Next day, before dark, Finch arrived, bursting into the house out of the rain, his leather coat black with dirt, his childish face crumpled. There were no clients at that hour. He was well known in the house as Sir Thomas Wyatt’s man. I stood by, as tense as a wire, while he was plied with food and drink and pestered by Anne Cathcart for the latest news. Sir Thomas, he said, had determined to enter the city though Ludgate. He hoped on the way to capture Queen Mary herself, who was said to be lodged at St James’s Palace.
It was only when Finch stepped outside to relieve himself and to see to his mare that I managed to snatch a private word. We stood under the eaves of the barn.
‘How is Sir Thomas?’ I asked. Such a light, slight question. I did not know what else to say.
‘Madam, he is superb. He admits no talk of defeat. But it is hard. Very hard. We managed to cross the river a good many miles upstream. Then the carts carrying the guns overturned or became stuck in the mud. The men dragging them are exhausted. Many of them just abandoned us and peeled off. They are all volunteers, they did not bargain for this.’
Thomas I know was on horseback, but nevertheless I cannot bear to think of him on that nightmare journey.
He still did not give up. I could not see Finch’s face in the darkness but his voice grew shakier.
‘We lost guns when they fell off carts into ditches and hours were wasted striving in vain to haul them out. Government spies followed us and galloped back to the city to report what they saw.’
Even from the foot of Hay Hill, he said, you can hear the roll of drums. All fighting men in London are summoned to assemble overnight around Charing Cross. There might be as many as ten thousand. His voice shook.
‘It does not look good, Madam. But my master will not be told.’
‘How many men does he still have with him?’
‘He says, three thousand. But I think there will not more than one tenth of that by morning. He is leading them up here, to the ridge of the hill, to rest up until dawn. He charges me to say, Madam, that he will come to you if he is able.’
Thomas came to me in my chamber in the small hours of that night. It was black dark and still pouring with rain. I could make out by touch that he was wearing a velvet coat – I could not tell the colour – with stiff lace, and all soaked through. Under it he was wearing chain mail, so that I could not hold him close.
‘Mind your feet and ankles,’ he said. ‘My spurs are knife-sharp.’
His troops and ordnance, he said, were up at the top of the hill. He was tense, elated, overtired but with no desire for sleep, he was in his element. Finch, he said, would keep me informed. I might trust in Finch, he was a good Kentish fellow.
He kissed me and then he was gone, clattering down my stair, sideways because of the spurs, out of the back door and away up the hill to his troops. We had not heard their approach earlier because they came up from the other side.
That was the last time I saw Thomas Wyatt before I saw him die.
The capture of Queen Mary was a fantasy, it never happened. Of course it did not. There was something magnificently unrealistic about my Thomas. Puerile, his detractors said. If he had succeeded, he would have been hailed as a hero. To my mind, he was a hero.
Thomas and his troops, further depleted after skirmishes coming down Hay Hill, reached Charing Cross next morning and were attacked head-on by the Queen’s cavalry. Incredibly, they broke through. Desperation makes men savage. After noon Thomas and his officers, with followers on foot struggling with the weaponry and damaged gun-carts, were riding up the Strand and along Fleet Street to Ludgate. The gate was closed and barred against them.
They told me that Sir Thomas Wyatt knocked on the gate and shouted out to his supporters within that he had kept his word. He arrived precisely when he said he would. But there was no response. There were no supporters within the gates awaiting him.
That was as much as I gleaned at Hay Hill. After this, few people who knew anything about anything came, and the hall room was half-empty. Our regular informants, the gentlemen normally so opinionated and loquacious, were considering their positions and keeping within doors. The roads out of London were barely passable because of the weather, and unsafe on account of vagrant soldiery.
My guts were gnawed as if by rats. Fortunately there was little demand for mutton pies. I was not wanted in the kitchen. I retreated into my chamber. I avoided Anne.
Mercifully Finch came again to see me, not the next evening but the one after. The news he brought might be terrible, but anything is better than waiting, waiting, waiting and not knowing. Waiting for news of the beloved takes all one’s energy.
I could hardly ask Finch up into my chamber, and did not want to talk with him in the hall room. I led him to the pasture across the track from Anne’s house. The cattle had been taken indoors and it was a dank and desolate expanse. We sat side by side in the dusk on the wet trunk of a fallen tree. Finch was in a state of agitation. I could not always follow what he said in his Kentish voice and had to ask him to repeat.
Finch said:
‘When Ludgate was not opened to him, Sir Thomas went into the courtyard of that inn which lies up against the gatehouse – it’s called La Belle Sauvage – and slumped down on a bench. I was there with him, and also young Edward – his son, or his half-brother, whatever, who had come with him from Allington.’
‘How old is this Edward? And how did Sir Thomas look?’
‘Madam, I cannot tell, perhaps twelve years old? And my master was weary, his face was grey.’
Poor boy Edward. Poor Thomas.
Finch said:
‘Sir Thomas left the inn, collected up his troops – only about sixty or seventy of them remaining, Madam – and made to retreat to for Charing Cross. Government troops had blocked off every side street and barricaded Fleet Street. Sir Thomas and his men managed to hack their way through the barricades as far as Temple Bar where they were faced with a more powerful force.’
They were so brave. They were so few, and their opposition so many, yet the fighting at Temple Bar went on for a whole murderous and bloody hour. Swords, daggers, pikes, clubs. There were calls from the government side for Sir Thomas to surrender to prevent further bloodshed.
The intention was to take Sir Thomas alive, Finch said. In the end one gentleman rode up to him alone and unarmed. Whatever he said, Sir Thomas gave up his sword and assented to be mounted behind him and removed from the scene.
‘Who was this gentleman?’
‘Sir Maurice Berkeley. He is reputed to have been for Lady Jane Grey, in the past. I know nothing of him.’
I did not know he had been knighted.
‘Sir Maurice Berkeley owns most of the town in which I was born,’ I told Finch.
‘Indeed, is that so, Madam. I followed my master on foot, running, I saw my master put into a barge and rowed down river towards the Tower. They had taken his sword from him but he looked very fine in his velvet coat. He held his head high.’
‘Of what colour is the coat?’
‘Plum colour. But much stained and soiled.’
Finch said that those of his followers who survived tried to run away, but the ways were blocked and most were caught. Gallows are being erected all over London for the hangings.
‘There are forty men from Kent among them, eight of them my cousins.’
‘What will you do now?’
‘I do not want to leave my master.’
‘He is in the Tower. You cannot reach him. If you stay you will end up on the gallows like your cousins. Go now, go straight home to Kent. Are you married?’
‘I have a sweetheart.’
‘Go back to her and make your life. Cross the river by whatever means, and go home. Wait …’
I ran across the track to the house, up my stair, found a few coins, came back to Finch and put them in his hand.
‘This is what your master would wish. I know it. Go now, saddle your mare and be gone.’
I hope to God he did escape.
I had a hope before we parted that Finch would at the last minute pass to me some gift, some token of love, entrusted to him by Thomas. There was nothing like that. No.
The customers returned to Hay Hill. The crisis – ‘Wyatt’s rebellion’ they were calling it – was already history. Back came the gentlemen with their broadsheets and pamphlets and tales from the city and the Court. Back came the ladies.
I sat like a stone through tirades against Thomas. Because of his rebellion, the government decided that Lady Jane Grey and her associates must be eliminated in case of further manifestations of dissent. She was already in the Tower. A few days after Thomas’s imprisonment, her young husband was executed on Tower Hill. She saw his headless corpse brought back on a cart. She herself went the same way straight afterwards.
‘Sir Thomas witnessed all this,’ said Master Piers Perceval. ‘I have it on good authority that he would have seen the whole thing from his chamber in the White Tower. I only hope that he has a proper sense of his responsibility for this gratuitous tragedy.’
I felt it almost as my own guilt. Lady Jane Grey was used, abused and lost her life through no fault of her own. A pawn knocked off the board. Her father the Duke of Suffolk was beheaded too. Then, Thomas’s cousin Thomas Cobham, and young Edward Wyatt – that poor little boy – were hung, drawn and quartered. There were many, many more executions. A wholesale slaughter. Queen Mary was taking no chances.
They were keeping Thomas alive for a reason. The marriage of Queen Mary to Philip of Spain was imminent. The talk at Hay Hill was all about the Princess Elizabeth and the threat she might pose to the new regime. If it were proved that she had been party to the plot against her half-sister, she could be got rid of, eliminated.
Elizabeth was fetched from the country and shut up in the Tower. Under interrogation, she swore she had no part in any conspiracy against the Queen. She was lying, they said.
The Court was nervous, alive with rumours of further plots. So was Hay Hill, and Piers Perceval was relishing the drama.
‘It is clear that Elizabeth conspired against her sister, and naturally Thomas Wyatt knew that. They have had Lady Wyatt – his wife, Mistress Agnes – brought up from Allington. She implores him to confess, to save his life and their children’s future. He swears there is nothing to confess. Now he is being tortured, to force him to confess. Then Elizabeth can be accused. They must have evidence.’
Tortured? Tortured?
Master Perceval was looking straight at me across the table. He was very drunk.
‘On the rack, Madam. Do you know what the rack is?’
‘No, sir.’
‘It is a matter of rollers and ropes and pulleys and levers. On a wooden frame like a bed. They stretch you, Madam. It is a matter of snapping sinews and cracking bones and shoulders torn from their moorings. While they pull out your toenails with pincers.’
Thomas’s toenails.
Piers Perceval slumped over his wine goblet, one hand covering his face.
‘The fool,’ he mumbled. ‘The fool. The fool …’
*
Thomas was sent to trial and sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered. After that, he was put on the rack again in the hope of obtaining evidence of the Princess Elizabeth’s guilt.
He could so easily have lied, to save himself. He did not, he could not, he would not. That is the measure of the man, that is the measure of my Thomas. They gave up, and fixed the date of his execution. I state all this flatly, so that it may all be known in years to come. When matters are as bad as they can possibly be one must either go mad, or take one’s own life, or close down, becoming devoid of hope or will or desire. That is how it was for me. I made the paste for the crust of mutton pies. I could not eat. I will not speak of the nights. It is in the past now.
I was up on Tower Hill early on the eleventh day of April, wishing to be near to him at the end. I was not early enough. There were already hundreds of people milling around.
I had never witnessed an execution before. I looked at the block, and beside it a basket of sawdust. Black-clothed officials were muttering among themselves. And suddenly there was my Thomas and everything happened quickly.
He was limping when he stepped up on to the scaffold. He turned to the crowd, raised his head, and spoke in a loud clear voice. He had acted, he said, on his own responsibility.
‘The Princess Elizabeth and her friends had no part in any of it, none whatsoever.’ A clerical person leapt up on to the scaffold to contest what Thomas said. He was shouted down and dragged away. It is shameful, it is just not done, said the people pressing all around me, to challenge the last statement of a man about to meet his Maker.
I was pushed and shoved by men and women trying to get closer to the front. For a moment I thought I saw Eleanor Wilmer among them. It could not have been Eleanor, just someone who looked liked her. I scoured the crowd with my eyes and did not find her. There were so many people. I dreaded encountering her again, but – but what? Something unfinished, perhaps.
Thomas had not noticed me on the day of his father’s funeral Mass and he did not see me now. I am not tall and his eyes did not search the crowd. Without aid he took off his black gown, laid it down, and unlaced his doublet. He shook hands with the officials, took out his own handkerchief and tied it over his eyes himself. The executioner picked up the axe. He was wearing a mask. Thomas knelt and laid his head upon the block.
He was brave. He behaved honourably. Everyone said so.
Thomas’s head was severed in a single stroke. That was a mercy. The executioner picked up his head by the hair, pulled away the handkerchief and displayed Thomas’s face. Then he threw his head into the basket. I do not forget the sounds the onlookers made. There was something animal, sexual, about those sounds. Shocking, disgusting. I turned my head away and vomited, spattering a man’s hose and shoe. He swore at me. I pulled up my hood and slunk away. I did not stay to see Thomas’s body being hacked into pieces.
He said to me once that execution was less degrading than hanging. Maybe. Maybe.
On my bad nights, I still after all these years see his head, and the bloody stub of his great neck, shreds of pipes and sinews trailing from it.
They took up Thomas’s head and put it on a cart and drove it out of London and stuck it in a cage on the gibbet on top of Hay Hill, up the lane from Anne Cathcart’s house. We heard shouts and the rumblings of wheels but did not chance to look out. It was Anne’s man Luke who came running in to tell us, his blue eyes bulging.
I knew that place up on the ridge. I often walked up there in the early mornings, for the fresh air and the quietness. The gibbet is an old one, the timbers coming apart at the joints. I used to sit down on a fallen cross-beam at its foot, unthinking of the structure’s function.
‘But why?’ said Anne. ‘Why is he stuck up here?’
I knew. I began to tell Anne what Thomas had told me on that last night, before everything went so horribly wrong, when he collected his scattered troops together up on Hay Hill. They were attacked and some of them wounded on their approach. Hay Hill was the beginning of the end for him, emblematic of his failure. To expose his head in this obscure spot was a gesture of contempt.
Anne was not listening. I know her so well. She was wondering whether curiosity would draw more gentlemen out to Hay Hill to see this spectacle, and how she could best turn the occasion to profit by offering refreshment and comfort to the well-heeled and prurient. I clambered up to my room. I was in shock at that time and somewhat insane. This is the only explanation I can give for what I did.
A few days later the head of Sir Thomas Wyatt was gone from the gibbet on Hay Hill. Someone had stolen it. The world never knew who took it.
Because it was me. I walked up to the ridge in the light of half a moon and yanked it out of the iron cage and put it in a cloth bag. Thomas’s head had been boiled. A head is nearly all bone, with pockets and cushions of flesh. My father used to make brawn from the heads of sheep an
d pigs, stewing them with onions and herbs until the meat fell away. When the liquor cooled, the meat was suspended in jelly. This was the brawn. It was popular with customers, though if the boiled head were not picked over carefully, chips of bone remained in the finished article on which one could break a tooth. My job, in those far-away days, was to pick out the chips of bone with my fingers before adding the meat to the liquor and putting it in a cold place to set.
I could have made brawn from Thomas’s head, and ingested my beloved, so that I would be he and he would be me for ever. I imagined doing it.
A man’s head is heavy. I kept transferring the bag from one hand to the other as I walked back down the hill and through the night all the way into London, keeping my hooded head down. I made my way to the Strand and to the river. The tide was beginning to run out fast eastwards, towards the sea that I had never seen.
The stones on the foreshore are always wet and slippery. Then there is mud, and the lapping waters. I stepped off the stones into the mud. I waded into the river up over my knees, the out-going tide nearly unbalancing me. I opened the bag and heaved out Tom’s head. My sacred relic. The one and only sacred relic with any meaning.
I thought, he will float free. I was cradling him in farewell when I heard a woman’s voice calling my name.
‘Agnes Peppin!’
My heart thudding, my skin prickling, I turned and saw in the darkness the grinning face of Eleanor Wilmer. An illusion, surely.
Not an illusion. It was she, in the flesh, in the even more ample flesh. What happened next is so horrid that I can hardly write it down. It is hard to believe it happened. It did.
I shouted at her:
‘Why ever are you here? What do you want?’
She shouted back:
‘I know what you have done. I saw what you have done. I have been watching you, I have been following you.’
‘You have been stalking me? That is disgusting. And why, in heaven’s name?’
‘I want you, Agnes, and I want your money. For us, for you and me together. You owe me. You are nothing without me.’
‘I will give you money, if that is what you want. But now just go! Why are you not away with Jack?’
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