Death of the Fox

by George Garrett

  Which is Providence.

  He turns to Fortune, then, fearing Providence more, thus doubling his fears.

  Meanwhile it is a simple story of this world, an exemplum of the justice of this world. His new wealth is without meaning because the habit of extravagance has increased.

  Blessed with more than he ever hoped for, he finds it is not enough. Will never be enough. All the wealth of the world would only serve to make him spend more than the world’s value.

  Therefore everything has changed. And nothing has changed.

  Small wonder if his wines have the savor of wormwood and all his meats still taste like boiled beans.

  When care or prudence might serve to defend him, he must be most careless. As careless as saints who live by faith alone.

  He, too, must live by faith. But it is a faith of this world, faith in the King he serves and in those who serve him.

  There is no faith left for himself.

  Grin, Robert Cecil, at that. For Cecil of all men could tell him how in the courts of this world, faith and trust are to be most secretly hoarded.

  Bacon is, then, as spendthrift in things spiritual as temporal.

  Because faith is blind, he must be blind to the King. Blind to the truth that Bacon’s faith, though rendered in touching innocence, at best is meaningless, at worst is imitation; for it touches the conscience of the King. The King is not free to accept the gift of blind faith. The King needs neither faith nor love from his politic servants.

  The King demands pure service. If service is rendered by someone faithful, loyal, and loving, good and well enough. But the King must preserve his freedom. To reward or punish strictly according to the service rendered. And, at the last, must keep the power to bless or damn without regard either to faith or good works. The King must preserve this power to preserve himself. If and when he is threatened, he must always have another, like the taster at his banquets, to take the poison for him.

  Bacon, in all his eminence, is singularly appropriate for this service. An entirely satisfactory victim, should any victim be needed. But because his precious felicity depends, for him, upon his faith in the King, he cannot believe this.

  Francis Bacon is a restless man, a light sleeper. Not as Ralegh is, by design and purpose. Bacon sleeps lightly because he cannot sleep deep and well. Because his deep sleeps are troubled by bad dreams. Awake or asleep, he is vulnerable.

  It does not take an oracle to see the probability of Bacon’s fall. For Edward Coke, though old, is alive and well; and in disgrace, with little to lose, and grows more formidable than before. Bacon cannot see clear what any clever courtier can, that, besides all other reasons, the King, by placing Coke upon the Commission to deal with Ralegh, is keeping Coke near at hand, a trump card in his hand. And more—a twinge of royal conscience?—he has made this manifest to Francis Bacon, has given him all warning he will ever receive.

  Bacon’s other folly, of placing trust in those who serve only for their own gain, this would not take a Robert Cecil to teach. They will serve him well only so long as it serves them. When weather turns bad, they will vanish like birds in winter. And they are not to be blamed for this. From stable groom to the high steward, they are all men and free-born Englishmen. Service can be readily purchased, but a man’s love is not for sale.

  Bacon knows this too, but he cannot believe it.

  To ask for their love is to be more than a fool. It is to insult the deepest essence of the man. Not even kings can afford such arrogance.

  To be given what seems to be love and to accept it, is to be deceived. It is to be surrounded by false and dissembling servants who are no servants at all.

  Bacon must know this, but he cannot believe it. In desperate hope, he can only increase his offerings; and his extravagances correspondingly increase the duplicity of all who serve him.

  There is a story which has lately made the rounds. It has much sad truth in its kernel, more than gossips can know.

  It is told how some distinguished visitor was waiting upon Bacon. He sat in a chamber and waited his turn. After a while a servant entered, ignoring him, and crossed the room and opened a chest without bolt or lock on it. The chest was cram-full of money. The servant scooped up a handful of coins, filled his purse, and departed.

  After a while there came another and another, and the last of these was so indifferent and careless that he left the lid of the chest open.

  When the gentleman finally met with Bacon, he told him what he had seen.

  Bacon shrugged. “I know, I know,” he said.

  “God’s wounds!” the gentleman exclaimed. “Why do you not put a stop to such a practice?”

  “Because …” replied Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Lord Chancellor of England. “Because I cannot help myself.”

  Marke well deare boy whilest theise assemble not,

  Green springs the tree, hempe growes, the wagg is wilde,

  But when they meet, it makes the timber rott,

  It fretts the halter, and it choakes the childe.

  Then bless thee, and beware, and let vs praye,

  Wee part not with the at this meeting day.

  —Sir Walter ravleigh to his Sonne

  When darkness has fallen, Bess will come. And they will have supper together. His son will not come with her. The boy must not be too much tested until the affair is settled one way or the other.

  Carew is much on his mind. Poor son of old age, he has never really known his father or a father’s love. Not for him as for Wat, wild Wat, upon whom all love and hope had been laid—thus placed in hazard.

  Wat was almost the same age as Carew is now when, in 1603, Ralegh said farewell to all joys and sorrows. Wat, however, was even then half raised to be his father’s heir. He had stood by his father’s side, imitating his pose, for a portrait. Until Ralegh’s fall, Wat had known his father only as one of those to whom many doffed hats or made suits and for whom all doors opened. Wat knew this as his birthright.

  His father’s fall was inexplicable, a riddle to his unformed mind. Then, equally without rhyme or reason, Ralegh’s life was spared. And even in disgrace, in prison, some brightness and power remained. Enough remaining so that the boy, though he found certain doors—including ones which had been his own, Durham House, Sherbourne—closed, felt no harsh pinch of need. He had been prepared to be fatherless and poor. And then with less cause than the flipping of a coin, he found himself neither. In truth found he was, ironically, despite the closing of those certain doors, more specially chosen, blessed as it were, by a father’s love and, indeed, by blood kin on both sides, by his father’s friends and even some of his father’s enemies.

  All of which, while pleasing and surprisng, seemed ridiculous.

  For how could Wat know, even dimly surmise, that with his life, his father had also regained one hope—his son? That, snatching at the world again, Ralegh vowed to himself that, live in the Tower or die there, he would see Wat given all love, care, and education befitting the son and heir of a man who had stood once near the bright center of this kingdom. That in that ashen hope, though sworn to in sorrow and love, were the unquenchable embers of his father’s ambitions.

  No, it seemed all a strange game to young Wat, pointless and foolish, save that he never learned, until perhaps the last moment of his life, that he could, too, lose it.

  He could not know why those who had not wished the father good, next sought the son’s favor and good will. Unable yet to grasp the amenities of the struggle for power and honor. His father might curse Cecil for duplicities, and, indeed, it was that little man who, for want of a single word in a legal document, took from Wat, even before he held it, the estate of Sherbourne. But that same hunchback offered Wat many kindnesses. Wat had grown up close as a cousin to Cecil’s son. He could not accept any of this with heavy solemnity. He was banned from a Court he had never attended, but he soon made a friendship with young Prince Henry. He lacked nothing much. And because he was the son of a man now legally d
ead, beyond help or harm, he found himself free, outside conventions of expectation. His privileges were so vague as to be almost without limit.

  Given the best education that England could offer. Given a Continental tour, in company with Ben Jonson. Raised as a proper courtier’s son. Raised to lead and to command, when and if Ralegh’s fortunes turned.

  Given all his father’s care and cunning could devise. Given the love of an indulgent mother. Who spoiled by cherishing him too much.

  But none of this, none of it mattered. Wat was formed not by tutors and old books, not by any words of wisdom. Nor by sports and exercise at games—though he grew strong and was expert with weapons and a masterful horseman. Nor by the amenities of fashion, though like his father, he wore only the finest and best-fitting clothes. Nor by mathematics, though he could plot a course at sea by the sun and the Pole Star before he ever stepped aboard a ship. Nor by music, though his fingers, though not so graceful as his father’s, could pluck and strum clean chords, clear notes from lute and cithern and a family of the viols, and he could raise a deep voice to sing a part at sight.

  Not trivium or quadrivium, not tags of the ancients or mysteries of sciences shaped Wat Ralegh. Within the roaring boy was always the child who had learned once and for all that this world—time, mutability, fortune, honor, or disgrace—is nothing more than a jest, an aside by a clown who has captured the laughter of spectators at an otherwise flawed and yawn-provoking play.

  From that belief Wat could have gone on in any number of directions. He might have turned his heart toward religion. Let all who knew Wat laugh out loud, but still he might have grown into a grave divine. But since he had health and strength and growing good fortune, he did not grow out of childhood. He was the child of this world, no other. And yet because the world was ridiculous (a boy who had yet to be truly wounded was thinking this), a theater of knaves and fools, what cared he?

  So he became a kind of careless martyr to this world.

  Ralegh did not know this, deceived, seeing the boy through some charlatan’s illusive spectacles. The charlatan was himself and his revived, undying hopes.

  Well, perhaps that should be an epitaph for every father since Adam.

  Yet he sensed that though Wat moved in and through this world like a proud horseman in a crowd of walkers, he did not know the world. Wat was, in truth, unworldly. Thus Ralegh’s manuscript of “Instructions to his son,” a manuscript wide copied and passed about. Coldly reasonable, not in extolling the wisdom of old verities, but as a chart to guide him. News of how it is possible to endure and thrive, not by impulse, but by design. Not by fortune, but through freedom. Not by chance, but by choice.

  A distillation, a cordial of his own experience in the world. An old world, sick to death, for which there is no good medicine, however honeyed and spiced, that does not have a bitter taste.

  Medicine it was, though, to help an unworldly worldling. Advice for the building up of his estate. His estate most of all. And in so doing to marry out of sane worldly wisdom and not out of fantasy and desire. To seek and keep good friends, ones who could help but never harm him. To shun the flattery of others and self-praise, which is flattery of self. For flattery is the beast that biteth smiling. To keep a close mouth and bite his tongue rather than reveal himself. To shun the weakness of poverty, and to seek riches not for their own value, but for the freedom wealth can buy. How to treat servants. How to avoid excess in fashion. To be careful of drunkenness; this specially for Wat, who possessed a mighty thirst. And only at the end, in brief sentences, Ralegh reminded him to serve God in faith and obedience.

  Oh, there were those who laughed, remarking that therein lay all the vaunted wisdom of Walter Ralegh. Never mind the formal glitter of the poems. Nor the solemn, sonorous dignity of his History of the World. Nor the practical rhetoric of one document or the other. No, they said, see how he advises his son to live, and you shall know him plain.

  And perhaps their posterity will come to the same self-pleasing conclusion from the manuscript—if any copy survive the worm.

  No matter. He had not sought the opinion of other men. Let them think as they please. It was for Wat he wrote his advice. And the paradox was that it was wasted on Wat. Who never knew the world or believed in it until he tasted the living truth of death at San Thomé. And then, lacking both wisdom and experience, he could only have been … hugely surprised. Confirmed in his own poor wisdom. In death a witness to it.

  Son teaching the father by dying. And unhinging the father, already half mad from fever. He was, until the fever left him, almost a disciple of the son. Tempted to take his own life. To let go of his suffering body and die. Not so much withstood temptation as outlived it. His flesh would not let him die. And in the end, from Newfoundland, with what was left of his men, sailed home in the high cold bracing winds of northern seas, steady on course, to keep all appointments.

  Which gesture Wat had not lived long enough to understand. Wat would have been baffled, though he would have tilted his head back and laughed at the bravado of it.

  Ralegh invested his hopes in Wat and failed. Knows how he had been doomed to fail even though Wat had not fallen and should live long.

  And all the while his sole claim to any posterity was Carew, the child of the Tower, still only a child. A child he hardly knows at all.

  So much for the wisdom of fathers …

  And Ralegh turns from the rain-beaded windows and a shattered view of Old Palace Yard, back to chamber and fire. Calls to a servant and moves to sit himself at a table. Where, according to his wishes there are paper, ink, sand, and feathered quills. And a penknife to sharpen the quills to the point that most pleases him. A mere toy, a lady’s penknife of silver. Yet sharp enough to hold a keen edge.

  Sharp enough to slash a wrist or cut a man’s throat from ear to ear.

  He sharpens quills to write, taking his time. His gown, shiny silk and with silver threads, hangs loose from bent shoulders. He puts aside penknife and quill to accept with a nod a cup of wine the servant places beside him. To sip, for the warmth of it. The servant has now lit fresh candles for him. Nearby a fire glows to fat embers. Soon the servant will heave another log and set it to growling and smoking.

  He sips wine, liquid firelight tilting and reflecting itself in the cup, and wonders what he can say to his young son.

  Long before, waiting his first appointment with an executioner, he wrote a rash of last letters and verses. Had written farewell to his wife. Through the ironies of time and chance, the letters were dispatched fifteen years too early. Nothing more to be written to Bess now.

  No, he can talk to her this evening when she comes.

  But to Carew, he must make an accounting. Must leave some words, somehow framed so as to be sustaining.

  Any father would be tempted to be well remembered and loved by an only son, even though that memory and love should cost the son crippling pain. Any father would be tempted to lay up at least that much claim to immortality. Dying, to leave a ghostly memory, emblem of himself to haunt the living. And how many fathers since Adam must have done so? Have dreamed to triumph over death and time in that literal fashion.

  He does not wish that to be his own folly. He has written again and again of the folly of men who seize the last occasion for immortality. And he has derided them for it. Not wishing to deform truth to leave behind false memory.

  Alexander the Great, of whom he wrote in his History, had done that at the outer edge of his conquests, his farmost camp on the banks of the Indus. There, before withdrawing, he ordered artificers to build huts and furniture and implements and even arms and armor hugely beyond any human size. To leave a camp which, to others, would seem a habitation for giants.

  A folly which Ralegh had ridiculed for its simplicity, but also as a grotesque emblem of the folly of all aspiring men.

  He hopes his son will never imagine he was sired by a giant.

  My son, it is the prerogative of the old to inflict upon the young
a tedious celebration of the past, spent seasons, festivals, and holidays of lost time. And as the world goes, it falls the duty of the young to hear them out or to seem to; and remains the privilege of the old to practice that prerogative, though the exercise serve only to prove the folly thereof. For the old hold no patent, license, or monopoly on wisdom, which, being mysterious and, all reasonable men will agree, invaluable, is beyond the possession of one man or another, one station or one age. For youth, though bound to ignorance out of inexperience, is not likewise condemned to be foolish. For if the purpose of the old be to transmit such wisdom as they deem they have come into, together with a history of themselves and their experience, judiciously framed and arranged in quiet afterthought, and thereby to preserve for the young the best of what has been, and so to defend them from the repetition of many errors and follies of the past, then their intent is surely foolish. It is doomed and fated to fail. The young will either listen, nodding assent and masking an honest indifference, thus learning chiefly the fine art of duplicity at a tender age, or they will listen truly, but without full understanding; as newly arrived in a foreign country, one listens out of courtesy, with much frowning concentration, to a strange tongue, the grammar of which is less than half mastered. Or, should a young man be fortunate enough to be free from need to listen to elders or heed the clucking of old ganders, whose chief claim to excellence is to have lived long enough to be unfit for anything except a stewing pot, he will stop his ears or walk away in insolence, leaving an old man to mutter at his own shadow by the fire.

  Nonetheless, with knowledge of the vanity of my purpose and some foreknowledge of its likely failure, I would seek …

  I would seek … what?

  A clumsy exercise in an antiquated style, lacking the time for revision and polish; so that even if I were not to be credited for any substance whatsoever, I might win grudging approval for virtuosity.

  Time will bleed away, an inward wound, until I truly bleed.