PART ONE

I
Across the Narrow Sea

‘So now get up.’
Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the
cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned
towards the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out.
One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.
Blood from the gash on his head – which was his father’s first
effort – is trickling across his face. Add to this, his left eye is
blinded; but if he squints sideways, with his right eye he can see
that the stitching of his father’s boot is unravelling. The twine has
sprung clear of the leather, and a hard knot in it has caught his
eyebrow and opened another cut.
‘So now get up!’ Walter is roaring down at him, working out
where to kick him next. He lifts his head an inch or two, and
moves forward, on his belly, trying to do it without exposing his
hands, on which Walter enjoys stamping. ‘What are you, an eel?’
his parent asks. He trots backwards, gathers pace, and aims
another kick.
It knocks the last breath out of him; he thinks it may be his last.
His forehead returns to the ground; he lies waiting, for Walter to
jump on him. The dog, Bella, is barking, shut away in an
outhouse. I’ll miss my dog, he thinks. The yard smells of beer and
blood. Someone is shouting, down on the riverbank. Nothing hurts, or perhaps it’s that everything hurts, because there is no
separate pain that he can pick out. But the cold strikes him, just in
one place: just through his cheekbone as it rests on the cobbles.
‘Look now, look now,’ Walter bellows. He hops on one foot,
as if he’s dancing. ‘Look what I’ve done. Burst my boot, kicking
your head.’
Inch by inch. Inch by inch forward. Never mind if he calls you
an eel or a worm or a snake. Head down, don’t provoke him. His
nose is clotted with blood and he has to open his mouth to
breathe. His father’s momentary distraction at the loss of his
good boot allows him the leisure to vomit. ‘That’s right,’ Walter
yells. ‘Spew everywhere.’ Spew everywhere, on my good
cobbles. ‘Come on, boy, get up. Let’s see you get up. By the
blood of creeping Christ, stand on your feet.’
Creeping Christ? he thinks. What does he mean? His head
turns sideways, his hair rests in his own vomit, the dog barks,
Walter roars, and bells peal out across the water. He feels a sensation of movement, as if the filthy ground has become the
Thames. It gives and sways beneath him; he lets out his breath,
one great final gasp. You’ve done it this time, a voice tells Walter.
But he closes his ears, or God closes them for him. He is pulled
downstream, on a deep black tide.
The next thing he knows, it is almost noon, and he is propped in
the doorway of Pegasus the Flying Horse. His sister Kat is
coming from the kitchen with a rack of hot pies in her hands.
When she sees him she almost drops them. Her mouth opens in
astonishment. ‘Look at you!’
‘Kat, don’t shout, it hurts me.’
She bawls for her husband: ‘Morgan Williams!’ She rotates on
the spot, eyes wild, face flushed from the oven’s heat. ‘Take this
tray, body of God, where are you all?’
He is shivering from head to foot, exactly like Bella did when
she fell off the boat that time. A girl runs in. ‘The master’s gone to town.’
‘I know that, fool.’ The sight of her brother had panicked the
knowledge out of her. She thrusts the tray at the girl. ‘If you leave
them where the cats can get at them, I’ll box your ears till you see
stars.’ Her hands empty, she clasps them for a moment in violent
prayer. ‘Fighting again, or was it your father?’
Yes, he says, vigorously nodding, making his nose drop
gouts of blood: yes, he indicates himself, as if to say, Walter was
here. Kat calls for a basin, for water, for water in a basin, for a
cloth, for the devil to rise up, right now, and take away Walter
his servant. ‘Sit down before you fall down.’ He tries to explain
that he has just got up. Out of the yard. It could be an hour ago,
it could even be a day, and for all he knows, today might be
tomorrow; except that if he had lain there for a day, surely
either Walter would have come and killed him, for being in the
way, or his wounds would have clotted a bit, and by now he
would be hurting all over and almost too stiff to move; from
deep experience of Walter’s fists and boots, he knows that the
second day can be worse than the first. ‘Sit. Don’t talk,’ Kat
says.
When the basin comes, she stands over him and works away,
dabbing at his closed eye, working in small circles round and
round at his hairline. Her breathing is ragged and her free hand
rests on his shoulder. She swears under her breath, and sometimes she cries, and rubs the back of his neck, whispering, ‘There,
hush, there,’ as if it were he who were crying, though he isn’t. He
feels as if he is floating, and she is weighting him to earth; he
would like to put his arms around her and his face in her apron,
and rest there listening to her heartbeat. But he doesn’t want to
mess her up, get blood all down the front of her.
When Morgan Williams comes in, he is wearing his good town
coat. He looks Welsh and pugnacious; it’s clear he’s heard the
news. He stands by Kat, staring down, temporarily out of words;
till he says, ‘See!’ He makes a fist, and jerks it three times in the air. ‘That!’ he says. ‘That’s what he’d get. Walter. That’s what
he’d get. From me.’
‘Just stand back,’ Kat advises. ‘You don’t want bits of Thomas
on your London jacket.’
No more does he. He backs off. ‘I wouldn’t care, but look at
you, boy. You could cripple the brute in a fair fight.’
‘It never is a fair fight,’ Kat says. ‘He comes up behind you,
right, Thomas? With something in his hand.’
‘Looks like a glass bottle, in this case,’ Morgan Williams says.
‘Was it a bottle?’
He shakes his head. His nose bleeds again.
‘Don’t do that, brother,’ Kat says. It’s all over her hand; she
wipes the blood clots down herself. What a mess, on her apron;
he might as well have put his head there after all.
‘I don’t suppose you saw?’ Morgan says. ‘What he was wielding, exactly?’
‘That’s the value,’ says Kat, ‘of an approach from behind – you
sorry loss to the magistrates’ bench. Listen, Morgan, shall I tell
you about my father? He’ll pick up whatever’s to hand. Which is
sometimes a bottle, true. I’ve seen him do it to my mother. Even
our little Bet, I’ve seen him hit her over the head. Also I’ve not
seen him do it, which was worse, and that was because it was me
about to be felled.’
‘I wonder what I’ve married into,’ Morgan Williams says.
But really, this is just something Morgan says; some men have
a habitual sniffle, some women have a headache, and Morgan has
this wonder. The boy doesn’t listen to him; he thinks, if my
father did that to my mother, so long dead, then maybe he killed
her? No, surely he’d have been taken up for it; Putney’s lawless,
but you don’t get away with murder. Kat’s what he’s got for a
mother: crying for him, rubbing the back of his neck.
He shuts his eyes, to make the left eye equal with the right; he
tries to open both. ‘Kat,’ he says, ‘I have got an eye under there,
have I? Because it can’t see anything.’ Yes, yes, yes, she says, while Morgan Williams continues his interrogation of the facts; settles
on a hard, moderately heavy, sharp object, but possibly not a
broken bottle, otherwise Thomas would have seen its jagged edge,
prior to Walter splitting his eyebrow open and aiming to blind
him. He hears Morgan forming up this theory and would like to
speak about the boot, the knot, the knot in the twine, but the
effort of moving his mouth seems disproportionate to the reward.
By and large he agrees with Morgan’s conclusion; he tries to
shrug, but it hurts so much, and he feels so crushed and
disjointed, that he wonders if his neck is broken.
‘Anyway,’ Kat says, ‘what were you doing, Tom, to set him off?
He usually won’t start up till after dark, if it’s for no cause at all.’
‘Yes,’ Morgan Williams says, ‘was there a cause?’
‘Yesterday. I was fighting.’
‘You were fighting yesterday? Who in the holy name were
you fighting?’
‘I don’t know.’ The name, along with the reason, has dropped
out of his head; but it feels as if, in exiting, it has removed a
jagged splinter of bone from his skull. He touches his scalp, carefully. Bottle? Possible.
‘Oh,’ Kat says, ‘they’re always fighting. Boys. Down by the
river.’
‘So let me be sure I have this right,’ Morgan says. ‘He comes
home yesterday with his clothes torn and his knuckles skinned,
and the old man says, what’s this, been fighting? He waits a day,
then hits him with a bottle. Then he knocks him down in the
yard, kicks him all over, beats up and down his length with a
plank of wood that comes to hand …’
‘Did he do that?’
‘It’s all over the parish! They were lining up on the wharf to
tell me, they were shouting at me before the boat tied up.
Morgan Williams, listen now, your wife’s father has beaten
Thomas and he’s crawled dying to his sister’s house, they’ve
called the priest … Did you call the priest?

‘Oh, you Williamses!’ Kat says. ‘You think you’re such big
people around here. People are lining up to tell you things. But
why is that? It’s because you believe anything.’
‘But it’s right!’ Morgan yells. ‘As good as right! Eh? If you
leave out the priest. And that he’s not dead yet.’
‘You’ll make that magistrates’ bench for sure,’ Kat says, ‘with
your close study of the difference between a corpse and my
brother.’
‘When I’m a magistrate, I’ll have your father in the stocks.
Fine him? You can’t fine him enough. What’s the point of fining
a person who will only go and rob or swindle monies to the same
value out of some innocent who crosses his path?’
He moans: tries to do it without intruding.
‘There, there, there,’ Kat whispers.
‘I’d say the magistrates have had their bellyful,’ Morgan says.
‘If he’s not watering his ale, he’s running illegal beasts on the
common, if he’s not despoiling the common he’s assaulting an
officer of the peace, if he’s not drunk he’s dead drunk, and if he’s
not dead before his time there’s no justice in this world.’
‘Finished?’ Kat says. She turns back to him. ‘Tom, you’d
better stay with us now. Morgan Williams, what do you say?
He’ll be good to do the heavy work, when he’s healed up. He can
do the figures for you, he can add and … what’s the other thing?
All right, don’t laugh at me, how much time do you think I had
for learning figures, with a father like that? If I can write my
name, it’s because Tom here taught me.’
‘He won’t,’ he says. ‘Like it.’ He can only manage like this:
short, simple, declarative sentences.
‘Like? He should be ashamed,’ Morgan says.
Kat says, ‘Shame was left out when God made my dad.’
He says, ‘Because. Just a mile away. He can easily.’
‘Come after you? Just let him.’ Morgan demonstrates his fist
again: his little nervy Welsh punch. After Kat had finished swabbing him and Morgan Williams had
ceased boasting and reconstructing the assault, he lay up for an
hour or two, to recover from it. During this time, Walter came to
the door, with some of his acquaintance, and there was a certain
amount of shouting and kicking of doors, though it came to him in
a muffled way and he thought he might have dreamed it. The question in his mind now is, what am I going to do, I can’t stay in
Putney. Partly this is because his memory is coming back, for the
day before yesterday and the earlier fight, and he thinks there might
have been a knife in it somewhere; and whoever it was stuck in, it
wasn’t him, so was it by him? All this is unclear in his mind. What
is clear is his thought about Walter: I’ve had enough of this. If he
gets after me again I’m going to kill him, and if I kill him they’ll
hang me, and if they’re going to hang me I want a better reason.
Below, the rise and fall of their voices. He can’t pick out every
word. Morgan says he’s burnt his boats. Kat is repenting of her
first offer, a post as pot-boy, general factotum and chucker-out;
because, Morgan’s saying, ‘Walter will always be coming round
here, won’t he? And “Where’s Tom, send him home, who paid
the bloody priest to teach him to read and write, I did, and you’re
reaping the bloody benefit now, you leek-eating cunt.”’
He comes downstairs. Morgan says cheerily, ‘You’re looking
well, considering.’
The truth is about Morgan Williams – and he doesn’t like him
any the less for it – the truth is, this idea he has that one day he’ll
beat up his father-in-law, it’s solely in his mind. In fact, he’s
frightened of Walter, like a good many people in Putney – and,
for that matter, Mortlake and Wimbledon.
He says, ‘I’m on my way, then.’
Kat says, ‘You have to stay tonight. You know the second day
is the worst.’
‘Who’s he going to hit when I’m gone?’
‘Not our affair,’ Kat says. ‘Bet is married and got out of it,
thank God. Morgan Williams says, ‘If Walter was my father, I tell you, I’d
take to the road.’ He waits. ‘As it happens, we’ve gathered some
ready money.’
A pause.
‘I’ll pay you back.’
Morgan says, laughing, relieved, ‘And how will you do that,
Tom?’
He doesn’t know. Breathing is difficult, but that doesn’t mean
anything, it’s only because of the clotting inside his nose. It
doesn’t seem to be broken; he touches it, speculatively, and Kat
says, careful, this is a clean apron. She’s smiling a pained smile,
she doesn’t want him to go, and yet she’s not going to contradict
Morgan Williams, is she? The Williamses are big people, in
Putney, in Wimbledon. Morgan dotes on her; he reminds her
she’s got girls to do the baking and mind the brewing, why
doesn’t she sit upstairs sewing like a lady, and praying for his
success when he goes off to London to do a few deals in his town
coat? Twice a day she could sweep through the Pegasus in a good
dress and set in order anything that’s wrong: that’s his idea. And
though as far as he can see she works as hard as ever she did when
she was a child, he can see how she might like it, that Morgan
would exhort her to sit down and be a lady.
‘I’ll pay you back,’ he says. ‘I might go and be a soldier. I could
send you a fraction of my pay and I might get loot.’
Morgan says, ‘But there isn’t a war.’
‘There’ll be one somewhere,’ Kat says.
‘Or I could be a ship’s boy. But, you know, Bella – do you
think I should go back for her? She was screaming. He had her
shut up.’
‘So she wouldn’t nip his toes?’ Morgan says. He’s satirical
about Bella.
‘I’d like her to come away with me.’
‘I’ve heard of a ship’s cat. Not of a ship’s dog.’
‘She’s very small. ‘She’ll not pass for a cat,’ Morgan laughs. ‘Anyway, you’re too
big all round for a ship’s boy. They have to run up the rigging like
little monkeys – have you ever seen a monkey, Tom? Soldier is
more like it. Be honest, like father like son – you weren’t last in
line when God gave out fists.’
‘Right,’ Kat said. ‘Shall we see if we understand this? One day
my brother Tom goes out fighting. As punishment, his father
creeps up behind and hits him with a whatever, but heavy, and
probably sharp, and then, when he falls down, almost takes out
his eye, exerts himself to kick in his ribs, beats him with a plank
of wood that stands ready to hand, knocks in his face so that if I
were not his own sister I’d barely recognise him: and my
husband says, the answer to this, Thomas, is go for a soldier, go
and find somebody you don’t know, take out his eye and kick in
his ribs, actually kill him, I suppose, and get paid for it.’
‘May as well,’ Morgan says, ‘as go fighting by the river,
without profit to anybody. Look at him – if it were up to me, I’d
have a war just to employ him.’
Morgan takes out his purse. He puts down coins: chink, chink,
chink, with enticing slowness.
He touches his cheekbone. It is bruised, intact: but so cold.
‘Listen,’ Kat says, ‘we grew up here, there’s probably people
that would help Tom out –’
Morgan gives her a look: which says, eloquently, do you mean
there are a lot of people would like to be on the wrong side of
Walter Cromwell? Have him breaking their doors down? And
she says, as if hearing his thought out loud, ‘No. Maybe. Maybe,
Tom, it would be for the best, do you think?’
He stands up. She says, ‘Morgan, look at him, he shouldn’t go
tonight.’
‘I should. An hour from now he’ll have had a skinful and he’ll
be back. He’d set the place on fire if he thought I were in it.’
Morgan says, ‘Have you got what you need for the road?’
He wants to turn to Kat and say, no. But she’s turned her face away and she’s crying. She’s not
crying for him, because nobody, he thinks, will ever cry for him,
God didn’t cut him out that way. She’s crying for her idea of
what life should be like: Sunday after church, all the sisters,
sisters-in-law, wives kissing and patting, swatting at each other’s
children and at the same time loving them and rubbing their little
round heads, women comparing and swapping babies, and all the
men gathering and talking business, wool, yarn, lengths, shipping, bloody Flemings, fishing rights, brewing, annual turnover,
nice timely information, favour-for-favour, little sweeteners,
little retainers, my attorney says … That’s what it should be like,
married to Morgan Williams, with the Williamses being a big
family in Putney … But somehow it’s not been like that. Walter
has spoiled it all.
Carefully, stiffly, he straightens up. Every part of him hurts
now. Not as badly as it will hurt tomorrow; on the third day the
bruises come out and you have to start answering people’s questions about why you’ve got them. By then he will be far from
here, and presumably no one will hold him to account, because
no one will know him or care. They’ll think it’s usual for him to
have his face beaten in.
He picks up the money. He says, ‘Hwyl, Morgan Williams.
Diolch am yr arian.’ Thank you for the money. ‘Gofalwch am
Katheryn. Gofalwch am eich busness. Wela I chi eto rhywbryd.
Pobl lwc.’
Look after my sister. Look after your business. See you again
sometime.
Morgan Williams stares.
He almost grins; would do, if it wouldn’t split his face open.
All those days he’d spent hanging around the Williamses’ households: did they think he’d just come for his dinner?
‘Pobl lwc,’ Morgan says slowly. Good luck.
He says, ‘If I follow the river, is that as good as anything?’
‘Where are you trying to get? ‘To the sea.’
For a moment, Morgan Williams looks sorry it has come to this.
He says, ‘You’ll be all right, Tom? I tell you, if Bella comes looking
for you, I won’t send her home hungry. Kat will give her a pie.’
He has to make the money last. He could work his way downriver; but he is afraid that if he is seen, Walter will catch him,
through his contacts and his friends, those kind of men who will
do anything for a drink. What he thinks of, first, is slipping on to
one of the smugglers’ ships that go out of Barking, Tilbury. But
then he thinks, France is where they have wars. A few people he
talks to – he talks to strangers very easily – are of the same belief.
Dover then. He gets on the road.
If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It
gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men
trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a
wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great
many problems. And then horses, he’s always been around
horses, frightened horses too, because when in the morning
Walter wasn’t sleeping off the effects of the strong brew he kept
for himself and his friends, he would turn to his second trade,
farrier and blacksmith; and whether it was his sour breath, or his
loud voice, or his general way of going on, even horses that were
good to shoe would start to shake their heads and back away
from the heat. Their hooves gripped in Walter’s hands, they’d
tremble; it was his job to hold their heads and talk to them,
rubbing the velvet space between their ears, telling them how
their mothers love them and talk about them still, and how
Walter will soon be over.
He doesn’t eat for a day or so; it hurts too much. But by the time
he reaches Dover the big gash on his scalp has closed, and the
tender parts inside, he trusts, have mended themselves: kidneys,
lungs and heart.

He knows by the way people look at him that his face is still
bruised. Morgan Williams had done an inventory of him before
he left: teeth (miraculously) still in his head, and two eyes, miraculously seeing. Two arms, two legs: what more do you want?
He walks around the docks saying to people, do you know
where there’s a war just now?
Each man he asks stares at his face, steps back and says, ‘You
tell me!’
They are so pleased with this, they laugh at their own wit so
much, that he continues asking, just to give people pleasure.
Surprisingly, he finds he will leave Dover richer than he
arrived. He’d watched a man doing the three-card trick, and
when he learned it he set up for himself. Because he’s a boy,
people stop to have a go. It’s their loss.
He adds up what he’s got and what he’s spent. Deduct a small
sum for a brief grapple with a lady of the night. Not the sort of
thing you could do in Putney, Wimbledon or Mortlake. Not
without the Williams family getting to know, and talking about
you in Welsh.
He sees three elderly Lowlanders struggling with their bundles
and moves to help them. The packages are soft and bulky, samples
of woollen cloth. A port officer gives them trouble about their
documents, shouting into their faces. He lounges behind the
clerk, pretending to be a Lowland oaf, and tells the merchants by
holding up his fingers what he thinks a fair bribe. ‘Please,’ says
one of them, in effortful English to the clerk, ‘will you take care
of these English coins for me? I find them surplus.’ Suddenly the
clerk is all smiles. The Lowlanders are all smiles; they would have
paid much more. When they board they say, ‘The boy is with us.’
As they wait to cast off, they ask him his age. He says eighteen,
but they laugh and say, child, you are never. He offers them
fifteen, and they confer and decide that fifteen will do; they think
he’s younger, but they don’t want to shame him. They ask what’s
happened to his face. There are several things he could say but he selects the truth. He doesn’t want them to think he’s some failed
robber. They discuss it among themselves, and the one who can
translate turns to him: ‘We are saying, the English are cruel to
their children. And cold-hearted. The child must stand if his
father comes in the room. Always the child should say very
correctly, “my father, sir”, and “madam my mother”.’
He is surprised. Are there people in the world who are not
cruel to their children? For the first time, the weight in his chest
shifts a little; he thinks, there could be other places, better. He
talks; he tells them about Bella, and they look sorry, and they
don’t say anything stupid like, you can get another dog. He tells
them about the Pegasus, and about his father’s brewhouse and
how Walter gets fined for bad beer at least twice a year. He tells
them about how he gets fines for stealing wood, cutting down
other people’s trees, and about the too-many sheep he runs on the
common. They are interested in that; they show the woollen
samples and discuss among themselves the weight and the weave,
turning to him from time to time to include and instruct him.
They don’t think much of English finished cloth generally,
though these samples can make them change their mind … He
loses the thread of the conversation when they try to tell him their
reasons for going to Calais, and different people they know there.
He tells them about his father’s blacksmith business, and the
English-speaker says, interested, can you make a horseshoe? He
mimes to them what it’s like, hot metal and a bad-tempered
father in a small space. They laugh; they like to see him telling a
story. Good talker, one of them says. Before they dock, the most
silent of them will stand up and make an oddly formal speech, at
which one will nod, and which the other will translate. ‘We are
three brothers. This is our street. If ever you visit our town, there
is a bed and hearth and food for you.’
Goodbye, he will say to them. Goodbye and good luck with
your lives. Hwyl, cloth men. Golfalwch eich busness. He is not
stopping till he gets to a war. The weather is cold but the sea is flat. Kat has given him a holy
medal to wear. He has slung it around his neck with a cord. It
makes a chill against the skin of his throat. He unloops it. He
touches it with his lips, for luck. He drops it; it whispers into the
water. He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a grey
wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.

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.

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.

III
At Austin Friars
1527

Lizzie is still up. When she hears the servants let him in, she comes
out with his little dog under her arm, fighting and squealing.
‘Forget where you lived?’
He sighs.
‘How was Yorkshire?’
He shrugs.
‘The cardinal?’
He nods.
‘Eaten?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tired?’
‘Not really.’
‘Drink?’
‘Yes.’
‘Rhenish?’
‘Why not.’
The panelling has been painted. He walks into the subdued
green and golden glow. ‘Gregory –’
‘Letter?’
‘Of sorts.’
She gives him the letter and the dog, while she fetches the
wine. She sits down, taking a cup herself. ‘He greets us. As if there were only one of us. Bad Latin.’
‘Ah, well,’ she says.
‘So, listen. He hopes you are well. Hopes I am well. Hopes his
lovely sisters Anne and little Grace are well. He himself is well.
And now no more for lack of time, your dutiful son, Gregory
Cromwell.’
‘Dutiful?’ she says. ‘Just that?’
‘It’s what they teach them.’
The dog Bella nibbles his fingertips, her round innocent eyes
shining at him like alien moons. Liz looks well, if worn by her
long day; wax tapers stand tall and straight behind her. She is
wearing the string of pearls and garnets that he gave her at New
Year.
‘You’re sweeter to look at than the cardinal,’ he says.
‘That’s the smallest compliment a woman ever received.’
‘And I’ve been working on it all the way from Yorkshire.’ He
shakes his head. ‘Ah well!’ He holds Bella up in the air; she kicks
her legs in glee. ‘How’s business?’
Liz does a bit of silk-work. Tags for the seals on documents;
fine net cauls for ladies at court. She has two girl apprentices in
the house, and an eye on fashion; but she complains, as always,
about the middlemen, and the price of thread. ‘We should go to
Genoa,’ he says. ‘I’ll teach you to look the suppliers in the eye.’
‘I’d like that. But you’ll never get away from the cardinal.’
‘He tried to persuade me tonight that I should get to know
people in the queen’s household. The Spanish-speakers.’
‘Oh?’
‘I told him my Spanish wasn’t so good.’
‘Not good?’ She laughs. ‘You weasel.’
‘He doesn’t have to know everything I know.’
‘I’ve been visiting in Cheapside,’ she says. She names one of her
old friends, a master jeweller’s wife. ‘Would you like the news? A
big emerald was ordered and a setting commissioned, for a ring, a
woman’s ring.’ She shows him the emerald, big as her thumbnail. ‘Which arrived, after a few anxious weeks, and they were cutting
it in Antwerp.’ Her fingers flick outwards. ‘Shattered!’
‘So who bears the loss?’
‘The cutter says he was swindled and it was a hidden flaw in
the base. The importer says, if it was so hidden, how could I be
expected to know? The cutter says, so collect damages from your
supplier …’
‘They’ll be at law for years. Can they get another?’
‘They’re trying. It must be the king, so we think. Nobody else
in London would be in the market for a stone of that size. So
who’s it for? It isn’t for the queen.’
The tiny Bella now lies back along his arm, her eyes blinking,
her tail gently stirring. He thinks, I shall be curious to see if and
when an emerald ring appears. The cardinal will tell me. The
cardinal says, it’s all very well, this business of holding the king
off and angling after presents, but he will have her in his bed this
summer, for sure, and by the autumn he’ll be tired of her, and
pension her off; if he doesn’t, I will. If Wolsey’s going to import
a fertile French princess, he doesn’t want her first weeks spoiled
by scenes of spite with superseded concubines. The king, Wolsey
thinks, ought to be more ruthless about his women.
Liz waits for a moment, till she knows she isn’t going to get a
hint. ‘Now, about Gregory,’ she says. ‘Summer coming. Here, or
away?’
Gregory is coming up thirteen. He’s at Cambridge, with his
tutor. He’s sent his nephews, his sister Bet’s sons, to school with
him; it’s something he is glad to do for the family. The summer is
for their recreation; what would they do in the city? Gregory has
little interest in his books so far, though he likes to be told
stories, dragon stories, stories of green people who live in the
woods; you can drag him squealing through a passage of Latin if
you persuade him that over the page there’s a sea serpent or a
ghost. He likes to be in the woods and fields and he likes to hunt.
He has plenty of growing to do, and we hope he will grow tall. The king’s maternal grandfather, as all old men will tell you,
stood six foot four. (His father, however, was more the size of
Morgan Williams.) The king stands six foot two, and the cardinal
can look him in the eye. Henry likes to have about him men like
his brother-in-law Charles Brandon, of a similar impressive
height and breadth of padded shoulder. Height is not the fashion
in the back alleys; and, obviously, not in Yorkshire.
He smiles. What he says about Gregory is, at least he isn’t like I
was, when I was his age; and when people say, what were you like?
he says, oh, I used to stick knives in people. Gregory would never
do that; so he doesn’t mind – or minds less than people think – if
he doesn’t really get to grips with declensions and conjugations.
When people tell him what Gregory has failed to do, he says, ‘He’s
busy growing.’ He understands his need to sleep; he never got
much sleep himself, with Walter stamping around, and after he ran
away he was always on the ship or on the road, and then he found
himself in an army. The thing people don’t understand about an
army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to
scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising
water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted
abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the
gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but
not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething
anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or
whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good
at the basic business of thinking. It didn’t take him many winters
to get out of fighting and into supply. In Italy, you could always
fight in the summer, if you felt like it. If you wanted to go out.
‘Asleep?’ Liz says.
‘No. But dreaming.’
‘The Castile soap came. And your book from Germany. It was
packaged as something else. I almost sent the boy away. In Yorkshire, which smelled of unwashed men, wearing
sheepskins and sweating with anger, he had dreams about the
Castile soap.
Later she says, ‘So who is the lady?’
His hand, resting on her familiar but lovely left breast,
removes itself in bewilderment. ‘What?’ Does she think he has
taken up with some woman in Yorkshire? He falls on to his back
and wonders how to persuade her this is not so; if necessary he’ll
take her there, and then she’ll see.
‘The emerald lady?’ she says. ‘I only ask because people say
the king is wanting to do something very strange, and I can’t
really believe it. But that is the word in the city.’
Really? Rumour has advanced, in the fortnight while he has
been north among the slope-heads.
‘If he tries this,’ she says, ‘then half the people in the world
will be against it.’
He had only thought, and Wolsey had only thought, that the
Emperor and Spain would be against it. Only the Emperor. He
smiles in the dark, hands behind his head. He doesn’t say, which
people, but waits for Liz to tell him. ‘All women,’ she says. ‘All
women everywhere in England. All women who have a daughter
but no son. All women who have lost a child. All women who
have lost any hope of having a child. All women who are forty.’
She puts her head on his shoulder. Too tired to speak, they lie
side by side, in sheets of fine linen, under a quilt of yellow turkey
satin. Their bodies breathe out the faint borrowed scent of sun
and herbs. In Castilian, he remembers, he can insult people.
‘Are you asleep now?’
‘No. Thinking.’
‘Thomas,’ she says, sounding shocked, ‘it’s three o’clock.’
And then it is six. He dreams that all the women of England
are in bed, jostling and pushing him out of it. So he gets up, to
read his German book, before Liz can do anything about it. It’s not that she says anything; or only, when provoked, she
says, ‘My prayer book is good reading for me.’ And indeed she
does read her prayer book, taking it in her hand absently in the
middle of the day – but only half stopping what she’s doing –
interspersing her murmured litany with household instructions;
it was a wedding present, a book of hours, from her first
husband, and he wrote her new married name in it, Elizabeth
Williams. Sometimes, feeling jealous, he would like to write
other things, contrarian sentiments: he knew Liz’s first husband,
but that doesn’t mean he liked him. He has said, Liz, there’s
Tyndale’s book, his New Testament, in the locked chest there,
read it, here’s the key; she says, you read it to me if you’re so
keen, and he says, it’s in English, read it for yourself: that’s the
point, Lizzie. You read it, you’ll be surprised what’s not in it.
He’d thought this hint would draw her: seemingly not. He
can’t imagine himself reading to his household; he’s not, like
Thomas More, some sort of failed priest, a frustrated preacher.
He never sees More – a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod – without wanting to ask him, what’s
wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in
what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up
with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and
a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every
month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of
this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the
Bible, ‘Purgatory’. Show me where it says relics, monks, nuns.
Show me where it says ‘Pope’.
He turns back to his German book. The king, with help from
Thomas More, has written a book against Luther, for which the
Pope has granted him the title of Defender of the Faith. It’s not
that he loves Brother Martin himself; he and the cardinal agree it
would be better if Luther had never been born, or better if he had
been born more subtle. Still, he keeps up with what’s written, with what’s smuggled through the Channel ports, and the little
East Anglian inlets, the tidal creeks where a small boat with
dubious cargo can be beached and pushed out again, by moonlight, to sea. He keeps the cardinal informed, so that when More
and his clerical friends storm in, breathing hellfire about the
newest heresy, the cardinal can make calming gestures, and say,
‘Gentlemen, I am already informed.’ Wolsey will burn books,
but not men. He did so, only last October, at St Paul’s Cross: a
holocaust of the English language, and so much rag-rich paper
consumed, and so much black printers’ ink.
The Testament he keeps in the chest is the pirated edition from
Antwerp, which is easier to get hold of than the proper German
printing. He knows William Tyndale; before London got too hot
for him, he lodged six months with Humphrey Monmouth, the
master draper, in the city. He is a principled man, a hard man, and
Thomas More calls him The Beast; he looks as if he has never
laughed in his life, but then, what’s there to laugh about, when
you’re driven from your native shore? His Testament is in
octavo, nasty cheap paper: on the title page, where the printer’s
colophon and address should be, the words ‘printed in utopia’.
He hopes Thomas More has seen one of these. He is tempted to
show him, just to see his face.
He closes the new book. It’s time to get on with the day. He
knows he has not time to put the text into Latin himself, so it can
be discreetly circulated; he should ask somebody to do it for him,
for love or money. It is surprising how much love there is, these
days, between those who read German.
By seven, he is shaved, breakfasted and wrapped beautifully in
fresh unborrowed linen and dark fine wool. Sometimes, at this
hour, he misses Liz’s father; that good old man, who would
always be up early, ready to drop a flat hand on his head and say,
enjoy your day, Thomas, on my behalf.
He had liked old Wykys. He first came to him on a legal
matter. In those days he was – what, twenty-six, twenty-seven? not long back from abroad, prone to start a sentence in one
language and finish it in another. Wykys had been shrewd and
had made a tidy fortune in the wool trade. He was a Putney man
originally, but that wasn’t why he employed him; it was because
he came recommended and came cheap. At their first conference,
as Wykys laid out the papers, he had said, ‘You’re Walter’s lad,
aren’t you? So what happened? Because, by God, there was no
one rougher than you were when you were a boy.’
He would have explained, if he’d known what sort of explanation Wykys would understand. I gave up fighting because, when
I lived in Florence, I looked at frescoes every day? He said, ‘I
found an easier way to be.’
Latterly, Wykys had grown tired, let the business slide. He
was still sending broadcloth to the north German market, when
– in his opinion, with wool so long in the fleece these days, and
good broadcloth hard to weave – he ought to be getting into
kerseys, lighter cloth like that, exporting through Antwerp to
Italy. But he listened – he was a good listener – to the old man’s
gripes, and said, ‘Things are changing. Let me take you to the
cloth fairs this year.’
Wykys knew he should show his face in Antwerp and Bergen
op Zoom, but he didn’t like the crossing. ‘He’ll be all right with
me,’ he told Mistress Wykys. ‘I know a good family where we
can stay.’
‘Right, Thomas Cromwell,’ she said. ‘Make a note of this. No
strange Dutch drinks. No women. No banned preachers in
cellars. I know what you do.’
‘I don’t know if I can stay out of cellars.’
‘Here’s a bargain. You can take him to a sermon if you don’t
take him to a brothel.’
Mercy, he suspects, comes from a family where John
Wycliffe’s writings are preserved and quoted, where the scriptures in English have always been known; scraps of writing
hoarded, forbidden verses locked in the head. These things come down the generations, as eyes and noses come down, as meekness or the capacity for passion, as muscle power or the need to
take a risk. If you must take risks these days, better the preacher
than the whore; eschew Monsieur Breakbone, known in
Florence as the Neapolitan Fever, and in Naples, no doubt, as
Florence Rot. Good sense enforces abstinence – in any part of
Europe, these islands included. Our lives are limited in this way,
as the lives of our forefathers were not.
On the boat, he listened to the usual grievances from fellow
passengers: these bastard pilots, lanes not marked, English
monopolies. The merchants of the Hanse would rather their own
men brought the ships up to Gravesend: Germans are a pack of
thieves, but they know how to bring a boat upstream. Old
Wykys was queasy when they put out to sea. He stayed on deck,
making himself useful; you must have been a ship’s boy, master,
one of the crew said. Once in Antwerp, they made their way to
the sign of the Holy Ghost. The servant opening the door
shouted ‘It’s Thomas come back to us,’ as if he’d risen from the
dead. When the three old men came out, the three brothers from
the boat, they clucked, ‘Thomas, our poor foundling, our
runaway, our little beaten-up friend. Welcome, come in and get
warm!’
Nowhere else but here is he still a runaway, still a little, beaten
boy.
Their wives, their daughters, their dogs covered him in kisses.
He left old Wykys by the fireside – it is surprising how international is the language of old men, swapping tips on salves for
aches, commiserating with petty wretchednesses and discussing
the whims and demands of their wives. The youngest brother
would translate, as usual: straight-faced, even when the terms
became anatomical.
He had gone out drinking with the three brothers’ three sons.
‘Wat will je?’ they teased him. ‘The old man’s business? His wife
when he dies?’ ‘No,’ he said, surprising himself. ‘I think I want his daughter.’
‘Young?’
‘A widow. Young enough.’
When he got back to London he knew he could turn the business around. Still, he needed to think of the day-to-day. ‘I’ve seen
your stock,’ he said to Wykys. ‘I’ve seen your accounts. Now
show me your clerks.’
That was the key, of course, the key that would unlock profit.
People are always the key, and if you can look them in the face
you can be pretty sure if they’re honest and up to the job. He
tossed out the dubious chief clerk – saying, you go, or we go to
law – and replaced him with a stammering junior, a boy he’d
been told was stupid. Timid, was all he was; he looked over his
work each night, mildly and wordlessly indicating each error
and omission, and in four weeks the boy was both competent
and keen, and had taken to following him about like a puppy.
Four weeks invested, and a few days down at the docks, checking who was on the take: by the year end, Wykys was back in
profit.
Wykys stumped away after he showed him the figures.
‘Lizzie?’ he yelled. ‘Lizzie? Come downstairs.’
She came down.
‘You want a new husband. Will he do?’
She stood and looked him up and down. ‘Well, Father. You
didn’t pick him for his looks.’ To him, her eyebrows raised, she
said, ‘Do you want a wife?’
‘Should I leave you to talk it over?’ old Wykys said. He
seemed baffled: seemed to think they should sit down and write
a contract there and then.
Almost, they did. Lizzie wanted children; he wanted a wife
with city contacts and some money behind her. They were
married in weeks. Gregory arrived within the year. Bawling,
strong, one hour old, plucked from the cradle: he kissed the
infant’s fluffy skull and said, I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what’s the point of breeding children,
if each generation does not improve on what went before?
So this morning – waking early, brooding on what Liz said last
night – he wonders, why should my wife worry about women
who have no sons? Possibly it’s something women do: spend
time imagining what it’s like to be each other.
One can learn from that, he thinks.
It’s eight o’clock. Lizzie is down. Her hair is pushed under a
linen cap and her sleeves turned back. ‘Oh, Liz,’ he says, laughing at her. ‘You look like a baker’s wife.’
‘You mind your manners,’ she says. ‘Pot-boy.’
Rafe comes in: ‘First back to my lord cardinal?’ Where else, he
says. He gathers his papers for the day. Pats his wife, kisses his
dog. Goes out. The morning is drizzly but brightening, and
before they reach York Place it is clear the cardinal has been as
good as his word. A wash of sunlight lies over the river, pale as
the flesh of a lemon.

PART TWO

I
Visitation
1529

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?’

The cardinal clears his throat softly. ‘We all do,’ Cavendish
says, and the cardinal says, ‘Thomas, we are the works of his
hand.’
When they get out to the cardinal’s barge his flags are flying: the
Tudor rose, the Cornish choughs. Cavendish says, wide-eyed,
‘Look at all these little boats, waffeting up and down.’ For a
moment, the cardinal thinks the Londoners have turned out to
wish him well. But as he enters the barge, there are sounds of
hooting and booing from the boats; spectators crowd the bank,
and though the cardinal’s men keep them back, their intent is
clear enough. When the oars begin to row upstream, and not
downstream to the Tower, there are groans and shouted threats.
It is then that the cardinal collapses, falling into his seat, beginning to talk, and talks, talks, talks, all the way to Putney. ‘Do
they hate me so much? What have I done but promote their
trades and show them my goodwill? Have I sown hatred? No.
Persecuted none. Sought remedies every year when wheat was
scarce. When the apprentices rioted, begged the king on my
knees with tears in my eyes to spare the offenders, while they
stood garlanded with the nooses that were to hang them.’
‘The multitude,’ Cavendish says, ‘is always desirous of a
change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him
down – for the novelty of the thing.’
‘Fifteen years Chancellor. Twenty in his service. His father’s
before that. Never spared myself … rising early, watching late …’
‘There, you see,’ Cavendish says, ‘what it is to serve a prince!
We should be wary of their vacillations of temper.’
‘Princes are not obliged to consistency,’ he says. He thinks, I
may forget myself, lean across and push you overboard.
The cardinal has not forgotten himself, far from it; he is
looking back, back twenty years to the young king’s accession.
‘Put him to work, said some. But I said, no, he is a young man.
Let him hunt, joust, and fly his hawks and falcons …’ ‘Play instruments,’ Cavendish says. ‘Always plucking at
something or other. And singing.’
‘You make him sound like Nero.’
‘Nero?’ Cavendish jumps. ‘I never said so.’
‘The gentlest, wisest prince in Christendom,’ says the cardinal.
‘I will not hear a word against him from any man.’
‘Nor shall you,’ he says.
‘But what I would do for him! Cross the Channel as lightly as
a man might step across a stream of piss in the street.’ The cardinal shakes his head. ‘Waking and sleeping, on horseback or at my
beads … twenty years …’
‘Is it something to do with the English?’ Cavendish asks
earnestly. He’s still thinking of the uproar back there when they
embarked; and even now, people are running along the banks,
making obscene signs and whistling. ‘Tell us, Master Cromwell,
you’ve been abroad. Are they particularly an ungrateful nation?
It seems to me that they like change for the sake of it.’
‘I don’t think it’s the English. I think it’s just people. They
always hope there may be something better.’
‘But what do they get by the change?’ Cavendish persists.
‘One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who
bites nearer the bone. Out goes the man grown fat with honour,
and in comes a hungry and a lean man.’
He closes his eyes. The river shifts beneath them, dim figures
in an allegory of Fortune. Decayed Magnificence sits in the
centre. Cavendish, leaning at his right like a Virtuous Councillor,
mutters words of superfluous and belated advice, to which the
sorry magnate inclines his head; he, like a Tempter, is seated on
the left, and the cardinal’s great hand, with its knuckles of garnet
and tourmaline, grips his own hand painfully. George would
certainly go in the river, except that what he’s saying, despite the
platitudes, makes a bleak sense. And why? Stephen Gardiner, he
thinks. It may not be proper to call the cardinal a dog grown fat,
but Stephen is definitely hungry and lean, and has been promoted by the king to a place as his own private secretary. It is
not unusual for the cardinal’s staff to transfer in this way, after
careful nurture in the Wolsey school of craft and diligence; but
still, this places Stephen as the man who – if he manages his
duties properly – may be closer than anyone to the king, except
perhaps for the gentleman who attends him at his close-stool and
hands him a diaper cloth. I wouldn’t so much mind, he thinks, if
Stephen got that job.
The cardinal closes his eyes. Tears are seeping from beneath
his lids. ‘For it is a truth,’ says Cavendish, ‘that fortune is inconstant, fickle and mutable …’
All he has to do is to make a strangling motion, quickly, while
the cardinal has his eyes shut. Cavendish, putting a hand to his
throat, takes the point. And then they look at each other, sheepish. One of them has said too much; one of them has felt too
much. It is not easy to know where the balance rests. His eyes
scan the banks of the Thames. Still, the cardinal weeps and grips
his hand.
As they move upriver, the littoral ceases to alarm. It is not
because, in Putney, Englishmen are less fickle. It’s just that they
haven’t heard yet.
The horses are waiting. The cardinal, in his capacity as a churchman, has always ridden a large strong mule; though, since he has
hunted with kings for twenty years, his stable is the envy of
every nobleman. Here the beast stands, twitching long ears, in its
usual scarlet trappings, and by him Master Sexton, the cardinal’s
fool.
‘What in God’s name is he doing here?’ he asks Cavendish.
Sexton comes forward and says something in the cardinal’s
ear; the cardinal laughs. ‘Very good, Patch. Now, help me mount,
there’s a good fellow.’
But Patch – Master Sexton – is not up to the job. The cardinal
seems weakened; he seems to feel the weight of his flesh hanging on his bones. He, Cromwell, slides from his saddle, nods to three
of the stouter servants. ‘Master Patch, hold Christopher’s head.’
When Patch pretends not to know that Christopher is the mule,
and puts a headlock on the man next to him, he says, oh for Jesus’
sake, Sexton, get out of the way, or I’ll stuff you in a sack and
drown you.
The man who’s nearly had his head pulled off stands up, rubs
his neck; says, thanks Master Cromwell, and hobbles forward to
hold the bridle. He, Cromwell, with two others, hauls the cardinal into the saddle. The cardinal looks shamefaced. ‘Thank you,
Tom.’ He laughs shakily. ‘That’s you told, Patch.’
They are ready to ride. Cavendish looks up. ‘Saints protect us!’
A single horseman is heading downhill at a gallop. ‘An arrest!’
‘By one man?’
‘An outrider,’ says Cavendish, and he says, Putney’s rough but
you don’t have to send out scouts. Then someone shouts, ‘It’s
Harry Norris.’ Harry throws himself from his mount. Whatever
he’s come to do, he’s in a lather about it. Harry Norris is one of
the king’s closest friends; he is, to be exact, the Groom of the
Stool, the man who hands the diaper cloth.
Wolsey sees, immediately, that the king wouldn’t send Norris
to take him into custody. ‘Now, Sir Henry, get your breath back.
What can be so urgent?’
Norris says, beg pardon, my lord, my lord cardinal, sweeps off
his feathered cap, wipes his face with his arm, smiles in his most
engaging fashion. He speaks to the cardinal gracefully: the king
has commanded him to ride after His Grace and overtake him,
and speak words of comfort to him and give him this ring, which
he knows well – a ring which he holds out, in the palm of his
glove.
The cardinal scrambles from his mule and falls to the ground.
He takes the ring and presses it to his lips. He’s praying. Praying,
thanking Norris, calling for blessings on his sovereign. ‘I have
nothing to send him. Nothing of value to send to the king.’ He looks around him, as if his eye might light on something he can
send; a tree? Norris tries to get him on his feet, ends up kneeling
beside him, kneeling – this neat and charming man – in the
Putney mud. The message he’s giving the cardinal, it seems, is
that the king only appears displeased, but is not really displeased;
that he knows the cardinal has enemies; that he himself, Henricus
Rex, is not one of them; that this show of force is only to satisfy
those enemies; that he is able to recompense the cardinal with
twice as much as has been taken from him.
The cardinal begins to cry. It’s starting to rain, and the wind
blows the rain across their faces. The cardinal speaks to Norris
fast, in a low voice, and then he takes a chain from around his
neck and tries to hang it around Norris’s neck, and it gets tangled
up in the fastenings of his riding cape and several people rush
forward to help and fail, and Norris gets up and begins to brush
himself down with one glove while clutching the chain in the
other. ‘Wear it,’ the cardinal begs him, ‘and when you look at it
think of me, and commend me to the king.’
Cavendish jolts up, riding knee-to-knee. ‘His reliquary!’
George is upset, astonished. ‘To part with it like this! It is a piece
of the true Cross!’
‘We’ll get him another. I know a man in Pisa makes them ten
for five florins and a round dozen for cash up front. And you get
a certificate with St Peter’s thumbprint, to say they’re genuine.’
‘For shame!’ Cavendish says, and twitches his horse away.
Now Norris is backing away too, his message delivered, and
they are trying to get the cardinal back on his mule. This time,
four big men step forward, as if it were routine. The play has
turned into some kind of low comic interlude; that, he thinks, is
why Patch is here. He rides over and says, looking down from
the saddle, ‘Norris, can we have all this in writing?’
Norris smiles, says, ‘Hardly, Master Cromwell; it’s a confidential message to my lord cardinal. My master’s words were
meant only for him.’ ‘So what about this recompense you mention?’
Norris laughs – as he always does, to disarm hostility – and
whispers, ‘I think it might be figurative.’
‘I think it might be, too.’ Double the cardinal’s worth? Not on
Henry’s income. ‘Give us back what’s been taken. We don’t ask
double.’
Norris’s hand goes to the chain, now slung about his neck.
‘But it all proceeds from the king. You can’t call it theft.’
‘I didn’t call it theft.’
Norris nods, thoughtful. ‘No more did you.’
‘They shouldn’t have taken the vestments. They belong to my
lord as churchman. What will they have next? His benefices?’
‘Esher – which is where you are going, are you not? – is of
course one of the houses which my lord cardinal holds as Bishop
of Winchester.’
‘And?’
‘He remains for the while in that estate and title, but … shall
we say … it must come under the king’s consideration? You
know my lord cardinal is indicted under the statutes of praemunire, for asserting a foreign jurisdiction in the land.’
‘Don’t teach me the law.’
Norris inclines his head.
He thinks, since last spring, when things began to go wrong, I
should have persuaded my lord cardinal to let me manage his
revenues, and put some money away abroad where they can’t get
it; but then he would never admit that anything was wrong. Why
did I let him rest so cheerful?
Norris’s hand is on his horse’s bridle. ‘I was ever a person who
admired your master,’ he says, ‘and I hope that in his adversity he
will remember that.’
‘I thought he wasn’t in adversity? According to you.’
How simple it would be, if he were allowed to reach down and
shake some straight answers out of Norris. But it’s not simple;
this is what the world and the cardinal conspire to teach him. Christ, he thinks, by my age I ought to know. You don’t get on
by being original. You don’t get on by being bright. You don’t
get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook;
somehow he thinks that’s what Norris is, and he feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he
prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are
extreme, the cardinal in the mud, the humiliating tussle to get
him back in the saddle, the talking, talking on the barge, and
worse, the talking, talking on his knees, as if Wolsey’s unravelling, in a great unweaving of scarlet thread that might lead you
back into a scarlet labyrinth, with a dying monster at its heart.
‘Master Cromwell?’ Norris says.
He can hardly say what he’s thinking; so he looks down at
Norris, his expression softened, and says, ‘Thanks for this much
comfort.’
‘Well, take my lord cardinal out of the rain. I’ll tell the king
how I found him.’
‘Tell him how you knelt in the mud together. He might be
amused.’
‘Yes.’ Norris looks sad. ‘You never know what will do it.’
It is at this point that Patch starts screaming. The cardinal, it
seems – casting around for a gift – has given him to the king.
Patch, he has often said, is worth a thousand pounds. He is to go
with Norris, no time like the present; and it takes four more of
the cardinal’s men to subdue him to the purpose. He fights. He
bites. He lashes out with fists and feet. Till he is thrown on to a
baggage mule, stripped of its baggage; till he begins to cry,
hiccupping, his ribs heaving, his stupid feet dangling, his coat
torn and the feather in his hat broken off to a stub.
‘But Patch,’ the cardinal says, ‘my dear fellow. You shall see
me often, once the king and I understand each other again. My
dear Patch, I will write you a letter, a letter of your own. I shall
write it tonight,’ he promises, ‘and put my big seal on it. The king
will cherish you; he is the kindest soul in Christendom. Patch wails on a single thin note, like someone taken by the
Turks and impaled.
There, he says to Cavendish, he’s more than one kind of fool.
He shouldn’t have drawn attention to himself, should he.
Esher: the cardinal dismounts under the shadow of old Bishop
Wayneflete’s keep, surmounted by octagonal towers. The
gateway is set into a defensive wall topped with a walkway; stern
enough at first sight, but the whole thing is built of brick, ornamented and prettily inlaid. ‘You couldn’t fortify it,’ he says.
Cavendish is silent. ‘George, you’re supposed to say, “But the
need could never arise.”’
The cardinal’s not used the place since he built Hampton
Court. They’ve sent messages ahead, but has anything been
done? Make my lord comfortable, he says, and goes straight
down to the kitchens. At Hampton Court, the kitchens have
running water; here, nothing’s running but the cooks’ noses.
Cavendish is right. In fact it is worse than he thinks. The larders
are impoverished and such supplies as they have show signs of
ill-keeping and plunder. There are weevils in the flour. There are
mouse droppings where the pastry should be rolled. It is nearly
Martinmas, and they have not even thought of salting their beef.
The batterie de cuisine is an insult, and the stockpot is mildewed.
There are a number of small boys sitting by the hearth, and, for
cash down, they can be induced into scouring and scrubbing;
children take readily to novelty, and the idea of cleaning, it
seems, is novel to them.
My lord, he says, needs to eat and drink now; and he needs to
eat and drink for … how long we don’t know. This kitchen must
be put in order for the winter ahead. He finds someone who can
write, and dictates his orders. His eyes are fixed on the kitchen
clerk. On his left hand he counts off the items: you do this, then
this, then thirdly this. With his right hand, he breaks eggs into a
basin, each one with a hard professional tap, and between his fingers the white drips, sticky and slow, from the yolk. ‘How old
is this egg? Change your supplier. I want a nutmeg. Nutmeg?
Saffron?’ They look at him as if he’s speaking Greek. Patch’s thin
scream is still hurting his ears. Dusty angels look down on him as
he pounds back to the hall.
It is late before they get the cardinal into any sort of bed worthy
of the name. Where is his household steward? Where is his comptroller? By this time, he feels it is true that he and Cavendish are
old survivors of a campaign. He stays up with Cavendish – not
that there are beds, if they wanted them – working out what they
need to keep the cardinal in reasonable comfort; they need plate,
unless my lord’s going to dine off dented pewter, they need
bedsheets, table linen, firewood. ‘I will send some people,’ he says,
‘to sort out the kitchens. They will be Italian. It will be violent at
first, but then after three weeks it will work.’
Three weeks? He wants to set those children cleaning the
copper. ‘Can we get lemons?’ he asks, just as Cavendish says, ‘So
who will be Chancellor now?’
I wonder, he thinks, are there rats down there? Cavendish
says, ‘Recall His Grace of Canterbury?’
Recall him – fifteen years after the cardinal chivvied him out of
that office? ‘No, Warham’s too old.’ And too stubborn, too
unaccommodating to the king’s wishes. ‘And not the Duke of
Suffolk’ – because in his view Charles Brandon is no brighter
than Christopher the mule, though better at fighting and fashion
and generally showing off – ‘not Suffolk, because the Duke of
Norfolk won’t have him.’
‘And vice versa.’ Cavendish nods. ‘Bishop Tunstall?’
‘No. Thomas More.’
‘But, a layman and a commoner? And when he’s so opposed in
the matter of the king’s marriage suit.’
He nods, yes, yes, it will be More. The king is known for
putting out his conscience to high bidders. Perhaps he hopes to
be saved from himself. ‘If the king offers it – and I see that, as a gesture, he might –
surely Thomas More won’t accept?’
‘He will.’
‘Bet?’ says Cavendish.
They agree the terms and shake hands on it. It takes their mind
off the urgent problem, which is the rats, and the cold; which is
the question of how they can pack a household staff of several
hundred, retained at Westminster, into the much smaller space at
Esher. The cardinal’s staff, if you include his principal houses,
and count them up from priests, law clerks, down to floorsweepers and laundresses, is about six hundred souls. They
expect three hundred following them immediately. ‘As things
stand, we’ll have to break up the household,’ Cavendish says.
‘But we’ve no ready money for wages.’
‘I’m damned if they’re going unpaid,’ he says, and Cavendish
says, ‘I think you are anyway. After what you said about the
relic.’
He catches George’s eye. They start to laugh. At least they’ve
got something worthwhile to drink; the cellars are full, which is
lucky, Cavendish says, because we’ll need a drink over the next
weeks. ‘What do you think Norris meant?’ George says. ‘How
can the king be in two minds? How can my lord cardinal be
dismissed if he doesn’t want to dismiss him? How can the king
give way to my lord’s enemies? Isn’t the king master, over all the
enemies?’
‘You would think so.’
‘Or is it her? It must be. He’s frightened of her, you know.
She’s a witch.’
He says, don’t be childish. George says, she is so a witch: the
Duke of Norfolk says she is, and he’s her uncle, he should know.
It’s two o’clock, then it’s three; sometimes it’s freeing, to think
you don’t have to go to bed because there isn’t a bed. He doesn’t
need to think of going home; there’s no home to go to, he’s got
no family left. He’d rather be here drinking with Cavendish, huddled in a corner of the great chamber at Esher, cold and tired
and frightened of the future, than think about his family and
what he’s lost. ‘Tomorrow,’ he says, ‘I’ll get my clerks down
from London and we’ll try and make sense of what my lord still
has by way of assets, which won’t be easy as they’ve taken all the
paperwork. His creditors won’t be inclined to pay up when they
know what’s happened. But the French king pays him a pension,
and if I remember it’s always in arrears … Maybe he’d like to
send a bag of gold, pending my lord’s return to favour. And you
– you can go looting.’
Cavendish is hollow-faced and hollow-eyed when he throws
him on to a fresh horse at first light. ‘Call in some favours.
There’s hardly a gentleman in the realm that doesn’t owe my lord
cardinal something.’
It’s late October, the sun a coin barely flipped above the
horizon. ‘Keep him cheerful,’ Cavendish says. ‘Keep him talking.
Keep him talking about what Harry Norris said …’
‘Off you go. If you should see the coals on which St Lawrence
was roasted, we could make good use of them here.’
‘Oh, don’t,’ Cavendish begs. He has come far since yesterday,
and is able to make jokes about holy martyrs; but he drank too
much last night, and it hurts him to laugh. But not to laugh is
painful too. George’s head droops, the horse stirs beneath him,
his eyes are full of bafflement. ‘How did it come to this?’ he asks.
‘My lord cardinal kneeling in the dirt. How could it happen?
How in the world could it?’
He says, ‘Saffron. Raisins. Apples. And cats, get cats, huge
starving ones. I don’t know, George, where do cats come from?
Oh, wait! Do you think we can get partridges?’
If we can get partridges we can slice the breasts, and braise
them at the table. Whatever we can do that way, we will; and so,
if we can help it, my lord won’t be poisoned.

II
An Occult History of Britain
1521–1529

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

fight for status, and try to get their brats induced somehow intothe line of succession. The son Henry acknowledges is known asHenry Fitzroy; he is a handsome blond child made in the king’sown image. His father has created him Duke of Somerset andDuke of Richmond; he is not yet ten years old, and the seniornobleman in England.Queen Katherine, whose boys have all died, takes it patiently:that is to say, she suffers.When he leaves the cardinal, he is miserably angry. When hethinks back to his earlier life – that boy half-dead on the cobblesin Putney – he feels no tenderness for him, just a faint impatience: why doesn’t he get up? For his later self – still prone togetting into fights, or at least being in the place where a fightmight occur – he feels something like contempt, washed with aqueasy anxiety. That was the way of the world: a knife in thedark, a movement on the edge of vision, a series of warningswhich have worked themselves into flesh. He has given the cardinal a shock, which is not his job; his job, as he has defined it atthis time, is to feed the cardinal information and soothe histemper and understand him and embellish his jokes. What wentwrong was an accident of timing only. If the cardinal had notmoved so fast; if he had not been so edgy, not knowing how hecould signal to him to be less despotic to Boleyn. The troublewith England, he thinks, is that it’s so poor in gesture. We shallhave to develop a hand signal for ‘Back off, our prince isfucking this man’s daughter.’ He is surprised that the Italianshave not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just nevercaught on.In the year 1529, my lord cardinal newly disgraced, he will thinkback to that evening.He is at Esher; it is the lightless, fireless night, when the greatman has gone to his (possibly damp) bed, and there is only George Cavendish to keep his spirits alive. What happened next,he asked George, with Harry Percy and Anne Boleyn?He knew the story only in the cardinal’s chilly and dismissiverendition. But George said, ‘I shall tell you how it was. Now.Stand up, Master Cromwell.’ He does it. ‘A little to the left.Now, which would you like to be? My lord cardinal, or theyoung heir?’‘Oh, I see, is it a play? You be the cardinal. I don’t feel equal to it.’Cavendish adjusts his position, turning him imperceptiblyfrom the window, where night and bare trees are their audience.His gaze rests on the air, as if he were seeing the past: shadowybodies, moving in this lightless room. ‘Can you look troubled?’George asks. ‘As if you were brooding upon mutinous speech,and yet dare not speak? No, no, not like that. You are youthful,gangling, your head drooping, you are blushing.’ Cavendishsighs. ‘I believe you never blushed in your life, MasterCromwell. Look.’ Cavendish sets his hands, gently, on his upperarms. ‘Let us change roles. Sit here. You be the cardinal.’At once he sees Cavendish transformed. George twitches, hefumbles, he all but weeps; he becomes the quaking Harry Percy,a young man in love. ‘Why should I not match with her?’ hecries. ‘Though she be but a simple maid –’‘Simple?’ he says. ‘Maid?’George glares at him. ‘The cardinal never said that!’‘Not at the time, I agree.’‘Now I am Harry Percy again. “Though she be but a simplemaid, her father a mere knight, yet her lineage is good –”’‘She’s some sort of cousin of the king’s, isn’t she?’‘Some sort of cousin?’ Cavendish again breaks up his role,indignant. ‘My lord cardinal would have their descent unfoldedbefore him, all drawn up by the heralds.’‘So what shall I do?’‘Just pretend! Now: her forebears are not without merit,young Percy argues. But the stronger the boy argues, the more my lord cardinal waxes into a temper. The boy says, we havemade a contract of matrimony, which is as good as a truemarriage …’‘Does he? I mean, did he?’‘Yes, that was the sense of it. Good as a true marriage.’‘And what did my lord cardinal do there?’‘He said, good God, boy, what are you telling me? If you haveinvolved yourself in any such false proceeding, the king musthear of it. I shall send for your father, and between us we willcontrive to annul this folly of yours.’‘And Harry Percy said?’‘Not much. He hung his head.’‘I wonder the girl had any respect for him.’‘She didn’t. She liked his title.’‘I see.’‘So then his father came down from the north – will you be theearl, or will you be the boy?’‘The boy. I know how to do it now.’He jumps to his feet and imitates penitence. It seems they hada long talk in a long gallery, the earl and the cardinal; then theyhad a glass of wine. Something strong, it must have been. The earlstamped the length of the gallery, then sat down, Cavendish said,on a bench where the waiting-boys used to rest between orders.He called his heir to stand before him, and took him apart infront of the servants.‘“Sir,”’ says Cavendish, ‘“thou hast always been a proud,presumptuous, disdainful and very unthrift waster.” So that wasa good start, wasn’t it?’‘I like,’ he says, ‘the way you remember the exact words. Didyou write them down at the time? Or do you use some licence?’Cavendish looks sly. ‘No one exceeds your own powers ofmemory,’ he says. ‘My lord cardinal asks for an accounting ofsomething or other, and you have all the figures at your fingertips. ‘Perhaps I invent them.’‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ Cavendish is shocked. ‘You couldn’t dothat for long.’‘It is a method of remembering. I learned it in Italy.’‘There are people, in this household and elsewhere, whowould give much to know the whole of what you learned inItaly.’He nods. Of course they would. ‘But now, where were we?Harry Percy, who is as good as married, you say, to Lady AnneBoleyn, is standing before his father, and the father says …?’‘That if he comes into the title, he would be the death of hisnoble house – he would be the last earl of Northumberland thereever was. And “Praise be to God,” he says, “I have more choiceof boys …” And he stamped off. And the boy was left crying. Hehad his heart set on Lady Anne. But the cardinal married him toMary Talbot, and now they’re as miserable as dawn on AshWednesday. And the Lady Anne said – well, we all laughed at thetime – she said that if she could work my lord cardinal anydispleasure, she would do it. Can you think how we laughed?Some sallow chit, forgive me, a knight’s daughter, to menace mylord cardinal! Her nose out of joint because she could not havean earl! But we could not know how she would rise and rise.’He smiles.‘So tell me,’ Cavendish says, ‘what did we do wrong? I’ll tellyou. All along, we were misled, the cardinal, young Harry Percy,his father, you, me – because when the king said, Mistress Anneis not to marry into Northumberland, I think, I think, the kinghad his eye cast on her, all that long time ago.’‘While he was close with Mary, he was thinking about sisterAnne?’‘Yes, yes!’‘I wonder,’ he says, ‘how it can be that, though all these peoplethink they know the king’s pleasure, the king finds himself atevery turn impeded.’ At every turn, thwarted: maddened and baffled. The Lady Anne, whom he has chosen to amuse him,while the old wife is cast off and the new wife brought in, refusesto accommodate him at all. How can she refuse? Nobody knows.Cavendish looks downcast because they have not continuedthe play. ‘You must be tired,’ he says.‘No, I’m just thinking. How has my lord cardinal …’ Missed atrick, he wants to say. But that is not a respectful way to speak ofa cardinal. He looks up. ‘Go on. What happened next?’In May 1527, feeling embattled and bad-tempered, the cardinalopens a court of inquiry at York Place, to look into the validityof the king’s marriage. It’s a secret court; the queen is notrequired to appear, or even be represented; she’s not evensupposed to know, but all Europe knows. It is Henry who isordered to appear, and produce the dispensation that allowedhim to marry his brother’s widow. He does so, and he is confident that the court will find the document defective in some way.Wolsey is prepared to say that the marriage is open to doubt. Buthe does not know, he tells Henry, what the legatine court can dofor him, beyond this preparatory step; since Katherine, surely, isbound to appeal to Rome.Six times (to the world’s knowledge) Katherine and the kinghave lived in hope of an heir. ‘I remember the winter child,’Wolsey says. ‘I suppose, Thomas, you would not be back inEngland then. The queen was taken unexpectedly with pains andthe prince was born early, just at the turn of the year. When hewas less than an hour old I held him in my arms, the sleet fallingoutside the windows, the chamber alive with firelight, the darkcoming down by three o’clock, and the tracks of birds and beastscovered that night by the snow, every mark of the old worldwiped out, and all our pain abolished. We called him the NewYear’s prince. We said he would be the richest, the most beautiful, the most devoted. The whole of London was lit up in celebration … He breathed fifty-two days, and I counted every one of them. I think that if he had lived, our king might have been – Ido not say a better king, for that could hardly be – but a morecontented Christian.’The next child was a boy who died within an hour. In the year1516 a daughter was born, the Princess Mary, small but vigorous.The year following, the queen miscarried a male child. Anothersmall princess lived only a few days; her name would have beenElizabeth, after the king’s own mother.Sometimes, says the cardinal, the king speaks of his mother,Elizabeth Plantagenet, and tears stand in his eyes. She was, youknow, a lady of great beauty and calm, so meek under the misfortunes God sent her. She and the old king were blessed with manychildren, and some of them died. But, says the king, my brotherArthur was born to my mother and father within a year of theirmarriage, and followed, in not too long a time, by anothergoodly son, which was me. So why have I been left, after twentyyears, with one frail daughter whom any vagrant wind maydestroy?By now they are, this long-married couple, dragged down bythe bewildered consciousness of sin. Perhaps, some people say, itwould be a kindness to set them free? ‘I doubt Katherine willthink so,’ the cardinal says. ‘If the queen has a sin laid on herconscience, believe me, she will shrive it. If it takes the nexttwenty years.’What have I done? Henry demands of the cardinal. What haveI done, what has she done, what have we done together? There isno answer the cardinal can make, even though his heart bleedsfor his most benevolent prince; there is no answer he can make,and he detects something not entirely sincere in the question; hethinks, though he will not say so, except in a small room alonewith his man of business, that no rational man could worship aGod so simply vengeful, and he believes the king is a rationalman. ‘Look at the examples before us,’ he says. ‘Dean Colet, thatgreat scholar. Now he was one of twenty-two children, and the only one to live past infancy. Some would suggest that to invitesuch attrition from above, Sir Henry Colet and his wife musthave been monsters of iniquity, infamous through Christendom.But in fact, Sir Henry was Lord Mayor of London –’‘Twice.’‘– and made a very large fortune, so in no way was he slightedby the Almighty, I would say; but rather received every mark ofdivine favour.’It’s not the hand of God kills our children. It’s disease andhunger and war, rat-bites and bad air and the miasma fromplague pits; it’s bad harvests like the harvest this year and lastyear; it’s careless nurses. He says to Wolsey, ‘What age is thequeen now?’‘She will be forty-two, I suppose.’‘And the king says she can have no more children? My motherwas fifty-two when I was born.’The cardinal stares at him. ‘Are you sure?’ he says: and then helaughs, a merry, easy laugh that makes you think, it’s good to bea prince of the church.‘Well, about that, anyway. Over fifty.’ They were hazy aboutthese things in the Cromwell family.‘And did she survive the ordeal? She did? I congratulate bothof you. But don’t tell people, will you?’The living result of the queen’s labours is the diminutive Mary– not really a whole princess, perhaps two-thirds of one. He hasseen her when he has been at court with the cardinal, and thoughtshe was about the size of his daughter Anne, who is two or threeyears younger.Anne Cromwell is a tough little girl. She could eat a princessfor breakfast. Like St Paul’s God, she is no respecter of persons,and her eyes, small and steady as her father’s, fall coldly on thosewho cross her; the family joke is, what London will be like whenour Anne becomes Lord Mayor. Mary Tudor is a pale, clever dollwith fox-coloured hair, who speaks with more gravity than the average bishop. She was barely ten years old when her father senther to Ludlow to hold court as Princess of Wales. It was whereKatherine had been taken as a bride; where her husband Arthurdied; where she herself almost died in that year’s epidemic, andlay bereft, weakened and forgotten, till the old king’s wife paidout of her private purse to have her brought back to London, dayby painful day, in a litter. Katherine had hidden – she hides somuch – any grief at the parting with her daughter. She herself isdaughter of a reigning queen. Why should Mary not ruleEngland? She had taken it as a sign that the king was content.But now she knows different.As soon as the secret hearing is convened, Katherine’s stored-upgrievances come pouring out. According to her, the whole business is the fault of the cardinal. ‘I told you,’ Wolsey said. ‘I toldyou it would be. Look for the hand of the king in it? Look for thewill of the king? No, she cannot do that. For the king, in hereyes, is immaculate.’Ever since Wolsey rose in the king’s service, the queen claims,he has been working to push her out of her rightful place asHenry’s confidante and adviser. He has used every means he can,she says, to drive me from the king’s side, so that I know nothingof his projects, and so that he, the cardinal, should have the direction of all.

He has prevented my meetings with the ambassadorof Spain. He has put spies in my household – my women are allspies for him.The cardinal says, wearily, I have never favoured the French,nor the Emperor neither: I have favoured peace. I have notstopped her seeing the Spanish ambassador, only made the quitereasonable request that she should not see him alone, so that Imight have some check on what insinuations and lies he presentsto her. The ladies of her household are English gentlewomenwho have a right to wait upon their queen; after almost thirtyyears in England, would she have nothing but Spaniards? As for driving her from the king’s side, how could I do that? For yearshis conversation was, ‘The queen must see this,’ and ‘Katherinewill like to hear of this, we must go to her straight away.’ Therenever was a lady who knew better her husband’s needs.She knows them; for the first time, she doesn’t want to complywith them.Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will beto turn her out of the estate of wife? He, Cromwell, admiresKatherine: he likes to see her moving about the royal palaces, aswide as she is high, stitched into gowns so bristling withgemstones that they look as if they are designed less for beautythan to withstand blows from a sword. Her auburn hair is fadedand streaked with grey, tucked back under her gable hood likethe modest wings of a city sparrow. Under her gowns she wearsthe habit of a Franciscan nun. Try always, Wolsey says, to findout what people wear under their clothes. At an earlier stage inlife this would have surprised him; he had thought that undertheir clothes people wore their skin.There are many precedents, the cardinal says, that can help theking in his current concerns. King Louis XII was allowed to setaside his first wife. Nearer home, his own sister Margaret, whohad first married the King of Scotland, divorced her secondhusband and remarried. And the king’s great friend CharlesBrandon, who is now married to his youngest sister Mary, had anearlier alliance put aside in circumstances that hardly bearinquiry.But set against that, the fact that the church is not in the business of breaking up established marriages or bastardising children. If the dispensation was technically defective, or in anyother way defective, why can it not be mended with a new one?So Pope Clement may think, Wolsey says.When he says this, the king shouts. He can shrug that off, theshouting; one grows accustomed, and he watches how the cardi nal behaves, as the storm breaks over his head; half-smiling, civil,regretful, he waits for the calm that succeeds it. But Wolsey isbecoming uneasy, waiting for Boleyn’s daughter – not the easyarmful, but the younger girl, the flat-chested one – to drop hercoy negotiations and please the king. If she would do this, theking would take an easier view of life and talk less about hisconscience; after all, how could he, in the middle of an amour?But some people suggest that she is bargaining with the king;some say that she wants to be the new wife; which is laughable,Wolsey says, but then the king is infatuated, so perhaps hedoesn’t demur, not to her face. He has drawn the cardinal’s attention to the emerald ring Lady Anne now wears, and has told himthe provenance and the price. The cardinal looked shocked.After the Harry Percy debacle, the cardinal had got Anne sentdown to her family house at Hever, but she had insinuated herselfback to court somehow, among the queen’s ladies, and now henever knows where she’ll be, and whether Henry will disappearfrom his grasp because he’s chasing her across country. He thinksof calling in her father, Sir Thomas, and telling him off again, but– even without mentioning the old rumour about Henry andLady Boleyn – how can you explain to a man that as his firstdaughter was a whore, so his second one should be too: insinuating that it’s some sort of family business he puts them into?‘Boleyn is not rich,’ he says. ‘I’d get him in. Cost it out forhim. The credit side. The debit side.’‘Ah yes,’ the cardinal says, ‘but you are the master of practicalsolutions, whereas I, as a churchman, have to be careful notactively to recommend that my monarch embark on a studiedcourse of adultery.’ He moves the quills around on his desk,shuffles some papers. ‘Thomas, if you are ever … How shall I putit?’He cannot imagine what the cardinal might say next.‘If you are ever close to the king, if you should find, perhapsafter I am gone …’ It’s not easy to speak of non-existence, even if you’ve already commissioned your tomb. Wolsey cannot imaginea world without Wolsey. ‘Ah well. You know I would prefer youto his service, and never hold you back, but the difficulty is …’Putney, he means. It is the stark fact. And since he’s not achurchman, there are no ecclesiastical titles to soften it, as theyhave softened the stark fact of Ipswich.‘I wonder,’ Wolsey says, ‘would you have patience with oursovereign lord? When it is midnight and he is up drinking andgiggling with Brandon, or singing, and the day’s papers not yetsigned, and when you press him he says, I’m for my bed now,we’re hunting tomorrow … If your chance comes to serve, youwill have to take him as he is, a pleasure-loving prince. And hewill have to take you as you are, which is rather like one of thosesquare-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes.Not that you are without a fitful charm, Tom.’The idea that he or anyone else might come to have Wolsey’shold over the king is about as likely as Anne Cromwell becoming Lord Mayor. But he doesn’t altogether discount it. One hasheard of Jeanne d’Arc; and it doesn’t have to end in flames.He goes home and tells Liz about the fighting dogs. She alsothinks it strikingly apt. He doesn’t tell her about the fitful charm,in case it’s something only the cardinal can see.The court of inquiry is just about to break up, leaving the matterfor further advisement, when the news comes from Rome thatthe Emperor’s Spanish and German troops, who have not beenpaid for months, have run wild through the Holy City payingthemselves, plundering the treasuries and stoning the artworks.Dressed satirically in stolen vestments, they have raped the wivesand virgins of Rome. They have tumbled to the ground statuesand nuns, and smashed their heads on the pavements. A commonsoldier has stolen the head of the lance that opened the side ofChrist, and has attached it to the shaft of his own murderousweapon. His comrades have torn up antique tombs and tipped out the human dust, to blow away in the wind. The Tiber brimswith fresh bodies, the stabbed and the strangled bobbing againstthe shore. The most grievous news is that the Pope is taken prisoner. As the young Emperor, Charles, is nominally in charge ofthese troops, and presumably will assert his authority and takeadvantage of the situation, King Henry’s matrimonial cause is setback. Charles is the nephew of Queen Katherine, and while he isin the Emperor’s hands, Pope Clement is not likely to lookfavourably on any appeals passed up from the legate in England.Thomas More says that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! saysThomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don’t do that. They’re toobusy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.Under his clothes, it is well known, More wears a jerkin ofhorsehair. He beats himself with a small scourge, of the type usedby some religious orders. What lodges in his mind, ThomasCromwell’s, is that somebody makes these instruments of dailytorture. Someone combs the horsehair into coarse tufts, knotsthem and chops the blunt ends, knowing that their purpose is tosnap off under the skin and irritate it into weeping sores. Is itmonks who make them, knotting and snipping in a fury of righteousness, chuckling at the thought of the pain they will cause topersons unknown? Are simple villagers paid – how, by thedozen? – for making flails with waxed knots? Does it keep farmworkers busy during the slow winter months? When the moneyfor their honest labour is put into their hands, do the makersthink of the hands that will pick up the product?We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us:sooner rather than later. Ask the virgins of Rome.He thinks, also, that people ought to be found better jobs.Let us, says the cardinal at this point, take a step back from thesituation. He suffers some genuine alarm; it has always been clearto him that one of the secrets of stability in Europe is to have the papacy independent, and in the clutches of neither France northe Emperor. But his nimble mind is already skipping towardssome advantage for Henry.Suppose, he says – for in this emergency, it will be to me thatPope Clement looks to hold Christendom together – supposeI were to cross the Channel, stop off in Calais to reassure ourpeople there and suppress any unhelpful rumours, then travelinto France and conduct face-to-face talks with their king,then progress to Avignon, where they know how to host apapal court, and where the butchers and the bakers, the candlestick-makers and the keepers of lodgings and indeed thewhores have lived in hope these many years. I would invite thecardinals to meet me, and set up a council, so that the businessof church government could be carried on while His Holinessis suffering the Emperor’s hospitality. If the business broughtbefore this council were to include the king’s private matter,would we be justified in keeping so Christian a monarchwaiting on the resolution of military events in Italy? Might wenot rule? It ought not to be beyond the wit of men or angels tosend a message to Pope Clement, even in captivity, and thesame men or angels will bring a message back – surely endorsing our ruling, for we will have heard the full facts. And when,of course, in due time – and how we all look for that day –Pope Clement is restored to perfect liberty, he will be so grateful for the good order kept in his absence that any little matterof signatures or seals will be a formality. Voilà – the King ofEngland will be a bachelor.Before this can happen the king has to talk to Katherine; he can’talways be hunting somewhere else, while she waits for him,patient, implacable, his place set for supper in her private apartments. It is June, 1527; well barbered and curled, tall and stilltrim from certain angles, and wearing white silk, the king makeshis way to his wife’s apartments. He moves in a perfumed cloud made of the essence of roses: as if he owns all the roses, owns allthe summer nights.His voice is low, gentle, persuasive, and full of regret. If hewere free, he says, if there were no impediment, it is she, above allwomen, that he would choose for his wife. The lack of sonswouldn’t matter; God’s will be done. He would like nothingbetter than to marry her all over again; lawfully, this time. Butthere it is: it can’t be managed. She was his brother’s wife. Theirunion has offended divine law.You can hear what Katherine says. That wreck of a body, heldtogether by lacing and stays, encloses a voice that you can hear asfar as Calais: it resounds from here to Paris, from here to Madrid,to Rome. She is standing on her status, she is standing on herrights; the windows are rattled, from here to Constantinople.What a woman she is, Thomas Cromwell remarks in Spanish:to no one in particular.By mid-July the cardinal is making his preparations for thevoyage across the Narrow Sea. The warm weather has broughtsweating sickness to London, and the city is emptying. A fewhave gone down already and many more are imagining they haveit, complaining of headaches and pains in their limbs. The gossipin the shops is all about pills and infusions, and friars in thestreets are doing a lucrative trade in holy medals. This plaguecame to us in the year 1485, with the armies that brought us thefirst Henry Tudor. Now every few years it fills the graveyards. Itkills in a day. Merry at breakfast, they say: dead by noon.So the cardinal is relieved to be quitting the city, though hecannot embark without the entourage appropriate for a prince ofthe church. He must persuade King François of the efforts heshould make, in Italy, to free Pope Clement by military action;he must assure François of the King of England’s amity and assistance, but without committing any troops or funds. If God giveshim a following wind, he will bring back not only an annulment, but a treaty of mutual aid between England and France, onewhich will make the young Emperor’s large jaw quiver, and drawa tear from his narrow Habsburg eye.So why is he not more cheerful, as he strides about his privatechamber at York Place? ‘What will I get, Cromwell, if I gaineverything I ask? The queen, who does not like me, will be castoff and, if the king persists in his folly, the Boleyns brought in,who do not like me either; the girl has a spite against me, herfather I’ve made a fool of for years, and her uncle, Norfolk,would see me dead in a ditch. Do you think this plague will beover by the time I return? They say these visitations are all fromGod, but I can’t pretend to know his purposes. While I’m awayyou should get out of the city yourself.’He sighs; is the cardinal his only work? No; he is just thepatron who demands the most constant attendance. Businessalways increases. When he works for the cardinal, in London orelsewhere, he pays his own expenses and those of the staff hesends out on Wolsey business. The cardinal says, reimburseyourself, and trusts him to take a fair percentage on top; hedoesn’t quibble, because what is good for Thomas Cromwell isgood for Thomas Wolsey – and vice versa. His legal practice isthriving, and he is able to lend money at interest, and arrangebigger loans, on the international market, taking a broker’s fee.The market is volatile – the news from Italy is never good twodays together – but as some men have an eye for horseflesh orcattle to be fattened, he has an eye for risk. A number of noblemen are indebted to him, not just for arranging loans, but formaking their estates pay better. It is not a matter of exactionsfrom tenants, but, in the first place, giving the landowner anaccurate survey of land values, crop yield, water supply, builtassets, and then assessing the potential of all these; next, puttingin bright people as estate managers, and with them setting up anaccounting system that makes yearly sense and can be audited.Among the city merchants, he is in demand for his advice on trading partners overseas. He has a sideline in arbitration,commercial disputes mostly, as his ability to assess the facts of acase and give a swift impartial decision is trusted here, in Calaisand in Antwerp. If you and your opponent can at least concur onthe need to save the costs and delays of a court hearing, thenCromwell is, for a fee, your man; and he has the pleasant privilege, often enough, of sending away both sides happy.These are good days for him: every day a fight he can win.‘Still serving your Hebrew God, I see,’ remarks Sir ThomasMore. ‘I mean, your idol Usury.’ But when More, a scholarrevered through Europe, wakes up in Chelsea to the prospect ofmorning prayers in Latin, he wakes up to a creator who speaksthe swift patois of the markets; when More is settling in for asession of self-scourging, he and Rafe are sprinting to LombardStreet to get the day’s exchange rates. Not that he sprints, quite;an old injury drags sometimes, and when he’s tired a foot turnsinward, as if he’s walking back towards himself. People suggest itis the legacy of a summer with Cesare Borgia. He likes the storiesthey tell about him. But where’s Cesare now? He’s dead.‘Thomas Cromwell?’ people say. ‘That is an ingenious man.Do you know he has the whole of the New Testament by heart?’He is the very man if an argument about God breaks out; he isthe very man for telling your tenants twelve good reasons whytheir rents are fair. He is the man to cut through some legalentanglement that’s ensnared you for three generations, or talkyour sniffling little daughter into the marriage she swears she willnever make. With animals, women and timid litigants, hismanner is gentle and easy; but he makes your creditors weep. Hecan converse with you about the Caesars or get you Venetianglassware at a very reasonable rate. Nobody can out-talk him, ifhe wants to talk. Nobody can better keep their head, whenmarkets are falling and weeping men are standing on the streettearing up letters of credit. ‘Liz,’ he says one night, ‘I believe thatin a year or two we’ll be rich.

She is embroidering shirts for Gregory with a black-work
design; it’s the same one the queen uses, for she makes the king’s
shirts herself.
‘If I were Katherine I’d leave the needle in them,’ he says.
She grins. ‘I know you would.’
Lizzie had grown silent and stern when he told her how the
king had spoken, at the meeting with Katherine. He had told her
they should separate, pending a judgment on their marriage;
perhaps she would retire from court? Katherine had said no; she
said that would not be possible; she said she would seek advice
from canon lawyers, and that he, himself, should equip himself
with better lawyers, and better priests; and then, after the shouting was done, the people with their ears pressed to the walls had
heard Katherine crying. ‘He doesn’t like her crying.’
‘Men say,’ Liz reaches for her scissors, ‘“I can’t endure it when
women cry” – just as people say, “I can’t endure this wet
weather.” As if it were nothing to do with the men at all, the
crying. Just one of those things that happen.’
‘I’ve never made you cry, have I?’
‘Only with laughter,’ she says.
Conversation fades into an easy silence; she is embroidering
her own thoughts, he is plotting what to do with his money. He
is supporting two young scholars, not belonging to the family,
through Cambridge University; the gift blesses the giver. I could
increase those endowments, he thinks, and – ‘I suppose I should
make a will,’ he says.
She reaches out for his hand. ‘Tom, don’t die.’
‘Good God, no, I’m not proposing it.’
He thinks, I may not be rich yet but I am lucky. Look how I
got out from under Walter’s boots, from Cesare’s summer, and a
score of bad nights in back alleys. Men, it is supposed, want to
pass their wisdom to their sons; he would give a great deal to
protect his own son from a quarter of what he knows. Where
does Gregory’s sweet nature come from? It must be the result of his mother’s prayers. Richard Williams, Kat’s boy, is sharp, keen
and forward. Christopher, his sister Bet’s boy, is clever and
willing too. And then he has Rafe Sadler, whom he trusts as he
would trust his son; it’s not a dynasty, he thinks, but it’s a start.
And quiet moments like this are rare, because his house is full of
people every day, people who want to be taken to the cardinal.
There are artists looking for a subject. There are solemn Dutch
scholars with books under their arms, and Lübeck merchants
unwinding at length solemn Germanic jokes; there are musicians
in transit tuning up strange instruments, and noisy conclaves of
agents for the Italian banks; there are alchemists offering recipes
and astrologers offering favourable fates, and lonely Polish fur
traders who’ve wandered by to see if someone speaks their
language; there are printers, engravers, translators and cipherers;
and poets, garden designers, cabalists and geometricians. Where
are they tonight?
‘Hush,’ Liz says. ‘Listen to the house.’
At first, there is no sound. Then the timbers creak, breathe. In
the chimneys, nesting birds shuffle. A breeze blows from the
river, faintly shivering the tops of trees. They hear the sleeping
breath of children, imagined from other rooms. ‘Come to bed,’
he says.
The king can’t say that to his wife. Or, with any good effect, to
the woman they say he loves.
Now the cardinal’s many bags are packed for France; his
entourage yields little in splendour to the one with which he
crossed seven years ago to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. His
itinerary is leisurely, before he embarks: Dartford, Rochester,
Faversham, Canterbury for three or four days, prayers at the
shrine of Becket.
So, Thomas, he says, if you know the king’s had Anne, get a
letter to me the very day. I’ll only trust it if I hear it from you.
How will you know it’s happened? I should think you’ll know by his face. And if you have not the honour of seeing it? Good
point. I wish I had presented you; I should have taken the chance
while I had it.
‘If the king doesn’t tire of Anne quickly,’ he tells the cardinal,
‘I don’t see what you are to do. We know princes please themselves, and usually it’s possible to put some gloss on their actions.
But what case can you make for Boleyn’s daughter? What does
she bring him? No treaty. No land. No money. How are you to
present it as a creditable match at all?’
Wolsey sits with his elbows on his desk, his fingers dabbing
his closed lids. He takes a great breath, and begins to talk: he
begins to talk about England.
You can’t know Albion, he says, unless you can go back
before Albion was thought of. You must go back before Caesar’s
legions, to the days when the bones of giant animals and men lay
on the ground where one day London would be built. You must
go back to the New Troy, the New Jerusalem, and the sins and
crimes of the kings who rode under the tattered banners of
Arthur and who married women who came out of the sea or
hatched out of eggs, women with scales and fins and feathers;
beside which, he says, the match with Anne looks less unusual.
These are old stories, he says, but some people, let us remember,
do believe them.
He speaks of the deaths of kings: of how the second Richard
vanished into Pontefract Castle and was murdered there or
starved; how the fourth Henry, the usurper, died of a leprosy
which so scarred and contracted his body that it was the size of a
mannikin or child. He talks of the fifth Henry’s victories in
France, and the price, not in money, to be paid for Agincourt. He
talks of the French princess whom that great prince married; she
was a sweet lady, but her father was insane and believed that he
was made of glass. From this marriage – Fifth Henry and the
Glass Princess – sprung another Henry who ruled an England
dark as winter, cold, barren, calamitous. Edward Plantagenet, son of the Duke of York, came as the first sign of spring: he was a
native of Aries, the sign under which the whole world was made.
When Edward was eighteen years old, he seized the kingdom,
and he did it because of a sign he received. His troops were
baffled and battle-weary, it was the darkest time of one of God’s
darkest years, and he had just heard the news that should have
broken him: his father and his youngest brother had been
captured, mocked and slaughtered by the Lancastrian forces. It
was Candlemas; huddled in his tent with his generals, he prayed
for the slaughtered souls. St Blaise’s Day came: 3 February, black
and icy. At ten in the morning, three suns rose in the sky: three
blurred discs of silver, sparkling and hazy through particles of
frost. Their garland of light spread over the sorry fields, over the
sodden forests of the Welsh borderlands, over his demoralised
and unpaid troops. His men knelt in prayer on the frozen
ground. His knights genuflected to the sky. His whole life took
wing and soared. In that wash of brilliant light he saw his future.
When no one else could see, he could see: and that is what it
means to be a king. At the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross he took
prisoner one Owen Tudor. He beheaded him in Hereford
marketplace and set his head to rot on the market cross. An
unknown woman brought a basin of water and washed the
severed head; she combed its bloody hair.
From then on – St Blaise’s Day, the three suns shining – every
time he touched his sword he touched it to win. Three months
later he was in London and he was king. But he never saw the
future again, not clearly as he had that year. Dazzled, he stumbled through his kingship as through a mist. He was entirely the
creature of astrologers, of holy men and fantasists. He didn’t
marry as he should, for foreign advantage, but became enmeshed
in a series of half-made, half-broken promises to an unknown
number of women. One of them was a Talbot girl, Eleanor by
name, and what was special about her? It was said she was
descended – in the female line – from a woman who was a swan. And why did he fasten his affection, finally, on the widow of a
Lancastrian knight? Was it because, as some people thought, her
cold blonde beauty raised his pulse? It was not exactly that; it
was that she claimed descent from the serpent woman, Melusine,
whom you may see in old parchments, winding her coils about
the Tree of Knowledge and presiding over the union of the moon
and the sun. Melusine faked her life as an ordinary princess, a
mortal, but one day her husband saw her naked and glimpsed her
serpent’s tale. As she slid from his grip she predicted that her
children would found a dynasty that would reign for ever: power
with no limit, guaranteed by the devil. She slid away, says the
cardinal, and no one ever saw her again.
Some of the candles have gone out; Wolsey does not call for
more lights. ‘So you see,’ he says, ‘King Edward’s advisers were
planning to marry him to a French princess. As I … as I have
intended. And look what happened instead. Look how he chose.’
‘How long is that? Since Melusine?’
It is late; the whole great palace of York Place is quiet, the city
sleeping; the river creeping in its channels, silting its banks. In
these matters, the cardinal says, there is no measure of time; these
spirits slip from our hands and through the ages, serpentine,
mutable, sly.
‘But the woman King Edward married – she brought, did she
not, a claim to the throne of Castile? Very ancient, very obscure?’
The cardinal nods. ‘That was the meaning of the three suns.
The throne of England, the throne of France, the throne of
Castile. So when our present king married Katherine, he was
moving closer to his ancient rights. Not that anyone, I imagine,
dared put it in those terms to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. But it is as well to remember, and mention from time to
time, that our king is the ruler of three kingdoms. If each had
their own.’
‘By your account, my lord, our king’s Plantagenet grandfather
beheaded his Tudor great-grandfather. ‘A thing to know. But not to mention.’
‘And the Boleyns? I thought they were merchants, but should
I have known they had serpent fangs, or wings?’
‘You are laughing at me, Master Cromwell.’
‘Indeed not. But I want the best information, if you are leaving
me to watch this situation for you.’
The cardinal talks then about killing. He talks about sin: about
what’s to be expiated. He talks about the sixth King Henry,
murdered in the Tower; of King Richard, born under Scorpio,
the sign of secret dealings, tribulation and vice. At Bosworth,
where the Scorpian died, bad choices were made; the Duke of
Norfolk fought on the losing side, and his heirs were turned out
of their dukedom. They had to work hard, long and hard, to get
it back. So do you wonder, he says, why the Norfolk that is now
shakes sometimes, if the king is in a temper? It’s because he
thinks he will lose all he has, at an angry man’s whim.
The cardinal sees his man make a mental note; and he speaks of
the loose rattling bones under the paving of the Tower, those
bones bricked into staircases and mulched into the Thames mud.
He talks about King Edward’s two vanished sons, the younger of
them prone to stubborn resurrections that almost threw Henry
Tudor out of his kingdom. He speaks of the coins the Pretender
struck, stamped with their message to the Tudor king: ‘Your days
are numbered. You are weighed in the balance: and found
wanting.’
He speaks of the fear that was then, of the return of civil war.
Katherine was contracted to be married into England, had been
called ‘Princess of Wales’ since she was three years old; but
before her family would let her embark from Corunna, they
exacted a price in blood and bone. They asked Henry to turn his
attention to the chief Plantagenet claimant, the nephew of King
Edward and wicked King Richard, whom he had held in the
Tower since he was a child of ten. To gentle pressure, King
Henry capitulated; the White Rose, aged twenty-four, was taken out into God’s light and air, in order to have his head cut off. But
there is always another White Rose; the Plantagenets breed,
though not unsupervised. There will always be the need for more
killing; one must, says the cardinal, have the stomach for it, I
suppose, though I don’t know I ever have; I am always ill when
there is an execution. I pray for them, these old dead people. I
even pray for wicked King Richard sometimes, though Thomas
More tells me he is burning in Hell.
Wolsey looks down at his own hands, twists the rings on his
fingers. ‘I wonder,’ he murmurs. ‘Wonder which it is.’ Those
who envy the cardinal say he has a ring which enables its owner
to fly, and allows him to encompass the death of his enemies. It
detects poisons, renders ferocious beasts harmless, ensures the
favour of princes, and protects against drowning.
‘I suppose other people know, my lord. Because they have
employed conjurers, to try to get it copied.’
‘If I knew, I’d get it copied myself. I’d give one to you.’
‘I picked up a snake once. In Italy.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘For a bet.’
‘Was it poisonous?’
‘We didn’t know. That was the point of the bet.’
‘Did it bite you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Why of course?’
‘It wouldn’t be much of a story, would it? If I’d put it down
unharmed, and away it slid?’
Unwillingly, the cardinal laughs. ‘What will I do without you,’
he says, ‘among the double-tongued French?’
In the house at Austin Friars, Liz is in bed but she stirs in her
sleep. She half wakes, says his name and inches into his arms. He
kisses her hair and says, ‘Our king’s grandfather married a
serpent.’ Liz murmurs, ‘Am I awake or asleep?’ A heartbeat, and she
slides away from him, and turns over, throwing out an arm; he
wonders what she will dream. He lies awake, thinking. All that
Edward did, his battles, his conquests, he did with Medici money
behind him; their letters of credit were more important than
signs and wonders. If King Edward was, as many people say, not
the son of his father at all, not the son of the Duke of York; if
King Edward’s mother, as some people do believe, had bred him
from an honest English soldier, an archer called Blaybourne;
then if Edward married a serpent woman, his offspring would be
… Unreliable, is the word that comes to mind. If all the old
stories are to be believed, and some people, let us remember, do
believe them, then our king is one part bastard archer, one part
hidden serpent, one part Welsh, and all of him in debt to the
Italian banks … He too slides, drifts towards sleep. His accounting fails; the spectral world moves in, where pages of figures used
to be. Try always, the cardinal says, to learn what people wear
under their clothes, for it’s not just their skin. Turn the king
inside out, and you will find his scaly ancestors: his warm, solid,
serpentine flesh.
When in Italy he had picked up a snake for a bet, he had to
hold it till they counted ten. They counted, rather slowly, in the
slower languages: eins, zwei, drei … At four, the startled snake
flicked its head and bit him. Between four and five he tightened
his grip. Now some cried, ‘Blood of Christ, drop it!’ Some
prayed and some swore, some just kept on counting. The snake
looked sick; when they had all reached ten, and not before, he
eased its coiled body gently to the ground, and let it slip away
into its future.
There was no pain, but one could see clearly the puncture
wound. On instinct, he tasted it, almost bit his own wrist. He
noticed, surprised by it, the private, white, English flesh of his
inner arm; he saw the narrow blue-green veins into which the
snake had slipped the poison. He collected his winnings. He waited to die, but he never did
die. If anything, he got stronger, quick to hide and quick to
strike. There was no Milanese quartermaster could out-bawl
him, no bought-in Bernese capitaine who would not fall back
before his grim reputation for blood first and bargaining later.
Tonight is hot, it is July; he is asleep; he dreams. Somewhere in
Italy, a snake has children. He calls his children Thomas; they
carry in their heads pictures of the Thames, of muddy shallow
banks beyond the reach of the tide, beyond the wash of the
water.
Next morning when he wakes, Liz is still sleeping. The sheets
are damp. She is warm and flushed, her face smooth like a young
girl’s. He kisses her hairline. She tastes of salt. She murmurs, ‘Tell
me when you are coming home.’
‘Liz, I’m not going,’ he says. ‘I’m not going with Wolsey.’ He
leaves her. His barber comes to shave him. He sees his own eyes
in a polished mirror. They look alive; serpent eyes. What a
strange dream, he says to himself.
As he goes downstairs he thinks he sees Liz following him. He
think he sees the flash of her white cap. He turns, and says, ‘Liz,
go back to bed …’ But she’s not there. He is mistaken. He picks
up his papers and goes to Gray’s Inn.
It is recess. The business is not legal; the discussion is of texts,
and the whereabouts of Tyndale (somewhere in Germany), and
the immediate problem is a fellow lawyer (so who shall say he
should not be there, visiting Gray’s Inn?) called Thomas Bilney,
who is a priest also, and a fellow of Trinity Hall. ‘Little Bilney’
he’s called, on account of his short stature and worm-like attributes; he sits twisting on a bench, and talking about his mission to
lepers.
‘The scriptures, to me, are as honey,’ says Little Bilney, swivelling his meagre bottom, and kicking his shrunken legs. ‘I am
drunk on the word of God. ‘For Christ’s sake, man,’ he says. ‘Don’t think you can crawl
out of your hole because the cardinal is away. Because now the
Bishop of London has his hands free, not to mention our friend
in Chelsea.’
‘Masses, fasting, vigils, pardons out of Purgatory … all
useless,’ Bilney says. ‘This is revealed to me. All that remains, in
effect, is to go to Rome and discuss it with His Holiness. I am
sure he will come over to my way of thinking.’
‘You think your viewpoint is original, do you?’ he says
gloomily. ‘Still, at that, it may be, Father Bilney. If you think the
Pope would welcome your advice in these matters.’
He goes out, saying, there’s one who will jump into the fire,
given an invitation. Masters, be careful there.
He doesn’t take Rafe to these meetings. He will not draw any
member of his household into dangerous company. The
Cromwell household is as orthodox as any in London, and as
pious. They must be, he says, irreproachable.
The rest of the day is nothing to remember. He would have
been home early, if he had not arranged to meet up in the
German enclave, the Steelyard, with a man from Rostock, who
brought along a friend from Stettin, who offered to teach him
some Polish.
It’s worse than Welsh, he says at the end of the evening. I’ll
need a lot of practice. Come to my house, he says. Give us notice
and we’ll pickle some herring; otherwise, it’s pot-luck.
There’s something wrong when you arrive home at dusk but
torches are burning. The air is sweet and you feel so well as you
walk in, you feel young, unscarred. Then you see the dismayed
faces; they turn away at the sight of you.
Mercy comes and stands before him, but here is no mercy. ‘Say
it,’ he begs her.
She looks away when she says, I am so sorry.

He thinks it’s Gregory; he thinks his son is dead. Then he half
knows, because where is Liz? He begs her, ‘Say it.’
‘We looked for you. We said, Rafe, go and see if he’s at Gray’s
Inn, bring him back, but the gatekeepers denied they’d seen you
the whole day. Rafe said, trust me, I’ll find him, if I go over the
whole city: but not a sign of you.’
He remembers the morning: the damp sheets, her damp forehead. Liz, he thinks, didn’t you fight? If I had seen your death
coming, I would have taken him and beaten in his death’s head; I
would have crucified him against the wall.
The little girls are still up, though someone has put them into
their nightdresses, as if it were any ordinary night. Their legs and
feet are bare and their nightcaps, round lace bonnets made by their
mother, are knotted under their chins with a resolute hand. Anne’s
face is like a stone. She has Grace’s hand tucked in her fist. Grace
looks up at him, dubious. She almost never sees him; why is he
here? But she trusts him and lets him lift her, without protest, into
his arms. Against his shoulder she tumbles at once into sleep, her
arms flung around his neck, the crown of her head tucked beneath
his chin. ‘Now, Anne,’ he says, ‘we must take Grace to bed,
because she is little. I know you are not ready to sleep yet, but you
must go in beside her, because she may wake and feel cold.’
‘I may feel cold,’ Anne says.
Mercy walks before him to the children’s room. Grace is put
down without waking. Anne cries, but she cries in silence. I’ll sit
with them, Mercy says: but he says, ‘I will.’ He waits until
Anne’s tears stop flowing, and her hand slackens in his.
These things happen; but not to us.
‘Now let me see Liz,’ he says.
The room – which this morning was only their bedroom – is
lively with the scent of the herbs they are burning against contagion. They have lit candles at her head and feet. They have bound
up her jaw with linen, so already she does not look like herself.
She looks like the dead; she looks fearless, and as if she could judge you; she looks flatter and deader than people he has seen
on battlefields, with their guts spilled.
He goes down, to get an account of her deathbed; to deal with the
household. At ten this morning, Mercy said, she sat down: Jesu, I
am so weary. In the middle of the day’s business. Not like me, is
it? she’d said. I said, it’s not like you, Liz. I put my hand to her
forehead, and I said, Liz, my darling … I told her, lie down, get to
bed with you, you have to sweat this out. She said, no, give me a
few minutes, I’m dizzy, perhaps I need to eat a little something,
but we sat down at the table and she pushed her food away …
He would like her to shorten her account, but he understands her
need to tell it over, moment by moment, to say it out loud. It is like
a package of words she is making, to hand to him: this is yours now.
At midday Elizabeth lay down. She was shivering, though her
skin burned. She said, is Rafe in the house? Tell him to go and
find Thomas. And Rafe did go, and any number of people went,
and they didn’t find you.
At half past twelve, she said, tell Thomas to look after the children. And then what? She complained her head ached. But
nothing to me, no message? No; she said she was thirsty.
Nothing more. But then Liz, she never did say much.
At one o’clock, she called for a priest. At two, she made her
confession. She said she had once picked up a snake, in Italy. The
priest said it was the fever speaking. He gave her absolution. And
he could not wait, Mercy said, he could not wait to get out of the
house, he was so afraid he might take the contagion and die.
At three in the afternoon, she declined. At four, she put off the
burden of this life.
I suppose, he says, she will want to be buried with her first
husband.
Why should you think that?
Because I came more lately. He walks away. There is no point in
writing the usual directions about mourning clothes, beadsmen, candles. Like all the others touched by this sickness, Liz must be
buried quickly. He will not be able to send for Gregory or call the
family together. The rule is for the household to hang a bunch of
straw outside the door as sign of infection, and then restrict entry
for forty days, and go abroad as little as possible.
Mercy comes in and says, a fever, it could be any fever, we
don’t have to admit to the sweat … If we all stayed at home,
London would come to a standstill.
‘No,’ he says. ‘We must do it. My lord cardinal made these
rules and it would not be proper for me to scant them.’
Mercy says, where were you anyway? He looks into her face;
he says, you know Little Bilney? I was with him; I warned him,
I said he will jump into the fire.
And later? Later I was learning Polish.
Of course. You would be, she says.
She doesn’t expect to make sense of it. He never expects to
make any better sense of it than it makes now. He knows the
whole of the New Testament by heart, but find a text: find a text
for this.
Later, when he thinks back to that morning, he will want to
catch again that flash of her white cap: though when he turned,
no one was there. He would like to picture her with the bustle
and warmth of the household behind her, standing in the
doorway, saying, ‘Tell me when you are coming home.’ But he
can only picture her alone, at the door; and behind her is a wasteland, and a blue-tinged light.
He thinks of their wedding night; her trailing taffeta gown, her
little wary gesture of hugging her elbows. Next day she said,
‘That’s all right then.’
And smiled. That’s all she left him. Liz who never did say much.
For a month he is at home: he reads. He reads his Testament, but
he knows what it says. He reads Petrarch whom he loves, reads
how he defied the doctors: when they had given him up to fever he lived still, and when they came back in the morning, he was
sitting up writing. The poet never trusted any doctor after that;
but Liz left him too fast for physician’s advice, good or bad, or
for the apothecary with his cassia, his galingale, his wormwood,
and his printed cards with prayers on.
He has got Niccolò Machiavelli’s book, Principalities; it is a
Latin edition, shoddily printed in Naples, which seems to have
passed through many hands. He thinks of Niccolò on the battlefield; of Niccolò in the torture chamber. He feels he is in the
torture chamber but he knows that one day he will find the door
out, because it is he who has the key. Someone says to him, what
is in your little book? and he says, a few aphorisms, a few
truisms, nothing we didn’t know before.
Whenever he looks up from his book, Rafe Sadler is there. Rafe
is a slight boy, and the game with Richard and the others is to
pretend not to see him, and say, ‘I wonder where Rafe is?’ They
are as pleased with this joke as a bunch of three-year-olds might
be. Rafe’s eyes are blue, his hair is sandy-brown, and you couldn’t
take him for a Cromwell. But still he is a tribute to the man who
brought him up: dogged, sardonic, quick on the uptake.
He and Rafe read a book about chess. It is a book printed
before he was born, but it has pictures. They frown over them,
perfecting their game. For what seems like hours, neither of them
makes a move. ‘I was a fool,’ Rafe says, a forefinger resting on the
head of a pawn. ‘I should have found you. When they said you
weren’t at Gray’s Inn, I should have known you were.’
‘How could you have known? I’m not reliably where I
shouldn’t be. Are you moving that pawn, or just patting it?’
‘J’aboube.’ Rafe snatches his hand away.
For a long time they sit gazing at their pieces, at the configuration which locks them in place. They see it coming: stalemate.
‘We’re too good for each other.’
‘Perhaps we ought to play against other people.’
‘Later. When we can wipe out all-comers.’ Rafe says, ‘Ah, wait!’ He seizes his knight and makes it leap.
Then he looks at the result, aghast.
‘Rafe, you are foutu.’
‘Not necessarily.’ Rafe rubs his forehead. ‘You might yet do
something stupid.’
‘Right. You live in hope.’
Voices murmur. Sunlight outside. He feels he could almost
sleep, but when he sleeps Liz Wykys comes back, cheerful and
brisk, and when he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over
again.
From a distant room a child is crying. Footsteps overhead.
The crying stops. He picks up his king and looks at the base of it,
as if to see how it is made. He murmurs, ‘J’adoube.’ He puts it
back where it was.
Anne Cromwell sits with him, as the rain falls, and writes her
beginner’s Latin in her copy book. By St John’s Day she knows
all common verbs. She is quicker than her brother and he tells her
so. ‘Let me see,’ he says, holding out his hand for her book. He
finds that she has written her name over and over, ‘Anne
Cromwell, Anne Cromwell …’
News comes from France of the cardinal’s triumphs, parades,
public Masses and extempore Latin orations. It seems that, once
disembarked, he has stood on every high altar in Picardy and
granted the worshippers remission of their sins. That’s a few
thousand Frenchmen free to start all over again.
The king is chiefly at Beaulieu, a house in Essex he has
recently bought from Sir Thomas Boleyn, whom he has made
Viscount Rochford. All day he hunts, undeterred by the wet
weather. In the evening he entertains. The Duke of Suffolk and
the Duke of Norfolk join him at private suppers, which they
share with the new viscount. The Duke of Suffolk is his old
friend and if the king said, knit me some wings so I may fly, he
would say, what colour? The Duke of Norfolk is, of course, chief of the Howard family and Boleyn’s brother-in-law: a sinewy
little twitcher, always twitching after his own advantage.
He does not write to the cardinal to tell him that everybody in
England is saying that the king means to marry Anne Boleyn. He
doesn’t have the news the cardinal wants, so he doesn’t write at
all. He gets his clerks to do it, to keep the cardinal updated on his
legal affairs, his finances. Tell him we are all well here, he says.
Tender him my respects and my duty. Tell him how much we
would like to see his face.
No one else in their household falls sick. This year London
has escaped lightly – or at least, everyone says so. Prayers of
thanksgiving are offered in the city churches; or prayers of
appeasement, perhaps one should call them? In the little
conclaves that meet at night, God’s purpose is interrogated.
London knows that it sins. As the Bible tells us, ‘A merchant
shall hardly keep himself from doing wrong.’ And elsewhere it is
stated, ‘He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent.’ It
is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation. ‘Whom
the Lord loveth he correcteth.’
By early September, the plague has run its course and the
family is able to gather to pray for Liz. Now she can have the
ceremonies that were denied her when she left them so suddenly.
Black coats are given to twelve poor men of the parish, the same
mourners who would have followed her coffin; and each man in
the family has pledged seven years of Masses for her soul. On the
day appointed, the weather clears briefly, and there is a chill in
the air. ‘The harvest is passed, the summer is ended, and we are
not saved.’
The small child Grace wakes in the night and says that she sees
her mother in her shroud. She does not cry like a child, noisy and
hiccupping, but like a grown woman, weeping tears of dread.
‘All the rivers run into the sea, but the seas are not yet full.’ Morgan Williams shrinks year by year. Today especially he looks
small and grey and harassed, as he grips his arm and says, ‘Why
are the best taken? Ah, why are they?’ Then, ‘I know you were
happy with her, Thomas.’
They are back at Austin Friars, a swarm of women and children and robust men whom mourning hardly takes out of their
customary black, the garb of lawyers and merchants, of accountants and brokers. There is his sister, Bet Wellyfed; her two boys,
her little daughter Alice. There is Kat; his sisters have their heads
together, deciding who shall move in to help out Mercy with the
girls, ‘until you marry again, Tom.’
His nieces, two good little girls, still clutch their rosary beads.
They stare around them, unsure what they must do next. Ignored,
as the people talk over their heads, they lean against the wall, and
flick their eyes at each other. Slowly, they slide down the wall,
straight-backed, till they are the height of two-year-olds, and
balancing on their heels. ‘Alice! Johane!’ someone snaps; slowly
they rise, solemn-faced, to their proper heights. Grace approaches
them; silently they trap her, take off her cap, shake out her blonde
hair and begin to plait it. While the brothers-in-law talk about
what the cardinal is doing in France, his attention strays towards
her. Grace’s eyes grow wide as her cousins draw her hair back
tight. Her mouth opens in a silent gape, like a fish’s mouth. When
one squeak escapes her, it is Liz’s sister, the elder Johane, who
crosses the room and scoops her up. Watching Johane, he thinks,
as he often has, how alike the sisters are: were.
His daughter Anne turns her back on the women, slides her
arm into her uncle’s. ‘We’re talking about the Low Countries
trade,’ Morgan tells her.
‘One thing’s for sure, Uncle, they won’t be pleased in
Antwerp if Wolsey signs a treaty with the French.’
‘That’s what we’re saying to your father. But, oh, he will stick
by his cardinal. Come, Thomas! You don’t like the French any
more than we do.’ He knows, as they do not, how much the cardinal needs the
friendship of King François; without one of the major powers of
Europe to speak for him, how will the king get his divorce?
‘Treaty of Perpetual Peace? Let’s think, when was the last
Perpetual Peace? I give it three months.’ It is his brother-in-law
Wellyfed who speaks, laughing; and John Williamson, who is
Johane’s husband, asks will they take bets on it: three months,
six? Then he remembers they’re at a solemn occasion. ‘Sorry,
Tom,’ he says, and breaks into a spasm of coughing.
Johane’s voice cuts across it: ‘If the old gamester keeps coughing like this, the winter will finish him off, and then I’ll marry
you, Tom.’
‘Will you?’
‘Oh, for sure. As long as I get the right piece of paper from
Rome.’
The party smile and hide their smiles. They give each other
knowing looks. Gregory says, why is that funny? You can’t
marry your wife’s sister, can you? He and his boy cousins go off
into a corner to talk about private subjects – Bet’s boys Christopher and Will, Kat’s boys Richard and Walter – why did they call
that child Walter? Did they need a reminder of their father,
lurking around after his death, to remind them not to get too
happy? The family never meet but he thanks God that Walter’s
not with them any more. He tells himself he should have more
kindness towards his father, but his kindness extends only to
paying for Masses for his soul.
In the year before he came back to England for good, he had
crossed and recrossed the sea, undecided; he had so many friends
in Antwerp, besides good business contacts, and as the city
expanded, which it did every year, it seemed more and more the
right place to be. If he was homesick, it was for Italy: the light,
the language, Tommaso as he’d been there. Venice had cured him
of any nostalgia for the banks of the Thames. Florence and Milan
had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who’d stayed at home. But something pulled at him – curiosity about
who was dead and who’d been born, a desire to see his sisters
again, and laugh – one can always laugh somehow – about their
upbringing. He had written to Morgan Williams to say, I’m
thinking of London next. But don’t tell my father. Don’t tell him
I’m coming home.
During the early months they tried to coax him. Look,
Walter’s settled down, you wouldn’t know him. He’s eased back
on the drink. Well, he knew it was killing him. He keeps out of
the law courts these days. He’s even served his turn as churchwarden.
What? he said. And he didn’t get drunk on the altar wine? He
didn’t make off with the candle funds?
Nothing they said could persuade him down to Putney. He
waited more than a year, till he was married and a father. Then he
felt safe to go.
It was more than twelve years he’d been out of England. He’d
been taken aback by the change in people. He left them young
and they had softened or sharpened into middle age. The lissom
were lean now and dried out. The plump were plumper. Fine
features had blurred and softened. Bright eyes were duller. There
were some people he didn’t recognise at all, not at first glance.
But he would have known Walter anywhere. As his father
walked towards him he thought, I’m seeing myself, in twenty,
thirty years, if I’m spared. They said that drink had nearly done
for him, but he didn’t look half-dead. He looked as he had
always looked: as if he could knock you down, and might decide
to do it. His short strong body had broadened and coarsened.
His hair, thick and curling, had hardly a thread of grey. His
glance was skewering; small eyes, bright and golden-brown. You
need good eyes in a smithy, he used to say. You need good eyes
wherever you are, or they’ll rob you blind.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Walter said. Where once he would have
sounded angry, he now sounded merely irritated. It was as if his son had been on a message to Mortlake, and had taken his time
over it.
‘Oh … here and there,’ he said.
‘You look like a foreigner.’
‘I am a foreigner.’
‘So what have you been doing?’
He could imagine himself saying, ‘This and that.’ He did say
it.
‘And what sort of this and that are you doing now?’
‘I’m learning the law.’
‘Law!’ Walter said. ‘If it weren’t for the so-called law, we
would be lords. Of the manor. And a whole lot of other manors
round here.’
That is, he thinks, an interesting point to make. If you get to be
a lord by fighting, shouting, being bigger, better, bolder and
more shameless than the next man, Walter should be a lord. But
it’s worse than that; Walter thinks he’s entitled. He’d heard it all
his childhood: the Cromwells were a rich family once, we had
estates. ‘When, where?’ he used to say. Walter would say, ‘Somewhere in the north, up there!’ and yell at him for quibbling. His
father didn’t like to be disbelieved even when he was telling you
an outright lie. ‘So how do we come to such a low place?’ he
would ask, and Walter would say it was because of lawyers and
cheats and lawyers who are all cheats, and who thieve land away
from its owners. Understand it if you can, Walter would say, for
I can’t – and I’m not stupid, boy. How dare they drag me into
court and fine me for running beasts on the so-called common?
If all had their own, that would be my common.
Now, if the family’s land was in the north, how could that be?
No point saying this – in fact, it’s the quickest way to get a lesson
from Walter’s fist. ‘But was there no money?’ he’d persist. ‘What
happened to it?’
Just once, when he was sober, Walter had said something that
sounded true, and was, by his lights, eloquent: I suppose, he said, I suppose we pissed it away. I suppose once it’s gone it’s gone. I
suppose fortune, when it’s lost, it will never visit again.
He thought about it, over the years. On that day when he
went back to Putney, he’d asked him, ‘If ever the Cromwells
were rich, and I were to go after what’s left, would that content
you?’
His tone was meant to be soothing but Walter was hard to
soothe. ‘Oh yes, and share it out, I suppose? You and bloody
Morgan that you’re so thick with. That’s my money, if all have
their own.’
‘It would be family money.’ What are we doing, he thought,
quarrelling right off, rowing within five minutes over this nonexistent wealth? ‘You have a grandson now.’ He added, not
aloud, ‘And you aren’t coming anywhere near him.’
‘Oh, I have those already,’ Walter said. ‘Grandsons. What is
she, some Dutch girl?’
He told him about Liz Wykys. Admitting, therefore, that he
had been in England long enough to marry and have a child.
‘Caught yourself a rich widow,’ Walter said, sniggering. ‘I
suppose that was more important than coming to see me. It
would be. I suppose you thought I’d be dead. Lawyer, is it? You
were always a talker. A slap in the mouth couldn’t cure it.’
‘But God knows you tried.’
‘I suppose you don’t admit to the smithy work now. Or
helping your uncle John and sleeping among the turnip shavings.’
‘Good God, father,’ he’d said, ‘they didn’t eat turnips at
Lambeth Palace. Cardinal Morton eat turnips! What are you
thinking?’
When he was a little boy and his uncle John was a cook for the
great man, he used to run away to Lambeth to the palace, because
the chances of getting fed were better. He used to hang around
by the entrance nearest the river – Morton hadn’t built his big
gateway then – and watch the people come and go, asking who was who and recognising them next time by the colours of their
clothes and the animals and objects painted on their shields.
‘Don’t stand about,’ people bellowed at him, ‘make yourself
useful.’
Other children than he made themselves useful in the kitchen
by fetching and carrying, their small fingers employed in plucking songbirds and hulling strawberries. Each dinner time the
household officers formed up in procession in the passages off
the kitchens, and they carried in the tablecloths and the Principal
Salt. His uncle John measured the loaves and if they were not just
right they were tossed into a basket for the lower household.
Those that passed his test he counted as they went in; standing by
him, pretending to be his deputy, he learned to count. Into the
great hall would go the meats and the cheeses, the sugared fruits
and the spiced wafers, to the archbishop’s table – he was not a
cardinal then. When the scrapings and remnants came back they
were divided up. First choice to the kitchen staff. Then to the
almshouse and the hospital, the beggars at the gate. What wasn’t
fit for them would go down the line to the children and the pigs.
Each morning and evening the boys earned their keep by
running up the back staircases with beer and bread to put in the
cupboards for the young gentlemen who were the cardinal’s
pages. The pages were of good family. They would wait at table
and so become intimate with great men. They would hear their
talk and learn from it. When they were not at the table they were
learning out of great volumes from their music masters and other
masters, who passed up and down the house holding nosegays
and pomanders, who spoke in Greek. One of the pages was
pointed out to him: Master Thomas More, whom the archbishop
himself says will be a great man, so deep his learning already and
so pleasant his wit.
One day he brought a wheaten loaf and put it in the cupboard
and lingered, and Master Thomas said, ‘Why do you linger?’ But
he did not throw anything at him. ‘What is in that great book?’

he asked, and Master Thomas replied, smiling, ‘Words, words,
just words.’
Master More is fourteen this year, someone says, and is to go
to Oxford. He doesn’t know where Oxford is, or whether he
wants to go there or has just been sent. A boy can be sent; and
Master Thomas is not yet a man.
Fourteen is twice seven. Am I seven? he asks. Don’t just say
yes. Tell me am I? His father says, for God’s sake, Kat, make him
up a birthday. Tell him anything, but keep him quiet.
When his father says, I’m sick of the sight of you, he leaves
Putney and sets off to Lambeth. When Uncle John says, we have
plenty of boys this week, and the devil finds work for idle hands,
he sets off back to Putney. Sometimes he gets a present to take
home. Sometimes it is a brace of pigeons with their feet tied
together, and gaping bloody beaks. He walks along the riverbank
whirling them about his head, and they look as if they are flying,
till somebody shouts at him, stop that! He can’t do anything
without someone shouting. Is it any wonder, John says, when
you are into any mischief going, prone to giving back answers
and always reliably to be found where you shouldn’t be?
In a small cold room off the kitchen passages there is a woman
called Isabella, who makes marzipan figures, for the archbishop
and his friends to make plays with after supper. Some of the
figures are heroes, such as Prince Alexander, Prince Caesar. Some
are saints; today I am making St Thomas, she says. One day she
makes marzipan beasts and gives him a lion. You can eat it, she
says; he would rather keep it, but Isabella says it will soon fall to
pieces. She says, ‘Haven’t you got a mother?’
He learns to read from the scribbled orders for wheat flour or
dried beans, for barley and for ducks’ eggs, that come out of the
stewards’ pantries. For Walter, the point of being able to read is
to take advantage of people who can’t; for the same purpose one
must learn to write. So his father sends him to the priest. But
again he is always in the wrong, for priests have such strange rules; he should come to the lesson specially, not on his way from
whatever else he is doing, not carrying a toad in a bag, or knives
that want sharpening, and not cut and bruised either, from one of
those doors (doors called Walter) that he is always walking into.
The priest shouts, and forgets to feed him, so he takes off to
Lambeth again.
On the days when he turns up in Putney, his father says,
where by the sweet saints have you been: unless he’s busy inside,
on top of a stepmother. Some of the stepmothers last such a short
time that his father’s done with them and kicked them out by the
time he gets home, but Kat and Bet tell him about them, screeching with laughter. Once when he comes in, dirty and wet, that
day’s stepmother says, ‘Who does this boy belong to?’ and tries
to kick him out into the yard.
One day when he is nearly home he finds the first Bella lying
in the street, and he sees that nobody wants her. She is no longer
than a small-sized rat and so shocked and cold that she doesn’t
even cry. He carries her home in one hand, and in the other a
small cheese wrapped in sage leaves.
The dog dies. His sister Bet says, you can get another. He
looks in the street but never finds one. There are dogs, but they
belong to somebody.
It can take a long time to get to Putney from Lambeth and
sometimes he eats the present, if it’s not raw. But if he only gets a
cabbage, he kicks it and rolls it and thrashes it till it is utterly,
utterly destroyed.
At Lambeth he follows the stewards around and when they
say a number he remembers it; so people say, if you haven’t time
to write it down, just tell John’s nephew. He will cast an eye on a
sack of whatever’s been ordered in, then warn his uncle to check
if it’s short weight.
At night at Lambeth, when it’s still light and all the pots have
been scoured, the boys go outside on to the cobbles and play at
football. Their shouts rise into the air. They curse and barge into each other, and till somebody yells to stop, they fight with their
fists and sometimes bite each other. From the open window
above, the young gentlemen sing a part-song in the high careful
voices they learn.
Sometimes the face of Master Thomas More appears. He
waves to him, but Master Thomas looks down without recognition at the children below. He smiles impartially; his white
scholar’s hand draws close the shutter. The moon rises. The pages
go to their truckle-beds. The kitchen children wrap themselves in
sacking and sleep by the hearth.
He remembers one night in summer when the footballers had
stood silent, looking up. It was dusk. The note from a single
recorder wavered in the air, thin and piercing. A blackbird picked
up the note, and sang from a bush by the water gate. A boatman
whistled back from the river.
1527: when the cardinal comes back from France, he immediately begins ordering up banquets. French ambassadors are
expected, to set the seal on his concordat. Nothing, he says,
nothing, will be too good for these gentlemen.
The court leaves Beaulieu on 27 August. Soon afterwards,
Henry meets the returned cardinal, face-to-face for the first time
since early June. ‘You will hear that the king’s reception of me
was cold,’ Wolsey says, ‘but I can tell you it was not. She – Lady
Anne – was present … this is true.’
On the face of it, a large part of his mission has been a failure.
The cardinals would not meet him at Avignon: made the excuse
that they didn’t want to go south in the heat. ‘But now,’ he says,
‘I have a better plan. I will ask the Pope to send me a co-legate,
and I will try the king’s matter in England.’
While you were in France, he says, my wife Elizabeth died.
The cardinal looks up. His hands fly to his heart. His right hand
creeps down to the crucifix he wears. He asks how it occurred. He
listens. His thumb runs over the tortured body of God: over and over, as if it were any lump of metal. He bows his head. He
murmurs, ‘Whom the Lord loveth …’ They sit in silence. To break
the silence, he begins to ask the cardinal unnecessary questions.
He scarcely needs an account of the tactics of the summer just
past. The cardinal has promised to help finance a French army
which will go into Italy and try to expel the Emperor. While this
is happening, the Pope, who has lost not just the Vatican but the
papal states, and seen Florence throw out his Medici relatives,
will be grateful and obliged to King Henry. But as for any longterm rapprochement with the French – he, Cromwell, shares the
scepticism of his friends in the city. If you have been in the street
in Paris or Rouen, and seen a mother pull her child by the hand,
and say, ‘Stop that squalling, or I’ll fetch an Englishman,’ you are
inclined to believe that any accord between the countries is
formal and transient. The English will never be forgiven for the
talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get
off their own island. English armies laid waste to the land they
moved through. As if systematically, they performed every
action proscribed by the codes of chivalry, and broke every one
of the laws of war. The battles were nothing; it was what they did
between the battles that left its mark. They robbed and raped for
forty miles around the line of their march. They burned the
crops in the fields, and the houses with the people inside them.
They took bribes in coin and in kind and when they were
encamped in a district they made the people pay for every day on
which they were left unmolested. They killed priests and hung
them up naked in the marketplaces. As if they were infidels, they
ransacked the churches, packed the chalices in their baggage,
fuelled their cooking fires with precious books; they scattered
relics and stripped altars. They found out the families of the dead
and demanded that the living ransom them; if the living could
not pay, they torched the corpses before their eyes, without ceremony, without a single prayer, disposing of the dead as one might
the carcases of diseased cattle. This being so, the kings may forgive each other; the people
scarcely can. He does not say this to Wolsey, who has enough
bad news waiting for him. During his absence, the king had sent
his own envoy to Rome for secret negotiations. The cardinal had
found it out; and it had come to nothing, of course. ‘But if the
king is less than frank with me, it does nothing to aid our cause.’
He has never before met with such double-dealing. The fact is,
the king knows his case is weak in law. He knows this, but does
not want to know it. In his own mind, he has convinced himself he
was never married and so is now free to marry. Let us say, his will
is convinced, but not his conscience. He knows canon law, and
where he does not know it already he has made himself expert.
Henry, as the younger brother, was brought up and trained for the
church, and for the highest offices within it. ‘If His Majesty’s
brother Arthur had lived,’ Wolsey says, ‘then His Majesty would
have been the cardinal, and not me. Now there’s a thought. Do
you know, Thomas, I haven’t had a day off since … since I was on
the boat, I suppose. Since the day I was seasick, starting at Dover.’
They had once crossed the Narrow Sea together. The cardinal
had lain below, calling on God, but he, being used to the voyage,
spent the time on deck, making drawings of the sails and rigging,
and of notional ships with notional rigging, and trying to
persuade the captain – ‘yourself not offended,’ he said – that
there was a way of going faster. The captain thought it over and
said, ‘When you fit out a merchant ship of your own, you can do
it that way. Of course, any Christian vessel will think you’re
pirates, so don’t look for help if you get in difficulties. Sailors,’ he
explained, ‘don’t like anything new.’
‘Nor does anyone else,’ he’d said. ‘Not as far as I can see.’
There cannot be new things in England. There can be old
things freshly presented, or new things that pretend to be old. To
be trusted, new men must forge themselves an ancient pedigree,
like Walter’s, or enter into the service of ancient families. Don’t
try to go it alone, or they’ll think you’re pirates. This summer, with the cardinal back on dry land, he remembers that voyage. He waits for the enemy to come alongside, and
for the hand-to-hand fighting to begin.
But for now he goes down to the kitchens, to see how they are
getting on with their masterpieces to impress the French envoys.
They have got the steeple on their sugar-paste model of St Paul’s,
but they are having trouble with the cross and ball on top. He
says, ‘Make marzipan lions – the cardinal wants them.’
They roll their eyes and say, will it never end?
Since he returned from France their master has been uncharacteristically sour. It is not just the overt failures that make him
grumble, but the dirty work behind the scenes. Squibs and slanders were printed against him and as fast as he could buy them up
there was a new batch on the street. Every thief in France seemed
to converge on his baggage train; at Compiègne, though he
mounted a day-and-night guard on his gold plate, a little boy was
found to be going up and down the back stairs, passing out the
dishes to some great robber who had trained him up.
‘What happened? Did you catch him?’
‘The great robber was put in the pillory. The boy ran away.
Then one night, some villain sneaked into my chamber, and
carved a device by the window …’ And next morning, a shaft of
early sun, creeping through mist and rain, had picked out a
gallows, from which dangled a cardinal’s hat.
Once again the summer has been wet. He could swear it has
never been light. The harvest will be ruined. The king and the
cardinal exchange recipes for pills. The king lays down cares of
state should he happen to sneeze, and prescribes for himself an
easy day of music-making or strolling – if the rain abates – in his
gardens. In the afternoon, he and Anne sometimes retire and are
private. The gossip is that she allows him to undress her. In the
evenings, good wine keeps the chills out, and Anne, who reads
the Bible, points out strong scriptural commendations to him. After supper he grows thoughtful, says he supposes the King of
France is laughing at him; he supposes the Emperor is laughing
too. After dark the king is sick with love. He is melancholy,
sometimes unreachable. He drinks and sleeps heavily, sleeps
alone; he wakes, and because he is a strong man and a young man
still he is optimistic, clear-headed, ready for the new day. In
daylight, his cause is hopeful.
The cardinal doesn’t stop work if he’s ill. He just goes on at his
desk, sneezing, aching, and complaining.
In retrospect, it is easy to see where the cardinal’s decline
began, but at the time it was not easy. Look back, and you
remember being at sea. The horizon dipped giddily, and the
shoreline was lost in mist.
October comes, and his sisters and Mercy and Johane take his
dead wife’s clothes and cut them up carefully into new patterns.
Nothing is wasted. Every good bit of cloth is made into something else.
At Christmas the court sings:
As the holly groweth green
And never changes hue
So I am, and ever hath been,
Unto my lady true.
Green groweth the holly, so doth the ivy.
Though winter blasts blow ever so high.
As the holly groweth green,
With ivy all alone,
When flowers cannot be seen
And green-wood leaves be gone,
Green groweth the holly.

Spring, 1528: Thomas More, ambling along, genial, shabby. ‘Just
the man,’ he says. ‘Thomas, Thomas Cromwell. Just the man I
want to see.’
He is genial, always genial; his shirt collar is grubby. ‘Are you
bound for Frankfurt this year, Master Cromwell? No? I thought
the cardinal might send you to the fair, to get among the heretic
booksellers. He is spending a deal of money buying up their
writings, but the tide of filth never abates.’
More, in his pamphlets against Luther, calls the German shit.
He says that his mouth is like the world’s anus. You would not
think that such words would proceed from Thomas More, but
they do. No one has rendered the Latin tongue more obscene.
‘Not really my business,’ Cromwell says, ‘heretics’ books.
Heretics abroad are dealt with abroad. The church being universal.’
‘Oh, but once these Bible men get over to Antwerp, you know
… What a town it is! No bishop, no university, no proper seat of
learning, no proper authorities to stop the proliferation of socalled translations, translations of scripture which in my opinion
are malicious and wilfully misleading … But you know that, of
course, you spent some years there. And now Tyndale’s been
sighted in Hamburg, they say. You’d know him, wouldn’t you, if
you saw him?’
‘So would the Bishop of London. You yourself, perhaps.’
‘True. True.’ More considers it. He chews his lip. ‘And you’ll
say to me, well, it’s not work for a lawyer, running after false
translations. But I hope to get the means to proceed against the
brothers for sedition, do you see?’ The brothers, he says; his little
joke; he drips with disdain. ‘If there is a crime against the state,
our treaties come into play, and I can have them extradited. To
answer for themselves in a straiter jurisdiction.’
‘Have you found sedition in Tyndale’s writing?’
‘Ah, Master Cromwell!’ More rubs his hands together. ‘I
relish you, I do indeed. Now I feel as a nutmeg must do when it’s
grated. A lesser man – a lesser lawyer – would say, “I have read Tyndale’s work, and I find no fault there.” But Cromwell won’t
be tripped – he casts it back, he asks me, rather, have you read
Tyndale? And I admit it. I have studied the man. I have picked
apart his so-called translations, and I have done it letter by letter.
I read him, of course, I do. By licence. From my bishop.’
‘It says in Ecclesiasticus, “he that toucheth pitch shall be
defiled.” Unless his name’s Thomas More.’
‘Well now, I knew you were a Bible reader! Most apt. But if a
priest hears a confession, and the matter be wanton, does that
make the priest a wanton fellow himself?’ By way of diversion,
More takes his hat off, and absently folds it up in his hands; he
creases it in two; his bright, tired eyes glance around, as if he
might be confuted from all sides. ‘And I believe the Cardinal of
York has himself licensed his young divines at Cardinal College
to read the sectaries’ pamphlets. Perhaps he includes you in his
dispensations. Does he?’
It would be strange for him to include his lawyer; but then it’s
strange work for lawyers altogether. ‘We have come around in a
circle,’ he says.
More beams at him. ‘Well, after all, it’s spring. We shall soon
be dancing around the maypole. Good weather for a sea voyage.
You could take the chance to do some wool-trade business,
unless it’s just men you’re fleecing these days? And if the cardinal asked you to go to Frankfurt, I suppose you’d go? Now if he
wants some little monastery knocked down, when he thinks it
has good endowments, when he thinks the monks are old, Lord
bless them, and a little wandering in their wits; when he thinks
the barns are full and the ponds well stocked with fish, the cattle
fat and the abbot old and lean … off you go, Thomas Cromwell.
North, south, east or west. You and your little apprentices.’
If another man were saying this, he’d be trying to start a fight.
When Thomas More says it, it leads to an invitation to dinner.
‘Come out to Chelsea,’ he says. ‘The talk is excellent, and we
shall like you to add to it. Our food is simple, but good. Tyndale says a boy washing dishes in the kitchen is as pleasing
to the eye of God as a preacher in the pulpit or the apostle on the
Galilee shore. Perhaps, he thinks, I won’t mention Tyndale’s
opinion.
More pats his arm. ‘Have you no plans to marry again,
Thomas? No? Perhaps wise. My father always says, choosing a
wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will
pull out the eel?’
‘Your father has married, what, three times?’
‘Four.’ He smiles. The smile is real. It crinkles the corner of his
eyes. ‘Your beadsman, Thomas,’ he says, as he ambles away.
When More’s first wife died, her successor was in the house
before the corpse was cold. More would have been a priest, but
human flesh called to him with its inconvenient demands. He did
not want to be a bad priest, so he became a husband. He had
fallen in love with a girl of sixteen, but her sister, at seventeen,
was not yet married; he took the elder, so that her pride should
not be hurt. He did not love her; she could not read or write; he
hoped that might be amended, but seemingly not. He tried to get
her to learn sermons by heart, but she grumbled and was stubborn in her ignorance; he took her home to her father, who
suggested beating her, which made her so frightened that she
swore she would complain no more. ‘And she never did,’ More
will say. ‘Though she didn’t learn any sermons either.’ It seems
he thought the negotiations had been satisfactory: honour
preserved all round. The stubborn woman gave him children,
and when she died at twenty-four, he married a city widow,
getting on in years and advanced in stubbornness: another one
who couldn’t read. There it is: if you are so lenient with yourself
as to insist on living with a woman, then for the sake of your soul
you should make it a woman you really don’t like.
Cardinal Campeggio, whom the Pope is sending to England at
Wolsey’s request, was a married man before he was a priest. It makes him especially suitable to help Wolsey – who of course has
no experience of marital problems – on the next stage of the
journey to thwart the king in his heart’s desire. Though the imperial army has withdrawn from Rome, a spring of negotiations has
failed to yield any definite result. Stephen Gardiner has been in
Rome, with a letter from the cardinal, praising the Lady Anne,
trying to disabuse the Pope of any notion he may entertain that
the king is being wilful and whimsical in his choice of bride. The
cardinal had sat long over the letter listing her virtues, writing it
in his own hand. ‘Womanly modesty … chastity … can I say
chastity?’
‘You’d better.’
The cardinal looked up. ‘Know something?’ He hesitated, and
returned to his letter. ‘Apt to bear children? Well, her family is
fertile. Loving and faithful daughter of the church … Perhaps
stretching a point … they say she has the scriptures in French set
up in her chamber, and lets her women read them, but I would
have no positive knowledge of that …’
‘King François allows the Bible in French. She learned her
scriptures there, I suppose.’
‘Ah, but women, you see. Women reading the Bible, there’s
another point of contention. Does she know what Brother
Martin thinks is a woman’s place? We shouldn’t mourn, he says,
if our wife or daughter dies in childbirth – she’s only doing what
God made her for. Very harsh, Brother Martin, very intractable.
And perhaps she is not a Bible-woman. Perhaps it is a slur on her.
Perhaps it is just that she is out of patience with churchmen. I
wish she did not blame me for her difficulties. Not blame me so
very much.’
Lady Anne sends friendly messages to the cardinal, but he
thinks she does not mean them. ‘If,’ Wolsey had said, ‘I saw the
prospect of an annulment for the king, I would go to the Vatican
in person, have my veins opened and allow the documents to be
written in my own blood. Do you think, if Anne knew that, it would content her? No, I didn’t think so, but if you see any of
the Boleyns, make them the offer. By the way, I suppose you
know a person called Humphrey Monmouth? He is the man
who had Tyndale in his house for six months, before he ran off to
wherever. They say he sends him money still, but that can’t
possibly be true, as how would he know where to send?
Monmouth … I am merely mentioning his name. Because …
now why am I?’ The cardinal had closed his eyes. ‘Because I am
merely mentioning it.’
The Bishop of London has already filled his own prisons. He
is locking up Lutherans and sectaries in Newgate and the Fleet,
with common criminals. There they remain until they recant and
do public penance. If they relapse they will be burned; there are
no second chances.
When Monmouth’s house is raided, it is clear of all suspect
writings. It’s almost as if he was forewarned. There are neither
books nor letters that link him to Tyndale and his friends. All the
same, he is taken to the Tower. His family is terrified. Monmouth
is a gentle and fatherly man, a master draper, well liked in his
guild and the city at large. He loves the poor and buys cloth even
when trade is bad, so the weavers may keep in work. No doubt
the imprisonment is designed to break him; his business is tottering by the time he is released. They have to let him go, for lack of
evidence, because you can’t make anything of a heap of ashes in
the hearth.
Monmouth himself would be a heap of ashes, if Thomas More
had his way. ‘Not come to see us yet, Master Cromwell?’ he says.
‘Still breaking dry bread in cellars? Come now, my tongue is
sharper than you deserve. We must be friends, you know.’
It sounds like a threat. More moves away, shaking his head:
‘We must be friends.’
Ashes, dry bread. England was always, the cardinal says, a
miserable country, home to an outcast and abandoned people,
who are working slowly towards their deliverance, and who are visited by God with special tribulations. If England lies under
God’s curse, or some evil spell, it has seemed for a time that the
spell has been broken, by the golden king and his golden cardinal. But those golden years are over, and this winter the sea will
freeze; the people who see it will remember it all their lives.
Johane has moved into the house at Austin Friars with her
husband John Williamson and her daughter little Johane – Jo, the
children call her, seeing she is too small for a full name. John
Williamson is needed in the Cromwell business. ‘Thomas,’ says
Johane, ‘what exactly is your business these days?’
In this way she detains him in talk. ‘Our business,’ he says, ‘is
making people rich. There are many ways to do this and John is
going to help me out with them.’
‘But John won’t have to deal with my lord cardinal, will he?’
The gossip is that people – people of influence – have
complained to the king, and the king has complained to Wolsey,
about the monastic houses he has closed down. They don’t think
of the good use to which the cardinal has put the assets; they
don’t think of his colleges, the scholars he maintains, the libraries
he is founding. They’re only interested in getting their own
fingers in the spoils. And because they’ve been cut out of the
business, they pretend to believe the monks have been left naked
and lamenting in the road. They haven’t. They’ve been transferred elsewhere, to bigger houses better run. Some of the
younger ones have been let go, boys who have no calling to the
life. Questioning them, he usually finds they know nothing,
which makes nonsense of the abbeys’ claims to be the light of
learning. They can stumble through a Latin prayer, but when
you say, ‘Go on then, tell me what it means,’ they say, ‘Means,
master?’ as if they thought that words and their meanings were
so loosely attached that the tether would snap at the first tug.
‘Don’t worry about what people say,’ he tells Johane. ‘I take
responsibility for it, I do, alone.’

The cardinal has received the complaints with a supremehauteur. He has grimly noted in his file the names of thecomplainers. Then he has taken out of his file the list, and handedit over to his man, with a tight smile. All he cares for are his newbuildings, his banners flying, his coat of arms embossed on thebrickwork, his Oxford scholars; he’s plundering Cambridge toget the brightest young doctors over to Cardinal College. Therewas trouble before Easter, when the dean found six of the newmen in possession of a number of forbidden books. Lock themup by all means, Wolsey said, lock them up and reason withthem. If the weather is not too hot, or not too wet, I might comeup and reason with them myself.No use trying to explain this to Johane. She only wants toknow her husband’s not within arrow-shot of the slanders thatare flying. ‘You know what you’re doing, I suppose.’ Her eyesdart upwards. ‘At least, Tom, you always look as if you do.’Her voice, her footstep, her raised eyebrow, her pointed smile,everything reminds him of Liz. Sometimes he turns, thinkingthat Liz has come into the room.The new arrangements confuse Grace. She knows her mother’s firsthusband was called Tom Williams; they name him in their household prayers. Is Uncle Williamson therefore his son? she asks.Johane tries to explain it. ‘Save your breath,’ Anne says. Shetaps her head. Her bright little fingers bounce from the seedpearls of her cap. ‘Slow,’ she says.Later, he says to her, ‘Grace isn’t slow, just young.’‘I never remember I was as foolish as that.’‘They’re all slow, except us? Is that right?’Anne’s face says, more or less, that is right. ‘Why do people marry?’‘So there can be children.’‘Horses don’t marry. But there are foals.’‘Most people,’ he says, ‘feel it increases their happiness.’‘Oh, yes, that,’ Anne says. ‘May I choose my husband?’ ‘Of course,’ he says; meaning, up to a point.‘Then I choose Rafe.’For a minute, for two minutes together, he feels his life mightmend. Then he thinks, how could I ask Rafe to wait? He needs toset up his own household. Even five years from now, Annewould be a very young bride.‘I know,’ she says. ‘And time goes by so slowly.’It’s true; one always seems to be waiting for something. ‘Youseem to have thought it through,’ he says. You don’t have to spellout to her, keep this to yourself, because she knows to do that;you don’t have to lead this female child through a conversationwith the little shifts and demurs that most women demand. She’snot like a flower, a nightingale: she’s like … like a merchantadventurer, he thinks. A look in the eye to skewer your intentions, and a deal done with a slap of the palm.She pulls off her cap; she twists the seed pearls in her fingers,and tugs at a strand of her dark hair, stretching it and pulling outits wave. She scoops up the rest of her hair, twists it and wraps itaround her neck. ‘I could do that twice,’ she says, ‘if my neckwere smaller.’ She sounds fretful. ‘Grace thinks I cannot marryRafe because we are related. She thinks everybody who lives in ahouse must be cousins.’‘You are not Rafe’s cousin.’‘Are you sure?’‘I am sure. Anne … put your cap back on. What will your auntsay?’She makes a face. It is a face imitative of her aunt Johane. ‘Oh,Thomas,’ she murmurs, ‘you are always so sure!’He raises a hand to cover his smile. For a moment Johaneseems less worrying. ‘Put your cap on,’ he says mildly.She squashes it back on to her head. She is so little, he thinks;but still, she’d be better suited by a helmet. ‘How did Rafe comehere?’ she says. He came here from Essex, because that’s where his fatherhappened to be at the time. His father Henry was a steward to SirEdward Belknap, who was a cousin of the Grey family, and sorelated to the Marquis of Dorset, and the marquis was Wolsey’spatron, when the cardinal was a scholar at Oxford. So yes,cousins come into it; and the fact that, when he had only beenback in England for a year or two, he was already somehow inthe cardinal’s affinity, though he had never set eyes on the greatman himself; already he, Cromwell, was a man useful to employ.He worked for the Dorset family on various of their tangledlawsuits. The old marchioness had him tracking down bed hangings and carpets for her. Send that. Be here. To her, all the worldwas a menial. If she wanted a lobster or a sturgeon, she ordered itup, and if she wanted good taste she ordered it in the same way.The marchioness would run her hand over Florentine silks,making little squeaks of pleasure. ‘You bought it, MasterCromwell,’ she would say. ‘And very beautiful it is. Your nexttask is to work out how we pay for it.’Somewhere in this maze of obligations and duties, he metHenry Sadler, and agreed to take his son into his household.‘Teach him all you know,’ Henry proposed, a little fearfully. Hearranged to collect Rafe on his way back from business in hispart of the country, but he picked a bad day for it: mud anddrenching rain, clouds chasing in from the coast. It was not muchafter two when he splashed up to the door, but the light wasalready failing; Henry Sadler said, can’t you stay, you won’tmake it to London before they close the gates. I ought to try toget home tonight, he said. I have to be in court, and then there’llbe my Lady Dorset’s debt collectors to see off, and you knowhow that is … Mistress Sadler glanced fearfully outside, anddown at her child: from whom she must now part, trusting him,at the age of seven, to the weather and the roads.This is not harsh, this is usual. But Rafe was so small that healmost thought it harsh. His baby curls had been cropped and his ginger hair stood up at the crown. His mother and father kneltdown and patted him. Then they swaddled and pulled and knottedhim into multiple layers of over-wrapped padding, so that his slightframe swelled into the likeness of a small barrel. He looked downat the child and out at the rain and thought, sometimes I should bewarm and dry like other men; how do they contrive it while I nevercan? Mistress Sadler knelt and took her son’s face in her hands.‘Remember everything we have told you,’ she whispered. ‘Sayyour prayers. Master Cromwell, please see he says his prayers.’When she looked up he saw that her eyes were blurred withtears and he saw that the child could not bear it, and was shakinginside his vast wrappings and about to howl. He threw his cloakaround himself. A scatter of raindrops flew from it, baptised thescene. ‘Well, Rafe, what do you think? If you’re man enough …’He held out his gauntleted hand. The child’s hand slotted into it.‘Shall we see how far we get?’We’ll do this fast so you don’t look back, he thought. The windand rain drove the parents back from the open door. He threwRafe into the saddle. The rain came at them horizontally. On theoutskirts of London the wind dropped. He lived at FenchurchStreet then. At the door a servant held out his arms in an offer totake Rafe, but he said, ‘We drowned men will stick together.’The child had become a dead weight in his arms, shrinkingflesh inside seven sodden layers of interwrapped wool. He stoodRafe before the fire; vapours rose from him. Roused by thewarmth, he put up small frozen fingers and tentatively began tounpick, to unravel himself. What place is this, he said, in adistinct, polite tone.‘London,’ he said. ‘Fenchurch Street. Home.’He took a linen towel and gently blotted from his face thejourney just passed. He rubbed his head. Rafe’s hair stood up inspikes. Liz came in. ‘Heaven direct me: boy or hedgehog?’ Rafeturned his face to her. He smiled. He slept on his feet. When the sweat comes back this summer, 1528, people say, asthey did last year, that you won’t get it if you don’t think aboutit. But how can you not? He sends the girls out of London; firstto the Stepney house, and then beyond. This time the court isinfected. Henry tries to outride the plague, moving from onehunting lodge to the next. Anne is sent to Hever. The feverbreaks out there among the Boleyn family and the lady’s fathergoes down first. He lives; her sister Mary’s husband dies. Annefalls ill but within twenty-four hours she is reported back on herfeet. Still, it can wreck a woman’s looks. You don’t know whatoutcome to pray for, he says to the cardinal.The cardinal says, ‘I am praying for Queen Katherine … andalso for the dear Lady Anne. I am praying for King François’sarmies in Italy, that they may meet with success, and yet not somuch success that they forget how they need their friend and allyKing Henry. I am praying for the king’s Majesty and all his councillors, and for the beasts in the field, and for the Holy Father andthe Curia, may their decisions be guided from above. I ampraying for Martin Luther, and for all those infected with hisheresy, and for all who combat him, most especially the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, our dear friend Thomas More.Against all common sense and observation, I am praying for agood harvest, and for the rain to stop. I am praying for everybody. I am praying for everything. That is what it is, to be acardinal. Only when I say to the Lord, “Now, about ThomasCromwell –” does God say to me, “Wolsey, what have I toldyou? Don’t you know when to give up?”’When the infection reaches Hampton Court, the cardinal sealshimself off from the world. Only four servants are allowed toapproach him. When he re-emerges, he does look as if he hasbeen praying.At the end of the summer, when the girls come back toLondon, they have grown and Grace’s hair has been bleached bythe sun. She is shy of him and he wonders if now she can only associate him with that night when he carried her to bed, aftershe had been told her mother was dead. Anne says, next summer,whatever happens, I prefer to stay with you. The sickness has leftthe city, but the cardinal’s prayers have met with variable success.The harvest is poor; the French are losing badly in Italy and theircommander has died of plague.Autumn comes. Gregory goes back to his tutor; his reluctanceis clear enough, though little about Gregory is clear to him.‘What is it,’ he asks him, ‘what’s wrong?’ The boy won’t say.With other people, he is sunny and lively, but with his fatherguarded and polite, as if to keep a formal distance between them.He says to Johane, ‘Is Gregory frightened of me?’Quick as a needle into canvas, she darts at him. ‘He’s not amonk; has he cause?’ Then she softens. ‘Thomas, why should hebe? You’re a kind father; in fact, I think too much so.’‘If he doesn’t want to go back to his tutor, I could send him toAntwerp to my friend Stephen Vaughan.’‘Gregory will never make a man of business.’‘No.’ You can’t see him beating out a deal on interest rateswith one of the Fuggers’ agents or some sniggering de Mediciclerk. ‘So what will I do with him?’‘I’ll tell you what to do – when he is ready, marry him well.Gregory is a gentleman. Anyone can see that.’Anne is eager to make a start with Greek. He is thinking whobest to teach her, asking around. He wants someone congenial,whom he can talk to over supper, a young scholar who will livein the house. He regrets the choice of tutor he’s made for his sonand nephews, but he won’t take them away at this point. Theman is quarrelsome, and to be sure there was a sad episode whenone of the boys set fire to his room, because he’d been reading inbed with a candle. ‘It wouldn’t be Gregory, would it?’ he’d said,always hopeful; the master seemed to think he was treating it as ajoke. And he’s always sending him bills that he believes he’s paid;I need a household accountant, he thinks. He sits at his desk, piled high with drawings and plans fromIpswich and Cardinal College, with craftsmen’s estimates andbills for Wolsey’s planting schemes. He examines a scar in thepalm of his hand; it is an old burn-mark, and it looks like a twistof rope. He thinks about Putney. He thinks about Walter. Hethinks about the jittery sidestep of a skittish horse, the smell ofthe brewery. He thinks about the kitchen at Lambeth, and aboutthe tow-headed boy who used to bring the eels. He rememberstaking the eel-boy by the hair and dipping his head in a tub ofwater, and holding it under. He thinks, did I really do that? Iwonder why. The cardinal’s probably right, I am beyondredemption. The scar sometimes itches; it is as hard as a spur ofbone. He thinks, I need an accountant. I need a Greek tutor. Ineed Johane, but who says I can have what I need?He opens a letter. It is from a priest called Thomas Byrd. He isin want of money, and it seems the cardinal owes him some. Hemakes a note, to have it checked out and paid, then picks up theletter again. It mentions two men, two scholars, Clerke andSumner. He knows the names. They are two of the six collegemen, the Oxford men who had the Lutheran books. Lock themup and reason with them, the cardinal had said. He holds theletter and glances away from it. He knows something bad iscoming; its shadow moves on the wall.He reads. Clerke and Sumner are dead. The cardinal should betold, the writer says. Having no other secure place, the Dean sawfit to shut them in the college cellars, the deep cold cellarsintended for storing fish. Even in that silent place, secret, icy, thesummer plague sought them out. They died in the dark andwithout a priest.All summer we have prayed and not prayed hard enough. Hadthe cardinal simply forgotten his heretics? I must go and tell him,he thinks.It is the first week in September. His suppressed grief becomesanger. But what can he do with anger? It also must be suppressed. But when at last the year turns, and the cardinal says, Thomas,what shall I give you for a new-year gift?, he says, ‘Give me LittleBilney.’ And without waiting for the cardinal to answer he says,‘My lord, he has been in the Tower for a year. The Tower wouldfrighten anyone, but Bilney is a timid man and not strong and Iam afraid he is straitly kept, and my lord, you remember Sumnerand Clerke and how they died. My lord, use your power, writeletters, petition the king if you must. Let him go.’The cardinal leans back. He puts his fingertips together.‘Thomas,’ he says. ‘My dear Thomas Cromwell. Very well. ButFather Bilney must go back to Cambridge. He must give up hisproject of going to Rome and addressing the Pope to bring himto a right way of thinking. There are very deep vaults under theVatican, and my arm will not be able to reach him there.’It is at the tip of his tongue to say, ‘You could not reach intothe cellars of your own college.’ But he stops himself. Heresy –his brush with it – is a little indulgence that the cardinal allowshim. He is always glad to have the latest bad books filleted, andany gossip from the Steelyard, where the German merchants live.He is happy to turn over a text or two, and enjoy an after-supperdebate. But for the cardinal, any contentious point must bewrapped around and around again with a fine filament of words,fine as split hairs. Any dangerous opinion must be so plumpedout with laughing apologies that it is as fat and harmless as thecushions you lean on. It is true that when he was told of thedeaths underground, my lord was moved to tears. ‘How could Inot have known?’ he said. ‘Those fine young men!’He cries easily in recent months, though that does not mean histears are less genuine; and indeed now he wipes away a tear,because he knows the story: Little Bilney at Gray’s Inn, the manwho spoke Polish, the futile messengers, the dazed children, Elizabeth Cromwell’s face set in the fixed severity of death. He leansacross his desk and says, ‘Thomas, please don’t despair. You stillhave your children. And in time you may wish to marry again.’ I am a child, he thinks, who cannot be consoled. The cardinalplaces his hand over his. The strange stones flicker in the light,showing their depths: a garnet like a blood bubble; a turquoisewith a silver sheen; a diamond with a yellow-grey blink, like theeye of a cat.He will never tell the cardinal about Mary Boleyn, though theimpulse will arise. Wolsey might laugh, he might be scandalised.He has to smuggle him the content, without the context.Autumn, 1528: he is at court on the cardinal’s business. Mary isrunning towards him, her skirts lifted, showing a fine pair ofgreen silk stockings. Is her sister Anne chasing her? He waits tosee.She stops abruptly. ‘Ah, it’s you!’He wouldn’t have thought Mary knew him. She puts one handagainst the panelling, catching her breath, and the other againsthis shoulder, as if he were just part of the wall. Mary is stilldazzlingly pretty; fair, soft-featured. ‘My uncle, this morning,’she says. ‘My uncle Norfolk. He was roaring against you. I saidto my sister, who is this terrible man, and she said –’‘He’s the one who looks like a wall?’Mary takes her hand away. She laughs, blushes, and with alittle heave of her bosom tries to get her breath back.‘What was my lord of Norfolk’s complaint?’‘Oh …’ she flaps a hand to fan herself, ‘he said, cardinals,legates, it was never merry in England when we had cardinalsamong us. He says the Cardinal of York is despoiling the noblehouses, he says he will have all to rule himself, and the lords to belike schoolboys creeping in for a whipping. Not that you shouldtake any notice of what I say …’She looks fragile, breathless still: but his eyes tell her to talk.She gives a little laugh and says, ‘My brother George roared too.He said that the Cardinal of York was born in a hospital forpaupers and he employs a man was born in the gutter. My lord father said, come now, my dear boy, you lose nothing if you areexact: not quite a gutter, but a brewer’s yard, I believe, for he’scertainly no gentleman.’ Mary takes a step back. ‘You look agentleman. I like your grey velvet, where did you find that?’‘Italy.’He has been promoted, from being the wall. Mary’s handcreeps back; absorbed, she strokes him. ‘Could you get mesome? Though a bit sober for a woman, perhaps?’Not for a widow, he thinks. The thought must show on his facebecause Mary says, ‘That’s it, you see. William Carey’s dead.’He bows his head and is very correct; Mary alarms him. ‘Thecourt misses him sadly. As you must yourself.’A sigh. ‘He was kind. Given the circumstances.’‘It must have been difficult for you.’‘When the king turned his mind to Anne, he thought that,knowing how things are done in France, she might accept a … acertain position, in the court. And in his heart, as he put it. Hesaid he would give up all other mistresses. The letters he haswritten, in his own hand …’‘Really?’The cardinal always says that you can never get the king towrite a letter himself. Even to another king. Even to the Pope.Even when it might make a difference.‘Yes, since last summer. He writes and then sometimes, wherehe would sign Henricus Rex …’ She takes his hand, turns up hispalm, and with her forefinger traces a shape. ‘Where he shouldsign his name, instead he draws a heart – and he puts their initialsin it. Oh, you mustn’t laugh …’ She can’t keep the smile off herface. ‘He says he is suffering.’He wants to say, Mary, these letters, can you steal them forme?‘My sister says, this is not France, and I am not a fool like you,Mary. She knows I was Henry’s mistress and she sees how I’mleft. And she takes a lesson from it. He is almost holding his breath: but she’s reckless now, shewill have her say.‘I tell you, they will ride over Hell to marry. They have vowedit. Anne says she will have him and she cares not if Katherine andevery Spaniard is in the sea and drowned. What Henry wants hewill have, and what Anne wants she will have, and I can say that,because I know them both, who better?’ Her eyes are soft andwelling with tears. ‘So that is why,’ she says, ‘why I miss WilliamCarey, because now she is everything, and I am to be swept outafter supper like the old rushes. Now I’m no one’s wife, they cansay anything they like to me. My father says I’m a mouth to feedand my uncle Norfolk says I’m a whore.’As if he didn’t make you one. ‘Are you short of money?’‘Oh, yes!’ she says. ‘Yes, yes, yes, and no one has even thoughtabout that! No one has even asked me that before. I have children. You know that. I need …’ She presses her fingers againsther mouth, to stop it trembling. ‘If you saw my son … well, whydo you think I called him Henry? The king would have ownedhim as his son, just as he has owned Richmond, but my sisterforbade it. He does what she says. She means to give him a princeherself, so she doesn’t want mine in his nursery.’Reports have been sent to the cardinal: Mary Boleyn’s child isa healthy boy with red-gold hair and lively appetites. She has adaughter, older, but in the context that’s not so interesting, adaughter. He says, ‘What age is your son now, Lady Carey?’‘Three in March. My girl Catherine is five.’ Again she touchesher lips, in consternation. ‘I’d forgotten … your wife died. Howcould I forget?’ How would you even know, he wonders, butshe answers him at once. ‘Anne knows everything about peoplewho work for the cardinal. She asks questions and writes theanswers in a book.’ She looks up at him. ‘And you have children?’‘Yes … do you know, no one ever asks me that either?’ Heleans one shoulder against the panelling, and she moves an inch closer, and their faces soften, perhaps, from their habitual bravedistress, and into the conspiracy of the bereft. ‘I have a big boy,’he says, ‘he’s at Cambridge with a tutor.

I have a little girl calledGrace; she’s pretty and she has fair hair, though I don’t … Mywife was not a beauty, and I am as you see. And I have Anne,Anne wants to learn Greek.’‘Goodness,’ she says. ‘For a woman, you know …’‘Yes, but she says, “Why should Thomas More’s daughterhave the pre-eminence?” She has such good words. And she usesthem all.’‘You like her best.’‘Her grandmother lives with us, and my wife’s sister, but it’snot … for Anne it’s not the best arrangement. I could send herinto some other household, but then … well, her Greek … and Ihardly see her as it is.’ It feels like the longest speech, unless toWolsey, that he’s made for some time. He says, ‘Your fathershould be providing properly for you. I’ll ask the cardinal tospeak to him.’ The cardinal will enjoy that, he thinks.‘But I need a new husband. To stop them calling me names.Can the cardinal get husbands?’‘The cardinal can do anything. What kind of husband wouldyou like?’She considers. ‘One who will take care of my children. Onewho can stand up to my family. One who doesn’t die.’ Shetouches her fingertips together.‘You should ask for someone young and handsome too. Don’task, don’t get.’‘Really? I was brought up in the other tradition.’Then you had a different upbringing from your sister, hethinks. ‘In the masque, at York Place, do you remember … wereyou Beauty, or Kindness?’‘Oh …’ she smiles, ‘that must be, what, seven years ago? Idon’t remember. I’ve dressed up so many times.’‘Of course, you are still both. ‘That’s all I used to care about. Dressing up. I remember Anne,though. She was Perseverance.’He says, ‘Her particular virtue may be tested.’Cardinal Campeggio came here with a brief from Rome toobstruct. Obstruct and delay. Do anything, but avoid givingjudgment.‘Anne is always writing letters, or writing in her little book.She walks up and down, up and down. When she sees my lordfather she holds up a palm to him, don’t dare speak … and whenshe sees me, she gives me a little pinch. Like …’ Mary demonstrates an airy pinch, with the fingers of her left hand. ‘Like that.’She strokes the fingers of her right hand along her throat, till shereaches the little pulsing dip above her collarbone. ‘There,’ shesays. ‘Sometimes I am bruised. She thinks to disfigure me.’‘I’ll talk to the cardinal,’ he says.‘Do.’ She waits.He needs to go. He has things to do.‘I no longer want to be a Boleyn,’ she says. ‘Or a Howard. Ifthe king would recognise my boy it would be different, but as itis I don’t want any more of these masques and parties and dressing up as Virtues. They have no virtues. It’s all show. If they don’twant to know me, I don’t want to know them. I’d rather be abeggar.’‘Really … it doesn’t have to come to that, Lady Carey.’‘Do you know what I want? I want a husband who upsetsthem. I want to marry a man who frightens them.’There is a sudden light in her blue eyes. An idea has dawned.She rests one delicate finger on the grey velvet she so admires,and says softly, ‘Don’t ask, don’t get.’Thomas Howard for an uncle? Thomas Boleyn for a father?The king, in time, for a brother?‘They’d kill you,’ he says.He thinks he shouldn’t enlarge on the statement: just let itstand as fact. She laughs, bites her lip. ‘Of course. Of course they would.What am I thinking? Anyway, I’m grateful for what you havedone already. For an interval of peace this morning – becausewhen they’re shouting about you, they’re not shouting aboutme. One day,’ she says, ‘Anne will want to talk to you. She’llsend for you and you’ll be flattered. She’ll have a little job foryou, or she’ll want some advice. So before that happens, you canhave my advice. Turn around and walk the other way.’She kisses the tip of her forefinger and touches it to his lips.The cardinal does not need him that night, so he goes home toAustin Friars. His feeling is to put distance between himself andany Boleyns at all. There are some men, possibly, who would befascinated by a woman who had been a mistress to two kings, buthe is not one of them. He thinks about sister Anne, why sheshould take any interest in him; possibly she has informationthrough what Thomas More calls ‘your evangelical fraternity’,and yet this is puzzling: the Boleyns don’t seem like a family whothink much about their souls. Uncle Norfolk has priests to dothat for him. He hates ideas and never reads a book. BrotherGeorge is interested in women, hunting, clothes, jewellery andtennis. Sir Thomas Boleyn, the charming diplomat, is interestedonly in himself.He would like to tell somebody what occurred. There is noone he can tell, so he tells Rafe. ‘I think you imagined it,’ Rafesays severely. His pale eyes open wide at the story of the initialsinside the heart, but he doesn’t even smile. He confines hisincredulity to the marriage proposal. ‘She must have meantsomething else.’He shrugs; it’s hard to see what. ‘The Duke of Norfolk wouldfall on us like a pack of wolves,’ Rafe says. ‘He would comeround and set fire to our house.’ He shakes his head.‘But the pinching. What remedy?’‘Armour. Evidently,’ says Rafe.‘It might raise questions.’ ‘Nobody’s looking at Mary these days.’ He adds accusingly,‘Except you.’With the arrival of the papal legate in London, the quasi-regalhousehold of Anne Boleyn is broken up. The king does not wantthe issue confused; Cardinal Campeggio is here to deal with hisqualms about his marriage to Katherine, which are quite separate, he will insist, from any feelings he may entertain aboutLady Anne. She is packed off to Hever, and her sister goes withher. A rumour floats back to London, that Mary is pregnant.Rafe says, ‘Saving your presence, master, are you sure you onlyleaned against the wall?’ The dead husband’s family says it can’tbe his child, and the king is denying it too. It’s sad to see thealacrity with which people assume the king is lying. How doesAnne like it? She’ll have time to get over her sulks, while she’srusticated. ‘Mary will be pinched black and blue,’ Rafe says.People all over town tell him the gossip, without knowingquite how interested he is. It makes him sad, it makes himdubious, it makes him wonder about the Boleyns. Everythingthat passed between himself and Mary he now sees, hears, differently. It makes his skin creep, to think that if he had been flattered, susceptible, if he had said yes to her, he might soon havebecome father to a baby that looked nothing like a Cromwell andvery like a Tudor. As a trick, you must admire it. Mary may looklike a doll but she’s not stupid. When she ran down the galleryshowing her green stockings, she had a sharp eye out for prey. Tothe Boleyns, other people are for using and discarding. The feelings of others mean nothing, or their reputations, their familyname.He smiles, at the thought of the Cromwells having a familyname. Or any reputation to defend.Whatever has happened, nothing comes of it. Perhaps Marywas mistaken, or the talk was simply malice; God knows, thefamily invite it. Perhaps there was a child, and she lost it. Thestory peters out, with no definite conclusion. There is no baby. It is like one of the cardinal’s strange fairy tales, where nature itselfis perverted and women are serpents and appear and disappear atwill.Queen Katherine had a child that disappeared. In the first yearof her marriage to Henry, she miscarried, but the doctors saidthat she was carrying twins, and the cardinal himself remembersher at court with her bodices loosened and a secret smile on herface. She took to her rooms for her confinement; after a time, sheemerged tight-laced, with a flat belly, and no baby.It must be a Tudor speciality.A little later, he hears that Anne has taken the wardship of hersister’s son, Henry Carey. He wonders if she intends to poisonhim. Or eat him.New Year 1529: Stephen Gardiner is in Rome, issuing certainthreats to Pope Clement, on the king’s behalf; the content of thethreats has not been divulged to the cardinal. Clement is easilypanicked at the best of times, and it is not surprising that, withMaster Stephen breathing sulphur in his ear, he falls ill. They aresaying that he is likely to die, and the cardinal’s agents are aroundand about in Europe, taking soundings and counting heads,chinking their purses cheerfully. There would be a swift solutionto the king’s problem, if Wolsey were Pope. He grumbles a littleabout his possible eminence; the cardinal loves his country, itsMay garlands, its tender birdsong. In his nightmares he seessquat spitting Italians, a forest of nooses, a corpse-strewn plain.‘I shall want you to come with me, Thomas. You can stand bymy side and move quick if any of those cardinals tries to stabme.’He pictures his master stuck full of knives, as St Sebastian isstuck full of arrows. ‘Why does the Pope have to be in Rome?Where is it written?’A slow smile spreads over the cardinal’s face. ‘Bring the HolySee home. Why not?’ He loves a bold plan. ‘I couldn’t bring it to London, I suppose? If only I were Archbishop of Canterbury, Icould hold my papal court at Lambeth Palace … but old Warhamdoes hang on and on, he always baulks me …’‘Your Grace could move to your own see.’‘York is so remote. I couldn’t have the papacy in Winchester,you don’t think? Our ancient English capital? And nearer theking?’What an unusual regime this will turn out to be. The king atsupper, with the Pope, who is also his Lord Chancellor … Willthe king have to hand him his napkin, and serve him first?When news comes of Clement’s recovery, the cardinal doesn’tsay, a glorious chance lost. He says, Thomas, what shall we donext? We must open the legatine court, it can be no longerdelayed. He says, ‘Go and find me a man called AnthonyPoynes.’He stands, arms folded, waiting for further and better particulars.‘Try the Isle of Wight. And fetch me Sir William Thomas,whom I believe you will find in Carmarthen – he’s elderly, so tellyour men to go slowly.’‘I don’t employ anyone slow.’ He nods. ‘Still, I take the point.Don’t kill the witnesses.’The trial of the king’s great matter is approaching. The kingintends to show that when Queen Katherine came to him shewas not a virgin, having consummated her marriage with hisbrother Arthur. To that end he is assembling the gentlemen whoattended the royal couple after their wedding at Baynard’sCastle, then later at Windsor, where the court moved in November that year, and later at Ludlow, where they were sent to playat Prince and Princess of Wales. ‘Arthur,’ Wolsey says, ‘wouldhave been about your age, Thomas, if he had lived.’ The attendants, the witnesses, are at least a generation older. And so manyyears have gone by – twenty-eight, to be precise. How good cantheir memories be? It should never have come to this – to this public and
unseemly exposure. Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king’s will, accept that her marriage is invalid
and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will
become a nun: if the king will become a monk.
Meanwhile she presents reasons why the legatine court should
not try the issue. It is still sub judice at Rome, for one thing. For
another, she is a stranger, she says, in a strange country; she
ignores the decades in which she’s been intimate with every twist
and turn of English policy. The judges, she claims, are biased
against her; certainly, she has reason to believe it. Campeggio lays
hand on heart, and assures her he would give an honest judgment, even if he were in fear of his life. Katherine finds him too
intimate with his co-legate; anyone who has spent much time
with Wolsey, she thinks, no longer knows what honesty is.
Who is advising Katherine? John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester.
‘Do you know what I can’t endure about that man?’ the cardinal
says. ‘He’s all skin and bone. I abhor your skeletal prelate. It
makes the rest of us look bad. One looks … corporeal.’
He is in his corporeal pomp, his finest scarlet, when the king
and queen are summoned before the two cardinals at Blackfriars.
Everyone had supposed that Katherine would send a proxy, but
instead she appears in person. The whole bench of bishops is
assembled. The king answers to his name, in a full, echoing voice,
speaking out of his big bejewelled chest. He, Cromwell, would
have advised a motion of the hand, a murmur, a dip of the head
to the court’s authority. Most humility, in his view, is pretence;
but the pretence can be winning.
The hall is packed. He and Rafe are far-off spectators. Afterwards, when the queen has made her statement – a few men have
been seen to cry – they come out into the sunshine. Rafe says, ‘If
we had been nearer, we could have seen whether the king could
meet her eye.’
‘Yes. That is really all anyone needs to know.’ ‘I’m sorry to say it, but I believe Katherine.’
‘Hush. Believe nobody.’
Something blots out the light. It is Stephen Gardiner, black
and scowling, his aspect in no way improved by his trip to
Rome.
‘Master Stephen!’ he says. ‘How was your journey home?
Never pleasant, is it, to come back empty-handed? I’ve been
feeling sorry for you. I suppose you did your best, such as it is.’
Gardiner’s scowl deepens. ‘If this court can’t give the king
what he wants, your master will be finished. And then it is I who
will feel sorry for you.’
‘Except you won’t.’
‘Except I won’t,’ Gardiner concedes; and moves on.
The queen does not return for the sordid parts of the proceedings. Her counsel speaks for her; she has told her confessor how
her nights with Arthur left her untouched, and she has given him
permission to break the seal of the confessional and make her
assertion public. She has spoken before the highest court there is,
God’s court; would she lie, to the damnation of her soul?
Besides, there is another point, which everyone has in mind.
After Arthur died, she was presented to prospective bridegrooms – to the old king, as it may be, or to the young Prince
Henry – as fresh meat. They could have brought a doctor, who
would have looked at her. She would have been frightened, she
would have cried; but she would have complied. Perhaps now
she wishes it had been so; that they had brought in a strange man
with cold hands. But they never asked her to prove what she
claimed; perhaps people were not so shameless in those days.
The dispensations for her marriage to Henry were meant to
cover either case: she was/was not a virgin. The Spanish documents are different from the English documents, and that is
where we should be now, among the subclauses, studying paper
and ink, not squabbling in a court of law over a shred of skin and
a splash of blood on a linen sheet. If he had been her adviser, he would have kept the queen in
court, however much she squealed. Because, would the witnesses
have spoken, to her face, as they spoke behind her back? She
would be ashamed to face them, gnarled and grizzled and each
equipped with perfect recollection; but he would have had her
greet them cordially, and declare she would never have recognised them, after so much time gone by; and ask if they have
grandchildren, and whether the summer heat eases their elderly
aches and pains? The greater shame would be theirs: would they
not hesitate, would they not falter, under the steady gaze of the
queen’s honest eyes?
Without Katherine present, the trial becomes a bawdy entertainment. The Earl of Shrewsbury is before the court, a man who
fought with the old king at Bosworth. He recalls his own longago wedding night, when he was, like Prince Arthur, a boy of
fifteen; never had a woman before, he says, but did his duty to his
bride. On Arthur’s wedding night, he and the Earl of Oxford had
taken the prince to Katherine’s chamber. Yes, says the Marquis of
Dorset, and I was there too; Katherine lay under the coverlet, the
prince got into bed beside her. ‘No one is willing to swear to
having climbed in with them,’ Rafe whispers. ‘But I wonder they
haven’t found someone.’
The court must make do with evidence of what was said next
morning. The prince, coming out of the bridal chamber, said he
was thirsty and asked Sir Anthony Willoughby for a cup of ale.
‘Last night I was in Spain,’ he said. A little boy’s crude joke,
dragged back into the light; the boy has been, these thirty years,
a corpse. How lonely it is to die young, to go down into the dark
without any company! Maurice St John is not there with him, in
his vault at Worcester Cathedral: nor Mr Cromer nor William
Woodall, nor any of the men who heard him say, ‘Masters, it is
good pastime to have a wife.’
When they have listened to all this, and they come out into the
air, he feels strangely cold. He puts a hand to his face, touches his cheekbone. Rafe says, ‘It would be a poor sort of bridegroom
who would come out in the morning and say, “Good day,
masters. Nothing done!” He was boasting, wasn’t he? That was
all. They’ve forgotten what it’s like to be fifteen.’
Even as the court is sitting, King François in Italy is losing a
battle. Pope Clement is preparing to sign a new treaty with the
Emperor, Queen Katherine’s nephew. He doesn’t know this
when he says, ‘This is a bad day’s work. If we want Europe to
laugh at us, they’ve every reason now.’
He looks sideways at Rafe, whose particular problem, clearly, is
that he cannot imagine anyone, even a hasty fifteen-year-old,
wanting to penetrate Katherine. It would be like copulation with a
statue. Rafe, of course, has not heard the cardinal on the subject of
the queen’s former attractions. ‘Well, I reserve judgment. Which is
what the court will do. It’s all they can do.’ He says, ‘Rafe, you are
so much closer in these matters. I can’t remember being fifteen.’
‘Surely? Were you not fifteen or so when you fetched up in
France?’
‘Yes, I must have been.’ Wolsey: ‘Arthur would have been
about your age, Thomas, if he had lived.’ He remembers a
woman in Dover, up against a wall; her small crushable bones,
her young, bleak, pallid face. He feels a small sensation of panic,
loss; what if the cardinal’s joke isn’t a joke, and the earth is
strewn with his children, and he has never done right by them? It
is the only honest thing to be done: look after your children.
‘Rafe,’ he says, ‘do you know I haven’t made my will? I said I
would but I never did. I think I should go home and draft it.’
‘Why?’ Rafe looks amazed. ‘Why now? The cardinal will want
you.’
‘Come home.’ He takes Rafe’s arm. On his left side, a hand
touches his: fingers without flesh. A ghost walks: Arthur,
studious and pale. King Henry, he thinks, you raised him; now
you put him down.

July 1529: Thomas Cromwell of London, gentleman. Being
whole in body and memory. To his son Gregory six hundred and
sixty-six pounds thirteen shillings and four pence. And featherbeds, bolsters and the quilt of yellow turkey satin, the joined
bed of Flanders work and the carved press and the cupboards,
the silver and the silver gilt and twelve silver spoons. And leases
of farms to be held for him by the executors till he comes to full
age, and another two hundred pounds for him in gold at that
date. Money to the executors for the upbringing and marriage
portions of his daughter Anne, and his little daughter Grace. A
marriage portion for his niece Alice Wellyfed; gowns, jackets and
doublets to his nephews; to Mercy all sorts of household stuff
and some silver and anything else the executors think she should
have. Bequests to his dead wife’s sister Johane, and her husband
John Williamson, and a marriage portion to her daughter, also
Johane. Money to his servants. Forty pounds to be divided
between forty poor maidens on their marriage. Twenty pounds
for mending the roads. Ten pounds towards feeding poor prisoners in the London gaols.
His body to be buried in the parish where he dies: or at the
direction of his executors.
The residue of his estate to be spent on Masses for his parents.
To God his soul. To Rafe Sadler his books.
When the summer plague comes back, he says to Mercy and
Johane, shall we send the children out?
In which direction, Johane says: not challenging him, just
wanting to know.
Mercy says, can anyone outrun it? They take comfort from a
belief that since the infection killed so many last year, it won’t be
so violent this year; which he does not think is necessarily true,
and he thinks they seem to be endowing this plague with a
human or at least bestial intelligence: the wolf comes down on
the sheepfold, but not on the nights when the men with dogs are waiting for him. Unless they think the plague is more than bestial
or human – that it is God behind it – God, up to his old tricks.
When he hears the bad news from Italy, about Clement’s new
treaty with the Emperor, Wolsey bows his head and says, ‘My
Master is capricious.’ He doesn’t mean the king.
On the last day of July, Cardinal Campeggio adjourns the
legatine court. It is, he says, the Roman holidays. News comes
that the Duke of Suffolk, the king’s great friend, has hammered
the table before Wolsey, and threatened him to his face. They all
know the court will never sit again. They all know the cardinal
has failed.
That evening with Wolsey he believes, for the first time, that
the cardinal will come down. If he falls, he thinks, I come down
with him. His reputation is black. It is as if the cardinal’s joke has
been incarnated: as if he wades through streams of blood, leaving
in his wake a trail of smashed glass and fires, of widows and
orphans. Cromwell, people say: that’s a bad man. The cardinal
will not talk about what is happening in Italy, or what has
happened in the legate’s court. He says, ‘They tell me the sweating sickness is back. What shall I do? Shall I die? I have fought
four bouts with it. In the year … what year? … I think it was
1518 … now you will laugh, but it was so – when the sweat had
finished with me, I looked like Bishop Fisher. My flesh was
wasted. God picked me up and rattled my teeth.’
‘Your Grace was wasted?’ he says, trying to raise a smile. ‘I
wish you’d had your portrait made then.’
Bishop Fisher has said in court – just before the Roman holidays set in – that no power, human or divine, could dissolve the
marriage of the king and queen. If there’s one thing he’d like to
teach Fisher, it’s not to make grand overstatements. He has an
idea of what the law can do, and it’s different from what Bishop
Fisher thinks.
Until now, every day till today, every evening till this, if you
told Wolsey a thing was impossible, he’d just laugh. Tonight he says – when he can be brought to the point – my friend King
François is beaten and I am beaten too. I don’t know what to do.
Plague or no plague, I think I may die.
‘I must go home,’ he says. ‘But will you bless me?’
He kneels before him. Wolsey raises his hand, and then, as if
he has forgotten what he’s doing, lets it hover in mid-air. He says,
‘Thomas, I am not ready to meet God.’
He looks up, smiling. ‘Perhaps God is not ready to meet you.’
‘I hope that you will be with me when I die.’
‘But that will be at some distant date.’
He shakes his head. ‘If you had seen how Suffolk set on me
today. He, Norfolk, Thomas Boleyn, Thomas Lord Darcy, they
have been waiting only for this, for my failure with this court,
and now I hear they are devising a book of articles, they are
drawing up a list of accusations, how I have reduced the nobility,
and so forth – they are making a book called – what will they call
it? – “Twenty Years of Insults”? They are brewing some stewpot
into which they are pouring the dregs of every slight, as they
conceive it, by which they mean every piece of truth I have told
them …’ He takes a great rattling breath, and looks at the ceiling,
which is embossed with the Tudor rose.
‘There will be no such stewpots in Your Grace’s kitchen,’ he
says. He gets up. He looks at the cardinal, and all he can see is
more work to be done.
‘Liz Wykys,’ Mercy says, ‘wouldn’t have wanted her girls
dragged about the countryside. Especially as Anne, to my
knowledge, cries if she does not see you.’
‘Anne?’ He is amazed. ‘Anne cries?’
‘What did you think?’ Mercy asks, with some asperity. ‘Do
you think your children don’t love you?’
He lets her make the decision. The girls stay at home. It’s the
wrong decision. Mercy hangs outside their door the signs of the
sweating sickness. She says, how has this happened? We scour, we scrub the floors, I do not think you will find in the whole of
London a cleaner house than ours. We say our prayers. I have
never seen a child pray as Anne does. She prays as if she’s going
into battle.
Anne falls ill first. Mercy and Johane shout at her and shake
her to keep her awake, since they say if you sleep you will die.
But the pull of the sickness is stronger than they are, and she falls
exhausted against the bolster, struggling for breath, and falls
further, into black stillness, only her hand moving, the fingers
clenching and unclenching. He takes it in his own and tries to
still it, but it is like the hand of a soldier itching for a fight.
Later she rouses herself, asks for her mother. She asks for the
copybook in which she has written her name. At dawn the fever
breaks. Johane bursts into tears of relief, and Mercy sends her
away to sleep. Anne struggles to sit up, she sees him clearly, she
smiles, she says his name. They bring a basin of water strewn
with rose petals, and wash her face; her finger reaches out, tentative, to push the petals below the water, so each of them becomes
a vessel shipping water, a cup, a perfumed grail.
But when the sun comes up her fever rises again. He will not
let them begin it again, the pinching and pummelling, the
shaking; he gives her into God’s hands, and asks God to be good
to him. He talks to her but she makes no sign that she hears. He
is not, himself, afraid of contagion. If the cardinal can survive this
plague four times, I am sure I am in no danger, and if I die, I have
made my will. He sits with her, watching her chest heaving,
watching her fight and lose. He is not there when she dies –
Grace has already taken sick, and he is seeing her put to bed. So
he is out of the room, just, and when they usher him in, her stern
little face has relaxed into sweetness. She looks passive, placid;
her hand is already heavy, and heavy beyond his bearing.
He comes out of the room; he says, ‘She was already learning
Greek.’ Of course, Mercy says: she was a wonderful child, and
your true daughter. She leans against his shoulder and cries. She says, ‘She was clever and good, and in her way, you know, she
was beautiful.’
His thought had been: she was learning Greek: perhaps she
knows it now.
Grace dies in his arms; she dies easily, as naturally as she was
born. He eases her back against the damp sheet: a child of impossible perfection, her fingers uncurling like thin white leaves. I
never knew her, he thinks; I never knew I had her. It has always
seemed impossible to him that some act of his gave her life, some
unthinking thing that he and Liz did, on some unmemorable
night. They had intended the name to be Henry for a boy,
Katherine for a girl, and, Liz had said, that will do honour to
your Kat as well. But when he had seen her, swaddled, beautiful,
finished and perfect, he had said quite another thing, and Liz had
agreed. We cannot earn grace. We do not merit it.
He asks the priest if his elder daughter can be buried with her
copybook, in which she has written her name: Anne Cromwell.
The priest says he has never heard of such a thing. He is too tired
and angry to fight.
His daughters are now in Purgatory, a country of slow fires
and ridged ice. Where in the Gospels does it say ‘Purgatory’?
Tyndale says, now abideth faith, hope and love, even these
three; but the greatest of these is love.
Thomas More thinks it is a wicked mistranslation. He insists
on ‘charity’. He would chain you up, for a mistranslation. He
would, for a difference in your Greek, kill you.
He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a
moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything
they need to know.
Tyndale says, ‘Love never falleth away.’
October comes in. Wolsey presides, as usual, over the meetings
of the king’s council. But in the law courts, as Michaelmas term
opens, writs are moved against the cardinal. He is charged with success. He is charged with the exercise of power. Specifically, he
is charged with asserting a foreign jurisdiction in the king’s realm
– that is to say, with exercising his role as papal legate. What they
mean to say is this: he is alter rex. He is, he has always been, more
imperious than the king. For that, if it is a crime, he is guilty.
So now they swagger into York Place, the Duke of Suffolk, the
Duke of Norfolk: the two great peers of the realm. Suffolk, his
blond beard bristling, looks like a pig among truffles; a florid
man, he remembers, turns my lord cardinal sick. Norfolk looks
apprehensive, and as he turns over the cardinal’s possessions, it is
clear that he expects to find wax figures, perhaps of himself,
perhaps with long pins stuck through them. The cardinal has
done his feats by a compact with the devil; that is his fixed
opinion.
He, Cromwell, sends them away. They come back. They come
back with further and higher commissions and better signatures,
and they bring with them the Master of the Rolls. They take the
Great Seal from my lord cardinal.
Norfolk glances sideways at him, and gives him a fleeting,
ferrety grin. He doesn’t know why.
‘Come and see me,’ the duke says.
‘Why, my lord?’
Norfolk turns down his mouth. He never explains.
‘When?’
‘No hurry,’ Norfolk says. ‘Come when you’ve mended your
manners.’
It is 19 October 1529

III
Make or Mar
All Hallows 1529

Halloween: the world’s edge seeps and bleeds. This is the time
when the tally-keepers of Purgatory, its clerks and gaolers, listen
in to the living, who are praying for the dead.
At this time of year, with their parish, he and Liz would keep
vigil. They would pray for Henry Wykys, her father; for Liz’s
dead husband, Thomas Williams; for Walter Cromwell, and for
distant cousins; for half-forgotten names, long-dead half-sisters
and lost step-children.
Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz
back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It’s true he is at
Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he
thought, she’ll know how to find me. She’ll look for the cardinal,
drawn through the space between worlds by incense and candlelight. Wherever the cardinal is, I will be.
At some point he must have slept. When daylight came, the
room felt so empty it was empty even of him.
All Hallows Day: grief comes in waves. Now it threatens to
capsize him. He doesn’t believe that the dead come back; but that
doesn’t stop him from feeling the brush of their fingertips, wingtips, against his shoulder. Since last night they have been less
individual forms and faces than a solid aggregated mass, their flesh slapping and jostling together, their texture dense like sea
creatures, their faces sick with an undersea sheen.
Now he stands in a window embrasure, Liz’s prayer book in
hand. His daughter Grace liked to look at it, and today he can
feel the imprint of her small fingers under his own. These are
Our Lady’s prayers for the canonical hours, the pages illuminated by a dove, a vase of lilies. The office is Matins, and Mary
kneels on a floor of chequered tiles. The angel greets her, and the
words of his greeting are written on a scroll, which unfurls from
his clasped hands as if his palms are speaking. His wings are
coloured: heaven-blue.
He turns the page. The office is Lauds. Here is a picture of the
Visitation. Mary, with her neat little belly, is greeted by her pregnant cousin, St Elizabeth. Their foreheads are high, their brows
plucked, and they look surprised, as indeed they must be; one of
them is a virgin, the other advanced in years. Spring flowers grow
at their feet, and each of them wears an airy crown, made of gilt
wires as fine as blonde hairs.
He turns a page. Grace, silent and small, turns the page with
him. The office is Prime. The picture is the Nativity: a tiny
white Jesus lies in the folds of his mother’s cloak. The office is
Sext: the Magi proffer jewelled cups; behind them is a city on a
hill, a city in Italy, with its bell tower, its view of rising ground
and its misty line of trees. The office is None: Joseph carries a
basket of doves to the temple. The office is Vespers: a dagger
sent by Herod makes a neat hole in a shocked infant. A woman
throws up her hands in protest, or prayer: her eloquent, helpless palms. The infant corpse scatters three drops of blood,
each one shaped like a tear. Each bloody tear is a precise
vermilion.
He looks up. Like an after-image, the form of the tears swims
in his eyes; the picture blurs. He blinks. Someone is walking
towards him. It is George Cavendish. His hands wash together,
his face is a mask of concern. Let him not speak to me, he prays. Let George pass on.
‘Master Cromwell,’ he says, ‘I believe you are crying. What is
this? Is there bad news about our master?’
He tries to close Liz’s book, but Cavendish reaches out for it.
‘Ah, you are praying.’ He looks amazed.
Cavendish cannot see his daughter’s fingers touching the
page, or his wife’s hands holding the book. George simply looks
at the pictures, upside down. He takes a deep breath and says,
‘Thomas …?’
‘I am crying for myself,’ he says. ‘I am going to lose everything, everything I have worked for, all my life, because I will go
down with the cardinal – no, George, don’t interrupt me –
because I have done what he asked me to do, and been his friend,
and the man at his right hand. If I had stuck to my work in the
city, instead of hurtling about the countryside making enemies,
I’d be a rich man – and you, George, I’d be inviting you out to
my new country house, and asking your advice on furniture and
flower beds. But look at me! I’m finished.’
George tries to speak: he utters a consolatory bleat.
‘Unless,’ he says. ‘Unless, George. What do you think? I’ve
sent my boy Rafe to Westminster.’
‘What will he do there?’
But he is crying again. The ghosts are gathering, he feels cold,
his position is irretrievable. In Italy he learned a memory system,
so he can remember everything: every stage of how he got here.
‘I think,’ he says, ‘I should go after him.’
‘Please,’ says Cavendish, ‘not before dinner.’
‘No?’
‘Because we need to think how to pay off my lord’s servants.’
A moment passes. He enfolds the prayer book to himself; he
holds it in his arms. Cavendish has given him what he needs: an
accountancy problem. ‘George,’ he says, ‘you know my lord’s
chaplains have flocked here after him, all of them earning – what?
– a hundred, two hundred pounds a year, out of his liberality? So, I think … we will make the chaplains and the priests pay off the
household servants, because what I think is, what I notice is, that
his servants love my lord more than his priests do. So, now, let’s
go to dinner, and after dinner I will make the priests ashamed,
and I will make them open their veins and bleed money. We need
to give the household a quarter’s wages at least, and a retainer.
Against the day of my lord’s restoration.’
‘Well,’ says George, ‘if anyone can do it, you can.’
He finds himself smiling. Perhaps it’s a grim smile, but he
never thought he would smile today. He says, ‘When that’s done,
I shall leave you. I shall be back as soon as I have made sure of a
place in the Parliament.’
‘But it meets in two days … How will you manage it now?’
‘I don’t know, but someone must speak for my lord. Or they
will kill him.’
He sees the hurt and shock; he wants to take the words back;
but it is true. He says, ‘I can only try. I’ll make or mar, before I
see you again.’
George almost bows. ‘Make or mar,’ he murmurs. ‘It was ever
your common saying.’
Cavendish walks about the household, saying, Thomas
Cromwell was reading a prayer book. Thomas Cromwell was
crying. Only now does George realise how bad things are.
Once, in Thessaly, there was a poet called Simonides. He was
commissioned to appear at a banquet, given by a man called
Scopas, and recite a lyric in praise of his host. Poets have strange
vagaries, and in his lyric Simonides incorporated verses in praise
of Castor and Pollux, the Heavenly Twins. Scopas was sulky, and
said he would pay only half the fee: ‘As for the rest, get it from
the Twins.’
A little later, a servant came into the hall. He whispered to
Simonides; there were two young men outside, asking for him by
name. He rose and left the banqueting hall. He looked around for the
two young men, but he could see no one.
As he turned back, to go and finish his dinner, he heard a terrible noise, of stone splitting and crumbling. He heard the cries of
the dying, as the roof of the hall collapsed. Of all the diners, he
was the only one left alive.
The bodies were so broken and disfigured that the relatives of
the dead could not identify them. But Simonides was a remarkable man. Whatever he saw was imprinted on his mind. He led
each of the relatives through the ruins; and pointing to the
crushed remains, he said, there is your man. In linking the dead
to their names, he worked from the seating plan in his head.
It is Cicero who tells us this story. He tells us how, on that day,
Simonides invented the art of memory. He remembered the
names, the faces, some sour and bloated, some blithe, some
bored. He remembered exactly where everyone was sitting, at
the moment the roof fell in.

PART THREE

I
Three-Card Trick
Winter 1529–Spring 1530

Johane: ‘You say, “Rafe, go and find me a seat in the new Parliament.” And off he goes, like a girl who’s been told to bring the
washing in.’
‘It was harder than that,’ Rafe says.
Johane says, ‘How would you know?’
Seats in the Commons are, largely, in the gift of lords; of lords,
bishops, the king himself. A scanty handful of electors, if pressured from above, usually do as they’re told.
Rafe has got him Taunton. It’s Wolsey terrain; they wouldn’t
have let him in if the king had not said yes, if Thomas Howard
had not said yes. He had sent Rafe to London to scout the uncertain territory of the duke’s intentions: to find out what lies
behind that ferrety grin. ‘Am obliged, Master.’
Now he knows. ‘The Duke of Norfolk,’ Rafe says, ‘believes
my lord cardinal has buried treasure, and he thinks you know
where it is.’
They talk alone. Rafe: ‘He’ll ask you to go and work for him.’
‘Yes. Perhaps not in so many words.’
He watches Rafe’s face as he weighs up the situation.
Norfolk is already – unless you count the king’s bastard son –
the realm’s premier nobleman. ‘I assured him,’ Rafe says, ‘of your respect, your … your reverence, your desire to be at his –
erm –’
‘Commandment?’
‘More or less.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said, hmm.’
He laughs. ‘And was that his tone?’
‘It was his tone.’
‘And his grim nod?’
‘Yes.’
Very well. I dry my tears, those tears from All Hallows day. I
sit with the cardinal, by the fire at Esher in a room with a
smoking chimney. I say, my lord, do you think I would forsake
you? I locate the man in charge of chimneys and hearths. I give
him orders. I ride to London, to Blackfriars. The day is foggy, St
Hubert’s Day. Norfolk is waiting, to tell me he will be a good
lord to me.
The duke is now approaching sixty years old, but concedes
nothing to the calendar. Flint-faced and keen-eyed, he is lean as
a gnawed bone and as cold as an axe head; his joints seem knitted
together of supple chain links, and indeed he rattles a little as he
moves, for his clothes conceal relics: in tiny jewelled cases he has
shavings of skin and snippets of hair, and set into medallions he
wears splinters of martyrs’ bones. ‘Marry!’ he says, for an oath,
and ‘By the Mass!’, and sometimes takes out one of his medals
or charms from wherever it is hung about his person, and kisses
it in a fervour, calling on some saint or martyr to stop his current
rage getting the better of him. ‘St Jude give me patience!’ he will
shout; probably he has mixed him up with Job, whom he heard
about in a story when he was a little boy at the knee of his first
priest. It is hard to imagine the duke as a little boy, or in any way
younger or different from the self he presents now. He thinks
the Bible a book unnecessary for laypeople, though he under stands priests make some use of it. He thinks book-reading an
affectation altogether, and wishes there were less of it at court.
His niece is always reading, Anne Boleyn, which is perhaps why
she is unmarried at the age of twenty-eight. He does not see why
it’s a gentleman’s business to write letters; there are clerks for
that.
Now he fixes an eye, red and fiery. ‘Cromwell, I am content
you are a burgess in the Parliament.’
He bows his head. ‘My lord.’
‘I spoke to the king for you and he is also content. You will
take his instructions in the Commons. And mine.’
‘Will they be the same, my lord?’
The duke scowls. He paces; he rattles a little; at last he bursts
out, ‘Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a … person? It
isn’t as if you could afford to be.’
He waits, smiling. He knows what the duke means. He is a
person, he is a presence. He knows how to edge blackly into a
room so that you don’t see him; but perhaps those days are over.
‘Smile away,’ says the duke. ‘Wolsey’s household is a nest of
vipers. Not that …’ he touches a medal, flinching, ‘God forbid I
should …’
Compare a prince of the church to a serpent. The duke wants
the cardinal’s money, and he wants the cardinal’s place at the
king’s side: but then again, he doesn’t want to burn in Hell. He
walks across the room; he slaps his hands together; he rubs them;
he turns. ‘The king is preparing to quarrel with you, master. Oh
yes. He will favour you with an interview because he wishes to
understand the cardinal’s affairs, but he has, you will learn, a very
long and exact memory, and what he remembers, master, is when
you were a burgess of the Parliament before this, and how you
spoke against his war.’
‘I hope he doesn’t think still of invading France.’
‘God damn you! What Englishman does not! We own France.
We have to take back our own.’ A muscle in his cheek jumps; he paces, agitated; he turns, he rubs his cheek; the twitch stops, and
he says, in a voice perfectly matter-of-fact, ‘Mind you, you’re
right.’
He waits. ‘We can’t win,’ the duke says, ‘but we have to fight
as if we can. Hang the expense. Hang the waste – money, men,
horses, ships. That’s what’s wrong with Wolsey, you see. Always
at the treaty table. How can a butcher’s son understand –’
‘La gloire?’
‘Are you a butcher’s son?’
‘A blacksmith’s.’
‘Are you really? Shoe a horse?’
He shrugs. ‘If I were put to it, my lord. But I can’t imagine –’
‘You can’t? What can you imagine? A battlefield, a camp, the
night before a battle – can you imagine that?’
‘I was a soldier myself.’
‘Were you so? Not in any English army, I’ll be bound. There,
you see.’ The duke grins, quite without animosity. ‘I knew there
was something about you. I knew I didn’t like you, but I couldn’t
put my finger on it. Where were you?’
‘Garigliano.’
‘With?’
‘The French.’
The duke whistles. ‘Wrong side, lad.’
‘So I noticed.’
‘With the French,’ he chuckles. ‘With the French. And how
did you scramble out of that disaster?’
‘I went north. Got into …’ He’s going to say money, but the
duke wouldn’t understand trading in money. ‘Cloth,’ he says.
‘Silk, mostly. You know what the market is, with the soldier over
there.’
‘By the Mass, yes! Johnnie Freelance – he puts his money on
his back. Those Switzers! Like a troupe of play-actors. Lace,
stripes, fancy hats. Easy target, that’s all. Longbowman?’
‘Now and then.’ He smiles. ‘On the short side for that.’ ‘Me too. Now, Henry draws a bow. Very nice. Got the height
for it. Got the arm. Still. We won’t win many battles like that any
more.’
‘Then how about not fighting any? Negotiate, my lord. It’s
cheaper.’
‘I tell you, Cromwell, you’ve got face, coming here.’
‘My lord – you sent for me.’
‘Did I?’ Norfolk looks alarmed. ‘It’s come to that?’
The king’s advisers are preparing no fewer than forty-four
charges against the cardinal. They range from the violation of the
statutes of praemunire – that is to say, the upholding of a foreign
jurisdiction within the king’s realm – to buying beef for his
household at the same price as the king; from financial malfeasance to failing to halt the spread of Lutheran heresies.
The law of praemunire dates from another century. No one
who is alive now quite knows what it means. From day to day it
seems to mean what the king says it means. The matter is argued
in every talking shop in Europe. Meanwhile, my lord cardinal
sits, and sometimes mutters to himself, and sometimes speaks
aloud, saying, ‘Thomas, my colleges! Whatever happens to my
person, my colleges must be saved. Go to the king. Whatever
vengeance, for whatever imagined injury, he would like to wreak
on me, he surely cannot mean to put out the light of learning?’
In exile at Esher, the cardinal paces and frets. The great mind
which once revolved the affairs of Europe now cogitates ceaselessly on its own losses. He lapses into silent inactivity, brooding
as the light fails; for God’s sake, Thomas, Cavendish begs him,
don’t tell him you’re coming if you’re not.
I won’t, he says, and I am coming, but sometimes I am held
up. The House sits late and before I leave Westminster I have to
gather up the letters and petitions to my lord cardinal, and talk
with all the people who want to send messages but don’t want
them put into writing I understand, Cavendish says; but Thomas, he wails, you can’t
imagine what it’s like here at Esher. What time is it? my lord
cardinal says. What time will Cromwell be here? And in an hour,
again: Cavendish, what time is it? He has us out with lights, and
reporting on the weather; as if you, Cromwell, were a person to
be impeded by hailstorms or ice. Then next he will ask, what if he
has met with some accident on the road? The road from London
is full of robbers; wasteland and heathland, as the light fails, are
creeping with the agents of malefice. From that he will pass on to
say, this world is full of snares and delusions, and into many of
them I have fallen, miserable sinner that I am.
When he, Cromwell, finally throws off his riding cloak and
collapses into a chair by the fire – God’s blood, that smoking
chimney – the cardinal is at him before he can draw breath.
What said my lord of Suffolk? How looked my lord of
Norfolk? The king, have you seen him, did he speak to you?
And Lady Anne, is she in health and good looks? Have you
worked any device to please her – because we must please her,
you know?
He says, ‘There is one short way to please that lady, and that is
to crown her queen.’ He closes his lips on the topic of Anne and
has no more to say. Mary Boleyn says she has noticed him, but
till recently Anne gave no sign of it. Her eyes passed over him on
their way to someone who interested her more. They are black
eyes, slightly protuberant, shiny like the beads of an abacus; they
are shiny and always in motion, as she makes calculations of her
own advantage. But Uncle Norfolk must have said to her, ‘There
goes the man who knows the cardinal’s secrets,’ because now
when he comes into her sight her long neck darts; those shining
black beads go click, click, as she looks him up and down and
decides what use can be got out of him. He supposes she is in
health, as the year creeps towards its end; not coughing like a sick
horse, for instance, nor gone lame. He supposes she is in good
looks, if that’s what you like. One night, just before Christmas, he arrives late at Esher and
the cardinal is sitting alone, listening to a boy play the lute. He
says, ‘Mark, thank you, go now.’ The boy bows to the cardinal;
he favours him, barely, with the nod suitable for a burgess in the
Parliament. As he withdraws from the room the cardinal says,
‘Mark is very adept, and a pleasant boy – at York Place, he was
one of my choristers. I think I shouldn’t keep him here, but send
him to the king. Or to Lady Anne, perhaps, as he is such a pretty
young thing. Would she like him?’
The boy has lingered at the door to drink in his praises. A hard
Cromwellian stare – the equivalent of a kick – sends him out. He
wishes people would not ask him what the Lady Anne would
and would not like.
The cardinal says, ‘Does Lord Chancellor More send me any
message?’
He drops a sheaf of papers on the table. ‘You look ill, my lord.’
‘Yes, I am ill. Thomas, what shall we do?’
‘We shall bribe people,’ he says. ‘We shall be liberal and openhanded with the assets Your Grace has left – for you still have
benefices to dispose of, you still have land. Listen, my lord – even
if the king takes all you have, people will be asking, can the king
truly bestow what belongs to the cardinal? No one to whom he
makes a grant will be sure in their title, unless you confirm it. So
you still have, my lord, you still have cards in your hand.’
‘And after all, if he meant to bring a treason …’ his voice
falters, ‘if …’
‘If he meant to charge you with treason you would be in the
Tower by now.’
‘Indeed – and what use would I be to him, head in one place,
body in another? This is how it is: the king thinks, by degrading
me, to give a sharp lesson to the Pope. He thinks to indicate, I as
King of England am master in my own house. Oh, but is he? Or
is Lady Anne master, or Thomas Boleyn? A question not to be
asked, not outside this room. The battle is, now, to get the king alone; to find out his intentions, if he knows them himself, and broker a deal. The cardinal
urgently needs ready cash, that’s the first skirmish. Day after day,
he waits for an interview. The king extends a hand, takes from
him what letters he proffers, glancing at the cardinal’s seal. He
does not look at him, saying merely an absent ‘Thanks.’ One day
he does look at him, and says, ‘Master Cromwell, yes … I cannot
talk about the cardinal.’ And as he opens his mouth to speak, the
king says, ‘Don’t you understand? I cannot talk about him.’ His
tone is gentle, puzzled. ‘Another day,’ he says. ‘I will send for
you. I promise.’
When the cardinal asks him, ‘How did the king look today?’
he says, he looks as if he does not sleep.
The cardinal laughs. ‘If he does not sleep it is because he does
not hunt. This icy ground is too hard for the hounds’ pads, they
cannot go out. It is lack of fresh air, Thomas. It is not his
conscience.’
Later, he will remember that night towards the end of December when he found the cardinal listening to music. He will run it
through his mind, twice and over again.
Because as he is leaving the cardinal, and contemplating again
the road, the night, he hears a boy’s voice, speaking behind a halfopen door: it is Mark, the lute-player. ‘… so for my skill he says
he will prefer me to Lady Anne. And I shall be glad, because
what is the use of being here when any day the king may behead
the old fellow? I think he ought, for the cardinal is so proud.
Today is the first day he ever gave me a good word.’
A pause. Someone speaks, muffled; he cannot tell who. Then
the boy: ‘Yes, for sure the lawyer will come down with him. I say
lawyer, but who is he? Nobody knows. They say he has killed men
with his own hands and never told it in confession. But those hard
kinds of men, they always weep when they see the hangman.’
He is in no doubt that it is his own execution Mark looks
forward to. Beyond the wall, the boy runs on: ‘So when I am with Lady Anne she is sure to notice me, and give me presents.’
A giggle. ‘And look on me with favour. Don’t you think? Who
knows where she may turn while she is still refusing the king?’
A pause. Then Mark: ‘She is no maid. Not she.’
What an enchanting conversation: servants’ talk. Again comes
a muffled answer, and then Mark: ‘Could she be at the French
court, do you think, and come home a maid? Any more than her
sister could? And Mary was every man’s hackney.’
But this is nothing. He is disappointed. I had hopes of particulars; this is just the on dit. But still he hesitates, and doesn’t
move away.
‘Besides, Tom Wyatt has had her, and everybody knows it,
down in Kent. I have been down to Penshurst with the cardinal,
and you know that palace is near to Hever, where the lady’s
family is, and the Wyatts’ house an easy ride away.’
Witnesses? Dates?
But then, from the unseen person, ‘Shh!’ Again, a soft giggle.
One can do nothing with this. Except bear it in mind. The
conversation is in Flemish: language of Mark’s birthplace.
Christmas comes, and the king, with Queen Katherine, keeps it
at Greenwich. Anne is at York Place; the king can come upriver
to see her. Her company, the women say, is exacting; the king’s
visits are short, few and discreet.
At Esher the cardinal takes to his bed. Once he would never
have done that, though he looks ill enough to justify it. He says,
‘Nothing will happen while the king and Lady Anne are
exchanging their New Year kisses. We are safe from incursions
till Twelfth Night.’ He turns his head, against his pillows. Says,
vehement, ‘Body of Christ, Cromwell. Go home.’
The house at the Austin Friars is decorated with wreaths of
holly and ivy, of laurel and ribboned yew. The kitchen is busy,
feeding the living, but they omit this year their usual songs and
Christmas plays. No year has brought such devastation. His sister Kat, her husband Morgan Williams, have been plucked
from this life as fast as his daughters were taken, one day walking
and talking and next day cold as stones, tumbled into their
Thames-side graves and dug in beyond reach of the tide, beyond
sight and smell of the river; deaf now to the sound of Putney’s
cracked church bell, to the smell of wet ink, of hops, of malted
barley, and the scent, still animal, of woollen bales; dead to the
autumn aroma of pine resin and apple candles, of soul cakes
baking. As the year ends two orphans are added to his house,
Richard and the child Walter. Morgan Williams, he was a big
talker, but he was shrewd in his own way, and he worked hard
for his family. And Kat – well, latterly she understood her
brother about as well as she understood the motions of the stars:
‘I can never add you up, Thomas,’ she’d say, which was his
failure entirely, because who had taught her, except him, to count
on her fingers, and puzzle out a tradesman’s bill?
If he were to give himself a piece of advice for Christmas, he’d
say, leave the cardinal now or you’ll be out on the streets again
with the three-card trick. But he only gives advice to those who
are likely to take it.
They have a big gilded star at the Austin Friars, which they
hang in their great hall on New Year’s Eve. For a week it shines
out, to welcome their guests at Epiphany. From summer
onwards, he and Liz would be thinking of costumes for the
Three Kings, coveting and hoarding scraps of any strange cloth
they saw, any new trimmings; then from October, Liz would be
sewing in secrecy, improving on last year’s robes by patching
them over with new shining panels, quilting a shoulder and
weighting a hem, and building each year some fantastical new
crowns. His part was to think what the gifts would be, that the
kings had in their boxes. Once a king had dropped his casket in
shock when the gift began to sing.
This year no one has the heart to hang up the star; but he visits
it, in its lightless store room. He slides off the canvas sleeves that protect its rays, and checks that they are unchipped and unfaded.
There will be better years, when they will hang it up again;
though he cannot imagine them. He eases back the sleeves,
pleased at how ingeniously they have been made and how
exactly they fit. The Three Kings’ robes are packed into a chest,
as also the sheepskins for the children who will be sheep. The
shepherds’ crooks lean in a corner; from a peg hang angel’s
wings. He touches them. His finger comes away dusty. He shifts
his candle out of danger, then lifts them from the peg and gently
shakes them. They make a soft sound of hissing, and a faint
amber perfume washes into the air. He hangs them back on the
peg; passes over them the palm of his hand, to soothe them and
still their shiver. He picks up his candle. He backs out and closes
the door. He pinches out the light, turns the lock and gives the
key to Johane.
He says to her, ‘I wish we had a baby. It seems such a long time
since there was a baby in the house.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Johane says.
He does, of course. He says, ‘Does John Williamson not do his
duty by you these days?’
She says, ‘His duty is not my pleasure.’
As he walks away he thinks, that’s a conversation I shouldn’t
have had.
On New Year’s Day, when night falls, he is sitting at his
writing table; he is writing letters for the cardinal, and sometimes
he crosses the room to his counting board and pushes the counters about. It seems that in return for a formal guilty plea to the
praemunire charges, the king will allow the cardinal his life, and
a measure of liberty; but whatever money is left him, to maintain
his state, will be a fraction of his former income. York Place has
been taken already, Hampton Court is long gone, and the king is
thinking of how to tax and rob the rich bishopric of Winchester.
Gregory comes in. ‘I brought you lights. My aunt Johane said,
go in to your father.’ Gregory sits. He waits. He fidgets. He sighs. He gets up. He
crosses to his father’s writing table and hovers in front of him.
Then, as if someone had said, ‘Make yourself useful,’ he reaches
out timidly and begins to tidy the papers.
He glances up at his son, while keeping his head down over his
task. For the first time, perhaps, since Gregory was a baby, he
notices his hands, and he is struck by what they have become: not
childish paws, but the large, white untroubled hands of a gentleman’s son. What is Gregory doing? He is putting the documents
into a stack. On what principle is he doing it? He can’t read them,
they’re the wrong way up. He’s not filing them by subject. Is he
filing them by date? For God’s sake, what is he doing?
He needs to finish this sentence, with its many vital
subclauses. He glances up again, and recognises Gregory’s
design. It is a system of holy simplicity: big papers on the
bottom, small ones on top.
‘Father …’ Gregory says. He sighs. He crosses to the counting
board. With a forefinger he inches the counters about. Then he
scoops them together, picks them up and clicks them into a tidy
pile.
He looks up at last. ‘That was a calculation. It wasn’t just
where I dropped them.’
‘Oh, sorry,’ Gregory says politely. He sits down by the fire
and tries not to disturb the air as he breathes.
The mildest eyes can be commanding; under his son’s gaze, he
asks, ‘What is it?’
‘Do you think you can stop writing?’
‘A minute,’ he says, holding up a delaying hand; he signs the
letter, his usual form: ‘your assured friend, Thomas Cromwell.’
If Gregory is going to tell him that someone else in the house is
mortally ill, or that he, Gregory, has offered himself in marriage
to the laundry girl, or that London Bridge has fallen down, he
must be ready to take it like a man; but he must sand and seal this.
He looks up. ‘Yes?’

Gregory turns his face away. Is he crying? It would not be
surprising, would it, as he has cried himself, and in public? He
crosses the room. He sits down opposite his son, by the hearth.
He takes off his cap of velvet and runs his hands back through his
hair.
For a long time no one speaks. He looks down at his own
thick-fingered hands, scars and burn marks hidden in the palms.
He thinks, gentleman? So you call yourself, but who do you
hope to mislead? Only the people who have never seen you, or
the people you keep distanced with courtesy, legal clients and
your fellows in the Commons, colleagues at Gray’s Inn, the
household servants of courtiers, the courtiers themselves … His
mind strays to the next letter he must write. Then Gregory says,
his voice small as if he had receded into the past, ‘Do you remember that Christmas, when there was the giant in the pageant?’
‘Here in the parish? I remember.’
‘He said, “I am a giant, my name is Marlinspike.” They said he
was as tall as the Cornhill maypole. What’s the Cornhill
maypole?’
‘They took it down. The year of the riots. Evil May Day, they
called it. You were only a baby then.’
‘Where’s the maypole now?’
‘The city has it in store.’
‘Shall we have our star again next year?’
‘If our fortunes look up.’
‘Shall we be poor now the cardinal is down?’
‘No.’
The little flames leap and flare, and Gregory looks into them.
‘You remember the year I had my face dyed black, and I was
wrapped in a black calfskin? When I was a devil in the Christmas
play?’
‘I do.’ His face softens. ‘I remember.’
Anne had wanted to be dyed, but her mother had said it was
not suitable for a little girl. He wishes he had said that Anne must have her turn as a parish angel – even if, being dark, she had to
wear one of the parish’s yellow knitted wigs, which slipped sideways, or fell over the children’s eyes.
The year that Grace was an angel, she had wings made of
peacock feathers. He himself had contrived it. The other little
girls were dowdy goose creatures, and their wings fell off if they
caught them on the corners of the stable. But Grace stood glittering, her hair entwined with silver threads; her shoulders were
trussed with a spreading, shivering glory, and the rustling air was
perfumed as she breathed. Lizzie said, Thomas, there’s no end to
you, is there? She has the best wings the city has ever seen.
Gregory stands up; he comes to kiss him good night. For a
moment his son leans against him, as if he were a child; or as if the
past, the pictures in the fire, were an intoxication.
Once the boy has gone to bed he sweeps his papers out of the
tidy stack he has made. He refolds them. He sorts them with the
endorsement out, ready for filing. He thinks of Evil May Day.
Gregory did not ask, why were there riots? The riots were
against foreigners. He himself had not long been home.
As 1530 begins, he does not hold an Epiphany feast, because so
many people, sensible of the cardinal’s disgrace, would be
obliged to refuse his invitation. Instead, he takes the young men
to Gray’s Inn, for the Twelfth Night revels. He regrets it almost
at once; this year they are noisier, and more bawdy, than any he
remembers.
The law students make a play about the cardinal. They make
him flee from his palace at York Place, to his barge on the
Thames. Some fellows flap dyed sheets, to impersonate the river,
and then others run up and throw water on them from leather
buckets. As the cardinal scrambles into his barge, there are
hunting cries, and one benighted fool runs into the hall with a
brace of otter hounds on a leash. Others come with nets and
fishing rods, to haul the cardinal back to the bank. The next scene shows the cardinal floundering in the mud at
Putney, as he runs to his bolt-hole at Esher. The students halloo
and cry as the cardinal weeps and holds up his hands in prayer.
Of all the people who witnessed this, who, he wonders, has
offered it up as a comedy? If he knew, or if he guessed, the worse
for them.
The cardinal lies on his back, a crimson mountain; he flails his
hands; he offers his bishopric of Winchester to anyone who can
get him back on his mule. Some students, under a frame draped
with donkey skins, enact the mule, which turns about and jokes
in Latin, and farts in the cardinal’s face. There is much wordplay
about bishoprics and bishop’s pricks, which might pass as witty
if they were street-sweepers, but he thinks law students should
do better. He rises from his place, displeased, and his household
has no choice but to stand up with him and walk out.
He stops to have a word with some of the benchers: how was
this allowed to go forward? The Cardinal of York is a sick man, he
may die, how will you and your students stand then before your
God? What sort of young men are you breeding here, who are so
brave as to assail a great man who has fallen on evil times – whose
favour, a few short weeks ago, they would have begged for?
The benchers follow him, apologising; but their voices are lost
in the roars of laughter that billow out from the hall. His young
household are lingering, casting glances back. The cardinal is
offering his harem of forty virgins to anyone who will help him
mount; he sits on the ground and laments, while a flaccid and
serpentine member, knitted of red wool, flops out from under his
robes.
Outside, lights burn thin in the icy air. ‘Home,’ he says. He
hears Gregory whisper, ‘We can only laugh if he permits us.’
‘Well, after all,’ he hears Rafe say, ‘he is the man in charge.’
He falls back a step, to speak with them. ‘Anyway, it was the
wicked Borgia Pope, Alexander, who kept forty women. And
none of them were virgins, I can tell you.’ Rafe touches his shoulder. Richard walks on his left, sticking
close. ‘You don’t have to hold me up,’ he says mildly. ‘I’m not
like the cardinal.’ He stops. He laughs. He says, ‘I suppose it
was …’
‘Yes, it was quite entertaining,’ Richard says. ‘His Grace must
have been five feet around his waist.’
The night is loud with the noise of bone rattles, and alive with
the flames of torches. A troop of hobby horses clatters past them,
singing, and a party of men wearing antlers, with bells at their
heels. As they near home a boy dressed as an orange rolls past,
with his friend, a lemon. ‘Gregory Cromwell!’ they call out, and
to him as their senior they courteously raise, in lieu of hats, an
upper slice of rind. ‘God send you a good new year.’
‘The same to you,’ he calls. And, to the lemon: ‘Tell your
father to come and see me about that Cheapside lease.’
They get home. ‘Go to bed,’ he says. ‘It’s late.’ He feels it best
to add, ‘God see you safe till morning.’
They leave him. He sits at his work table. He remembers
Grace, at the end of her evening as an angel: standing in the firelight, her face white with fatigue, her eyes glittering, and the eyes
of her peacock’s wings shining in the firelight, each like a topaz,
golden, smoky. Liz said, ‘Stand away from the fire, sweetheart,
or your wings will catch alight.’ His little girl backed off, into
shadow; the feathers were the colours of ash and cinders as she
moved towards the stairs, and he said, ‘Grace, are you going to
bed in your wings?’
‘Till I say my prayers,’ she said, darting a look over her shoulder. He followed her, afraid for her, afraid of fire and some other
danger, but he did not know what. She walked up the staircase,
her plumes rustling, her feathers fading to black.
Ah, Christ, he thinks, at least I’ll never have to give her to
anyone else. She’s dead and I’ll not have to sign her away to some
purse-mouthed petty gent who wants her dowry. Grace would
have wanted a title. She would have thought because she was lovely he should buy her one: Lady Grace. I wish my daughter
Anne were here, he thinks, I wish Anne were here and promised
to Rafe Sadler. If Anne were older. If Rafe were younger. If Anne
were still alive.
Once more he bends his head over the cardinal’s letters.
Wolsey is writing to the rulers of Europe, to ask them to support
him, vindicate him, fight his cause. He, Thomas Cromwell,
wishes the cardinal would not, or if he must, could the encryption be more tricky? Is it not treasonable for Wolsey to urge
them to obstruct the king’s purpose? Henry would deem it is.
The cardinal is not asking them to make war on Henry, on his
behalf: he’s merely asking them to withdraw their approval of a
king who very much likes to be liked.
He sits back in his chair, hands over his mouth, as if to disguise
his opinion from himself. He thinks, I am glad I love my lord
cardinal, because if I did not, and I were his enemy – let us say I
am Suffolk, let us say I am Norfolk, let us say I am the king – I
would be putting him on trial next week.
The door opens. ‘Richard? You can’t sleep? Well, I knew it.
The play was too exciting for you.’
It is easy to smile now, but Richard does not smile; his face is
in shadow. He says, ‘Master, I have a question to put to you. Our
father is dead and you are our father now.’
Richard Williams, and Walter-named-after-Walter Williams:
these are his sons. ‘Sit down,’ he says.
‘So shall we change our name to yours?’
‘You surprise me. The way things are with me, the people
called Cromwell will be wanting to change their names to
Williams.’
‘If I had your name, I should never disown it.’
‘Would your father like it? You know he believed he had his
descent from Welsh princes.’
‘Ah, he did. When he’d had a drink, he would say, who will
give me a shilling for my principality? ‘Even so, you have the Tudor name in your descent. By some
accounts.’
‘Don’t,’ Richard pleads. ‘It makes beads of blood stand out on
my forehead.’
‘It’s not that hard.’ He laughs. ‘Listen. The old king had an
uncle, Jasper Tudor. Jasper had two bastard daughters, Joan and
Helen. Helen was Gardiner’s mother. Joan married William ap
Evan – she was your grandmother.’
‘Is that all? Why did my father make it sound so deep? But if I
am the king’s cousin,’ Richard pauses, ‘and Stephen Gardiner’s
cousin … what good can it do me? We’re not at court and not
likely to be, now the cardinal … well …’ He looks away. ‘Sir …
when you were on your travels, did you ever think you would
die?’
‘Yes. Oh, yes.’
Richard looks at him: how did that feel?
‘I felt,’ he said, ‘irritated. It seemed a waste, I suppose. To
come so far. To cross the sea. To die for …’ He shrugs. ‘God
knows why.’
Richard says, ‘Every day I light a candle for my father.’
‘Does that help you?’
‘No. I just do it.’
‘Does he know you do it?’
‘I can’t imagine what he knows. I know the living must
comfort each other.’
‘This comforts me, Richard Cromwell.’
Richard gets up, kisses his cheek. ‘Good night. Cysga’n dawel.’
Sleep well; it is the familiar form for those who are close to
home. It is the usage for fathers, for brothers. It matters what
name we choose, what name we make. The people lose their
name who lie dead on the field of battle, the ordinary corpses of
no lineage, with no herald to search for them and no chantry, no
perpetual prayers. Morgan’s bloodline won’t be lost, he is sure of
it, though he died in a busy year for death, when London was never out of black. He touches his throat, where the medal
would have been, the holy medal that Kat gave him; his fingers
are surprised not to find it there. For the first time he understands why he took it off and slid it into the sea. It was so that no
living hand could take it. The waves took it, and the waves have
it still.
The chimney at Esher continues to smoke. He goes to the Duke
of Norfolk – who is always ready to see him – and asks him what
is to be done about the cardinal’s household.
In this matter, both dukes are helpful. ‘Nothing is more
malcontent,’ says Norfolk, ‘than a masterless man. Nothing
more dangerous. Whatever one thinks of the Cardinal of York,
he was always well served. Prefer them to me, send them in my
direction. They will be my men.’
He directs a searching look at Cromwell. Who turns away.
Knows himself coveted. Wears an expression like an heiress: sly,
coy, cold.
He is arranging a loan for the duke. His foreign contacts are
less than excited. The cardinal down, he says, the duke has risen,
like the morning sun, and sitteth at Henry’s right hand.
Tommaso, they say, seriously, you are offering what as guarantee? Some old duke who may be dead tomorrow – they say he is
choleric? You are offering a dukedom as security, in that barbaric
island of yours, which is always breaking out into civil war? And
another war coming, if your wilful king will set aside the
Emperor’s aunt, and install his whore as queen?
Still: he’ll get terms. Somewhere.
Charles Brandon says, ‘You here again, Master Cromwell,
with your lists of names? Is there anyone you specially recommend to me?’
‘Yes, but I am afraid he is a man of a lowly stamp, and more fit
that I should confer with your kitchen steward –’
‘No, tell me,’ says the duke. He can’t bear suspense. ‘It’s only the hearths and chimneys man, hardly a matter for
Your Grace …’
‘I’ll have him, I’ll have him,’ Charles Brandon says. ‘I like a
good fire.’
Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor, has put his signature first
on all the articles against Wolsey. They say one strange allegation
has been added at his behest. The cardinal is accused of whispering in the king’s ear and breathing into his face; since the cardinal
has the French pox, he intended to infect our monarch.
When he hears this he thinks, imagine living inside the Lord
Chancellor’s head. Imagine writing down such a charge and taking
it to the printer, and circulating it through the court and through
the realm, putting it out there to where people will believe
anything; putting it out there, to the shepherds on the hills, to
Tyndale’s ploughboy, to the beggar on the roads and the patient
beast in its byre or stall; out there to the bitter winter winds, and to
the weak early sun, and the snowdrops in the London gardens.
It is a wan morning, low unbroken cloud; the light, filtering
sparely through glass, is the colour of tarnished pewter. How
brightly coloured the king is, like the king in a new pack of cards:
how small his flat blue eye.
There is a crowd of gentlemen around Henry Tudor; they
ignore his approach. Only Harry Norris smiles, gives him a
polite good morning. At a signal from the king, the gentlemen
retire to a distance; bright in their riding cloaks – it is a hunting
morning – they flutter, eddy, cluster; they whisper, one to the
other, and conduct a discourse in nods and shrugs.
The king glances out of the window. ‘So,’ he says, ‘how is …?’
He seems reluctant to name the cardinal.
‘He cannot be well till he has Your Majesty’s favour.’
‘Forty-four charges,’ the king says. ‘Forty-four, master.’
‘Saving Your Majesty, there is an answer to each one, and
given a hearing we would make them.’ ‘Could you make them here and now?’
‘If Your Majesty would care to sit.’
‘I heard you were a ready man.’
‘Would I come here unprepared?’
He has spoken almost without thinking. The king smiles. That
fine curl of the red lip. He has a pretty mouth, almost like a
woman’s; it is too small for his face. ‘Another day I would put you
to the test,’ he says. ‘But my lord Suffolk is waiting for me. Will the
cloud lift, do you think? I wish I’d gone out before Mass.’
‘I think it will clear,’ he says. ‘A good day to be chasing something.’
‘Master Cromwell?’ The king turns, he looks at him, astonished. ‘You are not of Thomas More’s opinion, are you?’
He waits. He cannot imagine what the king is going to say.
‘La chasse. He thinks it barbaric.’
‘Oh, I see. No, Your Majesty, I favour any sport that’s cheaper
than battle. It’s rather that …’ How can he put it? ‘In some countries, they hunt the bear, and the wolf and the wild boar. We once
had these animals in England, when we had our great forests.’
‘My cousin France has boar to hunt. From time to time he says
he will ship me some. But I feel …’
You feel he is taunting you.
‘We usually say,’ Henry looks straight at him, ‘we usually say,
we gentlemen, that the chase prepares us for war. Which brings
us to a sticky point, Master Cromwell.’
‘It does indeed,’ he says, cheerful.
‘You said, in the Parliament, some six years ago, that I could
not afford a war.’
It was seven years: 1523. And how long has this audience
lasted? Seven minutes? Seven minutes and he is sure already.
There’s no point backing off; do that and Henry will chase you
down. Advance, and he may just falter. He says, ‘No ruler in the
history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They’re
not affordable things. No prince ever says, “This is my budget; so this is the kind of war I can have.” You enter into one and it
uses up all the money you’ve got, and then it breaks you and
bankrupts you.’
‘When I went into France in the year 1513 I captured the town
of Thérouanne, which in your speech you called –’
‘A doghole, Majesty.’
‘A doghole,’ the king repeats. ‘How could you say so?’
He shrugs. ‘I’ve been there.’
A flash of anger. ‘And so have I, at the head of my army. Listen
to me, master – you said I should not fight because the taxes
would break the country. What is the country for, but to support
its prince in his enterprise?’
‘I believe I said – saving Your Majesty – we didn’t have the
gold to see you through a year’s campaign. All the bullion in the
country would be swallowed by the war. I have read there was a
time when people exchanged leather tokens, for want of metal
coins. I said we would be back to those days.’
‘You said I was not to lead my troops. You said if I was taken,
the country couldn’t put up the ransom. So what do you want?
You want a king who doesn’t fight? You want me to huddle
indoors like a sick girl?’
‘That would be ideal, for fiscal purposes.’
The king takes a deep ragged breath. He’s been shouting. Now
– and it’s a narrow thing – he decides to laugh. ‘You advocate
prudence. Prudence is a virtue. But there are other virtues that
belong to princes.’
‘Fortitude.’
‘Yes. Cost that out.’
‘It doesn’t mean courage in battle.’
‘Do you read me a lesson?’
‘It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means
having the strength to live with what constrains you.’
Henry crosses the room. Stamp, stamp, stamp in his riding
boots; he is ready for la chasse. He turns, rather slowly, to show his majesty to better effect: wide and square and bright. ‘We will
pursue this. What constrains me?’
‘The distance,’ he says. ‘The harbours. The terrain, the people.
The winter rains and the mud. When Your Majesty’s ancestors
fought in France, whole provinces were held by England. From
there we could supply, we could provision. Now that we have
only Calais, how can we support an army in the interior?’
The king stares out into the silver morning. He bites his lip. Is
he in a slow fury, simmering, bubbling to boiling point? He
turns, and his smile is sunny. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘So when we next
go into France, we will need a sea coast.’
Of course. We need to take Normandy. Or Brittany. That’s all.
‘Well reasoned,’ the king says. ‘I bear you no ill will. Only I
suppose you have no experience in policy, or the direction of a
campaign.’
He shakes his head. ‘None.’
‘You said – before, I mean, in this speech of yours to the
Parliament – that there was one million pounds in gold in the
realm.’
‘I gave a round figure.’
‘But how would you find that figure?’
‘I trained in the Florentine banks. And in Venice.’
The king stares at him. ‘Howard said you were a common
soldier.’
‘That too.’
‘Anything else?’
‘What would Your Majesty like me to be?’
The king looks him full in the face: a rare thing with him. He
looks back; it is his habit. ‘Master Cromwell, your reputation is
bad.’
He inclines his head.
‘You don’t defend yourself?’
‘Your Majesty is able to form his own opinion.’
‘I can. I will.’ At the door, the guards part their spears; the gentlemen step
aside and bow; Suffolk pounds in. Charles Brandon: he looks too
hot in his clothes. ‘You ready?’ he says to the king. ‘Oh,
Cromwell.’ He grins. ‘How’s your fat priest?’
The king flushes with displeasure. Brandon doesn’t notice.
‘You know,’ he chuckles, ‘they say the cardinal once rode out
with his servant, and checked his horse at the head of a valley,
where looking down he saw a very fair church and its lands
about. He says to his servant, Robin, who owns that? I would
that were my benefice! Robin says, It is, my lord, it is.’
His story meets with poor success, but he laughs at it himself.
He says, ‘My lord, they tell that story all over Italy. Of this
cardinal, or that.’
Brandon’s face falls. ‘What, the same story?’
‘Mutatis mutandis. The servant isn’t called Robin.’
The king meets his eye. He smiles.
Leaving, he pushes past the gentlemen, and who should he
meet but the king’s Secretary! ‘Good morning, good morning!’
he says. He doesn’t often repeat things, but the moment seems to
call for it.
Gardiner is rubbing his great blue hands together. ‘Cold, no?’
he says. ‘And how was that, Cromwell? Unpleasant, I think?’
‘On the contrary,’ he says. ‘Oh, and he’s going out with
Suffolk; you’ll have to wait.’ He walks on, but then turns. There
is a pain like a dull bruise inside his chest. ‘Gardiner, can’t we
drop this?’
‘No,’ Gardiner says. His drooping eyelids flicker. ‘No, I don’t
see that we can.’
‘Fine,’ he says. He walks on. He thinks, you wait. You may
have to wait a year or two, but you just wait.
Esher, two days later: he is hardly through the gateway when
Cavendish comes hurtling across the courtyard. ‘Master
Cromwell! Yesterday the king

‘Calmly, George,’ he advises.‘– yesterday he sent us four cartloads of furnishings – comeand see! Tapestry, plate, bed hangings – was it by your suit?’Who knows? He hadn’t asked for anything directly. If he had,he’d have been more specific. Not that hanging, but this hanging,which my lord likes; he likes goddesses, rather than virginmartyrs, so away with St Agnes, and let’s have Venus in a grove.My lord likes Venetian glassware; take away these battered silvergoblets.He looks contemptuous as he inspects the new stuff. ‘Onlythe best for you boys from Putney,’ Wolsey says. ‘It is possible,’he adds, almost apologising, ‘that what the king appointed forme was not in fact what was sent. That inferior substitutionswere made, by inferior persons.’‘That is entirely possible,’ he says.‘Still. Even so. We are more comfortable for it.’‘The difficulty is,’ Cavendish says, ‘we need to move. Thiswhole house needs to be scrubbed out and aired.’‘True,’ the cardinal says. ‘St Agnes, bless her, would beknocked over by the smell of the privies.’‘So will you make suit to the king’s council?’He sighs. ‘George, what is the point? Listen. I’m not talking toThomas Howard. I’m not talking to Brandon. I’m talking tohim.’The cardinal smiles. A fat paternal beam.He is surprised – as they thrash out a financial settlement for thecardinal – at Henry’s grasp of detail. Wolsey has always said thatthe king has a fine mind, as quick as his father’s, but morecomprehensive. The old king grew narrow as he aged; he kept ahard hand on England; there was no nobleman he did not holdby a debt or bond, and he said frankly that if he could not beloved he would be feared. Henry has a different nature, but whatis it? Wolsey laughs and says, I should write you a handbook. But as he walks in the gardens of the little lodge at Richmond,where the king has allowed him to remove, the cardinal’s mindbecomes clouded, he talks about prophecies, and about thedownfall of the priests of England, which he says is foretold, andwill now happen.Even if you don’t believe in omens – and he doesn’t, personally– he can see the problem. For if the cardinal is guilty of a crime inasserting his jurisdiction as legate, are not all those clerics, frombishops downwards, who assented to his legacy, also guilty? Hecan’t be the only person who’s thinking about this; but mostly, hisenemies can’t see past the cardinal himself, his vast scarlet presence on the horizon; they fear it will loom up again, ready forrevenge. ‘These are bad times for proud prelates,’ says Brandon,when next they meet. He sounds jaunty, a man whistling to keephis courage up. ‘We need no cardinals in this realm.’‘And he,’ the cardinal says, furious, ‘he, Brandon, when hemarried the king’s sister out of hand – when he married her in thefirst days of her widowhood, knowing the king intended her foranother monarch – his head would have been parted from hisbody, if I, a simple cardinal, had not pleaded for him to the king.’I, a simple cardinal.‘And what excuse did Brandon make?’ the cardinal says.‘“Oh, Your Majesty, your sister Mary cried. How she did cryand beg me to marry her myself! I never saw woman cry so!” Sohe dried her tears and got himself up to a dukedom! And now hetalks as if he’s held his title since the Garden of Eden. Listen,Thomas, if men of sound learning and good disposition come tome – as Bishop Tunstall comes, as Thomas More comes – andplead that the church must be reformed, why then I listen. ButBrandon! To talk about proud prelates! What was he? The king’shorsekeeper! And I’ve known horses with more wit.’‘My lord,’ Cavendish pleads, ‘be more temperate. AndCharles Brandon, you know, was of an ancient family, a gentleman born.’ ‘Gentleman, he? A swaggering braggart. That’s Brandon.’ Thecardinal sits down, exhausted. ‘My head aches,’ he says.‘Cromwell, go to court and bring me better news.’Day by day he takes his instructions from Wolsey at Richmond,and rides to wherever the king is. He thinks of the king as a terraininto which he must advance, with no sea coast to supply him.He understands what Henry has learned from his cardinal: hisfloating diplomacy, his science of ambiguity. He sees how theking has applied this science to the slow, trackless, dubious ruinof his minister. Every kindness, Henry matches with a cruelty,some further charge or forfeiture. Till the cardinal moans, ‘I wantto go away.’‘Winchester,’ he suggests, to the dukes. ‘My lord cardinal iswilling to proceed to his palace there.’‘What, so near the king?’ Brandon says. ‘We are not fools toourselves, Master Cromwell.’Since he, the cardinal’s man, is with Henry so often, rumourshave run all over Europe that Wolsey is about to be recalled. Theking is cutting a deal, people say, to have the church’s wealth inexchange for Wolsey’s return to favour. Rumours leak from thecouncil chamber, from the privy chamber: the king does not likehis new set-up. Norfolk is found ignorant; Suffolk is accused ofhaving an annoying laugh.He says, ‘My lord won’t go north. He is not ready for it.’‘But I want him north,’ Howard says. ‘Tell him to go. Tell himNorfolk says he must be on the road and out of here. Or – andtell him this – I will come where he is, and I will tear him with myteeth.’‘My lord.’ He bows. ‘May I substitute the word “bite”?’Norfolk approaches him. He stands far too close. His eyes arebloodshot. Every sinew is jumping. He says, ‘Substitute nothing,you misbegotten –’ The duke stabs a forefinger into his shoulder.‘You … person,’ he says; and again, ‘you nobody from Hell, youwhore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer. He stands there, pushing away, like a baker pressing thedimples into a batch of manchet loaves. Cromwell flesh is firm,dense and impermeable. The ducal finger just bounces off.Before they left Esher, one of the cats that had been brought into kill the vermin gave birth to a litter in the cardinal’s ownrooms. What presumption, in an animal! But wait – new life, inthe cardinal’s suite? Could that be an omen? One day, he fears,there will be an omen of another sort: a dead bird will fall downthat smoking chimney, and then – oh, woe is us! – he’ll neverhear the last of it.But for the while the cardinal is amused, and puts the kittenson a cushion in an open chest, and watches as they grow. One ofthem is black and hungry, with a coat like wool and yellow eyes.When it is weaned he brings it home. He takes it from under hiscoat, where it has been sleeping curled against his shoulder.‘Gregory, look.’ He holds it out to his son. ‘I am a giant, myname is Marlinspike.’Gregory looks at him, wary, puzzled. His glance flinches; hishand pulls away. ‘The dogs will kill it,’ he says.Marlinspike goes down to the kitchen, to grow stout and liveout his beastly nature. There is a summer ahead, though hecannot imagine its pleasures; sometimes when he’s walking in thegarden he sees him, a half-grown cat, lolling watchful in an appletree, or snoring on a wall in the sun.Spring 1530: Antonio Bonvisi, the merchant, invites him tosupper at his fine tall house on Bishopsgate. ‘I won’t be late,’ hetells Richard, expecting that it will be the usual tense gathering,everyone cross and hungry: for even a rich Italian with an ingenious kitchen cannot find a hundred ways with smoked eel or saltcod. The merchants in Lent miss their mutton and malmsey, theirnightly grunt in a featherbed with wife or mistress; from now tillAsh Wednesday their knives will be out for some cut-throatintelligence, some mean commercial advantage. But it is a grander occasion than he thought; the Lord Chancellor is there, amongst a company of lawyers and aldermen.Humphrey Monmouth, whom More once locked up, is seatedwell away from the great man; More looks at his ease, holding thecompany captive with one of his stories about that great scholarErasmus, his dear friend. But when he looks up and sees him,Cromwell, he falls silent halfway through a sentence; he casts hiseyes down, and an opaque and stony look grows on his face.‘Did you want to talk about me?’ he asks. ‘You can do it whileI’m here, Lord Chancellor. I have a thick skin.’ He knocks backa glass of wine and laughs. ‘Do you know what Brandon issaying? He can’t fit my life together. My travels. The other dayhe called me a Jewish peddler.’‘And was that to your face?’ his host asks politely.‘No. The king told me. But then my lord cardinal callsBrandon a horsekeeper.’Humphrey Monmouth says, ‘You have the entrée these days,Thomas. And what do you think, now you are a courtier?’There are smiles around the table. Because, of course, the ideais so ridiculous, the situation so temporary. More’s people arecity people, no grander; but he is sui generis, a scholar and a wit.And More says, ‘Perhaps we should not press the point. Thereare delicate issues here. There is a time to be silent.’An elder of the drapers’ guild leans across the table and warns,his voice low: ‘Thomas More said, when he took his seat, that hewon’t discuss the cardinal, or the Lady either.’He, Cromwell, looks around at the company. ‘The kingsurprises me, though. What he will tolerate.’‘From you?’ More says.‘I mean Brandon. They’re going to hunt: he walks in andshouts, are you ready?’‘Your master the cardinal found it a constant battle,’ Bonvisisays, ‘in the early years of the reign. To stop the king’s companions becoming too familiar with him. ‘He wanted only himself to be familiar,’ More suggests.‘Though, of course, the king may raise up whom he will.’‘Up to a point, Thomas,’ Bonvisi says; there is some laughter.‘And the king enjoys his friendships. That is good, surely?’‘A soft word, from you, Master Cromwell.’‘Not at all,’ Monmouth says. ‘Master Cromwell is known asone who does everything for his friends.’‘I think …’ More stops; he looks down at the table. ‘In alltruth, I am not sure if one can regard a prince as a friend.’‘But surely,’ Bonvisi says, ‘you’ve known Henry since he wasa child.’‘Yes, but friendship should be less exhausting … it should berestorative. Not like …’ More turns to him, for the first time, asif inviting comment. ‘I sometimes feel it is like … like Jacobwrestling with the angel.’‘And who knows,’ he says, ‘what that fight was about?’‘Yes, the text is silent. As with Cain and Abel. Who knows?’He senses a little disquiet around the table, among the morepious, the less sportive; or just those keen for the next course.What will it be? Fish!‘When you speak to Henry,’ More says, ‘I beg you, speak tothe good heart. Not the strong will.’He would pursue it, but the aged draper waves for more wine,and asks him, ‘How’s your friend Stephen Vaughan? What’s newin Antwerp?’ The conversation is about trade then; it is aboutshipping, interest rates; it is no more than a background hum tounruly speculation. If you come into a room and say, this is whatwe’re not talking about, it follows that you’re talking aboutnothing else. If the Lord Chancellor weren’t here it would be justimport duties and bonded warehouses; we would not be thinking of the brooding scarlet cardinal, and our starved Lentenminds would not be occupied by the image of the king’s fingerscreeping over a resistant, quick-breathing and virginal bosom.He leans back and fixes his gaze on Thomas More. In time there is a natural pause in conversation, a lull; and after a quarter-hourin which he has not spoken, the Lord Chancellor breaks into it,his voice low and angry, his eyes on the remnants of what he haseaten. ‘The Cardinal of York,’ he says, ‘has a greed that will neverbe appeased, for ruling over other men.’‘Lord Chancellor,’ Bonvisi says, ‘you are looking at yourherring as if you hate it.’Says the gracious guest, ‘There’s nothing wrong with theherring.’He leans forward, ready for this fight; he means not to let itpass. ‘The cardinal is a public man. So are you. Should he shrinkfrom a public role?’‘Yes.’ More looks up. ‘Yes, I think, a little, he should. A littleless evident appetite, perhaps.’‘It’s late,’ Monmouth says, ‘to read the cardinal a lesson inhumility.’‘His real friends have read it long ago, and been ignored.’‘And you count yourself his friend?’ He sits back, armsfolded. ‘I’ll tell him, Lord Chancellor, and by the blood of Christhe will find it a consolation, as he sits in exile and wonders whyyou have slandered him to the king.’‘Gentlemen …’ Bonvisi rises in his chair, edgy.‘No,’ he says, ‘sit down. Let’s have this straight. Thomas Morehere will tell you, I would have been a simple monk, but myfather put me to the law. I would spend my life in church, if I hadthe choice. I am, as you know, indifferent to wealth. I am devotedto things of the spirit. The world’s esteem is nothing to me.’ Helooks around the table. ‘So how did he become Lord Chancellor?Was it an accident?’The doors open; Bonvisi jumps to his feet; relief floods hisface. ‘Welcome, welcome,’ he says. ‘Gentlemen: the Emperor’sambassador.’It is Eustache Chapuys, come in with the desserts; the newambassador, as one calls him, though he has been in post since fall. He stands poised on the threshold, so they may know himand admire: a little crooked man, in a doublet slashed and puffed,blue satin billowing through black; beneath it, his little blackspindly legs. ‘I regret to be so late,’ he says. He simpers. ‘Lesdépêches, toujours les dépêches.’‘That’s the ambassador’s life.’ He looks up and smiles.‘Thomas Cromwell.’‘Ah, c’est le juif errant!’At once the ambassador apologises: whilst smiling around, asif bemused, at the success of his joke.Sit down, sit down, says Bonvisi, and the servants bustle, thecloths are swept away, the company rearranges itself more informally, except for the Lord Chancellor, who goes on sitting wherehe’s sitting. Preserved autumn fruits come in, and spiced wine,and Chapuys takes a place of honour beside More.‘We will speak French, gentlemen,’ says Bonvisi.French, as it happens, is the first language of the ambassadorof the Empire and Spain; and like any other diplomat, he willnever take the trouble to learn English, for how will that helphim in his next posting? So kind, so kind, he says, as he easeshimself back in the carved chair their host has vacated; his feet donot quite touch the floor. More rouses himself then; he and theambassador put their heads together. He watches them; theyglance back at him resentfully; but looking is free.In a tiny moment when they pause, he cuts in. ‘MonsieurChapuys? You know, I was talking with the king recently aboutthose events, so regrettable, when your master’s troops plundered the Holy City. Perhaps you can advise us? We don’tunderstand them even now.’Chapuys shakes his head. ‘Most regrettable events.’‘Thomas More thinks it was the secret Mohammedans in yourarmy who ran wild – oh, and my own people, of course, thewandering Jews. But before this, he has said it was the Germans,the Lutherans, who raped the poor virgins and desecrated the shrines. In all cases, as the Lord Chancellor says, the Emperormust blame himself; but to whom should we attach blame? Areyou able to help us out?’‘My dear Sir Chancellor!’ The ambassador is shocked. Hiseyes turn towards Thomas More. ‘Did you speak so, of myimperial master?’ A glance flicked over his shoulder, and hedrops into Latin.The company, linguistically agile, sit and smile at him. Headvises, pleasantly, ‘If you wish to be half-secret, try Greek.Allez, Monsieur Chapuys, rattle away! The Lord Chancellor willunderstand you.’The party breaks up soon after, the Lord Chancellor rising togo; but before he does, he makes a pronouncement to thecompany, in English. ‘Master Cromwell’s position,’ he says, ‘isindefensible, it seems to me. He is no friend to the church, as weall know, but he is friend to one priest. And that priest the mostcorrupt in Christendom.’With the curtest of nods he takes his leave. Even Chapuysdoes not warrant more. The ambassador looks after him,dubious, biting his lip: as if to say, I looked for more help andfriendship there. Everything Chapuys does, he notices, is likesomething an actor does. When he thinks, he casts his eyes down,places two fingers to his forehead. When he sorrows, he sighs.When he is perplexed, he wags his chin, he half-smiles. He is likea man who has wandered inadvertently into a play, who hasfound it to be a comedy, and decided to stay and see it through.The supper is over; the company dwindle away, into the earlydusk. ‘Perhaps sooner than you would have liked?’ he says, toBonvisi.‘Thomas More is my old friend. You should not come hereand bait him.’‘Oh, have I spoiled your party? You invited Monmouth; wasthat not to bait him?’ ‘No, Humphrey Monmouth is my friend too.’‘And I?’‘Of course.’They have slid back naturally into Italian. ‘Tell me somethingthat intrigues me,’ he says. ‘I want to know about ThomasWyatt.’ Wyatt went to Italy, having attached himself to a diplomatic mission, rather suddenly: three years ago now. He had adisastrous time there, but that’s for another evening; the question is, why did he run away from the English court in suchhaste?‘Ah. Wyatt and Lady Anne,’ Bonvisi says. ‘An old story, I’dhave thought?’Well, perhaps, he says, but he tells him about the boy Mark,the musician, who seems sure Wyatt’s had her; if the story’sbouncing around Europe, among servants and menials, what arethe odds the king hasn’t heard?‘A part of the art of ruling, I suppose, is to know when to shutyour ears. And Wyatt is handsome,’ Bonvisi says, ‘in the Englishstyle, of course. He is tall, he is blond, my countrymen marvel athim; where do you breed such people? And so assured, ofcourse. And a poet!’He laughs at his friend because, like all the Italians, he can’tsay ‘Wyatt’: it comes out ‘Guiett’, or something like that. Therewas a man called Hawkwood, a knight of Essex, used to rape andburn and murder in Italy, in the days of chivalry; the Italianscalled him Acuto, The Needle.‘Yes, but Anne …’ He senses, from his glimpses of her, that sheis unlikely to be moved by anything so impermanent as beauty.‘These few years she has needed a husband, more than anything:a name, an establishment, a place from which she can stand andnegotiate with the king. Now, Wyatt’s married. What could heoffer her?’‘Verses?’ says the merchant. ‘It wasn’t diplomacy took himout of England. It was that she was torturing him. He no longer dared be in the same room with her. The same castle. The samecountry.’ He shakes his head. ‘Aren’t the English odd?’‘Christ, aren’t they?’ he says.‘You must take care. The Lady’s family, they are pushing alittle against the limit of what can be done. They are saying, whywait for the Pope? Can we not make a marriage contract withouthim?’‘It would seem to be the way forward.’‘Try one of these sugared almonds.’He smiles. Bonvisi says, ‘Tommaso, I may give you someadvice? The cardinal is finished.’‘Don’t be so sure.’‘Yes, and if you did not love him, you would know it wastrue.’‘The cardinal has been nothing but good to me.’‘But he must go north.’‘The world will chase him. You ask the ambassadors. AskChapuys. Ask them who they report to. We have them at Esher,at Richmond. Toujours les dépêches. That’s us.’‘But that is what he is accused of! Running a country withinthe country!’He sighs. ‘I know.’‘And what will you do about it?’‘Ask him to be more humble?’Bonvisi laughs. ‘Ah, Thomas. Please, you know when he goesnorth you will be a man without a master. That is the point. Youare seeing the king, but it is only for now, while he works outhow to give the cardinal a pay-off that will keep him quiet. Butthen?’He hesitates. ‘The king likes me.’‘The king is an inconstant lover.’‘Not to Anne.’‘That is where I must warn you. Oh, not because of Guiett …not because of any gossip, any light thing said … but because it must all end soon … she will give way, she is just a woman …think how foolish a man would have been if he had linked hisfortunes to those of the Lady’s sister, who came before her.’‘Yes, just think.’He looks around the room. That’s where the Lord Chancellor sat. On his left, the hungry merchants. On his right, the newambassador. There, Humphrey Monmouth the heretic. There,Antonio Bonvisi. Here, Thomas Cromwell. And there areghostly places set, for the Duke of Suffolk large and bland, forNorfolk jangling his holy medals and shouting ‘By the Mass!’There is a place set for the king, and for the doughty littlequeen, famished in this penitential season, her belly quakinginside the stout armour of her robes. There is a place set forLady Anne, glancing around with her restless black eyes, eatingnothing, missing nothing, tugging at the pearls around her littleneck. There is a place for William Tyndale, and one for thePope; Clement looks at the candied quinces, too coarsely cut,and his Medici lip curls. And there sits Brother Martin Luther,greasy and fat: glowering at them all, and spitting out his fishbones.A servant comes in. ‘Two young gentlemen are outside,master, asking for you by name.’He looks up. ‘Yes?’‘Master Richard Cromwell and Master Rafe. With servantsfrom your household, waiting to take you home.’He understands that the whole purpose of the evening hasbeen to warn him: to warn him off. He will remember it, the fatalplacement: if it proves fatal. That soft hiss and whisper, of stonedestroying itself; that distant sound of walls sliding, of plastercrumbling, of rubble crashing on to fragile human skulls? That isthe sound of the roof of Christendom, falling on the peoplebelow.Bonvisi says, ‘You have a private army, Tommaso. I supposeyou have to watch your back.’ ‘You know I do.’ His glance sweeps the room: one last look.
‘Good night. It was a good supper. I liked the eels. Will you send
your cook to see mine? I have a new sauce to brighten the season.
One needs mace and ginger, some dried mint leaves chopped –’
His friend says, ‘I beg of you. I implore you to be careful.’
‘– a little, but a very little garlic –’
‘Wherever you dine next, pray do not –’
‘– and of breadcrumbs, a scant handful …’
‘– sit down with the Boleyns.

II
Entirely Beloved Cromwell
Spring–December 1530

He arrives early at York Place. The baited gulls, penned in their
keeping yards, are crying out to their free brothers on the river,
who wheel screaming and diving over the palace walls. The carmen are pushing up from the river goods incoming, and the
courts smell of baking bread. Some children are bringing fresh
rushes, tied in bundles, and they greet him by name. For their
civility, he gives each of them a coin, and they stop to talk. ‘So,
you are going to the evil lady. She has bewitched the king, you
know? Do you have a medal or a relic, master, to protect you?’
‘I had a medal. But I lost it.’
‘You should ask our cardinal,’ one child says. ‘He will give
you another.’
The scent of the rushes is sharp and green; the morning is fine.
The rooms of York Place are familiar to him, and as he passes
through them towards the inner chambers he sees a half-familiar
face and says, ‘Mark?’
The boy detaches himself from the wall where he is leaning.
‘You’re about early. How are you?’
A sulky shrug.
‘It must feel strange to be back here at York Place, now the
world is so altered.’
‘No. ‘You don’t miss my lord cardinal?’
‘No.’
‘You are happy?’
‘Yes.’
‘My lord will be pleased to know.’ To himself he says, as he
moves away, you may never think of us, Mark, but we think of
you. Or at least I do, I think of you calling me a felon and
predicting my death. It is true that the cardinal always says, there
are no safe places, there are no sealed rooms, you may as well
stand on Cheapside shouting out your sins as confess to a priest
anywhere in England. But when I spoke to the cardinal of killing,
when I saw a shadow on the wall, there was no one to hear; so if
Mark reckons I’m a murderer, that’s only because he thinks I
look like one.
Eight anterooms: in the last, where the cardinal should be, he
finds Anne Boleyn. Look, there are Solomon and Sheba,
unrolled again, back on the wall. There is a draught; Sheba eddies
towards him, rosy, round, and he acknowledges her: Anselma,
lady made of wool, I thought I’d never see you again.
He had sent word back to Antwerp, applied discreetly for
news; Anselma was married, Stephen Vaughan said, and to a
younger man, a banker. So if he drowns or anything, he said, let
me know. Vaughan writes back: Thomas, come now, isn’t
England full of widows? And fresh young girls?
Sheba makes Anne look bad: sallow and sharp. She stands by
the window, her fingers tugging and ripping at a sprig of rosemary. When she sees him, she drops it, and her hands dip back
into her trailing sleeves.
In December, the king gave a banquet, to celebrate her father’s
elevation to be Earl of Wiltshire. The queen was elsewhere, and
Anne sat where Katherine should sit. There was frost on the
ground, frost in the atmosphere. They only heard of it, in the
Wolsey household. The Duchess of Norfolk (who is always furious about something) was furious that her niece should have
precedence. The Duchess of Suffolk, Henry’s sister, refused to
eat. Neither of these great ladies spoke to Boleyn’s daughter.
Nevertheless, Anne had taken her place as the first lady of the
kingdom.
But now it’s the end of Lent, and Henry has gone back to his
wife; he hasn’t the face to be with his concubine as we move
towards the week of Christ’s Passion. Her father is abroad, on
diplomatic business; so is her brother George, now Lord
Rochford; so is Thomas Wyatt, the poet whom she tortures.
She’s alone and bored at York Place; and she’s reduced to sending
for Thomas Cromwell, to see if he offers any amusement.
A flurry of little dogs – three of them – run away from her
skirts, yapping, darting towards him. ‘Don’t let them out,’ Anne
says, and with practised and gentle hands he scoops them up –
they are the kind of dogs, Bellas, with ragged ears and tiny
wafting tails, that any merchant’s wife would keep, across the
Narrow Sea. By the time he has given them back to her, they have
nibbled his fingers and his coat, licked his face and yearned
towards him with goggling eyes: as if he were someone they had
so much longed to meet.
Two of them he sets gently on the floor; the smallest he hands
back to Anne. ‘Vous êtes gentil,’ she says, ‘and how my babies
like you! I could not love, you know, those apes that Katherine
keeps. Les singes enchaînés. Their little hands, their little necks
fettered. My babies love me for myself.’
She’s so small. Her bones are so delicate, her waist so narrow;
if two law students make one cardinal, two Annes make one
Katherine. Various women are sitting on low stools, sewing or
rather pretending to sew. One of them is Mary Boleyn. She keeps
her head down, as well she might. One of them is Mary Shelton,
a bold pink-and-white Boleyn cousin, who looks him over, and –
quite obviously – says to herself, Mother of God, is that the best
Lady Carey thought she could get? Back in the shadows there is another girl, who has her face turned away, trying to hide. He
does not know who she is, but he understands why she’s looking
fixedly at the floor. Anne seems to inspire it; now that he’s put
the dogs down, he’s doing the same thing.
‘Alors,’ Anne says softly, ‘suddenly, everything is about you.
The king does not cease to quote Master Cromwell.’ She
pronounces it as if she can’t manage the English: Cremuel. ‘He is
so right, he is at all points correct … Also, let us not forget,
Maître Cremuel makes us laugh.’
‘I see the king does sometimes laugh. But you, madame? In
your situation? As you find yourself?’
A black glance, over her shoulder. ‘I suppose I seldom. Laugh.
If I think. But I had not thought.’
‘This is what your life has come to.’
Dusty fragments, dried leaves and stems, have fallen down her
skirts. She stares out at the morning.
‘Let me put it this way,’ he says. ‘Since my lord cardinal was
reduced, how much progress have you seen in your cause?’
‘None.’
‘No one knows the workings of Christian countries like my
lord cardinal. No one is more intimate with kings. Think how
bound to you he would be, Lady Anne, if you were the means of
erasing these misunderstandings and restoring him to the king’s
grace.’
She doesn’t answer.
‘Think,’ he says. ‘He is the only man in England who can
obtain for you what you need.’
‘Very well. Make his case. You have five minutes.’
‘Otherwise, I can see you’re really busy.’
Anne looks at him with dislike, and speaks in French. ‘What
do you know of how I occupy my hours?’
‘My lady, are we having this conversation in English or
French? Your choice entirely. But let’s make it one or the other,
yes?’ He sees a movement from the corner of his eye; the halfhidden girl has raised her face. She is plain and pale; she looks
shocked.
‘You are indifferent?’ Anne says.
‘Yes.’
‘Very well. In French.’
He tells her again: the cardinal is the only man who can deliver
a good verdict from the Pope. He is the only man who can
deliver the king’s conscience, and deliver it clean.
She listens. He will say that for her. He has always
wondered how well women can hear, beneath the muffling
folds of their veils and hoods, but Anne does give the impression that she is hearing what he has said. She waits him out, at
least; she doesn’t interrupt, until at last she does: so, she says,
if the king wants it, and the cardinal wants it, he who was
formerly the chief subject in the kingdom, then I must say,
Master Cremuel, it is all taking a marvellous long while to
come to pass!
From her corner her sister adds, barely audible, ‘And she’s not
getting any younger.’
Not a stitch have the women added to their sewing since he
has been in the room.
‘One may resume?’ he asks, persuading her. ‘There is a
moment left?’
‘Oh yes,’ Anne says. ‘But a moment only: in Lent I ration my
patience.’
He tells her to dismiss the slanderers who claim that the cardinal obstructed her cause. He tells her how it distresses the cardinal that the king should not have his heart’s desire, which was
ever the cardinal’s desire too. He tells her how all the king’s
subjects repose their hopes in her, for an heir to the throne; and
how he is sure they are right to do so. He reminds her of the
many gracious letters she has written to the cardinal in times
past: all of which he has on file. ‘Very nice,’ she says, when he stops. ‘Very nice, Master
Cremuel, but try again. One thing. One simple thing we asked of
the cardinal, and he would not. One simple thing.’
‘You know it was not simple.’
‘Perhaps I am a simple person,’ Anne says. ‘Do you feel I
am?’
‘You may be. I hardly know you.’
The reply incenses her. He sees her sister smirk. You may go,
Anne says: and Mary jumps up, and follows him out.
Once again Mary’s cheeks are flushed, her lips are parted. She’s
brought her sewing with her, which he thinks is strange; but
perhaps, if she leaves it behind, Anne pulls the stitches out. ‘Out
of breath again, Lady Carey?’
‘We thought she might run up and slap you. Will you come
again? Shelton and I can’t wait.’
‘She can stand it,’ he says, and Mary says, indeed, she likes a
skirmish with someone on her own level. What are you working
there? he asks, and she shows him. It is Anne’s new coat of arms.
On everything, I suppose, he says, and she smiles broadly, oh
yes, her petticoats, her handkerchiefs, her coifs and her veils; she
has garments that no one ever wore before, just so she can have
her arms sewn on, not to mention the wall hangings, the table
napkins …
‘And how are you?’
She looks down, glance swivelling away from him. ‘Worn
down. Frayed a little, you might say. Christmas was …’
‘They quarrelled. So one hears.’
‘First he quarrelled with Katherine. Then he came here for
sympathy. Anne said, what! I told you not to argue with
Katherine, you know you always lose. If he were not a king,’ she
says with relish, ‘one could pity him. For the dog’s life they lead
him.’
‘There have been rumours that Anne ‘Yes, but she’s not. I would be the first to know. If she thickened by an inch, it would be me who let out her clothes. Besides,
she can’t, because they don’t. They haven’t.’
‘She’d tell you?’
‘Of course – out of spite!’ Still Mary will not meet his eyes.
But she seems to feel she owes him information. ‘When they are
alone, she lets him unlace her bodice.’
‘At least he doesn’t call you to do it.’
‘He pulls down her shift and kisses her breasts.’
‘Good man if he can find them.’
Mary laughs; a boisterous, unsisterly laugh. It must be audible
within, because almost at once the door opens and the small
hiding girl manoeuvres herself around it. Her face is grave, her
reserve complete; her skin is so fine that it is almost translucent.
‘Lady Carey,’ she says, ‘Lady Anne wants you.’
She speaks their names as if she is making introductions
between two cockroaches.
Mary snaps, oh, by the saints! and turns on her heel, whipping
her train behind her with the ease of long practice.
To his surprise, the small pale girl catches his glance; behind
the retreating back of Mary Boleyn, she raises her own eyes to
Heaven.
Walking away – eight antechambers back to the rest of his day –
he knows that Anne has stepped forward to a place where he can
see her, the morning light lying along the curve of her throat. He
sees the thin arch of her eyebrow, her smile, the turn of her head
on her long slender neck. He sees her speed, intelligence and
rigour. He didn’t think she would help the cardinal, but what do
you lose by asking? He thinks, it is the first proposition I have
put to her; probably not the last.
There was a moment when Anne gave him all her attention:
her skewering dark glance. The king, too, knows how to look;
blue eyes, their mildness deceptive. Is this how they look at each other? Or in some other way? For a second he understands it;
then he doesn’t. He stands by a window. A flock of starlings
settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree. Then, like black
buds unfolding, they open their wings; they flutter and sing, stirring everything into motion, air, wings, black notes in music. He
becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure: that
something almost extinct, some small gesture towards the future,
is ready to welcome the spring; in some spare, desperate way, he
is looking forward to Easter, the end of Lenten fasting, the end of
penitence. There is a world beyond this black world. There is a
world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a
world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he
doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken
back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
In Lent, there are butchers who will sell you red meat, if you
know where to go. At Austin Friars he goes down to talk to his
kitchen staff, and says to his chief man, ‘The cardinal is sick, he is
dispensed from Lent.’
His cook takes off his hat. ‘By the Pope?’
‘By me.’ He runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks,
the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its
edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, ‘Do you think I look
like a murderer? In your good opinion?’
A silence. After a while, Thurston proffers, ‘At this moment,
master, I would have to say …’
‘No, but suppose I were making my way to Gray’s Inn … Can
you picture to yourself? Carrying a folio of papers and an
inkhorn?’
‘I do suppose a clerk would be carrying those.’
‘So you can’t picture it?’
Thurston takes off his hat again, and turns it inside out. He
looks at it as if his brains might be inside it, or at least some
prompt as to what to say next. ‘I see how you would look like a lawyer. Not like a murderer, no. But if you will forgive me,
master, you always look like a man who knows how to cut up a
carcase.’
He has the kitchen make beef olives for the cardinal, stuffed
with sage and marjoram, neatly trussed and placed side by side in
trays, so that the cooks at Richmond need do nothing but bake
them. Show me where it says in the Bible, a man shall not eat beef
olives in March.
He thinks of Lady Anne, her unslaked appetite for a fight; the
sad ladies about her. He sends those ladies some flat baskets of
small tarts, made of preserved oranges and honey. To Anne
herself he sends a dish of almond cream. It is flavoured with rosewater and decorated with the preserved petals of roses, and with
candied violets. He is above riding across the country, carrying
food himself; but not that much above it. It’s not so many years
since the Frescobaldi kitchen in Florence; or perhaps it is, but his
memory is clear, exact. He was clarifying calf’s-foot jelly, chatting away in his mixture of French, Tuscan and Putney, when
somebody shouted, ‘Tommaso, they want you upstairs.’ His
movements were unhurried as he nodded to a kitchen child, who
brought him a basin of water. He washed his hands, dried them
on a linen cloth. He took off his apron and hung it on a peg. For
all he knows, it is there still.
He saw a young boy – younger than him – on hands and
knees, scrubbing the steps. He sang as he worked:
‘Scaramella va alla guerra
Colla lancia et la rotella
La zombero boro borombetta,
La boro borombo …’
‘If you please, Giacomo,’ he said. To let him pass, the boy
moved aside, into the curve of the wall. A shift of the light wiped
the curiosity from his face, blanking it, fading his past into the past, washing the future clean. Scaramella is off to war … But
I’ve been to war, he thought.
He had gone upstairs. In his ears the roll and stutter of the
song’s military drum. He had gone upstairs and never come
down again. In a corner of the Frescobaldi counting house, a
table was waiting for him. Scaramella fa la gala, he hummed. He
had taken his place. Sharpened a quill. His thoughts bubbled and
swirled, Tuscan, Putney, Castilian oaths. But when he committed
his thoughts to paper they came out in Latin and perfectly
smooth.
Even before he walks in from the kitchens at Austin Friars, the
women of the house know that he has been to see Anne.
‘So,’ Johane demands. ‘Tall or short?’
‘Neither.’
‘I’d heard she was very tall. Sallow, is she not?’
‘Yes, sallow.’
‘They say she is graceful. Dances well.’
‘We did not dance.’
Mercy says, ‘But what do you think? A friend to the gospel?’
He shrugs. ‘We did not pray.’
Alice, his little niece: ‘What was she wearing?’
Ah, I can tell you that; he prices and sources her, hood to hem,
foot to fingertip. For her headdress Anne affects the French
style, the round hood flattering the fine bones of her face. He
explains this, and though his tone is cool, mercantile, the women
somehow do not appreciate it.
‘You don’t like her, do you?’ Alice says, and he says it’s not for
him to have an opinion; or you either, Alice, he says, hugging her
and making her giggle. The child Jo says, our master is in a good
mood. This squirrel trim, Mercy says, and he says, Calabrian.
Alice says, oh, Calabrian, and wrinkles her nose; Johane remarks,
I must say, Thomas, it seems you got close.
‘Are her teeth good?’ Mercy says. ‘For God’s sake, woman: when she sinks them into me, I’ll let
you know.’
When the cardinal had heard that the Duke of Norfolk was
coming out to Richmond to tear him with his teeth, he had
laughed and said, ‘Marry, Thomas, time to be going.’
But to go north, the cardinal needs funding. The problem is
put to the king’s council, who fall out, and continue the quarrel
in his hearing. ‘After all,’ Charles Brandon says, ‘one can’t let an
archbishop creep away to his enthronement like a servant who’s
stolen the spoons.’
‘He’s done more than steal the spoons,’ Norfolk says. ‘He’s
eaten the dinner that would have fed all England. He’s filched the
tablecloth, by God, and drunk the cellar dry.’
The king can be elusive. One day when he thinks he has an
appointment to meet Henry, he gets Master Secretary instead.
‘Sit down,’ Gardiner says. ‘Sit down and listen to me. Contain
yourself in patience, while I put you straight on a few matters.’
He watches him ranging to and fro, Stephen the noonday
devil. Gardiner is a man with bones loose-jointed, his lines
flowing with menace; he has great hairy hands, and knuckles
which crack when he folds his right fist into his left palm.
He takes away the menace conveyed, and the message. Pausing
in the doorway, he says mildly, ‘Your cousin sends greetings.’
Gardiner stares at him. His eyebrows bristle, like a dog’s
hackles. He thinks that Cromwell presumes –
‘Not the king,’ he says soothingly. ‘Not His Majesty. I mean
your cousin Richard Williams.’
Aghast, Gardiner says, ‘That old tale!’
‘Oh, come,’ he says. ‘It’s no disgrace to be a royal bastard. Or
so we think, in my family.’
‘In your family? What grasp have they on propriety? I have no
interest in this young person, recognise no kinship with him, and
I will do nothing for him.’

‘Truly, you don’t need to. He calls himself Richard Cromwell
now.’ As he is going – really going, this time – he adds, ‘Don’t let
it keep you awake, Stephen. I have been into the matter. You may
be related to Richard, but you are not related to me.’
He smiles. Inside, he is beside himself with rage, running with
it, as if his blood were thin and full of dilute venom like the
uncoloured blood of a snake. As soon as he gets home to Austin
Friars, he hugs Rafe Sadler and makes his hair stand up in spikes.
‘Heaven direct me: boy or hedgehog? Rafe, Richard, I am feeling
penitent.’
‘It is the season,’ Rafe says.
‘I want,’ he says, ‘to become perfectly calm. I want to be able
to get into the coop without ruffling the chickens’ feathers. I
want to be less like Uncle Norfolk, and more like Marlinspike.’
He has a long soothing talk in Welsh with Richard, who laughs
at him because old words are fading from his memory, and he is
forever sliding through bits of English, with a sly borderlands
intonation. He gives his little nieces the pearl and coral bracelets
he bought them weeks ago, but forgot to give. He goes down to
the kitchen and makes suggestions, all of them cheerful.
He calls his household staff together, his clerks. ‘We need to
plan it,’ he says, ‘how the cardinal will be made comfortable on
the road north. He wants to go slowly so the people can admire
him. He needs to arrive in Peterborough for Holy Week, and
from there shift by stages to Southwell, where he will plan his
further progress to York. The archbishop’s palace at Southwell
has good rooms, but still we may need to get builders in …’
George Cavendish has told him that the cardinal has taken to
spending time in prayer. There are some monks at Richmond
whose company he has sought; they spell out to him the value of
thorns in the flesh and salt in the wound, the merits of bread and
water and the sombre delights of self-flagellation. ‘Oh, that
settles it,’ he says, annoyed. ‘We have to get him on the road.
He’d be better off in Yorkshire. He says to Norfolk, ‘Well, my lord, how shall we do this? Do
you want him gone or not? Yes? Then come to the king with me.’
Norfolk grunts. Messages are sent. A day or so later, they find
themselves together in an antechamber. They wait. Norfolk
paces. ‘Oh, by St Jude!’ the duke says. ‘Shall we get some fresh
air? Or don’t you lawyers need it?’
They stroll in the gardens; or, he strolls, the duke stamps.
‘When do the flowers come out?’ the duke says. ‘When I was a
boy, we never had flowers. It was Buckingham, you know, who
brought in this knot garden sort of stuff. Oh dear, it was fancy!’
The Duke of Buckingham, keen gardener, had his head cut off
for treason. That was 1521: less than ten years ago. It seems sad
to mention it now, in the presence of the spring: singing from
every bush, every bough.
A summons is received. As they proceed to their interview, the
duke baulks and jibs; his eye rolls and his nostrils distend, his
breath comes short. When the duke lays a hand on his shoulder,
he is forced to slow his pace, and they scuffle along – he resisting
his impulse to pull away – like two war veterans in a beggars’
procession. Scaramella va alla guerra … Norfolk’s hand is trembling.
But it is only when they get into the presence that he fully
understands how it rattles the old duke to be in a room with
Henry Tudor. The gilded ebullience makes him shrink inside his
clothes. Henry greets them cordially. He says it is a wonderful
day and pretty much a wonderful world. He spins around the
room, arms wide, reciting some verses of his own composition.
He will talk about anything except the cardinal. Frustrated,
Norfolk turns a dusky red, and begins to mutter. Dismissed, they
are backing out. Henry calls, ‘Oh, Cromwell …’
He and the duke exchange glances. ‘By the Mass …’ mutters
the duke.
Hand behind his back, he indicates, be gone, my lord Norfolk,
I’ll catch up with you later. Henry stands with arms folded, eyes on the ground. He says
nothing till he, Cromwell, has come close. ‘A thousand pounds?’
Henry whispers.
It is on the tip of his tongue to say, that will be a start on the
ten thousand which, to the best of my knowledge and belief, you
have owed the Cardinal of York for a decade now.
He doesn’t say it, of course. At such moments, Henry expects
you to fall to your knees – duke, earl, commoner, light and heavy,
old and young. He does it; scar tissue pulls; few of us, by our
forties, are not carrying injuries.
The king signals, you can get up. He adds, his tone curious,
‘The Duke of Norfolk shows you many marks of friendship and
favour.’
The hand on the shoulder, he means: the minute and unexpected vibration of ducal palm against plebeian muscle and bone.
‘The duke is careful to preserve all distinctions of rank.’ Henry
seems relieved.
An unwelcome thought creeps into his head: what if you, Henry
Tudor, were to be taken ill and fall at my feet? Am I allowed to pick
you up, or must I send for an earl to do it? Or a bishop?
Henry walks away. He turns and says, in a small voice, ‘Every
day I miss the Cardinal of York.’ There is a pause. He whispers,
take the money with our blessing. Don’t tell the duke. Don’t tell
anyone. Ask your master to pray for me. Tell him it is the best I
can do.
The thanks he makes, still from his kneeling situation, is
eloquent and extensive. Henry looks at him bleakly and says,
dear God, Master Cromwell, you can talk, can’t you?
He goes out, face composed, fighting the impulse to smile
broadly. Scaramella fa la gala … ‘Every day I miss the Cardinal
of York.’
Norfolk says, what, what, what did he say? Oh, nothing, he says.
Just some special hard words he wants me to convey to the cardinal The itinerary is drawn up. The cardinal’s effects are put on
coastal barges, to be taken to Hull and go overland from there.
He himself has beaten the bargees down to a reasonable rate.
He tells Richard, you know, a thousand pounds isn’t much
when you have a cardinal to move. Richard asks, ‘How much of
your own money is sunk in this enterprise?’
Some debts should never be tallied, he says. ‘I myself, I know
what is owed me, but by God I know what I owe.’
To Cavendish he says, ‘How many servants is he taking?’
‘Only a hundred and sixty.’
‘Only.’ He nods. ‘Right.’
Hendon. Royston. Huntingdon. Peterborough. He has men
riding ahead, with precise instructions.
That last night, Wolsey gives him a package. Inside it is a small
and hard object, a seal or ring. ‘Open it when I’m gone.’
People keep walking in and out of the cardinal’s private
chamber, carrying chests and bundles of papers. Cavendish
wanders through, holding a silver monstrance.
‘You will come north?’ the cardinal says.
‘I’ll come to fetch you, the minute the king summons you
back.’ He believes and does not believe that this will happen.
The cardinal gets to his feet. There is a constraint in the air. He,
Cromwell, kneels for a blessing. The cardinal holds out a hand to
be kissed. His turquoise ring is missing. The fact does not evade
him. For a moment, the cardinal’s hand rests on his shoulder,
fingers spread, thumb in the hollow of his collarbone.
It is time he was gone. So much has been said between them
that it is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to
gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral. This is not
the occasion to embrace. If the cardinal has no more eloquence to
offer, he surely has none. Before he has reached the door of the
room the cardinal has turned back to the fireplace. He pulls his
chair to the blaze, and raises a hand to shield his face; but his hand is not between himself and the fire, it is between himself
and the closing door.
He makes for the courtyard. He falters; in a smoky recess
where the light has extinguished itself, he leans against the wall.
He is crying. He says to himself, let George Cavendish not come
by and see me, and write it down and make it into a play.
He swears softly, in many languages: at life, at himself for
giving way to its demands. Servants walk past, saying, ‘Master
Cromwell’s horse is here for him! Master Cromwell’s escort at
the gate!’ He waits till he is in command of himself, and exits,
disbursing coins.
When he gets home, the servants ask him, are we to paint out
the cardinal’s coat of arms? No, by God, he says. On the
contrary, repaint it. He stands back for a look. ‘The choughs
could look more lively. And we need a better scarlet for the hat.’
He hardly sleeps. He dreams of Liz. He wonders if she would
know him, the man he vows that soon he will be: adamant, mild,
a keeper of the king’s peace.
Towards dawn, he dozes; he wakes up thinking, the cardinal just
now will be mounting his horse; why am I not with him? It is 5
April. Johane meets him on the stairs; chastely, she kisses his
cheek.
‘Why does God test us?’ she whispers.
He murmurs, ‘I do not feel we will pass.’
He says, perhaps I should go up to Southwell myself? I’ll go
for you, Rafe says. He gives him a list. Have the whole of the
archbishop’s palace scrubbed out. My lord will be bringing his
own bed. Draft in kitchen staff from the King’s Arms. Check the
stabling. Get in musicians. Last time I passed through I noticed
some pigsties up against the palace wall. Find out the owner, pay
him off and knock them down. Don’t drink in the Crown; the ale
is worse than my father’s.
Richard says, ‘Sir … it is time to let the cardinal go. ‘This is a tactical retreat, not a rout.’
They think he’s gone but he’s only gone into a back room. He
skulks among the files. He hears Richard say, ‘His heart is
leading him.’
‘It is an experienced heart.’
‘But can a general organise a retreat when he doesn’t know
where the enemy is? The king is so double in this matter.’
‘One could retreat straight into his arms.’
‘Jesus. You think our master is double too?’
‘Triple at least,’ Rafe says. ‘Look, there was no profit for him,
ever, in deserting the old man – what would he get but the name
of deserter? Perhaps something is to be got by sticking fast. For
all of us.’
‘Off you go then, swine-boy. Who else would think about the
pigsties? Thomas More, for instance, would never think about
them.’
‘Or he would be exhorting the pig-keeper, my good man,
Easter approacheth –’
‘– hast thou prepared to receive Holy Communion?’ Rafe
laughs. ‘By the way, Richard, hast thou?’
Richard says, ‘I can get a piece of bread any day in the week.’
During Holy Week, reports come in from Peterborough: more
people have crowded in to look at Wolsey than have been in that
town in living memory. As the cardinal moves north he follows
him on the map of these islands he keeps in his head. Stamford,
Grantham, Newark; the travelling court arrives in Southwell on
28 April. He, Cromwell, writes to soothe him, he writes to warn
him. He is afraid that the Boleyns, or Norfolk, or both, have
found some way of implanting a spy in the cardinal’s retinue.
The ambassador Chapuys, hurrying away from an audience
with the king, has touched his sleeve, drawn him aside.
‘Monsieur Cremuel, I thought to call at your house. We are
neighbours, you know. ‘I should like to welcome you.’
‘But people inform me you are often with the king now, which
is pleasant, is it not? Your old master, I hear from him every
week. He has become solicitous about the queen’s health. He
asks if she is in good spirits, and begs her to consider that soon
she will be restored to the king’s bosom. And bed.’ Chapuys
smiles. He is enjoying himself. ‘The concubine will not help him.
We know you have tried with her and failed. So now he turns
back to the queen.’
He is forced to ask, ‘And the queen says?’
‘She says, I hope God in his mercy finds it possible to forgive
the cardinal, for I never can.’ Chapuys waits. He does not speak.
The ambassador resumes: ‘I think you are sensible of the tangle
of wreckage that will be left if this divorce is granted, or, shall we
say, somehow extorted from His Holiness? The Emperor, in
defence of his aunt, may make war on England. Your merchant
friends will lose their livelihoods, and many will lose their lives.
Your Tudor king may go down, and the old nobility come into
their own.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘I am telling all Englishmen.’
‘Door-to-door?’
He is meant to pass to the cardinal this message: that he has
come to the end of his credit with the Emperor. What will that do
but drive him into an appeal to the French king? Either way,
treason lies.
He imagines the cardinal among the canons at Southwell, in
his chair in the chapter house, presiding beneath the high vaulting like a prince at his ease in some forest glade, wreathed by
carvings of leaves and flowers. They are so supple that it is as if
the columns, the ribs have quickened, as if stone has burst into
florid life; the capitals are decked with berries, finials are twisted
stems, roses entangle the shafts, flowers and seeds flourish on
one stalk; from the foliage, faces peers, the faces of dogs, of hares, of goats. There are human faces, too, so lifelike that perhaps they
can change their expression; perhaps they stare down, astonished, at the portly scarlet form of his patron; and perhaps in the
silence of the night, when the canons are sleeping, the stone men
whistle and sing.
In Italy he learned a memory system and furnished it with
pictures. Some are drawn from wood and field, from hedgerow
and copse: shy hiding animals, eyes bright in the undergrowth.
Some are foxes and deer, some are griffins, dragons. Some are
men and women: nuns, warriors, doctors of the church. In their
hands he puts unlikely objects, St Ursula a crossbow, St Jerome a
scythe, while Plato bears a soup ladle and Achilles a dozen
damsons in a wooden bowl. It is no use hoping to remember
with the help of common objects, familiar faces. One needs startling juxtapositions, images that are more or less peculiar, ridiculous, even indecent. When you have made the images, you place
them about the world in locations you choose, each one with its
parcel of words, of figures, which they will yield you on demand.
At Greenwich, a shaven cat may peep at you from behind a
cupboard; at the palace of Westminster, a snake may leer down
from a beam and hiss your name.
Some of these images are flat, and you can walk on them. Some
are clothed in skin and walk around in a room, but perhaps they
are men with their heads on backwards, or with tufted tails like
the leopards in coats of arms. Some scowl at you like Norfolk, or
gape at you, like my lord Suffolk, with bewilderment. Some
speak, some quack. He keeps them, in strict order, in the gallery
of his mind’s eye.
Perhaps it is because he is used to making these images that his
head is peopled with the cast of a thousand plays, ten thousand
interludes. It is because of this practice that he tends to glimpse
his dead wife lurking in a stairwell, her white face upturned, or
whisking around a corner of the Austin Friars, or the house at
Stepney. Now the image is beginning to merge with that of her sister Johane, and everything that belonged to Liz is beginning to
belong to her: her half-smile, her questioning glance, her way of
being naked. Till he says, enough, and scrubs her out of his mind.
Rafe rides up the country with messages to Wolsey too secret
to put into letters. He would go himself, but though Parliament
is prorogued he cannot get away, because he is afraid of what
might be said about Wolsey if he is not there to defend him; and
at short notice the king might want him, or Lady Anne. ‘And
although I am not with you in person,’ he writes, ‘yet be assured
I am, and during my life shall be, with your grace in heart, spirit,
prayer and service …’
The cardinal replies: he is ‘mine own good, trusty and most
assured refuge in this my calamity’. He is ‘mine own entirely
beloved Cromwell’.
He writes to ask for quails. He writes to ask for flower seeds.
‘Seeds?’ Johane says. ‘He is planning to take root?’
Twilight finds the king melancholy. Another day of regress, in
his campaign to be a married man again; he denies, of course, that
he is married to the queen. ‘Cromwell,’ he says, ‘I need to find
my way to ownership of those …’ He looks sidelong, not
wishing to say what he means. ‘I understand there are legal difficulties. I do not pretend to understand them. And before you
begin, I do not want them explained.’
The cardinal has endowed his Oxford college, as also the
school at Ipswich, with land that will produce an income in
perpetuity. Henry wants their silver and gold plate, their
libraries, their yearly revenues and the land that produces the
revenues; and he does not see why he should not have what he
wants. The wealth of twenty-nine monasteries has gone into
those foundations – suppressed by permission of the Pope, on
condition that the proceeds were used for the colleges. But do
you know, Henry says, I am beginning to care very little about
the Pope and his permissions? It is early summer. The evenings are long and the grass, the air,
scented. You would think that a man like Henry, on a night like
this, could go to whichever bed he pleases. The court is full of
eager women. But after this interview he will walk in the garden
with Lady Anne, her hand resting on his arm, deep in conversation; then he will go to his empty bed, and she, one presumes, to
hers.
When the king asks him what he hears from the cardinal, he
says that he misses the light of His Majesty’s countenance; that
preparations for his enthronement at York are in hand. ‘Then
why doesn’t he get to York? It seems to me he delays and delays.’
Henry glares at him. ‘I will say this for you. You stick by your
man.’
‘I have never had anything from the cardinal other than kindness. Why would I not?’
‘And you have no other master,’ the king says. ‘My lord
Suffolk asks me, where does the fellow spring from? I tell him
there are Cromwells in Leicestershire, Northamptonshire –
landed people, or once they were. I suppose you are from some
unfortunate branch of that family?’
‘No.’
‘You may not know your own forebears. I shall ask the
heralds to look into it.’
‘Your Majesty is kind. But they will have scant success.’
The king is exasperated. He is failing to take advantage of what
is on offer: a pedigree, however meagre. ‘My lord cardinal told
me you were an orphan. He told me you were brought up in a
monastery.’
‘Ah. That was one of his little stories.’
‘He told me little stories?’ Several expressions chase each other
across the king’s face: annoyance, amusement, a wish to call back
times past. ‘I suppose he did. He told me that you had a loathing
of those in the religious life. That was why he found you diligent
in his work.’ ‘That was not the reason.’ He looks up. ‘May I speak?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Henry cries. ‘I wish someone would.’
He is startled. Then he understands. Henry wants a conversation, on any topic. One that’s nothing to do with love, or
hunting, or war. Now that Wolsey’s gone, there’s not much scope
for it; unless you want to talk to a priest of some stripe. And if
you send for a priest, what does it come back to? To love; to
Anne; to what you want and can’t have.
‘If you ask me about the monks, I speak from experience, not
prejudice, and though I have no doubt that some foundations
are well governed, my experience has been of waste and corruption. May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a
parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organise a masque
at court but call without notice at a monastery? I have seen
monks who live like great lords, on the offerings of poor people
who would rather buy a blessing than buy bread, and that is not
Christian conduct. Nor do I take the monasteries to be the
repositories of learning some believe they are. Was Grocyn a
monk, or Colet, or Linacre, or any of our great scholars? They
were university men. The monks take in children and use them
as servants, they don’t even teach them dog Latin. I don’t
grudge them some bodily comforts. It cannot always be Lent.
What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness – their
worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of
invention. When did anything good last come from a
monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what
they repeat is corrupt. For hundreds of years the monks have
held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be
our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have
suppressed the history they don’t like, and written one that is
favourable to Rome.’
Henry appears to look straight through him, to the wall
behind. He waits. Henry says, ‘Dogholes, then?’
He smiles. Henry says, ‘Our history … As you know, I am gathering
evidence. Manuscripts. Opinions. Comparisons, with how
matters are ordered in other countries. Perhaps you would
consult with those learned gentlemen. Put a little direction into
their efforts. Talk to Dr Cranmer – he will tell you what is
needed. I could make good use of the money that flows yearly to
Rome. King François is richer by far than I am. I do not have a
tenth of his subjects. He taxes them as he pleases. For my part, I
must call Parliament. If I do not, there are riots.’ He adds,
bitterly, ‘And riots if I do.’
‘Take no lessons from King François,’ he says. ‘He likes war
too much, and trade too little.’
Henry smiles faintly. ‘You do not think so, but to me that is
the remit of a king.’
‘There is more tax to be raised when trade is good. And if taxes
are resisted, there may be other ways.’
Henry nods. ‘Very well. Begin with the colleges. Sit down
with my lawyers.’
Harry Norris is there to show him out of the king’s private
rooms. Not smiling for once, rather stern, he says, ‘I wouldn’t be
his tax collector.’
He thinks, are the most remarkable moments of my life to be
spent under the scrutiny of Henry Norris?
‘He killed his father’s best men. Empson, Dudley. Didn’t the
cardinal get one of their houses?’
A spider scuttles from under a stool and presents him with a
fact. ‘Empson’s house on Fleet Street. Granted the ninth of
October, the first year of this reign.’
‘This glorious reign,’ Norris says: as if he were issuing a
correction.
Gregory is fifteen as summer begins. He sits a horse beautifully,
and there are good reports of his swordsmanship. His Greek …
well, his Greek is where it was.

But he has a problem. ‘People in Cambridge are laughing at
my greyhounds.’
‘Why?’ The black dogs are a matched pair. They have curving
muscled necks and dainty feet; they keep their eyes lowered,
mild and demure, till they sight prey.
‘They say, why would you have dogs that people can’t see at
night? Only felons have dogs like that. They say I hunt in the
forests, against the law. They say I hunt badgers, like a churl.’
‘What do you want?’ he asks. ‘White ones, or some spots of
colour?’
‘Either would be correct.’
‘I’ll take your black dogs.’ Not that he has time to go out, but
Richard or Rafe will use them.
‘But what if people laugh?’
‘Really, Gregory,’ Johane says. ‘This is your father. I assure
you, no one will dare laugh.’
When the weather is too wet to hunt, Gregory sits poring over
The Golden Legend; he likes the lives of the saints. ‘Some of
these things are true,’ he says, ‘some not.’ He reads Le Morte
d’Arthur, and because it is the new edition they crowd around
him, looking over his shoulder at the title page. ‘Here beginneth
the first book of the most noble and worthy prince King Arthur
sometime King of Great Britain …’ In the forefront of the
picture, two couples embrace. On a high-stepping horse is a man
with a mad hat, made of coiled tubes like fat serpents. Alice says,
sir, did you wear a hat like that when you were young, and he
says, I had a different colour for each day in the week, but mine
were bigger.
Behind this man, a woman rides pillion. ‘Do you think this
represents Lady Anne?’ Gregory asks. ‘They say the king does
not like to be parted from her, so he perches her up behind him
like a farmer’s wife.’ The woman has big eyes, and looks sick
from jolting; it might just be Anne. There is a small castle, not
much taller than a man, with a plank for a drawbridge. The birds, circling above, look like flying daggers. Gregory says, ‘Our king
takes his descent from this Arthur. He was never really dead but
waited in the forest biding his time, or possibly in a lake. He is
several centuries old. Merlin is a wizard. He comes later. You will
see. There are twenty-one chapters. If it keeps on raining I mean
to read them all. Some of these things are true and some of them
lies. But they are all good stories.’
When the king next calls him to court, he wants a message sent to
Wolsey. A Breton merchant whose ship was seized by the
English eight years ago is complaining he has not had the
compensation promised. No one can find the paperwork. It was
the cardinal who handled the case – will he remember it? ‘I’m
sure he will,’ he says. ‘That will be the ship with powdered pearls
for ballast, the hold packed with unicorns’ horns?’
God forbid! says Charles Brandon; but the king laughs and
says, ‘That will be the one.’
‘If the sums are in doubt, or indeed the whole case, may I look
after it?’
The king hesitates. ‘I’m not sure you have a locus standi in the
matter.’
It is at this moment that Brandon, quite unexpectedly, gives
him a testimonial. ‘Harry, let him. When this fellow has finished,
the Breton will be paying you.’
Dukes revolve in their spheres. When they confer, it is not for
pleasure in each other’s society; they like to be surrounded by
their own courts, by men who reflect them and are subservient to
them. For pleasure, they are as likely to be found with a kennelman as another duke; so it is that he spends an amiable hour with
Brandon, looking over the king’s hounds. It is not yet the season
for hunting the hart, so the running dogs are well fed in their
kennels; their musical barking rises into the evening air, and the
tracking dogs, silent as they are trained to be, rise on their hind
legs and watch, dripping saliva, the progress of their suppers. The kennel children are carrying baskets of bread and bones, buckets
of offal and basins of pigs’-blood pottage. Charles Brandon
inhales, appreciative: like a dowager in a rose garden.
A huntsman calls forward a favourite bitch, white patched
with chestnut, Barbada, four years old. He straddles her and
pulls back her head to show her eyes, clouded with a fine film.
He will hate to kill her, but he doubts she will be much use this
season. He, Cromwell, cups the bitch’s jaw in his hand. ‘You can
draw off the membrane with a curved needle. I’ve seen it done.
You need a steady hand and to be quick. She doesn’t like it, but
then she won’t like to be blind.’ He runs his hand over her ribs,
feels the panicked throb of her little animal heart. ‘The needle
must be very fine. And just this length.’ He shows them, between
finger and thumb. ‘Let me talk to your smith.’
Suffolk looks sideways at him. ‘You’re a useful sort of man.’
They walk away. The duke says, ‘Look here. The problem is
my wife.’ He waits. ‘I have always wanted Henry to have what
he wants, I have always been loyal to him. Even when he was
talking about cutting my head off because I’d married his sister.
But now, what am I to do? Katherine is the queen. Surely? My
wife was always a friend of hers. She’s beginning to talk of, I
don’t know, I’d give my life for the queen, that sort of thing. And
for Norfolk’s niece to have precedence over my wife, who was
Queen of France – we can’t live with it. You see?’
He nods. I see. ‘Besides,’ the duke says, ‘I hear Wyatt is due
back from Calais.’ Yes, and? ‘I wonder if I ought to tell him. Tell
Henry, I mean. Poor devil.’
‘My lord, leave it alone,’ he says. The duke lapses into what, in
another man, you would call silent thought.
Summer: the king is hunting. If he wants him, he has to chase
him, and if he is sent for, he goes. Henry visits, on his summer
progress, his friends in Wiltshire, in Sussex, in Kent, or stays at
his own houses, or the ones he has taken from the cardinal. Sometimes, even now, the queen in her stout little person rides
out with a bow, when the king hunts within one of his great
parks, or in some lord’s park, where the deer are driven to the
archers. Lady Anne rides too – on separate occasions – and
enjoys the pursuit. But there is a season to leave the ladies at
home, and ride into the forest with the trackers and the running
hounds; to rise before dawn when the light is clouded like a
pearl; to consult with the huntsman, and then unharbour the
chosen stag. You do not know where the chase will end, or when.
Harry Norris says to him, laughing, your turn soon, Master
Cromwell, if he continues to favour you as he does. A word of
advice: as the day begins, and you ride out, pick a ditch. Picture
it in your mind. When he has worn out three good horses, when
the horn is blowing for another chase, you will be dreaming of
that ditch, you will imagine lying down in it: dead leaves and
cool ditch-water will be all you desire.
He looks at Norris: his charming self-deprecation. He thinks,
you were with my cardinal at Putney, when he fell on his knees
in the dirt; did you offer the pictures in your head to the court, to
the world, to the students of Gray’s Inn? For if not you, then
who?
In the forest you may find yourself lost, without companions.
You may come to a river which is not on a map. You may lose
sight of your quarry, and forget why you are there. You may
meet a dwarf, or the living Christ, or an old enemy of yours; or a
new enemy, one you do not know until you see his face appear
between the rustling leaves, and see the glint of his dagger. You
may find a woman asleep in a bower of leaves. For a moment,
before you don’t recognise her, you will think she is someone
you know.
At Austin Friars, there is little chance to be alone, or alone with
just one person. Every letter of the alphabet watches you. In the
counting house there is young Thomas Avery, whom you are training up to take a grip on your private finances. Midway
through the letters comes Marlinspike, strolling in the garden
with his observant golden eyes. Towards the end of the alphabet
comes Thomas Wriothesley pronounced Risley. He is a bright
young man, twenty-five or so and well connected, son of York
Herald, nephew to Garter King-at-Arms. In Wolsey’s household
he worked under your direction, then was carried away by
Gardiner, as Master Secretary, to work for him. Now he is sometimes at court, sometimes at Austin Friars. He’s Stephen’s spy,
the children say – Richard and Rafe.
Master Wriothesley is tall, with red-blond hair, but without
the propensity of others of that complexion – the king, let’s say –
to grow pink when gratified, or mottled when crossed; he is
always pale and cool, always his handsome self, always
composed. At Trinity Hall he was a great actor in the students’
plays, and he has certain affectations, a consciousness of himself,
of how he appears; they mimic him behind his back, Richard and
Rafe, and say, ‘My name is Wri-oth-es-ley, but as I wish to spare
you effort, you can call me Risley.’ They say, he only complicates
his name like that so he can come here and sign things, and use up
our ink. They say, you know Gardiner, he is too angry to use
long names, Gardiner just calls him ‘you’. They are pleased with
this joke and for a while, every time Mr W appears, they shout,
‘It’s you!’
Have mercy, he says, on Master Wriothesley. Cambridge men
should have our respect.
He would like to ask them, Richard, Rafe, Master Wriothesley
call me Risley: do I look like a murderer? There is a boy who says
I do.
This year, there has been no summer plague. Londoners give
thanks on their knees. On St John’s Eve, the bonfires burn all
night. At dawn, white lilies are carried in from the fields. The city
daughters with shivering fingers weave them into drooping
wreaths, to pin on the city’s gates, and on city doors. He thinks about that little girl like a white flower; the girl
with Lady Anne, who manoeuvred herself around the door. It
would have been easy to find out her name, except he didn’t,
because he was busy finding out secrets from Mary. Next time
he sees her … but what’s the use of thinking of it? She will come
of some noble house. He had meant to write to Gregory and say,
I have seen such a sweet girl, I will find out who she is and, if I
steer our family adroitly in the next few years, perhaps you can
marry her.
He has not written this. In his present precarious situation, it
would be about as useful as the letters Gregory used to write to
him: Dear father, I hope you are well. I hope your dog is well.
And now no more for lack of time.
Lord Chancellor More says, ‘Come and see me, and we’ll talk
about Wolsey’s colleges. I feel sure the king will do something
for the poor scholars. Do come. Come and see my roses before
the heat spoils them. Come and see my new carpet.’
It is a muted, grey day; when he arrives at Chelsea, Master
Secretary’s barge is tied up, the Tudor flag limp in the sultry air.
Beyond the gatehouse, the red-brick house, new-built, offers its
bright facade to the river. He strolls towards it, through the
mulberry trees. Standing in the porch, under the honeysuckle,
Stephen Gardiner. The grounds at Chelsea are full of small pet
animals, and as he approaches, and his host greets him, he sees
that the Chancellor of England is holding a lop-eared rabbit with
snowy fur; it hangs peacefully in his hands, like ermine mittens.
‘Is your son-in-law Roper with us today?’ Gardiner asks. ‘A
pity. I hoped to see him change his religion again. I wanted to
witness it.’
‘A garden tour?’ More offers.
‘I thought that we might see him sit down a friend of Luther,
as formerly he was, yet come back to the church by the time they
bring in the currants and gooseberries. ‘Will Roper is now settled,’ More says, ‘in the faith of England
and of Rome.’
He says, ‘It’s not really a good year for soft fruit.’
More looks at him out of the tail of his eye; he smiles. He chats
genially as he leads them into the house. Lolloping after them
comes Henry Pattinson, a servant of More’s he sometimes calls
his fool, and to whom he allows licence. The man is a great
brawler; normally you take in a fool to protect him, but in
Pattinson’s case it’s the rest of the world needs protection. Is he
really simple? There’s something sly in More, he enjoys embarrassing people; it would be like him to have a fool that wasn’t.
Pattinson’s supposed to have fallen from a church steeple and hit
his head. At his waist, he wears a knotted string which he sometimes says is his rosary; sometimes he says it is his scourge.
Sometimes he says it is the rope that should have saved him from
his fall.
Entering the house, you meet the family hanging up. You see
them painted life-size before you meet them in the flesh; and
More, conscious of the double effect it makes, pauses, to let you
survey them, to take them in. The favourite, Meg, sits at her
father’s feet with a book on her knee. Gathered loosely about the
Lord Chancellor are his son John; his ward Anne Cresacre, who
is John’s wife; Margaret Giggs, who is also his ward; his aged
father, Sir John More; his daughters Cicely and Elizabeth; Pattinson, with goggle eyes; and his wife Alice, with lowered head and
wearing a cross, at the edge of the picture. Master Holbein has
grouped them under his gaze, and fixed them for ever: as long as
no moth consumes, no flame or mould or blight.
In real life there is something fraying about their host, a suspicion of unravelling weave; being at his leisure, he wears a simple
wool gown. The new carpet, for their inspection, is stretched out
on two trestle tables. The ground is not crimson but a blush
colour: not rose madder, he thinks, but a red dye mixed with
whey. ‘My lord cardinal liked turkey carpets,’ he murmurs. ‘The Doge once sent him sixty.’ The wool is soft wool from mountain
sheep, but none of them were black sheep; where the pattern is
darkest the surface has already a brittle feel, from patchy dyeing,
and with time and use it may flake away. He turns up the corner,
runs his fingertips over the knots, counting them by the inch, in
an easy accustomed action. ‘This is the Ghiordes knot,’ he says,
‘but the pattern is from Pergamon – you see there within the
octagons, the eight-pointed star?’ He smooths down the corner,
and walks away from it, turns back, says ‘there’ – he walks
forward, puts a tender hand on the flaw, the interruption in the
weave, the lozenge slightly distorted, warped out of true. At
worst, the carpet is two carpets, pieced together. At best, it has
been woven by the village’s Pattinson, or patched together last
year by Venetian slaves in a backstreet workshop. To be sure, he
needs to turn the whole thing over. His host says, ‘Not a good
buy?’
It’s beautiful, he says, not wanting to spoil his pleasure. But
next time, he thinks, take me with you. His hand skims the
surface, rich and soft. The flaw in the weave hardly matters. A
turkey carpet is not on oath. There are some people in this world
who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those
who will allow some drift at the margins. He is both these kinds
of person. He would not allow, for example, a careless ambiguity
in a lease, but instinct tells him that sometimes a contract need
not be drawn too tight. Leases, writs, statutes, all are written to
be read, and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.
More says, ‘What do you think, gentlemen? Walk on it, or hang
it on the wall?’
‘Walk on it.’
‘Thomas, your luxurious tastes!’ And they laugh. You would
think they were friends.
They go out to the aviary; they stand deep in talk, while
finches flit and sing. A small grandchild toddles in; a woman in
an apron shadows him, or her. The child points to the finches, makes sounds expressive of pleasure, flaps its arms. It eyes
Stephen Gardiner; its small mouth turns down. The nurse
swoops in, before tears ensue; how must it be, he asks Stephen, to
have such effortless power over the young? Stephen scowls.
More takes him by the arm. ‘Now, about the colleges,’ he says.
‘I have spoken to the king, and Master Secretary here has done
his best – truly, he has. The king may refound Cardinal College
in his name, but for Ipswich I see no hope, after all it is only … I
am sorry to say this, Thomas, but it is only the birthplace of a
man now disgraced, and so has no special claim on us.’
‘It is a shame for the scholars.’
‘It is, of course. Shall we go in to supper?’
In More’s great hall, the conversation is exclusively in Latin,
though More’s wife Alice is their hostess and does not have a
word of it. It is their custom to read a passage of scripture, by
way of a grace. ‘It is Meg’s turn tonight,’ More says.
He is keen to show off his darling. She takes the book, kissing
it; over the interruptions of the fool, she reads in Greek.
Gardiner sits with his eyes shut tight; he looks, not holy, but
exasperated. He watches Margaret. She is perhaps twenty-five.
She has a sleek, darting head, like the head of the little fox which
More says he has tamed; all the same, he keeps it in a cage for
safety.
The servants come in. It is Alice’s eye they catch as they place
the dishes; here, madam, and here? The family in the picture
don’t need servants, of course; they exist just by themselves,
floating against the wall. ‘Eat, eat,’ says More. ‘All except Alice,
who will burst out of her corset.’
At her name she turns her head. ‘That expression of painful
surprise is not native to her,’ More says. ‘It is produced by scraping back her hair and driving in great ivory pins, to the peril of
her skull. She believes her forehead is too low. It is, of course.
Alice, Alice,’ he says, ‘remind me why I married you.’ ‘To keep house, Father,’ Meg says in a low voice.
‘Yes, yes,’ More says. ‘A glance at Alice frees me from stain of
concupiscence.’
He is conscious of an oddity, as if time has performed some
loop or snared itself in a noose; he has seen them on the wall as
Hans froze them, and here they enact themselves, wearing their
various expression of aloofness or amusement, benignity and
grace: a happy family. He prefers their host as Hans painted him;
the Thomas More on the wall, you can see that he’s thinking, but
not what he’s thinking, and that’s the way it should be. The
painter has grouped them so skilfully that there’s no space
between the figures for anyone new. The outsider can only soak
himself into the scene, as an unintended blot or stain; certainly,
he thinks, Gardiner is a blot or stain. The Secretary waves his
black sleeves; he argues vigorously with their host. What does St
Paul mean when he says Jesus was made a little lower than the
angels? Do Hollanders ever make jokes? What is the proper coat
of arms of the Duke of Norfolk’s heir? Is that thunder in the
distance, or will this heat keep up? Just as in the painting, Alice
has a little monkey on a gilt chain. In the painting it plays about
her skirts. In life, it sits in her lap and clings to her like a child.
Sometimes she lowers her head and talks to it, so that no one else
can hear.
More takes no wine, though he serves it to his guests. There
are several dishes, which all taste the same – flesh of some sort,
with a gritty sauce like Thames mud – and then junkets, and a
cheese which he says one of his daughters has made – one of his
daughters, wards, step-daughters, one of the women of whom
the house is full. ‘Because one must keep them employed,’ he
says. ‘They cannot always be at their books, and young women
are prone to mischief and idleness.’
‘For sure,’ he mutters. ‘They’ll be fighting in the streets next.’
His eyes are drawn unwillingly to the cheese; it is pitted and
wobbling, like the face of a stable boy after a night out. ‘Henry Pattinson is excitable tonight,’ More says. ‘Perhaps he
should be bled. I hope his diet has not been too rich.’
‘Oh,’ says Gardiner, ‘I have no anxieties on that score.’
Old John More – who must be eighty now – has come in for
supper, and so they yield the conversation to him; he is fond of
telling stories. ‘Did you ever hear of Humphrey Duke of
Gloucester and the beggar who claimed to be blind? Did you
ever hear of the man who didn’t know the Virgin Mary was a
Jew?’ Of such a sharp old lawyer one hopes for more, even in his
dotage. Then he begins on anecdotes of foolish women, of which
he has a vast collection, and even when he falls asleep, their host
has more. Lady Alice sits scowling. Gardiner, who has heard all
these stories before, is grinding his teeth.
‘Look there at my daughter-in-law Anne,’ More says. The girl
lowers her eyes; her shoulders tense, as she waits for what is
coming. ‘Anne craved – shall I tell them, my dear? – she craved a
pearl necklace. She did not cease to talk about it, you know how
young girls are. So when I gave her a box that rattled, imagine her
face. Imagine her face again when she opened it. What was
inside? Dried peas!’
The girl takes a deep breath. She raises her face. He sees the
effort it costs her. ‘Father,’ she says, ‘don’t forget to tell the story
of the woman who didn’t believe the world was round.’
‘No, that’s a good one,’ More says.
When he looks at Alice, staring at her husband with painful
concentration, he thinks, she still doesn’t believe it.
After supper they talk about wicked King Richard. Many
years ago Thomas More began to write a book about him. He
could not decide whether to compose in English or Latin, so he
has done both, though he has never finished it, or sent any part of
it to the printer. Richard was born to be evil, More says; it was
written on him from his birth. He shakes his head. ‘Deeds of
blood. Kings’ games.’
‘Dark days,’ says the fool .

‘Let them never come again.’
‘Amen.’ The fool points to the guests. ‘Let these not come
again either.’
There are people in London who say that John Howard,
grandfather of the Norfolk that is now, was more than a little
concerned in the disappearance of the children who went into the
Tower and never came out again. The Londoners say – and he
reckons the Londoners know – that it was on Howard’s watch
that the princes were last seen; though Thomas More thinks it
was Constable Brakenbury who handed the keys to the killers.
Brakenbury died at Bosworth; he can’t come out of his grave and
complain.
The fact is, Thomas More is thick with the Norfolk that is
now, and keen to deny that his ancestor helped disappear
anyone, let alone two children of royal blood. In his mind’s eye
he frames the present duke: in one dripping, sinewy hand he
holds a small golden-haired corpse, and in the other hand the
kind of little knife a man brings to table to cut his meat.
He comes back to himself: Gardiner, jabbing the air, is pressing the Lord Chancellor on his evidence. Presently the fool’s
grumbling and groaning become unbearable. ‘Father,’ Margaret
says, ‘please send Henry out.’ More rises to scold him, take him
by the arm. All eyes follow him. But Gardiner takes advantage of
the lull. He leans in, speaks English in an undertone. ‘About
Master Wriothesley. Remind me. Is he working for me, or for
you?’
‘For you, I would have thought, now he is made a Clerk of the
Signet. They assist Master Secretary, do they not?’
‘Why is he always at your house?’
‘He’s not a bound apprentice. He may come and go.’
‘I suppose he’s tired of churchmen. He wants to know what he
can learn from … whatever it is you call yourself, these days.’
‘A person,’ he says placidly. ‘The Duke of Norfolk says I’m a
person.’ ‘Master Wriothesley has his eye on his advantage.’
‘I hope we all have that. Or why did God give us eyes?’
‘He thinks of making his fortune. We all know that money
sticks to your hands.’
Like the aphids to More’s roses. ‘No,’ he sighs. ‘It passes
through them, alas. You know, Stephen, how I love luxury. Show
me a carpet, and I’ll walk on it.’
The fool scolded and ejected, More rejoins them. ‘Alice, I have
told you about drinking wine. Your nose is glowing.’ Alice’s face
grows stiff, with dislike and a kind of fear. The younger women,
who understand all that is said, bow their heads and examine
their hands, fiddling with their rings and turning them to catch
the light. Then something lands on the table with a thud, and
Anne Cresacre, provoked into her native tongue, cries, ‘Henry,
stop that!’ There is a gallery above with oriel windows; the fool,
leaning through one of them, is peppering them with broken
crusts. ‘Don’t flinch, masters,’ he shouts. ‘I am pelting you with
God.’
He scores a hit on the old man, who wakes with a start. Sir
John looks about him; with his napkin, he wipes dribble from his
chin. ‘Now, Henry,’ More calls up. ‘You have wakened my
father. And you are blaspheming. And wasting bread.’
‘Dear Lord, he should be whipped,’ Alice snaps.
He looks around him; he feels something which he identifies
as pity, a heavy stirring beneath the breastbone. He believes Alice
has a good heart; continues to believe it even when, taking his
leave, permitted to thank her in English, she raps out, ‘Thomas
Cromwell, why don’t you marry again?’
‘No one will have me, Lady Alice.’
‘Nonsense. Your master may be down but you’re not poor,
are you? Got your money abroad, that’s what I’m told. Got a
good house, haven’t you? Got the king’s ear, my husband says.
And from what my sisters in the city say, got everything in good
working order.’ ‘Alice!’ More says. Smiling, he takes her wrist, shakes her a
little. Gardiner laughs: his deep bass chuckle, like laughter
through a crack in the earth.
When they go out to Master Secretary’s barge, the scent of the
gardens is heavy in the air. ‘More goes to bed at nine o’clock,’
Stephen says.
‘With Alice?’
‘People say not.’
‘You have spies in the house?’
Stephen doesn’t answer.
It is dusk; lights bob in the river. ‘Dear God, I am hungry,’
Master Secretary complains. ‘I wish I had kept back one of the
fool’s crusts. I wish I had laid hands on the white rabbit; I’d eat it
raw.’
He says, ‘You know, he daren’t make himself plain.’
‘Indeed he dare not,’ Gardiner says. Beneath the canopy, he
sits hunched into himself, as if he were cold. ‘But we all know his
opinions, which I think are fixed and impervious to argument.
When he took office, he said he would not meddle with the
divorce, and the king accepted that, but I wonder how long he
will accept it.’
‘I didn’t mean, make himself plain to the king. I meant, to Alice.’
Gardiner laughs. ‘True, if she understood what he said about
her she’d send him down to the kitchens and have him plucked
and roasted.’
‘Suppose she died? He’d be sorry then.’
‘He’d have another wife in the house before she was cold.
Someone even uglier.’
He broods: foresees, vaguely, an opportunity for placing bets.
‘That young woman,’ he says. ‘Anne Cresacre. She is an heiress,
you know? An orphan?’
‘There was some scandal, was there not?’
‘After her father died her neighbours stole her, for their son to
marry. The boy raped her. She was thirteen. This was in York shire … that’s how they go on there. My lord cardinal was
furious when he heard of it. It was he who got her away. He put
her under More’s roof because he thought she’d be safe.’
‘So she is.’
Not from humiliation. ‘Since More’s son married her, he lives
off her lands. She has a hundred a year. You’d think she could
have a string of pearls.’
‘Do you think More is disappointed in his boy? He shows no
talent for affairs. Still, I hear you have a boy like that. You’ll be
looking for an heiress for him soon.’ He doesn’t reply. It’s true;
John More, Gregory Cromwell, what have we done to our sons?
Made them into idle young gentlemen – but who can blame us
for wanting for them the ease we didn’t have? One thing about
More, he’s never idled for an hour, he’s passed his life reading,
writing, talking towards what he believes is the good of the
Christian commonwealth. Stephen says, ‘Of course you may
have other sons. Aren’t you looking forward to the wife Alice
will find you? She is warm in your praises.’
He feels afraid. It is like Mark, the lute player: people imagining what they cannot know. He is sure he and Johane have been
secret. He says, ‘Don’t you ever think of marrying?’
A chill spreads over the waters. ‘I am in holy orders.’
‘Oh, come on, Stephen. You must have women. Don’t you?’
The pause is so long, so silent, that he can hear the oars as they
dip into the Thames, the little splash as they rise; he can hear the
ripples in their wake. He can hear a dog barking, from the southern shore. The Secretary asks, ‘What kind of Putney enquiry is
that?’
The silence lasts till Westminster. But on the whole, not too
bad a trip. As he mentions, disembarking, neither of them has
thrown the other in the river. ‘I’m waiting till the water’s colder,’
Gardiner says. ‘And till I can tie weights to you. You have a trick
of resurfacing, don’t you? By the way, why am I bringing you to
Westminster? ‘I am going to see Lady Anne.’
Gardiner is affronted. ‘You didn’t say so.’
‘Should I report all my plans to you?’
He knows that is what Gardiner would prefer. The word is
that the king is losing patience with his council. He shouts at
them, ‘The cardinal was a better man than any of you, for managing matters.’ He thinks, if my lord cardinal comes back – which
by a caprice of the king’s he may, any time now – then you’re all
dead, Norfolk, Gardiner, More. Wolsey is a merciful man, but
surely: only up to a point.
Mary Shelton is in attendance; she looks up, simpers. Anne is
sumptuous in her nightgown of dark silk. Her hair is down, her
delicate feet bare inside kidskin slippers. She is slumped in a
chair, as if the day has beaten the spirit out of her. But still, as
she looks up, her eyes are sparkling, hostile. ‘Where’ve you
been?’
‘Utopia.’
‘Oh.’ She is interested. ‘What passed?’
‘Dame Alice has a little monkey that sits on her knee at table.’
‘I hate them.’
‘I know you do.’
He walks about. Anne lets him treat her fairly normally,
except when she has a sudden, savage seizure of I-who-will-beQueen, and slaps him down. She examines the toe of her slipper.
‘They say that Thomas More is in love with his own daughter.’
‘I think they may be right.’
Anne’s sniggering laugh. ‘Is she a pretty girl?’
‘No. Learned though.’
‘Did they talk about me?’
‘They never mention you in that house.’ He thinks, I should
like to hear Alice’s verdict.
‘Then what was the talk?’
‘The vices and follies of women. ‘I suppose you joined it? It’s true, anyway. Most women are
foolish. And vicious. I have seen it. I have lived among the
women too long.’
He says, ‘Norfolk and my lord your father are very busy
seeing ambassadors. France, Venice, the Emperor’s man – just in
these last two days.’
He thinks, they are working to entrap my cardinal. I know it.
‘I did not think you could afford such good information.
Though they say you have spent a thousand pounds on the cardinal.’
‘I expect to get it back. From here and there.’
‘I suppose people are grateful to you. If they have received
grants out of the cardinal’s lands.’
He thinks, your brother George, Lord Rochford, your father
Thomas, Earl of Wiltshire, haven’t they got rich from the cardinal’s fall? Look at what George is wearing these days, look at the
money he spends on horses and girls; but I don’t see much sign
of gratitude from the Boleyns. He says, ‘I just take my
conveyancer’s fee.’
She laughs. ‘You look well on it.’
‘Do you know, there are ways and ways … Sometimes people
just tell me things.’
It is an invitation. Anne drops her head. She is on the verge of
becoming one of those people. But perhaps not tonight. ‘My
father says, one can never be sure of that person, one can never
tell who he’s working for. I should have thought – but then I am
only a woman – that it is perfectly obvious that you’re working
for yourself.’
That makes us alike, he thinks: but does not quite say.
Anne yawns, a little catlike yawn. ‘You’re tired,’ he says. ‘I
shall go. By the way, why did you send for me?’
‘We like to know where you are.’
‘So why does your lord father not send for me, or your
brother?’ She looks up. It may be late, but not too late for Anne’s
knowing smile. ‘They do not think you would come.’
August: the cardinal writes to the king, a letter full of complaint,
saying that he is being hounded by his creditors, ‘wrapped in
misery and dread’ – but the stories that come back are different.
He is holding dinners, and inviting all the local gentry. He is
dispensing charity on his old princely scale, settling lawsuits, and
sweet-talking estranged husbands and wives into sharing a roof
again.
Call-Me-Risley was up in Southwell in June, with William
Brereton of the king’s privy chamber: getting the cardinal’s
signature on a petition Henry is circulating, which he means to
send to the Pope. It’s Norfolk’s idea, to get the peers and bishops
to sign up to this letter asking Clement to let the king have his
freedom. It contains certain murky, unspecific threats, but
Clement’s used to being threatened – no one’s better at spinning
a question out, setting one party against the other, playing ends
against the middle.
The cardinal looks well, according to Wriothesley. And his
building work, it seems, has gone beyond repairs and a few renovations. He has been scouring the country for glaziers, joiners,
and for plumbers; it is ominous when my lord decides to
improve the sanitation. He never had a parish church but he built
the tower higher; never lodged anywhere where he did not draw
up drainage plans. Soon there will be earthworks, culverts and
pipes laid. Next he will be installing fountains. Wherever he goes
he is cheered by the people.
‘The people?’ Norfolk says. ‘They’d cheer a Barbary ape.
Who cares what they cheer? Hang ’em all.’
‘But then who will you tax?’ he says, and Norfolk looks at
him fearfully, unsure if he’s made a joke.
Rumours of the cardinal’s popularity don’t make him glad,
they make him afraid. The king has given Wolsey a pardon, but if he was offended once, he can be offended again. If they could
think up forty-four charges, then – if fantasy is unconstrained by
truth – they can think up forty-four more.
He sees Norfolk and Gardiner with their heads together. They
look up at him; they glare and don’t speak.
Wriothesley stays with him, in his shadow and footsteps,
writes his most confidential letters, those to the cardinal and the
king. He never says, I am too tired. He never says, it is late. He
remembers all that he is required to remember. Even Rafe is not
more perfect.
It is time to bring the girls into the family business. Johane
complains of her daughter’s poor sewing, and it seems that,
transferring the needle surreptitiously into her wrong hand, the
child has devised an awkward little backstitch which you would
be hard-pushed to imitate. She gets the job of sewing up his
dispatches for the north.
September 1530: the cardinal leaves Southwell, travelling by easy
stages to York. The next part of his progress becomes a triumphal
procession. People from all over the countryside flock to him,
ambushing him at wayside crosses so that he can lay his magical
hands on their children; they call it ‘confirmation’, but it seems
to be some older sacrament. They pour in by the thousand, to
gape at him; and he prays for them all.
‘The council has the cardinal under observation,’ Gardiner
says, swishing past him. ‘They have had the ports closed.’
Norfolk says, ‘Tell him if I ever see him again, I will chew him
up, bones, flesh and gristle.’ He writes it down just so and sends
it up-country: ‘bones, flesh and gristle.’ He can hear the crunch
and snap of the duke’s teeth.
On 2 October the cardinal reaches his palace at Cawood, ten
miles from York. His enthronement is planned for 7 November.
News comes that he has called a convocation of the northern
church; it is to meet at York the day after his enthronement. It is a signal of his independence; some may think it is a signal of
revolt. He has not informed the king, he has not informed old
Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury; he can hear the cardinal’s
voice, soft and amused, saying, now, Thomas, why do they need
to know?
Norfolk calls him in. His face is crimson and he froths a little
at the mouth as he starts to shout. He has been seeing his
armourer for a fitting, and is still wearing sundry parts – his
cuirass, his garde-reins – so that he looks like an iron pot
wobbling to the boil. ‘Does he think he can dig in up there and
carve himself a kingdom? Cardinal’s hat not enough for him,
only a crown will do for Thomas bloody Wolsey the bleeding
butcher’s boy, and I tell you, I tell you …’
He drops his gaze in case the duke should stop to read his
thoughts. He thinks, my lord would have made such an excellent
king; so benign, so sure and suave in his dealings, so equitable, so
swift and so discerning. His rule would have been the best rule,
his servants the best servants; and how he would have enjoyed
his state.
His glance follows the duke as he bobs and froths; but to his
surprise, when the duke turns, he smites his own metalled thigh,
and a tear – at the pain, or something else – bubbles into his eye.
‘Ah, you think me a hard man, Cromwell. I am not such a hard
man that I don’t see how you are left. Do you know what I say?
I say I don’t know one man in England who would have done
what you have done, for a man disgraced and fallen. The king
says so. Even him, Chapuys, the Emperor’s man, he says, you
cannot fault what’s-he-called. I say, it’s a pity you ever saw
Wolsey. It’s a pity you don’t work for me.’
‘Well,’ he says, ‘we all want the same thing. For your niece to
be queen. Can we not work together?’
Norfolk grunts. There is something amiss, in his view, with
that word ‘together’, but he cannot articulate what it is. ‘Do not
forget your place.’ He bows. ‘I am mindful of your lordship’s continuing favour.’
‘Look here, Cromwell, I wish you would come down and see
me at home at Kenninghall, and talk to my lady wife. She’s a
woman of monstrous demands. She thinks I shouldn’t keep a
woman in the house, for my pleasant usage, you know? I say,
where else should she be? Do you want me to disturb myself on
a winter’s night and venture out on the icy roads? I don’t seem to
be able to express myself correctly to her; do you think you
could come down and put my case?’ He says, hastily, ‘Not now,
of course. No. More urgent … see my niece …’
‘How is she?’
‘In my view,’ Norfolk says, ‘Anne’s out for bloody murder.
She wants the cardinal’s guts in a dish to feed her spaniels, and his
limbs nailed over the city gates of York.’
It is a dark morning and your eyes naturally turn towards Anne,
but something shadowy is bobbing about, on the fringes of the
circle of light. Anne says, ‘Dr Cranmer is just back from Rome.
He brings us no good news, of course.’
They know each other; Cranmer has worked from time to
time for the cardinal, as indeed who has not? Now he is active in
the king’s case. They embrace cautiously: Cambridge scholar,
person from Putney.
He says, ‘Master, why would you not come to our college? To
Cardinal College, I mean? His Grace was very sorry you would
not. We would have made you comfortable.’
‘I think he wanted more permanence,’ Anne says, sneering.
‘But with respect, Lady Anne, the king has almost said to me
that he will take over the Oxford foundation himself.’ He smiles.
‘Perhaps it can be called after you?’
This morning Anne wears a crucifix on a gold chain. Sometimes her fingers pull at it impatiently, and then she tucks her
hands back in her sleeves. It is so much a habit with her that
people say she has something to hide, a deformity; but he thinks she is a woman who doesn’t like to show her hand. ‘My uncle
Norfolk says Wolsey goes about with eight hundred armed men
at his back. They say he has letters from Katherine – is that true?
They say Rome will issue a decree telling the king to separate
from me.’
‘That would be a clear mistake on Rome’s part,’ Cranmer says.
‘Yes it would. Because he won’t be told. Is he some parish
clerk, the King of England? Or some child? This would not
happen in France; their king keeps his churchmen under his
hand. Master Tyndale says, “One king, one law, is God’s ordinance in every realm.” I have read his book, The Obedience of a
Christian Man. I myself have shown it to the king and marked
the passages that touch on his authority. The subject must obey
his king as he would his God; do I have the sense of it? The Pope
will learn his place.’
Cranmer looks at her with a half-smile; she’s like a child who
you’re teaching to read, who dazzles you by sudden aptitude.
‘Wait,’ she says, ‘I have something to show you.’ She darts a
look. ‘Lady Carey …’
‘Oh, please,’ Mary says. ‘Do not give it currency.’
Anne snaps her fingers. Mary Boleyn moves forward into the
light, a flash of blonde hair. ‘Give it,’ Anne says. It is a paper,
which she unfolds. ‘I found this in my bed, would you believe?
As it happened, it was a night when that sickly milk-faced
creeper had turned down the sheet, and of course I could not get
any sense out of her, she cries if you look at her sideways. So I
cannot know who put it there.’
She unfolds a drawing. There are three figures. The central
figure is the king. He is large and handsome, and to make sure
you don’t miss him he is wearing a crown. On either side of him
is a woman; the one on the left has no head. ‘That’s the queen,’
she says, ‘Katherine. And that’s me.’ She laughs. ‘Anne sans tête.’
Dr Cranmer holds out his hand for the paper. ‘Give it to me,
I’ll destroy it. She crumples it in her fist. ‘I can destroy it myself. There is a
prophecy that a queen of England will be burned. But a
prophecy does not frighten me, and even if it is true, I will run
the risk.’
Mary stands, like a statue, in the position where Anne left her;
her hands are joined, as if the paper were still between them. Oh,
Christ, he thinks, to see her out of here; to take her to somewhere
she could forget she is a Boleyn. She asked me once. I failed her.
If she asked me again, I would fail her again.
Anne turns against the light. Her cheeks are hollow – how thin
she is now – her eyes are alight. ‘Ainsi sera,’ she says. ‘Never
mind who grudges it, it will happen. I mean to have him.’
On their way out, he and Dr Cranmer do not speak, till they
see the little pale girl coming towards them, the sickly milk-faced
creeper, carrying folded linen.
‘I think this is the one who cries,’ he says. ‘So do not look at
her sideways.’
‘Master Cromwell,’ she says, ‘this may be a long winter. Send
us some more of your orange tarts.’
‘I haven’t seen you for so long … What have you been doing,
where have you been?’
‘Sewing mostly.’ She considers each question separately.
‘Where I’m sent.’
‘And spying, I think.’
She nods. ‘I’m not very good at it.’
‘I don’t know. You’re very small and unnoticeable.’
He means it as a compliment; she blinks, in acknowledgement.
‘I don’t speak French. So don’t you, if you please. It gives me
nothing to report.’
‘Who are you spying for?’
‘My brothers.’
‘Do you know Dr Cranmer?’
‘No,’ she says; she thinks it’s a real question.
‘Now,’ he instructs her, ‘you must say who you are.’ ‘Oh. I see. I’m John Seymour’s daughter. From Wolf Hall.’
He is surprised. ‘I thought his daughters were with Queen
Katherine.’
‘Yes. Sometimes. Not now. I told you. I go where I’m sent.’
‘But not where you are appreciated.’
‘I am, in the one way. You see, Lady Anne will not refuse any
of the queen’s ladies who want to spend time with her.’ She raises
her eyes, a pale momentary brightness. ‘Very few do.’
Every rising family needs information. With the king considering himself a bachelor, any little girl can hold the key to the
future, and not all his money is on Anne. ‘Well, good luck,’ he
says. ‘I’ll try to keep it in English.’
‘I would be obliged.’ She bows. ‘Dr Cranmer.’
He turns to watch her as she patters off in the direction of
Anne Boleyn. A small suspicion enters his mind, about the paper
in the bed. But no, he thinks. That is not possible.
Dr Cranmer says, smiling, ‘You have a wide acquaintance
among the court ladies.’
‘Not very wide. I still don’t know which daughter that was,
there are three at least. And I suppose Seymour’s sons are ambitious.’
‘I hardly know them.’
‘The cardinal brought Edward up. He’s sharp. And Tom
Seymour is not such a fool as he pretends.’
‘The father?’
‘Stays in Wiltshire. We never see him.’
‘One could envy him,’ Dr Cranmer murmurs.
Country life. Rural felicity. A temptation he has never known.
‘How long were you at Cambridge, before the king called you up?’
Cranmer smiles. ‘Twenty-six years.’
They are both dressed for riding. ‘You are going back to
Cambridge today?’
‘Not to stay. The family’ – the Boleyns, he means – ‘want to
have me at hand. And you, Master Cromwell?

‘A private client. I can’t make a living from Lady Anne’s black
looks.’
Boys wait with their horses. From various folds of his
garments Dr Cranmer produces objects wrapped in cloth. One
of them is a carrot cut carefully lengthways, and another a
wizened apple, quartered. As if he were a child, fair-minded with
a treat, he gives him two slices of carrot and half the apple, to feed
to his own horse; as he does so, he says, ‘You owe much to Anne
Boleyn. More than perhaps you think. She has formed a good
opinion of you. I’m not sure she cares to be your sister-in-law,
mind …’
The beasts bend their necks, nibbling, their ears flicking in
appreciation. It is a moment of peace, like a benediction. He says,
‘There are no secrets, are there?’
‘No. No. Absolutely none.’ The priest shakes his head. ‘You
asked why I would not come to your college.’
‘I was making conversation.’
‘Still … as we heard it in Cambridge, you performed such
labours for the foundation … the students and Fellows all
commend you … no detail escapes Master Cromwell. Though to
be sure, this comfort on which you pride yourselves …’ His
tone, smooth and unemphatic, doesn’t change. ‘In the fish cellar?
Where the students died?’
‘My lord cardinal did not take that lightly.’
Cranmer says, lightly, ‘Nor did I.’
‘My lord was never a man to ride down another for his opinions. You would have been safe.’
‘I assure you he would have found no heresy in me. Even the
Sorbonne could not fault me. I have nothing to be afraid of.’ A
wan smile. ‘But perhaps … ah well … perhaps I’m just a
Cambridge man at heart.’
He says to Wriothesley, ‘Is he? At all points orthodox?’
‘It’s hard to say. He doesn’t like monks. You should get on. ‘Was he liked at Jesus College?’
‘They say he was a severe examiner.’
‘I suppose he doesn’t miss much. Although. He thinks Anne is
a virtuous lady.’ He sighs. ‘And what do we think?’
Call-Me-Risley snorts. He has just married – a connection of
Gardiner’s – but his relations with women are not, on the whole,
gentle.
‘He seems a melancholy sort of man,’ he says. ‘The kind who
wants to live retired from the world.’
Wriothesley’s fair eyebrows rise, almost imperceptibly. ‘Did
he tell you about the barmaid?’
When Cranmer comes to the house, he feeds him the delicate
meat of the roe deer; they take supper privately, and he gets his
story from him, slowly, slowly and easily. He asks the doctor
where he comes from, and when he says, nowhere you know, he
says, try me, I’ve been to most places.
‘If you had been to Aslockton, you wouldn’t know you were
there. If a man goes fifteen miles to Nottingham, let him only
spend the night away, and it vanishes clear from his mind.’ His
village has not even a church; only some poor cottages and his
father’s house, where his family has lived for three generations.
‘Your father is a gentleman?’
‘He is indeed.’ Cranmer sounds faintly shocked: what else
could he be? ‘The Tamworths of Lincolnshire are among my
connections. The Cliftons of Clifton. The Molyneux family, of
whom you will have heard. Or have you?’
‘And you have much land?’
‘If I had thought, I would have brought the ledgers.’
‘Forgive me. We men of business …’
Eyes rest on him, assessing. Cranmer nods. ‘A small acreage.
And I am not the eldest. But he brought me up well. Taught me
horsemanship. He gave me my first bow. He gave me my first
hawk to train. Dead, he thinks, the father long dead: still looking for his hand
in the dark.
‘When I was twelve he sent me to school. I suffered there. The
master was harsh.’
‘To you? Or others as well?’
‘If I am honest, I only thought of myself. I was weak, no
doubt. I suppose he sought out weakness. Schoolmasters do.’
‘Could you not complain to your father?’
‘I wonder now why I did not. But then he died. I was thirteen.
Another year and my mother sent me to Cambridge. I was glad
of the escape. To be from under his rod. Not that the flame of
learning burnt bright. The east wind put it out. Oxford –
Magdalen especially, where your cardinal was – it was everything
in those days.’
He thinks, if you were born in Putney, you saw the river every
day, and imagined it widening out to the sea. Even if you had
never seen the ocean you had a picture of it in your head from
what you had been told by foreign people who sometimes came
upriver. You knew that one day you would go out into a world
of marble pavements and peacocks, of hillsides buzzing with
heat, the fragrance of crushed herbs rising around you as you
walked. You planned for what your journeys would bring you:
the touch of warm terracotta, the night sky of another climate,
alien flowers, the stone-eyed gaze of other people’s saints. But if
you were born in Aslockton, in flat fields under a wide sky, you
might just be able to imagine Cambridge: no further.
‘A man from my college,’ Dr Cranmer says tentatively, ‘was
told by the cardinal that as an infant you were stolen by pirates.’
He stares at him for a moment, then smiles in slow delight.
‘How I miss my master. Now he has gone north, there is no one
to invent me.’
Dr Cranmer, cautious: ‘So it is not true? Because I wondered
if there was doubt over whether you were baptised. I fear it could
be a question, in such an event.’ ‘But the event never took place. Really. Pirates would have
given me back.’
Dr Cranmer frowns. ‘You were an unruly child?’
‘If I’d known you then, I could have knocked down your
schoolmaster for you.’
Cranmer has stopped eating; not that he has tasted much. He
thinks, at some level of his being this man will always believe I
am a heathen; I will never disabuse him now. He says, ‘Do you
miss your studies? Your life has been disrupted since the king
made you an ambassador and had you tossed on the high seas.’
‘In the Bay of Biscay, when I was coming from Spain, we had
to bale out the ship. I heard the sailors’ confessions.’
‘They must have been something to hear.’ He laughs. ‘Shouted
over the noise of the storm.’
After that strenuous journey – though the king was pleased
with his embassy – Cranmer might have dropped back into his
old life, except that he had mentioned, meeting Gardiner in
passing, that the European universities might be polled on the
king’s case. You’ve tried the canon lawyers; now try the theologians. Why not? the king said; bring me Dr Cranmer and put him
in charge of it. The Vatican said it had nothing against the idea,
except that the divines should not be offered money: a merry
caveat, coming from a Pope with the surname of de’ Medici. To
him, this initiative seems nearly futile – but he thinks of Anne
Boleyn, he thinks of what her sister had said: she’s not getting
any younger. ‘Look, you’ve found a hundred scholars, at a score
of universities, and some say the king is right –’
‘Most –’
‘And if you find two hundred more, what will it matter?
Clement isn’t open to persuasion now. Only to pressure. And I
don’t mean moral pressure.’
‘But it’s not Clement we have to persuade of the king’s case.
It’s all of Europe. All Christian men.’
‘I’m afraid the Christian women may be harder still.’ Cranmer drops his eyes. ‘I could never persuade my wife of
anything. I would never have thought to try.’ He pauses. ‘We are
two widowers, I think, Master Cromwell, and if we are to
become colleagues, I must not leave you wondering, or at the
mercy of stories that people will bring to you.’
The light is fading around them while he talks, and his voice,
each murmur, each hesitation, trails away into the dusk. Outside
the room where they sit, where the house is going on its nightly
course, there is a banging and scraping, as if trestles were being
moved, and a faint sound of cheering and whooping. But he
ignores it, settles his attention on the priest. Joan, an orphan, he
says, servant in a gentleman’s house where he used to visit; no
people of her own, no marriage portion; he pitied her. A whisper
in a panelled room raises spirits from the fens, fetches the dead:
Cambridge twilights, damp seeping from the marshes and rush
lights burning in a bare swept room where an act of love takes
place. I could not help but marry her, Dr Cranmer says, and
indeed, how can a man help marrying? His college took away his
fellowship, of course, you cannot have married fellows. And
naturally she had to leave her place, and not knowing what else
to do with her, he lodged her at the Dolphin, which is kept by
some connections of his, some – he confesses, not without a
downward glance – some relations of his, yes it is true that some
of his people keep the Dolphin.
‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. The Dolphin is a good house.’
Ah, you know it: and he bites his lip.
He studies Dr Cranmer: his way of blinking, the cautious
finger he lays to his chin, his eloquent eyes and his pale praying
hands. So Joan was not, he says, she was not, you see, a barmaid,
whatever people say, and I know what they do say. She was a
wife with a child in her belly, and he a poor scholar, preparing to
live with her in honest poverty, but that didn’t happen, in the
event. He thought he might find a position as secretary to some
gentleman, or as a tutor, or that he might earn a living by his pen, but all that scheming was to no avail. He thought they might
move from Cambridge, even from England, but they didn’t have
to, in the end. He hoped some connection of his would do something for him, before the child was born: but when Joan died in
labour, no one could do anything for him, not any more. ‘If the
child had lived I would have salvaged something. As it was, no
one knew what to say to me. They did not know whether to
condole with me on losing my wife, or congratulate me because
Jesus College had taken me back. I took holy orders; why not?
All that, my marriage, the child I thought I would have, my
colleagues seemed to regard it as some sort of miscalculation.
Like losing your way in the woods. You get home and never
think of it again.’
‘There are some strange cold people in this world. It is priests,
I think. Saving your presence. Training themselves out of natural
feeling. They mean it for the best, of course.’
‘It was not a mistake. We did have a year. I think of her every
day.’
The door opens; it is Alice bringing in lights. ‘This is your
daughter?’
Rather than explain his family, he says, ‘This is my lovely
Alice. This is not your job, Alice?’
She bobs, a small genuflection to a churchman. ‘No, but Rafe
and the others want to know what you are talking about so long.
They are waiting to know if there will be a dispatch to the cardinal tonight. Jo is standing by with her needle and thread.’
‘Tell them I will write in my own hand, and we will send it
tomorrow. Jo may go to bed.’
‘Oh, we are not going to bed. We are running Gregory’s greyhounds up and down the hall and making a noise fit to wake the
dead.’
‘I can see why you don’t want to break off.’
‘Yes, it is excellent,’ Alice says. ‘We have the manners of
scullery maids and no one will ever want to marry us. If our aunt Mercy had behaved like us when she was a girl, she would have
been knocked round the head till she bled from the ears.’
‘Then we live in happy times,’ he says.
When she has gone, and the door is closed behind her,
Cranmer says, ‘The children are not whipped?’
‘We try to teach them by example, as Erasmus suggests,
though we all like to race the dogs up and down and make a
noise, so we are not doing very well in that regard.’ He does not
know if he should smile; he has Gregory; he has Alice, and
Johane and the child Jo, and in the corner of his eye, at the
periphery of his vision, the little pale girl who spies on the
Boleyns. He has hawks in his mews who move towards the
sound of his voice. What has this man?
‘I think of the king’s advisers,’ Dr Cranmer says. ‘The sort of
men who are about him now.’
And he has the cardinal, if the cardinal still thinks well of him
after all that has passed. If he dies, he has his son’s sable hounds
to lie at his feet.
‘They are able men,’ Cranmer says, ‘who will do anything he
wants, but it seems to me – I do not know how it seems to you –
that they are utterly lacking in any understanding of his situation
… any compunction or kindness. Any charity. Or love.’
‘It is what makes me think he will bring the cardinal back.’
Cranmer studies his face. ‘I am afraid that cannot happen now.’
He has a wish to speak, to express the bottled rage and pain he
feels. He says, ‘People have worked to make misunderstandings
between us. To persuade the cardinal that I am not working for
his interests, only for my own, that I have been bought out, that
I see Anne every day –’
‘Of course, you do see her …’
‘How else can I know how to move next? My lord cannot
know, he cannot understand, what it’s like here now.’
Cranmer says gently, ‘Should you not go to him? Your presence would dispel any doubt. ‘There is no time. The snare is set for him and I dare not
move.’
There is a chill in the air; the summer birds have flown, and
black-winged lawyers are gathering for the new term in the fields
of Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s. The hunting season – or at least, the
season when the king hunts every day – will soon be over. Whatever is happening elsewhere, whatever deceits and frustrations,
you can forget them in the field. The hunter is among the most
innocent of men; living in the moment makes him feel pure.
When he returns in the evening, his body aches, his mind is full
of pictures of leaves and sky; he does not want to read documents. His miseries, his perplexities have receded, and they will
stay away, provided – after food and wine, laughter and exchange
of stories – he gets up at dawn to do it all over again.
But the winter king, less occupied, will begin to think about
his conscience. He will begin to think about his pride. He will
begin to prepare the prizes for those who can deliver him results.
It is an autumn day, whitish sun flitting behind the loosening,
flickering leaves. They go into the butts. The king likes to do
more than one thing at once: talk, direct arrows at a target. ‘Here
we will be alone,’ he says, ‘and I will be free to open my mind to
you.’
In fact, the population of a small village – as it might be,
Aslockton – is circulating around them. The king does not know
what ‘alone’ means. Is he ever by himself, even in his dreams?
‘Alone’ means without Norfolk clattering after him. ‘Alone’
means without Charles Brandon, who in a summer fit of fury the
king advised to make himself scarce and not come within fifty
miles of the court. ‘Alone’ means just with my yeoman of the
bow and his menials, alone with my gentlemen of the privy
chamber, who are my select and private friends. Two of these
gentlemen, unless he is with the queen, sleep at the foot of his
bed; so they have been on duty for some years now. When he sees Henry draw his bow, he thinks, I see now he is
royal. At home or abroad, in wartime or peacetime, happy or
aggrieved, the king likes to practise several times in the week, as
an Englishman should; using his height, the beautiful trained
muscles of his arms, shoulders and chest, he sends his arrows
snapping straight to the eye of the target. Then he holds out his
arm, for someone to unstrap and restrap the royal armguard; for
someone to change his bow, and bring him a choice. A cringing
slave hands a napkin, to mop his forehead, and picks it up from
where the king has dropped it; and then, exasperated, one shot or
two falling wide, the King of England snaps his fingers, for God
to change the wind.
The king shouts, ‘From various quarters I receive the advice
that I should consider my marriage dissolved in the eyes of
Christian Europe, and may remarry as I please. And soon.’
He doesn’t shout back.
‘But others say …’ The breeze blows, his words are carried
off, towards Europe.
‘I am one of the others.’
‘Dear Jesus,’ Henry says. ‘I will be unmanned by it. How long
do you suppose my patience lasts?’
He hesitates to say, you are still living with your wife. You
share a roof, a court, wherever you move together, she on the
queen’s side, you on the king’s; you told the cardinal she was
your sister not your wife, but if today you do not shoot well, if
the breeze is not in your favour or you find your eyes blurred by
sudden tears, it is only sister Katherine whom you can tell; you
can admit no weakness or failure to Anne Boleyn.
He has studied Henry through his practice round. He has
taken up a bow at his invitation, which causes some consternation in the ranks of the gentlemen who stud the grass and lean
against trees, wearing their fallen-fruit silks of mulberry, gold
and plum. Though Henry shoots well, he has not the action of a
born archer; the born archer lays his whole body into the bow. Compare him with Richard Williams, Richard Cromwell as he is
now. His grandfather ap Evan was an artist with the bow. He
never saw him, but you can bet he had muscles like cords and
every one in use from the heels up. Studying the king, he is satisfied that his great-grandfather was not the archer Blaybourne, as
the story says, but Richard, Duke of York. His grandfather was
royal; his mother was royal; he shoots like a gentleman amateur,
and he is king through and through.
The king says, you have a good arm, a good eye. He says
disparagingly, oh, at this distance. We have a match every
Sunday, he says, my household. We go to Paul’s for the sermon
and then out to Moorfields, we meet up with our fellow guildsmen and destroy the butchers and the grocers, and then we
have a dinner together. We have grudge matches with the vintners …
Henry turns to him, impulsive: what if I came with you one
week? If I came in disguise? The commons would like it, would
they not? I could shoot for you. A king should show himself,
sometimes, don’t you feel? It would be amusing, yes?
Not very, he thinks. He cannot swear to it, but he thinks there
are tears in Henry’s eyes. ‘For sure we would win,’ he says. It is
what you would say to a child. ‘The vintners would be roaring
like bears.’
It begins to drizzle, and as they walk towards a sheltering
clump of trees, a pattern of leaves shadows the king’s face. He
says, Nan threatens to leave me. She says that there are other men
and she is wasting her youth.
Norfolk, panicking, that last week of October 1530: ‘Listen. This
fellow here,’ he jerks his thumb, rudely, at Brandon – who is
back at court, of course he is back – ‘this fellow here, a few years
ago, he charged at the king in the lists, and nearly killed him.
Henry had not put his visor down, God alone knows why – but
these things happen. My lord here ran his lance – bam! – into the king’s headpiece, and the lance shattered – an inch, one inch, from
his eye.’
Norfolk has hurt his right hand, by the force of his demonstration. Wincing, but furious, earnest, he presses on. ‘One year
later, Henry is following his hawk – it’s that cut-up sort of
country, flat, deceptive, you know it – he comes to a ditch, he
drives in a pole to help him cross, the infernal instrument breaks,
God rot it, and there’s His Majesty face down and stunned in a
foot of water and mud, and if some servant hadn’t clawed him
out, well, gentlemen, I shudder to think.’
He thinks, that’s one question answered. In case of peril, you
may pick him up. Fish him out. Whatever.
‘Suppose he dies?’ Norfolk demands. ‘Supposing a fever
carries him away or he comes off his horse and breaks his neck?
Then what? His bastard, Richmond? I’ve nothing against him,
he’s a fine boy, and Anne says I should get him married to my
daughter Mary, Anne’s no fool, let’s put a Howard everywhere,
she says, everywhere the king looks. Now I have no quarrel with
Richmond, except he was born out of wedlock. Can he reign?
Ask yourselves this. How did the Tudors get the crown? By
title? No. By force? Exactly. By God’s grace they won the battle.
The old king, he had such a fist as you will go many a mile to
meet, he had great books into which he entered his grudges and
he forgave, when? Never! That’s how one rules, masters.’ He
turns to his audience, to the councillors waiting and watching
and to the gentlemen of the court and the bedchamber; to Henry
Norris, to his friend William Brereton, to Master Secretary
Gardiner; to, incidentally, as it happens, Thomas Cromwell, who
is increasingly where he shouldn’t be. He says, ‘The old king
bred, and by the help of Heaven he bred sons. But when Arthur
died, there were swords sharpened in Europe, and they were
sharpened to carve up this kingdom. Henry that is now, he was a
child, nine years old. If the old king had not staggered on a few
more years, the wars would have been to fight all over again. A child cannot hold England. And a bastard child? God give me
strength! And it’s November again!’
It’s hard to fault what the duke says. He understands it all;
even that last cry, wrung from the duke’s heart. It’s November,
and a year has passed since Howard and Brandon walked into
York Place and demanded the cardinal’s chain of office, and
turned him out of his house.
There is a silence. Then someone coughs, someone sighs.
Someone – probably Henry Norris – laughs. It is he who speaks.
‘The king has one child born in wedlock.’
Norfolk turns. He flushes, a deep mottled purple. ‘Mary?’ he
says. ‘That talking shrimp?’
‘She will grow up.’
‘We are all waiting,’ Suffolk says. ‘She has now reached fourteen, has she not?’
‘But her face,’ Norfolk says, ‘is the size of my thumbnail.’ The
duke shows off his digit to the company. ‘A woman on the
English throne, it flies in the face of nature.’
‘Her grandmother was Queen of Castile.’
‘She cannot lead an army.’
‘Isabella did.’
Says the duke, ‘Cromwell, why are you here? Listening to the
talk of gentlemen?’
‘My lord, when you shout, the beggars on the street can hear
you. In Calais.’
Gardiner has turned to him; he is interested. ‘So you think
Mary can rule?’
He shrugs. ‘It depends who advises her. It depends who she
marries.’
Norfolk says, ‘We have to act soon. Katherine has half the
lawyers of Europe pushing paper for her. This dispensation. That
dispensation. The other dispensation with the different bloody
wording that they say they’ve got in Spain. It doesn’t matter.
This has gone beyond paper. ‘Why?’ Suffolk says. ‘Is your niece in foal?’
‘No! More’s the pity. Because if she were, he’d have to do
something.’
‘What?’ Suffolk says.
‘I don’t know. Grant his own divorce?’
There is a shuffle, a grunt, a sigh. Some look at the duke; some
look at their shoes. There’s no man in the room who doesn’t
want Henry to have what he wants. Their lives and fortunes
depend on it. He sees the path ahead: a tortuous path through a
flat terrain, the horizon deceptively clear, the country intersected
by ditches, and the present Tudor, a certain amount of mud
bespattering his person and his face, fished gasping into clear air.
He says, ‘That good man who pulled the king out of the ditch,
what was his name?’
Norfolk says, drily, ‘Master Cromwell likes to hear of the
deeds of those of low birth.’
He doesn’t suppose any of them will know. But Norris says, ‘I
know. His name was Edmund Mody.’
Muddy, more like, Suffolk says. He yells with laughter. They
stare at him.
It is All Souls’ Day: as Norfolk puts it, November again. Alice
and Jo have come to speak to him. They are leading Bella – the
Bella that is now – on a ribbon of pink silk. He looks up: may I
be of service to you two ladies?
Alice says, ‘Master, it is more than two years since my aunt
Elizabeth died, your lady wife. Will you write to the cardinal,
and ask him to ask the Pope to let her out of Purgatory?’
He says, ‘What about your aunt Kat? And your little cousins,
my daughters?’
The children exchange glances. ‘We don’t think they have been
there so long. Anne Cromwell was proud of her working of
numbers and boasted that she was learning Greek. Grace was
vain of her hair and used to state that she had wings, this was a lie . We think perhaps they must suffer more. But the cardinal could
try.’
Don’t ask, don’t get, he thinks.
Alice says, encouragingly, ‘You have been so active in the
cardinal’s business that he would not refuse. And although the
king does not favour the cardinal any more, surely the Pope
favours him?’
‘And I expect,’ says Jo, ‘that the cardinal writes to the Pope
every day. Though I do not know who sews his letters. And I
suppose the cardinal might send him a present for his trouble.
Some money, I mean. Our aunt Mercy says that the Pope does
nothing except on cash terms.’
‘Come with me,’ he says. They exchange glances. He sweeps
them along before him. Bella’s small legs race. Jo drops her lead,
but still Bella runs behind.
Mercy and the elder Johane are sitting together. The silence is
not companionable. Mercy is reading, murmuring the words to
herself. Johane is staring at the wall, sewing in her lap. Mercy
marks her place. ‘What’s this, an embassy?’
‘Tell her,’ he says. ‘Jo, tell your mother what you have been
asking me.’
Jo starts to cry. It is Alice who speaks up and puts their case.
‘We want our aunt Liz to come out of Purgatory.’
‘What have you been teaching them?’ he asks.
Johane shrugs. ‘Many grown persons believe what they believe.’
‘Dear God, what is going on under this roof? These children
believe the Pope can go down to the underworld with a bunch of
keys. Whereas Richard denies the sacrament –’
‘What?’ Johane’s mouth falls open. ‘He does what?’
Mercy says, ‘Richard is right. When the good Lord said, this is
my body, he meant, this signifies my body. He did not license
priests to be conjurers.’
‘But he said, it is. He did not say, this is like my body, he said,
it is. Can God lie? No. He is incapable of it.

‘God can do anything,’ Alice says.
Johane stares at her. ‘You little minx.’
‘If my mother were here, she would slap you for that.’
‘No fighting,’ he says. ‘Please?’ The Austin Friars is like the
world in little. These few years it’s been more like a battlefield
than a household; or like one of the tented encampments in
which the survivors look in despair at their shattered limbs and
spoiled expectations. But they are his to direct, these last hardened troops; if they are not to be flattened in the next charge it is
he who must teach them the defensive art of facing both ways,
faith and works, Pope and new brethren, Katherine and Anne.
He looks at Mercy, who is smirking. He looks at Johane, a high
colour in her cheeks. He turns away from Johane and his
thoughts, which are not precisely theological. He says to the
children, ‘You have done nothing wrong.’ But their faces are
stricken, and he coaxes them: ‘I shall give you a present, Jo, for
sewing the cardinal’s letters; and I shall give you a present, Alice,
I am sure that we do not need a reason. I shall give you
marmosets.’
They look at each other. Jo is tempted. ‘Do you know where
to get them?’
‘I think so. I have been to the Lord Chancellor’s house, and his
wife has such a creature, and it sits on her knee and attends to
everything she says.’
Alice says, ‘They are not the fashion now.’
‘Though we thank you,’ says Mercy.
‘Though we thank you,’ Alice repeats. ‘But marmosets are not
seen at court since Lady Anne came up. To be fashionable, we
should like Bella’s puppies.’
‘In time,’ he says. ‘Perhaps.’ The room is full of undercurrents,
some of which he does not understand. He picks up his dog,
tucks her under his arm and goes off to see how to provide some
more money for brother George Rochford. He sits Bella on his
desk, to take a nap among his papers. She has been sucking the end of her ribbon, and attempting subtly to undo the knot at her
throat.
On 1 November 1530, a commission for the cardinal’s arrest is
given to Harry Percy, the young Earl of Northumberland. The
earl arrives at Cawood to arrest him, forty-eight hours before his
planned arrival in York for his investiture. He is taken to Pontefract Castle under guard, from there to Doncaster, and from
there to Sheffield Park, the home of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Here
at Talbot’s house he falls ill. On 26 November the Constable of
the Tower arrives, with twenty-four men at arms, to escort him
south. From there he travels to Leicester Abbey. Three days later
he dies.
What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island,
poor and cold.
George Cavendish comes to Austin Friars. He cries as he talks.
Sometimes he dries his tears and moralises. But mostly he cries.
‘We had not even finished our dinner,’ he says. ‘My lord was
taking his dessert when young Harry Percy walked in. He was
spattered with mud from the road, and he had the keys in his
hands, he had taken them from the porter already, and set
sentries on the stairs. My lord rose to his feet, he said, Harry, if
I’d known, I’d have waited dinner for you. I fear we’ve almost
finished the fish. Shall I pray for a miracle?
‘I whispered to him, my lord, do not blaspheme. Then Harry
Percy came forward: my lord, I arrest you for high treason.’
Cavendish waits. He waits for him to erupt in fury? But he
puts his fingers together, joined as if he were praying. He thinks,
Anne arranged this, and it must have given her an intense and
secret pleasure; vengeance deferred, for herself, for her old lover,
once berated by the cardinal and sent packing from the court. He
says, ‘How did he look? Harry Percy?’
‘He was shaking from head to foot. ‘And my lord?’
‘Demanded his warrant, his commission. Percy said, there are
items in my instructions you may not see. So, said my lord, if
you will not show it, I shall not surrender to you, so here’s a
pretty state of affairs, Harry. Come, George, my lord said to me,
we will go into my rooms, and have some conference. They
followed him on his heels, the earl’s party, so I stood in the door
and I barred the way. My lord cardinal walked into his chamber,
mastering himself, and when he turned he said, Cavendish, look
at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.’
He, Cromwell, walks away so that he does not have to see the
man’s distress. He looks at the wall, at the panelling, at his new
linenfold panelling, and runs his index finger across its grooves.
‘When they took him from the house, the townspeople were
assembled outside. They knelt in the road and wept. They asked
God to send vengeance on Harry Percy.’
God need not trouble, he thinks: I shall take it in hand.
‘We were riding south. The weather was closing in. At
Doncaster it was late when we arrived. In the street the townsfolk were packed shoulder to shoulder, and each person holding
up a candle against the dark. We thought they would disperse,
but they stood all night in the road. And their candles burned
down. And it was daylight, of a sort.’
‘It must have put heart into him. Seeing the crowds.’
‘Yes, but by then – I did not say, I should have told you – he
had gone a week without eating.’
‘Why? Why did he do that?’
‘Some say he meant to destroy himself. I cannot believe it, a
Christian soul … I ordered him a dish of warden pears, roasted
with spices – did I do right?’
‘And he ate?’
‘A little. But then he put his hand to his chest. He said, there is
something cold inside me, cold and hard like a whetstone. And
that was where it began.’ Cavendish gets up. Now he too walks about the room. ‘I called for an apothecary. He made a powder
and I had him pour it into three cups. I drank off one. He, the
apothecary, he drank another. Master Cromwell, I trusted
nobody. My lord took his powder and presently the pain eased,
and he said, there, it was wind, and we laughed, and I thought,
tomorrow he will be better.’
‘Then Kingston came.’
‘Yes. How could we tell my lord, the Constable of the Tower
is here to fetch you? My lord sat down on a packing case. He
said, William Kingston? William Kingston? He kept on saying
his name.’
And all that time a weight in his chest, a whetstone, a steel, a
sharpening knife in his gut.
‘I said to him, now take it cheerfully, my lord. You will come
before the king and clear your name. And Kingston said the
same, but my lord said, you are leading me into a fool’s paradise.
I know what is provided for me, and what death is prepared.
That night we did not sleep. My lord voided black blood from
his bowels. The next morning he was too weak to stand, and so
we could not ride. But then we did ride. And so we came to
Leicester.
‘The days were very short, the light poor. On Monday
morning at eight he woke. I was just then bringing in the small
wax lights, and setting them along the cupboard. He said, whose
is that shadow that leaps along the wall? And he cried your name.
God forgive me, I said you were on the road. He said, the ways
are treacherous. I said, you know Cromwell, the devil does not
delay him – if he says he is on the road he will be here.’
‘George, make this story short, I cannot bear it.’
But George must have his say: next morning at four, a bowl of
chicken broth, but he would not eat it. Is this not a meatless day?
He asked for the broth to be taken away. By now he had been ill
for eight days, continually voiding his bowels, bleeding and in
pain, and he said, believe me, death is the end of this. Put my lord in a difficulty, and he will find a way; with his
craft and cunning, he will find a way, an exit. Poison? If so, then
by his own hand.
It was eight next morning when he drew his last breath.
Around his bed, the click of rosary beads; outside the restive
stamp of horses in their stalls, the thin winter moon shining
down on the London road.
‘He died in his sleep?’ He would have wished him less pain.
George says, no, he was speaking to the last. ‘Did he speak of me
again?’
Anything? A word?
I washed him, George says, laid him out for burial. ‘I found,
under his fine holland shirt, a belt of hair … I am sorry to tell
you, I know you are not a lover of these practices, but so it was.
I think he never did this till he was at Richmond among the
monks.’
‘What became of it? This belt of hair?’
‘The monks of Leicester kept it.’
‘God Almighty! They’ll make it pay.’
‘Do you know, they could provide nothing better than a coffin
of plain boards?’ Only when he says this does George Cavendish
give way; only at this point does he swear and say, by the passion
of Christ, I heard them knocking it together. When I think of the
Florentine sculptor and his tomb, the black marble, the bronze,
the angels at his head and foot … But I saw him dressed in his
archbishop’s robes, and I opened his fingers to put into his hand
his crozier, just as I thought I would see him hold it when he was
enthroned at York. It was only two days away. Our bags were
packed and we were ready for the road; till Harry Percy walked
in.
‘You know, George,’ he says, ‘I begged him, be content with
what you have clawed back from ruin, go to York, be glad to be
alive … In the course of things, he would have lived another ten
years, I know he would.’ ‘We sent for the mayor and all the city officials, so that they
could see him in his coffin, so there could be no false rumours
that he was living and escaped to France. Some made remarks
about his low birth, by God I wish you had been there –’
‘I too.’
‘For to your face, Master Cromwell, they had not done it, nor
would they dare. When the light failed we kept vigil, with the
tapers burning around his coffin, till four in the morning, which
you know is the canonical hour. Then we heard Mass. At six we
laid him in the crypt. There left him.’
Six in the morning, a Wednesday, the feast of St Andrew the
Apostle. I, a simple cardinal. There left him and rode south, to
find the king at Hampton Court. Who says to George, ‘I would
not for twenty thousand pounds that the cardinal had died.’
‘Look, Cavendish,’ he says, ‘when you are asked what the
cardinal said in his last days, tell them nothing.’
George raises his eyebrows. ‘I already have. Told them
nothing. The king questioned me. My lord Norfolk.’
‘If you tell Norfolk anything, he will twist it into treason.’
‘Still, as he is Lord Treasurer, he has paid me my back wages. I
was three-quarters of the year in arrears.’
‘What were you paid, George?’
‘Ten pounds a year.’
‘You should have come to me.’
These are the facts. These are the figures. If the Lord of the
Underworld rose up tomorrow in the privy chamber, and
offered a dead man back, fresh from the grave, fresh from the
crypt, the miracle of Lazarus for £20,000 – Henry Tudor would
be pushed to scrape it together. Norfolk as Lord Treasurer? Fine;
it doesn’t matter who holds the title, who holds the clanking keys
to the empty chests.
‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘if the cardinal could say, as he used to
say to me, Thomas, what would you like for a New Year’s gift, I
would say, I would like sight of the nation’s accounts. Cavendish hesitates; he begins to speak; he stops; he starts
again. ‘The king said certain things to me. At Hampton Court.
“Three may keep counsel, if two are away.”’
‘It is a proverb, I think.’
‘He said, “If I thought my cap knew my counsel, I would cast
it into the fire.”’
‘I think that also is a proverb.’
‘He means to say that he will not choose any adviser now: not
my lord of Norfolk, nor Stephen Gardiner, or anyone, any
person to be close to him, to be so close as the cardinal was.’
He nods. That seems a reasonable interpretation.
Cavendish looks ill. It is the strain of the long sleepless nights,
of the vigil around the coffin. He is worried about various sums
of money the cardinal had on the journey, which he did not have
when he died. He is worried about how to get his own effects
from Yorkshire to his home; apparently Norfolk has promised
him a cart and a transport allowance. He, Cromwell, talks about
this while he thinks about the king, and out of sight of George
folds his fingers, one by one, tight into the palm of his hand.
Mary Boleyn traced, in his palm, a certain shape; he thinks,
Henry, I have your heart in my hand.
When Cavendish has gone, he goes to his secret drawer
and takes out the package that the cardinal gave him on the day
he began his journey north. He unwinds the thread that binds
it. It snags, knots, he works at it patiently; before he had expected
it, the turquoise ring rolls into his palm, cold as if it came
from the tomb. He pictures the cardinal’s hands, long-fingered,
white and unscarred, steady for so many years on the wheel
of the ship of state; but the ring fits as if it had been made for
him.
The cardinal’s scarlet clothes now lie folded and empty. They
cannot be wasted. They will be cut up and become other
garments. Who knows where they will get to over the years?
Your eye will be taken by a crimson cushion or a patch of red on a banner or ensign. You will see a glimpse of them in a man’s
inner sleeve or in the flash of a whore’s petticoat.
Another man would go to Leicester to see where he died and
talk to the abbot. Another man would have trouble imagining it,
but he has no trouble. The red of a carpet’s ground, the flush of
the robin’s breast or the chaffinch, the red of a wax seal or the
heart of the rose: implanted in his landscape, cered in his inner
eye, and caught in the glint of a ruby, in the colour of blood, the
cardinal is alive and speaking. Look at my face: I am not afraid of
any man alive.
At Hampton Court in the great hall they perform an interlude;
its name is ‘The Cardinal’s Descent into Hell’. It takes him back
to last year, to Gray’s Inn. Under the eye of the officials of the
king’s household, the carpenters have been working furiously
and for bonus rates, erecting frames upon which to drape canvas
cloths painted with scenes of torture. At the back of the hall, the
screens are entirely hung with flames.
The entertainment is this: a vast scarlet figure, supine, is
dragged across the floor, howling, by actors dressed as devils.
There are four devils, one for each limb of the dead man. The
devils wear masks. They have tridents with which they prick the
cardinal, making him twitch and writhe and beg. He had hoped
the cardinal died without pain but Cavendish had said no. He
died conscious, talking of the king. He had started out of sleep
and said, whose is that shadow on the wall?
The Duke of Norfolk walks around the hall chortling, ‘Isn’t it
good, eh? It’s good enough to be printed! By the Mass, that’s
what I shall do! I shall have it printed, so I can take it home with
me, and at Christmas we can play it all over again.’
Anne sits laughing, pointing, applauding. He has never seen
her like this before: lit up, glowing. Henry sits frozen by her side.
Sometimes he laughs, but he thinks if you could get close you
would see that his eyes are afraid. The cardinal rolls across the floor, kicking out at the demons, but they harry him, in their
woolly suits of black, and cry, ‘Come, Wolsey, we must fetch you
to Hell, for our master Beelzebub is expecting you to supper.’
When the scarlet mountain pops up his head and asks, ‘What
wines does he serve?’ he almost forgets himself and laughs. ‘I’ll
have no English wine,’ the dead man declares. ‘None of that cats’
piss my lord of Norfolk lays on.’
Anne crows; she points; she points to her uncle; the noise rises
high to the roof beams with the smoke from the hearth, the
laughing and chanting from the tables, the howling of the fat
prelate. No, they assure him, the devil is a Frenchman, and there
are catcalls and whistles, and songs break out. The devils now
catch the cardinal’s head in a noose. They haul him to his feet, but
he fights them. The flailing punches are not all fake, and he hears
their grunts, as the breath is knocked out of them. But there are
four hangmen, and one great scarlet bag of nothingness, who
chokes, who claws; the court cries, ‘Let him down! Let him
down alive!’
The actors throw up their hands; they prance back and let him
fall. When he rolls on the ground, gasping, they thrust their forks
into him and wind out lengths of scarlet woollen bowel.
The cardinal utters blasphemies. He utters farts, and fireworks
blast out from corners of the hall. From the corner of his eye, he
sees a woman run away, a hand over her mouth; but Uncle
Norfolk marches about, pointing: ‘Look, there his guts are
wound out, as the hangman would draw them! Why, I’d pay to
see this!’
Someone calls, ‘Shame on you, Thomas Howard, you’d have
sold your own soul to see Wolsey down.’ Heads turn, and his
head turns, and nobody knows who has spoken; but he thinks it
might be, could it be, Thomas Wyatt? The gentlemen devils have
dusted themselves down and got their breath back. Shouting
‘Now!’ they pounce; the cardinal is dragged off to Hell, which is
located, it seems, behind the screens at the back of the hall. He follows them behind the screens. Pages run out with linen
towels for the actors, but the satanic influx knocks them aside. At
least one of the children gets an elbow in the eye, and drops his
bowl of steaming water on his feet. He sees the devils wrench off
their masks, and toss them, swearing, into a corner; he watches as
they try to claw off their knitted devil-coats. They turn to each
other, laughing, and begin to pull them over each other’s heads.
‘It’s like the shirt of Nessus,’ George Boleyn says, as Norris
wrenches him free.
George tosses his head to settle his hair back into place; his
white skin has flared from contact with the rough wool. George
and Henry Norris are the hand-devils, who seized the cardinal
by his forepaws. The two foot-devils are still wrestling each
other from their trappings. They are a boy called Francis
Weston, and William Brereton, who – like Norris – is old
enough to know better. They are so absorbed in themselves –
cursing, laughing, calling for clean linen – that they do not
notice who is watching them and anyway they do not care. They
splash themselves and each other, they towel away their sweat,
they rip the shirts from the pages’ hands, they drop them over
their heads. Still wearing their cloven hooves, they swagger out
to take their bow.
In the centre of the space they have vacated, the cardinal lies
inert, shielded from the hall by the screens; perhaps he is sleeping.
He walks up to the scarlet mound. He stops. He looks down.
He waits. The actor opens one eye. ‘This must be Hell,’ he says.
‘This must be Hell, if the Italian is here.’
The dead man pulls off his mask. It is Sexton, the fool: Master
Patch. Master Patch, who screamed so hard, a year ago, when
they wanted to part him from his master.
Patch holds out a hand, to be helped to his feet, but he does
not take it. The man scrambles up by himself, cursing. He begins
to pull off his scarlet, dragging and tearing at the cloth. He Cromwell, stands with his arms folded, his writing hand tucked
into a hidden fist. The fool casts away his padding, fat pillows of
wool. His body is scrawny, wasted, his chest furred with wiry
hairs. He speaks: ‘Why you come to my country, Italian? Why
you no stay in your own country, ah?’
Sexton is a fool, but he’s not soft in the head. He knows well
he’s not an Italian.
‘You should have stayed over there,’ Patch says, in his own
London voice. ‘Have your own walled town by now. Have a
cathedral. Have your own marzipan cardinal to eat after dinner.
Have it all for a year or two, eh, till a bigger brute comes along
and knocks you off the trough?’
He picks up the costume Patch has cast off. Its red is the fiery,
cheap, quick-fading scarlet of Brazil-wood dye, and it smells of
alien sweat. ‘How can you act this part?’
‘I act what part I’m paid to act. And you?’ He laughs: his shrill
bark, which passes as mad. ‘No wonder your humour’s so bitter
these days. Nobody’s paying you, eh? Monsieur Cremuel, the
retired mercenary.’
‘Not so retired. I can fix you.’
‘With that dagger you keep where once was your waist.’ Patch
springs away, he capers. He, Cromwell, leans against the wall; he
watches him. He can hear a child sobbing, somewhere out of
sight; perhaps it is the little boy who has been hit in the eye, now
slapped again for dropping the bowl, or perhaps just for crying.
Childhood was like that; you are punished, then punished again
for protesting. So, one learns not to complain; it is a hard lesson,
but one never lost.
Patch is trying out various postures, obscene gestures; as if
preparing for some future performance. He says, ‘I know what
ditch you were spawned in, Tom, and it was a ditch not far from
mine.’ He turns to the hall where, unseen and beyond the dividing screen, the king, presumably, continues his pleasant day.
Patch plants his legs apart, he sticks out his tongue. ‘The fool has said in his heart, there is no Pope.’ He turns his head; he grins.
‘Come back in ten years, Master Cromwell, and tell me who’s the
fool then.’
‘You’re wasting your jokes on me, Patch. Wearing out your
stock-in-trade.’
‘Fools can say anything.’
‘Not where my writ runs.’
‘And where is that? Not even in the backyard where you were
christened in a puddle. Come and meet me here, ten years today,
if you’re still alive.’
‘You would have a fright if I was dead.’
‘Because I’ll stand still, and let you knock me down.’
‘I could crack your skull against the wall now. They’d not miss
you.’
‘True,’ Master Sexton says. ‘They would roll me out in the
morning and lay me on a dunghill. What’s one fool? England is
full of them.’
He is surprised there is any daylight left; he had thought it was
deepest night. In these courts, Wolsey lingers; he built them.
Turn any corner, and you will think you will see my lord, with a
scroll of draughtsman’s plans in his hands, his glee at his sixty
turkey carpets, his hope to lodge and entertain the finest mirrormakers of Venice – ‘Now, Thomas, you will add to your letter
some Venetian endearments, some covert phrases that will
suggest, in the local dialect and the most delicate way possible,
that I pay top rates.’
And he will add that the people of England are welcoming to
foreigners and that the climate of England is benign. That golden
birds sing on golden branches, and a golden king sits on a hill of
coins, singing a song of his own composition.
When he gets home to Austin Friars he walks into a space that
feels strange and empty. It has taken hours to get back from
Hampton Court and it is late. He looks at the place on the wall where the cardinal’s arms blaze out: the scarlet hat, at his request,
recently retouched. ‘You can paint them out now,’ he says.
‘And what shall we paint else, sir?’
‘Leave a blank.’
‘We could have a pretty allegory?’
‘I’m sure.’ He turns and walks away. ‘Leave a space.

III
The Dead Complain of Their Burial
Christmastide 1530

The knocking at the gate comes after midnight. His watchman
rouses the household, and when he goes downstairs – wearing a
savage expression and in all other respects fully dressed – he finds
Johane in her nightgown, her hair down, asking ‘What is this
about?’ Richard, Rafe, the men of the household steer her aside;
standing in the hall at Austin Friars is William Brereton of the
privy chamber, with an armed escort. They have come to arrest
me, he thinks. He walks up to Brereton. ‘Good Christmas,
William? Are you up early, or down late?’
Alice and Jo appear. He thinks of that night when Liz died,
when his daughters stood forlorn and bewildered in their
night-shifts, waiting for him to come home. Jo begins to cry.
Mercy appears and sweeps the girls away. Gregory comes
down, dressed to go out. ‘Here if you want me,’ he says diffidently.
‘The king is at Greenwich,’ Brereton says. ‘He wants you
now.’ He has ordinary ways of showing his impatience: slapping
his glove against his palm and tapping his foot.
‘Go back to bed,’ he tells his household. ‘The king wouldn’t
order me to Greenwich to arrest me; it doesn’t happen that way.’
Though he hardly knows how it happens; he turns to Brereton.
‘What does he want me for?’ Brereton’s eyes are roaming around, to see how these people
live.
‘I really can’t enlighten you.’
He looks at Richard, and sees how badly he wants to give this
lordling a smack in the mouth. That would have been me, once,
he thinks. But now I am as sweet as a May morning. They go out,
Richard, Rafe, himself, his son, into the dark and the raw cold.
A party of link-men are waiting with lights. A barge is waiting
at the nearest landing stairs. It is so far to the Palace of Placentia,
the Thames so black, that they could be rowing along the River
Styx. The boys sit opposite him, huddled, not talking, looking
like one composite relative; though Rafe of course is not his relative. I’m getting like Dr Cranmer, he thinks: the Tamworths of
Lincolnshire are among my connections, the Cliftons of Clifton,
the Molyneux family, of whom you will have heard, or have
you? He looks up at the stars but they seem dim and far away;
which, he thinks, they probably are.
So what should he do? Should he try for some conversation
with Brereton? The family’s lands are in Staffordshire, Cheshire,
on the Welsh borders. Sir Randal has died this year and his son
has come into a fat inheritance, a thousand a year at least in
Crown grants, another three hundred or so from local monasteries … He is adding up in his head. It is none too soon to
inherit; the man must be his own age, or nearly that. His father
Walter would have got on with the Breretons, a quarrelsome
crew, great disturbers of the peace. He recalls a proceeding
against them in Star Chamber, would be fifteen years back … It
doesn’t seem likely to furnish a topic. Nor does Brereton seem
to want one.
Every journey ends; terminates, at some pier, some mistshrouded wharf, where torches are waiting. They are to go at
once to the king, deep into the palace, to his private rooms.
Harry Norris is waiting for them; who else? ‘How is he now?’
Brereton says. Norris rolls his eyes. ‘Well, Master Cromwell,’ he says, ‘we do meet under the
strangest circumstances. Are these your sons?’ He smiles, glancing around their faces. ‘No, clearly not. Unless they have divers
mothers.’
He names them: Master Rafe Sadler, Master Richard
Cromwell, Master Gregory Cromwell. He sees a flicker of
dismay on his son’s face, and clarifies: ‘This is my nephew. This,
my son.’
‘You only to go in,’ Norris says. ‘Come now, he is waiting.’
Over his shoulder, he says, ‘The king is afraid he may take cold.
Will you look out the russet nightgown, the one with the sables?’
Brereton grunts some reply. Poor work, shaking out the furs,
when you could be up in Chester, waking the populace, beating
a drum around the city walls.
It is a spacious chamber with a high carved bed; his eye flickers
over it. In the candlelight, the bed hangings are ink-black. The
bed is empty. Henry sits on a velvet stool. He seems to be alone,
but there is a dry scent in the room, a cinnamon warmth, that
makes him think that the cardinal must be in the shadows,
holding the pithed orange, packed with spices, that he always
carried when he was among a press of people. The dead, for sure,
would want to ward off the scent of the living; but what he can
see, across the room, is not the cardinal’s shadowy bulk, but a
pale drifting oval that is the face of Thomas Cranmer.
The king turns his head towards him as he enters. ‘Cromwell,
my dead brother came to me in a dream.’
He does not answer. What is a sensible answer to this? He
watches the king. He feels no temptation to laugh. The king says,
‘During the twelve days, between Christmas Day and Epiphany,
God permits the dead to walk. This is well known.’
He says gently, ‘How did he look, your brother?’
‘He looked as I remember him … but he was pale, very thin.
There was a white fire around him, a light. But you know, Arthur would have been in his forty-fifth year now. Is that your age,
Master Cromwell?’
‘About,’ he says.
‘I am good at telling people’s ages. I wonder who Arthur
would have looked like, if he had lived. My father, probably.
Now, I am like my grandfather.’
He thinks the king will say, who are you like? But no: he has
established that he has no ancestors.
‘He died at Ludlow. In winter. The roads impenetrable. They
had to take his coffin in an ox-cart. A prince of England, to go in
a cart. I cannot think that was well done.’
Now Brereton comes in, with the russet velvet, sable-lined.
Henry stands up and sheds one layer of velvet, gains another,
plusher and denser. The sable lining creeps down over his hands,
as if he were a monster-king, growing his own fur. ‘They buried
him at Worcester,’ he says. ‘But it troubles me. I never saw him
dead.’
Dr Cranmer says, from the shadows, ‘The dead do not come
back to complain of their burial. It is the living who are exercised
about these matters.’
The king hugs his robe about him. ‘I never saw his face till
now in my dream. And his body, shining white.’
‘But it is not his body,’ Cranmer says. ‘It is an image formed in
Your Majesty’s mind. Such images are quasi corpora, like bodies.
Read Augustine.’
The king does not look as if he wants to send out for a book.
‘In my dream he stood and looked at me. He looked sad, so sad.
He seemed to say I stood in his place. He seemed to say, you have
taken my kingdom, and you have used my wife. He has come
back to make me ashamed.’
Cranmer says, faintly impatient, ‘If Your Majesty’s brother
died before he could reign, that was God’s will. As for your
supposed marriage, we all know and believe that it was clean
contrary to scripture. We know the man in Rome has no power to dispense from the law of God. That there was a sin, we
acknowledge; but with God there is mercy enough.’
‘Not for me,’ Henry says. ‘When I come to judgment my
brother will plead against me. He has come back to make me
ashamed and I must bear it.’ The thought enrages him. ‘I, I
alone.’
Cranmer is about to speak; he catches his eye, imperceptibly
shakes his head. ‘Did your brother Arthur speak to you, in your
dream?’
‘No.’
‘Did he make any sign?’
‘No.’
‘Then why believe he means Your Majesty anything but good?
It seems to me you have read into his face what was not really
there, which is a mistake we make with the dead. Listen to me.’ He
puts his hand upon the royal person, on his sleeve of russet velvet,
on his arm, and he grasps it hard enough to make himself felt. ‘You
know the lawyers’ saying “Le mort saisit le vif”? The dead grip the
living. The prince dies but his power passes at the moment of his
death, there is no lapse, no interregnum. If your brother visited
you, it is not to make you ashamed, but to remind you that you are
vested with the power of both the living and the dead. This is a sign
to you to examine your kingship. And exert it.’
Henry looks up at him. He is thinking. He is stroking his sable
cuff and his expression is lost. ‘Is this possible?’
Again Cranmer begins to speak. Again he cuts him off. ‘You
know what is written on the tomb of Arthur?’
‘Rex quondam rexque futurus. The former king is the future
king.’
‘Your father made it sure. A prince coming out of Wales, he
made good the word given to his ancestors. Out of his lifetime’s
exile he came back and claimed his ancient right. But it is not
enough to claim a country; it must be held. It must be held and
made secure, in every generation. If your brother seems to say that you have taken his place, then he means you to become the
king that he would have been. He himself cannot fulfil the
prophecy, but he wills it to you. For him, the promise, and for
you, the performance of it.’
The king’s eyes move to Dr Cranmer, who says, stiffly, ‘I
cannot see anything against it. I still counsel against heeding
dreams.’
‘Oh, but,’ he says, ‘the dreams of kings are not like the dreams
of other men.’
‘You may be right.’
‘But why now?’ Henry says, reasonably enough. ‘Why does
he come back now? I have been king for twenty years.’
He bites back the temptation to say, because you are forty and
he is telling you to grow up. How many times have you enacted
the stories of Arthur – how many masques, how many pageants,
how many companies of players with paper shields and wooden
swords? ‘Because this is the vital time,’ he says. ‘Because now is
the time to become the ruler you should be, and to be sole and
supreme head of your kingdom. Ask Lady Anne. She will tell
you. She will say the same.’
‘She does,’ the king admits. ‘She says we should no longer bow
to Rome.’
‘And should your father appear to you in a dream, take it just
as you take this one. That he has come to strengthen your hand.
No father wishes to see his son less powerful than himself.’
Henry slowly smiles. From the dream, from the night, from
the night of shrouded terrors, from maggots and worms, he
seems to uncurl, and stretch himself. He stands up. His face
shines. The fire stripes his robe with light, and in its deep folds
flicker ochre and fawn, colours of earth, of clay. ‘Very well,’ he
says. ‘I see. I understand it all now. I knew who to send for. I
always know.’ He turns and speaks into the darkness. ‘Harry
Norris? What time is it? Is it four o’clock? Have my chaplain
robe for Mass. ‘Perhaps I could say Mass for you,’ Dr Cranmer suggests, but
Henry says, ‘No, you are tired. I’ve kept you from your beds,
gentlemen.’
It is as easy as that, as peremptory. They find themselves
turned out. They pass the guards. They walk in silence, back to
their people, the man Brereton shadowing them. At last, Dr
Cranmer says, ‘Neat work.’
He turns. Now he wants to laugh but he dare not laugh.
‘A deft touch, “and should your father appear to you …” I
take it you don’t like to be roused too often in the small hours.’
‘My household was alarmed.’
The doctor looks sorry then, as if he might have been frivolous. ‘Of course,’ he murmurs. ‘Because I am not a married man,
I do not think of these things.’
‘I am not a married man, either.’
‘No. I forgot.’
‘You object to what I said?’
‘It was perfect in every way. As if you had thought of it in
advance.’
‘How could I?’
‘Indeed. You are a man of vigorous invention. Still … for the
gospel, you know …’
‘For the gospel, I count it a good night’s work.’
‘But I wonder,’ Cranmer says, almost to himself. ‘I wonder
what you think the gospel is. Do you think it is a book of blank
sheets on which Thomas Cromwell imprints his desires?’
He stops. He puts a hand on his arm and says, ‘Dr Cranmer,
look at me. Believe me. I am sincere. I cannot help it if God has
given me a sinner’s aspect. He must mean something by it.’
‘I dare say.’ Cranmer smiles. ‘He has arranged your face on
purpose to disconcert our enemies. And that hand of yours, to
take a grip on circumstance – when you took the king’s arm in
your grasp, I winced myself. And Henry, he felt it.’ He nods.
‘You are a person of great force of will. Clerics can do this: speak about your character. Give verdicts:
this one seems favourable, though the doctor, like a fortuneteller, has told him no more than he already knew. ‘Come,’
Cranmer says, ‘your boys will be fretting to see you safe.’
Rafe, Gregory, Richard, cluster round him: what’s happened?
‘The king had a dream.’
‘A dream?’ Rafe is shocked. ‘He got us out of bed for a
dream?’
‘Believe me,’ Brereton says, ‘he gets one out of bed for less
than that.’
‘Dr Cranmer and I agree that a king’s dreams are not as other
men’s dreams.’
Gregory asks, ‘Was it a bad dream?’
‘Initially. He thought it was. It isn’t now.’
They look at him, not understanding, but Gregory understands. ‘When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they
were under my bed, but you said, it can’t be so, you don’t get
demons our side of the river, the guards won’t let them over
London Bridge.’
‘So are you terrified,’ Richard says, ‘if you cross the river to
Southwark?’
Gregory says, ‘Southwark? What is Southwark?’
‘Do you know,’ Rafe says, in a schoolmaster’s tone, ‘there are
times when I see a spark of something in Gregory. Not a blaze,
to be sure. Just a spark.’
‘That you should mock! With a beard like that.’
‘Is that a beard?’ Richard says. ‘Those scant red bristles? I
thought there was some negligence by the barber.’
They are hugging each other, wild with relief. Gregory says,
‘We thought the king had committed him to some dungeon.’
Cranmer nods, tolerant, amused. ‘Your children love you.’
Richard says, ‘We cannot do without the man in charge.’
It will be many hours till dawn. It is like the lightless morning
on which the cardinal died. There is a smell of snow in the air ‘I suspect he will want us again,’ Cranmer says. ‘When he has
thought about what you have said to him and, shall we say,
followed where his thoughts lead him?’
‘Still, I shall go back to the city and show my face.’ Change my
clothes, he thinks, and wait for the next thing. To Brereton he
says, ‘You know where to find me. William.’
A nod, and he walks away. ‘Dr Cranmer, tell the Lady we did
a good night’s work for her.’ He throws his arm around his son’s
shoulder, whispers, ‘Gregory, those Merlin stories you read – we
are going to write some more.’
Gregory says, ‘Oh, I didn’t finish them. The sun came
out.’
Later that day he walks back into a panelled chamber at Greenwich. It is the last day of 1530. He eases off his gloves, kidskin
scented with amber. The fingers of his right hand touch the
turquoise ring, settling it in place.
‘The council is waiting,’ the king says. He is laughing, as if at
some personal triumph. ‘Go and join them. They will give you
your oath.’
Dr Cranmer is with the king; very pale, very silent. The doctor
nods, to acknowledge him; and then, surprisingly, a smile floods
his face, lighting up the whole afternoon.
An air of improvisation hangs over the next hour. The king
does not want to wait and it is a matter of which councillors can
be found at short notice. The dukes are in their own countries,
holding their Christmas courts. Old Warham is with us, Archbishop of Canterbury. It is fifteen years since Wolsey kicked him
out of his post as Lord Chancellor; or, as the cardinal always put
it, relieved him of worldly office, so allowing him the opportunity, in his last years, to embrace a life of prayer. ‘Well,
Cromwell,’ he says. ‘You a councillor! What the world comes
to!’ His face is seamed, his eyes are dead-fish eyes. His hands
shake a little as he proffers the holy book. Thomas Boleyn is with us, Earl of Wiltshire, Lord Privy Seal.
The Lord Chancellor is here; he thinks in irritation, why can
More never get a proper shave? Can’t he make time, shorten his
whipping schedule? As More moves into the light, he sees that he
is more dishevelled than usual, his face gaunt, plum-coloured
stains under his eyes. ‘What’s happened to you?’
‘You didn’t hear. My father died.’
‘That good old man,’ he says. ‘We will miss his wise counsel in
the law.’
And his tedious stories. I don’t think.
‘He died in my arms.’ More begins to cry; or rather, he seems
to diminish, and his whole body to leak tears. He says, he was
the light of my life, my father. We are not those great men, we
are a shadow of what they were. Ask your people at Austin
Friars to pray for him. ‘It’s strange, Thomas, but since he went,
I feel my age. As if I were just a boy, till a few days ago. But
God has snapped his fingers, and I see my best years are behind
me.’
‘You know, after Elizabeth died, my wife …’ And then, he
wants to say, my daughters, my sister, my household decimated,
my people never out of black, and now my cardinal lost … But
he will not admit, for even a moment, that sorrow has sapped his
will. You cannot get another father, but he would hardly want to;
as for wives, they are two-a-penny with Thomas More. ‘You do
not believe it now, but feeling will come back. For the world and
all you must do in it.’
‘You have had your losses, I know. Well, well.’ The Lord
Chancellor sniffs, he sighs, shakes his head. ‘Let us do this necessary thing.’
It is More who begins to reads him the oath. He swears to give
faithful counsel, in his speech to be plain, impartial, in his manner
secret, in his allegiance true. He is getting on to wise counsel and
discreet, when the door flies opens and Gardiner swoops in, like
a crow that’s spied a dead sheep. ‘I don’t think you can do this without Master Secretary,’ he says, and Warham says mildly, by
the Blessed Rood, must we start swearing him all over again?
Thomas Boleyn is stroking his beard. His eye has fallen on the
cardinal’s ring, and his expression has moved from the shocked
to the merely sardonic. ‘If we do not know the procedure,’ he
says, ‘I feel sure Thomas Cromwell has a note of it. Give him a
year or two, and we may all find ourselves superfluous.’
‘I am sure I shall not live to see it,’ Warham says. ‘Lord Chancellor, shall we get on? Oh, you poor man! Weeping again. I am
very sorry for you. But death comes to us all.’
Dear God, he thinks, if that’s the best you get from the Archbishop of Canterbury, I could do the job.
He swears to uphold the king’s authorities. His preeminences, his jurisdictions. He swears to uphold his heirs and
lawful successors, and he thinks of the bastard child Richmond,
and Mary the talking shrimp, and the Duke of Norfolk showing
off his thumbnail to the company. ‘Well, that’s done,’ says the
archbishop. ‘And amen to it, for what choice have we? Shall we
have a glass of wine warmed? This cold gets into the bones.’
Thomas More says, ‘Now you are a member of the council, I
hope you will tell the king what he ought to do, not merely what
he can do. If the lion knew his own strength, it would be hard to
rule him.’
Outside it is sleeting. Dark flakes fall into the waters of the
Thames. England stretches away from him, low red sun on fields
of snow.
He thinks back to the day York Place was wrecked. He and
George Cavendish stood by as the chests were opened and the
cardinal’s vestments taken out. The copes were sewn in gold and
silver thread, with patterns of golden stars, with birds, fishes,
harts, lions, angels, flowers and Catherine wheels. When they
were repacked and nailed into their travelling chests, the king’s
men delved into the boxes that held the albs and cottas, each
folded, by an expert touch, into fine pleats. Passed hand to hand, weightless as resting angels, they glowed softly in the light; loose
one, a man said, let us see the quality of it. Fingers tugged at the
linen bands; here, let me, George Cavendish said. Freed, the
cloth drifted against the air, dazzling white, fine as a moth’s wing.
When the lids of the vestments chests were raised there was the
smell of cedar and spices, sombre, distant, desert-dry. But the
floating angels had been packed away in lavender; London rain
washed against the glass, and the scent of summer flooded the
dim afternoon.

PART FOUR

I
Arrange Your Face
1531

Whether it is through pain or fear, or some defect of nature;
whether because of the summer heat, or the sound of hunting
horns winding into the distance, or the spinning of sparkling dust
in empty rooms; or whether it is that the child has lost sleep, while
from dawn onwards her father’s decamping household was
packed up around her; for whatever reason, she is shrunken into
herself, and her eyes are the colour of ditchwater. Once, as he is
going through the preliminary Latin politenesses, he sees her grip
tighten on the back of her mother’s chair. ‘Madam, your daughter
should sit.’ In case a contest of wills should ensue, he picks up a
stool and places it, with a decisive thud, by Katherine’s skirts.
The queen leans back, rigid inside her boned bodice, to
whisper to her daughter. The ladies of Italy, seemingly carefree,
wore constructions of iron beneath their silks. It took infinite
patience, not just in negotiation, to get them out of their clothes.
Mary drops her head to whisper back; she hints, in Castilian,
that it is her woman’s disorder. Two pairs of eyes rise to meet his.
The girl’s glance is almost unfocused; she sees him, he supposes,
as a bulky mass of shadow, in a space welling with distress. Stand
up straight, Katherine murmurs: like a princess of England.
Braced against the chair back, Mary takes a deep breath. She
turns to him her plain pinched face: hard as Norfolk’s thumbnail. It is early afternoon, very hot. The sun casts against the wall
shifting squares of lilac and gold. The shrivelled fields of Windsor
are laid out below them. The Thames shrinks from its banks.
The queen speaks in English. ‘Do you know who this is? This
is Master Cromwell. Who now writes all the laws.’
Caught awkwardly between languages, he says, ‘Madam, shall
we go on in English, or Latin?’
‘Your cardinal would ask the same question. As if I were a
stranger here. I will say to you, as I said to him, that I was first
addressed as Princess of Wales when I was three years old. I was
sixteen when I came here to marry my lord Arthur. I was a virgin
and seventeen when he died. I was twenty-four years old when I
became Queen of England, and I will say for the avoidance of
doubt that I am at present aged forty-six, and still queen, and by
now, I believe, a sort of Englishwoman. But I shall not repeat to
you everything that I told the cardinal. I imagine he left you
notes of these things.’
He feels he should bow. The queen says, ‘Since the year began
they have brought certain bills into Parliament. Until now Master
Cromwell’s talent was for moneylending, but now he finds he has
a talent for legislation too – if you want a new law, just ask him. I
hear that at night you take the drafts to your house in – where is
your house?’ She makes it sound like ‘your dog-hole’.
Mary says, ‘These laws are written against the church. I
wonder that our lords allow it.’
‘You know,’ the queen says, ‘that the Cardinal of York was
accused under the praemunire laws of usurping your lord
father’s jurisdiction as ruler of England. Now Master Cromwell
and his friends find all the clergy complicit in that crime, and ask
them to pay a fine of more than one hundred thousand pounds.’
‘Not a fine. We call it a benevolence.’
‘I call it extortion.’ She turns to her daughter. ‘If you ask why
the church is not defended, I can only tell you that there are
noblemen in this land’ – Suffolk, she means, Norfolk – ‘who have been heard to say they will pull the power of the church down,
that never again will they suffer – they use the word – a churchman to grow so great as our late legate. That we need no new
Wolsey, I concur. With the attacks on the bishops, I do not
concur. Wolsey was to me an enemy. That does not alter my feelings towards our Holy Mother the church.’
He thinks, Wolsey was to me a father and a friend. That does
not alter my feelings towards our Holy Mother the church.
‘You and Speaker Audley, you put your heads together by
candlelight.’ The queen mentions the Speaker’s name as if she
were saying ‘your kitchen boy’. ‘And when the morning comes
you induce the king to describe himself as head of the church in
England.’
‘Whereas,’ the child says, ‘the Pope is head of the church
everywhere, and from the throne of St Peter flows the lawfulness
of all government. From no other source.’
‘Lady Mary,’ he says, ‘will you not sit?’ He catches her just as
she folds at the knees, and eases her down on to the stool. ‘It is
just the heat,’ he says, so she will not be ashamed. She turns up
her eyes, shallow and grey, with a look of simple gratitude; and as
soon as she is seated the look is replaced by an expression as
stony as the wall of a town under siege.
‘You say “induce”,’ he tells Katherine. ‘But Your Highness,
above anyone, knows that the king cannot be led.’
‘But he may be enticed.’ She turns to Mary, whose arms have crept
over her belly. ‘So your father the king is named head of the church,
and to soothe the conscience of the bishops, they have caused this
formula to be inserted: “as far as the law of Christ allows”.’
‘What does that mean?’ Mary says. ‘It means nothing.’
‘Your Highness, it means everything.’
‘Yes. It is very clever.’
‘I beg you,’ he says, ‘to consider it in this way, that the king has
merely defined a position previously held, one that ancient
precedents ‘– invented these last months –’
‘– show as his right.’
Under her clumsy gable hood, Mary’s forehead is slick with
sweat. She says, ‘What is defined can be redefined, yes?’
‘Indeed,’ her mother says. ‘And redefined in favour of the
church – if only I fall in with their wishes, and put myself out of
the estate of queen and wife.’
The princess is right, he thinks. There is room for negotiation.
‘Nothing here is irrevocable.’
‘No, you wait to see what I will bring to your treaty table.’
Katherine holds out her hands – little, stubby, puffy hands – to
show that they are empty. ‘Only Bishop Fisher defends me.
Only he has been constant. Only he is able to tell the truth,
which is that the House of Commons is full of heathens.’ She
sighs, her hands fall at her sides. ‘And now under what persuasion has my husband ridden off without a farewell? He has not
done so before. Never.’
‘He means to hunt out of Chertsey for a few days.’
‘With the woman,’ Mary says. ‘The person.’
‘Then he will ride by way of Guildford to visit Lord Sandys –
he wants to see his handsome new gallery at the Vyne.’ His tone
is easy, soothing, like the cardinal’s; perhaps too much so? ‘From
there, depending on the weather, and the game, he will go to
William Paulet at Basing.’
‘I am to follow, when?’
‘He will return in a fortnight, God willing.’
‘A fortnight,’ Mary says. ‘Alone with the person.’
‘Before then, madam, you are to go to another palace – he has
chosen the More, in Hertfordshire, which you know is very
comfortable.’
‘Being the cardinal’s house,’ Mary says, ‘it would be lavish.’
My own daughters, he thinks, would never have spoken so.
‘Princess,’ he says, ‘will you, of your charity, cease to speak ill of
a man who never did you harm? Mary blushes from neckline to hairline. ‘I did not mean to fail
in charity.’
‘The late cardinal is your godfather. You owe him your
prayers.’
Her eyes flicker towards him; she looks cowed. ‘I pray to
shorten his term in Purgatory …’
Katherine interrupts her. ‘Send a box to Hertfordshire. Send a
package. Do not seek to send me.’
‘You shall have your whole court. The household is ready for
two hundred.’
‘I shall write to the king. You may carry the letter. My place is
with him.’
‘My advice,’ he says, ‘take this gently. Or he may …’ He indicates the princess. His hands join and drift apart. Separate you.
The child is fighting down pain. Her mother is fighting down
grief and anger, and disgust and fear. ‘I expected this,’ she says,
‘but I did not expect he would send a man like you to tell me.’ He
frowns: does she think it would come better from Norfolk?
‘They say you had a trade as a blacksmith; is that correct?’
Now she will say, shoe a horse?
‘It was my father’s trade.’
‘I begin to understand you.’ She nods. ‘The blacksmith makes
his own tools.’
Half a mile of chalk walls, a mirror for the glare, bounce at him a
white heat. In the shadow of a gateway, Gregory and Rafe are
jostling and pushing, insulting each other with culinary insults
he has taught them: Sir, you are a fat Fleming, and spread butter
on your bread. Sir, you are a Roman pauper, may your offspring
eat snails. Master Wriothesley is leaning in the sun and watching
them, with a lazy smile; butterflies garland his head.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he says. Wriothesley looks gratified. ‘You look
fit to be painted, Master Wriothesley. A doublet of azure, and a
shaft of light precisely placed.’ ‘Sir? Katherine says?’
‘She says our precedents are fake.’
Rafe: ‘Does she understand that you and Dr Cranmer sat up
all night over them?’
‘Oh, wild times!’ Gregory says. ‘Seeing the dawn in, with Dr
Cranmer!’
He throws an arm around Rafe’s bony little shoulders and
squeezes him; it is a liberation to be away from Katherine, from
the girl flinching like a whipped bitch. ‘Once I myself, with
Giovannino – well, with some boys I knew –’ He stops: what is
this? I don’t tell stories about myself.
‘Please …’ Wriothesley says.
‘Well, we had a statue made, a smirking little god with wings,
and then we beat it with hammers and chains to make it antique,
and we hired a muleteer and drove it to Rome and sold it to a
cardinal.’ Such a hot day, when they were ushered into his presence: hazy, thunder in the distance, and white dust from building
sites hanging in the air. ‘I remember he had tears in his eyes when
he paid us. “To think that on these charming little feet and these
sweet pinions, the gaze of the Emperor Augustus may have
rested.” When the Portinari boys set off for Florence they were
staggering under the weight of their purses.’
‘And you?’
‘I took my cut and stayed on to sell the mules.’
They head downhill through the inner courts. Emerging into
the sun, he shades his eyes as if to see through the tangle of treetops that runs into the distance. ‘I told the queen, let Henry go in
peace. Or he might not let the princess move with her upcountry.’
Wriothesley says, surprised, ‘But it is decided. They are to be
separated. Mary is to go to Richmond.’
He did not know. He hopes his hesitation is not perceptible.
‘Of course. But the queen had not been told, and it was worth a
try, yes?’ See how useful Master Wriothesley is. See how he brings us
intelligence from Secretary Gardiner. Rafe says, ‘It is harsh. To
use the little girl against her mother.’
‘Harsh, yes … but the question is, have you picked your
prince? Because that is what you do, you choose him, and you
know what he is. And then, when you have chosen, you say yes
to him – yes, that is possible, yes, that can be done. If you don’t
like Henry, you can go abroad and find another prince, but I
tell you – if this were Italy, Katherine would be cold in her
tomb.’
‘But you swore,’ Gregory says, ‘that you respected the queen.’
‘So I do. And I would respect her corpse.’
‘You would not work her death, would you?’
He halts. He takes his son’s arm, turns him to look into his
face. ‘Retrace our steps through this conversation.’ Gregory
pulls away. ‘No, listen, Gregory. I said, you give way to the
king’s requests. You open the way to his desires. That is what a
courtier does. Now, understand this: it is impossible that Henry
should require me or any other person to harm the queen. What
is he, a monster? Even now he has affection for her; how could he
not? And he has a soul he hopes may be saved. He confesses
every day to one or other of his chaplains. Do you think the
Emperor does so much, or King Francis? Henry’s heart, I assure
you, is a heart full of feeling; and Henry’s soul, I swear, is the
most scrutinised soul in Christendom.’
Wriothesley says, ‘Master Cromwell, he is your son, not an
ambassador.’
He lets Gregory go. ‘Shall we get on the river? There might be
a breeze.’
In the Lower Ward, six couples of hunting dogs stir and yelp in
the cages on wheels which are going to carry them across country.
Tails waving, they are clambering over each other, twisting ears
and nipping, their yaps and howls adding to the sense of nearpanic that has taken over the castle. It’s more like the evacuation of a fort than the start of a summer progress. Sweating porters are
heaving the king’s furnishings on to carts. Two men with a
studded chest have got wedged in a doorway. He thinks of
himself on the road, a bruised child, loading wagons to get a lift.
He wanders over. ‘How did this happen, boys?’
He steadies one corner of the chest and backs them off into the
shadows; adjusts the degree of rotation with a flip of his hand; a
moment’s fumbling and slipping, and they burst into the light,
shouting ‘Here she goes!’ as if they had thought of it themselves.
Be packing for the queen next, he says, for the cardinal’s palace at
the More, and they say, surprised, is that so, master, and what if
the queen won’t go? He says, then we will roll her up in a carpet
and put her on your cart. He hands out coins: ease up, it’s too hot
to work so hard. He saunters back to the boys. A man leads up
horses ready for harnessing to the hounds’ wagons, and as soon
as they catch their scent the dogs set up an excited barking, which
can still be heard as they get on the water.
The river is brown, torpid; on the Eton bank, a group of listless swans glides in and out of the weeds. Their boat bobs
beneath them; he says, ‘Is that not Sion Madoc?’
‘Never forget a face, eh?’
‘Not when it’s ugly.’
‘Have you seen yourself, bach?’ The boatman has been eating
an apple, core and all; fastidious, he flicks the pips over the side.
‘How’s your dad?’
‘Dead.’ Sion spits the stalk out. ‘Any of these yours?’
‘Me,’ Gregory says.
‘That’s mine.’ Sion nods to the opposite oar, a lump of a lad
who reddens and looks away. ‘Your dad used to shut up shop in
this weather. Put the fire out and go fishing.’
‘Lashing the water with his rod,’ he says, ‘and punching the
lights out of the fish. Jump in and drag them gasping out of the
green deep. Fingers through the gills: “What are you looking at,
you scaly whoreson? Are you looking at me?”’ ‘He not being one to sit and enjoy the sunshine,’ Madoc
explains. ‘I could tell you stories, about Walter Cromwell.’
Master Wriothesley’s face is a study. He does not understand
how much you can learn from boatmen, their argot blasphemous
and rapid. At twelve he spoke it fluently, his mother tongue, and
now it flows back into his mouth, something natural, something
dirty. There are tags of Greek he has mastered, which he exchanges
with Thomas Cranmer, with Call-Me-Risley: early language,
unblighted, like tender fruit. But never does a Greek scholar pin
back your ears as Sion does now, with Putney’s opinion of the
fucking Bullens. Henry goes to it with the mother, good luck to
him. He goes to it with the sister, what’s a king for? But it’s got to
stop somewhere. We’re not beasts of the field. Sion calls Anne an
eel, he calls her a slippery dipper from the slime, and he remembers
what the cardinal had called her: my serpentine enemy. Sion says,
she goes to it with her brother; he says, what, her brother George?
‘Any brother she’s got. Those kind keep it in the family. They
do filthy French tricks, like –’
‘Can you keep your voice down?’ He looks around, as if spies
might be swimming by the boat.
‘– and that’s how she trusts herself she don’t give in to Henry,
because if she lets him do it and she gets a boy he’s, thanks very
much, now clear off, girl – so she’s oh, Your Highness, I never
could allow – because she knows that very night her brother’s
inside her, licking her up to the lungs, and then he’s, excuse me,
sister, what shall I do with this big package – she says, oh, don’t
distress yourself, my lord brother, shove it up the back entry, it’ll
come to no harm there.’
Thanks, he says, I had no idea how they were managing.
The boys have got about one word in three. Sion gets a tip. It’s
worth anything, to be reacquainted with the Putney imagination.
He will cherish Sion’s simper: very unlike the real Anne.
Later, at home, Gregory says, ‘Ought people to speak like
that? And be paid for it? ‘He was speaking his mind.’ He shrugs. ‘So, if you want to
know people’s minds …’
‘Call-Me-Risley is frightened of you. He says that when you
were coming from Chelsea with Master Secretary, you threatened to throw him out of his own barge and drown him.’
That is not precisely his memory of the conversation.
‘And does Call-Me think I would do it?’
‘Yes. He thinks you would do anything.’
At New Year he had given Anne a present of silver forks with
handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with,
not to stick in people.
‘From Venice!’ She is pleased. She holds them up, so the
handles catch and splinter the light.
He has brought another present, for her to pass on. It is wrapped
in a piece of sky-blue silk. ‘It is for the little girl who always cries.’
Anne’s mouth opens a little. ‘Don’t you know?’ Her eyes brim
with black glee. ‘Come, so I can tell you in your ear.’ Her cheek
brushes his. Her skin is faintly perfumed: amber, rose. ‘Sir John
Seymour? Dear Sir John? Old Sir John, as people call him?’ Sir
John is not, perhaps, more than a dozen years older than himself,
but amiability can be ageing; with his sons Edward and Tom now
the young men about court, he does give the impression of
having eased into retirement. ‘Now we understand why we never
see him,’ Anne murmurs. ‘Now we know what he does down in
the country.’
‘Hunting, I thought.’
‘Yes, and he has netted Catherine Fillol, Edward’s wife. They
were taken in the act, but I cannot find out where, whether in her
bed, or his, or in a meadow, a hayloft – yes, cold, to be sure, but
they were keeping each other warm. And now Sir John has
confessed it all, man to man, telling his son to his face that he’s
had her every week since the wedding, so that’s about two years
and, say, six months, so …’ ‘You could round it off to a hundred and twenty times, assuming they abstain at the major feasts …’
‘Adulterers don’t stop for Lent.’
‘Oh, and I thought they did.’
‘She’s had two babies, so allow respite for her lying-in … And
they are boys, you know. So Edward is …’ He imagines how
Edward is. That pure hawk’s profile. ‘He is cutting them out of
the family. They are to be bastards. She, Catherine Fillol, she’s to
be put in a convent. I think he should put her in a cage! He is
asking for an annulment. As for dear Sir John, I think we will not
see him at court soon.’
‘Why are we whispering? I must be the last person in London
to hear.’
‘The king hasn’t heard. And you know how proper he is. So if
someone is to come to him joking about it, let it not be me or
you.’
‘And the daughter? Jane, is it?’
Anne sniggers. ‘Pasty-face? Gone down to Wiltshire. Her best
move would be to follow the sister-in-law into a nunnery. Her
sister Lizzie married well, but no one wants Milksop, and now
no one will.’ Her eyes fall on his present; she says, suddenly
anxious, jealous, ‘What is it?’
‘Only a book of needlework patterns.’
‘As long as it is nothing to tax her wits. Why would you send
her a present?’
‘I feel sorry for her.’ More now, of course.
‘Oh. You don’t like her, do you?’ The correct answer is, no,
my lady Anne, I only like you. ‘Because, is it proper for you to
send her a present?’
‘It is not as if it is tales out of Boccaccio.’
She laughs. ‘They could tell Boccaccio a tale, those sinners at
Wolf Hall.’ Thomas Hitton, a priest, was burned just as February went out;
taken up by Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, as a smuggler of
Tyndale’s scriptures. Soon afterwards, rising from the bishop’s
frugal table, a dozen guests had collapsed, vomiting, rigid with
pain, and been taken, pale and almost pulseless, to their beds and
the ministrations of the doctors. Dr Butts said the broth had
done it; from testimony of the waiting-boys, it was the only dish
they had tasted in common.
There are poisons nature herself brews, and he, before putting
the bishop’s cook to the torture, would have visited the kitchens
and passed a skimmer over the stockpot. But no one else doubts
there has been a crime.
Presently the cook admits to adding to the broth a white
powder, which someone gave him. Who? Just a man. A stranger
who had said it would be a good joke, to give Fisher and his
guests a purge.
The king is beside himself: rage and fear. He blames heretics.
Dr Butts, shaking his head, pulling his lower lip, says that poison
is what Henry fears worse than Hell itself.
Would you put poison in a bishop’s dinner because a stranger
told you it would be a laugh? The cook won’t say more, or
perhaps he has reached a stage beyond saying. The interrogation
has been mismanaged then, he says to Butts; I wonder why. The
doctor, a man who loves the gospel, laughs sourly and says, ‘If
they wanted the man to talk, they should have called in Thomas
More.’
The word is that the Lord Chancellor has become a master in
the twin arts of stretching and compressing the servants of God.
When heretics are taken, he stands by at the Tower while the
torture is applied. It is reported that in his gatehouse at Chelsea
he keeps suspects in the stocks, while he preaches at them and
harries them: the name of your printer, the name of the master of
the ship that brought these books into England. They say he uses
the whip, the manacles and the torment-frame they call Skeffing ton’s Daughter. It is a portable device, into which a man is folded,
knees to chest, with a hoop of iron across his back; by means of
a screw, the hoop is tightened until his ribs crack. It takes art to
make sure the man does not suffocate: for if he does, everything
he knows is lost.
Over the next week, two dinner guests die; Fisher himself rallies.
It is possible, he thinks, that the cook did speak, but that what he
said was not for the ears of the ordinary subject.
He goes to see Anne. A thorn between two roses, she is sitting
with her cousin Mary Shelton, and her brother’s wife Jane, Lady
Rochford. ‘My lady, do you know the king has devised a new
form of death for Fisher’s cook? He is to be boiled alive.’
Mary Shelton gives a little gasp, and flushes as if some gallant
had pinched her. Jane Rochford drawls, ‘Vere dignum et justum
est, aequum et salutare.’ She translates for Mary: ‘Apt.’
Anne’s face wears no expression at all. Even a man as literate as
he can find nothing there to read. ‘How will they do it?’
‘I did not ask about the mechanics. Would you like me to
enquire? I think it will involve hoisting him up in chains, so that
the crowd can see his skin peeling off and hear him screaming.’
To be fair to Anne, if you walked up to her and said, you are
to be boiled, she would probably shrug: c’est la vie.
Fisher is in bed for a month. When he is up and about he looks
like a walking corpse. The intercession of angels and saints has not
sufficed to heal his sore gut and put the flesh back on his bones.
These are days of brutal truth from Tyndale. Saints are not
your friends and they will not protect you. They cannot help
you to salvation. You cannot engage them to your service with
prayers and candles, as you might hire a man for the harvest.
Christ’s sacrifice was done on Calvary; it is not done in the Mass.
Priests cannot help you to Heaven; you need no priest to stand
between you and your God. No merits of yours can save you:
only the merits of the living Christ.