A Fine Madness by Alan Judd (best classic books TXT) 📕

Mr Secretary’s house at Barn Elms was a pleasing spot looking onto a meadow running down to the river. I arranged that our boatman should wait and be refreshed in the kitchen. Mr Secretary did not at first join us, being busy with correspondence. We found the other three already seated at a table in the small orchard and supplied with ale.

His Majesty will not of course have known these gentlemen, though he may have known of Robert Poley. Poley and Skeres must be long dead now. Ingram Frizer is still alive, last I heard. How or where the others died, I do not know, though Skeres probably died in prison. You shall find, sir – if God spares you, as I pray He shall – that age brings not the prosperity and security you hoped but a continuation of youth’s troubles and vexations while depriving you of the vigour and means to contest them. Age is unfair.

And if your luck is like mine, sir, you may find you are punished for living into a new reign. Consider that I was once you, as close to the great events of the kingdom as you are now. I was known to great men of the realm such as Sir Francis, Lord Burghley, Lord Leicester, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Ralegh and various ambassadors and men of state. My name was known even to the Queen, who once expressed pleasure at my service and rewarded me with a pension. I was privy to secrets and affairs of state that even now would cause men to draw breath.

Yet here I am in the King’s Bench prison, ignored, forgotten, discarded like an old shift too often worn. If I am remembered at all it is because some vengeful money-hound pursues me through the courts or because the state harries me for ancient debts to the Crown incurred through youth and inexperience in the last reign. I rot here at the mercy of my enemies, denied work to relieve my debts or to support my beloved Mary who depends upon me. Yet still the state remembers enough of me to demand my old deciphering skills when it suits. If I am still so useful and so trusted with secret matters, may I not at least work from my own house?

And now you, sir, come calling, imploring me to sieve what is left of my memories of a man who died some thirty years ago. You say you may give no reason other than that the King requires it, for why I cannot tell. But His Majesty himself is ailing, you tell me, so I must tell all this day. I pray God relieve His Majesty’s suffering and grant him long life. Please assure him of my fealty and say I beg forgiveness for being the only man living to have had a hand in the execution of his mother, which was lawfully done under pressure of circumstances few now comprehend. And tell him I freely confess mis-spent customs dues, buying property with Crown money which I still owe and would repay if I could earn again. And remind him too that Christopher Marlowe was also a man of the old reign, though he at least had the good fortune to die young and quick. He did not live to find himself unknown at Court, recalled only to be used and punished, as if survival is a sin.

Very well, sir, I shall get on, I shall. That day when we all met at Barn Elms was a prefiguring, as I have said, of Christopher’s death a few years later. The three present at that fateful occasion were the three whom he and I joined that bright morning in the orchard, including, of course, the man who killed him. I shall describe them for you as best I can.

Ingram Frizer we have met already at Lyford Grange. That gave you the essence of the man: a loyal dog, bullying, robust, hard-riding, hard-dealing. Perhaps no more out for himself than most men but he cared less to hide it and was more successful. He made sure he served his masters well, especially Thomas Walsingham, Sir Francis’s nephew whose man he became and whose widow he enriched in diverse dishonest ways, for which he was well rewarded.

You may have heard him described as a bawdy serving-man who argued with Christopher over a wench. That is untrue. He was more than a serving-man, more like a factor or bailiff who ensured obedience to his master’s bidding. He was a yeoman, later styled a gentleman. He was never a bawd, no more in drink than most men and taking women only as he found them, not as trade. I believe he later married. Nor do I know of any wench over whom he and Christopher would have argued. It is hard to imagine them having a woman in common.

Nicholas Skeres was a London man, son of a merchant tailor and about the same age as Christopher. He was small and pale with a black beard neatly trimmed and one eye half closed as if frozen in a wink. He studied law at Furnival’s Inn, lent money at high rates, bought bonds without paying, when he could get away with it, and sold them to the gullible, who did pay. He was ever in court, suing or being sued. Quiet-spoken and polite, he was a natural deceiver or coney-catcher, on business terms with notorious London street thieves such as Staring Robyn and Welsh Dick. Yet he too styled himself a gentleman and was later servant to the Earl of Essex, whose livery he wore until his master’s head was freed from his body. He and Frizer did business together. I heard he died some years ago and, assuming there is more justice in the next world than this, he should now be held to the fire and writhing on the prongs of Satan’s