The Heretic’s Wife

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

  “If Thomas More traps me, the cause will not suffer as it will if he catches you,” he said. And then lightening his tone to reassure his friend, “Besides, I am small fry. They have forgotten about me. And consider this, my friend”—he slapped Tyndale on the shoulder—“though you may write better than me, and translate faster, I am a better talker.”

  Tyndale laughed. “I cannot deny the verity of that.” But the laugh soon died as he said soberly, “First you’d have to gain the king’s ear. He has given safe-conduct to Robert Barnes, after Barnes sent him a gracious letter requesting that he be allowed to return to take care of business. Safe-conduct with no strings attached.” He too was watching the spider feed on its prey. He added, “But Robert Barnes has never incurred Thomas More’s wrath.”

  “Thomas More only knows my name, not my face. He wouldn’t know me if he encountered me on the street. I know Robert Barnes. He is a good man. I can go under disguise—maybe as his servant. That way the safe-conduct would cover me as well.”

  “If you are going as anybody’s servant, you’d best keep your mouth shut.” Tyndale allowed a small smile. “Servants don’t spout classical allusions for curses.”

  But John didn’t take Tyndale’s good-natured baiting. “When is Barnes leaving?” he asked, making up his mind.

  “This afternoon. A Hansa shipment is due to leave for the London Steelyard in about five hours—I’m proud to say it’ll be carrying something besides Flemish weavings. Barnes told me he planned to be on it. You could be in London tonight. If all goes well you might even be back before your wife returns. If you decide to go.”

  “Even if I can’t gain the king’s ear, I can spy out the lay of the land. I can surely get to Cromwell. We get such conflicting reports. Some say that More is losing his influence, that the Boleyn woman has influence over the king. It might be that some persuasive argument would win him over. He must at least be open to the idea. Why else would he have offered us pardon and a place at court?”

  “Take Chaplain Rogers with you,” Tyndale said.

  John shook his head. “Two would be in more danger than one. I’ll go alone. But, please explain the safe-conduct to my wife so she’ll understand why I left without telling her. Tell her I’ll be back as soon as I can and that I would like her to stay in the safety of the English House until I return.”

  “Never fear, John. We’ll keep her safe. You just watch out for yourself. Kate’s too young to be a widow.”

  Kate listened to Catherine Massys’s rhythmic breathing and longed for the sound of John’s gentle snoring. This was her last night in Leuven, and she was eager not just for the comfort of her bed but for the comfort of her husband’s arms. But she was glad she had come; she had particularly enjoyed meeting with Catherine’s friends. They were a group of very brave women.

  Because they had to be more secretive than in Antwerp—which was bigger, an important business center, and more tolerant, less watchful of such activity—a sharp edge of excitement sparked the Bible study of the women of Leuven. Children were not allowed. They might carry tales away. The women were mostly older, except for two: one who was unmarried and one who, like Kate, was childless. They received Kate into their sisterhood with smiles and hugs. Kate soon learned that these women took their faith as seriously as life and death. Kate marveled at their boldness—and their recklessness. Even Catherine squirmed when Berta, the oldest among them, after reading the Bible lesson railed against the black-robed Roman charlatans. Did it never occur to Berta that the stranger they trusted might be a spy for the Church?

  But Kate suspected they all knew this was no silly girl’s game they were playing. As Kate had helped Catherine arrange pillows in a circle on the floor in her room—“an upper room,” Charlotte, the pretty blond fräulein, called it—the women spoke of the ruses they used with their husbands. One of the regulars, a woman named Dora, had not shown up. Her husband had found out about the meetings and given her a black eye and threatened worse. It would be a while before she would be back. “But I know Dora. She will find a way,” Catherine had said soberly. How much they must have been like the earliest Christians, Kate thought—before a powerful Church hierarchy hid the simple, pure message preached by an itinerant Galilean carpenter in undecipherable language, carved stone, and hammered gold.

  Now remembering the woman whose husband had beaten her, Kate lay awake in the quiet darkness of that same upper room and breathed a little prayer of thanks for her gentle husband who had once jokingly promised “not to beat her.” To Dora and many women like her it was no joke. Yet even Kate’s husband, who believed as she did and risked his life to prove it, disapproved of the women’s meetings and would have been more content if she stayed at the English House sharpening his quills and fetching him cider.

  Was it a sin for Kate to want more? A sin to want to participate in a direct way in the cause? The priests preached—even some of the reformists—that women bore the curse of Eve, and so theirs was the lesser role. Was it a sin of pride that made her want to take the risks they took, make the difference they made? A sin of pride to think she even possessed the courage? That same sin—if sin it was—had put her on the river dressed like a man to do the work of a man, and God had rewarded that act by uniting her with John. And then another thought occurred to her that squeezed like a hot pincer on yielding flesh.

  Could it be that her woman’s pride was the sin that caused her baby to die in her womb?

  Was that God’s punishment? Rewards for good works, punishments for misdeeds: that was what the priests taught. But you don’t believe that, Kate Frith. A God of grace and mercy, even a God of justice, would not punish your innocent baby for your sins. And then another thought pushed its way in. But God might think such a willful woman not fit to be a mother.

  No. (Did she say that out loud? Catherine mumbled in her sleep and turned over.) Kate rejected such a notion out of hand. The Lutherans believed in grace, rejecting the image of God as harsh harvest lord with a whip in one hand and a bag of coins in the other, and she agreed with them.

  So why were her warring thoughts keeping her awake? Maybe because she was too stupid to figure it all out, maybe because she was a woman—no, if she was stupid, it was not because she was a woman. She’d been reading the translated pages of the English Old Testamant that John and Tyndale had been working on so hard. She’d found women there: strong women, like Judith and Deborah and Esther. And in the New Testament, too, there were Dorcas and Phoebe and Lydia of Philippi to whom the Apostle Paul addressed his letter: “I thank my God for every remembrance of you . . .” Brave women who also met to study and pray at great personal risk.

  One thing was sure. She did not have to deceive John as these Leuven women deceived their husbands. It was wrong to deceive him. She would tell him the whole truth, how their numbers grew with each meeting and how they were just as determined and just as serious as he and the fellows who had been locked up with him in that Oxford cellar. He would not forbid her. Of that she was sure.

  She fell asleep imagining him sleeping alone and wondered if he lay awake, missing her.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The spirit of error and lying hath taked his wretched soul with him straight from the short fire to the fire everlasting. And this is lo Sir Thomas Hitton, the devils stinking martyr, of whose burning Tyndale maketh boast.

  —SIR THOMAS MORE

  ON THE DEATH OF THOMAS HITTON

  He . . . is . . . breaking . . . the law! Your father, the greatest defender of the law in England, is disregarding it as though he is the giver of the law and not its keeper. The law is clear. All people charged with heresy are to be turned over to the secular authorities.”

  “But he is the secular authority,” Meg Roper said as quietly as she could, to calm her usually mild-mannered husband.

  “There are procedures—lawful, established due process—which he is flouting.” He pounded the table. Some of his morning porridge slopped out.

  “Shh,
William. The servants might hear you,” she said, wiping up the spill.

  He lowered his voice, but only a little. “He’s becoming deranged, I tell you. He has a morbid obsession with burning. First, there was that leather seller Phillips that he and his boot-licking bishop unlawfully interrogated at his ‘tree of troth’ in Chelsea’s own garden and continued to do so in clear violation of the law—even after the man was found innocent by a jury. And then that priest named Hitton—the first burning in eight years. Eight years, Meg, England had been free of the taint of smoke, and then your father is made chancellor.”

  “But that is just coincidence.”

  “It was an illegal search that put Thomas Hitton in the fire, and Thomas More delighted in the burning of a man whose only crime was that he had letters in his pockets to people your father called ‘the heretics beyond the sea’! Letters, Meg. A man was tied to a wooden stake and burned because he carried letters to William Tyndale.”

  Meg remembered uncomfortably the time when she had wandered into the garden uninvited and been scolded for her intrusion by her father, whom she had always thought the gentlest of men, and how more than once she’d heard strange cries coming from the porter’s lodge, another place where she and the rest of the household had been forbidden to go.

  “It’s all lies, vicious lies, spread by his enemies,” she insisted. “Every great man has enemies. He is lenient enough with your reform views. How can he be as bad as some are saying?”

  “Don’t be so blind, Margaret. The great Thomas More himself searched Petite’s Quay and imprisoned John Petite, a member of Parliament and a burgess of London, even when he found no banned books.”

  William tore off a hunk of bread and pointed it at her to punctuate his words. “Somebody better stop him. Somebody better talk to him. Even Wolsey didn’t break the law with such abandon. And Cuthbert Tunstall might have been a toady for the pope, but unlike Stokesley, he drew the line at torture and burning. When your father’s victims tell what he’s doing, he just gives that little smile of his and says that he is only trying to save souls. Between him and the new Bishop of London, there won’t be any souls left to save.”

  “Would you like some more porridge?” she asked, hoping to change the subject. “I’m sorry that’s all we have. Cook is busy making black puddings. You like black puddings.”

  But he would not be so easily diverted. It was as though a dam had broken, and the words just kept pouring out. She had no idea he carried such resentment for her father.

  “I know of a Cambridge book dealer named Nicholson who swears that Sir Thomas beat him for five days—five days—whilst he was tied to a post in his garden and had cords tied around his forehead until he fainted. You’d better talk to your father, Meg. You have some influence with him. Talk to him, if you love him. He’s becoming drunk with his own power.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Meg promised, just to shut him up. She was sure her father would have an answer for each and every one of the scurrilous charges.

  “When?” he asked pointedly.

  “When the time is ripe, William. I’ll confront him with the rumors, and then you’ll see he’ll answer all your charges.”

  “Maybe to your satisfaction,” he said, “but I doubt to anybody else’s.” And then he left the table abruptly without even giving her the usual peck on the cheek.

  The shocking news that John had gone to England without her, back into the mouth of danger without even consulting her, made Kate angry. Then it terrified her. When he returned a week before Christmas looking so ragged and unkempt she hardly recognized him, he hugged her so joyfully, she wondered if he was oblivious to the abandonment she’d felt, the terror he’d put her through.

  “There are more of the great unwashed masses than there are of prosperous men, my love,” he’d said. “The trick is to blend in among them without looking like a vagrant. Just your everyday yeoman laborer here,” he said, “anxious to get home to his wonderful wife,” and he kissed her. He smelled of the road, but his lips tasted honey sweet.

  “I even counterfeited a license to show that I am in the employ of one Sir Sidney Stottlemeyer,” he said when they separated. He reached into his leather pack and handed her the document so that she could appreciate his joke. “A beadle outside of Westminster actually said he knew the man, even though I just made up the name. ‘Great gray-haired worthy knight,’ I said, ‘with a mole right at the tip of his nose.’ ‘Yes, yes, I remember him well. Give him my regards,’ the poor fool said.”

  She examined the official-looking document he’d forged in his fine hand, wondering at her husband’s courage and resourcefulness. “Why did you need to show a license? We were never asked for such a document. I don’t recall our apprentice carrying one.”

  The smile vanished and a look that said as much of anger as she ever saw on her husband’s face took its place. “That’s the beneficent Chancellor More’s doing. He’s pushed a law through Parliament stating that any healthy person found outside his native parish without a license to beg or proof of employment shall be stripped naked, tied to a cart tail, and whipped publicly through the streets until his body is bloody.”

  Kate had a sudden vision of her brother’s back with its striped scars, followed by a vision of Margaret Roper defending the charity of her noble father. The old familiar anger welled up inside her.

  But anger could not long survive John’s innate good nature. He laughed as though it were all some great game and not a matter of life and death, as he pulled off the stained jerkin and sliced open the lining with a knife. Letters, dozens of them, came pouring out. “Each one is stuffed with money,” he announced proudly, “and words of encouragement and great affection for our cause.” His eyes were bright with excitement.

  He’d come back alone, he said, not waiting to travel under Barnes’s safe-conduct because he wanted to deliver the letters—and to see his beautiful wife, of course. He’d not been able to see the king, he said, but it would probably have done no good anyway. As chancellor, More was hellbent on burning every reformer in Christendom. When John started naming names of Bible sellers, Bible buyers, and Bible readers who had been interrogated by Sir Thomas More and Bishop Stokesley, her heart nearly froze with fear.

  “Do you remember hearing us talk about a man named Christoffel van Ruremund?”

  Kate shook her head.

  “He is . . . he was . . .” John said, “a Dutchman running pirated unbound copies of William’s New Testament into England. He wasn’t one of us, but he didn’t have to be. As long as William gets the Word out, he doesn’t care who gets the profit.”

  “You said ‘was’?”

  “More caught him. Shut him up in the Tower. He died there after one of the chancellor’s ‘interrogations.’ ”

  Her breath caught in her throat. “How did you hear that?”

  “There’s an inn down by London Bridge, the Sign of the Bottle, where the Bible men meet. I don’t know if you knew about it. Your brother probably did. They told me about Christoffel and a few of their other customers. The innkeeper’s wife warned me that the place was being watched by More’s spies.” He paused and took her by the shoulders, hugged her to him. “Don’t ever talk to strangers about what we do here, Kate. Even the women you meet with. Sometimes I wish you would just be content to—”

  “You know I wouldn’t,” she said before he could give voice to the protest she did not want to hear—especially now when he’d taken such a risk and not even consulted her first. “You’re the one who takes chances. You’re the glib one, preaching to every John and Tom that will listen to you, running off into the dragon’s lair.”

  “It’s just that the fewer who know us, know what we do . . . well, suppose this Christoffel broke under interrogation—lesser men have.”

  She thought of her brother, who had broken under the same wrath, and the shame and the horror she’d felt for his suffering.

  “If he knew where we were . . .”

  Tear
s stung her eyes at the thought of losing both her brother and her husband to Thomas More’s frenzied hatred. “Promise me you’ll never do that again,” she said. “Please.”

  He pulled her to him, kissed the top of her head. “I went down to Paternoster Row. I saw your print shop.”

  She looked up at him, genuinely interested, though she knew his ploy. He was trying to divert her. He had not promised. But she determined that if he went again, he would not go alone.

  “It still has a sign, GOUGH’S BOOK AND PRINT SHOP. A bit rusted and in need of paint.”

  “Was anybody occupying it?”

  “No. It had boards across the windows and doors. And a faded notice that said it had been sealed up because of the plague, with a crude drawing that was supposed to warn away those who can’t read—that’s what kept the vagrants out, I suppose. The notice bore Lord Walsh’s seal. I recopied it and put a new date on it.”

  “But you didn’t go inside.” She had a sudden wash of longing to see the little shop and climb the stairs to her old room beneath the eaves.

  “Of course I went inside. That’s where I stayed while I was in London. I pried a board loose and went in through the window fronting the alley.” He grinned at her. “I slept in your little bed, though it would have suited two better.”

  “How long were you there? Where else did you go?”

  “I didn’t stay in London long, just long enough to find out what I needed to know.”

  “And what was that?”

  “That if the Boleyn woman ever opened Henry’s mind as we thought, that window has closed. Last April he called together some of the clergy and they even discussed licensing an English Bible. Some, according to my sources at the inn I was telling you about, actually had the courage to argue for it, but More won the day. As long as More is chancellor, there will be no legal Bible,” he said soberly. “And yet, the Bibles are everywhere, from Gravesend to Bristol, from the noblest castle to the meanest hovel. One day, not soon, but one day—it is a freedom the people mean to have.”