Death of a Chancellor

17

Anne Herbert had her private suspicions about why Patrick Butler should be taking her to Glastonbury for the day. Never before, in all the months she had known him, had he proposed an expedition out of Compton, not even to the seaside some twenty miles away. She had dressed in sensible rather than fashionable clothes, fearing that any trip to Glastonbury with Patrick might involve the ascent of Glastonbury Tor. He had chatted happily on the train, regaling Anne with details of the first excerpt of the monk’s diary from the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries which was to be published in the Grafton Mercury the following week.

‘The Bishop seems to have done a splendid job with the translation, Anne. I rather feared it would all be very dry and boring. We don’t know the fellow’s name so he’s just referred to as the monk of Compton. He seems to have spent a lot of time complaining about the food and the sloppy habits of his superiors.’

Now they were standing on the edge of the field that contained the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. ‘The farmer doesn’t mind people wandering about,’ Patrick assured Anne. ‘I checked in that hotel where we had our coffee. Just have to be careful not to disturb the sheep.’

Glastonbury Abbey had once been one of the richest and grandest abbeys in Britain. It was famed throughout the kingdom for its relics and its collection of gold and silver ornaments. Now most of it had disappeared. Grass, moss and lichen had spent three hundred and sixty years creeping over the walls so they were now a dark green colour. The local birds had taken sanctuary here, rooks and starlings and sparrows building their nests in masonry that had once been nave and cloister. The sun was shining but a bitter wind swirled around what was left of the walls. The windows, once graced with the most elaborate stained glass the sixteenth-century craftsmen could produce, now gave vistas of distant hills or other sections of ruined wall. The doors through which the abbot and the monks had processed to their daily round of services now gave entrance to flocks of wandering sheep.

‘How did it come to be such a ruin, Patrick?’ said Anne Herbert, pointing across to the melancholy view.

‘I expect somebody bought it for the stone after the abbey was dissolved. Then he’ll have sold it off. I expect half the town is built with the stones that were here once. Come, Anne, if we go up there I think we’ll be where the high altar must have been.’

Anne Herbert looked at him sadly. ‘Patrick,’ she said, ‘do you think Compton Minster will look like this in a hundred years’ time?’

‘It might.’ Patrick Butler laughed at the thought of the splendid spate of stories that would be produced by the Decline and Fall of Compton. ‘We must have had two religious revolutions in this country at least, Anne. One when Christianity replaced the pagans and the Druids. Another when this abbey here was closed down. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have another, this time an agnostic or atheist revolution. It’s amazing how many of these people there are already. All churches to be abolished by order of the state. Building fabric to be used for the construction of dwellings for the deserving poor. That’s what happened here, after all, except the dwellings were for the deserving rich.’

He took Anne by the hand and led her towards what he thought must be the remains of the high altar. That, she felt suddenly, would be an interesting place for a proposal of marriage. Perhaps that was what Patrick had planned all along.

An elderly porter who remembered Powerscourt from his days as an undergraduate pointed him in the direction of his old tutor’s rooms.

‘He’s still in the same place, my lord, Mr Brooke, though he’s very frail now. The Head Porter doesn’t think he’ll last the year out. Myself, I’m not so sure. Mr Brooke says the port will see him through.’

‘Come in,’ said the old man, rising slowly from his chair, leaning heavily on a stick. ‘Good to see you, Powerscourt. Last time you were here was in ’97. I looked it up in my diary. Some nasty business with Germans, I seem to remember.’

‘How are you, sir?’ said Powerscourt, slipping effortlessly into the mode of address of his student days.

‘I’m less mobile than I was even then,’ said the senior tutor, subsiding into his chair once more. ‘College is in much better shape, mind you. That terrible man who was Master then, he’s gone. Dropped dead in the Senate House Passage. I’d say the Good Lord called him home if I believed in the Good Lord. New Master believes in proper food. Thank God for that too. And proper wine. Place used to be like a second rate boarding school in the victualling department. Now it’s more like a London Club.’

Powerscourt smiled. He noticed that the old copies of The Times were still piled high around the old man’s chair. Soon they might be as high as his head.

‘Now then, Powerscourt, mustn’t keep you from your work.’ Gavin Brooke reached across to a little table and brought out a letter. He searched all his pockets for his spectacles before discovering that they too were on the table.

‘Reformation, you said in your first letter. That’s what you want to know about. We’ve got just the man for you here in college. Young fellow by the name of Broome, Jarvis Broome. It’s his special field of expertise. He’s expecting you now. And then you asked about a theologian. After lunch I’ve arranged for you to see our Dean. He’s very sound on all that sort of stuff.’

Powerscourt thanked the old man and was about to take his leave.

‘I was thinking the other day, Powerscourt, about my books,’ said the old man, gazing up at the shelves where a long row of works by Gavin Brooke, Senior Tutor and University Lecturer in Modern History, were prominently displayed. ‘At the time I wrote the early ones on Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, some of the participants were still alive. Did you know that the last surviving member of the British delegation to the Congress of Vienna didn’t pass on until 1885? Now they’re all dead, all those people I wrote about. Every single one of them.’ The old man shook his head.

‘Maybe you’ll meet them all on the other side, Mr Brooke. You could give history lectures up in heaven. I’m sure your subjects would flock along. They can’t have very much to do up there.’

‘Be on your way, young man. I tell you what they’d do, all those people I wrote about if I met them in heaven or hell. They’d probably be like all the other bloody historians I’ve met down here. They’d say I had the emphasis wrong. Even more likely they’d tear my books to shreds.’

Patrick Butler actually had three different proposals of marriage, carefully written out and currently incarcerated in his back pocket. First he had gone to the poetry section of the County Library and made copious notes. Then, late one evening when his reporters had all gone home, he composed them in his office surrounded by the normal detritus of his trade. The first was heavily dependent on the love sonnets of Shakespeare. The second was equally reliant on the work of John Donne, though even Patrick, who was not easily shocked, had been a little embarrassed at some of the language employed by the Dean of St Paul’s. At least he hadn’t ventured as far as Rochester. And the third was entirely his own work. Cynics might have said that it sounded too like one of his own leading articles in the Grafton Mercury, but it was late by this stage and Patrick was growing tired.

‘Look, Anne,’ he said, standing by a rectangular row of bricks, now only a couple of feet high and almost invisible in the long grass. ‘This is where the high altar must have been. The choir must have been down there by that wall on the left.’

‘Are you sure, Patrick?’ said Anne, feeling that this was not after all a particularly romantic spot.

‘I think so,’ Patrick replied, leading her further down towards the remains of the nave. ‘And I think they’ve put the Lady Chapel at the wrong end, if you see what I mean. It’s right down at the far end. I think it should be up here somewhere. Maybe the masons looked at their plan the wrong way round.’ The Lady Chapel, he thought, that might be better for his purpose. At least a lot of it was still standing.

Lord Francis Powerscourt was trying to work out how many times he must have walked this short route from the porter’s lodge to the last staircase by the river in the three years he had lived there during his time in Cambridge. Five or six times a day say forty times a week, three hundred and fifty a term, a thousand a year, three thousand times altogether. He was passing the hall and the kitchens now where the young Powerscourt, rather nervously, had intoned the Latin Grace before dinner. Quid quid appositum est, aut apponetur, Christus benedicere dignetur in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. The words came back to him automatically. Powerscourt didn’t think he would have described the food in his time as being like that served in the clubs of London, certainly not in any of the ones he belonged to. It was much worse than the second rate boarding school derided by his former tutor. Here was the staircase. He walked a few paces forward and peered down at the river, still meandering in its sluggish way along the Backs. To his left was King’s where the famous Chapel was hidden from sight by the buildings of Clare. To his right the solid mass of Trinity and the glory of Wren’s great Library inside.

Jarvis Broome was a handsome young man, cleanly shaven, with a large collection of ancient volumes stacked in neat piles around his desk. He showed Powerscourt to a chair with a view of the college lawns and a brief sliver of river.

‘Gavin Brooke tells me you want to know about the Reformation, Lord Powerscourt. Is there anything in particular I can help you with? I’m writing a book on the subject, though God knows when I’ll ever finish it.’

There, thought Powerscourt, is the world’s difference between the scholar and the journalist. For Patrick Butler, surely more or less the same age as Jarvis Broome, not finishing an article, not finishing all the copy for his paper would be professional suicide. For Jarvis Broome, finishing too soon, finishing without having read all the available material, finishing without coming to a considered judgement, would leave him open to the savagery of his peers.

‘I should explain, Mr Broome, that I am investigating a series of murders in a cathedral, Compton to be precise. They are about to celebrate one thousand years of worship in the cathedral, or the abbey, as it was, this Easter Sunday.’

Powerscourt did not give the young scholar any details of how the murders had been committed. ‘What I would like to know,’ he went on, wondering how long it would be before Jarvis Broome had a shelf full of his own books like Gavin Brooke, ‘is how much opposition there was at the time. Not so much to the question of the King’s divorce and the establishment of Henry as Supreme Head of the Church of England, as to the Dissolution of the Monasteries.’

‘Now that is a most interesting question, Lord Powerscourt.’ The young man got up from his chair and began pacing up and down the room, in exactly the same fashion, Powerscourt noted wryly, as he had done when writing his history essays over twenty years before.

‘I’ll try to be brief, Lord Powerscourt. I could go on all day about this. Let me say, as a preamble, that history is always written by the victors, as I am sure you know. I am certain that there was much more opposition to the various moves in the course of the Reformation than we know about. Some of the opposition will have fallen away, like water through a colander, as it were, and we shall never recover it, we shall never find out about it at all.’

A pair of college gardeners were trimming the edges of the lawns outside. Through the slightly open window Powerscourt could hear a couple of thrushes singing happily in the Fellows’ Garden on the other side.

‘Three points, I think, are worth considering,’ said Broome. Powerscourt suddenly remembered the angry complaint of a fellow undergraduate of his, also studying history, but with a different tutor. ‘Is it because bloody Gaul was divided into three parts?’ he had said bitterly. ‘Every time I take an essay to the wretched man there are always three points to be considered. Why not two, or four or five, maybe even seven? Why not just one, for God’s sake? Why is it always three?’

‘The Pilgrimage of Grace,’ Jarvis Broome went on, ‘1536. This was a mass rising of the North of England against the King’s policies, against his advisers, of course, rather than against the King himself. There were many reasons for the revolt, some to do with taxation, some to do with personal jealousies, the usual sort of mixture, but the principal reason was religious. The rebels objected to the changes that had taken place and the further changes they knew were coming, including the Dissolution of the Monasteries. They didn’t want a Protestant Reformation. They wanted to keep a Catholic England. The banners and the symbols tell the story. They marched behind banners of the Five Wounds of Christ, which showed a bleeding heart, sometimes a Host, above a chalice, both surrounded at the corners of the illustration by the pierced hands and feet of Christ on the cross.’

‘What happened to them?’ said Powerscourt.

‘They made the great mistake of trusting the King’s word,’ Broome replied. ‘At one stage they could have marched to London and toppled the Tudors from their throne. But they were picked off bit by bit by duplicity and double dealing. The ring leaders were all executed.’

‘How?’ said Powerscourt suddenly.

‘Most of them were beheaded. Their heads were left stuck in prominent places in the towns and cities where they came from. Anybody who tried to cut them down was liable to meet the same fate themselves.’

Patrick Butler had fallen silent as they peered at the ruins of the Lady Chapel in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. He had felt in his pocket for the three proposals he had written out. None of them felt quite right at this moment. He found that his brain had delivered to him a newspaper headline that seemed to sum up his predicament. Editor Lost For Words.

Anne Herbert thought the ruins of the Lady Chapel looked remarkably similar to the ruins of the nave and the high altar. Try as she might, she couldn’t see much difference. She hoped her children were behaving themselves with their grandmother.

‘They say King Arthur and his knights lived round here, Anne,’ said Patrick, recovering his powers of speech. ‘He came with a great army to rescue Queen Guinevere who had been imprisoned by his enemies in a castle on the tor.’

Anne Herbert tried to imagine Patrick as a Knight of the Round Table, Sir Galahad or Sir Lancelot or Sir Bedevere. She couldn’t manage it. A monk perhaps, creating a Book of Hours or copying out the Gospels with occasional rude asides in the margins, yes, but mounted on horseback and riding into battle, no.

‘Would you have liked to live in those times, Anne? Handsome young men on horseback pressing their suits?’

‘I think I might have been the Lady of Shalott,’ said Anne, ‘floating down to Camelot behind that rotting barn over there.’ Privately she felt that the knights would have said their piece by now, proposals of wedlock delivered from behind a visor in sub Tennysonian verse, the suitor clanking on bended knee before her.

‘I don’t think I’d have liked it much then,’ said Patrick. ‘Life can’t have been much fun for a humble scribe. I tell you what,’ he said, postponing things yet again, ‘why don’t we have lunch and then climb to the top of the tor.’

‘What most historians have not realized up until now,’ Jarvis Broome was back sitting at his desk, ‘is the link between the violence, the savagery of the repression of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 and the comparatively peaceful passage of the Dissolution of the Monasteries two or three years later. You can read many history books, Lord Powerscourt, which fail to make to make any link at all between those two facts. Previous historians talk blithely about how the acceptance of the Dissolution shows the monasteries were known to have been corrupt, or were not loved by the people. In fact the people were terrified by the reprisals handed out to the northern rebels. They were too frightened to risk their necks by opposing the end of the abbeys. I regard it as a complete failure of historical imagination and I hope to put the record straight.’

Powerscourt thought that mutual co-operation and brotherly love between the practitioners of the historian’s craft was not going to get any better.

‘Do we know how many people did oppose the Dissolution? And do we know what happened to them?’

‘I fear,’ said Jarvis Broome, ‘that they were all executed. It is difficult to be precise about the numbers as the records have often been lost. Some of the Northern abbots were believed to have fled south to join their colleagues in other monasteries. They too were put to death.’

The sun had gone in while Anne Herbert and Patrick Butler ate their modest lunch in the George and Pilgrims Hotel. There was a wind rising as they set off out of the town towards the path that led to the summit of Glastonbury Tor, a round hill rising some three hundred and fifty feet above the surrounding plain.

‘I came here when I was eleven or twelve with a history master from school, Anne,’ said Patrick as they reached the path that led to the summit. ‘Long ago, all this plain was water, it was the lake of Avalon. We had to learn bits of the Idylls of the King to declaim when we reached the top.’

‘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.