The Time Before You Die: A Novel of the Reformation

Preface to the Revised Edition

This novel was written in the mid-1970s, and failed to find a publisher in Britain. In 1999, having lain in a drawer for more than twenty years, it was published by Ignatius Press.

A historical monograph, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation, by Dermot Fenlon, published in 1972, was the prompt for the novel’s portrait of Reginald Pole, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, and for centuries a neglected figure in English history. The prompt for the novel’s picture of the last days of the Carthusian monasteries before the Dissolution was the account in the third volume (1959, revised 1971) of David Knowles’ The Religious Orders in England. In the four decades since the novel was written, a notable change in the long-prevailing negative view of the pre-Reformation church in England has been delivered by some historians, notably by Eamon Duffy in his The Stripping of the Altars (1992). Unfortunately the anti-Catholic prejudice that has been the default position of English popular opinion for centuries has recently received new encouragement from the hugely successful novels of Hilary Mantel.

The cruel plunder of the Church by Henry VIII, the Protestant iconoclasm of the brief reign of Edward VI, the restoration of Catholic life under Mary, clouded by the burning of many Protestants and doomed to failure by the deaths of Mary and her cousin Pole on the same day in 1558, provide the painful background to the story told here. Also essential to the story are the Yorkshire countryside where the ruins of Mount Grace Priory and Rievaulx Abbey stand, and York itself, the medieval city remarkably unchanged. The novel’s central character, Robert Fletcher, is one of the many hundreds of monks and nuns expelled from their monasteries, for no fault of their own, by the arbitrary action of Henry VIII. Fletcher’s name and age are known. Like almost all his fellow victims of the Dissolution, he has otherwise disappeared from the historical record, but what happens to him in the novel is solidly founded on known facts of the period. The diplomatic letters punctuating the story are invented; their writers and recipients are not, and there are many such letters in the invaluable thirty-seven volumes of the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (1862—1932).

For a person of faith, conscience, and intelligence, the middle years of the sixteenth century were fraught with difficulties and dilemmas, produced in the wake of Luther’s rebellion against the Church, now almost exactly five hundred years ago. How one imagined monk and one real churchman, Cardinal Pole, who was as important to the history of the whole Latin church as he was to the history of England, dealt with these challenges, and managed to preserve their integrity and their fidelity, is the subject of this novel.

Lucy Beckett

Pentecost 2015

PART ONE

1518—1554

1

June 1518

Fray Bernardino de Mesa, of the Order of Preachers, ambassador to the court of King Henry VIII, in England, to Charles, King of Castile and Aragon and Count of Burgundy, in Spain; June 1518.

. . . Despite the rumours of plague, Cardinal Wolsey stops in London and has received many several times the ambassadors of the king of France. He has sent to me to return to London, whither I shortly go, hopeful as I now am of his true and earnest endeavours towards the universal peace of Christendom. The Princess Mary, your cousin, who is now two years old, continues in good health, thanks be to God; I am very sorry to hear talk of her betrothal to the dauphin of France. God grant it will be no more than rumour. The Lady Margaret Pole, the countess of Salisbury, is appointed the princess’s governess; and a more devout and godly lady and a more loyal friend to the queen your aunt I know there is not in all England. The queen your aunt, who is again with child (God grant she bear at last a healthy son), has journeyed with her court to Oxford, to the shrine of Saint Frideswide, and afterwards to the town, where, at a goodly and sober dinner in Merton Hall, I saw her converse cheerfully with many doctors and scholars, among them Master Reginald Pole, who is son to the said countess of Salisbury and who, I am told, is excellently learned in Latin and Greek and conspicuous still more for his virtue than for his learning. He was as a boy put to school at the king’s charge with the monks of the Charterhouse at Sheen, a house long in the royal favour. They say his mother would have him a churchman, and, indeed, such a young man, come to riper years, will surely be deserving of high place. The king is at Abingdon and hunts every day.

2

September 1520

Robert, I shall not see you again in this life. There is something I would have you know before you go from here for ever.

Master Husthwaite stood at his parlour window, looking out at the autumn evening. Mist lay over the river. The sun had set and the moor at the head of the dale was turning from purple to black. The lay brother who had come from the Charterhouse with the letter sat eating at the table.

Robert Fletcher had looked forward to this letter, without impatience, for months. Now he was in a fever of haste, as if the prior of the Mountgrace might change his mind about the empty cell if he did not appear by nightfall. He sat down again unwillingly. He had wanted to leave at once, as soon as the man came to the priest’s house, where he had happened to be, copying a book, because the harvest was finished. But there were twelve miles of sheep-path between Hawnby and the Charterhouse, and it would be dark in an hour. He must wait until the morning.

The priest went on without turning round, peering into the dusk.

"The better world we hoped for when I was young, the world in which ancient learning would so marry with Christian virtue as to bring forth civil peace and private holiness where there were ignorance and enmity before: Is that world even now coming into being? When the cardinal founds a college at Oxford and Greek is taught in the university, when the king and the queen show favour to scholars and England holds the peace of Christendom firm—is this the dawn we once thought to see? And where am I in this new world? Hidden away altogether from them all, a priest for a handful of poor people in a northern dale, with my books and my long-sought peace, and nothing, after today, nothing. Getting through slow days towards death with my books, as your father does with his drinking.

But you, Robert, being young, and setting forth tomorrow on a strait path to God that will give you nevertheless a freedom you will come to understand, you are a part of this new world. For it must keep secret within it, as the Carthusians are secret in their cloister, the best of the old. So that you are what I have done, Robert, all I have done, for the new world.

The lay brother at the table pushed away his dish. Then he got up, bowed to Master Husthwaite’s back, and left the room. They heard him climb the stairs.

The priest crossed the room and embraced Robert Fletcher, holding him close for a long time. At last he took him by the shoulders and held him at arm’s length.

Farewell, Robert, my son. Forgive me my grief at seeing you go, and. . . He made the sign of the cross on his forehead with his thumb. One day, if you find you need to, forgive me for having burdened you with too great a hope. He turned back to the window. Now go, boy. Go.

In the morning he could not find Will.

He had slept badly, his schoolmaster’s high words echoing in his head like accusations. He meant to leave with the first light.

He woke his father, who smelled of ale and smoke as he always did, from sitting half the night over the fire, and whose shirt was sticky with dirt. He said:

I am going, father, to the Mountgrace. I am going today. I shall not see you again.

Old Tom Fletcher sat up in his bed. Very slowly, his eyes dull, he took it in. He shook his head slowly, angrily, like a bull.

You do that, lad. You get away from here. You should never have been born, that you should not. I sent you away, didn’t I? Why did you ever come back?

His eyes filled with tears as he went on. Robert gritted his teeth.

But you did come back, and you’ve worked your share since you were a little lad, and no thanks from your brother or me, I daresay.

Never mind that now.

Get along with you, lad, with your priest’s manners and your learning. Forget this place. Damned house. Only fit for dying in. Faded away, she did, my lass. Not a word she said. No house for the living. Tom’ll bury me, have no fear, and glad to do it. Say a prayer for your mother now and then so she rest easy. Don’t trouble yourself about me. I’ll bide in this world as long as I may, to keep Tom out. He laughed with malice. Only to keep Tom out.

The old man looked at him sharply, returning to the present.

Where is it you’re going then? Oh, aye, to the monks, the fat monks. Like carp, they are, fat carp in a pond, bloated on the rents of such as me.

I’m going to the Charterhouse, father, not to the abbey.

What’s the difference? They’re all monks, aren’t they? Fine white bread and folded hands and never the sweat on their backs. Get away to your monks, damn you! Leave me in peace. I never wanted you here with her eyes and her soft ways. Get away and good riddance!

He slapped the air in front of his face as if hitting at a fly, and Robert left him.

He went out of the house to look for Will. The sun had risen. The new day glistened with a dew not far from a frost. He walked over the sheep-cropped grass, his footprints dark behind him, and forgot them both, his father and the priest. It was his own day, the first day. His life in the Charterhouse was an empty page on which all the writing would be fair and even, a silver field he would cross in a straight line to the top where the moor began and the wind always blew, the spirit of God.

Will was nowhere.

He wanted to see him before he left, to look at him carefully once more so as to remember him, for all that Will would not return his glance.

He went back to the house and looked again in the loft, where Will would sit for hours, rolling the stored apples. He looked in all the buildings round the yard. He went down even to the river, although for years Will had not gone that far. When the sun was already high he met his half-brother Tom.

Where is Will?

Are you here yet? You reckoned last night to be gone for a monk long by now.

Where is Will?

I’ve more to do than know where Will might be. What does it matter to you where he is? He’ll be back for his dinner right enough.

At dinner-time, Will had not come back.

Robert was afraid for Will, afraid that he had hidden, run away, got into danger somewhere, because somehow he had understood that he himself was going. Will, his other half-brother, was mute and called an idiot, although Robert knew that he was neither deaf nor witless. He had often watched him search the sky for curlews crying somewhere out of sight. He had taught him to blow on a blade of grass between his thumbs and make it squawk, and Will had even laughed. He had never got him to utter a word. Now and then rage would seize Will, shake him like a gale, and he would smash something, anything. The trough in the yard he had broken with a pick so that the water streamed down into the mud. A winter’s heap of firewood he had pulled about him, flinging huge logs over his shoulder as if they were twigs. When a sheepdog took his tame duck in its mouth and left it on the ground with a broken leg, he beat the duck to a mess of bloody feathers with a spade and afterwards set fire to the barn so that all that year’s hay was destroyed. But almost always he was quiet, frightened, and slow, never wandering far, afraid both of the empty moor above the farm and of the river winding under trees on the floor of the dale.

Until late in the afternoon Robert looked for Will, with fear hardening in his stomach. He did not find him. At last he left his father’s farm, weeping. His feet when he left had become like stones, holding him back as in a dream.

He walked over the moors to the Charterhouse in silence, the lay brother walking beside him. As he walked he remembered the one other such journey he had made.

He had been seven years old, and Tom, already grown, already hating him, had fetched him away from Arden mill, the nuns’ mill up the dale. Two days before, Robin the miller had died, carried in from the hayfield with a pitchfork stuck deep into his guts. The five nuns had sobbed. Then remembered him.

What’ll we do with the lad?

He’ll have to go back to his father’s house, poor bairn.

Old Tom Fletcher’s not fit to care for man nor beast, and no woman in the place.

How can we keep him here with Robin dead?

He had walked down the lane from Arden between banks of cow-parsley, following Tom, who stopped once and said:

At Easterside you’ll do as I tell you and never heed father. Do you hear? Once a bastard, always a bastard. And your mother no more than a servant girl, remember that, a little whore that came to scour pots after mother died.

For fifteen years he had worked at Easterside for Tom, at first minding geese and feeding hens, later ploughing, sowing, reaping with the men, tending sheep, out on the moor alone looking for ewes buried in snow while his father sat sullen by the fire and Will was only kicked and cursed. On idle evenings, when Tom let him go, Master Husthwaite had taught him to read and write, had taught him Latin in his warm parlour, read with him the psalter and the Gospels and Virgil, Saint Bernard and Cicero and Saint Aelred of Rievaulx, to whose great decayed abbey down the dale his father sometimes went to wrangle with the bailiff. So he had learned to live also in the country of language, the country of those things which cannot be known without the words that reveal them. The silence of the Charterhouse to which he walked was to be filled with the words of that country, the words and the silence of the Kingdom of God.

As he walked, he more than once looked behind him. The hills changed their places and after a short time hid the dale.

Night had fallen when they reached the monastery of the Mountgrace. The heavy gate was opened softly and shut behind him without a sound. As he came through into the outer court, he saw no lights from the cells ranged round the cloister. Then he remembered, from his single visit two years before, that the monks’ windows looked out only to their own gardens. The lay brother gave him bread and cabbage broth alone in the guesthouse, showed him a bed in a long room with other, empty beds, and left him without a light, saying that he would be back in the morning to take him to the prior.

He did not sleep at once. He lay in the dark, cold under a thin, clean blanket, and thought of Will, who often slept beside him on the straw of the fold-yard, in the steamy warmth of cattle and dogs. He was afraid for Will, afraid all at once for himself. He tried to pray. O Lord God. For God he had left Easterside. The words of his prayer came back to him dry, without meaning. He shivered in the alien bed. The faces of the priest, his father, Will, even Tom, passed one after the other before his eyes. It was as he had last seen them, these faces, that he would now always know them. They would age and alter out of his sight.

But he slept, after all, a sound, dreamless sleep.

3

August 1522

Pietro Bembo, scholar, in Padua, to his friend Gasparo Contarini, ambassador of the Republic of Venice at the court of Emperor Charles V, King of Castile and Aragon, Count of Burgundy, hereditary lord of the Netherlands, Austria, etc., etc., in Spain; August 1522.

". . . Meanwhile the dog-days pass pleasantly enough here in the country. My little boat rocks at anchor on the tree-shaded stream that flows past my house, and not far away, on the margin of my fields, the graceful Brenta follows its course towards the lagoon. A friend has discovered for me a portrait said to be of Laura herself, to hang beside my Petrarch on the east wall of my library; whether or not the lady be indeed Laura, it is a fine thing and fills to better advantage the space from which poor Boccaccio has had to be banished to the ill-lit south wall. I wish you were here with us, my dear Contarini, to admire the Attic vase and the bronze figure of Hermes, undamaged in all parts, which I have acquired from my watchful friend in Naples, well rewarded for his vigilance, since you left us to pursue the more virtuous but no doubt less agreeable paths of public duty.

A most remarkable young man, who arrived in Padua earlier this year to advance his studies under the guidance of our good old Leonicus, has joined our circle and visits my house frequently, spending many hours in the examination of my collection of antiquities and manuscripts. Reginald Pole by name, he is a near cousin to the king of England; the English ambassador, Signor Pace, tells me that he has even been spoken of in his own country as a likely husband for the king’s only daughter, who, in the absence of a live male heir, must one day to the great anxiety of all inherit her father’s realm and power. This young Pole is already adept in the discipline of Ciceronian eloquence and, although by nature reticent to the point of taciturnity, acquits himself in companionable discourse with intelligence and grace. I flatter myself that his increasingly elegant use of the Italian tongue owes not a little to my own tutelage. But the polish which the best of trainings has applied to noble birth and a gentle disposition is only the most apparent of his many merits. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that he is possibly the most virtuous, learned, and grave young man in the whole of Italy today, and I should be most gratified if you were to form an acquaintance with him on your return, not far distant it is to be hoped, to Venice. The years will, I have no doubt, prove him to be a man worthy of the affection of the most refined spirits. . .

4

October 1522

The day before Robert Fletcher was to be professed as a monk, the prior came to his cell, slowly, walking with a stick, to hear his confession. In his own oratory he knelt in front of the old man and told him of his impatience, his restlessness, his grief at finding himself, after two years, no closer to the peace he had entered the Charterhouse to find.

He said: The day Master Husthwaite brought me to see you, that first day, I stood in your window looking out over the cloister. I saw the cells of all the monks, the closed doors. I listened to Master Husthwaite describing me to you, telling you that I was patient, faithful, obedient. It was not true, none of it was true. But I promised myself before God as I stood in your window that if only I should be allowed to come here I would make it true. I thought that alone in my cell I should have the time, all the time for God. And now, it is less true than ever it was. It is not that I. . . that I. . . Sometimes I wish that I had committed some great sin for which I could be sorry all my days.

With tears in his eyes, he stared down at the knots in the planks that made the swept floor on which he knelt.

Indeed I am ashamed. And yet I know not. . .

He could not find the words. The words he had carefully prepared in the days before he did not utter, because they seemed to him now an account of someone else’s soul. He had a sense of strength, of power within himself that thus far in his life every day had no more than scattered and wasted; he yearned to gather it together, the whole of himself, his whole soul and body, and lay it before God.

I have done nothing. Neither good nor evil. And now I shall not. . .

It was not what he meant to say. Then he saw what he meant.

I am afraid that what I wish for is to die.

After a long silence the prior said, very softly, very slowly: Mean by sin a lump. You yourself, body and soul, indivisible, are that lump. And I myself also, and every man. We can do no more than know ourselves as we are, and offer ourselves to God who has already accepted us, already forgiven us. Who takes away the sin of the world.

The words floated towards Robert Fletcher like leaves on the surface of a stream.

My child, believe, believe what we have so many ways been told. His mercy is on them that fear him. His mercy is. It is not for you to deserve, only to trust, only to accept what is there, for you, for us all, for you only. Every hair on your head has been counted.

Like leaves on the surface of a stream he heard the words, like leaves, two or three among countless leaves, as if it did not matter which the old man chose to speak. He knelt, bowed to the ground, as the leaves floated by.

Quietly the prior went on. "Our names are written upon water, and all that we do and say, but the water is God’s time. In him there is no movement from the past into the future. The flow of the water is our impression, the mark we make and its unmaking; in him is no unmaking, only the creation of the always new which afterwards he will not let die. To him we are bound; our end is in him, and therefore is no end. What you have done, what you will do, signifies nothing, nothing, except inasmuch as it takes you further from him or closer to him. The rest is in the eyes of the world, and what are the eyes of the world? Dead men’s eyes. To live well is never to despair of him, never, for he did not, he does not, he will not despair of you.

"We are fallen men and having lost God’s glory we live in the world and stray, terrified, on dark paths towards our certain deaths. But if we had not been wretched, there had been no need for Christ to come. And unless we know our wretchedness, unless we weep for it, he does not come. There is a veil upon our hearts. But if we turn always to him, the veil will thin and fade. The veil will be taken away. With an open face one day you will see the glory of the Lord.

You will live, child of this house of God, you will live. Whether for an hour or for fifty years, you will live always on the edge, between his time and ours, and I pray that one day you will cross that edge for ever without fear.

The prior stopped speaking. After some minutes, in a firmer voice, he pronounced the words of absolution over him and blessed him. Robert Fletcher stood up. He put out his hand to help the old man from the chair in which he sat. When the prior was upright, he did not at once let go of Robert’s hand but stooped and kissed it.

Thank you, the prior said. Come with me. It is time for Vespers.

They went out into the cloister. The bell began to toll, and other monks appeared at their doors. The prior took him out across the wide grass towards the church. They stopped in the middle of the cloister garth, where the nuttrees were beginning to lose their leaves, and the prior said: One thing I would have you remember. It is easy to mistake love for faith. You can love what you know but in what you do not yet know you must have faith. Faith is for the night, for the cold weather. If a monk does not recognise the difference between love and faith he will lose heart when the days shorten, as they will.

He leaned on his stick and waved his other hand at the yellow woods above them.

If a wind gets up tonight, there’ll be scarcely a leaf left by morning. Our life here also has its seasons.

Here?

The bell ceased. Smoke curled out of a bonfire in the orchard and thinned slowly, scenting the air. Light from the west, which had already left the cloister, gilded the trunks of the oaks on the hillside like paint.

Here in this Charterhouse. Here on this earth. The prior smiled at him. When I am dead, he said, I commend you to the care of Thomas Leighton, who has been a monk of this house almost as long as I have.

The old man suddenly raised his head and pointed at the sky.

Look there! Imagine how small we must appear to him, a little patch of stone and grass, a few monks running about, not to be told one from another, like rabbits in a paddock.

High up, in the last sunshine, a hawk hung, scanning the earth for his prey.

The prior smiled and nodded as they walked on towards the church. Robert Fletcher shivered.

On a December morning in the same year, laid on a cross of ashes and surrounded by his monks, the prior died. He was buried next day in a nameless grave according to Carthusian custom. Afterwards they elected a new prior, Master John Wilson, an honest man, sober and just in all his dealings. Thomas Leighton, an old monk of fierce aspect to whom Robert Fletcher had never had cause to speak, cast his vote for Master Wilson with the rest.

5

August 1527

Don Inigo de Mendoza, ambassador to the court of King Henry VIII in London, to Emperor Charles V, King of Castile and Aragon, Count of Burgundy, hereditary lord of the Netherlands, Austria, etc., etc., in Spain; August 1527.

. . . While Cardinal Wolsey remains in France, I am able from time to time to speak alone with Queen Catherine your aunt, from the which privy speech the said cardinal, when in England, did all things in his power, both mannerly and unmannerly, to hinder me. The said cardinal believed himself despatched not only to sign those treaties with the king of France against your Imperial Majesty of which you are aware, but also to arrange an infamous match between King Henry and the Princess Renée of France, against such time as King Henry will have contrived to procure from Rome the declaration of his marriage to the queen’s grace as sinful and void. At this present, however, the queen informs me that the cardinal is forbidden to treat of any such French marriage, not, alas, because the king has altered his mind concerning his union with the queen’s grace, but because he is resolved to marry with a certain lady of the English court, one Mistress Anne Boleyn. It pains me grievously to send this news to your Imperial Majesty. I am requested by the queen, however, to inform you that she has no mind to yield to the king’s request that she meekly retire herself into a nunnery. She is, on the contrary, entirely and wholly confident of the lawfulness, innocence, and virtue of her marriage with the king, and of her right and duty to remain at his side as his true wife, for her own sake and for that of the Princess Mary her daughter. She rests with full hope upon the expectation of your Imperial Majesty’s help and succour in her affairs (trusting in particular that the presence of your armies in Rome cannot but assist her cause). Meanwhile she bears herself with the dignity and courage natural to so great a lady, appearing at court with the magnificence to which she has long been accustomed, as for example upon the occasion, several days past, of the return to court of Master Reginald Pole, who is cousin to the king and a young man, as I am told, of much promise in affairs of state. He has been abroad these seven years, studying with the most famous masters in Italy (whence he has returned on account of the late disorders in Rome), and the king and queen together greeted him, with every appearance of warmth and kindness, which, in these uncertain times, it greatly gladdened my heart to see. It is my own opinion that if the queen holds firm and treads a watchful path, the king may yet desist from these his most wicked intentions. Long may the cardinal be detained in France, for I doubt not that he, to keep his high place in the king’s favour, must do his utmost to further the king’s design.

6

1528

In the Charterhouse of the Mountgrace time passed with an order, measured by the tolling bell, that gave to many years the semblance of one. The seasons followed each upon the last, bare wood, green shoot, bloom, and mealy fall, with the often repeated singleness of Christmas, Passiontide, Easter, and Pentecost, each signifying all those that had been and were to be.

Robert Fletcher became, very slowly, a Carthusian monk. Vespers and the night offices the monks sang together in the church; on Sundays the prior,