Once, in the days of time immemorial, there was a king of
Greece who had thirty-three daughters. Each of these daughters
rose up in revolt and murdered her husband. Perplexed as to how
he had bred such rebels, but not wanting to kill his own flesh and
blood, their princely father exiled them and set them adrift in a
rudderless ship.
Their ship was provisioned for six months. By the end of this
period, the winds and tides had carried them to the edge of the
known earth. They landed on an island shrouded in mist. As it
had no name, the eldest of the killers gave it hers: Albina.
When they hit shore, they were hungry and avid for male
flesh. But there were no men to be found. The island was home
only to demons.
The thirty-three princesses mated with the demons and gave
birth to a race of giants, who in turn mated with their mothers
and produced more of their own kind. These giants spread over
the whole landmass of Britain. There were no priests, no
churches and no laws. There was also no way of telling the time.
After eight centuries of rule, they were overthrown by Trojan
Brutus.
The great-grandson of Aeneas, Brutus was born in Italy; his
mother died in giving birth to him, and his father, by accident, he killed with an arrow. He fled his birthplace and became leader of
a band of men who had been slaves in Troy. Together they
embarked on a voyage north, and the vagaries of wind and tide
drove them to Albina’s coast, as the sisters had been driven
before. When they landed they were forced to do battle with the
giants, led by Gogmagog. The giants were defeated and their
leader thrown into the sea.
Whichever way you look at it, it all begins in slaughter. Trojan
Brutus and his descendants ruled till the coming of the Romans.
Before London was called Lud’s Town, it was called New Troy.
And we were Trojans.
Some say the Tudors transcend this history, bloody and
demonic as it is: that they descend from Brutus through the line
of Constantine, son of St Helena, who was a Briton. Arthur,
High King of Britain, was Constantine’s grandson. He married
up to three women, all called Guinevere, and his tomb is at Glastonbury, but you must understand that he is not really dead, only
waiting his time to come again.
His blessed descendant, Prince Arthur of England, was born
in the year 1486, eldest son of Henry, the first Tudor king. This
Arthur married Katherine the princess of Aragon, died at fifteen
and was buried in Worcester Cathedral. If he were alive now, he
would be King of England. His younger brother Henry would
likely be Archbishop of Canterbury, and would not (at least, we
devoutly hope not) be in pursuit of a woman of whom the cardinal hears nothing good: a woman to whom, several years before
the dukes walk in to despoil him, he will need to turn his attention; whose history, before ruin seizes him, he will need to
comprehend.
Beneath every history, another history.
The lady appeared at court at the Christmas of 1521, dancing in a
yellow dress. She was – what? – about twenty years old. Daughter of the diplomat, Thomas Boleyn, she has been brought up since childhood in the Burgundian court at Mechelen and Brussels, and more recently in Paris, moving in Queen Claude’s train
between the pretty chateaux of the Loire. Now she speaks her
native tongue with a slight, unplaceable accent, strewing her
sentences with French words when she pretends she can’t think
of the English. At Shrovetide, she dances in a court masque. The
ladies are costumed as Virtues, and she takes the part of Perseverance. She dances gracefully but briskly, with an amused expression on her face, a hard, impersonal touch-me-not smile. Soon
she has a little trail of petty gentlemen following her; and one not
so petty gentleman. The rumour spreads that she is going to
marry Harry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland’s heir.
The cardinal hauls in her father. ‘Sir Thomas Boleyn,’ he says,
‘speak to your daughter, or I will. We brought her back from
France to marry her into Ireland, to the Butlers’ heir. Why does
she tarry?’
‘The Butlers …’ Sir Thomas begins, and the cardinal says, ‘Oh
yes? The Butlers what? Any problem you have there, I’ll fix the
Butlers. What I want to know is, did you put her up to it?
Conniving in corners with that foolish boy? Because, Sir
Thomas, let me make myself plain: I won’t have it. The king
won’t have it. It must be stopped.’
‘I have scarcely been in England these last months. Your Grace
cannot think that I am party to the scheme.’
‘No? You would be surprised what I can think. Is this your
best excuse? That you can’t govern your own children?’
Sir Thomas is looking wry and holding out his hands. He’s on
the verge of saying, young people today … But the cardinal stops
him. The cardinal suspects – and has confided his suspicion – that
the young woman is not enticed by the prospect of Kilkenny
Castle and its frugal amenities, nor by the kind of social life that
will be available to her when, on special occasions, she hacks on
the poor dirt roads to Dublin.
‘Who’s that?’ Boleyn says. ‘In the corner there? The cardinal waves a hand. ‘Just one of my legal people.’
‘Send him out.’
The cardinal sighs.
‘Is he taking notes of this conversation?’
‘Are you, Thomas?’ the cardinal calls. ‘If so, stop it at once.’
Half the world is called Thomas. Afterwards, Boleyn will
never be sure if it was him.
‘Look now, my lord,’ he says, his voice playing up and down
the diplomat’s scales: he is frank, a man of the world, and his
smile says, now Wolsey, now Wolsey, you’re a man of the world
too. ‘They’re young.’ He makes a gesture, designed to impersonate frankness. ‘She caught the boy’s eye. It’s natural. I’ve had to
break it to her. She knows it can’t proceed. She knows her place.’
‘Good,’ the cardinal says, ‘because it’s below a Percy. I mean,’
he adds, ‘below, in the dynastic sense. I am not speaking of what
one might do in a haystack on a warm night.’
‘He doesn’t accept it, the young man. They tell him to marry
Mary Talbot, but …’ and Boleyn gives a little careless laugh, ‘he
doesn’t care to marry Mary Talbot. He believes he is free to
choose his wife.’
‘Choose his –!’ the cardinal breaks off. ‘I never heard the like.
He’s not some ploughboy. He’s the man who will have to hold
the north for us, one of these days, and if he doesn’t understand
his position in the world then he must learn it or forfeit it. The
match already made with Shrewsbury’s daughter is a fit match
for him, and a match made by me, and agreed by the king. And
the Earl of Shrewsbury, I can tell you, doesn’t take kindly to this
sort of moonstruck clowning by a boy who’s promised to his
daughter.’
‘The difficulty is …’ Boleyn allows a discreet diplomatic
pause. ‘I think that, Harry Percy and my daughter, they may
have gone a little far in the matter.’
‘What? You mean we are speaking of a haystack and a warm
night? From the shadows he watches; he thinks Boleyn is the coldest,
smoothest man he has ever seen.
‘From what they tell me, they have pledged themselves before
witnesses. How can it be undone, then?’
The cardinal smashes his fist on the table. ‘I’ll tell you how. I
shall get his father down from the borders, and if the prodigal
defies him, he will be tossed out of his heirdom on his prodigal
snout. The earl has other sons, and better. And if you don’t want
the Butler marriage called off, and your lady daughter shrivelling
unmarriageable down in Sussex and costing you bed and board
for the rest of her life, you will forget any talk of pledges, and
witnesses – who are they, these witnesses? I know those kind of
witnesses who never show their faces when I send for them. So
never let me hear it. Pledges. Witnesses. Contracts. God in
Heaven!’
Boleyn is still smiling. He is a poised, slender man; it takes the
effort of every finely tuned muscle in his body to keep the smile
on his face.
‘I do not ask you,’ says Wolsey, relentless, ‘whether in this
matter you have sought the advice of your relatives in the
Howard family. I should be reluctant to think that it was with
their agreement that you launched yourself on this scheme. I
should be sorry to hear the Duke of Norfolk was apprised of
this: oh, very sorry indeed. So let me not hear it, eh? Go and ask
your relatives for some good advice. Marry the girl into Ireland
before the Butlers hear any rumour that she’s spoiled goods. Not
that I’d mention it. But the court does talk.’
Sir Thomas has two spots of angry red on his cheekbones. He
says, ‘Finished, my lord cardinal?’
‘Yes. Go.’
Boleyn turns, in a sweep of dark silks. Are those tears of
temper in his eyes? The light is dim, but he, Cromwell, is of very
strong sight. ‘Oh, a moment, Sir Thomas …’ the cardinal says.
His voice loops across the room and pulls his victim back. ‘Now, Sir Thomas, remember your ancestry. The Percy family
comprise, I do think, the noblest in the land. Whereas, notwithstanding your remarkable good fortune in marrying a Howard,
the Boleyns were in trade once, were they not? A person of your
name was Lord Mayor of London, not so? Or have I mixed up
your line with some Boleyns more distinguished?’
Sir Thomas’s face has drained; the scarlet spots have vanished
from his cheeks, and he is almost fainting with rage. As he quits
the room, he whispers, ‘Butcher’s boy.’ And as he passes the
clerk – whose beefy hand lies idly on his desk – he sneers,
‘Butcher’s dog.’
The door bangs. The cardinal says, ‘Come out, dog.’ He sits
laughing, with his elbows on his desk and his head in his hands.
‘Mark and learn,’ he says. ‘You can never advance your own
pedigree – and God knows, Tom, you were born in a more
dishonourable estate than me – so the trick is always to keep
them scraped up to their own standards. They made the rules;
they cannot complain if I am the strictest enforcer. Percys above
Boleyns. Who does he think he is?’
‘Is it good policy to make people angry?’
‘Oh, no. But it amuses me. My life is hard and I find I want
amusement.’ The cardinal casts on him a kindly eye; he suspects
he may be this evening’s further diversion, now that Boleyn has
been torn into strips and dropped on the ground like orange peel.
‘Who need one look up to? The Percys, the Staffords, the
Howards, the Talbots: yes. Use a long stick to stir them, if you
must. As for Boleyn – well, the king likes him, and he is an able
man. Which is why I open all his letters, and have done for
years.’
‘So has your lordship heard – no, forgive me, it is not fit for
your ears.’
‘What?’ says the cardinal.
‘It is only rumour. I should not like to mislead Your Grace.’ ‘You cannot speak and not speak. You must tell me now.’
‘It’s only what the women are saying. The silk women. And
the cloth merchants’ wives.’ He waits, smiling. ‘Which is of no
interest to you, I’m sure.’
Laughing, the cardinal pushes back his chair, and his shadow
rises with him. Firelit, it leaps. His arm darts out, his reach is
long, his hand is like the hand of God.
But when God closes his hand, his subject is across the room,
back to the wall.
The cardinal gives ground. His shadow wavers. It wavers and
comes to rest. He is still. The wall records the movement of his
breath. His head inclines. In a halo of light he seems to pause, to
examine his handful of nothing. He splays his fingers, his giant
firelit hand. He places it flat on his desk. It vanishes, melted into
the cloth of damask. He sits down again. His head is bowed; his
face, half-dark.
He Thomas, also Tomos, Tommaso and Thomaes Cromwell,
withdraws his past selves into his present body and edges back to
where he was before. His single shadow slides against the wall, a
visitor not sure of his welcome. Which of these Thomases saw
the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves
right through you. You shy, you duck, you run; or else the past
takes your fist and actuates it, without the intervention of will.
Suppose you have a knife in your fist? That’s how murder
happens.
He says something, the cardinal says something. They break
off. Two sentences go nowhere. The cardinal resumes his chair.
He hesitates before him; he sits down. The cardinal says, ‘I really
would like the London gossip. But I wasn’t planning to beat it
out of you.’
The cardinal bows his head, frowns at a paper on his desk; he is
allowing time for the difficult moment to pass, and when he
speaks again his tone is measured and easy, like a man telling anecdotes after supper. ‘When I was a child, my father had a friend a customer, really – who was of a florid complexion.’ He touches
his sleeve, in illustration. ‘Like this … scarlet. Revell was his
name, Miles Revell.’ His hand drifts to rest again, palm downwards on the blackish damask. ‘For some reason I used to believe
… though I dare say he was an honest citizen, and liked a glass of
Rhenish … I used to believe he was a drinker of blood. I don’t
know … some story I suppose that I had heard from my nurse, or
from some other silly child … and then when my father’s apprentices knew about it – only because I was foolish enough to whine
and cry – they would shout out, “Here comes Revell for his cup
of blood, run, Thomas Wolsey …” I used to flee as if the devil
were after me. Put the marketplace between us. I marvel that I
didn’t fall under a wagon. I used to run, and never look. Even
today,’ he says – he picks up a wax seal from the desk, turns it
over, turns it over, puts it down – ‘even today, when I see a fair,
florid man – let us say, the Duke of Suffolk – I feel inclined to
burst into tears.’ He pauses. His gaze comes to rest. ‘So, Thomas
… can’t a cleric stand up, unless you think he’s after your blood?’
He picks up the seal again; he turns it over in his fingers; he averts
his eyes; he begins to play with words. ‘Would a bishop abash
you? A parish clerk panic you? A deacon disconcert?’
He says, ‘What is the word? I don’t know in English … an
estoc …’
Perhaps there is no English word for it: the short-bladed knife
that, at close quarters, you push up under the ribs. The cardinal
says, ‘And this was …?’
This was some twenty years ago. The lesson is learned and
learned well. Night, ice, the still heart of Europe; a forest, lakes
silver beneath a pattern of winter stars; a room, firelight, a shape
slipping against the wall. He didn’t see his assassin, but he saw his
shadow move.
‘All the same …’ says the cardinal. ‘It’s forty years since I saw
Master Revell. He will be long dead, I suppose. And your man?’
He hesitates. ‘Long dead too? It is the most delicate way that can be contrived, to ask a man
if he has killed someone.
‘And in Hell, I should think. If your lordship pleases.’
That makes Wolsey smile; not the mention of Hell, but the
bow to the breadth of his jurisdiction. ‘So if you attacked the
young Cromwell, you went straight to the fiery pit?’
‘If you had seen him, my lord. He was too dirty for Purgatory.
The Blood of the Lamb can do much, we are told, but I doubt if
it could have wiped this fellow clean.’
‘I am all for a spotless world,’ Wolsey says. He looks sad.
‘Have you made a good confession?’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Have you made a good confession?’
‘My lord cardinal, I was a soldier.’
‘Soldiers have hope of Heaven.’
He looks up into Wolsey’s face. There’s no knowing what he
believes. He says, ‘We all have that.’ Soldiers, beggars, sailors, kings.
‘So you were a ruffian in your youth,’ the cardinal says. ‘Ça ne
fait rien.’ He broods. ‘This dirty fellow who attacked you … he
was not, in fact, in holy orders?’
He smiles. ‘I didn’t ask.’
‘These tricks of memory …’ the cardinal says. ‘Thomas, I shall
try not to move without giving you warning. And in that way we
shall do very well together.’
But the cardinal looks him over; he is still puzzling. It is early
in their association and his character, as invented by the cardinal,
is at this stage a work in progress; in fact, perhaps it is this
evening that sets it going? In the years to come, the cardinal will
say, ‘I often wonder, about the monastic ideal – especially as
applied to the young. My servant Cromwell, for instance – his
youth was secluded, spent almost entirely in fasting, prayer and
study of the Church Fathers. That’s why he’s so wild nowadays.’
And when people say, is he? – recalling, as best they can, a
man who seems peculiarly discreet; when they say, really? Your man Cromwell? the cardinal will shake his head and say, but I
try to mend matters, of course. When he breaks the windows we
just call in the glaziers and part with the cash. As for the procession of aggrieved young women … Poor creatures, I pay them
off …
But tonight he is back to business; hands clasped on his desk,
as if holding together the evening passed. ‘Come now, Thomas,
you were telling me of a rumour.’
‘The women judge from orders to the silk merchants that the
king has a new –’ He breaks off and says, ‘My lord, what do you
call a whore when she is a knight’s daughter?’
‘Ah,’ the cardinal says, entering into the problem. ‘To her face,
“my lady.” Behind her back – well, what is her name? Which
knight?’
He nods to where, ten minutes ago, Boleyn stood.
The cardinal looks alarmed. ‘Why did you not speak up?’
‘How could I have introduced the topic?’
The cardinal bows to the difficulty.
‘But it is not the Boleyn lady new at court. Not Harry Percy’s
lady. It is her sister.’
‘I see.’ The cardinal drops back in his chair. ‘Of course.’
Mary Boleyn is a kind little blonde, who is said to have been
passed all around the French court before coming home to this
one, scattering goodwill, her frowning little sister trotting always
at her heels.
‘Of course, I have followed the direction of His Majesty’s
eye,’ the cardinal says. He nods to himself. ‘Are they now close?
Does the queen know? Or can’t you say?’
He nods. The cardinal sighs. ‘Katherine is a saint. Still, if I
were a saint, and a queen, perhaps I would feel I could take no
harm from Mary Boleyn. Presents, eh? What sort? Not lavish,
you say? I am sorry for her then; she should seize her advantage
while it lasts. It’s not that our king has so many adventures,
though they do say … they say that when His Majesty was young, not yet king, it was Boleyn’s wife who relieved him of his
virgin state.’
‘Elizabeth Boleyn?’ He is not often surprised. ‘This one’s
mother?’
‘The same. Perhaps the king lacks imagination in that way.
Not that I ever believed it … If we were at the other side, you
know,’ he gestures in the direction of Dover, ‘we wouldn’t even
try to keep track of the women. My friend King François – they
do say he once oozed up to the lady he’d been with the night
before, gave her a formal kiss of the hand, asked her name, and
wished they might be better friends.’ He bobs his head, liking the
success of his story. ‘But Mary won’t cause difficulties. She’s an
easy armful. The king could do worse.’
‘But her family will want to get something out of it. What did
they get before?’
‘The chance to make themselves useful.’ Wolsey breaks off
and makes a note. He can imagine its content: what Boleyn can
have, if he asks nicely. The cardinal looks up. ‘So should I have
been, in my interview with Sir Thomas – how shall I put it –
more douce?’
‘I don’t think my lord could have been sweeter. Witness his
face when he left us. The picture of soothed gratification.’
‘Thomas, from now on, any London gossip,’ he touches the
damask cloth, ‘bring it right here to me. Don’t trouble about the
source. Let the trouble be mine. And I promise never to assault
you. Truly.’
‘It is forgotten.’
‘I doubt that. Not if you’ve carried the lesson all these years.’
The cardinal sits back; he considers. ‘At least she is married.’
Mary Boleyn, he means. ‘So if she whelps, he can acknowledge it
or not, as he pleases. He has a boy from John Blount’s daughter
and he won’t want too many.’
Too large a royal nursery can be encumbering to a king. The
example of history and of other nations shows that the mothers