28
The Queen’s Bench Prison,
16th September 1594
Ned Monkton is one of twenty prisoners appearing this morning before a justice of the assizes. He is next in the queue, between a permanently soused woman of sixty accused of naming her cats Lucifer and Belial, and a labourer indicted for stealing an awl and a hammer from his employer.
The clerk has already read out the charge, first in Latin, which was meaningless to Ned, and then in English: that he did, in chance medley – that is, in a hot quarrel – kill Sir Fulke Vaesy, knight, a resident of the Castle Baynard Ward of the city, in contravention of the queen’s common law.
Ned has submitted his plea: not guilty. The findings of the coroner’s jury and his own deposition, written for him by Rose, have been presented to the justice in advance. A jury of residents drawn from nearby Borough High Street has been assembled. A small crowd has gathered to watch the proceedings. Rose stands amongst them, drying her eyes on her sleeve. She doesn’t want Ned to see her distressed.
The conversation between the magistrate – imperious in a red gown and a black cloth cap – and the prosecuting sergeant dies on their lips when Ned is brought before them. They stare at him, the magistrate through a pair of slightly opaque spectacles. Then, hurriedly calculating the distance between the accused and their own suddenly vulnerable bodies, they independently wave the two court guards to move closer to the giant standing in the body of the court.
What is to be made of him? the justice wonders, tugging a little nervously at his ruff. Look at that bushy auburn beard. You could hide a whole gang of cut-purses in that thicket. Look at the ruddy complexion – clearly a man drunk from dawn to dusk. Or is he flushed with an inveterate and dangerous anger? And those huge hands. Murderer’s hands, without a doubt. This humble show that he is putting on must be intended to deceive. It cannot be his true nature. That is not how God has fashioned the bear.
‘You plead not guilty,’ the sergeant says, ‘yet you look like a man easily roused.’
Rose calls out, ‘Oh, he’s easily roused, Your Honour. It’s a job to stop him being roused. Sometimes I ’as to ask for a night off.’
Guffaws from the assembled spectators.
‘Restate your account of what happened, Master Monkton,’ the magistrate says, quieting the laughter with a downward wave of his hand.
Intimidated by the majesty of the law, Ned does his best. And it is not at all bad. He has a confidence in him that Rose hasn’t seen before. It makes her proud. It makes her weep again.
‘Your Honour, Sir Fulke Vaesy wrote a letter to the Privy Council denouncing my friend, Dr Nicholas Shelby, who is physician to the young son of Sir Robert Cecil. I went to his house on St Andrews’s Hill to make him retract the calumny.’
‘And that’s when you murdered him,’ the Crown’s sergeant interjects helpfully.
‘No, sir.’
‘Did Sir Fulke agree to your request?’
‘He did so agree, yes.’
‘By your gentle persuasion, no doubt?’ More laughter from the public. ‘And then you killed him.’
‘I had words with him, yes. But I laid not a hand upon him, sir – not until I went to leave. Then he drew upon me. It was a poniard.’ Ned places his two palms a foot apart. ‘About this long. He sought to strike me with it. I pushed him. He fell against his desk. His brains was dashed out.’
Rose smiles proudly from the public cordon. She had counselled him to speak simply and plainly, not to try to impress with airs that might only make him risible in the eyes of the court. He has not let her down.
The magistrate shuffles through the written depositions before him. He finds what he is looking for. ‘It is written here that the accused cites the manservant of Sir Fulke Vaesy as a witness. Is he here?’
‘No, Your Honour,’ says the sergeant. ‘He is not to be found.’
‘The constables have made a proper search for this… Ditworth person?’
‘No effort has been spared, Your Honour. All we can ascertain is that he has taken the opportunity of his master’s demise to leave the city. It seems that, as Sir Fulke’s servant, he was ill used.’
‘So we have only your word that you did not assault the victim,’ the magistrate says, addressing Ned with a doubting eye.
‘That is how it passed, Your Honour. I ’ave sworn to it, on the Bible.’
Another ruffle through the documents, a downward jab of the magistrate’s thumb as though squashing a woodlouse. ‘Ah, here it is: an account that tells me you are well known on Bankside as a drunk and a brawler. A Constable Willders reports that on numerous occasions you fought with the watch when leaving taverns in an inebriated state. You were so quarrelsome, in fact, that they paid you money to go quietly to your bed, rather than risk injury to themselves. The warden at St Thomas’s Hospital writes that you were frequently to be found intoxicated in the mortuary crypt. How say you?’
Ned finds an unexpected dignity. To Rose, he seems to grow even taller, causing her to make tearful honking noises that draw a frown of irritation from the magistrate.
‘That was my place of work, Your Honour,’ he says calmly. ‘All day an’ into the night, amongst the dead. That it made me quarrelsome, I do not deny. But that was before Master Nicholas and Mistress Bianca found me. I was a different man then. I was angry. So might you be, with only the forgotten dead for company.’
‘And I would suggest the accused is angry still,’ the sergeant says. ‘So angry, in fact, that he forced a supposed confession from Sir Fulke Vaesy and then beat him to death.’
‘Where is this letter you forced Sir Fulke to make, before you killed him?’
‘I didn’t kill him, Your Worship,’ Ned objects. ‘The desk did.’
More guffaws from the public, silenced by a mournful glare from the magistrate.
‘Where is the letter?’
‘It is sent to Lord John Lumley, at Nonsuch Palace. I gave it into the hands of his secretary at his London house on Woodroffe Lane. I have placed my trust in Lord Lumley to lay it before the Privy Council.’
‘To what end?’
‘So that Dr Shelby can be zonerated.’
‘Exonerated of what?’ the magistrate asks.
‘Seeking to poison our sovereign lady Elizabeth, the queen.’
A single gasp from someone in the crowd. Then almost complete silence, freighted with appalled expectation.
The only sound comes from Rose: a tearful porcine snort. For a moment she is too taken by compassion for her great, dumb, cod’s-headed magnificent bear of a husband to comprehend the implication of what he’s just said. But not for long. The look on the magistrate’s face sees to that. Then she can only watch and listen with mounting horror as everything unravels.
The magistrate says ponderously, ‘Are you informing the bench that Sir Fulke Vaesy had denounced this Shelby person for attempting regicide?’
Ned looks at him blankly. ‘I know not what that means, Your Worship.’
‘Killing his queen, man! Killing the anointed sovereign set over him by God.’
‘But he didn’t, Your Worship.’
The sergeant chips in helpfully, ‘That is what the papist rogue Lopez claimed when he faced the same charge.’