When he reached his father, Will raised himself to a sitting position, and gave Dan a half-reproachful, half-guilty look.
“Well,” he sighed, “your sister won’t have me. The monks are telling me I’ll have to go and live with you again.”
“You can’t,” Dan said firmly. “I’ve no room.”
Help eventually came from the prior himself. “Your father is not a bad soul,” he told Dan with commendable frankness. “But,” he continued gravely, “the work of this monastery is serious. Your father may remain on one condition: that he stays within our gates.”
Dan looked at his father’s face. He didn’t rate the chances highly.
Susan Bull’s nightmare began on a perfect summer day.
It was one of the things Susan liked about Rowland that, while his career and marriage had led him towards the gentle class in society, he was not in the least ashamed of his family of brewers; and every few months they would pay a visit to the old brewery at Southwark. Thomas had accompanied them on this occasion, and after showing him round the extensive premises which the brewery occupied now, the family had all repaired to the old George Inn where the business had first begun.
Susan had been feeling rather mellow. The danger she had feared in April had receded. Whether they liked it or not, hardly anyone else had refused the Supremacy oath; and though Fisher, More and Doctor Wilson were still confined to the Tower, no further action had been taken against them. The mood of the court was also lighter. “The king and Queen Anne are happy together,” Thomas reported. “Everyone is sure there’ll be a male heir sooner or later.” Above all, Rowland seemed to be contented. The crisis with his conscience now past, he was enjoying his work and their life together had been especially happy.
It was a jolly party, consisting of the three visitors, Rowland’s old father and his two brothers. Susan always felt comfortable with the Bulls. Unlike Rowland, who with his dark hair and balding head looked more like a Celtic Welshman, they had remained true to the family type, with fair hair, blue eyes and broad Saxon faces. They were solidly conservative in all their opinions; but if they lacked Rowland’s intellectual gifts, it was obvious that they were as proud of him as he was of them, and soon Thomas was cheerfully assuring them: “Such a fine scholar as Rowland can’t fail to be chancellor one day.”
Thomas was at his best. He gave them vivid depictions of the gay life of the court, the jousts, the sports, the music. He told them funny stories about all the great folk there. Rowland’s father was curious about the painter Holbein, who had already made portraits of many of the greatest figures in England. “Do you know,” Thomas told them, “his painting of King Henry is so lifelike that the first day it was hung one of the courtiers, who didn’t know it was there, gave a huge start and bowed to it!”
He even made his dour master Cromwell sound delightful. “Cromwell is tough,” he conceded, “but he has a fine mind. He loves the company of scholars and Holbein often dines with him. But do you know who his closest friend is? Archbishop Cranmer himself.” He grinned at Susan. “We courtiers are not all so bad,” he said.
For a long time, in the old tavern where Dame Barnikel had once presided, they enjoyed each other’s company so much that by mid-afternoon when they decided to return by river to Chelsea, they were all a little drunk.
How well everything looked, Susan thought, as their barge skimmed up the stream. The surface of the water was like liquid glass; the sky was blue, the air was still. There was no doubt that the Tudors had improved London. As they passed the mouth of the Fleet, narrower now thanks to repeated encroachments, she looked with approval at the king’s new waterside hall by Blackfriars and, across the Fleet, reached by a bridge, the little palace of Bridewell for important foreign visitors. She smiled at the Temple enclosure and at the green lawns of the great houses, each with its own river steps. True, the old palace of the Savoy had lost its ancient glory – it had never recovered from Wat Tyler’s destruction more than a century before and the site contained only a modest hospital now. But just as they approached Westminster there was another huge building site, the splendid new palace which King Henry was going to call Whitehall.
By Westminster, she realized that Rowland was really rather flushed. She did not mind. He was humming softly to himself, but quite tunefully. His eyes were glazed. As for Thomas, he seemed to find everything amusing.
It was a few minutes later, after they had passed Westminster and were drawing level with the archbishop’s Lambeth Palace on the opposite bank that Rowland nudged her and pointed. By Lambeth steps, she now observed, a handsome barge had tethered and its occupants were about to walk through the big brick gatehouse to the palace.
“There goes Cranmer,” he said, and Susan watched curiously as a tall, handsome figure emerged from the barge. But her attention was soon caught by something else. For as the men were unloading a quantity of baggage, she noticed that four of them were carrying a large box, almost like a coffin.
“Do you suppose someone has died?” she said.
And then, for no good reason that she could see, Thomas started to giggle.
“I can’t see what’s so funny,” she remarked. “People do die, you know.” But now he burst out laughing. “I think,” she said crossly, “you might explain.”
“Cranmer’s little secret,” he muttered, then grinned. “Hush.”
“You’re drunk,” she sighed. His eyes were bloodshot.
“Maybe, sister.” He was quiet for a few moments. The coffin went through the gatehouse. Then he chuckled again. “Do you promise not to tell,” he said confidentially, “if I tell you what’s in that box?”
“I suppose so,” she said reluctantly.
“Mistress Cranmer,” he grinned. “That box contains his wife.”
For a moment Susan could not speak. Priests sinned, of course, although the English clergy had in fact been rather free of this kind of laxity recently. But for the archbishop to keep a woman . . . “Cranmer has a doxy?” she queried.
But Thomas was shaking his head. “Not a doxy. She’s his lawfully wedded wife. His second, actually. They were married before he became archbishop.”
“But does King Henry know?”
“Yes. Doesn’t approve. But he likes Cranmer. Needs him too, to legitimize the Boleyn marriage. So he’s made Cranmer promise to keep it a secret. That’s why Mistress Cranmer is never seen. When he travels, she goes in a box.” He laughed again. His words were a little slurred. “Don’t you think it’s funny?”
Susan looked at Rowland, but he was still humming, apparently not quite aware of what was being said. Just as well, she thought. “She must be a loose sort of woman,” she said with disgust.
“Not at all,” Thomas replied. “Very respectable. Cranmer married her when he was studying in Germany. I believe her father’s a pastor.”
“Germany?” She frowned. A pastor? It took her a moment to realize the implication. “A Lutheran pastor?” she asked. “Do you mean,” she continued, amazed, “that this woman, who is married to our own archbishop, is a Lutheran?” And then an even worse thought occurred to her. “But what does this mean about Cramner? Is he a covert heretic?”
“A modest reformer,” he assured her. “No more.”
“And the king? Surely he doesn’t secretly sympathize with the Protestants?”
“Good heavens, no,” he cried.
She supposed it was so. She noticed, though, that the conversation had sobered him. He even looked a little anxious. But she would probably have left the matter there if she had not suddenly had a terrible flash of perception.
“And you, Thomas,” she turned on him. “What are you?”
Yes, he was sober now. She looked into his eyes, but he dropped them and did not answer.
For Thomas, as for many others, the conversion had taken place when he was a student – though to call the radical change in his beliefs a conversion was not quite proper, since he had not actually joined another faith.
Of the two great universities, Cambridge had always been a more radical place than traditionalist Oxford. And when Cambridge men, inspired by the Renaissance scholar Erasmus, turned their gaze upon the creaking old colossus of the medieval Church, they soon stripped it down to its mechanical essentials; even the most hallowed doctrines were examined.
Thomas never forgot the first time he had heard the central doctrine of Transubstantiation – the miracle of the Mass – attacked. He had known, of course, that Wyclif and the Lollards had questioned it. He was aware that heretical Protestants in Europe were now denying it. But when he heard a respected Cambridge scholar in action, he had been shaken.
“Discussion of this question,” the scholar had pointed out, “has usually been about details. Does God really grant a miracle to every priest every time? Or, more philosophically, how can the Host be both bread and the body of Christ at the same time? But all this,” he stated confidently, “is unnecessary speculation. My case is far simpler. It rests on what the Bible actually says. In only one of the four Gospels does Our Lord tell his disciples to re-enact this part of the Last Passover Supper, and all He says is: ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ Nothing more. It is a commemoration. That is all. Why, then, have we invented a miracle?”
By the time he left the bracing East Anglian air of Cambridge, Thomas Meredith was no longer a believing Catholic.
If pressed to define his allegiance, he would have had to say he belonged to the party of reform. It was a broad group. Though Cambridge was its intellectual base, there was a little circle around the rising scholar Latimer at Oxford, too. There were progressive churchmen like Cranmer, some prominent Londoners, aristocratic sympathizers at court, including some of Queen Anne Boleyn’s relations; and even, as Thomas had discovered, Secretary Cromwell. It was also an élite. The majority of English folk were attached to the old, familiar ways. As usually happens, the reformers were not answering a cry from the people: they had merely decided to improve them.
“I’m not sure if I’m a Lutheran or not,” Meredith had recently confessed to Cromwell, “but I do know I want to see religion radically purified.” There was only one man in England, however, who could change the religion of the people: the king. How could the reformers hope to move the self-proclaimed Defender of the Faith towards their camp?
“Opportunity,” Cromwell said. “It’s that simple. After all,” he reminded him, “who could possibly have foreseen, when it began, the amazing outcome of the Boleyn affair? Yet for us reformers it was an astounding gift, because it is causing the king to break with Rome. We can build on that.”
“The king may be excommunicated,” Thomas objected, “and he may tolerate Cranmer’s tendencies because he likes him, but he still seems to hate heretics as much as ever. He hasn’t moved an inch towards reform.”
“Patience,” Cromwell grunted. “He can be influenced.”
“But how?” Thomas cried. “By what arguments?” At this, Cromwell had only smiled.
“I see,” he remarked with a shake of his head, “that you still know nothing of princes.” He looked him calmly in the eye. “If you want to influence a prince, young man, forget arguments. Study the man.” He sighed. “Henry loves power. That is his strength. He is hugely vain. He wants to look like a hero. That is his weakness. And he needs money. That is his necessity.” His small eyes bored into Thomas. “With these three levers we can move mountains.” And now he smiled. “We may even, young Thomas Meredith, be able to bring a religious reformation to England.” He patted the young man’s hand. “Give me time.”
Now therefore, as Thomas gazed into his sister’s worried face, he wondered what to say. He was already sober enough to realize, with a shock, that he had allowed himself to say too much. He must somehow backtrack.
“I’m not Protestant,” he assured her. “Nor is anyone at court.” He smiled. “You worry too much.”
But she had seen his eyes. And for the first time in her life, she knew he was deliberately lying to her. And though she said nothing, it gave her great pain to know, whatever cynical schemes might or might not be going on at court, that from that day she could no longer trust her brother.
Shocked and disappointed as she was, Susan did not let this matter dominate her thoughts. Rowland, fortunately, had not really taken in their conversation. Nor did she enlighten him. If Thomas was, in some sense, secretly lost to her, she did not want to place the burden of her feelings on her hard-working husband. I must be a good wife and a support to him, she reminded herself.
Only sometimes, when she found herself in the house alone did a sense of desolation visit her. It was, she recognized, a moral loneliness. She would dearly have liked to correspond, at least, with Peter; but his last letter had told her that he was now well enough to undertake a pilgrimage to some of the greatest shrines so she did not even know where to write to him. Meanwhile, she continued, from time to time, to welcome Thomas to the house, and watch him play with the children, and pretend that all was well.
It had been her idea to visit Greenwich. She had always wanted to see round the greatest palace, and learning that King Henry was away one autumn day when both Thomas and Rowland had business there, she had suggested that she accompany them.
She enjoyed the day. Thomas had conducted them all round the great waterside palace. He had even procured a chamber inside the palace where they could spend the night before returning to Chelsea in the morning.
A little before sunset the three of them walked up the broad, green slope behind Greenwich Palace. For a short while they had strolled across to the edge of Blackheath and then returned to the top of the slope to watch the sun go down. It was certainly a fine sight. Above, the sky was clear; from the east, a faint cool breeze was coming up from the estuary, while in the west, grey clouds with burnished edges lay in long streaks above the horizon. Below her, the turrets of the palace caught the sun’s rays; to the left, in the middle distance, Susan could see all London laid out and beyond that, the golden ribbon of the Thames wandering westward. After they had gazed several minutes, when the sun went behind a cloud, turning the scene to greyness, Thomas suddenly pointed at the Deptford dockyard just upstream, and cried: “Look.”
No monarch had done more to build a navy than Henry VIII of England. There were several ships, including the great six-hundred-ton Mary Rose; but the pride of his fleet was the Henry, Grâce à Dieu, the mightiest English warship yet to float. This vessel, detaching itself from the cluster of masts by the Deptford wharfs, had just glided into the river.
As the four-masted ship moved out towards midstream, Susan found herself watching spellbound. It was certainly huge. The Great Harry, the sailors affectionately called the mighty vessel. “Weighs over a thousand tons,” Thomas murmured in a voice of awe. The ship seemed to dominate the whole river.
Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the Great Harry unfurled not its everyday, but its ceremonial sails, which were painted gold. And at the same moment, as if in response, a cluster of the sun’s rays burst out through a gap in the western cloud, catching the ship and its sails magically in a pool of red gold light on the darkening river, so that it floated there like a fairy ship, gleaming, unreal, and so lovely that Susan caught her breath. For over a minute this vision lasted, until the sun was covered again.
This was the magical vision Susan would have carried away with her if the master had not decided on one more manoeuvre. Just as the sun withdrew, along the whole length of the ship’s side two lines of traps abruptly burst open and from these dark cavities ran out the muzzles of a score of cannon, so that in an instant
the great ship was transformed from a golden phantom to a grim, brutal engine of war.
“Those cannon could reduce the palace to rubble,” Thomas remarked admiringly.
“Magnificent,” Rowland agreed.
But the warship filled Susan with dread. It reminded her of the other transformation that she had witnessed in a garden the summer before. It was as if the golden ship and the dour vessel with its dull, threatening cannon were two faces of the king himself. And while the men remained contentedly watching as the Great Harry moved slowly downstream, she felt a strange uneasiness, and a little shudder passed through her that, she told herself, was only caused by the breeze which now felt cold, coming from the east.
They were standing in a hallway, whose dark wooden panelling was glowing softly in the candlelight when the young man came up to Thomas.
“Secretary Cromwell will need you first thing in the morning,” he murmured. And then with a smile: “It’s been decided. We’re to draft the new Act of Parliament at once.”
Wondering what this might be, she had glanced at Rowland; but he evidently did not know. Then she noticed, even in the shadow, that Thomas was blushing. “What Act of Parliament?” she quickly enquired.
The young man looked uncertain for a moment, but then grinned. “It won’t be a secret after tonight anyway,” he said, “so I can tell you. It’s to be called the Act of Supremacy.”
“What’s to be in it?” she asked.
“Well,” he replied cheerfully, “Thomas knows better than I, but the main provisions are these.” He began to explain.
At first, as she listened, Susan was not sure what the purpose of this new Act was. It seemed to recapitulate all the things, in his dispute with the Pope, that Henry had already done – the appropriation of Rome’s revenues, the succession provisions, and much else besides. But gradually, as he continued, her eyes grew wide with astonishment.
Rowland finally spoke. “No king in history has ever made such claims!”
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