The Heretic’s Wife

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

  Her father had laughed when he said that, and added he hoped she didn’t have intentions of selling bloody pieces of his shirt. He wanted to keep his devotion private. That’s why he didn’t use the Chelsea laundress. Margaret had not minded. She’d been laundering his bloodstained shirts for years. But never had they been so bloody. This was no token ritual.

  “Why would you ask such a question, Margaret? If it’s all my blood? Have you been listening to devilish rumors?”

  “I just worry about you. As the blood on your shirts increases . . . your joy seems to be seeping out.”

  He smiled weakly. A smile that if it was meant to reassure fell short. “There will be time for joy later. When the hard work of the Church is done.”

  “The Church! You are chancellor, Father, not archbishop.”

  “Don’t be impertinent to your father, Margaret. It is a sin. But my duties as chancellor are not unlike the duties of archbishop. The state cannot exist without the Church. What is good for the Church is likewise good for the Crown.” His voice dropped off here, as though he was distracted by some unpleasant thought.

  “I’m sorry. I did not mean any disrespect. It’s just that there are rumors . . . that perhaps you are . . . too zealous in holy matters. More zealous than the law allows.”

  His voice hardened. “You would presume to instruct me in the law, daughter? I have taught you more law than manners, apparently.”

  She felt her skin grow hot beneath his withering glance. They were suddenly not father and daughter but adversaries. His eyes were cold, his voice controlled, completely devoid of that warmth and merriment she usually saw when they were together. It occurred to her, but only briefly, to think how she would hate to face such a prosecutor.

  “Of course I would not . . . it’s just that . . . William says—”

  “Ah, William says.” The look he gave her was so fierce it almost took her breath away. “What else does son-in-law Roper say? The man whose false theology I have allowed to infect my own household simply out of love for my daughter—tell me, daughter, what else does William say? How ill does he repay me?”

  Meg clutched the bloody shirts to her bosom, unaware that one had left a stain upon the pale blue silk of her bodice, unaware of anything except the shame and remorse she felt for causing her father pain.

  “Nothing, Father. William has nothing but the highest praise for you. He is very proud of you, as are we all.”

  He paused and looked out the window of his study where the season’s first snowfall was beginning to cover the ugly, scarred earth of a killer frost.

  “Winter is come again,” he said as though that fact surprised him.

  “Aye, Father. It is,” she said, relieved that the subject was ended. Nothing had changed; she had not persuaded him, but she had kept her promise.

  “You will need a new cloak,” he said. “The chancellor’s daughters should be arrayed as befits their station.”

  “You are very generous,” she said, thinking, how could the rumors be anything but false? He was a loving father and a just man. Was not his tolerance of William’s reform tendencies proof of that tolerance?

  “Would you allow me to put a soothing ointment on your back?”

  He laughed at that. “Well, that would somewhat undercut the act of atonement, wouldn’t it?” It was good to hear his laughter. She was trying to remember the last time she’d heard him laugh, when they were interrupted by the porter’s sudden appearance at the door.

  “Your guest has arrived, Sir Thomas,” he said.

  “I’ll be right there.” Thomas answered, leaping up from his chair. She watched in amazement as he hurried after the porter with all the energy of a youth.

  Barrister James Bainham proved not to be easily persuaded. Kate watched the stunned expressions on the faces of the translators as the merchant informers told how he had been subjected to More’s tree of troth, then racked until his body was crippled and ruined, and yet he had not recanted. But the news that his new wife had been thrown into the Fleet for not producing the Tyndale books when their house was searched, accomplished what his physical torture could not. He abjured.

  Kate remembered her brother, how he had recanted for the sake of his wife and child. Would John do as much for me? she wondered. Would I want him to? The merchants and translators and some of the refugees—the few who could be trusted—were holding weekly prayer meetings now for the sufferers back in England. Praying that she would never be faced with such a choice, Kate thanked God that John was not in England.

  THIRTY-ONE

  [A]ll the griefs, which the temporal (secular) men were grieved with should be put in writing and delivered to the king.

  —PARLIAMENT, JAN. 1532, CONCERNING

  COMPLAINTS AGAINST THE CLERGY, WHICH

  RESULTED IN LEGISLATION THAT LIMITED

  THE POWER OF THE CLERGY AND LED TO

  MORE’S RESIGNATION

  By March, Kate was sure that she was pregnant. The first morning she was sick, she laid it to the venison she’d had the night before—she’d thought she’d detected a gamey smell beneath the heavy spices the cook sometimes used to salvage what was marginally salvageable. John had left their warm bed in the emerging dawn to go down to the scriptorium, as they jokingly called the cluttered section of the hall that Mistress Poyntz tried to hide behind a screen. Kate was struggling to lace her bodice when without warning the nausea overwhelmed her. Before she could grab the chamber pot from beneath the bed, she splattered the offending venison onto the rush-strewn floorboards. She lay back on the bed until the nausea passed, then cleaned up the mess and went downstairs to see if John needed her.

  For the next few days she was able to stomach only stale crackers and weak cider. John had at first made a little joke about her sudden fondness for communion wafers, and then he’d started to worry. Kate ameliorated his concern by telling him that married life was making her plump, and so she thought that if she ate less, she might not lose her figure. Whereupon he’d slipped his arm around her waist and told her he’d love her if she grew as fat as the baker’s wife.

  By the time the thawing earth had birthed the first snowdrop, Kate no longer blamed the venison. At first she dared not hope and didn’t share her good news with anyone, not even the women in her study group—but more than once, John had come upon her daydreaming and commented that she seemed far away. “Just thinking how lucky I am to have such a talented husband,” she would say, or, “I’m dreaming of the coming spring.” This seemed to satisfy John, who would go back to writing his own work.

  He’d been working on the polemic for days, whenever he was not reading copy for Tyndale or translating passages. In it he argued that the doctrine of Purgatory was a recent construct of the Church, with no basis in Scripture, and that the bread and wine of the Eucharist were merely symbolic of the body of Christ. Kate understood the argument against Purgatory; it was the scaffolding on which the sale of indulgences was based, the means by which the common people were exploited and enslaved by a corrupt Church hierarchy. She didn’t, however, understand her husband’s insistence on spending so much time on the symbolism of the Eucharist. Even the Bible men, or “new men” as some called them, could not agree on the doctrine of transubstantiation. What did it matter if the participant thought the wine really turned into blood, as long as he thought he was taking into his body the spirit of Christ in an act of obedience? But John was utterly devoted to developing the fullest argument possible against the Real Presence of Christ’s body and blood in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. He already had enough to fill two volumes, and he was still writing.

  The masculine environment of the merchant boardinghouse was not a proper home for a new baby, she decided one day as the translators argued good-naturedly. The child needed a proper home. How to tell John? Unlike her, he loved the environment of the English House. But then he’d been trained at Cambridge and Oxford. The close living of the dormitory brotherhood suited him. Indeed, she feare
d that the news of the coming child might not be wholly welcomed by its theologian-turned-husband-about-to-turn-father. With the passing months, he’d seemed more relieved than bothered by their childlessness, laying it to God’s will each time she brought it up. Well, now that this child was an accomplished fact, and one he’d taken an active role in accomplishing, she would just remind him that this was also God’s will.

  By May, she was certain enough that she began to clumsily stitch crib clothes, and confided in Mistress Poyntz, beseeching her to purchase suitable fabrics. When Mistress Poyntz returned from the market, she summoned Kate to her room and laid the soft linen for swaddling cloths out on the bed.

  “I couldn’t resist this,” Mistress Poyntz said, and it was almost as if she read Kate’s mind. “No, you will not pay for this. This is a gift.”

  Kate fingered the silk and lace of a tiny little bonnet with disbelief. It had been three months—two weeks past the time when she had lost the other child. It was going to happen; they were going to have a child. The tears welled in her eyes and spilled over, running down her cheek. She sniffed and brushed them away.

  “You have to tell him, you know,” Mistress Poyntz said, reaching for her hand.

  “I know,” Kate said between sniffs. “I was just waiting until—”

  “Until you were sure you wouldn’t lose this one. But you can’t really ever be sure of that, my dear, not until you are holding the child, and he is tugging at your nipple like a hungry little savage.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Kate said. “When the time is right, I’ll tell him.”

  It was the last straw, Sir Thomas thought, as he strode from Parliament House down to the Westminster Stairs to hail his boatman. The session had ended and he had lost. Cromwell and the king had won it all. Parliament had made Henry the sole power in England, stripping the bishops of everything—even the power to arrest heretics. That, too, now rested with the king. If Chancellor More wanted someone arrested for heresy, he must go through Cromwell and not Bishop Stokesley. Hah! That was a fool’s errand.

  A commission was to be formed of half lay men and half clerics who would decide all Church matters, including cases of heresy. With Cromwell’s Lutheran sympathies and the Boleyn woman pushing the king for leniency, there was little likelihood of maintaining recent progress. Thomas More’s campaign for the protection of the one true Church had stumbled badly.

  By arguing for the bishops, who were too craven to plead their own cause, and against Henry, he had risked everything. He had already lost the king’s favor over the great matter of his divorce. Now with this failed parliamentary campaign in favor of the bishops’ maintaining their power and privileges, he had incurred the king’s wrath. But so be it. Thomas More had been true to that which mattered to him most in the world. There would be no coward’s stain on his honor. Consequences be damned.

  He had to call the boatman twice. “Richard!” Sharply the second time, accompanied by a swat on the shoulder from a rolled-up writ.

  The boatman, who was sleeping on a bench beside the stair, jumped up. “Begging your pardon, my lord. I had not expected you so soon.”

  “My business here is finished,” Sir Thomas said curtly. “Take me home.”

  If the boatman heard any finality in his voice, he did not voice it.

  As the boatman rowed silently up the sun-dappled Thames toward Chelsea, Sir Thomas did not notice the perfume of apple blossoms in the air or feel the warm breeze against his skin. In his heart it was still winter. He plotted his next move in his own great matter, and he was glad his father was not alive to see it.

  “I am sorry it has come to this, Thomas,” the king said two days later, after the clergy had acquiesced in Convocation. (They had little choice given their craven natures, Thomas thought. Cowards all—except Bishop Fisher, who alone had stood with Thomas against the tide. Even Stokesley was strangely silent.)

  Thomas found the king in the garden at York Place, playing with the dogs beneath a shower of pink petals. Wordlessly, Thomas handed him the white kid bag containing the chancellor’s seal and chain of office. Judging from the laboring of Henry’s breath, His Majesty’s body was overheated from the exercise, but his voice was chilly.

  “I had thought, by appointing a layman chancellor, to avoid such adversarial circumstances,” he said, falling heavily onto a bench beneath a canopy of blossoms. He indicated that Thomas should sit beside him.

  “It is my health, Your Majesty, which as you know has not been good since my father died. I cannot under such circumstances serve Your Majesty as Your Majesty deserves.”

  Henry laughed, but Thomas knew that laugh. He’d heard it when he refused to sign the king’s petition to the pope. It was a laugh that carried no mirth.

  “Pretty words. You are a complicated man, Thomas,” Henry said, accepting the bag, then flinging it on the bench between them as though it were a small thing and not the symbol of the second-most powerful man in the realm. One of the great mastiffs came up to him, and he scratched it behind its ears. The dog stood at attention.

  Thomas said nothing. When no persuasive argument could be made in one’s defense, saying nothing was the least objectionable option.

  “I miscalculated in making you chancellor, Master More. I had grown exceedingly weary of stumbling over clergy, always at my head and foot and side, whichever way I turned. I thought with your appointment to be rid of this unceasing intrusion into affairs of state.” He sighed, exhaling such a great breath the dog’s hind leg quivered. “But now I see that you have more clergy in you than any archbishop I know.”

  He stopped scratching the dog’s ear. The dog sat obediently at his master’s foot, so quietly he might have been carved in stone. His companion, a bitch with skin the color of smooth ale, lay some few feet away, watching, her ears peaked as if waiting for a signal.

  Even the dogs will not challenge his discipline, Thomas thought. You have not as much sense as they do.

  “It is my health, Your Majesty, only my health, which prompts me to surrender the seal. I simply wish to retire in peace,” he said quietly.

  “And I wish to abdicate the throne and move to France to be a bootblack to Francis I,” Henry said just as quietly, each word heavy with sarcasm and threat.

  Then the king stood up and, whistling to his dogs to follow, strode back into York Place, leaving Thomas alone on the garden bench with the white kid bag holding the abandoned symbol of power.

  “You are getting fat as the baker’s wife.” John laughed as he patted his wife’s gently protruding stomach beneath the light linen of her summer shift. “But I’m glad the sickness has passed. I like seeing you eat again,” he said.

  After she’d told him her news, he’d gone down to the kitchen to pilfer a bit of dried apple and cheese and bread—“and buttermilk if there is any, please.” He’d come back with it all, the buttermilk too, and now they had it spread out between them on the bed in a midnight picnic. He watched her now as she munched.

  “What are you looking at, John Frith? Haven’t you ever seen a woman eat before?”

  “Not like this,” he said, laughing as he reached up and wiped the milk mustache from her upper lip, then licked his finger clean.

  She leaned across the spread of food between them and kissed him. “I love you, husband,” she said.

  “You say that now,” he said, nibbling a slice of dried apple, then offering her the other half. “But when the child comes, you’ll only have eyes for him . . . or her.”

  “Well, I won’t, but if I did you’d hardly notice. You have your work and your friendship with William and Chaplain Rogers and the gang of merchants that promote your cause.”

  “Our cause,” he corrected her. “And I will notice.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t want the baby,” she said, abandoning her food lust, suddenly hungry for reassurance. “That’s why I waited so long to tell you.” She watched him carefully, alert for the flickering glance, the lowered eyelid. She would
know if he lied to her to protect her feelings.

  His gaze did not waver. “I want only what you want,” he said. “And I will try with all my heart to be a good father.”

  That was a good enough answer, but somehow, unlike the victuals of the midnight picnic, it left her vaguely unsatisfied.

  She was in her fifth month when he told her he was leaving to go back to England. It was mid-July and hot at midday. John had taken to walking with her in the shade of the garden each day, at first so careful and solicitous of her that she felt cramped until she reassured him that this time would be different.

  The roses were in bloom and there was a turf bench beneath a plane tree. “Let’s linger here a minute before we go back in,” he said. “Tyndale is out on one of his charity runs, and Purgatory can wait.”

  He spread his handkerchief so she would not get grass stains on her skirt and held her hand as they sat side by side on the grassy bench.

  “I felt the baby kick this morning,” she said. “It was the strangest thing, a little like a butterfly flutter. My heart fluttered with it.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t just bilious humors from all the strange foods you’ve been eating lately? You said you didn’t like pickled herring, and last night you ate your portion and half mine.”

  “Your half went to the baby. Apparently he—or she—likes pickled herring. You don’t begrudge it, do you?”

  He laughed. “I can begrudge you nothing. You could have taken it all—you know that.”