The Queen's Cipher (35 page)

“Leave it alone. People are watching.”

“For fuck’s sake, Freddie, this isn’t Fortnum and bloody Masons. It’s an up-market greasy spoon full of spotty undergraduates who are always picking away at themselves.”

They were surrounded by young people talking so loudly it made his ears buzz.

He caught sight of himself in a wall mirror. No sign of the offending blemish but a furtive morning-after-the-night-before face staring back at him hoping there were no Beaufort students in the crowded cafe to observe the company he was keeping. That said his fried breakfast had never tasted better. He filled his mouth with bacon and tomatoes, chewing the rashers with a noisy relish.

Freddie shifted in his seat and felt a gratifying twinge of pain in his groin. Shouldn’t he be ashamed? They had made love again last night. It was getting to be a habit, one he not only enjoyed but seemed to need. If sex with Cheryl had become a drug it was pure Colombian cocaine.

Under the table, a hand was sliding up his trouser leg.

“Wild times, Freddie.” Cheryl loved saying his name. “I fell asleep before you’d finished telling me why Lady Elizabeth chucked Bacon. Was it a political decision?”

“Yes and no.”

“I wish you’d stop saying that. I’m sick to death of hearing clever people say ‘on the one hand this and on the other hand that.’ Give me a one-armed academic any time.”

Freddie accepted the rebuke. “I suppose the final straw was Bacon’s arrest for non-payment of a debt. He was released from prison immediately but it sent out the wrong message. Marriage was a business affair and Francis Bacon didn’t have the credit for it. Anyway, on the evening of November 2nd 1598, with her father as the only witness, Lady Elizabeth Hatton secretly married Bacon’s arch rival, the Attorney-General Edward Coke. It was a strangely rushed affair. The bride was twenty six years younger than the groom, who already had eleven children, and the couple had nothing in common. Naturally, people thought the worst. Why should a rich and beautiful young woman marry an ill-tempered obstinate bookworm like Coke? There could be only one explanation. Someone had been ‘inward’ with Lady Hatton.”

“And did the Lady Elizabeth have a child?”

“Yes, she had a daughter called Frances but, before you jump to conclusions, the baby was supposed to have been born years later.”

“Oh yeah, I’ve heard that one before,” Cheryl snorted. “Fake birth certificates were all the rage in our tower block. It was a child support fiddle.”

Freddie rolled his eyes but said nothing.

“Supposing Elizabeth was in a delicate state,” she persisted, “why turn to an old geezer like Coke? Was he the only one willing to take damaged goods?”

“That’s where the politics came in. Lord Burghley had died and his son Robert wanted to take over from him. A match between his niece and the Attorney-General cemented his power base.”

“I’m surprised a feisty piece like Lady Elizabeth let herself be manipulated in this way.”

“Strange as it may seem, women had little say in those days. A wife was supposed to yield her body, name and worldly goods to her husband but not Lady Hatton; she kept her name and would only let Coke into the house by the back door. As for the wedding ceremony, it took place at night, without banns or licence, a triple breach of the marriage canons, for which Coke was prosecuted in the ecclesiastical courts, leaving him to make the humiliating plea of ‘ignorance of the law.’”

He wiped his mouth on a paper serviette. “The marriage was a complete disaster with Coke beating and starving their daughter Frances to make her marry Buckingham’s elder brother and Lady Hatton bursting into Bacon’s bedroom to get the Lord Keeper to issue a warrant against her husband.”

“Oh, this sounds great. I want all the sordid details.”

He looked at her thin body, hunched over the table: collar bone and shoulders protruding through the fabric of her blouse. “Sorry to disappoint you but I’ve got a class soon.”

“Before you go,” she pleaded, “tell me this. Do you think
Love’s Labour’s Lost
reflected Bacon’s miserable state of mind after losing his lover?”

Freddie shrugged. “My gut reaction is no. I’m pretty sure the play is autobiographical but not in that way.” He didn’t want to tell her what he was thinking. Not yet at least.

“What does that mean,” she moaned. “Come on Freddie, cough up.”

He’d had enough of her playful bullying. “Shut up Cheryl, and I’ll take you to Stratford to see the damned play for yourself. Let you judge what it’s really about.”

“Our first date,” she said happily.

The cryptogram you found in the First Folio is all the proof I need that Francis Bacon was Shakespeare’s silent partner. I had felt certain he was the sole author but, as the old proverb says, half a loaf is better than none. The key question hasn’t changed though: Why a man supposedly greedy for political power and personal glory would behave in such a self-effacing way when it came to his playwriting.

The Bacon Society has been trying to answer the question for more than a century without much success. Various explanations have been offered, none of them wholly convincing: it was thought undignified for a member of the aristocracy to write for the common stage; histories written by influential courtiers might be construed as commentaries on contemporary events, making them politically dangerous; Bacon’s mother was a ferocious Puritan who would have been mortified to learn than one of her sons was producing plays to be performed in such a den of depravity as the commercial theatre. The best of these arguments, to my mind, is the Rosicrucian one. Francis shared the Greek belief that drama could transform human understanding. He called play-acting ‘a kind of musician’s bow by which men’s minds may be played upon.’ In other words, theatre audiences could be educated while being entertained providing the teacher remained out of sight. And this, in essence, is the Rosicrucian blueprint that Bacon set out in his novella New Atlantis in which a country is governed by an invisible college of philosopher scientists. Rosicrucians also believed that drama could be a potent form of mass communication.

There is, however, another explanation for Bacon’s anonymity which I advance with some reluctance. I’ve never been a fan of the royal birth theory. The Baconian movement prospered until the occultists took over. The Detroit dentist Orville Owen had a dream commanding him to construct a great cipher wheel which revealed that Bacon was the son of Elizabeth and Leicester and that kicked things off. The most influential of the royal birth crazies was the spiritualist Alfred Dodd who churned out books about a tormented Tudor heir deprived of his birthright and martyred by an evil state. Absolute tosh, I thought. Yet Dodd may not be such a crackpot after all!

What has forced me to revise my opinion is the unique book I acquired at auction. I showed it to you and Dr Dilworth when you first visited me. Do you remember the genealogy with the thumbnail sketches of each English monarch’s reign since the Conquest together with their coats-of-arms? The work was done in Bacon’s Twickenham scrivenery and is of an extremely high standard with immaculate penmanship and beautiful blazonry. A gift fit for a queen you might think, which was precisely Bacon’s intention. He had the genealogy prepared in 1593 as a New Year’s gift for Elizabeth. He had fallen into royal disfavour by speaking out in Parliament against a triple subsidy, a higher level of taxation than had ever being levied on the English people in the past. Denied access to Her Majesty’s presence and anxious to make amends, Bacon gave the book to the Lord Keeper’s secretary Morgan Coleman in the hope that his master, Sir John Puckering, would pass it on to her. What makes this genealogy truly remarkable is its hidden gematria. The sheets are unnumbered but Queen Elizabeth’s own potted history and coat-of-arms had been placed on the thirty-third page. At first glance, it appeared as if the rest of the codex was empty, which seemed very odd indeed, until, on closer examination, I found the Bacon family coat-of-arms on a sheet near the end of the volume. The sheet was the sixth-seventh in the genealogy. This cannot have happened by accident. Bacon had used his personal number counts to link himself with Queen Elizabeth, almost as if she had played some part in his christening.

This set me thinking about something he said to the Queen: ‘I see you have withdrawn your favour from me, and now I have lost many friends for your sake: I shall lose you too. You have put me like one of those that the French call ‘enfans perdu’ ... into matters of envy without place, or without strength.’ A lost child is a very evocative image, don’t you think? At various other times he likened himself to a hawk tethered to the royal wrist and a withered branch of Elizabeth’s ‘roots’, while in a personal prayer he thanked God for ‘keeping me still in thy fatherly school, not as a bastard, but as a child.’ Finally, and this is something I’ve only just learned, Sir Nicholas Bacon never entered Francis’s name in the Bacon family genealogy.

If Bacon was indeed Queen Elizabeth’s love child it would help to explain why he kept his playwriting a secret. If the nobility felt it was beneath them to write for the theatre then a prince certainly wouldn’t do so, especially if he was a Rosicrucian who believed that good work should be invisible.

I wish I had never sold the Morgan Coleman to Duncan. I was strapped for cash at the time. Now the codex is lost: burned to a cinder in the bookshop fire. But I wouldn’t want to ignore its message.

What do you think?

THE CHRISTMAS COMEDY

The ambassador had had to wait for his audience. Now he stood in the Privy Chamber not knowing where to look. Frenchmen were not easily embarrassed and Andre Hurault de Maisse had witnessed many surprising things during his long career in diplomacy but not a half-naked Elizabeth Tudor. She was wearing a black taffeta dress open to the waist. Below this dress was another of white damask, also open to the waist. He could see all the way from her breasts to her belly button: in short, too much royalty for comfort.

He had expected to encounter a refined, self-possessed woman with a will of steel; not a thin-faced old lady in a red wig pulling at her dress with fluttering hands. Was this how the English queen received foreign envoys or was she flirting with him? He knelt to kiss her hand, glad to take his eyes off her décolleté, but she ordered him to rise and hugged him in both arms, apologising for not having seen him earlier. She had been indisposed and near to death. This was the opening gambit in an audience that was almost as strange as her appearance.

De Maisse was here to negotiate a Spanish ceasefire. As a Catholic convert, his royal master Henry IV wanted to bring peace to Europe and hoped his most accomplished diplomat might win Elizabeth over. But the lady was not for turning. She pouted her lips, heaved her bosom and talked incessantly, covering all manner of subjects, from dancing to music, from Catholic plots to Philip II’s preparations for another Armada in 1598. She told him King Philip had tried to kill her fifteen times. “How the man must love me!” said with a wry smile. Religion was her biggest problem and yet the differences between men were of slight account. What really mattered was the love of her people. On and on she rambled while de Maisse struggled to get a word in.

“I have so much enjoyed our conversation, ambassador, but we must leave it there. I have a play I must attend in Wolsey’s Great Chamber. I believe you have received an invitation to our Christmas revels.”

“Indeed so, your Majesty, I look forward to seeing Master Shakespeare’s latest comedy.”

“It has a strange alliterative title, don’t you think?
Love’s Labour’s Lost
doesn’t sound much of a comedy to me. We shall see. Now, I must summon my ladies to prepare me for this evening.”

The French diplomat backed out of her presence, bowing as he did so, only to collide with three attractive young women carrying gowns and robes.

Two hours later, just before dusk, Queen Elizabeth reappeared in a silver gauze gown with slashed sleeves and skirts of white and crimson brocade. It was one of the three thousand dresses she possessed, many of them white, her favourite colour because it symbolised virginity and purity. She was accompanied by the Lord Chamberlain and her privy councillors and, on passing through the apartment where De Maisse and a Venetian envoy were waiting, graciously added them to her retinue, according them high status behind Lord Burghley and the Earl of Essex.

The sight of a young girl scattering rose petals before the royal procession was the cue for the trumpeters to begin a brassy fanfare in the Great Hall. Courtiers in silks and velvets sank to their knees beneath starched lace ruffs, peascod belly doublets and puffed breeches, trying not to stab each other with their ornamental swords, while ladies curtsied as best they could in stiff gowns, petticoats, wired farthingales and corsets. The awkwardness of this ritual brought a smile to Elizabeth’s face. It might be funnier, she thought, than the play they were about to see.

As musicians played soft string melodies in a vaulted alcove and the setting sun created diamond patterns on the hammer-beam roof, the Queen wafted through the torch lit hall and into the adjoining Great Chamber which was the most intimate theatrical space Whitehall had to offer. With its lower ceiling, wooden floor and woven tapestries it had better acoustics than anywhere else in the palace.

A curtained-off stage had been erected on a high platform in front of the fireplace while, facing it, in the centre of the room, was a canopied golden throne surrounded by stools and benches for the Queen’s invited guests. After Elizabeth had taken her place, the audience was seated according to title and rank. Beneath the elevated throne, a richly embroidered stool was reserved for Essex, newly restored to royal favour and, according to palace gossip, about to be made Earl Marshal of England, with the two foreign ambassadors and the great lords grouped on stools around him.