Early dark has fallen. He rises, lights a candle, closes the shutter against a night of steel-tipped stars. His daughter’s eyes follow him, every move. She would make a good witness, he thinks. ‘Thomas More wrote his epitaph in his lifetime,’ he tells her. ‘He was that sort of man.’ Words, words, just words. ‘He wanted it engraved in stone:
‘He believed this? Truly?’
‘That we needed the constraint of ignorance? Yes.’
‘He did not give much credit to his fellow man.’
‘But then – I dare say that unless you knew him you could not understand – his own sins lay heavy on him. And at the end, I think he had lost faith in his own arguments. Those people who now claim to be his followers – he would not recognise the painted papist they make of him. I can remember a time when he was no great friend of popes. And you know that blood-truffler Stokesley is still at work? Stokesley who is Bishop of London, I mean. It was a protégé of his that was vicar of Louth – that is in the east country, where these late troubles broke out. It all goes back to More.’
She frowns. So many names, too many; too much geography, the terrain of a strange land. ‘Nothing ended with his death,’ he says. ‘It only began. When he was alive and Lord Chancellor, Stokesley used to aid him, raiding houses, hauling men and women to prison.’
‘Dismiss this bishop. You have power.’
‘Not that much.’
‘Shall I see him?’
‘Stokesley?’ He is amused. ‘If you like. He is a blustering fellow. Not worth the seeing, in my opinion. I have better bishops to show you. And noble dames, if you like. And their lords.’
‘Shall I see Henry, where he is throned?’
He hesitates. ‘Tell me about Tyndale. After his arrest.’
‘He was not hurt in prison. I can say at least that. They respected his scholarship and they tried by reason to convince him. They treated him as a Christian man.’
More, he thinks, would have tormented him with bitter words and with scourges.
‘He wrote much in his own defence. They brought against him the worst people they had.’ She spits out their names. ‘Dufief, who is a corrupt lawyer. Tapper. Doye, Jacques Masson. All the great papists of Leuven.’
‘They wanted to destroy him in argument,’ he says. ‘I admit, I have wanted that myself. If he would have come to the king’s side in his great matter – I mean, the matter of his marriage – he would have been safe, perhaps sitting here with us now. I tried to save him, but I am only a private man. I was not even Lord Cromwell then. The Emperor did not heed my appeals.’
‘Your king might have saved him,’ she says, ‘but he would not. Some would ask why, when your ears are open to the gospel, you would serve such a master.’
‘Who else should I serve? A man cannot be masterless.’
The door opens. Young Mathew. Letters. ‘Put them there.’
‘They stay for an answer, sir.’
‘Leave them. Say I am with my daughter.’
‘I should say that?’ Mathew asks. ‘As you please, sir.’ He goes out.
She says, ‘My tale is almost done. Tyndale gave no ground. They could not shake him. All the weary months they say he prayed for his gaolers, and I believe we shall presently hear that some of them were brought to Christ.’
‘That would be good hearing.’ More likely, he thinks, they stripped his cell after he was gone, stealing even a threadbare coat or candle-end. ‘They say he tried to work even while he was shut up.’ He imagines the word of God, damp and slimy, slipping from the page and pooling on the stone flags.
‘I can’t see that could be possible.’
She says, ‘He left certain writings behind him, in the city, in the secret places of the wall.’
‘Who has them? I shall buy them.’
‘I cannot tell you. Your king might rip them from your hands.’
True, he thinks.
‘We thought they would burn him as soon as the trial was done, but they kept him a little space – to give him more chance to recant, we suppose. Then we thought they might burn him inside the prison, but it was done in the market. They chained him to the stake, and put a halter around his neck. They arranged this mercy, as they call it – to be strangled first. They make a hole in the stake – do you know this? – and pass the rope through, so the executioner is behind him, and when the flame is set, he heaves backwards on the rope, and so kills the good soul. But often of course he does not.’
‘I have heard he was not dead when the fire reached him. That he spoke from the flames. He said, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”’
She says, ‘He spoke nothing. How could he speak? He was choked. He stirred and moved and cried with the pain.’ She is angry. ‘Who is King Henry, to occupy his last thought? And what is England – except the realm that turned its back on him?’
