Kit laid low for much of 1594, outcast, guilt-ridden and homesick. He could not even find consolation in his pipe-smoking as tobacco was hard to come by and cripplingly expensive in Antwerp. Hints of his mood over this period can be traced in sonnets of loneliness and exile, through the outsiders and castaways of his plays, in scenes of fated parting. Falstaff's reluctant leave-taking of a tearful Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly in Henry TV Part Two springs to mind. As he leaves, Mistress Quickly notes mournfully: 'Well, fare thee well. I have known thee these twenty-nine years . . .' - (II iv 369-70, Kit's age when he fled England).
In his guise as Walter de Hoogh, sparkling Kit Marlowe had lost one of his greatest delights: the curl and energy of spoken English, the easy wit and wilful waywardness of a mother-tongue conversation. Like Mowbray in Richard II, he realised sadly that: 'My native English, now I must forgo;/ And now my tongue's use is to me no more/ Than an unstringed viol or harp' (I iii 160-62). Though he was adept at other languages, none fired him like his own tongue. English may have disappeared from his day-to-day life, but in private he clung to it, wrote in it, disrupted, expanded and re-invented it - for the rest of his life. He continued writing plays because he needed the money, but the underlying impetus - and the one that is most evident to us today - was his passion for the language. He simply could not leave it alone. The language was all he had left.
Kit's yearning for home, and for the friends and lover he was separated from found expression in John of Gaunt's aching lament in Richard II for an idealised England, viewed from a distance - a 'scept'red isle', a 'demi-paradise', a 'precious stone set in the silver sea', inhabited by a happy breed of men, a 'land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land' (II i 3off). Kit even continued to write sonnets to his lost Emilia Bassano, and while his feelings for the young Southampton somehow sustained him, at the same time the hopelessness of the passion consumed him. The motto on his 1585 portrait' Quod me nutrit me destruit' (What nourishes me, destroys me) seems oddly prescient here; it recurs as 'Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by' in Sonnet 73, a poem of regret and parting. He hears, too, that his 'posthumous' reputation is being blackened - probably by rumours spread by Cecil. He is sinking into public disgrace, and feels cheated by Fortune. All this culminates in a howl of isolation:
When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless [useless] cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate . . .
(Sonnet 29)
Disgrace and loss of reputation become a recurrent theme in Kit's writings hereon, from Mowbray's concern with his 'fair name' through Cassio's 'Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation!' (Othelloll iii 255). Part of Kit's shame was a secret one, the 'invisible disgrace' of the death of the ruffler in Deptford; but as rumours about a 'brawl' began to circulate, there was also the public infamy of a name linked with violence and debauchery. He was absolutely powerless to do anything about that, and the slur has stuck.
In the autumn of 1594, Kit suddenly disappeared from Antwerp. Payments made to 'de Hooch' in the Bellerus account book stop abruptly in September - so it is possible that he again went to Frankfurt, but did not come back.* Oliver Laurens mentions just one visit to Kit in 1594, and it is not improbable that they once more met at the book fair. No part of Oliver's journal for this year survives, but in a later table he records collecting three plays from Kit in 1594. Unfortunately, he does not record what they were, though Richard II, Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice are the most likely candidates, as all appear to have been performed in 1595/6. By 1594 Oliver had at last left the sticky employ of the Puddinge of St Paul's, and was working with Thomas Thorpe, a young man of around his own age, who, after a nine-year apprenticeship, had in 1594 become a freeman of the Stationers' Company. 'Odd' Thorpe, as he was known, did not have a press or stall of his own - his books were printed by the publisher George Eld, and sold in the shop of John Wright at Christ Church Gate. At a time when printing, publishing and bookselling were only just beginning to untwine into distinct professions, 'Odd' Thorpe was probably one of the first ever packagers. His was a fluid, almost freelance life, and the arrangement between them suited Oliver perfectly, as it gave him even more flexibility to travel abroad.
Oliver no doubt brought Kit news of changes in London. He told of how the theatre companies had reorganised, that the recently amalgamated troupes of Lord Strange's and the Admiral's Men had once again split - Alleyn and Henslowe hiving off to the Rose with most of the Admiral's Men, while the remainder joined Strange's troupe to form a strong new company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men. He had to reveal that Will Shakespere was demanding a larger cut than had originally been agreed of the payments for Kit's plays. This was bad news for Kit, who needed the money. Hope for further financial help from Walsingham or Southampton receded, as they were already putting out large amounts in Kit's cause. Shakespere had implied blackmail to Tom Walsingham and had been bought off with a lump sum of £1,000. This huge amount (the equivalent of £500,000 today) had been in part met by the Earl of Southampton, who, enraged by Will Shakespere's greed, had severed all ties with him, and was no longer willing to pose as his patron. Will had used the money to become a shareholder of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a shrewd business move, but hard to explain away on the salary of a humble bit-part actor and budding author. To make matters worse, Will was beginning to pen his own rather inept plays (such as Love's Labour's Won) and trivial verse, like that accompanying the rather mean wedding gift of gloves from his father's shop to Alexander Aspinall, an old Stratford friend:
The gift is small,
The will is all:
Alexander Aspinall.
This doggerel is surpassed in awfulness only by the verses he would one day compose for his tombstone.
Kit had probably already heard of the gruesome death of the new Earl of Derby. An unsigned letter (in English) found among the Bellerus company correspondence tells of a 'loyal Derby hound poisoned by biting on a hunchback toad'.* With Derby's death and Sir Robert Cecil's continuing ascent, any last hope of Kit's return to England was extinguished. Now that the Strange plot had misfired, were Cecil ever to discover that Kit was still alive and able to link him to events, it would mean instant death not only for Kit, but for his closest and most loyal friends - and Cecil was increasingly reaching a position from which he could effect that with ease.
It is little wonder that it was at this time, when Kit was faced with the realities of permanent exile, that he decided to leave the gloom of Antwerp and seek out pleasure and adventure.
Kit's first move was to attach himself to one of the troupes of players performing at the Frankfurt fair. This would not have been Robert Browne's company, as not even Kit would be so audacious as to assume his new persona was effective enough to fool, for any protracted time, people he had once known. Besides, it would appear from records that 1594 was one year that Browne did not travel to Germany, as he had just lost his wife and children to the plague.
There were, however, other companies to choose from. The last few years of the sixteenth century were a high point of the English comedians' activity on the Continent, especially after 1594 when the Lord Admiral's and the Lord Chamberlain's Men held a virtual monopoly in London, forcing smaller troupes to tour. Ad hoc companies of five or six men would form in London, and pick up foreign players when necessary along the way. After the spring and summer fairs many troupes returned to England, though a lucky few managed to secure winter patronage in the court of a local aristocrat. The Duke of Brunswick and Landgrave Maurice of Hesse-Kassel were especially enthusiastic about the English comedians. They were the first princes in Germany to establish permanent theatres, and main tained resident companies of English players and musicians throughout the winter (although casts changed frequently). In 1594, the star lutenist and songwriter John Dowland was amply rewarded by both:
When I came to the Duke of Brunswick he used me kindly & gave me a rich chain of gold, £23 in money with velvet and satin and gold lace to make apparel, with promise that if I would serve him he would give me as much as any prince in the world. From thence I went to the Lantgrave of Hessen, who gave me the greatest welcome that might be for one of my quality who sent a ring into England to my wife valued at £20 sterling, and gave me a great standing cup with a cover gilt, full of dollars, with many great offers for my service.
These were courts that sparkled with intellect as much as they glistered with gold, where brains were valued as well as background, where winters were spent in a fizz of plays and song, in poetry, debate and witty conversation. It was all Kit could hope for, and more - Kassel also had hot, healing mineral springs, where you could steam and stew, though the snow came to the very water's edge.
A 'Walter Hooghspier' appears on the payroll of a small company led by Harry Brodribb, which, after giving the rather old-fashioned but ever popular Gammer Gurton's Needle at the Frankfurt fair, travelled north to spend at least part of the winter in the court at Kassel.* Brodribb was 'a good, portly soul', 'a tun of a man' who was 'full of jests, and gipes, and knaveries, and mocks', a white-bearded old trouper who warmed Kit's heart. He was a good comic actor, perfectly suited to the role of Bottom in an early version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and was the prototype for the ebullient character of Falstaff. It is said that his rich turn of phrase awakened Kit's genius for living vernacular prose, which blossomed for the first time in the Henry plays and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Brodribb was no friend of Robert Browne, having once said that he 'wouldn't trust his arse with a fart', and slipped quickly and happily into his absent rival's place on the winter circuit.
Once again, Kit's fine singing voice was his passport - as it had been a decade earlier, when as a student he had slipped away with travelling players to France. He travelled with Brodribb's company as a singer and interpreter, providing a running scene-by-scene commentary at indoor performances. Like other strolling troupes, Brodribb's band travelled light, with few props and costumes and much of their repertoire already committed to memory. They had been given a wagon at Arnhem by Ernest Casimir, the Count of Nassau, but because of the appalling condition of the roads, wheels impeded rather than speeded their progress.
They are probably the players given leave to perform for a week in the market-place at Fulda in mid-October; and the 'Engelendische Comoedianten with such 'herliche, guette musichd ('wonderful good music') reported by one Balthasar Hofgartner in a letter to his wife in early November, from Marburg - a precariously steep university town beside the river Lahn, where the players would have had temporarily to abandon their wagon to tackle the narrow stairways that twisted up the mountain towards the Schloss, between high stone walls and half-timbered houses. They are almost certainly the troupe in Wilhelmsburg Castle in the tiny town of Schmalkalden earlier in the summer. A company of English comedians would not normally visit such a poor town, well away from the trade routes, but Landgrave Maurice was there between June and August each year for the annual Hirschessen (a great feast of venison), and this is most likely when the arrangements for their winter visit to Kassel were made. By the end of November they were in Kassel performing at Maurice's court, possibly arriving in time to see the pillars of fire, mountains of flame and thousands of 'firespitting rockets' that made up a pyrotechnic display in celebration of his son Otto's christening.
This was the first time we have a record of Landgrave Maurice hosting English players, though his kinsman the Duke of Brunswick had hired Browne's men as early as 1592, and as Kassel was on the way from Frankfurt to Brunswick's seat, comedians may have stopped over before. Unlike the Duke, who penned plays that were 'beyond measure obscene and full of the lowest terms of abuse', Maurice 'the Learned' of Hesse was a paragon among princes, renowned for his learning and high culture. Edward Monings, arriving in the train of Lord Hunsdon, who was sent as ambassador to the court of Hesse in 1596, describes him as 'a goodly personage, of stature tall and stra[i]ght for his proportion, of a good presence and a gallant countenance, manly visaged, with a faire big blacke eye, deepe aburne haire, comlie in behaviour, gratious and persuasive in speach'. He was a hearty drinker (getting so mightily intoxicated on a visit to Spandau, that he and his servants could barely find the city gate), with an arched brow and lips that seemed constantly at work suppressing an explosion of laughter. Yet he was also known for his gravity and wide knowledge, was a good composer in his own right, played the organ well, and (rare among his contemporaries) spoke fluent English, as well as French and Italian.
Maurice the Learned had a five-storey castle, 'like the Louvre in Paris, hie and statelie', with a large upper hall, 'a very curious roome, made no doubt of purpose to entertaine strange Princes, all of marble, the doores, the flower [floor], the sides, windowes, roofe, and all things pertinent, being of carved gray marble'. In winter, the marble had to be kept continuously hot, to prevent it from cracking and loosening, and the hall made a warm, convivial indoor theatre. Playing indoors seems to have alerted Kit to the power of night scenes, which begin to be a feature of his plays (though in the open-air London theatres, where performances took place in the afternoon, they would have lacked impact). The players seem to have inspired Maurice in turn - within a few years he would have his own theatre, on the English model, the first purpose-built theatre in Germany.
By the time Brodribb's troupe arrived in Kassel, John Dowland was already 'plying marvellous eloquent music to feast the ears' of Maurice's court. Meeting Dowland would give Kit's thinking, and his work, a new direction. The musician was a melancholy man - a 'humour' much in vogue with artists and intellectuals at the time, but in his case it was a genuine and at times intense depression. Later, Kit would affectionately make light of him in the character of Jaques in As You Like It, a man who can 'suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs', and who has 'a melancholy of [his] own compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects', one of these being 'the sundry contemplation of [his] travels' - ruminations that wrap him in sadness (II iv 13; IV i 15-18).
When they first met, Dowland's mood was a match for Kit's own despair. His music offered a means of expressing it. John Dowland was beginning to write highly innovative 'ayres', which occupied a middle ground between recitative and Italian aria (essentially the same word). He took the twangs and scrapes of the background accompaniment to recitative, and transformed them into music that fused so singly with the words of his songs that the shades and shapes and colours became one, like burnished walnut wood. His airs were not narrative, but poised moments of contemplation, solo musings that perfectly crystallised a mood, or enfolded a thought. They are the difference between the long bombastic speeches in Kit's earlier plays and the complex, sophisticated soliloquies of Hamlet.
Kit's voice enchanted Dowland, and the pair worked closely that winter. One of the songs they wrote together, perhaps the most famous, encapsulates (like Sonnet 29) Kit's sense of exile and shame:
Flow, my tears, fall from your springs!
Exiled
for ever let me mourn;
Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings,
There
let me live forlorn.
Down, vain lights, shine you no more!
No
nights are dark enough for those
That in despair their lost fortunes deplore.
Light
doth but shame disclose.
In one verse, Kit appears to pun rather sadly on his new name: 'From the highest spire of contentment/My fortune is thrown'. The biographer Diana Poulton detects the same hand in the lyrics of 'Flow, my tears' as in some other Dowland songs, such as 'In darknesse let me dwell', pointing to a number of verbal parallels, and to the idea of hell as not so much a place of fire and torment, but of blackness and perpetual night. That idea runs through many of Kit's other works - 'That his soul may be as damn'd and black/As hell. . .' {Hamlet III iii 94-5); 'though ignorance were as dark as hell' {Twelfth Night IV ii 45); 'In hell-black night endured' {Lear III vii 59); 'as black as hell, as dark as night' (Sonnet 147), and so on. Poulton also points out that the song 'Farewell unkind farewell', which expresses the sentiments of a young girl who has eloped from home taking her father's fortune, parallels perfectly the situation in The Merchant of Venice, down to the apposite line; 'Love, not in the blood [i.e. her Jewish blood], but in the spirit doth lie'.
Before the winter's end, Kit had disappeared off Brodribb's payroll, and from the court at Kassel. Exactly why he did this, or where he went, is not clear. The most likely explanation is that someone arrived in Kassel who might recognise him - there was significant traffic between Maurice's court and London. A sadder possibility is that he feared John Dowland might betray him to Sir Robert Cecil. It is hard to imagine Kit's working so intensely with someone, and not feeling tempted to reveal who he was, and it is not improbable that Dowland was in contact with Cecil during his stay at Kassel - Cecil had signed Dowland's passport, and a year later Dowland felt the need to write a contradictory, panic-stricken letter to the privy councillor, disassociating himself from the treasonable activities of English Catholics in Italy.
There is a further, more intriguing, possibility - that Kit temporarily resumed his former profession of spying. Germany was a welter of petty principalities that were already beginning to polarise into a largely western Protestant Union and a Catholic League, centred on Bavaria in the south. Landgrave Maurice, despite his merry-making and fondness for theatre, was moving from Lutheranism towards a stricter Calvinism. By 1604, the people of Hesse would be smashing 'dumb idols' and graven images, with Germany edging closer to the internecine destruction of the Thirty Years War. Even in the mid-i5gos, it is not unlikely that Maurice needed an ear in the courts of some of his southern neighbours.
Early in 1595, there are reports of 'Walter, a Fleming', who is 'a melancholic singer and bitter foole', dispensing verbal birchings to delighted aristocrats all the way from Wurzburg to Vienna.* It would have been quite possible for such an itinerant entertainer also to dispatch coded letters back to Landgrave Maurice. Ajester's motley would not have settled easily on proud Kit, and if this is him, it perhaps explains the acid streak that runs through many of his stage fools. Touchstone, Feste, the Fool in King Lear and Lavatch in All's Well That Ends Well, all have the bitterness of the scholar reduced to earning his bread by clowning.
Walter, the 'bitter foole', quickly disappears from gossip and court records, and within a month one 'Hooghius' arrives to lodge with the librarian of the Imperial Library in Vienna, the ageing Doctor Hugo Blotz.* 'Blotius', as he was known, was a scholarly and amiable Dutchman (though perhaps he and Hooghius spoke Latin) not averse to taking in financially straitened, intelligent travellers as lodgers. The roving, and at times blue-plumed, soon-to-be-ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wot-ton, had spent some time under Blotius's roof four years earlier. Hooghius occupied the same comfortable chambers, adjoining the former Minorite monastery where the library was housed. His private study opened directly into the library, and he had access not only to its 9,000 volumes, but also to Dr Blotius's personal collection, which included a copy of Holinshed's chronicles of England (a similar edition to the one Kit had had to leave behind in Antwerp). The rent was the same as Wotton had paid - two florins a week for chamber, stove, table and lights, with ample wine. Hooghius and Blotius spent many a convivial evening discussing Ovid and the Greeks, and arguing about war, rebellion and the rights of kings. (Blotius was an ardent advocate of unity and peace in the civil strife that was beginning to tear apart the German states.)
Hooghius's abrupt departure from Vienna is perhaps explained by a reference in the city magistrate's records in September of 1595 to a 'Walter de Hooch . . . charged to have attempted to bugger one Heinrich Engelbert and for other unlawful entry', who later escaped over the Alps to Italy, where (at least so Protestant foreigners believed) such activities were viewed as a something of a national pastime.* {'Bugeria is an Italian word', opined the learned Justice Coke in his Laws of England.) Kit's distaste for the attitude of minor Viennese officials towards sexual licence is evident in Measure for Measure. He was never to return.
In Italy, a possible false trail appears. In the late 1890s, a Scots Jesuit called Father Hugh MacLennan, while researching the life of the eccentric and sometimes extravagantly mendacious seventeenth-century poet, essayist and biographer Sir Thomas Urquhart, uncovered mention of 'a second Admirable Crichton', active in Italy in 1596 and 1597.† This, of course, refers not to the castaway manservant of J. M. Barrie's 1902 play, but to a successor to the original Admirable Crichton, James Crichton of Cluny, whose multifarious talents astonished courtiers and learned men all over northern Italy, before his death in a brawl in Mantua in 1582, at the age of twenty-two. Sir Thomas Urquhart was this Admirable Crichton's first biographer, but between Crichton's own self-invention, the legend that grew around him, and Urquhart's less than strict adherence to the tiresome strictures of truth (he once claimed to have traced his own family tree back to Adam) the facts of his life are sometimes hard to discern.
Born into a good Scottish family, young James Crichton nevertheless found himself penniless, so set about earning handsome reward in Genoa, Venice, Padua and Mantua by flashy displays of swordsmanship, excellent dancing and acrobatics, champion jousting, and dangerous feats of horse-breaking. He conversed in ten languages, debated theology, science and philosophy with the best minds of the time (and won), and produced 'unpremeditated and beautiful' extempore Latin poetry, which he would then proceed to recite backwards, just for effect. His sudden death - most likely at the hands of the Duke of Mantua himself, in jealousy over a shared mistress - fanned the flames of an already blazing fame. Poems in his name continued to appear for two or three years after his 'death' in Mantua, and there was talk of 'Crichton, The Survivor'. Father MacLennan seems to have stumbled upon a revival of this myth of a revenant, recurring some ten years later - or simply on an impostor. This 'Second Admirable Crichton' not only extemporised 'silver-tongued' verses, but improvised on stage, wrote comedies for courtiers, seduced ladies, was 'audacious and nimble' and a 'roguish mimick'. He is sometimes known as Gualtiero l'Alto (a literal translation of Walter de Hoogh). So it is tempting to see him as Kit. He certainly had Kit's style (or that of a much reinvigorated Kit), and the feats of the original Admirable Crichton would surely have been known to Kit, who was in Padua with Oliver Laurens just a few years after Crichton's well-publicised Mantua brawl. But this resurrected Crichton is heard of as far away as Sicily, and continues to appear well into 1597, by which time Kit was back in Antwerp.
In London, meanwhile, Oliver Laurens was beginning to fret. Harry Brodribb had brought back a letter in the spring of 1595, and also the news that Walter Hooghspier had left Kassel months earlier. There had been some sonnets from Vienna, then silence. As the supply of plays dried up, Will Shakespere became increasingly difficult to deal with. Through the winter and into 1595, Oliver had passed on, one by one, the three plays he had received from Kit in 1594. Will wrote them out in his familiar hand, for sale to the Chamberlain's Men. Although he incorporated the changes that emerged in rehearsal (mainly ad-libbing by star clowns and topical spice, but also practical changes made by the players themselves), Will made no attempt to foul these papers with the scratchings and stirrings of a restive muse, but presented them with scarcely a blot. According to John Heminges and Henry Condell in their preface to the First Folio: 'His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.' Far from permitting this to arouse suspicion, Will used it to promote the reputation of his extraordinary talent. In a passage 'concerning our Shakespeare' in his literary notebook, the playwright Ben Jonson wrote: I remember the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line.' Jonson went on to say 'Would he had blotted out a thousand,' but then, as Jonathan Bate notes, the tone of most of Jonson's allusions to Will Shakespere during his lifetime was one of 'affectionate mockery'. (However, at times it was more vicious than that, as when in a rancorous epigram he labelled Shakespere a 'Poet-Ape'.) It was only after Will's death, seven years after, when he was paid to contribute an elegy to the First Folio - that Jonson wrote a poem praising him as 'Sweet Swan of Avon' and 'Soul of the Age'.
Given the swift turnaround in London theatres, the three plays Oliver had received in 1594 did not go far, and although verse-letter sonnets continued to come, Kit had stipulated that these be kept private. (Rumours of their existence did surface, perhaps through Will's conniving - Francis Meres seems to have had an inkling of something when he wrote in his Wit's Treasury, 1598, of Shakespere's 'sugared sonnets among his private friends'.) The drying up of the source meant that from early 1595, Will Shakespere's promising new career as a writer appeared threatened, and he was once again becoming difficult and unpleasant. His revealing the truth about Kit would not have much effect on Kit himself, but would have nasty consequences for the friends he had left behind. Oliver would have to persuade Kit to keep writing, and decided to use the opportunity of a 1595 visit to the Frankfurt book fair to travel to Vienna and speak to him. He appears also to have used a little espionage work to help finance the trip, under his old alias of William Hall - in March 1596, the Chamber Treasurer paid £15 to 'Hall and Wayte' for messages brought from the Low Countries. A surviving fragment of Oliver's journal, which appears to date from the preceding January, describes a winter crossing of the Alps, from Italy into Switzerland. Kit was with him.
Either Blotius had been at the Frankfurt fair, and knew of Kit's departure from Vienna, or Oliver travelled to Vienna after the fair, only to find his friend had flown. Given the lapse of time between the fair and the Alps crossing, the latter seems the most likely case. Oliver may well have suspected that Kit would be in Padua or the nearby spa town of Abano, where he could indulge his weakness for the waters and where he stood less chance of meeting someone he knew. What remains of Oliver's journal picks up the journey farther west, on Lake Como - but this does not necessarily provide a clue to Kit's earlier whereabouts, as this was en route to a pass that was good for a winter crossing, and one not much frequented by English travellers. The pair travelled as Netherlanders from the Spanish-occupied south. Oliver's sometime guise as a Frenchman (one also favoured by Fynes Moryson) would have been inadvisable, as by now France was at war with Spain, and the Duke of Milan, through whose territory they were passing, was sympathetic to the Spanish. They appear to have had a rough passage across Lake Como, and to have been forced ashore during a storm, onto the island of Comacina - a wild, forested, rocky isle that had the reputation of being haunted. Some see Comacina as inspiring the setting for Prospero's enchanted island in The Tempest. In the Middle Ages it had indeed been a refuge for the occasional dethroned monarch or misunderstood holy man; its nine churches were later sacked and the island depopulated.
From Lake Como they took a stagecoach into thick forest and up the Bregaglia valley, through villages where houses were painted in splendid patterns, their bright colours glinting in the hard winter light, past frozen waterfalls and a creaking glacier to Casaccia, at the foot of the Septimer pass. The Septimer had been built by the Romans, was at a fairly low altitude, and was not quite as treacherous as some other routes, where sometimes stakes were set in the snow, a spear's length apart, 'to guide the Passinger his dangerous way, of the which stoopes if hee faile, he is lost for ever', and where wayside mortuaries were set up to preserve the more hapless wayfarers in snow. Fynes Moryson had heard of people being conveyed on sleds, when 'sometimes it happens, that in a turning or winding way, the sledge whereon the passenger sits, is cast out of the way, and hangs downe into a most deepe valley, with the passengers head downewards and heeles upward'.
Oliver and Kit had no such terrors ahead. Contrary to what one might expect, current travel advice was that 'the fittest time to passe the Alpes, are the Winter moneths, when no snow is newly fallen, and the old snow is hard congealed'. They set out with two guides and a small party from Casaccia, wearing boots studded with nails, and each with a mule which they sometimes led, and otherwise rode, one hand on the mane, the other on the saddle, face bent low over its neck. The first part of the pass was rocky, and extraordinarily steep: 'a Staircase!' wrote Oliver, 'slippery and Excessive cold, a smart hill and every inch as surly as we had expected from its rugged brow'. At the top they were enveloped in mist, but then the mountains changed from 'rough great Text [capitals] to a faire running hand', and the descent was much easier. They emerged from the cloud, 'and fell as it were out of the skyes on a place called Bivio'.* From here, Kit began the long, cold journey back to Antwerp.
* Laurens box, folder 14.
* Laurens box, folder 14; This does seem to refer to Lord Strange, who, it will be remembered, suffered a revolting and mysterious death by apparent poisoning soon after becoming the fifth Earl of Derby.
* Keaton, Luvvies' Labours, p. 3856°.
* Zelle, Bare Truth, pp. 232-6.
* William H. Pratt, The Doctor's Men, p. 82.
* Quoted in Pratt, Doctors Men, p. 95.
† Fr Hugh MacLennan, A Roman in the Gloamin': Sir Thomas Urquhart and the Decline of Scottish Catholicism, p. 23 ff.
* Rosine, Oliver Laurens, p. 322. The traveller Richard Lassels had a similar crossing in the 1660s.