To London, for an evening Reception at Lambeth Palace. I join a more or less orderly queue and shake hands with the Archbishop of Canterbury himself as I enter the strangely-named Guard Room, a fine upper Hall with a splendid 14th century roof. Portraits of 17th and 18th century prelates line the walls.
At the far end of the room, nearest the window, I spot at once a familiar face: Archbishop Laud. Knowing no one else at this Reception, I go across to say hello to him. His eyes follow me as I negotiate the crush of guests: a scarlet splash of Chelsea Pensioners, a church parade of padres, even perhaps the sly shade of a rural dean. (I hope I may be forgiven the Grantchester echo in that last sentence – I am here with three other members to represent the Rupert Brooke Society.)
Laud hasn’t changed much: his portrait by Van Dyck is as arresting as ever. Actually it is a copy of the original, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, a picture I always recommend to my students if we are studying literature of the 17th century. Laud rests his arm on a convenient pillar, and stares out from the canvas: it’s a slightly weary, but unflinching, gaze, I always think. He looks harassed, but in charge; imposing in his convocation robes: not a man to lose his head in a crisis (though he did in the end do just that).
Beneath the portrait I see a small glass display case. To my alarm, it contains what appears from its dome-like shape to be a skull. Surely it can’t be Laud’s own, preserved as a relic? (Laud met his end on the executioner’s block at the Tower in 1645, a victim of the politics of the Civil War.) It’s not impossible: such relics have been preserved before now. The head of Saint Ambrose Barlow (no relation) used to reside in a glass cabinet half way up the staircase of Barlow Hall, on the outskirts of Manchester. Is it still there, I wonder, and if so do golfers offer it a quick oblation on their way to the first tee? Barlow Hall now houses Chorlton cum Hardy Golf Club.
On closer inspection I find that what sits in the Archbishop’s case is something much odder than a head. It’s the shell of a tortoise originally given to Laud by his old college, St John’s Oxford. This pet quickly became a favourite, and was translated from the gardens of Fulham Palace to those of Lambeth when Laud was elevated from London to Canterbury.
By all accounts Laud’s testudine companion outlived his master – by over 100 years – until he too came to an unfortunate end. This may be the fate of many tortoises, certainly of tortoises kept as pets. In Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers (1972) the absent-minded professor, George Moore, has a pet tortoise called Pat, to whom he is devoted. George is not himself accident-prone, but all his animals are prone to accidents at George’s hand: he inadvertently shoots his pet rabbit, Thumper, with a bow and arrow then later, with an awful inevitability, comes down off a stepladder, crushing the unfortunate Pat under foot. After a gasp of horror and a moment’s disbelieving silence, the audience breaks into appalled laughter.
I saw the original production of this play at the National Theatre, with Michael Hordern playing George: the expression of abject dismay on his face when he realised he had made Pat go splat lives with me to this day. I suspect that all future revivals of Jumpers will have to carry the following disclaimer: ‘No live tortoises were harmed during the production of this play’.
Stoppard may have felt that Pat had had a raw deal. In a later play, Arcadia (1993), he introduced another tortoise, who fared rather better: his name, aptly enough, was Plautus the Tortoise and he was sleepy enough to spend most of the play playing the part of a paperweight.
Sleep was what did for Archbishop Laud’s tortoise in the end. There are three versions of the sad tale. In January 1753, a gardener in the Palace grounds was digging mulch from the compost heap where the tortoise had been enjoying a snug and happy hibernation, and either
1) disturbed the poor creature who promptly died of hypothermia in the frosty air, or2) skewered him on the prongs of his fork, or
3) inadvertently, though appropriately, beheaded him with his spade.
Whatever the exact cause of death, at least Laud’s poor old tortoise had the distinction, before his extinction, of being the last surviving creature in England to have lived through the English Civil War.
Adrian Barlow
10 March 2011
[illustration: Archbishop Laud, from the portrait by Van Dyck
The Civil Wars in East Anglia, 18-20 March 2011: a weekend course at Madingley Hall.
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