The Incendium Plot Page 2

  It had been an absurd plan, conceived in hypocrisy and devoid of reason. And it had exactly the opposite effect to that intended. After the excommunication and the plot’s discovery, royal tolerance had been replaced by fear and suspicion and the country was as far from Rome as it had ever been.

  The wherryman steered the boat without mishap under the arches of London Bridge and drew up at the stairs just outside the old city wall. Christopher ordered him to wait there for him. ‘Fine morning for it, sir,’ the man said as Christopher stepped out of the boat, sending a fat rat scurrying down a hole in the brickwork. ‘Good crowd, I daresay. They deserve a show after all this time.’

  Christopher looked back and snapped at him, ‘Hold your foul tongue and pray for the soul of the condemned man.’ He was in no mood for banter.

  The sun was already hot and by the time he reached the top of Tower Hill sweat was running uncomfortably down his back and into his groin. The day promised to be sweltering. At the top of the hill, a noisy crowd was gathering around the scaffold, newly erected on a small green near the north-west corner of the Tower wall. A line of yeomen, the queen’s own bodyguard, in their red and gold tunics and armed with swords and halberds, kept the crowd from approaching too close.

  Christopher used his height and reach to force a way through the throng, paying no heed to the curses hurled at him, until he found a place to one side from where he had a clear view of the platform, on which clean straw had been laid and the executioner’s block made ready. He could see an open coffin placed behind the scaffold. Above it all, the Tower loomed huge and threatening. How many executions had the ancient building seen in its five hundred years? How many more before it too crumbled away to dust?

  The crowd grew until it overflowed into the streets that converged at the green. Christopher scanned it. There were two faces he knew but none he recognized as a relative of the prisoner. It was a gathering of working men and women in leather jerkins and woollen smocks – smiths and cobblers, milkmaids and tavern-keepers – some of whom would have forfeited a morning’s pay to be there. Of gentlemen or even working yeomen there were few. He shooed away a child peddling straw dolls dressed in crimson and gold but lacking heads. A vendor went from group to group selling penny buns and mugs of ale for twopence. Another had a tray of oysters fresh-lifted from the beds downstream. Trade was brisk. The vendors would dine well that day.

  Here and there an argument broke out. A fat man was dragged complaining to the back to allow others a better view and a mother with a bawling child was told to take it home lest it be put to sleep on the block. When they had to, the yeomen guards used the shafts of their halberds to keep order. Christopher watched and listened. The earl would wish to know the mood of the crowd.

  A cry went up and Christopher instinctively turned his head to follow the general gaze. As he watched, the executioner and his young assistant, both gloved and masked, emerged from the Postern Gate in the Tower wall. They were followed by the prisoner, his hands tied and surrounded by a troop of guards. Christopher had never before set eyes on Norfolk, so could not be sure how imprisonment had affected him, but for a man of only thirty-six years he appeared diminished – round-shouldered, head bowed, an air of fatigue about him – the mien of a much older man.

  Not for the first time, Christopher wondered how he would conduct himself were he on the way to the scaffold. Would he hold his head high and stand by his principles or would he declaim his innocence and cravenly plead for mercy? How could a man know such a thing about himself until it happened?

  The prisoner was accompanied by John Foxe, once Norfolk’s tutor, Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s, and a third man whom Christopher did not recognize. The crowd erupted as if to send the condemned man on his way from this life to the next with their cries ringing in his ears. Looking neither right nor left, Norfolk ignored them all. When he stumbled, Foxe extended a hand to steady him. Norfolk recovered his footing and raised his eyes to the platform. His face betrayed no emotion. Christopher watched, if not with admiration, at least with respect.

  Assailed by raucous shouts of ‘traitor’ and ‘papist coward’ and ‘hang him and draw him’, the little party progressed steadily to the scaffold. A bun was thrown at the prisoner and a screeching hag reached out as if to scratch out his eyes. One old man fell to his knees in front of him and in a pitiful croak asked God to be merciful on a sinner. He was swiftly bundled aside by a guard.

  The duke climbed the scaffold and stood facing the crowd. Gradually the hubbub died down. When he could be heard he spoke in a clear voice. ‘I do not fear death. I have never been popish and I have been loyal to the queen and to England. I know nothing of Spanish plots and my guilt, if guilt it is, lies in my innocent communication with the Queen of Scots, which has been spoken of by my enemies as evidence of treason.’

  The audience muttered among themselves and shuffled their feet impatiently. They cared nothing for fine words. An officer of the guard, sensing their mood, gruffly urged the prisoner to cut short his address. The good people of London, he said in a voice that could be heard around the green, had come to see justice done, not to listen to long speeches.

  When Norfolk fell silent, the executioner knelt before him to ask his forgiveness and was given a small purse of coins. The prisoner then read aloud the fifty-first psalm, substituting, at one point, ‘England’ for ‘Jerusalem’. Finally he embraced his tutor and the dean, refused a blindfold, removed his cloak, cap and doublet and knelt to put his neck on the block. Christopher kept his eyes open. The earl would wish to know if there had been any mishap. The executioner raised the axe, paused for a moment and brought it down squarely on the exposed flesh. The head fell, blood gushed and the crowd bellowed its approval. The executioner picked up the severed head and held it up by the hair for it to see its detached body. In a second or two, it had been done. Thomas Howard was dead. Christopher closed his eyes and muttered a brief prayer. The crowd cheered. For some, just one more execution. For others, the death of a traitor. For almost all, a morning’s entertainment and a quantity of ale. Slowly, laughing and chattering, the crowd began to disperse, leaving but a handful of women on their knees, weeping and wailing and calling down God’s mercy on the dead man.

  It was over. Christopher used a sleeve to wipe sweat from his brow and was about to return to the steps when he felt a tug on his sleeve. Expecting a cutpurse or pickpocket he turned sharply. A slight figure, perhaps a foot shorter than he, stood behind him, face half hidden under a hood and dressed modestly in grey. ‘Joy of the day, Dr Rad,’ said the figure in little more than a whisper. ‘Thought I might find you here.’

  Christopher glanced about. ‘Ell, what are you doing here? This is no place for a lady and we might be seen.’

  The woman stifled a laugh. ‘Lady, eh? That’s new. And there’s no eyes on us. They’re all chittering and chattering about the duke with no head.’

  ‘What is it, Ell?’

  ‘Thought you should know, doctor. Had a man in the house two nights since. Went with the dark girl, Sal. Beat her about horrible. Face cut and bruised and bleeding from inside. Poor thing. Pretty girl she is. Won’t be able to work for a good time, now.’

  Again Christopher looked about. ‘I am sorry for it, Ell, but such things are not uncommon in your line of work. Why do you tell me?’

  ‘Big bugger, he was. Hair the colour of a rusty nail. Spoke different, Sal says. Not English. Might have been Scotch.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He was boasting about how he was going to rescue the Scotch queen and set London ablaze. Spoke of fires and flames and slicing the queen’s head from her shoulders. Sal said he had the look of Satan in his eyes. Frightened she was. And then he started knocking her about. Got away before any of us could stop him.’

  ‘Did you see him?’

  Ell shook her head. ‘He’d gone when I heard Sal crying out. We did the best we could for her but she’s in a poor way.’

  ‘Drunk?’

  ‘Drunk as a French lord, but still capable and frightening. Thought you should know.’

  Christopher took a crown from his purse and slipped it to her. Ell received a coin whenever she brought him intelligence, whether it had worth or not, and she expected more than a shilling or two. ‘I can earn a shilling lying on my back,’ she had once chided him. ‘When I am on my feet, I expect more.’ It mattered not. He reclaimed his expenditure from Leicester’s comptroller. ‘Probably nothing in it, Ell. Just a fanciful rogue in his cups with a taste for a woman’s blood.’

  ‘We get plenty of them, doctor. This one seemed different, Sal said. Thought you should know.’

  ‘You were right to tell me, Ell. Be off now before we’re seen.’

  Ell pushed her hood back an inch and grinned. Brown eyes and rosebud lips in an oval face framed by auburn curls; it was no wonder that she was in such demand. She could easily have passed for a lady at court. Only her words revealed her for what she was. ‘Come by soon, doctor. And don’t forget, not so much as a farthing to you. You’re a handsome gentleman and it’d be a treat after all the ugly fat pigs I have to spread my legs for.’

  Christopher shook his head. ‘Thank you, Ell, it’s a tempting offer but I’m well served.’ He grinned. ‘And I wouldn’t want the pox.’

  Ell’s voice rose. ‘You won’t get no French welcome from me, doctor. I always wash out thorough afterwards.’ She wagged her finger at him.

  ‘Ssh, Ell. Thank you for finding me. Go safely.’ He watched her leave before walking down the hill to the stairs. A lovely lady, a valuable intelligencer and a whore. He knew of no other like her. He had once asked how she had come to be an intelligencer for his predecessor. She had grinned and held a finger to her lips. ‘Couldn’t say, doctor. Just one o
f those strange things that happen in a lady’s bed chamber.’ In return, she had asked him why he was a doctor. When he told her that he had studied long enough to be a teacher and ‘doctor’ simply meant ‘teacher’, she had laughed and said, ‘Well then, I must be a doctor too. I’ve been at it long enough and I’ve taught my gentlemen a thing or two.’ A whore, but a rare one.

  The one-eyed wherryman was waiting. ‘Did they show him his body, your lordship?’ the man asked with a lewd grin. ‘They do say the head lives long enough to see the body for itself.’ Christopher ignored him. ‘Back to Blackfriars, is it?’

  ‘To Whitehall steps and be quick about it,’ replied Christopher shortly. The earl would be waiting.

  The wherryman spat into the river and fixed him with his eye. ‘An extra threepence to Whitehall, it will be.’ Christopher did not bother to argue. The fare was of no consequence. The earl had never baulked at the expenses he incurred in the course of carrying out his duties.

  As the sun had climbed so had the stench of the river. Bloated animal carcasses floated among the refuse of the villages upstream and the excrement and debris of the city, forcing Christopher to hold a corner of his gown to his nose and to keep his gaze firmly on the trees and meadows on the south bank. The wherryman struggled against the flow, especially where it strengthened under the bridge, so that they took twice as long to reach Blackfriars as they had to reach the Tower. By the time they rounded the sweeping bend in the river and Whitehall Palace came into view, Christopher was grinding his teeth with impatience. He wanted to make his report and be done with it.

  The wherryman pulled up against the pier commonly known as Whitehall steps and tossed a rope over a large stone placed there for the purpose. Not even waiting for the boat to settle in the water, Christopher handed the wherryman a few coins, received a vulgar grunt of acknowledgement and stepped out on to the pier. He hurried up to a private gate near the royal chapel. His face was well enough known to be admitted without fuss, but still a guard escorted him to the earl’s apartments. In a palace of fifteen hundred rooms, dozens of galleries and corridors, a cockpit, a tiltyard and a tennis court, it was not difficult to lose one’s way. In frivolous mood, Leicester had once insisted that there were lost courtiers still wandering the passages from the days of King Henry. Whitehall Palace was larger than many villages.

  When first he had entered the place he had found its size and splendour overpowering: wherever he looked, an unmatched show of wealth, a strange silence, and a hint of menace. A new official royal residence – much of it built and restored by the queen’s father – it watched over the law courts and parliament at Westminster, as if to make clear to any man who doubted it that it was the monarch who ruled England. Christopher was now accustomed to it, yet still Whitehall Palace could be unsettling.

  The royal apartments stood to the left of the gate by which he entered, their windows looking out over the river. Following his escort, he climbed a flight of steps and passed along a gallery overlooking the queen’s garden, where neatly trimmed grass walks separated rows of square beds filled with red and white roses, set around a stone fountain gushing water pumped from the river. At the edge of a dirty, coal-smoked, bustling city the garden’s beauty was almost mystical. A game was in progress on the bowling green. He could just make out the gentle clunk of bowl on bowl and the muted voices of the players. On the morning of the execution of a kinsman of the queen, the game, it seemed, might be played but voices must not be raised.

  The earl’s apartments were guarded, as always, by a yeoman either side of his door. Again, Christopher was admitted without fuss and entered an antechamber from which an imposing carved door led to the earl’s office. His escort knocked, and he was ushered in. For once, there was no waiting for the earl to be ready for him. The door was closed behind him.

  It was a room he had come to know well – large and airy, immaculate and sumptuously furnished with intricate Italian and French furniture and rich Flemish drapes. On the walls hung a huge arras, a fine portrait of the queen and smaller ones of the earl, his father and his late wife, Amy Robsart.

  The queen’s portrait dominated the room. It showed her at her most regal – bejewelled, elaborately costumed in purple and gold, looking down on the observer, unsmiling, unforgiving, a haughty set to her mouth. Her skin showed no sign of the smallpox she had suffered ten years earlier, although whether that was the work of nature or of the artist, Christopher could not tell. He had seen the queen only once, and that at some distance when she was walking with her ladies in the garden. At least that was once more than most of her subjects could boast. He sometimes thought that unswerving loyalty to a prince one has never set eyes on and is thus not able to picture in one’s mind, cannot be easy. That is not to say that the queen hid herself away, far from it. Her progresses around the country were designed, in part, to show herself to her people. But did a Cornish miner or a Lancashire shepherd who had never seen a proper likeness of her not wonder about the appearance of the woman to whom he owed his loyalty?

  There was another thought – disloyal, even treasonous – that always came into his head when he looked at that painting. How did Her Majesty appear when she woke each morning, dishevelled from sleep and clad only in her night attire? Was there an artist skilled enough to make her regal then? He doubted it. It was said that she took two hours or more to dress and complete her toilette.

  Leicester was known for his looks, but in this portrait, smaller than that of the queen, he appeared to Christopher more formidable than handsome – slim and athletic, a narrow face, with a long, straight nose, dark eyes and a neat pointed beard. The artist had sought to portray him as a statesman by dressing him in black and giving him a tiny twist of the lip and a knowing look in the eye. It was the eyes that drew the observer in.

  The earl was alone, sitting at his magnificent walnut writing table. On a matching, smaller table stood a chess board set with ivory pieces and a cylindrical brass clock. Despite the heat, he wore a tight-fitting doublet of black cloth embroidered in red and gold over a snowy-white shirt. His hair was coal-black and swept back from his forehead. Even the hair at his temples showed no sign of grey. He put down the document he was reading but did not rise. ‘Dr Radcliff,’ he asked without preamble, ‘what news do you bring?’ The voice was low and musical.

  Christopher removed his cap and bowed his head. The earl placed a high value on courtesy, seldom lapsed from the highest standards himself and expected the same from every rank of society. Christopher had heard him, on a single day, reprimand a senior palace official for a rude interruption and praise a humble servant for careful attention to his wishes. ‘I have come directly from the Tower, my lord. The deed is done.’

  Leicester nodded and peered at him from under his heavy lids. ‘You will understand why I did not myself attend.’

  ‘Of course, my lord.’

  ‘Was it swift?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘The queen will be glad of it. She deplores unnecessary suffering. Did he speak?’

  ‘He did. He claimed never to have been popish and proclaimed his innocence and his loyalty to Her Majesty.’

  ‘Popish. Was that the word he used?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Why that word, do you think?’

  ‘I too wondered that. Perhaps he was trying to disassociate himself from the pope’s unholy bull, without exactly denying his Catholicism.’ The papal bull, the so-called Regnans in Excelsis, which had excommunicated England’s Protestant queen and had called on all Catholics to rise up against her, had been taken by the Privy Council as tantamount to a declaration of war. It had undermined the last of the queen’s natural tolerance and could scarcely have been more damaging. Now the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘traitor’ were as good as synonymous.