The Red Book of Heroes

'What now, Mother Eve?' he answered. 'Sit not musing with some serpent in your breast, or some new persuasion to offer Father Adam the apple yet once again.'

'I have sworn myself,' said she, and at this More laughed and replied:

'That was like Eve, too, for she offered Adam no worse fruit than she had eaten herself.'

Finding that his daughter's persuasions were useless, the king and council sent Cromwell to see if by fair words or threats he could induce More to declare that the king was head of the church. But, try as he might, nothing either treasonable or submissive could be wrung from the prisoner.

'I am the king's true, faithful subject, and pray for his highness, and all his, and all the realm,' said sir Thomas. 'I do nobody none harm, I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish everybody good, and if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live. And I am dying already, and have since I came here been many times in the case that I thought to die within one hour. And therefore my poor body is at the king's pleasure.' Then Cromwell took his leave 'full gently,' promising to make report to the king.

Lord Cromwell having failed also, the whole council next came and put forth all their skill, with no better result; and it was then determined to bring sir Thomas out of the Tower, and to try him at Westminster on the charge of treason. Neither the prisoner nor the judges had any doubt as to what the verdict would be; but whatever his thoughts as to the future, More must have rejoiced to be rowing once more on the Thames, with the air and sunlight all around him, and after a year's confinement even the sight of Westminster Hall and the assembly met together, as he knew, to doom him would have been full of interest. He was allowed a chair, for his legs were so swollen that he could hardly have stood; and then began the trial which a late lord chancellor has called 'the blackest crime under the name of the law ever committed in England.' At the close, sentence was passed. More had been proved guilty of treason, and was to be hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn.

The constable of the Tower, sir William Kingston, sir Thomas's 'very dear friend,' conducted the condemned man back to prison, and so sorrowful was the constable's face that any man would have thought that it was he who was condemned to death. Margaret Roper was waiting on the wharf, and as her father landed from the barge she flung herself into his arms, 'having neither respect to herself, nor to the press of people that were about him.' He whispered some words of comfort and gave her his blessing, and 'the beholding thereof was to many present so lamentable that it made them to weep.'

The last shame of hanging was after all not inflicted on him, and the King decreed that his faithful servant and merry companion should be executed on Tower Hill, like the rest of the men whose bodies lie in the church of St. Peter ad Vincula within the Tower walls. The day before his beheading sir Thomas wrote with a charred stick to Margaret, leaving her the hair shirt he had always worn under his clothes, and messages and little remembrances to the rest of the old household. Oddly enough, his wife is never mentioned.

Very early in the morning of July 6 the king sent sir Thomas Pope to tell More he was to die before the clock struck nine, and to say that 'he was not to use many words' on the scaffold, evidently fearing lest the minds of the crowd might be stirred up to avenge his murder.

More answered that he had never meant to say anything at which the king could be offended, and begged that his daughter Margaret might be present at his burial. Pope replied that the king had given permission for his wife and children and any other of his friends to be there, and sir Thomas thanked him, and then put on a handsome dress of silk which had been provided on purpose by the Italian Bonvisi.

But sir Thomas was not allowed to be at peace during the short walk between the Beauchamp Tower and the block, for he was beset first by a woman who wished to know where he had put some papers of hers when he was sent to prison, and then by a second, upbraiding him with a judgment he had given against her when he was chancellor.

'I remember you well, and should give judgment against you still,' said he; but at length the crowd was kept back, and a path was kept to the scaffold.

Roper was there, watching, and he noticed that the ladder leading to the platform was very unsteady. Sir Thomas noticed it too, and with his foot on the first step turned and said to the lieutenant of the Tower:

'I pray thee see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.'

When he reached the top, he knelt down and prayed; then rising, kissed the executioner, and said:

'Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office. My neck is very short, take heed therefore thou strike not awry.' As he spoke, he drew out a handkerchief he had brought with him, and, binding it over his eyes, he stretched himself out on the platform and laid his head on the block.

Thus died sir Thomas More, because he would not tie his conscience to another man's back, for he had no enemies save those who felt that this courage put them to shame, and he had striven all his life to do harm to no one. After his death, his head, as was the custom, was placed on a stake, and shown as the head of a traitor on London Bridge for a month, till Margaret Roper bribed a man to steal it for her, and, wrapping it round with spices, she hid it in a safe place. It is possible that she laid it in a vault belonging to the Roper family, in St. Dunstan's Church in Canterbury, but she herself lies with her mother, in the old church of Chelsea, where sir Thomas 'did mind to be buried.'

What the king's feelings were when he heard that the act of vengeance had been accomplished we know not, but the emperor Charles V. spoke his mind plainly to the English ambassador, sir Thomas Eliott.

'My Lord ambassador, we understand that the king your master hath put his faithful servant sir Thomas More to death.'

Whereupon sir Thomas Eliott answered 'that he understood nothing thereof.'

'Well,' said the emperor, 'it is too true; and this we will say, that had we been master of such a servant, of whose doings ourselves have had these many years no small experience, we would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than such a worthy counsellor.'

THE LITTLE ABBESS

A nun!

As one reads the word, two pictures flash into the mind. One is that of sisters of mercy going quickly through the streets, with black dresses and flappy white caps, to visit their poor people. If you look at their faces, you will notice how curiously smooth and unlined they are, even when they are not young any more, and their expression is generally quiet and contented, while the women of their own age who live in the world appear tired and anxious.

The other picture is one that most of us have to make for ourselves, as few have had a chance of seeing it. This nun is also dressed in black robes, and has a flowing black veil, and a white band across her forehead, under which her hair, cut short when she takes her vows, is hidden away. She never leaves her convent, except for a walk in the garden, but she often has children to teach, for many convents are great Roman Catholic schools, and the nuns have to take care that they can tell their scholars about the discoveries of the present day: about wireless telegraphy, about radium, about the late wars and the changes in the boundaries of kingdoms, and many other things.

Of course, nuns are divided into various orders, each with its own rules, and some, the strictest, do not admit anyone inside the convent at all, even into a parlour. After a girl has taken the veil, she is allowed to receive one visit from her friends and relations, and then she says good-bye to them for ever.

But if you had been living in Paris towards the end of the sixteenth century, when Catherine de Médicis was queen-mother, and into the days when Henry IV. was king, and his son Louis succeeded him, you would have found this picture of a convent very far from the truth. Convents were comfortable and even luxurious houses, richly endowed, where poor noblemen and gentlemen sent their daughters for life, paying on their entrance what money they could spare, but keeping enough to portion one or two girls – generally the prettiest of the family – or to help the son to live in state. If, as often happened, the father did not offer enough, the abbess would try to get more from him, or else refuse his daughter altogether. If she was accepted, he bade her farewell for the time, knowing that he could see her whenever he chose, and that she would lead quite as pleasant and as amusing an existence as her married sister. Perhaps, too, she might even be allowed to wear coloured clothes, for there was one order in which the habit of the nuns was white and scarlet; but even if the archbishop, or the abbot, or the king, or whoever had supreme power over the convent, insisted on black and white being worn, why, it would be easy to model the cap and sleeves near enough to the fashion to look picturesque; and could not the dress be of satin and velvet and lace, and yet be black and white still?

As to food, no one was more particular about it than the abbess of a large convent, or else the fine gentlemen and elegant ladies would not come from Paris or the country round to her suppers and private theatricals, where the nuns acted the chief parts, or to the balls for which she was famous. How pleasant it was in the summer evenings to sit with their friends and listen to music from hidden performers; and could anything be so amusing as to walk a little way along the road to Paris till the nuns reached a stretch of smooth green turf, where the monks from a neighbouring monastery were waiting to dance with them in the moonlight?

No, decidedly, nuns were not to be pitied when Henry IV. was king.

Yet soon all these joys were to be things of the past, and it was a girl of sixteen who set her hand to the work.

The family of the Arnaulds were well known in French history as soldiers or lawyers – sometimes as both, for the grandfather of the child whose story I am going to tell you commanded a troop of light horse in time of war, and in time of peace was, in spite of his being a Huguenot – that is, a Protestant – Catherine's trusted lawyer and adviser. This Antoine Arnauld, or M. de la Mothe, as he was called, was once publicly insulted by a noble whose claim to some money Arnauld had been obliged to refuse.

'You are mistaking me for somebody else,' answered M. de la Mothe, quietly.

'What do you mean? I thought you just admitted that you were M. de la Mothe?' replied the angry nobleman.

'Oh, yes,' said the lawyer, 'so I am; but sometimes I change my long robe for a short coat, and once outside this court you would not dare to speak to me in such a manner.'

At this point one of the attendants whispered in his ear that this was the celebrated soldier, and the nobleman, who seems to have been a poor-spirited creature, instantly made the humblest apologies.

Many of his relatives remained Huguenots up to the end, but M. de la Mothe returned to the old religion after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572. No man ever had a narrower escape of his life, for his house in Paris was attacked during the day, and though his servants defended it bravely, neither he nor his children would have been left alive had not a messenger wearing the queen's colours been seen pushing through the crowd. The leaders then called upon the mob to fall back, and the messenger produced a paper, signed by the queen, giving the family leave to come and go in safety.

M. de la Mothe's son, Antoine Arnauld, had in him more of the lawyer than the soldier, and he was clever enough to escape detection for acts which we should certainly call frauds. But he was an excellent husband to the wife of thirteen whom he married, and a very affectionate father to the ten out of his twenty children who lived to grow up.

Monsieur Arnauld was much thought of at the French bar, and was entrusted with law cases by the court and by the nobles. He was a pleasant and clever man, and made friends as easily as money, and if he and his wife had chosen they might have led the same gay life as their neighbours. But the little bride of thirteen did not care for the balls and plays in which the fashionable ladies spent so much of their time, and her dresses were as plain as those of the nuns ought to have been. She looked well after her husband's comfort, and saw that her babies were well and happy, and when everything in her own house was arranged for the day, she went through the door that opened into her father's Paris dwelling, and sat with her mother, who was very delicate and could scarcely leave her sofa.

The summer months were passed at monsieur Arnauld's estate of Andilly, not far from Paris, to which they all moved in several large coaches. Even here the lawyer was busy most of the day over his books and papers, but in the evening he was always ready to listen to his wife's account of her visits to their own poor people, or to those of the village near by. At a period when scarcely anyone gave a thought to the peasants, or heeded whether they lived or died, Arnauld's labourers were all well paid, and the old and ill fed and clothed. And if monsieur Arnauld did not go amongst them much himself, he allowed his wife to do as she liked, and gave her sound advice in her difficulties.

As they grew older the children used often to accompany their mother on her rounds, and learnt from her how to help and understand the lives that were so different from their own. They saw peasants in bare cottages contented and happy on the simplest food, and sometimes on very little of it. They did not think about it at the time, of course, but in after-years the memory of these poor people was to come back to them; and they no longer felt strange and shy of those whom they were called upon to aid.

Madame Arnauld's second daughter, Jacqueline, was a great favourite with her grandfather, monsieur Marion, and was very proud of it. In Paris every morning she used to run into his house, locking the door of communication behind her. If, as often occurred, her brothers and sisters wanted to come too, and drummed on the panels to make Jacqueline open it, she would call out through the key-hole:

'Go away! You have no business here, this house belongs to me,' and then she would run through the rooms till she found her grandfather, and sit chattering to him about the things she liked and the games she was fond of. She was quick and clever and easily interested, and it amused monsieur Marion to listen to her when he had no work to occupy him; but one fact he plainly noticed, and that was that Jacqueline was never happy unless she was put first.

In the year 1599, madame Arnauld, though only twenty-five, had eight children, and her father, monsieur Marion, who was already suffering from the disease which afterwards killed him, began to be anxious about their future. After talking the matter over with his son-in-law, they decided that it was necessary that the second and third little girls, Jacqueline and Jeanne, should become nuns, in order that Catherine, the eldest, might have a larger fortune and make a more brilliant marriage. Not that monsieur Marion intended that they should be common nuns. He would do better than that for Jacqueline, and as his majesty Henry IV. had honoured him with special marks of his favour, he had no doubt that the king would grant an abbey to each of his granddaughters.

When the plan was told to madame Arnauld, she listened with dismay.

'But Jacqueline is hardly seven and a half,' she said, 'and Jeanne is five;' but monsieur Marion only laughed and bade her not to trouble herself, as he would see that their duties did not weigh upon them, and that though he hoped they would behave better than many of the nuns, yet they would lead pleasant lives, and their mother could visit them as often as she liked.

Madame Arnauld was too much afraid of her father to raise any more objections, but she had also heard too much of convents and their ways to wish her daughters to enter them. Meanwhile the affair was carried through by the help of the abbé of Citeaux, and as a rule existed by which no child could be appointed abbess, the consent of the Pope was obtained by declaring each of the girls many years older than she really was. Both Arnauld and Marion considered themselves, and were considered by others, to be unusually good men, yet their consciences never troubled them about this wicked fraud.

However, by the aid of the false statement all went smoothly, and the old and delicate abbess of Port Royal, an abbey situated in a marshy hollow eighteen miles from Paris, agreed to take Jacqueline as helper or coadjutrix, with the condition that on the death of the old lady the little girl was to succeed her, while Jeanne was made abbess of Saint-Cyr, six miles nearer Paris, where madame de Maintenon's famous girls' school was to be founded a hundred years later. The duties of the office were to be discharged by one of the elder nuns till Jeanne was twenty.

It is always the custom that the young girls or novices should spend a year in the convent they wish to enter before they take the vows, which are for life. During that time they can find out if they really wish to leave the world for ever, or if it was only a passing fancy; while the abbess, on the other hand, can tell whether their characters are suited to a secluded existence, or if it would only make them – and therefore other people – restless and unhappy. When Jacqueline became a novice in 1599, her father invited all his friends, and a very grand company they were. The child was delighted to feel that she was the most important person present, and no doubt amused her grandfather by her satisfaction at being 'first.' No such fuss seems to have been made over Jeanne on a similar occasion, but in a few weeks both little girls were sent for eight months to Saint-Cyr.

Abbesses though they might be, they were still the children who had played in their father's garden only a few weeks before. Jacqueline and her elder sister Catherine, the one who was 'to be married,' and very unhappily, were chief in all the games and mischief. They were very daring, and were always quick at inventing new plays. They were very sensible, too, and if one of their brothers or sisters hurt themselves during their games, these two knew what was best to be done without troubling their mother. They were all fond of each other, and never had any serious quarrels; but Jacqueline was generally the leader, and the others, especially the shy and dreamy Jeanne, let themselves be ruled by her. At Saint-Cyr, Jacqueline, who felt no difference, and speedily became a favourite of the other novices, ordered her sister about as she had been accustomed to do, and generally Jeanne obeyed her meekly; but at last she rebelled and informed Jacqueline, much to her surprise, that it was her abbey, and that if Jacqueline did not behave properly she might go away to her own.

Some months of Jacqueline's noviciate had still to run when she was sent to the abbey of Maubuisson, which belonged to the same order of nuns as Port Royal, whereas the nuns of Saint-Cyr belonged to another community. The abbess, Angélique d'Estrées, was a famous woman, and her nuns were some of the worst and most pleasure-loving in the whole of France. Most likely madame Arnauld heard of the change with trembling, but she could do nothing: in October 1600, Jacqueline, then nine years old, took the veil and the vows of poverty and obedience in the midst of a noble company. She was far too excited to think about the religious ceremony which had bound her for life to the cloister, and certainly nobody else – unless her mother was present – thought about it either. Her very name was changed too, and instead of 'Jacqueline' she became 'Angélique,' as 'Jeanne' became 'Agnes.'

As soon as the little girl was a professed nun, monsieur Marion and monsieur Arnauld, who were not satisfied that the pope's consent already obtained was really sufficient, began afresh to prepare a variety of false papers, in order that when Angélique took possession of her abbey no one should be able to turn her out of it. Seventy years before a law had been passed declaring that no nun could be appointed abbess under forty, and though this was constantly disregarded, the child's father and grandfather felt that it was vain to ask the Pope to nominate a child of nine to the post. So in the declaration her age was stated to be seventeen; but even that Clement considered too young, and it required all the influence that monsieur Marion could bring to bear to induce him at last to give his consent. Permission was long in coming, and in the midst of the negotiations the old abbess died suddenly, and Angélique, now ten and a half, was 'Madame de Port Royal.'

When Angélique said good-bye to the nuns at Maubuisson, all of whom had been fond of her, her mother took her to Port Royal, fearing in her heart lest the customs of the convent might be as bad as in the one ruled by madame d'Estrées. But she was consoled at finding the abbey far too poor to indulge in all the expensive amusements of Maubuisson, and that it contained only thirteen nuns, so that Angélique would not have so many people to govern. It was thirty years since a sermon had been preached within its walls, except on a few occasions when a novice had taken the veil, and during the carnival, just before Lent, all the inmates of the convent, the chaplain or confessor among them, acted plays and had supper parties. Like the Maubuisson sisters, the nuns always kept their long hair, and wore masks and gloves; but they were only foolish, harmless young women following the fashion, except the oldest of them all, whom madame Arnauld managed to get dismissed.

Angélique was now nearly eleven, but much older in her thoughts and ways than most children of her age, though she was still fond of games, and spent part of the day playing or wandering about the garden. If it was wet, she read Roman history, and perhaps she may have learnt something of housekeeping from the prioress, who saw that all was kept in order. The abbess said carefully the short prayers appointed for certain hours of the day, and heard matins every morning at four and evensong every afternoon. After this was over, she did as she was bidden by her superior, the abbot of Citeaux, and took all her nuns for a solemn walk on the hills outside the abbey.

At first the young abbess was full of self-importance, and much occupied with her position. After Agnes's taunts when they were both at St. Cyr – oh, long ago now! – it was delightful to be able to send her own carriage for her, and play at the old home games in the garden. But by-and-by the novelty wore off, and she became very tired of her life, which was always the same, day after day, and would never, never be different. If only she could be back at Andilly with the rest! and then she would shut her eyes very tight so that no tears might escape them.

Lively and impulsive though she was, she was not accustomed to speak of her feelings to others, and did her best to thrust her longing for freedom into the background. But she grew pale and thin in the struggle, and at last there came a day when a visitor, guessing what was the matter, hinted that as she had taken her vows before she was old enough to do so by law, it would be easy to get absolved from them. Something of the kind may have perhaps occurred to Angélique, but, put into words, the idea filled her with horror, for deep down in her mind she felt that though her profession had been thrust upon her before she knew what she was doing, she would feel ashamed and degraded all her life if she broke her vows. Still, she wanted to forget it all if she could, and in order to distract her thoughts she began to receive and pay visits in the neighbourhood, to the great grief of her mother, who feared this was the first step towards the moonlight balls of Maubuisson.

Angélique was far too tender-hearted to withstand her mother's tears, and gave up paying calls; spending the time instead in reading Plutarch's 'Lives' and other books about ancient history, and pretending to herself that she was each of the heroes in turn. But even Plutarch was a poor substitute for home life, and when her fifteenth birthday was drawing near she began to wonder if she could stand it any longer.