The Queen's Cipher

by David Taylor

  History, she thought, was simply a version of events, collective memories about the past carefully edited to suit those in power. The single voice was seldom heard. Yet here it was, loud and clear, in a comedy first performed before the Queen. What an incredible story, a gold-plated soap opera about a brilliant but bitter son who designed a play to stir the conscience of his royal mother.

  *

  Even the walls of palaces had draughts and Elizabeth shivered in the night air as she waited for the play to end. The lords of Navarre and their French ladies had gone their separate ways leaving the stage to the comic characters to perform what appeared to be the kind of seasonal songs young children might sing. Only they too were barbed.

  Elizabeth had heard enough. Many years ago, when her advisors suggested the forcible conversion of her Catholic subjects, she had said she ‘would not open windows into men’s souls.’ Well, that’s what this play had done to her. Opened windows she had kept firmly shut.

  As a strong believer in absolute monarchy and divine right she had absolved herself from any guilt for what had happened forty years ago. She would have married Dudley had it been possible, of course she would, and acknowledged their child too. But it hadn’t been possible. She could only rule England if she stayed single and her weak and fractured kingdom needed her on the throne. She had reinvented herself as the Virgin Queen to see off the Catholic threat after the Pope excommunicated her and, with the passage of time, had come to almost believe in her virginity. But she could no longer do so, not with the dramatist’s words echoing in her ears – ‘Here stand I, lady. Dart thy skill at me.’ He was challenging her to face the truth.

  “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo,” said the lisping Spaniard. The room fell silent waiting for their grim-faced monarch to lead the applause.

  After a long pause Elizabeth clapped her hands and her courtiers joined in enthusiastically. While the players were taking their curtain calls a plan began to form in her mind. She beckoned the Lord Chamberlain to her side. George Carey was her first cousin and a discreet man. “George,” she said, “I would like a private word with that fellow Shakespeare. See to it.”

  “A thousand pardons, your Majesty, but I cannot carry out your command. Master Shakespeare is in Warwickshire looking after a sick child.”

  How very convenient, she thought, and further confirmation of what she feared. Another hand was upon this play and she couldn’t speak to him either. This, however, could be rectified by giving him the audience he craved, once she had worked out what she might say.

  *

  “What about these seasonal songs tagged onto the end of the play,” Cheryl asked. “They celebrate spring and winter and have been composed, we’re told, ‘in praise of the owl and the cuckoo’ which, when you think about it, is a pretty strange choice given that the cuckoo leaves its offspring in another bird’s nest and the owl has always been a bird of ill omen.”

  When daisies pied and violets blue,

  And lady-smocks, all silver-white,

  And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

  Do paint the meadow with delight,

  The cuckoo then on every tree

  Mocks married men, for thus sings he:

  Cuckoo!

  Cuckoo, cuckoo – O word of fear,

  Unpleasing to a married ear.

  When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,

  And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks;

  When turtles tread, and rooks and daws,

  And maidens bleach their summer smocks,

  The cuckoo then on every tree

  Mocks married men, for thus sings he:

  Cuckoo!

  Cuckoo, cuckoo – O word of fear,

  Unpleasing to a married ear.

  The verses celebrated the renewal of nature. The fields were in flower and larks soared above. But the mood darkened with the repeated chorus. The lovemaking wasn’t all it might be and this gave Freddie an idea. What if the songs contained a narrative, a nature lesson that helped to explain the play’s cryptic title, Love’s Labour’s Lost?

  He located a pair of old almanacs bought in an Oxford book sale and handed one to Cheryl so that they could swap notes. Daisies and blue violets peaked in April while the lady’s smock or cuckoo flower blossomed in the meadows in the middle of that month. Turtles mated in April, skylarks sang in April and the two-syllable call of the early cuckoo was first heard in mid April. Later cuckoos changed their note to ‘cook.’

  “Right,” he said, “let’s see if winter’s song is equally time specific.”

  When icicles hang by the wall,

  And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,

  And Tom brings logs into the hall,

  And milk comes frozen home in pail;

  When blood is nipped, and ways be foul,

  Then nightly sings the staring owl:

  Tu-whit, tu-whoo! – a merry note,

  While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

  When all aloud the wind doth blow,

  And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,

  And birds sit brooding in the snow,

  And Marian’s nose looks red and raw;

  When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

  Then nightly sings the staring owl:

  Tu-whit, tu-whoo! – a merry note,

  While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

  The harshness of winter had replaced the gaiety of spring. Ways were foul, blood was nipped, the milk was frozen, the congregation had colds and yet, paradoxically, the owl’s hooting was ‘a merry note.’ The almanacs and the perpetual calendar agreed on one thing: the most severe winter weather invariably came in the second half of January. As for the people objectified in the song, Marian was a generic name for a whore while ‘nose-reddening’ was a familiar synonym for sexual excess. In keeling the pot, greasy Joan might appear to be a harmless scullery maid but in Shakespeare’s lexicon ‘greasy’ often meant ‘obscene,’ ‘keeling’ meant ‘cooling’ and the ‘pot’ stood for the human body in The Taming of the Shrew. By now, in Freddie’s overactive brain, Joan had morphed into a somewhat disreputable midwife sponging the pain-racked body of a woman in labour.

  He too needed to cool down. Joining Cheryl on the sofa he closed his eyes and let himself relax. But something was gnawing away at his subconscious; something to do with January. It gradually came to him. Didn’t the month take its name from the Latin word for a door? The goose had changed by going outdoors just as the hart had shed its horns on emerging from the thicket. Shakespeare had borrowed wholesale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the imagery in Love’s Labour’s Lost was mostly transformational. Was there an actual day of transformation in that month?

  Cheryl supplied the answer. Her almanac recorded the fact that January 25th was the Festival of St Paul, the day on which the saint saw the blinding light on his way to Damascus, a transformation that was celebrated by a religious ceremony in London.

  Clambering to his feet, Freddie foraged through his bookcase and returned with a paperback copy of John Stow’s A Survey of London, published in the same year as Love’s Labour’s Lost. In it Stow described an annual ritual on the Festival of St Paul in which a buck was slaughtered below St Paul’s high altar. According to him, the cathedral’s dean and chapter ‘sent the body of the buck to baking, and had the head fixed on a pole, borne before the cross in their procession, until they issued out of the west door, where the keeper that brought it blew the death of the deer.”

  For hundreds of years, apparently, a male deer had been ceremonially killed on January 25th. Its horned head was paraded through the streets in front of the cross and Francis Bacon had duly recorded this in his Promus. ‘Good means against bad, horns to crosses,’ read the cryptic entry.

  There was one more thing to do. Check out the date of Francis Bacon’s christening. If he was right about this, the baby’s name should have been registered on the day of transformation.

  As his computer screen flickered into life
he uttered a silent prayer. The Wikipedia entry read: ‘Francis Bacon was born on January 22nd 1561 and baptised three days later at St Martin-in-the-Fields.’ He slumped onto the settee drained of energy.

  Cheryl flung her arms around his neck. “Bloody fantastic,” she cried. “Three days after his birth, on the day of transformation, a baby is christened as Francis Bacon. This explains the play’s obsession with the number three. The songs describe a nine month pregnancy cycle which ends in love’s labour being well and truly lost. Once you appreciate what’s going on, it’s an amazing piece of theatre intended for an audience of one. Whether he wrote the play or not, Bacon must have chosen its imagery and devised its puzzles. Why do you think he did it?”

  Freddie extricated himself from her embrace before answering. “It’s a cry for recognition. He’s telling her he knows the truth about his birth and understands why she disowned him and why she has refused to give him any political promotion. He’ll settle for what he calls ‘the kingdom of the mind’ but he’s not prepared to be ignored.”

  “Elizabeth was a right old hypocrite, peddling her chastity when she didn’t possess it.”

  To his surprise, he sprang to the Queen’s defence. “Don’t be too hard on her. Women have come a long way since then and virtue no longer depends on an unbroken hymen.”

  “Oh, come off it Freddie! Boasting about being virgo intacta when you’re not and getting your royal doctors to lie about it is pretty shitty behaviour.”

  “Maybe, but even in a modern permissive society where they are little more than figureheads, monarchs can’t afford to get embroiled in sex scandals.”

  Cheryl cocked her head. “You’re amazing, you are.”

  “Thanks,” he said, “but we shouldn’t get carried away. The once fashionable Baconian Theory fell into disrepute because of an obsession with ciphers and a belief in his royal birth. And here we are dabbling in both of these heresies. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “Of course it does but the truth should out. Don’t you have confidence in your own research?” Her voice rose to a shrill crescendo as she wrestled with his bleak attitude.

  “Nope, it’s not that. It’s just that I’m painfully aware of the enduring power of legend. The Virgin Queen is a story people actually want to buy into, even if they doubt it on rational grounds. And don’t forget, there are a lot of historians’ reputations at stake.”

  “Well, what do you intend to do with all the stuff you’ve discovered?”

  “Nothing for the time being, I don’t want to go off half cock and get the sack because of it. I’m in enough trouble as it is.”

  A few months ago, when he’d been with Sam, he wouldn’t have had these doubts. He was forever vacillating. What had happened to his courage?

  “Come on!” Cheryl sounded exasperated. “I know you think I’m just a silly girl with a massive crush on her tutor and you’re right, I’d do almost anything for you, except listen to this defeatist bullshit. In case you hadn’t noticed, times are changing. History is seen for what it is, a malleable construct, and, in English Literature, it’s now respectable to run a degree course in Shakespeare authorship studies. I guarantee people will sit up and take notice if you publish your findings.”

  The fierceness of her response flustered him and he began to stutter. “L-listen, the word ‘authority’ has t-two meanings. It means the power to command and exact obedience and it also means expertise but in universities power and expertise lie in the same hands, giving those in authority the resources to dismiss alternative points of view and conflicting messages.”

  By now, she was shaking with passion. In this pessimistic mood, he was a major disappointment to her, a man of words rather than actions, lacking in moral fibre.

  “Because of the information explosion we rely more than ever on experts,” she argued. “But what we get from them is inherently biased, coloured by their vested interests. Then there’s our cultural conditioning. How can we hope to break the crust of convention when our teachers reinforce it? As students, we are tied to an outdated exam system in which we are told what books to read and what to make of them. Where is the room for fresh thinking in such an ossified command structure?”

  He looked at her with renewed respect. “You may well be right. You are right about academics being motivated by a desire to protect their careers. That’s always been true. In his day, Francis Bacon complained about Cambridge lectures being ‘so managed that the last thing anyone would be likely to entertain is an unfamiliar thought.’ He also wrote that anyone with an independent mind would find themselves isolated at university.”

  “Just like you, Freddie. You and Bacon are fucking soul mates!”

  “I should be so lucky. But universities are conservative places.”

  “Yeah, and those that run them are fucking politicians, afraid to do a reverse ferret.”

  “What in heaven’s name is that?”

  “A reverse ferret is a U-turn in Hackney-speak.”

  She had hit the nail on the head. There was no such thing as absolute truth. It was simply a question of what we considered to be true, and the longer that belief had been held the harder it was to challenge it. Instead of facts driving beliefs, our beliefs dictated which facts we were prepared to accept. That was how society worked. The Stratford genius and the Virgin Queen were so much a part of our intellectual baggage we simply couldn’t do without them. They defined us.

  “Sorry to be such a coward,” he told her. “Look, if you’re really stuck on this royal birth thing I’ll take you to see a friend of mine who is an expert on the subject. He’s a Queen’s Counsel.”

  Cheryl rolled her eyes. “That’s impressive,” she conceded.

  13 JUNE 2014

  Friday the Thirteenth was bound to be an unlucky day. Sitting on the top table at the annual dinner of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics in San Francisco’s old town hall, Sam wriggled miserably in the low-backed black satin evening gown she wore as the guest speaker’s partner. Tonight as Milton Cleaver studied the menu through his half-glasses, the bow was tied, the carnation button-holed in the white tuxedo and the speech typed out on cue cards in his jacket pocket.

  How much he loves these occasions, she thought uncharitably, and how upset he is going to be when he discovers that the only appetizers on offer are ‘gumbo ya-ya’ and ‘roasted veal-herb meatballs in a green peppercorn sauce’. Proof, if proof was needed, of Milton’s oft-stated belief that American cooking lacked the refinement of European cuisine.

  “I’m looking forward to hearing you speak, Professor Cleaver. I’ve heard so much about you,” a tall raw-boned woman in a silk chiffon gown was telling him. According to the place card, she was the President’s lady. Milton smiled at Kathleen Miller, said something deferential and turned away.

  Aware he was staring at her, Sam coolly returned his gaze. He is over fifty, she thought, and yet he looks sleeker than ever. He’s a smooth-talking advertisement for a low calorie diet. Look at those eyes, soft and confiding like a priest about to hear confession. How had she imagined she could control such a man? Capturing by submission was a courtesan’s trick but Milton couldn’t be manipulated in this way. He talked of love but there was no enthralment. He called her his ‘muse’ but that was merely a euphemism for mistress. She was a trophy. No more, no less.

  By now her unyielding lover was listening to a famous author loudly denouncing the philistinism of the Man Booker Prize judges. Milton will give him five minutes, she guessed, and then look away. He rations his time like a scarce resource. On cue, he swung around to network with a thick-set, middle-aged literary critic.

  Above the hum of conversation in the dining room she could pick out the nasal twang of Milton’s new acquaintance. “Given the pressures of conformism,” he was proclaiming, “it’s vital that a forum should exist in which literature is discussed cogently without recourse to the exclusionary argot of academic coteries.” Milton nodded wisely as he gingerly prodded a wild
mushroom lasagne. “I couldn’t agree more, Patrick. We must uphold the validity of the literary imagination and foster a common culture. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a speech to prepare.”

  Although a good after-dinner speech always appeared to trip off the tongue, in reality, accomplished speakers put a great deal of time and effort into their remarks. But Milton had already done his homework and was word perfect. Bringing the cue cards out of his breast pocket was merely an excuse to stop talking to his grisly featured tablemate.

  Half an hour later the moment arrived. The ALSC President Harry Miller stood up and tapped the table for silence. He began with a couple of old jokes that drew a ripple of polite laughter from his audience. His delivery was flat and toneless, that of a novelist who listened only to his inner ear.

  “It is my great pleasure to introduce our distinguished guest speaker, err ...” Everyone held their breath as Harry searched his notes for a name. Then with a smirk on his face, he lifted his head to say, “Only kidding folks! Our speaker is Milton Cleaver, professor in the Comparative Humanities at Mather University. The floor is yours Milton.”

  Payback time, Sam thought. Such an inept introduction will have him seething. Milton rose to his feet, smiling broadly. “A pompous speaker with a high opinion of his oratorical skills gave a rambling after-dinner speech. Afterwards, he asked his neighbour who happened to be Oscar Wilde how he would have delivered that speech. ‘Under an assumed name,’ Wilde replied.”

  Milton’s audience roared with laughter. He’s got them, Sam reckoned as she joined in the applause. For a comparatively slight man he had a remarkably sonorous voice and its magisterial boom filled the room, transfixing the dinner guests who were more aware of its tone and timbre than with what was being said. Naturally enough, he was talking about the Bard.

  “Shakespeare’s plays may be man’s supreme artistic achievement yet, in the Elizabethan age, actors were treated as vagabonds and popular drama was too vulgar to be an art form. Religion lay at the heart of this. Biblical prohibitions led to boys donning women’s clothing in the theatre but this, too, was thought to be sinful. Puritans condemned cross-dressing for blurring gender boundaries and arousing homoerotic desires.”