‘Five?’
‘Ten. Over fifteen years or so. I only have to breathe upon Jane for her to be in pup. I come and go, and am often away for months on end. I have to admit that I become confused over the children’s names and ages. Though the newest little one has wormed his way into my heart.’
So be it. There was no point in my being jealous. I had what I had with Thomas and it was, to start with, enough.
On my own, I thought about that cousinage of landed and ennobled families. Thomas is a spoke in an wheel spinning above the rest of us, spanning every shire, connecting down the generations through bloodline or marriage, through inherited titles and property, through privilege and influence, with the Court at the hub. New men may rise and rise, and through advantageous marriage or high office join the gyre, but even a Thomas Cromwell is crushed by the wheel in the end. There are feuds and enmities, wheels within the wheel. There is so much to gain and so much to lose. The cousinage fixes places and positions for its kith and kin. Anyone Thomas meets at Court, or in great houses in the country, knows who he is and where he fits in on the wheel. From his earliest youth he knew who they all were, too, and their fathers, and the names of their home places and estates.
In that last respect, much like Bruton. I speak of ‘the great world’, but with rather less awe since one of Thomas’s toenails, on the great toe of the right foot, curled inwards into the flesh and caused him pain. He could hardly get his boot on. I crushed herbs, mixed the green mash into lard, applied the paste to the toe and wrapped it. He had let his toenails grow too long. Even a Wyatt must pare his toenails.
When his father died, Thomas looked after Elizabeth Darrell. He could afford to. He sold some Allington lands to the King for four thousand pounds, which went to her, and made over to her other Wyatt properties. She is presently living at Tintinhull in my own county of Somerset, and she has married.
Thomas let drop that his own mother’s new husband, Edward Warner, made his fortune by buying and selling former monastic houses. I had a flare-up of black rage against the raptors, the well-connected land-grabbers, the parasites, the opportunists. I did not feel angry with Thomas Wyatt. I was enamoured, obsessed.
I told him about my own life, partially and rapidly, not wishing to weary him with what must seem petty beyond belief. Yet he listened, and asked questions. Often he laughed. He found my life a comedy. He found Eleanor Wilmer very comical.
I told him about the butcher’s shop, and learning to read, and meeting John Leland, and Peter Mompesson and the baby. I told him about my emerald dolphin, why I had it and how I lost it. I did not say much about Shaftesbury Abbey – not the devotional aspect – but I told him about Dorothy Clausey and who she was, and about Father Robert Parker, and what happened to Father Pomfret, and about my difficulties with Master Tregonwell. I told him about the Abbess and about Sir Thomas Arundell who read us the poem by Thomas’s father.
‘And when you all had to leave? Was that really so very terrible?’
Thomas would never grasp what it was like. I just said, ‘Yes, it was very terrible.’
I told him about my peregrinations since then, and the places I saw and the people I met and left, and how I came to be living on Hay Hill.
He took my chin in his hand, turned my face to the moonlight, kissed me and said:
‘You are picaresque.’
I did not know what that meant.
‘In Spain they tell stories about a kind of rogue they call a pícaro. He is charming and sharp-witted and makes his way by attaching himself profitably to a person in a high position, and getting the better of his master, making a fool of him. He then moves on to batten on someone else. There is no conclusion, just episodes, one thing after another, with no moral – and no morals, either.’
I was cast down. Robert Parker maybe, but surely not me.
‘You are picaresque, Agnes, but you are honest. With you, it is more a matter of …’
‘Of just one thing after another?’
We left it at that and went to bed. Just one thing after another.
We were together for less than a year. When he paid secret visits to me at Hay Hill he came with an armed guard, a man from his home county of Kent. His name was Finch. He was short with a round face like a child’s although he must have been twenty-five years old at least. Finch would remain on duty at the foot of my stairs until Thomas was ready to leave. I thought nothing of it. I grossly underestimated Thomas’s perilous involvement in the kingdom’s affairs.
He did attempt to explain the issues to me. Lady Jane Grey was a Protestant and a clever and well-educated young lady, a distant cousin to poor King Edward and his half-sisters, the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. As a child Lady Jane lived with Edward’s uncle Thomas Seymour, who married King Henry’s widow, his sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr.
Princess Elizabeth was cared for by this Seymour couple as well, because her mother Anne Boleyn was executed when she was only two years old. My Thomas told me that Thomas Seymour, old enough to be Elizabeth’s grandfather, treated the little girl as a love-toy.
I think that is right. It still makes my mind reel. The nearer you get to the hub of the wheel, the more convoluted and toxic are the relationships. And all these people, ready now to slaughter one another, have been on familial terms since they were children. Some of them still are children.
Keep up, Agnes.
9
THE GREAT WORLD
I need to piece together the year 1553, the year in which Thomas Wyatt and I were together. If I do not record it I will forget, and even now I will make mistakes.
Lady Jane Grey was married that May to the son of the Duke of Northumberland, the most powerful man in the kingdom according to Thomas and, reluctantly, proclaimed Queen in July by her father-in-law and his cronies.
She was Queen for only ten days. The government changed sides and proclaimed the Princess Mary as Queen. I forget what caused them to change their minds about Lady Jane. It could be they mistrusted her ambitious father-in-law.
Princess Mary passionately wished to be Queen. In August she rode into London with an armed force to the applause of the common people who poured out on to the streets to see the parade. Her young half-sister the Princess Elizabeth rode at her side. A couple of weeks later Lady Jane’s father-in-law, no longer the most powerful man in the kingdom, was executed for treason.
At the beginning of October Mary was crowned in Westminster Abbey. Protestants were out, and adherents to the Old Religion were in. The ageing Duke of Norfolk was released from imprisonment. Lady Jane Grey was sent to the Tower, charged with high treason.
That never seemed just to me. Lady Jane Grey never wanted to be Queen and she was not yet seventeen years old.
*
Thomas favoured Queen Mary because she is the next in line, although she is not ideal. She had a wretched girlhood, he said, kept away from her mother, King Henry’s first Queen. She has a troubled and a troublesome temperament. Her female cycles are known to be disordered. Her father the late King tried without success to find a husband for her. She is in her late thirties – and still unmarried.
If her half-sister Elizabeth were to marry and have a son, that son would be the rightful heir to the throne because males take priority over females.
‘I do not know the Princess Elizabeth, but she is young, and cleverer and more sprightly than Queen Mary. She is a Protestant as King Edward was. Her bloodline would make for better continuity. I really do not know what to think.’
He did know what to think when it became known that a marriage was planned between Queen Mary and Prince Philip of Spain. Philip was the son of the King of Spain, and it was the King of Spain who proposed the match. Few English people liked this idea. England should never submit to being a dependency of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. England’s sovereignty would be compromised. Everything would be turned upside down all over again. The Old Religion and its rites and practices would be brought back. That would of
course be a comfort to many.
Maybe to me? I did not know. In Spain, Thomas said, non-Catholics were persecuted, tortured and burned alive.
‘Not that there are many Protestants in Spain. It is a matter of Jews and Mohammedans.’
I understood, and it was like a shock of cold water that Christianity was just one religion among others. This was a door opening on a void.
‘Across the sea, you mean? They have a different God?’
‘It’s the same God, but they slaughter each other for the small differences. And in India, in Africa, they have are many gods and not our God at all. And yes, across the sea, of course.’
‘I have never seen the sea. Tell me about the sea.’
He bade me recall how it was when one stood on a high place and looked over to where the land stopped and the sky began. I pictured to myself the view over the Abbey Park at Shaftesbury, and the line of forest far away.
‘Now imagine if there were nothing but water up to the line where the sky begins, not just in front of you but all around you, with no land in sight in any direction.’
Seamen, he said, have a name for that line where the sea meets the sky – something like ‘orisoun’, a French-Latin word, he said. There was, he said, great delight in being at sea:
‘The blue-green of the ocean and a lively breeze on a fine day. The millions of stars above you in the night. On my last voyage from Spain I lay on the deck and knew myself to be swinging between the ultimate of tranquillity and the ultimate of mortal danger.’
For there you were, he said, cooped up for months with your companions in a fragile oaken vessel, at the mercy of the winds. And there were storms, and the ship battered by waves as high as castles. Or there was no wind at all and the ship drifted, and men fell sick or lost their wits or died of thirst.
‘Always we are waiting for the boy in the crow’s nest at the top of the mast to shout out that he sees land, pointing his finger and hallooing, and the crew running to the side hoping to see what he sees. You can smell land from many sea-miles away. But you are never safe. There are underwater rocks as you near the land which can pierce the hull and send you down to death.’
I never heard him so eloquent.
‘The sea is not like a river or a lake. The sea is a salt-water world – full of strange creatures and tormented by whirlpools and currents to drag a vessel off course.’
I want to see the sea.
If the Spanish marriage were to go ahead, there could be torturings and burnings of fellow-Christians, Protestants, here in England. ‘Quite right too,’ said some. ‘Bring back the old values.’ As the evenings drew in, the night-time talk at Hay Hill became confrontational.
‘Scaremongering apart, it is a simple question of patriotism,’ said Thomas privately to me. ‘This marriage is an insult. Why cannot Queen Mary marry a decent Englishman?’
Thomas began conspiring with others who were already determined to stop at any cost, by force, the Spanish marriage. Lady Jane Grey’s father the Duke of Suffolk, and Edmund Warner, Thomas’s step-father, were among them.
If Queen Mary were not to marry Prince Philip of Spain there had to be another candidate.
‘Edward Courtenay fits the bill,’ said Thomas, ‘he is Earl of Devon.’
‘A decent Englishman, then?’
‘He is a nonentity, a shallow popinjay. A more forceful man might have ideas of his own. All that Courtenay will be required to do is marry the Queen and if possible impregnate her, and please God he is capable of that.’
By November he was meeting regularly with his fellow-conspirators. I never saw Thomas in the light of day from then on. He was so occupied that he could only come through the back door and up the stair to my chamber after dark. Though we did not need light when we were together. He was excited, like a boy included in the plots and plans of bigger boys. The French too wanted to curb the power of Spain, and Tom was in personal contact with the French ambassador who wrote most flatteringly, promising French equipment, troops, perhaps even an invasion.
At some point the purpose of it all escalated from stopping the Spanish marriage to deposing the Queen altogether. I suspect half the conspirators had no very clear idea of what they were doing, or why. They plunged on regardless and made a date for the armed rebellion. It was to take place on March 18 of the following year.
It did not happen like that at all. It happened much faster. There was far too much gossip, far too many people knew about it, and Edward Courtney was useless. His attempts to raise a force in Devon were half-hearted. He never even left London to drum up support, whingeing about the difficulties of travelling down to Devon in the bad weather. Most other leaders – distinguished gentlemen all – failed to muster much support in their own counties either, and with the plot becoming public knowledge, some were arrested.
So Thomas, a latecomer to the conspiracy, by force of circumstances found himself its leader. This terrified me.
‘Drop it,’ I said, as if he were a dog. ‘Please drop it. This cannot succeed and you will come to harm.’
He would not drop it, not even after the government, desperate to avoid armed confrontation, promised pardons to all rebel militiamen who departed peacefully to their homes within twenty-four hours.
Thomas was exactly where he wanted to be, in the eye of the storm.
‘You may not see me for a while,’ he said, in the middle of the January 1554.
*
I followed events by listening with all my ears to the gentlemen who came to Hay Hill. I dreaded being called away for some domestic purpose and missing something. There was little secrecy. Everyone seemed to know something.
Thomas apparently rode off to Allington after he left me to see his family and prepare his Kentish militia for action. He had a proclamation read out calling for all men to join up and march on London with him to unseat the Popish Queen. He mustered about one thousand five hundred, and marched them northwards towards the capital. He arranged for a store of arms and ordnance to be waiting for him and support was promised from within the city itself.
But the omens were not good. The contingent from the West Country never arrived. They never even set off. His letters were intercepted and the French ambassador’s involvement was discovered. French support was hastily withdrawn. Thomas chose not to reveal this to his followers.
Next night we had better news. Better for me, that is, because there were many at Hay Hill who thought that Thomas Wyatt was wrongheaded. The Duke of Norfolk with a gaggle of Londoners attacked Thomas and his rebels on their way through Kent – and most of the Duke’s followers deserted and came over to Thomas’s side.
‘The Duke has run away!’ said our informant, ‘and left behind his guns and his treasure and his baggage. It’s good luck for Wyatt. He must press on now into London.’
But he didn’t. It was a fatal mistake. He waited for a couple of days, expecting at any moment the arrival of reinforcements from the Midlands, under Lady Jane Grey’s father. They never arrived, and those few days gave time for the Queen’s government to make their preparations.
All this happened within one just week of his leaving Allington. He said to me, on that last visit before the rebellion:
‘I may never see my old grey castle again.’
*
The next thing we heard was that he was leading his army into London through Southwark.
I could not forbear to ask: ‘What is Southwark?’
The Hay Hill gentlemen told me that Southwark – they call it the Borough – is on the south bank of the Thames, over London Bridge, and outside the city’s jurisdiction.
‘Southwark is a naughty place, Mistress Agnes.’
Southwark means bear-baiting, and scurrilous theatricals, and Winchester Geese. The ladies laughed behind their hands. Winchester Geese are loose women.
‘Not many of us here who haven’t been over to Southwark. But now Wyatt cannot get away from there. Everyone tells him he can’t cross the river. No one
can. It is most inconvenient for the market-traders.’
The Queen’s men had broken up a span of London Bridge to make it impossible for the rebels and all their ordnance and equipment to enter the city.
‘Shall I tell you what Wyatt did then? I’ll need another cup of wine first, Miss Agnes.’
It was like the little tailor in Sherborne all over again. If the speaker is a customer of the little tailor, this tale will soon be known all over the country.
‘Well, friends, Sir Thomas Wyatt would not believe the crossing was impossible. Late that night he climbed up all alone on to the parapet of the gatehouse of the bridge, jumped down on to the roof, forced open a window, crept down a stair and ended up in the lodge where the gatekeeper and his family were sitting round their fire. Imagine their terror! He swore the family to silence if they valued their lives and walked out onto the bridge.’
It was as he was told. A complete span had been knocked down, and guns at the further end were trained on the space. Thomas went back by the same way he had come. This exploit was thought to be highly comical and probably untrue:
‘A typical Wyatt story.’
Typical indeed. It sounds very like Thomas to me. I picture him climbing in like a burglar and erupting into the warm room, a devilish apparition. But so dangerous, he could have fallen to his death in the space where the bridge was broken.
In the morning, cannons from the Tower of London bombarded the Southwark shore.
‘Men are deserting him, melting away into the dark. He had better leave Southwark, and fast. There’s a government bounty – land to the value of a hundred pounds a year – for the capture of Sir Thomas Wyatt.’
Anyone but Thomas would have abandoned the rebellion. He did not. He retreated with his remaining men, straggling westwards upriver, still on the south bank, in driving rain. It was raining steadily on Hay Hill too. I left the company and stood at the door and thought how cold he must be, how wet and hungry. The roads everywhere were deep in mud. I went back into the warm.
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