It is Christmas Eve when Alice More comes to see him. There is
a thin sharp light, like the edge of an old knife, and in this light
Alice looks old.
He greets her like a princess, and leads her into one of the
chambers he has had repanelled and painted, where a great fire
leaps up a rebuilt chimney. The air smells of pine boughs. ‘You
keep the feast here?’ Alice has made an effort for him; pinned
her hair back fiercely, under a bonnet sewn with seed pearls.
‘Well! When I came here before it was a musty old place. My
husband used to say,’ and he notes the past tense, ‘my husband
used to say, lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning,
and when you come back that night he’ll be sitting on a plush
cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him
money.’
‘Did he talk a lot about locking me in dungeons?’
‘It was only talk.’ She is uneasy. ‘I thought you might take me
to see the king. I know he’s always courteous to women, and
kind.’
He shakes his head. If he takes Alice to the king she will talk
about when he used to come to Chelsea and walk in the gardens.
She will upset him: agitate his mind, make him think about More,
which at present he doesn’t. ‘He is very busy with the French
envoys. He means to keep a large court this season. You will have
to trust my judgement.’
‘You have been good to us,’ she says, reluctant. ‘I ask myself
why. You always have some trick.’
‘Born tricky,’ he says. ‘Can’t help it. Alice, why is your
husband so stubborn?’
‘I no more comprehend him than I do the Blessed Trinity.’
‘Then what are we to do?’
‘I think he’d give the king his reasons. In his private ear. If the
king said beforehand that he would take away all penalties from
him.’
‘You mean, license him for treason? The king can’t do it.’

‘Holy Agnes! Thomas Cromwell, to tell the king what he can’t
do! I’ve seen a cock swagger in a barnyard, master, till a girl
comes one day and wrings his neck.’
‘It’s the law of the land. The custom of the country.’
‘I thought Henry was set over the law.’
‘We don’t live at Constantinople, Dame Alice. Though I say
nothing against the Turk. We cheer on the infidels, these days. As
long as they keep the Emperor’s hands tied.’
‘I don’t have much money left,’ she says. ‘I have to find fifteen
shillings every week for his keep. I worry he’ll be cold.’ She
sniffs. ‘Still, he could tell me so himself. He doesn’t write to me.
It’s all her, her, his darling Meg. She’s not my child. I wish his first
wife were here, to tell me if she was born the way she is now.
She’s close, you know. Keeps her own counsel, and his. She tells
me now he gave her his shirts to wash the blood out, that he wore
a shirt of hair beneath his linen. He did so when we were married
and I begged him to leave it off and I thought he had. But how
would I know? He slept alone and drew the bolt on his door. If
he had an itch I never knew it, he was perforce to scratch it
himself. Well, whatever, it was between the two of them, and me
no part of it.’
‘Alice –’
‘Don’t think I have no tenderness for him. He didn’t marry
me to live like a eunuch. We have had dealings, one time or
another.’ She blushes, more angry than shy. ‘And when that is
true, you cannot help feeling it, if a man might be cold, if he
might be hungry, his flesh being one with yours. You feel to him
as you might a child.’
‘Fetch him out, Alice, if it is within your power.’
‘More in yours than mine.’ She smiles sadly. ‘Is your little man
Gregory home for the season? I have sometimes said to my
husband, I wish Gregory Cromwell were my boy. I could bake
him in a sugar crust and eat him all up. Gregory comes home for Christmas, with a letter from Rowland
Lee saying he is a treasure and can come back to his household
any time. ‘So must I back,’ Gregory says, ‘or am I finished being
educated now?’
‘I have a scheme for the new year to improve your French.’
‘Rafe says I am being brought up like a prince.’
‘For now, you are all I have to practise on.’
‘My sweet father …’ Gregory picks up his little dog. He hugs
her, and nuzzles the fur at the back of her neck. He waits. ‘Rafe
and Richard say that when my education is sufficient you mean
to marry me to some old dowager with a great settlement and
black teeth, and she will wear me out with lechery and rule me
with her whims, and she will leave her estate away from the children she has and they will hate me and scheme against my life
and one morning I shall be dead in my bed.’
The spaniel swivels in his son’s arms, turns on him her mild,
round, wondering eyes. ‘They are making sport of you, Gregory.
If I knew such a woman, I would marry her myself.’
Gregory nods. ‘She would never rule you, sir. And I dare say
she would have a good deer park, which would be convenient to
hunt. And the children would be in fear of you, even if they were
men grown.’ He appears half-consoled. ‘What’s that map? Is it
the Indies?’
‘This is the Scots border,’ he says gently. ‘Harry Percy’s
country. Look, let me show you. These are parcels of his estates
he has given away to his creditors. We cannot let it continue,
because we can’t leave our borders to chance.’
‘They say he is sick.’
‘Sick, or mad.’ His tone is indifferent. ‘He has no heir, and he
and his wife never come together, so it is not likely he will. He
has fallen out with his brothers, and he owes a deal of money to
the king. So it would make sense to name the king his heir, would
it not? He will be brought to see it.’
Gregory looks stricken. ‘Take his earldom?’ ‘He can keep the style. We’ll give him something to live on.’
‘Is this because of the cardinal?’
Harry Percy stopped Wolsey at Cawood, as he was riding
south. He came in, keys in his hand, spattered with mud from the
road: my lord, I arrest you for high treason. Look at my face, the
cardinal said: I am not afraid of any man alive.
He shrugs. ‘Gregory, go and play. Take Bella and practise your
French with her; she came to me from Lady Lisle in Calais. I
won’t be long. I have to settle the kingdom’s bills.’
For Ireland at the next dispatch, brass cannon and iron shot,
rammers and charging ladles, serpentine powder and four
hundredweight of brimstone, five hundred yew bows and two
barrels of bowstrings, two hundred each of spades, shovels,
crowbars, pickaxes, horsehides, one hundred felling axes, one
thousand horseshoes, eight thousand nails. The goldsmith
Cornelys has not been paid for the cradle he made for the king’s
last child, the one that never saw the light; he claims for twenty
shillings disbursed to Hans for painting Adam and Eve on the
cradle, and he is owed for white satin, gold tassels and fringes,
and the silver for modelling the apples in the garden of Eden.
He is talking to people in Florence about hiring a hundred
arquebusiers for the Irish campaign. They don’t down tools, like
Englishmen do, if they have to fight in the woods or on rocky
terrain.
The king says, a lucky new year to you, Cromwell. And more
to follow. He thinks, luck has nothing to do with it. Of all his
presents, Henry is most pleased with the Queen of Sheba, and
with a unicorn’s horn, and a device to squeeze oranges with a
great gold ‘H’ on it.
Early in the new year the king gives him a title no one has ever
held before: Vicegerent in Spirituals, his deputy in church affairs.
Rumours that the religious houses will be put down have been
running about the kingdom for three years and more. Now he has the power to visit, inspect and reform monasteries; to close
them, if need be. There is hardly an abbey whose affairs he does
not know, by virtue of his training under the cardinal and the
letters that arrive day by day – some monks complaining of
abuses and scandals and their superiors’ disloyalty, others
seeking offices within their communities, assuring him that a
word in the right quarter will leave them forever in his debt.
He says to Chapuys, ‘Were you ever at the cathedral in
Chartres? You walk the labyrinth,’ he says, ‘set into the pavement, and it seems there is no sense in it. But if you follow it
faithfully it leads you straight to the centre. Straight to where
you should be.’
Officially, he and the ambassador are barely on speaking
terms. Unofficially, Chapuys sends him a vat of good olive oil.
He retaliates with capons. The ambassador himself arrives,
followed by a retainer carrying a parmesan cheese.
Chapuys looks doleful and chilly. ‘Your poor queen keeps the
season meagrely at Kimbolton. She is so afraid of the heretic
councillors about her husband that she has all her food cooked
over the fire in her own room. And Kimbolton is more like a
stable than a house.’
‘Nonsense,’ he says briskly. He hands the ambassador a
warming glass of spiced wine. ‘We only moved her from
Buckden because she complained it was damp. Kimbolton is a
very good house.’
‘Ah, you say that because it has thick walls and a wide moat.’
The scent of honey and cinnamon wafts into the room, logs
crackle in the hearth, the green boughs decorating his hall diffuse
their own resinous scent. ‘And the Princess Mary is ill.’
‘Oh, the Lady Mary is always ill.’
‘The more cause to care for her!’ But Chapuys softens his
tone. ‘If her mother could see her, it would be much comfort to
them both.’
‘Much comfort to their escape plans. You are a heartless man.’ Chapuys sips his wine. ‘You know,
the Emperor is ready to stand your friend.’ A pause, heavy with
significance; into which, the ambassador sighs. ‘There are
rumours that La Ana is distraught. That Henry is looking at
another lady.’
He takes a breath and begins to talk. Henry has no time for
other women. He is too busy counting his money. He is growing
very close, he doesn’t want Parliament to know his income. I
have difficulty getting him to part with anything for the universities, or to pay his builders, or even for the poor. He only thinks
of ordnance. Munitions. Shipbuilding. Beacons. Forts.
Chapuys turns down his mouth. He knows when he’s being
spun a line; if he didn’t, where would be the pleasure in it? ‘So I
am to tell my master, am I, that the King of England is so set on
war he has no time for love?’
‘There will be no war unless your master makes it. Which, with
the Turks at his heels, he scarcely has time to do. Oh, I know his
coffers are bottomless. The Emperor could ruin us all if he liked.’
He smiles. ‘But what good would that do the Emperor?’
The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms.
Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and
processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed
across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a
woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange
flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the
discreet sigh of flesh against flesh. The king – lord of generalities
– must now learn to labour over detail, led on by intelligent
greed. As his prudent father’s son, he knows all the families of
England and what they have. He has registered their holdings in
his head, down to the last watercourse and copse. Now the
church’s assets are to come under his control, he needs to know
their worth. The law of who owns what – the law generally – has
accreted a parasitic complexity – it is like a barnacled hull, a roof
slimy with moss. But there are lawyers enough, and how much ability does it require, to scrape away as you are directed?
Englishmen may be superstitious, they may be afraid of the
future, they may not know what England is; but the skills of
adding and subtraction are not scarce. Westminster has a thousand scratching pens, but Henry will need, he thinks, new men,
new structures, new thinking. Meanwhile he, Cromwell, puts his
commissioners on the road. Valor ecclesiasticus. I will do it in six
months, he says. Such an exercise has never been attempted
before, it is true, but he has already done much that no one else
has even dreamed of.
One day at the beginning of spring he comes back from Westminster chilled. His face aches, as if his bones lie open to the
weather, and nagging at his memory is that day when his father
mashed him into the cobblestones: his sideways view of Walter’s
boot. He wants to get back to Austin Friars, because he has had
stoves installed and the whole house is warm; the Chancery Lane
house is only warm in patches. Besides, he wants to be behind his
wall.
Richard says, ‘Your eighteen-hour days, sir, can’t continue for
ever.’
‘The cardinal did them.’
That night in his sleep he goes down to Kent. He is looking
over the accounts of Bayham Abbey, which is to be closed by
Wolsey’s command. The hostile faces of the monks, hovering
over him, cause him to swear and say to Rafe, pack these ledgers
and get them on the mule, we’ll examine them over our supper
and a glass of white burgundy. It is high summer. On horseback,
the mule plodding after them, they pick a route through the
monastery’s neglected vineyards, dipping with the track into a
sylvan dimness, into the bowl of broad-leaved green at the valley
bottom. He says to Rafe, we are like two caterpillars sliding
through a salad. They ride out again into a flood of sunlight, and
before them is the tower of Scotney Castle: its sandstone walls,
gold stippled with grey, shimmer above its moat. He wakes. He has dreamed of Kent, or been there? The ripple
of the sunshine is still on his skin. He calls for Christophe.
Nothing happens. He lies still. No one comes. It is early: no
sound from the house below. The shutters are closed, and the
stars are struggling to get in, working themselves with steel
points into the splinters of the wood. It occurs to him that he has
not really called for Christophe, only dreamed he has.
Gregory’s many tutors have presented him with a sheaf of
bills. The cardinal stands at the foot of his bed, wearing his full
pontificals. The cardinal becomes Christophe, opening the
shutter, moving against the light. ‘You have a fever, master?’
Surely he knows, one way or the other? Have I to do everything, know everything? ‘Oh, it is the Italian one,’ he says, as if
that discounts it.
‘So must we fetch an Italian doctor?’ Christophe sounds
dubious.
Rafe is here. The whole household is here. Charles Brandon is
here, who he thinks is real, till Morgan Williams comes in, who is
dead, and William Tyndale, who is in the English House at
Antwerp and dare not venture. On the stairs he can hear the efficient, deathly clip of his father’s steel-tipped boots.
Richard Cromwell roars, can we have quiet in here? When he
roars, he sounds Welsh; he thinks, on an ordinary day I would
never have noticed that. He closes his eyes. Ladies move behind
his lids: transparent like little lizards, lashing their tails. The
serpent queens of England, black-fanged and haughty, dragging
their blood-soaked linen and their crackling skirts. They kill and
eat their own children; this is well-known. They suck their
marrow before they are even born.
Someone asks him if he wants to confess.
‘Must I?’
‘Yes, sir, or you will be thought a sectary.’
But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done,
that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they’re mine. Besides, when I come to judgment I mean to come with a memorandum in my hand: I shall
say to my Maker, I have fifty items here, possibly more.
‘If I must confess, I’ll have Rowland.’
Bishop Lee is in Wales, they tell him. It might take days.
Dr Butts comes, with other doctors, a swarm of them sent by
the king. ‘It is a fever I got in Italy,’ he explains.
‘Let’s say it is.’ Butts frowns down at him.
‘If I am dying, get Gregory. I have things to tell him. But if I
am not, don’t interrupt his studies.’
‘Cromwell,’ Butts says, ‘I couldn’t kill you if I shot you
through with cannon. The sea would refuse you. A shipwreck
would wash you up.’
They talk about his heart; he overhears them. He feels they
should not: the book of my heart is a private book, it is not an
order book left on the counter for any passing clerk to scrawl in.
They give him a draught to swallow. Shortly afterwards he
returns to his ledgers. The lines keep slipping and the figures
intermingling and as soon as he has totalled up one column the
total unmakes itself and all sense is subtracted. But he keeps
trying and trying and adding and adding, until the poison or the
healing draught loosens its grip on him and he wakes. The pages
of the ledgers are still before his eyes. Butts thinks he is resting as
ordered, but in the privacy of his mind little stick figures with
arms and legs of ink climb out of the ledgers and walk about.
They are carrying firewood in for the kitchen range, but the
venison that is trussed to butcher turns back into deer, who rub
themselves in innocence on the bark of the trees. The songbirds
for the fricassee refeather themselves, hopping back on to the
branches not yet cut for firewood, and the honey for basting has
gone back to the bee, and the bee has gone back to the hive. He
can hear the noises of the house below, but it is some other
house, in another country: the chink of coins changing hands,
and the scrape of wooden chests over a stone floor. He can hear his own voice, telling some story in Tuscan, in Putney, in the
French of the camp and the Latin of a barbarian. Perhaps this is
Utopia? At the centre of that place, which is an island, there is a
place called Amaurotum, the City of Dreams.
He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired
from the effort of smiling at the foe.
Thomas Avery comes up from the counting house. He sits by
him and holds his hand. Hugh Latimer comes and says psalms.
Cranmer comes and looks at him dubiously. Perhaps he is afraid
that he will ask, in his fever, how is your wife Grete these days?
Christophe says to him, ‘I wish your old master the cardinal
were here to comfort you, sir. He was a comfortable man.’
‘What do you know of him?’
‘I robbed him, sir. Did you not know? I robbed his gold plate.’
He struggles to sit up. ‘Christophe? You were the boy at
Compiègne?’
‘Certainly it was me. Up and down the stairs with buckets of
hot water for the bath, and each time a gold cup in the empty
bucket. I was sorry to rob him, for he was so gentil. “What, you
again with your pail, Fabrice?” You must understand, Fabrice
was my name in Compiègne. “Give this poor child his dinner,”
he said. I tasted apricots, which I never had before.’
‘But did they not catch you?’
‘My master was caught, a very great thief. They branded him.
There was a hue and cry. But you see, master, I was meant for
greater fortune.’
I remember, he says, I remember Calais, the alchemists, the
memory machine. ‘Guido Camillo is making it for François so he
will be the wisest king in the world, but the dolt will never learn
how to use it.’
This is fantasy, Butts says, the fever rising, but Christophe
says, no, I assure you, there is a man in Paris who has built a soul.
It is a building but it is alive. The whole of it is lined with little
shelves. On these shelves you find certain parchments, fragments of writing, they are in the nature of keys, which lead to a box
which contains a key which contains another key, but these keys
are not made of metal, or these enfolded boxes of wood.
Then what, frog-boy? someone says.
They are made of spirit. They are what we shall have left, if all
the books are burned. They will enable us to remember not only
the past, but the future, and to see all the forms and customs that
will one day inhabit the earth.
Butts says, he is burning up. He thinks of Little Bilney, how he
put a hand in the candle flame the night before he died, testing
out the pain. It seared his shrinking flesh; in the night he whimpered like a child and sucked his raw hand, and in the morning
the city councillors of Norwich dragged him to the pit where
their forefathers had burned Lollards. Even when his face was
burned away, they were still pushing into it the emblems and
banners of popery: their fabric singed and fringes alight, their
blank-eyed virgins cured like herring and curling in the smoke.
He asks, politely and in several languages, for water. Not too
much, Butts says, a little and a little. He has heard of an island
called Ormuz, the driest kingdom in the world, where there are
no trees and no crop but salt. Stand at its centre, and you look
over thirty miles in all directions of ashy plain: beyond which lies
the seashore, encrusted with pearls.
His daughter Grace comes by night. She makes her own light,
wrapped within her shining hair. She watches him, steady,
unblinking, till it is morning, and when they open the shutter
the stars are fading and the sun and moon hang together in a pale
sky.
A week passes. He is better and he wants work brought in but
the doctors forbid it. How will it go forward, he asks, and
Richard says, sir, you have trained us all and we are your disciples, you have made a thinking machine that marches forward as
if it were alive, you don’t need to be tending it every minute of
every day.