[To face p. 278
SIR THOMAS GRESHAM
(From a contemporary engraving)
Meanwhile, Mr. Keyes was enduring a good deal of hardship in the Fleet, the foulest of the many foul prisons of those days. His grievances and annoyances were many and peculiar. He was apparently engaged in some suit, unconnected with his marriage, and his lawyers were allowed to visit him in the Fleet and talk to him in the presence of the warden. Moreover, there was some project for his being sent to Ireland, though whether as a prisoner we know not. There exists, however, a letter from Keyes, dated “Fleet Prison, July 16, 1566,” in which the imprisoned Sergeant-Porter begs Cecil to “give him instructions how to act, as to his going into Ireland.” The wording of this suggests that he was to have held some official position there. The scheme apparently came to nothing, for on July 25 of the same year, he prepared a petition to the effect that he would renounce his wife and have his marriage declared null and void, if only he might be allowed to leave the Fleet and retire into Kent, urging that, after all, “he had formerly done the Crown good service in suppressing insurrections”—a reference, no doubt, to some share he must have had in the defeat of the Wyatt rebellion. Dr. Grindal, then Bishop of London, refused, however, to annul the marriage, and referred the matter to the Court of Arches, which, so far as can be ascertained, also refused—at any rate Keyes was asking leave to cohabit with Lady Mary as late as in 1570. But his lordship’s Christian charity permitted him to suggest that the bulky captive might well be allowed to go into the country to take some open-air exercise, “for his bulk of body being such as I know it to be, his confinement in the Fleet putteth him to great inconvenience.” This suggestion was accepted, and for a few months Keyes was allowed to walk in the garden attached to the Fleet Prison; but a new warden was appointed in December 1566, and this slight solace was taken away; and further, instead of being allowed, as hitherto, to cook his own food, the ex-Sergeant-Porter was compelled to live on the horrible diet provided by the prison authorities. In this same December he complains to Cecil that “he had been given a piece of beef which had been dropped into some poison, prepared for a dog that had the mange!”
It did not kill him, if indeed that had been intended, but he fell so ill as to require the attentions of a certain Dr. Langford, who charged him a mark [i.e. 6s. 8d.] for his services. The prisoner lived on; to send another letter to Cecil, complaining that “they have taken away from me my stone-bowe wherewith I was wont to shoot at birds out of my prison-window, for the refreshment of myself sometimes; but even this little solace is denied me.” Probably the neighbours objected as much as the birds!
At last, when unkind wardens, poisonous food, and lack of fresh air had thrown the unfortunate Sergeant-Porter into a “languor,” he was relegated, in accordance with Dr. Grindal’s suggestion, to his native place, Lewisham, then a remote village, now a large town within half-an-hour’s journey of London—it probably took Mr. Keyes some hours’ hard riding to reach it on horseback. Thence he continued to appeal for the queen’s pardon, “if only for the sake of my poor children, who innocent as they are, suffer punishment with me for my offence.[134] If it were Her Majesty’s and your honour’s [Cecil’s] pleasure to fetter me with iron gyves, I could willingly endure it; but to bear the cruelty of this warden of the Fleet, without cause, is no small grief to my heart.” Evidently memories of the stern official haunted the poor fellow in his rural retreat. From Lewisham, Mr. Keyes went to Sandgate Castle on the Kentish coast. Thence, in May 1570, he addressed a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, beseeching his grace to intercede for him with the queen, “that according to the laws of God I may be permitted to live with my wife.” This is rather a change of feeling from the time, four years previously, when he expressed his willingness to have his conjugal fetters snapped, if only he might retire to Kent! The archbishop did not grant this prayer; and Mr. Thomas Keyes died—probably in September 1571, and very likely at Sandgate: his burial register is lost, and there is no proof that he returned to Lewisham—worn out by his manifold troubles and by the effect of his unhealthy existence in the Fleet Prison.