The Queen's Cipher (10 page)

“Now, tell me this, Dr Dilworth,” Strachan said. “Why did Bacon sign his name with the letter C beneath it and why did he add a crescent C to his family coat of arms?”

Sam didn’t have to think. “It’s gematria. C is the Roman numeral for 100 and 100 is the number count of his name. Francis adds up to 67 and Bacon to 33.”

“Exactly so, and when Standen mentions ‘100’ in his intelligence report he’s referring to Francis Bacon. Bacon was proud to have the perfect three figure number as his codename. It was a vanity thing. And there’s something else I need to tell you.”

“Go on then.”

“The Elizabethan satirists Joseph Hall and John Marston used this knowledge to ‘out’ Bacon as the hidden writer of Shakespeare’s
Venus and Adonis
.”

Freddie gave an involuntary gasp. He had heard of Hall and Marston but not that they had had recourse to a Hebrew number system in their satires.

Sam was the first to speak. “Explain that to us.”

Their host was eager to oblige. “Hall called the concealed poet Labeo. Do you see why?”

“Labeo is a five letter word with a number count of 33,” she replied evenly. “Just like Bacon.”

“Couldn’t that be a coincidence,” Freddie inquired.

“It’s not,” Strachan snapped. “The real Labeo, Marcus Antistius Labeo, was a lawyer in imperial Rome who possessed a towering intellect and had fallen out of favour at court for speaking his mind – just like Bacon.”

“Do we actually know that Hall and Marston had
Venus and Adonis
in mind,” Sam asked.

The actor pulled a tiny volume out of a pocket in his shorts. In his 1597 satires Hall had scourged the evils of his day, including the craze for erotic verse. He was particularly harsh on Labeo for using hyphenated words as epithets.
Venus and Adonis
was full of double-barrelled adjectives such as ‘purple-coloured,’ ‘rose-cheeked’ and ‘sick-thoughted.’

“Marston was even more explicit,” Strachan explained. “In
The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image
he parodied lines from
Venus and Adonis
and shed crocodile tears for their hidden author who was ‘not mediocria firma’ from Hall’s spite.
Mediocria firma
was the Bacon family motto. No one else had this motto.”

Freddie and Sam swapped glances. Their zealous host had made a truly compelling point.

Strachan lifted a scatter cushion on the settee to reveal a vellum covered volume. “In another of his satires, Marston criticises the silent writer, whom he now calls Mutius, for ‘wanton skips’ that sit badly with his ‘graver speech.’ He also mentions Mutius’ ‘true judicial style’ and says ‘his silent name one letter bounds.’”

“‘Thy true judicial style’,” Strachan apostrophised, slamming the book shut as if to trap Mutius between its pages. “The anonymous poet is a lawyer whose measured speech contrasts sharply with the rhetorical devices and eroticism of
Venus and Adonis
and whose ‘silent name one letter bounds.’ In other words, Francis Bacon, the Queen’s Counsel. You see, Dr Brett, the truth will out.”

At that moment Freddie found Strachan insufferably arrogant and longed to take him down a peg or two. “In my experience,” he said, “there is no one truth. The truth is what each individual chooses to believe and that only deepens the mystery of what really happened in the past.”

“You think so?” the actor raged. “We’re talking about a literary lawyer whose name has a number count of 10, 50 or 100 to create the Roman numerals X, L or C. Well, none of them do – not Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, Michael Drayton, George Peele or Thomas Nashe. But I’ll tell you what does have a count of 100, Kinsayder, the pseudonym under which Marston wrote his
Metamorphosis
.”

“I think it’s time for some wine.” Antonia’s suggestion lowered the temperature in the room. She picked up the coffee things and disappeared into the galley to see what Tesco’s had left in their last delivery.

There was a temporary lull while Strachan got his breath back. “What’s also significant is Marston’s use of the adjective ‘true’ in describing Mutius’ style. Can you guess why?”

Freddie hated being patronised. “There was a short-lived craze for erotic verse based on Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
,” he said curtly, “and they came out of one cultural milieu, the Inns of Court. Writing one of these narrative poems might be considered a false judicial style.”

Strachan turned to Sam. “Wasn’t this a strange thing for Shakespeare to cut his teeth on?”

“Now you mention it, yes, it was,” she agreed. “This kind of lascivious poem was what you might expect from an inbred gathering of rich, fastidious young men who were experimenting with sex, but not a natural style of writing for a country boy to master, particularly when he was heterosexual.”

Antonia returned with a bottle of wine and a snack lunch consisting of steak sandwiches with hot chilli sauce and what appeared to be baked semolina dumplings. During the meal the conversation turned to mundane subjects such as the disadvantages of living on a houseboat. Strachan took no part in the somewhat stilted small talk and drank a good deal more than he ate.

Eventually, his patience wore out. “So, Dr Brett, have I convinced you that Hall and Marston were the first exponents of the Baconian Theory.”

Freddie ignored the question. “I see it this way. If Bacon had been writing poetry under the name of Shakespeare and Hall and Marston blew his cover, wouldn’t he have tried to silence them.”

“And that’s precisely what happened,” Strachan replied triumphantly. “The Archbishop of Canterbury ordered Hall’s and Marston’s satires to be burned. Whitgift had been Bacon’s tutor at Cambridge and was a family friend. Quite a coincidence wouldn’t you say.”

“But that’s all it is,” Freddie replied. “If, as you claim, gematria was all the rage in Elizabethan society why haven’t I heard of it before?”

Strachan raised an eyebrow before taking a small badly-wrapped parcel off the teak coffee table. “Here, take a look at this,” he said, ripping off the brown paper to reveal a slim book with a brown leather binding. “I’m thinking of selling this manuscript to my chiselling book dealer to pay our bloody council tax. What we’ve got here is a unique document; a genealogy that actually came out of Francis Bacon’s Twickenham scrivenery.”

Sam frowned. “You’re saying Bacon had his own workshop.”

“That’s right. He hired scribes to copy out his works in longhand. Bacon called them his ‘good pens.’ This genealogy was prepared in 1593 and was meant to be a New Year’s gift for Queen Elizabeth. As Bacon was out of favour at court he gave the book to the Lord Keeper’s Secretary Morgan Coleman in the hope that Sir John Puckering would pass it on to the Queen.”

The codex was a genuine work of art. Exquisite calligraphy and blazonry had gone into telling the brief history of every English ruler since 1066. Freddie flicked through its pages. “These potted histories are lifted from Holinshed’s
Chronicles
- so what.”

Sam held the codex up to the light. “Here’s an oddity,” she said. “There are three quires of paper in the book and yet Queen Elizabeth’s own history appears in the middle of the book. Why so many blank pages. And they’re unnumbered too.”

She began to count from the front of the book. “Oh, I get it! It’s concealed gematria. Elizabeth was the twenty-third crowned head of England since the Conquest but her entry appears on the thirty-third page, the numerical value of Bacon’s name.”

“Don’t stop there,” the actor said airily. “The next thirty-three pages are empty before the Bacon coat of arms appears on page 67. Satisfied now, Dr Brett?”

The logic was inescapable. Bacon had used gematria in a highly personal way. But to what end? Why had he identified himself with Queen Elizabeth? The questions were stacking up.

But Freddie couldn’t bring himself to admit as much. “Even if this Hebrew number code was in common use, it doesn’t mean Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s poem. It simply indicates that Hall and Marston thought this might be the case.”

Sam’s hand brushed his knee. It was a warning signal. “I’d like to see Hall’s satires, Mr Strachan,” she said brightly.

“Gladly my dear,” he passed her the pocket-sized book.

Leafing through its brittle pages, her eyes shot up. “Here in the second book, the opening lines: ‘For shame write better Labeo, or write none, Or better write, or Labeo write alone.’ Hall is saying Labeo wrote with someone else, presumably Shakespeare. He’s talking about a writing partnership.”

For a few seconds their host appeared flustered. He was as wedded to the notion of a single alternative Shakespeare as orthodox scholars were to the idea of a solitary genius from Stratford. But he rallied quickly.  “I don’t agree. The basic thrust is that Bacon should write under his own name. Have you ever read John Aubrey’s
Brief Lives
?”

“Not recently,” said Freddie gulping down some wine. “What did the old gossip say about Francis Bacon?”

“‘His Lordship was a good poet, but concealed, as appears by his letters.’”

Strachan was like a terrier with a bone. Campion, Waller, Stow and Howes had all written about Bacon’s poetry. Then there was
Baconiana
, a posthumous collection of his writings, in which the editor Thomas Tenison likened Lord Verulam to a great painter who didn’t always sign his work.

“Now that’s the testimony of a man who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. An unimpeachable source, wouldn’t you say, Dr Brett.”

As the son of a rector, Freddie wasn’t prepared to concede the point. “In my experience, devout men are poor judges of human nature. Even if Bacon didn’t always sign what he wrote, that’s a far cry from saying he was responsible for Shakespeare’s plays.”

“Well, at least he possessed some of them. After his death, eight Shakespeare quarto editions were discovered in Bacon’s library, none at all in Shakespeare’s hovel. And what about the
Manes Verulamiani
, the elegies printed shortly after Bacon’s death in 1626. These verses were written by scholars, literary figures and leading clergymen and they praise Bacon for producing ‘the precious gem of concealed literature’ and renovating philosophy by means of comedy and tragedy. What do you think they were talking about?”

Sam tried to defuse the situation. “It’s really surprising how many English poets and novelists originally published anonymously – Spenser, Donne, Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Byron, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Austen, Dickens  – the list is endless. I guess the absence of an author provoked curiosity and conjecture. Sir Walter Scott even went so far as to review one of his own anonymous novels before admitting the truth.
That
I can understand but putting someone else’s name on the cover and never owning up to it seems pretty weird to me.”

The actor erupted like a volcano. “It wasn’t that unusual.
The London Prodigal
and
A Yorkshire Tragedy
were published under Shakespeare’s name, yet he didn’t write them. He was a plagiarist. He stole other writer’s work. Read what the university-educated dramatist Robert Greene had to say about him in his deathbed pamphlet.”

He had touched a raw nerve. Freddie hated any argument based on class or education. “Greene was a snob who couldn’t stand the idea that a country boy wrote better plays than he could.”

“If it was just a case of sour grapes why did Shakespeare’s backers react so violently to Greene’s pamphlet, demanding a retraction from his publisher? What did they have to hide?”

Strachan began to cough and splutter. Antonia rushed to help him. “He’s having one of his turns,” she explained. “Donald has emphysema. His oxygen tank is next door.”

By now he was gasping for air and had to be led into the bedroom.

Waiting in the cabin, Freddie was full of remorse. “I don’t know what comes over me sometimes. I shouldn’t have riled the old boy like that.”  

Antonia came out shaking her head. “Donald’s finished for the day, I’m afraid.”

Having said their goodbyes, Sam followed Freddie down the gangplank belting up her raincoat in the thin afternoon drizzle. “What did you make of that?” she asked.

“That we should keep an open mind,” he muttered. “Strachan is a zealot but what he had to say about Hall and Marston puts a different complexion on things. Here are two contemporaries of Bacon who thought he helped Shakespeare write his narrative poems and their work is suppressed. We can’t ignore that, can we?”

18 APRIL 2014

An improvement in the weather had brought a lightness of spirit to Oxford, a beeping of car horns and laughter as everyone took to the streets as if newly out of hibernation. Perched on the steps of the Martyrs’ Memorial beneath a grim redemptive message they probably couldn’t read, a gaggle of noisy foreigners picnicked early on pork pies and tomatoes while down below them, a tall, angular figure paced the streets outside St Mary Magdalen.

Encircled by the bicycle racks of the non-believers, the church was of less interest to Freddie than the wrought iron railings of the ladies lavatory; only for him to avert his gaze in embarrassment as a gowned female emerged from its subterranean depths and flapped out onto the pavement.

At last Sam appeared, looking cool and composed in a white jacket and a black and white striped skirt.

“Alright?” he inquired.

“It depends what you mean,” she replied. “I’m not a great fan of smelly johns.”

“I mean, are you ready to move.”

“Absolutely, more than ready to encounter all those dark cloisters and grinning gargoyles you promised to show me.” She had accepted his invitation to spend the day in Oxford.

“I thought we’d start off in the Broad which is the heart of the university.”

But they soon tired of sightseeing and, purchasing cups of coffee from a street vendor, walked back to Freddie’s college where their way was blocked by a burly man in a badly pressed suit.

“It’s Dr Brett isn’t it? I have something for you, sir.” He sounded like an off-duty police officer.

“You’ve been served.” A writ was thrust into Freddie’s hand.

“What does it say?” Sam peered curiously at the legal document he was holding.