Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

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      Officially, I didn’t know any of this. But there’d been no stopping Will talking while he was in the grip of the new idea, telling us excitedly that it was corrupt to pay to pray for the souls of the dead, because Purgatory had never existed except in the minds of money-grubbing monks; nonsense to believe in the age-old communion of the faithful, living and dead, joined through time in the body of the Church, because faith was a private matter between God and worshipper; and that it was foolish to see divine purpose in the Church of Rome. Forget priests, forget monks; refuse to respect your fathers; break every tie with the past.

      Will was nothing if not sincere. He’d argued with Father in every corner of the house and garden. And Father was nothing if not gentle back. I’d seen him walking in the garden with Will, an arm around the younger man’s back, a sorrowful look on his face. ‘Arguing with your husband has got us nowhere,’ he’d told Margaret in the end, ‘so I’ll just stop arguing.’ Perhaps it was his prayers for Will’s soul, and his forbearance, that finally persuaded my brother-in-law to stop his flirtation with the forbidden and rediscover his passionate belief in a more familiar form of God (and his passionate admiration of Father into the bargain).

      ‘That wasn’t the work of a bigot, now, was it?’ John was saying gently. ‘No one could have been more restrained.’ And he was encouraging me to smile, to wipe the fears from my heart. My mouth twitched back at him. It was a relief to remember that moment of sweetness. I almost gave in. But not quite.

      ‘But it doesn’t make sense,’ I said stubbornly. ‘How he behaved with Will doesn’t fit in with the other things he’s been doing. In the New Building, where we’re not invited. And in London, and at court. That’s what I don’t understand.’

      John was towering beside me, with an anxious look on his face again that probably matched the anxious look on mine. I felt disloyal to be snooping through the parts of my father’s public life that he didn’t tell us about at home, but I’d been a secret agent in my own home ever since we came to Chelsea. So I kept drawing on his arm, pulling him on through the garden. The only way I could show John what troubled me about the direction Father’s mind was turning – how he was leaving behind the civilised thinking that had created our bookish, loving family; how he was now to be more feared than trusted or obeyed – was to show him what I’d seen.

      We were walking towards the New Building – Father’s sanctuary from court life: his private chapel, his gallery, his library, his place of contemplation and prayer, the place where he wrote his pamphlets. It had monkish bare walls, a single bench and a plain desk. He prayed, then he sat at that desk and poured out the filth of his public letters. I couldn’t imagine how he could bring himself to even think some of the words he came up with, let alone write them, let alone publish them:

      Since Luther has written that he already has a prior right to bespatter and besmirch the royal crown with shit, will we not have the posterior right to proclaim the beshitted tongue of this practitioner of posterioristics most fit to lick with his anterior the very posterior of a pissing she-mule until he shall have learned more correctly to infer posterior conclusions from prior premises?

      I opened the door, brought John inside (he seemed taller than ever, hunched inside its austere confines), and closed it, silently pointing out the brown-stained tangle of the scourge swinging from a hook on its inner side. The scourge was another new manifestation of Father’s conscience: his protection against the bodily lusts that kept him from becoming a priest himself long ago; the weapon he turned on himself in his bigger war against instinct and unreason.

      What private lusts, and for whose bodies, would made him flail his own skin until he drew blood? It hurt me to think of his poor innocent skin, already chafed and broken by his hair shirt, lashed into worse pus and scab by that ugly sliver of bloodied leather. It was almost as bad as seeing the tortured prisoners at the other end of the garden, to imagine him torturing himself, alone, in here.

      He kept his pamphlets and writings in the library, along with the confiscated, banned and impounded books that he had special dispensation from Bishop Tunstall to read and refute. He had a complete library of heresy here, in his place of prayer, down to William Tyndale’s New Testament in English – one of the few copies that had escaped the bonfire at St Paul’s. Cardinal Wolsey had thrown the rest into the flames. Watching him were 30,000 cheering Londoners and my grimly approving father.

      On the desk was last week’s draft of the letter Father had been writing to Erasmus for so long, begging him to get off the fence and denounce Luther. I’d read it before, and been chilled by the fury of Father’s phrasing: he wrote that he found all heretics ‘absolutely loathsome, so much so that unless they regain their senses I want to be as hateful to them as anyone can possibly be’.

      Hateful indeed. I shivered. The word brought back the image of Robert Ward, the scared little shoemaker locked up in our garden, praying to die.

      I knew Father was wasting his ink trying to persuade Erasmus. Nothing I’d seen the old man write suggested there was the least chance of him publicly supporting Father in any crusade against the religious reformers. He was too busy feeling disappointed, in Luther and Zwingli on one hand, in Father on the other. In everyone who’d once been a humanist but had since become a zealot.

      Erasmus might have taken to calling the most ranting evangelicals ‘rabble-pleasers’, ‘mangy men’, and ‘utterly lacking in sincerity’. But he was no more impressed with the ‘uncouth, splenetic’ style of Father’s written attacks, which he said, ‘could give Luther lessons in vehemence’.

      I felt for Erasmus. Deserted on both sides by the former disciples of the new learning as they forgot the classics and rushed into their violent religious extremes instead. Sitting in Basel, looking forlornly round for intellectual playmates who might still enjoy Greek writings and Arabic geometry, or revel in moderation, mockery, learning, laughter, inquiry, beauty, truth and all the rest of the last generation’s forgotten dream. The same dream that Father brought all of us up to be a living illustration of; the same dream that Master Hans would tomorrow start illustrating us as illustrating. A charming public image coming into existence of a private reality in danger of fading away.

      ‘Look at this,’ I heard myself whispering to John, pulling out one offending volume after another and opening them to the worst pages. ‘And this. And this.’ There was still enough January sunshine to read by inside. But he screwed up his eyes with a show of reluctance and took them to the desk, by the window, to see properly.

      ‘Don’t you see, John?’ I pressed, and my whisper hissed against the bare plaster. ‘He’s lost his reason. We could wait forever for him to give us permission to be together. He might never do it. He can’t think about any of us any more. He’s too obsessed with this. He’s gone mad with hate.’

      I’d been thinking this about Father for so long, while I’d had no one to share it with, that it was a relief to speak my doubt aloud, especially to the man I loved.

      But John was squaring his shoulders, and giving me the same kind but unconvinced smile that my smaller self had seen whenever I offered the wrong answer in a lesson. He shook his head.

      ‘It’s his job,’ he said simply, dropping the page of foulmouthed nonsense about Luther’s posterioristics. ‘That’s William Ross speaking, not Thomas More.’

      Another neat commonsense blow at my fears; another sign that John knew a lot about Father’s work. I had to admit that Father had been asked by the King – and not chosen himself – to reply to Luther’s writings against the Pope. And it was true that he’d been ashamed enough of the crass language, zealotry and poor reasoning of the writing he was СКАЧАТЬ