His dying was long-drawn-out, taking years where men had expected months. It seemed that he could not die until he saw his great project in a fair way to fulfillment. He had always at his right hand driving him on, pouring as it seemed his own strength into the duke’s failing body and mind, his Benedictine chaplain and confessor William de la Torre, later to be spoken of with bated breath as Abbot William. Many monks ruled upon the hilltop in the course of the centuries but they were not remembered in after years. Only William de la Torre and one other were remembered, William’s stature in men’s minds almost equaling that of the Cathedral itself. It was said he was well over six foot and could fell a man with one blow of his great fist. He was a man of powerful intellect, iron will and keen ambition. Moreover he was a genius. Duke Jocelyn’s wealth procured the services of the finest masons and craftsmen in the country, men who could work in stone and wood and stained glass almost as though they were God Himself forming the crested mountains, the forests and birds and flowers with fingers that could not err. It procured too a vast mass of suffering labor. The whole fen country travailed to build the church and monastery. Men groaned and sweated dragging stones up the hill. They sawed wood till they dropped with exhaustion. They caught the ague working upon the walls in the rain and bitter wind. It was accounted as nothing for men high up on the scaffolding of the great tower in cold weather to fall suddenly, as birds fall from a tree in a great frost. They died but there were plenty more to take their place. Looking out from the plateau and seeing the trains of oxcarts bringing the stone and wood along the rough tracks through the fen, and the barges coming up the river laden with precious metals, velvet for faldstools and hangings, breviaries and sacred vessels, it seemed as though the whole world were converging on the strange hill in the wilderness. And William de la Torre held it all in the hollow of his hand.
At some time during the building Duke Jocelyn died, actually at the last in fear, and unshriven as his father had been, because William de la Torre, sent for in a hurry, dallied discussing plans for the chapter house with his architect and strolled along to the duke’s bedchamber too late to be of any assistance to him. Jocelyn’s body was enclosed in a leaden coffin with not much ceremony and forgotten until such time as William de la Torre deemed it politic to bury it beside the high altar of his church, on the day of its consecration to Saint Michael and All Angels, preaching over it a sermon so eloquent and moving that the vast congregation wept unashamedly. William de la Torre also wept. It was part of his power that he was so fine an actor that he could convince himself as well as others. Duke Jocelyn died without issue, though he left a child widow, Blanche Fontaine, who lived out the rest of her short life in a house at the monastery gateway, later called Fountains, where centuries later Isaac Peabody called weekly to wind the clocks for old Miss Montague.
And so, in the absence of heirs, Abbot William reigned supreme; though that he would have done in any case, for supremacy was his role, and he could be great in it as this world counts greatness. He was a great abbot. The towering church that was his creation more than any man’s dominated the whole country for miles around. The monastery buildings surrounded it, chapter house and infirmary, library and dorters, kitchens and cloister, all fine buildings in themselves but dwarfed by the leap of walls and towers and battlements above them. The poor little town that struggled up the hill became almost swamped by storehouses, granaries and stables. The people lived in mean little houses crushed between the monastery buildings and the city walls, and they toiled for the Abbot as once they had toiled for Duke Rollo. But the Abbot had more thought for them. The monks cared for the sick among them, taught their children in the monastery school, fed them in times of famine and kept them safe in time of war. Works of learning as well as mercy were accomplished on the hilltop, books were written, manuscripts were illuminated and music was composed. The singing of the monks in choir could be heard on still days far across the fen, as could the pealing of the bells, and men working in the fields would stop and turn and lift up their eyes to the great church and praise God.
The monastery never wanted for wealth. Its fame was so great that men flocked to it bringing their riches with them. Among the monks were not only noblemen expiating their sins, and scholars, artists and musicians desiring peace and quiet, but men who desired to pray. It was a great house of prayer. It was great. “It is great,” were the last words of Abbot William upon his deathbed. He died, aged eighty-eight, unhumbled to the last. The great bell of the Rollo tower tolled for him on a night of storm but the next morning dawned calm and still, and a little boy who lived down by the North Gate said he saw two swans circling over the Rollo tower. Yet men’s hearts failed for fear. The Abbot was dead. What now would happen to them? He was the monastery. He was subsistence itself. Men could not conceive of life without that hated, feared, indomitable man to goad them through it. By his command he was buried almost obscurely behind the high altar beneath a slab of black stone. He had had the bodies of Rollo and Phillippa moved from their burying place and entombed inside the monastery church in a wonderful chantry, and Blanche Fontaine too had her chantry, and the tomb of Duke Jocelyn beside the high altar had his mailed figure lying upon it in a far greater dignity and beauty than had been his in life; but William de la Torre had known he needed no monument to his memory. The great church was his monument and he would not be forgotten as long as it endured. His choice of an apparently humble tomb had been the last gesture of his pride.
2.
In fearing that they faced disintegration without him men had forgotten the momentum that men of genius leave behind them in their works. The life of the monastery moved on in the course he had appointed for it for several centuries, the only major change being that a succeeding Abbot became the first Bishop of a newly formed fen diocese, the monastery church his Cathedral, and the Prior of the monastery became its head. During these years the church was beautified in many ways and the Lightfoot clock and the statue of Michael the Archangel were placed high in the Rollo tower. Bishops and Priors came and went and some were saints and some were not, and some were beloved in their day and some were hated, but none was remembered excepting only Prior Hugh, who was Prior at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries.
He was a little man, quiet and peace-loving, so that men were not surprised when they heard that he had commanded his monks to yield humbly to the command of the King’s Grace and to offer no resistance when the commissioners came to drive them from their home. Yet when they arrived, with a formidable array of armed men as escort, and on a cold snowy day rode up the hill to the monastery to take possession of it in the King’s name, it was found that the Prior had schooled his monks for a departure of dignity and grandeur. He himself in his simple monk’s habit came out from the Cathedral and stood in front of the west door, at the top of the flight of stone steps that led up to it, and it seemed to the townsfolk and peasants who had come crowding and weeping up the steep streets to see the last of the monks who had looked after them for so many years, that he was a much taller man than they remembered. His voice, as he cried out to the commissioners and their men to stand aside that his sons might pass out, had an authority in its tones that none had heard before. Then the great door of the monastery, which opened upon the wide greensward that stretched from the front of the steps to the Porta, swung open and the monks came out in procession singing with splendid vigor the fighting psalm, the sixty-eighth, “Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered.” Their great gold processional cross and their banner of Michael the Archangel were forfeit to the King, but at their head walked the youngest novice carrying a large cross made of two bits of wood nailed together. As they passed beneath the foot of the steps their Prior raised his hand and blessed them, and he kept his hand raised until the last of them had passed out through the Porta. They could be heard singing as they went down the narrow cobbled street that led to the North Gate, and across the bridge over the river to the rough road beyond that led
back through the fen to the world they had renounced. Their singing died away and what happened to them no man ever knew, though for centuries afterwards it was said that on nights of wind and driving snow the chanting of the monks could be heard sounding through the storm.
When the last of his sons had disappeared the Prior dropped the hand he had raised in blessing and turned and walked back into the Cathedral. They found him later lying dead before the altar, the knife with which he had ended his earthly life lying beside him. It was not the action of a true priest, who may not himself dismiss from life the soul that is God’s, but it was an act for which men nevertheless remembered him with sympathy and admiration. Even his enemies were grieved and, defying the law that those who take their own life must not be buried in consecrated ground, they buried him where they had found him, laying over his coffin a flat black stone such as covered the body of Abbot William. No man afterward dared disturb his bones, and for years it was remembered that some poor half-crazed girl had vowed that on the day of his death she had seen two swans flying over the city toward the setting sun, and their wings were of pure gold. And so these two men, the first Abbot and the last Prior, lay the one behind the high altar and the other in front of it. Four centuries divided them but in the life of the great Cathedral that was no more than the exhalation of a breath.
The years went on and the city on the hill endured many and sometimes terrible vicissitudes. The monastery became the property of the King and its lands and buildings were given by him to one of his favorites, Harry Montague. Harry gave a great banquet to celebrate his arrival and as it was fine summer weather many of his cronies rode all the way from London to assist at the junketings. It was almost like the old days of Duke Rollo come back again, with men and horses clattering up and down the cobbled streets of the city, music and reveling, and succulent smells of baked meats floating on the wind. But the people of the city were sullen and miserable. They had been utterly dependent on the monastery and they did not know what was to happen to them now. And they felt disorientated. Through the years they had come to feel, if only subconsciously, that the city existed for the Cathedral and monastery, and the Cathedral and monastery for God. The city had been God-centered and now they felt as though God had forsaken them. They did not like the Lord Harry.
They liked him even less when at the end of the final banquet he and his cronies, being all of them as full of wine as their skins would hold, carried the priceless books and manuscripts out of the library, flung them in a great pile on the green at the foot of the steps where Prior Hugh had stood to bless his monks, and made a bonfire of them. The leaves of the books were many of them yellowed and brittle with age, like the petals of dried flowers, and they burned brightly. Harry and his friends, most of them young men and wild as well as merry with the drink, were intoxicated by the leaping flames. Tumbling over each other in their excitement they ran into the dorters and refectory, coming back with hangings and chairs and tables which they flung yelling on the bonfire. The flames leaped so savagely that the whole sky was lit up, and could be seen right across the flat country, even as far as the sea coast, and when sparks carried by the high wind caught the thatch of the little houses down below, and the city too was on fire, it seemed to the awed watchers in the fen villages that the whole hill was being destroyed by fire from heaven. They remembered the singing of the monks upon that night of wind and snow six months ago. “Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered; let them also that hate Him flee before Him. Like as the smoke vanisheth, so shalt Thou drive them away; and like as wax melteth at the fire, so let the ungodly perish at the presence of God.” And then they saw the great Cathedral rising like a rock from the fire, its tall towers stark and black against the flame-lit sky. It was a tremendous presence there and it seemed that it trampled on the flames. Slowly, gradually, they died. The stars and the moon entered once more into possession of the sky and the great fire was over.
It had been extinguished with great courage by the citizens themselves. Running cursing from their burning houses the men formed chains of buckets down to the river and for hours they fought the fire and at last they conquered. Throughout the fight they were aware of the presence up above them, the great strong thing that could not be destroyed. Many a man said afterwards that the Cathedral fought with them. But there had been some among them, children and old people, who had died in the fire, and the city did not forget. Nothing Harry Montague could do now would ever lessen their hatred of him. When some years later he was stabbed in the fen by an unknown hand the city glowed and gloated.
His descendants lived on for a while in the fine house that Harry had made out of the central part of the monastery buildings, the kitchen, refectory and dorters, and the Prior’s chamber and chapel. The rest, the library, the infirmary, the offices and outbuildings, gradually fell into disrepair. The walls and roofs remained intact, so strongly fashioned were they, but inside the bats haunted them, there was moaning in the chimneys and broken doors screamed eerily on rusted hinges in the wind. The Montagues did not stand it for long. They vowed the place was haunted. The people of the city did not grow tired of hating them and they were always afraid. They went away and lived in a great house by the sea. Only one of them, Harry’s youngest son Thomas, remained behind and lived in a little house in the city. He was a gentle and kindly man and wore down the people’s hatred. He married the mayor’s daughter and finally became mayor himself. His descendants always lived in the city, the last of them being old Miss Montague of Fountains.
Then another hierarchy came into being at the top of the hill. The King’s Grace appointed a Dean to administer the affairs of the Cathedral, and Canons, lay clerks and choristers to preach and sing the services. During the reign of the Montagues there had been an outbreak of the plague, failure of the crops and bitter poverty that they had done nothing to relieve. The people had felt there was a curse upon the city because the monks had been driven away, but now that the men of God were back, even though they were no longer monks, hope was reborn and men went to work with a will. The Cathedral bells rang out again, sounding far across the fen as in the old days, and on summer mornings and evenings, when the west door was left open, men and women pausing in their work could hear the singing of the lay clerks and choristers as once they had heard the chanting of the monks. There were no more empty buildings on the hilltop. Harry Montague’s house became the Deanery, and the other buildings were incorporated in the new houses for the Canons, a choir school and almshouses for the poor of the city. The new men of God were good to the poor, and the city began to feel itself again. Without that life of praise and prayer and charity at its heart it had been like a wheel without a hub, as purposeless as a godless world. The men upon the hilltop might at times individually fail them, might grow loveless or indolent, but what they stood for was always the same.
3.
The centuries passed again. In the great days of Queen Elizabeth the First all went well with the city and the fen villages, apart from the normal hardships of a countryside where life was never easy, but the Civil War left ugly scars behind it. The fen country was predominantly for Parliament but there were a few royalists in the city and the most determined among them was the Dean, Peter Rollard, a round rubicund little man with a red beard and a temper to match. His determination had been increased by the fate of the royalist Bishop, who was in prison. He had now to be loyal for the two of them. Commanded to discontinue the use of music and ritual in his Cathedral, and to worship God there in the full starkness of the Puritan faith, he refused, and the Cathedral worship continued as before until on a cold gray day of east wind Lieutenant General Cromwell himself, with a company of his Ironsides behind him, rode into the city. They clattered up the cobbled streets, rode under the great Porta on to the green and dismounted at the foot of the steps where Prior Hugh had stood to bless his monks. Evensong was being sung in the Cathedral at the time, and the triumphant Magnificat rolled out to greet the Lieutenant General
as he leaped up the steps and went in through the Porch of the Angels to the open west door beneath the Rollo tower. His spurred boots rang on the paving stones of the nave as he strode up it, and his harsh grating voice, raised to the full-echoing apocalyptic roar of an enraged prophet, preceded him.
The lay clerks and choristers heard the roar and the clanging before they saw the Lieutenant General, and their voices wavered, but when they saw him striding down upon them, black-cloaked, his tall black hat increasing his great height, their voices died away altogether and Dean Peter Rollard sang the last two verses alone. He was not a musical man but his vocal chords were powerful. The Lieutenant General was not able to make himself heard, and taking an unloaded pistol from his holster he flung it at Peter Rollard. It struck the Dean’s right shoulder and the pain was so intense that his right arm hung useless. A lesser man would have discontinued the altercation, but Peter Rollard, perceiving that Cromwell was sacrilegiously wearing his hat in the house of God, picked up his service book in his left hand and aimed it at the hat. His aim was entirely accurate. Cromwell’s men, who had followed him at a respectful distance, closed about the Dean and he was marched off to the city prison.
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