BY CHRISTIAN OWEN

Inspired by the fact that some monks in the reign of Henry VIII, rich in choral experience, retrained as royal musicians after the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

He stood at the end of the cloister

And at the end of the age;

His robe was the robe of a cleric

But his heart was the heart of a sage.

He saw the disciples departing,

He saw the great churches go,

And the priests in long lines came after

Their flocks, at the evening’s slow

Amen. The Lord Bishop looked upwards;

His eyes, so pale and so blue,

Were fixed on the gold vault of heaven

And the angels that looked from it too.

‘God’s ways are mysterious,’ he murmured

‘But everything must be for the best;

So down with the shrines and the steeples,

And away with the candle and vest.

God’s ways are mysterious surely;

There must be some good in it all.

But what will the parishioners think of me

If they see me in Parliament’s thrall?’

‘What a terrible thing,’ said the Prior,

‘What a terrible thing, I declare,

To see the old customs vanish,

And the world become slightly less fair.

Oh, send us an Archbishop who’ll stand

For the altars we loved long ago,

With his crosier and ring and his mitre

And his great ten-gallon chapeau.’

‘No, child,’ said the Reverend Mother,

‘It is just as I thought. I’m afraid

That I never had faith in the future

Of the altars so finely displayed. 

So fold up your books of devotion,

Put out the sweet rose and the thyme,

For the gardens of Glastonbury

Are raked up and gone in their prime.’

They took him away from his cloister,

They took him away from his school,

They put him in charge of the minstrels

And the bandsmen of Henry’s rule.

He played on the fiddle at Shottesbrooke,

He played at Carlisle and Hull,

But his heart most of all still rejoiced

In the cloisters so lonely and full.

His voice was the voice of a minstrel

As he rode on his mule through the rain,

But his heart was the heart of a cleric

Who could not play that tune again.

And he stood at the end of the cloister

And he stood at the end of the age,

With his fiddle to the tune of a requiem

And the choir at the end of the stage.