‘By God,’ Charles Brandon bursts out, ‘such a man would be
a knave. Would Francis do that?’
Anne looks at him, lids half-lowered. ‘My lord Suffolk, is
your lady wife ready for the journey?’
Suffolk reddens. ‘My wife is a former Queen of France.’
‘I am aware of it. François will be pleased to see her again. He
thought her very beautiful. Though of course, she was young
then.’
‘My sister is beautiful still,’ Henry says, pacific. But a tempest
is boiling up inside Charles Brandon, and it breaks with a yell
like a crack of thunder: ‘You expect her to wait on you? On
Boleyn’s daughter? Pass you your gloves, madam, and serve you
first at dinner? Make your mind up to it – that day will never
come.’
Anne turns to Henry, her hand fastening on his arm. ‘Before
your face he humiliates me.’
‘Charles,’ Henry says, ‘leave us now and come back when you
are master of yourself. Not a moment before.’ He sighs, makes a
sign: Cromwell, go after him.
The Duke of Suffolk is seething and steaming. ‘Fresh air, my
lord,’ he suggests.
Autumn has come already; there is a raw wind from the river.
It lifts a flurry of sodden leaves, which flap in their path like the
flags of some miniature army. ‘I always think Windsor is a cold
place. Don’t you, my lord? I mean the situation, not just the
castle?’ His voice runs on, soothing, low. ‘If I were the king, I
would spend more time at the palace in Woking. You know it
never snows there? At least, not once in twenty years.’
‘If you were king?’ Brandon stumps downhill. ‘If Anne
Boleyn can be queen, why not?’
‘I take that back. I should have used a more humble expression.’
Brandon grunts. ‘She will never appear, my wife, in the train of
that harlot. ‘My lord, you had better think her chaste. We all do.’
‘Her lady mother trained her up, and she was a great whore,
let me tell you. Liz Boleyn, Liz Howard as was – she was the first
to take Henry to bed. I know these things, I am his oldest friend.
Seventeen, and he didn’t know where to put it. His father kept
him like a nun.’
‘But none of us believe that story now. About Monseigneur’s
wife.’
‘Monseigneur! Christ in Heaven.’
‘He likes to be called that. It is no harm.’
‘Her sister Mary trained her up, and Mary was trained in a
brothel. Do you know what they do, in France? My lady wife
told me. Well, not told me, but she wrote it down for me, in
Latin. The man has a cock-stand, and she takes it in her mouth!
Can you imagine such a thing? A woman who can do such a
filthy proceeding, can you call that a virgin?’
‘My lord … if your wife will not go to France, if you cannot
persuade her … shall we say that she is ill? It would be something
you could do for the king, whom you know is your friend. It
would save him from –’ He almost says, from the lady’s harsh
tongue. But he backs out of that sentence, and says something
else. ‘It would save face.’
Brandon nods. They are still heading towards the river, and he
tries to check their pace because soon Anne will expect him back
with news of an apology. When the duke turns to him, his face is
a picture of misery. ‘It’s true, anyway. She is ill. Her beautiful
little’ – he makes a gesture, his hands cupping the air – ‘all fallen
away. I love her anyway. She’s as thin as a wafer. I say to her,
Mary, I will wake up one day, and I won’t be able to find you, I’ll
take you for a thread in the bed linen.’
‘I am so sorry,’ he says.
He rubs his face. ‘Ah, God. Go back to Harry, will you? Tell
him we can’t do this.’
‘He will expect you to come to Calais, if your lady wife cannot.’ ‘I don’t like to leave her, you see?’
‘Anne is unforgiving,’ he says. ‘Hard to please, easy to offend.
My lord, be guided by me.’
Brandon grunts. ‘We all are. We must be. You do everything,
Cromwell. You are everything now. We say, how did it happen?
We ask ourselves.’ The duke sniffs. ‘We ask ourselves, but by the
steaming blood of Christ we have no bloody answer.’
The steaming blood of Christ. It’s an oath worthy of Thomas
Howard, the senior duke. When did he become the interpreter of
dukes, their explainers? He asks himself but he has no bloody
answer. When he returns to the king and the queen-to-be, they
are looking lovingly into each other’s faces. ‘The Duke of Suffolk
begs pardon,’ he says. Yes, yes, the king says. I’ll see you tomorrow, but not too early. You would think they were already man
and wife, a languorous night before them, filled with marital
delights. You would think so, except he has Mary Boleyn’s word
for it that the marquisate has bought Henry only the right to
caress her sister’s inner thigh. Mary tells him this, and doesn’t
even put it in Latin. Whenever she spends time alone with the
king, Anne reports back to her relations, no detail spared. You
have to admire her; her measured exactness, her restraint. She
uses her body like a soldier, conserving its resources; like one of
the masters in the anatomy school at Padua, she divides it up and
names every part, this my thigh, this my breast, this my tongue.
‘Perhaps in Calais,’ he says. ‘Perhaps he will get what he wants
then.’
‘She will have to be sure.’ Mary walks away. She stops and
turns back, her face troubled. ‘Anne says, Cromwell is my man.
I don’t like her to say that.’
In ensuing days, other questions emerge to torment the
English party. Which royal lady will be hostess to Anne when
they meet the French? Queen Eleanor will not – you cannot
expect it, as she is the Emperor’s sister, and family feeling is
touched by His Disgrace’s abandonment of Katherine. Francis’s sister, the Queen of Navarre, pleads illness rather than receive the
King of England’s mistress. ‘Is it the same illness that afflicts the
poor Duchess of Suffolk?’ Anne asks. Perhaps, Francis suggests,
it would be appropriate if the new marquess were to be met by
the Duchess of Vendôme, his own maîtresse en titre?
Henry is so angry that it gives him toothache. Dr Butts comes
with his chest of specifics. A narcotic seems kindest, but when
the king wakes he is still so mortified that for a few hours there
seems no solution but to call the expedition off. Can they not
comprehend, can they not grasp, that Anne is no man’s mistress,
but a king’s bride-to-be? But to comprehend that is not in
Francis’s nature. He would never wait more than a week for a
woman he wanted. Pattern of chivalry, he? Most Christian king?
All he understands, Henry bellows, is rutting like a stag. But I
tell you, when his rut is done, the other harts will put him down.
Ask any hunter!
It is suggested, finally, that the solution will be to leave the
future queen behind in Calais, on English soil where she can
suffer no insult, while the king meets Francis in Boulogne.
Calais, a small city, should be more easily contained than
London, even if people line up at the harbourside to shout
‘Putain!’ and ‘Great Whore of England.’ If they sing obscene
songs, we will simply refuse to understand them.
At Canterbury, with the royal party in addition to the pilgrims
from all nations, every house is packed from cellars to eaves. He
and Rafe are lodged in some comfort and near the king, but there
are lords in flea-bitten inns and knights in the back rooms of
brothels, pilgrims forced into stables and outhouses and sleeping
out under the stars. Luckily, the weather is mild for October.
Any year before this, the king would have gone to pray at
Becket’s shrine and leave a rich offering. But Becket was a rebel
against the Crown, not the sort of archbishop we like to encourage at the moment. In the cathedral the incense is still hanging in
the air from Warham’s interment, and prayers for his soul are a constant drone like the buzz of a thousand hives. Letters have
gone to Cranmer, lying somewhere in Germany at the Emperor’s
travelling court. Anne has begun to refer to him as the Archbishop-Elect. No one knows how long he’ll take getting home.
With his secret, Rafe says.
Of course, he says, his secret, written down the side of the
page.
Rafe visits the shrine. It is his first time. He comes back wideeyed, saying it is covered in jewels the size of goose eggs.
‘I know. Are they real, do you think?’
‘They show you a skull, they say it’s Becket’s, it’s smashed up
by the knights but it’s held together with a silver plate. For ready
money, you can kiss it. They have a tray of his finger bones. They
have his snotty handkerchief. And a bit of his boot. And a vial
they shake up for you, they say it’s his blood.’
‘At Walsingham, they have a vial of the Virgin’s milk.’
‘Christ, I wonder what that is?’ Rafe looks sick. ‘The blood,
you can tell it’s water with some red soil in it. It floats about in
clumps.’
‘Well, pick up that goose quill, plucked from the pinions of the
angel Gabriel, and we will write to Stephen Vaughan. We may
have to set him on the road, to bring Thomas Cranmer home.’
‘It can’t be soon enough,’ Rafe says. ‘Just wait, master, till I
wash Becket off my hands.’
Though he will not go to the shrine, the king wants to show
himself to the people, Anne by his side. Leaving Mass, against all
advice he walks out among the crowds, his guards standing back,
his councillors around him. Anne’s head darts, on the slender
stem of her neck, turning to catch the comments that come her
way. People stretch out their hands to touch the king.
Norfolk, at his elbow, stiff with apprehension, eyes everywhere: ‘I don’t care for this proceeding, Master Cromwell.’ He
himself, having once been quick with a knife, is alert for movements below the eyeline. But the nearest thing to a weapon is an outsize cross, wielded by a bunch of Franciscan monks. The
crowd gives way to them, to a huddle of lay priests in their vestments, a contingent of Benedictines from the abbey, and in the
midst of them a young woman in the habit of a Benedictine nun.
‘Majesty?’
Henry turns. ‘By God, this is the Holy Maid,’ he says. The
guards move in, but Henry holds up a hand. ‘Let me see her.’ She
is a big girl, and not so young, perhaps twenty-eight; plain face,
dusky, excited, with an urgent flush. She pushes towards the
king, and for a second he sees him through her eyes: a blur of
red-gold and flushed skin, a ready, priapic body, a hand like a
ham that stretches out to take her by her nunly elbow. ‘Madam,
you have something to say to me?’
She tries to curtsey, but his grip won’t let her. ‘I am advised by
Heaven,’ she says, ‘by the saints with whom I converse, that the
heretics around you must be put into a great fire, and if you do
not light that fire, then you yourself will burn.’
‘Which heretics? Where are they? I do not keep heretics about
my person.’
‘Here is one.’
Anne shrinks against the king; against the scarlet and gold of
his jacket she melts like wax.
‘And if you enter into a form of marriage with this unworthy
woman, you will not reign seven months.’
‘Come, madam, seven months? Round it off, can you not?
What sort of a prophet says “seven months”?’
‘That is what Heaven tells me.’
‘And when the seven months are up, who will replace me?
Speak up, say who you would like to be king instead of me.’
The monks and priests are trying to draw her away; this was
not part of their plan. ‘Lord Montague, he is of the blood. The
Marquis of Exeter, he is blood royal.’ She in turn tries to pull
away from the king. ‘I see your lady mother,’ she says,
‘surrounded by pale fires. Henry drops her as if her flesh were hot. ‘My mother?
Where?’
‘I have been looking for the Cardinal of York. I have searched
Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, but the cardinal is not there.’
‘Surely she is mad?’ Anne says. ‘She is mad and must be
whipped. If she is not, she must be hanged.’
One of the priests says, ‘Madam, she is a very holy person.
Her speech is inspired.’
‘Get her out of my way,’ Anne says.
‘Lightning will strike you,’ the nun tells Henry. He laughs
uncertainly.
Norfolk erupts into the group, teeth clenched, fist raised.
‘Drag her back to her whorehouse, before she feels this, by God!’
In the mêlée, one monk hits another with the cross; the Maid is
drawn backwards, still prophesying; the noise from the crowd
rises, and Henry grasps Anne by the arm and pulls her back the
way they came. He himself follows the Maid, sticking close to
the back of the group, till the crowd thins and he can tap one of
the monks on the arm and ask to speak to her. ‘I was a servant of
Wolsey,’ he says. ‘I want to hear her message.’
Some consultation, and they let him through. ‘Sir?’ she says.
‘Could you try again to find the cardinal? If I were to make an
offering?’
She shrugs. One of the Franciscans says, ‘It would have to be
a substantial offering.’
‘Your name is?’
‘I am Father Risby.’
‘I can no doubt meet your expectations. I am a wealthy man.’
‘Would you want simply to locate the soul, to help your own
prayers, or were you thinking in terms of a chantry, perhaps, an
endowment?’
‘Whatever you recommend. But of course I’d need to know he
wasn’t in Hell. There would be no point throwing away good
Masses on a hopeless case. ‘I’ll have to talk to Father Bocking,’ the girl says.
‘Father Bocking is this lady’s spiritual director.’
He inclines his head. ‘Come again and ask me,’ the girl says.
She turns and is lost in the crowd. He parts with some money
there and then, to the entourage. For Father Bocking, whoever
he may be. As it seems Father Bocking does the price list and
keeps the accounts.
The nun has plunged the king into gloom. How would you feel
if you were told you’d be struck by lightning? By evening he
complains of a headache, a pain in his face and jaw. ‘Go away,’ he
tells his doctors. ‘You can never cure it, so why should you now?
And you, madam,’ he says to Anne, ‘have your ladies put you to
bed, I do not want chatter, I cannot stand piercing voices.’
Norfolk grumbles under his breath: the Tudor, always something the matter with him.
At Austin Friars, if anyone gets a sniffle or a sprain, the boys
perform an interlude called ‘If Norfolk were Doctor Butts’. Got
a toothache? Pull them out! Trapped your finger? Hack your
hand off! Pain in the head? Slice it off, you’ve got another.
Now Norfolk pauses, in backing out of the presence. ‘Majesty,
she didn’t say the lightning would in fact kill you.’
‘No more did she,’ Brandon says cheerily.
‘Not dead but dethroned, not dead but stricken and scorched,
that’s something to look forward to, is it?’ Pitifully indicating his
circumstances, the king barks for a servant to bring logs and a
page to warm some wine. ‘Am I to sit here, the King of England,
with a miserable fire and nothing to drink?’ He does look cold.
He says, ‘She saw my lady mother.’
‘Your Majesty,’ he says, cautious, ‘you know that in the cathedral one of the windows has an image of your lady mother in
glass? And would not the sun shine through, so it would seem as
if she was in a dazzle of light? I think that is what the nun has
seen. ‘You don’t believe these visions?’
‘I think perhaps she can’t tell what she sees in the outside
world from what is inside her head. Some people are like that.
She is to be pitied, perhaps. Though not too much.’
The king frowns. ‘But I loved my mother,’ he says. Then:
‘Buckingham set much store by visions. He had a friar who prophesied for him. Told him he would be king.’ He does not need to
add, Buckingham was a traitor and is more than ten years dead.
When the court sails for France he is in the king’s party, on the
Swallow. He stands on deck watching England recede, with the
Duke of Richmond, Henry’s bastard, excited to be on his first sea
voyage, and to be in his father’s company too. Fitzroy is a handsome boy of thirteen, fair-haired, tall for his age but slender:
Henry as he must have been as a young prince, and endowed
with a proper sense of himself and his own dignity. ‘Master
Cromwell,’ he says, ‘I have not seen you since the cardinal came
down.’ A moment’s awkwardness. ‘I am glad you prosper.
Because it is said in the book called The Courtier that in men of
base degree we often see high gifts of nature.’
‘You read Italian, sir?’
‘No, but parts of that book have been put into English for me.
It is a very good book for me to read.’ A pause. ‘I wish’ – he turns
his head, lowering his voice – ‘I wish the cardinal were not dead.
Because now the Duke of Norfolk is my guardian.’
‘And I hear Your Grace is to marry his daughter Mary.’
‘Yes. I do not want to.’
‘Why not?’
‘I have seen her. She has no breasts.’
‘But she has a good wit, my lord. And time may remedy the
other matter, before you live together. If your people will translate for you that part of Castiglione’s book that relates to gentlewomen and their qualities, I’m sure you will find that Mary
Howard has all of them. Let’s hope, he thinks, it won’t turn out like Harry Percy’s
match, or George Boleyn’s. For the girl’s sake too; Castiglione
says that everything that can be understood by men can be
understood by women, that their apprehension is the same, their
faculties, no doubt their loves and hates. Castiglione was in love
with his wife Ippolita, but she died when he had only had her
four years. He wrote a poem for her, an elegy, but he wrote it as
if Ippolita was writing: the dead woman speaking to him.
In the ship’s wake the gulls cry like lost souls. The king comes
on deck and says his headache has cleared. He says, ‘Majesty, we
were talking of Castiglione’s book. You have found time to read
it?’
‘Indeed. He extols sprezzatura. The art of doing everything
gracefully and well, without the appearance of effort. A quality
princes should cultivate, too.’ He adds, rather dubious, ‘King
Francis has it.’
‘Yes. But besides sprezzatura one must exhibit at all times a
dignified public restraint. I was thinking I might commission a
translation as a gift for my lord Norfolk.’
It must be in his mind, the picture of Thomas Howard in
Canterbury, threatening to punch the holy nun. Henry grins.
‘You should do it.’
‘Well, if he would not take it as a reproach. Castiglione recommends that a man should not curl his hair nor pluck his
eyebrows. And you know my lord does both.’
The princeling frowns at him. ‘My lord of Norfolk?’ Henry
unleashes an unregal yell of laughter, neither dignified nor
restrained. It is welcome to his ears. The ship’s timbers creak.
The king steadies himself with a hand on his shoulder. The wind
stiffens the sails. The sun dances over the water. ‘An hour and we
will be in port.’
Calais, this outpost of England, her last hold on France, is a town
where he has many friends, many customers, many clients. He knows it, Watergate and Lantern Gate, St Nicholas Church and
Church of Our Lady, he knows its towers and bulwarks, its
markets, courts and quays, Staple Inn where the Governor
lodges, and the houses of the Whethill and Wingfield families,
houses with shady gardens where gentlemen live in pleasant
retreat from an England they claim they no longer understand.
He knows the fortifications – crumbling – and beyond the city
walls the lands of the Pale, its woods, villages and marshes, its
sluices, dykes and canals. He knows the road to Boulogne, and
the road to Gravelines, which is the Emperor’s territory, and he
knows that either monarch, Francis or Charles, could take this
town with one determined push. The English have been here for
two hundred years, but in the streets now you hear more French
and Flemish spoken.
The Governor greets His Majesty; Lord Berners, old soldier
and scholar, is the pattern of old-fashioned virtue, and if it were
not for his limp, and his evident anxiety about the vast expenses
he is about to incur, he would be straight out of the book called
The Courtier. He has even arranged to lodge the king and the
marquess in rooms with an interconnecting door. ‘I think that
will be very suitable, my lord,’ he says. ‘As long as there is a
sturdy bolt on both sides.’
Because Mary told him, before they left dry land, ‘Till now she
wouldn’t, but now she would, but he won’t. He tells her he must
be sure that if she gets a child it’s born in wedlock.’
The monarchs are to meet for five days in Boulogne, then five
days in Calais. Anne is aggrieved at the thought of being left
behind. He can see by her restlessness that she knows this is a
debatable land, where things might happen you cannot foretell.
Meanwhile he has private business to transact. He leaves even
Rafe behind, and slips away to an inn in a back court off Calkwell Street.