London (87 page)

When Dan Dogget reported for duty one bright morning in May, he was in a cheerful mood. He was certainly a handsome sight. A scarlet jacket laced with gold, white hose, gleaming black shoes with silver buckles and, on his head a smart peaked cap of black velvet: the summer livery of the king’s watermen suited his splendid figure very well.

The months since he had joined the royal barge had been happy indeed. The pay was everything he had hoped for; and on ceremonial occasions the bonuses could be huge. Only one matter had given him any difficulty. He had never had to submit to discipline before. When the barge-master curtly told him what to do, he sometimes experienced a kind of bafflement, and more than once he had caught himself longing for the cheerful anarchy of his father. I suppose, he acknowledged to himself, I’m more like him than I thought. But he managed to keep his feelings under control.

He was taken aback when, as soon as he arrived at the Greenwich waterfront, the barge-master told him: “You’re off duty today, Dogget. I’ve a message here that says you’re to go to the Charterhouse. Your father’s there?” Dan nodded and the master grinned. “Seems your old man’s giving a bit of trouble. You’d better be off there.”

It was worse than he had feared. When he arrived at the monastery, Dan found the sub-prior awaiting him, and also his sister. “The prior is most displeased,” the man informed him. “Lord have mercy on his soul, poor old man,” his sister offered, with aggressive piety. “It’s up to you, Dan,” she added firmly.

It had been an event for the Charterhouse monks: the younger ones had never seen anything like it. For Will Dogget in his cups was still a memorable figure. He had gone into a local tavern and made some acquaintances there who had bought him drinks. He had drunk there and at other taverns for some hours. He had given them a song and then at last, having consumed far more than he had done for many months, he started back towards the Charterhouse.

It was dark and the big outer gateway was closed when Will Dogget staggered up. When his good-natured banging failed to elicit any response, he had decided to see if he could break the gate of the monastery down. When a greatly perturbed young monk had finally opened the gate, the old man had walked sorrowfully over to a little nut tree in the yard, sat down with his back to it and had given them a few verses of a waterman’s ditty the language of which had certainly never been heard in the Charterhouse before.

“We cannot have this,” the sub-prior explained. The old man would have been ejected that morning if his daughter had not sworn by all the saints whose images she sold that she could do nothing for him.

When he reached his father, Will raised himself to a sitting position, and gave Dan a half-reproachful, half-guilty look.

“Well,” he sighed, “your sister won’t have me. The monks are telling me I’ll have to go and live with you again.”

“You can’t,” Dan said firmly. “I’ve no room.”

Help eventually came from the prior himself. “Your father is not a bad soul,” he told Dan with commendable frankness. “But,” he continued gravely, “the work of this monastery is serious. Your father may remain on one condition: that he stays within our gates.”

Dan looked at his father’s face. He didn’t rate the chances highly.

Susan Bull’s nightmare began on a perfect summer day.

It was one of the things Susan liked about Rowland that, while his career and marriage had led him towards the gentle class in society, he was not in the least ashamed of his family of brewers; and every few months they would pay a visit to the old brewery at Southwark. Thomas had accompanied them on this occasion, and after showing him round the extensive premises which the brewery occupied now, the family had all repaired to the old George Inn where the business had first begun.

Susan had been feeling rather mellow. The danger she had feared in April had receded. Whether they liked it or not, hardly anyone else had refused the Supremacy oath; and though Fisher, More and Doctor Wilson were still confined to the Tower, no further action had been taken against them. The mood of the court was also lighter. “The king and Queen Anne are happy together,” Thomas reported. “Everyone is sure there’ll be a male heir sooner or later.” Above all, Rowland seemed to be contented. The crisis with his conscience now past, he was enjoying his work and their life together had been especially happy.

It was a jolly party, consisting of the three visitors, Rowland’s old father and his two brothers. Susan always felt comfortable with the Bulls. Unlike Rowland, who with his dark hair and balding head looked more like a Celtic Welshman, they had remained true to the family type, with fair hair, blue eyes and broad Saxon faces. They were solidly conservative in all their opinions; but if they lacked Rowland’s intellectual gifts, it was obvious that they were as proud of him as he was of them, and soon Thomas was cheerfully assuring them: “Such a fine scholar as Rowland can’t fail to be chancellor one day.”

Thomas was at his best. He gave them vivid depictions of the gay life of the court, the jousts, the sports, the music. He told them funny stories about all the great folk there. Rowland’s father was curious about the painter Holbein, who had already made portraits of many of the greatest figures in England. “Do you know,” Thomas told them, “his painting of King Henry is so lifelike that the first day it was hung one of the courtiers, who didn’t know it was there, gave a huge start and bowed to it!”

He even made his dour master Cromwell sound delightful. “Cromwell is tough,” he conceded, “but he has a fine mind. He loves the company of scholars and Holbein often dines with him. But do you know who his closest friend is? Archbishop Cranmer himself.” He grinned at Susan. “We courtiers are not all so bad,” he said.

For a long time, in the old tavern where Dame Barnikel had once presided, they enjoyed each other’s company so much that by mid-afternoon when they decided to return by river to Chelsea, they were all a little drunk.

How well everything looked, Susan thought, as their barge skimmed up the stream. The surface of the water was like liquid glass; the sky was blue, the air was still. There was no doubt that the Tudors had improved London. As they passed the mouth of the Fleet, narrower now thanks to repeated encroachments, she looked with approval at the king’s new waterside hall by Blackfriars and, across the Fleet, reached by a bridge, the little palace of Bridewell for important foreign visitors. She smiled at the Temple enclosure and at the green lawns of the great houses, each with its own river steps. True, the old palace of the Savoy had lost its ancient glory – it had never recovered from Wat Tyler’s destruction more than a century before and the site contained only a modest hospital now. But just as they approached Westminster there was another huge building site, the splendid new palace which King Henry was going to call Whitehall.

By Westminster, she realized that Rowland was really rather flushed. She did not mind. He was humming softly to himself, but quite tunefully. His eyes were glazed. As for Thomas, he seemed to find everything amusing.

It was a few minutes later, after they had passed Westminster and were drawing level with the archbishop’s Lambeth Palace on the opposite bank that Rowland nudged her and pointed. By Lambeth steps, she now observed, a handsome barge had tethered and its occupants were about to walk through the big brick gatehouse to the palace.

“There goes Cranmer,” he said, and Susan watched curiously as a tall, handsome figure emerged from the barge. But her attention was soon caught by something else. For as the men were unloading a quantity of baggage, she noticed that four of them were carrying a large box, almost like a coffin.

“Do you suppose someone has died?” she said.

And then, for no good reason that she could see, Thomas started to giggle.

“I can’t see what’s so funny,” she remarked. “People do die, you know.” But now he burst out laughing. “I think,” she said crossly, “you might explain.”

“Cranmer’s little secret,” he muttered, then grinned. “Hush.”

“You’re drunk,” she sighed. His eyes were bloodshot.

“Maybe, sister.” He was quiet for a few moments. The coffin went through the gatehouse. Then he chuckled again. “Do you promise not to tell,” he said confidentially, “if I tell you what’s in that box?”

“I suppose so,” she said reluctantly.

“Mistress Cranmer,” he grinned. “That box contains his wife.”

For a moment Susan could not speak. Priests sinned, of course, although the English clergy had in fact been rather free of this kind of laxity recently. But for the archbishop to keep a woman . . . “Cranmer has a doxy?” she queried.

But Thomas was shaking his head. “Not a doxy. She’s his lawfully wedded wife. His second, actually. They were married before he became archbishop.”

“But does King Henry know?”

“Yes. Doesn’t approve. But he likes Cranmer. Needs him too, to legitimize the Boleyn marriage. So he’s made Cranmer promise to keep it a secret. That’s why Mistress Cranmer is never seen. When he travels, she goes in a box.” He laughed again. His words were a little slurred. “Don’t you think it’s funny?”

Susan looked at Rowland, but he was still humming, apparently not quite aware of what was being said. Just as well, she thought. “She must be a loose sort of woman,” she said with disgust.

“Not at all,” Thomas replied. “Very respectable. Cranmer married her when he was studying in Germany. I believe her father’s a pastor.”

“Germany?” She frowned. A pastor? It took her a moment to realize the implication. “A Lutheran pastor?” she asked. “Do you mean,” she continued, amazed, “that this woman, who is married to our own archbishop, is a Lutheran?” And then an even worse thought occurred to her. “But what does this mean about Cramner? Is
he
a covert heretic?”

“A modest reformer,” he assured her. “No more.”

“And the king? Surely he doesn’t secretly sympathize with the Protestants?”

“Good heavens, no,” he cried.

She supposed it was so. She noticed, though, that the conversation had sobered him. He even looked a little anxious. But she would probably have left the matter there if she had not suddenly had a terrible flash of perception.

“And you, Thomas,” she turned on him. “What are you?”

Yes, he was sober now. She looked into his eyes, but he dropped them and did not answer.

For Thomas, as for many others, the conversion had taken place when he was a student – though to call the radical change in his beliefs a conversion was not quite proper, since he had not actually joined another faith.

Indeed, the process had been subtle. Part of it he had felt free to admit to Susan and Rowland in their conversations at Chelsea: the scholar’s desire to purify the scriptural texts, the intellectual’s scorn for idolatry and superstition. But beyond this lay something far more radical and dangerous, and for Thomas at least, the inspiration for these other ideas could be summed up in a single word: Cambridge.

Of the two great universities, Cambridge had always been a more radical place than traditionalist Oxford. And when Cambridge men, inspired by the Renaissance scholar Erasmus, turned their gaze upon the creaking old colossus of the medieval Church, they soon stripped it down to its mechanical essentials; even the most hallowed doctrines were examined.

Thomas never forgot the first time he had heard the central doctrine of Transubstantiation – the miracle of the Mass – attacked. He had known, of course, that Wyclif and the Lollards had questioned it. He was aware that heretical Protestants in Europe were now denying it. But when he heard a respected Cambridge scholar in action, he had been shaken.

“Discussion of this question,” the scholar had pointed out, “has usually been about details. Does God really grant a miracle to every priest every time? Or, more philosophically, how can the Host be both bread and the body of Christ at the same time? But all this,” he stated confidently, “is unnecessary speculation. My case is far simpler. It rests on what the Bible actually says. In only one of the four Gospels does Our Lord tell his disciples to re-enact this part of the Last Passover Supper, and all He says is: ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ Nothing more. It is a commemoration. That is all. Why, then, have we invented a miracle?”

By the time he left the bracing East Anglian air of Cambridge, Thomas Meredith was no longer a believing Catholic.

If pressed to define his allegiance, he would have had to say he belonged to the party of reform. It was a broad group. Though Cambridge was its intellectual base, there was a little circle around the rising scholar Latimer at Oxford, too. There were progressive churchmen like Cranmer, some prominent Londoners, aristocratic sympathizers at court, including some of Queen Anne Boleyn’s relations; and even, as Thomas had discovered, Secretary Cromwell. It was also an élite. The majority of English folk were attached to the old, familiar ways. As usually happens, the reformers were not answering a cry from the people: they had merely decided to improve them.

“I’m not sure if I’m a Lutheran or not,” Meredith had recently confessed to Cromwell, “but I do know I want to see religion radically purified.” There was only one man in England, however, who could change the religion of the people: the king. How could the reformers hope to move the self-proclaimed Defender of the Faith towards their camp?

“Opportunity,” Cromwell said. “It’s that simple. After all,” he reminded him, “who could possibly have foreseen, when it began, the amazing outcome of the Boleyn affair? Yet for us reformers it was an astounding gift, because it is causing the king to break with Rome. We can build on that.”

“The king may be excommunicated,” Thomas objected, “and he may tolerate Cranmer’s tendencies because he likes him, but he still seems to hate heretics as much as ever. He hasn’t moved an inch towards reform.”

“Patience,” Cromwell grunted. “He can be influenced.”

“But how?” Thomas cried. “By what arguments?” At this, Cromwell had only smiled.

“I see,” he remarked with a shake of his head, “that you still know nothing of princes.” He looked him calmly in the eye. “If you want to influence a prince, young man, forget arguments. Study the man.” He sighed. “Henry loves power. That is his strength. He is hugely vain. He wants to look like a hero. That is his weakness. And he needs money. That is his necessity.” His small eyes bored into Thomas. “With these three levers we can move mountains.” And now he smiled. “We may even, young Thomas Meredith, be able to bring a religious reformation to England.” He patted the young man’s hand. “Give me time.”