Barns and Such Outhouses

by Charles Howard, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The first draft of the letter said that the fleet was in good order. Howard read it back to himself and struck it through. The order was in the ships. The men were in the street.

He had come ashore at Margate in the forenoon, on the tenth of August, in the Ark's pinnace, with four oarsmen and his clerk, Ralph Merrick. He took Merrick because a letter would have to be written before night, and he meant to write it from what he had seen. A dispatch from a cabin is a dispatch about a cabin.

The tide was half out. The pinnace grounded on the sand below the town, and the oarsmen went over the side into water to their knees and walked her in. Howard stepped onto the hard without wetting his boots, which was a courtesy to his rank paid by four men who had not eaten fresh meat in six weeks. He noted it. He noted most things.

The first of them was lying against the wall of a net-house above the tideline. He had a blanket that had been a sail and was shaking under it in the sun. His face was red and his eyes were wrong: open, and too bright, and not on anything. Beside him a second man sat with his knees up, and beside that one a third, who was dead. Nobody had closed his eyes, and the flies were on them.

"Whose are these?" Howard said.

One of the oarsmen went and bent over the sitting man and asked him, and came back.

"The Elizabeth Jonas, my lord. Landed yesterday. They were told there would be lodging."

"By whom?"

The oarsman did not know. It did not signify. Somebody aboard the Elizabeth Jonas had told a boatload of sick men there would be lodging because it was the thing that got them into the boat. Howard did not hold it against him. He would have said the same.

"Merrick. Write: nine of the clock, the strand. Three of the Jonas, one dead."

Merrick wrote it on his knee.

---

The town was small and it had shut its doors. That was not malice. Margate had perhaps a hundred and twenty houses, and it had watched the fleet come into the Roads after Gravelines with every bell rung and had then watched boat after boat put men ashore who could not stand. Everyone in Thanet knew what a ship's fever did once it came into a house. The doors were shut against that, not against the Queen's service, and Howard did not waste breath telling them the difference.

He walked up the street with Merrick behind him. There were men in doorways, men on the steps of the church, a man lying full length across the gutter so that a carter coming down from the market had stopped his horse rather than drive over him and was sitting on his cart staring at the problem. There was a smell Howard knew from Plymouth: the sweet rank smell of the beef that had been bad when it was put aboard and worse every week after. The men had eaten it because there was nothing else. They had drunk the beer that had gone sour in the cask, because there was nothing else. Hawkins had told him in July what the victuals were, and Howard had written to the Council, and the Council had sent what it could, and it had not been enough, and that was the whole of the history.

He counted as he went. He did not count aloud.

At the head of the street a woman came out of a house with a bucket and threw the slops into the gutter a yard from the man lying there. She saw Howard's chain and his cloak and stopped with the bucket held in front of her like a shield.

"Who is the chief man of this town?" Howard asked her.

"There is the deputy," she said. "He is gone to Canterbury."

"When?"

"Tuesday."

So he had left when the first boats came in. Howard did not say anything about that either.

"Then who has barns?"

She looked at him a long moment. She had worked out who he was by now, or near enough.

"Jordan Sackett has the great barn at Dent-de-lion," she said. "And there is Hoyle's barn on the Ramsgate road, but it is full of his corn."

"Corn can be moved," said Howard. "Thank you, mistress."

---

On the walk out to Sackett's farm he did what he had done every morning since the Armada had been sighted off the Lizard. He asked himself three questions, in order.

What is the state of the fleet as an institution?

The ships were sound. The Spaniards had been chased north as far as the Firth of Forth and had not turned. The fire ships had done their work off Calais and the fight off Gravelines had done the rest that was in English power to do; the wind was doing the remainder. On paper there were near two hundred sail and some fifteen thousand men. In fact there were not. The men were the institution, and the institution was dying in barns and gutters at a rate he could not yet put a number to, and that was the first thing he did not know and needed to.

What does Drake want, and does it serve the purpose?

He knew what Drake wanted. There was a letter from Drake in his cabin that he had not answered. It concerned the Rosario, Don Pedro de Valdés's great ship that Drake had taken in the Channel, and the money that had been in her, and how much of it had come to the Queen and how much had not. Frobisher had things to say on that subject and had said some of them in public. All that could wait. Drake's wanting was not the danger this week. The danger this week was a fleet with no men in it if the Spaniard turned in the north and came back down, which he would not, almost certainly; but almost was not a word the Lord Admiral could use when the Council asked whether the coast was safe.

What does the Council need to hear from me tonight?

That was the question he had been carrying since the strand. The Council wanted the fleet discharged as soon as it could safely be done, because every man on the books was a man eating victuals and drawing wages, and the Treasury had been scraped to the plate. Lord Burghley had said so, courteously. Lord Burghley's courtesy was a precise instrument. The Council needed to hear that the fleet could be paid off cheaply and soon.

It could not. And the Council governed from what it was told.

"Merrick."

"My lord."

"How many have we seen?"

Merrick had kept the count better than he had. "Forty-one, my lord, that I am sure of. Six dead."

"Write it."

---

Jordan Sackett was a man of about fifty, broad, with a farmer's forearms and a Thanet way of standing with his weight back on his heels so that you came to him and not he to you. He had heard who was coming. His wife and two grown sons stood in the yard behind him, and a dog that knew better than to bark.

The barn was a good barn. Howard could see that from the gate. It was long and high, timber-framed, weatherboarded, with a thatch that had been done in the last five years. A barn like that was a man's whole estate turned into a building.

"Goodman Sackett."

"My lord."

"I have men who served the Queen and are sick and have nowhere to lie. I want your barn for them."

Sackett had his answer ready. Howard let him make it, because a man who has been allowed to say his piece can be moved afterwards, and a man who has been cut off cannot.

"My lord, I have my hay in it. I have my plough-gear and my harness. If I put sick men in it I lose the hay, for no beast will eat it after, and I lose the barn for a year, for nobody in Thanet will come near it, and I lose my own sons, maybe, for the fever goes where it likes. I am sorry for the men. I am. I stood on the cliff and watched the ships go by in July and prayed with the rest. But I am asked to give my farm away for them, and I am not a lord, my lord."

"No," Howard said. "You are not."

He looked at the barn again, and then at the sons.

"Your hay," he said. "What is it worth?"

Sackett named a sum. It was too high by a third and both men knew it.

"Your harness and plough-gear can be moved to the cart-shed. My men will do it. Your hay can go up into the loft and I will have a sail laid over it. The men will lie on the floor on straw, which you will sell me, and which I will pay for, and which will be burned when they are gone. Your sons will not go into the barn. My people will tend the men. They are seamen. They are used to tending each other."

Sackett was listening now, with the weight a little further forward.

"As to the year you lose, and the barn's name in Thanet, I cannot pay you for that in coin today. I will pay you in this." He held out his hand without turning his head, and Merrick put the writing-board into it with a sheet of paper and the ink. Howard wrote standing, using the board on his forearm.

I, Charles Lord Howard, Lord Admiral of England, have taken the barn of Jordan Sackett of Dent-de-lion in the parish of Saint John in Thanet for the lodging of her Majesty's sick seamen, by necessity of the service, and do undertake that he shall be satisfied for his loss and charge, either by her Majesty or by myself. 10 August 1588.

He signed it. He held it out.

Sackett could read. Howard watched him read it twice.

"Either by her Majesty," Sackett said slowly, "or by yourself."

"Yes."

"That is a deal of sick men to stand surety for, my lord."

"It is."

What the paper said, and what Sackett understood it to say, was not that a lord was being generous. It said that if this barn was refused, it was refused not to Charles Howard but to the Lord Admiral, and the Lord Admiral was the Queen's office in the fleet, and the man who refused it would be named in a dispatch to the Council by tonight. Howard had not said so. He did not need to. It was in the title at the head of the paper, and it was why the title was there.

And it said the other thing too. That the title would answer for the debt if the Crown did not.

Sackett folded the paper and put it inside his jerkin.

"Straw is fourpence the truss," he said.

"Merrick, pay him for forty trusses now. And two angels on account for the hay."

Merrick opened the purse he carried. It was Howard's purse. The fleet's money was in the Treasury in London, where it had been since the spring.

---

By three in the afternoon the barn at Dent-de-lion had sixty-three men in it, and Hoyle's barn on the Ramsgate road had thirty, with the corn piled at one end under a tarpaulin and Hoyle standing at the door counting the sacks as if the sick men might rise up and eat them.

They brought them on hurdles and on doors taken off their hinges and two by two with a man's arms over his mates' shoulders. The oarsmen of the Ark's pinnace carried until they were grey in the face, and Howard sent them back to the ship and had six more men brought, from the Ark's own company, who were well and who had volunteered when they were asked, which was not a thing to be ordered.

Howard did not carry anyone. That was not squeamishness. If the Lord Admiral took the corner of a hurdle, then for the time it took to walk from the strand to the barn there would be nobody in Margate who could tell the carter to move his cart or the woman to fetch water or Hoyle to stop counting sacks. It was a question of where he stood.

He stood mostly at the barn door.

Sir Robert Southwell came ashore at about four. He was married to Howard's daughter Elizabeth, and he commanded the Elizabeth Jonas, and the men in the barn were most of them his. He came up the lane fast with his hat in his hand. He had not slept, by the look of him.

"My lord, I had not known it was so bad ashore."

"You knew it was bad aboard."

"It has been bad aboard since Plymouth." Southwell looked into the barn and away again. "I have buried more men out of the Jonas than the Spaniard ever killed in her. She is fouled through. The surgeon says it is in the timbers."

"Then get it out of the timbers. Put every man ashore that can be put ashore, here or at Sandwich. Take the ballast out of her; it is stinking. Burn wet broom in her, below, with the hatches on, and keep it burning three days. Then wash her down with vinegar and put fresh ballast in."

"That is the ship out of service for a week."

"She is out of service now. She only looks in service."

Southwell nodded. He was a good officer and did not need it said twice. He stood a moment longer, his hat still in his hand.

"Elizabeth will ask after you," he said.

"Tell her I am well. It is true."

---

Toward evening Howard went into the barn.

It was cooler inside, and dim, with the light coming in long bars through the gaps in the weatherboarding and lying across the straw and the men. The smell of the fever was stronger here, and the smell of new straw went some way against it. A boy from the Ark was going along the rows with a bucket of small beer that had come up from the Ark's own hold, which was the last good beer Howard knew of between Dover and the Nore. A gunner's mate from the Ark, a Wapping man named Thomas Gale who had nursed men through the flux in the Caribbean years before, was going along behind the boy. He had appointed himself to this, and Howard had let the appointment stand.

Near the middle of the floor a man reached up out of the straw and took hold of the hem of Howard's cloak.

Gale stepped forward to free it. Howard lifted a hand.

The man was young. Twenty, perhaps. The fever had taken the flesh off his face and put a high colour in the bones. He wore a canvas shirt and a seaman's slops, and someone had written his name for him on a slip of paper and tucked it in his shirt where it could be found. Howard did not read it.

"My lord," the man said. His voice was very thin. "Are we to be paid?"

There were thirty men in hearing. Some of them raised their heads.

Howard knew what the Council would wish him to say. He knew what would put this man easy for the night. Yes was a short word and a kind one, and it would cost nothing tonight, and it would cost everything in a month when the men who lived went to the pay-table at Chatham and found it bare, and remembered who had said yes in a barn in Thanet.

"Not tonight," he said. "Not this week. I will not tell you otherwise."

The man's hand stayed on the cloak.

"You will be paid. I have written to the Council for your wages and I will write again tonight. Until they come I will do what I can of my own. If you die before they come your wages go to whoever you name, and Gale here will write it down for you. That is how it stands."

He saw the man take it in, slowly, the whole of it, the not and the will and the die. It was not comfort. It was a true account. Howard had found that men who had served at sea could tell the one from the other, and in the end they preferred the account.

The man let go of the cloak.

"Edmund Pike," he said. "Of Rye. For my mother."

"Gale."

"I have it, my lord."

---

They went back to the ship by the last of the light, the pinnace low in the water with the six Ark men who had carried all afternoon and were too tired now to row, so that the four oarsmen who had gone back and slept and come in again took them off. The Roads were full of ships at anchor, the riding lights coming out one by one across the water, the Ark among them with her lanterns lit at the stern. It was a fleet. From the water it looked like the fleet that had gone up the Channel behind the Spaniard in July, every ship in her place. Lord Burghley would see it so, if he came down to look. It was why he must not be allowed to judge from the look of it.

In the great cabin Howard had the candles brought and sat down to the letter.

Merrick read him back the morning's draft. The fleet is in good order. Howard had already struck that through. Merrick read him the notes from the day: the strand, the street, the church steps, the barns, the counts. Ninety-three men lodged. Eleven dead that they knew of, in Margate alone, since the morning. Southwell's word on the Elizabeth Jonas. The prices of straw and hay.

He began to dictate. He spoke slowly and plainly and in the order the Council would need the matters in: the Spaniard first, because the Council would ask first whether the Spaniard was coming back; the state of the ships second; and the men third, at length. He gave Southwell's word as Southwell's. He gave the numbers as numbers and said where they were not yet sure. He said that men having no place to receive them died in the streets, because they did. He said that he was driven himself to come a-land to see them bestowed in some lodging, and that the best he could get was barns and such outhouses, and that the relief was small that he could give them there.

Merrick's pen went steadily. Outside, someone in the waist of the ship was being sick over the side, and someone else was saying his name over and over in a low voice as if to keep him from going anywhere.

"My lord," said Merrick, when he paused. "Shall I put in the Sackett paper? The undertaking?"

Howard considered it.

The Council needed to know that money had been laid out, and by whom, because the account would be rendered and they ought not to be surprised by it. They did not need to know that the Lord Admiral had put his own name to a farmer's barn as surety against the Queen. That would read, in London, as a reproach. A reproach did not get men paid. It got Lords of the Council to explain why they had been right.

"No. Put that I have laid out some money of my own for their relief, and will account for it, and that her Majesty shall not be charged for what I do of my own accord. Then put the wages. Plainly. That the men are owed and must be paid, and soon, or her Majesty will find no man willing to serve her at sea another year." He paused. "That last is not a threat. Write it so it does not read as one."

"How shall I write it so, my lord?"

"Write it as a fact. It is one."

Merrick wrote. When the body of the letter was done Howard took it from him and read it through, all of it, with the candle drawn close. He changed two words. Then he took the pen himself, because there was one sentence he meant the Lord Treasurer to see in the Lord Admiral's own hand and not a clerk's, and he dipped it, and wiped it on the lip of the ink-horn, and wrote it under the rest in his square careful letters.

It would grieve any man's heart to see them that have served so valiantly to die so miserably.

He signed beneath it. Merrick sanded the sheet, shook it off over the deck, folded it, and held the wax to the candle until it ran.

Howard pressed the seal down into it and held it there.

✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾

THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Carolō Howardō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Charles Howard, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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