The Order of the Bench

by Charles Howard, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The place was empty again.

Howard saw it from the door of the Parliament Chamber before he saw anything else, the way a man coming on deck sees first the gap in a line of ships. The earls sat on their bench along the wall in their order, red cloth and ermine, and the bench had a space in it a yard wide where nobody sat. It had been empty since the Parliament opened. The clerks had stopped looking at it. The bishops across the chamber had never looked at it at all, which was how bishops looked at a thing.

He came in carrying the white staff. It was a plain rod of wood painted white, a little taller than his shoulder, and it had been put into his hand in October with the office of Lord Steward for this Parliament. He had sworn the Commons with it, above four hundred of them, filing past in their best gowns and saying the words after him. That was done. Now he carried it in and out and set it against the bench beside him, and it marked him as an officer of the household and set him above every earl who was nothing else. Two days before the Parliament the Queen had made him Earl of Nottingham. He was sixty-one years old and had been Lord Admiral for twelve. He had not asked for the earldom and had not refused it. Nobody refused it.

He walked to his place and sat, and the earl on his left inclined his head, and the earl on his right did not, being asleep.

The gap was on the far side of the chamber from him, and he did not look at it again. He knew whose it was.

---

Peter Cobb found him in the lobby at the rising, with a paper.

Cobb was his secretary for the Admiralty business. He was a Deptford man, the son of a shipwright, who had come to Howard at fifteen to copy and stayed at forty to manage the copying. He did not bring papers into Westminster unless a paper could not wait for Westminster to be done with.

"The Ordnance, my lord," Cobb said.

Howard took it and read it standing. It was a note in a clerk's hand from the Office of the Ordnance in the Tower. The clerk's name was Hugh Kellaway. Howard did not know him. The note was very respectful and very short. It said that the warrant for the issue of eleven lasts of corn powder, with match and shot answerable, to the ships appointed for the winter guard of the Narrow Seas, had been drawn and lay ready, and wanted only the hand of the Master of the Ordnance. The Master had not been at the Tower since his return from the Islands. The Office humbly begged his lordship's direction.

Howard folded the note once.

"Eleven lasts," he said.

"They spent the most of what they had at sea after the Adelantado's fleet, my lord. The account came up from Chatham on Saturday. The Vanguard has not two barrels left in her that her gunner would trust."

"And the Ordnance cannot issue without the Master's hand."

"So the clerk says. It is so, my lord. The Lieutenant can issue for ordinary service. This is not ordinary. It is the whole guard."

Howard knew it. He had been at the Council board in April when the Queen's instructions for the new Master were settled, and he had been content with them, because they were good instructions. The Ordnance kept the Queen's powder; the Admiralty asked for it; the Master signed. That was how a thing was kept from being stolen. It was a good arrangement. It had one weakness, and the weakness was a man in his own house with the shutters closed and a physician going in and out.

"Where is the guard now?"

"The Vanguard and the Antelope at Chatham. The Crane and two pinnaces in the Downs. The rest is not yet fitted."

"What do they have in them, the Downs ships?"

"Enough to answer a salute, my lord. Not to fight."

Howard stood a moment in the lobby with the paper in one hand and the white staff in the other. Lords went past him and bowed and he answered them. The Spaniard would not come in December. The Adelantado's fleet had been broken up at sea in October by the weather, which was not the first time in nine years the weather had done England that service, and the Lord Admiral did not count on its doing it again. The Spaniard would not come in December. There were Dunkirkers, though, who came whenever they liked, and four ships in the Downs with enough powder to answer a salute.

"Go to the Tower," he said. "Tell Kellaway the Lord Admiral has seen his note and thanks him for it, and he is to keep the warrant ready and not let it go into a drawer. Tell him nothing else."

"Shall I go to my lord of Essex's house? With a copy?"

"No."

Cobb waited.

"My lord of Essex has had copies," Howard said. "He has had everything. A copy from me is a thing he can refuse to open. I will not give him that."

---

The Queen was at Whitehall. Howard had lodgings there by right of his wife, who served in the Bedchamber, and he went there in the afternoon by water because the street was mud to the ankle. The river was low and brown and the cold came off it. The watermen were wrapped to the eyes. One of them knew him and touched his cap, and Howard knew him too, an old Ark man who had lost two fingers at Gravelines and could still pull an oar, and he called him by name, and the man was pleased. It cost nothing. It was not nothing either.

He sent Cobb to the Tower and went up alone.

The patent was in its box on the table in the outer room, where it had been since October. It was a great sheet of parchment, engrossed in a fine secretary hand, with the Great Seal hanging from it on cords in a skin bag. He had read it once when it came and had not taken it out since. He took it out now and laid it flat and weighted the corners with a candlestick, an inkhorn, a prayer book and his own hand.

It was all in Latin, as these things were, and the Latin went on for some while about the antiquity of his house and the services of his father before it came to him. Then it came to him. It named the year eighty-eight and the Spaniard driven from the seas. Then it named Cadiz. It said that in the year past the town of Cadiz had been taken and the Spanish fleet in that harbour destroyed, and it said these things in a sentence that had the Lord Admiral at the head of it, in the place where the Earl of Essex had expected to find himself.

That was the sentence. He had known it was there. He read it slowly, as he read a dispatch from a captain he did not entirely trust, looking for what it claimed and what it left room for.

It did not say that Howard alone had done it. It did not need to. It said what it said in the voice of the Crown, under the Great Seal, and every man who read it would understand it as the Crown's account of Cadiz. That was what a patent was for.

Howard had not written it. He did not know for certain who had drafted it; it had come down from the Secretary's office, and Sir Robert Cecil's people had a gift for a sentence that said one thing and let a man hear another. He had read it in October and had thought it handsome and had not thought about it further. That autumn he had been at Westminster by day and at the defence of the coast until midnight, with the Adelantado somewhere to the west of him. By November my lord of Essex was gone from court, and the reason for it was all over London in a week.

He thought about Cadiz now, as exactly as he could.

He had commanded the fleet. That was true. The fight in the bay in the morning, the galleons in the narrows, the Saint Philip and the Saint Andrew, the ships going in one after another under the town batteries in the order he had set the night before; that was the fleet's, and the fleet was his. Ralegh had led the van and done it well and wanted it known, and it was known. But the town had not been taken by ships. The town had been taken by men going over the wall on the landward side and fighting through the streets to the market-place, and at the head of those men, by every account Howard had heard, had been Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, with his sword out.

That was also true. A Lord Admiral who could not hold two true things at once had better keep to a single ship.

So the patent was not false. It was a Crown account that left out a man, and the man was the most dangerous subject in England when he was left out of anything, and he was at this moment the Master of the Queen's Ordnance with eleven lasts of powder lying unsigned in a drawer at the Tower.

Howard rolled the parchment back up and put it in the box.

---

Catherine came from the Queen's side a little after five, when the candles had been lit. She was forty-seven and had been at Elizabeth's elbow for twenty-five years, and she had her cousin's habit of seeing the whole room before she spoke in it. She saw the box on the table and that it had been opened.

"So," she said. She sat and let her women take her shoes and her outer gown and then sent them out. "You have been reading your Latin."

"I have."

"She is in a bad temper. She has been in a bad temper since Monday. He wrote to her again. He does not come; he writes. He is very sick, he says, and much wronged, and he does not know why he should come to a Parliament in which he must sit below the man who robbed him of his honour in a piece of parchment. She threw the letter on the floor, and a maid of honour who had done nothing to deserve it picked it up."

"He wants the patent altered."

"He wants it cancelled and a new one made. He wants it said in the new one what he did at Cadiz. Failing that, he wants it said that the Lord Admiral did nothing at Cadiz." She held her hands out to the fire. "She will not alter a patent. A patent is the Crown speaking. If the Crown unsays itself in December because the Earl of Essex is sulking in his house, there is no patent in England worth the wax."

"She is right."

"Of course she is right. She is also unhappy, and he knows it, and he is waiting for her to be unhappy enough." Catherine looked at him. "Charles. What have you been doing?"

He told her about the powder.

She heard him out. She did not interrupt, which she had learned from him, or he from her; neither of them remembered. When he had done she said, "That is a small thing."

"It is a small thing. Eleven lasts of powder. It is the Narrow Seas with four ships in them that cannot fight. It is small until a Dunkirker comes into the Downs and takes a collier out from under the Crane's guns because the Crane has nothing to put in them. Then it is a large thing, and Cecil asks the Lord Admiral how it came about, and the Lord Admiral says that the Master of the Ordnance would not sign because his feelings were hurt by a sentence in Latin. And Cecil writes that down."

"And Essex says it was your patent that hurt them."

"And Essex says that."

The fire settled. Down in the court someone was calling for a torch.

"Then he should be made to sign," Catherine said. "She can command him. She has only to send."

"She can command him to sign this. Then there is the next warrant, and the one after. He is the Master. Every gun on every ship I have goes through his office. I can command a captain, and a captain will obey me, sulking or no, because his ship and his prize money and his next appointment hang on it. I cannot command the Earl of Essex. Nobody can command him who is not the Queen, and she cannot command him every day. He must be brought to want to do it."

"By whom?"

"By where he sits."

She did not understand him at once, and then she did. He watched it come into her face.

"You know the Act," he said.

"I know there is an Act."

"King Henry's. For placing the Lords. I had it read to me in October when they gave me the staff, because I did not know where I was to sit and would not ask. The great officers first, whatever their degree. Then, after them, six offices, and the man who holds one of them sits above every other lord of his own degree. The Great Chamberlain. The Constable. The Marshal. The Admiral. The Steward of the Household. The Chamberlain of the Household." He said it the way he would have given a line of battle, in order, without emphasis. "That is why I sit above him. The patent makes me an earl. The office does the rest: an earl who is Admiral sits above every earl who holds no office, and this month I am Steward as well. He sits where his creation puts him. Which is below me, and below a good many others."

"And the Marshal."

"The Marshal sits above the Admiral. The Marshal's office has lain empty since old Shrewsbury died. Seven years."

Catherine was silent for a long moment.

"You want her to make him Earl Marshal," she said.

"I want her to know that if she does, the Lord Admiral will not take it as a wrong. That is all. She will not do it if she thinks it is a stroke against me, because she will not be seen to strike at me to please him. She is too proud of her own patent for that. But if she knows that I would have it so, then the patent stands, every word, and he has his place, and the place is above mine, and he can come back to the Parliament and sit there in front of every lord in England and they will all see where he sits. That is what he wants. He does not want the Latin. He wants the bench."

"He will sit above you."

"Yes."

"Every day of the Parliament. And at every feast, and every procession, and every christening, and in the chapel. Above you. He is thirty-two years old. You were the Queen's Admiral when he was learning to trail a pike in the Low Countries." Her voice had not risen, but it had gone very level, and he knew that tone; he had heard her use it on a Lord Chamberlain. "And I am to go to her and say that my husband desires it."

"Not desires. Will not take it as a wrong."

"It is the same thing, said by a woman with her shoes off."

"It is not the same thing," Howard said, "and you know it is not, and so will she."

Catherine looked into the fire.

"And the Countess of Nottingham," she said, "who has been a countess since October. Where will she walk?"

He had not thought of that. He thought of it now, honestly, and saw that she was owed an answer and that he did not have one that would content her.

"Where her husband's degree puts her," he said. "Which is where she walked yesterday. The office is mine. It was never yours. Nothing is taken from you."

"Nothing is taken from me." She said it over once more, quietly, as if she were reckoning a bill. "You will lose the first place on the bench and you have done the reckoning and it comes out cheap. I would like to know the reckoning."

"Eleven lasts of powder," Howard said. "And the Ordnance for as long as he holds it. And a man who took a town with his own sword, put back in the line where he can be used, instead of shut in his house with his friends telling him that the Howards have stolen his honour. That is a long reckoning, Kate, and I have not got to the end of it. But I know which side the balance is on."

"And the patent?"

"The patent is not altered. Not a word. Cadiz stands as the Crown said it." He paused. "He took the town. I took the bay. If he wants it said so he may say so. He may say it from the Marshal's place. I do not mind what he says. I mind that he signs."

She sat a while longer. Then she stood and put her hand on his shoulder, in passing, the way she did when a thing was decided and she did not want to say that it was.

"Not yet," she said. "Tonight she would hear it as you giving way to him, and she would be angry with you for it, and that would do nobody any good. On Thursday. After the Council. She is always gentler after the Council, because she has been cross with all of them and has none left over."

"Thursday," Howard said.

"And I will not say it is your desire."

"No."

"I will say," said Catherine, choosing it, "that the Lord Admiral has served Your Majesty in the first place for a long while and is content to serve in the second, so long as he serves."

He looked up at her. She was already turning away to call her women in.

"That will do," he said.

---

The Parliament rose for Christmas. Kellaway at the Tower kept the warrant out of the drawer, and when the Clerk of the Deliveries came to ask him why it was out, Kellaway said the Lord Admiral had seen it, which was true, and the Clerk went away. The Crane lay in the Downs and fired a salute to a Danish merchantman on Saint Stephen's day and had two barrels left after. No Dunkirker came. It was the weather for it, and none came, and Howard did not take the credit for that.

The patent creating Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Earl Marshal of England passed the seals in the last days of December. Howard heard of it from Cobb, who heard it from a Chancery clerk, before he heard it from anyone at court. Catherine did not mention it. Neither did he.

In January the Lords sat again.

Howard came in with the white staff and saw it from the door, as he had before. The gap on the earls' bench had closed. The earls had been moved along. The space was now near the head of the bench, beside the Earl of Oxford, who was Great Chamberlain and sat first, and before the place where the Lord Steward and Lord Admiral would sit. The Earl Marshal was in it.

He was dressed in black velvet, and there was a marshal's staff across his knees that was new and that he held as if he had carried it all his life. He had lost flesh in his face since the autumn, and the colour he had was high and unhealthy, and he looked, for all that, like a man who had come into his own house after a long journey and found the fire lit. Half the chamber was watching him. The other half was watching Howard.

Howard went to his place, which was the next place down. He set the white staff against the bench. Then he turned to the Earl Marshal and bowed, not deeply, at the angle due from the Admiral to the Marshal and not a hair beyond it, and he saw Essex see the angle and measure it.

Essex inclined his head. After a moment, because he was generous when he had won and it cost him nothing, he inclined it a little further.

"My lord Admiral."

"My lord Marshal." Howard sat down. He took a folded paper out of his sleeve. "I am glad to see your lordship recovered. There is a thing here of your office that has wanted your hand since November."

Essex took it. He unfolded it on his knee and read it. Howard watched him read it: the eleven lasts, the match and shot, the ships of the winter guard. He saw the moment when Essex understood how long it had lain, and why, and what it would have looked like if anything had come of it. Essex's mouth tightened at one corner.

He did not say anything. He rose, and crossed to the clerks' table, and took a pen there without asking for it, and signed across the foot of the warrant in his large rapid hand, Essex, with a flourish under it that ran nearly to the edge of the sheet.

He came back and handed it to Howard. Howard gave it, without looking at it, to the Gentleman Usher, who carried it to the bar, where Cobb was waiting. Cobb took it out of the chamber at a walk and was running before he reached the stair.

✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾

THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Īdibus Octōbribus (15 October 2026), ā Carolō Howardō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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

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