he asked, and Master Thomas replied, smiling, ‘Words, words,
just words.’
Master More is fourteen this year, someone says, and is to go
to Oxford. He doesn’t know where Oxford is, or whether he
wants to go there or has just been sent. A boy can be sent; and
Master Thomas is not yet a man.
Fourteen is twice seven. Am I seven? he asks. Don’t just say
yes. Tell me am I? His father says, for God’s sake, Kat, make him
up a birthday. Tell him anything, but keep him quiet.
When his father says, I’m sick of the sight of you, he leaves
Putney and sets off to Lambeth. When Uncle John says, we have
plenty of boys this week, and the devil finds work for idle hands,
he sets off back to Putney. Sometimes he gets a present to take
home. Sometimes it is a brace of pigeons with their feet tied
together, and gaping bloody beaks. He walks along the riverbank
whirling them about his head, and they look as if they are flying,
till somebody shouts at him, stop that! He can’t do anything
without someone shouting. Is it any wonder, John says, when
you are into any mischief going, prone to giving back answers
and always reliably to be found where you shouldn’t be?
In a small cold room off the kitchen passages there is a woman
called Isabella, who makes marzipan figures, for the archbishop
and his friends to make plays with after supper. Some of the
figures are heroes, such as Prince Alexander, Prince Caesar. Some
are saints; today I am making St Thomas, she says. One day she
makes marzipan beasts and gives him a lion. You can eat it, she
says; he would rather keep it, but Isabella says it will soon fall to
pieces. She says, ‘Haven’t you got a mother?’
He learns to read from the scribbled orders for wheat flour or
dried beans, for barley and for ducks’ eggs, that come out of the
stewards’ pantries. For Walter, the point of being able to read is
to take advantage of people who can’t; for the same purpose one
must learn to write. So his father sends him to the priest. But
again he is always in the wrong, for priests have such strange rules; he should come to the lesson specially, not on his way from
whatever else he is doing, not carrying a toad in a bag, or knives
that want sharpening, and not cut and bruised either, from one of
those doors (doors called Walter) that he is always walking into.
The priest shouts, and forgets to feed him, so he takes off to
Lambeth again.
On the days when he turns up in Putney, his father says,
where by the sweet saints have you been: unless he’s busy inside,
on top of a stepmother. Some of the stepmothers last such a short
time that his father’s done with them and kicked them out by the
time he gets home, but Kat and Bet tell him about them, screeching with laughter. Once when he comes in, dirty and wet, that
day’s stepmother says, ‘Who does this boy belong to?’ and tries
to kick him out into the yard.
One day when he is nearly home he finds the first Bella lying
in the street, and he sees that nobody wants her. She is no longer
than a small-sized rat and so shocked and cold that she doesn’t
even cry. He carries her home in one hand, and in the other a
small cheese wrapped in sage leaves.
The dog dies. His sister Bet says, you can get another. He
looks in the street but never finds one. There are dogs, but they
belong to somebody.
It can take a long time to get to Putney from Lambeth and
sometimes he eats the present, if it’s not raw. But if he only gets a
cabbage, he kicks it and rolls it and thrashes it till it is utterly,
utterly destroyed.
At Lambeth he follows the stewards around and when they
say a number he remembers it; so people say, if you haven’t time
to write it down, just tell John’s nephew. He will cast an eye on a
sack of whatever’s been ordered in, then warn his uncle to check
if it’s short weight.
At night at Lambeth, when it’s still light and all the pots have
been scoured, the boys go outside on to the cobbles and play at
football. Their shouts rise into the air. They curse and barge into each other, and till somebody yells to stop, they fight with their
fists and sometimes bite each other. From the open window
above, the young gentlemen sing a part-song in the high careful
voices they learn.
Sometimes the face of Master Thomas More appears. He
waves to him, but Master Thomas looks down without recognition at the children below. He smiles impartially; his white
scholar’s hand draws close the shutter. The moon rises. The pages
go to their truckle-beds. The kitchen children wrap themselves in
sacking and sleep by the hearth.
He remembers one night in summer when the footballers had
stood silent, looking up. It was dusk. The note from a single
recorder wavered in the air, thin and piercing. A blackbird picked
up the note, and sang from a bush by the water gate. A boatman
whistled back from the river.
1527: when the cardinal comes back from France, he immediately begins ordering up banquets. French ambassadors are
expected, to set the seal on his concordat. Nothing, he says,
nothing, will be too good for these gentlemen.
The court leaves Beaulieu on 27 August. Soon afterwards,
Henry meets the returned cardinal, face-to-face for the first time
since early June. ‘You will hear that the king’s reception of me
was cold,’ Wolsey says, ‘but I can tell you it was not. She – Lady
Anne – was present … this is true.’
On the face of it, a large part of his mission has been a failure.
The cardinals would not meet him at Avignon: made the excuse
that they didn’t want to go south in the heat. ‘But now,’ he says,
‘I have a better plan. I will ask the Pope to send me a co-legate,
and I will try the king’s matter in England.’
While you were in France, he says, my wife Elizabeth died.
The cardinal looks up. His hands fly to his heart. His right hand
creeps down to the crucifix he wears. He asks how it occurred. He
listens. His thumb runs over the tortured body of God: over and over, as if it were any lump of metal. He bows his head. He
murmurs, ‘Whom the Lord loveth …’ They sit in silence. To break
the silence, he begins to ask the cardinal unnecessary questions.
He scarcely needs an account of the tactics of the summer just
past. The cardinal has promised to help finance a French army
which will go into Italy and try to expel the Emperor. While this
is happening, the Pope, who has lost not just the Vatican but the
papal states, and seen Florence throw out his Medici relatives,
will be grateful and obliged to King Henry. But as for any longterm rapprochement with the French – he, Cromwell, shares the
scepticism of his friends in the city. If you have been in the street
in Paris or Rouen, and seen a mother pull her child by the hand,
and say, ‘Stop that squalling, or I’ll fetch an Englishman,’ you are
inclined to believe that any accord between the countries is
formal and transient. The English will never be forgiven for the
talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get
off their own island. English armies laid waste to the land they
moved through. As if systematically, they performed every
action proscribed by the codes of chivalry, and broke every one
of the laws of war. The battles were nothing; it was what they did
between the battles that left its mark. They robbed and raped for
forty miles around the line of their march. They burned the
crops in the fields, and the houses with the people inside them.
They took bribes in coin and in kind and when they were
encamped in a district they made the people pay for every day on
which they were left unmolested. They killed priests and hung
them up naked in the marketplaces. As if they were infidels, they
ransacked the churches, packed the chalices in their baggage,
fuelled their cooking fires with precious books; they scattered
relics and stripped altars. They found out the families of the dead
and demanded that the living ransom them; if the living could
not pay, they torched the corpses before their eyes, without ceremony, without a single prayer, disposing of the dead as one might
the carcases of diseased cattle. This being so, the kings may forgive each other; the people
scarcely can. He does not say this to Wolsey, who has enough
bad news waiting for him. During his absence, the king had sent
his own envoy to Rome for secret negotiations. The cardinal had
found it out; and it had come to nothing, of course. ‘But if the
king is less than frank with me, it does nothing to aid our cause.’
He has never before met with such double-dealing. The fact is,
the king knows his case is weak in law. He knows this, but does
not want to know it. In his own mind, he has convinced himself he
was never married and so is now free to marry. Let us say, his will
is convinced, but not his conscience. He knows canon law, and
where he does not know it already he has made himself expert.
Henry, as the younger brother, was brought up and trained for the
church, and for the highest offices within it. ‘If His Majesty’s
brother Arthur had lived,’ Wolsey says, ‘then His Majesty would
have been the cardinal, and not me. Now there’s a thought. Do
you know, Thomas, I haven’t had a day off since … since I was on
the boat, I suppose. Since the day I was seasick, starting at Dover.’
They had once crossed the Narrow Sea together. The cardinal
had lain below, calling on God, but he, being used to the voyage,
spent the time on deck, making drawings of the sails and rigging,
and of notional ships with notional rigging, and trying to
persuade the captain – ‘yourself not offended,’ he said – that
there was a way of going faster. The captain thought it over and
said, ‘When you fit out a merchant ship of your own, you can do
it that way. Of course, any Christian vessel will think you’re
pirates, so don’t look for help if you get in difficulties. Sailors,’ he
explained, ‘don’t like anything new.’
‘Nor does anyone else,’ he’d said. ‘Not as far as I can see.’
There cannot be new things in England. There can be old
things freshly presented, or new things that pretend to be old. To
be trusted, new men must forge themselves an ancient pedigree,
like Walter’s, or enter into the service of ancient families. Don’t
try to go it alone, or they’ll think you’re pirates. This summer, with the cardinal back on dry land, he remembers that voyage. He waits for the enemy to come alongside, and
for the hand-to-hand fighting to begin.
But for now he goes down to the kitchens, to see how they are
getting on with their masterpieces to impress the French envoys.
They have got the steeple on their sugar-paste model of St Paul’s,
but they are having trouble with the cross and ball on top. He
says, ‘Make marzipan lions – the cardinal wants them.’
They roll their eyes and say, will it never end?
Since he returned from France their master has been uncharacteristically sour. It is not just the overt failures that make him
grumble, but the dirty work behind the scenes. Squibs and slanders were printed against him and as fast as he could buy them up
there was a new batch on the street. Every thief in France seemed
to converge on his baggage train; at Compiègne, though he
mounted a day-and-night guard on his gold plate, a little boy was
found to be going up and down the back stairs, passing out the
dishes to some great robber who had trained him up.
‘What happened? Did you catch him?’
‘The great robber was put in the pillory. The boy ran away.
Then one night, some villain sneaked into my chamber, and
carved a device by the window …’ And next morning, a shaft of
early sun, creeping through mist and rain, had picked out a
gallows, from which dangled a cardinal’s hat.
Once again the summer has been wet. He could swear it has
never been light. The harvest will be ruined. The king and the
cardinal exchange recipes for pills. The king lays down cares of
state should he happen to sneeze, and prescribes for himself an
easy day of music-making or strolling – if the rain abates – in his
gardens. In the afternoon, he and Anne sometimes retire and are
private. The gossip is that she allows him to undress her. In the
evenings, good wine keeps the chills out, and Anne, who reads
the Bible, points out strong scriptural commendations to him. After supper he grows thoughtful, says he supposes the King of
France is laughing at him; he supposes the Emperor is laughing
too. After dark the king is sick with love. He is melancholy,
sometimes unreachable. He drinks and sleeps heavily, sleeps
alone; he wakes, and because he is a strong man and a young man
still he is optimistic, clear-headed, ready for the new day. In
daylight, his cause is hopeful.
The cardinal doesn’t stop work if he’s ill. He just goes on at his
desk, sneezing, aching, and complaining.
In retrospect, it is easy to see where the cardinal’s decline
began, but at the time it was not easy. Look back, and you
remember being at sea. The horizon dipped giddily, and the
shoreline was lost in mist.
October comes, and his sisters and Mercy and Johane take his
dead wife’s clothes and cut them up carefully into new patterns.
Nothing is wasted. Every good bit of cloth is made into something else.
At Christmas the court sings:
As the holly groweth green
And never changes hue
So I am, and ever hath been,
Unto my lady true.
Green groweth the holly, so doth the ivy.
Though winter blasts blow ever so high.
As the holly groweth green,
With ivy all alone,
When flowers cannot be seen
And green-wood leaves be gone,
Green groweth the holly.

Spring, 1528: Thomas More, ambling along, genial, shabby. ‘Just
the man,’ he says. ‘Thomas, Thomas Cromwell. Just the man I
want to see.’
He is genial, always genial; his shirt collar is grubby. ‘Are you
bound for Frankfurt this year, Master Cromwell? No? I thought
the cardinal might send you to the fair, to get among the heretic
booksellers. He is spending a deal of money buying up their
writings, but the tide of filth never abates.’
More, in his pamphlets against Luther, calls the German shit.
He says that his mouth is like the world’s anus. You would not
think that such words would proceed from Thomas More, but
they do. No one has rendered the Latin tongue more obscene.
‘Not really my business,’ Cromwell says, ‘heretics’ books.
Heretics abroad are dealt with abroad. The church being universal.’
‘Oh, but once these Bible men get over to Antwerp, you know
… What a town it is! No bishop, no university, no proper seat of
learning, no proper authorities to stop the proliferation of socalled translations, translations of scripture which in my opinion
are malicious and wilfully misleading … But you know that, of
course, you spent some years there. And now Tyndale’s been
sighted in Hamburg, they say. You’d know him, wouldn’t you, if
you saw him?’
‘So would the Bishop of London. You yourself, perhaps.’
‘True. True.’ More considers it. He chews his lip. ‘And you’ll
say to me, well, it’s not work for a lawyer, running after false
translations. But I hope to get the means to proceed against the
brothers for sedition, do you see?’ The brothers, he says; his little
joke; he drips with disdain. ‘If there is a crime against the state,
our treaties come into play, and I can have them extradited. To
answer for themselves in a straiter jurisdiction.’
‘Have you found sedition in Tyndale’s writing?’
‘Ah, Master Cromwell!’ More rubs his hands together. ‘I
relish you, I do indeed. Now I feel as a nutmeg must do when it’s
grated. A lesser man – a lesser lawyer – would say, “I have read Tyndale’s work, and I find no fault there.” But Cromwell won’t
be tripped – he casts it back, he asks me, rather, have you read
Tyndale? And I admit it. I have studied the man. I have picked
apart his so-called translations, and I have done it letter by letter.
I read him, of course, I do. By licence. From my bishop.’
‘It says in Ecclesiasticus, “he that toucheth pitch shall be
defiled.” Unless his name’s Thomas More.’
‘Well now, I knew you were a Bible reader! Most apt. But if a
priest hears a confession, and the matter be wanton, does that
make the priest a wanton fellow himself?’ By way of diversion,
More takes his hat off, and absently folds it up in his hands; he
creases it in two; his bright, tired eyes glance around, as if he
might be confuted from all sides. ‘And I believe the Cardinal of
York has himself licensed his young divines at Cardinal College
to read the sectaries’ pamphlets. Perhaps he includes you in his
dispensations. Does he?’
It would be strange for him to include his lawyer; but then it’s
strange work for lawyers altogether. ‘We have come around in a
circle,’ he says.
More beams at him. ‘Well, after all, it’s spring. We shall soon
be dancing around the maypole. Good weather for a sea voyage.
You could take the chance to do some wool-trade business,
unless it’s just men you’re fleecing these days? And if the cardinal asked you to go to Frankfurt, I suppose you’d go? Now if he
wants some little monastery knocked down, when he thinks it
has good endowments, when he thinks the monks are old, Lord
bless them, and a little wandering in their wits; when he thinks
the barns are full and the ponds well stocked with fish, the cattle
fat and the abbot old and lean … off you go, Thomas Cromwell.
North, south, east or west. You and your little apprentices.’
If another man were saying this, he’d be trying to start a fight.
When Thomas More says it, it leads to an invitation to dinner.
‘Come out to Chelsea,’ he says. ‘The talk is excellent, and we
shall like you to add to it. Our food is simple, but good. Tyndale says a boy washing dishes in the kitchen is as pleasing
to the eye of God as a preacher in the pulpit or the apostle on the
Galilee shore. Perhaps, he thinks, I won’t mention Tyndale’s
opinion.
More pats his arm. ‘Have you no plans to marry again,
Thomas? No? Perhaps wise. My father always says, choosing a
wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will
pull out the eel?’
‘Your father has married, what, three times?’
‘Four.’ He smiles. The smile is real. It crinkles the corner of his
eyes. ‘Your beadsman, Thomas,’ he says, as he ambles away.
When More’s first wife died, her successor was in the house
before the corpse was cold. More would have been a priest, but
human flesh called to him with its inconvenient demands. He did
not want to be a bad priest, so he became a husband. He had
fallen in love with a girl of sixteen, but her sister, at seventeen,
was not yet married; he took the elder, so that her pride should
not be hurt. He did not love her; she could not read or write; he
hoped that might be amended, but seemingly not. He tried to get
her to learn sermons by heart, but she grumbled and was stubborn in her ignorance; he took her home to her father, who
suggested beating her, which made her so frightened that she
swore she would complain no more. ‘And she never did,’ More
will say. ‘Though she didn’t learn any sermons either.’ It seems
he thought the negotiations had been satisfactory: honour
preserved all round. The stubborn woman gave him children,
and when she died at twenty-four, he married a city widow,
getting on in years and advanced in stubbornness: another one
who couldn’t read. There it is: if you are so lenient with yourself
as to insist on living with a woman, then for the sake of your soul
you should make it a woman you really don’t like.
Cardinal Campeggio, whom the Pope is sending to England at
Wolsey’s request, was a married man before he was a priest. It makes him especially suitable to help Wolsey – who of course has
no experience of marital problems – on the next stage of the
journey to thwart the king in his heart’s desire. Though the imperial army has withdrawn from Rome, a spring of negotiations has
failed to yield any definite result. Stephen Gardiner has been in
Rome, with a letter from the cardinal, praising the Lady Anne,
trying to disabuse the Pope of any notion he may entertain that
the king is being wilful and whimsical in his choice of bride. The
cardinal had sat long over the letter listing her virtues, writing it
in his own hand. ‘Womanly modesty … chastity … can I say
chastity?’
‘You’d better.’
The cardinal looked up. ‘Know something?’ He hesitated, and
returned to his letter. ‘Apt to bear children? Well, her family is
fertile. Loving and faithful daughter of the church … Perhaps
stretching a point … they say she has the scriptures in French set
up in her chamber, and lets her women read them, but I would
have no positive knowledge of that …’
‘King François allows the Bible in French. She learned her
scriptures there, I suppose.’
‘Ah, but women, you see. Women reading the Bible, there’s
another point of contention. Does she know what Brother
Martin thinks is a woman’s place? We shouldn’t mourn, he says,
if our wife or daughter dies in childbirth – she’s only doing what
God made her for. Very harsh, Brother Martin, very intractable.
And perhaps she is not a Bible-woman. Perhaps it is a slur on her.
Perhaps it is just that she is out of patience with churchmen. I
wish she did not blame me for her difficulties. Not blame me so
very much.’
Lady Anne sends friendly messages to the cardinal, but he
thinks she does not mean them. ‘If,’ Wolsey had said, ‘I saw the
prospect of an annulment for the king, I would go to the Vatican
in person, have my veins opened and allow the documents to be
written in my own blood. Do you think, if Anne knew that, it would content her? No, I didn’t think so, but if you see any of
the Boleyns, make them the offer. By the way, I suppose you
know a person called Humphrey Monmouth? He is the man
who had Tyndale in his house for six months, before he ran off to
wherever. They say he sends him money still, but that can’t
possibly be true, as how would he know where to send?
Monmouth … I am merely mentioning his name. Because …
now why am I?’ The cardinal had closed his eyes. ‘Because I am
merely mentioning it.’
The Bishop of London has already filled his own prisons. He
is locking up Lutherans and sectaries in Newgate and the Fleet,
with common criminals. There they remain until they recant and
do public penance. If they relapse they will be burned; there are
no second chances.
When Monmouth’s house is raided, it is clear of all suspect
writings. It’s almost as if he was forewarned. There are neither
books nor letters that link him to Tyndale and his friends. All the
same, he is taken to the Tower. His family is terrified. Monmouth
is a gentle and fatherly man, a master draper, well liked in his
guild and the city at large. He loves the poor and buys cloth even
when trade is bad, so the weavers may keep in work. No doubt
the imprisonment is designed to break him; his business is tottering by the time he is released. They have to let him go, for lack of
evidence, because you can’t make anything of a heap of ashes in
the hearth.
Monmouth himself would be a heap of ashes, if Thomas More
had his way. ‘Not come to see us yet, Master Cromwell?’ he says.
‘Still breaking dry bread in cellars? Come now, my tongue is
sharper than you deserve. We must be friends, you know.’
It sounds like a threat. More moves away, shaking his head:
‘We must be friends.’
Ashes, dry bread. England was always, the cardinal says, a
miserable country, home to an outcast and abandoned people,
who are working slowly towards their deliverance, and who are visited by God with special tribulations. If England lies under
God’s curse, or some evil spell, it has seemed for a time that the
spell has been broken, by the golden king and his golden cardinal. But those golden years are over, and this winter the sea will
freeze; the people who see it will remember it all their lives.
Johane has moved into the house at Austin Friars with her
husband John Williamson and her daughter little Johane – Jo, the
children call her, seeing she is too small for a full name. John
Williamson is needed in the Cromwell business. ‘Thomas,’ says
Johane, ‘what exactly is your business these days?’
In this way she detains him in talk. ‘Our business,’ he says, ‘is
making people rich. There are many ways to do this and John is
going to help me out with them.’
‘But John won’t have to deal with my lord cardinal, will he?’
The gossip is that people – people of influence – have
complained to the king, and the king has complained to Wolsey,
about the monastic houses he has closed down. They don’t think
of the good use to which the cardinal has put the assets; they
don’t think of his colleges, the scholars he maintains, the libraries
he is founding. They’re only interested in getting their own
fingers in the spoils. And because they’ve been cut out of the
business, they pretend to believe the monks have been left naked
and lamenting in the road. They haven’t. They’ve been transferred elsewhere, to bigger houses better run. Some of the
younger ones have been let go, boys who have no calling to the
life. Questioning them, he usually finds they know nothing,
which makes nonsense of the abbeys’ claims to be the light of
learning. They can stumble through a Latin prayer, but when
you say, ‘Go on then, tell me what it means,’ they say, ‘Means,
master?’ as if they thought that words and their meanings were
so loosely attached that the tether would snap at the first tug.
‘Don’t worry about what people say,’ he tells Johane. ‘I take
responsibility for it, I do, alone.’