The Bleeding Land Read Online Free PDF

that needs cutting out for the sake of all God-fearing men. For the sake of the country.’
    ‘Bastard’s refusing to be sworn on our Bible!’ another man yelled, raising a chorus of jeers and taunts.
    ‘Hang ’im!’ a man yelled.
    ‘Aye, string the cur up!’ someone else bawled. The Speaker for the Lords, a fat man whose red face and sharp black beard glistened with sweat, turned to the throng, both hands raised in an appeal for quiet. Eventually the clamour died, leaving a few late-hurled curses hanging in the pungent air.
    ‘This man is accused of being an agent for the Pope,’ he said, ‘and of divers seditious and traitorous acts.’
    ‘Give him the whip!’ a woman shrieked.
    ‘Furthermore,’ the fat man went on, ‘he has before this assembly stated his refusal to recognize our Holy Bible.’ This provoked another storm and someone threw a fleshy bone, which struck Robert Phillip’s shoulder, though he barely flinched as his rheumy eyes glared at the crowd from beneath bushy, unkempt eyebrows.
    The Speaker turned back to the Lords, seeming to seek a particular bishop’s approval to continue. The aquiline-faced bishop nodded sombrely, his eyes revealing nothing, and the fat man turned once more to the crowd.
    ‘Robert Phillip will be confined to the Tower,’ he announced, stirring a chorus of ayes from the Lords and inciting another two dozen opinions for and against the punishment as Tom was buffeted this way and that.
    Now Robert Phillip’s face flushed as at last he lost a grip on the reins of his equanimity.
    ‘You dare not!’ he bellowed in a voice that surprised Tom, for it defied the priest’s apparent frailty. Men jeered at his outburst. ‘I am Her Majesty’s servant! I claim our queen’s protection!’
    ‘The Queen is a whore!’ someone yelled. Even the Lords were jeering now, some daring to voice their own opinions of their Catholic queen.
    ‘Take him away!’ the Speaker commanded the soldiers, and so they formed a guard of iron and steel in which they ensconced the priest that he might make the three miles to the Tower in one piece.

CHAPTER TWO

    THE RAPIER WHISPERED up the scabbard’s throat, flashing in the dimly lit hall, and Mun looked along all three foot of slender blade at the man who had come at him with a dagger.
    ‘Stand off, sir!’ he said, at which his would-be attacker bared well-worn teeth and spat in disgust. Mun had not seen who had begun the trouble but none of that mattered now, for he was caught in the maw of it come what may.
    ‘You Roundhead dogs grow too bold!’ Thomas Lunsford roared at the growing mob that had forced Lunsford’s party and Mun and Sir Francis back into the hall’s north-east corner, by the stout door that led to the Receipt of the Exchequer. Being similarly attired to Lunsford’s men, Sir Francis and Mun had been lumped together with the objects of the mob’s wrath and now found themselves outnumbered five to one with the odds getting longer as more apprentices were drawn to the fray.
    Having failed to find Tom, Mun had returned just as the one-eyed soldier had swaggered into Westminster Hall, threatening anyone who dared bawl against bishops. Mun had asked who the man was and his father had told him as they watched Lunsford’s men shoving their way through the protesters, their battle-scarred commander riding roughshod through an already volatile situation.
    ‘The King has made him Lieutenant of the Tower,’ Sir Francis had said, his tone betraying that even he thought that an odd appointment for a man of Lunsford’s dubious qualities. ‘That raised Cain in the Commons. Lunsford’s a hot-headed fool, a bully and a braggart. Look at him! He’s like a child poking a stick into a beehive.’
    Many, including Members of the House and others whose curiosity had brought them to Westminster to witness the presentation of the Root and Branch, had slunk off as the mood darkened. Others, city apprentices mainly, who had heard that