Part 2

The account rolls of the College Bursars in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. fortunately tell us exactly the situation of the rooms occupied by Badcoke and Harrison, and as, for the proper understanding of subsequent events, it is necessary that we should realise their condition and relation to the rest of the College, I shall not scruple to be particular. They were on the left-hand side of the staircase now called K, in the eastern range of the College, and at the northern end of what had once been the dormitory of the Nuns of St. Radegund. Badcoke’s chamber, which was on the highest floor, was one of the largest in the College, and for that reason the Statutes prescribed that it should be reserved “for more venerable persons resorting to the College”; and Badcoke, being neither a Fellow nor a graduate, was regarded as belonging to this class. Below his chamber was that of Harrison, and on the ground-floor was the “cool-house,” where the College fuel was kept. Between this ground-floor room and L staircase--which did not then exist--there is seen at the present day a rarely opened door. Inside the door a flight of some half-dozen steps descends to a narrow space, which might be deemed a passage, save that it has no outlet at the farther end. On either side it is flanked, to the height of two floors of K staircase, by walls of ancient monastic masonry; the third and highest floor is carried over it. Here, in the times of Henry VIII. and the Nunnery days before them, ran or stagnated a Stygian stream, known as “the kytchynge sinke ditch,” foul with scum from the College offices. Northward from Badcoke’s staircase was “the wood-yard,” on the site of the present L staircase. It communicated by a door in its outward, eastern wall with a green close which in the old days had been the Nunnery graveyard. In Badcoke’s times it was still uneven with the hillocks which marked the resting-places of nameless, unrecorded Nuns. The old graveyard was intersected by a cart-track leading from Jesus Lane to the wood-yard door. The Bursar’s books show that Badcoke controlled the wood-yard and coal-house, perhaps in the capacity of Promus, or Steward.

Now when Badcoke and Harrison came to occupy their chambers on K staircase, Jesus, like other Colleges in those troublous times, had fallen on evil days. Its occupants comprised only the Master, some eight Fellows, a few servants, and about half-a-dozen “disciples.” Nearly half the rooms in College were empty, and the records show that many were tenantless, _propter defectum reparacionis_; that is, because walls, roofs and floors were decayed and ruinous. Badcoke, being a man of means, paid a handsome rent for his chambers, not less than ten shillings by the year, in consideration of which the College put it in tenantable repair; and, as a circumstance which has some significance in relation to this narrative, it is to be noted that the Bursar--the accounts of the year are no longer extant--recorded that in 1539 he paid a sum of three shillings and fourpence “to Adam Waller for layyinge of new brick in yᵉ cupboard of Mr. Badcoke’s chamber.” The cupboard in question was seemingly a small recessed space, still recognisable in a gyp-room belonging to the chambers which were Badcoke’s. The rooms on the side of the staircase opposite to those of Badcoke and Harrison were evidently unoccupied; the Bursar took no rent from them. The other inmates of the College dwelt in the cloister court.

In this comparative isolation Badcoke and Harrison lived until the death of Henry VIII. in 1546. In course of time Harrison became a Fellow of the College; but Badcoke preferred to retain the exceptional status of its honoured guest. To the Master, Dr. Reston, and the Fellows, whose religious sympathies were with the old order of things, their company was inoffensive and even welcome. But trouble came upon the College in 1549, when it was visited by King Edward’s Protestant Commissioners. It stands on record, that on May 26th “they commanded six altars to be pulled down in the church,” and in a chamber, which may have been Badcoke’s, “caused certayn images to be broken.” Mr. Badcoke “had an excommunicacion sette uppe for him,” and was dismissed from the office, whatever it was, that he held in the College. Worse still for his happiness, his companion of many years, Richard Harrison, was “expulsed his felowshippe” on some supposition of trafficking with the court of Rome.[3] He went overseas, as it was understood, to the Catholic University of Louvain in Flanders.

In 1549 Badcoke must have been, as age went in the sixteenth century, an old man. His deprivation of office, the loss of his friend, and the abandonment of long treasured hopes for the restitution of the religious system to which his life had been devoted, plunged him in a settled despondency. The Fellows, who showed for him such sympathy as they dared, understood that between him and Harrison there passed a secret correspondence. But in course of years this source of consolation dried up. Harrison was dead, or he had travelled away from Louvain. With the other members of the College Badcoke wholly parted company, and lived a recluse in his unneighboured room. By the wood-yard gate, of which he still had a key, he could let himself out beyond the College walls, and sometimes by day, oftener after nightfall, he was to be seen wandering beneath his window in the Nuns’ graveyard, his old feet, like Friar Laurence’s, “stumbling at graves.” An occasional visitor, who was known to be his pensioner, was Adam Waller. But, though Waller was still at times employed in the service of the College, his character and condition had deteriorated with years. He was a sturdy beggar, a drunkard, sullen and dangerous in his cups, and Badcoke was heard to hint some terror of his presence. At last the Master learnt from the ex-Prior that he was about to quit the College, and none doubted that he would follow Harrison to Louvain.

Shortly after this became known, Badcoke disappeared from College. He had lived in such seclusion that for a day or two it was not noticed that his door remained closed, and that he had not been seen in his customary walks. When the door was at last forced it was discovered that he had indeed gone, but, strangely, he had left behind him the whole of his effects. Adam Waller was the last person who was known to have entered his chamber, and, being questioned, he said that Badcoke had informed him of his intention to depart three days previously, but, for some unexplained reason, had desired him to keep his purpose secret, and had not imparted his destination. Badcoke’s life of seclusion, and his known connection with English Catholics beyond sea, gave colour to Waller’s story, and, so far as I am aware, no enquiries were made as to the subsequent fate of the ex-Prior. But a strange fact was commented on--that the floor of the so-called cupboard was strewn with bricks, and that in the place from which they had been dislodged was an arched recess of considerable size, which must have been made during Badcoke’s tenancy of the room. There was nothing in the recess. Another circumstance there was which called for no notice in the then dilapidated state of half the College rooms. Two boards were loose in the floor of the larger chamber. Thirty feet below the gap which their removal exposed, lay the dark impurities of the “kytchynge sinke ditch.”

Adam Waller died a beggar as he had lived.

A century after these occurrences--in the year 1642--the attention of the College was drawn by a severe visitation of plague to a much-needed sanitary reform. The black ditch which ran under K staircase was “cast,” that is, its bed was effectually cleaned out, and its channel was stopped; and so it came about that from that day to this it has presented a clean and dry floor of gravel. Beneath the settled slime of centuries was discovered a complete skeleton. How it came there nobody knew, and nobody enquired. Probably it was guessed to be a relic of some dim and grim monastic mystery.

Now whether Adam Waller knew or suspected the existence of a treasure hidden in the wall-recess of Badcoke’s chamber, and murdered the ex-Prior when he was about to remove it to Louvain, I cannot say. One thing is certain--that he did not find the treasure there. When Badcoke disappeared he left his will, with his other belongings, in his chamber. After a decent interval, when it seemed improbable that he would return, probate was obtained by the Master and Fellows, to whom he had bequeathed the chief part of his effects. In 1858 the wills proved in the University court were removed to Peterborough, and there, for aught I know, his will may yet be seen. The property bequeathed consisted principally of books of theology. Among them was Stephanus’ Latin Vulgate Bible of 1528 in two volumes folio. This he devised “of my heartie good wylle to my trustie felow and frynde, Richard Harrison, if he shal returne to Cambrege aftyr the tyme of my decesse.” Richard Harrison never returned to Cambridge, and the Bible, with the other books, found its way to the College Library.

Now there are still in the Library two volumes of this Vulgate Bible. There is nothing in either of them to identify them with the books mentioned in Badcoke’s will, for they have lost the fly-leaves which might have revealed the owner’s autograph. Here and there in the margins are annotations in a sixteenth-century handwriting; and in the same handwriting on one of the lost leaves was a curious inscription, which suggests that the writer’s mind was running on some treasure which was not spiritual. First at the top of the page, in clear and large letters, was copied a passage from Psalm 55: “Cor meum conturbatum est in me: et formido mortis cecidit super me. Et dixi, Quis dabit pennas mihi sicut columbae, et volabo et requiescam.” (My heart is disquieted within me: and the fear of death is fallen upon me. And I said, O that I had wings like a dove: for then would I fly away, and be at rest.) Then, in lettering of the same kind, came a portion of Deuteronomy xxviii. 12: “Aperiet dominus thesaurum suum, benedicetque cunctis operibus tuis.” (The Lord will disclose his treasure, and will bless all the works of thy hands.) Under this, in smaller letters, were the words, “Vide super hoc Ezechielis cap. xl.”

If in the same volume the chapter in question is referred to, a singular fact discloses itself. Certain words in the text are underscored in red pencil, and fingers, inked in the margin, are directed to the lines in which they occur. Taken in their consecutive order these words run: “Ecce murus forinsecus ... ad portam quae respiciebat viam orientalem ... mensus est a facie portae extrinsecus ad orientem et aquilonem quinque cubitorum ... hoc est gazophylacium.” This may be taken to mean, “Look at the outside wall ... at the gate facing towards the eastern road ... he measured from the gate outwards five cubits (7¹⁄₂ feet) towards the north-east ... there is the treasure.”

The outer wall of the College, the wood-yard gate and the road through the Nuns’ cemetery must at once have suggested themselves to Richard Harrison, had he lived to see his friend’s bequest, and he must have taken it as an instruction from the testator that a treasure known to both parties was hidden in the spot indicated, close to Badcoke’s chamber. And the first text cited must have conveyed to him that his friend, in some deadly terror, had transferred the treasure thither from the place where the two friends had originally laid it. But the message never reached Harrison, and it is quite certain that no treasure has been sought or found in that spot. If the Canterbury or any other treasure was deposited there by Badcoke it rests there still.

To those who are curious to know more of this matter I would say: first, ascertain minutely from Loggan’s seventeenth-century plan of the College the position of the wood-yard gate; and, secondly, which indeed should be firstly, make absolutely certain that John Badcoke was not mystifying posterity by an elaborate jest.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Cooper, _Annals_, I., p. 393.

[2] _The Suppression of the Monasteries_ (Camden Society’s Publications), p. 90.

[3] Cooper, _Annals_, II. p. 29.

The True History of Anthony Ffryar

The world, it is said, knows nothing of its greatest men. In our Cambridge microcosm it may be doubted whether we are better informed concerning some of the departed great ones who once walked the confines of our Colleges. Which of us has heard of Anthony Ffryar of Jesus? History is dumb respecting him. Yet but for the unhappy event recorded in this unadorned chronicle his fame might have stood with that of Bacon of Trinity, or Harvey of Caius. _They_ lived to be old men: Ffryar died before he was thirty--his work unfinished, his fame unknown even to his contemporaries.

So meagre is the record of his life’s work that it is contained in a few bare notices in the College Bursar’s Books, in the Grace Books which date his matriculation and degrees, and in the entry of his burial in the register of All Saints’ Parish. These simple annals I have ventured to supplement with details of a more or less hypothetical character which will serve to show what humanity lost by his early death. Readers will be able to judge for themselves the degree of care which I have taken not to import into the story anything which may savour of the improbable or romantic.

Anthony Ffryar matriculated in the year 1541-2, his age being then probably 15 or 16. He took his B.A. degree in 1545, his M.A. in 1548. He became a Fellow about the end of 1547, and died in the summer of 1551. Such are the documentary facts relating to him. Dr. Reston was Master of the College during the whole of his tenure of a Fellowship and died in the same year as Ffryar. The chamber which Ffryar occupied as a Fellow was on the first floor of the staircase at the west end of the Chapel. The staircase has since been absorbed in the Master’s Lodge, but the doorway through which it was approached from the cloister may still be seen. At the time when Ffryar lived there the nave of the Chapel was used as a parish church, and his windows overlooked the graveyard, then called “Jesus churchyard,” which is now a part of the Master’s garden.

Ffryar was of course a priest, as were nearly all the Fellows in his day. But I do not gather that he was a theologian, or complied more than formally with the obligation of his orders. He came to Cambridge when the Six Articles and the suppression of the monasteries were of fresh and burning import: he became a Fellow in the harsh Protestant days of Protector Somerset: and in all his time the Master and the Fellows were in scarcely disavowed sympathy with the rites and beliefs of the Old Religion. Yet in the battle of creeds I imagine that he took no part and no interest. I should suppose that he was a somewhat solitary man, an insatiable student of Nature, and that his sympathies with humanity were starved by his absorption in the New Science which dawned on Cambridge at the Reformation.

When I say that he was an alchemist do not suppose that in the middle of the sixteenth century the name of alchemy carried with it any associations with credulity or imposture. It was a real science and a subject of University study then, as its god-children, Physics and Chemistry, are now. If the aims of its professors were transcendental its methods were genuinely based on research. Ffryar was no visionary, but a man of sense, hard and practical. To the study of alchemy he was drawn by no hopes of gain, not even of fame, and still less by any desire to benefit mankind. He was actuated solely by an unquenchable passion for enquiry, a passion sterilizing to all other feeling. To the somnambulisms of the less scientific disciples of his school, such as the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life, he showed himself a chill agnostic. All his thought and energies were concentrated on the discovery of the _magisterium_, the master-cure of all human ailments.

For four years in his laboratory in the cloister he had toiled at this pursuit. More than once, when it had seemed most near, it had eluded his grasp; more than once he had been tempted to abandon it as a mystery insoluble. In the summer of 1551 the discovery waited at his door. He was sure, certain of success, which only experiment could prove. And with the certainty arose a new passion in his heart--to make the name of Ffryar glorious in the healing profession as that of Galen or Hippocrates. In a few days, even within a few hours, the fame of his discovery would go out into all the world.

The summer of 1551 was a sad time in Cambridge. It was marked by a more than usually fatal outbreak of the epidemic called “the sweat,” when, as Fuller says, “patients ended or mended in twenty-four hours.” It had smouldered some time in the town before it appeared with sudden and dreadful violence in Jesus College. The first to go was little Gregory Graunge, schoolboy and chorister, who was lodged in the College school in the outer court. He was barely thirteen years old, and known by sight to Anthony Ffryar. He died on July 31, and was buried the same day in Jesus churchyard. The service for his burial was held in the Chapel and at night, as was customary in those days. Funerals in College were no uncommon events in the sixteenth century. But in the death of the poor child, among strangers, there was something to move even the cold heart of Ffryar. And not the pity of it only impressed him. The dim Chapel, the Master and Fellows obscurely ranged in their stalls and shrouded in their hoods, the long-drawn miserable chanting and the childish trebles of the boys who had been Gregory’s fellows struck a chill into him which was not to be shaken off.

Three days passed and another chorister died. The College gates were barred and guarded, and, except by a selected messenger, communication with the town was cut off. The precaution was unavailing, and the boys’ usher, Mr. Stevenson, died on August 5. One of the junior Fellows, sir Stayner--“sir” being the equivalent of B.A.--followed on August 7. The Master, Dr. Reston, died the next day. A gaunt, severe man was Dr. Reston, whom his Fellows feared. The death of a Master of Arts on August 9 for a time completed the melancholy list.

Before this the frightened Fellows had taken action. The scholars were dismissed to their homes on August 6. Some of the Fellows abandoned the College at the same time. The rest--a terrified conclave--met on August 8 and decreed that the College should be closed until the pestilence should have abated. Until that time it was to be occupied by a certain Robert Laycock, who was a College servant, and his only communication with the outside world was to be through his son, who lived in Jesus Lane. The decree was perhaps the result of the Master’s death, for he was not present at the meeting.

Goodman Laycock, as he was commonly called, might have been the sole tenant of the College but for the unalterable decision of Ffryar to remain there. At all hazards his research, now on the eve of realisation, must proceed; without the aid of his laboratory in College it would miserably hang fire. Besides, he had an absolute assurance of his own immunity if the experiment answered his confident expectations, and his fancy was elated with the thought of standing, like another Aaron, between the living and the dead, and staying the pestilence with the potent _magisterium_. Until then he would bar his door even against Laycock, and his supplies of food should be left on the staircase landing. Solitude for him was neither unfamiliar nor terrible.

So for three days Ffryar and Laycock inhabited the cloister, solitary and separate. For three days, in the absorption of his research, Ffryar forgot fear, forgot the pestilence-stricken world beyond the gate, almost forgot to consume the daily dole of food laid outside his door. August 12 was the day, so fateful to humanity, when his labours were to be crowned with victory: before midnight the secret of the _magisterium_ would be solved.

Evening began to close in before he could begin the experiment which was to be his last. It must of necessity be a labour of some hours, and, before it began, he bethought him that he had not tasted food since early morning. He unbarred his door and looked for the expected portion. It was not there. Vexed at the remissness of Laycock he waited for a while and listened for his approaching footsteps. At last he took courage and descended to the cloister. He called for Laycock, but heard no response. He resolved to go as far as the Buttery door and knock. Laycock lived and slept in the Buttery.

At the Buttery door he beat and cried on Laycock; but in answer he heard only the sound of scurrying rats. He went to the window, by the hatch, where he knew that the old man’s bed lay, and called to him again. Still there was silence. At last he resolved to force himself through the unglazed window and take what food he could find. In the deep gloom within he stumbled and almost fell over a low object, which he made out to be a truckle-bed. There was light enough from the window to distinguish, stretched upon it, the form of Goodman Laycock, stark and dead.

Sickened and alarmed Ffryar hurried back to his chamber. More than ever he must hasten the great experiment. When it was ended his danger would be past, and he could go out into the town to call the buryers for the old man. With trembling hands he lit the brazier which he used for his experiments, laid it on his hearth and placed thereon the alembic which was to distil the _magisterium_.

Then he sat down to wait. Gradually the darkness thickened and the sole illuminant of the chamber was the wavering flame of the brazier. He felt feverish and possessed with a nameless uneasiness which, for all his assurance, he was glad to construe as fear: better that than sickness. In the college and the town without was a deathly silence, stirred only by the sweltering of the distilment, and, as the hours struck, by the beating of the Chapel clock, last wound by Laycock. It was as though the dead man spoke. But the repetition of the hours told him that the time of his emancipation was drawing close.

Whether he slept I do not know. He was aroused to vivid consciousness by the clock sounding _one_. The time when his experiment should have ended was ten, and he started up with a horrible fear that it had been ruined by his neglect. But it was not so. The fire burnt, the liquid simmered quietly, and so far all was well.

Again the College bell boomed a solitary stroke: then a pause and another. He opened, or seemed to open, his door and listened. Again the knell was repeated. His mind went back to the night when he had attended the obsequies of the boy-chorister. This must be a funeral tolling. For whom? He thought with a shudder of the dead man in the Buttery.

He groped his way cautiously down the stairs. It was a still, windless night, and the cloister was dark as death. Arrived at the further side of the court he turned towards the Chapel. Its panes were faintly lighted from within. The door stood open and he entered.

In the place familiar to him at the chancel door one candle flickered on a bracket. Close to it--his face cast in deep shade by the light from behind--stood the ringer, in a gown of black, silent and absorbed in his melancholy task. Fear had almost given way to wonder in the heart of Ffryar, and, as he passed the sombre figure on his way to the chancel door, he looked him resolutely in the face. The ringer was Goodman Laycock.