She was foolish, she knew. Her family had always said so. How tragic it was that she, the simplest of them all, should be married to one of the most learned men in England!
There was so much to learn. She had always believed that a wife had but to watch the servants and see that there was no waste in the kitchen. That had been her stepmother's duty. But here at The Barge, much was expected of her.
“Jane,” he had said, “I will lay the whole world at your feet.” She had thought that was one of the most beautiful things a husband could say to his wife; but she had discovered that his way of laying the whole world at her feet was to attempt to teach her Latin and to make her repeat, by way of re-creation, the sermons they heard in St. Stephen's Church in Walbrook.
“Poor little Jane,” he said, “they have neglected your education, but we will remedy that, my love. I said I would lay the whole world at your feet, did I not? Yes, Jane, I will give you the key to all the treasures in the world. Great literature—that is the world's greatest treasure; and the key is understanding the languages in which it is written.”
She was a most unhappy bride. She felt bewildered and lost and wished she were dead.
Surely everything a normal woman needed was denied her. In a book he had written, entitled The Life of John Picus, there was a dedication to a woman. She had felt a faint stirring of jealousy, but she had discovered that the woman to whom the book was dedicated was a nun—a sister who lived with the Order of the Poor Clares just beyond the Minories. How could she be jealous of a nun? Even that was denied her. She knew that she had married no ordinary man, and she fervently wished that she had a husband whom she could understand—someone like her father or her brothers, even if there were occasions when he was angry with her and beat her. This harping on the value of learning, in spite of his kindness and gentleness, was sometimes more than she could bear.
He was trying to mold her, to make her into a companion as well as a wife. It was like asking an infant to converse with sages.
Dr. Lily came to the house, as did Dr. Linacre and Dr. Colet; they conversed with her husband, and they laughed frequently, for Thomas laughed a good deal; but a woman could not continue to smile when she had no idea of the cause of laughter.
Sometimes her husband took her walking through the City, pointed out with pride what he considered places of interest.
They would walk through Walbrook and Candlewick Street, through Tower Street to the Great Tower. Then Thomas would tell her stories of what had happened within those gloomy walls, but she found she could not remember which of the kings and queens had taken part in them; and she would be worried because she knew she could not remember. Then he would take her to Goodman's Fields and pick daisies with her; they would make a chain together to hang about her neck; he would laugh and tease her because she was a country girl; but even then she would be afraid that he was making jokes which she did not recognize as such.
Sometimes they would walk along by the river or row over to Southwark, where the people were so poor. Then he would talk of the sufferings of the poor and how he visualised an ideal state where there was no such suffering. He loved to talk of this state which he built up in his imagination. She was rather glad when he did so, for he would not seem to notice that she was not listening, and she could let her mind enjoy memories of New Hall.
At other times they would walk through the Poultry to the Chepe and to Paul's Cross to listen to the preachers. He would glance at her anxiously, hoping that her delight in the sermons equaled his own. He would often talk of Oxford and Cambridge, where so many of his friends had studied. “One day, Jane, I shall take you there,” he promised her. She dreaded that; she felt that such places would be even more oppressive than this City with its noisy crowds.
Once she watched a royal procession in the streets. She saw the King himself—-a disappointing figure, unkingly, she thought, solemn and austere, looking as though he considered such displays a waste of money and time. But with him had been the young Prince of Wales, who must surely be the most handsome Prince in the world. She had cheered with the crowd when he had ridden by on his gray horse, so noble, so beautiful in his purple velvet cloak, his hair gleaming like gold, his sweet face, as someone in the crowd said, as lovely as a girl's, yet masculine withal. It seemed to Jane that the Prince, who was smiling and bowing to all, let his eyes linger for a moment on her. She felt herself blushing; and surely all the homage and admiration she wished to convey must have been there for him to see. Then it had seemed that the Prince had a special smile for Jane; and as she stood there, she was happy—happy to have left New Hall, because there she could never have had a smile from the boy who would one day be the King.
The Prince passed on, but something had happened to Jane; she no longer felt quite so stupid; and when Thomas told her of the coming of King Henry to the throne, she listened eagerly and she found that what he had to tell was of interest to her. Thomas was delighted with that interest, and when they reached The Barge he read her some notes which he had compiled when, as a boy, he had been sent to the household of Cardinal Morton, there to learn what he could. The notes were written in Latin, but he translated them into English for her, and she enjoyed the story of the coming of the Tudor King; she wept over the two little Princes who, Thomas told her, had been murdered in the Tower by the order of their wicked, crook-backed uncle, Richard. She could not weep for the death of Arthur, for, had Arthur lived, that beautiful Prince who had smiled at her would never be a King. So the death of Arthur, she was sure, could not be a tragedy but a blessing in disguise.
Thomas, delighted with her interest, gave her a lesson in Latin; and although she was slow to understand, she began to feel that she might learn a little.
She thought a good deal about the handsome Prince, but a conversation she overheard one day sent her thoughts fearfully to the Prince's father, the flinty-faced King.
John More came to see his son and daughter-in-law. Like Thomas, he was a lawyer, a kindly faced man with shrewd eyes.
He patted Jane's head, wished her happiness and asked her if she were with child. She blushed and said she was not.
Marriage, she heard him tell Thomas, was like putting the hand into a blind bag which was full of eels and snakes. There were seven snakes to every eel.
She did not understand whether that meant he was pleased with his son's marriage or not; and what eels and snakes had to do with her and Thomas she could not imagine.
But there was something which she did understand.
John More said to his son: “So, your piece of folly in the Parliament has cost me a hundred pounds.”
“My piece of folly?”
“Now listen, son Thomas. I have been wrongfully imprisoned on a false charge, and my release was only won in payment of a hundred pounds. All London knows that I paid the fine for you. You were the culprit. You spoke with such fire against the grant the King was asking that it was all but halved by the Parliament. The King wishes his subjects to know that he'll not brook such conduct. You have done a foolish thing. A pair of greedy royal eyes are turned upon us, and methinks they will never lose sight of us.”
“Father, as a burgess of London, I deemed it meet to oppose the King's spending of his subjects' money.”
“As a subject of the King, you have acted like a fool, even though as a burgess you may have acted like an honest man. You are a meddler, my son. You will never rise to the top of our profession unless you give your mind to the study of law, and to nothing else. I kept you short of money at Oxford….”