by V L Perry
He truly sounded like a schoolmaster. I wasn’t sure why he felt such a need to defend the man, for More did not hesitate to scourge even his friends. He painted word-pictures of fat, greedy wool traders who lived in luxury on the profits their starving laborers had brought them, knowing full well this was how his friend Bonvisi had made his fortune. And the Utopians’ view of gems and precious things as childish baubles—even their privies were made of gold and silver—was hardly flattering to the king, who owned many rich outfits like the ones described in the book. Perhaps the king had not read it.
“Would you live there, in Utopia?” I asked, to change the subject.
He seemed to consider it. “I might. No hunger, and learning for all. And no lawyers. It appeals to me,” he joked. Sir Thomas More himself was a lawyer.
“Yes, learning,” I said, “and what of music and dancing and poetry? What of… everything else?” All the Utopians’ free time was spent reading or attending lectures. I could not picture Tom Seymour staying in this dry, colorless world even for a single day.
But that was the least of what bothered me about Utopia, this No Place that More longed for. Rotating everything every two years, for instance—houses, occupations, and all. For all his book-learning, it was clear the man was no farmer. The Utopians had no holidays, no families, no inheritances, no property they could call their own. Even their clothing was all made from the same skins, meant to last seven years. What would become of the weavers and dyers, the sempters and merchants? Where was beauty in this world?
“But there is beauty there, and love,” Kratzer said. “The Utopians work but six hours a day, and devote their free time to making merry. Would this not be better for the average tradesman, who must toil from before dawn until after dark just to scratch a living?”
“No, Master Kratzer. They study music and dancing and football. That’s different from living.”
“Perhaps so,” he said, which surprised me. “Perhaps More feels we must stand constantly vigilant against the evil that threatens to overwhelm us. It puts on different faces, though ‘tis always the same battle, always won or lost in the same way. But I cannot bring myself to believe the human heart such a cesspit.”
I shook my head. “Then you do not know, Master Kratzer, that some men are little better than beasts.” Even beasts did not slaughter each other purely for sport, did not burn and crush one another over beliefs.
“I have not spent my whole life in a monastery, mistress,” he said, with a smile that did not touch his eyes.
Before I could do more than form a vague anger at the presumption of the man--he’d left Vienna long before the Turks attacked, had never heard the thunder of their cannon or smelled their strangely sweetish gunpowder heavy on the air--his next words brought my thoughts to a halt: “I was at the University in Wittenberg before that, and heard Luther lecture there on the Psalms. I took from him all the learning I could, and then left. But I had friends who stayed to listen.”
Luther again. One couldn’t get through a day without some mention of him; I was truly weary of the man. “Only a monk could live in Utopia,” I said, bringing the conversation back to the dim little chamber where we sat. “Though perhaps not even there, for they worship the planets and allow widows to be priests and…” I trailed off.
“Permit divorce,” Kratzer finished. “Yes, in some cases.”
It made no sense. More refused to support the king’s divorce (or annulment, or whatever you were to call it) from Queen Katharine, but allowed his Utopians to divorce and remarry according to their whims. The ordered world on paper was very different from the one teeming around me. This, I felt sure, was not why the Lady had wanted me here.
“Is it not better to take a privilege that only the wealthy can afford,” Kratzer asked, “and distribute it equally among all people, as they do with work? Do you not think it would prevent much unhappiness, if a couple knows they will not be pleasing to each other beforehand?”
My spine prickled. Omnia sunt communia. Equal wealth and work: the rallying cry of the peasant armies Zwingli and Muntzer had led across Germany in 1525, churning madly across the countryside. Every day messengers had brought the Archduke word of burnt castles and overrun cities; once, at Linz, we were even close enough to smell the smoke. They had been so convinced that God would intervene on their behalf, that theirs was a just and holy cause. They had been defeated, tortured, and executed. Even Luther, who they called to for aid, cried that they should be killed like mad dogs. Reform always meant bloodshed, with things ending the same or worse than they were before.
“Surely…there must be some kind of…order,” I said slowly. “We obey those who have been placed in authority over us, or else we would not be good.”
“But whose rule shall we obey? You have seen what happens when different authorities proclaim different kinds of order. The Utopians recognize no rank among them; all are equal from the moment they are born, and so they live perfect agreement.”
“Except for the king,” I said, “and the slaves. There must needs be kings and slaves, so they rest of us may be in between.”
. “Your friend who taught you German,” he said suddenly. “Did she return to England with you?”
What kind of question was that? No, she did not. She had been in the evacuation caravan a day behind ours, supposed to meet at the port in Rotterdam. It had been captured outside the city by one of the Turk’s garrisons. But I had never spoken of it, and would not now, though my eyes glittered at him.
“I see,” he said. “I am sorry. Sometimes my curiosity is greater than my judgment.” He bent over the book. “Let us continue….”
After that day’s lesson ended, my head felt like a tight cloth was twisted round it. I needed time to think before returning to the studied coldness of the Lady’s household, or supper in the crowded hall. The long banqueting room outside her chambers was used for storage during the fast season, and there I could spent a few precious moments alone among the tapestries that were hung to hide the dusty tables and chests.
But when I got there, I found that someone else had the same idea.
Jane Seymour stood at the far end of the chamber. From the look she gave me you would have thought she smelled rot.
“I come here to be alone,” she said.
“Well,” I answered. “So do I.”
Most of the scenes …For several minutes we stayed at opposite ends, each pretending to be absorbed in the tapestries. There was never anywhere in a royal palace where you could be alone. She should know that. But then, so should I.
The long chamber was not so long that we could completely avoid each other. Soon she was beside me, both of us staring at a scene of
“Is it Flemish?” she asked.
“No, I don’t think so. It looks German.”
“You’ve been everywhere, haven’t you? Eliza says you’ve been all over, even to the Levant.”
“Well, I’ve been to many places, but not the Levant.” The Holy Roman Empire covered most of Europe, though the Archduke himself spent much of his time on the western border of Hungary, repelling the Turks.
“How I’d love to go there someday. Imagine walking the very streets that Christ Himself walked.” People only think of the destination, not the journey. They little imagine the filth and the long hours, the sweat or freezing, the hunger and soreness of traveling, the danger from Infidels or even the Christians who took to robbing their own on the highways. The slight figure next to me, hardly more than a girl, could never hold up over such travail.
A rustling at the far end of the corridor caught our attention. Apparently the place was even less of a refuge than we thought, for huddled there on a stack of trunks was a young woman, her forehead tucked against her folded knees. I recognized her, but couldn’t recall her name; she did not bed in the maid’s chamber with us, but shared her family’s quarters.
When Jane said, “Eleanor?” the girl raised a tear-stained face.
“Oh,
” she said, in a queer flat voice. She flicked a glance at me. “I didn’t think anyone would be here. Forgive me.”
“What’s troubling you?” Jane asked. Her voice, hard-edged only a few moments ago, was now soft with concern that sounded genuine. It was the first I saw of her chameleon nature, though not the last.
Eleanor wiped her cheek, waved her hand as if shooing a fly. “It’s nothing to cry over, my father says. And he’s right, of course. He’s made a good match for me, with Percy; I’m to marry him in the spring,” she blurted, as if confessing.
“Why, that is nothing to cry over,” Jane said. “Percy is a good man, and pious--a rare enough combination. And his family has estates all over the North. You’ll be able to come and go as you please, have plenty of servants and jewels.”
“And he’s handsome,” I put in. “You’ll be the envy of every maid at court.” She was lucky; it could have been an old grandfather, or a widower with children the same age as their new stepmother.
“I suppose so.” She did not look cheered. What more could the silly girl want?
“Is there someone else?” Jane asked.
“No. There’s not. Not anymore.” She sighed and bit her lip. “But there was, for awhile.”
“Well.” We stood there a moment. “You’ll forget him in time. Everyone usually has to lose at least one love before they find true happiness.” Even then I remember wondering how Jane Seymour could possibly know such a thing herself.
“It’s not that,” sighed Eleanor. “It’s the wedding.”
I began to comprehend as Jane asked, “The wedding night, you mean?”
Now Eleanor managed a weak smile, which made her look worse. “If I tell Percy beforehand, he’ll find a way to break it off. He expects to marry a virgin, after all! But if I wait until we bed together and let him find out then… how much worse will that be?”
“He doesn’t have to find out,” Jane said. “You still have your courses each month, don’t you?” Her voice was hard. Eleanor nodded uneasily. “You’ve got time, then; no marriages till after Easter. If you can figure out the days when your courses are likely to come, you can try to make sure the wedding falls during that time. All you have to do is act a bit; he’ll never know.”
My surprise at hearing these words from Jane’s prim mouth turned to astonishment when she added: “If not, you can hide a pin in your gown. You don’t need much; a single drop of blood on the sheets is all most men’s vanity requires. They see what they wish to believe.”
Eleanor too looked surprised, but I could see the idea spreading through her mind. She thanked Jane—ignoring me—and left the chamber.
We looked at each other, Jane and I. I had judged her on her appearance, seen her only as Tom Seymour’s sister. Perhaps there were more surprises beneath that cool surface.
“Go ahead and tell,” she challenged. “Make yourself popular with them. They’d love to hear it.”
“Them?” I jerked my head toward the apartments behind us. “I wouldn’t tell them if the palace was on fire.”
The Lady had apparently decided to take charge of all her women’s literary educations. Not for her the age-old contentment of needlework; she had designs for turning her court into a center of New Learning, as Marguerite had in France. In addition to the gentleman painters, printers, musicians, poets, historians, scholars, clerics, and courtiers she gathered about her, we were to share in the glory as well.
There was only one problem: almost no one in the Lady’s service showed any inclination for learning. She would have had better luck reading to the caged lark in her privy chamber.
Still she tried. We heard saints’ lives and miracles, of course, as well as some stories by an Italian, forced through Lady Wingfield’s halting translation. Tale after tale of nuns and maidens horsing it with monks, bishops who paid husbands gilded silver coins for the privilege of forcing themselves on their wives, a gardener who feigned dumbness in order to lie with an entire convent, Inquisitors who stuffed themselves at the high table and spared barely two cauldrons of broth for the poor. There was hardly a one but made some point about the greed about the laxness of the Church. The writer had later become a monk, she told us, so perhaps he was drawn to these ideas. The Lady was many things, but subtle was not one of them.
Hardest to bear were the tales of Saladin, how wise and clever he was, how ready to forgive and reward. The Infidels are none of those things.
An Englishman in the court of Richard II had taken the Decameron as his inspiration, and written his own series of tales told by pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. William Thynne, the Chief Clerk of the Kitchen who the Lady had raised into her poetic circle, had collected them and bound them in a red silk volume with gold lettering, dedicated to the king. A kitchen clerk, of all things; I wondered if there was mutton-grease spattered on the pages. Yet she would not have thought it odd if the chamberers had suddenly wanted to learn French, or if the boys who scoured the privy drains began painting scenes of the Crucifixion.
Meg and Lady Rochford read aloud, and here again were the same characters in new forms: a womanish pardoner who sold fake relics, a wanton prioress, a luxurious monk, a friar who took bribes, a lecherous summoner with small Latin. There was a woodcut that showed them all seated round a table together. They told stories about the usual debauching of maidens and young wives cuckolding old husbands and so on, as well as a fanciful one about roosters, which seemed out of place.
The same poet had also written legends of good women – in response, so the story said, to a rebuke from his queen for always portraying women as inconstant or shrewish. Day after day we heard of Cleopatra, Dido, Medea, Thisbe, Ariadne – women who suffered for love, who had given everything for men they loved and been wronged, abandoned, betrayed. It grew numbing after a time.
Jane listened and sometime giggled at bawdy stories , but she grew intent at tales of suffering and martyrdom. Poor Constance, betrothed to the Sultan of Syria and determined to convert him, framed and banished on the strength of forged letters…Philomena’s beheading at the hands of the Emperor Diocletian when she refused to marry him….they captured her imagination, and she talked of them later with the sort of reverence usually given to holy books.
Once we knew those (more or less), the Lady herself read aloud to us from Marguerite’s Heptameron, which she said was written to answer to the male poets. Her voice took on a fluid rhythm, rising and falling like music. As far as I could tell they were all the same stuff: battles of wits between men and women, the same accusations of lasciviousness and admonitions of virtue flying back and forth. It was difficult to tell one from another. She always asked us about them once they were finished. This itself was a trick from Marguerite’s book; the characters in the Heptameron told witty stories, then sat around discussing them for ages, taking the joy out of them.
I wondered why we needed more of what had already been written hundreds of years ago. The Lady said there were so few women’s stories that Marguerite had had to write some.
“But every story has women in it,” Jane said once, startling me. “Or almost every one; there’s Queen Guenevere, and Isolde, and Heloise…”
The Lady looked at her with those black brows arched. “But the stories don’t belong to them. Men do not write of women’s thoughts. Why do none of the ballads tell of Guenevere’s feelings?”
“They do tell of her feelings for Lancelot.”
“Yes, and talk mostly about him. Not what she felt, what she wanted. Wouldn’t you want to know what really happened, through Guenevere’s eyes? If she loved Arthur or resented being married to him as a pawn, what she really thought about, whether she would have preferred to die at the stake rather than waste her days in a convent?”
The Lady was enjoying this; Jane, I could tell, was not. She gave a shrug of her pale shoulders that clearly said What nonsense, and bent her head again to her sewing.
Meg spoke up: “The Infidels have a tale of a woman who tells stories.
George has told me of them. About flying carpets and demons who live in lamps.”
The king’s gentlemen made their entrance at that fortunate moment, Wyatt and Lord Rochford and Tom Seymour among them. Learned conversation was over; piety and virtue were forgotten.
Forgive me if I don’t say very much about them. It was rather difficult at times for me to tell them apart, and as very few of them ever spoke to me after I declined their invitations to dance, or to bed. I never got to know any of them well, for which I am grateful. They were simply always there, like fixtures or part of the furniture. Until one day, they weren’t. But that came later.
Just before Easter a bright spot appeared in the blue daytime sky, with a faint haze streaking behind it. A divine omen…meaning what? Many thought it was caused by the king’s plans to marry the Lady, though Cranmer was quick to proclaim that it signified God’s displeasure with the Pope’s interference with divine will. The university scholars argued about it, the theologians claimed it portended some great disaster, the politicians thought it heralded a great victory. The chroniclers wrote of a similar sight just before the Conquest, which had turned out to be a good omen for William the Conqueror. Or a bad one for King Harold, depending on how you looked at it.
“’Tis but a comet,” Kratzer said. They were common enough; the ancients and the Infidels knew of them, though learned men disagreed about what they were: Aristotle had thought they were balls of flame in the atmosphere, while Seneca held that they were small, burning planets.
“But why does God send them?” I asked.
“Ah, for that you would need to consult a philosopher,” he replied. “I merely observe and describe. Interpretation is for holier men than I.”
Kratzer had explained that the day of Easter itself was reckoned by the first full moon after the spring equinox. To my shock at how pagan this sounded, he replied delightedly that it was pagan: the Church had arranged its feast days to coincide with the festivals of the heathens they wished to convert, so that the change would be easier for them, more familiar. Perhaps in its own way the Church did realize that all faiths were one, equally comforting and ridiculous.