When the door was closed Giles turned and gave me a wry smile. ‘Madge tells me she committed a small indiscretion when you were here yesterday. She told you a little of my quarrel with my nephew.’
‘Only that it was a quarrel over politics.’
‘She felt she had to tell me.’ He smiled sadly. ‘Well, Matthew, if you are to help me in London, you should know. Only – it was a little difficult for me to speak of.’
‘I understand. But – Giles, are you sure you are well enough to travel? After Fulford –’
He waved a large hand, his emerald ring catching the light. ‘I am going,’ he said with sudden sharpness. ‘That is decided. But let me tell you about my nephew.’
‘If you wish.’
Giles began. ‘It was a great sorrow to me that my wife and I had no children that lived. My wife had a sister, Elizabeth, and she married a man called Dakin. A law-clerk, a mousy little fellow without ambition. I always thought him a poor creature, and – well, if I am honest, I was jealous they had a son who grew up tall and strong, never had a day’s illness. He went to read for the bar at Gray’s Inn when he grew to manhood. With a letter of recommendation from me.’ He smiled tightly. ‘An affection for the boy had grown in me by then. Martin was clever, he liked to think for himself and I admired that. It is an uncommon quality. You have it,’ he added, pointing at me with his goblet.
I laughed. ‘Thank you.’
‘And yet that quality can be carried too far, it can take one into dangerous waters.’
‘It can,’ I agreed.
‘Martin would return to York to visit his parents every year.’ He looked at the table on its dais. ‘We had some merry evenings here, Martin and his parents, me and my wife. All dead now, apart from Martin and me.’ His mouth hardened. ‘And yet he never spoke to me of something that must have been working secretly in his mind for a long time. Not till he came home in the summer of 1532, nine years ago. The King was still married to Catherine of Aragon then, though he had been trying to get a divorce out of the Pope for years so he could marry Anne Boleyn. He was coming to the end of that road, soon he would break with Rome, appoint Cranmer Archbishop of Canterbury and get him to declare his first marriage invalid.’
‘I remember it well.’
‘Virtually everyone in the north viewed the prospect of a break with Rome with horror. We knew Anne Boleyn was a reformer, we feared this would mean heretics like Cromwell coming to power, as indeed it did.’
‘I was a reformer then, Giles,’ I said quickly. ‘I knew Cromwell well in the days before he came into his great power.’
Giles gave me an interrogative look. His eyes could be very sharp. ‘From what you have said, I think you are no longer an enthusiast?’
‘I am not. For neither side.’
Giles nodded. ‘Martin was. He was as much of an enthusiast as it was possible to be.’
‘For reform?’
‘No. For the Pope. For Queen Catherine. That was the problem. Oh, it was – and is – easy to be sentimental about the King’s first wife. How she had been married to him for twenty years, always been loyal, how wicked the King was to cast her aside for Anne Boleyn. Yet there was more to it than that, as we both know. Queen Catherine was in her forties, past child-bearing, and she had not given the King a male heir. Unless he could marry a younger woman who might provide an heir, the Tudor dynasty would die with him.’
‘All that is true.’
‘And there were many of us who thought the only way to preserve true religion in England was for Queen Catherine to do what the Pope himself had suggested to her: go into a nunnery, allow the King to marry again.’ He shook his head. ‘Foolish, obstinate woman. By insisting God intended her to be married to the King until death, she brought about the very revolution in religion she hated and feared.’
I nodded. ‘It is a paradox.’
‘A paradox Martin could not see. He stood stiff in the view that the King must stay married to Catherine of Aragon. So he told us over the dinner-table that day, in no uncertain terms.’ Giles looked over at the table. ‘It made me wroth, furious. I saw, if he did not, that unless Catherine of Aragon agreed to a divorce, or to go to a nunnery, the King would break with Rome. As in the end he did. It may seem strange, now both Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn are dead, to think we argued so fiercely, but we who supported the old religion were split: the realists like me, and those like Martin who urged Queen Catherine should not give an inch. I was angry, Matthew.’ He shook his leonine head. ‘Angry too to hear Martin’s parents support him, and realize he must have discussed his beliefs with them, though not with me that had done everything to smooth and aid his path into the law.’ A heavy bitterness came into Giles’s voice.
‘Perhaps he had not told them. His parents might only have felt they must stand in their child’s corner in argument.’
Giles sighed. ‘Perhaps. And perhaps the old sourness at my childless state was part of my anger, especially when my wife began to argue Martin’s side too. She should not have, that was disloyal of her. Anyway, in the end I ordered Martin Dakin and his parents from my table.’
I looked at Giles in surprise. It was hard to imagine him full of such fierceness. But before his illness he must have been formidable.
‘I never spoke with Martin or his parents again. My wife was sore upset when I forbade her sister our table. She never really forgave me.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘My poor Sarah, her sister’s family forbidden the house. And then three years ago the plague came to York and they all died, my wife, and both Martin’s parents, a few weeks later. Martin came up and arranged his parents’ funerals, but I could not bring myself to contact him, or attend. I do not even know whether he is married now; he was single at the time we quarrelled.’ I saw shame on his lined face.
‘That is a story to pity a man’s heart, Giles. Yet one that has been all too common these last few years, families split apart over religious differences.’
‘Pride and obstinacy are great sins,’ he said. ‘I see that now. I would be reconciled with Martin if I can.’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘In the end we both lost, and Cromwell and the reformers won.’
‘You should know, Giles,’ I said, ‘I may have become disillusioned with the reformers but I hold the old regime to be no better. No less ruthless, no less fanatical.’ I paused. ‘No less cruel.’
‘For all I may have grown sadder and mellower these last few years, at the end I cleave to my faith.’ He looked at me. ‘As all men must at the end. They say the King himself is disillusioned with reform,’ he added. ‘Yet I am not so sure. Cranmer is still in charge of the church.’
I shrugged. ‘The King plays one faction off against the other. He trusts neither now.’
‘So with him it is all politics?’
‘Perhaps he believes every twist and turn he makes inspired by God himself working in his mind.’
He grunted. ‘I think we are agreed at least that the notion God works the King’s mind for him is nonsense.’
‘We old reformers never sought to put the King in the Pope’s place.’ I looked at him. I was not surprised he was a religious conservative, I had gathered as much. Yet the obstinate bitterness he had shown towards his family had shown me a new side to his character. But we all have darker sides to our natures, I thought.
‘Well,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Let us leave these sad topics. We should go and see how young Barak is doing.’
I hesitated, then said, ‘Giles. Before we do, there is something I ought to tell you in my turn.’
He looked at me curiously. ‘What is that?’
‘Yesterday, when I was in your library, looking at your maps –’
‘Ah, yes. Did you find what you wanted? Madge said you stayed a long time.’
‘I did, and thank you. Your collection is truly remarkable.’
He smiled with pleasure. ‘It has been my pastime for fifty years.’
‘Did you know you have some lawbooks there that I think no one else has, that have been lost?’