The Queen's Cipher (7 page)

The cipher key offered two sets of numbers for the five vowels, separate numbers for short words and syllables, plus a hieroglyphic 9 to signify repetition of the previous letter.

“How did you work this out?” he asked.

“Oh, I used frequency analysis – which letters appear most often in the English language and how that might relate to the frequency with which certain numbers appear in the cipher text – and when that didn’t work, I simply had a guess. It’s mostly trial and error.”

“You’ve given the cipher a name I see.”

“Sure, I’ve called it the Queen’s Cipher because some of the encrypted stuff is about Elizabeth. Standen is describing how the Queen’s welcome for Essex was overseen by two courtiers called Greville and Williams who were skulking around in the palace corridors. Not that I know anything about them.”

Freddie had studied Tudor history at school. “I can help you with that,” he said eagerly. “Sir Fulke Greville was a kinsman of the Earl of Essex, a typical Elizabethan courtier, while Sir Roger Williams was a rather boastful Welsh warrior for whom the Queen had a soft spot.”

Sam gave him a knowing smile. “I guess you want to know what they saw that was of such a nature that it needed to be encrypted.”

“Yes please,” he said.

She picked up the photocopy of the spy’s report and read off the numbers for Freddie to jot down and turn into numbers.

44113021223435194035183822183211403412142319153591235

STANDERS/BY/SAWE/A/PAYRE/OF/BUSSES

Greville and Williams had witnessed ‘a pair of busses changed in such a sweet and amorous manner as it was a content to behold’ and the queen had scolded them for behaving like peeping toms.

“I don’t see why a couple of kisses should matter that much,” Sam sounded disappointed.

“Because they’re not ordinary kisses,” Freddie replied. “A ‘buss’ is pretty full on.”

The literature of the period contained many references to the ‘lewd practice’ of bussing. Robert Herrick had drawn a sharp distinction between it and a normal caress. ‘Kissing and bussing differ both in this, we buss our wantons, but our wives we kiss.’

Sam wrinkled up her nose. The image of a young earl with his tongue down an old queen’s throat was less than appealing. “Elizabeth was a bit old for French kissing. She must have been sixty if she was a day.”

“Honour is due, Sam. You were right to call Elizabeth a ‘cock-teaser’ in your Verona lecture.”

He thought about the prissy historians for whom Elizabeth was Essex’s ‘indulgent aunt’ and wanted to laugh. Here was proof of what they’d talked about in Verona. A little piece of history had suddenly floated to the surface. It made Freddie want to do some bussing of his own.

Unaware of the effect she was having on him, Sam began to scowl. “We can’t be sure Standen was telling the truth. He was a spy so deception came naturally to him.”

“Why lie in cipher? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I suppose you’re right,” she said, “but what has this undoubtedly fascinating piece of gossip about the queen’s love life got to do with Shakespeare? I think Bard-lite was pulling your chain.”

“I’m not so sure,” he replied. “The Standen letter also mentions secret dispatches going astray in Scotland. They must have been about the royal succession which was a touchy subject in the 1590s.”

“Tell me about it,” she said. “My Tudor history is a little hazy.”

Freddie explained that the Essex and Cecil factions were intriguing separately with James VI of Scotland who was Elizabeth’s most likely successor. What they were trying to do was to shore up their positions at court without the queen finding out about it. It was a dangerous game to play in which agents acted as go-betweens. Who knows, he said, perhaps Shakespeare had been a freelance spy for Essex just as his rival Marlowe was for Cecil.”

Sam gave him a pitying look. “That’s horseshit.”

Freddie’s eyes glinted. “One thing we do know about Shakespeare is that he was a commoner with aspirations to be a gentleman. As soon as he had money he bought himself a big house in Stratford and sought a coat of arms from the Herald’s College. He understood the hierarchical nature of Elizabethan society; how you had to know the right people to get on in life. He needed an illustrious backer but there was a price to pay for it. Powerful patrons wanted something in return.”

The Earl of Essex and his close friend the Earl of Southampton had wanted to capitalise on post-Armada jingoism by filling the theatres with stirring histories about martial valour. This would illustrate the need for strong leadership in times of war and expose appeasers like Cecil who wanted peace with Spain. Once the commercial theatre began to draw in the crowds, it was bound to be used for political propaganda.

Sam listened carefully to the argument before shaking her head. “No, I don’t buy that. If Shakespeare had been the Earl of Essex’s creature he would have been implicated in his master’s treason. Yet he got off scot-free. The judicial tribunal into the playing of
Richard II
before the Essex rebellion didn’t even call on him to testify.”

“Yeah, someone must have helped Shakespeare out. History seldom tells the whole story. That’s why we have to use our intelligence and intuition.”

“Oh, we’re back to that again. Let’s have the benefit of your inspired storytelling.”

“Don’t knock storytelling. That’s how people understand their world. There has been an upsurge in the study of narratives in the social sciences. It’s hypothetical reasoning, logic applied to information, a theory given flesh.”

“OK, I’m sorry.” Her blue eyes sparkled. “How does Shakespeare the political propagandist play? Did he feel at home in a coterie of soldiers, scholars, statesmen, spies and sodomites?”

“That’s a very sibilant sentence,” Freddie told her. “I prefer the three P’s: poverty, patronage and putting money in one’s purse. Those were the things that rocked Shakespeare’s world. He was quite materialistic, you know.”

THE IMPECUNIOUS PLAYWRIGHT

Magic might ward it off. Lucky charms could be employed. Even the physician wore a beaked mask and a dead toad around his neck. Tobacco smoking was worth a try; so too the burning of brimstone. The Church believed in the power of prayer. But whatever precautions you took, the bad air was out there, lurking in London’s crowded streets and alleyways.

The plague was hovering over William Shakespeare, driving him on in the knowledge that each word might be his last. He thought of the three Fates – one spinning the thread of human life, one measuring that thread, and the third one cutting and cancelling it with her abhorred shears. It was almost a year since the last outbreak. The disease would soon return.

As a writer he had studied the pestilence, seeking inspiration in the sudden mortality of men. He had stood in the shadows watching the iron wheels of the dead-cart striking sparks from the cobbled lane as the corpse-gatherers made their gruesome rounds. He had seen the bodies tossed into the tumbrels, God’s terrible gleaning bound for the burial pits outside the city walls, and the doors daubed with red paint. Lord have mercy upon us! Should he be spared, he would explore this recurring nightmare in one of his plays.

What might be said of this budding dramatist in his twenty-eighth year? Will was neither tall nor graceful. His hair was already thinning from the brow and what was left was an indeterminable shade of brown. But his dark gypsy eyes were far from nondescript and his sensitive hands deft enough to fashion a goose quill in a matter of seconds. Unlike the rest of his family he could read and write. Not that any two sentences looked alike as he chopped and changed as he went along. What was constant, however, was the fluidity and rhythm of his writing and the imagery he could conjure up. Lacking a formal education, he possessed a genius for words.

Scribbling away in the Rose’s tiring house, Will thought about his future. Theatres were unsavoury places, where groundlings got their pockets picked and their cocks sucked before the first interval, but it wouldn’t always be like this. Already the cheapest and most popular form of entertainment, the stage was a cockpit for conflicting ideas and those at court wanted to possess the power that lay in the playwright’s pen. As a shopkeeper’s son, he would doff his cap to the aristocracy in the sixpenny seats if they paid him for it.

Food prices had almost doubled since he came to London. You couldn’t purchase a loaf of bread for less than four pence or a plump goose for under a shilling. The cost of accommodation was also soaring. Half his earnings went on rent. Sitting in his garret one night he had drawn up a balance sheet and accepted its baleful logic. On Henslowe’s rates of pay, three plays a year would buy him a pair of stout leather boots, a linen shirt and a new jerkin with nothing left for the finer things in life like a ten shilling prostitute at Black Luce’s or even a bottle of decent French wine.

There was no escaping it: the only way to change his stars was by seeking patronage and he had a target in mind – Henry Wriothesley, the young Earl of Southampton, a wealthy theatre-loving bisexual Catholic and a close friend of England’s rising star, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who had inherited his stepfather Leicester’s position at court and also the tax revenue from his sweet wines monopoly. He had been told Essex was looking for a stage writer by no less a person than the earl’s campaign manager. Francis Bacon was quite open about Essex’s political motives. “The theatre is the most accessible form of entertainment in the city. My Lord wants to converse with the people of London, to win them over to his cause. You could help him do that.”

When Will asked whether Essex wanted plays to mirror his political philosophy, Bacon talked about state control of the stage and how drama had been made to work to the royal advantage. “What is sauce for the goose can also be sauce for the gander, Master Shakespeare.”

The rumour was that the two young earls would be occupying the stage chairs when Will’s Henry VI was next performed. To earn their favour, which might run to a dedication fee or even a small annuity, Will was adding a new scene to his history play, a tear-jerking death for the valiant warrior, Lord Talbot, designed to appeal to noblemen yearning nostalgically for the code of chivalry. According to Bacon, Essex planned to use the theatre to whip up patriotic fervour and to expose cowardly self-serving courtiers. Well, he could help there too, by describing how the heroic Talbot was left to die outside Bordeaux because England’s leading nobles refused to reinforce his army and how this had led to the loss of our French territories and to civil war.

“Talbot’s farewell will be grist to their mill,” he told an impassive props basket. “My lord of Essex sees himself as England’s Achilles.”

A loud crashing noise came between Will and his propaganda. The Heavens had fallen in – quite literally. The stagehands couldn’t get the hang of the new-fangled pulley system and the false ceiling had collapsed. Carpenters rushed to repair the damage.

It was mid morning and the dress rehearsal was nothing short of a disaster. Lord Strange’s Men were due to perform Marlowe’s
The Jew of Malta
in a few hours time and all they had got through so far was the prologue, delivered in ringing tones by Will before disappearing into the wings to get on with his writing. The Elizabethan theatre was a hard grind: morning rehearsals, afternoon performances; fifteen shows a month, half of them new. The more plays Will could churn out, the better for everyone.

Sitting at a small desk, wedged between a curtain and a row of costumes, he had moved from Malta to the muddy fields of France. Holinshed’s Chronicles lay open on his knee as he imagined Lord Talbot’s son being blooded in battle. What if he talked about ‘the maidenhead of thy first fight,’ a startling metaphor, but was it apt or merely a reflection of his urgent desire to ravish black-eyed Bess Cowper. Not that she was a virgin, far from it.

Something else was nagging away at Will. It was high time he visited his family in Stratford. He hadn’t seen his children for more than a year. The twins, Hamnet and Judith, had just turned seven while his eldest daughter, Susanna, would soon be nine. It was his wife Anne he didn’t want to see. All they had ever had in common was a sexual desire that was now a thing of the past.

He remembered the wild look in Anne’s eye when he first unlaced her bodice in her father’s field. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” he had asked, trying out a line that took his fancy. “Nay, Will, I want your prick not your poesy,” she had replied, screaming loudly when she got her wish. “Faster sweeting, faster,” she moaned, as they rolled around in the winter barley. If this was the language of love it had a most urgent vocabulary.

Later, he had tried to explain metaphors to her. How you compared one thing to another to heighten emotional awareness. How ‘love’ was ‘spring’ and ‘death’ was ‘winter’ but Anne couldn’t see the point of such fancy talk. “By taking one thing and calling it another you are playing with words. One thing cannot be another. My breast is just a breast, not a golden globe or a maiden world unconquered.” There in the long grass, they stopped arguing. It had been a meeting of bodies, not of minds, and there had been unfortunate consequences.

He still had difficulty in thinking of Anne as his wife. They had married in a rush at her parish church in Temple Grafton, kneeling before the altar in linen caps designed to ward off demons. But the real demons had been in his head. Rightly or wrongly, he could never get rid of the feeling that she had trapped him into marrying her. He had only been eighteen while she was a knowing twenty-six.

Anne’s small dowry and his own lack of independent means had forced them to live with his parents and she was still there in Henley Street, nagging him for a place of her own. To make matters worse, she had come to share her brother’s faith. Calvinism was sweeping through Stratford like a forest fire and the council of burgesses and aldermen was already talking of banning all dramatic performances.

“Playwriting is the Devil’s work.” That’s what she had told him on his last visit. “Your name is hated here, husband.” “Maybe so,” he had replied, “but Puritan morality won’t last and my name will!”