‘And what of accomplices?’ Cecil asks. ‘It’s most unlikely he could have perpetrated this fraud alone.’
‘If I hear anything, I’ll tell you.’
As Cecil takes his seat behind his desk, he gives Nicholas a bland smile. ‘I shall look forward to it.’
Trying to steer the subject away from Oliver Henshawe, Nicholas says, ‘How are the peace negotiations to progress? Will there be emissaries? A conference?’
Mr Secretary Cecil looks at him blankly. ‘Peace negotiations?’
‘Now that you have the list of names that Don Rodriquez sent.’
‘Oh, that,’ says Cecil, as though he has just remembered where he left some unimportant trinket. He taps the desk drawer. ‘That’s safe in here. No need to worry for the present.’
‘But aren’t you going to–’
‘All in good time, Nicholas,’ Cecil interrupts. ‘The greatest threat to the safety of the realm was Robert Devereux, and he has now been gelded. Lord Mountjoy is to be sent to Ireland in his place. I’m sure he will soon bring the Irish to obedience and all this disquiet and expense may be dispensed with. Then we shall have time for the luxury of sounding out the gentlemen on Señor Calva de Sagrada’s list.’
Do they teach that smile to the young lawyers studying at the Temple? Nicholas wonders – the sort of smile that tells you how little you understand the world, and how better it would be if you didn’t trouble yourself trying.
But it tells Nicholas all he needs to know. Cecil’s response to Edmund Spenser’s approach was nothing to do with advancing peace, it was all to do with the humbling of his rival, Robert Devereux.
Nicholas thinks of Cachorra’s bravery and determination, of the courage of Don Rodriquez to extend the hand of peace to an enemy, of Piers Gardener’s willingness to risk his life for a cause he believed in. Their example makes what he has to say next all the easier.
‘There is something else I came to tell you, Sir Robert,’ he begins, feeling a great weight lifting from his shoulders. ‘It is with regret that I must inform you that I can no longer serve as your physician – or your intelligencer.’
He looks at Cecil and waits for an answer. Will it be rage? Cold anger? Threatening?
But Mr Secretary Cecil is a busy man. He is attending to the many important documents on his desk. The crooked shoulders hunch like a hawk pecking at the carcass of its prey. He doesn’t look up. In fact, as far as Nicholas can tell, he seems not to have heard him.
Ned remembers the directions from his first visit.
‘Follow that line of beech trees along Alleyne’s Meadow to the brook,’ the steward at Milkwell Manor had told him then. ‘Once across – it’s not much of a jump – you’ll find old Godwinson’s hut on the far side of the pasture. He’s bound to be there. He can’t have left more than twice since his son was murdered.’
‘Was it really necessary to ’ave Vyves and Strollot leave behind quite so much of the money left over from what ’Enshawe gulled from the Treasury?’ he asks Nicholas as they walk together in the cool of an October morning.
‘It was part of the bargain, Ned,’ Nicholas says, admiring the dewy cobwebs glinting like lace against the hedgerows. ‘That money was no more ours than it was his.’
‘Pity,’ says Ned.
‘But right.’
‘S’pose so,’ admits Ned. ‘What I shan’t never understand is why a fellow who ’as everything – a pleasing front, manners, position, reputation – why does that man turn out so bad? Why does ’e turn so cruel?’
‘I can’t answer that, Ned. I’m a physician, not a confessor.’
At the brook Ned Monkton needs do little more than step across. He puts out his hand to help Nicholas follow. ‘Aye, well, it was a shame to see it go,’ he says. ‘We could ’ave ’ad ourselves a right old revel with that much coin.’
Nicholas jumps across the stream, his free hand holding tight to the heavy purse at his belt. As he lands, a stab of fiery pain bursts through his still-healing wounds. Recovering his balance and his composure, he says, ‘This won’t cure Aaron Godwinson of the grief of losing his son, but it will buy him a flock of his own, and enough to live on for a good while. I know it’s rightly the Exchequer’s money, but if they are so determined to be careless with it, then it’s only right that we put at least some of it to good use.’
‘I can see the right in that,’ says Ned, his auburn beard and hair merging with the autumn leaves so that he looks like a creature born of the wildwood.
‘And what better use for it than that a father gets some recompense for his son’s service – even if that son didn’t make it all the way to Ireland?’
Ned lets out a laugh that rolls like summer thunder. ‘Playin’ fast and loose with government money – why, I do believe we’ve made a Banksider of you at last, Dr Shelby.’
And then he turns his back on Nicholas and starts to climb the bank.
Nicholas follows. Up through the bracken he goes, the silvery spiders’ webs clinging to his sleeves like the dried trails of a lover’s tears, and into the meadow – where an old, white-haired man is sitting on the dewy grass, singing a mournful song to a small huddle of studiously indifferent sheep.
Historical Note
Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, did not give up on his plan to restore – by force – his reputation and rid England of the courtiers he still believed to be the queen’s enemies. In February 1601 he would embark on the brief rebellion that would lead to his execution a few days later.
Spain made one last attempt at an invasion of Ireland, landing a large force in the same year. It was soundly defeated at Kinsale, along with Tyrone’s army. Hugh O’Neill himself continued his struggle against the English Crown. In 1607 he was forced to flee Ireland. He died in exile in Rome nine years later.
Did Essex really suffer from syphilis? In his excellent account of the earl’s life, An Elizabethan Icarus, the historian Robert Lacey certainly thinks so.
The muster fraud was a significant drain on England’s efforts to quell the Tyrone rebellion. Lax official control meant it was easy for captains to pay men to join the muster, then send them home and recruit far more cheaply in Ireland, pocketing the difference. Robert Cecil and Essex’s successor, Lord Mountjoy, made strenuous efforts to stamp out the practice.
The severing of heads as trophies was common on both sides during Tyrone’s rebellion. Which side began the custom is unclear. The journal of Sir William Russell contains several instances:
Captain Street sent in five of the traitors’ heads… Garrald McShaan Begg’s head sent in… Captain Willis brought in two traitors’ heads…
Quarter was in short supply:
The foragers took a prisoner in a house, wherein they found a bag of bullets newly molten for the enemy. He was executed.
Edmund Spenser’s views on how Ireland could be quickly brought under control were not unusually harsh for the time, though it is noteworthy that his pamphlet A View of the Present State of Ireland did not find a publisher until 1633.
The list of the peace faction that the fictitious Don Rodriquez brought to England must have languished in Mr Secretary Cecil’s desk drawer for quite some time. It was not until 1604, the year after Elizabeth’s death, that envoys from King Philip III sat down with the English Privy Council to agree a peace treaty between the two realms. A contemporary depiction of the event – The Somerset House Conference – hangs today in London’s National Portrait Gallery. Save for the gowns and the ruffs, it could almost be a photograph of any modern-day international political gathering. On the left of the table are the delegates from Spain and the Spanish Netherlands. On the right sit the representatives of James I. Amongst them – nearest to the viewer, and the only one who appears to have notes in front of him – is a rather enigmatic-looking Robert Cecil.