After the Conqueror’s sons Rufus and Henry I, and a period of feudal anarchy while the heirs in the female line fought for supremacy, the English Crown had settled upon an extraordinary man. Henry II had inherited England and Normandy through his mother, the Conqueror’s granddaughter. By a spectacular marriage he controlled the vast lands of Aquitaine in south-west France, including the rich wine region of Bordeaux. From his French father, he had also inherited the fertile region of Anjou, which lay between his Norman and his wife’s domains. The King of England was thus master of a feudal empire that stretched up Europe’s Atlantic coast from Spain to Scotland and threatened even the jealous king of France.
From his father he had inherited two other things. The first was a curious family name. A certain ancestor, it was said, had worn in his cap not a feather but a flower, a sprig of broom. Plante à genêt, they called it in French. In English, Plantagenet.
He had also inherited the Plantagenet family temperament. Brilliant and restless, the sharp-eyed Henry was seldom in one place for more than a few days as he laboured to secure and expand his empire. He was a wonderful administrator. Already he was transforming English justice, his trained judges offering his subjects royal courts instead of the unreliable ones of the feudal barons. His administration was strict. That very year half the sheriffs of England were trembling as the clerks of the Exchequer suddenly arrived to inspect their affairs. No wonder young Silversleeves’s father had admonished him: “If you would only work and serve the king well, the whole world would be at your feet.”
But there was another side to the Plantagenets. Even by the standards of those dangerous times they were ruthless and devious. Some said they were descended from the Devil. “From the Devil they came,” the great Bernard of Clairvaux had grimly remarked, “and to the Devil they will return.” Their fits of temper were legendary.
King Henry II also had four turbulent sons. It was to secure the succession to the English throne, therefore, and to prevent anarchy, that he had summoned his family and magnates to Westminster Abbey to witness the coronation of his eldest son whilst he himself was still alive. “Perhaps,” the onlookers hoped piously, “this will bring some order to this devil’s brood.”
The other strange feature of the ceremony was that Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, the priest who should have officiated, was not even present. He had fled the country.
Becket. Cursed name. Cursed family. Strike them down and they rise up again like serpents.
A dark night. That was what reminded him of Becket. Another dark night long ago. And another crime. A terrible one.
Had his own family done it? Were they born criminals?
No. He could not accept that. If the Beckets drove men to dark deeds, it was they, the cursed Beckets, who were to blame. It must be so.
The enmity between the Beckets and the Silversleeves had not simply continued from the preceding century, it had grown worse.
When Gilbert Becket, a prosperous mercer, and his family had arrived in London, the Silversleeves, still living in their stout stone hall in the shadow of St Paul’s, were rich, proud and respected. But when they had haughtily declared of the newcomers, “They’re interlopers,” no one seemed to take much notice. This was not really surprising. Already at that time London’s leading citizens included many new arrivals from France, Flanders and Italy. Names like Le Blond and Bucherelli soon became English as Blunt and Buckerell. The Beckets moved into a substantial house on the West Cheap, just below the Jewry. They bought a dozen other houses. They prospered. But when young Silversleeves’s grandfather, confidently expecting to be chosen for an important city position, had seen Gilbert Becket chosen instead, the old bitterness had turned to flaming hatred.
Who had started the fires? The first had begun at the Beckets’ house on the very night their son Thomas was born. The second, many years later, began elsewhere but destroyed most of their property. And then the rumours had begun. “It was the Silversleeves,” people began to whisper. “They started those fires. They ruined the Beckets.” It was outrageous. It cast a pall of suspicion over the entire Silversleeves family. However hotly Pentecost’s father had denied it, the hissing rumour spread and could not be quenched. Gradually a new and even more insidious thought crept into the mind of this gloomy family. “The Beckets started the rumour,” they decided. “They’ll torment us to the grave.” It did not make him any less resentful when young Pentecost secretly asked himself: could it be true?
And still those Beckets would not lie down. Londoners remembered young Thomas Becket very well. Thomas of London, he often used to call himself. A lazy fellow who, like young Silversleeves, had never become a magister. He became a clerk, though, and despite his father’s ruin got himself noticed. He was good at that, always making friends and dropping them, as the Silversleeves family liked to point out. Then the old Archbishop of Canterbury had taken him into his household. He charmed the king. He had a talent for that too, with his tall good looks, his elegance and his brilliant eyes. He must have served his masters well, even brilliantly, for suddenly, to all London’s astonishment, at the age of only thirty-seven he was made Chancellor of England.
Pentecost had once seen him riding down the West Cheap with his retinue. He had been magnificently dressed in a cloak lined with ermine. Jewels had flashed on his tunic. Even the men who rode with him looked like dukes. “He’s got style,” his father had conceded gloomily. And then, with irritation: “Look at him. He takes on more airs than the king.”
But the surprise of Becket’s rise to the chancellorship was nothing compared with the general stupefaction when, seven years later, he was made Archbishop of Canterbury. Thomas, the worldly servant of the king, Primate of all England? And to remain the king’s chancellor as well?
“The king wants the Church under his thumb,” young Silversleeves’s father had remarked. “With Becket there, that’s what he’ll get.” It was sensible enough, if a little shocking.
And then the strangest thing had happened. Pentecost remembered it well, that day he had returned home from school to find his father’s courtyard full of people talking excitedly.
“Becket has turned against the king.”
Of course, for a king and an archbishop to quarrel was not unusual. For the past one hundred years, a great debate had been taking place across Europe as to how Church and State should exercise their authority. Were the great feudal bishops subject to kings or not? Could a pope depose a king? There had been angry words, even excommunications. In England only a generation earlier, Rufus’s callous treatment of the Church had forced the saintly Archbishop Anselm to leave the kingdom for several years. Certainly, Henry II was just the kind of monarch to provoke one of these quarrels. But Becket? The king’s own man?
“He’s given up all ostentation,” the reports came. “He lives like the simplest monk.” Had the ambitious and worldly Londoner really turned pious? Why should he suddenly have had a blazing row with Henry over the Church’s rights and then left the country?
“I can explain it,” Pentecost’s father had said. “It’s typical of a Becket. He’s found a new role to play. He’s just showing off as usual.”
Whatever the cause, the dispute had been dragging on for several years. The two men, once such friends, were now the bitterest enemies. Which was why King Henry had had his son crowned not, as was his right, by Canterbury, but by the Archbishop of York. Like everything Henry did, it was carefully – in this case viciously – calculated. It was the final insult.
“Poor Becket,” Silversleeves had remarked the day before with satisfaction. “That must really have hurt. I wonder what he’ll do now.”
Pentecost Silversleeves might have continued pondering this interesting question had there not, at this moment, been a sudden commotion at the entrance.
The short, sturdy master craftsman with the close-cropped brown beard and white patch in his hair burst through the courtiers in the doorway and fairly bounced into the chamb
er. He was wearing a bright green tunic and green leggings. His face, as red as his soft leather boots, was so puffed up with fury that he looked like an indignant cockerel. Behind him loomed two large bailiffs.
Seven startled scribes, quill pens still in hand, turned to stare. The courtiers, uncertain what to do, hesitated. The grave figures at the Exchequer table, surprised at this unseemly interruption, gazed down the chamber silently. But the craftsman was not concerned with them. He was shouting.
“There he is. That’s the one. Seize him!” The furious fellow pointed at Pentecost.
An astonished silence.
“Of what is he accused?” The awesome voice of the justiciar, personal representative of the king himself.
And then, ringing round every corner of that hallowed chamber, came the terrible reply:
“Of murder.”
The large, broad-faced man gazed around him with satisfaction. The other men in his little hall bowed respectfully, and Alderman Sampson Bull smiled back. This was going to be the best day of his life.
Everything about Alderman Sampson Bull was red. He was wearing a long red gown, a red hose, a red tunic with gold cuffs and a painted leather belt. On his head was a large red beret. His face, whose strong jowl carried two days’ growth of fair beard, was ruddy. Only his eyes were blue. With his head thrust forward from his bulky frame, his appearance matched his family name.
The name itself had come about gradually. After the Conquest, the family had been content to adopt the Norman way, adding their father’s name, with the prefix Fitz, to their own. But this system had one disadvantage. Whilst Leofric’s son was Edward FitzLeofric, his grandson was Richard FitzEdward, and Richard’s son was in his turn Simon FitzRichard. If three or four generations were living at any one time it could become very confusing. Since the family always lived by the sign of the Bull, however, they were often known more simply as the family of Bull.
Sampson Bull was a man of importance. Since his father’s death two years earlier, he had been head of the family. A rich mercer – a wholesale merchant dealing in wool and cloth – at the age of thirty he had already been chosen as alderman of his ward in the city. And it was no small thing to be an alderman. The government of London that was now taking on a settled form consisted of three levels. The lowest was the parish, often very small, but which might contain a few citizens of importance. Of greater significance were the twenty or so wards. Each ward had its own little council, the wardmote, consisting of its leading citizens, who also came together to form the city’s greater council. But at the pinnacle were the aldermen, one for each ward. Sometimes they still owned whole areas of their ward; often they kept their post for life. They organized the militia. And it was these men, like so many feudal barons, who made up the city’s all-powerful inner council. Sampson Bull was of this inner group.
The London over which they ruled was larger than before. Many more houses had appeared along the roads leading out of the city; whilst on the western side, outside Newgate, where the River Fleet became the Holborn, the city’s new outer limit was marked by stones known as the city’s bar. But if nowadays the streets of London and its trading were regulated by proud merchants like Sampson Bull, those grim sentinels of the Norman Conquest still remained. Standing guard over the city in the west were the fortifications by Ludgate; in the east, the mighty Tower. The castles of London belonged to the king and his magnates, and both still spoke that single, surly word: “Obey”.
But as Alderman Bull completed the business of the wardmote and dismissed its members with a wave of his hand, he was not thinking about the king. He had a far more cheerful subject on his mind. Minutes later, as he walked up the gentle slope of Cornhill, he allowed his mind to dwell upon it pleasantly.
Bocton. He was going to get it back.
It was a century since Leofric the Saxon had lost the ancestral Kentish estate to a certain St Malo, follower of the Conqueror, and the Bulls had assumed it was gone for good. But twenty years ago young Jean de St Malo had gone on the Second Crusade, mortgaging his estate to do so. The crusade was a disaster; the knight had returned broken, and after years of struggle had finally given up. Bocton had just passed to his creditor. Yesterday, that gentleman had called upon the alderman to acquaint him with the situation.
He was a short, neat, elegant man. He wore a black silk cloak and a skullcap. His name was Abraham.
“As soon as I realized it had been in your family, I came to you,” Abraham explained. “As you know, I can’t keep the place anyway.”
And Bull, with a grin, replied: “Thank God for that.”
There were many moneylenders in London nowadays. Expanding trade, the huge scale of operations in the Plantagenets’ sprawling European empire, and the overseas expenses of the crusades all needed financing. Norman, Italian and French moneylenders provided huge sums of money; so did that most Christian, crusading order, the Knights Templar; and so did the Jewish community of England. Their methods were not markedly different, with one exception. While most moneylenders held estates, and the Templars even became specialists in land management, the Jews were still prohibited from owning land. So when a Jewish financier repossessed an estate, he always sold it.
Abraham named a price. Bull explained that once his ship returned he could pay it. “And Bocton will be ours again,” he had told his wife and children. A crowning achievement.
Had he any doubts that the voyage would be a success? None. Did he trust Abraham to wait a little? Certainly. His word was good. Was there anything that worried the merchant about the transaction? Well, perhaps. There was one discordant note sounding at the back of his mind.
He had not told his mother. But that was a problem for another day.
His journey up Cornhill had been for a particular purpose and now, having reached the summit, he looked down upon the second reason for his cheerfulness that morning.
It was a small sailing ship. At a time when most cargo was carried overseas by foreign merchants, Bull had, the previous month, become one of the few Londoners to own his own vessel. Though the sleek, many-oared longships of the Norsemen were still to be seen, his own stout little ship was of the south European type more often used in London now. Broad-beamed, deep of draught and usually propelled by a single mainsail, it was clumsy and slow, its rudder set at an angle at the stern’s side, so that the vessel was steered rather as a riverman steers his boat with a single oar. However, the cog, as it was called, could also sail with a small crew in all weathers, and carried a prodigious load.
In the bowels of this particular ship rested a third of Bull’s fortune in the form of wool bound for Flanders. When it returned laden with silks, spices and luxury goods, the profits from the voyage would give him enough spare money to make the most important alteration to the family’s status and fortunes since the Norman Conquest.
How gaily the little cog passed before the Tower. Bull had come to the top of Cornhill so that he could see the whole panorama of the Thames’s great, shining path towards the estuary. The cog entered the long stretch of the Pool of London and approached the river’s huge curve.
And then something strange happened. Suddenly the cog seemed to lurch. A second later, its prow veered towards the southern bank, it drifted sideways, began to turn about crazily, and then, as though some unseen hand had caught it, held fast.
Alderman Bull, understanding at once what had occurred, let out a bellow of rage that must have carried all the way down to All Hallows and even to the river below.
“Kiddles!” he shouted. “God damn the king!”
Then he rushed down the hill.
Treasonable though this sentiment was, there was hardly an alderman in London who would not have echoed it. The city’s ancient fishing rights had long been vested in certain great offices, and the fishing for many miles downstream now belonged to none other than the king’s servant, the Constable of the Tower. Since the Thames teemed with fish, the rights were valuable and were therefore cynica
lly let for the constable’s maximum profit. As a result, the river’s broad waters were cluttered with nets, weirs, booms and traps of every kind. Scarcely a month went by without some ship being fouled. These obstacles were known as kiddles. And though the larger merchants never ceased complaining, even to the king himself, about the damage to shipping, only vague promises were ever made and the infuriating kiddles remained.
By late that afternoon, the cog was back at the wharf, its rudder broken, and at least a day’s sailing lost while it was repaired. The nets, Bull discovered, belonged to a red-haired fishmonger named Barnikel, whom he knew slightly, and who very reasonably remarked, “I’m sorry about your cog, but I paid the constable a fortune to fish there.” Furious though he was, Bull could hardly argue.
But one thing Bull did know. And he knew it with precisely the same sense of black and white, right and wrong, of his ancestors. He had been cheated. The king and his constable, contemptuous of the city’s leaders, were operating a system that was unfair, a racket. It was all he knew and all he cared about. Standing alone on the wharf and staring along the waterfront towards the Tower, he made a quiet but solemn vow.
“I’ll stop them one day.”
It might reasonably be supposed that fate had completed her work in ruining the best day in the life of Alderman Bull. Certainly he supposed so, as he trudged bitterly home that evening. But that would have been to underestimate the powers of providence.
On his arrival home, the alderman found his family waiting anxiously for him at the door. Imagining it was on account of the ship, he told them tersely that the rudder would be mended. It was then that his mother, gently shaking her head, revealed, “I’m afraid there is something else.” And at his impatient look: “You must be calm, Sampson, not angry.”
“What about?”
“Well.” She paused nervously. “It’s about your brother.”