London (93 page)

It was occasioned by the Pope. In May, still urging Europe’s monarchs to depose the schismatic English king, the vigorous pontiff made Bishop Fisher, still in the Tower with More, a cardinal. King Henry’s fury knew no bounds. “If the Pope sends a cardinal’s hat,” he vowed, “there will be no head to put it on.”

On 23 June, tired and broken, the saintly and grey-haired old Bishop of Rochester was led out on to the green in the Tower of London, and his head was struck off. It marked, most men felt, the passing of an age.

Two weeks later he was followed to the block by the former chancellor, Thomas More. But though it was known that the royal servant died for the faith, his fate was seen more as a political fall than a religious martyrdom and did not make nearly such a powerful impression at the time.

Doctor Wilson, who had originally accompanied the two men, being of no importance, remained almost forgotten in the Tower.

The monks of the London Charterhouse continued their sufferings. Three more were executed and the rest were subjected to constant indignities. Their trials were made all the more painful by the fact that other houses of the order submitted to the oath, and the head of the order in France even sent a message that they should do likewise.

It was hardly even noticed when, one evening in June, upon orders from the office of Vicegerent Cromwell, the cowardly Father Peter Meredith, still very frail, was conveyed out of the monastery to go to another religious house in the north. Old Will Dogget went with him.

In the spring of 1536 a double irony took place. Perhaps, had she remained his wife, or even been more kindly treated, the Queen Katherine, Henry’s Spanish wife, might have lived longer. But whether this is so or not, at the start of that year, in a cold house in East Anglia, she died. Had King Henry waited, therefore, he would have been free to marry and need never have broken with Rome at all.

Within months, moreover, Anne Boleyn, the other great cause of the business, having failed to produce the needed male heir, fell into disfavour and was executed. Then King Henry married again. But he did not return the Church to Rome. He liked being Supreme Head, and besides, the money he was now deriving from the Church was considerable.

1538

It was a May morning, but there was thunder in the air.

The two Flemings looked at each other glumly across their little stall. Neither of them could find words to speak, but more than once they glanced sadly at the Charterhouse as if to say: you have deserted us. Though what the poor old monastery, now empty of inhabitants, could have done it would have been hard to say. Fleming and his wife had no thoughts, however, of such niceties that day. They were too busy pitying themselves. They were taking down the stall for the last time. The business was closed.

The fault was King Henry’s. Or, to be yet more precise, that of his Vicegerent Cromwell. For Cromwell was closing all the monasteries.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries was already the most extraordinary affair. For the last two years, up and down the country, the smaller, then the greater houses had been visited by Cromwell or his men. Some had been found guilty of laxity, others merely closed on little or no pretext. The vast holdings of lands, accumulated over the centuries, had thus fallen into the hands of the Church’s new spiritual head, who had for the most part sold them off, sometimes allowing his friends to purchase at discounted prices. About a quarter of the property in England was changing hands, the greatest change since the Norman Conquest.

“It has also,” Cromwell remarked with satisfaction, “transformed the king’s finances.” On the strength of it, the Supreme Head was starting to build Nonsuch, another huge palace outside London.

But this was not all. The reforming party in the English Church had received such strength and encouragement from this great cleansing of the past that they had also won Henry’s permission to accompany it, this spring, with another purge.

“Superstition,” Cromwell and his friends declared: “we must rid England of popish superstition.” It was not a wholesale purge, but for weeks now, all over the country, a careful selection of images, statues and relics had been destroyed. Pieces of the Holy Rood had been burned, sanctuaries closed. Even the great jewel-encrusted shrine of London’s saint, Thomas Becket had been broken up and its gold and gems taken to the king’s treasury. The point was made.

There had been, even Cromwell had to admit, one unfortunate by-product of all this zeal. The monasteries had been host and comforter to an army of the poor. Old men like Will Dogget had been housed; hungry folk had been fed at their doors. Suddenly in London now there were tribes of beggars with whom the parishes could scarcely cope. The aldermen had appealed to Cromwell, who had to agree that something must be done.

And then there were the stall holders. What was to become of those who, like the Flemings, trafficked before the gates of every London monastery in all the religious trinkets and images that were now condemned? Nothing, it seemed. “Our occupation’s gone,” Mistress Fleming declared. Bitterly they packed up their stall.

A few minutes later, as they wheeled their handcart down into Smithfield, another melancholy sight awaited them. In the middle of the open area, a crowd had gathered. Before it a curious little square scaffold had been set up underneath which piles of wood had been stacked. As they drew closer, they could see that an elderly figure was hanging by his arms in chains from the scaffold and that the wood beneath him was about to be lit.

The reformers were doing good work that day. Along with the statues and the images and the superstitious relics, they had found an old man to burn.

Old Doctor Forest had been told he should die years ago. His crime had been that he was confessor to poor Queen Katherine. In his eighties now, he had been left, half forgotten in jail for some years until, as an afterthought, it had been realized that someone had better burn him or he might die of natural causes. Presiding over this little ceremony the Flemings saw a tall, grim, grey-bearded figure, who, as they drew near, was calling out to the old man: “In what state, Doctor, will you die?”

Hugh Latimer, the Oxford scholar and reforming preacher was a bishop now. If he had any objection to this affair, he certainly gave no sign of it. Gallantly the old man replied that, even if the angels were to start teaching any but the true doctrines of Holy Church, he would not believe them. At which answer Latimer indicated that it was time that he should burn.

But something special had been ordained that morning. Instead of the usual fire, where the victim either suffocated or died of the flames quite quickly, they had decided to dangle the old man over the fire in chains so that he could suffer a slow death that might torture him for hours. Under Hugh Latimer’s supervision, this was now done. But the crowd, for once, had had enough. As the flames and smoke rose, a rush of able-bodied men knocked the scaffolding down and within a minute or two, the old man was dead.

Slowly the two Flemings continued on their way.

“It’s lucky,” Mistress Fleming declared to her husband, “that my brother Daniel makes good money on the royal barge. He’ll have to look after us now.”

“You think he will?”

“Of course,” she said. “He’s family, isn’t he?”

Just then, she heard a rumble of thunder.

But there was no thunder that morning twenty miles away to the east, in the old Kent city of Rochester: only a pale blue sky and a bright sheen on the water of the River Medway as it went silently to meet the Thames around the point.

Everything was quiet as Susan waited.

It had been Thomas’s idea, the previous year, that she should move to Rochester; and though at first she had been hesitant, she was glad in the end to find a pleasant sanctuary in the old place, far from the unhappy scenes she associated with the capital. The children were happy there too. In the modest lodgings near the cathedral, she had discovered a new peace.

But she was not sure about the meeting this morning. Thomas had insisted upon it, and after all his kindness over the last few years, she had not felt she could refuse him. He had even come down, hours before, and tactfully taken the children out for a long walk, so that she could see her visitor alone. But did she want to see him?

Peter. In the first weeks after Rowland’s death, she could not even bear to hear his name. When she heard he had left London for the north, she was glad. Once or twice, in the last two years, she had considered writing to him, but had not done so since she did not know what she should say. And now he was coming to see her. All the monks in England, of course, were now without a home. As each monastery was dissolved, they had to leave. Most were being given pensions, not ungenerous. Some had become parish priests; some left holy orders and even married.

“I will see him,” she had told Thomas finally, “but you must make one thing clear. I cannot take him in to live with me. I hope he does not think I can.”

At mid-morning there was a knock at the door and the sound of footsteps entering the little house. And then she saw her husband.

Few people in Rochester, in the years that followed, paid any special attention to the Brown family. Her neighbours remembered that Susan Brown had been a pious widow and that she had married again. It was said that her new husband, Robert Brown, had been a monk, but no one seemed certain. He was a quiet man, devoted to his wife and stepchildren, who referred to him affectionately as “father”. He became a schoolmaster at Rochester’s ancient school; and he seemed happy in his work and in his loving family, though sometimes, it seemed to those who came to know him a little, he wore a rather wistful expression which suggested that he might still secretly hanker after the life of the cloister he had left.

When he died, ten years after coming to Rochester, his wife was so upset that the priest heard her call softly to him, “Rowland,” which, he believed, had been the name of her first husband. But the priest knew that, in their grief, people sometimes became confused, and he thought no more about it.

In the decades that followed, no family could have been less conspicuous. Susan was determined to keep it so. The girls married; young Jonathan became a schoolmaster. Their inner faith, of course, was Catholic. But after all that had passed, she advised them: “Whatever happens, keep your own counsel. Be silent.”

The final years of King Harry were grim. He became bloated and sick. The fortune he had stolen from the Church was wasted in extravagant palaces and useless foreign ventures to satisfy his craving for glory. Wives came and went. Even clever Cromwell fell from favour and lost his head.

The king had managed to produce an heir in the end, by the third of his six wives. The boy Edward, everyone said, was brilliant but sickly, and it soon became clear that his tutors, Cranmer and his friends meant to take their new boy king even further from the true Catholic faith after King Harry died. But even Susan was astounded when she discovered how far they meant to go.

“Cranmer’s Prayer Book,” she said to her family, “need not have been so bad. After all, it is mostly a translation of the Latin rite and I’ll agree that his language is beautiful.” But the doctrines the English Church were now espousing were no longer just those of reformers. They were entirely Protestant. “The miracle of the Mass is utterly denied,” she cried. Priests could marry. “I’m sure that suits Cranmer,” she remarked acidly. But, in a way, even more shocking to the senses was the physical destruction which the Protestants demanded. She saw it most painfully one day when, visiting London, she slipped into Peter’s little church of St Lawrence Silversleeves.

The change was truly astounding. The little church had been stripped. The dark old rood screen which her brother had loved was gone. They had burned it. The walls were whitewashed. The altar had been taken away and a bare table placed in the middle of the church. Even the new stained glass windows had been smashed. She knew this vandalism had been taking place everywhere, but here in her brother’s church it hurt her more. Do they really imagine, she wondered, that by breaking up everything beautiful they can purify their own sinful souls? But despite all these horrors, she stuck to her rule: be silent.

Nor when the Protestant boy king died and his sister Mary came to the throne, did Susan allow herself to rejoice too soon. True, Mary as the daughter of poor, Spanish Queen Katherine, was a devout Catholic. True, she swore to return England to the true Church of Rome. “But her nature is obstinate,” Susan judged, “and I fear she will handle the business badly.” And alas, that was how it turned out. Despite the protests of her people, she insisted upon marrying King Philip of Spain. The Catholic cause from now on, in the minds of many Englishmen, came to mean that they would be subject not only to a Pope, but to a foreign king as well. Then came the burnings of Protestants. All the leaders of the reform were sentenced. When Cranmer burned, she felt sorry for him. When cruel old Latimer went to the stake she only shrugged. “He did worse to others.” But soon the English were calling their queen “Bloody Mary”; and when, after five unhappy years, she died childless, it did not at all surprise Susan that England’s religion was still an open question.

There remained only one of King Harry’s children, Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, and Susan was sure that she could not return England to Rome. For if the Pope in Rome were the true authority, then her mother’s marriage to the old king must have been invalid. She herself, therefore, would be a bastard and could not legitimately sit on England’s throne. The religious settlement that Elizabeth constructed was perfectly logical, therefore. The question of the Mass was described by a formula so mysterious that with enough good will you could read it either way. A degree of religious ceremony was maintained. The Pope’s authority was denied, but Elizabeth tactfully called herself Supreme Governor, instead of Supreme Head of the English Church. To Catholics therefore she could say: “I have given you a reformed Catholicism.” To Protestants: “The Pope is denied.” Or as Susan put it drily: “Bastard child; bastard Church.”