Death of the Fox

by George Garrett

  That she loved us and this kingdom I find remarkable. Yet she did love us and even at the last when so few loved her.

  And it is that love, my son, all these years afterwards, which has the power to transform our memory of her, of the age, and therefore of ourselves. So that we view those times gone with and through the transforming power of love. And none of us who were witnesses in flesh, will ever again have the power to give true testimony.

  We are all false witnesses. Yet the sum of our witnessing may be true.

  When I was a scholar at Middle Temple, there was a type of rascal who would haunt the porch and hall at Westminster when the courts were in session. For a sum he would bear false witness in any case. And the sign of his trade, for he might be dressed as a gentleman or vagabond, was bits of straw set in the soles of his shoes.

  I pray that if I am a false witness of my time, the transforming power of love will turn that dirty straw to gold.

  I have managed to leave you some kind of estate, by fair means and by sly. All this will be clear to you in due time. I shall not leave you penniless, to be a yoke to your mother and trouble to your kin. But, much as I regret it, I cannot leave you a tithe of the wealth which I have gambled, spent, and lost.

  I restore my esteem of myself with the hope that I may leave you a compensatory sum of imaginary gold, the gold of my love.

  But I proposed to tell you of the world I knew which was new to me once. As this world, though older than memory, is now new to you.

  New it seemed to us, then, all things shining with newness. And that was the magic of the Queen. She dazzled and delighted with seeming changes, as if to deny all our past and to celebrate the future. To those who were young it seemed as though, touched by the wand of her scepter, the world was freshly gilded and beginning again.

  A false garden it may have been, after all. But God knows it was rich and cunning.

  My son, my child, it will be difficult for you to believe all the changes wrought in this land, and worked upon the face of the land in a lifetime.

  Look to the land. Imagine a hawk’s view of it, the rolling pattern of forests, fields, and fens. Even the pattern and cut of the land has much altered. For now in the South you shall see an irregular motley for grazing and growing, enclosed with briary quickset hedges. This where once and still into my time, there were the common fields, champion fields, in long narrow strips like fat German bacon. The rule is now severality.

  And so your yeoman farmer, like your town merchant or tradesman, has come to be a kind of gentleman. Differing in distinction, at times, in that he has not yet earned arms or title and he has less debt outstanding than most gentlemen in England.

  The very color and the costume of the land has changed. Rich gold of wheat and grain where once a dozen crops grew in strips and patches. Sheep graze on fields of close green where unlucky men plowed and tilled and lived poor off the land.

  Foreigners who come here speak well of many things, but hardly ever find pleasure in our roads, our marshes and fens, and our forests.

  Our roads and paths are still barbarous. A native-born Englishman can lose his way within his own country. To know the roads of England is to wish devoutly to avoid them. Perhaps one day this will change, too.

  It did not suit the Queen or her government to encourage easy idle travel in those times. Nor to offer any more broad Roman roads to invading armies.

  Our marshes and fens are many, but they were many times more then, before the Dutchmen came, fleeing from wars, and taught us how to drain them.

  The forests dwindled much in my times. Picked for the masts and timbers of ships. Plucked for the building of houses, for floors and panels, stairways and railings, and for the joinery to fill our rooms. Cut and hewn to make bracing for mines and to make machines. Burned to make charcoal. Consumed to ash in thousands of fireplaces where once there were only open hearths in halls. Gone up in the smoke of thousands of chimneys where once a hole in the roof served all but royal blood.

  When I was young old men were saying that our smokeless halls and houses were exacting the price of English vigor. As if our strength came into being like the flavor of West phalian ham. I’ll only grant them that cloudy smoke may have spared them the odor of each other and of the animals that shared their houses with them.

  From the forests look to the trees which grace this land, offering a wonder of blossom in springtime and pools of shade in summer and harvest. When I was a lad we had an army of English trees—lime tree and holly, buckthorn, maple and wild pear, hawthorn and dogwood, elder and ash, the great oaks, the Cornish elm, birch, beech, willow and poplar, and not to forget, most English of all in its twistings upon itself, the yew tree.

  All these remain.

  But where you look now, growing as if they had been here from the first week of Creation, you will see, for instance, chestnut, tulip, walnut, horse chestnut, sycamore, cedar, laburnum, locust, the medlar and the bay, all of them new in my own times, each brought from foreign climes and planted here. Making this place their own. Yet the green of their leaves and the shape of the shade they cast is new to an old man.

  And when you go to some great house in the country, or perhaps, with good fortune, come to hold one of your own, you will find growing there oranges and lemons, capers and wild olives, trees and herbs from the farthest places of the earth.

  I am pleased to see the mulberry trees which the King has planted, not far from where I write now, are prospering. I think, though, that he planted them to feed worms and make silk. I fear the King will go naked if he gambles on English silk.

  Now come closer to the houses. Look to their gardens. Not the marvelous gardens of Theobalds or Gorhambury or, yes, Sherbourne. But consider the common English gardens—kitchen garden, herb garden, flower garden.

  I pray neither famine nor misfortune shall cause you to want for good English meat, that you shall always be able to answer the growls of your stomach with native beef, bread, and beer. But fancy them or not, you shall find growing common here such newfangled things as the asparagus and artichoke, carrots, beetroots, French peas and beans, cabbages and watercress.

  You know our English fruits and berries, the delights of our apples, cherries, pears, and plums. But you know as well the taste of the melons—the sugar melon, musk melon, pear melon. All new in my time.

  I myself have introduced some things into this country. One of these is the pineapple. Which our King so relishes he says it is a fruit fit for kings alone. I wish he could have seen the naked Indians with paint on their faces eating it. Or our seamen, who stuffed it like bread.

  You will eat the meat of the potato and the new potato. The new potato is adequate when roasted with good rich marrow and well spiced and sugared. Boiled it is an abomination!

  But before you enter a yeoman’s house, glance at the flower garden. Which his wife keeps for her salads, medicines, perfumes, and cordials, sweetening and savor of many things, and, indeed, more and more with these years for the pure bright useless pleasure of them. And ever among those flowers she grows and tends will be the invaders who now make much glory in our English springtime: daffodil, crocus, hyacinth, French cowslip, saffron flower, for examples.

  Nearby, her plantings of new herbs would make a whole book unto themselves.

  And if he is firm in prosperity, yeoman landholder or city merchant or tradesman, you shall find he has his pleasure garden for the idle time after dinner or after supper on a summer evening. He will have sweet, various hedges there, bowers made from twined branches of fair trees—lime tree, willow, whitethorn, maple, elm. Graveled walks to wander. Flowers growing beside them and not as before on raised beds of board or tiles or bones. He will have lavender and sage put there, camomile and rosemary. And he will turf a path or alley, putting down wild thyme, mints, and burnet, which, stepped upon, tincture the air with scents.

  Come closer to his house. Built in the fashion and the stuff of his county. In Devon he will have neither stone nor ti
mber to do much, but he will smooth over his old wattle and daub hive with a lime plaster. His door will be well made and carved, inviting, not defending. He will have windows squared off and wide, not narrow and pointed as they once were. And where he once looked out dimly, if at all, through thick sheets of horn, close latticework, or oiled linen, living within a lantern, as it were, now he lets in sunlight by day through windows of glass and brightens the early night with his own lights; tallow or wax candles now, seldom stinking and stuttering rush ends dipped in raw fat.

  Enter and see where once he had one high room for the family and animals together, he has made a ceiling and partitions, and there are many rooms. And he has put his animals out into barn and sheds. He has covered earthen floor with stones or board. If he has no woven matting, you will find he has strewn the floor with rushes and his wife has sprinkled these with rosemary, sage, and saffron.

  Our late Queen favored the scent of meadowsweet in her chambers. To remind her truly of the country.

  You will see his walls are well plastered, brightened with painted or stained cloths, patterns painted there, and some pithy posy from a book, as proud as any nobleman’s motto.

  He invites you to share his dinner. Where there was once a place to put up the trestle table and chests to sit upon, he has a standing table well made of good ash, elm, oak, or walnut Your host has a chair at the head of the table, and you sit on a joint stool which, if it lacks bags or cushions to comfort your bottom, will at least have cloth or leather covering.

  Look at the table. He has a knife at your place where not long ago even the richest gentleman expected you to bring your own. His old treen platters are gone. You are served off of pewter or even plate. His wooden spoons, once so carefully carved on winter nights by the fire, sitting on a chest where now he has the fine wainscot bench, are gone too. He eats with pewter and silver. Wooden bowls and earthenware crocks have all but vanished. His ewer and basin are brass. His salt cellar, over which he bends his head to say grace, is likely to be silver. His wine bowl, also silver, sits on the buffet nearby, winking bright, together with some pieces of good plate, and perhaps some glasses too, surely cups for wine and beer and ale where once he had horns to drink from.

  If your drink is beer, you will call it English. But it is new enough. I have no trouble remembering when there was only ale and (so fine in Devon!) cider to drink. If he has wine to offer, it will be muscadel or malvesey, claret, Canary, Greek, or Italian whites of many kinds, bastard, with sweets and spices, or plain.

  Here we are joined together. For you and I both take it for indisputable truth that all fit wine comes from other countries. And so it is; for there is scarcely one good vineyard in this kingdom. Yet when I was a boy your age, I yawned, listening to old men praise the virtues of the wines the English monks made before King Henry turned them out.

  Where the yeoman ate bean bread and oat bread or, in bad times, a bread of acorns, he serves you fresh baked rye or barley bread in little loaves. And for an occasion may serve white wheaten bread.

  Where once he filled himself and his guests with windy English broad beans, marrow, and oats and the drippings, you will have beef and mutton and veal in plenty, with chicken or the wildfowl, such as quail or partridge or pheasant, and oysters in season, and carp, trout, and perch; sometimes a brace or so of wild hare which he has coursed with his own greyhounds, swift and silent. Sometimes the sweet flesh of small birds taken by his own falcon.

  You will have a salad of greens and herbs and fruits and flowers. And to finish there will be a sugarloaf and some kissing comfits and suckets his wife has made.

  After dinner you may retire to his garden. Or in cold and rain you may sing together or pick at a cithern. He may read a book for pleasure and instruction and likewise his wife.

  This man’s grandfather could neither read nor write. His father read painfully slow, aloud from his Scripture and Common Prayer, following a blunt and calloused finger word by word across the page. Now he keeps books in a chest. He can write a letter on paper and keep his own accounts. His wife can read to herself. Already their children are pleased to correct their errors and to astonish them with the tags of Latin they have learned at school.

  Once, even in prosperous times, leather, russet, and kersey were his costume. And still you will find him too shrewd to follow too close the model of the Court and go out in all weathers in silks and satins. Yet he is not ashamed that he owns some fine clothes of the best stuffs. And these he will wear for feast days, holidays, and fairs.

  Also his wife, though she seems modest enough in foil to any city lady, still must have her starched collars, her ruffs and cuffs, her proud and useless apron of Flemish lace, scented gloves of kid or suede, and little velvet shoes. Except for the sparks and embers of jewels, she’s as grand as any lady of the age before.

  Both will have hats of velvet, fur, or of Dutchwork felt. His brogues with a hundred hobnails have been discarded for boots of leather and fit for riding as well as walking. And so you will see him sitting an amble or a hard trot as well as any chevalier, riding not our scruffy little swayback native English horses, but one of the foreign horses, now as native as our own—the small swift Barbary; the Neapolitan, gentle and courageous; the proud Spanish jennet; the strong and enduring Almaine, the spirited Frieslander; the Hungarian of most expert hard trot; and lately the racing Galloway nag in honor of our King. To find an old English great horse you must go to the tilting yard at Westminster, where they are kept, together with other quaint customs of our barbarous knights of long ago.

  This yeoman and his wife take their dalliance, ease, and sleep in a chamber with a feather bed, their sheets sweetened with fresh herbs and their cedar linen chests bulging, kept fresh with sachets and sweet bags made from her herbs and flowers. And she paints her face and reddens her lips and perfumes her flesh like a lady. Their chamber is clean enough, the Jordan pot emptied daily in the jakes, deep and distant from the house, where there was once an open steaming dungheap close by. And the jakes is kept clean and emptied by a laystow man and not by the master.

  His father had a pallet on the floor. And his grandfather jostled pigs for a place in a pile of straw and used a smooth log to pillow his head.

  His grandfather sweated and toiled the whole year around, bent and stooped and old even before his prime. In summer he watered the land with his sweat. In winter became a snotty nose, with fingers and toes made of frozen turnip. Though he and his servants labor hard and long, he has a full tithe or more of the year now for feasts and holidays, fairs, and church ales. In spring he can pause in his labor and sniff the sweet new air and look upon the season with pleasure.

  This very idleness, the leisure to pause from labor and enjoy some pleasure, is altogether new, my son.

  The yeoman can while away hours hunting or fowling or angling. He can hunt the cunning hare as well, indeed with more freedom and ease, as the King. He can raise bassets and beagles and have his pack of hounds. Though he may follow old country custom and go out fowling with net or lime or pitfall, you will not find him armed for the sport, as he was in my youth, with a stone bow or bird-bolt. He carries a caliver and uses it as well as a soldier.

  To speak of weapons: In my youth he was a sword and a buckler man. Now he will practice with rapier and pick his own style, as it pleases him, from a book, if not a fencing master. He can be a perfect French, Italian, or Spanish swordsman. And you, my son, if you desire to learn the old art of sword and buckler or the broadsword, must seek out a master in London and pay him well to teach you.

  According to our law this yeoman keeps bows and arrows and must go to the butts and try his skill with the others. But this is a sport now, which, still in my youth, was called a weapon of war. He will obey the law, more or less, but only for pleasure and exercise and perhaps to set example for younger men who might otherwise find more solace in tavern ale, in dice and cards.

  You will find some pairs of cards in his house, and he and his wife p
lay with them, not primero perhaps, which requires the cultivated leisure of a Court, but surely triumph, gleek, mann and ruff and suchlike games. They may not play chess, but will be fierce at backgammon. Who, a little time ago, knew no such games and could not tell the jack of hearts from the king of diamonds.

  They all play at bowls and quoits, nine holes, and shoveboard with their Edward shillings.

  On holidays he will watch the young at their rowdy games of cudgel play, their wrestling and running and the riding of the quintain, where many a rustic will find his skull clouted and himself knocked arse over heels out of his thin saddle.

  He can watch or join in the country dancing—the round, the hay, the trenchmore. Can clap his hands and shuffle his feet to the hornpipes and drums of Solomon’s jig. Will return from fair with toys and trinkets for his little children. Toys which might once have pleased a prince and still amaze and delight the father, whose greatest childhood prize was a spinning top.

  And when this yeoman dies, he will be placed in a wooden box, all draped in black, and buried with ceremony. Less than an age ago, his naked body was wrapped in a cloth and heaved like a side of bad meat into a hole while the parish priest muttered prayers.

  All this, my son, has come to be in a lifetime. And it would amaze me no less if I had never left Devon and the house at Hayes Barton.

  But many fair things are full false. And I would not, with praise for the changes, seek to disguise the scabs of failure. But I do not wish to indulge myself in thoughtless raillery either.

  To be sure, the old have always railed against all things new. And you would find me guilty of that habit, too, I venture, if it were my fortune to live long and to see you grow into manhood. My consolation against the loss of that joy will be that I can spare you the shame of an old man’s cackling.

  The old railed all my young time. And the young made faces, out of sight, when good sense forbade them to jeer back. Saving jests and stones to hurl at strangers.