“But he’ll never hurt Thomas More,” I argue. “The king loves Thomas, he allowed him to stay silent when others had to advise about the marriage. He made Reginald speak out, but he allowed Thomas to stay quiet. He allowed him to give up his seal of office and go home. He said that if Thomas was silent, then he could live quietly, privately. And Thomas has done this. He lived with his family and told everyone he was glad to be a private scholar. It’s not possible that the king should condemn his friend, such a beloved friend, to death.”
“I bet you he will,” Montague says. “They’re just trying to find a day which won’t disturb the apprentice boys. They don’t dare to execute John Fisher on a saint’s day. They fear they are making another saint.”
“For God’s sake, why don’t they both beg for pardon, submit to the king’s will, and come out?”
Montague looks at me as if I am a fool. “You imagine that John Fisher, confessor to Lady Margaret Beaufort, one of the holiest men who ever guided the Church, is going to publicly declare that the Pope is not head of the Church? Swear to a heresy in the sight of God? How could he ever do that?”
I shake my head, blinded by the rush of tears to my eyes. “So that he might live,” I say despairingly. “Nothing matters more than that. So that he doesn’t have to die! For words!”
Montague shrugs. “He won’t do it. He can’t bring himself to it. Nor Thomas More. Don’t you think that it will have occurred to him? Thomas? The cleverest man in England? I imagine that he thinks of it every day. I imagine, given Thomas’s passion for life and for his children, especially his daughter, that it is his great temptation. I imagine that he puts it aside from him every day of his life, every minute.”
I sink into a chair, and I cover my face with my hands. “Son, are those good men going to die rather than sign their name on a piece of paper delivered to them by a scoundrel?”
“Yes,” Montague says. “And if I were more of a man, I would have done the same and I would be in the Tower with them and not let them go as if I were Judas, worse than Judas.”
I raise my face at once. “Don’t wish it,” I say quietly. “Don’t wish yourself in there. Don’t ever wish such a thing.”
He pauses. “Lady Mother, the time is coming when we will have to make a stand, either against the king’s advisors or against him himself. John Fisher and Thomas More are making that stand now. We should stand with them.”
“And who will stand with us?” I demand. “When you tell me that the emperor is setting sail to invade, then we can stand. Alone, I don’t dare it.”
I look at his determined pale face, and I have to get a grip on myself so that I don’t break down. “Son, you don’t know what it’s like, you don’t know the Tower, you don’t know what it’s like to look out of the little window. You don’t know what it’s like to hear them building the scaffold. My father was executed there, my own brother walked across the drawbridge to Tower Hill and laid down his head on the block. I can’t risk you, I can’t risk Geoffrey. I can’t see another Plantagenet walk into the place. We can’t stand without the certainty of support, we can’t stand without the certainty of victory. We can’t go towards death like trusting beasts to slaughter. Promise me that we will not throw ourselves on the scaffold. Promise me that we will only stand against the Tudors if we are certain that we can win.”
The new Holy Father sends the king a message that cannot be mistaken. He makes John Fisher a cardinal of the Church, a sign to everyone that this great man, in failing health in the Tower, must be treated with respect. The Pope is head of the universal Church, and the man held as a traitor, praying for strength, is his cardinal, under his explicit protection.
The king swears aloud, before all the court, that if the Pope sends a cardinal’s hat, then the bishop will be unable to wear it for he will have no head.
It is a brutal, brutish joke. But the gentlemen of the court hear Henry and they do not silence him. Nobody says “Hush” or “God forgive you.” The court, my sons shamefully among them, allow the king to say anything, and then in June, beyond belief, they let him do it. They let him execute the saintly man who was his grandmother’s greatest friend and chosen confessor. They let him execute the friend who was his wife’s spiritual advisor. John Fisher was a good, kind, loving man, he found me a refuge when I was a young woman and desperate for a friend; and I don’t stand up and say one word in his defense.
His long vigil in the Tower did not frighten the old man; they say that he never tried to escape the fate that Thomas Cromwell prepared for him. On the morning of his execution he sent for his best clothes as if he were a bridegroom, and went to his death gladly as if to his wedding. I shudder when I hear this and go to my chapel to pray. I couldn’t do that. I would never do that. I lack the faith and, besides, I have spent all my life clinging onto life.
In July, Thomas More, after writing and praying and thinking, and finally realizing that there is no way to satisfy God and the king, walks out of his cell, looks up at the blue sky and the crying seagulls, and strolls up to Tower Hill quietly, as if taking the air on a summer’s day, and lays his head down on the block as he too chooses death rather than deny his Church.
And no one in England objects. Certainly, we don’t say a word. Nothing happens. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
I read in a terse note from Reginald that the Holy Father, the King of France, and the emperor agree that the King of England must be stopped; not another death can be permitted. It is a horror breaking out in England, and the whole world is shamed by it. The whole of Christendom is stunned that a king should dare to execute a cardinal, should martyr the greatest theologian in his country, his dearest friend. Everyone is horrified and soon they start to ask: If the king can do this, what else will he do? Then they start to ask: What about the queen? What might this tyrant do to his queen?
At the end of August, Reginald writes to us and says that he has achieved the goal he has been working for—the king is to be excommunicated. This could not be more important; it is the declaration of war by the Pope on the king. It is the Pope telling the English, telling all of Christendom, that the king is not blessed by God, is not authorized by the Church; he is outside, he is certain to go to hell. No one need obey him, no Christian can defend him, no one should take up arms for him, indeed anyone fighting against him is blessed by the Church as a crusader riding against a heretic.
He is excommunicated but the sentence is suspended. He is to be allowed two months to return to his marriage with the queen. If he persists in his sins, the Pope will call on the Christian kings of Spain and France to invade England, and I shall come in with their army and raise the English with you.
Montague has been so sick since the death of Thomas More that his wife writes to me and asks me to come to his bedside. She fears that he might die.
What’s the matter with him?
I reply heartlessly.
He has turned his face to the wall and will not eat.
He is heartsick. I cannot help him. This is heartbreak, like the Sweat—a disease that came in with the Tudors. Tell him to get up and meet me in London; there is no time for anyone to ill-wish themselves. Burn this.
Montague arises from his sick bed and comes to see me, pale and grave. I call all of us together, as if for a family party to celebrate the birth of two new boys. My daughter, Ursula, has another boy whom she has named Edward, and Geoffrey has a fourth child, Thomas. My cousin Henry Courtenay and his wife, Gertrude, come with two silver christening cups, and my son-in-law Henry Stafford takes one for his son, with thanks. We look like a family party celebrating the birth of new children.