Vanora Bennett - The People’s Queen

So it makes the Merchants of the Wool Staple angry with the King if they find out he’s been cheating them – for instance by granting special licences to the Italian merchant community trading out of London, so the foreigners can bypass all the weighing and measuring and customs-paying that English merchants have to endure at Calais or Middleburg. This blithe cheating keeps the Italians happy, as they get to make a bigger profit margin while undercutting the English merchants’ sales prices later, at the Flanders wool fairs. It makes the King happy, too, because how can the Italians then refuse when he asks them for a direct loan, to help pay for his war in France?

But there isn’t much the Merchants of the Wool Staple can do about being ripped off by their King, except grin and bear it and, when the King then asks them for a direct loan, too (since the Italians have been so generous), to agree, and ask to take on the Italians’ loan, too, on condition the Italians have their special licences cancelled, so the English, at least, get their monopoly of wool exports back. And then they’re left shouldering a double debt burden, with no guarantee that the King might not, tomorrow or the next day, take it into his head to do another quiet little deal with another Italian to get off scot free from all taxes for a quick cash payment now. There’s nothing the merchants can do openly to let off steam. Sometimes the English merchants’ apprentices, having heard unpleasant things said about the Italian merchants of London at their masters’ tables, get drunk and go and beat up the nearest Italian. The apprentices are savagely punished. Hanged, often. There’s never any question of calling the King to account.

Chaucer’s job will not be to call the King to account. It will be to be the royal eyes and ears inside London. He will deal with the pre-exports: what leaves England. London is the last place a King’s man can, realistically, get at the wool due for export; after that it’s entirely in the hands of the merchants themselves. For almost the entire wool crop leaving England goes through London, where it is packed and weighed and warehoused by merchants; and it’s here that the greatest merchants live. It will be Chaucer’s job to reweigh the wool crop, sack by sack, and go through the merchants’ paperwork, and to form his own view of how big the English trade in wool really is, and how much the merchants should really have paid the King for these exports, or for others, and, generally, to increase the King’s income from the City merchants in whatever way he sees fit.

‘Be one of them,’ Latimer has told Chaucer. ‘Make them feel at home with you. Listen to their privy talk. You’ll know how. But always remember the reckoning. The bill for these past three years of war has been £200,000, and the truce that’s holding now won’t last for ever. As long as you’re clearing more than 25,000 sacks of wool a year, and getting an annual yield of £70,000 on it, England’s still afloat. More or less,’ and here, Chaucer recalls, the Baron’s face wrinkled into a long, mirthless grin that was more like a snarl. ‘At least, as long as the Pope doesn’t also come back with his begging bowl. Thirty thousand for his Italian wars, indeed. We can’t afford to pay to fight the French and for him to wage wars too. Things are far too tight as it is.’

The vast amounts take Chaucer’s breath away, even more than the tightness of the royal finances, the narrowness of the margins, and the King’s reliance on a mixture of charm and bullying of the entrepreneurs whose language he doesn’t even speak (the King sticks to French) to keep England staggering on. He feels naive to be so astonished by these enormous figures. But he is. Chaucer lives in small coin, on graces and favours. The sheer staggering weight of the money being talked about is beyond his ken.

And when they disembark, his welter of conflicting emotions only swirls more wildly.

He shouldn’t be surprised, he tells himself. It’s years since he’s been surrounded like this by his father’s acquaintances. He was a child. Watching these half-dozen mostly familiar faces now, the jowls and wrinkles more accentuated than he remembers, the stubble going grey or white on firmly jutting chins (though the furs on their long gowns, worn despite the heat of the day, are more splendid than ever), he feels, almost, a little boy again – the little boy his father used to get in to serve the merchants their wine in the Chaucer house on Thames Street. That smaller Chaucer used to listen admiringly to the talk about pepper imports and mackerel catches and the iniquity of the law allowing foreign merchants to retail their goods on English soil and the quality of this year’s wine from Gascony, while outside on the wharves that you could see, dimly, through the glass windows (how proud his father had been of those glass windows), the men running like ants under the winches, watching the barrels swinging down, and the flash and splash of river traffic. Back then, Chaucer knew that any minute he’d feel his father’s hand ruffling his head or patting his back. Those quiet, fond, proud touches, which in the manner of small boys trying to be big he never acknowledged, but which he always quietly put himself in the way of, are all that’s missing now.

He presses his lips and eyelids together. No point in regrets. John Chaucer, who so wanted to better himself that he spent the Mortality years trailing around France in King Edward’s baggage train buying wine for the forces, and then for the King himself, would have been proud to see his son here today, stepping up to the Wool Wharf, the powerhouse where English wealth is made, measured and exported, in the very shadow of the Tower of London, being deferred to by the powerful men he worked so hard to make his own friends.

Chaucer looks around. This year’s Mayor is in the welcoming party (a stringy grey man from a lesser guild; Chaucer has no childhood memories of him ). More importantly, the man who’s about to become Mayor for the next year is here too: William Walworth, fishmonger and alderman of Bridge Ward, a tall, ascetic-looking man with spun-gold hair and the innocent face of an angel. Chaucer remembers Walworth’s long, thin legs, crossing and uncrossing themselves, the elegant, tendony ankles, the high-arched feet, from a very distant past in which the little Geoffrey played quietly under the table with his ball or top, listening to the men’s voices. But it’s another of these familiar men – Nicholas Brembre, tall burly Brembre, now alderman for Bread Street Ward – who steps superbly forward from the furry, velvety, bass-voiced cluster and takes it upon himself to reintroduce the rest. Walworth just stands behind Brembre, looking avuncular. Perhaps, now Walworth has secured the mayor’s office for himself for a year, he’s letting his friend show his paces in time for next year’s selection – for, Chaucer knows, Walworth, Brembre, and the stocky, balding man at his side, John Philpot, a grocer like Brembre, are famous for sticking together and protecting each other’s interests. Between them, the three victuallers pretty much run the City. They share the mayor’s and sheriffs’ jobs among themselves, year in, year out. And these are the three London men to whom the King comes, year in, year out, asking for money. Chaucer can see for himself how closely they cooperate. Even now, they’re standing together, shoulder to shoulder, making sure he sees their faces first; keeping the lesser men back.

Chaucer remembers Brembre best, from childhood. All that dark energy, those forceful gestures, years ago, once rather frightened little Geoffrey. But now Chaucer has adult eyes in his head, and what he sees with them is that Brembre has become golden. Almost physically golden. The grocer’s skin is gilded, as if by the sun, or (perhaps more plausibly for a man who spends his daylight hours in warehouses, checking his inventories of pepper and saffron and pomegranates) just by good fortune and soft living and ambition satisfied. He’s smooth and honeyed with success. His blue eyes sparkle as brightly as ever, his face is as animated as Chaucer remembers it being long ago, though his large, regular features seem bigger and smoother, his black hair is silver-streaked, and success has slowed the man’s once rapid, excitable speech into a deeper, calmer purr. ‘My dear Geoffrey,’ he says, very warmly, putting an arm around Chaucer’s back, as if claiming ownership. ‘We are all delighted to welcome you back to London.’