“We always speak with everybody,” Richard Layton says quietly. “That’s how we make sure that not a sparrow falls. We are doing God’s work, we do it thoroughly.”
“Prior Richard will sit with you, and hear all that is said,” I assert.
“Alas, no. Prior Richard will be our first interview.”
“Look,” I say, in sudden fury. “You can’t come in here to my priory, founded by my family, and ask questions as you like. This is my land, this is my priory. I won’t have it.”
“You did sign the oath, didn’t you?” Layton asks negligently, turning over the papers on the desk. “Surely you did? As I recall only Thomas More and John Fisher refused to sign. Thomas More and John Fisher, both dead.”
“Of course My Lady Mother signed.” Geoffrey speaks for me. “There is no question of our loyalty, there can be no question.”
Richard Layton shrugs. “Then you accepted the king as the supreme head of the Church. He orders that it be visited. We are here doing his bidding. You are not questioning his right, his divine right, to govern his Church?”
“No, of course not,” I say, driven.
“Then please, your ladyship, let us start,” Layton says with a most agreeable smile, pulls out the prior’s chair from behind the prior’s table, seats himself, and opens his satchel while Thomas Legh draws a stack of papers towards him and writes a heading on the first page. It says Visitation of Bisham Priory, April 1536.
“Oh,” Richard Layton says, as if it has just occurred to him. “We’ll speak to your chaplain too.”
He catches me quite unawares. “I don’t have one,” I say. “I confess to Prior Richard, as does my household.”
“Did you never have one?” Layton asks. “I was sure there was a payment, in the priory accounts . . .” He turns over pages as if looking for something he vaguely remembers, flicking through them like an actor playing the part of someone looking for a name in old papers.
“I did,” I say firmly. “But he left. He moved on. He gave me no explanation.” I glance at Geoffrey.
“Most unreliable,” he says firmly.
“Helyar, wasn’t it?” Layton asks. “John Helyar?”
“Was it?”
“Yes.”
They stay in the guesthouse of the priory for a week. They dine with the canons in the priory dining hall and they are wakened through the night by the priory bell ringing for prayer. I hear with some pleasure that they complain of sleeplessness. The cells are small and stone-walled and there are no fires except in the prior’s study room and in the dining hall. I am sure that they are cold and uncomfortable but this is the monastic life that they are investigating; they should be glad that it is poor and rigorous. Thomas Legh is accustomed to grander standards, he travels with fourteen men in his livery and his brother is his constant companion. He says that they should be staying in the manor and I say that they would be welcome but I have an infestation of biting fleas and all the rooms are being smoked and aired. Clearly, he does not believe me, and I do not try to convince him.
On the third day of their visit Thomas Standish, the clerk of the kitchen, comes bursting into the dairy where I am watching the maids press the cheeses.
“My lady! The villagers are up at the priory! You’d better come at once!”
I drop the wooden cheese press with a clatter on the well-scrubbed board and strip off my apron.
“I’ll come!” says one of the dairymaids eagerly. “They’re going to throw that Crummer man from his horse.”
“No, they’re not, his name is Cromwell, and you will stay here,” I say firmly.
I stride out of the kitchen, and the clerk takes my arm to guide me over the cobbles of the yard. “There’s just a dozen of them,” he says. “Nate Ridley and his sons, and a man I don’t know, and Old White and his boy. But they’re full of it. They say they won’t let the visitation happen. They say they know all about it.”
I’m just about to answer when my words are drowned out by a sudden peal of bells. Someone is ringing the bells out of order, out of time, then I hear that they are ringing them backwards.
“It’s a sign.” Standish breaks into a run. “When they ring the bells backwards, they signal that the commons have taken command, that the village is up.”
“Stop them!” I order. Thomas Standish runs ahead as I follow him to the priory where the fat bell ropes dangle at the back of the church. There are three Bisham men and one man I don’t know, and the clangor of the ill-timed peal is deafening in the small space.
“Stop it!” I shout, but no one can hear me. I cuff one of my men around the head with a hard backward slap of my hand, and I poke the other with the blunt cheese knife that I still have in my hand. “Stop it!”
They stop pulling the ropes as soon as they see me and the bells jangle on more and more unevenly until they are stilled. Behind me the two visitors, Legh and Layton, come tumbling into the church, and the men turn on them with a growl of anger.
“You get out,” I say to them briskly. “Go and sit with the prior. I can’t answer for your safety.”
“We are on the king’s business,” Legh starts.
“You’re on the devil’s business!” one of the men exclaims.
“Now then,” I say quietly. “That’s enough.”
To the two visitors I say, “I warn you. Go to the prior. He’ll keep you safe.”
They drop their heads and scuttle from the chapel. “Now,” I say steadily, “where are the rest of you?”
“They’re in the priory, they’re taking the chalice and the vestments,” Standish reports.
“Saving them!” old Farmer White says to me. “Saving them from those heretical thieves. You should let us do our work. You should let us do God’s work.”
“It’s not just us,” the stranger tells me. “We’re not alone.”
“And who are you?”
“I’m Goodman, from Somerset,” he says. “The men of Somerset are defending their monasteries too. We’re defending the Church, as the monks and the gentry should do. I came here to tell these good people. They must stand up and defend their own priory. Each one of us must save God’s things for better times.”
“No, we must not,” I say quickly. “And I’ll tell you why. Because after these two men have run away—and I am sure you can make them scuttle back to London—the king will send an army and they will hang each one of you.”
“He can’t hang us all. Not if the whole village rises,” Farmer White objects.
“Yes, he can,” I say. “Do you think that he does not have cannon, and handguns? Do you think he doesn’t have horses with lances and soldiers with pikes? Do you think he can’t build enough scaffolds for all of you?”
“But what are we to do?” The fight has quite gone out of them. A few villagers straggle in through the church door and look at me as if I will save the priory. “What are we to do?”
“The king has become the Moldwarp,” a woman cries out from the back of the crowd. Her dirty shawl is over her head and her face is turned away. I don’t recognize her and I don’t want to see her face. I don’t want to give evidence against her, as she goes on, shouting treason. “The king has become a false king, hairy as a goat. He’s run mad and eats up all the gold in the land. There will be no May. There will be no May.”
I glance anxiously at the door and see Standish nod reassuringly. The visitors have not heard this; they are cowering in the prior’s chamber.
“You are my people,” I say quietly into the unhappy silence. “And this is my priory. I cannot save the priory but I can save you. Go to your homes. Let the visitation finish. Perhaps they will find no wrongdoing and the canons will stay here and all will be well.”
There is a low groan as if they are all in pain. “And if they don’t?” someone says from the back.
“Then we must beg the king to dismiss his wrong-thinking advisors,” I say. “And put the country to rights again. As it was, in the old days.”
�
��Better put it back to the old days before the Tudors,” someone says very quietly.
I put my hand out to order them to be silent before someone shouts “À Warwick!”.
“Silence!” I say, and it sounds more like a plea than a command. “There can be no disloyalty to the king.” There is a mutter of agreement to that. “So we have to allow his servants to do their work.”
Some of the men nod as they follow the logic.
“But will you tell him?” someone asks me. “Tell the king that we cannot lose our monasteries and our nunneries. Tell him that we want our altars at the roadside and our places of pilgrimage. We need our feast days and the monasteries open and serving the poor. And we want the lords to advise him, not this Crummer, and the princess to be his heir?”
“I’ll tell him what I can,” I say.
Unwillingly, uncertainly, like cattle that have broken through a hedge into a strange field and then don’t know what to do with their freedom, they allow themselves to be chivvied out of the priory chapel and down the road to the village.
When all is quiet again, the door to the priory opens and the two visitors come out. I feel quite triumphant over their nervous sidle to the door of the church and the way they look around at the traces of unrest, the mud on the floor, the bell ropes hanging, and frown at the echo of the ringing.
“These are a very troubled people,” Legh says to me as if I have stirred them to rebellion. “Disloyal.”
“No, they’re not,” I say flatly. “They are completely loyal to the king. They misunderstood what you were doing, that is all. They thought that you had come to steal away the church’s gold and close down the priory. They thought that the Lord Chancellor was closing down the churches of England for his own benefit.”
Legh smiles at me thinly. “Of course not,” he says.
Next day, Prior Richard comes to me in my records room at the manor. I am seated at a great round rent table, with each drawer labeled with a letter. Every tenant’s deeds are in a drawer labeled with the right letter and the table can spin from A to Z so that I can draw out, in a moment, the document that I need. The prior’s arrival distracts me from my pleasure in the well-run business that is my home. “They are speaking with the nuns today.”
“You don’t think there will be a problem?”
“If your daughter-in-law complains . . .”
I close a drawer and push the table a little to the right. “She can say nothing that is critical of the priory. She might say that she has changed her mind about being a nun, she might say that she wants to come out and draw her dower from my rents, but that is not the sort of corruption they are charged to find.”
“It’s the only thing where we might be seen as at fault,” he says tentatively.
“You are not at fault,” I reassure him. “It was Montague and I who urged her to go in, and Montague and I who have kept here there.”
Still, he looks worried. “These are troubled times.”
“None worse,” I say, and mean it. “I’ve never known worse.”
Thomas Cromwell’s men, Richard Layton and Thomas Legh, take their leave of me with perfect civility and mount up to go. I note their good horses and their fine saddlery; I note Legh’s men and their smart livery. The king’s Church is a profitable service, it appears. Judging poor sinners seems to pay extraordinarily good wages. I wave them off, knowing that they’ll be back with a prompt decision, but even so I am surprised that a mere four days later, the prior comes to the manor and tells me that they are returned.
“They want me to leave,” he says. “They have asked for my resignation.”
“No,” I say flatly. “They have no right.”
He bows his head. “Your ladyship, they have a command with the king’s seal, signed by Thomas Cromwell. They have the right.”
“Nobody said that the king should be head of the Church to destroy it!” I burst out in sudden anger. “Nobody swore an oath saying that the monasteries should be closed and good men and women thrown into the world. Nobody wanted the stained glass taken from the windows, nobody wanted the gold taken from the altars, nobody in this country swore an oath calling for the end of the Catholic communion! This is not right!”
“I pray you,” he says, white as his linen, “I pray you be silent.”
I whirl to the window and I glare out at the sweetness of the green leaves on the trees, at the bobbing white and pink of the apple blossom over the orchard wall. I think of the child that I knew, of the little boy Henry who wanted to serve, who shone with innocence and hope, who was, in his childish way, devout.
I turn back. “I can’t believe this is happening,” I say. “Send them to me.”
The visitors, Layton and Legh, come into my privy chamber quietly, but without any signs of apprehension. “Close the door,” I say, and Legh closes it and they stand before me. There are no chairs for them, and I don’t move from my seat in the big chair with the canopy of state over my head.
“Prior Richard will not resign,” I say. “There is nothing wrong with the priory, and he has done nothing wrong. He will stay in his post.”
Richard Layton unrolls a scroll, shows me the seal. “He is commanded to resign,” he says regretfully.
I let him hold it towards me so that I can read the lengthy sentences. Then I look at him. “No grounds,” I say. “And I know you have no evidence. He will appeal.”
He rolls it up again. “There is no form of appeal,” he says. “We need no grounds. The decision is final, I am afraid, your ladyship.”
I rise to my feet and I gesture to the door to tell them that they are to go. “No, my decision is final,” I say. “The prior will not resign unless you can show that he has done something wrong. And you cannot show that. So he is staying.”
They bow, as they have to. “We will return,” Richard Layton says.
This is a testing time. I know that some monasteries have become lax and their servants a byword for corruption. I know—everyone knows—of the pigeon bones and the duck’s blood relics, and the bits of string that are offered to the gullible as the Virgin’s girdle. The country is full of fearful fools and the worst of the monasteries and nunneries have battened off them, misled them, exploited them, and lived like lords while preaching poverty. Nobody objects to the king appointing honest men to discover these abuses and stop them. But I shall see now what happens when the king’s visitors come to a priory that serves God and the people, where the treasures are used for the glory of God, where the rents taken by the prior are used to feed the poor. My family founded this priory and I will protect it. It is my life: like my children, like my princess, like my house.
Montague writes to me from London, unsealed and unsigned:
He says that he sees that God will not give him a son with her.
I hold the letter in my hand for a moment before I push it deep into the heart of the fire. I know that Anne Boleyn will not call herself queen for long.
In the hour before dinner, when I am sitting with my ladies in my privy chamber and the musician is playing the lute, I hear a great knock on the outer door.
“Go on,” I say to the musician who lets the notes die away as we listen to the sound of feet walking through the hall and coming up the stairs. “Go on.”
He strikes a chord as the door opens and Cromwell’s men Layton and Legh come into the room and bow to me. With them, like a ghost risen from the grave, but a triumphant ghost in new clothes, is my daughter-in-law, the grieving widow of my son Arthur, Jane, last seen clawing at the door of the family crypt and crying for her husband and son.
“Jane? What are you doing here? And what are you wearing?” I ask her.
She gives a little defiant laugh, and tosses her head. “These gentlemen are escorting me to London,” she says. “I am betrothed in marriage.”
I feel my breath coming faster as my temper rises. “You are a novice in a priory,” I say quietly. “Have you quite lost your mind?” I look at Richard Layton. “Are
you abducting a nun?”
“She has spoken with the prior, and he has released her,” he says smoothly. “No novice can be held if she changes her mind. Lady Pole is betrothed to marry Sir William Barrantyne and I am commanded to take her to her new husband.”
“I thought William Barrantyne just stole goods and lands from the Church?” I say viciously. “I am behind the times. I didn’t know he captured nuns also.”
“I am no nun, and I should never have been put in there and kept there!” Jane shouts at me.
My ladies jump to their feet, my granddaughter Katherine scuttles towards me as if she would stand between me and Jane, but I gently put her to one side. “You asked, you begged, you cried to be allowed to withdraw from the world because your heart was broken,” I say steadily. “Now I see your heart is mended and you beg to come out again. But be very sure to tell your new husband that he takes a poor novice, not an heiress. You will get nothing from me when you marry and your father may leave your inheritance away from a runaway nun. You have no son to bear your name or inherit. You can return to the world if you wish; but it will not return everything to you. You will not find matters as you left them.”
She is horrified. She had not thought of this. I imagine her betrothed will be horrified too, if he even goes ahead with marriage to a woman who is not an heiress. “You have robbed me of my estate?”
“Not at all, you chose a life of poverty. You took one decision in grief and now are taking another in temper. You cannot seem to take a decision and stay with it.”
“I will get my fortune back!” she rages.
Coolly, I look past her to Richard Layton, who has been observing this with growing uneasiness. “Do you still want her?” I ask indifferently. “I imagine that your lord Thomas Cromwell did not plan to reward his friend William Barrantyne with a penniless madwoman?”
He is at a loss. I press my advantage. “And the prior will not have released her,” I say. “Prior Richard would not do so.”
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