The Fifth Queen (6 page)

The City men came down in a solid body, and at sight of the red crosses on their white shoulders the Lutherans set up a cry of ‘Rome, Rome.’ Their stones began to fly at once, and, because they pressed so closely in, the City bowmen had no room to string their bows. The citizens struck out with their silvered staves, but the heavy armour under their white sur-coats hindered them. The Lutherans cried out that the Kingdom of God was come on earth because a Queen from Cleves was at hand.

An alderman’s charger was struck by a stone. It broke loose and crashed all foaming and furious through a tripe stall on which a preacher was perched to hold forth. The riot began then. All in among the winter trees the City men in their white and silver were fighting with the Lutherans in their grey frieze. The citizens’ hearts were enraged because their famous Dominican preacher had been seized by the Archbishop and spirited into Kent. They cried to each other to avenge Dr Latter on these lowsels.

Men struck out at all and sundry. A woman, covered to the face in a fur hood and riding a grey mule, was hit on the arm by the quarterstaff of a Protestant butcher from the Crays, because she wore a crucifix round her neck. She covered her face and shrieked lamentably. A man in green at the mule’s head, on the other side, sprang like a wild cat under the beast’s neck. His face blazed white, his teeth shone like a dog’s, he screamed and struck his dagger through the butcher’s throat.

His motions were those of a mad beast; he stabbed the mule in the shoulder to force it to plunge in the direction of the soldiers who kept the little gate, before in the throng the butcher had reached the ground. The woman was flogging at the mule with her reins. ‘I have killed ‘un,’ he shrieked.

He dived under the pikes of the soldiers and gripped the
captain by both shoulders. ‘We be the cousins of the Duke of Norfolk,’ he cried. His square red beard trembled beneath his pallid face, and suddenly he became speechless with rage.

Hands were already pulling the woman from her saddle, but the guards held their pikes transversely against the faces of the nearest, crushing in noses and sending sudden streaks of blood from jaws. The uproar was like a hurricane and the woman’s body, on high, swayed into the little space that the soldiers held. She was crying with the pain of her arm that she held with her other hand. Her cousin ran to her and mumbled words of inarticulate tenderness, ending again in ‘I have killed ’un.’

The mob raged round them, but the soldiers stood firm enough. A continual cry of ‘Harlot, harlot,’ went up. Stones were scarce on the sward of the park, but a case bottle aimed at the woman alighted on the ear of one of the guards. It burst in a foam of red, and he fell beneath the belly of the mule with a dry grunt and the clang of iron. The soldiers put down the points of their pikes and cleared more ground. Men lay wallowing there when they retreated.

The man shouted at the captain: ‘Can you clear us a way to yon stairs?’ and, at a shake of the head, ‘Then let us enter this gate.’

The captain shook his head again.

‘I am Thomas Culpepper. This is the Duke’s niece, Kat,’ the other shouted.

The captain observed him stoically from over his thick and black beard.

‘The King’s Highness is within this garden,’ he said. He spoke to the porter through the little niche at the wicket. A company of the City soldiers, their wands beating like flails, cleared for a moment the space in front of the guards.

Culpepper with the hilt of his sword was hammering at the studded door. The captain caught him by the shoulder and sent him to stagger against the mule’s side. He was gasping
and snatched at his hilt. His bonnet had fallen off, his yellow hair was like a shock of wheat, and his red beard flecked with foam that spattered from his mouth.

‘I have killed one. I will kill thee,’ he stuttered at the captain. The woman caught him round the neck.

‘Oh, be still,’ she shrieked. ‘Still. Calm. Y’ kill me.’ She clutched him so closely that he was half throttled. The captain paced stoically up and down before the gate.

‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I have sent one hastening to his dukeship. Doubtless you shall enter.’ He bent to pull the soldier from beneath the mule’s belly by one foot, and picking up his pike, leaned it against the wall.

With his face pressed against his cousin’s furred side, Thomas Culpepper swore he would cut the man’s throat.

‘Aye, come back again,’ he answered. ‘They call me Sir Christopher Aske.’

The red jerkins of the King’s own guards came in a heavy mass round the end of the wall amid shrieks and curses. Their pike-staves rose rhythmically and fell with dull thuds; with their clumsy gloved hands they caught at throats, and they threw dazed men and women into the space that they had cleared before the wall. There armourers were ready, with handcuffs and leg-chains hanging like necklaces round their shoulders.

The door in the wall opened silently, the porter called through his niche: ‘These have leave to enter.’ Thomas Culpepper shouted ‘Coneycatcher’ at the captain before he pulled the mule’s head round. The beast hung back on his hand, and he struck it on its closed eyes in a tumult of violent rage. It stumbled heavily on the threshold, and then darted forward so swiftly that he did not hear the direction of the porter that they should turn only at the third alley.

Tall and frosted trees reached up into the dim skies, the deserted avenues were shrouded in mist, and there was a dead and dripping silence.

‘Seven brawls y’ have brought me into,’ the woman’s voice came from under her hood, ‘this weary journey.’

He ran to her stirrup and clutched her glove to his forehead. ‘Y’ave calmed me,’ he said. ‘Your voice shall ever calm me.’

She uttered a hopeless ‘Oh, aye,’ and then, ‘Where be we?’

They had entered a desolate region of clipped yews, frozen fountains, and high, trimmed hedges. He dragged the mule after him. Suddenly there opened up a very broad path, tiled for a width of many feet. On the left it ran to a high tower’s gaping arch. On the right it sloped nobly into a grey stretch of water.

‘The river is even there,’ he muttered. ‘We shall find the stairs.’

‘I would find my uncle in this palace,’ she said. But he muttered, ‘Nay, nay,’ and began to beat the mule with his fist. It swerved, and she became sick and dizzy with the sudden jar on her hurt arm. She swayed in her saddle and, in a sudden flaw of wind, her old and torn furs ruffled jaggedly all over her body.

T
HE
K
ING WAS PACING
the long terrace on the river front. He had been there since very early, for he could not sleep at nights, and had no appetite for his breakfast. When a gentleman from the postern gate asked permission for Culpepper and the mule to pass to the private stairs, he said heavily:

‘Let me not be elbowed by cripples,’ and then: ‘A’ God’s name let them come,’ changing his mind, as was his custom after a bad night, before his first words had left his thick, heavy lips. His great brow was furrowed, his enormous bulk of scarlet, with the great double dog-rose embroidered across the broad chest, limped a little over his right knee and the foot dragged. His eyes were bloodshot and heavy, his head hung
forward as though he were about to charge the world with his forehead. From time to time his eyebrows lifted painfully, and he swallowed with an effort as if he were choking.

Behind him the three hundred windows of the palace Placentia seemed to peer at him like eyes, curious, hostile, lugubrious or amazed. He tore violently at his collar and muttered: ‘I stifle.’ His great hand was swollen by its glove, sewn with pearls, to an immense size.

The gentleman told him of the riot in the park, and narrated the blasphemy of the German Lutheran, who had held up a putrid dog in parody of the Holy Mass.

The face of the King grew suffused with purple blood.

‘Let those men be cut down,’ he said, and he conceived a sorting out of all heresy, a cleansing of his land with blood. He looked swiftly at the low sky as if a thunderbolt or a leprosy must descend upon his head. He commanded swiftly, ‘Let them be taken in scores. Bid the gentlemen of my guard go, and armourers with shackles.’

The sharp pain of the ulcer in his leg gnawed up to his thigh, and he stood, dejected, like a hunted man, with his head hanging on his chest, so that his great bonnet pointed at the ground. He commanded that both Privy Seal and the Duke of Norfolk should come to him there upon the instant.

This grey and heavy King, who had been a great scholar, dreaded to read in Latin now, for it brought the language of the Mass into his mind; he had been a composer of music and a skilful player on the lute, but no music and no voices could any more tickle his ears.

Women he had loved well in his day. Now, when he desired rest, music, good converse and the love of women, he was forced to wed with a creature whose face resembled that of a pig stuck with cloves. He had raged overnight, but, with the morning, he had seen himself growing old, on a tottering throne, assailed by all the forces of the Old Faith in Christendom. Rebellions burst out like fires every day in all the corners
of his land. He had no men whom he could trust: if he granted a boon to one party it held them only for a day, and the other side rose up. Now he rested upon the Lutherans, whom he hated, and, standing on that terrace, he had watched gloomily the great State barges of the Ambassadors from the Empire and from France come with majestic ostentation downstream abreast, to moor side by side against the steps of his water-gate.

It was a parade of their new friendship. Six months ago their trains could not have mingled without bloodshed.

At last there stood before him Thomas Cromwell, unbonneted, smiling, humorous, supple and confident for himself and for his master’s cause, a man whom his Prince might trust. And the long melancholy and sinister figure of the Duke of Norfolk stalked stiffly down among the yew trees powdered with frost. The furs from round his neck fluttered about his knees like the wings of a crow, and he dug his Earl Marshal’s golden staff viciously into the ground. He waved his jewelled cap and stood still at a little distance. Cromwell regarded him with a sinister and watchful amusement; he looked back at Privy Seal with a black malignancy that hardened his yellow features, his hooked nose and pursed lips into the likeness of a mask representing hatred.

This Norfolk was that Earl of Surrey who had won Flodden Field. They all then esteemed him the greatest captain of his day—in the field a commander sleepless, cunning, cautious, and, in striking, a Hotspur.

A dour and silent man, he was the head of all the Catholics, of all the reaction of that day. But, in the long duel between himself and Cromwell he had seemed fated to be driven from post to post, never daring to proclaim himself openly the foe of the man he dreaded and hated. Cranmer, with his tolerant spirit, he despised. Here was an archbishop who might rack and burn for discipline’s sake, and he did nothing.… And all these New Learning men with their powers of language, these
dark bearded men with twinkling and sagacious eyes, he detested. He went clean shaved, lean and yellow-faced, with a hooked nose that seemed about to dig into his chin. It was he who said first: ‘It was merry in England before this New Learning came in.’

The night before, the King had sworn that he would have Privy Seal’s head because Anne of Cleves resembled a pig stuck with cloves. And, shaking and shivering with cold that penetrated his very inwards, with a black pain on his brow and sparks dancing before his jaundiced eyes, the Duke cursed himself for not having urged then the immediate arrest of the Privy Seal. For here stood Cromwell, arrogantly by the King’s side with the King graciously commanding him to cover his head because it was very cold and Cromwell was known to suffer with the earache.

‘You are Earl Marshal,’ the King’s voice drowned Norfolk’s morning greeting. He veered upon the Duke with such violence that his enormous red bulk seemed about to totter over upon the tall and bent figure. A searing pain had shot up his side, and, as he gripped it, he appeared to be furiously plucking at his dagger. He had imagined Chapuys and Marillac, the Ambassadors, coming upon guards with broken heads and sending to Paris letters over which Francis and his nephew should snigger and chuckle.

‘You are Earl Marshal. You have the ordering of these ceremonies, and you let rebels and knaves break heads within my very park for all the world to see!’

In his rage Norfolk blurted out:

‘Privy Seal hath his friends, too—these Lutherans. What man could have foreseen how insolent they be grown, for joy at welcoming a Queen of their faith,’ he repeated hotly. ‘No man could have foreseen. My bands are curtailed.’

Cromwell said:

‘Aye, men are needed to keep down the Papists of your North parts.’

The two men faced each other. It had been part of the Duke’s plan—and Cromwell knew it very well—that the City men should meet with the Lutherans there in the King’s own park. It would show the insolence of the heretics upon whom the Privy Seal relied, and it might prove, too, the strength of the Old Faith in the stronghold of the City.

Henry rated violently. It put him to shame, he repeated many times. ‘Brawling beneath my face, cries in my ears, and the smell of bloodshed in my nose.’

Norfolk repeated dully that the Protestants were wondrous insolent. But Cromwell pointed out with a genial amusement: ‘My Lord Duke should have housed the City men within the palace. Cat will fight with dog the world over if you set them together.’

The Duke answered malignantly:

‘It was fitting the citizens should wait to enter. I would not cumber his Highness’ courtyards. We know not yet that this Lady cometh to be welcomed Queen.’

‘Body of God,’ the King said with a new violence: ‘do ye prate of these matters?’ His heavy jaws threatened like a dog’s. ‘Hast thou set lousy knaves debating of these?’

Norfolk answered darkly that it had been treated of in the Council last night.

‘My Council! My Council!’ The King seemed to bay out the words. ‘There shall some mothers’ sons rue this!’

Norfolk muttered that he had spoken of it with no man not a Councillor. The King’s Highness’ self had moved first in this.