Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [439]
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