The next letter, like its predecessor, is undated, but I should guess it to come from the early part of December 1678.
If I seemed distracted at my last visit to you, which I greatly fear I was, then I must own to you that I have been much vexed in spirit. You have heard from me how my Provost’s Lodging stood much in need of repair. Indeed, at the time, I only knew the half of it. The whole house is most prodigiously infected with damps, unwholesome airs, noisome stenches, cold blasts coming from under doors and through ill-made casements; moreover with every form of vermin and pestilent insect such as spiders, beetles, bats, mice and rats who are forever skittering and scuttering behind the panels and wainscots and most especially at night when the very walls of my bedchamber seem alive with their gnawings and scrapings. It is, in truth, a Pandaemonium and I sleep but fitfully. I have had poisons set down and have put cats and terriers to the hunting of my tormentors, but to no avail. Last night I was in my bed and having sunk into a fitful doze, I felt something fall upon my bed. Putting out my hand I touched a thing, I know not what, it must surely have been a rat, but heavier and more monstrous than any I have known [the word ‘thing’ was heavily underlined by Hodnet]. Its hairs were sparse and more like the bristles of an old hogg to touch. I leaped up and the thing made off. The curtains of my bed being drawn, and it being dark, I saw nothing of it and I thank my Saviour that I did not. Truly, it may have been a dream, and I pray it was, but yet it was like no dream that I ever had or hope to have.
You may well suppose that much of my life has fallen into disarray as a consequence, but, by God’s Grace, I have held my mind together to do the business of the college with the zeal and dispatch for which I was elected Provost. I show no outward signs of dismay, except to such as you who are my intimates, and I thank God daily for this fortitude of Spirit.
One matter, I must confess to you, vexes my soul more even than my nightly torment. You would know that the small skills and reputation I possess have put me much in request as a preacher and that this is a Holy Work I love to do. Last week, being called upon to deliver the University Sermon at Great St Mary’s you can conceive with what diligence I composed it. Indeed, being more than ever reluctant to go to my bed, I spent the best part of the two nights preceding my delivery of it in the writing. To tell truth, I felt myself much soothed and satisfied by my efforts. It was a Divine Consolation to me that, in the midst of tribulation, I could yet abundantly fulfill a duty so pleasing to my Lord and Saviour.
Imagine then my consternation when, upon mounting the pulpit to deliver what I had set down, I found my writing in parts so badly crabbed that I was at pains to read it out. My natural fluency was stemmed, though I thank my God that I made good without undue stumblings, until I came upon this passage which should have read as follows:
‘It was with great courtesy and most sweet humility that our Saviour did act as intercessor for us and did establish that Mystic Union between God and His Church which endureth for Ever More.’
Yet this was not what I had written down, and what I had written is what I here set down:
‘It was with great courtesy and most sweet humility that our Saviour did act as intercessor for us and did establish that Mistaken Union between God and His Church which endureth for Never More.’
How I could have brought forth such a grave and blasphemous error I know not, for I had read and read again these words to my complete satisfaction but a few hours before. And yet, there it was, writ down in my own hand. I confess it made me halt and for some moments in that pulpit I was robbed of all composure. At length I gathered together my distracted wits and did continue, but without that winning fervour and fluidity as I had formerly evinced. My congregation fell to coughing and did not enjoy that grace of the Spirit through me as I would have wished to have granted them.
The next letter to Mr Beard comes from the early part of 1679.
My griefs come upon me thick and fast. I did tell you that my friend Mr Catton was like to be elected to a fellowship and indeed all fell out as I desired. But on the night of his preferment and much against my admonishments he went a carousing with certain of his fellows in a low ale house not far from the river. A short while after midnight he was seen by his companions to start up from the table and to address words unto the empty air. They, thinking that this was some idle jape brought on by strong ale, bade him sit down again. But he paid them no heed and continued to discourse with vacancy, his eyes fixed upon the open ale-house door. Presently he leaves his companions and goes out into the night. They did not follow him and, being craven-hearts and empty-skulled fellows, gave as their reason that they were suddenly struck with much fear. What befell Mr Catton then, God, He knows, but I do not. Yet, when I was walking early on the morrow in the Fellow’s Garden—my nights being restless, I did often walk abroad early in the cool of the morning to soothe my spirits—I spied what I first thought to be a great mass of clothes and clouts all wet upon the grass. First wondering if this were some knavery of the serving men or the students I approached and beheld that it was the figure of a man but so swelled and distended in the face and belly that it scarce resembled a human creature. Summoning Courage to my aid I did approach still closer to see the face and there—I shudder even now to recall it—I saw the features of my poor friend Mr Catton all pumpled and bloated as if by the plague, and his skin as gray as an old shroud. Yet, by some foul circumstance, he still lived, and was taking in great gasps of breath like a trout landed upon the river bank by an angler. Then of a sudden, in one great convulsion, his whole body seemed to burste open and great gouts and floods of water did pour out from him as though he were a leaking flagon or a torn wine skin, and all the water was noisome and stinking and full of corruption. There was such a vast outpouring that it seemed that all the jakes and privies of the city were disbouched from my poor friend’s body. And at the end he lay there a dead corpse, emptied of those foul waters which now lapped about my feet like the very waters of Acheron and Styx. Aye, and would it had been Lethe! Long may I live, but however long, Time will never take from me the fearful horror of that hour. See how the strokes of my pen are all of a tremble as I write!
I have sought consolation in prayer and holy meditation, yet nothing will assuage my amaz’d despair. I seek to do the Lord’s work in preaching the word, yet even in this my endeavours turn to ashes. I find that when I turn to the writing of them my thoughts are confounded and corrupted and know nothing of their former fecundity. By a great endeavour of body and soul I fashion my discourse, yet when I rise to deliver it in the House of God, I see nothing but confusion on the page before me. And lo! like the apostle Paul, what I would that I did not, and what I would not that I have done. I see things that I cannot have written and yet I have. In my homily and exhortation against the fear of death which I was to deliver in the college chapel I read: ‘Remember, o man, that thou must die. Ere summer thou shalt be no more.’ Whence comes this? And here I see: ‘I await thee. Water shall cover us both.’ What manner of thing is this that I write not what I would? Do my enemies go about to bewitch me? Am I plagued by the spirit of one I have wronged? Yet, before God, I have wronged none and none should be mine enemy.
The last letter written to the Revd Mr Beard again has no date but it must come from some time in March 1679. It is an angry document, in parts barely coherent, and would appear to indicate an irrevocable rift between the two friends. It seems that Dr Hodnet had been invited to the Revd Mr Beard’s parish at Grantchester to deliver a Lenten sermon, and that this sermon had not gone well. Mr Beard had evidently objected strongly to some of the matter in Dr Hodnet’s discourse and he in turn had taken exception to these objections. His letter concludes thus:
You tell me that I said of our Lord that for forty days and forty nights he feasted in the desert when I had meant fasted, I protest before God that I did not. I protest. How could such a thing have passed my lips? What calumny is this, sir? Do you seek to drive me mad? And when you say that I had
told your congregation: ‘he that hath fears to fear, let him fear,’ I did not. Do not try me with your foolishness, sir, and let all communication between us be at an end.
The final document I would have you consider is a pamphlet of a kind produced in thousands throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but which are now accounted rarities. This one is particularly rare. Indeed, the only one extant that I know of is in the possession of the St James’s College library. It is dated 1679 and is entitled: A True and Faithfull Relation of the Most Lamentable and Mysterious Death of the Rev’d Elias Hodnet D.D., sometime Provost of St James’s College in the City of Cambridge. The front of it carries a woodcut in a black border, crudely drawn but not without a certain power. It depicts a man standing in a pulpit in church, dressed in the usual lawn-sleeved surplice and black stole of an Anglican divine of that period. As no portrait survives of Dr Hodnet we do not know how true a likeness it is, but the figure is tall and lean with long lugubrious features. He is in the act of preaching but on his right shoulder crouches a curious black, misshapen creature with little stumpy wings. This demon holds up his hand to his mouth and whispers privily into Dr Hodnet’s ear. To the right and pointing downwards is a huge hand emerging from a cloud, such as you will see often in this kind of print and depicting the hand of God. The scroll along the top of the woodcut bears a quotation from Genesis 11 verse 7. ‘Go to, let us go downe and there confounde their language.’ I will spare you the pious moralising with which this ‘Relation’ (like so many others of its kind) is larded and confine myself to the significant facts.
The pamphlet begins with a generally laudatory account of Dr Hodnet’s career, but then it states, rather vaguely, that ‘’twas thought that in his latter years he became known of the Devill and reaped many rewards and benefits by that hellish association.’ It tells how, having once been a noted preacher, his sermons began to decline in popularity because he ‘began to wander in his wits, and dwelt overmuch upon the tortures of the damned.’ Then came the fatal day in the April of 1679 when he preached his last sermon in the church of St Bene’t’s in Cambridge.
The pamphlet reports:
He was to preach on that text from the Revelation of John: ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock.’ And yet, in the course of his sermon, he was heard to travesty the words of this most sacred text as: ‘Behold, I stand at the bridge and wait.’ And each time he in error spoke these words—by what devilish prompting we dare not say—he did pause and look aghast and the most deadly pallor overspread his cheeks. Yet he continued to speak until his final peroration which we now set down just as he wrote it without alteration. Thus:—
‘It is certain that the Kingdom of Hell is of a truth within us, but also upon this earth. Surius saith that there be certain mouths of hell, and places appointed for the punishment of men’s souls, as at Hecla in Iceland, where the ghosts of dead men are familiarly seen, and sometimes talk with the living, and where lamentable screeches and howlings are continually heard, which strike a terror to the auditors; moreover, fiery chariots are commonly seen to bring in the souls of men in the likeness of crows, and devils ordinarily go in and out. For God would have such visible places, that mortal men might be certainly informed that there be such punishments after death, and learn hence to fear God. Thus we may glimpse, but through a glass darkly, what torments the Lord of this World hath prepared for they who serve him. In the vaults of his darknesse, beyond the wall of Death, are many cries, but all unheard there, for every appeal to mercy, every supplication for pardon is swallowed up in the maw of Him whose mouth is that of a Raging Lion, whose stare, like the Basilisk’s, turns all to stone, whose breath, like the Dragon, consumes with a raging fire, and whose body, like the Serpent’s, returns upon itself and choketh all within it. Very truly hath Isaiah spoken: “There is no peace, saith the Lord unto the Wicked.” For hath not the Lord of Heaven put those wicked persons into the hands of the Lord of this World? And hath not the Devil, for it is He, confounded their sleep with a thousand creeping things that wander unceasingly through the mazings of their house and minde, with many curious whisperings and scrapings? And hath not his servant Death put up his raw and bony head against my head and shrieked aloud words which I dare not speak? And are not the very waters of Baptism turned into a foul and stinking puddle? For when the soul is corrupted, then all is corrupt and there is no joy any more, and all the world is become a painted show. And behold he stands not at the door to knock, for the door is barred and bolted everlastingly. Behold there is another, by which I mean Satan, Lord of Hell, and he stands at the Bridge and waits, but he will not wait for long, for he is ravening to take us unto himself eternally.’
As he spoke these words all the congregation did sit in great amazement, and many, beholding his grasping of the air and the rolling of his eyes as he spoke, thought his wits distracted; and some said he was bewitched and thought to lay hold of him. But he of a sudden did run from the pulpit and out of the church door, and though some followed him few saw what happened next for he did run with great speed like a wild horse affrighted.
But there was a certain undergraduate, a Mr Kimball, who in an idle hour was standing fishing by the Queens’ Bridge over the Cam and we have it of him what happened next. As he was fishing by the bridge he noticed all of a sudden a figure upon the bridge that was dressed all in black with a black hat on his head. His features Mr Kimball could not see for they were all in shadow which he said was a curious thing for it was a fine morning. And another thing he did observe of the man which struck him with much amazement and that was that the man in black who had a large and corpulent body seemed to glister all over with water and that an odour was wafted from him which smelled much of the corrupt mud at the bottom of an old mill pond or of graveyard mould. Then, as he looked, Mr Kimball did see another man come running towards the bridge from the city, and this man was in his middle years, he said, narrow-looking and thin as a rush-light, and he ran, said Mr Kimball, as if seven devils were after him. Then, when this running man, who was Dr Hodnet, came to the bridge he halted as he saw the man in black. Then the man in black did stretch his arms towards Dr Hodnet, whether in greeting or for some other reason, Mr Kimball cannot say. Then Dr Hodnet uttered a great cry and ran at the man in black as if to strike him down, but the man in black folded his arms around Dr Hodnet and held him fast. Anon began a struggle which, sayth Mr Kimball, was most terrible to see for the man in black did grip Dr Hodnet with big splayed hands which, Mr Kimball reports, must have been gloved for they were as black as the rest of him, and the fingers being long were like the talons of a great eagle around the mean and frail body of the Reverend Dr Hodnet. And all the while Dr Hodnet did utter the most piteous cries, such as ‘Christ have mercy!’ and ‘Lord defend me, though I am but a sinner!’ Mr Kimball says that he dared not bring aid to this distracted man for, he said, he was held fast by mortal terror for his life and soul. Then Mr Kimball saw that with one great heave, the man in black did heave Dr Hodnet over the bridge and that he went with him into the flood. And they were swept down beneath the waters and in a moment had vanished from sight.
Such was the most lamentable and tragicall fate of the Reverend Dr Hodnet. Some days later his corpse was discovered some two miles down the river from where last he was seen, at Horningsea. His features being much blackened by corruption and eaten away of vermin, it was only by the aid of the Revd Mr Beard, who knew him from the rings on his fingers, that the body was shown to be the mortall remaines of the Provost of St James’s College. Of the Man in Black no trace or sign was ever found.
The reader may imagine for himself the kind of vapid moralising with which the pamphleteer concludes his sensational account. As to Hodnet’s sermons, whose beauties were said to rival those of Taylor himself, they were never to be published, as the Doctor dearly wished them to be. Moreover, the manuscripts have been lost to posterity, though I yet live in hopes of unearthing an example among the archives of St James’s College.
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MAGUS ZOROASTER
Only the day before it happened I had been telling my agent how much I resembled Clive MacIver. And now he is dead; MacIver, that is; not—alas—my agent.
I was always being mistaken for him. This led to some embarrassing moments, such as when I was asked my opinion of the latest novel by Martin Amis in a book shop, or when I was attacked in an art gallery for not approving of Balthus. (And I like Balthus.) Sometimes I told them I was not Clive MacIver, but I wasn’t believed; so I found it easier just to give some drivelling reply and clear off.
The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler Page 11
