II
Paternity
1527

So: Stephen Gardiner. Going out, as he’s coming in. It’s wet, and
for a night in April, unseasonably warm, but Gardiner wears
furs, which look like oily and dense black feathers; he stands
now, ruffling them, gathering his clothes about his tall straight
person like black angel’s wings.
‘Late,’ Master Stephen says unpleasantly.
He is bland. ‘Me, or your good self?’
‘You.’ He waits.
‘Drunks on the river. The boatmen say it’s the eve of one of
their patron saints.’
‘Did you offer a prayer to her?’
‘I’ll pray to anyone, Stephen, till I’m on dry land.’
‘I’m surprised you didn’t take an oar yourself. You must have
done some river work, when you were a boy.’
Stephen sings always on one note. Your reprobate father.
Your low birth. Stephen is supposedly some sort of semi-royal
by-blow: brought up for payment, discreetly, as their own, by
discreet people in a small town. They are wool-trade people,
whom Master Stephen resents and wishes to forget; and since
he himself knows everybody in the wool trade, he knows too
much about his past for Stephen’s comfort. The poor orphan
boy! Master Stephen resents everything about his own situation.
He resents that he’s the king’s unacknowledged cousin. He
resents that he was put into the church, though the church has
done well by him. He resents the fact that someone else has latenight talks with the cardinal, to whom he is confidential secretary. He resents the fact that he’s one of those tall men who are
hollow-chested, not much weight behind him; he resents his
knowledge that if they met on a dark night, Master Thos.
Cromwell would be the one who walked away dusting off his
hands and smiling.
‘God bless you,’ Gardiner says, passing into the night unseasonably warm.
Cromwell says, ‘Thanks.’
The cardinal, writing, says without looking up, ‘Thomas. Still
raining? I expected you earlier.’
Boatman. River. Saint. He’s been travelling since early
morning and in the saddle for the best part of two weeks on the
cardinal’s business, and has now come down by stages – and not
easy stages – from Yorkshire. He’s been to his clerks at Gray’s
Inn and borrowed a change of linen. He’s been east to the city, to
hear what ships have come in and to check the whereabouts of an
off-the-books consignment he is expecting. But he hasn’t eaten,
and hasn’t been home yet.
The cardinal rises. He opens a door, speaks to his hovering
servants. ‘Cherries! What, no cherries? April, you say? Only
April? We shall have sore work to placate my guest, then.’ He
sighs. ‘Bring what you have. But it will never do, you know.
Why am I so ill-served?’
Then the whole room is in motion: food, wine, fire built up. A
man takes his wet outer garments with a solicitous murmur. All
the cardinal’s household servants are like this: comfortable, softfooted, and kept permanently apologetic and teased. And all the
cardinal’s visitors are treated in the same way. If you had inter rupted him every night for ten years, and sat sulking and scowling at him on each occasion, you would still be his honoured
guest.
The servants efface themselves, melting away towards the
door. ‘What else would you like?’ the cardinal says.
‘The sun to come out?’
‘So late? You tax my powers.’
‘Dawn would do.’
The cardinal inclines his head to the servants. ‘I shall see to this
request myself,’ he says gravely; and gravely they murmur, and
withdraw.
The cardinal joins his hands. He makes a great, deep, smiling
sigh, like a leopard settling in a warm spot. He regards his man of
business; his man of business regards him. The cardinal, at fiftyfive, is still as handsome as he was in his prime. Tonight he is
dressed not in his everyday scarlet, but in blackish purple and
fine white lace: like a humble bishop. His height impresses; his
belly, which should in justice belong to a more sedentary man, is
merely another princely aspect of his being, and on it, confidingly, he often rests a large, white, beringed hand. A large head –
surely designed by God to support the papal tiara – is carried
superbly on broad shoulders: shoulders upon which rest (though
not at this moment) the great chain of Lord Chancellor of
England. The head inclines; the cardinal says, in those honeyed
tones, famous from here to Vienna, ‘So now, tell me how was
Yorkshire.’
‘Filthy.’ He sits down. ‘Weather. People. Manners. Morals.’
‘Well, I suppose this is the place to complain. Though I am
already speaking to God about the weather.’
‘Oh, and the food. Five miles inland, and no fresh fish.’
‘And scant hope of a lemon, I suppose. What do they eat?’
‘Londoners, when they can get them. You have never seen
such heathens. They’re so high, low foreheads. Live in caves, yet
they pass for gentry in those parts.’ He ought to go and look for himself, the cardinal; he is Archbishop of York, but has never
visited his see. ‘And as for Your Grace’s business –’
‘I am listening,’ the cardinal says. ‘Indeed, I go further. I am
captivated.’
As he listens, the cardinal’s face creases into its affable, perpetually attentive folds. From time to time he notes down a figure
that he is given. He sips from a glass of his very good wine and at
length he says, ‘Thomas … what have you done, monstrous
servant? An abbess is with child? Two, three abbesses? Or, let me
see … Have you set fire to Whitby, on a whim?’
In the case of his man Cromwell, the cardinal has two jokes,
which sometimes unite to form one. The first is that he walks in
demanding cherries in April and lettuce in December. The other
is that he goes about the countryside committing outrages, and
charging them to the cardinal’s accounts. And the cardinal has
other jokes, from time to time: as he requires them.
It is about ten o’clock. The flames of the wax candles bow
civilly to the cardinal, and stand straight again. The rain – it has
been raining since last September – splashes against the glass
window. ‘In Yorkshire,’ he says, ‘your project is disliked.’
The cardinal’s project: having obtained the Pope’s permission,
he means to amalgamate some thirty small, ill-run monastic
foundations with larger ones, and to divert the income of these
foundations – decayed, but often very ancient – into revenue for
the two colleges he is founding: Cardinal College, at Oxford, and
a college in his home town of Ipswich, where he is well remembered as the scholar son of a prosperous and pious master
butcher, a guild-man, a man who also kept a large and well-regulated inn, of the type used by the best travellers. The difficulty is
… No, in fact, there are several difficulties. The cardinal, a Bachelor of Arts at fifteen, a Bachelor of Theology by his mid-twenties, is learned in the law but does not like its delays; he cannot
quite accept that real property cannot be changed into money,
with the same speed and ease with which he changes a wafer into the body of Christ. When he once, as a test, explained to the
cardinal just a minor point of the land law concerning – well,
never mind, it was a minor point – he saw the cardinal break into
a sweat and say, Thomas, what can I give you, to persuade you
never to mention this to me again? Find a way, just do it, he
would say when obstacles were raised; and when he heard of
some small person obstructing his grand design, he would say,
Thomas, give them some money to make them go away.
He has the leisure to think about this, because the cardinal is
staring down at his desk, at the letter he has half-written. He
looks up. ‘Tom …’ And then, ‘No, never mind. Tell me why you
are scowling in that way.’
‘The people up there say they are going to kill me.’
‘Really?’ the cardinal says. His face says, I am astonished and
disappointed. ‘And will they kill you? Or what do you think?’
Behind the cardinal is a tapestry, hanging the length of the
wall. King Solomon, his hands stretched into darkness, is greeting the Queen of Sheba.
‘I think, if you’re going to kill a man, do it. Don’t write him a
letter about it. Don’t bluster and threaten and put him on his
guard.’
‘If you ever plan to be off your guard, let me know. It is something I should like to see. Do you know who … But I suppose
they don’t sign their letters. I shall not give up my project. I have
personally and carefully selected these institutions, and His
Holiness has approved them under seal. Those who object
misunderstand my intention. No one is proposing to put old
monks out on the roads.’
This is true. There can be relocation; there can be pensions,
compensation. It can be negotiated, with goodwill on both sides.
Bow to the inevitable, he urges. Deference to the lord cardinal.
Regard his watchful and fatherly care; believe his keen eye is
fixed on the ultimate good of the church. These are the phrases
with which to negotiate. Poverty, chastity and obedience: these are what you stress when you tell some senile prior what to do.
‘They don’t misunderstand,’ he says. ‘They just want the
proceeds themselves.’
‘You will have to take an armed guard when next you go
north.’
The cardinal, who thinks upon a Christian’s last end, has had
his tomb designed already, by a sculptor from Florence. His
corpse will lie beneath the outspread wings of angels, in a
sarcophagus of porphyry. The veined stone will be his monument, when his own veins are drained by the embalmer; when his
limbs are set like marble, an inscription of his virtues will be
picked out in gold. But the colleges are to be his breathing monument, working and living long after he is gone: poor boys, poor
scholars, carrying into the world the cardinal’s wit, his sense of
wonder and of beauty, his instinct for decorum and pleasure, his
finesse. No wonder he shakes his head. You don’t generally have
to give an armed guard to a lawyer. The cardinal hates any show
of force. He thinks it unsubtle. Sometimes one of his people –
Stephen Gardiner, let’s say – will come to him denouncing some
nest of heretics in the city. He will say earnestly, poor benighted
souls. You pray for them, Stephen, and I’ll pray for them, and
we’ll see if between us we can’t bring them to a better state of
mind. And tell them, mend their manners, or Thomas More will
get hold of them and shut them in his cellar. And all we will hear
is the sound of screaming.
‘Now, Thomas.’ He looks up. ‘Do you have any Spanish?’
‘A little. Military, you know. Rough.’
‘You took service in the Spanish armies, I thought.’
‘French.’
‘Ah. Indeed. And no fraternising?’
‘Not past a point. I can insult people in Castilian.’
‘I shall bear that in mind,’ the cardinal says. ‘Your time may
come. For now … I was thinking that it would be good to have
more friends in the queen’s household.