Martyr (44 page)

A Few Notes

Pursuivants:
state-employed officers with the power to execute warrants of search and arrest. They were a ragtag bunch of armed mercenaries, often hastily assembled from local people, court hangers-on, legal officials, and even convicts, all made legitimate by wearing the Queen’s escutcheon. They were particularly used in hunting Roman Catholic priests and those who harbored them. Christopher Devlin in
The Life of Robert Southwell
describes them as “hounds to whom harrying women was cheaper and more sensational than stag-hunting.”

Priest holes:
hiding places built deep within the fabric of Catholic houses. The greatest exponent of the craft was Nicholas Owen, a diminutive carpenter and lay Jesuit brother from Oxford, who built many priest holes before being starved out of one himself and dying under torture in the Tower in 1606, staying silent to the end. Owen, who was known as “Little John,” was canonized and beatified in the twentieth century. One of the finest remaining examples of his work, which visitors can enter, is at the National Trust property Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk.

Intelligencers:
spies reporting to the Principal Secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, who is seen as the father of the modern secret service. His network of agents and correspondents encompassed Europe and the Middle East, yet he was expected to fund the operation himself and was so impoverished at his death in 1590 that he was buried privately at night to avoid the cost of the splendid funeral so immense a figure might have warranted.

Jesuits:
members of the Society of Jesus, a highly disciplined religious order founded in 1534 by the Spaniard Ignatius Loyola with the aim of converting heathens to Christianity. They took vows of poverty, chastity, and pilgrimage to Jerusalem (though this was, at that time, impossible). They were known for their unflinching obedience to the Pope and for their care of the sick and destitute. Jesuits soon became the “shock troops of the counter-Reformation” (well, that’s the way the Protestants saw them), sending the likes of Robert Southwell and Edmund Campion to martyrdom in England. Elizabeth I and her ministers regarded Jesuits as traitors ready to resort to assassination to restore the Pope’s authority. In 1606, the Jesuit Fr. Henry Garnet (who had arrived in England with Southwell in 1586) was hanged, drawn, and quartered having been implicated in the Gunpowder Plot.

Weapons:
Firearms were rapidly replacing the medieval crossbow and longbow. The most frightening innovation for monarchs was the wheel-lock pistol, which was replacing the matchlock. Wheel-locks had a mechanism which spun a serrated steel edge against a piece of iron pyrite, sending sparks into the gunpowder, which exploded and discharged the ball or bullet. Previously, with matchlock weapons (including the cumbersome old arquebus, familiarly known as hagbut or hackbut), the gunpowder had to be ignited by a pre-lighted taper, or match. The big advantage of wheel-locks was that they could be held in one hand, be primed and loaded in advance, and be small enough to be concealed under a cloak or in a sleeve. Ornate wheel-locks became the must-have accessory for men of substance, and whole cavalry squadrons carried them into battle, each man carrying two or more primed weapons in their hands and belts. Men commonly armed themselves with swords and daggers (a poniard is a small dagger). Guards carried pole weapons—pikes and halberds. The pike was little more than a pole with a spear head, while the halberd had a three-edged head: axe, pike, and hook.

Whores:
It is curious that the seamier side of life flourished so well at a time of great religious fervor. Southwark was famous for its brothels, which the London authorities could do nothing to control, being outside the City walls. Prostitution was illegal but bribery of constables was commonplace. Whores were often called Winchester Geese, as much of Southwark came under the control of the Bishop of Winchester. Other slang names included bawdy basket, callet, drab, punk, hobby horse, stale, strange woman, strumpet, and trug. A brothel madam was known as “Mistress of the Game,” and her clients were called “committers” or “hobby horse men.” Sexually transmitted disease—the French Welcome—was rife and, in the days before anti biotics, virtually untreatable (though that didn’t prevent early quacks devising and selling so-called cures).

Army and Navy:
Unlike the professional Spanish troops, England did not have a standing army. In times of trouble, such as the impending Armada invasion, militias were raised by the nobility from among their tenants and by the great craft guilds. Nor was the Navy a permanent fixture, but thanks to the enthusiasm for privateering of Drake, Hawkins, and others, the English had become great sea warriors. Their ships were designed to be leaner and faster than the towering Spanish galleons, which had an advantage in close combat but were easily harried and outgunned by the English at longer range.

The Privy Council:
the rough equivalent of a modern-day cabinet of ministers. During Elizabeth’s reign it varied in numbers from ten to twenty. The Queen did not attend meetings, but the proceedings were reported to her assiduously and she had the final say over matters of policy. Generally, she expected her ministers to get on with the day-today business of running the country. As well as executive powers, the Council also acted as a court when it sat in Star Chamber (the old council chamber at Westminster). Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham were the dominant Privy Council men for much of the reign.

Prison:
There were fourteen gaols in London. A wide variety of offenses could land someone there, ranging from vagrancy, debt, or fortune-telling to the most severe of crimes. The conditions prisoners had to endure depended largely on how much garnish (bribe money) they could afford to give the Keeper. They were surprisingly open, however, enabling Robert Southwell and other priests to visit prisoners and say Mass. The Marshalsea and the Clink in Southwark were seen as softer options than the City gaols such as Newgate, Bridewell, Wood Street Counter, and the Fleet. Southwell’s companion, Fr. Henry Garnet, wrote of feeling “safe from danger” while visiting prison.

Tobacco:
Tobacco was
not
introduced to England by Sir Walter Raleigh. Though he sponsored ventures to Virginia in the 1580s, he never went there himself and, anyway, tobacco was probably brought to Europe by sailors—Spanish, Portuguese, and English—as early as the 1560s, when Raleigh was still a boy.

Beasts:
Richard Topcliffe and others used the word to refer to the Pope, Jesuits, and the Catholic Church generally, because they were seen as the anti-Christ—“the beast of the apocalypse,” from the Book of Revelation, chapter 13.

Printing and newspapers:
Some historians believe that half the population of England could read by the end of the sixteenth century. Londoners, particularly, were hungry for news and bought up broadsheets (or broadsides) as fast as they could be printed. Illustrated by woodcuts and often written in ballad form, they would look very different from newspapers as we know them.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the writings of many superb historians, but a few books merit special mention for the assistance they have given me in understanding the late Elizabethan period.

Most important, I would like to pay tribute to
The Life of Robert Southwell
by Christopher Devlin, a vivid biography and history that was first published in 1956 and makes one feel as if the events described happened last week.

Other books I would particularly recommend include
The Defeat of the Spanish Armada
by Garrett Mattingly,
The Confident Hope of a Miracle by
Neil Hanson,
Elizabeth’s
Spy Master by Robert Hutchinson,
God’s Secret Agents
by Alice Hogge,
The Awful End of Prince William the Silent
by Lisa Jardine,
The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake
by Samuel Bawlf,
A Brief History of the Tudor Age
by Jasper Ridley,
The Reckoning
by Charles Nicholl,
The Elizabethan Underworld
by Gamini Salgado,
The A to Z of Elizabethan London
compiled by Adrian Prockter and Robert Taylor,
Elizabeth’s London
by Lisa Picard,
Shakespeare
by Bill Bryson,
The Master Mariner
by Nicholas Monsarrat,
The Coming of the Book
by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin,
The Englishman’s Food
by J. C. Drummond and Anne Wilbraham,
Invisible Power
by Alan Haynes,
Palaces & Progresses of Elizabeth I
by Ian Dunlop,
Entertaining Elizabeth I
by June Osborne.

I would also like to thank my wife, Naomi, my brother, Brian, and the Reverend Selwyn Tillett for their invaluable help.

About the Author

After a career in national newspapers, Rory Clements now lives with his family in an old farmhouse in Norfolk and writes full-time. When not immersing himself in the world of Elizabethan England, he enjoys a game of tennis with friends, a glass of red wine with his artist wife, Naomi Clements Wright, and village life generally.
Martyr
is his debut novel, the first of a series featuring John Shakespeare. He is at work on his second John Shakespeare novel,
Revenger

MARTYR
A Bantam Book / June 2009

Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2009 by Rory Clements

Bantam Books and the Rooster colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clements, Rory.
Martyr / Rory Clements.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90655-4

1. Secret service—England—Fiction. 2. Drake, Francis, Sir,
1540?–1596—Assassination attempts—Fiction. 3. Great
Britain—History—Elizabeth, 1558–1603—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6103.L45M37 2009

823′.92—dc22—2008048057

www.bantamdell.com

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