PART FOUR

I
Arrange Your Face
1531

Whether it is through pain or fear, or some defect of nature;
whether because of the summer heat, or the sound of hunting
horns winding into the distance, or the spinning of sparkling dust
in empty rooms; or whether it is that the child has lost sleep, while
from dawn onwards her father’s decamping household was
packed up around her; for whatever reason, she is shrunken into
herself, and her eyes are the colour of ditchwater. Once, as he is
going through the preliminary Latin politenesses, he sees her grip
tighten on the back of her mother’s chair. ‘Madam, your daughter
should sit.’ In case a contest of wills should ensue, he picks up a
stool and places it, with a decisive thud, by Katherine’s skirts.
The queen leans back, rigid inside her boned bodice, to
whisper to her daughter. The ladies of Italy, seemingly carefree,
wore constructions of iron beneath their silks. It took infinite
patience, not just in negotiation, to get them out of their clothes.
Mary drops her head to whisper back; she hints, in Castilian,
that it is her woman’s disorder. Two pairs of eyes rise to meet his.
The girl’s glance is almost unfocused; she sees him, he supposes,
as a bulky mass of shadow, in a space welling with distress. Stand
up straight, Katherine murmurs: like a princess of England.
Braced against the chair back, Mary takes a deep breath. She
turns to him her plain pinched face: hard as Norfolk’s thumbnail. It is early afternoon, very hot. The sun casts against the wall
shifting squares of lilac and gold. The shrivelled fields of Windsor
are laid out below them. The Thames shrinks from its banks.
The queen speaks in English. ‘Do you know who this is? This
is Master Cromwell. Who now writes all the laws.’
Caught awkwardly between languages, he says, ‘Madam, shall
we go on in English, or Latin?’
‘Your cardinal would ask the same question. As if I were a
stranger here. I will say to you, as I said to him, that I was first
addressed as Princess of Wales when I was three years old. I was
sixteen when I came here to marry my lord Arthur. I was a virgin
and seventeen when he died. I was twenty-four years old when I
became Queen of England, and I will say for the avoidance of
doubt that I am at present aged forty-six, and still queen, and by
now, I believe, a sort of Englishwoman. But I shall not repeat to
you everything that I told the cardinal. I imagine he left you
notes of these things.’
He feels he should bow. The queen says, ‘Since the year began
they have brought certain bills into Parliament. Until now Master
Cromwell’s talent was for moneylending, but now he finds he has
a talent for legislation too – if you want a new law, just ask him. I
hear that at night you take the drafts to your house in – where is
your house?’ She makes it sound like ‘your dog-hole’.
Mary says, ‘These laws are written against the church. I
wonder that our lords allow it.’
‘You know,’ the queen says, ‘that the Cardinal of York was
accused under the praemunire laws of usurping your lord
father’s jurisdiction as ruler of England. Now Master Cromwell
and his friends find all the clergy complicit in that crime, and ask
them to pay a fine of more than one hundred thousand pounds.’
‘Not a fine. We call it a benevolence.’
‘I call it extortion.’ She turns to her daughter. ‘If you ask why
the church is not defended, I can only tell you that there are
noblemen in this land’ – Suffolk, she means, Norfolk – ‘who have been heard to say they will pull the power of the church down,
that never again will they suffer – they use the word – a churchman to grow so great as our late legate. That we need no new
Wolsey, I concur. With the attacks on the bishops, I do not
concur. Wolsey was to me an enemy. That does not alter my feelings towards our Holy Mother the church.’
He thinks, Wolsey was to me a father and a friend. That does
not alter my feelings towards our Holy Mother the church.
‘You and Speaker Audley, you put your heads together by
candlelight.’ The queen mentions the Speaker’s name as if she
were saying ‘your kitchen boy’. ‘And when the morning comes
you induce the king to describe himself as head of the church in
England.’
‘Whereas,’ the child says, ‘the Pope is head of the church
everywhere, and from the throne of St Peter flows the lawfulness
of all government. From no other source.’
‘Lady Mary,’ he says, ‘will you not sit?’ He catches her just as
she folds at the knees, and eases her down on to the stool. ‘It is
just the heat,’ he says, so she will not be ashamed. She turns up
her eyes, shallow and grey, with a look of simple gratitude; and as
soon as she is seated the look is replaced by an expression as
stony as the wall of a town under siege.
‘You say “induce”,’ he tells Katherine. ‘But Your Highness,
above anyone, knows that the king cannot be led.’
‘But he may be enticed.’ She turns to Mary, whose arms have crept
over her belly. ‘So your father the king is named head of the church,
and to soothe the conscience of the bishops, they have caused this
formula to be inserted: “as far as the law of Christ allows”.’
‘What does that mean?’ Mary says. ‘It means nothing.’
‘Your Highness, it means everything.’
‘Yes. It is very clever.’
‘I beg you,’ he says, ‘to consider it in this way, that the king has
merely defined a position previously held, one that ancient
precedents ‘– invented these last months –’
‘– show as his right.’
Under her clumsy gable hood, Mary’s forehead is slick with
sweat. She says, ‘What is defined can be redefined, yes?’
‘Indeed,’ her mother says. ‘And redefined in favour of the
church – if only I fall in with their wishes, and put myself out of
the estate of queen and wife.’
The princess is right, he thinks. There is room for negotiation.
‘Nothing here is irrevocable.’
‘No, you wait to see what I will bring to your treaty table.’
Katherine holds out her hands – little, stubby, puffy hands – to
show that they are empty. ‘Only Bishop Fisher defends me.
Only he has been constant. Only he is able to tell the truth,
which is that the House of Commons is full of heathens.’ She
sighs, her hands fall at her sides. ‘And now under what persuasion has my husband ridden off without a farewell? He has not
done so before. Never.’
‘He means to hunt out of Chertsey for a few days.’
‘With the woman,’ Mary says. ‘The person.’
‘Then he will ride by way of Guildford to visit Lord Sandys –
he wants to see his handsome new gallery at the Vyne.’ His tone
is easy, soothing, like the cardinal’s; perhaps too much so? ‘From
there, depending on the weather, and the game, he will go to
William Paulet at Basing.’
‘I am to follow, when?’
‘He will return in a fortnight, God willing.’
‘A fortnight,’ Mary says. ‘Alone with the person.’
‘Before then, madam, you are to go to another palace – he has
chosen the More, in Hertfordshire, which you know is very
comfortable.’
‘Being the cardinal’s house,’ Mary says, ‘it would be lavish.’
My own daughters, he thinks, would never have spoken so.
‘Princess,’ he says, ‘will you, of your charity, cease to speak ill of
a man who never did you harm? Mary blushes from neckline to hairline. ‘I did not mean to fail
in charity.’
‘The late cardinal is your godfather. You owe him your
prayers.’
Her eyes flicker towards him; she looks cowed. ‘I pray to
shorten his term in Purgatory …’
Katherine interrupts her. ‘Send a box to Hertfordshire. Send a
package. Do not seek to send me.’
‘You shall have your whole court. The household is ready for
two hundred.’
‘I shall write to the king. You may carry the letter. My place is
with him.’
‘My advice,’ he says, ‘take this gently. Or he may …’ He indicates the princess. His hands join and drift apart. Separate you.
The child is fighting down pain. Her mother is fighting down
grief and anger, and disgust and fear. ‘I expected this,’ she says,
‘but I did not expect he would send a man like you to tell me.’ He
frowns: does she think it would come better from Norfolk?
‘They say you had a trade as a blacksmith; is that correct?’
Now she will say, shoe a horse?
‘It was my father’s trade.’
‘I begin to understand you.’ She nods. ‘The blacksmith makes
his own tools.’
Half a mile of chalk walls, a mirror for the glare, bounce at him a
white heat. In the shadow of a gateway, Gregory and Rafe are
jostling and pushing, insulting each other with culinary insults
he has taught them: Sir, you are a fat Fleming, and spread butter
on your bread. Sir, you are a Roman pauper, may your offspring
eat snails. Master Wriothesley is leaning in the sun and watching
them, with a lazy smile; butterflies garland his head.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he says. Wriothesley looks gratified. ‘You look
fit to be painted, Master Wriothesley. A doublet of azure, and a
shaft of light precisely placed.’ ‘Sir? Katherine says?’
‘She says our precedents are fake.’
Rafe: ‘Does she understand that you and Dr Cranmer sat up
all night over them?’
‘Oh, wild times!’ Gregory says. ‘Seeing the dawn in, with Dr
Cranmer!’
He throws an arm around Rafe’s bony little shoulders and
squeezes him; it is a liberation to be away from Katherine, from
the girl flinching like a whipped bitch. ‘Once I myself, with
Giovannino – well, with some boys I knew –’ He stops: what is
this? I don’t tell stories about myself.
‘Please …’ Wriothesley says.
‘Well, we had a statue made, a smirking little god with wings,
and then we beat it with hammers and chains to make it antique,
and we hired a muleteer and drove it to Rome and sold it to a
cardinal.’ Such a hot day, when they were ushered into his presence: hazy, thunder in the distance, and white dust from building
sites hanging in the air. ‘I remember he had tears in his eyes when
he paid us. “To think that on these charming little feet and these
sweet pinions, the gaze of the Emperor Augustus may have
rested.” When the Portinari boys set off for Florence they were
staggering under the weight of their purses.’
‘And you?’
‘I took my cut and stayed on to sell the mules.’
They head downhill through the inner courts. Emerging into
the sun, he shades his eyes as if to see through the tangle of treetops that runs into the distance. ‘I told the queen, let Henry go in
peace. Or he might not let the princess move with her upcountry.’
Wriothesley says, surprised, ‘But it is decided. They are to be
separated. Mary is to go to Richmond.’
He did not know. He hopes his hesitation is not perceptible.
‘Of course. But the queen had not been told, and it was worth a
try, yes?’ See how useful Master Wriothesley is. See how he brings us
intelligence from Secretary Gardiner. Rafe says, ‘It is harsh. To
use the little girl against her mother.’
‘Harsh, yes … but the question is, have you picked your
prince? Because that is what you do, you choose him, and you
know what he is. And then, when you have chosen, you say yes
to him – yes, that is possible, yes, that can be done. If you don’t
like Henry, you can go abroad and find another prince, but I
tell you – if this were Italy, Katherine would be cold in her
tomb.’
‘But you swore,’ Gregory says, ‘that you respected the queen.’
‘So I do. And I would respect her corpse.’
‘You would not work her death, would you?’
He halts. He takes his son’s arm, turns him to look into his
face. ‘Retrace our steps through this conversation.’ Gregory
pulls away. ‘No, listen, Gregory. I said, you give way to the
king’s requests. You open the way to his desires. That is what a
courtier does. Now, understand this: it is impossible that Henry
should require me or any other person to harm the queen. What
is he, a monster? Even now he has affection for her; how could he
not? And he has a soul he hopes may be saved. He confesses
every day to one or other of his chaplains. Do you think the
Emperor does so much, or King Francis? Henry’s heart, I assure
you, is a heart full of feeling; and Henry’s soul, I swear, is the
most scrutinised soul in Christendom.’
Wriothesley says, ‘Master Cromwell, he is your son, not an
ambassador.’
He lets Gregory go. ‘Shall we get on the river? There might be
a breeze.’
In the Lower Ward, six couples of hunting dogs stir and yelp in
the cages on wheels which are going to carry them across country.
Tails waving, they are clambering over each other, twisting ears
and nipping, their yaps and howls adding to the sense of nearpanic that has taken over the castle. It’s more like the evacuation of a fort than the start of a summer progress. Sweating porters are
heaving the king’s furnishings on to carts. Two men with a
studded chest have got wedged in a doorway. He thinks of
himself on the road, a bruised child, loading wagons to get a lift.
He wanders over. ‘How did this happen, boys?’
He steadies one corner of the chest and backs them off into the
shadows; adjusts the degree of rotation with a flip of his hand; a
moment’s fumbling and slipping, and they burst into the light,
shouting ‘Here she goes!’ as if they had thought of it themselves.
Be packing for the queen next, he says, for the cardinal’s palace at
the More, and they say, surprised, is that so, master, and what if
the queen won’t go? He says, then we will roll her up in a carpet
and put her on your cart. He hands out coins: ease up, it’s too hot
to work so hard. He saunters back to the boys. A man leads up
horses ready for harnessing to the hounds’ wagons, and as soon
as they catch their scent the dogs set up an excited barking, which
can still be heard as they get on the water.
The river is brown, torpid; on the Eton bank, a group of listless swans glides in and out of the weeds. Their boat bobs
beneath them; he says, ‘Is that not Sion Madoc?’
‘Never forget a face, eh?’
‘Not when it’s ugly.’
‘Have you seen yourself, bach?’ The boatman has been eating
an apple, core and all; fastidious, he flicks the pips over the side.
‘How’s your dad?’
‘Dead.’ Sion spits the stalk out. ‘Any of these yours?’
‘Me,’ Gregory says.
‘That’s mine.’ Sion nods to the opposite oar, a lump of a lad
who reddens and looks away. ‘Your dad used to shut up shop in
this weather. Put the fire out and go fishing.’
‘Lashing the water with his rod,’ he says, ‘and punching the
lights out of the fish. Jump in and drag them gasping out of the
green deep. Fingers through the gills: “What are you looking at,
you scaly whoreson? Are you looking at me?”’ ‘He not being one to sit and enjoy the sunshine,’ Madoc
explains. ‘I could tell you stories, about Walter Cromwell.’
Master Wriothesley’s face is a study. He does not understand
how much you can learn from boatmen, their argot blasphemous
and rapid. At twelve he spoke it fluently, his mother tongue, and
now it flows back into his mouth, something natural, something
dirty. There are tags of Greek he has mastered, which he exchanges
with Thomas Cranmer, with Call-Me-Risley: early language,
unblighted, like tender fruit. But never does a Greek scholar pin
back your ears as Sion does now, with Putney’s opinion of the
fucking Bullens. Henry goes to it with the mother, good luck to
him. He goes to it with the sister, what’s a king for? But it’s got to
stop somewhere. We’re not beasts of the field. Sion calls Anne an
eel, he calls her a slippery dipper from the slime, and he remembers
what the cardinal had called her: my serpentine enemy. Sion says,
she goes to it with her brother; he says, what, her brother George?
‘Any brother she’s got. Those kind keep it in the family. They
do filthy French tricks, like –’
‘Can you keep your voice down?’ He looks around, as if spies
might be swimming by the boat.
‘– and that’s how she trusts herself she don’t give in to Henry,
because if she lets him do it and she gets a boy he’s, thanks very
much, now clear off, girl – so she’s oh, Your Highness, I never
could allow – because she knows that very night her brother’s
inside her, licking her up to the lungs, and then he’s, excuse me,
sister, what shall I do with this big package – she says, oh, don’t
distress yourself, my lord brother, shove it up the back entry, it’ll
come to no harm there.’
Thanks, he says, I had no idea how they were managing.
The boys have got about one word in three. Sion gets a tip. It’s
worth anything, to be reacquainted with the Putney imagination.
He will cherish Sion’s simper: very unlike the real Anne.
Later, at home, Gregory says, ‘Ought people to speak like
that? And be paid for it? ‘He was speaking his mind.’ He shrugs. ‘So, if you want to
know people’s minds …’
‘Call-Me-Risley is frightened of you. He says that when you
were coming from Chelsea with Master Secretary, you threatened to throw him out of his own barge and drown him.’
That is not precisely his memory of the conversation.
‘And does Call-Me think I would do it?’
‘Yes. He thinks you would do anything.’
At New Year he had given Anne a present of silver forks with
handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with,
not to stick in people.
‘From Venice!’ She is pleased. She holds them up, so the
handles catch and splinter the light.
He has brought another present, for her to pass on. It is wrapped
in a piece of sky-blue silk. ‘It is for the little girl who always cries.’
Anne’s mouth opens a little. ‘Don’t you know?’ Her eyes brim
with black glee. ‘Come, so I can tell you in your ear.’ Her cheek
brushes his. Her skin is faintly perfumed: amber, rose. ‘Sir John
Seymour? Dear Sir John? Old Sir John, as people call him?’ Sir
John is not, perhaps, more than a dozen years older than himself,
but amiability can be ageing; with his sons Edward and Tom now
the young men about court, he does give the impression of
having eased into retirement. ‘Now we understand why we never
see him,’ Anne murmurs. ‘Now we know what he does down in
the country.’
‘Hunting, I thought.’
‘Yes, and he has netted Catherine Fillol, Edward’s wife. They
were taken in the act, but I cannot find out where, whether in her
bed, or his, or in a meadow, a hayloft – yes, cold, to be sure, but
they were keeping each other warm. And now Sir John has
confessed it all, man to man, telling his son to his face that he’s
had her every week since the wedding, so that’s about two years
and, say, six months, so …’ ‘You could round it off to a hundred and twenty times, assuming they abstain at the major feasts …’
‘Adulterers don’t stop for Lent.’
‘Oh, and I thought they did.’
‘She’s had two babies, so allow respite for her lying-in … And
they are boys, you know. So Edward is …’ He imagines how
Edward is. That pure hawk’s profile. ‘He is cutting them out of
the family. They are to be bastards. She, Catherine Fillol, she’s to
be put in a convent. I think he should put her in a cage! He is
asking for an annulment. As for dear Sir John, I think we will not
see him at court soon.’
‘Why are we whispering? I must be the last person in London
to hear.’
‘The king hasn’t heard. And you know how proper he is. So if
someone is to come to him joking about it, let it not be me or
you.’
‘And the daughter? Jane, is it?’
Anne sniggers. ‘Pasty-face? Gone down to Wiltshire. Her best
move would be to follow the sister-in-law into a nunnery. Her
sister Lizzie married well, but no one wants Milksop, and now
no one will.’ Her eyes fall on his present; she says, suddenly
anxious, jealous, ‘What is it?’
‘Only a book of needlework patterns.’
‘As long as it is nothing to tax her wits. Why would you send
her a present?’
‘I feel sorry for her.’ More now, of course.
‘Oh. You don’t like her, do you?’ The correct answer is, no,
my lady Anne, I only like you. ‘Because, is it proper for you to
send her a present?’
‘It is not as if it is tales out of Boccaccio.’
She laughs. ‘They could tell Boccaccio a tale, those sinners at
Wolf Hall.’ Thomas Hitton, a priest, was burned just as February went out;
taken up by Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, as a smuggler of
Tyndale’s scriptures. Soon afterwards, rising from the bishop’s
frugal table, a dozen guests had collapsed, vomiting, rigid with
pain, and been taken, pale and almost pulseless, to their beds and
the ministrations of the doctors. Dr Butts said the broth had
done it; from testimony of the waiting-boys, it was the only dish
they had tasted in common.
There are poisons nature herself brews, and he, before putting
the bishop’s cook to the torture, would have visited the kitchens
and passed a skimmer over the stockpot. But no one else doubts
there has been a crime.
Presently the cook admits to adding to the broth a white
powder, which someone gave him. Who? Just a man. A stranger
who had said it would be a good joke, to give Fisher and his
guests a purge.
The king is beside himself: rage and fear. He blames heretics.
Dr Butts, shaking his head, pulling his lower lip, says that poison
is what Henry fears worse than Hell itself.
Would you put poison in a bishop’s dinner because a stranger
told you it would be a laugh? The cook won’t say more, or
perhaps he has reached a stage beyond saying. The interrogation
has been mismanaged then, he says to Butts; I wonder why. The
doctor, a man who loves the gospel, laughs sourly and says, ‘If
they wanted the man to talk, they should have called in Thomas
More.’
The word is that the Lord Chancellor has become a master in
the twin arts of stretching and compressing the servants of God.
When heretics are taken, he stands by at the Tower while the
torture is applied. It is reported that in his gatehouse at Chelsea
he keeps suspects in the stocks, while he preaches at them and
harries them: the name of your printer, the name of the master of
the ship that brought these books into England. They say he uses
the whip, the manacles and the torment-frame they call Skeffing ton’s Daughter. It is a portable device, into which a man is folded,
knees to chest, with a hoop of iron across his back; by means of
a screw, the hoop is tightened until his ribs crack. It takes art to
make sure the man does not suffocate: for if he does, everything
he knows is lost.
Over the next week, two dinner guests die; Fisher himself rallies.
It is possible, he thinks, that the cook did speak, but that what he
said was not for the ears of the ordinary subject.
He goes to see Anne. A thorn between two roses, she is sitting
with her cousin Mary Shelton, and her brother’s wife Jane, Lady
Rochford. ‘My lady, do you know the king has devised a new
form of death for Fisher’s cook? He is to be boiled alive.’
Mary Shelton gives a little gasp, and flushes as if some gallant
had pinched her. Jane Rochford drawls, ‘Vere dignum et justum
est, aequum et salutare.’ She translates for Mary: ‘Apt.’
Anne’s face wears no expression at all. Even a man as literate as
he can find nothing there to read. ‘How will they do it?’
‘I did not ask about the mechanics. Would you like me to
enquire? I think it will involve hoisting him up in chains, so that
the crowd can see his skin peeling off and hear him screaming.’
To be fair to Anne, if you walked up to her and said, you are
to be boiled, she would probably shrug: c’est la vie.
Fisher is in bed for a month. When he is up and about he looks
like a walking corpse. The intercession of angels and saints has not
sufficed to heal his sore gut and put the flesh back on his bones.
These are days of brutal truth from Tyndale. Saints are not
your friends and they will not protect you. They cannot help
you to salvation. You cannot engage them to your service with
prayers and candles, as you might hire a man for the harvest.
Christ’s sacrifice was done on Calvary; it is not done in the Mass.
Priests cannot help you to Heaven; you need no priest to stand
between you and your God. No merits of yours can save you:
only the merits of the living Christ.