The Queen's Lady (56 page)

She ran down the path to the wicket gate and dashed back to Jinner at the stable. They grabbed their horses from the startled groom, and fled.

It was hot noon. Sir Thomas More pressed his palm against the window casement. The stone was cold, refreshingly cold. It helped a little; the trembling of his hand lessened.

He was standing alone in a dim second-story room of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace of Lambeth and looking down on a large garden where twenty or thirty clerics were milling—bishops and abbots, their chaplains and clerks. Some had already been inside to stand before the commissioners, then had returned to the garden to chat with colleagues awaiting their turn. All had been summoned here, like him, to swear the Oath.

More watched the churchmen, faintly sickened by their behavior. They strolled the paths arm-in-arm. They gossiped on benches. They laughed under apple trees and hailed one another at intersections in the hedges. To him, standing above them, their faint chatter sounded both flat and frantic, like so many bumblebees droning in the heated, garish foliage. He had to narrow his eyes at the glaring sunlight that seemed to throb off the scarlet flowers and glossy emerald leaves, off the blinding brass of the sun-dial and the hectic clerical silks. Finally, he drew his head back into the cool gloom. No. He felt no impulse to join that sweaty, grinning throng.

He knew the commissioners downstairs had hoped he would. “Why not walk a while and think,” Audeley had suggested. Audeley, his dull-witted successor as Lord Chancellor. Oh, yes, More thought, the commissioners’ expectations had been obvious: once in the garden and bantering with the others, my resolution would surely falter.

The others. He wondered again why he had been called in with this body of clergy. He was the only layman among them. Already, commissioners had sped out to every shire in the realm, marshaling justices of the peace to administer the Oath to every Englishman. Cromwell, with characteristic thoroughness, had organized the unprecedented action. Why, then, have they brought me in with these illustrious churchmen, he asked himself, when I could just as easily have been approached at home in Chelsea? Did Cromwell intend it as an honor? Or a threat?

“Walk and think,” Audeley had said.

But More had done with thinking, and had come instead to this cool stone chamber.

He looked at his hand. It still trembled on the casement. Around his fingers he could make out, on the stone, traces of the fire that had threatened the palace years ago. Faint smears of soot, mere shadows, curled in crevices between the blocks. That fire had been long ago, he thought, and yet, like skin that has been scalded, the scars remain, though on skin they would show tough and white, and on this stone, a ghostly black. He felt the shudder leap inside him again, beginning at his heart and trembling down into his bowels where a primordial panic squirmed. Would violence done to his body leave indelible scars like this? The shudder increased the tremor of his hand and again he flattened it against the stone to stop it. But the fear in his bowels would not be quelled.

He closed his eyes and forced himself to re-examine the scene he had just played out with the commissioners. Had he made any slip?

“May I see a copy of the Oath?” he had asked them. Refusing a chair, he had stood before their table: Audeley, Cromwell, Archbishop Cranmer, William Benson, Abbot of Westminster, and a few others. More’s skin had prickled at the sight of the last face at the table: Jerome Bastwick, the King’s new almoner.

Politely, they had showed him the printed Oath with the Great Seal of the Realm affixed, and a copy of the Act of Succession. Politely, they had let him read in silence.

The Oath made reference to the Act of Succession which stated that the swearer would “bear faithful obedience to King Henry’s heirs by his most dear and entirely beloved lawful wife, Queen Anne.” More had felt a jolt of hope. Would they be satisfied if he swore simply to the royal succession as decreed by Parliament? With that he had no quarrel. Succession was a temporal matter, and Parliament was well within its rights to fix it on whatever heir it chose. It had done so many times, over several hundred years.

He read on: “Ye shall observe, maintain and defend this Act and all the whole contents and effects thereof, and all other Acts and Statutes made since the beginning of this present Parliament.” His stomach tightened. Here was the quicksand. “. . .
all other Acts and Statutes
. . .” The lengthy preamble of the Act of Succession itself declared that the King’s marriage with the former Queen Catherine had been invalid from the beginning since it had been made against the laws of God. For More to accept the Act of Succession, then, was to accept that the Church had erred. Worse, other Acts of this Parliament recognized the King as Supreme Head of the Church in England, and for him to accept that was . . . impossible.

For a moment, standing before the commissioners, he shut his eyes to subdue the shudder and in that moment a high-pitched laugh from the garden pierced the room, a laugh rich and ribald. More raised his head, eyes open. “My lords,” he said, “I cannot swear this Oath.”

Along the table the commissioners glanced at one another as if unsure of what they had heard.

“Cannot?” asked Cromwell.

“My conscience will not allow of it.”

“The law of the land requires it,” Cromwell said.

“Then must I refuse the law.”

There was silence. A bumblebee trapped inside a window thumped against the glass.

Chancellor Audeley cleared his throat. “Sir Thomas, all the learned, honorable men in the garden—bishops and abbots—all have sworn.”

“Not all in the realm will, I think.”

“All will who value their heads!” came Cromwell’s stern reply.

More had been about to correct him, for the threat was not strictly accurate. The charge for refusal to swear the Oath was misprision of treason which was not a capital offense as was high treason. But the penalty was still terrible: forfeiture of all possessions and imprisonment at the King’s pleasure, perhaps for life. But More said nothing.

Archbishop Cranmer asked, as if to clarify a point, “Sir Thomas, these learned prelates who have already sworn—do you say that they were wrong to take the Oath?”

“My lords, I do not say any of these gentlemen are wrong to swear. I leave every man to his own conscience and think it not unreasonable that every man should leave me to mine.”

The commissioners buzzed together for a moment. Then Bastwick spoke. The puckered smile of victory on his lips was so controlled, so subtle, that only More was conscious of it. “Sir Thomas, is it that you do not approve the Royal Succession?”

The other commissioners quieted for the answer.

“My lords,” said More, “I am right willing and ready to swear to the succession as it is decreed by Parliament.” But no farther, he thought.

“Then why will you not swear the Oath?” Audeley asked with a perplexed frown. “For what cause?”

“The cause of obstinacy,” Cromwell growled. “The King will not tolerate this, sir.”

“If the King will grant me immunity I will gladly give my reasons.”

“Immunity?” Cromwell scoffed. “Impossible.”

“Then, if I may not declare the causes without peril, to leave them undeclared is no obstinacy.”

“Tell this commission why you will not swear,” Cromwell demanded.

“My lord,” said More, “I will not.”

Archbishop Cranmer made a small, conciliatory laugh. “But if—oh, do let us find our way happily out of this thicket, Sir Thomas—if you will not swear, yet you do not say that those who do so are wrong, then you must be in some doubt as to whether to swear or no. And one thing you will agree as certain is that a subject’s duty is to obey his Prince. The King has ordered you to take the Oath. The certainty of your duty should prevail over your doubt.”

More suppressed the smile of derision that rose to his lips. He said only, “Were that so, my lord Archbishop, then might we say that if a man had any doubts about what his conscience required of him, an order from the King would settle all.”

“And so it should,” cried Cromwell.

“Unless a man sets himself up above the King,” Bastwick said pointedly.

“I have never,” More quickly declared, “set myself above the statutes of the King in Parliament, nor never will. Well I know there are times when the edicts of the state must overrule a citizen’s right to private judgment. But the moral authority of the state is delegated to it by the community of all Christian souls—” He stopped abruptly, afraid of saying too much.

The Abbot of Westminster sputtered, “Surely, Sir Thomas, you must know yourself in error when you see that the Parliament and the King’s whole council of the realm stand on the other side, and you stand alone in this refusal!”

“My lord Abbot, if I believed that I stood utterly alone, indeed I would tremble to set my mind against so many. But I am not alone. I have on my side as great a council, and greater: the general council of Christendom. I will not swear.”

Cromwell threw up his hands. “And will not say why not!”

“And
must
not say why not.”

They stared at him.

“Why not walk a while and think?” Audeley had suggested.

At the window of the burned chamber More rested his forehead against the stone casement and tried to will the shudder to subside. As he did, the babble of the churchmen in the garden faded. The gray, barren space behind him hummed with the holy silence of sanctuary. When he lifted his forehead, he saw that his sweat had left a smudge, dark like the traces of smoke beside it.

Soon
, he told himself,
I must go and stand before the commissioners again. And this time they will ask only once. I must hold the course of silence. Silence, in law, cannot be construed as an admission of guilt. Silence will be my sanctuary
. He closed his eyes and realized that the shudder, and the trembling of his hands, had finally stopped. He had conquered his body. He had beaten its craven urge to capitulate.

“Thank the Lord,” he whispered. “The field is won.”

29

T
here was a faint creak outside the door of the attic room, and Honor whirled around from the window. A dagger lay on a barrel beside the single candle. She lunged for it, raised it, and stood watching the door. Silence returned. She relaxed. The Sydenham’s once-great house was now a bleak, dilapidated tenement, and although its rooms below her were crammed, the inmates slept the exhausted sleep of poverty. Still, she tensed at every scrape and thud that echoed through the barren corridors and crept up the rickety stairs to the attic. She was hollow-eyed from lack of sleep. Since bolting from Cromwell’s, she had been hiding in this garret.

“I think I’ve been followed,” she had whispered to Bridget Sydenham at the front door. Even as she had spoken, the gaunt, wasted face before her had made her regret her decision to come. “I’ve endangered you,” Honor had said, turning. “I’ll go.”

But the bony hand had pulled her across the threshold. “If God has set your footsteps toward me, who am I to question His wisdom?”

That had been two days ago.

In the garret, Honor walked back to the window and looked out at London’s skyline thrusting into the cold moonlight—the spire of St. Paul’s, the jagged roofs on London Bridge, the fortress of the Tower. Her mind still swam with confusion. Nothing made sense. Except that everything had unraveled. That much was terrifyingly clear.

There was a clatter outside the door. Honor snuffed the candle, pressed herself into the shadows against the wall, and lifted the dagger. From the window a shaft of silver-blue moonlight bisected the small room and fell just short of the doorway.

The door swung halfway open. Bridget Sydenham leaned in, her hand cupped around a candle. Honor sighed her relief. Suddenly, a man’s body obscured the flame. Honor flattened against the wall again, her dagger lifted, her heart thudding. There was nowhere to run to, but she would fight before she would let them take her.

The man kicked the door fully open and stepped into the darkness. His knee thumped the barrel. “Curse it!” he muttered. “Where is she?”