Traitor (52 page)

‘What did you do?’

‘I ran. What else should I do? I know when I’m not pigging wanted. Shouldn’t have gone there. Why would I want anything to do with people like that?’

‘Come home with us. We’re your family now.’

She huddled deeper into the blanket and looked away.

‘There’s nothing for you here, Ursula. You just said so yourself.’

She was shaking her head. ‘I won’t fit in. Didn’t fit in at that house in the shire of Kent, did I? They treated me like a skivvy and kept making dirty remarks about me. And they knew I heard them. Called me slut and drab and thief.’

‘Well, you
are
a thief! You stole their horse to prove it.’

‘I didn’t steal the nag, I borrowed it. Anyway, that’s by the by. I’m not a slut nor a drab.’

‘No, you’re not. So come with us. What have you got to lose?’

‘I don’t know.’

Shakespeare had dismounted now. He walked to her and put an arm around her shoulder. ‘You’ll work for us, but you won’t be a skivvy. You’ll help Jane with the children and the running of the house, and we’ll give you an education. Teach you to read and write.’

‘What do I want with reading and writing? How will that help me go a-sharking?’

‘There’ll be no more of that. And you’ll understand why you should learn to read and write, once you try it.’

‘Why you doing this for me?’

‘Because we esteem you highly. And we need an extra pair of hands. We’re moving into a new house and there will be a great deal to do. More than anything, you’ll cheer the place up. The children have had a tough time these past months. I know they’ll take to you. Say you’ll come. We like you.’

Her face creased up. For a moment, Andrew thought he saw a tear forming in her eye, then rejected the very notion as ridiculous. Ursula Dancer didn’t cry.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘Oh, of course I’ll pigging come.’

As always, I am indebted to many people for their support and help. I would particularly like to mention Michael Riordan, archivist of St John’s and the Queen’s Colleges, Oxford, for giving me his valuable time, and Bill Clements, chairman of the Fortress Study Group,
www.fsgfort.com
. My thanks, too, to my wife Naomi, editor Kate Parkin and agent Teresa Chris.

Books that have been especially helpful include:
Hamlet’s Divinity
by Christopher Devlin;
The Queen’s Conjuror
by Benjamin Woolley;
Sir John Norreys and the Elizabethan Military World
by John S. Nolan;
The Fraternitye of Vacabondes
by John Awdeley;
A Caveat or Warning for Commen Cursetors vulgarely Called Vagabones
by Thomas Harman;
The Art of War and Renaissance England
by John R. Hale;
Shakespeare’s England
, edited and introduced by R. E. Pritchard;
Elizabethan Military Science
by Henry J. Webb;
Elizabeth’s Wars
by Paul E. J. Hammer;
Elizabeth’s Army
by C. G. Cruickshank;
The Elizabethan Militia
by Lindsay Boynton;
The English Yeoman
by Mildred Campbell;
The Works of Sir Roger Williams
, edited by John X. Evans;
Martin Frobisher
by James McDermott;
The Telescope
by Richard Dunn;
Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era
by Curtis C. Breight;
Shakespeare’s Military Language
by Charles Edelman;
Manavilins
by Rex
Clements;
The University of Oxford: A New History
by G. R. Evans;
The Colleges of Oxford: Their History and Traditions
, edited by Andrew Clark;
The Earls of Derby 1485–1985
by J. J. Bagley.

The Hesketh Affair: Timeline

1581

Dr John Dee, astrologer to the Queen, scientist and alchemist, is noted by spies as being friendly with Lancashire cloth merchant Richard Hesketh. Hesketh was in Antwerp as agent, a diplomatic post representing England’s commercial interests in the city. He shared an interest in alchemy with Dee, who was then in England, and the two men corresponded. Dee cast Hesketh’s horoscope.

1589

Richard Hesketh, now returned to Over Darwen, Lancashire, is implicated in the murder of a local landowner, Thomas Hoghton, in a dispute over cattle. Hesketh flees to Prague (then in Bohemia), where he joins the circle of Edward Kelley, a former counterfeiter from Lancashire, and also a former ‘scryer’ – medium – to Dr Dee.

1591

Christmas: Lord Strange’s Men – the players’ company that presented the first plays of William Shakespeare – triumph at court, staging six plays before the Queen at the seasonal court festivities.

Ferdinando, Lord Strange, who is descended from Henry VII through his mother’s line, is a prime claimant to the throne of England and the toast of high society.

1592

13 June:
A spy in Brussels named Robinson reports to his masters in England, ‘There is certainly intelligence between Strange and the Cardinal [William Allen].’ Strange is now suspected of being a crypto-Catholic. His younger brother William, a friend of Dr Dee, is more favoured by the Cecil faction at court.

1593

9 September:
Richard Hesketh lands at Sandwich in Kent, having sailed from Hamburg. Apparently, he has been exonerated by someone on the Privy Council of any blame in the murder that caused his exile. He walks to Canterbury where, at the Bell Inn, he meets a young soldier named Trumpeter Richard Baylie, whom he takes on as a servant. Together, they travel to Rochester, then to Gravesend, London and Hampstead.

16 September:
They stay at the White Lion, Islington. As they are leaving, a boy named John Waterworth hands Hesketh a letter ‘from one Mr Ickman (or Hickman) to take to the Earl of Derby’.

20 September:
Bartholomew Ickman (like Kelley, a former ‘scryer’ to Dee) visits Dr Dee at his home in Mortlake.

22 September:
Hesketh and Baylie arrive at Over Darwen. They stay there with Hesketh’s wife, Isabel, for two days before travelling south again to Lathom House in Lancashire, home of the Derby dynasty.

25 September:
Hesketh arrives at Lathom House in Lancashire, the palatial home of Lord Strange, and hands him a letter
urging him to snatch the crown of England for Catholicism – as well as supposedly threatening him with a wretched death if he reveals their plan. Though Hesketh says he picked up the letter in Islington, the letter is later claimed by prosecutors to be from the exiled Cardinal William Allen, head of the Catholic resistance to Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant regime. Hesketh had intended returning to his wife, but Lord Strange – who succeeds this very day to the title Earl of Derby on the death of his father – urges Hesketh to stay over Michaelmas. Hesketh seems flattered by the attention and agrees to accompany the earl to court.

2 October:
On the way to court, Hesketh stops at Brereton in Cheshire. From there, he writes to his wife, Isabel, and to his brother, Thomas, a fiercely anti-Catholic lawyer. The letters are carried by Trumpeter Baylie.

9 October:
Lord Strange, the new Earl of Derby, reports directly to the Queen at Windsor and shows her the treasonable letter brought by Hesketh, who is immediately arrested.

15 October:
William Wade, clerk to the Privy Council, begins Hesketh’s interrogation.

4 November:
Hesketh, weeping and wailing, confesses to treason, though he maintains he was an innocent dupe in the matter and did not know the contents of the letter. Lord Strange, the fifth Earl of Derby, is excluded from the proceedings by the Cecils and their allies. No witnesses are called at the trial.

29 November:
Hesketh is drawn on a hurdle to the scaffold at St Albans, where he is hanged, quartered and beheaded.

Christmas:
It is a very different festive season to the one enjoyed by the earl two years earlier. Now he stays away from court, alarmed by malicious rumours circulating about him. Hesketh’s brother, the Protestant lawyer Thomas Hesketh, is known to be among those slandering him, trying
to further the cause of the Duchy of Lancaster and undermine the power of the earl in the North.

27 December:
Lord Burghley refuses to give the Chamberlainship of Chester to the Earl of Derby, a position that should have been the earl’s by right. Instead it is given to Sir Thomas Egerton. On top of that, the earl’s old friend, the Earl of Essex, has turned against him and is luring away his retainers. These snubs confirm what the earl and his wife, Alice, most fear: that they are ‘crossed in court and crossed in his country’.

1594

23 March:
At Mortlake, Dr Dee gives a horse to Bartholomew Ickman, his former ‘scryer’ and near-neighbour. Ickman heads north.

5 April:
The Earl of Derby – Ferdinando, Lord Strange as was – becomes violently ill after a day’s hunting. The next day he begins to vomit blood.

The Strange Tale of Alice and Thomas

There is a curious postscript to the mysterious illness of the fifth Earl of Derby. Six years after the events described in this book (much of it true, though, of course, fictionalised), the humbly born man who investigated the affair went on to marry the earl’s aristocratic widow.

That investigator was Sir Thomas Egerton, bastard son of a Cheshire landowner. The widow was Alice, dowager Countess of Derby, née Alice Spencer of Althorp.

At one time, early in his career, Egerton had been a mere aide to the family of Lord Derby, dependent upon their largesse. But by 1594 he had risen to become one of the greatest lawyers in the land, a former attorney-general and newly appointed Master of the Rolls.

So when he arrived at Lathom House in Lancashire to investigate the devastating illness that had laid low the Earl of Derby, his relationship with the family was very different.

By now, Egerton, a convert from Catholicism, had a reputation as a fervent Protestant, an implacable prosecutor of Catholic priests and those who harboured them. He had taken a leading – and uncompromising – role in bringing Edmund Campion, Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington plotters to their deaths on the scaffold.

He was responsible for ordering prisoners to be tortured and was close to the Queen’s despised priest-hunter, the cruel and relentless Richard Topcliffe.

And so his eventual marriage at the age of sixty to the cultured, beautiful Alice (a patron of the arts and the widow of a man who sponsored the early theatrical endeavours of William Shakespeare, among others) seems something of a mismatch – which is just as it turned out.

Yet it was Egerton who suffered the most. If he had hoped his marriage would bring him the aristocratic lustre he so desired, he was to discover only misery, for the haughty Alice – twenty years his junior – despised him and treated him with disdain.

She became one of the great hostesses of the court, a favourite of Elizabeth, performing in masques, and supporting playwrights and poets including Edmund Spenser and the young John Milton. Yet she had a cutting way with words and proved avaricious and careless with money, spending their great wealth with impunity, which displeased the frugal Egerton.

In the latter years of his life, Egerton (by now Lord Chancellor) confided in his son John that the marriage had brought him nothing but despair and he spewed out his venomous feelings towards his wife, accusing her of having ‘a
bitter tongue’. He wrote to his son: ‘I thank God I never desired a long life, nor ever had cause to desire it since this, my last marriage, for before I was never acquainted with such tempests and storms.’

Fort El Léon: The Aftermath

The cruelty of war is aptly demonstrated by the aftermath of the battle for Fort El Léon near Brest in Brittany on 7 November 1594.

After five hours of bloodshed, only half a dozen of the four hundred Spanish defenders were found alive, hiding in the rocks of the cliff beneath the fort. The English commander, Sir John Norreys, spared them and sent them back to the main Spanish army of General Juan del Águila.

Instead of being welcomed, however, they were hanged for cowardice.

Another casualty was Martin Frobisher, the commander of the English fleet and hero of the English assault. He had personally led his marines into the fort’s breach and had been shot in the hip. The wound in itself was not life-threatening, but the surgeon who removed the bullet left wadding in the wound and the subsequent infection led to gangrene, which killed Frobisher on his return to England.

The word ‘vagabond’ conjures up an image of romance and freedom on the open road, but the life of such people in the sixteenth century was anything but romantic.

They were the dispossessed of the age. They had no land, no welfare and were driven on from town to town. When apprehended, they could face the whip, mutilation or death by hanging.

If the Elizabethan historian William Harrison is to be believed, then the vagabonds of England were subjected to virtual genocide during the reign of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII.

In his
Description of Britain
, Harrison wrote in 1577 that Henry ‘did hang up three score and twelve thousand of them in his time’. So, out of a population of probably no more than 3 million, he executed 72,000 vagabonds (the equivalent for today’s population would be about 1.5 million).

Harrison said that Henry’s brutality seemed to terrify the vagabonds into submission, but that since the king’s death their numbers had greatly increased and there were now over 10,000 roaming the land and they had become so well organised that they had their own social structure and cant (some of which has survived in common usage, as you will see from the short lexicon below).

Yet Harrison clearly had no time for able-bodied vagabonds. He said: ‘They are all thieves and caterpillars in the commonwealth and, by the word of God, not permitted to eat since they do but lick the sweat from the true labourers’ brows.’

Facing such hostility, the vagabonds sought protection in numbers, forming themselves into large bands. This, of course, only served to make them seem more menacing and they came to be seen as a great social nuisance by the burgesses of towns and by the government. In London, they would be rounded up and thrown into Bridewell for whipping and forced labour.