Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  He told how he became a servant to Sir Francis Walsingham, with whom he lived in Paris at the embassy, and how Sir Francis had employed him chiefly to spy on the Spanish ambassador and on a man named Morgan, who was agent for the Queen of Scots.

  “And I tell you,” he said, tapping again on the table, “we who ferret out the news by which the statesmen guide their practices, receive small wages and less praise, even as those statesmen themselves get poxy treatment from the Queen. A man does well to look to his own chances.”

  I thought him a zany, notwithstanding, so to talk to me, who was a stranger to him; and I thought Will Shakespeare, glancing at him darkly now and then, gave little credit to his talk.

  I was eager to be taken that hour to Lord Burghley, or to Sir Francis Walsingham; indifferent, indeed, which member of the Council should be sponsor of my fortune, so be I missed no opportunity. But Berden told me neither of them could be seen that morning, since the parliament was sitting and the Lords held council in the morning to be ready for the session in the afternoon.

  “Moreover,” said he, “matters such as this are better deftly-managed, such a pick-thank lot they are at court, each studying to claim all credit for himself.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Of many famous men, and of the meeting with Thomas Phelippes which took Will to Westminister.

  BERDEN found me not so ignorant as he imagined. Princes and their ministers seek safety for the state in preserving that very ignorance that constitutes its gravest danger; whereas, it seems to me, that if men were all equally well-informed it must inevitably follow that the greater part would rally to lawful government, but in ignorance lies such uncertainty as stimulates sedition.

  And who shall preserve ignorance, that is like a mist dispersable by every wind of truth that blows? We of the shires and counties were kept more or less informed by the members of Parliament returning to their homes between the short sessions.

  So what I did know certainly was mixed with false and ridiculous tidings, but I had a sort of general knowledge that made me able to hold my ground with Berden. I knew, for instance, that the Scots Queen was now at Tutbury in the custody of Sir Ralph Sadler, a man advanced in years, who some said favoured her; though that I doubted, knowing the Lord Harry had employed him in suppressing monasteries, and how he had fought against the Scots, rallying the cavalry at Pinkie Cleugh, and what not else. And I knew it was common talk that there was more than one French priest in the Scots Queen’s household in disguise; nor was there doubt in anybody’s mind that she was practising against the realm, with secret messages to Parma in the Low Country, and to the Duke of Guise in France, and even to Phillip, King of Spain; as it was also known that many in England favoured her and looked to see her on the throne before long.

  I had heard even my father Sir Harry say, and more than once, that it were well to keep Mary Queen of Scots alive and in good countenance, in order that England might not lack a queen if God should see fit to remove Elizabeth, by a murderer’s hand or otherwise. My father was one of the first in our part of England to sign the Association Bond for the protection of the Queen’s life, but it was understood, nevertheless, that her life hung by a pack-thread since the Pope had excommunicated her with promises of wealth in this world and salvation in the next for her assassin.

  It was common rumour, too, and well-known to us country gentry, that Percy, Neville, Arundel, Throgmorton, Paget, and others of our nobility who had escaped to foreign parts, were planning invasion to set Mary of Scotland on the throne. The Duke of Guise should go to Scotland to invade us from the North, and the King of Spain should send his troops to land in Ireland. Nor had England any army to resist them.

  There were also stories that the Queen would marry the Earl of Leicester, to raise an heir to her own body and to set all rivalries at rest. But there were few who liked that prospect, since the Earl was but a Dudley and ill spoken of — under suspicion, moreover, of having murdered Amy Robsart, whom he had married secretly and then wished dead.

  So there was much to talk of, and no little mutual understanding, as Berden and I rode toward Paul’s yard, where the printing shops lie cheek by jowl beneath a wooden colonade, alongside houses of the better class of merchants and the shops of sword-smiths, ruff-makers, glovers, and what not else. That ‘prentice lad had followed us; he seemed vastly taken with me, so I let him hold the horses, but I wondered what trouble his master would make for him when he should return to that shop in Cheapside.

  Mighty entertainment had I watching how the grave and venerable men who stood at corners measured the young gallants’ swords and brake them if they passed a lawful length. For all were aping the Italians in those days, but an Order in Council had set limits to the fashion, and many a cock-feathered gallant I saw well mocked and impotently furious because his costly new Italian blade was snapped into a business for the blacksmith. Glad I was that none had coaxed me to Italianate myself. My sword was good old English, short and heavy, that a Halifax had borne on Flodden Field that time the Scots had sought to take advantage of King Harry when his back was turned.

  And when we had seen all the shopkeepers’ daughters, I wondered a while at Paul’s, which is a building that I doubt not makes the foreigners put tongue in cheek when they speak of us as barbarous pirates.

  There I first set eyes on men who are the very marrow of the spine of England, Berden naming them as he and I stood watching from a corner near the main door. Some I would have recognized from hearsay. Sir Francis Drake, Fulke Grenville, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir John Hawkins, Sir Richard Grenville and Lord Howard of Effingham were all of one group, filling up the aisle in two lines as they strolled up and down, so that others had to turn when they turned, they setting the pace for the whole procession that flowed back and forth like a tide up the mouth of a river.

  Of them all Lord Howard of Effingham, the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, was by far the handsomest; but Sir Philip Sidney, already Master of the Ordnance although not greatly older than myself, was next to him in good looks. But the man who made my heart leap as I watched him was Sir Francis Drake. He was dressed in a suit of red and white, with a velvet cloak that showed off the breadth of his shoulders and depth of his chest. He had a thick neck that looked fit to bear a cannon-ball, and a cannonball was what I thought of as I stared at his high forehead and the brave blue eyes beneath.

  And this I marked: that though he neither raised his voice nor gestured forcibly, his speech came out of him like gun-shot; so that all men listened to him, though he seemed not to care that they listened.

  Came a man in a russet suit, whom at first sight I liked not at all — a spare, impassive, pock-marked fellow, red-haired, something over thirty, who passed through the crowd adroitly and tapped at Berden’s shoulder from behind.

  “What have you?” he demanded.

  He was owlish. I perceived that Berden feared him; and indeed there was nothing about him that a man of merry humour might regard with liking, though he stirred curiosity, Nor was he altogether mean to look at; there was something of enthusiasm in him, as if in secret he pursued a steadfast aim, and it leaped into my mind as I observed him that an alchemist or a sorcerer might look as he did.

  “I have Joshua Stiles as good as caught,” said Berden and presented me, naming the man Master Thomas Phelippes. His strange brown eyes changed vaguely, as if mayhap he knew my name by hearsay; and I learned later that he never forgot whatever he had once heard.

  He led the way into a corner near Duke Humphrey’s tomb, where the low ruffians and broken gentlemen who could be hired for any venture stood around in groups, and Berden told him in a low voice all about my ride to London.

  Phelippes asked to see the trinket. He returned it to me after one swift glance.

  “Yes, we have him now,” he said quietly, “and another besides, if no fool blunders.”

  Berden flinched at that, so I knew there was discontent between them. For a while they whispered with their backs toward me,
so I turned to watch Sir Francis Drake again, who had brought all the walkers in Paul’s to a standstill by pausing in converse with Sir Thomas Hawkins and Lord Howard.

  Phelippes touched me on the shoulder. “Ride,” he said, “with Berden to the Palace Yard and await my coming.”

  So we rode to Westminster, where a crowd stood struggling to see the quartered wretch whom they had dragged up Cheapside earlier in the day. But we threaded our way around the edges of the crowd and rode under an echoing arch, where halberdiers admitted Berden without challenge.

  The inner yard was smoothly paved, with a great well in the midst that seemed to serve no purpose, since there were neither buckets nor beam, although there was a stone arch over it with hooks to which we fastened our reins. There we waited, watching the comings and goings of many messengers, some of whom from their liveries I knew to be followers of the Earl of Leicester.

  Very tardily came Phelippes. He brought with him a certain Captain Jaques, who looked like an Italian but was not, though I never learned in what land he had first seen daylight; he rode, and he stood like a soldier to be counted on for fierceness, and behind him rode four others not less dark and desperate of aspect than himself. Phelippes threw his reins to Berden and went in through a door in the shadow at a corner of the yard. The rest of us stood staring at one another. It was a long time, and we half-frozen, before Phelippes came out through the same narrow door and beckoned me.

  I followed him up steps into a narrow corridor from which oaken doors opened on either hand. There was a weight of silence and a chill gloom, as if we were entering a dungeon; but we went up stone stairs to a wider corridor and at the end of that a bright fire of sea-coal was burning in an iron grate at which a dozen saucy pages warmed themselves. There Phelippes left me for a while.

  The good comfortable glow of sea-coals warmed me finely, and the need to stare those pages out of countenance restored my self-assurance, what with being chilled to the marrow in the yard and waiting like a serving man at Phelippes’s beck and call. I recalled to myself that I was being much more fortunate than I had reason to expect, and by the time Phelippes opened a door and beckoned I felt ready to make my bow to Queen Elizabeth herself.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Of meeting with Lord Secretary Burghley.

  I FOLLOWED Phelippes into a room in which sat four venerable-looking secretaries in black suits, who wrote studiously by the dim light from narrow window’s. At the far end was a door by which a man sat on a stool, holding a black rod tipped with ivory; he tapped on the door with his stick, not opening until he heard a voice within, which brought my heart to my mouth.

  Phelippes led into a dim room sumptuously furnished, lined with shelves on which were boxes, many of them covered with red leather. At a table in the midst two secretaries sat, their quill pens squeaking on the parchment. Neither of them glanced up. But he who sat in a great armchair by the fireside stared at me, and I had no eyes thereafter for whatever else was in the room, so curiously stirring was his presence. Since that day I have come to think him great, and I have thought him mean; I have despised his underhandedness (the more since I have had to play my part in it! ) and I have admired his sagacity, his loyalty and courage, even while offended by his treacherous unfairness; but I have never overcome that feeling in his presence of being face to face with forces that are not exactly of this world — forces both good and evil, and all terrible.

  “My Lord Burghley,” said Phelippes, “this is the son of Sir Harry Halifax of Brownsover, of whom I spoke.”

  He was long past middle-age, grey-bearded, growing bald and wearing a black silk cap. He had the gout and his right foot was in a great felt slipper resting on a cushion.

  He was dressed all in black with a white lawn ruff, very dainty and stiff, and he wore a long gold chain, curiously wrought. I took him for a man of rather less than middle height, though that was not so easy to determine, because of the chair and the way he sat in it; but he was not one to be feared for his physical strength; what power he had undoubtedly resided in the massive forehead. His face smacked of a kind of incredulous wisdom, as if nothing could happen that should surprise him, he having tasted of all disappointments — an irascible man and, I doubted not, given to brooding, chin on chest — pallid and far heavier of paunch than looked good for his health.

  “You have a trinket?” he said suddenly, in a sullen voice, as if he made an accusation that he dared me to deny.

  I gave him the red box and he studied it a long while, stroking the gimcrack with his thumb as he watched the firelight playing on the green stone.

  “Dangerous spoil to be caught with!” he said, staring at me. “What do you seek in London?”

  “Fortune,” said I, hoping I might make him smile; but he only stared, as if wondering what treachery might underlie my frank appearance — so that even I myself began to think me treacherous.

  He bade me tell him how I came to London.

  “How now, sir!” he demanded. “Have you told the half of it? Who is this Mildred Jackson whom a follower of the Earl of Leicester tells me you have dared to covet?”

  So I told him, and he questioned me narrowly as to her age and how her mother, being gently bred, had come to marry such a rat as Tony Pepperday. Then he asked me about the Earl of Leicester’s quarrel with my father, and of my father’s death. I told him all I knew, which was not much. Seeing him apparently displeased, I added how my father had let me sign the Association Bond, setting my name beneath his on the parchment, father and son united in a just cause.

  He grunted. “Talk must be tested,” he said, staring at Phelippes, and I noticed that his old grey eyes were wondrous thoughtful. “I commend none to Her Highness of whose integrity I lack experience.”

  My heart leaped to my mouth. I felt such sudden triumph as I did the day I beat my father to his knees at sword-play. I stammered something — I forget what.

  “You stand foully with the Earl of Leicester, sirrah!” he said suddenly.

  I felt my heart sink down into my boots. The Earl of Leicester was a member of the Privy Council, even as Lord Burghley himself, and I did not understand that he spoke for Phelippes’s benefit, intending that Phelippes should report to others how he had rebuked me for the Earl of Leicester’s sake. I stammered I had done the Earl no wrong.

  “He will himself be judge of that,” Lord Burghley answered. “How is it you were silent until questioned? Do you come to London looking for vengeance?”

  I answered: “Broken causes are ill mended by hasty speech; nor was my father, Sir Harry, one who looked for other vengeance than God visits, having taught me that whoever serves his God with zeal and his lawful prince with honesty may look to God to recompense him.”

  “Most men look to the Queen’s purse,” said Lord Burghley and I saw a thin suggestion of a smile escape him. “Will you forget the wrong the Earl of Leicester did you?”

  “Forgetfulness,” I said, “is not a quality we Halifaxes shine in. My father Sir Harry was a loyal knight, and I should fall short of my duty an I strove not to restore his good name and to make another for myself, the better to continue his. However, a revenge were poxy service to a gentleman in Heaven, who is doubtless too contented there to care for bickerings in this world.”

  “You have a smooth tongue, sirrah. I have seen how ready speech too often hides unreadiness,” he answered; and, thinking I had said too much, I was silent, biting my tongue with anger at my lack of wisdom. For a while he stared at me again. Then suddenly:

  “There is a warrant for the seizure of the person of Joshua Stiles, an alderman. Keep tryst with him in Spitalfields to-night as Phelippes says you have appointed. Berden shall have the warrant. Take with you Captain Jaques and the four men that he has. See to it that Joshua Stiles is in the Marshalsea by midnight, and when you have the signature of the keeper of the Marshalsea, return with it to my house, no matter at what hour, bringing with you Berden and the others.”

  Many a question lea
ped into my mind: as whether I should order Berden or he me; whether I should expect payment for the service; whether or no I was now in the Queen’s employment, or might look for that if the outcome were successful. But he perceived my will to question him and gestured. Phelippes plucked my sleeve.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Of the standing on terms with Berden.

  I HAVE learned since what all who deal with courtiers, aye, and with princes, have to learn: that it is the use of statecraft to keep all men eager in uncertainty, rather than by flattering importunity to sharpen appetites.

  But I did not understand at the time, and when we were outside the door I sought to question Phelippes.

  “‘Steeth and nails!” he answered, “my master is Sir Francis Walsingham, and one is enough! My trade is reading ciphers, but marry! I have never guessed right when I tried to read Lord Burghley’s mind. That which is written in cipher is written and stands to be read; but a minister’s thoughts, I doubt not, are a secret that the minister himself would give a fortune to unravel.”

  He took the warrant from the secretary in the outer room and handed it to Berden in the yard, saying Berden might borrow his horse, and then left us, entering the building by another door. Whereat Captain Jaques decided he would ride my mare, making use of outlandish oaths to make me timorous. He swaggered up and stood between me and the mare, his four men grinning. Berden watched me with the corner of his eye, knowing no more than I did how I stood yet with Lord Burghley; I was minded to give him a good impression as well as to discover how much substance of authority was in myself, which later on the outer semblance of authority might fit, in the way that a good glove fits a strong hand.

  “You will do my bidding,” I answered. “Mount that knacker’s meat that brought you!”

  Jaques looked like having at me there and then with his long rapier, he being choleric and used, I doubted not, to snatching trifles like a bully rooster among chickens. But I turned my back. I looked at my horse’s girths. As I expected, he tried to turn his disappointment with a mocking laugh, so I turned on him again.