Ruled Britannia Read Free Page A

.
    On went the procession. Other voices drowned out Edward Kelley’s whining claims of innocence. Behind the condemned prisoners rode the Grand Inquisitor, somber in a purple habit, and several members of the House of Commons, their faces smug and fat and self-satisfied. Another company of soldiers—Spaniards and Englishmen mixed again—and the parade was done.
    As it went past, the pikemen who’d been holding back the crowd shouldered their weapons. Some folk went on about their business. More streamed after the procession to Tower Hill, to watch the burnings that would follow. Shakespeare stepped out into the muddy street. Along with the rest of the somber spectacle, he wanted to see Edward Kelley die.
    â€œSay what you will about the Spaniards, but they’ve brought us a fine show,” said a man at his elbow.
    The fellow’s friend nodded. “Better than a bear-baiting or a cockfight, and I never thought I’d say that of any sport.”
    Tower Hill, north and west of the Tower itself, had been an execution ground since the days of Edward IV, more than a hundred years before. Things were more elaborate now than they had been. Stakes with oil-soaked wood piled high around them waited for the condemned prisoners. Iron cages waited for them, too, in which they would listen to the charges that had brought them here. More iron cages, small ones, awaited the pasteboard effigies of the folk who had died in gaol or escaped the Inquisition’s clutches.
    At a safe distance from the stakes stood a wooden grandstand. Queen Isabella and King Albert sat on upholstered thrones, surrounded by grandees both English and Spanish on benches. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Grand Inquisitor, and the other dignitaries from the procession joined them. The first group of soldiers fanned out toprotect the grandstand along with the men already there. The rest kept back the crowd.
    After Philip Stubbes was locked in his cage, he began singing hymns and shouting, “Vanity and lies! Beware of Popish vanity and lies!” A monk spoke to him. He defiantly shook his head and kept on shouting. The monk unlocked the cage. He and several of his fellows went in. They bound Stubbes’ hands and gagged him to keep him from disrupting the last part of the ceremony.
    That worked less well than they must have hoped. When the charge of heresy was read out against him, he made a leg like a courtier, as if it were praise. More than a few people in the crowd laughed and clapped their hands.
    Shakespeare didn’t. No way to know whose eyes may be upon me, and all the more so after that Kelley—damnation take him!—called out my name . He nervously fingered his little chin beard. A hard business, living in a kingdom where the rulers sit uneasy on the throne and their minions course after foes as hounds course after stags .
    He plucked out a hair. The small, brief pain turned his thoughts to a new channel. In a play, could I place a man of Stubbes’ courage? he wondered. Or would the groundlings find him impossible to credit?
    One by one, the captives sentenced to more imprisonment or to wear the sanbenito were led away. Only those who would die remained. They were led out of their cages and chained to the stakes. As monks made the sign of the cross, executioners strangled a couple of them: men who had repented of their errors, whether sincerely or to gain an easier death.
    Edward Kelley cried, “Me! Me! In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti , me!” But his Latin, his learning, did him no good at all.
    The inquisitors looked toward the Queen. Isabella was in her early thirties, a couple of years younger than Shakespeare, and swarthy even for a Spaniard—to English eyes, she seemed not far from a Moor. The enormous, snowy-white ruff she wore only accented her dark skin. Swarthy or not, though, she was the Queen; Albert held the throne through his marriage to her. She raised her hand, then