I have a little girl calledGrace; she’s pretty and she has fair hair, though I don’t … Mywife was not a beauty, and I am as you see. And I have Anne,Anne wants to learn Greek.’‘Goodness,’ she says. ‘For a woman, you know …’‘Yes, but she says, “Why should Thomas More’s daughterhave the pre-eminence?” She has such good words. And she usesthem all.’‘You like her best.’‘Her grandmother lives with us, and my wife’s sister, but it’snot … for Anne it’s not the best arrangement. I could send herinto some other household, but then … well, her Greek … and Ihardly see her as it is.’ It feels like the longest speech, unless toWolsey, that he’s made for some time. He says, ‘Your fathershould be providing properly for you. I’ll ask the cardinal tospeak to him.’ The cardinal will enjoy that, he thinks.‘But I need a new husband. To stop them calling me names.Can the cardinal get husbands?’‘The cardinal can do anything. What kind of husband wouldyou like?’She considers. ‘One who will take care of my children. Onewho can stand up to my family. One who doesn’t die.’ Shetouches her fingertips together.‘You should ask for someone young and handsome too. Don’task, don’t get.’‘Really? I was brought up in the other tradition.’Then you had a different upbringing from your sister, hethinks. ‘In the masque, at York Place, do you remember … wereyou Beauty, or Kindness?’‘Oh …’ she smiles, ‘that must be, what, seven years ago? Idon’t remember. I’ve dressed up so many times.’‘Of course, you are still both. ‘That’s all I used to care about. Dressing up. I remember Anne,though. She was Perseverance.’He says, ‘Her particular virtue may be tested.’Cardinal Campeggio came here with a brief from Rome toobstruct. Obstruct and delay. Do anything, but avoid givingjudgment.‘Anne is always writing letters, or writing in her little book.She walks up and down, up and down. When she sees my lordfather she holds up a palm to him, don’t dare speak … and whenshe sees me, she gives me a little pinch. Like …’ Mary demonstrates an airy pinch, with the fingers of her left hand. ‘Like that.’She strokes the fingers of her right hand along her throat, till shereaches the little pulsing dip above her collarbone. ‘There,’ shesays. ‘Sometimes I am bruised. She thinks to disfigure me.’‘I’ll talk to the cardinal,’ he says.‘Do.’ She waits.He needs to go. He has things to do.‘I no longer want to be a Boleyn,’ she says. ‘Or a Howard. Ifthe king would recognise my boy it would be different, but as itis I don’t want any more of these masques and parties and dressing up as Virtues. They have no virtues. It’s all show. If they don’twant to know me, I don’t want to know them. I’d rather be abeggar.’‘Really … it doesn’t have to come to that, Lady Carey.’‘Do you know what I want? I want a husband who upsetsthem. I want to marry a man who frightens them.’There is a sudden light in her blue eyes. An idea has dawned.She rests one delicate finger on the grey velvet she so admires,and says softly, ‘Don’t ask, don’t get.’Thomas Howard for an uncle? Thomas Boleyn for a father?The king, in time, for a brother?‘They’d kill you,’ he says.He thinks he shouldn’t enlarge on the statement: just let itstand as fact. She laughs, bites her lip. ‘Of course. Of course they would.What am I thinking? Anyway, I’m grateful for what you havedone already. For an interval of peace this morning – becausewhen they’re shouting about you, they’re not shouting aboutme. One day,’ she says, ‘Anne will want to talk to you. She’llsend for you and you’ll be flattered. She’ll have a little job foryou, or she’ll want some advice. So before that happens, you canhave my advice. Turn around and walk the other way.’She kisses the tip of her forefinger and touches it to his lips.The cardinal does not need him that night, so he goes home toAustin Friars. His feeling is to put distance between himself andany Boleyns at all. There are some men, possibly, who would befascinated by a woman who had been a mistress to two kings, buthe is not one of them. He thinks about sister Anne, why sheshould take any interest in him; possibly she has informationthrough what Thomas More calls ‘your evangelical fraternity’,and yet this is puzzling: the Boleyns don’t seem like a family whothink much about their souls. Uncle Norfolk has priests to dothat for him. He hates ideas and never reads a book. BrotherGeorge is interested in women, hunting, clothes, jewellery andtennis. Sir Thomas Boleyn, the charming diplomat, is interestedonly in himself.He would like to tell somebody what occurred. There is noone he can tell, so he tells Rafe. ‘I think you imagined it,’ Rafesays severely. His pale eyes open wide at the story of the initialsinside the heart, but he doesn’t even smile. He confines hisincredulity to the marriage proposal. ‘She must have meantsomething else.’He shrugs; it’s hard to see what. ‘The Duke of Norfolk wouldfall on us like a pack of wolves,’ Rafe says. ‘He would comeround and set fire to our house.’ He shakes his head.‘But the pinching. What remedy?’‘Armour. Evidently,’ says Rafe.‘It might raise questions.’ ‘Nobody’s looking at Mary these days.’ He adds accusingly,‘Except you.’With the arrival of the papal legate in London, the quasi-regalhousehold of Anne Boleyn is broken up. The king does not wantthe issue confused; Cardinal Campeggio is here to deal with hisqualms about his marriage to Katherine, which are quite separate, he will insist, from any feelings he may entertain aboutLady Anne. She is packed off to Hever, and her sister goes withher. A rumour floats back to London, that Mary is pregnant.Rafe says, ‘Saving your presence, master, are you sure you onlyleaned against the wall?’ The dead husband’s family says it can’tbe his child, and the king is denying it too. It’s sad to see thealacrity with which people assume the king is lying. How doesAnne like it? She’ll have time to get over her sulks, while she’srusticated. ‘Mary will be pinched black and blue,’ Rafe says.People all over town tell him the gossip, without knowingquite how interested he is. It makes him sad, it makes himdubious, it makes him wonder about the Boleyns. Everythingthat passed between himself and Mary he now sees, hears, differently. It makes his skin creep, to think that if he had been flattered, susceptible, if he had said yes to her, he might soon havebecome father to a baby that looked nothing like a Cromwell andvery like a Tudor. As a trick, you must admire it. Mary may looklike a doll but she’s not stupid. When she ran down the galleryshowing her green stockings, she had a sharp eye out for prey. Tothe Boleyns, other people are for using and discarding. The feelings of others mean nothing, or their reputations, their familyname.He smiles, at the thought of the Cromwells having a familyname. Or any reputation to defend.Whatever has happened, nothing comes of it. Perhaps Marywas mistaken, or the talk was simply malice; God knows, thefamily invite it. Perhaps there was a child, and she lost it. Thestory peters out, with no definite conclusion. There is no baby. It is like one of the cardinal’s strange fairy tales, where nature itselfis perverted and women are serpents and appear and disappear atwill.Queen Katherine had a child that disappeared. In the first yearof her marriage to Henry, she miscarried, but the doctors saidthat she was carrying twins, and the cardinal himself remembersher at court with her bodices loosened and a secret smile on herface. She took to her rooms for her confinement; after a time, sheemerged tight-laced, with a flat belly, and no baby.It must be a Tudor speciality.A little later, he hears that Anne has taken the wardship of hersister’s son, Henry Carey. He wonders if she intends to poisonhim. Or eat him.New Year 1529: Stephen Gardiner is in Rome, issuing certainthreats to Pope Clement, on the king’s behalf; the content of thethreats has not been divulged to the cardinal. Clement is easilypanicked at the best of times, and it is not surprising that, withMaster Stephen breathing sulphur in his ear, he falls ill. They aresaying that he is likely to die, and the cardinal’s agents are aroundand about in Europe, taking soundings and counting heads,chinking their purses cheerfully. There would be a swift solutionto the king’s problem, if Wolsey were Pope. He grumbles a littleabout his possible eminence; the cardinal loves his country, itsMay garlands, its tender birdsong. In his nightmares he seessquat spitting Italians, a forest of nooses, a corpse-strewn plain.‘I shall want you to come with me, Thomas. You can stand bymy side and move quick if any of those cardinals tries to stabme.’He pictures his master stuck full of knives, as St Sebastian isstuck full of arrows. ‘Why does the Pope have to be in Rome?Where is it written?’A slow smile spreads over the cardinal’s face. ‘Bring the HolySee home. Why not?’ He loves a bold plan. ‘I couldn’t bring it to London, I suppose? If only I were Archbishop of Canterbury, Icould hold my papal court at Lambeth Palace … but old Warhamdoes hang on and on, he always baulks me …’‘Your Grace could move to your own see.’‘York is so remote. I couldn’t have the papacy in Winchester,you don’t think? Our ancient English capital? And nearer theking?’What an unusual regime this will turn out to be. The king atsupper, with the Pope, who is also his Lord Chancellor … Willthe king have to hand him his napkin, and serve him first?When news comes of Clement’s recovery, the cardinal doesn’tsay, a glorious chance lost. He says, Thomas, what shall we donext? We must open the legatine court, it can be no longerdelayed. He says, ‘Go and find me a man called AnthonyPoynes.’He stands, arms folded, waiting for further and better particulars.‘Try the Isle of Wight. And fetch me Sir William Thomas,whom I believe you will find in Carmarthen – he’s elderly, so tellyour men to go slowly.’‘I don’t employ anyone slow.’ He nods. ‘Still, I take the point.Don’t kill the witnesses.’The trial of the king’s great matter is approaching. The kingintends to show that when Queen Katherine came to him shewas not a virgin, having consummated her marriage with hisbrother Arthur. To that end he is assembling the gentlemen whoattended the royal couple after their wedding at Baynard’sCastle, then later at Windsor, where the court moved in November that year, and later at Ludlow, where they were sent to playat Prince and Princess of Wales. ‘Arthur,’ Wolsey says, ‘wouldhave been about your age, Thomas, if he had lived.’ The attendants, the witnesses, are at least a generation older. And so manyyears have gone by – twenty-eight, to be precise. How good cantheir memories be? It should never have come to this – to this public and
unseemly exposure. Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king’s will, accept that her marriage is invalid
and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will
become a nun: if the king will become a monk.
Meanwhile she presents reasons why the legatine court should
not try the issue. It is still sub judice at Rome, for one thing. For
another, she is a stranger, she says, in a strange country; she
ignores the decades in which she’s been intimate with every twist
and turn of English policy. The judges, she claims, are biased
against her; certainly, she has reason to believe it. Campeggio lays
hand on heart, and assures her he would give an honest judgment, even if he were in fear of his life. Katherine finds him too
intimate with his co-legate; anyone who has spent much time
with Wolsey, she thinks, no longer knows what honesty is.
Who is advising Katherine? John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester.
‘Do you know what I can’t endure about that man?’ the cardinal
says. ‘He’s all skin and bone. I abhor your skeletal prelate. It
makes the rest of us look bad. One looks … corporeal.’
He is in his corporeal pomp, his finest scarlet, when the king
and queen are summoned before the two cardinals at Blackfriars.
Everyone had supposed that Katherine would send a proxy, but
instead she appears in person. The whole bench of bishops is
assembled. The king answers to his name, in a full, echoing voice,
speaking out of his big bejewelled chest. He, Cromwell, would
have advised a motion of the hand, a murmur, a dip of the head
to the court’s authority. Most humility, in his view, is pretence;
but the pretence can be winning.
The hall is packed. He and Rafe are far-off spectators. Afterwards, when the queen has made her statement – a few men have
been seen to cry – they come out into the sunshine. Rafe says, ‘If
we had been nearer, we could have seen whether the king could
meet her eye.’
‘Yes. That is really all anyone needs to know.’ ‘I’m sorry to say it, but I believe Katherine.’
‘Hush. Believe nobody.’
Something blots out the light. It is Stephen Gardiner, black
and scowling, his aspect in no way improved by his trip to
Rome.
‘Master Stephen!’ he says. ‘How was your journey home?
Never pleasant, is it, to come back empty-handed? I’ve been
feeling sorry for you. I suppose you did your best, such as it is.’
Gardiner’s scowl deepens. ‘If this court can’t give the king
what he wants, your master will be finished. And then it is I who
will feel sorry for you.’
‘Except you won’t.’
‘Except I won’t,’ Gardiner concedes; and moves on.
The queen does not return for the sordid parts of the proceedings. Her counsel speaks for her; she has told her confessor how
her nights with Arthur left her untouched, and she has given him
permission to break the seal of the confessional and make her
assertion public. She has spoken before the highest court there is,
God’s court; would she lie, to the damnation of her soul?
Besides, there is another point, which everyone has in mind.
After Arthur died, she was presented to prospective bridegrooms – to the old king, as it may be, or to the young Prince
Henry – as fresh meat. They could have brought a doctor, who
would have looked at her. She would have been frightened, she
would have cried; but she would have complied. Perhaps now
she wishes it had been so; that they had brought in a strange man
with cold hands. But they never asked her to prove what she
claimed; perhaps people were not so shameless in those days.
The dispensations for her marriage to Henry were meant to
cover either case: she was/was not a virgin. The Spanish documents are different from the English documents, and that is
where we should be now, among the subclauses, studying paper
and ink, not squabbling in a court of law over a shred of skin and
a splash of blood on a linen sheet. If he had been her adviser, he would have kept the queen in
court, however much she squealed. Because, would the witnesses
have spoken, to her face, as they spoke behind her back? She
would be ashamed to face them, gnarled and grizzled and each
equipped with perfect recollection; but he would have had her
greet them cordially, and declare she would never have recognised them, after so much time gone by; and ask if they have
grandchildren, and whether the summer heat eases their elderly
aches and pains? The greater shame would be theirs: would they
not hesitate, would they not falter, under the steady gaze of the
queen’s honest eyes?
Without Katherine present, the trial becomes a bawdy entertainment. The Earl of Shrewsbury is before the court, a man who
fought with the old king at Bosworth. He recalls his own longago wedding night, when he was, like Prince Arthur, a boy of
fifteen; never had a woman before, he says, but did his duty to his
bride. On Arthur’s wedding night, he and the Earl of Oxford had
taken the prince to Katherine’s chamber. Yes, says the Marquis of
Dorset, and I was there too; Katherine lay under the coverlet, the
prince got into bed beside her. ‘No one is willing to swear to
having climbed in with them,’ Rafe whispers. ‘But I wonder they
haven’t found someone.’
The court must make do with evidence of what was said next
morning. The prince, coming out of the bridal chamber, said he
was thirsty and asked Sir Anthony Willoughby for a cup of ale.
‘Last night I was in Spain,’ he said. A little boy’s crude joke,
dragged back into the light; the boy has been, these thirty years,
a corpse. How lonely it is to die young, to go down into the dark
without any company! Maurice St John is not there with him, in
his vault at Worcester Cathedral: nor Mr Cromer nor William
Woodall, nor any of the men who heard him say, ‘Masters, it is
good pastime to have a wife.’
When they have listened to all this, and they come out into the
air, he feels strangely cold. He puts a hand to his face, touches his cheekbone. Rafe says, ‘It would be a poor sort of bridegroom
who would come out in the morning and say, “Good day,
masters. Nothing done!” He was boasting, wasn’t he? That was
all. They’ve forgotten what it’s like to be fifteen.’
Even as the court is sitting, King François in Italy is losing a
battle. Pope Clement is preparing to sign a new treaty with the
Emperor, Queen Katherine’s nephew. He doesn’t know this
when he says, ‘This is a bad day’s work. If we want Europe to
laugh at us, they’ve every reason now.’
He looks sideways at Rafe, whose particular problem, clearly, is
that he cannot imagine anyone, even a hasty fifteen-year-old,
wanting to penetrate Katherine. It would be like copulation with a
statue. Rafe, of course, has not heard the cardinal on the subject of
the queen’s former attractions. ‘Well, I reserve judgment. Which is
what the court will do. It’s all they can do.’ He says, ‘Rafe, you are
so much closer in these matters. I can’t remember being fifteen.’
‘Surely? Were you not fifteen or so when you fetched up in
France?’
‘Yes, I must have been.’ Wolsey: ‘Arthur would have been
about your age, Thomas, if he had lived.’ He remembers a
woman in Dover, up against a wall; her small crushable bones,
her young, bleak, pallid face. He feels a small sensation of panic,
loss; what if the cardinal’s joke isn’t a joke, and the earth is
strewn with his children, and he has never done right by them? It
is the only honest thing to be done: look after your children.
‘Rafe,’ he says, ‘do you know I haven’t made my will? I said I
would but I never did. I think I should go home and draft it.’
‘Why?’ Rafe looks amazed. ‘Why now? The cardinal will want
you.’
‘Come home.’ He takes Rafe’s arm. On his left side, a hand
touches his: fingers without flesh. A ghost walks: Arthur,
studious and pale. King Henry, he thinks, you raised him; now
you put him down.