The Queen's Lady (72 page)

Suddenly, he gasped in horror at his own actions. He released her as if her flesh had scalded his palms.

Honor stood before him, panting, stunned. “You’re mad!”

“Leave me, Satan!” he shouted. With the back of his hand he slapped her cheekbone so hard it almost stunned her. “Leave me!”

He raised his arm again to strike. But she caught his wrist with both hands, stopping him. Their arms locked overhead like two warriors.

From the stairwell came a short, sharp laugh. More and Honor twisted.

Jerome Bastwick stood at the cell’s entrance.

“What’s this?” Bastwick said, and clucked his tongue. “Disharmony in the More household?”

Walsingham came down the final step and waited at Bastwick’s side.

“Well,” Bastwick went on pleasantly, “perhaps, through this meeting, we can salvage some harmony after all. Do you both remember the last time we were all together? Star Chamber, twelve years ago? We only need gold spangles on this ceiling to make us believe we are in that court again, do we not? We lack only our august judge. But let us take his absence as a cue for a further alteration.”

He gave a sharp nod to Walsingham who moved toward Honor.

“The verdict, for instance,” Bastwick said. “That verdict never suited me. This time, to see justice done, let us snuff out the
real
criminals. The traitor, and the heretic.”

As Walsingham grabbed Honor’s arm, Bastwick smiled.
“Fiat justicia.”

37

T
he crowd came early to watch Sir Thomas More die.

He was not yet in sight, but around the roped-off scaffold on Tower Hill the people pressed close: common men and women, lords on horseback, soldiers with staves, courtiers and their ladies. One rising gentleman of the court, however, Master Richard Riche was not present.

Riche had stood as the Crown’s witness at More’s trial in Westminster Hall on the first day of July. He had been asked by one of the eighteen judges—Cromwell, Audeley, and Thomas Boleyn among them—to tell the court of the conversation that had passed between him and Sir Thomas on the day he had been sent to remove the prisoner’s books.

“As I was leaving,” Riche had testified, “I put a hypothetical case to the prisoner. ‘Say that an act of Parliament made me King,’ said I. ‘Would not you then take me for King, Sir Thomas?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ replied the prisoner. ‘That I would.’ ‘And say that a further act of Parliament made me Pope,’ said I. ‘Would you, then, take me for Pope?’ ‘For answer to that,’ the prisoner said, ‘let me put a case to you. Suppose the Parliament made a law that God should not be God. Would you, then, Master Riche, say that God were not God?’ ‘No, sir,’ said I, ‘for no Parliament may make such a law.’ ”

“And what said the prisoner to that?” a judge had asked.

“He said, ‘No more, Master Riche, than Parliament can make the King Supreme Head of the Church.’ ”

More had groaned at the charade. Defending himself, he had protested, “My lords, can you really believe that after so carefully denying answer to your subtle questions day in and day out for over a year, I would have babbled the secrets of my conscience to such a man as this?”

But only one witness was required for a conviction of high treason. Riche’s perjured testimony sufficed. After fifteen minutes of deliberation the judges sentenced More to death. Mercifully, the barbarous sentence for a traitor was commuted to beheading.

Then, More had finally broken his long silence about his motives.

“My lords,” he said, rising before the judges. “This indictment is grounded upon an act of Parliament directly repugnant to the laws of God and His Holy Church, the supreme government of which no temporal prince may presume by law to take upon himself.”

Murmurs of astonishment had rippled through the packed court. “This realm of England,” More had continued, “may no more refuse obedience to the See of Rome than a child may refuse obedience to a father. England, being but one member and small part of the Church, may not make a particular law disagreeable with the general law of Christ’s universal Catholic Church any more than the City of London, being but one poor member in respect of the whole realm, might make a law against an act of Parliament to bind the whole realm. This statute is contrary to the laws and statutes of our own land as laid down in Magna Carta, ‘that the English church may be free and that it may exist with all its laws uncorrupted and its liberties unviolated,’ and further it is contrary to the sacred oath which the King’s highness made at his coronation, swearing to defend the Church.”

“And,” he had said with rising fervor, “as for my lords’ marveling that I so stiffly stand against all the bishops, universities and learned men of the realm, I say that for every bishop who stands with this statute, a hundred stand against it, not in this realm, but in the rest of Christendom. And not only bishops, but a great majority of the living and the dead, and all the holy saints in heaven, too, and all the general councils of Christendom for a thousand years.”

“I have no more to say, my lords, except that, as the blessed apostle St. Paul consented to the death of St. Stephen by stoning, and as those two holy saints now are both friends in heaven, so I trust that, though your lordships have been my judges here on earth to my condemnation, we may yet meet merrily in heaven to our everlasting salvation.”

Walking now toward Tower Hill, More heard the crowd hush as the first people saw him approach with his escort. He tried to walk steadily. He held tight with both hands to a small red cross. He beat back the thought that red was for martyrs. Pride, the worst of sins.

A woman reached out and touched his shoulder. He heard her fingernails scrape on his robe as she was pulled away. He looked straight ahead.

He saw dust hovering above the straw on the scaffold. The sheriff and the executioner stood there already, waiting. Flies were buzzing over the polished wood of the block. The block itself was very low; he saw that he would have to lie on his stomach to stretch his head across it.

The stairs to the scaffold creaked under his step. For a moment he had to lean on the lieutenant’s arm to steady himself as he went up. The executioner walked forward to meet him and, as tradition demanded, went down on his knee for forgiveness. More raised him up and embraced him, and gave his blessing. Then, he looked out across the circle of upturned faces.

The sheriff strode quickly to his side, hands raised. “Forgive me, Sir Thomas. The King’s Grace has ordered that you make no lengthy oration.”

More squinted up at the bright July sun, then down again at the expectant faces.

“Good people . . .” He was surprised by the thin sound of his voice. Thin and dry. But people were leaning forward. They wanted to hear him. He cleared his throat to begin again. He could smell the sawdust in the bucket that would hold his severed head. “Good people,” he said, “I entreat you to pray for me here on earth, and I shall pray for you in heaven.”

He caught the sheriff’s frown. The sheriff looked as if he feared he would have to stop a speech after all. But More had only one last thing to say. He looked above the faces, to a band of white clouds on the horizon. His voice came strong and clear.

“I die the King’s good servant . . . but God’s first!”

Bridget Sydenham had firmly taken her granddaughter’s hand and turned the child away from the scaffold as soon as Sir Thomas More mounted the steps. They were leaving. Bridget had no desire to hear More’s words, and she was not a woman who thrilled to see her enemy’s blood spilled. She had wanted only to satisfy herself that justice was done. To bear witness. For her husband Humphrey’s sake.

Pulling the child away from the crowd, Bridget walked with her towards Cheapside. Little Jane had difficulty keeping up with her grandmother’s smart pace. As they neared the shops, a cheer went up in the distance behind them. Bridget looked back at Tower Hill. There was silence at the scaffold. It was done.

Jane was pointing eagerly at a pie stall near the busy market cross. Bridget decided it would be a ha’penny well spent. As they neared the stall, a crier arrived at the cross. He took up his position on a box, and people began to drift in around to hear his announcements. Bridget listened with only half an ear, until the final announcement, which caught all her attention. The crier proclaimed of a burning to take place in three days’ time at Smithfield. A wicked heretic was to be punished, he declared, both for the edification of the populace and for the hopeful recantation of the heretic herself. The name the crier called out was Honor’s.

Bridget Sydenham was surprised. Not that Honor had been captured; it was only too like her to have returned to England for some reason of her own. Bridget was surprised, rather, because she knew that Honor had never been a wholehearted believer in their cause. Yet there it was; Honor was going to burn rather than recant. The Lord’s love must have finally reached her after all.

Bridget closed her eyes. She thought of Humphrey, and imagined him, as she always did, sitting at the feet of God. She said a silent prayer that Honor’s soul would soon find such sweet repose as well.

“Dear Lord,” she whispered, “accept another martyr for Thy dear name.”

38

H
onor’s ankle chains clanged over the worn flagstones of St. Paul’s. She had just emerged with her escort from the Lollard’s Tower in the corner of the cathedral. Led by Bastwick and followed by three officers, she walked barefoot down the nave toward the main doors. She wore a rough homespun tunic and her head was bare, for the clothes she had arrived in she had sold to her jailer for food; the homespun dress was one of his wife’s cast-offs.

The cathedral doors opened. Sunlight streamed in, dissolving the gloom. Honor stepped outside and squinted in the strong light. She paused for a moment on the step and felt the sun-heated stone warming her feet. She inhaled deeply, then coughed, for the freshness of the air was startling. For two weeks she had been breathing the stuffiness of her cell. The morning air tasted inexpressibly sweet.

An officer bent to unlock her ankle fetters, then nudged her down the stairs. A workhorse stood ready with a hurdle harnessed behind it. Honor lay on her back on the hurdle and the officers strapped her down. The leather restraining thongs cut into her wrists. Bastwick and his men swung onto their mounts, two ahead of her and two behind. One tugged the workhorse’s lead. It shook its harness and the small procession started out of the churchyard. Every thud of the hurdle over the cobbles jolted Honor’s bones.