The Secret Diaries of Juan Luis Vives

by Tim Darcy Ellis

  “Where is Mistress Roper?”

  William Roper had gotten close enough to hear us. “Mrs Roper is at home in bed. She has lost my child.”

  Why was he not there with her? Why were her parents and her sisters at court? Why was it his child, not their child? Sir Thomas seemed to catch my thoughts.

  “We have no choice but to be here. The king demands it.”

  The music grew louder, and the acrobats entered, leading a performing bear that would normally have struck fear in my bones. Cicely turned white and one poor woman collapsed in a heap. But there were stranger animals here, too: the king as King Arthur defending Guinevere, who could be no one else but Anne Boleyn. As all this transpired, the queen, unannounced, took her seat at the top table. I was tired of this charade, and all I could think about was Meg, alone in Chelsea.

  It was a commandment to visit the sick, so I had to go.

  I rushed back up the staircase to my room, grabbed my satchel, climbed out the window, and slid down a lead pipe. Dogs barked, but I bribed them with veal bones from the banquet. I showed papers to the groomsmen, knowing they couldn’t read them, and stole out through the side gate. I rode through the night, the ground quickly turning white with snow.

  There were guards at her gatehouse, almost asleep, huddled together like lambs. They recognised me and said, “The house is empty, sir.”

  “Not entirely. I’ve brought gifts from my wife to the Lady Roper. Please call for Dorothy. She knows me well.”

  Five minutes passed. Dorothy arrived in dressing gowns and a long coat. Older than she looked, she saw and heard everything that happened in the household. She knew of our bond, knew that Meg needed love. She let me through, though she would not disturb Meg tonight. But I had not come this far to wait. I crept from my room, shoeless, walked softly down the corridor, opened the door, and made my way to her bedside. She did not stir; her nurse was asleep on a couch.

  I stood and watched her for a while, the pale skin and highbrow. She sensed my presence before opening her eyes.

  “I knew you would come.”

  The nurse stirred, and Meg asked her to leave. Reluctantly, she did. We sat quietly with snow piling up outside her window, and the bedroom fire casting a reddish light.

  Finally, words came from some place deep within me. “How can it be? So together and yet so divided?”

  She reached out for my hand and pulled it to her cheek. My face was next to hers and I got in bed and lay next to her. She fell asleep again, and I lay there, just watching.

  The nurse returned in the morning with a tray of hot bread, a kettle of hot water, a pot of honey, and lemon. She shrieked when she saw me lying there. I jumped off the bed, grabbed my boots, and ran back down the corridor to my room.

  Later, Meg came and got me. She was weak but managed to walk through the corridors and empty rooms of her father’s house. At one point, our fingertips brushed past each other and our hands clasped tight, like a newborn baby’s around a finger. We talked about the summer at Bucklersbury, of angels and redemption, of an evening long ago when we fell half-asleep on the cushions in the courtyard.

  “Do you remember what the gypsy told me?” she asked.

  How could I have forgotten that she predicted that my dead mother would be killed?

  “I do.”

  “She said that the new queen would hate you, that new queen won’t be called Mary. Will she?”

  “Anne,” I said. “If not by Rome’s way, then by Henry’s. He’ll find a way to make her the new queen.”

  “Why will she hate me?” Meg asked.

  “Because you are cleverer than her and because the king will admire you, always.”

  Later, she spoke of the words of my books that had persuaded her that a free woman could affect change, that the voice of the woman must be heard. She apologised once again for speaking to Reginald Pole. I put a finger to her lips.

  “Will my father keep away as it all unfolds?” she asked. “Will he meet the same fate?”

  “I do not think so.”

  “But you, señor, will benefit from the changes?”

  I remained silent.

  “My husband will come. I don’t know when, but he can’t find you here.”

  I kissed her on the forehead and said my goodbyes. I wondered if this would be the last time. Although I had no stomach for the court and was tired of its intrigues and masquerades, I had to get back. That is where I am now, scribbling this down, for he has called for me at last, this very night, and soon I must go.

  3 January 1529

  I was passed from one group of guards to another like a confused little mouse being toyed with by alley cats. I was taken through passages and up stairways into the heart of the palace. His Majesty the King of England, in the dead of night, sat on a purple cloth chair and held a gold cup. He was writing something on a timber lectern balanced between the arms of his chair. There was a minute of enforced silence before he spoke, sighing heavily.

  “I did not give you leave from court, but I knew by the minute where you were. Do you think I do not know my own realm?”

  “Your Majesty, I visited Mistress Roper with gifts from my wife, for they’ve shown me such tender hospitality over the years.”

  “Shut up!” he bellowed. “There are more spies in court than you realise. And don’t pretend to be having another bloody fit. You think I don’t know about your fellow Jews and the grimy hole in Houndsditch? This is my realm. Mine! I know very well about your synagogue and the rescue from the Domus, and I know all about Señor Hayim known as Vives known as Lewis.”

  I knew this might be my only chance. I had to stay strong. “Majesty, I am your loyal friend and your supporter, and together—”

  “I have need of you, Lewis,” he said.

  “Indeed, you do, sir.”

  “You know about my great matter?”

  I nodded.

  “Then you know that the Book of Leviticus does not allow a man to marry the wife of his dead brother. You know the marriage was consummated and productive. But Deuteronomy says I should marry my dead brother’s wife and take care of her.”

  He wanted a Jew’s opinion, a rabbinical mind to make sense of this.

  I looked at him in the eye. “The bible is the word of man, not the literal word of God, though God’s intent is there if you search for it.”

  His countenance softened. “You are agreed that the annulment is legal before God?”

  “I’d need time to consult the Talmud and to interview you to see what’s in your intent.”

  “A Jew to interview the King of England? What treason is this?”

  An overwhelming sense of joy engulfed me, a freedom I’d not previously known.

  “So, you want your freedom here. The king of Spain won’t like it. Very well, Lewis. It is too late tonight. Tomorrow the Jew will interview the king.” He nodded to his guard. “Show the Jew his chamber.”

  In my father’s house, we were once told that sleep is one sixtieth of death, when a small part of the soul visits the other side. I think it’s true because that night a ghost spoke to me.

  “Stay true to your heart,” my father said. “Love your very being, the thing that was, that thing that is, and the thing that will be.” He then vanished behind the shutters of our whitewashed house in La Juderia.

  Dawn broke like a whisper. A pale light shone briefly through the grey sky of the English winter. As I peered through the windows, I saw a riding party return, the king at the head. He brought his horse onto the cobbles below and was soon back in the palace. Soon after that the men arrived. I was strip-searched and even had my buttocks parted, as if I could hide a knife there! When I got to his chamber, the men, bar one, were sent away. He was hot from the hunt and had the remnant of pickled fish on his breath.

  “Talk! That’s what this is, is it not
?”

  I asked him of his boyhood, his favourite pet, his mother and father, of the forests he ran through with his brother and sisters. His very being relaxed as he slumped into the purple-backed chair raised on the dais. I walked as I talked.

  “And what was your relationship with Arthur like?” I asked.

  “I could match him in archery or fencing, but his knowledge of Greek, of Latin—he was brighter, better.”

  “No, that only describes him. How were your relations?”

  “Cold, remote. Father’s boy. Arthur, the king’s best boy. And then he was gone. I was sad for mother, but it served Father right.”

  “You were glad for your brother’s death. How did the gladness of personal tragedy make you feel?”

  He looked at me as if I were mad. “I felt, felt like a cunt-ass. Does that make you a happy Jew?”

  “Cunt-ass, Your Majesty, is not a feeling. I asked you how you felt.” Had I stepped too far?

  “Good Jew, indeed.” The king could not help but chuckle. “So good that you’re bloody useless with women but easily distracted by them, or so I am told.”

  We were here to talk of him, not me. I waved my hand as if to say, “Come on.”

  “I felt pain and guilt for a while, but I vowed I’d never ever feel either again.”

  “But you feel them, don’t you—pain and guilt?”

  “Never! I knew God would raise me up above father and brother.”

  “Raise you up to be a great king?”

  ‘Yes, I still want to be a good king, not a pawn of the old guard or the pope, to show them what a king can do and to be a proud son for Mother.”

  “Your mother died before your father?” I asked.

  “That was the saddest day for this kingdom,” he replied.

  “Don’t you mean the saddest day for you? Then understand how the kingdom will feel if Queen Catherine is put aside.”

  “This is not why I have brought you here.” He banged his fist on the arm of the chair. “I have brought you to decipher scripture and obtain your support.”

  Here was my chance. This is what the brotherhood had been waiting for during the last six years. I had to make the King of England want something from us.

  “Campeggio is on his way from Rome to give you advice, is he not?” I asked.

  “What if I said Rome’s jurisdiction in this land is waning, that I’m after an older interpretation of scripture?”

  “I’d say you were very a wise, enlightened prince, that this realm could be a new utopia, a beacon, a model.”

  “Yes, yes, yes. But what do your books say?”

  I had to think hard, for how could I be a true Hebrew scholar when those texts were banned in my own home?

  “I can advise you with my head and my heart, but those two may give you quite separate answers.”

  “What does your head say, Jew?”

  “The Torah and Talmud tell me that the divorce can proceed, but only in a nation where Jews can freely live.” I was lying.

  “I knew it. But your heart, what does it tell you?”

  “My heart tells me that the people love the queen like a mother. It also tells me you’ll have to go carefully, or Princess Mary may one day exact a terrible revenge.”

  That fired him up. “She is my bastard daughter, one of many. She will not be queen, and Anne will give me plenty of sons. That much she has promised.”

  “No one can promise you that,” I remarked.

  “It is God’s will!” he said, rising in pitch. “And I know very well what the queen told you on the barge that day—that Arthur had her not just the once, but many times over.”

  My face fell. Anne Boleyn had heard and understood the words between the queen and me. I wanted to run.

  The king shouted at his one guard. “Bring in Raphael.”

  A door in the panelled wall opened and in came an old, tall man with a long grey beard and spectacles on a single eyepiece. This was a rabbi.

  “Look at his ring!” the king exclaimed. “And there it was, the third gold ring with the enamelled Star of David. I had kept mine hidden with my wife in Bruges. “This is Raphael, the great German rabbi.”

  I looked from the rabbi to king and king to rabbi. Their faces were empty, expressionless. This game had not gone as expected. What about our rights to live in this land? A small army to rescue my sister?

  “Shalom, rabbi… shalom,” I said. Was this the one who had brought the Talmud from Germany, the one I had seen in the king’s library? The king told me that he had called for him secretly and had not let him down once. I wondered how much the king had paid him. Why would he ask for my opinion if he had the rabbi’s?

  The rabbi stood there, looking like a wizard with his long beard and dark coat all the way to the floor. With a wry grin, he blessed me in Hebrew and asked in broken English, “How is your secret shule?”

  “Shule?” I asked.

  “Yes, your secret synagogue.” Caught as I was like a hare in a wolf’s den, I could not answer except in vague terms. “The family of Nuevos are well. Thank you for your concern.”

  “Spaniard, my spies are everywhere,” the king said.

  So, there was one among us in league with the king and his henchmen? Was it Ambrosius Moyses, the flirtatious musician? Benjamin Elisha? William Roper?

  “As long as you support your king, you will be safe. In time you will get what you want. You support your king, don’t you?”

  I remembered the queen and the princess. My head was a storm of conflicting thoughts and misplaced loyalties. Clarity deserted me, and I played for time.

  “You are my host, my king, and my friend. But why do you crave my support if you have the rabbi’s?”

  “They take you seriously—all of them. Erasmus, More, Wolsey, the queen. Look at de Praet. You turned him from lion to lamb, which is why Wolsey booted him out. I need men like you. You’re good, Jew. I always said it, and so I have your support, yes?”

  “I will always support my king in a realm where Jews may safely live,” I said.

  “Charles V—can you imagine his response?” the king asked. “And Sir Thomas and the bishops—they won’t like it either. Wolsey I can lose, but Thomas, no.”

  “But think of the gain—three thousand years of wisdom, the best scientists, physicians, and financiers. Sir Thomas must bend.”

  “Bend at the neck before he’d agree to it,” replied the King. After a moment’s contemplation, he said, “Then you will declare for me when I ask for it?”

  “On the condition that Jews may be allowed to return by a lawful means to find refuge in this land and in all the lands which the English settle,” I replied. “And I need a small army to take me to Valencia where—”

  “Good,” he interrupted. “The two great Jews agree. Vives, you will speak for me when asked. Be assured that no Jew will be burnt here so long as I am king.”

  “That’s a promise?” I asked.

  ‘Yes. None is to be burnt.”

  A guard ushered Raphael and me out of the room. We were in one of the antechambers with a small fire and giant candles. The king’s man stayed with us.

  “It has been many generations since our two branches were one,” I said to Raphael.

  “Perhaps forty generations,” he replied, blank-faced. Was he my friend or not?

  “May I call you brother?” I asked sheepishly.

  “Yes.” He smiled at last. “One day we’ll sound the great shofar for our freedom. We will all be brothers again.”

  “In this land?”

  “It will happen, and when it does it will be a most precious moment.”

  What I most wanted to know was when this would happen, but I knew I’d be told, “B’yi-to,” in its proper time. He had to be secreted away, back to German lands. His barge was waiting.

/>   The king knew of our meetings and gave his word that there would be no burnings. But was he frightened of the Spanish king or of upsetting Sir Thomas? Have I got any farther at all? With my sister still in the same danger, where can I turn for help?

  30 January 1529

  The king was friendly though his hands were tied. That’s the message I gave to Álvaro, to Benjamin, and to Señores Isaacs and Añes. They sat in a circle in the dingy cellar. Edward Scales studied an ancient fragment of a Torah scroll by candlelight. They listened with eager ears and bright eyes, like little children on the first night of Chanukah. No one reacted when I spoke of Rafael, the German rabbi. What did they know that I didn’t? Why did they need me?

  “I’ve got no army to take to Spain,” I said.

  “Don’t stop trying,” Álvaro said. “Go back to the queen. It’s my guess that she’s feeling it.”

  “Feeling what exactly?” I asked.

  “Guilt, desperation, fear. She doesn’t want to lose you. Use it. Work with it.”

  Álvaro handed me two letters, one from Bruges, one from Chelsea.

  Husband,

  It broke me that you would not be coming home for the season, that you would prefer to light candles elsewhere than here with your wife and family.

  If Mother weren’t so frail, I would board the next ship and find you somehow in that city I’ve never visited. I would cross the ocean for you, Juanito.

  Will you not give up the fight and bring me fruit and flowers on a Friday? Will you not be content with your writings and your plans, your hospitals and your schools? And the little one, he pines for his father. He prays that you’ll return. He prays so hard that he cries.

  Come home,

  Marguerite

  My mind returned to Bruges, to life in a slower city. I was building hospitals, writing prose, and teaching youth. I cast my eyes towards the other letter, the one from Chelsea. I pried open the seal, looked at the writing, and sank into my frame. It was not written in the hand of Meg.

  Señor Vives,

  You invaded the chamber of a miscarried woman, the private sanctuary of a wife. A warning: make your way overseas and quickly. If you value anything you have, then go.