They are taking apart the cardinal’s house. Room by room, the
king’s men are stripping York Place of its owner. They are
bundling up parchments and scrolls, missals and memoranda and
the volumes of his personal accounts; they are taking even the
ink and the quills. They are prising from the walls the boards on
which the cardinal’s coat of arms is painted.
They arrived on a Sunday, two vengeful grandees: the Duke of
Norfolk a bright-eyed hawk, the Duke of Suffolk just as keen.
They told the cardinal he was dismissed as Lord Chancellor, and
demanded he hand over the Great Seal of England. He,
Cromwell, touched the cardinal’s arm. A hurried conference.
The cardinal turned back to them, gracious: it appears a written
request from the king is necessary; have you one? Oh: careless of
you. It requires a lot of face to keep so calm; but then the cardinal has face.
‘You want us to ride back to Windsor?’ Charles Brandon is
incredulous. ‘For a piece of paper? When the situation’s plain?’
That’s like Suffolk; to think the letter of the law is some kind
of luxury. He whispers to the cardinal again, and the cardinal
says, ‘No, I think we’d better tell them, Thomas … not prolong
the matter beyond its natural life … My lords, my lawyer here
says I can’t give you the Seal, written request or not. He says that properly speaking I should only hand it to the Master of the
Rolls. So you’d better bring him with you.’
He says, lightly, ‘Be glad we told you, my lords. Otherwise it
would have been three trips, wouldn’t it?’
Norfolk grins. He likes a scrap. ‘Am obliged, master,’ he says.
When they go Wolsey turns and hugs him, his face gleeful.
Though it is the last of their victories and they know it, it is
important to show ingenuity; twenty-four hours is worth
buying, when the king is so changeable. Besides, they enjoyed it.
‘Master of the Rolls,’ Wolsey says. ‘Did you know that, or did
you make it up?’
Monday morning the dukes are back. Their instructions are to
turn out the occupants this very day, because the king wants to
send in his own builders and furnishers and get the palace ready
to hand over to the Lady Anne, who needs a London house of
her own.
He’s prepared to stand and argue the point: have I missed
something? This palace belongs to the archdiocese of York.
When was Lady Anne made an archbishop?
But the tide of men flooding in by the water stairs is sweeping
them away. The two dukes have made themselves scarce, and
there’s nobody to argue with. What a terrible sight, someone
says: Master Cromwell baulked of a fight. And now the cardinal’s ready to go, but where? Over his customary scarlet, he is
wearing a travelling cloak that belongs to someone else; they are
confiscating his wardrobe piece by piece, so he has to grab what
he can. It is autumn, and though he is a big man he feels the cold.
They are overturning chests and tipping out their contents.
They scatter across the floor, letters from Popes, letters from the
scholars of Europe: from Utrecht, from Paris, from San Diego de
Compostela; from Erfurt, from Strassburg, from Rome. They are
packing his gospels and taking them for the king’s libraries. The
texts are heavy to hold in the arms, and awkward as if they breathed; their pages are made of slunk vellum from stillborn
calves, reveined by the illuminator in tints of lapis and leaf-green.
They take down the tapestries and leave the bare blank walls.
They are rolled up, the woollen monarchs, Solomon and Sheba; as
they are brought into coiled proximity, their eyes are filled by
each other, and their tiny lungs breathe in the fibre of bellies and
thighs. Down come the cardinal’s hunting scenes, the scenes of
secular pleasure: the sportive peasants splashing in ponds, the
stags at bay, the hounds in cry, the spaniels held on leashes of silk
and the mastiffs with their collars of spikes: the huntsmen with
their studded belts and knives, the ladies on horseback with
jaunty caps, the rush-fringed pond, the mild sheep at pasture, and
the bluish feathered treetops, running away into a long plumed
distance, to a scene of chalky bluffs and a white sailing sky.
The cardinal looks at the scavengers as they go about their
work. ‘Have we refreshments for our visitors?’
In the two great rooms that adjoin the gallery they have set up
trestle tables. Each trestle is twenty feet long and they are bringing up more. In the Gilt Chamber they have laid out the cardinal’s gold plate, his jewels and precious stones, and they are
deciphering his inventories and calling out the weight of the
plate. In the Council Chamber they are stacking his silver and
parcel-gilt. Because everything is listed, down to the last dented
pan from the kitchens, they have put baskets under the tables so
they can throw in any item unlikely to catch the eye of the king.
Sir William Gascoigne, the cardinal’s treasurer, is moving
constantly between the rooms, preoccupied, talking, directing
the attention of the commissioners to any corner, any press and
chest that he thinks they may have overlooked.
Behind him trots George Cavendish, the cardinal’s gentleman
usher; his face is raw and open with dismay. They bring out the
cardinal’s vestments, his copes. Stiff with embroidery, strewn
with pearls, encrusted with gemstones, they seem to stand by
themselves. The raiders knock down each one as if they are knocking down Thomas Becket. They itemise it, and having
reduced it to its knees and broken its spine, they toss it into their
travelling crates. Cavendish flinches: ‘For God’s sake, gentlemen,
line those chests with a double thickness of cambric. Would you
shred the fine work that has taken nuns a lifetime?’ He turns:
‘Master Cromwell, do you think we can get these people out
before dark?’
‘Only if we help them. If it’s got to be done, we can make sure
they do it properly.’
This is an indecent spectacle: the man who has ruled England,
reduced. They have brought out bolts of fine holland, velvets and
grosgrain, sarcenet and taffeta, scarlet by the yard: the scarlet silk
in which he braves the summer heat of London, the crimson
brocades that keep his blood warm when snow falls on Westminster and whisks in sleety eddies over the Thames. In public the
cardinal wears red, just red, but in various weights, various
weaves, various degrees of pigment and dye, but all of them the
best of their kind, the best reds to be got for money. There have
been days when, swaggering out, he would say, ‘Right, Master
Cromwell, price me by the yard!’
And he would say, ‘Let me see,’ and walk slowly around the
cardinal; and saying ‘May I?’ he would pinch a sleeve between an
expert forefinger and thumb; and standing back, he would view
him, to estimate his girth – year on year, the cardinal expands –
and so come up with a figure. The cardinal would clap his hands,
delighted. ‘Let the begrudgers behold us! On, on, on.’ His
procession would form up, his silver crosses, his sergeants-atarms with their axes of gilt: for the cardinal went nowhere, in
public, without a procession.
So day by day, at his request and to amuse him, he would put
a value on his master. Now the king has sent an army of clerks to
do it. But he would like to take away their pens by force and
write across their inventories: Thomas Wolsey is a man beyond
price. ‘Now, Thomas,’ the cardinal says, patting him. ‘Everything I
have, I have from the king. The king gave it to me, and if it
pleases him to take York Place fully furnished, I am sure we own
other houses, we have other roofs to shelter under. This is not
Putney, you know.’ The cardinal holds on to him. ‘So I forbid
you to hit anyone.’ He affects to be pressing his arms by his
sides, in smiling restraint. The cardinal’s fingers tremble.
The treasurer Gascoigne comes in and says, ‘I hear Your Grace
is to go straight to the Tower.’
‘Do you?’ he says. ‘Where did you hear that?’
‘Sir William Gascoigne,’ the cardinal says, measuring out his
name, ‘what do you suppose I have done that would make the
king want to send me to the Tower?’
‘It’s like you,’ he says to Gascoigne, ‘to spread every story
you’re told. Is that all the comfort you’ve got to offer – walk in
here with evil rumours? Nobody’s going to the Tower. We’re
going’ – and the household waits, breath held, as he improvises –
‘to Esher. And your job,’ he can’t help giving Gascoigne a little
shove in the chest, ‘is to keep an eye on all these strangers and see
that everything that’s taken out of here gets where it’s meant to
go, and that nothing goes missing by the way, because if it does
you’ll be beating on the gates of the Tower and begging them to
take you in, to get away from me.’
Various noises: mainly, from the back of the room, a sort of
stifled cheer. It’s hard to escape the feeling that this is a play, and
the cardinal is in it: the Cardinal and his Attendants. And that it
is a tragedy.
Cavendish tugs at him, anxious, sweating. ‘But Master
Cromwell, the house at Esher is an empty house, we haven’t a
pot, we haven’t a knife or a spit, where will my lord cardinal
sleep, I doubt we have a bed aired, we have neither linen nor firewood nor … and how are we going to get there?’
‘Sir William,’ the cardinal says to Gascoigne, ‘take no offence
from Master Cromwell, who is, upon the occasion, blunt to a fault; but take what is said to heart. Since everything I have
proceeds from the king, everything must be delivered back in
good order.’ He turns away, his lips twitching. Except when he
teased the dukes yesterday, he hasn’t smiled in a month. ‘Tom,’
he says, ‘I’ve spent years teaching you not to talk like that.’
Cavendish says to him, ‘They haven’t seized my lord cardinal’s barge yet. Nor his horses.’
‘No?’ He lays a hand on Cavendish’s shoulder: ‘We go upriver,
as many as the barge will take. Horses can meet us at – at Putney,
in fact – and then we will … borrow things. Come on, George
Cavendish, exercise some ingenuity, we’ve done more difficult
things in these last years than get the household to Esher.’
Is this true? He’s never taken much notice of Cavendish, a
sensitive sort of man who talks a lot about table napkins. But he’s
trying to think of a way to put some military backbone into him,
and the best way lies in suggesting that they are brothers from
some old campaign.
‘Yes, yes,’ Cavendish says, ‘we’ll order up the barge.’
Good, he says, and the cardinal says, Putney? and he tries to
laugh. He says, well, Thomas, you told Gascoigne, you did;
there’s something about that man I never have liked, and he says,
why did you keep him then? and the cardinal says, oh, well, one
does, and again the cardinal says, Putney, eh?
He says, ‘Whatever we face at journey’s end, we shall not
forget how nine years ago, for the meeting of two kings, Your
Grace created a golden city in some sad damp fields in Picardy.
Since then, Your Grace has only increased in wisdom and the
king’s esteem.’
He is speaking for everyone to hear; and he thinks, that occasion was about peace, notionally, whereas this occasion, we don’t
know what this is, it is the first day of a long or a short campaign;
we had better dig in and hope our supply lines hold. ‘I think we
will manage to find some fire irons and soup kettles and whatever else George Cavendish thinks we can’t do without. When I remember that Your Grace provisioned the king’s great armies,
that went to fight in France.’
‘Yes,’ the cardinal says, ‘and we all know what you thought
about our campaigns, Thomas.’
Cavendish says, ‘What?’ and the cardinal says, ‘George, don’t
you call to mind what my man Cromwell said in the House of
Commons, was it five years past, when we wanted a subsidy for
the new war?’
‘But he spoke against Your Grace!’
Gascoigne – who hangs doggedly to this conversation – says,
‘You didn’t advance yourself there, master, speaking against the
king and my lord cardinal, because I do remember your speech,
and I assure you so will others, and you bought yourself no
favours there, Cromwell.’
He shrugs. ‘I didn’t mean to buy favour. We’re not all like you,
Gascoigne. I wanted the Commons to take some lessons from
the last time. To cast their minds back.’
‘You said we’d lose.’
‘I said we’d be bankrupted. But I tell you, all our wars would
have ended much worse without my lord cardinal to supply them.’
‘In the year 1523 –’ Gascoigne says.
‘Must we refight this now?’ says the cardinal.
‘– the Duke of Suffolk was only fifty miles from Paris.’
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘and do you know what fifty miles is, to a halfstarved infantryman in winter, when he sleeps on wet ground
and wakes up cold? Do you know what fifty miles is to a baggage
train, with carts up to the axles in mud? And as for the glories of
1513 – God defend us.’
‘Tournai! Thérouanne!’ Gascoigne shouts. ‘Are you blind to
what occurred? Two French towns taken! The king so valiant in
the field!’
If we were in the field now, he thinks, I’d spit at your feet. ‘If
you like the king so much, go and work for him. Or do you
already?’