Nowhere in London. And its crowd went wild when they heard him. He knew how to make them roar, Master Marlowe, master of the mighty line and brave translunary things. And to my death-bed shame, confessing to deadly pride, I wanted to bring down his swaggering Scythian show-off hero, pull him off his pedestal and sweep him from the stage.
That looked to be impossible in ’88, when Tamburlaine first exploded in the Rose and wooed the crowds to ecstasy. I remember the first moment, like yesterday. Ned Alleyn came in on the trumpet call, all decked out in copper-laced coat over crimson velvet breeches. He was singing of his mistress, doomed to die, and the language was like liquor. All who heard it got drunk on it. Words were a net he threw over the world, making it his own, whatever the experience. Listen.
Is it not passing brave to be a king and ride in triumph through Persepolis?
Hearing lines like that and then going home to look at the knots in the beams, the spiders on the walls, to watch the Shoreditch shadows gathering wordlessly – no, it was impossible to sit still after hearing it. The quill twitched in my fingers. I ranged round the room like a caged lion, calling on angels to walk the walls of heaven, to entertain divine Zenocrate, telling the men of Memphis to wake to the clang of trumpets, hear the Scythian basilisks that, roaring, shake Damascus’ turrets down. And still it wasn’t enough to get it out of my system. I was high as a whore’s hem-line and hungry for more. Day after day I made a beeline for the Rose, got sucked in at Shoreditch, wherever it was playing.
Tamburlaine the Great, the wonder of the stage, the scourge of God and god of the split-eared groundlings for a whole year. Ned Alleyn of course, who could tear a cat upon the stage and strike spectators dead. A Scythian shepherd strides on stage (in russet mantle clad), looks about him, throws off his country cloak – a single arrogant gesture – sails from pastoral to heroic in one fell swoop and conquers all Asia in an hour. The sweep is breathtaking, the groundlings open-mouthed. London disappears around them. Only Tamburlaine exists. He slaughters the maids of Damascus, makes a footstool out of Turkey, fires the city in which his paramour has died, murders his own sons for milksops, drowns the whole of Babylon, and – most famously – forces two harnessed kings down on all fours, and with bitted mouths they draw him in his chariot till they drop. You pampered jades of Asia! What, can you draw but twenty miles a day? Pull or die.
But what was this Tamburlaine, after all, but a glorified butcher? The doubtful hero of a dubious drama that piles hyperbole on superlative till you feel it ought to pall. It never does, and that’s the trick of it. Yet Tamburlaine is stricken with a terrible emptiness. And why? Because, like his creator, he cares nothing for people. He lacks the common touch. It came to me in a flash, the vital ingredient, the one that Tamburlaine lacked.
The Crowd.
And along with it the language the crowd knows and uses, the real vernacular of ordinary louts and yobs, not this blazing blank verse uttered by a strutting king clown. Marlowe himself was locked in his own language and like a whore unpacked his heart with words. He was bound upon a wheel of words. The wheel thunders on by, a chariot of fire; impressive to the ear and eye, except that it goes nowhere, only round and round, like the whirling sword in Genesis, sterile as a curse. Words, words, words. When you die you run out of words and the rest is silence. Words are not enough.
And nor is power. He rides in triumph through Persepolis but never stops to govern it. A hanger-on in his own play, a blind ranting mouth. Power as an end in itself is a blind alley, leading to death. Tamburlaine’s days were numbered, I muttered, biding my time, my thoughts on brood. Hamlet and Henry Five were waiting to come on. I could hear them in the tiring-room, clearing their throats.
But in 1588 Marlowe was your only man. That was his glory hour. That was his year.
A year in which you didn’t have time to take a breath. Mary Stuart to the block and Cadiz to the torch. The Rose sprang up and Marlowe showered it with his magic. Holinshed’s Chronicles came out in a second, enlarged, edition and stood like a plum-tree heavy with history, rich and thick for stripping. But Holinshed’s England was about to be shaken by a fiery wind from Spain so that history fell ripe and plump into the present and people picked up the fruit and bit into the core. I too tasted it, like the Genesis apple, and the knowledge altered everything. When the blast of war rang in our ears it had the sound of a sudden answer from the Muse.
War.
War was my way forward. The answer to Marlowe was almost upon us, and was about to erupt.
The Armada was on the move.
30
‘So is that pie, I trust.’
What’s that, Francis?
‘The pie. On the move. I’m growing hungry again.’
Old Francis still. Always with an eye on his belly.
‘Hard not to, with a paunch like mine.’
And I’m trying hard to equate a great pie and a great enterprise.
‘What great enterprise?’
The Armada.
‘Oh, no! Not history, I beg you!’
It’s not about history, not as such. It’s about how history was the answer to the present.
‘You’ve lost me.’
How the Armada was the answer to Marlowe.
‘You’ve lost me even more – deeper than ever.’
Elizabeth herself built the Armada. She struck the first blow to the first keel on the day Philip first realised she was never going to marry him. All the other slights and hostilities followed naturally: helping the Dutch rebels, raiding the Spanish ships, treating his ambassadors like excrement. Most monstrously of all, murdering a Catholic queen. Sixtus Five was a wily old bird as Popes go. He never had much belief in Philip’s plan to beat us at sea. Philip, after squeezing Sixtus for cash without much return, squeezed his Italian bankers instead. Certain of support from twenty thousand English Catholics and appointing himself as the murdered Mary’s heir, he finally screwed up his own courage and decided on a plan, a good old Spanish plan.
‘I’d rather have a good old Spanish onion.’
This is how it went.
Parma would land from Flanders to liberate England from its ecclesiastical midnight. And to ensure his success a fantastic fleet of warships would control the crossing. The mighty Armada. This was the famous Enterprise of England, to which Sixtus gave his blessing but not his purse. The conjunctions told against him, though, so the astrologers murmured, shaking their heads at the stars, but Philip had had enough of Bitter Bess, the English heretic and cocktease of the century. Even after she had unleashed Drake and his dogs of war on Lisbon and Cadiz; even after the architect of the Armada, the Marquis of Santa Cruz had died, and was replaced by Medina Sidonia, a man with neither experience nor self-belief; even after the mocking weather dispersed his vessels, sending them back to Spain to reassemble; even after the storms cuffed and scattered his ships like acorn cups between Lisbon and Corunna; even after this complete programme of portents, still Philip wouldn’t give up on his English Enterprise. The Pope waved the cross over the entire army, and every soldier and sailor went out onto the waves with the blood and body of God in his mouth. It was the twelfth of July and many of these mouths were soon to be filled with the sea and the Catholic God washed out – a bitter aftertaste to the blessed sacrament.
The floating army entered the Channel. A weird formation, it was like a magnificent crescent moon, seemingly impregnable even to the icy eye of Admiral Howard. England and France stood on either side like spectators at a ball while the two fleets did a stately sarabande up the Channel, a Spanish measure, suiting the girth of the galleons, the English treading water, curtseying to their hellbent guests. Drake came out of Plymouth like a hawk and began to pluck the Spanish feathers. Viciously ripped and stabbed at, the dons fluttered into the Calais Roads. But El Draco sent in his fireships, double-shotted and packed with tar, floating accidents, and the frantic Spaniards were compelled to cut loose and head for the open water, only to be battered off Gravelines. Ev
en then many a man might have got a glimpse of Spain again before he died but for the god-sent gales that drove shoals of ships onto the sandbanks of the Netherlands to die there like stranded fish, while the tattered rags of the once proud Armada were driven north and north and north all round Scotland and Ireland to be smashed to splinters on their bleak island shores.
The riven ships disgorged their human cargoes into the sea’s white throat. Most went straight to the cold bowels below. Some were torn on the grinding teeth of reefs and rocks. Others whose flailing feet found shore ran into a fury worse than the sea’s. The Calibans of these islands stripped them bare of every shred of clothing they wore, butchering them without a shred of mercy. They were hanged, stabbed, pole-axed, cut into collops, or driven away stark naked to scratch for roots, gnaw at barks, suck limpets and seaweeds, nibble bitter berries, like starved spectral birds, till they retched and puked up everything from arsehole to Aragon and eked out an utterly miserable existence until they died. The looting Dutch and the tigerish Irish didn’t exactly welcome them either as beings from a brave new world. Spanish bastards – say good-bye to your balls, if you have any! Adios, amigos.
The days went by and the bloated bodies came rolling in on the tides, dead heads lolling like blind seaweeds, hundreds of them belonging to beardless boys, the long imagined terror of the high sea, their genitals hacked off and stuffed into their gaping mouths by the frenzied females of these inhospitable regions, the witches of the Western Isles. Misery has many varieties. Apart from the sea, the rocks, starvation, and the barbarities inflicted by these savages, there was typhus and scurvy, dysentery and delirium, the ever-open doors through which hundreds more were ushered into a wide choice of graves. Not many made it back to Spain.
‘Poor buggers.’
There were Englishmen who fared little better. While the services and celebrations were under way and painters and goldsmiths were getting rich on the harvest of God’s great gale, the army that had cheered the queen at Tilbury was broken up to avoid the inconvenient little matter of wages. What, give you thus much moneys? Fuck you, friends, the war’s over, or didn’t you notice? English seamen dying of typhus were as useless as Spanish corpses to their paymasters. So these men died without two pennies to be laid on their staring eyes. Their wives were cheated of their wages and their children cried for hunger. Meanwhile long live England and hurrah for the Protestant wind!
The queen took little account of her gangrened sailors. The war was won. And Elizabeth grieved for only one man, a casualty of time, not war. Bonny sweet Robin had sung his last song and the brazier in his breast was extinct. All her joy for thirty years and her fury too, often enough, but still the star in her sky, snuffed out now – he died at Rycote in spite of the medicines she sent there to succour him. And as the barges went in black down the Thames, the muffled oars dripping quiet pearl in lucent drops, the great Leicester was laid low. Even his horses, it was said, drank with a deathly decorum. As for Elizabeth, she locked herself in her room till the doors had to be broken down and she had no rage left to storm at the courtiers who crowded in to console her and rescue her from her memories. She had fifteen years left to get over it.
She never did. Not even in that time. Another fifteen years till King Death finally seduced the Virgin Queen. But every year’s a busy year for the King of Terrors, and ’88 was exceptionally crowded. The sea rolled over the Spaniards, the autumn leaves flickered on the grave of Tarleton – and the crows picked out the unseeing eyes of Father William Hartley.
‘Vile jellies again, where is thy lustre now?’
Where indeed? His October agony was over by then. That was the first time I saw with my own eyes on stalks just how the hangman carried out his trade. Hartley had been accused of carrying out exorcisms and that was more than enough to bring him to the scaffold. He was put to death at Shoreditch, quite close to the Theatre, in the melancholy vale, place of death and sorry execution, behind the ditches of the abbey.
It was a cold October morning. A string of geese came blaring overhead just as Hartley stepped out onto the scaffold, staggering a little. I remember how he looked up as he heard them calling, over the heads of the suddenly quietened crowd. How free they must have seemed to him. Sailing south. Soon to be crossing the river and the fields, then over the white cliffs and out into the unfenced blue immensities of sea and sky. Perhaps the priest saw them as symbols of his own soul, about to join them in their unfettered existence. I only recall the way the white-bearded chin jutted upwards for a moment and his eye caught the huge arrowhead flying by and everybody heard the wild trumpets and looked up too. Then the hangman pulled up Hartley’s gown over his head in one sudden movement and the old man found himself standing stark naked in front of the crowd, who exploded into uproarious approval, and the geese were drowned out. When I glanced up again they were already a faint scribble on the sky over the Thames.
I looked back at the naked Hartley. He was murmuring something. ‘Oh, it’s cold, it’s cold!’ It reminded me of the story of Latimer and Ridley standing stockingless in Oxford, waiting to be burned.
The noose went round his neck. He gave a little shiver and the crowd grinned and rubbed its hands in mocking imitation. Then the hangman shoved his victim off the scaffold and as he swung there the crowd caught its breath.
In that moment of sudden dramatic silence Hartley seemed to swing ever so slowly, twisting and turning, like a man floundering, drowning. It was as he swung back to the platform that the hangman’s hand reached out with what looked like infinite slowness and clutched him by the genitals. The other hand came down simultaneously, a blade flashed in the cold October sunlight, and the old man was suddenly back on stage, prickless now and spouting blood from the gash at his groin. ‘Oh, it stings! It stings!’
Like something a child might have cried out if he’d just cut his finger. The old man’s severed cock and balls were actually in the executioner’s fist and the poor old bugger was staggering about spouting blood but so far looking little more than dazed by his experience – the hangman had been careful not to swing him for more than a few seconds. The brief suspension and the genitals job – these were just the beginnings of the bloody business.
The executioner took hold of Hartley without warning, threw him down on his back, knelt over him with a big blade and slit him open – easy as unsealing a letter. Unseamed him from the nave to the chops. The crowd took in its breath again and the moment of silence was rent by one long loud shriek of pure pain. It tore the air as the knife had torn open the man’s body. It seemed to use up all his ability to express his agony because he stayed strangely quiet and unmoving as the hangman’s hand came out of the open doors of his belly, holding the bowels, trailing intestines like the locks of the Medusa. In he went for more, pulling it out in red fistfuls. No reaction. Somebody shouted that he must be dead already and the cry was taken up indignantly. He’d botched the job and cut short the fun.
Then as the executioner was reaching up into Hartley’s chest to extract his dead heart, the body bucked suddenly as if it had been struck by a thunderbolt. He half sat up and both his arms shot out and grabbed the hangman by the throat. It gave him quite a shock. He fell back and tried to free himself. But Hartley seemed to have summoned up a preternatural energy in his last moments and the hangman had to shout for his assistant to come and tear the priest’s hands away from his throat and hold him down while he went back to finish his grisly work. Bind fast his corky arms! They were like two wave-worn and sea-bleached sticks such as your boots might kick at on a dry old beach, sending them flying, sapless and light as air among the buzzing seaweeds and debris of the shore. Hartley had been apparently dead, yet he fought like a man of iron against his executioner, who now reached up again into the chest and took hold of the heart. And Hartley started to sit up a second time and the hangman put a knee on his chest and shouted again to the assistant executioner. He was kneeling behind the old man’s head and he pulled back on both arms as hard
as he could, to restrain him.
‘Oh, stop, my friend, stop! You’re hurting me!’
His privates had been sliced off, a red well was still pumping out blood from his groin, his innards stood in a steaming heap beside him on the scaffold, which was awash with blood – yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? – and the hangman had his hand inside his chest, clutching his heart, ready to tear it out and put an end to life. All this – and the old man was wailing to the bastard behind him that he was twisting his arms! Somebody was hurting his arms. It would come all right if only he would stop. Do you mind, friend? That hurts, don’t you see? Yet this old man, so gruesomely mangled, was just seconds from being a corpse.
Everybody could see from the executioner’s face that he had the heart entirely in his grasp. He gave a huge wrench. As he did so Hartley came up again for the third and final time, like a spent swimmer taking his last lungful, so that still the heart didn’t quite come out of the chest cavity, but you could hear the sound of the two ancient arms snapping like sticks. The assistant stood up at that point, grabbing him by his long white hair and pulling him back down flat on the scaffold. At the same time he placed his boot right across Hartley’s throat and now the executioner’s arm came back and shot high and straight in the air. Dripping and twitching at the end of it was what looked like a bag of jellied eels – the tiger heart of old Hartley, from whom there now issued one last long throaty sigh. After which he neither spoke nor moved again. His earthly struggles were over.
A great roar and a last cheer. Hartley had put on a fine show for a frail old priest. Ah, but these Catholics were full of the devil, naturally, and drew on darkness for their strength, Hartley being one of the most obdurate. That afternoon the crowd that had watched him die was still seething around Shoreditch, roaring drunk. They’d stayed on to wait for the Theatre to open.
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