V
“My mad nephew,” Master Printer Badge said to Throckmorton, “shall travel down from his chamber anon. When ye shall see the pickle he is in ye shall understand wherefore it needeth ten minutes to his downcoming.” To Throckmorton’s query he shook his dark, bearded head and muttered: “Nay; ye used him for your own purposes. Ye should know better than I what is like to have befallen him.”
Throckmorton swallowed his haste and leant back against the edge of a press that was not at work. Of these presses there were four there in the middle of the room: tall, black, compounded of iron and wood, the square inwards of each rose and fell rhythmically above the flutter of the printed leaves that the journeymen withdrew as they rose, and replaced, white, unsullied and damp as they came together again. Along the walls the apprentice setters stood before the black formes and with abstruse, deliberate or hesitating expressions, made swift snatches at the little leaden dice. The sifting sound of the leads going home and the creak of the presses with the heavy wheeze of one printer, huge and grizzled like a walrus, pulling the press-lever back and bending forward to run his eyes across the type—wheeze, creak and click—made a level and monotonous sound.
“Ye drill well your men,” Throckmorton said lazily, and smoothed his white fingers, holding them up against the light, as if they of all things most concerned him.
He had received that day at Hampton a letter from the printer here in Austin Friars, sent hastening by the hands of the pressman whose idle machine he now leant against. “Sir,” the letter said, “my nephew saith urgently that T. C. is landed at Greenwich. He might not stay him. What this importeth best is yknown to your worshipful self. By the swaying of the sea which late he overpassed, being tempestive, and by other things, my nephew is rendered incoherent. That God may save you and guide your counsels and those of your master to the more advantaging of the Protestant religion that now, praised be God! standeth higher in the realm than ever it did, is the prayer of Jno. Badge the Younger.”
Throckmorton had hastened there to the hedges of Austin Friars at the fastest of his bargemen’s oars. The printer had told him that, but that the business was the Lord Privy Seal’s and, as he understood, went to the advantaging of Protestantism and the casting down of Popery, never would he ha’ sent with the letter his own printer journeyman, busied as they were with printing of his great Bible in English.
“Here is an idle press,” he said, pointing at the mute and lugubrious instrument of black, “and I doubt I ha’ done wrong.” His moody brow beneath the black, dishevelled hair became overcast so that it wrinkled into great furrows like crowns. “I doubt whether I have done wrong,” and he folded his immense bare arms, on which the hair was like a black boar’s, and pondered. “If I thought I had done wrong, I might not sleep seven nights.”
A printer yawned at his loom, and the great dark man shouted at him:
“Foul knave, ye show indolence! Wot ye that ye be printing the Word of God to send abroad in this land? Wot ye that for this ye shall stand with the elect in Heaven?” He turned upon Throckmorton. “Sir,” he said, “your master Cromwell advanceth the cause, therefore I ha’ served him in this matter of the letter. But, sir, I am doubtful that, by losing one moment from the printing of the pure Word of God, I have not lost more time than a year’s work of thy master.”
Throckmorton rubbed gently the long hand that he still held against the light.
“Ye fall away from Privy Seal?” he asked.
The printer gazed at him with glowering and suffused eyes, choking in his throat. He raised an enormous hand before Throckmorton’s face.
“Courtier,” he cried, “with this hand I ha’ stopped an ox, smiting it between the eyes. Wo befall the man, traitor to Privy Seal, that I do meet and betwixt whose eyes this hand doth fall.” The hand quivered in the air with fury. “I can raise a thousand ’prentices and a thousand journeymen to save Privy Seal from any peril; I can raise ten thousand citizens, and ten thousand tomorrow again from the shires by pamphlets of my printing; I can raise a mighty army thus to shield him from Papists and the devil’s foul contrivances. An I were a Papist, I would pray to him, were he dead, as he were a saint.” Throckmorton moved his face a line or two backwards from the gesticulating ham of a hand, and blinked his eyes. “My gold were Privy Seal’s an he needed it; my blood were his and my prayers. Nevertheless,” and his voice took a more exalted note, “one letter of the Word of God, God aiding it, is of more avail than Privy Seal, or I, and all those I can love, or he. With his laws and his nose for treason he hath smitten the Amalekites above the belt; but a letter of the Word of God can smite them hip and thigh, God helping.” He seemed again to choke in his throat, and said more quietly: “But ye shall not think a man in land better loveth this godly flail of the monks.”
“Why, I do think ye would stand up against the King’s self,” Throckmorton said, “and I am glad to hear it.”
“Against all printers and temporal powers,” the printer answered. Amongst the apprentices and journeymen a murmur arose of acclamation or of denial, some being of opinion that the King was divine in origin and inspiration, but for the most part they supported their master, and Throckmorton’s blue eyes travelled from
