another’s mouth, these words might have been a threat but with this gentleman they conveyed passing amusement. His voice, too, was peculiarly dulcet and lulling. One could have listened to it without searching for meaning, as one listens to birdsong or the gentle purl of a stream.

  I shrugged helplessly, as if he had seen right through me, while all the time I hadn’t the faintest notion what he was talking about.

  “They are plotting – Cecil and Cobham and Raleigh . . .”

  He paused, as if he expected me to finish the sentence for him. Evidently he still thought I was feigning ignorance. I shrugged again, placatingly. In the gap while neither of us said anything, I had leisure to reflect on the irony of a player’s being accused of acting when he was merely being his innocent, simple self. When the other man finally realised I wasn’t going to break my silence, he spoke up.

  “They are plotting to make the Spanish Infanta the successor to the English throne. That is what Cecil and Cobham and Raleigh intend. You must surely know that, Master Revill? Everybody knows that.”

  As if to confirm his words, there was another burst of shouting and groaning from the far side of the door.

  “I – well, now you say so – I—”

  “It is the talk of the town, from tavern to palace.”

  “The talk of the town, yes.”

  I realised now that in the hot and fevered air of Essex House all sorts of wild notions and strange conceits might grip the minds and fancies of those who filled its precincts. What appeared to this gentleman to be ‘the talk of the town’ was no more than the discontented delirium of the Essexites. Why, the Spanish Infanta . . . successor to the throne . . . ridiculous! Cecil, Cobham and Raleigh plotting to this end . . . absurd!

  Yet, although this was my instinctive response, a tiny doubt crept into my mind. Perhaps this gentleman was in possession of facts – of secrets – which were hidden from ordinary mortals like me. He looked as though he might be, for he was obviously well connected. In addition, he spoke with a quiet assurance and, as I have described, his tone had a peculiar, ears-enchanting quality. As my eyes grew accustomed to the closet’s gloom, and I had more leisure for study, I saw too that he was not merely well dressed but finely dressed. His doublet was of white silk and his purple trunks and knee breeches were gold-encrusted. The flower-embroidered gauntlets he had been carrying were now laid between us on the table. I wondered whether he decked himself out every day as though he might be going to sit for his portrait.

  “Now, Master Revill, you have a message?”

  He gazed direct at me and I saw that his eyes possessed a particular brilliance.

  “Not for all ears. For . . . HW only.”

  “You are speaking to him. I am HW, Henry Wriothesley.”

  This was as I had half suspected. Even so, I was jolted by the realisation that I was talking to the Earl of Southampton.

  “I – I guessed as much.”

  “Then let me guess a little in return.” The same mild smile played around his lips. I wondered what this easy-going man was doing in a nest of rebels and malcontents, indulging in fantasies or nightmares about Cecil and Raleigh and the Spanish Infanta. Outside in the hall, the preacher’s reedy tones rose and fell, with crowd’s noises as a ground-bass.

  The Earl pursed his lips and pretended to be puzzled. “Let me guess. As to the identity of the person who has entrusted you with a message, now. Would his first initial be a W and his last one be an S, so that the two being put together make WS?”

  “Yes,” I said tersely, feeling that he was mocking me for my coyness in not naming him outright.

  “William Shakespeare?”

  “Yes. Our author.”

  “Our?”

  For some reason he seemed put out by my description. I was quite pleased to see this.

  “I mean our author at the Chamberlain’s. He is a shareholder – and sometimes a player too.”

  “I know this,” said Wriothesley. “Now tell me something I don’t know. What is the message that you have brought?’

  “It doesn’t make much sense to me,” I said.

  “It doesn’t have to. After all, you yourself said you were only a poor player. Out with it now, man.”

  I hesitated. There is a difference between calling oneself ‘a poor player’ and being so described by another. But the larger reason for my hesitating was the nature of the message I had to pass on. It really did not make much sense, and I suddenly became self-conscious about speaking the words in front of this great nobleman.

  “Very well. I was asked to say this to you (clearing my throat and taking a deep breath like some journeyman actor):

  ‘For shame deny that thou bear’st love to any

  Who for thy self art so improvident.’ ”

  After I’d recited these two lines there was a pause. I feared that there was some covert insult in them.

  “And that was all,” I said.

  A change had come over the face of the man lounging opposite me. The playful, half-mocking look had gone to be replaced by an expression that was almost wistful. The brilliant eyes seemed dimmed.

  “No more is necessary,” he said. “Tell me, how is Master Shakespeare – and Burbage and the others?”

  I was about to say something to the effect that he should know, since one of his party (to wit, Sir Gelli Merrick) had visited the Globe playhouse only the day before, when I realised that the visit had been sub rosa – certainly intended to be concealed from a poor player like Nick Revill and possibly not even known to a great player like the Earl of Southampton.

  “The winter is a lean period for all playhouses,” I said.

  “Yet you have the Queen’s favour, and that must take some of the edge off the chills and rain of winter.”

  Was it my imagination or was there a sharpness to his comment? For it was universally known that the individual in whose mansion we were sitting, the Earl of Essex, had until recently been the Queen’s favourite, indeed her chiefest favourite. But now, like Icarus, he had tumbled down as low as he had once flown high. The sun of the Queen’s favour had turned to ice. As with other great men at court, Southampton’s fortunes too could rise and fall. Since he had hitched his wagon to Essex’s train, those fortunes must of necessity have been on the wane. Still, it must be galling in the extreme to have basked in the Queen’s favour once and then to watch others warming themselves in the same place now – even if it was only a company of players.

  “We are to perform soon in her presence,” I said, hoping that a simple statement of fact would not offend or provoke him.

  “God willing, you will perform – and she will watch it,” he said mysteriously, then fell silent. Outside, the preacher continued to pipe his tune. Henry Wriothesley seemed to gather himself to say more. “Though I am glad enough that your company prospers, I meant to ask after particular individuals in it rather than the collective.”

  “Master Shakespeare?”

  I thought of Nemo’s words – ‘he and . . . this gentleman you have mentioned . . . were once friends’.

  “Yes, it is him I mean,” said Southampton. “He is well?”

  “I have no reason to think otherwise,” I said – rather formally perhaps.

  “As well as the indifferent children of the earth?”

  “What? Oh, yes,” I said, picking up the allusion to WS’s own Hamlet.

  “Happy in that he is not over-happy, you mean.”

  “On Fortune’s cap he is not the very button.”

  “No player – or author – can be that, I think. There are no great fortunes to be made in the playhouse, in any sense.”

  “You are better off so. Fortune gives only to take away.”

  “What she takes she can restore,” I said, with matching sententiousn
ess.

  “Perhaps, but she is truly a strumpet and no man should depend on her favours.”

  The image of Nell flashed across my mind.

  “He was very particular that I should speak to you in person.”

  “Who?”

  “Master Shakespeare.”

  “Return my greetings to him. You do not mind being a messenger, Master Revill? A Mercury?”

  “Not in the least.”

  And at that moment I did not. Listening to this graceful, slightly melancholy man, I had already fallen under the spell of his voice and his manner. I could understand how WS might have picked him out for a friend, or the other way about. Although he was perhaps only a year or two older than I was, he seemed far ahead of me in experience.

  “Thank him for his words. They are like him. They are his own words too, of course.”

  “I – I assumed so.”

  “I should reply in kind. Let me see.”

  This time the pause and puzzlement on Henry Wriothesley’s face was genuine. He was evidently searching his memory.

  “Ah, yes. I have it. Tell him this.”

  The Earl of Southampton straightened himself slightly in his seat. Without the preamble of throat clearing, he said:

  “ ‘Lo in the orient when the gracious light

  Lifts up his burning head, each under eye

  Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,

  Serving with looks his sacred majesty . . .’ ”

  “You should have been a player, my lord,” I said, when it was evident he was going to say no more. “Your voice would have brought in a thousand.”

  The compliment, untainted by flattery, slipped out. In fact it was the kind of remark which might easily be taken amiss. There are many men – and not all of them well-born either – who would be happy to take offence at having the low trade of the stage suggested to them. Yet Henry Wriothesley appeared the true gentleman when he inclined his head in acknowledgement of my words, used though he must have been to hearing his praises sung. Furthermore, he returned my compliment winged.

  “Experto crede, Master Revill. When the expert speaks we must believe him.”