by David Field
The Queen’s Constables
David Field
© David Field 2019
David Field has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
Originally published in 2019 by Sharpe Books.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Endnote
Chapter One
It was Saturday – market day – and like any other Tudor town on such a day, Nottingham’s Market Place was awash with deafening noise, contrasting smells and heaving crowds. Since early light the traders had been driving their carts into town and unloading their wares, and the objects of their grunting labour and commercial ambition were now on abundant display.
Corn from the Vale of Belvoir on the Leicestershire border, the first of the season’s apples and plums from Arnold in the north, and parsnips and other root crops from the villages to the west, competed for the limited purses of the local housewives with locally baked bread, pots, pans, cloth, basketry and leather goods as each stallholder loudly proclaimed their bargains into the narrow passageways between the lines of stalls. Beyond the low wall that divided the market place into two uneven halves lay the livestock pens, where one could purchase everything from a breeding cow to a goose whose neck would be obligingly wrung by the vendor for an extra penny. There were conies, capons, sheep, ducks and even ponies, each squawking, clucking or bellowing in protest against its enforced confinement.
Senior Constable Thomas Lincraft and his colleague Constable Giles Bradbury strolled slowly side by side, down one passageway between stalls, and then up another. Market Day was their busiest as they kept an experienced eye out for pickpockets, cut-purses, prostitutes and other undesirables who were always drawn to such a chaotic assembly of people about their lawful business. The two officers of the law already had three thieves and two prostitutes firmly tied to the designated post set into the ground at the eastern end of the market place, where they would remain until sunset, and the departure of the last trader. Tom and Giles would then return to their office in the Guildhall and come back with a cart in which to transport their day’s crop of felons to the gaol cells.
Ahead of them through the crush of bodies they became aware of the harsh clamour of angry argument, dominated by the shrill voice of a protesting woman. They instinctively quickened their pace without a word between them, then pushed through the last of those who had been blocking their view in order to identify the source of the dispute. A young woman was competing with a dishevelled looking man for possession of a woven basket of some sort, and as Tom dived into the contest to restore order, Giles ducked behind the woman’s stall and ran in pursuit of a skinny youth who had possession of a money bag. Giles brought the youth to the ground by means of a flying leap, and easily overpowered him in order to take the bag from his protesting grasp. Then he hauled the lad to his feet by the collar of his grubby shirt, and led him to where Tom had a firm grasp of the man who had been in the act of stealing the woven fruit basket, according to the young woman who was complaining bitterly to her stern faced saviour.
‘This your money bag?’ Giles enquired, and the woman turned, nodded and enquired ‘How did you know? And how did you come by it?’ Giles smiled knowingly.
‘The oldest trick in the game, Mistress. They works in twos – one of them distracts you by making a big show of stealing something off your stall, while the other nips behind it and steals anything worthwhile from the back while you’re too busy at the front, trying to get your goods back. You must be new around here, to have fallen for that one. And you must have been very unwise, not to have your money bag tied around your waist.’
‘It’s only my second market day,’ she smiled up at him, ‘but I were lucky that you and your friend here come by when you did.’
‘We’re both constables,’ Tom explained, ‘and we needs to haul these two away in order to tie them up until we can take them down to the gaol. Giles here will come back after that and make a note of your name.’
‘I can give you that now,’ the woman explained, ‘It’s Mary – Mary Cossall. But if this lovely young man would care to come back, I’ve got some elderberry wine we can share. My aunt made it.’
By dusk, the only remaining evidence that a market had been held there earlier was the occasional pile of abandoned rotting fruit that had not found a purchaser, in addition to a few portions of soiled straw from the animal stalls that were rolling around in the evening breeze. Giles walked into the square from the top end of Bridlesmithgate, and grinned as he saw that the young woman was still there. Hopefully she’d delayed her return home in order to meet up with him again. Her modest stall had already been dismantled, and now lay on top of her cart, concealing the assorted woven baskets that remained unsold, while the pony stood with its head down resignedly, awaiting the word to move on.
‘I’m afraid I finished the elderberry wine,’ she confessed with a welcoming smile ‘since my throat got dry with all that dust. But I stayed on, in case you wanted anything more from me.’
‘A kiss would be nice,’ Giles flirted outrageously with one of his special boyish smiles that had won over many a maiden. ‘But then we hardly knows each other, does we?’
‘You at least knows my name,’ Mary replied as she fluttered her eyelashes in what she hoped was coquettish encouragement to this strikingly handsome young hero with the broad shoulders and flowing auburn locks, ‘but I doesn’t know yours.’
‘Giles. Giles Bradbury.’
‘And you’re one of them constables?’
‘That’s me. Before that I were a farmer, out by Tollerton way.’
‘That’s over the river somewhere, isn’t it? I’m from the north side myself. At least, I were until Mam and Dad died, then I come to live at Sneinton with my aunt and uncle. He were the coachman for Earl Manvers until he upped and died, and the Master let Aunt Martha stay on in the cottage. She needed someone to keep her company around the place, and I had nowhere else to go, and now I sells the baskets what we weaves to put food in our mouths. She’s teaching me how, and this were my second week at the Saturday Market. We waited ages to get the pitch.’
‘So now I know all about you, except whether or not you’ve got any admirers,’ Giles smiled back invitingly, and she couldn’t help herself.
‘Not at the moment, unless some young constable might be interested in applying for the position.’ She winced inwardly at her own forward behaviour, and hoped that this beautiful piece of manhood wouldn’t misread the signal. But his continuing warm smile was reassuring as he mentally toasted his seeming good fortune. Mary was beautiful, with long flowing light auburn locks and the most entrancing green eyes. If indeed she wasn’t already spoken for, then the young men in Sneinton suffered from poor eyesight, he concluded as he pressed home his advantage.
‘Does you only come into the town on market days?’
‘Of course. It’s not safe any other time, is it? Especially not at night.’
‘It is if you’re in the company of a constable,’ he grinned, and she smiled back encouragingly. ‘I doesn’t drink ale, but I likes walking along the river on warm nights. I sometimes does that, but I never comes any further into town than the bridge.’
‘Even then you’d be taking a risk, without me walking with you,’ Giles said encouragingly, and she took the bait. ‘It looks as if the weather’s set fair for a day or two, so if I should happen to be somewhere near the bridge just as the sun sta
rts to go down tomorrow evening, would I be likely to find a gallant young constable to ensure my safety?’
‘You’d be safe from everyone except the gallant young constable,’ Giles assured her with a leer, and she hid her blushes by turning back towards the cart. ‘I need to get back. Could you walk part of the way with me?’
‘Wasn’t you planning on riding on top of the cart?’ Giles enquired. She leaned forward and placed a soft hand on his jacket.
‘I were until I got a better offer from a gallant young constable.’
‘How come you can read and write?’ Tom’s wife Lizzie enquired as she removed the bowl from the table after Tom had finished his late supper, and Tom frowned.
‘A long story, most of which you’ve heard many’s the time. When Dad and my older brother Richard got burned alive on the say-so of that bastard cousin Francis, Mam and me thought it best to get out of London, and we finished up here in Nottingham. Mam and her brother Robert was brought up on an estate out Bingham way, where their dad – my granddad – had been Steward until the lord of the manor got his land confiscated because he fell out with the Earl of Lincoln what owned all the lands in them parts. You couldn’t be a steward unless you could read and write, and I don’t know quite where my grandad learned, because I never met him. But he’d taught my uncle, and when I were put to work as his apprentice in the carpentry business here in town, he taught me. He never had any sons, see – just a couple of daughters – and in them days it weren’t thought proper for girls to be taught owt except needlework and cooking and such like.’
‘It still isn’t,’ Lizzie snorted, ‘but you’ve got a son, haven’t you?’
‘What you getting at, woman? You wants me to teach Robert to read and write? On top of my duties as a constable? You found a way of doubling the number of hours in a day, or what?’
‘No, not you,’ Lizzie replied with a scornful look. ‘You’re not home often enough to even talk to me beyond asking what’s for dinner, and you’ve no patience when it comes to Robert. But he’ll be eleven next birthday, and he couldn’t even sign his name to save his life. No, I were thinking of that there Free Grammar School round the corner on Stoney Street.’
‘It’s not free,’ Tom countered. ‘They charges twopence a week for the dinners they gets, and the cost of keeping the fires burning, and then there’d be the cost of them books. And I’m damned if I’m going to go cap in hand to them there Guardians of the school, asking for my son to be taken on as a “poor scholar”. So forget all about that idea.’
‘Maybe we could afford it, now that you’re being paid as a Senior Constable,’ Lizzie suggested. ‘There’s some weeks I’ve got a few pennies left over, and . . . .’
‘I said forget it!’ Tom shouted as he brought his fist down heavily on the table, rattling the candle holder in the process. ‘Book learning is for all them Popish lilies what swans around the place pretending they’re something they’re not. No good ever came of book learning, mark my words. But you’re right about Robert; he needs to be set to some trade or other – maybe carpentry, like I were.’
‘He certainly won’t follow you into being a constable, if he can’t read nor write,’ Lizzie fired back in her disappointment. ‘At least we’ll be sparing some poor unsuspecting woman the life I’ve had to lead.’
‘You’ve done well enough, for a girl what came from a family of ten whose dad were a gong farmer,’ Tom sneered, and was heartily relieved when Robert and Lucy came running back indoors from wherever they’d been collecting dirt on their clothes this time, and Lizzie turned her attentions towards them, and the state they were both in.
It was their fourth Sunday evening walking out together along the river bank, and this time Giles and Mary had wandered closer to the coppice of trees that overhung the water. There were flies in abundance that they swatted away with their free hands as they chatted away happily about their lives thus far, and Giles’s work as a constable whose duties required him to tangle with the most violent people in the county.
‘You needs to be tough to do that,’ Mary observed as she tucked her arm into his, pulled him closer towards him, then planted a kiss on his lips as he turned his head towards her. The kiss lingered longer than their previous ones, and had clearly left Mary slightly breathless as she added ‘Just the sort of man a woman needs to protect her in this wicked place. Until I met you I were fearful of coming into town even on market day, but now I feels a whole lot safer, knowing that you’re somewhere close at hand.’
‘Not always all that far away, neither,’ Giles reminded her. ‘Tom’s getting a bit shitty with me spending half of Saturday talking to you and guarding your aunt’s baskets.’
‘I’ve told her all about you – I hope you don’t mind,’ Mary advised him under lowered eyelashes. ‘Depends what you’ve told her, don’t it?’ Giles grinned back, and Mary kissed him again.
‘Just that you’re big and handsome, and strong and brave, and beautiful, and . . . ’
‘And what?’ Giles enquired coaxingly as they stopped in the grassy glade between two hanging willow trees whose branches drooped down towards the slow-moving water.
‘Well,’ Mary replied blushingly, ‘just the sort of feller a woman needs to give her bubbies.’
‘But not afore she’s married?’ Giles suggested, and she pulled him towards her, slid her arms round his broad back, kissed him hotly on the lips and ground her pelvis into his suggestively.
‘That depends on the feller, don’t it? And whether he intends to stay with her after the bubby’s born. It don’t matter whether you’re married or not then, does it?’
‘I don’t think the minister of St Mary’s would agree with you there,’ Giles replied with a rapidly drying throat.
‘But he isn’t here to ask, is he?’ Mary pointed out. ‘And it’s getting dark, and we’re hidden from view in these here trees. A girl could easily go wrong with the wrong sort of feller.’
‘What about the right sort?’ Giles enquired as he reached out and squeezed her breast.
‘It’s never felt more right,’ Mary breathed heavily as she pressed his hand even harder. Then they lowered themselves onto the grass in an urgent embrace without another word being spoken.
Tom cursed loudly as he broke the seal and read what Francis Walsingham had written. He’d almost forgotten the day when he and Giles had been appointed as ‘Constables Royal’, and considering that they’d never received a single penny by way of a stipend, it was something you could easily forget. Fancy titles like that meant nothing when you were slugging it out with Saturday night make believe prize fighters, or apprehending felons armed with knives who were accused of robbing coaches as they came into town, raping young girls in alleyways or waylaying unsuspecting merchants as they weaved their uncertain way back from an alehouse laden down with the day’s takings from an advantageous deal done over a few pots of the local brew.
That was the reality of life as a County Constable – locking up those accused by others. Tom was more inclined towards making his own enquiries before condemning anyone on the urgings of others, and he had seen enough of the sort of underhanded work in which Walsingham and his paymasters engaged to want none of it. Then again, to disobey the summons would be to lose the patronage and support of someone who might prove useful if Tom overstepped the mark once too often, and he’d come close to doing that more than once.
So he sighed, folded the summons neatly into the pocket of his jacket, made arrangements for a horse to be made ready the following morning from the stables kept at the rear of the Guildhall, and went home to break the news to Lizzie.
‘While you’re down there, see if you can find a school for Robert what’s prepared to teach the only son of a totally useless father,’ was her only riposte. But at daybreak the next morning she handed him a parcel of food and a bladder of small beer, wiped a betraying tear from her eye and begged him to come home safely as she waved him off at the door.
Chapter Two
He walked the final few steps into the courtyard of Whitehall, where he was to meet with Walsingham. The horse that had carried him for three days south from Nottingham was now stabled at his final inn, one that was dwarfed by the fine houses along the street they called Savoy, and he had opted to walk, rather than be refused stable space inside the pulsing heart of English government. His boots were now filthy, but at least his face was not red with the embarrassment of rejection, or his heart saddened by the curses of liveried servants as they ordered him back out into the public thoroughfare.
It was all bustle and self-importance in the entrance hall, and as he adjusted his eyes to the gloom he was all but bowled over by scurrying clerks carrying rolls of vellum and calling out to each other regarding their business. He flattened himself as far as he could against the inside of the front wall and wondered where to go next, until he was spotted lurking there by a tall man in a red and gold liveried tunic who walked over with his halberd and demanded to know his business.
Tom had retained the presence of mind to keep the written summons from Walsingham, else he might have been forced back out into the courtyard on the end of a pike. As it was, the man seemed impressed, and directed Tom up the sweeping flight of double stairs opposite the entrance, and by dint of a few more hesitant questions posed of superior faced officials, all wearing black robes and all speaking as if their noses were confined within horse feeding bags, Tom was ordered to take a seat in the outer chamber of a suite of offices on the first floor, where he heard copious references to ‘the Master’, ‘The Secretary’ and ‘Her Majesty’ in the many conversations that competed for his attention.