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.