AT DARTINGTON once more for the writers’ favourite literature festival,
“Ways with Words”. It is where size matters, not our size as authors, but the
amplitude of the estate, with its towering trees, world of lawns, and hints of
Dartmoor itself, the order it imposes on our bookish heads and lavish borders.
“What a treat!” we tell each other, as we watch novelists, journalists,
poets, and scribblers generally being debouched from Totnes station. Our works
sizzle under awnings, and those who have paid good money to listen to us move
through the great gardens like figures in an Edwardian painting, slowly,
hushed, relieved of all care while the sun burns down. The heat has caused the
sky to go beyond its July blue into a wavering pink, and straw hats appear.
I have been partnered with the Irish novelist Ronan Bennett. Unbeknown to
each other, we have been stirring the religious embers of the 17th century,
poking into them, making them flare up and cast a little light on what we may,
or may not, believe today. There are history and theology proper, and there are
imaginative forays into them, such as ours.
Ronan looks Jesuitical, but is decidedly not. What do I look like? It is not
for me to say. But here we are on the dais in the Great Hall of Richard Holand,
half-brother to Richard II, to answer for our audacity. Ronan’s probe into the
past is fearful in the extreme, and all the comforts of Dartington fled as I
read his story about the godly, as they were called, goings-on in a little
Yorkshire borough in the 1630s.
Havoc in its Third Year is a novel about recusancy, about how a Roman
Catholic family coped with “godliness”, about humanity and inhumanity, about
mercy giving way to justice. There was a hive of recusants buzzing all around
my house at that time, paying their non-attendance fines, harbouring priests
and experiencing a fear that was no more than a word to me until Ronan aroused,
in his novel, the 1630s knock on the door.
He stands at the microphone and reads the book in his soft Ulster voice, and
history loses its charm, as it has to do when such searchers dig into its
ashes. I cannot remember being so frightened by an episode in Christian
history, and, God knows, there have been frights enough. When I walk past the
little church at Withermarsh Green, our recusancy centre, where — it says — the
mass has been celebrated without interruption from the earliest times to our
own, I will know how those Stour Valley Catholics shook in their muddy shoes.
My embers are of the Arminian attempt to create a spiritual compromise
between the godly and what a later hymn-writer would call “the beauty of
holiness”. For a few years, it looked as though the examples set by Lancelot
Andrewes, officious Laud, grim Wren, Little Gidding, and Bemerton might heal
the breach, might patch up the ruins, might set up a strictly loving Christ in
his inhumane temples; but then came the Civil War.
The anti-hero of my novel The Assassin, a young army officer torn between
science and faith, thought that the poison could be cured at the prick of a
knife that he had bought for tenpence in a shop on Tower Hill — that it could
be let out of our society and its rulers. His name was Lieutenant John Felton,
and he lived just up the road from me when I was a boy, only several centuries
earlier. I waved to him from my bike, this bookish soldier whom they dubbed a
“malcontent”.
But who can be content with “religion” mal-used? Felton’s friend, converted
by Galileo, not our Lord, pointed to the stars, looked up to the immensity of
creation. What are we to make of our earth and its minute role in the universe?
Why can religious people be so cruel? Why is my green making all that fuss?