Death of the Fox: a novel about Ralegh

by George Garrett

  —May I add something to this protean picture? Please remember that any part of any one fashion might be worn with an alloy of others, according to taste and preference. Allow, too, that a man could settle his choice upon one style that pleased him most and wear it without regard to fashion.

  —Travel has been mentioned, both in uncomfortable fact and contented imagination. Some brought the bits and pieces of foreign fashions home with them. Others—some who had never stepped beyond the counties of their birth—would borrow a whim or notion, transformed by English tailors.

  —Consider that all the turns and counterturns, wars and troubles on the Continent cast up foreigners to live in England. They came from the Netherlands, from Germany, France, and Portugal, bringing their styles and their crafts of making and dyeing; new ways of weaving and coloring and cutting; starch and colored starch.

  —There was the jest in a common play, an English play, how an Englishman acquired his doublet in Italy, hose in France, bonnet in Germany, and his behavior everywhere.

  Taking such for granted, he does not mention the uniforms, gowns, and badges of office, of clerks and scholars, officers of government, offices of the Court, the clergy with ordered ranks and vestments, orders of knighthood and nobility. And the habitual clothing of the crafts and guilds, prentice, journeyman, and master. And servants clad according to the master’s wishes, the whole intricate ladder of ranks and stations, from turnspit and scullion to secretary and steward.

  —Compound it more by considering regulations and sumptuary laws, statutes designed to preserve some kind of order amid this confusion, requiring that citizens dress according to their stations. Needless to say, these laws changed with the music of fashion and were largely unenforced, being unenforceable. A freeborn Englishman has always deemed it a part of his natural liberty to dress as he pleases.

  —At Court, however, whims of the Queen were law. Woe to the lady who appeared there in anything more resplendent than the Queen!

  He is not interested in religious distinctions: the Puritan who railed against sumptuous apparel and affected, as his badge of honor, sober dress of plainest stuffs. The Jesuit, risking his life to bring his ministry to the faithful, therefore carefully disguised.

  And this is less than one half of the chronicle of costume. For the women, as ever, and especially in England, where their freedom forever astonished foreigners, were more elaborate and various in their fashions.

  —You have not troubled to mention the materials from which our costumes were wrought. From our native cloth makers came wool and other yarns: fustian, kerseys, broadcloths, and cottons. From the instruction of foreigners came variations such as grogram, bays and says, and mockado. And a wealth of the finer things: silk, damask, brocade, taffeta, sarcenet, satin, velvet, fine lawn, and cambric.

  —And the colors! All colors of nature and shades of the rainbow, together with a hundred subtle distinctions of each, each with a proper name: Popinjay Green, Peachflower, Maiden’s Blush, Russet Red, Horseflesh, Peas Porridge Tawny, Flame, Gingerline, Ash, Maidenhair Brown, Drake’s Color, Dead Spaniard, Devil-in-the-Hedge, Marigold, Kendal Green, Isabel, Blood red, Gooseturd Green, etc.

  —Picture every kind of fur, from beaver and otter to ermine. Every kind of leather, kidskin, suede. Handkerchiefs of rarest silk. Lacework adorning, and that lace made as fine as ferns. And all but the plainest garments embroidered inch by inch with rich threads, sometimes gold and silver. Tiny perfect jewels and gems sewn into cloth. The linings of all things made equally fine and then garments slashed and pinked and paned to show that beauty.

  —Not extraordinary to see a close row of buttons, ten, fourteen, or twenty-four, with each button a piece of gold, a small cut diamond in the center.

  —Hats of every kind and shape made of velvet or silk or beaver or ermine, adorned with ribbons and jewels, and with such bursts of the feathers of rare birds that we were called “the most feather-headed folk in the world.”

  —With gloves and shoes and girdles delicately scented.

  —Men and women wearing golden chains for their purses and watches and mirrors and penknives. The women carrying their masks and fans, all jeweled; busks, muffs, periwigs and bodkins. And whether wearing wigs or their own hair, dusting it with bits of jewels, flecks of the dust of gold.

  —All wearing jewels. Earrings of pearl and precious stones. Jewels upon scabbard and hilt of sword and dagger. The women with long rows of heavy bracelets over their sleeves. Necklaces with cameos of ivory or whale tooth, pendant jewels and jeweled watches. And bracelet watches to keep the pulse of time upon the wrist.

  —And at a cost beyond calculation. An embroidered waistcoat could cost as much as a small merchant ship. Short Spanish cloaks were worth several waistcoats.

  —If Walter Ralegh indeed spread a cloak for the Queen at a splashy place, the Queen then walked across a good year’s living for an ordinary gentleman.

  —In the reign of the Queen a pair of silk stockings cost more than an entire costume of her grandfather’s time.

  —Strangers, even from the rich countries, were baffled by our light extraordinary costumes. Which were worn with a blithe disregard for their fragility, and a perfect indifference to weather.

  —Costumes, worn as if all were actors in a play. And indeed these were true revelers, playing parts in the masques and joining the dancing afterwards with the Queen.

  —Fantasies out of a dream of chivalry, created for the surprising entrance of some man and his attendants before the Queen. Pleasing her or displeasing her—upon one occasion, one day, one time.…

  —No playhouse could offer such a scene as that one on Accession Day, 1598, when a tournament was prepared in honor of the Queen. For her pleasure, Sir Walter Ralegh gave the yeomen of the Guard plumes of orange tawny to wear. Whereupon, the Earl of Essex suddenly appeared, fresh from Wansted, where he had been in a fit of pouting and sulking, with more than two thousand men, knights and retainers, ten times the number of her Guard all wearing the same plumes. The populace was delighted by the Earl’s crude wit.

  —The Queen was not diverted by the sight of the Earl arriving with an army, like a baron of long ago, and, even in jest against a rival, willing to insult her honor, and, more dangerous, playing to the people, a show of wit and force and indifference, for their favor, their delight.

  —The Queen waited and watched and said nothing. Until Essex, all eyes on him, performed poorly at the tilt. At which moment she chose to cancel the celebration. As if to spare herself the sight of Essex’s disgrace.

  —There you have it, but not the full beauty. For, you see, the Queen knew Essex was no champion of the tiltyard. Knew there were a dozen men who could make a clown of him. Therefore she sat in her place and let that occur. Then, out of a gesture of seeming pity, called off the tournament and departed. Leaving those who had applauded him to laugh. The final rosette of irony being that she did, in truth, pity him and sought to school him in the craft of survival.

  Well then, disguise laid upon disguise. Life like a butterfly, a bee’s brief springtime of gathering honey. All things changing shape and form. All things afire with change. And yet, beneath all changes and disguises, was the forked, pale, hairy pelt of flesh shared by all alive. And, in fact, all that flowering clothing, fruit and blossom, was grafted upon one trunk. The multitude of changes catches the eye and disguises the deeper, more essential truth: that the one model of clothing never truly changed. Doublet, hose, jerkin, these were the three elements of costume of all Englishmen for a century and more. Farmer and blacksmith, beggar and barrister, mariner and merchant, child and man, all wore essentially the same clothing. No matter what differences in quality or kind of cloth. A way of dressing in functional purity, well fitting, made for action, for graceful and quick movement and for hard labor too, for riding, climbing, running, fighting, working.…

  —And for dancing and merely idling about. Though half the English nation might seek to imitate the Court, while t
he other half was railing against us, the Court was always the same and true to its original form; unchanging though it seemed to be the theater of change.

  —Clothing tells the story in small compass. Our clothing only seemed to change, the true design being maintained within disguises of decoration, embroidery, accessories, and whims of fashion, and all we cheerfully aped from foreign nations. Which amused strangers well enough, but served some purpose. One being show, the spectacle of power. Conquest, as it were. We seemed able to take whatever we chose from foreign nations for ourselves. To loot and pillage without war. What we took up could seem like a tribute offered. Adding up to create an imaginary empire served by all nations, friendly and hostile, with England at the center. Which is a fable as unlikely as Aesop’s moralities of talking, reasoning lions and ravens and foxes and geese. But a fable can inspire a dream that it is true.

  —Consider also that, as in all double-edged things, the discontent of Puritan, Jesuit, or proud old-fashioned Englishman against fashions of Court served a beneficial purpose. All railed against our apparel, each for his own reasons. It was a diverting subject, an object for satire and contempt. They were not only diverted, but beguiled. For they would have made complaint in any case. Better, therefore, they should squander wrath upon fragile illusions.

  —And their complaining served somewhat to check extraordinary excesses by the Court.

  —And do not forget that the celebration of the old, which had not been so celebrated when it was new, became a part of the same fable, implying a unity, an honor of the chronicle of England.

  —Not least, all could unite in complaint against the Queen’s gaudy Court and most against those supreme peacocks—her favorites.

  —Better satiric arrows, of those who swore all our virtue was gone with the longbow, should be aimed at them than at the Queen.

  —For all its beauty, our clothing lasted not much longer than the fashion of it. Materials made for the present, not to last. Gone like the autumn leaves. Just so.… Gone with the tottering banquet houses where once we danced. Gone with the jewels she had pawned by the end; so that the new King found much cunning paste and glass. Gone, at the last, with the Queen herself, her policy, her great men, and her favorites.…

  —Sir Walter Ralegh served two Courts, the one long, the other briefly. In the former he was called a fortunate upstart knave. In the latter, though never a presence, he has been, like the ghost of himself, a long and vexing memory.

  —The letter of all courts is much the same, but the spirit comes from the prince, first set, then maintained according to the purposes, character, and power of the ruler.

  —You must imagine the Court of the Queen before you picture him there.

  —When she came to London for her coronation, at one of the magnificent arches where spectacles were presented in her honor, she took especial note of a player who was tricked out as an ancient man armed with a scythe and an hourglass, representing Father Time.

  “Time …” she said. “Time hath brought me here.”

  —Which was all she could gloss from the text of the past. Last and least likely to wear the Tudor crown, indeed lucky to be alive, to have a head to hold a crown, she came to rule when all choices had been made and spent, all means of ruling tried. Disregarding the Lady Jane Grey, Queen for nine uncertain days, there were in one century five Tudor princes; and the chief purpose of each was the same—the renewal and revival of the kingdom. Each sought to break and to end a long winter, to announce and display a season of springtime. The first, Henry VII, sought this in the literal sense, rising to rule from the blood of Bosworth Field. For the other four—Great Henry, Edward, Mary, Elizabeth—the task became multifoliate, no less literal but partaking of allegory as well. They became sowers of seeds as in the parable. Only the last, Elizabeth, sowed seed on fertile ground. Only the barren Queen reaped a bountiful harvest.

  —But she could not have imagined that any more than she could have dreamed that one day, by Providence or the satirical whims of Dame Fortune, she would be Queen of England. She came all unprepared and thus, by paradox, was the one Tudor perfectly prepared to rule. The future was beyond knowing. She could build no castles there. The past had been spoken in a language beyond translating. And so she was left with the changing and inconstant present, whose common language is Mutability. She could possess the present, but only a day at a time. Who but a woman, masked with woman’s inconstancy, was so suited to preside over the present?

  —It is true that what she accomplished was out of necessity, but to perceive necessity—that was her wisdom.

  —From the beginning she lacked wealth. All the wealth her grandfather had carefully garnered, her father had spent twice over. The reigns of Edward and Mary became, in accounting, a sum of debts. She had no chance to increase the wealth of the kingdom except by careful conservation and by the artful and deceptive distribution of it.

  —She had some means, to be sure. She held the power of customs duties, poundage and tunnage, the monopolies, royal wards, attainders of property and estates of traitors, and indeed the Privy Seal, which could be pointed like a cannon at some rich lord. And she could call upon her Parliament for subsidies.

  —She could not consider arranging royal marriages for their double-stringed advantage—peace and profit. She had only one marriage, her own, with which to bargain.

  —Nor could she consider war an investment, the merchant adventuring of princes. The price was impossible. There could be no profit from even the smallest war. Only a few princes, already rich, already endowed with military power, could consider war in the old way. And these deceived themselves. Philip of Spain, with the wealth of an empire and the New World in his hands, possessing the most powerful forces by land and sea in the world, was hard pressed. When he was not spending his wealth, he was accumulating debts, forced to pawn and to borrow. The truth, evident to the Queen and a few others, was that she could not afford the most limited defensive wars. And at the end, forced into war, even her victories proved to be as she must have known they would, disasters.

  —In each of the means of increasing wealth, she had a strong bit, a sharp snaffle in the mouth restraining her. She must be exceeding careful. To meddle too much with the customs, for example, could destroy the trade it sought to encourage. Monopolies and perquisites could be sold to advantage. But she must not permit these to work ruin upon trade or to increase doubt and distrust among her people. The estates and marriages of royal wards might yield something, but nothing in proportion to her needs. The ancient Parliament of England could levy taxes and make subsidies. But they could also bargain with the prince, giving a subsidy in return for things they desire—including, of course, more power, more liberty. And England was the lowest taxed nation in the world. Her Parliament could change that forever, being liberal with the wealth of others. As for the attainders of the properties of traitors, she was willing to take advantage of this means whenever a plot was discovered and treasons were proved. But she had seen how the temptation could—witness her father—untune a mind with the discord of imaginary plots.

  —She had come to the throne with a weary people, willing to trust her because they had no choice, until she proved herself unworthy. This was her greatest credit. She must not dissipate this trust even for the general good. And she must reciprocate by demonstrating trust in them.

  —She must, therefore, seek new ways to earn wealth. No choice but to be frugal in all things. Yet she must not seem to be as poor as she was and thus reflect to the kingdom and a hostile world the poverty and weakness of this nation.

  —A most economical woman, our Queen. She knew prices to the penny and could have outbargained a fishwife. She could squeeze a gold half angel coin until the angel dropped his spear and fell like the groaning dragon at his feet.

  —Yet she knew how to seem spendthrift when the gesture was worth a fortune. As when upon a progress, the baggage all loaded and ready, word came to unload and unpack. The Queen had c
hanged her mind. And a burly carter, not knowing the Queen stood at the window above him, roared with laughter and said how, by God, now he knew the Queen to be a woman exactly like his wife.

  “Who is the villain who says so?” she shouted from the window.

  —And the poor man humbly knelt.

  —Then she laughed and threw him three gold angels and wished him well.

  —A gesture worth three hundred angels to her by the time the story had been told and retold.

  —One tongue is a flame and can burn down a forest.

  —Another example: how she always managed to lose something—glove, garter, jewel off her dress, etc.—whenever she appeared in public. This thing to be snatched up at once and kept like some saint’s relic by the finder. Yet she counted and recounted everything she possessed. And everything she lost was carefully recorded. The profit from her carelessness far exceeded the sum of all her losses. She never lost anything of much value. A careful carelessness, to say the least.

  —And she was well advised by men skilled at trade and all the tricks and sleights of hand with money. Sir Thomas Gresham, for example, who saved her fortunes; who milked Antwerp, Fleming and Spaniard alike, dry, for England and his own hungry purse; then, in effect, moved Antwerp to London when he built the magnificent Royal Exchange with its gilt grasshopper proudly surmounting all. And he spared no money in the setting up of charities, schooh, and almshouses, either. If he filled his purse in her service, his services were worth double that price.