Doctor Mirabilis (31 page)

‘Am I then a prisoner?’

‘Nay, sire,’ earl Bigod said, but his voice had been most grim. ‘But we must have reform.’

‘Reform, Gloucester?’

‘Yes, sire. Know ye that all here are sworn to die, rather than that England be ruined by the Romans.’

There had seemed to be no immediate danger of death to the full-armed barons, but the King had been reduced rapidly to a stuttering
transport of terror. It had not proven an onerous task to extort from him the appointment of a Council of twenty-four lordships,
to meet at Oxford in October and draw up a table of reforms.

That meeting Henry’s partisans had promptly dubbed the Mad Parliament, but none there took heed of that to their
hurt. One of its earliest acts was to invest Simon, first, with the post of military commander-in-chief for the seigniorial
forces, and second, with the custody of the castle of Winchester – whence, to guard against any surprise, the Mad Parliament
at once removed itself before completing its table of wrongs to be righted. The table itself was nevertheless titled the Provisions
of Oxford, to ensure the preservation of the letters patent under which the twenty-four had begun their labours.

Ere that work was through, Henry’s power – or at the very least, his power to make mischief – had been wrenched from his hands;
the Mad Parliament had given over the taxing of the realm, and much else, to three committees of its own. Little could have
galled Henry more than to assent to such Provisions, but assent he must, albeit they were capped by the boldest insult offered
to the Angevin crown since 1215: the demand that he reaffirm, on holy ground, the Great Charter which his father had so unwillingly
signed that June 15th at Runnymede.

It was to this high and ominous ceremony that Adam was riding now, in the greyness of his old age and the shadow of his guilt.

It had pleased the Mad Parliament to give Henry his choice of holy ground, and he had chosen a ruin: the Westminster Abbey
of Edward the Confessor, which that saint had spent most of his life a-building, and which Henry himself had pulled down in
order to erect something even greater to the Confessor’s memory. Nothing of the original was left now but Edward’s high-raised
shrine, and the new minster, though it had already cost a vast sum, was still radically incomplete.

Nevertheless Adam could bring himself to admire it; the King as a patron of the arts was not an inconsiderable man, whatever
his other weaknesses, and it was already plain to see that this church – of which Henry was in part also the architect – would
be nobly beautiful, could it be finished before the money ran out. In the meantime, the conclave
forgathered in St. Catherine’s Chapel, one of the few chambers which was whole.

No arms nor armour now, but instead crimson, gold and vair, all new, without so much as a grease-spot: all the chief lords
of England, each with a lighted taper in his hand; Henry the King, his face white as milk, the shadows on it deeply cut by
the upcasting light of the candle in his own hand, slightly a-tremble; the princes, Edward wearing the dark brow of suppressed
mutiny; the bishops, the-primate, even the papal legate, Guy de Foulques, Archbishop of Sabina himself; and from somewhere
in the darkness the cat-purr of the aged Matthew Paris,
scribble … scribble.…

They had already begun when Adam entered, and he was far from the centre of the conclave. Much indeed had changed since he
had stood at Grosseteste’s elbow in the Great Hall and heard not only the public words but the private consultations. Yet
from scraps of murmurs Adam quickly divined where they were at: earl Bigod was reading, in a monotonous, rapid drone-bass,
the articles of the Great Charter, and had already reached the twelfth.

‘No scutage or aid shall be imposed on our kingdom, unless by the Common Council of the realm … and in like manner it shall
be done concerning aids from the City of London.… The King binds himself to summon the Common Council of the realm respecting
the assessing of an aid (except as provided in XII) or a scutage …

And to each of these Henry the King said, through nearly motionless lips, ‘We so swear,’ and signed himself.

‘… to be proportionate to the offence, and imposed according to the oath of honest men in the neighbourhood. No amercement
to touch the necessary means of subsistence of a free man, the merchandise of a merchant, or the farming tools of a villein
… earls and barons to be amerced by their equals.…’

‘We so swear.… We so swear.…

‘… nothing shall be taken or given, for the future, for the Writ of Inquisition of life or limb, but it shall be freely granted,
and not denied.… No freeman shall be taken or
imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him except by the
lawful judgment of his peers and/or the law of the land.… We will sell to no man, we will not deny to any man, either justice
or right.…

‘We so swear.… We so swear.…’

‘… reaffirm Article I that the Church of England shall be free, and have her whole rights, and her liberties inviolable.…

The tapers burned lower; the chapel was reeking of sweat and tallow; but at last the earl put aside his parchments.

‘We so swear.’

The King let the words fall almost in a whisper, and then stood frozen for what seemed a long fall of sand. Then he dashed
his taper to the stones, and cried out thinly:

‘So go out with smoke and stench the accursed souls of those who break or pervert this Charter!’

By the breathless pause which followed, Adam knew that this oath had not been prescribed by the bishops for this occasion.
Then Simon de Montfort’s own taper struck the pavement, and the chapel rang with his voice, repeating the words.

The barons followed his lead, in a ragged chorus. Within no longer than it took to say a Paternoster, the chapel was plunged
into blackness, choking with wick-fumes … and then, it was a-shuffle with men edging cautiously, blindly toward the doorway
each remembered as being the nearest.

Adam pressed stumblingly through the slow-milling shapes, making haste slowly lest he jostle someone with hand on dagger,
toward where he had last seen earl Simon, guiding himself by the one remaining, distant star of Matthew Paris’ candle-flame.
It was slow work, against the main current; and by the time he had reached his goal, the smoky chapel was empty of all but
himself and the nodding, grinning historian.

Thus, Simon de Montfort’s farewell to his confessor; for he was at once to go on an embassy to Scotland. There was naught
left Adam Marsh now,
nec spe nec metu
, but his
judgment, which was not to be found in this world. In greyness and in shadow, he rode without haste toward Oxford to await
it.

And this, then, was the first year of the Age of the Holy Spirit! Small cause 1260 had given Roger Bacon for joy; and though
what he had been able to learn about the world outside the convent walls was little, he saw small hope for that world either,
except it rejoice in the imminence of Antichrist.

Within the convent, each day of this putatively great year dripped away exactly as had each day of the preceding three, worn
down under the corrosion of his ‘corrective discipline’ – changing straw; sweeping out cells; carrying slops and night-soil;
teaching a few young apprentices to the Order; copying Psalms; dipping candles; washing bottles; mending sandals; and praying
for deliverance. He could look forward now to naught else.

In the dragging-past of these lifetimes of days, but little study was possible, and less work; yet for a while he had refused
to be defeated. The
Reprobationes
was finished; and an introduction to a new subject,
De laudibus mathematicae
, and even the work itself, a
Communia mathematica
, although only in first recension. But nothing was so time-consuming as computation; and in especial one needed tables, which
he had neither the leisure to search out nor the money to buy.

The money was gone, all gone, leaving behind only a sort of lightness in the head, as that of a man but recently delivered
of a fever; or, more to the purpose, of a man in the aftermath of far too much wine, miserable in the knowledge that the only
cure is more, and that not to be had.

Nor was there any help for him from his brothers and superiors. In Oxford he had been at the least a resident master; here,
he was nothing. Early on, he had proposed to them that for the fame of the convent, in Paris where scholarship was everything,
he should write for them a summary of everything that he had read or found in the
natural sciences from the beginning, a
Communia naturalium
, to be published on to the shelves of the University; surely a better use for a scholar than setting him to changing beds.
He had shown them the preface for such a work; they had laughed at it. He did not speak to them now unless spoken to, and
that was seldom.

A few threads to the outside still were allowed him. Eugene wrote to him: outraged at still another prohibition of Aristotle
at Toulouse, the younger brother had at last come home to Ilchester and taken up the galling burden of the damaged estate
– a victory for Robert which Roger seldom cared to think about. Belatedly, because he had been so long out of England, Eugene
had discovered the greatness of Grosseteste, and was buying copies of his works as he could. Unable to share in the problems
of the estate, Roger could at least feel with Eugene the poignancy of the murder of the younger man’s studies, and wrote for
him a summary of the Capito’s teachings on time and motion, with a commentary; Eugene drank it down like water in a desert
and prayed urgently for more, but from the fastness of the convent there was little more to give.

Too, there were letters from Bungay, who had left Oxford in disgust at Roger’s exile and returned to his post as the vicar
of the provincial minister. But they were seldom heartening:

I must tell thee that the turmoil is in no wise lessened and that most of what was gained in St. Catherine’s chapel hath since
been lost, an I understand it aright. No sooner did earl Simon return from his embassy to Scotland than the King charged him
with fixing the particulars of the peace with France, a matter which kept him away most of this year; and in the meantime
the ‘bachelors’, as they now call those knights and gentry created out of incomes of fifteen pounds a year, those that were
formerly contented to be no more than coroners and jurymen, have had a Mad Parliament of their own. Now they demand that the
barons concede to them as vassals and tenants those same privileges
wrung by the baronage from the supreme landlord the King, and being rebuffed, do repair increasingly to the royal above the
seigniorial justice. In this matter earl Bigod appeareth helpless, referring to it as a disturbance in the commonalty, which
is in no wise the case, but serveth all the same to drive many a weaker baron to the King also, in hope of better arms against
this mythical insurgency. This division Prince Edward hath been quick to exploit, and it feareth me that earl Simon’s return
from France hath not been speedy enough to compose it. Thou wilt recall how at the birth of Edward our Henry was so eager
to receive gifts of congratulation that it was said at the Court,
Heaven gives us this child, but the King sells him to us:
I fear that we shall suffer much more at the hands of this prince before we suffer less. Remind thyself however how much
of what say needs must be rumour; for that chatterer Matthew Paris the King’s historian is dead, and his thousands of leaves
of gossip are shut up by the monks of St. Alban’s; and this year hath died also the most Christian and most noble Adam Marsh,
the last of our Order who might have known the truth. –
Thos.

Here indeed was cause for sorrow, and for despair. Who now was left to him but Eugene, and Bungay? There still existed the
small circle of the Peregrine College, but he had been able to visit that only the once since his exile, and had found all
there strangers to him but Peter de Maricourt himself. Moreover, it was dangerous to keep such arcane company, never for Roger
more so than now.

He moved about through his galling chores in a mist of lassitude and weariness. The days went by. Were it not for the frequent
Holy Days, he would have lost all track of them. Listlessly, he recast his notes from his lecture-battle with Richard of Cornwall
into a small volume, but even the panoplies of that demonic vision had lost all power to move him now; the words came as slowly
from the clotting quill-tip as those of a neophyte, and the temptation to write ‘Finis’ at the bottom of each new page was
almost irresistible. In the end, he dispatched it as a letter to Eugene, who was
baffled by it, particularly by the passage on black-powder, which Roger in a moment of prudence had partially reencyphered.

It was well that he had not published it. But a month after, there was read forth to the brothers of the convent at early
Mass, by order of Bonaventura, the new Constitutions of the Chapter of Narbonne:

‘Let no one glory in the possession of virtue in his heart if he puts no guard on his conversation. If anyone thinks that
he is religious and does not curb his tongue, but only allows his heart to lead him astray, then his religion is vain. It
is therefore necessary that an honourable fence should surround the mouth and other senses and acts, deeds and morals, that
the statutes of the regulars may not be destroyed by perfect men, but kept intact, lest they should be bitten by a snake when
they let down the barrier.…

‘Let the brothers carry nothing in words or in writing which could conduce to the scandal of anyone.…

‘Let no brother go to the court of the Lord Pope, or send a brother, without the permission of the Minister-General. Let them,
if they have gone otherwise, be at once expelled from the Curia by the procurators of the Order. And let no one apply to the
Minister-General for permission unless serious cause or urgent necessity demand it.