The Queen's Cipher

by David Taylor

  She wouldn’t let go of the argument. “Well, OK, so Shakespeare faced both ways but he wasn’t creepy like Bacon. I’ve read his Essays and what he wrote about love and marriage came from a cold, passionless heart. As he saw it, a woman was simply a handicap to an ambitious man.”

  Freddie called a time out for drinks. She followed him into the kitchen to watch him uncorking the Chianti. As he did so he talked about Bacon’s Essays. They were aphoristic and analytical. Bacon set love alongside our other needs in life. Love was a two-edged sword. We were born out of love but could be destroyed by it. Shakespeare held very similar views. In most of his plays love was a disturbing element. This was greeted with a loud popping noise as he pulled out the cork.

  “Take The Merchant of Venice for example,” he said. “In this play love is either blind or wilful. Portia’s choice in love is determined by lottery while Jessica’s love makes her a rebellious and undutiful daughter, a defector from her faith and a petty thief.”

  Cheryl grimaced. “You chose an easy one. What about Hamlet?”

  “That’s more complicated,” he admitted. “I think Hamlet and Ophelia loved one another but he could master his passion and make it ‘keep quarter.’ Ophelia was quite the opposite. She couldn’t cope with rejection and committed suicide. As for Queen Gertrude, well, ‘frailty thy name is woman.’ I rest my case. Ouch!”

  She had punched him in the ribs. “Let’s get back to Love’s Labour’s Lost, the comedy with the miserable title and the sad outcome. I get the feeling it’s autobiographical. Was 1597 a low point in Shakespeare’s love life?”

  “Who knows? It was the year in which he gave his wife Anne her own home in Stratford and a pretty grand one at that.”

  “What about Bacon. I don’t suppose he was in love, was he?”

  “Funny you should mention that. In the summer of 1597 he was courting his cousin, Lady Elizabeth Hatton, a wealthy and beautiful young widow who had many suitors, but it didn’t come to anything.”

  “Sounds like posh totty,” she sneered. “What went wrong?”

  “There were political and monetary drawbacks to the match and Bacon wasn’t helped by having a puritanical mother who believed in keeping her sons free from the sins of the flesh.”

  “So this courtship is going on just before Love’s Labour’s Lost is first staged. Maybe that’s what the play is about – unrequited love.”

  Cheryl’s hand made another foray into Brabant country. “You must tell me about it but not just yet.”

  ALL SOULS DAY

  To greet All Souls Day a dry, bitingly cold wind had come in from the east. Slumped in the corner of his coach with watering eyes and a churning stomach, Francis Bacon wrapped a cloak around his slender body to keep out the cold. He had swathed himself in furs and worn three waistcoats but all to no avail. He looked enviously at his young companion sprawling opposite him. Dressed only in a loose jerkin and a linen shirt thrown open to reveal his flawless skin, Henry Percy seemed oblivious to the cold. Francis had heard the whispers. His fellow servants called Percy a popinjay and a coxcomb but he got to ride in his master’s coach and they didn’t.

  Francis watched the weak afternoon sun glinting through the branches until the woodland thinned out to be replaced by the brown fields of the arable farmer. Plough clods had been left for the winter frosts to break down before being harrowed and sown with seed. Cereal crops would grow here – wheat, barley, rye and oats – to feed the capital city. These tenant farmers existed on the margins of subsistence and, a year ago, in Parliament, he had raised the issue of their plight. Money, he told his fellow MPs, should be like muck, spread around for the common good. Clever words but they had fallen on stony ground.

  They were travelling uphill through an oak wood that once belonged to the Benedictine order. The monks of St Albans had built a chapel here in which Catholic services were still held. Francis could see candles burning in the chapel windows and hear the solemn chanting of the mass as the congregation prayed for the passage of departed souls through Purgatory. As a good Protestant and loyal servant of the Crown it was his duty to report this unlawful assembly to the authorities but he had no intention of doing so. He might not believe in Purgatory but he could understand why others did. Purgatory was of poetic worth; a half-way house for the damaged soul, offering the distant hope of salvation.

  Sometimes he wished he had his mother’s clarity of conviction. There were no half measures for her. The older she got the greater her moral certainty. Advance the opinion, however tentatively, that there should be an after-death opportunity for the soul to flourish and she would repeat Calvin’s statement that Purgatory was one of Satan’s deadly fictions. Lady Anne was against any watering down of the Reformation, filling her household with Nonconformist preachers, which only served to widen the gap in understanding between her and a forward-looking son who preferred natural philosophy to liturgical reform. It was, he supposed, a generational problem. Old people couldn’t comprehend a future in which they would have no part to play.

  Francis felt guilty. He had undertaken this journey because his mother’s health was failing. Every day is a sick day, she had written in a rambling and incoherent letter. From what he could tell she had a quartan fever – a rising temperature accompanied by shivers, headaches and aching muscles – and he knew how such agues were treated. Doctors believed they were caused by an excess of yellow bile which must be drained off by attaching leeches to the patient’s body. In sucking blood out of the body, leeches were supposed to suck out the disease but, in practice, all they did was to weaken the patient by removing too much blood. Judging from what she had told him, his mother had become so muddled she thought the worms were in her drink rather than on her body.

  There had to be a better treatment and he had been fortunate enough to find one while litigating a case for the Royal College of Physicians. As the Queen’s Learned Counsel he had met the College Registrar Roger Marbeck whose laboratory at Amen Corner was piled high with tablets and tobacco leaves, a revolutionary cure for most diseases.

  “Tobacco is a fine purgative,” Marbeck enthused. “It conforms to the Galenic vision of four balanced elements, providing the hot and dry elements needed for good health.”

  “You wouldn’t perchance have anything for a fever,” Francis had asked him.

  “I have just the thing.” Marbeck pointed to a jar on the shelf above his head. “It’s a drug I acquired on the Cadiz expedition. It’s called ‘Jesuit’s Bark’ because Jesuit priests discovered it in Peru. A little of this fine powder in a glass of wine will quickly restore a patient’s health. I would count it an honour, sir, if you took some.”

  Francis checked the leather purse was still in his breeches. He would tell his mother the powder was ‘Peruvian bark’ for she couldn’t abide anything a Jesuit had touched.

  Dusk was falling as the coach rattled beneath Gorhambury’s gatehouse. In the gathering gloom he could just about make out the coat of arms chiselled into the stone entrance arch. It consisted of a shield surmounted by a coronet, a wild boar and the family motto, Mediocria Firma, moderate things are surest. He had always thought this a fine maxim but people were laughing at it in London. John Marston had used these very words to identify him as the anonymous co-author of Venus and Adonis. He could only hope news of this had not reached his mother’s ears. She would die of shame if she thought her younger son had been writing erotic verses.

  Leaving Percy to unload the luggage, Francis rushed off in search of her. Lady Anne was a creature of habit. Before dinner she liked to take a stroll in the long gallery Sir Nicholas had built for her. And there she was, dressed in black, gazing myopically at a stained glass window and crying softly to herself. He called out to her.

  “Is that you, Francis?” she asked. “Let me see you boy.”

  Lady Anne wiped the tears from the wrinkled lids of her pale grey eyes. Her white hair had thinned and the once unblemished round face with its broad forehead and small, uptu
rned nose was now daubed with liver spots that stuck to her skin like pieces of brown plaster.

  “I miss your father more with each passing day,” she sighed. “Did you know, he wrote me a poem after the death of our second baby daughter? That was back in Mary’s reign. It was a sad time for all of us. Three hundred Protestant martyrs burned at the stake.”

  Her mind was wandering. Catching herself in time, she pointed to the painted window.

  “What bird is that on yonder tree? I forget its name.”

  “It’s called a turkey. Father wanted these window panes to include New World novelties.”

  Lady Anne frowned at this. “A turkey you say? Queen Elizabeth ate one at her Christmas feast but I could not be persuaded to partake of its flesh when I was at court.”

  “Why was that, madam?” He was always formal with her.

  “The turkey cock is a disgusting creature in that it excites lust. Not a fit meat for the godly to eat.”

  Lady Anne’s gaze returned to the painted glass window leaving Francis tongue-tied and helpless. Throughout his early years he had stood in awe of his mother’s formidable character and piety. She had been his moral compass, his hair shirt and his fierce defender. The familiar unflinching stare remained but she no longer seemed able to hold on to an idea long enough to make sense of it.

  “That’s a tobacco leaf up there,” she said eagerly. “The weed ‘Nicotiana’ is such a panacea our physicians call it the ‘holy herb.’ What think you of that, Francis?”

  “Aye madam, all herbs are considered therapeutic, none more so than the tobacco leaf, but I seriously question its efficacy. This fashionable remedy may be a monster in disguise.”

  “So it’s no elixir.” She sounded disappointed.

  “Those who prescribe tobacco for all manner of diseases have yet to find their patients reaping any benefit from its use. Far from curing fever it invades the respiratory organs and makes the sufferer cough and splutter.”

  This was not what his mother wanted to hear. Keen to make amends, he reached into his breeches for the leather purse. “But not all New World cures are deficient. This is the aromatic bark of a Peruvian tree which has been pulverised into a light brown powder. Dissolved in wine or water this potion may be taken in half-dram doses every third or fourth hour until the fever is removed.”

  Lady Anne gave him a sharp look. “I have never heard of Peruvian bark. How do you know so much about it?”

  “I was told about it by a man in whom I have the greatest confidence. He works at the Royal College of Physicians.”

  “Does this friend of yours profess the true religion of Christ?”

  “I believe he does. He also knows a great deal about the treatment of illness.”

  “Then I will take the physic. The world is so hard a place it breeds suspicion.”

  She handed the purse to a servant with strict instructions concerning its use. “After supper I will take half a dram of this powder with nitre in milk. Bring it to me at table, without fail.”

  “How are you, Francis?” she asked, changing tack.

  “Well enough, madam, thank you for asking.” There it was again. Why did he address her in such a cold and distant manner? Was it a punishment for leaving him in limbo?

  Twenty years had gone by since his father’s death and still it rankled. As a long-lasting Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon had made huge sums of money out of public office and had used it to purchase estates which were entailed to his surviving sons. By the time he died four of them had sufficient lands to live off. Only he, the youngest, was not provided for in his father’s will. After the funeral he had asked Lady Anne for an explanation and her evasive answer had haunted him ever since. He had never seen her so agitated and uncertain. “It was thought her Majesty would support you in recognition of your father’s services to the state,” was all she could manage. This had mystified him. “Why should Sir Nicholas’ services, however meritorious, warrant such attention from the Queen?” he had asked. Lady Anne’s normally pale skin had gone scarlet. “The answer to that is not for me to give.” And that was it. She could not be coaxed into saying more. Queen Elizabeth must speak for herself.

  He had had plenty of time to think about this. A devout woman like Lady Anne wouldn’t lie. There was some secret about his birth and it belonged not only to the Bacons but to her Majesty. He had heard the rumours. The backhand sniggers about the Virgin Queen. Then there was his elder brother’s attitude. Anthony served the Queen but refused to go near her. And he wouldn’t say why.

  The other mystery was Elizabeth’s apparent aversion. She had taken a real fancy to him as a child, calling him her “young Lord Keeper” and paying special visits to Gorhambury to see her clever boy, but had kept him at arm’s length ever since. It was as if she couldn’t bear his presence. A principled speech he had made in the Commons against the award of a triple subsidy to the royal household had given her an excuse to ban him from court for more than three years and it was only recently that she had noticed him again, making him her Queen’s Counsel, an honorary, unpaid post in keeping with her miserly nature.

  So here he was, a thirty-seven-year-old man, chronically short of money and no nearer to knowing the truth about his birth.

  “Still keeping bad hours and worse company, I warrant.” Lady Anne couldn’t help herself. Scolding was a reflex action.

  “As to the hours, I plead nolo contendre. As to the company I keep, let us not talk of that.”

  Lady Anne stamped her foot. “Let me speak plainly. I trust you are no longer waited on by that bloody Percy who is a profane and costly villain.”

  “By my troth, madam, he is my most devoted servant.”

  “And I suppose you are still seeing that shameless lady who behaves like Solomon’s harlot. That one is bold and impudent; she cannot blush for she has lost the ornaments of a good woman.”

  The brazen hussy who had aroused his mother’s anger was Lord Burghley’s enchanting granddaughter Lady Elizabeth Hatton. He thought of her slim white neck, the curly auburn hair, the cupid bow of a mouth, the quick wit and the rebellious nature. He thought of her wearing an ivory satin gown and how they had flirted in the summer of ’97.

  “For shame, Elizabeth, where are your widow’s weeds.”

  “I am wearing them, you dolt, following the French fashion by dressing in white.”

  How perverse, he had thought, but, then again, how very like Elizabeth: her husband three months dead and already flouting convention. As a twenty-year-old widow she came with the Isle of Purbeck including Corfe Castle, Holdenby and Hatton House. Young women of wealth and beauty were in short supply. No wonder men were drawn to her.

  Although virtually penniless and older than some of her suitors, Francis had high hopes of winning her hand. They had always enjoyed each other’s company and he had a powerful ally in the Earl of Essex who had written to her parents pressing his case. Yet it felt strange strolling through the gardens of Hatton as a courting couple when he had known his second cousin since her childhood.

  It was a hot afternoon in late June. The perfumed gillyflowers were blooming and the sweet smell of lavender wafted through the air. Elizabeth was at her most vivacious, mocking his clumsy attempts at small talk. She told him Fulke Greville had much better manners.

  “Good thoughts are better than good manners,” he had replied.

  “But not when they take so long to express they grow tedious.”

  They were fencing with one another, using words as weapons.

  “You and I are too wise,” he retorted, “to woo peaceably.”

  “Those who claim to be wise seldom are.”

  “My dear Lady Distain, are you yet living.”

  “Can distain die when it has Bacon to feed off?”

  He could hear the seductive sound of her skirt swishing on the flagstones as they stepped off the terrace into the geometrically laid out garden with its box hedge parterres.

  Here the conversation took a dif
ferent turn. “How does your friend like his new home?”

  “Do you mean Shakespeare?”

  “Yes, the actor who writes amatory poems.”

  “He is well content and wants to thank your ladyship for suggesting the purchase.”

  It was a small world: Shakespeare had recently bought New Place in Stratford from William Underhill, the stepbrother of Elizabeth’s late husband, Sir William Hatton.

  “I hope Underhill didn’t drive too hard a bargain. Sir William told me he had to sell up because of the huge fines he incurred for recusancy.”

  “Will paid only sixty pounds in silver.”

  They had come to a rose canopied arbour guarded by a grotesque statue Sir William commissioned before his death. It depicted Priapus, the protector of gardens, with an engorged phallus.

  Francis drew Elizabeth’s attention to this swollen member. “Behold Sir William’s last erection!”

  “By no means,” Elizabeth said feelingly, wrinkling up her pretty nose.

  “Does the size of the male organ matter?” he asked innocently.

  “It does in Greek mythology. Priapus deterred garden thieves with his long pike.”

  “That is not my meaning, cousin.”

  “It is a better answer than you deserve.”

  “It is said women of quality are frightened by a proudly worn codpiece. It is too brave a show.”

  “When will men learn to be honest? Far from displaying power and virility, the parading of the genitals, in whatever form, demonstrates the opposite case, namely, impotence.”

  “God’s teeth, you are hard on my sex.”

  “Yes, as you would be hard on us.”

  “Let me know your reasoning, fair cousin.”

  “Why then, I cite that picked man of fashion, the Spanish grandee, and how his codding spirit got its comeuppance in the English Channel some ten years since.”

  “Excellent, i’faith, you advance an armada of reasons.”

  They walked towards the fish-ponds. “What think you of my water features?” she asked.