The Forest (45 page)

And when King Henry VIII of England quarrelled with the Pope, divorced his royal Spanish wife and made himself head of the Church of England, he had acted with a terrifying ruthlessness. Sir Thomas More, saintly old Bishop Fisher, the brave monks of the London Charterhouse and several others all suffered martyrdom. Most of Henry’s subjects were either cowed, or indifferent. But not all. In the north of England a huge Catholic uprising – the
Pilgrimage of Grace – had made even the king tremble before it was put down. The English people, especially in the countryside, by no means accepted the break with the old religious ways.

Yet as long as King Harry lived, good Catholics could still hope that the true Church might be restored. Other rulers might be impressed by the doctrines of Martin Luther and the new generation of Protestant leaders who were shaking all Europe with their clamour for change. But King Harry of England certainly believed he was a good Catholic. True, he had denied the authority of the Pope; true, he had closed down all the monasteries and stolen all their vast lands. But in all this he claimed he was only reforming papal abuses. His English Church was still in doctrine Catholic; he continued to execute troublesome Protestants as long as he reigned.

It was only when his poor, sickly son, the boy-king Edward VI and his Protestant guardians came to power that the new Protestant religion was forced upon England. The Mass was outlawed, the churches stripped of popish ornament. Protestants – they were mostly merchants and craftsmen in the towns – might have liked it, but honest Catholic folk in the countryside were horrified.

Hope returned for loyal Catholics when, after six years of this enforced Protestantism, the boy-king died and Henry’s daughter Mary came to the throne: child of the long-suffering Spanish princess – whom even Protestant Englishmen agreed Henry had treated shamefully when he divorced her – Mary wanted passionately to restore her mother’s true faith to her now heretic island kingdom and, given time, she might have succeeded.

The trouble was, the English didn’t like her. She was a sad woman. Deeply marked by her father’s treatment of her mother, passionate for her faith, all she longed for was a good Catholic husband and the blessing of children. But she had no charm; she was dictatorial; she wasn’t her father.
When she decided to marry the most Catholic king of mighty Spain – which was sure to put Englishmen under Spanish rule – and the English Parliament protested, she told them it was none of their business. And then, of course, she burned several hundred English Protestants.

By the standards of the age the burnings were not so terrible. By the time of the later Middle Ages, although there was nothing in the scriptures to support such a thing, the Christian community had developed an extraordinary appetite for burning human beings alive and it was a fashion that lasted for several centuries. Nor did it seem, in England, to make much difference which side of the denominational divide you were on. Catholics burned Protestants and Protestants burned Catholics. The Protestant Bishop Latimer had personally presided over what can only be described as the sadistic ritual murder of an elderly Catholic priest – a burning carried out in so disgusting a manner that even the crowd who had come to watch it broke down the barriers and intervened. Now, under Mary, it was Latimer’s turn to be burned, although with less sadism, thereby to earn the reputation of a martyr for his faith.

But there were others – simple townsmen, innocent of political connivance but humbly seeking God – who were burned; and there were too many of them. Before long, the English were calling their Catholic queen ‘Bloody Mary’.

The King of Spain came and went, and there was no child; the burnings continued. Then Mary tried to fight a little war and lost Calais, the last English possession in France. And by the time the poor woman died, after five miserable years upon the throne, the English were sick of her and welcomed good Queen Bess.

Clement Albion stared at his mother in horror.

Did she deceive herself or was she really so fearless? Perhaps she herself did not know. One thing he was sure of:
she had woven herself so closely into the part she played, and for so long, that she had become as stiff as the brocade of her dress.

Old King Harry had still been alive when she had married Albion. She was a Pitts – a notable family in the county of Southampton, as Hampshire was often called – and due, from a cousin, to receive a great inheritance. It was a marriage that had seemed to promise Albion great advancement. Nor, at first, had it seemed a difficulty that, like all her Pitts family, she was devout.

The crisis of Henry VIII’s reign had caused great shock in the county of Southampton. Bishop Gardiner of Winchester, in whose great diocese the region lay, was a loyal Catholic who had only with difficulty been persuaded to acknowledge Henry’s supremacy over the Church. He had nearly gone to execution like Fisher and More. When Henry had dissolved the monasteries huge tracts of the county had changed hands. In the New Forest, in particular, the great monastery of Beaulieu, the lands of Christchurch priory to the south-west, the smaller house of Breamore in the Avon valley and the great abbey of Romsey just above the Forest – these were all stolen, their buildings stripped and left to fall into ruin. For a family like the Pitts this was terrible indeed.

But the Protestant years of the boy-king that followed were almost beyond enduring. Bishop Gardiner was taken to the Fleet prison – a London common gaol – and then to the Tower, before being left under house arrest. In his place as bishop the king’s Protestant council sent a man who had been married three times, who held two bishoprics at the same time and who cheerfully sold part of Winchester’s endowment to pay off the family of the Duke of Somerset who had appointed him. ‘See’, a Pitt remarked drily, ‘how these Protestants purify the Church.’ And certainly, in the years of the boy-king that followed, the diocese of Winchester was well and truly purified. The churches of
Hampshire and the Isle of Wight had been particularly well furnished. With what boundless joy, therefore, the Protestant reformers now fell upon them. Silver plate and candlesticks, vestments, hangings, even the bells were taken down. Some of this huge haul simply disappeared, stolen. Some was sold, although for whose account it was not always easy to say. Thus the English Church was liberated from popery.

Clement had no memory of his mother during these years. He had been born early in the boy-king’s reign, but he was not yet three when his mother had left. He could only guess at what strains these events had put upon his parents’ marriage, but it was apparently his father’s purchase of some property that had belonged to Beaulieu Abbey that made his pious mother realize she could no longer dwell in her husband’s house. She had returned to her family, the other side of Winchester. His father had always told him that he had refused to let her take her little child with her, so Clement supposed it must be so.

With the accession of Queen Mary to the throne and the return of Bishop Gardiner to the diocese his mother, also, had returned to her marital home and Clement had come to know her. She was a strikingly handsome woman. He had felt so proud of her. And indeed, it seemed to him that these were happy years. He would never forget his parents’ gorgeous apparel when he was allowed to accompany them to Southampton to greet the King of Spain when he landed there to marry Mary Tudor. His mother’s strong faith was well known, and she and her husband had been well received at the royal court.

There had even been a child born, Clement’s sister Catherine. She was a pretty little girl. He had pushed her about in a small cart and she had loved him. But then Queen Mary had died and Elizabeth had come to the throne; and not long after, his mother had gone again, taking his sister with her.

His father would never say why she had left; nor, when they met, did his mother ever tell him much. But he supposed he could imagine.

‘The Whore’s Daughter’. That was how his mother always referred to the queen. To good Catholics, of course, King Henry’s Spanish wife had been his only wife until she died. The charade of the divorce and remarriage, sanctioned by Henry’s breakaway English Church, was nothing but a fraud. So Queen Anne Boleyn had never been married and her daughter Elizabeth was a bastard. Nor, for Clement’s mother, could Queen Elizabeth’s Church be of any interest. The Church that Elizabeth and her counsellor Cecil tried to create was a compromise. The queen did not claim to be its spiritual head but only its governor. Its doctrines were a sort of reformist Catholicism and on the vexed question of the Mass – whether or not a miracle took place and the bread and wine of the Eucharist actually became the body and blood of Christ – the English Church maintained a formula whose ambiguity was little short of genius.

But what was ambiguity to her? The Lady Albion knew she was right. And this, Clement assumed, was the reason for her departure. His father was kindly and, in his way, devout. But the Albion family had been making accommodations ever since the days of Cola the Huntsman, five hundred years before and Clement’s mother despised compromise. She also despised her husband so she left. Perhaps, Clement thought, his father had been relieved to see her go.

Queen Elizabeth’s cunning compromise had not been enough to preserve her island kingdom’s peace. The terrible religious forces that the Reformation unleashed had now divided all Europe into two armed camps who would war with each other, at a huge cost in human life, for more than a century. Whichever way the Queen of England turned, she found herself beset with danger. She deplored the
extremes of the Catholic Inquisition. She shared the horror of her Puritan subjects when, one terrible St Bartholomew’s Day, the conservative Catholics of France massacred thousands of peaceful Protestants. Yet she could not sanction the growing Puritan party in England who wanted, through an increasingly radical Parliament, to destroy her compromise Church and dictate to the queen herself. Even if her natural inclination was to move towards the ordered world offered by traditional Catholicism, that did her no good either. For since she couldn’t deliver her country to Rome, the Pope had not only excommunicated her but absolved all Catholics from allegiance to the heretic queen. Elizabeth couldn’t tolerate that: the Roman Church was outlawed in her realm.

The English Catholics did not rise in revolt, but they took all the steps they could to preserve their religion. And few places in southern England contained more loyal Catholics than the Winchester diocese. Even at the start of the reign, thirty priests there had resigned sooner than put up with Elizabeth’s compromise Church. Many of the better sort, as the gentry and merchant class were called, quite openly maintained their Catholic faith. One of the Pitts women was put in the Clink prison by the bishop for defying him and the queen’s secretary Cecil himself sent word to Albion to keep his wife quiet.

‘I cannot control her; she does not live in my house,’ Albion sent word back. ‘Although I couldn’t curb your mother’s tongue,’ he privately confessed to Clement, ‘even if she did live with me.’ His father had died not long after and it seemed the authorities had decided to ignore the Lady Albion since then.

But Clement always lived in dread. He strongly suspected that she harboured Catholic priests. The Isle of Wight and the inlets on the Southampton stretch of the southern coast were natural places to land Roman priests, and the loyal Catholic gentry, the recusants as they were
already being called, were ready to give them shelter. These priests were strictly illegal now; no less than four had been discovered in the Winchester diocese recently and taken away for burning. Any day, Clement expected to hear of his mother’s arrest for harbouring priests. She would not even exercise caution. The crimson she was wearing, he thought, was a typical case in point.

When, twenty years before, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots had been thrown out of her own kingdom by the Scottish Presbyterians, she had soon become the focus of every Catholic plot to overthrow her heretic English cousin. Held under house arrest in England, the wilful exile schemed endlessly until at last, at the start of 1587, Elizabeth had been practically forced by her own council to execute her.

‘She is a Catholic martyr,’ the Lady Albion had immediately declared and within a week she had come to visit her son, wearing the martyr’s crimson for all to see.

‘But must you openly defy the queen’s council and the bishop in this way?’ he had asked in a plaintive tone.

‘Yes,’ she had answered simply. ‘We must.’

We. That was the trouble. Whenever his mother spoke to him of the necessity of dangerous acts, she always spoke of ‘we’ – to let him know that in her mind he was infallibly included.

Ten years ago his mother had finally come into her cousin’s large inheritance. She became, therefore, a very rich woman, free to leave her fortune where and how she pleased. She never spoke of it. Neither did he. The idea that he could be loyal to the sacred cause in order to inherit her money was as unthinkable as to imagine that he would see a penny of it if he wasn’t. The nearest hint she had ever given of her position was once, when he had mentioned that his father had been short of money before his death, to remark: ‘I could not help your father, Clement. He was a broken reed.’ And in those words he thought he could hear, like a
soft snap, the sentence of poverty for those who disappointed her.

‘We’, therefore, it was. The fact that she had yet to give him anything, that he now had a wife and three children and that, if he displeased the queen’s council he could count upon losing the several posts in the Forest that provided his modest income – these considerations, of course, must mean nothing if he were to keep her good opinion as they both stood before the most high God.