“God help me,” he cried. St Osmund’s comforting shrine seemed suddenly far away, ineffectual. “Mother of God,” he begged, “save me.”
But the great stanchions of forked lightning struck at the ground all around him, time and again until he could only believe that the storm was searching him out, personally, for destruction. He was utterly alone. Half a mile away, he knew, was a flock of sheep. Were they as frightened as he was? Might not the storm in its appalling rage choose some of them instead of him? The rain drove down so hard, so relentlessly, that he could not see even half way to the sheep.
At one point for a few moments he thought the storm had begun to move; but then it returned to him, even more furious than before, with all the force of nightmare. Survivor though he was, he fell to the ground, huddled into a ball like a baby and lay, feeling utterly naked, on the ground as the storm beat upon him.
It was then that the supernatural event, the terrible wonder occurred.
It was a single shaft of lightning. The bang was so loud, so absolutely sudden – the gigantic force of it seemed to cleave the ground apart so directly under him – that, for an instant, he thought he had been struck. He very nearly had.
But even his terror was forgotten as he stared in front of him.
For the lightning, having struck the ground some twenty feet from where he lay, had not vanished, but raced eastward along the surface of the earth, carving a swathe of fire in a dead straight line for a hundred yards through the field of growing corn. There before him, to his astonishment, where a second earlier had been a drenched field, lay a black and smouldering path like a giant pointer.
As he gazed at it, he suddenly became aware that the storm, having apparently caused this terrifying phenomenon, had begun to move away.
He got up slowly. The rain was already slackening off. Cautiously he went forward and inspected the spot where the lightning had struck. Except that it was now blackened, it seemed like any other spot on the ground.
But why should it leave this huge scorched trail, so absolutely straight, across a field of corn? He had never seen such a thing before.
And how indeed could Will – who had never heard of the Romans, or their legions, who knew nothing of the lost settlement of Sorviodunum or the villa of Porteus – how could he know that buried underneath the cornfield, for a thousand years, a small, metalled Roman road had lain hidden, along which, since it was a perfect conductor, the huge bolt of lightning had earthed itself?
For long minutes Will stood there, oblivious even to the storm rolling away over the ridges to the north. The charred path – the pointer – lay before him.
“Mother of God and St Osmund,” he murmured at last. “It must be the sign.”
The sign did not point north-west to Bristol. It pointed east. Nothing could be more clear.
“I will go to London then,” he decided.
NEW WORLD
1553
A glorious new world was being born, and it was a dangerous place for people of conscience.
As Edward Shockley stood that April morning amongst the small crowd in St Thomas’s church who were watching Abigail Mason and her husband Peter set about their self-appointed task, he had a sudden premonition that they would soon be in danger. It was Abigail he feared for.
And yet, what they were doing would certainly meet with the approval of Bishop Capon, the justices of the peace, the king himself.
They were breaking one of the church windows.
Peter Mason was on his knees; Abigail stood over him. The pieces of stained glass already lay on the stone floor and Peter was pounding them carefully with a hammer. He glanced up frequently, his gentle, round face smiling, silently asking for approval which Abigail, very calm in her simple brown smock, quietly gave him.
“’Tis the Lord’s work thou dost, Peter,” she told him.
Yet it seemed to Shockley that her eyes were fixed on something beyond her husband while she encouraged him, as if this necessary but minor act of destruction almost bored her.
But then Abigail was a rare spirit – one of the few in Sarum with a fixed purpose in life. She had vision, and strength.
How he admired her for it.
“Abigail Mason knows what she believes,” he reminded himself sternly. “She does not lie.” And he shook his head sadly at his own weakness.
The little window which, three generations before, Benedict Mason had so proudly installed as a memorial to himself and his wife had lasted surprisingly long. The king’s commissioners had thought it too insignificant to bother with; and since Benedict had seven descendants living in Sarum now, Peter Mason, for fear of offending his cousins, had hesitated to deface the tiny memorial himself. But Abigail had been firm. She had spoken to him, lovingly but firmly again and again, and now at last it was done. No one had-dared to object. It was the Lord’s work.
She did not even glance at the little crowd who were watching. Though she was short, her pale face was set so firmly and her deep brown eyes were so calm that she seemed a being apart. Stern as she was, there was something about her, besides her courage, that Edward Shockley found strangely attractive – he could not formulate it into a thought, however, and whatever it was, the feeling was probably sinful. He turned away from the dutiful couple and looked about the church instead.
St Thomas’s Church had changed completely since he was a child. Even its name had been altered, for King Henry VIII, in the plenitude of his almost totalitarian power, had roundly declared that Thomas à Becket, the martyred archbishop who had defied the king, was no martyr but a rebellious subject. Accordingly the church beside the market place was no longer called St Thomas the Martyr but dedicated to another St Thomas, the Apostle, instead. It was the commissioners of the present boy king Edward VI, though, who had really altered the look of it. The old statue of St George had been torn down and smashed; most of the carvings had been broken up too. The chantries of Swayne and the Tailors’ Guild had been destroyed and their endowments confiscated. Two hundredweight of brass – thirty-six shillings’ worth – had been carted out of St Thomas’s alone, as well as most of the stained glass. The pride of the merchants and the guilds, their shrines, chantries and memorials, had all been humbled in the name of the true God. Why, even the great Doom painting had been white-washed over.
“There’ll be no more popish idols,” one of the workmen accomplishing the destruction had told him proudly. “We’ll soon have the place cleaned up.”
It was the same everywhere. St Edmund’s church was bare: the fraternity of the Jesus Mass was dissolved. As for the cathedral itself, the destruction had been remarkable. Not only the services at the chantries of Bishop Beauchamp and Lord Hungerford had been ended, but two thousand pounds-worth of gold and silver plate – the treasure of centuries – had been removed. The jewel-encrusted shrine of St Osmund, the city’s pride, had been stripped and broken up. Altars had been taken down to be replaced by plain tables, the ancient Latin liturgy changed to simple English; even the men who tended the candles had been dismissed. So far the cathedral’s windows had not been touched, but no doubt that would come too.
This was the will of the Protestant boy king Edward VI.
The Reformation had come to Sarum.
As Shockley left the little drama at St Thomas’s and made his way slowly across the town, his mind turned to another scene that had taken place an hour before in his own house. As he remembered it, he winced.
His five-year-old daughter, Celia, staring at him with wide, frightened eyes. His wife Katherine, her look of hurt and reproach before she burst into tears.
It was his fault, of course.
If it had not been for the Reformation, he would not have needed to lie.
But then who in Sarum could ever have expected that a Tudor king would start a Protestant Reformation in England?
Ever since 1485, when their victory over the unpopular Yorkist Richard III at Bosworth had put the upstart Welsh dynasty on the throne, th
e Tudors had done everything to make their rule unquestioned, and, above all, orthodox. Since their own claim to the throne, through a lucky marriage into the house of Lancaster, was rather obscure, Henry VII had married a Yorkist princess. The great feudal nobles were tired and weakened by the Wars of the Roses: the Tudors with their strong central government and their courts, like the mighty Star Chamber, soon awed them into submission. And where Henry VII consolidated his position, his son Henry VIII shone.
He was everything a northern Renaissance prince should be. Scholar, musician, poet, athlete. Under Henry, had England not defeated the invading Scots at Flodden, and trounced the French at the Battle of the Spurs? He was extravagant, certainly, but when he went to meet the French king at the sumptuous pageant known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, he showed himself to be magnificent.
Above all, in matters of religion, he was orthodox. For his writings in support of Rome, the pope had given young Henry VIII his glorious extra title: Defender of the Faith. Was his wife not the daughter of the most Catholic King of Spain, and aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles? When Luther’s Protestant movement had begun in Germany, and when milder reformers like Erasmus had questioned the malpractices of the Roman Church, the northern island of England with its faithful king had remained conservative and sternly apart.
Certainly, nothing could have been more Catholic than Sarum and its bishop.
For Henry’s great servant Wolsey had given the bishopric of Salisbury with its great estates to no less a person than the legate to England, Cardinal Campeggio.
Of course, the great Italian Cardinal was seldom present. The running of the diocese was lax. The cathedral choristers had dwindled to under a dozen. But what did that matter as long as England and Sarum were orthodox? When seditious printed books such as a series of Lutheran tracts, or Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament into English, appeared in England, King Henry VIII and Wolsey very properly burned them and Campeggio wrote, from Rome, to assure them: ‘no holocaust could be more pleasing to God.’
Sarum would never have known the Reformation but for that cruel accident of nature. It was not that Queen Katherine failed to give the king a son – for she had given him no less than four sons and three daughters in their almost twenty years of marriage; but except for one daughter, Mary, all her children died in infancy. True, the king had one son, born out of wedlock, whom he had made Duke of Richmond. But it was a legitimate heir that was needed.
And Sarum would never have become Protestant, it might perhaps be argued, if it had not been for the bishop. For Campeggio’s role in the king’s great matter was extraordinary. First, he had suggested that the illegitimate Duke of Richmond should marry his own half-sister Mary and inherit the crown – an idea, it seemed to many, more worthy of the Italian bishop’s contemporary Machiavelli. Then when Henry asked the pope to annul his marriage, and the embarrassed pope craftily turned the case over to Wolsey and Campeggio for trial it was Campeggio’s conduct that decided the outcome. It was a difficult situation. For at that moment, France and the Hapsburg emperor Charles, the queen’s nephew, were fighting for control of northern Italy. Charles was powerful: his dominions extended from Spain to the Netherlands. He had even held the pope captive for a time. If the pope granted the annulment he would be a laughing stock in Italy and anger Charles as well.
The subtle Bishop of Salisbury had known what to do. While Wolsey fretted and Henry grew more furious, he had prevaricated while he watched the situation in Italy. The Emperor Charles had won, the case was withdrawn to Rome and no annulment came. Henry’s patience had run out; Wolsey had fallen and the next year the King of England had started to withdraw his kingdom from the Church of Rome.
And if the Bishop of Salisbury had not prevaricated? Had he agreed to annul the marriage? Who can tell? Perhaps Sarum would be Roman Catholic still.
Shockley still trembled when he remembered the old king. When England left the Church of Rome, the constitution was, at least in theory, a more absolute rule than modern history has witnessed until the rise of the twentieth century totalitarian state. For by making himself – and all English monarchs since – the spiritual head of the English Church, Henry VIII became, in his own kingdom, both king and pope in one, a claim that no medieval monarch would ever have dreamed of. When brave men like his chancellor Thomas More protested, they were executed. His terrible and unpredictable power seemed to fall across England like a shadow. Anne Boleyn gave him a daughter, and was beheaded. Jane Seymour gave him a son at last, then died. Anne of Cleves was repudiated; Catherine Howard executed. Henry’s queens crossed the stage of history like victims going to a sacrifice.
But at Sarum, frightening as Henry was, life had not changed so much. For although the king had broken with Rome, he still showed himself to be a conservative Catholic at heart.
True, he had promoted men with Protestant leanings: the gentle and scholarly Archbishop Cranmer, who had given him his needed dispensation to marry Anne Boleyn; at Sarum, Boleyn’s former chaplain, Shaxton, was made bishop when Cardinal Campeggio was sent packing. But in nearby Winchester, Bishop Gardiner remained, sternly Catholic.
True, for a time, he had let the reformers make some changes. At Sarum, Shaxton good humouredly threw away a quantity of hairs, gobbets of wood, bullocks’ horns and other objects venerated as relics, and discouraged the people from kneeling to images of the saints and lighting candles. But later, seeing the Protestants becoming too strong, the king issued his famous Six Articles, whose orthodoxy was accompanied by such heavy penalties that Shaxton of Salisbury was forced to resign; and when he decided that priests should not be married, he even made poor Cranmer send his wife abroad.
For the church of Henry was Catholic in almost everything except acknowledging the authority of the pope. Indeed, on the great central question of Transubstantiation, Henry threatened anyone who denied it with burning – after all, had he not done so, then his new English Church and her priests would have been inferior to the Church of Rome.
Yet all the same, Sarum had changed – in two important respects.
The first was the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The minor houses had gone soonest. Edward Shockley remembered, as a boy, watching the men carrying two small crosses and items of furniture out of the Grey Friars’ old house near St Ann’s Gate. There had only been a handful of Franciscans there anyway, and half the place had been let to a tenant for years, Even so, he had been conscious that a world was passing away. But then, a few years later, the greater houses, Amesbury to the north and next-door Wilton had gone. And that had been another matter.
For the king, the closing of these often decrepit religious houses was chiefly a means of raising money and rewarding his friends. Amesbury went to the family of Jane Seymour; Wilton, with its huge and ancient estates, to a man rapidly rising in the royal service, Sir William Herbert.
But the effect on an area could be considerable. It was at Sarum. For centuries, when men looked west, they had seen the rich tracts around Wilton and known – those are the abbey lands. Passive, sleepy since Saxon times, one could be certain that, whatever else was happening, the old abbey estates would not change much. But look west now, and one saw the seat of a new and vigorous family power; for come what may, Sir William intended that the family of Herbert should be a mighty power in the land.
The second change was less obvious, but would have profounder consequences. This was the order, in Bishop Shaxton’s time, that every church in the diocese must buy one of the newly printed English bibles, translated by Coverdale and Tyndale. Henry had come to doubt the wisdom of this piece of Protestantism too. Late in the reign he decreed that only nobles and the gentry might read them aloud in their own homes – and that ordinary women and the lower orders were not to read a translated Bible at all.
But it was too late. The damage was done. Even Henry VIII could not close his subjects’ minds, once they had been opened.
Edward Shockley had read his Bible.
When he was in love.
It did not seem such a lie at the time. And anyway, he and Katherine Moody were meant for each other. Even her parents said so.
He and Katherine made a good-looking couple. Seen side by side, they seemed to fit together like two halves of a single entity, so that, once they were betrothed, old John Shockley his father had laughed, remarking that it was hard to imagine how they had ever been apart. They complemented each other in every way – her thick, light brown hair to his thin, yellow locks; her eyes were pale azure, his startling, deep blue. And his easy belief in himself, as the sole heir to the Shockley mill, was perfectly matched by her almost submissive desire to please.
It was two years before old King Harry died and he was doing business in the western city of Exeter when he first saw her. Both of them felt an instant attraction that had fortunately never left them since; and it was not long before he discovered that her father was a clothier, that she and her brother would each inherit a modest fortune, that she was unsure of herself, and that, in every way, she suited him admirably. He had fallen in love. He was twenty-one and she was seventeen.
There was only one problem: the Moodys were Catholic.
He was not surprised. He knew very well that in Wessex, the further one travelled into the hinterland, the more people clung to the old ways. If the Moodys, far to the west in their village near Exeter, longed for their Church to return to Rome, it was only to be expected.
It did not seem so important. His own parents, though they grudgingly accepted the king’s break with Rome, were certainly no Protestants. His father John had once called the reforming Bishop Shaxton a heretic to his face; and there were still Roman missals to be found in many a Wiltshire church. He supposed his parents and Katherine’s would find little to disagree about.
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