by M. J. Trow
Their instructions had been clear; camp tidily and as far from human habitation as possible. Don’t make too much noise. Don’t annoy – and this was mainly aimed at Alleyn, Burbage and Shaxsper – the fathers and husbands of the locality. Strike camp early and pack the tents well to make it easier when they needed to be put up again. And, despite Marlowe’s fears that trying to keep such a motley crew together and well behaved would be akin to herding cats, all had gone very smoothly. Sledd and Lyttleburye checked each night that everyone was still present and correct and, to their combined amazement, they hadn’t lost a soul.
Tonight, the camp was on its very best behaviour. They were within a day’s walk now of Titchfield and they would not have to travel separately any more. The Queen was joining them and she would ride in triumph on her litter, waving to the crowd that would doubtless throng the verges. They would not be going through any large towns, but rumour travels on swift wings, and so they were all ready for the biggest audience of their lives. Some of them were sick in nearby hedges. Some were simply sure their time had come – royal recognition must surely be around the corner. But if nothing else, in the morning, they could roll up the tents any-old-how and stuff them under seats. Some toyed with leaving them behind, but Philip Henslowe was travelling with them, and he could smell a wasted farthing at a hundred paces, so they all knew that would never work. But even so, it was a happy embryonic royal entourage that finally fell asleep in their field that night. Tomorrow was another day, and what a day!
Dawn came and revealed a camp already up and about. The birds shouted their joy at yet another glorious summer’s day as they filled the trees around the campsite, and many of the people sang too, for sheer excitement. The clothes they had been wearing since leaving London needed a brush but also embellishment and the seamstresses unpacked their bags of wonder and the cast lined up to receive their gewgaws and lace. The young lads were grumpy; now was the time that they had to stuff odd bits down their bodices and assume their wigs, hot and scratchy even in the moderate warmth of the start of another scorching summer’s day. They grumbled and moaned, but with a lick of powder, a dab of rouge and a talking-to from Tom Sledd, they were soon in character and the air was quickly full of their jackdaw cries and falsetto laughter. The ladies of the court – the real ladies – caught up handfuls of lace and strings of fake pearls and formed a laughing circle to adorn each other and soon looked as near to the real thing as was necessary. Mistress Henslowe, who considered herself to be a cut above the ordinary, had been giving them lessons in deportment, and so now they all sat and stood and walked just like the portly wife of a successful theatrical entrepreneur; but they were none the worse for that.
Behind the line of wagons, Shaxsper’s Guard were drilling as if to the manner born, and if not all of the breastplates matched and if some of the morions sounded more like linen stiffened with glue when hit with a careless halberd, then the crowd would not notice. He had drilled them and drilled them and now he was confident that they could pass even under the eye of a veteran. He left them shouldering pikes and wandered off in search of Tom Sledd, who as always was hovering over his people like a dragonfly, darting here and there, eyes everywhere. Finally, everyone was on their carts and, from the rear, Leonard Lyttleburye, in full herald rig with the quartered arms of England and carrying his furled standard as easily under his arm as if it were a walking cane, called the column to advance and, for the first time since leaving London, the Queen’s Progress, as yet sans Queen, rolled off in festive caravan, some of the men walking alongside, ready to wave at the assembled multitudes as they passed.
Two hours out from their campsite, most of the men had hopped back onto the carts. Walking and waving was all very well and good, but an audience was the only thing that made it all worthwhile and, so far, they had managed to impress two men driving a small herd of pigs, men and swine all encased in a covering of cracking mud. Spirits were sinking, wigs were becoming askew and at least one of the Lovelly maidens had hauled the hose out from the front of her bodice and was having a damn good scratch. Lyttleburye had sent a few runners off ahead to check the road – once a Cecil man, always a Cecil man at some deep level – and now, one of them was running back towards the head of the column, arms waving and face red with the shouting. The leading carter raised his arm and pulled in his horses, who were glad of the rest and stood waiting, ears flicking at the flies which were never far away.
As the lad drew nearer, they could hear what he was shouting. ‘The Queen! The Queen! The Queen!’
Mistress Henslowe nudged her husband in the ribs with an elbow surprisingly sharp in so plump a woman. ‘Master Henslowe,’ she hissed. ‘The Queen!’
‘Yes,’ he said, wearily, ‘yes, my love.’
‘Well, get down there. You are Sir Christopher Hatton, after all. You should greet her.’
He looked at her as if he had never seen her before. How had he come to marry such a thoroughly stupid woman? How had he not noticed it at the time? Perhaps he had been blinded by the fact that her father was something rather big in rice and she had a dowry as large as the great outdoors. He sighed. If he had his time all over again …
‘I am only Sir Christopher Hatton for the crowds, my dear. The Queen will be able to tell me from the real one, I have little doubt.’ His confidence in his performance had been waning on the journey. He was finding it hard to manage the wig, for one thing, and he had fallen over his rapier more times than he could count. ‘But if you think I should be on foot, then so be it.’ Anything to get away from the woman and possibly exchange a small squeeze with his little piece from near the Bear Garden. He jumped down and strode off towards the front of the line, remembering to point his toes.
Leonard Lyttleburye sprinted to the front, passing Henslowe easily though not quite as elegantly. He had a turn of speed which had surprised many a malcontent in the past and he was soon looming over the boy with the news.
‘The Queen?’ he asked. ‘Are you sure?’
The lad looked up at the giant and nodded. ‘She’s up there, just at the crossroads. She’s in this … thing …’ he sketched a shape in the air, ‘… a bit like a bed, a bit like a cart …’
‘Her litter, yes.’ Henslowe had caught up with Lyttleburye and gave them all the benefit of his lofty wisdom.
‘That’s it. And she’s got some really pretty girls with her, and some men with swords and that, but that’s all. Hardly anybody, really. Dangerous, I call it.’
‘Well, she’s got us now,’ Lyttleburye reassured him. He waved to the carters to move ahead and walked quickly with the leading horse. At the crossroads, there, as the lad had said, waited Gloriana in all her majesty. She was riding in a padded carriage, draped in gold tissue and with a canopy overhead with cooling fringes hardly stirring in the slight summer breeze. She had two beautiful girls sitting with her, one on either side and slightly below her, and they had spread her skirts across their laps, so as to not wrinkle the gorgeous fabric, which was embroidered with seed pearls and gold thread. Her auburn hair was dressed high from her forehead and that too was adorned in pearl and gold. Her face, dead white, was broken only by scarlet lips set in a firm line and two bead-like eyes which missed nothing. The two Guards, one at the front and one at the rear, looked as though they could give the entire company of Shaxsper’s men a run for their money, and they sat their horses with impassive faces. Lyttleburye bowed low and motioned the gawping carters to keep moving, breaking the column halfway down to let Gloriana take her place.
At the break for a midday meal, the Queen kept aloof from her subjects and ate alone. The cooks were not at all hurt that she didn’t choose to partake of their rye bread.
‘She’s got no teeth, some do say,’ a comfortable matron said, stirring something unspeakable in a pot over a hastily lit fire.
‘I heard she’s got ’em, only they’re all black and rotten. She can’t eat nothing more nor jelly and that.’
The comfortable lady guffaw
ed. ‘Well, she’s out of luck today, then. I’ve had no call to make a jelly since my old man passed over from …’
‘… eatin’ your jelly,’ the other one chimed in, the joke being a regular one between them.
‘Right enough there.’ And still chuckling, the women ladled the food into the waiting plates of the Progress in waiting.
Lyttleburye was going from wagon to wagon and paying off the carters. From now on, there would only be a couple of carts and the Queen’s litter. Everyone else would be on foot. Only the most infirm would ride – the whole show could only work if there appeared to be more people than there really were, that everyone danced and capered and waved streamers and garlands to bemuse the people. And even then, he thought with a sigh, it would be a close enough thing. He looked around and caught Tom Sledd’s eye. And the look between them said, ‘It’s a funny old game this theatre thing, right enough.’
FIFTEEN
A hawk, hovering high in the evening air, would have seen it all. She was looking for a harvest mouse scuttling in the golden corn to swoop onto and carry off to her fractious young, squabbling in the nest. But what she saw was a column on the road, like an army of ants far below her. She saw the dying sun glinting on halberd and pike heads, flashing on the jewels of those walking sedately at the column’s head. Then the flares burst into light and she wheeled away. There would be other catches, other unsuspecting prey on the south weald, away from all this noise and clamour.
They had lined the road for hours, the great, the good, the unwashed and the lame, waiting for a chance to glimpse Gloriana, the greatest queen of England for a thousand years. Schoolboys in their fustian gowns stood to attention, from their schools in Southampton and Gosport. The scholars of Winchester stood apart from them, as they had for centuries. All of them were under the watchful gaze and the harsh rods of their masters, stern teachers in their long academic robes and their coloured hoods, fluttering with memories of their old colleges of Oxford and Cambridge.
Sailors from Portchester in their scarlet frocks stood to attention, too. These men had faced the mighty Armada of Philip of Spain, stood on their rolling decks as the cannon thundered and death roared through the shrouds. Their Queen had forgotten them, heroes though they were, and had left them to die of scurvy in their hulks. Now, here she was, on her way to honour them at last. They cheered more lustily than any of the watchers as the flames shot towards the sky, thanks to the wizardry of the men of the Rose.
Boatmen in their leather aprons had brought their huge oars and nets to remind Her Majesty that they caught the fish that graced her table and carried her goods all along the south coast, through the Solent and out to the eastern reaches of the Channel. The shipbuilders from Buckler’s Hard intended to be seen by Her Majesty too. They were small acorns as yet, unable to compete with the great shipyards of Deptford and Plymouth, but they knew their day would come.
The merchants of every town within a day’s ride had taken up their places on the roadside, their wives, their children, their servants and their wives and children. Kit Marlowe, had he been there, would have looked in envy at their sheer numbers. They held aloft their devices, those guildsmen who were the backbone of Gloriana’s economy: the Skinners with their crowns and fur; the Vintners with their barrels; the Salters with their cellars; the Goldsmiths with their chalices and leopard’s heads, each trying to outshine the rest.
The shepherds and the herdsmen outnumbered everybody. They carried their crooks and wore their smocks, newly bleached and pressed. Could these be the same men who had pointed a cannon at the Bishop of Chichester only days ago? If so, they too had their women and children with them; so, surely, all was forgotten and forgiven? Her Majesty would never allow enclosures to happen, not in Chichester, not anywhere in the southlands. Even so, Wat, trailing the procession as it moved, carried a slim-bladed dagger under his smock and the huge wolf-dog slunk at his heels, snarling and growling at the crowd.
‘God Bless Your Majesty!’ a woman’s voice called from the throng and others took it up. There were cheers and whistles and roars of delight. Doting fathers hoisted their little ones onto their shoulders. Those little ones would go to their graves, long years from now, with this memory in their hearts. The Queen had passed them, close enough to breathe in the wafts of her perfume.
And the gentlemen! The lords and the gentlemen! They paraded like so many peacocks, plumed hats nodding in time to the drums, the hautbois and the flutes from behind. Their backs were ramrod straight, the Queen’s courtiers, pearls and diamonds glittering in their ears. Their rapiers swung at their sides. Surely, there was a law about that? The Queen herself had passed it; no sword blade was to be longer than three feet. But these … well, obviously, the law didn’t apply to the Court – or did they have special dispensation for Progresses?
Behind them, in the royal procession, the ladies of the Court seemed to float, their farthingales gorgeous with gilt, their jewelled skirts sending up little clouds of dust. Pages ran with them, their faces blacked and their eyes shining. They wore silk turbans on their heads and carried rattles, tambours and pipes, keeping perfect time with the musicians at the back.
Will Shaxsper, the glover’s son from Stratford, led the whole procession. He was wearing Tamburlaine’s breast and backplate, damascened in mock silver, and his staff of office was an old one pinched from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. His helmet, the Rose’s property woman had told him, came from a Spanish hidalgo killed on board the Concepción de Zubelzu in the Armada. ‘That’s easy for you to say,’ Shaxsper had told her, and didn’t believe a word of it; that said, however, the Spanish whatever-he-had-been had had a very large head, so at least the helmet fitted like a glove.
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ one of the crowd, for all he was of the Puritan persuasion, nudged his neighbour.
‘Well, yes and no.’ The man was frowning, looking backwards and forwards from the head of the column to the back.
‘How do you mean?’ The Puritan was confused; there were lights, there was music, there were beautiful people dressed in jewelled clothes. Indeed, what was not to like?
‘Well, there aren’t many of them, are there? I was at Theobalds earlier in the year – haven’t missed a Progress in years. There must have been … ooh, six times this number.’
‘Were you at Kenilworth?’ Ingram Frizer had come from nowhere, ‘back in seventy-five?’
‘Er … no,’ the perpetual Progressor had to admit. ‘Bit before my time.’
‘I was there,’ Frizer told him. ‘Youngster, of course, but I’ve never forgotten it. Forty-five.’
‘Forty-five what?’
‘In Her Majesty’s entourage.’
‘Never!’
‘As I live and breathe.’
‘No, no,’ somebody else had joined the debate. ‘That was the Earl of Leicester’s place, Kenilworth. Three days the festivities lasted. Music. Fireworks. Bit with a bear.’
‘Were you there?’ Frizer rounded on the man.
‘Er … no.’
‘Well, then,’ the walking-gentleman-turned-rabble-controller held his ground, ‘take it from one who was. This,’ he swept his arm to the parade passing before them, ‘is merely the advance guard, as they say in the army, the Forlorn Hope. The main body – the van, as we used to say in the Queen’s Guard – will be along tomorrow.’
The Puritan and the Progressor looked at each other. There it was, then – proof, if ever it were needed. And from a pensioner of the Queen’s Guard too, standing right next to … oh, no, wait a minute. Ingram Frizer had moved on.
The column had halted, as the dusk gathered and the guttering torches flickered on the travelling Court. Nicholas Skeres got there before Frizer and held his breath. A little nut-brown creature had leapt into the way of the procession, narrowly avoiding the thud of Shaxsper’s staff on the ground and nimbly darting to the foot of the Queen’s litter. He who jumped out at horses and found hilarious jokes in the most humdrum of things bowed low, l
ike one of the Queen’s Fools at the Court. He lifted his head to gaze on his sovereign and his smile froze. Half a dozen halberds were suddenly circling his neck, but Her Majesty clicked her be-ringed fingers and the procession moved on. ‘Give that man a guinea,’ she called over her shoulder, and the little nut-brown man was rolled aside.
Skeres grabbed his greasy collar and hauled him upright, ramming a groat into the man’s palm.
‘’Ere,’ he wheezed, more than a little rattled by the sudden assault of Shaxsper’s Guard. ‘Her Majesty, God Bless Her, said a guinea.’
‘Did she?’ Skeres scowled. ‘You need your ears cleaned out, Granddad. I distinctly heard “groat”.’ He twisted the old man’s collar so that it cut into his scrawny neck. ‘I distinctly remember, because it rhymes with “throat”. So, what did I hear?’
‘Groat,’ the old man squawked.
‘Good,’ Skeres smiled and smoothed down the greasy collar. ‘We can’t both be wrong, can we?’ And he was gone.
What had worried Marlowe more than somewhat about this Progress that was nothing of the sort, was the chronic shortage of horseflesh. True, the wagons and carts had been pulled by horses of a sort, many of the participants had even ridden the whole journey from London to their last camp. But none of those creatures would pass muster as part of the Queen’s entourage. They were poor, spavined creatures at best, with dusty, dry coats and ribs you could play a tune on. So, apart from the four that pulled the Queen’s litter, aided by the gentlemen of her court, there were only two outriders, making the most of things by cantering backwards and forwards in a swirl of cloaks and flying horsehair, stirring up dust from the road. Horses were always a problem for the theatre. The rare times they had been used, you could almost guarantee they would misbehave; a steaming pile of shit in the middle of the stage was the least of it.