Death of a Chancellor Read online

  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.’

  ‘What a frightful business,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Thank God we seem to live in more enlightened times. Now, my last question is this. Do you have details of the executions at individual abbeys or churches or cathedrals? Compton is my main interest, as you will appreciate.’

  If Jarvis Broome was wondering why Powerscourt should be so interested in possible deaths in Compton three and a half centuries before he did not show it.

  ‘I might be able to help you there,’ he said, reaching up towards a long series of black notebooks on the top shelf of his bookcase. ‘We certainly know about three abbots who were put to death at Colchester, Reading and Glastonbury. I’ve been round all the major places over the past couple of years and taken notes on what was relevant in the records. Calne, Cambridge, Canterbury, Carlisle, Chester, Compton, here we are.’

  Powerscourt leaned forward to look at the black notebook.

  ‘It would seem, Lord Powerscourt, that there were a number of deaths in Compton round the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. One monk, killed the year before.’

  ‘How did he die?’ asked Powerscourt.

  ‘He was burnt at the stake. Two more were given the full disembowelling treatment early in the year the monastery was dissolved. One last death shortly afterwards. The last Abbot was executed and his head put on display at the gateway leading into Cathedral Close. It seems that some more people may have lost their lives in the Prayer Book Revolt, but the records are unclear about the manner of their deaths.’

  Powerscourt took himself off for a solitary walk after lunch. He had borrowed Jarvis Broome’s desk and notepaper to send a brief letter to Dr Williams in Compton. He was, he wrote, now in possession of further information which confirmed, if confirmation was necessary, the substance of what he had said in his earlier letter. He asked the doctor to reply by return to his London address. Round and round the Fellows’ Garden he walked, ignoring the neatly kept rectangle of grass, the flowers coming into bloom, the birds still singing happily in their trees. The manner of death, he told himself, gives little clue as to the reason for it. There was no sense in it. Cries of alarm drew him to the terrace overlooking the river. A party of visitors had taken a punt on the river and appeared to have no idea about the propulsion techniques required on the Cam. The boat was going round and round, disturbing the ducks who scurried crossly away towards the more peaceful waters of Trinity and St John’s. Powerscourt wondered if he should offer instructions from his position on the bank. Then he saw that the pole had been abandoned and the party were going to proceed with the aid of two paddles in the stern of the boat. In the summer term, he said to himself, they would have been laughed to scorn.

  The Dean’s rooms were on the top floor of a tiny quadrangle off the front court. The chaos reminded Powerscourt briefly of the office of the editor of the Grafton Mercury.

  ‘I only moved in here yesterday,’ said the Dean. ‘My apologies for the chaos.’ Powerscourt saw that there was some form of order in the confusion. All the books were stacked neatly under the shelves by the side of the window. The pictures had been placed around the room underneath the places where they were going to hang. A large pile of papers, sermons perhaps, or unmarked undergraduate essays, were on top of the desk.

  The Dean himself was a tall figure in his middle forties with jet black hair to match the colour of his cassock. He wore a silver crucifix around his neck.

  ‘Thank you so much for taking the trouble to talk to me when you are in the middle of moving house,’ Powerscourt began, ‘and I fear you may find my questions somewhat unorthodox.’

  ‘Fire ahead,’ said the Dean cheerfully.

  Powerscourt had already decided that there was no point trying to navigate his way towards the crucial query. He went straight to the point.

  ‘Can you be an Anglican priest and a Roman Catholic priest at the same time?’

  The Dean stared at Powerscourt. Powerscourt said nothing.

  ‘God bless my soul,’ said the Dean. ‘Perplexed undergraduates reading theology – and most undergraduates reading theology these days are very perplexed indeed, Lord Powerscourt – ask me some pretty strange questions but I’ve never been asked that before. Just give me a moment to think about it, if you would.’

  The Dean stared hard at the opposite wall. Powerscourt noticed that the Dean seemed to have a large
collection of watercolours of derelict and desolate abbeys in the north of England. Fountains, he thought he could decipher at the bottom of one painting, Rievaulx on another. Desolate since the Dissolution of the bloody Monasteries, he said to himself. Were they never going to leave him in peace?

  ‘I think this might be the answer,’ said the Dean finally, his hands twisting at the chain of his crucifix for inspiration or consolation. ‘In theory, the answer has to be No. You have to swear allegiance and fidelity to one particular faith when you take holy orders. But in practice the answer might be Yes. It might be possible, if the person concerned is prepared to lie to their superiors and believes that the sins committed in terms of one religion are outweighed by the advantages conferred by the other.’

  Powerscourt had suspected that the answer might be something like this. No certainty anywhere.

  ‘And do you think, Dean, that it would be possible to live this double life for years and years?’

  The Dean’s fingers were off again. Powerscourt wondered how often he had to replace the chain.

  ‘I fear the answer is the same. In theory the answer would have to be No. In practice, if you were very careful and took great care to conceal your true allegiance, there is no reason why you should not keep up the fiction for a long period.’

  ‘I realize,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that this is an impossible question. In these circumstances, of a man masquerading, if you like, as a Protestant priest and a Catholic priest at the same time, which is likely to be his true position?’

  ‘Would he regard himself as a Catholic or a Protestant, do you mean?’ said the Dean quickly.

  ‘I do.’

  Once again the Dean stared at his wall. Faint sounds of somebody practising the organ drifted in from the Chapel next door. Powerscourt thought it was Bach.

  ‘This time,’ the Dean said finally, ‘you’ll be relieved to hear that I think the answer is more clear cut, even if it’s not absolutely definitive.’

  Certainly not, thought Powerscourt. In this world of scholarship and perplexed theology nothing was ever likely to be definitive.

  ‘Let me give you an analogy, if I may,’ the Dean went on, ‘between republics and monarchies. I don’t believe nations become republics because they want to be republics, if you see what I mean. They become republics because they don’t want to be monarchies. Republics, by definition, are non-monarchies. Anglicans are Anglicans to some extent because they don’t want or weren’t allowed by their governments to be Catholics. Anglicans to some extent define themselves by being not Catholics. Previous centuries have seen a great deal of anti-Catholic hatred whipped up in this country. Even today the celebrations of Guy Fawkes and Bonfire Night are hardly a celebration of Christian unity. But Catholics don’t define themselves by not being Anglicans, if you follow me. They have older, historically longer continuities. So I think it would be very difficult for this imaginary person to be really an Anglican purporting to be a Catholic. I think it is more likely to be the other way round, that he is truly a Catholic pretending to an Anglican.’

  ‘Or, perhaps,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that he was an Anglican and converted to Catholicism but forgot to slough off his Anglican skin, as it were.’

  ‘I doubt very much if he could have forgotten to get rid of the clothes, actually,’ said the Dean. ‘It would have been a deliberate act of policy, though why anybody would want to do such a thing I cannot imagine.’

  ‘One last question, Dean.’ Powerscourt was thinking about his return journey to London. ‘Is there much traffic between the two religions, Anglicans defecting to Rome and vice versa?’

  ‘There has always been a certain amount of traffic since the time of Newman and the Oxford Movement,’ replied the Dean. ‘Some people even buy season tickets for the journey. There was one wealthy man who travelled between the Anglican and the Catholic faiths and back again in the 1840s. Just before he died he reconverted to Catholicism.’

  ‘Is Newman still important? I thought he’d been dead for years.’

  ‘I don’t know very much about Newman,’ said the Dean, gazing at the great pile of papers on his desk. ‘Student at Trinity Oxford, Fellow of Oriel, Vicar of the University Church, prime mover in the Oxford Movement which tried to revive his Church, dithered about for a long time before he converted to Rome. Made a Cardinal as you know towards the end of his life. I do know a man, mind you, who knows all about conversions on the religious railway line. He’s writing a book on Newman’s legacy and his influence on subsequent converts. Man by the name of Philips, he’s a Fellow of Trinity, Newman’s old college at Oxford. Would you like me to write you an introduction?’

  ‘I should be more than happy to call on him tomorrow afternoon, if that would seem acceptable,’ said Powerscourt and headed for the stout oak that guarded the Dean’s quarters. He was almost on his way down the stairs when the Dean called after him.

  ‘Do you mind me asking, Lord Powerscourt, about the individual who might have been a Catholic and an Anglican priest at the same time? I presume he was purely hypothetical?’

  ‘He is not hypothetical,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Would that he were. He is alive and well and going about his business in the West Country.’

  ‘God bless my soul,’ said the Dean in horror. His fingers flew once more to the chain that held his crucifix.

  Old friends of Johnny Fitzgerald would have been most concerned about his behaviour on the day of Powerscourt’s departure to Bristol and Cambridge. Many would simply have dismissed the reports as impossible. Others would have doubted for Johnny’s sanity.

  First thing in the morning he went to the seven thirty Communion service in the cathedral. He stared so hard at the Canon and the choir that the Canon later told the Precentor that another mad person had joined the ranks of the congregation. Then he went to the leading stationer’s in the town and bought a series of maps of the locality and a small black leather notebook. He was back in the cathedral for Matins at eleven, after which he decamped to the County Library where he perused a number of county histories. Johnny for some unaccountable reason, was not familiar with libraries of any description. At one point he walked all over the two floors of the building, looking carefully at all the doors in case a bar might be concealed inside. It stands to reason they must have some means of refreshment in this bloody place, he had said to himself, they can’t sit cooped up here all day long without the need for a glass of something.

  After lunch he returned to the library once more and engaged in a long conversation with the head librarian about the location and the times of service of the various Catholic churches within a twenty-mile radius of Compton. These details he entered solemnly into his black book. At four thirty he was back in the cathedral for Evensong, eyes firmly fixed once more on the faces of the clergy and the adult members of the choir. The choirboys, for some strange reason, appeared to have no interest for him.

  Normality seemed to have been restored, however, on his return to Fairfield Park. He opened a bottle of Nuits St Georges before he had taken off his cloak and poured himself a generous glass. A few minutes later, cloak safely deposited into the arms of the butler, he helped himself to a second.

  ‘Would you say, Lucy,’ he found Lady Lucy in the drawing room singing something to do with a refiner’s fire, ‘that I am looking particularly virtuous this evening?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Lady Lucy replied, turning round from her piano stool to inspect him, ‘that virtuous is the first word that springs to mind when people look at you, Johnny.’

  ‘Come, come,’ said Johnny Fitzgerald, ‘you are looking at a man who has been to church three times today. And I’ve spent many hours working in the County Library. Is virtue not apparent? Surely the power of all those prayers must be visible in my face?’ He poured himself a third glass.

  ‘Three visits to the cathedral, Johnny? Libraries? Are you feeling all right? Do you need to lie down?’

  Johnny Fitzgerald laughed. ‘I’ve been trying
to remember the faces of all those people up at the cathedral.’

  ‘Forgive me for seeming obtuse, Johnny, and I’m sure it’s good for your immortal soul spending all that time in the cathedral, but how is that going to help?’

  ‘It’s so that I’d recognize them if I saw them again,’ said Johnny. ‘Francis asked me to find out if any other members of the clergy up there are secret Catholics. Look, Lucy, I worked it out like this. Suppose, like me, you’re fond of a drink. You need regular supplies of alcohol to keep you going. Well then,’ Johnny Fitzgerald proved his point by helping himself to a fourth glass of burgundy, ‘suppose it’s the same thing with these crypto-Catholics. They’re going to need a fix of the Mass or something every now and then, just like our friend the Archdeacon of Thursdays. I have here from my time in the library,’ Johnny pulled his black book out of his pocket and proudly showed Lady Lucy the first four pages, ‘a list of all the Catholic churches within a radius of twenty miles, and the times of all their services. So if any of our friends are going for a fix, they’ll find me lurking in the back pew. And I’ll know who the bastards are. There’s only one problem with this plan.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Lady Lucy, smiling at her friend.

  ‘Do you know what time they start their services, these Catholic persons? Wouldn’t you think they’d wait for a reasonable hour? Give a man time to digest his breakfast? They do not. Most of them only have one service in the week. And that’s Mass at half-past bloody seven in the morning.’