Читать книгу The Queens and the Hive - Edith Sitwell - Страница 10

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A tall figure robed in scarlet, with the long, ascetic, beautiful face of the Plantagenets, mounted the stairs of the Palace at Whitehall, and was greeted with tears of joy by a woman who was about to bear a child. The Queen’s cousin, the long-exiled Cardinal Pole, now Papal Legate to England, greeted her with the words of the Angel to the Holy Virgin: ‘Ave Maria gratia plena, Dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus’.

Supreme hour of happiness and of hope! ‘It was the will of God’, said the Cardinal, ‘that I should have been so long in coming. God waited till the time was ripe.’

It was indeed, as he might have foreseen, the hour of a miracle. For hardly had he reached his private rooms in Lambeth Palace, before a message was rushed to him from the Queen. In answer to the angelic salutation, ‘the babe had leapt in her womb’.

The cannon thundered. The Te Deum was sung in every church. The proof of Heaven’s mercy to England was the theme of every pulpit next day, which was a Sunday.

•••••

In the months since she had felt the stir within her of the child, the miraculous being who was to save England, other and humbler lives—each green life guarded by its particular star—stirred in the gardens of Hampton Court, sheltered by the walls to which rosemary was nailed. The roots of the violets, the primroses, the bears’-ears that were ‘of a fine light browne-yellow colour, which wee doe usually call Haire-colour’, with their ‘large leaves which are meally withall’ felt their lives stir under the manure of strawberry rot. Soon in the Palace, that is of the colour of strawberries or of a bullfinch’s rosy feathers, the life that was to be the flower of the kingdom would come into being.

On the 20th of April 1555, the Queen went into seclusion at Hampton Court, to await the birth of the child. The cradle-rockers, the physicians, the nurses, had long been ready. In the still-rooms of the Palace, remedies, restoratives, sweet waters, were being prepared. ‘Rose shredde small and sodde in clarified hony, maketh that hony medicinable with gode smell and this comforteth ... and defyeth glemy [gloomy] humours.’ ‘Some do put rose water in a glasse and they put roses with their dew thereto and they make it to boile in water then they sette it in the sun till it be redde.’ ‘Also drye roses put to the nose to smell do comfort the braine and the hart and quencheth spirits.’

But how can the heart that is dying, or is already dead, be comforted?

Processions of bishops and priests walked through the London streets chanting litanies. Another procession of bishops, in vestments of cloth of gold, bright as the fires that were so soon to be lit, walked round and round Hampton Court, with King Philip at their head, praying for the most serene auspicious delivery of the Queen, while she watched them from a window.

On the 30th of April, the supposed birth-pangs began. The bells rang, the Te Deum was sung in St. Paul’s, bonfires were made ready for lighting and tables for feasting in the streets. But where was the child?

The blasting curse from Heaven upon the Atridaean sins had descended upon Mary. She convinced herself that she was unable to bear her child because Heaven was offended by two frightful and unexpiated sins—her leniency towards the heretics, and that document denying the supremacy of the Pope, denying her mother’s legal marriage to her father, signed at a moment when she had succumbed to King Henry’s will because she and her servants were in danger of death by the axe.

The signing of that paper brought the hereditary madness that had flamed in Juana of Castille, her mother’s sister, nearer. It lit the first sparks of the martyrdoms. Mary knew, now, that she must give a sign to Heaven of her repentance for those mortal sins.

Therefore the heretics must be proceeded against. Sheets of fire ran along the ground like lightning, or like water.

The crowds saw Rogers, Canon of St. Paul’s, who, with Coverdale and Tyndall, had translated the Bible, ‘bathing his hands in the flame as if it were cold water’. They heard Bishop Hooper, who had fed the poor, crying, in his agony, ‘For God’s sake, good people, let me have more fire! [that his torture might end the sooner]. Lord Jesu, have mercy upon me! Lord Jesu, receive my spirit!’ But still his hands were seen to beat upon his breast, after those cries had ceased. It was three-quarters of an hour before his spirit left his crumbling body, and that body fell to ashes. The crowds saw Thomas Hawkes (who had told his friends that ‘if the rage of the pain was tolerable and might be suffered he should lift up his hands towards heaven before he gave up the ghost’) after he ‘had continued long in the fire ... reach up his hands, burning in a light fire; which was marvellous to behold, over his head to the living God, and with great rejoicing, as it seemed, strike and clap them together and so, straight way sinking down into the fire, he gave up his spirit.’

And from the crowds a hoarse murmur arose.

They saw the burning of the aged Archbishop Cranmer. To him Cardinal Pole had written: ‘Compared with you, all others who have been concerned in these deeds of evil, are but objects of pity. You exhorted your King with faire words to put away his wife.... You parted him from the Church, the common mother of the faithful; and thenceforth, throughout the land, law has been trampled under foot, the people bound with tyranny, the churches pillaged, the nobles murdered, one by another ... [an old grey head, honoured and loved, the head of the Cardinal’s mother, the Countess of Salisbury, hacked from her shoulders by many strokes, and lying in the dust ...] I say, were I to make my own cries heard in heaven, I would pray God to demand at your hands the blood of his servants.’ ...

Terrified by this denunciation, in unspeakable fear of an agonising death, the Archbishop, hoping for mercy, signed a paper acknowledging that he was a blasphemer, had persecuted the truth, and deserved eternal damnation. But when all hope was gone, he went to his death bravely, ‘renouncing and refusing those papers’ and holding the hand that signed them in the flames, to ‘suffer just punishment’.

In the midst of his own agony, did Bishop Latimer remember the words he had written, in jest, to Cromwell, when, in King Henry’s reign, another man was to perish in even greater torments, purposely prolonged, because he was steadfast in his faith? ‘If you wish me to play the fool [my italics] in my customary fashion when Forest shall suffer’—(the saintly Father Forest, who was suspended in an iron cage above the flames)—‘I wish my stage to stand near Forest, so that he may hear what I say, and perhaps be converted.’ He added, however, ‘If he [Forest] would yet with heart return to his abjuration, I would wish his pardon, such is my foolishness’.

Did the Bishop remember, also, the horrible letter he had written to Cromwell about Cardinal Pole, at a time when he knew the execution of the Cardinal’s mother had been planned? ‘Blessed be the God of England whose instrument you be! I heard you say, once, after you had seen that furious invective of Cardinal Pole, that you would make him eat his own heart, which you have now, I know, brought to pass, for he must needs now eat his own heart and be as heartless as he is graceless.’

The man who had eaten his own heart had now arisen to confront the Bishop, and there was no heart to which any supplication could be offered—no heart to hear those anguished cries.

The horrors of the Maryan reign in no wise excelled those of King Henry’s. The crowds might well have remembered the cry of a Catholic saint in that earlier reign, as his heart was torn from his living body: ‘What wilt thou do with mine heart, O Christ?’ But they could not remember, because they had not seen, how three out of the eighteen gentle, guiltless monks of the Charterhouse had been chained, standing upright, to the wall of their prison for thirteen days and nights, before being dragged on hurdles through the city to suffer unspeakable and most obscene mutilations, while still alive and conscious—in the full view of crowds, which included many of the King’s courtiers.

In thinking of the frightful cruelties enacted in the Maryan Age, we are apt to forget two things. The first is that (monstrous and unpardonable as is the cruelty) it is no more cruel to burn a living being in the name of a travesty of Almighty God, made in our own image, endowed with our own cruelty and foolish vanity, than it is to commit the unspeakable obscenity of disembowelling, emasculating, and tearing the heart from a living being in the name of another travesty.

This last, Henry sanctioned, Elizabeth sanctioned.

We must remember, too, thinking of the crimes committed by both sides, that to the men who perpetrated the Maryan martyrdoms, the blasphemy of those who denied the Transubstantiation was as frightful as to mock at the living Body of Christ upon the Cross.... If He were not present in the Consecrated Bread and Wine, would it not mean that He had deserted us? Those martyred under Mary had—in the minds of those who burned them—cast away from us, horribly, unforgivably, the Body of Christ.

There is no excuse for the cruelties of either side, but, again, the Protestants may have remembered the garish horror of that unspoken, appalling blasphemy the Blood of Hales (bird-lime coloured with ochre, compounded by priests and held at the Monastery of Hales) to which the people flocked in thousands, like the birds caught in that lime, believing, in the words of Archbishop Cranmer, ‘that it is the very Blood of Christ, and that it puts all men in a state of salvation’.

The cruelty on each side was responsible for that on the other. ‘The villainy you teach me I will execute,’ said a creation of the greatest man ever born in England, ‘and it shall go hard, but I will better the instruction.’

•••••

Standing naked in an ocean of fire, these men of the Maryan reign perished. Yet Heaven was not appeased.

On the 27th of June, the agitated Renard wrote to the Emperor: ‘Our doctors and ladies were two months out in their reckoning.... If, by God’s mercy, she does well, matters will have a better turn, but if not, I foresee trouble, and a great disturbance, so great, indeed, that the pen cannot express it. For it is certain that they have managed so ill with the succession, that if anything untoward happens, Lady Elizabeth will have the preference. [Lady Elizabeth, who had been imprisoned in the Tower, and in danger of death by the axe or by poison.] I am not at all sure that the King and the Court will be safe.... Some say the Queen is not pregnant at all, and if a fitting child had been found, there would not have been so much delay.’

Even before the conflagrations had begun, hatred of the Queen had risen like a pestilence from kennels and slums. A placard had been found nailed to the door of St. James’s Palace the day after the announcement that the Queen was to bear a child: ‘Are we such fools, oh noble English, that we can believe our Queen is enceinte of anything but an ape or a dog?’

One day a dead dog was thrown through the window of her Presence Chamber, tonsured, and with cropped ears, and a placard hung round its neck saying that all the priests in England should be hanged. Papers, strewn by an unseen hand, were found on the floors of her private apartments, even of her bedroom, telling her she was hated by the whole nation. Terrified, her ladies would burst into tears in her presence.

There was no charge against her that was not believed. As we have seen, it was said that she was about to have the body of the King her father disinterred that it might be burned as that of a heretic, deserving everlasting damnation—(she who had masses said for the soul of that beloved heretic). This was believed because she had, as Sir Thomas Smith declared, ‘showed cruelty, or rather a raging madness, on the bodies of God’s servants long before buried—drawing them forth of their graves to burn them as heretics’. And the long-dead body of an ex-nun, the wife of Peter Martyr, had been dragged from its grave and thrown upon a cesspool.

There was now no low mockery, no indignity, which was not heaped—the mockers being safe in their anonymity—on this agonised creature whose child could not be born.

A passer-by in the galleries of Hampton Court would see, slumped on the floor, her knees gathered up to her head, a figure that he took to be that of a dead woman. As he came nearer, that heap upon the floor would seem to be that of a beggar woman fallen there in her hunger and despair.

Then a physician and ladies-in-waiting would rush in, and as they lifted the fainting figure to its feet, the passer-by would see it was that of no dead woman, no beggar fallen from hunger, but that of a woman seemingly about to bear a child—the Queen of England.

But, as they carried her away, and the glamours of the summer light fell upon her haggard cheek, her distorted body in its ermine-trimmed dress, the nature of the burden she carried within her could be seen.

The child she was about to bear was Death. This was the child that Philip had given to her and to England.