‘A private client. I can’t make a living from Lady Anne’s black
looks.’
Boys wait with their horses. From various folds of his
garments Dr Cranmer produces objects wrapped in cloth. One
of them is a carrot cut carefully lengthways, and another a
wizened apple, quartered. As if he were a child, fair-minded with
a treat, he gives him two slices of carrot and half the apple, to feed
to his own horse; as he does so, he says, ‘You owe much to Anne
Boleyn. More than perhaps you think. She has formed a good
opinion of you. I’m not sure she cares to be your sister-in-law,
mind …’
The beasts bend their necks, nibbling, their ears flicking in
appreciation. It is a moment of peace, like a benediction. He says,
‘There are no secrets, are there?’
‘No. No. Absolutely none.’ The priest shakes his head. ‘You
asked why I would not come to your college.’
‘I was making conversation.’
‘Still … as we heard it in Cambridge, you performed such
labours for the foundation … the students and Fellows all
commend you … no detail escapes Master Cromwell. Though to
be sure, this comfort on which you pride yourselves …’ His
tone, smooth and unemphatic, doesn’t change. ‘In the fish cellar?
Where the students died?’
‘My lord cardinal did not take that lightly.’
Cranmer says, lightly, ‘Nor did I.’
‘My lord was never a man to ride down another for his opinions. You would have been safe.’
‘I assure you he would have found no heresy in me. Even the
Sorbonne could not fault me. I have nothing to be afraid of.’ A
wan smile. ‘But perhaps … ah well … perhaps I’m just a
Cambridge man at heart.’
He says to Wriothesley, ‘Is he? At all points orthodox?’
‘It’s hard to say. He doesn’t like monks. You should get on. ‘Was he liked at Jesus College?’
‘They say he was a severe examiner.’
‘I suppose he doesn’t miss much. Although. He thinks Anne is
a virtuous lady.’ He sighs. ‘And what do we think?’
Call-Me-Risley snorts. He has just married – a connection of
Gardiner’s – but his relations with women are not, on the whole,
gentle.
‘He seems a melancholy sort of man,’ he says. ‘The kind who
wants to live retired from the world.’
Wriothesley’s fair eyebrows rise, almost imperceptibly. ‘Did
he tell you about the barmaid?’
When Cranmer comes to the house, he feeds him the delicate
meat of the roe deer; they take supper privately, and he gets his
story from him, slowly, slowly and easily. He asks the doctor
where he comes from, and when he says, nowhere you know, he
says, try me, I’ve been to most places.
‘If you had been to Aslockton, you wouldn’t know you were
there. If a man goes fifteen miles to Nottingham, let him only
spend the night away, and it vanishes clear from his mind.’ His
village has not even a church; only some poor cottages and his
father’s house, where his family has lived for three generations.
‘Your father is a gentleman?’
‘He is indeed.’ Cranmer sounds faintly shocked: what else
could he be? ‘The Tamworths of Lincolnshire are among my
connections. The Cliftons of Clifton. The Molyneux family, of
whom you will have heard. Or have you?’
‘And you have much land?’
‘If I had thought, I would have brought the ledgers.’
‘Forgive me. We men of business …’
Eyes rest on him, assessing. Cranmer nods. ‘A small acreage.
And I am not the eldest. But he brought me up well. Taught me
horsemanship. He gave me my first bow. He gave me my first
hawk to train. Dead, he thinks, the father long dead: still looking for his hand
in the dark.
‘When I was twelve he sent me to school. I suffered there. The
master was harsh.’
‘To you? Or others as well?’
‘If I am honest, I only thought of myself. I was weak, no
doubt. I suppose he sought out weakness. Schoolmasters do.’
‘Could you not complain to your father?’
‘I wonder now why I did not. But then he died. I was thirteen.
Another year and my mother sent me to Cambridge. I was glad
of the escape. To be from under his rod. Not that the flame of
learning burnt bright. The east wind put it out. Oxford –
Magdalen especially, where your cardinal was – it was everything
in those days.’
He thinks, if you were born in Putney, you saw the river every
day, and imagined it widening out to the sea. Even if you had
never seen the ocean you had a picture of it in your head from
what you had been told by foreign people who sometimes came
upriver. You knew that one day you would go out into a world
of marble pavements and peacocks, of hillsides buzzing with
heat, the fragrance of crushed herbs rising around you as you
walked. You planned for what your journeys would bring you:
the touch of warm terracotta, the night sky of another climate,
alien flowers, the stone-eyed gaze of other people’s saints. But if
you were born in Aslockton, in flat fields under a wide sky, you
might just be able to imagine Cambridge: no further.
‘A man from my college,’ Dr Cranmer says tentatively, ‘was
told by the cardinal that as an infant you were stolen by pirates.’
He stares at him for a moment, then smiles in slow delight.
‘How I miss my master. Now he has gone north, there is no one
to invent me.’
Dr Cranmer, cautious: ‘So it is not true? Because I wondered
if there was doubt over whether you were baptised. I fear it could
be a question, in such an event.’ ‘But the event never took place. Really. Pirates would have
given me back.’
Dr Cranmer frowns. ‘You were an unruly child?’
‘If I’d known you then, I could have knocked down your
schoolmaster for you.’
Cranmer has stopped eating; not that he has tasted much. He
thinks, at some level of his being this man will always believe I
am a heathen; I will never disabuse him now. He says, ‘Do you
miss your studies? Your life has been disrupted since the king
made you an ambassador and had you tossed on the high seas.’
‘In the Bay of Biscay, when I was coming from Spain, we had
to bale out the ship. I heard the sailors’ confessions.’
‘They must have been something to hear.’ He laughs. ‘Shouted
over the noise of the storm.’
After that strenuous journey – though the king was pleased
with his embassy – Cranmer might have dropped back into his
old life, except that he had mentioned, meeting Gardiner in
passing, that the European universities might be polled on the
king’s case. You’ve tried the canon lawyers; now try the theologians. Why not? the king said; bring me Dr Cranmer and put him
in charge of it. The Vatican said it had nothing against the idea,
except that the divines should not be offered money: a merry
caveat, coming from a Pope with the surname of de’ Medici. To
him, this initiative seems nearly futile – but he thinks of Anne
Boleyn, he thinks of what her sister had said: she’s not getting
any younger. ‘Look, you’ve found a hundred scholars, at a score
of universities, and some say the king is right –’
‘Most –’
‘And if you find two hundred more, what will it matter?
Clement isn’t open to persuasion now. Only to pressure. And I
don’t mean moral pressure.’
‘But it’s not Clement we have to persuade of the king’s case.
It’s all of Europe. All Christian men.’
‘I’m afraid the Christian women may be harder still.’ Cranmer drops his eyes. ‘I could never persuade my wife of
anything. I would never have thought to try.’ He pauses. ‘We are
two widowers, I think, Master Cromwell, and if we are to
become colleagues, I must not leave you wondering, or at the
mercy of stories that people will bring to you.’
The light is fading around them while he talks, and his voice,
each murmur, each hesitation, trails away into the dusk. Outside
the room where they sit, where the house is going on its nightly
course, there is a banging and scraping, as if trestles were being
moved, and a faint sound of cheering and whooping. But he
ignores it, settles his attention on the priest. Joan, an orphan, he
says, servant in a gentleman’s house where he used to visit; no
people of her own, no marriage portion; he pitied her. A whisper
in a panelled room raises spirits from the fens, fetches the dead:
Cambridge twilights, damp seeping from the marshes and rush
lights burning in a bare swept room where an act of love takes
place. I could not help but marry her, Dr Cranmer says, and
indeed, how can a man help marrying? His college took away his
fellowship, of course, you cannot have married fellows. And
naturally she had to leave her place, and not knowing what else
to do with her, he lodged her at the Dolphin, which is kept by
some connections of his, some – he confesses, not without a
downward glance – some relations of his, yes it is true that some
of his people keep the Dolphin.
‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. The Dolphin is a good house.’
Ah, you know it: and he bites his lip.
He studies Dr Cranmer: his way of blinking, the cautious
finger he lays to his chin, his eloquent eyes and his pale praying
hands. So Joan was not, he says, she was not, you see, a barmaid,
whatever people say, and I know what they do say. She was a
wife with a child in her belly, and he a poor scholar, preparing to
live with her in honest poverty, but that didn’t happen, in the
event. He thought he might find a position as secretary to some
gentleman, or as a tutor, or that he might earn a living by his pen, but all that scheming was to no avail. He thought they might
move from Cambridge, even from England, but they didn’t have
to, in the end. He hoped some connection of his would do something for him, before the child was born: but when Joan died in
labour, no one could do anything for him, not any more. ‘If the
child had lived I would have salvaged something. As it was, no
one knew what to say to me. They did not know whether to
condole with me on losing my wife, or congratulate me because
Jesus College had taken me back. I took holy orders; why not?
All that, my marriage, the child I thought I would have, my
colleagues seemed to regard it as some sort of miscalculation.
Like losing your way in the woods. You get home and never
think of it again.’
‘There are some strange cold people in this world. It is priests,
I think. Saving your presence. Training themselves out of natural
feeling. They mean it for the best, of course.’
‘It was not a mistake. We did have a year. I think of her every
day.’
The door opens; it is Alice bringing in lights. ‘This is your
daughter?’
Rather than explain his family, he says, ‘This is my lovely
Alice. This is not your job, Alice?’
She bobs, a small genuflection to a churchman. ‘No, but Rafe
and the others want to know what you are talking about so long.
They are waiting to know if there will be a dispatch to the cardinal tonight. Jo is standing by with her needle and thread.’
‘Tell them I will write in my own hand, and we will send it
tomorrow. Jo may go to bed.’
‘Oh, we are not going to bed. We are running Gregory’s greyhounds up and down the hall and making a noise fit to wake the
dead.’
‘I can see why you don’t want to break off.’
‘Yes, it is excellent,’ Alice says. ‘We have the manners of
scullery maids and no one will ever want to marry us. If our aunt Mercy had behaved like us when she was a girl, she would have
been knocked round the head till she bled from the ears.’
‘Then we live in happy times,’ he says.
When she has gone, and the door is closed behind her,
Cranmer says, ‘The children are not whipped?’
‘We try to teach them by example, as Erasmus suggests,
though we all like to race the dogs up and down and make a
noise, so we are not doing very well in that regard.’ He does not
know if he should smile; he has Gregory; he has Alice, and
Johane and the child Jo, and in the corner of his eye, at the
periphery of his vision, the little pale girl who spies on the
Boleyns. He has hawks in his mews who move towards the
sound of his voice. What has this man?
‘I think of the king’s advisers,’ Dr Cranmer says. ‘The sort of
men who are about him now.’
And he has the cardinal, if the cardinal still thinks well of him
after all that has passed. If he dies, he has his son’s sable hounds
to lie at his feet.
‘They are able men,’ Cranmer says, ‘who will do anything he
wants, but it seems to me – I do not know how it seems to you –
that they are utterly lacking in any understanding of his situation
… any compunction or kindness. Any charity. Or love.’
‘It is what makes me think he will bring the cardinal back.’
Cranmer studies his face. ‘I am afraid that cannot happen now.’
He has a wish to speak, to express the bottled rage and pain he
feels. He says, ‘People have worked to make misunderstandings
between us. To persuade the cardinal that I am not working for
his interests, only for my own, that I have been bought out, that
I see Anne every day –’
‘Of course, you do see her …’
‘How else can I know how to move next? My lord cannot
know, he cannot understand, what it’s like here now.’
Cranmer says gently, ‘Should you not go to him? Your presence would dispel any doubt. ‘There is no time. The snare is set for him and I dare not
move.’
There is a chill in the air; the summer birds have flown, and
black-winged lawyers are gathering for the new term in the fields
of Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s. The hunting season – or at least, the
season when the king hunts every day – will soon be over. Whatever is happening elsewhere, whatever deceits and frustrations,
you can forget them in the field. The hunter is among the most
innocent of men; living in the moment makes him feel pure.
When he returns in the evening, his body aches, his mind is full
of pictures of leaves and sky; he does not want to read documents. His miseries, his perplexities have receded, and they will
stay away, provided – after food and wine, laughter and exchange
of stories – he gets up at dawn to do it all over again.
But the winter king, less occupied, will begin to think about
his conscience. He will begin to think about his pride. He will
begin to prepare the prizes for those who can deliver him results.
It is an autumn day, whitish sun flitting behind the loosening,
flickering leaves. They go into the butts. The king likes to do
more than one thing at once: talk, direct arrows at a target. ‘Here
we will be alone,’ he says, ‘and I will be free to open my mind to
you.’
In fact, the population of a small village – as it might be,
Aslockton – is circulating around them. The king does not know
what ‘alone’ means. Is he ever by himself, even in his dreams?
‘Alone’ means without Norfolk clattering after him. ‘Alone’
means without Charles Brandon, who in a summer fit of fury the
king advised to make himself scarce and not come within fifty
miles of the court. ‘Alone’ means just with my yeoman of the
bow and his menials, alone with my gentlemen of the privy
chamber, who are my select and private friends. Two of these
gentlemen, unless he is with the queen, sleep at the foot of his
bed; so they have been on duty for some years now. When he sees Henry draw his bow, he thinks, I see now he is
royal. At home or abroad, in wartime or peacetime, happy or
aggrieved, the king likes to practise several times in the week, as
an Englishman should; using his height, the beautiful trained
muscles of his arms, shoulders and chest, he sends his arrows
snapping straight to the eye of the target. Then he holds out his
arm, for someone to unstrap and restrap the royal armguard; for
someone to change his bow, and bring him a choice. A cringing
slave hands a napkin, to mop his forehead, and picks it up from
where the king has dropped it; and then, exasperated, one shot or
two falling wide, the King of England snaps his fingers, for God
to change the wind.
The king shouts, ‘From various quarters I receive the advice
that I should consider my marriage dissolved in the eyes of
Christian Europe, and may remarry as I please. And soon.’
He doesn’t shout back.
‘But others say …’ The breeze blows, his words are carried
off, towards Europe.
‘I am one of the others.’
‘Dear Jesus,’ Henry says. ‘I will be unmanned by it. How long
do you suppose my patience lasts?’
He hesitates to say, you are still living with your wife. You
share a roof, a court, wherever you move together, she on the
queen’s side, you on the king’s; you told the cardinal she was
your sister not your wife, but if today you do not shoot well, if
the breeze is not in your favour or you find your eyes blurred by
sudden tears, it is only sister Katherine whom you can tell; you
can admit no weakness or failure to Anne Boleyn.
He has studied Henry through his practice round. He has
taken up a bow at his invitation, which causes some consternation in the ranks of the gentlemen who stud the grass and lean
against trees, wearing their fallen-fruit silks of mulberry, gold
and plum. Though Henry shoots well, he has not the action of a
born archer; the born archer lays his whole body into the bow. Compare him with Richard Williams, Richard Cromwell as he is
now. His grandfather ap Evan was an artist with the bow. He
never saw him, but you can bet he had muscles like cords and
every one in use from the heels up. Studying the king, he is satisfied that his great-grandfather was not the archer Blaybourne, as
the story says, but Richard, Duke of York. His grandfather was
royal; his mother was royal; he shoots like a gentleman amateur,
and he is king through and through.
The king says, you have a good arm, a good eye. He says
disparagingly, oh, at this distance. We have a match every
Sunday, he says, my household. We go to Paul’s for the sermon
and then out to Moorfields, we meet up with our fellow guildsmen and destroy the butchers and the grocers, and then we
have a dinner together. We have grudge matches with the vintners …
Henry turns to him, impulsive: what if I came with you one
week? If I came in disguise? The commons would like it, would
they not? I could shoot for you. A king should show himself,
sometimes, don’t you feel? It would be amusing, yes?
Not very, he thinks. He cannot swear to it, but he thinks there
are tears in Henry’s eyes. ‘For sure we would win,’ he says. It is
what you would say to a child. ‘The vintners would be roaring
like bears.’
It begins to drizzle, and as they walk towards a sheltering
clump of trees, a pattern of leaves shadows the king’s face. He
says, Nan threatens to leave me. She says that there are other men
and she is wasting her youth.
Norfolk, panicking, that last week of October 1530: ‘Listen. This
fellow here,’ he jerks his thumb, rudely, at Brandon – who is
back at court, of course he is back – ‘this fellow here, a few years
ago, he charged at the king in the lists, and nearly killed him.
Henry had not put his visor down, God alone knows why – but
these things happen. My lord here ran his lance – bam! – into the king’s headpiece, and the lance shattered – an inch, one inch, from
his eye.’
Norfolk has hurt his right hand, by the force of his demonstration. Wincing, but furious, earnest, he presses on. ‘One year
later, Henry is following his hawk – it’s that cut-up sort of
country, flat, deceptive, you know it – he comes to a ditch, he
drives in a pole to help him cross, the infernal instrument breaks,
God rot it, and there’s His Majesty face down and stunned in a
foot of water and mud, and if some servant hadn’t clawed him
out, well, gentlemen, I shudder to think.’
He thinks, that’s one question answered. In case of peril, you
may pick him up. Fish him out. Whatever.
‘Suppose he dies?’ Norfolk demands. ‘Supposing a fever
carries him away or he comes off his horse and breaks his neck?
Then what? His bastard, Richmond? I’ve nothing against him,
he’s a fine boy, and Anne says I should get him married to my
daughter Mary, Anne’s no fool, let’s put a Howard everywhere,
she says, everywhere the king looks. Now I have no quarrel with
Richmond, except he was born out of wedlock. Can he reign?
Ask yourselves this. How did the Tudors get the crown? By
title? No. By force? Exactly. By God’s grace they won the battle.
The old king, he had such a fist as you will go many a mile to
meet, he had great books into which he entered his grudges and
he forgave, when? Never! That’s how one rules, masters.’ He
turns to his audience, to the councillors waiting and watching
and to the gentlemen of the court and the bedchamber; to Henry
Norris, to his friend William Brereton, to Master Secretary
Gardiner; to, incidentally, as it happens, Thomas Cromwell, who
is increasingly where he shouldn’t be. He says, ‘The old king
bred, and by the help of Heaven he bred sons. But when Arthur
died, there were swords sharpened in Europe, and they were
sharpened to carve up this kingdom. Henry that is now, he was a
child, nine years old. If the old king had not staggered on a few
more years, the wars would have been to fight all over again. A child cannot hold England. And a bastard child? God give me
strength! And it’s November again!’
It’s hard to fault what the duke says. He understands it all;
even that last cry, wrung from the duke’s heart. It’s November,
and a year has passed since Howard and Brandon walked into
York Place and demanded the cardinal’s chain of office, and
turned him out of his house.
There is a silence. Then someone coughs, someone sighs.
Someone – probably Henry Norris – laughs. It is he who speaks.
‘The king has one child born in wedlock.’
Norfolk turns. He flushes, a deep mottled purple. ‘Mary?’ he
says. ‘That talking shrimp?’
‘She will grow up.’
‘We are all waiting,’ Suffolk says. ‘She has now reached fourteen, has she not?’
‘But her face,’ Norfolk says, ‘is the size of my thumbnail.’ The
duke shows off his digit to the company. ‘A woman on the
English throne, it flies in the face of nature.’
‘Her grandmother was Queen of Castile.’
‘She cannot lead an army.’
‘Isabella did.’
Says the duke, ‘Cromwell, why are you here? Listening to the
talk of gentlemen?’
‘My lord, when you shout, the beggars on the street can hear
you. In Calais.’
Gardiner has turned to him; he is interested. ‘So you think
Mary can rule?’
He shrugs. ‘It depends who advises her. It depends who she
marries.’
Norfolk says, ‘We have to act soon. Katherine has half the
lawyers of Europe pushing paper for her. This dispensation. That
dispensation. The other dispensation with the different bloody
wording that they say they’ve got in Spain. It doesn’t matter.
This has gone beyond paper. ‘Why?’ Suffolk says. ‘Is your niece in foal?’
‘No! More’s the pity. Because if she were, he’d have to do
something.’
‘What?’ Suffolk says.
‘I don’t know. Grant his own divorce?’
There is a shuffle, a grunt, a sigh. Some look at the duke; some
look at their shoes. There’s no man in the room who doesn’t
want Henry to have what he wants. Their lives and fortunes
depend on it. He sees the path ahead: a tortuous path through a
flat terrain, the horizon deceptively clear, the country intersected
by ditches, and the present Tudor, a certain amount of mud
bespattering his person and his face, fished gasping into clear air.
He says, ‘That good man who pulled the king out of the ditch,
what was his name?’
Norfolk says, drily, ‘Master Cromwell likes to hear of the
deeds of those of low birth.’
He doesn’t suppose any of them will know. But Norris says, ‘I
know. His name was Edmund Mody.’
Muddy, more like, Suffolk says. He yells with laughter. They
stare at him.
It is All Souls’ Day: as Norfolk puts it, November again. Alice
and Jo have come to speak to him. They are leading Bella – the
Bella that is now – on a ribbon of pink silk. He looks up: may I
be of service to you two ladies?
Alice says, ‘Master, it is more than two years since my aunt
Elizabeth died, your lady wife. Will you write to the cardinal,
and ask him to ask the Pope to let her out of Purgatory?’
He says, ‘What about your aunt Kat? And your little cousins,
my daughters?’
The children exchange glances. ‘We don’t think they have been
there so long. Anne Cromwell was proud of her working of
numbers and boasted that she was learning Greek. Grace was
vain of her hair and used to state that she had wings, this was a lie . We think perhaps they must suffer more. But the cardinal could
try.’
Don’t ask, don’t get, he thinks.
Alice says, encouragingly, ‘You have been so active in the
cardinal’s business that he would not refuse. And although the
king does not favour the cardinal any more, surely the Pope
favours him?’
‘And I expect,’ says Jo, ‘that the cardinal writes to the Pope
every day. Though I do not know who sews his letters. And I
suppose the cardinal might send him a present for his trouble.
Some money, I mean. Our aunt Mercy says that the Pope does
nothing except on cash terms.’
‘Come with me,’ he says. They exchange glances. He sweeps
them along before him. Bella’s small legs race. Jo drops her lead,
but still Bella runs behind.
Mercy and the elder Johane are sitting together. The silence is
not companionable. Mercy is reading, murmuring the words to
herself. Johane is staring at the wall, sewing in her lap. Mercy
marks her place. ‘What’s this, an embassy?’
‘Tell her,’ he says. ‘Jo, tell your mother what you have been
asking me.’
Jo starts to cry. It is Alice who speaks up and puts their case.
‘We want our aunt Liz to come out of Purgatory.’
‘What have you been teaching them?’ he asks.
Johane shrugs. ‘Many grown persons believe what they believe.’
‘Dear God, what is going on under this roof? These children
believe the Pope can go down to the underworld with a bunch of
keys. Whereas Richard denies the sacrament –’
‘What?’ Johane’s mouth falls open. ‘He does what?’
Mercy says, ‘Richard is right. When the good Lord said, this is
my body, he meant, this signifies my body. He did not license
priests to be conjurers.’
‘But he said, it is. He did not say, this is like my body, he said,
it is. Can God lie? No. He is incapable of it.