The queen herself even examined him at Leicester House. She would have saved him if she could. She’d heard him lecture at Oxford on the moon and the tides, when he was a young man. But he didn’t say the right thing when she asked him The Bloody Question.
‘Which was?’
‘If the Pope invaded, which side would you fight on?’
He said: ‘I should so as God should give me grace.’
‘Equivocal.’
Unacceptable.
After that the warrants were issued to place him on the rack, where he stayed until his joints broke.
‘It never fails, does it?’
Inevitably the names began to come out, between the screams, names shrieked out of him by his torturers. And the horsemen arrived at the houses.
‘And the birds fled to the woods.’
If they had the chance. There were imprisonments, mysterious deaths. The Stratford schoolmaster left his post – unsurprising as his Jesuit brother was a member of the Campion mission and was tried along with him. At their trial Campion struck out. ‘In condemning us you condemn all your ancestors, all the ancient bishops and kings, all that was once the glory of England.’
‘Stirring stuff.’
If you’re a Catholic. He was then taken to Tyburn where he parted company with his genitals, bowels, and heart.
‘I like a bit of heart. Do we have to go into this?’
It was the first day of December, a chilly day for the solemn opening of the doors of your belly, when you feel the frost in your intestines. The snow goes gory for a moment and Campion’s body heat rises hissing from the ground. Heaven? That’s somewhere above the spectators’ heads, so they say, but the smoke of bloody execution vanishes before it even reaches eye level, it’s so cold. That’s how easy it is to snuff out a fire in the guts, no matter how holy the fuel, how heavenly the vision.
‘Out, out, brief candle – did somebody once say?’
I’ll wager Campion didn’t find it easy, though.
‘And I’ll wager nobody saw his soul as it rose up through the steam and made for paradise…’
Nobody saw my kinsman Edward Arden’s either, not even those members of our family who went up to London in secret to be there for him, to give moral support from the crowd – though what support you give to a man minus half his innards is a curious question.
‘Interesting family background, Will. And when was that one?’
That happened two years after Campion, courtesy of our local Puritan big cheese, Sir Thomas Lucy, under orders from Protestant Robert Dudley, now Elizabeth’s number one earl. Lucy harassed my father. And I took more than rabbits from his warren to pay him back for that.
‘Now Will, there are certain things a lawyer shouldn’t know.’
The time’s long gone by since that was actionable. I was young and high-spirited, and he made poaching a felony. But better a poacher than a Catholic, if Lucy was after your blood.
‘Was he such a thorn in your flesh?’
It was Lucy who helped mastermind the raids on known Catholic houses in Warwickshire, including a strike against our kinsman. Arden was arrested on false charges of conspiracy to kill the queen. His only crime, if you can call it that, had been to refuse to wear Leicester’s livery during the Kenilworth fireworks, preferring instead to refer to Dudley as an upstart adulterer. His real crime, of course, was that he was a Catholic, a member of the Old Religion and of the old gentry of Warwickshire, the enemies of the Elizabethan élite.
‘Dangerous days.’
Days you might never live through safely – not if you were a Catholic and they were on your trail. So the Queen’s agents rampaged through houses like wild leopards, pawing the panels, squinting wild-eyed and whiskered for secret chambers, sniffing the beds to see if they’d been slept in. Were there hairs on the pillows? Siftings of skin? Were the mattresses still warm? No, they weren’t, because the women had turned them over and re-made the beds. That didn’t persuade the Jesuit hunters. They had nostrils like the hounds of God that could sniff out papists even when they were standing ankle-deep in the effluence of the principal shitter, the cloaca maxima, that emptied into the moat.
‘Your family must have been all the time on edge.’
It was families like my mother’s that left the little local churches their best black damask gowns to be made into copes, and their two-year old heifers to help towards the maintenance of the church bells. And this was the extent of Arden’s villainy, this affection for the old churches, the old saints, and the older version of world history, which in their long view went right back to Peter and to Jesus Christ.
‘So they believed.’
A belief is enough. A belief can kill you. It was enough to put him in the picture – the Somerville-Throgmorton frame.
‘What?’
Yet another plot against the life of Elizabeth. So Arden was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Smithfield and his head spiked on London Bridge five days before yuletide.’
‘Gentle Jesus!’
Five years later, when I made my move to the capital, it was still there, the head. I couldn’t recognise him. You wouldn’t believe how a spell on London Bridge alters a man’s features so that even his own family can’t pick him out from the crowd. And there’s quite a crowd of heads on good old London Bridge.
‘I know, I’ve seen them.’
Just before I left for London my father took me up to the Henley Street loft and showed me something he’d hidden between the eaves and the joists when they’d searched our houses after Arden’s execution. It was his own copy of the Catholic Testament, also the gift of Campion, whose tarred and eyeless head now gaped blackly over the Thames. He seemed to have forgotten about my copy, and I never troubled him with the thought of it.
‘Look at it, Will,’ he whispered, so softly that you’d have thought the earth-clad mole deep beneath us listened for every word.
‘And read it, Will, read it aloud, quietly as you can.’
I knew it already, but I looked and read.
It was the same six-page book, each page handwritten and then signed in the name of John Shakespeare, who protested thereby that he was both willing and did infinitely desire that of this his last will and testament the glorious Virgin Mary might be chief Executresse, together with all the saints etcetera. And he begged and beseeched all his kinsfolk, in the bowels of his Saviour Jesus Christ, to sing masses for his soul after his death especially, he said, as I may be possibly cut off even in the blossoms of my sin.
‘Jesus.’
Exactly. After I’d finished reading I felt the hand that killed the cattle tightening on mine.
‘Pray for my soul in purgatory, Will.’
And pity me not. But lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold.
He then launched into the longest speech I ever heard from him. ‘Keep your beliefs just like this’ (that’s how it went) ‘hidden away up in the roof of your head. Don’t let anybody look into the windows of your eyes. And above all let nothing slip out of the door.’
‘Your gob?’
‘Give every man thine ear but few thy voice.’
‘Ah, old Polonius!’
‘Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar, beware of entrance to a quarrel, take each man’s censure but reserve thy judgement, costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, neither a borrower nor a lender be’ – yes, that was my father, no philosopher.
‘To thine own self be true?’
It would never even have occurred to him, not in a month of martyrs, quite the reverse, I can assure you. No, that was me, a humble line but ’twas mine own. My father didn’t get where he was by being true to himself. Truth was hardly the currency of the age, was it?
‘You say right.’
When he’d finished that longest speech of his life he asked me to kiss the little book that Campion had given to him, as he had to me with eyes on fire. It wouldn’t necessarily save your soul, he said, but it could easily shorten your life. Let i
t stay where it is, then. And he tucked it away, wedged it back into its hiding place, wrapped up in blackness, but close to the blue air and the eyes of cherubim and birds.
I expect it’s still there to this day.
‘What, up in Henley Street? Jesus!’
A careful man, my father. It wasn’t until Leicester died that he told me what he knew: that Protestant Leicester, who didn’t like the Ardens in general and had fought with Edward Arden in particular, had made up his mind to crush the family, and that’s why he had Edward arrested on those trumped up charges of treason. He was able to do it and to get away with it, the Puritan prick, though his own prick was far from pure. At that time he was dipping it on a regular basis well into a certain lady-in-waiting to the queen, while waiting his chance to fuck Her Majesty – in the very same house where he was busy screwing the gentlewoman.
‘The things you’ve known, Will.’
I suppose you could admire the sheer nerve of the bastard. But how the queen, who didn’t like Puritans, liked Leicester, remains something of an irony to me, though I’ve long ceased to puzzle over the power of a straight pizzle to bend the judgement of a pliable lady – whether she’s in waiting or in power.
‘So long as she’s in bed.’
The rules of the bed-game change all the others – politics, religion, even plain old-fashioned commonsense. The curious thing is that even as I stood at Leicester’s Fantasia in 1575 with my eyes popping out on stalks, the maestro himself was probably busy in the real world, plotting to crush the Ardens. Even at that time. And even at that time I knew that we were outsiders, keeping our outsides inside – discreetly hidden from the queen’s thought-spies.
‘It’s little wonder you’re old before your time – saving your presence.’
The following year the queen set up her Grand Commission to order, correct, reform, and punish any persons wilfully and obstinately absenting themselves from church and service. Civic officers such as my father now had to take the oath of allegiance to the queen – and their allegiance included religious allegiance to a monarch who was supreme head of the English Church.
‘Shades of Henry the Eighth.’
No shades of Thomas More, though, not in my father. When he said that he was not the stuff of which martyrs were made, he meant it. Nevertheless fines were levied against Catholics – which he refused to pay – and names were demanded.
‘You were on the wrong end of a witch-hunt.’
That’s putting it mildly. Some folk had even begun to laugh at witches. Nobody laughed at Catholics. And it wasn’t long afterwards that my father’s troubles started. He woke up one morning to find himself being prosecuted for shadowy dealings in usury and in wool – there were strict laws about brogging and shylocking – though I can tell you that the man who informed against him could hardly have been described as one of Warwickshire’s most honest and industrious characters.
‘Langrake?’
A rapist and an assassin. Also a small-fry spy, the kind of scum that those in power scoop up, dry out, and put in store for their purposes. Not that any of this mattered. My father, high on the wheel for twenty years and more, took the downward turn.
‘Never to come up again.’
He left off attending his council meetings, mortgaged and lost properties, houses, lands in Wilmcote and Snitterfield, was fined for various legal indiscretions and circumstances with his neighbours, and was also penalised for non-attendance at church, which he shunned like the plague for fear of process for debt – a debtor was always a good target on a Sunday, in spite of the injunction to let trespasses be forgiven. It’s true that there were some well-heeled Catholics who pretended to be bankrupt as an excuse for not attending the Anglican services, but my father wasn’t one of them. His eyes twinkled in the good times – they never burned like Campion’s. He never wore his Catholicism on his sleeve and he suffered the badge of the new compromise religion sensibly, going to church like a good child of the times.
‘So it was really money troubles that kept him away in the end?’
But in the eyes of the true Catholics he was just another backslider, a time-server and a liar, his spiritual bankruptcy echoing his empty coffers. And the richly left Mary Arden saw all her substance swiftly eaten away around the financial failures of this Snitterfield nobody who’d risen fast and far but had overreached himself in the end. Do you know she had her own private seal? A galloping horse. She had energy and pride. Whether or not he was on one of the blacklists of church or state made no difference to my mother. She was a spirited woman and understood one thing – that whatever the reason for it, social decline went only one way and that was down the road of humiliation and disgrace.
‘A big come-down.’
Especially as the drinking started then, and the vicious mole of nature came out in him. How could I blame him? He became funnier in a way – more human. Toby, Falstaff, Claudius, Cassio – human beings, Francis. But sweep away the fun, and what are you left with? Failure. Not that I didn’t sympathize with failure, with a fallen man, a troubled king.
There was a bitter price for me too. I was told one morning that my time with Jenkins was over, and without warning I exchanged the golden world of Ovid for the blood and grease of the Rothermarket and the stench of the shambles. Jenkins had said I might go to university. Destiny now demanded that I should be a butcher, a dresser of leather and a maker of gloves. My father’s fall changed everything.
‘Things could hardly have gotten worse.’
They could have got a lot worse. And almost did. I was sent off to Lancashire for a while.
‘That sink of popery.’
Well put, Francis. I was almost washed down with the best of them. That’s when I saw Campion again, not long before he was caught, and the whole sticky web was spun around me – to change the metaphor. I don’t like images of drowning.
‘What was going on?’
What was going on? There was always something going on. It went on for years. My old schoolmaster, Simon Hunt, had defected to Douai, taking with him one of his pupils, Robert Debdale, not much older than me. He had family in Shottery. Then schoolmaster John Cottam’s brother Thomas started off for Shottery with beads and crucifix and self-damning letter from Debdale. He never made it. He lay with the Scavenger’s Daughter before he was hanged and disembowelled – as was Debdale. They all came to the scaffold in time.
‘Did they try to involve you?’
What do you think? They were suicidal freaks, holy soldiers. I could have gone to Shottery under orders. As it was I went there on another mission – a mission of the heart – after I came back from Lancashire.
‘What were you doing in Shottery?’
All in good time, Francis. This was a melancholy time in our lives, after my father’s fall. And to further mark that melancholy time came three deaths that joined hands in triumvirate and sat on brood over an altered existence. The hatch and disclose would cast a blackness over the start of the eighties.
12
Francis had done rather well for a beefy lawyer, but at the mention of three deaths, he wilted and went off for another piss. When he returned he was revived, but not for chatter, or for legal work.
‘Will, if we’re to continue, can you order up some lunch?’
Yes, Francis, what’s your fancy?
‘Well, the subject of veal came up not so long ago. I don’t sup--p-ose –’
I’ll see what I can do.
Ding-dong bell.
It took some time and led to much small talk over much small beer that I’d managed to ask Alison to smuggle in. She’s a good girl, and helps me out. When she appeared with the veal, however, she was attended by Anne, whose only service was a shadow’s, casting that long look of reproach over the proceedings, as if the veal itself were in some measure accessory to a deathbed plot to outface the grim reaper with junket and jest. The beer was by that time under the bed, thanks to Francis’s fat but nimble fingers, though she may have nose
d it as she came in. I know every nerve in that face, and in the merest arch of an eyebrow I have learned to read passages of disparagement for a life ill-lived. Probably she thinks I’m dying of the pox. And possibly I am. Who but Hermes knows what hidden harms remain to plague me? Well, veal won’t cure me, whatever ails me, and that’s a surety.
Now good digestion wait on appetite.
‘And health on both.’
And all at once Francis was ripping into it like the good trencherman he’ll always be. Unless one day he drops stone-dead without the shadow of a question on his fat lips, I’ll be praying for him in eternity anon, to mend his ways.
‘Do you want the mustard Will?’
Not without mustard. Yes, that would be Francis’s last likely query, facing eternity. Hell on toast – and don’t forget the mustard.
But no, Francis, I’m not even having the veal, in case you hadn’t noticed.
‘What a waste! Well, all the more for the law, eh?’
But you may pour me some beer.
‘I’ll have some wine with this, if it’s all right with you.’
Make yourself at home, my friend, and reckon not the cost. It’ll all be coming out of my estate, won’t it?
A veal-hung pause.
‘Your estate. Ah, now I’m glad you asked that question. You’ve got one remaining sister.’
A sister. Yes, I had a little sister and the shadows took her. Till then death had been an abstraction, a bible story, a pile of bones, a slack-arsed old sexton. People turned pale, turned to stone, they dwindled – or they disappeared at once and you never saw them again. With Anne it was different. It was my first experience of death in the family.
One day in 1579 it was, when she suddenly fell ill. A hard February cough at first to keep the house awake, to stop me from sleeping in the chilly hours before dawn. Followed by a March fever, with weird little noises coming out of her, to the accompaniment of the crows in the elms, the bare winds banging the shutters. There was a flush on her face, roses damp with death’s first dew. Early herald of its endless day. As we went into rainy April the fever passed – but still Anne failed to find the strength to rise. An April wasting that was sadder than the dribbling plainsong of the rain, day-long, night-long, down on quiet windows that year. I was fifteen at the time. She was seven. And the house grew heavy with the knowledge that she was going to die. She stopped asking questions about herself, about anything. She stopped answering, stopped listening, stopped eating and sleeping, she neither smiled nor cried. Then one day she simply stopped.
Will Page 12
