One of the joys of being a volunteer at Fulham Palace is the resonance of history that we can sometimes take for granted but, which now and again makes itself quite palpable. I had such an experience recently, a synchronicity that made my day.
Some of you might be aware of the Shardlake series of mystery/thrillers set in Tudor times, starring a hunchbacked lawyer named Matthew Shardlake. Shardlake solves crime and unravels mysteries for royal personages, and through his creator C.J. Sansome, gives us a wonderful glimpse into Tudor times. I was reading the latest one called Lamentation which revolves around a true incident in the life of Catherine Parr (though heavily fictionalised to make an exciting story), whilst on the reception desk just before Christmas.
In the summer of 1546 Henry VIII was slowly dying and his Protestant and Catholic counsellors were engaged in a power struggle to control the 8-year-old heir Prince Edward. As heretics were hunted and burned at the stake, the Catholic party focus their attack on Henry's sixth wife. Queen Catherine was an intellectual and religious woman who was prone to write down her thoughts, and she had written a confessional book called The Lamentations of a Sinner. The book was regarded as so radically Protestant that if it should come to the King's attention it could bring her to the axe.
At the Palace of Whitehall, Catherine hides the controversial manuscript in a concealed coffer in her bedroom. The book stays there for a month until she resolves to ask Archbishop Cranmer for his opinion on what to do. They meet In the Queens Presence Chamber and Cranmer advises that on no account should she make the book known. Then a month later it is stolen, and a complicated mystery begins with the hunt for manuscript.
Shardlake and the Queen have a discussion about who could possibly have known or heard about the Lamentation, as only Cranmer had been told, and that was behind closed doors made of heavy oak. But Shardlake determines that Cranmer had urged the Queen to destroy the book quite vociferously and that their raised voices could have been easily heard outside the Chamber.
That day on the reception desk there was a memorial concert being held in the Great Hall which included some Tudor music I was most eager to hear but, at the very moment in the book when Catherin Parr is telling Shardlake that no one could possibly have overheard her, the heavy doors in the FP Reception Hall closed and I found that I could not hear the music. Then later, at the moment in the text when it is revealed that the discussion between the Queen and the Archbishop was one in which raised voices could indeed have been heard outside the Chamber, I could suddenly hear the music in the Great Hall as it grew louder.
It was a lovely moment and one which made me feel very much part of the history of Fulham Palace and glad to be a volunteer in this splendid building.
