The Complete Tudors by Jean Plaidy

Author:Jean Plaidy [Plaidy, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

HER POSITION was not relieved by the coming of the man from Rotterdam.

Jane had heard much of him; and of all the learned friends who struck terror into her heart, this man frightened her more than any.

He settled in at The Barge and changed the way of life there.

Sometimes he looked at Jane with a mildly sarcastic smile, and there would be a faint twinkle in his half-closed blue eyes as though he were wondering how such a man as his friend Thomas More could have married the insignificant little wench.

She learned a good deal about him, but the things which interested her were, Thomas said, unimportant. He was the illegitimate son of a priest, and this seemed to Jane a shameful thing; nor could she understand why he was not ashamed of it. He had become an orphan when he was very young, and when those about him had realized his unusual powers he had been sent into a convent of canons regular, but, like Thomas, he could not bring himself to take the vows. He had studied in Paris, where he had given his life to literature; and although he had suffered greatly from abject poverty and had been forced to earn his bread by becoming tutor to gentlemen, so dazzling was his scholarship that he had drawn the attention of other scholars to himself and was recognized as the greatest of them all.

Jane, in her kitchen, giving orders to her maids, could hardly believe that she had this great man in her house and that it was her husband with whom he went walking through the streets of London.

To some extent she was glad of this man’s visit; it turned Thomas’s attention from herself. They were translating something—to which they referred as Lucian—from Latin into Greek, she believed; they would spend hours together doing this work, disagreeing on many points. It seemed to Jane that learned conversation involved a good deal of disagreement. And so it happened that as Thomas must engage himself in continual conversation with Erasmus, with his work as a lawyer and with his attendances at the Parliament, he had less time to give to the tutoring of his wife.

But she, since the smile she was sure she had received from the Prince of Wales, began to feel that perhaps she was not so foolish as she had believed herself to be. On looking back, it seemed that that smile of the Prince’s had held a certain appreciation. She was not so foolish that she did not realize that the Prince would look for other qualities in a woman than did Thomas; yet the approbation of such a Prince gave her new courage and confidence in herself.

She listened more carefully to the discourses that went on about her; and when they were in English she found that they were not so dreary as she had believed they must be.

Erasmus disliked the monks; Thomas defended them.

Erasmus declared his intention of one day laying bare to the world the iniquitous happenings which occurred in some of the monasteries of Europe.

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