By What Authority? by Robert Hugh Benson (large ebook reader txt) 📖

in '80 for his reinstatement. Anthony went down to the old palace once or twice with him; and was brought closer to him in many ways; and his affection and tenderness towards his master continually increased. Grindal was a pathetic figure at this time, with few friends, in poor health, out of favour with the Queen, who had disregarded his existence; and now his afflictions were rendered more heavy than ever by the blindness that was creeping over him. The Archbishop, too, in his loneliness and sorrow, was drawn closer to his young officer than ever before; and gradually got to rely upon him in many little ways. He would often walk with Anthony in the gardens at Lambeth, leaning upon his arm, talking to him of his beloved flowers and herbs which he was now almost too blind to see; telling him queer facts about the properties of plants; and even attempting to teach him a little irrelevant botany now and then.

They were walking up and down together, soon after Campion's arrest, one August morning before prayers in a little walled garden on the river that Grindal had laid out with great care in earlier years.

"Ah," said the old man, "I am too blind to see my flowers now, Mr. Norris; but I love them none the less; and I know their places. Now there," he went on, pointing with his stick, "there I think grows my mastick or marum; perhaps I smell it, however. What is that flower like, Mr. Norris?"

Anthony looked at it, and described its little white flower and its leaves.

"That is it," said the Archbishop, "I thought my memory served me. It is a kind of marjoram, and it has many virtues, against cramps, convulsions and venomous bites--so Galen tells us." Then he went on to talk of the simple old plants that he loved best; of the two kinds of basil that he always had in his garden; and how good it was mixed in sack against the headache; and the male penny-royal, and how well it had served him once when he had great internal trouble.

"Mr. Gerrard was here a week or two ago, Mr. Norris, when you were down at Croydon for me. He is my Lord Burghley's man; he oversees his gardens at Wimbledon House, and in the country. He was telling me of a rascal he had seen at a fair, who burned henbane and made folks with the toothache breathe in the fumes; and then feigned to draw a worm forth from the aching tooth; but it was no worm at all, but a lute string that he held ready in his hand. There are sad rascals abroad, Mr. Norris."

The old man waxed eloquent when they came to the iris bed.

"Ah! Mr. Norris, the flowers-de-luce are over by now, I fear; but what wonderful creatures of God they are, with their great handsome heads and their cool flags. I love to hear a bed of them rustle all together and shake their spears and nod their banners like an army in array. And then they are not only for show. Apuleius says that they are good against the gout. I asked Mr. Gerrard whether my lord had tried them; but he said no, he would not."

At the violet bed he was yet more emphatic.

"I think, Mr. Norris, I love these the best of all. They are lowly creatures; but how sweet! and like other lowly creatures exalted by their Maker to do great things as his handmaidens. The leaves are good against inflammations, and the flowers against ague and hoarseness as well. And then there is oil-of-violets, as you know; and violet-syrup and sugar-violet; then they are good for blisters; garlands of them were an ancient cure for the headache, as I think Dioscorides tells us. And they are the best of all cures for some children's ailments."

And so they walked up and down together; the Archbishop talking quietly on and on; and helping quite unknown to himself by his tender irrelevant old man's talk to soothe the fever of unrest and anxiety that was beginning to torment Anthony so much now. His conversation, like the very flowers he loved to speak of, was "good against inflammations."

Anthony came to him one morning, thinking to please him, and brought him a root that he had bought from a travelling pedlar just outside the gateway.

"This is a mandrake root, your Grace; I heard you speak of it the other day."

The Archbishop took it, smiling, felt it carefully, peered at it a minute or two. "No, my son," he said, "I fear you have met a knave. This is briony-root carved like a mandrake into the shape of a man's legs. It is worthless, I fear; but I thank you for the kind thought, Mr. Norris," and he gave the root back to him. "And the stories we hear of the mandrake, I fear, are fables, too. Some say that they only grow beneath gallows from that which falls there; that the male grows from the corruption of a man's body; and the female from that of a woman's; but that is surely a lie, and a foul one, too. And then folks say that to draw it up means death; and that the mandrake screams terribly as it comes up; and so they bid us tie a dog to it, and then drive the dog from it so as to draw it up so. I asked Mr. Baker, the chirurgeon in the household of my Lord Oxford, the other day, about that; and he said that such tales be but doltish dreams and old wives' fables. But the true mandrake is a clean and wholesome plant. The true ointment Populeon should have the juice of the leaves in it; and the root boiled and strained causes drowsiness. It hath a predominate cold faculty, Galen saith; but its true home is not in England at all. It comes from Mount Garganus in Apulia."

It was pathetic, Anthony thought sometimes, that this old prelate should be living so far from the movements of the time, owing to no fault of his own. During these months the great tragedy of Campion's passion was proceeding a couple of miles away; but the Archbishop thought less of it than of the death of an old tree. The only thing from the outside world that seemed to ruffle him was the behaviour of the Puritans. Anthony was passing through "le velvet-room" one afternoon when he heard voices in the Presence Chamber beyond; and almost immediately heard the Archbishop, who had recognised his step, call his name. He went in and found him with a stranger in a dark sober dress.

"Take this gentleman to Mr. Scot," he said, "and ask him to give him some refreshment; for that he must be gone directly."

When Anthony had taken the gentleman to the steward, he returned to the Archbishop for any further instructions about him.

"No, Mr. Norris, my business is done with him. He comes from my lord of Norwich, and must be returning this evening. If you are not occupied, Mr. Norris, will you give me your arm into the garden?"

They went out by the vestry-door into the little cloisters, and skirting the end of the creek that ran up by Chichele's water-tower began to pace up and down the part of the garden that looked over the river.

"My lord has sent to know if I know aught of one Robert Browne, with whom he is having trouble. This Mr. Browne has lately come from Cambridge, and so my lord thought I might know something of him; but I do not. This gentleman has been saying some wild and foolish things, I fear; and desires that every church should be free of all others; and should appoint its own minister, and rule its own affairs without interference, and that prophesyings should be without restraint. Now, you know, Mr. Norris, I have always tried to serve that party, and support them in their gospel religion; but this goes too far. Where were any governance at all, if all this were to come about? where were the Rule of Faith? the power of discipline? Nay, where were the unity for which our Saviour prayed? It liketh me not. Good Dr. Freake, as his messenger tells me, feels as I do about this; and desires to restrain Mr. Browne, but he is so hot he will not be restrained; and besides, he is some kin to my Lord Burghley, so I fear his mouth will be hard to stop."

Anthony could not help thinking of Mr. Buxton's prediction that the Church of England had so repudiated authority, that in turn her own would one day be repudiated.

"A Papist prisoner, your Grace," he said, "said to me the other day that this would be sure to come: that the whole principle of Church authority had been destroyed in England; and that the Church of England would more and more be deserted by her children; for that there was no necessary centre of unity left, now that Peter was denied."

"It is what a Papist is bound to say," replied the Archbishop; "but it is easy to prophesy, when fulfilment may be far away. Indeed, I think we shall have trouble with some of these zealous men; and the Queen's Grace was surely right in desiring some restraint to be put upon the Exercises. But it is mere angry raving to say that the Church of England will lose the allegiance of her children."

Anthony could not feel convinced that events bore out the Archbishop's assertion. Everywhere the Puritans were becoming more outrageously disloyal. There were everywhere signs of disaffection and revolt against the authorities of the Establishment, even on the part of the most sincere and earnest men, many of whom were looking forward to the day when the last rags of popery should be cast away, and formal Presbyterianism inaugurated in the Church of England. Episcopal Ordination was more and more being regarded as a merely civil requirement, but conveying no ministerial commission; recognition by the congregation with the laying on of the hands of the presbyterate was the only ordination they allowed as apostolic.

Anthony said a word to the Archbishop about this.

"You must not be too strict," said the old man. "Both views can be supported by the Scriptures; and although the Church of England at present recognises only Episcopal Ordination within her own borders, she does not dare to deny, as the Papists fondly do, that other rites may not be as efficacious as her own. That, surely, Master Norris, is in accordance with the mind of Christ that hath the spirit of liberty."

Much as Anthony loved the old man and his gentle charity, this doctrinal position as stated by the chief pastor of the Church of England scarcely served to establish his troubled allegiance.

During these autumn months, too, both between and after the disputations in the Tower, the image of Campion had been much in his thoughts. Everywhere, except among the irreconcilables, the Jesuit was being well spoken of: his eloquence, his humour, and his apparent sincerity were being greatly commented on in London and elsewhere. Anthony, as has been seen, was being deeply affected on both sides of his nature; the shrewd wit of the other was in conflict with his own intellectual convictions, and this magnetic personality was laying siege to his heart. And now the last scene of the tragedy, more affecting than all, was close at hand.

Anthony was present first at the trial in Westminster Hall, which took place during November, and was more