The Heretic’s Wife (49 page)

It would not occur to Thomas until much later, after they had returned to the house in Milk Lane for a funeral feast attended by some very important people and presided over by his father’s now widowed fourth wife, after Thomas had lain sleepless for most of the night in his boyhood room, trying to wrap his mind around the realization that his father was not asleep in the great carved bed in the room below but in the cold ground of St. Lawrence chuchyard, after he realized that he would no longer pass his father in the halls of Westminster and kneel to pay his respects, that his father’s ambition had been fulfilled upon seeing his son Chancellor of England.

And now Thomas had to write the rest of the story himself. He had fulfilled his duty to his father. He was free to serve the Church.

“What do you think, John?” Kate said to her husband’s back as he was bent over his desk. She waved Catherine Massys’s letter of invitation in front of him. “Do you care if I go?”

He scanned the letter, frowned, and handed it back to her. “Are you sure this is something you really want to do?”

Translation: I would rather you didn’t.

“It would just be for a few days. She says I can travel both ways in the company of Quentin’s son and his wife. It will be perfectly safe. Leuven is only a day or so south of here.”

“A hard day. And of course I would care. I would miss you. What about your women’s . . . meeting?”

“Quentin’s son is leaving on Saturday after the Friday meeting, so I would only miss one. Just think how much work you could get done without me to distract you.”

“You never distract me.” He smiled and kissed her lightly. “It is the work that distracts me from you.”

“You are a silver-tongued flatterer, John Frith.” And she swatted him lightly on the shoulder. “But I’ve become so accustomed to your sweet talk I don’t think I want to be without it. I’ll just tell Catherine I appreciate the invitation to visit, but I can’t be away from my husband that long,” she said.

“That’s good,” he said.

But that night as she watched John laboring by candlelight over his translations, she reconsidered. “It would really only be for a few days. You would hardly have time to miss me,” she said.

“I will miss you the minute you are gone.”

He put down his pen and stretched. She walked behind him and massaged his neck, feeling the firm tight muscles relax beneath her fingers as he closed his eyes and moaned in relief. “You know, sweet wife,” he said between
umm
’s and
ah
’s “I think I already miss you, and you’re only thinking about going.” But when her fingers stilled, he picked up his pen and went back to work.

The day after his father’s burial, Sir Thomas More took to his Chelsea bed complaining of heaviness in his chest. All Dame Alice’s poultices and potions were of no avail to him. He lacked the strength to get out of bed. In his feverish dreams he was a boy again, lost and wandering in a dark wood, calling for his father who did not answer.

But on the fourth morning, his son-in-law Roper brought the news that, while the lord chancellor was involved with his father’s death and bound up in his grief, Cardinal Wolsey had been tried for treason and sentenced to
lose his head. When Thomas heard that Wolsey had cheated the executioner by dying on his way to the block, he smiled. At least the old reprobate had been spared the indignity of the headsman and managed to confound the king’s best-laid plans, yet again.

Thomas called for Barnabas to help him dress, and staggered, coughing and sputtering phleghm, down to his study. He drank Alice’s broth to get rid of her and then took up his pen. The fact that Wolsey had been convicted meant only one thing: Henry had decided to break with Rome. Maybe not today, or even tomorrow, but someday soon. Thomas More knew he would be called upon to choose between Crown and Church. This time the choice would be his. In the meantime he would fill the world with such a fury of refutation against the heretics that William Tyndale’s ears would burn as though the flames already scorched them.

Thomas would find his path through the dark wood. An imagined flame of a human bonfire would light the way.

The true heart of a wife [is the] preciousest gift that a man hath in this world.

—W
ILLIAM
T
YNDALE
ON THE
S
EVENTH
C
OMMANDMENT

T
homas Cromwell left the king’s privy chamber more chagrined than he was when he entered. The meeting with the king and the agent he’d brought at the king’s request had taken an unexpected turn.

Cromwell had not been happy when Henry asked him for the name of someone whose absolute loyalty and silence could be counted on, someone with open ears and a way of ferreting out information, someone on whom he could rely to go to the Continent and collect good opinion on his “great matter” to present to the pope. That could mean only one thing: if the king was still seeking influential testimony, then the break with Rome was not as imminent as Cromwell had hoped.

Sir Thomas Elyot’s name had come quickly to mind. Not that he was that reliable. But he was a noble acquaintance who needed employment, and Thomas Cromwell knew the value of granting favors to financially embarrassed parliamentarians. The king seemed pleased enough with the choice, instructing Elyot to report to Master Cromwell for any expenses he might incur during his mission. Cromwell liked the sound of that. It was good that
he was to be the paymaster; it would put the fellow even more in his debt—and keep him informed.

Thinking that was the end of the matter, Cromwell had bowed and was about to take his leave when Henry stayed him with his hand.

“You may be wondering, Master Cromwell, why in light of our recent conversations with you and Archbishop Cranmer, we are still seeking testimony in this matter. We are not. As you have advised, we have chosen another course.”

“But Your Majesty said—ah, I see. It is a ruse. Very clever of Your Majesty.”

He’d been worried for a moment. He cared not a saint’s knucklebone for the Boleyn woman, but getting shed of the Catholic queen could only be a good thing for the cause of reformation. And getting rid of Rome would be a good thing for the treasury—all that wealth, all that land and gold and silver owned by the Church and shut up in England’s monasteries and cathedrals. “Just think if the Crown had control of that, Your Majesty, and that neither the king nor his kingdom nor its archbishops nor bishops nor even its humblest parish priests would any longer be subject to Rome’s tyranny.”

It was an action bold enough to take the breath away.

Even Phillip the Fair of France had not dared go so far when he’d quarreled with Pope Urban, installing instead a French cardinal as the head of the Church in France. Cromwell had advised Henry against that historic precedent by pointing out the disastrous results. Christendom had wound up with two popes for a while—one in Rome and one in Avignon and then a third to overrule the other two.

“One supreme head,” he’d advised the king, “of both the temporal and the sacred. Then the king could grant his own divorce.” That was the seed Cromwell had planted in Henry’s head, the seed Cranmer had watered, and now it was close to sprouting in spite of Chancellor More’s fanatic clutching at the old order.

“You are right, Master Cromwell. Gathering testimonials is only a pretense,” the king said, idly examining his hands, adjusting his signet ring as though the matter were not important at all. “Master Elyot’s real mission is to seek out William Tyndale and John Frith. You will brief him on this mission in secret.”

Cromwell paused as he tried to figure what this might mean. He’d thought the ruse was simply intended to throw the Roman prelates off their guard, so as to catch them by surprise when Parliament declared Henry
VIII, King of England, the supreme head of God’s Holy Church in England.

“I do not understand, Your Majesty. Forgive me, but I thought that had already been done; Stephen Vaughan has already found them and brought back their answer.”

Cromwell was later to remember the look on Henry’s face and see it again many times in the next few years. It was a flash of anger, shocking and swift in its approach, like ragged ground lightning on a clear summer day. Just as dangerous and just as fleeting.

“Found them and lost them.” He waved his hand as if waving away a gnat. “Vaughan’s was a separate mission. Masters Tyndale and Frith have spurned the king’s grace. If you locate them again, you are to assist Sir Elyot—they are probably still hiding somewhere in the Low Countries, though they may have sought other cover by now—in bringing them back.” And then he added, “By whatever means necessary.”

“If I may ask, Your Majesty—”

“To stand trial for heresy, of course.”

“Of course,” Cromwell answered. But he really didn’t understand. He’d thought the king had been influenced in their favor by Anne Boleyn. Her influence was why he had offered them grace and favor in the first place. If he had now changed his mind because of the insult to his vanity, why not rely on the spy Thomas More and Bishop Stokesley had sent? Henry Phillips was a notorious ne’er-do-well. If anybody could trick them out of the protection of the English Merchants’ House, it would be he . . . unless the king no longer trusted Chancellor More.

“Your Majesty, Chancellor More has already an agent working on this, as I am sure you are aware.”

“Chancellor More is distracted.”

Why not fan the flames of More’s ill favor? Cromwell thought, as he said, “Distracted from the king’s business?”

“It just may be that though he is a layman, Chancellor More’s purpose lies more in Pope Clement’s interests than his king’s. Is the mission clear then?”

“Quite clear. Find Tyndale and Frith and bring them back by whatever means required.” Then sensing that this meeting had come to an end, he bowed. “Will that be all, Your Majesty?”

“That is all, Master Cromwell.”

As he left the privy chamber with Elyot in tow, it occurred to Thomas
Cromwell that the king’s favor was as mercurial as his moods. He would do well to remember that.

A spider had spun its web wide between two bushes in the courtyard of the English House. John Frith pondered the web’s gossamer symmetry, the strength of the almost invisible filament that anchored it to the bush nearest the bench on which he sat with William Tyndale. The sunlight slanted across the web, gilding the silken ribs of the gossamer edifice. It was a thing of beauty, not unlike the intricate splendor of a rose window in a great cathedral, John thought. A thing of beauty, but at the heart of that intricate beauty a black-robed spider devoured a struggling firefly at its leisure. John would have freed the hapless insect, but it was too late. The head of the firefly was already being slowly digested by the spider.