I am invited to the king’s rooms most evenings before dinner to listen to debates. Often I say what I think, and always I remind the king that the cause of reform is his cause, a process that he started in his wisdom, that his people revere him for bringing reform to England. But I can tell from the frosty silence that greets my words that the king is far from agreeing with me. He is planning something; but he does not discuss it with me. I know nothing until the first week of July, when the Privy Council announce a law that makes it a criminal offense to own a Bible in English translated either by William Tyndale or by Miles Coverdale.

This is madness. There is no understanding it. Miles Coverdale translated and improved the Tyndale Bible under the instruction of the king and it was published as the Great Bible, the king’s Bible, his gift to believers. This is the Bible that the king gave to his people only seven years ago. Everyone who can afford one has a copy. It would have been disloyal not to have a family copy. Every parish church was given one and ordered to display it. It is the best version in English; every bookcase in England has it. Now, overnight, ownership is a crime. It is a reversal so great that everything is turned around, and upside down. I think of Will Somers standing on his head as I hurry back to my private rooms and find Nan wrapping my precious, beautifully bound, and illustrated volumes in rough cloth and cording up a trunk.

“We can’t just throw them out!”

“They have to be sent away.”

“Where are you going to send them?” I ask.

“To Kendal,” she says, naming our family home. “As far away as possible.”

“It’s barely standing!”

“Then they won’t look there.”

“You’ve got my copy?”

“And your notes, and Catherine Brandon’s copy, and Anne Seymour’s and Joan Denny’s and Lady Dudley’s. This new law has caught us all out without warning. The king has made us all criminals overnight.”

“But why?” I demand. I am near to crying with anger. “Why make his own Bible illegal? The king’s Bible! How can it be illegal to own a Bible? God gave the Word to his people, how can the king take it back?”

“Exactly,” she says. “You think. Why would the king make a criminal of his wife?”

I take her hands, pulling her away from tying the knots on the trunk, and I kneel beside her. “Nan, you have been at court all your life; I am a Parr of Kendal raised in Lincoln. I’m a straightforward northern woman. Don’t speak in riddles to me.”