Making sense of “Stairway to Heaven”: an exegesis

“If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow don’t be alarmed now
It’s just a spring clean for the May Queen”

Those lyrics have haunted me since the early 1970s — as they have done for millions of baby boomers.

What do they mean? And who are those who stand looking? What are they looking for? How can you see their voices?

The most famous of all rocks song is probably the most cryptic. For half a century it made me wonder.

But thanks to a BBC documentary by a historian of religion, I now understand what Robert Plant was on about.

Last night I watched a rerun of Henry VIII’s Enforcer: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell, which I missed when it first aired in 2013. It was written and presented by Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, from whom I learnt that scala coeli (stairway to heaven) was an indulgence created by medieval popes.

Bequests for masses “at scala coeli” were popular in England until the 16th century. MacCulloch explains how it worked: “You pay your money, and the soul of your dear old deceased mother flies out of purgatory into heaven.”

But a church’s right to offer godly pardon had to be granted, and periodically renewed, by pontiffs. The Vatican was never going to relinquish ultimate control of such a money-spinner.

This is where Thomas Cromwell comes in. A brilliant self-taught lawyer, he was hired in 1517 by a merchant guild in Boston (Lincolnshire) for a very important mission.

The scala coeli licence for the chapel run by the guild was about to expire. Cromwell’s mission was to travel to Rome and get it renewed. A lot was riding on it. “The chief wealth of the guild came from the sale of this indulgence,” MacCulloch says.

The merchants invested no less than £1,200 (£600,000 in modern money) in the venture. Cromwell led a delegation to negotiate with Pope Leo X himself. He was successful, cementing his reputation as a fixer.

But Cromwell lived at a time when indulgences were seen with increasing suspicion in much of Christendom. Protestantism swept through England not just because it suited the matrimonial plans of a king: many “evangelicals” yearned to end what they viewed as Catholic skulduggery and return to Christ-like purity.

Thus Robert Plant’s lyrics tap into a deep English tradition of hostility to perceived superstition and ecclesiastical corruption.

At the centre of the song is a venal lady who wanted to turn everything into gold, and who thinks she can pay her way not just into Paradise but also into department stores after closing time.

She stands for what’s wrong in a world where dark shadows tower over small souls.

The longing feeling the narrator gets when he looks to the West clearly refers to the American’s Pilgrim Fathers leaving a wicked continent to found a New Jerusalem across the ocean.

Theirs is the Chiliastic promise of a new dawn, of songbirds that dispel bad thoughts and of forests that echo with laughter.

I’m still unsure about the significance of the bustling hedgerow, but I believe I’m on the right theological track here.

Returning to Cromwell, the irony is that a few years after securing a spurious papal blessing for the Boston church scam, as Henry VIII’s fixer-in-chief he engineered the break with Rome.

Cromwell’s conversion to Protestant reform — which MacCulloch argues was heartfelt — is again wonderfully captured by Plant:

“Yes there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on”