Sent To Coventry Quotes

It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none. But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say.

Parliamentary prisoners were often sent to Coventry under armed guard; hence the familiar expression.

In the spring of 1519, the Bishop of Coventry received word that certain families were teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments in English. The bishop ordered the arrest of Mr. Hatchets, Mr. Archer, Mr. Hawkins, Mr. Bond, Mr. Wrigsham, Mr. Landsdale and Mrs. Smith. While they were held at an abbey outside of town, their children were brought to Greyfriar’s Monastery in Coventry. The boys and girls were made to stand before Friar Stafford, the abbot. One by one, Stafford interrogated the children about their parents’ beliefs. “Now then,” he told them, “I charge you in the name of God to tell me the whole truth—you shall suffer severely for any lies you tell or secrets you conceal.” “What do you believe about the church and the way to heaven?” he asked them. “Do you go to the services of the parish church? Do you read the Scriptures in English? Do you memorize the Lord’s Prayer or other Scriptures in English?” After getting from the children’s own lips the information he needed to convict their parents, he warned them. “Your parents are heretics!” he bellowed. “They have led you away from the teachings of the church. You are never to meddle again with the Lord’s Prayer or the Ten Commandments or any other Scriptures in English. And if you do—rest assured you will burn at the stake for it!” The next day, the six fathers and Mrs. Smith stood before a panel of judges that included the bishop and Friar Stafford. After presenting the evidence against them—and because the men had been warned before by the bishop not to persist in their Lollard ways—the men were condemned to death by burning. But since this was Mrs. Smith’s first offense, the court dismissed her with a warning not to teach her children the Scriptures in English anymore under pain of death. It was late in the evening when the court dismissed, so the bishop’s assistant decided to see Mrs. Smith home in the dark. As they walked out into the night, he took her arm to lead her across the street. Hearing the rattling of papers within her sleeve, he stopped and said, “Well, what do you have here?” He grabbed her arm, reached into the sleeve and pulled out a little scroll. Under the light of a lantern, he read it and found that it contained handwritten in English the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Apostle’s Creed. “Well, well,” he said with a sneer. “Come now, this is as good a time as any!” He dragged her back again to the bishop. The panel quickly sentenced her to be burned with the six condemned men and sent her off to prison to await her fate. A few days later, guards led Mrs. Smith and the Lollard men to an open space in the center of Coventry known as Little Park. They tied them to a stake and burned them to death for the crime of teaching their children the Word of God in English.

Jack nodded, his mind drifting back to a night in Coventry when he and his wife had been caught in an air raid. He closed his eyes briefly as he thought about her, his throat catching as he recalled the letter she had sent him a week earlier. It had been the first he had received from his wife since arriving in France and he knew that it would be the last. In it she had confirmed all of the wild fantasies that had plagued him for countless nights. In it was the end of the hope he had clung to for so long. The letter had barely been a paragraph long, yet it had destroyed the world that Jack had once known. She had told him that there was another man, an American who was stationed on an airbase near their home. He was, she had told him, an officer. They had been together for two years and she planned to marry him. She had asked for a divorce and had informed him briskly that she intended, when the war was over, to take the children and return with her lover to New York. The letter had been blunt and to the point, there had been no warmth, no consideration in the words, just a cold animosity that Jack could not understand. The wording had suggested that it was his fault that their marriage had fallen apart, that somehow, in some imperceptible way, he had forced her into the arms of another. He felt his blood rising and he forced himself to breathe, his hands white against the stock of his Sten gun as he mulled over the contents of the letter. He had, deep inside, harboured a hope, a small dream that when the war finished they could rebuild their strained marriage. The letter had shattered that illusion and left in its wake a cold reality that had struck Jack like a thunderbolt. He spat onto the ground and wished that he could get five minutes alone with the bastard. All those years of writing to her, of missing her. All those years of struggling in the desert, longing to come home, of pouring his heart into the precious letters he had sent to her. All that time she had been with another man.