and who would bail old Shallot and risk the massed fury of the Scawsbys? I gulped and gagged as if the rough hempen necktie was already round my throat. Suddenly the Clerk to the Justices, a tall stooped figure dressed in a dark russet gown, rose and addressed the bench.
'I will, My Lord!' he announced. 'I will place my bond 'as surety for Shallot!'
Old Scawsby nearly exploded with apoplexy, so surprised he fixed the bond much lower than his own malice should have allowed: a hundred pounds, to be redeemed by the following Martinmas. I gripped the iron rail and stared in utter disbelief at my saviour: his long solemn face, hooked nose and calm grey eyes. Benjamin Daunbey had saved me from a hanging.
It's hard to define our relationship. Master and servant, close bosom friends, rivals and allies… do you know, after seventy years I still can't describe it. All I remember was that I was saved and walked free from the Sessions House. Other felons, not so lucky as I, were put in the stocks, tied to the triangle for a whipping or placed in the pillory, their ears nailed to the block until they either tore themself free or plucked up enough courage to cut them off.
In time I moved house, joining Benjamin in his narrow, dark tenement in Pig Pen Alley behind the butchers' shambles near Ipswich Market – a pleasant enough place inside with its low-ceilinged rooms, buttery, kitchen, small hall and white-washed chambers above. Behind it, however, Benjamin cultivated a paradise of a garden, laid out in rectangular plots, each protected by a low hedge of lavender. Some contained herbs – balm and basil, hyssop, calamine and wormwood – others flowers: marigolds, violets, lilies of the valley. There were stunted apple and pear trees as well as pot herbs growing along the wall to season the meat in winter. Benjamin, taciturn at the best of times, always used this garden as the setting in which to share his deepest thoughts. My master never explained why he intervened to save my life so I never asked him. One day he just sat in the garden and declared: 'Roger, you can be my servant, my apprentice. You have broken so many laws, you are probably more of an expert on justice than I am. However,' he wagged one bony finger at me, 'if you appear before Scawsby again, you will undoubtedly hang!'
I never did but Scawsby had not seen the last of me. Benjamin intrigued me, though he never discussed his early life.
'A closed book, Roger.' He smiled.
'Why haven't you married?' I asked. 'Don't you like women?'
'Passing fancies, my dear Roger,' he replied, and remained assiduous in his pursuit of his duties, even persuading me to join the choir at the local church, my bass an excellent foil to his tenor. I lustily bawled out the hymns whilst watching the heaving breasts of our female companions. Since then I've always had a soft spot for choirs.
At first, life was plain sailing. I kept my head down, doing the occasional errand, staying away from those areas where the powerful Scawsby family had a measure of influence. I feared for my master but one thing I had forgotten though Scawsby knew it well: Benjamin was a nephew of the great Lord Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Bluff Hal's principal minister. Now the Lord Cardinal was a hard man, not known for his generosity. A butcher's son from Ipswich, he had not forgotten his obscure beginnings but was equally determined that none of his relatives should remind him of them. When the rest of his large family came begging for favours, they were whipped off like a pack of hounds but Benjamin, the son of his favourite aunt, was cossetted and protected. My Lord Cardinal was determined that if he could be saved from the shambles of Ipswich and rise to be a royal favourite, Archbishop of York, Lord Chancellor and a Cardinal of the Roman Church, so could Benjamin.
Well, we all know about Wolsey. I was there when he died, in the Cathedral House at Lincoln, his great, fat fingers scrabbling at the bed clothes as he whispered, 'Roger, Roger, if I had served my God as well as I have served my King, he would not leave me to die like this!'
Now, old Wolsey fell when he failed to secure Bluff Hal's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and place him between the sheets with the hot-limbed, long-legged Anne Boleyn. I never told Benjamin this (indeed very few people knew it) but the Lord Cardinal did not die by natural causes – he was murdered by a subtle, deadly poison. However, that's another story for the future. In 1516, by subtle fetches, Wolsey had crept into the ear of the King. A brilliant scholar, Wolsey had gone to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became fellow and bursar until his hand was found dipping in the money bags. Anyway, with his crafty mind he soon became chaplain to long-faced Henry VII, buying a house in St Bride's parish in Fleet Street. When Henry VII went mad and died, our new young King, the golden boy, Bluff Hal, saw the craftiness in Wolsey and raised him high. He bought a house near London Stone in the Walbrook, becoming Almoner, Chancellor and Archbishop until all power rested in his great fat hands. Some people said Wolsey was the King's bawd, others his pimp, alleging he kept young ladies in a tower built in a pleasaunce near Sheen for the King's entertainment. Others claimed Wolsey practised the Black Arts and communed with Satan who appeared to him in the form of a monstrous cat. A great man, Wolsey! He built Hampton Court, his servants went round in liveries of scarlet and gold with the escutcheon T. C on their back and front – 'Thomas Cardinalis'. And, all the time, the Lord Cardinal never forgot his favourite kinsman, young Benjamin.
My Lord Cardinal did not give Benjamin actual honours but rather money, as well as opening the occasional door to preferment and advancement. At least that was the Cardinal's plan though it came to involve treason, conspiracy, murder and executions… but that was for the future. If I had known the end of the business at the beginning, I would have run like the fleetest hare. There, I speak as lucidly and clearly as any honest man!
Benjamin was twenty when I met him again as Clerk to the Justices. I was two years younger and quickly learnt to play the role of the clever, astute servant, ever ready to help his guileless master. Well, at least I thought him guileless but there was a deeper, darker side to Benjamin. I did hear a few rumours about his past but dismissed them as scurrilous (I never really did decide whether he was an innocent, or subtle and wise). Do you know, I once met him in a tavern where he sat clutching a small wooden horse to his chest, gazing at it raptly, his eyes full of religious fervour. Now the toy was nothing much, any child would play with it. This particular one looked rather old and battered.
'Master, what is it?' I asked.
Benjamin smiled like the silly saint he was.
'It's a relic, Roger,' he whispered.
Oh, God, I thought, and could have hit him over the head with a tankard.
'A relic of what, Master?'
Benjamin swallowed, trying hard to hide his pleasure.
'I had it from a man from Outremer, a holy pilgrim who has visited Palestine and the house Mary kept in Nazareth. This,' he lifted it up, eyes glowing as if he was Arthur holding the Holy Grail, 'was once touched and played with by the infant Christ and his cousin, John the Baptist.'
Well, what can you say to that? If I'd had my way, I'd have smashed the toy over the silly pedlar's head but my master was one of those childlike men: he always spoke the truth and so he believed that everyone else did. After that I decided to take him in hand and help him make full use of the Lord Cardinal's favours. In the spring of 1517, Wolsey granted Benjamin a farm, a smallholding in Norfolk on which to raise sheep, and my master gave me gold to buy the stock. In an attempt to save money I bought the sheep from a worried-looking farmer who pocketed my silver at Smithfield, handed over the entire flock and ran like the wind. No sooner had I returned these animals to my master's holding than they all died of murrain which explained the farmer's sudden departure. Of course, I did not tell my master about their former owner or how I had kept the difference between what he gave me and what I had spent. I am not a thief, I simply salted the money away with a goldsmith in Holborn in case Benjamin made further mistakes.
Cardinal Wolsey's rage can be better imagined than described. He angrily despatched his nephew to serve Sir Thomas Boleyn, a great landowner in Kent. You have heard of the Boleyns? Yes, the same family which produced the dark-eyed enchantress, Anne. Now she may have been a bitch, but once you met her father, you knew the reason why! Lord Thomas was a really wicked man who would do anything to advance his own favour with the King – and I mean anything. Of course, like all the arrogant lords of the soil, he hated Cardinal Wolsey and plotted with the other great ones to bring the proud prelate low. Although a powerful landowner, Lord Thomas had still married above himself, one of the Howards, the kin of my old general the Earl of Surrey who slaughtered the Scots at Flodden Field. Now Boleyn's wife, Lady Frances Howard, was the proverbial drawbridge, going down for anyone who asked her. Bluff King Hal's hands had been under her skirts and well above her garter many a time. The same is true of her eldest daughter, Mary, who had the morals of an alley cat. She bore Bluff Hal an illegitimate child but even he had grave doubts about its parentage and locked it away in the convent at Sheen. Mary and her sister Anne
