The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  27

  30 November 1554

  Outside the palace of Whitehall the crowd stood twenty deep. They had been waiting more than an hour; they stamped their feet and rubbed their hands to keep warm. Breath came from each mouth in little clouds, and a cold mist seeped through the streets from the river. A row of torches burned above the open gate, lighting the nearest faces with a red glow. The courtyard was packed with more waiting figures, servants, horses, soldiers, priests, who moved about, stamped, and blew against the lit windows of the great hall and the open door, where people peered over each other’s shoulders, trying to see inside. Now and then a scrap of news passed quickly from the door through the courtyard and out into the crowd.

  “The king and queen are seated.”

  “Lord Paget speaks.”

  “The bishop of Winchester speaks.”

  There was a long pause after this. What the bishop was saying was not thought worth reporting, and the crowd began to grow restless, so that when the next piece of news came: “One of the old lords has swooned for the heat,” it was greeted with a mocking cheer and a few cries: “We could do with a turn at his fire!” “Let him try the commons’ air!”

  Robert Fletcher stood with the rest. He was very cold and once or twice had wished he had not come, but the crowd was now too thick for him to leave before the end. His new friends, the group of firm Protestants, poor men and women, whose single-minded certainty had banished the doubts and griefs of the last months, had been surprised at his coming down.

  “If the bishop of Rome sends his minion to strengthen the queen and the Spaniards, what is it to us? Let them do what they will. Let them put us under the old yoke, let them bring back the heresy laws and hunt us through the town, we shall never yield to the bishop of Rome. We shall never give up the new ways; we shall never stray from the truth. They’ll not frighten us with their purgatory and their pains, so many Masses said for so many souls’ rest, and all to line their pockets and keep the bishop of Rome in gold and silver.

  “What do you want to go down there for, Master Fletcher, to see the great lords grovel to the cardinal from Rome? Not that they haven’t feathered their own nests right enough and won’t part with a penny for all they swear to be faithful Catholics now, to keep their place with the queen.”

  He said: “I saw him once upon a time, many years gone by. He was no cardinal then but a young man, as I was, though a lord. I showed him a garden.”

  They did not ask how such a thing had come about.

  “You mark my words, Master Fletcher, this is an evil day for England. Better for us all if Romans stayed in Rome—and better for England if Spaniards stayed in Spain. The queen should never have married a foreigner. Never. An English church for the English people, that’s what King Henry gave us; and the good bishops who gave us our English prayerbook are now in prison for their trouble and not likely to come out.”

  They were right. He knew that they were right. In two months their plain courage had refreshed him almost to a health as sound as theirs. Also their need of him. Most of the Protestant ministers had already left for Germany, and people too poor ever to leave, labourers and their wives, apprentices, widows, needed their services said for them, in the back rooms of inns and in houses along the Thames from which lightless boats could vanish swiftly on the dark water. They had work for him to do, and they joined together without question to pay for his bed and board. For as long as he was able, he would do what he could for them.

  He had left York, and Alice, and his son, whose name he did not know, in the unrecoverable past, as he had left the Charterhouse.

  And yet he had come to see. See what? The absolution of the realm from schism. The restoration of the Roman obedience. The queen and the bishops would still rule the Church. What were these but words that could be used to sanction the oppression of simple people who had understood that their salvation lay between God and themselves alone, in Jesus Christ’s death upon the Cross and their faith in him?

  But as he stood in the crowd and waited, as cold as the rest in the night air, he thought of Thomas Leighton, gaunt and furious in the Charterhouse, ready to die for those words, and of the monks who had been killed for them, disembowelled at Tyburn, the London crowd, this crowd, silent at the sight of the bloody habits.

  There was a stir in the courtyard of the palace, then in the crowd.

  “The king and queen kneel.”

  “The lords kneel all.”

  Those in the doorway knelt, and a few in the courtyard, still holding the bridles of restless horses. “The cardinal speaks.”

  The crowd fell suddenly silent, awed, as if, at the last moment, the face of this prince of the Church speaking a few yards from them, though they could neither see him nor hear his words, impressed them more than they had expected.

  Somewhere behind him in the crowd a sour voice said: “It’s old Wolsey’s ghost come to his own again, that’s what it is. This was his house once, though all’s forgot now, the cardinal’s house, it was, and state kept then as was never seen. And they promised us there would never be such as old Wolsey again, and now—”

  But his voice was lost in a low roar like a storm-wind, which came from the palace and spread outwards into the crowd, bringing people to their knees in hundreds in the dark.

  “Amen. Amen. Amen,” and then at once a great cheer from the hall, the courtyard, the crowd, wild cheers from the crowd, hats thrown in the air, and the servants scrambling to their feet to keep hold of the heads of rearing horses.

  He did not kneel but stood, dead at heart, while about him people laughed, cried, embraced each other, called out, “God save England! God save the Queen! God save the old ways!” and the cheering went on and on.

  The men in the doorway of the palace stood aside and bowed as the cardinal appeared, the scarlet cardinal in the flare of the torches, holding his right hand high and with many signs of the cross blessing the people.

  “Fetch a priest,” Robert Fletcher suddenly muttered to himself, watching. “Fetch a priest.” He could not see the cardinal’s face under the wide brim of his hat, only his beard, his long beard, almost white.

  The queen came out, on the arm of the Spanish king of England, but he saw no more than their black clothes and solemn pause on the threshold before the crowd pushed forward and hid them from him. He saw nothing else, for the waving, cheering backs in front of him, until the procession came out of the gates and forced the people back from the middle of the road. He watched it move away through the night towards the abbey of Westminster, the jingling throng of horses, soldiers, lights; among it somewhere the king, the queen, the cardinal; around it and behind it still the crowd, noisy, exulting, boys and women running ahead to get a better vantage.

  In the abbey church a Te Deum was to be sung, a hymn of praise in the royal church for Rome’s forgiveness of England.

  He waited in the road outside the palace until all the lights and all the cheering, following crowd had disappeared into the darkness. He turned at last and began to walk heavily towards the north, towards the Saracen’s Head at Islington, where even now other men were met together to pray, in the upper room, with doors locked, where plays were sometimes given.

  Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.

  Once he looked back and saw over the gate of the palace the row of torches still flaming in the dark, warming no one.

  PART TWO

  1558—1559

  1

  May 1558

  He found that he remembered now as he had never before remembered, perhaps because he had all the time there was in the day. Arden, for example, Arden most of all.

  That space between steep fields below the moor had made for a peculiar extremeness, a clarity in the weather: the short brilliance of the winter sun before it went down behind the western moor, and the chill interval of grey daylight that elapsed before the sky was tinged with the co
lours of a sunset that he could not see; the collected warmth of summer evenings, the long grass of the pasture, and gnats hanging in clouds over the cattle, as the light retreated up the hills before the line of shadow.

  Now he was old. Perhaps the clarity had been within himself. What he had left of it was only a memory, an old man’s memory of a certain place, long ago, the way the hills lay and the light fell, picking out every straw in the thatch, every unevenness in the stone, so that each cast its own shadow.

  What he remembered was what he had seen. But the boy who saw it, where was he? He did not remember him, that boy, as someone else at whom he could look back across those many years. His were still the eyes through which he saw the narrow dale, the stone walls, the birch trees, the beck. If what he had seen and his seeing it, his lucid vision, were not even yet after fifty years put out, it was because they were here, nowhere else but here, and now, so late, no other time but now.

  So he thought, because he had the time to think.

  He got up from his stool and limped towards the window. With the rest he had run away when they came at last to take them prisoner. He was too old to run far. He fell down some steps, twisting his ankle. Two young soldiers arrived, out of breath from the chase. They had to put down their weapons and help him to his feet. They were not rough with him and let him limp in front of them, slowly down the lane from Islington through the cheerful May Day crowds coming out of the city towards the fields. He had feared his arrest more than anything except the rack, more than the burning itself. There would be a man each side of him dragging him, holding on to his arms, and women would come and pull at his coat and jeer. He had seen it. He had seen an egg thrown at an old man with white hair. It had broken on his cheek, and the sticky mess trickled into his beard, mixed with tears.

  So that when they let him walk down by himself, at his own pace, he was glad that the sun shone, and smiled at the people passing in holiday clothes. At Newgate the soldiers were told to take him to the Tower, and they walked on. His swollen ankle did not hurt him. He might have been going to supper with a friend.

  At the Tower he tried to give the soldiers the few coins he had, but one of them said: “Keep that for the gaoler; money may make a hard bed softer, even here.”

  Since then, thirteen days had passed. He had not been sent for. No one had come to question him. He had feared most of all that they would ask him for names and rack him when he would not give them; and that then he would give them. But as the lengthening days went by and he saw no one but the gaoler and the gaoler’s wife, the fear began to fade. Was it even possible that he had been forgotten?

  He tried, and found it easier each day, not to consider what was to come, what he would say in answer to the charges they would read; not to think, either, of the last years and months, why he had stayed to repeat for simple men words that had become no more than battle-cries shouted to keep the courage up in a war whose purpose both sides had lost sight of. He was tired. There was nothing, any more, that he could do. He slept well. He was warm. He had enough to eat. Idle and light at heart, he passed the days in a recovery from fear that was like a recovery from sickness.

  He had no books. At the beginning there had been only the stool, a rough-hewn joint-stool, and a heap of straw to sleep on. He had asked for pen and paper, and the gaoler had told him that heretics were forbidden to write. Nevertheless next day, in return for one of the coins, he had brought him pens, ink, paper, a board, and a pair of trestles.

  He had written nothing.

  In Newgate they were chained hand and foot to the walls, sitting all day and all night in their own filth. He had peeled the shirts off their backs to wash them. Pieces of dirty linen he had not dared to lift stuck to open sores. Whom should he write to with words of fervour and strength when his letter alone might be enough to send a man there?

  Outside, the summer had begun. The altered sounds and smells of the first hot day reached him faintly through the bars of his unglazed window. For being high up and not buried in the dark, in the dripping earth, he was most grateful of all. From his straw bed, from his stool, walking about the room, he could see only the sky, the fine blue sky by day and at night the stars moving across the bars. But if he moved the stool under the window and climbed onto it, he could see out. He would stand there, looking, like a child watching the street from an upstairs room.

  “Whatever are you doing, Master Fletcher?” the gaoler’s wife had said, coming in with his food one day. “You’ll do yourself a mischief, clambering up there at your age.”

  “They’re going to burn me,” he said, but she was straightening the trestles of his table and did not hear.

  From the stool he could see down into a yard. It was cobbled, but in the middle were two old apple trees growing in patches of earth. From the top of the taller one, some feet below his window, a thrush sang early in the morning and in the evening. The trees had been skilfully pruned, and against the sunny wall on his left a strange kind of plum had been trained in the shape of a fan. Once, somewhere, someone had told him of trees grown so.

  Opposite to him was the next tower in the fortress wall, at its base a small door into the yard, lavender, a sprawling rosemary bush. On his right, beyond the battlements, was the river. He could not see it. But it was for the river that he climbed on the stool. The wide space above the water, full of the cries of gulls and the shouts of boatmen, he could see and hear, and at twilight lines of ducks flew westwards up the river, high over the water.

  He was content to watch. Had he not lived in a cell before? A garden, and a fortress wall, and beyond the wall free air. The pigeons flying silently up through the oak trees, in and out of sunlight and shadow, over the nettles and the unpruned briars. In that cell he had reckoned to die, laid on a cross of ashes. From this cell they would take him out and tie him to a post over the stacked faggots. A few minutes of cruel pain: Was not that all that had changed?

  He looked out of the window at the wall and beyond it at the bright air over the river where the gulls sailed. Perhaps he had been forgotten and would die here, after all, in his cell.

  He would be glad for a day such as this to be his last day. He had not once been down on his knees. He had not prayed a single prayer. He had no Testament, no psalter. The words of all the prayers he had ever said, old and new, English and Latin, had left his mind as empty as if they had never been, as empty as the dazzling cloudless sky. The Mountgrace, the Mountgrace, he said to himself, as if they had taken him back there, for his death.

  He was getting tired standing on the stool, a foolish old man gazing at nothing out of a high window. He would not get down until she brought him his meal. Cabbage soup, black bread, and water; he was hungry. As he realised that he was hungry, he laughed a little, at himself.

  The day before there had been a mug of ale.

  “A woman came with the ale and a clean shirt for you. She never gave her name.”

  She might have been one of a dozen women who came to the Saracen’s Head under the pretence of hearing the play. Each time they brought food and clothes for imprisoned heretics they risked their lives.

  “She said to see you had them, and she hopes you do well.”

  “If she comes again, tell her I do very well.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said the gaoler’s wife, as if she kept an inn.

  The gaoler had told him that they had burned no one out of Newgate for several weeks past. Those who had been taken with him were still alive. If the hot weather lasted, there would be fewer in Newgate. They had chosen the fire. Were they to be cheated of their brave deaths, the awe-struck crowd, the cross of twigs tied together and held up for them, the murmur of pity and anger as they passed? Had the bishops after three years of burnings at last learned the lesson of those who, years ago, had left monks to rot to death in Newgate because the butchery of six of them had only persuaded the people of their goodness? If they had, it was too late. The fires, the smell of charred flesh, the howls of those who,
in the rain, took an hour to die, had been an argument stronger than any book that those who ordered such deaths could not have the right of it. To a man who saw his neighbour burned on the pope’s authority for worshipping God in words laid down by parliament a short time ago, the case was plain enough. The bishops were turncoats and murderers. Those among them who were men of honour had been burned themselves or had gone abroad to wait until the queen should die and the Spaniards be sent home.

  He could have gone to join them. Twice since the burnings started he had been offered a place in a boat to Germany. “Take a younger man,” he had said. Was he choosing the fire? Perhaps. Now he wished only that the long, light days of his imprisonment would not cease until he died.

  But a year ago? Two years ago when they burned Cranmer? Had he not been certain then that he possessed the truth, that they could take away everything from him but his freedom to die for the truth? He had been brave then.

  He had also been afraid, to travel to a strange country, to be trapped in silence. Once in York he had watched a Fleming in a tavern. The man’s eyes shifted from face to face as he strained to pick out a word he knew. Some apprentices round a table laughed over a game. The stranger smiled. No one noticed. When he spoke, it was with the single words of a two-year-old child, but he was a man of fifty with a grizzled beard, dressed in the clothes of a merchant.

  But it was neither courage nor fear that had made him stay. It was the charge he had to bear. Men who could not write their names, ignorant boys and women, were going faithfully to their deaths on account of words bandied about by the learned. Learned men had drawn the battle-lines. Learned men had chosen a few phrases from here and there, descriptions of mysteries too deep and close for any mind to comprehend, and had imposed them on the ignorant on pain of losing their immortal souls. “The truth is thus and thus,” they said. “What that man tells you is idolatry.” Or: “The truth is thus and thus. What that man tells you is heresy.” Was it then for the learned to go away and leave the ignorant to fight alone? He had used such words himself. He had preached and taught. He had taken sides, certain that the side he had chosen was right and the other wrong. How could he have abandoned those who had followed others like him, and afterwards him, not because they understood but because they were led? Even after he no longer knew how much weight it was right for the great phrases to bear, he could not abandon those men and women. Them most of all.