Cheke's Choice

Truth is stranger than fiction. This breathtaking account of the extraordinary adventures of Sir John Cheke (pronounced 'Cheek') proves it! John Cheke was born in London, England in 1514. He currently (2013) resides on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he is a successful young corporate lawyer with a beautiful young Irish wife called Kathleen and a cute baby son called John, Jr. In 1556, the renowned classical scholar of Cambridge University and prominent advocate of the Reformed Faith Sir John Cheke was given a stark choice by the Catholic Queen of England, Bloody Mary Tudor: renounce his Anglican heresy, or, on the morrow, be burned at the stake in Smithfield, where hundreds of Protestant victims had already been burned alive during the Marian Persecutions of 1553, 1554, and 1555. During an earlier brush with England's uncompromising Catholic authorities, John Cheke had been obliged to exile himself in the Eternal City for a period of two years. During his stay in Rome he had become a friend of the great genius Galilei Galileo, who gave the likable Englishman a gift of his latest invention, a time machine configured in the compact shape of a wrist watch.In his dark and dank condemned cell in the Tower of London,John Cheke sits contemplating the miraculous machine strapped to his wrist. He contemplates it for hours.The bloodcurdling roars of the arch-heretic John Rogers are coming in through the small window of John Cheke's condemned cell. The faggots bundled up around John Rogers and the stake he was chained to in Smithfield Market had been set alight by the Immolation Marshall Sir Robin Tewkes seventeen hours ago, but the faggots were green and burned slowly, hence John Rogers was still roasting and screaming all this time later. At three minutes to three a.m.John Cheke decides he will use Galileo's gift to travel to 21st England to evaluate how the Reformation has turned out. His decision is partly the child of curiosity, partly the child of wishing to see a future England that has become a Second Jerusalem peopled by God-fearing saints, and partly a child of his visceral need to reassure himself that his gruesome martyrdom for the Reformed Faith will have been justified by the glories of God reflected in the England of 2020! John Cheke twiddles and punches the buttons and knobs on his time machine in the appropriate sequences, and a nanosecond's passage sees him vanish from his condemned cell and re-materialize in a sunny golden English meadow beneath an azure summer sky crisscrossed with jet vapors! The sixteenth-century knight's first encounter with the English of the twenty-first century comes in the shape of his entering a dusk-mantled Church of England soup kitchen in a picture-postcard village near a winding river in the Norfolk Broads. The female Anglican minister, a long-since wilted English Rose with disconcertingly yellow teeth, smilingly presents the dusty traveler with the inexplicably noble gait a fancy menu. Pride of place on the gilt-edge French Language bill of fare is taken up with 39 dishes composed of human flesh. Welcome to the Protestant England of 2020, Johnny!!! I wonder what Anglican Abominations await you beyond the dark, whining Thurne?