by David Taylor
“What’s this leading up to?” Cheryl inquired rudely.
“Forgive me, my dear, lawyers tend to take their time. Ascham’s The Schoolmaster contained a very strong hint about a royal birth.”
The book had been written at Elizabeth’s request to provide a ‘right order of teaching’ for young noblemen and princes. When it was finished, Ascham gave her a manuscript copy which included a preface, Divae Elizabethae, in which he mentioned how King David fell into ‘the deepest pit of wickedness,’ committing adultery and murder, yet received divine forgiveness. Ascham thought this Bible story mirrored the ‘good dealings of God with your Majesty.’
Freddie whistled aloud. “He’s actually accusing Elizabeth of the sin of David. David commits adultery with Bathsheba, making her pregnant, and then plots the death of her husband Uriah the Hittite so he can marry her. For Uriah read Amy Dudley. Elizabeth must have hated this. She’d get rid of the preface, if not of Ascham.”
“Yes, well, Ascham not only survived, he must have kept a handwritten copy of his seditious preface because it appeared two hundred years later in an anthology of his works.”
“Did anyone else risk the royal wrath by publishing lewd stories about her?”
“Only when she was dead,” Guest extracted a copy of Albion’s England from a drawer in his desk. William Warner’s epic poem had been an Elizabethan best-seller. Long after the queen’s death, in 1612, a version appeared which included a new couplet: ‘Hence England’s heirs-apparent have of Wales been princes, till Our Queen deceased concealed her heir, I know not for what skill.’
“He’d obviously been waiting to get that one in,” was Cheryl’s verdict on the matter.
Guest paused for dramatic effect. “Guess who also hinted that Elizabeth had a child?”
His visitors shook their heads in unison.
“Francis Bacon! Four years after her death he publishes an essay on her reign, A Collection of the Felicities of Queen Elizabeth, in which he says: ‘Childless she was, and left no issue behind her, which was the case of many of the most fortunate princes, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Trajan and others.’ Bacon liked to be succinct but here he was wasting words. If the Queen was childless, she couldn’t have had any issue. While none of the rulers he mentioned had legitimate heirs, Alexander and Julius Caesar had bastard sons. Indeed, Alexander had two of them by different women.”
“Perhaps Bacon didn’t know about these illegitimate offspring.”
Guest pursed his lips. “Sorry, that doesn’t wash. Bacon also wrote a Discourse in Praise of Queen Elizabeth which wasn’t published until after his death in which he returned to the question of her virginity, saying that great leaders either died childless or were ‘unfortunate’ in their children like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and a string of other Roman emperors who had sons in and out of wedlock that did not succeed them. You see what he’s saying, don’t you? It’s hard for the modern mind to comprehend the subtle innuendos and coded language of a bygone time when we live in an age of massive indiscretion where everything is spelt out in capital letters.”
There was a knock on the door and his legal secretary came into the room. “I’m sorry to interrupt but the instructing solicitors have arrived.”
“Thank you, Miss Beckett; perhaps you’ll give them my apologies while I wind up here.”
Guest stood up and shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry, we’ve run out of time …”
“Just one more question.” Cheryl fixed her green eyes on the barrister. “Did anyone even hint that Francis was the Queen’s bastard?”
“That’s a fascinating subject, Miss Stone, but it will have to wait for another day.”
“No, it won’t, you can keep those lawyers waiting. Come and sit next to me Seymour,” she said, patting the sofa’s soft leather upholstery with the palm of her hand.
The temptation was too great. “Well, I suppose I could spare a few minutes.”
As he joined her on the couch Cheryl winked at Freddie. “Right, what about all that lovely innuendo you were promising us.”
“Lawyers don’t always hit it off,” he began. “Sir Edward Coke was Bacon’s rival and the two men hated one another. Their rivalry was very evident in the Essex trial where, as Attorney-General, Coke led for the prosecution but made such a mess of the case that Bacon had to take over from him. This brought matters to a head and Coke publicly taunted Bacon for his unfortunate birth calling him ‘less than the least’ and saying he would clap a writ of Capias Utlagatum on his back.”
“What on earth is that?”
“It’s a writ of outlawry and, of course, bastards were outside the law. Bacon replied that he had been Coke’s better and may be again, when it pleased the Queen.”
“That’s a coded remark, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sure,” said Guest snuggling up to Cheryl, “but that’s how it was in those days, my dear. Secrets were supposed to be kept, particularly in a country ruled by a ruthless old woman who’d spent the previous forty years stressing her virginity.”
Freddie felt like the forgotten man. “Okay, let’s assume Elizabeth was Francis’ mother. That makes Sir Nicholas and Lady Anne Bacon his foster parents. My problem is this. I find it impossible to believe that a devout Puritan like Lady Anne would agree to fake a pregnancy.”
“I’ve given that some thought,” Guest said smoothly. “Lady Anne is one of Elizabeth’s principal ladies-in-waiting; her husband is the Lord Keeper and her brother-in-law is Secretary of State. The family has invested everything in the Protestant succession. Think what they might have lost if the truth had got out about the Queen’s condition.”
The desk top became Guest’s living theatre as he objectified the inkwell, blotter and paper clips to visualize this Tudor melodrama. His speech was low and rapid as he painted a dystopian picture of a pregnant queen unable to marry the man she loved, turning to her chief minister Cecil for guidance.
“He tells her not to worry, he’ll sort something out. He thinks of his sister-in-law Anne, who had had one sickly child and doubted whether she could have another. As a good wife she had sublimated her hatred of the Catholic faith to support her husband when he served Mary Tudor. Having swallowed her religious principles once, surely she could do so again, this time to protect a Protestant queen. If Elizabeth lost the throne, the true faith would go with her. By pretending to give birth Anne would prolong her husband’s career, gain a desired second child and earn the thanks of her sovereign. That’s a tempting pitch, don’t you think?”
“I’d do it in her shoes,” Cheryl said without hesitation.
Freddie disagreed. Lady Anne was a religious fanatic: a woman who believed her infant daughter Mary died because she had been given the name of the Catholic queen.
Seymour Guest waved an admonishing finger. “My dear chap, you are hoist with your own petard. If Anne believed God was punishing her for conspiring with Papists, she might well fear his wrath if she didn’t do everything in her power to prevent the Catholic faith from returning to England. In any case, there are hints that she went through with the deception.”
“Let’s hear them then.”
The barrister patted his bald head – surely designed for a horsehair wig – and sank further into his sofa, torn between a wild enthusiasm for his subject and the rigid code of a profession that expected its practitioners to make careful, responsible statements. Slowly, he began to assemble the dry bones of disconnected fact.
Rawley’s biography of Francis Bacon stated he ‘was born in York House, or York Place, in the Strand.’ York House was the Bacon family home while York Place was Queen Elizabeth’s Whitehall palace. Surely Bacon’s chaplain would know where his master was born? Bacon’s first French biographer Pierre Amboise claimed he was ‘born to the purple,’ the royal colour. Sir Nicholas Bacon made virtually no provision for his youngest son in his will and, after his death, Francis pressed an undisclosed suit with the queen for a decade or more before telling his uncle Burghley he was
prepared to settle for ‘the kingdom of the mind.’
“What about Lady Anne? Did she drop any hints?”
“One big one, you might think. In a 1593 letter to her elder son Anthony she said of Francis that she had never set out ‘to treat him as a ward; such a word is far from my motherly feeling for him.’ In law, the term ‘ward’ conveys guardianship. Why should a mother talk of her son in such a fashion?”
“Because he had brought the matter up and she was responding to the charge?”
Guest wiped his forehead with a fine silk handkerchief. “Precisely so and I would add this. In talking about his relationship with the queen Bacon used such graphic language. He called himself a lost child, a hawk tethered to the royal wrist, and a ‘withered branch’ of the Queen’s ‘roots.’”
Having run through these arguments, Seymour Guest sat back to study the effect they were having on his visitors. “There is also some genetic evidence,” he added. “Bacon didn’t look remotely like his supposed parents and he had dark brown eyes while they had light grey ones. The odds against this happening are 100 to 1.”
“Queen Elizabeth had black eyes and Leicester was so dark he was called ‘the Gypsy,’” Freddie said excitedly. “They could easily have been Francis Bacon’s parents.”
“Well, I hope that’s been helpful.” Guest stood up to bring the meeting to a close.
“There’s one thing that puzzles me,” he added as an afterthought. “If I was a man of mystery, secret author and royal bastard, I’d want to leave something behind to explain my strange life.”
“That’s interesting,” Freddie said after a long pause. “Didn’t Bacon talk about writing some kind of treatise for the people, Seymour?”
Guest flicked imaginary dust off his suit lapel. “He did but Bacon theorists have wasted too much time searching for such Holy Grails.”
“What about a second copy of Elizabeth’s secret marriage certificate,” Cheryl interjected. “Mightn’t Bacon have acquired that and hidden it away somewhere?”
Guest looked at his watch. “It’s possible.”
She grabbed a well manicured hand and stroked it. “Come on, Seymour, pretty please. Tell us where such a document might be.”
“Well, if you must know, I’d plump for Canonbury Tower which Bacon leased in 1616 when he was Attorney-General. The building has a mysterious stone carving and secret passageways and meetings of the so-called ‘Invisible College’ took place there.”
“It sounds absolutely wonderful. Can we go there, Freddie?”
“You’d better ask Seymour. The Bacon Society has rooms in the building.”
Guest smiled. “How about three o’clock tomorrow? I’ll get the caretaker to show you around. Miss Beckett will send you a confirmatory email.”
He glanced at the wall clock. “I’m afraid I’ve run out of time. My instructing solicitors will be champing at the bit. Freddie, it’s been a pleasure. Cheryl, I hope to see more of you later.”
“Not a chance,” she muttered, once they were out in the corridor.
1 JULY 2014
The Met Office’s wet weather forecast hardly did justice to the torrential rain and gale force winds that buffeted them as they left the shelter of the tube station. Freddie’s umbrella was blown inside out, forcing them to walk briskly, heads down against the driving rain.
“You wouldn’t think it was midsummer,” Freddie yelled above the rumbling thunder as they splashed their way through one of Canonbury’s gentrified garden squares.
Cheryl shook some of the water out of her bedraggled locks and raised her voice to the heavens. “‘Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, you cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drenched the steeples, drowned the cocks!’”
She looked at his soaking jeans. “Your cock looks pretty drowned in those trousers.”
“Don’t you like it? I call it my Tsunami look.”
“Of course I like it,” she shouted back at him. “You know me. But what about you and that American bitch? Do you still love her?”
“Honest answer, I don’t know. I feel like a jigsaw, broken into pieces.”
“So where does that leave me? As a shoulder to cry on, I suppose?”
Freddie brushed the rain off her face. “It’s not your shoulder I’m interested in.”
“Oh really, is that so? I’m in pieces, Nurse Nightingale,” she pouted out her lips in apparent agony. “Drop your drawers and comfort me. A mercy fuck, is that what you’re after?”
They had their sexual fantasies now. In one of them he was an ailing patient and she a hospital nurse, there to meet his every need.
“You’re doing it again, spouting profanities when you don’t need to.”
“You know what Groucho Marx said – women should be obscene and not heard.”
He hurt himself laughing. “The trouble is you’re both – obscene and heard!”
In the relentless downpour they could just about see a red and brown brick building rising above the waterlogged streets. A flash of lightning gave them a better look at the huge tower that was their destination.
Cheryl shivered in her waterproof jacket. “This is like one of those Hammer films when the hero and his beautiful red headed heroine enter Dracula’s castle.”
“Well, you’ve got the neck for it – in more ways than one.”
They didn’t have to knock on the door. It was already open and the lights were on in the porter’s lodge. Shaking the water off like a pair of dogs they entered a tiny room made more cramped by a bulky sofa, a pile of chairs and a fat shaven-headed man in circular spectacles warming his behind in front of a gas fire.
“Come in, come in,” he shouted, his eyes twinkling behind his glasses. “Upon my soul, how wet you are. Take this my dear to dry your lovely hair on.”
The rotund figure picked up a tea towel and handed it to Cheryl. “The name is Baines, Albert Baines, here to help you in whatever way I can.”
“You can’t have been very busy today,” Freddie said casually.
“You’re the second visitors. There was someone just before midday, said he was inspecting structural defects for the chartered surveyors, not a word of thanks when he left, didn’t even look in to say goodbye. Some people have no manners. There now, I’ve said it.”
Baines showed his disgust by dropping a sodden copy of the Daily Mail in the trash can.
Freddie explained who they were. “I expect Mr Guest told you we were coming.”
“Indeed he did. With your permission sir, I’d like to tell you about Canonbury Tower. It was erected in the early sixteenth century as a country residence for the Prior of St Bartholomew. William Bolton was both an Augustinian monk and a clerk of works to Henry VII. He presided over the construction of the Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey.”
“Funny country house,” Cheryl remarked. “Such a tall tower must have stood out like a sore thumb.”
“Oh, that. Astrologists predicted a great flood was coming, so Prior William copied Noah by building an ark, albeit a vertical one, and stocked it with enough food to survive until the waters subsided. The flood never happened, not until now at least.”
Baines was getting into his stride. “The English Reformation was planned here. It was Thomas Cromwell’s home for seven years before he lost his head. But what you’re really interested in is the building’s other famous inhabitant. Sir Francis Bacon acquired a forty year lease on the place when he was Attorney-General and he’s supposed to have used it for meetings of the Invisible College, otherwise known as the Rosicrucian Fraternity. The rooms upstairs all have oak panelling carved to Bacon’s specifications. Lots of Masonic symbols like the rose. Then there’s the upper chamber with its famous ‘writing on the wall.’ High above the lintel someone inscribed the names of the kings and queens of England in black lettering. Between Elizabeth and James I is a name beginning with the letter F that’s either worn away or been deliberately defaced. You’ll want to see that.”
“What
about the secret passageways that Mr Guest mentioned?” Cheryl’s eyes were shining.
“She loves all this cloak and dagger stuff,” Freddie explained.
Baines cleared a place for her on the sofa. “That’s an old story. When post-war repair work was done on the second floor room one of the oak panels near the fireplace had to be replaced. Behind the panel was some kind of passage which had to be closed again because of the bad air. The builders also demolished part of the tower wall and found steps leading to a subterranean tunnel that ran all the way to St Bartholomew’s priory.”
Cheryl finished drying her hair and handed back the towel. “Thanks, Albert, you’re a real mate.”
“Would you like me to show you around?”
“Thanks all the same,” Freddie said, “but we can manage on our own. We’re just popping up to the Compton Room.”
They climbed the staircase to the second floor and entered a Jacobean chamber, panelled from floor to ceiling in oak, with richly carved pilasters raised on plinths, bell-shaped capitals adorned with acanthus leaves and a palm leaf frieze. What caught Freddie’s eye was the ornate work above the fireplace on the north wall. Trailing roses had been incised into the wooden mantelpiece.
Cheryl saw a puff of dust rising above the fireplace’s stone surround. “That’s odd,” she said. “Where is the air coming from?”
Freddie took a slim-line torch out of his anorak pocket and shone it inside the fireplace’s flat-arched opening. The flickering light illuminated a brick wall not in the least blackened by soot or smoke.
The dust stirred again beside the cast-iron grate. They looked at one another in surprise.
“There’s got to be an alcove behind the fireplace and something is moving inside it,” he whispered, trying to appear nonchalant.
Cheryl retreated in shock. Searching for historical ghosts had seemed like fun but this was much too real for her, positively spooky.
Freddie prodded, pushed and poked the wooden panels near the fireplace.
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know exactly, some kind of release mechanism perhaps. I once saw a priest hole in Hindlip Hall with a fireplace hearth entry point that could be raised and lowered like a trap-door.”