Young Bess by Margaret Irwin

Author:Margaret Irwin [Margaret Irwin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780749012472
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2013-10-21T11:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

The light burnt all night in Lambeth Palace, where Archbishop Cranmer sat, writing the new English Prayer Book that was to make a new land of saints from this old sinful England.

He wrote in his window, never seeing the soft spring night outside, but only the balancing phrases that took shape on the blank paper beneath his fingers, phrases that responded to each other, built themselves up like the rungs of a ladder up to heaven, into the most perfect prose ever yet written in English.

And it was he who was writing it, he who was creating this great work, imperfect, tremulous man that he was, an arrant coward, as he had always known whenever he had entered the presence of that Sun of Man, that majestic, rollicking, bewildering, baffling Master, who had passed away only a little over a year ago, though it seemed like three or four centuries, and left the world this tired dim place, peopled by shadows.

He fingered the two grey prongs of straggling beard that were growing as long as a gnome’s in a German fairy-tale.

He had never cut nor trimmed it since King Henry died. His Gretchen did not like it. She did not see why he should look like an old goat as a protest against shaven priests – nor as a token of affection to his late master. Women had no sense of loyalty. They had no sense of proportion. She was mistress of Lambeth Palace, she was wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, a thing no woman had ever been before.

Yet she could worry about his beard. Was it, after all, a mistake to combine the clerical office with matrimony? He had never intended to do so himself; in fact, he had intended neither.

He had been frightened from women as a young man when he had been tricked and bullied into marrying the bouncing black-eyed niece of the landlady of the Dolphin Inn at Cambridge, and had therefore had to resign his new-won Fellowship. It had been a bitter pill to swallow along with the ‘raw, small and windy ale’ that Erasmus had so complained of as they sat and drank together at the Dolphin.

Lucky for him, said his friends, that his Black Joan died in childbed within the year, and he was promptly re-elected as Fellow. He also took Orders, a safeguard against further assaults. And ever after at Cambridge he frequented only the White Horse, where there were no dangerous women though plenty of dangerous talk; for the inn was so well known as a meeting-place for Lutheran reformers that it was nicknamed Little Germany.

But when much later he visited their headquarters in Germany itself, he fell in love, at forty-five, with the daughter of a scholar at Nuremberg, a maiden as fair, pliable and docile, as devoted to himself, as Joan had been dark and flashy and shrilly intent on her own way. He felt safe with Margarete Hosmer – Gretchen she liked him to call her

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