‘God can do anything,’ Alice says.
Johane stares at her. ‘You little minx.’
‘If my mother were here, she would slap you for that.’
‘No fighting,’ he says. ‘Please?’ The Austin Friars is like the
world in little. These few years it’s been more like a battlefield
than a household; or like one of the tented encampments in
which the survivors look in despair at their shattered limbs and
spoiled expectations. But they are his to direct, these last hardened troops; if they are not to be flattened in the next charge it is
he who must teach them the defensive art of facing both ways,
faith and works, Pope and new brethren, Katherine and Anne.
He looks at Mercy, who is smirking. He looks at Johane, a high
colour in her cheeks. He turns away from Johane and his
thoughts, which are not precisely theological. He says to the
children, ‘You have done nothing wrong.’ But their faces are
stricken, and he coaxes them: ‘I shall give you a present, Jo, for
sewing the cardinal’s letters; and I shall give you a present, Alice,
I am sure that we do not need a reason. I shall give you
marmosets.’
They look at each other. Jo is tempted. ‘Do you know where
to get them?’
‘I think so. I have been to the Lord Chancellor’s house, and his
wife has such a creature, and it sits on her knee and attends to
everything she says.’
Alice says, ‘They are not the fashion now.’
‘Though we thank you,’ says Mercy.
‘Though we thank you,’ Alice repeats. ‘But marmosets are not
seen at court since Lady Anne came up. To be fashionable, we
should like Bella’s puppies.’
‘In time,’ he says. ‘Perhaps.’ The room is full of undercurrents,
some of which he does not understand. He picks up his dog,
tucks her under his arm and goes off to see how to provide some
more money for brother George Rochford. He sits Bella on his
desk, to take a nap among his papers. She has been sucking the end of her ribbon, and attempting subtly to undo the knot at her
throat.
On 1 November 1530, a commission for the cardinal’s arrest is
given to Harry Percy, the young Earl of Northumberland. The
earl arrives at Cawood to arrest him, forty-eight hours before his
planned arrival in York for his investiture. He is taken to Pontefract Castle under guard, from there to Doncaster, and from
there to Sheffield Park, the home of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Here
at Talbot’s house he falls ill. On 26 November the Constable of
the Tower arrives, with twenty-four men at arms, to escort him
south. From there he travels to Leicester Abbey. Three days later
he dies.
What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island,
poor and cold.
George Cavendish comes to Austin Friars. He cries as he talks.
Sometimes he dries his tears and moralises. But mostly he cries.
‘We had not even finished our dinner,’ he says. ‘My lord was
taking his dessert when young Harry Percy walked in. He was
spattered with mud from the road, and he had the keys in his
hands, he had taken them from the porter already, and set
sentries on the stairs. My lord rose to his feet, he said, Harry, if
I’d known, I’d have waited dinner for you. I fear we’ve almost
finished the fish. Shall I pray for a miracle?
‘I whispered to him, my lord, do not blaspheme. Then Harry
Percy came forward: my lord, I arrest you for high treason.’
Cavendish waits. He waits for him to erupt in fury? But he
puts his fingers together, joined as if he were praying. He thinks,
Anne arranged this, and it must have given her an intense and
secret pleasure; vengeance deferred, for herself, for her old lover,
once berated by the cardinal and sent packing from the court. He
says, ‘How did he look? Harry Percy?’
‘He was shaking from head to foot. ‘And my lord?’
‘Demanded his warrant, his commission. Percy said, there are
items in my instructions you may not see. So, said my lord, if
you will not show it, I shall not surrender to you, so here’s a
pretty state of affairs, Harry. Come, George, my lord said to me,
we will go into my rooms, and have some conference. They
followed him on his heels, the earl’s party, so I stood in the door
and I barred the way. My lord cardinal walked into his chamber,
mastering himself, and when he turned he said, Cavendish, look
at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.’
He, Cromwell, walks away so that he does not have to see the
man’s distress. He looks at the wall, at the panelling, at his new
linenfold panelling, and runs his index finger across its grooves.
‘When they took him from the house, the townspeople were
assembled outside. They knelt in the road and wept. They asked
God to send vengeance on Harry Percy.’
God need not trouble, he thinks: I shall take it in hand.
‘We were riding south. The weather was closing in. At
Doncaster it was late when we arrived. In the street the townsfolk were packed shoulder to shoulder, and each person holding
up a candle against the dark. We thought they would disperse,
but they stood all night in the road. And their candles burned
down. And it was daylight, of a sort.’
‘It must have put heart into him. Seeing the crowds.’
‘Yes, but by then – I did not say, I should have told you – he
had gone a week without eating.’
‘Why? Why did he do that?’
‘Some say he meant to destroy himself. I cannot believe it, a
Christian soul … I ordered him a dish of warden pears, roasted
with spices – did I do right?’
‘And he ate?’
‘A little. But then he put his hand to his chest. He said, there is
something cold inside me, cold and hard like a whetstone. And
that was where it began.’ Cavendish gets up. Now he too walks about the room. ‘I called for an apothecary. He made a powder
and I had him pour it into three cups. I drank off one. He, the
apothecary, he drank another. Master Cromwell, I trusted
nobody. My lord took his powder and presently the pain eased,
and he said, there, it was wind, and we laughed, and I thought,
tomorrow he will be better.’
‘Then Kingston came.’
‘Yes. How could we tell my lord, the Constable of the Tower
is here to fetch you? My lord sat down on a packing case. He
said, William Kingston? William Kingston? He kept on saying
his name.’
And all that time a weight in his chest, a whetstone, a steel, a
sharpening knife in his gut.
‘I said to him, now take it cheerfully, my lord. You will come
before the king and clear your name. And Kingston said the
same, but my lord said, you are leading me into a fool’s paradise.
I know what is provided for me, and what death is prepared.
That night we did not sleep. My lord voided black blood from
his bowels. The next morning he was too weak to stand, and so
we could not ride. But then we did ride. And so we came to
Leicester.
‘The days were very short, the light poor. On Monday
morning at eight he woke. I was just then bringing in the small
wax lights, and setting them along the cupboard. He said, whose
is that shadow that leaps along the wall? And he cried your name.
God forgive me, I said you were on the road. He said, the ways
are treacherous. I said, you know Cromwell, the devil does not
delay him – if he says he is on the road he will be here.’
‘George, make this story short, I cannot bear it.’
But George must have his say: next morning at four, a bowl of
chicken broth, but he would not eat it. Is this not a meatless day?
He asked for the broth to be taken away. By now he had been ill
for eight days, continually voiding his bowels, bleeding and in
pain, and he said, believe me, death is the end of this. Put my lord in a difficulty, and he will find a way; with his
craft and cunning, he will find a way, an exit. Poison? If so, then
by his own hand.
It was eight next morning when he drew his last breath.
Around his bed, the click of rosary beads; outside the restive
stamp of horses in their stalls, the thin winter moon shining
down on the London road.
‘He died in his sleep?’ He would have wished him less pain.
George says, no, he was speaking to the last. ‘Did he speak of me
again?’
Anything? A word?
I washed him, George says, laid him out for burial. ‘I found,
under his fine holland shirt, a belt of hair … I am sorry to tell
you, I know you are not a lover of these practices, but so it was.
I think he never did this till he was at Richmond among the
monks.’
‘What became of it? This belt of hair?’
‘The monks of Leicester kept it.’
‘God Almighty! They’ll make it pay.’
‘Do you know, they could provide nothing better than a coffin
of plain boards?’ Only when he says this does George Cavendish
give way; only at this point does he swear and say, by the passion
of Christ, I heard them knocking it together. When I think of the
Florentine sculptor and his tomb, the black marble, the bronze,
the angels at his head and foot … But I saw him dressed in his
archbishop’s robes, and I opened his fingers to put into his hand
his crozier, just as I thought I would see him hold it when he was
enthroned at York. It was only two days away. Our bags were
packed and we were ready for the road; till Harry Percy walked
in.
‘You know, George,’ he says, ‘I begged him, be content with
what you have clawed back from ruin, go to York, be glad to be
alive … In the course of things, he would have lived another ten
years, I know he would.’ ‘We sent for the mayor and all the city officials, so that they
could see him in his coffin, so there could be no false rumours
that he was living and escaped to France. Some made remarks
about his low birth, by God I wish you had been there –’
‘I too.’
‘For to your face, Master Cromwell, they had not done it, nor
would they dare. When the light failed we kept vigil, with the
tapers burning around his coffin, till four in the morning, which
you know is the canonical hour. Then we heard Mass. At six we
laid him in the crypt. There left him.’
Six in the morning, a Wednesday, the feast of St Andrew the
Apostle. I, a simple cardinal. There left him and rode south, to
find the king at Hampton Court. Who says to George, ‘I would
not for twenty thousand pounds that the cardinal had died.’
‘Look, Cavendish,’ he says, ‘when you are asked what the
cardinal said in his last days, tell them nothing.’
George raises his eyebrows. ‘I already have. Told them
nothing. The king questioned me. My lord Norfolk.’
‘If you tell Norfolk anything, he will twist it into treason.’
‘Still, as he is Lord Treasurer, he has paid me my back wages. I
was three-quarters of the year in arrears.’
‘What were you paid, George?’
‘Ten pounds a year.’
‘You should have come to me.’
These are the facts. These are the figures. If the Lord of the
Underworld rose up tomorrow in the privy chamber, and
offered a dead man back, fresh from the grave, fresh from the
crypt, the miracle of Lazarus for £20,000 – Henry Tudor would
be pushed to scrape it together. Norfolk as Lord Treasurer? Fine;
it doesn’t matter who holds the title, who holds the clanking keys
to the empty chests.
‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘if the cardinal could say, as he used to
say to me, Thomas, what would you like for a New Year’s gift, I
would say, I would like sight of the nation’s accounts. Cavendish hesitates; he begins to speak; he stops; he starts
again. ‘The king said certain things to me. At Hampton Court.
“Three may keep counsel, if two are away.”’
‘It is a proverb, I think.’
‘He said, “If I thought my cap knew my counsel, I would cast
it into the fire.”’
‘I think that also is a proverb.’
‘He means to say that he will not choose any adviser now: not
my lord of Norfolk, nor Stephen Gardiner, or anyone, any
person to be close to him, to be so close as the cardinal was.’
He nods. That seems a reasonable interpretation.
Cavendish looks ill. It is the strain of the long sleepless nights,
of the vigil around the coffin. He is worried about various sums
of money the cardinal had on the journey, which he did not have
when he died. He is worried about how to get his own effects
from Yorkshire to his home; apparently Norfolk has promised
him a cart and a transport allowance. He, Cromwell, talks about
this while he thinks about the king, and out of sight of George
folds his fingers, one by one, tight into the palm of his hand.
Mary Boleyn traced, in his palm, a certain shape; he thinks,
Henry, I have your heart in my hand.
When Cavendish has gone, he goes to his secret drawer
and takes out the package that the cardinal gave him on the day
he began his journey north. He unwinds the thread that binds
it. It snags, knots, he works at it patiently; before he had expected
it, the turquoise ring rolls into his palm, cold as if it came
from the tomb. He pictures the cardinal’s hands, long-fingered,
white and unscarred, steady for so many years on the wheel
of the ship of state; but the ring fits as if it had been made for
him.
The cardinal’s scarlet clothes now lie folded and empty. They
cannot be wasted. They will be cut up and become other
garments. Who knows where they will get to over the years?
Your eye will be taken by a crimson cushion or a patch of red on a banner or ensign. You will see a glimpse of them in a man’s
inner sleeve or in the flash of a whore’s petticoat.
Another man would go to Leicester to see where he died and
talk to the abbot. Another man would have trouble imagining it,
but he has no trouble. The red of a carpet’s ground, the flush of
the robin’s breast or the chaffinch, the red of a wax seal or the
heart of the rose: implanted in his landscape, cered in his inner
eye, and caught in the glint of a ruby, in the colour of blood, the
cardinal is alive and speaking. Look at my face: I am not afraid of
any man alive.
At Hampton Court in the great hall they perform an interlude;
its name is ‘The Cardinal’s Descent into Hell’. It takes him back
to last year, to Gray’s Inn. Under the eye of the officials of the
king’s household, the carpenters have been working furiously
and for bonus rates, erecting frames upon which to drape canvas
cloths painted with scenes of torture. At the back of the hall, the
screens are entirely hung with flames.
The entertainment is this: a vast scarlet figure, supine, is
dragged across the floor, howling, by actors dressed as devils.
There are four devils, one for each limb of the dead man. The
devils wear masks. They have tridents with which they prick the
cardinal, making him twitch and writhe and beg. He had hoped
the cardinal died without pain but Cavendish had said no. He
died conscious, talking of the king. He had started out of sleep
and said, whose is that shadow on the wall?
The Duke of Norfolk walks around the hall chortling, ‘Isn’t it
good, eh? It’s good enough to be printed! By the Mass, that’s
what I shall do! I shall have it printed, so I can take it home with
me, and at Christmas we can play it all over again.’
Anne sits laughing, pointing, applauding. He has never seen
her like this before: lit up, glowing. Henry sits frozen by her side.
Sometimes he laughs, but he thinks if you could get close you
would see that his eyes are afraid. The cardinal rolls across the floor, kicking out at the demons, but they harry him, in their
woolly suits of black, and cry, ‘Come, Wolsey, we must fetch you
to Hell, for our master Beelzebub is expecting you to supper.’
When the scarlet mountain pops up his head and asks, ‘What
wines does he serve?’ he almost forgets himself and laughs. ‘I’ll
have no English wine,’ the dead man declares. ‘None of that cats’
piss my lord of Norfolk lays on.’
Anne crows; she points; she points to her uncle; the noise rises
high to the roof beams with the smoke from the hearth, the
laughing and chanting from the tables, the howling of the fat
prelate. No, they assure him, the devil is a Frenchman, and there
are catcalls and whistles, and songs break out. The devils now
catch the cardinal’s head in a noose. They haul him to his feet, but
he fights them. The flailing punches are not all fake, and he hears
their grunts, as the breath is knocked out of them. But there are
four hangmen, and one great scarlet bag of nothingness, who
chokes, who claws; the court cries, ‘Let him down! Let him
down alive!’
The actors throw up their hands; they prance back and let him
fall. When he rolls on the ground, gasping, they thrust their forks
into him and wind out lengths of scarlet woollen bowel.
The cardinal utters blasphemies. He utters farts, and fireworks
blast out from corners of the hall. From the corner of his eye, he
sees a woman run away, a hand over her mouth; but Uncle
Norfolk marches about, pointing: ‘Look, there his guts are
wound out, as the hangman would draw them! Why, I’d pay to
see this!’
Someone calls, ‘Shame on you, Thomas Howard, you’d have
sold your own soul to see Wolsey down.’ Heads turn, and his
head turns, and nobody knows who has spoken; but he thinks it
might be, could it be, Thomas Wyatt? The gentlemen devils have
dusted themselves down and got their breath back. Shouting
‘Now!’ they pounce; the cardinal is dragged off to Hell, which is
located, it seems, behind the screens at the back of the hall. He follows them behind the screens. Pages run out with linen
towels for the actors, but the satanic influx knocks them aside. At
least one of the children gets an elbow in the eye, and drops his
bowl of steaming water on his feet. He sees the devils wrench off
their masks, and toss them, swearing, into a corner; he watches as
they try to claw off their knitted devil-coats. They turn to each
other, laughing, and begin to pull them over each other’s heads.
‘It’s like the shirt of Nessus,’ George Boleyn says, as Norris
wrenches him free.
George tosses his head to settle his hair back into place; his
white skin has flared from contact with the rough wool. George
and Henry Norris are the hand-devils, who seized the cardinal
by his forepaws. The two foot-devils are still wrestling each
other from their trappings. They are a boy called Francis
Weston, and William Brereton, who – like Norris – is old
enough to know better. They are so absorbed in themselves –
cursing, laughing, calling for clean linen – that they do not
notice who is watching them and anyway they do not care. They
splash themselves and each other, they towel away their sweat,
they rip the shirts from the pages’ hands, they drop them over
their heads. Still wearing their cloven hooves, they swagger out
to take their bow.
In the centre of the space they have vacated, the cardinal lies
inert, shielded from the hall by the screens; perhaps he is sleeping.
He walks up to the scarlet mound. He stops. He looks down.
He waits. The actor opens one eye. ‘This must be Hell,’ he says.
‘This must be Hell, if the Italian is here.’
The dead man pulls off his mask. It is Sexton, the fool: Master
Patch. Master Patch, who screamed so hard, a year ago, when
they wanted to part him from his master.
Patch holds out a hand, to be helped to his feet, but he does
not take it. The man scrambles up by himself, cursing. He begins
to pull off his scarlet, dragging and tearing at the cloth. He Cromwell, stands with his arms folded, his writing hand tucked
into a hidden fist. The fool casts away his padding, fat pillows of
wool. His body is scrawny, wasted, his chest furred with wiry
hairs. He speaks: ‘Why you come to my country, Italian? Why
you no stay in your own country, ah?’
Sexton is a fool, but he’s not soft in the head. He knows well
he’s not an Italian.
‘You should have stayed over there,’ Patch says, in his own
London voice. ‘Have your own walled town by now. Have a
cathedral. Have your own marzipan cardinal to eat after dinner.
Have it all for a year or two, eh, till a bigger brute comes along
and knocks you off the trough?’
He picks up the costume Patch has cast off. Its red is the fiery,
cheap, quick-fading scarlet of Brazil-wood dye, and it smells of
alien sweat. ‘How can you act this part?’
‘I act what part I’m paid to act. And you?’ He laughs: his shrill
bark, which passes as mad. ‘No wonder your humour’s so bitter
these days. Nobody’s paying you, eh? Monsieur Cremuel, the
retired mercenary.’
‘Not so retired. I can fix you.’
‘With that dagger you keep where once was your waist.’ Patch
springs away, he capers. He, Cromwell, leans against the wall; he
watches him. He can hear a child sobbing, somewhere out of
sight; perhaps it is the little boy who has been hit in the eye, now
slapped again for dropping the bowl, or perhaps just for crying.
Childhood was like that; you are punished, then punished again
for protesting. So, one learns not to complain; it is a hard lesson,
but one never lost.
Patch is trying out various postures, obscene gestures; as if
preparing for some future performance. He says, ‘I know what
ditch you were spawned in, Tom, and it was a ditch not far from
mine.’ He turns to the hall where, unseen and beyond the dividing screen, the king, presumably, continues his pleasant day.
Patch plants his legs apart, he sticks out his tongue. ‘The fool has said in his heart, there is no Pope.’ He turns his head; he grins.
‘Come back in ten years, Master Cromwell, and tell me who’s the
fool then.’
‘You’re wasting your jokes on me, Patch. Wearing out your
stock-in-trade.’
‘Fools can say anything.’
‘Not where my writ runs.’
‘And where is that? Not even in the backyard where you were
christened in a puddle. Come and meet me here, ten years today,
if you’re still alive.’
‘You would have a fright if I was dead.’
‘Because I’ll stand still, and let you knock me down.’
‘I could crack your skull against the wall now. They’d not miss
you.’
‘True,’ Master Sexton says. ‘They would roll me out in the
morning and lay me on a dunghill. What’s one fool? England is
full of them.’
He is surprised there is any daylight left; he had thought it was
deepest night. In these courts, Wolsey lingers; he built them.
Turn any corner, and you will think you will see my lord, with a
scroll of draughtsman’s plans in his hands, his glee at his sixty
turkey carpets, his hope to lodge and entertain the finest mirrormakers of Venice – ‘Now, Thomas, you will add to your letter
some Venetian endearments, some covert phrases that will
suggest, in the local dialect and the most delicate way possible,
that I pay top rates.’
And he will add that the people of England are welcoming to
foreigners and that the climate of England is benign. That golden
birds sing on golden branches, and a golden king sits on a hill of
coins, singing a song of his own composition.
When he gets home to Austin Friars he walks into a space that
feels strange and empty. It has taken hours to get back from
Hampton Court and it is late. He looks at the place on the wall where the cardinal’s arms blaze out: the scarlet hat, at his request,
recently retouched. ‘You can paint them out now,’ he says.
‘And what shall we paint else, sir?’
‘Leave a blank.’
‘We could have a pretty allegory?’
‘I’m sure.’ He turns and walks away. ‘Leave a space.