He bade me good night and knocked heavily with his fist on the gate. When the night watch opened to him, he called out over his shoulder, “The world’s gone all English, Thomas, and Welsh e’now is but a barley-bread tongue.”

By midmorning the following day I had my letter from the corporal and some small coins pressed into my hand. It was in the first days of April when I left the city walls, and at the first mile marker, I peered back through the laggardly fog at the towers of Caernarvon and for a time felt myself to be at liberty.

Past thirty miles, I walked through the great castle of Conwy and then, in a needling shower, pushed my way into the vale of Clwyd. I worked from farm to farm, fallowing and herding, pressing on to the border lowlands in Denbigshire, where I lambed forty lambs for a great lordly house. But I burned to see London and so, not wanting to end my days in Wales, I passed beyond the fair pasturelands of Wales into England.

I made my way among the white chalk downs and gleaming hills of the Cotswold farmers and there my path crossed a brawny, pock-faced man, loaded with the hides of rabbit and lamb. He offered to show me the roads into London if I would stand his guard during the night. By noontide the third day we had traveled down Tyburn Street to the gallows, the westward portal to London.

The Tyburn gallows were three great posts joined topmost with stout beams. They rose up, tall and menacing, from the middle of the road, so that any cart or footman must pass around them. So large were they that three prison carts could have been backed into them at one time. There, dangling from the beams, were three bodies, freshly hanged: a man, a woman, and a boy. A few village women were yet gathering up their baskets of food, lingering long after the last of the struggling feet had stopped. Their children played in and out of the hanging posts, stuffing themselves with nuts and singing, “Hangman, hangman, one, two, three. Hangman, hangman, you can’t catch me.”

The hides trader took his leave of me at a crossroads and, pointing the way, told me how to find my way to King’s Gate. But because I was threadbare, I was then kicked and beaten to the stables, and finally to the king’s coal pits behind the Scottish Yard. Because of my size, I was set to loading and carrying coal for the cook fires hard by the Thames. Day upon day I corded wood and off-loaded barrels for the small-beer brewery. I slept crooked in a stairwell under the bake house and fought off wharf rats as great as bull mastiffs to keep what little bread I was thrown.

The bake woman was Welsh and a sharp-tongued gossip, and though she would hardly look at me, she found my silence a midden into which she dropped never-ceasing news of the day. London had become like a body with two heads that strained and tore at itself to go separate ways. One head was the common Parliament, led by fire-filled Puritans whose lay preachers had given themselves such names as Praise-God Barebones. These Puritans knocked down gilded altars, believing they were the stuff of idolatry, and resurrected in their place rude wooden tables for the communion bread. The other head was the king with his Catholic wife and archbishop, who would have every man in England read from a common prayer book of his own devise. The bake woman would spit into the fire and say hotly, “It won’t be long now afore the king’s wife will have us bakin’ the blood of our newborns into the wafers for her mass.”

On a morning in June at low tide, the damp stones stinking of the privy pits above, I was kicked awake by a river guard and told to go to the stables to help hang a door.

It was early yet, the fog not yet risen from the Scottish Yard, but at every lodge there were ’prentices and workmen standing in their doorways, waiting for me. And at every station the masons, porters, and smiths grinned and pointed, hiding their mouths behind their fists. Even the master of the beer cellar had roused himself from his bed. The porter’s lodge at the outer wall discharged the porter’s boy and two guards at a run as they followed me across Whitehall Road, and behind them came a full measure of workmen together in a tide.

To the west of Whitehall Street lay the horse-guard yard, flanked on three sides by the stable. Standing about the yard were six or seven of the king’s mounted men in blue coats and breeches, and with them a slant-eyed fool who wore around his neck a riding halter. He was large but with a child’s soft looks. One of the horse guards, seeing the crowd, walked towards me with a bridle and bit in one hand, and in the other a short whip.

With a great laugh he said to his fellows, “I’ll raise my wager, now that I’ve seen the Welshman. Ten shillings my fool beats your fool.”

He stopped within an arm’s breadth and, holding up the bridle, said, “Come, my great dray, bend down your head and take this between your teeth. I swear to you the whip will but tickle your neck if you run apace. Win for me and I’ll give you a shilling.”

He cocked his head at me, his smile faltering when I didn’t move. “Come, come. Take this bit and then give me your hand so I may straddle your back.”

Dropping the bridle down to his waist, he gave a great sigh as though deeply burdened by my silence. He flicked the whip at my chest, bringing a welt. “Well,” he said, “this one may need gelding.” He lowered the whip to slash at my thigh and I grabbed his fingers, squeezing them until they popped. I lifted him up and hung him by his coat from a high hook on the stable wall. Two of his men, weighted down with sword and cuirass, rushed at me, and I put them to ground like stranded kettle fish.

Suddenly, a loud field-ready voice cried, “Hold, hold!” and a stout, middling man with a red-winded face strode into the yard, pulling ’prentices and guardsmen roughly about, and with a great waving of arms made the sentries raise up their pikes. The bluejay I had hung on the wall was rescued and the crowd was soon scattered to their posts.

“Now, then,” threatened the stout man, standing on my toes. “What mean you to come and beat my men? I’m Llwewelyn, captain at arms, and I will have your head on a pike before you can finish a prayer. What say you?”

At hearing his good Welsh name I handed him the letter from Corporal Jones and waited while it was read. After a few surprised words, the captain embraced me as though I were a son truly lost and only just found, and I was that day taken into the king’s guard.

I drilled with pike and musket that summer through. Fitted with gorget, breastplate, and helmet, carrying a pike twenty feet long, five feet greater than other sentries, I made a fair impression upon the citizens of Whitehall. Posted at the palace gates where the stream of traffic was greatest, I wore a coat of scarlet with boots special-made to lift my height above seven feet. Men, and not a few women, would come to King’s Gate of an evening to gawk at me.

One night I was placed with a Cornishman, himself seven feet tall, on the stairs of the banqueting hall for the king’s summer’s-end feast. There the Cornishman and I were paired at the north entrance flanking the great ladies and lords that did pass through. Soon, before us stood the king himself. A man of smallish stature, not above five and a half feet, with sad eyes and a tripping tongue, he admired and examined us with pride. His queen came behind and with her own hand tied upon our breastplates two ribbons of red and gold. Afterwards, whenever the king was to go to Whitehall, whether to banquet or bait or receive men of great importance in his privy galleries, there stood the Cornishman and I.

We sentried beneath ceilings painted of men and women naked as newborns, flanked by hangings of silvered thread and carvings of alabaster and gold. Our cuirasses and helmets were kept from blackening by the king’s own armory squires. Our matched pikes of the finest ash were tied with the ribbons of favored court women who traipsed about us like cats in a granary, winking and gesturing for our notice, vying for a glance and a promising smile.

October brought open rebellion in Catholic Ireland, where it was proclaimed that British settlers were cut down by the thousands. Londoners came to call the slaughter the Queen’s Rebellion, for it was she they blamed for encouraging popery and open revolt. There was bloody action in the streets and even into Westminster Hall from citizens who feared the king himself was secretly a Catholic, bringing the well-remembered horrors of the Inquisition back to Protestant England. The king’s guards were called out to quiet the town and bring order again.

We broke dissent in Old St. Paul’s Church, where Puritan zealots gathered to try to turn away gaudy merchants who had filled the church naves with their goods, using the very baptismal font as a money counter. We chased the riotous preachers from the cathedral into the courtyard, where booksellers sold their wares to every rogue with a coin, and took the good ministers in chains to the Tower. We routed gangs of marching outlaw ’prentices, seeking only charitable pay and a relief from endless taxes which the king’s pleasures demanded, into the stinking alleys and public houses, where they sought shelter, and into houses where trap doors and ferret closets could hide a desperate man with a dirk or striking stick.

We raided the fomenting Cradle and Coffin Inn in St. Giles off Drury Lane, bastion of dissenters who wanted no hint of popery in their places of worship. And plucked deserting soldiers, sickened from the misuse of their own, from the Red Lion Inn over Fleet Ditch, and the Blood Bowl near Water Lane, where it was said a man a day was robbed and murdered.