Death of a Chancellor (31 page)

Jarvis Broome was a handsome young man, cleanly shaven, with a large collection of ancient volumes stacked in neat piles around his desk. He showed Powerscourt to a chair with a view of the
college lawns and a brief sliver of river.

‘Gavin Brooke tells me you want to know about the Reformation, Lord Powerscourt. Is there anything in particular I can help you with? I’m writing a book on the subject, though God
knows when I’ll ever finish it.’

There, thought Powerscourt, is the world’s difference between the scholar and the journalist. For Patrick Butler, surely more or less the same age as Jarvis Broome, not finishing an
article, not finishing all the copy for his paper would be professional suicide. For Jarvis Broome, finishing too soon, finishing without having read all the available material, finishing without
coming to a considered judgement, would leave him open to the savagery of his peers.

‘I should explain, Mr Broome, that I am investigating a series of murders in a cathedral, Compton to be precise. They are about to celebrate one thousand years of worship in the cathedral,
or the abbey, as it was, this Easter Sunday.’

Powerscourt did not give the young scholar any details of how the murders had been committed. ‘What I would like to know,’ he went on, wondering how long it would be before Jarvis
Broome had a shelf full of his own books like Gavin Brooke, ‘is how much opposition there was at the time. Not so much to the question of the King’s divorce and the establishment of
Henry as Supreme Head of the Church of England, as to the Dissolution of the Monasteries.’

‘Now that is a most interesting question, Lord Powerscourt.’ The young man got up from his chair and began pacing up and down the room, in exactly the same fashion, Powerscourt noted
wryly, as he had done when writing his history essays over twenty years before.

‘I’ll try to be brief, Lord Powerscourt. I could go on all day about this. Let me say, as a preamble, that history is always written by the victors, as I am sure you know. I am
certain that there was much more opposition to the various moves in the course of the Reformation than we know about. Some of the opposition will have fallen away, like water through a colander, as
it were, and we shall never recover it, we shall never find out about it at all.’

A pair of college gardeners were trimming the edges of the lawns outside. Through the slightly open window Powerscourt could hear a couple of thrushes singing happily in the Fellows’
Garden on the other side.

‘Three points, I think, are worth considering,’ said Broome. Powerscourt suddenly remembered the angry complaint of a fellow undergraduate of his, also studying history, but with a
different tutor. ‘Is it because bloody Gaul was divided into three parts?’ he had said bitterly. ‘Every time I take an essay to the wretched man there are always three points to
be considered. Why not two, or four or five, maybe even seven? Why not just one, for God’s sake? Why is it always three?’

‘The Pilgrimage of Grace,’ Jarvis Broome went on, ‘1536. This was a mass rising of the North of England against the King’s policies, against his advisers, of course,
rather than against the King himself. There were many reasons for the revolt, some to do with taxation, some to do with personal jealousies, the usual sort of mixture, but the principal reason was
religious. The rebels objected to the changes that had taken place and the further changes they knew were coming, including the Dissolution of the Monasteries. They didn’t want a Protestant
Reformation. They wanted to keep a Catholic England. The banners and the symbols tell the story. They marched behind banners of the Five Wounds of Christ, which showed a bleeding heart, sometimes a
Host, above a chalice, both surrounded at the corners of the illustration by the pierced hands and feet of Christ on the cross.’

‘What happened to them?’ said Powerscourt.

‘They made the great mistake of trusting the King’s word,’ Broome replied. ‘At one stage they could have marched to London and toppled the Tudors from their throne. But
they were picked off bit by bit by duplicity and double dealing. The ring leaders were all executed.’

‘How?’ said Powerscourt suddenly.

‘Most of them were beheaded. Their heads were left stuck in prominent places in the towns and cities where they came from. Anybody who tried to cut them down was liable to meet the same
fate themselves.’

Patrick Butler had fallen silent as they peered at the ruins of the Lady Chapel in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. He had felt in his pocket for the three proposals he had
written out. None of them felt quite right at this moment. He found that his brain had delivered to him a newspaper headline that seemed to sum up his predicament. Editor Lost For Words.

Anne Herbert thought the ruins of the Lady Chapel looked remarkably similar to the ruins of the nave and the high altar. Try as she might, she couldn’t see much difference. She hoped her
children were behaving themselves with their grandmother.

‘They say King Arthur and his knights lived round here, Anne,’ said Patrick, recovering his powers of speech. ‘He came with a great army to rescue Queen Guinevere who had been
imprisoned by his enemies in a castle on the tor.’

Anne Herbert tried to imagine Patrick as a Knight of the Round Table, Sir Galahad or Sir Lancelot or Sir Bedevere. She couldn’t manage it. A monk perhaps, creating a Book of Hours or
copying out the Gospels with occasional rude asides in the margins, yes, but mounted on horseback and riding into battle, no.

‘Would you have liked to live in those times, Anne? Handsome young men on horseback pressing their suits?’

‘I think I might have been the Lady of Shalott,’ said Anne, ‘floating down to Camelot behind that rotting barn over there.’ Privately she felt that the knights would have
said their piece by now, proposals of wedlock delivered from behind a visor in sub Tennysonian verse, the suitor clanking on bended knee before her.

‘I don’t think I’d have liked it much then,’ said Patrick. ‘Life can’t have been much fun for a humble scribe. I tell you what,’ he said, postponing
things yet again, ‘why don’t we have lunch and then climb to the top of the tor.’

‘What most historians have not realized up until now,’ Jarvis Broome was back sitting at his desk, ‘is the link between the violence, the savagery of the
repression of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 and the comparatively peaceful passage of the Dissolution of the Monasteries two or three years later. You can read many history books, Lord
Powerscourt, which fail to make to make any link at all between those two facts. Previous historians talk blithely about how the acceptance of the Dissolution shows the monasteries were known to
have been corrupt, or were not loved by the people. In fact the people were terrified by the reprisals handed out to the northern rebels. They were too frightened to risk their necks by opposing
the end of the abbeys. I regard it as a complete failure of historical imagination and I hope to put the record straight.’

Powerscourt thought that mutual co-operation and brotherly love between the practitioners of the historian’s craft was not going to get any better.

‘Do we know how many people did oppose the Dissolution? And do we know what happened to them?’

‘I fear,’ said Jarvis Broome, ‘that they were all executed. It is difficult to be precise about the numbers as the records have often been lost. Some of the Northern abbots
were believed to have fled south to join their colleagues in other monasteries. They too were put to death.’

The sun had gone in while Anne Herbert and Patrick Butler ate their modest lunch in the George and Pilgrims Hotel. There was a wind rising as they set off out of the town
towards the path that led to the summit of Glastonbury Tor, a round hill rising some three hundred and fifty feet above the surrounding plain.

‘I came here when I was eleven or twelve with a history master from school, Anne,’ said Patrick as they reached the path that led to the summit. ‘Long ago, all this plain was
water, it was the lake of Avalon. We had to learn bits of the
Idylls of the King
to declaim when we reached the top.’

‘Can you remember any of it, Patrick?’ said Anne, taking his arm as their route twisted steeply uphill.

Patrick frowned. The wind was very strong now, blowing fiercely through his hair. It was just beginning to rain.

‘It’s Arthur speaking, Anne, on his final journey, somewhere round where we are now.’

Last Words of Dying King, Patrick Butler thought to himself, translating the Passing of Arthur into a contemporary headline for the
Grafton Mercury.

‘Can you remember any more, Patrick? It’s lovely.’

He paused and put his hand to his forehead. ‘I’m not sure. I think so. Maybe I should wait until we get to the top. If you still want to reach the top, that is, Anne. We’ll
both be soaked to the skin. We may even get blown away.’

‘I don’t think we should give up now,’ said Anne, bending low against the wind and hurrying as fast as she could towards the little church on the summit.

The last hundred and fifty feet took them over half an hour. Sometimes the wind seemed to die down, then it would hit them full in the face as they moved on to another side of the slope. Once
Anne slipped on the wet grass and had to be hauled back up again. The noise of the gale was very loud. They could see the branches of the trees bending and swaying below them. They kept their heads
well down, eyes glued to the path. Overhead dark birds circled, keeping watch over their lofty kingdom. Sullen grey clouds were racing low across the sky. Patrick was cursing under his breath. Anne
was exhilarated, rejoicing in their rain drenched adventure.

At last they reached the top and huddled under all that remained of the little chapel of Saint Michael. Patrick pointed dramatically at the valley beneath them and shouted into the wind:

Now. It came to Patrick Butler in a flash. Now was the time to ask her. Forget all those proposals in his pocket. Forget about William Shakespeare and his sonnets. Forget about John Donne and
his love poetry. Forget the pretty speeches he had rehearsed as he lay on the hard single bed in his lodgings. Forget all the business of waiting for the right moment. This was the right moment.
Now or never. He turned towards her, his face drenched by the rain, his hair blown into an unruly sodden mass, flecks of mud on his trousers and his coat. But his eyes were bright.

‘Anne, will you marry me?’ he shouted into the gale, looking into those green eyes he knew so well.

‘Is that another quotation from Tennyson, Patrick?’ she shouted back.

‘It is a quotation from Patrick Butler, my love, on this day in this place at this time and meant with all my heart.’

Anne Herbert squeezed his arm very tight.

‘Of course I’ll marry you, Patrick. Why did it take you so long to ask?’

Patrick Butler held Anne Herbert very tight and kissed her full on the lips. Relief was flooding over him like the rain that cascaded down both their faces. Then it came to him. He
couldn’t stop it. Maybe I’ll always be like this, he said to himself. It was another headline.

Compton Couple Engaged on Glastonbury Tor.

‘There are just a couple of other things to be said about the Dissolution of the Monasteries,’ said Jarvis Broome, rising from his desk to pull down two dark red
notebooks from his shelves. Powerscourt thought the young man must be a more lively teacher than Gavin Brooke had been in his own undergraduate days.

‘For a start,’ Broome went on, ‘it would have been difficult to leave the monasteries as they were. Many of them directly or indirectly owed their allegiance to Rome. It would
have been like offering the enemy a series of strongholds deep inside your own territory. But, more important, much more important was the money. Henry, in his later years, was always in need of
cash. The income of the monasteries, from land and property, was much greater than his own. So under the pretence of extirpating these supposedly corrupt and Romish institutions, he could enrich
himself and buy off a lot of the gentry who might not have liked his religious reforms any more than the monks did with the booty of the monasteries. I think it must have been the biggest transfer
of wealth in England since the Norman Conquest.’

Powerscourt wondered if the man had detailed records on individual monasteries. He hoped he had.

‘My last point,’ Jarvis Broome went on, ‘and then I shall be free to answer any of your questions after listening so patiently to all this ancient history just goes to show how
deeply entrenched opposition was to all these religious reforms. In the 1540s in the West Country – some of the people in Compton may well have been involved in it – there was another
revolt called the Prayer Book Rebellion. It coincided with plans for the introduction of yet another new Book of Common Prayer, hence the name. Once again the insurgents marched behind the banners
of the Five Wounds of Christ. The rebels surrounded Exeter and the authorities had great difficulty in raising enough troops to suppress it. Like the Pilgrimage of Grace it failed. Over three
thousand rebels were slaughtered. Even after that there were further minor uprisings all over the country in the years that followed. However, I plan to finish my first volume with the accession of
Mary, so I have not looked into them very much as yet.’

With that Jarvis Broome leaned back in his chair and began to rearrange some of the old books on his desk.

‘I am most grateful to you, Mr Broome. Just a couple of questions, if I might.’