Spies, he means. To see how she will take the news. To see whatQueen Catalina will say, in private and unleashed, when she hasslipped the noose of the diplomatic Latin in which it will bebroken to her that the king – after they have spent some twentyyears together – would like to marry another lady. Any lady. Anywell-connected princess whom he thinks might give him a son.The cardinal’s chin rests on his hand; with finger and thumb,he rubs his eyes. ‘The king called me this morning,’ he says,‘exceptionally early.’‘What did he want?’‘Pity. And at such an hour. I heard a dawn Mass with him, andhe talked all through it. I love the king. God knows how I lovehim. But sometimes my faculty of commiseration is strained.’ Heraises his glass, looks over the rim. ‘Picture to yourself, Tom.Imagine this. You are a man of some thirty-five years of age. Youare in good health and of a hearty appetite, you have your bowelsopened every day, your joints are supple, your bones supportyou, and in addition you are King of England. But.’ He shakeshis head. ‘But! If only he wanted something simple. The Philosopher’s Stone. The elixir of youth. One of those chests that occurin stories, full of gold pieces.’‘And when you take some out, it just fills up again?’‘Exactly. Now the chest of gold I have hopes of, and the elixir,all the rest. But where shall I begin looking for a son to rule hiscountry after him?’Behind the cardinal, moving a little in the draught, KingSolomon bows, his face obscured. The Queen of Sheba – smiling,light-footed – reminds him of the young widow he lodged withwhen he lived in Antwerp. Since they had shared a bed, shouldhe have married her? In honour, yes. But if he had marriedAnselma he couldn’t have married Liz; and his children would bedifferent children from the ones he has now.‘If you cannot find him a son,’ he says, ‘you must find him apiece of scripture. To ease his mind. The cardinal appears to be looking for it, on his desk. ‘Well,Deuteronomy. Which positively recommends that a man shouldmarry his deceased brother’s wife. As he did.’ The cardinal sighs.‘But he doesn’t like Deuteronomy.’Useless to say, why not? Useless to suggest that, if Deuteronomy orders you to marry your brother’s relict, and Leviticussays don’t, or you will not breed, you should try to live with thecontradiction, and accept that the question of which takes priority was thrashed out in Rome, for a fat fee, by leading prelates,twenty years ago when the dispensations were issued, and delivered under papal seal.‘I don’t see why he takes Leviticus to heart. He has a daughterliving.’‘But I think it is generally understood, in the Scriptures, that“children” means “sons”.’The cardinal justifies the text, referring to the Hebrew; hisvoice is mild, lulling. He loves to instruct, where there is the willto be instructed. They have known each other some years now,and though the cardinal is very grand, formality has fadedbetween them. ‘I have a son,’ he says. ‘You know that, of course.God forgive me. A weakness of the flesh.’The cardinal’s son – Thomas Winter, they call him – seemsinclined to scholarship and a quiet life; though his father mayhave other ideas. The cardinal has a daughter too, a young girlwhom no one has seen. Rather pointedly, he has called herDorothea, the gift of God; she is already placed in a convent,where she will pray for her parents.‘And you have a son,’ the cardinal says. ‘Or should I say, youhave one son you give your name to. But I suspect there are someyou don’t know, running around on the banks of the Thames?’‘I hope not. I wasn’t fifteen when I ran away.’It amuses Wolsey, that he doesn’t know his age. The cardinalpeers down through the layers of society, to a stratum well belowhis own, as the butcher’s beef-fed son; to a place where his servant is born, on a day unknown, in deep obscurity. His fatherwas no doubt drunk at his birth; his mother, understandably, waspreoccupied. Kat has assigned him a date; he is grateful for it.‘Well, fifteen …’ the cardinal says. ‘But at fifteen I suppose youcould do it? I know I could. Now I have a son, your boatman onthe river has a son, your beggar on the street has a son, yourwould-be murderers in Yorkshire no doubt have sons who will besworn to pursue you in the next generation, and you yourself, aswe have agreed, have spawned a whole tribe of riverine brawlers– but the king, alone, has no son. Whose fault is that?’‘God’s?’‘Nearer than God?’‘The queen?’‘More responsible for everything than the queen?’He can’t help a broad smile. ‘Yourself, Your Grace.’‘Myself, My Grace. What am I going to do about it? I tell youwhat I might do. I might send Master Stephen to Rome to soundout the Curia. But then I need him here …’Wolsey looks at his expression, and laughs. Squabbling underlings! He knows quite well that, dissatisfied with their originalparentage, they are fighting to be his favourite son. ‘Whateveryou think of Master Stephen, he is well grounded in canon law,and a very persuasive fellow, except when he tries to persuadeyou. I will tell you –’ He breaks off; he leans forward, he puts hisgreat lion’s head in his hands, the head that would indeed haveworn the papal tiara, if at the last election the right money hadbeen paid out to the right people. ‘I have begged him,’ the cardinal says. ‘Thomas, I sank to my knees and from that humbleposture I tried to dissuade him. Majesty, I said, be guided by me.Nothing will ensue, if you wish to be rid of your wife, but a greatdeal of trouble and expense.’‘And he said …?’‘He held up a finger. In warning. “Never,” he said, “call thatdear lady my wife, until you can show me why she is, and how it can be so. Till then, call her my sister, my dear sister. Since shewas quite certainly my brother’s wife, before going through aform of marriage with me.”’You will never draw from Wolsey a word that is disloyal to theking. ‘What it is,’ he says, ‘it’s …’ he hesitates over the word, ‘it’s,in my opinion … preposterous. Though my opinion, of course,does not go out of this room. Oh, don’t doubt it, there werethose at the time who raised their eyebrows over the dispensation. And year by year there were persons who would murmurin the king’s ear; he didn’t listen, though now I must believe thathe heard. But you know the king was the most uxorious of men.Any doubts were quashed.’ He places a hand, softly and firmly,down on his desk. ‘They were quashed and quashed.’But there is no doubt of what Henry wants now. An annulment. A declaration that his marriage never existed. ‘For eighteenyears,’ the cardinal says, ‘he has been under a mistake. He hastold his confessor that he has eighteen years’ worth of sin toexpiate.’He waits, for some gratifying small reaction. His servantsimply looks back at him: taking it for granted that the seal of theconfessional is broken at the cardinal’s convenience.‘So if you send Master Stephen to Rome,’ he says, ‘it will givethe king’s whim, if I may –’The cardinal nods: you may so term it.‘– an international airing?’‘Master Stephen may go discreetly. As it were, for a privatepapal blessing.’‘You don’t understand Rome.’Wolsey can’t contradict him. He has never felt the chill at thenape of the neck that makes you look over your shoulder when,passing from the Tiber’s golden light, you move into some greatbloc of shadow. By some fallen column, by some chaste ruin, thethieves of integrity wait, some bishop’s whore, some nephew-ofa-nephew, some monied seducer with furred breath; he feels, sometimes, fortunate to have escaped that city with his soulintact.‘Put simply,’ he says, ‘the Pope’s spies will guess whatStephen’s about while he is still packing his vestments, and thecardinals and the secretaries will have time to fix their prices. Ifyou must send him, give him a great deal of ready money. Thosecardinals don’t take promises; what they really like is a bag ofgold to placate their bankers, because they’re mostly run out ofcredit.’ He shrugs. ‘I know this.’‘I should send you,’ the cardinal says, jolly. ‘You could offerPope Clement a loan.’Why not? He knows the money markets; it could probably bearranged. If he were Clement, he would borrow heavily this yearto hire in troops to ring his territories. It’s probably too late; forthe summer season’s fighting, you need to be recruiting byCandlemas. He says, ‘Will you not start the king’s suit withinyour own jurisdiction? Make him take the first steps, then he willsee if he really wants what he says he wants.’‘That is my intention. What I mean to do is to convene a smallcourt here in London. We will approach him in a shockedfashion: King Harry, you appear to have lived all these years inan unlawful manner, with a woman not your wife. He hates –saving His Majesty – to appear in the wrong: which is where wemust put him, very firmly. Possibly he will forget that the original scruples were his. Possibly he will shout at us, and hasten ina fit of indignation back to the queen. If not, then I must have thedispensation revoked, here or in Rome, and if I succeed inparting him from Katherine I shall marry him, smartly, to aFrench princess.’No need to ask if the cardinal has any particular princess inmind. He has not one but two or three. He never lives in a singlereality, but in a shifting, shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities.While he is doing his best to keep the king married to QueenKatherine and her Spanish-Imperial family, by begging Henry to forget his scruples, he will also plan for an alternative world, inwhich the king’s scruples must be heeded, and the marriage toKatherine is void. Once that nullity is recognised – and the lasteighteen years of sin and suffering wiped from the page – he willreadjust the balance of Europe, allying England with France,forming a power bloc to oppose the young Emperor Charles,Katherine’s nephew. And all outcomes are likely, all outcomescan be managed, even massaged into desirability: prayer andpressure, pressure and prayer, everything that comes to pass willpass by God’s design, a design re-envisaged and redrawn, withhelpful emendations, by the cardinal. He used to say, ‘The kingwill do such-and-such.’ Then he began to say, ‘We will do suchand-such.’ Now he says, ‘This is what I will do.’‘But what will happen to the queen?’ he asks. ‘If he casts heroff, where will she go?’‘Convents can be comfortable.’‘Perhaps she will go home to Spain.’‘No, I think not. It is another country now. It is – what? –twenty-seven years since she landed in England.’ The cardinalsighs. ‘I remember her, at her coming-in. Her ships, as you know,had been delayed by the weather, and she had been day upon daytossed in the Channel. The old king rode down the country,determined to meet her. She was then at Dogmersfield, at theBishop of Bath’s palace, and making slow progress towardsLondon; it was November and, yes, it was raining. At his arriving, her household stood upon their Spanish manners: theprincess must remained veiled, until her husband sees her on herwedding day. But you know the old king!’He did not, of course; he was born on or about the date the oldking, a renegade and a refugee all his life, fought his way to anunlikely throne. Wolsey talks as if he himself had witnessedeverything, eye-witnessed it, and in a sense he has, for the recentpast arranges itself only in the patterns acknowledged by hissuperior mind, and agreeable to his eye. He smiles. ‘The old king, in his later years, the least thing could arouse his suspicion. Hemade some show of reining back to confer with his escort, andthen he leapt – he was still a lean man – from the saddle, and toldthe Spanish to their faces, he would see her or else. My land andmy laws, he said; we’ll have no veils here. Why may I not see her,have I been cheated, is she deformed, is it that you are proposingto marry my son Arthur to a monster?’Thomas thinks, he was being unnecessarily Welsh.‘Meanwhile her women had put the little creature into bed; orsaid they had, for they thought that in bed she would be safeagainst him. Not a bit. King Henry strode through the rooms,looking as if he had in mind to tear back the bedclothes. Thewomen bundled her into some decency. He burst into thechamber. At the sight of her, he forgot his Latin. He stammeredand backed out like a tongue-tied boy.’ The cardinal chuckled.‘And then when she first danced at court – our poor princeArthur sat smiling on the dais, but the little girl could hardly sitstill in her chair – no one knew the Spanish dances, so she took tothe floor with one of her ladies. I will never forget that turn ofher head, that moment when her beautiful red hair slid over oneshoulder … There was no man who saw it who didn’t imagine –though the dance was in fact very sedate … Ah dear. She wassixteen.’The cardinal looks into space and Thomas says, ‘God forgiveyou?’‘God forgive us all. The old king was constantly taking his lustto confession. Prince Arthur died, then soon after the queendied, and when the old king found himself a widower he thoughthe might marry Katherine himself. But then …’ He lifts hisprincely shoulders. ‘They couldn’t agree over the dowry, youknow. The old fox, Ferdinand, her father. He would fox you outof any payment due. But our present Majesty was a boy of tenwhen he danced at his brother’s wedding, and, in my belief, itwas there and then that he set his heart on the bride. They sit and think for a bit. It’s sad, they both know it’s sad.The old king freezing her out, keeping her in the kingdom andkeeping her poor, unwilling to miss the part of the dowry he saidwas still owing, and equally unwilling to pay her widow’sportion and let her go. But then it’s interesting too, the extensivediplomatic contacts the little girl picked up during those years,the expertise in playing off one interest against another. WhenHenry married her he was eighteen, guileless. His father was nosooner dead than he claimed Katherine for his own. She wasolder than he was, and years of anxiety had sobered her andtaken something from her looks. But the real woman was lessvivid than the vision in his mind; he was greedy for what his olderbrother had owned. He felt again the little tremor of her hand, asshe had rested it on his arm when he was a boy of ten. It was as ifshe had trusted him, as if – he told his intimates – she had recognised that she was never meant to be Arthur’s wife, except inname; her body was reserved for him, the second son, uponwhom she turned her beautiful blue-grey eyes, her compliantsmile. She always loved me, the king would say. Seven years or soof diplomacy, if you can call it that, kept me from her side. Butnow I need fear no one. Rome has dispensed. The papers are inorder. The alliances are set in place. I have married a virgin, sincemy poor brother did not touch her; I have married an alliance,her Spanish relatives; but, above all, I have married for love.And now? Gone. Or as good as gone: half a lifetime waiting tobe expunged, eased from the record.‘Ah, well,’ the cardinal says. ‘What will be the outcome? Theking expects his own way, but she, she will be hard to move.’There is another story about Katherine, a different story.Henry went to France to have a little war; he left Katherine asregent. Down came the Scots; they were well beaten, and atFlodden the head of their king cut off. It was Katherine, thatpink-and-white angel, who proposed to send the head in a bagby the first crossing, to cheer up her husband in his camp. They dissuaded her; told her it was, as a gesture, un-English. She sent,instead, a letter. And with it, the surcoat in which the Scottishking had died, which was stiffened, black and crackling with hispumped-out blood.The fire dies, an ashy log subsiding; the cardinal, wrapped inhis dreams, rises from his chair and personally kicks it. He standslooking down, twisting the rings on his fingers, lost in thought.He shakes himself and says, ‘Long day. Go home. Don’t dreamof Yorkshiremen.’Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. He is aman of strong build, not tall. Various expressions are available tohis face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement.His hair is dark, heavy and waving, and his small eyes, which areof very strong sight, light up in conversation: so the Spanishambassador will tell us, quite soon. It is said he knows by heartthe entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of thecardinal is apt – ready with a text if abbots flounder. His speechis low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroomor waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft acontract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish ahouse and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the oldauthors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows newpoetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up andlast to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a beton anything.He rises to leave, says, ‘If you did have a word with God andthe sun came out, then the king could ride out with his gentlemen, and if he were not so fretted and confined then his spiritswould rise, and he might not be thinking about Leviticus, andyour life would be easier.’‘You only partly understand him. He enjoys theology, almostas much as he enjoys riding out.’He is at the door. Wolsey says, ‘By the way, the talk at court …His Grace the Duke of Norfolk is complaining that I have raised an evil spirit, and directed it to follow him about. If anyonementions it to you … just deny it.’He stands in the doorway, smiling slowly. The cardinal smilestoo, as if to say, I have saved the good wine till last. Don’t I knowhow to make you happy? Then the cardinal drops his head overhis papers. He is a man who, in England’s service, scarcely needsto sleep; four hours will refresh him, and he will be up whenWestminster’s bells have rung in another wet, smoky, lightlessApril day. ‘Good night,’ he says. ‘God bless you, Tom.’Outside his people are waiting with lights to take him home.He has a house in Stepney but tonight he is going to his townhouse. A hand on his arm: Rafe Sadler, a slight young man withpale eyes. ‘How was Yorkshire?’Rafe’s smile flickers, the wind pulls the torch flame into arainy blur.‘I haven’t to speak of it; the cardinal fears it will give us baddreams.’Rafe frowns. In all his twenty-one years he has never had baddreams; sleeping securely under the Cromwell roof since he wasseven, first at Fenchurch Street and now at the Austin Friars, hehas grown up with a tidy mind, and his night-time worries are allrational ones: thieves, loose dogs, sudden holes in the road.‘The Duke of Norfolk …’ he says, then, ‘no, never mind.Who’s been asking for me while I’ve been away?’The damp streets are deserted; the mist is creeping from theriver. The stars are stifled in damp and cloud. Over the city liesthe sweet, rotting odour of yesterday’s unrecollected sins.Norfolk kneels, teeth chattering, beside his bed; the cardinal’slate-night pen scratches, scratches, like a rat beneath his mattress.While Rafe, by his side, gives him a digest of the office news, heformulates his denial, for whom it may concern: ‘His Grace thecardinal wholly rejects any imputation that he has sent an evilspirit to wait upon the Duke of Norfolk. He deprecates thesuggestion in the strongest possible terms. No headless calf, no fallen angel in the shape of loll-tongued dog, no crawling preused winding sheet, no Lazarus nor animated cadaver has been
sent by His Grace to pursue His Grace: nor is any such pursuit
pending.’
Someone is screaming, down by the quays. The boatmen are
singing. There is a faint, faraway splashing; perhaps they are
drowning someone. ‘My lord cardinal makes this statement
without prejudice to his right to harass and distress my lord of
Norfolk by means of any fantasma which he may in his wisdom
elect: at any future date, and without notice given: subject only
to the lord cardinal’s views in the matter.’
This weather makes old scars ache. But he walks into his house
as if it were midday: smiling, and imagining the trembling duke.
It is one o’clock. Norfolk, in his mind, is still kneeling. A blackfaced imp with a trident is pricking his calloused heels.