by Phil Rickman
‘Mercy?’
‘A small town in the west. Once upon the Isle of Avalon. And once famous for its abbey. You know it?’
‘I know of it,’ I said.
Already making connections.
‘What do you know of it?’
‘I know that it was the burial place of King Arthur.’
Arthur… What of him? the Queen had asked.
Cecil sniffed.
Last night, I’d shut myself in the library to locate the books I’d be obliged to deliver to the Queen.
My shelves were yet rudimentary structures supported by bricks. On them, I’d found the works of Giraldus Cambrensis and Geoffrey of Monmouth, from which Malory had derived his pot-boiling twaddle, Morte d’Arthur.
Not that Geoffrey himself was much more reliable. When he ran out of history he’d make it up and, on the subject of Arthur, history was scant. But there must at least be seeds of truth therein, and it hadn’t been long before I’d been guided to the town of Glastonbury, Arthur’s burial place on the so-called Isle of Avalon. An island town no longer, it seemed, the sea having long ago retreated, leaving a community built among small hills swelling from waterlogged flatlands bordered with orchard.
Orchard.
Odd that the Queen and I should have been discussing this matter in my mother’s orchard. The very word Avalon was surely derived from Afal, the Welsh for apple. This area of Somersetshire was both rich in apple orchards and close to Wales and therefore seemed as likely as anywhere to be the mystical island to which, in legend, the dying King Arthur had been borne by barge.
Either to be healed of his wounds or to die and to be buried within the precincts of what would become a famous abbey. Depending which version of the story it was in your interests to believe.
A pretty tale, whichever you accepted. An inspiring tale. A tale to strengthen our tradition. The ideal of monarchy, with his round table of knights and his magical sword Excalibur, King Arthur had ever been central to us.
Us? Us the English? Us the British? Us… the Welsh?
You and I being both of Welsh stock, the Queen had said.
When I was a boy, my tad would tell me that we, the Dees – the name is rendered English from the Welsh Ddu, meaning black – were descended from Arthur himself. And I believed it, for who would choose not to? I believe it now, but not in the same way. Now I’m more interested in an Arthurian tradition, a mystical strand, from which we can draw an ancient energy.
Besides, a far more illustrious family than mine also claims descent from the great British hero.
Our royal ancestor, the Queen had said. With a smile.
‘…had it not been for that regrettable business twenty years ago,’ Cecil was saying.
‘Beg mercy?’
‘Over the Abbot of Glastonbury. It’s all most of us know of the ghastly place.’
‘Mmm. Yes.’
At the time of the Dissolution, the last Abbot of Glastonbury had been dragged through the town on a hurdle and then hanged, drawn and quartered. Tortured first, it was said, slowly and extensively.
This on the orders of Thomas Cromwell, acting for King Henry VIII. The Abbot having been treacherous and uncooperative.
‘All rather unnecessary,’ Cecil said, ‘given hindsight.’
I said nothing. The Dissolution of the monasteries still pained me, whenever I thought of it. Although I understood full well the need to be free of an oft-corrupt papacy, the destruction of such beauty and the loss of the centuries of knowledge it represented was near unbearable to me. All those books torn up and burned. Many of the rescued volumes in my library had, so to speak, scorched pages.
‘They say the place has never recovered,’ Cecil said.
‘As with other abbey towns. Was not this one the oldest religious house in England, in its foundation?’
It seemed more than likely that Cecil had been to Glastonbury himself, on one of his visits to his late friend Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset. But he said nothing.
‘Obviously an important place of pilgrimage, in its day,’ I said. ‘Given the legend of its foundation…’
As the Queen had reminded me, it was said that the wealthy merchant who had provided a tomb for his Saviour, had travelled to these islands, to trade, landing in the extreme west of England. And that Jesus, said by some sources to be his nephew, had journeyed with him as a boy, and had thus set foot both in Cornwall and Somersetshire.
Indeed, it was further said that Jesus had returned as a man, to train in the spiritual disciplines under the Druids. A thrilling legend which seemed unlikely ever to be proved. However, it was more widely believed that, after the crucifixion, Joseph had also returned, bringing with him the holy cup of the Last Supper which had later caught drops of the holy blood from the cross, and that this cup, the Holy Grail, remained, hidden somewhere.
The most precious, powerful and inspirational vessel in Christendom. The purest of King Arthur’s knights were said to have gone in quest of the Grail, thus bringing together the two great legends of Glastonbury. A holy legacy indeed, and out of all this had grown a huge and wealthy monastic establishment, said to have been founded by Joseph of Arimathea himself.
And then King Henry, the Great Furnace, had ordered its destruction.
‘Never been there yourself?’ Cecil said.
‘No.’
‘Odd. I mean… given your noted fascination with the great spiritual mysteries.’
I grew cautious.
‘It’s a question of time, Sir William.’
‘Time.’ He smiled. ‘We can always make time. And you could be there… oh, well within a week, I’m assured.’
He looked at me, placidly. There was never any reading of his eyes.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘For the stability of the realm of course.’ Parting his fingers, Cecil sat up in his chair and stretched his spine. ‘Why else do I exist?’
I’d wondered why he’d summoned me here, to his private home, his cottage. Had to be for reasons of secrecy.
Something sensitive. Something unofficial.
Therefore something heavy with risk.
I looked out of the window and now beheld the collected spires as something like to a bed of nails. With the twisted briars of religion and the gathering threats from abroad – the Queen of Scots fresh-married to the boy king of France – did Cecil not have enough tough meat on his plate without concerning himself with spiritual mysteries?
‘Are you quite sure I’m the man for this?’ I said.
V
Bones
OUTSIDE, the rain had ceased and the winter sun hung in the central window, looking heavy as a new coin. It lit the spines of the books on Cecil’s few finished shelves. Books dealing with politics, law and property, but nothing, I’d guess, on the spiritual mysteries.
I told Cecil about the pamphlet-seller, but not about my incautious attempt to take him on, nor how I’d been saved from what might have been a severe beating, or worse.
All the time was wondering if he knew full well what had occurred. This man had eyes all over the city, and beyond.
He lifted an eyebrow, reached for his wineglass then abruptly pushed it away.
‘There are scum out there who’ve been putting it around London that I maintain four mistresses and consume a gallon of wine nightly, before horsewhipping my children. Face it, you’re a public figure, now. Or at least, a public name.’
‘But my mother’s not. And she’d be alone at Mortlake, where it seems I’m hated and feared by all the new puritans lest I raid their family’s graves.’
‘Then we’ll protect her.’ His hands emerging from his robe like puppets. ‘I’ll have armed guards put into Mortlake for as long as you’re away. I’ll even have a guard mounted on your blessed library. How does that sound?’
‘Well, I don’t think there’s need for—’
‘Good. Settled, then.’
‘There’s also the matter of my work. I’m already serious
ly behind in my work.’
Cecil was gathering up the letters. He did not even look at me.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is your work.’
The stories of the four mistresses and the horsewhipping of children had obviously been plucked from the air to make a point. But there was gossip about Sir William Cecil, most of it related to his ancestry. The son of an innkeeper, it was oft-times said, in the same way that it was oft said of me that I was the son of a meat-slicer.
But is it such a bad thing that we are now living in an age where ability may, on occasion, be recognised above breeding?
I think not, and yet I believe ancestry to be important in ways that we have not yet fathomed. For my father, it was simple: he was a Welshman and, now that the Tudors of Wales had secured the English crown, this Welshness was an asset of no small proportion. I am Rowland Dee and I am a man of Wales! my tad would declare, with one hand on his heart, the other extended before him, and a comical deepening of his accent.
Sometimes he’d even repeat it in Welsh. Which, I would imagine, cut no ice at all with the Great Furnace, who gave not a shit for Wales, most of the time. It had been different, however, for his own father, the first Tudor king, who’d landed from France in the west of Wales and rode from there with a gathering army and a weight of tradition.
This tradition being King Arthur. According to the legends, Arthur had not died but was only sleeping and would return when his nation had need of him.
And so, within Henry Tudor, was Arthur risen again, and the sense of an older and more united Britain. Henry had married Elizabeth of York, thus meeting the red rose with the white. To seal the family’s royal destiny, he’d even given their first-born son, his heir, the name of Arthur and had him born at Winchester, which Malory claimed had once been Camelot.
A masterstroke. I knew the new Queen was much taken with this story of her family’s tradition and doubtless recognised its emotive power. King Arthur. Our royal ancestor, she’d said to me. And would have said more had not Blanche Parry appeared, the watchful owl amid the winter apple trees. Blanche having been given brief, I’d guessed, by this man, William Cecil, who at all times protected the Queen.
Sometimes, it seemed, from herself.
‘She’s a young woman,’ he said now. ‘She’s clever, well read, and already carries a weight of experience. And, given the parlous state of the exchequer, she is commendably cautious. But, as a young woman, she’s ever prey to the allure of a great romance. And the problems it might pose. For her.’
‘Believing she must, in some way, make the mantle of Arthur… fit a woman?’
I could still see no obvious problem. In Arthurian terms, the Queen was not merely Guinevere, nor even Morgan le Fay, the enchantress of Arthurian myth, but, potentially, someone greater, more powerful and more glamorous than either. I understood this entirely and did not think it foolish or wayward, for these were strange and awesome times.
And so I waited, the room awash now with winter sunlight, two unicorns coming to luminous life upon a new tapestry, as Cecil drank the rest of his wine with no apparent appreciation. I doubted he believed in unicorns.
‘It all depends,’ he said, ‘on how dead you believe Arthur to be.’
It was clear that we were now talking of the grave found in the abbey at Glastonbury during the reign of an earlier Henry, the Plantagenet, Henry II. I’d read of it last night in the writings of my father’s countryman, Giraldus Cambrensis.
In the year 1191, an excavation at Glastonbury Abbey had uncovered a stone and a cross of lead proclaiming the burial there of the renowned King Arthur. Nine feet further down into the earth, in an oaken coffin, had lain the bones of an inordinately large man and the smaller skeleton of what was taken to be a woman. And a lock of yellow hair which crumbled into dust when picked up by one of the monks.
Guinevere.
And, oh yes, the monks had found this grave. Arthur was risen just when the monks had need of him most.
‘They needed money,’ Cecil reminded me. ‘Lots of it. The abbey having recently been ravaged by a very destructive fire. In the twelfth century, the tales of Arthur and his knights were widely read and told to children. Nothing could have brought more fame and pilgrimage to Glastonbury than the bones of Arthur.’
Naturally, it was said by many that the grave was a fake and the so-called discovery of the royal remains nothing more than a deception by the monks. A deception which was also of considerable value to the King in subduing the hopes of the rebellious Welsh.
‘Nothing better than bones,’ I said to Cecil, ‘as evidence that Arthur was very conspicuously beyond revival.’
‘Indeed. Almost a century later, the bones were placed in a black marble tomb before the high altar of the rebuilt abbey church. Having first been inspected by King Edward I who, after crushing the Welsh once again, at great expense, would also have been delighted to confirm that Arthur was dead.’
‘What king of England would neglect such an opportunity?’
‘Ah.’ Cecil arose and walked over to the vast windows. ‘There you have it.’
‘A Tudor king of England?’
The sky over the river was clear of cloud; the air would freeze again tonight. I began to see a loose pattern. Highly useful for a Norman king, this evidence that Arthur was truly dead and the Welsh could no longer count on him. But for a king of Welsh descent, who had landed from France in the west of Wales and ridden into England under the numinous banner of an undying Arthur…
I was intrigued. My books had none of this.
‘So what happened,’ I asked Cecil, ‘to the black marble tomb when the abbey was despoiled?’
‘A good question.’
‘It’s gone, though?’
‘Every last stone. It was marble. The abbey’s little more than a quarry now.’
A bonus, then, for the son of the first Tudor king? In the early years of his reign, King Harry had also been keen to maintain the connection with an undying Arthur. Had not his own face been imposed upon the likeness of the round table in the cathedral at Winchester where his dead brother, Arthur, had, conveniently, been born?
‘You’re saying Thomas Cromwell took the bones?’
It was said that Cromwell, perversely, had acquired a personal collection of holy relics looted from the monasteries.
‘If he did,’ Cecil said, ‘he doesn’t seem to have bequeathed them to the nation when it was his turn to visit the axeman.’
‘What’s being said?’
‘My intelligence is that by the time the marble tomb was dismantled, the bones had simply disappeared.’
‘The monks having removed them, knowing what was to happen? Perhaps burying them in another grave, unmarked?’
‘That’s one possibility, yes.’
‘So all evidence of the death of the Queen’s spiritual forebear…?’
‘Gone.’
‘Do we know where they might be hidden?’
Cecil made no reply, returning to his board.
‘Is there a suggestion,’ I said, ‘that someone has them? And, if so… who?’
‘I don’t know. The Queen’s court’s as full of twitterings as a woodland at dawn. It’s all rumour.’
For the first time, he looked angry. He was a pragmatist, a practical man, a survivor. Modern politics, certainly at Cecil’s level, did not lie easily with superstition.
‘John, all I know is this. At my last but one meeting with the Queen, she asked two questions. The first… if there was a great house at Glastonbury to which she might… invite herself.’
Cecil was known to approve of the Queen’s extended visits to the homes of her supporters, thus relieving the beleaguered exchequer of considerable domestic expense, sometimes for weeks at a time. Usually, however, the chosen houses were within easy travelling distance of London. Glastonbury would be a journey of several days.
‘She seems to have been made aware, maybe through her reading, of the mystical qualities of the place. Ta
lk of visions – your area of expertise, not mine, but something’s put it into her mind. And she talks of Arthur, increasingly. As if she’s suddenly discovered his importance.’
The coal fire had burned low. Cecil might have summoned a servant by now to stoke it, but he only stared into the whitening embers.
‘And what was the Queen’s second question?’ I said.
His face was dark. He wiped a hand across his jaw.
‘She asked me what it might cost to restore the Abbey of Glastonbury to its former golden glory.’
‘Costly,’ I said.
‘Costly?’ Cecil smacked his board. ‘Jesu Christ, this was the most extensive, gorgeous, religious fucking edifice in the entire country!’
‘Ah.’
I stood up, still not fully understanding. If the Queen’s father had been happy enough to destroy the evidence, however discredited, of Arthur’s mortality, why was Elizabeth now interested in getting it back?
‘All right,’ Cecil said. ‘Let’s hasten to the chase. If these bones exist, we need to have them. Even though they’ve caused nothing but trouble for more than four centuries.’
My doublet was cheap and I was cold.
‘Sir William, I don’t know this place. I don’t know anyone there.’
‘Sit down, John. Not asking you to go out with a spade and a muffled lantern.’
I sat down. Cecil made a steeple of his fingers.
‘We’ve known each other for a good many years. Have our differences, I accept this, but I think we’re at least united in our desire to preserve this queen. In body and in… spirit. And it seems her spirit, at present, is troubled.’
‘She’s talked to you of this?’
‘Doesn’t talk to me of such things. She’ll doubtless, in due course, talk of them to you, as her adviser on matters less earthly. Her… Merlin, shall we say?’
I didn’t like the direction this was going. Cecil looked down at his board.
