The Frozen Thames

by Helen Humphreys

  The vicar hugs himself. It is so cold in the vestry that he can see his breath. It has not been difficult to imagine the boys flailing about in the icy river water.

  None of this really happened. It is a tale invented by the vicar so that his congregation will remain God-fearing, will not be tempted by the wondrous occurrence of the Thames freezing over and forget their duty to the Lord. God must maintain supremacy over all earthly delights, even those that seem miraculous themselves.

  The vicar rubs his nose. The tip is completely frozen. He cannot feel his own pinch.

  He has been vigilant. He has not permitted himself to visit the river at all, not even to catch a glimpse of it from the bell-tower. The booths erected upon it are for commerce, and the pursuits enjoyed on the ice are base and sinful. It would be entirely wrong for him to set foot in such a place.

  But the vicar has imagined the ice, has seen the long, white stretch of it in his mind, can imagine the feeling of walking upon water.

  He shakes his head. This isn’t doing him any good at all. He might as well name what needs to be named, so that there is no mistaking the lesson.

  He picks up his pen and begins to write.

  Their deaths were a judgment sent down from almighty God. This judgment could have been avoided. We must not forget we are in service to the Lord. We are not free men.

  1649

  —

  We placed the body of the King in the boat. The head was meant to decorate the spikes of Traitor’s Gate, but Cromwell had relented and placed it in the boat as well, so that it could be sewn back onto the body in Windsor and the family could bury the man entire.

  The head had been held up by the hair before the crowd and then the people had been let up to the block and, after paying, had been allowed to dip their handkerchiefs into the blood. The blood of a king will close any wound that it is brushed upon, will cure any illness that afflicts you.

  The King wanted the block to be set higher, but it would go no higher. He gave the signal for his own execution by stretching out his arms. One stroke of the axe and it was over. He had said some last words, but no one could hear what they were. We did hear him ask the executioner if his hair was well. He wore a black cloak, took it off to be just in his waistcoat, and then put it on again for the execution.

  We had not trusted that he would lay his head so obligingly upon the block. We had prepared hooks and staples with which to drag him to his slaughter if he had been unwilling. We did not trust that he would be anything other than arrogant, as he had been all through the trial. Even as the judgment was being read, the King would not admit to, or recognize, any of his faults.

  The judgment was simply put: “He, the said Charles Stuart, as a truant, traitor, murderer and public enemy to the good of this nation, shall be put to death by severing of his head from his body.”

  It was difficult to try the King. I will admit that Cromwell fixed the vote to please himself and his ends. There were meant to be 135 judges, but only 68 showed up at the trial, and Cromwell let only 46 of these into the hall.

  Charles was a tyrant who ruled only according to his will. He had governed England for eleven years without once calling parliament into session, and yet he seemed surprised when the people rose up against him. I almost admired him for this. I almost felt sorry for him.

  It is cold today, the day we executed Charles I. It is a Tuesday, a cold Tuesday, the thirtieth of January. The King had a last meal this morning of bread and wine and, before that, he was permitted to walk his dog for a final time in St. James’s Park. And now he is making the familiar journey from London to Windsor, but his coffin lies in this boat and the water of the Thames is in a frozen state. We have had to start south of the bridge, pole off the ice floes that surround the craft. It is a slow and difficult manoeuvre down the river.

  To kill one’s King is a solemn business. Even though many wanted him dead, I can attest that there was not a man who was not saddened by the sight of the sovereign’s head upon the block. We need to believe in the power and justness of the Crown, and when that is thrown into question, so too is everything else and we are as we are – sailing down a frozen river with a headless man at the helm.

  1655

  —

  I see it as I’m making my way home from the synagogue.

  The synagogue is not really a synagogue. It’s the rear of Abraham’s house. It’s actually a shed attached onto the rear of Abraham’s house. We meet there in secret, the handful of Jews who live in this part of London and know of one another. We live not as Jews, but disguised as Spaniards because Jews have not been allowed to live in England since 1290. In 1290, there was no tolerance for any religion except Catholicism and all Jews were expelled by Edward I.

  But the times are better than they were. Catholicism is not the official religion any more, and some of us have made our way back and stayed, in secret. Cromwell has allowed religious freedom even as he has, strangely, banned theatre. But this does not mean that we can stop posing as Spaniards, can stop meeting in the shed at the rear of Abraham’s house. Religious freedom does not extend to Judaism. But there is hope. Last year the Rabbi Manasseh, who lives in Amsterdam, sent his son, Samuel, to England to lobby Cromwell for re-admission. It is said that Cromwell is not opposed to consider such a request and, this year, the Rabbi himself intends to come and plead for the Jews to be allowed back into England.

  I cannot imagine what it would feel like to walk down the street as myself, after all this time as Pedro Alvarez. I cannot pretend to know what it would feel like to walk to the synagogue with my friends, instead of arriving alone at Abraham’s, slipping in under darkness, afraid of being discovered at the sin of worshipping in my own faith.

  This is what I am thinking when I see the ship. I have been keeping my head bowed, out of habit, so that no one will look too long upon my face and recognize me for a Jew. I have been keeping my head bowed because it is night and dark out and I am travelling home without the aid of a light.

  I imagine being free of my disguise, being able to return to myself, and I look up as I come around the corner of the street and I see it there, under the moon, silhouetted against the quay. It is an enormous ship, a web of rigging, a bowsprit the width of an ancient tree. It is an enormous ship and it is completely frozen into the ice. The ice has caught it, has pushed up against the hull and staved it in, snapped the massive timbers with ease. I can see the jagged mess that has been made of the hull, can see the strips of broken planks hanging from the side of the ship, the way hide hangs in flayed tatters from the side of a butchered ox.

  It stops me. I stand there, by the edge of the river, and I cannot seem to walk any farther.

  The ship was made for one thing and encountered another. Water is not recognizable as ice. But perhaps, even with the hole in its side, the ship will still float when the ice releases it. This is what I want – release. I can feel the tight grip of the ice around me, around my life, and what I want, this evening by the edge of the river, is to be cast back upon the water, to be set free.

  1662

  —

  I have cleared my desk and swept the room. I have stood by the window one last time, by the altar one last time. I have knelt on the cold stone floor in the nave and I have risen without comfort.

  It is a cold walk from the church and, since I am in no hurry, I take the path by the river so as to watch the skaters on the ice. It is on the frozen river this year that the new iron scheets from Holland are being used. They are far superior for sliding on the ice than the old skates made from animal bones. It is a marvel to see the swiftness with which the skaters move over the Thames, and I never tire of this sight.

  It is strange to think that I have left the Church for good, that I will not be returning on Sunday to deliver my sermon, as usual; that I will not be spending Saturday hunched over my desk, blowing on my hands to keep them warm while I struggle to write that sermon. I used to write about many wondrous things, of beasts and dist
ant lands, even of this frozen river. I cannot reconcile myself to the Act of Uniformity that is to be passed this year by parliament, and which states that the new Book of Common Prayer is to be used for all prayers and sacraments, and that it is to be the only text allowed in religious services. If this wasn’t offence enough, now all priests must be ordained by Episcopal rule, as was the case years ago. We are to be servants of the Church of England, instead of being servants to God.

  Charles II wants to abolish the religious freedoms that were granted during Cromwell’s stay in power, and yet Charles is engaged to be married to Catherine of Braganza, the daughter of King John IV of Portugal. She is a Roman Catholic and will never be crowned Queen because Catholics are forbidden, under the new rules, to take part in Anglican services. The whole thing is ludicrous. I have spent my entire life in service to God, to my idea of God. What am I meant to do with my life now? I am good for very little else.

  The river is busy today, full of revellers. I stand on the bank to watch the skaters. They glide effortlessly past me and I can hear the notching of their iron blades upon the surface of the ice. They pass alone, hands clasped behind their backs for balance. They pass in groups of two or three, holding on to one another’s hands. I like their wordless flight along the river. If I were still employed by the Church, this is what I would choose to write my sermon on for Sunday’s service. I would write about the frozen Thames, and the look of the skaters upon it, how the body well used is a celebration of the Glory of God.

  The skaters on the ice appear to have no worries, but I know this is not true. Each man and woman carries a burden that is sometimes impossible to bear. This year is particularly hard because the Hearth Tax has been introduced. The occupiers of each dwelling must pay two shillings for each hearth they possess. It hardly seems fair that, during one of the coldest winters in England, people must pay for their small portion of warmth.

  The Hearth Tax. The rule of the Bishops once again. It is perhaps the same thing. Our liberties are being taken from us, and we are meant to pay for the things that we need in order to remain alive.

  But there are the skaters. They have gone upriver and are now swooping back down towards me. They soar like birds, like I have always imagined the spirit soars when it is in the presence of the Lord. They move like they have no burdens, no worries, as if their lives do not cost them their lives.

  1666

  —

  While I have been imprisoned in the house, much has happened. The people living in the house next to ours have died and the house has been pulled apart, used to feed the fires that burn up and down the street. The weather has grown colder and the Thames has frozen over, frozen solid. The great Irish healer, Valentine Greatrakes, has come to England.

  And some things have not changed. The King and the merchants, the lawyers, the clergy, and the doctors, are all still in the country. They fled there almost a year ago, at the first sign of the plague, and perhaps they will never return to London.

  It was not easy to escape from the house. My father had the ring of red sores that begin the Black Death, and so we were all of us locked up in our house. A red cross was painted on the door to show our quarantine and a guard was posted so we could not leave. We were meant to be there for forty days and forty nights. In that time all who were infected would have died, although the others might also have died, as it was hard to get bribes out so that food could be brought in.

  It was my brother’s idea to kill the guard. Why should we have to die? he said. When it is only father who is ill.

  We used a rope and fastened a noose on the end of it and lowered it from the attic window in the early dark of evening. My brother insisted that I lower the noose because, as a girl, I had a more delicate touch than he did. He has clumsy hands, is always doing things too roughly. The dog used to yelp when he tried to pet her. My brother has the falling sickness, would collapse suddenly into fits that were alarming to behold and then, as suddenly as they had come upon him, they would be over.

  We lowered the noose from the attic window and snared the guard with it. Killing him was easier than I had imagined. He died with only a small flailing at the end of the rope. There did not seem to be much life in him to extinguish.

  My mother would not leave my father, and so we left them. The world that we walked out to was cold and beautiful. Once we were past the plague fires and down by the river it was quieter too. It was strange not to see animals about. Even in the bustle of London there have always been cats and dogs. But the songbirds have perished in the cold winter, and the King has ordered all the dogs and cats within the city to be destroyed, as he fears that they are responsible for carrying the plague.

  After such a long, hot summer, it is odd to come out into such a cold winter. We walked along the river in silence, grateful just to be walking, just to be outside again.

  I am taking my brother to see The Stroker. That is the name that has been given to Valentine Greatrakes because he has the habit of stroking his hands over the part of the body that is afflicted. His hands can cure. His hands are the opposite of my brother’s clumsy hands.

  Valentine Greatrakes is in Whitechapel and we have heard, through one of the nurses that came to tend my father in our quarantine, that he will see anyone who visits him there. He has cured a woman with a thickness of hearing and helped a man with a lame leg to walk again. The pain moves out slowly, said the nurse. Pain likes to stay and will not leave of a sudden.

  If the pain is in the shoulder, Valentine Greatrakes will stroke the shoulder and the pain will move to the elbow, then to the wrist, then to the hands, and finally, will travel out the tips of the fingers. People feel it as a great coldness leaving their bodies, said the nurse.

  (image credit 1666.1)

  My father will die. Perhaps my mother will also die, tending him so closely in that house with the red quarantine cross on the door. Or she will be hanged for the hanging of the guard. Yes, they will most certainly die. But my brother and I will live. I will make sure of that.

  I reach over and take his hand.

  “Let’s walk along the river,” I say. “I want to feel the great coldness under the soles of my feet.”

  1677

  —

  The artist is at work on two paintings. One is a scene in the Arctic with a floundering ship pitched steeply among the ice floes, the other a painting of the frozen Thames.

  The artist is from Holland, but he has spent a great deal of his life in England. He is an etcher as well as a painter and most of his work features animals – dogs and hunting scenes – so he is almost unaware of the fact that he has painted animals in both the Arctic scene and the painting of the frozen Thames. In the former a team of wild dogs chases a man across the ice in the foreground. In the Thames painting a dog barks at two men who have fallen to the ice, also in the foreground.

  The painting of the frozen Thames is huge, almost six feet wide, and it shows practically the entire span of the London Bridge in its background.

  The main action of the painting is a line of figures advancing across the river from a set of stairs at the left. The stairs are from a ferry stage and, since the watermen can’t row people across the ice, they stand guard at the top of the stairs and charge people to walk down the flight of steps onto the icy river. Once the people walk across they will be charged again to climb the steps on the other side.

  All of the figures are men except for one woman in the left background who is walking over the ice with a tray of cups balanced on her head. The painter has been down numerous times to the Thames and knows that, during this winter’s freeze, there is brandy for sale out on the ice.

  There are two references to the painter’s homeland in the painting of the Thames. One is a figure of a skater in the bottom right corner, wearing a Dutch hat. The second is a sign for an inn hanging at the top of the stairs. The sign has the drawing of a Dutch hat inside a wreath.

  The figures in the painting are very active, helping each
other over the ice, throwing snowballs, skating. One man shoots a gun at some birds crossing the sky over the bridge.

  In the Arctic painting there are fewer people. The central space of the painting is taken up with the distressed ship, sails up and flapping, tossed high by the ice floes. The background is merely a horizon line and there are only a handful of men and the wild dogs in the foreground.

  They seem like very different paintings, and it is only when they are both near completion that the painter realizes that they are very much alike. The scenes might be different, but the ice in both paintings is the same ice. It occupies the same space and looks identical in both depictions – chunks of sheared white more than six feet high, with chasms and craters, rivers of clearer, darker ice running under the base of the ice cliffs.

  The painter steps back, walks across the floor of his studio, and looks at the paintings from the far wall. He has never been to the Arctic, but he has been down to the Thames every afternoon all this long winter. Of course he would end up painting the same picture. He squints at the paintings. It is the Thames that looks fantastical, the ice so huge and difficult. The Arctic picture, this place he has never been and will never be, and which he has modelled solely on the vision of the frozen Thames – the Arctic painting looks exactly right, looks real.

  1684

  —

  An entire village has been built upon the ice. Booths have been made from blankets and the oars of the watermen. The main thoroughfare between the booths has been named Freezland Street. There are coffee houses and taverns, booths that sell slabs of roast beef. An ox has been roasted whole, and a printing press has been set up so that one can have one’s name printed in this place where men so oft were drowned. The Frost Fair is visited by a royal party that includes King Charles II (in what will be the last week of his life). They have their names engraved on a card – Printed by G. Groom, on the ICE, on the River Thames, January 31, 1684.