There was no doubt about it. There were fifty witnesses.
And now the bishop struck.
Bishop Erghum of Salisbury was not a man to be trifled with.
He also had a most unusual passion – for mechanical clocks.
These were still a great rarity. When the bellringers in the tall belfry tolled the hours, they were regulated not by any mechanical device, but by long candles, with marks on their side, whose accuracy was occasionally checked with a great hour glass. Erghum intended to change that.
It was while he was studying the design for the new clock – a large, cumbersome mechanism driven by weights hung from ropes and regulated not, as yet, by a pendulum but by a less accurate set of drums and wheels – that he was interrupted by an excited and scandalised Portehors with the news of Martin Shockley’s conduct in the market place.
To Portehors’s disappointment he did not rise from his chair in a towering rage; he only stared down at the picture of ropes, flywheels and gears and waved the young priest away. But if Portehors had looked more closely, he would have seen that the bishop’s face had set like a mask.
The next week they brought Stephen Shockley the news.
The bishop was going to excommunicate the Shockley family; and he was going to repossess the mill.
It was a terrible punishment, but the death of the archbishop and the fear of the revolt was causing a reign of harsh repression all over the country. The so-called Lollards who followed Wyclif’s teachings were heretics and their possessions could be forfeited.
“The bishop is my landlord,” Stephen reminded his son. “Now we’ll lose the mill through your folly.”
Yet even under this threat, Martin was unrepentant.
“John of Gaunt supports Wyclif,” he reminded his father. “So does the Earl of Salisbury himself, and other magnates, too.”
“The bishop can’t reach as high as Gaunt,” Shockley replied, “but he can crush us.”
His fears were well-founded: Erghum proved himself to be so strong that he even forced the great Earl of Salisbury to appear at Sarum and do penance for his Lollard sympathies in the cathedral. The Shockley family could be dealt with summarily and easily.
In the late summer of 1381, Stephen Shockley was about to lose his most valuable possession.
Edward Wilson used to laugh out loud when he remembered the events of the next few days. It was a story he loved to tell his children.
Stephen Shockley had been distraught.
“And then,” Edward would relate with a grin, “he came to me for advice.” He used to chuckle before he went on. “I told him not to worry.”
His business with Stephen Shockley had gone well; he had no wish to see his partner ruined, or to strengthen the hand of the bishop who as the feudal overlord of the town, interfered in its affairs too much. He also had one piece of information which Shockley did not possess.
This was that young Portehors was not, as he seemed, a paragon of virtue. For over a year, in fact, he had been having an affair with the wife of an ironmonger in the town. She was a large woman, far from good-looking, and it had always amused Edward Wilson to think of the pale, thin priest in her company. The young priest had been discreet, but not cautious enough, and several people in the city knew about his visits to her.
It was this weakness that gave Edward Wilson his idea. He said nothing more to Shockley.
Three evenings later, a remarkable set of circumstances took place, all by chance.
By chance Stephen Shockley was detained by a merchant until late in the evening on the other side of the town; by chance also, the Shockley children were out of the house, and by chance, therefore, Cecilia Shockley found herself alone in the house in the High Street.
It was an hour after dark, and she had already retired to bed when she heard the noise. Thinking it must be one of her family, she called out. There was no reply.
Puzzled she turned to one side, where she knew there was a candle, but before she could even find it, the door of the chamber swung open, and a tall, thin figure entered the room.
Cecilia Shockley was a plump, good-looking woman with a soft, gentle face; her normal expression was one of happy submissiveness to her husband. But she was not a nervous woman, nor physically weak.
And so she fought long and hard, and screamed loudly as the thin young man, whose face was covered by a hood, threw himself upon her and tore away the nightshirt she was wearing. She could not get the hood off his face, but she managed to kick him soundly, disregarding the oaths he muttered as he seized her by her long hair. He was strong, and determined, and as she felt his long arms close around her, she knew she was going to be raped. But she kept fighting.
It was the shouts in the street outside that saved her. For suddenly, when she herself was near the end of her resistance, he heard them, panicked and fled, leaving her shaking and hardly able to move.
It was by chance that Edward Wilson should have been passing the house at that time with two of his apprentices, who heard her screams.
Just as it was also chance, no doubt, that young Portehors should have received a mysterious and urgent message from his lover to meet her at the corner of the market place after dusk that evening so that, when she failed to arrive for the appointment, he should have been seen loitering there, not far from the scene of the crime. It was bad luck for him that Wilson and his apprentices should have chased the thin figure down the street and then lost him, only to see Portehors a few moments later.
But it was no chance that Edward Wilson should have requested a private interview with Bishop Erghum himself the next morning.
As always, he was deferential.
“You’ve heard that someone tried to rape Shockley’s wife last night, Your Grace.”
Erghum nodded. The family was disgraced, but he had no sympathy for crimes of this kind. “Bad business,” he said bleakly.
“Your Grace, I saw the man who did it.”
Erghum looked surprised.
“Then tell my bailiff at once, man. He’ll lock him up.”
Wilson looked at the floor carefully while he paused.
“I should prefer not.”
Erghum scowled at him. What was the fellow up to?
“Why?”
“It might be unwise, Your Grace. In these troubled times.” He paused again. “It was Portehors, Your Grace: your chaplain.”
Erghum glowered at him.
“Nonsense. He has an irreproachable character”
Wilson shook his head.
“Not quite.” And he outlined, in meticulous detail, what was known of Portehors’s affair with the ironmonger’s wife. “Of course, he’s a young man . . .” he suggested indulgently.
The bishop eyed him warily. His instinct told him that part of the story might be true.
“And you identified him running out of Shockley’s house?”
“I fear so,” Edward bowed respectfully.
“Anyone else see his face?”
“My two apprentices. But I have told them to say nothing. After all, we surprised him before the worst . . .’
“Yes. Yes.”
Erghum now saw what he was driving at, but he waited for Wilson to make the next move.
“The city is very disturbed at present,” Wilson went on calmly. “No harm was actually done. But if after Your Grace’s known anger with the Shockleys an affair of this kind were to come to court, I thought . . . the townspeople . . .” he trailed off and waited in an attitude of apparent obedience for the bishop’s instructions.
Though Bishop Erghum knew that he could never be sure exactly what Wilson had done, he thought he could guess most of it; and he admired the rogue’s cunning. It was also true that there had been troubles between some of the rowdier elements in the town and his bailiff recently; with the tense situation in the whole country at present, it was madness to tempt them to fury over a crime by his chaplain real or supposed.
He’s caught me nicely, he thought, and aloud he said: “So you want me to leave the Shockleys alone?”
Wilson said nothing.
“Control their boy,” Erghum growled. “I’ll have no Lollards here. You understand?”
Wilson bowed deeply, and the bishop waved him away.
Stephen Shockley was delighted when Wilson suggested that Martin go to Calais to conduct some business for him that autumn. It took the young man several months. And during this time, the bishop seemed to have forgotten about the mill. Cecilia Shockley’s assailant was never found.
And in later years, when Edward Wilson looked back on his long life, he never had reason to alter his favourite opinion, but could only laugh when he remarked:
“Most men are fools.”
THE ROSE
1456
There was an air of excitement in the town. Already, many of the narrow gabled houses were sporting decorations of flowers or richly dyed cloths from their overhanging eaves. In the streets, groups of brightly dressed men and women were moving cheerfully about, some to inns, others to the halls of the craftsmen’s guilds from which the sounds of celebration could be heard. It was early evening, but it would still be light for many hours.
For tomorrow was a great day.
It was by coincidence that the four intriguers each left their houses in the different wards of the city exactly as the former Bishop Erghum’s clock in the great belfry in the cathedral close struck six o’clock.
Each of the four men had a particular task to accomplish that evening. Their names were Eustace Godfrey, Michael Shockley, Benedict Mason, and John Wilson.
The excitement in the city of Salisbury had nothing to do with events in the outside world to which, for over half a century, its citizens had consistently paid as little attention as possible.
Yet there had been no lack of drama in England’s recent past. The valiant son of John of Gaunt whose huge Lancastrian estates lay over tracts of Wessex near Sarum, had seized the throne from his unhappy cousin Richard II, and so begun the rule of Lancaster. Next, the usurper’s son Henry V had won most of the kingdom of France at his famous battle of Agincourt; though since then, inspired by that strange sixteen-year-old girl Joan of Arc, the French had been gradually winning their country back again. They were stirring times.
In Sarum however, these great events abroad were only noted because of a brawl between a party of soldiers on their way to France and some of the town youths on Fisherton Bridge. Apart from this, the town paid its modest subsidies and took no further notice.
“There’s no profit in these foreign wars any more,” Shockley told his son. “It’s trade we want.”
Now yet another drama was unfolding. For only the year before the battle of St Albans had begun that high feudal drama, that sequence of battles between the rival branches of the royal family, Lancaster and York, that would later be known as the Wars of the Roses – a misleading title, as it happens, since though the white rose was the emblem of the house of York, the red rose was only adopted by the royal house in later, Tudor times.
Lancaster, in theory, meant the king. In practice, however, it meant his council, which had for thirty years been dominated by powerful magnates: first, until his death, by the French king’s great uncle Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, and now by his strong-willed wife, Margaret of Anjou.
For Henry VI of England was another of those unfortunate weakling kings, like Henry III two centuries before, who were such a feature of medieval history. Like his ancestor, he had a passion for building; but he also had a more serious disability. For unfortunately, when his father after Agincourt had married the daughter of the mad King of France, he had probably introduced the French king’s mental instability into the house of Lancaster. Only two years before, poor Henry VI had remained for months at nearby Clarendon during one of his fits of insanity.
The citizens of Salisbury cared nothing for these royal quarrels either. If royal visitors came, its aldermen donned their robes to receive them. They supplied minstrels to Clarendon. But the battles between the factions of Lancaster and York were fought by retainers or hired mercenaries and the people of the town went steadily about their business, wiser in their humble trading than the noble lords in their dynastic folly.
And what of the great event so eagerly anticipated at the cathedral? For in 1456, after centuries of application, the most recent negotiation, which itself had been started almost fifty years ago, seemed close to success. At last Sarum was to see its great Bishop Osmund canonised. Salisbury would have its own saint. The business might be concluded in months. Even now, the representatives of the dean and chapter were working for the great cause in Rome. No one doubted the value of the would-be saint, and his miracles – meagre though they were – were believed.
But the stately cathedral was sealed off in its private world behind the walls of the close, and the citizens of the town paid little attention to that either. For although the great schism had been settled in the early years of the century and the popes ruled over a united Catholic Church from Rome once more, that rule was passive. No terrible Interdicts fell upon the king or his people; Italy was far away and there were few foreign priests on the island now. The townspeople had their craft guilds and religious fraternities, with their own chapels and chantries – not in the huge and solemn cathedral but in the smaller parish churches of St Thomas, St Martin and St Edmund in the town itself. Religion too was a local affair, from which the outside world of bishops and popes could be excluded.