I don’t argue since Geoffrey is confident, and the news from the North is good. The abbeys are reopening, the pilgrims are dispersing with their pardons, each of them swearing an oath of loyalty to the king, all of them convinced that good times have come at last. Slowly, quietly, the religious women and men return to the abbeys and they open their doors again. Every village church has the story of a little miracle. People bring a crystal monstrance out of its hiding place under a thatch. Carpenters resurrect the beautiful carvings of saints from where they had been tumbled for safety into the wood piles, farmers dig carefully in the drainage ditches and bring out bright crucifixes. Vestments come out of hidden wardrobes, the monks come back to their cells. They mend the windows, they repair the roofs, I tell my steward to find Prior Richard and invite him back to Bisham.
“Lady Grandmother, do you think my uncle Reginald will come home?” Harry, Montague’s boy, asks me. And I answer him smiling: “Yes. Yes, I think he will.”
But in York in February, nine men are charged with treason by Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and they are sentenced to be hanged.
“How can they be hanged? Don’t they have a pardon?” I ask Geoffrey.
“Lady Mother, the duke is a hard man. He will feel that he has to show the king that though he sympathizes with the pilgrims he is hard on the rebels. He’ll hang one or two just to show his strength.”
Once again, I don’t argue with my son, but I am afraid that the king’s pardon is not proving to be a certain guarantee of safety. Certainly, the commons seem to think so, for Carlisle musters its men in desperation and they march against Thomas Howard’s army as if they are marching for their lives, staking everything on one last throw of the dice. Hundreds are killed by the well-armed, well-fed, well-mounted lords of the North who were beside them during the pilgrimage, but have abandoned them in the truce.
We get the news in London in the middle of February and the citizens peal the bells in joy that the landless poor men of the North have been defeated by the lords who, only a few months ago, stood by them. They say that Sir Christopher Dacre killed seven hundred men and took the rest prisoner, hanging them on the stunted little trees which is all that grow in the hard northwest, and Thomas Cromwell has promised him an earldom for his service.
Inspired by brutality, Thomas Howard now declares martial law in the North, which means that the magistrates and lords have no power against his rule. Howard can be judge, jury, and hangman to men who have no defense to offer. He declares war on his own countrymen—this is no difficulty for the man who beheaded his own niece and nephew. He holds impromptu hearings in little towns and hands down instant sentences of death. Hundreds of men are forced before him. The chain makers of Carlisle run out of iron and men have to be hanged wrapped in ropes to signify their shame. Thomas Howard marches out to hang villagers in their own little gardens, so that everyone knows that the pilgrim way led them home to death. His men go into every little village and every hungry hamlet, in the coldest time of year, and demand to know who rode out with the pilgrims and swore an oath? Who rang the church bells backwards? Who prayed for the return of the Church? And who rode out and did not come home again?
Montague writes to me a note from Greenwich, where he is at court.
The king has ordered Norfolk to go to all the monasteries that offered any resistance. He says the monks and canons must be a terrible example for others. I think he means to kill them. Pray for us.
I don’t understand the times that I am living in. I read my son’s letter, once, twice, three times, and I burn it as soon as I have remembered the terrible words by heart. I go to my chapel and kneel on the cold stone floors and pray, but I find all I am doing is running my beads through my hands and shaking my head, as if I want to deny the terrible things that are happening to the men who called themselves the pilgrims and marched for grace.
The king has heard that some widows and orphans have cut down the bodies of their husbands and fathers, executed as rebels, and buried them secretly, at night, in their churchyards. He has sent to Thomas Howard telling him to find these families and punish them. The bodies are to be dug up out of sanctified ground. He wants the corpses hanged until they rot.
Lady Mother, I think he has run mad.
Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, straining against his own conscience, obeys the king in everything, closing monasteries, and slamming the doors shut on those that had reopened. No one has any explanation of this, none seems needed. Now the buildings are to be handed to the neighboring lords for them to use as quarries for stone; the lands are to be sold to nearby farmers. The commons are to look no more to the abbeys for their comfort and help, the monks are to be homeless beggars. Our Lady is not to be invoked in a hundred, a thousand side chapels and roadside shrines. There are to be no more pilgrimages, there is to be no hope. A song comes out of the North that says there is to be no May, and I look out of the thick glass into the gray courtyard where the snow is slowly melting away, and think that the spring is coming this year without joy, without love, and it is true, the months will change but there will be no merry May.
BISHAM MANOR, BERKSHIRE, SPRING 1537
As soon as the roads are dry enough for travel I leave London and go to Bisham. Harry goes home with his father, his little face puzzled that the season which promised so much does not feel like spring at all. I ride pillion behind my Master of Horse and take some comfort in leaning against the man’s broad back as the big horse takes his rolling strides down the muddy road to Berkshire.
So I am out of the city when they bring in Tom Darcy to the Tower, and question him. He has little patience with them, God bless the old man for his fierce temper. He has the king’s pardon in his pocket and yet he is under arrest. He looks Thomas Cromwell in the face, and knows him for his judge and jury and yet says to him as they write down his words as evidence against him: “Cromwell, it is thou that art the very original and chief causer of all this rebellion and mischief.” When the blacksmith’s son blinks at this plain speaking, Darcy promises him a certain future death on the scaffold, telling him that if the day comes when there is only one nobleman left alive in England, that single lord will surely behead Thomas Cromwell.
They bring in John Hussey too, the princess’s old chamberlain, and I think of him, patiently watching me waste time over the inventory of her jewels, and of his wife’s faithful love for her. I pray no one tells the princess that her former chamberlain is under arrest in the Tower for questioning.
His inquisition, long, detailed, vindictive with petty threats, is of little help to Cromwell, for neither Tom Darcy nor John Hussey will name a single other man or woman. Darcy says nothing about riding with the pilgrims or opening the gates of Pontefract Castle to them. He says that he had the pilgrim badges left in a chest at the castle from his old crusade to the holy land, and he refuses to reveal who received them from his hands. He says: “Old Tom has not one traitor’s tooth in his head,” and he is faithful to the very last.
Henry Courtenay writes to me:
Pray for me, Cousin, for I have been named as Lord High Steward for the trial of those two good lords, John Hussey and Tom Darcy. I have Cromwell’s promise that if we find Tom guilty, he will have his sentence commuted to banishment—and he can come home later. But there is no hope for John Hussey.
I read the letter standing by the forge, waiting for my horse to be shod, and the moment that I have taken in the meaning I plunge it into the heart of the fire and turn to the messenger in the Exeter livery. “Are you going straight back to your master?”