'No One Says Amen'

Thomas Harcourt (né Whitbread) was an English Jesuit falsely convicted of conspiring to murder Charles II in the so-called Popish Plot fabricated by Titus Oates. Harcourt and four others were hanged, drawn and quartered on June 30, 1679. John Aubrey (1626-97) in his Brief Lives memorably describes the aftermath of the priest’s execution: 

“When Father Harcourt suffered at Tyburne, and his bowells, etc, throwne into the fire, a butcher’s boy standing by was resolved to have a piece of his Kidney which was broyling in the fire. He burn’t his fingers much, but he got it; and one Roydon, a Brewer in Southwark, bought it, a kind of Presbyterian. The wonder is, ’tis now absolutely petrified. But ’twas not so hard when he first had it. It being alwayes carried in the pocket hardened by degrees, better then by the fire -- like an Agate polished. I have seen it. He much values it.”

 

The true journalist’s credo: “I have seen it.” Aubrey relies on his senses. I’m reminded of Whitman: “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” As usual, Aubrey secures the odd compelling detail, which is why the common reader still reads him with interest. A good journalist, like any storyteller, thrives on detail. One wonders about the butcher’s boy, how much Roydon paid him for the petrified kidney and where it is today.

 

The day I read about Harcourt’s martyrdom (he was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929) I also read an account by a poet of preparations for a more traditional final resting place. In “Buying a Plot in Plague Time” (subtitled “After Larkin”), Maryann Corbett writes: “Nothing I can see / In the small print addresses dread, or God, / Or love.” She is writing after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. Death has become more real, less abstract, a bureaucratic certainty:

 

“Here, plague: take this dull prose; spare those I love.

I sign at all the Xs (and to prove

My resoluteness, press hard on the pen),

Scribble the check and seal the envelope.

Clinging weakly to hope,

I thumb the stamp on. No one says Amen.”