“I’ve spoken to Bishop Capon,” Forest explained, “he’s the best weathervane.”
“He’s a vigorous Protestant.”
Forest shook his head.
“That was last week. He’s changing. You must think of your safety and our business, Edward, and be ready to do the same.”
Which had made Edward Shockley think of his wife.
He looked at the situation calmly. He suspected Forest was right and the talk of tolerance was only a pretence.
Unless he wanted to risk his life, therefore, he would have to profess Catholicism again.
But what of Katherine? If he did so to comply with the new regime would she ever believe he was sincere? Surely not. He had already lied to her before.
Which led to a simple conclusion. Unless he was to endure years of her disbelief and distrust, he must convert now, apparently of his own free will.
He stood before her now in the guise of a penitent.
“Katherine, I ask your forgiveness. I spoke with fear in my heart, and with anger. I believe in the Catholic faith in which I was raised and I wish to return to it.”
“Are you sincere, Edward?” Her pale blue eyes were doubtful, yet he saw the hope in them.
“I swear.”
“Will you confess to a priest?”
“With all my heart.” He smiled.
There were tears in her eyes.
“I have prayed for this, Edward, three long months.”
“And I thank you for your prayers.”
How easy it was. He kissed her, though not without a secret sense of shame.
Forest was right.
Not only did Capon change sides again, but Bishop Gardiner was soon back at nearby Winchester. Within months, Parliament had granted Mary everything she demanded except the return of the English Church to Rome. All talk of toleration was forgotten. The Protestant bishops Latimer and Ridley were thrown into prison. Poor Archbishop Cranmer was arrested.
Worse, the thirty-seven-year-old queen longed for a Catholic husband and a child. Within a month she had chosen Philip of Spain. In order to make sure of support in the council Philip’s father the Holy Roman Emperor sent a gift of two thousand crowns to several key men. Lord Pembroke was one of them. And when Parliament protested at this intrusion of Spain into England’s affairs, Mary told them to mind their own business.
The news that came to Sarum left no doubt of the new queen’s strength.
In January a rebellion led by Wyatt, son of the minor poet, collected a large body of men and marched from Kent to London. At London they were crushed by Lord Pembroke and on the convenient suspicion that they were implicated, Lady Jane Grey and her husband were now beheaded. Mary’s half sister Elizabeth, it seemed, was also under suspicion, but since nothing could be proven, she was allowed to remain under supervision at the country palace of Woodstock.
Meanwhile, Bishop Capon deprived of their livings fifty-four clergymen of the diocese, who had been obeying his previous, Protestant instructions.
But the event which made Edward Shockley most nervous of all came in June 1554, when the Marquis de las Novas, personal emissary of King Philip of Spain, landed ahead of his royal master at Plymouth and was conducted thence by Lord Pembroke to Wilton House where he was greeted by a magnificent company led by Pembroke’s son, and including the sheriff of the county and two hundred gentlemen. Of these, none was better horsed or more splendidly dressed than the sallow squire of Avonsford, Thomas Forest.
Two weeks later the King of Spain and his fleet arrived at Southampton. They proceeded at once to the ancient city of Winchester, where they were married with all ceremony by the newly reinstated Bishop Gardiner, after which Lord Pembroke ceremonially carried the great sword of state in front of the Spanish king.
And though Forest assured him Philip alone could not inherit the English throne and that the Spanish connection would benefit English trade with Spain’s possessions in the New World and the Netherlands, he voiced the feelings of most Englishmen when he grumbled bitterly:
“I have no wish to be even half ruled by a Spanish king.”
Abigail Mason had grown very quiet of late. But the reason, Edward Shockley discovered, was greatly to her credit.
In August 1553 she had seen, with absolute clarity, what was to come.
“The true religion will be outlawed. Soon there’ll be nothing left but the Latin mass in every church,” she explained with disgust to her bemused husband. “We must leave.”
“Where shall we go?” he had asked.
And to his astonishment she had replied:
“Geneva, of course.”
He had stared at her open-mouthed, first in amazement, then in dismay.
“But how shall we find the money?”
“If it is the Lord’s will, then we shall find a way.”
His question was not unreasonable. Of the several hundred Protestant families who fled the regime of Mary Tudor, nearly all were gentlefolk, rich merchants or scholars. The number of humble artisans who could afford the luxury of escape to the continent probably numbered only a few dozen. Peter knew of no one else at Sarum who would even attempt such a bold venture.
But if they were to go, then her choice of Geneva was, at least for her, a natural one. For the Swiss city of Geneva was the home, the holy city, of the man she admired most: John Calvin.
“’Tis the City of God,” she reminded her husband.
In Geneva, the severe moral disciplinarian Calvin ruled with a Protestant regime as all-embracing and as fiercely doctrinaire as any opposing Catholic regime that Mary Tudor could have dreamed of imposing upon England.
Of all the Protestant leaders – Luther and his followers, who were still at root only reformist Catholics, or the more advanced teachers like Zwingli who emphasised that the communion was nothing more than an act of remembrance – it was the severe and logical Frenchman, Calvin, in his Swiss retreat, who appealed most to her own stern sense of duty. It was Calvin who insisted, by a process of simple deduction from the Bible, on one of the most terrifying if logical doctrines to emerge from the Protestant Reformation: the doctrine of predestination.
Predestination, though it could be deduced from St Augustine himself, was in the eyes of the Catholic church a heresy: for it denied that a man could exercise free will to follow the path of righteousness and, by God’s grace, reach heaven.
Even Shockley, when he used to admit his Protestantism, felt uncomfortable with this doctrine.
“If all is predestined, then there’s no point in prayer, good works, anything,” he complained, “since nothing we do can alter our fate.”
But to Abigail this was not the point: the logic of her case was unassailable. “Some are chosen, some are not,” she told Peter. And when he asked anxiously: “Are we chosen?” she would only reply: “Perhaps.”
“We must obey God’s law and trust in Him,” she declared. “God’s law is denied in England now. We’ll go to Geneva.”
And so, during the month of August, the couple collected all the money they could and made their preparations.
They never left.
For at the end of August 1553, the wife of Peter’s cousin Robert Mason suddenly and unexpectedly died in childbirth, and the distracted Robert was left in the cottage at Fisherton with no help, a surviving baby and a brood of young children. Peter and Abigail were with them when it happened.
It took Abigail one day to decide what must be done; the choice she made was selfless.
“We must stay,” she told Peter, with tears, for once, in her eyes. “It cannot be God’s will that we should leave our cousin alone like this.”
“We shall not go to Geneva then?”
She shook her head sorrowfully.
“Not yet. We must stay,” she replied sadly, “and suffer.”
“Then I had better unpack my tools,” the cutler replied, with secret relief.
From that day, Abigail had two families to care for.
Shockley had many matters
, other than religion, to consider at this time.
For three years the harvests had been poor; there was a sense of discomfort and unease in the countryside and it was hard not to be affected by it. More serious, from his point of view, was that the booming cloth market had led to overproduction.
“Our Fleming may be a good trader,” he told Forest, “but every month the merchant adventurers are complaining there’s too much cloth coming into Antwerp. Prices are falling. Are you sure we are wise to be setting up for more production now?”
But to his surprise Forest only smiled.
“What will happen when the glut gets worse?” he asked his young partner.
“Merchants will be ruined,” Shockley replied.
Forest nodded.
“Exactly. In a year or two there’ll be a crisis. But it will pass. The underlying market is strong. And when the crisis comes, we shall be trading, and we’ll buy up spare cloth at cheap prices from those who can’t afford to keep it any longer.” He smiled. “I’ve got enough money to ride out a dozen storms, Shockley. Let’s get to work.”
The two men would often ride over to Forest’s secondary estates, which lay the other side of Wilton to where the workshops were being set up, and whenever they passed the gates of Lord Pembroke’s great house there Forest would remark:
“That’s the man to watch, Edward. He’s even importing cloth workers from overseas.”
It was on one of these occasions that they saw a strange sight.
Just as they came to Pembroke’s gates, a coach with outriders came rumbling by from the west at such speed that they had to pull violently to one side to let it past. As it did so, the outriders flung stones at the gates, and from inside the coach Shockley heard a string of curses, apparently directed at the house. With a tremendous racket and much splashing of mud, the extraordinary cortège rumbled out of sight.
“What was that?” Shockley asked in amazement.
Forest grinned.
“That was Lord Stourton,” he replied.
Shockley knew him by name of course. Though their contact with Sarum had been sporadic over the centuries, everyone had heard of the ancient lords of Stourton who had ruled over parts of west Wiltshire for centuries. But he had never caught sight of him before.
“What’s he doing here?”
“He’s taken a hatred to Lord Pembroke,” Forest told him.
“Why?”
“Who knows? Perhaps because the Herberts came here recently; perhaps because they’re so powerful.” He shook his head. “Only a fool makes an enemy of Pembroke. But Stourton’s always making enemies. Some say he’s mad.”
Once they encountered Pembroke himself. He was riding quietly along the lane with two gentlemen, and to Forest’s profuse salute he gave a courteous but brief nod in reply. Shockley studied him as he passed and noted his long, aquiline face and hard, thoughtful eyes. Forest turned to him afterwards:
“Well?”
“Not a man I’d cross,” Edward confessed.
It was during this time that one minor but significant change took place in the Forest—Shockley affairs.
There were so many sides to the new business that Forest suggested to Shockley one day:
“We need a new pair of hands – someone to watch over the weavers, day to day.”
To this Shockley readily agreed and both men decided to look out for such a man.
Shockley was surprised however when, two weeks after he had mentioned it to her, Katherine said to him with a smile:
“I think I have your man for you.”
“Who is that?”
“My brother John.” And she explained.
The proposition she put to him had considerable merit. The boy was only nineteen, but he had spent all his life close to his father’s business and there was little about making cloth he did not know. He was eager to work for Shockley, it seemed, because there had been some friction between him and his father recently.
He was a pleasant, open-faced young man with slightly reddish hair. His pale eyes at first seemed a little ingenuous, but it was soon clear that in the workshop where he oversaw every detail of the spinning and weaving process, quietly but ruthlessly, he missed nothing. He spoke little, even when he was with his sister.
Forest approved of him.
Since he chose to lodge separately from his sister and brother-in-law, and as there was no available place for him on Forest’s estate, he took the lodgings in the tenement in Culver Street that had been vacated by Nellie Godfrey.
He was quiet, but he was a Catholic. Abigail – whom Shockley often saw when he dropped by to see the young man – tolerated his presence in silence, but she was prepared to admit:
“At least there are no more harlots here.”
Abigail was often at the house at Fisherton. She had found a young woman to suckle the baby, but all the other duties of keeping the little cottage and feeding Robert Mason’s family fell to her. Often Peter would walk the mile from Culver Street to Fisherton and eat with them before returning contentedly to his workshop in Culver Street, and Shockley guessed that the simple fellow was glad enough not to be on his way to Geneva. He often looked in upon the cutler in his workshop and never heard a word of complaint about his lot except once when he secretly confided:
“I miss Nellie, though.”
For Abigail Mason, the two years that followed Queen Mary’s accession were an increasingly difficult time. She had no doubt that she had done right in staying: that at least was some comfort. But the Catholic conditions were hard to bear. She avoided attending mass. This might have brought her into trouble with the authorities; but since it was known that she was looking after two households, and since no one was ever sure whether she was at Fisherton or in Salisbury, her absence could be conveniently overlooked.
And besides, she was quiet.
“I would speak out,” she told Shockley one day at Culver Street. “But there are our cousin Peter’s children to look after as well as ourselves . . .” and she quietly spread her hands. “I pray each day for deliverance,” she added.
She was ceaselessly at work. The dark rings under her eyes seemed to grow darker so that sometimes she looked gaunt and hollow-eyed. “She’s like a deathshead,” Shockley sometimes thought. But she went about her business, silent and indefatigable, and when once John Moody offered to let Peter join his own meal at Culver Street one day, she quietly but firmly refused.
“You would not eat with Catholics?” she asked Peter, and her husband, after pausing for a moment agreed that no, he supposed he would not.
In the spring of 1554, Abigail Mason herself observed a subtle change in her own behaviour for which she reproved herself. The trouble was Peter.
It was not easy to bear his indifference to her suffering: not that he meant any harm – far from it. Indeed, he was so eager, always, to please her. He would bring little gifts for Robert’s children; he would greet her sometimes with little posies of flowers when she returned tired in the evenings. Yet always, in his broad, affectionate, rather foolish smile, she could see clearly that he was untroubled by their predicament.
“Dost thou not grieve that we are unable to go to God’s city of Geneva?” she several times asked him and Peter, wanting to please her but plainly confused, would look troubled before replying hopefully:
“Are we not doing God’s work here?”
And she knew that he was relieved because he was not being asked to move from his little workshop.
Most of the time Abigail was silent. But sometimes alone with her husband and hearing of the raising of a new altar in some Wiltshire church, or the celebration of a dirge in the city, she would cry out:
“How can you smile, Peter Mason, when such things are done? How long are we to suffer the Roman Antichrist – or will you just stand weakly by?”
At such times, Peter would hang his head, confused and ashamed more on account of the scorn he sensed in her voice than any clear perception that he had sinned.
On three occasions he led Shockley to one side and asked his advice.
“She will speak out in public one day,” he told the merchant. “I fear it and I fear for her, Master Shockley.”
Hearing it, Edward Shockley too was troubled – for he, too, feared that Abigail’s resolute nature might bring her into direct conflict with Bishop Capon, and he dreaded the consequences.
It was on the third occasion that Peter had said quietly:
“My wife is not like me: she is brave and strong.” And Edward, though he agreed, had been sorry to see the cutler look so ashamed.
Strangely, though he even went to mass upon occasion, Abigail felt less friction with Robert at Fisherton. Unusually for the family, he had a thick shock of dark hair; he had a powerful, burly figure, and firm convictions.
“This rule is a great iniquity,” he told her. “But I’ll not oppose it until these children are grown,” and he gestured towards his six children.
“Does thy conscience trouble thee?” she asked.
“Yes,” he told her frankly, “every day. But this is a time to suffer in silence. That’s my judgement.”
And though she was not sure if he was right, she understood his decision, and bowed her head in respect.
“May we pray to God in the proper manner in private?” she asked.
To this Robert Mason did agree; with Robert leading their prayer, Peter, Abigail, the six children and several of their neighbours would meet discreetly in Fisherton and conduct their Protestant services each week with a good conscience.
There was no question about one thing at least: Robert’s children needed her. It was a comfort in her adversity to have them about her. The baby in particular she cherished; indeed, it was hard sometimes to draw herself away from it, and often when she arrived back in Culver Street she would stand silently at the door of her husband’s little workshop and gaze at him wondering:
“Will God perhaps, after all, grant us a child?”
If she could not quite respect her husband over the all-important matter of religion, she could not fault his conduct. Not only did Peter try to help her, but he never complained. Often she was at Fisherton longer than she had intended, but when she came to him at last and apologised for her long absence he would smile sweetly and answer: “I am well enough here,” so that at times she wondered if perhaps her absence was a relief to him.