London - Edward Rutherfurd [302]
But Thomas was shaking his head. “Not a doxy. She’s his lawfully wedded wife. His second, actually. They were married before he became archbishop.”
“But does King Henry know?”
“Yes. Doesn’t approve. But he likes Cranmer. Needs him too, to legitimize the Boleyn marriage. So he’s made Cranmer promise to keep it a secret. That’s why Mistress Cranmer is never seen. When he travels, she goes in a box.” He laughed again. His words were a little slurred. “Don’t you think it’s funny?”
Susan looked at Rowland, but he was still humming, apparently not quite aware of what was being said. Just as well, she thought. “She must be a loose sort of woman,” she said with disgust.
“Not at all,” Thomas replied. “Very respectable. Cranmer married her when he was studying in Germany. I believe her father’s a pastor.”
“Germany?” She frowned. A pastor? It took her a moment to realize the implication. “A Lutheran pastor?” she asked. “Do you mean,” she continued, amazed, “that this woman, who is married to our own archbishop, is a Lutheran?” And then an even worse thought occurred to her. “But what does this mean about Cramner? Is he a covert heretic?”
“A modest reformer,” he assured her. “No more.”
“And the king? Surely he doesn’t secretly sympathize with the Protestants?”
“Good heavens, no,” he cried.
She supposed it was so. She noticed, though, that the conversation had sobered him. He even looked a little anxious. But she would probably have left the matter there if she had not suddenly had a terrible flash of perception.
“And you, Thomas,” she turned on him. “What are you?”
Yes, he was sober now. She looked into his eyes, but he dropped them and did not answer.
For Thomas, as for many others, the conversion had taken place when he was a student – though to call the radical change in his beliefs a conversion was not quite proper, since he had not actually joined another faith.
Indeed, the process had been subtle. Part of it he had felt free to admit to Susan and Rowland in their conversations at Chelsea: the scholar’s desire to purify the scriptural texts, the intellectual’s scorn for idolatry and superstition. But beyond this lay something far more radical and dangerous, and for Thomas at least, the inspiration for these other ideas could be summed up in a single word: Cambridge.
Of the two great universities, Cambridge had always been a more radical place than traditionalist Oxford. And when Cambridge men, inspired by the Renaissance scholar Erasmus, turned their gaze upon the creaking old colossus of the medieval Church, they soon stripped it down to its mechanical essentials; even the most hallowed doctrines were examined.
Thomas never forgot the first time he had heard the central doctrine of Transubstantiation – the miracle of the Mass – attacked. He had known, of course, that Wyclif and the Lollards had questioned it. He was aware that heretical Protestants in Europe were now denying it. But when he heard a respected Cambridge scholar in action, he had been shaken.
“Discussion of this question,” the scholar had pointed out, “has usually been about details. Does God really grant a miracle to every priest every time? Or, more philosophically, how can the Host be both bread and the body of Christ at the same time? But all this,” he stated confidently, “is unnecessary speculation. My case is far simpler. It rests on what the Bible actually says. In only one of the four Gospels does Our Lord tell his disciples to re-enact this part of the Last Passover Supper, and all He says is: ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ Nothing more. It is a commemoration. That is all. Why, then, have we invented a miracle?”
By the time he left the bracing East Anglian air of Cambridge, Thomas Meredith was no longer a believing Catholic.
If pressed to define his allegiance, he would have had to say he belonged to the party of reform. It was a broad group. Though Cambridge was its intellectual base, there was a little circle around the rising scholar Latimer at Oxford, too. There were progressive churchmen like Cranmer, some prominent