Will

by Christopher Rush

It was the quinsy that stopped her eating – but that’s a medical matter. The taste for life had gone. And yet she wouldn’t lie down but stayed propped up on cushions, for fear she’d never get up again if she took to bed. For four days she sat, and even stood, simply stood there dying, such was the will – not to live, but to fend off the fearful skeleton that grinned at her in the mirror, humouring her, looking over her shoulder, scoffing her state, allowing her a little breath, a little scene, death keeping his court. Yes, now she was Richard the Second. Now she was all kings and queens.

  There were stories of visions heralding her end. She saw her own body gloating down at her from above, emaciated, horrible, surrounded by the flames of hellfire – hallucinations that attend the dying, antics of the brain, of course, but still there were necromantic exercises performed, just to make sure, to exorcise the devils that had been sent to torment her in her last days. As devils are. As devils do.

  ‘Well, we’ve all to come to it.’

  And what of other visions? Did she think of her mother, accused of adultery with six men including her own brother and executed when her daughter was only two? She didn’t have it easy. Offspring of a notorious whore, bastardised, scarred by watching women go to their deaths at the hands of men, the bed and the block fused and confused in her damaged mind, barred from the throne since she was two, forced further back by a pale cold-hearted brother, coughing his black life up against the pillows for Lady Jane Grey, bastardised again by Bloody Mary and accused of treason, the gibbets strung with rebels and she herself rowed through Traitor’s Gate in the pouring rain and into the Tower.

  Even as Mary lay dying she swore that her sister was a theological bastard and the bastard of an adulteress and a whore, not even Henry’s child – though a blind man could have spied the father, from a mile away, of that pale-skinned, red-haired, hook-nosed, and black-eyed beauty. Only at her last gasp did Mary give in, acknowledging Elizabeth as her heir. She had made it.

  Made it into forty-five years of stress, the sovereign born cloven, not crested, much to the chagrin of her father, who little realised she’d be more of a son to him than most sons could ever have been, and who declared that if she were turned out of the realm in her petticoat she could live in any place in Christendom.

  What lay under that petticoat? Venus or Vesta? Brown-nosed Lyly, who licked anything that faintly resembled a royal rear, called her better than both. She was in her sixties by the time I first played before her and saw the famous facial inventory at close quarters, the corpse’s skin, the bill-hook, the black eyes, the sugar-black teeth to match – the queen who wouldn’t look in the mirror because there she saw a death’s head wearing a wig. Beneath that red wig the red fires of the follicles had long gone out but the red temper still raged and burned and ate her up.

  Was the coronation, I wonder, the brightest memory of all? The crisp winter morning with the hint of snow in the air? The ermine cape, the cloth-of-gold gown, the crimson-covered chariot, draped with velvet, the long loose hair, worn like her mother’s a quarter of a century ago, before it was pinned up ready for the block? Or did an oak-tree spread itself out instead in her failing brain while, standing beneath its canopy, already royal with expectation, a young girl of twenty-five, watched a messenger draw close, knowing his message would be wordless, waited for the proffered ring, drawn from the dead finger of an unwilling bitter sister?

  What did she really believe in by the end? Loyalty? Love? Friendship? Religion? Difficult to say, but not much is the probable answer, outside of duty – meaning England, the anchor she clung to perhaps when her eyes began to swim.

  Carey heard her sigh forty or fifty times – such deep sighs she fetched as he had never heard since Mary Queen of Scots went under the axe. On the 23rd she asked for a little rose-water and some currants, then the inflammation in her throat prevented her from saying any more. Wordless, still she refused until the last possible moment – by putting her hand to her head when James was mentioned and making her fingers into the shape of a crown – to name her successor: she had reigned for nearly half a century without one. Word was sent all the same to James in Edinburgh to watch the Tudor clock. It ticked as all clocks do. She turned her face to the wall and slipped into the deep sleep, and on 24th March, between two o’clock and three in the morning, died without further fuss – mildly, it was reported, like a lamb, easily like an autumn apple from the tree – at Richmond Palace, after a short illness, bravely borne, Elizabeth, Queen of England, 1533–1603.

  What more can you say? Ripeness is all. The ancient overdressed woman who’d been monarch of the realm for as long as most of us could remember – bewigged, beruffed, bejewelled, begotten a bastard in the eyes of her enemies but ultimately betrothed only to her country – was dead. And those black moth’s eyes which looked as if they’d never slept beneath the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of the uneasy head, were closed at last. James was proclaimed in Cheapside and few wished her alive again – the decades of uncertainty had gone, and the gloom of those last years and melancholy months.

  The body was brought by barge from Richmond to lie in state at Whitehall: a dead body ablaze with jewels, replacing the fire of England that had gone out. Up in his turreted study, that night, high above the Thames, Ralegh wept more scented crocodiles from his window as he watched the melancholy line of boats go by with muffled oars, their torches glimmering on the water. The chief cargo was the age itself, the chief barge carrying the embalmed body of the ancient virgin, seduced at last by the invincible bridegroom. Her old Captain of the Guard had greater reason to weep than he could have guessed. His protectress gone, the wolves were already gathering at his gate, baring their teeth. There were tears in their eyes too, but like Ralegh’s for Essex, they too were crocodiles. The fall of a falcon usually involves a sparrow or two, even those who acted like eagles before worms.

  But there was only one great one the people of London had come to mourn. Westminster was awash with people, in the streets, houses, windows, leads and gutters, a multitude of all sorts who’d come to see her make her last progress. And when they saw the effigy over the coffin a great groaning wave of grief went up that washed the spires and shrunken skulls of London. Soon the sweet regret set in – it always does as people remember the good days – which is what people do and what good days are for. There had been heroism enough in her time to eclipse the cruelty. But Dekker exaggerated as usual when he wrote of showers of tears raining down for the old queen. Down she went into the vault in Westminster Abbey, over monumentless Mary, the half-sister but full-blooded and well-bloodied Catholic. All one now. Emilia Bassano’s much cuckolded strummer was one of the musicians that saw to her obsequies – at which there was much professional sighing and no real grief. Nothing worse than becoming too successful and living too long.

  The poets kept their silence. Mine was noted by Chettle, among others, and the Stratford shepherd was urged to remember Elizabeth and sing her rape, done by that Tarquin, death. Chettle himself took me to task for not responding to the honourable task.

  Nor doth the silver-tongued Melicert drop from his honeyed Muse one sober tear to mourn her death who gracèd his desert, and to his lays opened her royal ear.

  Melicert indeed. Silver-tongued if you like. Silence is pure gold, they say. Mine was, compared to the plays that followed now. You won’t find much nostalgia there for a life well lived, nor much to celebrate in the life of the times, nor in the life to come. I was going my own way in an age that had shaken the certainties. Tragedy was the tool I would use to explore the new incoherence. Chaos had come again. I was entering the tunnel. Out went the lights, as they’d done in Henley Street. And once more we were all left darkling.

  56

  It took the new king six weeks to get from Edinburgh to London. Robin Carey had done it in three days – at breakneck speed, and on the third night he came thrashing into Edinburgh, bruised, travel-stained, and torn, and gave James a blue ring from a fair lady. The man
he’d come to see, though keen to take up his crown and toss the old one into the gutter, was not so keen on physical exertion, but he was anxious to make a big show of it. This would be no mere journey, it would be a triumphal progress.

  And it was – except that the new arrival was terrified by the sight of his own subjects clamouring to come close, and wasn’t over eager to stage him to the public view. As the people screamed to get a better look at him, he showed every sign of anxiety and alarm, but managed to carry off his nervousness with a jest.

  ‘Good God Almighty, how much nearer can they get? Would the bastards like to see what I had for breakfast? Do they want me to pull down my breeks so that they can gawp up my arse?’

  This was Elizabeth’s replacement – a man with the body of a weed, the heart and stomach of a coward, and the manners of a boor, though a scholarly one and a pompous and pedantic ass. An interesting oddity of a new ruler and one who would suit well in some strange new play methinks – God’s vicar playing God himself, a duke of dark corners. But he resembled his predecessor in one respect – he enjoyed cruelty to animals as turned into sport. Animals were for cruel fun – and for stuffing down your gullet. In vast quantities. He was a glutton.

  But he arrived from his rainswept Scotland and its dark theology remarkably affable and oddly robust for a man whose frame spoke of physical frailty. Would you care to take a closer look, Francis? Truth to tell I do not recommend it, but I expect you’re curious, and there’s no need to go as far as craning up the royal arse. Let me show you what I saw in the May of 1603.

  ‘I’ve heard he’s no picture.’

  A big head and a scraggy beard, bulging hare’s eyes staring at you moistly, curiously, warily, summing you up. He was nobody’s fool in spite of facial evidence to the contrary. A slobbering tongue, too long and loose for the wet mouth – it was true what they’d said – the spittle hitting you in the eye and spraying the air about you the moment he started to speak. Later you noticed that he always seemed to be eating his wine rather than drinking it, so that it dribbled out on either side of the mouth and back into the cup. There must have been a good quarter’s worth of backwash – the goblet got fuller rather than emptier, the more he drank – or rather slurped. And when you lowered your eyes, affecting humility but actually trying to avoid the spray, what did you see? A pair of spindly legs sticking out clownishly from an armoury of heavily quilted clothes. All that padding was fearfully intended to stop, or at least to slow the course of, a sudden stiletto or an assassin’s dagger. The poor man lived in perpetual terror of his life.

  Sadly he hadn’t inherited an ounce of his mother’s notorious beauty. It was the father’s wretched physique that had come through. He was still in the Mary Stuart womb, and technically therefore in the same room as his mother, when his father and his drunken thugs murdered Rizzio before her eyes. He was not long out of the womb when Darnley was murdered in his turn by the mother’s next lover. And even after he came to the Scottish throne witches were after him, waxen images of himself, live cats tied to joints of corpses and hurled into the yeasty sea to raise storms to drown him as he made his way to Denmark to marry Anna. He was a king of terrors, stalked by the King of Terrors himself. Satan was alive and well in Scotland. Plots to destroy him multiplied in his mind. Even as a boy he’d had a hard time of it – he was a target for the rival Scottish nobles bent on kidnap (the hand that keeps the king controls the realm), and his bent backside was a butt for the erudite lash of George Buchanan, who schoolmastered him mercilessly. The Bible was his entertainment, though he took refuge in books on history and witchcraft. No wonder he looked as he did, and looked at you as he did – with those abstracted and always anxious eyes. He was never sure of the English crown but by the time it came his way he was ready to go wild. And he did.

  Not everybody benefited. Ralegh went straight to prison. Jamie hated him down to his earring, hated him for introducing tobacco to the court – a vice he blasted in one of his books – hated him for making the Spanish merchants rich and the court unhealthy, hated him for bringing savages to England. Two months after the accession old Stinkweed found himself deprived of his captaincy of the Guard, then of his income, then of his house. He no longer needed a house, quipped the king, bound as he was for the Tower, like Harry. He was confined there in the summer, charged with treasonable conspiracies, and tried in November. The court condemned him to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. He must have sweated. He knew what that meant. But such is the mind of the mob – the poor who’d have gone a hundred miles to see him hanged now went the extra mile to save him, and the king gave in to the popular mood and reprieved him on the scaffold. But his days are numbered.

  Whereas young Harry – now ageing Harry, to speak true – was set free and given double compensation for his time in the Tower – Essex’s sweet wines’ revenue and Knight of the Garter. Jack Donne was another. Bess sent him to the Fleet for running off with his employer’s niece – she was only sixteen at the time, Anne More. But he was forgiven and became a better boy under Jamie. Some said Jamie would have liked Jack under him too – a handsome piece of haunch, if not a stripling at thirty. But you can’t bugger the Dean of St Paul’s – a plum post for the court’s most popular preacher – though Jack never was at heart’s ease with himself or his position, always feeling in disgrace with fortune and his own eyes. Self-envious was our Jack, his own worst enemy. He was lucky to have the king as a friend. Same with Bacon – the rubbery little turd got a knighthood.

  But Jamie’s best move, only ten days into his reign and by far the greatest act of that reign – says your impartial client, Francis – was to take over our Company and issue us with a warrant for Letters Patent under the Great Seal. The warrant went under the seal only two days later. His good servants William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillips, John Heminges, Henry Condell, William Sly, Robert Armin, Richard Cowley, and the rest of their associates were permitted freely to use and exercise the art and faculty of playing comedies, tragedies, histories, and the like as well for the recreation of his loving subjects as for his royal solace and pleasure when he should think good to see them during that pleasure, etcetera etcetera. It was a bitter pill indeed for the City Fathers to swallow but they just had to gulp and bow. Jamie the Sixth’s the man!

  Furthermore, the said comedies and tragedies and suchlike were to be shown to their best commodity as well within their now usual house called the Globe within his Majesty’s county of Surrey, as also within any town halls or moot halls or other convenient places within the liberties and freedom of any other city, university, or town.

  And more words to that effect.

  We were now the King’s Men.

  Forgive the parliamentary language, Francis, but that is exactly what it was. It had a certain ring to it, you will admit. The King had done us proud. Starved of theatre culture during his colourless days with Calvin, he’d determined to make up for it with drums and trumpets. Less than a fortnight as king and he had his own theatre group. At the stroke of a pen the rate of pay was doubled from ten to twenty pounds per performance. We were up to our balls in clover and all we had to do was bend a little and browse.

  We weren’t the only men. After Henslowe leased out the Rose to Pembroke’s and Worcester’s, these lads went to the Curtain and joined up with what was left of Oxford’s to become the Queen’s Men, with Thomas Heywood as resident poet and actor, Will-style. And Alleyn was still the star of the Admiral’s, who became Prince Henry’s Men. But we were the premier company in the country and our performances, as things turned out, numbered more than those of all the other companies combined. We did not fear the Greeks. We were men of the hour.

  The King’s Act had made me into a Groom of the Royal Chamber, and though I never went near the royal chamber (nobody did if they could help it) I had to look the part for the coronation the following year and was duly awarded four and a half yards of scarlet cloth by the Master of the Great Wardrobe. And so, in a resul
ting red livery of doublet, hose and cloak, with the royal arms emblazoned on the sleeves, I walked in the procession through the streets of London, bound for Whitehall. I couldn’t help thinking as I looked at the roaring sea of faces, how I’d stolen here all those years ago (sixteen was it?), a frightened shadow from Stratford, slipping in anonymously, and now here I was, one of the chosen few, proceeding publicly and with great ceremony, my will well plumed up under the red plumage, proud as a peacock – or so we were instructed to appear. That wasn’t difficult, after all, for an old actor, and though I couldn’t give a tinker’s toss at the time, a part of me was just sorry my old father wasn’t there to see his son swanning along behind the King – it would have flushed him up with sheer pride to have spotted me just below the sergeants and yeomen but still above the boys and pages, following the cynosure of the nation, a Scottish scarecrow on a white mule. It took half a day to reach Westminster from the Tower and my legs were killing me.

  But there was a bright March sun in our faces and it was a far cry from those never-to-be-forgotten bad old days trudging behind the cart in the wind and the rain, only to be spat on by jumped up jacks-in-office and have the sticks and halters shaken in our faces. No more o’ that, I thought, no more o’ that, and as I joined in the prayers for God to protect our king and grant him a long safe and happy reign, I meant every word of it – well, almost. Never mind about the happiness, I thought – just make it long. And make it safe.

  The Powder Plotters were thinking different thoughts. They’d had a year to think them and behind the mouth-honour there was whispered discontent. But let that wait. I shall be faithful, Francis. I promised to be faithful that glittering March morning, a faithful subject all my days, and to mine own self to be true. My personal faith was no child of state, was builded far from accident, suffered not in smiling pomp and feared not policy, that heretic which works on leases of short-numbered hours, but all alone stood hugely politic. Stood above it all, if you like. Stayed out of it at least. A quiet life is all I wanted.