May 1558
He found that he remembered now as he had never before remembered, perhaps because he had all the time there was in the day. Arden, for example, Arden most of all.
That space between steep fields below the moor had made for a peculiar extremeness, a clarity in the weather: the short brilliance of the winter sun before it went down behind the western moor, and the chill interval of grey daylight that elapsed before the sky was tinged with the colours of a sunset that he could not see; the collected warmth of summer evenings, the long grass of the pasture, and gnats hanging in clouds over the cattle, as the light retreated up the hills before the line of shadow.
Now he was old. Perhaps the clarity had been within himself. What he had left of it was only a memory, an old man’s memory of a certain place, long ago, the way the hills lay and the light fell, picking out every straw in the thatch, every unevenness in the stone, so that each cast its own shadow.
What he remembered was what he had seen. But the boy who saw it, where was he? He did not remember him, that boy, as someone else at whom he could look back across those many years. His were still the eyes through which he saw the narrow dale, the stone walls, the birch trees, the beck. If what he had seen and his seeing it, his lucid vision, were not even yet after fifty years put out, it was because they were here, nowhere else but here, and now, so late, no other time but now.
So he thought, because he had the time to think.
He got up from his stool and limped towards the window. With the rest he had run away when they came at last to take them prisoner. He was too old to run far. He fell down some steps, twisting his ankle. Two young soldiers arrived, out of breath from the chase. They had to put down their weapons and help him to his feet. They were not rough with him and let him limp in front of them, slowly down the lane from Islington through the cheerful May Day crowds coming out of the city towards the fields. He had feared his arrest more than anything except the rack, more than the burning itself. There would be a man each side of him dragging him, holding on to his arms, and women would come and pull at his coat and jeer. He had seen it. He had seen an egg thrown at an old man with white hair. It had broken on his cheek, and the sticky mess trickled into his beard, mixed with tears.
So that when they let him walk down by himself, at his own pace, he was glad that the sun shone, and smiled at the people passing in holiday clothes. At Newgate the soldiers were told to take him to the Tower, and they walked on. His swollen ankle did not hurt him. He might have been going to supper with a friend.
At the Tower he tried to give the soldiers the few coins he had, but one of them said: “Keep that for the gaoler; money may make a hard bed softer, even here.”
Since then, thirteen days had passed. He had not been sent for. No one had come to question him. He had feared most of all that they would ask him for names and rack him when he would not give them; and that then he would give them. But as the lengthening days went by and he saw no one but the gaoler and the gaoler’s wife, the fear began to fade. Was it even possible that he had been forgotten?
He tried, and found it easier each day, not to consider what was to come, what he would say in answer to the charges they would read; not to think, either, of the last years and months, why he had stayed to repeat for simple men words that had become no more than battle-cries shouted to keep the courage up in a war whose purpose both sides had lost sight of. He was tired. There was nothing, any more, that he could do. He slept well. He was warm. He had enough to eat. Idle and light at heart, he passed the days in a recovery from fear that was like a recovery from sickness.
He had no books. At the beginning there had been only the stool, a rough-hewn joint-stool, and a heap of straw to sleep on. He had asked for pen and paper, and the gaoler had told him that heretics were forbidden to write. Nevertheless next day, in return for one of the coins, he had brought him pens, ink, paper, a board, and a pair of trestles.
He had written nothing.
In Newgate they were chained hand and foot to the walls, sitting all day and all night in their own filth. He had peeled the shirts off their backs to wash them. Pieces of dirty linen he had not dared to lift stuck to open sores. Whom should he write to with words of fervour and strength when his letter alone might be enough to send a man there?
Outside, the summer had begun. The altered sounds and smells of the first hot day reached him faintly through the bars of his unglazed window. For being high up and not buried in the dark, in the dripping earth, he was most grateful of all. From his straw bed, from his stool, walking about the room, he could see only the sky, the fine blue sky by day and at night the stars moving across the bars. But if he moved the stool under the window and climbed onto it, he could see out. He would stand there, looking, like a child watching the street from an upstairs room.
“Whatever are you doing, Master Fletcher?” the gaoler’s wife had said, coming in with his food one day. “You’ll do yourself a mischief, clambering up there at your age.”
“They’re going to burn me,” he said, but she was straightening the trestles of his table and did not hear.
From the stool he could see down into a yard. It was cobbled, but in the middle were two old apple trees growing in patches of earth. From the top of the taller one, some feet below his window, a thrush sang early in the morning and in the evening. The trees had been skilfully pruned, and against the sunny wall on his left a strange kind of plum had been trained in the shape of a fan. Once, somewhere, someone had told him of trees grown so.
Opposite to him was the next tower in the fortress wall, at its base a small door into the yard, lavender, a sprawling rosemary bush. On his right, beyond the battlements, was the river. He could not see it. But it was for the river that he climbed on the stool. The wide space above the water, full of the cries of gulls and the shouts of boatmen, he could see and hear, and at twilight lines of ducks flew westwards up the river, high over the water.
He was content to watch. Had he not lived in a cell before? A garden, and a fortress wall, and beyond the wall free air. The pigeons flying silently up through the oak trees, in and out of sunlight and shadow, over the nettles and the unpruned briars. In that cell he had reckoned to die, laid on a cross of ashes. From this cell they would take him out and tie him to a post over the stacked faggots. A few minutes of cruel pain: Was not that all that had changed?
He looked out of the window at the wall and beyond it at the bright air over the river where the gulls sailed. Perhaps he had been forgotten and would die here, after all, in his cell.
He would be glad for a day such as this to be his last day. He had not once been down on his knees. He had not prayed a single prayer. He had no Testament, no psalter. The words of all the prayers he had ever said, old and new, English and Latin, had left his mind as empty as if they had never been, as empty as the dazzling cloudless sky. The Mountgrace, the Mountgrace, he said to himself, as if they had taken him back there, for his death.
He was getting tired standing on the stool, a foolish old man gazing at nothing out of a high window. He would not get down until she brought him his meal. Cabbage soup, black bread, and water; he was hungry. As he realised that he was hungry, he laughed a little, at himself.
The day before there had been a mug of ale.
“A woman came with the ale and a clean shirt for you. She never gave her name.”
She might have been one of a dozen women who came to the Saracen’s Head under the pretence of hearing the play. Each time they brought food and clothes for imprisoned heretics they risked their lives.
“She said to see you had them, and she hopes you do well.”
“If she comes again, tell her I do very well.”
“Thank you, sir,” said the gaoler’s wife, as if she kept an inn.
The gaoler had told him that they had burned no one out of Newgate for several weeks past. Those who had been taken with him were still alive. If the hot weather lasted, there would be fewer in Newgate. They had chosen the fire. Were they to be cheated of their brave deaths, the awe-struck crowd, the cross of twigs tied together and held up for them, the murmur of pity and anger as they passed? Had the bishops after three years of burnings at last learned the lesson of those who, years ago, had left monks to rot to death in Newgate because the butchery of six of them had only persuaded the people of their goodness? If they had, it was too late. The fires, the smell of charred flesh, the howls of those who, in the rain, took an hour to die, had been an argument stronger than any book that those who ordered such deaths could not have the right of it. To a man who saw his neighbour burned on the pope’s authority for worshipping God in words laid down by parliament a short time ago, the case was plain enough. The bishops were turncoats and murderers. Those among them who were men of honour had been burned themselves or had gone abroad to wait until the queen should die and the Spaniards be sent home.
He could have gone to join them. Twice since the burnings started he had been offered a place in a boat to Germany. “Take a younger man,” he had said. Was he choosing the fire? Perhaps. Now he wished only that the long, light days of his imprisonment would not cease until he died.
But a year ago? Two years ago when they burned Cranmer? Had he not been certain then that he possessed the truth, that they could take away everything from him but his freedom to die for the truth? He had been brave then.
He had also been afraid, to travel to a strange country, to be trapped in silence. Once in York he had watched a Fleming in a tavern. The man’s eyes shifted from face to face as he strained to pick out a word he knew. Some apprentices round a table laughed over a game. The stranger smiled. No one noticed. When he spoke, it was with the single words of a two-year-old child, but he was a man of fifty with a grizzled beard, dressed in the clothes of a merchant.
But it was neither courage nor fear that had made him stay. It was the charge he had to bear. Men who could not write their names, ignorant boys and women, were going faithfully to their deaths on account of words bandied about by the learned. Learned men had drawn the battle-lines. Learned men had chosen a few phrases from here and there, descriptions of mysteries too deep and close for any mind to comprehend, and had imposed them on the ignorant on pain of losing their immortal souls. “The truth is thus and thus,” they said. “What that man tells you is idolatry.” Or: “The truth is thus and thus. What that man tells you is heresy.” Was it then for the learned to go away and leave the ignorant to fight alone? He had used such words himself. He had preached and taught. He had taken sides, certain that the side he had chosen was right and the other wrong. How could he have abandoned those who had followed others like him, and afterwards him, not because they understood but because they were led? Even after he no longer knew how much weight it was right for the great phrases to bear, he could not abandon those men and women. Them most of all.
He got down off the stool and carried it to the table, walking stiffly from standing for so long. For a while he sat motionless, a piece of paper in front of him. Then he took a pen and wrote:
“I, Robert Fletcher, being of sound mind and a prisoner of the bishop of London, do here set forth to my own satisfaction that:
“Item: The bishops who have, for the pope, condemned many to death by burning are turncoats, bloody butchers, and unpolitic.
“Item: Those condemned of the said bishops are innocent of sedition, faithful to the doctrine in which their betters have instructed them, constant, cheerful, and fearless in adversity.
“Item: It is not of necessity consequent upon the aforesaid articles that what the said bishops hold to be true is not the truth, or that what those condemned of the said bishops hold to be true is indeed the truth.
“Item: What is truth?”
He smiled as he wrote the last three words, smiled as he had when he noticed that he was hungry.
He added: “Written at the Charterhouse of the Tower of London the 14th day of May, 1558, and the fifth year of the Queen’s Majesty’s reign.”
He crumpled the paper into a ball and put it in his sleeve. He rose, pushing back his stool with some force from the table, and limped about the room. It was for his own sake that he had not gone to Germany, not for the sake of those who were hunted through the back alleys of London and chained to slimy walls in Newgate. It was not because he was afraid to die in a foreign country, though he was. In the end it was least of all because he was sure even to the stake that he was right. He had stayed to wait. To wait for what? For his own certainty to dissolve, as it had dissolved again and again, all his life.
When he was seven years old a brother he did not know he had taken him from Arden, down the lane between the banks of cow-parsley. That had been the beginning. Since then he had built in every place, out of every place, a new certainty, deeper within himself, closer, perhaps, to God, and each one had gone down before the next. It was wholeness that he had waited for, and these had all been parts, only parts of the truth. If he had gone to Germany he would have chosen one part. The exiles in Frankfurt and Strasbourg wrote books reviling what he had loved for half his life and sent them back to England to uphold in poor devils with halters round their necks the belief that they were saints of God.
That was it. In riven England were the rifts of his own soul. A part, a side, a faction, one loyalty to be used against another; none of these could be the answer to the question he had just written down.
Now that he knew the question, would he be given the time to discover the answer? Pilate had asked the question and turned away. He would not. Now, he would not.
His idle peace had gone, and his lightness of heart. Though his ankle was hurting him, he walked back and forth, dragging his foot. He had lost the simple earth, the narrow dale before the beginning, and the garden of his cell at the Mountgrace, again. He was back in the unpruned wood among the nettles and the flying birds.
“God preserve me in this mortal life a little while,” he said.
He was not going to burn, yet. He was not going to recant, for that would be to choose a different part, to join a different faction. But when they brought him to trial, he would hide between their questions, their phrases set to snare him, and they would have to send him back to prison, to his cell. He would wait a little longer in the world if he could. The whole was there, somewhere, yet to be found, and in it nothing should be lost, nothing that had once been known and loved betrayed.
He was no longer content to die.
At last he sat down again at his table and prayed to God for endurance and sharp wits. When the gaoler’s wife came in with his soup he was asleep, his head on his folded arms.