The most precious, powerful and inspirational vessel in Christendom. The purest of King Arthur’s knights were said to have gone in quest of the Grail, thus bringing together the two great legends of Glastonbury. A holy legacy indeed, and out of all this had grown a huge and wealthy monastic establishment, said to have been founded by Joseph of Arimathea himself.
And then King Henry, the Great Furnace, had ordered its destruction.
‘Never been there yourself?’ Cecil said.
‘No.’
‘Odd. I mean… given your noted fascination with the great spiritual mysteries.’
I grew cautious.
‘It’s a question of time, Sir William.’
‘Time.’ He smiled. ‘We can always make time. And you could be there… oh, well within a week, I’m assured.’
He looked at me, placidly. There was never any reading of his eyes.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘For the stability of the realm of course.’ Parting his fingers, Cecil sat up in his chair and stretched his spine. ‘Why else do I exist?’
I’d wondered why he’d summoned me here, to his private home, his cottage. Had to be for reasons of secrecy.
Something sensitive. Something unofficial.
Therefore something heavy with risk.
I looked out of the window and now beheld the collected spires as something like to a bed of nails. With the twisted briars of religion and the gathering threats from abroad – the Queen of Scots fresh-married to the boy king of France – did Cecil not have enough tough meat on his plate without concerning himself with spiritual mysteries?
‘Are you quite sure I’m the man for this?’ I said.
V
Bones
OUTSIDE, the rain had ceased and the winter sun hung in the central window, looking heavy as a new coin. It lit the spines of the books on Cecil’s few finished shelves. Books dealing with politics, law and property, but nothing, I’d guess, on the spiritual mysteries.
I told Cecil about the pamphlet-seller, but not about my incautious attempt to take him on, nor how I’d been saved from what might have been a severe beating, or worse.
All the time was wondering if he knew full well what had occurred. This man had eyes all over the city, and beyond.
He lifted an eyebrow, reached for his wineglass then abruptly pushed it away.
‘There are scum out there who’ve been putting it around London that I maintain four mistresses and consume a gallon of wine nightly, before horsewhipping my children. Face it, you’re a public figure, now. Or at least, a public name. ’
‘But my mother’s not. And she’d be alone at Mortlake, where it seems I’m hated and feared by all the new puritans lest I raid their family’s graves.’
‘Then we’ll protect her.’ His hands emerging from his robe like puppets. ‘I’ll have armed guards put into Mortlake for as long as you’re away. I’ll even have a guard mounted on your blessed library. How does that sound?’
‘Well, I don’t think there’s need for-’
‘Good. Settled, then.’
‘There’s also the matter of my work. I’m already seriously behind in my work.’
Cecil was gathering up the letters. He did not even look at me.
‘ This,’ he said, ‘is your work.’
The stories of the four mistresses and the horsewhipping of children had obviously been plucked from the air to make a point. But there was gossip about Sir William Cecil, most of it related to his ancestry. The son of an innkeeper, it was oft-times said, in the same way that it was oft said of me that I was the son of a meat-slicer.
But is it such a bad thing that we are now living in an age where ability may, on occasion, be recognised above breeding?
I think not, and yet I believe ancestry to be important in ways that we have not yet fathomed. For my father, it was simple: he was a Welshman and, now that the Tudors of Wales had secured the English crown, this Welshness was an asset of no small proportion. I am Rowland Dee and I am a man of Wales! my tad would declare, with one hand on his heart, the other extended before him, and a comical deepening of his accent.
Sometimes he’d even repeat it in Welsh. Which, I would imagine, cut no ice at all with the Great Furnace, who gave not a shit for Wales, most of the time. It had been different, however, for his own father, the first Tudor king, who’d landed from France in the west of Wales and rode from there with a gathering army and a weight of tradition.
This tradition being King Arthur. According to the legends, Arthur had not died but was only sleeping and would return when his nation had need of him.
And so, within Henry Tudor, was Arthur risen again, and the sense of an older and more united Britain. Henry had married Elizabeth of York, thus meeting the red rose with the white. To seal the family’s royal destiny, he’d even given their first-born son, his heir, the name of Arthur and had him born at Winchester, which Malory claimed had once been Camelot.
A masterstroke. I knew the new Queen was much taken with this story of her family’s tradition and doubtless recognised its emotive power. King Arthur. Our royal ancestor, she’d said to me. And would have said more had not Blanche Parry appeared, the watchful owl amid the winter apple trees. Blanche having been given brief, I’d guessed, by this man, William Cecil, who at all times protected the Queen.
Sometimes, it seemed, from herself.
‘She’s a young woman,’ he said now. ‘She’s clever, well read, and already carries a weight of experience. And, given the parlous state of the exchequer, she is commendably cautious. But, as a young woman, she’s ever prey to the allure of a great romance. And the problems it might pose. For her.’
‘Believing she must, in some way, make the mantle of Arthur… fit a woman?’
I could still see no obvious problem. In Arthurian terms, the Queen was not merely Guinevere, nor even Morgan le Fay, the enchantress of Arthurian myth, but, potentially, someone greater, more powerful and more glamorous than either. I understood this entirely and did not think it foolish or wayward, for these were strange and awesome times.
And so I waited, the room awash now with winter sunlight, two unicorns coming to luminous life upon a new tapestry, as Cecil drank the rest of his wine with no apparent appreciation. I doubted he believed in unicorns.
‘It all depends,’ he said, ‘on how dead you believe Arthur to be.’
It was clear that we were now talking of the grave found in the abbey at Glastonbury during the reign of an earlier Henry, the Plantagenet, Henry II. I’d read of it last night in the writings of my father’s countryman, Giraldus Cambrensis.
In the year 1191, an excavation at Glastonbury Abbey had uncovered a stone and a cross of lead proclaiming the burial there of the renowned King Arthur. Nine feet further down into the earth, in an oaken coffin, had lain the bones of an inordinately large man and the smaller skeleton of what was taken to be a woman. And a lock of yellow hair which crumbled into dust when picked up by one of the monks.
Guinevere.
And, oh yes, the monks had found this grave. Arthur was risen just when the monks had need of him most.
‘They needed money,’ Cecil reminded me. ‘Lots of it. The abbey having recently been ravaged by a very destructive fire. In the twelfth century, the tales of Arthur and his knights were widely read and told to children. Nothing could have brought more fame and pilgrimage to Glastonbury than the bones of Arthur.’
Naturally, it was said by many that the grave was a fake and the so-called discovery of the royal remains nothing more than a deception by the monks. A deception which was also of considerable value to the King in subduing the hopes of the rebellious Welsh.
‘Nothing better than bones,’ I said to Cecil, ‘as evidence that Arthur was very conspicuously beyond revival.’
‘Indeed. Almost a century later, the bones were placed in a black marble tomb before the high altar of the rebuilt abbey church. Having first been inspected by King Edward I who, after crushing the Welsh once again, at great expense, would also have been delighted to confirm that Arthur was dead.’