Rather than live in snuff will be put out.
He puts Bible, pen, and ink aside. He takes up the candle in his hand. Letting wax run warm on his fingers. Stares into the flame. Puffs his cheeks and blows it out in a gust.
Tosses the spent candle aside. Lowers his head to the pillow. And in a moment or two is deep and sound asleep.
Now for the rest: if we truly examine the difference of both conditions, to wit, of the rich and mighty whom we call fortunate, and of the poor and oppressed whom we account wretched, we shall find the happiness of the one and the miserable estate of the other so tied by God to the very instant, and both so subject to interchange (witness the sudden downfall of the greatest princes and the speedy uprising of the meanest persons) as the one hath nothing so certain whereof to boast, nor the other so uncertain whereof to bewail itself. For there is no man so assured of his honor, of his riches, health or life, but that he may be deprived of either or all at the very next hour or day to come.
RALEGH—Preface to
History of the World
A two-wheeled cart rattles windows. Riding on the driver’s rail are a boy and a man. The man is large and thick and square. Crudely carved from a tree trunk. The boy’s the image of his father. Both are dressed in simple homespun black. Neat and clean. Both are grave-faced, as solemn as preachers on Good Friday afternoon. In the cart behind them is a bale of fresh straw, some pots and buckets, and a long wooden chest like a sailor’s.
The boy shivers in the cold and shifts his limbs as an awkward, growing boy will.
The man holds the reins as the old horse, a white nag, sway-backed, walks along, clip and clop, head down, half asleep. The man with his head up and his back straight. His neck is so thick and corded it seems he has no neck at all. A square, crude-clipped head set flat upon the shoulders. The face, above a full beard, is hard as teakwood, calm and composed. The eyes, alive though; dark eyes, liquid, calm, and curiously gentle.
“Father,” the boy asks, “do you think he will give us some reward?”
The man’s expression does not change. He looks ahead along the narrow street. Nothing moves except his lips.
“It is the custom. And I know him to be a most gracious and generous gentleman, a true gentleman.…”
He means what he says, not being given to idle words. But the qualification, the second use of the word gentleman, has its edge. For this fellow is, by both law and the papers of William Segar, Garter King of Arms, a gent himself. By law and proper papers and at a price of twenty-two shillings paid to Segar, he has been awarded the arms of a gentleman.
Perhaps if he had had thirty pounds for the purpose (though the price is now forty, they say) he could also be a carpet knight, knighted by the King of England. There have been many, not all of them of any higher rank and many of less importance than he. After all, in the first year of his reign the King knighted a thousand men, including not only merchants, but a barber and a fellow whose one claim to honor was that he was married to the laundress of the late Queen. The King could hardly be blamed, of course. For the late Queen had left him a scant nobility and, likewise, so few knights that in many counties it was not possible to assemble enough to make a lawful jury.
Well, King James found one way to increase his wealth. Knighthood for sale. Noble titles less easy to acquire and more costly, but nevertheless upon the market. As early as his first year, in a stroke, James issued a summons to all the English whose lands yield more than forty pounds a year, to come and be knighted. Or else to make a lesser payment if they preferred not to purchase a title. And there were new titles, not only the costly English baronet, but all the titles of Scotland and even Ireland, some having precedence over English nobility. The King made a feast of nobility, creating sevenfold the number of English peers. And not neglecting his old kingdom, he invented the Order of Knights Baronet of Nova Scotia. For ten thousand pounds a gentleman could be named a baron and be called Lord.
Well, sir, no wonder that the heralds of the College of Arms, in imitation of the King, could make a fellow into a gentleman. The true heralds, of course. There are many counterfeit and crank heralds abroad who are also making good profit. And when the Garter King of Arms, established in Derby House, saw fit to grant arms to such as the son of a peddler, a soap maker, a plasterer, a fishmonger, a hosier, and even a common player, why, then, any man who could raise the price, even a cutpurse, had precedent for his ambitions.
The man on the rail of the two-wheeled cart paid his price and received arms, too, and was a certified English gentleman. But, through misfortune, there was a scandal concerning his case, not in the granting of arms, but an error of Segar in giving him arms still extant in France. For which the Garter King gained a respite from duty and a term in Marshalsea prison. For which the innocent man in the cart gained considerable embarrassment. And that embarrassment being more fuel heaped on a fire. For though his vocation and service is honorable and he performs it well, it is a vocation not much respected by common people.
He is resigned to that. And he is capable of making distinctions between gentlemen of this age and the last.
“Yes, lad,” he says quietly. “He will abide by old custom. And we shall each receive an adequate reward.”
They pass on. Only the creak of the old-fashioned wheels and the slow rhythm of hooves.
That pair is Mr. Gregory Brandon, Gent., hangman and executioner, together with his young son Richard, who is learning his father’s trade.
For the first time in the week a canopy of stars. New clarity of air and colder than the fog and gusts of rain on the feast day of St. Simon and St. Jude. Stars, afire with continual overbrimming of inner light, in cold clear cloudless air, burning steady and even. In foul weather, they are veiled from sight, obscured and diminished, suddenly few and poor; and the tired earth hunches to itself, lonely, a beggar without shelter. Ragged creature, sore and stiff, shivering like the last oak leaves, gnawed by hunger and without hope.
And then, upon a slight turning of wind, change of weather, and there they are! Still shining though we have seen them not; and therefore, o ye of little faith, ye have imagined them gone for good, blown out like old candles and ourselves left, hopeless, condemned, and self-condemning, to perpetual darkness.
Nay, there is more than breach of faith in this triumph over right reason, which tells us otherwise, refutes fallacious imagination, but is not heard. For is it not true, brothers, that we not only fear the future in the darkness of the present, but also in fear and trembling deny the truth of the past? Ascribing the memory of the sun and moon and all that multitudinous host of numbered but uncounted stars to our own fantasy?
What a foolish paradox is there, my foolish brothers! To permit imagination to rise above right reason in discord and untuning. And then, mark you, to deny the reports of five senses and all records of memory. To deny the works of reason in the name of idle imagination. Imagination, an upstart tyrant, having usurped the throne and scepter of the anagogical man, then empowered—by will, mind you, by our own free volition—to revise the chronicle of our lives and make it seem imagination has been always king and right reason only a Lord of Misrule.
How intricate the mind of man is at the craft of devising unhappiness!
How fierce is the spirit of man in the overthrow of felicity!
How weak is our power to withstand testing and travail!
In winter we fear spring will never come again. In springtime we shrug off memory of winter’s barren time, as we toss aside our cloaks upon the first warm day, and in blithe forgetfulness take the wonders of blooming and blossoming to be eternal.
At harvest we gorge like grunting swine, stagger in a grinning similitude of ourselves, belly tight as a drumhead with church ale, more like an African ape or monkey than an image of God, our Father. We dance beneath the harvest moon like gypsies until we fall. On earth we reach out to possess each other, man and woman slithering together in spittle and juices of flesh like fish in a cree
l.
Waking one day to a world of bristle and stubble, leafless trees and earth turned to iron again. Waking to shame and famine, having made no provision for body or soul. Even the pissant, the wren, and the squirrel shame us with industry. Waking to winter sprung upon us like an ambush. And yet instead of asking our Lord’s forgiveness for follies, we curse ourselves, which is in no way similar to repentance or contrition. Curse the weather, and curse Fortune, and, indeed, may come to curse the Almighty in our hopelessness!
For absence of hope is achieved by the banishment of faith, and charity steals away with the other two. He without hope is near to despair, close to that unforgivable condition which we name the sin against the Holy Ghost.
O ye of little faith! Could ye not watch and wait one hour with me?
Consider sheep, oft cited in the Scripture, who have no immortal soul. The sheep, who of all our beasts is most ignorant, being unable to save itself from not only the ravenous wolf and the wiles of the goat, being also incapable of preserving itself against its own folly and ignorance without continual herding and safeguarding, prodding by crook and staff, barking and nipping by faithful sheepdogs. The sheep, I say, dirty and stupid, lacking not merely soul but half the wit of a mongrel cur, fit to be sheared naked of greasy pride, then to be cut and cooked in its own fat and carved upon a table, the bones for the dogs and the dung heap. Consider that this sheep can demonstrate more faith and reason than a man. For sheep will safely graze, never doubting the presence of the shepherd though they see him not and though that shepherd pipe not a sound.
Our Shepherd pipes without ceasing, his music being in and of the world and all the firmament and in the Holy Scripture and in the omnipresent promptings of the Holy Spirit.
We are most fortunate sheep and altogether undeserving. For when we do not see the Shepherd, we deny him. And when our waxy ears, deaf to all but the noise of our hungers, pleasures, and pains, when our useless, faithless ears, I say, do not respond to the threefold harmony of our Shepherd’s pipe, we deny there is music anywhere.
And then, praise be His Name, there comes a slight change of wind, a turn of weather, and, lo and behold, the infinite majesty of starry heavens is revealed, a thousand thousand eyes forever watching over us; their luster undiminished and unfading; their music inaudible and ineffable but demonstrable by simplest intellection; holes and chinks in a crumbling wall of the darkness, revealing the promise of an immortal and infinite brightness which would blind mortal eyes; there are the stars innumerable as the tribes from the loins of Abraham.…
And then we rejoice in God’s gifts and mercy. As is meet and right and our bounden duty. Yet in joy and celebration of the world restored, robed in borrowed light, we should fall to our knees and weep for shame at our restless unbelief, our doubts and denials and unfaithfulness. Should offer up tears of repentance, contrition, and resolve; our paltry tears, which stir God the Father with smiling mercy and forgiveness, which God, in infinite mercy and wisdom, does mysteriously value, counting as nothing His own tears wept for us. His tears which some poets say are these very stars which brighten the darkness.…
So goes the portion of the sermon, as yet unspoken, taking shape in the mind of Robert Tounson.
No more than forty and already the Dean of the Collegiate Church of St. Peter in Westminster, he stands before the gate of the future. Waiting upon an occasion to enter into the garden of greatness, he presides over a famous domain. Worthy of the power of a bishop. Indeed, in its time it was a bishopric. Until Queen Elizabeth placed all the Abbey and its environs under the rule of a dean, but one independent of the bishops, all save the Archbishop. Power of office and responsibility are his, though not, like the abbots of old times, the concomitant wealth from possession of a hundred towns, a score of villages, more than two hundred manor houses and all the revenues thereof. None of that now, not since 1559, when Queen Elizabeth put out John Feckenham and the last monks of St. Benedict and turned the Abbey into a collegiate church.
It is enough for a young man to preside over, including all but the ancient palace and hall; the huge church including its multitude of sanctuaries, large and small, and within its boundary chapels, bell towers, gatehouses, cloisters, and a train of outbuildings and residences. Presiding over a thousand years of history, here where royalty, kings and queens from the dim Saxon days to children of King James, lie buried and where kings since the Conqueror have received the crown in the service of Coronation. Presiding over the shadowy tombs and mysteries of the future, he rules twelve prebends, a schoolmaster, an usher, and their servants. He is charged with the education of forty young scholars in the school, and also the care of twelve almsmen.
From where he sits in Jerusalem chamber, he can hear, dimly, noise of young scholars in the hall. Who, having attended their waking devotions, are eating a breakfast on enormous tables, made of wood from the ill-fated Armada, and given by the Queen.
Earlier he rose and left the deanery to see to the church. Walked the length of the nave, on beyond, past the high altar and the ring of chapels, and into the chapel of Henry VII at the east end. This place, crowded with royal tombs and effigies, most recently constructed chapel of his church, delights him and lifts his spirit. Well lit with candles and tapers, the wrought stone—walls, niches, columns, and tracery—springs heavenward, lighthearted, so craftily chiseled that it has been magically robbed of weight, is as airy as the play of fountains. And so the waking heart, a cold and heavy stone, may be broken by joy and lifted spiritually to join the wish of stone, aspiring to the heights where the tracery of vaults—like splashed water frozen at the instant of splashing, like the miraculous fountain of St. Thomas in far India—disappears.
Restored, he returned briskly, turning from the church through the chapel of St. Faith and across the great cloisters to the deanery. In the cloisters he was first startled, then inspired by the change of weather. Sky suddenly alive, afire with stars. It took his breath and lifted him higher than his prayers.
With no guests to entertain here, he has come to the Jerusalem chamber to collect his mundane thoughts for the affairs of the day. It is a quiet chamber, warmer and more pleasant than the deanery, with a fire casting its color on the deep-set painted windows, the polished cedar of paneling, bringing a living movement, new luster to the tapestries which tell the history of Jerusalem.
This has been a busy week with no time for leisure or for the luxury of meditation. Now he has a few minutes, thanks to his early rising, to think on the stars. Which have wakened his sleeping thoughts like a hive of ringing bells. And from that silent ringing he has come upon the subject for a sermon. A sermon worthy of a bishop—apt and simple, faithful to Gospel, albeit less ingenious and not so rhopographical as some more learned than he.
Let them spin their tropes, parade learning. They may please courtiers and Court ladies, may enjoy the pleasures of London. But they will not wear the bishop’s miter. For the bishop, shepherd of the flock, must be a humble man and wise in humility.
And Robert Tounson has been marked to be a bishop. He is a mere step away from the glory of his true vocation.
This has been a year for the death of old bishops and the investing of new ones.
There have been implicit promises, and these last months he has been on tenterhooks, as chairs and places fell vacant and were filled. Dr. John Jegon, Bishop of Norwich, died and there was much scrambling. When the tumult of gossip cleared, it was John Overall, Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, who was translated to that place.
It annoys Tounson, as it does other ambitious young divines, that they must jostle against bishops, too, who can use wealth to find fatter pastures. How can the Dean, without sufficient estate to win favor from the King, bid for a place against even the poorest bishop, who is rich as any earl? But who was it went, then, to Lichfield and Coventry? Why, none other than Dr. Valentine Carey, Dean of St. Paul’s. More power to him. It cost him a pretty penny.
It must have cost them both a goodly
sum. For Overall had first to overcome the Bishop of Bristow, who was also hungry for Norwich. Then the subtle Valentine Carey passed by Felton, Bishop of Bristow, to vault into the seat at Coventry.
Some consolation there in the price it cost Carey. At first it was believed that Dr. Anthony Maxie, Dean of Windsor and most pleasing to His Majesty, would gain a chair. And the bruit was that Valentine Carey edged him out with a fulsome five and twenty hundred thanks. For which thanks he received not Norwich, but Coventry.
Many places fell vacant in this year by the hand of the Lord. But they were filled by the open hands of the King and Council and sometimes surprisingly.
Item. The Bishopric of Chichester went to Thomas Morton, Bishop of Chester. And into his place came one John Bridgeman, a parson of Wigon.
Item. After much speculation Landaffe went to George Carleton.
Item. Most disappointing of all to Tounson was the elevation of Martin Fatherby, prebend at Canterbury, to the Bishopric of Salisbury. Which Tounson had some hopes for.
Item. Most recent the death of James Montague. Tounson has held no hopes in that direction. But he was as surprised as all others when Bishop Andrewes, the eloquent Lancelot Andrewes of Ely, and once Dean here, was made new Bishop of Winchester.
Still, in an odd year, with churchmen dying and the living playing at the game of chairs and music, there is possibility. Someone must take Lancelot Andrewes’ place at Ely, if and when he relinquishes it. Then there is news that when John King, Bishop of London, last preached before the Court and King, he was tiresome and did not please.
But, though gossip feed imagination, it is not a meal of hope.
More to the point is the news that this Fatherby, so newly made Bishop of Salisbury, is heavy, ill with a dropsy and not long for this world.
Perhaps King and Council work with wisdom, after all. True, the King is hard pressed for money and therefore a bishopric can cost a fortune. Yet there is some justice in this; for by moving the older bishops about or elevating such types as Martin Fatherby, known to be in poor health, the King can be certain that there will always be places to offer. And here’s irony too. For if Fatherby, for example, should die soon enough (pray for the health of his immortal soul; flesh is as grass that withers away), he shall not even have commenced to regain his investment. And still the diocese will be worth its weight and more. Why not earn it twice over, if one were a king?
Death of the Fox Page 52