The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  Robert Fletcher, triumphant, looked at the other monks once more, and last of all at the prior, and said, slowly and with final weight:

  “Loathe for to think on aught under God, and go not thence for anything that befalleth.”

  He sat down quietly, thanking God for the words which had come to him, the right words.

  In the silence that followed, the prior sat for a while with bowed head. At last he opened his mouth to speak. A low growl came from the corpse-like lips of Thomas Leighton.

  “You spoke, Master Leighton?” the prior said.

  “I said, ‘I come not to bring peace, but a sword.’ ”

  Thomas Leighton died in June, before they heard that three more monks had been slaughtered in London, and then Bishop Fisher, and then Sir Thomas More, who had been Chancellor of England; before the hottest weeks of the summer, when strangers arrived every few days to question the prior and often the monks also; before two monks ran away and were caught on the road to Scotland and brought back with their hands tied like common thieves; before the prior went away to York to see the archbishop and came back with a book proving the pope’s authority to be no greater than that of any other foreign bishop.

  In August they learned that a monk of Jervaulx, not fifteen miles away, had been hanged in chains at York for upholding the supremacy of the pope on the word of Master Leighton of the Mountgrace, which he would not forsake. But when the monks of the Mountgrace were asked to swear the second oath, the oath of loyalty to the king as head of the Church in England, they swore it, all of them, with soldiers eating round the fire in the guesthouse, their weapons on the floor beside them.

  Robert Fletcher knelt in his cell that day with The Cloud of Unknowing open in his hands and thanked God for the saving of his monastery from a needless end.

  10

  November 1535

  Master Edmund Harvell, merchant, at Venice, to Master Thomas Cromwell, Secretary to King Henry VIII, in London; November 1535.

  “. . . I have myself delivered into the hand of the said Master Reginald Pole your letter requiring him to make answer at the king our sovereign’s express commandment to those things which have been asked of him and signifying to him your desire that this same answer may be to the honour of God and the satisfaction of the king’s grace. He read in my presence your letter and the letters of the king’s chaplain bearing the same commandment of his grace and put them away privily, saying to me never a word. One in my pay, whom (after many several vain endeavours to overcome with gifts the silence of his servants) I have at length placed within his household here, informs me that he is now much occupied in the writing of a book, an answer, it may be understood, to the king our master’s repeated requests for his opinion concerning the king’s proceedings as to the divorce and the casting off of the bishop of Rome’s yoke. He is said to be altogether turned away from his books of philosophy and to have told the young men about him that theological learning is alone truly deserving of their study. He makes much of certain grave and illustrious men, his elders by many years, Signor Gasparo Contarini and the Abbot Cortese and Bishop Carafa of Chieti among them, with whom he spends long hours at the abbey of San Giorgio, discussing, as my informant has it, reforms needful in the bishop of Rome’s church. Which way, after all such studies and deliberations, he will tend in the matter of his answer to the king’s grace, time will surely uncover, which I cannot. Care for the dignity and safety of his mother and brothers yet in England will surely weigh heavy against such pronouncements to the king’s dissatisfaction as he, in his regard for the bishop of Rome, may falsely judge to be to the honour of God.

  “A rumour I have thus far been powerless to verify holds that the said Master Pole has received from the emperor himself a letter encouraging him to hope for succour in an invasion of England that would have as its end the placing of the Princess Mary upon the throne with Master Pole as her husband. If this be indeed the case, Master Pole is already deep in such traitorous dealings with Messire Chapuys as those for which Bishop Fisher lately met his end. It is certain that Master Pole did take very ill the news of the bishop’s death and that of Sir Thomas More, and that rasher voices in his household than his own compared their deaths to that of Thomas Becket in ancient time. The Signory of Venice, however, has been not greatly troubled by the English news, caring, as is its long-known custom, much for the consideration and protection of the wool trade and little for the bishop of Rome’s honour and dignity. If the said bishop of Rome publish the bull against the king’s highness that I am told has been prepared, upon my word as a merchant trading in the port of Venice, the Signory will put the profit of the republic before whatever duty it may owe to the said bishop.”

  11

  1535—1538

  After the summer of 1535 more than four years passed in which the monks of the Mountgrace were again left undisturbed in the peace of the cloister. Once, in October 1536, a servant to Sir Thomas Percy dismounted from his horse at the gate and demanded of the prior that he and two of his monks should ride forth with their best cross to join and succour the great pilgrimage then afoot against the king’s plundering ministers. The prior called the man into the chapter-house and said before the assembled monks that it was not the business of monks of the Charterhouse to march with men under arms, whatever their cause. The messenger rode away alone. A month later they heard that the pilgrimage had been cruelly put down and that the pilgrims, called rebels by the king, had dispersed into the far corners of the north whence they had come. During the following spring and summer further letters from London and York brought news of the executions of all the leaders of the pilgrimage, though the king had pardoned them, including Sir Thomas Percy and the abbot of Jervaulx. The monks said prayers for the dead men’s souls, thankful that their prior had kept them from danger within the walls of their cells.

  Their peace was not as it had been: it was soured, curdled, with fear.

  In the summer of 1537 they heard that ten monks of the London Charterhouse, who for two years had refused to swear allegiance to the king’s supremacy over the Church, had been taken from their monastery and chained to posts in the dark in Newgate gaol, where one by one they died of hunger and disease.

  The news that frightened them the most, because they understood it the least, came early in 1538. The Charterhouses of Coventry and Sheen, where no offence had been committed nor any disobedience shown, were surrendered to the king by their priors, and the monks dispatched into the world to find, each man for himself, where to lay his head.

  The monks of the Mountgrace prayed for the safety of their house.

  12

  March 1538

  Messire Eustace Chapuys, ambassador to the court of King Henry VIII in London, to Emperor Charles V, King of Castile and Aragon, Count of Burgundy, hereditary lord of the Netherlands, Austria, etc., etc., in Spain; March 1538.

  “. . . Much though it is to be wished that King Henry will indeed contract the Milanese marriage, with all the advantages to your imperial grace’s interests in the Low Countries that we have before this time set forth, I fear that it would be over-sanguine to hope for his true firmness of purpose in this matter. The infant Prince Edward continues in good health and, having satisfied after so many years his great longing and desire for an heir male, the king at this present approaches the devising of a further union with a levity that is the despair of his councillors.

  “I have discerned a most dire change in the dealings of Master Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal, with the religion of this realm. Following the forfeitures of some few abbeys and priories in the north, as retribution for their complicity in the great rising, Master Cromwell has lately received the surrenders of many several more in all parts of the realm, innocent of any resistance to the king though these have been. Further, the monks of these last-surrendered abbeys and priories are no longer given leave to pursue their religion in another house but are cast upon the world with but a meagre pension to keep them from beggary. De
spite letters despatched by the said Lord Privy Seal this very month to all the abbots and priors of England signifying that the king intends no suppression of any house yet standing except they desire such suppression of themselves or else misuse themselves contrary to their allegiance, I reckon these fair words in truth no more than threats to them that they must keep such goods and rents secure and whole as they now possess, for the future enrichment of the king’s store. For the word at court is all of a general dissolution, and those who would advance themselves by the purchase of abbey lands from the king are even now sharpening their pens.

  “Cardinal Pole’s vain endeavour to assist the rising in the north has earned his family much grief and danger in these last months, and I have heard that his mother, the Lady Margaret (who, your grace will recall, was so good and faithful a friend to the late Queen Catherine, your aunt), was constrained to write him letters condemning him as a traitor and avowing her earnest wish that he had never been born (though in her heart I do believe her most anxious for his safety from spies and assassins despatched by the said Lord Privy Seal), proud as she must in truth be to know a son of hers prince of the Church and ever close to the pope himself.”

  13

  June 1538—May 1539

  Robert Fletcher glanced every day at his precious book, which was never sent back to the London Charterhouse, but opened it no longer. It seemed now not to have been written for him but for someone else whom he had once known. He had come down into the shadows with the rest, and, like them, he waited, watching the prior, while all over England monks were taking their pensions and leaving their cloisters, putting off their habits and setting forth to scatter their bones across the land.

  In June 1538 the Charterhouse of Axholme fell, whose prior had been one of those disembowelled in 1535. In November 1538 the last monks in the London Charterhouse, those who had yielded to the king, were turned out. Their cells were used to store the pavilions, banners, and gilded tents that decked the field for the king’s jousts. In March 1539 Witham and Hinton, in Somerset, the oldest of the English Charterhouses, were surrendered without protest, though the prior of Hinton had written to the Mountgrace in February that he would never give up that which was not his to give but dedicated to Almighty God.

  Robert Fletcher had once been sure of the course the prior should take. After the assault of all this news, his sureness had altogether failed. When yielding was to save the house, there had been a reason for yielding. When nothing could save the house, what reason was there for resisting? He saw none. He shared the fear of all the others.

  They lived through the days as they always had, in their cells, in choir, on their knees. But they were moving in an emptiness. They had died to the world; they had been called to live only towards their own deaths, towards the thinning of the veil that separated them from God. Time for them had been folded up in God, folded up no less in death. They were monks. They were not going to die as monks. This they now knew. Therefore what was slowly lost its meaning for them because what was to come had already been taken from them.

  As martyrs they could have died as monks. Little by little they understood that the occasion for such a death had slipped by without their grasping it. Robert Fletcher knew that by some of them he himself was held to blame for this.

  One day in May 1539 he heard Geoffrey Hodson, crossing the cloister, tell another monk that Master Fletcher had seen a vision announcing that the Mountgrace was to be saved and that the prior had believed his story to the ruin of them all. It was loudly said, in order that he should hear. He walked back without pausing to his cell, climbed the ladder to his loft, and stood at the window, angry, looking over the wall into the wood. It was not true; but what profit could there now be in more words of his? The moment was past, the time when they might have chosen another way.

  He ran a finger along the familiar lifting grain of the rough oak window frame. Perhaps what the young monk had said was after all not far from the truth. He thought of Master Leighton and of his own certainty that the old man had been wrong in the stand he had taken, lacking an understanding of the true end of Carthusian life. Now his own understanding, his own certainty, had dissolved with the dissolution of the naked intent stretching into God by which he had set so much store. God seemed infinitely far away and careless, after all, of the fate of his monks, who were to be loosed into the world in a terrifying freedom that had about it none of the warmth of obedience. Was it that old Leighton had been right? And yet what purpose would their deaths have served?

  He stood at the window for a long time. He opened the casement, and mild sweet air came into the musty loft. He looked out at the new green leaves of the trees, the stars of the garlic, the blue forget-me-nots, blooming beneath them, the slanting sunlight breaking through them, and knew that he was glad. Whether or not it was his own doing, however much or little he was to blame, he was glad, glad not to have died, not to have starved to death chained to a post in Newgate. And he knew in the same instant that it was not the pain and the filth and the dark that he was glad to have escaped but death itself, the leaving of the world, before, before—

  He watched a bumblebee blunder from starry flower to flower of the wild garlic. Before what, he did not know. But he laughed to himself as he stood there, looking at the wood beyond the wall, the scrambling briars, the green sprawl of the traveller’s joy, the spikes of the foxgloves, the tall nettles, taller every day, outside the garden where no one cut them down. What ruin, he asked himself as he breathed the soft air. What ruin?

  He looked up the hillside under the oaks and saw a deer, a young stag, knee-deep in garlic and bluebells, regarding him with a clear gaze. He held his breath. But the stag bucked suddenly, plunged its antlered head forward, and bounded away up the hill, disappearing among the tree trunks.

  Robert Fletcher bent and kissed the unplaned casement frame, which was warm in the sun.

  14

  October 1539

  Master Edmund Harvell, merchant, at Venice, to the Lord Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal and Lord Great Chamberlain of England, at the court of King Henry VIII in London; October 1539.

  “. . . I have lately travelled to Rome, at much charge to myself and pains upon the way thither, being not well pleased with the diligence of him whom I during the past year, at your lordship’s behest, have retained to spy upon the traitor Pole and to discover his purposes against the king’s majesty and realm.

  “The said traitor Pole returned to Rome last month, his journey to the emperor in Spain and to France in search of aid and comfort in his seditious enterprises against the king’s highness having been, most happily, not one whit more fruitful than that which he undertook two years since. He expended much time, and all to waste, in Toledo and afterwards with an Italian bishop close to Avignon; in like manner on the former occasion he was forced to lie for weeks idle in Liège, which is neither a French nor an imperial city, since neither the emperor nor the king of France cares to receive the sworn enemy of the king’s highness, be he even the bishop of Rome’s cardinal-legate with never so great a train. The said bishop of Rome may thunder as he will; his commission appointed to punish the king’s grace for the destruction of the idolatrous shrine to the traitor Thomas Becket is already dissolved for lack of work to do, nor has his minion Pole the power to act in his master’s evil designs without succour from the emperor or from France. The cardinal’s traitorous purposes against his native land being thus now in check, he talks away the time, or so I learned in Rome, with other cardinals of like mind, among whom Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, of the noble family of Venice, is his nearest friend, in vain attempts to further the cause of a general council of the Church. It is my belief that such a council will never come to pass, for so deep in iniquity are sunk the most part of the bishops and cardinals that they will never countenance such light upon their dealings as a general council would shed abroad. If there be any council, it will rather be no more than that assembly of ambitious manciples, of men sworn t
o popish lusts and gains, that your lordship has written of before this time.

  “While thus constrained in Rome the traitor Pole has few means by which he may harm the king’s majesty; nevertheless by the same token he is in Rome protected from those captains as have been bruited in all Italy to serve his majesty in the matter of the said cardinal’s apprehension. It is certain that he went in fear of his life upon his several travels of the last years, but by disguise and feigned roads and other such tricks he has up to this present devised to evade and escape all these his pursuers.

  “When I left Rome he lay ill in his house there, though not, I fear, sick unto death. One of the lowest servants of his household, whom by lavish gifts I at length enjoined to speak, told me that he grieves much for the deaths of his brother and kinsmen and for the imprisonment of his mother, as well he may, knowing naught but his own foolish pride and black villainy to have brought all about. The having upon his soul the ruin of so great a family and the base ingrate malice with which he has used his natural prince and country were enough long since to have persuaded to a more conformable mind one less hardened in evil intent than he.

  “I am now come again into Venice, where my own affairs have suffered not a little loss from these two months’ absence in your lordship’s business. If my pains and charges therein were to be speedily requited, the damage were soon set to rights. There is great scarcity of wheat in Venice, and it is my advice that licence granted by his majesty for the free exporting of wheat and other grain from England into Venice would earn the more gratitude of the Signory, which it is ever to the advantage of the realm to foster.”

  15

  December 1539—April 1540