The Queen's Cipher

by David Taylor

  “Of course, plagiarism cannot be ignored, but having studied the case against you it seems that any theft on your part was quite unconscious. You know what TS Eliot said when he was accused of cribbing vast chunks of The Waste Land.”

  “No, Master, what did he say?”

  “He said, ‘immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.’ And yes, literature is theft. Even my hero, Homer, took much of the Iliad from older material.”

  “That’s if he ever existed!” Freddie couldn’t resist having a dig at Sir Alan whose laborious translation of the Iliad provoked such mirth in the Beaufort staff common room.

  “Oh, he existed all right. It’s just that we know nothing about him. You know the standard joke? The Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name.”

  “Didn’t they say that about Shakespeare?”

  “And for the same reason, lack of biographical detail, but one thing we know about Shakespeare is that he was a plagiarist, a ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles,’ like Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, but we don’t hold that against the Bard, do we? And if Shakespeare can get away with it, so should a Shakespeare scholar who shows real academic promise and is very popular with the student body. My colleagues have agreed there will be no tribunal. Case dismissed. Congratulations, Dr Brett.”

  Friday 27 June 2014 • Cherwell

  Brett Mugged Twice!

  Beaufort’s most talked about lecturer ended up in hospital last weekend after a burglar put the boot in outside his flat in Walton Lane. Fortunately, Dr Freddie Brett’s injuries – a broken cheekbone and cracked ribs – were of a comparatively superficial nature and he was discharged in time to watch last night’s Channel Four documentary in which his old enemy, the late Professor Cartwright accused him of plagiarism. Brett watchers will be well aware of the part he played in the scandal which led to Cartwright losing his Oxford chair. This then was payback from beyond the grave but, in our opinion, it was a damp squib. Beaufort’s disciplinary board must be of a like mind for they have dropped all charges against Dr Brett. The real question is this: how will our hero manage to screw up next? We wait with bated breath.

  27 JUNE 2014

  Freddie fastened his dressing gown, popped a couple of painkillers into his mouth and washed them down with water. Deciding that was enough medication for now, he scooped the remaining tablets off the bathroom shelf and put them into the plastic film canister he kept as a pill jar.

  He straightened up in front of the mirror. The face that greeted him had the hollow look of a badly beaten up boxer, one eye half closed, the other swollen and discoloured. The strapped up rib and blood clots in his nose made breathing difficult while the fractured cheekbone felt numb but, for all that, his body was on the mend.

  A key turned in the lock. “We’ve arrived!” Simon yelled down the corridor.

  Simon burst into the kitchen with a bag of groceries followed by a rather sheepish-looking Cheryl. She was dressed in a teal satin blouse and a long print skirt whose russet shades matched her hair.

  “What do you think of my Florence Nightingale outfit,” she inquired with an air of forced gaiety. “I’m the Lady with the Lamp. No legs on view you notice, didn’t want to over-excite the patient. How is the scar healing?”

  He moved the hair on his temple to give her a better look. The wound was only a small one.

  Simon chimed in. “It’s very disappointing. I’d expected a couple of metal plates and screws to hold the cheekbone in place but, apparently, our boy didn’t require this. He’s a total fraud and doesn’t deserve all the sympathy he gets.”

  Cheryl dug Simon playfully in the stomach. “You total bag of wind, no one could have been more concerned about him than you were.”

  “But that was when I thought he was severely injured. Now all he needs is tucking up in bed with a cup of hot cocoa and that, Cheryl old darling, I can safely leave to you. So buenos tardes and adios amigos! My bags are packed and I’m off to see my chums in Brighton. Have fun in my absence.”

  For some reason Cheryl looked uncomfortable, fiddling self-consciously with the buttons on her blouse. She stared at him as if uncertain what to say. “Can I get you a cup of tea?” she asked.

  “Not for me, thanks,” he replied, self-consciously tightening his dressing gown.

  She couldn’t keep it in any longer. The words came tumbling out. “Look, I want to know who attacked you and why he went mental. You must have some idea. Come on, cough up.”

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” he mumbled, “but my head was a bit scrambled at the time. He told me to stick to Shakespeare or worse would follow. He said I’d been making a nuisance of myself.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “How should I know? Perhaps he was referring to our extra-curricular activities.”

  “Don’t joke about it, Freddie. This is serious.”

  “I can see myself on the cobbles getting my head kicked in and the more I think about it, the angrier I get. Whatever the crazy maniac was trying to do, I’m not going to let him intimidate me.”

  “Good for you.” Cheryl studied his battered face. “You’re looking tired. Why don’t you go and have forty winks. You’ll feel better for it. Don’t worry about me. There are plenty of books here to keep me amused.”

  He watched her smoothing down her uncustomary long skirt and felt a tug of desire before shuffling off to the bedroom.

  Three hours later, refreshed by a short sleep and wearing a blue slim fit shirt and beige chinos, he wandered into the lounge to find Cheryl curled up on the sofa surrounded by paperbacks. “My, don’t we look elegant,” she said approvingly.

  “I raided your bookshelves for stuff on the young Elizabeth. What a selection - Neale, Starkey, Jenkins, they’re all here.” He had acquired the books in a car boot sale but never read them.

  “I’ll tell you this much,” she said. “Elizabeth had an awful upbringing. The poor little thing spent her childhood in mortal terror. To be only two when your father executes your mother, to have four stepmothers, to be sexually abused by your last stepmother’s husband, to be implicated in plots to overthrow your half-brother and sister, to be under house arrest and put in the Tower, to be declared illegitimate and constantly pressurized to change your religion - talk about living by your wits.”

  Freddie doubted whether anyone could crowd so much drama into their adolescent years.

  Cheryl swung her legs off the sofa to make room for him. “Imagine you are a tiny tot used to wearing lovely dresses,” she began. He struggled to do so. “Suddenly you are sent away from court. All you hear is backstairs gossip. Servants whispering that your father has executed your mother and declared you a bastard. Do you know how Elizabeth behaves? She never cries for her mother. Not once. The past is buried with Anne Boleyn. She talks about her father’s greatness and how she wants to please him. She’s only a kid and yet she’s already learned to guard her tongue in case the walls have ears.”

  “So she’s a quick learner.”

  “She had to be.”

  “Was she emotionally frigid? Scarred by her early experiences as some historians claim?”

  “Do me a favour,” Cheryl scoffed at the idea. “We are talking about the daughter of Henry Tudor and Anne Boleyn here. The Boleyn women had loads of sex appeal. Anne’s sister Mary had been the king’s mistress while her mother was supposed to have shown Henry the ropes when he was a lad. A lustful king like Henry would never have turned his kingdom upside down for an ice maiden. No, Anne was fully hot and she did what a clever woman had to do to secure a good marriage – she used her body as a bargaining chip.”

  “If Elizabeth hadn’t liked sex,” she continued, “why did she indulge in slap and tickle with the admiral?”

  “And who would that be?”

  “Thomas Seymour, the Lord High Admiral of England.”

  “I assume he got that fancy title because he was Jane Seymour’s brother. Apart from molest
ing underage girls, what was he good at?”

  “Not a lot really. The admiral never spent much time at sea. He wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box. But he was an accomplished seducer; you have to give him credit for that. Women adored him, particularly the Dowager Queen Katherine Parr.”

  Henry VIII’s sixth wife married Thomas Seymour shortly after she was widowed. By then his elder brother was the Lord Protector at Edward VI’s court and the fourteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth was entrusted to his keeping in Chelsea. Having got Katherine pregnant, Seymour acquired a key to Elizabeth’s bedchamber and took to entering her room every morning in his night shift for what would now be called fantasy foreplay. They pretended the princess’ bed was a Spanish galleon on which she tried to repel boarders before succumbing to his powerful embrace.

  The glint in Cheryl’s eye suggested a liking for such nautical adventures. “My last boyfriend taught me a game called ‘The Princess and the Pirate.’ Fancy playing it, Freddie?”

  “Later perhaps,” he said. “Did Catherine Parr know what was going on under her roof?”

  “That’s the odd thing. She was like this pious Protestant lady, strait-laced in the extreme, yet she actually joined in Seymour’s sex romps. Once when walking with Elizabeth in the garden, she pinioned the girl’s arms while Seymour took a knife to her dress and cut it to pieces.”

  “Sounds like a tabloid front page story.”

  “And it had a tabloid ending when Catherine caught Elizabeth in Thomas’s arms and sent the girl packing.”

  “Did she go quietly?”

  “On the face of it, yes, but privately she was distraught as she had a huge crush on Seymour. Her governess Kat Ashley admitted as much under examination. She also testified to the princess’ prolonged illness. According to Kat, Elizabeth was ‘first sick about midsummer,’ roughly six weeks after leaving the Seymour household, which gave rise to stories of a pregnancy and a miscarriage.”

  Freddie scratched his head. “Historians don’t believe that.”

  “No, they settle either for a ‘long-drawn-out nervous collapse’ or ignore her illness altogether.”

  Cheryl brushed a lock of red hair out of her eyes, her face flushed with indignation. “These male historians seem to have had a thing for Elizabeth. From what I’ve read, she could do no wrong. Her vanity was self-confidence and her indecision masterly temporization. Granted she was a great queen, but she made mistakes too.”

  “I guess you’re right. Men idealize powerful women like Maggie Thatcher, the Iron Lady.”

  The air grew suddenly cold around him. It was as if he had opened the tent flap and gone out into a blizzard.

  “Don’t talk to me about that cow,” Cheryl hissed. “She was the most socially divisive prime minister ever. She busted the unions, destroyed communities, deregulated the City and restored class privilege. As for the Falklands, that was fought to preserve her reputation.”

  “I am sure you are right,” he replied hastily. The Falklands had been a ridiculous war. The Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges said it was like two bald men fighting over a comb.

  Cheryl moved on. She had been reading about Elizabeth’s accession day which had begun with a piece of playacting. Sitting under an oak tree at Hatfield reading her Bible, she had waited for news of Mary’s death. As the weather was bitterly cold and the messenger late, she must have been freezing.

  “So what have we learned?” Cheryl asked rhetorically. “Elizabeth was an incredibly bright woman who fully understood the seductive power of myth. No one knew what she was thinking. If she gave birth to a child and wanted to conceal the fact, I think she might have got away with it.”

  “I need to sit down now,” he murmured, “my ribs are aching.”

  The Virgin Queen was instantly forgotten as Cheryl guided him back to the sofa. Once he was comfortable she snuggled up to him, pressing her face against his shoulder. He bent over and kissed her tenderly on the lips. “You’re not messing me around, are you Freddie?” she said fiercely. “If you are leading me on, I’ll cut out your heart with a spoon.”

  “You got that from a movie.”

  He thought of another film, Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and how it had brought them together. “Do you still want to meet that QC?” he asked.

  Cheryl was all for a trip to London but wondered what was so special about this silk.

  “We met at a college reunion and got on very well together. Seymour Guest had just been called to the bar and it came as a surprise to discover that he was a member of the Bacon Society. Now he’s president and as a criminal barrister he knows all about the burden of proof. We’ll ask him whether there’s any evidence to support the royal birth theory.”

  With that settled he lay back on the couch and closed his eyes.

  “Before you rest, there’s one thing I have to know,” she said. “You’ve read loads about Francis Bacon. Did he ever get back into Queen Elizabeth’s good books?”

  “Not half. In her declining years, she had a remarkable change of heart where he was concerned. There’s a good book by Lytton Strachey in which he mentions ‘strange dialogues’ held in private between ‘two most peculiar minds.’”

  “Sounds quite intimate, mother and son reunited. Do you think they played chess?”

  Cheryl’s fluttering eyelashes made Freddie laugh.

  “Oh, I’m sure they must have done. Francis would have to let mummy win though.”

  THE CHESS MATCH

  Set in triple time, to the sound of tabor and pipe, there were five steps to this measure: right, left, right, left, cadence. The last two beats consisted of a leap with the couple landing with one leg ahead of the other. The lavolta step brought men and women into such close proximity many dancing masters felt it should be outlawed. Thomas Cardell was not one of them. With great skill and agility, he put his right arm around his partner’s waist, took her left hand in his, lifted her onto his right thigh, and revolved at great speed before lowering her again. When the music finally stopped she fell in a heap on the floor, dizzy and out of breath.

  Cardell dropped to his knees offering a napkin for her sweating brow. The exhausted face looking up at him was that of an almost toothless woman who hid her wrinkles under a thick white lead foundation. The face belonged to Elizabeth Tudor, now in her sixty-seventh year. She rose with as much dignity as anyone wearing farthingales might muster, straightened her red wig and dismissed him with a wave of the hand. As the dancing master backed out of her presence Elizabeth saw her reflection in a large gilt mirror. In official mythology she was still a demigod but the magic was wearing thin. The mirror would have to go. It was time for a fresh start.

  This morning’s meeting was long overdue. Next to herself, he had the sharpest, most subtle brain in England and had used it to support the Earl of Essex in his power struggle with the Cecils. This deep-seated rivalry had begun to threaten her throne. He had said as much in one of his oh so clever essays. ‘When factions are carried too high, and too violently, it is a sign of weakness in princes, and much to the prejudice of their authority.’ There was very little that escaped Francis Bacon’s attention, apart from his own failings. But he was desperate to win her approval and she could use that to bend him to her will. Emotions didn’t enter into it. Where was the wretched fellow?

  *

  The Palace of Whitehall might be a courtier’s second home but he could still get lost in it. The building was chaotic, sprawling arbitrarily over twenty acres, with more rooms than the Vatican, but only peers could pass unchallenged through the heavily guarded double doors of the Privy Chamber. As he waited to be announced, Francis Bacon thought of previous meetings with the Queen. How she had been a benign figure in his youth, laughing at his precocious wit, but had done nothing for him as an adult. An unpaid appointment as a Learned Counsel was his only advancement. To make matters worse, she had picked a quarrel with him over his Commons speech on the triple subsidy and let it fester for years, banning him from her prese
nce. It was a long time to bear a grudge. Not that he had helped matters with the comedy he’d written but neither of them had spoken of that - until now at least. He could feel his knees trembling.

  She was standing beneath Holbein’s massive wall mural of Henry VIII. A reminder, if one was needed, that she was the autocratic daughter of a mighty king. He looked at her long face, the hooked nose and tightly drawn mouth before kissing the royal hand. In bowing low he could not help but see her scrawny bosom for she kept the bodice of her silver gown open to signify her maidenhood. How ironic this was. By staying single, Elizabeth would leave England without a male heir after her father had turned the kingdom inside out to secure one. Parliament had wanted her to marry but she had put its members in their place.

  If the ravages of time had left her any beauty it lay in her hands which moved restlessly to reflect her altering moods. Her personal motto semper eadem, ‘always the same,’ couldn’t be further from the truth.

  “Princes have big ears, Master Bacon,” she said, half-mockingly. “They hear all manner of bruits and are advised of the old saying, ‘no smoke without the fire’.” The accusatory tone served no purpose other than to disconcert him. It was a small revenge for his coded attacks on her style of government with its equivocations and ‘answers-answerless.’

  “But enough of that,” she added, “We are inclined to forget the past. It is time to look ahead. Join me at the chess table for I know you to be a proficient at this game.” The first person singular had replaced the royal plural.

  She pointed towards a Flemish table on which finely carved ivory chess pieces were set out on a games board. “I have to thank the lathe-turners of Germany for my chessmen. At least the craftsmanship is Protestant, even if the game is Catholic.”

  Bacon looked puzzled. “Your Majesty surprises me. I thought chess reached Europe through the Islamic countries of Spain and Sicily.”

  “And so it did but Spanish Catholics changed the rules of engagement. In the Arab version of the game, the queen was a feeble piece capable only of single diagonal steps around the board. But after Queen Isabella expelled the Moors from Spain the piece became very powerful, moving any number of squares in a straight or diagonal line.”