Now, here, in the Sluytermans’ garden, he nodded in agreement with his host. ‘Yes, I will do the same.’
The garden was cool, with good shade from an array of well-tended trees: birch and young oak, hornbeam and ash. Shakespeare and Boltfoot were sipping Dutch brandy with Sluyterman. Boltfoot looked ill at ease. His back was still scorched. The mere touch of the cloth of his shirt could make him wince. Further down the garden, the young Sluytermans were playing with Shakespeare’s three children. It was Sunday and morning prayers were done.
Shakespeare’s eyes followed the servant girl, Susanna, as she carried a jug of cordial to the children.
‘She is well, Mr Shakespeare,’ Sluyterman said. ‘We are pleased to have her once again in our home. There has been too much suffering. I owe you a great deal for all your help. More than I can ever repay, I fear.’
‘I believe you had some knowledge of Curl?’
‘That Curl, yes, I recall him well. I had hoped never to hear his name or see him again when we parted company two years since. Was ever a man so ill-named? Holy Trinity… ha!’
‘You believe he deliberately put the servant Kettle into your home?’
‘I do, Mr Shakespeare, I do, indeed. He wished to find an excuse for calling in Mr Topcliffe and the pursuivants. It was all done in vengeance for some perceived ill done him. Yet he, Curl, was the faithless servant.’
‘What were your dealings with him?’
‘He was a wool factor, but he had little success. He asked to work for me as an agent, saying he could supply good grease wool in great quantities. I was uncertain at first, but then he brought me samples and I agreed to his terms, for wool is difficult to come by for export. I knew I could sell it for good profit in the Low Countries, where there is a great demand. Their home supply has been much disrupted by the wars. This worked well for both of us for two months, no more. Then I realised he was cheating me. He took me for a gull. I did not know it at first, but the wool he shipped was mostly of poorer quality than he had first shown me, and I received complaints from my buyers. I found, too, that he had been charging me for greater quantities than he supplied, so I severed my links with Mr Curl. He was angry with me, but what could I do?’
Shakespeare said nothing. It was a lamentable story which, through a cruel twist of fate, had caused Catherine to be in the Dutch market with Susanna at the very moment that a cask of gunpowder exploded.
Jan Sluyterman shook his head mournfully and repeated, ‘What could I do?’
Suddenly, Shakespeare realised that Boltfoot was looking at him curiously, as though he had something to say. ‘Boltfoot?’
Boltfoot looked away, then took a hefty swig of the brandy. ‘Eases the pain, master.’
‘I thought for a moment you wished to say something.’
‘Just that.’
‘What was that, Boltfoot, that look you gave me?’ Shakespeare asked quietly as they walked the short distance home a little later.
‘Master?’
‘I know you well enough, Boltfoot. That look wasn’t pain. There was something else — something you wished to say.’
‘I do not wish to speak out of order.’
‘God’s blood, Boltfoot, speak your mind.’
Boltfoot shifted uneasily, looking down at his club foot. ‘I do not know at all whether I should be saying this, for it do sound bad, and I know Mr Sluyterman to be a good man, or at least I believe I do. But I did hear another version of that story of him and Holy Trinity Curl.’
Shakespeare stopped. He stood in the middle of the dusty road and tried in vain to look Boltfoot in the eye. ‘And from whom did you hear this story?’
‘From Curl himself, after they had discovered me. I couldn’t stop him, no man could. The tale came out of his mouth in every last detail. He foamed at the mouth with venom as he told me what he thought of Mr Sluyterman and said what he had supposedly done to him.’
‘Tell me.’
At last, Boltfoot looked up and met his master’s gaze. ‘The way Curl told it, he was a successful wool merchant when along comes Sluyterman and suggests they join forces. Curl is to supply the English wool, just as Sluyterman said just now, and Mr Sluyterman will sell it on. But that’s where the similarity in the tale ends. For Curl said he was not Sluyterman’s servant at that time, but an equal partner, and he says that bit by bit he was cheated out of his share of the concern and was left impoverished. In the end, he had to go a-begging for work to Mr Sluyterman…’
‘And?’
‘He was given a job in the counting house, as a ledger clerk, dealing with bills of lading at twelve pence a day. That was scarce enough for him and his wife and two young children, but at least they ate. But that was not the end of it. He said Mr Sluyterman dismissed him in the winter of ’90, claiming he had made misrepresentations in the ledger, though as Curl tells it he had always been honest. After that, Curl could find no work and was brought to such a turn of poverty that he and his family lost the roof over their heads. The children, cold and hungry, took sick and died. His wife cut her own throat. Curl heard later that his job of work in the counting house had been given to a nephew of Sluyterman newly arrived from the Low Countries, which he believed to be the real reason he was dismissed. Now I have no way of knowing whether any of that is true, Mr Shakespeare, but I tell you this: I did believe it at the time of being told.’
Shakespeare did not know what to say. Had he been so wrong about Sluyterman? It was an uncomfortable, troubling thought, and one that was difficult to accept. Yet it would undoubtedly explain why Curl was so fervent in his loathing of the Dutch strangers. He stood there in the street. Above him, swallows swooped and soared. The fragrance of summer flowers drowned the foul city hum, yet his mouth had a bitter taste of rising bile. He wanted to return to Sluyterman’s house and put it to him directly.
It was Boltfoot who stayed him. ‘There is nothing to be gained, master. That is why I said nothing.’
Was that it? Was no one honest in this city of thieves and whores? He nodded briskly to Boltfoot. ‘You are right.’ He turned back and strode the last few paces to his own open door. Ahead of him the children were laughing and skipping, full of the delights of their afternoon at play. He shut the door behind him and enclosed himself in his own world. At least there was beauty and decency here.
The London Informer, July 1593
KING PHILIP AND A PRINCELY LIE
Fair reader, while London suffers the darkness of Satan’s foul pestilence, secure in the faith that the Lord’s light will prevail, we have at last a sunbeam of news. Sooth to say, it is news of no news, but it is a fine thing for all that. We have learned on the greatest authority that the recent scurrilous report of some Scottish prince is naught but perfidy, wrought by our enemies in Spain.
This fanciful princeling was but the fevered reverie of Senor Felipe and his cringing, timorous lickspittles. Their wish was to sow discord and unrest in England, but this enterprise, like the Armada before it, has failed in every degree. This imagined son of the devil Mary and her viperous partner in murder, Bothwell, is as substantial as the air itself. That is, no substance at all. He does not exist and never has. This prince was a fantasme, designed to stir the disaffected, be they Romish or atheistic, to insurrection. Puff, he is gone.
Of greater concern, dear readers, is the plague that daily weaves its evil amongst us. The aldermen of the twenty-six wards tell us that King Pest is spread through the air by cats and dogs, and that they must be destroyed. It is The London Informer ’s duty to spur the aldermen, the Lord Mayor and his marshals to action, for word has reached us of a rabid white dog that does spread his vile poison around the city. Is it not time to toss this white dog’s carcass into the Hounds Ditch, that honest men and women may sleep sound at night without fear of his savage bite?
God Save the Queen.
Walstan Glebe, publisher
Historical Notes
Hellburners and the Spanish Armada
Hellbur
ners — exploding fireships packed with gunpowder — were first used on the night of 4 April 1585, at Antwerp.
In the long-running Dutch revolt against Spanish rule in the Low Countries, the mainly Protestant city was besieged by the Duke of Parma’s Catholic armies. To enforce their iron grip, the Spanish had blocked the vital river Scheldt — Antwerp’s main supply route from the sea — with a half-mile bridge built on piles seventy-five feet deep and, in the middle section, secured by a pontoon of ships and longboats linked by massive chains. It was covered from both shores by forts with two-hundred-gun batteries of heavy artillery and was patrolled by an army of battle-hardened soldiers. With food running short, the suffering people of Antwerp were desperate to break this seemingly impenetrable barrier.
Help was at hand. An ambitious young Italian military engineer named Federigo Giambelli was in the city. He had already offered his services to the Spanish, but had been spurned. It was a decision that would cost Spain dear, for Giambelli was now working for the Dutch instead. He had a design for a floating bomb which, he claimed, would blow the river barrier apart and allow food and munitions to be brought into Antwerp under cover of darkness.
The burghers of Antwerp had nothing to lose, so they accepted his plan. They gave him two seventy-ton ships, the Hope and the Fortune. These were stripped down to their hulls. The holds were then lined with long funnels of brick and stone, thirty-six feet long and three feet in diameter, and each packed with more than three tons of high-quality gunpowder. To make the huge bombs even more devastating, a mass of iron implements and rocks — anything sharp and hard which they could find — was added to the deadly mix. The devices were then topped off with sheets of lead and more stones, including flagstones and graveyard headstones.
The final, brilliant, innovation was to add a timing device to one of the bombs, the one aboard the Hope. An Antwerp clockmaker built a machine, based on the wheel-lock pistol, in which, at a set time, a lever would fall, spinning a steel wheel against flint and sending a shower of sparks into the gunpowder.
To lower the Spanish guard, a number of traditional fireships were first sent with the ebb tide downriver against the barrier. These were piled with firewood and burning pitch. The Spanish troops, unperturbed by the smoke-belching vessels, boarded them and doused them before any damage could be done to their own ship-bridge. Finally, the Hope and the Fortune were let loose to run with the current. To make them look like normal fireships, small fires had been started on the decks — as camouflage for what lay beneath.
The Fortune, which had a normal fuse, drifted into the riverbank and fizzled out harmlessly. The Hope, however, arrived at its target. Spanish troops swarmed aboard with pails of water, laughing scornfully at the pathetic attempts of the Dutch to break the siege. And then the time-bomb went off.
The blast was heard fifty miles away, and the slaughter was on a scale never before known. Up to a thousand people were killed and many more were injured — even by twenty-first-century standards, a huge number for a single, non-nuclear weapon. The Duke of Parma himself was knocked off his feet by a flying stave. The pageboy at his side was killed, as were several of his senior officers. Bodies — and parts of bodies — were still being found many months later.
A hole of more than fifty metres was blown in the barrier. But there was confusion among the Dutch and the relief fleet did not manage to get through the gap before the shaken Spanish army repaired the damage.
Antwerp was not saved. The defenders (around a third of whom were Catholic) held out for a further four months before surrendering in August 1585. But the psychological impact of the hellburners was longer-lasting; the memory of that bloody night came back to haunt Spain three years later during England’s decisive battle against the Armada in the summer of 1588.
The Armada had been harried by the English fleet all the way up the Channel but had remained largely intact. Now the Spanish ships were anchored off Calais, awaiting their chance to embark Parma’s troops from the Low Countries for the planned invasion of England.
In desperation, the English decided to send fireships against them. In the past they had not been effective weapons; usually they were easily evaded or steered away by ships’ boats with grappling irons. But this was different.
The Duke of Medina-Sidonia, admiral of the Spanish fleet, and his captains were all painfully aware that the architect of the hellburners, Federigo Giambelli, had gone to England to work for Queen Elizabeth. They naturally assumed that Giambelli was building hellburners once more. In fact, he was at that time vainly attempting to build a defensive boom across the Thames, but Medina-Sidonia had no way of knowing this. When the Spanish look-outs spotted several harmless supply barges approaching the English fleet from the north, their worst fears seemed to be confirmed; surely these must be Giambelli’s hellburners.
That night eight large English fireships were sent against the moored Spanish ships. Their decks and sails ablaze, they were pushed by strong winds directly towards the heart of the enemy fleet. As their loaded cannons exploded, the Armada captains’ jitters turned to outright panic. In ‘shameful confusion’, utterly convinced they were about to be blown apart, most of them cut their anchor lines and ran for safety.
The Armada, previously so tight and disciplined as it sailed up the Channel, was now in total disarray, battered by howling winds and churning seas. Having lost their anchors, they were never able to regroup successfully. The threat to England was all but gone.
The hellburners may not have saved Antwerp, but they had helped save England. What is not recorded is whether Sir Francis Drake and the other English admirals understood in advance why their fireships — which did not set fire to a single Spanish vessel — would prove so effective.
King James and the Scottish witch trials
The Scottish witch trials were a sensation of the 1590s. Dozens of people were burned at the stake for a variety of crimes such as communing with Satan and plotting to kill King James VI.
The most prominent witch-persecutor was James himself. He was both horrified and obsessed by the cult and wrote a treatise, Demonologie, in which he clamoured for all sorcerers and devil-worshippers to be executed. His interest in the subject started in 1589, when he went to Oslo to marry Anne of Denmark. During the celebrations, he met the demonologist Niels Hemmingsen and was fascinated by his opinions. Witchcraft trials were common in Scandinavia at that time. Returning to Scotland with Anne, the young King was almost shipwrecked by a storm — an event blamed on witchcraft.
Meanwhile, a few miles east of Edinburgh in the town of Tranent, a young serving girl named Gellie Duncan had aroused the suspicions of her employer, David Seton, who was bailie — or sheriff — for the area. Gellie was known locally as a healer. Seton decided her powers must emanate from the dark side, and interrogated her. Unhappy with her responses, he had her tortured with thumbscrews and other devices.
When she still denied being a witch, her body was examined and a ‘mark of satan’ was found on her. This was a nipple-like patch of skin which, when pricked, neither bled nor caused pain. It was supposed to be used to suckle demons. Gellie now made a full confession. She said her healing powers came from the devil.
Then she went further — and implicated thirty other people as witches. Most of them were women, including seemingly respectable wives of the Edinburgh middle classes. They included a midwife named Agnes Sampson and a high-born woman named Barbara Napier, lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Angus. All were arrested and held in prison. Scottish society was rocked to its foundations but there was more to come. All the accused were tortured and their bodies searched for the mark of the devil. King James attended some of these torture sessions and personally interrogated the accused.
Agnes Sampson now confessed that there were more than two hundred witches in the coven — and she said they had conspired with the devil to kill King James and his bride by sinking their ship on its voyage home to Scotland. Their plan was devised at a meeting with th
e devil in the church at North Berwick, a coastal port not far from both Tranent and Edinburgh. Among the two hundred witches present were a schoolteacher known as Dr John Fian or Feane and an old man named Graymeale.
Satan ordered them to take a cat, pass it nine times across a fire, then put to sea in sieves. They were to cast the cat into the sea, a sort of demonic baptism. This would raise a storm to sink the King’s ship. Their plan did not, of course, succeed.
On their return to land, they marched back to the church, led by Gellie Duncan, who played a reel on her Jew’s harp — a small, lyre-shaped instrument played against the teeth. They walked three times around the church, against the passage of the sun, then Dr Fian blew into the locked keyhole of the church and the door burst open. The church was in darkness, so he blew on the candles and they immediately lit.
The devil was waiting for them. He conducted a satanic service, then put his tail over the pulpit and made the witches kiss his buttocks. His followers then went outside where they feasted on dead bodies from the graveyard, before having a last dance, accompanied again by Gellie, who sang ‘ Kimmer, go you before, kimmer go you. If you will not go before, kimmer let me.’
At their trials, the alleged witches were accused of a number of crimes, including plotting against the King, burning his wax effigy, foretelling deaths, casting revenge spells against neighbours, being transported by the devil to foreign lands, keeping moles’ feet as charms, and dismembering the corpses of unbaptised children.
King James was particularly interested in the fates of Gellie Duncan, Agnes Sampson and Barbara Napier. He had Gellie brought to his palace of Holyrood House and made her play the tune which she had performed for the witches. He also had Agnes brought to him and questioned her at length.
At first he did not believe her tale, but then she asked to be allowed to approach him. She whispered in his ear words which had passed between him and his new queen on their wedding night in Oslo, when they were alone. The King was convinced by what he heard, ‘and swore by the living God that he believed all the devils in hell could not have discovered the same’.
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