It was a brief speech but I don’t recall all the details. I know what she did not say — the silence all London was abuzz with for days after. She did not confess her adulteries. She bade us pray for the king and for herself. Then the women helped her remove her cape and her headdress. Her long hair gleamed in the sunlight before she tucked it into a little cap. As she was composing herself, a tall figure stepped on to the stage behind her.
I turned to Robert. ‘Who — ’
‘The executioner. Brought specially from France. They say he’s very good. Pray God it may be so.’
One of the ladies came forward with a blindfold. Before it was fastened, the queen looked around the ranks of men happy or content or indifferent to witness her destruction. As her gaze reached the end of the line, it rested on me for a long moment — or so it seemed. I could not tear my eyes away from the slight figure, who now knelt, her head bent slightly forward, her lips moving in silent prayer. Up to that moment the performance had proceeded at a slow, almost stately pace, like a sinister pavane. But now the Frog took a stride forward, swinging his large sword as he did so. It flashed down in a wide arc. The capped head fell to the floor, bounced and rolled a few feet. The body, fountaining blood, remained upright for several seconds before tumbling sideways.
That was when I threw up all over the smart black gown of the man sitting in front of me.
Chapter 1
The nauseating scene I was obliged to witness that May morning was the first in a series of violent acts that would change England for ever and involve a very reluctant twenty-two-year-old merchant in that revolution. The sequence of events would rob me of my truest friend, turn my life inside out and, in very fact, almost bring it to a precipitate end — and that more than once. Of course, I could not know that at the time. The queen’s death had no relevance to me, Thomas Treviot, freeman goldsmith of the City of London. I had no interest in the affairs of the royal court. For all I cared, Lecher Harry could have been a Musselman with a dozen wives and decapitated every one of them. I had problems enough of my own. Grief enough and to spare.
A mere eight months before Queen Anne’s execution I had been one of the most fortunate young men in London. And I knew it. I was the only son (in fact, the only surviving child) of Thomas Treviot Senior and his wife, Isabel. My father was one of the leading City goldsmiths and, at the age of ten, I was apprenticed to him. Nine years later, having served two years as a journeyman, I was admitted a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths of the City of London. I worked beside my father to build upon an already flourishing business. My life lay before me like the map of a familiar land. There were no spaces marked ‘Terra Incognita’ or peopled with speculative monsters, such as one sees on new charts of Africa or America. One day I would take over the business operating from the sign of the Swan in Goldsmith’s Row, continue running it on the lines laid down by my father, assume my place among the mercantile nobility of the City, grow into an old and respected member of the Worshipful Company and eventually be laid to rest with others of my peers in the Church of St John Zachary, next to our company hall. Life became even more agreeable a year later when, in May 1534, I married Jane Coutray, a daughter of one of the London aldermen. It was in every way a suitable match. Suitable, not only because it greatly pleased our families, but also because we were very much in love. Jane, with her flowing fair hair and heart-melting smile, was everything a successful young businessman could want in a wife. She kept house immaculately and presided with charm and wit over our table when we entertained. There was only one thing we lacked — children. But we were young and time was on our side. Or so, in the careless arrogance of youth, we thought.
It was in December 1534 that Jane became pregnant. Any parent will know the joy and excitement that filled us over the following months. Yet no one was happier than my father. The prospect of a new generation to carry on the business delighted him. He dismissed as nonsense our protests that the baby might be a girl. He was right, but would never know it. The following summer he fell victim, like hundreds of others, to an outbreak of quotidian fever. Suddenly I was left alone, shouldering all the responsibilities of running the business, supporting my grieving mother and ensuring that Jane had everything necessary to bring her to term successfully. Her time came in early September of 1535. She was delivered of a healthy boy. Three days after the birth my lovely Jane was dead of the fever that kills many new mothers.
Everyone was very kind. John Fink — my journeyman apprentice, who had been with the firm as long as I could remember and knew the business as well as I, if not better — eagerly took on fresh responsibilities — I knew I could leave much of the day-to-day running in his hands. I could also rely on the Goldsmiths’ Company’s excellent record of looking after distressed members. For several months brother craftsmen kept an eye on the workshop and supervised my accounts. Neighbours were sympathetic. But sympathy is a flower that soon fades and grief is a much hardier plant. Perhaps I might have come to terms with it more rapidly had I not had so much support. If I had thrown myself into supervising the workshop, the heat and din of precious metals being melted, hammered and fashioned into jewellery and table plate might have driven other thoughts from my mind for much of the working day. Discussing their needs with clergy commissioning chalices, patens and altar furniture, with courtiers wanting to impress the king with the New Year gift of an embossed cup and cover, with newly rich merchants wishing to adorn their tables and court cupboards with silver plates and dishes or young gentlemen seeking expensive love pledges would have kept me in the world that goes on despite all our personal tragedies. But I was left much to my own memories and they were unbearable.
I fled from them. I had to escape from the everyday, the familiar. All that I saw, heard, smelled and felt reminded me of what I had lost. They spoke of happy days now gone beyond recall. My home at the sign of the Swan had become a mausoleum. The shop and the atelier were filled with my father’s shrewd, energetic presence. The parlour and especially the bedchamber enshrined the very essence of Jane. She had been my light, my warmth. Without her all was like a cold, blackened hearth on which no fire would ever burn again. Escape seemed to offer the only way to keep a semblance of sanity.
So I took myself out. Out of the shop. Out of the house. Out of the City. Away from anywhere that conjured up images of lost happiness. I rode about aimlessly, steering Dickon along the solitary heights of Hampstead or the marshy banks of the Lea near Hackney village. I had no care for where I was; no interest in the things I saw and heard. Sometimes I shouted my rage into the empty autumn air. Rage against a cruel God, who had given me everything and then taken a perverse delight in snatching it all away. I even complained to the yellowing woods and new-ploughed fields about well-meaning friends who tried to comfort me with platitudes, sympathy and advice.
Everyone warned me about riding unaccompanied along roads around the City infested with highway robbers. My response was that anyone killing me for my purse would be doing me a service. Colleagues urged me to put the past behind me, to abandon self-pity and look to my responsibilities. My son needed me, they said. But I could not bring myself even to look at him. To my distraught mind he was his mother’s murderer. Or, if he was not, then I must be, for I was responsible for the condition that had killed her. My mother and her ladies had decided that the boy was to be baptised with the name Raphael. Our parish priest had advised that the name of the archangel meant, in the original tongue, ‘God heals’. It was, he said, a good omen. I raised no objection. I was too much out of my wits to listen to any counsel. The counsellors themselves were abhorrent to me. I shunned them and wanted only to be alone. That was why I failed to notice the change in my mother. She, who had always been so calm and strong, was being destroyed from within by the canker of a grief even more virulent than my own. She became vague and absent-minded. Sometimes she spoke as though her husband were still alive. I should have seen the signs if I had not been blinded by my own feelings.