The Project Gutenberg EBook of By What Authority?, by Robert Hugh Benson
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Title: By What Authority?
Author: Robert Hugh Benson
Release Date: November 2, 2006 [EBook #19697]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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BY
WHAT AUTHORITY?
By
Robert Hugh Benson
_Author of_
"The Light Invisible," "The King's Achievement,"
"A Book of the Love of Jesus," etc.
BENIZIGER BROS.
PRINTERS TO THE HOLY APOSTOLIC SEE,
NEW YORK, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO.
_I wish to acknowledge a great debt of
gratitude to the Reverend Dom Bede
Camm., O.S.B., who kindly read this book
in proof, and made many valuable corrections
and suggestions._
ROBERT HUGH BENSON
_Tremans
Horsted Keynes
October 27, 1904_
PENATIBVS · FOCISQVE · CARIS
NECNON · TRIBVS · CARIORIBVS
APVD · QVAS · SCRIPSI
IN · QVARVM · AVRES · LEGI
A · QVIBVS · ADMONITVS · EMENDAVI
HVNC · LIBRVM
D.
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAP. PAGE
I. The Situation 1
II. The Hall and the House 8
III. London Town 21
IV. Mary Corbet 37
V. A Rider From London 51
VI. Mr. Stewart 64
VII. The Door in the Garden Wall 79
VIII. The Taking of Mr. Stewart 90
IX. Village Justice 99
X. A Confessor 108
XI. Master Calvin 124
XII. A Winding Up 140
PART II
I. Anthony in London 152
II. Some New Lessons 168
III. Hubert's Return 183
IV. A Counter March 196
V. The Coming of the Jesuits 213
VI. Some Contrasts 235
VII. A Message From the City 252
VIII. The Massing-House 267
IX. From Fulham to Greenwich 279
X. The Appeal to Cæsar 296
XI. A Station of the Cross 313
XII. A Strife of Tongues 334
XIII. The Spiritual Exercises 351
XIV. Easter Day 368
PART III
I. The Coming of Spain 384
II. Men of War and Peace 390
III. Home-Coming 404
IV. Stanfield Place 421
V. Joseph Lackington 429
VI. A Departure 439
VII. Northern Religion 453
VIII. In Stanstead Woods 468
IX. The Alarm 484
X. The Passage To the Garden-house 492
XI. The Garden-house 505
XII. The Night Ride 521
XIII. In Prison 526
XIV. An Open Door 541
XV. The Rolling of the Stone 552
BY WHAT AUTHORITY?
CHAPTER I
THE SITUATION
To the casual Londoner who lounged, intolerant and impatient, at the
blacksmith's door while a horse was shod, or a cracked spoke mended,
Great Keynes seemed but a poor backwater of a place, compared with the
rush of the Brighton road eight miles to the east from which he had
turned off, or the whirling cauldron of London City, twenty miles to the
north, towards which he was travelling.
The triangular green, with its stocks and horse-pond, overlooked by the
grey benignant church-tower, seemed a tame exchange for seething
Cheapside and the crowded ways about the Temple or Whitehall; and it was
strange to think that the solemn-faced rustics who stared respectfully at
the gorgeous stranger were of the same human race as the quick-eyed,
voluble townsmen who chattered and laughed and grimaced over the news
that came up daily from the Continent or the North, and was tossed to and
fro, embroidered and discredited alternately, all day long.
And yet the great waves and movements that, rising in the hearts of kings
and politicians, or in the sudden strokes of Divine Providence, swept
over Europe and England, eventually always rippled up into this placid
country village; and the lives of Master Musgrave, who had retired upon
his earnings, and of old Martin, who cobbled the ploughmen's shoes, were
definitely affected and changed by the plans of far-away Scottish
gentlemen, and the hopes and fears of the inhabitants of South Europe.
Through all the earlier part of Elizabeth's reign, the menace of the
Spanish Empire brooded low on the southern horizon, and a responsive
mutter of storm sounded now and again from the north, where Mary Stuart
reigned over men's hearts, if not their homes; and lovers of secular
England shook their heads and were silent as they thought of their tiny
country, so rent with internal strife, and ringed with danger.
For Great Keynes, however, as for most English villages and towns at this
time, secular affairs were so deeply and intricately interwoven with
ecclesiastical matters that none dared decide on the one question without
considering its relation to the other; and ecclesiastical affairs, too,
touched them more personally than any other, since every religious change
scored a record of itself presently within the church that was as
familiar to them as their own cottages.
On none had the religious changes fallen with more severity than on the
Maxwell family that lived in the Hall, at the upper and southern end of
the green. Old Sir Nicholas, though his convictions had survived the
tempest of unrest and trouble that had swept over England, and he had
remained a convinced and a stubborn Catholic, yet his spiritual system
was sore and inflamed within him. To his simple and obstinate soul it was
an irritating puzzle as to how any man could pass from the old to a new
faith, and he had been known to lay his whip across the back of a servant
who had professed a desire to try the new religion.
His wife, a stately lady, a few years younger than himself, did what she
could to keep her lord quiet, and to save him from incurring by his
indiscretion any further penalties beyond the enforced journeys before
the Commission, and the fines inflicted on all who refused to attend
their parish church. So the old man devoted himself to his estates and
the further improvement of the house and gardens, and to the inculcation
of sound religious principles into the minds of his two sons who were
living at home with their parents; and strove to hold his tongue, and his
hand, in public.
The elder of these two, Mr. James as he was commonly called, was rather a
mysterious personage to the village, and to such neighbours as they had.
He was often in town, and when at home, although extremely pleasant and
courteous, never talked about himself and seemed to be only very
moderately interested in the estate and the country-life generally. This,
coupled with the fact that he would presumably succeed his father, gave
rise to a good deal of gossip, and even some suspicion.
His younger brother Hubert was very different; passionately attached to
sport and to outdoor occupations, a fearless rider, and in every way a
kindly, frank lad of about eighteen years old. The fifth member of the
family, Lady Maxwell's sister, Mistress Margaret Torridon, was a
quiet-faced old lady, seldom seen abroad, and round whom, as round her
eldest nephew, hung a certain air of mystery.
The difficulties of this Catholic family were considerable. Sir Nicholas'
religious sympathies were, of course, wholly with the spiritual side of
Spain, and all that that involved, while his intense love of England gave
him a horror of the Southern Empire that the sturdiest patriot might have
envied. And so with his attitude towards Mary Stuart and her French
background. While his whole soul rose in loathing against the crime of
Darnley's murder, to which many of her enemies proclaimed her accessory,
it was kindled at the thought that in her or her child lately crowned as
James VI. of Scotland, lay the hope of a future Catholic succession; and
this religious sympathy was impassioned by the memory of an interview a
few years ago, when he had kissed that gracious white hand, and looked
into those alluring eyes, and, kneeling, stammered out in broken French
his loyalty and his hopes. Whether it was by her devilish craft as her
enemies said, or her serene and limpid innocence as her friends said, or
by a maddening compound of the two, as later students have said--at least
she had made the heart and confidence of old Sir Nicholas her own.
But there were troubles more practical than these mental struggles; it
was a misery, beyond describing, to this old man and his wife to see the
church, where once they had worshipped and received the sacraments, given
over to what was, in their opinion, a novel heresy, and the charge of a
schismatic minister. There, in the Maxwell chapel within, lay the bones
of their Catholic ancestors; and there they had knelt to adore and
receive their Saviour; and now for them all was gone, and the light was
gone out in the temple of the Lord. In the days of the previous Rector
matters were not so desperate; it had been their custom to receive from
his hands at the altar-rail of the Church hosts previously consecrated at
the Rectory; for the incumbent had been an old Marian priest who had not
scrupled so to relieve his Catholic sheep of the burden of recusancy,
while he fed his Protestant charges with bread and wine from the
Communion table. But now all that was past, and the entire family was
compelled year by year to slip off into Hampshire shortly before Easter
for their annual duties, and the parish church that their forefathers had
built, endowed and decorated, knew them no more.
But the present Rector, the Reverend George Dent, was far from a bigot;
and the Papists were more fortunate than perhaps, in their bitterness,
they recognised; for the minister was one of the rising Anglican school,
then strange and unfamiliar, but which has now established itself as the
main representative section of the Church of England. He welcomed the
effect but not the rise of the Reformation, and rejoiced that the
incrustations of error had been removed from the lantern of the faith.
But he no less sincerely deplored the fanaticism of the Puritan and
Genevan faction. He exulted to see England with a church truly her own at
last, adapted to her character, and freed from the avarice and tyranny of
a foreign despot who had assumed prerogatives to which he had no right.
But he reverenced the Episcopate, he wore the prescribed dress, he used
the thick singing-cakes for the Communion, and he longed for the time
when nation and Church should again be one; when the nation should
worship through a Church of her own shaping, and the Church share the
glory and influence of her lusty partner and patron.
But Mrs. Dent had little sympathy with her husband's views; she had
assimilated the fiery doctrines of the Genevan refugees, and to her mind
her husband was balancing himself to the loss of all dignity and
consistency in an untenable position between the Popish priesthood on the
one side and the Gospel ministry on the other. It was an unbearable
thought to her that through her husband's weak disposition and principles
his chief parishioners should continue to live within a stone's throw of
the Rectory in an assured position of honour, and in personal
friendliness to a minister whose ecclesiastical status and claims they
disregarded. The Rector's position then was difficult and trying, no less
in his own house than elsewhere.
The third main family in the village was that of the Norrises, who lived
in the Dower House, that stood in its own grounds and gardens a few
hundred yards to the north-west of the village green. The house had
originally been part of the Hall estate; but it had been sold some fifty
years before. The present owner, Mr. Henry Norris, a widower, lived there
with his two children, Isabel and Anthony, and did his best to bring them
up in his own religious principles. He was a devout and cultivated
Puritan, who had been affected by the New Learning in his youth, and had
conformed joyfully to the religious changes that took place in Edward's
reign. He had suffered both anxiety and hardships in Mary's reign, when
he had travelled abroad in the Protestant countries, and made the
acquaintance of many of the foreign reformers--Beza, Calvin, and even the
great Melancthon himself. It was at this time, too, that he had lost his
wife. It had been a great joy to him to hear of the accession of
Elizabeth, and the re-establishment of a religion that was sincerely his
own; and he had returned immediately to England with his two little
children, and settled down once more at the Dower House. Here his whole
time that he could spare from his children was divided between prayer and
the writing of a book on the Eucharist; and as his children grew up he
more and more retired into himself and silence and communing with God,
and devoted himself to his book. It was beginning to be a great happiness
to him to find that his daughter Isabel, now about seventeen years old,
was growing up into active sympathy with his principles, and that the
passion of her soul, as of his, was a tender deep-lying faith towards
God, which could exist independently of outward symbols and ceremonies.
But unlike others of his school he was happy too to notice and encourage
friendly relations between Lady Maxwell and his daughter, since he
recognised the sincere and loving spirit of the old lady beneath her
superstitions, and knew very well that her friendship would do for the
girl what his own love could not.
The other passion of Isabel's life at present lay in her brother Anthony,
who was about three years younger than herself, and who was just now more
interested in his falcons and pony than in all the religious systems and
human relationships in the world, except perhaps in his friendship for
Hubert, who besides being three or four years older than himself, cared
for the same things.
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