Portrait of an Unknown Woman

It was an overcast morning. The light was softer than usual. With a soft light in her eyes, she’d been telling Hans Holbein a long-ago story about Sir Thomas’s wit: about how he’d met a fraud of a Franciscan monk in Coventry who’d told him that getting to Heaven was easy if you only relied on the Virgin Mary. All you had to do was say the rosary every day (and pop a penny into the Franciscan’s purse every time you recited the psalterium beatae virginis). ‘Ridiculum,’ Sir Thomas said matter-of-factly, even after the monk brought out all his books ‘proving’ that Mary’s intervention had worked miracles on many occasions. Finally, with a lawyer’s respect for logical argument, he silenced the monk with the reasonable argument that it was unlikely that Heaven would come so cheap.

Hans Holbein had roared with appreciative laughter. ‘That sounds the kind of thing a friend of Erasmus’ would say,’ he chortled. It was also the kind of thing that he might say, or Kratzer, if either of them had the presence of mind to get the phrases off their lips with More’s panache. But he also noted her nostalgic look, and the fleeting sadness on her face as she quietly said ‘yes’. They both knew that this wasn’t how the Sir Thomas of today, the defender of the Church at all costs, would behave.

He didn’t understand why, but something about the complicity of that moment meant that he instinctively nodded assent when she next asked to see the picture.

‘I am not usually shy about my work. But this one I am having problems with,’ he said, dancing a little jig of unease in front of the covered picture. ‘I have seen your father, and talked to him, and I know he is an intelligent, good, gentle man who loves to laugh. Only the other day I was laughing to hear his judgement in court when your Dame Alice adopted a street dog, and a beggar woman took her to court saying the dog was hers; and Sir Thomas ruled that Dame Alice must buy the dog; and everyone was happy, the kind of justice I can understand, ha ha! But my picture is too serious. And nothing I do will put laughter into the face of the man I’m drawing.’