Mary Gentle (87 page)
Authors: A Sundial in a Grave-1610
(what became of them)
Shadows we are, and like shadows depart
—sundial, Pump Court, Middle
Temple
T
he Bishop of Luçon,
ARMAND-JEAN DU PLESSIS
, returned from his exile in 1614, after being elected as member to the States-General. There he attracted the attention of Marie de Medici and became her protégé. She appointed him to her council of state, and his fortunes rose and fell over the next few years with her, and with Concini.
After Concini was assassinated, du Plessis transferred his power base to the young king Louis XIII, and was responsible for at least one of Marie de Medici’s periods of exile. In 1622 he was made cardinal, and was de facto ruler of France (and King Louis) from the mid-1620s onward. Born in 1585, Cardinal Richelieu died in 1642, only a year after Sully.
MAXIMILIEN DE BETHUNE
,
BARON ROSNY
,
DUC DE SULLY
(1560–1641), spent the thirty years after King Henri’s death writing his
Memoirs
. In his old age, he continued to wear the fashions of his youth, and small children chased after him in the street. He kept peacocks on his estate, whose noise upset his neighbors, but—being, by then, very deaf—this did not bother Sully in the slightest. The
Memoirs
are both touching and entertaining, if not always (one suspects) in the way that Monsieur the Duc intended.
JAMES I /
VI did not die until 1625, but he was never the same man after the loss of ROBERT CECIL
. He succeeded in keeping
died of typhoid fever.
James’s cousin ARBELLA STUART
, having married William Seymour, was kept at various locations under “house arrest” until 4 June 1611, when she tried—dressed in men’s clothes, and with the help of one “Markham”—to escape from
William Seymour later reconciled with James I, married again, and became the Duke of Somerset at the Restoration of Charles II.
James’s son CHARLES STUART
was executed on 30 January 1648 (1649 by the Gregorian Calendar), his disastrous autocratic rule having given rise to the English Civil War, and the following American and French revolutions, through the political philosophies that opposed him.
The
PUTNEY DEBATES
came to a violent end two years before, in 1647. What it was that the men of the army debated is stated fairly at the beginning, by one Colonel Rainborow:
I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he has not had a voice to put himself under.
Universal suffrage was not to arrive in
It is recorded of DOCTOR ROBERT FLUDD
that he never left
His works include the
Apologia Compendenaria Fraternitatem de Rosae Cruce
(
A Compendious Apology for the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross
), and the monumental two-volume
Utruisque Cosmi Historia
(
History of the Macrocosm
and
History of the Microcosm
); the latter published by the firm of De Bry in the Palatinate. This German publishing house produced many books connected with the mainstream of Hermetic Rosicrucian philosophy—a philosophy which perhaps had its most concrete experiment in Bohemia in 1619–20, under King Frederick and his wife, Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I. It failed catastrophically, and began the Thirty Years’ War.
After their brief appearance in print from 1610 to the 1620s, the BROTHERS OF THE ROSY CROSS
became apocryphal. Rumours of links to the Masons, the Templars, the Acception, and to almost every other secret society known to European history have since attached themselves to the name of Rosicrucian.
More mundanely, Rosicrucian thought, largely via Sir Francis Bacon’s
New Atlantis
and the Royal Society, invigorates the Intellectual and Scientific Revolutions of the later seventeenth century in
HENRY PERCY
, 9
TH EARL OF NORTHUMBERLAND
, the “Wizard Earl,” was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Tower of London after his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot (1605). He stayed imprisoned there until 1621. After this, he lived in retirement on his estate in Petworth, still forbidden to travel more than thirty miles from his home. He died in 1631—on November 5th.
Until his death in 1621, THOMAS HARIOT
lived in Syon House, supported by the Earl of Northumberland, while he worked on his observations of sunspots, invention of navigational instruments, and algebra. He wrote the first book on the English colonisation of the
Brief and True Report of the new-found land of Virginia
(1588). Like Marlowe, he was an atheist. Had he published his findings, his reputation might have rivalled Galileo’s. (See
Siderius Nuncius,
1610).
John Aubrey notes that, while the Earl was in the Tower, “to HUES
(who wrote
On the Use of Globes
) and to MR
.
WARNER
, he gave an annuity of but sixty pounds per annum. […] They had a table at the Earl’s expense, and the earl himself had them to converse with, singly or together.” (
Brief Lives
)
AEMILIA LANIER
died in 1654, at the age of 84, having been kept out of the sheerest poverty by her son, a musician to Charles I, and (eventually) a Crown pension. She thereafter sank into obscurity. If she wrote again, it was not under her own name, and she survives in history only as the author of “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum”—and as the supposed “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Of the PLAY
titles mentioned in Henslowe’s account books for The Rose Theatre, perhaps one-third survive as texts. The other two-thirds are lost to us, all except their titles, and they include the most prized work of dramatists such as John Webster. One of the titles mentioned is
The Viper and Her Brood,
to whom no author is ascribed. Webster’s plays, like Marlowe’s, and Shakespeare’s, were the trash of history; and where they have not gone to line pie dishes, it’s pure lucky accident.
No records remain of Elena Zorzi/Suor Caterina, but the WITCH OF WOOKEY
is currently reputed still to inhabit Wookey Hole caves. The paper mill continues to exist, and up until a few years ago still made paper commercially.
GABRIEL SANTON
, according to a faint but decipherable marginal note in the
Memoirs
, eventually married the landlady of his local tavern, and lived to a ripe old age, fathering children into his eighties.
The samurai armor sent as a gift from the SHOGUN TOKUGAWA IEYASU
to “King” Maurice at The Hague, in 1612, can be seen in Paris, having been forcibly removed there at some time in the 1790s.
HIDETADA sent two armors to James I/VI, c.1614; both made by Ieyasu’s personal armorer, Iwai Yozaemon, in Nara. Or rather, there not being sufficient time to make dedicated new armors for James before the ship departed, they were appropriated from another customer, whose
mon
they still bear. Both armors have been displayed in the Tower of London. Now that the Tower has, after 900 years, ceased to be an armory, one remains there, and the other is in the new Royal Armouries building in Leeds.
After the SAKOKU
(“Closed Country”) Edict of AD 1636,
As yet, no data exists on the location of a relevant comet.
This book owes much to the restorative powers of strong coffee and chocolate biscuits, and more to the posters and lurkers of rec.arts.sf.composition; with special mention to Brian M. Scott, Anna Feruglio Dal Dan, Emiliano Farinelli, and Anna Mazzoldi.
M
ARY
G
ENTLE
published her first novel at the age of eighteen, and has a master’s degree in seventeenth-century studies and another in war studies. She is author of several novels, including the award-winning
Ash
. She lives in Stevenage,
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This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A SUNDIAL IN A GRAVE: 1610
. Copyright © 2007 by Mary Gentle. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
