Sacred Treason

by James Forrester

“You do not need to thank me.”

  “Nevertheless, you have avenged Henry’s death as well as my ordeal.” She paused, nervous, trying to find the right words—words that she could bear to hear herself saying. “They kept me in the cellar where he died. Walsingham’s guards told me. They also told me about what they did to him before they killed him—cutting strips of skin off his back, burning him, and other terrible things.”

  They fell silent. One church bell began to ring in the distance. Very soon other bells were ringing too, including the bell of St. Bride’s nearby.

  “Will you go down to Devon to find your wife tomorrow?” Clarenceux felt the pain in his abdomen and shoulder, and remembered what difficulty he had had just walking up the stairs and across the room. “Not tomorrow, no. It is a long way. But soon.”

  They fell silent again.

  “What will you do with Lord Percy’s document?”

  “I have not had much time to think about it. I have to keep it safe. Sir William Cecil wants me to guard it for him.”

  “He will use you. He is a cunning man.”

  “Maybe. But it is still in my possession. And we are still alive.”

  “Under the rule of a Protestant queen.”

  Clarenceux lifted his hand. “Don’t say that. Don’t be like the others. You told me that you did not want a revolution, but only to be safe. That is what you have got.”

  Rebecca smiled weakly. Then she realized Clarenceux could not see her face in the darkness of the hall, so she leaned forward and took his hand in hers and gave it a little squeeze.

  “Yes, and I am grateful. I just wish there was something I could do for you to make you as grateful to me.”

  He felt for her hand and held it in his. “You have already done enough. You saved my life. You worked out the sequence of letters in the book. You gave me strength in Hackney Church. Most of all you are still alive. I saw what a world without you looks like, just for one night, and it was so cold. I do not want to see such a world again.”

  “Sweet words, Mr. Clarenceux. But you understand my meaning, I am sure. Your wife will soon return, and when she does, you will be glad. She will not want me around, and nor will you. I understand now.”

  “What do you understand?”

  “You. And her. After Crackenthorpe arrested you, in this room, she and I talked upstairs in your study. And I did not understand then what it is about her that you love. The two of you seem so different. At times on our travels I thought perhaps you do not love her. But now I see that you do. For you, love is a matter of honor—just as it was for Lord Percy. He could not change and nor can you. Honor, duty, love, respect—all these things are the same to you. You are intrinsically loyal—you protect those you love as a matter of duty and those you love depend on you. You have built your own world around yourself, and you will defend it with your life.”

  “And now you too are part of that world.”

  “No. No, I am not. And I never can be. I was—but only while you were alone and in need of me. Now I must stay away from you. For both our sakes.”

  The prospect of being apart from her all the time was an emptiness. “This afternoon, Rebecca, sitting in this seat, I was alone for a short while. And I found myself reflecting on all the events of the last week. And I thought of all the people to whom I am grateful. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I owe more to you than to anyone else. It’s not just that I owe you my life; it is everything you—”

  “But that is what I am saying, Mr. Clarenceux. You cling to the past. For you the past is one long series of triumphs, adventures, and splendor, and wondrous proud moments and honorable gentlemanly things. You genuinely love the past. For me the past is not something to love. It is hunger, through not having enough bread. It is pain, the loss of three babies. The loss of my husband. Can’t you see that?”

  Clarenceux said nothing.

  Her voice was urgent, convinced of her rightness but struggling with emotion. “The big difference between you and Francis Walsingham is that the past means little or nothing to him. For him only the future counts; and he does not love it, he fears it. I am like that too. I fear the future, I really do.”

  Clarenceux shook his head. “I don’t know. But the bells will ring soon. Will you stay here tonight? I do not know if I have a bed left intact. But you are welcome to it if I do.”

  “Mr. Clarenceux, thank you, but I will take my chances. I cannot stay here any longer. Not with you.”

  Clarenceux wiped his face with his hand. “I know that it is selfish and unfair of me to say so but I cannot agree with you. I need you—”

  “No, Mr. Clarenceux, you need your wife. You love her. Imagine she were threatened—nothing would stop you defending her. Whatever you may feel at this moment, you know you would never forgive yourself if you let her be hurt. I can see now that you never touched me because you were protecting her, your marriage, and everything else that you believe is right and good and proper; everything else which is part of the life you have built around you.”

  Clarenceux suddenly knew that she was right. It struck him straight to the bone. He looked for some way to persuade them both that she was wrong but knew that he would be lying if he tried, and doing her a disservice as well as himself.

  “Where will you go?”

  “I will find somewhere. Home maybe. Or someone’s stable loft.”

  “Stay here, Rebecca.”

  “Is Thomas here still?”

  “Yes, downstairs. I told him I would call if I needed anything. But—”

  “Then he will look after you. You don’t need me.”

  “Rebecca, please.”

  She rose from the chair in the darkness and bent over him, and kissed his forehead. “Good-bye, Mr. Clarenceux.”

  He looked up and saw the outline of her face. “Rebecca, I…” But he could not find the words. “I am sorry if I have hurt you. I never meant to upset you…I still want to make you happy.”

  She put her hands either side of his face. “I know. That is the one thing I cannot forgive you for.”

  And then, second by second, she was further from him, further away and leaving. She was walking across the room, feeling her way. He heard her steps on the stairs and then the front door opening and closing.

  Clarenceux sat alone in his hall, in the darkness, his face wet with tears.

  76

  Lady Percy was sitting in her dark chamber at Sheffield Manor. She had been in the same chair all afternoon, looking across the park, hoping to see a messenger. None had come. A little rain had fallen, and the clouds were heavy in the sky as the evening drew on. Still she sat, waiting.

  After a while Benedict Richardson came with a lamp. She was unresponsive and declined his suggestion that she should eat. After a few more questions, to which she made no reply, he reached out to close the shutters to the window.

  “Leave them,” she commanded.

  “But my lady—”

  “You may go.”

  He looked at her and at the empty fireplace, then bowed and withdrew.

  Lady Percy’s thoughts had sunk into darkness with the passing of the day. No message had come. The Knights of the Round Table had been betrayed—she felt it. And with them she too had been betrayed. It seemed to her that the flame that had scorched her all her life, burning her through the years, had suddenly gone out.

  She looked for her sticks by the light of the candle that Richardson had left. She set them before her, stood up, and walked to the window. Slowly she leaned forward and rested her head on the frozen leaded glass.

  Out there, in the cold darkness, the queen of England’s rule held strong. Lady Percy knew it as a dark reign: a reign without true light. But it seemed to her at that moment that what lay beyond the window was less significant than what lay on this side.

  “I am a Talbot and I am a Catholic,” she whispered to the glass, “and I will never give up hope. I swear by almighty God and this great darkness in which
He has wrapped us, I will have my revenge. It is my destiny. That will be my changing from maiden to woman, not my marriage.”

  She remained at the window for some minutes before turning and slowly shuffling along an unlit stone corridor toward her bedchamber.

  77

  Clarenceux remained in his chair for a long time after Rebecca left. Minutes turned into quarters of an hour, and the first hour came to its silent end in the darkness. Eventually Thomas came up to the hall bearing a candle.

  “Thank you, Thomas.”

  “Mr. Clarenceux, sir?”

  “Yes, Thomas?”

  “Will things return to normal now? Are you going to stay?”

  “Yes, I am staying.” He sighed heavily. “When I have regained my strength, you and I will go down to Devon and bring back Awdrey and the family. Then things will be more or less as they were before.”

  “That is good, sir. It would be good if things got back to normal. There is one mattress that was not too badly damaged in the guest room. I picked up all the feathers and stuffed them back in as well as I could before I sewed it up. It should suffice for a few nights.”

  Clarenceux looked up at the old man in the candlelight. “Thank you, Thomas. Thank you for all you’ve done for me.”

  The servant bowed his head. “Sir?”

  “Yes, Thomas?”

  “I was wondering, in my time going to Devon and coming back, what was the meaning of Henry Machyn’s chronicle? It has been much on my mind.”

  “The meaning of the chronicle?” Clarenceux thought back to when he had received it, to Henry Machyn’s worried face. He thought too about the moment when he had seen his study wrecked, with parchment and paper all across the floor and his father’s portrait smashed. Then he had seen the wood of the door in a new real light, as if he had no possessions but was fighting his way through the world, and the whole world was a strange place. He thought too of Walsingham’s cellar and of searching for Rebecca in the cold churchyard. Finally his mind rested on the image of Rebecca herself, declaring to him that she was unimportant and had nothing, but still determined to go her own way.

  “The meaning, Thomas, was esperance.”

  “Sir?”

  Clarenceux smiled. “It was the last word in the chronicle. It means hope. In all our struggles, the last word is hope.”

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction, but it was inspired by some extant historical documents created by and referring to real historical characters. The real Clarenceux King of Arms in 1563 was one William Harvey (not Harley), who was appointed in 1556 and died in 1567. The real Henry Machyn was one of William Harvey’s London friends: he was a merchant taylor, funeral arranger, and parish clerk, who died in November 1563. Machyn’s name would have faded into obscurity if it had not been for his chronicle or “cronacle” (as he himself called it). He began writing in 1550, shortly before the death of his brother, Christopher. According to the official copy of his will, he left his chronicle to “Master Clarenceux” (i.e., William Harvey).

  Sometime after the death of William Harvey, the chronicle was acquired by the great collector Robert Cotton (d. 1631). It thus became part of what was without doubt the greatest library of English historical manuscripts ever assembled by an individual. This massive collection was later moved to Ashburnham House in Westminster where, on October 23, 1731, a terrible fire destroyed the building. Many manuscripts were lost altogether. Many others were rescued as flames consumed their outer edges—Machyn’s manuscript was one of these. Its binding, margins, and spine were all burnt away; only the central portion of each page survived. For the next hundred years these charred pages lay loose and unsorted in a box in the British Museum. Eventually they were put in order by Sir Frederick Madden in 1829 and edited by John Gough Nichols, being published as The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London in 1848. A growing interest in sixteenth-century history brought it to wider notice, and so Henry Machyn was included in the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, published in 1893.

  In 1999, when working at the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, I was commissioned to rewrite the entry on Henry Machyn for what was to become The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Over the course of the twentieth century, his self-taught style of writing had led to his text being studied as one of the few examples of phonetic spelling to survive from the Tudor period. In addition, his unusual choice of words—which verged perhaps on dialect—meant that his chronicle was not just valuable to social historians, but a key work for linguistic scholars too, especially for those who wanted to know how English sounded before Shakespeare and how different regional accents could be mapped for the early period. But where was Henry Machyn originally from? Was he a Yorkshireman or a Londoner? Being a historian rather than a linguistic expert, I set about answering this question in a purely historical way, through archival research. I found the official copy of his will, which was previously unknown, in the Corporation of London Records Office, together with another family will. Using these documents and other archival sources, the family origins could be shown to lie in northern Leicestershire. I then pursued my interest in Machyn further, drawing upon references to him in the Merchant Taylors’ records and other parish sources. The result was an article, “Tudor Chronicler or Sixteenth-century Diarist? Henry Machyn and the Nature of His Manuscript,” published in The Sixteenth Century Journal (volume xxxiii, 2002, pp. 981–998). This remains the fullest account of his life and work.

  In the course of my research I followed up a reference in Machyn’s chronicle to the painter-stainer John Heath (d. 1553), father of Lancelot Heath, who was a witness of Machyn’s will. One line in Heath’s own will (which is now in the National Archives, PROB 11/25/Bucke), inspired this book:

  Item I give and bequeath to the Knights of the Round Table if I do it not by life time twenty shillings to be spent at Mile End.

  Machyn mentioned this bequest in his chronicle, stating under an entry for March 22, 1563, (the day of John Heath’s funeral) that the Painters and the Clerks “had twenty shillings to make merry with all at the tavern.” But it was the reference to the “Knights of the Round Table” that attracted my attention. Having also written an article for the ODNB on Thomas Talbot, one of the founder members of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, I knew there were various societies that had huge political importance. Indeed, the original Society of Antiquaries was suppressed due to its growing political influence. I thought about that reference to “the Knights of the Round Table” for the next ten years.

  Machyn’s chronicle is not a seditious document, but it is an extraordinary one, describing the drama of day-to-day life in early Elizabethan England and detailing a very large number of executions for treason and heresy.

  Recently a new edition, entitled A London Provisioner’s Chronicle, 1550–1563, by Henry Machyn has been created under the auspices of Professor Richard Bailey and made freely available online as a joint publication of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/machyn/). Incidentally, this allows clarity as to the meaning of “drawing” in the phrase “hanging, drawing, and quartering.” It does not normally refer at this period to disembowelling but the process of dragging the condemned person to the gallows. A good example is that of Mr. William Thomas: Machyn states that he was arraigned at the Guildhall in May 1554 and sentenced to “suffer death, to be drawn and quarted.” Machyn goes on to say that some days later, on May 18, 1554, Mr. Thomas:

  “was drawn upon a sled…from the Tower unto Tyburn…And he was hanged and after his head struck off and then quartered. And the morrow after his head was set on London Bridge and three quarters set over Cripplegate’.

  Clearly the sentence of “drawing” resulted in the man being “drawn” in a sled, publicly, to the place of execution—not to having his entrails pulled out of him while he was still alive.

/>   As mentioned above, the original binding and the beginning and end pages were lost in the fire in 1731, and so, in developing the plot in this book, I had some freedom to invent two entries that Machyn never wrote—specifically the first and last lines. However, the other quotations from Machyn’s chronicle are present in the original (although I have modernized some spellings). The quotation from Machyn’s will is similarly a genuine one. The epitaph on Lord Percy’s tomb in Hackney church is likewise accurate, and Esperance was an actual Percy family motto—although the additional lines from Job were not on the original tomb. Many other elements of the story are based on historical reality—the collapse of the spire of St. Paul’s, the parishes of residence of the protagonists, the timing of the full moon in December 1563, Sir William Cecil’s patronage of the young Walsingham, Cecil’s house on the Strand, the location of the Bull’s Head tavern, the appearance of Sheffield Manor, Lady Percy’s Catholic sympathies, the existence of chalk caverns in Chislehurst, the layout of Hackney in Elizabethan times, and Eustace Chapuys’s letter to the Holy Roman Emperor, to point to just a few. Creating the story has been an interesting experience for me as a historian, juggling with past reality, allowing some facts to fall, and inventing others to suit the fiction. Sir William Cecil and Francis Walsingham were genuine characters, of course, as were Lord and Lady Percy and the royal individuals. Richard Crackenthorpe and Julius Fawcett are fictitious characters. Three historical individuals have had their names changed. One is William Harvey himself. Another is Henry Machyn’s wife, who was actually called Dorothy Lawe or Lowe (not Rebecca). Daniel Gyttens—one of the actual signatories of Henry Machyn’s will—was correctly Davy Gyttens.

  The possible illegitimacy of Queen Elizabeth is a tantalizing mystery. As stated in the book, the Act of Parliament Titulus Regis (1484) did establish two circumstances for the illegitimacy of Edward V—his father’s pre-contract of marriage with another woman (Eleanor Butler), and the subsequent marriage in secret to Edward V’s mother (Elizabeth Woodville). Henry VII repealed this Act shortly after gaining the throne in 1485 and had the original cut out of the records and burnt, but copies did survive and were known in the sixteenth century. On top of this, it is worth noting that it was the circumstances, not the Act itself, that removed the boy from the throne: the Act was passed a year after Richard III had taken the crown from his nephew on the grounds of illegitimacy. So it is fair to argue, historically, that Queen Elizabeth was similarly vulnerable at the start of her reign, for her circumstances were similar to those of Edward V. To be precise, her father had been previously married (to Catherine of Aragon) and his second marriage (to Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother) took place in secret. Although it could be said that Henry VIII’s first marriage was annulled, there remained a question mark over Anne Boleyn. If she too had previously been contracted to Lord Percy, before marrying Henry VIII in secret, then Elizabeth was illegitimate on her mother’s side as well as (arguably) on her father’s.