Time now to consider the compacts that hold the world together:
the compact between ruler and ruled, and that between husband
and wife. Both these arrangements rest on a sedulous devotion,
the one to the interests of the other. The master and husband
protect and provide; the wife and servant obey. Above masters,
above husbands, God rules all. He counts up our petty rebellions, our human follies. He reaches out his long arm, hand
bunched into a fist.
Imagine debating these matters with George, Lord Rochford.
He is as witty a young man as any in England, polished and well
read; but today what fascinates him is the flame-coloured satin
that is pulled through his slashed velvet over-sleeve. He keeps
coaxing the little puffs of fabric with a fingertip, pleating and
nudging them and encouraging them to grow bigger, so that he
looks like one of those jugglers who run balls down their arms.
It is time to say what England is, her scope and boundaries:
not to count and measure her harbour defences and border walls,
but to estimate her capacity for self-rule. It is time to say what a
king is, and what trust and guardianship he owes his people:
what protection from foreign incursions moral or physical, what
freedom from the pretensions of those who would like to tell an
Englishman how to speak to his God. Parliament meets mid-January. The business of the early
spring is breaking the resistance of the bishops to Henry’s new
order, putting in place legislation that – though for now it is held
in suspension – will cut revenues to Rome, make his supremacy
in the church no mere form of words. The Commons drafts a
petition against the church courts, so arbitrary in their proceedings, so presumptuous in their claimed jurisdiction; it questions
their jurisdiction, their very existence. The papers pass through
many hands, but finally he himself works through the night with
Rafe and Call-Me-Risley, scribbling amendments between the
lines. He is flushing out the opposition: Gardiner, although he is
the king’s Secretary, feels obliged to lead his fellow prelates into
the charge.
The king sends for Master Stephen. When he goes in, the hair
on his neck is bristling and he is shrinking inside his skin like a
mastiff being led towards a bear. The king has a high voice, for a
big man, and it rises when he is angry to an ear-throbbing shriek.
Are the clergy his subjects, or only half his subjects? Perhaps
they are not his subjects at all, for how can they be, if they take
an oath to obey and support the Pope? Should they not, he yells,
be taking an oath to me?
When Stephen comes out he leans against the painted
panelling. At his back a troupe of painted nymphs are frisking in
a glade. He takes out a handkerchief but seems to have forgotten
why; he twists it in his great paw, wrapping it around his knuckles like a bandage. Sweat trickles down his face.
He, Cromwell, calls for assistance. ‘My lord the bishop is ill.’
They bring a stool and Stephen glares at it, glares at him, then sits
down with caution, as if he is not able to trust the joinery. ‘I take
it you heard him?’
Every word. ‘If he does lock you up, I’ll make sure you have
some small comforts.’
Gardiner says, ‘God damn you, Cromwell. Who are you?
What office do you hold? You’re nothing. Nothing.’ We have to win the debate, not just knock our enemies down.
He has been to see Christopher St German, the aged jurist,
whose word is respected all over Europe. The old man entertains
him civilly at his house. There is no man in England, he says,
who does not believe our church is in need of reform which
grows more urgent by the year, and if the church cannot do it,
then the king in Parliament must, and can. This is the conclusion
I have come to, after some decades of studying the subject.
Of course, the old man says, Thomas More does not agree
with me. Perhaps his time has passed. Utopia, after all, is not a
place one can live.
When he meets the king, Henry rages about Gardiner: disloyalty, he shouts, ingratitude. Can he remain my Secretary, when he
has set himself up in direct opposition to me? (This is the man
whom Henry himself praised as a stout controversialist.) He sits
quietly, watching Henry, trying by stillness to defuse the situation; to wrap the king in a blanketing silence, so that he, Henry,
can listen to himself. It is a great thing, to be able to divert the
wrath of the Lion of England. ‘I think …’ he says softly, ‘with
Your Majesty’s permission, what I think … The Bishop of
Winchester, as we know, likes arguing. But not with his king. He
would not dare to do that for sport.’ He pauses. ‘So his views,
though mistaken, are honestly held.’
‘Indeed, but –’ The king breaks off. Henry has heard his own
voice, the voice he used to the cardinal when he brought him
down. Gardiner is not Wolsey – if only in the sense that, if he is
sacrificed, few will remember him with regret. And yet it suits
him, for the moment, to have the snarling bishop still in his post;
he has a care for Henry’s reputation in Europe, and he says,
‘Majesty, Stephen has served you as an ambassador to the limit of
his powers, and it would be better to reconcile him, by honest
persuasion, than to force his hand by the weight of your
displeasure. It is the more pleasant course, and there is more
honour in it.’ ‘Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?’ He watches Henry’s face. He is alive to anything that concerns
honour.
‘Is that the advice you would always give?’
He smiles. ‘No.’
‘You are not wholly determined I should govern in a spirit of
Christian meekness?’
‘No.’
‘I know you dislike Gardiner.’
‘That is why Your Majesty should consider my advice.’
He thinks, you owe me, Stephen. The bill will come in by and
by.
At his own house he meets with parliamentarians and gentlemen from the Inns of Court and the city livery companies; with
Thomas Audley who is Mr Speaker, and his protégé Richard
Riche, a golden-haired young man, pretty as a painted angel,
who has an active, quick and secular mind; with Rowland Lee, a
robust outspoken cleric, the least priestly man you would find in
a long day’s march. In these months, the ranks of his city friends
are thinned by sickness and unnatural death. Thomas Somer,
whom he has known for years, has died just after release from the
Tower, where he was shut up for distributing the gospel in
English; fond of fine clothes and fast horses, Somer was a man of
irrepressible spirits, till at last he had his reckoning with the Lord
Chancellor. John Petyt has been released but he is too sick to
take any more part in the Commons. He visits him; he is
confined to his chamber now. It is painful to hear him fighting
for breath. The spring of 1532, the year’s first warm weather,
does nothing to ease him. I feel, he says, as if there is an iron hoop
around my chest, and they are drawing it tighter. He says,
Thomas, will you look after Luce when I die?
Sometimes, if he walks in the gardens with the burgesses or with
Anne’s chaplains, he feels the absence of Dr Cranmer at his righthand side. He has been away since January, as the king’s ambassador to the Emperor; on his travels, he will visit scholars in Germany to canvass support for the king’s divorce. He had said to
him, ‘What shall I do if, while you are away, the king has a dream?’
Cranmer had smiled. ‘You worked it by yourself, last time. I
was only there to nod it through.’
He sees the animal Marlinspike, his paws hanging as he drapes
himself from a black bough. He points him out. ‘Gentlemen, that
was the cardinal’s cat.’ At the sight of the visitors Marlinspike
darts along the boundary wall, and with a whisk of his tail disappears, into the unknown territory beyond.
Down in the kitchens at Austin Friars, the garzoni are learning
to make spiced wafers. The process involves a good eye, exact
timing and a steady hand. There are so many points at which it
can go wrong. The mixture must have the right dropping consistency, the plates of the long-handled irons must be well greased
and hot. When you press the plates together there is an animal
shriek as they meet, and steam hisses into the air. If you panic and
release the pressure you will have a claggy mess to scrape away.
You must wait till the steam dies down, and then you start counting. If you miss a beat the smell of scorching permeates the air. A
second divides the successes from the failures.
When he brings into the Commons a bill to suspend the
payment of annates to Rome, he suggests a division of the
House. This is far from usual, but amid shock and grumbling the
members comply: for the bill to this side, against the bill to the
other side. The king is present; he watches, he learns who is for
him and who against, and at the end of the process he gives his
councillor a grim nod of approval. In the Lords this tactic will
not serve. The king has to go in person, three times, and argue his
own case. The old aristocracy – proud families like the Exeter
clan, with their own claim to the throne – are for Pope and
Katherine and are not afraid to say so: or not yet. But he is identifying his enemies and, where he can, splitting them.
Once the kitchen boys have made a single commendable
wafer, Thurston has them turn out a hundred more. It becomes second nature, the flick of the wrist with which one rolls the halfset wafer on to the handle of a wooden spoon and then flips it on
to the drying rack to crisp. The successes – with time, they
should all be successes – are stamped with the badges of the
Tudors, and stacked by the dozen in the pretty inlaid boxes in
which they will come to the table, each frail golden disk
perfumed with rosewater. He sends a batch to Thomas Boleyn.
As father of the queen-to-be, Wiltshire thinks he deserves
some special title, and has let it be known it would not be
disagreeable to him to be known as Monseigneur. He confers
with him, his son and their friends, then walks to see Anne,
through the chambers at Whitehall. Month by month her state is
greater, but he goes through with a bow from her people. At
court and in the offices of Westminster he dresses not a whit
above his gentleman’s station, in loose jackets of Lemster wool
so fine they flow like water, in purples and indigos so near black
that it looks as if the night has bled into them; his cap of black
velvet sits on his black hair, so that the only points of light are his
darting eyes and the gestures of his solid, fleshy hands; those, and
flashes of fire from Wolsey’s turquoise ring.
At Whitehall – York Place, as it was – the builders are still in.
For Christmas, the king had given Anne a bedroom. He led her
to it himself, to see her gasp at the wall hangings, which were of
cloth of silver and cloth of gold, the carved bed hung with
crimson satin embroidered with images of flowers and children.
Henry Norris had reported to him that Anne had failed to gasp;
she had just looked around the room slowly, smiled, blinked.
Then she had remembered what she ought to do; she pretended
to feel faint at the honour, and it was only when she swayed and
the king locked his arms around her that the gasp came. I do
devoutly hope, Norris had said, that we shall all at least once in
our lives cause a woman to utter that sound.
When Anne had expressed her thanks, kneeling, Henry had to
leave, of course; to leave the shimmering room, trailing her by the hand, and go back to the New Year feast, to the public scrutiny of
his expression: in the certainty that news of it would be conveyed
all over Europe, by land and sea, in and out of cipher.
When at the end of his walk through the cardinal’s old rooms
he finds Anne sitting with her ladies, she already knows, or
seems to know, what her father and brother have said. They
think they are fixing her tactics, but she is her own best tactician,
and able to think back and judge what has gone wrong; he
admires anyone who can learn from mistakes. One day, the
windows open to the wing-beats of nest-building birds, she says,
‘You once told me that only the cardinal could set the king free.
Do you know what I think now? I think Wolsey was the last
person to do it. Because he was so proud, because he wanted to
be Pope. If he had been more humble, Clement would have
obliged him.’
‘There may be something in that.’
‘I suppose we should take a lesson,’ Norris says.
They turn together. Anne says, ‘Really, should we?’ and he
says, ‘What lesson would that be?’
Norris is at a loss.
‘None of us are likely to be cardinals,’ Anne says. ‘Even
Thomas, who aspires to most things, would not aspire to that.’
‘Oh? I wouldn’t put money on it.’ Norris slouches off, as only
a silken gentleman can slouch, and leaves him behind with the
women.
‘So, Lady Anne,’ he says, ‘when you are reflecting on the late
cardinal, do you take time to pray for his soul?’
‘I think God has judged him, and my prayers, if I make them
or if I do not, are of no effect.’
Mary Boleyn says, gently, ‘He is teasing you, Anne.’
‘If it were not for the cardinal, you would be married to Harry
Percy.’
‘At least,’ she snaps, ‘I would occupy the estate of wife, which
is an honourable estate, but now ‘Oh, but cousin,’ Mary Shelton says, ‘Harry Percy has gone
mad. Everybody knows it. He is spending all his money.’
Mary Boleyn laughs. ‘So he is, and my sister supposes it is his
disappointment over her that is to blame.’
‘My lady,’ he turns to Anne, ‘you would not like to be in
Harry Percy’s country. For you know he would do as those
northern lords do, and keep you in a freezing turret up a winding
stair, and only let you come down for your dinner. And just as
you are seated, and they are bringing in a pudding made of
oatmeal mixed with the blood of cattle they have got in a raid,
my lord comes thundering in, swinging a sack – oh, sweetheart,
you say, a present for me? and he says, aye, madam, if it please
you, and opens the sack and into your lap rolls the severed head
of a Scot.’
‘Oh, that is horrible,’ Mary Shelton whispers. ‘Is that what
they do?’ Anne puts her hand to her mouth, laughing.
‘And you know,’ he says, ‘that for your dinner you would
prefer a lightly poached breast of chicken, sliced into a cream
sauce with tarragon. And also a fine aged cheese imported by the
ambassador of Spain, which he intended no doubt for the queen,
but which somehow found its way to my house.’
‘How could I be better served?’ Anne asks. ‘A band of men on
the highway, waylaying Katherine’s cheese.’
‘Well, having staged such a coup, I must go …’ he gestures to
the lute-player in the corner, ‘and leave you with your goggleeyed lover.’
Anne darts a look at the boy Mark. ‘He does goggle. True.’
‘Shall I send him off? The place is full of musicians.’
‘Leave him,’ Mary says. ‘He’s a sweet boy.’
Mary Boleyn stands up. ‘I’ll just …’
‘Now Lady Carey is going to have one of her conferences
with Master Cromwell,’ Mary Shelton says, in a tone of giving
agreeable information.
Jane Rochford: ‘She is going to offer him her virtue again.’ ‘Lady Carey, what can you not say before us all?’ But Anne
nods. He may go. Mary may go. Presumably Mary is to carry
messages that she, Anne, is too delicate to convey direct.
Outside: ‘Sometimes I need to breathe.’ He waits. ‘Jane and
our brother George, you know they hate each other? He won’t
go to bed with her. If he is not with some other woman he sits up
at night with Anne in her rooms. They play cards. They play
Pope Julius till the dawn comes. Did you know the king pays her
gambling debts? She needs more income, and a house of her own,
a retreat, not too far from London, somewhere on the river –’
‘Whose house has she in mind?’
‘I don’t think she means to turns anyone out.’
‘Houses tend to belong to somebody.’ Then a thought strikes
him. He smiles.
She says, ‘I told you to stay away from her, once. But now we
cannot do without you. Even my father and my uncle say so.
Nothing is done, nothing, without the king’s favour, without his
constant company, and nowadays when you are not with Henry
he wants to know where you are.’ She steps back, appraises him
for a moment as if he were a stranger. ‘My sister, too.’
‘I want a job, Lady Carey. It isn’t enough to be a councillor. I
need an official place in the household.’
‘I’ll tell her.’
‘I want a post in the Jewel House. Or the Exchequer.’
She nods. ‘She made Tom Wyatt a poet. She made Harry Percy
a madman. I’m sure she has some ideas about what to make you.’
A few days before Parliament met, Thomas Wyatt had come to
apologise for getting him out of bed before dawn on New Year’s
Day. ‘You have every right to be angry with me, but I’ve come to
ask you not to be. You know how it is at New Year. Toasts are
drunk, and the bowl goes round, and you must drain the bowl.’
He watches Wyatt as he walks about the room, too curious
and restless and half-shy to sit down and make his amends face to-face. He turns the painted globe of the world, and rests his
forefinger on England. He stops to look at pictures, at a little
altarpiece, and he turns, questioning; it was my wife’s, he says, I
keep it for her sake. Master Wyatt wears a jacket of a stiffened
cream brocade trimmed with sables, which he probably cannot
afford; he wears a doublet of tawny silk. He has tender blue eyes
and a mane of golden hair, thinning now. Sometimes he puts his
fingertips to his head, tentative, as if he still has his New Year
headache; really, he is checking his hairline, to see if it has
receded in the last five minutes. He stops and looks at himself in
the mirror; he does this very often. Dear God, he says. Rolling
about the streets with that crowd. I’m too old for such behaviour. But too young to lose my hair. Do you think women care
about it? Much? Do you think if I grew a beard it would distract
… No, probably not. But perhaps I will anyway. The king’s
beard looks well, does it not?
He says, ‘Didn’t your father give you any advice?’
‘Oh yes. Drink off a bowl of milk before you go out. Stewed
quinces in honey – do you think that works?’
He is trying not to laugh. He wants to take it seriously, his
new post as Wyatt’s father. He says, ‘I mean, did he never advise
you to stay away from women in whom the king is interested?’
‘I did stay away. You remember I went to Italy? After that I
was in Calais for a year. How much staying away can a man do?’
A question from his own life; he recognises it. Wyatt sits down
on a small stool. He props his elbows on his knees. He holds his
head, fingertips on his temples. He is listening to his own heartbeat; he is thinking; perhaps he is composing a verse? He looks
up. ‘My father says that now Wolsey is dead you’re the cleverest
man in England. So can you understand this, if I say it just once?
If Anne is not a virgin, that’s none of my doing.’
He pours him a glass of wine. ‘Strong,’ Wyatt says, after he has
downed it. He looks into the depth of the glass, at his own
fingers holding it. ‘I must say more, I think.’ ‘If you must, say it here, and just once.’
‘Is anyone hiding behind the arras? Somebody told me there
are servants at Chelsea who report to you. No one’s servants are
safe, these days, there are spies everywhere.’
‘Tell me in what day there were not spies,’ he says. ‘There
was a child in More’s house, Dick Purser, More took him in out
of guilt after he was orphaned – I cannot say More killed the
father outright, but he had him in the pillory and in the Tower,
and it broke his health. Dick told the other boys he did not
believe God was in the Communion host, so More had him
whipped before the whole household. Now I have brought him
here. What else could I do? I will take in any others he illtreats.’
Smiling, Wyatt passes his hand over the Queen of Sheba: that
is to say, over Anselma. The king has given him Wolsey’s fine
tapestry. Early in the year, when he went in to speak to him at
Greenwich, the king had seen him raise his eyes to her in greeting, and had said, with a sideways smile, do you know this
woman? I used to, he said, explaining himself, excusing himself;
the king said, no matter, we all have our follies in youth, and you
can’t marry everyone, can you … He had said in a low voice, I
have in mind that this belonged to the Cardinal of York, and
then, more briskly, when you go home make a place for her; I
think she should come to live with you.
He gives himself a glass of wine, and another to Wyatt; says,
‘Gardiner has people outside the gate, watching who comes and
goes. This is a city house, it is not a fortress – but if anybody’s
here who shouldn’t be, my household does enjoy kicking them
out. We quite like fighting. I’d prefer to put my past behind me,
but I’m not allowed to. Uncle Norfolk keeps reminding me I was
a common soldier, and not even in his army.’
‘You call him that?’ Wyatt laughs. ‘Uncle Norfolk?’
‘Between ourselves. But I don’t need to remind you of what
the Howards think is due to them. And you’ve grown up Thomas Boleyn’s neighbour, so you know not to cross him,
whatever you feel about his daughter. I hope you don’t feel
anything – do you?’
‘For two years,’ Wyatt says, ‘I was sick to my soul to think of
any other man touching her. But what could I offer? I am a
married man, and not the duke or prince she was fishing for,
either. She liked me, I think, or she liked to have me in thrall to
her, it amused her. We would be alone, she would let me kiss her,
and I always thought … but that is Anne’s tactic, you see, she
says yes, yes, yes, then she says no.’
‘And of course, you are such a gentleman.’
‘What, I should have raped her? If she says stop she means it –
Henry knows that. But then another day would come and again
she would let me kiss her. Yes, yes, yes, no. The worst of it is her
hinting, her boasting almost, that she says no to me but yes to
others –’
‘Who are?’
‘Oh, names, names would spoil her pastime. It must be so
arranged that every man you see, at court or down in Kent, you
think, is he the one? Is it him, or him? So you are continually
asking yourself why you’ve fallen short, why you can never
please her, why you never get the chance.’
‘I should think you write the best poems. You can comfort
yourself there. His Majesty’s verses can be a little repetitive, not
to say self-centred.’
‘That song of his, “Pastime With Good Company.” When I
hear it there is something inside me, like a little dog, that wants to
howl.’
‘True, the king is past forty. It is melancholy to hear him sing
of the days when he was young and stupid.’ He watches Wyatt.
The young man looks dazed, as if he has a persistent pain
between his eyes. He is claiming that Anne no longer torments
him, but that’s not how it looks. He says, brutal as a butcher, ‘So
how many lovers do you think she has had?’ Wyatt looks down at his feet. He looks at the ceiling. He says,
‘A dozen? Or none? Or a hundred? Brandon tried to tell Henry
she was soiled goods. But he sent Brandon away from court.
Imagine if I tried. I doubt I’d get out of the room alive. Brandon
forced himself to speak, because he thinks, come the day she
gives in to Henry, what then? Will he not know?’
‘Give her credit. She must have thought of that. Besides, the
king is no judge of maidenheads. He admits as much. With
Katherine, it took him twenty years to puzzle out his brother
had been there before him.’
Wyatt laughs. ‘When the day comes, or the night, Anne can
hardly say that to him.’
‘Listen. This is my view of the case. Anne does not concern
herself with her wedding night because there is no cause for
concern.’ He wants to say, because Anne is not a carnal being, she
is a calculating being, with a cold slick brain at work behind her
hungry black eyes. ‘I believe any woman who can say no to the
King of England and keep on saying it, has the wit to say no to any
number of men, including you, including Harry Percy, including
anyone else she may choose to torment for her own sport while she
is arranging her career in the way it suits her. So I think, yes, you’ve
been made into a fool, but not quite in the way you thought.’
‘That is meant as consolation?’
‘It should console you. If you’d really been her lover I would
fear for you. Henry believes in her virginity. What else can he
believe? But he will prove jealous, once they’re married.’
‘As they will be? Married?’
‘I am working hard with Parliament, believe me, and I think I
can break the bishops. And after that, God knows … Thomas
More says that in the reign of King John when England was
placed under an interdict by the Pope, the cattle didn’t breed, the
corn ceased to ripen, the grass stopped growing and birds fell out
of the air. But if that starts to happens,’ he smiles, ‘I’m sure we
can reverse our policy.’