Some stories do have happy endings. It depends however on what manner of man the Marquess is. I think there must be many more kinds of men than just the two described by Anne Cathcart.
I have had very little experience of couples, except from a distance – lovers in the lanes, families harassed by squalling infants, pairs of ancients on sticks. I hardly count my parents, they are unlike other people. The married pair I observed at close quarters with Anne Cathcart hardly enlarged my understanding.
They were Master Piers Perceval and his wife Mistress Agnes – another Agnes, like myself, so I was curious to see her. The Percevals are friends of Anne’s from her London days. Passing through Shaftesbury on their way to visit relatives in Cornwall, they sent a message inviting Anne to call upon them at the inn where they were spending the night. Having attained permissions from the Prioress for an hour’s visit to her old acquaintances between Vespers and Compline, she took me with her as her companion, as was the rule.
The Percevals greeted Anne with cries of pleasure. The three of them sat around the table, and Master Perceval called for ale. I sat to one side, on a stool, to all intents and purposes invisible. That was only proper. I was only the chaperone.
Mistress Agnes was voluble. After desultory questions as to her dear Anne’s health and spirits, she began to talk. She talked unceasingly throughout our visit. With many a merry laugh and toss of the head, she spewed information about her cousins and their marriages and their children, and those children’s marriages and places of residence, about her servants and their foibles and shortcomings, and the new gowns she was ordering from the new Queen’s dressmaker. She recounted stories within her stories, returning to the main path before setting out to regale Anne with anecdotes of who said what to whom and when, and who had been unfaithful and with whom, and how the property was to be divided, veering off into the ill-health of some rich uncle and its probable cause.
She was neither wholly malicious nor wholly charitable. She was a market-woman setting out her wares. She was a female mountebank intent on inspiring wonderment.
There was no sieve between what passed through her head and what came out of her mouth, to hold back the dross. Even Anne was silenced, and it is hard to silence Anne. Her initial lively interruptions, her essays at inserting into the torrent of trivia some contributions of her own, were overridden.
Master Perceval meanwhile sat with his hand on his chin, and never took his eyes off his lady wife for one moment. Nothing she said can have been new to him, but he appeared to give her his whole attention. I do not know what was in his mind.
Perhaps he was thinking: ‘She is the most fascinating creature. See how she moves her hands, see how expressive are her sweet features! How utterly charming she is. I am the most fortunate of men.’
Perhaps he was thinking: ‘What have I done to be tied for life to this petty self-concerned creature, this small-minded little rattle. I wish she would die.’
I cannot know. But the encounter did have a purpose. When I scraped the legs of my stool on the flagstones to convey that our hour was nearly up, Mistress Agnes looked at her husband. He leaned forward and addressed Anne.
‘May I enquire, Mistress Anne, what is your understanding of the future of Shaftesbury Abbey? Is it much spoken of, amongst yourselves?’
‘We hear the rumours,’ she said. ‘But Shaftesbury is safe. Shaftesbury is unassailable.’
‘Ah. But in the unlikely – the most unlikely – event of, shall we say, the ultimate catastrophe, what would be your own plans?’
‘I have not even thought about it. I suppose I would go to London and throw myself upon the mercy of old friends. But it will not happen.’
‘Of course not. But’ – he glanced at me – ‘may we perhaps speak alone, in confidence?’
‘No,’ said Anne. ‘That is not allowed, under our Rule. Besides, which, Sister Agnes is my friend.’
No one thought the coincidence of names worth commenting on. Master Perceval plunged on.
‘If you were to return to London you would be in danger of arrest. What you did is known. You are safe so long as you are a nun, but as an unsupported woman you would suffer the full force of the law. The interested party lost her position at Court because of what you did, and the interested party may be hot for revenge.’
Anne blushed scarlet and said nothing.
‘I knew your father,’ said Master Perceval. ‘That is the reason I am here. He was good to me when we were all young. I remember you as a little girl. A very pretty little girl too. Very pretty indeed. I would like to help you.’
His wife gave a laugh, the snort of a horse. She rose from her seat, as if to bring the interview to an end.
‘I did not do it, what they say I did,’ said Anne.
‘So be it,’ said Master Perceval. ‘I have said what I wanted to say. You may call upon me if you are ever in need, at any time of the night or day.’
He finished what was left of his ale, and stood up.
*
Dame Elizabeth Zouche, I note, is becoming a politician, fostering alliances with influential men with whom she has some personal connection. One of those on whom she is relying for counsel is Sir Thomas Arundell.
‘I am selling the leases of some lands to Sir Thomas Arundell. He is very pressing on the matter. Sometimes it is advantageous to concede in small things in order to gain greater things.’
We have had several visits from Sir Thomas Arundell. He and the Abbess sit at the table in her parlour. She sits at the head in her great carved chair. Another chair is carried in for him. I have a stool and small trestle in a corner behind him, taking notes on the conversation.
‘As to the lands I am acquiring,’ he said to the Abbess on the first occasion that I was on duty, ‘I will need your Abbey Seal on the deeds to validate the sale, for afterwards.’
Afterwards? What afterwards?
‘It will be advisable,’ Sir Thomas continued, ‘not to mention our arrangements to anyone outside these four walls. We do not wish to cause scandal or awaken jealousies. Oho, oho, the King himself might be jealous!’
Sir Thomas laughed a false laugh.
He is a persuasive young gentleman. Dame Elizabeth is beguiled by him. For his visits, she wears a high gable hood showing her front hair, and a silk veil. She smiles and uses her eyes. I never saw her coquettish like that with anyone else. He likes her too, though not half as much as he likes himself. He treats her as a woman of the world, leaning back in his chair, one leg in sleek black hose thrown across the other, giving her the news from London, who’s in and who’s out. A man can be riding high, honours and appointments piled into his lap. Then one false move, or one accusation of treachery, and he loses everything, sometimes his life.
‘Sir Thomas Wyatt is one such,’ said Sir Thomas Arundell. ‘Did you ever hear of him, Madam, down here in your western fastness? A curious poet and a handsome fellow. He was intimate with the Lady Anne Boleyn. How intimate cannot be proven, and of course I would never enquire directly of him, but he has spent time in the Tower under suspicion of adultery. He was only released because his father is a good friend of Thomas Cromwell. That is how the world works.’
He drew a paper out of his shirt-folds and spread it on the table.
‘I dined with him only last week, which may have been unwise on my part but he is good company. He gave me some verses which he is passing around among his friends. They have not been printed, they cannot possibly be printed. I will read to you only the beginning. The latter portion is of a nature to land him straight back in the Tower:
‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame and meek
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometimes they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with continued change.’
He read with emphasis and in
a dramatic whisper.
‘Continued change, Madam,’ he said, ‘continued change. That is what we must expect.’
He threw the paper down on the table and left. I put it away. I read the rest later. I quite see how it could have resulted in the poet’s re-arrest.
This Sir Thomas Arundell is another Cornishman, like Master Tregonwell, and another second son. How they do get around, these men from Cornwall. I suspect he is ruthless, though charming when he chooses, as he chooses to charm Dame Elizabeth Zouche. He wears a long, curling blue feather on his hat. The blue of the feather is deeper than the blue of forget-me-nots or the blue of the sky, it is the most intense, drenched blue I ever saw. When he visits her, he lays his hat upon his knee and smooths the feather with his fingers. He has been informing her recently about an ‘outrageous’ uprising of both clerics and laity in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire against the closing of religious Houses.
‘The small, failing Houses, of course?’
‘Yes, Madam, of course. We have to put the ruffians down, and hard. Parliament is passing an Act giving the closure of small monastic Houses the full force of the law. Then there can be no misapprehensions.’
Sir Thomas is some kind of kinsman to the King himself. He lets that drop casually. He is close to Master Thomas Cromwell, and was knighted at the coronation of Queen Anne Boleyn. His wife is a first cousin of that unfortunate lady. He is frequently at Court and attends all state occasions. In our own part of the country he has a finger in every pie. His coach, as he brags, is continually on the road between London and the West Country.
‘There are courtiers, and there are those that are courted,’ said the Abbess to me after he left. ‘Sir Thomas is on the cusp between the one and the other. He is a government servant who is looking to improve his position. I have to say that the Arundells are all good Catholics.’
‘Why, Madam, did he say that the King might be jealous of the land purchase?’
‘If the land sales were known, and we were ever investigated, which God forbid, both we and Sir Thomas could be charged with an exchange of property which should properly, in these strange times, be accruing to the King. If we retain Sir Thomas’s support, it will save us any aggravation.’
So at their next meeting it fell to me to note down that she was taking Sir Thomas Arundell’s advice and ceding to Master Thomas Cromwell, as he requested of her, the next presentation to the patronage of a parish in Wiltshire, which would mean a loss of tithes to the Abbey. She dictated the formal letter to me afterwards: ‘I am content to facilitate Master Cromwell in this matter and hope that it will give him pleasure.’
Lady Elizabeth puts faith in kinship. She reminded Sir Thomas that she was connected to him through John, Lord Zouche of Cary, whose first wife’s mother was an Arundell.
‘His first wife’s mother, you say.’
He spoke the words laboriously, as if a first wife’s mother was a concept so obscure that he had difficulty in apprehending it.
‘Is that so, Madam?’
She did not elucidate her own connection to Lord Zouche. He was not interested.
She explained the land transaction with Arundell to the community in Chapter as part of her plan to secure the prosperity of Shaftesbury Abbey for another six hundred years.
‘I have every confidence. You will pay no heed to rumours, or to stories about what may or may not be happening elsewhere.’
That autumn of 1536 the Abbess’s confidence began to seem misplaced. She learned from her letters details of those uprisings in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire against the closing of monasteries.
The uprisings were put down with violence. Thousands of people had occupied Lincoln Cathedral and refused to disperse. It began as a protest against the closure of Louth Park Abbey – a once great Cistercian House, but with only ten monks remaining. The vicar of Louth was hung, drawn and quartered. Around two hundred others were hanged.
This horror is something quite new. It is hard to apprehend. But it is hundreds of miles away from Shaftesbury.
*
We had our own first experience of a closure soon after the Abbess received this horrid news – which she chose not to share with the community in Chapter.
The Novice Mistress, Mother Monica Slater, called us together and told us that three new sisters were expected, and that our help would be required in preparing places in the dorter and making them comfortable. These sisters and their Prioress were coming from Cannington Priory near Glastonbury, which was being closed down. We were taking them in.
She made it seem unremarkable, unthreatening. Small, failing Houses, she said, had been closing over many years, and Master Thomas Cromwell was simply speeding up the closure of those which could no longer manage their affairs and had no money and could hardly even feed themselves, let alone help the poor. ‘It is just common sense.’
While she was speaking thus calmly, I was thinking of the new Act of Suppression to which Sir Thomas had referred, the text of which the Abbess had been sent from London. She required me to make several copies of it. I already had the notion that one day I might compose my own record of what happened – although it is turning out to be more about myself, like a journal – and so I made and kept my own copy:
Forasmuch as manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living is daily used and committed among the little and small abbeys, priories, and other religious houses of monks, canons and nuns, where the congregation of such religious persons is under the number of twelve persons, whereby the governors of such religious houses, and their convent, spoil, destroy, consume, and utterly waste, as well as their churches, monasteries, priories, principal houses, farms, granges, lands, tenements, and hereditaments, as the ornaments of their churches, and their goods and chattels, to the high displeasure of Almighty God, slander of good religion, and to the great infamy of the King’s highness and the realm, if redress be not had thereof …
And so on and on.
I said, after Mother Monica ceased speaking about the arrivals from Cannington, ‘But what if in the end we too are ordered to close down?’
The words flew out of my mouth. There was a moment’s silence. The Novice Mistress crossed herself.
‘Do not make yourself ridiculous, Agnes Peppin. Cannington is a small, failed House. Shaftesbury Abbey is in a different category altogether.’
‘What will happen to Cannington?’ asked a Fairhead. ‘I know that House, it is in the middle of the village, a good House.’
‘I understand it is being acquired as a residence by a private gentleman. But that is none of our business.’
But all the precious things the Cannington nunnery possessed – and there had been Benedictine nuns in that village for three hundred years – in the way of books and manuscripts, silver and gold plate, pewter, vessels, embroidered vestments, altar cloths, manuscripts, tapestries, glassware, were packed into wagons and saddle bags and taken away after dark up the long road towards London, where the King’s new Court of Augmentations would receive them into to his coffers. The Commissioners did not go empty-handed, either.
The nuns from Cannington arrived after dark, in the rain. I watched them totter in through the gatehouse, drenched and bewildered. The man who brought in their bundles in on a handcart dumped them down on the cobbles and left. We took the shivering sisters into the parlour and fed them soup. They were thin and hunched, their habits muddy at the hems, and no longer black but brownish with age. The Novice Mistress told us that the Cannington sisters were well-born, and had been ‘naughty nuns’. In times past, there had been scandals. They did not look naughty now.
Their Prioress, Dame Cecilia de Verney, was old and weak and had no notion of where she was. She was led off to the Infirmary. I was allotted the task of tending her there. I thought to myself that this work might have been given to Eleanor Wilmer, since I already had so much to do. Not that Eleanor would have been any good at it. And the Novice Mistress said that I needed a lesson in humility. The work had its adva
ntages. The Infirmary has fires burning, and is warm.
Dame Cecilia muttered sometimes in a tongue that they said was the French of France. Once she said to me politely, in English,
‘Madam, may I go home?’
‘Where is home?’
She looked at me with her pink-rimmed eyes and said, ‘Away, away.’
‘Back to Cannington?’
‘No no no … Before.’
Once a week I washed her face and hands and feet, and wiped down her bald crotch and shrivelled shanks. Clean linen absorbed the smells. I would have liked to wash her whole body, but the Infirmaress told me that fatal infection from water enters through the skin. I said to myself, please God let me never grow old, I would rather be dead.
Dame Cecilia did die. It was the hour of Matins, the darkest hour, and we were all in choir. In the morning I laid her out, as my mother would have done. I filled the openings in her body with herbs. I sang for her the little songs my mother sang. Dame Cecilia was buried with no marker in the nuns’ graveyard.
I prayed for her soul. Whatever my distaste, I know that my hands upon her body were kind, by the grace of God yes my hands were kind.
Not everyone in the Infirmary was kind. The women from the town who did most of the nursing were rough. I saw one of them slap a sick nun across the face because she was crying out loud for the pain in her belly. I saw another forcing lumps of hard bread between the lips of a nun whose mouth was covered in sores. She whimpered and turned her head away but the nurse yanked it back by the strings of her cap. I saw other disrespectful happenings which I prefer not to record. This was not good.
I did not say anything to Dame Alice Doble, the Infirmaress, because since she stalked up and down the ward a dozen times a day she must have seen everything I saw. I did not dare to bring it up in Chapter, which may after all have been the right thing to do. I told Dame Agatha Cracknell, the Prioress, who seemed to me to be the proper person to correct irregularities. I went to her office, where she was surrounded by business. Stupidly, it slipped my mind that she and the Infirmaress were particular friends.
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