by Robert Nye
Soon enough a gang of these Irish kerns came slipping out of the night. We waited until they had made themselves comfortable and taken complete possession of our camp. Then I drew my sword, we leaped out from our hiding places, and we had the lot of them our prisoners in a matter of minutes.
One of the kerns was laden with loops of willow and osiers, bound and plaited together into witHics, which they use instead of halters for their horses. I asked him what he intended to do with them.
‘They are for hanging English churls,’ he said.
Is that so?’ I said. ‘Well, they’ll serve just as well for hanging an Irish kern.’
I had the man hanged in one of his own witHics. The rest I handled according to their deserts. Then I rode at the head of my company after Lord Grey.
I never saw a land so desolate. It was all wastes of bog and rocky outcrop, with ill-marked tracks, low hills, dwarf trees, and practically never a sign of human habitation.
When I arrived at the English camp below Smerwick fort I found Lord Grey in difficulties. His problem was that he could not attack the Spanish in their lair without proper artillery, and artillery is hard to transport in a land without roads. We had therefore to wait while messengers were dispatched to summon a handful of the Queen’s ships to the coast of Munster. Each day that the ships never came we sat watching the woods to our rear, fearful that Desmond’s rebel forces would come overland to join with the invader before we could blast him out.
Desmond never came. The ships did. Their ordnance once ashore, we had the fort at our mercy.
What’s more, they soon knew it, those Spaniards. A single volley of cannonballs and they desired a parley with the Lord Deputy. The Lord Deputy declined. A second volley and they requested that they might have liberty to depart with bag and baggage. Which was again declined. Then they sent out urgent word promising the surrender of the fort if only their leaders were permitted free passage to go home to Spain. But my Lord Grey refused this as quickly as all the rest. We required an absolute yielding or nothing.
Privately, I heard Grey remark that his outriders reported Desmond just four days’ march away. If the rebels arrived before the fort fell then our only means of retreat would be cut off, and the ships could not save us or even hold their own against the combined might of Spain and Desmond’s insurgents.
But it was at this point that any prospect of defeat became purely academic. The Spanish in the fort decided that there was no way they could escape. They hoisted a white flag, therefore, and with one voice they all cried out: ‘Misericordia! Misericordia!’ They sent messengers across to us offering to yield both themselves and their fort. Unconditional surrender.
My son, I am not proud of what happened next.
When the captain of the Spanish troops had yielded himself to Lord Grey, and the fort had surrendered, I was sent in together with another English soldier, Captain Mack-worth, at the head of our two companies. To do Grey’s dirty work. Which I didn’t enjoy.
To be brief, we made a great slaughter. We put the most part of the Spaniards to the sword, killing 507 of them. We also hanged 17 Irish and a few English who had turned traitor.
This action had been miscalled ‘barbarous’ and a ‘massacre’. In fact, Gaptain Mackworth and I behaved exactly according to orders. Wholesale slaughter of enemy prisoners of war was orthodox military practice in Ireland at that time. (It might be regretted that we had been reduced to the level of what the Spanish or the Irish would have done to us, had the boot been on the other foot; but that is another matter.) If I have a criticism to make it is only the one that the Queen made, when she had Grey’s report: namely, that he treated the leaders of the invading forces rather better than the rank and file, sparing some of them their lives for the sake of the ransom money. That was wrong. Those fat rats held no commission and should have been dispatched the same way as their mice. For the rest: Death is always a harsh sight, and it is true that the occupants of Smerwick fort died unarmed and in cold blood. But so does every murderer on the gallows. And these were mercenary murderers and papistical gallows-birds.
*
Lord Grey I did not like, and the dislike was mutual.
He had been a penny-pinching patron of my friend George Gascoigne, poet and soldier. Another good friend of mine, another poet, Edmund Spenser, became Grey’s secretary in Ireland. Gascoigne was a boisterous ruffian, Spenser a gentle spirit; Grey treated both of them abominably, never recognising their special qualities, using their need to further his own career. In which pursuit, I might add, he was not conspicuously successful.
He was a born complainer, a ruthless and insensitive boor, forever bemoaning his lot and asking the Queen to recall him from Ireland to the Court.
It was well known that he gave the confiscated lands of Anglo-Irish traitors to his own favourites. What was worse and less common than this was the way he infected those favourites with his private melancholy concerning that benighted country - so that the men despised their appointments, and abused them, and treated Ireland itself as a place irredeemably lost. Not a commonwealth, but a common woe.
When, later, I was asked by the Queen and the Council for my own reading of the Lord Deputy’s character and policy, I pointed out a few of these shortcomings, and Grey got to hear of it. He went on record then to claim that his own experience
and reason made him my superior in every respect,
‘For my own part I must be plain,’ he said, ‘I like neither
Captain Ralegh’s carriage nor his company,’ I can return the compliment. Grey stooped. He was companionable as the pox.
*
Queen Elizabeth’s pedantic witty prattle. Sometimes that shrill Tudor voice reminded me of nothing so much as the monotonous sound made by the beak of a woodpecker when it is drumming, drumming, drumming against the bark of a tree.
‘Stop your senseless chatter, spinster!’ I’d mutter under my breath, exasperated beyond endurance.
What makes me remember this?
The khoka leaf perhaps. The Indian brought me another this afternoon and I am chewing it as I write. The herb has the power to sharpen the past, to make it like a thorn in the mind. It also heightens one’s awareness of the present. A moment ago I cut myself a slice of bread. Cutting a slice of bread. What could be more everyday, more ordinary? Yet I found myself transfixed for a moment in the moment. The knife seemed to glow in my hand, the bread as it broke apart looked to me like a miracle, and I had all at once this sensation of being one with the knife and the bread and yet standing in the corner of my cabin and watching the whole transaction - bright blade cutting through brown crust - as if I were someone else, a spectator. I must question the Indian about the leaf’s chemical properties. Also I must determine the limits of his harvest of them. The herb is without doubt a thousand times more potent than tobacco.
I remember Elizabeth’s smell too. When she died they said that she had sat for many days and nights on a pile of cushions in the middle of her private chamber, refusing to go to bed. Then she danced. Then she fell down on the dancing floor. They had to strip layer after layer of cheesy petticoats from her. I remember—
What is it that says ‘I’ in I remember?
Memory has more, to it than the first person singular. Memory’s life is larger, deeper, darker, more abundant. Better to go along with these movements of remembrance than to get stranded in midstream on the mere steppingstones of identity. What such movements amount to is not exactly a flowing river, either. Even less a long thread of moments passed through that eye of a needle which is the self.
But now I forget what I set out to say in the first place.
And where was the first place?
It was Windsor.
And Elizabeth never heard my complaint about her voice, I might add.
As antidote I call to mind what another man said of the Queen: When she smiled, it had a pure sunshine that every one did choose to bask in if they could; but anon came a sudden gathering of cl
ouds, and the thunder fell in a wondrous manner on all.
Thus Sir John Harrington, her godson, inventor of the water closet, and translator of Ariosto. (Whom he called Harry Osto.)
A fly is trying to get out of my cabin. It rages round the room: a meagre fury. And I have to get it right, of course. But what then is ‘right’? My sea charts and tables, my almanacs? A very simple-minded sort of rightness. The smell of the dead men in Smerwick fort? More complicated that, if right at all. Yet I acted under orders, I did my duty. But there were flies on them, a passion of flies, and what if obedience can be a sin? God damn it, in Youghal, when they sacked the town, the Irish kerns were not content to slaughter all their brothers. They gouged out every woman’s eyes, and slit every child’s nose, besides. There is a long tally to count, and what I did that flyblown summer day with Captain Mackworth goes only a little way towards the reckoning.
Yet I mean there can be no escape. No escape from the past. No escape from the present. No escape for the fly from this room. No escape for your father, Carew, from this endless and pitiless remembering and repeating, always the same, always different, always the knife and always the spectator, always coming back to the present definition of events and then the sudden sharp despair of knowing that yet again the event has eluded me.
Elizabeth droned and Elizabeth stank.
Yet Elizabeth danced.
Yes. Elizabeth danced high and disposedly even on the edge of the grave. Elizabeth was nothing if not her father’s daughter. I remember a story that she told me once. It concerned the day when she passed through London, one week before her coronation, in a procession of recognition. In Cheapside the young Elizabeth was seen to smile just once. An immeasurable smile, that pure sunshine. Many remarked on it, but few or none knew why she smiled. She told me why. It was because she had heard a voice in the crowd, the voice of an old man saying: ‘I remember old King Harry the Eighth when I look at her.
*
Note added later. What King Henry the 8th has to do with anything is beyond credence. It seems to me now that the words I wrote under the influence of the eating of the leaf pass understanding. I let them remain here only as a warning to myself. For the rest: My talk about average speeds to Newfoundland and so forth strikes me as not allowing for the damnation that without doubt has gone with us on this voyage. Such estimates presume normality, and in the circumstances I must be a fool to presume anything of the kind. This infernal ship. This hellish voyage. How dare I imagine that we could ever enjoy fair winds in our sails?
As for the fly: I opened the door and it flew out to die in the larger cabin of the world.
14
24 March
So now we are down to two.
I must confess it: I am not much surprised. Overnight, the Jason, the Southampton, and the Star have fled. Parker, North, and Sir John Ferne, with their soldiers and their sailors, have deserted me.
Only the Encounter remains here beside my Destiny at St Kitts. The Encounter, of London, a ship of 160 tons, with 17 pieces of ordnance. Thomas Pye is her master, and my old friend Samuel King her loyal captain.
The rumour runs among my own men that Parker, North, and Ferne have not gone to join the others who ran away before. Indeed, it is said that they have not turned pirate, but have sailed for home. Perhaps they have, perhaps they have not. They have elected to disobey their lawful Admiral, and to pursue their own ends upon the seven seas. Thus they are no better than mutineers. I shall say no more on the subject.
Their going makes me the firmer in my purpose.
We sail for Newfoundland, then sail for home.
‘When?’ Samuel King came aboard to ask me this morning.
‘Tomorrow,’ I told him.
*
And so tonight I choose to remember that moment just before dawn on the morning of Monday the 19th of March two years ago, when a black coach drawn by two black horses rattled across the bridge over the moat of the Tower of London, came to a brief halt while the great gates of the Middle Tower on the west wall swung open to allow it out, and then went hurtling north down Tower Hill. The coachman cracked his whip. One of the horses stumbled. The coach rocked from side to side, its iron wheels striking sparks from the frosty cobbles.
There were two men in the coach. One was Sir Lewis Stukeley, Vice Admiral of Devon. The other was Sir Lewis Stukeley’s cousin.
‘Damn this,’ I said. ‘Tell the coachman to stop. I want to go home with a few teeth as well as my head.’
‘You will walk?’ Stukeley asked. He seemed startled by the prospect.
‘I always preferred it,’ I said. ‘That or horseback. These hell-carts are for women and invalids.’
Stukeley sighed. ‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘I shall bear the responsibility.’
‘You must,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget. You’re your cousin’s keeper now.’
We were into Houndsditch Minories before the coachman could pull up his horses. I climbed down instantly and limped off up the street. Stukeley must have seized one of the flaring torches from the front of the coach before he came hurrying after me.
‘Are you a bat or a devil?’ he said, when he caught up. ‘It seems you can see in the dark.’
I responded, I suppose, with a noise which was half grunt and half growl. I had come to a stop, leaning hard on my silver-topped stick. Stukeley stared at me. What must he have seen by the light of his torch? An old man’s face, white, haggard, pinched with pain. Big beads of sweat on the high furrowed forehead, no doubt. And more sweat trickling down the hollowed-out cheeks.
‘I remember my London,’ I told him. ‘And a man gets used to doing without daylight in the Tower.’
I moved off again, walking fast despite my limp. Stukeley kept up with me now. He snatched at my elbow.
‘Sir Walter,’ he said, ‘this is dangerous. Let me go back for the carriage.’
‘It’s no more than a mile,’ I said. ‘Less, unless the streets have been stretched since the last time I walked them.’
I shivered, wiping froth from my mouth and from my beard. Then I stopped and considered my cousin in the torchlight. Stukeley looked little more than a boy. A plump, slightly petulant boy, fine-nostrilled, handsome, but with a weak chin and the merest scribble of hair on his upper lip. In fact, he must be about 40. His father died in ‘78. Thomas Stukeley. An adventurer, a malcontent. Killed by Moors at the Battle of Alcazar. In fair fight, apparently, though some say he was murdered after the battle by his own Italian soldiers. Peele wrote a play about him. A poor piece. No one is ever likely to write a play about his timorous son.
I said: ‘What particular dangers do you have in mind, cousin Lewis?’
‘I mean that this isn’t the best of times to be out and about,’ Stukeley said mildly. ‘There are few honest men—’
‘True, very true,’ I snapped. ‘Honesty never made a crowd even in my day. But I assure you that for an ancient prisoner any time is a more than good time to be “out and about”, as you put it.’ I chuckled. ‘Besides, can you doubt that King James isn’t taking care of us both every minute?’
Stukeley frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
I mean that you are inexperienced,’ I told him. ‘Too green and too close to me to be left to do a difficult job like this all on your own. I mean, sir, that you, my keeper, are yourself being kept. In other words, that the King’s concern about his faithful subject Walter Ralegh is so great that if you were to turn around now and stroll back down the Minories you would have trouble not tripping over a few fine fellows in long black cloaks. No, don’t look over your shoulder. Let us go on our way again.’
I set a slower pace then and the sun was just starting to come up over Aldgate when we met a man walking towards us. He was rough-looking, I remember, plainly an artisan of some kind, wearing a flat cap, coarse doublet, and trunk breeches. The man was carrying a small wooden box under his right arm. I nodded to him, and the man returned the greeting civilly, passed us, then turned on his heel
and came back.
If I’m wrong then I’m wrong,’ he said. ‘But you look like Sir Walter Ralegh.’ ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You are Walter Ralegh?’ ‘No less,’ I admitted. ‘And no more.’
The man set his box down on the pavement. He did this so carefully that it crossed my mind that it must contain eggs. The man bowed, removing his cap. ‘So it’s justice at last,’ he said. ‘King James has pardoned you. I give thanks to God, sir.’
‘King James has not pardoned me,’ I said. ‘He has only let me out of my lodgings in the Tower to exercise my lame leg a little.’
The stranger looked confused. ‘Do you joke with me, Sir Walter? I am only a simple man.’
I said: ‘Then you are to be congratulated. Simplicity is the hardest thing of all, I think. What is your name?’
‘Barnaby Adams, sir.’
‘And what is your trade, Mr Adams?’
‘I’m a bricklayer, sir. That is, when there’s bricks to be laid. Times are bad. Times are very bad.’ ‘I am sorry to hear it,’ I said.
‘They’ve been worse for you,’ the man replied generously. ‘Locked up in the Tower all these years. But everybody knows you were never a traitor, sir, never a friend of the Spaniard like they said.’
‘An English face with a Spanish heart’
‘What’s that, sir?’
‘Something Mr Attorney Coke called me,’ I explained. ‘The words stuck in my head. What was the rest of it? Ah, yes. Spider of hell. And the greatest Lucifer that ever lived. Most picturesque.’
‘Coke!’ The bricklayer spat. ‘They say that one can’t even cope with his wife, sir. She’s the biggest whore in London, if you’ll pardon my Spanish!’
‘Mr Adams,’ I said, ‘your simplicity is shrinking. You must not suppose that I hate Sir Edward Coke because he hated me. He is only a lawyer. As to my trial, it is my belief that he failed to do himself justice. As to his marital difficulties, one of the pleasures of imprisonment is that a man can concentrate his mind on other matters. Especially if, like me, that man is under a sentence of death which has never yet been revoked.’