by Barbara Kyle
Interest glinted in his eyes.
With some irritation, she intoned what she believed to be his reasoning: “If you do not believe the King to be Supreme head of the English Church—”
“And I do not say whether I do or no,” he quickly pointed out.
“Quite,” she agreed tightly. “But if you do not believe it, then by swearing you do believe it you perjure your immortal soul. However, if you declare your reasons for refusing to swear, you forfeit your life. And so you are threatened by a double-edged sword. It is a sword made sharper by the Church’s teaching that, since life is a gift from God, to forfeit it is a sin.”
His smile was small but proud. “I taught you well.”
Somewhere above them, an iron door clanged. “Yet, apparently,” More sighed, “the King will settle for nothing less than my total submission.”
“Your recantation,” she said softly.
He looked sidelong at her. She saw that her use of the word had prickled him. It sparked an idea. Could she shame him to his senses? “You have been just as merciless to other men,” she said harshly. “To so-called heretics.”
The accusation sizzled in the air between them.
“Admit it,” she said. “As Chancellor of England you forced men suspected of heresy to answer whether or not they believed the Pope was head of the Church, knowing they would violate their conscience if they said ‘yes’ and would be burned if they said ‘no’. Why should you balk at being forced to make the same impossible choice?”
“There is a difference. When I examined heretics, the law of every country in Christendom laid down that the Pope was head of the Church. The doctrine that the King is Supreme head of the English Church is accepted only here, and rejected in every other country in Christendom.”
“But you burned men for holding to their conscience! You argued that it was seditious for a Protestant to refuse to burn a Bible when commanded to do so by the King. But now, you refuse a command of loyalty from that same King.”
“Protestants?” He spat out the word. “You call these vermin ‘Protestants’?”
“They protest arbitrary authority. As you are doing. The oath you demanded of them, with all the deadly might of the Church behind you, was intolerable. Just as the King’s demand for this oath, with all the might of the state behind him, is intolerable.”
“The heretics condemned themselves with actions. I do nothing. I simply maintain silence.”
“You burned Ralph Pepperton for his silence!”
His face darkened. “That name again. Should I have guessed your true heart that day? The day we quarreled over Pepperton? You turned cold, and afterwards avoided me. Well, tell me now, what do you ‘protest’? Do you protest authority so much that you would snatch felons from the law? Carry them away in ships and deposit them abroad to infect the innocent people of other lands? Is that your protest?”
She stared, dumbfounded. Then, suddenly, she understood. “Bastwick told you this.”
“Then you do not deny it!” A thin cry came from his throat. “My God. Until this very moment I did not believe it. I thought Bastwick poured such poison in my ears only to wound me. To weaken me. And I resisted!” He held his head, appalled. “I was so sure he lied.” He staggered to the stool, clutched for it and thudded onto it. “This is a place for reckoning truth indeed! Honor Larke, the viper in my bosom. Honor Larke, the heretic!”
Honor’s heart seemed to stop. He knew everything! And, knowing it, he hated her. All bonds between them now were severed. The chasm that separated them roared with emptiness, as vast as any imagined pit in hell.
“I thought I had taught my children so carefully. You, who were so quick to learn—I thought I had taught you so well.” Blank-eyed, he swiveled on the stool so that his back was to her. “What a cesspool we have made of God’s creation!” he moaned.
He was talking to himself, to the walls, cutting her off completely. He lifted his eyes to a crucifix on the wall. “Lord, we defile Your blessed sacrifice. Everything we love on earth turns rank. In truth, I long to leave it!”
Honor tried to take a step toward him, but she could not move. It was as though she stood on the edge of the chasm, and on the far side he was wandering away from her, drifting off toward the mists of death, fading from her view. She burned to call him back. Could she make a bridge with words—the bright, strong words of her newfound understanding? Could she then grasp his hand and haul him back to her side, the side of life?
With a surge of anger at the delusions that stunned his mind, she wanted to shout across to him, These are hallucinations. I have seen every kind of self-deception forged into every kind of faith in God. I have watched you all kill one another for faith, and I watch you now begging for death, begging at the feet of a man bleeding to death on a cross. Your religion is a cult of death! She wanted to shout, Why do you long to leave life for a mirage of heaven? Why, when we have wild musk roses, and swallows, and love between man and woman, and work, and learning, and watching children grow? Are these not heaven enough?’
But she said none of these things. Something held her back. She could neither speak nor move.
More, oblivious to her, heaved a shuddering sigh. “The light in the cathedral is a heavenly light. The gold of saints’ halos…ivory of their bones…red of their blood on the stones…stones where Saint Thomas was slain by his king.”
He was staring at the gray wall as if he saw such colors emblazoned there, and Honor realized he was lost in a time forty-five years ago, a time when he served as a page-boy in the house of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Days spent in the cathedral that enshrined the bones of Archbishop Thomas à Becket, murdered by a jealous king, and made a saint.
“I long for peace, Lord,” More murmured. “I long for sanctuary from the moil of men, the grasping for gold, the lusting, and the vile desires. Once, in the monastery, You gave me that sanctuary, Lord. I was not worthy then. But soon…soon, God willing, I will stand among the choiring of angels, and the blessed community of apostles and saints and martyrs that throng the skies…”
He rose, lost in his vision, his back still to her. He stretched his arms stiffly at his sides, palms up, so that with his body he formed an arrow, a man offering himself to his God, and intoned:
“Give me the grace, good Lord
To set the world at nought;
To set my mind fast upon thee,
And not to hang upon the blast of men’s mouths;
To be content to be solitary;
Not to long for worldly company…”
Now, Honor understood what held her back. Now she knew that, finally, she was looking at the real man. Not his thin shield of jests and wit. Not even the beaten armor of his hatred of heretics. But the man who stood naked in his faith. A man in whose huge imagination the heaven-scapes were so peopled with centuries of noble saints and martyrs that any human touch would shatter the magnificent dream.
“To know my own vileness and wretchedness,
To humble and meeken myself
under the mighty hand of God…”
And suddenly, she knew what she must do. He had chosen his destiny. Death was his choice. And she must let him die. Equally emphatic was an echo of the truth that had just burst upon her. Heaven enough, right here on earth? Yes! I want the roses and the swallows. I want to go back to my child. I want to help her grow. What a shift is here! Sir Thomas must be allowed to die, and I can see again why I want to live! Anger toward him drained out of her, and in its place flowed a sensation of pure love. He chanted on:
“To bear the cross with Christ;
To have the last thing in remembrance,
And to have ever before mine eye my death
that is ever at hand…”
Finally, Honor could move. She almost fell toward him. “Sir Thomas, you did teach me well. All the understanding in my heart is thanks to you, and all the tools to search for truth.”
She was standing before him, face-to-face, and the im
pulse of tenderness was so strong in her that she flung her arms around his neck. She held his body tightly against hers and kissed his cheek.
He shivered. In a sudden, violent motion like a spasm his hand plowed into her hair. The other hand swept down her back and groped at her buttock. His lips burned her forehead.
He pulled back. Fear blazed over his face. “Satan!” he cried. “I knew you would one day come to me in this guise! Come with soft words and soft flesh, tempting me to abandon God!”
He grabbed two handfuls of her hair and wrenched her head backwards. Honor gasped in pain. “Now I see you, what you are, woman! It is Satan who has tumbled you into heresy. Satan had taken your body as his host.” He shouted into her open mouth, “I know what you desire, devil! But my immortal soul you shall never seize!”
His hands ripped free of her hair and instantly manacled her wrists. He twisted her arms behind her, bending them and pinning them against her back with such a savage jolt that she cried out.
“How long have you inhabited this soft body, Satan?” he cried. “Have you been sucking this girl’s blood these many years, tempting me to wallow in the muck?” He crushed her to him, pressing her breasts hard against his chest. “Has that been your sport? Have you danced her into a travesty of Christian marriage with another devil, to delight in filthy fornication?” He breathed on her neck, “And has that devil-husband fed here, amongst these limbs?” His open mouth pressed her throat.
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
The King’s Good Servant
The 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 th
e 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.