The Mirror and the Light

By 20 October the ambassadors of Cleves are back in Düsseldorf. The Emperor grants a safe-conduct for Anna to pass through his territories. Much as he mislikes the alliance, he will not harass a lady on her matrimonial journey; his aunt, his regent in the Low Countries, insists the Princess of Cleves should be shown every courtesy and even provided with an escort.

Thurston says to him, ‘You know that cat that you fetched from Esher in your pocket, in the cardinal’s time? Master Gregory took against him, and called him Marlinspike? Well, I think I saw him on the wall the other day, with a piece of a rabbit under his paw. But I said to myself, can any cat live that long?’

He says, ‘The cardinal’s cat would be a prodigy of nature, I suppose. How did he look?’

‘Torn up a bit,’ Thurston says. ‘But aren’t we all?’

This winter, the king is taking the surrender of the great abbeys, with their manorial titles and broad acres, their watercourses, fishponds, pastures, their livestock and the contents of their barns: every grain of wheat weighed, every hide counted. If some geese have flocked to market, cattle strolled to the slaughterhouse, trees felled themselves, coins jumped into passing pockets … it is regrettable, but the king’s commissioners, men not easy to deceive, could not go about their work without their presence being heralded: the monks have plenty of time to spirit their assets away. Treat the king fairly, and he will be a good master. When St Bartholomew surrenders and its bells are taken to Newgate, Prior Fuller is granted lands and a pension. Officers of the Court of Augmentations move into its great buildings, and Richard Riche plans to turn the prior’s lodging into his town house. In the north country, Abbot Bradley of Fountains settles for an annual pension of a hundred pounds. The Abbot of Winchcombe, always a helpful man, accepts a hundred and forty. Hailes surrenders, where they displayed the blood of Christ in a phial. The great convent at Syon is marked for closure, and he reminds himself of Launde, where Prior Lancaster has been in post for three decades, which is too long. It has not been a pious or happy house these last years. When questioned the prior would always declare, omnia bene, all’s well, but it wasn’t: the church roof leaked, and there were always women about. All that is over now. He will rebuild it, a house after his own liking, in England’s calm and green heart. In dark weather he dreams of the garden arbour, of the drifting petals of the rose, pearl-white and blush-pink. He dreams of violets, hearts-ease, and the blue stars of the pervink, or periwinkle, used by our maids as lovers’ knots; in Italy they weave them into garlands for condemned men.

In November he writes in his memoranda, ‘The Abbot of Reading to be tried and executed.’ He has seen the evidence and the indictments; there is no doubt of the verdict, so why pretend there is? The days of the great abbeys died with the north country rebellion. The king will no longer countenance subversion of his rule, or the existence of men who lie awake in their plush curtained lodgings and dream of Rome. Thousands of acres of England are now released, and the men who lived on them dispersed to the parishes, or to the universities if they are learned: if not, to whatever trade they can find. For their abbots and priors it mostly ends with an annuity, but if necessary with a noose. He has taken into custody Richard Whiting, the Abbot of Glastonbury, and after his trial he is dragged on a hurdle through the town and hanged, alongside his treasurer and his sacristan, on top of the Tor: an old man and a foolish, with a traitor’s heart; an embezzler too, who has hidden his treasures in the walls. Or so the commissioners say. Such offences might be overlooked, if they were not proof of malice, a denial of the king’s place as head of the church, which makes him head of all chalices, pyxs, crucifixes, chasubles and copes, of candlesticks, crystal reliquaries, painted screens and images in gilt and glass.

No ruler is exempt from death except King Arthur. Some say he is only sleeping, and will rise in an hour of peril: if, say, the Emperor sends troops. But at Glastonbury they have long claimed Arthur was as mortal as you and me, and that they have his bones. Time was, when the abbey wanted funds, the monks were on the road with their mouldy head of John the Baptist and some broken bits of the manger from Bethlehem. But when that failed to make their coffers chime, what did they arrange to find beneath the floor but the remains of Arthur, and beside him the skeleton of a queen with long golden hair?