The Heretic’s Wife

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

  The first hit over his left shoulder was for his patron and sometime friend. Wolsey—Wolsey with his cardinal’s hat. These first stripes, Sir Thomas laid on more in anger than in repentance, just to catch the rhythm, to crack open the doorway to the ecstasy of pain. Wolsey! A cardinal! With a secret marriage. A cardinal with both the power of the clergy and a wife.

  Then three more stripes for his lawyer father, John More. His father who must be pleased. His father who must be praised. His father who must be obeyed.

  Then a shift over the right shoulder, angrier still, his rage still hurling outward. Rage for Luther and his furfuris, the ape of a translator William Tyndale. Merda, stercus, lutum. Shit. Dung. Filth. Dangerous, villainous heretics! Breathing heavily now. One who took a whoring nun to wife and one who lived like a monk, even as he dared praise marriage for the clergy.

  Then a deep inhalation and two more strokes. Left. Right. This time in penance for his own sin, payment for his own pleasure. One for his dead wife, his young and docile Jane. He had enjoyed her overmuch. Inhale. For his lust of her, he’d abandoned his little cell in the Charterhouse, his Carthusian monk’s cell. Exhale. And another for his second wife. Dame Alice—her tongue, scourge enough for any man. Her will as powerful.

  Left, right. One to pay for his son. Two. Three. To pay for Alice’s daughter. Jane’s daughters.

  The burn began in his shoulder and spread between his shoulder blades, little tongues of flame licking at skin already raw from his hair shirt.

  Two more stripes for Meg, the daughter he loved best. Once over the left shoulder. Once over the right.

  Ten. Eleven. Twelve . . . one laid on for each of his grandchildren, until his flesh quivered with repentance, until he’d paid for all his pleasure, both innocent and carnal. Thirteen. Fourteen. Until his body and his mind were as exhausted as when he’d first lain with a woman. This traitor to his vocation. This sinner, too carnal to live celibate and too lawful to live a lie. As Wolsey did, Wolsey who wore a cardinal’s robe.

  Only when his flagellation was ended, his sinner’s soul new-cleansed and the embers of his anger banked for a season, could Sir Thomas reenter his Friday domestic bliss. In summer, he would picnic with his family across the wide lawns of his new Chelsea palace. In winter he would practice the lute with Alice and their daughters in the winter solar or retire to his library to discuss Aristotle with his daughter Margaret.

  But if one did not count the chapel where his spirit gained redemption, or the library, where he wrote his poetry, dreamed out his Utopia, held intelligent discourse with his Meg, the pearl of his heart, the rose garden was Sir Thomas More’s favorite place. He had an aviary there with exotic birds for song and color, and a few ferrets and weasels—even a caged ape named Samson for entertainment. The roses, washed by the misting English rain, or bruised by the bright sunshine, were always fragrant in summer.

  But it was not yet summer.

  On this early spring morning the buds would be mere swellings on the bare and prickly vines. Yet, the garden beckoned. For in its forbidden heart, where his grandchildren and his daughters never ventured, a thorn tree of a different sort flourished, often blooming red and out of season. But that tree bloomed only at night, and it was yet day, and Meg would be waiting in the library.

  After the day had ended, after Alice began to snore and the sounds of the great house stilled, Thomas left his slumbering wife and whispered to the servant who slept outside his chamber.

  “It is time, Barnabas,” he said, and handed the servant the coiled whip.

  As he passed the library, he noticed the tapers were still lit, their yellow light spilling from the half-closed door—Meg, working late again, leaving her husband to a lonely bed. But he’d little sympathy for William Roper. Thomas feared he harbored a Lutheran heretic in his very bosom. Only this one favorite daughter would be allowed such forbearance.

  He smiled, thinking of her working on her Greek translations late into the night, her face bent over the desk, her fine script flowing from her cramped fingers, the words from her nimble intellect. What did it matter that she was the homeliest of the lot? She was possessed of a fine mind; one might even say a beautiful mind. She was too good for William Roper, though the match, like all the marriages made in the More household, had brought its share of wealth and good connections.

  Thomas carried the torchlight as he and the servant descended the darkened stairs and entered the slumbering rose garden. Past the songbirds who slept with their heads tucked under their clipped wings, past the ferrets and the weasels who foraged in the darkness for food, treading across the knot garden where the smitten rosemary released its chastened winter fragrance on the night air.

  They reached a small clearing.

  The cold light of a frosty quarter moon picked out the figure tied to the whipping post. More’s “Tree of Troth,” Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall called it. Thomas preferred to think of it as Jesu’s Tree.

  The man was stripped naked to the waist and bound at his wrists and ankles. His chin rested on his chest as though he slept too, like the winter garden. A knotted rope was wound tightly around his forehead. His blond hair fell forward, obscuring one side of his face. Sir Thomas lifted the torchlight to inspect his prisoner. His anger, so lately purged, rose inside him again. Even the man’s posture was a sacrilege, as though his unconscious body conspired in the Christ-like pose.

  “Wake up the Lollard,” he said, “so that he may be made to see the error of his ways. The sting of the whip may clarify his mind so he can return to the true faith.”

  The servant lifted the whip and curled it around the naked chest of the prisoner, who opened his eyes and settled an unwavering blue gaze upon his questioner.

  A woman’s high, sweet voice called out, “Father, are you there?”

  Startled, Thomas motioned for the servant to recede into the shadow as he recognized Meg’s voice. He shouted, his tone unusually harsh. “Is that you, Margaret? You know this part of the garden is forbidden. Where are you?”

  Her tone was chastened when she answered. “I’m by the fishpond, Father. There was a messenger for you from the king.”

  “Wait where you are. I’ll come to you,” he shouted. Then to the servant, he hissed, “Take him back to the porter’s lodge,” indicating with a toss of his head the circuitous direction the servant should lead the prisoner.

  “Aye, milord. But the porter said to remind you that this is the tenth day and under the law—”

  “The porter reminds the king’s legal advisor of the law? How very judicious of him. Tell him I know the law as well as any man in England, and under the law a prisoner under suspicion of heresy may be interrogated. And so can a servant in sympathy with heretics.” His gaze locked with the prisoner’s. Thomas looked away. “Put him back in the stocks,” he said as he stalked off toward the fishpond.

  The moonlight reflected coldly off the pond, picking out a slight ripple in the water where the wind ruffled the surface, picking out, too, his daughter’s pale face beneath her velvet caplet. She hugged herself and shivered in the moonlight. “I’m sorry, Father. It’s just that I thought you—”

  He immediately relented. “If I sounded curt to you, it’s because I care only for your safety. At night the keepers let Samson roam free. And during the day, if he should see you, he might frighten you.”

  “But he doesn’t frighten you.”

  “Ah yes, daughter. But you see, I am very familiar with the beast. Where is the king’s messenger?”

  “He is in your library. Actually, there were two messengers. The first was from Bishop Tunstall. He left his message after I assured him I would place it myself in your hands. But the king’s messenger . . . I thought . . .”

  “You were right to summon me,” he said, “but next time, send one of the grooms.”

  Putting his arm around her shoulders, he led her up the front steps. The dark face of the red brick façade loomed over them, its black windows like all-knowing eyes. A
s they approached the library, Thomas could see the Tudor-liveried messenger pacing before the fire. Best not to keep him cooling his heels overlong. He bade his daughter good night at the door, watching her affectionately as she curtsied and then melted with a swish of satin skirts into the deepening shadows beyond the hall.

  The messenger was a familiar face that Thomas had seen often at court. With a curt nod of recognition, he took the scroll and quickly broke the king’s red wax seal. He scanned the words quickly, his heart sinking.

  “This requires an answer,” he said, without looking up. “It is late. I will consider it and give you my written response in the morning.” He pulled a rope and a servant appeared almost immediately. “Sam here will provide you with a bed in the guesthouse and refreshment—or whatever else you require. You will not find the hospitality of Chelsea House lacking. Return to this chamber after prime; I will give you a message for His Majesty.”

  Sighing wearily, Thomas laid the court document on his desk and settled into the chair beside the fire. He rubbed his fingers back and forth across his furrowed brow as he studied the embers. So. Finally it has come. You can no longer dance around it, he told himself. There had been hints, both subtle and not, but he’d always been able to sidestep the implications. Now here it was. A direct request from Henry VIII, Defender of the Faith—a title Sir Thomas had helped his sovereign obtain by writing the refutation of the Lutheran doctrine that gained him that honor—to help the king with his “great matter.”

  There was a sudden chill in the room. He shivered, igniting the fire beneath his hair shirt. The shifting coals on the hearth sighed, as if in reminder that one refused a king, especially this king, at one’s peril. Thomas was fifty-one years old, and he felt every birthday in his bones. He had served Henry well, but it appeared he was not to be allowed to retire. How could he answer “nay” and not provoke his king to wrath? But how could he answer “yea” and preserve his public honor? He got up wearily and poked at the fire, gathering the coals back together. His eye fell on a small bound packet.

  Meg had mentioned another message. He recognized Cuthbert Tunstall’s familiar seal. He tore this one open with more enthusiasm. It contained a small book and a few pamphlets. Although the two colleagues often exchanged books, Thomas examined this book with curiosity and some surprise. It was Tyndale’s English New Testament! He’d heard about it, though he’d not seen one before because, like all works containing Lutheran doctrine and glosses, it was banned under the bishop’s recent monition.

  A scrap of vellum fell out and fluttered to the floor. Thomas bent to retrieve it. The letter, written in Latin, as was all correspondence among More, Bishop Tunstall, and Cardinal Wolsey, gave More specific dispensation to possess the book along with a request to help catch out the “sons of iniquity” who were spreading Luther’s poison across England. The letter further suggested that Sir Thomas could best serve this cause by writing a refutation of Tyndale for publication and distribution, and offered monetary compensation.

  Thomas opened the English New Testament with curiosity and, squinting in the candlelight, flipped through the pages. Tyndale was a capable translator and a cunning one. Each page fueled Thomas’s anger more: the base Anglo-Saxon word choices, the plainness of the verbiage, the use of the word congregation and not church, the use of elder in place of priest, deliberately stripping the Church of its claim to being Christ’s body on earth. Even the use of repent and not do penance, a blatant slap at the Church’s penitential system of indulgences. He scanned the heretical Lutheran glosses that railed against the power of the Church, feeling his temper rise. Coenum! Excrement! A foul heretical document!

  His fingers itched to begin.

  Thomas would not help Henry make a legal wife of his whore, but this he could do. This he would do. And for free. He slammed the little pocketsized book shut, the profane thing, cheaply bound, cheaply printed, and made to throw it in the fire. But no, not the book. The book was evidence. It was the book’s author who should be consigned to the flames. He and all other foul and stinking heretics like him, who would sully England with this profane offal.

  From somewhere deep in the heart of the garden, he heard an animal roar. Samson. The keeper had given the beast a brief furlough from his cage. The sap was rising in the earth, and Samson would be feeling the stirrings inside himself. He would be beating on his chest, lunging at the leash that kept him inside the walled garden, anger in his wild cry. Sir Thomas thumbed through the other heretical samples, feeling a great sympathy with Samson’s rage. But he could not beat his chest and scream into the silence of slumbering Chelsea House. Sir Thomas More was a civilized man. A great scholar. A man of classical learning. An honorable man. And a Christian.

  He slammed the New Testament down on the table and pounded it with his fist, then stood up and, gathering his ermine-fringed cloak, strode from the room. The door slammed behind him as he went in the direction of the porter’s lodge.

  THREE

  By burning Luther’s books you may rid your bookshelves of him but you will not rid men’s minds of him.

  —ERASMUS OF ROTTERDAM

  The daffodils were blooming in the window box outside Gough’s Book and Print Shop, but neither their brave yellow blossoms nor the thin sunlight lifted Kate’s spirits. Not one word from John since the day two weeks ago when they had taken him away. He would have gotten a message to his wife, or to her, unless he was dead—or in prison. Each day they waited, thinking he would be home today or tomorrow. Today and tomorrow and more tomorrows came and went, and no John.

  Her sister-in-law came to the shop every morning. When the door opened sharply at nine bells, Kate didn’t even have to look up.

  “Tell me he’s not dead, Kate. Last night I dreamed I saw his body in a winding sheet. Tell me John is all right,” she said, her large brown eyes overflowing while the two-year-old squirmed in her arms.

  “He’s not dead, Mary. I would know if he were dead,” she said, reaching for the boy who held his arms out to be taken. “That’s just your own fevered brain conjuring demons from your fear.”

  What she did not say was that at this very minute he could be undergoing the most grievous kind of torture or languishing in the Lollard prison, a horror she had first heard whispered about as a child. The Lollards had been persecuted for two hundred years, since John Wycliffe first called the Roman Church to account for its abuses and dared to call for the Scriptures to be translated from Latin into English so that every man could discern the truth for himself. Her family had been engaged in that struggle for liberty for almost as long.

  She buried her head in the boy’s blond curls, feeling its softness as she brushed the bone of the skull underneath with her lips. So hard, and yet so fragile. The baby smell of him reminded her of the baby Madeline.

  “If they had killed him, we would have heard about it,” Kate said to reassure herself as much as Mary. “Why else do it, if not to noise it abroad to strike fear in the hearts of their enemies?”

  “They say that Wolsey doesn’t like the killing. That he gives them a chance to abjure . . . but I’m not sure that John would—”

  “John would abjure for you, Mary. And for his son,” she said flatly, remembering the resolute look on his face as he had burned the books. “He would for you.”

  “And you do not approve.”

  “I don’t know what I would do in his place. But I know what our father did. He died in the Lollard prison because he stood fast for his beliefs. He would not deny that a man should have the right to read the Gospel in his own language, and he would not proclaim allegiance to a Church that taught false doctrines.”

  “And is that what you would have your brother do? Your father wasn’t the only one to suffer. What about you and John? What about your mother? She didn’t die of weak lungs. She died of grief. Whenever you speak of your father you have that same look of . . . worship on your face that John has.”

  At the word face, the boy put his hand on
Kate’s cheek and repeated the word as though they were playing the game they often played: nose, hand, face, ears. Her heart clutched with affection at the touch of his hand on her face.

  Her sister-in-law persisted. “Would you do it, Kate? Would you recant?”

  “I said I don’t know what I would do, Mary,” she said, feeling resentful that her sister-in-law was pressing her. “It would be as though our father died for nothing. And those before him. Our family has always been involved with reform. You know that. We grew up on stories of martyrdom and heroism. We inherited those stories along with that big old family Bible.” She looked down at Pipkin squirming in her arms. “But I do not have as much to lose as John.”

  Kate liked to think she knew what she would do, but who could ever know? Many brave men had broken under torture. How could a woman hope to endure?

  “Air,” said the child, pulling on Kate’s hair.

  “Here, take your little wiggle worm back,” she said as she disentangled his hands from her hair, then reached for her cloak on the peg by the door and struggled into it. “I’ll be back in time for you to go home before dark. If anybody asks for a Lutheran text, just say—well, you know what to say.”

  “I’ll say we no longer sell those. They are illegal,” she said, her chin thrust out, her eyes snapping with fire.

  Mary might be a gentle soul, Kate thought, but she had a streak of determination hard as iron.

  When Kate did not correct her, Mary asked, the harshness of her tone softened, her eyes once again soft and moist, “Where will you look today?”

  “Maybe down by the docks. The Hanseatic Merchants League. They might have heard something.”

  “Some ting.” The boy nodded, his face grown suddenly as solemn as the two women he trusted.

  But Kate turned her back. She could no longer bear to look at him. She opened the door and headed out to begin her search as she had each day for two weeks. The sharp March wind bit her neck, forcing her to pull up the squirrel-lined hood of her cloak. There was no such protection for the cold that squeezed at her heart.