Sarum (136 page)
Authors: Edward Rutherfurd
He was quiet, but he was a Catholic. Abigail – whom Shockley often saw when he dropped by to see the young man – tolerated his presence in silence, but she was prepared to admit:
“At least there are no more harlots here.”
Abigail was often at the house at Fisherton. She had found a young woman to suckle the baby, but all the other duties of keeping the little cottage and feeding Robert Mason’s family fell to her. Often Peter would walk the mile from Culver Street to Fisherton and eat with them before returning contentedly to his workshop in Culver Street, and Shockley guessed that the simple fellow was glad enough not to be on his way to Geneva. He often looked in upon the cutler in his workshop and never heard a word of complaint about his lot except once when he secretly confided:
“I miss Nellie, though.”
For Abigail Mason, the two years that followed Queen Mary’s accession were an increasingly difficult time. She had no doubt that she had done right in staying: that at least was some comfort. But the Catholic conditions were hard to bear. She avoided attending mass. This might have brought her into trouble with the authorities; but since it was known that she was looking after two households, and since no one was ever sure whether she was at Fisherton or in Salisbury, her absence could be conveniently overlooked.
And besides, she was quiet.
“I would speak out,” she told Shockley one day at Culver Street. “But there are our cousin Peter’s children to look after as well as ourselves . . .” and she quietly spread her hands. “I pray each day for deliverance,” she added.
She was ceaselessly at work. The dark rings under her eyes seemed to grow darker so that sometimes she looked gaunt and hollow-eyed. “She’s like a deathshead,” Shockley sometimes thought. But she went about her business, silent and indefatigable, and when once John Moody offered to let Peter join his own meal at Culver Street one day, she quietly but firmly refused.
“You would not eat with Catholics?” she asked Peter, and her husband, after pausing for a moment agreed that no, he supposed he would not.
In the spring of 1554, Abigail Mason herself observed a subtle change in her own behaviour for which she reproved herself. The trouble was Peter.
It was not easy to bear his indifference to her suffering: not that he meant any harm – far from it. Indeed, he was so eager, always, to please her. He would bring little gifts for Robert’s children; he would greet her sometimes with little posies of flowers when she returned tired in the evenings. Yet always, in his broad, affectionate, rather foolish smile, she could see clearly that he was untroubled by their predicament.
“Dost thou not grieve that we are unable to go to God’s city of Geneva?” she several times asked him and Peter, wanting to please her but plainly confused, would look troubled before replying hopefully:
“Are we not doing God’s work here?”
And she knew that he was relieved because he was not being asked to move from his little workshop.
Most of the time Abigail was silent. But sometimes alone with her husband and hearing of the raising of a new altar in some Wiltshire church, or the celebration of a dirge in the city, she would cry out:
“How can you smile, Peter Mason, when such things are done? How long are we to suffer the Roman Antichrist – or will you just stand weakly by?”
At such times, Peter would hang his head, confused and ashamed more on account of the scorn he sensed in her voice than any clear perception that he had sinned. On three occasions he led Shockley to one side and asked his advice.
“She will speak out in public one day,” he told the merchant. “I fear it and I fear for her, Master Shockley.”
Hearing it, Edward Shockley too was troubled – for he, too, feared that Abigail’s resolute nature might bring her into direct conflict with Bishop Capon, and he dreaded the consequences.
It was on the third occasion that Peter had said quietly:
“My wife is not like me: she is brave and strong.” And Edward, though he agreed, had been sorry to see the cutler look so ashamed.
Strangely, though he even went to mass upon occasion, Abigail felt less friction with Robert at Fisherton. Unusually for the family, he had a thick shock of dark hair; he had a powerful, burly figure, and firm convictions.
“This rule is a great iniquity,” he told her. “But I’ll not oppose it until these children are grown,” and he gestured towards his six children.
“Does thy conscience trouble thee?” she asked.
“Yes,” he told her frankly, “every day. But this is a time to suffer in silence. That’s my judgement.”
And though she was not sure if he was right, she understood his decision, and bowed her head in respect.
“May we pray to God in the proper manner in private?” she asked.
To this Robert Mason did agree; with Robert leading their prayer, Peter, Abigail, the six children and several of their neighbours would meet discreetly in Fisherton and conduct their Protestant services each week with a good conscience.
There was no question about one thing at least: Robert’s children needed her. It was a comfort in her adversity to have them about her. The baby in particular she cherished; indeed, it was hard sometimes to draw herself away from it, and often when she arrived back in Culver Street she would stand silently at the door of her husband’s little workshop and gaze at him wondering:
“Will God perhaps, after all, grant us a child?”
If she could not quite respect her husband over the all-important matter of religion, she could not fault his conduct. Not only did Peter try to help her, but he never complained. Often she was at Fisherton longer than she had intended, but when she came to him at last and apologised for her long absence he would smile sweetly and answer: “I am well enough here,” so that at times she wondered if perhaps her absence was a relief to him.
Was it that thought, she asked herself, that several times made her burst out at him in renewed anger at his indifference to the terrible events of Mary’s reign?
Edward Shockley watched all these developments in the Mason household with mixed feelings. Sometimes, when he looked at simple Peter and his intense, passionate wife, he could not help feeling a tinge of contempt for the cutler; but no sooner had he felt it than he rounded upon himself:
“And you, Edward Shockley, who understand these things more plainly than Peter Mason. Aren’t you going to mass with the rest like the coward you are?” he would demand of himself.
For certainly there were no more perfect Catholics in Sarum now than Edward Shockley and his wife Katherine.
Each week, with her brother John, they went to mass and Edward solemnly raised his eyes at the elevation of the Host.
Katherine was happy; and he had to admit, that as far as his home life went, so was he. She was pregnant again.
And yet, despite this happiness, like a man who is unfaithful to his wife when he is happy with her, Edward Shockley was tempted to lead a double life.
He knew about the Mason family’s illicit prayer meetings because Peter Mason had told him; and it was one day in the late spring that he had astonished the cutler by suggesting that he join them one day.
“Only, you must not speak of it,” he made him promise.
Peter was delighted, and if Abigail was not, she pursed her lips and said nothing.
He liked the prayer meetings for several reasons, not least of which was that it made him feel proud of himself.
He might lie in public when he raised his eyes at the elevation of the Host; he might lie in private to his wife. But at least here, with these good people at their secret prayers, he felt he was being honest.
The meetings were illicit and dangerous. The thought that he might be discovered frightened him. But he felt sure he could trust the Masons.
“Of course,” he remarked to Abigail one day, “though I pray in private, with my wife and family to consider, I cannot speak out.” He watched her, hoping for the sign of approval.
Abigail said nothing at first, but she turned to look up at him with her deep brown eyes; he noticed how pale her face was, how dark the shadows were under her eyes; and she gazed at him now for fully half a minute. It was a look of perfect understanding, of resigned contempt, and of gentle condemnation that he would never forget.
“Ask God and thy conscience, Edward Shockley,” she said at last. “Do not ask me.”
He blushed deeply and did not raise the subject again.
It was after one of those meetings that he experienced an anxious moment. For as they came together out of the little house in Fisherton, Edward Shockley suddenly caught sight of John Moody. He was standing in the lane, about a hundred yards away, and since he was in the act of turning, it was impossible to be sure whether the young man had seen him or not.
He hurried away, and put the incident out of his mind.
In the year of Our Lord 1554, at the end of November, after Parliament formally submitted to him as papal legate, the kingdom of England was received back into the Church of Rome.
That this had been achieved, despite the earlier wishes of Parliament to remain free of Rome, was due to the determination of three people: Mary, her husband Philip of Spain, and the legate himself, Cardinal Pole.
The last was a remarkable figure. He was of English royal blood. His only ambition, to be pope, and his mission, to return England to the fold.
He was frankly disgusted by what he found.
The English Parliament would only vote for a return to Rome on condition that none of the Church lands taken by King Henry and now in their hands were to be restored – a greedy pragmatism that appalled him. As for the Church of England, the Protestant success, he roundly told the English Catholic clergy, was chiefly their own fault. If they had not so utterly neglected their duty, the people would have held the Roman Church in more respect. “You’ve only yourselves to blame.” Now, however, action was called for: and the first task was to place worthy priests in every parish.
“There’s only one problem,” Forest remarked caustically to Shockley: “no worthy priests.”
The shortage of priests was chronic: even the august Cardinal Pole could not immediately change that. The Catholic reform of Queen Mary was, in religious terms, an undistinguished affair.
But certain things the queen and cardinal could do. If they could not supply sound Catholics, they could root out and destroy heretics, and from the end of 1554 they set out on that course.
They were dark years for the queen as well as her subjects. Tortured by the misery of a false pregnancy when all she wanted in the world now was a child; made still more desperate by the coldness of her husband Philip, who soon returned for long periods to the continent; the reign of Bloody Mary was steeped in misery.
While the Protestant preacher John Knox thundered from outside the realm that good Englishmen should overthrow their tyrants, the tyrants in question set about their terrible work.
In 1555, the burnings began.
When news came that two of England’s greatest Protestant bishops, Latimer and Ridley, were publicly burned, Shockley could only shake his head in despair.
“We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England as shall never be put out,” Latimer had cried out. It seemed to Shockley that by killing such men Pole and the queen were offending ordinary Englishmen more deeply than they realised.
“Cardinal Pole’s giving orders to dig up dead heretics too and burn their bodies,” Forest told him one day with grim amusement. “You can’t say the man isn’t thorough.”
But it was in the spring of the following year that another event, much less heroic, stirred the hearts of many Englishmen still more.
For poor Archbishop Cranmer, the author of the English Prayer Book, had honest doubts. Had it been right to deny the Holy Father in Rome and put in his place as head of the Church the terrible figure of Henry VIII? Had it been right to annul the marriage of the blameless Katherine of Spain, whose daughter was now queen? Was it right to deny the doctrine of purgatory, Transubstantiation and the rest, about which there were so many divisions even amongst the reforming parties? Cranmer had held the new English Church together and risen to great heights – but had he, after all, perhaps been wrong?
It was not just his death they wanted. It was a confession. They kept him waiting for a month; they worked upon his doubts; they argued with him, wearied, probed, assaulted his mind. They carefully flayed the raw nerve of his doubting conscience. And they broke him. They broke him twice.
Edward Shockley was standing on Fisherton Bridge, talking to Peter and Abigail Mason when a passer-by gave them the news.
“Cranmer has recanted. Signed the document with his own hand – says he was wrong all along!”
For a second all three looked at each other in amazement. Edward spoke first.
“They’ll burn him now. They’ve got what they wanted.” He felt bitter.
But Abigail, looking at the two men, only said bleakly:
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