My disability had come upon me when I was three; I began to stoop forward and to the right, and no brace could correct it. By the age of five I was a true hunchback, as I have remained to this day. I was always jealous of the boys and girls around the farm, who ran and played, while I could manage nothing more than a crab-like scuttle they mocked me for. Sometimes I would cry out to God at the injustice of it.
My father farmed a good acreage of sheep and arable land near Lichfield. It was a great sorrow to him that I could never work the farm, for I was his only surviving child. I felt it all the more because he never reproached me for my infirmity; he simply said quietly one day that when he grew too old to work the farm himself he would appoint a steward, who perhaps could work for me when he was gone.
I was sixteen when the steward arrived. I remember biting back a flood of resentment when William Poer appeared in the house one summer's day, a big, dark-haired man with a ruddy open face and strong hands which enveloped mine in a horny grip. I was introduced to his wife, a pale pretty creature, and to Mark, then a sturdy, tousle-headed toddler who clung to her skirts and stared at me with a dirty thumb in his mouth.
By then it had already been decided that I was to go to London to study at the Inns of Court. It was the coming thing, if one wished financial independence for a son and he had a modicum of brains, to send him to law. My father said that not only was there money to be made, but legal skills would one day help me in supervising the steward's running of the farm. He thought I would return to Lichfield, but I never did.
I arrived in London in 1518, the year after Martin Luther posted his challenge to the pope on the door of Wittenberg Castle church. I remember how hard it was at first to get used to the noise, the crowds — above all, the constant stench — of the capital. But in my classes and lodgings I soon found good company. Those were already days of controversy, the common lawyers arguing against the spreading use of the Church courts. I sided with those who said the king's courts were being robbed of their prerogative — for if men dispute the meaning of a contract, or slander each other, what business is that of an archdeacon? This was no mere cynical desire for business; the Church had become like a great octopus, spreading its tentacles into every area of the nation's life, all for profit and without authority in Scripture. I read Erasmus, and began to see my callow thraldom to the Church of my youth in a new light. I had reasons of my own to be bitter against the monks especially, and now I saw that they were good ones.
I completed my schools and began to make contacts and find business. I discovered an unexpected gift for disputation in court, which stood me in good stead with the more honest judges. And in the late 1520s, just as the king's problems with the papacy over the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon began to make a public stir, I was introduced to Thomas Cromwell, a fellow lawyer then rising high in the service of Cardinal Wolsey.
I met him through an informal debating society of reformers, which used to meet in a London inn — secretly, for many of the books we read were forbidden. He began to put some work from departments of state my way. And so I was set on my future path, riding behind Cromwell as he rose to supplant Wolsey and became the king's secretary, commissioner general, vicar general, all the time keeping the full extent of his religious radicalism from his sovereign.
He began to seek my assistance with legal matters affecting those who enjoyed his patronage — for he was building a great network — and I became established as one of 'Cromwell's men'. So when, four years ago, my father wrote to ask if I could find William Poer's son a post in one of the expanding departments of state my master controlled, it was something I was able to do.