July 1529: Thomas Cromwell of London, gentleman. Being
whole in body and memory. To his son Gregory six hundred and
sixty-six pounds thirteen shillings and four pence. And featherbeds, bolsters and the quilt of yellow turkey satin, the joined
bed of Flanders work and the carved press and the cupboards,
the silver and the silver gilt and twelve silver spoons. And leases
of farms to be held for him by the executors till he comes to full
age, and another two hundred pounds for him in gold at that
date. Money to the executors for the upbringing and marriage
portions of his daughter Anne, and his little daughter Grace. A
marriage portion for his niece Alice Wellyfed; gowns, jackets and
doublets to his nephews; to Mercy all sorts of household stuff
and some silver and anything else the executors think she should
have. Bequests to his dead wife’s sister Johane, and her husband
John Williamson, and a marriage portion to her daughter, also
Johane. Money to his servants. Forty pounds to be divided
between forty poor maidens on their marriage. Twenty pounds
for mending the roads. Ten pounds towards feeding poor prisoners in the London gaols.
His body to be buried in the parish where he dies: or at the
direction of his executors.
The residue of his estate to be spent on Masses for his parents.
To God his soul. To Rafe Sadler his books.
When the summer plague comes back, he says to Mercy and
Johane, shall we send the children out?
In which direction, Johane says: not challenging him, just
wanting to know.
Mercy says, can anyone outrun it? They take comfort from a
belief that since the infection killed so many last year, it won’t be
so violent this year; which he does not think is necessarily true,
and he thinks they seem to be endowing this plague with a
human or at least bestial intelligence: the wolf comes down on
the sheepfold, but not on the nights when the men with dogs are waiting for him. Unless they think the plague is more than bestial
or human – that it is God behind it – God, up to his old tricks.
When he hears the bad news from Italy, about Clement’s new
treaty with the Emperor, Wolsey bows his head and says, ‘My
Master is capricious.’ He doesn’t mean the king.
On the last day of July, Cardinal Campeggio adjourns the
legatine court. It is, he says, the Roman holidays. News comes
that the Duke of Suffolk, the king’s great friend, has hammered
the table before Wolsey, and threatened him to his face. They all
know the court will never sit again. They all know the cardinal
has failed.
That evening with Wolsey he believes, for the first time, that
the cardinal will come down. If he falls, he thinks, I come down
with him. His reputation is black. It is as if the cardinal’s joke has
been incarnated: as if he wades through streams of blood, leaving
in his wake a trail of smashed glass and fires, of widows and
orphans. Cromwell, people say: that’s a bad man. The cardinal
will not talk about what is happening in Italy, or what has
happened in the legate’s court. He says, ‘They tell me the sweating sickness is back. What shall I do? Shall I die? I have fought
four bouts with it. In the year … what year? … I think it was
1518 … now you will laugh, but it was so – when the sweat had
finished with me, I looked like Bishop Fisher. My flesh was
wasted. God picked me up and rattled my teeth.’
‘Your Grace was wasted?’ he says, trying to raise a smile. ‘I
wish you’d had your portrait made then.’
Bishop Fisher has said in court – just before the Roman holidays set in – that no power, human or divine, could dissolve the
marriage of the king and queen. If there’s one thing he’d like to
teach Fisher, it’s not to make grand overstatements. He has an
idea of what the law can do, and it’s different from what Bishop
Fisher thinks.
Until now, every day till today, every evening till this, if you
told Wolsey a thing was impossible, he’d just laugh. Tonight he says – when he can be brought to the point – my friend King
François is beaten and I am beaten too. I don’t know what to do.
Plague or no plague, I think I may die.
‘I must go home,’ he says. ‘But will you bless me?’
He kneels before him. Wolsey raises his hand, and then, as if
he has forgotten what he’s doing, lets it hover in mid-air. He says,
‘Thomas, I am not ready to meet God.’
He looks up, smiling. ‘Perhaps God is not ready to meet you.’
‘I hope that you will be with me when I die.’
‘But that will be at some distant date.’
He shakes his head. ‘If you had seen how Suffolk set on me
today. He, Norfolk, Thomas Boleyn, Thomas Lord Darcy, they
have been waiting only for this, for my failure with this court,
and now I hear they are devising a book of articles, they are
drawing up a list of accusations, how I have reduced the nobility,
and so forth – they are making a book called – what will they call
it? – “Twenty Years of Insults”? They are brewing some stewpot
into which they are pouring the dregs of every slight, as they
conceive it, by which they mean every piece of truth I have told
them …’ He takes a great rattling breath, and looks at the ceiling,
which is embossed with the Tudor rose.
‘There will be no such stewpots in Your Grace’s kitchen,’ he
says. He gets up. He looks at the cardinal, and all he can see is
more work to be done.
‘Liz Wykys,’ Mercy says, ‘wouldn’t have wanted her girls
dragged about the countryside. Especially as Anne, to my
knowledge, cries if she does not see you.’
‘Anne?’ He is amazed. ‘Anne cries?’
‘What did you think?’ Mercy asks, with some asperity. ‘Do
you think your children don’t love you?’
He lets her make the decision. The girls stay at home. It’s the
wrong decision. Mercy hangs outside their door the signs of the
sweating sickness. She says, how has this happened? We scour, we scrub the floors, I do not think you will find in the whole of
London a cleaner house than ours. We say our prayers. I have
never seen a child pray as Anne does. She prays as if she’s going
into battle.
Anne falls ill first. Mercy and Johane shout at her and shake
her to keep her awake, since they say if you sleep you will die.
But the pull of the sickness is stronger than they are, and she falls
exhausted against the bolster, struggling for breath, and falls
further, into black stillness, only her hand moving, the fingers
clenching and unclenching. He takes it in his own and tries to
still it, but it is like the hand of a soldier itching for a fight.
Later she rouses herself, asks for her mother. She asks for the
copybook in which she has written her name. At dawn the fever
breaks. Johane bursts into tears of relief, and Mercy sends her
away to sleep. Anne struggles to sit up, she sees him clearly, she
smiles, she says his name. They bring a basin of water strewn
with rose petals, and wash her face; her finger reaches out, tentative, to push the petals below the water, so each of them becomes
a vessel shipping water, a cup, a perfumed grail.
But when the sun comes up her fever rises again. He will not
let them begin it again, the pinching and pummelling, the
shaking; he gives her into God’s hands, and asks God to be good
to him. He talks to her but she makes no sign that she hears. He
is not, himself, afraid of contagion. If the cardinal can survive this
plague four times, I am sure I am in no danger, and if I die, I have
made my will. He sits with her, watching her chest heaving,
watching her fight and lose. He is not there when she dies –
Grace has already taken sick, and he is seeing her put to bed. So
he is out of the room, just, and when they usher him in, her stern
little face has relaxed into sweetness. She looks passive, placid;
her hand is already heavy, and heavy beyond his bearing.
He comes out of the room; he says, ‘She was already learning
Greek.’ Of course, Mercy says: she was a wonderful child, and
your true daughter. She leans against his shoulder and cries. She says, ‘She was clever and good, and in her way, you know, she
was beautiful.’
His thought had been: she was learning Greek: perhaps she
knows it now.
Grace dies in his arms; she dies easily, as naturally as she was
born. He eases her back against the damp sheet: a child of impossible perfection, her fingers uncurling like thin white leaves. I
never knew her, he thinks; I never knew I had her. It has always
seemed impossible to him that some act of his gave her life, some
unthinking thing that he and Liz did, on some unmemorable
night. They had intended the name to be Henry for a boy,
Katherine for a girl, and, Liz had said, that will do honour to
your Kat as well. But when he had seen her, swaddled, beautiful,
finished and perfect, he had said quite another thing, and Liz had
agreed. We cannot earn grace. We do not merit it.
He asks the priest if his elder daughter can be buried with her
copybook, in which she has written her name: Anne Cromwell.
The priest says he has never heard of such a thing. He is too tired
and angry to fight.
His daughters are now in Purgatory, a country of slow fires
and ridged ice. Where in the Gospels does it say ‘Purgatory’?
Tyndale says, now abideth faith, hope and love, even these
three; but the greatest of these is love.
Thomas More thinks it is a wicked mistranslation. He insists
on ‘charity’. He would chain you up, for a mistranslation. He
would, for a difference in your Greek, kill you.
He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a
moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything
they need to know.
Tyndale says, ‘Love never falleth away.’
October comes in. Wolsey presides, as usual, over the meetings
of the king’s council. But in the law courts, as Michaelmas term
opens, writs are moved against the cardinal. He is charged with success. He is charged with the exercise of power. Specifically, he
is charged with asserting a foreign jurisdiction in the king’s realm
– that is to say, with exercising his role as papal legate. What they
mean to say is this: he is alter rex. He is, he has always been, more
imperious than the king. For that, if it is a crime, he is guilty.
So now they swagger into York Place, the Duke of Suffolk, the
Duke of Norfolk: the two great peers of the realm. Suffolk, his
blond beard bristling, looks like a pig among truffles; a florid
man, he remembers, turns my lord cardinal sick. Norfolk looks
apprehensive, and as he turns over the cardinal’s possessions, it is
clear that he expects to find wax figures, perhaps of himself,
perhaps with long pins stuck through them. The cardinal has
done his feats by a compact with the devil; that is his fixed
opinion.
He, Cromwell, sends them away. They come back. They come
back with further and higher commissions and better signatures,
and they bring with them the Master of the Rolls. They take the
Great Seal from my lord cardinal.
Norfolk glances sideways at him, and gives him a fleeting,
ferrety grin. He doesn’t know why.
‘Come and see me,’ the duke says.
‘Why, my lord?’
Norfolk turns down his mouth. He never explains.
‘When?’
‘No hurry,’ Norfolk says. ‘Come when you’ve mended your
manners.’
It is 19 October 1529