Then Henry died, and Edward died, and Mary came to the throne; everyone had to change his religion once more and everything was in a turmoil. Peter Martyr, who had already changed his religion once and did not feel equal, at his age, to doing it again, fled from the country, and Richard Cox’s place as Dean was taken by Richard Marshall, a gentleman of drunken habits who didn’t care how many times a day he changed his religious beliefs provided he could celebrate the change in good liquor.
To him came the commissioners from Mary, sent to Oxford to cast out from the city heretics dead and alive, to inquire if it were true, as the Queen’s Grace had heard, that Catherine Martyr, who had been buried beside the shrine of Saint Frideswide, was a heretic? As poor Catherine had been unable to speak English no one knew what her opinions were, she might have been a Mohammedan for all anyone knew to the contrary, so it was thought best to run no risk of contaminating the shrine and Dean Marshall was commanded to cast her out.
He was a loathsome, brutal creature, but even he did not like the task he had been set. He spent the day shut up inside the Deanery with a few boon companions, drinking deep, and when the sun was setting, and a sky like a rose was spread out behind the Fair Gate, he and his companions and some workmen, with crowbars on their shoulders, reeled off to the Cathedral and locked themselves in. When they came out again, carrying poor Catherine, the shadows were falling and the bright sky veiled its face in honor. . . . Not knowing what to do with the body Dean Marshall put it at the bottom of the Deanery garbage heap and hoped for the best.
Then Mary died, Elizabeth came to the throne and everyone quickly changed their religion again; though it gave pleasure to all that Dean Marshall, having mixed himself up in some plot or other, was thrown into prison and died there in the misery he so richly deserved. The Queen’s Grace was very busy during the early years of her reign in finding out all that Mary had done and immediately doing the opposite. . . . Mary had said Catherine was to be taken out so Elizabeth naturally said she was to be put in again. . . . Orders were sent to Christ Church for the honorable re-burial of Catherine Martyr.
George Carew, the new Dean, a man of very different character from his predecessor, summoned his Chapter—of whom Canon Leigh was now a member—to his aid and together they removed Catherine from the Deanery garbage heap and conveyed her reverently to the Cathedral. While they were looking about for an obscure corner where she could be safely put for the moment they stumbled over yet another collection of bones, wrapped up in a silk wrapping.
“What on earth?” asked the Dean.
“Could they be Saint Frideswide?” suggested one of the Canons tentatively. “She got mislaid, you know, after the desecration of her shrine.”
“Is this Cathedral never spring cleaned?” snapped the new Dean irritably. He was a cultured, fastidious man, and his nerves were completely overturned by the events of the morning. He scarcely dared move a step to right or left lest he fall over yet another dead body.
The Canons gloomily shook their heads. During recent years, with Bishops and an Archbishop being burnt outside the city wall and all men walking in peril of their lives, such customs as spring cleaning had rather fallen into abeyance.
“What in the name of heaven,” demanded poor Dean Carew of his Chapter, “am I to do with these ladies?”
A burly Canon raised his head. “Throw ’em in together, Master Dean,” he suggested helpfully. “Have a grand combined funeral service for both good dames.”
So it was decided, and the Dean and Chapter went thankfully home to dinner.
For a short time the bodies of Catherine and Frideswide lay side by side in the Cathedral, reverently and carefully guarded, and on January 11, 1562, before a large concourse of people, they were laid to rest in a common grave with much pomp and ceremony. It was a great occasion. Bells were rung, hymns were sung and a volume of Latin poems was written to celebrate the event.
But Canon Leigh, as three years later he walked up the Cathedral in procession for Sunday morning service, averted his eyes from the shrine with a shiver of horror; for never, as long as he lived, would he forget the morning when they had looked for Catherine in the Deanery garbage heap.
3.
The great days of Cathedral worship, those days when the music of the mass sounded like the angels singing and the incense drifted in a fragrant cloud through the pillared aisles, had gone forever, but in this service of the reformed religion there was both dignity and beauty. The choir sang the psalms of David with simplicity, as the birds sing, and the prayer that Cranmer had written, repeated by Canon Leigh in his deep and beautiful voice, had a haunting beauty that smote hard upon each heart. “O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy; increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal.”
They applied it, as all men apply great literature, to their own personal needs. To Joyeuce it brought an overwhelming sensation of comfort. The awful complication of “things temporal,” the children and the dogs and the housekeeping and Great-Aunt, and now this further confusion of fiery love that for days and nights had been threatening to overwhelm her, seemed to sort themselves and fall into place. Under the guidance of God, it seemed, one could thread one’s way through them and somehow or other come out the other side.
She lifted her head and looked across to the place where Nicolas knelt. His eyes were shut and his white ruff, even though it was not in quite the right place for a halo, yet made his beautiful face took very saintly. Looking at him with yearning love she saw that his lips moved and her heart leaped up in joy to think that he too was praying that prayer for guidance.
“Nine from seven you can’t,” whispered Nicolas—he always did his accounts in church—“Nine from seventeen is eight. . . . Damn . . . . I’ve spent too much. What’ll Father say?” His lids flew apart in consternation and he found Joyeuce looking at him, her deep blue eyes fixed upon his face with a penetrating look that seemed to pierce his soul. He gave her one of his flashing smiles and then hastily lowered his lids again to shut out her eyes. . . . . They were too possessive altogether and Nicolas had no intention, at present, of undertaking responsibilities that might prove in any way inconvenient. The shouldering of responsibility, like the accumulation of learning, he was putting off till a later and more convenient date.
And Philip Sidney, kneeling beside Nicolas with his fair head buried in his arms, was thinking, as he always thought on Sundays, of the little church of Whitford, Flintshire, of which he was lay rector. His father, Lord President of Wales, had made him rector of Whitford when he was nine and a half. A gentleman of the name of Gruff John was his proctor, lived in the rectory and did all the work, but Philip had an annual income of sixty pounds a year from his benefice and always found that it came in very handy. . . . And Philip, a deeply religious boy, loved to think that he was lay rector of Whitford. . . . As he knelt there, with his face hidden in his folded arms, he was seeing the little gray church squatting in a fold of the Welsh hills. At this moment Gruff John, a gentleman with a tremendous bass voice, would be booming out Cranmer’s prayer over the heads of his kneeling congregation, a handful of shepherds and farmers with their wives and families. Outside in the churchyard the bees would be buzzing over the wild flowers and from up in the hills the sound of sheep bells would come faintly down the wind. Philip, kneeling in Christ Church Cathedral, prayed for his parishioners, for the burly farmers and the grizzled shepherds and their comely wives and rosy children. He prayed for his church, too, that it might always be a house of prayer, and for Gruff John, and for the sheep up in the hills, and for himself, that God would make him worthy of his sixty pounds a year.
Canon Calfhill, he to whom posterity would owe it that the story of Catherine Martyr was put on record, preached a sermon that was listened to by a small proporti
on of the scholars with burning attention. Later in the day they were all of them required to give an account of the sermon to their tutors, a tiresome regulation that was enough to drive anyone distracted, but they had evolved an elaborate system by which only one scholar on each staircase listened while the rest of them just thought great thoughts. Then after dinner the one who had listened instructed the ones who hadn’t as to what they should say to their tutors, and all was well. They took it in turns to listen, of course, starting at the beginning of the year with the scholars whose names began with A and working carefully through in alphabetical order.
It was Philip’s turn today to listen for his staircase, but he didn’t mind because he liked sermons and always listened in any case. The sermon was preached in Latin, of course, and as Canon Calfhill was a fine Latin scholar it was worth listening to. Not only could he preach magnificently in Latin but he could write fine Latin verse too, and his epigram on Frideswide and Catherine was much admired.
Ossa Frideswidæ** sacro decorata triumpho
Altari festis mota diebus erant.
E tumulo contra Katharinæ Martyris ossa
Turpiter in fædum jacta fuere locum.
Nunc utriusque simul saxo sunt ossa sub uno,
Par ambabus honos, et sine lite cubant.
Vivite nobiscum concordes ergo papistæ
Nunc coeunt pietas atque superstitio.
**Note. The bones of Frideswide adorned for holy triumph on festal days were moved to the altar. From the sepulchral mound, on the other hand, the bones of Catherine Martyr had been shamefully cast into a foul place. Now the bones of each are together under one stone, equal is the honor to both, and without strife they lie. Live therefore, followers of the Pope, with us in concord, now piety and superstition combine.
Canon Calfhill only preached for one hour because his congregation was for the most part young and he always said it was best to preach only short sermons to the young, lest their spirits should suffer weariness and so be alienated from religion, and then they all sang a hymn and filed out joyously into the glorious sunshine. Hautclere, Douce, Clement, Austin, Marie, Gabriel and John rang out again over their heads, answered by all the bells of Oxford, and Great Tom boomed out the hour for dinner.
4.
The College authorities never understood why it was that after dinner the scholars sat out on their staircases in the utmost discomfort instead of comfortably in their rooms. And it always seemed to be one scholar only, they noticed, who was doing all the talking, while the rest, hands locked round their knees, were attentively silent.
Philip had been very much moved by Canon Calfhill this morning and sitting at the top of his flight of stairs in Broadgates Hall, with various be-ruffed gentlemen sprawling below him all the way down the stairs to the open door leading to Fish Street, he waved his hands in the air and held forth at the top of his voice. The others listened hard, cuffing anyone who shuffled his feet or coughed too loudly, for their account of the morning’s sermon was always much admired by their tutors on the days when Philip had been listening to it. . . . For Philip could set them on fire. . . . He was a sort of spiritual Midas. Everything he touched, whether it was a Latin sermon or a way of life, or a cause or a personality, seemed to shine with a new glory.
He finished his exposition, and a little sigh of admiration rose like incense from the crowded staircase. It always amazed him that he, shy as he was, should have this power over his fellows. It did not make him proud, it only increased his humility, just as his beautiful home and his fine possessions increased it. . . . For to be dowered with lovely things through no effort and no virtue of one’s own is very humbling, he found; the fear of unworthiness and the fear of mishandling kept one perpetually crawling to the feet of God. . . . Later in his life he inscribed his shield with the words, “These things I hardly call our own.”
A figure suddenly appeared at the open doorway at the foot of the stairs, blocking out the sun, and Philip gazed at it with dismay, for the figure was a magnificent one dressed in the Leicester colors, and held in its hand a letter tied in scarlet silk. . . . And if there was one thing Philip disliked more than another it was being interfered with by Uncle Leicester.
Like mist before the sun the other scholars melted away, for they knew their place when the colors of the Chancellor were flaunted in the streets of Oxford, and the magnificent serving man advanced up an empty staircase and bowed low before the slender boy who sat at the top.
Philip received the letter with a dignified inclination of his fair head and felt rather anxiously in his wallet for a tip. There was, as he had feared, nothing in it but a couple of groats. These, however, he presented with such an air that they might have been ten gold coins, and the servant received them as though they were twenty. . . . Servants adored Philip Sidney. Though he was too shy to say much to them he always seemed to notice that they were there, and to be glad that they were.
Left alone, Philip perused the missive from his august relation with a heavy sigh. It was as he had feared. Uncle Leicester was in Oxford on business, was staying at Queen’s College—the food was very good at Queen’s—and would be at the Fair Gate in an hour’s time that he and Philip might spend a happy afternoon together.
Philip went to his room with leaden footsteps and proceeded to wash himself, and scent himself, and put on his best crimson doublet and his pantoffles, leather shoes with exaggeratedly pointed toes, a new fashion introduced from Venice. He felt a fool in his pantoffles, but Uncle Leicester had given them to him so he must wear them.
As he dressed he took himself severely to task for his dislike of Uncle Leicester, who was so fond of him and so tirelessly good to him. . . . If only the man would not interfere. . . . Philip found it difficult to forgive his uncle for the letter he had written to the Dean of Christ Church when Philip first came up to Oxford. “Our boy Philip being of a delicate constitution,” the Chancellor had written to the Dean, “it is our wish that he should eat flesh in Lent.” And the Dean had replied that the wish of the Chancellor being law the regulation as to scholars eating only fish in Lent should be set aside in Philip’s case, and Philip should eat flesh. Could anything, Philip asked himself, have been more unkind? It was quite bad enough to have a delicate constitution without having the attention of the entire College drawn to it. . . . In Lent, when he had to sit in hall choking his way through a huge platter full of underdone beef oozing red blood round the edge of every slice, and all the other scholars sitting round, disentangling fish bones from their teeth and looking at him, he could have cried. Indeed sometimes at night he did; partly from vexation of spirit and partly because if Uncle Leicester had only known it his delicate constitution and such quantities of underdone beef did not really agree together very well. . . . But then he must remember, as his mother, Uncle Leicester’s sister Mary, was always urging him to, that poor Uncle Leicester had no children and loved Philip as his own son. . . . But then, as Philip couldn’t help pointing out to his mother, if Uncle Leicester had no children it was entirely his own fault for making such a mess of his matrimonial affairs.
For Philip’s family had a skeleton in the cupboard—Aunt Amy. Philip had loved Aunt Amy very dearly and even though she had now been dead for five years he could not forget about her. She had been so pretty and loving, and so sweet to him when he was a little boy, that he had loved her the best of all his aunts. He would never forget her sitting on the grass at Penshurst, dressed in a pink frock, and making daisy chains for him when he was small. She had been happy in those days, and had laughed when she twisted the daisy chains round her dark head and his yellow one. When he had eaten too much beef he had a horrible nightmare in which he saw his pretty Aunt Amy, still to his imagination dressed in her pink frock, come hurtling down those awful stairs at Cumnor Place and falling in a pitiful heap at the bottom, with her neck broken. In his nightmare he stood there at the bottom of the stairs watching it happen, b
ut with his feet chained to the floor so that he couldn’t run forward and catch her in his arms before she struck the ground. He always woke up from this dream sweating and screaming out in terror, so that his friend Fulke Greville, who had the room next to his at Broadgates Hall, would have to come running in and give him a drink of water, and hit him on the back and tell him not to be an ass, and sit on his bed and tell him nice tales about bear-baiting and cock-fighting before he was sufficiently comforted to go to sleep again.
Uncle Leicester and Aunt Amy had been very happy when they first married. It was only later, when the Queen’s Grace, completely bowled over by Uncle Leicester’s magnificent looks, showered honor upon honor on his head, that it swelled up, together with the heads of his relations, and poor Amy seemed to them not quite equal to her great position. It was the fault of the Queen’s Grace, of course. She fell in love with Leicester’s “very goodly person,” and it was whispered in the Court that he could have married her had it not been for Amy. Horrible scandals about Elizabeth and Leicester were whispered everywhere. They heard them at Penshurst, Philip’s home, and Aunt Amy, even though she was not allowed to come to Court, heard them too and was very unhappy.
Of course it was not true, as everyone said at the time, that Uncle Leicester had sent her to stay at Cumnor Place so that his friend Anthony Foster, who lived there, should throw her down those stairs. . . . It was a clear case of suicide. . . . Her maid had heard her praying to God “to deliver her from desperation” and she had sent all her servants to Abingdon Fair on the night she died. But still, it was all very horrible, and Uncle Leicester had not made things better by never going near her body when it lay in state in Gloucester Hall, and absenting himself from her burial in Saint Mary’s Church. Doctor Babington, too, one of Uncle Leicester’s chaplains, who had loved Amy and who had to preach her funeral sermon, made everything worse by getting upset and describing Amy as “pitifully murdered” when he had meant to say “accidentally slain.”