‘Oh, they would, Richard. But in an hour you will eat them
with eggs baked in cream, and the Lord Chancellor will not.
Shall we get down to work?’
Through September he has been rounding up the priests and
monks who have been close to the Maid. He and Sir Purse sift the
papers and conduct the interrogations. The clerics are no sooner
under lock and key than they begin to deny her, and deny each
other: I never believed in her, it was Father So-and-So who
convinced me, I never wanted any trouble. As for their contacts
with Exeter’s wife, with Katherine, with Mary – each disclaims
his own involvement and rushes to implicate his brother-inChrist. The Maid’s people have been in constant contact with the
Exeter household. She herself has been at many of the chief
monastic houses of the realm – Syon Abbey, the Charterhouse at
Sheen, the Franciscan house at Richmond. He knows this
because he has many contacts among disaffected monks. In every
house there are a few, and he seeks out the most intelligent.
Katherine herself has not met the nun. Why should she? She has
Fisher to act as a go-between, and Gertrude, Lord Exeter’s wife.
The king says, ‘It is hard for me to believe Henry Courtenay
would betray me. A Garter knight, a great man in the lists, my
friend since I was a boy. Wolsey tried to part us, but I wouldn’t
have it.’ He laughs. ‘Brandon, do you remember Greenwich,
that Christmas, which year was it? Remember the snowball
fight?’
This is the whole difficulty of dealing with them, men who
are always talking about ancient pedigrees, and boyhood friendships, and things that happened when you were still trading
wool on the Antwerp exchange. You put the evidence under
their noses, and they start getting teary over snowball fights.
‘Look,’ Henry says, ‘it is Courtenay’s wife that is to blame.
When he knows the whole of her practices he will want to be rid
of her. She is fickle and weak like all her sex, easily led into
scheming. ‘So forgive her,’ he says. ‘Write her a pardon. Put these people
under a debt of gratitude to you, if you want them to leave off
their foolish sentiment towards Katherine.’
‘You think you can buy hearts?’ Charles Brandon says. He
sounds as if he would be sad if the answer were yes.
He thinks, the heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it
on a scale. ‘It is not a price in money we are offering. I have
enough to put the Courtenay family on trial, all Exeter’s people.
If we forbear to do it, we are offering their freedom and their
lands. We are giving them a chance to recoup the honour of their
name.’
Henry says, ‘His grandfather left Crookback for my father’s
service.’
‘If we forgive them they will play us for fools,’ Charles says.
‘I think not, my lord. Everything they do from now on, they
do under my eye.’
‘And the Poles, Lord Montague: what do you propose there?’
‘He should not assume he will be pardoned.’
‘Make him sweat, eh?’ Charles says. ‘I am not sure I like your
way of dealing with noblemen.’
‘They get their deserts,’ the king says. ‘Hush, my lord, I need
to think.’
A pause. Brandon’s position is too complicated for him to
sustain. He wants to say, pay them out as traitors, Cromwell: but
mind you butcher them respectfully. Suddenly his face clears.
‘Ah, now I remember Greenwich. The snow was knee-deep that
year. Ah, we were young then, Harry. You don’t get snow any
more, like you did when we were young.’
He gathers up his papers and begs to be excused. Reminiscence is setting in for the afternoon and there is work to be done.
‘Rafe, ride over to West Horsley. Tell Exeter’s wife the king
thinks all women fickle and weak – though I should have
thought he has plenty of evidence to the contrary. Tell her to set
down in writing that she has not the wit of a flea. Tell her to claim she is exceptionally easy to mislead, even for a woman. Tell her to
grovel. Advise her on the wording. You know how to do it.
Nothing can be too humble for Henry.’
This is the season for humility. The word from the talks in
Marseilles is that King Francis has fallen at the Pope’s feet and
kissed his slippers. When the news comes, Henry bellows an
obscenity and shreds the dispatch in his hands.
He collects up the pieces, lays it out on a table and reads it.
‘Francis has kept faith with you after all,’ he says. ‘Surprisingly.’
He has persuaded the Pope to suspend his bull of excommunication. England has a breathing space.
‘I wish Pope Clement in his grave,’ Henry says. ‘God knows
he is a man of filthy life, and he is always ailing, so he ought to
die. Sometimes,’ he says, ‘I pray that Katherine might be translated into glory. Is that wrong?’
‘If you snap your fingers, Majesty, a hundred priests will come
running to tell you right from wrong.’
‘It seems I prefer to hear it from you.’ Henry broods, in a
sulky twitching silence. ‘If Clement dies, who will be the next
rogue in office?’
‘I’ve put my money on Alessandro Farnese.’
‘Really?’ Henry sits up. ‘One lays bets?’
‘But the odds are short. He has thrown about such bribes to
the Roman mob all these years, that they will put the cardinals in
terror when the time comes.’
‘Remind me how many children has he.’
‘Four I know of.’
The king is looking into the tapestry on the near wall, where
white-shouldered women walk barefoot on a carpet of spring
flowers. ‘I may have another child soon.’
‘The queen has spoken to you?’
‘Not yet.’ But he sees, we all do, the flare of colour in Anne’s
cheeks, the silk sleekness of her person, the tone of command
ringing in her voice as she hands out favours and rewards to the people around her. This last week, there are more rewards than
black looks, and Stephen Vaughan’s wife, who is in the Bedchamber, says she has missed her courses. The king says, ‘She has
missed her …’ and then he stops, blushing like a schoolboy. He
crosses the room, flings open his arms and embraces him, shining
like a star, his great hands with their blazing rings seizing handfuls of the black velvet of his jacket. ‘This time for sure. England
is ours.’
Archaic, that cry from his heart: as if he were standing on the
battlefield between the bloodied banners, the crown in a thorn
bush, his enemies dead at his feet.
He disengages himself gently, smiling. He uncrumples the
memorandum he had clenched in his fist when the king seized
him; because is that not how men embrace, they knead each
other with big fists, as if to knock each other down? Henry
squeezes his arm and says, ‘Thomas, it is like hugging a sea wall.
What are you made of?’ He takes the paper. He gapes. ‘Is this
what we must do this morning? This list?’
‘Not more than fifty items. We shall soon work through.’
For the rest of the day he cannot stop smiling. Who cares for
Clement and his bulls? He might as well stand on Cheap and let
the populace pelt him. He might as well stand under the Christmas garlands – which we dust with flour in years when there is
no snow – and sing, ‘Hey nonny no, Fa-la-la, Under the trees so
green-o.’
On a cold day towards the end of November the Maid and half a
dozen of her principal supporters do penance at Paul’s Cross.
They stand shackled and barefoot in a whipping wind. The crowd
is large and boisterous, the sermon lively, telling what the Maid
did on her night walks when her sisters in religion were sleeping,
and what lurid tales of devils she told to keep her followers in
awe. Her confession is read out, at the end of which she asks the
Londoners to pray for her, and begs for the king’s mercy.
You wouldn’t know her now, for the bonny girl they had at
Lambeth. She looks haggard and ten years older. Not that she has
been hurt, he would not countenance that for a woman, and in
fact they have all talked without duress; the hard thing has been
to stop them complicating the story by rumours and fantasies, so
that half England is dragged into it. The one priest who had
persistently lied, he had simply locked up with an informer; the
man was detained for murder, and in no time at all Father Rich
had set about saving his soul and interpreting to him the Maid’s
prophecies and impressing him with the names of important
people he knew at court. Pitiful, really. But it has been necessary
to put on this show, and next he will take it to Canterbury, so
Dame Elizabeth can confess on her home ground. It is necessary
to break the hold of these people who talk of the end times and
threaten us with plagues and damnation. It is necessary to dispel
the terror they create.
Thomas More is there, jostled among the city dignitaries; he is
making towards him now, as the preachers step down and the
prisoners are being led from the platform. More rubs his cold
hands. He blows on them. ‘Her crime is, she was made use of.’
He thinks, why did Alice let you out without your gloves?
‘For all the testimony I have got,’ he says, ‘I still cannot understand how she arrived here, from the edge of the marshes to a
public scaffold at Paul’s. For sure she made no money out of it.’
‘How will you frame the charges?’ His tone is neutral, interested, lawyer-to-lawyer.
‘The common law does not deal with women who say they
can fly, or raise the dead. I shall put an act of attainder into Parliament. Treason charges for the principals. The accessories, life
imprisonment, confiscation, fines. The king will be circumspect,
I think. Even merciful. I am more interested in unravelling the
plans of these people than in exacting penalties. I don’t want a
trial with scores of defendants and hundreds of witnesses, tying
the courts up for years. More hesitates.
‘Come on,’ he says, ‘you would have seen them off that way
yourself, when you were Chancellor.’
‘You may be right. I am clear anyway.’ A pause. More says,
‘Thomas. In the name of Christ, you know that.’
‘As long as the king knows it. We must keep it firmly in his
mind. A letter from you perhaps, enquiring after the princess
Elizabeth.’
‘I can do that.’
‘Making it plain you accept her rights and title.’
‘That is not a difficulty. The new marriage is made and must be
accepted.’
‘You don’t think you could bring yourself to praise it?’
‘Why does the king want other men to praise his wife?’
‘Suppose you were to write an open letter. To say that you
have seen the light in the matter of the king’s natural jurisdiction
over the church.’ He looks across to where the prisoners are
being loaded into the waiting carts. ‘They are taking them back
to the Tower now.’ He pauses. ‘You mustn’t stand about. Come
home with me to dinner.’
‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around
on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put
food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.’
He watches him melt into the crowd of home-going aldermen.
He thinks, More is too proud to retreat from his position. He is
afraid to lose his credibility with the scholars in Europe. We must
find some way for him to do it, that doesn’t depend on abjection.
The sky has cleared now, to a flawless lapis blue. The London
gardens are bright with berries. There is an obdurate winter
ahead. But he feels a force ready to break, as spring breaks from
the dead tree. As the word of God spreads, the people’s eyes are
opened to new truths. Until now, like Helen Barre, they knew
Noah and the Flood, but not St Paul. They could count over the
sorrows of our Blessed Mother, and say how the damned are carried down to Hell. But they did not know the manifold miracles and sayings of Christ, nor the words and deeds of the apostles, simple men who, like the poor of London, pursued simple
wordless trades. The story is much bigger than they ever thought
it was. He says to his nephew Richard, you cannot tell people
just part of the tale and then stop, or just tell them the parts you
choose. They have seen their religion painted on the walls of
churches, or carved in stone, but now God’s pen is poised, and he
is ready to write his words in the books of their hearts.
But in these same streets Chapuys sees the stirrings of sedition, a city ready to open its gates to the Emperor. He was not at
the sack of Rome but there are nights when he dreams of it as if
he had been there: the black guts spilled on antique pavements,
the half-dead draped in the fountains, the chiming of bells
through the marsh fog, and the flames of arsonists’ torches
leaping along the walls. Rome has fallen and everything within it;
it was not invaders but Pope Julius himself who knocked down
old St Peter’s, which had stood for twelve hundred years, the site
where the Emperor Constantine himself had dug the first trench,
twelve scoops of soil, one for each of the apostles; where the
Christian martyrs, sewn into the skins of wild beasts, had been
torn apart by dogs. Twenty-five feet he dug down to lay his new
foundations, through a necropolis, through twelve centuries of
fishbones and ash, his workmen’s shovels powdering the skulls
of saints. In the place where martyrs had bled, ghost-white boulders stood: marble, waiting for Michelangelo.
In the street he sees a priest carrying the host, no doubt to a
dying Londoner; the passers-by uncover their heads and kneel,
but a boy leans out of an upper window and jeers, ‘Show us your
Christ-is-Risen. Show us your Jack-in-the-Box.’ He glances up;
the boy’s face, before it vanishes, is vivid with rage.
He says to Cranmer, these people want a good authority, one
they can properly obey. For centuries Rome has asked them to
believe what only children could believe. Surely they will find it more natural to obey an English king, who will exercise his
powers under Parliament and under God.
Two days after he sees More shivering at the sermon, he
conveys a pardon to Lady Exeter. It comes with some blistering
words from the king, directed to her husband. It is St Catherine’s
Day: in honour of the saint who was threatened with martyrdom
on a wheel, we all walk in circles to our destination. At least,
that’s the theory. He has never seen anyone over the age of twelve
actually doing it.
There’s a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right
through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe
when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not
strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel
inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.
Next day, at Hampton Court, the king’s son the Duke of Richmond marries Norfolk’s daughter Mary. Anne has arranged this
marriage for the glorification of the Howards; also, to stop
Henry marrying his bastard, to the boy’s advantage, to some
princess abroad. She has persuaded the king to waive the magnificent dower payment he would have expected and, triumphant in
all her designs, she joins the dancing, her thin face flushed, her
shining hair braided with dagger-tips of diamonds. Henry
cannot take his eyes off her, and nor can he.
Richmond draws to him all other eyes, gambolling like a colt,
showing off his wedding finery, turning, leaping, bouncing and
strutting. Look at him, the older ladies say, and you will see how
his father was once: that perfect glow, skin as thin as a girl’s.
‘Master Cromwell,’ he demands, ‘tell the king my father that I
want to live with my wife. He says that I am to go back to my
household and Mary is to stay with the queen.’
‘He has a care for your health, my lord.’
‘I am fifteen next.’
‘It wants half a year till your birthday.’ The boy’s blithe expression vanishes; a stony look takes over
his face. ‘Half a year is nothing. A man of fifteen is competent.’
‘So we hear,’ Lady Rochford says, standing idly by. ‘The king
your father brought witnesses to court to say his brother could
do the deed at fifteen, and more than once a night.’
‘It is also your bride’s health that we need to think of.’
‘Brandon’s wife is younger than mine, and he has her.’
‘Every time he sees her,’ Lady Rochford says, ‘if I judge by the
startled expression on her face.’
Richmond is digging himself in for a long argument, entrenching himself behind precedent: it is his father’s way of arguing.
‘Did not my great-grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, give
birth at thirteen years, to the prince who would be Henry
Tudor?’
Bosworth, the tattered standards, the bloody field; the stained
sheet of maternity. Where do we all come from, he thinks, but
this same hole and corner dealing: sweetheart, yield to me. ‘I
never heard it improved her health,’ he says, ‘or her temper. She
had no children after.’ Suddenly he is tired of the argument; he
cuts it short, his voice tired and flat. ‘Be reasonable, my lord.
Once you’ve done it, you’ll want to do it all the time. For about
three years. That’s the way it goes. And your father has other
work in mind for you. He may send you to hold court in
Dublin.’
Jane Rochford says, ‘Be easy, my lamb. There are ways that
can be contrived. A man may always meet a woman, if she is
willing.’
‘May I speak as your friend, Lady Rochford? You risk the
king’s displeasure if you meddle in this.’
‘Oh,’ she says easily, ‘Henry will forgive anything to a pretty
woman. They only seek to do what is natural.’
The boy says, ‘Why should I live like a monk?’
‘A monk? They go to it like goats. Master Cromwell here will
tell you. ‘Perhaps,’ Richmond says, ‘it is madam the queen who wants
to keep us apart. She doesn’t mean the king to have a grandson in
the cradle, before he has a son of his own.’
‘But do you not know?’ Jane Rochford turns to him. ‘Has it
not reached your ears that La Ana is enceinte?’
She gives her the name Chapuys gives her. He sees the boy’s
face open in blank dismay. Jane says, ‘I fear by summer you will
have lost your place, sweetheart. Once he has a son born in
wedlock, you may tup to your heart’s content. You will never
reign, and your offspring will never inherit.’
It isn’t often that you see a princeling’s hopes destroyed, in the
instant it takes to pinch out a candle flame: and with the same
calculated movement, as if born of the neatness of habit. She has
not even licked her fingers.
Richmond says, his face crumpling, ‘It may be another girl.’
‘It is almost treason to hope so,’ Lady Rochford says. ‘And if
it is, she will have a third child, and a fourth. I thought she would
not conceive again but I was wrong, Master Cromwell. She has
proved herself now.’
Cranmer is in Canterbury, walking on a path of sand barefoot to
his enthronement as primate of England. The ceremony done, he
is sweeping out the priory of Christ Church, whose members
gave so much encouragement to the false prophetess. It could be
a long job, interviewing each monk, picking their stories apart.
Rowland Lee storms into town to put some brawn into the business, and Gregory is in his train; so he sits in London reading a
letter from his son, no longer nor more informative than his
schoolboy letters: And now no more for lack of time.
He writes to Cranmer, be merciful to the community there, as
nothing worse than misled. Spare the monk who gilded the
Magdalene’s letter. I suggest they give a present in cash to the
king, three hundred pounds will please him. Clean out Christ
Church and the whole diocese; Warham was archbishop for thirty years, his family are entrenched, his bastard son is archdeacon, take a new broom to them. Put in people from home: your
sad east Midlands clerks, formed under sober skies.
There is something beneath his desk, under his foot, the nature
of which he has avoided thinking about. He pushes his chair
back; it is half a shrew, a gift from Marlinspike. He picks it up
and thinks of Henry Wyatt, eating vermin in his cell. He thinks
of the cardinal, resplendent at Cardinal College. He throws the
shrew on the fire. The corpse fizzes and shrivels, bones gone
with an empty little pop. He picks up his pen and writes to
Cranmer, shake out those Oxford men from your diocese, and
put in Cambridge men we know.
He writes to his son, come home and spend the new year with
us.
December: in her frozen angularity, a blue light behind her cast
up from the snow, Margaret Pole looks as if she has stepped
from a church window, slivers of glass shaking from her gown;
in fact, those splinters are diamonds. He has made her come to
him, the countess, and now she looks at him from beneath her
heavy lids, she looks at him down her long Plantagenet nose,
and her greeting, ice-bright, flies out into the room. ‘Cromwell.’
Just that.
She comes to business. ‘The Princess Mary. Why must she quit
the house in Essex?’
‘My lord Rochford wants it for his use. It’s good hunting
country, you see. Mary is to join her royal sister’s household, at
Hatfield. She will not need her own attendants there.’
‘I offer to support my place in her household at my own
expense. You cannot prevent me from serving her.’
Try me. ‘I am only the minister of the king’s wishes, and you,
I suppose, are as anxious as I am to carry them out.’
‘These are the wishes of the concubine. We do not believe, the
princess and I, that they are the king’s own wishes.