‘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.
18
‘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.’
‘Of course.’
‘I know this sounds rather morbid, but could you tell me in detail how most of these people were executed?’
‘Well,’ said Broome, ‘if you were defeated in a battle you probably died in one of the usual ways that soldiers die in combat. Apart from that there were three main methods of execution.’
Here come those three points again, thought Powerscourt.
‘The first was burning at the stake for heresy. That gave rise to the famous dying remark of Bishop Latimer to his fellow heretic Nicholas Ridley as they waited for the pyre to be lit around them in Oxford: “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as I trust shall never be put out.” Sir Thomas More himself was not averse to the burning of heretics, you know. He sent quite a few sinners off to meet their maker in the fiery furnace.’
‘I’ve always wondered,’ said Powerscourt, ‘if they thought they were being consumed in hell’s flames, if all those paintings of the fires of hell weren’t dancing in front of their eyes, as it were, as they were consumed, all hope of heaven burnt away.’
‘I suspect, that for many of them their faith burnt ever brighter as their mortal lives ebbed away but we have no means of knowing.’
‘And the second?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘The second was the most terrible of all. There’s actually a very good description of it in the trial and sentencing of Sir Thomas More.’ Broome pulled down a book from his shelves and turned to a passage near the end. ‘“Sir Thomas More, you are to be drawn on a hurdle through the City of London to Tyburn, there to be hanged till you be half dead, after that cut down yet alive, your bowels to be taken out of your body and burned before you, your privy parts cut off, your head cut off, your body to be divided in four parts, and your head and body to be set at such places as the King shall assign.” It was a very popular mass spectator sport, I’m afraid, at Tyburn and similar places, rather like the Romans packing the Colosseum to watch the Christians being devoured by the lions. And the last method was a simplified version. You were beheaded and your head was later exhibited on a pole somewhere. That was what happened to Sir Thomas More as a favour from the King. He didn’t have to go through with all the disembowelling business. He was killed with one stroke of the executioner’s axe, his head was boiled, impaled on a pole and raised above London Bridge.’
‘What a frightful business,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Thank God we seem to live in more enlightened times. Now, my last question is this. Do you have details of the executions at individual abbeys or churches or cathedrals? Compton is my main interest, as you will appreciate.’
If Jarvis Broome was wondering why Powerscourt should be so interested in possible deaths in Compton three and a half centuries before he did not show it.
‘I might be able to help you there,’ he said, reaching up towards a long series of black notebooks on the top shelf of his bookcase. ‘We certainly know about three abbots who were put to death at Colchester, Reading and Glastonbury. I’ve been round all the major places over the past couple of years and taken notes on what was relevant in the records. Calne, Cambridge, Canterbury, Carlisle, Chester, Compton, here we are.’
Powerscourt leaned forward to look at the black notebook.
‘It would seem, Lord Powerscourt, that there were a number of deaths in Compton round the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. One monk, killed the year before.’
‘How did he die?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘He was burnt at the stake. Two more were given the full disembowelling treatment early in the year the monastery was dissolved. One last death shortly afterwards. The last Abbot was executed and his head put on display at the gateway leading into Cathedral Close. It seems that some more people may have lost their lives in the Prayer Book Revolt, but the records are unclear about the manner of their deaths.’
Powerscourt took himself off for a solitary walk after lunch. He had borrowed Jarvis Broome’s desk and notepaper to send a brief letter to Dr Williams in Compton. He was, he wrote, now in possession of further information which confirmed, if confirmation was necessary, the substance of what he had said in his earlier letter. He asked the doctor to reply by return to his London address. Round and round the Fellows’ Garden he walked, ignoring the neatly kept rectangle of grass, the flowers coming into bloom, the birds still singing happily in their trees. The manner of death, he told himself, gives little clue as to the reason for it. There was no sense in it. Cries of alarm drew him to the terrace overlooking the river. A party of visitors had taken a punt on the river and appeared to have no idea about the propulsion techniques required on the Cam. The boat was going round and round, disturbing the ducks who scurried crossly away towards the more peaceful waters of Trinity and St John’s. Powerscourt wondered if he should offer instructions from his position on the bank. Then he saw that the pole had been abandoned and the party were going to proceed with the aid of two paddles in the stern of the boat. In the summer term, he said to himself, they would have been laughed to scorn.