Death of Kings (3 page)

“I do not know where you are headed.”

“You will soon, Nicholas. I am leading you to no place of treason or disloyalty, be assured of that. As I say, doubt over the succession breeds alarm and despondency. This is natural. With
some it does more. They begin to think that it is their business to fill the vacuum which will be left at the top. Not just their business but their right and their duty.”

“These are matters far above my head, sir.”

“There is a certain great gentleman of this city who has recently returned from Ireland,” he said, then paused. “You know who I mean?”

“It is the – the – Earl of Essex.”

He tapped his forefinger against his lips. “Good. I wanted you to name him for yourself. He returned from Ireland helter-skelter, thinking to save our Queen.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Don’t play ignorant. All of London knows his offences, and half the country besides.”

True enough. Essex had been sent to that troublesome island (or had badgered the Queen and Council that he should be sent) to deal once and for all with the rebel Tyrone. I had actually seen him
as he paraded through the streets with his commanders on his way northwards to embark for Ireland. The air was full of success. Victory was inevitable. But victory proved elusive. Even the expected
pitched battle never took place . . . rather a meeting of the two leaders, by a river, alone . . . and rumours of an ‘understanding’ between Tyrone and Essex. Following which, this
great gentleman conceived the idea that the Council was plotting against him and his Queen. Accordingly, he raced back to see her at her palace at Nonesuch.

“For which he was arrested and tried on a charge of treason,” I said.

“And in her great mercy, our sovereign lady did not demand the extreme forfeit. You see, Nicholas, you are as familiar with the story as any citizen.”

He paused and rose from the table and made his way to the cupboard against the wall to refill his glass. My drink was almost untouched. When he got up his flickering shadow seemed to swell on
the plastered wall and I saw that he was a hunchback. I realised then who he was, and a great gust of fear swept across my soul. I think he understood that I had grasped his identity because he
gave me time, after he’d resumed his place, to compose myself. But my hands trembled and my mouth seemed filled with sand.

“Some men are not apt for mercy,” he continued. “It merely provokes them to greater disobedience. This noble gentleman we are talking of, for example. His sovereign forgave him
for his disobedience, his importunacy, etc. All he had to do was to utter an appropriate declaration, to bind himself by a soothing promise, and he would have been allowed to retire to the country
to meditate on the Queen’s goodness. He should have struggled to bring himself within the pale. But he chose not to. We have one here who prefers to command an army rather than to command
himself.”

I nodded. Some strangled noise emerged from my throat. I was still too nervous to speak.

“Come, Nicholas. We are on the same side, you and I.”

“Yes, Master Secretary,” I managed through a tightened gorge and a sand-filled mouth.

Sir Robert Cecil, Secretary to the Council, smiled in a pleasant but slightly disdainful manner, as if he were complimenting a not overbright boy on cracking a not particularly difficult
riddle.

“Now you know who I am you can surely understand why it is better that you don’t know precisely where you are. This is one of several secure places that we use when we wish to
conduct business away from the Argus eyes of the Court. So our guests are usually brought here as if they were playing at hoodman-blind. Ignorance is safety.”

“I may not know where I am, but I can’t be any use to you if I remain in ignorance about why I am . . . wherever I am,” I said, neglecting in my urgency to be frightened of
this great and powerful man. “
Why
have you brought me here? I am altogether in a mist.”

“Well. Let me clear a little of it. I want you, Master Revill, to do some work for your Queen and your country. To the quick of the matter. I have information that, within the next couple
of days, the Chamberlain’s Men will be approached to put on a performance of a play.”

“Saving your reverence, there is nothing special in that.”

“There will be about this performance. Your Company will soon be requested to stage Master William Shakespeare’s
Richard II.
”

Ah,
Richard II.

I began to see through the mist that surrounded me not so much a glimmer of light as a darker shape forming.

“You are familiar with the play?”

“It is a fusty piece, not often performed,” I said.

“With good reason. It deals with the death of kings. It ends with the deposition of the lawful Richard and the triumph of the usurper Henry Bolingbroke. Anybody must see that a
presentation of this play now, at this moment, would be—”

“—a nice question,” I interrupted, forgetting myself.

“—a dangerous proceeding, I was going to say. But I am glad that you have such a quick apprehension, Nicholas. Yes, dangerous to all, players and spectators alike. To stage this
Richard
now is to bring fire and powder together.”

“Only a play,” I said.

“One spark is enough,” said Sir Robert Cecil. “A fool may fire a forest. Why, you know that he wears a secret note in a little black bag tied round his neck.”

“Who, sir?”

“Essex. He wears a note from James of Scotland about his neck and shows it to his intimates. He thinks his treason to be so fine that it must be displayed not once but again and again.
Well, he’ll find that the cord holding that bag round his neck will be strong enough to hold up something else.”

The smooth, even tones had left Sir Robert’s voice. His hands no longer perched neatly under the bearded chin or lay at rest on the paper-strewn table but opened and closed in the
candlelight like agitated birds.

“No matter. Essex is not your concern. He is out of your sphere.
He
will not be approaching the Chamberlain’s Men with the request for
Richard.
You are to watch for a
man called Cuffe or one called Merrick.”

“But what do they hope to gain? Forgive me, sir, I cannot see the advantage in asking for an old play to prop up a new cause.”

“Nicholas, you believe in your craft?”

“Of course.”

“In fact, I have heard that you make great claims for it. Let me see—” (and he cast about among the sheets in front of him until he found the one he was looking for)
“– What was it you once said? Ah I have it. You were talking of players, I believe. ‘We are the voice of our age. We are the mirror of the times.’ ”

“No doubt I was – my tongue was carried away by liquor, perhaps.”

I squirmed on my chair in embarrassment. Were those words mine?

They had a familiar ring.

“Those are the very words, the liquor-borne ones I mean, that it is worth paying attention to.
In vino Veritas
,” said Sir Robert. “This is beside the point. Very
recently you were in the habit of making the largest claims for the players and the playhouse. Surely you haven’t changed your mind?”

“I – no – I still think my profession to be an honest calling.”

“No more than honest?”

“Even a noble one if it helps to cast a little light onto the benighted stage which is this world,” I said defensively. “I stand by what I said.”

“Very good,” said Sir Robert. “Every man should esteem his trade, provided it be lawful.”

But I hardly heard what he was saying. Those fine utterances about ‘voices’ and ‘mirrors’ were, no doubt, the kind of thing that I was accustomed to say too often,
particularly in my early, heady days with the Chamberlain’s Company (I was all of a four-month veteran now and looked back on my unfledged beginnings with amusement), but the sentences
he’d quoted were precise and had the air of being reported from life. Indeed, they were from life. I now remembered a scene at supper with the Eliots, Sir Thomas, Lady Alice and young William
Eliot. I remembered myself, a little flushed with drink and with the elevated company, being hoist up on my own rhetoric as I made great pronouncements on the value of plays and
playing.
¹

But what made the sweat stand out on my brow was the realisation that this great man had before him a document which detailed some – all? – of my heedless words at a supper in a
private house the previous autumn. Would you care to have recalled to you what you said last Thursday morning to your wife in the privacy of your chamber? No? Or that wordy dispute with an old
school friend in the corner of a tavern? Not that neither?

Well, you may see how alarmed I began to grow as I understood that the Secretary to the Council had a record of my unconsidered words. I felt also a little anger, but that was easy enough to
hold in check. Sir Robert Cecil grasped my discomfort.

“Nicholas,” he said soothingly, “do not worry that I can quote you to yourself. Some men might be flattered. Anyway it is my business to know what people are thinking and
saying. I agree with your words on the value of plays, by the way. I believe that Master Shakespeare has put something not dissimilar into the mouth of one of his characters.”

I realised how artfully Sir Robert had gone about not only to reassure me but also to put me in my place by demonstrating that the high view which I had expressed of my profession was taken,
pretty well wholesale, from our greatest playwright. I saw how quietly, how subtly, he had been able to suggest the frightening extent of his knowledge. Why, his network of informers and agents
must be all-encompassing if he received reports on the high-flown words of a poor player at the supper table.

“But since you share my regard for plays,” he went on, “you hardly need to ask what the value of a performance of
Richard II
is to these desperate men. They plan to use
it as a fingerpost signing the way down their chosen road.”

“Yes,” I said.

“The road to treason is miry, and it helps to know that others have travelled that route before.”

“If enough travel it, it becomes well paved,” I said.

“Well,” he said, looking directly at me, “that is quick of you. I believe that I have the right man in front of me. Unlike most roads, the greater the number that walk it the
smoother and more even it becomes. So, Master Revill, that is why I require your help. To uproot this fingerpost before it gets firmly planted.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I am sorry on such a night to have kept you from your warm bed but, as you can see, these are urgent matters of state. Your mission is important . . .”

“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”

And what I understood was that this man must have in his service as many eyes as there were stars in the frosty sky outside.

It was under the stars that I was abandoned when the game of my arrival was reversed at the end of the interview. After telling me a little more in respect of the grandly
termed ‘mission’, Sir Robert instructed me to return to the lobby and wait. Again, I was grasped from behind and a blind slipped over my eyes before I had an opportunity to glance
round. Ushered back into the biting air, I was whirled through the streets, spun round and marched in the opposite direction, not once but several times. Eventually we halted. The same voice as in
the beginning, courteous, low but firm.

“We are leaving, Master Revill. Thank you for your compliance.” He spoke as if I had had a choice. His tones were soft as smoke in the night air. “Even though you might
consider this a piece of child’s play, I require you to count up to ten, let us say, when I give the word. After that you may remove your blind and go on your way.”

“Where am I?”

“Where you were, sir. Have no fear. Now you should count.”

I did as I was told and, after counting silently to ten, removed my blindfold. The dark houses rose up before me, seeming no more substantial than pasteboard against the twinkling blackness of
the sky. After a moment I was able to confirm that my captor had been as good as his word and that I was standing at the very point where I had first been intercepted, by the corner of Hart Lane.
The streets were empty. As far as I could tell from the position of the stars the whole episode had lasted some two hours or more. It was that dead time of the night when even the sots and
ne’er-do-wells have retired or fallen down in their places, and honest, hardworking folk are not yet stirred.

The entire business might have been a dream, yet not for an instant did I consider it so. I returned to my lodgings and lay awake there, unable to stop thinking of the extraordinary events of
the night and eventually falling into what seemed to be only a few minutes of strange-coloured slumber before I had to be up for rehearsal.

My mind was filled with plot and counter-plot. I had been catapaulted onto a greater stage than I was accustomed to play on. One where high and mighty conspirators disposed of whole realms, and
played with crowns, as easily as you or I might crack an egg.

As I’ve mentioned, by chance I had once glimpsed the greatest of these conspirators.

When my lord of Essex departed for Ireland, he was sent off by the London citizenry as though he was already leading his army
home
, in triumph. Victory in the field was preordained. Only
now do I see – even I, with my little knowledge of the world – that certainty as to outcomes in such affairs is rarely matched by the event. Fortune is truly a strumpet, or so she
proved in this case. However, on that March day when the Earl of Essex left for the barbarous isle there was confidence, even exultation, in the air.

I made up one of the crowd that thronged the thoroughfares along which Essex and his followers paraded. I was then newly arrived in London, a stranger to the playhouse and its kingdom in
Southwark. A stranger to my friend Nell and to Master WS and Burbage & Co. There is no creature greener than he who is newly come to the city from the country and who would not, for a thousand
pound, wish to have that green-ness revealed. So, it was with amazement that I found myself within a day or two of my arrival tumbled into a crowd that waved and hurrahed a great general. All around
us, church bells rang madly. I wondered if this were not some regular happening. Why, perhaps generals and other mighty personages rode through the streets once a fortnight! That would be something
to boast about to my untravelled parents back at home in Somerset! (I forgot from time to time that I had no home, except a plague-stricken village, and no parents either who were above
ground.)