by Robert Nye
It looms large in my mind tonight that our English navy is rotten. I saw the shipyards at Deptford and Greenwich. Bad ships, old ships, corrupt officers, a navy stinking of bilge water and rotten meat. And the few new vessels that have been built since the death of the Queen are all too ornate and cumbersome to withstand another Armada. A clown for a King, and a few silly toys for a navy.
‘You might be playing straight into Gondomar’s hands,’ my Captain King murmured.
Sam, I think you are right.
Gondomar is a Machiavel.
*
Carew, have you ever seen a cockfight? The game-cocks come at each other like miniature warriors, strutting and stabbing, with steel spurs sharp as razors on their heels. Each bird is well barbered and groomed beforehand - its wings trimmed so that they are like darts, its tail cut down by a third, its hackle and rump feathers shortened. Their combs are cut down close also, to make a good mark for each other’s beaks.
Picture the scene for yourself. It is Friday the 23rd of March just two years ago. It is a battle royal in the cockpit which Henry the 8th added to the Palace of Whitehall. In a battle royal, twelve cocks are set loose in the pit together. They fight until only one is left alive.
Five of the birds are dead already. A third is hopping about crazily with one eye missing. Most of the others spout fountains of blood as they come jabbing and spiking and scratching and cutting at each other, a raucous riot of feathers and spurs and claws.
(It occurs to me that my method in this writing is most curious, yet necessarily so. I am recreating past scenes for you, Carew, and to some extent for myself - the better to get to the bottom of them. Yet sometimes they are scenes in which as you perceive I play no part, not having been present to witness with my own eyes what things were done nor hear with my own ears what things were said. So do romancers write, who make up fictions for the entertainment of empty minds. My purpose is different. I am trying to get at the truth of certain past events that have bearing on my situation now. Truth needs no audience, but he who would tell it is helped to keep straight by a listener he loves. What better listener than a man’s son? Especially a son whose father is almost a stranger to him. As you are, Carew, because of my long absence from you in the Tower. Be sure, however, that I am inventing nothing. I rely on Ralph Winwood’s report in this instance, as in the scene set at Theobalds which I wrote earlier today. And, perhaps you will notice, I do not pretend to know what anyone was thinking or feeling; in other words, I refrain from indulgence in that trick of omniscience as played by our bold fictioneers. I tell you what Winwood told me. Where Winwood told me what he thought and he felt, I repeat that. For the rest, I report just the outward events and remarks to the best of my memory. There can be no steel glass in these passages.)
Now, where were we? Ah yes, the royal cockpit. With seven game-cocks left of the original twelve. And with four main persons present. Namely: King James, George Villiers, Ralph Winwood, and Count Gondomar.
James can never resist a little wager. So when Villiers remarked that he thought the Irish Gilder looked the gamest bird left in the fight, the King required him to put his money where his mouth was. Villiers did. To the tune of 25 triple sovereigns.
The King matched that, making his own bird the Dominique. Then he turned to Winwood. Ralph dislikes cock-fighting, but since he had to choose something, he went for the Shawlneck.
‘Amor conciliatur auro? the Spanish Ambassador said.
James squealed, his eyes as keen as the fighting bird’s he had selected to carry his wager. ‘Auro conciliatur amor? he said. ‘That is, if you aspire to quote Ovid? You had it arsy-versy. A uro conciliatur amor Love yields to gold’
‘I stand corrected,’ the Spanish Ambassador said. Then he added: ‘Your Majesty speaks Latin like a pedant. I fear I only speak it like a gentleman.’
Winwood has told me that this is an ancient routine. He cannot understand why King James has never yet learned to see through it. Count Gondomar will deliberately misquote one of the Latin poets, in order to flatter King James’s vanity. For James will always leap in to correct him. The Spaniard then works some refinement on the fact that he has been corrected, so that he can insult our King in the next breath after the one which concedes that James is right. It happens every other time they meet, apparently. Yet his Majesty always rises to the bait.
That Friday, Count Gondomar was angling with a vengeance. ‘Talking of gold,’ he continued.
‘Which cock?’ James said.
‘The Red Quill,’ Gondomar said quickly, not even bothering to glance at the birds in the pit. ‘Talking of gold, your Majesty will do me much kindness if we do not waste words and time pretending that the pirate Ralegh has any intention of voyaging to Virginia. His goal is Guiana, just as it was in ‘95. His object is gold.’
‘Your Ovid is banal,’ King James said, yawning. ‘The power of hard cash is a truism known to every age. Philip of Mace-don used to say that he could capture any town, just as long as he could drive to the gates of it an ass laden with silver -to bribe some of the defenders. Ah, the Shawlneck is done for!’
Winwood says he looked away, as much to avoid Gondomar’s steely and ironical eye as to save himself from observing the doubtless bloody fate of the bird he had been obliged to choose for the wagering.
Gondomar’s body is obese and his face lean. ‘El Dorado’ he said. ‘The golden city.’ He laughed without amusement, Winwood said. ‘Pah!’ he went on. ‘It is lunatic. This quest proposed by a ghost arisen panting from the bed of a dead Virgin Queen!’
Winwood told me that King James now launched into a longish speech, quite obviously got ready for the occasion. The gist of it was that he, too, disliked me. He referred to me never by name. Always as the man. The man might have been Elizabeth’s favourite, James said, but he was certainly not his. The man had been released from the Tower, yes, but he was unpardoned and forbidden to show his face at Court; all he was permitted to do was to go about and make provision for his intended voyage - and that only in the company of a keeper. Further, the man was as it were dead already, a corpse, a person dead in law, convicted of high treason in 1603. ‘The first year of our reign in England,’ as James reminded everyone present.
I can quote the rest of what his Majesty had to say verbatim. Word for word, you see, I once heard it before. Only before it had been from the lips of Sir John Popham, the Lord CHicf Justice, wearing a black cap.
The King spoke with much relish, Winwood observed.
The King said: ‘The man was sentenced to be hanged and cut down alive, his body opened and his heart and bowels plucked out and his privy members cut off and thrown into the fire before his eyes, and then his head stricken from his body and his body divided into four quarters to be disposed of at our pleasure.’
The King was keeping his eyes on the game-cocks.
The King said: ‘That sentence has never been revoked.’
There was a silence.
Then Gondomar said: ‘More to the point - it has never been executed. And I never could understand why.’
‘His Majesty’s mercy,’ Villiers purred. ‘Infinite. Mysterious. And beyond any Spanish wit.’
James was cackling and pointing. ‘Alas, poor Steenie,’ he cried. ‘So much for your Irish Gilder!’
Villiers’ bird had gone down, hacked to pieces by the spurs of its few remaining rivals. The King’s Cockmaster, who presides over the pit at Whitehall, leaned across the barrier to remove it from the matted stage with a net on a pole.
There was a lot more verbal fencing, Winwood told me. Gondomar made his usual speech regarding the many blessings which would flow from a marriage between Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta. Such an alliance might in effect bring about a reconciliation of the English Church with Rome. He could imagine it leading (say) to a great Council of the Church, with his Majesty King James and his Holiness the Pope as joint presidents. There was also the little matter of the Infanta’s dowry, et cetera.
King James countered this by mumbling something about negotiations for a possible French marriage for his ‘baby Charles’ being somewhat well advanced, and before Gondomar could get another word in Villiers started complaining that they’d heard all this before.
‘Whisht now,’James breathed. ‘Look.’
They all turned their faces to the cockpit. Only two cocks were left - the Dominique (which the King had chosen for his wager) and Gondomar’s own bird, the Red Quill. The Red Quill was down on its back. The Dominique was busy with beak and spurs, gouging and treading.
James gurgled with delight, so Winwood said.
Then, suddenly, the case was altered. The Red Quill rolled over in the pool of its own blood, scrambled and scratched through shed feathers and other dead birds, and came at the Dominique with a last and desperate vigour. Its fury, bred of hopelessness, made it invincible. Its spurs cut into the King’s bird, its beak stabbed again and again into the Dominique’s comb.
The Dominique went down. It was not dead, but it had no fight left in it. The Cockmaster used his long pole to get the bird on its feet again, prodding. But the Dominique was too exhausted to fight. It had lost too much blood. It stood, shivering, hot-eyed, resigned, in the middle of the pit. The Red Quill came at it and killed it.
‘Birds and beasts are fortunate,’ King James observed. ‘They run no risk of going to hell.’
‘They are there already,’ Villiers suggested.
James does not favour remarks which substitute philosophy for religion. ‘We prate of hell like fools,’ he said. ‘Ask Count Gondomar about it. He ought to be well-informed upon such matters.’
‘As a beast?’ Villiers said, giggling.
The Spanish Ambassador bowed deep. ‘As a devil,’ he declared.
‘Steenie,’ James said, ‘he is cleverer than us. Give him his winnings.’
*
My mind moves fast from one memory to another, but sorrow makes me slow in all their telling.
After the three years in France, where I learned the rudiments of war, I came back to spend three years at Oxford, learning nothing whatsoever.
Correction: I did learn how to borrow. The small spoils of war eventually ran out. I was too proud to go begging to my father. By the time of my last winter at Oriel College I was quite without money.
That winter was especially cold. I had to persuade a fellow student, a Mr Child of Worcester, to lend me a gown to walk out in.
When spring came, that is just what I did. Walked out of Oxford wearing Mr Child’s gown and never came back. The direction I walked in was London.
8
17 March
London then. London in 1575. The grey Thames. The grey skies. The narrow streets so thick with folk that you could hardly walk from Drury Lane to Bridewell without getting a bruise. London: two hundred thousand people crammed and jammed together to make one monstrous dunghill with a few flowers growing on it. A breeding ground for pestilence and plague. A phoenix nest. A city much like hell, I think. Or heaven.
The city smelt. It smelt of beer and spices and money and muck. The Thames was a running latrine. Westminster was a sovereign cess-pool. Take sulphur and mix it with mud and you have something like the smell of the London to which I came in the 17th year of Elizabeth’s rule.
The city sang. It sang of pedlars and poets and church bells and horses’ hooves. Cheap-jacks would yell at you on every corner, trying to sell everything from odious eel-pies to almanacs that forecast the exact date of the end of the world. Coachmen would bawl and crack their whips at you to get out of the way of their iron-wheeled hell-carts. Every gentleman who rode or strode the streets went accompanied by his clutter of barging and bullying servants, brutes chosen as much for the size of their mouths as the strength of their muscles.
Beyond all and above all, though, the bells. From my first lodgings at Lyons Inn and then in the Middle Temple, I learned all their various chimes and tolls. St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey, All Hallows Barking near the Tower, St Bartholomew’s in Smithfield, the Dutch church of Austin Friars, St James’s at Clerkenwell, St Giles in Cripplegate, Ely Chapel Holborn, St Dunstan’s in Fleet Street (with its overhanging clock and two bells struck every quarter hour by wooden jacks armed with clubs), St Andrew Undershaft’s (so called because the maypole was set up in the meadow in front of it each May Day), St Olave’s in Hart Street, St Helen’s Bishopsgate, St John of Jerusalem by Finsbury Fields, St Saviour’s across the river in Southwark, and then of course the mighty booming bell of the Temple Church itself.
Such a blessing, such a scolding of bells!
On the morning of my 21st birthday (forgive an old man the recall of this small vanity) I stood wrapped in Mr Child’s gown not far from the great flight of stairs leading up to the Queen’s Palace of Whitehall, and I imagined that all London’s bells rang just for me.
London smelt and London sang. But the city was really a hive. A vast hive of commerce and intrigue, of religion and politics, of froth and filth, pleasure, treasure, information, speculation, minds, bodies, dreams, rags and jewels, the teeming matter of life and of death. The people of the city were the bees: humble bees, bumble bees, soldier bees and social bees, mason bees and worker bees, with not a few drones. You could see them swarm at any time of pageant - a busy buzzing mass of gentlemen and hooligans, ladies and drabs, little Cockney shopkeepers and wealthy merchants from every part of the earth. The honey of the hive was not mere money. It was something altogether stranger, something common yet singular, durable yet elusive. It was there behind the dancing and the diplomacy, the plays and the processions, the bear-baiting in the Paris Garden on Bankside and the spiked skulls of traitors that grinned on London Bridge. This honey was dark and bright and hot and cold. It filled the whole honeycomb from the brothels of Cheapside to the chapels in Lambeth Palace. It intoxicated. It poisoned. It inspired. You could feel its excitement working in the crowds that gathered to greet ships returning to the Pool after great voyages of discovery, as well as in the crowds that flocked each morning to watch prostitutes stripped and whipped naked in public. It would like as not be the same crowd. It would assuredly be the same honey. No one could take it and break it or eat it or drink it wholly, yet everyone tasted it there on his tongue to a certain degree. No high foreign prince ever came with a glittering army to possess it for a lifetime, while the most beggarly knave in a ditch might dream through his shivers that he enjoyed it for a night. It made Shakespeare (but later, and distantly) its poet. It made me (and sooner, but all too closely) its slave. It was the sweetest honey that ever there was to flow into men’s minds to gladden them, yet it was a honey which stung my heart nearly to death. It was cerebral and passionate and absolute and virginal. It had something to do with the queendom. It had everything to do with the Queen.
*
‘Elizadeath,’ the Indian says.
He came with me this morning to the spring. It is good there, before the sun makes the island too hot. I plunged my lame leg in the water. A most sufficient medicine, cold and sharp. I walk better for it, and my fever is nearly all gone.
This is the night of our 5 th day here at Nevis. The mood that marks what is left of our fleet is one of the blackest misery and confusion. My captains avoid me. The men lie and cast dice in the shadows. Our morale has never been lower, nor discipline more difficult to maintain. Two sailors aboard Barker’s pinnace, the Page, were found with their throats cut last night. It appears that they had been suspected of cheating at the dice. The state of our disorder can be measured by the fact that their murderer or murderers did not consider it necessary to conceal the crime by throwing the corpses over the side of the ship. Questioned about it, Barker himself just shrugged and turned away.
My own mood is one of despair and indecision.
A gnawing then numbing despair. An utter impotence of indecision.
What to do? Where to go? And why?
Why anything?
That is the basic and unanswer
able question. My past, my present, and any imaginable future seem equal in their total lack of meaning.
The weather does not help. Hot days, parched nights, with never a whisper of wind. Nothing moves. Nothing, that is, save the birds which appear without fail over the Destiny at each dawn and each darkfall. Are they eagles? Or vultures? Probably neither, and I betray only my own state of mind in naming them so. Big birds, wide-winged, high up and indifferent, flying north, flying south, as many flying one way as the other, like the cripple-winged thoughts that fly through my head as I watch them.
Today, at any rate, there was the visit to the sulphur spring with the Indian. I never meant to take him. He just followed. No doubt he grew curious where I went each morning. Sam King followed also, suspicious that the savage meant me harm. Three men scrambling up a way of white rocks as the sun rose over a cone-shaped Carib island. The first man old and infirm, with a stick to lean on. The second man young and sure-footed, able to leap from outcrop to outcrop as nimble as any goat if he so wanted, but deliberately holding back, waiting for the first man to move on again ahead, keeping a respectful distance. The third man tough and burly, but also old like the first, his face like teak, his gaze never leaving the Indian. Sam never dropped far behind, though I noticed when the two of them caught up with me at the place where the spring issues forth from the ground that the effort had cost him much. His shirt was soaked with sweat, and his breathing sounded rasping like a bellows.
This cunning lovely water.
We are like kinds - the water and I.
I washed my lame leg in the spring. I watched the sun dry the sulphury water where it trickled down the lightning-marks of my scars. I got them at Cadiz, those jagged wounds. I suppose I was lucky to keep my leg. The ship’s surgeon was all for sawing it off at the knee, and would have done the job no doubt if he hadn’t been frightened off by the pestilential number of Spanish cannon-balls which came whizzing across the bay to interrupt his carving. We won the day, of course, and my leg mended, but it has been my most imperfect part ever since, and the gross damp of the Tower of London didn’t help matters.