Martin Stephen - The rebel heart

'A group of Lord Essex's men were at the Globe yesterday. They saw the play, and then apparently one of them, Lord Mounteagle I think, offered the players forty shillings — forty shillings'. — to put on a performance of Richard the Second. You know — the old play by Shakespeare!'

'I should think the players'll have forgotten the lines by now,' said Gresham. 'It hasn't been performed for years now, has it? It's hardly the height of fashion.'

'That's what the players said, apparently. But the money was too good, and they've agreed to stage it. Tonight. You know what it means, don't you? The play, I mean.'

'It's the story of the rebellion by the Welshman Bolingbroke, who's shown as a loyal and good servant to a fickle monarch. He's banished, returns to England and, with the help of Welsh support, overthrows and imprisons Richard, eventually becoming King himself,'said Gresham.

An incitement to rebellion? A signal to London of what was going to happen? He jumped up to his feet.

'Are we going to the play?' Jane wanted to be in the action.

'Yes. Perhaps. Why not? But first I have to see someone.'

Plays were performed in the early afternoon, after the main meal of the day which, for most people, was at noon. There was time for Gresham to do what he had to do and see the play. 'Who?' asked Jane.

'I have to see a man called Smith,' answered Gresham grimly. He took Mannion and four men with him and returned in time for their dinner. There was a sense of suppressed tension in him. 'Are we going to the play?' asked Jane.

'Yes,' said Gresham. 'But I warn you it could be dangerous. I'm gambling that Essex will be there, so that I can talk to him. I must talk to him! If he is there, you'll be safe. He won't attack me if there's a woman in the party, I know it. If he's not, it could get nasty. Very much so. So if you come it's as our insurance, but at great risk.'

He could see the fear in her eyes, but also the excitement. 'Will I need a pistol?' she asked. 'Can you stuff one in your dress?' 'I'd rather you carried it for me.'

They ordered the boat. Unusually, Gresham chose the crew.

The playhouses were on the south side of the river, outside the strict boundaries of the City of London and thereby granted a little more freedom to do what the City Fathers so hated them for doing. Plays were seditious, evil things in the opinion of many, inflaming the popular imagination and corrupting it, hotbeds of riot, breeding centres for plagues of the body and plagues of the mind. It was a damp, cold day, though not wet enough to cancel the performance. The actors had an awning over the stage, and those who could pay sat in the tiered ranks and boxes of the wooden 'O' that was the Globe theatre. Only the groundling stood and caroused in the open area of the pit, and they were used to being soused.

It was a smaller crowd than usual flitting across the river, and the Globe was only half full, some put off by the damp, some by the unfashionable play and others fearful of what this revival might mean. Some people came onto the streets when rebellion was in the air but more locked and bolted their doors. Yet it seemed as if every rabble-rouser, Welsh peasant and unemployed soldier who had ever walked London's streets was packed in the theatre. Half an hour before the play was due to begin the noise level was rattling the timbers and shaking dust out of the thatch.

'Is this safe?' asked Mannion, not usually prone to feeling nervous.

'For us? For London? Or for the Queen? I don't know,' answered Gresham. Southampton was there, he saw, Mounteagle and the vulture-like Gelli Meyrick, plus a host of the others Essex had gathered round him like a graveyard gathers corpses. And Davies, of course. Would Essex come? Surely he would. For months now he had refused to leave Essex House, citing the danger he believed he was in from his enemies. The attack on Southampton by Grey, when for once the odious little toad was apparently doing nothing more than riding about his own business, had confirmed Essex in his opinion, and produced a host more pamphlets. Even without their master, the mood of the assembly was dark, violent, poisonous.

They had been spotted by the Essex crowd — Gresham, Mannion and Jane, together with the eight men who had rowed them there. There was a strict order among them for who rowed to the play, and such trips were a zealously guarded perk of working for Gresham. Gresham had ordered the rota to be thrown out of the window this time, and had chosen the men himself. Jack, Dick and Edward were there, and five others whose qualifications for the trip seemed to be in the broadness of their backs rather than in their love of poetry. They were on open seats on the first tier, just to the side of the stage. Essex's major cronies were in the same tier, taking the middle seats as befitted the patrons of the performance. Meyrick nudged Davies, and both men looked up to gaze calmly at Gresham. He gazed back. The two men looked impassively at him for a moment, whispered a few more words and turned away.

'We could 'ave trouble gettin' out of 'ere,' said Mannion.

'We could,' said Gresham. 'Give the nod to Tom.'

Jane had not understood why three of the men were carrying bulky leather sacks on their backs, with a flap of leather over the top to protect their contents from the rain.

'It's to carry your pistol,' said Gresham.

Nor did she understand why a ninth man, the rather nondescript' looking Tom, very different from the man who had died on the Anna, had been parked as an extra in the boat, between the oarsmen, and confined to the pit, and banned from wearing the black and silver of Gresham's livery. Jane had heard him being told to lose himself, but to keep in touch. He kept turning round and staring up at the gallery with a fixed, white look, his hair plastered down on top of his head by the thin drizzle. Mannion waited until none of the Essex men seemed to be looking in their direction, stood up and snapped his fingers at a boy selling nuts and ale. As he bought them, he looked down at Tom, and gave a slight nod. Tom nodded back, and quietly and without fuss began to edge to the exit door nearest to him. No one paid any attention to him. Mannion's eyes followed him to the door. So far so good.

The cannon roared its blank shot from the roof, and the trumpet blast sounded for the last time to announce the start of the play.

They were rusty in the parts, the actors, but they were professionals and they warmed to their material. King Richard was a pathetic figure, a man more destined for a College than for a Court, while the powerful figure of Bolingbroke was shown reluctantly wresting a Crown he did not want. It did not take long to see why Essex's men had chosen the play. Bolingbroke talked of his, 'Eating the bitter bread of banishment.'

In Gresham's mind Essex kept recurring not in the figure of Bolingbroke, but in the doomed figure of Richard II. All the huge melancholia of the man, his vast capacity for self-pity, was there in Richard's lines:

'Of comfort no man speak:

Let's talk of graves, of worms, of epitaphs;

Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth;

Let's choose executors, and talk of wills.'

Gresham felt a chill in his heart as the actor recited the words:

'A brittle glory shineth in this face:

As brittle as the glory is the face.'

It was Essex's face he saw, and Essex's voice as the actor intoned:

'I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.'

The stamping and cheering at the end seemed to last for ever, and while it was at its height Gresham gave the signal and he and his men, gathered protectively round Jane, made their way to the door and the thin, narrow wooden passageway that led downstairs. It smelt of piss and worse, where men and women had used it to answer nature's call. Two men brought up the rear, facing backwards, in case of a rush from behind. They emerged into the open, muddy courtyard, the sound and smell of the river just before them.