The Poor Laws of Elizabeth were not generous; but they admitted, for the first time, that the charity of individuals and the Church might not be enough to help the army of poor. Not that one should be lenient. Able-bodied vagrants were still to be whipped and a hole bored through the gristle of their right ear. Persistent vagrants could even be executed.
There were plenty of poor in Sarum. Not only was the Sarum cloth trade in a recession, but on the land, things were worse. Spain’s decades of importing gold from the New World had brought about a huge increase in bullion that had spread inflation to every part of Europe. Corn prices rose, and the tenants on their farms had to pay more for their necessities. The fines paid on entering a tenancy went up and the peasantry were hit hard. Forest was an active landlord.
“He’s found better seed; and he folds more sheep on his fields than ever,” Shockley conceded. “It’s his poor tenants that suffer.”
And the problem of the poor increased.
Elizabeth’s solution was simple and practical. She decreed that a poor rate was to be levied compulsorily to pay for the helpless; and she set up apprenticeships and workhouses for poor children and families. The whole business was managed by the Justices of the Peace.
Forest was now a Justice of the Peace.
“If a man’s got even one leg, Forest will say he’s fit to work,” Edward complained. There was a new workhouse in the city now, the Bridewell. “He treats the poor in there as if they were animals.”
Edward Shockley was constantly trying to help the poor. Moody helped him. Forest once angrily complained that half their apprentices were taken from the poor house, and both Shockley and Moody had laughingly to admit that this was true.
There was another source of good workmen though, besides the poor house. For Lord Pembroke had encouraged a number of Flemish weavers fleeing the religious persecution to settle at Wilton. Although he was a Catholic himself and they were Protestants, Moody seemed to have a natural understanding with these skilful men and employed several of them for Shockley.
“So with our Flemings and our vagabonds,” Edward used to claim cheerfully, “we do very well.”
It did not make him popular with Forest.
Time and again, when Forest tried to deny the poor their aid, Shockley and his helpers raised the issue again. At first Forest had attempted to ignore them, but Shockley had grown too powerful for him. He was elected to the inner council of twenty-four – he was a man of consideration in the city.
The result of this, by 1570, was that Forest completely avoided him. When they met, it was in strictly formal settings; and though Edward himself was affable, Forest was cold and distant.
His favourite moment came in 1574.
For that was the year of the visit of the queen.
She came first to Wilton. There was a new earl now, not such a dour figure as his father, and a favourite with Elizabeth. On Friday September 30 he entertained her magnificently at his great house; on Saturday, he had prepared an elaborate banqueting house made of leaves in Clarendon Forest, but then the rains came and Elizabeth dined in the lodge. Even so, the deer were coursed with swift greyhounds, and the queen was said to be pleased.
And then, on Monday, after the afternoon dinner, the queen and her court came to the town.
They were magnificently dressed, the men in their tight-fitting under and over-robes, white ruffs at the collar and wrists, and short cloaks; the women with their stately, big-shouldered gowns that fanned down from a narrow waist to the ground, and huge ruffs that hugged their cheeks, rising to above the ears. But in both men and women, it was the material that made the cloth merchant gasp. Splendid silks, dazzling, heavy brocades of every colour.
“Why,” he murmured, “they’d stand up by themselves.”
His family were watching from a respectful distance as he stood with the other council men, dressed in their scarlet gowns, while the lesser merchants stood behind them, robed in black gowns lined with taffeta or silk, and watched the mayor solemnly present the usual offerings to a visiting monarch – a solid gold cup filled with coins to the value of twenty pounds in gold.
She came to him.
“No man has done more for the poor in Salisbury than Master Shockley,” the mayor kindly declared.
She stared at him, and, for a moment, he was aware of her pale, plain face with its high cheekbones, pock-marked skin, and eyes that measured everything.
“Good, Master Shockley.” He blushed.
She was about to move on when she paused.
“Who are the Justices who look after the poor?” she demanded.
“Thomas Forest” she was told, “is one.”
“Well, where is he?”
Forest came forward and made a graceful bow.
She turned to Shockley – half terrifying, half mischievous.
“Does he perform this duty well?”
All eyes were upon him. There was an awkward silence. He looked at Forest, who had gone a little pale.
Then he spoke the truth.
“No, my lady,” he answered.
“Ha!”
To his astonishment, she broke out into a loud, raucous laugh.
Forest had scarcely spoken to him at all after that.
It was a brief moment of glory. But he had met her. His family and the town had seen it.
“The only trouble was,” he chuckled afterwards, “she almost ruined us.”
It was not just the present to the monarch, which was usually returned as charitable gifts. It was the fees charged by her staff.
“They’re like a plague of locusts,” he protested.
There were bakers, littermen, footmen, musicians, porters, yeomen, the serjeant-at-arms, who took a full forty shillings; the king of heralds, who took fifty; and the trumpeters who provided the fanfares when the queen entered the city and who demanded three pounds in gold.
“Never again, we pray!” he cried. It was not only the aristocrats in their houses who dreaded the honour of a royal visit; it was the burghers of every town in the country too.
So what in the world, he wondered, could Forest want with him now?
The Forests began their wooing of Edward Shockley in September 1580 with an invitation to Avonsford Manor.
He did not hesitate about going.
“Forest’s sure to be up to something,” he thought cheerfully. “I wonder what.”
When he arrived, he found two surprises awaiting him.
The first was that the Wilsons of Christchurch were staying there: not only old Jack, and his wife Nellie, but their three fine seafaring sons as well. It made him smile both with pleasure and amusement to see them: for one was the image of the father, another the male likeness of Nellie, and the third a tall, big-chested amalgam of the two.
Nellie had not grown fat, but she had grown stout and it suited her. Her hair was grey, but her eyes still sparkled; she still favoured a doublet that laced across the front; she wore a modest ruff, and she set the whole off with a jaunty little conical brimmed hat in which she stuck a feather. Her three hearty sons, all in their twenties, obeyed her even faster than they obeyed Captain Jack.
For a second, as they came face to face, he saw her hesitate. He understood. He bowed low.
“Mistress Wilson.”
If the Forests were not even aware of who she was, the secret past of Nellie Godfrey would never pass his lips. She saw it in his eyes and gave him a grateful smile.
He had no doubt they were all there for a reason, but Forest was obviously in no hurry to enlighten them.
He was more concerned that they meet his son.
Giles Forest was a pleasant-looking young man of the same age as the eldest Wilson boy. But there the resemblance ended. Slim, dark, with fine, delicate features and tapering fingers, his thin legs encased in a silken hose, his hair teased into curls, he was the perfect model of the courtier. He had spent the last few years at Oxford, and so to Shockley the young man was almost a stranger. But it was clear at once that he was determined to make himself agreeable to the merchant.
The other surprise was a change which many people might not have noticed. But Shockley did, the moment he entered the hall.
It was the Forest coat of arms.
He remembered it well from his youth: a proud lion in a field. Or so it had been.
But now, resplendent in the place of honour, painted on a wooden board, rested a far more impressive and complex affair for every visitor to see. He stared at it in wonder.
For though the proud lion, which had now for decades proclaimed the Forest’s gentility, was still to be seen, it had been shifted into the second of the four quarters into which the shield had now been divided. In the first quarter now resided another and older emblem: a white swan on a red ground: the ancient arms of Godefroi. To this had been added a little badge, a difference, to show that the family came from one of several branches of the Godefroi line.
It was young Giles Forest who explained the change to him.
“Those are the Godefroi arms,” he said, “for the family of Forest descends from them, a famous ancient line from whom we had these lands by marriage. And those,” he pointed to another quarter, “are the arms of the lords de Whiteheath, another Norman family from whom we derive and there,” he concluded proudly, pointing at the fourth quarter, “are the ancient arms of Longspée, the ancient earls of Salisbury.”
Shockley was impressed. He had an idea that the Forests had come out of Salisbury a few generations before but he could not remember the details.
“I had not known the family was no noble,” he remarked respectfully; and the pleasant young man beside him bowed.
“I will show you our pedigree,” he promised.
For, like many other rising families at the time, the Forests had been to the College of Arms where, just then, resided some of the greatest rascals in the history of genealogy. There, one of the Kings of Arms had performed one of the favourite miracles of his trade. Putting the new arms the family had recently obtained into second place, he in no time discovered a far more ancient and noble origin for them in the ancient family of Godefroi, and since there seemed to be no claimants to their arms about, he kindly gave them, ‘differenced’ to make it seem more plausible, to the Forests. There was no question of a possible connection. It was a fabrication, pure and simple.
But once the Godefroi ancestry was admitted, why then, to be sure, all manner of splendid connections could be found in the perfectly genuine pedigree of the ancient knights of Avonsford. As he went back in time however, as an added bonus to the family who were paying him so well, the herald allowed his imagination to run riot, and added to the pedigree he drew up not only knights, but even magnates, like Longspée, to whom the Godefrois had never been more than tenants. It was a magnificent affair, and by this means, yet another rising Tudor family rooted itself in a fictitious Norman past.
That Nellie might have some connection with the ancient swan on its red ground never occurred to anyone; she was not even fully aware of it herself. But stout Nellie Wilson of Christchurch, even if she guessed what had been done, had no intention of digging up the memory of Nellie Godfrey of Culver Street. And as for the children of her brother Piers, they knew her only as the rich aunt who sent them presents and their father as a carpenter. The Forests were secure.
There were other new treasures in the house: a fine portrait of Forest, a delicate miniature, the size of a man’s hand, of his son; a fine arras. The party admired them all.
They dined well. Forest provided a succulent swan. And as a special course he added a curious vegetable Shockley had never seen before. It was pale in colour and had a pasty texture, and it tasted sweet.
“What is it?” he asked.
“’Tis from across the ocean, from the Spanish New World,” Wilson explained. “A rare taste.”
It was. Forest had obtained the first of the sweet potatoes from South America, that were soon to be followed by their cousins, the ordinary potato, back to the old world.
It was after dinner that Forest took the men aside and opened the discussions.
“Captain Wilson has plans for new voyages that could bring enormous profits,” he explained to Edward. “He wants to find people in Sarum to supply the money, and so I thought you should come to hear him.” Then he motioned Wilson to commence.
It was an extraordinary story.
“First,” Wilson explained, “consider Russia.”
Shockley had known something of this trade. For twenty years English merchants had been trying, by crossing Russia, to get to the ancient and lucrative Persian trade routes. They had met with small success. But with Russia itself, trade was booming, encouraged by a new Czar, Ivan, who would later be called ‘the terrible’.
“Russia has oil, tallow, tar, hides – hundreds of thousands of them, timber for masts,” Wilson enumerated. “With Spain threatening us more each day, all the shipbuilding materials from Russia will have a ready market here. Similarly, consider Poland and the territories about her. They too have shipping materials – and they want your broadcloth, Master Shockley. Only last year the Eastland Company was formed for this trade. It will weaken those damned Hanse merchants and strengthen us.”