admittance to a room at the Boar’s Head which overlooked Crooked Lane
and the churchyard of St. Michael. But the regular occupant, who was
none less than George Peele, was not then within to hear the summons.
Late, on the following morning, soon after Peele had reached his room,
another knock, this time by a stranger, sounded. Immediately the door
was opened, and a man, whose apparel and hands bespoke contact with
wherries and fish, handed in a sealed letter. Peele broke it open and
read the following:
“My Dear Peele: Tamworth’s and my apartments were destroyed by fire
last night, and he, while striving for my safety, perished in the
flames. Of this I shall write you more fully when time is afforded
me, and travel has somewhat dispelled the present oppressive gloom.
I sought entrance at thy door last night to announce my intention
of departing, but no one answered my knocking. I can no longer risk
the safety of my few remaining friends, and, knowing of no refuge
under a government whose hand would be raised against me if my
existence were known, I leave for Venice to-night. I shall continue
writing, but, as of late, it must be under the name of Shakespere.
Vale. Faustus.”
The reading finished, he asked of the man who still stood at the door:
“Where is the person who sent this?”
“On the Thames; aboard ship bound seaward.”
“When did you leave him?”
“Not long since, for I rowed directly up the river after putting him
aboard that ship in midstream. When ashore I came directly here.”
“That is all,” said Peele, and as the door was closed by the departing
wherry man, he continued in audible voice, but solely for his own ear:
“Poor Tamworth! and how much better off are the living? Poor Marlowe!
but still this change is for thy best interests. Thy Jew of Malta is
strong, but the crudeness of detail arises from unfamiliarity with the
scenes where it is laid. The fire burning within thee, O noble friend
and fellow dramatist, must blaze clearer and brighter from new fuel now
to be furnished thee. Barabbas is great, but a greater Jew will arise
from out thy meditations in the City of the Sea. This is the language
of prophecy.”
THE RIDE TO TYBURN.
--“_And where didst meet him?_
_Upon mine own freehold within forty feet of the gallows,
conning his neck verse._”
--_Jew of Malta._
--“_Who doth (Time) gallop withal?_
_With a thief to the gallows; for though he goeth as softly
as foot can fall, he thinks himself too soon there._”
--_As You Like It._
At the house of the sheriff in Deptford, Anne waited many long days
for Bame to appear with her father. No news of Bame’s arrest reached
her ears, and no answer came to her message to Marlowe. At length an
opportunity arose to send another messenger to Canterbury, this time
by no circuitous route; but, despite its delivery, Manuel Crossford
did not appear to secure her liberation. The wished-for reconciliation
between father and daughter did not take place until many months
later; but before the month of June had passed, the aid which Anne had
sought from those nearest to her through blood and family ties, came
in the person of a maid in the house of the sheriff. This maid had
been deputized to attend upon the fair prisoner. As might have been
expected she was easily won over, and on a dark night an escape was
effected through unbolted doors, and a boat which lay ready on the
Thames. The maid had enlisted the services of a lad who would have
crossed the sea at her bidding, and by him they were conveyed up the
river to London, where, in a quarter at some distance from her former
home with her aunt, and in ignorance of what was transpiring with Bame
and Marlowe, we must leave her and return to those characters who had
become involved in a web from which there was no possible extrication.
The boy Pence had been set at liberty. His companions, Pento and Badly,
had suffered capital punishment. Bame would have immediately met the
same fate, but an extra effort was made in his behalf.
Eliot’s attempts to learn something of Tamworth, and of his
companion whose name was still unknown, proved fruitless. With their
disappearance, all hope of a new trial for Bame was extinguished. But
a writ of error was taken, and the case, after swinging back and forth
between the courts, was finally determined adversely to the appellant.
Bame was resentenced, and the day fixed was December 6th, 1594. It had
at length dawned in the streets of London.
Bame saw the morning only through bars never gilded by sunlight, and
this was the last daybreak he would ever witness. It had not aroused
him from sleep, for he had walked the cell for eighteen hours without
an intermission of rest, except as he had paused for a bite at the
bread or for a swallow of water handed in by the turnkey. No death
watch had been in the corridor; for prisoners awaiting execution in
those days were too numerous to command any particular attention. Thus
his meditations had been undisturbed, except by the hourly passing
by the guard, whose footsteps only diverted his thoughts of the
approaching last hour, to the momentary apprehension that it was at
hand. At such times he would pause in his walk; glance at the window to
see if the night had passed, and failing to recognize any difference
between the gloom within and the gloom without the bars, would brush
the sudden beads of perspiration from his brow and await the dying away
of the disturbing footsteps.
Amid all the thoughts of the coming ordeal, there was one consolation
that remained. It was in the mode of his prescribed death. The victims,
of whose untimely fates he had been the prime spring, had met death in
bitter agony at the stake; he was to be hung. While he had not gloated
over the tortures of the condemned free-thinkers, he had deemed these
tortures merited, and, as a late witness of the agonies of martyrs, he
had at times fairly smiled at his own sentence.
There was one man amid the dense crowd, thronging the front of Newgate
on that morning, who waited with something more than vulgar curiosity
to see the condemned felon come forth. At an early hour, this man
had mounted the stone block which stood on the edge of the street
directly before the gates of the prison; and neither the threats of
the approaching storm, nor its furious presence had driven him under
shelter. Under the livid colored clouds, which still obscured the
sky after the passing of the tempest, he maintained his position of
vantage. It gave him a commanding view on all sides, and likewise made
him a conspicuous figure. The tumbril bearing Bame would pass close
before him. He could not fail in his accost of the condemned to secure
his attention, and for this purpose he held this position. What was
his ultimate design could not be read in the expression of his face
or his demeanor. It might be that he intended by the fervor of devout
utterance to strengthen the tried soul of the man entering the valley
of shadow, or, on the contrary, to exhibit to the latter a gloating
visage and hurl an execration in his face.
Whoever in the idle crowd questioned the design of this heavy man in
leathern doublet who stood above them, remained only a short time
in ignorance. The heavy gates swung open, and three men flourishing
halberds cleared the way for a horse and open cart. Behind the cart
came four armed riders, and the hangman in rough cassock and black
hat. The cart bore two men. One was the driver. The other was a man
in manacles who stood erect for the moment while the wheels run over
the smooth pavement. As evidence of innocence, he wore a white cockade
in his hat, and an expression of forced resignation appeared on his
face. The crowd was silent for a moment, and then cheered him as they
noticed his erect posture and the white cockade.
The horse had been reined in at the edge of the street for a moment
while the crowd was being thrust back by the guard. Bame silenced
the cheering by his effort to be heard above this demonstration. He
repeated his words twice, and then they heard him.
“I have committed no crime,” he cried, “My death will be a judicial
murder.”
Contrary to his expectations, the words did not revive the applause
that had preceded them. This was occasioned by another voice that rang
out in clear and louder accents:
“The dog lies. He should be strangled before he reaches the gallows. A
public accuser! a public informer!”
Bame turned his head, and on his elevated perch he saw Gyves, the
ex-constable. The crowd saw him too, and in its fickleness cheered
him and then hooted and threw mud and stones at Bame. The latter was
knocked into a sitting posture by the missiles where he remained
trembling from fear of a more violent assault being made. Up to that
moment he had prayed for death in any form, except at the hands of the
hangman; but in the sudden and unexpected presence of mob violence,
fierce and strong enough to crush out all life, he forgot the incentive
of his prayers.
The driver’s hat had been knocked from his head, and this angered him
so that he swore loudly and called vile names even at the man who
picked the fallen hat from the ground and threw it into the cart. At
the same time he sent the long lash of his whip cracking and smarting
into the faces of the front row of the crowd. They fell back, jeering
at him.
“Kill him, too!” they yelled.
“A fit mate for the felon!”
“He handles his reins like Tyburn hemp!”
“An apprentice for the hangman!”
“Take that!”
“And that!”
Another volley of stones and mud followed. Bame lay flat in the cart
and escaped injury, but the driver fell back stunned, with the reins in
his nerveless hands. Then there was a discharge of firearms. The guards
had leveled their blunderbusses and puffs of smoke curled upwards from
the wide mouths. The mob turned and broke away precipitately on all
sides, leaving two who had fallen with the report of the firearms, and
now lay outstretched on the stone pavement. One of them was Gyves. His
late prominence and appearance as the leading spirit of the mob had
made him the mark for more than one of the guards, and his body was
riddled with balls. Thus was the beginning of the ride marked with
death, and the end was to be no less a tragedy.
While London was under the rule of the Plantagenets, the penalty
pronounced against capital offenders was inflicted amid the elms in
Smithfield; but under the piteous eyes of children from the windows
of the encroaching dwellings of a rapidly increasing populace, the
executioner bungled so badly in his frequent task, that early in the
reign of the Tudors, the distant bank of the Tyburn was selected as
a more suitable spot for carrying the death sentence into effect.
Here, for a few years following, the surrounding fields remained open,
and none but the constant mob from Faringdon ward looked upon the
unsightly object under the “Tyburn tree.” This mob followed the cart
of the condemned in all seasons and under all skies. On dry roads it
was enveloped in dust; the mud was beaten down by its untiring feet in
stormy seasons, and while it was compact in body upon leaving Newgate
it was a scattered procession in its retreat from Tyburn.
The Tyburn road started amid thick clustering buildings, but soon
shaking itself free from these, it ran on, wide and firm, by bordering
dwellings, tippling houses and inns, into the open country, where it
straggled and seemed aimless in its purpose. But this seeming was only
to quiet the thousands of wretches who were carried over its surface
on their last ride. For them there were three miles of hard travel,
and at the end of each intermediate mile, hope could kindle in their
breasts that the ride might be only the beginning of a journey into
exile. In summer they saw broad fields of grain; felt the cool shade of
forests; heard the songs of birds; or, in the dead season of the year,
reaped from the vision of white hills a temporary respite from brooding
melancholy.
The crowd that followed the cart bearing Bame was boisterous to a
degree suggestive of immediate violence. They had, with blanched
faces, seen the death meted out to two of their members; and while
this scene had for a time appalled and silenced them, as they drew
away from the close buildings in the outer ward of the city, their ill
will against the guard and its prisoner became manifest through their
murmurs and demeanor. They did not blame the guard so much as they
did the prisoner. The guard had done its duty, undoubtedly; it was a
mere instrument, but Bame had been the cause. The result lay at his
door. The driver must press forward speedily, and the hangman must be
unusually expeditious if the crowd was to be pacified.
Bame realized the situation, and contrary to the usual desire of Tyburn
passengers, prayed for a speedy ride. There was the inn of the White
Ox on ahead. Would it ever be reached? The wheels of the cart sunk so
deep in the mud that it seemed as though at every yard they would stop
turning. The guard flourished its weapons at the restless mob behind
it, and still the procession moved. Here was the White Ox at last,
and there at the front edge of its wide porch stood the man who had
actually counted seven hundred and four condemned felons ride by the
White Ox during that year. He thought that he had marked them on the
inner edge of the white railing against which he was leaning, but he
had missed at least two score driven by on several early hours while
he was sleeping off the effect of some late-at-night potations. He
had reason to count, for he was the tapster, and here the executioner
always stopped for a drink. It was not to steady his nerves, for
apparently he had none. The tapster had it ready when the cart stopped.
The man in the cassock and black hat rode close to the edge of the
railing and took the glass from the tapster’s hand. As he raised it to
his lips, he bowed in mock cheer to the sad-faced man in the tumbril as
though to say, “This is to your good health.” However, he said nothing,
except to the driver whom he admonished to drive more rapidly.
About three miles from the west wall of London, on what is now Oxford
street, close at the foot of a small declivity, there stood at the
time of our narrative a solitary building of two stories. Near this
structure was a cluster of elm trees, and from them the place had
received the title of “The Elms.” The building had been designed for
an inn, but the locality was in such ill favor that very few occasions
arose for its landlord to welcome the coming, and speed the parting
guest. One side of the steep mossed roof sloped toward the muddy road;
the other side touched the top of a lofty board fence. This fence
surrounded the “triple tree of Tyburn,” as the gallows was called. The
obnoxious structure whereon felonies were expiated was invisible to
all travelers except those coming down the hill from where the bourne
of Tye found its source; but the enclosing fence was such a subject of
notice and inquiry, that strangers, as well as neighboring farmers,
were glad to pass quickly by it. The tenant of the Elms, however, did
not depend for livelihood upon the profits of the inn bar, its table
or its beds. The key to the great gates of the fence hung within
the tap-room, and there was revenue to the landlord for being its
custodian. In the enclosure were raised seats and on “state” occasions
these were in demand at fair prices, all of which were collected and
retained by the keeper. This keeper was a woman, nicknamed Mother Peter.
As usual, Mother Peter had the gates open long before the procession
arrived; and so, without a pause, into the enclosure passed the stern,
compact and mounted body, representative of order, and after it the
loose and disorderly mob. The latter filled the space between the
widely separated gate posts as it poured in, a body of ill-clad flesh,
of all ages and of both sexes, with brutal and repulsive faces, and
audible from jeers, curses and loud laughter.
The enclosure was one of three acres with a flat open space in the
center around whose edges rose tiers of seats sloping upward and
backward to the fence’s top. In the center was a triangular platform,
raised twenty feet above the ground, and having at each of its three
corners an upright post each with a beam extending horizontally from
its top. Broad steps led up to this platform, and on it was a bench and
a table. On the table was an earthen jug and beside it an earthen bowl.
In the table was a Bible. From the three horizontal arms, black ropes
suspended, and every breeze swayed them.
The tumbril had stopped at the foot of the broad steps. Its footboard
was let down and Bame descended from it. He stood there with a guard
on each side, and the crowd drawn backward to standing places on the
encircling seats. A feeling of weakness pervaded him as he glanced
upward at the posts and their suspended ropes so ominous of evil
to himself. He partially recovered his control while the guard and
executioner were attending to their horses, and then, with them, he
ascended the steps to the platform.
From the raised platform Bame could see across the top of the gates
of the enclosure toward London. He looked absently in that direction,
and at first saw nothing because of the tumult in his mind. Suddenly
the scene swept into his field of consciousness, and under a dark
canopy of smoke and cloud, he saw the distant city. No sunlight lay
upon the myriad of walls that formed the picture. No gilded dome, nor
window in visible towers, flashed to him a welcome or a warning. In
the gloom, it seemed a city of death or sleep, and he felt it to be
a vision, impalpable and evanescent. The broken steeple of St. Paul,
the crumbling Roman wall, the fronts of familiar buildings, brought a
rush of tender memories and a flood of tears. He could not brush this
evidence of weakness aside, for his hands were bound; and so with outer
vision blurred, the inner, or spiritual, became the real. The fields of
morning appeared, and he passed through them as with the rapid wings of
an angel, catching their scents and a sweetness of life like that known
only to the barefooted boy when the grass is green and the day perfect
and no duties confront him. Then the fire of the period of ambition
filled him, and he saw his home, the deserted bench at which he once
labored, the patient face of his wife and then the figure of Marlowe
as he appeared to him under the blazing lights of the chantry. Ah! was
it he? Yes. “And are not the charges false?” rises the question from a
thousand voices.
He recognizes them all, and he attempts to say, “Yes, and let it be
so recorded!” but he finds himself without voice. There is a darkness
that is never to be lifted about him. He has a faint comprehension of
the reason, but it grows into no verity. Verities are beyond him, so is
the world with all its falseness. There is a close cloth over his face
which stifles him. He feels bungling fingers about his neck, then the
scraping of a rough substance in the same place. He imagines he cries:
“Unloose! Air, air! My God, save me!”
But in fact he had said nothing, and with these unuttered words upon
his burning lips, he feels a terrific jar that seems an explosion
in his own brain. All the world is aflame. Was there ever such an
illumination? But, O God! what thrust was that through the center of
life itself? This is pain in its purity. But, wait, hold but a moment,
O ye fires! It groweth dark and darker. An absolute blackness is
gathering with a swiftness incomprehensible; and a roar, as mighty and
continuous as the ocean at steep headlands, fills his ears, increases
and then dies utterly.
Bame was hanging under the Tyburn gallows.
FINIS CORONAT OPUS.
_No bounds, but heaven, shall bound his empery,_
_Whose azured gates, enchased with his name,_
_Shall make the Morning haste her grey uprise_
_To feed her eyes with his engraven fame._
--_Dido, i._
_Methinks ’tis pride enough to be his son._
_See how the morning opes her golden gates,_
_And takes her farewell of the glorious sun._
--_Third Part of Henry VI, ii, 1._
In 1597 the Privy Council commanded that the playhouses in Finbury
Fields be leveled to their foundations, but the command had not been
executed. It is one thing to decree, it is another to enforce. The
indignant spirit of reform that prevailed upon the administrative
body appeared to have exhausted its power with the procurance of the
mandate, for even on the Sabbath, the annunciatory trumpets before the
Curtain and Theater continued to proclaim the daily stage performance.
The last trumpet for the day had blown before the Curtain on a winter
afternoon in 1598, and a packed audience already filled its pit and
galleries, when a solitary foot traveler, leaving the Shore-ditch
highway, entered the narrow lane leading toward the fields. The air
was cold and frosty, and that may have caused the traveler to keep
the cape of his cloak raised high around his face. At any rate, on
such a day, there was nothing in the fact that the low-drawn hat and
high-raised cape left visible only a pair of eyes, to raise suspicion
that the man desired to avoid identification.
A heavy snow had fallen during the previous night, but a wide,
firmly-beaten path led over it across the fields. As he noted this
condition of the way, he calculated that several thousand people had
preceded him. Was it to hear Alleyn at the Theater, or Burbage at
the Curtain? He thought that it was to hear Burbage, and possibly
his knowledge of what that great actor was to perform forced this
conclusion. The play of Hamlet had already been performed at White Hall
before the Queen, but this was to be its first presentation before the
public. The praise bestowed upon it by the titled few who had assembled
in the banqueting house at the palace had reached the public ear, and
its effect was here demonstrated. It was the prospect of seeing this
play that led this man across the fields which he had not entered for
several years.
If he had been at all interested in his surroundings, he would have
noticed that in the short space of time which had elapsed since the
last day he had passed through the break in the field wall, many
changes had taken place. The ruins of the old church of Holywell
(demolished in the reign of Henry VIII) had been removed, or
appropriated for the walls of dwellings arising above the ancient
foundations. Much solid ground had been made where the sedge had sprung
from shallow marsh water, and houses here and there dotted the white
expanse. An assembly house for the worship of Brownists stood within
the brick boundary wall of the fields. Although a low structure, it
covered a large area and appeared a menace against the playhouses.
These theaters, of height equivalent to three stories, were resplendent
with lively-colored fronts and painted windows. A single red flag
fluttered above the top of each. There had been no changes in their
exteriors since the observer last saw them. Hundreds of horses, many
richly caparisoned, and others bearing rude saddles only, stood in
groups before both houses, while shivering boys and men held them. Only
a few of the dismounted riders were standing at the entrances of the
theaters.
The late comer passed around one of these groups, and at the entrance
of the Curtain presented a letter to the doorkeeper, who, without
betraying his inability to read, passed it into a square window, within
which was a room with cheerful fire and a man who broke open the letter
and read it, saying:
“It is the man for whom a box has been reserved.”
“Who is he?” asked the other.
“The note sayeth not.”
“Strange that a whole box should have been reserved for one person on
such a day,” growled the doorkeeper.
“Well, those were Shakespere’s orders, and as he holds much of the
stock of the company, his request must be respected. The note is signed
by him. Admit him to box 4.”