Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series
Page 143
Enter MARY.
MARY.
O Philip!
Nay, must you go indeed?
PHILIP.
Madam, I must.
MARY.
The parting of a husband and a wife
Is like the cleaving of a heart; one half
Will flutter here, one there.
PHILIP.
You say true, Madam.
MARY.
The Holy Virgin will not have me yet
Lose the sweet hope that I may bear a prince.
If such a prince were born and you not here!
PHILIP.
I should be here if such a prince were born.
MARY.
But must you go?
PHILIP.
Madam, you know my father,
Retiring into cloistral solitude
To yield the remnant of his years to heaven,
Will shift the yoke and weight of all the world
From off his neck to mine. We meet at Brussels.
But since mine absence will not be for long,
Your Majesty shall go to Dover with me,
And wait my coming back.
MARY.
To Dover? no,
I am too feeble. I will go to Greenwich,
So you will have me with you; and there watch
All that is gracious in the breath of heaven
Draw with your sails from our poor land, and pass
And leave me, Philip, with my prayers for you.
PHILIP.
And doubtless I shall profit by your prayers.
MARY.
Methinks that would you tarry one day more
(The news was sudden) I could mould myself
To bear your going better; will you do it?
PHILIP.
Madam, a day may sink or save a realm.
MARY.
A day may save a heart from breaking too.
PHILIP.
Well, Simon Renard, shall we stop a day?
RENARD.
Your Grace’s business will not suffer, sire,
For one day more, so far as I can tell.
PHILIP.
Then one day more to please her Majesty.
MARY.
The sunshine sweeps across my life again.
O if I knew you felt this parting, Philip,
As I do!
PHILIP.
By St. James I do protest,
Upon the faith and honour of a Spaniard,
I am vastly grieved to leave your Majesty.
Simon, is supper ready?
RENARD.
Ay, my liege,
I saw the covers laying.
PHILIP.
Let us have it.
[Exeunt.
Act IV
Scene I
A Room in the Palace
MARY, CARDINAL POLE
MARY.
What have you there?
POLE.
So please your Majesty,
A long petition from the foreign exiles
To spare the life of Cranmer. Bishop Thirlby,
And my Lord Paget and Lord William Howard,
Crave, in the same cause, hearing of your Grace.
Hath he not written himself — infatuated —
To sue you for his life?
MARY.
His life? Oh, no;
Not sued for that — he knows it were in vain.
But so much of the anti-papal leaven
Works in him yet, he hath pray’d me not to sully
Mine own prerogative, and degrade the realm
By seeking justice at a stranger’s hand
Against my natural subject. King and Queen,
To whom he owes his loyalty after God,
Shall these accuse him to a foreign prince?
Death would not grieve him more. I cannot be
True to this realm of England and the Pope
Together, says the heretic.
POLE.
And there errs;
As he hath ever err’d thro’ vanity.
A secular kingdom is but as the body
Lacking a soul; and in itself a beast.
The Holy Father in a secular kingdom
Is as the soul descending out of heaven
Into a body generate.
MARY.
Write to him, then.
POLE.
I will.
MARY.
And sharply, Pole.
POLE.
Here come the Cranmerites!
Enter THIRLBY, LORD PAGET, LORD WILLIAM HOWARD.
HOWARD.
Health to your Grace! Good morrow, my Lord Cardinal;
We make our humble prayer unto your Grace
That Cranmer may withdraw to foreign parts,
Or into private life within the realm.
In several bills and declarations, Madam,
He hath recanted all his heresies.
PAGET.
Ay, ay; if Bonner have not forged the bills. [Aside.
MARY.
Did not More die, and Fisher? he must burn.
HOWARD.
He hath recanted, Madam.
MARY.
The better for him.
He burns in Purgatory, not in Hell.
HOWARD.
Ay, ay, your Grace; but it was never seen
That any one recanting thus at full,
As Cranmer hath, came to the fire on earth.
MARY.
It will be seen now, then.
THIRLBY.
O Madam, Madam!
I thus implore you, low upon my knees,
To reach the hand of mercy to my friend.
I have err’d with him; with him I have recanted.
What human reason is there why my friend
Should meet with lesser mercy than myself?
MARY.
My Lord of Ely, this. After a riot
We hang the leaders, let their following go.
Cranmer is head and father of these heresies,
New learning as they call it; yea, may God
Forget me at most need when I forget
Her foul divorce — my sainted mother — No! —
HOWARD.
Ay, ay, but mighty doctors doubted there.
The Pope himself waver’d; and more than one
Row’d in that galley — Gardiner to wit,
Whom truly I deny not to have been
Your faithful friend and trusty councillor.
Hath not your Highness ever read his book.
His tractate upon True Obedience,
Writ by himself and Bonner?
MARY.
I will take
Such order with all bad, heretical books
That none shall hold them in his house and live,
Henceforward. No, my Lord.
HOWARD.
Then never read it.
The truth is here. Your father was a man
Of such colossal kinghood, yet so courteous,
Except when wroth, you scarce could meet his eye
And hold your own; and were he wroth indeed,
You held it less, or not at all. I say,
Your father had a will that beat men down;
Your father had a brain that beat men down —
POLE.
Not me, my Lord.
HOWARD.
No, for you were not here;
You sit upon this fallen Cranmer’s throne;
And it would more become you, my Lord Legate,
To join a voice, so potent with her Highness,
To ours in plea for Cranmer than to stand
On naked self-assertion.
MARY.
All your voices
Are waves on flint. The heretic must burn.
HOWARD.
Yet once he saved your Majesty’s own life;
Stood out against the King in your behalf.
At his own peril.
MARY.
&nbs
p; I know not if he did;
And if he did I care not, my Lord Howard.
My life is not so happy, no such boon,
That I should spare to take a heretic priest’s,
Who saved it or not saved. Why do you vex me?
PAGET.
Yet to save Cranmer were to serve the Church,
Your Majesty’s I mean; he is effaced,
Self-blotted out; so wounded in his honour,
He can but creep down into some dark hole
Like a hurt beast, and hide himself and die;
But if you burn him, — well, your Highness knows
The saying, ‘Martyr’s blood — seed of the Church.’
MARY.
Of the true Church; but his is none, nor will be.
You are too politic for me, my Lord Paget.
And if he have to live so loath’d a life,
It were more merciful to burn him now.
THIRLBY.
O yet relent. O, Madam, if you knew him
As I do, ever gentle, and so gracious,
With all his learning —
MARY.
Yet a heretic still.
His learning makes his burning the more just.
THIRLBY.
So worshipt of all those that came across him;
The stranger at his hearth, and all his house —
MARY.
His children and his concubine, belike.
THIRLBY.
To do him any wrong was to beget
A kindness from him, for his heart was rich,
Of such fine mould, that if you sow’d therein
The seed of Hate, it blossom’d Charity.
POLE.
‘After his kind it costs him nothing,’ there’s
An old world English adage to the point.
These are but natural graces, my good Bishop,
Which in the Catholic garden are as flowers,
But on the heretic dunghill only weeds.
HOWARD.
Such weeds make dunghills gracious.
MARY.
Enough, my Lords.
It is God’s will, the Holy Father’s will,
And Philip’s will, and mine, that he should burn.
He is pronounced anathema.
HOWARD.
Farewell, Madam,
God grant you ampler mercy at your call
Than you have shown to Cranmer.
[Exeunt Lords.
POLE.
After this,
Your Grace will hardly care to overlook
This same petition of the foreign exiles
For Cranmer’s life.
MARY.
Make out the writ to-night.
[Exeunt.
Scene II
Oxford. CRANMER in Prison
CRANMER.
Last night, I dream’d the faggots were alight,
And that myself was fasten’d to the stake, I
And found it all a visionary flame,
Cool as the light in old decaying wood;
And then King Harry look’d from out a cloud,
And bad me have good courage; and I heard
An angel cry ‘There is more joy in Heaven,’ —
And after that, the trumpet of the dead.
[Trumpets without.
Why, there are trumpets blowing now: what is it?
Enter FATHER COLE.
COLE.
Cranmer, I come to question you again;
Have you remain’d in the true Catholic faith
I left you in?
CRANMER.
In the true Catholic faith,
By Heaven’s grace, I am more and more confirm’d.
Why are the trumpets blowing, Father Cole?
COLE.
Cranmer, it is decided by the Council
That you to-day should read your recantation
Before the people in St. Mary’s Church.
And there be many heretics in the town,
Who loathe you for your late return to Rome,
And might assail you passing through the street,
And tear you piecemeal: so you have a guard.
CRANMER.
Or seek to rescue me. I thank the Council.
COLE.
Do you lack any money?
CRANMER.
Nay, why should I?
The prison fare is good enough for me.
COLE.
Ay, but to give the poor.
CRANMER.
Hand it me, then!
I thank you.
COLE.
For a little space, farewell;
Until I see you in St. Mary’s Church.
[Exit Cole.
CRANMER.
It is against all precedent to burn
One who recants; they mean to pardon me.
To give the poor — they give the poor who die.
Well, burn me or not burn me I am fixt;
It is but a communion, not a mass:
A holy supper, not a sacrifice;
No man can make his Maker — Villa Garcia.
Enter VILLA GARCIA.
VILLA GARCIA.
Pray you write out this paper for me, Cranmer.
CRANMER.
Have I not writ enough to satisfy you?
VILLA GARCIA.
It is the last.
CRANMER.
Give it me, then.
[He writes.
VILLA GARCIA.
Now sign.
CRANMER.
I have sign’d enough, and I will sign no more.
VILLA GARCIA.
It is no more than what you have sign’d already,
The public form thereof.
CRANMER.
It may be so;
I sign it with my presence, if I read it.
VILLA GARCIA.
But this is idle of you. Well, sir, well,
You are to beg the people to pray for you;
Exhort them to a pure and virtuous life;
Declare the Queen’s right to the throne; confess
Your faith before all hearers; and retract
That Eucharistic doctrine in your book.
Will you not sign it now?
CRANMER.
No, Villa Garcia,
I sign no more. Will they have mercy on me?
VILLA GARCIA.
Have you good hopes of mercy!
So, farewell.
[Exit.
CRANMER.
Good hopes, not theirs, have I that I am fixt,
Fixt beyond fall; however, in strange hours,
After the long brain-dazing colloquies,
And thousand-times recurring argument
Of those two friars ever in my prison,
When left alone in my despondency,
Without a friend, a book, my faith would seem
Dead or half-drown’d, or else swam heavily
Against the huge corruptions of the Church,
Monsters of mistradition, old enough
To scare me into dreaming, ‘what am I,
Cranmer, against whole ages?’ was it so,
Or am I slandering my most inward friend,
To veil the fault of my most outward foe —
The soft and tremulous coward in the flesh?
O higher, holier, earlier, purer church,
I have found thee and not leave thee any more.
It is but a communion, not a mass —
No sacrifice, but a life-giving feast!
(Writes.) So, so; this will I say — thus will I pray.
[Puts up the paper.
Enter BONNER.
BONNER.
Good day, old friend; what, you look somewhat worn;
And yet it is a day to test your health
Ev’n at the best: I scarce have spoken with you
Since when? — your degradation. At your trial
Never stood up a bolder man than you;
You would not cap the Pope’s com
missioner —
Your learning, and your stoutness, and your heresy,
Dumbfounded half of us. So, after that,
We had to dis-archbishop and unlord,
And make you simple Cranmer once again.
The common barber dipt your hair, and I
Scraped from your finger-points the holy oil;
And worse than all, you had to kneel to me;
Which was not pleasant for you, Master Cranmer.
Now you, that would not recognise the Pope,
And you, that would not own the Real Presence,
Have found a real presence in the stake,
Which frights you back into the ancient faith:
And so you have recanted to the Pope.
How are the mighty fallen, Master Cranmer!
CRANMER.
You have been more fierce against the Pope than I;
But why fling back the stone he strikes me with?
[Aside.
O Bonner, if I ever did you kindness —
Power hath been given you to try faith by fire —
Pray you, remembering how yourself have changed,
Be somewhat pitiful, after I have gone,
To the poor flock — to women and to children —
That when I was archbishop held with me.
BONNER.
Ay — gentle as they call you — live or die!
Pitiful to this pitiful heresy?
I must obey the Queen and Council, man.
Win thro’ this day with honour to yourself,
And I’ll say something for you — so — good-bye.
[Exit.
CRANMER.
This hard coarse man of old hath crouch’d to me
Till I myself was half ashamed for him.
Enter THIRLBY.
Weep not, good Thirlby.
THIRLBY.
Oh, my Lord, my Lord!
My heart is no such block as Bonner’s is:
Who would not weep?
CRANMER.
Why do you so my — lord me,
Who am disgraced?
THIRLBY.
On earth; but saved in heaven
By your recanting.
CRANMER.
Will they burn me, Thirlby?
THIRLBY.
Alas, they will; these burnings will not help
The purpose of the faith; but my poor voice
Against them is a whisper to the roar
Of a spring-tide.
CRANMER.
And they will surely burn me?
THIRLBY.
Ay; and besides, will have you in the church
Repeat your recantation in the ears
Of all men, to the saving of their souls,
Before your execution. May God help you
Thro’ that hard hour!
CRANMER.
And may God bless you, Thirlby!
Well, they shall hear my recantation there.
[Exit Thirlby.
Disgraced, dishonour’d! — not by them, indeed,
By mine own self — by mine own hand!
O thin-skinn’d hand and jutting veins, ‘twas you
That sign’d the burning of poor Joan of Kent;
But then she was a witch. You have written much,