‘Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?’ ‘Anne has asked me: Cromwell, what does he really believe?’
‘So you have conversations? And about me? Not just yes, yes,
yes, no? I’m flattered.’
Wyatt looks unhappy. ‘You couldn’t be wrong? About Anne?’
‘It’s possible. For the moment I take her at her own valuation.
It suits me. It suits us both.’
As Wyatt is leaving: ‘You must come back soon. My girls have
heard how handsome you are. You can keep your hat on, if you
think they might be disillusioned.’
Wyatt is the king’s regular tennis partner. Therefore he knows
about humbled pride. He fetches up a smile.
‘Your father told us all about the lion. The boys have made a
play out of it. Perhaps you would like to come one day and take
your own role?’
‘Oh, the lion. Nowadays, I think back on it, and it doesn’t
seem to me like a thing I would do. Stand still, in the open, and
draw it on.’ He pauses. ‘More like something you would do,
Master Cromwell.’
Thomas More comes to Austin Friars. He refuses food, he
refuses drink, though he looks in need of both.
The cardinal would not have taken no for an answer. He
would have made him sit down and eat syllabub. Or, if it were
the season, given him a large plate of strawberries and a very
small spoon.
More says, ‘In these last ten years the Turks have taken
Belgrade. They have lit their campfires in the great library at
Buda. It is only two years since they were at the gates of Vienna.
Why would you want to make another breach in the walls of
Christendom?’
‘The King of England is not an infidel. Nor am I.’
‘Are you not? I hardly know whether you pray to the god of
Luther and the Germans, or some heathen god you met with on
your travels, or some English deity of your own invention. Perhaps your faith is for purchase. You would serve the Sultan if
the price was right.’
Erasmus says, did nature ever create anything kinder, sweeter
or more harmonious than the character of Thomas More?
He is silent. He sits at his desk – More has caught him at work
– with his chin propped on his fists. It is a pose that shows him,
probably, to some combative advantage.
The Lord Chancellor looks as if he might rend his garments:
which could only improve them. One could pity him, but he
decides not to. ‘Master Cromwell, you think because you are a
councillor you can negotiate with heretics, behind the king’s
back. You are wrong. I know about your letters that come and go
to Stephen Vaughan, I know he has met with Tyndale.’
‘Are you threatening me? I’m just interested.’
‘Yes,’ More says sadly. ‘Yes, that is precisely what I am doing.’
He sees that the balance of power has shifted between them:
not as officers of state, but as men.
When More leaves, Richard says to him, ‘He ought not.
Threaten you, I mean. Today, because of his office, he walks
away, but tomorrow, who knows?’
He thinks, I was a child, nine or so, I ran off into London and
saw an old woman suffer for her faith. The memory floods into
his body and he walks away as if he sails on its tide, saying over
his shoulder, ‘Richard, see if the Lord Chancellor has his proper
escort. If not, give him one, and try to put him on a boat back to
Chelsea. We cannot have him wandering about London,
haranguing anyone at whose gate he may arrive.’
He says the last bit in French, he does not know why. He
thinks of Anne, her hand outstretched, drawing him towards her:
Maître Cremuel, à moi.
He cannot remember the year but he remembers the late April
weather, fat raindrops dappling the pale new leaves. He cannot
remember the reason for Walter’s temper, but he can remember
the fear he felt in the pith of his being, and his heart banging against his ribs. In those days if he couldn’t hide out with his
uncle John at Lambeth he would get himself into the town and
see who he could pick up with – see if he could earn a penny by
running errands up and down to the quays, by carrying baskets
or loading barrows. If you whistled for him, he came; lucky, he
knows now, not to have got in with low-lifes who would lead
him to be branded or whipped, or to be one of the small corpses
fished out of the river. At that age you have no judgement. If
somebody said, good sport over there, he followed the pointing
finger. He had nothing against the old woman, but he had never
seen a burning.
What’s her crime? he said, and they said, she is a Loller. That’s
one who says the God on the altar is a piece of bread. What, he
said, bread like the baker bakes? Let this child forward, they said.
Let him be instructed, it will do him good to see up close, so he
always goes to Mass after this and obeys his priest. They pushed
him to the front of the crowd. Come here, sweetheart, stand with
me, a woman said. She had a broad smile and wore a clean white
cap. You get a pardon for your sins just for watching it, she said.
Any that bring faggots to the burning, they get forty days’
release from Purgatory.
When the Loller was led out between the officers the people
jeered and shouted. He saw that she was a grandmother, perhaps
the oldest person he had ever seen. The officers were nearly
carrying her. She had no cap or veil. Her hair seemed to be torn
out of her head in patches. People behind him said, no doubt she
did that herself, in desperation at her sin. Behind the Loller came
two monks, parading like fat grey rats, crosses in their pink
paws. The woman in the clean cap squeezed his shoulder: like a
mother might do, if you had one. Look at her, she said, eighty
years old, and steeped in wickedness. A man said, not much fat
on her bones, it won’t take long unless the wind changes.
But what’s her sin? he said.
I told you. She says the saints are but wooden posts. Like that post they’re chaining her to?
Aye, just like that.
The post will burn too.
They can get another next time, the woman said. She took her
hand from his shoulder. She balled her two hands into fists and
punched them in the air, and from the depth of her belly she let
loose a scream, a halloo, in a shrill voice like a demon. The press
of people took up the cry. They seethed and pushed forward for
a view, they catcalled and whistled and stamped their feet. At the
thought of the horrible thing he would see he felt hot and cold.
He twisted to look up into the face of the woman who was his
mother in this crowd. You watch, she said. With the gentlest
brush of her fingers she turned his face to the spectacle. Pay
attention now. The officers took chains and bound the old
person to the stake.
The stake was on top of a pile of stones, and some gentlemen
came, and priests, bishops perhaps, he did not know. They
called out to the Loller to put off her heresies. He was close
enough to see her lips moving but he could not hear what she
said. What if she changes her mind now, will they let her go?
Not they, the woman chuckled. Look, she is calling on Satan to
help her. The gentlemen withdrew. The officers banked up
wood and bales of straw around the Loller. The woman tapped
him on the shoulder; let’s hope it’s damp, eh? This is a good
view, last time I was at the back. The rain had stopped, the sun
broken through. When the executioner came with a torch, it was
pale in the sunshine, barely more than a slick movement, like the
movement of eels in a bag. The monks were chanting and
holding up a cross to the Loller, and it was only when they
skipped backwards, at the first billow of smoke, that the crowd
knew the fire was set.
They surged forward, roaring. Officers made a barrier with
staves and shouted in great deep voices, back, back, back, and the
crowd shrieked and fell back, and then came on again, roaring and chanting, as if it were a game. Eddies of smoke spoiled their
view, and the crowd beat it aside, coughing. Smell her! they cried.
Smell the old sow! He had held his breath, not to breathe her in.
In the smoke the Loller was screaming. Now she calls on the
saints! they said. The woman bent down and said in his ear, do
you know that in the fire they bleed? Some people think they
just shrivel up, but I’ve seen it before and I know.
By the time the smoke cleared and they could see again, the
old woman was well ablaze. The crowd began cheering. They
had said it would not take long but it did take long, or so it
seemed to him, before the screaming stopped. Does nobody pray
for her, he said, and the woman said, what’s the point? Even after
there was nothing left to scream, the fire was stoked. The officers
trod around the margins, stamping out any wisps of straw that
flew off, kicking back anything bigger.
When the crowd drifted home, chattering, you could tell the
ones who’d been on the wrong side of the fire, because their faces
were grey with wood-ash. He wanted to go home but again he
thought of Walter, who had said that morning he was going to
kill him by inches. He watched the officers strike with their iron
bars at the human debris that was left. The chains retained the
remnants of flesh, sucking and clinging. Approaching the men,
he asked, how hot must the fire be, to burn bone? He expected
them to have knowledge in the matter. But they didn’t understand his question. People who are not smiths think all fires are
the same. His father had taught him the colours of red: sunset
red, cherry red, the bright yellow-red with no name unless its
name is scarlet.
The Loller’s skull was left on the ground, the long bones of her
arms and legs. Her broken ribcage was not much bigger than a
dog’s. A man took an iron bar and thrust it through the hole
where the woman’s left eye had been. He scooped up the skull
and positioned it on the stones, so it was looking at him. Then he
hefted his bar and brought it down on the crown. Even before the blow landed he knew it was false, skewed. Shattered bone,
like a star, flew away into the dirt, but the most part of the skull
was intact. Jesus, the man said. Here, lad, do you want a go? One
good swipe will stove her in.
Usually he said yes to any invitation. But now he backed
away, his hands behind his back. God’s blood, the man said, I
wish I could afford to be choosy. Soon after that it came on to
rain. The men wiped their hands, blew their noses and walked off
the job. They threw down their iron bars amid what was left of
the Loller. It was just splinters of bone now, and thick sludgy
ash. He picked up one of the iron bars, in case he needed a
weapon. He fingered its tapered end, which was cut like a chisel.
He did not know how far he was from home, and whether
Walter might come for him. He wondered how you kill a person
by inches, whether by burning them or cutting them up. He
should have asked the officers while they were here, for being
servants of the city they would know.
The stink of the woman was still in the air. He wondered if she
was in Hell now, or still about the streets, but he was not afraid
of ghosts. They had put up a stand for the gentlemen, and though
the canopy was taken down, it was high enough off the ground
to crouch underneath for shelter. He prayed for the woman,
thinking it could do no harm. He moved his lips as he prayed.
Rainwater gathered above him and fell in great drops through the
planking. He counted the time between drops and caught them
in his cupped hand. He did this just for a pastime. Dusk fell. If it
were an ordinary day he would have been hungry by now and
gone looking for food.
In the twilight certain men came, and women too; he knew,
because there were women, that they were not officers or people
who would hurt him. They drew together, making a loose circle
around the stake on its pile of stones. He ducked out from under
the stand and approached them. You will be wondering what has
happened here, he said. But they did not look up or speak to him. They fell to their knees and he thought they were praying. I have
prayed for her too, he said.
Have you? Good lad, one of the men said. He didn’t even
glance up. If he looks at me, he thought, he will see that I am not
good, but a worthless boy who goes off with his dog and forgets
to make the brine bath for the forge, so when Walter shouts
where’s the fucking slake-tub it’s not there. With a sick lurch of
his stomach he remembered what he’d not done and why he was
to be killed. He almost cried out. As if he were in pain.
He saw now that the men and women were not praying. They
were on their hands and knees. They were friends of the Loller,
and they were scraping her up. One of the women knelt, her
skirts spread, and held out an earthenware pot. His eyes were
sharp even in the gloom, and out of the sludge and muck he
picked a fragment of bone. Here’s some, he said. The woman
held out the bowl. Here’s another.
One of the men stood apart, some way off. Why does he not
help us? he said.
He is the watchman. He will whistle if the officers come.
Will they take us up?
Hurry, hurry, another man said.
When they had got a bowlful, the woman who was holding it
said, ‘Give me your hand.’
Trusting, he held it out to her. She dipped her fingers into the
bowl. She placed on the back of his hand a smear of mud and grit,
fat and ash. ‘Joan Boughton,’ she said.
Now, when he thinks back on this, he wonders at his own
faulty memory. He has never forgotten the woman, whose last
remnants he carried away as a greasy smudge on his own skin,
but why is it that his life as a child doesn’t seem to fit, one bit
with the next? He can’t remember how he got back home, and
what Walter did instead of killing him by inches, or why he’d run
off in the first place without making the brine. Perhaps, he
thinks, I spilled the salt and I was too frightened to tell him. That seems likely. One fear creates a dereliction, the offence brings on
a greater fear, and there comes a point where the fear is too great
and the human spirit just gives up and a child wanders off numb
and directionless and ends up following a crowd and watching a
killing.
He has never told anyone this story. He doesn’t mind talking
to Richard, to Rafe about his past – within reason – but he
doesn’t mean to give away pieces of himself. Chapuys comes to
dinner very often and sits beside him, teasing out bits of his life
story as he teases tender flesh from the bone.
Some tell me your father was Irish, Eustache says. He waits,
poised.
It is the first I have heard of it, he says, but I grant you, he was
a mystery even to himself. Chapuys sniffs; the Irish are a very
violent people, he says. ‘Tell me, is it true you fled from England
at fifteen, having escaped from prison?’
‘For sure,’ he says. ‘An angel struck off my chains.’
That will give him something to write home. ‘I put the allegation to Cremuel, who answered me with a blasphemy, unfit for
your Imperial ear.’ Chapuys is never stuck for something to put
in dispatches. If news is scant he sends the gossip. There is the
gossip he picks up, from dubious sources, and the gossip he feeds
him on purpose. As Chapuys doesn’t speak English, he gets his
news in French from Thomas More, in Italian from the merchant
Antonio Bonvisi, and in God knows what – Latin? – from
Stokesley, the Bishop of London, whose table he also honours.
Chapuys is peddling the idea to his master the Emperor that the
people of England are so disaffected by their king that, given
encouragement by a few Spanish troops, they will rise in revolt.
Chapuys is, of course, deeply misled. The English may favour
Queen Katherine – broadly, it seems they do. They may mislike
or fail to understand recent measures in the Parliament. But
instinct tells him this; they will knit together against foreign
interference. They like Katherine because they have forgotten she is Spanish, because she has been here for a long time. They
are the same people who rioted against foreigners, on Evil May
Day; the same people, narrow-hearted, stubborn, attached to
their patch of ground. Only overwhelming force – a coalition,
say, of Francis and the Emperor – will budge them. We cannot, of
course, rule out the possibility that such a coalition may occur.
When dinner is over, he walks Chapuys back to his people, to
his big solid boys, bodyguards, who lounge about, chatting in
Flemish, often about him. Chapuys knows he has been in the
Low Countries; does he think he doesn’t understand the
language? Or is this some elaborate double-bluff?
There were days, not too long past, days since Lizzie died,
when he’d woken in the morning and had to decide, before he
could speak to anybody, who he was and why. There were days
when he’d woken from dreams of the dead and searching for
them. When his waking self trembled, at the threshold of deliverance from his dreams.
But those days are not these days.
Sometimes, when Chapuys has finished digging up Walter’s
bones and making his own life unfamiliar to him, he feels almost
impelled to speak in defence of his father, his childhood. But it is
no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to
be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing
to conceal. A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen
movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his
face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you
open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
On 14 April 1532, the king appoints him Keeper of the Jewel
House. From here, Henry Wyatt had said, you are able to take an
overview of the king’s income and outgoings.
The king shouts, as if to any courtier passing, ‘Why should I
not, tell me why should I not, employ the son of an honest blacksmith?’ He hides his smile, at this description of Walter; so much more
flattering than any the Spanish ambassador has arrived at. The
king says, ‘What you are, I make you. I alone. Everything you
are, everything you have, will come from me.’
The thought gives him a pleasure you can hardly grudge.
Henry is so well disposed these days, so open-handed and
amenable, that you must forgive him the occasional statement of
his position, whether it is necessary or not. The cardinal used to
say, the English will forgive a king anything, until he tries to tax
them. He also used to say, it doesn’t really matter what the title
of the office is. Let any colleague on the council turn his back, he
would turn again to find that I was doing his job.
He is in a Westminster office one day in April when Hugh
Latimer walks in, just released from custody at Lambeth Palace.
‘Well?’ Hugh says. ‘You might leave off your scribble, and give
me your hand.’
He rises from his desk and embraces him, dusty black coat,
sinew, bone. ‘So you made Warham a pretty speech?’
‘I made it extempore, in my fashion. It came fresh from my
mouth as from the mouth of a babe. Perhaps the old fellow is losing
his appetite for burnings now his own end is so near. He is shrivelling like a seedpod in the sun, when he moves you can hear his
bones rattle. Anyway, I cannot account for it, but here you see me.’
‘How did he keep you?’
‘Bare walls my library. Fortunately, my brain is furnished with
texts. He sent me off with a warning. Told me if I did not smell
of the fire then I smelled of the frying pan. It has been said to me
before. It must be ten years now, since I came up for heresy
before the Scarlet Beast.’ He laughs. ‘But Wolsey, he gave me my
preacher’s licence back. And the kiss of peace. And my dinner.
So? Are we any nearer a queen who loves the gospel?’
A shrug. ‘We – they – are talking to the French. There is a
treaty in the air. Francis has a gaggle of cardinals who might lend
us their voices in Rome.’ ‘Alas, What Shall I Do For Love? Hugh snorts. ‘Still waiting on Rome.’
‘That is how it must be.’
‘We will turn Henry. We will turn him to the gospel.’
‘Perhaps. Not suddenly. A little and a little.’
‘I am going to ask Bishop Stokesley to allow me to visit our
brother Bainham. Will you come?’
Bainham is the barrister who was taken up by More last year
and tortured. Just before Christmas he came before the Bishop of
London. He abjured, and was free by February. He is a natural
man; he wanted to live, how not? But once he was free his
conscience would not let him sleep. One Sunday he walked into
a crowded church and stood up before all the people, Tyndale’s
Bible in his hand, and spoke a profession of his faith. Now he is
in the Tower waiting to know the date of his execution.
‘So?’ Latimer says. ‘You will or you won’t?’
‘I should not give ammunition to the Lord Chancellor.’
I might sap Bainham’s resolve, he thinks. Say to him, believe
anything, brother, swear to it and cross your fingers behind your
back. But then, it hardly matters what Bainham says now. Mercy
will not operate for him, he must burn.
Hugh Latimer lopes away. The mercy of God operates for
Hugh. The Lord walks with him, and steps with him into a
wherry, to disembark under the shadow of the Tower; this being
so, there is no need for Thomas Cromwell.
More says it does not matter if you lie to heretics, or trick
them into a confession. They have no right to silence, even if they
know speech will incriminate them; if they will not speak, then
break their fingers, burn them with irons, hang them up by their
wrists. It is legitimate, and indeed More goes further; it is blessed.
There is a group from the House of Commons who dine with
priests at the Queen’s Head tavern. The word comes from them,
and spreads among the people of London, that anyone who
supports the king’s divorce will be damned. So devoted is God to
the cause of these gentlemen, they say, that an angel attends the sittings of Parliament with a scroll, noting down who votes and
how, and smudging a sooty mark against the names of those who
fear Henry more than the Almighty.
At Greenwich, a friar called William Peto, the head in England
of his branch of the Franciscan order, preaches a sermon before
the king, in which he takes as his text and example the unfortunate Ahab, seventh king of Israel, who lived in a palace of ivory.
Under the influence of the wicked Jezebel he built a pagan
temple and gave the priests of Baal places in his retinue. The
prophet Elijah told Ahab that the dogs would lick his blood, and
so it came to pass, as you would imagine, since only the successful prophets are remembered. The dogs of Samaria licked Ahab’s
blood. All his male heirs perished. They lay unburied in the
streets. Jezebel was thrown out of a window of her palace. Wild
dogs tore her body into shreds.
Anne says, ‘I am Jezebel. You, Thomas Cromwell, are the
priests of Baal.’ Her eyes are alight. ‘As I am a woman, I am the
means by which sin enters this world. I am the devil’s gateway, the
cursed ingress. I am the means by which Satan attacks the man,
whom he was not bold enough to attack, except through me.
Well, that is their view of the situation. My view is that there are
too many priests with scant learning and smaller occupation. And
I wish the Pope and the Emperor and all Spaniards were in the sea
and drowned. And if anyone is to be thrown out of a palace
window … alors, Thomas, I know who I would like to throw.
Except the child Mary, the wild dogs would not find a scrap of
flesh to gnaw, and Katherine, she is so fat she would bounce.’
When Thomas Avery comes home, he lowers to the flagstones
the travelling chest in which he carries everything he owns, and
rises with open arms to hug his master like a child. News of his
government promotion has reached Antwerp. It seems Stephen
Vaughan turned brick-red with pleasure and drank off a whole
cup of wine without cutting it with water.