Читать книгу Fanfare for Elizabeth - Edith Sitwell - Страница 3

Table of Contents

This is England, this is the Happy Isle; it is the year 1533 and we are on our way to the country palace of the King—a giant with a beard of gold and a will of iron.... “If a lion knew his strength,” said Sir Thomas More to Cromwell, of his master, “it were hard to rule him.” Henry the Eighth had that leonine strength, but he had also a strange wisdom that was like a third eye, seeing into the hearts of his people. He was born to rule, and with all his lion’s strength and ferocity he was in certain ways a great King—averting from England many of the storms that arose in Europe from the changes in religious opinion. But his blindness in one direction was as great as his seeing powers in another, and he did not avert poverty from his people. On the contrary, he brought down destitution upon thousands by the overthrow of the monasteries.

He was a man of great personal beauty: “His Majesty”, wrote the Venetian, Sebastiano Giustinian, “is as handsome as nature could form, above any Christian prince—handsomer far than the King of France. He is exceedingly fair, and as well proportioned as possible. When he learned that the King of France wore a beard, he allowed his to grow; which being somewhat red, has the appearance of being of gold.... Affable and benign, he offends no one. He has often said to the Ambassador that he wished that everyone was content with his own condition, adding that ‘we are content with our islands’.”

He drew the bow, declared the Ambassador, with greater force than any man in Europe, and jousted marvellously. As late as 1529, a new ambassador, Falier, said that “In the eighth Henry God has combined such corporeal and intellectual beauty as not merely to surprise but astound all men. His face is angelic rather than handsome.”

Even in his later years Henry had still an appearance of great magnificence and power, like a sun running to seed. But he had grown heavier, the earth shook when he walked. And the prince with the face of an angel had fallen under the spell of his own princely will.

His temper had changed; but in earlier days he seemed a part of the English soil, of the English air, which was so mild that “laurel and rosemary flourish all winter, especially in the southern parts, and in summer time England yields apricots plentifully, musk melons in good quantity, and figs in some places, all of which ripen well, and by the same reason, all beasts bring forth their young in the open fields, even in the time of winter. And England hath such abundance of apples, pears, cherries and plums, such variety of them and so good in all respects, that no country yields more or better, for which the Italians would gladly exchange their citrons and oranges. But upon the sea coasts the winds many times blast the fruits in the very flower....”^[1]

At the end of Elizabeth’s reign, “Besides that we have most delicate apples, plummes, peares, walnuts, filberds, etc.,” wrote Harrison,^[2] “and those of sundrie sorts, planted within fortie yeeres passed, in comparison with which most of the old trees are nothing worth, have we no less store of strange fruit, as apricots, almonds, peaches, figges, corne-trees” (a kind of cherry) “in noble men’s orchards. I have seene capers, oranges and lemmons, and heard of wild olives growing here; besides the strange trees, brought from far, whose names I know not. ... We have in like sort such workmen as are not onlie excellent in graffing the naturall fruits, but also in their artificial mixtures, whereby one tree bringeth forth sundrie fruits, and one and the same fruit of divers colours and tastes, dalleing as it were with nature and his course, as if his whole trade were perfectlie known unto them: of hard fruits they will make tender, of soure sweet, of sweet yet more delicate, bereaving, also some of their kernels, others of their cores, and finally induing them with the savour of muske, ambre, or sweet spices at their pleasures. Divers also have written at large of these severall practises, and some of them had to convert the kernels of peaches into almonds, of small fruit to make farre greater, and to remove or add superfluous moisture to the trees.”

Gardens and orchards containing fruits such as these, grew in the heart of London.

It was thought, earlier in the giant’s reign, that gold lay under the soil.... But that hope proved to be unfounded. There were, however, other riches. Polydore Vergil had called the wool yielded by those sheep “that bring forth their young in the open fields”, “England’s Golden Fleece”.^[3] All was fatness and plenty, until the nation of the beggars began with the destitution caused by the suppression of the monasteries.

What is that rumbling noise we hear, resembling the beginning of an earthquake? It is the sound of the carts bringing merchandise to London.... But in the mornings to come there will be less and less travellers to the City, for a reason we shall see. The Plague is approaching London, slow wave by wave, and will overwhelm it like a sea.

Now we, and the carts, are coming nearer to “the noble city of London” (as Andrew Boorde, one of the King’s physicians, called it), in that “city which excelleth all others ... for Constantinople, Venice, Rome, Florence, cannot be compared to London”.

Presently we shall come to the heart of the City, the Tower, and see, fixed to one of the turrets by spears, the skulls “denuded of flesh”, the signs of Henry’s vengeance against traitors.

Small dark clouds circling in the sky swoop downwards from time to time, and we see that they are kites and other carrion birds—“so tame”, wrote Trevison, “that they will eat bread and butter out of little children’s hands”.

But now we are only on the outskirts—the suburbs which were then the slums and the breeding-places of the Plague, the dwelling-places of the criminal population.

“How happy”, wrote Thomas Dekker, “were cities if they had no Suburbes, sithence they serve but as caves, where monsters are tied up to devoure the Citties their-selves. Would the Divell hire a villain to spil blood? There we shall finde him. One to blaspheme? there he hath choice. A Pandar that would court a nation at her praiers? hees there ... a cheater that would turne his own father a-begging? Hees there too. A harlot that would murder her own new-borne Infant? She lies in there.”

Here, the “dores of notorious Carted Bawdes (like Hellgates) stand night and day wide open, with a paire of Harlots in Taffeta gownes (like two painted posts) garnishing out those dores ... when the dore of a poore Artificer (if his child had but died with one token of death about him) was close ramm’d up and guarded for feare others should have been infected. Yet the plague a whorehouse lays upon a Citty is worse, yet is laughed at: if not laughed at, yet not look’d into, or if look’d into, wincked at.”^[4] And yet “Seriant Carbuncle, one of the Plague’s chiefe officers, dare not venture within three yardes of an Harlot, because Mounseer Dry-Bone,^[A] the French-Man, is a Ledger” (lodger) “before him”.^[5]

[A] Mounseer Dry-Bone, or syphilis, the appalling disease which, since the capture of Naples by the French in 1495, had ravaged Europe, rivalling and eclipsing leprosy in its horror.

Now we are passing Newington, one of the worst of the slums, and from there move onwards through the shamble-smelling, overhanging streets where the Plague breeds, onward through the streets haunted by Puffing Dick, King of the Beggars, he who “was a man crafty and bold; yet he died miserably. For, after he had commanded now fully eight years, he had the pyning of the Pox and the Neopolitan scurf, and there was an end of Puffing Dick”.^[6]

The company of the beggars, a nation within a nation, living by its own laws, even speaking its own language, was to become, in the reign of Elizabeth, one of the gravest of menaces, till there came a time when that nation bearded, and tried to browbeat, the great Queen in her own person.

By the year 1536, this nation had been joined by the “helpless, needy wretches, unused to dolour, and uninstructed in business”^[7] who were turned abroad following the overthrow of the Monasteries. Mr. Ronald Fuller, in The Beggars’ Brotherhood, gives the number of these condemned to starvation as 88,000.

Every day would see hordes of these poor creatures going to join the company of the ruffians who, at the beginning of Henry’s reign, were ruled over by Cocke Lorell, “the thyrde person in the realm” and the terror of the London streets.^[8] Cocke Lorell may have been a myth, but the later King, Puffing Dick, was a very real personage.

All the old Hospitals, St. Mary Bethlehem, St. Thomas of Southwark, St. Bartholomew, and that terrifying shadow of a nunnery, St. James-in-the-field, “an Hospitall for leprous virgins”, were closed till the end of Henry the Eighth’s reign, and their inmates were let loose in the streets, leprous virgins, persons shadowed by Mounseer Dry-Bone, the French-Man, and others.

These lay abroad in the streets of London, mingling their diseases and their miseries, hungry and naked, with wounds coalescing and decomposing under the enormous sun and the freezing moon, their stench offending the passers-by. Sometimes a few of the less helpless would rise up, and in a company of huge trunks, lumps, hulks and hulls, with tatters fluttering like seas, would swarm past the palaces, the monasteries the old occupants of which had gone. If they begged without a written permission, they were rewarded by the pillory, the whip, branding, slavery, or the gallows.

Such was their destitution that they would defy even the Plague. A writer of thirty years later put these words in the mouths of the beggars: “If such plague do ensue, it is no great loss. We beggars reck nought of the carcass, but do defy it; we look for the old cast coats, jackets, hose, caps, belts and shoes, by their deaths, which in their lives they would not depart from, and this is an hap. God send me one of them....”^[9]

Sometimes a roar would echo through the streets from the Bear-garden, that filthy hell where devils from the slums tortured the helpless.

“No sooner was I entered,” wrote Thomas Dekker, some sixty years later, “but the very noyse of that place put me in mind of Hell: the beare (dragt to the stake) shewed like a black ragged foule, that was Damned, and newly committed to the infernall Churle, the Dogges like so many Divels inflicting torments upon it.

“At length a blinde Bear was tyed to the stake, and instead of baiting him with dogges, a company of creatures that had the shapes of men, and faces of Christians, (being either Colliers, Carters, or Watermen) took the office of Beadles upon them, and whipt Mounsier Hunkes, till the blood ran doune his old shoulders: it was some sport to see Innocence triumph over Tyranny, by beholding those unnecessary tormentors go away with scratched hands or torne legs from a porre Beast arm’d only by nature to defend himselfe against Violence: yet methought that this whipping of the blinde Beare moved as much pittie in my breast towards him, as leading of porre starved wretches to the whipping posts in London (when they had need to be relieved with foode) ought to move the Cittizens, though it be the fashion now to laugh at their punishment.”^[10]

What death could be sufficiently terrible for the tormentors of the starved, I do not know: but one would like to think that those scratched by the blind bear died after suffering the tortures of gangrene.... Perhaps they did.... I hope so. In any case, we have passed by these chivalrous sports, and the streets, and now move among the airs that drift from the gardens, until we come to a favourite palace of the King, Greenwich, “first builded”, says Harrison in his Description of England, “by Humphrie of Gloucester, upon the Thames side foure miles east from London, in the time of Henrie the sixt, and called Pleasance. Afterwards it was greatly enlarged by King Edward IV; garnished by King Henry VII, and finallie made perfect by King Hen. 8 the arche Phenix of his time for fine and curious masonrie.”

This palace of peach-red brick bore everywhere the daisy emblem of Marguerite of Anjou ... the river ran past it, and the arche Phenix could be rowed in his barge to the steps that led up to the palace. From the mullioned windows the father of the navy could watch his ships as they passed down the river.^[11]

As we come nearer, there is a sound of music, approaching us from the direction of the gardens.