‘Behave yourself, my boy. Remember your age.’
It was the age of compromise. Dead Edward’s Protestant Prayer Book, talking to God in English, private arrangement, do it yourself, a plain Protestant queen, no windows in men’s souls, but windows in their bellies or oaths on their lips. Believe what you like, or must – only conform, and escape the hangman’s noose, and worse, his blade. And make your faces vizors to your hearts.
It was the age of outwardness. Of seeming. Add to that plots and massacres and seminary scholars, a Bull of Excommunication on a sovereign queen, infiltrators from Douai, Rheims, holes in houses, priests in privies grinning up to their necks in rich reeking papish turds, a land honeycombed with secret cells, sticky with slime and Spain – and you have every sleeper in the country wide awake. The Spaniard alone proved a night-owl. Spain had also murdered sleep – and the knife was under Mary’s pillow.
It was the age of plots. Elizabeth had grown up among plots. She herself was the fruit of her royal father’s most infamous plot and as soon as he was dead the fruit scattered its seeds. She sat like a bright fly at the trembling centre of a web of spiders – not all of them Spanish spiders by any means: there were plenty of English house-spiders hidden in the cracks. They were going to stab her, smother her, blow her at the moon, infect her food and drink, poison her stirrup, her shoe, her dress, her comb, destroy her by some other horrible Italian device. Deadly perfumes were under concoction, inflammable oils for drawing curtains of flames across bedchambers, around the royal bed itself, sending a sleeping queen shrieking into a swift and red eternity. Oh, most horrible, I promise you! Most bloody, most sudden, most terrible – and most true.
It was the age of Mary. Quick to wrath, our English queen was slow enough to send her Scottish cousin into the next world. She’d been sitting on it for twenty years and in the year I came to London the egg finally hatched. And yet even then, when the serpent’s egg cracked open and the papist snakes came slithering into her skirts, still she agonised. For there’s such divinity doth hedge a king, or queen…
It was the age of Babington. Yes, the plot that finally brought Mary to the block, exchanging feathery metaphors for a sharp axe and a sealed coffin. When I came up from Stratford four months later it was still the talk of London.
It began with Ballard the priest, but a man called Poley was in there too. Ballard corrupted Babington, who’d been a page of Mary’s when she was at Sheffield. A cat may look at a king, and a page can come pretty close to poor puss, especially when puss is pretty, and when pussy cares to purr, which Mary knew how to do. And Babington came of rich old church stock. To a papist no pussy purrs like Catholic pussy. He was an impressionable pothead – easily infiltrated. Mary to him was next to mother of God and he dreamed of celestial intercourse. His political dreams were simple. And dreadful. And so he drew in a dozen conspirators, six of whom were to kill the queen, with Mary’s written consent. Walsingham knew every word of it – letters intercepted, decoded, sent on again, the conspirers given all the rope they needed to hang themselves – and the Walsingham net closed, and the spymaster’s spiders pounced.
There were traitors enough to require a two-day diet of executions, seven at a time brought onto the scaffold, a scene so frightful first time round that the crowd spared the second batch from the full rigour of the torments prescribed by law although the queen had specially requested new techniques to ensure maximum suffering for all. Even the hardened hangers-on at Tyburn, the mob-dogs that cheered on the executioner and lapped up the spillages, even this hard core were shaken by the brutality of the dismemberings and disembowellings. Babington himself was not deprived of his rightful share of the agonies of execution. He and his companions poured out their lives in pain – what Topcliffe the torturer had cleverly left them of their lives – and it was said that their screams from the scaffold could be heard over six counties of England, carrying even further than Edward the Second’s when that white-hot poker shot up his back passage and frizzled his innards to nothing, to a black hole, in one unbelievable second. As for Babington’s cries, I never heard them in Stratford and if I had I might have stayed far from London, for he and his companions died slowly and loudly and their excruciating shrieks sent flocks of shocked seabirds winging their way darkly northward, echoing the shrieks as they flew. An old man looks up from his September stubble, a witch-woman from her Snitterfield shithouse, they hear the cries, see the dark shapes in the sky and mutter their spooky conclusions: ‘Ah! there go the souls of Babington and his friends, and they’ll be snatched by the devil before they get far, you mark my words.’ And so perish all the queen’s enemies.
It was the age of Elizabeth. She was the belle of the English ball, and she queened it on the English stage. She could make the melody that England longed to hear, the song that sends men melting mad with ecstasy. She knew how to pluck St Crispin’s string, to find it in the hearts of Englishmen and strum it as hard as Robin’s robin.
‘Bonny sweet Robin? Did you hear the redbreast sing?’
Yes, I heard it then, though the age of Leicester was worn bare by ’87 and Dudley himself but a year left to live. He’d sprung from a race of greedy upstart crooks, his treacherous grandfather had been executed by axeman Henry and his plotter father by Mary and the sons sent to the Tower. There Dudley had met Bess, also a prisoner at the time, and mutual incarceration added to the chemistry, forming a strong bond.
‘That’s putting it politely, perchance?’
Some of the courtiers sniggered that he wetted her fancy whenever he entered the room – you could hear her itch for him – and when she came to power she made him Master of the Horse.
‘Or Master of the Mare.’
As he was quickly christened. She might even have married him, except for the small matter of his being married already, to Amy Robsart. So when Amy was found at home one Sunday noon, dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs with broken neck, there was ample scope for speculation. She had breast cancer, it was said, though she suspected poison – and a servant’s evidence pointed to suicide, to escape the pain and the full prowl of the wolf.
‘Or the cancer of an aimless existence.’
There are worse things than the wolf. On the day she died every-one in the house had gone to Abingdon Fair, apart from a brace of ladies, so an assassin could have slipped in like a shadow and earned easy money – a simple push, an accident. She was drowsy with drugs after all, had been drinking a lot to dull the pain, and by this time had brittle bones. And who knows if that was all there was to it, unless you saw the hand of God there, clearing the way for a queen of England to marry a man she loved, and he an Englishman to boot, and down to his boots.
‘And yet but a subject.’
And she a sovereign. And his family tainted with treason. Though the coroner’s verdict was death by misadventure, the people’s verdict was murder and they were muddied, thick and unwholesome in their thoughts and whispers for little Amy’s death.
‘And the sea-winds caught the gossip.’
In France Mary Stuart had shown her claws and sneered that the English queen was about to marry her horse-keeper, and other nations joined the French in asking what sort of religion held sway in a country where a subject murdered his wife and not only got away with it but was rewarded with his sovereign’s hand in marriage. Besides which, to marry Dudley would have been to remove herself from the chessboard of the European marriage market.
An impossible choice. She dammed up desire and tried to act like a prince. But at Whitehall she had his suite of rooms moved to the first floor next to her own, his own ground floor apartments suffering from the damp – too close to the river, it would seem. And he’d come into her bedchamber at dawn and hand her her shift. Oh, she knew how to keep the dog panting, and he couldn’t contemplate a second marriage while he was the object of the queen’s affection. Yet this was the game he was expected to play and if it didn’t end in bed it earned him the condemnation of the court for th
e ambitious upstart that he was.
And so: exhausted by her virginity, he started to sleep with Lettice Knollys, voluptuously lovely, Lady Hereford and the queen’s first cousin. He’d already slept with Lady Sheffield, made her pregnant, and undergone a ceremony of sorts, all in huggermugger. Then, when Lord Hereford died, he tried to persuade Lady Sheffield to keep pussy in the bag, the ceremony never having amounted to a wedding. And for five years she’d thought herself fast married. The queen had given him Kenilworth back in the early sixties and he’d spent a dozen years turning it from a fortress to a palace. But even when publicly fêting and privately fucking his queen during the famous housewarming perchance, he was privily in the petticoats of a countess. Or two.
Three years later Leicester married Lettice – secretly again, when she was well pregnant. Or not so well. The infant died and they had to wait till the end of the seventies, for a son that lived. He was so adored by his parents they nicknamed him The Noble Imp. But their joy was cut short. He died aged four – and Leicester himself had only four years left, having suffered the worst of sorrows and lived long enough to feel a queen’s hot breath go cold.
That was the end of Lettice. The Queen never forgave her for taking away her lover. She’d never let Leicester bring her to court, and she kept the knife in even after he was dead. The widow was made to pay back every penny her late husband owed the crown. She snatched back the estates she’d given him, and forced the countess to sell fifty thousand pounds of jewellery to come into the clear. While Elizabeth still sported a whole treasury of jewels that were Leicester’s presents.
‘In the end, though, it’s not the jewels we remember best, is it?’
In any love affair, or any human bond. They say that going through her things after she died, they came across a scrap of folded parchment in a cabinet by her bed. Across it she’d written the words His last letter. It was only a scribbled note, thanking her for the prescriptions she’d sent him. Even a queen’s medicines don’t keep an earl from death, once his time has come. But in spite of the feud she let his body lie in peace at Warwick, next to the Noble Imp.
‘The stuff of drama, Will.’
Drama was the trumpet that summoned the world to London, to my very doorstep, and it was no provincial matter now. I’d left the Stratford Guild Hall far behind. The whole of London was a theatre. I couldn’t have come at a better time. The playhouse sat in my hand like an oyster. The trick was to pop in a pearl and make them think it real. I’d arrived on cue, ready for the uncurtained age. History took me by the hand. Anything was possible in an age which had put a girdle round about the earth.
It was the age of Drake. He’d left London ten years earlier, ringed the globe in three, and come back to London with most of his men, fleecing Philip’s treasure fleet en route and disgorging a fortune at the queen’s feet.
Drake had made it into the age. It was the age of London.
And to come to London was to come of age.
23
Newgate was my way in. Running with the sun along the city walls you came to Aldersgate, Cripplegate, Moorgate, Bishopsgate, Aldgate, Ludgate – and so back to Newgate. All roads led to Newgate.
It was through that particular breach in the blood-and-mortared city walls that I entered London on the twenty-sixth day of June 1587, an anonymous shadow from Stratford, noticed by nobody. I came in on that sunlit morning without fuss but with my eyes wide open.
‘What did you see, lad?’
Once the city had sucked you in through the wall, you didn’t so much see London as hear it. The Stratford silences, the wide skies of Warwickshire still filled my head. And so it was the London din that hit me on that first morning.
The gun foundries were busy preparing for Spain, and from the corner of Thames Street and Water Lane down near the river, and from beyond Houndsditch, it sounded as if the business with the dons had already begun. Vulcan’s stithy was hard at it and the smoke hung out in columns and flags to boast the enterprise all the way to the Bay and beyond.
‘The Bay of Biscay-O.’
Down in the streets – the fractured clattering of all the London songs: sweep chimney sweep, brooms new brooms green brooms, small coals sea coals, hot peas ripe cherries water from the wells – clear water fresh wells, whelks and mussels and cockles in their shells. A clangorous crying like the sea. And all through it and over it like the wail of gulls a keening of a different kind: bread and meat for the Lord’s sake to the poor prisoners of Newgate – the pathetic jabberings of starving jailbirds, ravenous for scraps.
‘When I swing by the string –’
You shall hear the bell ring.
‘A raucous throng, the London rabble. Can you still hear it, Will?’
Hear it years later, over these crows, the elegies from the elms, hear it coming through again, the curses, the prayers, the laughter and anger, thundering of hooves and clattering of barrows, whistling and spitting of prentice-boys, trilling and skirling of wet wenches on heat, the oaths of the urchins, the calls from the wharves and the echoing docklands, the sailor’s sea-salted, hoarse-throated shout, the scream of the back-lashed whore, the yells of the wherrymen, the blackguards, the bullies, the beggars – the general gender, the distracted multitude, the lifeblood of London.
‘Your future audience, lad. Your public.’
They came to hear a periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to split their ears, then they’d go out and tear a poet to pieces, split open his belly if it suited their spleen. By day they were a froth, a floating scum, seething on the city’s filth. By night they lived in its spinning innards. In the mornings they came out and hatched and hotched like lice on the open sores of dawn, and they lived and died like maggots in its rotting bowels.
‘A far cry from Stratford.’
London was an offence to eyes, ears, and nostrils. The brick kilns at Islington were belching their reek and a red sea of hell was pumping into the city, billowing among its churches.
‘Stinking it to high heaven.’
Its offence was rank. There was one noisesome stench above the rest that hit me as soon as I came through Newgate. I was just inside the wall. After a minute I moved on, but with the faltering step of a frightened man approaching the block. It was only when I came to St Nicholas-within-Newgate that I knew at once what it was that I was remembering.
‘You heard the screaming of cattle?’
Smelt their blood first. Close to the gate stood the slaughterhouse, St Nicholas’ shambles. Here the streets glittered and stank and ran with grease, and the birds fell on the scavengings like black rain. The same old shivers came on me again, a helpless witness to screaming sheep, the convolutions of bowels that strewed the roads, slithering over stones, stilled streamers of life turning loathsome and stagnant and black.
‘Home sweet home, eh?’
A grisly welcome to the Stratford shadow as it stole in under the archway and sped like an arrow out of the sight and sound and smell of horror. I went like a ghost among the oyster-wenches and serving maids, turning southwards up Ludgate Hill, came down in suddenness on the church whose bulk had held my eye for miles all the way in.
‘The great St Paul’s.’
A sight worse than anything hell could offer. The middle aisle was awash – with human scum. Here lawyers and clients worried the bones of their business like dubious sharp-faced wolves. Here the horniest hag-shaggers in London proclaimed their appetites, the bulging red-painted codpieces thrust out like bunched haemorrhoids as they strutted up and down as hot as monkeys, as prime as goats, as salt as wolves in pride – all looking for a fuck with the first available floosie to spread her shanks for sixpence. And here the fieriest Tybalts in the land paraded their blades of Spain, itching to pick a fight with killers of similar kidney.
‘A den of thieves.’
The work of worship went on unregarded in the choir. Red-faced delivery men threaded their way through the throng, carrying coals and corpses and shitloads of everyt
hing, fagged out and farting under their burdens, grunting and sweating. As I stood and gaped there was a general shout and the whole concourse parted down the middle and swept back like the Sea of Egypt, leaving a narrow passage all down the aisle.
‘Moses come again?’
A pack of mules and horses came clattering up the centre aisle. The crowd hissed and roared and the air burned blue with curses – to treat the path to God like a common causeway! – and then they were gone again in a thunder of hooves and a whiff of shit as the Red Sea closed before the echoes had even died away.
‘I understand they call it Duke Humphrey’s Walk.’
Where God and Mammon fought it out, God losing all the way where whores and pimps and pickpockets plied their trade, where idlers came to stare vaguely at bills for employment posted on the pillars, and shun work like death. Here you could show off your tackle or your tailor, pick up some gossip, a servant or a whore. You could cadge a loan, a drink, a meal, steal a purse, boot a beggar, spit on a bankrupt, avoid a creditor, a Puritan, a punk, and all by the prick of noon. After that you could have lunch or hear a play. And any left behind –
‘Dined with Duke Humphrey.’
A good phrase for an empty belly. And somewhere under all this sacrilege lay the fresh green bones of Sir Philip Sidney, laid to rest in February, just the week before they killed the Scottish queen, Sweet Sir Philip, gentleman of English poetry and bullet-honoured hero of the walls of Zutphen, defender of the Dutch and golden verse, gently decomposing underneath my feet. There was more sweetness in his melting flesh, not nine months into its rotting, than in this quintessence of corruption.
Will Page 20
