David Dickinson: Death of a Chancellor

‘Guard me when my life shall fail me. Bid me come to thee above.’

The Dean was but a few rungs from the top now, way above Powerscourt and the others in the upper tower. Then something seemed to happen to his lower leg. He looked as though he might fall. Just in time he reached aloft and pulled himself up, holding on to the feet of the Virgin. Then his other arm reached her waist.

‘With all thy saints to sing thy love. World without end. Amen.’

It was hard to tell the precise sequence of events at this point. The statue, designed to withstand the storms and gales of centuries, was not designed to take the weight of a fifteen-stone man holding on to it for dear life. Very slowly the Virgin began to lean. Then she leant a little further. Then she fell, breaking into several pieces on the cathedral roof before tumbling to the ground. The Dean seemed to hang suspended at the top of the spire. Then he too fell, a last Hail Mary following his passage back to earth, bouncing off the side of the spire, rolling over the parapet of the upper tower, crashing on to the roof of the east transept, then a final sickening crunch of flesh and bones as he landed on the ground twenty paces from the Chief Constable. Ambrose Cornwallis Talbot, Dean of Compton Cathedral, was dead before he touched the ground. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death, Amen.

Two burly policemen were carrying Johnny Fitzgerald down to earth. Powerscourt sprinted along the clerestory and down the stairs. The cathedral dedicated to the Virgin was empty. Canon Gill and Richard Hooper had departed. A dark blue police cloak had been placed over the body of the Dean where he had fallen. Dr Williams, summoned to attend the morning’s events by the Chief Constable, had made a cursory inspection.

‘He’s dead, of course,’ he said to Powerscourt and the Chief Constable. ‘Let’s pray that he’s the last.’

‘He is,’ said Powerscourt quietly, staring sadly at the dark blue cape that covered the battered body of the Dean. ‘It’s all over now.’

The Dean’s letter was three pages long. Powerscourt found it on the study desk in the Deanery, addressed to himself, written in a flowing copperplate. Ambrose Cornwallis Talbot spoke of his growing disillusion with the Anglican Church, a disillusion that gradually turned into hatred. He said it was a Church that had turned its back on belief in favour of comfort, that had sacrificed the difficult truths of the Christian faith in favour of a quiet life in the countryside and the pomp and privilege of its bishops in the worldly surroundings of the House of Lords. Its buildings were in the wrong place, in the countryside rather than in the cities, where a national Church should be based with the vast numbers of the urban poor rather than in the upholstered comfort of parsonage and rectory. Soon, the Dean continued, the Anglican Church would be completely filled with the wrong sort of worshippers, devotees of the numinous cadences of Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and the soaring beauty of the anthems of Purcell and Byrd. But a Church was not meant to be a place of pilgrimage for lovers of the English language or the anthems of centuries past. It should be rooted in the present, daily confronting the problems of God’s people, preaching Christ’s Gospel where it was most needed. It was in his own former parish in the slums of London’s docks that his Anglican faith had finally ebbed away with the tides. So great was the personal crisis that his doctors ordered him to take a quieter position in Compton. Nine years ago the Dean had joined the Bishop in the Catholic faith. The Bishop, with a more acute sense of history than his, had first suggested the reconsecration of the minster to the true faith on the Easter Sunday of its thousandth anniversary. The Dean had organized it, the slow process of secret recruitment, the appointment of the Archdeacon to carry out the negotiations with Rome. Reluctantly they had sanctioned his mission to Melbury Clinton, realizing that it was a terrible risk, but believing him when he said he could not carry on out without the consolation of regular celebration of the Mass. All three had been members of Civitas Dei for the past seven years. The two missing vicars choral had found out about the Archdeacon at Melbury Clinton. The Dean had packed them off to a new life in Canada with six months’ wages in their pockets.

Powerscourt had hoped for more information about Civitas Dei, but suspected that Talbot was being faithful to its principles of secrecy to the last.

Single human lives, the Dean went on, had little meaning to him in comparison with the glory of the enterprise and the reclamation for the Catholic Church of a cathedral that had been stolen from it at the Reformation. He had, throughout, acted entirely alone. He hoped and prayed that the events of Saturday and Sunday would mark the sounding of the tocsin, a trumpet call that would signal the beginnings of the return of the people of England to the Holy and Apostolic Church, that the lives of the isles would once more be carried out to the slow rhythm of the Church’s calendar and the central mystery of the Mass.

John Eustace had changed his mind about making the journey to Rome. So had Arthur Rudd, who had referred extensively to his doubts in the diaries he had kept which had perished with him in the flames. Edward Gillespie had been overheard telling a colleague that he proposed to tell Powerscourt in person all about the conspiracy. He had, the Dean went on, deliberately echoed the deaths in Compton at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries as a tribute, a memorial to those faithful Catholics who had given their lives for the true religion in 1539 and 1540. He reminded Powerscourt that as a gesture to a more squeamish age he had killed all his victims before the burning and the disembowelment. He had no regrets, for he was the servant of a higher Truth, the pupil of a greater authority, the handmaiden of the only true faith.

‘Let me conclude, Powerscourt,’ the Dean’s letter ended, ‘with the words of Thomas Babington Macaulay which have been an inspiration to me for years: “The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the furthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot in Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s.”’

Powerscourt read the letter twice. Then he folded it up and put it into his suit pocket. He felt numb before the Dean’s diatribe, sad that his life had ended in such a terrible fashion. Then he thought of the families of John Eustace and Arthur Rudd and Edward Gillespie and grew suddenly very angry that one man could think he had the right to play God, to take away human lives, to leave behind broken families who would mourn for years. Not only mad, he said to himself, but bad. He wondered about the people the Dean had betrayed, the baptized he christened in one faith while believing in another, the young couples he had married in his deception, the funerals and burials of those who believed they were under the care of a Protestant priest and going to a Protestant destination.

Two days later Powerscourt and Lady Lucy were making their way once again across the Cathedral Green. The sun was still shining but there was a bitter wind. They were going to say their farewells to the minster at Evensong. They would both be back, in a month’s time, for the wedding of Patrick Butler and Anne Herbert. Patrick had threatened to expose him in the pages of the Mercury if they failed to turn up.