Here will be Anne of Denmark, wife to James and friend to Walter Ralegh. Unless, in her illness, she is still at Oatlands.
Now comes Kingston, where in dim days Saxon kings were crowned.
Widening, deeper, the river passes the palace of Richmond. A favorite of the late Queen, though not so much for pleasure as Nonsuch or Greenwich. Most remembered as the chief seat of her grandfather, Henry VII.
Place where, still a princess, she was reconciled with Mary, the Queen. Together they came from London in midsummer on barges covered with fresh flowers so that each seemed a floating garden. Came to feast in the banquet house upon a miracle of sweetness, a huge cake made to appear like a pomegranate tree and bedecked in colored sweets to show the arms of Spain.
Place where we came from London on torchlight barges, to the noise of musicians and under a canopy of fireworks, for a night of revels—masques and dancing, perhaps a play.
Place where Elizabeth took much delight in her grandfather’s cunning secret passages.
Place where it pleased the late Queen to permit her godson, Sir John Harrington, to build and install his wondrous new invention, the Ajax, a machine designed to replace the privy and the Jordan pot of the chamber. Calling him her saucy poet of the laystow, the Queen allowed it. But also allowed as how the galloping rush of waters which followed upon the pulling of a chain near frightened her out of her wits and like to have bound her innards for a week. Saying: “Go to, Sir Jakes, your jest will be the ruin of my bowels and is unfit for all but savages. Take a patent upon it and sell it to Irish or blackamoors. But not in my kingdom!”
Richmond, the place where Henry VIII, young, made entertainments for the Venetians. And where, after many years and near to the end of her reign, when the Venetian Ambassador, Scarmelli, came to complain of English pirates, the Queen received him grandly and graciously chided him for long years of silence from Venice. All in his native tongue. And after he had bowed and departed, the Queen turned laughing to her Court, half in wonder herself, for she had not spoken the Italian tongue in half a century.
Place for such curiosities as the chamber where Henry VII died, the walls sprinkled and dotted with his blood according to his wishes. Where can be seen the round mystic mirror wherein that king could see all things presently passing in the world, on land and on sea. Which mirror broke at the instant of his death. An inconvenience for all future kings of England.
Place for the library of Henry VII, an abundance of printed books and manuscripts. Some forbidden, dealing with magic and black arts.
Where a visitor may be shown a vellum scroll of twenty feet in length, demonstrating the genealogy of the English kings from Adam onwards.
Where one Henry died and where King James’ son, Henry, Prince of Wales, spent his final summer. A place of too many deaths to please our living King.
Except the one death which pleased him. For here at Richmond, alas, the late Queen suffered her illness, dying upon the eve of Lady Day.
Beyond Richmond and coming to the curving turn at Lambeth Marsh. Passing the old manor house of Copped Hall, where the Lady Arabella, eager as James, waited for the Queen’s choice.
Now at the turning, tall upon the south bank, a sprawling of brick and stone, high-topped by towers, is Lambeth Palace, seat of the archbishops of Canterbury.
Highest above the outer court walls, overlooking the river and half of London, that small tower built a century and a half before by Archbishop Chicheley, for his convenience in the leisurely torture of the Lollard heretics.
Across the river stands Westminster, with the hall, old palace, the abbey, and Whitehall.
And now at last, deeper, still running clear, the river swallows up the waters of London, gulping the Fleet without hesitation. And taking thereby much that is foul from London, darkening its clarity.
Taking London’s waters and waste, but leaving a blessing for fishermen, fishmongers, and tables, a treasure of trout, perch, smelt, shrimps, bream, flounder, haddock, and many others. Sometimes, though rarely, a catch of carp. And upon occasion the fat salmon, though never so sweet as the salmon of Exe and the Devon rivers.
Flowing past London, now eagerly dreaming the sea ahead. Perhaps one last regret, a moment of hesitation, a bulge and loop, like a gut, at the Isle of Dogs, with Greenwich and noble buildings across the way.
Salute to Greenwich, then, and off and away, wider and deeper and swifter, running easterly past Beckton, Woolwich, Grays, Tilbury—where the greatest English army gathered and dispersed in triumph and without a fight—and Gravesend.
Until, like a huge jaw yawning with astonishment, the river goes to sea.
Waves shrug ermine shoulders. Shrieking gulls claim possession of blustering air.
There with wind to fill sails and belly them out like a woman with child, strange chords plucked from lines and halyards, the rig strummed by mad fingers, a cithern accompanying the crying of the gulls, who wish us no good luck; there to sail south down the British Sea toward Westcountry ports.
And from there on a day of favoring winds to set forth to far southern islands.
Where, at last, we turn westward with the trade winds and follow the sun, to sail on into the burning water and gold of the sky.…
But he is not on any rolling, pitching, wind-teased vessel now. The breeze on this river is not more yet than his own breath. He sighs for the shimmering, evanescent, butterfly’s wing of the present moment. Which reason again reminds him is his most precious possession. That moment, in purity, always threatened by memory and wishes. Or is that true? Why not call the present the sum of all?
The trick of time lies in its deceptions. Pea in the pod, shell game, past, present, future, shift place in one instant and who can say which is which and be sure?
Oars of the bargemen rise and dip and pull together, light and easy, wet with fresh drops as they feather, then swing to pull again. They hold the slim barge straight, riding clean in the water toward the arches of London Bridge.
Ralegh sits down, taking a place beside Apsley. His legs are tired.
The watermen and passengers in boats and wherries have seen him and guessed the purpose of this journey.
They will have told his name a thousand times before twilight. Indeed, before midday dinner his name will be bruited the length of the town.
So much value, then, for the precautions taken by these gentlemen from Kings Bench.
There are more virgins than there are secrets in London.
And there are more black swans than virgins.
Seeing now, in dawnlight hodgepodge, hurly-burly, hugger-mugger of the rooftops and gables, spires and bell towers, all shapes and sizes. Across a slant of distance, rising above everything, the bulk of St. Paul’s. Taller than all even without its spire. Shape of a lazy giant, half asleep, sprawled, propped high upon one elbow, heavy-lidded, overseeing all.
The inlet at Billingsgate. They pass close by a weather-worn merchant vessel, her ordnance bristling. Watermen are off-loading cargo to the wharf.
Back from the Baltic run, with rough furs and straight Polish timber lashed on deck.
London Bridge growing sudden and hugely ahead. With noise of water running through arches. With dim clatter of traffic overhead. Twenty-one stone piers to hold up twenty arches. Water narrowing, blocked by corn mills and waterworks on the south side and by heavy-timbered starlings built out to protect each pier. Narrowing so strict it makes waterfalls at the peak and the turn of the tide; when shooting the bridge takes all of the skill of the best of the watermen and allows an unwary passenger to taste his heart.
Did that also young and green with another whose name I cannot remember. Upon a wager and too drunk to fear the devil. And the waterman prayed like a Turk atop a temple howling when we steered his boat clumsy and laughing through thunder of white water to drop and spin around like a chip in a whirlpool. Yet not so much as a drop splashed our clothes.
London Bridge was built for wise men to go over and fools to go
under.
Fool or wise, I have walked over and around more times by far than I have gone under. For ever since I first crossed over, I have rejoiced to walk in the crowded savage streets. Savage? It seems so to the stranger. Friend Spenser, reared and schooled here, calls it “merry London.” Our King calls it “a foul town.”
Though famine and plague may scatter the crowds—not silence them, mind you, for they are as noisy in disaster as in triumph and festival—they return. Coming leaping back to spawn again.
And such a rage of color and textures. Granite stone from Cornwall and Devon, sandstone brought from York, freestone and, chiefly, Caen stone from Normandy. Marble from the Isle of Purbeck. Brickwork, glazed or plain, every age and shade, from blood and rose to rose pink. Plaster and timber, oak from Shropshire and Sussex, Lancashire and Cheshire, dark as ebony from time, or tricked out with gilding and painted decoration. Roofs of slate or lead and sometimes, against all common sense and regulation, of plain timber and even thatch.
Such colors in the streets—flowering of signs and banners and pennants.
And swirling street crowds. As if each dirty roadway, street, and alley were a river of flowers and flesh. No, not of flesh. Flesh not often seen except when some rogue or mort is stripped to reveal it. And it, too, is colorful soon with stripes of blood.
Only faces are seen, and faces of strangers are paper masks, their bodies clad, even the poor, in such various colors you can believe the shards and fragments of all the broken stained glass of England were seeds. Took root here by the river in the bone-rich earth. From which these living flowers bloomed.
Here the figure fails. Who’d sniff the scent without a strong nosegay in one hand, a pomander in the other, and a bag of sweet herbs around the neck? Whoever heard of flowers who can bawl more noise than a battlefield?
Though it may be if our ears were rightly tuned we might hear garden flowers shriek or squeal like butchered beasts when the cold knife cuts them off at stem or they are yanked by the roots to slow death.…
A head-tilting look, straight at the roofs of the high houses on the bridge. There toward Southwark side stands that new buffoonery some wag calls Nonsuch House, a drunkard’s fancy in timber, made by Dutchmen and shipped over to be pieced together here, crowned with crazed gilt domes and a clutter of gilded weather vanes to rival the pickled heads on the gate.
I will not picture how my head might look, no man being at best advantage bodiless, unbarbered, grinning on the end of a pike.…
And, going under, craning to see the tower of the Chapel of Thomas built upon the central pier of the bridge.
The crypt, they say, has a secret flight of stairs to the river. For a man in danger to go down. Better it were for a man to go up, I say.…
Smoking chimneys of houses. Each year the chimneys multiply, not going forth, but standing in one place. Multiply and grow taller to belch more smoke of sea coal and wood.
Under the bridge and look to the left now. To Southwark and tower of St. Mary Overy. Which some call St. Savior.
Many a marriage, many a christening, and funeral there. Many the tombs. And lately it is again the fashion to be placed there.
There lies the tomb of the moral Gower, greatest of all the old poets excepting Chaucer. A painted effigy beneath a canopy of carved stone. His head resting upon his three most celebrated volumes for eternal pillows.
And an inscription reading: “Whosoever prayeth for the soul of John Gower, he shall, so oft as he doth, have an M and a D days of pardon.”
Then let us all pray for John Gower’s soul until all England is pardoned forever.…
Out of sight, down the road to Canterbury, stands Old Tabbard Inn. From whence the finest English poet before our Spenser, and Spenser’s master and better, set forth with nine and twenty others on an April pilgrimage.
All their pilgrimages are done with, both Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser now lying in a corner of the Abbey of Westminster, hard by the Chapel of Henry VII. Chaucer, the Flower of Poets, and Spenser, named Prince of the same breed, close together. Setting a new ambition and fashion for our poets. Ben Jonson praying he shall be buried there too. Not only for ambition but, ever the satiric wit, for the poet’s justice of it. Saying: “By God, when I was a bricklayer, I laid half the new brick and repaired half the old that is there. It is only right I should be allowed to rest there too.”
Oh, old Southwark has many fine taverns and inns now, and a cluster of no less than five jails. None of them vacant or idle. No scarcity of that sort of pilgrim.
Now Bankside. Where the wise, going up- and downriver, disembark to walk around to the other side of London Bridge.
Bankside, proud with the Bishop of Winchester’s old palace.
And beyond there seeing the rising up of the familiar shapes of the playhouses, the Rose and the Globe. The Globe new built again since that time when he watched from the Tower to see it burn, an unplanned part of the show of Henry VIII by William Shakespeare.
And also, standing taller than either of these, the triple-tiered, many-galleried shape of our English Circus Maximus—the Beargarden. Where, though you can see neither Jesuit nor Puritan fed to lions, you will see native English dogs test courage against the bear and bull.
Or an ape with a whip ride a pony like a man, round and around, shouting in an incomprehensible tongue, fleeing a pack of wild dogs.
Or a blind bear chained to a stake fighting off dogs and ripping them gutless as cleaned fish.
All this and more if blood is your pleasure.
Your hard-shell snail of a Puritan rails against it. Just so calls the playhouse the house of the devil. Being able to speak with the most righteous vehemence because he has never been to either.
Tell him there are many worse things to see in this world if he will open his eyes. And he need not travel far, not beyond the limits of his own ward, to see them.
Go ask some drooling, poxed wretch, with a ruined rotten flap of a nose, to tell you of the pleasures of the stews in Southwark. And he will hawk and spit at your face.
Nothing special in that, though. For a man can acquire rosy emblems of the French disease in any ward or liberty of London. And for a modest price. Even, indeed, in stately shadows of Westminster. Though a man must pay more dearly for a lady’s favors there.
Passing now the inlet of Queenhithe on the London Bank. So soon? His looking at Southwark and Bankside costing him more time than he knew. Has gone past Ebbgate and Dowgate, with barges loading and unloading, already.
Here lies a middling-size Spanish vessel, of too much draught to ease into the inlet. Therefore anchored, fore and aft. Off-loading cargo to watermen. No love lost there between them, amid the shouts, as oranges and lemons go ashore and casks of Spanish wine. The Spaniards certain the watermen will dawdle and loaf time away, costing them tide and breeze. The watermen thinking what the returning cargo to Spain will be. Thinking good powder and English ordnance, on-loaded at Tower Wharf. Thinking: We are not galley slaves yet, so mind your sharp voices, you blackbeard bastards!
Just ahead lies Puddle Lane Wharf, overseen by the towers of Baynard’s Castle, as old as the Tower and built by a lord who served the Conqueror, to match the Tower and to end the old wall of London.
Baynard’s Castle now wasting and crumbling away. Though Great Henry came there often and troubled to rebuild it. And there most proudly lived the Earl of Pembroke, who proclaimed Queen Mary, and upon occasion of her first Parliament paraded to Baynard’s Castle with two thousand men and sixty of his gentlemen, men in velvet coats with chains of gold, gentlemen in blue coats and each wearing the Earl’s badge of the green dragon.
And once the old Earl held a banquet for Queen Elizabeth and afterwards they climbed a tower to see a display of fireworks, the river afire with reflection of falling stars.
Three towers face the river and an ancient gate with portcullis. From which a stone bridge leads down direct to the wharf.
But this morning no carts rumb
le under the gate. They are busy at Puddle Wharf, loading barrels of beer and returning to the new-built brewhouse nearby with barley and malt and hops. To be brewed with sweet healing waters from the well at St. Bride’s.
If you prefer our old English ale, sir, I say we should turn back to Southwark. For Southwark ale is so snappy and strong it will keep a man from church.…
Now Blackfriars and the wharf, a free landing place. And once, before the Dissolution, the sprawling seat of nine acres of the Preaching Friars. Where Parliaments once met. Where Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, was lodged.
Here Cardinal Wolsey was tried. And here, too, ecclesiastics gathered to hear a cause of matrimony between Henry VIII and his lawful wife. Which, unforeseen then, was to be the end of Blackfriars.
The old parish church of St. Anne is a stable for horses. There are tennis courts and places to let and lease to gentlefolk.
Here Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, kept chambers in the porter’s lodge, and had his garden. Ralegh dined there once too often.
Here, in the larger precinct, Ben Jonson lived.
And Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, and his lady lived there too, before they were imprisoned.
In ’76 the old Parliament Chamber was rebuilt into a private playhouse, smaller than the suburb theaters, and with seats in the pit. And there he saw by candlelight, in the company of others from Court, Jonson’s The Case Is Altered, and many a comedy acted by the Children of the Chapel Royal.
When that theater closed—he could still go to see the Children of Queens Revels at Whitefriars—he tried his skill with Rocco Bonetti or his son, Italian fencing masters who kept school there. Bonetti was quick and nimble. Give him a chance and he’d take your buttons one by one with so delicate a flick that he would neither scratch the skin nor tear clothing. All bravado and dexterity he was. But not so well versed in the rough and tumble of plain swordplay. As witness the scars he wore from choosing to cross blades with that stout London master, albeit a loudmouth bragging rogue, Austin Bagger of Warwick Lane.
Death of the Fox Page 17
