Shakespeare's Rebel

  ‘On the contrary, my lord – nothing sells like notoriety.’

  ‘Well, I am pleased my death will oblige someone.’ Both men laughed, perhaps more than the jest warranted. Eventually Essex coughed, went on more softly, ‘Have you read it?’ John nodded. ‘What think you of the system?’

  Well, thought John, why not discuss swordplay? Why not? There will be axe play soon enough. ‘I think, my lord . . .’ He was about to give out his usual – that he had tried them all and that the system that worked best was the one that allowed a long sleep in an unholed skin. But then he recalled his latest times with sword in hand – in Nonsuch House. In the Irish ambuscado. Indeed, in the street with Silver and Shakespeare two years before, almost to this day. So instead he replied, ‘I think he is right. The backsword and the blow has the vantage over the rapier and the thrust . . . six times out of ten. Those are English odds.’ He shrugged. ‘Or perhaps it is that I am merely, like Silver, an old English dog myself, and cannot be about these new, foreign tricks.’

  Essex nodded. ‘Well, I am of an older age too then, Master Lawley. It is what has put me within these walls, perhaps. Ushers me to what I go to now. The new men have it with their . . . new ways.’ He sighed, pushed fingers through his thinning hair, then bent to rest upon the desk. His hand fell atop a satchel. Straightway his eyes gleamed and he rose from his slouch clutching the bag. ‘And yet, why should the new men – Cecil and his crew – have everything their own way? Why should not old virtues be rewarded? I have secured one victory in the defeat anyway. Yours.’ He thrust out the satchel. ‘Contained within is the reward for a lifetime of loyalty, sir. Take it.’

  Inwardly, John groaned. Rewards from this man had near killed him more than once. ‘My lord, with your favour, you owe me nothing.’

  ‘But I do.’ Essex pulled back the flap. There were two rolls inside, sealed in tangerine ribbons. ‘Open them. This one first.’

  John placed the satchel under his arm, took out the scroll indicated, unrolled it. Placing it upon the desk, he weighted it down with small books at top and bottom and bent to study. It was a coat of arms, beautifully drawn and painted on fine vellum. One side of the shield was held by Essex’s own hunting hound, the other by a unicorn, the fierce beast that could never be conquered except by trickery. Above them the usual broadswords did not swing but a backsword rested on a round buckler. There were bars and blazons in many colours. John did not truly understand the heraldic devices. But he could read the Latin motto well enough. ‘Absolute Fidelis,’ he said aloud.

  Essex had never enquired after his education. ‘Absolutely Faithful,’ he explained. ‘As you have ever been, John. Or should I say, Sir John Lawley. This is for you. I had the College of Heralds draw it up but yesterday. Have a care, I think the ink is still wet.’

  He chuckled, and so did John. It was a touching gesture from a condemned man with much upon his mind. But it could mean little more than the gesture. John knew that Elizabeth, furious that the earl had made more knights on campaign than she had in her entire reign, was trying to disbar them all – and conspirators made the easiest of targets.

  The doubt must have shown on his face. ‘Nay, do not fear it, John.’ Essex thrust out that square-cut beard. ‘I was her vice-regent in Ireland and it was my right to honour warriors so.’ He shrugged. ‘Yet I admit, some may struggle to get the College of Heralds to acknowledge them . . . which is why I decided to pursue yours myself.’ He grinned, pointing to the parchment. ‘Do you like it?’

  John looked at it again, in wonder now. If it were true . . . then what? As ever, he did not have a pot to piss in. As ever, he would be living on his wits – and they were waning with his age. War and whisky had taken a toll.

  Again, it was as if Essex read the book of his mind. ‘There’s something else,’ he said, with unconcealed delight. ‘It is under your arm. What could it be?’

  John took the other parchment from the satchel, broke the seal, read. ‘It is a grant of lands, my lord.’

  Essex clapped his hands together. ‘Aye! As I told you, I have spent my last weeks trying to sort out my estate.’ He gestured to the table, awash with papers. ‘Mostly I was selling what was not already mortgaged, which was little. And then I came across . . . that!’ He pointed. ‘An unmortaged estate I’d forgotten I owned. Do you read where the land is?’

  John glanced down. The writing was tight-packed but he was able to discern a name amidst the scrawl. ‘It says Zennor, milord. In the county of . . .’ He squinted. ‘Cornwall, is it?’

  ‘It is!’ Essex was shaking with excitement now. ‘In Cornwall! Your native soil!’

  It was the one great misapprehension Essex had always held of him. He would try again, this last time. ‘Good my lord, I was born and raised in Shropsh—’

  Essex, as ever, was not listening. ‘Sixty acres. I did not know I owned it and so I could not sell it or I would have. And so I can bequeath it to you.’

  He beamed. John thought to speak again, to explain . . . but it would serve no purpose, neither his nor the earl’s. For it also struck him with sudden force. He did have a pot to piss in now. Sixty acres, even in a distant land such as Cornwall, would fetch some silver, sure.

  And yet? A thought froze him. What would he spend that silver upon? Rent a slightly better hovel in Southwark? Purchase the first bottle of whisky that would inevitably come – not next week, next month, but within the year, certain, and a succession of them to follow? It might take a while to drink that amount of coin, but it would be gone eventually. Unless . . . unless there was something else to be done with this bequest? This must be scanned, he thought, looking up. Essex was staring at him.

  ‘My lord, I . . . thank you.’

  ‘’Tis the least you deserve, dear Johnnie. I only wish . . .’

  Footsteps down the hall. ‘My lord, ’tis time,’ came a voice.

  John started but Essex waved a hand. ‘’Tis only Master Ashton, come for prayer. My last moments must be spent in that.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Will you wait? Will you accompany me on one last journey . . . Sir John?’

  He nodded. ‘As far as I am able to go with you, good my lord, I will.’

  John allowed the Puritan preacher to pass him in the doorway, stepped out into the corridor. Its walls were hung with tapestries, its flagstones covered in rush carpets. Beauchamp Tower was where a special few of the condemned spent their last night on earth, and it more resembled a nobleman’s house than a prison. He suspected that the Queen’s mother, Anne Boleyn, had passed her execution’s eve there. He then realised that his own grandfather must have visited her there . . . and begun that extraordinary tale.

  The drone of prayer came from within the cell. John went to sit in an arrow-slit alcove. What would he think now, his French executioner grandfather, to see his grandson sitting there holding a knighthood and the deeds to land?

  What do I think?

  He began to work his thoughts – but had them soon interrupted by footsteps upon the stair. He looked up to see the officer who had but lately freed him, Thomas Waller. Close behind him came the man’s master.

  Sir Robert Cecil stopped dead when he saw John rising from his seat. ‘Ha! So there you are, you naughty knave. I wondered what had become of you. And here I find you. Not where I expected at all.’

  ‘Master Secretary.’ John assayed the minimum of bows. ‘Where did you expect me?’

  ‘I know that you were at the siege. Yet you did not make the tally at Newgate. And I know how.’ He glared. ‘Yet whoever you showed . . . our bargain too did not retrieve it, as the paper instructed. I should never have given you such a liberty. It was a moment of weakness. I want it back.’ He stepped closer, arm outstretched. ‘Give it me.’

  A loud shout of ‘Hallelujah!’ from the cell pulled Cecil’s gaze away. For the briefest of seconds John was able to glance at Thomas Waller. The officer’s face was as immobile as ever. Which made the small wink he gave all the more pronounced.

  When Cec
il turned back, John spoke. ‘Sir Robert,’ he said, as softly as before, ‘I no longer have it.’ He raised his voice just slightly as the other man stirred. ‘Do not fear. It is sealed and lodged somewhere safe, guarded by this instruction: that it cannot be accessed even by me. By no one . . . unless, perchance, a certain event were to come to pass.’

  ‘What event?’ snapped Cecil.

  ‘Oh, say’ – John shrugged – ‘that I was to be found, like Kit Marlowe, in a Deptford tavern with a dagger in my head.’

  John could see the fury in the man’s eyes, the words he would speak troubling his lips. Yet he mastered himself, breathed deep. ‘Do you think such a device will protect you for long? I could deny it as a fraud. And who would be believed? The Queen’s first minister . . . or a player, a noted brawler and a drunkard?’

  John swallowed. Anger would not help him. Something else might. He reached into his satchel. ‘They might, though, believe a knight of the realm.’

  Cecil glanced at the scroll John held up. ‘Do you think your knighthood will hold, sirrah? Oh yes, I know of it. Nothing the earl does within these walls goes unnoted. Indeed he boasted of his efforts with the College of Heralds on your behalf at our last interview. We have had several.’ His lips curled into a grin. ‘I should tell you that her majesty is even now at her palace of Greenwich, quill poised over the list of Essex’s knights banneret, striking them off one by one. It gives her much delight, it is said.’ He nodded. ‘So you should consider the fate of one such: Sir Gelli Meyrick, my lord of Essex’s steward. He believed the least his knighthood would obtain for him was the noble’s courtesy of an axe on Tower Green. But it was stripped from him just before his bowels were torn from his body at Tyburn. The fate of all ignoble traitors.’

  Though his sword and buckler had been taken from him at the Beauchamp’s entrance, John stood straight now and placed his hands on his hips where his weapons would be. ‘Is that what you threaten me with, sir?’

  ‘I? Threaten?’ The smirk widened. ‘I do not need to threaten, sirrah. I need simply to remind. You are my creature still. Your fate in my hands. Note that, Master Lawley.’ He leaned closer, spoke softer. ‘For I will call on you one day. You may be certain of that.’ He turned again towards the cell. ‘And now to say a last prayer with the condemned. Forgiveness will always be exchanged’ – he glanced at John once more as he swept past – ‘between noblemen.’

  Waller followed, his face as stony as ever. From the cell came murmured greetings, then louder prayer. John did not sit again. He just stared into the wall and considered the Master Secretary’s words. Considered them well.

  He was not left to his thoughts for long. Prayers ended, the cell door reopened and Cecil passed him and descended the stairs without looking at him again. Then there were more boots, ascending. Within the cell they must have heard them too, for the two voices rose from murmur to ecstatic appeal.

  ‘Forgive me, O God, these my transgressions. Wash my sins away. Receive me into thy loving bosom. Amen. Amen. Amen.’

  Six soldiers rounded the corner, kept coming. The captain of the guard halted before John. ‘You are my lord of Essex’s man?’ he asked.

  He had no desire to deny him now. ‘I am.’

  ‘And you are to accompany him to the scaffold?’

  John nodded. ‘So far, I pray, and no further.’

  The guard nodded. ‘So do we all pray. Will you fetch him out?’

  ‘I will.’

  As John entered the cell, amens rang out again. Essex was kneeling, hands clasped before him, eyes fast shut. Yet they shot open at John’s tread and he could see in them just one moment of terror before a calm returned. ‘’Tis time?’

  ‘It is.’

  Essex rose, swayed, reached to the vicar at his side to steady himself. He leaned a moment, breathing deep, then looked at John. ‘’Tis not that I fear, you understand. All this praying’ – he gave a little chuckle – ‘is hard upon the knees.’ The earl took another deep breath, then released his grip. ‘Let us to it then,’ he said, and crossed to the door. In the corridor the guard had formed and they took the earl into their midst. They descended, and as they exited below, on the captain’s nod, a guard there returned to John his backsword and buckler.

  It was not a long journey. Tower Green was a patch of snowy grass disturbed by the footsteps of the witnesses who had gone before. They swiftly reached the scaffold, upon which the masked executioner stood, leaning on his giant axe.

  John followed the earl and his divine, the latter in continuous prayer, the former silent. He was focused not on the next world now, but on the moments that would precede his entry into it. A light snow was falling, melting as it landed, making the stairs they climbed slick; but Essex trod carefully, did not slip. The platform achieved, he peered down upon the small crowd, all men, each with bonnets pulled down and scarves raised high against the cold. They looked anonymous, like participants in a masque, only their eyes showing. They could have been enemies or friends – both, probably. John noted Cecil only because of the tall Waller beside him.

  Whoever they were, Essex forgave them all and any that he had ever affronted. He blamed no one save himself – for his folly, his arrogance, his delusions. He was ever prone to self-chastisement, but here he made a simple tally, a last recounting of his sins. He was the foremost defender of the Church in England. He expected no forgiveness upon the scaffold, but he prayed for it in the kingdom to come.

  ‘And this last I say to you: do nothing in this life save loyally serve her majesty. She was ever good to me and I her most ungrateful servant. May my foolish death serve her as a warning to other fools.’ He stood straighter and cried out into the snow, falling heavier now, ‘God save the Queen!’

  There was a murmured response. Essex stared at the faceless crowd for a moment longer, then turned back. ‘My cloak,’ he said softly.

  John reached to unclasp it, then untied the tangerine scarf, held that up. ‘For your eyes, my lord?’

  Essex took it, gazed at it a moment, then shook his head. ‘Nay. I will look at God’s world one last time. It will make a good contrast to His paradise that I am soon to see.’ Yet he did not release the scarf, holding John there. ‘There is one last favour I would ask of you. One that you may not be able to grant.’

  ‘Ask it, my lord, and if it is in my power, I will do it.’

  The earl pulled something from his doublet. When he held it out, John saw that it was a handkerchief. Indeed, it was the handkerchief that the Queen had given him to deliver to the earl in Ireland with her message of love. He had last seen it tucked into the earl’s boot cuff when he burst into her bedroom at Nonsuch. ‘If you ever get a chance, return this to her. Tell her . . .’ He gazed above John, snow on his eyelashes. ‘Nay,’ he continued, ‘tell her nothing. Just give it to her.’

  He pressed it to his mouth, closed his eyes, opened them, passed it over. John nodded, made to step back towards the stair. But the earl reached again, caught the pommel of his backsword, drew it an inch, held him there by it. ‘Shall we draw this good English steel, Sir John, and fight our way out of here?’ He glanced at the masked crowd. ‘Look at them down there with their bird-spit rapiers. Even Cecil sports one. Could not a pair of bold Englishmen cut them all down, like we did our enemies at Cadiz? We two, against a hundred?’

  John smiled. ‘I am game if you are, good my lord.’

  Essex smiled too. ‘Aye, you always were.’ The smile passed. ‘Would that I had died that day upon such a cause,’ he murmured. He shoved the sword back in, but kept his hand upon the pommel. ‘Farewell then, Johnnie,’ he said.

  ‘Farewell, young Rob,’ John replied.

  A nod, a last smile and the earl turned away. John descended the scaffold, moved to its front, looked up in time to meet Essex’s gaze a last time. Then Robert Devereux turned. ‘About your work, sir,’ he said briskly and, laying his head upon the block, he closed his eyes with a sigh.

  The great axe fell – three times, s
uch was the man’s ineptitude. But when at last it was off, held aloft to the guttural cry of ‘Behold the head of a traitor,’ unlike the others there who gave back before the bright spray from the trunk, John stepped forward. Blood splattered him, his cloak, his hair and face. He was not concerned about that – only in seeing that the handkerchief was fully soaked in it. When it was, he turned and made for a postern he knew from his time there, the nearest one to St Katharine’s Dock.

  The wherry was tied up where he had left it. The wherryman rose when John approached. ‘All done?’ St Lawrence asked softly.

  ‘All done.’

  ‘May God have mercy on his soul,’ said the captain, raising his eyes skywards.

  ‘Amen,’ said John. Shakespeare had lent him the money required to free the Irishman from Newgate. His traitor’s fine was heavy, though, and he had decided on the swiftest way to pay it off – he would use his strength and size and ply the oar. Will had lent him the money for that too.

  ‘Fancy a row?’ John asked.

  ‘’Tis my trade now.’ St Lawrence hefted his oars. ‘Back to Southwark? We’ll be against the tide, but . . .’ He shrugged.

  ‘Nay. With the tide.’ John pointed downriver. ‘Let’s to Greenwich.’

  XXXIX

  Last Audience

  It was an hour’s pull to their destination, even with the tide and two men heaving lustily – for John took his turn at the oars, to let St Lawrence breathe; and to distract his own mind with exercise. When not rowing, he stared at the water, and tried not to think about what lay ahead.

  Greenwich was one palace unknown to him – it contained no prison, after all. He could barely see the building for the falling snow, was only aware of a certain immensity of fluted gables and shining glass, standing in the midst of snowy fields and box-hedged gardens. The dock was just below these, the royal barge tied there. When the wherry nudged in just behind it, John climbed out, rope in hand to secure it. He had scarce straightened from that when he was surrounded by armed men.