The Heretic’s Wife

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

  She wiped her eyes, her little wallow in the slough of self-pity momentarily banished by her curiosity. She unfolded the yellowed parchment and squinted to make out the faded ink. No brilliant pigments here but just a few words written in the familiar hand of the rest of the Bible and centered like a poem in the middle of the page.

  My dearest Anna, please hold these words in your heart until you believe them: “All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. For this is the great deed that our Lord shall do, in which He shall save His Word in all things—He shall make well all that is not well.” These are the words of a holy woman I once knew. Now that I am an old man I understand them better—though not completely. I spent so many years grieving that I sometimes overlooked the treasure that I had been given in you. I hope one day you will understand these words too. I hope you know that I have always loved you. You were the fulfillment of this promise in my life.—Your loving grandfather, Finn.

  Anna squinted at the date: 14 June 1412—over one hundred years ago. She had a sudden curiosity about this Anna. Had she found all things well? Had she even found the note? They had certainly never found it in all the years they’d had the Bible. Had it lain, hidden for over a century, perhaps a message to her and not to the Anna for whom it was intended?

  In which He shall save His Word in all things, the note had said. What would John make of it? Would he see the reference to the “Word” as affirmation, or would he read it as condemnation? He had certainly been carrying out the family tradition of helping save the Word—at least until recently. Or did the “Word” refer to some promise that had more to do with the hope that was carried in the Word than the actual preserving of the Scriptures? It was a cryptic message—hard to decipher without knowing the writer and his Anna, this ancestor who might have been bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh.

  She wrapped the great Bible back up and hid it beneath the hearth, then placed a big iron pot over the loose stone. She placed the note there, too, but separate from the Bible; even if she sold the Bible, she would keep the note. It was like a gift from the past to give her courage. “All will be well,” she repeated, and then, “He will make all things well.” But Kate needed hope now, not when she was old. She needed money and she needed somebody to love and be loved by. If He was going to make all things well now would be a good time to start.

  The only place she knew to make discreet inquiries about selling the Bible was down on the docks. John had often had dealings with a man named Humphrey Monmouth of the Merchant Adventurers League. He would know where she could sell the Bible. There was still light enough to go there and be back before dusk.

  At least it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

  SIX

  A purgatory! There is no one only, there are two. The first is the Word of God, the second is the Cross of Christ: I do not mean the cross of wood, but the cross of tribulation. But the lives of papists are so wicked that they have invented a third.

  —JOHN FRITH IN RESPONSE TO THOMAS MORE’S

  WRITINGS ON THE DOCTRINE OF PURGATORY

  Don’t stir, Alice,” Sir Thomas More said to his sleeping wife. “Cook will give me a cold biscuit and a cup of tepid milk.”

  Dame Alice didn’t stir. He slapped the bulky mound of his wife’s hip underneath the linen coverlet.

  “What’s it? Thomas—”

  Her scowl was not something every man would want to wake up to.

  It was Tuesday—one of the four days that the king’s council met each week. Thomas More had risen early, before his household was astir, and gone outside to summon a waterman to convey him downriver to Westminster. The cool morning air caressed his face. The summer had been an unusually hot one, and he was not looking forward to leaving his Chelsea paradise for sickness-infested London—not even for the grandeur that was Westminster Hall. Reluctantly, he’d gone back inside to collect his papers and bid his wife good-bye.

  “I said, Alice, no need to make a fuss that your lord and master is going off to labor for your bread.”

  She opened one eye only. “The only thing laboring will be your stomach at His Majesty’s board, I’ll wager.”

  Thomas sighed. Tongue like an adder and not even fully awakened. One had to admire such a supple if biting wit, he supposed. In a great beauty one might even tolerate it amiably. But Alice was no beauty by any stretch of a man’s imagination and hardly young, older than he by some years and not overly inclined to intellectual pursuit. Yet in spite of those shortcomings, she was a suitable enough wife. Laying her scolding tongue aside, she supported him in his ambition, and she knew how to run the house of a great man. The servants held her in greater respect than they did him. In matters at Chelsea her word was law.

  Besides, if she had been a winsome maid with soft thighs and milk-white skin and shining hair—he squeezed his shoulder blades beneath the hair shirt—how could he ever do enough penance for his carnal thoughts, let alone his pleasure?

  His wife raised her head from the pillow, her nightcap as askew as the drunken judge’s cap whose case was on today’s docket. He suppressed a laugh. One ridiculed Dame Alice at one’s peril. She opened both eyes and locked her cloudy blue gaze onto his as he bent to plant a dutiful kiss on her forehead.

  “You’d best tell me now if you’ll be bringing anybody back like that Dutchman you’re so fond of or that portrait painter.”

  “Would that I could bring Erasmus back. Or even Holbein. They would offer intellectual diversion. Everybody who can walk has fled London because of the sweating sickness. I’m afraid, dear wife, you’ll have to be content with my poor company.”

  She sat bolt upright in the bed, eyes wide with outrage. “You’re a fool, Thomas More. Did you just hear what words came out of your mouth? All of London is fleeing, and here you go tearing hell-for-leather right into the heart of pestilence so that you can bring it back like some proud gift to your family.”

  “Take care, Mistress More, that you do not o’erstep your bounds,” he said, shrugging into his surcoat. His tolerance of her harping mood wore thin whenever she questioned his familial devotion. He did everything for his family. “A man must do his duty whether it is convenient or not,” he said. “Besides, what pestilence could thrive on that acid tongue of yours?”

  She lay back down and pulled the sheet up to her chin. “You’re a great one for duty. I’ll give you that,” but it did not sound like a compliment. “Go off with you, then. Have it your own stubborn way. When have you not? Your duty and your legal reckonings and ciphers may be important, but I’d not put too much faith in them. In the end it’s people that count.”

  “My legal reckonings and ciphers have served you well enough, my lady. I’ll not put my faith in people.” He reached for his favorite hat. “The king whose favor we currently enjoy would not hesitate to put my head on the block if he thought one castle could be gained by it. No. I’ll put my faith in the law. It is not fickle. You should do likewise.”

  He sighed, wearying of this verbal sparring that had become their language.

  “I’ll try to return before bedtime,” he said.

  “Ever the dutiful husband,” she muttered, as turning on her side, she pulled the sheet over her head.

  Thomas noticed, as he entered the first of the eight rooms that must be navigated on the way to Westminster Hall’s Star Chamber, that the usual traffic was absent. He had grown accustomed now to the rich furnishings, the tapestries, gold candlesticks and sconces, the gilded ceilings, even the star-studded ceiling of the aptly named Star Chamber where the council met, but they looked grander emptied of their human detritus. When he opened the door to that great legal chamber, he was somewhat taken aback. This room, more sumptuous than the others in its rich tapestries and gilded ornaments, was empty.

  Except for Wolsey. He sat alone in the center, ensconced upon the chancellor’s woolsack, his scarlet cardinal’s robes spread out like a courtesan’s skirts. The scowl on his face gave him the look of a giant red toad, a giant red to
ad who held an orange pomander ball to his nose to ward off the sickness that he was sure was about to enter the room. When he saw it was only Thomas, the scowl gave way to a half-smile, and he put down the clove-studded orange. Its spiced fragrance competed with the herbs scattered on the floor, weighting the stale air of the closed chamber with a cloying odor.

  “Thomas,” the cardinal said in the tone that he used when especially gratified by some fortuitous turn of event. “It appears others are not as conscientious as you and I. We have no quorum so I’ve cleared the dockets. The sergeant at arms has sent all the supplicants and prosecutors back to their respective dunghills. They will not spread their infection here. I did not send a messenger because I knew you would be already in route, and besides, I wanted to see you.”

  He heaved himself up from the woolsack and went over to the table where the writs were usually processed. “Take a seat, Thomas,” he said affably—he could be jovial when his temper was not raised, or when it suited his purpose—“there is a small matter I would discuss with you.”

  Thomas steeled himself against what he knew was coming: a request for his intervention in the king’s “great matter.” The cardinal sat down heavily across the table from him.

  “Concerning the king’s divorce from Queen Katherine, Thomas, His Majesty is bothered that you do not join your voice to his cause. And I would like your opinion as well.” He said it lightly, as though the subject had never been broached between them and they were only engaged in an afternoon’s gossip. Thomas knew a trap when he saw one. If he said he thought the king should have his divorce, then his recruitment to that cause would be taken for granted. If he said he thought it a sin to put aside a wife of twenty years in favor of—well, that way certainly was perilous.

  “I have no opinion, Eminence, other than a legal opinion.” Thomas sighed. “And that you already know.”

  “A careful answer. But so there can be no misunderstanding between us,” Wolsey snapped, all joviality gone, “give me your legal opinion once again, now that we are alone, just the two of us.”

  “The fact that you and I are discussing this in seeming privacy does not change my answer. It is not lawful for King Henry to divorce the queen and marry Anne Boleyn unless the pope grants dispensation.”

  Wolsey considered quietly, forming his full lips into a pout. “That is not helpful, Thomas,” he muttered almost as to himself. “There are many forces against this king. I have heard even of a holy nun from Kent who prophesied that if the king divorces the queen, he will die and his kingdom will come to ruin. Have you heard this, Thomas?”

  “I have heard somewhat of that. It is women’s gossip. I take no stock in such ravings.”

  “Wise, Thomas. That is wise.”

  Sweat beads adorned the cardinal’s upper lip. It was a warm day to be clothed in cardinal’s robes and a sable scarf, but Thomas figured Wolsey would sweat on a mid-winter’s day clad only in his shirt—if the question of the king’s great matter came up. All Wolsey’s attempts to petition the pope had been in vain. Henry’s Spanish queen was very well connected—better connected than the great English cardinal and chancellor, apparently.

  The cardinal wiped his brow with a silk handkerchief. “You are not quite off the hook yet, Thomas. I have another matter that requires your legal opinion. And as you are steward of Cardinal College at Oxford this matter imputes to you a professional interest.”

  Well, at least this was safer ground, Thomas thought.

  “A bit of a problem has arisen with some of the students, some of the scholars who have fallen under the Lutheran influence. Have you been informed of that?”

  “I’ve heard somewhat about it,” Thomas said. “But I thought all that was put to rest back in the spring with the bookseller Garrett’s arrest. I assumed the students were disciplined and made to see the error of their ways.”

  Wolsey heaved himself up and began a slow pacing, his full robes swishing on the floor. “They were disciplined. Therein lies the conundrum. As to seeing the error of their ways, that’s an entirely different matter altogether. Do you know a student by name of John Frith?”

  Thomas shook his head. He really didn’t have much to do with the day-to-day affairs of Oxford, though his title carried a good stipend.

  Wolsey sank down onto the woolsack and stared into the middle distance, past Thomas. “He’s a brilliant young scholar. Ironic, isn’t it, Thomas, that some of the brightest Cambridge students that I recruited to seed my new college at Oxford, now repay me with these little intellectual excursions into heresy? You will hear of young Frith, you may mark it, if he’s still alive.”

  “What do you mean, ‘if he’s still alive’?”

  “It seems in disciplining them Dean Higdon may have gone a bit further than was prudent.”

  “How so?”

  “He locked Frith and four or five others in a cellar beneath the college.”

  “Well—I suppose that was within his powers of discretion. They are students—”

  “For three months.”

  “Three months!” Thomas repeated the words to make sure he’d heard the chancellor aright. “Without due process? Without even a hearing? Eminence, I’m surprised you would allow—”

  “I did not allow it, Master More. They were apparently forgotten about.”

  “What are the conditions in the cellar?”

  “Not good. I’m told it is used for storing salted fish. Not a very pleasant place.”

  “Let them out immediately,” Thomas said.

  “It’s not that simple, I’m afraid.” The cardinal twisted the large seal ring on his fat sausage finger. “A couple of them have died. Probably of the sweating sickness, but . . .”

  Thomas’s mind began to whirl. This was stupidity on the part of both the college and the cardinal, but it was a stupidity that would accrue to his reputation since he was steward of the college.

  “Tell Dean Higdon to notify their families immediately,” he said. “Express sympathy that they have died. And say because of the contagion within the city, their bodies have already been buried and the college will pay for the families to visit the gravesites et cetera, et cetera. Say nothing about the conditions under which they died.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Release them immediately.”

  “But surely they will shout it abroad that they were unlawfully imprisoned and ill-used.”

  “How many are still alive?”

  “Two or three, I think.”

  “Two or three? Which is it?”

  The cardinal lowered his head like a ram about to charge, warning Thomas that his tone was offensive. His lips barely moved as he said, “Frith and Betts and I can’t remember the name of the other one.”

  Thomas looked away. One did not interrogate the chancellor of England in the same tone one took with a common criminal at the bar, he reminded himself. “Be reassured, Your Eminence. This is manageable,” he said with soothing tones.

  “I was sure we could count on you for this at least,” Wolsey said, pursing his lips.

  Thomas ignored the barb. “These students have not only broken the law of the school but they have broken the law of the land. For this latter they shall have their due process: official interrogation and then a charge of heresy. When the law is done with them, they’ll be in no condition to shout anything abroad. I can virtually guarantee they will be begging to kiss the pope’s jeweled slippers.”

  “All done within the law?”

  “Always within the law, Eminence.”

  Wolsey smiled. “Your reassurance has given me an appetite,” he said, the joviality returned. “The king has invited us to dine in his chamber.”

  Thomas hesitated, wondering if he dared offer an excuse.

  “You do not need to look so uncomfortable, Sir Thomas. He will not broach the subject of the divorce with you—not in company. Sounding you out and persuading you to our side on that matter is my job.”

  “Your Emin
ence—”

  “Say no more,” Wolsey said, holding up his hand, “lest I feel my temper rise. And that might interfere with my digestion. You would not want that on your conscience now, would you?”

  “Not for all the world,” Thomas said, smiling, “for that would interfere with mine.”

  Kate was glad as she approached the merchants’ hall that she had decided against taking the Wycliffe Bible with her. Such a large parcel would attract the curious—and besides, it was heavy. It was a very hot day. The sweat was already running down between her breasts and the crease between her shoulder blades. If Monmouth wanted to buy the Bible from her, surely he wouldn’t mind stopping in at the bookshop—former bookshop, she thought wryly—to pick it up. But when she inquired at the guildhall, the sergeant at arms told her that Sir Humphrey was probably down at the docks.

  She paused the briefest moment to consider whether or not it was prudent to go down to the docks alone. Shielding her eyes against the sun that glinted off the Thames, she glanced in the direction of the crates and barrels and sacks piled up dockside. Only one or two men labored in the noon heat, unloading what looked like grain sacks, and they were too busy and wilted to pay her any attention. In the distance she saw Sir Humphrey. She recognized him by his fancy clothes, though in the heat he looked more hot than splendid. Poor man. Kate had seen him twice before when he’d come to speak to John. His wife had come with him once and she’d been likewise absurdly overdressed. From what Kate remembered of the wife’s manner, Sir Humphrey probably thought it easier to go about in heavy leggings and padded doublet during the height of summer than to incur his wife’s sharp tongue.

  Sir Humphrey was coming from the direction of the lone ship docked in the sun-sparked river. Above his large lace collar his face wore an expression of intense satisfaction. He was perusing a small book. He smiled broadly, then quickly secreted the book inside his voluminous doublet, causing her to wonder if perhaps his extravagant dress served another purpose than to please his wife.