Some of this weight was lifted within a year, fortunately, by a sudden increase in the popularity of theology as a subject;
for toward the end of 1254 there arrived at Oxford the first copy of the
Introduction to the Eternal Gospel
of the Franciscan Gerard of San Borgo. Its reputation had preceded it by months, for in fact the book was creating a furor throughout Christendom – a fact Roger could well understand after reading it himself.
The Eternal Gospel of the title was the work of one Joachim of Flora, a Calabrian visionary who bad predicted that an Age
of the Holy Spirit would begin in 1260, ushered in by a new Order of monks headed by Merlin, and heralded by the dissolution
of all disciplinary institutions. It was Gerard’s contention that the Franciscans might become this new Order, provided that
they return to the rule of absolute poverty laid down by their founder.
Roger and Bungay discussed the work through many a night, as did half of Oxford. To Roger, at least, there seemed to be reason
and justice in much of Gerard’s contentions.
‘Including the prophecies, Roger?’
‘They will have to wait upon events, of course. Yet the imminent coming of the Antichrist hath also often been prophesied;
it seemeth me only reasonable that some great spiritual leader might arise at the same time to combat him. But thou kenst
well that it is not the prophecies that are creating all this dissension, but the doctrine of renunciation of worldly possessions.’
‘It hath put weapons into the hands of our enemies, that much is evident,’ Bungay said thoughtfully. ‘William of St. Amour
in particular, an implacable man. He holds it as evidence against us from our own mouths.’
‘He will use it eke against the Dominicans if he can,’ Roger predicted. ‘Yet still I hold that Gerard’s argument hath reason
behind it. Consider, I urge thee, how St. Francis himself may look from Heaven upon the vast holdings of
property we have accumulated in his name. Indeed; we should thank God that he was excepting Christ the mildest of men, or
else we might find ourselves all barefoot in the road at this very moment.’
‘Many are saying what you say, Roger, yet withal I’d not proclaim it quite so loud. Joachimism is perilous close to becoming
proclaimed a heresy; Innocent bath already called a special Council in Anagni to condemn the book – Gerard’s, I mean, not
the Eternal Gospel itself.’
‘And Gerard?’ Roger said.
‘Is in the hands of the Inquisition.’
That ended the conversation for that evening. Yet for some months it appeared that Bungay’s forebodings had not been fated
to be borne out, for in Anagni matters had gone somewhat askew. The proximate cause, apparently, had been that same William
of St. Amour, who had rushed to Rome to denounce the orders root and branch, and found a sympathetic ear – or a malleable
mind – in Innocent IV. The result, whatever the cause, was a bull,
Etsi animarum
, seriously curtailing the privileges of the orders; not a victory for the Joachimites, but not a rebuff either.
The next act of Innocent IV was to die, to be succeeded by Alexander IV, who promptly repudiated
Etsi animarum
, fanning the flames higher once more. William of. St. Amour, frustrated and furious, left Rome as hurriedly as he had entered
it – he was a man who did everything in great haste, including thinking – and dispatched over Europe a polemic,
De periculis novissimorum temporum
, in which the orders were depicted as themselves inviting the advent of Antichrist. Gerard of San Borgo remained in his dungeon,
the first to reap his own whirlwind.
(Milord Modena: I send herewith for your kind attention the book
De erroribus medicorum
which I promised you in Tivoli. Ad majorem gloria Dei, R. Bacon.)
There was a diversion: the killing in Lincoln of a boy named Hugh, widely described as a ritual murder by Jews – story which
grew as it travelled until the poets took it up, after which all possibility of learning the truth disappeared
forever. There were miracles, and proposals of canonization, and Hugh was buried next to Grosseteste in the hope of speeding
the lad’s Elevation; but the campaign to canonize the Capito had itself bogged down. In the meantime, Hugh’s enthusiasts pressed
his cause with Heaven by putting to the torch such houses in various Jeweryes as seemed worth looting.
The Joachimite furor went on, until it had forced out of office the very general of the Franciscans himself, John of Parma,
for pronounced Joachimite leanings. His successor was Bonaventura, a dour and energetic theologian whose closest friend was
the Dominican Albertus Magnus: a friendship bodying forth the inexorable enmity felt by both men toward anything which stirred
up trouble between the orders, in especial Joachimism with its grandiose claims for the Franciscans as the coming Order of
Merlin.
‘I told thee, Roger, politics is no whit less complicated here than at the Court!’
‘Brother, I believed thee then.’
But Roger had almost given up following these coils; two years of them had exhausted his attention for such theological hair-splitting;
though he was still troubled by a suspicion that Gerard had been right, and that the mounting troubles between the orders
might well presage the coming of the Antichrist, voicing this opinion won him nothing but dark intimations that he must be
a heretic and a disciple of the Antichrist himself. Bungay had called that tune rightly enough. Besides, the
Metaphysica
was still far from finished, and now there was a-bowing a work on weights and measures, the
Reprobationes.
Politicking could go on without him.
‘An alms, an alms for John! An alms for John, who hath the very begging bowl of Belisarius! Only a penny to touch the bowl
of Belisarius!’
‘Hark. What’s that? Listen!’
‘To what? What is it, Roger?’
‘Below – that cry in the street. Listen.’
‘An alms for John! Only a penny! An alms, an alms for John.…
‘… I hear nothing, Roger. Art well?’
Politicking went on without him, and reached to him. In 1256 Bonaventura voided the appointment of Thomas Docking, despite
his new degree, and named a new lector to the Franciscans at Oxford, and regent master to boot. The successor to Adam Marsh’s
chair, and Grosseteste’s before him, was Richard Rufus of Cornwall.
One month later, Bonaventura interdicted Roger’s lectures at Oxford for suspected irregularities, namely, Joachimism and magic,
and recalled him to Paris.
Cornwall had paid his debt, however belatedly.
Parting once more from Oxford, and now also from Bungay, was bitter; but the sharpest pang, which did not strike until Roger
was better than half across the Dover Strait, was also the least expected: to realize only now that in all this time, he had
never once visited Ilchester, nor even thought to do so.
The cold winds blew him on regardless.
On the road to London yet another time, yet another wearisome time, Adam Marsh took thought most conscientiously of those
high matters which awaited him at the end; but only, as it were, within his intellectual soul, that raven of Elias. If long
practice in manœuvres he abhorred had given him nothing else, it had trained him to reflect simultaneously upon two wholly
different sets of circumstances, with the set he loved less relegated to the outermost regions of his mind, where it ticked
away like a water-clock without the necessity of paying it much heed:
will, guilt, will, guilt.…
Today, in his sensitive soul, that ticking went endlessly toward reminding him that he was fifty-seven years old. No! Yet
it was most certainly correct; his age was always one year less than the last two digits of the year; and this was certainly
1258, and the dregs of it at that. It had been almost two years since Roger Bacon had ruined himself at Oxford with his arrogance,
as Adam long ago at Kirkby-Maxloe had greatly feared that he would, and been recalled to Paris … and it had been almost ten
years, nay eleven, since he had seen Eleanor of Leicester.
For that punishment – for he could not but regard it as such – high matters were at least in part responsible, and could not
be kept as far from his heart as his will would bid them stay. It had been eleven years ago that Henry, no doubt with a view
to removing from England a continuing wellspring of defiance, had named Simon de Montfort his
locum-tenens
or Seneschal in Gascony, and had kept him there for six years; would indeed have kept him there forever had it not been for
the stupid zeal of Henry’s friends, who stirred the Gascons to so many complaints of cruelty and injustice – plausible enough,
if one recalled the Albigensians – that the earl was provoked to come home and
demand trial. He had been acquitted, but was still affronted and had demanded reparations, thus leading to still another quarrel
with his liege which could surely have been avoided had Simon’s enemies pimply left well enough alone.
Henry knew this; last year he had sent Simon abroad again as one of his ambassadors to France. Beyond doubt there had been
other reasons as well, for the reparations had not been the only cause of the broil in 1255. That had also been the year when
the King, at the behest of the Pope, had allowed his second son Edmund of Lancaster to claim the Crown of Sicily, with the
clear expectation that the realm was to pay for a war of succession on Edmund’s behalf over that much-disputed Kingdom; and
Simon was scarce in France again before Henry’s brother Richard earl of Cornwall – that same earl to whom the King had earlier
mortgaged sole right to extort money from the Jews – sued for the Imperial throne, his election bribery again to be paid from
English taxes.
Remote, remote – yet painfully close to the heart. Surely it was but natural in the earl of Leicester to take his lady wife
with him to his estates in Gascony, no man could dispute that. He was not even depriving her of a confessor, for she still
had Adam’s brother Robert, now Dean of Lincoln and a strong clerical partisan of Simon’s cause against the King. Yet that
argument cut two ways: for by the same reasoning could it be called natural to leave her there for three years more, while
he fought at home with the King? Cedes, for all of England was a-shimmer with rebellion, and a man with a Gascon sanctuary
for his lady could not but count himself fortunate. The fact that, once more back in England, he was still without Eleanor
was amenable to the same explanation.
There was without doubt a curse upon the land, and that not only the burden of Henry’s and Rome’s rapacious greed; for the
harvests this year had been the worst in memory, and famine was everywhere. Thousands had starved to death in London alone.
No one who loved her could wish Eleanor anywhere but where she was.
Yet the thorns of guilt steadily poisoned Adam’s blood, and in his soul there whispered constantly another explanation. That
voiceless whisper was abetted by additional circumstances: for though the insurgent barons claimed St. Robert of Lincoln as
their chiefest patron (notwithstanding that the Capito had yet to be canonized), Simon himself no longer spoke more than perfunctorily
to Grosseteste’s only spiritual heir, regardless of opportunity.
Did the earl know? But what was there to know? There had been no sin committed, nay nor ever would be. But to this objection
there was an inexorable reply in Scripture. Eleanor was surely guiltless; but this could not be said of Adam, in his heart
nor in Heaven.
He had been tempted eke to think that Heaven had a little conspired to help him in these outward events, keeping Eleanor in
Gascony the while his old age crept toward him. Too, his services as mediator were still in demand at court, maugre Simon’s
absences and his coldness, for the primate, Boniface of Savoy, made no secret of his admiration for Adam as an expert lawyer
and theologian; and the primate was also a member of Simon’s party. Two years ago Boniface had even tried to win Adam the
see of Ely, an attempt abetted by the King, who perhaps saw in this a way to placate two clerical opponents at once. Doubtless
Henry was unaware of the gulf that Adam sensed between himself and Simon; yet even if he had, Henry knew also that Adam confessed
his Queen. The see, however, was refused, for the Lateran still remembered Grosseteste with little love, and would not advance
his most favoured familiar even at the petition of Rome’s most obedient secular prince.
Heaven’s help or no, Adam’s essay to pluck out his offending eye also had failed.
Simon’s return had been stormy beyond all imagining, and though the King had prepared for it, he had not thought far enough
ahead. At the April parliament in the Great Hall at Westminster, the barons, at Simon’s advice, had arrived in complete armour.
They stood as silent as statues while the King’s half-brother, William de Valence,
denounced the earls of Gloucester and Leicester as the sources of every evil under which England was suffering. Even de Valence’s
rather shaky denunciation of Simon as ‘an old traitor and a liar’ went by in a silence so complete that Adam had been able
to hear clearly the scratch and sputter of old Matthew Paris’ goose-quill.
Evidently de Valence had misinterpreted that silence, for his next words to fall upon Adam’s incredulous ears had been a demand
for more money. After a moment, Simon had wordlessly deferred to Gloucester.
‘Nay,’ earl Bigod said. ‘More money paid to the Pope, on behalf of the King’s son and his Sicilian Crown? Not a mark!’
‘It lieth nat with thee to refuse us, my lord Gloucester. An ye be mutinous, we shall send thee reapers and reap thy fields
for thee.’
‘And I will send ye back the heads of your reapers,’ Bigod said evenly.
The King had entered as he was speaking, and for the first time there was movement: there swept through the statues a threatening
clatter of swords. Whatever Henry had anticipated, it had not been this, but he was far quicker to see what was under his
nose than his half-brother had been. He said at last: