by Robert Nye
Still, I make Sam and the others of our company sound too parsonical. The fighting in France was grim and bloody, but there were more times when we laughed than when we wept.
Ah, the smell of bacon sizzling in a pan in the dark that is just before dawn of a battle! And the rising sun seen through the pricked ears of a horse galloping full-tilt despite powder and shot into the thickest part of the fray! Drums! Trumpets! Pikes! Tented fields! Bare swords! Pistols and caliver!
But I romanticise. Both the abstraction and the actuality that is war. Mars is an ugly god. The wolf and the woodpecker are sacred to him. I have seen wolves dig up dead men to eat them. The woodpecker has a sly and spiteful laugh.
Fascination with war soon turns to disgust.
I was with Samuel King at Languedoc. The enemy had hidden themselves in the caves there. Those caves had only one entrance, and that very narrow, cut out in the midway of high rocks. We let down a chain with burning bundles of straw bound round a heavy stone. Most of the men down there in the caves were choked to death. The rest came scrambling forth like bees smoked out of a hive.
Alexander the Great once employed the same tactics in India. But I didn’t know that then. I thought it original.
Our campaign, at all events, proved useless. We were fighting a losing battle right from the start. Word came from the Queen that we were to disband, disperse, and disappear. The Huguenot leader was captured, and beheaded on a scaffold. I remember his banner: It bore a severed head on a black ground, and the motto Finem det mihi Virtus. Just so, valour did end his days. And Sam, for once, was silent concerning death’s ugliness.
Not long after that, in the night of the 23rd of August, 1572, I was in Paris when Huguenot nobles were dragged from the Palace of the Louvre and slaughtered in the courtyard, while King Charles the 9th of France leaned from his bedroom window wearing a nightcap and shouting out: ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’
The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day. Ten thousand Protestants done to death. King Philip the 2nd of Spain was said to have smiled for the first and last time in his life.
Next morning I saw Gaspard de Coligny, that great Admiral, flung by a servant from an upper window of his house. Some Catholic Samaritan most charitably wiped the blood from his face, then kicked it in and rode away. Later, in the afternoon, some children came playing. They hacked off Coligny’s head, and his hands, and his genitals. Then they sold them to souvenir hunters. What was left of his corpse was hung up by the feet on the public gibbet at Montfaucon.
All these things I witnessed in France with Samuel King. There are others of that company I remember: Philip Budocks-hide, who was always ready to wager on anything (two raindrops down a window it was once), and Franccis Berkeley who could drink a pint of ale in a single swallow. But Budocks-hide and Berkeley were killed soon after, in the campaigns in Ireland. Only Sam King survives of that crew. My friend, my fellow, my oldest companion in arms. Trust him, my son.
And know that there are no such things as Wars of Religion. There are only Civil Wars. And by Civil War no nation is ever bettered.
*
So I have turned again to the past. Carew, to give you the past makes the present less intolerable for me here. We are still anchored in the shining Bay of Nevis. This morning I saw a turtle as big as a sHicld. The sea between here and St Kitts is as blue as your mother’s right eye. Where it frets against the shore you can see swarm upon swarm of minute but bright-coloured fishes in it, striped and speckled, many with long fins that make them look like soldiers. I saw also a huge land crab whose popping eyes and fumbling oversized pincers put me in mind of King James.
As to the birds: This island is full of flamingoes. Tall, pink, stalk-legged, they remind me of those ephemeral lazy young dandies, all garters and lacework collars, who perfumed Elizabeth’s Court before the rough wind of the Great Armada came to blow them away to some safer satin nest far deep in the heart of the country. But the species that interest me most are the boobies and the frigates or man-of-war birds. The booby, dusk-coloured, dives headlong down into the sea for its prey. The man-of-war bird is your perfect unconscionable pirate. Fork-tailed, with a seven-foot wingspan, it swoops down to make the booby vomit up what it has eaten, in order to eat it, and lives on nothing else.
To give you my past and my present makes some kind of future seem possible.
But where? When? And how?
To revictual and return to Guiana? To fall on the Plate Fleet? To go home?
I suggested this evening to Parker that my letter from Montmorency could perhaps be construed as the letter of marque he thought necessary for any privateering venture. It speaks, after all, of the Grand Admiral’s willingness to persuade Louis the 13th to admit me and my men to any French port upon our return ‘avec tous ses ports, navires, équipages, et bien par lui traités ou conquis’
‘Ou conquis’ I said. Is that not a licence to privateer?’
Parker said: ‘But last night you insisted we would not run for cover to France.’
I meant not empty-handed,’ I replied.
Parker smiled unpleasantly, and whistled one sour note through his teeth. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘The prospect of selling the French a ship full of Spanish silver makes right what you thought to be wrong.’
I was silent. I thought of the frigate bird.
Parker said: ‘And you’ll hoist the French flag at your mast then?’
That stopped me.
This black Destiny may be my coffin and that blue sea my shroud, but Sir Walter Ralegh shall not die under false colours.
7
16 March
Chudleigh has gone. With the F lying Joan. John Chudleigh, of Devon, who was the first of my captains to look coldly on my proposal that we sail back to the Orinoco once our vessels are refurbished. Whether he elected to fly because he feared I would, after all, compel the fleet to return for the gold, I don’t know. But this morning I woke to find one ship less in the Bay. Chudleigh had slipped away in the night, and all his crew with him, including William Thorne (a good and experienced master), 25 men, and 14 fair pieces of ordnance.
It seems he gave no warning of his flight.
At least, none of the other captains will admit to knowing where he has gone.
My own guess is that Chudleigh and the Flying Joan are now heading for one of the pirate islands - Tortuga, most likely - there to rendezvous with Whitney and Wollaston and others already established in the dirty trade of piracy.
We are well rid of such vermin.
But their defection hardly simplifies my problem.
What to do next?
*
If I go for the Plate Fleet it means war with Spain. That much is obvious. And Winwood wants it. He got me out of the Tower to acHicve that end. I remember the story he told me of Gondomar’s fury when his spies brought him the news of my release. The Spanish Ambassador even attempted that most difficult of tasks: to speak to King James on one of his days spent out hunting.
You should know, Carew, that our King pursues the pleasures of the chase from dawn to twilight on four days in every week. Two other days he watches cock-fighting. Sundays are different, of course. Sundays he lies in bed, propped up against pillows and cushions, thin tapers burning in brass sockets on the headboard behind him, a seven-branched candlestick on the ebony-inlaid table by his bedside, the hanging tapestries drawn close around three sides of his giant four-poster, with (winter or summer) a massive log fire roaring in the grate. I have Winwood’s word for these details. Sundays James meditates, by candlelight and firelight, upon key phrases in the Lord’s Prayer; or else upon the Divine Right of Kings; or (but I flatter myself) upon the evils of smoking tobacco. Sundays, cosy and warm, with plenty of mattresses under him, he even denies himself his catamite Villiers.
I came out of the Tower on a Monday, however. And that particular Monday, the King was at Theobalds, in Hertfordshire, his favourite residence.
The hunting is good there. And always it ends the same
way. King James plunges his naked feet into the slit-open belly of the stag. He wriggles his toes in the warm entrails. He paddles in the reeking bowels of the creature.
All day that Monday - so Ralph Winwood told me - he kept bringing up topics to keep the King’s mind from the subject of my release. He was worried that James might renege, and then countermand it.
So now, standing up in his stirrups to relieve his heavy limbs from the ache of the long day’s hunt, Winwood watched impassively as the King splashed up and down in the stag’s insides, and remarked that it might be a good idea if James displayed his face a little more often in public.
Which stratagem drew the buffoonery he desired.
‘My face?’ James cried. ‘Are you joking?’
‘No, Sire,’ Winwood said. ‘I am serious. The people like to see their Sovereign now and then. They enjoy a show, you know, and it helps keep them loyal.’
James giggled. ‘I’ll give them a show!’ he screeched. ‘I’ll pull down my breeches and they shall see my arse as well!’
(I am quoting Winwood’s story word for word. You must learn, my son, what manner of man this King of ours is.)
James rolls his eyes a lot. He rolled them now. Then:
‘Steenie!’ he shouted.
This was the signal for George Villiers, Gentleman of the Bedchamber and Master of the King’s Horse, to spring from his saddle. A lithe springer, George Villiers. He knew what was required of him. Stooping, he scooped up two handfuls of blood from the dead stag. He began rubbing the King’s naked legs with them. The King’s mud-spattered boots and huge quilted daggerproof breeches lay in a heap by his horse. Villiers worked hard, an over-ripe smile on his heart-shaped face. Soon (Winwood said) the spindly regal shanks were criss-crossed with dripping gore.
‘That’s good,’ James announced. (He would have pronounced it guid, but I’m damned if I’m going to sit here under a Caribbean sun trying to imitate a Scotch accent.) ‘That’s very good, Steenie,’ James said. He fondled the young man’s dark chestnut hair where he knelt to his task. ‘Just the wee bit more? Just the finishing off now?’
Villiers finished his Majesty off. Winwood studied a hedge while he did.
Villiers winked at Winwood on the ride back to the hunting-lodge.
‘It’s good for his gout’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Winwood said.
Supper was interrupted by the arrival of a messenger. The messenger being a tight-buttocked young man, the King did not immediately bawl him out. The messenger’s scrap of paper torn from its envelope, however, Winwood told me that James turned irritably to confront him.
‘Gondomar,’ he said.
Winwood says he tried hard to look surprised.
‘Requesting an audience,’ James went on. ‘Can it be that the Spanish Ambassador also requires a flash of the royal arse?’
Villiers laughed uneasily, then made a whistling mouth. ‘Wants to lick it more likely,’ he suggested. Winwood winced.
(God knows if you will ever have the chance to peruse these pages, Carew. If you do, no doubt you will be old enough in the world’s wickedness to read them without blinking. I am writing to you now not as my young son, but as the man you one day will be when I am no more. It is important that you understand this incredible clown of a King who has done all he can to heap dirt on the throne of England.)
This King’s hand played now in Villiers’ short beard, tickling. ‘Shall we tell him what he can go and do, sweetheart?’ he said.
‘He’s a lecherous little prick,’ his catamite replied. ‘He’s probably done it twice already on the way out here.’
Winwood got up to go. ‘If your Majesty will excuse me,’ he said.
‘The devil I will,’James said. ‘Sit yourself down, man.’
Winwood sat. He kept his gaze fixed on his plate.
James started sucking at a goblet of resi nat ed Greek wine. That’s his favourite drink, and I’ve seen him drinking it. (We have met only once, face to face. I’ll be coming to that.) King James drinks as if eating. His tongue is too big for his mouth, and the wine invariably dribbles into his beard, which is wispy, square-trimmed.
When he had finished his drink and (according to Winwood) Villiers had leaned across the table to kiss his lips clean for him, his Majesty said: ‘Some fun with Count Gondomar about Winwood’s uncooked friend and his quest for El Dorado? Shall we, shan’t we?’
(Winwood’s ‘uncooked friend’ being me. James delights in puns. When we met he thought it the height of wit to declare that he’d heard of me rawly.)
Poor Ralph cleared his throat and gave it as his opinion that it was vital some pretence be kept up that my expedition was intended for Virginia.
‘I wasn’t asking you, sober-sides,’ James gurgled. ‘Steenie, my gorgeous Greek icon of St Stephen, what do you say, Steenikins?’
Villiers pursed his lips, clutching his head in his hands and going through a pantomime of considering the matter profoundly. Then he shrugged, took a gold coin from his pocket, tossed it, looked at the result and pronounced: ‘St Stephen, who positively detests all stiffnecked men, says that little Spanish monkeys are no bloody good either. St Stephen says such monkeys should be taught their place. Say that you’ll see Sefiora Gondomar - oh, next Friday. They’re cooler on Fridays, these Catholics. On account of the fish.’
I was told that King James roared with laughter at this feeble witticism. He leaned across the table to caress his catamite’s cheek. Then he turned an amiably contemptuous face back to Winwood. ‘The difference between you and my Steenie,’ he began, ‘the difference between you and sweet Steenie is ‘
Winwood says he had to bite his tongue and clench his fists. He’s a solid man. I can imagine him sitting there, lowering his head like a bull about to be killed.
‘Och the devil the difference,’ James said, flopping back into his chair. ‘It’s what we men have in common that’s so salient, after all.’
Winwood began to make a further noise about the advisability of not conceding an audience to the Spanish Ambassador.
James interrupted him. ‘I never intended for a second to see Gondomar tonight,’ he cackled. His watery blue eyes would be lukewarm with malice. (How well I remember that look, though I’ve seen it but once.) He addressed himself then to the messenger, who had watched this buffoonery without astonishment. He said: ‘Tell our friend the Ambassador of our dear brother of Spain that we’re feeling just a little dreich after a day when we had many momentous decisions to make. Tell him that we adore his company but couldn’t possibly do it justice at this hour. But he can wait on us on Friday in our cockpit at Whitehall. At noon. On the stroke.’
The messenger bowed and departed.
‘What’s that dreich?’ George Villiers asked idly.
‘Fucked out and far from home,’ replied King James.
*
I just discovered that the Indian will not sleep in Keymis’s cabin. Robin, my page, told me that the sheets there have never been touched. I found the Indian on the quarter-deck and asked him why. He said nothing. He pointed to the bowsprit. It appears that he prefers to lie stretched on it at night. Of course, he won’t be able to rest there once we sail. Unless he never sleeps, or wants to drown, I begin to wonder if this Christoval Guayacunda is a madman.
*
An interesting if depressing private conversation with Samuel King, who came aboard the flagship at seven bells especially to put it to me that even if we sail in boldly under our own colours and succeed against all the odds in picking off any of the stragglers from the Plate Fleet such action might entail the sacrifice of the security of our friends at home in England who have placed trust in us. My wife Bess, Mr Secretary Winwood, Lord Arundel, Lord Doncaster - they would suffer, they could be punished along with us.
I considered the point well taken, but argued that if such an act provoked outright war with Spain, which Winwood for one most certainly wants, then we would bring no discredit on ourselves or our f
riends at home.
Sam King said one word only in reply: ‘Gondomar.’
I knew what he meant without any further need for discourse. Don Diego S anniento, Count Gondomar, Ambassador Ordinary in London of King Philip the 3rd of Spain, is a clever and complicated man. He runs rings round the English politicians, and - although the King may win the odd little battle as on that day of my release from the Tower when he refused him an audience - he has James in his pocket also.
Gondomar is dangerous. Gondomar is an enigma. He reads Winwood, for instance, like an open book. It might even be that his complaints about my voyage were so much bluster. That he wanted the fight at San Thome - in fact, feels disappointed now, if word has already got back to him that the thing was no more than a skirmish. That he expects me to go for the Plate Fleet, the quest for the gold having failed. (I am not so unlearned in intrigue as to doubt that every word of my talk with viper Bacon that evening in Gray’s Inn Fields went straight to the ears of the King, and from the King’s lips to Gondomar.) It could be that Philip of Spain is looking for a righteous excuse to declare war on England, and with the Pope’s blessing of course. And that Gondomar has been instructed all along to engineer an occasion for such war, behind his ceaseless pacific palaver about marrying the Infanta Maria to James’s son and heir, ‘Baby Charles’ as he calls him, though the sad fellow is rising sixteen.
