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.”
2 comments:
In 1975, the Folio Society published a volume of excerpts from Aubrey's "Brief Lives," including 91 lives. In 1988, the Society published a second volume of excerpts, including a further 139 lives. Harcourt didn't make the cut in either volume.
(As an aside, in the bookshops I frequent, I usually see lots of Folio Society volumes. Shows how popular they've been over the years.)
Rather timely for me. Today we will have the funeral for my brother, who died in November swimming in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Maryann Corbett poem is melancholy; I will try to say Amen.
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