Slowly, as Cavendish and I added property and houses to our fortune, each one chiseled from the dying body of the old church, I created new books, a new one for each new estate, each one showing a good balance of profit on rents, or sale of wool, or hay or corn or wheat or iron ore, or whatever goods each land could bring to us. Slowly I learned the prices of trees standing in a forest and the value of timber when they were felled. Slowly I learned to estimate the price of wool on a sheep’s back or the profits to be made from a flock of geese at Christmas. My husband Cavendish hired good reliable men who had served the monks in the abbeys and the nuns in the nunneries and knew how lands should yield good rents and revenue, and I set myself to learn from them. Soon it was my task to read the accounts brought to me by the stewards of our growing estates: I was overseer as well as house manager. Soon it was I who knew to the last penny that our properties were well run and our wealth was increasing.

None of this happened overnight, of course. We were married ten years; we had our children—eight of them, bless them all, and bless the good husband who gave them to me, and the fortune to endow them. He rose high in the favor of the court. He served first Thomas Cromwell and then directly the king. He served in the Court of Augmentations, that prime position, and traveled the country valuing the church properties and turning them over to the Crown, as one after another proved to be unfit for the work of the Lord and better closed down.

And if it happened that the houses that were the richest, and the most profitable, were the first to attract the attention of godly reform, then it was not for us to question the mysterious ways of Providence. If they had been good men they would have been good stewards of the wealth of the Lord and not squandered the church’s fortune: encouraging the poor in idleness and building churches and hospitals of excessive beauty. Better for God that poor stewards be replaced by those who knew the value of money and were ready to set it to work.