Most Secret (4 page)

In this rabbit warren, down by the mud-flats where the stench of tannery smoke hung thickest, Bully ruled supreme above his crew of pickpockets, thimbleriggers, pimps, cutpurses, and bankrupts. He had been (he said) a soldier. He knew the ways of fashion. That ruined gentleman, sobbing draggle-haired across a chair, “Our Father, which art in heaven,” who needed half a pint of raw Hollands to quieten his shaking guts and steady his hand for dealing at cards again: that ruined gentleman was Bully’s closest friend. Bully jostled the timid when he ventured forth. He swore By the Hilts; he went sometimes to the bear garden at Southwark across the river, there to guzzle warm wine while dogs tore out the throat of roaring Bruin, or two fencing masters made each other’s blood fly in a cut-and-thrust with double-edged swords. When he had a shilling or two to wager, he visited the cockpit in Shoe Lane. Meanwhile, at the George above Hanging Sword Alley he shook out dice among the quart pots, with his fuddled harlots around.

Bully and his cronies kept up an incessant feud, for one reason or another, with the stately old institution next door. Side by side with Alsatia, separated from it only by a brick wall, lay the premises of the Temple. Here the Templars—young men they were, mostly—lived in a sort of university, with the Benchers as dons and the Treasurer as Chancellor.
In mentibus parentorum
, they studied law. In actuality, they did almost anything else.

Through courts and cloisters swarmed a pack of robust, arrogant students as formidable as Bully himself. Questionless, there must have been somebody of studious habits—Roger North says his brother Francis was. Tucked away up two pairs of stairs, in an airless petit chamber with a tallow dip, you might perhaps have found one earnest young man poring late over Littleton, Manwood on Forest Law, Coke’s Pleas of the Crown and Jurisdiction of the Courts, Fitzherbert’s
Natura Brevium
and other delectable uses of
hic, haec, hoc.
A most exemplary fellow, this, who kept vast commonplace-books practised putting causes in the Common Pleas, had a weak smile and fluttery hands, nor ever got drunk except with a judge.

But the Templars in general, being three-bottle men, were lads of a different kidney. They paid five pounds entrance fine to get five years’ sport before they assumed wheedling airs and a scarlet gown at Westminster Hall. If an officious Bencher tried to make them behave, he was held under a pump. Even my Lord Mayor, who essayed an entry in full panoply with the sword of state before him, got his sword of state beaten down and himself booted out, and provoked a riot for whose quelling he must appeal to the king and whistle up the trainbands. Your Templars gave much patronage to fencing-and-dancing schools. They were fond of a hand at basset over a late tobacco pipe and half a dozen of claret; they ate cheese-cakes; they pursued with gusto masked nymphs in the Mulberry Garden or picked up a fashionable disease among the trulls at Whetstone Park.

If a poor Bencher complained to the judges about them, he was frequently snubbed. And why not? Those were great days (say four or five years after the Great Fire, about the time when Sir Matthew Hale became Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench for the brethren of the long robe. Anybody, from the nervous barrister with a first brief to the eminent sergeant-at-law in his black coif, could tell you that advancement did not lie in knowledge of the Year Books.

“Keep on the good side of the judge, young man,” shrewd counsel would have run. “Know the judge; study the judge; let your client lose his cause without a word, but for God’s sake don’t cross His Lordship or dispute with him when he shows signs of having a bee under his peruke.”

Or, as a litigious widow once put it:

“Come, Mr. Blunder, pray bawl soundly for me at the King’s Bench. Bluster, sputter, question, cavil; make sure your argument be intricate enough to confound the court, and then you may do my business.”

But,
imprimis,
coddle His Lordship. Even our rigid-minded old Puritan Hale, as a result of dexterous smoothing, has a partiality for drunken Will Scroggs, whose tipple is claret, and for drunken young George Jeffreys, whose tipple is anything. Above all, for the long run, strive by judicious toadying to win the favour of a patron: first among the powerful aldermen of the City and then—if Providence is kind—among the all-powerful lords of His Majesty’s court. You may be Chief Justice in half a dozen years, and perhaps Lord Chancellor in ten.

Anyhow, it made a pleasant interval for shrewd lawyers in the haunts south of Temple Bar. Towards evening, when a mist crept up from the gardens along the river, Fleet Street grew warm and bright with the red lattices of taverns. Over against the Middle Temple gate stood the famous Devil and St. Dunstan, which Ben Jonson knew in James the First’s time. Not far away was the Cock, where the actress Mrs. Knepp ate lobster with Mr. Pepys of the Admiralty before they took coach for some amorous fondling at Vauxhall; the Globe, at which Mr. Henry Vaughan scribbled verses “in a chamber painted overhead with a cloudy sky”; the Bell, Peele’s, and the Greyhound. Hard by Temple Bar stood Dick’s, and the Rainbow that was the second oldest coffee-house in London. At the corner of Chancery Lane—its double balcony overlooking the pillory in Fleet Street—you might see the notorious King’s Head tavern, at which the Green Ribbon Club would scheme its Whiggeries in later years.

Not the taverns of the courtliest wits, these. For such you must pass Temple Bar, far westward into the world of fashion. Hereabouts you would seldom find Jack Wilmot, “Little Sid,” or Gentle George Etherege. These arbiters of the witty word visited Fleet Street only as preparation for a night’s scouring through the City: to wrench off door knockers, belabour the watch, or smash the windows of blind old Mr. Milton’s house in Holborn.

But the company could be rare enough, after the thunder of wagons had ceased in the street. It was a fine sight for Jack Pauper, shivering outside these snug boxes, when the sharp air steamed the windows at nightfall, and he could see the fire gleaming on pewter pots, rich cheeses, and nets of lemons; when sparks fluttered up among the dark old chimneypots, like the brown-peruked, white-waistcoated, purple-cloaked young sparks gesticulating inside; when, as you passed by in the street, you could smell the roast sizzling in gravy on its spit over the fire, and a fragrance of hot spiced ale.

Presently, in the thick dusk, mummified heads were no longer visible atop Temple Bar. Presently lackeys came trotting from the opposite direction, holding up flaring links to light the way for my lord and my lady borne east in gilt sedan chairs. They swept past shuttered shops, turning left up the court and plying the knocker of the licensed gaming-house in Bell Yard. My lady raised a claret-coloured curtain of her chair to show—briefly, in the blaze of torches—large eyes peering out, paint, and patches. Through the mud-and-kennel smells of everywhere trailed a scent of orange pomade.

The visitors moved on. A last torch shone on the face of somebody hunched in the pillory, forgotten by the constable; he had been insensible since midday, from a blood-caked gash over one eye, and still hung limp with his mouth open. In Bell Yard the iron knocker banged again; the door opened. Presently laughter and calling died away with the barking of dogs.

Once outside Temple Bar (Dr. Wren built it, where formerly there had been only posts and chains across the road) you were en route to Westminster by way of the Strand. On the south side of the street, from here to Charing Cross, stood the great town-houses of the nobility.

Look at them, now, as you might have seen them then.

Under the eaves of the noblemen’s houses, stuck like a poultice to every buttress, are the little shops and stalls: the merchant very dignified in his flat-topped cap, rubbing his hands and yodelling. Round the rails of St. Clement’s Church you watch them a-bickering, as thick as the sparrows that twitter above its porch. Here too are some mountebanks: fire-eaters, raree-show-men, ballad singers hoarsely warbling.

But of this hubbub it is only in part that I would speak. The world my grandfather came to know lay still farther west, within a quarter mile or so round Whitehall Palace.

Charing Cross at that time was a vast open space, bare brown earth underfoot, with the Royal Mews, where the soldiers were quartered, stretching along the north side. If you stood with your back to the Royal Mews, you could look straight down King Street to Whitehall. On the left, where the Thames curved, a crazy, ancient hodge-podge of a palace—all architectural styles, though in the main of red brick or dressed stone—straggled for half a mile along the waterside. So much without plan had they built the old rookery that one of its principal gates, the Holbein Gate, stood slap in the middle of King Street and blocked the road; but the public had a right of way through it to Westminster.

If you followed the crowd that debouched past Spring Gardens (good glades and arbours for dalliance, and Rhenish cost only eightpence the bottle), you would plunge into the bustle round Whitehall Palace. Across King Street on the right were stationed the Horse Guards, two troopers in breastplates and blue sleeves, sitting their horses motionless on either side of a grey stone gate; and beyond them, acre upon acre, rose up the trees of St. James Park.

Over the main body of the palace, opposite on your left, the sky would be tumbling with smoke from half a mile of chimneypots: high and low, little and big, singly or in clusters, out of every cranny whence smoke could issue. Beside the Banqueting House opened another gateway, called the Palace Gate, which constituted the entrance-in-chief. Sedan chairs waited there to be hired, the chairmen smoking their pipes and lounging in the shade of trees that hung over the wall.

There was always much commotion at the Palace Gate. You found there a throng of pedlars with wares of every sort, from a string of glass beads to a swearing parrot. (My grandfather bought a fine swearing parrot once, and was very proud of it; but his friends used to throw water over it to make it swear, and they did this so often that the parrot caught cold and died.) Pedlars and mountebanks were supposed to be forbidden in this quarter, because they made such a crush that the gentry could scarcely enter. Quite often a pair of sentries would come out raging and prod at them with pikes or halberds, but they always pressed back. After all, the public had another right of way here: this time through the Great Court to the waterside.

Does that shock you, dear grandchildren, in our well-behaved year 1815? But it was true.

There stood the dirty white gatehouse, with lodgings for the king’s almoner. Beyond it lay the Great Court, which smelt most powerfully of cooking; the palace kitchens and buttery had been built along its north side at the rear, and steamed all day above a noise of clanking pots and mysterious knockings at casks. If you had an errand away from Whitehall, you would push your way across the cobblestones and go along an open passage with the kitchens at one side and on the other side the Great Hall, which had been turned into a public playhouse. At the end of this passage the public stairs descended to the water and to the swarm of boats clustering there. At a very modest price you could take wherry for anywhere in the City, with none to hinder or say you nay.

But if you were merely one of the ragtag throng, and had no errand or thought of one, you would only swear at the watermen and stick your head round the corner for a glance along the waterside. A little southward lay the private landing stairs, which the king and his household used. At the top of these private stairs, up a ten-foot ladder, the queen had her volary; and, when anybody began to descend, the birds would set up such a clatter and song that it was as loud as a herald crying the royal presence.

(She was very fond of birds, was the poor Portuguese queen, and of all gentle things. She had a retreat built on the flat roof near the private stairs: her bedroom windows opened on this. It was from this retreat that they watched the river pageants or processions—the king fingering his chin, patting the heads of his spaniels, and sometimes saying, “God’s fish, madam!” while Queen Catherine sat with her hands folded in her lap. She was a quiet, dark, ill-favoured little lady, with protruding teeth; much given to piety, and fortitude, and unobtrusiveness. My grandfather was once escorted, with much pomp, to see her chamber. He said she had nothing in it but some pious pictures and books of devotion, her holy water in the alcove where she slept, and at her bedside a clock with a lamp burning inside it, so that she could tell the hour at any time in the night. I have heard that sometimes, in the night, she cried.)

Oh, yes. It was a town in itself, this careless, brawling, loosely managed hive of a palace. I told you the Great Hall had been turned into a public playhouse. There was also (unknown to the various chancellors or grooms or such-like dignitaries) a public dram-shop smack in the middle of the palace, under the very stairs leading up to the king’s Presence Chamber. They only discovered it by accident, years later. During the reign of James the Second, in looking for a place to put the queen’s sedan chair, they came upon a parcel of tipplers earnestly boozing underneath the stairs; and nobody (including the proprietor) could tell how long the place had been there.

This is the atmosphere my grandfather found when he strolled into the Great Court one evening in May of the year one thousand six hundred and seventy. He was moving along pleasantly and good-humouredly, thumbs in his sword belt, whistling a country air, and at peace, or so he thought, with all the earth.

He walked into trouble five minutes later.

I
T WAS, THEN, ONE
of those warm days when the blood stirs, the trees seem more green, and even the geese strut their ways saying “boo” to each other. My grandfather, Roderick Kinsmere, had been wandering through town since early morning, having taken up quarters at the Grapes near Charing Cross and stabled his horse there.

To him London seemed a vastly fine place, if far from overclean. In his heart of hearts he was not easy, and perhaps a trifle struck with awe. But this is a state of mind which no Kinsmere has ever relished, and he resolved not to betray it.