The venerable abbot thus journeyed home in the company of Pollard. It was this Pollard who had been Crumwell’s agent in sending him to the Tower, who had weeks ago turned the monks out of the monastery and had begun the wrecking of Glastonbury Abbey, a house, which on his first arrival there he had described to his employer as “great, goodly and so princely that we have not seen the like;” and in another letter he repeats the same assurance, adding that “it is a house meet for the kings majesty, and for no one else.”
Measures had already been taken to have all secure at Wells, although Abbot Whiting had evidently been left in ignorance of the fact that there was now no Glastonbury Abbey for him to return to. Crumwells captive reached Wells on Friday, November 14, and once safely brought back into his own country there was neither delay nor dissembling. The plan devised was rushed through without giving a soul among the unhappy actors in the scene time to reflect upon what they were doing – time to recover their better selves – time to avert the guilt which in some measure must fall upon them. In accordance with the wicked policy so often pursued in Tudor times, a jury – the people themselves – were made active agents in accomplishing the royal vengeance, the execution of which had been already irrevocably settled in London. John, Lord Russell, had for some time past been superintending the necessary arrangements in the. county of Somerset itself. His business had been to get together a jury which he could trust to do, or perhaps in this case tacitly countenance, the king’s will, and it was one part of his care, when all was over, to send to Crumwell their names with a view, doubtless, of securing their due . reward. Unfortunately, although Russell’s letter is preserved the list enclosed has perished. But a letter from Pollard to Crumwell gives the names of some who distinguished themselves by their zeal, and who had been “very diligent to serve the king at this time.” Among these first of all is “my brother Paulet,” for whom is bespoken “the surveyorship of Glaston,” with the promise to Crumwell that “his lordship’s goodness,” showed in this matter, Paulet when he takes the prize “shall recompense to his little power.” Other diligent persons whom Pollard specially names are John Sydenham and Thomas Horner, and finally Nicholas Fitzjames, the same who, but a year or two before, had written to Crumwell in Abbot Whiting’s behalf.
As is well known from the history of the Pilgrimage of Grace, jury-making had at this time been raised to an art, – an art so exquisitely refined that it aimed at making friends, kins-folk, even brothers the accomplices by word of mouth in the legal or illegal murders which disgraced this reign. The minds of the men selected in this case to register the decrees of the kingly omnipotence, escape our means of inquiry, but Lord Russell has recorded “that they formed as worshipful a jury as were found here these many years,” and of this fact he “ensured” his “good lord” Crumwell.
Russell’s care, moreover, had been diligently exercised, not merely in assembling the jury, but in getting together an audience for the occasion. His efforts were successful, for he gathered at Wells such a concourse of people, that he was able to declare “there was never seen in these parts so great appearance as were here at this present time.” He adds the assurance so tediously common in documents of that pre-eminently courtly age, that none had ever been seen “better willing to serve the king.”
This was the scene which met Abbot Whiting’s eyes in Pollard’s company as he entered the city of Wells, where so often before he had been received as a venerated and honoured guest. Unfortunately we have no direct and continuous narrative of all that took place. If it was dangerous to speak it was still more dangerous to write in those days, except of course in one sense, – that which was pleasing to the court. Fortunately two letters survive, written by the chief managers of the business, John, Lord Russell, and Richard Pollard, one of the “counsel” who had been engaged in the Tower with Crumwell, for the careful drawing of the indictment against the abbot. Both were written on the Sunday, the day following the execution. An earlier letter by Pollard, written on the day itself and evidently giving more details, is wanting in the vast mass of Crumwell’s papers. This, the earliest news of the accomplishment of the king’s will, was not improbably taken by the ready minister to the king himself and left with his majesty. Fragmentary though the records that exist are, and only giving here a hint, there a mere outline of what took place, without order and without sequence, they in this form have a freshness and truthfulness which still enable us to realise what actually took place.
On the abbot’s arrival in the city of Wells, the business was begun without waiting to give the condemned man time for rest or for thought. Pollard was in charge of the indictment, over which Crumwell had spent his day, in the drafting of which so many counsel learned in the law had exercised their ingenuity, and which was the outcome of the secret examinations conducted during the abbot’s two months’ imprisonment in the Tower. But it was by no means intended that a drop of bitterness in the cup should be spared him; every successive stage of indignity was to be offered the venerable man till his last breath and then to his lifeless body. He was to be struck in the house of his friends, and by his own dependents. From out the crowd there came forward new accusers, “his tenants and others,” putting up “many accusations for wrongs and injuries he had done them;” not of course that it was in the least intended that there should be time for enquiry into their truth; the mere accusations were enough, and they were part of the drama that had been elaborated with such care.
But this was not the only business of the day. The venerable man was to be associated and numbered with a rabble of common felons, and to stand in the same rank with them. Together with the abbot of the great monastery of Glastonbury there were a number of people of the lowest class – how many we know not – who were accused of “rape and burglary.” “They were all condemned,” says Russell, and four of them “the next day, if not the same day, put to execution at the place of the act done, which is called the Mere, and there adjudged to hang still in chains to the example of others.”
Of any verdict or of any condemnation of the abbot and of his two monks nothing is said by Russell or Pollard, but they proceed at once to the execution.
It is not impossible, seeing the rapid way in which the whole business was carried through, that had the scene of the so-called trial been Glastonbury in place of Wells, the abbot would have met his fate and gained his crown that very day. But the king and his faithful minister, Crumwell, had devised in the town of Glastonbury a scene which was to be more impressive than that which had taken place in the neighbouring city, more calculated to strike terror into the hearts of the old man’s friends and followers.
After being pestered by Pollard with “divers articles and interrogatories,” the result of which was that he would accuse no man but himself, nor “confess no more gold nor silver, nor anything more than he did before you [Crumwell] in the Tower,” the next morning, Saturday, November 15, the venerable abbot with his two monks, John Thorne and Roger James, were delivered over to the servants of Pollard for the performance of what more had to be done. Under this escort they were carried from Wells to Glastonbury. Arrived at the entrance of the town the abbot was made to dismount. And now all the brutal indignities and cruel sufferings attending the death of a traitor condemned for treason were inflicted upon him. And in truth, like many a true and noble Englishman of that day, Richard Whiting was, in the sense of Crumwell and Henry, a traitor to his king. The case from their point of view is well expressed by one of the truculent preachers patronised by the sovereign as his most fitting apologists.
“For had not Richard Whiting, that was Abbot of Glastonbury, trow ye, great cause, all things considered, to play so traitorous a part as he hath played, whom the king’s highness made of a vile, beggarly, monkish merchant, governor and ruler of seven thousand marks by the year? Trow ye this was not a good pot of wine? Was not this a fair almose at one man’s door? Such a gift had been worth grammercy to many a man. But Richard Whiting having always a more desirous eye to treason than to truth, careless, laid apart both God’s goodness and the king’s, and stuck hard by the Bishop of Rome and the Abbot of Reading in the quarrel of the Romish Church. Alas! what a stony heart had (Richard) Whiting, to be so unkind to so loving and beneficent a prince, and so false a traitor to Henry VIII, king of his native country, and so true, I say, to that cormorant of Rome.”
In this new meaning of treason. Abbot Whiting was adjudged the traitor’s death. At the outskirts of his own town his venerable limbs were extended on a hurdle, to which a horse was attached. In this way he was dragged on that bleak November morning along the rough hard ground through the streets of Glastonbury, of which he and his predecessors had so long been the loved and honoured lords and masters. It was thus among his own people that, now at the age of well nigh fourscore years, Abbot Whiting made his last pilgrimage through England’s “Roma Secunda.” As a traitor for conscience sake he was drawn past the glorious monastery, now desolate and deserted, past the great church, that home of the saints and whilom sanctuary of this country’s greatness, now devastated and desecrated, its relics of God’s holy ones dispersed, its tombs of kings dishonoured, on further still to the summit of that hill which rises yet in the landscape in solitary and majestic greatness, the perpetual memorial of the deed now to be enacted. For, thanks to the tenacity with which the memory of “good Abbot Whiting” has been treasured by generations of the townsfolk, the very hill today is Abbot Whiting’s monument.
His last act was simple. Now about to appear before a tribunal that was searching, just and merciful, he asks forgiveness first of God and then of man, even of those who had most offended against justice in his person and had not rested until they had brought him to the gallows amidst every incident that could add to such a death – ignominy and shame. The venerable abbot remains to the last the same as he always appears throughout his career; suffering in self-possession and patience the worst that man could inflict upon his mortal body, in the firm assurance that in all this he was but following in the footsteps of that Lord and Master in whose service from his youth upwards he had spent his life.
In this supreme moment his two monks, John Thorne and Roger James, the one a man of mature age and experience, the other not long professed, showed themselves worthy sons of so good a father. They, too, begged forgiveness of all and “took their death also very patiently.” Even Pollard seems moved for the moment, for he adds with an unwonted touch of tenderness, “whose souls God pardon.”
There is here no need to dwell on the butchery which followed, and to tell how the hardly lifeless body was cut down, divided into four parts and the head struck off. One quarter was despatched to Wells, another to Bath, a third to Ilchester, and the fourth to Bridgewater, whilst the venerable head was fixed over the great gateway of the abbey, a ghastly warning of the retribution which might and would fall on all, even the most powerful or the most holy, if they ventured to stand between the king and the accomplishment of his royal will.
All this might indeed strike terror into the people of the whole country, but not even the will of a Tudor monarch could prevent the people from forming their own judgment on the deed that had been done, and preserving, although robbed of the Catholic faith, the memory of the “good Abbot Whiting.” It is easy to understand how, so soon after the event as Mary*s reign, the inhabitants of the town and neighbourhood, with a vivid recollection of the past, were ready and even eager to make personal sacrifices for the restoration of the abbey. But even a hundred years later, and indeed even down to the present day, the name of Abbot Whiting has been preserved as a household word at Glastonbury and in its neighbourhood. There are those living who, when conversing with aged poor people, were touched to find the affectionate reverence with which his name was still treasured on the spot, though why he died and what it was all about they could not tell. That he was a good, a kind, a holy man they knew, for they had been told so in the days of their youth by those who had gone before.