London - Edward Rutherfurd [359]
It was a sensation. Sir Jacob Ducket grimly took his family to St Paul’s churchyard to witness some of the executions; little Julius was too young to go, but by the age of four, when the local children built a great bonfire opposite Mary-le-Bow and commemorated the day by burning an effigy of Guy Fawkes, he knew the chant:
Remember, remember, the Fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot . . .
He knew what it meant, too, since his father had firmly instructed him, with his third, never-to-be-forgotten lesson: “No popery, Julius. The papists are the enemy within.”
1611
It was impossible not to love Martha Carpenter. No one who knew her could imagine her ever acting with malice. Nor indeed could she. Always gentle, always meek, she had never in her twenty-seven years asked anything for herself. When told she must remain at home to look after her grandmother, she undertook it as a duty of love. When Cuthbert left and went to build the Globe, though her grandmother cursed him, she had continued to see him and to pray for his soul. Yet now, as she held out the book to her brother and looked up with her round face and her sweet smile, the blood drained from his face.
“Swear,” she said.
Martha shared with many Puritans the quality of hope. Hope was an important virtue, which was about to change the world.
For the Reformation had come not only to destroy. The true doctrine of the Protestants, as they saw it, was one of love, and their best preachers conveyed a message of extraordinary joy.
There were many such men in London. Her favourite as a child had been a Scotsman, a quiet old man with crinkled white hair and the clearest blue eyes she had ever seen. “It is simple,’ he would tell her. “Strip away the pomp, worldliness and superstition of the Romish Church and what remains? The Truth. For we have the Word of God in the scriptures, the very utterances of Our Lord in the Gospels.” When she read the Bible, she realized, God was speaking to her directly.
Several of their neighbours in the little parish of St Lawrence Silversleeves were fellow Puritans. When they met to hear a sermon, or to pray together in each others’ houses, they did so in a spirit of charity. Admonition was rare. In Presbyterian Scotland and the Calvinist regions of Europe every parish was organized like this. There were no priests, for each congregation elected its own elders to lead it. Nor were there bishops. The elders in turn elected regional committees to co-ordinate their activities. And it was these developments abroad which had sown the seed of the greatest hope of all: that the kingdom of God might come on Earth.
Of course, the true and perfect kingdom was not due until the world’s last days. This was known from the biblical Book of Revelation. But one could at least approach that state. Wasn’t it the plain duty of every freeborn Puritan to march with his brethren towards the light and build God’s kingdom – the shining city on a hill – here and now? It was, after all, no more than the medieval idea of a commune. But this time a commune for God.
So it was that little Martha, growing up amongst such people, came to possess a dream that would be the guiding vision of her life. When she crossed the river and looked across to London’s crowded houses and the dark, Gothic mass of old St Paul’s, in her mind’s eye she saw God’s kingdom, waiting to rise. She saw it so clearly: a shining city on a hill.
She also possessed the virtue of patience. And patience was needed. When King James had come to England from Presbyterian Scotland, the Puritans had hoped: “Surely he will bring the true faith with him.” But James had not enjoyed being subject to the Scottish elders, and he realized that the authority of the monarchy depended upon its supremacy over the English Church. The Church of England, with its reformed Catholic faith, its bishops, ceremonies and all the rest, must remain. As King James remarked to his English councillors: “No bishop, no king.”
So the Bishop of London still