The dates and times of major events of Vives’s life as described in the two diaries are accurate as far as can be ascertained. The dates of his arrivals and departures from England and the death of his father, as well as the dates of his incarceration in England, are known and followed faithfully. The letter he signed in support of Catherine of Aragon on the orders of Wolsey is thought to be the reason he was arrested. It is known that he was incarcerated for a time with the Spanish ambassador, Inigo Mendoza de Zuniga.
That Vives knew the More family well and stayed at their various homes is also fact. Vives’s wife was Marguerite Valldaura, who came from a family of Jewish origin from Valencia and who settled in Bruges. She never came to England despite being personally invited by the queen. Her father dealt in cloth and diamonds, and her brother, Nicolas Valldaura, became a physician. Vives’s friendship with Álvaro de Castro, “whom he loved like a brother” and with whom he stayed in London, is well-attested. Gasper de Castro is also recorded in state documents in London in the 1550s. Beatriz, Vives’s sister, joined him in Bruges in 1531. One of Vives’s brothers-in-law who remained in Valencia went before the Inquisition.
Sir Thomas More was imprisoned in the Tower of London by Henry VIII and executed on 6 July 1535, ostensibly for refusing to accept the annulment of the marriage of Henry and Catherine. His last letter from the Tower, “The Agony of Christ,” was passed to his daughter Meg. In her will, she left it to Fray Pedro de Soto of Valencia, home of the Vives family. It now resides in the Corpus Christi Museum in Valencia. At More’s execution, he commented that his beard had committed no crime and thus should be spared the axe. His head was placed on a pike on London Bridge for a month after his execution, and Meg obtained it, possibly by bribery. She kept it for years under her bed, and she is thought to be buried with it in Canterbury. His hair shirt is preserved and currently on display at Syon House, formerly Syon Abbey.
The Flying Horse Inn in Houndsditch was present in the seventeenth century, and it is possible that a tavern existed there earlier as this area escaped the ravages of the Great Fire of London in 1666. Of the secret Jews of sixteenth-century London, there are tantalising glimpses. The Chancery Court records record several Londoners with Jewish surnames such as Cohen, Isaacs, and Levy. The Domus Conversorum, or house of the converts, was continually inhabited at this time. An Edward Scales left the Domus in 1527. The musician Ambrosius Moyses is attested to in the historical record as a court musician, an early violin player who sometimes was known as John Anthony.
Elements of Vives’s conversation with Catherine of Aragon on the barge to Syon House are mentioned in his writings. She asked him which of the two he would choose: good fortune or adversity. She commented that she would choose an equal share, and if then she still had to choose, she would choose the latter, feeling that it would strengthen her. The reported speech at the Christmas gathering of Sir Thomas More, 1523—“Only any non-donkey of any man except Socrates and another belonging to this same man begins contingently to be black”—are the actual words of Vives, who used them to illustrate that the exclusivity of academic writing was often nonsense. He was a lifelong proponent of clarity in writing.
That Henry VIII had Jewish sympathies is generally acknowledged, and there are no records of Jewish persecutions during his reign apart from the temporary imprisonment in 1541 of the court musicians. It is thought that there may have been up to nineteen Jewish musicians in Henry’s court. The imprisonment may have been an attempt to placate the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The king had a long association with Marco Raphael, the German rabbi mentioned in the text, and the king personally came to the defence of the wealthy financier, Diego Mendes of Antwerp, who was imprisoned on the accusation of Judaism.
The character of Johannes Van der Poel is fictitious, although Bruges became the model for secular care of the poor along the lines of On Assistance to the Poor. The students of Vives were instrumental in bringing this about.
Vives died on May 6, 1540, and his wife died twelve years later. Both were forty-eight years of age at death. Evidence from the history of the Jews in Spain and Portugal after the 1492 expulsion shows that many small communities of crypto-Jews lived as Catholics whilst practising Judaism in secret, sometimes for hundreds of years. An isolated community, the Belmonte Jews of Portugal, survives into the present day and finally has a synagogue in which the community may worship in peace.
Vives and his wife were both buried in the tenth-century church of St. Donatian in Bruges, which was destroyed by occupying French troops in 1799.