David Dickinson - Death of a Chancellor

‘Can you remember any of it, Patrick?’ said Anne, taking his arm as their route twisted steeply uphill.

Patrick frowned. The wind was very strong now, blowing fiercely through his hair. It was just beginning to rain.

‘I am going a long way

With these thou seeest – if indeed I go -

For all my mind is clouded with a doubt

To the island valley of Avillion.

‘It’s Arthur speaking, Anne, on his final journey, somewhere round where we are now.’

Last Words of Dying King, Patrick Butler thought to himself, translating the Passing of Arthur into a contemporary headline for the Grafton Mercury.

‘Can you remember any more, Patrick? It’s lovely.’

He paused and put his hand to his forehead. ‘I’m not sure. I think so. Maybe I should wait until we get to the top. If you still want to reach the top, that is, Anne. We’ll both be soaked to the skin. We may even get blown away.’

‘I don’t think we should give up now,’ said Anne, bending low against the wind and hurrying as fast as she could towards the little church on the summit.

The last hundred and fifty feet took them over half an hour. Sometimes the wind seemed to die down, then it would hit them full in the face as they moved on to another side of the slope. Once Anne slipped on the wet grass and had to be hauled back up again. The noise of the gale was very loud. They could see the branches of the trees bending and swaying below them. They kept their heads well down, eyes glued to the path. Overhead dark birds circled, keeping watch over their lofty kingdom. Sullen grey clouds were racing low across the sky. Patrick was cursing under his breath. Anne was exhilarated, rejoicing in their rain drenched adventure.

At last they reached the top and huddled under all that remained of the little chapel of Saint Michael. Patrick pointed dramatically at the valley beneath them and shouted into the wind:

‘Avillion, where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow

Nor ever wind blows loudly: but it lies,

Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns

And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea,

Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.’

Now. It came to Patrick Butler in a flash. Now was the time to ask her. Forget all those proposals in his pocket. Forget about William Shakespeare and his sonnets. Forget about John Donne and his love poetry. Forget the pretty speeches he had rehearsed as he lay on the hard single bed in his lodgings. Forget all the business of waiting for the right moment. This was the right moment. Now or never. He turned towards her, his face drenched by the rain, his hair blown into an unruly sodden mass, flecks of mud on his trousers and his coat. But his eyes were bright.

‘Anne, will you marry me?’ he shouted into the gale, looking into those green eyes he knew so well.

‘Is that another quotation from Tennyson, Patrick?’ she shouted back.

‘It is a quotation from Patrick Butler, my love, on this day in this place at this time and meant with all my heart.’

Anne Herbert squeezed his arm very tight.

‘Of course I’ll marry you, Patrick. Why did it take you so long to ask?’

Patrick Butler held Anne Herbert very tight and kissed her full on the lips. Relief was flooding over him like the rain that cascaded down both their faces. Then it came to him. He couldn’t stop it. Maybe I’ll always be like this, he said to himself. It was another headline.

Compton Couple Engaged on Glastonbury Tor.

‘There are just a couple of other things to be said about the Dissolution of the Monasteries,’ said Jarvis Broome, rising from his desk to pull down two dark red notebooks from his shelves. Powerscourt thought the young man must be a more lively teacher than Gavin Brooke had been in his own undergraduate days.

‘For a start,’ Broome went on, ‘it would have been difficult to leave the monasteries as they were. Many of them directly or indirectly owed their allegiance to Rome. It would have been like offering the enemy a series of strongholds deep inside your own territory. But, more important, much more important was the money. Henry, in his later years, was always in need of cash. The income of the monasteries, from land and property, was much greater than his own. So under the pretence of extirpating these supposedly corrupt and Romish institutions, he could enrich himself and buy off a lot of the gentry who might not have liked his religious reforms any more than the monks did with the booty of the monasteries. I think it must have been the biggest transfer of wealth in England since the Norman Conquest.’

Powerscourt wondered if the man had detailed records on individual monasteries. He hoped he had.

‘My last point,’ Jarvis Broome went on, ‘and then I shall be free to answer any of your questions after listening so patiently to all this ancient history just goes to show how deeply entrenched opposition was to all these religious reforms. In the 1540s in the West Country – some of the people in Compton may well have been involved in it – there was another revolt called the Prayer Book Rebellion. It coincided with plans for the introduction of yet another new Book of Common Prayer, hence the name. Once again the insurgents marched behind the banners of the Five Wounds of Christ. The rebels surrounded Exeter and the authorities had great difficulty in raising enough troops to suppress it. Like the Pilgrimage of Grace it failed. Over three thousand rebels were slaughtered. Even after that there were further minor uprisings all over the country in the years that followed. However, I plan to finish my first volume with the accession of Mary, so I have not looked into them very much as yet.’

With that Jarvis Broome leaned back in his chair and began to rearrange some of the old books on his desk.

‘I am most grateful to you, Mr Broome. Just a couple of questions, if I might.’

‘Of course.’

‘I know this sounds rather morbid, but could you tell me in detail how most of these people were executed?’

‘Well,’ said Broome, ‘if you were defeated in a battle you probably died in one of the usual ways that soldiers die in combat. Apart from that there were three main methods of execution.’

Here come those three points again, thought Powerscourt.

‘The first was burning at the stake for heresy. That gave rise to the famous dying remark of Bishop Latimer to his fellow heretic Nicholas Ridley as they waited for the pyre to be lit around them in Oxford: “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as I trust shall never be put out.” Sir Thomas More himself was not averse to the burning of heretics, you know. He sent quite a few sinners off to meet their maker in the fiery furnace.’

‘I’ve always wondered,’ said Powerscourt, ‘if they thought they were being consumed in hell’s flames, if all those paintings of the fires of hell weren’t dancing in front of their eyes, as it were, as they were consumed, all hope of heaven burnt away.’

‘I suspect, that for many of them their faith burnt ever brighter as their mortal lives ebbed away but we have no means of knowing.’

‘And the second?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘The second was the most terrible of all. There’s actually a very good description of it in the trial and sentencing of Sir Thomas More.’ Broome pulled down a book from his shelves and turned to a passage near the end. ‘“Sir Thomas More, you are to be drawn on a hurdle through the City of London to Tyburn, there to be hanged till you be half dead, after that cut down yet alive, your bowels to be taken out of your body and burned before you, your privy parts cut off, your head cut off, your body to be divided in four parts, and your head and body to be set at such places as the King shall assign.” It was a very popular mass spectator sport, I’m afraid, at Tyburn and similar places, rather like the Romans packing the Colosseum to watch the Christians being devoured by the lions. And the last method was a simplified version. You were beheaded and your head was later exhibited on a pole somewhere. That was what happened to Sir Thomas More as a favour from the King. He didn’t have to go through with all the disembowelling business. He was killed with one stroke of the executioner’s axe, his head was boiled, impaled on a pole and raised above London Bridge.’