Doctor Mirabilis

by James Blish

  ‘He will use it eke against the Dominicans if he can,’ Roger predicted. ‘Yet still I hold that Gerard’s argument hath reason behind it. Consider, I urge thee, how St. Francis himself may look from Heaven upon the vast holdings of property we have accumulated in his name. Indeed; we should thank God that he was excepting Christ the mildest of men, or else we might find ourselves all barefoot in the road at this very moment.’

  ‘Many are saying what you say, Roger, yet withal I’d not proclaim it quite so loud. Joachimism is perilous close to becoming proclaimed a heresy; Innocent bath already called a special Council in Anagni to condemn the book – Gerard’s, I mean, not the Eternal Gospel itself.’

  ‘And Gerard?’ Roger said.

  ‘Is in the hands of the Inquisition.’

  That ended the conversation for that evening. Yet for some months it appeared that Bungay’s forebodings had not been fated to be borne out, for in Anagni matters had gone somewhat askew. The proximate cause, apparently, had been that same William of St. Amour, who had rushed to Rome to denounce the orders root and branch, and found a sympathetic ear – or a malleable mind – in Innocent IV. The result, whatever the cause, was a bull, Etsi animarum, seriously curtailing the privileges of the orders; not a victory for the Joachimites, but not a rebuff either.

  The next act of Innocent IV was to die, to be succeeded by Alexander IV, who promptly repudiated Etsi animarum, fanning the flames higher once more. William of. St. Amour, frustrated and furious, left Rome as hurriedly as he had entered it – he was a man who did everything in great haste, including thinking – and dispatched over Europe a polemic, De periculis novissimorum temporum, in which the orders were depicted as themselves inviting the advent of Antichrist. Gerard of San Borgo remained in his dungeon, the first to reap his own whirlwind.

  (Milord Modena: I send herewith for your kind attention the book De erroribus medicorum which I promised you in Tivoli. Ad majorem gloria Dei, R. Bacon.)

  There was a diversion: the killing in Lincoln of a boy named Hugh, widely described as a ritual murder by Jews – story which grew as it travelled until the poets took it up, after which all possibility of learning the truth disappeared forever. There were miracles, and proposals of canonization, and Hugh was buried next to Grosseteste in the hope of speeding the lad’s Elevation; but the campaign to canonize the Capito had itself bogged down. In the meantime, Hugh’s enthusiasts pressed his cause with Heaven by putting to the torch such houses in various Jeweryes as seemed worth looting.

  The Joachimite furor went on, until it had forced out of office the very general of the Franciscans himself, John of Parma, for pronounced Joachimite leanings. His successor was Bonaventura, a dour and energetic theologian whose closest friend was the Dominican Albertus Magnus: a friendship bodying forth the inexorable enmity felt by both men toward anything which stirred up trouble between the orders, in especial Joachimism with its grandiose claims for the Franciscans as the coming Order of Merlin.

  ‘I told thee, Roger, politics is no whit less complicated here than at the Court!’

  ‘Brother, I believed thee then.’

  But Roger had almost given up following these coils; two years of them had exhausted his attention for such theological hair-splitting; though he was still troubled by a suspicion that Gerard had been right, and that the mounting troubles between the orders might well presage the coming of the Antichrist, voicing this opinion won him nothing but dark intimations that he must be a heretic and a disciple of the Antichrist himself. Bungay had called that tune rightly enough. Besides, the Metaphysica was still far from finished, and now there was a-bowing a work on weights and measures, the Reprobationes. Politicking could go on without him.

  ‘An alms, an alms for John! An alms for John, who hath the very begging bowl of Belisarius! Only a penny to touch the bowl of Belisarius!’

  ‘Hark. What’s that? Listen!’

  ‘To what? What is it, Roger?’

  ‘Below – that cry in the street. Listen.’

  ‘An alms for John! Only a penny! An alms, an alms for John.…

  ‘… I hear nothing, Roger. Art well?’

  Politicking went on without him, and reached to him. In 1256 Bonaventura voided the appointment of Thomas Docking, despite his new degree, and named a new lector to the Franciscans at Oxford, and regent master to boot. The successor to Adam Marsh’s chair, and Grosseteste’s before him, was Richard Rufus of Cornwall.

  One month later, Bonaventura interdicted Roger’s lectures at Oxford for suspected irregularities, namely, Joachimism and magic, and recalled him to Paris.

  Cornwall had paid his debt, however belatedly.

  Parting once more from Oxford, and now also from Bungay, was bitter; but the sharpest pang, which did not strike until Roger was better than half across the Dover Strait, was also the least expected: to realize only now that in all this time, he had never once visited Ilchester, nor even thought to do so.

  The cold winds blew him on regardless.

  XI: ST. CATHERINE’S CHAPEL

  On the road to London yet another time, yet another wearisome time, Adam Marsh took thought most conscientiously of those high matters which awaited him at the end; but only, as it were, within his intellectual soul, that raven of Elias. If long practice in manœuvres he abhorred had given him nothing else, it had trained him to reflect simultaneously upon two wholly different sets of circumstances, with the set he loved less relegated to the outermost regions of his mind, where it ticked away like a water-clock without the necessity of paying it much heed: will, guilt, will, guilt.…

  Today, in his sensitive soul, that ticking went endlessly toward reminding him that he was fifty-seven years old. No! Yet it was most certainly correct; his age was always one year less than the last two digits of the year; and this was certainly 1258, and the dregs of it at that. It had been almost two years since Roger Bacon had ruined himself at Oxford with his arrogance, as Adam long ago at Kirkby-Maxloe had greatly feared that he would, and been recalled to Paris … and it had been almost ten years, nay eleven, since he had seen Eleanor of Leicester.

  For that punishment – for he could not but regard it as such – high matters were at least in part responsible, and could not be kept as far from his heart as his will would bid them stay. It had been eleven years ago that Henry, no doubt with a view to removing from England a continuing wellspring of defiance, had named Simon de Montfort his locum-tenens or Seneschal in Gascony, and had kept him there for six years; would indeed have kept him there forever had it not been for the stupid zeal of Henry’s friends, who stirred the Gascons to so many complaints of cruelty and injustice – plausible enough, if one recalled the Albigensians – that the earl was provoked to come home and demand trial. He had been acquitted, but was still affronted and had demanded reparations, thus leading to still another quarrel with his liege which could surely have been avoided had Simon’s enemies pimply left well enough alone.

  Henry knew this; last year he had sent Simon abroad again as one of his ambassadors to France. Beyond doubt there had been other reasons as well, for the reparations had not been the only cause of the broil in 1255. That had also been the year when the King, at the behest of the Pope, had allowed his second son Edmund of Lancaster to claim the Crown of Sicily, with the clear expectation that the realm was to pay for a war of succession on Edmund’s behalf over that much-disputed Kingdom; and Simon was scarce in France again before Henry’s brother Richard earl of Cornwall – that same earl to whom the King had earlier mortgaged sole right to extort money from the Jews – sued for the Imperial throne, his election bribery again to be paid from English taxes.

  Remote, remote – yet painfully close to the heart. Surely it was but natural in the earl of Leicester to take his lady wife with him to his estates in Gascony, no man could dispute that. He was not even depriving her of a confessor, for she still had Adam’s brother Robert, now Dean of Lincoln and a strong clerical partisan of Simon’s cause against the King. Yet that
argument cut two ways: for by the same reasoning could it be called natural to leave her there for three years more, while he fought at home with the King? Cedes, for all of England was a-shimmer with rebellion, and a man with a Gascon sanctuary for his lady could not but count himself fortunate. The fact that, once more back in England, he was still without Eleanor was amenable to the same explanation.

  There was without doubt a curse upon the land, and that not only the burden of Henry’s and Rome’s rapacious greed; for the harvests this year had been the worst in memory, and famine was everywhere. Thousands had starved to death in London alone. No one who loved her could wish Eleanor anywhere but where she was.

  Yet the thorns of guilt steadily poisoned Adam’s blood, and in his soul there whispered constantly another explanation. That voiceless whisper was abetted by additional circumstances: for though the insurgent barons claimed St. Robert of Lincoln as their chiefest patron (notwithstanding that the Capito had yet to be canonized), Simon himself no longer spoke more than perfunctorily to Grosseteste’s only spiritual heir, regardless of opportunity.

  Did the earl know? But what was there to know? There had been no sin committed, nay nor ever would be. But to this objection there was an inexorable reply in Scripture. Eleanor was surely guiltless; but this could not be said of Adam, in his heart nor in Heaven.

  He had been tempted eke to think that Heaven had a little conspired to help him in these outward events, keeping Eleanor in Gascony the while his old age crept toward him. Too, his services as mediator were still in demand at court, maugre Simon’s absences and his coldness, for the primate, Boniface of Savoy, made no secret of his admiration for Adam as an expert lawyer and theologian; and the primate was also a member of Simon’s party. Two years ago Boniface had even tried to win Adam the see of Ely, an attempt abetted by the King, who perhaps saw in this a way to placate two clerical opponents at once. Doubtless Henry was unaware of the gulf that Adam sensed between himself and Simon; yet even if he had, Henry knew also that Adam confessed his Queen. The see, however, was refused, for the Lateran still remembered Grosseteste with little love, and would not advance his most favoured familiar even at the petition of Rome’s most obedient secular prince.

  Heaven’s help or no, Adam’s essay to pluck out his offending eye also had failed.

  Simon’s return had been stormy beyond all imagining, and though the King had prepared for it, he had not thought far enough ahead. At the April parliament in the Great Hall at Westminster, the barons, at Simon’s advice, had arrived in complete armour. They stood as silent as statues while the King’s half-brother, William de Valence, denounced the earls of Gloucester and Leicester as the sources of every evil under which England was suffering. Even de Valence’s rather shaky denunciation of Simon as ‘an old traitor and a liar’ went by in a silence so complete that Adam had been able to hear clearly the scratch and sputter of old Matthew Paris’ goose-quill.

  Evidently de Valence had misinterpreted that silence, for his next words to fall upon Adam’s incredulous ears had been a demand for more money. After a moment, Simon had wordlessly deferred to Gloucester.

  ‘Nay,’ earl Bigod said. ‘More money paid to the Pope, on behalf of the King’s son and his Sicilian Crown? Not a mark!’

  ‘It lieth nat with thee to refuse us, my lord Gloucester. An ye be mutinous, we shall send thee reapers and reap thy fields for thee.’

  ‘And I will send ye back the heads of your reapers,’ Bigod said evenly.

  The King had entered as he was speaking, and for the first time there was movement: there swept through the statues a threatening clatter of swords. Whatever Henry had anticipated, it had not been this, but he was far quicker to see what was under his nose than his half-brother had been. He said at last:

  ‘Am I then a prisoner?’

  ‘Nay, sire,’ earl Bigod said, but his voice had been most grim. ‘But we must have reform.’

  ‘Reform, Gloucester?’

  ‘Yes, sire. Know ye that all here are sworn to die, rather than that England be ruined by the Romans.’

  There had seemed to be no immediate danger of death to the full-armed barons, but the King had been reduced rapidly to a stuttering transport of terror. It had not proven an onerous task to extort from him the appointment of a Council of twenty-four lordships, to meet at Oxford in October and draw up a table of reforms.

  That meeting Henry’s partisans had promptly dubbed the Mad Parliament, but none there took heed of that to their hurt. One of its earliest acts was to invest Simon, first, with the post of military commander-in-chief for the seigniorial forces, and second, with the custody of the castle of Winchester – whence, to guard against any surprise, the Mad Parliament at once removed itself before completing its table of wrongs to be righted. The table itself was nevertheless titled the Provisions of Oxford, to ensure the preservation of the letters patent under which the twenty-four had begun their labours.

  Ere that work was through, Henry’s power – or at the very least, his power to make mischief – had been wrenched from his hands; the Mad Parliament had given over the taxing of the realm, and much else, to three committees of its own. Little could have galled Henry more than to assent to such Provisions, but assent he must, albeit they were capped by the boldest insult offered to the Angevin crown since 1215: the demand that he reaffirm, on holy ground, the Great Charter which his father had so unwillingly signed that June 15th at Runnymede.

  It was to this high and ominous ceremony that Adam was riding now, in the greyness of his old age and the shadow of his guilt.

  It had pleased the Mad Parliament to give Henry his choice of holy ground, and he had chosen a ruin: the Westminster Abbey of Edward the Confessor, which that saint had spent most of his life a-building, and which Henry himself had pulled down in order to erect something even greater to the Confessor’s memory. Nothing of the original was left now but Edward’s high-raised shrine, and the new minster, though it had already cost a vast sum, was still radically incomplete.

  Nevertheless Adam could bring himself to admire it; the King as a patron of the arts was not an inconsiderable man, whatever his other weaknesses, and it was already plain to see that this church – of which Henry was in part also the architect – would be nobly beautiful, could it be finished before the money ran out. In the meantime, the conclave forgathered in St. Catherine’s Chapel, one of the few chambers which was whole.

  No arms nor armour now, but instead crimson, gold and vair, all new, without so much as a grease-spot: all the chief lords of England, each with a lighted taper in his hand; Henry the King, his face white as milk, the shadows on it deeply cut by the upcasting light of the candle in his own hand, slightly a-tremble; the princes, Edward wearing the dark brow of suppressed mutiny; the bishops, the-primate, even the papal legate, Guy de Foulques, Archbishop of Sabina himself; and from somewhere in the darkness the cat-purr of the aged Matthew Paris, scribble … scribble.…

  They had already begun when Adam entered, and he was far from the centre of the conclave. Much indeed had changed since he had stood at Grosseteste’s elbow in the Great Hall and heard not only the public words but the private consultations. Yet from scraps of murmurs Adam quickly divined where they were at: earl Bigod was reading, in a monotonous, rapid drone-bass, the articles of the Great Charter, and had already reached the twelfth.

  ‘No scutage or aid shall be imposed on our kingdom, unless by the Common Council of the realm … and in like manner it shall be done concerning aids from the City of London.… The King binds himself to summon the Common Council of the realm respecting the assessing of an aid (except as provided in XII) or a scutage …

  And to each of these Henry the King said, through nearly motionless lips, ‘We so swear,’ and signed himself.

  ‘… to be proportionate to the offence, and imposed according to the oath of honest men in the neighbourhood. No amercement to touch the necessary means of subsistence of a free man, the merchandise of a merchant, or the far
ming tools of a villein … earls and barons to be amerced by their equals.…’

  ‘We so swear.… We so swear.…

  ‘… nothing shall be taken or given, for the future, for the Writ of Inquisition of life or limb, but it shall be freely granted, and not denied.… No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him except by the lawful judgment of his peers and/or the law of the land.… We will sell to no man, we will not deny to any man, either justice or right.…

  ‘We so swear.… We so swear.…’

  ‘… reaffirm Article I that the Church of England shall be free, and have her whole rights, and her liberties inviolable.…

  The tapers burned lower; the chapel was reeking of sweat and tallow; but at last the earl put aside his parchments.

  ‘We so swear.’

  The King let the words fall almost in a whisper, and then stood frozen for what seemed a long fall of sand. Then he dashed his taper to the stones, and cried out thinly:

  ‘So go out with smoke and stench the accursed souls of those who break or pervert this Charter!’

  By the breathless pause which followed, Adam knew that this oath had not been prescribed by the bishops for this occasion. Then Simon de Montfort’s own taper struck the pavement, and the chapel rang with his voice, repeating the words.

  The barons followed his lead, in a ragged chorus. Within no longer than it took to say a Paternoster, the chapel was plunged into blackness, choking with wick-fumes … and then, it was a-shuffle with men edging cautiously, blindly toward the doorway each remembered as being the nearest.

  Adam pressed stumblingly through the slow-milling shapes, making haste slowly lest he jostle someone with hand on dagger, toward where he had last seen earl Simon, guiding himself by the one remaining, distant star of Matthew Paris’ candle-flame. It was slow work, against the main current; and by the time he had reached his goal, the smoky chapel was empty of all but himself and the nodding, grinning historian.