The Final Sacrament

by James Forrester

  I could not help but put up my hand first when it came to question time, for I come from a very different point of view. This is because the social landscape of the past is much too interesting to be seen as a backdrop only to what actually did happen. Historians and novelists alike can investigate what didn’t happen, whether through “Virtual History” essays or wholly imaginary fictions. And as for simplifying characters, few people ever say that Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One is a weak history play because it conflates the two Edmund Mortimers into one, so that the Earl of March becomes the husband of Glendower’s daughter. Hilary responded that “there is no excuse for ignoring the written record…many heinous crimes are justified because Shakespeare did them. But you are not Shakespeare.” Who did that “you” refer to, I wondered: had she aimed it directly at me? I suddenly felt as welcome as Coleridge’s man from Porlock. A little later, she charmingly suggested she might have been a little harsh, and that what she had said only really could apply to her own work. She does not make rules for other writers, she said.

  I have some sympathy for Hilary’s complaint. In an article in the Guardian, “The lying art of historical fiction,” I had similarly criticized the suggestion in the film Braveheart that William Wallace (who was executed in 1305) seduced Princess Isabella (born 1296, queen of England from 1308), and was thereby the father of Edward III (born 1312). That lacked intelligence, as well as integrity. However, the message of my article was that the real test of historical fiction is not how accurate it is but how good it is. I stand by the opinion expressed above: “the social landscape of the past is much too interesting to be seen as a backdrop only to what actually did happen.” If you follow the example of my Time Traveler’s Guides and make a journey into whichever kingdom or country in the past interests you, then why not set a story in that country? The sixteenth century was the ideal setting for my trilogy.

  There are some aspects of this book that are based on historical evidence, however, and it may be useful to draw attention to some of the more interesting ones, as some of the details are surprising or little known.

  To begin with, the document that lies at the heart of this story—although it probably never existed—reflects circumstances surrounding the marriage(s) of Anne Boleyn that might well have been true. For further details about this, see my Author’s Note to Sacred Treason. In that book, the key to the location of the document is hidden in the chronicle of Henry Machyn, a parish clerk and a Merchant Taylor, who wrote an account covering the years 1550–63 (today this is in the British Library: Cotton MS Vitellius F v). He was first married to Jone, who bore him several children, including his son and heir John; and later to Dorothy, by whom he had three daughters, all of whom died in infancy. At his death in 1563 he bequeathed his chronicle to his friend, the herald William Harvey, Clarenceux King of Arms, on whom I based my William Harley. I changed the name to emphasize the fictional nature of this character. Likewise I changed the name of Henry Machyn’s wife from Dorothy to Rebecca to allow a greater degree of latitude with the facts (and because too many people said the Yellow Brick Road came to mind when they read the name “Dorothy”).

  Obviously certain other characters in this book are based on real people—Queen Elizabeth; Sir William Cecil; Francis Walsingham; Lady Percy; the earl of Shrewsbury; Sir Gilbert Dethick; Sir Peter Carew; John Hooker; Sir William Drury; Richard Grafton; John Stow; and various Scottish persons, including Lord Henry Stewart (also known as Lord Darnley), Mary Queen of Scots, and Lord Bothwell. I will not insult the reader’s intelligence by pretending my characters closely reflect their historical namesakes; they do not. The queen, Sir William Cecil, and Walsingham all carry something of their real selves, but they appear here primarily as signifiers of power—Elizabeth I representing the throne, Sir William Cecil the authority of the queen’s Secretary, and Francis Walsingham the connivance of a “spymaster.” However, the details concerning the succession and the circumstances of Elizabeth’s birth and official illegitimacy are correctly related, as are the details of the plot to kill Lord Henry Stewart (Lord Darnley).

  It is in the social detail that I have taken pains to represent past reality—to describe what England looked and smelled like, and, above all, how its people behaved. The hanging scene and the bullbaiting are, as you may expect, heavily imagined, as I have never witnessed either, although some rather unsavory images on the Internet assisted in the recreation of the bull-baiting scene, and I bore in mind Dickens’s famous letter to The Times when writing the hanging scene. Similarly, the level of violence toward women is extrapolated from what I know of the legal cases of the time. It is important to remember that violence was endemic in Elizabethan England—and so was sexism and belief in the divinity of the social hierarchy. Today we cannot tolerate such sexist and hierarchical attitudes, but they were normal in the sixteenth century, and violence against women was much more commonplace than we could possibly accept today. Anyone who thinks I have overdone this aspect should reflect on a case I noted in my Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England. As Joan Somers tended to her mistress’s cattle in a field in late 1590, a man called Rice Evans came up to her. He seized her and told her that she could cry out as much as she wanted, for there was no one to hear her. He then raped her violently. Later she realized that she was pregnant. When others noticed, she was summoned to court and prosecuted for the sin of fornication. That is the measure of the degree of sexism inherent in the law. As there were no witnesses, Evans was not prosecuted; instead she was the one taken to court to face the consequences and ultimately punished for his crime.

  In a similar vein, people might wonder about the plight of women in jail. The situation as related here—that women sentenced to death were not hanged if they “pleaded their bellies”—is true. So are the processes alluded to herein; a woman might try to get a jailer, fellow prisoner, or some other man to make her pregnant to put off the day of execution, hoping to slip through the system. Many failed to escape, being hanged not long after their child had been born, taken away and given to a wet nurse. But some were successful in evading the noose. Other aspects of women’s roles in society reflected in this book include cleaning—all laundry was performed by women—and the restrictions on women obtaining professional positions. As alluded to by Mr. Wheatsheafen, a woman in the diocese of Exeter did receive a license in surgery in 1568: this was Mary Cornellys of Bodmin, who qualified as a medical practitioner a full three centuries before Elizabeth Garrett Anderson—but exceedingly few women did likewise. And, apart from midwifery and the duty of being a churchwarden, that was the only professional or official role permitted to women at the time.

  There are a number of characters in this novel who are called John, William, and Thomas. Not only is Clarenceux called William, but Sir William Cecil also appears regularly, and there are passing references to Sir William Drury and William Willis. As for Johns, there are John Beard, John the Egyptian, John Blackwell (“Sir John”), John Greystoke, John Lucas, “John Black,” John Parker, John Hunter, John Machyn, John Stow, John Wyclif, John Badby, and John Hooker. Why so many? The last-mentioned five were historical personages. I did think of removing some of the others—but the fact is that more than 50 percent of the entire male population was called John, William, or Thomas, and John was the most popular of the three—so thirteen Johns was about right. In case readers are wondering about a clergyman being called “Sir John,” in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, incumbents of parishes still were addressed in this honorific way. As for children’s words for their parents: according to the OED, supplemented with further references by my friend Susannah Davis, these were “Mam” and “Dad,” and even “Daddy” is to be found in a fifteenth-century poem by John Lydgate.

  I ought to admit that I have not always been consistent in using the correct sixteenth-century nomenclature. I have made no attempt to reflect the speech patterns of the period, which many people would find very awkward to read. M
oreover, I have been deliberately anachronistic with some terms, such as “nursing.” This did not relate to looking after the sick in the sixteenth century; women “attended,” “tended,” “helped,” “kept,” and “watched” with the ill, but “nursing” was synonymous with wetnursing. However, explaining such things in a novel—and not using such terms when otherwise I was using normal modern speech—seemed counterproductive and unlikely to enhance the reader’s enjoyment.

  Certain places are described with verisimilitude—Wynkyn de Worde was actually buried in St. Bride’s Church, and its vine-covered columns were a notable feature. The church was indeed lacking a vicar in 1566. Greyfriars Church had lost all its monuments, as described here, including the alabaster tombs of queens, in the 1550s. Portchester Castle was being used as a military hospital. Thame Abbey was a Cistercian house of monks; parts of it survive that indicate the layout was unorthodox. The lake or great fish pond on the east is still there; the church however, has entirely vanished, even though it was about 230 feet long and had a Lady Chapel extending it another forty-five feet. Henry of Abingdon was a real person and he did attend the Council of Constance—but he did not write a chronicle. The Lollard knights are partly based on reality but the story about them taking shelter in Thame Abbey is fiction. The actual hiding place used by Clarenceux exists—but not at Thame. I don’t know where it is. I was told about it at an event by a member of the public and promptly forgot about it until thinking through the end of this novel.

  The authors Grafton and Stow were actually at loggerheads about the use of Stow’s information. In fact, all the sixteenth-century books quoted in this novel are actual texts—including Grafton, Agrippa, and Gratarolus.

  I stated in my Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England that the cauliflower was introduced to England at a dinner for the Privy Council in 1590, but subsequently I noticed one in Joachim Beuckelaer’s painting in the National Gallery, Four Elements: Fruit and Vegetable Market (1569) and another in a work by the same artist dated 1564, so clearly they were available in the Low Countries in the 1560s.

  Religion is perhaps the most important and most difficult contemporary detail, and it is a subject I have tried to reflect more accurately than most of the historical novels set in the sixteenth century, which tend to downplay the spiritual values of the age. Some people have expressed surprise that my character behaves as he does, that he has no secret cynical side that allows him to sidestep his religious convictions when it suits him. I find their surprise extraordinary. For a start, atheism as we know it was not really possible in the 1560s. A few people had been accused of being “against God,” but as I have written in my Elizabethan Time Traveler’s Guide, not believing in God was like not believing in trees: the physical and the metaphysical could not be divided. People were deeply involved in the religious quest: the majority of books published in the sixteenth century were of a theological nature. This is out of keeping with the secularism of the twenty-first century; it is difficult for modern people to understand. However, there is a comparison. The religiosity of the sixteenth century was powered by an ardent quest for truth. So too is the atheism of the present day. I am not referring here to the mindless sort of atheism espoused by those who have no concern for anything other than shrugging off religion in the hope of freeing themselves in some way or other from organized religion’s limitations. I am referring to those who positively seek the truth, who wish to understand the nature of life on Earth as desperately as a Catholic in the sixteenth century would have sought God’s will, and who are not satisfied with explanations that depend on the Old Testament or any other religious text.

  When twenty-first-century atheists are challenged as to their lack of belief in God, their faith in God’s absence often proves as unshakable as sixteenth-century faith in God’s presence: convinced atheists and people following a religious quest are not dissimilar in that respect. In Clarenceux’s searching questions about why God makes the righteous suffer, and his skepticism of how one man can order another to change what he believes, I hope I have provided a sixteenth-century struggling spirit who, on the one hand, is true to the religious standards of his time, and on the other, is an adequate metaphor for both the religious searching soul and the inquiring secular mind of today.

  (Ian) James Forrester (Mortimer)

  Acknowledgments

  I did not include an acknowledgement page in either of the first two volumes of this trilogy, Sacred Treason and The Roots of Betrayal, so I hope readers do not begrudge me using this page to thank a few people for their help bringing the whole trilogy to fruition.

  My first acknowledgement of gratitude is to someone I don’t know. In the late 1990s an editor at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sent me a standard commissioning form asking me to write a new entry for the chronicler or “diarist,” Henry Machyn (d. 1563). In the course of the research undertaken to fulfill that commission, I discovered much more about Henry Machyn than was previously known (published in full by the Sixteenth Century Journal in 2002). In particular, I found that he left his “cronacle” (as he called it) to William Harvey, Clarenceux King of Arms (d. 1567). I also discovered a reference to the informal sixteenth-century London association or group of friends who called themselves the Knights of the Round Table, of which Henry was a member. It was that reference which first inspired these novels. Obviously there have been many other inspirations along the way—people and places, personal situations and stories—but the very first spark came from that research. So, a big thank you to whoever it was at ODNB who sent me that commission.

  My agent, Jim Gill at United Agents, deserves a round of applause for taking the first book, Sacred Treason, and finding a publisher when it was still unfinished. I’m very grateful to him for that vote of confidence. Also I am grateful for the foreign rights agents at United Agents, Jane Willis, Zoe Ross, and Jessica Craig, for the encouragement they have given me in selling these books to foreign-language markets.

  A very big THANK YOU goes to Martin Fletcher of Headline Review, who commissioned the trilogy and whose enthusiasm for the story in Sacred Treason and the two latter novels has been inspirational. I am also very grateful to Martin’s colleagues at Headline Review, especially Samantha Eades, not only for helping produce the books but for being so imaginative in finding ways to publicize them. Also to Joan Deitch, who copyedited all three books—and who had to contend with the vagaries of my style. The whole team at Headline has been wonderful.

  Thanks to Suzannah Lipscomb for the tour of Hampton Court, and to Susannah Davis for all the references to “Mam” and “Dad.” Thanks to my brother, Robert Mortimer, of the London Fire Brigade, for advice about how burning buildings consume oxygen.

  I am grateful to a few of my neighbors and friends for helping inspire various characters’ appearances and mannerisms in these books, especially the first two. I won’t name all the names—but you know who you are. One person I will mention: I am particularly grateful to Andy Gardner, whose conversations in the lanes around Moreton—when he has taken the time to stop his van and chat—have been one of the most pleasing aspects of the process. No doubt Raw Carew will find another ship soon and sail off into the sunset.

  I began with an anonymous thank-you and my penultimate one is also to someone I don’t know. At an event in Newbury, Berkshire, in 2011, a member of the public came up to me and told me about her house. There was a hiding place in it, a priest hole, and she had lived in the house for many years before she found it. I do not know who she was or where the house is, but the story lodged at the back of my mind. Readers of this book will realize how much I gained from that little detail.

  Finally, and most of all, I wish to thank my wife, Sophie. I am grateful for her support and encouragement. She has, at the same time, lifted my spirits and kept my feet on the ground—not a mean feat. I walk all the taller because of her.

  Read on for an excerpt from Sacred Treason, no
w available from Sourcebooks Landmark.

  Tuesday, December 7, 1563

  It was a cold day for a killing. The Scotsman, Robert Urquhart, rubbed his hands and breathed on them as he waited in Threadneedle Street, in London. Watching the door to Merchant Taylors’ Hall, he clutched each finger in turn, trying to keep them supple, his grip strong. He cursed the gray December skies. Only when two men appeared at the top of the steps, walking very slowly and deep in conversation, did he forget the chill in his bones. His victim, William Draper, was the one on the left—the jeweled gold collar gave him away.

  He studied Draper. Narrow face, gray hair and beard, about sixty. Not tall but well dressed, in an expensive green velvet doublet with lace ruff and cuffs. Eyes like a fox. He looked selfish, judgemental—even a little bitter. You could see how he had made his money: with an ambition as cold and biting as this weather, and with as little remorse.

  Urquhart watched Draper pull his cloak close and wait, standing on the bottom step, above the frozen mud. The man continued talking to his less well dressed companion. The carts and pedestrian traffic of the street passed in front of them, the snorting of the horses and the drivers’ breath billowing in the cold morning air.

  It could not be done here, Urquhart could see that. Not without risking his own arrest. That would be as bad as failure. Worse—for he knew her ladyship’s identity. They would torture that information out of him. Arrest would simply require her ladyship to send another man, to kill him as well as Draper.

  He walked to the end of the street and looked back casually. A servant led a chestnut palfrey around the corner from the yard and held it steady, offering the reins to Draper who mounted from the bottom step with surprising agility. Draper offered some final words to his companion from the saddle, then gestured good-bye with a wave of his hand and moved off.