Death of Kings

by Philip Gooden

  I confess to a wish that someone should have stepped in at that point, likely a stern but kindly parent, and stopped us in our tracks, or turned us gently aside, or told us to disperse to our lodgings. Sunday is for home or church. This was not my fight. Even so I was quite unable to shift away from the tag-rag parade, partly from the shame of being seen to break ranks, partly through our hapless forward motion. I wondered whether it was in this spirit that men entered battle, willy nilly.

  St Paul’s churchyard was emptier than I’d ever seen it. Our low army milled about in the middle while the sun pondered us at a slant and Essex strode about, declaiming that there was a plot to murder him and a plot to sell the crown to the Spanish Infanta. I wasn’t sure whether he was addressing us, or the handful of bystanders (who looked petrified or perplexed, as men will in the presence of the mad), or merely talking to himself. Sweat stood out on his white brow and his face was contorted. Much of the fire had gone out of the party. There were as yet no murmurings of dissent but the few weapons in view were carried at a somewhat depressed angle and the cries were more muted. I caught the eye of the gigantic gentleman, the one who’d told me in a small voice as we entered Essex’s courtyard that our hour had come. He looked away.

  After St Paul’s the next port of call on our mad, sun-lit progress was the house of Sheriff Smyth in Fenchurch Street. The Sheriff was waiting on his doorstep like the good host. His demeanour, however, looked to me not like one ready to receive visitors but rather of one who would bar them from his premises. I don’t know why we were there. You might have thought it was to lay our hands on some arms, since Sheriff Smyth was known to be half an Essexite (although, until the moment when they were actually called on, many Londoners were half-Essexites). What we actually received from him was a drink. Perhaps to buy time, perhaps out of pity for us dry, sweaty rebels, he sent out his servants with tankards and cups of beer. When the liquor and the containers ran out, he ordered some of his fellows to fetch supplies from the nearest ale-house. The beer was most welcome but I could not help thinking it was beside our purpose, a digression on our journey. As we swilled and sweated in the sun, we watched our leaders conferring with the Sheriff. Then Essex entered his house and the Sheriff closed the door.

  Then the moment came which told me that they – we – were defeated, when they’d barely started. No, to be precise, there were two such moments. Someone said that Devereux had repaired to Smyth’s house not to discuss strategy or ask for support, but to request a change of shirt. Now, it was true that the day was unwontedly hot and that, as I’d already seen for myself, Essex had worked himself up into a lather. Nevertheless, just as one shouldn’t change horses in midstream, one shouldn’t, I suspect, change shirts in mid-rebellion. It reveals a lack of . . . some essential requirement for a successful uprising.

  The second moment was this: to while away the time while his seniors were shut up with the Sheriff, shirt-hunting or otherwise, one of the Essex leaders high-handedly ordered a neighbouring armourer to surrender some half dozen halberds which were sunning themselves in the window of his shop. These weapons were triumphantly seized upon and bandied about as if they were genuine spoils of battle. Then I overheard the armourer, a stout tradesman and no whit abashed, ask the Essexite when he might expect payment for his goods. I didn’t hear what answer was made, but it was at this moment – when a fat, phlegmatic shop-keeper enquired of a tall rebel when his bill would be settled – that I suspected our uprising was likely to fall flat on its face.

  I didn’t hear the response, if indeed one was given at all, because at that instant there came trotting up Fenchurch Street a detachment of horsemen. Some of the Essexites threw down their tankards and plucked out their swords, but the riders stopped well out of range. From their midst rode a brightly caparisoned figure. His costume was of a flashing richness, reds and golds and blues catching the sun. The ostrich feathers on his hat would have kept Icarus aloft. His horse, nearly as well decked out as the rider, skittered on the cobbles.

  Slowly, deliberately, he extracted from his gorgeous garments a scroll which he unfurled with the same deliberation. No one uttered a word while this was going on. We watched as breathlessly as I have seen an audience hang on through one of Burbage’s masterly pauses. Then the herald, as his subsequent words proved him to be, cast his eyes over the mass of men gathered in the street. I wondered what he saw through his case of eyes. A gathering of discontented individuals, some holding tankards, others with swords at half-port, sweat trickling off their brows, their Sunday finery looking not of the freshest. Though the herald had the advantage which a mounted man always possesses over grounded humanity, I noticed that he still kept a prudent distance. Arrayed behind him was his escort.

  Then he spoke. His voice carried; it was clear and firm; sufficient prerequisites for a herald, I suppose.

  “Hear you the proclamation of our most blessed sovereign, her majesty Queen Elizabeth, the defender of the faith, a prince anointed by God, the empress of England and Ireland. All good and loyal citizens are required to listen to her proclamation. Her most excellent Majesty and our gracious Queen hereby declares Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, to be a traitor to her and to her realm. Moreover, she proclaims that all those who give aid, comfort and succour to the said Earl of Essex by word or deed are equally with him proclaimed traitors and no true subjects of her majesty. Furthermore, our most excellent sovereign declares that all good and loyal citizens are bound by their allegiance to give to her and to her realm any and all such assistance as shall be required to defeat the malice of treason and the impiety of rebellion. Long live the Queen!”

  All around me there was silence as the import of the herald’s words struck home. It was as if the Essexites had embarked on this enterprise in a reckless moment, or in holiday mood, and not realised until this very instant the gravity of their situation. For myself, I felt relieved that we had been, as it were, called to order. Surely now everyone would turn their faces homeward and do their best to bury this unhappy day.

  The herald did not deign to gaze at us for more than a few moments after he’d delivered his proclamation. Perhaps he had our measure; or perhaps it was merely that he was commissioned to pronounce, not to parley. He wheeled his horse around and, surrounded by his entourage, trotted off down Fenchurch Street. There were odd abusive cries from Essex’s company, but they lacked force or heart. Someone in the vanguard launched off a halberd – perhaps one of those which had just been appropriated – at the retreating troop. It was a gesture; a halberd is not designed to be thrown. It clattered harmlessly on the cobbles. That was all.

  There was a sudden burst of conversation around me. “It’s a trick,” one said, and a second, “We are undone,” while a third contented himself with muttering “Treachery” several times over in a pensive tone. The crowd moved uncertainly in one direction, then in another. If it had a mind, it was unable to make it up. Then Essex and the rest emerged from the Sheriffs house. The door was closed firm behind them as if to shut off assistance or retreat that way. He didn’t appear to have got anything from the Sheriff, not even a change of shirt. I wondered whether Devereux had been sheltering indoors until the herald departed but quickly dismissed that notion. Foolish he might have been; a hothead for sure; not altogether in his right mind then (and perhaps for many months previously); but he was no coward.

  Soon apprised of what had occurred – that he was now officially denounced as a traitor, and that all those who hitched their fortunes to his wagon would be similarly regarded – he tried to stiffen his followers’ sinews by proclaiming that he alone stood for the good of the Queen and, mindful of his hearers, the good of London too. That if they searched for traitors now, they should be looking in other directions. His voice came wavering over the men strung out along the street.

  But it was too late. Too late to indulge in argument and definitions of treason. Essex’s day might have been saved if the citizens of London had risen in his wake, as their fo
rebears had massed behind the swaggering Henry Bolingbroke. But our mother city, she had stayed quiet – and thus had London spoken, in her own fashion. Now Essex, having failed to acquire new followers, started to lose command of those he already had. The company was fraying at the edges. One man near me made off down Mincing Lane. Another strode rapidly up the street, as if he’d just remembered an urgent, unperformed task. I spied the little-voiced giant edging his way with delicacy through the crowd; evidently he’d decided that, for him, the hour had come and gone.

  Strangely, now that it was possible to make an unobtrusive escape from this unhappy scene, I found myself rooted to the spot. It was simple enough for any man to save himself by slipping down one of the many narrow streets and alleys which lead off Fenchurch Street, and this is what many were now doing. Some even discarded their weapons, either by leaning them carefully against the walls of houses (perhaps they thought to retrieve them later) or by letting them drop to the ground from nerveless fingers. If I’d earlier thought we were like an army marching, helplessly, towards a battle, I now saw the scene as a bloodless rout. It was the more shaming because there was no sign of an enemy, no smoke, no cannon, no sword or lance. We were self-driven from the field.

  I don’t know why I should have felt the shame of their defeat as if it were my own. Such a reaction was absurd too, because I had no interest in the Earl of Essex’s success and ought to have invested every hope in his failure. Nevertheless, I was somehow sorry that events had taken this turn.

  I must have fallen into a kind of reverie because the next thing I was aware of was Henry Wriothesley once again at my side.

  “Come, Mercury, it will not do to stand here like a lame-brain in the middle of the road. We are all departing.”

  “Where?”

  “Our day is not done. We have not finished.”

  He gestured in the direction of a mass of men beginning to move off in a westerly direction down Fenchurch Street. They were returning along the way we’d come not so long before. A glance sufficed to show that the Essexites were a depleted force, probably a spent one. I’ve seen mobs of apprentices almost as numerous. The difference was that these men – the ones that had chosen not to slide away down the alleys and side-streets – were the desperate and the dangerous ones. Or the ones with absolute conviction as to the Tightness of their cause. Perhaps it comes to the same thing. They were still armed; and now, even though on the move, they were surely cornered. Among their number were several distinguished individuals. Knights and lords of the realm. Commanders, generals and other men of worth. Men who at other times had done the state some service.

  None of these thoughts occurred to me at the time, of course. But later, when I tried to account for the peculiar sadness which the event threw over me, these were the terms in which I explained it to myself. It was my first experience of the waste – I can think of no better word – the waste, I say, that sometimes seems to lie at the heart of all our striving.

  But such reflections were far from my mind now, as I looked at the Earl of Southampton.

  “You understand, Mercury. We have not finished.”

  “If you say so,” I said dully.

  “But you are not with us. You never were.”

  While the stragglers of the group flowed past us, I struggled to remember our earlier conversation outside Essex House.

  “A witness only,” I said, finally recalling a talk that seemed to have taken place centuries before. “A witness.”

  “Like the playwright,” said Wriothesley.

  I thought I knew whom he alluded to, but for some reason did not want enlightenment.

  “I’m a player, when all is said and done.”

  “A player,” he repeated, and I wondered that he could find the leisure to echo my words.

  “Nothing more than that,” I said thankfully.

  “What did I say?” he said. “I mean the first time that we met. Happy in that you are not over-happy.”

  “Though you did not apply the words to me, I accept them willingly.”

  “Do not become over-happy, Mercury,” he said, clasping my shoulder. “Now make your escape. Do not travel in our direction.”

  “You too, my lord? It isn’t too late to change course.”

  “That is the first foolish remark I have heard from your lips,” he said. He half-smiled, turned on his heel and ran to join the vanishing troop.

  Comes a time when every man must consider his own preservation. Instinctively I headed for the river and started off down Rood Lane. It was deserted. All good citizens had locked themselves up safe from the taint of insurrection, while those Essexites who considered discretion the better part of valour had already taken advantage of the few minutes since the herald’s proclamation to put a space between themselves and their erstwhile leader.

  I ran and ran, my feet thudding on the rough cobbles and trying to avoid the kennel which bisected the narrow street and whose contents, not touched by the direct hand of the sun, were nevertheless beginning to loosen in the warmth of the day and to grow slippery and noxious. Sweat poured down my face and trickled into my eyes, making my passage harder. All I was concerned to do was to reach the river, catch a ferry to the other side and go to ground in my home territory. Though normally accounted the most lawless region of our great city, Southwark seemed to me now, after the perils of the northern shores, a positive haven.

  It was then that I heard behind me a familiar voice.

  “Signor Revill! Signor Revill!”

  I slackened and looked round, although I knew what I’d see. Sure enough there was our Italian exquisite in hot pursuit. At first I thought he was chasing after me in order to drag me back to the Essexites but a glance was enough to establish that he too was running away. His neat features were drawn tight, and I was pleased to note a disorder in his dress and a droop in his moustache. He drew level.

  “Signor Revill. Mio amico.”

  I made no reply but continued to move at something between a walk and a run.

  “Dove vai?” he half shouted, keeping pace.

  Without understanding his words I could guess at his meaning. He grasped me by the upper arm even as we were proceeding rapidly side by side.

  “I say, where you go?”

  I tried to shake him off but he had a strong, insistent grip. I wanted to rid myself of Signor Nod’s company not only because I instinctively disliked – and feared – the man but also because I considered that he was not safe to be with. If they were looking for the leaders of the insurrection, then this loud-mouthed, finely dressed foreigner who had kept the postern-gate at Essex House would surely not escape their notice.

  So I halted, meaning to disengage myself from his grasp even if I had to prise off his fingers one by one. Then, as we were gazing at each other like angry lovers, we heard a swelling sound, like many voices rising together and carried aloft on the wind. Then a sharper, more unmistakable noise: the rattle of pistol fire from a few streets away. It was coming from the quarter in which the remaining Essexites had departed. I guessed that they’d encountered some opposition, perhaps as they were trying to exit the city by one of the gates.

  Signor Noti turned to look in the direction of the gunfire, releasing my arm as he did so. Then, with one accord, we made off down Rood Lane with renewed urgency. My impulse was still to get to the river; his impulse, evidently, was to stick by my side. I deferred the problem of escaping from him. As we crossed Thames Street I slowed down slightly, thinking that to be seen running in a more populous thoroughfare might be to draw attention to oneself, might be construed as the gait of guilt. I needn’t have worried. The houses in this street too were firm shut. There was that air of fear and withdrawal which I have observed when the plague strikes.

  I turned smart down St Mary Hill. I was breathing hard and, in between my own gasps, heard at my back the panting of my unwished-for companion. Moments later I – we – had reached the river. The February sun glinted off the water. It loo
ked calm, reassuring. But our Thames is like the vulgar mob, never to be trusted, capable of changing its face from one instant to the next. There was a scatter of keys and landing points along this stretch below the Bridge and usually one found a ferry soon enough. A boatman, sometimes two or three, would be waiting at Billingsgate or Somar Key, or on his way across with a fare from the other bank.

  As my feet clattered on the wooden platform which jettied out over the water, I shaded my eyes and cast about for a ferryman. The river returned my gaze with its blank glitter. There didn’t appear to be a boat, or at least not a boat in motion, anywhere. I wondered whether the ferrymen too had been seized by the prevailing alarm and had scuttled for shelter until this storm should have blown itself out.

  To my right was the solid wooden cliff of London Bridge, to my left the wider expanses of the river. My home was on the other bank but it might as well have been in far Cathay, or in Elysium, for all the chance there seemed of reaching it at this moment. Of course, I could have walked the few hundred yards to the Bridge and thus made shift to cross the water. But the sound of gunfire still rung in my mind, if not my ears. I was convinced that ‘they’, the authorities, would have closed up the entrance on this side or, at the least, would be stopping and interrogating all those who wanted to cross from north to south. It was what I would have done in their position. Though no voluntary participant in the Essex uprising, though only present at this morning’s turmoil because of the written instructions of an agent of the state, I was by no means certain that this guaranteed my safety. At worst, I might come within range of a careless pistol. At best, I could be seized and shut up. Then questioned and threatened. And afterwards tortured.