Death of Kings (25 page)

Well, I thought, this will make a fine tale to tell my grandchildren one day – of how I once kept distant company with Earls and Keepers of the Great Seal and the like, and was present at
the unfolding of great affairs of state – that’s to say, if I lived long enough to sire the children who’d produce the grandchildren. At the moment this appeared doubtful. The
mood in the courtyard was grim. Rapiers were being flexed, fingers pricked with dagger points.

I was right in my belief that no further indoors parley was intended for, within the space of a few minutes, Essex and Southampton reappeared on the steps in the company of some of his own
gentlemen but without the Queen’s men. At first I thought that they might have been murdered inside the house but, although there was a look of resolution on the rebels’ faces, there
was as yet no mark of bloody desperation about them. Whatever had happened to the Keeper and the Chief Injustice was probably no worse than involuntary confinement. The first shots had still to be
fired in this battle. What had occurred so far was a shadow-play, a dumb-show.

Now everything happened very fast. Essex made a sign to the commander of the halberdiers and then he and Southampton with their retinue made towards the main gates. The crowd didn’t know
whether to accompany them or to make way for them and, in the ensuing confusion, I found myself carried forward and then almost thrown against Henry Wriothesley.

“Mercury, you are here,” he said, grasping at my arm in the middle of the press. Absurdly, he sounded to my ears pleased to see me.

“My lord,” I said equally absurdly, as if we were meeting back-stage.

We were forced forward together by the squeezing of the crowd at our heels and shoulders. By this time the main gates had been opened and the whole company gushed out into the Strand. I’m
not a military man but if there was an instant when the Essexites were vulnerable it was surely as they – we – were pouring into the public highway, confined between the gateposts and
in disarray. But when I looked round the Strand, across which fell the thin sun of a winter morning, I saw only a few stragglers and a more disciplined group dressed in livery who were, I presumed,
the abandoned attendants of the Lord Keeper.

I began to think that, if the authorities were so remiss as to despatch their greatest emissaries with only a handful of unarmed servants, then they were too sleepy, too secure. Where was Robert
Cecil’s famous foreknowledge? What price Nemo’s machinations now?

I was still next to the Earl of Southampton.

“Is this your fight, Mercury, or do you come with another message from the playwright?”

“Neither,” I said, unthinking – or not wanting to be associated with this dangerous tide of men. In fact, I planned to take to my heels as soon as I spotted a convenient bend
or corner.

“Then what are you doing here? This is a dangerous place, a dangerous time.”

He looked hard at me as he said these words, with the Essexites milling all about us, shouting and crying, clasping each others’ hands, leaning against one another like drunkards,
brandishing swords and daggers so that they flashed in the sun. For some reason I felt disinclined to lie to Southampton – or maybe it was that I simply couldn’t think of anything else
to say.

“I – I am here as a witness.”

“Yes,” he said, seeming to accept what I said (which was, after all, a version of the truth and preferable to saying I was a spy). “A witness. We shall have need of those. In
how many ages hence will this scene be acted over? How often shall we be called the restorers of our country’s liberty? Yes, we shall have need of witnesses.”

It was alarming that my innocent fragment of truth was being taken so seriously.

“Keep close to me, Mercury. I may need you during the day.”

This was the last thing I wanted to hear. It would make slipping away more difficult. It would make slipping away look like desertion or betrayal. Then I thought that if I lived through this
tumultuous day, if I survived this fraught hour, I would indeed have something to report to those grandchildren of mine. More to the point, I would have a great deal to tell Nemo and so earn his
eternal gratitude – or at least gratitude enough to get me out of the hole I appeared to have dug for myself in this respect, and maybe enough to help protect the Chamberlain’s into the
bargain.

On the other hand, if fickle fortune favoured Essex and his followers, I’d be well placed to do . . . who knew what? Just well placed.

I’m faintly ashamed now to confess to these thoughts, which flashed through my mind incoherently, and in a fraction of the time it takes to read them. My main idea was still to get away,
or if that was impossible to keep my head well down.

Where was the Earl of Essex during this period? He must have been at the edge of the group because there was a sudden surge to the right – that is to the east. Southampton moved through
the press to rejoin his leader, urging me to accompany him. I might have broken away altogether at this point but it isn’t easy to extricate yourself from a moving mass, or at least to move
in the opposite direction. Besides, I felt a strange reluctance to abandon Wriothesley. I reasoned that we had not yet come to harm, and that it would be prudent to float on this stream for the
time being – or if not prudent then less dangerous than attempting to swim against it. I tried to make my way after Southampton but without being in any great hurry to catch him up, if you
see what I mean.

Thus we moved eastwards down the Strand and past Temple Bar, tramping and swinging all the while through mud and puddles with the indifference of children who have their minds on greater things
and who forget their mothers’ scoldings. While we were in the early stages of our march, Signor Noti strode along the edges of the company, urging us on with extravagant gestures and shouts
of “Avanti!” and other incomprehensible foreignisms. I could not rid my mind of the thought: so this is what it is to be part (albeit an unwilling part) of a head, a rising, an
insurrection! History’s smithy was hot. Great works were being beaten out in her forge, were they not? I wondered whether these scenes would be enacted, as Henry Wriothesley had claimed, in
centuries yet to come. I wondered whether other great happenings – such as the assassination of Julius Caesar, or the fall of the noble town of Troy – had proceeded in this lame-brain,
ragtag, half-meant fashion. Somehow I doubted it.

Now it was not so far from mid-morning and the sun beat on our heads with an unseasonable fierceness. There were some questions, shouted and whispered, about our destination. We were heading for
the City but no one seemed to know exactly where we were going. And where were the cheering crowds, the faces packed at the windows, the supporters waiting to be picked up on the way? All the noise
and the eagerness were coming from the few hundred of us who were streaming along, and not from the bystanders, of whom there were only a few – and those few seeming rather to be baffled than
enthusiastic. As we passed between St Dunstan’s and Temple Church, the number of watchers was swelled by men and women exiting the churches. But, as far as I could judge from my position at
the edge of the throng, they were gazing at us with surprise or shock, as if we were a party of apprentice boys. Believe me when I say that I took care to shout or at least to talk loud in support
of the rowdy company in which I found myself, at the same time as holding in reserve an expression of scepticism, of distance, should it be required.

This was the strangest journey I’d ever been on, I thought. Then I remembered that only a couple of days earlier I’d walked half a mile with a dead man on my back.

There were more people on the street at the bottom of Ludgate Hill, where the slope had the effect of compressing and slowing us down, but they avoided meeting our eyes or, if they did, regarded
us with outright fear and hostility. I noticed one or two mothers actually snatched up their little children and cradled them to their breasts or turned their faces to the wall. I glimpsed doors
being hastily shut. If the Essexites hadn’t been so wrapped up in their own cause, if they hadn’t still been making a fair amount of noise about it, they might have noticed the dead
silence of the streets.

Once we’d penetrated the City walls through Lud Gate it became known by some strange, unspoken process that our destination was St Pauls. The great churchyard is the heart, or navel, of
the City, and on weekdays is crowded with humanity of all shapes, mostly crooked ones. Fertile ground for the rearing of a head, perhaps. But on the Sabbath a pallid respectability establishes
itself briefly over the area. If Essex’s hope was that he would find the Sunday congregation just emerging and rather more ready to listen to his address than to a sermon, he was almost
certainly too late. The morning service must have been finished some time since. In any case the silent streets and the barred doors smacked to me of the hand of the authorities.

I confess to a wish that someone should have stepped in at that point, likely a stern but kindly parent, and stopped us in our tracks, or turned us gently aside, or told us to disperse to our
lodgings. Sunday is for home or church. This was not my fight. Even so I was quite unable to shift away from the tag-rag parade, partly from the shame of being seen to break ranks, partly through
our hapless forward motion. I wondered whether it was in this spirit that men entered battle, willy nilly.

St Paul’s churchyard was emptier than I’d ever seen it. Our low army milled about in the middle while the sun pondered us at a slant and Essex strode about, declaiming that there was
a plot to murder him and a plot to sell the crown to the Spanish Infanta. I wasn’t sure whether he was addressing us, or the handful of bystanders (who looked petrified or perplexed, as men
will in the presence of the mad), or merely talking to himself. Sweat stood out on his white brow and his face was contorted. Much of the fire had gone out of the party. There were as yet no
murmurings of dissent but the few weapons in view were carried at a somewhat depressed angle and the cries were more muted. I caught the eye of the gigantic gentleman, the one who’d told me
in a small voice as we entered Essex’s courtyard that our hour had come. He looked away.

After St Paul’s the next port of call on our mad, sun-lit progress was the house of Sheriff Smyth in Fenchurch Street. The Sheriff was waiting on his doorstep like the good host. His
demeanour, however, looked to me not like one ready to receive visitors but rather of one who would bar them from his premises. I don’t know why we were there. You might have thought it was
to lay our hands on some arms, since Sheriff Smyth was known to be half an Essexite (although, until the moment when they were actually called on, many Londoners were half-Essexites). What we
actually received from him was a drink. Perhaps to buy time, perhaps out of pity for us dry, sweaty rebels, he sent out his servants with tankards and cups of beer. When the liquor and the
containers ran out, he ordered some of his fellows to fetch supplies from the nearest ale-house. The beer was most welcome but I could not help thinking it was beside our purpose, a digression on
our journey. As we swilled and sweated in the sun, we watched our leaders conferring with the Sheriff. Then Essex entered his house and the Sheriff closed the door.

Then the moment came which told me that they – we – were defeated, when they’d barely started. No, to be precise, there were two such moments. Someone said that Devereux had
repaired to Smyth’s house not to discuss strategy or ask for support, but to request a change of shirt. Now, it was true that the day was unwontedly hot and that, as I’d already seen
for myself, Essex had worked himself up into a lather. Nevertheless, just as one shouldn’t change horses in midstream, one shouldn’t, I suspect, change shirts in mid-rebellion. It
reveals a lack of . . . some essential requirement for a successful uprising.

The second moment was this: to while away the time while his seniors were shut up with the Sheriff, shirt-hunting or otherwise, one of the Essex leaders high-handedly ordered a neighbouring
armourer to surrender some half dozen halberds which were sunning themselves in the window of his shop. These weapons were triumphantly seized upon and bandied about as if they were genuine spoils
of battle. Then I overheard the armourer, a stout tradesman and no whit abashed, ask the Essexite when he might expect payment for his goods. I didn’t hear what answer was made, but it was at
this moment – when a fat, phlegmatic shop-keeper enquired of a tall rebel when his bill would be settled – that I suspected our uprising was likely to fall flat on its face.

I didn’t hear the response, if indeed one was given at all, because at that instant there came trotting up Fenchurch Street a detachment of horsemen. Some of the Essexites threw down their
tankards and plucked out their swords, but the riders stopped well out of range. From their midst rode a brightly caparisoned figure. His costume was of a flashing richness, reds and golds and
blues catching the sun. The ostrich feathers on his hat would have kept Icarus aloft. His horse, nearly as well decked out as the rider, skittered on the cobbles.

Slowly, deliberately, he extracted from his gorgeous garments a scroll which he unfurled with the same deliberation. No one uttered a word while this was going on. We watched as breathlessly as
I have seen an audience hang on through one of Burbage’s masterly pauses. Then the herald, as his subsequent words proved him to be, cast his eyes over the mass of men gathered in the street.
I wondered what he saw through his case of eyes. A gathering of discontented individuals, some holding tankards, others with swords at half-port, sweat trickling off their brows, their Sunday
finery looking not of the freshest. Though the herald had the advantage which a mounted man always possesses over grounded humanity, I noticed that he still kept a prudent distance. Arrayed behind
him was his escort.

Then he spoke. His voice carried; it was clear and firm; sufficient prerequisites for a herald, I suppose.